Love's Obsession Page 11
Jim arranged to send his Vounous research papers to Sweden, posting ten large packages containing forty quarto box files of pottery catalogue cards and tomb registers, fifty Leica rolls of film, whole and half-plate glass and cut film, over 2000 six-by-nine-inch negatives and 150 large negatives. He retained a further twenty box files to help him finalise the text for publication and promised to send drawings later of the approximately 2000 objects they had excavated.39 Sending material to Sweden was an unusual decision, given that the excavation had been conducted under the auspices of the British School at Athens, but Gjerstad had offered to publish the site and had no qualms about accepting ‘your most generous gift to the Swedish Cyprus Expedition … a very valuable and important contribution to the archive of the Cyprus Collections in Stockholm’.40 At about this time Gjerstad invited Jim to formally join forces with the Swedish Cyprus Expedition project by taking responsibility for the publication of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age period. This volume would complement Jim’s work at Vounous. Jim was flattered and eager to assist.
His friends Jack Hamson and the numismatist Peter Grierson regretted his decision to leave England, but understood it.
It is a decision to the advantage of your son—taking the rational as distinct from the English view of likely events upon the continent of Europe. It may even conduce to your own physical well being … my intelligence tells me that it is wise to remove one’s self from the frontiers of Europe, but I have an irrational belief that it may yet be that this country will ride out the storm again. I note that your compatriots are all agreed to write this country off, and to transport a reasonable proportion of its inhabitants to their wide open spaces … it is certain that your decision to go to Australia is a matter of regret, and loss, to your friends in this country; and may well be loss to yourself also, in many of those imponderables that somehow continue to have such great weight … Well my dear James I wish you and Eleanor, as ever, the very best good fortune, in Australia or elsewhere, drunk or dry.41
The year 1947 was pivotal. Whatever happened, whatever decisions were made with whatever consequences, Cyprus would lie at the centre.
Before sailing for Australia Jim made a final visit to the island. The army arranged his passage. The stopover was ostensibly to inspect the Kumarcilar Khan, the building he believed he had persuaded the Cyprus Government to provide as headquarters for his Australian Cyprus Expedition. He planned to meet Eleanor and Peter a fortnight later in Port Said but theirs would be a long wait.
Now thirty-four, Jim was lean and athletic, having regained the weight stripped from him during four years of incarceration. With a flick of red hair, a square jaw and piercing blue eyes, he still resembled a naughty boy, his cherubic smile the most reliable indicator of impending mischief. He had charisma and charm but also, occasionally, a melancholic cold detachment.
Eve had learned to mask her feelings but not to ignore them. She and Jim had been friends for over a decade. They shared a love of Cyprus and whatever reluctance there was to act on impulse in England, now in Cyprus they both abandoned any reserve. Two weeks grew into three months. They explored places where Jim’s planned Australian Cyprus Expedition might work and immersed themselves in the island and its beauties. They visited Joan at Rizokarpaso, Eve’s old haunt in the Karpas. Near Peter and Elektra Megaw’s cottage they scrambled over the weathered limestone of the Kyrenia Range, looking out to the distant sea, posing for each other. The hesitant expression of Eve’s childhood photos becomes the open, unselfconscious face of a lover. Three months passed quickly. They were committed—to Cyprus, to archaeology, to each other. It was not easy to distinguish these three loves or know which took precedence.
On the morning of his departure for Port Said and ultimately Australia they left Sotira to drive south to the harbour at Limassol. Officious men in uniforms yelled instructions and stamped papers and a proper goodbye was impossible amid the noise and clamour of passengers clutching shapeless bags, and children crying at weary mothers. As she farewelled Jim at the dock Eve must have wondered at the consequences of their affair. But there was nothing for it. There would be no going back. The die was cast.
PART 2
A New World, 1947–62
Chapter 6
Australia, 1947–50
Jim joined Eleanor and Peter at Port Said. Eleanor was not in any doubt about the cause of Jim’s delay. ‘You’ve had a nice quiet affair in Cyprus’, she laughed as Jim helped get their baggage on board and they both sat down beside Peter’s pram.1
The SS Asturias was twenty-two years old and, like Europe itself, battle-weary. Launched in 1925, she had made the voyage from Southampton to South America many times before being converted into an armed merchant cruiser at the start of the war. Torpedoed in the South Atlantic in 1943 and abandoned as a total loss, the British Government bought her in 1946 and gave her a complete refit. She could accommodate nearly fifteen hundred passengers in three classes and over the next five years helped to transform post-war Australia, bringing more than twenty thousand European migrants to a new hemisphere.2
Jim wrote to Eve every few hours, regretting their rushed and unsatisfactory parting, and savouring the three months that preceded it. ‘Have you answered my formal offer of marriage yet?’ he asked.3 ‘Do you want to be my constant companion in all our work as in love?’4 His letters charted the ship’s passage. ‘Off the horn of Africa’, ‘Off the Chagos Islands’, ‘Southern Hemisphere’.
The voyage was tense, full of recriminations and regrets. Jim and Eleanor fought, cried and argued, and finally laughed about it all. Jim recounted the events to Eve:
Things are pretty friendly now, since the real shock has worn off …We wander round the deck at night hand in hand, discussing our futures. Eleanor’s apologised for what she called you, and Peter Hugh will be allowed to stay with us … Now that I’m away from you, I begin to see the pattern of why I love you—your willingness to help me with work; your interest in me personally; your affection; your adoration—may I call it that? your zest for life, your way of managing me without bullying; your patience (you’ll need lots); your excellent, if latent, brain; your dignity and courage; your beauty of feature and figure; your frankness; your enjoyment of sex. I could go on forever.5
Sometimes Peter Hugh distracted them. Jim thought him ‘absolutely adorable. Masses of bright curly hair and an insolent face’,6 although he was ill prepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood.
I’ve had babies in a big way … Last night I had to sleep miserably in a deck chair because one young mother couldn’t face taking her extremely repulsive infant to bed in the cabin. It was thought advisable for her to have a man with her in case of rape or something, so I was deputed to the job … I spent the night looking at your photo, thinking of our future, and drinking P.H’s emergency brandy ration … Anyway you’d better cogitate hard about children, for they do mean giving oneself up entirely and a consequent lack of comradeship.7
In Cyprus, Eve waited patiently and continued working at the Cyprus Museum or volunteering at the Blind School, while madly working to finish Jim’s drawings. Jim was right. For the moment they had only memories and plans.8 She confided in Elektra Megaw, who Jim thought would support her, but was reluctant to mention anything yet to her family.
Jim hoped to arrange a divorce quickly by claiming adultery with an ‘unnamed woman’ and asked Eve to look again for their receipt from a hotel in Nea Salamis which he had mislaid. ‘Can I find it? Can I hell. I remember you giving it to me, but God above knows where it is.’ He even discussed the problem with Eleanor and they sat side by side on their deck chairs laughing at ‘the sheer incompetence of the peccant husband’.9 Though Eleanor hoped this affair was casual, and Jim did not tell her of his plans to bring Eve to Australia, there was to be no going back.
When the ship docked in Melbourne, Jim spent a day visiting his sponsor, Walter Beasley. He was unsure how he would explain away his upcoming divorce and remarriage, giv
en Beasley’s Christian conscience.10 For the moment Beasley seemed happy with his plans and thought Jim’s negotiations with the Cyprus Government for support of his proposed expedition ‘too crafty for words. He reckons I’ve been in the Levant too long to be caught’, he told Eve. They were an odd pair, the old man teetotal, non-smoking and religious, the younger, chain-smoker, already over-fond of drink and without any obvious religious belief.
I left the place a wreck, and threw myself on the padre as soon as I got on board—he produced a bottle of altar wine, which I downed non-stop … The Australian Archaeological Institute is purely Biblical, and a bit of a shambles. Fortunately I am not expected to sort it out … I am not a diplomat.11
The next evening their ship steamed steadily north towards Sydney. Jim stood on deck at sunset leaning toward the blue coastline. It was not just the padre’s wine that left him heady with excitement; it was years since he had been home. He was beginning a new life and he wrote to Eve that he hoped this country would be their ‘land of promise and city of delight’.
Perhaps I am a little excited about getting near home. What a lot of new things you’ll have to learn—new stars, new flowers, new birds, new animals, new scenery, new people. It’s a pity that Westralia is such a barren place, flat and bare. But New South Wales is very different: semi-tropical coast, delicious mountains, big rivers, and plenty of trees, even if there’s no real undergrowth. Those big brown eyes are going to be quite amused.
Sydney will rather amuse you too, it’s such a queer mixture of the ultra-modern and the Victorian. But I think you’ll love our harbour lights. Eve darling, what an adventure we started that night at the Imperial. I wonder where lies journey’s end, or if there is one for us.
We are over the first hurdle, but for heaven’s sake don’t think we are home yet. The more I think about the problem the greater seems the jungle through which I have to cut a track.12
Jim searched for the two shoulders of land that protect Sydney Harbour from view. Cook, the greatest of navigators, had missed it as he sailed north. Flinders, whose grandson Jim had worked for, knew it well, one of the great natural harbours of the world.
Australia in 1947 was not the place Jim had left seven years before. A Labor government had taken the country through the war years and edged it closer to America after the fall of Singapore. While Great Britain remained for many Australians the place they called ‘home’, these ties were loosening. Even so, local papers were full of the planned visit of the Mountbattens and the doings at Ascot, together with advertisements for food hampers to buy for friends and relatives still suffering rationing in Britain. But Australians now realised Britain was a long way away. In 1942 Japanese midget submarines had launched attacks from Sydney Harbour. Both Darwin and Broome were bombed. Jim had suffered four years in a prisoner of war camp in Germany, but compared with the experiences of thousands of Australians in Japanese camps in Thailand and Malaya—Changi, the Burma Railway—many might think his a comparatively easy war.
Jim landed in a city of nearly one-and-a-half million in a country of seven-and-a-half million and with a population set to explode in a few years. Returning soldiers and booming immigration strained services. Papers ran articles railing against housing shortages alongside advertisements for the latest household goods. The tensions between expectations and reality simmered. Jim spoke as a member of the upper class when he told Eve that ‘all the employers curse Australian labour and the new 40 hour week’, but as a patriotic Australian when he added, that ‘to anyone from home it looks as if 40 hours of Aussie labour is worth a damn sight more than 48 of English’.13 There was an optimism borne of peace and the promise of prosperity.
On the other hand, Jim returned to a culturally and socially conservative country. In the same year that Jim returned, many other Australians—writers, artists—were escaping overseas in the hope of finding a more congenial life in societies less stultifying than Australia’s. The White Australia Policy remained unchallenged, Aborigines were not citizens of their own country, pubs closed at 6 pm, chicory essence passed as coffee, equal pay for women was years away. Jim complained that even friends at the Numismatic Society called him ‘Sir’.14 Divorce was rare and shocking and nothing about their situation would be easy. Jim warned Eve: ‘If you think we can twine orange blossom and lace round this marriage, you’d better think again. There’s nothing romantic or pleasant in it—I’ve deserted my wife and baby.’15
But Jim settled easily into Australia. Sydney was bright and gay, he explained to Eve. ‘You’ll begin to see the inter-relation of the environment and the Australian character, why we are quick and hasty and direct, reckless and rather feckless, and why nobody is better than his fellow. You can’t be depressed for too long here, though you might shoot yourself on the spur of the moment’.16
Almost as soon as he landed, Jim set about finagling to get Eve passage to Australia. After years of war, people were on the move all over the world and passenger ships scarce. International shipping was sporadic at best and obtaining passage from Cyprus to Australia would prove difficult. Beasley had paid Jim’s own transfer costs and now Jim persuaded him to pay £250 toward the cost of bringing out his urgently needed ‘technical assistant’. That the staunchly Christian Beasley was manipulated in this way and contributed unwittingly to bringing Jim’s lover to Australia, was unlikely—when discovered—to do Jim any favours. Jim wrote to the Foreign Minister, H.V. Evatt, asking him to cable the Australian Commissioner in Cairo to secure passage for his ‘assistant’. Trendall sensibly made him tone down the letter, but even so it was an extraordinary request.17 Jim’s father, only recently aware of the relationship between Jim and Eve, was ‘astounded’: ‘He thinks I’ll probably be hanged if Evatt ever finds out how he’s been used!’18
Jim gave Eve detailed advice about beginning her life in Australia: ‘Shoes situation here quite good. Stockings are worn in town and by ladies (i.e. graduates) at the Univ. But in the summer you needn’t wear them. Hats as you like.’ Eve should bring sheets and linen, both difficult to find in Australia, and he told her to bring items from Bellapais: ‘5 bath towels, 6 face towels, 4 red blankets, 6 napkins, 1 coloured tablecloth and 4 napkins, 3 large striped Lefkoniko sheets and 8 small Cyprus towels together with 3 small coloured tray cloths.’ Jim suggested they leave buying pyjamas until the price dropped ‘or we go back to Cyprus, when we can have an orgy of spending on that sort of luxury. Buy them for yourself if you need them.’19
Eve was unable to board a ship until December and in the intervening six months they wrote to each other almost every day. For Jim, writing was a way of sorting himself out, of testing ideas, of thinking. He was introspective and bleak, demanding and despairing, argumentative, arrogant, loving and sometimes lost. Eve replied less emotionally and looked forward, not back. She was practical and sensible where he was morose, a dreamer full of dark fantasies.
Within a fortnight of his return to Australia Jim and his father boarded the train for Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains to visit his mother’s grave. The countryside calmed him and reminded him of the Kyrenia Range, but the visit aroused demons: ‘I can’t bear grave visits, and in an icy wind driving mountain mist across the forests all my ghosts trooped out of the vault, all the memories and images of happy times, of high hopes now shattered and broken, of all that I’ve fought for against my family.’20 He collapsed on return to Sydney.
Jim juggled concerns and responsibilities, obligations and ambitions. The final break with Eleanor was painful. He was often unwell and felt physically sick at the thought of losing his son.21 He had no space at the university for his library and he could not find anywhere suitable to live. Trouble was brewing with Beasley, and the Australian Cyprus Expedition looked further and further away. He had abandoned not just Eleanor, but Park Cottage, which he loved. He was homesick for Cyprus and for England.
He dwelt on the past, his failures and loss. ‘I’m feeling awful to-night, as the sun goes and darkness
closes in. I just can’t bear my own company in these empty days and nights, sitting in the ruins of my old life.’22 But he loved this country of his birth. ‘Wait till you’ve smelt burning gum-leaves, for that is the finest aroma I’ve ever met.’23
In the six months of longing to be reunited, Jim and Eve lived on edge, strained by the separation and concerned for their future. They had few doubts about their decision but its cost was steep. In Cyprus Eve waited for a boat to Australia and struggled to make sense of Jim’s demands. His love letters alternated with others full of complicated complaints and endless lists and orders for pots and coins.
Bugger you. Your letters have just come. When I say buy 1–12 I mean 1–12 not 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 18, 23 anyway. You’ve not sent me sketches, and how the hell do I know that this new list of pots is worth £50. We decided to buy on your drawings and you bloody well stick to it. You’ve made me really angry by your lousy unsystematic way of dealing with things …You would cause this bother just when I’m hopelessly busy.24
He always apologised but distance and postal delays exacerbated anxieties. When Jim wrote to say he was ill once again, Eve worried as she tried to imagine him alone and friendless in the alien world he described and which she was soon to enter.
At nine in the morning and a week before Christmas, Jim Stewart strode along Manning Road toward the red brick buildings of Sydney University. Preoccupied with his precarious domestic situation, he bounded up the steps below the three-storey clock tower, scarcely noticing the elaborate turrets that erupted from the tower’s roof. Sydney University was nearing its century and its Tudor Gothic architecture sat solidly out of place amongst the bustle of post-war mercantile Sydney. The buildings formed a square around a grassed quadrangle, itself dissected by cement paths. Jim turned left as he crossed the quadrangle and passed a group of students chatting in the shady stone colonnade. Outside, it was hot as a Cypriot summer.