The Lovers of Pound Hill

by Mavis Cheek

  Down below and back in the village, comfortably ensconced under the bar counter of the Old Holly Bush, the pub cat, simply known as She, was giving birth to her kittens. If I am to be tipped out at night to apparently hunt for rats and mice, was how Montmorency put it to himself some weeks previously, then I might as well go over the road for a bit of comfort. He had been agreeably surprised at the comfort offered him once introduced to human bedding by She – but he accepted it graciously, and, being a gentleman cat, he always left at dawn. However, recently, on stepping over to visit, She had remarked in a hissy sort of way that if he wouldn’t mind clearing off, she would be very much obliged. And now she was just getting on with it. Simplicity itself, being a cat. Compared, she thought, to the complexities of human beings. They seemed to be forever chasing their own tails, forgetting everything they knew, not knowing what they wanted and getting nowhere whereas She, Montmorency and their kind kept to their own territory, knew exactly what they wanted, took only what they needed, and on the whole lived very well on it.

  In the surrounding landscape the breeze had dropped, the sun shone, the ancient shadows remained still and deep and the Gnome, or the god, or the mammoth bit of Roman graffiti – whatever the figure be – had the look of one who is not very happy but can do nothing about it. Bloody lovers, he thought. Always something going on up here to remind him of all that. And he without even the art of lifting his manhood above his ankles (Sappho, paraphrased, c. 590 BC). Below him Mrs Webb’s gnomes winked and shone and twinkled in the warm light. He glared all around him, as he had been designed to do, but no one paid him the least attention. The earth was still for that moment, love was let in and even the rooks were quiet.

  Postscript

  IF THERE WAS one thing about Freddy Rathbone that Molly Bonner had to acknowledge it was that he was even more tenacious than she was. If you said to him in a letter something along the lines of, ‘I do not think you will be able to help but you might. This young man called Robin Whittington who is in the same neck of the woods as you and has been lost presumed dead for nearly five years. I doubt you can help to find him, but – just supposing – here are all the details of the case …’ Despite the careless dismissal of several hundred miles (same neck of the woods being scarcely true), if Molly Bonner knew anything about anything, it was that he would try – and if there were a Robin Whittington out there to be found – he would find him. And he did. Doctors being rather thin on the ground among the outlawed of those parts, and the outlawed of those parts very often needing the administrations of a good medical man, Robin was an unwilling guest for the duration, though a Hippocratically useful one, and very glad to be rescued.

  That first night, having overcome a certain amount of disbelief and shyness which had naturally led to activities of a private and personal nature, Dorcas and Robin, naked and happy, lay in each other’s arms and marvelled – and Marvelled – at how, despite time passing, love could remain constant. Dorcas asked, perhaps with just a hint of censure, ‘Did you ever try to escape?’ And Robin said that of course he did. Dorcas then asked, still with the hint of censure, ‘Did you ever refuse to do what they wanted?’ To which Robin said that of course he did not. He reminded her that, given the situation he found himself in, he was, first and foremost, a doctor, and that no doctor worth his or her salt would – even though a kidnap victim – refuse to help an ailing man, woman or child. Of whom there were many in the place where he was kept. And Dorcas, pressing up close to the body of the man she loved, and it had to be up close because they were in her bed in the Squidge which made any other such position perilous, decided that was the reason she loved him. ‘But I don’t think I’ll be going abroad for a while,’ he said comfortably. ‘No,’ said Dorcas, showing a spirit that had seemed lacking in recent times. ‘You most certainly will not.’

  Now the dig on Pound Hill was well and truly over – the tarpaulins and the plastic were all gone – and everything had been put back exactly – well, almost exactly – as it once was. Except for one very clever thing. Molly kept her promise. The Gnome’s mighty member was restored and rested once again across the grave of the lovers, as the council and the heritage people insisted it must, but with one great difference. At the point at which the Gnome’s mighty member lay across the grave of the lovers, instead of grass and chalk, a sheet of laminated glass was placed there, so that all who came up to look and pay their respects to the Lovers of Pound Hill could do so by viewing them through the transparent panel. As Robin said, ‘From now on we can look at love through and beyond the vulgar attempt to expunge it.’ The vicar had nearly eaten his little heart out at this line from the inaugural speech, for he wished with all his little heart that he had said it; more, he wished within his little heart that he had seen it and recognised it. He felt unusually uncomfortable and vowed to try harder. Why, he was wearing the most ordinary, humble clothes that day, which, he felt, was a start.

  Molly approved. She might not know her poetry – something she intended to put right, much to Freddy’s amazement and amusement – but she did know her history, and her historians. Their words transcended time. As Tacitus, or Livy or Plutarch knew, men (and presumably women, though they kindly do not say) and their worlds crumble when they forget to recognise and respect the lessons of history. And there on Pound Hill, she thought happily, is the truth of this. No more dismissing love as an unknown, or a convention, or not experienced until modern times, no more forgetting the value of it now as then. The Lovers of Pound Hill had seen to that. A lesson for us all, she thought, and Yes, yes, she really must read some poetry.

  Winifred had edited their Lufferton Boney footage so that it was perfectly professional. Molly would take this new evidence to London along with her grandfather’s notebooks and he would be accorded the correct honours. Molly would take second place. He had led her there and he had told her, more or less, how to go about things. He was the real start, not her. The letters she would keep along with the shale pieces and the electroplated button. Her spoils. She left the village more fulfilled than when she arrived there and who, she said to Freddy, could say fairer than that? They packed up all the cumbersome hardware and her beautiful tools, and placed the bosing mallet and the lump of wood in pride of place. Who knew if she would use it again? For the moment there were things of a more personal nature to concentrate on. Being Molly Bonner, you may be sure that she would.

  The vicar’s delight knew no bounds. Two prospective weddings. Two! ‘You will be raised up,’ so Lady Dulcima had said, and the vicar thought, Who can deny the honour of an aristocrat? He was only waiting, somewhat nervously, for the adjustments to start on the pulpit, as promised. He went away to stay with his sister in Filey, at the suggestion of Dulcima, for a little break. He was very excited. Raised up at last.

  Lady Fitzhartlett, who was one to keep her word and who had never intended to knock down old traditions – even if they were a touch uncomfortable for their vicar – selected the highest of the footstools to present to him when he returned from Filey. He would be easily seen over the beautifully carved pulpit rim once he stood on that, and it would make Fitzhartlett happy to lose at least one of them, and she liked the idea of making him happy again. The other footstools would make excellent wedding presents as they were finely worked and rather beautiful. It would please her very much to give Dorcas another gift from Beautiful Bygones. She vaguely remembered the Spode dish and how it had made her smile. Now that Robin was back perhaps she would be able to spend some time putting her feet up so a footstool would be just the thing. And then there was the christening present for Pinky and Susie. Oh yes, she would find homes for them all. Waste not, want not. Dulcima sighed with pleasure. Even Nigel seemed more manly nowadays. He was not Dulcima’s first choice, it is true, but he was what her daughter wanted and her daughter seemed to be exactly what he wanted. (‘Lady Fitzhartlett, I would not change a hair on her head’ – which was rather a blow). Nowadays Marion went up and down Pound Hill without so mu
ch as a squeak. How nice it was the way everything worked out in the end. Harty would come round eventually when Nigel learned how to shoot properly – or even adequately. Let us face it, thought Dulcima, Sir Roger never has.

  In the Old Holly Bush Julie Barnsley was crouching under the bar and stroking She. And She was purring. Both felt an immense sense of achievement. The kittens slept. ‘We’ll give one to Miles,’ she said later to Peter. ‘He’ll need a bit of company now he doesn’t have Montmorency.’

  Pinky and Susie sat side by side at the kitchen table. They had their backs to the open window and the Gnome. On the table was the rudimentary plan of a vegetable garden. They were now considering where to put the herbs. ‘Probably where the crystals are now,’ said Susie, without so much as looking up. And Pinky replied, quite smoothly and easily, ‘I agree.’

  On the day of Molly’s departure, Robin and Dorcas climbed to the top of Pound Hill and looked down on the van and the trailer as it made its way along the winding road out of the village. Of course Molly Bonner would be back, Dorcas knew, for she had several weddings to attend. And a baptism, or christening, or Druidical baby blessing. Happy things to come. As Dorcas raised her hand to wave at the slowly disappearing vehicle, the sun came out from behind a cloud (there were not many in the sky that day) and caught, like a tiny fire, the diamond on Dorcas’s finger. It flashed its light and sent a wink across the landscape. And, as if to answer the wink, the laminated glass that covered the grave of the Lovers of Lufferton Boney also caught the sun, and also winked. Which seemed, to anyone who noticed in the village below, to be a satisfactory phenomenon. Back down the couple came, slowly, laughing again at Robin’s mistaking the vicar for someone who was blind. Though privately Dorcas wondered if that was very far from the truth.

  In the Squidge, and unaware of the furry feline gift that he would one day receive, which might prove the making of him – and might not – Miles sat motionless and miserable in an armchair, staring out and up at the Gnome. As the sunlight caught the glass that covered the embracing bones of the eternal lovers, Miles saw how Dorcas’s diamond winked and flashed its message across the landscape and into his tiny, narrow, dark sitting room. That Molly Bonner, he thought. That archaeologist’s granddaughter with her full purse and promises. She had well and truly done for him. Somehow, somehow, he had always known, from the very first time he saw her bouncing her way down the village street, that she would. All that shocking colour, that startling pink and red and whatnot, could only do him harm. Like the Gnome, Miles was now a creature undone. ‘I lift up mine eyes to the Hill,’ he said aloud, ‘From whence cometh my help.’ But sadly for Miles, it did not.

  The so-called Lovers of Valdaro, also dubbed the ‘Valdaro Lovers’, is a pair of human skeletons locked in an eternal embrace discovered by archaeologists at a Neolithic tomb in S. Giorgio near Mantova, Italy in 2007.

  Archaeologist Elena Maria Menotti led the excavation. Scientists believe that the lovers are a man and woman no older than 20 years old and approximately 5′2″ in height. They were removed from the ground intact and sent to Musei Civici in Como where they are undergoing tests.

  Author’s Note

  PARTLY THIS BOOK is all my daughter’s fault for rekindling my interest in ancient landscapes – through her involvement with a Jurassic Museum on Purbeck – and partly it came about because, living in the beautiful south west of England, there is no escaping our ancestors. It must have been like Piccadilly Circus, particularly in the Iron Age, with groups of people tripping over each other all the time – virtually no hill was left without a human settlement or fortification. And then there is the Cerne Abbas Giant – that unashamedly masculine figure cut out of the Dorset landscape with no one quite knowing by whom or why or exactly when. He’s certainly a shocker. I was playing around with these ideas and the way we feel we are so sophisticated and advanced in our ways now compared to the superstitions and rituals of the past, and thinking that for all their being thousands of years old those rituals and superstitions seemed to be very powerful and exact and full of meaning. I went on the Internet to see where I could read up more about these things and – quite suddenly – I was staring at a picture of two neolithic skeletons, very young, male and female, held together in a loving embrace that had lasted for five thousand years. For the first time in anything so ancient that I had seen, here were our indigenous ancestors showing us that they knew all about love in quite the same way that we did. Perhaps even more so than now, given the current somewhat fickle and transient nature of love affairs (if heat magazine is anything to go by). Out of that came a novel that put together the two ideas of the Cerne Abbas Giant and the apparently all-powerful supremacy of his bigness, and the underlying, undermining sweetness of the two young eternal lovers.

  The Italian archaeologist, a woman, who discovered the skeletons in Valdaro was absolutely determined that they should never be separated, even when taken away for investigation. And they were not. Only an Italian …

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  Copyright © Mavis Cheek 2011

  Mavis Cheek has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Extract from An Arundel Tomb © Philip Larkin,

  Collected Poems, Faber and Faber Ltd.

  PABLO NERUDA. ‘Tu risa’, LOS VERSOS DEL CAPITÁN

  © Fundación Pablo Neruda, 2011

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

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  ISBN 9780091931667