by Henry Gee
Chapter 13. Correspondent
London and Cambridge, England, Earth, March 2025
At length burst the argent revelry,
With plume, tiara and all rich array,
Numerous as shadows haunting fairily
The brain, new stuff’d, in youth. With triumphs gay
Of old romance.
John Keats— The Eve of St Agnes
Jadis’ nerves fell away as soon as she took her seat at the press conference—MacLennane to her left, Jack on her right—and had been introduced to the crowd of journalists, photographers and cameramen who’d crammed, almost on top of each other, it seemed to her, in the small but unnaturally brightly lit library that London’s Royal Institution had arranged. Not that anyone paid very much attention to her two male outriders, because she’d looked (as they’d hoped) as marvelously un-academic as might be imagined.
She’d fretted for several days about what to wear, as (she’d felt) she had little sense for such things, except that what suited her least of all was indecision. The few women academics she knew were, in the main, as unconscious of fashion as she was—either that, or they went to the other extreme and dolled up to the nines, dressing to impress—something which she felt might be fine for some people, but only made her feel uncomfortable. Her male friends included Roger MacLennane, who always wore the same dark, slightly crumpled suit; and Avi Malkeinu, whose idea of female fashion probably extended only as far as swimwear.
That left Jack, and he was biased.
“I think I’d have to declare an interest,” he’d said, in his best mock-serious voice, as, shirt-sleeves rolled up, he’d rubbed her back as she sat up in the bath one evening several days earlier, “as not only do I love you, but I love you more each day, as there is progressively more of you to love”—at which she’d snorted and soaked him with bubble-laden water. He’d sat for a moment, quite still on the edge of the bath, wet through, smiling quizzically, but saying nothing. So he did what she knew he’d do—something so practical, so funny, so Jack. He’d stripped and climbed in behind her, a leg on either side. She was, by now, in hoots of giggles, the water surging and splashing around her, around him, and all over the floor.
“Give me one of those Paleolithic mother-goddesses every time,” he’d said, half laughing, half growling, and starting to rub her shoulders and neck, which she loved—but not without first giving each of her increasingly sore and swollen breasts a playful squeeze—which she liked rather less.
She decided that she enjoyed being pregnant. She enjoyed the fullness of it. The only bad thing about it, after the horrible first couple of months, was the backache, hence the time spent in the bath. But what had surprised her—and delighted her—was how much her desire for Jack had sharpened. She supposed that it might have something to do with the physicality of it, that here was starkly tangible reassurance that she was tied to the Earth.
That, and her recent rediscovery of the sense of smell, and especially his smell, an ineffable sense of masculinity, nothing very strong—not like unwashed socks or stale beer or anything like that—but an instantly recognizable presence that reassured her, and which lingered in the flat even when he wasn’t physically there. Some mornings it had been extremely difficult to leave his embrace, as if she were attached to him by a bungee cord. Hence his candid lack of objectivity, whether she wore a stylish designer outfit, or ‘Horrible’ (her baggy old once-purple jersey). She felt that he’d have adored her just the same had she been wearing a dustbin liner.
For his part, Jack found Jade’s pregnancy enchanting. Her body was changing in all kinds of ways that he loved to examine in the tiniest detail, as if he were a surveyor, mapping the topography of an unexplored continent in the throes of some incremental but ultimately profound change of climate, from the trimly temperate, to the lush and exotic.
For her, then, her weight taken by the water and Jack’s body for a chair, her lover had crystallized into a pair of hands. Funny that she’d paid so little attention to them before, but pregnancy was refining all her senses, not only smell and taste. His were the hands of a man who belonged outdoors—the hands of a field geologist, the hands of contradiction—calloused and ridged as they endured frost and thaw, but capable of marvelously sensitive precision and agility, as those same rough fingertips felt their way towards a fossil or crystal so fragile that it might be shattered by a drop of water—and cradled it unharmed to safety. And so she craved the touch of his hands, the counterpoint of roughness and gentleness, as they traversed her curving form, as if constantly recording, measuring her totality at any instant. As her body swelled, so did her need for him, until it was like a constant drone in the background of her life. However, as her insistent desire resonated with Jack’s own, she felt him rise and grow behind her, in the small of her back. And the water was getting cold, too.
“Out you get, young man,” she’d said, unmoving, her eyes still closed.
“‘Fraid not,” he’d countered, “as I am at present pinned to the spot by a Dangerous Wild Animal.”
She gripped the sides of the bath, put her feet together and crouched—wriggling the arced expanse of her behind at Jack, teasingly, mockingly—and then stood fully upright. Just before she stepped out in search of a towel he’d looked up at her and for a moment she was a vast statue, shining with water, the fullness of her body exaggerated by the foreshortened angle of view. Jack sank into the bath, filling the space she’d left, stretched out, looked up at her and said:
“There was a reason for those Paleolithic mother-goddesses, you know.”
“Hmm?” She had started to dry her hair.
“They illustrate the inherent superiority of women. If only in the geometrical sense.” She turned suddenly to lean over the bath, a mad flurry of wild hair, eyes and towel—
“I said, out—you—get!”
Jack did, at least, have a constructive idea. If she couldn’t ask Roger what to wear, why not ask Mrs Roger? She’d be at the celebration tomorrow.
“You can ask her then,” he said. “Quite a character, Marjorie MacLennane,” said Jack. “I think you’d like her.”
“I had no idea that Roger was married!” she exclaimed. “What do you think of her?”
“Me? She’s terrifying. But that shouldn’t deter you.”
If Professor Ernestine Yanga only looked like the President of a local Women’s Institute, then Marjorie MacLennane really was one, and many other things besides. She was a pillar of the Conservative Association, a Church Commissioner, and judged a hand of bridge with such frightening perspicacity that few ever dared challenge her. She would have it that as a daughter of a Brigadier-General, her life was dedicated to service.
Most people found her too intimidating to talk to, or even approach, on those occasions (rare) when she accompanied Roger to departmental parties. For her part, she found most of the academics not to her taste, and even if they had been, they’d have very little to discuss. Many of them detested everything she stood for, and shunned her in what she considered a singularly ill-bred fashion, by talking over her in her presence, or simply turning their backs. But when Roger threw a small party to celebrate Jack’s doctorate and the impending publication of the paper in Nature (‘Large-scale anthropogenic landscape modification in the Upper Pleistocene of France,’ by J. L. Markham, John A. Corstorphine, Avram Y. Malkeinu and Roger Sutherland MacLennane), she felt she could hardly refuse.
“You really must meet Jack,” Roger had implored, “and you must certainly meet Jadis.” Jadis? What kind of a name was that? But then, she sighed, this was likely to be her husband’s finest hour, and perhaps a last hurrah before he was kicked out to pasture. So duty called.
When she actually met Jadis, she found her disarmingly unlike what she had expected—although, if pressed, the nature of that expectation would have been ill-defined. At first she was puzzled. To her, Jadis seemed a mixture
of opposites. On the one hand she seemed ethereal, almost transparent, and distracted, as if she didn’t really belong on this planet. Her fiercely black gaze, on the other hand, betokened a person earthy, practical, unlikely to be intimidated by anyone. Rather like she was herself, in fact.
The truth was that Marjorie saw herself in Jadis, as a young woman, a graduate of Girton with a Double First in Natural Sciences, which is how she had met her junior-research-fellow husband. But it had been much more difficult for women in her position to pursue careers of their own in those days. That they might do so while conspicuously pregnant was unthinkable, yet pregnancy seemed to suit Jadis very well. So she had taken Jadis under her wing, and invited her to call on her at home.
“You can never go wrong with a Little Black Number,” Marjorie had said, when Jadis had called the day after the party at the MacLennane’s imposing Victorian villa, exposing a rail of Chanel gowns in her wardrobe to the kind of scrutiny which her late grandfather had reserved for drilling the troops before Mountbatten, as the Union flag had been lowered for the last time over Delhi.
“Try this. It was made for me when I had to go to some ball or another, when I was pregnant with Fiona. That was… well, Fiona has children of her own now.”
Marjorie helped the gown over Jadis’ head. Marjorie and Jadis were about the same height, so it fitted very well. It was classically black and breathtakingly elegant. Jadis looked at the mirror, disbelieving, enchanted. Then she looked at Marjorie, whose expression was unfathomable. “That’s the one for you, my dear. Would you like to try some pearls?”
At the back of the press conference sat Marcel Montgolfier, a distant relation of the pioneer balloonists, but proximately the veteran London correspondent of Agence France Presse. A press briefing in London on the topography of La France Profonde seemed an incongruity that bordered on effrontery, but no matter; in any case, one could forgive these English scientists in their startling assertion that French civilization was so ancient that it had preceded humanity itself.
This offered by twinkling bespectacled figure at the right of the panel, the man Montgolfier’s press pack described as Professor Roger Sutherland MacLennane, FRS, from the University of Cambridge. Not that Montgolfier didn’t know this, of course. MacLennane was a well-known scientist, who while reserved, always seemed to be good for an off-the-record briefing. Our picture of Neanderthal Man as the primitive savage (MacLennane said) was a distortion caused by the fact that history is always written by the victor: when the first Homo sapiens came into Europe some 40,000-or-so years ago, it was not to meet a debased tribe like Charles Darwin’s Fuegians, but the bones of a civilization that had, in his words, “endured for eight thousand centuries, and had created megaliths the size of mountains.”
The theme was continued by Dr Jack Corstorphine, the tall young scientist on the left of the panel, in the casual jacket and polo shirt, who explained, with a quiet but compelling authority, that the breadth and extent of this ancient civilization would have been incomprehensible to our own ancestors, who would therefore have seen only wilderness, weaving the bones of this great and ancient culture into the legend and myth of centuries. As the ruins of Roman Britain had appeared to the barbarian Saxons as the works of mythical giants, so the megalith at Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards in Gascony had appeared to our ancestors—and also, said Dr Corstorphine, to ourselves, until our own researches had recognized it as being “something quite extraordinary.”
Dr Corstorphine was a new face to Montgolfier, but in his assured delivery he could tell that he was one of MacLennane’s latest protégés. But MacLennane and Corstorphine were the sideshows, the hors-d’oeuvres, compared with what was obviously the main attraction, a young woman who was looking up at Corstorphine, as he spoke, with an expression of—what was it? Adoration?—so intense that it could have melted granite. When the girl (identified as ‘Ms Jadis L. Markham’), rose to speak, the room fell silent, except for the sound of a few people swallowing and some quickly stifled coughs.
This was not a scientist—this was a movie star. As Jadis Markham discussed, with a dignified poise, how the ancient inhabitants of Europe had done more than leave a few isolated monuments, but instead had modified the very face of the Earth, Montgolfier and the assembled press corps began to lose the thread of the story and take a greater interest in its speaker. She was dressed in classic Chanel. Montgolfier (who had covered fashion in his time, in between stints on the diplomatic desk) thought her gown had been a couture item from the sixties: could anyone name any scientist, let alone such a débutante, who could carry off such cool retro chic? And—unbelievable—she was at least five months pregnant, and yet the gown fitted her as if pregnancy was her natural state, the state in which she was most at ease: she simply glowed. The whole effect, the way her outrageously untamed cloud of glossy dark hair (who said scientists were buttoned-up?) tumbled over her pale shoulders, her décolletage, was enchanting! And her face! Framed—and indeed, sometimes partly obscured—by this nebula of hair, were two bright but yet unfathomably dark wells of intelligent, calculating ferocity. She was like a cat, a wild thing, he thought, her wildness kept in tight coils by an adamantine composure which on the surface appeared easy and carefree, but which—he was sure—was, not so far beneath, passionate and determined.
All this in a girl of how old? Twenty-one? If this was another of MacLennane’s protégées, Montgolfier would bet that she would be his last, his swansong, because she’d be impossible to follow.
As Montgolfier sat, enraptured, it occurred to him that although the story itself was important—it certainly was that, and would be the centre of all discussion for weeks and months—he was not watching a press conference so much as a wedding, or a coronation. All this from tiny things he’d noticed that were never spoken out loud for all that they were quite evident, even from his place at the back. How Jadis, for all the control that belied her years, for all that she conducted the wolf-pack of journalists as if she were Karajan directing the Berlin Philharmonic, would frequently glance at Jack, only for a moment, but with an expression of such—how could he describe it—supplication?—and his face would bestow a warmth of reassurance in return. And all this presided over by MacLennane, who watched both of them with proprietorial satisfaction. This would be a great story, Montgolfier thought, because the people were at least as interesting as the tale they told. This is the next dynasty of archeology in the making (he would write). He hoped he’d be able to get a picture of Jadis.
At the very end, Montgolfier essayed a question for this rising star. “Ms Markham,” he asked, “excuse my presumption, but how will you reconcile your—how shall I say—imminent family commitments—with what promises to be an extensive program of field research?”
Jadis turned her lighthouse eyes on Montgolfier. She paused for a moment, and it seemed to him that her hair gathered around her face like a brooding storm cloud.
“I’ll take them with me of course,” she said, with an asperity that made him start. “What else would I do with them?”
And then the storm clouds dissipated as quickly as they had arrived, her face opening into a smile as bright as the sun, and of such innocent loveliness that he thought he’d die right there, at the pinnacle of his long career.
And in England.
After the conference, when they’d managed to elude the last of the cameras, supplementary interviews and questions, Roger treated them both to lunch at Fortnum’s, but then announced he was staying overnight on in London. “Business at the Royal. Then I’ll hole up at the Athenaeum,” he’d said, hailing a cab in Piccadilly to take Jadis and Jack to Kings Cross. “But don’t forget, you two—my office, nine o’clock, day after tomorrow. Might have a bit of news.” He tapped his nose conspiratorially, his expression unreadable behind his glasses.
The train home pulled through the cramped crenellations of North London and eventually eased into flat country under the immense East Anglian sky, the land beneath cl
othed in the brilliant green haze of early Spring. Jadis leaned into Jack, and neither said a word for a long time. A full hour into the journey, Jack pulled her closer. “Might I ask you a question, Ms Markham?” he began, in his best Monty-Python French Accent. This time her smile was just for him.
“But of course!”
“You said, them. That you’d take them with you, into the field, when we get to excavate.”
“Well if there are, it’s all your fault, you silly man,” she said, pushing closer still: and then more quietly, looking directly up at him and smiling, blearily, but just for him: “‘Nothing like a good seeing to,’ you said, ‘for clearing the brain.’”
She began to nod, and it was only then that Jack realized how tired she must have been—the trip had taken it out of her: that, and the spotlight. And how he still had to listen to MacLennane’s advice: just make sure you’re not the one left behind. How he’d struggled through his thesis defence, when she, a graduate student just starting out, had had all those journalists under her spell. When the train pulled in to Cambridge, she was asleep in his arms.
The next morning, as she looked over the breakfast table for the Oxford marmalade, Marjorie MacLennane saw Roger’s unopened copy of The Times. Such a waste, she thought, given that he’d get his own copy at his club. Then she remembered why Roger had been away and took another look at the lead story. ‘Civilization dates back a million years, scientists say,’ read the headline, but the picture was of a young girl, hair awry, who for all her youth had the steel of ancient wisdom in her eyes.
“Good for you, Jadis Markham,” said Marjorie, marmalade now quite forgotten.