Making It Up (11 page)

So where has she gone?

Paul looks around the room. Penny's anorak hangs on the back of the door, but in any case those black clouds he watched earlier have dispersed—the threat of rain has passed. Her brush and comb are on the dressing table. Her nightdress protrudes from under the pillow. There is a pile of books on her bedside table—paperback novels for the most part. Paul does not read novels himself, of course, and finds her addiction vaguely irritating. Surely there are better ways of spending her time? She has been reading other things lately, too. He can see authorial names in the pile that give him a tingle of annoyance: Germaine Greer, Kate Millett. He has found an attitude of amused skepticism to be the best thing where this sort of stuff is concerned.

Paul has a wash and goes down to the bar. He will have to do some hard talking to Chambers this evening, who is becoming rather too independent and high-handed. This dig is under joint direction. Chambers had no business sinking that trench without consultation. He does not appreciate the importance of more work in the flotation tank on material from the best stratified layers. It was a mistake to team up with him. He has a considerable reputation but no sense of procedure. And an exasperating personality.

 

 

Sampson is getting up his nose. Tight-arsed bugger. Okay, so he's considered the bee's knees these days where theory's concerned, but his fieldwork is nothing to write home about. And he's a menace on site—always on about how we need to have a meeting about this, and we haven't yet agreed the agenda for that. We'd grind to a halt if things were done his way.

Mike is enjoying the dig. He always enjoys digs. Digs are what he is for. And this is an absolutely prime site, one that he's been dying to tackle. Plus it's not a bad group, Sampson aside. Old June is all right, even if she can't always take a joke. Guy Lambert seems a decent sort, and prepared to work his socks off. Mrs. S—Penny—is a bit subdued but who wouldn't be, married to that bloke? The students are the usual mixed bunch. Reasonable lineup of girls, couple of nice enough lads. That Cambridge twerp Luke is a bit of a pain in the neck, with his public school drawl and his old banger of an MG. Daddy's a high court judge—that was made much of on his CV, and Mummy's some sort of second cousin twice removed of Paul Sampson, which is why young Luke is getting his hands dirty on Cornbury Hill. Something to keep the boy occupied and out of trouble for a few weeks of the vacation. Luke knows sod-all about prehistory and cares less, but that expensive education has taught him how to lay on the charm. June has fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, the silly girl—doesn't seem to notice that it's never Luke heaving the big barrow, and that when it's raining Luke's got himself the cushy job pot-washing in the tent. Well, I've got news for young Luke. Guess who's on Elsan duty tomorrow.

 

 

Alice does not want to be an archaeologist. She is interested all right, but some basic instinct for self-preservation tells her that this is not for her. She has no idea what she does want to do—if indeed the bomb spares her for long enough to do anything—but she knows that she lacks a certain fervor that is required, and that she senses in all the professionals on the dig, however variously manifested. Admittedly, you can apparently be an archaeologist and seldom dig at all, if ever. You can spend your time in a lab, assessing bones or snails or pollen, or scrutinizing bits of pottery. You can behave more like an anthropologist and batten onto such hunter-gatherers as still exist around the globe, and note the physical effects on the environment of butchering or cooking, with a view to applying these insights to interpretation of the archaeological record. Actually, Alice doesn't think she would much fancy that—hunter-gatherers tend to live in the most disagreeable circumstances, by all accounts; Cornbury Hill on a wet day is bad enough. She tries to envisage the Sampsons in the Kalahari or Alaska, or indeed Mike; no such experience has been claimed.

Professor Sampson had a face like thunder in the pub this evening. First he and Mike were cloistered together in a corner of the saloon bar for an hour or so, not looking as though they were enjoying each other's company, and then Penny Sampson suddenly appeared and her husband got up and kind of herded her upstairs. Later, she came down by herself and ate a Scotch egg with June.

 

 

June wonders if something is up with Penny Sampson. She seems on edge this evening, and earlier June saw her getting into the car, having rushed off from the dig as soon as they'd finished for the day. Said she was meeting a friend. “Did you find your friend all right?” June asked kindly, but Penny didn't seem to want to go into that, so they had something to eat and talked shop. Paul was nowhere to be seen, though Mike Chambers was much in evidence, as usual, chatting up anyone who came into the bar and showing off like crazy if they displayed any interest in the dig.

From time to time June would like to clobber Mike. That stream of not-so-funny jokes. The professional northerner stance that assumes the moral high ground because he's more working-class more right-on more rooted more plainspoken than anyone else. Which means he's entitled to make fun of anyone with a posh accent, such as Luke. It's okay for him to tease Luke by imitating the way he talks—that officer-class voice, Mike calls it, with a grin and the twinkly look that's meant to say—just having a laugh, nothing personal, okay? But there'd be all hell to pay if anyone started taking the mickey where
he's
concerned.

Plus, she can't stand all that macho stuff. Strutting about the place in too-tight jeans, the testosterone radiating off him. His favorite word is “wimp”—anyone's a wimp when he wants to have a go at them. Always with the grin and the twinkle, of course. And he's an out-and-out male chauvinist pig, no question. He likes women all right, but for one thing only. He fancies Laura, as does Luke, which is another reason Mike has got it in for Luke.

In June's opinion, Luke is a really nice boy. Okay—he's public school and his dad's a judge, but that's hardly his fault. He's got manners, which is more than you can say for many students, and he's helpful and friendly.

June has never had an academic post, but she has dug alongside so many students that she considers herself an expert on the species. This lot are a pretty reasonable bunch, in fact—Luke especially, and Alice, who is a bright, serious girl and genuinely interested in the work. Peter and Brian are your typical twenty-year-old lads, all chat and cheek. Laura is a bit of a home-counties princess, but she is pulling her weight. Eva is rather a whiner, always fussing about her grant application. She wants to do an M.A. in archaeology and anthropology, which makes her the only one of them for whom this dig is a really significant CV item, and that is very much how she sees it. June has already been lined up as a referee. Eva really wants Paul Sampson, of course, but doesn't quite like to ask.

 

 

Paul took her upstairs as soon as she came back, and required an explanation. He needed her to help him with sorting the seeds and snails sieved in the flotation tanks, and she was nowhere to be found. The bedroom in chaos; the car gone. Why? Where? The day's work is not at an end when we come down from the hill; she should know that.

One of those women, apparently. This so-called group. Happened to be down this way and wanted to meet up. He had made it clear that there was no time for this kind of thing in the middle of a dig. And then she had declined to help with the sorting, said she had a headache, and went down to the bar.

From time to time Paul remarks that his wife has apparently joined the sisterhood. He says this with a grin, which can be interpreted as benignly tolerant or sardonic, according to inclination. If the other person appears baffled, he spells it out: Penny is displaying feminist tendencies. But he does not pursue the subject. He lets it fall aside—a matter for observation, merely. If someone seems keen to develop the point—women, for instance—he listens with a quizzical look on his face, a faint smile, one eyebrow lightly cocked. Those who know him well are familiar with that expression: students, colleagues, wives. When the other person is through with whatever point they had to make he comes back with some quick and dismissive rejoinder and takes the conversation elsewhere. So much for that.

 

 

Alice cannot imagine being thirty, like June, let alone forty or fifty or sixty, and really old is quite inconceivable. Since she is unlikely to get there this is irrelevant, but she does find herself thinking about age, as she scrabbles away up on the hill.

The bones that they find are those of people who died young; life was short back then. Someone as old as Paul Sampson would have stuck out a mile; a person in his forties like Mike would have been thought elderly. Alice has a great-aunt who is ninety-three and still expressing forceful opinions. If it were not for the bomb, Alice too could presumably expect that she might fetch up thus.

The bomb is special to us lot, thinks Alice, but of course there has always been something around to give people the chop. You got picked off by an arrow or a spear, or you starved or you died of disease. We've got antibiotics and immunization but we've got the bomb too, so they kind of cancel each other out in terms of progress.

It is a golden day, up here this morning. A blue sky with rippling veils of cirrus cloud, a soft stir in the wind, bees and butterflies at work on the grassy hillside. The fields round about are studded with sheep, black-and-white cows are spread out in drifts against the green. Hard to believe that anything nasty ever took place here. But it did, it did. Witness those gnarled fragments of weaponry lined up on the trestle tables down at the school, witness the bones.

But those people must also have looked up and thought: Oh, it's a nice day. Or something along those lines. They must have noticed the wildflowers and the butterflies, even if they didn't make lists and check up on the names, like Alice does, which is profoundly twentieth-century behavior. Cattle would have been of extreme interest to them, though not in any aesthetic sense. And they would above all have been intensely conscious of other people, of one another. The hill would have been a hotbed of interaction, of observation, just as it is now.

Alice reckons that Luke and Laura have done it. They've been to bed together. There's that look about both of them—a sort of heightened, satisfied look. And they've been rather pointedly not paying too much attention to each other this morning. How did they manage it? Where? Certainly not in the school—we'd all have known. They must have gone off somewhere in Luke's car. And, yes, come to think of it, one didn't notice either of them around yesterday evening. Peter and Brian were in the pub and I went for a walk with Eva, but where were Luke and Laura? In a field somewhere, presumably—bedded down in a hay meadow, all very Thomas Hardy. Well, at least Laura won't be a fallen woman, wandering along the hedgerows with a baby in her arms. Probably she won't get pregnant. She's on the pill anyway, in honor of the boyfriend—she told me that on the first night here. Her pills are stuck up on the shelf in our room, so that she won't forget. Will she be mentioning Luke to the boyfriend? Laura believes that other people should be absolutely open and candid with each other—she explained all that when we were working in Trench B the first week, apropos of the boyfriend and the fact that they've agreed not to get engaged at the moment, which doesn't mean that they may not do so in the future, simply that they both think it's too early for an absolute commitment. But of course they sleep together, that goes without saying; Laura thinks that sex should just be free and natural. I wonder if the boyfriend will agree.

 

 

They're fucking, those two. It's bloody obvious. The looks they give each other. You can practically smell the sex.

All right, all right—I'm an envious bugger of forty-five and I wouldn't mind getting into her pants myself. Not that she's ever going to realize that, and nor will anyone else—I've always known better than to make a fool of myself over students.

Pity June turns me right off. No joy there.

 

 

Apparently a very famous archaeologist is going to pay a visit to the dig. A Grand Old Man. Alice has heard of Sir John Causley, and so has Eva, but none of the other students have. The prospect of this visitor has both Professor Sampson and Mike Chambers in quite a stew. There is much polishing up of the site; a new trench has been opened. Alice is given the task of redoing some of the more scruffy labels, because she has nice handwriting, which meant a peaceful day on her own down at the school. The material on the table is more orderly in consequence, and she has learned a lot in the process, such as how to distinguish a pin from an awl, or bronze from iron when both are lumps of corroded metal. She doubts if this knowledge is going to be of any use in later life, but since she fully accepts that knowledge is to be valued for its own sake, that is not an issue. She is not after all studying history at university as a vocational training.

The children at Little Cornbury primary school have also been studying history. This is evident from the artwork around the room. Greek vase figures have been most convincingly reproduced by Sharon Curtis, age ten, and various others; there is a plywood model of the Parthenon, mathematically exact, that must have required many painstaking hours; portrait drawings of the Greek gods flank an impressive clay head of Zeus, with beard and flowing locks. Clearly, history has been good fun. Which is fine, thinks Alice, arranging another arrowhead in its little plastic pouch: thus do you engage the interest of ten-year-olds. She wishes she had been at a school like this.