Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  Now, Maggie had walked off along the narrow earth balk that served as a cat-walk among the burial pits, Susan, sitting back for a moment to wipe her face – the heat was exhausting – saw her ankle-socks, her stocky legs, her large loose bottom, and felt a rush of pity; there was something schoolgirlish about the woman, as though she carried an albatross adolescence with her, some fatal undevelopment of the heart.

  The separation of the lovers caused general merriment. Maggie was determined to run a clean site, it was suggested, in every sense. Or maybe she wished to preserve the moral spirit of the Priory.

  Susan had taken to wandering around the cathedral and its precincts for half an hour or so most evenings, before it grew dark and the place was given over to the portentous booming of the son et lumière. It was there, a few days later, that she met Maggie, who came striding through the cloister where Susan was sitting on a lower inner wall, enjoying the effects of evening sunlight on the fan-vaulting. Seeing her, Maggie stopped.

  ‘Oh, hello, what on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Nothing, particularly. Just that it's specially nice at this time of day.’

  ‘Is it? I wouldn't know. I had to see the cathedral people about this Open Day idea – endless talk, wasting half my evening. I haven't even started on the finds yet, or mapping these new walls.’ She had begun to move on again, saying, ‘Are you going back?’ Susan, who had intended to sit for longer, found herself drawn alongside. She said, ‘Open Day?’

  ‘They want us to have an Open Day on the site,’ said Maggie irritably, ‘to coincide with their junketings. It's the thousandth anniversary of the reconsecration or something. Anyway, they want us to do conducted tours of the site, with explanatory talks and stuff, and a display of the finds and whatnot.’

  Susan said, ‘Isn't that rather a nice idea?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, get people interested. And they are, they're always asking us things …’ Catching Maggie's expression she added, ‘Of course, I'm afraid we're not all that good at explaining, but we do what we can.’

  Maggie said, ‘Oh, I suppose so. But it means losing a whole day.’

  They had reached the west door of the cathedral. Susan, arrested as always by the delicacy of the carvings, the tier upon tier of saints, the lavish complexity of leaves, of beasts, of fact and fantasy, of the pious and the secular, was silent. Maggie, walking quickly through, said, ‘We can do a short cut through the building, can't we? Oh, I suppose I'll have to go along with them – I did point out that it was mucking up our schedule, but I doubt if that sank in far. There was one bloke who had what I suppose was quite a valid point about attracting possible funds. You never know who may show up – local big-wigs and so forth. We need at least another season on this dig and if the Ministry grant is the same next year it quite frankly won't do.’

  It was almost eight; the tourists had ebbed, leaving the cathedral in a sombre peace, except for occasional quackings over the loud-speakers outside, getting themselves into good voice for the night's event. The Gift Shop had closed, and the Chapter House Refreshment Bar. Evensong (shifted forward by an hour to accommodate the son et lumière) was over. It was chill, much cooler than outside, and there was that curious unanalysable ecclesiastical smell of stone, brass polish and something that could not in an Anglican cathedral be incense, and yet was oddly reminiscent. It was as though the place generated its own climate, regardless of contemporary conditions. Sunlight poured through the clerestory windows, defining quatrefoils and shafts, losing its intensity as it fell down the heights of the building to become a rainbow reflection on the hefty piers of the nave. Elsewhere, at ground level, dusk had muted all the conflicts and confusions of daylight – the material variety of marble, stone, wood, brass, iron; the shufflings of time and style; the polyglot babble of visitors. It had, for once, a unity.

  Susan said, with diffidence, ‘I always think it's odd you can have this part so Norman, and then all the rest later, and somehow it works. I've never really looked properly at a cathedral before.’

  ‘Mmn,’ said Maggie. ‘Of course there's a lot of nonsense talked about the original plan – the official guide-book's quite wrong, Battersby did it and he's notoriously unsound.’ They had reached the main entrance. Standing in a flood of multi-coloured light from the rose window, her face-bathed in it, suddenly beautified, as though by some divine intervention – the miraculous staunching of a wound, the non-putrefaction of a corpse – she went on grudgingly, ‘Oh well, I suppose I'll have to lay it on, this bally Open Day. You could help John and Steve with the chat bits, I won't be able to do it all and you've picked up quite a lot really.’ She moved, and her face turned from rose to gold. ‘By the way, why did you come on the dig? One wonders vaguely sometimes – you know, what brings people.’

  It was the first time Susan had ever heard her express curiosity about another person, she realised; Maggie seemed usually quite set apart from ordinary probings and exchanges, like someone with a heavy cold, or the impediment of a language difficulty.

  Susan had never told anyone on the dig of her private preoccupation. Now, she said, ‘Oh, I just thought I'd like to do something different for part of the summer, learn about something new.’

  Saying it, she felt shabby in the untruth, as though she had in some curious way misused the place: the beauty of the cathedral, those inaccessible people whose bones she handled every day.

  But Maggie had already lost interest. She said, with a glance at her watch, ‘Oh God – nearly half past eight, I'll be in the school till all hours. See you tomorrow,’ and strode away over the precinct; at the far side, people were assembled on the scaffolding from which the son et lumière could be best appreciated; behind, the cathedral awaited its nightly bashing by searchlight and sepulchral voices.

  The preparations for the Open Day drove Maggie into a frenzy of exasperated activity (‘… though I don't know what the hell I'm thinking of, letting the schedule be set back by at least two or three days just so we can stand around answering a lot of no doubt irrelevant questions, still, I suppose public relations do matter …’): the school was cleared, in so far as possible, and a display of finds arranged on trestle tables. A large, explanatory plan of the site was drawn by Gwyn and the girl from Nottingham, the chronology clarified by the use of different coloured tempo pens. Maggie and the other professionals divided up the site between them, each to guard and explain his or her own territory. The volunteers were detailed off on to stewarding duties. Susan was in charge of the school, and had the job of explaining the finds.

  They were all surprised by the success of the occasion. Admittedly, the weather helped, but even a warm sunny day could not entirely account for the file of people who shuffled through the site, tiptoeing along the cat-walks, keeping a respectful distance from Maggie's NO VISITORS BEYOND THIS POINT signs, listening, asking questions. In the school, Susan was hemmed in. She felt like an overtaxed shop-assistant or barmaid, explaining her wares for hour after hour – the Roman pottery, the fragments of painted tile from the Priory, the coins and buttons and broken combs, the medieval shoe, the fourteenth-century slipware dish (almost complete), the pins and nails and pipe-bowls, the bones of the stillborn baby arranged on cottonwool in a shoebox (the rest of the burials were stacked away in their plastic bags in the school washroom).

  It had been intended that they should close down at five o'clock. However, this was presumably not made clear in the publicity put out by the cathedral authorities, for at five fifteen the queue waiting for admission still reached the length of the outer wattle barrier. There was a hasty consultation. Maggie wanted to make a firm announcement and have any further comers turned away; she was prevailed on to continue till six, and grudgingly agreed. By a quarter to six she had left her own section of the site and was patrolling, looking at her watch and frowning, as though she would stem the flow by sheer force of will. She seemed in an odd state of combined irritation and elation. All day, her voice had been hig
h-pitched in its rattle of explanation and instruction; she had been impatient with questioners.

  Coming into the school, where a couple of dozen people were still filing past the trestle tables, she lifted her wrist, tapped her watch, mouthed at Susan ‘Time's up’. She edged past the visitors, and said sharply to a small child whose fingers had crept towards the shoebox containing the baby's bones, ‘Don't touch, please.’

  The baby had aroused interest, all day. Everybody had wanted to speculate about how old, and why, and when. A midwife had offered technical explanations, gleaned from something about the shape of the skull. This particular child had been staring, fascinated, for several minutes. Now, he said suddenly to Susan, ‘Am I like that inside?’

  She said, ‘Yes.’ His parents, over by the door, were signalling to him to come. Slowly, he spread out his hand, staring at the fingers. Looking up at her again, he said, ‘Will I be like that when I'm deaded?’

  She hesitated, glancing for a moment at the parents, still signalling, at Maggie's expression of fretful endurance. She said, ‘Yes. And me.’

  The child nodded gravely; he shot out his thin arm and stared at it. Then he turned and went after his parents. Maggie sighed and said, ‘Well, I suppose we must count ourselves lucky if nothing's been damaged or nicked. I hope nothing has been damaged or nicked?’

  Susan said, ‘I don't think so.’ The last visitors were leaving now. Maggie said, ‘Well, that's it.’ She drew her hand across her forehead, and Susan saw that it was shaking. From outside, the other volunteers were waving with glass-raising gestures: they were off to the pub. She said to Maggie, ‘I'm going now. I'll come back later and help straighten up in here, if you like.’ She felt another of those small rushes of sympathy: that shaking hand – why, in what way, had the day been such a strain?

  It was a couple of hours before she returned to the school, and was surprised to find Maggie alone: she had imagined that John Hacker and the others would have been there. Maggie said, ‘Oh, I told them to push off, I can get on quicker on my own,’ adding – not very graciously – ‘I'd forgotten you said you'd come – actually you could give me a hand with these sherds, they seem to have got somewhat muddled up.’

  Her voice was slightly slurred. She reached under the table and brought out a half-empty bottle of wine, ‘Here, d'you want a drink? There's another glass on the windowsill, I think.’

  She had done little about clearing up; the display of finds was much as it had been earlier. Instead, she seemed to have been fiddling with some bits of glazed pottery, the pieces of the slipware dish which, it was thought, could probably be reconstructed for the City Museum.

  Susan said, ‘It's just like stuff in trendy shops now, isn't it, that glaze?’

  ‘Is it? I s'pose so.’ Maggie began to talk about the day. ‘… Pretty well impossible to get across to people what this sort of thing is really about’ – she squinted at a glazed fragment, ‘That's later – how's that got in with this lot? Yes, it's from Pit 18 – I knew people would start messing things about. And all those endless irrelevant questions – like that kid you were talking to. There were kids all over the place – I was going spare at some moments, thinking they'd crash down into a burial or something.’

  Susan said, ‘I didn't think he was irrelevant – that little boy.’

  ‘What?’ Maggie slopped some more wine into her glass, waved the bottle at Susan – who saw now with a twitch of alarm that there was another bottle, empty, under the table.

  Maggie talked. About past digs; about her doctorate; about the write-up of the current dig which, if things worked out right, should do her reputation ‘… no harm at all, in fact rather a lot of good – I think I may put out an interim thing even before next season.’ And then, suddenly, she was talking about more personal things ‘… You didn't know I was married once, did you?’ She chuckled, waving the bottle again. ‘More? Come on, we might as well finish it.’

  Susan, embarrassed, said, ‘Well, actually, someone did once say …’

  ‘That's something that simply isn't relevant either, my marriage. What's happened is over and done with. You just don't give it another thought, if you've got any sense – you move on. It's the only way to live, if you ask me.’ She paused, shoving the sherds around on the table in front of her like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. ‘When Derek walked out on me I thought, right, that's that. Finished. Kaput. Take a deep breath and forget it. He wasn't an archaeologist, by the way – that was one thing that was wrong from the start. And, frankly now, it's as though he never was. Do you know, I can't really remember what he looked like.’ She squinted up at Susan, her expression distinctly triumphant. ‘He absolutely no longer exists.’

  There was a silence. Maggie took a swig at her drink. Susan said awkwardly, ‘Actually, I think – I don't know – if it was me, I think I'd want to try to work out why – try to see what it was that had happened to me, after all it's all going to be part of the person you end up being and in that case …’

  ‘You're wrong,’ said Maggie flatly. ‘You go nuts that way, mulling things over. Take my word for it. Wipe the slate clean- wham!’ She swept her arm across the table in a decisive gesture; sherds and other bits and pieces went flying; she was quite drunk now. She slumped with her head cupped in her hands, elbows on the table, as Susan scrambled on the floor, picking things up. ‘Wham! Bam! Finish!’

  A large piece of floor tile from the early church was shattered into several smaller pieces; the base of a glass bottle was broken, too; the shoebox had upended, scattering the baby's bones all over the place. Carefully, Susan gathered everything up. Some bones, she saw anxiously, had slipped down between two worm-eaten floorboards and would have to be retrieved tomorrow, somehow, with pincers or something, or at the worst one would have to take the boards up.

  She said to Maggie, gently, ‘Wouldn't you like to go back to your digs now? You look awfully tired.’

  ‘I'm never tired. And I'll tell you another thing- celibacy's a damn sight more comfortable than people make out. Don't you be fooled.’ She scowled at the sherds in front of her, roughly assembled in the form of a dish, and shunted them into confusion again with a savage gesture, spilling more on to the floor. Susan said, ‘Oh please – come on, Maggie, let's go now.’

  Maggie shoved her chair back from the table. She stared vacantly at the window, at the night sky, at the lurid glimmer of the cathedral, ‘You take my advice, Susan, I'm a lot older than you and I know how it goes. I know the score. Don't you ever let yourself be lumbered with what's over and done with. Travel light, that's what.’ Her face was red and shiny; she looked older than she was and also, in some elusive way, younger: her features had, still, the chubbiness, the expectancy, of a girl's face. She groaned suddenly. ‘Oh God, what a day! I hate having people all around me like that, on and on …’

  Susan took her arm. ‘I'll walk back with you.’

  They went out together. Maggie, staggering a little, would have left the place open; Susan found the key hanging behind the door and locked up. Walking through the empty streets, Maggie said blearily, ‘Well, thanks for helping, anyway. You know, as I say, it's a pity you never thought of doing archaeology.’ She tapped Susan's arm, peering sideways at her in the darkness. ‘It's not half a bad career – I mean, yes, it's badly paid and all that, but there's more important things than that, aren't there? I'll tell you one thing – I've never been bored, not for fifteen years, and you can't say that in every job, can you?’

  Susan walked slowly back to the police station. It was quite late; she had not been back since that morning; the others were playing poker. Someone said, ‘Hey – there's a letter for you.’

  She sat on the edge of her camp-bed, reading it. ‘I got back a few days ago,’ he wrote. ‘Actually, Jane and I parted company around Rouen. It wasn't really working out all that well. I rang your mother and she said you were on this dig thing (that threw me a bit, I must say! Whatever put that idea into your head!) but probably going to finish
at the end of the week. So what I've been wondering, Sue, is should I come down there and fetch you? I think I could get hold of my dad's car and maybe we could go off and have a few days somewhere …’

  She sat there for a while, holding the letter, seeing, beyond the windows, the flare of the cathedral, hearing, behind the slam of the poker players' cards, the muffled and distorted boom of the loudspeakers, ending their nightly re-enactment of Houghcester's long and complex history. Then she got out her pad and began to write a reply: ‘Actually,’ she wrote, ‘I think I'll stay on here a bit longer, maybe till the beginning of next term, more or less – some of the others are off soon, and I'd like to help out the woman who is in charge, I've come to feel a bit sorry for her. I suppose she's not all that nice but she means well. It has been interesting – seeing what people do who are professionally involved with history, as it were, I feel I've learned things, though I suppose nothing that's likely to be useful …’

  Servants Talk About People: Gentlefolk Discuss Things

  ‘I THINK I knew his father,’ said my uncle. ‘Was he in India during the war?’

  I said, ‘I've really no idea. I don't know Mark all that well. I only mentioned him because I …’

  ‘That'll be him,’ said my uncle, with furrowed brow. ‘He was in Calcutta in '43. Man with a limp. Played the trombone. Waiter! Could we have the menu?’

  The menu, size of a wall-poster, was propped up before us by, in fact, a waitress. Even in the expensive murk of the restaurant it was difficult not to sense barely restrained passion of some kind; she stared over my uncle's head at the swing door leading to, presumably, the kitchens. My uncle, poring over the tortuously hand-written placard, said, ‘I hope this place'll be all right. Neighbour of ours recommended it. They seem to go in for veal in a big way. Would you like a starter?’