by Rosie Thomas
She did stop at that, and they listened to the echo of her gabbled words.
Chris fumbled with his cuff and looked at his watch.
‘I wonder, would you like to come and have a drink with me?’
‘Now?’
‘That’s what I was hoping.’
‘I would like to. Yes. I would love to.’
Amos stood alone in the middle of the yard. A fine, soft rain was falling out of a black sky, and he took pleasure in ignoring it. A gust of wind blew fallen leaves over his ankles. The lights were on in the Mead kitchen, shining on the comfortable clutter of the dresser shelves, but he could see that the room was empty. Miranda would be reading in her drawing room, sitting on the sofa with her knees folded beneath her. She read a lot.
Amos hadn’t quite got used to the communal aspects of their life here, the way they all knew what each of the others did with their days, when for so many years only Katherine had had even a partial knowledge of his comings and goings. In the past, on the very rare evenings when she had gone out without him, he would have been content with the television or the latest political biography. Now solitude coupled with the proximity of company made him restless. He had been drawn out of the neat cottage and into the rain, just to see what might be going on.
There was a pale light showing in the barn windows, and the scrape and rattle of a shovel carried across to him. A silvery film of rain droplets glimmered in the fibres of his sweater. Amos ducked the few yards to Selwyn and Polly’s door and banged on the warped planks.
Selwyn bellowed, ‘Yeah, c’mon in,’ without stopping work.
An extension cable now snaked across the dirt-caked floor, and a naked bulb in a wire cage swung from a beam.
In the trenches lay new piping for drains. Copper standpipes rose where sinks and basins would finally be positioned. Selwyn was waist-deep in the trench at the point where the water company would bestow the mains feed. He threw aside a shovel and waved his fist in the air.
‘Amos. Check out my sewage outlets. Poetry, eh?’
Amos gritted his teeth.
It was almost unbearable, in fact actually intolerable, to witness the rapid progress that Selwyn was making while his own works were at a standstill.
‘Don’t you ever stop?’ he demanded.
‘Occasionally. But I have to force myself. I’m loving it.’ Selwyn insisted. He was enjoying the contrast in their situations, that was certain.
‘Bastard archaeologists,’ Amos muttered.
Selwyn stooped down and extracted something from the trench. He rubbed a thumb over it, squinted at the edge that was exposed and flung it aside. It fell with a faint clink. Selwyn levered himself out of the hole and arched to ease his back.
‘Right. Well, since you’re here, what about a beer?’
Amos would have preferred whisky, but he took the bottle that Selwyn passed to him. The ambient temperature in the barn kept the beer desirably chilled. They sat down at a trestle table pushed out of the way against an exposed stone wall.
‘Where’s Polly?’
‘Gone to the pub with Colin.’
‘They’re close, those two.’
Selwyn rubbed his stubbled chin. ‘They are. It’s good for them both. They talk a lot. You know, liberal use of the f-word.’
Amos raised an eyebrow.
‘Feelings.’
Both men laughed.
‘Katherine?’
‘Stopped off on her way back from London to look at the shield and the torc, curses be upon the things. A bloody long look, it turns out.’
‘What’s up? No dinner?’
‘I can cook a meal for myself,’ Amos said.
‘Sure.’ Selwyn shrugged. He delved in a carton and took out two foil trays, shook an old sheet off a box-shape that turned out to be a microwave oven balanced on a stool, slid in the trays and pressed the buttons. Like the light cable, the power for the oven also coiled over the floor, both of them connected via a hefty socket bar to a hole in the barn wall.
‘All mod cons, eh? Personally I rather liked the camping gas, but Polly wasn’t having any of it. So we’re on Miranda’s power for now, and the electrician’s coming next week to connect us to the mains. Serious progress.’
‘When do you expect to finish?’
The microwave pinged. Selwyn placed one tray and a fork in front of Amos and took the other for himself. Amos inspected the fork, wiped it on his handkerchief and began to eat the curry. He was hungry, and the truth was that although the fridge in the cottage had looked well stocked, he hadn’t immediately seen the ingredients that would add up to the sort of meal that Katherine would cook.
‘It’s the second week in October now. It’ll be looking a lot different in a couple of months’ time. By Christmas, anyway. Not the frills, maybe.’
‘Flush lavatories? Or do those count as frills?’
Selwyn snorted between mouthfuls of curry. ‘There’s nothing wrong with old Chemical Ali as far as I’m concerned.’ He nodded towards the chemical toilet that was decently housed behind closed doors in what had once been a feed store. ‘But Polly regards an operating flush as mandatory. She tends to go in the house, for the time being.’
‘You’d be happy with a shovel in the woods,’ Amos observed.
He was thinking how the picture summed up Selwyn. Whatever might go wrong, and often did, Selwyn could convince people that the life he happened to be living was enviable because he was living it. It was a simple investment of self-confidence that Amos had never been able to achieve. Amos had been an eminent barrister, had grown rich, had an amiable wife and two sons who looked set to match his success, yet around Selwyn he still felt thwarted, as though there were some inner VIP room in life to which he had failed to gain admittance. He envied his old friend just as deeply and silently as he had done when Selwyn pranced in his velvet trousers at the Blue Peony decks, with a three-deep ring of girls surrounding him.
Selwyn leaned forward. ‘Whereas you couldn’t think of anything worse, eh? How long have we known each other?’
‘Um, forty years? Can that be right?’
‘Yes, and in all that time have you noticed that you’ve been getting more like yourself, while I’ve become a more pronounced version of me? That’s what happens to people. Forty years ago, did you expect that our tastes and inclinations were going to converge?’
Amos considered this proposition. ‘When you’re twenty, you think all people in their fifties look and behave the same. The old are grey, baggy, uninteresting and largely indistinguishable. So yes, I suppose I did.’
‘Nope. It was never going to happen, my friend. This is an age conversation. Twenty quid in the box.’
‘To hell with the bloody box.’
‘All right. I won’t tell if you don’t. Do you want another beer?’ They had devoured the food.
‘Haven’t you got any scotch?’
‘No.’ Selwyn was rolling himself a thin, whiskery cigarette. Amos had stopped smoking on doctor’s orders, even his good cigars, but he would have liked one now.
‘I’ll go and get mine.’
The rain had stopped, the house lights glowed in the empty kitchen, and Katherine still wasn’t home. Amos tried her mobile, but it was turned off. He hoisted the scotch bottle off the polished drinks tray and walked back across the yard. Selwyn had left the table and was trundling a wheelbarrow towards a mound of rubble. The bare light bulb cast his oversized shadow up the wall.
‘I thought we were going to have a drink,’ Amos said, exasperated.
Over his shoulder Selwyn answered, ‘We are. But since there are two of us, I want to shift a couple of barrow loads into the skip. It’s too much for Polly. Do you want to shovel or barrow?’
The skip was stationed outside the barn door, with a rather steeply inclined plank leading up to the lip.
‘Shovel.’
Amos trod over the piece of rubble that Selwyn had tossed out of the drain trench. It lay in a small heap of similar
fragments, and he bent down to pick one up. It was a mud-caked chunk of dark brown earthenware. Selwyn saw him examining it.
‘What was the actual deal with the planning department for your work, by the way?’ Amos asked.
Selwyn did an elaborate yawn. ‘No deal. Application for conversion of outbuilding for domestic use, plans and drawings submitted, permission granted.’
‘Straightforward.’
‘It was, yes.’
Amos leaned on the shovel and the two men looked at each other. There were two shadows looming on the wall. Selwyn finished his cigarette and threw away the tiny butt, and the shadow of his arm swiped over the shadow of Amos’s head. ‘What’s the latest on your site? The princess and all her finery, and so on?’
Amos turned the fragment over and over in his fingers. He looked more closely, and saw a suggestion of a pattern pierced on one corner of it.
‘I’m waiting. That beardy digger and his cohorts have been formally granted a month’s suspension of work in the immediate area, to enable a properly structured excavation and study to take place. Nothing can happen in the meantime. Nothing. Zero. My contractor insists that it’s not worth trying to work around the edges, which means of course that they’ve got another job that will fit in nicely.’
In that time, Selwyn’s house would have floors and walls. Maybe even glass in the windows.
Selwyn put a hand on Amos’s shoulder. ‘That’s rough,’ he said, and it was clear that he meant it. ‘But in the great scheme of life, a few weeks isn’t so long.’
Amos considered a retort along the lines of it being plenty long enough to test his own sanity, whereas Selwyn would already have been carted away in a straitjacket. But Selwyn’s commiseration was genuine, and in any case there would only be temporary satisfaction in punching him in the jaw. He threw away the piece of pot and it landed somewhere in the shadows.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ Amos shouted.
They set to work.
Katherine and Chris were in a pub five minutes’ walk from his office. When they arrived it had been full of groups of noisy young people, probably estate agents – the windows of most of the adjacent shops were full of pictures of cottages – but now the crowd was thinning. Chris had found a table in the angle of a high-backed bench where they were screened from the remaining drinkers at the bar.
They had been talking for quite a long time.
Chris told her more about the excavation, tracing out the shape of the grave enclosure on the table top and explaining that it was unlikely that the shield and the torc would be the only finds to emerge.
‘There will be more?’
‘Those two pieces are so special, I’d expect there to be more ornaments, pottery, maybe coins. We have to excavate very carefully, so as not to destroy any remains. The smallest details can often be the most telling. Merely knowing what a person ate reveals a whole culture. Animal fats mean relative prosperity, a stew made of weeds abject poverty. Our princess may have been at the head of several villages made up of family groups. She’d have been their symbolic defender, or maybe she actually went to war against tribal enemies, like Boudicca. She may have been the daughter or the widow of a chieftain, or perhaps an exceptionally powerful or charismatic leader in her own right. Having been buried with a neck ornament and a shield like that, I do know that she was somebody of great note.’
She liked the way he talked about the princess and her people as though he knew them, as though they were living at a distance from where he and Katherine were sitting, but not so far away as to be inaccessible. In the end he interrupted himself.
‘I’m sorry. Archaeologists can get wildly over-enthusiastic and don’t notice that they’re boring the company.’
‘I’m interested.’
He grinned. His dark beard made his smile bright. ‘I’ve been accused of obsession. Preferring the company of the long-ago dead to the living and breathing. Not always unjustifiably.’
Katherine could see that he might be guilty of this, but it wasn’t the worst fault she could think of. It depended on who the living and breathing actually were.
‘If your work is about past lives, I can see it must sometimes be quite difficult to drag yourself into the present.’
His eyes were on her face. ‘Yes. It can be. What about you, Katherine?’
Their glasses were empty. Katherine knew she couldn’t have another drink, she had to drive all the way home to Meddlett, but she very much wanted to go on sitting here talking to Dr Christopher Carr. It was an ordinary after-work pub with a fruit machine flashing in a corner, yet she was feeling the same warmth and the desire somehow to capture the moment that she had experienced in the Griffin with Polly and Colin. What is it, she wondered, that was all of a sudden making her pub-prone? Another of those awkward developments peculiar to women of late middle age?
‘Me?’ she asked.
Chris glanced about. ‘I can’t see anyone else I might be directing the question at. I have been talking interminably about grave enclosures and linear earthworks, and now I’d like to hear something about you. Do you live in the present, for example?’
Katherine reached for her glass before remembering it was empty.
He read her thoughts. ‘You could have something different. It doesn’t have to be alcohol.’
‘Fruit juice, then.’
He came back with orange juice for her, another beer for himself. ‘I take the bus. Or walk. It’s only a couple of miles. Go on. What about you?’
It was probably at least thirty years since Amos had been on a bus.
Katherine considered. ‘Living in the present or in the past? You’re the second person this week to ask me a version of that question. Do I look displaced? No, maybe don’t answer that.’
‘You look wonderful, as a matter of fact.’
She discovered she had no idea how to deal with such a direct compliment. The only option seemed to ignore it, in case it had been a joke. Perhaps he would assume she was deaf.
He was leaning towards her, his hands on the table. They were good hands, square and capable. It would have been easy to reach out and grasp them.
Quickly she said, ‘I’m not certain I’ve lived at all. That is, I’ve done the usual things in the usual way, and mostly as well as I could, but I’m not convinced that that’s living. I mean, some people take risks, don’t they? They make sacrifices for the sake of others. They pioneer, or they make discoveries, or they overcome obstacles. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have done those things if circumstances had been different, but as it turned out the demands have never been placed on me. I can’t look back and say, that was difficult, it was a challenge and I rose to it and I’m proud of myself.
‘So what have I done? I’ve been a reasonably good wife and mother. My sons are in their twenties. They’re endowed with the usual healthy male quotient of self-interest and ambition. I do love them. Looking back, I see that I’ve been protected and kept in comfortable prosperity. I know how fortunate I am, compared with what a lot of women have to endure. It’s rather old-fashioned. Does all this sound ridiculous?’
‘Not ridiculous, no. I think you could be less dismissive of yourself.’
Could I? she wondered.
‘Are you married, Chris?’
‘I was. For twelve years. Sarah and I split up about four years ago and she’s now remarried to one of her colleagues. We have two daughters. They live with their mother and they stay with me most weekends. Daisy still loves that but nowadays Gemma doesn’t always want to come, she’d rather be with her mates. That’s normal, isn’t it? It’s all quite civilized, Mal – that’s the husband – and I even have a pint together from time to time. That’s not to say that I didn’t want to tear him apart when she left me. For the first year or so I could quite easily have killed and dismembered him. My daughters were asleep in his house, my wife was in his bed. Did they do the same things that she and I used to? I’d stumble around our place, remembering how it used
to be when we were all together, and I was mad enough to hammer the walls with my fists until the bloke next door started hammering back. But now I see the two of them together, I can’t recall precisely what it felt like when she was married to me and not him. Occasionally I even wish I had the anguish back, at least that would be a validation. But not all that often.’
‘What about girlfriends?’ she ventured.
He said, ‘A couple. There’s no one at the moment.’ Then he added in a lower voice, ‘It doesn’t happen more than once or twice in a lifetime. You look at someone and you think, “Yes, of course, it’s you. There you are”.’
The bar was filling up again. These were different people, older and less exuberant than the young office workers. They were the ones who had gone home or somewhere else to eat a meal, and were now intending to drink away what was left of the evening. In any case, as far as Katherine and Chris were concerned the pub and the street and the whole city were deserted but for themselves.
Chris touched the back of her hand. ‘You’ve stayed married. Don’t dismiss that as an achievement. I expect it involved plenty of sacrifices and demands. Probably some pioneering.’
Katherine realized that he had not only listened to what she said to him, but had remembered it. How very unlike Amos that was.
Perhaps he was now hoping or even expecting that she might make some parallel admissions about her own marriage. But she had already been disloyal enough. The details she could at least keep to herself.
‘I suppose it would be an unusual marriage if it hadn’t.’
Chris nodded, looking away from her. He was lonely, she thought. Not in an odd or remotely threatening sense, but just in the way of a warm, affectionate man who wanted someone to be with.
‘You’ll marry again. You’ll probably have a second family. That’s what happens, isn’t it?’
His momentarily assumed expression of mock horror made her laugh.