by F. G. Cottam
‘We don’t get on at all. I haven’t even spoken to her since the beginning of term. We don’t phone or email one another. We’re strangers, really. We don’t even text.’
‘So your upbringing wasn’t as idyllic as people must generally suppose.’
‘Why would people suppose anything?’
‘You grew up in public, Jane.’
‘I didn’t have a choice in that. I wasn’t aware then there was any other way of doing it.’
Grayling looked down at the wet ground and then his head rose and he fixed her with his eyes. They were a pale blue contradiction, cold but filled with a kindly concern at the same time. ‘How does it feel, coming back to this place?’
‘Normal,’ she said. ‘What happened yesterday was abnormal. The person I saw was not of this place or even, I think, properly of this world.’
‘You mean you imagined him?’
‘I don’t mean that at all. What I mean is that he seemed like a trespasser. But even that isn’t strong enough.’ She shivered. ‘He seemed more a violation. There was something so unnatural and threatening about him. He should have seemed natural, with those antique clothes and that old-fashioned hairstyle, thoroughly at home in an ancient place. But he didn’t. He seemed instead like an insult to the world.’
‘You should get into the van,’ Grayling said. ‘You should go before Martha becomes impatient and starts to pound on her bloody horn.’
Jane turned and started to walk away from him.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘They’re going to have to go back and exhume Martin before their drive back to Cambridge. If you would prefer, you can ride back there in the Land Rover, with me.’
‘That’s considerate of you,’ she said.
‘It isn’t anything of the sort. I’m merely thinking of the reduction a passenger will represent in the size of my carbon footprint.’
‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’ll get my rucksack from the van. Does the Land Rover have a radio? I can’t remember. It’s a long journey without music.’
‘No radio,’ Grayling said. ‘But I am blessed with a very fine singing voice, should music be required.’
He was teasing her about the radio. Of course he was. He needed one for the traffic bulletins. At the wheel of the Land Rover, she thought there was some hint of the military about his bearing and demeanor she had never really noticed before.
‘What did Adam find?’
‘Something pricelessly rare and impossible to explain in any terms I have taught you to understand. He found something so old we know almost nothing about the civilization responsible for its creation.’
‘Was it plundered, then?’
Grayling smiled tightly. Sleet was slashing in frozen sheets across the windscreen. There were things about Scotland Jane did not think she would miss. ‘No. It was not something the Vikings or the Celts stole. The Vikings were great travellers, but even on their marauding voyages they did not reach the place where this item was originally created. You must wait until after I have spoken to your father, Jane. Then I expect to be in a position to tell you more.’
‘What if he forbids you to tell me?’
Grayling glanced at her. ‘I do not think he will.’
‘Have you ever met my dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so.’
‘This is not a conspiracy. It is certainly no conspiracy of silence. It is merely protocol, as I have already explained.’
‘If my dad forbids you to tell me more I will simply ask Adam.’
‘Well,’ Grayling said. ‘I can’t prevent you from doing that. But as you said yourself last night, Adam is in the habit of keeping his word.’
And you have sworn him to silence on the matter of the find, Jane thought. But she did not bother to say so. She knew it was the fact just then on both their minds. Instead, she reached for the radio’s controls. She got Coldplay performing ‘Yellow’. She would have preferred something a bit more upbeat. But it was better than nothing. To her surprise, Grayling sang along. To her further surprise, he really did have an excellent singing voice.
The Land Rover ate miles in its stolid progress south. Jane thought of her father’s Jaguar and her mother’s Porsche and how seldom over recent years she had been ferried willingly in either vehicle. Her parents had their lives, she supposed.
Eventually, she dropped off and dozed. And she dreamed of an elderly sailor in mottled blues, singing sea shanties in a language alien to her. His movements were sly and spasmodic and strange, and their strangeness provoked her back into consciousness, eventually. She awoke with the look in his unblinking glass eyes disapproving, in her dream memory.
‘A nightmare?’
‘Did I cry out?’
‘You moaned and mumbled a bit.’
‘It was all very random,’ Jane said. ‘I was aboard an old warship, steaming through the North Sea crewed by sailors who moved like dolls. No earthly logic to it.’
‘Nothing earthly at all, by the sound of it,’ Grayling said.
Jane looked at the speedometer and out at the passing landscape. Grayling had switched the radio off. She realized that they were unlikely to arrive in Cambridge before dark. She wanted to speak to Adam but could not very well do it now. And he had not yet called her. He rented digs in the town but she did not know the address. Maybe Martin Prior had it.
‘There’s a bag on the seat behind you,’ said Grayling. ‘There’s a flask of coffee and sandwiches.’
‘I can’t eat your lunch,’ Jane said. She was hungry, though. Her impromptu visit to the site had not allowed time for breakfast.
‘I’m provisioned for two,’ Grayling said. ‘I was hoping that you would agree to travel back with me.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m curious about you. I’d like you to tell me about yourself.’
‘My favourite subject,’ she said, reaching behind her for the lunch bag.
‘Except that it isn’t. Most young people can’t stop talking about themselves, but you are quite reticent. It’s an unusual trait.’
Jane bit into a sandwich. The bread was coarse and thickly buttered and the filling was strong Scottish cheese and fresh cucumber. It tasted delicious. It occurred to her that she had, that morning, smoked her last cigarette. She chewed and swallowed. ‘I don’t know, Professor,’ she said. ‘Adam Parker is pretty reticent.’
‘He is,’ Grayling said, ‘which makes it doubly unusual. Provide a bored driver with a distraction, Jane.’ He nodded at the radio. ‘I can’t get a decent signal in this weather on that. Tell me about yourself.’
And so she did.
His long and strange evening of revelation with McGuire had compelled Adam to think about his father. The memory of his dad was not strong. At least, it wasn’t at first. It was enfeebled by time and deliberate effort, he realized now, reminiscing after a night’s sleep and most of a day, remembering with something like surprise just how brutally hurtful the breach had been for him.
The truth he was now obliged to acknowledge was that, actually, he had adored his dad. And his dad had left him completely and without apparent regret. There had been no hesitation and no compunction. And he had only been eleven years old when he suffered this unsustainable loss.
He had been honest, but not wholly honest with Grayling in their brief discussion of the matter on the day after his find. His mum did pretend his dad was dead. But he did that too. It was his as well as her way of dealing with an absence that had hurt him when it happened the way he imagined it might hurt to be torn fully conscious limb from protesting limb.
He stopped walking and looked at nothing and breathed in the chill November air. He was remembering his dad’s smell. His father had smelled of oil and sweat and the salt of the sea and hand-rolled tobacco. He had smelled of a sort of manliness Adam had smelled on no one since. But he had not hugged a mature man since his father’s departure, so perhaps that was the reason for this.
He had not invited or been off
ered the same physical closeness. For better or for worse, you only got one dad. His father had smelled sure and familiar and safe. But in the end he had been none of those things, had he? He had possessed none of those qualities. His scent had been a seductive lie, like everything else about him, like the strong, cradling embraces that had felt like love. Adam clenched his fists and blinked back tears now, knowing he still missed the comfort of those embraces terribly.
His dad had been a seaman. He had worn a sailor’s tattoos in fading ink on the brawny forearms concealed by the sleeves of his reefer jacket. He wore jeans and boots and a ribbed wool hat pulled down low over his hair. He had gazed for a long moment outside their front door at his son, looking back up at him. The expression on his face had been new and unreadable. Then he had hoisted his duffle bag up on to one broad shoulder and turned and was gone in the rapid, loping stride that was so familiar and that Adam had never seen again.
He had been obliged to run, as a child, just to keep up with his dad. He remembered the callus that had always felt like a coin in his palm when they held hands and Adam’s enclosed fingertips found it. It had felt like a ten-pence piece.
Adam’s eyes felt raw. He sniffed. There had been a lot packed into those brief periods when his father had been home from the sea. He would leave for the ship clean-shaven and with his black hair shorn and return tousled and bearded, and they would do everything there was for a man and his boy to do together. There had been a lot of his dad, Adam realized, every time in those days and weeks of precious shore leave, and then there had been nothing at all.
He must remember to ask his father why, for that had been McGuire’s instruction to him. He was to seek out and talk to his father about the strange object he had uncovered from the Scottish forest loam. The reason for doing this had not been explained. McGuire had insisted that it was his father’s place to tell him. McGuire had given him an address. He would, dutifully, ask his dad about the object. Then he would ask him how he had found it in his heart to go with such finality.
A twig snapped on the ground to his rear and he wheeled around and Jane Dobb was there, her hair a glorious halo in the gloaming, the green glitter of her eyes almost feral in the last of the light, her lips slightly parted, all of her unreal, so gorgeous and surprising was the sight of her.
‘You’ve been crying,’ she said. ‘Oh, Adam.’ And she closed the distance between them and reached for him. As she held him he heaved a sob he could not prevent, there on the bank of the river in the unexpected tenderness of her embrace.
‘Are you real?’ he said. ‘You look like a dream.’
She found his mouth with hers and kissed him. And he tasted her and knew that she was real.
‘Grayling brought me back,’ she said. ‘I hoped I might find you here.’ She smiled. ‘I’m not stalking you, I promise. I’ve seen you walking here.’
‘I’ve never seen you.’
‘From the river,’ she said. ‘I scull with the rowing club. You dawdle and daydream. You wouldn’t have noticed.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘But I did.’
‘Thank God.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Everything,’ he said, ‘but nothing, Jane, now you’re here.’
He could not hold back with her. There was a way of dealing with relationships in the early stages. It involved coolness and detachment and a light sprinkling of irony. Adam Parker knew that he could never do this with Jane Dobb. He could not play a role with her. She took him truthfully or not at all.
He thought that he would love her, if he didn’t love her already. He thought in truth that he did love her already. It did not matter if she knew. She would know. He could not conceal feelings so strong and anyway, what was the point of doing so?
‘Why did you travel back with Grayling?’
‘To satisfy his curiosity, I think. He wanted to know about me. He asked me questions about you, too, to which I didn’t know any of the answers. Not that I would have told him if I had.’
‘But you told him about yourself?’
‘I did.’
‘Did he tell you about what’s going on? About what’s happened?’
‘He said he had to consult my father first. The protocol, apparently, whatever that means.’
Adam nodded. He felt more grateful for Jane’s presence there than he could have expressed. He delighted in her company, but it was more than that. She had distracted him from the bleak sorrow of his grief.
‘Will you tell me what’s going on?’ she said.
‘I’m going away,’ Adam said. ‘I’ve got to go to Rotterdam. Grayling has to talk to your father. I have to talk to mine.’
‘I assumed he was dead.’
‘No, just buried. He’s buried aboard a barge in Rotterdam, apparently.’
‘I know a nice restaurant. Not quiet, nowhere is in Cambridge that’s worth going to, really. But there’s privacy, you don’t see our crowd there. We’ll find a secluded corner.’ She smiled. ‘The table for two they always have in old-fashioned films. Are you hungry?’
‘I am for you,’ he said, truthfully. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Don’t be sorry. I expect I’m every bit as hungry for you.’
Martin Prior sat in the study of his flat and considered the revelations of the previous evening. The experience had left him exhausted and exalted at the same time. He was glad that he had been able to isolate himself on the minibus between the white buds of his iPod earphones. He would not have been capable of the small-talk with which people felt obliged to fill tedious journeys.
He felt grateful for his father’s generosity in providing him with a private and well-appointed place in which to live. He often felt grateful to his father, despite having known nothing but parental largesse all his life. He was observant enough to know that he was privileged. He felt he deserved it, but that didn’t prevent him from being appreciative.
Right now he felt that he needed his privacy, his seclusion, as he never had before. He had a lot to think about. The implications of what he had seen were profound and staggering. The responsibility he had been offered, should he consent to take it on, was more enormous than anything he had experienced in his relatively short life.
He looked again at the artefact he had been given. He had adjusted his desk lamp so that it sat bathed in a pool of yellow light. He stroked it with a finger, aware of the sheer alien strangeness of the thing and the exquisite workmanship it embodied. They had said it was taken from life, that the creature it depicted was real.
He felt as though he had been there weeks, rather than just for most of a single night. That was the power of revelation, though. That was the impact of profound truths of which he had been unaware. He had returned to the hostel sometime after five a.m. and no one there had been any the wiser as to his absence from it. Even though he’d been exhausted, he had not slept.
Instead, he had taken out the artefact he was examining now and cradled it, crooning a song he had heard his father play, an old favourite of the old man’s own university days, some prog rock anthem performed by Genesis or Yes or Pink Floyd.
Martin was very glad of the seclusion his flat afforded. He could do the research he needed to do here without curious eyes looking at the computer screen over his shoulder or riffling through his written notes. His privacy was guaranteed. But he would be cautious, nevertheless. He would hide the artefact for a start. He would tuck that fabulous item of treasure away.
Truth be told, he was pretty impressed with himself. He had been chosen to accomplish something significant. It was a rare accolade and it was also vital. He had needed this, he realized, this magnitude of responsibility. He had craved it.
His life had been without genuine challenge. This was no doubt the cause of his womanizing. He had been eager for victory but deprived of a meaningful cause and had done what attractive men resort to doing when they are empty of purpose. He had been narcissistic and directionless,
going through the motions of sexual conquest in the absence of anything more fulfilling. No wonder he had felt so hollow for so long. He did not feel hollow now.
This fresh and honest self-appraisal did not mean giving up on Jane Dobb. It meant just the opposite. She was beautiful and brilliant and he thought more than ever worth competing for. His approach and purpose would be different now, though, in pursuing Jane.
It was no longer a question of resorting to dubious means to eventually bed her. There would be no subterfuge, no seduction by stealth and no careful demolition of the character of Adam Parker.
She was not simply someone at the head of a horny list he’d compiled. She was instead the only name on the list. And she would be treated with the consideration she deserved. He would woo her. He did not think she would find him, with his new accomplishments, easy to resist. It would happen over time, of course. But as the herald had been at pains to emphasize, Martin could be a very patient man.
After crooning that song as he caressed the object given him, at the hostel early that morning, Martin had tried to find it on the internet so that he could download it on to his iPod and listen to it on the long journey back. He found it, searching for a snatch of the lyric.
To his surprise, it was not by Genesis or by any other of what he thought of as the usual prog rock suspects. It was a song by a band called King Crimson. He thought that his father must have played it, though, for it to seem so familiar to him. He could not imagine where else he could have heard it. Its title was, ‘The Court of the Crimson King’, and he could not rid his head of its mournful verses and solemn melody.
FIVE
Full darkness had by now descended. Their corner table was candlelit. The walls were covered in a sort of velvet plush and embellished with plaster details painted gold. Adam looked up from his menu at Jane. Candlelight complimented her. She suited any light, but it gave her skin a smoothly sculpted look, and its flickering shadows made a ruby cascade of her hair.
She became aware of his scrutiny and looked back, raising an eyebrow in an expression of ironic counter-appraisal, and he was hit by the full force of her; not just by her good looks but by the glamour she possessed. Jane’s glamour was a very potent quality in those slightly hokey surroundings, away from the mud and the grey air of the dig. It seemed not so much an attribute, as a force.