Spiderweb (14 page)

They complete the last few hundred yards. They climb the steps of the fateful building. They search for their names on the list. The seating is in alphabetical order; they will not be in the same room. Nadine rolls her eyes, clutches Stella’s arm for a moment and is swallowed by the crowd.

Sitting at her desk, Stella sees that she is surrounded by men. One or two are acquaintances, others she knows by sight. All they have in common is that their surname begins with B and they have been exposed to the same information for the last three years. Men outnumber women by ten to one. However, it is not this fact that engages her attention but a strange detached perception of the whole scene, as though she were no longer a participant. She sees it suddenly as a ritual, entirely baffling to anyone who did not know what was going on (thus perhaps is the anthropologist born). It is as though she rises and floats up to the top of the great room with its high windows and stares down at this ceremonially clad throng of initiates. The ranks of desks, the bent heads, the sense of portent. The priestly figure who walks between the rows, bestowing sheets of printed paper. The small defiant gestures – the men who wear a buttonhole, a carnation or a rose, the girls with their manipulations of the dress code. The scene becomes ripe for exegesis and deconstruction, like some inscrutable practice of another age. What are these people about to do? Why are there so many men and so few women? What is the significance of their apparel, their silence, their air of resignation?

One day, she thinks, I shall look back at this moment and it will be neither here nor there. Except that it will, because what sort of degree I get may well decide which way I go next.

‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘You’re looking for the book on the mineral line.’

‘I was. But then I started thinking about Schools. That traumatic business. Did you know that Nadine wore a black suspender belt, for luck?’

‘No, but it sounds entirely in character. Though I fear it didn’t help. She got a Third, whereas you or course got the anticipated First. Not that she held it against you – she saw both results as perfectly appropriate.’

And so that time is inextricably wound into everything that has happened to me since, thought Stella. The First meant I could go ahead and do the diploma and thus I ended up as I have. Hence the rest of life, or at least the framework thereof.

Richard had by now found the required book. ‘Here we are. Borrow it.’

‘Thank you. It’s a daunting thought – the way in which your fate is largely fixed by what happens to you when barely out of adolescence.’

‘Do you feel that yours went awry, then?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Stella. ‘I meant simply that you point in a particular direction when still in a state of confusion.’ It occurred to her as she spoke that Richard was a man who had very likely never been in such a condition. But does anyone decide to become a civil servant at the age of twenty? Well, yes – plenty do, or the country would have long since ground to a halt.

‘Black coffee or white?’ said Richard. ‘What I really wanted to be was an opera singer.’

‘Black, please.’ So there you go – civil servant is
faute demieux,
as is right and proper.

‘But the Bach Choir was as far as I ever got in that direction. A run-of-the-mill tenor, that’s all I was.’

It occurred to Stella as they talked that Nadine had referred little to her husband, over the years. Seminal events, from time to time – a promotion, some professional
coup.
The children got more of a showing. The impression given of Richard was that of an essential backdrop. What he said or thought was not part of Nadine’s periodic accounts of family life. The letters and cards. Those occasions, decreasing over the years, when she and Stella met for a meal or an outing. Richard was simply there, one understood, a crucial continuity, the basic accessory to the life that Nadine had always planned. And Stella herself had come to think of him thus. Or, rather, had barely thought of him at all. No wonder, then, that he now proved occasionally unpredictable.

He stood at the window of her car as she was leaving. ‘Bear in mind my offer to sort out your recalcitrant machine.’

No, she thought as she drove away, I can’t sink so low. That it should come to this – Nadine’s husband offering to mend my lawnmower.

When she turned off the main road into the lane she saw in the distance that the Hiscox boys were loitering outside the cottage, wheeling bicycles. Up to some mischief while she had been gone? She speeded up, suspicious, and they at once rode off in the direction of the bungalow. Back at the cottage, she made a tour of inspection but could find nothing amiss. Everything seemed normal, Bracken ecstatic in welcome.

The old woman’s car wasn’t there so the boys went round the back of the cottage and rattled on the windows a bit to start the stupid dog barking. They nosed around for a while and then they came back round the cottage on to the lane – dog barking and barking still – and the woman’s car was turning in off the main road so they pushed off back home.

She was waiting on the doorstep when they got back from school. Hands on her hips. That look on her face. ‘So where’ve you been?’

School bus was late.

‘The school bus wasn’t late. I phoned. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve been on to the school and the bus left dead on time. And you’re twenty minutes late. So where’ve you been, I’d like to know? You’ve been off somewhere buying cigarettes, haven’t you? Right, then, that’s no cash for either of you for as long as I decide and don’t bother to ask how long that’s going to be …’

And so on. She’d got it in for them, for days and days now, not letting up. It had begun with catching them smoking and then them saying that about needing new bikes and now she was on a roll, letting rip half a dozen times a day, jumping on them as soon as they were back from school. But she was letting their father have it too, just as much. Winding him up till he burst out and then sticking her fingers in her ears. ‘Can’t hear a word you’re saying. I’m not interested. Tra-la, tra-la, tra-la.’

You’d have thought they could get together – the two of them and their father. But it didn’t work that way. Their father just boxed himself off when things were like this. Didn’t open his mouth. Slammed out of the house and worked in the sheds. You did best to keep away from him.

At meal times she banged food down in front of them. Things she knew they didn’t like. Disgusting fish. Muck worse than school dinners. She didn’t eat it herself. Maybe she didn’t eat. Maybe it was something else that kept her going – kept her revved up like that. Not drink, though, nor smoking. Something inside her, it was. Something that gave her a charge.

Something that made her not like anyone else. Mad, they’d heard someone say once. That woman’s mad. They hadn’t been supposed to hear.

They’d talked about this, afterwards. But she couldn’t be mad, because mad people can’t cope, can they? Gran was mad, pretty well, because she didn’t know her own name half the time and forgot anything she was told. Their mother could cope all right. She coped everyone else into the ground. She coped them out of her way.

That was how to get on top, no question. You had to sort people out before they had time to mess you up, like she did. They’d watched her to see how it was done, they’d been watching her at it since before they could remember. They’d tried it, too. At school. And it worked – people left them alone. They didn’t have any mates, but they didn’t care about that. Nor did she, and she didn’t care either. I don’t give a damn about anyone, she’d say – got that?

So nor did they. Except for her. They hated her but she was the only person they wanted to please. They felt as though they were split in half. Often they wanted to kill her, always they’d do anything – bloody anything – to have her take notice of them, be in a good mood with them.

When there was no chance or that, like now, they went around looking for something to smash up.

Hi! says Judith. I’m back. Been back for some while, in fact, but I couldn’t ring before because I’ve been busy, believe it or not. There’s a turn up for the books! Busy! I’ve got a job -would you credit it? A small job, a tiddly job as they go, and it won’t last long, but, by gosh, it’s work! I’m getting my hands dirty again. So come and see me on site, soon as you can. Where? Ah – Langley Manor. What’s Langley Manor? you ask. Langley Manor, my dear Stella, is the National Staff Training Centre for the Southwest Building Society. And what does the Southwest Building Society have to do with rescue archaeology? Ah, well – what has happened is that most inconveniently for the Southwest Building Society the excavation for the foundations of the squash court in the grounds, which is apparently essential to the well-being of the trainees at Langley Manor, has turned up some medieval tiles and what looks like the foundations of an early chapel. And since the Southwest Building Society cannot afford to do what it would prefer to do and quietly immolate this tiresome evidence, for fear of adverse publicity, it has agreed to halt its building programme – grudgingly and with much talk of the appalling costs incurred – while rescue archaeology moves in to find out just what it is we have here. Come – it’s good.

Stella located Langley Manor on her large-scale atlas of southwestern England – a significant black blob, complemented by similar blobs elsewhere, the Houses and Courts and Parks. There they were, the great houses of the county, each presiding over its neighbourhood, an extinguished social structure preserved thus on the page. For none of these Tudor, Georgian or Victorian piles was any longer the focus of local power and prestige. Many were still large-scale employers, but reborn as nursing homes, conference centres or country house hotels. Defrocked, they sat there in the landscape as architectural incongruities, out of scale and out of step. It was only on the map that they came back into perspective, each of them seen to be at the hub of its neighbourhood, lording it over the attendant villages and hamlets. A few were serving the heritage industry and raking in the shekels, tricked out with some zebras and buffalo or a miniature railway. All still in business, one way or another, but a far cry from their original purpose as social indicators.

Langley Manor was approached through parkland, the winding road allowing the visitor to appreciate stands of fine trees and grazing cattle before it straightened out into an avenue lined with chestnuts, displaying the distant façade of a Jacobean mansion. An array of signs indicated car-parks for Visitors, for Staff, Coffee Shop, Restaurant, Tennis Courts, Putting Green. The logo of the building society was prominent. Geraniums blazed in geometrical beds. The lawns were shaven carpets.

Stella parked her car and was directed by an attendant -also sporting the logo – to gravelled paths leading through gardens: ‘You’ll find them beyond the rose walk and the gazebo.’ The flunkeys simply wear a different uniform, she thought. Commerce takes over where the aristocracy left off. This place – this entire landscape, indeed – was a subtle fusion of what was and what now is. And what now obtains is what matters – the rest is ballast, or backdrop, or the submerged seven-eighths of the iceberg. On the whole, this has been the case wherever Stella looked. In Malta or the Delta or Greece or indeed Orkney the crucial issue for most people was whether or not they had a firm grasp on the twentieth century, by way of access to petrol-driven vehicles and an improved diet, quite as much as the defence of customary practices and beliefs. There was she, pestering people about their lineage patterns and their neighbourhood structures when half the time what they themselves were exercised about was the fact that they had not yet achieved a transistor radio or a motorized scooter.

She found Judith squatting amid rubble, attended by a bunch of students, all of them stained pink with Somerset mud.

‘Hello there! Six more tiles today and we think we’ve got the outline of the perimeter wall. We’ll take our lunch break while you’re here and I’ll give you a run down.’

The students wandered off. Stella and Judith sat in the gazebo.

‘Happy?’ said Stella.

‘Like a pig in clover. This only came my way because the young turks are all off at a Roman site that’s been turned up under the new motorway spur. The kids are on loan from the University. It’s a question now of fighting the building society for time. Men in dark suits keep coming to peer disconsolately, pretending to be interested.’

‘When we first knew each other you were a young turk yourself, I suppose. On that Malta dig.’

‘But it never felt like that at the time, did it? The first dig I was ever on, the director tried to sleep with me. A Cambridge professor, at that.’

‘Did he succeed?’

‘Certainly not. Though I considered it, in the interests of my career.’ Judith laughed. ‘Anyway, I was in love with one of the other academics and she wouldn’t even look at me.’

‘So what is this thing you’re rescuing here?’

‘It’s a twelfth-century chapel. Associated undoubtedly with the priory that was on this site until it was knocked down for the building of the big house.’

‘And what will happen to it?’

‘Oh, it’ll get buried under their wretched squash court. But I hope not before we’ve rescued any artefacts there may be and uncovered enough to make a plan of the structure. Anyway … it’s been my salvation. I was at a very low ebb.’

‘Your hands are certainly good and dirty now. You’re eating Somerset earth with your sandwich. Which looks delicious.’

‘Have one. Mary made them.’

‘Mary well?’

‘Mary’s fine,’ said Judith shortly. A pause. ‘Actually, there’s something I’ve been wondering about …’ She broke off – a change of mind, it would seem – and began to talk about the excavation. The tiles must be survivors from the original floor. Judith’s hope was that they might turn up fragments of worked stone to indicate the internal layout. She needed to get into a library to bone up – this wasn’t her field at all.

‘Sorry … blathering on like this. I get obsessed. So what’s been happening with you?’

‘I, too, have been applying myself,’ said Stella. ‘I have been thinking about gender and field-work.’ She described her article. ‘And how would that tally with your professional experience?’

‘Oh, sex is a central concern in archaeology. All those hot nights under the stars. But of course the objects of study aren’t around to complicate things. It’s nicely straightforward and enlivens many a dig.’

‘This is a serious piece I’m writing,’ said Stella.

‘Of course it is.’ A propitiatory grin. ‘And I am frivolous. Actually, some of your gripes apply. Machinery. Though I’m better than you at unreliable cars. Remember that heap we hired to drive around Italy?’

‘Vividly.’

But it is not the image of the car that is lodged in Stella’s head so much as that of Judith herself. Judith is wearing shorts and a skimpy black top. She is darkly tanned. They are somewhere in southern Italy, stuck once more at the side of an unfrequented, shadeless, dusty road with the temperature in the nineties. Judith is bent over the bonnet. When she looks up her face is streaked with oil where she has wiped away the sweat.

‘Blast the internal combustion engine,’ she says. ‘If we were Romans, we’d be there by now. On foot. No damn spark plugs or batteries.’

Cropped dark hair. Wiry sunburnt limbs. Something androgynous about her, thinks Stella. Timeless, too. She could be anyone, any time, in this place. Were it not for the car. This hopeless Fiat or whatever it is.

‘… looking for that Roman amphitheatre,’ said Judith. ‘Stuck by the road with the thing conked out again and then that guy with a truck turned up and towed us to the next village where his second cousin was the local mechanic. And you tried to talk to him in awful Italian about what was what in this village in darkest Calabria.’

‘I did?’ said Stella.

‘You did indeed. I saw a field trip looming. My God, I thought, we’ve got to get out of here.’

This man is no longer there. Nor the conversation. Being towed over bumpy roads by a battered truck, yes, dimly. Loud and clear, on the other hand, is an old woman in black standing beside the car – the confounded Fiat or whatever – and holding forth in incomprehensible dialect. She makes gestures. There is a man in jeans and a grubby white vest who laughs and interprets. He is the mechanic. The old lady is his grandmother. She is blessing the car.

‘She may as well,’ says Judith. ‘A bit of extra insurance. If anyone has a line to the Almighty in these parts, I should think she has.’

‘… the old lady who blessed the car,’ said Stella.

‘Really? Her I’ve forgotten entirely. Anyway, it got us to the Roman site. That’s as clear as day.’

But not to Stella. Just a hazy impression of hard blue sky, the surprising curve of ruins against a hillside, Judith scrambling hither and thither.

It is moth-eaten, this fabric of the past. But Stella’s moth holes do not coincide with Judith’s moth holes, it would seem. Of course not. Unreliable witnesses, all of us. We select the evidence, or something does.

‘Hey – how did we get on to this?’ said Judith. ‘We were talking about your article, I thought. Which I’d like to read. Anyway, I must get back to the job in hand. Here come the kids. Hang around for a bit if you’ve got nothing better to do.

So Stella stayed for a while to watch this strange and reassuring process of meticulous recovery, while somewhere nearby a lawnmower purred over the lawns and the distant chock of croquet mallets backed by cries of distress indicated that the Southwest Building Society trainees were nicely into traditional country house pastimes during their leisure hours. Judith and her assistants brushed soil from fragments of ancient walling; within the Manor initiates contemplated banks of computer screens. Stella sat in the gazebo and considered this interesting juxtaposition of activities until her own failure to contribute to either began to induce guilt. When she said goodbye, Judith was too absorbed to make a more than perfunctory response.

Turning off the road and on to the lane she found herself confronted by a Hiscox tractor, roaring down upon her. She pulled into the passing place to let it by and caught a glimpse of Ted Hiscox in the cab, staring dourly ahead.

They’d had a real set-to, their parents. She had begun it, of course. Going on about money. Most of it the boys missed, because it wasn’t a good thing to hang about when there was a row going on, but they heard bits through the open window. ‘This place was bought with my money and just you remember that … if it wasn’t for me, you’d be down at the Job Centre … it’s me keeps this business going. Who does the accounts? Who got the loan from the bank?’ Their father didn’t put up much of a showing. Just ‘Shut up! Shut up, will you! Belt up, for Christ’s sake!’ She always won in a fight – with anyone, at home or outside – just because she never let up. She could shout anyone down. Eventually the other person had had all they could stand and backed off. Like animals. You saw animals doing that. Dogs fighting – the one that goes on and on and the one that gives up.

Their father said, ‘Shut up! Just bloody shut your mouth!’ one last time and then packed it in. Went out. The door slam made the whole bungalow shake. Into the tractor and off. Probably didn’t even know where he was going – just had to get away from the place for a bit.