Chapter Four
London, July 1940
In the hospital, you could hear the sound of feet approaching from the other end of the corridor. They echoed on the red tiles, the sort that looked like they should be warm but were always cold. So even if you were pretending to sleep you knew if someone was coming.
When Ant was first taken there he’d turned over every time he heard footsteps, even though he couldn’t sleep on that side, because of the raw-red skin shrinking, contracting into hundreds of scabs. Turning was agony but he still did it. He had to check, you see. Because perhaps they’d got it wrong and she’d come back for him. Perhaps she’d been taken to another place.
But it wasn’t ever her.
The old Victorian hospital smelled of something sickly sweet and it was chilly, even in the height of summer, and very quiet. The other children in Ant’s ward were silent, like him. Some of them couldn’t speak, they were too badly hurt; some of them wouldn’t speak, because of what they’d seen. Ant had talked to one little girl across the way from him. She was called Cherry. She was permanently clutching a bear that one of the Red Cross workers had given Ant, which he’d given to her. He was too old for teddies, he told her. She had bedraggled bunches, one lopsided. No one had taken the ribbons out and brushed her hair since whatever had happened to her. She was a chatterbox, not like the others. When she talked she waggled her head and powder fell in gentle clouds from her grey hair, shining like a halo round her head in the cold sunlight. It was rubble dust, from her bombed-out house. Ruby, the girl in the bed next to Ant, had whispered to him when Cherry was finally asleep that her whole family had been killed, both parents, two brothers, a newborn baby sister, her grandparents. But she didn’t talk about them. She just talked about Mickey Mouse; she’d been to the flicks to see some cartoons the day before it happened. She was mad on Mickey Mouse. Had the gas mask too. Ant liked talking to her – she was sweet, and he preferred talking to girls anyway.
About two weeks after he’d arrived Ant woke up and looked across, and Cherry wasn’t there. He was confused: he wasn’t sleeping well, these dreams that bound him tight like chains and left him screaming and the mattress drenched in sweat and urine. But her bed was neatly remade, new sheets, scratchy blankets, waiting for someone else.
‘Where’s Cherry?’ he’d said to Ruby.
‘Didn’t you see?’ She was reading a comic; she looked over the top of it, pityingly.
‘No. Where’s she gone?’
‘Little blighter bought it in the night. Didn’t you hear her yelling? Till they came for her?’
Ant swallowed, and looked across. ‘I – I must have been asleep.’
‘You were, but even with all the racket you make I’d have thought you’d have heard her—’
‘Was she that ill then?’ He was staring at the window sill, high above Cherry’s bed, where his teddy bear was sitting.
‘Course she was. Skin turned purple. The shrapnel got in her leg.’ Ruby was not a sentimentalist. ‘They cut it off last night, only hope. Nurse said she died in the middle of it.’ She shook her head with relish. ‘Heart stopped.’
Colin, the fat, weeping boy on the other side of Ruby, blinked fast. ‘Shut up, Ruby.’
‘P’raps it’s for the best,’ said Ruby, wise beyond her years. ‘Where would she have gone?’
‘I said shut up, Ruby, otherwise I’ll knock your bleeding block off,’ said Colin, furiously. ‘Just shut up.’
‘Well, it’s true, ain’t it?’ Ruby turned to Ant, as if he was her ally. ‘No one come for her, did they? No one visited her.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘I mean—’
Ant had lain back down in bed, turning himself away from her; he was rarely rude, his mother was a great one for manners, but he couldn’t listen any more.
‘Sorry, Ant,’ she was saying. ‘Just meant it about her, ’cause she was – sorry.’
Sorry.
At the end of the long room the doors suddenly swung open, banging as they did; some of the children looked up, but for the first time Ant didn’t. He heard footsteps, approaching; he felt his injured leg ache with the pain of twisting away, the scabs smarting as his broken skin stretched over the rough sheets; he felt one of the scabs break open, as the sounds grew louder. He smiled as Sister Eileen went past followed by a lady in a drab coat, clip-clopping towards a bed at the far end of the room. ‘John?’ Sister said in a firm voice. ‘Mrs Havers is here to take you to a nice new home. Sit up, dear. No, no crying, please. Time to get dressed.’
No one was coming for him. He understood that now even if the others didn’t.
Daddy had been killed only two months into the war. Because there was no fighting, no one dying, people began calling it the Phony War which Ant liked, it made him feel better – only Philip Wilde had died, when his plane burst into flames during training in Newquay. His father, the flight engineer and the navigator were all killed instantly. ‘A hero. He wouldn’t have suffered,’ said the man from the RAF who came to tell them. ‘He wouldn’t have known what was happening.’
Mummy and he had actually laughed about that when he’d gone. ‘I’d jolly well know what was happening if a fire-ball engulfed my plane,’ Mummy had said afterwards, lighting a cigarette and pouring out the last of the gin. It sounded awful to be laughing but they did; the RAF chaplain who came the next day said it was shock.
‘I’d bloody know it too!’ Ant had chimed in, hugging his knees. He couldn’t stop laughing, great gulping roars of it. ‘I’d bloody realise if I was being burned to death!’
‘Don’t say bloody, darling.’
So even as he watched his mother die, even as he saw the puddle of vomit left by the squeaky-clean new ARP warden who helped drag him out of the cupboard first, leaving his mother behind, half of her blown away, clean down one side, Ant was still saying it to himself, whispering it rather as they stretchered him out of the pile of bricks and pipes and torn fabrics flapping in the summer breeze that had once been his family’s home. ‘I’d jolly well realise if I was being burned to death!’ He thought he should keep saying it, keep joking. Mummy hated people being serious. It was only when one of the nurses slapped him, the next day, when he couldn’t stop repeating it, that he realised he shouldn’t say it out loud. And it was only when they came and told him he’d missed her funeral that he began to wonder if it was true, that she wasn’t coming back. So Cherry’s death was when it started for real: the idea that what he’d seen that night had happened, that this was his life, not something up on the pictures, or in make-believe, nightmares.
A month after he’d arrived it was almost August and for the first time Ant dreamed of his mother and their little house with the red front door in Camden and he saw her coming in from the tiny garden, still laughing about something. And he heard a voice saying, in the dream, quite clearly, The house is gone. She’s dead. Daddy’s dead. You’re all on your own. And then the scene and the people in it vanished, sliding quickly away like the pieces of the magnetic theatre his parents had bought him for Christmas last year. The front of the house, the characters on the stage, the back scenery walls of the parlour with the photographs and the radio – all of it disappeared, pulled away, cardboard and paper. Years later, when he was old, this is what he remembered as the worst time. Often he thought that everything sprang from the days following that realisation: the darkness that was always, always waiting for him. To the end of his life, he was terrified of the dark.
And then, one day, she came.
Ant was sitting in bed reading a book about lost treasure in Central Africa, picking idly at the scabs on his legs – they had threatened to bandage his hands to stop him picking at them, they didn’t understand why he kept doing it, why he liked to see them grow back, again and again. A bluebottle buzzed loudly in the window above him. He could hear children playing outside, the ones who were well enough to. They were quiet, not like street games back on his road.
It was summer. He wondered what his friends were up to. He didn’t know what you did in summer when a war was on. It sounded funny when you said it like that. Ant tried to smile again but he couldn’t.
By now he was relieved every time the footsteps came and they weren’t for him. It was better to be in this misery than contemplate anything else. So Ant arranged his face into a mask of unconcern, thinking how proud of him Mummy would be, and smiled at the woman advancing along the corridor, who was dressed head to toe in varying shades of brown and black – brown boots, high-necked blouse and a long brown rippling silk skirt – all topped off by a velvety, swirling kind of jacket in a pattern of peacock feathers.
As she bent over him, Ant wondered idly how she could bear all those clothes in the heat. Her nose twitched as he nodded at her. It was a long nose, slightly bent. She had messy hair, and thin, red-raw hands, which waved around as though unconnected to their owner. It was her eyes, though, that was what he noticed. She had dark green eyes, beautifully expressive and full of life; they sparkled as she talked, they looked at him shrewdly and made you forget the long bent nose, the odd, slightly grubby clothes. She was talking to him, saying something.
‘Dear Ant, I’m so glad to have found you, and in one piece.’
She was actually clasping his hand, and Sister was nodding. Ant was too surprised to say anything. He was sure there was something about her that seemed familiar, but his addled, broken head couldn’t remember what it was, and her eyes danced as she smiled at him, and it was as though they were bewitching him.
‘I’m so sorry to have left you here for so long. There was some trouble getting back. In the end I had to get the train to Basra and wait for a boat going to England. It was rather tricky at times,’ she said breezily, as though she were describing a fresh afternoon on the Serpentine. ‘But we got here in the end!’ She sat down on the bed, tucking a stray strand of chestnut hair behind one ear. ‘Ah,’ she said, nodding. ‘Queen Sheba’s Ring. Rider Haggard, jolly good. Jolly good. Tell me, do you like adventure stories then?’
He was silent.
‘Anthony’s a good reader, loves his books,’ said Sister. ‘Now, Anthony. Say hello to your aunt.’
A throbbing ache began to beat against Ant’s skull. The lady – who looked, he thought now, a bit like a pelican he’d seen in the zoo, all flappy and long arms and folded bits – just smiled. She put a package, wrapped in creased pieces of brown paper, down on the bed beside him.
‘I said, say hello to your aunt,’ said Sister, in a menacing tone.
‘She’s not my aunt. I’ve never seen her before.’
The woman nodded, just as Sister clicked her tongue in annoyance. ‘Don’t be so silly. Of course she is.’
Ant said, quite politely, ‘Sister Eileen, she’s not my aunt.’
‘No, it’s quite true, I’m not.’ The strange woman looked up. ‘I’m his great-aunt, Sister Eileen. Philip was my nephew. Dear Philip. In the interests of accuracy I feel one should point this out.’
‘I see,’ said Sister Eileen, without enthusiasm. ‘Anthony, get up. Clear up your things. Miss Wilde is taking you away now.’
‘But I don’t –’ Ant began. Panic seized him, and he flicked off one of the scabs on his arm, and moved the package out of the way to show Sister Eileen. ‘Look – it’s bleeding. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know a Miss Wilde. You can’t make me go with her. Who are you?’ he said, and he knew he was being rude.
Miss Wilde seemed unbothered. ‘Why on earth should you know?’ she said. She tapped the book. ‘We do, however, have the same surname, and I do seem to recall sending you one or two carefully selected presents from time to time.’
He narrowed his eyes, drawing the book closer. ‘Did you give me this?’
‘Well, I did. It’s rather contrived, but the adventure’s jolly good. We actually don’t know anything about the Queen of Sheba, but I have been to King Solomon’s Mines.’
‘Really?’ Despite himself, Ant sat up. ‘Where are they?’
‘Near Jerusalem. The copper in the mines turns the sand into different colours. Red, green, blue – like a rainbow.’
‘And did you find anything?’
‘Many things,’ she said, her eyes twinkling. ‘That’s my job.’
‘I should like to be an adventurer,’ Ant said. ‘Or a tomb raider, like Belzoni.’
‘Well. His methods are rather frowned on now, dear Anthony, although if it wasn’t for him the British Museum would be fairly empty. But I’m very glad to hear we have a common interest.’ She patted the package beside her. ‘And I’ve brought you a present today.’
‘What’s your proper name?’
‘It’s Dinah. Dinah Wilde.’
Anthony eyed the brown-paper parcel, speculatively. ‘Dinah,’ he said, rolling the familiar name around on his tongue. ‘I do know you. But you don’t live here, you live in the desert.’
He wished he could remember more, but his brain didn’t seem to work properly these days, hadn’t since the night he lost Mummy. But he remembered now his father had adored his aunt Dinah, who lived far away and almost never came back to England. Philip Wilde, a great storyteller, had told his young son the tales about her, passed down by his own mother, who was much older than her younger, eccentric sister and who remembered the terrible things Dinah used to get up to. It was her, wasn’t it. Naughty Aunt Dinah. ‘She stole a parakeet from Regent’s Park Zoo.’ ‘She and my grandfather bet on woodlice crawling up the pews at Midnight Mass.’ ‘She fired a gun once out in India and blew a man’s fingertip clean off.’
Mummy frowned on these stories. Aunt Dinah had stayed with them once when Ant was tiny, Ant was sure, and Mummy didn’t like her. Mummy frowned on any mention of Aunt Dinah now, not to mention Dinah’s father, Philip’s grandfather, a colonel in the army who had Come to No Good. There was more, he was sure, but he couldn’t really remember . . . Ant blinked, swamped by other memories.
Terrible Great-Aunt Dinah now took his hand and Ant didn’t, for some reason, shake it away. ‘I used to live in the desert, yes. I live here now, Ant dear.’ She pushed the package towards him. ‘Open it.’
Ant peeled back the layers of brown paper and lifted out a small stone slab. He stared at a female figure, whose arms were outstretched. She had wide eyes, full lips, huge wings – she was naked, and he felt rather funny looking at her huge breasts, but she was definitely an angel, or a fairy, not a real woman. In one hand she held a pine cone; on the other rested an unblinking owl.
Sister Eileen gave a sniff of disapproval, but Ant was interested.
‘What is it?’ he said, turning the smiling figure with the bulging eyes and thick, curving lips over in his sore hands. It was cool to the touch.
‘It’s from an ancient city thousands of years old. I bought her in a bazaar in Baghdad. I take her everywhere I go, and she keeps me safe.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ Great-Aunt Dinah said, smiling. ‘I was in Nineveh excavating King Ashurbanipal’s library. It may well be the greatest library there ever was. I felt funny suddenly. I’m not normally claustrophobic – you spent hours in those places, cramped, searing heat, no light, smell of gas lamps. But I suddenly felt strange. Faint. I picked her up and stepped out of the chamber for some air and there were sand lizards everywhere. Thousands of them, lined up perfectly still, watching me. I went back to my tent to lie down. A sandstorm blew up and trapped the others in the chamber. Three other tents were blown away. Five men died. I held her in my hands all through it and she gave me comfort. She kept me safe. She told me when to leave. Important to know.’ Ant looked from his aunt to the small figure. ‘So I thought you’d like her, too. She’s very old.’
‘Older than Jesus?’
She smiled, pushing her finger up the ridge of her nose, as though there were glasses there, which there weren’t. ‘Much, much older. You can hang her above the front door. It’s to keep bad spirits out.’
‘Oh, I don’t have a front door,’ Ant said. His voice wobbled. ‘It – it got blown off.’
Sister Eileen cleared her throat, in irritation.
‘You do now. You’re going to come and live with me, by the sea.’ Dinah’s eyes shone. ‘You’ll be safe there. I promise.’