Treasures of Time (25 page)

‘I’m going to Danehurst tomorrow, to start setting things up for the filming. They’re doing some helicopter shots. And I thought I’d try to have a chat with your aunt.’

I don’t care for this at all, Nellie thought. Why? Hugh wouldn’t mind – indeed he’d be tickled pink, I suspect. And there is nothing wrong with this young man, really, a rather earnest person in fact, he means well. The glasses, of course, help to create an impression of responsibility. So why do I have this resistance to contributing so much as a shred to what is after all a perfectly respectable undertaking? Suppose someone were writing Hugh’s biography – would I feel the same? Is it a snobbishness about television? Do I think the camera will lie any more or less readily than the pen? Because both, of course, do that. Which perhaps is what accounts for this queasiness – the certainty that whatever is said will not be the truth, the whole truth or even part of the truth. And that one would not want it to be in any case, because recollection is a private matter and we all have the right to do our own distorting of the past. Collective distortion can be left to professionals.

‘Well, yes, if I can be of any help. Not technical things? That’s all I know anything about, really, the rest is just personal… A personal slant on the dig? Oh, I see. Dear, it’s so difficult to think of anything that might be of interest, let’s see…’

What one sees, personally slanted on one elbow with backside on a particularly muddy bit of ground – very awkward but the only possible position – is a section of Wiltshire subsoil larded with stones. It is dark and perpetually damp there – we have all got slight rheumatism. Hugh squats at my back. From time to time his thigh brushes against mine and it means nothing at all, for which thanks be to God. I don’t feel anything, except someone’s thigh. I have come through, it is all quite all right now, for always. And nobody any the wiser, except for oneself, who has acquired a bit of insight into one of the more taxing areas of human emotion. I scrape and brush and Hugh scrapes and brushes and we chat away: Hugh thinks he has a chance of the London Directorship,
if
this dig is all it looks like being,
if
he can publish in time.

Going outside one blinks – the light seems of Mediterranean intensity. I stand looking down into the Kennet Valley and thinking how odd it is that what happened here once to someone else determines what happens now, to us. Kate is playing on the grass. She has the little trowel I got her, the little trowel with the blue handle. She runs up with something she has dug up and gives it to me. For you, she says, I dug it for you, Aunt Nellie. It is a bit of bottle glass, smoothed and blunted by its years in the ground. I put it in my pocket. I still use it as a paper weight.

‘No,’ said Laura. ‘If she says no she means no. Talking to cameras wouldn’t be Nellie at all. Anyway she doesn’t much like television. Will this dress be all right – the colour? I have got a blue silk I rather wondered about. But don’t you want to sort of rehearse it? I mean, what I’m going to say? Well, I suppose so, if that’s what you feel – actually I think I’d probably get
more
relaxed, not less… Whatever you like. And where? In the garden. Well yes if you feel that would be nice, I’ll try and get Ted Lucas to do the grass, the only snag is if it’s windy one’s hair is going to get a bit blown about. I suppose you want me to just remember out loud?’

Remember what?

Remember going up to the dig on a hot afternoon because one had been on one’s own all day and was bored stiff. In that pink flowered sun-dress and a big straw hat and the French sandals. Wondering how they could bear it, stuck away inside those damp earthy trenches all day in the lovely weather.

Thinking, I am thirty-six. Nearer forty than thirty. Nearer being old than being young. Not believing it; thinking, it can’t happen to
me
; knowing that it would. A sinking in one’s stomach. Walking up to Charlie’s Tump with a sinking in one’s stomach.

The blue sky and the grass and little coppery butterflies and larks singing – none of it giving a damn about how I feel. Kate grubbing about with a trowel I’d let her have. Getting cross with her because she put her dirty hands on my skirt; trying to rub the stain out with a hanky.

Tom, in a room furnished like an airport departure lounge, studied a notice-board on which the forthcoming visit of a distinguished scholar was advertised alongside the activities of a Consciousness-Raising Group and a lecture on Women and the Media. From time to time he glanced furtively at the other candidates, a worryingly astute-looking trio, exuding historical acumen and charm of personality. Stukeley, at this moment, was not being particularly supportive, either. In fact, he felt like a thoroughly nit-picking subject, a piece of academic washing-up, unproductive and self-contemplative. The others, undoubtedly, were engaged on airy generous public-spirited topics, capable of infinite expansion in discussion, matters of wide concern, seminal historic issues.

He exchanged newspapers with a fellow candidate, and read an alternative view on what should be done about the car industry.

Chapter Eleven

‘No.’

Kate said, ‘Oh.’ She read the letter and went on, ‘You don’t really mind, do you?’

‘Funnily enough I don’t. Rejection should be more dampening than this.’

So far, after all, there had not been much of it in the career of Tom Rider. Progress had been fairly smooth. At Batts Road primary school reception class there had been a system for the encouragement of five-year olds whereby a satisfactory piece of work – sums or writing or whatever – had been rewarded by a small sticky-backed gold paper star which was pasted onto the relevant page of the exercise book. Tom, on his third day at school, had discovered the source of these stars in a drawer of the teacher’s table and appropriated a handful which he plastered over every page of his book. He could not remember, now, if this ploy had been rumbled, but if it had no one had been particularly cross. Now, evidently, the free flow of gold stars was coming to an end.

On the way back to London in the train this had come suddenly to mind. And with it other blurred and fragmented scenes from school and childhood: some perhaps significant, others emphatically not. Once, slumped over a biro-scarred school copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, he had perceived suddenly the nature of wit; another time, he had sat with gathering resentment in a Religious Instruction class and recognized in himself the birth of intellectual scepticism. And he had had a fight in a seedy concrete playground with an odious boy whose face he could still see but whose name was long since lost, and come off best. And lured a girl called Sue into the long grass at the edge of the recreation ground and there made various investigations into the construction and inclinations of girls in general. And grown up and gone away and returned, in the fullness of time, to see with surprise that his native town was both smaller, dirtier and more familiar than he had thought, and that he himself was no longer so detectably of it. That he was a citizen of a larger country.

He had thought about this in the train in conjunction with other and more confused thoughts about the general nature of countries, which had led on to idle reflections about nationality and the importance or unimportance thereof, and thence to the observation that he was almost the only native in the train compartment. He was surrounded by tourists: American, Japanese, German, French, indeterminate. This, of course, was explained by the fact that the train included both Oxford and the stop for Stratford in its route; it also endorsed the claims made by the British Tourist Board in today’s paper concerning doubled, or was it trebled, proceeds from tourism. Interesting also was the observation that all these visitors appeared, at least to his own not very practised eye, to be extremely rich: they wore what looked like pricey clothes and were slung about with expensive cameras and baggage. He felt a sudden community with the unobtrusive but inquisitive peasant bystanders in some pre-war snap of visitors to the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal.

In the two seats opposite him, sharing his table, were an oriental couple who talked in what Tom guessed to be Japanese. Indeed, on inspection, the dozen or so neighbouring seats were all filled with Japanese, presumably of the same party. They had boarded the train at the Stratford stop, having evidently spent the night there. After a while, Tom became aware of conspiratorial talk between his neighbours, and glances in his direction. A decision was reached and the man – in his early thirties, immaculately dressed – reached in a briefcase and produced a camera, which he handed to Tom, with the request that he take their photograph. The two – the girl also was thirtyish – put their heads closer together against the midnight blue background of Intercity’s upholstery, smiled with disarming confidence and Tom, after some initial alarm at the complexity of the camera, snapped them twice. There was much smiling and chatter amongst the rest of the party, more cameras – yet smaller and more intricate – were produced and Tom found himself in the position of staff photographer. Some of the girls were very pretty. He achieved great popularity; though it was unclear how much, if at all, anyone could speak English, except the man who had made the first request, who turned out to be the organizer of the. party and a competent linguist. They were members of a golf club, it appeared, on a European tour and presently enjoying the penultimate three days of their English week; today was set aside for Oxford, where they would see the city, after which a coach would take them to Blenheim Palace, the grave of Winston Churchill and something vaguer listed as The Beauty of the English Countryside. Tom inspected the proffered itinerary and made various suggestions. His own Oxford background emerged, and aroused much interest. He told them what would be most worth looking at, and how to find it. The conversation shifted to a delicate probing of Tom’s present situation; he told his new acquaintances about the problems of job-hunting (the girl, though unwilling to speak, evidently understood English perfectly well) and received beaming assurances of how certain he was to find himself successful. There was a pause while coffee was served – Tom, much embarrassed, had to allow his companions to pay for his – and the two Japanese began to talk energetically to each other in their own language. Tom reverted to his newspaper, but after a few minutes they were seeking his attention again.