Swimming to Ithaca by Simon Mawer Page A

confessed that she enjoyed the place. And she found the locals very friendly. ‘I’d expected … oh, I don’t know. Indifference, at least. Hostility, maybe. I find them very warm.’
    He agreed. ‘The Cyps love to have someone be nice to them, that’s the truth. They’re not bad types really. Bit like the Irish – they want to be loved, but they do reserve the right to shoot you in the back if necessary.’
    She laughed. It didn’t take long to discover that he was remarkably expert on arcane matters of Greece and the Greeks. He could converse easily with the locals in their own language and evoke smiles and laughter just as he did with the British. And there was the further, surprising fact – she discovered this the next time they met, when he came with her and Edward and Binty and Douglas up into the mountains for a picnic – that he was a poet.
    They’d gone to Platres, a village high up among the pine trees, into a cool that you couldn’t find down on the coast. The road wound up through olive groves and vineyards, then higher and higher, lifting them out of the heat until the coast was a distant smudge of brown in the haze and the trees had turned from olive to pine, and there was the smell of resin on the air. They drove through the village and on up the road until there was a place they could pull off on to a forestry track. Geoffrey let the others get on with unpacking the cars while he stood lookingout over the roofs of the village and the dome of the church. Far beyond, in the haze of distance, was the faint blue wash of the sea and the silver expanse of the Akrotiri salt lake. ‘Platres, where is Platres?’ he asked of no one in particular. ‘And this island, who knows it?’
    Binty was spreading a rug on the ground, and finding plates and cutlery, putting out the food, getting things organized. ‘Geoffrey, what on earth are you going on about? For goodness’ sake shut up and do what you’re good at – open that bottle of wine.’
    He did as he was told – ‘Ah! The old trout’s a soak!’ he cried – but Dee had understood that his words had been neither casual nor whimsical. When they were settled and they all had a glass of wine and the food was being passed round, she asked, ‘That was a quote, wasn’t it, that “who knows this island?” business?’
    He smiled gratefully. ‘“The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres/Tearful bird on sea-kissed Cyprus.” Greek poet called Seferis. He was here a few years ago. Yiorgos Seferiades is his real name. He’s a diplomat, works for the Greek Foreign Office.’
    ‘I didn’t know you liked poetry, Geoffrey.’
    He shook his head. ‘I don’t really. Often I loathe it. But it likes me. You know the kind of thing? Hangs round me like an unwelcome friend. The kid at school that no one gets on with, and I’m too damn kind to tell him to bugger off, and of course everyone judges me by him. Oh,
Geoffrey
, they say: he hangs around with old Poesy. Funny fella.’
    ‘Do you write it as well?’
    ‘I try. That’s a very different thing.’
    Only later did she come across one of his pieces, published in the
Times of Cyprus
. She kept the cutting on her bedside table. She preferred poems that rhymed, of course, but she thought she understood what he meant. There was much about thisisland that she had not expected, either. And she fancied herself in the midst of her own particular Odyssey.
    Swimming to Ithaca
When I first came ashore on Ithaca
    I expected something different.
    The grey olives, fingering the wind,
    Were predictable enough.
    The asphodel, with its cat’s piss smell,
    Anticipated.
    And of course I knew it would be hot and dry.
But when I first came ashore at Ithaca
    It was Penelope who surprised me.
    Her manner with the suitors,
    And her impatience with my stories.
    And the relationships she had been weaving
    In my absence.
I had hoped to find an ally in Telemachus
    But he just shrugged his shoulders
    And asked where I