‘Well, my PhD thesis is in “staring at slimy black stuff”,’ Millie said, reasonably. ‘It was that or “big bits of broken pots”.’
‘And even talking to Duncan has to be an improvement on sitting in an empty classroom colouring in next term’s register, or whatever it is you do in the summer holidays,’ Tabs threw in over Millie’s shoulder. ‘I mean, for a teacher, this is practically getting off your head on E’s and dancing all night with a tattooed bloke from Gloucester who calls himself Daemon.’ We stared at her, until she muttered, ‘or something’, and set about opening a biscuit wrapper with her teeth.
I left the pair of them to hug and catch up after their week apart and went off to hunt down Duncan, picking my way through the fog, which got deeper and more ‘horror movie’ with every metre I went down the hill. Eventually I found a group of students, putting in a new trench in line with the ‘wood trench’ further along the dale, who pointed me in his direction.
Duncan was wandering slowly along, staring at the ground. The mist hung on his hair and jacket as though the sky had spat him out, his shoulders were hunched and his chest and chin were subsumed together under another horribly furred sweater. It looked as though someone had tried to dress a sasquatch.
‘Hey.’
‘Mmmm? Oh. Hello.’
I fell into step beside him. Although physically Duncan was there, his eyes were looking into another century. When he lifted his chin, I was fairly sure he wasn’t looking at me, but was seeing this place as it might have been millennia ago.
‘Millie’s back,’ I said at last, when my ego was beginning to tunnel its way out through my feet. ‘So you’ll be able to find out about your wood.’
‘Yuh.’ He was scanning the skyline now. The barrow on the hill was a dark hump, the hilltops tentative pencil sketches; the whole view looked like a watercolour painting that’s been left out in the rain. A gust of breeze blew the slightly chocolatey smell of wet peat past me and then tried to ram it down the back of my neck. I shivered.
‘There must be something here, somewhere,’ Duncan said, not to me but to the air. ‘Everything – everything points to a settlement around here, we just need to find it. If the wood is part of a trackway, at least we can …’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘Sorry, not your problem. Just thinking aloud there.’
‘Well, anyway.’ I felt a bit awkward. ‘Millie, tent, wood, etc etc. Whenever you’re ready.’ And then, a sudden thought. ‘Oh, and by the way, do you know if there are any tents empty? Only now Millie is back I’m not sure I …’
And a sudden image of how it used to be when Jamie came back after a work trip, the sheer joy of seeing him again, the warmth of his body in bed, the feel of his arms around me. And the knowing I would never have that again. I’d got used to that feeling of a knife slowly gutting me and my heart falling out onto the ground at my feet; now that knife was a little less keen, a little less eager to slit me, but not by much. Like being attacked by a dagger and then a butter knife. Still an attack.
‘Hey.’ I had his attention now. ‘Grace?’
‘No, nothing, sorry.’ I swallowed the feeling of loss, felt it travel down my throat into my stomach, where it floated on the unshed tears. ‘Just, you know, memories and stuff. It’s fine.’
‘Was he ill for long?’ Now I had his full focus. In this all-encompassing fog it felt a little bit like we were the only people for miles, even though, off up the hill, I could hear the generator and the sound of an argument. As though the air had folded itself protectively around us.
‘Two years. It was aggressive and he … it was all very sudden.’
‘So, for the last four years you’ve been unhappy?’
Duncan tipped his head on one side and looked at me from under his mist-pearled hair. I wondered, as I thought about his question, if he was like this with the students. Maybe this was his style. Direct. No mimsying around the subject … no wonder everyone thought he was prickly.
‘Not all the time, no. We still had good times, even when Jamie … before he got really ill. I sometimes …’ I stopped. How did I explain? What could I say that didn’t make me sound uncaring or dismissive?
‘Sometimes it didn’t seem real? Like he was faking it?’
Wow. Where was he getting this from? It was a bit too accurate for me.
‘It just felt like it couldn’t be happening. Not to him, not to us. Not now … We’d …’ I stopped myself. Nobody knew, not even Tabs. But then, what was the point of keeping quiet about it? Who was it hurting? Only me now. ‘We’d started trying for a baby. It had only been a couple of months, and then he got ill, and Jamie said we should keep going because then at least I’d have something to remember him by, but I couldn’t face the idea of him not being around to see his child and … I started taking the pill again. Didn’t tell him, of course.’ I pulled my coat around me, mimicking the feel of Jamie’s hug. ‘And I keep thinking how different life could have been,’ I finished, my words faint, just puffs of steam into the moist air.
Duncan stopped looking at me and tipped his head back up to those vague lines that were the hills. ‘They say life turns on a sixpence, don’t they, but really? I think it’s less than that. A molecule, an atom. One thing different and it would all be different. If we could go back and change it, we could make everything all right again. If I’d been more there, if Anya hadn’t spent so much time alone …’ He shook his head again and the beads of water ran to the ends of his hair and weighted them down. ‘Closure. That’s all I want, really. To know what happened, however stupid, however painful.’
In all this enfolding fog I had a sudden moment of clarity. ‘Is that why you’re really digging here? You think her body is here somewhere?’
He shook his head and nestled his chin back into the collar of his jacket. ‘No. No. I’ve always wanted to dig here, been obsessed with the place since I can remember. I must have been about five, six maybe, I just remember running out on the moor and wanting to get my hands in the ground. Don’t know why, it just … calls to me, somehow.’ And now he gave me a direct look, his eyes were dark, as though the day had sucked all the warmth from them. ‘But, yes. If she tried to walk over the hills, in the fog then, maybe. Maybe that’s part of it now.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Almost without thinking I laid my hand on his arm. I’d met plenty of people who had lost someone in the past two years, self-help groups, counselling, other people telling me their stories of love and loss. But none of them had had to bear not only the loss, but being suspected of having a hand in it.
‘You know I’ve got a tent.’
‘Alluring talk, tell me more.’ I removed my hand, trying to make it look as though I was flicking some of this dampness from my fringe, rather than withdrawing. I wasn’t a stranger to subject changes when things got a little too close for comfort, when the alternative to moving the talk on was to begin to cry.
‘Well … it’s a tent. You know, triangular, canvas. Zip, sort of thing?’
‘Yes, I know what a tent is. That’s not what I meant when I said “tell me more”. I meant, tell me what it is about this tent that I should be interested in.’
‘Och, I find triangular canvas incredibly interesting, you quite clearly have not lived.’
‘Well, I certainly haven’t lived in my local branch of Go Outdoors, anyway.’ I tucked my incriminating hands into my pockets. Somewhere, at the top of the hill, I could hear my name being called.
‘If you need somewhere to stay, now Millie’s back. My tent. It has two rooms, so you could have privacy and not have to worry about the sight of me shaving the mud off my ears at the end of a long day.’
He still wasn’t looking at me. In fact, he was shifting about as though the mud was exerting suction on his boots and he was slowly sinking into the peat.
‘I hardly know you.’
‘It’s a frigging tent, not a bordello! I’m just offering you somewhere to lay your head at night if you want somewhere quiet. I’m not propositioning you, hell, most summers I share with Richard and he’ll tell you I can keep my hands to myself.’ Duncan turned as though he was about to walk away. ‘In fact, I’ve had a lot of practice at keeping everything to myself.’
At that point I got a, probably way overdue, twinge in the region of my guilt glands. He was just being nice! Why was I being all defensive and ‘Ooh, stay in a tent with a man, what would Mother Superior say?’
‘Thanks, Duncan,’ I managed to make myself say. ‘It’s very kind of you.’
‘Och, I heard you creaking there. Being pleasant actually suits you, you should put in a bit more practice now and again.’
‘And to think, people say that you are the difficult one.’
We lapsed into a fog-bound silence. The generator was still chugging away at the top of the hill and a few muffled conversations drifted through the heavy air, as though a bunch of garrulous ghosts were having a convention, but Duncan and I seemed too enmeshed in cloud to speak. He had his head down, little drips of water tipping his hair and forming delta-maps across the shoulders of his coat but, in some curious way, it all looked natural, as though this was his proper environment. I tried to picture him in a dinner jacket, and failed. It was like trying to picture a seal in a bikini.
‘Would you like to look at it? Before you commit?’ Duncan’s voice made me jump. ‘I feel that convention forces me to add an, “Oooerr, missus”, but I meant the tent and I suspect you know that. You know where it is, it’s where you came to borrow my socks … desirable location, just thought you’d like to see the other room. Measure it up for furniture, curtains, that kind of thing.’
I’d forgotten about the tent. I’d forgotten about Millie and Tabs and the dig and pretty much everything except the blanketing effect of the fog and this dark, absorbed man next to me. I’d even, for another few seconds, forgotten Jamie. There was, quite simply, no point of contact between my scatterbrained, adventurous husband, our lively flat and demanding jobs and this place.
‘I will, yes please, but can it be later? Only I’m due on the sieves, I only came to tell you about Millie being back, and this is already the longest coffee break in recorded history.’
As I walked away back up the hill, I looked back over my shoulder. The fog swirled and closed itself around Duncan until he was nothing but a dark shape in the greyness, but I knew he was watching me go and my chest ached with the weight of that moment we’d shared, down in the valley. I’d never really confided in anyone about how I truly felt about Jamie’s death before. That it made me feel sad and lonely should be a given, but the fact that I felt so angry? That I felt he’d cheated me of the future I’d been promised – home, loving husband, children – and now I was back to where I’d been at twenty-five, only without the dewy wash of youth and the positive outlook. That I hated my husband for leaving me …
And Duncan had seen all that. Maybe he felt some of the same emotions. Maybe he too felt cheated of his future; it couldn’t be easy, after all, living with the uncertainty of what had happened to his girlfriend, and maybe he too wanted to turn time back and unhappen it all.
My eyes were pricking again. The sudden outbursts of tears could still creep up and ambush me when I least expected them. When I thought everything was normal and ticking over nicely, and then I’d suddenly find myself bent double over the edge of the sink, or hiding in the book cupboard at work, sobbing as though I’d just heard the news all over again. It was Duncan’s fault, I thought, rubbing the back of my hand over my eyes as though its weight could hold back the crying. If he hadn’t brought all this to the surface, my guilt at being angry, the whole bloody mess that was being left a widow at thirty-two – I would have been fine.
The tears were pouring out now, joined by copious snot. I’d never been a pretty crier. Jamie said that when I cried my whole face turned to jelly, which was just charming of him, but probably true. There was simply no point in going up to the sieves in this state, the place was already two feet of mud, we didn’t need any more liquid going on up there. Katrin would just have to manage a little while longer on her own, or co-opt Kyle into giving her a hand. I rubbed my face, which didn’t help at all, and walked off away from the dig, down the dale towards the austere little commune around the bend.
There was something about the simplicity of their living that made me feel calmer just by looking at it, although I made sure I was out of sight of the man who was walking along the meadow by the river, swinging a very hand-made looking scythe. A young boy of around nine or ten with reddish curly hair was following the man, occasionally limping a little in an exaggerated way if the man looked in his direction. Perhaps he was expected to collect up the hay and was playing on an imagined injury, but instead was watching the work and occasionally shouting something I couldn’t hear, but, from the generally irritated air of the man, would seem to be words of advice. The man was bare-chested, his tunic top tucked into the cord-bound waist of his leggings to keep it out of the way as he swung a regular arc with the small blade. The long grass fell in soft swathes in front of him. I could smell its new-cutness mingled with the smell of animal dung and something pungently like very sweaty people.
The fog seemed confined to our end of the dale; here the air was very clear, the sun breaking through cloud and making the mower mop at his forehead. I looked away, up the valley sides towards where the barrow was casting a shadow over a field of rather pathetic looking wheat, and saw that I wasn’t the only person watching him cut the grass. At the side of the farthest hut stood the woman I’d seen crying. In this bright sunlight I had a better view of her, dark auburn hair caught up at the back of her head, and she was taller than I’d thought at first, taller than the man doing the scything anyway. She was shaking out some fabric, which was definitely a ruse, because unless that stuff had glue on it it was well clean by now, with the vigour she was putting into it. She wasn’t even checking it, and one end had come away and was flapping feebly, barely attached to the rest of the garment. Even from back here, just over the boulder wall, I could see her expression and it was one of hopeless longing, very reminiscent of a bunch of Year Ten girls watching the Sixth Form stud pass by in a corridor.
Over in the meadow the boy called something I was too far away to hear, and waved. The woman flapping the material paused, then waved back and the man stopped his spine-crunching bend and flex and straightened up to look her way, the hand not holding the scythe coming up to shade his eyes from the sun. She instantly pretended to be engrossed in whatever it was she had in her hand, flicking and twiddling it as though it was vital that it be spotless, and I recognised that look too. Shame at being caught out staring at a man.
Maybe it was against whatever religion kept them living in these basic conditions. But then, I reasoned as I turned to walk back up to where the wet sieves were pouring water in a constant dirty stream along the hillside, any religion that forbade attraction between the sexes was going to be pretty self-limiting. And pretty difficult to enforce … did you enforce religion?
The change of thought-subject drove away the last of the remaining tears and I waded back to the running water of the wet sieves and the running commentary of Katrin with renewed energy.
Chapter Thirteen
Duncan looked around the tent with increasing desperation. What … I mean … why on earth did I offer to share? Even Richard complains about sharing with me and he’s got all the natural niceties of a warthog. He shoved a pair of mud-encrusted overtrousers into his rucksack, then tried propping the bag against one of the tent supports at an ‘interior design’ level. There. That adds a ‘focal point of interest’ … Oh God, no it doesn’t, it makes it look as though I pack while I’m drunk. The trousers came out again and he folded them up and laid them at the foot of his sleeping bag. There. I’m
a working archaeologist, not Kirstie Allsopp, she can’t expect the place to look like a show home.
He sat down on the old milk bottle crate, which did duty in all the tents as a chair, cupboard, bookcase, and just to keep everything out of the running water that periodically cascaded through the campsite. Maybe Grace did expect the place to be immaculate? She’d looked pretty immaculate herself when she turned up that first day. Duncan leaned forward and put his head in his hands, feeling the ingrained mud tight under his nails and the little beginnings of dreadlocks forming at the back of his neck. She’s just another site volunteer. Someone who’s here for a couple of weeks and then gone, just a peripheral. So why the hell am I so bothered whether she thinks I’m the next candidate for Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners? It’s a tent, a fucking tent!
But he couldn’t restrain himself from peeping through the zipped doorway into the other compartment, where he had, until recently, kept boxes of his equipment and some pages of reading he was supposed to be doing. He checked that the floor was free from mud, that the sides were tautly pegged and not caving loosely in and making the room look like an elephant’s armpit.
‘Knock knock,’ said someone outside the main entrance.
‘Who’s there?’ Duncan quickly stepped out of the back room and rezipped it.
No reply, but Grace inserted herself through the open flap at the tent front, stretching herself up as she came inside and he found himself confronted by her front, her chest being practically pressed against him as they were squashed together in the limited space. He tried to find somewhere else to look.
‘Tessa’s been found.’ She sat on the recently vacated crate. ‘I thought you’d want to know as soon as possible. And yes, she’s fine. She’d done what pretty much everyone thought, gone off to York to meet up with a boyfriend. Honestly, does nobody think to tell anyone where they’re going? It’s like all those keep safe talks we give the kids in Year Seven just roll right through their heads.’
Living in the Past Page 8