Lovers and Newcomers (22 page)

‘Where’s Damon?’ he asked.

‘How should I know?’

‘You haven’t seen him?’

Jessie turned the shocking voltage of her glare on him. Her lower lip stuck out, ripe and shiny.

‘We split, remember. That’s that. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘That’s not answering the question.’

‘What are you, fucking CID all of a sudden? I haven’t got to answer your questions, Kieran Kennedy.’

Geza looked in, wearing a khaki camouflage parka over bleached jeans.

‘I am going now. I will be in the caravan if you want something,’ he told her, frowning at Kieran. Geza lived in a static caravan parked on a field past the council houses, far enough from the picturesque end of Meddlett.

‘Yeah. I’m all right, mate. See you, Geza’.

‘Not him as well?’ Kieran muttered.

She looked on him with scorn. ‘He’s
gay
, you knob.’

‘
Have
you seen Damon? I want to know exactly what you told him about Mead and the princess. After I gave you a lift and told you to keep it to yourself, and everything. What have you done?’

Jessie lifted her head. ‘Princess?’

‘Haven’t you seen the news?’

‘Listen, geek boy. I’ve been working all day, or else I’ve been at my place listening to my music and having a well-earned kip. There’s been a load of people in here, and a lot of talk about stuff being nicked off your secret excavation. What else should I know?’

He gestured in disbelief. ‘The burial site. She’s a tribal chieftain of the Iceni. We found the skeleton.
I
did, in fact.’ He couldn’t resist trying to impress her with that, which was a joke, Jessie of all people. ‘She was buried with ceremonial goods, gold and coins, an amazing shield, and someone heard about it and came last night and ripped off everything we hadn’t already recovered. How can that be, Jessie? Why don’t you tell me how?’

Jessie undid her apron and dropped it on the table. She was smiling now, a dazzling slice of lips and teeth that utterly transformed her. ‘A princess, eh?’

Kieran didn’t look at the low scoop of her T-shirt, or the exposed fronds of her tattoo.

Jessie waltzed in a slow circle. ‘Ah, I love the sound of that. A proper role model, as they say. We could do with one, around here. Who was she, archaeology man? What was she like?’

He was annoyed by her failure to grasp the significance of the loss. He felt it as deeply as if that stupendous torc and the coins and the imagined splendour of the lost goods had all belonged to him personally, and as if they had been snatched out of his reverent hands and the gold and the precious shreds of prehistory carelessly thrown to the four winds. Fury blazed up in him. He grabbed her wrist, above the hygiene dressing she was obliged to wear for work.

‘What have you done?’ he demanded.

Jessie’s smile instantly turned to a scowl. She snatched her hand back and hit him full in the face. He gasped with the pain and the indignity.

‘Don’t touch me. You and your stupid dig and your degree, pissy prehistory and geeky job, and poncing around the place like the batty professor. Damon is worth ten of you, and he’s a useless piece of shit. Now fuck off. You
and
your brother.’

She stormed out of the bar. Out in the pub yard she let Rafferty out of the store shed where the dog had spent the evening lying on a pile of flatpack boxes. They disappeared into the night.

Kieran sat nursing his pride and his stinging face. Vin appeared through the bead curtain separating the bar from the kitchen.

‘Still here, are you? Haven’t you got no home to go to?’

NOVEMBER

SEVEN

The last few days of October trickled away, the nights lengthening dramatically and the light even at midday seeming as grey and filmy as old cobwebs. Rooks noisily debated in the bare trees.

The police withdrew from the site, leaving a sea of mud. The archaeologists returned and sadly picked over what remained. Another handful of coins was uncovered, fused amongst the fragments of the earthenware jar that had once contained them, but the meagreness of this remaining hoard only emphasized the imagined lustre of what was missing.

Katherine was in her office in London when Chris called her. He was in London too, he told her, showing the torc and the shield to interested experts. They agreed to meet for dinner that evening in an Italian restaurant. She shielded the phone handset as they spoke, conscious of her colleagues at the adjacent desks, surprised to find herself making these furtive arrangements even though she had longed for his call.

She hurried home first, to the small flat in Bloomsbury she and Amos had bought as a pied-à-terre following the move to Mead. She stood for a long time looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, wondering how a woman in the second half of her fifties prepared for an evening like this one. Her dating days had been short-lived, and were decades in the past. Her drawers and cupboards contained what now looked like expensive camouflage – clothes to conceal ripples and bulges, to present a modest face to the world, to hide within. Plenty of taupe and black. Nothing gaudy or flamboyant or, God forbid, sexy. For a moment she played with the idea of calling Miranda for advice. But she already knew what Miranda would say.

‘No, K, not a little black dress. Much too obvious.’

She opened her lingerie drawer, then catching on to the subtext of her own imagining she slammed it shut again with her cheeks burning. This was all racing ahead of her, too fast, too eagerly. She should call him now and cancel. Definitely. She looked for her mobile.

Hesitating, with the phone in her hand, she thought a little harder.

It was unlikely that Chris would take very precise note of what she was wearing, given that he didn’t seem to worry too much about his own clothes (North Face). It was only a dinner, and no promises had been made. Underwear was not yet and might never be relevant, so the absence of Agent Provocateur was not a crucial factor.

Besides, whatever she wore it would not make her beautiful, or sexy. Clothes were just clothing. She
felt
sexy tonight, therefore she was. This last wanton thought made her smile, an unaccustomed slow beat of private amusement.

She put on scent, trousers, heels, a cashmere sweater. She was just doing up her coat (camel, Max Mara) when her phone rang. She reached for it. It would be him, of course. She hadn’t changed her mind; he had.

‘Hi, Mum.’

It was Sam, her elder son. He was the one who resembled her, whereas Toby took after Amos. She was close to both her boys, but they seemed lately to have floated off into a universe of work, peopled by friends she had never met, and sub-cultures and private languages that in no way touched on the family world.

‘Dad told me you’re down here. I thought you might like a drink or the cinema?’

‘I would have done. But I’m having dinner with a friend.’

‘Where are you meeting her?’

An obvious assumption. Katherine thought quickly. She’d better not mention the restaurant in case Sam breezily suggested looking in on them. Her mind went blank of any other of a million possible venues.

‘Mum?’

She mumbled that they were meeting first at the British Museum (this coming to mind because Chris had told her it was where he would be this afternoon), and then they planned to find somewhere nearby.

‘Are you all right?’ Sam asked, after a pause.

It had been one tiny lie, but delivered with massive ineptitude. She was no good at this, she realized.

‘Of course I am. Just in a hurry, darling. Shall I call you tomorrow?’

She was on her way. Katherine finished doing up her coat, walked out into the street and hailed a taxi. She felt that she might as well have been wearing a sign around her neck. A Woman on the Brink of Adultery.

Mead was a good winter house. With its low-set windows and thick walls it could be dark in summer, but as the year’s sun and warmth sank away it seemed to settle on its haunches and happily turn inwards. Fires warmed the old chimney breasts, wood ash powdered the stone hearths, pools of yellow lamp light glowed in the rooms. Miranda always relished the point at which autumn dipped into winter. She ordered books from Amazon, piled up the cushions on her sofas and drew the curtains, preparing for her own version of hibernation.

‘Are we Green or Mauby in this household?’ Selwyn demanded on the same evening that Katherine and Chris met for dinner.

‘What?’

A couple of days before, Selwyn and Polly had been talking to Vin Clarke in the Griffin.

He had told them the long history of the Fifth of November festival in Meddlett. Under Elizabeth I the area surrounding the village had been home to a number of devout Catholic families. The Lord Chamberlain at the time of Guy Fawkes had also been a local man, and following the discovery of the Catesby plotters in November 1605, fighting had broken out between the Lord Chamberlain’s estate workers and supporters, and the sons and servants of Catholic families. One man from each side had been killed. Their names were Green and Mauby, and in the modern commemoration of the events, two men from the village, dressed up as their historic counterparts, took their places at the head of two ragged troops of followers and led them through the streets by a traditional route, rapping on doors as they passed to call out more followers.

Each year, by the time they reached the blazing bonfire most of the village and dozens of people from beyond would be dancing and singing in one or other of the groups. The mock battle that followed was supposed to be genteelly choreographed, but had occasionally been known to develop into something closer to a real fight. Over the years, the ferocity depended on which villagers and outside factions were currently opposing each other and how much drink they had consumed.

‘Which one?’ Selwyn repeated now. Polly looked up from her book. The three of them were sitting by the fire in Miranda’s drawing room. Colin was away.

‘Neither,’ Miranda snapped.

‘Must be one or the other,’ Selwyn said reasonably. ‘According to Vin in the pub, everyone around Meddlett knows which side they belong on. Like Montague and Capulet, Rangers or Celtic. You can’t just pick a team, you have to have it in your blood.’

Polly’s imagination had been caught by the publican’s story, so she had looked up the background history. ‘Rangers and Celtic is a better analogy because it was a religious divide,’ she said. ‘James the First’s Lord Chamberlain of the time, the Earl of Suffolk, was one of the men who discovered the kegs of gunpowder beneath the Palace of Westminster on the fifth of November.’

‘Yes, that’s right. Lockington was one of the earl’s family estates,’ Miranda put in.

Lockington was a nearby hamlet, no more than a cluster of estate cottages dominated by a fine hall rebuilt in the eighteenth century and now owned by the National Trust. The grounds were used for vintage car rallies and, unpopularly, for model aircraft flying days. The gnat’s whine of circling models in still weather was sometimes audible at Mead.

Miranda knew the stories too. She folded her knees beneath her on the battered sofa.

‘When the news of the conspiracy reached Norfolk, the Lockington men poured out of the fields, led by a man called Robert Green who was the earl’s land manager and a fierce anti-Papist. The mob took their pikestaffs and converged on the homes of several known Catholic recusant families. They beat on the doors with their sticks until they either opened up or were broken down. Green’s idea was to march all the Catholics to the green in Meddlett and force them to watch burning effigies of the Pope and Guy Fawkes and the conspirators, but the Catholics fought back. Women and children ran out to hide in the fields and hedges, the men blackened their faces and wrapped themselves in their cloaks so that neighbour couldn’t recognize neighbour.’

Selwyn leaned across and lifted a log from the basket on the hearth.

Miranda drank some of her wine. ‘There was a night of hand-to-hand fighting in the Meddlett lanes and alleyways. As the story goes, under cover of all this Green’s son William was caught hiding in a hay barn with the daughter of John Mauby, a Catholic. She might have been with William by choice or under duress, but in any case the boy was dragged away and butchered. Before morning Mauby was dead too, murdered in retaliation.

‘In the aftermath some of the Catholics fled the area altogether, others went into hiding. The bitterness lasted for centuries. It’s still with us, in one disguise or another, and the violence that bubbles up from time to time around here reflects that.’

Polly said, ‘Ah, so there is a Montague and Capulet dimension as well. It’s a bloodthirsty tale.’

Selwyn had listened to all this, lying back and tilting the red wine in his glass to catch the firelight glimmer.

‘Jake’s family, where did they stand? Pikestaffs or home guard?’ he asked.

‘The Meads were yeomen in those days, and converts to Anglicanism under Elizabeth. Always an eye to the main chance, Jake used to say.’

The log collapsed in the grate. Sparks flew up the chimney.

‘Greens, then. Pity, in a way. I’d been drawn to the other side. Still, history dictates.’

Miranda raised an eyebrow at him.

‘Tell me you’re not planning to get involved in any of this.’

‘I can’t, because I am. More than that, I’d say it’s absolutely not to be missed. From Vin’s description.’

‘But it’s
horrible
. Dozens of boozed-up kids roaming the streets breaking windows and scratching cars, a kind of politically correct hog-roast parish fun unsuccessfully imposed on centuries of hatred and prejudice, police pretending to enter into the spirit of the night, and fireworks going off around your ankles. Vin Clarke’s a publican, he sells beer. He’s not going to tell you to stay at home, is he?’

Selwyn grinned in his piratical way. ‘What’s not to like?’

‘Believe me. Lock the doors.’

‘Mirry, why do you loathe this picturesque commemoration of our local history with such a passion?’