Elegy for a Queen

by Margaret James

  ‘But we’re not hiding anything. Why should Gordon Clark think he needs moles?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’ve had a lot of dealings with developers. They’re a shifty bunch.’ Janet stood up and stretched. ‘Well, team, we have a bit of cash in hand, so we can hire equipment when we need it, and now we have all these willing workers, too. It’s never going to last, but bugger it – let’s all go to the pub.’

  * * * *

  Indeed, it didn’t last. David Linton finally put his foot down, and said Susannah had been away from the library long enough. She was his assistant, after all. The following Monday morning, he’d expect her at her desk.

  Janet called him a bastard. Susannah calmed her down, and then asked David if she could spend one more week at the excavation.

  ‘Why?’ he demanded, shortly. ‘You surely must have learned the basic theory by now. You’ve had a lot of practical experience. Susannah, they’re not going to find much more this side of Christmas, and soon the weather will be too bad for digging, anyway.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘Trent Weston will bounce back,’ continued David. ‘There was something about the company in the Telegraph this morning – they’re definitely recovering. By spring, that field will all be under concrete.’

  ‘I’ll say I’ll just be over at weekends, then,’ said Susannah.

  ‘You can’t work all the time!’ David looked exasperated. ‘Oh, very well,’ he muttered. ‘Go and play in the mud on Tuesday mornings. If we’re not too busy, you can skive off Thursdays, too.’

  ‘Thanks, David,’ grinned Susannah. ‘You’re a good egg, you know that?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ said David. He scowled at Janet. ‘I just don’t want this hoyden coming round here to carry on at me. I only have to think about her and I feel a migraine coming on.’

  * * * *

  Susannah wanted to keep busy, because it stopped her thinking. She spent most evenings in the library, working on the millennium project, or she joined the diggers in the pub, where she drank more Parker’s Special than was good for her, and had to keep running to the loo all night.

  She was determined not to think of Gavin, but her subconscious didn’t get the message. So when she couldn’t help it, she told herself that he was just a womanising airhead, who had barely scraped a bad degree.

  He was too thick to get any sort of interesting job, so he’d had to go and work – God help us – in a tractor factory. He had no sort of cultural life at all – he didn’t know a sonnet from a jar of raspberry jam.

  So even if he did decide he fancied her, and even if she was so desperate that she considered going out with him, she couldn’t because her friends would laugh like drains.

  ‘How are the mighty fallen,’ they would smirk. ‘Strange, we never knew you fancied him. God, Susannah, aren’t we slumming it?’

  She could hear them now. She realised she would never live it down if she went out with Gavin. So his fate was sealed.

  But then she had a nice, long letter from a college friend, in which Gavin had a starring part.

  ‘As for Gavin Hunter,’ wrote Serena, ‘as for God’s gift to the female sex – and doesn’t he just know it – you’ll never guess who he’s been going around with, so I’ll tell you.

  ‘Only Gina Sullivan! Only the French Department’s femme fatale and mega-brain supreme! Laura says it’ll never last, she reckons Gina’s far too classy for the likes of him. But when we saw them at a club last week, they were eating one another alive. My God, it was embarrassing! Gavin isn’t very bright, but he does have nice shoulders, don’t you think?

  ‘So anyway, how are things in Marbury? I thought you’d be coming down here most weekends, but nobody has seen you, so I presume you’ve found yourself some gorgeous Gabriel Oak – or is it Oake? The guy in Far from the Madding Crowd – from whom you can’t bear to tear yourself away. But come and see us soon. This new flat in Leytonstone’s quite big, so we can give you (and any friend) a proper bed. We’ll go to that new club, or maybe see a film or two – how does that sound to you?’

  It sounds bloody awful, thought Susannah, who suddenly felt sick. The thought of going clubbing with Serena and the others, of walking into Gavin and his bloody femme fatale, made her want to howl.

  How dared Serena say that he was thick! She hadn’t got a well-paid job in industry, she probably couldn’t add two and two together, but Gavin had beaten off loads of people with maths and science degrees.

  She screwed Serena’s letter into a ball. She lobbed it at the bin, missed by a metre, and then burst into tears.

  Chapter 12

  ‘I’ll probably go abroad in spring,’ said Janet, as they sat in the Lamb after another freezing day at the Wellesley dig. ‘In this month’s Archaeologist, there’s a thing about an excavation in Benin. They’re looking for some ancient civilisation in the Yorubesi Gorge, but they’ve got problems.’

  ‘Yeah, they have,’ grinned Mike. ‘I know the guy in charge, he’s raving mad.’

  ‘But the deputy director’s just gone down with yellow fever,’ continued Janet. ‘He’s going to be invalided home, and so they’ll need – ‘

  ‘You don’t want his job, do you?’ asked Susannah.

  ‘Why not?’ Janet shrugged. ‘I’ve worked for lunatics before, and I can handle psychos. At least it’s warm in Africa. A person can get sick of the all this bloody wind and rain.’

  ‘But what about the dig at Little Wellesley? I thought your field was Roman Britain, too?’

  ‘My field is anywhere I can get a job.’ Janet sighed and shook her golden head. ‘The dig at Wellesley won’t go on for ever. What I need is a sponsor, someone very old and rich and stupid.

  ‘Anyway, I meant to tell you guys – I rang the editor of the local newspaper today. He’s sending a reporter to talk to us next week. Come on, Suke, drink up. What’s wrong with you tonight?

  ‘Nothing,’ lied Susannah. ‘I’m just tired.’

  * * * *

  ‘So listen,’ said Janet, as she addressed her workforce, ‘smile, look keen, and answer their stupid questions as politely as you can. Remember to keep telling them we’re desperate for cash. We’re okay for now, but if Sir Alec pulls the plug, we’ll all be up shit creek.’

  The reporter came at lunch time, just as everyone was about to go to the Green Man, and he had a grumpy, bored photographer in tow.

  ‘What have you found so far?’ he asked, looking at the not especially photogenic wall.

  ‘A Roman building that was probably a temple,’ Janet told him, fixing her hard, blue glare on the other diggers, daring anyone to contradict her, or slope off to pub.

  ‘You found any coins, then? Any rings and stuff?’

  Janet pushed her hand into the pocket of her jeans, and produced a couple of Roman coins from the museum in Marbury. ‘This is the kind of thing we’re hoping to discover,’ she told the reporter, sweetly. ‘I’m sure we’re going to be finding something very similar soon.’

  ‘They won’t make a decent picture, love.’ Glowering like a discontented tortoise, the photographer shivered inside his padded nylon anorak. ‘What about you, darling?’ he enquired, as he turned to Susannah. ‘You a digger, too? Or just the girl who boils the kettle and makes the place look pretty?’

  ‘This is Susannah Miller. She’s our expert on Anglo-Saxon England. She works in the Abbot’s Library, at Marbury Minster.’ Janet watched the reporter write that down. ‘Just now, she’s getting experience in the field.’

  The snapper smirked sarcastically.

  ‘Okay then, Don – shall we have a picture of the team?’ The reporter stuffed his notebook in his pocket, then looked around the site. ‘Over there looks good.’

  He rounded up the diggers. ‘We’ll have girls in the front,’ he said, ‘so take your hats off, ladies, fluff your hair up. Let’s have nice big smiles!’

  The snapper clicked away. ‘We’re desperate for helpers,’ Janet said, as the reporter
shivered in the wind. ‘We’re sure there’s something special here. Why don’t you write this down?’

  The reporter started scribbling again.

  ‘This whole area’s going to be developed,’ said Susannah. ‘So whatever’s down there will soon be buried under tons of concrete. If your readers care about their heritage, they should come to Little Wellesley, and see what’s going on.’

  ‘We need their help, you see,’ said Anna. ‘We need it now. Next week, next month, it will be much too late.’

  ‘Well done, you guys,’ said Janet, as they watched the two men drive away.

  * * * *

  The aftershocks from the earthquake of Black Monday still rocked the City, and Gavin could see things were going badly for Fraser Redman. Called in to see his boss, he was expecting to be sacked, but instead was told the firm would be restructuring, and he’d be spending the next few weeks at one of the company’s factories in the Midlands.

  He rang Susannah and said that since he wouldn’t be a million miles away, he could come over and see her now and then – if that would be okay?

  ‘Yes, that would be nice,’ Susannah said politely, wondering how Gina Sullivan fitted into this latest scheme of things. ‘But we’re very busy at the moment, so I don’t have much free time.’

  She stared down at a letter to a long-dead bishop that she’d been working on that morning. Does Wulfric mean my family to starve? Must we go bare-footed and arse-naked? Suddenly, she imagined Gavin naked. She felt the blood surge up her neck and flood her burning cheeks.

  Pull yourself together, she thought, and don’t be such a fool. If she didn’t see him, she decided, if she didn’t speak to him, if she was out or busy when he called, she would get the better of this absurd infatuation.

  Why had she ever borrowed that ridiculous little rust heap? Why didn’t he come and drive the wretched thing away? Then she need never see or speak to him again. The next time Gavin rang, she decided, David could talk to him – and if he came into the library, she’d go upstairs and hide.

  But Gavin didn’t ring. The days went by, turned into weeks, but he didn’t come to Marbury, as she had half expected.

  Instead of being relieved, however, she was so offended and upset that she snapped at Janet and was curt with Mike and Anna, although she didn’t know why.

  At the excavation, she forgot to fill in records. She hacked away in Janet’s carefully-sited, neatly-excavated test pits as if she was trying to trowel to Australia, disregarding evidence and destroying contexts one by one. Or she crouched there, doing nothing, staring into space.

  ‘What’s got into Suke these days?’ asked Anna, as she watched Susannah climb a ladder, spilling most of the spoil in her bucket, then throwing the bucket itself into a ditch.

  ‘Time of the month,’ grinned Mike, and tapped his nose. ‘I know the signs. You’re a bitch when you’ve got PMT.’

  ‘I reckon she’s in love with whatsisname.’ Janet shook her head. ‘She’s got it bad, but she thinks that if she lets him know it, he’ll be off into the sunset.’

  ‘I dunno why women think that,’ said Mike. ‘If Susannah had the hots for me, I’d give her one.’

  ‘Oh, get back in your pit,’ said Anna, kicking him.

  * * * *

  Gavin eventually turned up in Marbury one dull, rainy evening, just as Janet dropped Susannah off in the Cathedral Close.

  ‘Look, standing by that shiny new Fiesta, isn’t it whatsisface,’ said Janet, grinning. ‘You’re in for a busy night.’

  Susannah blushed. Getting out of Janet’s dirty van, she trudged towards the gleaming new saloon. Yet another company car, she thought, he must be doing well.

  Gavin grinned. ‘Jesus, what a sight,’ he said. ‘You look like one of the Bisto Kids.’

  ‘I know.’ Susannah was only too aware of her dirty jeans, her mud-caked boots, her filthy hands. ‘I must go and have a bath,’ she muttered.

  ‘You do that, then I’ll take you for a curry.’

  ‘I’ll be an least an hour.’

  ‘I’ll go and get a paper, read a book. Or I’ll listen to the radio.’ Gavin opened the door of the Fiesta. ‘No hurry, take your time.’

  ‘You can wait in the masters’ common room, if you like,’ Susannah said, ungraciously.

  ‘Okay.’ Gavin locked the car. ‘But as I said, don’t rush.’

  Susannah had a scalding bath. She washed her dirty hair, then tried on everything she owned. But she didn’t look right in anything.

  ‘Oh, to hell with it!’ She slammed her wardrobe door. She picked her old black jeans up off the floor and pulled them on, she threw a plain green top over her head, and then ran down the stairs.

  She realised she’d forgotten to put on make-up, and her hair was damp and full of tangles. But what did it matter? Who would notice? Who would care?

  Thinking – hoping – praying they might meet Mike and Anna, she took Gavin to an Italian restaurant she knew Anna liked, in a shabby, run-down part of town.

  Gavin ate a basket of bread rolls and wolfed down his spaghetti. But although she was starving, and her stomach rumbled like Vesuvius, Susannah found she could hardly eat a thing.

  ‘You don’t seem very hungry,’ murmured Gavin, looking at her plate.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she said, and poked a pasta spiral, ‘I just want to go to bed.’

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Gavin. ‘I’ll take you home.’

  They walked in silence through the bleached-out, neon-lit city streets. ‘I’d really like some coffee,’ he told her, as they reached the Close, as she braced herself to hear him say he had to go.

  ‘Oh – fine,’ she said, astonished. ‘Come in, I’ll make you some.’

  * * * *

  ‘Sit down,’ she said, and went off down the landing.

  Gavin sat on Susannah’s bed and looked around the room. Clothes and books lay everywhere, but there were no pink candles, silly ornaments or fluffy toys – none of the rubbish with which most girls cluttered up their rooms.

  Susannah brought in two mugs of coffee. She sat down on the window seat and gazed across the city. ‘It’s very cramped up here,’ she said. ‘But there’s a lovely view.’

  Gavin walked to the window and stared into the rainy darkness. The moon was just a sliver, and all the spires and steeples of the city were mere shadows, dark grey ghosts. He looked down at Susannah, saw her face was drawn and pale. ‘What’s the matter, Suze?’ he asked her, softly.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I – I’m just tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Yeah, you work too hard, you always did.’ Gavin hunkered down beside her, noticing she wasn’t wearing make-up, that she hadn’t even brushed her hair. She looked washed out, exhausted. ‘I’ll be off,’ he said. ‘You get some sleep.’

  Susannah spun round and glared at him. ‘I can’t sleep!’ she cried. ‘Oh, God – you don’t know what it’s like, you don’t have dreams like mine, night after night!’

  ‘Susie, it’s all right, don’t get upset.’

  Gavin had meant to pat her shoulder, but instead he stroked her soft, dark hair. Then, meeting no resistance, he curled a strand around one finger and drew her close to him.

  But as he was about to kiss her, she burst into tears. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she gulped, hiding her face and sobbing like a child.

  ‘What is it, love?’ he whispered.

  ‘It – it’s nothing,’ wept Susannah. ‘It’s just that I – Gavin, I’m so alone!’

  So Gavin put his arms around her, hugged her as he’d have hugged his little sister. ‘You haven’t any brothers or sisters, then?’

  ‘N-no, I’m an only child. My parents were as well, and so I don’t have cousins. I’ve a great aunt in Macclesfield or somewhere, b-but she must be a hundred and I don’t know her at all.’

  ‘Poor Susie.’ Gavin thought she looked about thirteen tonight, and he felt like a child molester. ‘What can I do to help?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, there’s nothi
ng anyone can do. I’m all right now.’ Susannah looked down at her hands, but then glanced up and forced a smile. ‘It’s not all bad, you know. You’ll think I’m really wicked to say this – but when they died, it freed me, in a weird kind of way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If my Dad was still alive, he’d be annoyed to see me messing around at the excavation and working in the library. He’d be going on at me to get a proper job, and Mum would be nagging me about my hair, and stuff like that.’

  Susannah shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘I was their little princess, that’s what they always called me. They expected such great things of me. We didn’t have much in common. But I miss them so!’

  ‘Poor Susie,’ Gavin said. ‘But listen, you don’t have to be alone. If you need a friend, you call on me.’

  ‘I – thank you, Gavin.’ Susannah wriggled out of his embrace and, suddenly brisk and cheerful, she dashed the last few tears from her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added, ‘crying all over you like that. I mean, your shirt’s all damp.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Gavin stood up. ‘I must go,’ he said, ‘I have to be at work by six tomorrow. But I’ll ring you soon.’

  * * * *

  Susannah watched him drive away. She did feel better now, but wasn’t sure why.

  ‘They expect great things of me.’

  ‘What?’ Susannah spun round to see who’d spoken. But there was no one there. She was imagining things again. She ought go to bed.

  Part 2

  Aelwyn

  Chapter 13

  Susannah sat in the back of Janet’s van, reading the Independent. Britain was up shit creek, as Mike would say. It had been spending far more than it earned. Now, it was payback time.

  Why hadn’t anyone seen it coming? Why had almost everyone, including her own father, been so wildly over-confident? Why had Robert Miller borrowed, mortgaged, borrowed yet again? Why hadn’t he foreseen his downfall?