No, he wouldn’t say that. Have become an empty shell. Before I pass sentence, have you anything to say? Nothing, my lord. Something shall come of nothing. I have no hesitation in sentencing you, Edward Gilchrist, twenty-three, of the parish of Cartersfield with Mendleton in the county of Berkshire, to hard labour. In a sense, as you will, I hope, come to realise, it is a punishment you have chosen for yourself, a return to society for all you have so thoughtlessly taken. And may God have mercy on your soul.
On yours, too, mate.
Edward eased his back and shifted along the pavement. The white passageway now stretched dirtily for seven or eight feet, a thin red stripe running down one side. It could hardly have been a very important passage, he thought: it looked more like the sort of dank hall that ran from gun-room to gentlemen’s cloakroom in a large Victorian house. Silly, really, to spend your last free holiday before life is Real Life is Earnest digging up a Roman villa. Instead of squatting at the bottom of a deep trench with your shirt off when the sun doesn’t even get far enough down to tan you, you could be doing something to the point. To the point? What point?
Real alienation, this. Christ, all that Oxford talk. This soil is real all right. It smells real, it smells good and dirty the way soil ought to smell. Pavement’s real, too, shows someone real once lived here and had a real house. Ours is a continuously inhabited island. I am deep in the heart of England. It smells damp and dirty, as it should.
“How are you getting on down there?”
Edward jumped. “Please don’t do that,” he said. In his surprise his elbow had knocked into the wall of the trench and a thin trickle of soil had fallen on the piece of pavement he had just uncovered.
“Sorry,” said Mr Armitage. He was the Ministry of Works archaeologist in charge of the excavation. He began to climb down the ladder into the ditch.
“There’s nothing new to see,” said Edward. “I’ve moved a couple of feet further forward, that’s all.”
“Any small finds?”
“Bits of pottery. Nothing interesting.”
Armitage glanced at the shards. “No sign of post-holes, I suppose?”
“None at all.”
“I still feel that this was probably a covered way between the main house and the outbuildings, you know. You will keep a sharp lookout for fragments of wood, won’t you?”
“It might just have had a sort of pergola—nothing but a trellis and some roses. Vines, perhaps.”
Armitage nodded, looking slowly along the walls of the trench. Then he climbed up the ladder again. “Good luck,” he said from the top.
“Thanks,” said Edward. He had little idea of what he was doing, except in the most obvious sense. He had simply read about the excavation in the local paper, come to have a look and found that his services would be welcome. At least, that was to put it rather strongly: they wouldn’t be unwelcome, Armitage had said. He took up a spade or a trowel as ordered and dug or scraped where he was told, taking, he noticed, far more care about it than the professionals who tended to shovel where he would sift. Armitage and his assistant, Mrs Blewett, occasionally inspected his work, but always refrained from comment. They would gaze at the variously coloured layers of earth in a trench and nod as though satisfied. Edward was strictly amateur. His finds so far had been two brass clips and an indecipherable coin.
He bent again to the pavement and brushed away the fall of earth. Wouldn’t the Romans have laughed to see us solemnly sieving their rubbish heaps? Is their central-heating really all that clever? Didn’t they perhaps regard it with the same blasé air that we regard ours? What are archaeologists two thousand years hence going to say about the ruins they dig up? The once-powerful British Empire was rich both at home and abroad. Pottery from as many as seven thousand different potteries has been found all over the world. These shards confirm the existence of major trade routes. The remains of narrow and winding roads throughout Britain indicate that, though difficult and slow, journeys were possible between the main cities.
But no, that’s all fantasy. Future historians will know all too much about every detail of our lives. Microfilms, card-indices, photostats, tapes, records, books and books of surveys and statistics and analyses—Christ, there are people spending their lives telling us how we are living, and without them we would hardly know. There will be nothing for the future to explain, if there is a future, that is. Poor bloody undergraduates in 3960. Perhaps they’ll have abolished the viva by then. About bloody time, too.
Edward’s viva was still to come. Notably weak on the Romans and the Dark Ages, he had been reduced to writing a jejeune and deliberately unfinished essay on Hadrian, in the hope that the examiners would assume it was only shortage of time that prevented him from displaying further knowledge. Jutes, Danes, Saxons and Angles were all the same to him, but there was something to be said for the Romans, they were at least reasonably efficient. The invaders who succeeded them had no sense of order at all, and most of them couldn’t even spell their names right. He hoped, without much confidence, that his brief archaeologising might help him to remember about the importance of burial sites as opposed to crematoria. But his mind usually ran on other things.
Your salad days are over now, Edward. They’re not, daddy-o, not over by any means. Work, who wants to work? The only work worth doing is play, and the only play worth anything is work. Play? No. You’ve got to be left alone, that’s all that matters, you’ve got to stay clear. So you’ve got to have money. So Ed Gilchrist has to make that Top Twenty chart soonest. Backing, that’s the secret. You can sing terribly and get away with it if only you have the right backing. The right backing and the right kind of number. Must make Pete Harrisson take it all more seriously. Thinks he’s too good for pops. Write our own tunes, lyrics, arrangements, snatch all the wages that way, strike real pay dirt. Dirt. Hell, that man’s coming for a drink. Must finish that song tonight, too. Heavy beat, that’s essential. But strings, too, whining away for sentiment. The kids are suckers for sentimental rhythm. Good title, that, Sentimental Rhythm. Probably been used. A bit thirties, too. Perhaps that’s what I ought to go for, old standards. Never make it as a rock singer, too old at twenty-three. Got to be still at bloody school.
Come on, come on, another foot before we pack it in. How dull can a pavement get? The question is what to sing at the test recording. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Make a song of that. Don’t call me, darling, I’ll call you, just the way I used to do. Call you names. Before we say goodbye. No. I called and called the number that you gave me. Been done. Busy line. Good number, Busy Line. Must keep it very, very simple for the pop charts, don’t want more than one idea.
“Do you want some tea, Edward?” said Belinda Hayes, peering down at him. She was reading Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge, and her status on the site was therefore slightly higher than Edward’s.
“Tea? What’s the time?”
“About half past five.”
“God, I must go. I mean, no thanks, Belinda, sorry. There’s a man coming for drinks, and I promised I’d be home.”
He straightened up and looked at his day’s work. It wasn’t in the least impressive.
“Find anything?” said Belinda.
“Absolutely nothing. I’m beginning to wonder whether there’s anything to find.”
He handed his trowel and other implements up to Belinda, then the small tray of dun-coloured shards. As he climbed the ladder out of the trench he said, “Goodness, the sun’s still shining.”
“How now, old mole,” said Belinda.
He put on his shirt and they went together towards the small hut which was the excavation’s headquarters. Armitage and Mrs Blewett were poring over some fragments of glazed pottery.
“I must go now, I’m afraid,” Edward said.
Armitage looked hurt, Mrs Blewett surprised. The very latest one could get anything to eat in Cartersfield was eight o’clock, and no one had seen either of them leave the site before seven forty-five.
“See you all tomorrow,” said Edward, slinging his old mackintosh over his shoulder.
“Bye,” said Belinda. She watched him go down the path that led through beeches and oaks to the lane. Edward had told his mother that Belinda Hayes was a nice girl, but he couldn’t take her seriously when he saw nothing of her all day but her bottom. Besides, it was impossible to establish anything more than a friendly working relationship with a girl who had never even heard of Charlie Parker.
When he came to the road he wiped his hands on the thighs of his jeans and threw the mackintosh into the back of the 1937 Ford Ten which he had bought the previous year for seventy-five pounds and to his parents’ horror. It worked, just, and though it was very draughty, he used it to transport the members of the Oxford band with which he played when they had an engagement outside the university. It had become known as The Bandwaggon. He wiped his feet carefully on the verge, got in, turned the car in the gateway and set off home to Mendleton.
He felt tired. He wasn’t used to physical labour or to being outdoors all day. But it might, one never could tell, prove genuinely useful at the viva to have scrabbled away for a couple of weeks at a dreary bit of pavement. In spite of playing a lot of jazz, he had worked hard, if unconventionally, and there was a chance, a slight but real chance, that he might get a First. That would make his parents shut up. He could stave off the horrors of a permanent job for several years while pretending to do some research—something simple and factual, casting yet another thin ray of light on some minor aspect of eighteenth-century electioneering. It was a well-covered field, and the rules for covering what remained had been laid down by the great Namier in such a way that you scarcely had to think for yourself at all.
Acknowledgements are due to the librarians of the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and the County Library of Flint: also to my supervisor, without whose unfailing enthusiasm I should never have had the heart to finish this work, and to his wife, whose support in difficult times has been invaluable: to Professors Regius and Emeritus: to Miss Phoebe Reynolds, who uncomplainingly typed no less than eighteen different versions of the manuscript: and to Miss Anne Culhampton. Miss Culhampton, a copy editor of the university press which is publishing this work, deserves more praise than I can fairly give her: both style and logic improved markedly under her direction. Finally, I should like to point out that this bloody rubbish has cost me four valuable years of my life, and that if there are any errors in it, they are entirely due to the incompetence of the people I have thanked above, whose names it would be invidious to repeat, and I couldn’t care less, anyway.
I couldn’t ever be a don, you have to be fundamentally serious, you have to apply yourself with intellectual rigour. And anyway, they probably won’t let me research, they think I’m just frivolous. I’m not frivolous, damn it, I’m too serious, that’s my trouble. How can anyone serious spend years fiddling with scholarship? How can they think it seriously matters, those balding, bespectacled, frivolous, essentially frivolous, research students? They can’t face seriousness, they hide under their documents, archives, statistics. Nice to have letters after your name, yes, makes you feel safe, earns you a better salary, yes, yes, yes. Better than sweating away seriously in a secondary modern school. Not for me.
Why, Edward Gilchrist, do you think only in terms of money? Surely you don’t believe that money can buy happiness? No, indeed. Of course not, no, no. Oh no. No? It’s all pointless, isn’t it, that’s the point, the whole business of going to work in the morning and coming home in the evening and then going off to work again next morning, with two weeks off every other August bank holiday, and why should I? Why? You get caught in that and you’re caught for life. You start inventing loyalties, moralities, to keep yourself going. You’ve got to stay clear as long as you possibly can. Money’s nothing to do with it. It’s a way of seeming to stay clear, that’s all.
And what about love, Edward—or may I call you Teddy?—don’t you plan to marry and raise a family? How are you proposing to fit love into your scheme of non-involvement? I take it you have the normal physical desires, you’re not a castrato? No, not that, not that exactly, more a—well, love, that’s a personal question, isn’t it, fans? I mean—But Teddy, your fans, they want to know everything about your sex life. I don’t believe in love, then, do I? Where’s my manager, he’ll answer that question, where is he? Now come on, Teddy, let’s have a straight answer, shall we? People have been whispering about you, you know. Whispering? Whispering about me? But there’s nothing to—Precisely—and why not? Look, you’re not my analyst, are you? Do you have an analyst? No, of course not. Well then, let’s say I am. Your public, Teddy, your fans, they analyse your every move. Tell them to get stuffed, then. No, no, Teddy, you don’t mean that, you know you don’t, you love your fans: but whom do you really love, Teddy? I told you, I don’t believe in all that, I—I’ve felt different about all that since, oh, a couple of years ago, there was—but that’s nothing to do with—and there’s Jackie, Jackie Harmer, I date her, she’s sort of my girl. That’s all we wanted to know, Edward, just who was your girl. You gotta have a girl, you see, for the fans, right? Yes, yes, I see——
His hands slithered along the rim of the steering-wheel as he turned into the drive that led to Mendleton, and he nearly hit a gatepost. Christ, I’m sweating. That’s what talking to yourself can do. So shut up, shut up.
The gravel spluttered beneath his wheels as he forced himself to think about nothing, about nothing at all.
He parked the car in the old stable to which it was allotted, and walked up to the house. Mendleton was built of stone, yellowed and softened by four hundred years of wind and rain and sun, and it glowed in the bright late afternoon, windows glistening, one chimney lazily smoking. Beneath the ancient walk of yews, older than the existing house, there was a deep green stillness, like the stillness of a well. The house itself basked in calm, only the distant chink of glasses indicating human presence as someone prepared a trolley for drinks.
The evening’s visitors were to be an old woman called Grace Shrieve and her nephew, a district officer or something from somewhere in the middle of Africa. The soirée was not likely to prove entertaining, but it would make a change. And it had already proved a useful excuse for leaving the excavation before his back collapsed from the strain of squatting. He looked forward to a leisurely bath, and then an appearance in the drawing-room for half an hour before the visitors left. His mother would excuse him vaguely, saying that he was so enthralled in his digging that he seemed to have lost all sense of time, and his father would announce that it was an excellent thing to study the past. The more we understand about our origins, he was fond of pontificating, the more we understand ourselves : the past, he would conclude grandly, illuminates the present, and we live in the present. Many guests had been struck dumb by this undoubted truth. Mr Gilchrist was not really an alarming man, but his unblushing air of superior knowledge and experience often deceived others as much as himself.
Edward went upstairs. His room was large and airy, with two tall windows which looked across the lawn and towards the woods in which he had been digging. It had been his room for as long as he could remember, and it still bore many traces of his growing up. There was a large cupboard in one corner which had once housed his impressive collection of toys. Now it was simply a wardrobe, but on top of it lingered a few broken legs and the chewed ears of long-lost woolly animals, and occasionally he would find at the backs of drawers the button eyes he had spent hours removing as a child, to the fury of his nanny. In the bottom drawer of the chest on the other side of the room, next to the dressing-table, was a rubbish heap of childhood memories—old school magazines, stamp albums, aborted collections of cigarette cards, marbles, gnarled and invincible conkers, programmes of plays and concerts. There were letters he had preserved from his teenage romances and group photographs of people he could no longer name. A souvenir of the Coronation supported a pile of exercise-books, and bicyc
le-clips tangled with the straps of roller-skates. He never looked in this drawer, using it merely from time to time as a slot in which to post documents of no further current interest but which might, he never knew, one day be useful. His General Certificates of Education, “O” and “A” levels, were there, his Certificate of Matriculation, Certificate “A” from the school Corps, school-lists for five years and many diaries full of scrawled appointments and notes. He could scarcely read his juvenile writing, and few of the notes would have meant anything to him now even if he had bothered to read them, but the diaries remained with all the other detritus of childhood and adolescence in the bottom drawer.
The White Father Page 6