by John Preston
“In a manner of speaking,” I said.
“Now that we are all here, would everyone care to sit down?”
While there was a murmur of agreement at this, no one made any move to do so.
“Would you care to sit, Mr. Brown?” Mrs. Pretty asked.
“I’m fine where I am. Thank you very much, Mrs. Pretty.”
No one spoke for a few moments. Then Mrs. Pretty said, “I have asked you here to discuss a rather delicate matter, Mr. Brown.”
Already I’d decided to make a clean breast of it — there seemed no point doing anything else. Without further ado, I said, “I know that Mr. Phillips told me to stop digging. And I know that I had no business going back and carrying on last night —”
Before I could say anything else, Mrs. Pretty held up her hand. “I have no intention of rebuking you for your enthusiasm, Mr. Brown. Quite the contrary. In fact, I want to make it plain from the outset that no one here has anything but the highest praise for the way you have conducted the excavation.”
Reid Moir nodded. So too, I saw, did Charles Phillips. It was at this point that I began to grow alarmed.
“Nonetheless,” she went on, “we must, all of us, take into account that this is a far bigger project than we could ever have imagined.”
Mrs. Pretty paused, apparently to catch her breath. But before she could do so, Phillips stepped in. “You mustn’t take this personally, Brown,” he said.
“Take what personally, Mr. Phillips?”
“Mmm? What I am about to say. First of all, I would like to second Mrs. Pretty’s opinion of your abilities. You have done a first-rate job here. Your knowledge of Suffolk soil is second to none. Frankly, I doubt if anyone could have done any better. However, as Mrs. Pretty has already pointed out, this is now a very important dig, among the most important ever undertaken in this country. One that simply cannot be left in the hands of a somewhat ad hoc team from what, with the best will in the world, can only be described as a small provincial museum. Especially at this critical juncture. Therefore, with the full agreement of Mrs. Pretty and, of course, with Mr. Reid Moir and Mr. Maynard’s consent, I have assumed full control of the excavation. I will be working with a number of people from the British Museum. All of them top people in their fields. We in turn will be liaising closely with the Ministry of Works.”
Even then his words took a few moments to sink in.
“You’re replacing me?” I said.
“That is not how I would choose to put it, Brown. I very much hope that you will feel able to carry on. Albeit in a more subordinate role.”
I looked across at Reid Moir. He gazed back at me. I’ve seen livelier-looking stares on a fishmonger’s slab. Then I looked at Mrs. Pretty. She was staring at the floor.
“When exactly are you taking over, Mr. Phillips?” I asked.
“Immediately. From today.”
There was still a kind of swirl inside my head. Spinning everything round and round and then tossing it away.
“I see …” I said. “In which case, I’d like to assure you that I’ll do anything I can to help. In — in whatever way you see fit.”
Phillips turned to the others.
“You see? I told you that I did not anticipate any difficulties. Nonetheless, I am grateful for your attitude, Brown. Very grateful.”
“Was there anything else?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so, unless …”
He glanced across at Mrs. Pretty, but she didn’t react. “No, I think we have said everything that needed to be said.”
Grateley was waiting outside the door to lead me away. As we were passing the kitchen, Robert ran out. He stopped when he saw me. I started towards him, intending to give him a pat on the head. That was all. But as I did so, he flinched and ran back through the door.
Peggy Piggott
JULY 1939
After breakfast Stuart went for his morning walk. I sat in the lounge and read the newspaper. Several of the other guests were also there, sitting half-buried in their tatty chairs, staring out with veiled, incurious eyes. They barely moved even when the maid came in with the carpet sweeper. Part of me wanted to pull them to their feet, the women as well as the men, and spin them round, twirl them out of themselves. This thought, though, was immediately succeeded by a sense of guilt. What a troublesome nature I have and how hastily I rush to judge people.
Some judgments, however, cannot be avoided. The matter of the hotel, for instance. When Stuart was a child he had come here on holiday with his parents. Ever since, he had dreamed of coming back. But the place is not what it was. That much was obvious on our first night as we sat in the dining room, struggling to read grease-speckled menus by the light of a flickering chandelier.
“I’m afraid they have rather let the place go, darling,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course not.”
Soon afterwards, in an attempt to drive the silence away, a woman began to play the harp. She sat in the corner, plucking away at the strings with thick, inexpressive fingers. We both ordered the pork for our main course. The meat was so tough I had to use my knife like a saw. As we were chewing away, we caught one another’s eye and started laughing. We both buried our faces in our napkins until our convulsions had passed.
Now I looked up to see that a boy had come into the lounge. He was wearing a brown uniform and swinging a silver dish.
“Piggott,” he called out.
A rustle of disapproval passed through the other guests. They did not care to be disturbed by any noise apart from the dinner gong.
“Piggott!” called out the boy again.
The ridiculous thing is I didn’t recognize my own name. Not at first. The boy was about to go out again when I lifted my hand and said, “Here.”
“Mrs. Piggott?” he said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it either.
“Yes.”
He held out the dish. It was much clouded by fingerprints. A brown envelope was lying there.
“Telegram for you.”
The words “S. Piggott Esq.” were typed on the envelope. I picked it up, wondering who could have died or suffered some terrible accident. Telegrams always meant bad news; everybody knew that. Meanwhile, the other guests were staring at me from the depths of their chairs. All plainly suspecting me of being an impostor, yet willing me to open the envelope just the same.
I sat and waited for Stuart to come back, forcing myself to concentrate on the newspaper. But I could only manage it for a few more minutes before I jumped to my feet and ran from the room — doubtless provoking another rustle of disapproval.
Outside it was raining. I stood beneath the awning and tried to see if I could catch sight of him. Rows of little Regency houses stretched in either direction, all painted in shades of cream, all with wrought-iron balconies facing towards the sea. Cliffs the color of ox blood towered behind them. A few pedestrians were walking along the front, their heads down, their shoulders hunched.
Stuart, however, was not among them. I kept turning in one direction and then the other, all the time feeling a tide of panic rising inside me. At last I saw him. His mackintosh was stained with rain and his hair plastered over the dome of his head. He was only a few yards away when he looked up.
“Hello, darling! What are you doing out here?”
I didn’t say anything; I just handed him the telegram. He didn’t open the envelope until he had first taken off his coat, shaken it out and then hung it in the lobby. As he was reading, he pushed his bottom lip forward. Water ran down his face and collected there.
Then he began to laugh.
“What is it?”
He gave the telegram to me.
MAJOR FIND IN SUFFOLK STOP SHIP-BURIAL EVEN BIGGER THAN OSEBERG STOP COME AT ONCE STOP BRING WIFE STOP REGARDS PHILLIPS STOP
“I suppose I had better wire him back,” said Stuart.
“What are you going to tell him?”
“Why, that it’s i
mpossible, of course. Typical Phillips, issuing lordly commands and expecting everyone immediately to drop whatever they’re doing.”
The panic must have churned me up. I was so relieved nothing was wrong that I didn’t want the moment to pass.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go?” I asked.
“Darling … we’re on our honeymoon. There can be no question of our going. You’re not seriously suggesting that we should, are you?”
“No, no … I mean, not unless you want to.”
“Of course not. Besides, it’s not a matter of what I want … Strange, though, that Phillips should ask specially for you. Strange for him, that is. I suppose he must have read your paper on Bosnian lake villages. I did send it to him, and it is awfully good, of course. Do you think this ship can really be longer than the one at Oseberg — that was more than seventy feet, as I recall … For heaven’s sake, what am I thinking of? Look, why don’t you wait in the lounge, darling, and I’ll go straight to the post office and wire him back.”
But before he could go, I put my hand on his sleeve. “What if this find really is as exciting as Phillips says?”
“Yes, but even so …”
“This might be our last chance to be involved in something really significant for a long time. We might kick ourselves in years to come, when we’re old.”
“Darling, no. It’s simply not fair on you. Besides, the weather is bound to buck up soon. I only wish the hotel wasn’t so en ruine.”
My fingers were still resting on his sleeve, the nails cut in unattractive little scallops. Staring at them, I said, “Why don’t you wire Phillips to tell him that we’re coming?”
Stuart didn’t reply, not immediately. When he did so, his words all came out in a tumble. “Are you quite sure? I mean, absolutely positive? Remember, you’ve never met Phillips. He can be a bit of a terror, you know. And there’s bound to be trouble here. I booked us in for a full week.”
“Just leave that to me,” I said.
“Really? I just hate to think of you being disappointed, that’s all.”
I stood on tiptoe and kissed him. “You know you don’t have to worry about that.”
The woman behind the reception desk seemed more upset than dismayed when I told her we were leaving. “But you’re in the bridal suite,” she kept repeating. In the end, she agreed that we would pay for the three nights we had spent there — this without my having to mention the pork, or the upholstery, or the wardrobe door that unaccountably swung open in the middle of the night.
After Stuart had paid the bill, the same boy who had brought the telegram took our cases out to the car and helped strap them on the back. Despite the car’s being left out in the rain, the engine caught immediately. No doubt following instructions, the boy stayed outside and wanly waved us off.
At the end of the promenade, the road turned inwards, climbing all the time. Through the passenger window, I could see the horseshoe bay with its terraces of cream houses and the ox-blood cliffs that seemed to be pushing them towards the sea. As the road switched back and forth between the folds of hills, I couldn’t entirely suppress a sense of relief. It felt as if we were climbing out of a hole.
That night we stayed with Stuart’s sister and her husband in London — they live just around the corner from the rooms in Gower Street that I rented when I was studying for my diploma. The next morning we were on the road by nine o’clock. For the first time in days, the sun came out. Fortunately we had the road almost to ourselves and made good progress as far as Colchester.
On the other side of the town we pulled into a field to eat the sandwiches Stuart’s sister had made. Several other cars were already parked there. People sat on the verge, eating and drinking. The men were in their shirtsleeves. A couple of the women, I saw, had rolled their stockings down to their ankles. Children were playing, throwing stones at a cattle trough. Whenever one of the stones hit, there was a loud booming sound. Every so often, one of the adults turned round and told them to stop, but they didn’t take any notice.
We sat in the car with both the doors and windows open. “You’ve never been to Suffolk, have you, darling?” Stuart asked.
“You make it sound like another country,” I said with my mouth full of sandwich.
“Oh, they’re a funny lot, you know. Quite primitive, but proud of it. They rather see themselves as a race apart.”
“In what way?”
“An attitude really. A kind of bloody-mindedness and general dislike of authority. They like to think that they’re out on the edge of things, while everyone else is either soft or ignorant.”
An hour later we crossed the border from Essex into Suffolk. After Stuart’s description, I had half expected to see people jumping about in animal skins. However, all that happened was that the land grew flatter and flatter. The fields stretched away into the distance, broken only by lines of trees. It looked just like a prairie. Everything felt too big, too open, too exposed. Between the rows of barley and rye, the soil was the color of canvas.
Wind, warm yet quite odorless, blew through the car. Even the cattle looked unsure of themselves, lost amid all this emptiness. What few houses we saw all seemed to have crudely built wooden porches and windows scarcely big enough to fit a person’s head through. There also seemed to be an abnormal number of abandoned agricultural vehicles by the side of the road, most of them covered in parasols of cow parsley. Arcs of sand lay across the road and crunched beneath our wheels. Occasionally, I caught glimpses of the sea, although the flatness of the land made it almost impossible to tell where the land ended and the water began. Only a dull, metallic gleam gave it away.
It was after five o’clock by the time we arrived in Woodbridge. Stuart had arranged to meet Charles Phillips at the Bull Hotel. The Bull turned out to be a black and white coaching inn at the top of the town with a plaque on the front proclaiming that King Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont and Saxony had stayed on several occasions, but giving no indication as to what had brought him there.
A girl showed Stuart and me up to the room Phillips had reserved for us. The smell of beer, sour but strangely exotic, drifted up from the bar. Our room had twin beds and overlooked the square, with a shared bathroom at the end of the corridor. Stuart sat on one of the beds and pronounced it to be a definite improvement on Sidmouth. Then he came over to the window where I was standing and put his arm around my shoulder.
“Well done, darling,” he said.
“Well done for what?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought that far.”
“You can’t just say ‘well done’ for no reason,” I said.
“Yes, I can. I can say whatever I want. Although, strictly speaking, I’m the one who deserves the congratulations.”
“For what exactly?”
“For persuading you to marry me, of course.”
I turned towards him and placed my hands flat against his chest. “I don’t know if I took that much persuading. Besides, impressionable girls are always falling in love with their professors. It must be one of the hazards of the job.”
“Not a hazard — not for me. Entirely a blessing … Now then,” he said, “shall we go downstairs and see if Phillips is here?”
In fact, Phillips had not arrived, although he did so a few minutes later. While we had talked about Phillips on the journey up, nothing had quite prepared me for my first sight of him. He was a much larger man than I had expected. However, he carried his bulk, if not proudly, then with a considerable air of entitlement. By contrast, his bow tie was rather small, making him look like an inexpertly wrapped parcel.
When Stuart introduced me, his gaze ran up and down me in a quite blatant manner. Not just once either, but several times. Before sitting down, he glanced suspiciously at the other customers and then said, “I think we should be safe here.”
Once seated, he beckoned the barman over. “A pint of your best bitter for me,” said Phillips. “I’m sure you’ll join me, Stuart. And what would
you like, my dear?” he asked.
“A half of best bitter, please.”
He looked at me again, as if to make sure he had heard correctly.
“And a half of best bitter,” he said.
When the beer arrived, Phillips drank half his in a single gulp. “Right then, to business.” The ship, he said, was more than eighty feet long so far, with the likelihood that it would be close to a hundred feet by the time both ends had been exposed. “As for dates, my estimate at this stage is anything from AD 600 to 800. I don’t think we will be able to pinpoint it more accurately until we see what is in the burial chamber.
“Everything’s been a bit of a mess so far. A local man called Brown was having a go under the auspices of Ipswich Museum. Self-taught, I’m afraid, and with everything that entails. He was on the verge of going right into the chamber, but fortunately I managed to step in before any real damage could be done. I’m hoping we will be joined by Frank Grimes from the Ordnance Survey. Possibly by Crawford too, if he can get away. Also, John Ward-Perkins is going to try to come from Rome. For the moment, however, it’s just going to be the three of us.
“Now, I should tell you that the landowner, a Mrs. Pretty, is a rather difficult lady, with some very fixed ideas of her own. There was even a bit of bother from the Ministry of Works, who had some lunatic scheme to erect a roof over the whole site. However, thanks to some nimble footwork on my part, I don’t anticipate any further difficulties.”
“What’s the situation with Ipswich, CW?” Stuart asked.
At this Phillips began to laugh. “They’re not very happy, I can tell you.”
“I bet they’re not,” said Stuart, who had also started laughing.
“I thought Reid Moir might have a seizure when I told him I was taking over. What made it even worse is that he was still smarting over the reviews of his new book.”
“What’s this one about?” Stuart asked.
“Flints!” exclaimed Phillips. “Paralyzingly dull, by all accounts. Do you know, I don’t think he’s forgiven me over that whole business with the aerial photographs.”