Droplets of mist attached themselves like burs to Viv’s sleeves as she walked away from St Dunstan’s Hostel for blind servicemen, and diagonally across the park towards the lamplit facade of Cambridge Terrace. All her life she had looked down from her second-storey bedroom to this piece of darkness, and yet the first time she had walked home from St Dunstan’s past sunset, through the clawed shadows of trees, it had felt unknown to a greater degree than anything in Labraunda or Peshawar. Now, just a few weeks later, she barely gave it a thought.
She hadn’t dreamed returning to London would feel so much like freedom. How it changed the character of a city, the landscape of it, to have so many women in places they’d never been seen before — far more than when she had left. Today if a woman archaeologist were to suggest going to Cairo to work on maps no one would laugh. Gertrude Bell had joined Lawrence at the Arab Bureau, and it was whispered that Margaret Hasluck was with Intelligence too. The possibilities for Viv’s life were so overwhelming she decided to resume VAD duties for a short time until she made up her mind about what else to do. It was the news of nursing shortages at St Dunstan’s across the park which led to that decision. It wasn’t a Class A hospital, and it was close enough to home to allow her to avoid hostel living. Convenience, rather than duty, guided her. But from her first day at St Dunstan’s, service — a word which had never carried much weight in her life — revealed itself as privilege. Nothing in her life had ever made her feel more useful than placing a blind man’s hand on Braille and watching his face as the shapes became letters for the first time. And if sometimes the slow pace of a Braille-learner’s progress made her think wistfully of Najeeb, the thought was accompanied by only a dull pain now. He was receding. Even Tahsin Bey was receding. She hadn’t written to him once since arriving in London. What was the point if the letters didn’t get through to him?
A boy bicycled past, singing, Oh we don’t want to lose you but we think you should go. Viv picked up her pace. Mary, soon to leave for nursing duties on the Front, was expected for supper.
When she arrived home, she could hear Mary’s voice, and her father’s, booming out from the parlour, partners in conviction. Viv smiled as she handed her coat to the one-armed footman. Mary and Papa were as united over pacifists as they’d once been divided over suffragettes, though when they suddenly fell silent she knew Mama had delivered a quiet, stinging blow. Nothing was as it had been before, and she thought of the colonial wives in Peshawar — their lives still mired in the nineteenth century — with pity.
She sent the footman into the parlour to say she’d be down in a few minutes, and went up the stairs to change out of her uniform. On her desk, beneath the framed rubbing of Asoka’s Rock Edict, was today’s post. She picked up the two envelopes. The first from Mrs Forbes in Peshawar had a pleasing thickness. She would read it after supper. The second, in an unfamiliar hand, was from Greece.
She stepped out onto her balcony, into the unexpectedly mild evening. Above, the thick bank of clouds reflected the flickering gaslight of streetlamps. The orange glow from streets and clouds was strong enough to read by. Opening the envelope she pulled out a sharp-edged page which gashed her thumb as she withdrew it. Holding her thumb to her mouth, she looked at the seal at the top of the page and frowned. Why would Tahsin Bey’s nephew, Mehmet, be writing to her? And why from Greece?
Vivian Rose Spencer
I have this address from my uncle’s book, and hope it continues to be the correct one. For a long time I’ve avoided writing to you, but there are things which must be said. Last April, Wilhelm sent a telegram informing my uncle of your activities in London. I was with my uncle when he received it. He was insistent that whatever the war may have forced on you, you didn’t come to Labraunda as a spy and that it had been his idea, not yours, for you to join the coastal walk which made you so valuable to Intelligence. I said it was obvious that his feelings for you were strong enough to make manipulation easy. We argued about it, but in the end he made me feel guilty for my ill thoughts about you.
It didn’t occur to my uncle to wonder why Wilhelm had sent a telegram — he didn’t see the urgent method of communication as a warning although we knew already that Wilhelm was with Military Intelligence in Germany. (‘How will archaeologists ever be trusted again’ was my uncle’s only note of complaint about what you had done, and he directed it mostly at Wilhelm.) At first, it didn’t occur to me either. But then I asked if he might have said anything to you which would create trouble if you repeated it in London to the men you were working for.
‘She would never repeat it.’
Those were his words, and they made my heart stop. I thought I was the only one close enough to know his deepest secret, and even I had never heard him express it directly. I merely knew in the way we know unsaid things about people we have loved and revered all our lives. He would not hear anything I tried to say to him about you, about the danger in which he had placed himself.
It is only now, all these months later in my self-imposed exile in Greece, that I have managed to receive confirmation that the Germans intercepted a communication from London which described my uncle as an Armenian sympathiser who could be a useful informant. You were named as the source. Wilhelm found out about this after the Germans relayed the information to the Ottomans. It is possible you already know this, and regard it as just another casualty of war, one suffered by the enemy, but in case you don’t: two days after receiving Wilhelm’s telegram, while walking Alice through the park in accordance with his daily ritual, my uncle was shot dead. There is no doubt in my mind it was because of your betrayal.
Mehmet
Viv lowered the hand holding the letter, the taste of iron on her tongue. After the war, Vivian Rose. His voice in her ear, its accent, its timbre. Her own voice that of a stranger when she cried out into the night.
Later, much later that evening, after her mother finally tiptoed away from her room, believing she was asleep, Viv lay open-eyed in the pitch darkness. Tahsin Bey on the Split Rock of Labraunda watching the sunrise; Tahsin Bey teaching Nergiz’ son bird-calls; Tahsin Bey lighting up a cigarette and telling a story of two thousand years ago as if it were still unfolding; Tahsin Bey removing clinging earth from the eyes of a stone god, his breath combining with Viv’s to allow Zeus to see again; Tahsin Bey stepping close to her, his hand on her waist, one strong forearm holding her close. Tahsin Bey’s body lowered into the earth.