Swimming to Ithaca Read online

  Also by Simon Mawer

  FICTION

  Mendel’s Dwarf

  A Jealous God

  The Bitter Cross

  Chimera

  The Gospel of Judas

  The Fall

  NON-FICTION

  A Place in Italy

  My thanks to Phaedon Stamatopoulos for his assistance with the Greek.

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-1-405-51276-3

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 Simon Mawer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Charles Walker

  Contents

  Also by Simon Mawer

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  One

  Thomas Denham watched his mother dying.

  The historian in him had expected the event to have a significance of some kind. It surprised him to find none. Oh, there was tragedy of course. Agony, misery, fear, all those things, for him and his sister – but above all, presumably, for their mother. But at the time, in time, there was no significance. Nothing he could get hold of, understand, absorb into his personal world. There was no meaning. Deirdre Denham, née Boltby, had lived. Now she was dying. The fabric of time and space that had opened for a few years to allow her existence was now closing. She would vanish. That was it.

  A young doctor came and examined her, and afterwards took him aside. ‘Not long now,’ she said. She might have been talking about a train they were waiting for. ‘She seems unconscious, but that doesn’t mean she can’t hear what’s going on around her. So.’

  So? So what? What was he meant to do with that piece of knowledge? The doctor strode away to her next appointment with death. She looked about sixteen. He thought of asking whether she was fully qualified yet, but didn’t. Two types of person you daren’t antagonize: the waiter in a restaurant and the staff in a hospital.

  The terminal ward was a warren of rooms linked together by the meanderings of a long corridor – it was euphemistically called the Simpson Ward, but all the patients knew what ‘Simpson’ meant. ‘I don’t want to go into the Simpson Ward,’ his mother had said during the early days of her treatment. Irony stalked the corridors of the hospital: Simpson was the inventor of anaesthetic, the man who had first tried to take the pain out of sickness.

  Thomas rang his sister. They had visited in shifts during the later stages of the illness, changing places like soldiers on sentry duty. Paula had been there most of the previous night, when their mother was still more or less awake, and had gone home in the early morning when Thomas appeared. But now it seemed that the moment had come for double turn. ‘You’d better come now, Paula.’

  There was a silence on the other end of the line. Not silence in the abstract, but a silence; something positive.

  ‘See you soon,’ he said, and replaced the receiver.

  He went back to his mother’s room and sat by her bedside and watched the slow rise and fall of her chest beneath the covers. She wasn’t old, but the illness had made her so. She had become thin and haggard and wrinkled, wasted by both the disease and its treatment, with a scrub of grey hair that had regrown after they had abandoned the chemicals that had made it fall out in the first place. ‘Mother?’ he called softly, but there was no reply.

  There are easy deaths – something short and sharp, like his father’s – but his mother’s had not been like that. It had taken eighteen months. Or four years. Or a lifetime. Like any piece of history, it all depends where you want to draw the start line – eighteen months earlier when they had detected metastasis in bone and brain? Or two years earlier when breast cancer had been diagnosed? Or you might date it all from the moment when that first cell somewhere in the pliant tissue of her left breast had mutated from the benign to the malignant. When would that have been? Undatable, so not historical? Or you might go further back, to an unperceived moment when sperm first nuzzled into egg within the claustrophobic fallopian tube of a Sheffield college teacher’s wife one rainy October day in 1923. Death begins from the moment of conception. A life is the history of a death.

  At one point during her illness his mother had told him, with something approaching pride, that she had finally returned to the weight that she had been at her wedding; as though there were an upside to the disease after all, a hidden benefit. Later, much later, just a week or so ago, she had said something else. Lying in her bed in the hospital, cold despite the heat, her hand lying on the sheet like the claw of a bird, she had said to him: ‘This is a punishment.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean, Mother?’

  ‘I believe that we are punished for what we have done. This is my punishment.’

  He had been dismissive. ‘Don’t be silly. What do you have to be punished for?’

  For a moment she had seemed about to answer. But then she had just closed her eyes and he hadn’t pursued the matter. Why, he wondered, had she cause to fear punishment? The idea of punishment as a reason for this suffering revolted him, yet later he thought, Why not? Medical science could not give a reason, aside from the obvious organic ones – this mutation, that carcinoma, those metastases – so why not invoke the callous judgement of some irascible and inhuman god?

  He met Paula in the waiting room. Her face was strangely mask-like, as though the skin had been pulled taut against the gale that was blowing through their lives. ‘She’s unconscious now,’ he told her as they embraced.

  Paula pushed him away. ‘Unconscious? Oh God. Since when? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I did, just now. The doctor says that she still might be able to hear what’s said to her.’

  ‘Hear? Oh my God.’ She seemed to find unconsciousness a disaster, but surely it would be a blessing, wouldn’t it? She hurried into the room and sat down beside the bed, holding the claw of her mother’s hand, whispering to the figure beneath the blankets. What was she saying? They weren’t in the habit of opening their hearts to one another, not this family. They talked, oh yes, but they never talked about what was at the heart of things, possibly because the implicit assumption was that there was nothing there, really, no heart of things at all to have anything at it. Just life and you got on with it. Or death, and you got on with that too. Matter-of-fact, be it the Yorkshire plainness of his mother’s side or the London pragmatism of his father’s. ‘I’m not a man of very deep emotion,’ his father had told him once. And, on another occasion: ‘Never get yourself on the wrong side of an unequal relationship. I badgered your mother into marrying me and it’s not been an easy relationship ever since.’

  Had that been a joke? But no, it was serious – one of the few bits of advice his father had ever given him, apart from an awkward little lecture on sex when Thomas was about twelve. ‘I know all about it,
Dad,’ he’d wanted to say during that agonizing conversation, but of course the truth was quite otherwise: he had known nothing about it, nothing beyond the basic mechanics, gleaned from an encyclopaedia, of penis and vagina. Not that his father’s dissertation did much good – everything that Thomas knew he had learned from Gilda.

  Thomas watched his mother die, accompanied to the brink by her daughter. At around two o’clock – morning or afternoon? – the faint rise and fall of her chest stopped and she was dead.

  Paula wept. This was unusual. She was an efficient woman, in matters of the heart as in matters of career. She had a husband and two children, a house in Kent and a flat in London, and a successful career in journalism. She wrote a column giving advice to people on how to conduct their emotional lives. Weeping didn’t seem to come into it; and yet there she was, weeping.

  Thomas watched his mother die, and found that he couldn’t weep.

  There were things to do, the undertakers to ring, the registrar and the solicitor to contact – phone calls to make and letters to write. Paula was busy, what with deadlines to meet and the children to organize, and an interview to do with a footballer who spent more time in the gossip columns than he did in the sports pages. She would try to get down in the afternoon.

  So he cancelled a lecture and two tutorials and drove out through the city towards Essex, that forgotten lump of England tucked away behind London’s arse – a landscape of estuaries and inlets, of salt marsh and clay fields lying slack beneath a pewter sky. You could smell the sea on the air, see it in the bloom that lit up the sky from beneath. The house where his mother had spent the last few years of her life was in the middle of the town, tucked into a line of what were once fishermen’s cottages. Presumably the houses had then been squalid hovels, reeking of fish and shit, the object of bourgeois disapproval and philanthropy, and the threat of condemnation as unfit for human habitation. Now they were subject to preservation orders, and painted in pastel shades that no fishwife could ever have envisaged.

  Lace curtains twitched as he unlocked the front door. He wondered whether the neighbours knew. He wasn’t even sure who they were, old ladies with Zimmer frames replacing the fishwives of yesteryear. He’d never been sure what had led her to this final stop in her journey; some vague idea that living near the sea was good for you?

  Inside the house there was something of his mother’s presence, like the potter’s thumbprint in clay. She had sat there, in that armchair, walked over there to those bottles (most of them near-empty) to pour herself a gin and tonic, which is what she always drank, a little too much of late. Chemotherapy, she used to say, when she was in her cups. There were Staffordshire pottery pieces, and a painting of a Mediterranean hillside, and a portrait of her done in pastels by a friend. It was a strange likeness that grasped many of her features – her nose, the set of her chin, the slightly impatient compression of her lips – without capturing any real sense of her presence.

  On the mantelpiece was a picture of his parents at their wedding. Spring 1947, at a hotel on the edge of the moors above Sheffield, the two of them cutting the tiered cake. There was something touching about her slender fragility, and the shadows in her face and behind her smile, a smile that Thomas knew from memory as one thing (warm, motherly) and saw now, frozen in that photo, as something else (remote, guarded, sad). He had been to that hotel as a child, and to the church. Both buildings were remarkably similar for their Gothic pretences and their grey, soot-stained stone. He had gone with his grandparents and their curious Yorkshire accents and comfortable manners. They had taken afternoon tea in the hotel and paid a hushed visit to the shadows of the church, which seemed a secretive and unknowable place, like the sexuality that it had licensed that had, in its turn, engendered Thomas. Was he perverse to find sex in a church? At the time (twelve, thirteen years old, not long after that embarrassing conversation with his father) he had thought so. It had shamed him. He had knelt in one of the pews and prayed for forgiveness. Now he considered it a remarkable percipience, a sign of the historical insight that was to dog his adult life. With my body I thee worship, with all my worldly goods I thee endow. Sex and economics – a heady cocktail.

  Where, he wondered vaguely as he examined the photograph, was his mother now? The thought was a childhood relic, a leftover from his innocent past when the ceremonies of religion had half convinced him. ‘Nowhere, Mother,’ he said out loud.

  Unsure where to begin, he went upstairs to the room that she had used as a study. It faced the back of the house, overlooking the narrow garden that she had cultivated assiduously until her illness. There was a cupboard and a chest of drawers, a bureau and a filing cabinet. He opened the bureau and found letters, a whole drawer full of them, a mosaic of various sheets, of differing colours and textures, differing hands, differing sizes, different salutations.

  Dear Deirdre …

  My Dearest Dee …

  Dee darling …

  Dear Mrs Denham …

  One or two were in his own childish handwriting, the weekly letters he had been constrained to write from boarding school.

  Dear Mummy,

  It is raining here and we can’t go out. I’m not very happy because 7/6 isn’t really enough. Can you please send me a postal order, please. Not much. 5/- would be alright. Yesterday (Sat) we played St Anthony’s. I didn’t score but Maloney did.

  There were similar offerings in Paula’s childish hand and, in contrast, one or two from their grandfather, composed with a certain quaintness, like missives from a previous century: My Dearest Deirdre … with great affection, your loving father.

  Time passed, signalled by the sound of a carriage clock that she had bought at an antique shop in York and which beat like a pulse on the shelf above her desk. The speed of time disturbed. How do you measure it? Seconds, hours, days, years, centuries of course – but that’s not how it is. Time isn’t a scalar dimension like distance or mass; it’s a vector, like acceleration. It can vary, speed up, slow down, deviate. At times it can be like struggling uphill – a boring afternoon, a visit to the dentist – while at others it’s like freewheeling and the wind is in your hair and you haven’t noticed the ditch that lies ahead. The problem with time is that in order to measure it you need to have somewhere to stand outside it. Give me a fulcrum and a place to stand and I will move the Earth. Archimedes, of course. Thomas felt the need for something similar, a place outside time from which to observe and measure its passage.

  Another letter.

  My darling Dee,

  May I, after all these years? Perhaps I shouldn’t. Dear D, then. . Ya sou. Do you remember how I tried to teach you some Greek? And how we laughed? Or perhaps you have put all that behind you, stuffed it into the part of your memory that is reserved for painful things.

  The reason I am writing is that time has passed, and time, surely, is the great healer. But not only healer. Emasculator. Whatever is the female equivalent of that, I wonder? Effeminator doesn’t sound right, does it? Anyway, it was all so long ago and now I fancy that you might not be too appalled to recognize my writing again and perhaps reply. No obligation on your part, I assure you.

  Geoffrey

  Geoffrey Crozier: a small, dark man with an uproarious laugh and something of the attitude of a market trader. ‘Always sounds as though he’s about to try and sell you something,’ that’s what Thomas’ father used to say.

  Attitude. There was this man walking along the street, and the wind blew his hat off. Well, off he goes running after it, but just as he’s about to reach it, there’s this dog, grabs the hat and eats it. The man shouts to the dog’s owner: ‘Oi! Your dog’s just eaten my hat.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ the dog’s owner says. ‘Well that’s your problem, mate. In this wind, you should have held it on.’

  ‘Oh,’ the man with the hat says. ‘That’s your attitude, is it?’

  ‘No, mate,’ the dog’s owner replies, ‘it’s not my ’at ’e chewed, it’s your ’at ’e chewed.’
>
  Paula shrieking with laughter. She didn’t really understand the joke, but Geoffrey was laughing uproariously, and so was their mother, so Paula laughed too. ‘Attitude!’ Geoff would cry from then on, and Paula would double up in laughter. Attitude! Attitude!

  There were other words in the vocabulary of laughter: ‘pellucid’ was one, and ‘anemone’. ‘Pellucid,’ Paula would say eagerly, and Geoffrey would wince. ‘Rude,’ he’d cry. ‘Rude.’

  Thomas took the pen and a blank sheet of paper and wrote out a transliteration of Geoffrey’s Greek salutation, and discovered meaning hidden beneath the unfamiliar letters: Me poli agapi: with much love.

  And what would she have written in reply? My darling Geoffrey?

  He put the letter aside. Ideas were crawling through the undergrowth of his mind, memories circling behind him, tantalizingly just out of sight, but always there, like threatening shapes in the shadows. From a photograph on the top of the bureau, she looked back at him from thirty-five years ago, with that tired, unhappy smile that had been her trademark. The expression seemed almost derisive now that he was reading her mail.

  ‘What are you looking for, Tom?’

  ‘Unpaid bills, that kind of thing.’

  ‘You know how organized I was. You’ll not find anything out of place.’

  ‘What about letters from Geoffrey Crozier?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Who was he, Mother?’

  ‘A dear old friend. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  But she didn’t. Just the smile.

  He got up from the desk and went to the bookshelf. The book wasn’t there, but eventually he found it downstairs in the sitting room, a narrow volume with the title in faded gold lettering down the spine: Aphrodite Died Here. He recalled flicking through it as a child and seeing the author’s name on the title page, being told by his mother that this was what Geoffrey did when he was being serious, which wasn’t very often as far as Thomas could see. ‘Geoffrey is a very clever man,’ she always told her son.