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

where all the cards of a pack are placed face-down and you have to pick them up in pairs, recalling where the failures were so that others may be matched. He turns the photograph over and reveals a black and white snap of a car. It isn’t a car that he recognizes – it’s some kind of 1950s model, possibly American, with a wide band down the whole length of the body just below the windows.
    Yellow stripe for taxis, white stripe for hire cars. Why doeshe remember that? What random bits of circuitry bring that kind of fact floating out of the depths? And which was this – yellow or white? The stripe appears darker than the ground beneath the wheels or the blinding white wall behind. A taxi, then, in bright sunlight. With the driver standing by the door – a young man in white shirt and dark trousers and dusty shoes with pointed toes. His black hair is swept back in a cowlick, his eyes and mouth are smiling. And Thomas’ mother is standing beside him, her face composed, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes hidden by dark sunglasses with thick plastic frames. She is wearing that full cotton frock, decorated with fruit – oranges and lemons. Her waist is narrow, clinched by a wide belt. But there is nothing else, no other hint from the past, no faint footprint to mark the passage of something or someone. Just the photograph of a young man – in his twenties? – and Thomas’ mother – in her thirties – and a taxi parked outside a garage. And the only significance that it carries is that it is here, preserved for over forty years in an envelope marked
Oddments
. Mere survival is evidence.
    He picks up the menu card. This is easy. The lettering across the top announces HMT EMPIRE BUDE , and the date is typed below: 17th May 1957. The meal is of passing interest, an elaborate confection of Frenchified names that come down to brown soup, meat and two veg, apple pie, cheese and coffee. But in a ragged frame around the typed words there are nine signatures, scrawled in a variety of pens and at a variety of angles. One he makes out immediately because it is his mother’s. Another, written in a looped, convent-school script, is naively readable:
Araminta Paxton
. Araminta, he knows, is Binty. And there is Douglas’ beside it. Douglas and Binty.
    The other signatures mean little. Something that may be
Jennifer
, another that may be
Roger
.
Nissey
? Does such a surname exist? Another name begins with M and O. And there’s a DB.
    Turning the menu over, he smiles to find that there is more writing on the back:
To the Hidden Dreamer, from one who’s rude and able, DB
. The same rabbit-eared B in the same handwriting as the signature. There is a quickening, the foetus of an idea stirring in the womb of his mind. He counts the possible letters in this signature and comes to something between eleven and fourteen. That will do. It is within the limits of historical probability, that malleable border that historians instinctively draw around their little islands of fact.
    He grabs a piece of scrap paper and finds a ballpoint pen in one of the cubby-holes in the desk.
    ‘Let’s play anagrams,’ she used to say. ‘Try “Thomas Denham”.’
    Me sad hot man.
    ‘Do you know what I am? I’m the Hidden Dreamer.’
    The sad hot man considers the phrase on the back of the menu: ‘one who’s rude and able’. He finds it quickly enough,
rude able
transforming into
Braudel
beneath his pen, leaving only a superfluous E. A small tug of excitement. He scribbles down the remaining letters in a rough circle –
ONE WHOS AND E
– but he can’t make anything out of them. It’s like the final clue of the crossword, the one that won’t work out whatever you do with it, however you bend the meanings and the words.
    But if
ONE
signifies “I”? I WHOS AND E.
    Which gives him the letters for ‘Damien’, all except a missing M. And leaves him with
SHOW
. Is there some hidden message in that? Show what?
    I’m.
    Where do answers come