Swimming to Ithaca by Simon Mawer Page B

had been all this time.
Expedience had become habit, that’s the trouble.
    I’d been halfway round the world,
    And no one cared to listen.
We become our absences.
    O ne day she went into the town on her own. You weren’t supposed to do this. You were advised against being on your own, despite the truce that had been declared by EOKA.
    ‘I want a taxi,’ Dee said to the owner of the grocery shop.
    ‘My cousin,’ was his reply.
    And so, half an hour later, his cousin came with the taxi. The vehicle was a large, brash Opel Kapitan, a model that you didn’t find in Britain but you saw everywhere on the island – flashy and chrome-trimmed, like an American car. It wore a wide yellow stripe down one side, which signalled its status as a taxi, and scabs of pink undercoat paint all over it, which signalled its owner’s status as a driver of flair and masculinity. Cyprus racing colours, the British called the patches of undercoat it bore, or Cyprus blush. He laughed when she told him. The cousin was called Stavros. He was a portly man, with remarkably small feet for so large a body. He emerged from behind the steering wheel of the Opel like a dancer executing some intricate passage, a
paso doble
or something. Taking Dee’s hand he bowed over it as though it were the hand of the Queen of the Hellenes, or perhaps Penelope’s or even Aphrodite’s. ‘My lady,’ he breathed. ‘Please.’
    Dee noticed that the nail on the little finger of his right hand was disproportionately long, nurtured and cultivated like a pet. She felt a tremor of disgust. He seemed entirely untrustworthy. Used to Yorkshire plainness, she was suspicious of anything that might be dismissed as flannel, and flannel Stavros certainly possessed. ‘More flannel than a haberdasher’s,’ her Aunt Vera was wont to say.
    With great ceremony she was ushered into the back of the car and the door slammed shut. Again that fluid shuffle, and Stavros was behind the steering wheel, peering round with a smile of white and brown and gold. ‘Where my lady want to go?’
    ‘Just into town,’ she told him.
    He looked pained at the idea, at the tragic waste of talent that this would involve. ‘But I take you anywhere.
Anywhere
, lady. Nicosia, you want Nicosia? I take you Nicosia. Shops? Bars? I take you. Kyrenia? I have cousin in Kyrenia sells thinks, good thinks, good price. I take you there.’
    ‘Just into town, thank you,’ repeated Dee, and there was something in her manner that told Stavros that they would be going no further, at least not today.
    That was her first real expedition on her own. She, who was happy enough walking by herself on the moors above her home town, was thrilled with the excitement of being on her own amid the racket of a Mediterranean port, walking beneath palm trees on the seafront, sitting outside a café on a rickety iron chair to drink Turkish coffee and eat drippingly sweet
kadeif
, witness to the noise and anarchy of the town. Edward was flying that morning, and she looked up, squinting against the brilliant sun while a Meteor jet, glinting silver, traced a fine line of white through the sky above the Akrotiri peninsula. Was that him? She imagined him there in the cockpit, his face hidden behind the rubber oxygen mask that smelled the same as condoms, his gloved hand holding the control column with a kind of delicacy while he pulled it back into his belly and sent the jet soaring towards those faint brush-strokes of cirrus cloud that were all the eastern Mediterranean could manage. ‘That’s my husband,’ she wanted to call out to someone. ‘There, flying high above us all.’
    Later she went and found Marjorie Onslow, at work at her SSAFA canteen near the harbour. ‘I’ve escaped,’ Dee confessed. ‘Come out on my own.’
    Marjorie was delighted to see her. ‘Jolly good thing too. If you like you can always give me a hand here.’
    *
    That afternoon, after Paula had come back from school, Binty picked them both up and