Making It Up

by Penelope Lively

  One of those women, apparently. This so-called group. Happened to be down this way and wanted to meet up. He had made it clear that there was no time for this kind of thing in the middle of a dig. And then she had declined to help with the sorting, said she had a headache, and went down to the bar.

  From time to time Paul remarks that his wife has apparently joined the sisterhood. He says this with a grin, which can be interpreted as benignly tolerant or sardonic, according to inclination. If the other person appears baffled, he spells it out: Penny is displaying feminist tendencies. But he does not pursue the subject. He lets it fall aside—a matter for observation, merely. If someone seems keen to develop the point—women, for instance—he listens with a quizzical look on his face, a faint smile, one eyebrow lightly cocked. Those who know him well are familiar with that expression: students, colleagues, wives. When the other person is through with whatever point they had to make he comes back with some quick and dismissive rejoinder and takes the conversation elsewhere. So much for that.

  Alice cannot imagine being thirty, like June, let alone forty or fifty or sixty, and really old is quite inconceivable. Since she is unlikely to get there this is irrelevant, but she does find herself thinking about age, as she scrabbles away up on the hill.

  The bones that they find are those of people who died young; life was short back then. Someone as old as Paul Sampson would have stuck out a mile; a person in his forties like Mike would have been thought elderly. Alice has a great-aunt who is ninety-three and still expressing forceful opinions. If it were not for the bomb, Alice too could presumably expect that she might fetch up thus.

  The bomb is special to us lot, thinks Alice, but of course there has always been something around to give people the chop. You got picked off by an arrow or a spear, or you starved or you died of disease. We’ve got antibiotics and immunization but we’ve got the bomb too, so they kind of cancel each other out in terms of progress.

  It is a golden day, up here this morning. A blue sky with rippling veils of cirrus cloud, a soft stir in the wind, bees and butterflies at work on the grassy hillside. The fields round about are studded with sheep, black-and-white cows are spread out in drifts against the green. Hard to believe that anything nasty ever took place here. But it did, it did. Witness those gnarled fragments of weaponry lined up on the trestle tables down at the school, witness the bones.

  But those people must also have looked up and thought: Oh, it’s a nice day. Or something along those lines. They must have noticed the wildflowers and the butterflies, even if they didn’t make lists and check up on the names, like Alice does, which is profoundly twentieth-century behavior. Cattle would have been of extreme interest to them, though not in any aesthetic sense. And they would above all have been intensely conscious of other people, of one another. The hill would have been a hotbed of interaction, of observation, just as it is now.

  Alice reckons that Luke and Laura have done it. They’ve been to bed together. There’s that look about both of them—a sort of heightened, satisfied look. And they’ve been rather pointedly not paying too much attention to each other this morning. How did they manage it? Where? Certainly not in the school—we’d all have known. They must have gone off somewhere in Luke’s car. And, yes, come to think of it, one didn’t notice either of them around yesterday evening. Peter and Brian were in the pub and I went for a walk with Eva, but where were Luke and Laura? In a field somewhere, presumably—bedded down in a hay meadow, all very Thomas Hardy. Well, at least Laura won’t be a fallen woman, wandering along the hedgerows with a baby in her arms. Probably she won’t get pregnant. She’s on the pill anyway, in honor of the boyfriend—she told me that on the first night here. Her pills are stuck up on the shelf in our room, so that she won’t forget. Will she be mentioning Luke to the boyfriend? Laura believes that other people should be absolutely open and candid with each other—she explained all that when we were working in Trench B the first week, apropos of the boyfriend and the fact that they’ve agreed not to get engaged at the moment, which doesn’t mean that they may not do so in the future, simply that they both think it’s too early for an absolute commitment. But of course they sleep together, that goes without saying; Laura thinks that sex should just be free and natural. I wonder if the boyfriend will agree.

  They’re fucking, those two. It’s bloody obvious. The looks they give each other. You can practically smell the sex.

  All right, all right—I’m an envious bugger of forty-five and I wouldn’t mind getting into her pants myself. Not that she’s ever going to realize that, and nor will anyone else—I’ve always known better than to make a fool of myself over students.

  Pity June turns me right off. No joy there.

  Apparently a very famous archaeologist is going to pay a visit to the dig. A Grand Old Man. Alice has heard of Sir John Causley, and so has Eva, but none of the other students have. The prospect of this visitor has both Professor Sampson and Mike Chambers in quite a stew. There is much polishing up of the site; a new trench has been opened. Alice is given the task of redoing some of the more scruffy labels, because she has nice handwriting, which meant a peaceful day on her own down at the school. The material on the table is more orderly in consequence, and she has learned a lot in the process, such as how to distinguish a pin from an awl, or bronze from iron when both are lumps of corroded metal. She doubts if this knowledge is going to be of any use in later life, but since she fully accepts that knowledge is to be valued for its own sake, that is not an issue. She is not after all studying history at university as a vocational training.

  The children at Little Cornbury primary school have also been studying history. This is evident from the artwork around the room. Greek vase figures have been most convincingly reproduced by Sharon Curtis, age ten, and various others; there is a plywood model of the Parthenon, mathematically exact, that must have required many painstaking hours; portrait drawings of the Greek gods flank an impressive clay head of Zeus, with beard and flowing locks. Clearly, history has been good fun. Which is fine, thinks Alice, arranging another arrowhead in its little plastic pouch: thus do you engage the interest of ten-year-olds. She wishes she had been at a school like this.

  On the other side of the room is Professor Sampson’s table with the material garnered from the flotation tanks. Alice is not fond of the flotation tanks, but has gamely done her stint when required. You empty bags of spoil into a sieve which is set over a forty-gallon oil drum, and you then run water through this from the hosepipe that has been set up. Despite wearing waders, you get extremely wet, and your hands freeze. The resulting detritus left in the sieve is then taken down to the school, where Professor Sampson will sort through it in search of the emmer wheat, snail shells, and other clues as to diet and environmental conditions in the area back in the first century AD. Snail shells are particularly eloquent, it seems. The whole process is time-consuming, and a source of dissension between Paul Sampson and Mike Chambers. Mike wants to concentrate on stripping as much of the site as possible in the little time that they have. Professor Sampson wants valuable evidence about climate and environment.

  Paul would also like evidence that Chambers sees this dig as a joint venture. The man’s attitude seems to be that he is entitled to proceed exactly as he pleases, regardless of Paul’s views. He makes it manifestly clear that he has no interest in examination of the wider context of the site. Open trenches right, left, and center, grab as many finds as you possibly can in the time, and that’s it, as far as Chambers is concerned. He is apparently impervious to reasoned argument. Sits there with that grin on his face and then says, “Okay, okay—let’s just play it by ear, shall we?” And the next day you find he’s putting another trench through the rampart, and taking students off the flotation tank.

  They could do with a few more hands, the way things are going. Paul regards students as a necessary evil. They are an essential workforce, but they require supervision, take up time, and contribute an unwelcome element of
levity and personal interaction. He is careful to keep himself expediently distanced from them, unlike Chambers, who spends half the day backslapping and then holds court in the pub every evening. Paul just about knows their names, after three weeks, and that is quite enough and all that is required.

  Time was, Paul was not quite so indifferent to students. Penny was of course a student on his M.A. course when he first met her. But that was a long time ago and irrelevant and in any case he is annoyed with Penny at the moment.

  Alice finds herself cast in the role of confidante. Laura thinks that she may be falling in love with Luke, which creates a problem: she might not after all want to go to Spain with the boyfriend, in which case she need never have come on this dig in order to impress her parents. Alice points out that if she had not come on the dig she would never have met Luke. This elegant complication silences Laura, but only briefly; she then has the idea that perhaps she could go to Spain with Luke. That would kind of straighten things out. What does Alice think?

  Alice has no thoughts on the matter because at this moment her trowel reveals a curious-looking metal object. They are working in Trench B, which runs diagonally across part of the site and through the complex of hut circles marked out by postholes. Any out-of-the-ordinary find must be reported, so Alice goes off in search of Mike Chambers, who joins them in the trench and examines the object.

  “Well, I know what that is,” says Laura. “It’s a nappy pin. You see them exactly the same in Boots.”

  “It’s a pin all right,” says Mike. “But forget nappies. They would have used this to fix a cloak or other garment. Well done, Alice—that’s a nice find.”

  They all three contemplate the pin, and Alice notes that Mike is doing his best not to contemplate Laura, who is wearing a tight skimpy top that leaves her with bare shoulders and well-exposed cleavage.

  “Okay, girls, carry on,” says Mike, rather briskly. He leaves them, and presently they hear him joshing Luke, over in the other trench. He is calling Luke a wimp for using a kneeler. There is a tacit code of practice on the dig that while it is all right for girls to use kneelers, any male definitely loses face by so doing. Consequently, all the boys have sore knees, and Mike himself is no doubt heading for a major arthritis problem in the fullness of time. Never mind, honor is at stake.

  Laura listens to Mike and rolls her eyes. She says, “Really, he is a bit much, isn’t he? Luke calls him Asterix the Gaul.” She yawns. “I couldn’t sleep last night. That’s a symptom, isn’t it?”

  Laura is not the only one to confide in Alice. Eva is not exercised about love or Spanish holidays, but she is getting these headaches, and also she is afraid that the hard bed in the school is affecting a problem she has with her back. Plus, she thinks that the principal of her college, on whom she depends for a good reference in support of her grant application, does not like her. It seems to Alice that possibly Eva is not cut out for a life in the front line of archaeology, but she refrains from saying so. People do what they are going to do.

  Or do they? When Alice was ten she was going to be a vet. At sixteen it was social work, and at eighteen she fancied something in Africa with Oxfam, and now she hasn’t got the faintest idea what she wants to do. The future—given that there is one—seems like some impenetrable fog into which you are required to plunge, blindly forging ahead in some direction that leads goodness knows where. Alice has always been a careful person, and the awful randomness of this arrangement offends her. She rather envies those who are carelessly unconcerned, like Laura, who might try to get into the BBC, or publishing, and actually would like to get married and have children but of course you can’t go round saying that in this day and age. Or June, who started out teaching in a comprehensive school and was seduced into archaeology by a chance visit to a local dig, which spurred her out of teaching and into a different life. “Thank heaven,” says June. “If I hadn’t happened to drop by that site and got totally hooked I’d probably still be battling with fourteen-year-olds. Pure luck.”

  June does believe in luck. Or rather, she can’t see that anything much else directs what happens to you. Luck, and hard graft. June is a worker, always has been. She can’t abide skivers and slackers, and you get a few of those on most digs, though not too much on this one. This is a funny sort of dig. Each one has its individual climate, and the weather on this is particularly unpredictable, and that is not just the rain. Mike and the Prof are at loggerheads more often than not. The Prof and his wife don’t speak to each other. A couple of the kids are very obviously having it off—not that that’s either here or there, but it does rather thicken the atmosphere.

  And Mike gets on her nerves, which is a distraction. June is here to work, not to be riled by some testosterone-driven director. Okay, he’s a good archaeologist, and actually June prefers his methodology to that of the Prof, with his environmental obsessions, but when it comes to people management, Mike is abysmal.

  June simply wants to dig. She loves it. She gets all her thrills from digging: the point when you can suddenly make sense of what you’re looking at, the moment your trowel comes up against something intriguing. All she ever wants to do is to dig. She doesn’t want a posh job, or any more money than just enough to live on. She just wants to go on as she is now, hiring herself out month by month, year by year, into a future which she never considers. What’s the point? It will arrive anyway, bringing with it whatever the fates have laid up for you.

  I’m going to make it rule number one on any bloody dig of mine in future that female personnel cover up. They can wear burkas. No tits on view, no bums, no flesh. And anyone suspected of copulation will be dealt with accordingly. Fuck the permissive society.

  Mike means this, and would like to blaze away along these lines right out loud, though he has more sense of self-preservation than to do so. He has a strong streak of old-fashioned working-class Puritanism which is as offended by the spirit of the times as another part of him is gratified by the license that allows sexual indulgence on all fronts. This discord makes for some confused reactions from time to time.

  There is an element of subversion about this dig, no question. Though Mike cannot quite nail what it is; just a feeling that things, or people, could go off the rails in some way. And it is only a couple of days till the grand panjandrum shows up for this state visit, which is seen as a high compliment and has Sampson running round like a scalded cat. Mike himself has been mildly cynical in public about Sir John Causley’s impending arrival, pointing out that the old boy hasn’t had a major excavation to his name for decades, much of his work is now quite outdated, and this is just a photo opportunity. There has been talk of the local newspaper covering the occasion. Privately, Mike is rather looking forward to making himself known to Causley, who remains an influential figure, and he knows that a good spread in the local rag, with some nice shots of the site, would be advantageous all round, even if it does bring a few gawpers in its wake.

  Penny Sampson has gone. Just like that. Yesterday she was here, and today she isn’t. Nobody seems to know if she’s coming back or not. June has taken over her area.

  Alice has already noticed the way in which, on the dig, news hops from person to person, changing shape in the process. In this instance, Penny Sampson has gone to visit a sick mother, it is said. No, she is ill herself—having a breakdown. She’ll be back at the end of the week. No, she won’t.

  Paul puts the envelope from his wife under a pile of shirts in the top drawer of the chest. He would not wish anyone to see this, under any circumstances. For some reason, it is more insulting and exasperating to have your wife disappear to join up with a so-called women’s group than if she had run off with a lover.

  “Sick mother, my foot. She’s walked out on him,” Mike tells June, who shrugs, and refuses to comment. None of his business, nor hers.

  The dig settles to Penny Sampson’s absence. It has its own momentum, and soon it is as though she had never been. Part of an infant’s cranium is found in
one of the pits; Mike’s new rampart trench is revealing evidence of a defensive structure; Luke and Laura are caught by Mike snogging behind the tents and there are words. Mike tells them to bloody well keep that sort of activity off the site; Luke laughs and says, “Will do, squire.” Later, Laura tells Alice that it was so embarrassing, but actually quite funny too.

  Alice is aware of a kind of latent anarchy in the air. People are edgy. Professor Sampson has been tight-lipped and acerbic since his wife’s departure; he says little to anyone unless he must. Eva had a migraine and spent an entire day lying on her bed at the school. Two German students who were supposed to be joining them have sent a telegram to say that they cannot do so after all; Mike is saying that they are now seriously shorthanded and everyone is going to have to pull their finger out. And the weather is not helping. There have been twenty-four hours of continuous rain; the trenches are now quagmires and the entire site is sopping wet. The time when they were rained off was spent washing and sorting shards and doing other housekeeping chores, which meant that everyone was cheek by jowl in the tents. Mike made sure that Luke and Laura were kept as far apart as possible; in consequence they spent all day casting smoldering glances across the trestle tables. Professor Sampson stood staring morosely at the water-logged site.

  Alice cleans shards with a toothbrush. The impression given by the assembled harvest of the dig is that the ancient occupants of the hill were people who spent their time breaking crockery and losing small objects. This fits nicely with the theory of processual archaeology, she realizes, because of course this stuff has been shunted into the twentieth century and has lost all contact with its original existence. Those bits and pieces are now teasing references to their context back then. Alice marks a shard—CBH ’73—thus placing it even more firmly in this day and age, and listens to the rain hammering on the roof of the tent. Chucking down; raining stair-rods. Presumably the Celts had their own colloquialisms for bad weather. She thinks about the language that should hang in the air up here, centuries of it, the reverberations of a million exchanges about love and war, birth and death, and what to have for supper. Instead of which all that is left is this entirely tangible array of broken rubbish.