Swimming to Ithaca by Simon Mawer Page A

her at the same time, the very worst sort of motion. But somehow her body was beginning to accept it and she was starting to feel better. It was rather like recovering from a bout of flu: she felt weak and elated at the same time.
    ‘How does saying it’s psychological help?’
    ‘It doesn’t help at all, really. But it’s an interesting point.’
    ‘Not if you’re seasick, it isn’t.’
    There was a squad of soldiers doing physical training on the deck below. The soldiers had undernourished figures and pale skin that looked as though it was being exposed to the sun forthe first time ever. A drill sergeant shouted commands and the men made Xs and Ys of themselves, and bent to touch their toes.
    ‘What are those men doing?’ Paula asked.
    ‘They’re making themselves big and strong,’ Major Braudel told her.
    ‘They look weedy to me.’
    ‘That’s the problem.’
    Braudel was an officer of one of the two battalions aboard. He was tall and slender, with pale hair. Perhaps his hair colour made him seem young, as well as his symmetrical features and smooth complexion. Certainly he seemed more youthful, more enthusiastic than Edward. The evening before, he had come over to their table and tried to persuade Dee to dance. The band had been playing and there were one or two couples attempting a wayward foxtrot. But she had claimed that she was still unsteady on her feet, and still a little queasy, so instead he had gone off to the bar and returned with a glass of some murky concoction that he presented to her with comic solemnity. ‘What you need is a brandy and milk. Does wonders for a hangover.’
    ‘But I haven’t got a hangover.’
    ‘You soon will have, if you drink all that brandy and milk.’
    That had made her laugh. It had been the first laugh since leaving the Needles astern. He introduced himself to the others at the table. His Christian name, he confessed with some embarrassment, was Damien. ‘After the apostle to the lepers.’
    They hadn’t understood the reference.
    ‘A Belgian priest who went to Hawaii to look after lepers. My father was Belgian, you see. And a devout Catholic. He came to England during the Great War, married my mother and never went back.’ He looked at Dee thoughtfully, almost embarrassingly. ‘Where’s the accent from?’
    ‘Can you hear it?’
    He grinned. ‘Ee ba gum.’
    ‘Sheffield,’ she admitted; she
admitted
it. It annoyed her, that she should not be proud of the fact.
    ‘I know Sheffield well,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent hours lying in wet heather on the moors. Bang, bang, you’re dead, that kind of thing. The natives were quite friendly. They’d come out and bring us cups of hot tea. But they looked at us strangely when we didn’t drink it from the saucers.’
    Somehow that conversation had signalled the end of her sickness. And now it was morning and they were approaching the Portuguese coast and she had woken up to a new world of possibility. For the first time she had felt genuine hunger, and on their way to breakfast she and Paula had encountered Braudel again. ‘You need a turn round the deck,’ he informed them. ‘You must get up an appetite before you eat.’
    ‘I’ve already got an appetite,’ Paula told him.
    Braudel laughed, and took her hand. ‘We have to think of Mummy, don’t we?’ They walked together towards the dining room, with the land gleaming away to port and the waves sparkling in between, and the sun coming up, cool at first but on a trajectory that would take it high and hot. Damien had, he explained, been this way before.
    ‘What, on the promenade deck?’
    ‘No, you chump. This bit of sea. Last year, bound for the Canal Zone.’
    Dee was amused by the way he called her ‘chump’, as though he was the brother she had never had. ‘Chump’ seemed the kind of term used between brothers and sisters.
    ‘You were at Suez?’
    ‘Just about. We’d just landed and deployed towards Port Fuad and then they pulled us out.