Swimming to Ithaca by Simon Mawer Read Free Book Online Page A

plunges his hands into the drawer and lifts a muddle of clothes to his face and breathes her in. For a moment she is there in his brain, conjured up by her smell, her scent, the haunting effects of some portion of the brain – the limbic system, maybe – to evoke a whole presence. Redolence is close to recollection. Why is that? Where is the history of smell?
    ‘Tom, what on
earth
are you doing?’
    A flash of heat in his face. He shoves the things back in the drawer, his hands shaking. ‘Just looking, Mummy.’
    She crosses the room, glances at him curiously, closes the drawer. ‘Well, you mustn’t look without asking,’ she says, and crouches beside him to take him in her arms; and her smell is there, infusing his brain, muddled up with the whole of him. Her breasts large
and soft. He wants to see them. He wants, for a shameful, suppressed moment, to suck at them.
    He opens other drawers and inside the last, lifting aside some woollens, he discovers a manila envelope. The word
Oddments
is scrawled across the flap in her handwriting – he remembers the characteristic flourishes, the slant and attack, the style that once brought breathless excitement whenever he received a letter from her. Her handwriting is as redolent of its creator as her features and her voice, and her smell.
    Oddments
.
    Thomas takes the folder through into the study. He can’t deny a certain quickening of the pulse, a certain tremor in the bowels as he sits at her desk and slides the contents out on to the polished wood. There are a couple of newspaper cuttings, a photo, a crumpled, faded bill from a restaurant, a typewritten menu and, in a folded sheet of plain paper, a pressed flower – a cyclamen. He unfolds the newspaper cuttings. The first one includes a poem, one of Geoffrey Crozier’s, entitled ‘Swimming to Ithaca’. And there’s a sheet of plain paper, brown with age, with another poem on it, typewritten and dedicated.
For Dee
,
with affection
,
Geoffrey
. This one’s called ‘Persephone’. Something about Lethe, the river of forgetfulness that guards the entrance to the underworld. He puts both poems aside. The second cutting is altogether more interesting to the historian. It has the name of the newspaper – the
Times of Cyprus
– pencilled across the top in her handwriting, along with the date:
15th May 1958
. At the head of the story is a portrait photograph of a man wearing a uniform cap. His features are smoothed by the morbid hand of a photographic studio and his smile is hopeful, the kind of smile you wear when you are putting a brave face on things before going off to war. The story below reads:
BRITISH OFFICER SHOT
    A British military spokesman reported yesterday that Major Damien Braudel, of the Second Battalion of the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, died in Limassol on Wednesday of gunshot wounds. The precise nature of the incident is not yet clear, but Army sources said that the probability is that it was an E.O.K.A. action. Major Braudel had been on Cyprus for one year with his regiment, during which he had been involved in operations against E.O.K.A. bands in the Troödos Mountains. He leaves behind his wife and two children. Next of kin have been informed.
    A vague recollection stirs, like the elusive image of a dream that remains with you after waking. Damien. And Braudel, a name that memory suddenly and surprisingly gives him as Brawdle. Even that is evidence of a kind, the fact that the misspelled name has lain in his mind all those years, to be lifted out of memory and compared with the actual spelling in print before him. He tries not to pursue the recollection lest it fade away entirely. Instead he turns to the photograph that lies tantalizingly face-down on the desk, with that crisp concavity that is caused by shrinkage of the emulsion. Two inches by three, with deckle edging. Written on the blank back – again, her handwriting – is the name
Nick
.
    It’s like playing pelmanism, that childhood game