7.
Somerville spent an extra day in Constantinople talking to colleagues at the Imperial Museum and examining some Hittite stamp seals recently discovered at Boğazköy in Anatolia, site of the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusas. There were also several sculptured reliefs from the King’s Gate that he had not seen before.
It was late when he arrived back; his wife was already in bed and he did not want to disturb her. The following morning, before breakfast, was the first opportunity for them to talk together. Edith was still in her dressing gown. She had had tea served to her, but she was slow to wake in the mornings and still had the slightly bemused, sleepy-eyed look that he had always found voluptuous and touching at the same time.
“Well, they have given me assurances of help,” he said. “I think I succeeded in convincing them of the importance of what we are doing here. I went into some detail about these recent finds, which point toward a substantial Assyrian presence.”
“Them? Who were the others?”
“A man introduced to me as Baron Rampling was also there. In fact it was at his house that we met. He was very affable and hospitable.”
“Rampling? The shipowner? What on earth was he doing there?” Surprise had taken the sleep from her eyes. “You didn’t recognize him, you didn’t know who he was?”
“No, why should I?”
It was now, with these words of his wife’s, that the first misgivings came to him. The Ambassador, he now recalled, had said very little about Rampling in the course of their chat afterward, only that he was wealthy and had influence in high circles. The warmth of his reception, the cordiality of his old school friend, the genial attention paid to him by the obviously powerful man who was his host… And then the matter was of such overwhelming importance to him it had seemed natural that even a grand and titled personage should be prepared to help, should lend his attention to such a threat, such an injustice. Now this cold breath, where warmth should have been. It is you, he thought, looking at his wife’s face. You take my faith away. Something close to hatred came into his heart for a moment, then was lost, merged in his doubt. “A beautiful house,” he said. “One of those old wooden houses on the Bosporus, looking straight out across the water.” He remembered how the light had grown stronger as he advanced, like an earnest of success.
“The gossip columns were full of his doings at one time,” she said. John never read these things anyway, she knew that. “Daddy once acted for him, something to do with export permits. Said he is an absolute so-and-so, do anybody down that got in his way.” Her adored father, after a highly successful career as a barrister, had recently been appointed a High Court judge. “I just can’t imagine why a man like that should take an interest in archaeology,” she said.
“He struck me as a fair-minded man. Very reasonable. We did a sort of deal.”
He told her then of the agreement they had made, a quid pro quo really, he explained: the geologist, this dynamic American, to be given a cover for his activities, and the full weight of the Foreign Office, supported by the influence of Lord Rampling, to be brought to bear on the railway company. “Naturally,” he said, “in this milieu of power politics, you have to give something if you want to get something, that is the way these things are conducted.”
A reply rose to Edith’s lips, caustic in nature, as she saw the look of worldly sagacity that had appeared on her husband’s face, but she repressed it; there was really no point. “Well,” she said in flat tones, “we shall have to hope for the best then, shan’t we?”
And that was exactly it, she thought a little later as she dressed. John is the one who is doing the hoping, they have already got what they wanted, they will get this American here, who sounds absolutely dreadful, and we will have to put up with him at mealtimes and see him every day for goodness knows how long. This was all it had come to, the exaltation of the parting. A fire soon doused. If only there had been nothing required in exchange, if Rampling had been there for John’s sake, instead of his own. Then he would have cut a dignified figure, whether or not they did anything about it. She herself did not care much about the railway, whether it went here or there. She had never understood how or why her husband had so convinced himself that the line would go bang smack into Tell Erdek. As far as she could see, there wasn’t much to lose; John could go and dig somewhere else. She hadn’t much in the way of historical imagination, and the finds they had made so far hadn’t impressed her greatly; a bit of ivory, a fragment of stone, a few scratches on a clay tablet, a stump of a wall—it couldn’t be thought to add up to anything very exciting. No, what mattered was the enterprise itself, the spirit of it, the going for what you wanted, the not being daunted. Again the thought came to her, unwelcome, painful even, but not to be held off: John was pathetic; he lacked what Daddy would have called a firm grip. That serious, slightly frowning air he had assumed, the man of the world pronouncing on power politics when he was really such a simpleton. She shouldn’t have married him; she had been taken in by that early boldness of his, that visionary quality, giving up everything to follow the dream. He had not lived up to it; it was as though he had cheated her, broken the contract. She had seen Rampling’s picture in the newspaper sometimes, elegant and portly, a big-nosed, bushy-eyebrowed, commanding face. Something predatory, almost savage, in the lines of the mouth. A brute of a man, Daddy had said. But someone who knew what he was doing, who went for what he wanted, who wouldn’t have the wool pulled over his eyes.
The morning, she felt, had begun badly, and it was to continue in the same way. She and Patricia were still working to fit together the pieces of Seljuk pottery that had been found in promising quantity and quite close together, instead of in the usual scattering. She had reached a point in the process that she always rather enjoyed; some curved pieces from the neck of a jar were laid out before her on cardboard, and with the aid of rubber gloves and a small sponge on a stick she was applying a weak solution of hydrochloride acid to the surfaces. She was watching with the usual pleasure the melting away of the encrusted dirt, the magical emergence of the softly glowing green and blue glazes, when Patricia, sitting opposite to her at the table, said with characteristic abruptness, “I’ve decided what I would like to do when we go back home.”
Well, Edith thought, that’s a step in the right direction. That is, if one had to have a career; she herself had never felt the need for one other than that of support and companion to a man of purpose. But Patricia’s restless wish for one, and her uncertainty about the choice, had cast a sort of drama over the business that irked Edith because it seemed so spurious.
“Oh, yes, what is it?” she said.
“I am going to work for the Women’s Social and Political Union.”
Edith stared, completely taken aback. Whatever she had been expecting, it was not this, the militant wing of the suffragette movement. She felt a gathering sense of outrage. It couldn’t be a sudden decision, not a thing like that. The girl had kept quiet about her sympathies—a treacherous silence, it seemed to Edith now. “What,” she said, “that appalling Pankhurst woman?”
Patricia laid down the piece she was holding, placing it very carefully on the table. “Mrs. Pankhurst is a very brave and dedicated woman,” she said, in a voice that had the steadiness of conscious control.
“But how can they possibly think blowing up post offices and setting fire to theaters and doing wanton damage to private property can serve any purpose?”