Читать книгу Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide: A Collection of Short Stories - Fay Weldon - Страница 8

It was my cleaner Susie who first told me what was happening at the site. ‘Cleaner’ is the word Susie uses to keep me in my place: she seems rather more like a friend and ally, but she enjoys these social distinctions. She’s the policeman’s wife: she comes up to my rackety household and helps out because she’s bored, or so she says, and points out that I’m an artist and not a housewife by nature, as she is. Everyone should do what they’re good at in this life, she maintains. She, by implication, is good at housework: I am not.

I’m a professional sculptor. The children are with their father during term time, but I still needed help to keep domestic matters under control. I live in the village of Rumer in Kent, outside Canterbury, in a farmhouse. At the time I had two goats, two dogs, three cats, a pet hen, and an electric kiln in the barn. I did a lot of work in papier-mâchée, and it tended to creep out of the studio in shreds and scraps, and was even worse than clay for mess. If there’s too much mess I can’t concentrate. If there’s no food in the fridge I don’t stop to eat: then I’m too hungry to work. Susie kept things in balance. I believe her to be some kind of saint. Calling her the cleaner is rather like calling Moses the jobbing gardener because he smote the rock. If I say this kind of thing to her she seems immeasurably shocked.

Susie’s husband worked in town and though he was always kind to me, I would not want to be the criminal who crossed him. He has managed to build the fanciest bungalow in the village,and Susie keeps a perfect garden. Rumer is a pretty, peaceful and prosperous place and has won the best-kept village in Kent competition two years running, having survived BSE, foot-and-mouth, the falling off of the tourist trade—it has some good Roman ruins—and kept its village store and post office. But Susie is right: as a place it can get a bit boring. My two children, in their teens, try not to show it but are always happy to get back to town at the end of the holidays.

But nothing happens and nothing happens and then all of a sudden everything happens, in places as in people’s lives, and what was to happen, what was to be described in the papers as ‘The Affair of the Rumer Site’, was to take everyone by surprise.

Susie had a part-time job at the local comprehensive school, as a personal counsellor. It was her task to take alienated and troubled children under her wing, get them to school if they were truanting, sit with them in class if they were school refusers, help them with lessons they didn’t understand, and stay with them in the playground if they were bullied. She was not trained in any way to do it—the school can’t afford anyone expensive—but there is something about her apparently stoical presence, which means the pupils seem to accept her as one of their own. She is passionately on the children’s side: only occasionally does she raise her eyes to heaven and shrug. Hopeless, why waste the State’s money and my time. Let them go free.

One Friday afternoon in mid-July she turned up with the ironed sheets, disturbed and upset. (I have never yet ironed a sheet: Susie will not make a bed without first doing so. She has an ironing press: I have not.) The weather had been very hot: drought had set in: it was in that curious inconclusive patch of time after exams have finished and school hasn’t yet shut up shop for the summer. I’d been trying to finish the ceramic triptych I was working on before the children came down for the summer, and had managed it with a day to spare. I was exhausted and dehydrated, after days with the kiln, and still not quite back in the real world.

Now here was Susie sitting at the kitchen table actually crying. She said she had taken a group of her rejectees, as she called them, down to see the site. She’d thought the children would be really interested to see the unearthed graves and the skeletons still lying there, two thousand years on. But they had been indifferent, looked at her as if she was crazy to take them all the way in the heat to look at a few old bones, and one of the girls, Becky Horrocks, had tossed her cigarette into an open grave.

‘What site?’ I asked. ‘What graves?’ I’d quite forgotten. The row—about building the biggest shopping mall in all Europe on a site designated as an area of natural beauty and scientific interest, just a mile south of Rumer—has been rumbling on for so many years I had assumed it would never be resolved. But apparently it had, the developers had won, work had begun within the day and the bulldozers had been in skimming the site.

So much for the grebes and the greater crested warbler and the lesser toad and the marsh pippin: they would have to fend for themselves. As would the village shop, newsagent and post office. All must bow down in the face of progress: all must be sacrificed to the temple of Mammon. It was monstrous. Though as I sat there at the table with the dogs panting beside me in the heat, the thought of the chilly air around the long stretches of frozen-food cabinets filled me with delinquent delight.

‘They’ve uncovered a Roman graveyard,’ said Susie. ‘Twelve graves still with the bodies in them. And what Pam says is a Druid’s well but you know what she is.’

Pam was the local white witch: she had a mass of long white hair and a penchant for crystals and Goddess worship. She also ran, rather successfully, the local estate agency. She was widowed and had taken on the business after her husband’s death, but had changed her manner of living and dressing. Now she saw faces in the running brook, heard the Great God Pan rustling in the hedges, and suspected any stranger in the village of being an extraterrestrial visitor from the Dog Star Sirius. But she could sell any property she set her mind to. I think she used hypnosis.

‘I hope they stopped work,’ I said and Susie said they had, but only because there was a handful of protesters still parading the site, and they’d seen a skeleton go into the skip along with the top sward, the rare ferns, the lesser celandine and lumps of sticky yellow clay, and had called the police, who came without riot gear, and were very helpful and refrained from observing how quickly they ceased being pigs and scum when anyone actually needed them.

The police had made the JCBs pull back, and Riley’s the developers keep to the letter of the law and call in the archaeologists, no matter how their lawyers protested that they were exempt, and that every day of stopped work cost them at least £100,000. And there the skeletons lay, indecently uncovered—except the one rescued in bits from the skip, now at the county morgue being dated and pigeonholed—waiting for their fate to be decided. There’d been nothing in the local paper, let alone the nationals. Susie reckoned Riley’s had made sure of that. They didn’t want sightseers holding up the work.

‘That’s horrible,’ I said. ‘The age of a body doesn’t make any difference. Two thousand years ago or yesterday, it’s the same thing. It deserves respect’

Susie said what bothered her so about Becky Horrocks, the girl who’d thrown the cigarette stub, was how little she must care about herself, if she cared so little for the dead.

That evening, when the sun stopped baking and a cool breeze got up, Matt and Susie called by and took me down to the site. How parched and dry the landscape looked! I had a bad back from heaving stuff in and out of the kiln and my hands were rough and blistered, but the triptych was ready to go off. It was a commission for Canterbury Cathedral and was part of some European-funded art and religion project. It would be touring the cathedrals of the country over the next year.

I am not a particularly religious person—not like Susie and Matt, who go dutifully to Rumer parish church every Sunday and twice on Christmas Day—but then I was not required to be: just a good artist. The theme of the work was the coming of Christianity to the British Isles, which heaven knew was shrouded in myth and mystery anyway, and my guess was as good as anyone’s.

The centre panel was the child Jesus sailing into Glastonbury around the year AD 10 with his uncle Joseph of Arimathea—a tin trader—and almost certainly myth. The right panel depicted Saint Piran sailing to Cornwall from Ireland in a stone coracle—the stuff of magic, a tale drifted down from the sixth century. On the left was Saint Augustine, riding into Canterbury in AD 597 with his retinue of forty monks, sent by Pope Gregory to bring the gospel to the heathen English, for which there was a basis in history proper. The panels were in bright flower-bedecked colours, designed to glow and shine in the vaulted gloom of the cathedral: light breaking into darkness. I was really pleased with it but doing it had left me exhausted.

I thought perhaps it was exhaustion that made me react as I did. The desolation a handful of JCBs can wreak in a couple of days is extraordinary. The whole valley was down to subsoil: a great stretch of yellow-grey earth taking up the space—perhaps half a mile across and two-thirds of a mile long—between two untouched still green and verdant hills, stretching like tautened muscles on either side of the scar. I began to cry. How could Ihave been so indifferent as to what was going on around me? Matt looked embarrassed.

Susie took me by the hand and led me to a square patch of stony ground, more grey than yellow, which rose above the surrounding clay. She was wearing a neat green shirtwaister and lace-up walking shoes. I was in an old T-shirt, jeans and sandals. Susie always dressed up to go out: now I unexpectedly saw my lack of formality as rash. It made me too vulnerable. The living should dress up to honour the dead.

There were I suppose a dozen graves, running north to south: a few were no more than oblongs let down into bare earth, most were lined with what I supposed to be lead. In the bottom of each lay a skeleton: long strong white bones: some disturbed by animals—rodents, I suppose, or whatever disturbs the dead underground, over centuries—but for the most part lying properly, feet together, finger bones fallen to one side. Scraps of leather remained in the graves: what looked like a belt here, a sandal thong there. I was distressed for them.

‘They can’t just be left here on their own, exposed,’ I said. ‘They’re well dead,’ said Matt. ‘I don’t think they’ll mind.’ The wind got up a little and dust and earth swirled round the graves; already the sharpness of their edges was beginning to dull. If only rain would fall. The green surface of mother earth is so thin, so full of the defiance of the death and dust that lies beneath.

‘I wonder who was here before us,’ said Susie, ‘laying them to rest so long ago. Young strong men: how they’ll have grieved. And we don’t even know their names.’

Matt was stirring the ground with his foot and turning up a few pieces of what looked to me like Roman tile. ‘Reckon there’s another Roman villa round here,’ he said. ‘That won’t make the developers too happy.’ But he reckoned they’d manage to get the archaeologists on their side, and forget about it and build anyway. They’d go through the motions but there was too much at stake to hold up work for more than a week at the most.

Susie and I said we’d take turns grave-watching. It didn’t seem right to leave the graves unattended. I’d take the shift until midnight, then she’d turn up in their camper van and spend the rest of the night on site. Matt said we were crazy but went along with it. Indeed, he said he’d relieve his wife at six and stay until eight when he had to get to work. Surely by then Riley’s would have got their act together and organised a watchman, and the archaeologists would turn up to do whatever they were required to do under statute.

I sat and watched the sun set and the moon rise, and the white bones began to glimmer in their graves. I thought I could hear the sound of Romans marching, but that was imagination, or a distant helicopter. I drifted off to sleep. It wasn’t at all creepy, I don’t know why: it should have been. There was a kind of calm ordinariness in the air. My earlier distress was quite gone. At about eleven Mabs turned up with a massive flashlight and a camping chair and table and some sandwiches and coffee. She’d been through to Susie on the phone. We sat quietly together until Susie relieved us: bump, bump, bump, in the camper van. Mabs took me home and I slept really soundly, though in the morning my back was bad again.

I rang the Bishop’s Palace to ask about reinterring the bodies. I couldn’t get through to the Bishop but I explained the situation to some kind of sub-Canon and he said they were well aware of it, and since the graves were lying north to south, they were not Christian burials in the first place, but pagan and nothing to do with the Church. It was up to the civil authorities to do what they decided was best. The University of Birmingham had tendered for the contract: the site was to be photographed and mapped—there had indeed been a Roman villa on the site, as well as a pottery and a graveyard—but take off a layer and the country was littered with them. The bones? They’d be placed in sealed plastic bags and taken off to the research department at Birmingham for medical or other research.

‘Pagan?’ I enquired. ‘I thought we were all ecumenical, now.’

But no. Ecumenical did not extend to heathens. I pleaded without success but the bishopric was unmoved, nor would they put me through to anyone else. I thought about withdrawing my triptych from the cathedral in protest but couldn’t bear to do that.

I went down to the site later in the day. The whole world seemed to be out and about in the hot sun, and not a scrap of shade. The graveyard area was roped off, there were security guards, the JCBs buzzed away at the far end of the site, archaeological students peered and measured. A handful of old ladies from Rumer had brought chairs and were sitting round the one that I was beginning to see as the master grave—it was lead-lined, decorated, and larger than the others. They were knitting. They were like Furies, or the Norns, or some kind of Greek chorus—but knitting. Well, this was Rumer. An ice-cream van plied its wares: word was beginning to get round: people were turning up in cars to stare and marvel.

Earth-moving machinery rumbled, turned, groaned and clanked in the distance, but management—you could tell them by their grey suits and pale faces, sweating in the heat—were everywhere. Pam was in urgent conversation with a grizzled man in a hat looking rather like Harrison Ford who was sitting on the end of the master grave making notes and taking photographs. A helicopter swept to and fro over the site, presumably doing the aerial survey the Canon had spoken of.

‘What’s with the old ladies?’ I asked Pam. ‘I didn’t know they knitted.’

‘They’re from the church,’ she said. ‘They’re making a knitted patchwork tapestry to auction for charity. They usually sit and do it in the church hall but they felt like some fresh air and all trooped around here.’

‘Isn’t that rather peculiar?’ said I.

‘No more peculiar than you and Susie sitting out here all last night,’ said Pam. ‘The archaeologists aren’t very friendly. They’re on the developers’ side. Well, they’re the ones who’re paying. They’re making a survey of the site, then they’re sealing it and the shopping mall goes ahead on top of it’

‘I’ll call the newspapers,’ I said. ‘It’s a scandal.’

‘The living have to exist and do their shopping,’ said Pam. ‘Along with the mall go sixty starter homes, a foot clinic with accommodation for six nurses, and an Internet cafée free for under-eighteens. Riley’s put out a press release today.’

‘It’s still a temple to Moloch,’ I said. ‘And personally I have no intention of worshipping him.’

Susie came up. She had a party of A-level pupils with her, the cream of the bunch, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, making notes as to the manner born.

‘They reckon the villa dates from around the first half of the first century,’ said Susie. ‘And the graveyard too. I reckon it’s something really special but they can’t afford to admit it’

I remonstrated with the Harrison Ford lookalike: there had to be some kind of ceremony, I said. He couldn’t just pack the skeletons up in plastic bags so they lay on dusty shelves for ever. He spoke Nottingham, which was rather a pity, not Hollywood. He dismissed me as a middle-class busybody. The life of the real world had to go on. It couldn’t be forever caught up in its past. Fine words, I thought, for an archaeologist. A trahison des clercs. Even the academics had forsaken us, and bowed down before Mammon. We had quite a row, which he won. When I got to the station to meet the children I was still quite pink with anger.

They had bought computer games with them. I took them down to the site: they were moderately interested, out of politeness, but not much.

‘They’re just old bones,’ they said. ‘Chill, Mum,’ and went into a chorus of dem bones dem bones dem dry bones; I supposed they’d seen piles of bodies on TV in their time. I always looked away at the horrors. I turned on the news to find out what was going on in the world. An official drought had been declared. Hosepipe bans had been imposed in most parts of the country. That would put paid to the lettuces, already struggling, and the gooseberries would be tiny and sour.

Their father was going to marry again. That was okay be me, and by them. They seemed to like her. We were all on good terms. It’s always rather a shock, though. The children said I should marry again; it was easier for them if there was someone to look after me. I said I didn’t need looking after and they laughed hollowly.

That night we stood around the special grave, the master grave, the grave of the tallest soldier, in the moonlight. There was Susie, Pam, Carter Wainwright and I. Riley’s didn’t run to a night watchman. Carter was a hippie silversmith: he made the kind of jewellery Pam loved to wear: crystals set in silver: a kind of feng shui approach to the art of jewellery. Beads that brought you luck: earrings to focus the chakra required. I couldn’t stand that woozy kind of thing, really, but he was a nice enough fellow. Even quite good-looking for a pagan. And not married.

‘I don’t see how we can be sure he wasn’t a Christian,’ I said. ‘People travelled a lot in those days. For all we know these are the bones of the centurion John Wayne played in the film, the one who took Jesus’ robe after the crucifixion and was converted. Why are people so sure such things can’t be?’

‘Because it’s so very unlikely,’ said Carter Wainwright. I bet he was christened something like Kevin Smith and changed his name when he came down here. People do. But he had a nice deep voice.

‘My point is, Carter,’ I said, ‘if they found an early Christian cross in this grave tomorrow, they’d have to believe.’

‘But they’re not going to find any such thing, are they,’ he said. ‘They might,’ I said. ‘You never know. If you come back to my house tonight I can show you all sorts of early Christian references. If you add mercury to the silver mix they always assume it’s old silver. Should anyone take it into their head to do any testing.’

‘I know all about that,’ he said. ‘I had a job once faking old clock faces. “Restoring” they called it, but from what they charged, I called it faking. I came down here to Rumer to live a more honest life.’

‘Two wrongs don’t make a right,’ said Pam, primly, but she didn’t sound very convinced.

‘I don’t think we’d better tell Matt,’ said Susie. ‘He’s such a stickler.’

‘You can’t do this,’ said Pam.

‘Yes we can,’ I said. ‘Then they can give these bodies a decent burial and we can all get some peace and some sleep.’

I bent down and picked out of the grave what looked like a sliver of wood, or had once been wood, in a blackened kind of way. And I gave it to Carter Wainwright and he put it in his pocket.

‘Give it the trace of a wooden frame,’ I said, ‘just to confuse the issue.’

I noticed my blistered fingers were getting better. Touch had been quite painful and cooking the children’s chicken dinner had been hell. Carter Wainwright came back with me for the books and a certain amount of canoodling did take place, I must say, before he took his leave. I didn’t want to be a burden to my children: a silversmith and a sculptor could live fairly amicably together. And he swore his name was truly Carter Wainwright and I believed him.

In the morning my back was better and my fingers unblistered and smooth. This is what a little sex can do for you, I concluded. And amazingly, it started to rain. You could practically see the lettuces breathe the moisture in, and their hearts swell and curl and firm. All the animals went out into the wet, which was rather unusual for them, and skittered about in pleasure. The ground was parched, how it drank in the rain.

I went down to the site with the children. Now that there were news teams and cameras and journalists with notebooks, they took more interest. Apparently a Christian cross, a Chi Rho, made of silver and wood, had been found in the grave of one of the centurions. They reckoned the sudden rain had loosened the earth, which was why they hadn’t seen it before. No-one had expected rain; it certainly hadn’t been forecast, and it was only local.

Harrison Ford from Nottingham was in a foul mood. This was the last thing he had wanted. Pam reckoned he was on some sort of performance bonus. He was in conference with his friend from Riley management, Marcus Dubiddy; I saw the Chi Rho lying on a piece of plastic by the grave while they argued. Both men looked thoroughly cross.

The rain had stopped pelting and now drifted in a kind of warm gentle misty shroud over the site. Those of us in jeans and T-shirts were at an advantage over the suits, whose ties began to look flabby very quickly. My son Joel even consented to join the dustpan and brush brigade, volunteers rounded up locally to help the Birmingham students sieve the ribboned-off sections of the site. They had at least five minutes’ training before setting to. At least there was stuff to find: oyster shells, bits of metal and broken Samian ware, all of which were being catalogued, plastic-bagged,and logged. Faster, faster, urged the overseers. They must cover more ground, more quickly. I felt protective of him, as if he were being whipped to build a pyramid.

Joel eavesdropped on Dubiddy’s conversation—I had been marked out as a troublemaker. The Chi Rho was to be sent by courier to the British Museum and they’d date it as a matter of urgency, and value it.

I must admit we panicked, Carter, Pam, Susie and I. We were to be discovered. The silver would be traced back to Carter: my involvement would be suspected. We had forged an early Christian cross. They would think it was some elaborate plan to make money out of the tourist trade. They would not believe our motives. Who nowadays would put themselves out to get a few old dry bones a Christian burial?

We drank too much Chilean red that night, round at my place, to quell our nerves and celebrate the removal of the triptych to Canterbury Cathedral. The carriers had come that day. The more we thought about it the more delinquent our forgery seemed, and indeed impertinent. The Roman legions came from all over the world: the centurion could have belonged to any of a dozen faiths. Many worshipped Mithras, the Sun God. Susie said she didn’t think he was a Mithraic, see, it was still gently raining; surely Mithras would have honoured his own? It was fine enough over the rest of the country: only our graves dwelt in this gentle, moist, life-giving Christian mist.

Matt, usually so wary of Pam, for his sort and her sort do not usually agree, came up and drank with us, and they told each other jokes. Susie became quite pink and giggled: Carter decided he had fallen in love with me; the children persuaded me to take in a stray cat who kept trying to live with us, while I tried to let her know, tactfully and firmly, that it was not to be. That night there was a terrific thunderstorm and lightning struck the village shop. The postmistress said it was the spirits of the unburied dead up there on the site bringing bad luck.

The British Museum sent an e-mail to Harrison’s laptop the next day. The Chi Ro was genuine. Two thousand years old, give or take a decade or two. Riley’s put out a press release. Carter was beside himself with pleasure. Not only had he had found me but he was one of the greatest forgers alive.

The next day the press turned up in force. Priceless, or at any rate in the region of several million pounds. We could say nothing, and we had won nothing. It was too late. Riley’s put guards on the site and strung a barbed wire fence around it. But still the bones were to go to Birmingham the next day. And within hours after that the skimming would continue and the vast screed would be laid, and that would be the end of our history, not to mention the nesting sites of the greater crested warbler, et cetera.

Then a Canon from Canterbury rang me to congratulate me on the triptych, and I think he meant it. I bought up the matter of the graves.

‘If they’ve found a Chi Rho in a Roman soldier’s grave,’ I said, ‘and the British Museum has validated it, then can’t we just accept that the dead soldier is a Christian? Sure, he might have stolen the cross, but for that matter he could have been present at the Crucifixion.’

It was amazing with what equanimity I could lie. I put it down to being in love. The Canon hummed and hawed and then all of a sudden cheered up, and said of course. He would be happy to do some kind of service of reconciliation, before the bones were bagged. He’d get through to the Rumer parish priest. I said they’d have to be quick. He said the Church could be if it had to be.

And sure enough early the next morning, while a restive Harrison Ford and his team stood back, and the JCBs stood silhouetted against the skyline with the young sun behind them—the storm had cleared the air—the knitting women set up a trestle table with a white cloth and a pot of wild flowers on it: and the Canon, an eagle of a man, turned up in his little Volkswagen, even bringing with him a Bishop from a neighbouring diocese—he had his crook with him and his gold embroidered over-vests, or whatever they’re called, in the back seat, and all those concerned and interested turned up, and a few journalists as well.

And the priests performed a service of reconciliation: and we sang a few quavery hymns, lost on the breeze—O God our help in ages past—then the table was folded, and the altar cloths, and we drifted off, and peace descended on the valley. All of a sudden it was a place like anywhere else.

Then Harrison and his team darted in like a team of vultures to take their pickings away, and their vans moved off. The JCBs surged down the hill to get to the part of the site they’d been denied, and a hundred cement mixers queued up on the new roads waiting to get in. Goodbye, marsh pippin, goodbye. The future knocks on the door, and if you don’t let it in, it simply batters it down.

But peace and prosperity has descended upon Rumer as if it were blessed: visitors come from all over the world to see the knitted patchwork tapestry, which won an international art prize and now hangs behind the altar, instead of being auctioned. To our relief the mall traffic was rerouted away from the village: a free bus service runs three times a week there and back for those without cars. Our flowers win at Chelsea: we grew a record carrot and its photograph was in the Mail. We keep the post office and the village store, and the little school was even reopened: the young stay instead of going off to the big city: why live away from paradise?

As for the mall itself, that prospered mightily. The fruit was always fresh and the bread stayed cheap. The charity shops were given concessions. The Internet cafée sopped up the alienated young and has given them purpose and achievement. Becky Horrocks took up computer studies. Matt was promoted to crime prevention officer and could work locally, to Susie’s pleasure. The mall even boasted a little museum, endowed by Riley’s and the University of Birmingham, where you could see photographs of the site, and the outline of the villa and the graveyard, and a replica of the Rumer Cross. I could not find out what happened to the original. It was probably bought by Bill Gates or Steven Spielberg to enrich their collections.

I married Carter Wainwright (in church, of course). My hands stay smooth and strong the better to continue to work. So do his. We are both employed these days doing restoration work, mostly for cathedrals. Carter replaces stolen silver plate (there’s a lot of that to do) and I forge, fashion and bake metal, stone and clay, making good whatever the weather undoes.

We don’t say it to each other, but we can both see in retrospect that what was going on at the site was miraculous, outside the normal order of things. It would not surprise me if it were indeed a sliver of the true cross I picked up that day and which Carter worked with: and that it leaves its blessed traces behind. I think we will be forgiven for our deceit: we were meant to do what we did.