by John Tagholm
Afterwards she lay like the woman in the excavation, her hands crossed over her chest, naked on the bed. ‘Did that just happen?’ she asked the ceiling.
‘I doubt if history will record that it did,’ he said.
‘That depends, of course.’
‘On what?’
‘Well, you didn’t ask if I was on the pill.’
He rolled over to face her but she continued to look straight above. ‘Do you mind?’
‘No.’
‘And are you?’
‘No. Do you mind?’
‘No.’
They bathed together and then he lay on the bed as she wandered around between the bedroom and the bathroom preparing to go out.
‘I have brought a dress in honour of the occasion,’ she said, holding up a crumpled ball which she opened out and slipped over her head before pulling on her jeans. She went into the bathroom and regarded herself in the mirror. The brown eyes that stared back were undoubtedly hers but what they saw was quite new, quite different. She called through to him that they would be eating at Joseph’s old restaurant and that they would stop by and see if he was at home first. He came up behind and joined her face in the mirror. They didn’t have to say anything.
It was as Beatrice had predicted. Joseph opened the door and she saw him take in the presence of Harry.
‘Ah, perfect,’ he said. ‘You’re the reason she’s been looking so ravishing. Come in, come in, I’ve just made a pissaladier. I must have known you were coming.’
‘This is Harry Wesley,’ she said and he ushered them in.
‘Well, he’s a very lucky man,’ he said without looking around. ‘You’ve kept him very quiet, Flotsam.’
‘Even from me,’ she said and she heard him laugh.
‘Took you by surprise, did he? What do you make of her, Harry?’ He was now opening a bottle of wine.
‘She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,’ he said.
‘So, Flotsam’s finally come to rest are we saying?’ handing him a glass of pink wine. ‘How’s she’s gone this long, I really don’t know.’
‘I feel the same way.’
‘Will you come to dinner with us, Joseph, at your old place?’ Beatrice said.
‘And come between you two? Is that wise?’
‘It is,’ said Harry.
Later, in the restaurant, Beatrice watched as Joseph unfurled for Harry the now familiar stories of his life and she saw them laugh, the restaurateur in his pomp.
‘This young woman,’ he said, ‘has rewritten a lot of the history you’ve just heard. Do you think she’ll do the same to you?’
‘She already has,’ Harry said.
‘So, if you’re not going to make a film about me, what are you going to do instead?’ Joseph said, turning to Beatrice.
‘I have an idea,’ she said, ‘but it’s still forming. But can I ask you something first? Were you serious about wanting me to direct “Winter in Provence”?’
‘My dear, nothing would give me greater pleasure. But I wouldn’t have to talk about my childhood, would I?’
‘Only your version.’ She sensed Harry looking at her.
‘But what makes you think,’ Joseph said, ‘that you can persuade your controller chappie, Graham Roth, to commission it?’
‘Oh, he will. It’s part of a trade, you see.’
‘My dear, how mysterious you are. Are you going to tell us what this trade is?’
Beatrice turned to Harry. ‘Not yet. I need to talk about it with my partner first, although I think he may already know.’
‘Never mind, I’ll send you my proposal for “Winter in Provence” anyway. I’m sure you’ll be able to improve it.’
They parted at the edge of the old port on stones worn smooth by the passage of history, the old man winding his way towards his home to leave them to walk along the quayside in search of a cab.
‘Did you know that it would turn out like this?’ she asked him.
‘Do you know, I think I did. It was just a question of getting your attention.’
‘Well, you have.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
The girl walks back into the sun, taking the right fork at the end of the path that will one day become Bishopsgate, where the roads still split in exactly the same way today, downwards towards the river. Along the way, near the point where, three hundred years later, Leadenhall Market would begin, she overhears that another attack from the Danes is close, so she changes direction to what, in time, will become Lombard Street. Beneath the fields to the north, where sheep now grazed, later called Moorgate, scores of passengers would one day be killed in a Tube accident. At the very spot where she stands on this golden day, a bomb will fall during the Second World War and kill an ambulance driver and two nurses. Just behind her, a century earlier, a footpad would murder a young woman for a halfpenny.
The girl passes by the ditches being dug to repel the invader and sees the recently unearthed golden dagger, lost in a fight by the previous invader. Further along, closer to her home, the flames from the great fire would, half a millennium later, be at their fiercest. She begins to run, her legs carrying her faster and faster, her arms outstretched so that soon she cannot feel the path underneath her. She is free, alive, the link between the past and the present and there is in her, on this bright autumn day, the feeling of eternity, that what she is, at this very moment, would last forever. She was complete and along this path, with her home just in front, she feels she can go on forever.
Wrapped in her own happiness, she does not see the woman waiting in the shadows of the old wall, her eyes narrow and cold and hidden. When she runs alongside the Walbrook, down the slope of the hill, her feet light on the banks, she does not see the woman shuffling after her, the one figure weighed down by life and poisoned by its disappointments, the other unburdened and seemingly weightless.
She reaches the edge of the water, where the tributary flows into the larger river and sees the mud it brought curl into a tick in the darker waters, instantly to be washed away. She does not feel the blow, aware but briefly of the huge darkness which follows. Like her grandfather before, she never knows this moment and her body is lifeless before it drops into the water, pulled into its cold embrace where it will be washed in and out with the tides, each motion reducing it further until only the bones remain.
The river is still alive, still breathes in and out and still, when it chooses, reveals its secrets, offering clues to the past, of lives come and gone.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
The train pulled out of Gare St-Charles and for the third time in two weeks she was speeding through the portal of bleached rocks that protect the northern reaches of the city. Only now it was different, of course and Beatrice considered the figure of Dr Harold Wesley sitting opposite, tapping away at his computer in response to the latest information about the excavation in Marseille.
‘You’re going to ask me something, I can tell,’ he said without looking up from his screen.
He was right and it was tiny details like this, his instinctive awareness of her, that she realised had been there from the start, although she had been painfully slow in recognising it. Last night, after they had left Joseph, when they lay in bed and his hand rested on her stomach, he had said something which remained with her now, so obvious but, as is the case with many truths, unseen until they are spoken.
‘I’ve noticed,’ he said, after she’d admitted to a series of unsuccessful relationships, ‘that you expect the worst, as if you’ve decided beforehand that things will go wrong. Perhaps you chose men who merely confirmed your expectations. If what you tell me about your mother is true, you’re used to being criticised, or ignored and so, despite your success, this is what you feel about yourself.’
She had lain awake thinking about this and could see that it was true and that she had found herself with men who did just that, confirmed the criticism she expected, apparently content that they showed no interest in her beyo
nd the sexual. ‘Is that why I ignored you to begin with?’
‘Probably. Either that, or you didn’t fancy me.’
‘I couldn’t see you. I wasn’t looking.’
‘That’s what I’d hoped.’
The train sped on through the morning and he continued to tap away at his keys.
‘I was wondering what might have happened to Flotsam,’ she said.
‘We can’t really tell. She may have fallen, or been bashed from behind by a blunt object. Who knows? She might have been hit by a horse, or a Viking, or killed by the broken mast of a ship.’
‘So we can make up what finally took place, you mean?’
‘Up to a point. History is a bit treacherous. It’s like the currents in a river, hidden, shifting, dangerous and often contradictory. Sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on the truth.’
‘In answer to your original question, I was thinking about last night,’ she said, ‘and tomorrow morning.’
‘And what’s happening then?’
‘I want you to meet my boss.’
‘Is this part of your mysterious trade?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve fixed a meeting for eleven. Could you get away?’
‘And you’re not going to tell me until then?’
‘I will if you want.’
‘No, like before, I’m prepared to wait.’
That night he stayed with her in Spitalfields and they made love within seconds of arriving at the apartment. Later she noticed that on the empty shelf opposite the bed he had placed a print of the ring that had been found in Marseille, the first of an accumulation of objects she knew would fill that space and, she thought with some certainty, would remain.
The next day they walked across to the offices of The Digital Corporation, which occupied two floors of an anonymous block just off Kingsway. Along the way they swapped more information about themselves, gradually unpacking their backgrounds, piecing together their histories, the beginnings of an exchange that would never be quite complete. She was greeted by several of her colleagues, who regarded Harry Wesley with undisguised interest.
‘Trust me,’ she said, just before they were ushered through to Graham Roth’s over-large office. He was sitting on the edge of his desk, in front of a wall covered with commendations, award certificates and photographs of him with the great and good, finishing a telephone call. He waved them in and rang off.
‘You sort of disappeared,’ he said to her.
‘I sort of did, didn’t I. Let me introduced you to Harry Wesley.’ The two men shook hands and Beatrice smiled as she saw Roth’s eyes assessing Harry, trying to work out exactly where he fitted into the scheme of things, a predatory male on guard in case he was in the presence of superior opposition. ‘Harry is an osteoarchaeologist, about which more later.’
Graham Roth raised his eyebrows in mock admiration. ‘So, what do you have for me?’
She slid across a two page proposal that she had reworked that morning from the information that Joseph had emailed.
‘“Winter in Provence”?’ But this is not too different from what I wanted in the first place.’
‘True. Joseph doesn’t want me to make a documentary about his life and I respect that, although I do know that what I have subsequently learnt about him will be reflected, one way or the other, in these programmes.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as fleeing to Provence as a young man and starting his first restaurant in Marseille. He talks wonderfully about those days. And you’ll be pleased to know that he’s got the tourist board on his side.’
She watched him scan the proposal again, but she knew that its acceptance was a formality, that the deal with the publishers he had mentioned weeks ago, allied to support from the French, would see it through.
‘Fine, then. When do you want the production period to start?’
‘But there’s something else, another film. I want to make a deal with you.’ Graham Roth looked at her quizzically as if to say I’m the one the makes the deals and not you. ‘I’ll trade “Winter in Provence” for your backing for a very different sort of documentary. Let me paint a picture for you.’
Both men were watching her and Beatrice stood up and walked over to the window, where she could see the traffic negotiating the semi-circle of Aldwych.
‘Its about the unexpected death of a child. A real child. And a real mystery. Perhaps even a murder.’ Without looking round she knew that she had Graham Roth’s attention. ‘And it’s about three generations of the same family, the child who died, her mother and her grandmother.’
She came towards them, her head turned to one side, her eyes focusing elsewhere. ‘The story begins with the discovery of a child’s skull on the foreshore of the Thames, a dirty fragment of a human being, eyeless and without a lower jaw.’ She walked behind them as she spoke. ‘The film cuts between the past and the present for the skull, it turns out, thanks to the work of osteoarchaeologist Dr Harry Wesley, is a thousand years old. It holds some of the clues to what happened to her. Was she murdered, or did she die accidentally?
‘The skull is real, the child was real, but her history is lost, like the histories of so many people. So, on one level, this is a film about the elusiveness of history. It will be presented by Harry, who is one of the world’s leading archaeologist and he will take us through the clues that the skull offers and the techniques involved in dating and examining bones and teeth and the evidence they give about geography and diet.’
She saw Harry smile at her, a smile she reflected before a new seriousness took over her face.
‘But I want the film to be about much more. You see,’ she took a step closer to them, ‘I want to give these three Anglo-Saxon women a story, which may or may not be completely true on one level, the factual, but will be on another, the emotional. I imagine a woman, an important woman, who makes jewellery and her daughter and granddaughter and what happens to them. The grandmother begins her life not far from here, down there on the river,’ she pointed to the window, ‘where she lives before moving down river, to where the City is now. Her husband is killed by the Danes when London Bridge is attacked. His body is lost and for all we know his bones are not five hundred metres from where we are now sitting. Later the woman meets a sailor, who commissions a necklace from her and persuades her to leave with him and her daughter for a new life far away and they sail to the port that will become Marseille. There is evidence, from examination of remaining teeth in the skull, that for a while she lived somewhere else, probably in the south where the weather and the food were better. There she continues to make jewellery and her daughter learns as well, the skills handed down from one to the other.’
Beatrice looks across to Harry before continuing and she could see the smile was still on his face.
‘She dies here of the plague and is buried in a communal grave on the hill above the old town.’ She saw Harry watching her, willing her on, hearing the story of fact and fiction being woven together. ‘The daughter in turn marries and has her own child and when her husband dies at sea she returns to London, the place where she was born. Before she leaves she makes two identical rings. One she leaves above the body of her mother at the plague pit, the other she always wears. Somewhere, somehow it is lost but a thousand years later it is discovered and now everyone can see it in the British Museum. And to make the story complete, the companion ring has just been found in Marseille, along with the bones of a woman.’
Harry flicked through to the photograph and pushed the phone across to Graham Roth.
Beatrice came away from the window and walked back to the table. ‘As I have said, her daughter is killed, deliberately or accidentally, we don’t know. But she was real, as were her mother and grandmother. They existed and I, with the help of Harry, will give them life. It’s about three generations of strong women and the support they give each other.’ Beatrice stopped and closed her eyes, raising her head towards the chrome lamp which hung from the ceiling.
Beatrice stopped and looked at both men. ‘But she’s forgotten. And it’s too easy to be forgotten. We’ll bring her to life.’
‘Brilliant,’ Harry said.
Roth looked disapprovingly at him. ‘Sounds more like a drama than a documentary,’ he said.
‘It did happen,’ she said. ‘In one form or another, it did happen. And we have to put flesh on those bones, on that skull. The assumptions we make will be based on the best facts that we have. We can save this girl from obscurity.’ She stared at Harry as she said this.
‘Do you have a title?’ Graham Roth asked and again Beatrice knew that she had his approval for the film, if not his understanding of its real purpose.
‘I do,’ she said. ‘It’s “A Girl Called Flotsam”.’
Beatrice could sense Harry looking at her and shaking his head. ‘How long have you been thinking about this?’ The question, which had it come from Graham Roth might have been laden with criticism, was instead said with an element of awe. She looked at him and in that moment Graham Roth didn’t exist, his views, one way or the other, entirely irrelevant.