Treasures of Time (24 page)

Kate, washing her hands in the museum Ladies, saw in the mirror the door open and the Assistant Director, Mary Halliday, come in. Since she believed that Mary Halliday did not like her the prospect of an enforced conversation filled her with panic and she dived into the lavatory (to which she had already been), pretending not to have seen Mary Halliday. There, she sat uneasily until she heard the door open and close once more. Mary Halliday noticed the retreating back of that odd grumpy girl who was Hugh Paxton’s daughter, thought it would be nice to get to know her better, but for some reason she seemed vaguely hostile… washed, tidied and went out again.

In the Underground, staring blankly at the row of blankly staring faces opposite, Kate thought suddenly that she had hardly any friends. If something awful happened to me there is no one, really, that I could ring up and say, look, can I come round at once, I must talk, something awful… But then, I am not the kind of person who would ever make that kind of phone call in any case. I don’t tell people things. I’ve never been able to be cosy with people; other girls haven’t usually much cared for me. Men have, more, which surprised me very much at the beginning, when I was nineteen or so and it first happened. I hadn’t thought I was attractive, either. Being attractive for going-to-bed purposes must be quite different from being attractive for friendly purposes, which I find depressing.

Tom has been, amazingly, both.

Has been?

Back at the flat she made herself a meal and settled down with a book. When the phone rang she leapt to it. ‘Kate? It’s Tony – Tony Greenway.’

‘Oh. Tom’s away for the night – he’s having this interview tomorrow morning.’

‘I know. I thought, you’re on your own, maybe you’d like to come out for a drink?’

‘Oh. Well, actually – yes, all right, I suppose I could. Thank you,’ she added after a moment.

‘Right. I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes or so, O.K.?’

They sat opposite one another in a crowded pub of carefully preserved Edwardian ambiance. Tony said, ‘Well, here’s to Tom’s prospects.’

‘He thought there were probably a lot of other people after the job.’

‘Ah. Tell me, Kate, what took you into the museum business? You never thought of following in your father’s foot-steps?’

She hates talking about herself, he thought. A rare quality. Most people, it’s like turning on a tap. The problem is to shut them up, interviewing, not get them going. ‘Yes?’ he said encouragingly, with his detached, friendly, professional look of enquiry. ‘Yes, I see – it was all a bit accidental. The usual process of one thing leading to another. But I’m sure you were right not to go into the civil service. I can’t see you as a civil servant, Kate.’ There, he thought, that’s better, she
can
unbend, it just needs the right approach. ‘But you must have picked up a bit as a child, hanging around your father’s digs, and just all the stuff there is at Danehurst… Of course I know you’re not involved particularly now with prehistoric things, but even so… Tell me about Charlie’s Tump, for instance, how much do you remember of all that? Was there some kind of moment of truth, or did they always suspect what they were on to?’

Moment of truth?

There is this moment, that I seem to have by me still, a moment when I am inside the Tump with Daddy and Aunt Nellie. It is dark inside, and a bit wet, but cosy, it is like being in a dark earthy cupboard, I pretend I am a mole, a mole in a hole, my hole, my safe cosy hole where no one can get me… I make myself a nest and I curl up in it and watch them dig. They are digging up a person. A skeleton person. Slowly slowly, because they mustn’t spoil it. I see the bones, and Daddy brushing the earth away from the bones, and I look at my hand and think that I am like that inside, too. There is the hard part of people that is their bones and the soft part on the outside, and when you are dead the soft part goes away. Where does it go to? I ask Daddy and Aunt Nellie where it goes but they are busy, they are not listening. What is dead? The person they are digging is dead. Everybody is dead one day, when they get old. Daddy and Aunt Nellie and Mummy will get old and be dead. I am six and a half, after Christmas I will be seven. Before you are born you are inside your mummy’s tummy. I think that is horrid, it is disgusting, sometimes I think of that when I am having lunch and it makes me feel sick, I can’t finish my lunch.

I can hear sheep noises from outside, and birds, and Brenda talking to somebody. In here it is quiet. The dead person has been here for a long time, a long long time, I don’t know how long, Daddy says they lived thousands and thousands of years ago, the people he digs. Suddenly I feel sad; it is like being not well, there is nothing I can do about it; I lie on my side and tears drip down my face and melt into the ground.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I can’t remember all that much. I was only about six. I suppose I must have been up there sometimes. Honestly, it’s all very hazy now. I do vaguely remember a bit of fuss and excitement, and the people I remember – a woman called Brenda Carstairs who was Dad’s assistant and a Spanish man who came to help, and Paul Summers who you’ve met. And…’

‘Yes?’ Funny, Tony thought, she’s going all buttoned-up again, just as for once one thought one had got her relaxed. She’s a nice girl, that’s the trouble. Nice but bloody difficult. Too difficult for Tom. They won’t marry, of course, in the end. ‘Yes?’

‘… oh and silly little things that aren’t relevant, like Aunt Nellie giving me a trowel of my own. I adored it – I can see it now, Woolworth’s, with a bright blue handle. I dug a burial mound for a dead bird with it. But otherwise it’s all a bit blank, I’m afraid.’

‘A Spaniard? Do you remember his name?’

‘No,’ said Kate.

‘Paul Summers put me in touch with Miss Carstairs, which was rather nice. We had a talk.’

‘Goodness. I don’t expect any of us have seen her since then.’

‘She teaches in Durham. Rather a gym mistress type.’

But voluble enough over a couple of drinks and a meal in Durham’s plushiest hotel.

‘Oh, it was a smashing dig, we all enjoyed it, Hugh Paxton was great fun to work with though he had a temper, mind, I remember him flaring up once or twice when he thought someone had done something daft. Mrs P frankly I never much cared for. One always felt he ought to have married the sister – what was she called? Nellie something – but of course Mrs P was a real sex-pot and Hugh was rather a one for the girls. Dear me, I shouldn’t be saying all this – don’t you go plying me with drink before we do this film thing. How long do you want me to talk for? Only a minute or so – well, whatever you like but of course there’s lots to
say
about it, after all it was an important dig. Mind, once Hugh cottoned on to just
how
important there was a lot of pressure on, the appointment to the Directorship of the Council was coming up and he realized he was in with a chance so long as people knew about Charlie’s Tump. He did rush things a bit, maybe, towards the end of the summer.’

‘Paul Summers I remember quite well,’ said Kate, ‘because he could do that thing where you put a piece of grass between your hands and blow and it makes a squeaking noise. I was deeply impressed.’

‘Paxton. How does one describe Paxton? Well, to lay all one’s cards on the table, I must admit that we didn’t always see eye to eye. His methods wouldn’t always be my methods. His trenching, for instance… And he wasn’t a man who took advice kindly. Very opinionated. Oh, he had flair all right – one of those archaeologists who just seems to know by instinct where to put the spade in. I never know whether it’s luck or inspiration. I mean, Charlie’s Tump wasn’t, on the ground, all that promising a site – a dozen other barrows spring to mind that might have seemed more worth doing, at the time, but Hugh Paxton has to pick the right one, straight off. And of course the burial was a secondary insertion anyway – a piece of unexpected luck. It had been tampered with in the past, inevitably – Stukeley mentions one of his contemporaries having a go at it – fascinating dig, one was glad to be there, I remember it all well – Laura drifting about in fashionable outfits, and Nellie working like a Trojan as ever. There was a bosomy girl called Brenda something, and a Spanish chap whose name escapes me. I suppose the daughter must have been around – she’d have been a small child. And it was a break-through in many ways, there was a lot of very valuable evidence and it all fits in nicely with post radio-carbon theories. But of course the person who got most out of it was Paxton himself It got him the Directorship, no doubt about that. And Paxton was only too well aware. I’m not saying he manipulated things. Let’s just put it that once he knew what he was onto he went like the clappers. He was determined to publish before the appointing committee met. It could legitimately be said that the excavation of the final chamber was done in an unholy scramble. Not that I’m going to put it quite like that for this recording of yours. I’ll temper it.
De mortuis etc
.’