Treasures of Time (7 page)

Oh, I know Nellie had a thing for Hugh, way back, before he met me, but that was over ages ago, and in any case Hugh…

He must not look at her like that. When he looks at her there is something in his face that only otherwise is there when he looks at Kate.

My head aches and I am on the edge of crying, and now the car is scratched, the new car.

She turned and walked briskly to the present car, a small Renault. She put her books and shopping into the back seat and re-locked it. Then, still purposefully, although she had not in fact decided what to do next, she continued down the length of the High Street, arriving eventually at St Mary’s.

Here, she hesitated a moment and then went through the porch, past the notices inviting her prayers for the Third World, for the victims of the Indian floods, for the homeless and the starving. Inside the church, she stood for a moment in the nave, looking at the flower arrangements by the pulpit and on the window-ledges. They were the usual tasteless affairs of ill-assorted stuff sprouting in a fan from some rather nasty containers: Laura inspected them with contempt. In the village, she had started a few years ago to do the church flowers herself, now that she had more time, replacing the stiff jam-jar bouquets with pretty trailing arrangements, lots of silvery leaves and foliage effects and imaginative combinations. The church looked heaps better now, though admittedly there had been a bit of resentment, one sensed, from the Vicar’s wife and old Mrs Binns and the people who had been doing the flowers for years. One had had to be tactful – explaining how one had after all done a Constance Spry course years ago, had a bit of an eye for interior decoration and so forth.

She stepped into a pew and sank to her knees, giving the dusty hassock a little shake first. She did not know, really, how it was that she had come more and more to religion. Of course, they had been raised in a Christian home, she and Nellie, and on and off, over the years, she had been a church goer, but infrequently. Hugh, of course, never was. Nor Nellie. Now, though – quite apart from the flower arranging – she found herself regularly in the village church. She had her special seat, out of the draught from the door, no one else now would dream of sitting there. And she had got into the habit of praying in privacy, most days, just a few words as she went to bed, it was a nice ritual, in some way settling.

She bent her head and murmured the Lord’s Prayer. Then she looked up at the light shafting dustily down on the altar and considered. Help the unfortunate, she prayed, the sick and the poor and the old. Please may the motorway plans come to nothing, the ones that might affect the Kennet Valley. May that tiresome sinus trouble I’ve been getting go away.

She raised her eyes, noticing a particularly barbaric arrangement of purple anemones on the altar. Overhead, the church clock hummed and struck twelve; the building crouched emptily around her; outside, cars bustled by. And please, she prayed, make something happen, make things more interesting. She got up, and tugged her skirt straight again. And as she did so it occurred to her that she could call on that new couple who had bought a house in West Overton, on the way home, on the pretext of suggesting membership of the Wiltshire Historical Association: people said he was something rather high up in the civil service, and one would probably be offered a sherry…

It was nearly two before she got home. As she made herself a snack for lunch the telephone rang. ‘Mrs Paxton?’ a man’s voice, an agreeable voice, its tone suggesting a desire to please, an expectation of further relationship – ‘This is Tony Greenway, from the BBC. Thank you so much for your letter, I can’t tell you how delighted I was to hear that you feel enthusiastic about our plans for the programme on your husband – that really was the most encouraging news. Now, the thing is, would there be any chance of my coming down to see you in the near future?’

‘Well, yes,’ Laura said. ‘Yes, I think I could manage that, I…’

‘What I thought was, could I take you for lunch some day soon? I expect you’ll know the local restaurants to suggest somewhere, and then perhaps I could give you a general picture of the project and see what your feelings are?’

Laura said she thought that sounded a nice idea. The Ailsford Arms in Marlborough, she suggested, wasn’t too bad.

‘Lovely,’ said Tony Greenway. ‘Now, let’s see… Is there any possibility of next Thursday?’

Laura said, ‘Just let me check my diary – next week
is
a bit hectic, I seem to remember.’ She stared out of the window for a few moments and then said, ‘No – isn’t that lucky, Thursday as it happens is clear.’

‘Super. Can I come and pick you up about twelve-thirty, then, would that be all right?’

Tony Greenway put the receiver down and scrawled across a pad: ‘Paxton widow 12.30. Locations. Colleagues and relations. Slant on personality. Check career details, background data. Photos, private collection, papers?’

Laura, humming, went back to her scrambled eggs and added a pinch of herbs.

Tom, as a child, had been taken once by his parents to some stately home. Which it was, he no longer remembered: the day had compacted in the mind to a series of sensations and incidents – a long car ride, Kevin being sick, a picnic by a road roaring with traffic, an interminable tree-lined avenue like an exercise in perspective with, at the end, a doll’s house mansion. And, with great clarity, the portrait of an armoured, probably seventeenth century, gentleman posed besides a marble-pillared fireplace – the same fireplace, as the hectoring guide pointed out, before which the conducted tour now stood. And Tom, confronted with this simple piece of information, this juxtaposition of the vanished and the extant, had looked at the strong-featured face in the portrait and seen, suddenly, a real man, albeit no longer here but none the less real for that. The past, he had realized, is true.

It was probably that moment that had committed him to what he was now doing, he thought, running his finger down a page of the B.M. catalogue, noting with irritation another sequence of titles that would have to be looked at. He glanced at the clock and saw with relief that it was twelve-forty, a not too unrespectable knocking-off time to meet Kate at one, given that it was a nice day for a leisurely walk to the pub and a browse maybe in the bookshop on the way.

She was late. He ordered two Ploughman’s Lunches, pleased by the inappropriateness of this in Gower Street, and sat waiting for her below a display of pre-war railway advertisements, the delights of Devon and Cornwall as promised by the G.W.R. Disorderly files of schoolchildren, headed for the Museum, flowed past the windows. Kate herself was currently engaged on the organization of a new project whereby an assortment of choice objects from a number of a different museums were to be arranged into a permanent travelling exhibition available to provincial museums and educational establishments: it was carefully devised to interest people of about fourteen and called ‘Our Island Heritage’. It was bedevilled with administrative problems and causing Kate much bother.

She arrived, and said gloomily, ‘Ma rang.’

‘She’s well, I hope?’

She shot him a suspicious look. ‘Why shouldn’t she be? She always has been. Or are you being satirical or something? I never know for sure. Sometimes you’re making fun and I don’t absolutely know, it’s off-putting.’

‘I thought it was interesting,’ said Tom. ‘Isn’t that interesting – not instantly being sure what people mean?’

‘No. It’s unsettling. And I wish she wouldn’t ring the Museum, I’ve asked her not to. She just says but darling I always used to ring Hugh at the Council nobody minded at all. And when I say well that was different, he was the head of it after all, I’m just a Grade II Assistant and it annoys people to have to come chasing up to Archives to find me she says well Kate I expect if you work hard you’ll do quite well in the end.’

Tom laughed.

‘She says why don’t we go down this weekend.’

‘Why don’t we, then?’

‘She’s got this person from the BBC coming, the one who’s doing the programme on Dad.’

‘Ah.’

‘And people for lunch on Sunday.’

‘What sort of people?’

‘People who live in Wiltshire and find things to do,’ said Kate morosely.

‘Where I come from,’ said Tom, ‘they go to a lot of trouble not to do anything they haven’t got to.’

He had discovered with surprise, on his arrival in the southern white-collar counties, the furious busyness of the professional classes. You could not hold your head up in society, it seemed, if you were unable to claim intolerable pressures, both inside an occupation and, even more, outside it. At a sherry party in his supervisor’s house, he had listened with interest to a group of (he gathered) unemployed women vying with one another in their accounts of lives with never a spare moment, dizzy in the service of Parent Teacher Associations, Conservation Societies, adult literacy campaigns and ornithology. Going home again, he found himself taking a new view of his parents’ untroubled appreciation of the eight hour day and the five day week. If he had asked his father if he was busy, he would have stared in incomprehension: if you were at work, you were at work, and if you were at home you were at home, and that was all there was to it. He said to Kate, ‘Well, all I can say is they don’t have this problem with leisure in Rotherham. They aren’t even ashamed of it.’

She left him at the tube station, and he walked back to the Museum alone and sat down again in front of his pile of books, his loose-leaf files, his card index box. Two and half centuries away, William Stukeley, out of doors in the fresh air of May 1721, stumped around the Wiltshire downs, measuring lumps and bumps in the turf and doing his bit to free the landscape of fantasy.

Kate did the shopping on her way back to the museum: meat for a goulash, a nice chunk of cheese, some household bits and pieces. She had said to Tom ‘Don’t be late, the thing I’m going to cook won’t keep’ – meaning, don’t skive off for a drink with some crony when the Reading Room shuts – and he had replied in that light way of his that might or might not conceal crossness, do you
have
to keep taking the magic out of living in sin, Kate? And this had preyed on her mind all afternoon. Do I nag? she had thought, am I going to be that kind of wife? Am I possessive? Ought we to be living together, or have we spoilt things? Does he love me as much as I love him?

She fretted and analysed, while scouring reference books and inventories, telephoning that unhelpful man at the V and A, comparing glossy photographs of Viking shields. And, flicking through back numbers of
Antiquity
in search of a reference to the stuff from that Orkney hoard, she found an article by her father, and read it, hunched over the trestle table with a dozen other things she ought to be doing and the afternoon half gone already: ‘… the vexed question of the British faience beads and whether or not they are of local provenance, my personal belief being that…’