Swimming to Ithaca (38 page)

They drove to Nicosia for the funeral. The interment was at the military cemetery at Wayne’s Keep, a bleak place outside the city, a wasteland of dust and rock and eucalyptus trees. The officers of Damien’s regiment were among the mourners and the burial party was chosen from his company. The soldiers performed their strange, slow-motion drill, like dancers performing an underwater ballet. And then, after the coffin had been lowered into the ground and riflemen had aimed their rifles at the sky and fired a salute, a lone bugler played the Last Post. Damien’s wife and daughters stood at the graveside as motionless as sentries as the mournful notes rose like ghosts into the hot air.

Dee went over to her when it was all over. ‘We met last Christmas,’ she said.

The woman looked at her and smiled bleakly. ‘Of course. Deirdre, isn’t it?’

‘Dee, yes.’ She touched the woman’s arm. ‘I’m so very, very sorry.’

Sarah raised her pale eyebrows. ‘What do you have to be sorry about?’ she asked. ‘Did you do something wrong?’

It was two days later that Geoffrey came round. Tom was in his room and Paula was outside in the garden. As they sat in the living room sipping coffee, the adults could hear the little girl talking to some animal she had discovered among the bushes, explaining how it should behave if it was to be a good boy. She collected beetles, assembling them into families, giving them names, ascribing to them human follies and human desires.

‘He’s not tried to get in touch?’ he asked.

Dee fiddled with a packet of cigarettes, took one out and lit it with a trembling flame. ‘Why should he?’

‘We’re not playing games, Dee. You were having an affair with him, weren’t you?’

She felt the sting of blood in her cheeks. ‘Where do you get that idea from?’

‘Why can’t you just answer me straight? For God’s sake, Damien Braudel is dead, murdered in cold blood by EOKA. You were one of the first people at the scene and for all we know the killer may be the man who you’ve been fucking!’

‘How dare you speak like that!’

‘Dare? I dare all right. I’ll continue to dare until I get some sense from you. Remember the day when he came round here, the day before he disappeared. Remember that?’

‘Of course I remember.’

‘He was here for over two hours. We know that. We know something else, as well. There was another visitor that morning.’

‘Another visitor? What are you talking about, Geoffrey? Why
are you talking in riddles? Why is everyone talking in riddles?’

‘There’s no riddle, Dee. There was another visitor. He came in a civilian car driven by an Englishwoman. I’ve checked the number plate. Douglas Paxton’s. It pulls up by the gate and a young boy gets out. The others wait in the car, while he goes through the gate and round the side of the house. A few minutes later he comes back. Carrying a football.’ He paused, watching her closely. ‘Did you know that?’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about. Do you mean Tom? Is that what you mean? Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Perhaps I should have a word with him. Perhaps I should go in and have a little chat with him. As a family friend. Dear old Uncle Geoffrey. What exactly happened that day when you went to get your football? What did you see, old fella? Did you see your mummy fucking the taxi driver?’

‘Don’t you dare do such a thing!’

‘I’m just saying things as they are, Dee. The games are over. Now it’s serious. Can’t you get that into your stupid little head?’

T
he phone rang. Every time it rang she felt a small pulse of fear. The silent calls seemed to be more frequent now. The phone would sound through the house and she would grab the receiver up and there would be nothing. ‘Hello,’ she would say, ‘hello?’ And then, sometimes, dangerously, ‘Is that you?’ And the line would hiss back at her, and she wouldn’t know whether it was him or not, whether he was on the other end listening to her hesitant, anxious voice, or whether he had forgotten all about her and the call was nothing more than a wrong number, a random mechanical error at some unknown exchange. But this time as she snatched up the receiver there was a voice.
‘Good-morning.’ It seemed oiled, like a well-kept knife blade. ‘Is that lady Denham?’

‘It’s Mrs Denham, yes.’

‘Ah, Mrs Denham. This is Stavros Kyprianou. That car you ordered, lady. It will be there in ten minutes. Is that right?’

She tried to swallow, but the obstruction in her throat wouldn’t go down.

‘Lady? Are you there?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’m here. Yes, that’s right. The car—’

‘That you ordered. It is there in ten minutes.’

‘Yes.’

She put the phone down and stood there, almost as though the power of movement had deserted her. How should she prepare? She found no answer to the question. There was no way to prepare, no special clothes to wear, nothing to take with her, no way to stiffen her resolve. She opened the front door and glanced outside. There was the row of anonymous houses, the strip of potholed tarmac leading down to the shop at the corner with the delivery van parked near by.
AΦPOΔITH
, it said on its side. The shop belonged to Stavros’ cousin. It was where she had gone on her first exploration of the world outside the house, the place where she had been offered a chair –
karekla
, the owner had called it – and Paula had been given a glass of orange juice. But the shop wasn’t called Aphrodite. She realized that now. Almost everything else in this cursed island was called Aphrodite, but not that shop. General Stores, or something.

She went back inside. ‘I’m going shopping,’ she told Voula.
Pao yia psonia
. The girl nodded and grinned, as she always did when Dee attempted anything in Greek. ‘Back in the afternoon.
Apoghevma
.’

Ten minutes later Stavros was there exactly as he said – the Opel
Kapitan, with its familiar splashes of undercoat, idling outside the gate and he himself standing at the passenger door awaiting her arrival, just as usual. She settled into the oily interior, feeling sick with apprehension. ‘All right, lady?’ They pulled away from the kerb. She had expected to head out into the countryside, but instead Stavros followed the familiar road towards the town centre, past the fire station and the police compound. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

His eyes watched her in the mirror. ‘You think I tell you where we are going? Of course I don’t tell you.’

She glanced out through the window, bewildered. Not only ‘where are we going?’, but also ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ She looked round to see if anyone was following, but there was just the usual traffic milling around behind them, the buses, the trucks, the battered cars, the donkey carts.

‘Nicos is stupid, lady,’ Stavros said. ‘I tell to him, he is stupid to do this.
Palavos
, I say him. Stupid.’

‘Say to him,’ she said.

‘Say to him what?’

‘No, that’s what you say. Say to him. Not “say him”. And “tell him”, not “tell to him”.’

A glance in the mirror, his eyes narrow. ‘Look, lady, I not correct your Greek, you not correct my English. OK?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘
Signomi
. I’m sorry. Is that right?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.’

They came to a halt behind a bus. Old women climbed on board. There were sacks on the roof, produce for market. Stavros tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and hooted impatiently. ‘I say him that he should not trust an English-woman, but he say me that you are his friend. What kind of friend? I ask. Just a friend, he say.’ Again the eyes, watching, questioning. She looked away, out of the window at the passing traffic and the dilapidated buildings.

She shouldn’t have asked about
signomi
. She knew it was correct. Nicos had taught her.

The bus moved away, trailing a cloud of black smoke. Stavros drew out after it. They passed a market, stalls with fruit and vegetables spilling out over the pavement. A cyclist teetered across in front of the car and Stavros rammed his fist on to the horn, shouting something out of the window. Then without warning he braked and swung the car down a side street. It happened in an instant – a sudden deceleration, a squeal of rubber on the hardened asphalt, the centripetal force flinging her against the door – and they were off the main road. The side street was barely wide enough for one car to pass. A pedestrian pressed back against the wall and shouted abuse. A couple of old ladies retreated into a doorway. Glancing back Dee saw a donkey cart jammed across the road behind them, with the driver climbing down to see about something. Perhaps it was the cyclist. Maybe they’d hit him. Cars hooted in anger. There was a couple of men arguing and gesticulating. And then she understood – it was something about Stavros’ manner, a small laugh, a glance of satisfaction in the mirror – that what she had just seen had been deliberate, that any following vehicle was irrecoverably stuck on the far side of that little street incident, that they were now on their own. He slowed and turned the car again and the scene vanished. Now there was only a succession of narrow streets, little more than alleyways, with shops and bars and a patch of wasteland where a building had apparently been pulled down or was being rebuilt, or perhaps both of those things at the same time.

The car slowed to a halt. On the right there was a garage door, an open mouth between two shuttered façades. He swung the wheel over and the car lurched on to the pavement and eased into the narrow entrance. They stopped. The door rumbled down behind them and darkness fell.

‘Where are we?’

‘No matter, lady, where we are.’ He climbed out and opened the rear door of the car to take her arm. ‘You come. Please.’

There was the smell of oil about the place, and in the shadows a vague suggestion of bits of machinery. A door opened on to a narrow corridor. There was a flight of concrete stairs lit by a dusty window. He ushered her up to a landing and a bare, whitewashed room with a table and two chairs and a picture of Makarios on the wall. There was always a picture of Makarios.

‘You stay,’ he said, and was gone.

She waited. A single window overlooked a high-walled courtyard where sparrows scratched in the dust. Pigeons were strutting along the top of the wall, chests puffed out in the vain hope that that kind of thing would impress the females. And it did, for a moment. She could hear cooing and burbling and a rapid clatter of wings. Easy for pigeons, she thought.

A footfall on the landing made her turn. The door opened and he stood there in the doorway.

‘Nicos.’

He was unshaven, the dark hair on his upper lip already making the beginnings of a moustache. His hair was no longer Brylcreemed into a quiff but had been left rough and disordered. He seemed older, as though she had found him halfway through some kind of metamorphosis, a transformation from fragile, vulnerable larva to tough, carapaced adult. There was a pistol – she didn’t know the type but it looked like one of those army revolvers – stuffed into his waistband.

He came in and closed the door. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said. ‘Bit of a surprise, really.’

‘Is it?’

‘Well, you know. Things have changed a bit, ’aven’t they?’ The London slant to his voice, the glottal stops, the dropped Hs – it was somehow surprising to find them all in place. They
looked at each other with the same suppressed awkwardness as before, but then there had only been a narrow gap to cross; now it seemed to have become a gulf. ‘What are you doing, Nicos?’ she asked. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’

He sniffed, glanced round the room, then pulled the revolver out of his waistband and placed it on the table. ‘I can’t tell you that, can I?’

‘What’s that thing?’

‘What d’you think it is?’

Anger rose inside her. ‘This is damned silly.’

‘Look, we’ve only got a few minutes. Let’s not argue, eh?’

She looked away from him but there wasn’t much to look at – just the bare room with its single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and the dusty window and the bright light outside; and the pistol, like a great black arachnid, a glistening scorpion, lying on the table. Her eyes stung with tears. ‘What happened?’ she said, not knowing what to say. ‘Between us, I mean. If only—’

‘If what?’

She shrugged. ‘Things had been different. If we’d met in England or something. God, I don’t know … If I’d met you in London, before I’d got married …’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Nicos. I just don’t know.’

He laughed. It wasn’t a forced laugh like Geoffrey’s. It was dry and rough and natural, devoid of artifice. ‘I’d just have been a Ted, wouldn’t I? You might have passed me by in the street and thought yuck or something. You wouldn’t even have talked to me.’

‘I’m talking to you now.’

He came nearer, turned her face gently towards him. She wanted him to kiss her again. She wanted his tongue inside her mouth, and other things that she dared not even imagine. That dreadful compulsion. Was it love? ‘Do you remember that time when I took you to the airport?’ he asked.

‘Of course. Of course I do.’

‘And you were in tears and I thought you were the most beautiful thing in the world, do you remember that?’

‘I remember the tears. I don’t remember the last bit.’

‘Well that’s what I thought. I thought, if I could have this woman my life would be complete.’

‘So you’ve had your wish, haven’t you? And is it complete?’

‘It was a only few minutes. Is that enough to last a lifetime? That’s the question. Difficult calculation, in’t it?’ He stood there looking at her with almost no expression, as though she should provide the answer.

She nodded towards the pistol. It pointed diagonally across the table and she could see the bullets in its chambers, like seeds in a pod. ‘What are you going to do with that thing?’

‘Whatever’s needed.’

‘Isn’t that killing? Isn’t that what they do?’

‘It’s a war, isn’t it? Killing happens. But it needn’t happen, not if the British get out and leave the island to its people.’

‘And the Turks?’

‘The real war is with the Turks.’ His tone suggested that she was stupid not to have seen this obvious truth. ‘We’re not fighting the British, Dee. We are fighting the Turks.’