The Daffodil Sky (23 page)

‘Roman my bloody foot,' Johnson said. ‘How do they know? Like this talk about the world being a million years old. They wadn't there, was they? How do they know?'

That night Joe Longland talked to Kitty about the dust, the thin light rosy dust, that had come off on his fingers. He and Kitty were saving up to get married; she was a dark, warm-skinned eager girl who did housework for a doctor in the mornings and work in the fields, hop-tying, strawberry-picking and so on, most afternoons. She was pretty and brown with sun. They were
saving nearly three pounds a week between them and had been waiting for more than four years for a house to fall empty. Joe was cautious and steady and stubborn with prejudices about taking rooms with other people. Proudly he wanted a house of his own.

‘When was Roman?' he said. ‘About how long ago?'

That was how they came to be interested. At first they merely walked up in the evenings through the old gully of the quarry workings and then over the bleached grey stubble of last year's wheat crop that still covered the field where Joe was working. The evenings were calm and warm. The two of them sat on dry stubble and gazed at the professor's excavations. Neither of them understood these excavations. The second week-end he had begun a shallower, wider piece of digging and at the bottom of it, like a floor, lay a pattern of the little square rosy-brown tiles that Joe had found.

Joe was puzzled because even this shallower excavation was three feet or more below the stubble surface. ‘Did it sink down there? If it didn't how did that depth of soil get on top of it? You'd think up here, on this hill, it'd be the other way round. You'd think soil would blow away.'

‘The thing to do is to ask this professor,' she said. ‘Why don't we come up Saturday and ask him?'

On Saturday afternoon they stood quietly, almost shyly, watching a young brown fair-haired man in khaki shorts scrupulously brushing dust from the tiled floor at the bottom of the shallower excavation. He seemed as absorbed in this work, crawling on his hands and knees, as a man trying to pick up minute fallen grains of seed.

‘Excuse me,' Joe said, ‘could you tell us if Professor Brookes is coming this week-end?'

The man lifted his head sharply from the trench. His eyes, light blue and quick, seemed to dance in the sun.

‘I'm Brookes.'

Joe could not believe it. Professors were inevitably old and bearded, with perishable memories. They were short-sighted and peered at the world through microscopes. Their trade-mark was the decayed umbrella. Brookes, on the other hand, had the almost curt look of a youthful impostor and a tongue that was cryptic.

‘Interested in this?'

‘I work here,' Joe said. ‘I'm the one that dug it up.'

‘Good.'

For some time this cryptic, almost boyish manner of speech kept them at a distance, intimidated. They could only watch the scrupulous hands at work with the brush, cleaning the rose-brown tiles, and feel awkwardly a deepening sense of intrusion. For long intervals Brookes too seemed to forget them, becoming absorbed in occasional fresh neat excursions into earth with the shining point of a builder's trowel.

‘Shall we go?' Kitty said. More deeply than Joe she felt the sense of intrusion; the way Brookes ignored them seemed pointed and offhand.

‘Oh! don't go.'

The voice from the trench was terse and peremptory; she could not believe that it came from the youthful, absorbed figure picking away with the trowel.

‘Come down here and have a look at this. This is the heating chamber.' He began curtly to explain his
discoveries. ‘You hit the thing in a lucky place. Another yard or two and you might have bust it to pieces.'

‘Hot water?' Joe said.

‘Why not? The villa probably had steam-heating too.'

‘How old is all this?'

‘First or second century. Probably second. That's a coin I picked up—end of the second century. Of course it doesn't date it. Could have been dropped a century after the place was built.'

Joe held the coin in his big hands. After a moment or two Kitty took it from him and looked at it for some time too and then handed it back to the professor.

‘No. Keep it. We'll find plenty like that. It's not particularly rare. Keep it.'

The blue eyes danced, flashing pure and quick, smiling, so that the girl was slightly embarrassed, taken unawares, not knowing what to say.

‘Thank you very much,' Joe said. ‘That's very kind of you.'

‘Not a bit. You're interested. Local people usually aren't.'

‘What did you mean about a villa?' Joe said.

‘There was probably a house here. Generally the bath-house was some distance away—sort of up the garden path. We may find it. The trouble is to get enough help with the digging.'

Joe laughed.

‘We're looking for a house,' he said. ‘It might suit us.'

‘We've been waiting over four years,' Kitty said. ‘I don't think we'll ever get one.'

‘We've waited all this time,' Joe said. ‘We can wait a bit longer.'

When Kitty smiled her small upper teeth, level and pretty, bit down with shy delicacy on her lower lip. The professor seemed attracted by this quick expression of diffidence and said, smiling back at her:

‘Well, you could hardly find a better spot than this. The Romans knew how to pick them—half-way up the hillside like this. Perfect. Look at it.' He waved rose-dusty hands towards the summer valley, where the course of the little river was traceable only by its fringe of alder trees and the meadows about it were gold-green with swathes of hay. ‘Nice to think of it, isn't it? Nearly two thousand years ago—probably a vineyard just below us here. Wild hyacinths in the woods, probably nightingales—changed a lot, of course, in some ways but in some ways not much.'

In the old quarry workings the brown everywhere was pricked with yellow fire and the air was heavily sweet with the first summer hay.

‘Probably got their stone from the same quarry,' the professor said. ‘Sure to have done. And we're probably from the same stock—well, not you and I,' he said to Joe, ‘but she might well be——'

‘Me?' Suddenly the glow in her skin was dark crimson and the professor watched it flush swiftly up through her face, beyond the black eyebrows, into the roots of the black hair.

‘I should think it's more than likely,' he said. ‘That dark hair and that straight nose. And not so very tall.'

‘A Roman girl,' Joe said. ‘That's a new one—might be your house.'

‘I wish it was,' she said. ‘I'm sick of waiting.' The two men were laughing; she was caught between a
cross-fire of words that made her shyer than ever. ‘All we'll get is a pre-fab. Or a hut. If we're lucky.'

Suddenly Joe saw the pain of her shyness and said:

‘Did you mean it about not getting any help with the digging? I'll help. I'll come and dig.'

‘It has to be voluntary,' the professor said. ‘There's no money——'

‘That's all right,' Joe said. ‘I'll come. Kitty and me'll come. Any night we can.'

‘It would have to be while I was here,' the professor said. ‘Under my direction. But I start my summer holiday next week—three weeks of it—and I'm thinking of putting up at the pub here and digging most of the time.'

‘We'll come,' Joe said. ‘Evenings and Saturdays. Kitty might be able to come some afternoons too—eh, Kitty?'

‘I might come when the strawberries are finished,' she said. The flush had died slowly from her face and now she was looking down at the little valley with its hidden stream and its fields with their light gold rings of hay. ‘I never thought I'd be digging for a house. That's something I never thought of.'

He walked in a confused and heavy way up the gully of the old workings, still swinging the wrench. In the hot sun the many bushes of broom were not only a mass of dripping flame. They clotted the air with a honey-light fragrance that seemed to flow down through the old hot rocks in a drowsy stream.

It was the second or third week-end when Johnson first began to taunt him. He could not remember which. He was confused now even about the day he had
discovered the site, about the day the professor had arrived, and about the afternoon Kitty had first worked with him at the diggings and had come back to say:

‘He makes it feel you've lived up there. All of a sudden you feel the stones are talking.'

‘How's the professor?' Johnson began to say. ‘Grown a beard yet? I thought professors had beards. Found the garden path?'

‘Garden path?'

‘Well, somebody's got to be led up it, ain't they?' Johnson said.

In the hot weather the fields of strawberries ripened quickly; by the end of June, the first week of the professor's holiday, the short season was over. Kitty, with nothing to do, began to help the professor two or three afternoons a week and then again with Joe in the evenings. And sometimes Joe, perched high on the mechanical scoop, would be able to swivel round and catch sight of them, two brown absorbed figures, not quite real, kneeling close together in the illusory quivering heat across the stubbled hillside.

To him, all the time, the work seemed painfully slow. Uneasily he began to feel that that was not quite real either, that the idea of a villa, of a Roman household, of people cultivating vines, listening to nightingales, luxuriating in hot baths, was also illusory, a mere part of the professor's charm. He was so used to excavating earth by the ton that he wanted to attack the site with pick and shovel, heartily, powerfully, with a muscular enthusiasm that would bring the whole pattern to life in a day. The professor remained rigidly and academically scrupulous. He scooped earth away with slow
skilled reverence, brushing dust with the fanatical precision of a fond spinster grooming a precious parlour carpet in springtime. This slow precision made it appear sometimes to Joe as if, in the long July afternoons, not a spadeful of earth had been removed, as if the Roman dust remained exactly as he had left it the evening before.

Then all through the heat of a July afternoon Johnson muttered over and over again that he thought the site was deserted. ‘Don't see the professor. Don't see the professor's assistant. Don't see nobody. Must have gone to have a lay-down to cool off somewheres——'

‘You mag just like a bloody woman, don't you?' Joe said.

‘Well, even professors git hot sometimes, don't they? Even professors've got to lay down sometime.'

Joe swung a spanner. He was not aware of swinging it. He saw Johnson duck by the rock-face. He saw the flash of a double spark, two winks of flame, as the spanner struck rock above Johnson's head.

Then he saw Johnson dive for the spanner. In four or five big strides he was there before him, pinning Johnson back by the neck against the rock, holding the spanner neck-high with the other hand.

‘You goad me just once more and see,' he said. He could feel the central bone of Johnson's neck giving, under his hand. The face was a mere hot withered blur of flesh against carved yellow rock. ‘You just goad me——'

‘Keep your bloody hair on,' Johnson said.

‘Just goad me,' he said. ‘Just goad me.'

That evening, when he left the shift and walked across to the excavations, neither the professor nor Kitty were
where he had expected them to be. The site of the bath was deserted. His illusion that neither rock nor dust had been touched became suddenly real. He stared down for some minutes at the empty grave-like diggings, troubled and sick, remembering Johnson. In a flash he felt his anger against Johnson turn and renew itself and surge against the two people he could not find, and in a moment he was lumbering like a bewildered bear across the hill.

He had not taken more than ten or a dozen strides when he saw the dark head of Kitty jump up forty or fifty yards away, startling, bodyless, straight out of earth. She saw him at once and waved her hand and began shouting something about the villa.

‘Joe!' she shouted. ‘We think this is it. This is the villa!'

Stupidly, with uneasy and stumbling devotion, he went across to her.

‘Couldn't think where you'd got to,' he said.

‘The professor had a plan and we started digging here——'

‘No, it was just a hunch,' the professor said. ‘I took a fix on the pub-sign. There's probably always been a ford on the river there, so I got the ford and the pub-sign and this spot all in one line and hoped. Not very orthodox, but the hunch came off, that's all.'

‘Don't you think that was clever?' she said. Her face, under the black hair, was crimson-brown with dust and sun and excitement. ‘We've got a house after all.'

He smiled at her and then suddenly rubbed his hand across her hair, brushing it. ‘You're all dusty,' he said
and sickly he remembered how near, by the rock-face, in frenzy, he had come to killing Johnson.

He had reached the top of the old gully. He had only to walk now across the field. He had chosen the end of the morning shift because he knew that the professor would be alone at the excavations. It would be an hour before Kitty arrived.

‘Ask him yourself,' Johnson had said. ‘I never said it. He said it. In the pub—that little Roman girl, he kept calling her.'

‘That's all right, Johnson. I've heard him call her that.'

‘Yeh, but not with that look on his face.'

‘What look?'

‘The what's yours is mine look,' Johnson said. ‘You know.'

That had been half-way through the morning shift. It was cunning of Johnson, though he did not see it, to give that twist to things. It had been easy when there was only Johnson's face leering against the rock-face or bulging in terror as he held the neck savagely pinned. Now Johnson had him tied in knots, with the result that it was not Johnson he hated, but the professor.