Ben said slowly, ‘Sorry, Daddy.’
He made a vow never to call him Daddy again. Such a silly name for a person like him.
‘I – I need to get some sheets from your room. For Mads.’
Tony rubbed the top of his head; the hair fluffed up and he smoothed it over his balding spot. Ben remembered the times his father had scorned men like Uncle Bertie who combed hair over their pate.
‘I’ll get the sheets. You fetch the dustpan. There’s broken bits everywhere but the bird’s all right, thankfully. Good old Alulim.’ He held it for a moment. ‘King for twenty-eight thousand years, he was. She used to use him to weigh down the tablecloth when we ate outside, of all the prosaic endings.’ Then he stared up at them, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘Don’t come down. You might cut yourself.’
Ben nodded, miserably. ‘Yes, sir.’
Cord moved towards the kitchen, and Tony’s expression softened. ‘It’s all right. Fetch the dustpan, OK?’
In that one moment Ben suddenly felt somehow lighter, relieved of some burden. He could not love this man in the way he had, it just wasn’t possible. He was able to shout at Ben about some old paperweight from some stupid old aunt when he’d just been doing that in the bedroom . . . Belinda’s face, her flushed neck, her amber-gold hair tumbling around her as her fingers caught at him, pulling him closer . . .
Why’s he like this?
Around the corner, Cord had begun singing to herself, her sweet voice low and sad.
‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun—’
‘Sorry,’ Ben said to her, under his breath. ‘I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have seen any of that.’ His father was crouched below him, picking up the broken shards of the plate, the paperweight still clenched in his hand. Cord carried on singing.
Golden girls and lads all must,
As chimney sweepers, come to dust.
Chapter Ten
Dorset, August 1940
Ant sat in the dark green Morris 8, looking for healing scabs, and when he found one on his shin, a fat, pinkish primrose, he picked at it with angry relish.
The car was wedged up beside a strange house. A voice came floating in through the open window, along with a faint smell of honeysuckle and briny seawater.
‘Come on, old girl. Hhhup. Hup!’
Ant gritted his teeth, eyes narrowed with loathing, and pulled off the scab.
‘Shut up,’ he muttered, under his breath.
‘That’s my girl. H-h-h-hup. Oh dear. Oh dear, the planes – they’re definitely getting closer, aren’t they?’
Before his mother died Ant had thought he hated Hitler, and the anonymous men who shot down his father, and most of all he had hated night-time – the terrifying, enveloping cloak of dark that descended on London each evening with the blackout, when you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. But his hatred for this person who was now in charge of him was something else. She can die for all I care, he would mutter under his breath. In fact, I wish she would die!
Funny to think at first she’d seemed all right; he’d quite liked her in the hospital, with her tales about ancient tombs and living in tents. But he hated her now. He hated her height, her silly floppy straw hat, her ridiculous large feet which made her look like a clown, the shapeless brown-and-grey clothing she wore. She was like a man playing dress-up, unnatural, clumsy: she wasn’t a mother, someone who made you cakes and listened to the radio with you and told you reassuring stories when you couldn’t sleep. His mother had been only twenty-two when she’d had him, and had still seemed like a young lady when she died: delicate, dainty, immaculately dressed; her nails were perfect glossy teardrops, her shining hair always smooth. It was impossible to believe that this person was now effectively his only living family member, that she was related to his dapper, neat father.
Now that Ant was thinking more clearly and was more used to her he was able to put his great-aunt into context, not that there was much context. He’d heard of Dinah, throughout his childhood; Mummy rather disapproved of her. She’d stayed with them once, on her last trip back to London ten years ago. He didn’t remember it, but apparently she had made a terrible mess and used to put her feet up on the arms of the sofa. Mummy had lost a silver cat charm in the chaos Dinah left; Mummy blamed her for this.
In the days before they travelled down to Dorset Dinah told Ant more about herself, some of which Ant remembered from her infrequent, extraordinary letters. He was used to people with interesting jobs – his father was an actor, after all, not a hugely successful one but still making a living from it (Captain Hook in rep being his greatest triumph to date). But his great-aunt’s job was something else. She had lived for years in Damascus, then worked on the famous excavations of the ancient city of Ur with its horrifying death-pits and ziggurats, these massive structures the size of pyramids, the sort you saw in comic-book stories about great explorers. That was her.
Now she lived in Baghdad, where she worked for the British Museum, periodically travelling, before the outbreak of war, to help with the excavations of the magnificent archaeological sites of Nimrud and Nineveh, where the great Assyrian kings had built their palaces. In Baghdad she had a courtyard garden with blue tiles, and a date palm tree, and a telescope up on the roof through which she could see the Milky Way. She had a monkey who sat on her shoulder and ate pistachio nuts out of her hand. She had been to Egypt, had seen the Sphinx and the pyramids: she had actually been inside Tutankhamun’s tomb. She had known Howard Carter, though not well.
Young Ant had no idea what pistachio nuts were, nor the Milky Way, but it was thrilling, all of it. Johnson had a piece of German shrapnel from where the house next door had been hit, and Rogers knew someone whose uncle was in the army and was going to kill Hitler with some poisoned tea, because apparently he liked tea. But he was the only boy at school who knew someone who’d been inside Tutankhamun’s tomb. Very, very hot, Aunt Dinah had written.
And extremely small, every room. But you can feel it, feel the power of the place. My favourite site, however, is Nineveh, in a city called Mosul. Now it is all desert, but once the plains in Northern Iraq were rich and fertile. Lions roamed the land, attacking and killing people. An ancient king built his new palace there. He called it the Palace Without Rival, and ensured Nineveh became the most powerful and beautiful city in the whole world. There was a winged bull carved into the gates, to guard the city from attack. He is thrice the height of you and me combined. I helped dig him up.
‘When will Aunt Dinah come back? Will she bring me a present?’ Ant used to ask his mother.
The last time he asked her she said, ‘Darling, I shouldn’t think she’ll return to England while the war’s on. But I’m sure she’ll come back afterwards. For a visit, not to live. She doesn’t like it here.’
‘Why?’
He remembered that Mummy had smiled.
‘The Wildes aren’t great ones for putting down roots. Your father wanted us to travel the world, I wanted to live in London. I persuaded him I wasn’t the type. But Dinah hates it here. Bad memories. Her family had lots of money once but it all vanished. Oh, now Daddy hates me talking about money, says it’s vulgar. But there you are, it all went.’
‘How?’
‘Oh, darling. Her father, your great-grandfather, lost it all. We don’t talk about it, I’m afraid.’ Ant, not understanding, had nodded obediently. ‘But Dinah has a flat in London, next to the Natural History Museum. And she has the Bosky, but it’s all shut up now; I haven’t been there since my honeymoon. It really is beautiful there, it’s rather unfair she won’t let anyone else in. Daddy says she’s a terrible hoarder. When she stayed with us she took some doilies, I’m absolutely sure of it. And I still wonder about that silver cat charm, I really do.’
‘I wish she’d come back.’
‘I think she likes it out there. Goodness knows why. It’s filthy, and she’s all alone – so very eccentric. But apparently she always was like that. And,’ his mother added, as though this were
a minor consideration, ‘the work she’s done has been important. She found some room or other they’d all forgotten about, absolutely stuffed with old panels – darling, don’t tell your father I said this, but he showed me the photographs and the pictures on the panels all look the same to me. Soldiers killing people. It always is. Still, she’s very clever, I’m sure. I’m sure she’s always saying she’ll come for a visit. I’m sure she’ll be back one day.’
In the end it took Mummy being killed to bring Aunt Dinah back from Baghdad.
Ant tried to ignore the sounds in the sky, the distant buzzing like swooping flies caught against a window. It was light, at the very least. Hours till blackout when he’d need to start worrying properly about what kind of blinds they had. He’d heard the countryside was even darker than town; Ant could barely imagine anything worse than the darkness in town. Very slightly, he began humming to block out the sound. Aunt Dinah was strong, but not strong enough to move a car by herself. As the Morris sat stubbornly in the yard-wide ditch, lopsided and looking rather drunken, through the open window Aunt Dinah’s voice came in, louder now.
‘Come on, old girl. You and me. H-h-h-h-hup, come on.’
Ant wound the window down a little further. He stuck his head out.
‘Are you sure I can’t help you, Aunt Dinah? I think we should be getting inside. The p-pl – the planes, they’re quite near—’
His great-aunt peered around the side of the car, in alarm, head cocked. ‘What’s that? Help?’ She tucked a clump of wayward hair behind her large ears. ‘Goodness, no. You must stay in the car for your own safety. It’s just that I can’t open the blasted front door with the car wedged so close to it. Potholes, they’re the very devil, aren’t they? But no matter. We’ll have you out in a jiffy.’ Now she was muttering quietly to herself. ‘I’ll have to go and ask old Alastair. Damn it. I just hope he doesn’t . . . Damn you, cracked earth of the southern coast! Oh, hell . . .’
When Anthony bent his knees as far as he could, the great browning scabs would crack and lift slightly, and one could see, in some seams, the skin peeling away, pinpricks of blood appearing. It was satisfying, to gently lift the edge up with one nail and to feel the rush of sharp pain. To feel anything.
The scabs on his legs were healing, though the wounds had been very deep, and he had had stitches on his left shin where the wall had fallen in on his leg. He and his mother had missed the air-raid warning – they’d been asleep – and so they’d run down to hide under the stairs. If they couldn’t make the shelter they knew they’d be safe there. They’d hidden there enough times before. Mummy had even found a bottle of sticky, dusty blackberry wine Daddy had made from the blackberries on Hampstead Heath a couple of years ago which they’d never finished, it being too sickly sweet in those pre-war years, when sugar was something normal you simply had when you felt like it. On her birthday, only a week before she died, they’d made for the cupboard under the stairs when the siren sounded. She’d put little glasses in there too, and she’d let him have a tiny measure of the stuff, and they’d been almost jolly, as the terrifying, screaming sounds of destruction tore overhead, tore up the world outside. Bombs landing yards away, noise so loud at first you thought you’d never stand it, you’d go mad, you’d rather run out on to the street and die than stay here like a stuck pig, waiting for it . . . And the sound as it hit, the sound of homes and shops and schools being blown apart or flattened. Nothing could prepare you for the terror you felt, there in the dark, listening for the next one, trying to work out if this time it’d be you. And then feeling luckier because you were safe there, and you could giggle about blackberry wine and other things and that you might one day get used to this hell. Yes, they’d begun to believe they’d be safe there, under the stairs.
In hospital he’d sat pulling at the too-tight starched bed sheets, picking at the flecks of scab, taking them off one by one. ‘Don’t do that,’ one of the nurses would say, slapping his hand away from the spots of pink, new skin. She was nice, blue eyes, plump lower lip. She had asked about Ant’s dad, she knew he’d been in the RAF. She had a boyfriend who flew Halifaxes, and she used to sit on Ant’s bed and talk to him about the pilots, how they were the bravest men, that they were winning the war for us, but she was vicious about the scabs. ‘Stop picking at them! They’ll never heal.’
Ant couldn’t tell her the truth, which was that he didn’t want them to heal. They were the link to the last night she was alive. If they healed, it’d be over and she’d be gone.
‘Ant? Ant? Stay in the car, will you, dear boy? I’m going to find Alastair Fletcher. He lives just down the road and he’ll be able to help us. Just one minute, dear Ant.’
Don’t call me Ant. Anthony knew Aunt Dinah was wrong, that the Morris 8 was the last place one wanted to be. He was a Londoner. Get to a shelter. Get out of the car. Get into the cellar or under the stairs or the table. Perhaps Aunt Dinah was trying to be kind, but she was stupid. She didn’t know anything . . . But he didn’t care if he died or not so he curled up tighter, enjoying the pain, wishing he could stop shaking.
The hospital had wired her to come home – it had taken her a month, first the train to Basra, an actual cattle truck where she’d shared a carriage with four horses. It was agonisingly slow, and dangerous, then she’d had a wait of days at Basra while she tried to get a passage back to England. She’d come straight to the hospital and then collected a friend’s car she’d arranged to borrow while he was away fighting. She hadn’t even been to her flat in South Kensington. Her friend Daphne was looking after it; she was engaged with war work and keeping extraordinary hours and Dinah hadn’t liked to turn up unannounced and take the sheets. So she’d been to Fortnum’s and bought some supplies. Money didn’t seem to be a factor with Aunt Dinah, not at first, not then. Later, she told him, later when things are more settled, we’ll go to London, go to the Assyrian rooms at the British Museum, see the great treasures of kings, of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal, some of these famous panels she’d helped excavate. We’ll stay with Daphne. Yes, Daphne was ever so jolly, such fun. She’d be delighted to meet Ant. Dinah had spoken to her, she’d said so.
I don’t want to meet bleeding Daphne, he wanted to scream. I don’t care about stones in museums, not now. I want everything to be normal again. But Dinah didn’t seem to be interested in things being normal. She didn’t care that all his books were gone, and his toys, and the photos on the sideboard, and Daddy’s cup for his local team’s winning their local cricket championship, or that the pots and baskets Mummy hung out to try and prettify the little back garden were crushed, as though a monster had stepped on them.
She didn’t seem to care, and she didn’t ask him about them, or the things he couldn’t stop picturing when he closed his eyes, when the dark clutched him tight and he was unable to make out his hands in front of his face, and she was all he could see.
Lying on the kitchen floor, thrown on to his back, legs in the air like an overturned tortoise, the night sky above him visible, and the walls smashed to pieces, he had looked over to the stairs and seen the cupboard door underneath them blown off, most of the stairs gone, and his mother against the back wall, facing him. One side of her was still a person, the other side of her blown right off, the brown Fair Isle knit frayed where she’d been torn in two, as though the monster had ripped a part of her away. The sinews on her neck, the splintered bone sticking out of her soft gold hair that curled around her head very white. The blue felt of her soft belt curling around and into the bloody, spongy mess of her missing stomach and sides, and as he watched, shock making him amazed at the force of transformation, he saw that dust, like grey-brown snow, was settling over the fresh red blood and clean white bone.
The scab lifted away at the edge, half an inch almost, revealing a plateau of slick red-raw skin underneath. All these things he’d seen and Aunt Dinah didn’t ask him about them. No one did. And he desperately wanted to say them to someone. So that he wasn’t alone, so that another pe
rson had heard about them. He told his mother everything, no matter how silly, and she listened, always knowing how to make it better – Anthony pulled viciously at the scab. It broke in two, one half gumming itself back into place on his knee, the other falling to the floor. Blood gushed up in the open wound and Ant hugged himself, angrily, as tears fell on to his knees, his hands.
Somehow, someone had found him his school uniform, which he hadn’t been wearing when the bomb hit; he couldn’t remember where his uniform had been or why it had suddenly reappeared by his bedside two days ago. Those were the only clothes he had now.
He’d never gone back to the house. They said there was no point. ‘Nothing left of the place at all, dearie,’ another nurse, not the nice one with the Halifax-flying sweetheart, had told him. She said it almost gleefully. He was supposed to be grateful Aunt Dinah had come to take him away. He’d been scheduled to go to the Boys’ Home the following week if she hadn’t turned up.
‘I want to stay in London,’ he’d told her when she’d returned to see him for the second time. ‘I don’t want to go to the seaside. I don’t know anyone.’ Besides, he had this idea that if he’d been hit once in London he couldn’t get hit again. Anywhere else was dangerous. He knew the streets round Camden, and he knew the park and the canal and the swings that weren’t ever bombed. He knew his way in the dark. The dark was the thing. He could cope with it, in London, where there were always sounds. ‘Please, don’t make me go there. I don’t want to – to – l-l-leave.’
‘Listen,’ she’d said. ‘We can’t stay in London. Daphne needs the flat. We’re going to the Bosky. My father built it. Your great-grandfather, Ant. It’s my house, it’ll be yours, it’s our home now. It’s what we both need. Fresh air, away from all the bad memories . . . by the sea. It’ll be wonderful.’ But she’d been chewing her nail as she said it, and he wasn’t sure she believed it, either.
Now, waiting for Aunt Dinah and this mythical neighbour, all he could make out so far was a dirt track, and an expanse of choppy grey water, separated from him by rows of dingy beach huts, and on the shore a barbed wire fence, stretching along the bay as far as he could see. Overhead, in the distance, still miles away but nearer now were the German MEs and British Spitfires, coiled and unravelling, spinning crazily in the grey-blue sky, like moths after too much candlelight. He could hear the roaring phut-phut, next to the sound of birdsong coming from the woods behind. Ant rattled the door handle, trying to get out. He didn’t care what Aunt Dinah said.
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