Chapter Twenty
1941
The third Christmas of the war was difficult for Ant. London seemed a distant dream to him; he could recall his life there still, but bits of it were becoming blotted over, like rain dropping on to a chalk painting. It bothered him and he took to testing his memory at night, trying to see exactly what he still knew about Kelly Street, the time before his father’s death, his mother’s death. He couldn’t remember the privy at the back of their house, for example, or the colour of the eyes of the sweetshop owner’s granddaughter, who had thick brown plaits and liked sherbets. He remembered the smell of coal in the air, and the burned-caramel scent of the roasted nuts in stiff paper cones sold by the man next to Mornington Crescent tube station. And the scratchy blue seats at the opulent Bedford cinema when he could escape his mother (who didn’t like him going, she said he’d catch fleas), and the particular fug of Turkish cigarettes, and the skinny old usherette who clipped your ticket. But he couldn’t remember the outside of the Bedford or where on the high street in Camden it was. He couldn’t remember whether his father had had a moustache the last time he came home on leave or not and this especially bothered him. They’d argued about Ant going to boarding school – his father was adamant it was best for him, that he couldn’t stay at home with his mother all the time. Ant had shouted at him, and refused to say goodbye. He remembered that.
He missed London but the truth was that he was at home here now. He loved the sea, and the sand, and the lanes where you could cycle everywhere, and Playland in Swanage where you could go on rides and play on the slot machines with your gaggle of friends, boys and girls you picked up en route into town, many of whom were staying in Swanage as their whole school had been evacuated. People were still dying every day and the planes buzzed overhead constantly but you got used to it. Ant could recall beginning to feel guilty about this but you had to. You squared your shoulders and carried on. That was all you could do. He had Aunt Dinah, after all, and she had always known how to make things better. He’d believed that, after a while.
Although, sometimes still . . . take Daphne, for example. Aunt Dinah said Daphne was an old friend she didn’t see much, and Daphne had stayed that first weekend of his birthday and had been quite jolly, helping make beef hash fritters and charming Mrs Proudfoot in the village into giving them a cup of sugar which she had heated up on the gas ring and somehow made long strands like filaments which she twisted into toffee-coloured bundles. She had a sweet tooth, and Ant noticed she ate most of the sugary hair herself.
Then Daphne said she wanted peace and quiet and to do some sailing, so she came back in a few weeks, then again and again. Ant didn’t understand why when it was anything but peaceful here and there was nowhere to sail, not with the beach and sea bristling with troops and fortifications. But still she kept coming down. She’d bring her ration book with her but it wasn’t worth much as she’d always used up most of her coupons. She was lazy, she lied, and, over time, Ant grew to dislike her. And he wouldn’t ever have admitted it to himself but he was disappointed that Dinah was in awe not just of her intelligence but also her superior social status – it was rumoured that Daphne was the daughter of an earl, that she had eloped with an Italian count to Monte Carlo when she was eighteen and had been excommunicated by her family as a result. ‘She used to be fabulously wealthy, before they cut her off without a penny. She moved in the best circles, Ant dear,’ Dinah told him once. ‘We were in Venice before the war for a conference on Sumeria and Daphne was staying in a palazzo on the Grand Canal. Guest of a duke there. Mallowan and Desmond and I were in a terrible pensione on the Lido and we all got bed bugs. She misses being rich, one has to feel for her. And the people she knew. I mean, she knows everyone. I saw her kiss Oswald Mosley at a party once.’
‘He’s not exactly the best people, Aunt Dinah.’
‘Oh, dash it, Ant, you know what I mean,’ Dinah had said crossly. ‘My point is she moves in the finest circles. I know she can be a little selfish, but it’s only what she’s used to. And I owe her.’ Her face fell, and her eyes were solemn. ‘I owe her a great deal. I can’t repay her.’
Ant didn’t believe this. He thought Daphne came because she wanted something and Dinah wouldn’t give it to her.
Christmas Eve was a bitter cold day and frost glittered on the sand. Dinah and Ant cut holly from the lane by the church together and were twining it in and out of the piles of boxes still stacked high in the sitting room at the Bosky in harmonious silence as darkness fell. There came a ferocious knocking at the door.
‘Mary and Joseph?’ said Dinah curiously, going downstairs. ‘Oh!’ he heard her say, as she opened the door. ‘Daphne! How – how wonderful.’ Tony’s heart sank, but he rearranged his face into a polite expression of surprise. Daphne came upstairs into the living room, wrapped in a large fur coat, the usual air of insouciance and prurient curiosity. She flopped on to the sofa, as she stretched out her arms.
‘What are you doing here, dearest?’ Dinah said behind her, scurrying to relieve her of her possessions. ‘I thought – the advice was not to travel by train this Christmas unless urgent.’
Daphne pulled her gloves off, one by one. ‘Well, dear, the museum’s been hit. Absolute carnage.’ She said this almost with relish.
‘Oh my dear. Oh no.’ Dinah turned pale. ‘But the marbles, and the panels, the statues – where – where was everything?’
Daphne looked around, lowered her voice. ‘It’s just us, isn’t it, darling? And him?’ She jerked her head at Ant. ‘Aldwych tube station.’
‘No, darling. Really?’
‘Absolutely, yes. Isn’t it a scream? The most priceless treasures in the British Museum, the Elgin marbles, most of the Assyrian reliefs, all stacked nicely away in the old tunnels from the line that goes up to the BM. Some of the other stuff’s gone out west, we’re not allowed to know where.’
Dinah rubbed her hands together, and exhaled. ‘How marvellous, how clever they are. That’s one in the eye for them. They’ll never find them, not even if we lose. Can you imagine if they got hold of the Elgin marbles.’
‘Oh, they’d slap them all over one of Speer’s ghastly Führer schlosses.’ She shrugged off her mink coat and said, ‘Too ghastly. The old place took quite a hit, I’m afraid. Everything’s ghastly, isn’t it?’
‘Mr Churchill’s in Washington,’ said Dinah, who had a huge, almost religious-like faith in the Prime Minister. ‘We must hope that his meetings with Mr Roosevelt will produce some new direction of hope for our two peoples.’
‘What rot. We’re all scuppered, Dinah. London’s a smouldering mess, virtually nothing left. It’s over – all we should do is drink and be merry for tomorrow we all die.’ She yawned, heavily, the scar on her cheek puckering as her muscles pulled downwards. ‘What’s for supper? I’m famished. Ant dear, is there any gin?’
Ant looked at her coldly. ‘No gin, sorry. You don’t seem that upset about the museum, Daphne.’
‘Ant!’ Dinah said, furiously. ‘Don’t be rude.’
But Daphne appeared not to have heard him. She sank down on to the sofa and looked up at Dinah with her big, clear blue eyes, rubbing her hands gently together in a curious motion, like a satisfied spiv.
‘Listen, old bean. That’s not why I came, I’m afraid. Dinah, poppet. I’m awfully sorry to bring bad news. The flat’s been hit.’
‘What flat?’
‘Your flat, darling.’
Dinah paused in the act of stuffing some holly into the handle above the window seat. She turned round, her mouth a large oval O. ‘Oh – oh, dear. Is it gone?’
‘Whole building now a pile of rubble. Everyone in it at the time killed. Absolutely rotten show, D, I’m so sorry.’
She had stopped rubbing her hands together and Ant saw the palms, as she flexed her fingers. They were flecked with black and grey, bumpy, as though she had taken in the gravel and rubble herself.
‘The barrage balloon, though . . .’ Dinah’s expression was bewildered.
‘Oh, darling. As though that’d make a difference. Haven’t you been listening to the news? Don’t you know how bad it’s been? Elizabeth Senior was killed two weeks ago, did you hear? Direct hit on her flat, her sister was in the other room, escaped without a scratch.’
Dinah put her fingers to her mouth. ‘Oh, dear Elizabeth – oh, no.’
Daphne pressed her palms down on her lap, and said, ‘What they’ll do now with the Prints and Drawings department I’ve no idea. There’s that awful Stanley Robinson gone off to fight and old Gadd isn’t up to the job – it’ll come down to me now, I know—’ She saw Dinah’s expression and said quickly, ‘I am sorry, D.’
Dinah was still. ‘Everything, really everything has gone?’
‘Darling, it was an incendiary bomb. Normally they can put them out in time but not this one – burned the place to the ground.’
Dinah slumped down into the window seat, staring at nothing, and after a moment she said, ‘I’m selfish for being so upset when there’s others who have absolutely nothing. Just rather a blow. Some dear memories in the place and – and money, you know . . . were you all right, dear Daphne?’
‘I was out. Dancing at the Café Royal – thank God. Boyo was with me, he was an awful brick, helped me clamber over the rubble to have a look and see if anything was salvageable . . .’ Daphne gave a small smile. ‘Listen, I told the ARP I’d tell you. You’ll have to go up to town to see what’s saved . . . not much, I think.’ She was watching Dinah carefully. ‘I think most of your papers, all the research on Nineveh – it’ll all have gone.’
Dinah slapped a box under her feet. ‘No, some of it’s here. It’s the personal things. Some of them were awfully . . . special.’
She turned to Ant. As though covertly checking to see if he was listening. Then she got up and went into the sitting room, holly in hand. In a minute or two Ant could hear her, singing, louder than he’d ever heard her before.
‘The holly and the ivy! When they are both full grown!’
‘This is awful.’ Ant didn’t understand why Daphne wasn’t being nicer to his aunt. ‘It’s her flat. It’s her home and now all of it’s . . .’ He trailed off.
Daphne said quietly, ‘Your aunt isn’t like you, sad because you’ve lost your home, Ant. She has homes all over the world. She takes things and leaves things everywhere. Don’t worry about her too much.’
‘But she’s lost almost everything.’
‘I’d hardly say that.’ Daphne waved an arm around the cluttered sitting room, then stood up. ‘War is misery.’ She came over to Ant, took his chin in her cold, firm hand. ‘Do you like it, living with Dinah?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Ant.
Daphne put her head on one side, looking at him with her curious, sparkling eyes. ‘Why?’ ‘Because she’s my family. And she loves me. And I love her.’
‘Sweet.’ She made a small moue with her mouth.
‘I don’t have a family. She’s the only bit of it I’ve got. She doesn’t have any family either. It’s her, and me, us together, you see.’
‘Yes. You know, Ant, your aunt –’ Daphne screwed up her eyes as though she were about to say something difficult, but then she opened her mouth so it made a small O and then stopped.
‘What?’
‘This rather changes things for her, losing the flat. Fewer options. She doesn’t like being pinned down. Trapped.’
‘I’m not trapping her,’ said Ant, hotly. ‘We just – we jolly well rub along together, that’s all.’
‘No, no, no, of course you’re not! I understand that. But I’ll be living here now too, you see. Hope that’s all right. We’ll have to be friends, you and me, Ant,’ she said.
‘Only Dinah calls me Ant now,’ he said. ‘It’s Tony, actually.’ He stared into her cornflower-blue eyes, and she slapped his cheek, gently.
‘Run and find me a drink, will you, Tony darling? Doesn’t matter about the gin. Just anything you’ve got.’ He could smell her scent now, that peculiar musky mix of floral scent and something else. Years afterwards he realised it was caraway seeds, and cigarettes, though why the former he had no idea, but then he had no idea about Daphne, who she was, where she came from, why she did what she eventually did.
‘How do you know Daphne?’ he found himself asking Dinah, one afternoon several months later. It was March, a beautiful spring day, and Dinah and Ant were outside, gently detangling the old dead branches of creepers, roses, tendrils of bindweed and honeysuckle that enmeshed themselves up the side of the house and along the porch and needed a firm prune every year.
Dinah paused in the act of pulling a skeletal set of long twigs, like Struwwelpeter’s fingernails, from the wild rose that climbed up the side of the Bosky and flowered a beautiful sunny yellow every May. She waved the branch at him.
‘I met her at the British Museum. I was back here for a time after the season at Ur, before I went to Baghdad. She was helping to catalogue the Assyrian seals. She’d just come down from Somerville with a First in Ancient History, and she’d got rid of the terrible Italian count by then, you know.’ Ant didn’t know. ‘These were only two other girls in the whole place. They’d had two women before but both of them had been made to leave when they got married.’ She shook her head. ‘All those brains, that ability, what they could have offered the museum . . . gone. Anyway, I knew no one in London and a lovely woman, dear Elizabeth who died last Christmas, she worked in the Prints and Sketches department. Well, she took us both under her wing. Daphne was very different from me – aristocratic, glamorous, ran with a fast set – but we rather palled up. It was thrilling to have a chum.’
‘You didn’t know anyone else in London?’
‘No, not a soul. I grew up in India. Father was a colonel in the army. Waziristan, then Kashmir, then we lived in Damascus.’
Ant said, ‘With your sister. My grandmother.’
‘But I didn’t really know Rosemary that well, she was eleven years older than me. She went back to England when I was five. I grew up practically as an only child, Ant. I was a mistake, you see.’
‘What do you mean?’
She laughed. ‘You’ll find out. Or I should say, hopefully you won’t. I didn’t come to England until I was eighteen. I grew up dreaming about it. And when I got here it was so green, like the ancient plains of Assyria used to be, when the lions and hoopoes were plentiful, before they all died out last century – such a tragedy, when you look at Ashurbanipal hunting all those noble lions and the trees around and the grasses, and now it’s all desert . . .’ She chewed a nail, and Ant waited patiently. ‘Anyway, England appeared to be like paradise, when I first came here. Regent’s Park – it seemed like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.’
‘I’ve never thought of it quite like that,’ Ant said.
‘Well. No pomegranate trees or waterfalls, or any of that, but the lushness – I thought we’d be so happy here, at first. I really thought things would be different.’ She stopped. ‘My father brought us down here, to the Bosky, the first summer we came back in 1908. He’d had it built for Mother as a surprise.’
Ant was pulling at a firmly attached rose creeper entwined around the porch overhang. ‘A whole house? That is a nice surprise.’
‘Daddy was rich then. He’d had a run of luck. Somewhere. Biarritz, I think. Not really sure.’ Aunt Dinah turned away and started hacking at the ground. ‘We moved so often. He’d get asked to leave his regiment, gambling debts and all that, but he was so charming they’d often find him a new job somewhere else.’
‘Did he have many debts?’
She nodded, cleared her throat, tucked a loose tendril of hair behind her ear. ‘Oh, yes, and a debt of honour is the most serious of all. We’d have to leave quite suddenly, sometimes.’ She smiled, but it didn’t reach her green eyes. ‘But when his luck was in . . .’ Dinah smiled. ‘We lived high on the hog, not that there’s much hog in Syria or India. He was the most generous man. That’s the thing, you see, about gamblers – often they do it to make people love them, make them happy. Poor Daddy. Even after he died, I felt desperate for him.’
‘How did he die?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh, Ant. You never knew? He shot himself.’
‘No.’ Ant was horrified.
‘I’m afraid so.’ She swallowed, closed her eyes. ‘He spent a month down here, kitting it all out, he ordered everything himself. Daddy! He always was wonderful with homes, knew how to make them cosy and beautiful, Mummy just wasn’t interested in that sort of thing, she’d rather have been outside with the horses. Daddy found the man to build the house, someone who’d built villas in Simla, up in the mountains in India. He chose all the furniture, he went to the Army and Navy and even picked out the dinner service and the cutlery. All by himself. It was his grand project. Then we all went down there for the summer. I hadn’t seen dear Rosemary for years and years. That’s the first time I met your dear father, he was just a baby then, such a cherub. Oh, we all had a wonderful time. It was – yes, it was the happiest I think I’d ever seen my father. It was the happiest I’ve ever been – but it was all a lie, you see.’ Her eyes were fixed on a point in the distance, out to sea.
‘We caught crabs. We played endless mah-jong, the proper rules for four.’
‘What do you mean, the proper rules?’
‘Never mind. Well, and we sailed, at Brownsea. He was a wonderful sailor . . . He’d got a new commission with a regiment in Yorkshire. I think Mummy thought the worst was over.’ She cleared her throat and looked around, back in reality. ‘Then he disappeared one morning. Gone off to the Riviera. Gambled the rest away and was so in hock they arrested him. Had him brought back to England and then it all came out, the house, everything in it, all paid for with money he didn’t have, money he owed . . . They as good as gave him the gun. We were here . . . having a picnic on the beach . . . We heard the shot and we ran back up to the house . . . Mummy found him on the porch . . . One does feel rather angry that he did it there. Silly, really.’ She let her hands fall to her side. He watched her as she turned and looked at the house, as if seeing it again for the first time in ages.
‘I’m so sorry, Aunt D. I never knew. Daddy never said—’
‘Well, we just didn’t discuss it – one didn’t, you know.’ Aunt Dinah smiled sadly. ‘But that first summer . . . Gosh, yes, then it all changed. He died, and Rosemary moved up to Northamptonshire and Mummy went with her, and I was in London studying at Bedford College – I didn’t see them for years and years . . .’ She trailed off. ‘It really was the end of our family.’
There was a silence. ‘Poor us,’ she said, after a short pause. ‘Don’t gamble, Ant, not even once. It gets into the blood. It’s bad for you. Let’s change the subject, shall we?’
‘How did you become an archaeologist?’
‘A good question. Oh, by bothering people. I went to stay with an old family friend in Damascus after I’d taken my degree and then the Great War broke out and I was rather stuck there. So I palled up with a nice chap who was studying the columns of the temple at Baal, and then I travelled along the Silk Route to Babylon, and then on to Ur. By camel, Ant dear, it was marvellous. The Gate of Ishtar, Nebuchadnezzar’s palaces and treasures – he besieged Jerusalem, you know. The start of history, and it was all there, just under the ground, more and more appearing every day. I stayed to help and I went to Ur for a season too and I became rather a talisman – one had a run of luck with finding a few things and so one was rather more welcome after that.’ She shrugged, as though a lone female travelling by camel from Syria to excavate ancient Babylonian sites was utterly normal. ‘So when I came back to London to help catalogue it all they gave me a job at the BM and that’s when I met Daphne. She lived in a terrible serviced flat in Kensington, costing an arm and a leg, and the porter used to try and put his hand up your skirt. Honestly, Ant. In the lift. Don’t do that to girls when you’re grown up, will you? Don’t ever do that.’
‘I won’t,’ he said, fervently.
Dinah handed him the branch. ‘On the pile with the wood that can be dried out, not the wet leaves that can be mulch, please. Where was I? Yes. She was running with rather a fast crowd, not terribly nice, to be honest. She’s rather easily led . . . I – anyway. I asked her to move in with me. And we lived together for two years before—’ She broke off. ‘Forget-me-nots. Lovely. Look, they’re out.’
‘Before what?’
‘I dropped a stone tablet on to a little table by the sofa. She was having a nap. Table had a glass top.’
Ant shook his head, not understanding.
‘I remember seeing the cheek open up, the line awfully clean, that’s the thing about glass. I gave her the scar.’ Ant dropped the branch he was holding. ‘Very bad business. Had to have it stitched back up and they did a wonderful job. Still, she caught an infection, was ill for ages.’
‘No – goodness. How did it happen?’
Dinah said firmly, ‘I was tight. My fault entirely. We had had a row about something – the tablet I was holding, I think. I couldn’t regret it more. A silly row.’ Her eyes swam with tears. ‘I can’t remember what and I wish I could. Poor Daphne.’
‘I rowed with Papa the last time I saw him,’ Ant told her, to make her feel better. ‘About boarding school. He wanted me to go, and I didn’t. I was horrible to him, and then he left, and he died two weeks later. I wish – if I could just change how we left it. One silly thing.’
‘You can’t though, can you?’ She put her head on one side, looking thoughtful, and hitched her fringed silk shawl around her shoulders. ‘Your father was rather keen on you attending his school, wasn’t he? He wrote to me about it, when the war broke out, since I was your guardian. Hadn’t heard from him for years. I think he wanted to make sure you had the best . . .’ Ant’s jaw clenched shut, and Dinah pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. ‘Listen, we all make mistakes. I went to Baghdad to escape mine. They’d got a place for me on a dig at the start of a new season and I’ve always loved Sennacherib, you know, he moved the capital to Nineveh, he built the palaces, the magical gardens . . . that’s where I found the angel, you know.’ She glanced up at her, above the door. ‘Where was I? Yes, so I let Daphne stay in the flat, seemed only right considering it all. And she – she and I—’ She stopped. ‘I keep having to remind myself it’s all gone. I’m free, really.’ She smiled, slowly.
‘Free?’
‘Free of certain obligations. I’d got myself in something of a mess, and now it’s all fine.’ She cleared her throat. ‘So, Ant, will you come back with me, back to Baghdad?’
He thought she’d gone mad. ‘Me? Baghdad? How, Aunt D?’
‘Not now! When this cruel war is over.’ She was rubbing her hands in the cold spring air. ‘Baghdad is wonderful. Peaches you pluck off the trees, and bridges made of boats, and minarets shaped like unicorn horns with curling staircases around the outside. You can buy anything in the great bazaar, things you didn’t even know you needed, things on the very edge of history – a carpet woven in Isfahan for a queen, or a glazed tile used to decorate a harem in Babylon, or a lovely hoopoe in a cage, I had one for ages. Zoltan used to keep interesting things for me, such a lovely man, he was a Magyar, you know, descended from Attila the Hun. And the food – fresh watermelons, and dates, and meat cooked so it melts in your mouth.’ Ant’s own mouth watered, the constant hunger, the dream of delicious food. Normally, they tried not to talk about foods they missed. ‘Chickens grilled on spits, and lamb, falling to bits off the bone . . . You can buy gold, and frankincense, and myrrh, Ant, we’ll live like ancient kings. You’ll love it, yes, yes, you will. I’ll buy you a camel if you want.’ She was smiling. ‘Honestly. There’s a Bedouin chap near the edge of Damascus who sells camels. And silver teapots.’
‘Aren’t they awfully uncomfortable?’
‘Teapots? Oh, camels. No, perfect shape. I could sit on them for hours.’
‘I never know if you’re telling the truth or not,’ he said, daringly, because she was relaxed and they were telling each other things.
She gave a small, rather sad smile. ‘Do believe me, darling. Will you think about it?’
‘I will – I—’ He was flustered, but he knew it was a lie, that they would never go together to Baghdad. ‘Look, I say. Daphne hasn’t got anything on you, has she?’
‘Oh . . . she wants something but she’s not going to get it.’ She hesitated, then said with bravado, ‘Nothing for you to worry about, dear boy. Promise.’
He didn’t believe her, but he slipped his hand inside hers anyway.