Treasures of Time

by Penelope Lively

  Bladon crawled with coaches. The driver, impervious to the inconvenience caused to pedestrians and other drivers, backed their vehicle into a narrow lane where it sat with its roof parallel to the upper windows of a row of stone cottages. Tom, looking out, found himself staring into the impassive face of an old lady sitting by her fireside in a murky interior. There was a dresser with coronation mugs and a fifties-type radio. He looked away again in embarrassment. The Japanese were filing out of the coach and heading for the churchyard.

  They gathered round the grave. ‘Is not very big,’ said one of the girls. Tom, sensitive to the past, felt suddenly awkward. But even the oldest person present had been no more than a child during the war; most of them had not been born. ‘You would think a bigger memorial,’ said Mr Tsuzuki. ‘Very famous Englishman. There is bad feelings now, yes?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Tom. ‘It’s nothing like that. I imagine this must have been what he wanted.’ The group, looking disappointed, began to drift away.

  Back in the coach, Tom addressed himself to explaining the significance of the landscape. This undertaking was prompted by an unwillingness that his charges should go away with a purely aesthetic impression of what they had seen: scenery, after all, is not interesting; landscape is. ‘What you have to realize,’ he said, doing his best to sound informative rather than instructive, ‘is that everything you see is quite artificial. This is a man-made country. Very intensively used for thousands of years. Now these small fields with hedges, for instance…’ Heads were turned politely in his direction as he outlined the processes of enclosure. The coy attempts by some of the girls to pronounce the names of villages through which they passed encouraged him to digress onto the subject of place-names. ‘Thames is interesting, because it’s not English. Most river-names aren’t. And in the north lots of names are Scandinavian.’ ‘Not English?’ said Mr Tsuzuki. With evident perplexity, he listened frowning to Tom’s account of Celts, Saxons and Vikings, while Tom declined the proffered large cigar.

  In Burford, Tom instructed the driver to drop them at the church and then find somewhere to park. He had already briefed the party about the Cotswold wool industry and continued on this theme as he led them into the churchyard. Mr Tsuzuki, relaying Tom’s information to stragglers who might have missed it, said, ‘Very prosperous place, many rich merchants, much money from trade.’ The audience looked at the surrounding cottages, the toppling grave-stones and the comfortably shaggy churchyard in evident disbelief. Tom stationed them in front of the porch and set about a short appreciation of English parish church architecture.

  ‘Christ! Tom!’

  He looked up. A ladder, which he had vaguely noticed, was propped against one of the nave windows, at the top of which someone – whose back had previously been turned – was repairing the stonework. This person, staring down, was now revealed as Martin Laker, deeply sunburnt, and with a chisel in one hand.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  The Japanese were all now, also, watching with interest. Martin came down the ladder and was introduced, with as much explanation to either side as Tom felt able to offer under the circumstances. The Japanese all shook hands with Martin in turn. ‘My friend,’ said Tom, ‘knows more about this kind of thing than I do – think he’d better take over for a bit.’ Martin conducted them round the church, proving a considerable hit, especially with the girls, his hairiness appearing to both fascinate and excite. When they came out into the porch again Mr Tsuzuki proposed that they should now go and have a cup of afternoon tea, and that Martin should join them as their guest. He clumped up Burford’s main street in the midst of the party, incongruous amid the pastel rain-coats (which had come out now, in response to a heavy shower) in his workman’s dungarees and heavy boots. The party almost completely filled the tea-shop, with Martin ensconced in the middle at Mr Tsuzuki’s table, tucking into paste sandwiches and small, pink iced cakes. In response to the beaming interest of Mr Tsuzuki’s girlfriend, he took various of his mason’s tools out of his pockets and described their use; other members of the group craned to hear, or rose from their seats to stand around him. Detectable in their interest, though, was an element of kindly patronage. Tom, who had planned at this point to give them a quick run-down of the sixteenth century and the dissolution of the monasteries prior to the drive back to Oxford, which would take in Minster Lovell, sat in silence.

  They parted from Martin outside the tea-shop, after more handshakes all round and a short photographic session. Martin entered into the spirit of this with great good humour, putting his arm round the girls’ shoulders and beaming broadly. Tom said, ‘Well, ’bye then, hope we didn’t interrupt your afternoon’s work too much. Love to Beth.’

  Martin grinned. ‘Not at all. Worth every minute. Sometime you must tell me just exactly how you got involved with all this.’ He clumped away down the street.

  When he had gone Mr Tsuzuki said, ‘A very charming person, your friend. You have known him long?’

  ‘We were students together, at Oxford.’

  There was a pause. Mr Tsuzuki looked perturbed. ‘Your friend is also university graduate?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  After a moment Mr Tsuzuki went on, ‘He is finding it difficult, then, to get employment? Suitable employment.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Tom. ‘Oh, I see… No, no. It’s not like that. He wants to do that kind of thing – stone-carving and metalwork and stuff. It’s purely a matter of choice.’

  They had been joined now by Mr Tsuzuki’s girlfriend and one of the other girls. Mr Tsuzuki broke into rapid Japanese, to which the girls responded with sounds of dismay and regret. Tom said again, ‘Really, it’s what he would choose to do. He’s just not the sort of person who would want an office job.’ His companions shook their heads sadly and one of the girls asked if his friend had perhaps had bad luck with his examinations.

  ‘No,’ said Tom. ‘As a matter of fact he got quite a good degree.’ There was no point in persisting with the struggle, he could see. He followed the group back into the coach.

  It now began to rain quite heavily. The coach splashed along the Windrush valley lanes, occasionally having to pause and shunt to and fro in order to manoeuvre tight corners, at which points the driver, who would have preferred the main road back, glanced balefully at Tom. The Japanese stared out at the dripping greenery. Tom indicated points of interest.

  At Minster Lovell, it had stopped raining, though clouds hung sullenly overhead; the ruins seemed suspended in a watery bowl of river, lush sodden growth and grey misty air. The group picked its way fastidiously over the wet grass. Tom gave a curtailed explanation of what they were seeing. One of the girls, who had evidently not taken in much, said, ‘Is all broken down. What a pity.’ ‘Well, yes,’ Tom said, ‘but it’s rather nice, all the same, isn’t it? Of course, we’ve been fond of ruins, in this country, ever since – oh, since the eighteenth century. I suppose it’s partly because we’ve got so many, we’ve had to make the best of them.’ He had intended this as a light-hearted remark, but nobody smiled. The party stood about in the grassy quadrangle formed by the shattered walls, and gazed up at the stonework and its cloak of ivy. Pigeons walked about cooing in the window openings; a pair of jackdaws tumbled around the bared remains of a fireplace, high above their heads. The noise of the river, a dozen yards away, was nicely answered by the rustle of a line of poplars. Hackneyed lines of verse came into Tom’s head. It occurred to him that there was no way, really, in which to explain the English response to places like this to anyone unfamiliar with it. Did you have eastern ruins? Well, yes, Indian ones, certainly. Kipling’s jungle city. But of course Kipling is anthropomorphizing in an English way. The city is Indian, but the response isn’t. The fact is, of course, that what you feel about what you see depends not on what it is, but who you are. A place is an illusion. Here we stand, these people and me, looking at quite different things.

  Mr Tsuzuki was glancing at his watch, in fact. ‘I am thinking, perhaps
…?’ ‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘Quite right.’ They trooped back to the coach and re-embarked.

  He parted from them eventually, at Paddington. Final photographs were taken, against the background of Platform I departure board. Addresses were exchanged; hands were shaken. The party left in a fleet of taxis, and Tom, by now genuinely sorry to leave them, made his way into the Underground.

  He felt disgruntled, both with himself and with the way the day had turned out. He hadn’t done at all well. He had bewildered rather than enlightened. Whether through accidents or circumstance or personal inadequacy he had managed to give an impression of a place in which the theatre was childish, the amusements quaint and irrelevant, the landscape baffling and the history incomprehensible. In which university graduates were obliged to repair churches and famous men were insufficiently honoured. In which, apparently, nothing is quite what it seems to be; whose architecture is either pretending to be what it is not, or in a state of disintegration.

  They would have done better, Tom thought, with a competent guidebook. And I should feel less frustrated at not having been able to do with any aptitude something which after all I never intended to do in the first place.

  And then, of course, there had been the matter of squaring things with Kate. Of accounting for what in the end amounted to an entire missing day, since she had expected him to phone her from the flat that morning, instead of which he had appeared just in time for dinner. And, on the face of it, a tale of twenty-five accidentally acquired Japanese sounded fairly implausible. She stood there with that expression of incredulity, and honestly he gave his account and could hope only that it might be received in the spirit in which it was given.

  Chapter Twelve

  Tony, with assistants and camera crew, had gone down to Wiltshire, where they were based at a pub in Marlborough. From here, he telephoned Tom and Kate at frequent intervals to complain about the weather, his own creative misgivings, and Laura. Laura, it seemed, had destroyed what Tony considered the period charm of the Danehurst garden by importing a firm of contractors to mow the lawn, cut the hedges and weed the beds. Also, she kept inviting the team to sherry parties to meet her friends. This, Tony said, depressed the camera crew who preferred beer and took up a lot of valuable time; she doesn’t seem to realize, he complained, that what we’re actually doing is working.

  ‘Naturally,’ said Kate, ‘what does he expect? Ma has always found people’s tendency to work a nuisance. It stops them doing other things that she might be wanting them to do. Let’s not go down this weekend.’

  ‘Oh, come on – it might be interesting. Anyway, you’ll get all hell from Laura if you don’t.’

  Kate groaned.

  Paul Summers, who was currently engaged on a dig somewhere in Yorkshire, had declined to make himself available for filming at Charlie’s Tump at any time other than a weekend, to Tony’s annoyance. The cost of this to the BBC, in overtime all round, would be considerable. However, it was impossible to sway such commitment to the job in hand, and Tony had had to settle for a major filming session on the Saturday, with possible extension to Sunday if the weather or other circumstances made this necessary. On the Friday, there was to be filming at Danehurst and round about.

  Laura telephoned, twice, to say that both Kate and Tom were expected by Friday evening at the latest. Help was required for various unspecified tasks.

  On Friday morning Kate announced suddenly that she had agreed to go into the museum on Saturday morning to help with the packing of some things that were being lent out for an exhibition.

  Tom said, ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I can. I am.’

  ‘Laura is going to say why can’t someone else do it.’

  ‘She can say.’

  What Laura in fact said was that in that case she would make do with Tom and Kate would have to follow on later. ‘I’ll pick you up at the station. You must learn to drive, Tom, it’s so odd – someone who doesn’t drive.’

  Kate said, ‘Just say you won’t. You don’t have to.’

  ‘Oh, I might as well. I can always get Tony to come and take me for a drink in the evening.’

  It had become hot. A summer of fitful weather had stabilized to produce a period of long sunny days culminating in still, balmy evenings. Wiltshire was as languid as some southern European pastoral scene, the trees sending long shadows down heat-sodden fields, cows clumped together with swishing tails.

  Laura, at the station, was wearing a flowered dress and straw hat; glimpsed first at a distance, on the other side of the car park, she was a girlish figure, so that for a moment Tom found himself looking at her with natural appreciation until he realized with a jolt who it was. She drove them back to Danehurst fast, saying they mustn’t waste a moment of the garden on such a heavenly evening.

  ‘I thought there was a job you wanted me to do.’

  ‘Oh, it can wait till later. There’s just some furniture I want moved before tomorrow.’

  She brought drinks out into the garden and sat down in a reclining chair on the terrace. ‘You do yours, Tom – you know how you like it. Sherry for me.’ She closed her eyes and leaned back. ‘Perfect. Summer at last. The sort of day that should go on for ever.’

  The garden, certainly, had been rather drastically tidied up. The lawn, neatly shaven, reached away to the clipped yew hedges; through the gap could be seen a section of the flower-garden beyond, a square of hazy blues and greens and golds, an impressionistic blur of colour. Nearer at hand, some plant with trailing ropes of periwinkle blue flowers smothered part of the terrace; Laura sat with her sandalled feet among them. The rose growing up that side of the house was covered with delicate, scented blooms. Yellow butterflies rose and dipped above the big border at the side of the lawn. Swallows chattered overhead. Down by the summerhouse a blackbird was thrashing a mangled worm against the grass.

  Laura’s cat appeared suddenly through the gap in the hedge, with something in its mouth. She slunk tigerishly towards them across the lawn to the terrace where she put down her burden, now revealed as a mouse, not by any means dead. After a minute she began to shunt its twitching body to and fro across the paving stones with one paw, purring loudly.

  Laura opened her eyes. ‘Oh, you bad Heloise. Another poor mouse.’ She watched for a moment or two and then closed her eyes again.

  Tom said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t really stand this.’ He got up, feeling slightly sick, and finished off the lacerated mouse, disposing of it at the back of the flower border. The cat looked on with manifest resentment. Laura said, ‘How brave of you, Tom. Of course, I never imagine they’re feeling much by that stage. Could you be very sweet and throw me over that cushion. Thanks.’ She tucked the cushion behind her head and stretched out more comfortably. ‘I tried to get Nellie to join us, but she’s been feeling a bit under the weather these last few days and she thought she’d stay in her room. Tell me, now, how did your interview go in that place?’

  ‘Oh, not too badly. But they appointed someone else.’

  There was a pause. Laura said, ‘Do help yourself to another drink.’ Then, ‘What will you do if you don’t get a job?’

  ‘That’s an interesting question.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t know Hugh when he was your age, I was so much younger than him… So I don’t know if it was at all like that, not that there’s really any kind of comparison. I read something in the paper the other day about it, obviously it’s not just you. What does happen to people who don’t get jobs?’

  It seemed a good idea to make the second drink quite a lot stronger than the first. ‘Oh, I should think they just fester away in private,’ said Tom, ‘trying not to be a nuisance to other people.’

  ‘Kate was quite lucky, I suppose. Though of course it’s different for a girl anyway.’

  The temptation to ask why was removed by Laura going suddenly into the house to check the dinner preparations. She was gone for some time and in her absence Tom put his feet up on a second chair and set to appreci
ation of what was indeed a particularly pleasant evening. The light had taken on a filmy quality, both muting colours and making the far seem nearer so that the downland hung at the end of the garden rich with detail: sheep, trees, the dark ring of a barrow. And the garden itself glowed and murmured and breathed out indefinable honeyed scents. It must be around midsummer, possibly midsummer night itself. And the sense of ripeness was having a slightly disturbing effect on the senses – though admittedly a couple of drinks might have played their part. Vague yearning feelings. Kate? But no – the feelings when examined a little did not seem to have anything much to do with Kate, which was disturbing in itself. Cherry? Well, just a bit, maybe, but only in a rather general sense. No, not really her either. Perhaps in fact they weren’t really to do with sex at all, or even love, though there seemed to be an eerie connection. Another drink would perhaps settle the stomach in some way.