Love's Obsession (27 page)

Eve returned to Wentworth Falls and a new house. Peter Stewart had turned twenty-one and assumed ownership of Mount Pleasant. Derek and Sonja moved into Lymdale, which had been Jim's mother's house. No one who knew Eve was entirely sure how they had managed to pay for the house, but it was widely believed that she bankrolled the family.

For decades Jim Stewart had believed there was a need for an international research facility on Cyprus and when Eve had inherited Tjiklos in 1961 this seemed to offer a solution.

Now Eve revived the idea and wrote to friends and colleagues seeking support. Confidentially she told Megaw of her plans.
59
A planning committee included Basil Hennessy, now working in Armidale at the University of New England. Basil discussed the idea with Vassos when in Cyprus in 1972; a brochure was prepared and the
Australian Women's Weekly
ran an article.
60
Eve fussed over the formalities of meetings and constitutions and wrote duplicate letters seeking support to everyone she could think of. She worried over names and abbreviations—SARI, NEAF, SPADE. She expected the proposed foundation would play multiple roles: it would pay for the publication of Jim's work; it would provide a centre on Cyprus for visiting scholars; and it would support student research. She saw Derek and Sonja Howlett as being permanent staff for the centre on Cyprus, although not everyone agreed with this proposition.

From Cyprus, Judith Stylianou advised Eve to obtain official support. In the middle of 1974, Basil—now back at Sydney University—reported on a meeting with the Australian Government in Canberra.

The upshot of it all was that I should be called before the Committee early in July to put our case and, hopefully, the Special Ministry of State will then contact the Department of External Affairs to ask them to make enquiries of the Government of Cyprus. They point out that this would not mean an immediate financial commitment but that if they were prepared to go this far that we could rest assured that we will also get financial assistance when the climate was right.
61

Less than a month later on 15 July 1974, right-wing members of the Cyprus National Guard, supported by the military Junta in Athens, deposed Archbishop Makarios in a military coup, claiming that Markarios was a Communist and hostile to
enosis
. On 20 July 1974 the Turkish Army invaded from the north and bombed Kyrenia. British residents of northern Cyprus were evacuated by ship. They were advised to meet at a nominated site and those who were unable to make the rendezvous were told to proceed to any of the open beaches along the northern coast, taking sheets and blankets with which to spell out ‘UK' on the sand.
62
When a final ceasefire was negotiated, the Turks held forty per cent of the island. This 1974 ceasefire line—today a messy line of rusting barbed wire and drums of cement—came to be known as the Green Line. The only country to recognise the Turkish state of Northern Cyprus is Turkey.

Few people at the time believed partition would last. Politically naive, Eve wrote to the Turkish consulate in Australia in February 1975 to investigate their possible support for a research centre at Tjiklos, now under Turkish military occupation. Gossip spread in the small archaeological community and Hector Catling, by now Director of the British School at Athens, wrote to Eve pointing out that, even if the rumour of her gifting Tjiklos to the Turks was untrue, ‘the rumour, as long as it goes unchecked, can only do a great deal of harm to your position vis-à-vis the Government of Cyprus and the Department of Antiquities, and, I fear, to the generality of Australian archaeologists in Cyprus and Greece'.
63
Basil explained to Eve that United Nations international law forbade archaeological work in military occupied areas. A reply from the Turkish authorities is annotated in Eve's handwriting, ‘No further action taken'.
64

By 1976 Eve had accepted defeat. Lymdale had been sold, Derek and Sonja returned to England, and she realised that, for the moment, Tjiklos was lost. A year later, towards the end of winter, she planted an apricot tree in the front yard of her house on Armstrong Street. Like the mulberries, this would make good jam, she thought, as she grabbed a shovel from the back landing. She took two objects whose meaning only she understood—Jim's ‘Pengy' and her own ‘heirless puppy'—and pushed them into the damp soil at the base of the hole. Like a foundation deposit, she thought, amulets to protect against harm. Neatly she recorded the event in her daily diary.
65

Chapter 12
Wentworth Falls, 1990

Dower House was a grand name for the six-roomed weatherboard cottage at the edge of the Blue Mountains. The name itself contributed to the sense of worlds juxtaposed and misaligned.

Inside the cottage a miscellany of clutter struggled for space: round-backed cedar dining chairs, a pine kitchen table, antique maps of Cyprus on horizontal weatherboard walls alongside china plates bearing scenes of Australian wildlife. In the sitting room, embroidered cushions and curtains shared space with ancient pottery and faded postcards of Kyrenia. Sketches of donkeys and koalas took pride of place along the mantelpiece. Three grey filing cabinets lined one wall, together with metal catalogue files, wooden boxes of photographic slides and a wooden cabinet with shallow drawers. An exquisite walnut veneer secretariat and a plain cedar bookcase were shoved together and cardboard boxes of books, files and loose sheets of paper spilled onto the fraying Persian carpet. Books, their spines soft from constant use, lay on every surface. A heavy sea trunk squatted beside the back door; another beside the laundry tub stood on green linoleum, its feet inlaid with ivory and lacy wooden fretwork. An Early Bronze Age pot in the bathroom sat oddly beside the tortoiseshell hairbrush in its special bag. Over everything, a patina of dust. In each object a story, a layer in the woman's life. The stratigraphy of any life is complex. Only careful excavation can expose those stories, but it is a limited sort of truth.

Few people knew this woman. Most residents of Wentworth Falls, if they thought at all about the old lady who lived alone on Armstrong Street, imagined a genteel background, though her battered parka and trousers, baggy at the knees, had seen better days. Her English accent was proper, almost prim, and her answers to questions precise. She seldom lost her temper but didn't suffer fools. Although the interior of her house seemed chaotic, she knew precisely where everything was and could tell each object's story. Visiting tradesmen thought her kind but eccentric and although she never locked her door, few people crossed her threshold.

Scarcely five feet tall, hair combed back from her face, Eve's eyes lit up at the sight of animals. She knew the names of all the birds that inhabited the gullies in the bush along the cliff's edge: noisy butcherbirds and small busy pardalotes, the red flash of a crimson rosella as it streaked across the tree line. Practical and deft, she could kill and pluck a turkey and once stitched up a mauled bird using baling twine and a hook used to sew hessian bags of grain. Later, when the bird was killed and trussed, no evidence of stitching or wound remained.
1
She would like to have been a vet and nothing made her angrier than cruelty to animals.

Eve finally had to deal with the immense body of work that had so consumed Jim's life, his ‘Corpus of Cypriot Antiquities'. Dozens of ring-bound binders confronted her, each containing details of pottery types collected over decades and endlessly reworked.

Paul Åström had offered to publish the corpus, suggesting at first that xerox copies might be sufficient, but neither Eve nor Basil thought this acceptable.
2
Eve decided to pay for photos and drawings from her ‘research' funds and enlisted Paul's help to write to museum directors who would be more likely to take notice of a professor than ‘an unknown female'.
3
There were so many references to check and she had to collect photos and drawings from museums around the world.

‘You may have heard that I am finalising my husband's Corpus of Cypriot antiquities', Eve wrote repeatedly to curators around the world. ‘All the types are listed in S.C.E., IV, 1A,
4
and most are illustrated there, but they are not described because Jim intended to bring out the Corpus as soon as S.C.E. was published—as it turned out, he did not even live to see the latter in print. So people must find a large part of S.C.E. unintelligible … I apologise for giving you so much trouble',
5
she always signed off. Each letter took her to a past she remembered vividly.

When she wrote to Claude Schaeffer she was back in Paris in 1959, waiting for Jim and Robert Merrillees to finish work in the hotel room. Correspondence with Dr Chehab took her to Beirut and her first visit to family there as a child in 1926. She knew little of the recent civil war in Lebanon but hoped that his beautiful museum had avoided destruction.
6
The Royal Ontario Museum had Cypriot pots in their Lady Loch collection. She had only met Lady Loch once, she wrote, but remembered her charming house and garden in Kyrenia.
7
She apologised to the curator of the Brussels Museum for not writing in French. ‘Forty years ago I would not have hesitated … but now I am out of practice although I can still read it easily.
'
8

The curator at the Manchester Museum wrote to say that Jim had taught his wife at Sydney University, the curator from the Fitzwilliam Museum knew Jim's Cambridge tutor at Trinity Hall, Mary Cra'ster at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was led to study archaeology after a visit to Jim and Eleanor in Bellapais as a child. Eve remembered Mary as a child when she had visited Nicosia to take part in a mounted paper chase on her pony.

You probably knew my aunt Ada who, with a friend, started the Kyrenia hospital. She went on living in Kyrenia after she retired from nursing. And I'm sure you knew my father. He was building a house at Eski Bakca, next to Mrs Houston, about a mile to the west of your grandfather's house. After Mr Routledge died, my father sold Eski and went to live on Tjiklos.
9

While waiting for photos and permissions for the corpus publication, Eve delved into Jim's long-neglected manuscript on the Lusignan coinage. Jim had worked on the manuscript on and off for many years and when he died Eve sent it to Christopher Blunt, who took it on holiday. His rereading confirmed that it must be published but he could see why Jim had not been entirely satisfied with the manuscript ‘as it now stands'. He suggested various changes to the text, but they would all involve a lot of work. She was not qualified to do it,
10
but after many years, the Cypriot numismatist Andreas Pitsillides offered to help and she started to tidy up the document, teaching herself the complex genealogies of the Medieval Lusignan family.
11

In 1978 Eve paid a ‘flying visit to Cyprus'.
12
Before leaving she wrote to Basil. She would fly out on 16 April and return a little over a month later. She wanted to make sure that, even though she was fit and healthy at sixty-four, if she did not return, Basil would know where things were and warned him that ‘clearing up here will be a helluva job'. Although neighbours and Laila Haglund, the latter now living in Sydney, could deal with some things, she was afraid that all the archaeological material ‘would be dumped on your head'.
13
Palealona and Lapatsa were reasonably straightforward but she was afraid that under cartons of sherds there might be more things. The main problem, of course, would be the corpus. Few people other than Eve would understand the complex series of letters and numbers (in superscript and subscript) that Jim had used to try to make sense of Cypriot pottery.

The purpose of the 1978 visit was twofold. She would work on pots in the Cyprus Museum and try to find out what was happening with Tjiklos. She stayed in Nicosia, paying expenses through what she called the Stewart Archaeological Research Trust, a financial fiction that she employed to separate her money and compartmentalise expenses.

I got a wonderful welcome from all my old friends and was so happy to be back in spite of the sadness of the situation. Two barbed wire fences stretch across the island from East to West; mainland Turkish soldiers are ensconced on the North, Greeks on the South, with U.N. forces between them. Virtually all the Greek Cypriots have been turned out of the North, often at a moment's notice, with only the clothes they stood up in. Turkish Cypriots from the South were sent north, but there are far fewer of them so, in the Kyrenia district, there are several empty villages while many people in the South are still living in tents in refugee camps … With some difficulty I got a permit from the Turkish military authorities to stay with English friends in Kyrenia, but I was not allowed to visit Tjiklos, which is occupied by soldiers. There is an amazing difference between the two sides. The North is a sleepy Turkish province, the South is booming; factories, high-rise blocks of flats and hotels to cope with the increasing influx of tourists, are springing up everywhere. The cost of living has shot up, but so have wages; formerly all the Museum Attendants came to work by bicycle, now each has a car. Solar-heated water for houses is the rule rather than the exception.

I could go on forever about my beloved Cyprus …
14

She organised a party for Tryphon, which she paid for herself, but the room heater she bought for him was paid—as Jim would have expected—out of the Research Trust. Like Jim she kept detailed lists of expenses. Tips, beer, matches and always cigarettes. Tryphon gave her two almonds, and back in Wentworth Falls, she planted them in pots and waited. In a southern hemisphere summer they germinated and when they were strong enough she planted them in her back garden, where they would remind her of Tryphon's smile and his rough hands digging through the limey soil to pull up a small cup with the pattern of Kamares ware.

She returned again briefly in 1981, again to work in the museum. She spent two nights with friends in Kyrenia, but was unable to visit Tjiklos. Andreas Pitsillides remembered her visit fondly. She met an old friend from England but was anxious to return to her dog, Tammy, in Australia. When she left, Andreas felt he had lost a member of his family and he worried when he read of bushfires in Australia later in the year.
15

A year after this visit, she wrote to Ino Nicolaou at the Cyprus Museum, wondering why the international money order she had sent had not been cashed. She had written to Vassos, but after many months she still had received no answer. ‘Is he ill again?' she asked Ino. ‘I am well,' she added, ‘and have plenty to keep me occupied: finishing Jim's work, looking after my garden and, recently, making blackberry jam'. She wrote later asking for photographs but some of the pots she wanted photographed could not be found. ‘It is unfortunate,' she replied, ‘because each pot is the only example of its particular type'—proof, if any were needed, of the tendency of the corpus to split pottery types into smaller and narrower categories.

After completing work on Jim's history of the Lusignan coinage she returned to the Bronze Age, where she felt more at ease.
16
It was such a pity that so many of the pots she wanted drawn could no longer be found in the Cyprus Museum.
17
‘I can't believe that I'm nearly 70', she told her friend there, Elias Markou. ‘I feel 20 years younger.' She was happy to hear Elias's news—he had been working with Paul Åström in Greece and visiting grandchildren. It was summer for Elias, but a bitterly cold winter in Wentworth Falls. They exchanged Christmas cards. Byzantine icons and scenes of the Cypriot countryside for rural scenes of animals in the Australian bush.

Not all her correspondence was cordial. Eve lost patience with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She was astonished to discover that their costs for photographs ranged between $70 and $100 and she certainly could not afford to send them two copies of the final publication. Although the three pots in the museum were the ‘only recorded examples of their respective types', she would not now be able to illustrate them.
18

After Mary Cra'ster retired, Eve's letters to the Cambridge University Museum of Art and Archaeology went unanswered.

Where are my photographs? It is over a month since you wrote to tell me that you had given the pots to your photographer—so where are the photographs?

This is URGENT …

My eyesight is failing; I must get the final volumes of the Corpus published while I can still see what I am doing.

It is no use saying ‘hand the work on to someone else'. There is only one man still alive who could read my husband's notes, and he has his own work to finish and publish.

I will wait one more week. After that, if the photos have not arrived, I will have to put in the Corpus: ‘Illustrations not obtainable from CUMAA'.
19

Few people were prepared to give as good as they got. Eve demanded photos and drawings of material at the Nicholson Museum. Jim's successor at Sydney University was Basil and Eve wrote to him in annoyance. Was she obliged to include an explanation in the corpus, ‘No illustrations available of the following types because Prof. J.B.H., of Sydney University, is sitting on the drawings of pots from our excavations'.
20
Basil replied, equally irritated: ‘I have received your ill-mannered letter and the immediate reaction is to tell you to go to hell but I presume that won't save time.' As usual, he said, Eve thought that Jim and her work formed the centre of the universe, when in fact Basil had obligations to the university, his students and his own research. Any offers of help with Jim's material were made simply for ‘old times sake' and she should learn to be less demanding and more polite.
21

Over the years Eve tinkered with the text of the corpus, adding material, correcting mistakes, replacing terms that were now outmoded. Gradually the manuscript became as much hers as Jim's. By now she could confidently assert that what Jim had begun was in fact a ‘typology', that it would never—could never—be a ‘corpus' in the way that Trendall and others had produced scholarly catalogues of black figure ware or other decorative arts held in museums around the world. These Cypriot artefacts continued to be unearthed and she could see no end to it. Really, this was a reference guide—a list of types. An attempt to bring order. But by now she knew that the world was a messy place. Attempts to pin it down, like a butterfly in a collection, were futile.