The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (6 page)

V Adam

Cobwebs of a grey June mist that was almost rain floated down on the excavated layers of Roman Britain and on the neatly turned out schoolboys spilling from a chartered bus like lava over their own past. So delightfully proper the boys looked in grey flannels and white shirts and light summer blazers, that several ritual-hungry visitors from Illinois were moved to preserve the charming sight on Polaroid film. Two by two, filing through ancient history, the boys marched down to the stone-tiered amphitheatre and into the greedy lenses and on to the rec room movie screens of middle America. As a final flourish one camera took in the little knot of chaperoning parents who huddled in weatherproof jackets at the rear. A nice touch, thought the photographer. After drinks one fall evening, he would show his neighbours in Evanston, Illinois, a spliced and fast-paced distillation of Europe. They would idle with swizzle sticks and ideas, speculating on the degree of damage which uniforms and regimentation and military drill inflicted on the schoolboy psyche. Probably substantial, they would conclude; only consider the state of Britain's economy and the attitude of the British worker. No individual initiative, no dynamism. And yet they would feel a certain wistfulness; would ply grandchildren with flannel blazers complete with embroidered pockets (the real thing!); would rise at inconvenient hours to observe royal occasions on television; would preserve the neat crocodile of boys forever coiling their way out of Kodak microframes and into the crumbling grass-glutted amphitheatre.

“Hey, Carpenter,” murmured the fair-haired boy who was Adam's partner in the crocodile. “I dare you to ask Price if we can have a treasure hunt for gladiator bones.”

Adam's mind skimmed through an extensive and recently garnered repertoire of imperial trivia: the papier-mâché model of a walled city with its forum and theatre, its villas and baths; the coloured chart of gladiatorial weapons; the re-enacted conquest of 55 BC. (Adam had not been cast as Julius Caesar or any of his bare-legged mini-skirted soldiers, but as a Briton daubed in woad.)

“I dare you back, Snelby,” he said coolly. He knew how to play this battle of wits. Never flinch, and always go one better. “I'll do it if you ask him what Roman loos were like.”

“Done!” A snicker of delight. “That's a good one. My dad would like that.”

Adam had seen Snelby's father on television from time to time, speaking in clipped tones on important matters. It was difficult to imagine his having an opinion on Roman loos.

“Your father an Oxford or a Cambridge man, Carpenter? Which?”

Adam looked thoughtfully at his feet for several seconds and then said carefully: “Can't you guess?”

“Cambridge. I knew it! Was he a sporting man too?”

“He won lots of sporting awards. He's fantastic at surfing and mountain climbing.”

“Surfing!
Where does he go surfing?”

“Oh, all over. In the Pacific.”

“In the Pacific! Gosh, what is he? I mean, what does he do?”

“He's a lawyer.” Also a weekend sheep farmer, but it might be better not to mention that.

“Is his practice in London? I mean, when does he get to the Pacific?”

“It's hard to explain,” Adam fenced. “He's away a lot”

“For the government?”

“Sort of.”

“I say, he's not in the Secret Service, is he?”

Adam smiled, but said nothing.

Snelby was impressed. “Of course, you're not allowed to tell, I know. Which college?”

“Pardon?”

“At Cambridge. Which college?”

“Ah … Can't you tell?”

“King's too! That means we'll go there together! I say, can I meet your father some day?”

“Well, uh … Right now he's in Australia.”

“That's why you had that awful accent. You travel around with him, lucky devil! Is it very hush-hush?”

“I really don't … Snelby, I shouldn't be …”

“You can count on me. Absolutely. You don't need to say another thing. I won't breathe a word. Gosh, your mother must have to be brave.” Craning back to see where Emily was. “She's very beautiful, your mother. Of course, I know Secret Service men always have beautiful women. Like James Bond.”

They had reached the amphitheatre into which a breeze blew the thin rain in reams of the sheerest chiffon. From the wet grass beneath his feet, Adam fancied he heard the sighing of legionnaires worn out in foreign service, their sighs stretching out across Gaul, their dreams touching, the lonely sons growing up without them in Rome. He wondered what Dave would be doing at this moment.

Rain always made him think of Dave. So did the sun; so did the beach. Because they were all so startlingly different, so absolutely unlike anything over there. After months of bleak drizzle when he had first arrived in London, a master had said to him: “I suppose you're sick of this rain, Carpenter? After Sydney?”

“Rain?” Bewilderment. “Is this rain, sir?”

The master had laughed. “A good line, Carpenter. A good line. Not bad for a wild colonial boy.”

But Adam had been genuinely surprised, thinking of the lashing fury of thunderstorms, and of southerly busters, and of cyclones hurling themselves in off the Pacific. He had not seen or felt anything that he recognised as rain.

Australia existed for him as a series of intensely remembered but permanently lost sensations. He grieved for them as for the loss of paradise. He would be walking over the shingle at Brighton in his rubber-soled shoes to where the weary Channel lapped against the grey stones, and he would feel affronted, as though words themselves were not reliable. He would stare at this sleeve of the Atlantic with disgust and think “ocean”, and the surf below Daves Sydney house would crash over powdered golden sands and through his nerve ends and he would remember the feel of Dave's hairy chest. His arms would be tightly around Dave's neck and together they would brace themselves against the will of the breaker, would swoop up, up its glassy wall, ducking under the foaming crest, coasting down the gentle green valley on the far side. If the wave were particularly high, Dave would say to him, laughing: “That one came all the way from Fiji, mate.”

And once, when a wave had spun them over and over like flecks of seaweed and had dumped them gasping and spluttering on the sand, Dave had thumped him on the back to get all the sea water out of his lungs and had told him: “
That
one came all the way from South America, mate!”

Mate.

Dave was his best and dearest mate. A father would be a mate you could never lose.

Once, after he and Snelby had both been caned for shooting small paper pellets from an elastic band in class (one of the pellets had hit Higgins on the ear and he had yelped), Snelby whispered to him: “You talk funny, Carpenter, but I think you're all right. You didn't flinch a bit.”

From Snelby, who had once held Adam's head under water for some obscure breach of school etiquette, this was high praise. Adam had asked shyly: “Will you be my mate, Snelby?”

“What's a mate?”

Adam had not known how to reply. He could place no further trust in words.

Snelby had simply shaken his head, grinning affectionately. “Peculiar, the way you talk, Carpenter. But I like you. One of the best.”

“And here,” Mr Price said, “are the remains of the forum where every important decision for the city would have been made. When imperial messengers arrived from Rome with proclamations from Caesar, this is where they would have been read to the people. And right here, in the centre of the forecourt, is the very sundial from which the city kept its time, still keeping the same perfect time from nature. That is to say,” he added dryly, “when there is enough sun to read it.”

The boys laughed as they crowded around the bronze dial to view the Roman numerals.

“What does it say here?” Mr Price asked, pointing to an inscription. “Dickinson?”

“Tempus fugit
, sir.”

“Which means, Higgins?”

“Time flies, sir.”

“Correct. And it certainly does. Fifteen centuries have passed since the last Roman soldier read the time from this clock. And that was probably just before he leapt into his chariot and headed down the great Roman road to London and then to the port and the ships. He was needed in Gaul and in Rome itself. The Empire was falling apart.

“And yet time stands still too. That road to London still exists. We came over it in the bus today. If we were to dig up a few layers of asphalt, we'd see the very stones the Romans laid down. Their shades are all around us.

“And that's what I want you to learn from this trip. History is a ladder. We stand on the shoulders of other men.”

He seemed to be talking at least partly to the little group of parents, several of whom were fathers who had taken the day off from law offices or government posts to accompany their sons. Adam could see that two of the fathers had been paying quite close and gallant attention to his mother. He was used to this. Men always fluttered around her like moths, they always looked at her that way.

Once, on the harbour ferry, he and Dave had left her standing at the railing and had gone to buy ice creams. When they came back up on deck she had been surrounded by three young men who might have stepped down from billboards advertising suntan lotion. Emily was smiling at all of them in her impartial absent-minded way.

Adam hated the three men instantly. He had tightened his grip on Dave's hand, instinctively afraid that Dave would be upset. But Dave had grinned at him and sighed.

“Don't worry mate. Only you and her violin stand a chance in her life.” His mother, Dave had told him, was like a Blue Wanderer. An odd thing to say but something Adam had never forgotten. He knew all about the rare butterflies called Blue Wanderers. He had seen one land light as a birds feather on a bush, its turquoise wings trembling. He knew that a Blue Wanderer could never be kept still.

“…and we'll meet back at the amphitheatre in one hour for the picnic lunch,” Mr Price was saying. “Until then you are free to browse in the sections of the museum that interest you most. But I want everyone to look carefully at the restored pictures in the floor tiles and wall paintings. And I want you to study the models of the villa and of the baths, so that you can tell me what aspects of our modern plumbing we owe to the Romans. I want you to look for the present in the past, and for the past in the present.”

Dave did that.

Dave had shown him a cave up in the Blue Mountains. When you lit a match you saw paintings on the rock walls: stick figures, animals, webbed designs that suggested the ghostly sounds of the didgeridoo and the rhythmic stamping of Aboriginal tribesmen.

“Those paintings have been here since before the first white man came to Australia, Adam,” Dave had told him. “And they will probably still be here after the last man of any colour has gone up in nuclear smoke.”

Did that mean, Adam wondered, that the paintings had been there before the Romans built Verulamium? He was hazy about the sequence of such distant events.

Time.

It was a mystery even greater than the mystery of words.

In the dawn light of his birthdays, he would be wakened by Dave's telephone calls. In Sydney, Dave would tell him, it was black as pitch. Uncle Jason disturbed his midnight sleep to tell him the sun was still shining in New York.

Was Dave, right now, deep in a dream of Adam and Emily? Were the stars winking down on the Blue Mountains? He knew it was winter there, that the cave walls would be crusted with frost. How could they be so far away, so out of season, out of reach, when he saw them so clearly in his mind that he could have touched them?

Tempus fugit.

He stared at the sundial as a thin ray of sunlight fell across it, marking out the hour close to midday.

He felt giddy, time whirling him around through space and through history like a toy on a string.

Tomorrow he would leave for New York. For a few days, Uncle Jason had said. And yes, he wanted very much to see Uncle Jason and his grandmother again — especially Uncle Jason. He had a sort of hunger for the rough caresses of men, for the smell and texture of tweed jackets when one is crushed against them. He thought he had lost Uncle Jason and his grandmother as he, had lost Dave. But would he now lose Snelby and Mr Price? Would his mother really bring him back? He thought of the Blue Wanderer and could not be sure.

Was there a place in history where he could just be still for a little while?

He put his arms around the sundial as though anchoring himself to something that had kept its moorings in the mad tidal flux of years, a still point at the eye of the reeling storm of history.

“What is it, Carpenter?” Mr Price asked in a kindly way. “Is something bothering you?”

“Oh! No, sir”

“If you don't hurry up and study the museum model of the baths, you won't be able to tell me about the plumbing in school tomorrow, will you?”

“I won't be there, sir. My mother is going to speak to you about it today. We're flying to New York tomorrow and I'll be away for a week.”

“New York! Goodness me, Carpenter, what a lucky fellow you are, travelling around the world with a famous mother!”

“Yes, sir”

“I keep forgetting you are actually an American. You sounded so very Australian when you came to us. I suppose you've been to the States many times for your mother's concerts?”

“I've never been there yet, sir. I'm not an American, really, although my mother is. I'm a citizen of the world.”

“A citizen of the world!” Mr Price raised a startled and amused eyebrow. “Is that so, Carpenter?”

“Yes, sir. You see I was conceived in Canada and born in Australia and now I am being educated in England.”

“I see. Yes, Quite, ah, quite cosmopolitan, Carpenter. Your … ah … your mother … won't she be upset if you describe yourself like this?”