Swimming to Ithaca (3 page)

Janet Burford came and embraced him and gave him a hesitant kiss. She was red-eyed. Was it so peculiar to be red-eyed at a funeral? And why had he even remembered the woman and her name?

‘Who’s she?’ Paula asked later.

‘A friend.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘My God, she’s years older than you. I thought you went for the younger ones.’

‘Not mine, you ass. Mother’s.’ They laughed at the misunderstanding. ‘She’s called Janet. She came round the day after Mother’s death. She rang the bell and stood there blinking like a bloody lighthouse. “You must be Thomas,” she said. Don’t know how she knew.’

Janet was frowning at them from across the room.

Paula said, ‘I hope she can’t lip-read’, and their laughter threatened to run out of control, like giggling in church. They used to be like that as children, united in giggles against the solemnities of the adult world.

As they struggled with self-control, a woman emerged from the crush of mourners and advanced on the two of them. ‘Tom, dear! And Paula. Oh, how sad it all is.’

Thomas smiled distractedly, not knowing who the woman was, but knowing that he ought to know. ‘It’s Binty,’ she said. ‘Binty Paxton.’

‘Of course. How kind of you to come.’

Binty was small and rotund. He remembered the rotundity but not the smallness, nor the hints of chocolate-box prettiness
that lay there beneath the slack flesh and blemished features. Her husband loomed behind her, as disproportionately tall as she was short. ‘Shame it has to be under such sad circumstances,’ he said, reaching out a gaunt hand.

His wife was talking over him as she had done for decades: ‘Dee was such a wonderful person. She was such fun, and so natural. She came into our lives like a breath of fresh air. So long ago, those days. A different world.’ Exactly which days was she referring to? ‘And you two? Both married, aren’t you? Dee always wrote a little note with her Christmas cards. Handwritten, not one of those dreadful circular things. Kept us up to date.’

‘Actually, I’m divorced. But Paula has managed to stick it out.’

‘Oh dear. How sad.’

‘No, quite happy. Happily divorced.’

And then suddenly, like crows moving off a carcass and leaving only debris behind, the people had gone, leaving Thomas and Paula, and the children and her husband in solemn alliance, to clear things away. With the help of Janet Burford.

‘I was awfully fond of her,’ Janet explained, as though to justify her presence. ‘We … we spent a lot of time together. We talked,’ she added, with emphasis, as though there might be some dispute about what precisely went on.

‘I think she’s after you,’ Paula whispered. The giggling resumed. Children again, without the controlling influence of a parent to admonish them.

For dinner that evening they took a large table in the restaurant of the Ship Hotel, across the road from the house. The room was called The Bo’sun’s Cabin and had the look of a maritime museum, cluttered with sextants and quadrants, compasses, chronometers and binnacles. Brass glinted in the shadows. The ceiling was low and beamed, the windows were portholes and
the bar was fashioned out of a capstan. Mine Host, sporting a yachting cap, presented diners with menus that resembled, approximately, a ship’s logbook. ‘As long as we don’t get leg of Long John Silver we’ll be all right,’ Paula’s husband Graham remarked.

‘Dead man’s leg,’ said Paula’s son. He was thirteen and at boarding school, and knew suet pudding.

‘Dead parrot,’ was Thomas’ own suggestion. The giggling began, edged with hysteria. The fact of being able to laugh at a moment like this seemed imbued with blame. You should be mourning; you
were
mourning, and it shouldn’t manifest itself like this, not with silly laughter.

‘Chicken cutlass,’ said Paula. ‘Sprinkled …’ she added, spluttering with laughter, ‘… sprinkled with … with …’

‘Go on,’ her children cried, nudging each other. ‘Go on, spit it out.’

‘Sprinkled with …’ Paula was red in the face, her laughter smothering everything. Mine Host watched, trying to use a smile to hide the suspicion that he was the butt of the joke. Even Philip laughed at the sight of his aunt in distress. ‘Go on, Aunt Paula. Spit it out!’ His voice was raised as high as the others’. A pleasing sign, this. Ever since the divorce he had been a sullen child. Thomas felt that rare emotion: paternal warmth. ‘What, Aunt Paula? Sprinkled with what?’

Finally Paula managed it: ‘With old salt!’

When the laughter had subsided Mine Host approached the table to take their orders. ‘Sorry to hear about your bereavement,’ he said.

After dinner Phil and Thomas walked back to the house. ‘Why are we staying at Grandma’s?’ the boy asked. ‘Why can’t we stay in the hotel like Aunt Paula and everyone?’

‘Why throw money away?’

‘They’re throwing money away, so why shouldn’t we?’

‘Because it’s
my
money.’ It was intended as a joke, but it fell flat in the way that most of Thomas’ jokes did fall flat with Philip. It seemed that his son had never forgiven him for letting Gilda walk out. The evidence of Thomas’ culpability was plain enough in the boy’s eyes: Phil and his mother now lived happily with her second husband, while Thomas remained alone with, occasionally, an unsuitable young woman to share his bed and his breakfast. Only once, a few years before, had the two of them ever tried to discuss these things. ‘I want you and I want Mummy,’ was all Philip said on that occasion. ‘Both together.’ As soon as Thomas attempted any kind of explanation, that had been Philip’s reply. He had repeated the words over and over: ‘I want you and I want Mummy, both together. I want you and I want Mummy, both together. I want you and I want Mummy, both together.’ The mantra of a disturbed child. That evening had ended with convulsive tears until eventually sleep overcame him.

Thomas had rung Gilda to confide in her. ‘I think Phil’s got problems.’

‘I should think he has, when he sees his father fucking girls who are young enough to be his sister.’

‘I think maybe we should get help for him.’

‘What do you mean, “help”?’

‘A shrink perhaps.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake grow up. All Phil needs is the comforts of a father – something that you seem unable to provide. If you can’t handle it just send him home early. Norman understands him, Norman’s just like a father to him. Norman’ll deal with him.’

They reached the front door of the house. ‘Sad about Grandma, isn’t it?’ Philip said as Thomas turned the key in the lock.

Father put his hand on son’s shoulder. ‘It happens, Phil, it
happens. Lots of things happen in life, not all of them good.’ Brave, male words.

‘Too right,’ Philip said, making his way upstairs to the spare room.

N
ext morning they saw the children off to the seaside with Graham. ‘Frinton,’ Paula had insisted. ‘Not Clacton. You’ll hate Clacton.’ There was a feeling of relief to see the Volvo draw away. There were things to do that only she and Thomas could manage – organization, certainly; expiation, perhaps. She stepped across the threshold into the hallway. ‘God, isn’t it strange?’

‘What?’

‘Her not being here.’

‘I’ve got used to it. I’ve been here much of the last ten days.’

‘Stop trying to score points.’

‘I’m not.’

Always rivals, rivals and friends at the same time, an exquisite kind of relationship that is perhaps reserved for siblings; they could say cruel things to each other that didn’t seem to hurt. Maybe that was the way they showed their affection. He watched her looking round the place, picking things up to examine them, then replacing them carefully where they were, as though she was in an antique shop or something. ‘Working out how we’re going to split the booty?’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘Well, we’ve got to decide. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’ve dumped poor old Graham with the kids. It’s what you do. In circumstances like this.’

She had picked up a porcelain piece, a shepherd and a
shepherdess that may have been – their mother had never had the piece valued, preferring fantasy over dull fact – early Meissen, and when she looked round at him her eyes were bright with tears. ‘I’d rather have her back.’

‘Of course.’

‘I find myself talking to her, d’you know that? Sounds silly and sentimental, doesn’t it? But I do nevertheless. I was doing an interview two days ago and I found myself thinking, That’s a good question, isn’t it, Mummy? And when I was writing it up: “Hey, read this,” I said to her. “Isn’t that good?” I almost expected her to reply.’

‘But she didn’t.’

‘Of course she bloody didn’t.’

‘The question is, which her do you talk to? Her as she was when she was ill, or her when she was healthy, or when she was young, or what?’

‘It’s just her. Like it always was.’

He shook his head. ‘No it’s not. It’s not at all like it always was. When she was alive, then there was just
her
. But now she’s dead you’ve got a choice. Which memory do you choose? Which version of her, at what age?’

‘What is this, a history lesson or something?’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘There’s no choice involved. It’s just her.’

He smiled, that aggravating expression he used with students when they said something stupid that he wasn’t going to grace with further discussion. ‘Let me show you what I’ve found.’

‘What is it?’

‘Just wait.’

He ran upstairs to the study and returned with three plastic slide boxes. Paula watched while he fiddled around with a projector in a corner of the sitting room. ‘What’s this? Holiday
snaps? You know what the two most boring things in the world are? Other people’s holiday snaps and other people’s dreams.’

‘These are
your
holiday snaps. Maybe your dreams as well. I found them last night when I was poking around after Phil had gone to sleep.’

He moved a corner table aside, took pictures down. Then he drew the curtains and plunged the room into a sudden, untimely darkness. A white shaft of light snapped through the shadows, spotlighting the far wall. Paula had turned in her armchair, putting her legs up and over one of the arms in a manner that her mother would never have allowed.

‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’

He pressed the button on the remote control. A second’s blackness, a whirr and click from the slide tray, and then, abruptly, there she was, projected almost life-size on the far side of the room, blanketed by shadows and framed by light, leaning against the wing of a car.

Paula gave a small gasp of surprise.

Dee was wearing shorts. The detail is important. She was wearing something like a T-shirt – did they have T-shirts in those days? – and a pair of shorts. The shorts were high-waisted but strikingly brief for the times. And the legs were strong and suntanned. A tennis player’s legs. And you could see the rise of her breasts beneath her T-shirt, and the shadow of her nipples where, Thomas realized with the force of revelation, he had once sucked.

‘Crumbs,’ Paula murmured thoughtfully. ‘I’ve never seen her in this light before.’

‘No.’

The car had the swollen lines and chrome trim of the fifties, the paintwork the colour of sun-faded grass. Behind the car was the plastered wall of a house, brilliant white in the sunlight, with
shuttered windows. Above the roof there was a sky of impossible turquoise.

‘Where did you find these?’

‘In the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. There’s a whole box of them. Evidence.’

‘Evidence of what?’

He didn’t reply. His mother looked back at him: but his mother at thirty-three years old, and so in a sense not his mother, not the woman who had died, not even the woman he recalled in his memories of decades ago when he was a mere ten years old, but someone else: Deirdre Denham, known then and always as Dee. ‘
Deirdre
,’ she used to lament. ‘What an awful name. It sounds like an anagram of “dreary”.’ But she assuredly was not dreary, standing there at the far end of the room beside the fireplace, leaning against the car and looking back at her two children with a slight smile. Was her expression underlain with the faint brush-strokes of sadness? Her hair was waved and brushed back. She had a marked widow’s peak and her face was almost heart-shaped, almost symmetrical.

She was beautiful. Thomas had never realized that before. She was his mother – many other things, but always that – and therefore sexless because so profoundly sexual: the flesh that had conceived and borne him and nurtured him. His creator. And she had been beautiful, alluring, replete with sexuality.

Paula’s voice came from the shadows: ‘Look at that smile. Ironical, or what?’

‘I don’t think things were ironical in those days.’

Laughter in the dark. ‘And those
legs
. Blimey.’

‘She was always proud of her legs.’

‘I’m not surprised. Wish I’d inherited them. Do you remember the car?’

‘Of course.’ He could remember the choosing of it, the question of its colour. What would be appropriate to export from
the drizzle of England to the sun of the Mediterranean? The family had argued about red, and decided that it would look too hot. So it was green.

‘And the house?’

He clicked the remote control, to move woman and car aside to reveal a house behind her, a single-storey building with a shallow, tiled roof and white walls. To either side of the doorway there were palm trees with trunks shaped like pineapples. On the veranda were two people – the same woman, wearing a cotton dress now, and a small girl. The little girl almost moved. She almost ran down the steps and down the concrete path to where the man with the camera stood. But of course she didn’t. She just stayed there, almost moving.

‘That’s me.’ Paula’s voice was quiet, as though they had just trespassed on to forbidden territory and didn’t want to alert the guards.

‘That’s you. At number one hundred and twenty-seven, Sixteenth of June Street, Limassol.’

‘How do you remember that?’

‘How do you remember anything?’

‘It doesn’t really look that long ago. Like yesterday. The colours.’

‘Kodachrome. Father must have been a bit of an expert. I mean, you didn’t get much amateur photography in those days – not of this kind. Box Brownies was the usual—’