Love's Obsession (2 page)

A note on terms

Monetary units are given exactly as they appear in the sources and I have made no attempt to convert these amounts to modern equivalents.

The pound sterling remains the currency of Great Britain. Australian currency consisted of Australian pounds, shillings and pence until 1966, when the country adopted a decimal currency and the Australian ‘dollar'. In Cyprus, the currency was the Cyprus pound divided into twenty shillings. In 1955 the currency went decimal with 1000 mils to the Cyprus pound. This was changed to 100 cents to the Cyprus pound in 1983. Until 1972, the Cyprus pound and pound sterling had equivalent value. In 2008 the national currency became the Euro.

The term ‘Near East' came into use during the second half of the nineteenth century, and was used to describe areas ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The term has different meanings for archaeologists, political scientists, historians and journalists. From an Australian perspective, Eurocentric terms such as the Near East, Middle East and Far East, have no logic at all, given that Japan and China (the Far East to Europe) are our northern neighbours. The term is retained primarily because it is the term used by J.R.B. Stewart in correspondence referring to Turkey and Cyprus. It is also the term of the professorship at Sydney University, which Stewart held.

Although neither Jim nor Eve Stewart would have understood the terms BCE (before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era), and are unlikely to have approved their use, these terms are used to conform to modern conventions and replace the earlier BC and AD.

Prologue

Cyprus 1947

The car bumped and ground its way along the rough road that wound its way up and over the Kyrenia Range. In the back a young woman sat numb, emotionless after months of waiting and preparation. She glanced back. Only the faint brushstroke of Turkey separated the sea from the sky. They dropped down into the vast sprawling plain of the Mesaoria. As they drove through Nicosia she bade a silent farewell to the museum, then they passed through the city gates and headed south.

Hassan parked near the wharf at Limassol. Cypriot travellers called to relatives, waving scarves. A small boy sat on a pile of boxes. A mother cradled a baby in her arms and turned towards an elderly couple standing at the edge of the crowd. Four hundred passengers were boarding, along with all their goods and chattels, on the SS
Misr
, embarking upon a new life in an unseen continent. The air was heavy with anticipation.

Her father directed Hassan to unload the baggage and find someone in charge. Tom Dray was aged seventy, tall with a neat white moustache to balance his receding hair, and a tendency to lean to the right to favour his good leg. Formally dressed in a double-breasted grey suit, he looked anxious but had little influence on his daughter's decisions. At thirty-three Eve was no longer a child. He fidgeted with the car keys and looked at his boots, wondering how long she would be gone and when she would come home.

She stepped from the car, drawing her cardigan close, and for a few minutes stood looking out at the translucent waters of the harbour. With plenty of time to board, she left the luggage to the men and set out along the foreshore.

She took a seat at her favourite café and watched fishermen in a rowboat as they untangled their nets. To her left, a man in baggy breeches was being shaved, and a hunter sat at a nearby table, his gun propped against the wall.
1
She ordered coffee and searched her purse for a sheaf of letters. She unfolded them carefully, with a caress, and began to read. Not that she needed to—she had all of his letters word perfect.

Eve, my darling … All this western country is magical today and the sun seems brighter than ever before … So far from feeling ashamed, this is the first day I've really felt peaceful since I came home … Your courage and quiet dignity took me first, then your mental probity; now your personal glory, your eyes, yourself, your lovingness, the way you dress. How futile it was for me to pretend that it was only an emotional entanglement … P.S. For god's sake don't go weaving pretty pictures round me. I'm a most unpleasant person really—selfish, self-centred, dogmatic, pompous, cowardly, unsensitive, stupid, affected.

She fingered the brooch he had given her that Easter.

The commonest mistake which we all make is to assume that our own personal miseries are worse than anyone else's. Please, my darling, accept this brooch … with some blessing in its original owner. The people of Castelorizo were evacuated to Cyprus (I think during the Dodecanese battles) for the safety of their lives, and were then left destitute. The women had to sell their ornaments to find money for food … May it be a symbol of hopelessness destroyed forever, and of joy and love and comradeship for all living future. It is nothing in itself, base island silver re-gilt. But it is survival of an old East-Mediterranean art, old already when Mycenae was young.
2

She smiled at the memory. He had gone with Petro to a Turkish village near Paphos in search of coins, his first love. They were welcomed with cheers and roars of delight from former soldiers of the Cyprus Regiment, and quite a celebration ensued.

‘When Turks drink they do it properly', he said. ‘Even the cats have
raki
instead of milk.
'
3

Back at the house Hassan had helped her stuff the car with bags and boxes. She had packed linen from Ayios Philon and summer clothing. How different could the weather be? Would it be like a Cyprus summer? Winter in Cyprus, summer in Australia; a topsy-turvy world. What a lot of luggage. Pots were wrapped carefully, each in crumpled newspaper, and pottery sherds nestled in dozens of flat cigarette tins, each labelled. She could never get enough of them and smiled, remembering his rebuke: ‘You fiend', he said, ‘You're not to use me as an excuse for smoking'.
4

She looked out across the water. A shepherd's voice rang out and she could hear the bells of his flock of sheep as they scampered over the stony ground, reminding her of that last day of their three months together, visiting favourite haunts and places where they would one day excavate. While sherd-hunting at Sotira, he scrambled ahead, racing over the rocks, then, calling to her, he suddenly stopped and bent to scoop up a Neolithic stone pounder lying on the ground as if dropped only yesterday.

‘What a wonderful day to farewell Cyprus', he said. Her hair fell loosely to her shoulders and she looked directly at him, shading her face against the fierce sun with her hand, her skin browned from months in the Cypriot sun.

‘It is our Cyprus', she said, standing with her back to the sea.
5

In the evening he lay in bed, watching her by the window, marvelling at the peace these months had brought him. She turned toward him and smiled. Their future was uncertain then. Memories would have to sustain them. Later, on the other side of the world, the sherds from Sotira helped him to relive this moment.
6

She drained her coffee and stubbed out a cigarette as she read the final lines of the letter. ‘I've always hated leaving Cyprus', he said, ‘I realised that you are quite right. It
is our
island, and we must have a stake in it. Those dusty roads, the Northern mountains, the sea, the bareness of Ayios Ioannis are all part of you and me.
'
7

‘Kiss me, my Eve.
'
8

PART 1
The Old World, 1914–47

Chapter 1
England, Egypt and Cyprus, 1914–36

Margery Dray turned into the hallway and sighed. ‘Oh dear.' Strung out before her were all her shoes, the laces knotted neatly one to the other to form a long accusatory line. Chastised earlier in the day for poor behaviour, her daughter Eve had exacted her revenge.
1
Quiet, efficient, determined. Eve never forgot and she never gave up.

Dorothy Evelyn Dray was born in the dying days of Edwardian England, as an Indian summer gave way to the catastrophe of the Great War of 1914. Eve was a hybrid, one part English gentry, one part eastern Mediterranean. From her mother she learned duty, obedience and rectitude; from her father a wry sense of humour, a love of travel and of animals. The deadpan poker face she perfected all on her own.

Eve's mother, Margery Mills, belonged to a family of modest wealth in late Victorian England, her world a slow and gentle round of country picnics, garden parties and visitors coming to stay for weekends in the country. Days distinguished themselves one from another by little more than the weather or the book lying in one's lap, but seldom by any change in routine. Rituals of shopping or tennis flowed with the rhythms and certainty of a broad slow-moving stream with few eddies to disturb the smooth grey passage of time.

The course of Margery's life was determined by men. The Mills family had occupied landed estates in Hampshire since the eighteenth century, but only the men ever owned Bisterne Manorhouse and the thousands of acres attached to it. Wives and daughters might live there but could never be certain of tenure. Margery grew up in this house with two older brothers, two younger sisters, and a mother who would dominate her life for years to come. Her father, a vicar with a passion for carpentry but little interest in the church, left the running of the parish to his wife. Domineering, devout and humourless, her household regimen was rigid and unbending. The family was dutiful and loyal, but undemonstrative. Margery seldom heard laughter or felt the warmth of a spontaneous embrace.
2

In 1901 Margery Mills, aged twenty-five, travelled to Cyprus to visit relatives who had lived there for eleven years. Her uncle, Hugh Nichols, was a road engineer. With only one decent road from the port of Larnaca to the inland city of Nicosia, he had no shortage of work. Unlike her Aunt Flo, who disliked riding, Margery was a keen horsewoman and travelled with Uncle Hugh on surveying trips, riding a horse named Selim Pasha to places with equally foreign names and exotic inhabitants: Limassol, Famagusta, Paphos, Kyrenia. They stayed with district commissioners or at local police stations to avoid the fleas and bedbugs of the local village inns.
3

Perhaps it was on one of these trips she first met a young Tom Dray, who arrived like a warm breeze through an open window into her cold and musty English life.

Tom Dray was born in 1879
4
with the privileges of an English birthright, though he spent little time in England. For most of his life he lived in the Near East, enjoying advantages not available in Victorian England's world of rigid hierarchies, where minute gradations of class were the warp and weft of society's fabric. Like many younger sons of relatively well-to-do but by no means wealthy families, Tom found more opportunities as a colonial son than in England. There, Tom was merely the youngest son of a doctor, but in Egypt or Lebanon or Cyprus he joined an exclusive expatriate world of administrators and government officials. If, as the Mills family believed, his mother was Syrian, that would have been further reason to avoid England.
5

A premature baby and the youngest of six, he was spoilt and coddled in childhood which he described years later:

I was born in London, a seven months child [premature] brought up in an incubator and told by the doctors that I was to do no work. I took full advantage of this until I was about ten and considered too old to start school. I was therefore supplied with tutors, a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman and a Syrian. By this time I had been sent out to Beirut where my father had gone as a doctor. My last memory of England was riding on Jumbo at the Zoo.
6

Tom effortlessly absorbed languages in polyglot Lebanon, where his father practised medicine and where the family lived in a large house in the picturesque hills of Broumanna outside Beirut. Tom learned French of course—from a tutor who stole the best stamps from his grandfather's album. He studied ancient Greek and Latin, languages that formed the basic education of all English schoolboys of a certain class, and Arabic from a Syrian Jew who, he remembered, fed him figs. At the small English school in Beirut which he finally attended with his sisters, cricket and football were the main attractions, not schoolwork. In early childhood he began his love affair with horses, and he and his sisters all rode well.

Tom's father knew that as the younger son Tom would have to make his own way in the world. He tried to direct Tom towards a financial career, but office work and banking held no attraction for his tall and energetic youngest son. When the Boer War began, a patriotic Tom was eager to enlist. The army offered prospects of adventure and travel, but his father scoffed. Tom was, he said, ‘too young to join up, too big a target & far too big a fool'. In the end, Tom found work as Inspector of Irrigation on the island of Cyprus. The only prerequisite for the job appears to have been an ability to play polo, at which Tom excelled.

We made a reservoir down by Famagusta, the surface of which made a most excellent polo field although it turned out to be useless as a reservoir.
7

From irrigation Tom moved casually into surveying. He met the head of the Land Registry Office while riding one day and was invited to his office to discuss a new system of land registration. Both knew little about how the system worked, but they enjoyed riding. So it was agreed that Tom would join the office where, he was delighted to discover, ‘there was still plenty of polo and shooting'.

Tom lived the good life as a young man on Cyprus and remembered it fondly. He rode, played polo, and moved in a circle of young and privileged colonial civil servants. Cyprus was English but not England, familiar and comfortable but warm and exotic. It was England without the straight jacket, the East without the muddle.

His world was outwardly Middle Eastern but inwardly Hampshire. In the streets wiry moustachioed men wandered the narrow stone alleys and courtyards in baggy trousers, while Turkish Cypriot women were veiled from head to foot. Shepherds picked their way across rocky ledges along the shoreline with small flocks of scruffy long-haired sheep, and bearded Orthodox priests sat in the cafes drinking coffee and nibbling Cypriot sweets. The call to prayer rang out on Fridays, bells tolled on Sundays and a cacophony of voices squabbled at the outdoor markets every other day. Indoors it was strictly the Home Counties. In Tom's Nicosia house, lace tablecloths covered cane tables and family portraits stared down from wooden frames. Beside a roll-top desk a standard lamp shone weakly beneath its tasselled shade onto an English newspaper lying on the divan. Cyprus became Tom's home for much of his adult life and finally the source of his considerable wealth. It was also to be central in the life of his daughter Eve.

The island of Cyprus emerges uneasily from the blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean, geographically closer to Turkey and Lebanon than to Greece. For thousands of years it has been within the orbit of great powers—Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Ottomans—but never at their centre. The island's position at the edge of the Eastern Mediterranean makes it strategically important, so it has rarely been the ruler of its own fate.

Cyprus is dry and barren limestone country with white beaches looped around the coasts and a wide open plain, the Mesaoria, which cuts the island in two from east to west. In the middle of this windswept and featureless fertile central plain squats the walled city of Nicosia, or Levkosia, a medieval city of moats, walls and gateways. Built by a mathematician, Nicosia is a circular city with twelve bastions, its geometry only apparent in plan view. The city looks inwards. No navigable river, harbour or natural feature determines its placement, other than its position at the centre of the rich agricultural Mesaoria.

Two mountain ranges stretch across the island from east to west. In the north, the narrow Kyrenia Range roars up out of the plain and looms over the northern coastline. In huge unlikely humps the mountain ropes along the top third of the island. The country is stripped bare, bones bleached, flesh cut away. The Kyrenia Range sprouts castles like the Mesaoria sprouts wheat. Leaning against the jagged rocks you are never sure if they are part of the mountain or the remains of a wall. In the south, the Troodos Mountains rise above nearly a quarter of the island. This is a greener, gentler landscape. Monasteries nestle in the mountain folds among forests of native cedar. The minerals of this area have been the source of the island's wealth for four thousand years and the slopes weep red copper mining slag.

When alloyed with tin, copper makes the metal that gave its name to the Bronze Age. Copper ingots from Alashiya, as the island was called, are drawn on the walls of Egyptian tombs, and ships wrecked off the southern coast of Turkey were laden with copper ingots from Cyprus, along with trade goods from all over the Eastern Mediterranean. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, emerged from the sea near Paphos on the island's southwest coast. Her consort, Hephaestus, was a metalworker crippled, as were most such workers, by the poisonous fumes of the furnaces and kilns of their trade.

The Phoenicians, Egyptians and Persians all at different times coveted the island. In the first century BCE, Cyprus became a Roman province with the city of Paphos its capital. The wealthy built magnificent buildings on the seashore, with lavish mosaics strewn like carpets on the floors of their villas. Cicero governed here for a time, a peaceful provincial appointment for a reflective senator, although he missed the political turmoil and intrigue of Rome. Later St Paul landed at Paphos to preach his new-fangled Christian religion.

On his way to the Third Crusade, the English king, Richard the Lionheart, conquered the island almost by accident, and sold it a year later to the Knights Templar. They in turn on-sold it to Guy de Lusignan, who had lost his grip on the city of Jerusalem. The Lusignans were Franks, from Poitou in western France, and the family ruled Cyprus for the next three hundred years. It is their medieval imprint that studs the mountain with castles—St Hilarion, Buffavento, Kyrenia, Famagusta. The castles cling like limpets to a foreign landscape.

In 1570 the Turks conquered the island and, like the Lusignans, ruled the island for a further three hundred years. When Tom Dray moved to Cyprus, the island was English and when Turkey entered the First World War on the side of the Germans, the British formally annexed the island.

Five years after first meeting on Cyprus, Tom and Margery's paths again converged, this time in Egypt, where Margery was visiting her elder brother, Jack. Cyprus had ended in professional disappointment for Tom. Denied promotion because he was too young, he had sat Greek and Turkish examinations concurrently—something no one had ever done before—only to be refused once more. He lost his temper with the governor, applied to leave the country and sailed for Egypt, where he tendered his resignation, having found work with the Egyptian Survey.

Tom and Margery became engaged. She was thirty-one,
8
three years older than her fiancé, and they married in August 1907 in the family church at Bisterne. They returned to Egypt, but the following year Margery was back in England awaiting the birth of her first child. A son, Francis, was born on the morning of Wednesday 16 July. Her diary records events: Thursday was a ‘bad day'. The baby was quickly baptised on Friday and the same afternoon he ‘left us'. Margery and Tom buried Francis in the churchyard at Bisterne and she wrote nothing in her diary until eleven days later, when the entry simply reads: ‘Downstairs pm'. She could put no words to her grief.

For the next seven years Margery and Tom Dray lived in Alexandria or Cairo, travelling in the Middle East and to Cyprus, where Tom's father and two of his sisters had retired. When Margery, aged thirty-eight, became pregnant for the second time she returned to England for the confinement.

Eve's birth in August 1914 coincided with the outbreak of war in Europe. Restless, Tom returned to Egypt, where he was seconded to Political Intelligence with the rank of Captain, with both Sir Harry Chauvel and General Allenby later writing appreciatively of his services during the war.
9
Margery remained in England. Having lost one child, Margery took particular care with her second, recording Eve's progress in detail in her diary. Perhaps she had cause for concern: at twelve months Eve would not crawl and she only began to walk unaided at eighteen months. She could be wilful and Margery wrote that she ‘has taken to screaming when she does not get what she wants'.
10

After a little over a year Margery returned to Egypt with Eve and for the next four years the family lived in the fashionable Cairo suburb of Heliopolis in a large two-storey house, the Villa de Martino. Often alone, toddler Eve found companionship with cats and dogs and other animals. When the family moved to Boulaq Dakrur in the countryside outside Cairo, pigeons, rabbits—Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter—and sheep joined the household. There was a cat called Miss Mewkins and a puppy named Pickle. Her father's horse was Trotsky. This period was one of the few times she lived with her father.

At the end of the war, Tom Dray was promoted to Director of Administrative Services in the Survey of Egypt; the King awarded him the Order of the Nile (3rd Class) in 1924.
11
Now in his forties, Tom's career was at its height, but his marriage had sunk to its lowest point. Margery and Eve, aged five, returned to England. Tom visited but was visibly bored and restless, and Margery's mother was a hard wedge between them.
12
In her diary Margery records her sadness. In 1919, on her twelfth wedding anniversary she doubted that Tom would remember the day, and a year later she confessed: ‘it has come to this—that I daren't remind him of our wedding anniversary because I feel he regrets it, and hates and despises me!
'
13
Apart from one year in 1921, Margery and Eve spent every Christmas between 1919 and 1924 in England, without Tom.