The noises from outside grew louder.
‘She was despised! Despised and rejected! Rejected of men! This rope is not thick enough, Dinah. Oh, it doesn’t matter, who’ll steal the thing? He’ll be up in a couple of hours.’ A pause. ‘But you don’t know who comes by here, perhaps a dishonest sort who might take a fancy and swipe it . . . Oh, dear, the sooner we give it to him and it’s inside the better. A woman of sorrows . . . and acquainted with greeeeeeeeeeef. Oh, what a glorious day it is.’
Ant bit the tip of his finger, blinking. He got up, patting the velvet dressmaker’s dummy which stood sentinel by his bed every night, and peered out of the window, squinting through the chink in the gauze. There she was, scratching on the dirt in the lane outside, skirts gathered in one arm, those huge feet in their big flat shoes planted firmly in the dust at right angles like a clown, rear end pointing up in the air. Little daisies and late violets bedded in the cracks at the edge of the house bobbed about in the fresh summer breeze.
Anthony shook his head. If he went outside and remonstrated with her (mildly, of course; they were always polite to each other) for making this racket this early in the morning she’d have some answer. She always did; he’d never known anyone so certain about everything they were doing and it was comforting, even if sometimes he wondered whether she was telling the truth all the time. The fact was, since the previous August, he did feel more warmly towards her. Perhaps he – he even liked her, a bit.
There had been dark days, moments when he’d thought he wouldn’t be able to survive, here or anywhere. The winter had been worst: the house was so cold and windy they both had chilblains, and the ache of missing his mother and father seemed to have settled in his heart; it was like a shard of ice, it hurt when he breathed. The Bosky was still crammed full of bric-a-brac and though Dinah sighed about it she made no effort to clear it. For one who was constantly busy she could also be curiously ineffective.
That first summer they had taken walks on the sand but during the autumn and winter the beach became inaccessible: littered with mines, covered in barbed wire, the land rising away from the shore up to the house lined with dragon’s teeth – pointed blocks of concrete in sturdy lines, designed to slow down the enemy. An invasion was expected that day, that week, that month and the word was if the Germans came they’d land at Worth Bay. And though Ant told himself he didn’t care about dying it was hard not to be scared all the time. Everyone was: they pretended not to be, of course. There were dogfights in the sky, night after night; German planes had been shot down at Harman’s Cross and right there in Worth Bay and the pilot of the latter had never been found: alone each night in the awful, thick, silken darkness, shivering with cold and yet still clammy with sweat, Ant would wonder: what if the pilot hadn’t drowned in the bay, what if he was still out there, waiting to come and kill them in their beds at night?
Then spring came, and somehow his suffering was eased in a tiny way by the lighter evenings, as well as the sweetness of the warmer air, the lambs out in the fields, the villagers who knew him now and were kind to him because they liked Dinah and were glad the Wildes had come back. Some of them even remembered his dad when he was young. Philip Wilde had put on plays and charged people to come and watch them and Tony loved hearing these stories, just as he loved hearing about Dinah’s father, Colonel Wilde, who liked firing shots off the porch on to the beach at sunset.
‘Oh, we wasn’t scared, we thought it was just Colonel Wilde having his fun, poor fella,’ Mrs Proudfoot told Ant once. She liked Ant and would give him twists of precious boiled sugar wrapped in waxed paper when he called to sweep her drive. Dinah, when Ant asked, was silent about her father, but that was no surprise. Another neighbour called Mr Hill let Ant choose a kitten of his own when his cat had a litter; Ant loved it and called it Sweep and it did a marvellous job of driving out the mice and rats that had taken up residence in the Bosky, chewing books, living amongst the junk of Dinah’s family and her former lives.
But mainly it was Dinah herself who made things better, by virtue of being gloriously certain about everything. Though the truth was that he didn’t understand her any more now than a year ago: she ate with her fingers; talked in strange languages when she washed the dishes; she knew nothing about film stars or radio programmes but knew hundreds of songs, some of them utterly filthy, that she’d picked up on digs. She liked cheese and attempted to make it with the curds gifted to her from the farm. She disastrously kept bees (the swarm flew away) and hens (rats ate the eggs; foxes ate the hens). She grew vegetables that either never came up or instantly bolted: she would lean on her spade in the tiny garden to the side of the house, strong slim hand on her forehead, loose tendrils of hair around her face, frowning at the tilled earth. She had tried to join the Home Guard and was disgusted when they laughed her away.
He was never sure what she understood about him. But she had somehow come to see his fear of the darkness, so had taught him to play mah-jong in his bedroom (in later years Tony realised the version he knew so well bore no relation to actual mah-jong, that she’d bent the rules so it worked for two people, made it up to suit them, like so many things). They’d stay up late into the night trading beautiful mahogany tiles inlaid with mother-of-pearl patterns, until he was drooping with sleepiness and the wick on the oil lamp had burned almost to nothing and Dinah could creep out and leave him, fast asleep. She taught him the rudiments of astronomy, with the ancient telescope the mysterious Daphne had grudgingly sent down from the flat in South Kensington and such books on the subject as were available at Swanage library. Her facility for acquiring knowledge astonished him – yet simple things, like clearing a space to walk from the sitting room out on to the porch, or remembering to shut up the hens, or keeping the milk in the larder, were utterly beyond her. And so every time he believed he understood her views or her approach she’d wrong-foot him. At first, she told lies – he wished she wouldn’t – just small ones, about where she’d been: ‘I was up at Bill’s Point,’ when he’d seen her in the village because he’d been there himself. Or about where food came from, or sometimes her stories of life in Baghdad that didn’t quite make sense. But Ant had been at school with a boy, Peters, who’d lied only when he was flustered or nervous. If you questioned him about it he lied even more. It was like that with Dinah. As life at the Bosky settled into something resembling a routine, she made things up less. And Ant didn’t see what harm it did, really. It was a diversion, after all. Life with her was curious, funny, frustrating, exhilarating – but never dull.
As Ant climbed back into bed, kicking the mah-jong set under the bed, the shuffling and the low singing faded away. He stared at the photograph of him and his mother on Brighton Pier, which sat beside his bed at all times. With a feeling of gloom he wondered with horror how his great-aunt celebrated birthdays, and Midsummer’s Day. She was a great one for marking occasions, big or small.
Though she rarely attended church herself she made Ant come with her on high days and holidays like Christmas and Ascension Day, when she would embarrass him terribly. Her knees knocked against the narrow pews when she sat down and her powerful voice boomed around the ancient stained glass; she had a beautiful voice, low and pure, but she sang far too loudly, enunciating every word. (‘When I survey the wuuuhndruss cross . . .’ ‘Christian! Dosst thou see them? On the holee grrrround?’)
The vicar, the Reverend Ambrose Goudge, was a kindly man with expressive eyebrows. Transplanted by the war from his High Church parish in Pimlico to a sleepy English village which now nightly feared either obliteration by a ferocious assault from the air or a German land invasion, he gave himself the not inconsiderable challenge of taking the residents’ minds off the war in whatever way he could. He had formed a local drama society which had already staged a sold-out production of Mother Goose and was full of ideas for what to do next.
The vicar adored Dinah and took to coming round for tea. Most men liked Dinah, Ant saw that early on, but in a strange way, diffe
rent from the way they liked his mother. They treated her as an equal, not someone whose hand ought to be delicately kissed like Mummy’s. Mummy would laugh gently at their jokes, and then ask them whether they thought it would turn to rain later, or whether they might be awfully kind and fetch more milk – Aunt Dinah wasn’t like that at all. She told Mr Hill, the local solicitor and noted local historian, that she believed in fairies, and that as a child she’d seen a witch land on the roof of this very house, a witch who’d carried away sprigs of rosemary for her potions. Mr Hill had nodded and asked for proof, folding his arms and listening carefully as Dinah told him about sightings of white witches in Dorset. She asked the vicar for evidence of transubstantiation, only the vicar just laughed, and said if she wanted evidence she’d missed the whole point.
That Easter there was a tiny piece of chicken each for lunch, courtesy of Alastair Fletcher from Beeches. His garden was large and he not only grew vegetables but kept chickens too. Ant was scared of Alastair, who could be kind but who he’d discovered could also be extremely stern. He could do things like fix kites and, directly after Ant and Dinah arrived, he had offered to help him with his bowling in the sandy lane, though he had a tendency to grip Ant’s too-thin arm tightly and tell him he needed to build up his muscles, or that his spin was pathetic. It wasn’t much fun and, after a while, Ant rather avoided him.
Like the Reverend Goudge, Alastair had been too old to be called up, and was an enthusiastic member of the LDV instead. And also like Reverend Goudge he would sit on the porch in the light summer nights before blackout looking out over Worth Bay, laughing at Dinah’s droll stories. Alastair had studied Greats at Oxford, which meant Latin and Greek, Ant discovered, and could talk for hours of places with exotic, magical names: the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the ancient minaret of the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, the Temple of Baal. He was at his happiest then; he was a serious man, serious in his interests. Dinah, who’d known the Fletcher family for years, said he hadn’t been like that always. His wife had died of influenza several years ago and her death, their children, and their care, seemed to lie heavy on him; he was extremely strict with Julia, who was treated like a Victorian debutante to be chaperoned everywhere even though she was only twelve, and perplexed by his withdrawn son, Ian.
Ant didn’t really like either of them. Julia was annoying, she talked too much and recited poems in an awful ‘knowing’ way, and Ian was strange. He had toothbrush hair, spoke in grunts if he spoke at all, and stared at Ant in almost open loathing. ‘No one likes poor Ian,’ Dinah said once. ‘The boy must have some redeeming features but it’s hard to know what they are.’
So the first couple of summers, Alastair was a reasonable neighbour. And it cheered him, Dinah believed, to sit on the porch and talk of inconsequential things unrelated to war and children. The dear, jolly vicar enjoyed both village gossip and discussions of ancient tombs and clay fragments, and he was the only person Ant knew who could tolerate Aunt Dinah’s dreadful elderflower wine. Ant would hear the three of them, as he lay in bed at the bottom of the house, and it made his fear of the dark seem more manageable, knowing that if he woke up the sounds of conversation would often still be floating down into his room.
These days even without mah-jong he regularly fell asleep straight away, for he’d be tired after another day of schooling. Lessons with Aunt Dinah were not remotely like the ones at his old school. English was Shakespeare, nothing else. Geography was crawling across the downs, looking for butterflies and their pupae, examining the plants and the rocks. History was the best: full of Sultans being murdered by their sons, or mad inbred kings with tongues the size of snakes, or Marie Antoinette’s clothes in prison: no Corn Laws or tedious naval battles. Nothing about living with Dinah was tedious.
Ant stared at the watch next to him. Suddenly, grief at his mother not being there to wish him a happy birthday settled on his chest so heavily he could not move. He decided he must get up. He would fetch a slice of bread from the pantry, go and find Sweep, who often slept in the kitchen at night, and take him back to bed with him, the bread, and his book. He was reading The Hobbit again; he’d read it twice now.
Silently, and not without a struggle, he put on his dressing gown – it was too small and smelled of oil from when he and Dinah had tried to mend the car and used the dressing gown as a rag. She had rinsed it in the sink afterwards but not successfully: he’d never admit it, but he liked not minding so much about pressed clothes and everything being just so all the time.
Creeping up the stairs, which were apt to creak, he came out into the sitting room and, pushing aside the blinds, gazed out at the view of the rising sun. Pearlescent ropes of cloud hung across the raspberry-red-and-turquoise sky and he smiled at the sight, pulling the dressing gown more tightly around him.
‘One-two two-two three-two hup! Up and down and up and down and . . .’
Ant turned to see his great-aunt lying on the floor, eyes fixed on the ceiling and apparently oblivious to his presence, alternating sit-ups with strange cranking arm movements in which she swung her arms behind her. She lifted herself off the floor with one hand.
‘Up and down and three and four! Come on old girl do some more!’
Anthony said, ‘Morning, Aunt Dinah.’ Dinah jumped, and her arm gave way. She collapsed on to the ground in surprise.
‘Oh, dear me, you gave me a shock.’
‘You gave me a shock.’ Ant felt this was unfair. ‘I thought you were outside.’
‘I was outside. Silly me!’ She shook her head and leaped to her feet, catlike. ‘Happy, happy birthday, old fruit.’ She gripped his shoulders, and kissed him firmly on the forehead. ‘Dear boy.’
‘Thanks,’ he mumbled.
But she stepped back, releasing him, and her eyes were shining. ‘What a glorious day to have a birthday. Your darling mother was clever, having you on Midsummer’s Day. Well, we’ve a host of activities planned. I have a picnic all ready for us. Ham, Ant dearest. I’ve got us some ham. Don’t ask me where.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘And tomatoes from the garden.’
‘No,’ he said, curiously. ‘Real actual tomatoes? Not from our garden?’
‘It must be some kind of miracle, for my reply is yes. Our garden. I’ve picked four. And there’s a cake with real eggs.’
He stared at her in disbelief. ‘Where from?’
‘Mrs Proudfoot brought it over last night. It’s her present to you.’ She clapped her hands. ‘But the cake’s for later. The vicar and Mrs Goudge and various others are all coming for tea this evening. Alastair’s coming too. His children are back early, their school’s been evacuated.’ Ant scowled. ‘Dear, but I thought you’d be pleased. Some children to play with.’
‘They’re not my sort of people. Ian gives me the willies. She’s cracked, too.’
‘You can’t celebrate reaching your teenage years solely with me. You have lessons with me and you live with me!’
Without really thinking he answered, ‘But I don’t mind all that. I like being with you.’
Dinah’s face flushed ridiculously and she raised her hands to her cheeks. ‘Dear Ant. Now, don’t you want to know where we’re going for our picnic?’
‘There?’ Embarrassed, Ant pointed to the sandy patch of half-dune before the dragon’s teeth and wire on the beach, one hundred yards hence, trying not to smile: where else could it be? Petrol was so dear these days the car had been up on bricks for months now, to protect the tyres, and as for buses, they were rarer than hen’s teeth.
She shook her head. ‘Aha! No! I have you, you see. I thought we’d go to St Aldhelm’s.’
This was an ancient chapel perched on top of cliffs the other side of Swanage. The views were magnificent, stretching for miles in every direction, and the walking particularly fine, but – Anthony hesitated. He didn’t care about views much and he remembered the time Dinah had made him walk to the Square and Compass Inn, in Worth Matravers, not far from St Aldhelm’s, on a broiling hot day the previous September. Th
e heat didn’t bother her; years of living in Iraq had made her resistant to most privations: lack of electricity, of hot water, of cool weather. Ant’s feet had bled and still she’d kept on walking, hat jammed on head, waving her arms, pointing out interesting barrows and rock strata, cooing in great excitement as the vista of the Purbeck Hills opened up before them. Eventually he had collapsed in tears against a milestone, refusing to go any further, almost hysterical with exhaustion and anger at her. She had had to flag down a car to drive them back. Once they got home, he was violently sick and had to spend the next day in bed.
‘How will we get there? Because, Aunt Dinah, I don’t want to sound wet, but it’s rather a hike and on one’s birthday one maybe doesn’t want to . . .’ He trailed off. She was watching him with a strange smile on her face.
‘Ah, I see. Well, why don’t you come with me,’ she said, leading him gently by the arm. They went outside on to the lane.
A bicycle, its frame dark blue, its handlebars polished dull silver, sat outside, propped against the house. She had tied a silk scarf around it in a bow. On the dirty sand around it she had drawn, with a stick or some such, the legend:
HAPPY B DAY DEAR ANT XXX
There were swooping curlicues framing the wonky writing. For the rest of Tony’s life, no matter how long afterwards, whenever he looked outside into the lane by the Bosky he would see that patch of the road, could see the letters forming again in the dirty ochre-coloured sand, hear the sound of her scratching them out, on that fine midsummer morning.
Anthony looked up at her. ‘It’s really mine?’
‘It’s really yours,’ she said, smiling at him, and he thought again how lovely her long, eager face was when she smiled.
The Wildflowers Page 21
