Treasures of Time

by Penelope Lively

  ‘I’m going to Danehurst tomorrow, to start setting things up for the filming. They’re doing some helicopter shots. And I thought I’d try to have a chat with your aunt.’

  I don’t care for this at all, Nellie thought. Why? Hugh wouldn’t mind – indeed he’d be tickled pink, I suspect. And there is nothing wrong with this young man, really, a rather earnest person in fact, he means well. The glasses, of course, help to create an impression of responsibility. So why do I have this resistance to contributing so much as a shred to what is after all a perfectly respectable undertaking? Suppose someone were writing Hugh’s biography – would I feel the same? Is it a snobbishness about television? Do I think the camera will lie any more or less readily than the pen? Because both, of course, do that. Which perhaps is what accounts for this queasiness – the certainty that whatever is said will not be the truth, the whole truth or even part of the truth. And that one would not want it to be in any case, because recollection is a private matter and we all have the right to do our own distorting of the past. Collective distortion can be left to professionals.

  ‘Well, yes, if I can be of any help. Not technical things? That’s all I know anything about, really, the rest is just personal… A personal slant on the dig? Oh, I see. Dear, it’s so difficult to think of anything that might be of interest, let’s see…’

  What one sees, personally slanted on one elbow with backside on a particularly muddy bit of ground – very awkward but the only possible position – is a section of Wiltshire subsoil larded with stones. It is dark and perpetually damp there – we have all got slight rheumatism. Hugh squats at my back. From time to time his thigh brushes against mine and it means nothing at all, for which thanks be to God. I don’t feel anything, except someone’s thigh. I have come through, it is all quite all right now, for always. And nobody any the wiser, except for oneself, who has acquired a bit of insight into one of the more taxing areas of human emotion. I scrape and brush and Hugh scrapes and brushes and we chat away: Hugh thinks he has a chance of the London Directorship, if this dig is all it looks like being, if he can publish in time.

  Going outside one blinks – the light seems of Mediterranean intensity. I stand looking down into the Kennet Valley and thinking how odd it is that what happened here once to someone else determines what happens now, to us. Kate is playing on the grass. She has the little trowel I got her, the little trowel with the blue handle. She runs up with something she has dug up and gives it to me. For you, she says, I dug it for you, Aunt Nellie. It is a bit of bottle glass, smoothed and blunted by its years in the ground. I put it in my pocket. I still use it as a paper weight.

  ‘No,’ said Laura. ‘If she says no she means no. Talking to cameras wouldn’t be Nellie at all. Anyway she doesn’t much like television. Will this dress be all right – the colour? I have got a blue silk I rather wondered about. But don’t you want to sort of rehearse it? I mean, what I’m going to say? Well, I suppose so, if that’s what you feel – actually I think I’d probably get more relaxed, not less… Whatever you like. And where? In the garden. Well yes if you feel that would be nice, I’ll try and get Ted Lucas to do the grass, the only snag is if it’s windy one’s hair is going to get a bit blown about. I suppose you want me to just remember out loud?’

  Remember what?

  Remember going up to the dig on a hot afternoon because one had been on one’s own all day and was bored stiff. In that pink flowered sun-dress and a big straw hat and the French sandals. Wondering how they could bear it, stuck away inside those damp earthy trenches all day in the lovely weather.

  Thinking, I am thirty-six. Nearer forty than thirty. Nearer being old than being young. Not believing it; thinking, it can’t happen to me; knowing that it would. A sinking in one’s stomach. Walking up to Charlie’s Tump with a sinking in one’s stomach.

  The blue sky and the grass and little coppery butterflies and larks singing – none of it giving a damn about how I feel. Kate grubbing about with a trowel I’d let her have. Getting cross with her because she put her dirty hands on my skirt; trying to rub the stain out with a hanky.

  Tom, in a room furnished like an airport departure lounge, studied a notice-board on which the forthcoming visit of a distinguished scholar was advertised alongside the activities of a Consciousness-Raising Group and a lecture on Women and the Media. From time to time he glanced furtively at the other candidates, a worryingly astute-looking trio, exuding historical acumen and charm of personality. Stukeley, at this moment, was not being particularly supportive, either. In fact, he felt like a thoroughly nit-picking subject, a piece of academic washing-up, unproductive and self-contemplative. The others, undoubtedly, were engaged on airy generous public-spirited topics, capable of infinite expansion in discussion, matters of wide concern, seminal historic issues.

  He exchanged newspapers with a fellow candidate, and read an alternative view on what should be done about the car industry.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘No.’

  Kate said, ‘Oh.’ She read the letter and went on, ‘You don’t really mind, do you?’

  ‘Funnily enough I don’t. Rejection should be more dampening than this.’

  So far, after all, there had not been much of it in the career of Tom Rider. Progress had been fairly smooth. At Batts Road primary school reception class there had been a system for the encouragement of five-year olds whereby a satisfactory piece of work – sums or writing or whatever – had been rewarded by a small sticky-backed gold paper star which was pasted onto the relevant page of the exercise book. Tom, on his third day at school, had discovered the source of these stars in a drawer of the teacher’s table and appropriated a handful which he plastered over every page of his book. He could not remember, now, if this ploy had been rumbled, but if it had no one had been particularly cross. Now, evidently, the free flow of gold stars was coming to an end.

  On the way back to London in the train this had come suddenly to mind. And with it other blurred and fragmented scenes from school and childhood: some perhaps significant, others emphatically not. Once, slumped over a biro-scarred school copy of Pride and Prejudice, he had perceived suddenly the nature of wit; another time, he had sat with gathering resentment in a Religious Instruction class and recognized in himself the birth of intellectual scepticism. And he had had a fight in a seedy concrete playground with an odious boy whose face he could still see but whose name was long since lost, and come off best. And lured a girl called Sue into the long grass at the edge of the recreation ground and there made various investigations into the construction and inclinations of girls in general. And grown up and gone away and returned, in the fullness of time, to see with surprise that his native town was both smaller, dirtier and more familiar than he had thought, and that he himself was no longer so detectably of it. That he was a citizen of a larger country.

  He had thought about this in the train in conjunction with other and more confused thoughts about the general nature of countries, which had led on to idle reflections about nationality and the importance or unimportance thereof, and thence to the observation that he was almost the only native in the train compartment. He was surrounded by tourists: American, Japanese, German, French, indeterminate. This, of course, was explained by the fact that the train included both Oxford and the stop for Stratford in its route; it also endorsed the claims made by the British Tourist Board in today’s paper concerning doubled, or was it trebled, proceeds from tourism. Interesting also was the observation that all these visitors appeared, at least to his own not very practised eye, to be extremely rich: they wore what looked like pricey clothes and were slung about with expensive cameras and baggage. He felt a sudden community with the unobtrusive but inquisitive peasant bystanders in some pre-war snap of visitors to the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal.

  In the two seats opposite him, sharing his table, were an oriental couple who talked in what Tom guessed to be Japanese. Indeed, on inspection, the dozen or so neighbouring seats were all filled wi
th Japanese, presumably of the same party. They had boarded the train at the Stratford stop, having evidently spent the night there. After a while, Tom became aware of conspiratorial talk between his neighbours, and glances in his direction. A decision was reached and the man – in his early thirties, immaculately dressed – reached in a briefcase and produced a camera, which he handed to Tom, with the request that he take their photograph. The two – the girl also was thirtyish – put their heads closer together against the midnight blue background of Intercity’s upholstery, smiled with disarming confidence and Tom, after some initial alarm at the complexity of the camera, snapped them twice. There was much smiling and chatter amongst the rest of the party, more cameras – yet smaller and more intricate – were produced and Tom found himself in the position of staff photographer. Some of the girls were very pretty. He achieved great popularity; though it was unclear how much, if at all, anyone could speak English, except the man who had made the first request, who turned out to be the organizer of the. party and a competent linguist. They were members of a golf club, it appeared, on a European tour and presently enjoying the penultimate three days of their English week; today was set aside for Oxford, where they would see the city, after which a coach would take them to Blenheim Palace, the grave of Winston Churchill and something vaguer listed as The Beauty of the English Countryside. Tom inspected the proffered itinerary and made various suggestions. His own Oxford background emerged, and aroused much interest. He told them what would be most worth looking at, and how to find it. The conversation shifted to a delicate probing of Tom’s present situation; he told his new acquaintances about the problems of job-hunting (the girl, though unwilling to speak, evidently understood English perfectly well) and received beaming assurances of how certain he was to find himself successful. There was a pause while coffee was served – Tom, much embarrassed, had to allow his companions to pay for his – and the two Japanese began to talk energetically to each other in their own language. Tom reverted to his newspaper, but after a few minutes they were seeking his attention again.

  ‘We would be very pleased,’ the man was saying, ‘if you would accompany us during our trip today. As our guide.’

  ‘Well,’ Tom began, ‘it would be nice, but really I…’

  The man, as he spoke, had been rapidly writing on a page torn from a notebook. He now pushed this across the table. Tom found himself confronted by three words in neat black handwriting: sixty pounds sterling.

  He stared. Unless he was being completely crass, unless there was some enormous cultural misunderstanding, he was being offered sixty pounds to spend the day going round Oxford and a few other places with a bunch of rather nice Japanese. ‘No, really,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t, I mean I’d rather just…’

  They were both nodding and smiling now. ‘It is our pleasure,’ said the man.

  ‘Oh, all right, then,’ said Tom.

  ‘Flamingos,’ he explained, ‘instead of croquet mallets.’ The group stared, in polite but unresponsive silence. As well they might. To stumble across the dress rehearsal of an undergraduate production of Alice in a college garden was the sort of thing that would happen. He tried to steer his flock quickly past, thinking in irritation that of all bloody stupid ways for a collection of expensive twenty-year olds to spend an afternoon…

  ‘A dragon,’ said Mr Tsuzuki helpfully, pointing. ‘And a tortoise.’

  ‘Gryphon, actually. And mock turtle. Look, I thought if we went to Christ Church Cathedral now…’

  ‘It is symbolical?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom. ‘At least, well I suppose you could say… It’s a children’s book, in fact, a nineteenth century children’s book about a girl who goes down a rabbit-hole and meets a lot of fantastic creatures…’ – the group gathered round attentively; one of the girls said, ‘What is rabbit-hole, please?’—

  ‘… and has various adventures. A good deal of the point of it is linguistic, there’s a lot of play on words, it’s awfully difficult to explain… These people are supposed to be the Red King and the Red Queen, and then there’s the White Queen and – oh, and a walrus and a carpenter and so forth.’

  ‘It is making social comment?’ said Mr Tsuzuki. The rest of the group had their cameras out now and were clicking away assiduously.

  ‘No, no. Really it’s to do with chess – the game – and playing-cards.’

  ‘Games? English drama is not making social comment, then? In Germany we saw two plays of political significance.’

  ‘It’s not typical,’ said Tom, with some desperation. ‘They’re just students, and even as a student activity it wouldn’t be entirely… You know, I think if we’re going to stick to the itinerary we really ought to be getting on to Christ Church.’

  This was turning out to be not at all what he had bargained for. It sounded on the face of it like a piece of cake: you led a group of people, admittedly of alien culture but that should be neither here nor there, round a familiar landscape and tried to give them a simple but intelligible account of what they were seeing. You assumed that they knew little if anything about either the history or the culture and tried to explain briefly but illuminatingly. It was a job that any intelligent and moderately articulate person should be able to do.

  The trouble had begun at the Martyrs’ Memorial.

  ‘… for heresy,’ said Tom, ‘during the Reformation.’ He stopped. Too technical. ‘That is the point in the sixteenth century when the official religion of this country becomes Protestant instead of Catholic.’ There was a worrying totality of incomprehension in the faces around him; the difficulty was, of course, that one’s own ignorance of Japanese history was equally extensive. What was the religion, anyway? Shinto, was that right? And would there have been any parallel to the Reformation? Religious martyrdom, surely; everybody has religious martyrdom.

  He ploughed on. The group, rain-coated to a man and woman (sensibly, as it later turned out) skipped nimbly out of the way of the traffic and clustered round him on the pavement. Two or three of the girls took the opportunity to plunge into the near-by Ladies.

  In the Broad, it occurred to him that a short digression on architectural style would be appropriate. He stood them opposite Balliol and indicated the façade.

  ‘Very beautiful,’ said Mr Tsuzuki. The cameras came out.

  ‘Well, actually in fact nowadays most people don’t really feel that nineteenth century building is beautiful, exactly. Of course it has its supporters but taste has swung away really from that kind of thing, it’s thought rather heavy and graceless – what is more highly regarded now is seventeenth and eighteenth century style. Now if you look down the other end of the street you’ll see the Sheldonian, which is by Sir Christopher Wren, who is generally considered I suppose to be one of our very greatest architects, perhaps the greatest… That round building.’

  Mr Tsuzuki nodded. ‘Church,’ he said to his girlfriend.

  ‘No, not a church.’ Tom led them on, explaining. ‘And the heads are the heads of Roman Emperors.’

  One of the women had good English and was more talkative than the rest. She also had a disconcerting habit of making occasional notes on a small pad, which came out now as she asked, ‘This is concerned also with the religious troubles you were speaking of – the Roman Catholics?’

  ‘No. No, I’m afraid not. It’s the ancient Romans, from Italy. It’s a reference to our education being classically based at that point, Latin you see was the basic language for educated people, but then the Romans also invaded this country. In about 55 B.C…’

  Perhaps it doesn’t really matter, he thought. After all, they’re here for a day out, that’s all. The trouble is it matters to me, now.

  There was more architectural trouble in Magdalen. Mr Tsuzuki was dismissive. ‘Not beautiful. Heavy and not graceful.’

  ‘In fact,’ said Tom unhappily, ‘this would be generally thought of as rather attractive. I know it’s very like the sort of nineteenth century stuff we were talking about befo
re, but the point is that this is genuine, it actually is medieval so that makes it all right. I know on the face of it it sounds a bit perverse.’

  They had lunch at the Steak Bar off the Cornmarket and the ladies were allowed a foray into Marks and Spencer. The coach, previously ordered by Mr Tsuzuki, was waiting at Gloucester Green. ‘Blenheim, Churchill grave and a mystery tour, right?’ said the driver. Tom, who had been giving the matter further reflection, added his own amendment. ‘Burford and the Windrush valley? O.K. then, squire, whatever you suggest. Better get off, if they’re wanting the six-eighteen back to London.’

  His architectural comments had confused rather than enlightened, Tom realized. On the bridge at Blenheim the group studied the front of the house and then looked to him enquiringly. He said, ‘It’s well thought of.’ The cameras clicked and the talkative lady brought out her note-book again. Several of the girls wanted to be photographed holding his arm; he felt himself, uneasily, to be taking on the symbolic sexual role of an Austrian ski instructor. It was hard to know whether to consider oneself flattered or degraded. He conducted them slowly up the approach to the palace and gave them a brief run-down of how it had come to be built. ‘Reward for winning an important battle,’ said the note-book wielding lady, scribbling. ‘The English people are very militaristic, yes?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom. ‘At least not more than most.’

  They returned to the coach. The driver, sitting on the step with a copy of The Sun, said ‘Bampton morris dancers are in the square, I should think your party would like another ten minutes or so here for that.’

  ‘Well…’ Tom began, doubtfully, but his flock was already straggling off in the direction of the thumping and bell-rattling. Mr Tsuzuki was especially enthusiastic and produced a movie camera and tripod which he set up; Tom’s assistance was required in various small ways, to hold pieces of equipment and hand them over at the right moment. The camera was of such versatility and technical achievement that clearly you could have shot a full length feature film with it. Several other members of the group stood round, taking a proprietorial interest, indicating to Tom one or two finer points. He stood there, holding Mr Tsuzuki’s rain-coat and something to do with a filter or a light-meter, and the whole scene seemed both ludicrous and faintly depressing. Mr Tsuzuki, in his spruce well-cut drip-dry suit, pointed the camera at the morris dancers who capered about obligingly with their bells and sticks and hobby-horses, dressed like a cross between a pierrot and the Mad Hatter. The note-book lady said, ‘It is being done here all the time, this dancing, in many places?’ Tom, in mounting exasperation, glared at the dancers. ‘Frankly, I’ve never set eyes on them before, it’s all fairly ridiculous, you musn’t imagine this is anything at all typical.’ A bystander, some tweedy Woodstock native, chipped in with a little lecture about the ancestry of morris dancing, to which the note-book lady and Mr Tsuzuki listened with attention. Tom, sulkily, helped Mr Tsuzuki shift the tripod for one final, wide-angled shot. An acolyte of the dancers was now handing round copies of a leaflet listing and describing the dances done, their provenance and implications. It included also a short potted biography of each dancer. Three of them were employed by British Leyland at Cowley, a point noted by Mr Tsuzuki. ‘This is important centre of your car industry, right?’ Tom nodded. ‘Unfortunately a lot of problems with your car industry?’ ‘Hadn’t we better be getting on?’ said Tom. ‘It’s going on for three.’