Making It Up (12 page)

On the other side of the room is Professor Sampson's table with the material garnered from the flotation tanks. Alice is not fond of the flotation tanks, but has gamely done her stint when required. You empty bags of spoil into a sieve which is set over a forty-gallon oil drum, and you then run water through this from the hosepipe that has been set up. Despite wearing waders, you get extremely wet, and your hands freeze. The resulting detritus left in the sieve is then taken down to the school, where Professor Sampson will sort through it in search of the emmer wheat, snail shells, and other clues as to diet and environmental conditions in the area back in the first century AD. Snail shells are particularly eloquent, it seems. The whole process is time-consuming, and a source of dissension between Paul Sampson and Mike Chambers. Mike wants to concentrate on stripping as much of the site as possible in the little time that they have. Professor Sampson wants valuable evidence about climate and environment.

 

 

Paul would also like evidence that Chambers sees this dig as a joint venture. The man's attitude seems to be that he is entitled to proceed exactly as he pleases, regardless of Paul's views. He makes it manifestly clear that he has no interest in examination of the wider context of the site. Open trenches right, left, and center, grab as many finds as you possibly can in the time, and that's it, as far as Chambers is concerned. He is apparently impervious to reasoned argument. Sits there with that grin on his face and then says, “Okay, okay—let's just play it by ear, shall we?” And the next day you find he's putting another trench through the rampart, and taking students off the flotation tank.

They could do with a few more hands, the way things are going. Paul regards students as a necessary evil. They are an essential workforce, but they require supervision, take up time, and contribute an unwelcome element of levity and personal interaction. He is careful to keep himself expediently distanced from them, unlike Chambers, who spends half the day backslapping and then holds court in the pub every evening. Paul just about knows their names, after three weeks, and that is quite enough and all that is required.

Time was, Paul was not quite so indifferent to students. Penny was of course a student on his M.A. course when he first met her. But that was a long time ago and irrelevant and in any case he is annoyed with Penny at the moment.

 

 

Alice finds herself cast in the role of confidante. Laura thinks that she may be falling in love with Luke, which creates a problem: she might not after all want to go to Spain with the boyfriend, in which case she need never have come on this dig in order to impress her parents. Alice points out that if she had not come on the dig she would never have met Luke. This elegant complication silences Laura, but only briefly; she then has the idea that perhaps she could go to Spain with Luke. That would kind of straighten things out. What does Alice think?

Alice has no thoughts on the matter because at this moment her trowel reveals a curious-looking metal object. They are working in Trench B, which runs diagonally across part of the site and through the complex of hut circles marked out by postholes. Any out-of-the-ordinary find must be reported, so Alice goes off in search of Mike Chambers, who joins them in the trench and examines the object.

“Well, I know what that is,” says Laura. “It's a nappy pin. You see them exactly the same in Boots.”

“It's a pin all right,” says Mike. “But forget nappies. They would have used this to fix a cloak or other garment. Well done, Alice—that's a nice find.”

They all three contemplate the pin, and Alice notes that Mike is doing his best not to contemplate Laura, who is wearing a tight skimpy top that leaves her with bare shoulders and well-exposed cleavage.

“Okay, girls, carry on,” says Mike, rather briskly. He leaves them, and presently they hear him joshing Luke, over in the other trench. He is calling Luke a wimp for using a kneeler. There is a tacit code of practice on the dig that while it is all right for girls to use kneelers, any male definitely loses face by so doing. Consequently, all the boys have sore knees, and Mike himself is no doubt heading for a major arthritis problem in the fullness of time. Never mind, honor is at stake.

Laura listens to Mike and rolls her eyes. She says, “Really, he is a bit much, isn't he? Luke calls him Asterix the Gaul.” She yawns. “I couldn't sleep last night. That's a symptom, isn't it?”

Laura is not the only one to confide in Alice. Eva is not exercised about love or Spanish holidays, but she is getting these headaches, and also she is afraid that the hard bed in the school is affecting a problem she has with her back. Plus, she thinks that the principal of her college, on whom she depends for a good reference in support of her grant application, does not like her. It seems to Alice that possibly Eva is not cut out for a life in the front line of archaeology, but she refrains from saying so. People do what they are going to do.

Or do they? When Alice was ten she was going to be a vet. At sixteen it was social work, and at eighteen she fancied something in Africa with Oxfam, and now she hasn't got the faintest idea what she wants to do. The future—given that there is one—seems like some impenetrable fog into which you are required to plunge, blindly forging ahead in some direction that leads goodness knows where. Alice has always been a careful person, and the awful randomness of this arrangement offends her. She rather envies those who are carelessly unconcerned, like Laura, who might try to get into the BBC, or publishing, and actually would like to get married and have children but of course you can't go round saying that in this day and age. Or June, who started out teaching in a comprehensive school and was seduced into archaeology by a chance visit to a local dig, which spurred her out of teaching and into a different life. “Thank heaven,” says June. “If I hadn't happened to drop by that site and got totally hooked I'd probably still be battling with fourteen-year-olds. Pure luck.”

 

 

June does believe in luck. Or rather, she can't see that anything much else directs what happens to you. Luck, and hard graft. June is a worker, always has been. She can't abide skivers and slackers, and you get a few of those on most digs, though not too much on this one. This is a funny sort of dig. Each one has its individual climate, and the weather on this is particularly unpredictable, and that is not just the rain. Mike and the Prof are at loggerheads more often than not. The Prof and his wife don't speak to each other. A couple of the kids are very obviously having it off—not that that's either here or there, but it does rather thicken the atmosphere.

And Mike gets on her nerves, which is a distraction. June is here to work, not to be riled by some testosterone-driven director. Okay, he's a good archaeologist, and actually June prefers his methodology to that of the Prof, with his environmental obsessions, but when it comes to people management, Mike is abysmal.

June simply wants to dig. She loves it. She gets all her thrills from digging: the point when you can suddenly make sense of what you're looking at, the moment your trowel comes up against something intriguing. All she ever wants to do is to dig. She doesn't want a posh job, or any more money than just enough to live on. She just wants to go on as she is now, hiring herself out month by month, year by year, into a future which she never considers. What's the point? It will arrive anyway, bringing with it whatever the fates have laid up for you.

 

 

I'm going to make it rule number one on any bloody dig of mine in future that female personnel cover up. They can wear burkas. No tits on view, no bums, no flesh. And anyone suspected of copulation will be dealt with accordingly. Fuck the permissive society.

Mike means this, and would like to blaze away along these lines right out loud, though he has more sense of self-preservation than to do so. He has a strong streak of old-fashioned working-class Puritanism which is as offended by the spirit of the times as another part of him is gratified by the license that allows sexual indulgence on all fronts. This discord makes for some confused reactions from time to time.

There is an element of subversion about this dig, no question. Though Mike cannot quite nail what it is; just a feeling that things, or people, could go off the rails in some way. And it is only a couple of days till the grand panjandrum shows up for this state visit, which is seen as a high compliment and has Sampson running round like a scalded cat. Mike himself has been mildly cynical in public about Sir John Causley's impending arrival, pointing out that the old boy hasn't had a major excavation to his name for decades, much of his work is now quite outdated, and this is just a photo opportunity. There has been talk of the local newspaper covering the occasion. Privately, Mike is rather looking forward to making himself known to Causley, who remains an influential figure, and he knows that a good spread in the local rag, with some nice shots of the site, would be advantageous all round, even if it does bring a few gawpers in its wake.

 

 

Penny Sampson has gone. Just like that. Yesterday she was here, and today she isn't. Nobody seems to know if she's coming back or not. June has taken over her area.

Alice has already noticed the way in which, on the dig, news hops from person to person, changing shape in the process. In this instance, Penny Sampson has gone to visit a sick mother, it is said. No, she is ill herself—having a breakdown. She'll be back at the end of the week. No, she won't.

Paul puts the envelope from his wife under a pile of shirts in the top drawer of the chest. He would not wish anyone to see this, under any circumstances. For some reason, it is more insulting and exasperating to have your wife disappear to join up with a so-called women's group than if she had run off with a lover.

 

 

“Sick mother, my foot. She's walked out on him,” Mike tells June, who shrugs, and refuses to comment. None of his business, nor hers.

The dig settles to Penny Sampson's absence. It has its own momentum, and soon it is as though she had never been. Part of an infant's cranium is found in one of the pits; Mike's new rampart trench is revealing evidence of a defensive structure; Luke and Laura are caught by Mike snogging behind the tents and there are words. Mike tells them to bloody well keep that sort of activity off the site; Luke laughs and says, “Will do, squire.” Later, Laura tells Alice that it was
so
embarrassing, but actually quite funny too.

Alice is aware of a kind of latent anarchy in the air. People are edgy. Professor Sampson has been tight-lipped and acerbic since his wife's departure; he says little to anyone unless he must. Eva had a migraine and spent an entire day lying on her bed at the school. Two German students who were supposed to be joining them have sent a telegram to say that they cannot do so after all; Mike is saying that they are now seriously shorthanded and everyone is going to have to pull their finger out. And the weather is not helping. There have been twenty-four hours of continuous rain; the trenches are now quagmires and the entire site is sopping wet. The time when they were rained off was spent washing and sorting shards and doing other housekeeping chores, which meant that everyone was cheek by jowl in the tents. Mike made sure that Luke and Laura were kept as far apart as possible; in consequence they spent all day casting smoldering glances across the trestle tables. Professor Sampson stood staring morosely at the water-logged site.

Alice cleans shards with a toothbrush. The impression given by the assembled harvest of the dig is that the ancient occupants of the hill were people who spent their time breaking crockery and losing small objects. This fits nicely with the theory of processual archaeology, she realizes, because of course this stuff has been shunted into the twentieth century and has lost all contact with its original existence. Those bits and pieces are now teasing references to their context back then. Alice marks a shard—CBH '73—thus placing it even more firmly in this day and age, and listens to the rain hammering on the roof of the tent. Chucking down; raining stair-rods. Presumably the Celts had their own colloquialisms for bad weather. She thinks about the language that should hang in the air up here, centuries of it, the reverberations of a million exchanges about love and war, birth and death, and what to have for supper. Instead of which all that is left is this entirely tangible array of broken rubbish.

A wet day in the Iron Age would have had everyone cooped up, getting on each other's nerves, just like today. Alice is trying to avoid Guy Lambert, as politely as possible. It is not that she has anything against him; he is unassuming, rather reserved, a pale, weedy young man in glasses, with a slight stammer—but it is becoming apparent that he is taken with her. Alice is a bit flattered, but she really doesn't fancy him in the very least, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise, so she has to be a little discouraging while not conspicuously unfriendly, which is quite difficult under today's cramped circumstances. He keeps coming over to her table, ostensibly to take a look at her trays.

That evening, Mike Chambers and Paul Sampson have another argument. The dispute begins as they are coming off the hill and escalates later in the school, where it is impossible to ignore what is going on, with the pair of them locked in not entirely sotto voce disagreement in a corner of the big classroom, surrounded by the spoils of the dig—the domestic bric-a-brac, the fragmented weaponry, the crucial snail shells and grains of emmer wheat. People tiptoe around them, pretending not to notice, and eventually retreat to the pub. There, Peter and Brian play darts with the local regulars, Laura and Luke hold hands in a corner of the saloon bar, Alice and Eva do
The Times
crossword. Later, Mike comes in, drinks malt whiskeys and engages in raucous repartee with the landlord. Paul Sampson is not seen.