by Rosie Thomas
Then be not coy, but use your time; And while ye may, go marry: For having once but lost your prime, You may for ever tarry.’
She recited it in a low voice, then smiled at me.
‘He found that himself. Is that surprising? I don’t think it was. Selwyn believed in marriage, even though we never did it ourselves. I suppose it was me who didn’t want to, not him. He was a traditional man, beneath it all.’
‘He was. He was a believer in one’s prime, too, and in not tarrying.’
The impatient, surging, hot-blooded essence of him seemed to rise up and fill the whole room. His son was breathing evenly on his mattress of cushions. I curled up inside myself, the first intimations of loss stabbing through shock’s anaesthesia.
‘We loved each other, you know,’ Polly said.
‘Yes.’
Tell her, I ordered myself. Grief and guilt goaded me beyond reason. My mouth opened and out came the first words.
‘Polly, I have to tell you something. I won’t know how to deserve your friendship if I don’t tell you.’
She turned to look full into my face.
‘No,’ she said.
That was all, one cold dry monosyllable, but it was as explicit as if written on a page for me to read.
Don’t try to absolve yourself by confessing. Don’t damage Selwyn’s memory for me. Keep what you know to yourself, and live with the knowledge of it.
We held each other’s eyes. Her eyelid twitched with weariness, but I was the one who looked away.
‘It’s nothing,’ I murmured.
We sat on together until it was almost morning.
Polly pulled Selwyn’s jumper around her shoulders but she was still shivering. I asked her if she would like to lie down in her bed for an hour or two, and she said that she would.
Now, in my own bedroom, I lean my forehead against the cold window glass and stare outside. There is grey in the sky between the trees, and the striking of the Meddlett church clock is just a reverberation in the chilly air.
‘I love you,’ I say aloud to Selwyn.
Another secret to add to the legions that each of us hides in our hearts.
FEBRUARY
FIFTEEN
The strip lights hummed as they walked down the avenue of bones, past the metal racks stacked with boxes labelled Hum F, complete. Chris held open the door to his office and Katherine followed him inside. Severe air conditioning lent the air the sterile tang that she remembered from her first visit, when he had placed the torc around her neck and astonished her by saying, ‘I so much wanted to do that.’
She put her fingers to her throat, remembering the ornament’s cold weight.
‘Where is it now?’ she asked.
‘With the Iron-Age metals experts, undergoing XRF.’
She raised her eyebrows. His work jargon was becoming a joke between them.
‘X-ray fluorescence. To determine the metal content. And other tests. None of this happens quickly. The pieces have a long history, it takes time to unravel it.’
They touched hands. It was still remarkable to them that their lives had somehow tilted together. Sometimes Katherine woke in the night and reached out to make sure that he was there, that it was really Dr Christopher Carr breathing beside her, only to discover that he too was awake and reassuring himself that she was with him. In spite of everything that had happened in the last weeks, Selwyn’s death and the end of her marriage, she didn’t think that there was any other time in her life when she had felt so vitally in the place and the moment. This, she finally understood, was probably what being in love meant. The condition withstood even the harshest external circumstances.
‘Show me the new finds?’ she asked.
He unlocked the safe. This time he lifted out a tier of plain cardboard boxes. Inside the largest lay a series of polythene pouches. One by one Chris unwrapped metal ornaments and laid them on a piece of folded cloth for her inspection. They were dirty and corroded, crusted greenish-black with verdigris. They looked less glamorous than the torc and shield, but Katherine had learned enough from Chris by this time to understand how important they were. He pointed to each object in turn.
‘Amber and metal alloy brooch, two more brooches and the chain to link them together, two decorative hair tresses, and a pair of gold earrings.’
‘She must have looked very fine, don’t you think, dressed up in all her glory?’
‘To primitive people she would have appeared no less than a goddess.’
From the second box he produced the iron wristlets that protected her arms from the fierce recoil of her bowstring, and a scatter of sharp flint arrowheads. She had been a true warrior.
‘What’s in there?’ Katherine pointed to the third and smallest box.
She had heard much about this last of the finds retrieved from the sports holdall. The newspapers after the recovery had all shown pictures, and Chris had appeared on the local news again to discuss it. But hardly anyone except the police and archaeologists had seen the real thing as yet.
Chris lifted out a cocoon of cloth, and gently peeled back the layers to reveal it.
The gold cup was crumpled at one side, but it was still magnificent.
It lay heavy in her hands, shining because the pure metal did not corrode. The body was decoratively ridged and the rim incised with a scroll pattern. The handle was a ribbed curve of gold, fastened to the body of the vessel with leaf-shaped rivets. Chris showed her how the cup would have been hammered from a sheet of soft metal formed into shape over a block of wood. For a piece so old, he said, the workmanship was extraordinary. She traced her fingertips over the rim, imagining where the princess would have touched it with her lips. This physical link made her seem almost present in the room with them. Then she touched the smooth rounded base. The cup wouldn’t have stood up on its own.
‘Why is it like that?’ she asked.
‘It wasn’t made to be set aside. It would have been too significant. So the child slaughtered and buried with her might well have been her cup-bearer, because she would have needed to take him as well as the cup itself with her on her journey into the afterlife.’
‘But you don’t know for sure?’
Chris shook his head.
‘In my world we don’t know many things for certain. And because the site was so badly disturbed by the looters, we lost all the context. But still, to have recovered these pieces at all goes a long way to compensate for that.’
It did compensate. He was so enchanted by this Iron-Age treasure, and the depth of his passion for it made him lovable in her eyes.
‘Tell me what you do know?’
The work by David the osteologist and others on the two sets of bones was complete, and the skeletons were boxed up in the repository.
Chris returned the cup and the ornaments to their places in the safe.
‘She was somewhere in her thirties. She was tall, about five foot six inches, and fairly well nourished on a mixed diet of grains and a little meat. Her teeth were bad, and she would have suffered from toothache. We don’t know what she died of, though. There are no specific skeletal indications. It could have been pneumonia, tetanus, a tumour, an aneurysm or even poisoning. We shall never know.’
In her mind’s eye Katherine saw the burial ground, and the views over the pastures. She realized that she no longer even thought of it as theirs, hers and Amos’s, let alone as a site for the futuristic house. Their plan belonged to a different time, as conclusively as the princess herself.
‘There is this, too,’ Chris said. Against the wall were two covered crates. In one, bagged up, lay several clumps of earth thickly studded with metal discs. In the other were sherds of dark brown grooved pottery. It was a hoard of Icenian coins, and the remains of the jars that had contained them.
He detached a single coin from the mass and held it out.
‘Face-Horse,’ she murmured, examining the faint outline of a human profile and remembering the other time she had seen the desig
n, back in the Mead woods on the day of the robbery. He stood back in admiration.
‘Would you like to join my team?’
‘Maybe,’ she laughed.
‘There’s one thing we haven’t come across before.’
They picked out and examined some of the slivers of pottery. Chris said that from the materials and the rudimentary incised decorations it was clear that they were pre-Iron Age, perhaps even as early as Neolithic. Katherine looked up at him in surprise.
‘But the coins they stored belong to the same period as the princess herself?’
He nodded. He thought that the jars must have been buried or hidden amongst rocks by much earlier peoples, and then discovered and incorporated by the Iceni into their own rituals. The ground seemed to slide from under Katherine’s feet again. She peered into further, even more remote layers of prehistory.
She said, ‘For thousands of years, different peoples have been living and hunting and eating and drinking, growing their crops, hiding their treasures, dying and being buried, just on that one patch of ground.’
‘The more I study it, the more I realize what a rich site it is,’ Chris answered.
‘Does Miranda know about the pottery?’
She was thinking how interested Miranda would be in this latest discovery from her beloved Mead. She could almost hear her saying, ‘If only Jake were here. He would have loved this.’ She still talked about Jake as if he were only temporarily absent, but of Selwyn she spoke hardly at all.
‘Only you and I and my team know, as yet, and we haven’t had time to do any detailed examination because the police took so long to release the artefacts. So I haven’t said anything to Mrs Meadowe or your husband, but they will be able to read everything when I submit my report.’
Your husband. Chris didn’t like to call him Amos. Katherine knew it was because he was pained and embarrassed to think of the hurt he had caused him, and this distress gave rise to an odd formality. She had tried to tell Chris: You didn’t cause the end of my marriage, Amos and I did. I made the decision. He didn’t really accept her assurance, though. He was a very good man, she thought once more. A reticent but decent, moral man.
‘I don’t know what Amos intends,’ she said now.
In the six weeks since Selwyn’s death, following the first terrible days and the funeral, Amos hadn’t mentioned the new house at all. In the abandoned trenches the churned-up earth formed hard crests and then softened again with the winter cycle of frost and thaw. Like Miranda and Polly, Amos had fallen into a limbo at Mead. Without Selwyn amongst them, it was as if the dynamo that had lately powered the place had run down and stopped.
Katherine put the pieces of ancient pot back into the crate.
‘Let’s go home,’ she said to Chris.
Home was no longer the cottage at Mead, and now the separation from Amos was final she felt uncomfortable in the Bloomsbury flat. If she had a home at all in those glazed, grieving weeks of January, it was Chris’s terraced house near the city ring road. From the front bedroom windows the dirty white-bronze glare of the motorway lights was clearly visible, but the back was quiet, with a view of tall trees.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said to her, often.
Chris liked to cook, she discovered. He clipped recipes from the colour supplements and picked up ingredients on the way home from work. Katherine sometimes lay on his sofa with a glass of wine, watching him through the open door of the kitchen as he stirred a wok. This experience, she wonderingly told him, was as exotic for her as a journey to Tibet.
Quite often they ate sitting on the sofa too; refilling each other’s glasses and talking across whatever was on television. Katherine realized how pleased she was to have withdrawn from the world of table mats, and crystal glasses that were too good to be put in the dishwasher. After their meal she would lazily postpone the washing up, stretching out instead with her feet in his lap.
He said once, ‘This is all anyone wants, you know. Anyone who isn’t a power-crazed megalomaniac, that is. Parties, date restaurants, singles bars, internet sites – they all exist ultimately to enable people to find just one other person to lie on the sofa and drink wine with.’
‘Wearing tracksuit bottoms,’ she said, indicating hers.
‘Of course.’
‘Where does sex fit in?’
Chris grinned. ‘Oh, somewhere on the menu. It’s not the ultimate driver, though. It’s a big mistake to make it that.’
‘We only think that because we’re old.’
‘Age has its benefits, then,’ he answered. ‘Hindsight being one of them.’
Tonight she drew the curtains and lit the coal-effect fire. There was a good smell of frying garlic. She looked into the kitchen.
‘Do I have time to speak to Polly?’
‘Yep.’
Katherine tried to call her every day. Sometimes Polly was calm, almost troublingly so. At others she sounded unhinged, as though grief rampaged through her and sabotaged all the structures of her being.
She confessed once, ‘I’m scared, Katherine. I wake up at three a.m. and remember all over again, and I have to stuff the sheet in my mouth to stop myself screaming. I’m frightened that if I do scream I’ll sound to myself like a lost person. But I don’t know how I’m going to live without him. How will I do it? Can you tell me? I don’t know anything, and I used to think I knew so much. I thought I’d made a watertight contract with my life. How mistaken can you be?’
Katherine tried to soothe her. ‘It will get better. You won’t always feel this bad. Shall I come and be with you? I could come right now, Poll.’
Polly’s voice rose. ‘No, I can’t bear to see you. Amos didn’t go and die, you had the luxury of deciding you didn’t want him, and now you’re in love with someone else.’
‘I know. It’s unfair,’ Katherine said humbly.
Polly had even been angry with Colin. In the first days after Selwyn died she couldn’t sleep or eat and her old friend had tried to persuade her that she must swallow some food and then take a sleeping pill. He even held out a spoon to her, as if she were a tiny child. She swatted his hand away and the food spilled on his clothes, and she had wept with the hollowness of pure desolation.
‘Stop it, Polly,’ he pleaded.
She rounded on him.
‘You don’t know what it’s like. Why couldn’t it have been me who died? Why is it me who is left behind?’
Knowing the selfishness of grief, he tried to reason with her.
‘I do know what you’re feeling. Stephen died. He was murdered, remember?’
She put her head in her hands. ‘I’m so sorry. But you and he, you weren’t living together then, you’d split up months before.’
Colin said, ‘I still loved him more than any person in the world. Except maybe for you, Polly.’
Her head snapped back. He saw that her face was contorted with anger.
‘Why is it you who is here, and not Selwyn?’
Not long after that Colin had gathered himself up and taken a job in America, telling Katherine that he was making it harder for Polly just by being at Mead.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Polly cried now to Katherine. ‘I’m ashamed of myself. I’m sorry to be so horrible, and so weak at the same time.’
‘You’re neither of those things. It’s grief. Is Mirry there?’
‘Miranda?’
The tone of Polly’s voice made Katherine say quickly, ‘What about the twins, or Ben? When it’s bad, why don’t you call them?’
‘Because when it’s bad I don’t want them to know how bad it can be. I want to try to protect them from that.’
Katherine didn’t say so, but she was reassured to hear this. The maternal instinct was still strong. It would take time, she thought, but in the end Polly would recover from her loss.
Tonight there was no answer from the barn, and Polly’s mobile was switched off. Katherine went back to the kitchen and stood behind Chris at the stove. Slowly she inclined h
er head until it rested against the breadth of his back.
In the barn Polly was surrounded by memories: Selwyn wielding a sledgehammer in a thick cloud of plaster dust, Selwyn crouched under the tarpaulin with rain spilling from the porous roof, Selwyn baring his teeth in a saurian smile on Christmas Eve as he welcomed everyone into the firelit room. Wherever Polly looked, there were pieces of him.
Alpha had printed Colin’s photograph of him flying past the start line of the Meddlett Fun Run on the last day of his life, and it was pinned to the wall next to the sink. But even if she were to go to some remote place where he had never set foot, she knew that her head would still be clamorous with his absence. In any case she couldn’t run away because she didn’t have enough money. Characteristically, Selwyn had left their financial affairs in worse shape than she might have predicted.
The three children had stayed on with her for a few days following the funeral. She was comforted by the solid weight of their bodies pressing against hers, and the smell of their skin, which now seemed hardly to have changed from babyhood. Alph and Omie suffered long bouts of crying and Polly held them as they wept, stroking their hair as she had done when they were little girls. Alph talked a lot on the telephone to Jaime. He was a doctor, her family now learned. He had offered to come up to Mead and do whatever he could to help, as had Omie’s Tom, but for now the Davieses clung to each other. It was too much to see anyone.
Ben was the one most changed by his father’s death. He might easily have chosen to be prostrated by it, but instead he moved quietly between the three women, trying on the new role of man of the house. He did his best to second-guess their needs, lighting the fires and bringing his mother cups of tea that she didn’t have the heart to tell him she didn’t want.
After ten days the twins had to go back to work. Ben stayed a little longer, until he heard that there was an opening on the magazine for a regular weekly film review.
‘Go on. Dad would want you to do it,’ Polly insisted.
Promising that he would come back at weekends, or at least whenever he didn’t have a movie to check out, Ben caught the coach back to London.