Treasures of Time (5 page)

‘But it’s that dig I was after, the Charlie’s Tump dig. Ah, it’s in this one. Goodness – who are all these people? There’s me, and Hugh, and you, Nellie. And Kate, of course, in a dear little sunsuit or something, it must have been hot. And that’s Brenda Carstairs, I think. But who on earth…’

Nellie’s fumbling speech distorts words; it is hard to catch, sometimes, just what she has said.

‘Oh,’ said Laura, ‘Carlos. Of course. Carlos Fuego – yes, he was there wasn’t he, that summer. Don’t bang the coffee cups down like that, Kate darling, you’ll break them and they’re the good ones. You’re off to bed, are you? Use my bathroom, darling, and Tom can have the spare one to himself.’

Tom, waking in a strange room, experienced a fleeting moment of confusion and spiritual detachment. He lay in a void that had no certainties beyond the body, his body, between sheets that were unnaturally crisp and clean; he groped for time and place, for why and when, and heard the voice of his future mother-in-law outside the door. Facts flooded in, and with them a fond reaction to that good smell of coffee coming from somewhere, and a lingering sense of deprivation: Kate had been tiresomely standoffish last night. ‘Honestly,’ she had said, ‘honestly you can’t, not here, I really am sorry, I mean it’s just as bad for me.’ She had stood outside her bedroom door, in striped schoolgirl pyjamas dredged up from some forgotten drawer. ‘
Why
not?’ ‘The bed squeaks, and Ma’s next door.’ ‘Oh, for goodness sake, Kate!’ He had stumped off in discomfort to a solitary night.

Now he contemplated, in the morning light, the room, with its slightly bleak, stripped-for-action look of all guest rooms: flower prints on the wall, one or two second-best ornaments. His own parents did not have a guest room; Kate, last month, had slept in what was still, when he came home from college, his brother Kevin’s room, with school photos pinned above the bed and football banners and old shoes tumbling from the cupboard. She had been perfectly happy. She had settled herself in like a dog turning round and round in an agreeable chair, eating greedily, in instant accord with his parents, avidly watching the television all evening. He had taken her to the pub, where she had hinted she would really rather get back. ‘I thought you must be bored.’

‘I haven’t ever actually seen a colour telly before,’ she had said. He had capitulated to the yearning in her face and taken her home again.

His mother had thought her a nice girl, no nonsense about her. His father had patted her on the arm at parting, indicating approval. Kate, on the way back to London, had said it’s good there, let’s go there often. How do you mean,
good
? he asked, and she replied, vaguely, oh, I don’t know, just you feel anybody could overhear anything anyone else said and it wouldn’t matter. Or thought, even.

He had felt obscurely flattered, and looked at his family with new eyes.

The thought of the eventual confrontation of his parents and Laura Paxton was so bizarre that he dismissed the whole thing and got out of bed, wondering if there would be Sunday papers and, more importantly, if the village rose to a pub: another lunch-time on those cut-glass thimbles of sherry would not do at all.

Nellie, negotiating the awkward turn in the passage outside her room, met him coming down the stairs, caught in his eye that flicker of embarrassment tempered with slight panic that she met in most eyes now and said, ‘No help needed, thank you – Kate is already down, I think.’ She trundled beside him to the kitchen and pushed from her, as she did half a dozen times a day, the remembrance of meeting people when you did not present, however well-meaning and sensitive the people might be, an instant problem. Tom held the kitchen door open for her and Laura, at the stove, turned and said, ‘Oh Nellie dear, you are naughty, I keep telling you to stay put in the mornings, Kate would have brought you a tray. Egg and bacon, Tom?’

He said to Kate, later, ‘I must say I can’t see your mother trowelling away in the dirt –
did
she?’

‘Not really. Well, she used to label sherds and that kind of thing, if the weather was nice, I can’t ever remember her actually digging. Mostly she didn’t come on digs. Aunt Nellie did, of course, unless she was busy with one of her own.’

He said in surprise, ‘I hadn’t realized she was an archaeologist herself, your aunt.’

‘Oh yes. She worked with Dad way back, when he was starting out. That’s how he met Ma – through Aunt Nellie.’

‘I see.’

‘And then all the time Dad was with the Council, after the war, she was at the Ministry of Works – but she still came on his digs sometimes. Like Charlie’s Tump. But mostly she was off somewhere doing things for the Ministry.’

Ah. She looked different, Nellie Peters, with her past filled in like this. It enlarged and clarified. Tom thought with discomfort that he had been speaking to her in the wrong way, given that she was a person, who, like oneself… and then, with chagrin, that it was deplorable in the first place to adopt a particular tone according to whether you knew a person to be, like oneself, educated and informed, or not… And would Nellie Peters, educated and informed, observe and ponder upon his (instinctively) altered tone when next he addressed her?

He should, of course, have cottoned on earlier, during that business about the votive figure or whatever it was.

‘You’ve
sold
it!’ Kate had said, staring at her mother across the breakfast table.

‘To a museum, darling. Nothing for you to be so disapproving about.’

‘What, Aunt Nellie?’

‘Nellie is saying,’ Laura said with a sigh, ‘that we had a little difference of opinion about it. The point is that new curtains were desperately needed for the drawing room – which you haven’t even noticed I daresay – and frankly the only thing to do was to sell something. And this house is crammed with bits and pieces that really no one ever looks at, of enormous interest I know but Hugh gave all his best stuff to the B.M. or the county museum years ago and sentimental value is another matter and frankly again I’m not sure that’s something I can afford. And John Barclay has said that little goddess thing must be worth a lot and there it was just sitting there…’

‘Gathering dust?’

‘Well, no actually, since it was in the glass-fronted case. But sitting there, and the drawing room crying out for new curtains…’

‘Positively weeping.’

Laura got up. ‘I think you’re being just a tiny bit rude, Kate, if I may say so. And the fact remains that the things are mine to do what I like with, so please don’t sit there with “And what would Daddy have said?” written all over your face, because the truth is I’m sure Hugh would have seen my point entirely and if he’d been just a mite more efficient about money, poor darling, this wouldn’t be necessary.’ She went out of the room, turning at the door to say, ‘If anyone felt like getting on with the washing-up, that would be simply lovely.’

Kate started to slam dishes into the sink with dangerous fervour. Tom said to Nellie, ‘What exactly was the thing that was sold?’

‘It was a small votive object – chalk, a female fertility…’ and then her treacherous speech had failed her and her voice had trailed off and in the pause he had said informatively, ‘Oh yes – neolithic, I expect, like that thing from Grime’s Graves in Norfolk, there are those flint-mines there, you know, where they found that curious little chalk figure in one of the shafts.’

It was surprising she had nodded with such tolerance. He sweated now at the recollection and decided that Kate’s assertions of her aunt’s niceness were quite correct.

The house
was
full of bits and pieces, it was true. He had wandered round, that morning, examining the monochrome detritus of prehistory – the uniformly beige display of pots and bowls and weapons – and had thought that it was perhaps this unrewarding front that had got the subject into trouble from the start. Laura had clearly had her way with the drawing room: there, shelves and cases held only the cheerful delicacy of some good eighteenth and nineteenth century china, and one or two pieces of modern pottery. But elsewhere Hugh Paxton’s collections of pots in a state of collapse, of pots resurrected, of flints and axes and spears, of gangrenous metal pins and brooches, of bones and funerary urns, dominated the house. Just throwouts, really, Laura had said, the best stuff went to the museums, of course. And yes, indeed, it was like the random loot of some nineteenth century clerical antiquarian – a studyful of ‘things of interest’ unrelated to time and place. Or those mysterious objects passed from hand to hand by a panel of archaeologists in that old television game that he remembered as a child – chunks of pot or metal held up for assessment and definition.

And that, of course, he thought, is the basic problem – what, in the end, can you do with a subject that depends entirely on the survival of material objects? No wonder it’s kept going off the rails, ever since the Saxons supposed the Roman towns were built by giants. Giants, gods, druids… A vehicle for every kind of expedient theory, the most malleable aspect of the past, prehistory. And the most treacherous. They get it all nicely sorted out into a chronological sequence, at last – the three ages – and then along come all sorts of disconcerting cultural overlaps that won’t fit in, and cultural parallels in the eastern Mediterranean or wherever, and they have to work out a new explanation – the invasionist theory. And then someone dreams up radio-carbon dating and blows everything sky high – Stonehenge far older than Mycenae, northern megalithic tombs earlier than any other stone buildings, and everybody has to take a deep breath and start all over again. How do you feel – when it becomes irrefutably clear that your life’s work has been based on a misapprehension? That you had been assembling the jigsaw puzzle all wrong and had better break it up and start again?

Not absolutely, of course. All that carefully collected evidence would still do – the product of all those wet or hot or windy weeks at Windmill Hill or Durrington Walls or Charlie’s Tump or wherever. It was the interpretation of it that must be chucked out. Though at least for good rational scientific reasons – not abandoned as a sop to religious mania, like poor old Stukeley and his druids, no parallel there. All the same, though, one might be able to fit an elegant little note into the thesis somewhere about the inconsistency of prehistory as a subject all along the line…

Assuming, of course, that one got as far as actually writing it, and didn’t just atrophy in a library first, turned to stone by apprehension and insidious doubt and guilty boredom, another petrified bust to join Voltaire and Dr Johnson and Plato – though less confident than they about the satisfactions of the life of the mind.

Tom thought of his friend Bob Taylor, his old friend-through-school-and-university, his colleague and rival from Sixth Form Prize to Finals, his mate and competitor, who would be starting his new job just about now.

‘ICI?’ he had said to Bob, incredulous – incredulous and furious. ‘You mean it, do you? Well, well, well. What do they pay? A good whack, no doubt.’

Bob said, ‘Look, the money is
not
the main thing, though I’m never going to convince you of that, I daresay. The main thing is that I’ll be
doing
something, or so I fondly believe. One might actually be able to affect what happens somewhere, for better or for worse. I got to the state where I just couldn’t any longer see myself, for the next forty years or whatever, sitting around trying to…’

‘Well, send us a food parcel from time to time, won’t you, up here in the world of make-believe.’

‘Oh, come off it, Tom, for Christ’s sake.’

They glared at each other. This is my best friend, Tom had thought, this is my best friend, in whom I was well pleased.

He would drop Bob a line, he thought now – ask how things were going, tacitly say sorry, suggest they got together at some point.

And of course he was going to get as far as writing the thesis, just as he had always seen things through, be they O-levels or A-levels or the production of the school magazine or the assimilation of a libraryful of information about the course of British history over the statutory period of three years allotted by a generous government for the (higher) education of its (brighter) citizens. He would learn everything there was to be learned about William Stukeley, reflect upon the implications of his career, pronounce upon the matter, and hope something came of it all.

And, prowling around Danehurst with an interested eye upon the life-style suggested by its contents, the academic grind did not seem to Tom that bad. Plenty of books (not just archaeology either), nice pictures, tasteful comfort, and a particularly pleasant bit of England outside the windows. He admired some early engravings of Avebury and Stonehenge, laid an envious hand on a second edition of Fielding, and stood at the drawing room window where on a table beside him lay a cutting from a newspaper which he read (such is the instinctive response to print induced by a prolonged education): ‘… this valuable book fully bears out the now widely held belief of specialists that the improvement and ultimate recovery of stroke victims owes as much to environmental factors as to any kind of treatment, and above all to the encouragement and optimism of those around them. Convince the patient that he
can
recover the use of his faculties, and the greatest hurdle is overcome. Of invaluable practical use to the relatives of patients, Dr Samson’s suggestions concerning the day-to-day…’