They began to walk down the path to the lane. Suddenly Shrieve stopped and turned something over with the toe of his shoe.
“Good God,” he said. “It can’t be.”
“What’s the matter?” said Edward. “It’s only a Free bottle top. Haven’t you ever seen one before?”
“Seen one? The whole of Africa is full of its beastly broken bottles.”
“The new international coloniser,” said Edward.
Shrieve flicked the tiny piece of metal into the bushes and they walked on. It was a cloudy day, and damp. The earth stuck to the soles of their shoes.
“Thank you so much for showing me round,” said Shrieve. “I really did find it most interesting. I can’t help, you see, thinking about what’s going to be buried in Africa.”
“Surely it’s not that bad?”
“No, perhaps not. But the really important things we’re leaving don’t have any outward and visible signs. And I wonder how long our foundations will last.”
Edward was about to speak, but checked himself.
“It’s all such a very long way from this,” said Shrieve, gesturing at the thick trunks of beeches, the heavy branches, last year’s mast beneath their feet. “I always forget how beautiful England is. You can’t know how beautiful, living here.”
“Yes, well,” said Edward. “I dare say it does seem like that after Africa. I can’t stand it myself. There’s nothing to do.”
Shrieve looked at him in amazement. “You do seem to have problems about your activities. Is it that there’s nothing worth doing, or that there’s nothing to do?”
“Both,” said Edward. His hands were thrust down the front pockets of his jeans, and his shoulders were hunched as he walked. “I mean, in the country there’s nothing to do whatever. I couldn’t plough fields and milk cows all my life, could you? And—oh, I don’t know. I just don’t see the point of sitting in an office all my life, either. When I’m dying, and I ask myself, well, was it worth it?—what am I going to say? Yes, it was lovely, I earned ten thousand pounds a year by the time I was forty-five? Or, no, it wasn’t, I just filled up my time with boring work because I couldn’t think of anything else to do?”
“You do take extreme positions,” said Shrieve. They had come to the lane where the Humber was parked in a gateway.
“One has to. We don’t believe in anything nowadays, we’re all agreed on that. But do they, the nits that grumble about it, do they believe in anything?”
“I really couldn’t tell you. I’m afraid I’m really only a visitor here.”
“Sorry. I just get so fed up sometimes. I think people are born and then they live for a bit, and then they die, and that’s it. So it’s a crime to waste what little there is.”
“Oh, quite,” said Shrieve. He gazed over the fields beyond the woods. “Forgive a visitor for asking, though, whether it’s really making the most of a life to spend it saying there’s nothing to do.”
“O.K.” Edward grinned. “Touché. Got any suggestions about what I should do about it?”
“None at all.”
They both laughed. Edward decided he liked the little man with his hair sticking up and his hollow cheeks: he didn’t seem to be full of the usual dreary assumptions.
“Do you really need someone to help you?” he asked suddenly. “I mean, I’ve got nothing to do. I’m going to London to play in a band next week, but that won’t take all day.”
“A jazz band?”
“Yes. I play piano. And I’m going to make a test recording, too, as a singer.”
“I don’t know anything about jazz,” said Shrieve.
“I don’t know anything about the Ngulu. I don’t know anything about anything, actually, but I could address envelopes or something.”
“I’m not sure that I do really need anyone,” said Shrieve slowly. “I’ve been wondering whether I was the right person to attempt the job singlehanded, that’s all. And I suppose it would be nice to have someone else to talk to who cared about it.”
“I can’t guarantee to care,” said Edward. “I think I could manage a little lively interest, though.”
Shrieve laughed. “Well, thanks for the offer. Why don’t you ring me when you come to London? I’m staying in a friend’s flat in Kensington.” He wrote the address and telephone number on a piece of paper.
“O.K.,” said Edward. He put the piece of paper in his hip-pocket. “I’ll probably be in London on Monday.”
“Ring any time. I’m in most of the day, writing bits and pieces about the Ngulu.”
“See you, then,” said Edward.
Shrieve started to put out his hand, then saw that Edward’s thumbs remained in the loops of his belt. “Goodbye,” he said.
Edward nodded.
As he drove away, Shrieve wondered what he had let himself in for, then decided that it was most unlikely that anything would come of it.
*
At lunch-time the excavators assembled from all over the site. Besides Armitage, Mrs Blewett, Belinda Hayes, Edward and two workmen employed by the Ministry, there was a small, thin boy of fourteen with ears that stuck out and an encyclopaedic knowledge of coins. His spectacles were held together with electrical tape, and his name was Simon Lowther. He was the son of the headmaster of Cartersfield Grammar School.
They had all brought their own sandwiches, and they sat politely apart from each other, dreading, Edward guessed, that someone might offer something to someone else. If that happened, there would have to be a general sharing. They drank from thermoses or bottles, except for Mrs Blewett who had an old army water-bottle, though as she always slept for an hour after lunch, it might not have held water. Edward found that he had left his bottle-opener behind, and he spent several vain minutes trying to prise the top off a bottle of Free. It came off with a sudden fizz, and rolled along the ground a few feet before falling into a trench. Armitage frowned: he was a man who liked a tidy site. Edward went to pick the cap up. As he dropped into the trench, the cuff of his jeans caught in some loose soil; bending to sweep it up, his eye caught a flash of green. It was a coin, caked in mud. He rubbed it against his shirt and saw that it was in excellent condition, unusually legible.
He put his head over the top of the trench and said, “Look, a find!”
Armitage thought he was being facetious. One didn’t excavate during the lunch break. He drank some tea from the cap of his thermos flask, then looked up to see the others gathered excitedly round Edward.
“Very, very good!” said Simon Lowther, rubbing his hands and standing on tip-toe. “Gosh, that really is something, Edward. Well done!”
“Hmm,” said Mrs Blewett. She took the coin from Edward as a mother might take a valuable plate from a child. “Yes, indeed, Simon, we really have made a discovery.”
“It’s late,” said Simon, his brow furiously wrinkled. “It can’t be earlier than 493, can it?”
“I’m not sure. We’ll have to look it up.”
She took the coin over to Armitage, who was still sipping his tea. “What’s going on?” he said.
“Look at this, Francis. It’s in beautiful condition, too, much the best we’ve found.”
“Where was it?”
“In that trench there,” said Mrs Blewett. Both their faces fell. They had decided only that morning that the pieces of masonry found in the trench belonged, at most, to a patio: the ditch was to be filled in.
“Oh dear,” said Armitage. “This may complicate things.”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs Blewett. “They were so careless, weren’t they?”
Simon hovered over the two professionals while Edward and Belinda lolled on the damp grass.
“I’m glad I’ve done something good for a change,” said Edward. “Armitage makes me feel I’m terribly—terribly disloyal for leaving at the end of the week.”
“I wish,” said Belinda, “God how I wish, that I could find one really stunning thing. Just one. A gold helmet. Or a hoard of silver plate. Then I
could retire, famous.”
“Oh, this is an agreeable way of passing a summer, don’t you think?”
“No,” said Belinda. “I wish I’d never taken up the subject. It was the anthropology that interested me, anyway, not the archaeology. Was that the Ngulu man you were talking about who came this morning?”
“Yes, that’s right. He’s rather nice.”
“They’re looney, the Ngulu. Rather sweet, but looney.”
“Really?” said Edward. He felt annoyed that he, who was going to assist them, knew less about them than Belinda. “Time to start work again.”
It would be nice, he thought, as he went back to his trench, to stay in London for a few weeks. Mr Gilchrist was given to saying: “I don’t know why I bother to keep this enormous place up for you children when you’re never here,” and the idea of London was surrounded by moral and economic disapproval. What do you want to go to London for, dear? A concert, Mummy. A concert: I see: and what sort of concert? Duke Ellington at the Astoria, Finsbury Park: Stockhausen at the Festival Hall: could you honestly tell the difference? You’ve got very rude, Edward, since you went to Oxford. Oh, it’s my friends—all jazz people are very, very rude, you know, it’s almost a matter of faith with us. Sometimes, Edward, I think you’re very young for your age. I’m going to London to get some experience of real life. You might get your hair cut while you’re at it.
The trouble was, money seemed to last only half the usual time in London. Record shops were very tempting: Julian “Cannonball” Adderly, Webern, Charlie Parker, Berg. But it wasn’t the records so much as just London. He didn’t go to night clubs, as he hoped his parents imagined, he didn’t smoke marijuana in seedy cellars in Notting Hill, he wasn’t extravagant: but London was insatiable. Now, though, he had every reason to be there, to be swallowed up himself, if necessary. The Ngulu needed him. A man called Fred Martin in a recording company wanted to hear him sing. Politics and jazz, old cynics, young enthusiasts. He mustn’t get them confused.
The thin red line of his corridor unwound its slow length along. It was as boring as the floor of a school lavatory, but he was coming to love it. It had persistence, an obstinate tenacity, an arrogant determination to survive in all its boringness. And no doubt school lavatories outlasted their schools, their permanent damp chill preserved down the ages for someone like himself to uncover years hence with delicate scraping fingers, not disturbing a tessera, bringing the unyielding ugliness once more to the light of a grey English day. Perhaps this wasn’t a villa at all, perhaps it was a Roman boarding-school. Perhaps the corridor had shrilled to Romano-British adolescent voices, had been stamped by generations of sandalled feet. Did the Romano-British wear sandals?
When he left to get home in time for dinner, it was beginning to rain, a warm, rather soupy rain which made him want to bathe rather than bath. There was just time. He drove quickly to the gravel-pits favoured by the youth of Cartersfield: it was here that there had been such trouble two summers ago. Someone had set fire to an island in the middle of one of the lakes, there had been hooliganism. Unthinkingly, Edward avoided the gravel pit where he and others had once swum with David Mander, the vicar’s nephew. He chose a small lake, changed in the car, then picked his way across the painful gravel to the water and plunged in. It smelt of reeds and riverbeds, and it was scattered with a million tiny pinpoints of rain. He lay on his back and allowed the rain to peck lightly at his face, then swam briskly out to a small island and back. He dried, shivering, and pulled on his clothes. He would just have time to change before dinner.
*
“Ah,” said Mr Gilchrist, “the horny-handed son of toil. And I bet he hasn’t washed his horny hands, either.”
“Let me see,” said Edward’s mother.
“Certainly not. As a matter of fact, the reason I was nearly late is that I went and swam for a few minutes in the gravel pits. I may smell a bit of weed, but the sweat of the day is now poisoning the pike.”
“How disgusting,” said Jane. She spent a lot of time playing tennis and her muscles were a little too beefy for an off-the-shoulder dress, but Edward thought she was really quite pretty. She didn’t swim, saying it put her eye out.
Mr Gilchrist, who occasionally floundered about for a few minutes, puffing and blowing and shouting, said, “Ah, swimming in the rain. It’s one of the greatest pleasures of youth.”
“Perhaps you’re thinking of singing in the rain?” said Edward.
“No, swimming.” Mr Gilchrist had missed the reference. “Do you remember, darling, how we used to go swimming after parties when we were first married?”
“All too well. There was that awful occasion when your cousin Toby pushed the host into the pool, do you remember?”
“Certainly I do. Poor old Toby.” He chuckled, then sighed. “It’s a bloody shame, having to come home, losing all that money. And after all the work he’s put into the farm, too.”
“Oh, really,” said Edward. “You know perfectly well that he only went to Kenya to avoid taxes. Serves him right.”
“Nonsense,” said Mr Gilchrist. “He was fed up with the awful austerity of the Labour government. I’d’ve gone myself if it hadn’t been too complicated, what with you children to educate and everything. That was a grim time, you know.”
“Well, I hope there’s another Labour government to greet him on his return,” said Edward. “But I suppose there won’t be.”
“I don’t think you really understand politics, dear,” said Mrs Gilchrist, “or you wouldn’t say such silly things.”
“I am completely apolitical,” said Edward, “as you know.”
“What’s apolitical?” said Jane.
“It means he hasn’t a sensible idea in his head,” said her father. “Apolitical, indeed. You’re just against everything.”
Edward smiled. It was important within the confines of family warfare that the first major untruth should be uttered against, rather than by, oneself.
The meal continued with equable bickering. Afterwards they sat in the drawing-room and watched television, a routine story of crime and its consequences which Edward found inexpressibly tedious. His father fell asleep, his mother knitted, Jane went upstairs. The flickering box in the corner continued to shed its fatuous blue light though no one was watching or listening.
Edward got up quietly and said to his mother, “I think I’ll go and practise.”
She nodded, putting a finger to her lips, warning him not to wake his father. Mr Gilchrist slept with his head lolling to the right, his hands folded neatly across his paunch. Mrs Gilchrist counted the rows of her knitting. The dim blue light from the corner watched over them like a household god.
The piano, an old upright with an incurable bass, was kept in what had once been called the schoolroom. Now it was used as an all-purpose store by the daily helps. Brushes and carpet-sweepers leaned against the wall, flower vases huddled together on a table, and a pile of mending waited on a chair. On the walls were the pictures that had hung in the nursery: some idiot pixies, the gift of a tasteless aunt, were munching a huge toadstool, Brueghel’s blind men led each other into the ditch, and The Laughing Cavalier, that eternal club bore, guffawed beside a sub-Dufy scene of brightly coloured yachts.
Edward played a few scales to warm himself up. He felt tired after his digging, and he hadn’t practised recently as much as he should have done. He tried the tune he had been fiddling with for the last few days, but it came out dull, with too many echoes from other songs, and no distinguishing mark of its own. The possibilities within the form of the pop song were strictly limited and almost exhausted, that was the trouble. And though he wanted very badly to write a hit so that he could make some money, when it came to the point he couldn’t find the necessary enthusiasm. He changed to what he really liked, a long jazz solo with much use of sevenths which he had developed from an idea on a record of an avant-garde American pianist. He repeated various passages, changing chords and rhythms, working towards a piece that
could eventually be played in public. He tended to be a sour-sweet soloist, he knew, and he tried to make his playing less emotional, but somehow it never was. He wasn’t really satisfied with his playing, and he often wondered whether music was, in fact, his medium: even what seemed at the time to be moments of originality and inspiration turned out to be no more than clever impersonations of the great. Yet he got immense pleasure from playing, from feeling the piano respond like a cat to his fingers, the notes purring, each key like a sensitive hair.
After a while he took down a book of Chopin waltzes. He wasn’t a skilled sight-reader, but he could get through most pieces more or less accurately, and he enjoyed a challenge, something which kept him on his finger-tips, as it were. But tonight he was too tired to play Chopin even well enough for himself, and he put the book back on top of the piano. As he was wondering whether to go back to the drawing-room, Jane came in.
“What were you playing?” she said.
“Chopin. Making a mess of it, too.”
“Oh, Chopin,” she said vaguely. She wandered round the room touching the chairs and tables, picking up the mending and putting it down again. “Have you written any good songs lately?”
“Nothing. I thought I’d had a good idea, but it turned out to be someone else’s, like all my ideas.”
“Sing something, Teddy.”
“One of my own compositions?” He played three deliberately harsh discords.
“Anything.” She opened the window and leaned out. “Look at the moon. Isn’t it pretty?”
Edward wrinkled his nose in disgust and began to sing ‘St James’s Infirmary’.
“I don’t like Blues,” said Jane. “Can’t you play something cheerful for a change?”
He played his new solo for her, and she seemed to like it, for she came and leaned on the piano, watching him. He hummed to himself as he played, as though he was in a private dream to which the music was only an accompaniment.
“What are you thinking about, Jane?” he said, stopping.
“About you. Why do you deliberately annoy Daddy?”
The White Father Page 9