by Rosie Thomas
‘Well, but, you’ve been seeing him for three weeks and I haven’t even met him yet. What’s that you’re drinking?’
‘House white. You’ll meet him, OK? I hardly know him myself yet.’
‘I’ll have the same. Do you want olives or anything? I really want to get to know him, Alph.’
‘You will. Exactly the way I know Tom. OK?’
‘Tom’s been around for ever, you must be able to tell the difference, it’s not like wooooh, suddenly there’s this person in my life that you’ve never even seen yet.’
‘It will be the same in the end. That’s just what it will be. Anyway it’s really early days, Omie. He’s great, that’s all I do know.’
Omie’s frown melted. She smiled fondly at her sister. ‘It’s so good to hear you say that. I’m really happy for you. Just don’t keep me in suspense for too long, all right?’
They subsided with their drinks in front of them, gazing out in relaxed harmony at the after-work crowds swirling past the window.
‘Where is Ben? Don’t tell me he’s not going to show up?’
‘He’ll get here, but why is he always, inevitably, boringly, infuriatingly half an hour late for every single occasion in his life?’
‘Could it be because he’s Dad’s son?’
Omie said, ‘I spoke to Mum. Did I tell you?’
‘Yes. I did, as well.’
They watched the passers-by for another moment. ‘You’re right about them, Alph. They’ve got lives, haven’t they? We can’t look through the prism of them being our parents for ever.’
‘No. Although they will be our parents for ever, won’t they?’
‘They’ve resigned all their responsibilities and become this eccentric pair of barn-dwellers. Like two old owls on a perch.’
As soon as he came through the door Ben caught sight of his sisters dissolving into laughter. It was a familiar sight that seemed to exclude him now and always, and his gloom deepened.
‘Here he is.’
‘Benj, it may never happen.’
He sighed. He put down his cycling helmet, his rucksack, his gloves and Day-Glo anorak.
‘I am afraid that it already has.’
Alpha found him a chair as Omega pushed through the crowds at the bar to buy him a drink. Ben sat down and ate a couple of olives, spitting the pits into the palm of his hand then shaking his fist as though he were rattling dice. With his sisters’ attention fully on him he unbent enough to offer them a ghost of his winning but slightly unfocused smile. The twins had their own version of Selwyn’s features and colouring, whereas Ben looked more like Polly but without the foxy spark of cleverness that sharpened their mother’s eyes.
The girls leaned forward. ‘What’s wrong?’
It was uncharacteristic of Ben to do anything as specific as ask to see them both and even to suggest a place and a time. He was more likely to agree vaguely to turn up at family gatherings and then find at the last moment that he couldn’t actually make it.
He touched his fist to his forehead. They waited, doing him the favour of not laughing at him.
‘It’s Nic.’
They didn’t look particularly surprised.
Ben went on, almost wailing, ‘She’s disappeared. She’s moved out of her place. I went around there with some stuff for her, used the key she gave me to get in, and her things have all gone. The Greek landlord told me she packed up and went.’
‘That’s not disappearing, really. Not tell-the-police disappearing. It’s more like escaping. Did you two have a row? Have you tried to call her?’ Omie wondered.
‘No, not a row. Of course I’ve tried calling, about seven hundred times. I’ve texted her, and left messages, but she’s not picking up. She’s not been on Facebook. She hasn’t been at Gina’s, either. Gina’s mad with her, she said to tell her that she can forget the job.’
The bar was packed now, and noisy. Ben stared around him, amazed to see so many people apparently relaxing and enjoying themselves when his own life was so taxing.
‘Don’t worry just yet. She’ll call you. Nic’s unpredictable, but you’ll hear from her when she’s ready,’ Alpha soothed.
Ben sucked in a lungful of air and closed his eyes very tightly as if he were about to bungee off a high bridge.
‘She’s pregnant.’
The girls looked at each other. Ben opened his eyes again, finding that after all he was not plummeting earthwards.
‘Ben. Didn’t you…?’
‘Didn’t she…?’
‘Not always,’ he said.
They drew closer together around the table, shutting off some of the hubbub of the bar by leaning forwards so that their three heads almost touched.
‘Maybe she’s gone home?’ Omie suggested.
‘She doesn’t get on with her mother. I don’t think she’s seen her more than twice in all the time we’ve known each other. She even came to ours for Christmas, didn’t she? What would you two do if you were her?’ he asked.
Perhaps his sisters could give him an insight into the extravagant mystery of women’s responses. Ben quite often found other people’s behaviour unfathomable, when he chose to think about it, whereas his own always seemed perfectly rational.
‘How pregnant is she?’ Omega asked.
‘I don’t know. Either you are or you aren’t, isn’t that it?’
‘I think if I was her, I’d be looking into the possibility of getting a termination,’ Alpha said with some caution.
Immediately Ben’s tragic expression brightened a little.
‘Exactly. That’s what I said to her. I told her to ask Gina what to do, I said we could get things fixed up, all that. But she just rolled over on her side and cried and wouldn’t speak to me. I hugged her, talked to her, and in the end after hours and hours she cheered up enough to eat some soup, but she wouldn’t say much about it afterwards. I thought she’d be thinking about it, you know, making a decision, and so I didn’t keep on about it. I just tried to be really loving and helpful, and I even turned down a couple of nights’ work so I could keep her company. Then four days afterwards, she’s gone. I mean, what could I do?’
‘Ben, what do you want to happen?’ Alpha asked him.
‘I want everything to be like it was. I want Nic and me to be happy together. I’m really worried about her.’
He sat back, breaking the circle.
For Ben, saying what he wanted was easily confused with getting what he wanted.
Omega went to buy another round of drinks. When she came back they talked some more about Nic and where she might be and how they might find her. Both girls predicted that she would reappear once she was no longer pregnant, but they didn’t share Ben’s certainty that he and she could then pick up from where they had left off. Wherever she had gone, Nic was probably making an enforced step into maturity, whilst Ben was still stuck somewhere in his late teens.
After half an hour Ben said he would have to go because he was working on a late shift, clearing up after a party. He put on his anorak and reached for his helmet.
‘I haven’t asked about either of you,’ he said with an air of baffled regret.
‘Alpha’s mystery man is still very much on the scene,’ Omega said.
‘Jaime’s not a mystery,’ Alpha said. Her face glowed. She looked like a woman in love and Omega felt the twist of pain with pleasure that always came when her sister experienced something wonderful that she couldn’t share.
‘That’s cool,’ Ben muttered.
He kissed them both and thanked them for their support and advice, although he was still wearing his tragic expression.
‘Have you told Mum?’ Omega wondered.
‘No. Don’t say anything. It’s just more proof of how hopeless I am.’ Ben said this as if it was accepted fact. He went on his way and they watched through the window as he cycled away into the glare of traffic.
‘Did you notice that he had no notion that it would be his baby, as well as Nic’s?’ Omeg
a mused.
‘Ben’s own inner child cries with a far louder voice,’ Alpha answered.
FIVE
Chris led the way down a neon-lit corridor, opened a door and stood aside to let Katherine pass through.
‘I’m delighted you could come in and see for yourself,’ he said.
They were now standing between rows of floor-to-ceiling metal shelving, the shelves stacked with brown cardboard boxes, each with a serial number and letters written on the front. Katherine considered his use of the word delighted. It was not effusive, she decided. That would contradict the rather marked impression his dry but also humorous manner had already made on her. Dr Christopher Carr would employ a scientific precision when it came to language. If he said he was delighted, then that would be the truth.
She looked around. It wasn’t difficult to decipher the legends on the boxes. Apart from the serial numbers there were dates, some abbreviations like Bm Mkt, which she guessed were site names, and Hum F, complete. These were rows of human bones. Storage for skeletons. The strip lighting hummed overhead.
‘It’s this way,’ Chris said. His outstretched hand almost touched her elbow. Katherine jumped.
‘Does this trouble you?’ He indicated the boxes.
‘No. But it’s impossible not to make the comparison, isn’t it?’
She meant them, dead. Us, alive.
In fact she felt almost supernaturally alive. The crepitation within her own ears sounded like snapping twigs, the whorls of skin at her finger ends seemed so sensitive that they tingled.
He looked at her. ‘In this job our aliveness, and the short span of our lives, confront us all the time.’
At the far end of the avenue of bones they came into a small room. A man was concentrating at a desk in front of a window.
Chris said, ‘Here’s Mrs Knight.’
‘It’s Katherine,’ she said.
The osteologist stood up, taking off his thick glasses. He was wearing thin surgical gloves; he didn’t try to shake her hand.
‘Here she is,’ he said, indicating what lay on his desk.
The bones had been cleaned and set in their proper sequence. Katherine studied the skull’s blank eye sockets, the hanging jaw with its stubborn teeth, the jagged break in the femur, the small bones of the feet and hands.
‘You’re certain of the sex now?’
‘There is never absolute certainty, but the signs are here.’
He took up the skull and the jawbone, and, placing them together, showed her how in a male the chin would have been more prominent. He ran his fingers over the cranium, indicating the smoother brow ridges. Then he exchanged the skull for two sections of the pelvis.
‘A female pelvis tends to be broader, like this one.’
Katherine gazed at the shallow cradle of bone.
‘How old was she? Did she have children?’
‘I’d say maybe thirty. Not a bad age, for the time. I don’t know about children. I’d expect to see some ridges or scars on the bone, here, but there are none. It’s not very easy to tell from skeletal remains.’
‘And the other one?’
David drew a box towards him and took off the lid. He showed her the child’s skull again and the splintered crater at the back of it.
‘He could have been her son?’
‘Perhaps, but given the massive head wound I think much more likely to have been an attendant or a slave. A ritual sacrifice, as we said, to accompany her into the afterlife. More clues may turn up as the excavation proceeds.’
Chris made a gesture of apology. ‘The local people were the Iceni. This site appears to be a Late Iron-Age rectangular enclosure with a dedicated ritual or funerary function. The richness of the grave goods suggests an important burial, and so it’s likely the associated settlement was a major tribal centre. Archaeologists have particular enthusiasms. It’s fascinating for us, but I do appreciate that for you and your husband the entire discovery may be more infuriating than exciting.’
Katherine followed the information through in her mind. ‘So where are the remains of this local settlement likely to be?’
‘We have some aerial photographs showing crop-marks that indicate earthworks to the north-east of your site. These may well have performed a defensive role around an early area of settlement, and it’s because of them that the county archaeologist ordered a watching brief as a condition of granting your planning permission. We were there to fulfil that brief when the digging began, and you know the rest of the story. But to answer your question, a little later on, which is when our burial seems to date from, that’s in the half-century or so before the Romans came, domestic sites in this area tended not to be enclosed by defences and so they don’t show up on the ground or from the air. But looking at the general topography, I’d guess that if there is an Iceni village settlement the remains would lie beneath the present house and its immediate surroundings.’
How far beneath our feet? Katherine wondered.
Chris’s dry, academic explanation contained no hint of fantasy but it still sliced the solid ground away from her. She thought of Mead: Miranda’s cushions and velvet curtains, the cement mixer, her clothes and Amos’s laptop, their books and bottles of wine and casual detritus now seemed perched only precariously on countless layers of remains. Broken pots, rotted fence posts, ashes, axe heads and hearth stones. Their own traces would decompose in their turn.
David had sat down and resumed his work. He used a paintbrush to clean dirt particles from the broken chain of vertebrae.
He explained, ‘I’ve removed a rib and sent it for radiocarbon dating. I hope that will give us a more precise date for when she lived. Chemical analysis of the bones will tell us about her diet, even the water she drank. Animal remains from the burial will indicate what herds were kept. Even the minute traces of pollen from the flowers that were buried with her will give us clues about the crops they grew. It adds up to a picture. Quite a vivid picture.’ He coughed, as if fearing that vivid might be judged too flowery in the context.
‘That’s extremely interesting,’ she said, in what she hoped was a suitably measured tone.
‘Katherine has come in to look at the treasure,’ Chris remarked. ‘She hasn’t seen it yet.’
She very much liked the way he pronounced her name, giving each syllable equal weight.
‘Of course,’ David nodded, politely but clearly conveying his opinion that the bones were the real treasure.
They said goodnight to him and went on into Chris’s office. It was tidy, with no personal possessions on view, although she checked for photographs. He unlocked a safe and took out the two pieces, unwrapped them and laid them out for Katherine to examine.
After a long moment she managed to say, ‘Yes. Yes, I do see.’
These ancient treasures were so brazenly beautiful. There was raw power in every twist of the ancient metal. The scale of the Mead discovery struck home to her as it hadn’t done before. Their house, Amos’s house, shrank by comparison to a bundle of tawdry steel and glass slabs.
Chris picked up the torc and held it out.
Katherine touched the golden twists and the elaborate ring terminals, but didn’t dare to take it from him. It was Chris who raised it to her throat, waiting until she nodded her head and then angling the weighty ornament to encircle her neck. It lay at the base of her throat, heavy and cold in contrast to the warmth of his hands.
Chris stood back and gazed at her.
‘Is it all right for me to have done that?’ In a much lower voice he added, ‘I so much wanted to.’
She stood up straight. The gold weighed her down, but she felt her bones spreading, her shoulders broadening and her head lifting as if it would float off the pivot of her spine. She caught sight of her reflection in the darkened window. Her eyes were wide.
With the great torc around her neck she looked primitive, like a barbarian.
In the reflected pane her eyes met Christopher Carr’s. He picked up the shield and
gave her that too. There must have been a leather strap by which to hold it but that had long ago rotted away. She grasped the rim instead and held the piece before her, the oval of her pale face a smaller repeat of the shield’s smooth glimmer.
A shiver passed through her. She was conscious of Chris standing close, so close that the air-conditioned space between them seemed charged with electricity.
She laid the shield aside. She lifted her hands to the spirals of gold and twisted her neck free of its weight.
‘What will happen to these things?’ she asked.
Chris folded them in their wrappings once again. ‘They’ll be extensively studied. The academic archaeologists from Oxford are coming tomorrow to have a preliminary look, and then the specialist from the British Museum arrives. There will be papers prepared, lectures given. A big find like this is an opportunity for everybody. The excavation itself is only the beginning.’
‘And after that? Where will they end up?’
‘Well. The county authorities will try to acquire the treasure for the museum here. More probably they’ll go on national display at the British Museum. You and Mr Knight don’t have a claim on the actual pieces in law, but as the landowners you’ll get an appropriate payment.’
She lifted her head.
The shield and the torc were back in the safe and Chris stood in front of her, his hands loose at his sides. His expression was serious, but the air of dry detachment was gone. In fact he looked hesitant, uncertain of himself.
Out of the blue, she suddenly thought that he might be going to kiss her.
The notion was so startling, so completely foreign and unlikely, that she started to laugh.
Of course he wasn’t going to kiss her, what was she thinking of?
She started talking to head off the interior laughter, then under the pressure of too much to be said that was normally left unspoken she found herself unable to stop.
‘As for payment, I can’t speak for Amos, he would probably say different, but the money really doesn’t matter. The pieces belong to Mead. The history matters, the Warrior Princess, but not the money. There’s too much of that already. I often wonder what it would have been like for us if Amos hadn’t made such a lot of it. Better, probably. We’d have had to invest more in each other.’