Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (2 page)

Charlotte had never in her life felt obliged to examine her relationships with anyone. Her mother, once rid of the armour-plated respectability of Maître Henri and his phalanx of parents, brothers and sisters, all devoted to the law, had married a happy-go-lucky literary exile from Leeds, as nearly as possible his opposite, and the half-English, half-French child had been absorbed into their slapdash household with the greatest enthusiasm and affection, and never given time to doubt or worry, surrounded as she was by joyous evidence of her own importance and value. There had never been too much money, but never less than enough. She had no vision of money as an independent power, or a formidable opponent. It was there to be used, insofar as you had it; and when you were short, you worked a little harder, and made good the deficiency. And foreseeing that necessity, you made sure that you knew something which could earn you money at need. It was as simple as that. She did not even know what it meant to adapt oneself to another person’s requirements for the sake of self-interest. All she had, to enable her to visualise Mr Stanforth’s view of her position, was a vivid imagination and a very acute intelligence. They helped her to understand him, and even, regretfully, to sympathise with him.

‘If you’re asking me,’ she said carefully,‘ to come into consultation and share responsibility for whatever decisions we have to make about Great-Uncle Alan’s affairs, of course I will, though I don’t claim to know anything about business and I probably shan’t be much help to you. I can’t even claim to know what he would want done, because I know almost nothing about him. But I don’t at all mind saying what I think
I
should want done in the circumstances. I don’t think, for instance, that I should want my death assumed and my property disposed of too soon, so we won’t go into that part of the affair just now, if you don’t mind. He’ll probably live to be a hundred, and make a will leaving whatever he’s got to his old college, and I shan’t mind at all. But I quite see that you need someone to come in on a practical issue like what to do about his tenants. I think you should extend the tenancy for another full year, if that’s what they would like. It would ensure the house being taken care of, and the staff maintained, since you say they’re good tenants. And even if Uncle Alan turns up within a month or two, he can hardly complain. It’s his own fault. And the inconvenience will be only slight, he can always take up residence at his college again until their time’s up.’

She made it sound very simple, as young people do; and she hadn’t yet considered the implications for herself, Mr Stanforth reflected cynically, or she would not so blithely dismiss the matter of the inheritance. It was not a fortune, but it was a respectable competence, thanks to royalties, which would continue for years yet, whether the doctor reappeared or remained in limbo. ‘I’m gratified,’ said Mr Stanforth, with only the mildest irony,‘ that your judgement agrees with mine. That is indeed what I had intended suggesting to you, and it disposes of the immediate problem.’

‘If you want me to keep in touch, and be available for consultation, of course I will.’

‘Thank you, that will ease my position considerably. And as you say, all we can do is wait, and continue to expect Doctor Morris to turn up in his own good time. May I ask what your own plans are? Do you intend to stay some time in England?’

‘I’m making my home here,’ she said. ‘I’m taking a teaching job in a new comprehensive school, but that won’t begin until the September term. That’s why I’m trying to fill up the gap with a few concerts, but of course I’m not good enough for the big dates, it will be mostly provincial engagements. I’ll let you have word of all my movements.’

‘That would be most kind and helpful.’

The interview seemed to have reached its natural conclusion. She picked up her handbag, and he rose from behind his desk to take a relieved and ceremonious farewell. But before they had reached the doorway she hesitated and halted.

‘You know what I would like? Could you let me have a list of all the books Uncle Alan’s written? If I’m going to be a stand-in for him, even temporarily, like this, I really need to know more about him, and that seems as good a way as any. They must surely convey something about him.’

Strange, he thought resignedly, she’s not at all interested in how much her kinsman’s worth, only, rather suddenly and rather late, in what he’s like. And at this stage, isn’t that rather an academic consideration? But he said politely: ‘Yes, of course. If you’ll allow me, I’ll have a few of his titles sent round to your hotel. This last one, the text he sent from Istanbul—the publishers took care of the proof-reading, of course—that one I believe I’ve got here. Take it with you, if you’d care to. Though it’s hardly the most riveting of his works. He found Aurae Phiala, it seems, rather an over-rated site in revisiting it.’

There was a large bookcase in the corner of his office, stocked mainly with leather-bound volumes; but the end of the lowest shelf was brightened by the clear colours of a number of paperbacks. He plucked one of them from its place and brought it to her. ‘The Roman Britain Library’, the jacket told her, and in larger print: ‘
A
URAE
P
HIALA
’, and Alan Morris’s name, with a comet’s-tail of letters after it.

The cover was a fine, delicately-composed, atmospheric photograph of a shallow bowl of meadows beside the silver sweep of a river, the whole foreground patterned with a mesh of low walls in amber stone and rosy, fired brick and tile, with two broken pillars to carry the accented rhythms up into a sky feathered with light cloud. Charlotte gazed at it, fascinated. A landscape obviously planned, disciplined, tamed long, long since, and long since abandoned to the river, the seasons and the sky; and not a human soul in sight. A less cunning photographer might have felt the urge to place a single figure, perhaps close to the columns, to give life and scale. This one had understood that Aurae Phiala was dead, and immense, needing no meretricious human yardstick to give it proportion.

‘But it’s beautiful!’ she said, and voice and accent had become wholly French for one moment. ‘This is where he spent those last few days?’ she said. ‘Before he caught that flight into Turkey?’

‘Yes. He knew the site from many previous visits, though I think he had never organised a dig there himself. The curator is an old friend of his, a fellow-student, I believe. But less distinguished.’

‘So Uncle Alan would be with friends, when he stayed there? And he went straight from this place, to catch his plane?’

‘So I understand. It is an attractive picture,’ said Mr Stanforth, with patronising tolerance. ‘Wonderful what a first rate photographer can do with even unpromising material. But you’ll see what Doctor Morris has to say about the place.’

‘Where is it?’ she asked, still viewing the sunlit, fluted hollow with pleasure and wonder.

‘Somewhere on the Welsh border, I believe. The text and maps will show you exactly where. The name means something like “the bowl of the gentle wind”. Apparently an ideal climatic site. But you’ll discover all about the place if you read it.’

Clearly he hardly believed that she would stay the course. She wondered if he himself had survived it. She closed the little book between her palms, and put it away in her handbag. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I look forward to setting foot in my uncle’s field.’

She was not sure herself how much in earnest she was, at that stage; and if she had had any other agreeable reading matter to fill up her evening, she might never have started on
Aurae Phiala
at all. But she had no concert, and no engagement socially, since she knew hardly anyone in London, the small hotel in Earls Court was not productive of amusing company, and the television was surrounded by a handful of determined fans watching a very boring boxing match. Charlotte returned almost gladly to the recollection of her morning interview, and in retrospect it seemed to her far more strange and mysterious than while it was happening. She had never been brought face to face with her great-uncle, and never devoted any conscious thought to him. He became real and close only now that he had vanished.

Such a curious thing for an established and respected elderly gentleman to do, now that she came to consider it seriously. How old would he be now? Her grandmother, his elder sister, would have been seventy if she had been still living, and there were several years between them. Probably sixty-three or sixty-four, and according to the photographs she had seen in newspapers and geographical magazines, and his occasional appearances on television, he looked considerably younger than his age, and very fit indeed. Say a well-preserved sixty-four, highly sophisticated, speaking at least three languages, enough to get him out of trouble in most countries, and with a select if scattered network of friends and colleagues all across the Middle East, to lend him a hand if required. And on his last known move obviously still in full control of his actions. A taxi had dropped him and his luggage at the main railway station, he had walked in through the entrance with a porter in attendance; and that was that.

On the face of it, a man about whom the whole world knew, whose life was an open book—no, a succession of books. But what did she really know about him? She roamed back thoughtfully into childhood memories, hunting for the little clues her mother and grandmother had let fall about him, and the sum of them all was remarkably meagre. A handsome, confident man, who had managed to retain his friends without ever letting them get on to too intimate ground. No wife ever, and (as far as anyone knew!) no children anywhere, but all the same, his kinswomen had spoken of him tolerantly, even appreciatively, as an accomplished lady-killer, evading marriage adroitly but finding his fun wherever he went. An eye for the girls at sixty no less than at twenty; and silver-grey temples, blue eyes and a Turkish tan were even more dangerously attractive than youth. He played fair, though, her mother had said of him generously. Not with the husbands, perhaps, but with the ladies. They had to be more than willing, and as ready as he to part without hard feelings afterwards. Doubtful if he ever dented a heart; more than likely he gave quite a number of hearts a new lift after they’d imagined the ball was over for them.

It seemed she did, after all, know a few significant things about him. He lived as he chose, one foot in home comforts, the other shod for roaming. She understood now what Mr Stanforth had meant by describing him as a man who had deliberately evaded certain responsibilities and involvements, and even kept his affairs in scrupulous order mainly to avoid being badgered, or giving anyone a hold on him. And she thought suddenly, with a totally unexpected flash of dismay and sympathy: My God, you overdid it, didn’t you? You were so successful at it that in the end you could vanish without leaving a soul behind sufficiently concerned about you to kick up a fuss—only a solicitor worried about the legal hang-ups, and especially the money!

Sympathy, of course, might be misapplied here. For all she knew, so far from being lonely and deprived at this moment, he might well be taking his mild pleasures in his usual fashion, with some lady chanced upon by pure luck in the wilds of Anatolia. In which case he would surface again when it suited him. All the same, the image of his isolation remained with her, and made her feel uneasy and even guilty towards him.

So it was partly out of an illogical sense of obligation that she began to read his book on Aurae Phiala. Eighty or so acres of Midshire by the river Comer, close by the border of Wales. A recreation city, apparently, for the officers of the garrison at Silcaster, and the legions tramping the long course of Watling Street. The account he gave of it was detailed, detached and distinctly unenthusiastic. A place of historical interest in its small way, especially for its sudden death at the end of the fourth century, after the legions that were its life and its protection had been withdrawn. But otherwise a site very unlikely to repay much further examination, and hardly worth spending money on, while so many more promising sites waited their turn to snatch a crumb of the meagre and grudging funds available. In plan after plan and page after page, Doctor Morris amended the estimates even he had given in articles previously published, and disputed various claims made for Aurae Phiala by other authorities. Their aerial photographs he subjected to destructive scrutiny, the light crop lines they detected under the unbroken fields he dated several centuries later than the sacking of Aurae Phiala, the dark crop marks emerging so strongly in contrast he refused to consider as early Roman military lines, but set well back into pre-Roman settlement. (A light, sandy sub-soil, Charlotte learned, provided a first-class ground for crop-marks, since crops growing over ancient foundations tend to ripen and show yellow while the rest of the field is still green. And the crop marks that show dark instead of pale are likely to lie along the lines where timber walls stood, prior to the stone.)

In short, Doctor Morris was bored with Aurae Phiala, and succeeded in making it slightly boring for his readers. Charlotte found herself intrigued by his handling of some of his colleagues who took views different from his own. His deference, while he refuted their conclusions, was careful and considerate. Even, perhaps, a little cagey? She felt almost sorry for Professor M. L. Vaughan, who was obviously in the same rank as her self-confident great-uncle, and differed from him on almost every point.

She would have been completely convinced, but for that limpid, lovely photograph on the book’s cover, so serene, and pure, and gracious in its emptiness of man, a tragic landscape recognised and captured.

It was one of those cosmic accidents which are no accident, that the next day, when she called in at a bookshop to look for some more Morris titles, she should find on the same shelf the total output of Professor M. L. Vaughan; and among the rest his:
Aurae Phiala: A Pleasure City of the Second Century A.D
. She took it down and opened it at random, and the prose caught her by its incandescent fervour. He was Welsh, of course, by his name; this frontier site might be expected to excite him. But he wrote like a sceptic captured and moved against his will.