Treasures of Time (16 page)

‘There you all are,’ said Laura. ‘At last. Kate darling there’s just time for you to pop up and change, I can’t think you’ll feel comfy like that.’

‘I’ll be all right, Ma, thanks.’

‘What a very dashing shirt, Tom. You’re happy as you are too, are you? Well, come and meet people, then.’

Old and young and mid-way, thought Nellie, watchful from the fireplace. A funny mixture, by and large. Interesting, though perhaps not quite in the way Laura thinks. Paul Summers has aged a lot. The television man looks in need of fresh air. The Hamiltons have so perfected the art of self-preservation they appear to be embalmed: those pink and white faces, that neatly waved grey hair. Kate is off her guard and must beware. Tom is a very rapid consumer of gin and tonic. This friend who is something in the National Trust I do not think I care for.

Laura thought, of course people like Tom and Tony thing may turn out to be someone in the end, you never know, one forgets they have hardly even begun. Once, James Hamilton wasn’t anyone in particular. Or John Barclay. She patted the sofa beside her and said, ‘John, do come and sit here and tell me all about your book, when is it coming out?’ I have always rather liked queers, she thought, there is something about the way they look at you: cosy and a bit suggestive too. Paul has got fat; he is quite high up now, Nellie says; I used to find him rather sticky, in the old days.

Does a man like this well-fed well-barbered well-spoken civil servant, Tom wondered, does he end up thus because he has so chosen and to that purpose dexterously steered his life, or has he become like that because of what has happened to him? I never saw a man with such clean finger nails. And the bloke who goes round country houses making lists of Grinling Gibbons fireplaces, does he wear a spotted bow tie and suggest a slight but well-controlled touch of the Augustus Johns by inclination or association? Do we choose, or are we chosen? I should rather like to know, being at the point of one or the other. At least Laura seems to be being free with the drink tonight, anyway.

Tony, leaning confidingly towards Paul Summers, talked of the programme on Hugh Paxton. Presently, diaries were brought out, an arrangement pencilled in.

Laura led them through to dinner, disposed them round the table.

‘Tell me,’ said James Hamilton to Tom, ‘how is Oxford?’

‘What you will have to watch out for,’ Paul Summers was telling Kate, ‘is getting trapped in the museum treadmill. Keep an eye out for other openings.’

‘… always marginally prefer Wilton,’ said Barbara Hamilton, ‘though Stourhead is unforgettable.’

‘Of course I dine in All Souls once or twice a year.’

‘… the Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments.’

‘… know the Pagets rather well, at Hornby Castle.’

Once, Nellie thought, I ate a meal at this table, time out of mind ago, and my younger sister Laura sat over there, with her back to the window, looking, I thought, a bit bored because Hugh and I were talking shop, on and off. She came, I think, because she was at a loose end and it was a nice day and she was curious, perhaps. She called Hugh Mr Paxton and tried to ask intelligent questions about the dig. And in the middle of saying something I saw his eyes on her, and how they were, and all of a sudden the day wasn’t so nice after all. It had gone cold. Time out of mind ago, that was. Or should be.

That mark on the dresser, Kate thought, that little gash you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t know about it, is where once Ma slammed down a big flowery jug and it broke. They had been shouting at each other; he stood over there by the window and she stood there by the dresser and I watched from the hall, where they didn’t know I was. ‘… only doing what you do yourself, Laura,’ he said. ‘I know, you know. I always have.’ I swung on the bannister, watching; they were like people in a pretend thing, I thought, a cinema or the pantomime. ‘Know, you know,’ I hummed to myself. ‘Know, you know. Doing what you do. Know you do.’ And Ma’s face was all red and angry and she banged the jug down and it broke into great big flowery pieces.

People were having quite a lot to drink. Some people. Tom was filling up his glass and saying that no, he didn’t in fact dine much in All Souls. He had had lunch in St Peter’s last year, he offered helpfully, in the Buttery. James Hamilton had turned now to Laura and was wondering what quirk of fate it was that led one so often to make the right, fortunate decision – talking to Tom here about Oxford reminds me that it was simply my housemaster having a brother at Wadham that took me there rather than elsewhere, for which thanks be, because there was Barbara, the Dean’s pretty daughter (he raised his glass to Barbara, who raised hers prettily back) and…

‘Oh,’ said Laura, ‘I think one is always making the wrong decisions. I could have gone to art college, but I didn’t.’

‘Do you think you’d be different, Ma?’

‘Goodness, I don’t know.’

‘Of course,’ said Tony, ‘choices are only random up to a point, aren’t they? Shall I do this or shall I do that. Most of them get thrust on us by social circumstance, or economic.’

‘You young,’ said Barbara, ‘didn’t have the war, of course, and all that that implied.’

‘Quite. But I was thinking less of being shaped by history than vaguer sort of processes like what is available at a particular time, by way of education or jobs or simply convention, what sort of things your sort of person does. Which is history of a kind, I suppose.’

‘Nowadays,’ said Laura, ‘as far as I can see you get all sorts of people doing all sorts of things.’

‘Confusing, isn’t it?’ said Tom. He met Laura’s blue stare across a vase of what looked to him like carefully-arranged weeds and bent his head hastily to his plate again.

James Hamilton suggested that the problem posed by a more fluid society might be that diversity of choice and raised expectations lead not so much to
more
rational decisions, but to
less
rational ones; in other words if more people both are able and expect to do more things they…

‘Get in a muddle,’ said Laura, ‘and most of them don’t know what they want anyway. Mrs Lucas’s sister’s boy has got a job at Harwell. Let’s hope he doesn’t blow us all up. Mrs Lucas only has to look at the washing-machine for it to go wrong.’

Take my own particular pond, James went on smoothly, now frankly one of the pleasures of impending retirement is to leave the Service with a sense of how very much its recruitment has changed since my own youth. We are broader based. I like it.

I don’t, thought Laura, and I bet you don’t really either, only it doesn’t do to say. ‘Gooseberry fool?’ she said. ‘Tom? Paul?’

‘Thanks,’ said Tom. He squinted at the bowl in front of him. The little green bits are hemlock, I should imagine, last resort of the socially threatened. I expect it grows wild in these parts. He picked up his glass, and put it down again, feeling Kate’s eye upon him.

‘Thanks, Laura,’ said Paul Summers. ‘Lovely. I remember your gooseberry fool from the old days. You know, following on what was being said I can’t help thinking of Hugh and remembering the way he came to the Council, to the Directorship, which had a smack of the random about it, I suppose. His application came in late – in fact there was a bit of bother about whether it could be allowed – and then just the week or so before the appointing committee met, the article on Charlie’s Tump was in
Antiquity
, and everyone was talking about it, and I suppose that swung the balance. A lot of people had thought Matlock would get the job.’

‘That cup from Charlie’s Tump is quite lovely,’ said Barbara. ‘The gold one. One would adore to have a modern replica.’

James Hamilton swilled his wine-glass, thoughtfully. ‘Interesting. Good timing – that particular dig came at the right moment for him. Did he
know
what would be there, Laura?’

‘No, of course not. Because the barrow was much older, anyway. They weren’t expecting to find that kind of thing at all. They nearly dug quite a different one, miles from here. And it
was
a rush getting that article out, that I do remember.’

‘Whose grave was it?’

‘One can’t possibly know,’ said Paul Summers. ‘Some Bronze Age man of substance. Anyway, an unknown benefactor to Hugh – he gave him a good reference, just in time for the Directorship.’

The effect of alcohol, Tom thought, is not so much to hinder the perception or cloud the vision as to render same more acute. So long as not too much is required of you by way of saying or doing things, all is well. The mind fairly ticks away. The blue-rinsed up-market hotel receptionist on my right is not quite as at her ease as one might think; she is frightened of old Tony there, which is interesting, because old Tony is as harmless as they come. Disconcerted by the unfamiliar, I suppose. And her husband is a right so-and-so. And this chap who worked with Hugh Paxton didn’t in fact like him overmuch, though he thinks no one knows.

And Hugh Paxton, like Stukeley up to a point, cashed in on the national past, though not wittingly or with calculation, as we all do who earn our keep at this particular trade. Stukeley, of course, distorted in order to get the results he wanted; Hugh Paxton presumably didn’t do that. Except in the way that convenient evidence for a theory always seems to come to hand more readily than inconvenient evidence. Convenient Wessex man, in this case.

Laura is an attractive woman. One can be aware of that, with perfect detachment and without prejudice. Or, at least, with a good deal of prejudice, but in all fairness.

What is odd, what I find odd, is that earlier archaeologists should have been so anxious to attribute everything to continental influence. You’d have thought it would have fitted in with good old imperialist chauvinist days to claim the culture that produced Avebury and Stonehenge and the Charlie’s Tump grave-goods for Britain. But not a bit of it – it all had to have come from the Mediterranean, via other nice civilized places like France. And that, of course, is to do with the conditioning of a classical education: anything that is culturally worth having comes from Greece or Rome. Very odd that not until the humdrum superseded retracted Britain of the nineteen sixties do we start thinking that maybe that part of it at least began here, with a bunch of homegrown Wiltshire farmers.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you could say that there isn’t anything all that culturally spectacular about mobilizing an admittedly startling amount of man-power in order to stand a lot of stones on their ends for superstitious reasons. You could say that, quite properly.’ They were all staring rather, at this not particularly sensational remark. James Hamilton, wearing an interrupted look, had his mouth open; he had very dapper teeth for a man of his age. ‘But of course,’ Tom went on, ‘the whole point is aspirations, in whatever direction. New Guinea tribesmen have never built anything; most of them haven’t even learnt how to make pottery. Primitive societies either stand still or they don’t. Wessex very much didn’t which is why in the fullness of time people like Stukeley and Hugh Paxton come along and spend their lives trying to work out what it was all about, and making a name for themselves in the process, and either getting it wrong or right, or somewhere in between, and confusing the issue with a whole lot of prejudices and assumptions of their own…’

‘Gracious, Tom,’ said Laura coldly, ‘what a diatribe! Well now, let’s go through for some coffee?’

And Nellie, silent on the side-lines, thought, this is better than the hospital waiting room, thank God I am not robbed of hearing nor the powers of observation. Poor Tom, put in his place, though of course in fact it is not poor Tom at all, because Tom’s day is yet to come and is going to be a rather satisfactory one, I suspect. And he is not, as it happens, much alarmed by Laura. But it is poor Kate, chewing her fingernails there just as she used to do at sixteen, and ten, and six. And as for the rest of them, it is interesting to note people all somewhat set in their ways – and the young can be that, too – doing their best to look as though they are not. Laura’s evening could be said to be a success, on the whole, though just at the moment that is not what she is thinking.

Chapter Seven

‘My sister is extraordinary,’ said Laura to Tony. ‘She had an obsession about getting in here to go through some papers of Hugh’s, and nothing would stop her, she even enlisted Ted Lucas who is slow on the uptake to say the least of it, and they heaved some sort of old door over the steps… Well anyway, she has had what she calls a sort-out.’ Laura surveyed the neat and dusted desk with disapproval. ‘The dig notes are in these boxes here, so I’ll leave you to it, shall I?’

And Tony sits at this desk of a man he never met, and reads, and blinks through his Mahler spectacles at difficult handwriting, and takes notes. He is quite absorbed; he puzzles over technical details and wonders who various people referred to are (and lists them, for his secretary to check) and wishes not for the first time in his career that one could dally further but it is no good, his year is mapped out already with schedules and dead-lines and studio dates; there is so long for Hugh Paxton and no more. Once or twice he feels intrusive; a scrawled note in another hand falls from between the pages of an exercise book – ‘Have gone up to the dig, can you bring the cameras when you come, also water and lunch things on table, see you later J.’ J must remain an unknown quantity in Hugh Paxton’s life, and he puts the note tidily back, as also a sepia photograph showing two people, with eyes screwed up against the sun, amid a dusty landscape, Paxton himself and the sister, what is she called? her in the wheel chair, who is also irrelevant, so far as Tony is concerned. It is remarkable, he thinks, how comprehensive a picture one builds up, I have a pretty good idea what sort of a man Hugh Paxton was, if I met him I would know what approach to take, what his foibles are, his prejudices, that he didn’t stand fools lightly, went straight to the point, worked hard and expected others to. But relaxed hard too, drank quite a bit, had an eye for the girls. One gets a composite picture, talking to people, reading this stuff, the man fills out…