The Wildflowers by Harriet Evans (20)

Chapter Seventeen

That evening, Ant sat on the edge of his bed and slowly slid the drawer of his bedside table out. He took the watch his parents had given him from its black box, and fastened the strap. He wound it up and set the correct time, then covered his wrist with his other hand, remembering the day they gave it to him, feeling the soft ticking through his fingers, up his arm, seconds of time passing that took him further away from them and his old life.

Upstairs, the large radio rumbled with news. The Home Service had a report of bombers attacking southern coastal towns. They didn’t say where; they never did. But he and Dinah had both heard the planes as she was preparing tea.

He could hear Dinah welcoming a guest; he thought it might be the vicar. Ant’s arms were warm and crisp with summer sun and he was tired from the long cycle ride and wished he could stay downstairs. But he climbed the steps anyway, touching the walls, for he loved the warmth of the wooden panels after the sun had been on them all day.

Suddenly he heard scattered noises like gunshots and he froze, heart thudding painfully before he realised the sound was clapping, not gunfire. He went out on to the porch and there was the tailor’s dummy, dragged up from his room and dressed with a paper hat, Alulim the ancient stone bird paperweight balanced on a side table, and Livingstone the stuffed monkey, Eunice the doll, the birds of paradise in their case.

‘They’re all out here too. They wanted to wish you a happy birthday,’ said Dinah, pushing her hair out of her eyes, and smiling at him. Ant stared at her, bewildered, then saw a knot of people beyond them too.

There was Reverend and Mrs Goudge, and Mrs Proudfoot holding a cake, and her daughter Eliza with the squint and her young man Joe Gage, and Alastair Fletcher and his children, Julia swinging from the porch balustrade, waving at the setting sun, and Ian, hands in pockets. And Phoebe and Roy, two other children from the village of his age with whom he used to hang around and the curate Bob and – oh, he couldn’t see who else was there. They all clapped as he appeared and he felt his cheeks smarting with embarrassment as though he’d been slapped, and then Mrs Proudfoot handed the cake to Dinah, who held it up, with the thirteen candles ablaze, and led them all in ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.

There were crystallised rose petals, yellow and pink, to decorate the thin buttercream layer on top of the cake. They spelled out ‘A’. The cake rested on the old willow-pattern cake stand that had belonged to his grandmother, Dinah’s sister Rosemary.

Julia Fletcher sang louder than everyone else, adding annoying trills and low rumbling harmonies to the song. Ant ignored her.

When they’d stopped singing and Ant had blown out the candles Dinah said, breathlessly, ‘Everyone chipped in. Jane made the beautiful sugar petals,’ she gestured at the vicar’s wife. ‘The eggs are from Mrs Proudfoot, and Joe and Alastair shared their sugar ration, and I got the cream and butter from old Roger Hardy’s farm up past the village. His son, Derek, brought it over.’ She smiled at a thin, sour-faced boy who sat, arms crossed, on the edge of the porch as though he wished he were anywhere but here. ‘Everyone chipped in, like I say, Ant. It’s all for you. Happy birthday.’ Her eyes shone and her beads clinked as she hugged him. ‘Happy, happy birthday, dear boy.’

‘Oh, yes, Ant, happiest of lovely delicious birthdays,’ said Julia, flinging her arms around him.

Ian muttered, ‘Shut up and stop being so jolly embarrassing, Jules.’

He pulled her away and she fell back, with a giggle.

Ant ignored her. She was annoying. But she couldn’t spoil this lovely afternoon.

There had never been such a cake and he could remember the taste of the fresh eggs, the cream and butter, for as long as he lived, years after eating such things became an unremarkable event. And there were sandwiches, on thin Victory loaf bread, with either local crab Julia had caught at Chapman’s Pool – which was decent of her – or tiny scrapings of meat paste and dripping provided by the vicar, and there were strawberries, and an extremely undercooked vegetable pie that Alastair had made and handed round, and was chaffed about and took in relatively good humour. The atmosphere was genial, magical even – there was something about that evening, when the light refused to fade and they might suddenly all have been bombed or gunned down, something glorious about it. Some of the guests dragged the old wicker chairs down the porch steps and on to the sand, others remaining on the porch or on the stairs. Derek, the farmer’s son, excused himself, Ian hung around looking miserable, and Julia chatted to Dinah about their shared belief in fairies.

When sunset came they set the candles and the paraffin lamps along the porch balustrade and they all ‘did’ a bit. Mrs Proudfoot sang, ‘When Father Painted the Parlour’ with great gusto which earned her an enthusiastic round of applause. Alastair recited, very seriously, ‘There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu’, to awed silence. Julia, rather shyly, sang a short verse of ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’ in a low, surprisingly sweet voice.

‘That was good,’ Ant told her as she hopped off the porch.

‘Oh, darling boy, you’re too kind,’ she told him, flinging her arms round him and he recoiled, regretting that he’d found her momentarily not annoying.

Then, at much urging, the birthday boy himself was pushed up on to the stage, made to do a speech. Though he was learning more Shakespeare every day with Dinah, the only piece he was confident he knew by heart was Prospero’s speech from The Tempest which his father had always done at auditions.

He was nervous, and unused to it, though he used to love acting at school, before Daddy died. He had to clear his throat twice to be able to get through the bit about ‘the great globe itself / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve’, for Daddy had always done a little action with his hands, miming the disintegration of everything, but then he forced himself to stop thinking about that, just pretend he was Prospero, standing on the steps of his own magical mysterious cabin looking out to sea, looking out at the horizon, and with his strange, otherworldly subjects about him, half real, half imaginary. And suddenly it was true. He was not a newly teenage boy standing knock-kneed on a porch on a summer’s evening. He was a sorcerer, an exiled duke, a master of magic, able to control tides, conjure up storms. In the distance, Venus shone steadily in the violet-peach sky. He fixed his gaze on her, and when he finished, there was respectful applause, but Dinah was staring at him, with a curious expression on her face.

‘You’re very good,’ Jane Goudge said, kissing his cheek as he came down the steps and stood amongst them rather awkwardly. The others stood up, murmuring. Dinah handed round more elderflower wine.

‘Thank you,’ said Ant. ‘It’s just remembering words, really—’

‘It’s a bit more than that, dear boy,’ said Mrs Goudge, hugging a cushion to herself and looking at him appraisingly. ‘He’s got a lovely speaking voice, hasn’t he, Ambrose?’

‘I should say so,’ said the vicar.

‘Yes, old bean, you really have,’ came a voice from the shadows of the setting sun.

Ant jumped. A woman was standing to the side of the Bosky, a little pigskin case in her hand.

‘Good – evening,’ he said, and the vicar and his wife stared at her. ‘How – may I help you?’

‘I should say so. I’m looking for Dinah Wilde, is she about?’

The Goudges went into the kitchen together to fetch her, leaving Anthony alone with the strange woman, who stepped forward, raising her face to him, and Ant had to stop himself from giving a low cry.

She had an elegant, swirling crop of blonde hair, which curled at her neck. Her eyes were blue, her white skin stretched over slanting cheekbones which might have given her the air of an ice princess or a sprite, Ariel come to life, but the hard squareness of her jaw offset it. There was something mannish about her, something ugly, though the eyes were almost turquoise and glittered. In the fading light he could only see she was dressed all in grey.

But none of that was what shocked him. There was a scar, running down her right cheek, a fine line like a seam, but for the end by the mouth where the red stitching was obvious. He blinked heavily, the excitement and emotion of the day catching up with him, and nodded at her.

‘You must be the famous Anthony,’ she said, in a strangely rich, clipped voice. ‘Well, this is awfully nice. Party, is it? I’m Daphne. Daphne Hamilton,’ she said, and she held out a slim white hand, each digit dotted with dark red nail polish. ‘I’m a very old friend of your aunt’s. You are Anthony, aren’t you?’

Alastair Fletcher was staring at Daphne, trying to size her up. He said tersely, ‘He’s Anthony, all right.’

‘Yes,’ Ant said, slowly, but it sounded unconvincing, as though he were lying. She held out a hand, and he took it and shook it. It was cool, soft, heavy and almost limp in his, as though she could barely be bothered to expend the effort on him.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you, Anthony. I say, where is she? Don’t tell me she’s done a runner again.’

At that moment, Dinah appeared on the porch, smiling in mid-conversation at something someone had said, half turning back to the house, and then she saw Daphne and stopped short, two crystal glasses in her hand, green stems glinting in the lamplight.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said. Ant looked at her, surprised; he’d never heard that tone in her voice before.

‘Evening, darling!’ Daphne called, gaily. ‘Gosh, well, I’ve come to see the great treasure-hunter in semi-retirement, if that’s all right.’ She held up a half-empty bottle of gin. ‘Bought some Booth’s Dry with me. Thought it’d be jolly to catch up. It’s awfully boring in town at the moment. Everyone’s either orf fighting, or evacuated, or run away like cowards, or they’re bloody dead.’ Her languid gaze took in the burning oil lamps, the cake stand empty but for crumbs, the glasses knocked over to the side. ‘I obviously made the right decision, coming here, even though the trains were terrible, darling, I had to take four of them and it took all day, that’s why I’m so late. You’ve grown your hair. I liked it short, I must say.’ She looked around and laughed. ‘I say. I can stay, can’t I?’

‘Oh.’ Dinah put down the glasses. ‘Well – of course you can, Daphne dear. It’s not awfully convenient but—’

‘I had to beg a lift off an extremely suspicious chap at the station,’ said Daphne as though Dinah hadn’t spoken. ‘Looked at me as though I was a Hun.’ She glanced around the porch, bird-like eyes taking everything in. ‘Anyway, darling, I wanted to talk to you about Ishtar.’

‘Ishtar?’ Dinah said, frowning.

‘Do listen, Dinah. You understand what I mean.’

‘Yes,’ said Dinah, nodding furiously. ‘Absolutely I do. But come inside, dear, I’ll show you your room . . .’

Conversation between the other guests had melted away and there was silence. Daphne looked around – she was always in control, he was to realise that later. ‘Hello.’ She raised a hand to the assembled group. ‘I like your brooch,’ she said to Mrs Goudge, who’d reappeared from inside.

‘This is my dear friend, Daphne Hamilton, assistant curator of Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum,’ said Dinah, needlessly loudly. ‘Daphne, do come in, darling.’

They walked inside, the stranger’s hand on the small of Dinah’s back, guiding her across the threshold of her own house, leaving Anthony alone on the porch.

‘Who is that, pray tell?’ came a voice at his elbow and he looked around to see Julia Fletcher doing balletic arm movements next to him.

‘She’s my aunt’s friend,’ he said. ‘From London.’

He leaned over and stared round past the house down to the lane, looking at the scuffed lettering of Dinah’s birthday message in the sandy dirt by the dusk light. It was almost all gone. From inside the house he heard lowered voices, and then a soft laugh. He hesitated, not sure why he did so, and then followed them inside.