Chapter Twenty-One
In 1942 after Daphne moved in for good, Dinah became obsessed with her nephew’s schooling. Ant’s father had gone to a well-known boys’ school in Sussex; there was a full boarding place available the following September. The school was good, it had not yet had to be evacuated, and the number of teachers currently fighting in the war was relatively low, meaning the disruption to lessons was minimal.
‘I can’t go on teaching you for ever, you know,’ she’d said to him at Easter, when this idea had first been mooted.
‘Yes, you can,’ said Anthony, horrified. ‘I don’t want to go to school, I don’t want to go away.’
‘It’s what your father wanted. You said so yourself.’
From the moment Ant had let slip about the final time he’d seen his father, he’d regretted it. He ground his teeth from side to side, anxiety pricking him. ‘I’m not likely to learn the ways of the world cooped up in a school with several hundred other boys. You’re always saying that. You said public schools were a stain on the British psyche.’
‘I did, didn’t I?’ she’d said.
‘Do you want to send me away?’ He glanced from her to Daphne, who had her head in a book, a cigarette in one drooping hand but who he knew, from a certain kind of tension in her still frame, was listening.
Dinah’s eyes widened. ‘No, no, Ant, dear. I don’t want to send you away, but I think you ought to go. Downham Hall is awfully good, and it’s what your father wanted for you, you know that. And I have the money—’
‘How? How have you the money all of a sudden?’
‘Don’t worry about that.’
He said quietly, ‘Please don’t make me.’
‘Oh, Ant, dear. You can’t stay here for ever,’ she said, gently.
‘I know that. But I wouldn’t feel right, leaving you alone, in wartime.’
She’d had her back to him, rearranging the mats on the dresser. ‘I’ve got Daphne.’
‘I don’t think Daphne’ll be much help if the Germans attack.’
Daphne looked up from Gone with the Wind, which she had borrowed off the vicar’s wife. ‘Dinah only wants what’s best for you, Ant—’
‘It’s Tony. Honestly, Dinah—’ But his great-aunt had turned away from him, and was humming. Almost as if he weren’t there.
Yet there was good news, too. With the arrival of summer, gradually Ant became aware for the first time of the sense that the country was fighting back, that they might be up to conquering the enemy. Years later, he would try to explain it to his children, this idea that the outcome of the war was so very perilous for months, even years of his life, and that they all expected at any moment for the Battle of Britain to be lost, or the bombing to inflict enough damage for the country to be unable to defend itself. They never believed him. ‘Don’t be silly, Daddy, the Battle of Britain was a glorious victory,’ Ben informed him once in a solemn voice.
‘Yes, but only because we very nearly didn’t win,’ Tony had told him.
‘That’s very unpatriotic. Miss Beale says it was being patriotic that helped us all fight Hitler and win the war.’
Tony couldn’t explain to a nine-year-old the terror of hearing the planes go over, wondering if this time would be it. The dreariness of dreaming of food, of constant hunger. The cold – it was always cold. The nightmares of his parents dying . . . How at one point he’d remembered saying to Dinah, ‘We will win, won’t we?’ and she replying, ‘I don’t know, Ant dear. I’m afraid it might all be over for us.’
But the nightly bombing raids had slowed – just a little. Some evacuees had gone back to London that summer. The Germans were losing in Russia – word was they couldn’t take Stalingrad. The army was already exhausted, and that was before the Russian winter set in. The Americans were in the fight now, fresh and unbattered. Something, steadily, was changing. With the arrival of summer and the introduction of Double Summer Time, to give people even more time to do things in the evenings, there was a feeling of hope around, you could smell it, taste it, for the first time in years and years.
The big event of the summer was that Reverend Goudge had taken it upon himself to put on a play. The village drama society had suffered from the onset of war and almost folded. The previous year the village hall had been strafed by guns from a low-flying Messerschmitt and caught fire, burning down to nothing. The hall was where wakes, wedding parties, choir rehearsals, Girl Guides and drama society productions had once taken place and now Reverend Goudge, with his usual enthusiasm, had decided that, for the good of the village, the drama society should be resurrected. He would direct a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
A stage had been made using driftwood from the beach and wooden beer crates donated by the village pub. It was July, unnaturally hot even for the time of year, still and humid. The group was of all ages, a ragtag mixture of evacuees and those locals either not fighting or not old enough to work, yet even so Ant was flattered – and very surprised – to be given the part of Bottom.
‘But I’m only fourteen,’ he protested.
‘Well, we’re short of men, dear,’ the vicar had said briskly. ‘You’re fourteen but you look twenty these days and the voice is wonderful. Bottom’s the key to the whole thing. You’ll be marvellous. Just pretend you’re doing one of your plays out on the porch.’
He would play Bottom again, and Lysander, and Oberon, to great applause, and he would direct the play too, but it was this production that he always remembered, when details of others had long been forgotten. The donkey’s head, made out of an old brown cushion of indeterminate hide, the smell of greasepaint and damp and sweat, the thrill of transforming, of becoming this utterly different being, a dolt, a lascivious fool, sloughing off the sadness and confusion of things. It was addictive, this sensation, with only one drawback: for the entire length of the run – three nights – he’d have to pretend to be in love with Julia Fletcher, who was playing Titania.
This summer Julia seemed even more grown up, wearing voluminous see-through clothing in layers and walking out early on the hills, declaiming poetry and the like. She picked flowers, and called them by their names, making up rhymes about them. She was always saying hello and trying to get him to come over to their house for tea, or to go on bike rides. Ant was shy. She was annoying, even if she did have a nice actual, real laugh and always shared her sandwiches. Dinah said it was difficult, living with Alastair Fletcher.
‘She’s a young girl. Everyone tries on different clothes for size before they decide who they’re going to be. Who cares if she wants to wear long dresses and waft around pretending she’s the Constant Nymph? She’ll grow out of it. There’s no harm in her. I think she’s a sweet girl.’
Even worse than Julia was Ian, her brother, who still popped up at odd moments around corners and seemed to be watching you all the time through his hooded, slitted eyes and who said things like, ‘Is your aunt happy now her friend’s here, her friend Daphne? Hm? Did you hear me, Wilde?’
After most rehearsals Ant would leave as swiftly as possible to avoid walking home with them: it was a great fiction still maintained between Alastair Fletcher and Aunt Dinah that their charges got on well. If he couldn’t get away quickly enough, he’d hang around until they’d gone, and talk to the ladies assisting with the production, or the vicar, then help to put the sets and props away. He liked old ladies. He liked vicars. He liked the gentle reassurance of village life, the humming sense of making do and community that bound them all together in those difficult days, and he’d rather spend his time with them; sometimes one of them might slip him a piece of cake, give him a warm kiss or share some story about his father when he was little.
One night, however, as he was walking home in the evening dusk after a nice chat with some of the ladies who were making his costumes, his luck ran out. He was waylaid by Julia Fletcher, who dragged him off the road into a lay-by. She’d obviously been lying in wait for him, half an hour or more.
As Anthony rebounded against the springy turf-and-ivy of the built-up hedgerow she gripped his upper arm.
‘Here, let go,’ he said, recovering from the shock of being abducted like this, and by a girl. And he couldn’t say what he wanted to, which was, It’ll be dark soon. We have to get back before it’s dark.
But she said nothing, only smoothed her wild hair back with her nail-bitten hands.
‘Look here – are you all right?’ Anthony had asked, rather alarmed at her strange expression and silence.
‘I say, are those pink forget-me-nots?’ she said, waving a small flower yanked from the hedgerow at him. ‘Hope’s gentle gem, the sweet forget-me-not. Beautiful, aren’t they? Aren’t they? Don’t you think? I love flowers.’
‘Oh. Don’t know. Don’t really mind them.’
‘Mind them! Ha!’ She gave a too-loud, world-weary laugh. ‘Such a boy!’
‘My aunt likes them. She uses them. Camomile in tea, and that sort of thing.’ Ant peered at the flower she was waving at him. ‘That’s not a forget-me-not, anyway. That’s deadly nightshade.’ He removed it gently from her hand. ‘You really should learn what’s what. It’s fearfully poisonous, Julia, I wouldn’t – oh!’
For she had pushed him against the hedge and kissed him, messily, frantically. Anthony was taken wholly by surprise, and stood rigidly waiting for her to finish, and when she broke away, she laughed and said, ‘Oh, goodness. I got you all wrong.’
‘What do you mean?’ he said, stung.
‘Well, I wanted to have a passionate interlude, and I thought you’d be ideal. But you’ve never kissed anyone before, have you?’
Surprise made Ant honest. He shook his head. ‘Course I haven’t. Who is there to kiss around here?’
Julia laughed again, theatrically, and kissed him again, and Anthony found, this time, that the position of her body against his was different and he liked it. He found he liked too her soft but firm tongue in his mouth, and he moved his head a little so they were actually kissing, and then put his arms around her, and felt her move against him, and that was even better. She tasted of something bitter and stale but her mouth and lips were wet and full, and as she sucked at him he found himself kissing her back, sliding his tongue into her mouth: he didn’t have time to think about it, because that was obviously what you did.
After an awfully long time – his erection was cramped in his slightly too-tight shorts, and starting to hurt, and he was worried that he might embarrass himself over her if she didn’t stop – he pulled away from her, and she fell back, pushing her hair out of her eyes again in a dramatic fashion. ‘There, damn you,’ she said, self-satisfied. ‘There you go, isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘No,’ said Anthony, truthfully. ‘Not at all. But I liked it when I got used to it.’
Julia looked a little disconcerted, and annoyed; this kind of talk was obviously not in the dramatic scene she had written in her head. ‘That’s all you’re going to say to me?’
‘Oh, well,’ said Anthony. ‘I say, in that case, thanks.’ He glanced at the violet-and-blue sky. ‘We should get back—’
‘Are you afraid of the dark?’
‘Course not,’ he said quickly. ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Oh. ’Cause if you are I collect glow-worms. I keep them in a jar. You can have some if you want.’
‘What for?’
‘Well, they glow, don’t they? I keep them outside the front door for when I’m coming back from walking in the lanes at night. Or in my room. They just . . . glow.’
He couldn’t help it; he laughed, and she smiled back at him.
‘Glow-worms glow,’ he said. ‘I’ll remember that.’
‘They’re lovely. Makes a bit of light. Not enough to break the blackout,’ she added hastily and she gave him a smile, a natural smile this time, and her face shone. ‘But enough. I’ll find you some. You’ll see.’
He shrugged. ‘Fine. All right, then. But look up deadly nightshade in the library, or ask for a book on flowers for your birthday, or something like that. Honestly, you’d die if you ate those berries.’
‘Oh, you bloody little fool,’ said Julia, spirits undampened by this admonition, and she walked on a little way ahead of him. Ant wondered where she got her conversation from – she talked like someone who’d copied phrases into a book to be reused. But he followed her back home again, down the verdant lane, heavy with the scent of late-summer honeysuckle. He was rather surprised but not displeased with the turn the evening had taken and absent-mindedly nudged his crotch with his knuckles, wondering if the events of the last hour would ever happen again. His lips tingled. When she turned off towards her house with a cheery wave of her hand he waved back, and turned to watch her go in, her halo of hair bouncing between her slim shoulder blades. Gosh, he thought. I wasn’t expecting that.
He walked down the path, hearing the sound of the sea sloshing in the bay below, the constant pull and pluck of the tide. He was thinking about Julia’s lips on his, the feeling of her body against him, wondering why she was like that – when he heard voices.
‘I’m sure – dear Daphne – I don’t. I can’t.’
‘You can, Dinah. Just one more. Come on, dearest.’
‘I’ve said before, you know I have! Let’s not talk about it any longer. I don’t want us to fall out . . .’
The waves and the wind were too loud, and he came closer to the house, and the sandy crunch of his feet on the path seemed unbearably loud.
‘. . . have to do it once more. I’m sorry but you do. For him.’
‘Yes.’ There was a long pause. ‘For him. You will – you will be extremely discreet, won’t you?’
‘Oh, yes. They don’t suspect a thing. A nice English girl like me.’
They must have moved about for he couldn’t hear the next few exchanges. But as he crept to the balustrade of the porch, straining to hear, Dinah said, ‘I suppose in wartime everyone does what they must.’
‘Tell yourself that, darling.’ Daphne gave a low, amused laugh, which chilled Ant to the very bone. ‘Go on, do.’
The French window opened, and he shrank behind the house, out of sight, and saw something being thrown out into the shivering mass of wild flowers and nettles by the house. It shook, rattled in the wind.
Hair. Human hair.
Ant began whistling loudly, then climbed the steps of the porch. He swung into the sitting room, banging the door casually loudly. Daphne looked up at him, in annoyance, alarm.
‘You’re back early.’
‘Well—’ he began, and then saw his aunt. All her hair had gone, cut into an uneven bob. Ribbons of grey and brown lay on the parquet floor. Dinah patted her neck.
‘It feels very odd. But it was Daphne’s idea.’ She turned towards him, and she seemed intensely vulnerable, her eyes huge, cheekbones jutting out. The hair around her skull was greyer, the muscles at the back of her neck fine, and fluted. ‘I used to have it like this, it’s rather nice to go back to it . . . It’s all right, isn’t it, Ant? Not too dramatic?’
He felt very angry. She looked totally different. ‘It’s lovely, Aunt D. Very dashing.’ He turned to Daphne. ‘Why?’
Daphne shrugged. ‘I was bored.’ She gave a small smile. Ant realised then that he hated her.