‘What do you suppose I’ve been doing for the last three months?’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all the time I was in France. Then I thought: “Well, I shall know when I see her again, in case I have imagined everything.’ But I hadn’t. You were just as I remembered you, and you were just as I want you.’
‘It’s a terrible risk.’
‘It’s not a risk for me. You may think it a risk for you. But does it matter taking risks? Does one get anywhere if one doesn’t take risks?’
To that I agreed. I have never refrained from doing anything on the grounds of security. I was happier after that. I felt, ‘Well, it is my risk, but I believe it is worth taking a risk to find a person with whom you are happy. I shall be sorry if it goes wrong for him, but after all that is his risk, and he is regarding it quite sensibly.’ I suggested we might wait for six months. He said he did not think that would be any good. ‘After all,’ he added, ‘I’ve got to go abroad again, to Ur. I think we ought to get married in September.’ I talked to Carlo and we made our plans.
I had had so much publicity, and been caused so much misery by it, that I wanted things kept as quiet as possible. We agreed that Carlo and Mary Fisher, Rosalind and I should go to Skye and spend three weeks there. Our marriage banns could be called there, and we would be married quietly in St. Columba’s Church in Edinburgh.
Then I took Max up to visit Punkie and James–James, resigned but sad, Punkie actively endeavouring to prevent our marriage.
In fact I came very near to breaking the whole thing off just before, in the train going up, as Max, paying more attention to my account of my family than he had so far, said: ‘James Watts, did you say? I was at New College with a Jack Watts. Could that have been your one’s son? A terrific comedian–did wonderful imitations.’ I felt shattered that Max and my nephew were contemporaries. Our marriage seemed impossible. ‘You are too young,’ I said desperately. ‘You are too young.’ This time Max was really alarmed. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I went to the University rather young, and all my friends were so serious; I wasn’t at all in Jack Watts’ gay set.’ But I felt conscience-stricken.
Punkie did her best to reason with Max, and I began to be afraid that he would take a dislike to her, but the contrary proved true. He said she was so genuine, and so desperately anxious for me to be happy–and also, he added, so funny. That was always the final verdict on my sister. ‘Dear Punkie,’ my nephew Jack used to say to his mother, ‘I do love you–you are so funny and so sweet.’ And really that described her very well.
The visit finished with Punkie retiring in storms of tears, and James being very kind to me. Fortunately my nephew Jack was not there–he might have upset the applecart.
‘Of course I knew at once that you had made up your mind to marry him,’ said my brother-in-law. ‘I know that you don’t change your mind.’
‘Oh Jimmy, you don’t know. I seem to be changing it all day long.’
‘Not really. Well, I hope it turns out all right. It’s not what I would have chosen for you, but you have always shown good sense, and I think he is the sort of young man who might go far.’
How much I loved dear James, and how patient and long-suffering he always was. ‘Don’t mind Punkie,’ he said. ‘You know what she is like–she’ll turn right round when it’s really done.’
Meanwhile we kept it a secret.
I asked Punkie if she would like to come to Edinburgh to our marriage, but she thought she had better not. ‘I shall only cry,’ she said, ‘and upset everyone.’ I was really rather thankful. I had my two good, calm Scottish friends to provide a stalwart background for me. So I went to Skye with them and with Rosalind.
I found Skye lovely, I did sometimes wish it wouldn’t rain every day, though it was only a fine misty rain which did not really count. We walked miles over the moor and the heather, and there was a lovely soft earthy smell with a tang of peat in it.
One of Rosalind’s remarks caused some interest in the hotel dining-room a day or two after our arrival. Peter, who was with us, did not, of course, attend meals in the public rooms, but Rosalind, in a loud voice, in the middle of lunch, announced to Carlo: ‘Of course, Carlo, Peter really ought to be your husband, oughtn’t he? I mean, he sleeps in your bed, doesn’t he?’ The clientele of the hotel, mostly old ladies, as one person turned a barrage of eyes upon Carlo.
Rosalind also gave me a few words of advice on the subject of marriage: ‘You know,’ she said, ‘when you are married to Max, you will have to sleep in the same bed as him?’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Well, yes, I supposed you did know, because after all you were married to Daddy, but I thought you might not have thought of it.’ I assured her I had thought of everything relevant to the occasion.
So the weeks passed. I walked on the moor and had fits of occasional misery when I thought I was doing the wrong thing and ruining Max’s life.
Meanwhile Max threw himself into an extra amount of work at the British Museum and elsewhere, finishing off his drawings of pots and archaeological work. The last week before the marriage he stayed up till five in the morning every night, drawing. I have a suspicion that Katharine Woolley induced Len to make the work even heavier than it might have been: she was much annoyed with me for not postponing the marriage.
Before we left London, Len had called round to see me. He was so embarrassed that I couldn’t think what was the matter with him.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘it is perhaps going to make it rather awkward for us. I mean at Ur and in Baghdad. I mean it wouldn’t be–you do understand?–it wouldn’t be in any way possible for you to come on the expedition. I mean, there is no room for anyone but archaeologists.’
‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘I quite understand that–we’ve talked it over. I’ve no useful knowledge of any kind. Both Max and I thought it would be much better this way, only he didn’t want to leave you high and dry at the beginning of the season, where there would be very little time to find anybody else to replace him.’
‘I thought…I know…’ Len paused. ‘I thought perhaps that–well, I mean people might think it rather odd if you didn’t come to Ur.’
‘Oh, I don’t know why they should think that,’ I said. ‘After all, I shall come out at the end of the season to Baghdad.’
‘Oh yes, and I hope you will come down then and spend a few days at Ur.’
‘So that’s all right, isn’t it?’ I said encouragingly.
‘What I thought–what we thought–I mean, what Katharine–I mean, what we both thought…’
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘-was that it might be better if you didn’t come to Baghdad–now. I mean, if you are coming with him as far as Baghdad, and then he goes to Ur and you go home, don’t you think that perhaps it would look odd? I mean, I don’t know that the Trustees would think it a good idea.’
That suddenly aroused my annoyance. I was quite willing not to come to Ur. I should never have suggested it, because I thought it would be a very unfair thing to do: but I could see no reason why I could not come to Baghdad if I wanted to.
Actually I had already decided with Max that I did not want to come to Baghdad: it would be a rather meaningless journey. We were going to Greece for our honeymoon, and from Athens he would go to Iraq and I should return to England. We had already arranged this, but at this moment I was not going to say so.
I replied with some asperity: ‘I think Len, it is hardly for you to suggest to me where I should and should not travel in the Middle East. If I want to come to Baghdad, I shall come there with my husband, and it is nothing to do with the dig or with you.’
‘Oh! Oh, I do hope you don’t mind. It was just that Katharine thought…’
I was quite sure that it was Katharine’s thought, not Len’s. Though I was fond of her, I was not going to have her dictate my life. When I saw Max, therefore, I said that though I did not propose to come to Baghdad, I had carefully not told Len that that was so.
Max was furious. I had to calm him down.
‘I’m almost inclined to insist that you come,’ he said.
‘That would be silly. It would mean a lot of expense, and it would be rather miserable parting from you there.’
It was then that he told me that he had been approached by Dr Campbell-Thompson and that there was a possibility that in the following year he would go and dig at Nineveh in the north of Iraq. In all probability I should be able to accompany him there. ‘Nothing is settled,’ he said. ‘It all has to be arranged. But I am not going to be parted from you for another six months the season after this. Len will have had plenty of time to find a successor by then.’
The days passed in Skye, my banns were duly read in church, and all the old ladies sitting round beamed on me with the kindly pleasure all old ladies take in something romantic like marriage.
Max came up to Edinburgh, and Rosalind and I, Carlo, Mary, and Peter came over from Skye. We were married in the small chapel of St Columba’s Church. Our wedding was quite a triumph–there were no reporters there and no hint of the secret had leaked out. Our duplicity continued, because we parted, like the old song, at the church door. Max went back to London to finish his Ur work for another three days, while I returned the next day with Rosalind to Cresswell Place, where I was received by my faithful Bessie, who was in on the secret. Max kept away, then two days later drove up to the door of Cresswell Place in a hired Daimler. We drove off to Dover and from thence crossed the Channel to the first stopping-place of our honeymoon, Venice.
Max had planned the honeymoon entirely himself: it was going to be a surprise. I am sure nobody enjoyed a honeymoon better than we did. There was only one jarring spot on it, and that was that the Orient Express, even in its early stages before Venice, was once again plagued by the emergence of bed-bugs from the woodwork.
PART IX
LIFE WITH MAX
I
Our honeymoon took us to Dubrovnik, and from there to Split. Split I have never forgotten. We were wandering round the place in the evening, from our hotel, when we came round the corner into one of the squares, and there, looming up to the sky, was the figure of St Gregory of Nin, one of the finest works of the sculptor Mestrovic. It towered over everything, one of those things that stand out in your memory as a permanent landmark.
We had enormous fun with the menus there. They were written in Yugoslavian, and of course we had no idea what they meant. We used to point to some entry and then wait with some anxiety to see what would be delivered. Sometimes it was a colossal dish of chicken, on another occasion poached eggs in a highly seasoned white sauce, another time again a sort of super-goulash. All the helpings were enormous, and none of the restaurants ever wished you to pay the bill. The waiter would murmur in broken French or English or Italian: ‘Not tonight, not tonight. You can come in and pay tomorrow.’ I don’t know what happened when people had meals for a week without paying and then went off on a boat. Certainly on the last morning when we did go to pay we had the utmost difficulty in getting our favourite restaurant to accept the money. ‘Ah, you can do it later,’ they said. ‘But,’ we explained, or tried to explain, ‘we cannot do it later, because we are going off by boat at twelve o’clock.’ The little waiter sighed sadly at the prospect of having to do some arithmetic. He retired to a cubicle, scratched his head, used several pencils in turn, groaned, and after about five minutes brought us what seemed a very reasonable account for the enormous amounts we had eaten. Then he wished us good luck and we departed.
The next stage of our journey was down the Dalmatian coast and along the coast of Greece to Patras. It was just a little cargo boat, Max explained. We stood on the quay waiting for its arrival, and became a little anxious. Then we suddenly saw a boat so minute–such a cockleshell–that we could hardly believe it was what we were waiting for. It had an unusual name, composed entirely of consonants–Srbn–how it was pronounced we never learnt. But this was the boat sure enough. There were four passengers on board–ourselves in one cabin and two others in a second. They left at the next port, so we then had the boat to ourselves.
Never have I tasted such food as we had on that boat: delicious lamb, very tender, in little cutlets, succulent vegetables, rice, sumptuous sauce, and savoury things on skewers. We chatted to the captain in broken Italian. ‘You like the food?’ he said. ‘I am glad. I have English food I ordered. It is very English food for you.’ I sincerely hoped he would never come to England, in case he discovered what English food was really like. He said that he had been offered promotion to a bigger passenger boat, but he preferred to stay on this one because he had a good cook here, and he enjoyed his peaceful life: he was not worried by passengers. ‘Being on a boat with passengers is having trouble all the time,’ he explained. ‘So I prefer not to be promoted.’
We had a happy few days on that little Serbian boat. We stopped at various ports–Santa Anna, Santa Maura, Santi Quaranta. We would go ashore and the captain would explain that he would blow the funnel half an hour before he was due to depart again. So, as we wandered through olive groves or sat among the flowers, we would suddenly hear the ship’s funnel, turn round and hurry back to the ship. How lovely it was, sitting in those olive groves, feeling so completely peaceful and happy together. It was a Garden of Eden, a Paradise on earth.
We arrived at last at Patras, bade cheerful farewells to the Captain, and got into a funny little train which was to take us to Olympia. It not only took us as passengers, it took a great many more bed-bugs. This time they got up the legs of the trousers I was wearing. The following day I had to slit the cloth because my legs were so swollen.
Greece needs no description. Olympia was as lovely as I thought it would be. The next day we went on mules to Andritsena–and that, I must say, very nearly tore the fabric of our married life.
With no previous training in mule-back riding, a fourteen hours’ journey resulted in such agony as is hardly to be believed! I got to a stage when I didn’t know if it would be more painful to walk or to sit on the mule. When we finally arrived, I fell off the mule, so stiff that I could not walk, and I reproached Max, saying: ‘You are really not fit to marry anybody if you don’t know what someone feels after a journey like this!’
Actually, Max was quite stiff and in pain himself. Explanations that the journey ought not to have taken more than eight hours by his calculations were not well received. It took me seven or eight years to realise that his estimates of journeys were always to prove vastly lower than they proved to be in reality, so that one immediately added a third at least to his prognostication.
We took two days to recover at Andritsena. Then I admitted that I was not sorry to have married him after all, and that perhaps he could learn the proper way to treat a wife–by not taking her on mule rides until he had carefully calculated the distance. We proceeded on a rather more cautious mule ride of not more than five hours, to the Temple of Bassae, and that I did not find exhausting at all.
We went to Mycenae, to Epidaurus, and we stayed in what seemed the Royal Suite in a hotel at Nauplia–it had red velvet hangings and an enormous four-poster with gold brocaded curtains. We had breakfast on a slightly insecure but ornamented balcony, looking out towards an island in the sea, and then went down to bathe, rather doubtfully, among large quantities of jelly-fish.
Epidaurus seemed particularly beautiful to me, but it was there really that I ran up against the archaeological character for the first time. It was a heavenly day, and I climbed up to the top of the theatre and sat there, having left Max in the museum looking at an inscription. A long time passed and he did not come to join me. Finally I got impatient, came down again, and went into the museum. Max was still lying flat on his face on the floor, pursuing his inscription with complete delight.
‘Are you still reading that thing?’ I asked.
‘Yes, rather an unusual one,’ he said. ‘Look here–shall I explain it to you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said firmly. �
��It’s lovely outside–absolutely beautiful.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ said Max absently.
‘Would you mind,’ I said, ‘if I went back outside?’
‘Oh no,’ said Max, slightly surprised, ‘that’s quite all right. I just thought you might find this inscription interesting.’
‘I don’t think I should find it as interesting as all that,’ I said, and went back to my seat at the top of the theatre. Max rejoined me about an hour later, very happy, having deciphered one particular obscure Greek phrase which, as far as he was concerned, had made his day.
Delphi was the highlight, though. It struck me as so unbelievably beautiful that we went round trying to select a site where we might build a little house one day. We marked out three, I remember. It was a nice dream: I don’t know that we believed in it ourselves even at the time. When I went there a year or two ago and saw the great buses travelling up and down, and the cafes, the souvenirs, and the tourists, how glad I was that we had not built our house there.
We were always choosing sites for houses. This was mainly owing to me, houses having always been my passion–there was indeed a moment in my life, not long before the outbreak of the second war, when I was the proud owner of eight houses. I had become addicted to finding broken-down, slummy houses in London and making structural alterations, decorating and furnishing them. When the second war came and I had to pay war damage insurance on all these houses, it was not so funny. However, in the end they all showed a good profit when I sold them. It had been an enjoyable hobby while it lasted–and I am always interested to walk past one of ‘my’ houses, to see how they are being kept up, and to guess the sort of person who is living in them now.
On the last day we walked down from Delphi to the sea at Itea below. A Greek came with us to show us the way, and Max talked to him. Max has a very inquiring mind, and always has to ask a lot of questions of any native who is with him. On this occasion he was asking our guide the names of various flowers. Our charming Greek was only too anxious to oblige. Max would point out a flower and he would say the name, then Max would carefully write it down in his notebook. After he had written down about twenty-five specimens he noticed that there was a certain amount of repetition. He repeated the Greek name which was now being given him for a blue flower with spiky thorns on it, and recognised it as the same name as had been used for one of the first flowers, a large yellow marigold. It then dawned upon us that, in his anxiety to please, the Greek was merely telling us the names of as many flowers as he knew. As he did not know many he was beginning to repeat them for each new flower. With some disgust Max realised that his careful list of wild flowers was completely useless.
An Autobiography Page 54