All the elation she had been feeling fled. Certain he had seriously bad news for her, and that the bad news had to do with Kate, or Ella, or Lewis, she headed straight for the drawing room and the cocktail cabinet and poured two generous measures of Laphroaig single malt into whisky tumblers.
‘Tell me,’ she said unsteadily. ‘Is someone I love dead? Is it Kate? Ella?’
‘God, no!’ He was appalled at what she had been imagining. ‘Both Kate and Ella are as fit as fleas.’ He took a deep swallow of whisky and then said, ‘The thing is, Daphs, over the last couple of years there’s been someone else . . .’
She cut him off, dizzy with relief. ‘Oh, for goodness sake! Is that all? I thought someone had died! I haven’t been living these last four years believing you’ve been faithful, Sholto. Come to that, I haven’t been a hundred per cent faithful, although I’ve only been unfaithful occasionally and I’ve never got involved in anything meaningful. The last four years have been four years of war and hell, and life being completely topsy-turvy and nothing normal, and the kind of stress I hope none of us ever have to live through again.’ She put her glass of whisky down and slid her arms around his waist. ‘Wartime unfaithfulness can stay where it belongs, in the war – and the war, thank God, is over. What matters, darling Sholto, is the here and now – and the future.’
He said gently, ‘There isn’t going to be a future for us, Daphs. At least not together. I’ve met someone I want to marry, and I want a divorce.’
For the briefest of seconds she didn’t believe him – couldn’t believe him – and then, as she saw the expression in his eyes and on his face, she said incredulously, ‘But you can’t divorce me and marry again. You’re a diplomat! Your career would be ruined. You would be ruined socially. No Hertford has ever divorced – they may have lived apart from their wives for a lifetime, but they’ve never divorced. And who on earth is it that you want to marry? A Cretan girl who barely speaks English? A girl who has never travelled outside Crete? A girl who hasn’t the faintest clue as to the kind of life you live, when you’re not living in a cave or a cheese-hut?’
He said, ‘I want to marry Nikoleta. I’m in love with her. I’ve told her I’m going to marry her – and I am. I want a divorce on the grounds of my adultery. It will be quicker than desertion.’
Daphne gaped at him, too stupefied for speech.
He picked up her glass of untouched whisky and pushed it into her hands. Hating the hurt he was causing, but having no second thoughts about causing it, he went on, ‘There are no ifs and buts, Daphs. Even if I hadn’t fallen in love with Nikoleta, I would still want a divorce. I made it plain it was all over between us, the last time we were together.’
‘But that was just a silly row over my staying on in Crete, when Caspian was evacuated from it.’
‘It wasn’t a silly row to me. It was the moment things finally ended between us. And now, four years later, I want a divorce so that I can marry Nikoleta.’
All she could think of was that once again Sholto had been unfaithful to her with someone she had counted a friend. In that, at least, he had been consistent. But that the friend in question should have been Nikoleta? Nikoleta who, for a time, had ensnared both Lewis and Kit? Nikoleta, for whom she had always had time and been kind towards?
She swallowed the whisky and said, the breath so tight in her chest that she had to fight for it, ‘Nikoleta isn’t going to marry you because she loves you! You do know that, don’t you? She’s marrying you for the same reason she would have married Lewis, or Kit, if they had been insane enough to ask her. She’s marrying you so that she can get away from Crete. So that she can live out her fantasy of being an English lady who meets royalty.’
‘You may be right,’ he said, and in his bronzed face white lines showed around his mouth. ‘But you know what, Daphne? I don’t care why she wants to marry me! I just want her to marry me.’
Daphne felt as if the floor was shelving beneath her feet. Never in a hundred years could she imagine Sholto reacting like that over her – or of any of the women he’d had affairs with in the past – and in that moment she knew that she had lost him; that there was no point in continuing to fight for their marriage; that it was a fight she wasn’t going to win.
Unsteadily she walked away from him and out on to the balcony. In the hazy light of late afternoon she gripped its iron railing. She had married Sholto because she had been crazily in love with him, but he had never loved her in quite the same way. If he had, he would never have indulged in so many careless affairs and flings. And now he had indulged in an affair that wasn’t careless; in an affair that, by the passionate way he had spoken of it, had been life-changing for him.
He stepped out onto the balcony behind her and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘I’d like for us to be loving friends, Daphs,’ he said thickly.
She didn’t answer him, because she couldn’t. She had never wanted to be loving friends with him. What she had wanted to be, always, was his wife and lover.
Accepting that was now never going to happen, she said bleakly, ‘I shall want full custody of Caspian.’
His response was the final nail in the coffin of their tempestuous marriage.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no problem about that.’
In Heraklion, Kate and Lewis were waiting for the announcement that the war was officially over. They were also waiting for something else. In a small chapel at British Army Headquarters, and accompanied by Ella and Pericles, they were waiting for the arrival of the army chaplain who was to marry them.
Kate was wearing a sky-blue dress that several years ago had been her best ‘dining at the Villa Ariadne’ dress. Her white straw hat was decorated with a wild red rose and she was holding a posy of roses mixed with honeysuckle.
‘Daphne is never going to forgive me for not waiting until she could be with us today,’ she said, more nervous than she could have believed possible.
‘Of course she will.’ There wasn’t a shadow of doubt in Ella’s voice. ‘She forgave me for getting married without her being there.’
Lewis, in SOE officer’s uniform, said reasonably, ‘And as I’m not being recalled to Cairo, but to London, this is the only possible arrangement. This way, at least Ella is with us.’
Behind them the chapel door opened and swung shut and the chaplain, also in uniform, hurried towards them, saying in high elation, ‘The BBC have just announced that there is shortly to be a special announcement! We none of us want to miss it, do we? Are these your witnesses, and have you got all your paperwork with you? You have? Jolly good. Then let’s begin.’
Eager to get back to a radio, he raced through the service at high speed. Neither Lewis nor Kate minded. The words were the words of the Anglican prayer book, and speed couldn’t mar the beauty or the solemnity of them.
When Lewis took the ring from the breast-pocket of his jacket and slid it on the fourth finger of Kate’s left hand, saying, ‘With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship and with all my worldly goods I thee endow’, tears blurred Ella’s eyes. It was a moment in which Christos had never seemed so near and, at the same time, so far from her.
‘Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder,’ the chaplain said.
From outside the chapel there erupted a thunderous storm of cheering, whistling, foot-stamping and triumphant shouting.
Aware that he was missing the historic announcement of a lifetime, the chaplain added in great hurry, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife!’ and set off at a run down the aisle, heading for the nearest radio.
Lewis took Kate in his arms and gave her a long, lingering, first married kiss.
Ella blinked her tears away and, at the chaplain’s undignified exit, began laughing.
Pericles said decisively, ‘This has made my mind up. I’m going to ask Apollonia to marry me.’
When, moments later, the four of them stepped out of the chapel into hot sunshine, every church bell in Heraklion was ringing a
nd the air was thick with the deafening sound of volley after volley of celebratory Cretan into-the-sky rifle shots.
‘And to think,’ Lewis said lovingly to his wife, ‘that I thought our wedding was going to be a quiet one!’
Chapter Forty
JULY 1949
It was early morning and Ella was in the kitchen of her little house in Archanes finishing baking for a very special event. It was the sixth anniversary of Christos’s death and, as it was coinciding with Daphne’s first visit back to Crete since she had left it during the British and Allied troop evacuation of 1941, it had seemed an ideal time to hold a memorial service for him. It was a day both Georgio and Adonis had always spent with her, and they would be doing so again. Even more importantly, so would Kate and Lewis – and the last time she, Kate and Daphne had all been together had been eight years ago, in the days immediately preceding the German invasion. All of which meant that, as well as celebrating Christos’s life, there were other things to celebrate as well – and not all of them were to do with personal friendships.
When Germany had unconditionally surrendered on the seventh of May 1945 and the rest of Europe had begun rebuilding shattered lives and bomb-blasted cities, war hadn’t ended in Greece. Greece had simply exchanged war against a foreign enemy for a civil war between those who wanted Greece to be Communist and those who did not – and, thanks in part to the amount of American aid now pouring into Greece, those who did not were clearly in the ascendancy and the end of the war was at last within sight.
It was not, Ella thought with relief as she gave the last cake a sprinkling of icing sugar, a civil war that had affected Crete in the same horrific way it had affected the mainland. Cretans had always thought themselves different from those in the rest of Greece, just as Yorkshire folk thought they were different from people in the rest of England; and if overall the island was anything politically, it was ardently republican.
The civil war had, though, meant that travelling abroad over the last few years hadn’t been easy, and when she’d taken Kostas Alfred and Alice Ariadne to meet their Yorkshire grandma, grandpa and great-grandpa, Ella had travelled the Heraklion–London part of the journey by cargo boat.
It had been a wonderful trip. Her mum had cried over the children and said what wonderfully curly hair they both had, and how Alice Ariadne was the image of Ella when Ella had been her age; her dad had initiated Kostas Albert into the art of pigeon-racing; and her granddad, whom she’d been relieved to find in fine fettle, had taken Kostas Albert and Alice Ariadne tramping over the nearby moor, fishing for sticklebacks in the beck that ran close to the house and, in the evenings and amid gales of laughter, playing card games such as Snap and Old Maid with them.
Although she had been a little nervous about doing so, she had contacted Sam.
‘Hello, Sam. It’s me, Ella,’ she had said tentatively when he had answered his home telephone. ‘I’m home for a few weeks and I wondered – if Jenny doesn’t mind – if we could all meet up?’
‘Ella?’ he’d said, dumbfounded. ‘Ella? I don’t believe it!’ And then, speaking away from the phone, ‘It’s Ella, Jenny! And she’s in Wilsden and wants to meet up.’
As she had no transport, Sam had insisted that, together with Jenny and their two children, he would drive down to Wilsden.
‘It’s nearly a year since Emma and Edward last saw your mum and dad and Jos,’ he’d said. ‘This is going to be a real treat for them – and I can’t begin to tell you how much of a treat seeing you is going to be, for Jenny and me.’
Ella’s mother had gone to town on the Yorkshire high tea that she had laid on, and it had become obvious to Ella that, as far as her mum, dad and granddad were concerned, Sam and Jenny and their children were family.
She, too, felt as if they were family. Jenny’s delight at finally meeting her was so sincere she’d known immediately that Jenny had no qualms about her husband meeting up with his ex-fiancée; that she was in a marriage far too strong and loving for such insecurity.
As for herself, very little had changed in the way she felt about Sam. Her feelings for him had always, at bottom, been sisterly, and they still were. He was the brother she’d never had; the person she could always turn to, in the safe knowledge that he would never let her down.
That evening when, in their little Morris Minor, the Jowett family had been lovingly waved off on their way back to their happy family life in Scooby, and when her mother was washing up the tea things and she was drying them, her mother had paused in what she was doing and said, ‘Do you have any regrets, Ella love? It could so easily have been you married to Sam and . . .’
‘No, Mum,’ she’d said gently, but firmly. ‘I have no regrets. Not one.’
It was true.
As she’d lain that night in the little single bed of her childhood, she’d known that nothing in the world would make her regret even a day of her marriage to Christos; that he would be a part of her for always.
Her return journey to Crete had also been by cargo boat – and she doubted that anyone had previously been taken to the dock it sailed from in a Rolls-Royce.
‘You can’t mean it,’ she’d said disbelievingly, when Kate had met her and the children off the Leeds–Bradford train at King’s Cross Station. ‘We’re going to drive to the Port of London in a Rolls-Royce?’
‘Lewis’s godfather insists, and not only that, but before you leave for the dock he’s also insisting that you and the children have tea with him at Claridge’s.’
She’d already known, from Kate’s letters to her, that Lewis’s godfather, Nathaniel Golding, was a South African who was rich as Croesus, and that it had been Nathaniel’s money that had funded the Kalamata Little Palace dig. What she hadn’t expected, though, was that she would ever meet him.
After the years of wartime occupation, stepping into Claridge’s for afternoon tea had been surreal.
‘Is this Fairyland?’ Alice Ariadne had whispered, round-eyed with wonder as, beneath glittering chandeliers, she sank up to her ankles in thick, deep carpet.
‘It’s Uncle Nathaniel’s kind of Fairyland,’ Kate had whispered back to her.
Despite the sea of haute-couture dresses and carelessly draped fur stoles at other tables, and despite having married a man who had turned out to be the laird of a considerable estate in Sutherland, Kate was dressed as she had always preferred to be dressed, in a sweater and skirt; the only difference being that her skirt was made of beautiful tweed and her sweater was cashmere.
In a bizarre kind of way, Nathaniel had reminded Ella of her grandfather. He was a little gnome of a man, who obviously had a great appetite for life and who, like her grandfather, took people as he found them.
‘And so, Ella, have Lewis and Kate given you the good news about the Little Palace dig?’ he’d asked, as Kostas Albert and Alice Ariadne had happily set about choosing cakes from a dizzying array.
Her eyes had immediately widened.
‘No,’ she’d said, her heart beating fast and light. ‘What is it?’
Nathaniel had leaned forward in his chair, hands clasped between his knees. ‘You have no doubt been worrying that, where Greek archaeological digs are concerned, things are now going to be different from what they were pre-war?’
She’d nodded, knowing that the only digs he, Lewis, Kate and herself had concerns about were the still-unfinished Little Palace and Sacred Cave digs.
‘I’m afraid the kind of agreement for permission to dig that I had with the former Greek government no longer stands. I regret it, but there it is.’ He paused. ‘However, as I said, there is good news. Both the Kalamata and Sacred Cave digs will now operate under the aegis of the British School of Archaeology in Athens, just as Knossos has, ever since Sir Arthur Evans transferred ownership of it to the British School in 1926. And the British School has agreed that Lewis will, as before, direct both digs.’
‘That means,’ Kate added, ‘that Lewis and I will be living at Kalamata again, and that you wil
l be able to rattle between Archanes and Kalamata in the Sally. We may even get Daphne aboard – she’s somewhere in the South of France at the moment and we haven’t been able to contact her yet.’
‘And Kit?’ she’d said. ‘Will Kit be aboard as well?’
Lewis had said, ‘Kit and Nick are on a dig in the Sudan, but when it comes to an end there will be a place for Kit on the dig at Kalamata – and Nick, too. A professional photographer is something the team has always been short of.’
‘It’s going to leave you light-handed, as far as qualified archaeologists are concerned, Lewis. There’s going to be just you, Kate, Ella and possibly the delightful-sounding Lady Daphne.’ Nathaniel had given Lewis a long, shrewd look and then said, ‘Unless, of course, you have a contact number for Helmut?’
‘I don’t.’ Lewis’s handsome face had become suddenly sombre. ‘I wish I did. I’ve contacted the German State Archaeologists’ Association and all they were able to tell me was that, at the end of the war, Helmut had gone to live in Switzerland.’
Later, in the rear seat of the Rolls-Royce with Kostas Albert, Alice Ariadne and Kate, Ella had said musingly, ‘Wasn’t it strange how Sholto and Nikoleta’s names never came up in the conversation?’
‘Not really.’ There had been wry amusement in Kate’s voice. ‘But if you want the latest update, they are married and living in Washington, where, by all accounts, the new Lady Hertford is a huge social success. A friend of Lewis’s was there recently and he says the general belief is that there was never a first Lady Hertford, and that Sholto met Nikoleta in Crete when he was a dashing British Liaison officer and she was a glamorous rifle-toting heroine, risking her life for her country. Daphne, I’m happy to say, is indifferent to being written out of Sholto’s history, but is tickled to death at Nikoleta’s apparent indignation that, although Daphne is divorced from Sholto, the only difference in their titles is that instead of being “Lady Hertford”, she is now “Daphne, Lady Hertford”. It’s something Nikoleta can’t get her head around.’
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