by John Preston
“You must tell Peggy what happened, CW.”
“Shall I? It was the most amusing thing.”
Phillips looked at me expectantly.
“Do, please,” I said.
“Very well. Reid Moir was awfully excited about what he claimed — insisted, would be nearer the mark — was evidence of a sunken village off the coast near Walberswick. He showed me the photographs and asked what I thought of his extraordinary find, plainly expecting me to salute him for his brilliance. I looked at them and said, my dear man, have you never seen oyster beds before?”
At this, they both began to laugh again, even more loudly than before. When the laughter had died away, Phillips held up his glass and called for more drinks.
“And how about events in the wider world?” Stuart asked. “How do you think they might affect us?”
Phillips looked at him blankly. “The wider world?”
“The Germans, CW …”
“Germans …” said Phillips in surprise. “I don’t recall a ship-burial ever being discovered in Germany.”
“No, no. I meant, the possibility — likelihood, even — of war.”
“Oh,” said Phillips. “That. Well, there’s no doubt that we will have to get our skates on. The BM has already started packing up its more fragile pieces and putting them in a tube tunnel beneath the Aldwych. I’d say we have three weeks at most to complete the excavation.”
It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how successfully I had used the excitement of our marriage to distract myself from the imminence of war. But the fact that I was having this realization at all probably meant the distraction had started to wear off.
Soon afterwards, Stuart excused himself. “Beer,” he explained with an apologetic wince. “It runs straight through me.”
Left alone with Charles Phillips, I struggled to think of something else to say. It was not easy, especially as he made no effort to instigate conversation. Instead, he sat polishing his spectacles with his handkerchief. This made me even more tongue-tied than usual. After a lengthy period of silence, I grew a little desperate.
“Are you also staying in the Bull, Mr. Phillips?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, yes,” he said. “I had been expecting to stay at Sutton Hoo House. That would have been far more convenient. Unfortunately, there appears to have been some sort of misunderstanding with Mrs. Pretty — the lady I mentioned earlier.”
Once again he lapsed into silence. Once again I strained for something to say.
“I wanted to tell you how flattered I was that you specifically asked for me to come here.”
Phillips glanced up at this, but did not reply.
“I know Stuart sent you my paper on Bosnian lake villages,” I went on. “It was awfully good of you to read it.”
He looked at me for longer than before, then said, “Very stimulating.”
“That means a great deal. I only hope I will be able to repay your faith in me.”
“I have no doubt you will.”
“It’s just that I haven’t done that much actual fieldwork.”
He shook his head impatiently. “Never mind about that.”
“I wouldn’t want you to think I was more experienced than I actually am.”
“You have all the key attributes,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”
“I do? I’m sure I’m being frightfully slow, Mr. Phillips, but I don’t follow you.”
“It’s perfectly simple. Look at me. Now, what do you see?”
“A man,” I said uncertainly.
“Yes, obviously a man. But a man of a certain size. I happen to have large bones; it runs in my family. Stuart has smaller bones than me, although even he must be around the twelve-stone mark. You, however, by virtue of your sex, are a good deal smaller and lighter than either of us. The ship is in a very delicate condition. You might say it scarcely exists at all, except for the rivets. Everything else is just hard sand. Put too much weight on it and the whole thing could disintegrate. It therefore seems sensible that I should supervise matters from outside the trench, while you will be able to get on with the actual digging. There,” he said, “is that clear enough?”
“Am I — am I to understand that you only asked me here because of my size, Mr. Phillips?”
Behind his spectacles, his eyes were quite small and bright. “Exactly,” he said.
The next morning we drove out to the dig. It was only a couple of miles away, on the other side of the estuary to Woodbridge. The driveway passed through a tunnel of beech trees. Sunlight flickered between the leaves, casting patterns on the gravel below. The house itself was a large white Edwardian building, set up on a bluff above the river, complete with squash court and garages.
Despite my having tried to envisage the site beforehand, I was still astonished by what I saw. There was a majesty about the sweep and scale of the ship that far exceeded any expectations. There was also something intensely moving about its tenacious hold on survival. About the way in which it had resisted obliteration by transforming itself from one substance into another. From wood into sand. It was like a giant apparition lying there before us. I looked at Stuart and saw that he was just as affected.
Three men were lined up on one side of the trench, apparently waiting for us. Phillips introduced them. “Mr. Spooner and Mr. Jacobs, and this is Mr. Brown, who did such sterling work on the earlier stages of the dig.”
Mr. Brown was a small, ferrety-faced man wearing an ancient tweed jacket and what might once have been a matching tweed cap. After we had all shaken hands, Stuart and I began by dividing the center of the ship into a grid. We then laid down a planning frame and marked off the squares with lengths of string. The men, meanwhile, were put to work shifting the spoil heaps — Phillips had decided these were too near the ship and should be moved further away. With only one wheelbarrow between them, this proved to be a lengthy business.
Stuart and I, however, made rapid progress. Once we had divided the ship into squares, we started cleaning down the south side of the burial area. During the morning Mrs. Pretty and her son, Robert, came out to see how we were getting along. Once again, Phillips performed the introductions. Mrs. Pretty seemed much too old to be the mother of such a young son. The boy, Robert, twisted shyly away while he was being introduced and then ran off towards the spoil heaps as soon as Phillips had finished.
That afternoon, Stuart started to make a proper map of the site, while I carried on as before. At seven o’clock we finished for the day and drove back to the Bull. As I was muddy from the dig, I decided to take advantage of the fact that the bathroom was free.
The water hiccuped and spat from the hot tap as the bathroom filled with steam. Standing on the cork mat, I tested the water with my foot. It was hotter than I had expected — so hot my toes instinctively clenched — although not too hot to tolerate. First I swung one leg in and then the other. The bath was wonderfully big; you could have fitted two people in it with no trouble at all.
As I lowered myself down, I could feel the line between hot and cold sliding up my body, from my calves up to my hips. Warming my blood by horizontal degrees. Once I was fully immersed, I lay back, gasping as the water closed over my chest, seeing the steam part with the force of my breath. I could feel the heat against my eyeballs, passing down my throat.
Enveloped in steam, shiny with soap, I spread my hands and let my arms float out on either side of me. As I did so, my thoughts also started to lighten and float. I found myself thinking about the flat in Great Ormond Street which I had moved into at the start of my second year at the university. Apart from the Georgian windows and a black marble fireplace, there was nothing particularly special about it. Pipes shrieked whenever the water was turned on, while strips of wallpaper fell from the walls like plane trees shedding their bark. The furnishings — Lloyd Loom chairs, pine table, mahogany tallboy — were a utilitarian jumble, while at night mice ran about beneath the floorboards.
Yet it was the
first place where I had ever felt truly at home, able to be myself. From a secondhand shop in Theobalds Road, I bought an old EMG gramophone with a brass horn and a box of needles. For an extra five shillings, the man offered to sell me a case of records. Some of the records were hopelessly scratched, while others were missing their labels. A few, however, were in a perfectly playable condition. One was Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto.
I had never heard it before, but from the moment it began I was filled with a kind of ecstatic familiarity. The music seemed to reach down deep inside me, touching me and transforming me. Dressed only in my underclothes, I began to dance around the flat. Not knowing what I was doing, but making my own steps. Improvising as best as I could. Flinging out my legs and throwing back my head. Catching glimpses of my reflection in the long mirror as I spun past. My body no longer lumpish and ungainly, but sleek and graceful. Soaring and then tumbling in this rhapsodic state of bliss.
Lying now in the bath, I started to sway gently in time to the music in my head. At first, the water threatened to slop over the sides, but as it balanced on the lip of the bath it grew suddenly viscous and slid back down the porcelain. Cupping my hands, I lifted them up and let the water trickle down over my head and shoulders.
As I was doing so, the bathroom door opened.
Immediately, I covered myself up as best I could. Through the steam I could see a face — a man’s face. Then a muffled voice said, “I’m frightfully sorry.” The door closed. It took me a few moments to realize that the man had been Stuart. Stepping out of the bath, I quickly toweled myself dry.
When I returned to the bedroom, Stuart was sitting in the armchair with a book open in his lap. He didn’t say anything when I came in. It was while I was brushing my hair that he said quietly, “I could have been anyone, you know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You forgot to lock the door.”
“I know … I didn’t think.”
“Of course, it doesn’t matter — seeing how it was me. But it might not have been me. That’s the point. You will be more careful in future, won’t you, darling?”
“I promise you it won’t happen again,” I said.
He smiled at me over the top of his spectacles, then returned to his book.
As we were on our way out of the hotel the next morning, the receptionist gave us a note from Charles Phillips. It said that he had gone to Cambridge and would not be back until sometime in the afternoon.
Stuart and I started where we had left off. He carried on making a map of the site, while I continued troweling and sieving in the southern corner of the burial chamber. The clouds soon parted and lifted. By the time Mrs. Pretty and Robert came out, the sun was shining more fiercely than it had done all summer. I wished I had packed a hat — my skin turns an off-puttingly dark shade of brown in the sun.
At eleven o’clock, Mrs. Pretty’s butler brought out a tray with two jugs of lemon barley water on it and some glasses. We all broke off and drank our fill. No one said very much. I know that I am apt to misread people’s moods, but it seemed to me to be an eager, expectant sort of silence. A sense of anticipation that everyone shared, but no one wished to acknowledge out loud.
When we had finished, I set to again. The crust of earth felt quite solid beneath my feet. Dust rose all round, caking my hands and stiffening my hair. Normally, there is something not simply absorbing about narrowing one’s focus to such a small area, but also soothing. Your world has shrunk to a few square inches of earth and nothing else matters. Nothing else can be allowed to matter.
Now, though, I found that my concentration had been affected. I wanted to blame it on the sunlight, while knowing perfectly well that it wasn’t the sunlight at all. My hands continued working away, but my mind did not feel connected to them. Instead, it kept wandering off on its own, always towards the same place. There was one image I couldn’t dislodge, no matter how hard I tried. It had been swimming around in my mind all night, looming before me whenever I tried to convince myself that I was on the verge of sleep.
All the time I saw Stuart’s face looking round the bathroom door. Except that now the steam had parted and I could see his expression quite clearly. Shocked, but not just shocked — something more than that. I told myself that I must be mistaken, that I was working myself into a state over nothing. Only this didn’t work either. The more I told myself, the less convincing it became.
Stuart is such a fine man: wise, kind and even-tempered. I feel so very lucky — so blessed — to have found him. It is an added blessing that we have shared interests to bind us together. This, I am convinced, is the key to an enduring relationship.
Yet I know that I must be doing something wrong. That I must be disappointing Stuart in some critical way. I cannot tell if it is my troublesome nature, or my appearance, or both. I so want to make myself attractive to him that it’s having quite the opposite effect. I am driving him away. But I have no idea how to make anything better, or who to turn to for advice.
As my hands kept on troweling, my eyes started to mist over. Angrily, I wiped the moisture away. It was only then that I saw what was lying in front of me. My first thought was that I must have dropped something. Or that someone else must have done. It looked so bright, so raw. So absurdly new.
I reached out and my fingers touched a small, hard object. At the same time I heard myself saying, “Oh,” in a faraway voice. Then I picked it up. Lying in the palm of my hand was a gold pyramid. It was flattened on top and decorated with what appeared to be tiny pieces of garnet and lapis lazuli. In the center of the flattened top was a square made up of even tinier blue and white chequered glass.
“Stuart,” I said, my voice sounding faint and scarcely my own.
He was sitting on the bank, drawing. I saw him lift up his head.
“What is it, darling?”
“Will you come here?”
When I put the pyramid in Stuart’s hand, I was struck by how much smaller it looked than it had done in mine. He stared at the pyramid for what felt like a long time before asking, “Where did you find this?”
I didn’t say anything; I just pointed down at the ground. When I did so, his face broke into a smile. It was such a big smile that it seemed to wrap itself around his face.
“You clever girl,” he said. Then he stepped forward and hugged me. “You clever, clever girl.”
I buried my forehead in his shoulder. I didn’t want him to see that I had been crying. Besides, I could hardly recall what I’d been making such a fuss about.
Then, in a much louder voice, he said, “May I have your attention, everyone? Peggy, my wife, has found something that I am sure will interest you.”
A quickening murmur ran round the site. Everyone strained forward, looking over the bank into the ship. We crossed to the ladder. I went up first. Mrs. Pretty and her son were waiting at the top.
“What is it?” Robert was yelling. “What have you found?”
“It appears to be a piece of jewelry,” I told him.
“Gold?”
“Oh, it’s gold, all right,” said Stuart, coming up behind me. “Gold with very intricate cloisonné work.”
Although I can’t imagine this meant a great deal to Robert, it did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm. As I handed the pyramid to Mrs. Pretty, he kept jumping up and down beside her.
“May I see, Mama? Please may I see?”
Rather than pass the pyramid to him, Mrs. Pretty held it out between her thumb and forefinger. He put his face very close to it, scrunching up his forehead and squinting at it from as many angles as possible. Afterwards, she let the men have a look — they had also gathered round and were showing a lively interest.
“You found this, did you, Mrs. Piggott?” Mrs. Pretty asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I believe so … I mean, yes, I did.”
At this, she grasped my hand, much more strongly and more warmly than I would have expected.
“Well done, my dear. Many congratulation
s. What a wonderful discovery.”
Part of me wanted to tell her that it had just been lying there. That all I had had to do was bend down and pick it up. But I said nothing. However ill-deserved all this praise may have been, I didn’t want it to go away. Not completely. My mouth was very dry. I kept hoping Mrs. Pretty’s butler would reappear with more barley water, but he never did.
While we were standing around in a dazed sort of way, Mr. Brown came over and asked if I wouldn’t mind telling him where I had found the pyramid.
“I can easily show you, if you like,” I said. “If you’d just come down the ladder.”
He glanced around before saying, “I’d better not, thank you.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll hold on to the bottom.”
“No, no,” he said, and gave a laugh. “It’s not that. Mr. Phillips has said he doesn’t want me going anywhere near the burial chamber.”
“Mr. Phillips? Why on earth would he say such a thing?”
“I don’t exactly know, although I dare say he has his reasons. Perhaps you could show me from here.”
I pointed down into the ship. “Just down there,” I told him. “See that greenish band there? Just to the left of it.”
After gazing at the spot for some time, he nodded, thanked me again and walked away. In the end, it was Stuart who suggested in a slightly embarrassed fashion that we should all go back to work.
When Phillips came back during the afternoon, he promptly flew into a rage at not having been there when the discovery was made. When shown the pyramid by Stuart, he glared at it, as if both stupefied and affronted by its presence.
“Ye gods,” he muttered.
“Peggy found it, CW,” Stuart told him.
Phillips didn’t react to this; he just kept on glaring at the pyramid. Soon afterwards the light turned an odd lemony color and rain began to fall. At first, it looked as if it would be no more than a shower, but then came several claps of thunder. These were followed by an extraordinary sight. A dark curtain was being drawn down the center of the estuary, wet on one side, dry on the other. It might have been moving on rails, brushing against the surface of the water.