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.’
Chapter Five
Late August 1975
Cord wriggled in bed, her toes bent by the over-tightly tucked-in sheets. She looked across at the pale lemon wall where the slatted blinds cast light and dark shadows and knew it would be another white-hot, cloudless day.
In the bed next to her, Ben snored gently. Cord glanced at his resting face, nose peeling and covered in freckles after a summer at Worth Bay, and then hugged herself, feeling the delicious smoothness of the sheets on her bare arms. Sheets at home were never silky like this, the weather was never kind like this, food didn’t taste like this at home: delicious, fresh, even if covered in sand. Leaving here every year was, she’d come to see, unbearable. Yesterday, she’d promised Ben he wouldn’t have to go to the dreaded new school. And Cord never broke her promises.
They had hidden the food and the suitcases in the beach hut the previous afternoon. The suitcases wouldn’t be needed until the Saturday after the August Bank Holiday, when summer was over, the house shut up and they were dragged into the car for the drive back to London. But Cord had reasoned that it was wise to hide the provisions now: it would avoid suspicion closer to the date. Daddy always said he had to get the shoes of a character right first to know how to play him. These days, it seemed to Cord as though she were wearing the right shoes all the time: she felt invincible.
They’d hatched plans before, silly plans really: the lemonade stall had hit the skids after only a day, and the sponsored sing-along last year had been cancelled after Daddy actually put masking tape over Cord’s mouth when she entered her second hour of singing a combination of songs from ABBA and The Sound of Music on the porch. There was, too, the dog-napping plan earlier in the summer which had not ended well. This, however, was the boldest yet. Ben was still afraid but Cord knew they could pull it off.
They were going to run away.
Run away and stay here, rather contradictorily. They’d never have to leave Worth Bay again and Ben wouldn’t have to go to the big boys’ school in Sussex, which he was dreading and which Daddy was adamant about, even though he himself had hated it. Antony and Cleopatra had finally finished and so Daddy had arrived two days ago to spend the last week with them and they had tried to talk to him about it. But Daddy, normally so reasonable, wouldn’t brook any discussion on the subject. ‘You’ll love it when you’re there, Ben,’ he’d say.
Ben was getting more and more desperate. He’d stopped sleeping, he was hardly eating – he’d even abandoned work on his model aeroplane. Cord thought it was utterly heartless; you only had to look at Ben to see he wasn’t supposed to be sent away. He was nothing like her: small for his age, shy, diffident. He’d be eaten alive at boarding school, that or worse, Mrs Berry, their housekeeper in London, had said grimly, though Cord didn’t think there was much worse than being eaten alive.
She had even discussed it with Simon, when he’d been down to stay. She’d found him sitting on the porch one afternoon while Mumma was napping, ostensibly doing the crossword, though in fact he was chewing a pencil and gazing into space.
‘Can you talk to Mumma and Daddy?’ she’d said. ‘About Ben going to school because he really doesn’t want to, and they won’t listen.’
Simon was ever so good to talk to when you managed to get his attention. The rest of the time he was almost as bad as Bertie, who was great at doing silly impressions and telling the children dirty jokes, but absolutely hopeless at things like finding hair ribbons or making sandwiches – he’d looked after them for an afternoon the previous year and Cord had actually got stuck in the toilet bowl, bottom almost touching the U-bend, hands, head and legs waggling frantically, crying out for help while Bertie was on the phone to someone called Johnny for half an hour about some silly play. But Simon could at least listen, and give advice.
‘Cordy, all I know is your old dad’s very keen on it,’ he said. ‘Mind you, I can’t see why.’
‘He hated it! Poor Ben. It’s horrid.’
‘He wants what he had for himself, that’s it, Cordy,’ Simon had told her, lighting a cigarette. He’d blown out the smoke and stared, ruminatively, out to sea. ‘He thinks he ought to fashion Ben in his own image. I’m afraid you won’t change his mind.’
Cord had stuck out her chin.
‘I will.’
Simon had simply laughed, and gone back to his paper. ‘And woe betide anyone who gets in your way. You do what you want. That’s my girl.’
This Cord took to be almost a tacit approval of their plans, which accelerated as a result of this conversation. A can here, a packet there, over the course of the summer and now there was more than enough for them to live on. Still in bed, Cord ran through the inventory, memorised in her head:
She reckoned this should provide enough for them to live on for at least a week in the beach hut, by which time she hoped her parents would have stopped searching for them and gone back to London.
It had to be done very carefully, of course: Mumma was surprisingly adept at spotting mischief-making. Behind the huge paperbacks or the Sunday Times magazine, behind the put-on languid hand-waving ‘run-along dear’-ness of her, under the great black sweep of that expertly applied eyeliner were sharp green eyes that noticed everything.
Ben was already in trouble, being rude to Simon when he stayed, then being rude to Daddy when he arrived, and then for the great dog-napping incident when he’d ‘borrowed’ a nice dog and taken him to the beach hut before alerting Cord to his actions. They’d called him Sandy, wittily, and played with him all afternoon and he’d been ever so friendly, wagging his tail and letting them feed him biscuits, and then the owner had gone past and seen Sandy in the open door of the beach hut and had called the police, accusing them of kidnapping his dog from up the road at Worth Farm and all hell had broken loose. He was not a kind farmer with a tweed hat and a piece of wheat hanging out of his mouth. He was thin and angry and kept saying how Sandy was a working sheepdog and a she, not a he. He pulled Sandy around a lot by the collar. And it turned out she laboured under the truly depressing name of Spam. Ben had been more furious about that than anything.
‘Such an undignified name to give her. Horrible. She should be called Hermione or Larch or something. Spam is so nasty.’
After it was over Ben brooded on Spam and her depressing life working for the horrid farmer, whom they�
�d seen about before, once carrying a dead kitten down the lane near the farm by the scruff of its neck and throwing it away like rubbish. He mentioned it to Cord several times, how unjust it was, how foul that man was.
But it was the dog-napping which had planted the seed in Cord’s head about running away. If they’d only kept the door of the beach hut shut Spam might not have been found and they could have kept her for ever. The grown-ups never went into the beach hut. Daddy was always saying they should sell it, but somehow he never seemed to get round to it.
The beach hut was the children’s private world, where they could keep all their beach kit – spades, sieves, windbreakers that made excellent tents and dens. It had the legendary points system and rules for Flowers and Stones stuck to the wall. It was where she and Ben would live in their own private world when the grown-ups had finally gone back to London. They could put up posters of Wonder Woman and some cricketers, there’d be tinned tomato soup and jelly and pineapple chunks for tea, and in the winter, when it was cold, they would burn the old theatre programmes of Mummy and Daddy’s which they kept in a big box under the stairs and which Cord had also secretly been transporting across to the hut. She knew how chilly it could be; they had come back in winter for Mrs Gage’s mother’s funeral; it was quite different here, out of season, the sand grey, the meadow dead and the branches bare, berries instead of green leaves. There were pine cones littering the lane and the fields behind; she’d never seen them there for they had always vanished by summer. Gone where? She didn’t know; she had collected a handful of them and stuffed them into the pockets of her winter coat and, once back in River Walk, had lined them up on her window sill, where they rattled when the winds blew, a reminder of the Bosky in winter, its other life she knew nothing about.
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