“Oh, of course,” said Miranda. “It was all arranged. And then I couldn’t go through with it. I looked at you and thought: no. But it was all fixed up—they were coming for you the next day. So there was nothing for it but to be up and off. Find someone to stay with until I could work out what to do. I thought of cousin Sylvia.”
Chloe remembered cousin Sylvia. Many families have a cousin Sylvia. She was someone’s sister, or aunt, who had somehow fallen foul of the accepted procedures of a conventional middle-class family of the mid-twentieth century and lived a raffish and ramshackle life on the other side of the tracks. Almost literally—Chloe remembered a dilapidated cottage beside a railway level crossing on a branch line in the west country. Cousin Sylvia had once been married, but no longer was, kept chickens and was indiscriminately hospitable and welcoming. There was often a burly farmer around who seemed to have his knees well under the table. In Chloe’s childhood, she and Miranda would stay with cousin Sylvia for days and weeks when Miranda was at a loose end or undecided about where exactly she wanted to go next.
“Yes,” said Chloe. “Cousin Sylvia. I see.”
She did see. She saw just how cousin Sylvia would have been a catalyst, would have served as the prompt for Miranda’s reinvention of herself, for her crossing over from one way of life into another.
She saw also that this conversation—if such it was—should have taken place long ago. She did not know if she wanted to hear more, or not. Miranda had in any case gone off at a tangent.
“Sylvia’s still going strong. I went to see her. Over eighty now, though you wouldn’t think it. Still keeping open house. If Sophie wants anywhere to hang out at any point . . .”
“No!”
Miranda shrugged. “Come to that, she’s welcome chez moi, if she feels like it. It would be odd to have a baby around again, but quite fun really. Oh God—I suppose it’ll be my great-grandchild. Help!” She reached for another cigarette, temporarily fazed.
Chloe’s voice was rather faint. “Sophie is fine here.” After a moment she added, “Thank you all the same.”
She felt indistinct. She was not herself at all. It was as though her vision of the world had been given a violent shake, so that now all was differently assembled. For a moment, as Miranda spoke, Chloe had seen her life reel away on some unimaginable course—her childhood passed amid faceless strangers, John unknown to her, the children consigned to oblivion. She looked now at Miranda and saw a person who was indefinably changed. But everything had been subtly skewed over the last few weeks; Miranda was just an extra twist. You think your grip is firm, and find that nothing is reliable. Above all, she saw procreation as some sort of malign joke, this random throw of the dice that determines who gets born and who does not. Words floated into her head: “There, but for the grace of God, go I. . . .” But Chloe knew full well that God has nothing to do with it; she was a rational woman, she was an atheist. All the same, she glimpsed the awful, pervading irrationality that sends people running for cover into the churches.
Sophie’s baby would be a girl—somehow Chloe was sure of that. There were these lines of women that extended back and forth through time, mothers and daughters and grandmothers, an inexorable progression. But every birth was a fortuitous event; the child born was a chance in a million. It was the uneasy alliance of this haphazard arrangement with the orderly descent of generations that had Chloe in a kind of despair. It was as though nature were jeering—confronting you with a diabolical marriage of order and disarray. You are programmed to go forth and multiply, but your children confound you. She saw with awful clarity that nature and nurture are not in apposition but have made some kind of provocative deal.
She offered her mother another cup of coffee. She emptied the cigarette stubs out of the saucer and replaced it at Miranda’s side. It was Saturday. The boys were off at a sporting fixture, or so they said. John was beside some reservoir, with a fishing rod, a packet of sandwiches, and a book of crossword puzzles. Sophie was upstairs, doing the exercises recommended by the lady at the clinic. Everyone was in place, except that there was no guarantee whatsoever that they would stay that way.
Chloe never was, and I did not become Miranda. If a place is haunted, it is perhaps with the ghosts of ourselves, both past and future. Not long ago, I sat in the Albert Hall, watching a production of Aida. My daughter was playing in the orchestra; her own two girls sat at my side. There was spectacle on the grand scale—an immense supine sarcophagus figure that rose up on pulleys, great sphinxes, a cavalcade of priests and soldiers carrying lit braziers, priests bearing poles with the heads of Anubis, Horus, Isis, Osiris. Watching, it seemed to me that I saw with double vision. The cast of the opera—the bronzed spear-bearers, the slaves, the white-robed attendants, the priestess with great wings—all of these seemed to drift through the revelers of New Year’s Eve 1951, through the Pierrots and the masked ladies and the 1920s flappers and the girl in jeans and a green-and-white-checked shirt who should have been able to look up and see an elderly woman gazing down at her. I felt as though I were suspended in time, existing both then and now. I knew what I know, about the years that lay between, but I was also that girl who knew nothing of all that, and for whom things might have spun off elsewhere, who might have become someone else.
The Temple of Mithras
Dear Professor Grimes,
I have read the article in The Times about your excavation of the Temple of Mithras in the City of London. I am a second-year History student at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and I am very interested in archaeology. The article mentions that you have student volunteers at your dig. Please may I come and help with the dig during the long vacation?
Yours sincerely,
Penelope Low
Dear Miss Low,
Thank you for your letter. I am pleased to hear of your interest in archaeology and would have liked to be able to invite you to join us in Queen Victoria Street, but I am afraid that we already have a full complement of student volunteers. I am so sorry.
I do hope that you will keep up your archaeological interest. You might wish to consider doing a Diploma or an M.A. in archaeology after your degree. If you should, I would be happy to give advice about the various universities at which you could do this.
Yours sincerely,
W.F. Grimes
Fictitious letters. I do not have access to Professor Grimes’s archive, and in any case letters from importunate students are unlikely to have survived, or his replies to them. But Professor Grimes is real enough, and he did indeed excavate the Temple of Mithras in 1954. And the student was real enough also. I do have vestigial access to the person who wrote a letter that ran something like that. And there is a clear-cut impression of a considerate and diplomatic reply from the professor—disappointing in that it put paid to those daydreams of a summer spent importantly scraping away in the Roman remains, but flattering in its concern for my future. His suggestion was never followed up. I did not go to Durham or to Cambridge to confirm that archaeological bent, in which case the forking path could have led to many places. Instead, I got myself a rather dead-end job after I took my degree, married young, and, eventually, became a novelist, which had never been on the cards, or so it seemed. But archaeology has played a theme song all my life.
The Temple of Mithras is real enough also. Or rather, was real. I paid it a visit the other day. But it is not there. On a terrace north of Temple Court, off Queen Victoria Street, there is a reconstruction of the ground plan of the building; the actual site lies beneath the foundations of the neighboring fourteen-story office block. Buildings rear up all around, traffic flows; the Walbrook, beside which the Mithraeum stood, is gone. The Museum of London has a display of objects found on the temple site: marvelous marble heads—bearded Serapis, fine-featured Minerva, the torso of a river god. They seem more actual and permanent, there in their glass case, than that 1950s excavation, my twenty-one-year-old self, and the kindly Professor Grimes.
The distorting
feature of anyone’s perception of their own life is that you are the central figure. Me; my life. But nobody else sees it thus. For others, you are peripheral. You may indeed be of significance to them—of great significance, perhaps—but equally you may make barely an impression; either way, you are not the seeing eye. You are an adjunct, a bit player.
So in the interests of truth and reality, most of these alternative lives of mine abandon the solipsistic vision. I am around, but shunted to one side. Stepping in as the novelist, I have woven myself into the general cast—an aspect of a narrative, which is all that any of us can be.
It is 1973. We are on a hilltop somewhere in southern England. Or rather, they are: this group of people apparently engaged in some random earth-moving operation. The hilltop is a mess, pockmarked with holes, scarred by long gashes in the turf, littered with buckets and wheelbarrows and a couple of tents and a smaller structure and a canary yellow JCB. And people: a group, of varying ages—one gray-headed man, three in their thirties or forties (one man, two women), a handful of young figures of both sexes. An anthropologist would be puzzled about the composition of this gathering, the kinship implications. What do they have to do with one another? And what are they up to, anyway?
There is a fine view from the hilltop—green distances all around, ridged with the dark lines of hedges, the whole complex, eloquent mosaic of English rural landscape. The hill itself has a curious tendency to undulate, up here at its crest; the turf rolls up into ridges, the ground does not seem to be behaving quite as it should, there is a sense of irregularity, of interference.
And that is of course the whole point. This is August 1973, but it is also the first century AD, and very many other points in time as well.
Never take anything at face value, thinks Alice. Nothing is ever quite what it seems. She thinks this as she emerges from the Elsan, which commands a particularly fine view, of the dig itself against the backdrop of landscape melting away toward a hazy horizon. There is a stiff breeze, as so often up here. She stands for a moment, looking at the chaos of the site, which makes a sort of sense to her by now; she stands there in the summer wind, with a kestrel floating at eye level and great luminous cathedrals of cumulus cloud passing overhead, and she thinks about violence. Just here, where they are digging, the ground whispers of violence. Blows and blood and screams and pain are hidden a few feet below the turf, in which pretty blue harebells grow, and cowslips and eyebright. This violence is silenced. The whispered testimony is all that is left of it—the sword hilt that was found in the main trench yesterday and that prompted several celebratory rounds in the White Hart that evening, the bones that are being exposed every day, many of them bearing significant grooves and fractures, the purposeful barbs of arrowheads, the sling balls. Something went on here. Something grim and final.
Other things are going on now. From where she stands, she can see that Luke and Laura are working side by side over by the rampart. Mike Chambers and Professor Sampson are conferring outside the big tent. Professor Sampson turns suddenly and goes inside. Mike Chambers walks off, fast.
Alice registers these conjunctions, but she is thinking about this deceptive place, this tranquil vista. You are looking at mayhem, all over Wiltshire and Dorset and Somerset, those calm green counties with their sleepy villages and the cricket pitches and the primary school playgrounds and the pubs with the hanging baskets that drip petunias and lobelia. Surface veneer, all of it. Dig a few feet and you are into bloodshed. The arrowheads and the axes and the swords and the daggers. The Stonehenge skeleton with the flint barb in its ribs and the bones at Maiden Castle, chopped about by sword blows, and the split skulls here at Cornbury Hill. This landscape is howling, if you listen.
But all that is academic now, in every sense. It is fodder for books and articles and conference papers; it will bolster CVs and job applications. The disheveled topography of the dig, with its pits and trenches, has reduced the evidence of what happened here to an assemblage of plans and labeled objects. Alice is no longer shocked or stirred when she sees another of those battered bones; she achieves the proper level of professional excitement when the word goes out that they have another sword blade, or a spearhead. It is only at night that violence simmers in her dreams.
Mike Chambers is beside Luke and Laura now, saying something. He points to the main trench. Luke gets up, rather slowly, and walks away. Professor Sampson comes out of the tent and looks at the horizon, where dark clouds are massing.
Alice is twenty years old and does not expect to live for very long. She does not believe that the world will go on for much longer. She is waiting for the bomb to drop. Each time she sees the word “nuclear” in the newspaper she feels that lead sinker in the pit of her stomach. She has marched for CND, of course, she has done her bit, but deep down she knows that it can do no good. The world is hurtling to its fate, and she with it; everything is in the lap of the gods—or, rather, it is in the hands of frenzied generals and mad statesmen.
Doing archaeology should concentrate the mind. You should be able to take the long view. Sub specie aeternitatis. All these extinguished cultures, all these vanished people, leaving nothing behind except various muddles of stone and a great many broken pots and hunks of metal and a scatter of bones, which gives employment to the likes of Professor Sampson and Penny Sampson and Mike Chambers and June Hammond. But somehow it doesn’t work like that; the long view is neither bracing nor consolatory—it simply makes Alice think that it is pretty thick to have been born into the generation that will see the end of the world. “We who live at the end of time.” Where did she read this? Who said it? One of the monks at Lindisfarne, is it, waiting for the next Viking raid? Or someone expecting the millennium, in AD 999? Whatever, she knows how they felt.
Penny Sampson walks toward the tent, carrying a bucket. She passes her husband; they do not speak to each other.
Alice heads back to the small tent. She is working here today with Eva, sifting material from postholes. Eva has her period, which means that she is getting stomach cramps, and wears a pained, stoical expression. You become very intimate with other people’s physical condition under these circumstances, striving away alongside all day and then sleeping together at night. Alice sleeps with Eva and Laura in the infants’ classroom of the village primary school that has been turned into a hostel and the dig’s command center. Luke, Peter, and Brian have another classroom, while Guy Lambert is on his own in a third, June Hammond has the sick bay, and Mike Chambers gets the teachers’ room to himself, with its attendant cloakroom. The rest of them use the children’s cloakroom, with much jollity about the pint-sized toilets intended for the infants. One of the school dinner ladies is earning some holiday money by coming in to do breakfast, and they are each provided with a bag of sandwiches and fruit to take up to the dig.
The Sampsons are staying at the pub. Professor and Mrs.; Paul and Penny. It is apparently all right to call them that, except that in his case you somehow don’t. He is not exactly matey. Perfectly polite, but in that “us and them” kind of way. It is clear that he sees students as a separate breed. When he explains something, it is in a brisk, functional manner—enough information for people to be briefed and efficient, but that’s all. Whereas Mike Chambers gets all expansive and enthusiastic; he’s the other kind of archaeologist, all beard and bonhomie. He’s a field man, it seems, whereas Professor Sampson is a theorist. Alice did get one of his books out of the library, but she found it hard going—all graphs and diagrams and tables.
Penny Sampson is a lot younger than he is. Around forty, whereas he must be going on for sixty. Apparently she is wife number three—she was a student on his M.A. course, way back. You wouldn’t have thought he’d be a lady-killer—three wives—but there’s no accounting for taste. She doesn’t actually have a job, it seems—not as such. The others here have university posts, or they aspire to, like Guy, or they move from dig to dig, like June, but Penny Sampson’s always been a sort of assistant to her husband,
working with him on digs and then helping with the deskwork afterward, getting it all written up. She’s pleasant enough, but seems a bit semidetached, as though her mind might be on something else a lot of the time.
Archaeologists always marry each other; they never meet anyone else. Mike Chambers said that in the pub one night, laughing. The Sampsons weren’t around. “Speak for yourself,” June Hammond had snapped. There’s a lot of to-and-fro between those two. He winds her up, and then she gets stroppy. But he’s like that with everyone. He isn’t married himself, it turns out. Nor is she.
June has come on this dig because Iron Age hill forts are her special interest. She is small and stocky, like a pit pony, and as tough as anything. She can move stuff like nobody’s business. Mike said, “We don’t need the JCB when we’ve got June,” which didn’t go down all that well.
And then there is Guy Lambert, who is a Ph.D. student, which puts him in a sort of no-man’s-land between the professionals and the students, though of course he intends to be an archaeologist. The students are the bottom of the hierarchy—the six of them who have signed on for the whole of the dig, and the handful of others who drift in for a few days or so, a bunch of sixth-formers from the local comprehensive, a couple of French girls who are students of some colleague of Mike’s, various others.
We’re the labor force, thinks Alice. Cheap labor, at that, but we’re all volunteers and there’s something in it for us, too. It’ll look good on our CVs, or we’re doing it to please our parents, like Laura, or we’re at a loose end, like Peter and Brian, or we’ve been told to, like the sixth-formers, or we’re just interested, like me. Actually, everyone gets interested, to a greater or lesser degree. It would be hard not to—even Laura got quite excited when June uncovered the shield boss. And everyone reacts to the bones; Peter and Brian make macabre jokes, and Laura comes over squeamish, or she did at first, but now even she is pretty blasé. We’re the old hands, the veterans; we even get asked to keep an eye on the new-comers, to see that they’re doing things right.
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