Treasures of Time

by Penelope Lively

  They climbed steeply, up a path creamy with thin chalk mud, leaving the road and the village behind, climbing into the wind, away from voices and cars, climbing it seemed upwards and backwards into a quieter older place, where sarsens lay undisturbed like grey islands on the turf and sheep turned bland, enquiring faces as they passed. The wind was sharper up here; it plastered their hair to their heads and fringed Kate’s ears with pink. She stumped up the path a yard or two ahead, like a tough little pony. Tom saw the green dome of the barrow on the skyline and called out, ‘Why Charlie’s Tump?’ and she shouted back, ‘Oh, it’s just the local name – some nonsense about Charles I. There’s a good view from the top. That’s Windmill Hill, over there, and East Kennet the other side of the valley.’

  He stood on top of the barrow and the green flanks of downland swooped around him in a circle, windy and ancient, swept by moving bands of sunlight that lit now this section and now that, in a shaft of green and gold and rich light brown. Marvellous, he thought, I’m in the wrong racket, that’s my trouble, I should have gone in for archaeology, a nice outdoor life instead of all this unhealthy bookwork. He turned, and saw Kate standing below him, staring towards a skinny copse at the edge of the field, a scatter of trees around a dip, furred over with the bright green of new leaves, and shouted, ‘Come and tell me about this dig – what happened?’

  I am digging, like Aunt Nellie and Daddy and Tony and Brenda and the one with the funny name. This is my dig, all my own, nobody else can dig here. This is my button that I have dug, and my bone and my bit of sharp black stuff and my bottle top.

  There is hot sun on my back; if I poke this spider with a bit of grass it runs into a hole and watches me, inside; when I press my eyes with my fingers I can see red circles, then blue ones, then purple ones.

  I can hear Daddy and Aunt Nellie talking. Daddy talks to Aunt Nellie in a special voice, it is not like the voice he talks to other people in.

  It is not like the voice he talks to Mummy in.

  I like Aunt Nellie. I like Daddy.

  If I creep, like this, through the long grass at the edge of the field no one knows I am there, not even the sheep. I wriggle on my tummy and I can go quite fast, like a worm, and already I am at the end of the field and they do not know I have gone, I can’t hear their voices any more, they can’t see me.

  There is someone in the trees, in there. Voices, whispering.

  It’s Mummy. Mummy with someone. If I go on creeping I can go through the bushes and jump on Mummy, make her laugh, make her see me, make her say ‘Kate!’ and hold her arms out.

  I must be very quiet. There are things prickling me.

  I can nearly see them now. It is that man, the one with the funny name, who talks a funny way. The one Mummy likes.

  Now I can see them.

  What are they doing? Why are they down there? Why is he doing that to Mummy?

  Chapter Two

  Laura said, ‘Gracious! She dragged you all the way up there – you must be exhausted. I haven’t been there for years, there are some photos of that dig in the old albums, somewhere. I must get them out and show you – it was after he published that dig that Hugh got the Directorship, of course.’ She went to rummage in the drawer of a tallboy.

  They had had dinner. They sat now, all of them, by the fire in the drawing room; Kate read The Times, Nellie a book on the Tradescants, Laura talked. Tom’s cheeks burned still with the wind; he looked across at Kate, scowling over Bernard Levin, and thought regretfully: silly girl, what got into her this afternoon, you’d have thought it was perversity of some kind I was suggesting.

  I like this place, he had said, it’s got something. And it’s made me feel extremely randy all of a sudden. Come on.

  And she stared at him in horror and said, in there! in the copse! don’t be silly, Tom, you are joking, aren’t you?

  I’m not joking at all, he’d said. I want to make love. Now. In there.

  Somebody might come, she argued in panic. And he said nobody’s going to come, at the worst, you might sting your bum on a nettle, and that’s a small price to pay, at least it ought to be. I wouldn’t mind, he had added crossly, but never mind, if you don’t want to.

  I’m sorry, she had said, anguished, I’m sorry, Tom – but I couldn’t, honestly, I really couldn’t. Not out here.

  ‘There,’ said Laura, dumping an album on the table. ‘This is the one. No, it isn’t – this is our wedding, and just before. Never mind, have a look, Tom – they’re rather amusing. And here’s Kate as a baby, at the end.’

  Kate as a baby has a strong suggestion of Kate now, which is beguiling. And here is Hugh Paxton, youngish, sitting in a deck chair reading a book in the garden of this house. And here is Laura, rather posed, on a beach somewhere, with what one has to concede is a very nice figure. And here…

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, shifting his chair to make room for Nellie at the table. ‘Can you see all right? Is this you? No, it’s Mrs Paxton, isn’t it, Laura I mean.’

  The photograph shows two people, standing side by side in front of – yes, in front of this house. The man has his head turned aside a little, as though perhaps evading the camera, he seems unwillingly there, in some way; the woman, on the other hand, smiles straight ahead and holds her skirt down against the wind, she looks confident and happy. There is a third person involved (naturally enough): the shadow of the taker, head and shoulders, protrudes in the right foreground of the picture.

  Nellie’s hand, now, her good hand, lies on the page to stop it flipping over.

  They come towards me, walking side by side. There is a wind and it blows Hugh’s hair upwards from his face, an inverted fringe. I start to say, ‘Sorry to be so late, there was a…’, and she slips her arm through his, through his crooked elbow, and calls out ‘You’re just in time, Mary’s coming over for lunch, and the Sadlers, it’s a celebration, Nellie, we’ve got something to tell you, we’re going to get married, Nellie.’

  He says nothing. They have stopped. He looks wooden, standing there beside her. He is wearing grey flannel trousers and a blazer. The trousers are baggy at the knee. I say nothing.

  Laura said, ‘Hugh and me. When can that be? Oh, I remember – you took it, Nellie. That old box Brownie you had. Not long after the war.’

  Nellie gets out of the car; she is all blown about, she must have driven with the hood down, she looks a mess. Hugh’s arm is round me; we walk together towards her; I say to him, ‘Darling, you tell her.’ I kiss her and say, ‘You’re just in time, it’s a celebration, Nellie, Hugh’s got something to tell you.’ Hugh says, ‘Well, Nellie, there’s going to be a wedding, we want you to know first of all.’

  I am wearing my New Look dress – long, long. I feel it brush my calves when I move. It has a petticoat that rustles.

  Nellie says, ‘I’m not entirely surprised. Congratulations. That’s marvellous.’ She takes her suitcase out of the car. She says, ‘You’ll have to learn how to get your hands dirty now, Laura.’ She goes into the house; there are creases all across the back of her skirt.

  ‘But it’s that dig I was after, the Charlie’s Tump dig. Ah, it’s in this one. Goodness – who are all these people? There’s me, and Hugh, and you, Nellie. And Kate, of course, in a dear little sunsuit or something, it must have been hot. And that’s Brenda Carstairs, I think. But who on earth…’

  Nellie’s fumbling speech distorts words; it is hard to catch, sometimes, just what she has said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Laura, ‘Carlos. Of course. Carlos Fuego – yes, he was there wasn’t he, that summer. Don’t bang the coffee cups down like that, Kate darling, you’ll break them and they’re the good ones. You’re off to bed, are you? Use my bathroom, darling, and Tom can have the spare one to himself.’

  Tom, waking in a strange room, experienced a fleeting moment of confusion and spiritual detachment. He lay in a void that had no certainties beyond the body, his body, between sheets that were unnaturally crisp and clean; he groped for time and pla
ce, for why and when, and heard the voice of his future mother-in-law outside the door. Facts flooded in, and with them a fond reaction to that good smell of coffee coming from somewhere, and a lingering sense of deprivation: Kate had been tiresomely standoffish last night. ‘Honestly,’ she had said, ‘honestly you can’t, not here, I really am sorry, I mean it’s just as bad for me.’ She had stood outside her bedroom door, in striped schoolgirl pyjamas dredged up from some forgotten drawer. ‘Why not?’ ‘The bed squeaks, and Ma’s next door.’ ‘Oh, for goodness sake, Kate!’ He had stumped off in discomfort to a solitary night.

  Now he contemplated, in the morning light, the room, with its slightly bleak, stripped-for-action look of all guest rooms: flower prints on the wall, one or two second-best ornaments. His own parents did not have a guest room; Kate, last month, had slept in what was still, when he came home from college, his brother Kevin’s room, with school photos pinned above the bed and football banners and old shoes tumbling from the cupboard. She had been perfectly happy. She had settled herself in like a dog turning round and round in an agreeable chair, eating greedily, in instant accord with his parents, avidly watching the television all evening. He had taken her to the pub, where she had hinted she would really rather get back. ‘I thought you must be bored.’

  ‘I haven’t ever actually seen a colour telly before,’ she had said. He had capitulated to the yearning in her face and taken her home again.

  His mother had thought her a nice girl, no nonsense about her. His father had patted her on the arm at parting, indicating approval. Kate, on the way back to London, had said it’s good there, let’s go there often. How do you mean, good? he asked, and she replied, vaguely, oh, I don’t know, just you feel anybody could overhear anything anyone else said and it wouldn’t matter. Or thought, even.

  He had felt obscurely flattered, and looked at his family with new eyes.

  The thought of the eventual confrontation of his parents and Laura Paxton was so bizarre that he dismissed the whole thing and got out of bed, wondering if there would be Sunday papers and, more importantly, if the village rose to a pub: another lunch-time on those cut-glass thimbles of sherry would not do at all.

  Nellie, negotiating the awkward turn in the passage outside her room, met him coming down the stairs, caught in his eye that flicker of embarrassment tempered with slight panic that she met in most eyes now and said, ‘No help needed, thank you – Kate is already down, I think.’ She trundled beside him to the kitchen and pushed from her, as she did half a dozen times a day, the remembrance of meeting people when you did not present, however well-meaning and sensitive the people might be, an instant problem. Tom held the kitchen door open for her and Laura, at the stove, turned and said, ‘Oh Nellie dear, you are naughty, I keep telling you to stay put in the mornings, Kate would have brought you a tray. Egg and bacon, Tom?’

  He said to Kate, later, ‘I must say I can’t see your mother trowelling away in the dirt – did she?’

  ‘Not really. Well, she used to label sherds and that kind of thing, if the weather was nice, I can’t ever remember her actually digging. Mostly she didn’t come on digs. Aunt Nellie did, of course, unless she was busy with one of her own.’

  He said in surprise, ‘I hadn’t realized she was an archaeologist herself, your aunt.’

  ‘Oh yes. She worked with Dad way back, when he was starting out. That’s how he met Ma – through Aunt Nellie.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And then all the time Dad was with the Council, after the war, she was at the Ministry of Works – but she still came on his digs sometimes. Like Charlie’s Tump. But mostly she was off somewhere doing things for the Ministry.’

  Ah. She looked different, Nellie Peters, with her past filled in like this. It enlarged and clarified. Tom thought with discomfort that he had been speaking to her in the wrong way, given that she was a person, who, like oneself… and then, with chagrin, that it was deplorable in the first place to adopt a particular tone according to whether you knew a person to be, like oneself, educated and informed, or not… And would Nellie Peters, educated and informed, observe and ponder upon his (instinctively) altered tone when next he addressed her?

  He should, of course, have cottoned on earlier, during that business about the votive figure or whatever it was.

  ‘You’ve sold it!’ Kate had said, staring at her mother across the breakfast table.

  ‘To a museum, darling. Nothing for you to be so disapproving about.’

  ‘What, Aunt Nellie?’

  ‘Nellie is saying,’ Laura said with a sigh, ‘that we had a little difference of opinion about it. The point is that new curtains were desperately needed for the drawing room – which you haven’t even noticed I daresay – and frankly the only thing to do was to sell something. And this house is crammed with bits and pieces that really no one ever looks at, of enormous interest I know but Hugh gave all his best stuff to the B.M. or the county museum years ago and sentimental value is another matter and frankly again I’m not sure that’s something I can afford. And John Barclay has said that little goddess thing must be worth a lot and there it was just sitting there…’

  ‘Gathering dust?’

  ‘Well, no actually, since it was in the glass-fronted case. But sitting there, and the drawing room crying out for new curtains…’

  ‘Positively weeping.’

  Laura got up. ‘I think you’re being just a tiny bit rude, Kate, if I may say so. And the fact remains that the things are mine to do what I like with, so please don’t sit there with “And what would Daddy have said?” written all over your face, because the truth is I’m sure Hugh would have seen my point entirely and if he’d been just a mite more efficient about money, poor darling, this wouldn’t be necessary.’ She went out of the room, turning at the door to say, ‘If anyone felt like getting on with the washing-up, that would be simply lovely.’

  Kate started to slam dishes into the sink with dangerous fervour. Tom said to Nellie, ‘What exactly was the thing that was sold?’

  ‘It was a small votive object – chalk, a female fertility…’ and then her treacherous speech had failed her and her voice had trailed off and in the pause he had said informatively, ‘Oh yes – neolithic, I expect, like that thing from Grime’s Graves in Norfolk, there are those flint-mines there, you know, where they found that curious little chalk figure in one of the shafts.’

  It was surprising she had nodded with such tolerance. He sweated now at the recollection and decided that Kate’s assertions of her aunt’s niceness were quite correct.

  The house was full of bits and pieces, it was true. He had wandered round, that morning, examining the monochrome detritus of prehistory – the uniformly beige display of pots and bowls and weapons – and had thought that it was perhaps this unrewarding front that had got the subject into trouble from the start. Laura had clearly had her way with the drawing room: there, shelves and cases held only the cheerful delicacy of some good eighteenth and nineteenth century china, and one or two pieces of modern pottery. But elsewhere Hugh Paxton’s collections of pots in a state of collapse, of pots resurrected, of flints and axes and spears, of gangrenous metal pins and brooches, of bones and funerary urns, dominated the house. Just throwouts, really, Laura had said, the best stuff went to the museums, of course. And yes, indeed, it was like the random loot of some nineteenth century clerical antiquarian – a studyful of ‘things of interest’ unrelated to time and place. Or those mysterious objects passed from hand to hand by a panel of archaeologists in that old television game that he remembered as a child – chunks of pot or metal held up for assessment and definition.

  And that, of course, he thought, is the basic problem – what, in the end, can you do with a subject that depends entirely on the survival of material objects? No wonder it’s kept going off the rails, ever since the Saxons supposed the Roman towns were built by giants. Giants, gods, druids… A vehicle for every kind of expedient theory, the most malleable aspect of the past
, prehistory. And the most treacherous. They get it all nicely sorted out into a chronological sequence, at last – the three ages – and then along come all sorts of disconcerting cultural overlaps that won’t fit in, and cultural parallels in the eastern Mediterranean or wherever, and they have to work out a new explanation – the invasionist theory. And then someone dreams up radio-carbon dating and blows everything sky high – Stonehenge far older than Mycenae, northern megalithic tombs earlier than any other stone buildings, and everybody has to take a deep breath and start all over again. How do you feel – when it becomes irrefutably clear that your life’s work has been based on a misapprehension? That you had been assembling the jigsaw puzzle all wrong and had better break it up and start again?

  Not absolutely, of course. All that carefully collected evidence would still do – the product of all those wet or hot or windy weeks at Windmill Hill or Durrington Walls or Charlie’s Tump or wherever. It was the interpretation of it that must be chucked out. Though at least for good rational scientific reasons – not abandoned as a sop to religious mania, like poor old Stukeley and his druids, no parallel there. All the same, though, one might be able to fit an elegant little note into the thesis somewhere about the inconsistency of prehistory as a subject all along the line…

  Assuming, of course, that one got as far as actually writing it, and didn’t just atrophy in a library first, turned to stone by apprehension and insidious doubt and guilty boredom, another petrified bust to join Voltaire and Dr Johnson and Plato – though less confident than they about the satisfactions of the life of the mind.

  Tom thought of his friend Bob Taylor, his old friend-through-school-and-university, his colleague and rival from Sixth Form Prize to Finals, his mate and competitor, who would be starting his new job just about now.