Sandlands (18 page)

‘And 614 – or whenever it was Raedwald was knocking about. Except that would be my lot, not the Germans.'

Momentarily puzzled, Bill frowned at her.

‘Vikings – Norsemen. Freya's a Norse name.'

‘And you're from Denmark? Or your family are?'

She grinned and shook her head. ‘Basildon. Another pint?'

 

It was perfect weather for the cycle ride to Friston the following afternoon, and Bill was getting the hang of the bike; he was using a range of gears from fourteenth to eighteenth. But the church, when he arrived, was disappointing: pretty enough, but heavily restored in the nineteenth century. The porch was plain and bare, with none of the ‘niches and shields' that James described – and certainly no sign of the coat of arms with the three Anglo-Saxon crowns. In the graveyard, wading knee-deep through yellowing grass and meadowsweet and overblown, head-heavy poppies, he found no Ager tombstones. It should be no surprise – fiction was fiction, after all – but he felt a sense of deflation nonetheless, and on the way back the hills seemed all to be against him and the sun was oppressive on his back. His collar chafed and he was sure his neck was burning.

After a shower he found himself hoping that Freya would be in the pub again, to commiserate on his failed mission. She was.

‘There's more pie,' she informed him by way of greeting. ‘Turkey and ham.' But through a mouthful of béchamel and shortcrust pastry she tendered little sympathy. ‘So Froston isn't Friston. It's somewhere else – or he just made it up.'

For some reason her robust dismissiveness rather cheered him up. ‘What about you, then? Did you despoil any historic treasures today? Rob any good graves?'

‘We don't do that any more.' For once, she really seemed in earnest. ‘Archaeologists – we're not like the gold-digger in your story. Those days of pot-hunting are long past – plundering the pyramids, stripping bare the sacred sites of other civilisations to sell the loot or cart things off and put them on display. Self-enrichment, self-aggrandisement.'

‘Cultural imperialism? But it's Suffolk you're digging up, not Byzantium or Asia Minor.'

She nodded, her brows drawn to a small crease. ‘But it's just another sort of imperialism, isn't it? The know-it-all present lording it over the past. The Victorians were terrible for it – and right through to the twenties and thirties, too.'

‘So what are you doing now, if you're not trying to know everything?'

At that, the crease smoothed away and she smiled at him. ‘Oh, don't worry, we're still appalling know-it-alls. We dig things up, but then we photograph and catalogue, record and document, and as often as not we put things back. It's not the finds so much as the findings. Not the objects but the stories they tell.'

‘So – you're no longer looking for the Holy Grail?'

The smile widened. ‘Nor the Arc of the Covenant, either. That Indiana Jones has a lot to answer for.'

Now it was Bill's turn to be sober. ‘I'm not sure the ghost of William Ager would make the distinction. I suspect for him it's disturbing things in the first place that's the sacrilege. The past just needs leaving well alone.'

For a while they attended to their pie in silence. Bill thought of fields where the soil had yielded its ancient possessions not to the archaeologist's trowel but to the tractor, working them up to the surface to be broken and scattered beneath the blade of the plough. He thought of artefacts lost to the wind and rain and sea: to coastal erosion, as at Dunwich, which he had visited as a boy with his grandmother, and seen broken headstones and human bones, shockingly naked and white, sticking through the sandy cliff at grotesque angles like trauma-shattered limbs, so that he'd thought it must be a battlefield until Gran told him it was just an old cemetery, going over the edge.

Recalling him from his meanderings, Freya said, ‘There are still holy grails, it's just that they're not things any more.'

‘So they're... what?'

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Explanations? Connections?' She must have been working in a vest; there was a line of fragile white at each side in the golden brown, further out along her collarbone than the straps of her dress. His own neck prickled.

‘Like us, then – like historians. Except my delving is all above ground. In county record offices, not tumuli. I do the Civil War. It's all old documents – letters, court rolls.'

‘Less muddy, at least.'

‘Just a bit of dust and mildew, sometimes.'

‘No risk of sunburn.'

His gaze loitered on the bronzed shoulders. ‘No. No sunburn.'

‘And you dig up secrets, not Anglo-Saxon crowns.'

He nodded, sitting back in his chair and sipping his beer. It was true: betrayals and chicaneries, dark deeds dragged out and exposed to daylight, these were his stock-in-trade.

Freya leaned intently forward. ‘The thing about secrets is, they're not like a silver crown. Once you've unearthed them, they cannot be put back.' She sought his eye and he saw that she was only half laughing. ‘So you see, it's you the vengeful ghosts of the past should be pursuing, not me.'

 

‘I read your story.' Tonight's pie was chicken and leek, and they had carried it outside on to the terrace, leaving the bar to a leather-hatted melodeon player singing a song about a foggy night at sea. Freya was attacking her plate with vigour. ‘Online, yesterday evening. I read “A Warning to the Curious”.'

‘And? What did you think?' He found he really wanted to know.

‘Well, I ended up going to sleep with the light on, if that makes you happy.'

He grinned. ‘Sorry about that.'

‘
And
since that day
,' announced the melodeonist through the open bar door, ‘
we'll roam the bay, until we find the
Navy Island gold
.'

Freya waved her beer glass. ‘I was thinking, though. He was spookily prophetic, wasn't he, your M. R. James? The barrow on the hill, overlooking the water where the enemy ships might come. The buried Anglo-Saxon treasure. Even the possible Raedwald connection. It's all exactly like Sutton Hoo, isn't it? But you say he wrote the story in 1925. That's more than a decade before they started to dig at the Hoo.'

‘Yes... But I suppose they knew there could be something there. I mean, the mounds were pretty obvious, sitting there for all to see. And there'd been looting in the past, things already found. Coins and so on.'

‘...a
man names Bones took a chest ashore...'

Freya impaled a potato and nodded eagerly. ‘Right. And did you know they'd found that ship at Snape as well?'

‘At Snape?'

‘I looked it all up last night. Don't you love the Internet? They found an Anglo-Saxon burial ship on Snape Common – it was excavated back in the 1860s. Not as big as the one at Sutton, and the grave goods were missing – probably been raided by earlier looters. But I wondered if maybe James knew about it.'

‘...
he killed his men, and cursed their souls; to roam
as ghosts, and protect the gold...'

‘Maybe he had even visited the site there, at Snape,' Freya persisted.

‘An archaeology fan?'

‘Well, why not? He was a medieval scholar, wasn't he?'

One evening on Wiki and she seemed to know more about it all than he did. ‘It's true that's very nearby,' he said. ‘To the places in the story, I mean. Snape Common practically backs on to Friston.'

‘There you are, then.' Her eyes gleamed triumphantly. They were, he noticed, a sun-dappled hazel green.

Inside the bar now an elderly woman was singing, strongly but tunelessly, about a lover gone to sea to face the foe amid the blund'ring cannons' roar. There was history, he thought, that wasn't buried in the earth or hidden in old papers. He would have made some observation of the kind to Freya but, before he could frame the thought, she said, ‘Speaking of archaeology fans, you should come and visit my dig some time. It's only me and the prof – not even her, some days – and I'm sure she won't mind. Come along and I'll give you the tour. If you're interested in a hole in the ground three metres square and a bit of old wall.'

‘Since you sell it so well, how can I resist? Thank you. And actually, I've been meaning to get down to the church. It's the other reason I came – apart from M. R. James, and a holiday, of course.'

‘Oh?'

‘My family came from here, you see – my grandmother's family. I used to come and stay when I was a kid. She lived in Southwold then, but she was born here in the village. I thought I might take a poke round the gravestones, maybe look at the parish register, and see what I can find.'

‘The old family tree thing?'

‘Not quite that.' He had an historian's disdain for fashionable genealogy, with its obsessive box-ticking. Pure snobbery, no doubt. ‘But family history, anyway.'

‘Parish records...' Freya's mouth, above the rim of her pint, was flirting with a smile. ‘Do I scent dust and mildew? A busman's holiday as well as a pilgrimage?'

 

By the weekend, even Freya had had her fill of pub pie. ‘D'you fancy a barbecue? A proper beach barbecue, I mean?'

They bought the fish from one of the fishermen's sheds on the beach at Aldeburgh: little flat dabs, locally caught, six of them for a fiver.

‘
Six?
'

Freya wafted a breezy hand. ‘Oh, we'll need three each, there's nothing on them.'

‘What are dabs, anyway?' He'd never seen them in Sainsbury's.

‘No idea. But you'll see – they taste like the North Sea. 'Cept without the sewage, obviously.'

She was right. The driftwood they gathered had been salted and seasoned by the sea until it was light as balsa; once they'd persuaded a match to light and not blow out, it caught like straw, and the shingle drew in air to whip the flames. Freya had brought kitchen foil, a lemon and a penknife; she gutted the fish with a nonchalance that was almost alarming. They were cooked in minutes and, eating scaldingly with his fingers and through mouthfuls of small bones, Bill had never tasted anything more delicious.

If the fire had lit readily and burned quickly it nevertheless died slowly, leaving them to lie back on their elbows and stare into the winking embers, or watch for the occasional flurry of rising sparks. It was strange, he thought, how the assortment of broken planks and branches kept their shape: empty, glowing crimson hulls, hollowed inside to little but hot air, first by the seawater and then by the fire. One touch and they would no doubt fall to ash.

Dust to dust
. Like the timber ribs of the exhumed burial ship at Sutton Hoo, which turned to powder as soon as exposed to air.

‘Is that the Martello tower? The one in the story?' Freya's words seemed to come to him from another time and place rather than from just across the fire. He blinked at her through the trickle of smoke.

‘I think so, yes.'

It lay along the beach, beyond them to the south, a massive squat cylinder of sombre grey brick – or in fact more a quatrefoil than a cylinder, with its four great clustered towers.

‘No wonder they were worried about invasion, those Ager blokes. The ones who were guarding Raedwald's crown. I mean, it's everywhere, isn't it? The physical threat of it. Those concrete pillboxes in all the fields on the way down here, waiting to defend the coast from two lots of Germans who never came. And then that bloody big thing, too. Whole garrisons of soldiers, watching for the French who never came either.'

Before that the Spanish, who'd sailed straight past, already defeated and in tatters. ‘Luckily for us,' he said.

‘Right.' Through the darkness and the shimmer of rising heat he could make out the light in her hazel eyes. ‘Or maybe not lucky. Maybe there really is some powerful protective magic at work along this coast.'

‘What about your lot, though?' He offered a smile, hoping to see her return it, but her expression remained distant, dreamy. ‘The Danes – the Vikings. They came, all right.'

Came and saw and conquered; or rather, they came and raided and went away – or came and married and settled. But it was tempting to believe in Freya's talismanic sorcery, even so. Lying here in the glimmer of the dying firelight, hearing the slop and suck of breaking waves at the waterline, there was a powerful sense of the collapsing telescope of time. He felt he knew what they must have felt, those long-dead ancestors, as they listened for the lap of the feared Norsemen's oars, or watched for lights where no lights should be, out in the shifting mass of indigo and grey that stretched from beach to horizon. Did the cries of gulls and terns transform into the far-off calls of warrior sailors, hastily hushed, as they hauled up the sail to drift in stealth towards the shore? But there was no seaborne invader now to threaten these shores. It was a long time since Bill's parents had lived with the threat of the Soviet tanks rolling westwards towards them across Germany and Holland. These days the spectre was just a lone stranger with a rucksack – or even a neighbour, student, colleague – though surely not here on the Suffolk coast.

There was still some warmth coming from the burnt-out husks of firewood as well as from the seared pebbles surrounding and beneath. But August was more than half over and the sun was gone already, and with it much of the day's heat. It felt suddenly like summer's end. Maybe the sea cooled slower than the air – or faster (Bill was no physicist) – or perhaps it was the sudden drop in temperature, but whatever the reason, a sea mist had formed above the breakers. At first there were only wisps of haze, like steam over a heated outdoor pool, but gradually they merged and increased in density, before starting to rise and roll up the banked shingle of the beach. The Martello tower was already shrouded in white to halfway up its walls. Then towards them, as Bill watched, there stretched a slow, unfurling, vaporous finger.