I felt myself going under again but now it was time ‘like an ever rolling stream’ that was bearing me away, as I clutched at bits of flotsam going past, remembered scenes: the school hall in assembly with a thousand voices thundering out the morning hymn, and even those who could barely read the words moving their lips in order not to be spotted by the head’s darting eyes, and then a form outing to Colchester museum with its spears, shield bosses, horse gear that might have belonged to our first rebel, Boudicca and old Latham who taught us history reciting at some inattentive boy: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, Wilkins,’ as he handed back a red scored exam paper.
‘History is more or less bunk.’ Discuss. ‘The only history that is worth a damn is what we make today.’ I opened the office safe, took out the inventory and went down to the storeroom to check out hidden treasures not on display. What could have been an annual chore was something I found stimulating, that gave me ideas for exhibitions, new angles, even, if there was room in the budget, new acquisitions. After a couple of hours I closed the book and went up to the little kitchen where the staff made their cups of tea and coffee.
Armed with a steaming mug and a feeling of satisfaction that nothing more than the contents of the prince’s buckle had gone adrift in the last year, and with some idea of ‘I do Like to be Beside the Seaside’ as the theme for a summer exhibition, the history of the ice-cream cone or the bathing costume, something light but themed through like a stick of rock, I went back to the office and dialled Hilary’s number.
‘Has Jack gone?’
‘I put him on the train this morning. I’m in the office doing the annual stock-taking.’
‘That sounds like fun. Very festive.’
‘And you?’
‘Beth’s gone to stay with a friend, having done her daughterly duty. At least she’s over the Boxing Day panto age which is a bit of a relief. But it’s probably only been displaced by sex, drugs and booze: a mother’s worst fear. How did it go with Jack?’
‘I did sometimes wonder if we were rehearsing for a buddy movie.’
‘Why don’t you have a trip to London? We could go to the theatre or something. It doesn’t have to be the panto. Bring your toothbrush.’
‘Tomorrow a possibility?’ I hoped she couldn’t hear my heart hammering.
‘Why not? Come to the museum. We’re not open yet either. You know where it is. I’m in the basement at the back: Conservation. They keep us away from the masses. If you come about one, we’ll go out and find some lunch.’
Next morning I put out two extra dishes for Caesar who watched me balefully from the arm of his favourite chair, left a note exhorting Mrs Shepherd to feed him some more from the tins in the fridge and the rattling packet of dried nodules, not forgetting to refill the saucer of special cat milk, and set off to drive to the station. What to pack had been a problem, as well as what bag. Hilary’s throwaway remark about the toothbrush might have been just that, meaning everything or nothing. I didn’t want my expectations, hopes, to be too obvious in case I was wildly misinterpreting or she had simply changed her mind overnight. So I took as little as was decently possible. Should I put in a packet of Featherlite? I hadn’t any in the house; it had been so long since I’d needed or even wanted them. At the station, leaving my car in the car park I found the nearest chemist’s just in case. As the train rattled its way through the seaside, rural and finally urban Essex, I tried to think of other things in order not to disgrace myself in front of my fellow travellers.
At Liverpool Street I took the District line going West and arrived at the Barbican, after only two stops, much too early. I would have to walk about a bit to waste some time. Surprisingly when I stepped out into Charterhouse Street, it was a fine though cold winter morning of hazy sunshine. The streets were empty and everywhere shuttered for the holiday, even the little cafés and sandwich bars I passed, the only relief in the cliff façades of office blocks, were darkly shut up. Somewhere to my right was the Charterhouse, once a Carthusian monastery. I was walking along the city boundary, on the edge of the Square Mile with the warehouses of Smithfield Market on my left. Taking a quick look at the map I had brought in my pocket, and glad there was no one around to see my tourist’s ignorance, I turned down a street between the handsome mid-Victorian brick buildings of the market halls that had once disguised their bloody trade.
The air should have been full of the cries of martyred men and animals. Dissidents had burned here; Wat Tyler had been beheaded for leading the first poll tax revolt; cattle pole-axed in their millions over the years, but it was silent. Not even a car went by. In the distance I could see a bundle huddled beside a wall that, as I passed, resolved itself into the shape of a man and his dog which looked up at me defensively as his owner slept on, daring me to interfere.
Continuing south down Little Britain I passed St Bartholomew’s and turned left along Newgate Street towards St Paul’s. Suddenly coming into view between the office skyscrapers, its dome and towers seemed to float upwards in the opal light. A quick look at my watch showed me I had wasted enough time and was now in danger of being late. Leaving the shimmering stone of the great carbuncle on its baroque pedestal, I hurried north up Aldersgate Street.
Ahead was the dark tunnel entrance to the Barbican. Briefly I wondered why I’d never been to the Museum of London before that one visit to see our finds, in what seemed a lifetime ago, and perhaps, in a sense, was, when Hilary was still just the Head of Conservation. After all London were our overseers, providing research and backup our own funds wouldn’t run to, including the rescue dig that had started all this with Harry Bates falling into the prince’s grave. Sometimes I almost wished that he hadn’t, that I’d been left to vegetate in my own quiet way. Now I was aware that I was breathing heavily from a sensation of, not exactly fear but apprehension as I hurried along between the tall blocks.
All this area must have been a maze of streets flattened by the Blitz, and rebuilt as an arts and residential area in the late seventies, judging by the aspirationally ugly architecture that had been meant to signify a clean modern future where culture was for every man, a pedestrianised, slabbed village on stilts, with airy walkways open to the elements, that should have given an illusion of light and space. As I half remembered, the sign for the museum pointed me up wide shallow steps to an upper level, a cathedral-sized west face in plate glass, steel and concrete. The revolving door poured me into a vast atrium filled with rippling light from the winter sun like a huge aquarium where many-coloured posters swam instead of exotic fish. It all had that quality of a dream, an unreality that made me think I must have been in some kind of daze or semi-catatonic state on my last visit, or like the sudden apprehension of déjà vu: I have been here before. Perhaps Hilary wasn’t real either.
Last time she had met me in the atrium. Now I had to seek her out. ‘I’m afraid we’re closed until next week.’ An attendant had appeared from behind an exhibition screen showing a recent find below the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, a sarcophagus that might contain the bones of the soldier martyr Martin himself and might even rewrite the accepted history of the collapse of Roman London as a capital city of the empire.
‘I’m looking for Hilary Caistor in Conservation.’
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll ring through and see if she’s in. Could I have your name please.’
‘Alex Kish.’
‘Just one moment.’ He’s watching me carefully while he dials, just in case I suddenly run amok, produce a gun, set off a bomb, make a wild dash among the exhibits. ‘I have a Mr Kish here. That’s fine. I’ll send him along.’ He puts back the receiver. ‘We have to be so careful. Last week we had someone claiming his ethnic group was underrepresented and waving what turned out to be a water pistol. He wanted the Iron Age stuff labelled in Cornish or Breton on the grounds that they were Celts.’
‘I know the feeling. I’m the curator at S
outhend. We get our weirdoes
even there. Where do I go?’
Hilary’s door had her nameplate on it, Dr H. Caistor, which was a little intimidating. I knocked. Suddenly the door opened. We stood for a second looking at each other and then spontaneously and simultaneously kissed.
‘Did you bring your toothbrush?’
‘I did.’
‘Then you can come in.’
327 BC Bucephala on the Hydaspes
Here died Bucephalus, beloved of the Lord Alexander, which city was named after him, for that he had carried his master across the world in journeying and in battle since his master first tamed him. For he was brought to King Philip as an unbroken colt whom none could mount or break although many tried. Then the king commanded him to be returned to Philonicus Of Thessaly, who had sent the beast, but the young prince stepping forward said first he would try him. Then was a wager made between father and son, for the price of the horse, that the prince could not subdue him. But Alexander had observed that the horse started at his own shadow when it danced before him. Therefore, turning him about so that the sun was in his eyes he gentled him with his hands and voice until the horse would let him mount. Then the horse began to gallop and Alexander let him have his head until he had done and the prince was able to turn him at the end of his career and bring him quietly about.
And Alexander, I believe, understood the nature of the horse as his own that he could not be forced but only persuaded by gentle means and for this reason King Philip, his father, appointed the philosopher Aristotle to be his tutor who was ever known as the prince’s governor because he was of too noble birth to bear the title of schoolmaster or tutor. He schooled the prince for seven years before he returned to Athens full of honours.
Yet in the matter of the mysteries of Orpheus Aristotle who regarded them as mere superstition and charlatanry was unable to persuade the prince and some men said that it was because his mother, Olympias of the Island of Samothrace was possessed with the spirit of Orpheus and the divine madness of Dionysus such as inspires the women of Thrace and that in the dances to the god she carried many small snakes about her that twined in the ivy she wore, and around the little javelins that the dancers carried in their hands, that all the men were afraid to approach her.
So when his father was dead and Alexander became King of Macedon and the Athenians, he set out to conquer Asia, for Darius III had assembled a great army against him to protect his empire. Alexander was chosen general of all the Greeks and many omens of victory were shown him by the gods such as the wooden statue of Orpheus which sweat miraculously when he came to the city of Lebethres. And wherever he went Bucephalus went with him. Yet in the first great battle after he had crossed the Hellespont the prince did not ride him but another that was killed under him. After this great victory over the Persians he subdued all the lands round about. And hence, as all the world knows, he continued with his conquests even into Egypt where he founded Alexandria, and thus through Mesopotamia, Media and Persia even up to the Caspian Sea, and there in the land of the barbarians and monsters, called Hyrcania, Bucephalus was captured as he was being led along. Enraged the King sent a herald to say that he would raze all their towns and kill every man, woman and child if his horse was not returned safe and whole to him. Yet when they did so he was overcome with joy and sent them a ransom for his horse.
Now marching ever west he came at last to the borders of India, having conquered all in his path. And here he did battle at the River Hydaspes with King Poros, a mighty king with many elephants in his army, and even so Alexander conquered him. Yet his victory was not so sweet for here, as I have told you, Bucephalus died, not of the wounds for which he was being treated, but worn out with age and journeying. And he was about fourteen years old.
After this last great battle the Macedonian troops would go no further into India and Alexander was forced to lead them back through Asia, settling his new kingdoms as he went. In his lands that were formerly those of the Persians he adopted their dress and customs in order to be more acceptable to the people, and to their soothsayers and magi, even wearing the Phrygian cap in which they depict the young god Mithras. And on this journey he became more and more fearful and distrustful of the gods, the priest, magi and oracles. Reaching Babylon after four years, he was taken with a fever of which after twenty-seven days he died in his thirty-second year. And it is certain that after the death of Bucephalus the king declined in spirit, feasting and drinking too much and fearful of the future that some would take all from him. And so it was.
Fragment of a lost work by Eratosthenes of Alexandria c. 220 BC
When we made love that first time it was the fumbled messy affair of people thinking it was too important to be just sex but that all the same they should try to get it right. It wasn’t that I was in too much of a hurry but it had been a long time and because I was unsure of my performance it was all over too soon. The next morning after a night together with the rhythms of sleep and breathing, the warmth of two bodies familiarly beside each other we made love again.
‘Mm. That was nice,’ Hilary said. ‘I’ll make some tea.’
‘Tell me about Beth’s father,’ I said over my steaming cup. I hadn’t had tea in bed since Lucy. It isn’t much fun on your own.
‘We were married very young; met at university. When I got pregnant and then had Beth he was teaching. I was bored at home, and he was surrounded by adoring students. The inevitable happened. I had the choice: either call it a day and start again or try to live with a serial philanderer who didn’t really want me anymore. I think it was a relief to him when I said I thought we should give up trying to make a go of it and moved out with Beth. I’d always thought I’d be a teacher too. I’d managed to finish my doctorate. But somehow after this I didn’t fancy it. I applied for the museum service. It seemed more stable, humdrum if you like.’
‘Tell me about it. But then your job is more exciting than mine. You get all that sexy dead stuff. I get whether the toilets are clean for thirty children to visit. It can’t have been easy with a small child.’
‘You’ll have to meet her soon, that’s if we’re going on like this.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes, yes I do. Very much, if you do.’ I hesitated. ‘Perhaps she won’t like me, take to me I mean.’
‘You were worried that Caesar wouldn’t like me and that turned out fine. Anyway she’s already curious. She’s probably telling her friend Julie right now: “Mum’s got a boyfriend. Isn’t that cool,” or whatever the in-word is now.’
Hilary’s flat was at the top of a tall block in the Barbican itself: ‘so that I can walk to work.’ The huge windows looked out on a sea of sky where from time to time gulls wheeled shrieking their anguished cries of drowned sailors or were carried up on thermals, like bits of blown charred rag against the light.
‘What time do you have to go?’
‘I ought to get back this afternoon.’
‘Come and see what we’ve done with your prince. Then we can have some lunch.’
So we went back to the high atrium of the museum and then down into the dimmed light of a basement room, lined with drawers and cupboards, and glass display cases standing here and there, interspersed with shrouded shadowy statuary as if we had descended to a sunken city, the cursed and drowned bones of Semmerwater, where: By king’s tower and queen’s bower // The fishes come and go.
Hilary pulled back a screen. ‘We did a reconstruction for fun and to see if it would be possible to put the whole tomb on display for the public. We haven’t quite decided yet.’
We were looking into the timber-lined tomb as if peering into a life-size maquette. There lay the king or prince with all his comforts and symbols of power about him in death. ‘Do you know any more about who he was?’
‘Not precisely but we managed to get some DNA from a tooth, the only one, and he was definitely a Saxon.’
‘Not even an Angle or a Kent
ish Jute?’
Hilary laughed. ‘I don’t think we can get into that sort of granularity yet. All they can say is he’s certainly not a Roman Briton. My money is still on Saegebert. But of course we have to show proper academic caution.’
The walls were hung with gleaming copper bowls, a flagon, a cauldron. Blue glass drinking cups threw back a cold sapphire gleam. His sword and shield lay at right angles to the wooden bed the king rested on, opposite a pair of crossed drinking horns. Reconstructions of the lyre and the folding stool were placed at his right hand and his head. The gold coins lay one above and one below the waist and two small gold crosses were placed on his forehead. The body itself was so lifelike in that dim light that I almost thought I saw it breathe as if at any moment it might stand up and resume its princely life.
‘That bag has a set of Anglo-Saxon draughtsmen in it. The flagon is from Byzantium, so is that silver spoon. One coin is from Paris; the other we’re not sure about. We think the bowl and the flagon are from the Eastern Mediterranean, probably Coptic, and the crosses perhaps Italian. Very multicultured, your prince.’
And there too was the gold buckle on a leather belt at his waist. ‘Any more surprises?’
‘Not like we found in the buckle. But the whole thing still surprises me: that it could have lain there for over twelve hundred years undisturbed and unknown.’
‘Was he definitely a Christian?’
‘It’s a strange mixture: a burial that manages to be both Christian and yet pagan, as if those in charge of it couldn’t quite make up their minds so they hedged their bets. Like our reconstruction; a mixture of real and fake.’
‘It all looks amazingly real to me. I definitely think you should show it. Of course I would love to have it all back.’
‘Time for lunch, I think,’ Hilary said, ‘before you’re tempted to run off with something.’
The Orpheus Trail Page 8