Fragile Blossoms (19 page)

‘Oh surely not.’

‘Oh surely yes! Tea-for-two with an unknown lady, it’ll be the talk of London.’

‘It was a little more public than that! We were in full view of the world, half the population of Bakers with their noses pressed against the glass.’

‘That doesn’t matter. As of today you are news. Get used to it. Noses pressed against glass is a foretaste of what is to come.’

Julia made her way back with all hope of sleep banished. Foretaste of what is to come? Of course there will be visitors, curiosity will bring them, but her life and Matty suddenly newsworthy, that’s not a welcome thought.

The moon a lamp hanging low over the house she closed the gate behind her and carried on watering the window boxes. All were abed, Matty long ago, and the maids worn out. Earlier Julia thanked them for their efforts.

‘You were so very professional and not at all daunted by our guest.’

‘I was in the back washing up,’ said Maggie. ‘I din’t see much of anythin’.’

‘I’m not sure about calm, madam,’ said Leah. ‘My knees were knocking.’

Julia smiled. ‘No one would have known. You were as you should be and I hope you’ll continue the same. Having been so honoured we may now expect other important guests and must behave in a dignified manner.’

Maggie, half-asleep, rolled her eyes. ‘Madam, must we always be dignified? Can’t we ever be happy and laugh and sing?’

Rightly reproved Julianna had laughed. ‘Of course you can! And why not now while we’re all together? You surely deserve it. But let’s make it a quiet sort of laughter and a mute sort of singing.’

Needless to say Maggie must be impertinent. ‘Can we sing ‘
Come into the Garden Maud?
’’ she’d said casting a sideways glance at Mrs Mac.

‘I’m not sure that’s appropriate.’

Mrs Mac had shrugged. ‘Let’s sing it, madam, appropriate or not! It’ll be the one and only time anyone invites me into any kind of garden.’

With that she began singing and the maids with her. They danced about the parlour, Maud an ostrich lifting knobbly knees, Leah a mature swan drifting to and fro, and Little Dottie Manners waltzing with Maggie.

They danced and they laughed and were glad. And Julia loved every one.

Thinking about it now outside watering peas she wished she’d danced with them. Abigail Dryden liked the poem
Maud
but hated the song she said it was for drunken men in saloon bars. She loved Tennyson’s poem, thought it sad, a man in hope of seeing his love waits in the darkness, the sound of laughter and of music coming from the house. ‘He shouldn’t be in the garden,’ mother would say breathlessly. ‘He is her secret and she is his.’

Julia would ask. ‘What do you mean secret?’ Mother would never say. Now Julia doesn’t need to ask. She knows. The secret is Luke Roberts.

Watering can set aside she sat on Matty’s swing, and gathering her skirts and humming softly under her breath began to push lazily back and forth.

It is years since she rode a swing, the last time was in the Rectory on a wooden plank astride Charlotte. Time has moved on but she’s still astride a swing. An image rocks back and forth inside her head, one she can’t shake off, a kiss being offered from one human being to another. It’s not the Prince’s kiss she recalls, the delicate touch of lips on her wrist. No! The kiss she remembers rose up in a woman’s eyes to float through the air and land on target.

Evelyn Carrington kissed Luke in that manner. ‘You will come to London won’t you?’ she’d said. The words were an invitation to visit and the look, her lips parted and her eyes lambent, was an invitation to love. Poets talk of Cupid’s arrow piercing the heart. If this is the case then Cupid’s arrow is sharp and the barbs coated with bitter aloes. Seeing that kiss, watching it happen, Luke Roberts a wanderer lost in a magical forest and about to be spirited away, an arrow had lanced Julia’s breast. She’d wanted to call out, ‘Don’t go, Mister Wolf! Stay with me!’ The words wouldn’t come. Debt, money loans and Meissen china, how could she ask when entangled in so many webs? Let him enjoy another web, one spun of Evie’s magic. He can’t fail to enjoy it.

Alone in the warm darkness Julia swung higher, skirts flaring out and the combs loose in her hair. Love is painful. She never felt that for Owen. Their love was manageable. There’s nothing manageable about jealousy. It hurts; what’s more it left Julia unable to decide whether the pain was caused by the giver or the recipient.

She went into the house and closed and double-locked the door.

The swing was left swaying and the chain links creaking.

‘
Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, Night, has flown,

Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone;

And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,

And the musk of the roses blown
.’

September 1900, Cairo

Julia is in small private graveyard in the south side of Sarah Salem, Old Cairo. She arrived in Egypt yesterday and this morning received a message from the Foreign Office asking to meet at the cemetery where she was told by a discomfited Consulate that her husband’s body had been removed.

‘What do you mean
removed
?’

‘We’ve learned this very week that a colleague of the late Doctor’s, a Professor Radcliff who works here in Cairo, and who I understand is on the way to meet you, has had the remains moved to another spot.’

‘What, dug up and taken to another place?’

The Consulate mopped his brow. ‘I know that this sounds like a wanton act of desecration but you know this...’

‘Sounds like?’ Julia hissed. ‘It
is
an act of desecration.’

‘Yes it is, of course it is. What I meant to say was this is Egypt, Mrs Dryden. A grave is despoiled of treasure and a body removed in the name of antiquity almost every day and no one here so much as raises an eyebrow.’

‘And was my husband’s body removed in the name of antiquity? It can’t have been for treasure. The only treasure to be had of Owen was the man himself.’

‘I don’t know why he was taken. I really don’t. I have heard rumours, this place is the Whispering Walls, there’s always some fresh devilry in the wind. But as for veracity you must ask Professor Radcliff.’

‘Don’t worry I will. I can’t tell you how upset I am about this.’

‘I imagine you are and again do apologise.’

‘I would have thought moving a body like that without the relative’s permission to be outside of the law.’

The man sniffed. ‘Where archaeology is concerned there is no law and none to enforce it. This country is a trading post of the dead, tombs robbed and bodies removed to all four corners of the earth and none to say nay. We at the Embassy deplore the whole disgraceful business but with British archaeologists among the forefront of such scavenging can do nothing. Here comes the Professor! Talk to her! Hopefully she’ll be able to set your mind at rest.’

A bullock cart rattled alongside. A woman jumped down. Dressed in Bedouin robe, the floating ends of a scarf wrapped about her head, she strode toward Julia, her hand thrust out in greeting. ‘Mrs Passmore! Ju-ju! At last we meet.’

‘Set my mind at rest?’Julia ground her teeth. ‘I doubt it.’

They sat in the cart, a theatre of three, poor Dorothy suffering from heat prone at the back, and Julia and this woman up front. A Texan, a thin blade of a body with intelligent face and ardent eyes, Kitty Radcliff shook Julia’s hand, remarked on the weather, and then proceeded to uproot any comfortable thoughts Julia might have on her marriage to Owen.

An archaeologist and expert in cuneiform writing Kitty Radcliff said she was based at the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo and had been there these seven years. ‘Though what use they are to me and I to them, an Assyriologist and a female, I don’t know. No matter how bright a woman carries no weight in this country. A lesser species we must fight for every crumb. I wouldn’t mind but I don’t care for Egyptian History. Persia was my choice but having been bitten by the treasure-seeking bug, and lately bitten again by Flinders Petrie and Co, I suppose I’m here until like Owen I too am mowed down by a bullock cart.’

This was the tenor of Miss Radcliff’s conversation, a dry mocking wit of her life and associates and devil take the listener’s feelings. It was a difficult meeting for Julia who while repressing anger was aware of a sense of guilt. Why didn’t she know of Owen’s life here in Egypt? Who is this woman and why did he never tell of friends he had in Cairo or anywhere else, close friends in this case with whom he could apparently jest of death.

‘I had to move the dear boy, you understand.’ Kitty Radcliff lit a cigarette, defiance in her eyes ‘I couldn’t leave him there. He hated Ex-Pat cemeteries and their beastly concrete markers. ‘Don’t let me to stifle in one of those, Kitty,’ he’d say. ‘I’d sooner cook on a brazier than lie alongside stuffed pigs.’

‘Stuffed pigs?’ Julia stared in disbelief! The Owen Passmore she knew would never talk so scathingly of people whomsoever they are.

‘I know.’ Kitty Radcliff smiled. ‘Stuffed pigs is how he saw the pen-pushers hereabouts. The wives and the retired Colonels and their dainty tea-cups and their antimacassars. He had no time for bureaucracy. He said it smacked of India and other tyrannies.’

Unbelievable! Today is the anniversary of Owen’s death. It’s four years to the day since Julia received a telegram telling of the accident and his resting place. Today she learns he lies elsewhere, a stranger buried by another stranger.

It appears Miss Radcliff knew Owen from Cambridge. ‘I was there in ’92 before secondment to Cairo. I went to every one of his lectures. I thought him quite the most brilliant man, if a little disrespectful of female deities, in particular Lady Bast. He said he was a dog person. Cats lacked in affection.’

Julia listened with mounting indignation. Nothing she heard from this woman explained her highhanded behaviour. ‘Miss Radcliff, I don’t really care how you and Owen met. I just want to know why you thought to move his body.’

‘Because he would’ve wanted to be moved! His place is with the people of Egypt not those that profit by them, and his choice would have been the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Naturally the authorities won’t sanction interment of any private individual there but as you now know Owen found his way home with or without official approval.’

‘Why there?’

‘He said he came as a boy. He and his father were hunting a species of lotus that grows on the lakes of El-Fayyoum. He said it was during that trip they visited the Valley of the Kings and how seeing it his heart had burned.’

Julia’s heart burned. ‘He told you that?’

‘Owen believed the pyramid to be more than a burial chamber. He thought it a kind of receiver and a point somewhere in the stars the transmitter. He once spent the night there, you know, crawled down through to the King’s Chamber and lay in the empty sarcophagus hoping to learn of their intention.’

‘And did he?’

Kitty Radcliff laughed. ‘He learned of a million bugs and how to make a man itch, beyond that I couldn’t say. His last wish was to be buried there.’

‘His last wish? You were with him when he died?’

‘I was. We were on El Sabtia Street when it happened, though street is an optimistic term for that dirt track. I saw it.’ Kitty Radcliff pulled on the cigarette. ‘Of course I realise I should’ve spoken with you, Mrs Passmore.’

‘Then why didn’t you? Did you think it wouldn’t matter to me?’

‘I hoped you wouldn’t need to know.’

‘What!’

‘I thought you would never find out.’

‘You mean if this hadn’t come to light I’d still be visiting an empty grave? My word, that’s a dreadful thing to admit don’t you think.’

‘Yes it is but you’ve no idea the fuss that goes on these days! Digs here in Egypt are not what it used to be, the government is cracking down.’

‘And not before time I would say!’

‘Well you might say that but your husband wouldn’t. It was a matter of expediency. An archaeologist’s life these days is one piffling form after another. Aware of the fuss they’d make if I sought permission I went ahead and took a chance.’

‘A chance with what?’

‘Well,’ Kitty Radcliff shrugged. ‘Your feelings I suppose.’

Julia returned to the hotel and that evening packing struggled to come to terms with the day. Who is Owen Passmore? She had thought she knew him. Now she realises she had no right to know him because she never tried. From the start he was a compromise, a home rather than a person, and when Matty came he was always secondary to his son. Any chance they had of learning about one another was lost with the tonsillectomy. Botched surgery came between them like the wall in Norfolk cutting off communication. That behind that wall was another Owen with different dreams and beloved of another woman never occurred to Julia. ‘And so what,’ she whispered. ‘Did you take your hopes to this Professor of Assyriology with the furious eyes? Did you die in her arms loving her and regretting me?’

How strange is the human condition? Before leaving England other questions of love occupied her mind. A frequent question, though never really uppermost, was how to fend off the Prince of Wales while retaining their friendship. The question is not new. It’s one she’s been asking these three years. There have been spats but no real issue. As Bertie gets older and his current favourites Lillie Langtry and Mrs Keppel hold tight his needs worry him and Julia less though like all hounds with an itch he can’t help scratching.

The night before she left England she dined at Marlborough House where he suggested she might like to comfort Caesar across the Hall having his claws clipped. There in the Salon with the dog in her arms Bertie asked was he, like Caesar, always to beg for her love. In answer she brought his hand to her lips, ‘you have my love, Sir, and always will.’ Smiling and fondling the dog’s ears he surrendered. ‘I’ll settle for that, Ju-ju, if only with hope of a change of heart.’

The issue that night was resolved with gentility. It’s doubtful she can do the same with Miss Radcliff who if not unhinged is surely unkind. Who meets with a widow and speaks of prior intimacies with the husband, and who, with any kindness, talks of being privy to a dying wish.

Tomorrow they go to the pyramid. Miss Radcliff was dismissive. ‘Are you sure? Women like you aren’t meant to crawl through tunnels.’ Julia lost her temper. ‘Do not presume to know me. You don’t know me and I certainly do not want to know you. I suggest you keep your opinions to yourself as I shall keep mine. You took it upon yourself to move him. To show me the new grave is the least you can do.’

‘I don’t think you want to come. It’s not exactly a walk in the park.’

‘You’ll take me. If you don’t I shall make a formal complaint to British Embassy and they, no doubt, will take it up the American Consulate. I imagine you’re here on a visa. I doubt you’ll want your affairs scrutinized. As you say authorities and their petty rules can make life difficult.’

There was a moment then when hatred burned in Kitty Radcliff’s eyes. Then she shrugged. ‘If we are going you’d better rethink your wardrobe. You’ll need trousers. Skirts are too much trouble, and as we are to climb in darkness I suggest you leave your wounded pride behind. I can lend you boots. We are about the same size. But you’ll have to bring your own courage.’

Furious, Julia stepped forward. ‘Don’t talk to me of wounding when for the last hour you’ve done your best to hurt me. I don’t know who you are or what you were to Owen and I don’t want to know. Beyond seeing his grave I have no wish to be in your company. You may dent my pride but you can’t touch my heart. No matter where he lies Owen is dead. There is no greater hurt.’

A duel of mute dislike they met at dawn. Julia had no need to borrow. With the help of the hotel concierge she was correctly attired. Still queasy of stomach Dorothy stayed behind. It took an age to cross the city, carts and wagons so thick. Last time Julia was in Egypt she was with Matty. They took a boat down the Nile. It was dirty and foul-smelling and bodies floated in the river but there was also a magical haze on the water, and the snouts of Matty’s crocodiles, and graceful felucca boats. Owen was everywhere. Julia stood at the rail and felt his breath on her cheek. ‘Oh my dearest dears!’ he’d whispered, ‘don’t you think this the most marvellous place?’

Memories of the man in dispute there’ll be no voices today.

Time has moved on since he died and Julia another woman. Though never shaped for a king’s mistress, father and the Rectory having too long a reach, the company of princes and their followers proved a powerful education. She’s learned much and not always what she wanted to know. Throughout the first year she had an excellent tutor in Evie. With the launch of N and N, or the Nanny Tea Shop as it is now known, the past shimmered through the present as a series of colours interspersed by shadow, Evie the brightest colour, and, the darkest shadow.

The success of the Tea-Shop, and the life of the owner, might be likened to a runner in the Grand National, a cheer for every hurdle but the winning-post always around the bend. A second shop, the Nanny Too, is to be opened in Cambridge. Evelyn did agree to cut the ribbon but in the last year there’s been a cooling and no attempt on either side to rekindle affection. They meet at functions and are polite but Julia is wary and Evie evasive. Where before there was generosity and the sharing of possessions now there is silence especially with respect to Luke Roberts.

If Julia sought to keep a tight rein on her feelings then he most assuredly did the same. At least Evie pretends affability whereas nowadays a bow from Mister Wolf is all one can expect. Be that as it may neither distance nor reserve can stop Julia hoping for his happiness. Is Luke happy? Is Freddie or Evie? Oh please let someone be happy!

*

Luke is making his way back to the Villa. An evening at the Borghese is planned with Eve’s friends, Robert Scholtz and his wife. It’s now quarter to seven. No need to rush. They’re not to meet until eight-thirty which gives plenty time to bathe and change. Were it not for a chance encounter he would’ve been back sooner. Freddie in the Vatican City and Eve out in the hills painting he’d spent the better part of the day in the Piazza Navona just sitting.

It was good, the sun not too hot and a chance to write to Nan. Then as these things happen he thought to make note regarding windows here in the Piazza and a business proposition in Harrogate lately put his way. It was the lintels on a building opposite that drew his eye. He opened his notebook and the breeze took an article he’d been reading about Westminster Abbey and the many Flying Buttresses. A chap nearby retrieved it and interested in such things struck up a conversation.

Three hours they sat. In Italy it’s rare to talk of stone in any manner other than of statuary and Michelangelo. The chap in the square was an architect, thus their conversation was of the nuts and bolts of building rather than a sculptor’s art. Luke came away from the encounter pleased. Not only was he able to converse on a topic he knew and liked he’d done so in Italian.