Lovers and Newcomers (18 page)

He was thinking how the picture summed up Selwyn. Whatever might go wrong, and often did, Selwyn could convince people that the life he happened to be living was enviable because he was living it. It was a simple investment of self-confidence that Amos had never been able to achieve. Amos had been an eminent barrister, had grown rich, had an amiable wife and two sons who looked set to match his success, yet around Selwyn he still felt thwarted, as though there were some inner VIP room in life to which he had failed to gain admittance. He envied his old friend just as deeply and silently as he had done when Selwyn pranced in his velvet trousers at the Blue Peony decks, with a three-deep ring of girls surrounding him.

Selwyn leaned forward. ‘Whereas you couldn’t think of anything worse, eh? How long have we known each other?’

‘Um, forty years? Can that be right?’

‘Yes, and in all that time have you noticed that you’ve been getting more like yourself, while I’ve become a more pronounced version of me? That’s what happens to people. Forty years ago, did you expect that our tastes and inclinations were going to converge?’

Amos considered this proposition. ‘When you’re twenty, you think all people in their fifties look and behave the same. The old are grey, baggy, uninteresting and largely indistinguishable. So yes, I suppose I did.’

‘Nope. It was never going to happen, my friend. This is an age conversation. Twenty quid in the box.’

‘To hell with the bloody box.’

‘All right. I won’t tell if you don’t. Do you want another beer?’ They had devoured the food.

‘Haven’t you got any scotch?’

‘No.’ Selwyn was rolling himself a thin, whiskery cigarette. Amos had stopped smoking on doctor’s orders, even his good cigars, but he would have liked one now.

‘I’ll go and get mine.’

The rain had stopped, the house lights glowed in the empty kitchen, and Katherine still wasn’t home. Amos tried her mobile, but it was turned off. He hoisted the scotch bottle off the polished drinks tray and walked back across the yard. Selwyn had left the table and was trundling a wheelbarrow towards a mound of rubble. The bare light bulb cast his oversized shadow up the wall.

‘I thought we were going to have a drink,’ Amos said, exasperated.

Over his shoulder Selwyn answered, ‘We are. But since there are two of us, I want to shift a couple of barrow loads into the skip. It’s too much for Polly. Do you want to shovel or barrow?’

The skip was stationed outside the barn door, with a rather steeply inclined plank leading up to the lip.

‘Shovel.’

Amos trod over the piece of rubble that Selwyn had tossed out of the drain trench. It lay in a small heap of similar fragments, and he bent down to pick one up. It was a mud-caked chunk of dark brown earthenware. Selwyn saw him examining it.

‘What was the actual deal with the planning department for your work, by the way?’ Amos asked.

Selwyn did an elaborate yawn. ‘No deal. Application for conversion of outbuilding for domestic use, plans and drawings submitted, permission granted.’

‘Straightforward.’

‘It was, yes.’

Amos leaned on the shovel and the two men looked at each other. There were two shadows looming on the wall. Selwyn finished his cigarette and threw away the tiny butt, and the shadow of his arm swiped over the shadow of Amos’s head. ‘What’s the latest on your site? The princess and all her finery, and so on?’

Amos turned the fragment over and over in his fingers. He looked more closely, and saw a suggestion of a pattern pierced on one corner of it.

‘I’m waiting. That beardy digger and his cohorts have been formally granted a month’s suspension of work in the immediate area, to enable a properly structured excavation and study to take place. Nothing can happen in the meantime.
Nothing
. Zero. My contractor insists that it’s not worth trying to work around the edges, which means of course that they’ve got another job that will fit in nicely.’

In that time, Selwyn’s house would have floors and walls. Maybe even glass in the windows.

Selwyn put a hand on Amos’s shoulder. ‘That’s rough,’ he said, and it was clear that he meant it. ‘But in the great scheme of life, a few weeks isn’t so long.’

Amos considered a retort along the lines of it being plenty long enough to test his own sanity, whereas Selwyn would already have been carted away in a straitjacket. But Selwyn’s commiseration was genuine, and in any case there would only be temporary satisfaction in punching him in the jaw. He threw away the piece of pot and it landed somewhere in the shadows.

‘Let’s get on with it,’ Amos shouted.

They set to work.

Katherine and Chris were in a pub five minutes’ walk from his office. When they arrived it had been full of groups of noisy young people, probably estate agents – the windows of most of the adjacent shops were full of pictures of cottages – but now the crowd was thinning. Chris had found a table in the angle of a high-backed bench where they were screened from the remaining drinkers at the bar.

They had been talking for quite a long time.

Chris told her more about the excavation, tracing out the shape of the grave enclosure on the table top and explaining that it was unlikely that the shield and the torc would be the only finds to emerge.

‘There will be more?’

‘Those two pieces are so special, I’d expect there to be more ornaments, pottery, maybe coins. We have to excavate very carefully, so as not to destroy any remains. The smallest details can often be the most telling. Merely knowing what a person ate reveals a whole culture. Animal fats mean relative prosperity, a stew made of weeds abject poverty. Our princess may have been at the head of several villages made up of family groups. She’d have been their symbolic defender, or maybe she actually went to war against tribal enemies, like Boudicca. She may have been the daughter or the widow of a chieftain, or perhaps an exceptionally powerful or charismatic leader in her own right. Having been buried with a neck ornament and a shield like that, I do know that she was somebody of great note.’

She liked the way he talked about the princess and her people as though he knew them, as though they were living at a distance from where he and Katherine were sitting, but not so far away as to be inaccessible. In the end he interrupted himself.

‘I’m sorry. Archaeologists can get wildly over-enthusiastic and don’t notice that they’re boring the company.’

‘I’m interested.’

He grinned. His dark beard made his smile bright. ‘I’ve been accused of obsession. Preferring the company of the long-ago dead to the living and breathing. Not always unjustifiably.’

Katherine could see that he might be guilty of this, but it wasn’t the worst fault she could think of. It depended on who the living and breathing actually were.

‘If your work is about past lives, I can see it must sometimes be quite difficult to drag yourself into the present.’

His eyes were on her face. ‘Yes. It can be. What about you, Katherine?’

Their glasses were empty. Katherine knew she couldn’t have another drink, she had to drive all the way home to Meddlett, but she very much wanted to go on sitting here talking to Dr Christopher Carr. It was an ordinary after-work pub with a fruit machine flashing in a corner, yet she was feeling the same warmth and the desire somehow to capture the moment that she had experienced in the Griffin with Polly and Colin. What is it, she wondered, that was all of a sudden making her pub-prone? Another of those awkward developments peculiar to women of late middle age?

‘Me?’ she asked.

Chris glanced about. ‘I can’t see anyone else I might be directing the question at. I have been talking interminably about grave enclosures and linear earthworks, and now I’d like to hear something about you. Do you live in the present, for example?’

Katherine reached for her glass before remembering it was empty.

He read her thoughts. ‘You could have something different. It doesn’t have to be alcohol.’

‘Fruit juice, then.’

He came back with orange juice for her, another beer for himself. ‘I take the bus. Or walk. It’s only a couple of miles. Go on. What about you?’

It was probably at least thirty years since Amos had been on a bus.

Katherine considered. ‘Living in the present or in the past? You’re the second person this week to ask me a version of that question. Do I look displaced? No, maybe don’t answer that.’

‘You look wonderful, as a matter of fact.’

She discovered she had no idea how to deal with such a direct compliment. The only option seemed to ignore it, in case it had been a joke. Perhaps he would assume she was deaf.

He was leaning towards her, his hands on the table. They were good hands, square and capable. It would have been easy to reach out and grasp them.

Quickly she said, ‘I’m not certain I’ve lived at all. That is, I’ve done the usual things in the usual way, and mostly as well as I could, but I’m not convinced that that’s
living
. I mean, some people take risks, don’t they? They make sacrifices for the sake of others. They pioneer, or they make discoveries, or they overcome obstacles. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have done those things if circumstances had been different, but as it turned out the demands have never been placed on me. I can’t look back and say, that was difficult, it was a challenge and I rose to it and I’m proud of myself.

‘So what
have
I done? I’ve been a reasonably good wife and mother. My sons are in their twenties. They’re endowed with the usual healthy male quotient of self-interest and ambition. I do love them. Looking back, I see that I’ve been protected and kept in comfortable prosperity. I know how fortunate I am, compared with what a lot of women have to endure. It’s rather old-fashioned. Does all this sound ridiculous?’

‘Not ridiculous, no. I think you could be less dismissive of yourself.’

Could I? she wondered.

‘Are you married, Chris?’

‘I was. For twelve years. Sarah and I split up about four years ago and she’s now remarried to one of her colleagues. We have two daughters. They live with their mother and they stay with me most weekends. Daisy still loves that but nowadays Gemma doesn’t always want to come, she’d rather be with her mates. That’s normal, isn’t it? It’s all quite civilized, Mal – that’s the husband – and I even have a pint together from time to time. That’s not to say that I didn’t want to tear him apart when she left me. For the first year or so I could quite easily have killed and dismembered him. My daughters were asleep in his house, my wife was in his bed. Did they do the same things that she and I used to? I’d stumble around our place, remembering how it used to be when we were all together, and I was mad enough to hammer the walls with my fists until the bloke next door started hammering back. But now I see the two of them together, I can’t recall precisely what it felt like when she was married to me and not him. Occasionally I even wish I had the anguish back, at least that would be a validation. But not all that often.’

‘What about girlfriends?’ she ventured.

He said, ‘A couple. There’s no one at the moment.’ Then he added in a lower voice, ‘It doesn’t happen more than once or twice in a lifetime. You look at someone and you think, “Yes, of course, it’s you.
There
you are”.’

The bar was filling up again. These were different people, older and less exuberant than the young office workers. They were the ones who had gone home or somewhere else to eat a meal, and were now intending to drink away what was left of the evening. In any case, as far as Katherine and Chris were concerned the pub and the street and the whole city were deserted but for themselves.

Chris touched the back of her hand. ‘You’ve stayed married. Don’t dismiss that as an achievement. I expect it involved plenty of sacrifices and demands. Probably some pioneering.’

Katherine realized that he had not only listened to what she said to him, but had remembered it. How very unlike Amos that was.

Perhaps he was now hoping or even expecting that she might make some parallel admissions about her own marriage. But she had already been disloyal enough. The details she could at least keep to herself.

‘I suppose it would be an unusual marriage if it hadn’t.’

Chris nodded, looking away from her. He was lonely, she thought. Not in an odd or remotely threatening sense, but just in the way of a warm, affectionate man who wanted someone to be with.

‘You’ll marry again. You’ll probably have a second family. That’s what happens, isn’t it?’

His momentarily assumed expression of mock horror made her laugh.

‘Small children? All over again? At my age?’

‘Are you so very ancient?’

They told each other their ages. Katherine was the older by nine years. She was nearly relieved it was that much. They might divert themselves by paying compliments, but she thought that on the whole men didn’t take a serious interest in women who were their senior by almost a decade.

But at the same time she felt a sharp and quite precise pang of disappointment. Dr Christopher Carr was an attractive man. Or – she made the effort to be honest with herself – she found him attractive, decidedly so. And how long was it since she had thought anything of the kind, about any man?

Decades, probably.

She drank the last of her orange juice, now warm and sticky, and wished it were gin. Luckily, the lights were dim and so probably Chris couldn’t see her pink face.

A silence developed between them. Katherine played with the idea of breaking it by suggesting they go to a hotel together, just to see how he would extricate himself.

‘Well. Look at the time,’ he said. He was grinning now. His confidence had returned.

‘Yes, I’d better get back. Amos will be wondering where I’ve got to.’

A cold wind drove spitting rain down the cobbled street outside the pub and Katherine pulled her coat tighter. Chris insisted on walking back with her to her car, parked further from his office than it need have been because she was unfamiliar with the town’s one-way system. They strode at quite a pace past the estate agents’ windows, apologizing when they accidentally bumped shoulders at a crossing.