Painted Horses (12 page)

Audrey Williams shrugged. “If history’s taught me anything it’s that life is short, alarmingly so. There’s not enough of it to waste. Or to let others waste for you.”

“Sometimes I think life would be simpler if I’d been born a man.”

“Oh rubbish. Life is what it is. Your life’s work, on the other hand—that you might exercise some control over.”

Catherine felt put in her place. The pub had filled with workingmen in the last few minutes and despite the accompanying din she knew with a sudden clarity that she could complain about her upbringing only so long because at some point the fault would simply become her own. “Did you find much resistance when you set out? Within the profession, I mean?”

“Everyone encounters resistance. It makes you stronger. In his own day Pitt-Rivers was regarded as a crackpot. Thankfully it didn’t stop him. He’s admirable for that as much as anything.”

Catherine’s beer stein had been taken away and replaced with another. She hadn’t noticed the switch. She was already tipsier than she’d ever been. “Thank you,” she said.

“Whatever for?”

“Actually I’m not sure. Taking me seriously, I suppose. General Pitt-Rivers may have been stoical, but I don’t quite know that I am. I think I crave approval.”

“Everyone does that as well, to one end or another. Probably even the general himself.”

“Well. I imagine he would have approved of you.”

Audrey Williams gave her a look. “I like to think so.”

Her courses began and she spent a week trying to channel her concentration, with limited success. She knew what the problem was.

She took the train back to London on Saturday morning and made her way to Walbrook. Audrey Williams was there, and a pair of volunteers cutting a new trench with shovels. Most of the paid crew was gone for the weekend but in their place was a man she’d heard much about in the previous weeks. The man the crew called the Professor.

Audrey Williams beckoned across the rubble. Her thick hair was disheveled and she wore a smudge of mud on one cheek, a slash like war paint. “Catherine Lemay, my American friend. This is Peter Grimes.” She winked. “The Professor.”

Grimes wiped his right hand on his trousers and then held it toward Catherine. He had a quiet half smile and a full head of graying hair. His shoulders were slightly stooped, like one of the wounded buildings that allowed him to see beneath the surface of the city. Catherine could not imagine a less intimidating human being.

“On tour here, are you?”

“No, I’m studying at Cambridge.”

“Archaeology, then?”

She shook her head. “I wish I were. The piano.”

Audrey Williams reached out and seized one of her hands. “You’ve lovely piano fingers. Long as tuning forks. Dig around in this dirt for a week, they won’t stay so lovely.” She looked at Grimes again. “Still, you can’t beat her back with a stick . . . She wrote letters to Mortimer Wheeler when she was a girl.”

“Ah. If Sir Mort could see you now I’m certain he’d write back. Have an interest in this sort of thing?”

“When I was a little girl I thought I’d mount an expedition to Syria. Find another Rosetta stone to decipher the Hittite hieroglyphs.”

“Ambitious.”

“Not ambitious enough, I’m afraid. Now I just play piano.”

Grimes looked off at an intact clock tower, fifty yards away. Otherwise the surroundings were a shamble of loose brick and standing water, the occasional lonesome wall. The random reach of bombs.

“I myself was a violinist, once upon a time. Not an unpromising one, either. But I caught the antiquarian bug young myself, from a schoolmaster. Went to work in a museum thinking it would ensure a life in the trenches.

“Now I mediate squabbles between the Corporation of London and the patrons of various antiquities societies. I conduct excavations mainly from afar. I placate developers and then explain it all to the press. I’ve become a bureaucrat, totally without intent.” Grimes looked at her. “Maybe should’ve stayed on with the violin.”

Catherine couldn’t tell if he was joking. His half smile never seemed to waver. She said, “Ever since I got here I can’t stay away. It’s not what I expected.”

“You must be serious about music, too. If that’s what brought you.”

Catherine smiled. “I’ve always thought I was . . . I’m certainly supposed to be.”

“Catherine, is it? Have you read any Forster?”

“George Forster? The naturalist on the Cook expeditions?”

His smile widened. “Beat her back indeed. E. M. Forster, the novelist. You might find him worthwhile. In archaeology, it’s helpful to remember it’s not all buried treasure and hieroglyphs. We’re also unearthing a bit of ourselves.”

A little later one of the excavators gave a shout. Audrey Williams and Grimes made their way through the warren of rubble and trenching. Catherine followed but kept to the side.

“Ah,” said Grimes. The excavator had unearthed a bit of stone foundation, straight sides jutting like no construction found in nature. “What I hoped. Let’s flag this and run a new trench here, see if we get the same run. Very good work.”

Grimes noticed Catherine scrutinizing the foundation from a dozen feet away. “Heavens child, it’s been buried a thousand years at least. You can’t hurt it.”

She stepped forward and knelt in the moist dirt. She put her fingers lightly on the textured surface of the exposed rock, felt the same visceral chill she felt at the site of the turret a few weeks earlier.

“We’re standing on a causeway, above the bank of a vanished river. I don’t mean this as metaphor. It shows on antiquated maps, in ancient depictions of Londinium. That standing water, there and there, welling up like blood through a scrape—that’s the remains of Walbrook. You can see the outfall still, west of the Cannon railway bridge. Walbrook was the drinking water for the Roman garrison.”

Catherine knew already the brook had run through the wall of the Roman settlement, hence the name. Her first day on the site the excavators told her the stream sprang from a marsh north of the city, flowed with other rivulets through a shallow valley finally to join the Thames.

“A thousand years later that had changed. The Walbrook had become a sewer, again no metaphor. The Romans were long gone and London had become a city, a teeming kettle of Normans and Saxons, Vikings, Celts, who knows what, sprawled beyond the old city walls. A metropolis even by our standards, but an entire nation to the medieval mind.

“Imagine the waste. Tons of it, century after century, through plagues and burnings and burials. Now imagine that waste cast into the rivers, not only the Walbrook but the Fleet, the Tyburn, the Thames itself.

“The Fleet and the Thames are still with us. The Walbrook simply stopped, by the sixteenth century no more than a legend. Even its river bottom disappeared.

“Some of this is speculation. A tale I tell myself as I work, because we don’t know for certain the function or the form of the Walbrook, and that is why we’re here. That wall you’re touching—fascinating, but entirely secondary. Walbrook mattered to Roman London, influenced its layout, possibly its very purpose. We would like to find out why. We need to know the nature of a stream that no longer exists.

“Catherine, I don’t know you at all. I don’t know your nature any more than I know the Walbrook’s. But I do know it’s regrettably rare to work at something with genuine passion. Surely you know that Cambridge has one of the oldest archaeology institutions in the world.”

Catherine found herself nodding.

Grimes fished a writing pad and fountain pen from an inside pocket. He wrote a name and tore the page loose and handed it to her. “This is a chair at the archaeology college. If you like I’ll ring him on your behalf. Perhaps you can sit through a course or two, if you have the time. I don’t mean to divert your attention from your chosen field, but it seems a shame to be so close and miss the chance.”

She took the scribbled name as though this were the Rosetta stone itself. “I’m honored,” she said.

“The honor’s mine. I’ll tell him that what you need isn’t theory, but practice. If you know what I mean.”

“Thank you,” she said. “You can’t know how much this means to me.”

He fixed his half smile on her, eyebrows lifted to the sky.

By the middle of the week she’d dropped her music studies entirely. She told her Fulbright contact she’d forfeit if necessary but even through the hollow, impersonal detachment of a radiophone the woman seemed unsurprised. She said she’d see what she could do. Apparently this was not the first time Europe had altered the plans of a young American. Catherine knew she should call her parents as well but the very prospect torqued her stomach into knots. Finally she settled on a telegram.

She had one day of lectures each week. Otherwise she was steered right into practical field analysis, with a special focus on what had recently been termed rescue archaeology. A fittingly dire designation. Grimes himself requested she stay on with Audrey Williams in the London rubble.

She was promoted from mere volunteer with little ceremony. Audrey Williams set her on a mound of excavated mud with a spade and a small gardener’s rake. Simple enough, though to Catherine the implements held the symbolic power of a Scythian’s warhorse, a minuteman’s musket.

She took one last look at her hands, her smooth, unbroken hands, with their perfect fingers and pointed little nails. She sunk the spade into the earth.

She let David take her, very soon after she returned from England. She was a changed person and he knew it too and it was time. He had changed himself in her absence, wrought by the pace of his work and the tapering of his athletic life. He didn’t row anymore. His arms and shoulders had lost their stitch-splitting bulk.

His hands had softened as well and this is what she noticed first, particularly in contrast to her own after a year’s digging. Her fingernails were no longer tipped with fine little points but by blunt edges, her once-smooth palms and delicate fingers now callused and gouged and scratched.

David on the other hand had become deskbound, spending his time brokering deals by telephone or reading through contracts and negotiations. She knew this lack of physicality was a problem for him because he was restless, constantly twitching. He kept talking of joining a gymnasium once his workload let up.

They were walking near his apartment. She’d been back a week and they had dinner in the late afternoon. He told her he’d missed her, missed her something fierce.

“I discovered myself, you know.” She meant it as a caution.

“I can tell,” he said. “It makes you beautiful.”

They planned to see a movie
, Blackboard Jungle
,
about unruly teenagers and this new music they were listening to. Movie and music both were all the rage, but Catherine had a restlessness of her own. She knew what it was.

David had paused to buy a paper to get the show times. She wandered a few feet ahead, staring down at her kneecaps and her bare sharp shins beneath the hem of her skirt. She turned back toward him as he approached, walking with the paper in front of his face. She hooked the top of the page with an index finger and lowered it like a slip. He peered at her. Sunday, the sidewalk around them leaf-dappled and empty. Still she spoke quietly.

“I want you to undress me. I want you to not make me pregnant.”

She walked in her bare feet to his bed. She was restless still but nervous as a deer. She tilted her head back so he could kiss her neck, felt his mouth on the thin skin of her clavicle and felt his hand move to her breast. She felt her nipples fill with blood and stand like hard little stones.

His shirt was off and she touched him as though he were a stove that might yet be hot. He hovered over her, his tongue on her neck and in her mouth and briefly on the lobe of her ear. She felt the grip of his teeth. A spasm shot through her in a jolt.

He undid the foil on a rubber and her eyes went briefly to his member. A little missile. Scar of circumcision. A glistening bead had formed and it dripped now down the inverted V of his glans. She looked away and up to his eyes.

“Sorry,” he said.

She shook her head. “What do you mean?”

He fiddled with the condom. “I know it’s sort of indelicate.”

She thought to tell him he had the wrong idea about her, that she was simply quiet and this was not the same as demure. She couldn’t come up with the words.

He opened her legs and looked down upon her and said, “My God.” He lowered himself and began to push to get inside her. He was in the wrong place. He mumbled again, “I’m sorry,” and with that she knew he felt as nervous as she did. She shifted her hips and reached in between them and took in her fingers for the first time the tremendous hardness of a lust-driven man. She tried to imagine her mother in this situation and couldn’t. She put the tip of him where he needed to be.

After a moment she understood the slick ooze that had leaked from him, understood it by the absence of anything similar on the rubber that he wore. She gasped from a flash of pain and then cried out as he tore through her with a mighty push. He backed off a little but then couldn’t seem to help himself. He thrust and thrust and she thought surely he’s all the way in me now surely he’s all the way in me now, only to find that he wasn’t.