Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  ‘Grace? What is it?’ Duncan had put the drinks down now and come to stand beside me. The pink lighting on his dark hair gave him a shop mannequin gloss.

  I tapped the glass holding the picture in place with my nail. ‘This. I was up there this morning. It didn’t look like this then.’

  Now we both looked at the picture. The barrow was just a mound, rising from the heather that lapped its foot. To one side, a fallen stone lay almost overgrown. There was no sign of the tall stone, in whose shelter I had fallen asleep, no sign of the ditch that surrounded the barrow, or of the line of white stones that had marked its base.

  ‘It looked pretty much like that when I was last up there, what, a couple of weeks ago,’ Duncan said, carefully. ‘Bit more bracken everywhere, and the barrow has weathered down a bit in the last eighty years or so, but, yep, that’s Long John.’

  He picked up his cider and took a sip, but I could feel his eyes on me all the time as I tipped the picture this way and that, trying to make what I remembered line up with what I could see. ‘Grace? What did it look like to you?’

  But my throat had closed over. I couldn’t say anything. All I could do was stare down at the innocent seeming picture in my hand and feel the eye-burn that was tears trying to make their way to the outside world.

  Very gently he took the photograph and laid it down on the table, then pushed me into a chair and shoved the long glass in front of me. ‘Okay,’ he said, very evenly. ‘You saw something different to this, then.’

  I managed to pick up the glass and took a very big drink from it. My eyes stung all over again, it was certainly gin. ‘Bigger. Ditch all round and little white stones. And a big stone, standing up, just away from it.’

  I heard him take a deep breath in and then blow it out like a silent whistle. There was a moment of quiet and then he said, ‘By the way and not to detract from your situation at all, but the chips are getting cold here.’

  I laughed, if a bit soggily. ‘They’re no good as ammunition if they’re cold.’

  ‘Ammunition?’

  ‘I might have to throw them at you, remember?’

  Duncan gave another of his sudden laughs, and I saw his face relax. His eyes stopped looking as though he was gazing into the past and his mouth stretched, two lines formed on either side like failed dimples, parenthesising his smile. He looked like a walking emoticon. ‘Aye. You might.’ The dish of chips was nudged along the table, nearer to my hand. ‘But try eating them first.’

  They were warm and salty, piquant with vinegar and I realised that I was actually very hungry. Tabitha and the rest of the catering crew did their best, but a day standing at the front of a classroom was no preparation for wet sieving in the open air, and the timing and queues often meant that when I got to the tent to eat all the best stuff was gone.

  Duncan watched me gobbling down the chips without comment. He sat opposite and drank his cider, occasionally stretching out his legs or leaning back, head on one side. When I’d slurped down the last chip and licked my fingers, he gave me a grin over his glass. ‘Better?’

  And yes, having a full stomach, even if it was full of fat, salt and carbs, had made me feel a little bit more cheerful about being deranged. So I nodded and drank some more gin, which probably, now I came to think of it, was heavily contributing to making me feel more human. ‘Thank you.’

  Raised eyebrows now, as the amber liquid of the cider went down a little further. ‘For …?’

  ‘For the chips. And also for not behaving as though I was a freak.’

  His hand came out and I was surprised at how warm his fingers were as they curled around my wrist and pushed, so that my glass slowly lowered back to the table. He kept his hand on mine and I was transfixed by the way his knuckles looked, with the skin rough and broken, flecked with little scabs and recent blood specks. Although the gin was probably responsible for that fixation too. ‘You’ve got workhouse hands,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got archaeologists’ hands,’ he said. ‘And you’re not a freak.’

  ‘But I saw—’

  ‘Grace, I’m a scientist. You say you saw something down in that dale, we found something down in that dale. What you thought you saw ties up with what we are finding.’ He tightened his fingers around mine. ‘I don’t understand the whys and the wherefores of all of it, but your reality and my reality seem pretty close on this one.’

  Gently he disentangled his hand and took it back to cup around his cider. I took another mouthful of gin. It was a lot easier to accept what he was saying when I was on the outside of strong alcohol. ‘Was it real, though?’

  Duncan leaned back again and his eyes were bright but almost hooded in the pink light. With his dark hair, the incipient beard and his straight nose, it made him look like a raven with a plan. ‘Well.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I put a trench in across the hut site, a couple where you said the other huts were, and we did a big excavation along where the track became a causeway into the river.’

  He dropped his eyes now, staring at the beer mat on the table in front of him, advertising a local brewery. He was clearly going to make me drag the information out of him.

  ‘And?’ I drained my gin down to the ice cubes.

  ‘And you were wrong about the trackway. Well, misplaced, we actually found it another couple of metres further along. Everything else, bang on.’

  There was a moment when I wondered whether the chips were going to come back up, but his measured excitement was reassuring. ‘So it was real? What I saw?’

  ‘I dunno. I don’t understand it either, but the statistical chances otherwise …’ He blew a long breath, which ruffled his hair.

  I looked around the inside of the pub. The rough stone walls with occasional plastered stretches, the random patterned carpet and the wooden furniture all gleaming and cosy by the light of those pink shaded lamps and warmed by a well-fuelled woodburner which cracked and thumped to itself in one corner like a steampunk band. This was real. I could smell it: spilled alcohol, chip residue, smoke …

  ‘What happens now?’ I rubbed my palm against the grain of the table, reassuring myself of its solidity.

  Duncan scratched at his stubbled cheeks with both hands, then rested his chin on his fists. ‘Now I get permission to dig right through until winter sets in. This is important, Grace, a proper Bronze Age settlement with evidence of ritual activities as part of everyday life … a barrow, a river … I could spend the rest of my working life on this excavation and not do more than scratch the surface.’ He was looking at me over the table, in a way that made my blood run a little warmer through my veins – although that also could have had something to do with the gin. ‘And I’d really like it if you stayed …’

  There was a commotion at the doorway, a sort of rattling bustle, and several men came in. One of them headed straight for our table.

  ‘Professor Duncan McDonald,’ said Detective Inspector Sunley. ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of contributing to the death by misadventure of Abigail Jacks …’

  And everything descended into confusion.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I woke with a gin headache. It was still dark and Duncan hadn’t returned to the tent yet, although Richard had gone to the police station to try to sort things out. The poor girl who’d died hadn’t even been anything to do with the dig. She’d apparently driven past on her way to the local town, where she’d taken an overdose of something she’d bought on a street corner in Middlesborough. Duncan had never met her, talked to her or even seen her, but she’d stopped and taken some photographs from the ridge of our site. A couple of the pictures had had Duncan in. And that was all they’d needed.

  I got up and put some clothes on, then went outside. The night was very clear, stars shone almost painfully bright against the navy blue sky and the moon hung full, almost touching the top of the barrow, a
s though it were too heavy to support itself in the sky and needed propping up from below. There was a crispness to the air, a slight sting as I breathed in and an owl made an unconvincing attempt at hooting, as though it were only an apprentice.

  With my heart doing its best to climb out of my throat, and my bladder trying to convince me that it really couldn’t take this kind of thing, I followed the newly beaten path down the dale towards the relocated dig site, keeping my eyes on my feet all the way. Afraid I might see … what? The cold had nothing to do with the way I was shivering, telling myself that I knew what was there: strips of cleared soil, holes carefully covered with plastic to prevent rain getting in, ranging poles propped against the heaps of earth waiting to be sieved.

  Almost without my being aware of it, the path turned from mud to peat and then to grass beneath my walking boots. The smell of newly dug ground dissipated in the air and was replaced by the smell of meat cooking, smoke, a dusty sort of smell like flour. I finally looked up.

  The woman I’d seen up at the barrow was standing with her back to me, tending a fire that was burning outside the huts. Every so often she threw another branch onto the embers, and stood looking out over the hilltops as though scanning for movement. Outside one of the other huts was a woman crouching, moving back and forth as though in some obscure kind of prayer, and it was only when the flames from the fire blew a little more in her direction that I saw she was grinding corn, rocking one huge stone on top of another, stopping every now and then to sweep the flour onto a cloth that she’d spread to catch it. She too kept standing and looking towards the hill, straightening her back and grimacing.

  After I’d watched for a couple of minutes, the woman grinding the corn stopped, swept the last flour off and tied up the cloth bundle, then came over to stand by the fire. She was more sturdily built than the woman I’d met, shorter and a little rougher looking around the edges, as though she was less caring about personal appearance. Her hair was dark and hung in greasy waves loose across shoulders clad in a kind of plaited wool shawl. Both women now had their backs to me, and the dark gave me confidence, so I crept a little closer, ducking under the cover of the rocks that protected this end of the settlement, until I could hear their voices, snatched towards me on the breeze that also brought the smoke.

  ‘You should sleep, Lady Hen,’ said grinding lady and my whole body did a peculiar kind of jump that made me bang one knee against a jutting rock. My ears knew, absolutely, that what they spoke was not English. It sounded like they were speaking Welsh with a strong Cornish accent … but my brain was getting it as clearly as though they were a couple of Sixth Formers doing an improvised play. ‘My Lord Tor will find him and bring him down.’

  ‘I know, Airwen,’ said the woman, Hen. ‘But I shall keep the fire burning as a beacon to them both. Why did he run away?’

  Airwen sighed. ‘You know my son, Lady. Headstrong as a tied ram. Tor told him that he was too young to consider being sent to my family. They live across the trade way, several days’ journey, you have seen them at the Midsummer gathering?’ Smoke blew and I couldn’t see the other woman for a moment, but then they were both clear against the fire. ‘Drustan has an affection for one of my cousins. He was hoping his father would let him leave and go back with them this Midwinter. But Tor—’ A shrug. ‘Wishes another few years with his son. Drustan is yet ten summers old. Tor is right, too young to leave us.’

  There seemed to be a lot of unspoken communication going on between the two women. Tilts of the head and raises of the arms, an almost embrace that died away.

  ‘I am … I am sure Lord Tor is right.’ Hen looked awkward, almost as though she didn’t know what to say, or wanted to be left alone. ‘Drustan is young yet, even for his years.’

  A log on the fire cracked loudly and spat sparks into the sky. Both women tipped their heads back to watch the lights float upwards. ‘They must grow away from us,’ said Airwen. ‘It will hurt to lose him, but I have asked the ancestors to allow my lord and I to try to make a child of our own. I shall care no less for Drustan when I have my own babe.’

  A sharp look from Hen, but no words to back it up. I was spellbound. All right, it was in a strange language and these people were probably long dead, but otherwise it was like watching an episode of EastEnders.

  ‘You have been a good mother to him, Airwen.’

  There was a shout from outside the ring of light the fire provided. A large brown dog ran down from the hillside and a smaller foxy-faced dog dashed to greet it, barking hysterically. They were followed by a man, the man I’d seen scything the grass, I thought, only he’d stopped giving it the full Poldark and had his shirt on, topped by a jerkin that looked as though it was made out of a deer. In his arms he carried the young boy who’d been following him and watching the scything. ‘He is found. Lost out on the trail and fearing wolves.’

  A moment followed that looked like every scene of lost child found that I had ever seen, and the century it took place in seemed irrelevant. The boy was kissed, scolded, even slapped across the head lightly by Airwen; the man was hugged, everyone talking at once and laughing that high, silly laugh of relief. The boy cried a bit, then began giving an, even to me, highly embellished account of the dangers he’d bravely faced before having to take refuge from a wolf pack which, in the opinion of the man, had consisted of one three-legged she-wolf who had spent most of her time trying to escape the boy.

  The other woman, Hen, having made sure that the boy was all right, quietly slipped away and I saw her go into the hut that lay separate from the others, while the boy and the other two adults drew closer to the fire, which was dying now, before heading off to the hut that stood in the centre of the group of three. The last branch sparked into glowing embers and the site was lost to the dark.

  I found myself on my knees and shaking, halfway along the path that led back to the camp, without any idea how I’d got there, and my head buzzing. There was a grey mist floating about in front of my eyes and I dropped my head forward to the ground in case I was about to faint. What had I seen? No, I knew what I’d seen. It had been as real as the bruise on my knee from the rock, as real as the smoke that had made my eyes water. Real. All of it.

  ‘Grace!’ There was a fast squelch and then Duncan was there, putting a hand underneath me to help me up. ‘Are you all right? What happened?’

  He looked like a man who’d spent all night in a police station, a sort of greyish look to his face and a smell of Dettol and old coffee sticking to his skin. ‘I might ask you the same thing,’ I said and gave a smile that wobbled at the edges of my lips.

  The next thing I knew I was being wrapped in a hug that brought more of the sour smell of municipality with it. ‘It was about as bad as you think it would be,’ he muttered, but he felt warm, even from outside his coat, and I realised how cold I was when he drew in his breath at the touch of my skin against him. ‘Wow, have you been out here all night? And why have you got mud on your head?’ The coat came off and was put round my shoulders.

  ‘I was walking. I saw …’ I gave him a brief rundown in between shivers.

  Duncan’s arm drew me close against him and I could feel my shudders absorbing into his body with a gratitude that was a little bit out of proportion to the circumstances. ‘Well, there’s nothing there now but a dig site,’ he said, looking back. ‘Or maybe I just can’t see.’ There was a tone to his voice that almost sounded like jealousy.

  ‘Oh yes, because it’s brilliant fun being able to look back three millennia, all the time wondering if you’re going mad or you’ve got some brain disease,’ I said, tartly, gritting my teeth against the cold and forcing myself to move slightly away from him.

  ‘I’d just like to see …’ A definite tightness in his voice now. ‘I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to find out what it was like to live back then. I’m not interested in battle sites or huge ritual monuments l
ike Stonehenge. I want to know what it was like for the ordinary people. The mums and dads, how they fed their kids, how they farmed, how they lived. And all that is incredibly ephemeral, it doesn’t leave much of a trace in the ground, so forgive me for being just a touch envious, Grace.’

  He’d moved away from me now, so there was a gap between us, which the cold of the morning air was filling, lifting the hem of the coat to sneak underneath and rub against my skin.

  ‘But we don’t know what I’m seeing! It might not be anything to do with you, it could just be …’ I trailed off, because, given the evidence, it was getting harder and harder to justify these visions as hallucinations and I was aware that I was beginning to make scepticism sound like an illness in its own right.

  Duncan put his hands into his jeans pockets and hunched his shoulders. The dying light of the moon, struggling now against the onset of the day, silhouetted him against the tufty heads of the bog cotton and rough bilberry bushes like a big, lumpy giant. His hair was long enough to move about in the filmy breeze that made me huddle further into his coat; he wasn’t far off, I thought, from needing one of the bandanas that the longer-haired diggers used to keep their hair from their eyes when they were working. And suddenly, without any warning, I was flooded with the urge to push my fingers through his hair, to run my hands over the planes of his face, feel the contours of his body against mine.

  The realisation made me stagger again. It was as though the Duncan I had known before had been beamed up and replaced by one just slightly better looking and more appealing. Even though I knew it was the same man, everything seemed to have shifted a couple of degrees, the world had dislocated under my feet and reasserted itself with him suddenly more central to it. It was a little like being slapped with one’s own libido.