The Dig (11 page)

Authors: John Preston

Unfortunately there was no time left to do anything about it. John and Will knocked off at six and an hour or so later Robert went in for his supper. Instead of carrying on, I wanted to have another think while I decided what to do next. I’d already unfolded the tarps and was preparing to spread them out, when I turned around to see a large, unfamiliar-looking man. He was climbing down the ladder right into the belly of the ship.

“Excuse me!” I called out.

This had no effect, none at all. Although the man could hardly have failed to hear me, he took no notice. Meanwhile, the ladder bowed beneath his weight. As he neared the bottom, I saw that he wasn’t simply large around the middle. He was large all over. His trousers were hitched very high over his chest and he wore a spotted bow tie.

“Stop there!” I shouted, much more loudly than before.

At this, he finally came to a halt.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

He looked straight through me. Or rather over my shoulder at the lines of rivets running off into the sand.

“Ye gods,” he said.

And then he carried on coming down the ladder.

“No, no! You can’t!”

Once again he stopped.

“I beg your pardon?” he said, saying it in such a way as to imply that no begging was involved.

“You can’t come down here.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not safe for someone of your —”

“Of my what?”

“Of your build,” I said.

By now he was only two or three rungs from the bottom. In the same slow, deliberate manner as before, he finished climbing down. Having reached the bottom, he stepped onto one of the planks and thrust his chest out at me. He did so like he was presenting it for inspection.

“Megaw said nothing this big had ever been found before. Certainly not in East Englia —” that was how he pronounced it. “Even so, I never expected this.”

I’d had enough by now. “Look here,” I said, “I’ve asked you twice to leave. That should be enough for anyone, but I’m doing so again. This is a very delicate site. And a dangerous one,” I said, pointing up at Billy’s LIVE BOMBS! sign.

“What about the chamber?” he asked.

“Chamber? What chamber?”

“Have you found any sign of the burial chamber?” Perhaps he was out of breath, but when he spoke to me he broke up his words into pieces as if he was talking to a child.

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

Shortly afterwards, he started to climb back up the ladder. Halfway up, though, he stopped and gazed back down at the ship.

“Ye gods,” he said again.

When I returned to the cottage Vera said, “There’s a surprise waiting upstairs for you, Basil.”

I can’t say I was in any mood for more surprises. “What do you mean?”

She laughed. “You go and have a look for yourself.”

May was standing in my bedroom. There were red patches on her cheeks. Around the brim of her bonnet her hair was sticking out all over the place.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Old Middleton was coming into Woodbridge. He offered me a lift. You sounded so out of sorts in your last letter, Basil, that I was worried. I thought I’d better see how you were. And I’ve brought you some fresh clothes.”

“I’m all right,” I said. “I am now anyway.”

“Really?”

She lifted her chin and I gave her a kiss. Then we sat together on the bed. The bed is a metal-framed affair, set unusually high off the ground. So high that our legs hung off the sides. The sun was shining straight in through the window. We both had to shield our eyes from the glare.

“Are you pleased to see me, Basil?”

“Course I am.”

“You don’t show it much,” she said.

I gave her another kiss. When we’d finished, I said, “Why don’t you take your hat off?”

She pulled out the pins. As she lifted the hat, her hair sprang up all round her head in stiff corkscrews. “There, is that better?”

“Much better — even better,” I added quickly.

“That Reid Moir. Behaving like he’s Lord God Almighty. If I ever see him I’d like to give him a piece of my mind.”

“Luckily there’s not much chance of that.”

“You’re too trusting, Basil. Yes, you are. How big did you say this ship of yours is?”

“Sixty-four feet so far.”

“Sixty-four feet!”

“And I reckon there could easily be another fifteen to go.”

“Something like this, everyone’s going to want a part of it. You’ll need to watch your back.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“No, really, Basil. I mean it. Play this one properly and you could make quite a name for yourself.”

“I’ll be all right,” I said again, quite keen to change the subject. “So what happened with Potter and the rent?”

“He’s not come back. I think I saw him off. For the time being at least.”

“I hope so.”

“The cheek of it, really. Seeing how little he’s done for us.”

“Best keep him sweet,” I said.

“Don’t you go worrying, Basil.”

“Nothing we can do anyway, is there?”

“Nothing at all.”

The sun was sinking now, just a last few shafts coming in through the window. Downstairs, Billy and Vera were talking. I could hear the mumble of their voices coming up through the floorboards.

“What else have you been up to, then?”

“Nothing much,” she said. “This and that …”

Something about May’s voice made me ask, “What do you mean, ‘This and that?’ ”

“Nothing!”

“Tell me,” I said.

Her cheeks had turned even redder now. “I cleared out your books, Basil.”

“You did what?”

“I had to! I could hardly move. Let alone sit down.”

“What have you done with them?”

“I put some in the roof and others in the shed. The rest I stacked in piles. Don’t be angry with me.”

“I’m not angry,” I said, and almost meant it.

May pressed down in the middle of the bed.

“I don’t think much of this mattress,” she said. “It’s a bit soft, isn’t it? Especially here.”

“It does me well enough.”

She brushed her hand over the crocheted bedspread. “Does this remind you of anything, Basil?”

I laughed. “Course it does.”

Back when May and I were courting, we arranged to meet one evening on Rickinghall Common. We were going to catch the bus into Stowmarket to see the pictures. May had knitted a dress specially. It was in the latest fashion, just over the knee. But on the way there she had to walk across a hay field. The grass was wet and the moisture weighed down the wool. By the time she reached the common the dress was flapping round her ankles.

“What must I have looked like?”

“I didn’t complain, did I?”

“That dress, I don’t know what happened to it.”

“You probably cleared it out,” I said.

We sat on the bed as the light faded around us. The dusk was thickening. The air might have been rubbed with charcoal.

“How much longer do you think you’ll be here, Basil?”

“Could be another three weeks. A month even.”

“That long! I miss you when you’re not at home. Especially now.”

“Come here,” I said.

“I am here, aren’t I?”

“Closer.”

She shifted along the mattress towards me. I started rubbing her back. I could feel her bones poking through like buttons. Then I put my hand around her shoulder.

All at once she pulled away. “Oh, Basil, I can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Old Middleton said I had to be down at the Orford road at nine if I wanted a lift back.”

“But I don’t want you to go.”

“I don’t want to go either, Basil. But you know how it is.”

She stood up and started pinning her hat back on. After a while I stood up too. When she’d finished with her hat, she bent over and checked herself in the mirror.

“You be careful with old Middleton,” I told her.

“What do you mean?”

“You heard me.”

“Don’t be daft, Basil. They don’t call him old Middleton for nothing, you know. Why, you’re not jealous, are you?”

“No,” I said. “Maybe. Just a little.”

“Really, you do talk some rubbish sometimes, you know.”

“Do I?”

“Not that I mind, not necessarily. Makes a girl feel wanted.”

“You should do,” I said.

“Should do what?”

“Feel wanted.”

She laughed. Then she put the backs of her fingers up against my cheek. “You be sure to take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

“Don’t work too hard either. And remember, Basil, don’t you take any more nonsense from that Reid Moir.”

The next morning I finished uncovering the line of discolored sand I’d found the day before. It ran straight across the ship — almost from one gunwale to the other. An hour later, John Jacobs found another one. Again, there was a single discolored line running across the ship. This second line, though, was less regular than the first — it was more like a faint thread running through the earth.

We measured the gap between the two lines. It was eighteen feet. The more I thought about it, the more likely I reckoned these were the remains of the burial-chamber walls. When I told Mrs. Pretty, she insisted on having a look for herself. I held the bottom of the ladder with my foot so that it didn’t slide and guided her down rung by rung. She knelt on a piece of hessian and inspected both of the lines.

“You really think this might be it, Mr. Brown?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “Not for sure. But it might be, yes.”

Throughout the afternoon we continued shaving down the area in the center of the ship, taking it off one thin layer at a time. As we were doing so, I found a third discolored line. This one was much shorter than the others — barely four feet in length and running downwards as well as outwards towards the position of the gunwale.

Sitting on the edge of the trench, I tried to work out what these lines could mean. The best theory I could fix on was this: the original burial chamber probably sat in the bottom of the ship with a pitched roof, much like a picture of Noah’s Ark in a child’s storybook. The Oseberg chamber seems to have been built like this — as far as I could tell from the illustrations in Maynard’s book. But at some stage the roof must have fallen in. Most likely due to the weight of soil. The fall seems certain to have dislodged the contents of the chamber. Of course, there’s also a possibility it might have crushed them in the process.

I drew a sketch of how the chamber might have looked — as close to scale as I could make it. I was staring at this sketch when Maynard appeared. I could tell straightaway there was something wrong. He’s a real worry-guts at the best of times. Now, though, he looked more bilious than ever. Rather than ask what the matter was, I decided to wait until he told me. As expected, it didn’t take long.

“Basil,” he said, “I fear I have done a foolish thing.”

“How’s that, then?”

“I meant no harm by it, I swear. Quite the reverse. My intention was solely to make sure that we — that you were on the right track. I wrote to Megaw in the Isle of Man.”

“Megaw?”

“Yes, at the museum there. I knew that he had records of burials that had been found on the island. Records that could be very useful in determining the precise date of this ship. Well,” he said in a shriller voice than before, “how could I
know that he had been at Cambridge with Charles Phillips? No sooner had Megaw received my letter than he contacted Phillips and read it out to him. Over the telephone,” he added, as if this made the whole thing even worse. “Now everyone seems to know about the dig. There’s already talk of the British Museum becoming involved. And the Ministry of Works.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“I know, Basil. I know … I never imagined a little thing would have such implications. As you can imagine, Reid Moir is furious. Apart from anything else, he can’t stand Phillips. It turns out there’s bad blood between them from way back. Apparently Phillips wrested control of the East Anglia Society from him in the most underhand fashion. You know how Reid Moir can be sometimes — far from reasonable, frankly. He spoke to me in the most — the most disparaging tones.”

I folded up the drawing and put it in my pocket. Maynard was still standing there, looking as if he’d swallowed a pound of worms.

“What do you think we should do, Basil?” he asked.

“Not much we can do, I wouldn’t have thought. Except wait and see. Whatever happens, I dare say we’ll be the last to know.”

When Robert appeared the next morning, he said that his mother wasn’t feeling well and might not come out today. Not unless we found anything significant. He also mentioned
that she’d had a visitor the night before. He’d been about to go to bed, he said, when someone had rung the front doorbell.

I can’t say I’d been paying much attention to this. Not until Robert said that this visitor had been large. Then I did come to.

“How do you mean ‘large’?” I asked him.

“Fat,” he said, and giggled. “Although I’m not meant to say that.”

“What did he look like?”

“I’ve just told you, Mr. Brown.”

“Did you notice anything else about him?”

“He wore a bow tie.”

“Did he now?”

“It had spots on it.”

“Yes,” I said, “I thought it might have done. And had you seen this man before?”

He shook his head. “But Mama must have known him.”

“How do you work that out?”