Treasures of Time Read online

  By the time they reached the end of the track and left the car in a gateway, to walk the last quarter mile, the light had almost drained away. The landscape was a uniform grey-blue, spiced here and there in the valleys with the lights of a village; the hills lay in long dark curves against a sky that was barely lighter; to the west, an orange ball of a sun hung just above the black copse. The wind poured over the hilltop, making the trees creak; otherwise there was nothing to be heard except the crying of lambs. Tony Greenway said, ‘It’s a barrow, I take it?’ He stood, staring round, hunched into his anorak. Kate explained the dig and its significance. Tony nodded and listened and asked several quite perceptive questions. Tom climbed to the top of the hillock and stood there, looking out over the fields, the valley, the grey soft hills. The place seemed very old, almost uninhabited, and inexpressibly sad. Under his feet was the tumbled stone chamber in which people of impenetrable beliefs had buried their dead; down there in the valley lorries twinkled their way along the A4. This landscape had been exploited by countless people in countless different ways and yet its endurance was absolute: the same sun hangs above the same cleft in the hills; the same uncaring wind bites hands and face. And I know everything, and nothing, Tom thought; I stand here, full of learning, I could give you a pretty good run-down on the last two thousand years, and I know nothing, I am constantly amazed by the world, I am as surprised by life as whoever it was Hugh Paxton dug out of this barrow. I have cost the state several thousand pounds, my head is full of expensive information, and my judgement is probably no better than the last man’s or the one before. Of course, I have scepticism, and rationality, and unbelief, which I suppose is better than bigotry and superstition and credulity. I am not likely to kill anyone else, except under great provocation, neither am I likely to take violent exception to people not feeling the same way as I do about things, and I probably won’t trample on those less able to look after their own interests. All of which adds up to quite a lot, on reflection. But… but the fact remains that I stand here, knowing everything that I know about what has been, and I know very little about what is. I live in a mysterious world.

  Tony Greenway appeared beside him. ‘It’s rather a super place, I must say.’

  ‘Mmn.’

  ‘I’ll certainly want a sequence here. What I shall never get across, alas, is the atmosphere.’

  ‘You think it’s got an atmosphere?’

  ‘Oh, Lord, yes. I mean, one has this feeling of immense antiquity, of so much having happened up here.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Tom, ‘this isn’t Charlie’s Tump at all. Kate’s frightfully short-sighted, as you’ve probably noticed, and with the light being so bad she directed you up the wrong track. This is just what’s left of a gun emplacement from the last war.’

  There was a silence. Tom said, ‘Sorry, I’m pulling your leg, of course – I couldn’t resist it.’

  Tony laughed. ‘Point taken. All atmosphere is in the eye of the beholder. Romanticism.’

  ‘Quite. Which isn’t to say that I’m not all for it. I think we could do with more of it – projection of feelings. It’s not doing it that’s dangerous.’

  Tony said earnestly, ‘You know, I do so agree with you, Tom.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got you one location, anyway. It makes me think of Urn Burial, this place. “The treasures of time lie high, in Urnes, Coynes, and Monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables”.’

  ‘Hold it a minute. Say that again.’

  ‘ “The treasures of time lie high…” ’

  ‘I like it,’ said Tony. ‘We’ve got a title, too. The Treasures of Time. Great. What is it, did you say?’

  ‘Urn Burial. Browne.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What’s happened to Kate?’

  ‘She thought that lamb had got its head stuck through the fence – she went to investigate.’

  It was almost dark now, the definition of shapes – trees, hills, hedges – fading every minute. Tom, filled with sudden high spirits said, ‘Wait here a moment.’ He slithered down the side of the barrow, crept round to the clump of bushes at the far end, watched Kate groping her way back along the fence, leapt out and grabbed her by the waist as she passed.

  Kate’s shriek brought Tony scrambling down. ‘It’s all right,’ said Tom. ‘I was just testing Kate’s powers of imagination – they seem to be in good order.’

  Kate said, ‘You gave me the fright of my life, what on earth are you on about?’ but she slid her arm cosily through his.

  ‘I’ve just been lecturing Tony about the value of imagination.’

  ‘Imagination isn’t jumping when people behave like five-year olds.’

  ‘True, but it’s having some apprehension of the unknown.’

  ‘The unknown in other people,’ said Kate. ‘That being what my ma is so bad at,’ she added, more quietly. Tony, shuttered off by the twilight, stood a yard or two away, watching them politely.

  Tom said, ‘I’d say it’s more that she’s barely aware of other people. A bit un-nerving, really. But lack of imagination comes into it, certainly. Tony’s problem was with the landscape, though – does it have qualities of its own, or is it entirely what we think it is?’

  Tony said, a little peevishly, ‘You’re getting too philosophical for me. All this arose, if you remember, from how we get the best out of this place as a location. Was this where that drinking-cup was found, and a shield, or something?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Kate. ‘It was a burial with particularly fine grave goods – one of the best Wessex finds. It hadn’t been robbed earlier, like so many, and everything was pretty well intact. There were grooved daggers, and the gold cup, and a lot of other stuff, rather spectacular really. They did two seasons on it, and it fitted in with anti-invasionist theory, which Dad was always very much in favour of, even before radio-carbon, really, as a display of wealth by prosperous local chieftains.’

  ‘The original Wiltshire squirearchy?’ said Tony. ‘And it was after that your father got the Directorship of the Council for Prehistoric Studies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They came down from the hill in near-darkness, stumbling along a track become unreliable, full of stones and invisible holes. Kate clung to Tom’s arm; Tony, a yard or two behind, slithered on the mud once or twice and swore.

  ‘One thing,’ he said. ‘One can’t complain of being deskbound in this job. I’ll push off as soon as I’ve dropped you back and said my farewells – maybe we could meet up for a drink in London sometime?’

  Chapter Four

  There were things that were within one’s powers and things that were not. There were small, private triumphs when something else became possible, or nearly possible. When one discovered that, using the invaluable little tong-device that Kate had found, one could pull up one’s stockings unassisted. That, by careful manipulation of the wheelchair and a judicious prior arrangement of cushions and chairs, one could get in and out of bed on one’s own. But there mocked and challenged, daily, those unattainable goals – the bathroom shelf, the switch on the standard lamp in the drawing room, Hugh’s study.

  Clarity of speech.

  If one could devise some way of getting the chair down those two steps, the study would be within bounds. A ramp? A couple of boards, securely placed; that old door that used to be in the garden shed…

  And Laura, staring, says ‘Why, for goodness’ sake, Nellie? If there’s something you want out of the study I can get it for you, you’ve only got to say. Do some work? But darling that’s the last thing you should be doing, you have to take things very very quietly, there is no need to force yourself to do anything. What work, anyway?’

  Sort out Hugh’s papers. Always wanted to see if that unfinished work on pottery sequences could be made publishable. Catalogue his dig notes.

  And Laura says, ‘Well, darling, I do think it’s quite unnecessary, and actually I’ve been thinking anyway of sending all the papers to the Council, the study need
s a good clear-out. Do you,’ she goes on, ‘want anything from Marlborough this morning, I am going in to shop.’

  Laura has been in better spirits lately, better-tempered. She has these new friends, the Hamiltons, who have come to live in West Overton, a near-retirement Treasury official and his sleek ageless wife, very busy about the place, full of creditable enthusiasms and energies. Laura and Barbara Hamilton are wondering about opening up a little place to sell really nice lithographs and prints, Barbara knows a lot of people in the art world, she has an eye for that kind of thing. A percentage of the profits would go to the Nature Conservancy; the prints, though, will not be Peter Scott ducks, that was not thought amusing when one suggested it.

  Playing at shops.

  A long time ago, when we were children, we were given a toy shop. It had a wooden counter, and wooden shelves and drawers behind. There were tiny packets (empty) of tea and sugar, with proper writing – Lyons, Tate and Lyle – and packets of semolina and sultanas and candied peel and biscuits and little blue paper bags for rice and flour. And a real pair of scales. And pretend fruit, made of plaster: oranges and lemons and bananas. And cardboard money. And a pad of paper headed Toytown Stores to write bills on.

  Laura was nearly always the shopkeeper, because of being the youngest and because the shop was for some reason more hers than mine, though given to us jointly I think by an aunt. Laura was five or six, as pretty as a picture or so everyone said, her hair so fair as to be almost white, as it will be again one day, around a face that is not so very different, that is recognizably the Laura of today.

  She weighs and counts and arranges, and I buy and order and pay. We both love the shop, it is fantasy made manifest; perhaps Laura loves it slightly more, and I get irritated because I am so seldom the shopkeeper, and after a while I refuse to play any more.

  Later, when Laura is somewhere else, I play with the shop by myself. I arrange it with great care, to my liking, and I do very complicated sums, I present myself with bills and pay them and take real flour and sugar from the kitchen and weigh it and put it in the blue bags. I have a whale of a time.

  And suddenly there is Laura, standing over me. She is so enraged she is speechless, her face is quite scarlet, she looks as though she might explode. And she does: she flies not at me but at the shop; she hurls herself at it and the wooden counter splinters and the shelves and the drawers, the cardboard packets are squashed, the money sent flying in all directions, the imitation fruit pulped to white powder under her shoes.

  The shop is ruined. We stare in horror at the ruins. Laura tramps through it, tears streaming down her face, and says, ‘I didn’t want it anyway, it wasn’t real. I don’t care.’

  Nellie ate her breakfast alone in the kitchen, Laura having gone to Marlborough. She made tea, and toast, and achieved with the help of a walking stick handle the packet of cornflakes in the corner cupboard that had hitherto eluded her, and enjoyed that small triumph. She read The Times from front to back, sat thinking for a while about what she had read, trundled back to her room to fetch the handy bag in which she kept her immediate needs – books, notepad and pen – and then wheeled herself through the drawing room window and onto the terrace, it being a nice day.

  A lovely day, indeed. Ten o’clock, and the sun lying warmly on face and arms and hands, the birds clamorous, the garden crackling with spring growth. And, sitting there, abandoning for the moment the matter in hand of writing to an old colleague, she was filled with pleasure, all else for the moment driven out: time and fate and what might come. Pleasure in the senses, in what lay before her eyes, simply in being. She had always liked to be out of doors, had resented the incarceration of the winter, had been thankful for work that was carried on as much in the open air as out of it. So that, although in all her life there can hardly have been a day when she would not have been at work by ten o’clock in the morning, there had been many days when she had been, as now, outside.

  She would have worked, if she had been permitted, until there was nothing she could usefully do. Inactivity had always annoyed her. When, from time to time, she had had jobs that seemed to her inadequate in their requirements, she had found herself more to do. She had never had high aspirations – Directorships, Chairs, were not for her. She had taken what was offered, been out of a job quite often, given her services on many digs for nothing, worked on necessary projects for a pittance. The small capital sum left her by her parents had made this possible; that, and the lack of dependants. Laura, similarly endowed, had got through the lot long ago.

  Things are not so bad, she thought, there is worse, there is far worse. And she began once more to write to the old colleague, a cheerful, chatty letter, relating what was of interest or amusing, omitting much.

  Laura said, ‘We adored each other, of course.’ She had had two glasses of sherry; she felt confidential, and melancholy in a rather agreeable way. ‘I was awfully young when we were married, just a girl really, Hugh was quite a bit older than me.’

  Barbara Hamilton nodded understandingly. ‘I do so wish we’d known him. I just have that feeling we’d have got on so well.’

  Laura hesitated. ‘Well, yes. Of course, Hugh had that impatient streak to him, it came of being half Welsh. I must admit he could be rude to people.’

  Barbara said, ‘I think really clever men, really exceptional people, are allowed that, don’t you? They just are on a slightly different plane. We knew Willie Maugham rather well and one always felt that about him.’

  One slightly tiresome thing about Barbara was the way she would keep mentioning important or interesting people she knew or had known, who were often as, if not more, important and interesting than the people one knew or had known oneself. Laura said, ‘Mmn, I s’pose so.’ Barbara’s husband was probably going to be made a Sir before he retired, it was hinted. Laura finished her third sherry and went on, ‘Of course, being with someone like that all one’s life one comes to feel that it’s nothing unusual.’

  Barbara said, ‘And with him doing such a fascinating subject you must have been awfully tempted to get involved yourself.’

  ‘I always felt strongly,’ said Laura, ‘that he needed a background where he could be quite private, detach himself from work when he wanted to, get away from it all. I don’t think it would have helped at all for me to be involved too. Unfortunately, my sister rather… Hugh always felt it was a very good thing I wasn’t all that involved in archaeology, I mean, quite interested enough to know what was going on, but not immersed, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Oh, quite,’ said Barbara.

  He is being quite unreasonable, he is in one of his beastly Welsh tempers, I won’t stand for it, why should I? It is always what he is doing that has to come first, I am never thought of, I can be left at Danehurst for weeks on end while he is off somewhere.

  We shout at each other. I shout about being left on my own at Danehurst and about going always by myself to dinners and things that he says bore him. I shout about not having holidays abroad like other people. I shout about money.

  And he shouts back, horrid unfair things that I don’t want to remember. I can only hear his voice, with that hard angry edge to it, and see his face, looking at me as though I were someone he did not know. I feel sick to my stomach; it is like being afraid; is it that I am afraid?

  I do care about his work. I do take the trouble to find out what he is doing. I know I could have gone to Spain with him.

  All right, then, I shout, what did you ask me to marry you for, then? You should have married Nellie, if that’s the sort of wife you wanted.

  He turns his back on me and goes out of the room.

  I sit there and look at the shut door and I feel scared. And lonely. Perhaps I should not have said that. But it is true, and in any case…

  Presently the scared feeling goes away. In any case, I know why he married me, and why he did not marry Nellie, never would have done. And later, in bed, I will be able to make it all right again, like I always can
when I want to. Maybe in the end I will even be able to make him come to the Sadlers’ dinner with me.

  Tom said, ‘You were pretty short with Tony Greenway.’

  ‘I didn’t like him.’

  ‘That was apparent.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Kate, stricken, ‘do you think he realized?’

  ‘No. And if he did, I should imagine he’s a pretty resilient fellow. I didn’t think he was all that bad. He makes a change, anyway.’

  He was gripped with restlessness, clutched by it so that during the day he shuffled his papers, watched the clock, made frequent sorties for a smoke, a drink, a wander through the streets. In the evenings he dragged Kate, who would have preferred to stay in, to cinemas and pubs. He was doing the thing he wanted to do, in the place he found most stimulating, spent his time with the person he preferred, and he felt discontented. He heard his mother’s voice – ‘Never satisfied, that’s your trouble…’ When Tony Greenway rang one evening to suggest meeting for a drink, he accepted with enthusiasm; Kate said she thought she wouldn’t bother, if nobody minded. He left her in the flat, reading, a sullen-child expression on her face.

  Tony looked tired. There was strain behind the sprightliness of his greeting. After a few minutes’ chat he began to relax and said, ‘Sorry, it’s been a hideous day, I’m knackered. I’ll be O.K. after a drink. Anyway, I’m out of the studio tomorrow, I’ve got to take a trip up north, that’ll set me up again.’

  Later, dropping Tom back at the flat, he said suddenly ‘I suppose you wouldn’t like to join me on this jaunt tomorrow?’

  ‘Where is it you’re going?’

  ‘I’ve got to go and see this old dear up in Yorkshire. Someone we used on a programme. There’s been a bit of trouble about her fee – the contract people boobed somehow – and also she didn’t absolutely like the way we slanted her bit. It’s the sort of thing that could be done by letter, but can be smoothed out much more satisfactorily in a face-to-face situation. It won’t take too long. She lives near Fountains Abbey so you can have a look round that while I chat her up. And I’ve got one or two more chores to do while we’re up there.’