by Rosie Thomas
Katherine put her hand on his arm. ‘Amos, please.’ But he shook it off. He marched to Alan’s side and tried to nudge him backwards towards the digger. The two of them performed a tiny dance with their chests puffed out. The gulls rose in unison from their perch, their wingbeats loud in the stillness. Alan scratched the back of his head under his hard hat and retreated a couple of reluctant steps, followed by the site manager making pacifying gestures. Miranda reached for Colin’s hand and held it, but her eyes were still fixed on the disturbed ground. Amos measured up to the contractor and Alan, as if he were going to manhandle them back to work. His face was red and he was puffing slightly. Amos was not used to having his orders ignored. For a moment it looked as if he might win, as Alan placed his boot on the step of the machine and prepared to climb up.
The archaeologist put down his trowel. He stood in front of the digger with his hand raised.
‘Work at this site is temporarily suspended,’ he said, ‘pending further investigation.’
‘On whose authority?’ Amos demanded.
‘On my own, for the time being,’ the young man answered. ‘I am just going to notify the police, and the coroner’s office.’
‘The police? The police?’ Amos came to a standstill, his arms flopping to his sides.
Katherine looked at her husband, then turned away from him.
‘What is it? Who was it?’ Miranda murmured.
The workmen were already filing cheerfully in the direction of their caravan, pulling off their helmets as they went.
‘I’m sorry,’ the young archaeologist said to Miranda and Amos and the others. He had a stud in his nose, and ropes of hair pulled back and buried under the loose collar of his plaid flannel shirt. His hands, heavy with dirt, hung loose at his sides. Colin tried to recall where he had seen him before.
‘I can’t say for certain, not immediately, but I’m fairly sure, based on what I can see, that this is not a recent interment. But I’ve got to act by the book.’
Miranda lifted her head. Her face was white. ‘Recent? What does that mean? I’ve lived here for more than twenty years. It’s my home. This was my husband’s land, he grew up here. Who would be buried in a spot like this?’
‘Are you sure these are human bones?’ Colin asked.
‘Yes, I am. There is part of a femur, and a patella.’ He tried to sound authoritative but a flush coloured his face, showing up the scattered pocks of healed acne. He was probably in his early twenties. Hardly a match for Amos, Colin thought, the poor kid.
The archaeologist continued, speaking directly and gently to Miranda because of the shock in her eyes. ‘The way the thigh and the knee were uncovered makes me think that the corpse may have been buried in a semi-crouching position. The remainder of the skeleton will be there, almost definitely.’ He raised his hand and pointed to the wall of the trench. Grass roots and a few bruised daisies overhung it.
‘How long ago?’ Miranda asked.
‘I’ll really have to check with my field supervisor. I’m not all that experienced.’ His colour deepened. ‘There are tests, of course. But he’s probably prehistoric. That would be my guess. Bronze Age, or Iron Age. Something like two thousand years old.’
‘Two thousand?’ Amos muttered, in spite of himself.
They looked out over the plateau of grass and the sweep of farmland and dappled country beyond it.
The regular perspective tilted, and swung out of alignment. Miranda steadied herself against Colin’s arm. She and the others had been thinking about their present concerns, she realized, and speculating only about the new house and next month and next year, but now their attention was forcibly dragged back through the centuries. Under the thin skin of earth, hardly more than two spade-depths below the grass, lay history. Silently she wondered what this landscape had looked like so long ago, and who it was who had come out of the opaque past to be uncovered in front of them.
Miranda found that she was shivering.
Amos recovered himself first. ‘The local CID are going to be most helpful with that, then.’
‘It’s a formality, sir. But this is a human body.’
‘How long is all this going to take? As a formality, of course?’
The archaeologist met his eye. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Let’s find out, shall we?’
Amos went to the site manager’s Portakabin and Miranda could see him vigorously making his points while the builder shook his head and fended him off with raised hands. Then Amos took out his mobile phone. Colin walked away and stood at a little distance, apparently contemplating the view. Katherine and Miranda were left at the side of the trench.
Seeing Miranda’s pallor Katherine asked, ‘Are you all right?’
Almost to herself Miranda said, ‘I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it before, but bones are so intimate when you’d really expect them to be quite dry and inanimate, wouldn’t you? It’s so apparent that once there was flesh and sinews and smooth skin. We were looking at a person’s leg, part of the body of a real person who lived and breathed, and then you have to take in the fact that they’ve been lying there in the ground for thousands of years. Jake and I used to come here sometimes and have a picnic, looking out over this view. It rather changes the picture, doesn’t it?’
Katherine touched her arm. ‘Do you want to go back to the house?’
Miranda was grateful for her concern. Realizing that she was still holding her picnic glass, she tipped the residue of her drink into the grass. The plastic was smeared and there was a scum of orange pulp sticking to the sides.
‘No, I want to see what’s going to happen. Champagne seems suddenly a bit off key, though, doesn’t it? Shall we go back and just sit down for a bit?’
They could hear Amos still shouting on the telephone. The archaeologist had made some calls too, and now he took out a camera and started snapping the open trench from various angles. The workmen were gathered around the caravan with their sandwiches and copies of the Sun.
The two women went back to their vantage point and sat down. Miranda dropped the empty champagne bottle into her basket and unscrewed the foot of her glass. It was becoming clear that they were going to have to wait some time for any developments. Miranda rested her chin on her knees. She had been thinking about Jake, and the quiet graveyard of Meddlett church where he was buried. Then her thoughts switched to Colin as she watched him strolling down to the distant fence marking the boundary of what had once been Miranda’s land and was now Amos’s.
She asked suddenly, ‘K? Do you think Colin is any happier living here with us, or is he just going through the motions?’
‘Of living, or trying to be happy?’
‘Doing one, while feeling obliged to attempt the other. There’s a glass wall around him, don’t you think? Ever since Stephen was killed. It’s as if he’s here because of not knowing where else to be? Although, come to think of it, maybe he’s not alone in that. Do you remember the times when we all used to live our lives, not just inhabit a corner of them?’
Katherine turned to look at Miranda’s face. After a moment she answered, ‘I don’t know what it must be like for Colin. Polly may know more, with her and Colin being so close, but probably none of us can do more than imagine. But, yes. He has put up barriers. Do you remember how exuberant he used to be?’
‘I do. The Ibiza trip?’
Laughter chased the sadness out of Miranda’s eyes as they acknowledged the memory.
In the mid-1970s, when Amos was insisting to Katherine that he was going to marry her so she had better get to know and like his friends, he had rented a holiday villa near San Antonio and invited a dozen people for a summer holiday. In the party were Miranda and the actor she was at that time considering as a potential husband, and Colin and the man with whom he had recently fallen in love.
Stephen was five years older than Colin. He was a compact, rather unsmiling businessman who didn’t try very hard to integrate himself into the group
. He didn’t particularly enjoy the island nightlife, he didn’t take any drugs or even drink very much, and it was obvious that he had only come on the holiday because he wanted to be with beautiful and extrovert Colin, whatever that might take.
It was a big enough group to absorb his differences without them seeming particularly noticeable, Miranda recalled, and in any case it was the time when Amos was remodelling himself as a traditionalist barrister and upholder of family values, which was much more remarkable and amusing to them all.
One day, when most of them were too sunburned and hungover to do anything but lie in the shade beyond the pool, Colin and Stephen whiled away the siesta hour by dressing up.
Miranda remembered waking up from a nap. Done up as Carmen Miranda, ‘As a tribute to you, of course,’ he had told her, Colin was kneeling precariously on a lilo in the middle of the pool. He was wearing a flamenco skirt, a bra top, gold hoop earrings, full make-up and a hat made out of a laden fruit bowl topped with a crest of bananas. He wobbled to his feet and began to strum a guitar. He managed a passable samba rhythm and a warble of ‘Bananas is My Business.’ But even with this apparition in front of them, it was Stephen they were all gaping at. He was arranged on a second lilo, two legs crammed into one leg of a pair of lime green trousers and two feet into a single swimming flipper. He was slowly combing the strands of a very old and matted long blonde wig to tumble over his hairy chest and looking at Colin with a parody of adoration that very clearly had real devotion embedded in it.
That was the first inkling that Miranda or any of Colin’s friends had of the extreme contradictions in Stephen’s nature. There were, they understood, all kinds of warring elements concealed under the solid exterior. It suddenly became much less surprising that Colin found him so interesting.
It was only a few seconds before Carmen Miranda very slowly and with great dignity tilted sideways into the water. Stephen neatly caught the guitar as it fell past him. Miranda’s actor cine-filmed the whole sequence.
‘I wish I had that film,’ Miranda sighed. ‘I’d give anything to see it again.’
‘Do you ever see whatshisname? The actor?’ Katherine wondered.
‘No. What was his name? Although in fact, I did see him about three years ago. In an episode of Holby City.’
‘Any good?’
Miranda laughed delightedly. ‘As a psychopathic father on the run while his teenaged daughter haemorrhaged in casualty? Absolutely excellent. I’ve probably got some photographs of the Carmen Miranda event in a box somewhere.’
‘We should get the old pictures out.’
‘Maybe.’
Katherine said, ‘It’s good to have these shared memories. It’s historic glue.’
Miranda considered for a moment, and then asked, ‘Do you ever feel that you’re only inhabiting your life, K?’
Katherine studied the patch of turf framed by her knees. There were ants busy between the blades of grass. Then she lifted her head. The archaeologist had descended into the trench once again.
‘I did. Sometimes. I think being here has changed that.’
‘Has it?’ Miranda was pleased. ‘Has it really?’ She seized on any confirmation that the Mead collaboration was working as she hoped.
Katherine said quickly, ‘Of course, I had Amos and the boys, and work, and people coming to dinner, all those things, so I wasn’t exactly lonely, but I did feel that I was sort of watching from the sidelines rather than pitching into the scrum myself. And I would use a bloody rugby metaphor, wouldn’t I, as if even the language for framing my own experiences has to be borrowed from my menfolk?’
She attempted a laugh at this, while Miranda only raised her eyebrows.
‘But I feel different here, being with you and Colin and Selwyn and Polly. It’s old ground, yet new at the same time. There’s a sense of anticipation, definitely hopeful anticipation. It’s not all to do with the glass house, although of course that’s exciting.’ She made this dutiful nod out of habit, and consideration to Amos and Miranda herself. ‘It’s almost a rebirth, isn’t it? A completely different way of living, and that leads to general crazy optimism, which is rather at odds with the reality as far as Amos and I are concerned.’
There was a pause. This was quite a long speech, for Katherine.
‘Any news about that?’ Miranda asked, treading carefully.
The reason for Amos’s departure from London and the law wasn’t discussed at Mead, although everyone knew that everyone else knew about it. She was relieved when Katherine answered matter-of-factly.
‘About whether the young woman is finally going to press charges? The most recent notion is that she won’t. I think she may be on dangerous ground because she almost certainly reciprocated some of Amos’s attentions, at least to begin with. Then she probably withdrew, and he naturally refused to accept her withdrawal, and then he would have crossed the line between pursuit and harassment somewhere along the way. I imagine that would all be rather delicate to prove in court, don’t you? Particularly against an adversary like Amos.’
Katherine picked a blade of grass and thoughtfully chewed on it.
‘Now he’s left the chambers that may be enough to satisfy her. I don’t know if he’ll go back to the Bar some day. If he’ll need to, that is. I don’t mean for the money, God knows he’s got enough of that piled up, but just to stay the Amos he is, in his own estimation. That’s why this new house, seeing it take shape here, is so important. It gives him a reason for being. He’s not the kind of man who retires to the golf course, particularly against his will. He’s been bored, lately, and it makes him more difficult.’
There were opposing notes of sympathy and of dismissal in her words, chiming together, that took both women a little by surprise.
‘Yes, I can see that,’ Miranda agreed.
Colin turned back from the boundary fence. He walked slowly, on a wide arc, but he was drawn steadily back to the trench. The young archaeologist was still on all fours, gently scraping with his trowel. He was so absorbed in what he was doing that he didn’t hear Colin’s approach, and it was the shadow falling across his work that made him jump. He jerked upright on his knees but his expression relaxed as soon as he saw that it wasn’t Amos.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered.
‘Why? You’re doing your job.’
The boy wasn’t looking at him. His gaze was fixed on the earth.
‘There’s something here.’ He knew he should keep the discovery to himself, maintain a professional detachment, but he couldn’t help blurting it out. His fist closed tightly on the handle of his trowel and it was all he could do to stop himself in his eagerness from lunging back at the find and gouging at the remains.
Colin heard how his voice shook.
‘What? What is it?’
The boy glanced quickly past him. Miranda and Katherine sat a way off, talking. Amos was still telephoning, the site crew lounged in the sunshine.
‘Look.’ He pointed downwards.
Out of the earth close to the edge of the trench, the rim of something smooth and curved now protruded. Crusted with dirt, it might have been taken for a large piece of broken glass or pottery, but the archaeologist had already rubbed an inch of it clean. The sun struck a dull gleam out of precious metal.
‘Good God,’ Colin said.
‘Yeah. And a bit,’ the boy agreed.
‘What happens now?’
‘Well, it doesn’t happen every day, does it? It’s killing me but I’ve got to wait for my field supervisor to show up. I don’t know much, but I’m pretty sure this is big.’
In the middle distance, a car drew up at the point where Amos’s driveway would one day meet the curving route to the main house. A uniformed policeman got out and opened the gate, then the patrol car bumped slowly over the builders’ track to the site.
‘Christ, now here’s the cops. I hoped the boss would get here first,’ the boy sighed.
‘You can handle it,’ Colin told him. The boy’s resemblan
ce to someone he knew was no longer troubling. It came to him that this wasn’t actually Jessie’s boyfriend from the first evening in the pub, the one she had squabbled with about ownership of the dog, but the two of them were certainly sufficiently alike to be mistaken for one another.
A second solid policeman emerged from the car. Amos made straight for the pair of them, with the site manager bobbing at his side.
‘Here we go then,’ said the archaeologist as he climbed reluctantly out of the trench.
Across the field, alerted by the sighting of police in the driveway of the house, Selwyn was hurrying towards them with Polly moving more slowly in his wake.
‘Has there been a murder?’ Selwyn asked.
‘Not recently, by the look of it,’ Colin told him. ‘Although I think Amos would prefer it to be a straightforward drug-related shooting. History may take longer to unravel.’
Amos said, surveying his site later that afternoon: ‘So, the monkeys have taken over the zoo.’
A van arrived, with ‘Anglian Archaeological Services’ painted on the sides. Several archaeologists of various degrees of seniority climbed out, donned helmets and fluorescent jackets with AAS printed on the back, fanned out and began measuring, pegging lines and scribbling on clipboards. The field supervisor, a lean bearded man in his forties, made a series of urgent calls. A frame tent was brought out and quickly erected over the trench, and the white nylon fabric sucked and billowed in a rising wind. The policemen conferred with the supervisor, the intermittent crackle of voices from their radios carrying across to where Selwyn stood joking about how English Heritage and the county archaeologist would never let Amos dig the channels in the earth for his futuristic ground exchange heating now that there was known to be treasure beneath.
‘Buried gold,’ Selwyn murmured. ‘Who knows, Amos, you might just have got even richer.’
‘Probably not, under the 1996 Treasure Act,’ Amos retorted. But that they should be even discussing this sharpened the sense that an unwelcome change was coming to Mead.
Another car wound its way towards them and yet another archaeologist emerged, bearing a licence from the Ministry of Justice to allow the human remains to be excavated. A copy of it was formally pinned to the door of the Portakabin. Amos read the licence and gave a curt, unwilling nod to acknowledge that, for now at least, he would have to agree to a suspension of work. It was clear that there would be no more progress on the site for the time being, so the builders packed up and went home. The police lingered long enough for the osteologist who had arrived in the van to assure them personally that the uncovered bones were hundreds of years old, then they folded their double bulk back into their patrol car and drove away.