Treasures of Time (2 page)

Penelope Lively manipulates the passage of time as brilliantly as she manipulates the complexities of her fictional characters. Technically she is flawless: her vocabulary and punctuation are precise, with never an extraneous syllable, and she has a highly developed visual sense and perfect pitch for dialogue. Yet ultimately the quality that defines Lively as such a superb novelist is that rare combination of the artist’s necessary detachment with an enormous zest and enjoyment, a powerful personal involvement in the world around her.
Treasures of Time
, moving and very funny, is a testament to all this.

Selina Hastings

Chapter One

The alarm went. He resisted it, burrowing against Kate’s warm back. He felt her reach out, bang the clock, lie in disquieting wakefulness. She said, ‘Tom?’ He burrowed again.

She sat up, the sheet slipping from her bare breasts. ‘Do wake up. Listen, I’ve been thinking. I shall have to take you to see my mother.’

‘Mmn?’

‘You’ll have to meet my mother.’

‘Ah. It’s come to that, has it?’

‘She keeps asking about you. I can’t put it off any longer.’

‘Well, fine, then. When do we go? Who wants to put it off, anyway?’

‘Me, I suppose.’ She had got out of bed now, and stood at the dressing-table brushing her hair. He watched her bottom, lovingly. Dear Kate. Splendid Kate. Her hair stood up in a dark wiry frizz all round her head; at her waist opposing pink curves nicely echoed the shape of white knobs on the dressing-table; below, her bottom rose and fell in time with the hair-brushing. He said, ‘What?’

‘Do wake up properly, Tom, it’s gone eight. I said we’d better go this weekend.’

‘Fine.’ He yawned, clasped his hands behind his head. ‘Great. I like Wiltshire. Cradle of British archaeology. Stonehenge. Avebury. Stukeley’s stamping ground – right up my street. Immemorial landscapes. And I’d like to know more about your father, anyway. I suppose the house is stuffed with axe-heads and bits of broken pot. Is it very grand?’

‘No, it’s not, in fact it’s a bit seedy.’ She was flinging clothes out of drawers now, quarrying pants and tights and jerseys in a frenzy of irritation.

‘Are you staying there all morning or are you going to the library?’

‘I love you when you’re cross,’ he said. ‘You go red all up your neck, did you know that? I love you anyway, and I daresay I’ll go to the library. Tell me, does your mother know about my humble origins?’

‘She knows we’re getting married, that’s all that’s relevant.’

‘Ah. What a stern girl you are. Straight to the point and no nonsense. Most people’s mums would want things filled in a bit, that’s all. She’d be entitled.’

‘She isn’t like most people’s mums. You’ll see. D’you want tea or coffee?’

He said, ‘She scares you stiff or something, doesn’t she? She’s the one thing that really steams you up. I want to meet her. Coffee, and three slices of toast please – in bed?’

‘
No
,’ she said. ‘Up, or not at all. And I’m going in fifteen minutes precisely. Some of us have a living to earn.’

His hands, every day, were grimy from books and manuscripts. Seventeenth century grime, some of it, he supposed. He sat in the British Museum Reading Room, picking slivers of dirt from under a fingernail, stared at Stukeley’s neat, distinctive handwriting, and read that on an April day in 1719 he visited an ‘antient’ site where ‘as we sat surveying the corn growing upon the spot I did see the perfect vestigia of a temple, as easily discernible upon the corn as upon paper.’ Crop marks, clever old Stukeley. And later he had ‘met with some excellent Ale.’ Ah. It’s knowing that kind of thing that makes this kind of thing seem slightly less of a fantasy than it does a lot of the time.

William Stukeley and his contemporaries: a study of seventeenth and early eighteenth century antiquarianism. Tom Rider, M.A., D.Phil. T. P. Rider, M.A., D.Phil. Thomas P. Rider, M.A., D.Phil. Or not, as the case may be. The little crescents of dirt lay on the manuscripts. And they call this a white-collar job. Stukeley, of course, got his hands dirty – digging, surveying – and his feet, too, plodding around in the muck.

There was a portrait of Stukeley that cropped up in reproduction in innumerable works: a fattish, jowly face, pointed nose, dark, sharp eyes, grey wig, flowing white cravat, jacket of dark, shiny material. From time to time Tom had scoured this for some kind of insight into this person who must occupy three years of his, Tom’s life. Three rather crucial years, at that. Occasionally the processes of historical research amazed him: we think we know about the past, learned blokes stake their professional reputations on this or that interpretation of the way things have been at this point or that. Here am I, about to contribute some seventy thousand words which will analyse and pronounce upon the way in which antiquarian studies declined from the intellectual vigour of the seventeenth century into the romantic inaccuracies of the early eighteenth, with special reference to the career of William Stukeley. I know a great deal about Stukeley; I probably know more about Stukeley than anybody else in the world; I know where he was on April 4th 1719 and I know who his friends were and in what language he addressed them and I know the broad course of his life from the day he was born till the day he died. The real Stukeley, of course, is effectively concealed by two hundred and fifty years of gathering confusion and conflicting interpretations of how the world may have appeared to other people. The real breathing feeling cock-and-balls prick-me-and-I-bleed Stukeley is just about as inaccessible as Neanderthal man.

‘Sometimes,’ he said to Kate, ‘sometimes I think of going into industry. A rather dubious branch of industry. Armaments. Or the manufacture of pop records.’

‘You don’t really,’ said Kate with tranquillity.

‘You’re happy to condemn me – us – to a lifetime of underpaid academic nitpicking? Anyway, there are no jobs.’

‘You love it. And some people get jobs – quite a lot do.’

‘Oh, you’re all right, I know. All set up with a pension. That’s what I’m marrying you for, I hope you realize.’

She worked in a museum, a civil servant, her responsibility to the past defined by grade and status. For the moment, she was in London, working on some vast new scheme of reclassification and reorganization, which she found tiresome. In the autumn, in their early courting period, she had been based at a provincial town in the process of setting up a refurbished County Museum; for Tom, now, love and lust would be for ever associated with ploughshares and sickles, with the machinery of the early glove industry, with brick moulds and stonemasons’ tools, with hay wains and milk floats and early twentieth century tractors. In this setting, he had waited patiently for her to finish her day’s work; the sight of a threshing machine or butter churn would, for the rest of his life, bring an expectant lift of the heart.

There was something equine about her, he had thought fondly, as she trotted about with her labels and cards, a small, dark, muscular girl, energetic and ferociously scowling. She scowled as she worked, as she walked with him on the woodlands near the town, as she made love. He found this appealing. The happier you are, he said, the more bad-tempered you look, did you know? I like that, it makes you such a splendidly misleading person, only those who know you can have the faintest idea what’s going on, have you always been like that?

She was twenty-four.

Do you want a ring? he said. All that stuff? Proof that my intentions are honourable – fairly honourable? And she had hugged him and glared from under those shaggy eyebrows and said that was the last thing she wanted, she wouldn’t know what to do with it.

They had a weekend in France instead.

Her father had been Hugh Paxton, the archaeologist. It must be odd, Tom sometimes thought, to have been fathered by a man to whom such a label was forever attached – ‘
The
Hugh Paxton, you mean? The archaeologist.’ How does it feel? he had asked her, early in their courting days, speaking as one whose father is Jim Rider, pure and simple. The corporation bus driver, if anyone. It doesn’t feel anything, she said, it’s just how it is, how it always was.

His was one of those names known even to those who know nothing of their field of work. Woolley, Childe, Piggott, Paxton, Wheeler – the names would have vague connotations where Ur, Mycenae, La Tène or Wessex might not. Hugh Paxton had missed, somehow, the age of the television archaeologist, though he had died only five years ago. Why? Tom asked, and Kate had shrugged and said, oh, he’d have hated it, it wasn’t his kind of thing at all. Ma would have loved it, of course, she had added, a minute or so later.

There was a photo of him on Kate’s dressing-table: a good-looking, slightly swarthy man (it was from him that her dark sturdiness came, her desirable springy body, that faint hairiness…). Tom had examined it with interest, felt mildly embarrassed sometimes at its scrutiny as he dressed and shaved, explained to it, apologetically, that he loved Kate and had the best possible intentions towards her. And Hugh Paxton looked the sort of man who would have known a bit of passion in his time, one way and another.

And now Tom sat beside Kate in the car (her car), headed for Danehurst along roads that soared across the Wiltshire downs, Kate hunched over the wheel in her usual unnerving position, nose too near the windscreen, taking the bends a little too fast.

‘Aunt what?’ he said.

‘Aunt Nellie. Aunt Nellie is my mother’s sister. They live together now because Aunt Nellie had a stroke two years ago and can’t do much for herself.’ She jinked sideways to miss an oncoming lorry.

Tom said, ‘Watch it.’ And then, ‘That’s very charitable of your mother.’

‘Not really. Aunt Nellie has a bit of money of her own and Ma hasn’t because my father left things in a muddle and there were a lot of death duties. It’s a quid pro quo. Aunt Nellie subsidizes Danehurst – it’s expensive to run.’

‘Ah,’ said Tom, adjusting his concept of Mrs Paxton.

‘Aunt Nellie,’ said Kate, in tones that would have sounded like fury to one unfamiliar with her way of disguising emotional revelation, ‘is very nice.’

‘Why have you never told me all this before?’

‘I probably have, and you weren’t listening. Anyway, you’re marrying me, not my family.’

‘People always say that. It’s a common instance of self-delusion.’

Kate thought: I am wearing jeans and a jersey, so she will be dressed to kill and will say, Kate I do think you might make just a bit of an effort when you come home. She will say it where Tom can hear, and I will go red like I always have when she tells me off. But if I had worn my new dress and my boots she would have had gardening things on and said, oh dear, I’m afraid we can’t live up to you London people, gracious Kate however much did you pay for that frock? Well, anyway, I’m glad you’re earning such a lot now, how nice. And I would have felt quite differently uncomfortable.

I can’t win, she thought angrily, and now already I am in a fuss and snapping at Tom and I love him and it is in no way his fault, no way at all.

They came out of Marlborough and drove beside the Kennet Valley, the trees and marshy gound making a darker green cleft between the wide flanks of the downs. Birds rolled in the wind above pale green fields and the flecked brown and white earth of chalk country. There was heavy traffic on the A4; the empty landscape at either side had an inaccessible serenity, as though behind glass. Kate said, ‘We’re there, all but,’ and swung suddenly onto a side road, without signalling, bringing a yelp of indignation from the car behind.