Treasures of Time (22 page)

‘Pity the Soane Museum couldn’t raise the funds,’ said Barclay. ‘Or the Bodleian. There have been murmurings, of course, that the Stantons might have put a lower price on them to keep them in the country. But one does see the problem, of course,’ he added.

‘Sometimes,’ said Kate, ‘people
give
things to libraries and museums. Such as my father. Of course he wasn’t rich or aristocratic.’

Archer was now looking ruffled. ‘Naturally the family are the first to regret… The Soane Museum was given eight weeks to try to match the Texas offer. Unfortunately… So there it is. Very sad, but inevitable.’

‘Oh, quite inevitable,’ said Tom, ‘given human nature, from which obviously even the aristocracy aren’t immune. It’s interesting,’ he went on, ‘I can understand lions and vintage cars and antique emporia, up to a point. Vulgarization and exploitation I can sympathize with. Just about. In fact at the moment they look in thoroughly good taste. This, though, leaves you fairly staggered. It’s amazing!’

‘Oh nonsense, Tom,’ said Laura. ‘You don’t know anything about how frightfully difficult it is for people to keep up old houses like this nowadays.’ She gave him an icy look and went after Archer, who had walked angrily away. John Barclay looked put out. He said, ‘Henry Archer is a distant cousin as it happens, his mother was a Stanton, but I suppose you couldn’t know that.’ He too moved off down the gallery.

Tom turned back to the picture. ‘My mother always used to say, you’re entitled to think what you like, but nobody’s going to thank you for saying it.’

‘So did mine,’ said Kate. ‘A bit differently put.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I’m not. I enjoyed it.’

‘I’m quite glad we came, all the same. There’s always something a bit awe-inspiring about greed on a really majestic scale.’

The next day, they walked on the downs behind the village. Kate said, ‘Ma was wondering about you, over the washing-up. She was wondering if you realized how off-put people can be by outspokenness and if there’d be any point in you trying for a job in the civil service and she could have a word with James Hamilton only to tell the truth she wasn’t absolutely sure you made an awfully good impression, that evening. And she was feeling it was a pity you were so opinionated because you’re really rather nice-looking.’

Tom laughed. He took her hand. ‘Well, it’s a relief that I’m acceptable on one count, I suppose.’

It was early evening. The sky had cleared after a day of intermittent heavy rain; in a clear, sharp light the surrounding hills had the brilliance and detail of scenery seen through binoculars: grazing sheep half a mile away wore discernible painted numbers, the trees crowning the hillock of the East Kennet barrow showed individual outlines. There were long muddy puddles on the farm track that they were following, wide streaks of light that reflected the sky so that, picking a way past them, they walked in a circular world, the same underfoot as overhead. Birds fled past like arrows. The wind brought smells of hay and a farmyard.

Everything is all right, Kate thought. Now, just this minute, everything is all right. I could sing. The world is beautiful and I am in it and that is enough. Just for now, it is as easy and as simple to be me as it is for those birds. All I have to do is be, not feel or think.

Once, I walked along here with my father.

I am thirteen. I have breasts that slide and bounce under my jerseys; I hate them, they make me feel funny, I think all the time that people must be staring at me. I walk beside Daddy and he talks about somewhere he has been digging, about what they dug and about the people he was with, he is funny about what someone did and he makes me laugh. Suddenly, I feel as though I were someone else, not me: I feel pretty and thin and friendly. I tell him about things: about what I like and what I think and what I have been doing at school. In the middle, I remember who I really am and I say, sometimes I hate being me, I hate who I am, I wish I was someone else, anyone else. And he takes my hand and swings my arm up and down and says, we all do that, Katie, now and again, it can’t be helped, that’s something we all have to put up with. Some more than others, he says, but that is to himself, it seems, not me. And then he sees a hawk on the telephone lines and shows me, and we stand for a moment, looking. The hawk is bright brown against the sky; I see its yellow stare and the wind ruffling its feathers and beyond it the green downs and the sun like a penny behind a cloud. I stand outside myself and see all that and everything is all right again.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m making a paper boat, aren’t I? This is paper-boat-sailing weather.’

The wind, driving along the puddle, ridged it with tiny waves. Tom said, ‘Go the other end, I’m sending you down an armada of unpaid bills.’

‘Idiot…. I could never fold them properly. It’s one of the lots of things I’ve never been able to do.’ She walked to the far end of the water and watched him, folding away there twenty yards up the path. ‘Go on,’ she shouted, ‘I’m waiting.’

‘Hang on, I’m a perfectionist, Batts Road primary school champion, time was.’

And the first boat came spinning down in the force nine gale, making good time, six seconds flat by Kate’s watch, to be fished out water-logged and on the edge of capsizing.

‘That’s not done your bank statement much good!’

‘Never mind. Stand by – something with a bit more power coming up.’

And the next, veering wildly, made four and a half seconds before going aground.

‘Tom! That was a page of notes or something!’

‘No time to be choosy. We’re racing some small craft now. Stop-watch out!’

Daft, she thought fondly, mad… And the cocked white hats came flying down, three of them, neck and neck. But one took off and became airborne, flew away over the fence into the field, one keeled over into the mud and was beached, leaving the winner only to be picked up by Kate. ‘Slow! Eight seconds!’

Letters, scrawled in black marker pen, crept in and out of the paper folds: a C and an H and an E. She shook it open and saw – streaked now with mud and wet – a sketch of a canal lock with a narrow boat drawn up in front. A gay, pretty little sketch. And across the bottom, scribbled, Tom – love from Cherry.

And the sun went in, appropriately, shoved behind a wedge of hitherto unremarked black cloud.

She handed him the unravelled boat, walked quickly away down the track.

He caught her up. ‘Look… She took me along the canal that day in Birmingham. She did it then.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d forgotten it was in my pocket. I didn’t look…’

‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter.’

But it does matter. Where there was sun and bright sky-reflecting water and grass pouring in the wind there is uncertainty and misgivings and the knowledge that nothing stays still, that one moves all the time from one moment to another, that everything changes.

Chapter Ten

‘The intellectual career of William Stukeley,’ Tom wrote, ‘may well provide us with a salutary instance of the manipulation of historical evidence.’ May well? Either it does or it doesn’t; ‘may well’ is journalese. Substitute ‘provides’ for ‘may well provide’… ‘As Stukeley’s attempts to interpret the information he had gathered move from the objective and scientific to the subjective and fantastic, as he starts to believe not what the facts suggest but what he would like to believe, we see…’ Well, what we see is a man behaving like most people, and not like a historian, which is what he is setting out to be. Historians are not allowed to use the past for their own ends. Nor, by the same token, are blokes who happen through accident of fate to own the only complete set of Inigo Jones plans and sketches pertaining to a particular house. Nor are politicians, house agents, antique dealers, autobiographers or any other category of person that does so most of the time. ‘… Nevertheless, however tarnished Stukeley’s credibility as an antiquarian after his ordination in 1728, his early work remains as testimony to a vigorous and enquiring mind, while the pattern of his career serves as a…’… useful rung for the scholarly progress of one Tom Rider, in this present year of grace, himself involved in the same line of business. Thus do we feed one upon another.

‘Well,’ he said to Tony Greenway, ‘I’ve got five chapters under my belt.’

‘Great! I’d love to read it, when you’ve got a bit further.’

‘You wouldn’t. Not really. You don’t have to be that polite. How’s the Paxton programme coming on?’

‘Quite nicely. The overall structure’s worked out now, and I’ve got various people on tape to go with film of different crucial sites. Helicopter shots, too. It’s going to be a very
visual
programme, much more so than Teilhard was, we had a lot of sweat there thinking up shots. At least with archaeology there’s absolutely no problem in that direction, it’s a question of picking and choosing. We’re filming down in Wiltshire at the end of the month. Will you and Kate be around?’

‘Oh, I don’t think we can miss out on that.’

‘All well now?’ said Tony delicately.

‘Pretty well.’

Tony’s own personal life – his inclinations even – remained mysterious and unspecified. He was attentive – slightly gallant, indeed – towards women while at the same time giving the impression that possibly these attentions were performed only in the course of duty, whether professional or social. If his taste ran rather to his own sex, there was no evidence for this either, except in the absence of any convincing demonstrations in the direction of girls. Tom was forced to the opinion that he might be in the presence of one of those rare spirits able to survive without emotional or sexual commitment of any kind. He wondered what it felt like. Where work was concerned, on the other hand, Tony gave every indication of absolute and indeed excessive commitment: he seemed frequently on the verge of nervous collapse. He worked, often, nine or ten hours a day, fuelled by enthusiasm and what appeared to be a kind of panic. He was also a prey to bouts of depression and self-doubt. During Tom’s sojourn in the flat, he had occasionally unburdened himself, slumped in gloom in the mornings, drinking cup after cup of coffee, dispirited about the impermanence of what he made, about something he called ‘truthfulness’, about whether it mattered at all. Of course it matters, Tom would say briskly; at the other end of the room the blank screen of the very large television set reflected the London skyline through the flat’s picture-window, a panorama of clouds, multi-storey buildings and the occasional aeroplane.

But at the moment, in the Gower Street pub, Tony was enjoying a spell of optimism. He had dropped in, as he often did, on the off-chance of finding Tom. He never, Tom realized, ate or drank alone; his own company (except, presumably, at night) appeared to alarm him and he took steps to avoid it as much as possible. He said, ‘We shall do a day’s filming at Danehurst itself, and one or possibly two up at Charlie’s Tump, where Paul Summers is going to talk about the finds there and its significance. Laura has been frightfully cooperative. I get the impression the sister is less enthusiastic.’