Treasures of Time (4 page)

Avebury ran with school children, larking among the stones like puppies, chivvied by fretting teachers. Tom, standing beside a sarsen, picked idly at the skin of lichen, and thought of Stukeley. He said to Kate, ‘He nearly got things right, you know, old William S. He was convinced Stonehenge was pre-Roman, he was sure Inigo Jones’s stuff about it being a Roman temple was nonsense, he was onto the idea of there being a whole prehistoric sequence, with different types of site fitting into different periods. And then he mucked it all up with lunatic theories about the Druids. He got religion and spoilt everything by trying to fit the facts to the argument. He chucked out truth and a scientific approach to the past for the sake of a convenient theory – and an emotionally appealing one.’

Kate said, ‘Lots of people do that. A woman came into the museum in the summer wanting a recipe for beeswax. To polish her furniture with.’

‘What
are
you talking about?’

‘What I said. She’d seen our section about nineteenth century household management and she wanted to make beeswax.’

‘P’raps she kept bees.’

‘No she didn’t. It was just a fad. I felt like telling her to go out and buy a tin of Mansion polish from the supermarket next door.’

‘You’ve got no respect for tradition. They’ll be throwing you out of the museums department.’

‘Museums are one thing,’ said Kate, ‘real life is a different matter altogether.’ She ran slithering down the grassy rampart, saying, ‘Let’s go somewhere else, there are too many people here.’

He caught her up at the bottom, and she said suddenly, in an odd tone, almost shy, ‘Shall I take you to one of Dad’s old digs? His big site is just near here – Charlie’s Tump. I was about six when they were working there, I can remember it vaguely…’

They climbed steeply, up a path creamy with thin chalk mud, leaving the road and the village behind, climbing into the wind, away from voices and cars, climbing it seemed upwards and backwards into a quieter older place, where sarsens lay undisturbed like grey islands on the turf and sheep turned bland, enquiring faces as they passed. The wind was sharper up here; it plastered their hair to their heads and fringed Kate’s ears with pink. She stumped up the path a yard or two ahead, like a tough little pony. Tom saw the green dome of the barrow on the skyline and called out, ‘Why Charlie’s Tump?’ and she shouted back, ‘Oh, it’s just the local name – some nonsense about Charles I. There’s a good view from the top. That’s Windmill Hill, over there, and East Kennet the other side of the valley.’

He stood on top of the barrow and the green flanks of downland swooped around him in a circle, windy and ancient, swept by moving bands of sunlight that lit now this section and now that, in a shaft of green and gold and rich light brown. Marvellous, he thought, I’m in the wrong racket, that’s my trouble, I should have gone in for archaeology, a nice outdoor life instead of all this unhealthy bookwork. He turned, and saw Kate standing below him, staring towards a skinny copse at the edge of the field, a scatter of trees around a dip, furred over with the bright green of new leaves, and shouted, ‘Come and tell me about this dig – what happened?’

I am digging, like Aunt Nellie and Daddy and Tony and Brenda and the one with the funny name. This is my dig, all my own, nobody else can dig here. This is my button that I have dug, and my bone and my bit of sharp black stuff and my bottle top.

There is hot sun on my back; if I poke this spider with a bit of grass it runs into a hole and watches me, inside; when I press my eyes with my fingers I can see red circles, then blue ones, then purple ones.

I can hear Daddy and Aunt Nellie talking. Daddy talks to Aunt Nellie in a special voice, it is not like the voice he talks to other people in.

It is not like the voice he talks to Mummy in.

I like Aunt Nellie. I like Daddy.

If I creep, like this, through the long grass at the edge of the field no one knows I am there, not even the sheep. I wriggle on my tummy and I can go quite fast, like a worm, and already I am at the end of the field and they do not know I have gone, I can’t hear their voices any more, they can’t see me.

There is someone in the trees, in there. Voices, whispering.

It’s Mummy. Mummy with someone. If I go on creeping I can go through the bushes and jump on Mummy, make her laugh, make her see me, make her say ‘Kate!’ and hold her arms out.

I must be very quiet. There are things prickling me.

I can nearly see them now. It is that man, the one with the funny name, who talks a funny way. The one Mummy likes.

Now I can see them.

What are they doing? Why are they down there? Why is he doing that to Mummy?

Chapter Two

Laura said, ‘Gracious! She dragged you all the way up there – you must be exhausted. I haven’t been there for years, there are some photos of that dig in the old albums, somewhere. I must get them out and show you – it was after he published that dig that Hugh got the Directorship, of course.’ She went to rummage in the drawer of a tallboy.

They had had dinner. They sat now, all of them, by the fire in the drawing room; Kate read
The Times
, Nellie a book on the Tradescants, Laura talked. Tom’s cheeks burned still with the wind; he looked across at Kate, scowling over Bernard Levin, and thought regretfully: silly girl, what got into her this afternoon, you’d have thought it was perversity of some kind I was suggesting.

I like this place, he had said, it’s got something. And it’s made me feel extremely randy all of a sudden. Come on.

And she stared at him in horror and said, in there! in the copse! don’t be silly, Tom, you are joking, aren’t you?

I’m not joking at all, he’d said. I want to make love. Now. In there.

Somebody might come, she argued in panic. And he said nobody’s going to come, at the worst, you might sting your bum on a nettle, and that’s a small price to pay, at least it ought to be.
I
wouldn’t mind, he had added crossly, but never mind, if you don’t want to.

I’m sorry, she had said, anguished, I’m sorry, Tom – but I couldn’t, honestly, I really couldn’t. Not out here.

‘There,’ said Laura, dumping an album on the table. ‘This is the one. No, it isn’t – this is our wedding, and just before. Never mind, have a look, Tom – they’re rather amusing. And here’s Kate as a baby, at the end.’

Kate as a baby has a strong suggestion of Kate now, which is beguiling. And here is Hugh Paxton, youngish, sitting in a deck chair reading a book in the garden of this house. And here is Laura, rather posed, on a beach somewhere, with what one has to concede is a very nice figure. And here…

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, shifting his chair to make room for Nellie at the table. ‘Can you see all right? Is this you? No, it’s Mrs Paxton, isn’t it, Laura I mean.’

The photograph shows two people, standing side by side in front of – yes, in front of this house. The man has his head turned aside a little, as though perhaps evading the camera, he seems unwillingly there, in some way; the woman, on the other hand, smiles straight ahead and holds her skirt down against the wind, she looks confident and happy. There is a third person involved (naturally enough): the shadow of the taker, head and shoulders, protrudes in the right foreground of the picture.

Nellie’s hand, now, her good hand, lies on the page to stop it flipping over.

They come towards me, walking side by side. There is a wind and it blows Hugh’s hair upwards from his face, an inverted fringe. I start to say, ‘Sorry to be so late, there was a…’, and she slips her arm through his, through his crooked elbow, and calls out ‘You’re just in time, Mary’s coming over for lunch, and the Sadlers, it’s a celebration, Nellie, we’ve got something to tell you, we’re going to get married, Nellie.’

He says nothing. They have stopped. He looks wooden, standing there beside her. He is wearing grey flannel trousers and a blazer. The trousers are baggy at the knee. I say nothing.

Laura said, ‘Hugh and me. When can that be? Oh, I remember – you took it, Nellie. That old box Brownie you had. Not long after the war.’

Nellie gets out of the car; she is all blown about, she must have driven with the hood down, she looks a mess. Hugh’s arm is round me; we walk together towards her; I say to him, ‘Darling, you tell her.’ I kiss her and say, ‘You’re just in time, it’s a celebration, Nellie, Hugh’s got something to tell you.’ Hugh says, ‘Well, Nellie, there’s going to be a wedding, we want you to know first of all.’

I am wearing my New Look dress – long, long. I feel it brush my calves when I move. It has a petticoat that rustles.

Nellie says, ‘I’m not entirely surprised. Congratulations. That’s marvellous.’ She takes her suitcase out of the car. She says, ‘You’ll have to learn how to get your hands dirty now, Laura.’ She goes into the house; there are creases all across the back of her skirt.