Treasures of Time (9 page)

‘Oh come on,’ said Tom. ‘He’s got to see it, it was your father’s big dig after all.’ Kate allowed herself to be led back to the car.

By the time they reached the end of the track and left the car in a gateway, to walk the last quarter mile, the light had almost drained away. The landscape was a uniform grey-blue, spiced here and there in the valleys with the lights of a village; the hills lay in long dark curves against a sky that was barely lighter; to the west, an orange ball of a sun hung just above the black copse. The wind poured over the hilltop, making the trees creak; otherwise there was nothing to be heard except the crying of lambs. Tony Greenway said, ‘It’s a barrow, I take it?’ He stood, staring round, hunched into his anorak. Kate explained the dig and its significance. Tony nodded and listened and asked several quite perceptive questions. Tom climbed to the top of the hillock and stood there, looking out over the fields, the valley, the grey soft hills. The place seemed very old, almost uninhabited, and inexpressibly sad. Under his feet was the tumbled stone chamber in which people of impenetrable beliefs had buried their dead; down there in the valley lorries twinkled their way along the A4. This landscape had been exploited by countless people in countless different ways and yet its endurance was absolute: the same sun hangs above the same cleft in the hills; the same uncaring wind bites hands and face. And I know everything, and nothing, Tom thought; I stand here, full of learning, I could give you a pretty good run-down on the last two thousand years, and I know nothing, I am constantly amazed by the world, I am as surprised by life as whoever it was Hugh Paxton dug out of this barrow. I have cost the state several thousand pounds, my head is full of expensive information, and my judgement is probably no better than the last man’s or the one before. Of course, I have scepticism, and rationality, and unbelief, which I suppose is better than bigotry and superstition and credulity. I am not likely to kill anyone else, except under great provocation, neither am I likely to take violent exception to people not feeling the same way as I do about things, and I probably won’t trample on those less able to look after their own interests. All of which adds up to quite a lot, on reflection. But… but the fact remains that I stand here, knowing everything that I know about what has been, and I know very little about what is. I live in a mysterious world.

Tony Greenway appeared beside him. ‘It’s rather a super place, I must say.’

‘Mmn.’

‘I’ll certainly want a sequence here. What I shall never get across, alas, is the atmosphere.’

‘You think it’s got an atmosphere?’

‘Oh, Lord, yes. I mean, one has this feeling of immense antiquity, of so much having happened up here.’

‘Actually,’ said Tom, ‘this isn’t Charlie’s Tump at all. Kate’s frightfully short-sighted, as you’ve probably noticed, and with the light being so bad she directed you up the wrong track. This is just what’s left of a gun emplacement from the last war.’

There was a silence. Tom said, ‘Sorry, I’m pulling your leg, of course – I couldn’t resist it.’

Tony laughed. ‘Point taken. All atmosphere is in the eye of the beholder. Romanticism.’

‘Quite. Which isn’t to say that I’m not all for it. I think we could do with more of it – projection of feelings. It’s not doing it that’s dangerous.’

Tony said earnestly, ‘You know, I do so agree with you, Tom.’

‘Well, we’ve got you one location, anyway. It makes me think of
Urn Burial
, this place. “The treasures of time lie high, in Urnes, Coynes, and Monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables”.’

‘Hold it a minute. Say that again.’

‘ “The treasures of time lie high…” ’

‘I like it,’ said Tony. ‘We’ve got a title, too. The Treasures of Time. Great. What is it, did you say?’

‘
Urn Burial
. Browne.’

‘Ah.’

‘What’s happened to Kate?’

‘She thought that lamb had got its head stuck through the fence – she went to investigate.’

It was almost dark now, the definition of shapes – trees, hills, hedges – fading every minute. Tom, filled with sudden high spirits said, ‘Wait here a moment.’ He slithered down the side of the barrow, crept round to the clump of bushes at the far end, watched Kate groping her way back along the fence, leapt out and grabbed her by the waist as she passed.

Kate’s shriek brought Tony scrambling down. ‘It’s all right,’ said Tom. ‘I was just testing Kate’s powers of imagination – they seem to be in good order.’

Kate said, ‘You gave me the fright of my life, what on earth are you on about?’ but she slid her arm cosily through his.

‘I’ve just been lecturing Tony about the value of imagination.’

‘Imagination isn’t jumping when people behave like five-year olds.’

‘True, but it’s having some apprehension of the unknown.’

‘The unknown in other people,’ said Kate. ‘That being what my ma is so bad at,’ she added, more quietly. Tony, shuttered off by the twilight, stood a yard or two away, watching them politely.

Tom said, ‘I’d say it’s more that she’s barely aware of other people. A bit un-nerving, really. But lack of imagination comes into it, certainly. Tony’s problem was with the landscape, though – does it have qualities of its own, or is it entirely what we think it is?’

Tony said, a little peevishly, ‘You’re getting too philosophical for me. All this arose, if you remember, from how we get the best out of this place as a location. Was this where that drinking-cup was found, and a shield, or something?’

‘That’s right,’ said Kate. ‘It was a burial with particularly fine grave goods – one of the best Wessex finds. It hadn’t been robbed earlier, like so many, and everything was pretty well intact. There were grooved daggers, and the gold cup, and a lot of other stuff, rather spectacular really. They did two seasons on it, and it fitted in with anti-invasionist theory, which Dad was always very much in favour of, even before radio-carbon, really, as a display of wealth by prosperous local chieftains.’

‘The original Wiltshire squirearchy?’ said Tony. ‘And it was after that your father got the Directorship of the Council for Prehistoric Studies?’

‘Yes.’

They came down from the hill in near-darkness, stumbling along a track become unreliable, full of stones and invisible holes. Kate clung to Tom’s arm; Tony, a yard or two behind, slithered on the mud once or twice and swore.

‘One thing,’ he said. ‘One can’t complain of being deskbound in this job. I’ll push off as soon as I’ve dropped you back and said my farewells – maybe we could meet up for a drink in London sometime?’

Chapter Four

There were things that were within one’s powers and things that were not. There were small, private triumphs when something else became possible, or nearly possible. When one discovered that, using the invaluable little tong-device that Kate had found, one could pull up one’s stockings unassisted. That, by careful manipulation of the wheelchair and a judicious prior arrangement of cushions and chairs, one could get in and out of bed on one’s own. But there mocked and challenged, daily, those unattainable goals – the bathroom shelf, the switch on the standard lamp in the drawing room, Hugh’s study.

Clarity of speech.

If one could devise some way of getting the chair down those two steps, the study would be within bounds. A ramp? A couple of boards, securely placed; that old door that used to be in the garden shed…

And Laura, staring, says ‘Why, for goodness’ sake, Nellie? If there’s something you want out of the study I can get it for you, you’ve only got to say. Do some work? But darling that’s the last thing you should be doing, you have to take things very very quietly, there is no need to force yourself to do anything. What work, anyway?’

Sort out Hugh’s papers. Always wanted to see if that unfinished work on pottery sequences could be made publishable. Catalogue his dig notes.

And Laura says, ‘Well, darling, I do think it’s quite unnecessary, and actually I’ve been thinking anyway of sending all the papers to the Council, the study needs a good clear-out. Do you,’ she goes on, ‘want anything from Marlborough this morning, I am going in to shop.’

Laura has been in better spirits lately, better-tempered. She has these new friends, the Hamiltons, who have come to live in West Overton, a near-retirement Treasury official and his sleek ageless wife, very busy about the place, full of creditable enthusiasms and energies. Laura and Barbara Hamilton are wondering about opening up a little place to sell really nice lithographs and prints, Barbara knows a lot of people in the art world, she has an eye for that kind of thing. A percentage of the profits would go to the Nature Conservancy; the prints, though, will not be Peter Scott ducks, that was not thought amusing when one suggested it.

Playing at shops.

A long time ago, when we were children, we were given a toy shop. It had a wooden counter, and wooden shelves and drawers behind. There were tiny packets (empty) of tea and sugar, with proper writing – Lyons, Tate and Lyle – and packets of semolina and sultanas and candied peel and biscuits and little blue paper bags for rice and flour. And a real pair of scales. And pretend fruit, made of plaster: oranges and lemons and bananas. And cardboard money. And a pad of paper headed Toytown Stores to write bills on.

Laura was nearly always the shopkeeper, because of being the youngest and because the shop was for some reason more hers than mine, though given to us jointly I think by an aunt. Laura was five or six, as pretty as a picture or so everyone said, her hair so fair as to be almost white, as it will be again one day, around a face that is not so very different, that is recognizably the Laura of today.

She weighs and counts and arranges, and I buy and order and pay. We both love the shop, it is fantasy made manifest; perhaps Laura loves it slightly more, and I get irritated because I am so seldom the shopkeeper, and after a while I refuse to play any more.

Later, when Laura is somewhere else, I play with the shop by myself. I arrange it with great care, to my liking, and I do very complicated sums, I present myself with bills and pay them and take real flour and sugar from the kitchen and weigh it and put it in the blue bags. I have a whale of a time.

And suddenly there is Laura, standing over me. She is so enraged she is speechless, her face is quite scarlet, she looks as though she might explode. And she does: she flies not at me but at the shop; she hurls herself at it and the wooden counter splinters and the shelves and the drawers, the cardboard packets are squashed, the money sent flying in all directions, the imitation fruit pulped to white powder under her shoes.

The shop is ruined. We stare in horror at the ruins. Laura tramps through it, tears streaming down her face, and says, ‘I didn’t want it anyway, it wasn’t real. I don’t care.’

Nellie ate her breakfast alone in the kitchen, Laura having gone to Marlborough. She made tea, and toast, and achieved with the help of a walking stick handle the packet of cornflakes in the corner cupboard that had hitherto eluded her, and enjoyed that small triumph. She read
The Times
from front to back, sat thinking for a while about what she had read, trundled back to her room to fetch the handy bag in which she kept her immediate needs – books, notepad and pen – and then wheeled herself through the drawing room window and onto the terrace, it being a nice day.

A lovely day, indeed. Ten o’clock, and the sun lying warmly on face and arms and hands, the birds clamorous, the garden crackling with spring growth. And, sitting there, abandoning for the moment the matter in hand of writing to an old colleague, she was filled with pleasure, all else for the moment driven out: time and fate and what might come. Pleasure in the senses, in what lay before her eyes, simply in being. She had always liked to be out of doors, had resented the incarceration of the winter, had been thankful for work that was carried on as much in the open air as out of it. So that, although in all her life there can hardly have been a day when she would not have been at work by ten o’clock in the morning, there had been many days when she had been, as now, outside.