Making It Up

by Penelope Lively

  They are here for six weeks, the duration of the dig. Two of those weeks have already passed, and now it feels as though they have always been here. Everything is entirely familiar: the camp beds in the primary school are no longer so hard, muscles have become used to kneeling or squatting all day, wind and rain are ignored. They know each other with an odd intensity; the outside world has come to seem irrelevant. And something strange has happened to time: it proceeds neither fast nor slow but seems to have become an entity, unrelated to normal days or weeks. They are in a time scale that is specific to the dig. Which is apt, thinks Alice, given the way history treats time, chopping it all up into sections.

  Prehistory has to be neatly divided into segments, and laid out in order: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age. They had to do that before anyone could get a grip on it; they had to establish a chronology. And the system fosters an entire way of thinking; you even look at the present century in terms of decades—the twenties, the thirties, the forties . . . Each with a particular climate and some kind of logo—a flapper doing the Charleston for the twenties, Hitler’s ranting face for the thirties, the blitzed facade of a building for the forties. And here they were now in the seventies, which are as yet too close up and intimate to have acquired a flavor. Alice supposes that she must be a child of the seventies—you are deemed to have sprung from the decade of your youth. Does she feel attuned to the times? Well, not particularly. She does not like pop music and she would hate to go to a music festival. She has never tried pot or anything else. She does not feel impelled to explore her sexuality. She is not a virgin, but she cannot chalk up a list of partners, nor would she wish to. She assumes that she has not yet come across the right bloke, but supposes that she will do so one day. Compared with many of her peers, she is in the slow lane, which does perhaps indicate a certain lack of accord with the spirit of the times. She thinks she might have slotted in rather better with the twenties; she has always rather liked the look of that period—the chunky little cars and the girls in frocks and the wind-up gramophones.

  Alice finds that she does a lot of thinking, as she kneels and scrapes up there on the hill. She thinks about the bomb, as always, and about the people they are digging up, for whom the Romans were presumably their version of the bomb, because it is the Romans who stormed the hill fort, left arrowheads and spear shafts, provoked sling stones. Other people up here, back then, were also waiting for nemesis. But she thinks too about the others on the dig, because you cannot help but be involved when you are all flung together like this. She thinks how assorted they are, whereas the people up here waiting for the Romans would have been very assimilated, all living the same sort of life, with the same sort of experiences and expectations. Alice, who grew up in Enfield and went to the grammar school, can hardly imagine what it would have been like to be Laura, whose home is called the Old Rectory and who went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Or Mike Chambers, who comes from County Durham and don’t you forget it, and whose father was a miner.

  Alice’s father works in a bank. His world is all about money. When he picks up a newspaper he always turns first to those columns of small print at the back. When he is with his cronies, they talk about the market and the pound and the dollar and stuff that sends Alice out of the room. Money is boring. Money is so boring. And people should not be preoccupied with money.

  Actually, she is coming to realize, everyone is preoccupied with money. Certainly, up here on the hill money is a frequent topic. Professor Sampson and Mike Chambers, who are joint directors of the dig, are concerned about the funding. Resources are stretched to the limit, which is why they have only six weeks. Professor Sampson and Mike can frequently be seen poring over a sheet of figures, in the White Hart of an evening.

  Peter and Brian are skint. They are trying to save their subsistence pay—the beer money, as it is called—for a spree to Paris planned for the last week of the vacation. So they nurse a pint and a packet of crisps for the entire evening, having eaten as much breakfast as they can and made their sandwiches last all day. Luke is worse than skint, according to him; the bank is getting nasty about his overdraft and he owes his mother and his aunt and the college buttery and Heffers. Not that that stops him making a good evening of it in the pub, or running that beat-up old MG that sits outside the primary school attracting much interest from the village. Eva is worried about whether or not she is going to get a grant to do her M.A. Laura has well-upholstered parents and doesn’t have to worry about grants, but she wants to go to Spain with her boyfriend and the parents are getting tight-lipped about providing the funds for this; she is on the dig to demonstrate to them how industrious and committed she can be. She phones the boyfriend from the pub each evening to complain.

  Alice herself has no surplus funds, but neither is she in debt and she knows that she can get by on her allowance because she is careful and provident. But in this climate of financial crisis that is clearly a rather boring thing to do—more boring than to be obsessed about money. So she bows to the prevailing culture and trades horror stories of indigence.

  Money is in the air, up here on the hill. Not as such—nobody needs ready cash and it is seldom seen; you would hardly know that this group was part of a cash economy. Indeed, exchange and barter seem more likely; there is a good deal of give-and-take, over the sandwiches and apples and soft drinks, during the midday break. But money strums away there in the background, lest anyone forget where and when they are. They may be up on a hillside with their hands in the detritus of the Iron Age, but it is still 1973, with all that that implies.

  How did money rate up here on the hill two thousand years ago? Was their world all about money? It was certainly about survival—about enough to eat, about cattle and crops and power, and that’s money in another form, thinks Alice.

  Occasionally, they dig up money. There are two Celtic coins and several Roman ones in the trays back at the school, neatly packaged and labeled along with all the other finds—the shards, the bones (ox, pig, sheep, human), the spindle whorls, the needles, the inscrutable lumps of metal which are in fact belt buckles or harness fittings or hilt segments or cuirass hinges or awls or gouges or pins. Artifacts. The position of each artifact has been planned—the place where it lay until one of them loosened the dirt around it with a trowel. This is the static record, and it is not the past at all but the present, since these artifacts exist today. Alice managed enough of Professor Sampson’s book, with its indigestible diagrams and graphs, to learn that the task of archaeology is to ask questions about the past of this material which is no longer in the past but very much present. The archaeologist is interested in the dynamics of past society; the challenge is to find links between statics and dynamics, to make assumptions about the middle range, which is the space between the two. These assumptions guide the archaeologist from observation of the static artifacts existing in the present to general theories about the dynamics of the past.

  But actually, thinks Alice, it is the other way round. Sorry, Professor Sampson. The dynamic is what is going on now, here, today, during these weeks that we are fossicking away up here. It is whatever happened back then that is static, unchangeable, finished with—whereas we are in this interesting capricious dynamic in which the story has yet to unfold. Luke is trying to get off with Laura. Mike Chambers fancies Laura, too, but he thinks no one has noticed. There is definitely bad blood between Professor Sampson and Mike Chambers—words in the trench yesterday that stopped just short of a full-scale row. And what is it with the Sampsons? You never see them together—they hardly speak to each other. None of this will feature in the account of the dig that will eventually be published, but it is this brew of human relations that is the narrative, the dynamic.

  Alice is back at the small tent. Eva is looking martyred. She says she thinks she may have to ask to go back to the school early. Professor Sampson is approaching, to check up on what they have achieved today.

  Paul Sampson stares intently at
an artifact. As a processual archaeologist—indeed, as one of the pioneers of processual archaeology—Paul knows full well that the interest of this object is its context in the past. The artifact itself is in a sense neither here nor there—or, rather, it is very much here but no longer there, which is why it is an enigma. He must decode this object—wring from the uncommunicating contemporary static in front of him the teasing dynamic of the past.

  In fact, the artifact does not require very much by way of decoding, since it is all too recognizably his wife’s spectacle case. The green plastic thing in which she keeps her dark glasses. But why is it open, and lying half under the bed? And why is there a further challenging artifact—her blue T-shirt—on the floor by the dressing table? And why is the wardrobe door open? And why, above all, are these objects here, while his wife is not? The last time he saw the blue T-shirt it was on Penny’s back, an hour or so ago, up on the hill. And the glasses were in their case, which was on the dashboard of the car, and the car is no longer outside the White Hart, but entirely absent.

  Even the most primitive exercise in middle-range assumption suggests that Penny has gone off somewhere in the car, having changed out of the T-shirt that she had worn all day—hurriedly dropping it on the floor and snatching up her dark glasses, allowing the case to fall under the bed.

  Why? Where?

  The principal guest bedroom of the White Hart has a double bed that sags disconcertingly in the middle, a walnut veneer wardrobe, a scratched deal dressing table, a violently patterned carpet and pink floral curtains. It is suffused with stale cooking smells, as is the rest of the pub. In fact, not much cooking goes on at the White Hart, since the food—on which members of the dig depend in the evenings—consists mainly of Scotch eggs, plough-man’s, quiche with coleslaw and a tomato, chicken in the basket, or baked potato with cheese and chutney. The smell seems intrinsic, and indeed is vaguely reassuring. Mike Chambers calls it a cultural indicator: “You know you’re in England by that smell.”

  Neither Paul nor Penny Sampson is dismayed by the facilities of the White Hart. They have known worse—much worse. They have experienced remote Turkish inns, they have camped in Libya and Greece and Scotland. Penny has not bolted from the White Hart as soon as she could after the end of the day’s dig in order to sample the fleshpots of Shaftesbury or Blandford Forum. Nor has she gone shopping, because her purse is lying on the dressing table.

  So where has she gone?

  Paul looks around the room. Penny’s anorak hangs on the back of the door, but in any case those black clouds he watched earlier have dispersed—the threat of rain has passed. Her brush and comb are on the dressing table. Her nightdress protrudes from under the pillow. There is a pile of books on her bedside table—paperback novels for the most part. Paul does not read novels himself, of course, and finds her addiction vaguely irritating. Surely there are better ways of spending her time? She has been reading other things lately, too. He can see authorial names in the pile that give him a tingle of annoyance: Germaine Greer, Kate Millett. He has found an attitude of amused skepticism to be the best thing where this sort of stuff is concerned.

  Paul has a wash and goes down to the bar. He will have to do some hard talking to Chambers this evening, who is becoming rather too independent and high-handed. This dig is under joint direction. Chambers had no business sinking that trench without consultation. He does not appreciate the importance of more work in the flotation tank on material from the best stratified layers. It was a mistake to team up with him. He has a considerable reputation but no sense of procedure. And an exasperating personality.

  Sampson is getting up his nose. Tight-arsed bugger. Okay, so he’s considered the bee’s knees these days where theory’s concerned, but his fieldwork is nothing to write home about. And he’s a menace on site—always on about how we need to have a meeting about this, and we haven’t yet agreed the agenda for that. We’d grind to a halt if things were done his way.

  Mike is enjoying the dig. He always enjoys digs. Digs are what he is for. And this is an absolutely prime site, one that he’s been dying to tackle. Plus it’s not a bad group, Sampson aside. Old June is all right, even if she can’t always take a joke. Guy Lambert seems a decent sort, and prepared to work his socks off. Mrs. S—Penny—is a bit subdued but who wouldn’t be, married to that bloke? The students are the usual mixed bunch. Reasonable lineup of girls, couple of nice enough lads. That Cambridge twerp Luke is a bit of a pain in the neck, with his public school drawl and his old banger of an MG. Daddy’s a high court judge—that was made much of on his CV, and Mummy’s some sort of second cousin twice removed of Paul Sampson, which is why young Luke is getting his hands dirty on Cornbury Hill. Something to keep the boy occupied and out of trouble for a few weeks of the vacation. Luke knows sod-all about prehistory and cares less, but that expensive education has taught him how to lay on the charm. June has fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, the silly girl—doesn’t seem to notice that it’s never Luke heaving the big barrow, and that when it’s raining Luke’s got himself the cushy job pot-washing in the tent. Well, I’ve got news for young Luke. Guess who’s on Elsan duty tomorrow.

  Alice does not want to be an archaeologist. She is interested all right, but some basic instinct for self-preservation tells her that this is not for her. She has no idea what she does want to do—if indeed the bomb spares her for long enough to do anything—but she knows that she lacks a certain fervor that is required, and that she senses in all the professionals on the dig, however variously manifested. Admittedly, you can apparently be an archaeologist and seldom dig at all, if ever. You can spend your time in a lab, assessing bones or snails or pollen, or scrutinizing bits of pottery. You can behave more like an anthropologist and batten onto such hunter-gatherers as still exist around the globe, and note the physical effects on the environment of butchering or cooking, with a view to applying these insights to interpretation of the archaeological record. Actually, Alice doesn’t think she would much fancy that—hunter-gatherers tend to live in the most disagreeable circumstances, by all accounts; Cornbury Hill on a wet day is bad enough. She tries to envisage the Sampsons in the Kalahari or Alaska, or indeed Mike; no such experience has been claimed.

  Professor Sampson had a face like thunder in the pub this evening. First he and Mike were cloistered together in a corner of the saloon bar for an hour or so, not looking as though they were enjoying each other’s company, and then Penny Sampson suddenly appeared and her husband got up and kind of herded her upstairs. Later, she came down by herself and ate a Scotch egg with June.

  June wonders if something is up with Penny Sampson. She seems on edge this evening, and earlier June saw her getting into the car, having rushed off from the dig as soon as they’d finished for the day. Said she was meeting a friend. “Did you find your friend all right?” June asked kindly, but Penny didn’t seem to want to go into that, so they had something to eat and talked shop. Paul was nowhere to be seen, though Mike Chambers was much in evidence, as usual, chatting up anyone who came into the bar and showing off like crazy if they displayed any interest in the dig.

  From time to time June would like to clobber Mike. That stream of not-so-funny jokes. The professional northerner stance that assumes the moral high ground because he’s more working-class more right-on more rooted more plainspoken than anyone else. Which means he’s entitled to make fun of anyone with a posh accent, such as Luke. It’s okay for him to tease Luke by imitating the way he talks—that officer-class voice, Mike calls it, with a grin and the twinkly look that’s meant to say—just having a laugh, nothing personal, okay? But there’d be all hell to pay if anyone started taking the mickey where he’s concerned.

  Plus, she can’t stand all that macho stuff. Strutting about the place in too-tight jeans, the testosterone radiating off him. His favorite word is “wimp”—anyone’s a wimp when he wants to have a go at them. Always with the grin and the twinkle, of course. And he’s an out-and-out male chauvinist pig, no qu
estion. He likes women all right, but for one thing only. He fancies Laura, as does Luke, which is another reason Mike has got it in for Luke.

  In June’s opinion, Luke is a really nice boy. Okay—he’s public school and his dad’s a judge, but that’s hardly his fault. He’s got manners, which is more than you can say for many students, and he’s helpful and friendly.

  June has never had an academic post, but she has dug alongside so many students that she considers herself an expert on the species. This lot are a pretty reasonable bunch, in fact—Luke especially, and Alice, who is a bright, serious girl and genuinely interested in the work. Peter and Brian are your typical twenty-year-old lads, all chat and cheek. Laura is a bit of a home-counties princess, but she is pulling her weight. Eva is rather a whiner, always fussing about her grant application. She wants to do an M.A. in archaeology and anthropology, which makes her the only one of them for whom this dig is a really significant CV item, and that is very much how she sees it. June has already been lined up as a referee. Eva really wants Paul Sampson, of course, but doesn’t quite like to ask.

  Paul took her upstairs as soon as she came back, and required an explanation. He needed her to help him with sorting the seeds and snails sieved in the flotation tanks, and she was nowhere to be found. The bedroom in chaos; the car gone. Why? Where? The day’s work is not at an end when we come down from the hill; she should know that.