Treasures of Time (29 page)

He shrank in horror beneath the blankets. What was this, for God’s sake? The product of a fevered imagination? Or had – hideous thought – had there come to pass last night in those lost whisky-sodden hours some appalling scene that he no longer remembered except in these horrifying fragments?

The underclothes were vivid. Flesh-coloured, lacy, and esoteric. Cami-knickers. That kind of thing is called a cami-knicker. How do I know that? he thought wildly, I’ve never heard of them before. Kate wore the bras and briefs familiar to anyone.

She sat there, Laura, undressed, in a murky light from the bedside lamp, hairbrush in hand, looking at him.

He groaned.

The image, of course, was also that of any television advertisement: the pretty, under-dressed woman, in a situation of suggestive privacy. Hairspray; deodorant; soap.

Racked by uncertainty, his head pounding, he got up and dressed. He did not know how he was going to look her in the face.

Chapter Thirteen

The cameras were being set up in the garden for Tony’s interview with Laura. The fine weather was lasting, though the forecasts had talked of thundery showers. Tom stood with Tony on the terrace.

‘Kate was held up, I hear.’

‘She’ll be down after lunch.’

‘You look a bit low. Anything wrong?’

Tom stared gloomily across the lawn. ‘It’s just possible,’ he said, ‘that I may have made a pass at Laura last night. In fact it’s remotely conceivable that more than that might have happened.’

‘Good Lord. I see. Well.’

There was a silence.

‘
Possible
. What exactly does that mean?’

‘I can’t remember. I was pissed, totally. There’s just a kind of impression. Which might or might not be imagination.’

‘Ah. Very awkward for you.’

‘Quite.’

‘You can’t ever be absolutely sure?’

‘No.’

‘And you couldn’t – er – ask?’

‘Christ, no.’

‘I see your problem,’ said Tony. ‘I certainly do.’ He put a sympathetic hand on Tom’s shoulder. ‘Well, I’d better get on.’

Laura – whose manner gave no clues that were in any way helpful – had come out of the house and was greeting the cameraman with the graciousness of a senior actress. She moved across the lawn with Tony, discussing problems of lighting and the disposition of chairs. Tom went into the sitting room and slumped on the sofa with the newspaper. The headache was beginning to wear off a little; he wished he was somewhere else. Anywhere else would do, really. Suppose he suddenly remembered an ailing grandmother and just upped and offed? But Kate was coming this afternoon.

Kate.

Another problem.

They drove to the point where the trackway to Charlie’s Tump led away from the road, and left the car in the layby there. The BBC cars had apparently braved the inconveniences of the track. Kate set off for the Tump without looking to see if Tom was following, walking quickly in that dogged way of hers. He was reminded of the first time they had come here. They had hardly spoken since she had arrived a couple of hours earlier; she seemed sullen and he had left her alone. Now, he did not attempt to catch up with her.

From this point it was impossible to see the barrow, positioned as it was not quite on the crest of the hill but at a point slightly below, and hidden by a piece of rising ground before. The track, snaking ahead between cornfields, seemed indeed to vanish at that point. To the right, a quarter mile or so away, the clump of trees crowning the East Kennet long barrow made a dark patch against the long pale swelling of another field, rooks circling above it. He and Kate had walked up there once, and he had found the site more evocative than the Tump, combining as it did the two mythic stage-settings of underworld and sylvan glade. He had remarked on this to Kate, who had said, ‘Or it’s a mound with some trees planted on it…’ Now, looking across at it once more, he wondered if Stukeley had ever walked up this particular downland way and, if so, what he had seen. The scenery of the classically-fed imagination? Or a ‘Sepulchre of the Ancient Britons’? Or a suitable site for the application of certain pre-conceived theories?

Barrows, of course, have always had their own mythology. That which cannot be explained is a subject for fantasy: the homes of the Little People, the sites of buried treasure, the graves of Arthurian heroes who will rise again. Even, absurdly, a hiding-place for Charles the First.

They had reached the crest of the lower hill now and the Tump itself came into view, with its stone threshold and dark maw and the white track winding towards it. Just ahead, the BBC cars were parked in a gateway, having reached the nearest point possible; beyond, a line of distant figures humped equipment up the last stretch of the hill. At the top, Tony stood silhouetted against the sky, a stooped Napoleonic figure staring down at his marshalled forces. From time to time he shouted some instruction; the wind had lifted his hair in a coxcomb from the top of his head. Once or twice he looked upwards, shielding his eyes with a hand. The sky had partly clouded over, as though shut off by a slowly tilting lid; the light had drained from the eastern half of the landscape, while the rest remained bathed in sunshine, an odd effect like illustrations of an eclipse in a school text-book. Somewhere along the Kennet Valley, a stone building was caught in a shaft of sunshine, a point of emphasis which somehow gave an air of contrivance to the whole scene: the fields, the sky, the dark slash of the valley, the clustered farms and cottages. It ceased to be a piece of countryside and entered a tradition of painting. Tom was reminded of the picture at Standhill – the carefully arranged view with figures in the foreground, the representation of an inhabited world. This piece of Wiltshire, too, had for the moment the same docility, the same suggestion of order and obedience, in which utility and aesthetics combined to please.

She could sense him behind her, some way behind. Not bothering to catch up. She thought, I’m cold, why am I so cold? It’s quite a nice day, quite sunny.

Clouds coming up, though. That, she supposed, would muck up their filming. And there indeed was Tony on the rim of the hill above the Tump, staring across the valley at the cloud bank. Presumably Paul Summers was up there too, who was going to be filmed talking about the excavation.

When I was a child, she thought, it used to seem miles coming up here. An endless walk. Hours. Now, it’s just ten minutes or so. Nothing is ever quite what it seems to be, that is what being grown-up adds up to, that is the one thing you do find out. That, and that you can’t count on much.

She had always thought this a primitive place, faintly threatening. Coming up with her father and others once, when she was a schoolgirl, she had wandered off and found them gone when she got back to the Tump; in panic she had fled down the path, experiencing that atavistic knowledge of pattering, following footsteps somewhere out of sight. Today, stumping upwards, not looking back – only Tom’s footsteps, now, and those felt rather than heard – she saw it as indifferent, a scene hostile to life, peopled only by sheep and birds, that might always have been thus. The barrows and trackways suggested a victory of nature over man, rather than the passage of time. All dead; all gone. Everything goes.

Tony and his entourage, scattered about the Tump itself, looked not so much incongruous as irrelevant. There was some kind of fuss going on around one of the BBC cars, which had apparently got stuck in a muddy gateway; the driver wrenched the wheel, someone else heaved at a bumper. Further away people were setting a camera up at the entrance to the Tump: an entrance that was itself in fact an illusion since behind the two huge blocks and the lintel stone that formed the doorway the internal stonework had long since collapsed. Kate thought of lying curled up in there, as a small child, with her father and Aunt Nellie; that was before the place had assumed for her its aura of desolation. Then, it had been somehow different.

It’s futile, all this, she thought. Pointless. I wish they weren’t doing it; I wish I hadn’t come up. She planned to wait for Tom at the fence before the Tump: to wait inadvertently as it were, to take his arm, start talking… Planned, and then, when she got there, climbed over and went plodding on towards where Tony Greenway stood with the others.

I don’t like that wire fence, it spoils the uninhabited effect. We shall have that in shot if we pan away from me to the view down the valley. And if we pull back instead we shall get that corrugated iron thing in the corner of the field.

Better to put the camera the other side, pan left from me over the top of the Tump, nothing obtrusive there. The joy of filming is that anything can always be made to appear otherwise. With a bit of care and application. You can always get what you want in the end.

I don’t like the look of that sky, not one little bit. That, of course, is the one thing you damn well can’t do anything about – the bloody weather. Are you ready, Mike? he said, let’s go, I’m worried about the light. O.K., Sue?

The mouth of the barrow behind him, he began to talk to the camera. ‘Charlie’s Tump, this little hill is called. Charles the First is supposed to have hidden here, in flight from Cromwellian troops – or at least that’s been the local story, down the centuries. He didn’t, of course – there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest that he ever came near the place. But it has generated its own myth, like so many prehistoric sites. Because of course what it really is is a barrow – a Neolithic long barrow. And its real claim to fame is that it is here that Hugh Paxton excavated the grave goods that have since come to be known as the Danehurst hoard. The dig that established his name. And the dig that in many ways consolidated modern archaeological theories about Wessex. Paul Summers worked here with Paxton that summer…’

Cut. And re-assemble cameras and people for the next shot. That sky is getting very dicey.

This is all fairly boring, Tom thought. Standing here not quite being able to hear Paul Summers give a run-down on prehistoric Wessex to a camera, some people from the BBC and a few sheep. And Kate, who is not listening. And by the look of that sky it’s going to come chucking down any minute now.