Swimming to Ithaca (33 page)

Paula asks, ‘Who’s Steve?’ but gets no reply.

‘I don’t hate Steve.’

‘Well, someone you have loved who then betrays you. The Janus face of love. Who said that?’

‘I’ve no fucking idea. Anyway, your mum didn’t betray you. From what you and Paula say, she seems to have been a loving mother. If she betrayed anyone, she betrayed your old man, and he’s dead.’

Momentarily the two women seem to be allied against him. He shakes his head. ‘It’s obvious. She’s there in Cyprus on her own and she’s bored. Imagine it. Father was away at work for most of the day and there she was, stuck at home. And she found someone else. You know what he said to me once? “I had to persuade your mother to marry me.” It was she who needed convincing, you see.’

‘Ridiculous,’ Paula says. ‘Anyway we’d have known about it, wouldn’t we?’

‘Would we? Would we have read the signs right? Remember how they used to fight? What was that all about? We were just kids. You were little more than a baby.’

‘But she just wasn’t that kind of woman.’

‘Who the hell isn’t that kind of woman? People have affairs all the time. Always have, always will. What else could stay with her for over three decades, to ambush her with guilt when she was dying?’

Paula laughs derisively. ‘Women have a million things to feel guilty about if they try. How about, not having another child? How about not loving us enough?’

‘She adored us.’

‘But it’s not something you measure on a scale. Maybe she adored us and yet still felt it wasn’t enough. Who knows? How about feeling guilt about abandoning you to boarding school, or not doing the same with me? How about not loving Dad enough? With women, it’s usually something like that – not loving enough, not doing enough, not being enough. Men feel guilt about excess, women about paucity.’

‘Very clever.’

‘Anyway, you’re just making suppositions. You’ve no real evidence whatever.’

He considers this, considers evidence, considers the present and the past, neither of them certain, the one ephemeral and random and bound by perspective, the other imperfectly perceived, like a dream recalled the morning after – something devoid of continuity or sense, and imbued with significance merely by virtue of being recalled at all. He sips his brandy. ‘Yes I have,’ he says. ‘I was there.’

There is a silence. Like so many silences, it is relative. There’s noise on the periphery: the fire in the grate, the television in the next room where the children are watching a game show with Birgit – there’s the muffled, incoherent sound of audience participation that conveys the idea of what’s going on but not the specifics. But between the three adults there is silence.

‘You were there? What the hell do you mean, you were there?’

He frowns. Suddenly he feels like a child put under some kind of sharp, adult interrogation, his eyes blistering with something that may be tears, the muscles round his mouth turning down under the weight of emotion. How to distract from this ridiculous weakness? He raises the brandy glass to his lips again and coughs with the sudden harshness of the liquor at the back of his throat. It gives him an excuse to get out his handkerchief. ‘I think so. I don’t know, really. I have this … dream, memory, I don’t really know what it is.’

‘What on earth are you talking about, Tommo?’

‘It’s like looking at a picture, really. There’s nothing else around it, no context or anything. No, not a picture. It’s more like standing in the wings of a theatre and watching what’s happening on stage. But just a scene, not the whole play. Just a scene. And …’ He tries a smile. ‘And it’s badly lit.’

‘What the hell are you saying?’

‘It’s always been there. Memory of a memory, perhaps. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Remembering becomes part of the memory. Or maybe it’s a dream, I don’t know. But I can see her; I’ve always been able to see her.’ He gestures, as though Dee might be there, if they only have eyes to see. ‘She’s there in the shadows. I’m in the light and they’re in the shadows, and I’m watching them.’

‘“Them”?’

‘I can’t see him. I don’t know who it is. When they’ve finished, she sits up and looks at me.’

‘Finished what? They were screwing? Who? Where is all this? Tommo, are you quite all right?’

Kale unfolds her legs and sits up. ‘Tom,’ she says. She’s never called him Tom before. ‘Let’s go to bed. You’re tired.’

‘Let him finish.’

Kale looks at Paula, her face clenched in anger. ‘Can’t you see how stupid all this is? She’s dead, your mum. She’s fucking dead! She doesn’t have to stand trial in front of you two.’

‘It’s not really your business, is it?’

‘It’s my fucking business if I have to sit and listen to it.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t speak like that in my home.’

He looks from his sister to Kale. He’s not oblivious to the argument between them; he just doesn’t feel it matters. ‘I don’t know where it is, nor when it is. I’m just standing there, looking. There’s bright light behind me, and a breeze.’ He laughs faintly and without conviction. ‘And I’m holding a football. Strange, that. A football. I don’t even like fucking football.’

A hot, dark room, ransacked by shadows. In the room there is a bed, strewn with sheets. Among the sheets, on the bed, two figures, naked, glazed with sweat, limbs locked together. Their movement is violent and staccato, with no beauty to it. There is sound, a rough grunting, neither male nor female, barely even human. He walks over to watch. The man is a shadow. He wants to see his face but can’t. Of the woman’s face there is no doubt: it is Kale’s, his mother’s, Gilda’s, his mother’s again. No doubt about any of them. And there’s more than just her face, the whole naked length of her in fact, her slopped breasts and splayed legs, the open mouth, the cave where he longs to hide, does hide, curled up like a foetus in the warmth.

And then abruptly he is standing by the bed again and the two figures part, and lie for a moment side by side among the ruin of the sheets and still he cannot see the face of the man.

She sits, running her fingers under her hair so that she is lifting it up in a cloud – an uncharacteristic gesture he has never seen before. One of her legs hangs off the bed; the other is up, the knee bent. Her lap is a deep shadow that crawls part way up her belly.

She turns and speaks to him. ‘Tom, you’re here—’

Thomas wakes from nightmare. There’s no one beside him in the bed and when he turns he sees her standing naked at the window, a pale, ghostly presence moulded out of light and dark. Through the windowpane in front of her is a wet, monochrome day, all colour leached out by drizzle.

‘What’s up?’

‘It’s raining.’

‘I can see it’s raining. Come back to bed.’

She glances round. ‘You were pissed last night.’

‘Not pissed. Eloquent.’

‘Eloquent my arse.’ She returns to her contemplation of the raindrops that are chasing each other down the pane, and the wet garden, and the woods on the far side of the garden wall. ‘I want to leave,’ she says.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Were you so pissed you didn’t hear? What was it she said? “Please don’t speak like that in my home.”’ She has put a dreadful accent on, an exaggerated imitation of Paula’s. ‘Emma and I just don’t fit in here, do we? So I want to go.’

‘For God’s sake, Kale—’

‘For
my
sake, thank you. Nobody else’s. You can keep your bloody sister, OK? And her house that’s like a bleeding palace, and her questions like she was a social worker or something. The way she stares at me, as though I’m some kind of freak. I feel like something on day-release from the zoo. She’s got everything and yet she’s so possessive. Won’t let anyone else in, won’t let you go, and you won’t let your mum go. Your bloody family, always clinging on to each other.’

‘That’s what families do, isn’t it?’

She stares pointedly out of the window. ‘I wouldn’t know, would I?’

Down in the kitchen everyone is already up and sitting round
the breakfast table. Despite the weather, the mood is one of high excitement. Graham is due back that morning from the States, and the children are eager to see him. Birgit and Paula are organizing them, and Christopher is explaining things to Emma, how far away America is, how much money his father makes there, how clever he is. ‘What about your father?’

‘He’s very clever too,’ Emma says.

She has her tiara on. ‘All night she is wearing it. All night,’ Birgit insists. ‘She is a princess.’

‘If I’m a princess,’ Emma explains to Christopher, ‘that means my father’s a king. So there.’

‘No he’s not.’

‘Yes he is.’

‘Did you mean all that stuff you said last night?’ Paula asks Thomas. She’s talking
sotto voce
, so that the kids won’t hear.

‘What stuff did I say?’

‘About catching Mummy at it. About hating her.’

‘I was pissed.’

‘You mean you didn’t mean it?’

‘I mean I shouldn’t have said it.’

‘But hating her …’

‘Childish, isn’t it? But sometimes it’s the only defence a child has. I mean …’ What
does
he mean? His whole working life has been about meaning, the meaning of history; and all the time there’s that feeling in the background that he’s chasing a phantom – there is no meaning, no sense at all, just contingent events piling one on top of the other, driven by nothing more than the mechanics of chaos. ‘I mean, I suppose Phil hates me at times. He probably hates me all the time. Parents aren’t very fashionable these days, are they? Nowadays you don’t understand them, you just blame them. Maybe when he grows up he’ll come to understand.’

‘I’m sure he doesn’t hate you, Tommo. Just adolescent angst.
But I’d be careful about introducing him to Kale. He’ll either loathe her or lust after her. Or both.’

A moment later Kale appears in the doorway. She’s barefoot and wearing only a short nightdress. The image of her body is visible like a ghost behind the thin material – her breasts like teardrops, the curve of her hips, the smudged shadow nestled between her thighs. There is a palpable intake of breath from Birgit, a small exhalation of annoyance from Paula. Christopher blushes.

‘Just coffee,’ she says when Paula asks. ‘I just want coffee. Instant’ll be fine.’

‘We don’t have instant.’ Paula is tight-lipped. ‘Well, maybe we’ve got some somewhere. I’ll have a look.’

‘Don’t bother. Whatever. Whatever’s the easiest.’

In the sober light of the morning it’s as though the gloss has been stripped from the two women, exposing the bare foundation of antagonism. Kale glances at Thomas. ‘I feel shitty,’ she says and takes her mug of coffee to go back upstairs. Christopher giggles uncertainly.

When breakfast comes to an awkward and silent end, Birgit takes the children to clean their teeth while Thomas and Paula clear the table. ‘She doesn’t have to parade around stark naked in front of everyone,’ she complains.

‘She didn’t even realize.’

‘Didn’t realize, my foot. Miss Kale knows exactly what she’s doing. She was pretty obnoxious last night. Is she going to apologize?’

‘I think she expects
you
to.’

‘When she was effing and blasting in my house?’ She rinses plates and bowls and stacks them in the dishwasher. Milk and butter go into the fridge, one of those double-door American ones big enough to hold a corpse.

‘I’m afraid she wants to go this morning. She’s pretty pissed off.’

‘Oh dear, Tommo. Is it all coming to pieces?’ There’s amusement in her expression, and a poor attempt at disappointment. ‘She’s really got you by the foreskin, hasn’t she?’

‘I don’t have a foreskin, Paula. They cut it off long ago.’

At least she laughs. ‘I’ll give her a hug and tell her she’s very sweet and mustn’t take me too seriously. Is that what you want?’

‘I think that would be the worst thing possible.’

That’s the moment when Kale appears again. She’s wearing a T-shirt and a short denim skirt now, with no more than a narrow smile of midriff to greet strangers. ‘You talking about me?’ she asks. ‘I don’t like being talked about behind my back.’

Paula tries a placating smile. ‘Tommo was telling me you have to go. What a shame. Graham will be so disappointed.’

Kale shrugs. ‘I’m sure he’ll be all right.’

‘I expect he will, my dear. That’s not quite what I meant.’

The two women face each other across the kitchen, protagonists in an obscure, undeclared cold war. Kale shrugs. ‘Anyway, thanks for having me and Emms to stay.’

Paula smiles her thin, acid smile, the one she uses with obnoxious interviewees. ‘It was a pleasure. Maybe we’ll see you again.’ The words are not posed as a question.

‘I wanted to stay with Linda,’ Emma says from the back of the car as they pull away from the house. In the mirror Thomas can see Paula with her two children waving, and the clumping Birgit standing beside them.

Kale lights a cigarette and winds the window down. ‘Shut up, Emms. You’ve got no choice.’

‘But I was having fun.’

‘You can’t have fun all the time.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because.’

It’s Sunday morning and the traffic into the city is light. They pass quickly from the countryside into the outer, twentieth-century purlieus – the semi-detached houses, the shopping malls, the plate-glass office blocks. In the back Emma sleeps, her head lolling from side to side. The journey takes them further into the city, into an inner circle of concrete flats and brick terraces where railways ride above the road, the arches boarded up or turned into lock-up stores and makeshift cafés. Torn posters announce raves that have long since passed, demonstrations that have long ago dispersed, sales that are over. Sometimes, like a fossil preserved amidst the accretions of the twentieth century, there’s a stretch of Victorian terrace.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kale says at last. ‘For fucking up like this.’

‘It’s all right. You haven’t fucked up.’

‘I just felt I was being used.’

‘By whom?’

‘By you. A trophy of some kind. “Look, I can still pull young women.” You know the kind of thing.’

They have paused at traffic lights while a train rattles and shudders on an iron bridge overhead. Disconsolate figures shuffle along the pavements, mouthing things to people who aren’t there. Thomas wonders whether that’s what he has been doing as well, mouthing words to someone who isn’t there. ‘I’m not using you, Kale,’ he says. ‘I love you. It’s different.’