Treasures of Time Read online

  The quartet ended. A further prayer, another offering from the choir, and the service was over. With a little outbreak of rustling and murmuring, the congregation prepared to leave. Laura’s female neighbour, she of the uncertain kneeling technique, put on her gloves and said, ‘Really very nice, just what Ashley would have liked, I’m sure.’ Laura smiled agreement. They moved sideways into the aisle, caught now in the general slow-moving exit. Laura found herself alongside her other neighbour. Propelled by the crowd, he accidentally jostled her. ‘Pardon,’ he said, and now she looked him full in the face. A rather jowly face, with unshaven look (constitutional, probably); swarthy (yes, certainly foreign); a tie that offended Laura’s fastidious eye.

  Something vaguely, distantly, disconcertingly reminiscent.

  And now he too was alerted. Puzzled. Confusion bloomed into recognition.

  ‘Lola!’

  ‘Laura,’ she said, thrown off her guard, ‘Laura Paxton. I’m sorry, I can’t quite…’

  ‘Laura – of course! Carlos. Carlos Fuego.’ He took her hand in his, in both his, she thought for an embarrassed moment he was going to kiss her. ‘So many years! So many, many years! And as beautiful as ever, Laura.’

  Larks singing, above Charlie’s Tump; a very pleasurable gush of something or other every time one set eyes on him; boredom, Hugh wrapped up in the dig, blind and deaf to anything else; brown Spanish eyes – admiring, proposing; twigs and bits of stone under one’s back; the thing oddly enhanced by panicky anticipation of discovery.

  Oh God, she thought. Him. She forced a smile. Made noises of surprise and pleasure. They moved together up the aisle. Gracious, Laura was thinking, how ever could one have… So overweight now, and looking years older than… well, than one does oneself. Yes, she said, at Danehurst still, with my sister, you remember my sister I expect. And he was saying the right, tactful things about Hugh, standing aside now, as they reached the door, to shepherd her solicitously through the crowd, through the porch, out into the sunlight. Had he always spoken such perfect English? He was very high up now in Spain, it would seem from what he said, had done well. His eyes were not suggestive and brown any more, but black and sharp. They were a little disconcerting, turned full on you.

  No, she found herself saying, no actually as it happens I’m not doing anything for lunch, what a nice idea…

  ‘Well,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘Here’s to a most agreeable reunion, Laura.’

  He had talked about his wife (rather pointedly, one felt), produced coloured photos of his children (something a bit vulgar about coloured snaps), asked after Kate. He had taken her to a very nice restaurant. He had talked entertainingly of this and that, plied her with wine, been a charming host. Of course there was no question of one feeling at all, well, at all attracted any more, but there was no denying he was pleasant company. Laura, graciously, mellowed.

  ‘I suppose you knew Ashley well, Carlos. I thought the service was awfully well done. More women than men there-odd. Why should Ashley have known more women than men?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think he did. It is merely that women have a longer expectation of life.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Laura. ‘How peculiar. Are you sure?’

  ‘Not peculiar at all, my dear Laura. A fact, that’s all. You are tougher.’ He grinned at her; there was a wink of gold tooth, rather too much gold tooth. What nonsense, Laura thought, I bet he’s just made that up on the spur of the moment.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t feel tough at all, personally.’

  ‘Nor do you look it. You are a very handsome woman, Laura.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Laura primly. She looked down at her plate; Carlos’s eyes were very penetrating, and they were at this point making undoubted reference, which she thought unfair. That wasn’t done.

  No one else ever had. But of course they had been English, the others. The three others; let’s not exaggerate. One had bumped into them, from time to time, over the years, and there had always been the most gentlemanly discretion. Not a word or glance capable of misinterpretation. Of course, one had always had very good taste in friends and in… well, in people one knew well.

  ‘You had excellent breasts,’ said Carlos. ‘Very English. Like apples.’

  Laura choked. She took a gulp of wine, hunted feverishly for her napkin and dabbed her lips.

  ‘One wanted to take a bite,’ Carlos went on. ‘Scr – r – runch. Like – what is that very good apple that is for Christmas time? Firm and juicy.’

  ‘Cox,’ said Laura. ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin, I expect you mean.’ She looked round nervously; his voice was much too loud. ‘It is a nice apple. We grow Laxtons rather more at Danehurst, and Worcesters, Cox’s don’t seem to like us, they…’

  ‘I’ve embarrassed you,’ said Carlos.

  ‘Well, I… No, not at all, Carlos, it’s just I…’ She drank some more wine.

  ‘Don’t you like to recall? It is good, as one gets older.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘It was sad for you, that summer at Charlie’s Tump.’

  ‘Sad?’ She stared at him, startled.

  ‘You weren’t happy, Laura. So beautiful, and not happy at all.’

  ‘I was perfectly happy,’ she said indignantly.

  Carlos shook his head. ‘You laughed and talked and all the time your eyes were looking out like a little girl that nobody loves.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘I am impertinent?’

  ‘No,’ said Laura. ‘Just wrong.’

  ‘Well, it was how it seemed to me. And I thought, such a pretty woman, somebody should do something. So I did.’ He patted her hand. ‘Very good memories, Laura. Tell me, how has it been for you, since that time – you have been happy, things have been good for you?’

  Laura withdrew her hand under the pretext of buttering a roll. She felt, now, not so much disconcerted at the turn the conversation had taken as offended at the implication of his remarks. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was very sweet of you to be so concerned about me, Carlos, but you really needn’t have bothered. Actually,’ she gave a little laugh, ‘I was a bit worried about you, I remember. I thought you were a bit out of things on the dig, being, well being the only person who wasn’t English, and all the others knowing each other so well.’

  ‘You tried to make me feel at home?’

  ‘Well,’ said Laura, evading his eye, ‘naturally one wanted to see that everyone was settling in, Hugh always left the domestic side of things very much to me.’ With irritation, she felt her face burn; really, this is getting worse and worse, I’m saying the stupidest things. ‘I can’t remember now where you all stayed – at the pub in Avebury, was it?’

  ‘I forget. I remember better those nice English apples.’ He patted her hand again. ‘Some more wine, Laura? No? Then I finish it. And the dig, of course, the dig that made your husband famous, one was proud to be associated. I had it in mind to come to Wiltshire while I am over on this trip, and see again, for nostalgia.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘And you must come to Danehurst, of course, if you do. The only thing is just this next week or two I’m awfully tied up with one thing and another. Some people are making a television film about Hugh.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I am inevitably a bit involved.’

  ‘Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This film. Sorry, that is perhaps not well put.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it’s very good English.’

  ‘Forgive me. I meant just, to make a film of the work of such a – such a strong person, and he himself is absent, is curious. Curious for those who remember him. Hollow.’

  ‘Perhaps a bit,’ said Laura. ‘Anyway, there it is.’

  ‘A brilliant man. Archaeology owes much. Myself, I remember principally a person always talking, always energetic, always busy, and behind it somehow melancholy. Complicated – how do you say? – complex.’

  ‘Melancholy
? Oh no, Hugh was always awfully easy going and cheerful. You’re quite wrong there, Carlos.’

  Carlos made a gesture of concession. ‘You know better than I, of course, much much better.’

  ‘Not melancholy at all,’ said Laura firmly. ‘A bit up and down, I suppose, but we’re all that, aren’t we? Gracious, look at the time – I’ll really have to be going, Carlos. Thank you so much for the most delicious lunch.’

  I sit in the drawing room and the rain rattles against the window like spears; it is only three o’clock in the afternoon, but almost as dark as evening. Hugh sits in the other chair. Nobody speaks. At last Hugh says, ‘Would you like us to separate? Is that what you would like?’ He looks tired, there are dark grooves under his eyes; but I am tired too, just as tired, I hardly slept a wink last night. I shake my head: that is not what I want, I have a sick feeling if I even think of that. I cannot be alone, he must not leave me alone, that I couldn’t endure. Hugh says, ‘All right. Not that then. We’ll go on as we are.’ He sighs, ‘I don’t know what you want, I wonder sometimes if you know yourself.’ He looks across the dark room at me, ‘Laura, have you ever loved anyone?’

  An exhausting day, she said to Nellie. Lovely flowers and singing, at the service. Lots of people asked after you. I got the material for the new cushion covers. Oh, and I ran into Carlos Fuego – do you remember him? – we had lunch. He’s very high up in the Madrid museum now, but dreadfully fat, I wouldn’t have known him at all.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Sure,’ said Tony. ‘Feel free. I’m hardly ever in, anyway. There’s a sofa in what’s laughingly called my study. The porter has a key. No trouble, Tom, no trouble at all – as long as you like. What? Oh come, you’ll patch it up in due course, surely. I’ll be seeing you, then.’

  Tony’s flat was full of carpet and glass-topped chrome-legged tables and small signs of affluence to which one was unaccustomed such as avocado stones in the sink tidy, full rather than empty bottles and lots of newspapers and periodicals. It was a place that invited parasitism and Tom settled in without compunction. In the evenings he watched Tony’s very large coloured television and thought about ringing Kate or went with Tony and friends of Tony’s to the pub round the corner and thought about ringing Kate. During the day he attended to Stukeley, ate Ploughman’s Lunches with B.M. cronies in Gower Street, and thought about ringing Kate.

  The year, as everything conspired to remind him, was rolling on. June, and before long it would be autumn which academically is a beginning and not an end. He turned, daily, to the Appointments page of The Times. He read that the University of East Anglia wanted a Lecturer in Social Change; the University of Warwick, an Assistant Lecturer in Business Studies; Bradford, a Fellow in Issues. No vacancies in History today; nor on many other days, come to that. On the other hand, looking at the opposite page, Tom noted that were he differently (and presumably less arduously and expensively) qualified he could earn £4,000 p. a. as P.A. /Sec to a dynamic Belgravia-based executive: rather more than East Anglia proposed for their Lecturer in Social Change. Or £3,800 as cheerful unflappable secretary to a young interior decorator with zooming West End business. And were he a computor programmer or a systems analyst the Saudi Arabian government would be interested in his services, to the tune of quite staggeringly large sums of money. Thoughtfully, he turned back to the Home News pages, where the oil tanker delivery men were striking for a twenty per cent increase on their basic minimum of £100 a week.

  In the available evidence on Stukeley’s career, there was very little reference to money: his income, his means of support, had to be deduced in more roundabout ways. If money preoccupied him at all, his diaries and notebooks gave no sign: he talked about his journeyings, about Druidical Temples and Celtic forts and ‘things antienter than the Romans’. No daily scouring of The Times for him; no interested observation of wage-settlements and breaches of the social contract. Things were simpler in those days, for a scholar and a gentleman.

  Even patronage is dead, thought Tom. Or at least not dead but buried behind the official bureaucratic anonymity of the Arts Council and the Social Science Research Council and the Department of Education and Science. I shall never address a letter, when I am older and more significant, to the Department of Education and Science pointing out that its favour has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it.

  At fourteen or so, I don’t remember ever thinking much about what I was going to do, or what I would like to do. At fifteen, I wanted to get better O-levels than Bob Taylor. At sixteen, it was becoming apparent that I was, to my own surprise and even more to that of my mum and dad, rather clever. At eighteen, it seemed to me that I stood quite a good chance of an Oxbridge place, and would have been somewhat put out to have to settle for anything else. At twenty-two, I had achieved a really very good degree, again to my own surprise, and mature and presumably rational men in advanced academic positions were suggesting post-graduate work. And I thought history was interesting and important.

  Thus are decisions made, or rather, not made. At any point along the line, had one of those things not happened, I would be somewhere quite different now, doing something quite other. All very random. Perhaps a critical path method would be better: a shrewd charting of possibilities and contingent moves: if I don’t get a first I will go into business/Oxfam administration/the Army; if I don’t get a job by October I will join the Civil Service/a Sunday newspaper/the BBC/shoot myself. If I ring Kate tonight and if she sounds at all welcoming I’ll go and see her, if on the other hand she is out, belligerent, recriminatory, not alone, I’ll…. If the librarian in the optimistically undersized sweater passes my desk within the next three minutes I’m allowed to pack it in a quarter of an hour early and have an extra drink this evening.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Kate. There was a pause. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Then I’m sorry too.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said hastily. ‘I’m just generally sorry.’

  ‘There are a couple of letters for you here.’

  ‘Ah. Perhaps I should look in and collect them.’

  He lay against Kate’s sleeping back and looked at Hugh Paxton’s photograph on the dressing-table, illuminated by a shaft from the street lamp. Back again, he said to it, as you see. If you are in a position to see; if by any awful chance I am wrong in my spiritual and relgious unbelief. I daresay you don’t much care for me; your wife certainly doesn’t. And yet, and yet… And yet she could do a lot worse, Kate. I mean well. I do love her. My shortcomings are fairly standard ones, I think. But she…

  But she is landed through no fault of her own with some fatal compulsion always to put herself in the least favourable light. Her own worst enemy is not an empty phrase. And I don’t know how fitted I am to cope with that. For ever.

  Kate, an hour or two later, lay with her hands linked behind her head. You’re snoring, she said to Tom, just very slightly, just enough to let me know you’re there; I can’t imagine why people complain about other people snoring, just at the moment it’s the nicest noise I’ve ever heard.

  I love you, she said. I know I’m difficult and cross and quite often people don’t like me, but I love you. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone.

  She looked at her father’s photograph. Even you, and that’s saying a great deal.

  Laura said, ‘Hello? Who’s that? Oh, I suppose it’s Tom.’

  ‘Yes. Kate’s not back yet, I’m afraid.’

  ‘The thing is, that if as I gathered from Kate you were coming down this weekend, the two of you, if you could get down by lunchtime, you could come with me to Standhill. John Barclay has very sweetly arranged to take me there.’

  ‘Standhill?’

  ‘Standhill is a terribly famous house,’ said Laura distantly. �
��By, um, by Inigo Thomas. I daresay you wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Ah.’ Tom considered the virtues of self-restraint, and rejected them. ‘I think perhaps you mean Inigo Jones.’

  There was a fractional pause. ‘Of course one isn’t normally allowed to see all the house but John knows the people – who are away – and the secretary is going to show us round. It is a marvellous chance to see the pictures before they go to America. You had better be here by half-past twelve, if you would like to come.’

  ‘The family are based in the Bahamas, of course, now,’ said John Barclay. ‘Tax.’

  ‘Sad for them,’ said Laura.

  ‘Henry Archer, who you will meet, runs the place, really awfully well, too.’

  Barclay drove. Laura sat beside him. Shreds of their conversation reached Tom and Kate, behind; which was just as well, Tom thought, the thing in its entirety, judging from the fragments you got, would have you in a state of apoplexy by the end of the drive. John Barclay wore a wide-brimmed black felt hat and dark glasses, which appeared to impede his driving.