by H. E. Bates
Joe was puzzled because even this shallower excavation was three feet or more below the stubble surface. ‘Did it sink down there? If it didn’t how did that depth of soil get on top of it? You’d think up here, on this hill, it’d be the other way round. You’d think soil would blow away.’
‘The thing to do is to ask this professor,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we come up Saturday and ask him?’
On Saturday afternoon they stood quietly, almost shyly, watching a young brown fair-haired man in khaki shorts scrupulously brushing dust from the tiled floor at the bottom of the shallower excavation. He seemed as absorbed in this work, crawling on his hands and knees, as a man trying to pick up minute fallen grains of seed.
‘Excuse me,’ Joe said, ‘could you tell us if Professor Brookes is coming this week-end?’
The man lifted his head sharply from the trench. His eyes, light blue and quick, seemed to dance in the sun.
‘I’m Brookes.’
Joe could not believe it. Professors were inevitably old and bearded, with perishable memories. They were short-sighted and peered at the world through microscopes. Their trade-mark was the decayed umbrella. Brookes, on the other hand, had the almost curt look of a youthful impostor and a tongue that was cryptic.
‘Interested in this?’
‘I work here,’ Joe said. ‘I’m the one that dug it up.’
‘Good.’
For some time this cryptic, almost boyish manner of speech kept them at a distance, intimidated. They could only watch the scrupulous hands at work with the brush, cleaning the rose-brown tiles, and feel awkwardly a deepening sense of intrusion. For long intervals Brookes too seemed to forget them, becoming absorbed in occasional fresh neat excursions into earth with the shining point of a builder’s trowel.
‘Shall we go?’ Kitty said. More deeply than Joe she felt the sense of intrusion; the way Brookes ignored them seemed pointed and offhand.
‘Oh! don’t go.’
The voice from the trench was terse and peremptory; she could not believe that it came from the youthful, absorbed figure picking away with the trowel.
‘Come down here and have a look at this. This is the heating chamber.’ He began curtly to explain his discoveries. ‘You hit the thing in a lucky place. Another yard or two and you might have bust it to pieces.’
‘Hot water?’ Joe said.
‘Why not? The villa probably had steam-heating too.’
‘How old is all this?’
‘First or second century. Probably second. That’s a coin I picked up—end of the second century. Of course it doesn’t date it. Could have been dropped a century after the place was built.’
Joe held the coin in his big hands. After a moment or two Kitty took it from him and looked at it for some time too and then handed it back to the professor.
‘No. Keep it. We’ll find plenty like that. It’s not particularly rare. Keep it.’
The blue eyes danced, flashing pure and quick, smiling, so that the girl was slightly embarrassed, taken unawares, not knowing what to say.
‘Thank you very much,’ Joe said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘Not a bit. You’re interested. Local people usually aren’t.’
‘What did you mean about a villa?’ Joe said.
‘There was probably a house here. Generally the bath-house was some distance away—sort of up the garden path. We may find it. The trouble is to get enough help with the digging.’
Joe laughed.
‘We’re looking for a house,’ he said. ‘It might suit us.’
‘We’ve been waiting over four years,’ Kitty said. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever get one.’
‘We’ve waited all this time,’ Joe said. ‘We can wait a bit longer.’
When Kitty smiled her small upper teeth, level and pretty, bit down with shy delicacy on her lower lip. The professor seemed attracted by this quick expression of diffidence and said, smiling back at her:
‘Well, you could hardly find a better spot than this. The Romans knew how to pick them—half-way up the hillside like this. Perfect. Look at it.’ He waved rose-dusty hands towards the summer valley, where the course of the little river was traceable only by its fringe of alder trees and the meadows about it were gold-green with swathes of hay. ‘Nice to think of it, isn’t it? Nearly two thousand years ago—probably a vineyard just below us here. Wild hyacinths in the woods, probably nightingales—changed a lot, of course, in some ways but in some ways not much.’
In the old quarry workings the brown everywhere was pricked with yellow fire and the air was heavily sweet with the first summer hay.
‘Probably got their stone from the same quarry,’ the professor said. ‘Sure to have done. And we’re probably from the same stock—well, not you and I,’ he said to Joe, ‘but she might well be——’
‘Me?’ Suddenly the glow in her skin was dark crimson and the professor watched it flush swiftly up through her face, beyond the black eyebrows, into the roots of the black hair.
‘I should think it’s more than likely,’ he said. ‘That dark hair and that straight nose. And not so very tall.’
‘A Roman girl,’ Joe said. ‘That’s a new one—might be your house.’
‘I wish it was,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of waiting.’ The two men were laughing; she was caught between a cross-fire of words that made her shyer than ever. ‘All we’ll get is a pre-fab. Or a hut. If we’re lucky.’
Suddenly Joe saw the pain of her shyness and said:
‘Did you mean it about not getting any help with the digging? I’ll help. I’ll come and dig.’
‘It has to be voluntary,’ the professor said. ‘There’s no money——’
‘That’s all right,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll come. Kitty and me’ll come. Any night we can.’
‘It would have to be while I was here,’ the professor said. ‘Under my direction. But I start my summer holiday next week—three weeks of it—and I’m thinking of putting up at the pub here and digging most of the time.’
‘We’ll come,’ Joe said. ‘Evenings and Saturdays. Kitty might be able to come some afternoons too—eh, Kitty?’
‘I might come when the strawberries are finished,’ she said. The flush had died slowly from her face and now she was looking down at the little valley with its hidden stream and its fields with their light gold rings of hay. ‘I never thought I’d be digging for a house. That’s something I never thought of.’
He walked in a confused and heavy way up the gully of the old workings, still swinging the wrench. In the hot sun the many bushes of broom were not only a mass of dripping flame. They clotted the air with a honey-light fragrance that seemed to flow down through the old hot rocks in a drowsy stream.
It was the second or third week-end when Johnson first began to taunt him. He could not remember which. He was confused now even about the day he had discovered the site, about the day the professor had arrived, and about the afternoon Kitty had first worked with him at the diggings and had come back to say:
‘He makes it feel you’ve lived up there. All of a sudden you feel the stones are talking.’
‘How’s the professor?’ Johnson began to say. ‘Grown a beard yet? I thought professors had beards. Found the garden path?’
‘Garden path?’
‘Well, somebody’s got to be led up it, ain’t they?’ Johnson said.
In the hot weather the fields of strawberries ripened quickly; by the end of June, the first week of the professor’s holiday, the short season was over. Kitty, with nothing to do, began to help the professor two or three afternoons a week and then again with Joe in the evenings. And sometimes Joe, perched high on the mechanical scoop, would be able to swivel round and catch sight of them, two brown absorbed figures, not quite real, kneeling close together in the illusory quivering heat across the stubbled hillside.
To him, all the time, the work seemed painfully slow. Uneasily he began to feel that that was not quite real either, that the idea of a v
illa, of a Roman household, of people cultivating vines, listening to nightingales, luxuriating in hot baths, was also illusory, a mere part of the professor’s charm. He was so used to excavating earth by the ton that he wanted to attack the site with pick and shovel, heartily, powerfully, with a muscular enthusiasm that would bring the whole pattern to life in a day. The professor remained rigidly and academically scrupulous. He scooped earth away with slow skilled reverence, brushing dust with the fanatical precision of a fond spinster grooming a precious parlour carpet in springtime. This slow precision made it appear sometimes to Joe as if, in the long July afternoons, not a spadeful of earth had been removed, as if the Roman dust remained exactly as he had left it the evening before.
Then all through the heat of a July afternoon Johnson muttered over and over again that he thought the site was deserted. ‘Don’t see the professor. Don’t see the professor’s assistant. Don’t see nobody. Must have gone to have a lay-down to cool off somewheres——’
‘You mag just like a bloody woman, don’t you?’ Joe said.
‘Well, even professors git hot sometimes, don’t they? Even professors’ve got to lay down sometime.’
Joe swung a spanner. He was not aware of swinging it. He saw Johnson duck by the rock-face. He saw the flash of a double spark, two winks of flame, as the spanner struck rock above Johnson’s head.
Then he saw Johnson dive for the spanner. In four or five big strides he was there before him, pinning Johnson back by the neck against the rock, holding the spanner neck-high with the other hand.
‘You goad me just once more and see,’ he said. He could feel the central bone of Johnson’s neck giving, under his hand. The face was a mere hot withered blur of flesh against carved yellow rock. ‘You just goad me——’
‘Keep your bloody hair on,’ Johnson said.
‘Just goad me,’ he said. ‘Just goad me.’
That evening, when he left the shift and walked across to the excavations, neither the professor nor Kitty were where he had expected them to be. The site of the bath was deserted. His illusion that neither rock nor dust had been touched became suddenly real. He stared down for some minutes at the empty grave-like diggings, troubled and sick, remembering Johnson. In a flash he felt his anger against Johnson turn and renew itself and surge against the two people he could not find, and in a moment he was lumbering like a bewildered bear across the hill.
He had not taken more than ten or a dozen strides when he saw the dark head of Kitty jump up forty or fifty yards away, startling, bodyless, straight out of earth. She saw him at once and waved her hand and began shouting something about the villa.
‘Joe!’ she shouted. ‘We think this is it. This is the villa!’
Stupidly, with uneasy and stumbling devotion, he went across to her.
‘Couldn’t think where you’d got to,’ he said.
‘The professor had a plan and we started digging here——’
‘No, it was just a hunch,’ the professor said. ‘I took a fix on the pub-sign. There’s probably always been a ford on the river there, so I got the ford and the pub-sign and this spot all in one line and hoped. Not very orthodox, but the hunch came off, that’s all.’
‘Don’t you think that was clever?’ she said. Her face, under the black hair, was crimson-brown with dust and sun and excitement. ‘We’ve got a house after all.’
He smiled at her and then suddenly rubbed his hand across her hair, brushing it. ‘You’re all dusty,’ he said and sickly he remembered how near, by the rock-face, in frenzy, he had come to killing Johnson.
He had reached the top of the old gully. He had only to walk now across the field. He had chosen the end of the morning shift because he knew that the professor would be alone at the excavations. It would be an hour before Kitty arrived.
‘Ask him yourself,’ Johnson had said. ‘I never said it. He said it. In the pub—that little Roman girl, he kept calling her.’
‘That’s all right, Johnson. I’ve heard him call her that.’
‘Yeh, but not with that look on his face.’
‘What look?’
‘The what’s yours is mine look,’ Johnson said. ‘You know.’
That had been half-way through the morning shift. It was cunning of Johnson, though he did not see it, to give that twist to things. It had been easy when there was only Johnson’s face leering against the rock-face or bulging in terror as he held the neck savagely pinned. Now Johnson had him tied in knots, with the result that it was not Johnson he hated, but the professor.
As the morning went on and the heat of the day thickened he found himself lashing and groping through a mass of complicated emotion, trying to struggle free. Now and then, down on the new workings, the shot-firers touched off blastings, two or three in succession, that cracked violently in the hot morning air. There was shot-firing every day and ordinarily he never noticed it. He had been so used to it so long that it was just another form of silence. The sound of nightingales always seemed far louder from the oaks at the top of the gully. It was getting late for nightingales now but in the season, when mating was in full flush, they sang not only at night but throughout most of the day, madly, never afraid of the blasting.
But now, during the sultry heat of the morning, he was shaken and startled by every blast. He was off his guard at the crack of each explosion, so that each time the blood jumped violently and darkly through his head. All his efforts at thinking were simply a series of grotesque and incoherent pictures—Johnson leering and lying, the professor and Kitty alone together in hot afternoons on the hill, the professor calling her his Roman girl, the professor with his stories of people looking down across that valley two thousand years ago, watching the vines, the sun, the summer grass by the summer river, listening to the nightingales—the professor with his way of making the stones talk. He knew that that was the way a man could get a girl excited and fooled and mesmerised.
Now, as he came lumbering up from the gully into the field of stubble beyond, he was all set to get to the truth of it. Unconsciously, hot and blind, he was swinging the spanner. At the back of his mind was the red-hot thought that he had given Johnson a lesson with the spanner. Just a lesson—just the face terrorised for a moment or two, just the bone of the neck pinned back by the rock. It never entered his head again that he had held Johnson, just for a second or two, like a fat scared fly, at the point of death.
Then, as he reached the excavations, he saw that they were empty. It had been ten days or more since the first excited discovery of the villa’s foundations and during that time the professor and himself and Kitty had worked more quickly than before, uncovering the oblongs of two small rooms. Now he wandered into and out of this broken ghost-house almost senselessly, searching clumsily for something he could not find.
It was only when he heard his name called that he came to himself for the first time. It was Kitty’s voice, calling him from the edge of the spinney above the diggings, and for a final moment, just before turning in answer, he half-expected to see her there with the professor. He half-wanted to see her there.
Instead she was sitting alone in the long grass under the edge of the spinney, bare-headed, eating the last of a packet of sandwiches. As he came up to her he could see white crumbs of bread on her lips that she had not wiped away. Seeing them, his frenzy began to ebb out of him even before he heard her say:
‘I think the professor’s gone down for a drink. I thought I caught sight of him—what made you come up? I somehow thought you would.’
‘I don’t know. I just thought——’ The spanner was still in his hand.
She saw it and said: ‘All of a hurry too. What made you all of a hurry?’
He felt the blood rushing into his throat. The terror of almost killing Johnson came swelling back, horrible and conscious. With sickness he remembered the professor and the way he had come blindly to find him there.
A moment later he was pressing her down against the earth. ‘I just wanted you,’ h
e said. ‘I was just thinking about you——’ He saw her lips, rose-dark, parted to reveal the soft, wet tongue between. The flush of excitement was rising quickly in her throat, up through the sun-brown face, beyond the black eyebrows and at last under the thick black hair.
He was speaking and kissing her at the same time: ‘Don’t let’s wait,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to wait no longer. I’m sick of waiting. We don’t want to wait no longer, do we?’
‘What about the house?’
‘We can get rooms,’ he said. ‘Pop Nichols has got two rooms. We’ve waited long enough. I’m sick of waiting——’
She began laughing and put her lips to his face. In the long grass she did not feel that she was breathing. Her bare brown arms pulled him down to her and held him against her body until it was no longer possible to see, above and about him, anything of the pure hot noon sky.
‘Do you think I was ever a Roman girl?’ she said. She was laughing again, the blood warm and crimson in her throat. ‘Do you think they were anything like me? Do you think they felt the same?’
He did not answer. Below them the villa with its naked dust lay exposed to the midday sun so that it was without a shadow on the hillside. The broom was flaring on the rock. In the spinney there was no sound of nightingales and presently there was no sound at all as she held him against her, in the deep grasses, imprisoned, out of the sun.
Go, Lovely Rose
‘He is the young man she met on the aeroplane,’ Mrs Carteret said. ‘Now go to sleep.’
Outside the bedroom window, in full moonlight, the leaves of the willow tree seemed to be slowly swimming in delicate but ordered separation, like shoals of grey-green fish. The thin branches were like bowed rods in the white summer sky.
