A Novel Page 4

‘Of course it matters,’ Hugh says, and there is a faint edge now in his voice. ‘I know today was important to you.’

  ‘To us, Hugh. Important to us.’ She immediately regrets this pious statement, but the damage has been done; now Hugh is the one to remove his hand.

  ‘You’re making it hard for me to apologise,’ he says. ‘Is there something else you’re not telling me?’

  ‘My father’s not well. I’m a little worried about him, that’s all.’ Feeling a sudden overpowering sense of sadness, Julia gets up too quickly, catches her knee painfully on the leg of the table. ‘We’ll talk later, OK?’

  Upstairs, she locks the door of the bathroom, sets the hot water running. Sitting on the edge of the bath, she takes out Hugh’s paper bag. Inside, wrapped in many layers of tissue paper, is a finely wrought wooden figurine: a young woman reclining beneath a tree with a book in her lap, the details meticulously rendered in a vigorous realist style. The artist has etched a title along the spine of the book, Welsh Dictionary, and the open page bears the definition of a single word, cariad, love. It is a whimsical but also a beautiful gift for Julia, and it is this image of Hugh, searching the gift shops in Rhayader for just the right thing to buy, that finally brings the tears rolling down her face.

  A Magical Thing

  WHETHER BY DESIGN, or merely through the accretions of the years, the cramped, cluttered, earth-toned, vaguely musty offices of the Oxfordshire County Archaeology Service seem perfectly attuned to the psychic comfort of their occupants. In his corner of the second-floor labyrinth, Donald is hedged in on one side by a wall of shelves stacked with several decades’ worth of surveys and site reports, all organised into their proper strata. Perpendicular to this is a row of antique wooden filing cabinets of unknown provenance. The window behind him offers a view across a diverse landscape of rooftops dating from all centuries between the sixteenth and the twentieth, and beyond to a half-built housing estate whose farther edge adjoins a series of ancient tree-lined fields ploughed dark brown for the autumn planting.

  A familiar, comforting sound from the direction of the kitchen advertises the approach of Betsy, the tea-lady, pushing her trolley stacked with rattling pots and urns. ‘The usual for you, my love?’ she says, in her rhetorical way, handing him his St. John’s College mug already filled with tea just this side of stewed. ‘There you are, my dear.’ With this, she proceeds amiably to the next stop on her early-morning round.

  Donald takes a sip of the bitter brew, puts the mug down and paces over to the window. The world outside seems grey and damp and beaten down, the trees disturbed by a ragged gusting wind, the last gasp of the overnight storm. He stands there for a while in a disconnected sort of way, watching the lapwings wheeling over the distant fields; then goes more resolutely back to his desk. He takes the local phone book out of a drawer, leafs rapidly through it, writes down a number on a slip of paper.

  The noise level in the office begins to pick up as the latecomers straggle in. Hearing the voice of his young assistant raised in laughter, Donald walks over to find him. Tim Watson is a newly minted Ph.D. from Bristol, tow-haired and pink-faced, with a strong line in fatalistic irony that will see him go far in the archaeological profession.

  ‘Morning, boss. What’s today’s adventure?’

  ‘Listen, can you do something for me, Tim? See if you can get through to the Cambridge group, ask if there are any new developments at Devil’s Barrow.’

  ‘Right you are, Dr. Gladstone.’

  Back at his desk, Donald begins doggedly working his way through a stack of neglected paperwork. Tim has done a good job with it, weeding out the rubbish, responding to the routine correspondence, leaving only the more interesting reports and conference announcements, copies of the inevitable contracts and waivers and other outputs of the county bureaucracy. Near the top of the pile is a thick envelope postmarked in Trowbridge, the engineering plans for the Amesbury bypass. Because of his expertise on the early medieval period in southern Britain, Donald has been asked to assist his Wiltshire colleagues with a preliminary assessment of a site thought likely to preserve traces of sixth-century occupation. He opens up the package, lays out the blueprints, absorbs himself for a while in the minutiae of site selection and mapping.

  Tim Watson is back within fifteen minutes. ‘I couldn’t raise a single helpful soul at Cambridge,’ he says, ‘but I did find this in the morning post.’ He hands over a sheet of paper filled with a small printed text circled dramatically with a thick red pen, a press release from Downing College.

  A team of Cambridge archaeologists led by Professor Paul Healey has made a remarkable discovery at Devil’s Barrow, one of a series of earthworks long thought to have ritualistic associations with the nearby stone circle at Stonehenge. Upon excavation of the barrow, which lies directly along the path made by the rays of the rising midwinter sun as it intersects the outer ring of sarsen stones, Healey’s team uncovered a deep pit in which were found fifteen human skeletons. Although the entombed remains were devoid of clothes or weaponry, several Roman coins of the Emperor Honorius suggest a tentative date of the fifth century AD.

  ‘It was not a happy ending for these people,’ said Professor Healey. ‘All but two of them were apparently subjected to a particularly gruesome kind of ritual sacrifice, in this case by crushing of the skull, impalement through the abdomen, and finally—the coup de grâce for any unfortunate enough still to be alive—by drowning in the pit, which we believe would have been filled with water to a considerable depth.’

  The most dramatic discoveries of all were made in the upper section of the burial mound. Interred directly above the sacrificial victims were the upper cranium and antlers of an Irish elk, Megaloceros giganteus, a species long extinct but famous in the fossil record for its remarkable size. Holes drilled in the skull indicate that the antlers were intended to be worn as a headpiece, probably by the human male—a man of unusual stature and physical strength—whose remains were found directly above it. At the top of the funerary pile, the team uncovered the skeleton of a solitary female. Buried with her, still clutched to her chest, was a ceramic cup decorated around the rim with abstract or possibly animistic images. Inside it were discovered traces of animal or perhaps human blood, suggesting the possibility of a ceremonial or religious significance for the object and its owner.

  According to Professor Healey, the apparently high status of this man and woman is reinforced by the fact that they alone avoided the terrible ‘threefold death’ that was meted out to the warriors interred beneath them. Instead, each seems to have been killed by a single thrust of a sword or spear. ‘This is truly a remarkable discovery,’ said Healey, ‘a once-in-a-century find.’

  Though hesitant to speculate on the significance of the remains, Healey was willing to advance one tentative hypothesis. ‘If the dating is correct,’ he said, ‘we may wonder whether this discovery is related to the Saxon incursions that were taking place at that time into southern Britain.’ Citing the medieval historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, Healey explained that Stonehenge has long been associated with the burial of a group of British ‘leaders and princes’ who had fought against the Saxons. ‘This was a period of great fear and confusion in post-Roman Britain,’ said Healey, ‘and also of great heroism on the part of the British defenders. Some have called this time the Age of Arthur.’

  The Devil’s Barrow finds will be the subject of a forthcoming archaeological symposium at Tintagel in Cornwall.

  ‘What do you make of it, boss?’ Tim says. ‘Could be a media feeding frenzy on this one?’

  ‘You can be sure of it,’ Donald says, distractedly, as he tries to work through the implications of what he has just read. He knows Paul Healey from the days when they were both lowly hack archaeologists employed by the Historic Building and Monuments Department. Paul’s big break came on a dig in Turkey, when he was lucky enough to discover a remarkable Hittite inscription on a clay tablet unearthed at the site of the ancient city of Troy. Less than a ye
ar later, greatly assisted by a previously unsuspected talent for publicity, he landed a generously funded readership at Cambridge. In Donald’s opinion, Paul Healey is a crass attention-seeker and, even worse, a starry-eyed romantic who imagines there is a new Troy to be discovered in every farmer’s field.

  The press release is classic Healey: without explicitly over-interpreting the finds, he hints at a dramatic explanation that is surely not justified by the evidence at hand. In effect, he is challenging others to prove that he has not, after all, uncovered the tomb of fifth-century British princes and their famous king and queen. Donald has not forgotten what Julia said to him at the pub in Malmesbury. If all this scholarship is really so misguided, why don’t you go ahead and correct it? And it is true, something needs to be done about Paul Healey.

  Tim Watson is still standing there, waiting for a more definitive reaction. ‘I’ll leave you to think about it, shall I? Let me know if you need anything else.’

  As Donald looks up at his resourceful assistant, it strikes him that Tim has a happy archaeological knack of finding interesting things quite by chance. ‘Will you come to Amesbury with me on Thursday? I could use your help down in the trenches.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember my gardening gloves,’ Tim says, walking away with a self-satisfied smile.

  After he has gone, Donald picks up the receiver and dials the number from the scrap of paper on his desk. On the second attempt, he gets through to the main office of Oxford University Press, asks to be put through to Julia Llewellyn’s extension. As her phone begins to ring, it occurs to him to wonder what precisely he is going to say to her.

  HAVING SLEPT LONG past her alarm, Julia awakens to an unaccustomed stillness in the bedroom, muted birdsong from outside, weak sunlight filtering through the blinds to catch the dancing dust-motes. The other side of the bed is empty and cold. She stares blearily at the clock, finds that she is already late for work. There are heavy weights on her forehead, steel bands around her arms and legs, pinning her to the mattress. Somehow she breaks free, forces herself to get up. She slides her feet into slippers, throws on her dressing gown against the chill in the air. As she looks at herself critically in the mirror above her dressing table, the previous evening’s uneasy conversation with Hugh comes back to her. She resolves to go downstairs and talk to him, tell him what is on her mind.

  He is at the kitchen table, casual, with coffee and newspaper in hand. ‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ he says.

  ‘I could make some breakfast, if you like?’

  He looks up at her, faintly quizzical. ‘I had something a while ago, thanks.’

  ‘I was wondering about taking the day off,’ Julia says. ‘I thought we might go into town together.’

  ‘Good idea.’ Hugh folds the paper, pushes away his coffee cup. ‘Just to warn you, though, Ruth’s on her way over. She promised to look over the Merton paperwork with me. We can go out afterwards, if you like.’

  It was always Ruth’s project, Hugh’s career in the high-end property market. After his political ambitions came to nothing, she persuaded him that he was nevertheless a born salesman, just the right person to hawk a certain kind of property to a certain kind of buyer. This is perhaps his biggest transaction so far, the divestment by Merton College of its ancient landholdings in and around a small Leicestershire town.

  ‘I wish you’d told me she was coming.’

  Hugh looks at Julia now with the particular kind of earnest expression that is most likely to irritate her. ‘It’s Monday. Usually you go to work.’ He gets up from the table. ‘I’m sorry, but I need to catch up on some reading before she arrives.’

  Half an hour later, Julia is showered and dressed and listening to the throbbing cadence of a diesel engine outside. She watches from the kitchen window as Hugh’s older half-sister climbs out of the taxi and approaches with small and deliberate steps up the drive. When the bell rings, she counts to thirteen before walking into the hall and opening the front door.

  ‘Hello, Ruth.’ She forces herself to smile.

  ‘Ah, Julia. I didn’t expect you to be at home. I hope I haven’t missed Hugh—he promised me he’d be in this morning.’ Ruth Mortimer speaks hurriedly, neither looking Julia fully in the eye nor allowing the words to interrupt her momentum as she continues on into the house. She is a thin woman with a long neck and features that have become more angular with the passing years. Her improbably dark hair is drawn up on top of her head in an elaborate twirled construction, securely pinned with a large blue lapis lazuli butterfly.

  ‘He’s in the study—’

  ‘I’ll go on through, shall I?’

  ‘Yes, do, you know the way.’

  Julia long ago gave up trying to analyse her lack of mutual understanding with her sister-in-law. At one time she would have made more of an effort, invited Ruth to share something of her presumably interesting life experience as a barrister attached to Gray’s Inn and Keble College, Oxford. But the years have worn away Julia’s tolerance for Ruth’s brittle personality; and Ruth, in any case, has always been less likely to pay real attention to her than to offer veiled reprimands for her evident inattention to Hugh’s well-being.

  ‘It feels chilly in here,’ Ruth says. ‘Is the heating on? I’ll just turn the thermostat up a little, if you don’t mind.’

  Julia does not reply, resists her reflexive response. She follows her sister-in-law through to Hugh’s study at the back of the house. A tall window looks out to the strip of grass that runs parallel to the garden fence, where fresh-cut sections of the fallen oak branch have been stacked in a neat geometric pile. There is a narrow mahogany desk, and behind it a bookcase whose contents are arranged carefully according to size rather than subject. The opposite wall is filled with a diverse assortment of artwork. Farthest from the door is Edward, the Black Prince, on his knees in prayer beneath a gilded archway, and next to him a poster featuring assorted British freshwater fish species gazing lugubriously into the room. Salvador Dalí’s The Broken Bridge and the Dream, with its skeletal, wraith-like figures melting into a gold and indigo sky, is mounted directly above Edward Burne-Jones’ The Beguiling of Merlin, the magician lying trapped in infatuated subservience at the feet of the lithe enchantress. Finally, closest to Julia, is a large and elaborate family tree mounted in a heavy wooden frame.

  Hugh is stretched out in a leather armchair in the corner, reading from a battered history journal. He looks up, smiles at his sister with what seems a sincere enthusiasm. ‘I’ve been reading about one of our Mortimer ancestors,’ he says.

  ‘Some rapacious Norman knight, I expect,’ Ruth says. There is something caustic in her voice. ‘Don’t forget, I’m not especially proud of our illustrious family history.’

  Hugh lifts his hand in a gesture of frustration, then drops it with a barely audible sigh, offers a small conciliatory smile. ‘Don’t get worked up, Ruth. It’s not worth it.’

  Julia is irritated to see that he is still a little frightened of his sister. As their desultory exchange continues, she finds herself studying the family tree on the wall beside her. It is a minor work of art, a vanity piece commissioned by Hugh’s father when he began what was to have been his grand retirement project, a genealogical treatise on the ancient Mortimer family. Robert Mortimer, who ended his military career as a lieutenant colonel in the Shropshire Light Infantry, was an avid horseman and a heavy drinker of vintage port. He was killed along with Hugh’s mother, Sarah Mortimer, when the car he was driving soon after finishing half a bottle of a 1963 Colheita went through a guard-rail in the Malvern hills. At twenty years old, Hugh inherited the family estates and also the task of bringing to a conclusion the voluminous History of the Mortimer Family of the Welsh March.

  At the left-hand edge of the frame, in an ornate typeface, are the words ‘Wales’ and ‘England’, from which two genealogical branches advance to meet somewhere in the middle, then split again into two new branches that continue to the right-hand edge. The first name listed on
the Welsh branch is Coel Hen, Old King Cole of the nursery rhyme, who died c. 800 AD. The English line, meanwhile, begins with the Saxon Ecgbert, King of Wessex (died 839 AD). The two lines meet in the year 1402, with the marriage of Sir Edmund Mortimer, a great-grandson of Edward III, to Catrin, daughter of Owain Glyn Dŵr, Prince of Wales. Seeing Glyn Dŵr’s name there reminds Julia of her conversation with Donald, her small ill-tempered tirade against the English theft of the Welsh heroic tradition. She regrets it now, wonders just how strange and intense he must think her.

  The upper right-hand branch of the family tree meanwhile continues through the dynasty of John of Gaunt, then the Tudors, the Stuarts, the House of Orange, the House of Hanover, and the Saxe Coburgs, with the modern Windsors at the farthest edge. The lower right-hand branch consists of a single unbroken line of Mortimers, father to son, from 1402 to the present day. It ends with Hugh Edmund, the only son of the late Robert and Sarah Mortimer, with Ruth Alice Mortimer, the product of Robert’s first, short-lived marriage to a distant cousin, awkwardly attached by a faint dotted line.

  ‘How many years has it been?’ Ruth is saying, referring to Hugh’s work on the family history. ‘Seventeen? Eighteen?’ She speaks in an ambiguous tone, almost light-hearted, though there is a trace of venom in it. ‘I think it’s time to move on—don’t you agree, Julia?’

  This is a common and insidious device of Ruth’s, to turn her frustration with Hugh back on to Julia, whom she has always considered an unwelcome addition to the family. As Julia stands there under her sister-in-law’s condescending gaze, the idea of spending any more time in her presence seems out of the question.

  ‘I think I’d better leave you to it,’ she says. ‘I’ve remembered something I need to finish off at work.’

  She is on her way to the back door before they have a chance to react. She takes her bicycle out of the shed, wheels it down the path and out through the back gate behind her studio. Pedalling hard, she tries to blank out all conscious thought, lets the cool air wash over her as she makes her way along the familiar leafy avenues to the more crowded, urban streets of Jericho, then Great Clarendon Street and the home of the Oxford English Dictionary. She locks up her bicycle in its allotted space just inside the gate, blowing on her hands to take away the chill of the handlebars as she climbs the steps to the door.