Swimming to Ithaca (7 page)

‘I know Sheffield well,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent hours lying in wet heather on the moors. Bang, bang, you’re dead, that kind of thing. The natives were quite friendly. They’d come out and bring us cups of hot tea. But they looked at us strangely when we didn’t drink it from the saucers.’

Somehow that conversation had signalled the end of her sickness. And now it was morning and they were approaching the Portuguese coast and she had woken up to a new world of possibility. For the first time she had felt genuine hunger, and on their way to breakfast she and Paula had encountered Braudel again. ‘You need a turn round the deck,’ he informed them. ‘You must get up an appetite before you eat.’

‘I’ve already got an appetite,’ Paula told him.

Braudel laughed, and took her hand. ‘We have to think of Mummy, don’t we?’ They walked together towards the dining room, with the land gleaming away to port and the waves sparkling in between, and the sun coming up, cool at first but on a trajectory that would take it high and hot. Damien had, he explained, been this way before.

‘What, on the promenade deck?’

‘No, you chump. This bit of sea. Last year, bound for the Canal Zone.’

Dee was amused by the way he called her ‘chump’, as though he was the brother she had never had. ‘Chump’ seemed the kind of term used between brothers and sisters.

‘You were at Suez?’

‘Just about. We’d just landed and deployed towards Port Fuad and then they pulled us out. Bloody farce. Betrayed by the Yanks. And after all we’ve done for them.’

‘Jolly good, I’d say.’

He looked at her in surprise and some amusement. ‘Jolly good what?’

‘The withdrawal.’

‘You think so?’

‘I think Suez was a terrible mistake. And Eden a fool.’

‘Good God, you’d better not say that kind of thing here. They’ll keelhaul you.’

‘Don’t you agree?’

‘I’m a soldier. It’s not my job to think.’ He smiled and looked away to the horizon and the smudge of land that was, so he told them, La Coruña. ‘“The burial of Sir John Moore”, you know? He played a big part in the history of our regiment. “Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note/As his corpse to the rampart we hurried.”’

‘Actually it’s “corse”.’

‘What?’

‘Corse, not corpse. Sort of poetic. Means the same thing.’

‘Is that so? Gosh, I bet
you
don’t saucer your tea. Where did you learn that?’

She made a face, an expression of regret. ‘I was at college for a while, studying English. Then I left to join the ATS and wasted two years, really. After the war all the places at college were taken up by men who had just been demobbed and there didn’t seem any room for me.’ It was sunny now. The sea had had the grey brushed out of it, to be replaced with a blue that you never saw in Britain. The waves seemed teasing rather than threatening. ‘And anyway I met my husband. He sort of swept me away from all that …’

Beneath the sun the British had undergone a metamorphosis, like imagos easing their way out of the grey chrysalis of life at home. There was colour, there was laughter, there was a subtle
shedding of old clothes in favour of new – tropical drill for khaki battledress; white cotton for brown wool. Pallid flesh took on shades of pink and tan. They indulged in novel games – quoits and deck hockey, and a shooting competition off the stern of the ship with balloons as targets. Dee partnered Braudel in a deck-tennis mixed-doubles competition while Paula laughed and shrieked from the sidelines. They got through to the final before being beaten by Binty and Douglas, who took the whole thing very seriously and became quite cross when Braudel and Dee laughed at their own mistakes. ‘There’s no point in playing if you don’t take it seriously,’ was what Binty said. But away from competition she was very sweet and had become quite a friend. ‘I can see that fellow’s got quite a pash on you,’ she remarked as they went to shower and change. ‘Edward would be jealous.’

‘Well, he’s no reason to be.’

‘Of course not, my dear. Everyone knows that shipboard romances are just a game. And he
is
a bit of a dish.’

Did that mean that Binty gave her seal of approval to their mild flirtation? She and Douglas had promised Edward that they would look after Dee during the voyage. Did that, Dee wondered, extend to guarding her marital virtue?

That evening at dinner they played a ridiculous game of Damien’s invention. It was called anagrams. The object was to compose phrases out of the letters of each other’s names. He won comprehensively. ‘I’m rude and able’, he made out of his own name, and ‘hidden dreamer’ from Dee’s. ‘Are you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she replied tartly.

The ship’s orchestra played songs from
My Fair Lady
, and she and Braudel danced together on the small apron of parquet that was the dance floor. It wasn’t milk and brandy in her glass now, but gin and it, a mixture that Damien persuaded her was rather superior to gin and tonic. ‘It’s stronger,’ she said, sipping it warily.

‘That’s why it’s superior.’ He had this mocking tone which amused her, as though he found everything faintly ridiculous – the ship, the reason for his journey, Dee herself. He was a soldier because he enjoyed soldiering, he told her. Nothing better. Certainly not working in some bloody office for a few pounds a year more than he was getting now. See the sand and flies of the world, he said. He was married, but his wife was staying in their house near Aldershot until it became clear how long his battalion was going to be abroad. He had two daughters, of nine and twelve.

‘I’d like to meet your family,’ Dee said. ‘What’s your wife’s name?’

He smiled. ‘Sarah. She’s not like you,’ he added.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Unspoiled.’

‘She is?’

‘You are.’

The band played ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ and they found themselves dancing rather close, his face against her hair, her own cheek against his chest. ‘Damien,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t think so.’

He moved perceptibly away. ‘No, I suppose not.’

Binty was watching, she knew that. Paula was in the cabin, being babysat by the ever-willing Marjorie, Tom was a thousand miles away at his boarding school and Edward was a thousand miles in the other direction, but Binty was watching. When the band finished, she and Damien went out on deck for a breath of fresh air. He held her hand. She felt bewildered and slightly light-headed. ‘I must go and relieve Marjorie,’ she told him. ‘Really, I must go.’

‘Of course,’ he agreed, and gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek before releasing her.

*

The next day the ship hove to in a flat calm. There was a church service on deck, with the chaplain of one of the battalions officiating. The headland away to port in the heat haze was Cape Trafalgar. Flags fluttered overhead, the famous signal that the
Victory
had flown on that October day in 1805 – England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty – while the band played ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’ and hundreds of voices, male voices, were raised up to the enamelled turquoise sky:

Eternal Father, strong to save

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

Who bids the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep

Wreaths were dropped overboard for the dead, and Dee felt ridiculously proud as she watched them float away on the gelatinous surface, proud that figures out of history – Lord Nelson pale and sensitive, Hardy tall and noble, hundreds of ordinary seamen with their tarred pigtails – could be real to men and women one hundred and fifty years later. This was the glory of the British, she felt. There were things that were disgraceful, things that her father quite rightly railed against; but not this. She saw Damien down on the lower deck with his men, looking fine in the uniform of his regiment, and she felt proud for him and a little guilty.

During the night they passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. Dee woke Paula so that they could look out across the black sea to the lights of Tangiers on one side and Algeciras on the other. By the next morning they were in the open sea once more, and memory of that narrow passage was no more than a half-remembered dream. While Paula squealed with delight they watched dolphins sliding through the water like knives and
flying fish darting like thrown daggers. The soldiers had rifle practice down on their deck, firing at targets thrown astern of the ship. The sound of gunfire was flat and abrupt, puny against the huge space of sky and sea.

Heat came gradually, in the ship’s stately progress eastwards down the Mediterranean. The heat increases going south and going east, that’s what Damien told her. It seemed obvious about going south, but why should heat increase going east? ‘Because you’re heading towards the Orient,’ had been his reply.

‘But that’s no answer. It’s just a word.’

‘Typical Sheffield, always wanting literal reasons. Doesn’t Orient
sound
hot? Isn’t that good enough? Doesn’t it sound hot and exotic, full of rich scents and strange flavours? But don’t ask me why.’

So she expected the heat, even if she couldn’t explain it – but not quite the oppression of it, the damp beneath her arms, the insidious trickle of sweat between her breasts, the thin layer of moisture that developed between her palm and the small starfish of a hand that was Paula’s.

‘Do you know the poem “Sailing to Byzantium”?’ she asked him. They were standing at the rail, watching. He was close enough for her to feel his hip against hers.

He didn’t.

‘That’s what we’re doing. We’re sailing to Byzantium.’

Thomas attends a faculty meeting, a tedium of discussion and deliberation in which they argue about labels on office doors. Should the department, in the pursuit of equality and the denial of hierarchy, abandon academic titles? Should the élitist ‘Dr T. Denham’ become the egalitarian ‘Thomas Denham’? The arguments circle, like the flies circling aimlessly in the centre of the room. ‘Why shouldn’t you be able to distinguish me from the caretaker?’ one of Thomas’ colleagues, a man of great personal courage, asks. ‘Did I spend years acquiring letters after my name in order to be reduced by your absurd principles from a
fellow
to a
bloke
?’

There’s laughter – after all, the joke was quite good – but Thomas fails to join in because he is not paying attention. With all the eagerness of the hunter for the quarry, he is thinking of the next class of Historiography Module 101.

As so often with hunting, waiting is rewarded: once again
Kale is the last to leave at the end of the class. She has that calm air of method, a taking of her time instead of rushing for the door like an adolescent. Today she looks older than previously. Perhaps it is her make-up, the blood red of today’s lips. It is so difficult to tell these days. Fashion gives little clue, manner gives less. She is, perhaps, in her late twenties. His heart lifts and sinks, both at the same time: a safer prospect, but at the same time less impressionable.

‘How about today?’

She glances up, puzzled. ‘Today?’

‘My offer of lunch.’

‘Oh.’ She looks round as though for an excuse, but doesn’t find one in the now empty seminar room with its disordered rows of chairs, its fire extinguisher and evacuation notices, its framed pictures of political posters from the Soviet Union – Trotsky like a glaring demon, Lenin pointing into the sunrise. Is it a good sign that she hasn’t come equipped with a get-out line? Or maybe she has completely forgotten his previous invitation and isn’t clever enough to invent an excuse on the spur of the moment.

She shrugs. ‘All right.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Great.’

They leave the building together, talking history, which is fine as far as Thomas is concerned. History is life; life history. He talks, she listens, and anyone overhearing might conclude that they are simply teacher and pupil discussing academic issues of mutual interest. They walk along the plate-glass flanks of the building, past a noticeboard that exhorts people to come to a disco, a demonstration, a festival of alternative film. It is a delight to have this girl walking by his side. Her presence confirms what he always feels, that he is as young as she; younger, in fact. Perhaps her height helps. She is quite tall, as tall as his mother.

Discussing Eric’s absurdities, they go out through the gates and pause on the pavement, on the edge of the traffic. ‘He’s a laugh,’ Kale says.

‘He’s the face of barbarism. Did you hear his comment when I gave you
What is History?
to read? He asked whether it was available on video.’

‘That was a joke.’

‘It was the truth dressed up as a joke.’

‘Whatever.’ She moves to cross the road and Thomas grabs her as a bus sweeps past, mere inches away. ‘It’s a one-way street.’ He points. The words are there, at her feet:
LOOK LEFT
. ‘For a second I thought you were going to bring the narrative to an abrupt halt.’ She gives a nervous laugh as he takes her arm and ushers her across the road in safety.

For lunch he has decided on a pub that isn’t usually frequented by members of the department. You have to know these things if you want a modicum of privacy. The Spigot and Firkin, it’s called, a place of noise and crush, populated by office workers on their lunch break. Thomas orders a pint of beer for himself and lager and lime for her and they stand side by side to examine the menu chalked on a blackboard behind the bar. Simultaneously they decide on the same thing: chicken tikka masala. That provides some amusement, a further fragile bond. Shared danger overcome, shared taste expressed.

‘Is Britain the only country in the world where you are expected to pay for your food and drink before you actually get them?’ he wonders aloud as he hands over the money.

The barman appears unmoved by comparison with other nations, other cultures. ‘What name’s that, mate?’

‘Thomas.’

He writes
Tom
on the order slip.

‘It’s Thomas,’ Thomas insists, and watches while the man
makes a correction:
Tomass
. Is that a joke? Kale seems to find it all funny, this expedition to the pub in his company, this choosing of the same lunch, this complaint about the way the bill works, this insistence on his full name. It is as though he is the student and she the teacher, and she is patronizing him – or maybe that is just the Auden illusion at work.