Chances

by Kate Field

  He caught me staring at him, as I studied his face, trying to reconcile the two versions of Paddy: the one who had hurt me and Caitlyn all those years ago, without any hint of remorse, and the man here now, who had given up his evening to take old people he didn’t know to the cinema. Who was the real Paddy Friel? Could he really have changed so much? He broke off what he was saying.

  ‘Is this weird?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ On so many levels. It was only a few weeks since he had been staying with me, after the sponsored walk, but this felt different; he was here because I’d asked him to be here – wanted him here? – not because there had been no other choice.

  ‘Because of us? Or because you normally do this with your man, the boor? Am I in his place?’

  I’d never done this with Rich. We’d never sat in my house together as the light faded, discussing our days and what our hopes were for tomorrow. We’d eaten together, watched television together, had sex … greater intimacies than these quiet moments with Paddy, but my emotions had never been engaged as they were now.

  ‘He’s not my man.’ I shrugged, not looking in Paddy’s direction. ‘We’re not together any more.’

  ‘Because of the woman in the pub?’

  ‘Partly.’ And partly because I had realised we weren’t compatible; because spending time with Paddy had made me realise we weren’t compatible. But I wasn’t going to explain that to Paddy.

  ‘Do you not think you might have been able to forgive him, in time? If it was a stupid mistake, and he could convince you he regretted it?’

  Now I glanced at Paddy, because I wondered why he was persisting with this; what did it matter to him whether I could forgive Rich or not? He hadn’t scrupled to share his poor opinion of him. He was leaning forward in his seat, mug clutched between his hands, watching me, a curious frown on his face.

  ‘Life’s too short to waste time on second chances,’ I said. I thought about all the things I had to look forward to: leaving work, going on the Cotswolds dig, my birthday – and then what? Finding a new career? There was so much lying ahead of me; I wasn’t going to take a step backward by getting involved with Rich again. ‘Isn’t that the point of a fortieth birthday?’ I added, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Isn’t it the perfect time to start again?’

  ‘You’re right.’ Paddy grinned, and the frown lifted. He leant forward, and clinked his mug against mine. ‘Here’s to starting again.’

  Chapter 18

  The last few weeks of the school year rushed by, and before I’d even come to terms with leaving, I was driving away for the last time, with a pot plant and a garden centre voucher as the only souvenirs of a thirteen-year career. Three days later, on a dank, drizzly Monday morning that didn’t seem a particularly auspicious start to my glittering new future, I set off to the dig in south Gloucestershire – my first step towards exploring whether this might be my new career.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d taken part in a dig in the Cotswolds. My dad had first brought me to the area, on one of our weekend excursions while Mum and Faye were busy shopping. On our way home after a walk, we’d stumbled upon the site of a Roman villa, and called in to have a look. That accidental visit had changed my life. I’d hung on every word the tour guide had uttered, fascinated by the details about how it had been discovered and the archaeological work that was still going on, and marvelling at the intricate mosaics and the artefacts that were housed in a small museum – artefacts that had survived over hundreds of years.

  My interest had been hooked from that day on, and when one summer I’d been able to spend a day volunteering there, I had known without a doubt that I wanted to carry on with this for the rest of my life. I’d even taken Paddy back to that Roman villa on one of his visits to our house, because it had been such a special place to me.

  I’d avoided going back to the area until now, fearing what painful memories might be waiting for me there, especially of Dad and of Paddy. But now, as the weather brightened and I drove through honey-stoned villages and towns, and swathes of lush, rolling countryside, instead of sadness, I was filled with an unexpected sense of contentment. I had loved the days I had spent exploring this area with Dad; those memories would always be good and precious, despite the tinge of loss. As for Paddy, we had been happy when we’d visited here, I was sure of it; in the prime of our relationship, in those glorious months when the future still seemed ours for the taking, and I had believed that our love was strong enough to withstand anything. So I let the memories in, let them play out in my mind, but it was only sadness I felt, not anger. Seeing Paddy again, spending time with him, had done me good, and helped me gain some perspective at last. We’d loved well and parted badly, but I couldn’t let the bad memories blind me to the good ones. It had all been so long ago. We were different people now. As we’d agreed that night of the cinema trip with Gran, it was time to start again.

  The dig I was joining was taking place in a field a few miles south of Cirencester, and I’d researched it extensively online. It was an amazing story. Several years ago, the owner of the field had planned to build a garage block in the grounds of his manor house, and had uncovered the remains of an ancient wall when preparing for the foundations. He had done the right thing and called in a team of archaeologists. Their investigations and subsequent excavations had confirmed this as the site of a Roman villa, one of the largest ever found in the area. It was exactly the sort of excavation and the era that I’d loved the most at university. I couldn’t wait to join in.

  I had booked a room in a nearby village pub for the two weeks I was taking part in the dig, and it was only a short drive on the Tuesday morning to our meeting place. We weren’t due to start work until nine, but I set off straight after breakfast, desperate to begin, and I soon found out that I wasn’t the only one. Even though I arrived half an hour early, there were already a few people waiting by the Portakabin that was used as a finds office, including a familiar face – my old university tutor, Christopher Porter. He spotted me as I walked towards the group and met me halfway.

  ‘Eve Roberts!’ He put out his hand and shook mine with enthusiasm. ‘I saw your name on the list and wondered if it could be the same one. How long has it been?’

  ‘Nineteen years since graduation.’ I grimaced, hearing it out loud. Where had the time gone? Back in my familiar uniform of old clothes and sturdy boots, I felt like an excited undergraduate again, not a middle-aged woman. ‘Let’s not dwell on that. How are you?’

  I was trying not to be too shocked by his appearance: his once dark hair was now pure grey and he seemed a shrunken version of the dynamic man I remembered. A shadow lurked in his eyes, a sign of sorrow that I recognised. Impulsively I reached out and squeezed his arm, releasing him from answering the question.

  ‘It’s good to see you again,’ I said. ‘This dig looks amazing. Have you worked on it before?’

  ‘Every year since it started. I’ve brought students down on field studies too. We both loved the Romans, didn’t we? So what have you been up to, Eve? Still pursuing archaeology, I hope?’

  ‘No, I haven’t been able to. My plans changed. I had family commitments …’ I stopped. I didn’t want to go into the whole history of Faye and Caitlyn here. I neither wanted nor deserved sympathy. And if this was a fresh start, I had to stop hiding behind my past. That was the whole point of coming on the dig, wasn’t it: to discover more about the Romans’ past and my future. Fortunately, Christopher was distracted by the arrival of more volunteers, and wandered away with the promise of more conversation later.

  The dig was divided into sections, and the volunteers were split into teams to work each section. One team was assigned to digging further trenches, in order to follow the external wall of the villa to see how extensive it was; the current guess was that there must have been at least twenty rooms on the ground floor. Another team was working in an area where bones had been found in previous years: identifying the animals the bones came from gave an insight int
o the diet of the people who had lived there.

  I wouldn’t have minded that job – I loved the small details about day-to-day life – but I was placed with one of the teams who were exposing more of what promised to be an amazing mosaic-tiled floor, which would probably have been at the centre of the villa. A section about three metres square had been revealed so far, and almost all the tesserae – the small pieces of stone that made up the mosaic – were still in place and had held their colours well; predominantly white, black, yellow and brown, with some small patches of red and blue in more ornate decorative sections. It looked as if the mosaic featured scenes from mythology, and the level of detail was incredible. I couldn’t wait to uncover more of it, and see if we could work out what stories were illustrated there.

  My team consisted of a young couple in their mid-twenties, two male undergraduates who were Christopher’s students, and Beverley, a single lady in her early fifties, who turned out to have come over from California to take part in this and several other digs over the summer. After brief introductions, one of the undergraduates volunteered to be in charge of drawing the plan, showing the precise locations of everything we discovered, and the rest of us entered the trench and set to work.

  My trowel fitted in my hand as if it had never left. I knelt down in the trench, pads protecting my knees, and started scraping gently at the earth that covered the next part of the mosaic. The ground was hard and dry after a spell of warm weather and at first I worked gingerly, making cautious scrapes as I found my way again. But my confidence grew with every shift of the trowel, and soon my hands were moving over the soil as easily as they had done over a computer keyboard only a few days before. Muscle memory kicked in: this was what my hands had been trained for, not typing and filing and answering the phone.

  I sat back and looked around at the various teams as they bent over their tasks with eager enthusiasm; I listened to the rhythmic clinks of trowel against stone, and I knew beyond doubt, before even half a day had passed, the answer I’d hoped attending this dig would provide. This was where I was supposed to be. This was what made me happy – what would make me happy in the future.

  I sat with Beverley during our first morning tea break, and we chatted more about our backgrounds. She was an enthusiastic amateur, and although she had no formal qualifications in archaeology, she had years of experience in taking parts in digs all over the world. The list of sites she had worked on filled me with envy; it could have been a duplicate of the itinerary that Paddy and I had planned. I both dreaded and longed to hear more about her experiences over the next couple of weeks.

  ‘You must have a remarkably understanding family,’ I said, as she mentioned her plans for the rest of the year, including four weeks in Romania in late September, where she hoped to explore both the Roman and medieval history of the country, and fit in a visit to Transylvania. ‘Don’t they mind you spending so much time away?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t have family,’ she said, smiling. ‘The folks died long ago. I never married, never had children. I can do as I please. It’s the best way to be!’

  They were lines I could have said myself; they certainly described the life I had now. I could do as I pleased. So why was there a flicker of doubt in my mind about whether it really was the best way to be? I was spared from thinking of a reply by Christopher wandering over to join us.

  ‘How are you finding it, Eve? Has it all come flooding back?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes!’ I could hardly contain my smile. ‘I’m loving it. It’s like I’ve never been away.’

  ‘Hey, do you two know each other?’ Beverley said. She turned to me. ‘I thought this was your first dig in years.’

  ‘It is. Christopher was one of my tutors at university, more years ago than either of us would like to admit.’

  ‘Eve was my star pupil,’ Christopher said, sitting down on the grass beside us. ‘She had a great eye for looking past the chaos of a site in progress and seeing the scale of what it had once been. And she was as happy working on the behind-the-scenes analysis as being on the front line of an excavation. She made the most thorough, incisive notes of anyone I’ve ever taught.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Beverley said, patting me on the shoulder. ‘It sounds like it’s a shame you gave it up. You need to get back at it! Wouldn’t you welcome her back, if she’s so great?’ she asked Christopher.

  ‘Of course I would.’ I shrank with mortification at Beverley’s less than subtle approach, but Christopher didn’t seem to mind. ‘We’re always looking for keen postgraduate students. I’d love to see you back, Eve, if you’re interested.’

  Interested? I could think of nothing I’d like more, and for a moment my head swam with possibilities: of returning to university and working with Christopher again; of studying a Master’s degree and perhaps going on to a PhD … I had the money to allow me some time out from work, and what better way to spend it than by attaining qualifications that would allow me to carry out more interesting work in future?

  But then the possibilities sank, weighted down with reality. I couldn’t disappear off to a university at the opposite end of the country from home. I had a house – Caitlyn’s home, if she ever chose to come back. I had Gran – it was all very well to miss visiting her for one weekend while I was on this dig, but not for weeks at a time. There weren’t any other universities near enough to allow me to live in Inglebridge while I studied; the isolated location I had once sought was now a disadvantage. It was a tempting dream to return to university, but not an achievable one.

  ‘Just say the word if I can help, Eve,’ Christopher said. ‘If I can’t tempt you with academia, I have contacts with employers across the country. I’d be more than happy to give you an introduction.’

  I thought about Christopher’s offer frequently over the next few days. Perhaps it was an off-the-cuff remark – no more than politeness – but it niggled at me. As we worked together in the intense mid-summer heat, the various teams across the sections bonded together as one unit in a way I remembered well and had missed more than I realised. There was something special about a group of like-minded enthusiasts uniting in a common goal; success for one was success for all. When the bones team unexpectedly discovered a Roman coin, we all celebrated, poring over the tiny piece of metal with as much delight as if it were part of the Crown Jewels. And as the days went by, my conviction grew that this was what I needed to be doing, one way or another. I didn’t know how I was going to take it forward and make it work, I only knew that I had to do it.

  My evenings were spent in my room in the village pub, doing what I had resisted for years: researching developments in archaeology since I had studied it, and reading about discoveries that had been made in the last two decades. Some I hadn’t been able to avoid, as they had been significant enough to make the news, such as the investigation into whether there were hidden chambers in Tutankhamen’s tomb. But equally interesting were the smaller discoveries, often stumbled across by accident, such as the Watlington Hoard, a collection of coins, jewellery and bars of silver found by a metal-detectorist and dating back to the time of Alfred the Great. And it wasn’t only new discoveries that fascinated me; technology had advanced so that old finds could be analysed in more detail than ever before.

  I sat on my bed with my laptop on my knee, and pored over it all, feeling the past come alive in more ways than one, and longing to find out more; trying to hold back thoughts of the one person who could share my enthusiasm, and gladly tell me everything I wanted to know.

  *

  By Friday, muscles that I’d forgotten existed were aching, my knees were sore despite the cushioned pads, and my nose was pink even though I’d applied lavish amounts of sun cream. I was loving every second of the dig. The whole team had arranged to go out to the nearest pub for a drink in the evening, to celebrate a successful first week, and I had decided that I would try to get Christopher on his own, to discover whether he really did know any employers who would be willing to take on
someone with more enthusiasm than experience. So it was concerning that by the time we stopped for our mid-morning tea break, Christopher still hadn’t arrived on site.

  ‘Do you think he’s ill?’ I asked Beverley, as we scrambled back down into the trench to carry on. It was a sign of how keen we all were: no one had thought to slack off in Christopher’s absence. ‘Should we try to find him?’

  ‘Hey, you worry too much,’ Beverley said, showing a remarkable insight into my character after only a short acquaintance. ‘I heard you Brits don’t like spending money. Perhaps he’s hiding somewhere so he doesn’t have to buy us all drinks tonight.’

  I laughed, but that didn’t sound like Christopher. I carried on with my work on the mosaic, stopping now and again to drink some water – it was another scorching day, and the sun was relentless on our heads. I glanced over at the young couple who were part of my team. They were working side by side as they had done all week, heads bent low together, talking and laughing as they worked.

  ‘Sweet, aren’t they?’ Beverley said, catching where I was looking.

  I nodded. I’d tried not to watch them too much. They were young, keen, in love and reminded me irresistibly of me and Paddy. We’d been like that once, in the glory days of our relationship: unable to bear being on the opposite side of a trench to each other, unable to survive more than a few minutes without sharing a smile, a touch, a moment to connect and to affirm everything we felt for each other. As I looked away across the dig site, I could picture Paddy exactly as he had been in those days – shorts, tight T-shirt, curls drooping in the heat … Except the figure I thought I was seeing in my imagination looked remarkably solid, and it was moving towards me and waving a hand. What on earth was going on? Was Paddy actually here? I began to wonder if my brain had been addled by too much sun.