Swimming to Ithaca (30 page)

‘Off Coldharbour Lane.’

‘What have you got?’

‘Got?’

‘A flat? A house?’

Kale laughs; a small exhalation of derision. ‘Oh that. A room. Just a room at the moment. In my mum’s flat. Overlooking the railway. I did share a flat, but we’ve just moved in with her.’

They talk for a while about life in Brixton, about looking after Emma, about Income Support and Child Benefit. It’s an awkward, fitful conversation. You can tell that Paula wants to ask about Emma’s father but that seems a bit tactless, even for her. So she asks about the history course that Kale has signed up to, and for once Kale isn’t defensive, but talks with enthusiasm and intelligence, that native wit that her schooling never managed to feed.

‘I think it’s quite inspiring,’ Paula observes, ‘to find someone like you going into further education. Makes me realize how easy I had it.’

Kale looks at her with something approaching contempt. ‘What do you mean, “someone like you”?’

In the afternoon Paula suggests an expedition to feed the ducks. Emma didn’t know there were ducks. ‘Where are the ducks?’ she asks. ‘Where are the ducks?’ Ducks seem too good to be true, better even than a real plastic tiara.

‘They’re in the forest.’

‘Where’s the forest?’

‘Through the gate at the bottom of the garden.’

‘Is it a secret gate?’ Emma is at that age when the questions all have answers of some kind. Thomas wonders whether that’s what growing up means: it’s when you start asking questions that have no answers.

‘It is a secret gate,’ Paula assures her, ‘but we know the spell to open it.’

The secret gate opens on to a small copse of beech and rhododendron. Beyond the trees there’s open heath. They venture out, the children running ahead.

The forest isn’t a forest, really. It’s a British sort of forest, distinguished mainly by the absence of trees. There is a sandy car park with wooden picnic benches and notices that admonish lighters of fires and scatterers of litter. The place is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the notices announce, in case the fact isn’t clear. Apparently, if you look carefully, you may find bog asphodel and sundew and things like that. Beyond the lake the slope is wooded, but you can see the roofs of houses among the trees. For all the bog asphodel, this is a tame landscape, a forest in nothing but name.

At the water the ducks converge on the children, hustling them for pieces of bread. There are patches of light on the far trees, scudding fast in the wind. The sun shines after a fashion. Once the supplies of bread are exhausted they all return to the house, straggling up the hill from the lake with the ducks complaining at their departure.

‘Where’s Emms?’ Kale asks when they reach the back door.

The question goes unheard at first. ‘Where’s Emms?’ just gets lost in the general hubbub as Paula’s children take off their boots. ‘Where’s Emma gone?’ she repeats. ‘Birgit, where’s Emma?’

‘She was outside.’ The German girl’s voice rises in pitch as
though she is questioning the very thing she is saying. Kale goes out to see. A moment later she is back.

‘She’s not there. Where’s she gone?’

Impatience at first, of course. ‘Paula, did you see Emma come in?’

She didn’t.

‘Christopher, where is she?’

Thomas goes back outside with Kale. They stand on the stone terrace looking out across the empty lawn, and feel only impatience. ‘Emms, where are you?’ Kale calls. ‘Mum wants you!’

There is no sign of the little girl. Kale walks across the grass – ‘Where the hell’s she got to?’ – and then suddenly she’s running. ‘The pond!’ She runs through the gap in the hedge and down to the lower level, to the stone surround of the pond where large, mysterious carp float just below the surface. Thomas follows her, dreading what they might find. But there is nothing. No Emma, no figure floating face-down in the shallow water, nothing. ‘Emms!’ she shouts, looking round. Her voice echoes off the flint wall. The light is grey and the wind sweeps through the trees beyond the wall – a sea sound, like waves raking through a shingle beach.

‘Emms!’

A small pulse of fear throbs in Thomas’ throat.

‘Emms, where are you?’ Kale calls. Her face is pale, like the face of someone at the scene of a road accident: shock, disbelief, fear. ‘Where the fuck’s she gone?’ she asks. She doesn’t ask it of Thomas, she asks it of the garden around her, of the lawn and the bushes and the trees.

‘Let’s go and look through the gate.’

‘Oh, Christ, she hasn’t gone outside …’

They discover that the gate is open. There is nothing dramatic, no plastic tiara on the ground or anything like that; but the gate is open. They step out into the trees.

‘Emms! Emms, Mum’s looking for you!’

The trees are swaying and roaring in the wind. Fright metamorphoses into panic, and panic brings the suspension of time. From mere concern to desperation takes a second and it takes half an hour. Impossible to tell which. Time runs at lightning speed and it stops. Immeasurable, it becomes useless. They run, through the trees and out into the open heath. They run because they feel that every second counts; they run without knowing where to run.

‘Wasn’t there a van in the car park? A car, wasn’t there a car? Fuck – there was a car.’ She runs towards the car park, and then stops and looks round desperately, not knowing what to do or where to go. The car park is empty. There are tyre marks in the gravel, and a chocolate bar wrapper blown against the base of the litter bin.

‘Emms! Emma!’ The name is pitched against the wind, but the little girl doesn’t answer. They run down to the lake, and pause there at the water’s edge and listen to the ducks chuckling quietly to themselves. It’s quite a good laugh really, a practical joke on the grand scale, with the adults panicking and running this way and that, calling and arguing and feeling the flood of irrationality that comes with fear; and the little girl squatting on the edge of the lake quite happily, talking to the ducks.

‘Emms! What the hell are you doing?’

Emma looks round. She is still wearing the tiara, although it’s a little lopsided now. ‘Listen to the ducks laughing.’

Kale runs to her and snatches her up into her arms. One of the little girl’s boots falls off. Kale is weeping, from relief, from misery, fear and despair overcome. ‘Emms, what the hell did you go off like that for? Why didn’t you tell Mummy? You mustn’t just go off on your own.’

Emma clings to her mother, grabs on to her like a monkey. ‘I hadn’t finished talking to the ducks.’

Kale is weeping and laughing at the same time, and burying her face in her daughter’s neck; and Thomas understands that he will never ever again be loved like that, never completely and convulsively, never with the whole being. He feels dispersed, separated from Kale in her happiness, lost among the sound of the trees in the wind, the swaying of the branches and the seething of the leaves.

There was the usual rigmarole of the airport, the coils of barbed wire, the soldiers in their sand-coloured uniform. She stood with Edward and Paula and watched a phalanx of passengers cross the concrete apron towards the customs shed. Over by the perimeter fence was the charred wreck of an airliner – a Handley-Page Hermes, destroyed months earlier by an EOKA bomb just minutes before it was due to take off for Britain, left now as a warning and a reproach.

Hermes was the Greek deity who conducted the souls of the dead to Hades. Tom knows this. He knows the type of aircraft; he knows the god. He watches and finds out, listens, reads, notes. Facts and ideas stick to his mind like flies to a flypaper. He doesn’t know what to make of this gift. It goes with school reports that accuse him of wasted talents, of much intelligence but no diligence. A diligence is a kind of horse-drawn carriage. Intelligence is the ability to unravel
knowledge, but it is also the knowledge itself. The language coils around like a snake, words meaning things, things meaning words. As he walks across the concrete apron he hears a cry, far out on the edge of his awareness. ‘Tom!’ the voice cries. ‘Tom!’

The small figure turned and looked, and raised one hand in a salute. ‘There he is!’ She waved. ‘It’s Tom!’ She felt tears – of joy, of relief, of shame. ‘Tom! Tom!’

Permitted to wave, they were not permitted to touch. There were documents to present, suitcases to be examined by sweating customs officers, chalk marks to be made on suitcases, queues to be followed before his arrival at the gate where Turkish policemen stood guard. It was half an hour until he was there before them, small and serious, distant despite his proximity.

His mother’s soft pliancy, her smell of earth and spice. Orange blossom, perhaps. Jasmine, maybe. He isn’t sure. Smells and words go poorly together. And his father proffering a tough hand for him to shake. And Paula watching with hostile eyes from behind his mother’s ice-blue skirt. But for the moment his mother is everything, the all-consuming love, the love that dare not speak its name because there is no word for it.

‘Tom. Darling, darling Tom.’

‘My ears are popping.’

‘Your ears are always popping. You’ll get over it. Aren’t you happy to be home?’

‘Of course I am.’ But he looked uncertain about it. Was it home?

The road climbed upwards into the hills. The fields were painted in the spring colours of a million flowers. He deflected questions about school, about his friends, about his other
world. There was this world and there was that world. Explorers of one rarely spoke about it to the inhabitants of the other. They passed through the villages, each with its mosque and its church, each with its donkeys and its curious villagers who turned and stared at passing cars.
ZHT
EOKA
was daubed in blue on one of the walls. There were army trucks on the road, and Land-Rovers with steel bars sticking out from their bonnets like the claws of some giant raptor – a protection against wires strung across the road. Tom explained to Paula how this trap would work – heads spinning across the tarmac, blood spurting, vehicles plunging out of control. ‘Don’t be so gruesome,’ Dee protested.

‘But it’s true, Mummy. It’s true.’

‘It may be true but you don’t have to talk about it.’

And then the car breasted a rise in the road and they could see the sea for the first time, the blue of the Mediterranean, bluer by far than her dress. There was a field of poppies, red against the blue.

‘Oh, do look!’ she called out. ‘Can we stop? Edward, can’t we stop for a moment?’

‘Better if we keep going.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’

Reluctantly he slowed the car and pulled off the road. ‘This isn’t very sensible.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no one around.’

‘You seem to think there’s no danger.’

‘I’m realistic, that’s all. And I know that most Cypriots wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘They kill birds happily enough, never mind flies.’

‘Don’t be so literal. You know what I mean.’

She flung the door open. There was a place where the rubble wall had fallen away. Hitching up her skirt, she negotiated the stones. ‘Come on, Tom, help Paula.’ They walked through the
field holding her hands, Tom and Paula knee-deep in blood, her skirt sweeping the flowers. ‘Take a photo,’ she called. ‘Get the camera.’

They turned to pose, Persephone with her children among the spring flowers. ‘Do get a move on, Edward.’

She wished it were him. She wished it were Charteris. Tears stung her eyes. Edward stood at the breach in the wall, with his eye to the camera. ‘Smile,’ he called.

No one did.

A
warm evening. The french windows were open on to the garden and you could hear the sound of crickets, a soft, patient trilling. The diners smoked and drank, and argued.

‘We’re on a bloody seesaw,’ Damien said. ‘We move one way – in favour of the Turks, say – and the Greeks are up in arms. We shift the other way and the Turks start complaining. One side demands partition and the other side refuses to countenance it.’ His voice was quiet and insistent. They listened to him carefully because they knew that he lived on the front line. He walked the streets with his soldiers. He confronted the youths of both sides face to face. ‘They need their heads banging together, that’s the truth of it. And I’m afraid that Foot isn’t the man to do it.’

‘Was Harding any better?’ Johnny Frindle asked. ‘When he was in charge we were fighting a military battle, but really this is a political issue. I mean, Britain doesn’t really want to be fighting either the Greeks or the Turks. We damn well ought to be concentrating on the Soviet Union. Mustn’t take our eye off the ball. That’s what we’re here for.’

Dee excused herself for a moment and went to check that
the children were asleep. When she came back the debate was still going on, the bloody politics of Aphrodite’s island being pulled this way and that. ‘Keeping the Turks happy, that’s the problem,’ Edward was saying. ‘We’ve got to keep the Turks happy.’

She began to clear away the dishes. Damien stood to help her and she gestured that he should stay in his seat – ‘No, really, Damien’ – but he followed her into the kitchen just the same, carrying a couple of plates. At the sink he brushed against her, his hand touching her arm. ‘Please,’ she said. Her tone was uncertain, hung between admonishment and entreaty.