Swimming to Ithaca (36 page)

‘Yes, what?’

‘The last time, when you went with Binty. To Lady’s Mile.’

‘Yes?’

She tries to smile. It’s a half-smile, with half the face, just the bottom part. ‘You came back after swimming, didn’t you? You came back for your ball.’

He shrugs and returns to the scorpion, which has backed into the hole and sits there with its claws raised, like an armoured car or a tank backed into a narrow defile.
Chelae,
the claws are called. It’s from the Greek. He knows that. He knows words.

‘Didn’t you?’

‘Maybe. I don’t remember.’

‘Did you come in?’

If you taunt a scorpion lots, it’ll sting itself. If you surround them with fire, they’ll sting themselves. He’s been trying to test these things scientifically. He wants to see whether it’s an old wives’ tale. How old do wives have to be before they tell tales?

‘Did you? Come into the house, I mean?’

‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything.’

She stands there watching, irresolute, scuffing at the ground with one toe, like Paula does when she doesn’t know what else to do. She says, ‘I love you all very much, you know that, don’t you? I love you and I love Paula and I love Daddy. You know that?’

She’s never said anything like that before. Does that make it an old wives’ tale? He shrugs, prods, watches the scorpion watching him with black scorpion eyes, armoured against the world.

T
he killings began. The British read about them in the
Times of Cyprus
, heard about them on the wireless, discussed them at cocktail parties and on the beach. Threadbare, squalid incidents: a Turk shot in a café, a Greek informer gunned down in his house in front of his wife and children, an off-duty soldier dying on a pavement in Nicosia, two military policemen shot in a street in Famagusta. Occasionally there would be a photograph, a grainy rectangle of newsprint showing limbs in postures that they never would have adopted in life – a foot twisted, an arm bent round, a head turned in the opposite direction from the body.

‘You really ought to be in married quarters,’ Binty told Dee. ‘You can’t be safe stuck out there in the town.’

‘In June,’ she said. ‘They’ve promised June.’

‘And that canteen where you help out. It’s really not safe.’

‘Of course it’s safe. It’s inside the port. There are guards.’

She felt detached from the world around her – from Edward, and Binty and Douglas and the others, detached from their fears and concerns. It had been like this when Charteris had gone. She had heard nothing for months and the life of the grimy city had continued around her, but all the while she had felt herself dispersed on a cold and distant ocean that she had never seen but which raged, icily, in her mind.

Stavros drove her down to the canteen. He was sullen and suspicious, but he was her only link. ‘What’s he doing?’ she would ask. ‘Tell me what he’s doing.’ His eyes, watching her in
the mirror, evaded hers whenever she looked. ‘Is he doing anything dangerous? You can tell me, you know you can tell me.’

‘Look, I not know anything, understand? I tell you that.’

‘The fighting that’s going on, the Turks and the Greeks. Is he tied up in that? Please tell me.’

‘I know nothing, lady.’

They drove through the narrow streets, with the domes of the cathedral on one side and the minaret of the Djami Kebir mosque on the other. ‘This is not a good area, lady. The Turks.’

‘You’re as bad as Nicos.’

Her laughter made him bridle. ‘What do you mean, “bad as Nicos”?’

‘A joke.’

He shrugged. ‘Jokes, always jokes, you English. I only warn, that is all. Better we go somewhere else.’

‘Well, I want to go this way.’

He drove on in sullen silence until she offered a sacrificial apology. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I snapped.
Signomi
.’

He glanced in the mirror. ‘Nicos say that you are a lady with, how do you say? –
pnevma
. Spirit. I like that.’

It seemed that for a moment his defence was down. ‘Have you …’ she hesitated in case the question would conjure up its own denial, ‘have you heard from him?’

He made a gesture with his hands, taking them from the wheel and opening them momentarily to the sky. ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

‘Tell me. Don’t talk in riddles.’

‘He tell to me to look after you. That is why I am not happy you go through this area.’

‘What else did he say?’

Another silence.

‘Did he say if I can see him?’

They were past the Castle and down by the waterfront where
the sea unravelled to the horizon, towards Egypt. There were the old godowns, the storehouses, the harbour gate with its armed guard. He drew in to the kerb, and in a moment was there at the door, opening it to let her out. ‘Perhaps,’ he said as she climbed out. ‘Be ready if I phone.’

‘What do you mean, be ready?’ Her heart, her perception of time itself, had stopped. ‘You’re talking riddles again.’

‘I don’t know riddles.’

‘Stories. You’re telling stories.’

‘I tell nothing. I just say to be ready for if I call. And you tell no one. You understand? Tell no one.’

‘I won’t. Of course I won’t.’

‘He trusts you,’ he said. ‘I do not.’

S
he sat with Marjorie, smoking, waiting for custom. The canteen was in danger of closing. With the outbreak of violence had come curfews, usually in the evening, sometimes throughout the whole day. Often the men were confined to camp, shut in their lines of sweltering tents out in the hinterland, behind barbed wire and sandbags and the impenetrable barriers of military routine. ‘I don’t know whether we should strike the flag,’ Marjorie said. ‘Not the kind of thing I want to do, but it all depends on the powers that be.’

But for the moment they soldiered on. That phrase, of course, was Marjorie’s. ‘I suppose you won’t be able to help out once you move into a married quarter?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to carry on alone.’

‘They ought to send someone else out from England.’

‘That’s the trouble. They might, if there was still demand, but in the present circumstances …’ Marjorie looked at her
sideways. She had a way of looking at you, as though she was peering over spectacles that she didn’t, in fact, possess. ‘By the way, where has your Nick gone? I haven’t seen him for days.’

‘I’ve told you, he’s not “my Nick”. And I don’t see why everyone is so interested.’

‘It sounds as though you’re missing him, darling.’

At that moment the phone rang, as startling and intrusive as a stone thrown through a window. Marjorie went to answer it, then looked across to Dee. ‘It’s for you.’

Dee took the receiver. ‘Hello? Who is it?’ There was the crackle of interference on the line. Somewhere far away a voice twittered, some distant, unintelligible conversation.

‘Hello? Who is this?’

For a moment she thought it might be him. But another voice spoke: ‘I thought I might find you there, hidden dreamer. I rang you at home but there was only the maid, gibbering at me in Greek. I haven’t seen you for ages.’

‘Oh. It’s you.’

‘Well, don’t sound so enthusiastic. Look, can’t we meet, at least for a chat? I’m at that bar on the seafront. Aphrodite’s. I won’t say anything embarrassing. Promise. Just a social chat, like old times.’

‘Old times weren’t like that.’

‘No, I suppose they weren’t. New times, then. I’ll be on my best behaviour. Nothing that anyone could gossip about.’

‘Look—’

He talked over her: ‘No, don’t say it. Don’t say anything. I’m there right now. Try and get away if you can. Just a few minutes.’

‘I told you, I can’t. I don’t think it’s—’

‘Don’t think, just do it.’

‘Damien …’ And then the click of the receiver on the far end, and the buzz of the dialling tone. She looked up at
Marjorie. ‘Damien Braudel,’ she said. ‘Apparently he’s at a bar near by. Do you mind if I nip out to say hello? Just for a few minutes?’

It was a fine morning. The heat had not yet blurred the air and the sky still possessed that intensity of blue that you never saw in England, as though it were a solid medium, not transparent. Before her was the cool expanse of the sea, ruffled by the morning breeze. There were a few couples strolling in the sunshine, some hopeful fishermen standing by the sea wall. A radio blared from a café. Was she being watched? She felt like an animal, a mouse or something, scurrying along beneath the watching eyes of carnivores – Geoffrey’s watchers in their anonymous vans, their neutral cars, their fawn raincoats and shop-soiled lightweight suits. Were they watching her now? She had no answer to the question. Once you think you are being watched, you are.

Cleopatra Street was bisected by sunlight, as though cut by a knife, the buildings on the right in shadow, the ones on the left in the glare. A grocery shop erupted across the pavement with crates of vegetables and fruit. Among the cars jammed along the pavement was a white coupé with the maker’s name, Borgward, in chrome letters. The Café Aphrodite was almost unchanged – only the name, in accordance with the EOKA edict, had been replaced by Greek lettering:
AΦPOΔITH
. Otherwise there were the same dusty bottles in the window, the same half a dozen Formica-topped tables out on the pavement, the same feeling that the place still hoped for a clientele that had never materialized. Damien was sitting at the same table as before, nursing a similar brandy sour. He half rose as she approached. ‘Long time, no see.’

There was an awkward greeting, a fumbled handshake combined with a chaste kiss, cheek to cheek. Precisely which cheek
was determined by a kind of lottery, a self-conscious bobbing of heads, a fumbling avoidance of mouths, a clumsy apology. She sat down across the table from him and tried to compose herself. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to be quick. Marjorie’s expecting me. She’s all on her own.’

‘Can’t we get some lunch somewhere?’

‘I’m sorry, there just isn’t time.’

Waiting for her order – she wanted tea, with fresh milk, not that terrible evaporated stuff – they constructed some kind of a conversation out of whatever there was to hand: the children, their spouses, the situation on the island. ‘I think they may ship all the families home,’ Damien said. ‘This place is a tinderbox at the moment.’

‘Douglas says there’s a settlement in the pipeline.’

He laughed. ‘Fat lot people like Douglas know about it. I’m in the front line. They sit cosily in the Club drinking gin and tonic and reading
The Times
and the
Telegraph
. They should get off their backsides and experience a bit of reality.’

The tea came. She sipped, and smiled vaguely and glanced round. They seemed out of place sitting there on the pavement, under the eyes of passers-by. Dee looked away, towards the promenade and the sea, out towards the hairline of the horizon that divided the soft blue of the water from the hard, turquoise sky.

‘You know your taxi driver fellow?’ Damien said.

She felt a small shock, like the sensation you might get from touching an appliance that hasn’t been properly earthed, a sharp tingling of pain and suspicion. ‘What about him? Have your men beaten him up again?’

‘It was hardly as bad as that. They gave him a bit of a going over perhaps.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘Sure there’s a difference.’ He reached inside his jacket, took
out a folded sheet of paper and handed it across the table. ‘Anyway, it seems that we weren’t altogether off the mark. Don’t wave it around, for heaven’s sake. There’d be a hell of a stink if anyone knew I’d shown it to a civilian.’

The document originated from 147 Field Security Section, whatever that might be. The word
‘RESTRICTED’
was stamped in red ink across one corner. ‘What is this?’

‘Just read it. It’s obvious enough.’

S
USPECTS, EOKA, LIMASSOL AREA
, the title proclaimed. Below were photographs of three men, each with a brief biographical sketch. One of the photos, she realized with a start of fear, showed Nicos – a younger, bland Nicos posing for the kind of snapshot that might have been used for a passport, but certainly Nicos.
Nikolaos Kyprianou. Part educated in England and speaks English almost like a native
, it said.
Strong London accent
.

Her mind trembled. For a moment she wondered whether something in the unsteady fabric might give way, whether she might break down there and then in front of Damien, with people walking past and watching them in the curious manner of the Greeks.

‘It seems he’s rather deeper in it than we might have thought.’

‘Why should I care?’

He was smiling at her. ‘Oh, but you do, don’t you, Dee?’

There was sweat on her forehead, sweat trickling beneath her arms. ‘Of course I don’t.’ She pushed the paper back across the table to him. ‘I haven’t seen him for days. His uncle has been doing the driving recently. That’s all I know.’

‘There’s quite a flap on about him.’

‘And I don’t believe he can be involved in anything of this sort. It’s you, it’s the Army and the government, it’s the situation they find themselves in.’ Anger grew inside her, anger and fear grafted together. ‘Why can’t you all just leave this bloody island alone? Tell me that. What’s the place got to do with you?’

He returned the sheet to the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘What’s it got to do with you, Dee?’

‘Nothing. I’m as much a foreigner here as you are. An invader.’

‘We’re getting the socialist sermon now, are we?’

She pushed her chair back and stood over him, oblivious to anyone who might have been watching, suddenly possessed by an anger that had never been given expression until this moment in the spring sunshine of Cleopatra Street. ‘It’s not a sermon, it’s just common sense. Our presence here makes criminals of the innocent. That’s all.’

‘The day of the riot …’

She paused, about to turn away. ‘What about it?’

He smiled up at her. ‘What went on between the two of you? Something had happened when I turned up. You looked as frightened as hell and he ran off like a kid that has been caught stealing apples. It wasn’t politics, that’s for sure. What was it, Dee?’