Swimming to Ithaca by Simon Mawer Read Free Book Online

says a male voice. ‘Posh. Somehow you can tell that.’
    Eric puts in another word. He appears to be enjoying this. ‘Surely the point is this: does it matter?’
    ‘What do you mean by “matter”?’ asks the girl in the skirt. Wondering what her name is, Thomas glances at the list in front of him. He can barely read the names in the backwash of light from the projector. Kale? Can it be Kale? Have they named her after a
cabbage
?
    ‘Well, is she of any historical significance?’ Eric asks. ‘That’s the
point
, isn’ it? It’s historians that decide. That’s what Tom here is trying to say, isn’ it? So, who is this woman? Does she
matter
, historically speaking?’
    ‘She certainly mattered to my personal history,’ says Thomas. ‘She’s my mother. Was. Was my mother.’
    After the class the girl in the skirt – Kale, it
is
Kale – lingers behind. Clearing up her books, or something. The others push out of the room and head off down the corridor leaving her alone.
    ‘Is it really Kale?’ he asks.
    She looks up with a quick smile. ‘Cognate with cabbage, you’re thinking.’
    He feels his stomach lurch, the sensation you get in a fairground, on the big dipper or something. ‘You don’t look much like a cabbage.’
    ‘It’s Kay
ley
, actually. Cognate with Kelly. That’s what my mother always told me. Irish.’
    ‘And you believed her?’
    ‘Don’t you always believe your mother? Didn’t you believe yours?’
    ‘I didn’t always know what she was telling me.’
    She stands there looking at him. She has short hair and thinly pencilled eyebrows and wide-open eyes. Her lips glisten. They form a complex piece of topography, a recurved bow, something convolute and secretive. She’s wearing a black leather jacket and a blue denim skirt and her legs are bare. He has already noticed them, of course. White and smooth, as though she has just waxed them. A slight sheen. ‘How about some lunch …?’
    She looks at him thoughtfully. What is she seeing in his expression? A bit unnerving, really, that kind of collected, composed look in an undergraduate. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m meeting my boyfriend.’
    ‘Oh. Right. Maybe another time?’
    A shrug. ‘Why not?’
    It was W. H. Auden. He remembers that as he watches the girl leave the room. W. H. Auden claimed to suffer from the same illusion, that in any group of people he always felt that he was the youngest present. Mind you, Auden wouldn’t have entertained the other illusion that Thomas has, the one about the girl called Kale, the one where she’s standing in the middle of the seminar room with her skirt round her waist and her knickers round her ankles.
    T homas creeps through his mother’s house like a spy. He searches through the darkened rooms like a thief. Time passes. There are the letters he has already seen, neatly piled besides some household bills. On the top, the one from GeoffreyCrozier. Crozier never came to the funeral, despite Thomas writing to tell him. When was that? Two weeks ago? Two days? Time is a malleable dimension. Historians struggle with dating, with calendars and chronologies, but the human brain treats time in cavalier fashion. Her death seems months ago, and only yesterday.
    He opens drawers. More papers, letters, photos. He leafs through them without method, cursing himself for being so unprofessional, for stirring up the archive, for destroying those subtle matters of placement and orientation that may themselves provide fleeting, ephemeral information. Later, fearfully, he goes into her bedroom where there is the wardrobe painted with flowers, and the dressing table with its clutter of potions and creams, the chest of drawers and the queen-size bed, covered still with its eiderdown. He can taste the smell of her in the air, the last exhalation of her presence. The drawers of her dressing table reveal a froth of silk and cotton, things that had once lain close to her flesh, but never as close as he. He