Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  She did not tell the voice. She packed her small case that very afternoon and left. Neither did she tell the tenants. With sudden detachment, she thought, well, they will have to sort things out for themselves, I have played my part, I have arranged the house, as I was told, now they must take care of themselves. I have myself to think of.

  And in a different bed, that night, she waited for the voice. And presently, in the populated gloom of the ward, it manifested itself. Now look where you have got us, it complained, now look where you have landed us.

  Listen, it said, craftily, listen and do as I tell you. Tell them that this is what I said to you … Tell them that this is what I told you to do …

  It lectured on, with renewed confidence, so loudly that she thought it impossible that she alone could hear.

  Interpreting the Past

  THE TOWN of Houghcester (pronounced Hosta) was much given over, in the summer of 1977, to its antecedents; indeed, you could have called the past a growth industry. And Houghcester had, of course, plenty of it, ranging from prehistoric – not much to show of that, bar some quite nice flints, axe-heads and reconstituted burial urns in the City Museum – on through the more conveniently demonstrable layers of Roman, Saxon, medieval and so forth. It was a well-endowed place, and never had its endowments been more skilfully exploited; it had taken to tourism with magnificent effect. Since towns cannot do their book-keeping as precisely as other commercial concerns, it would not be possible to estimate even roughly how many dollars, yen, francs etc. Houghcester had earned, but if it were, the place would have been justified in claiming the Queen's Award to Industry.

  All this, though, makes the town sound insensitively profit-minded. In fact, Houghcester was decently proud of its history, and concerned to make the most of it in every sense.

  The excavation of the Priory was being carried out by the Houghcester City Archaeological Unit, financed by public money (with a few private contributions), and supervised by the Chief Archaeological Officer. The diggers, rank and file, were a mixture of professional archaeologists and volunteer helpers.

  The volunteers ranged in age from sixteen to thirty-one and had various reasons for being there. Three were students of archaeology, one had been sent by her parents, one wished to impress her history teacher at school, with whom she was emotionally obsessed, another was unemployed and wanted to get away from home, and three liked outdoor life and were at a loose end.

  Susan Price was there because she had been crossed in love.

  She was nineteen and the experience was new to her; she found its effect devastating. She had never been profoundly unhappy before, but being a sensible and stoical girl she had decided to treat her condition like a debilitating illness, battle with it alone, look to the future, and seek some useful occupation. She saw the dig advertised in The Times, and applied.

  The objectives of the dig were briefly stated: to establish, as far as possible, the ground-plan of the Saxon church which pre-dated the medieval Priory church (itself almost literally in the shadow of Houghcester's famous cathedral) of which little now remained except the walls, and investigate the Priory burial ground which lay above the foundations of the early church. The skeletons, after removal and examination for demographic and medical purposes, were to be reinterred with Christian rites (most of them were thirteenth and fourteenth century, with a few from the Saxon Christian period), and the site tidied up and planted out as a municipal garden, preserving the ruined walls.

  The diggers crouched as though in worship above their allotted squares of ground, each with paraphernalia of plastic bucket, trowel, brush, shovel and paintbrush for meticulous clearance work. It was a good summer, and they wore, for the most part, jeans or tattered shorts, T-shirts or (for the men) navvies' vests. Some of them had straw hats. The site, at this stage of its clearance, looked like the dusty section of a beehive – many shallow dirt pits, some with the delicate tracery of a person laid bare, dome of skull, rib-cage, hand splayed out like a fan, others with leg-bones sticking out from the dry wall of soil, or a huddle of tibia, fibula, crania and so forth that must be carefully exposed and photographed before being removed.

  Maggie Spink, the director of the dig, moved all day long around the site, checking, measuring, photographing, removing finds (the detritus of sherds, fragments of china, buttons, gnarled twigs of metal, bits of clay pipe and lumps of aged glass that had accumulated at every layer) and chivvying those who knocked off periodically for a smoke in the sun. Since the site lay at the very heart of Houghcester, and on the route from the multi-storey car park to the cathedral, she had to deal also with the mild curiosity of the public, who were fenced off with wattle hurdles. When obliged to answer their questions, she was patient, but a little aloof; she would explain – briefly – the objectives and achievements of the dig, while – tacitly – making it clear that a more complex account would be above their heads. Those professionally concerned with the past, she seemed to suggest, are indeed accountable for what they are doing, but only up to a point; we are all technicians, now, and our ancestors are best approached with a proper expertise.

  She was a dumpy woman in her late thirties, with short straw-coloured hair, a large bottom and brusque manner. She dressed with what seemed an aggressive disregard for femininity. Susan Price was much alarmed by her, during her first few days on the dig, and deplored particularly the ankle-socks worn with open sandals.

  ‘You're reading what at Bristol?’ she had said to Susan, and when Susan had replied, English, she had said ‘Why?’

  To which Susan could find no reply at all.

  The other professional archaeologists treated her with respect: she was, they informed the volunteers, first class at the job, she had a growing reputation, had dug at this place and that, been associated with a string of impressive names. The volunteers approached her with circumspection; they had all, on arrival, been a little surprised to find their presence accepted not with gratitude, but rather as though the benefit were the other way round. They were privileged, Maggie seemed to suggest, on her introductory tour of instruction and explanation, to be apprenticed in this way. It was as though they were permitted to be acolytes at the religious ceremony of some sect from which they were bound, by their nature, to be excluded. For some, this was tantalising; they picked up the technical jargon of the archaeologists and brandished it around. For a few it was irritating; one young schoolteacher left after two days, complaining that he had been patronised. For most, it was neither here nor there; they had come to pass the time, not to have opinions.

  Susan Price, at the beginning, was only partly there in any case.

  She squatted over Burial No. 38, brushing crumbs of soil from a battered rib-cage, and addressed someone quite different: I expect you will be in France by now, she said, you and Jane. I can see you – I only wish I couldn't – sitting by the road, waiting for the next lift. Jane is all brown by now, I daresay, looking very nice. I am brown, too, as it happens, for what that's worth which is not much since I never look at myself in a mirror, these days, there doesn't seem a lot of point.

  When, exactly, did you start to go off me? I have to put it bluntly, because I suspect that only through bluntness am I going to get over this (do people?). I think, examining things, it must have been around that time we went to Bath for the day; I didn't realise it then, but looking back, I can detect a whiff of indifference. And then, there was that time you didn't turn up when we'd arranged to meet after my lecture and now I realise you must have …

  The dig packed up, each day, at five-thirty. The plastic bags of finds were removed to the disused Victorian school nearby which had been made over to the Unit for the summer; there, Maggie Spink would begin her evening's work of sorting and classification, while the rest filled in their ‘skelly charts’ – the surviving bits of person coloured in on a blueprint of what there ought to be, a heap of eccentric skeleton portraits with one red leg, six ribs, half a cranium, or pelvis and right foot only. The
y then dispersed to their homes or to the old police station scheduled for demolition in the autumn – allotted to the rest as a billet. There, they heated baked beans on primuses, talked, read, or wandered off into the city.

  Susan, for whom the process of self-distraction was a primary concern, bought guide-books and did the job properly. She studied the place as though she might be required to answer examination questions on it. She wandered in the cathedral for hours on end.

  The cathedral prospered all summer long; tourists flowed through it from early morning till sunset – American, French, German, Dutch, English – a quick canter, a leisurely stroll, a protracted tour of inspection according to age, temperament and degree of interest. Not since the era of pilgrimages could the place have done such good business. Admittedly, the poor and the uncharitable slid quickly past the prominent Appeal Box at the entrance, but almost everyone bought postcards, tea-towels, leather book-marks tooled in gold with a brass-rubbing of Sir Toby and Lady Falconer (c. 1428), pottery mugs picturing the west front, transparencies of the stained glass. The chapter house, converted into a tea-room and snack bar, was also enjoying a boom. Outside, in the cloisters and on the green, itinerant young of all nationalities sprawled in the sunshine. The cathedral officials presided with benevolence and tact, discreetly hovering behind pillars and at entrances, ready with information should it be required, not intruding unless invited. Not everyone wants Perpendicular windows, late Saxon wall-paintings or fifteenth-century misericords thrust upon them, after all, they may be there for quite other reasons – to placate their relatives, for a cup of tea, a break from driving, a snooze or a cuddle on the grass. The past has no right to impose itself on people; it is there to be taken or left, as we see fit, as it suits us. It is our turn now.

  Susan, her guide-books in hand, diligently sorted out styles and periods. She noted the surviving medieval street plan of the city – surviving in name and spirit only, for most of the early buildings had been torn down in the post-war zest for reconstruction. She agreed with Professor Pevsner that not all – indeed not much – of the reconstruction was successful. The shopping precinct, the public library, the new council offices, all had an aggressive immaturity, at odds with their background. They had not yet settled down, were in uneasy conflict with the old almshouses, the one remaining medieval gateway; in Sheep Street, which suggested quite other things, Boots and Mothercare confronted one another with a blaze of plate glass.

  The cathedral was mature, all right. It had been quietly maturing away there since its foundation in the early eleventh century, to such effect that the west tower was now in need of a massive underpinning job, the roof would have to be completely stripped and releaded, and the external carvings were in a sorry state. The appeal target had been pushed up perforce from £750,000 to a round million. The Friends (of the cathedral, that is) were working flat out.

  Susan, who had never before paid much attention to architecture, found herself not only distracted from her mourning but curiously soothed by the cathedral. There was something reassuring about this juxtaposition of period and mood, in which, eventually, what has been and what is now are reconciled and live together.

  Her fellow diggers were less concerned with the place. The professional archaeologists spent much of the evenings, when they were not helping Maggie Spink in the school, discussing their career prospects; the rest – the amateurs – regretted the lack of a television and amused themselves as best they could. If they could afford cinema or pub, they went out; if not, they lounged on their camp-beds, ate, drank tea and gossiped. In the intimacy of their closed society a sense of being cronies had soon been established, a defensive solidarity as the unskilled labouring mass. The student teacher and the girl from Nottingham had begun a flirtation that looked like developing into something more; the Welsh boy taught everyone to play poker and kept intense noisy games going till late at night. They talked about themselves, about each other, about Maggie Spink.

  ‘Hey …’ said Gwyn, dealing the cards one evening. ‘I found something out today. She's not a Miss at all, our Maggie, she's a Mrs. There's been a mister, but there ain't no more. He skipped out on her.’

  Someone said, ‘Wouldn't you?’ There were giggles.

  Maggie Spink appeared, on the dig's official documents, as Dr Spink. And yet, it was true, a married state was inconceivable, for less easily definable reasons than her ringless hands, her stridently self-sufficient manner. The girl from Nottingham said, ‘How do you know?’

  ‘John Hacker told me’ – John Hacker was one of the career archaeologists – ‘It was all years ago and she's dropped her married name and gone back to what she was called before and she gets hopping mad if anyone ever mentions it.’

  ‘Lots of people don't use married names now – women – specially if they've been working before, had careers.’

  ‘Get Ms Women's Lib there!’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said the girl from Nottingham. ‘I was only saying. Here – it's your deal.’

  Susan Price was vaguely moved by this exchange; she felt a creak of compassion for Maggie, a person who had not, hitherto, seemed in any way approachable. Even so, the feeling did not go very deep; she was still bound up in her own day-to-day survival, was only superficially present. Her internal monologues, though, she was surprised to note, were taking on a slightly different tone.

  What about you? she said to Burial No. 47. Did you ever have to endure this kind of thing? Sexual jealousy, it's called, and it's just about the nastiest feeling I've ever come across. Actually, since you were probably a nun I daresay it didn't arise – I hope not, for your sake. You didn't live all that long, of course – female, aged thirty to forty, level 306, right arm, pelvis and rib-cage, lower jaw-bone, left femur and metatarsus. You had a lot of trouble with your teeth, and what was probably arthritis, according to John Hacker, and there is evidence of malnutrition.

  I'm not a lot better, not yet. Curiously, the thought of her – Jane – is the worst; that's the one I have to squash firmest. With him it's different; since I've got to think of him all the time, can't help it, then I might as well accept it. Re-run things, as it were, like an old film. It hurts; the funny thing is that each time it looks ever so slightly different.

  That weekend at his parents' he was a bit off-hand with his mother; I didn't notice at the time. It's as though, then, I saw him head-on, in one way only (is that what's meant by love being blinkered?); now I remember things I didn't really register then. That conversation we had once about abstract pictures, in that art gallery, I remember every word (what I have to avoid is the feel of his arm round me, when we were having it …) but I find I'm not agreeing with him quite so much. Oh, but…I'd want to say, if we were having it again, and, no I think you're wrong about that what I think is …

  July became August; the cathedral clocked up its first hundred thousand of the Appeal, and celebrated by staging son et lumière for the next four weeks; the diggers, scratching their way down through levels 273-401, became a small, enclosed sect, in much the same way as the Priory whose detectable past they were so efficiently interpreting. There was a hierarchy, alliances and enmities, in-jokes and tribal jargon. One or two departed, a couple more came and were absorbed. The weather held. In the school the burials were stacked in heaps of plastic bags, awaiting collection; the skelly charts filled two walls; trestle tables were covered with trays of finds. Unexpected dramas or reverses punctuated the routine of the days: a conjectured drain turned out to be the entrance to an eighteenth-century charnel house, heavily populated, which was re-sealed after hasty investigation; the interesting depressions running parallel to the nave of the Saxon church proved to be Victorian celery beds, also an irrelevant intrusion. The past is a disorderly and unreliable affair; you cannot trust it very far.

  Susan, all one long, hot day, scraped with paintbrush and trowel around the fragile, bird-like bones of a baby (level 372, male, probably still-born, date uncertain, and what was that doing in a nu
nnery?). You'll have got to the Mediterranean by now, she said, if you've been lucky with lifts, or maybe you're in Spain, like you said you might, when we had that last talk, that awful one, when I cried (which makes me hot with shame to think of, I never cry). I slept rather well last night, you might be interested to hear, first time for ages.

  I have been going over everything we ever said to each other; sometimes, quite frankly, you seem to me a bit opinionated. Not that that means I feel any different, now; it is just rather interesting.

  The thing is, am I changing you, or is that how you were? How will I ever know?

  Either the heat, or the Victorian celery beds, had put Maggie Spink into an irritable state. She chivvied everybody, extended the working day by half an hour, and kept going on about how the excavation was behind schedule. ‘That is the trouble about a dig with a predominantly amateur element – you simply cannot get the right sense of urgency into people.’ Susan, tracing the tiny bleached splinters of the baby's foot, felt a shadow across her back and looked up into Maggie's sun-reddened face. She was agitated, on the edge of an outburst. After some discussion of the burial, and examination of a small heap of sherds, she said suddenly, ‘I've had to separate those two. I really cannot stand all that whispering and pawing on the site. Tim can go and number finds in the school.’

  The affair between the student teacher and the girl from Nottingham had prospered.

  Susan smiled. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I'm sure they don't really mean …’

  Maggie said violently, ‘If they want to fuck that's entirely up to them, but not on my dig, thank you very much.’ Her outrage seemed quite out of proportion to the offence; Susan, embarrassed, turned back to the baby. Lately, she had found herself for some reason the object of the older woman's gruff favour; she was considered apparently more serious and responsible than the rest. Once, Maggie had said, ‘It's a pity you didn't think of reading archaeology. You might have done quite well.’ Susan had repeated this to one of the younger career archaeologists, who had laughed – ‘Oh, Maggie doesn't recognise other branches of study. You should have told her English literature is quite well-regarded too.’