by John Tagholm
‘Alone, mother.’
‘What is it about you and men, Beatrice? Anthony was such a nice boy. Don’t you want to settle down?’
Beatrice knew only too well that it was not possible to have a rational conversation with her mother about this and she deliberately chose not to engage.
‘It’s partly work,’ she said.
‘Such a shame.’
To what this referred, Beatrice wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was merely a generic comment about her daughter, a blanket expression of disappointment. Eileen Palmenter’s grasp on her daughter’s life, only marginal at the best of times, became increasingly slim in the years after the death of her husband.
‘Don’t you want to know what I might be doing in France?’
‘Where, darling?’
If the remoteness of her mother and the absence of her father had done anything, Beatrice told herself, it was to give her a resolve to create a different sort of life for herself, regardless of the wishes of her mother.
‘Television. Well, I suppose it’s fine until you marry,’ had been a typical response. ‘Although what your father would have said, heaven only knows.’
Beatrice’s father had been an actuary, a profession she never understood until one evening, after she’d been teased at school for not knowing, she had asked. Jim Palmenter sat his daughter down and in measured tones told her that it was a job which looked into the future by assessing facts about the past. He was involved with pensions, money people saved for their retirement and he showed her complicated graphs about how long people lived in order, he said, that he could estimate what future liabilities might be like for his company. She didn’t understand everything but she recalled the conversation at his funeral not long afterwards when it seemed unbearably sad that a man whose life was expected to last a lot longer should unexpectedly be cut so short.
‘I found a skull by the Thames over the weekend.’
‘Darling, really, I’m eating.’
Am I my mother’s daughter, she wondered and not for the first time? On the way home, though, she realised that the lunch, however tortuous, had served one purpose, for it had, by chance, flushed out a decision on France. On her return to the flat she looked up Troumeg’s number in Deal and called, but the line appeared to be disconnected. She tried his Chelsea apartment where a rather sharp female voice told her that he no longer lived there and that she was so tired of receiving calls for him that she was going to change the number. Finally Beatrice called his agent, a long-suffering woman with a smoker’s voice.
‘Goodness only knows where he is,’ she said. ‘One minute he was here, then he was gone. It’s typical. He’s done it before. Have you tried his Paris number?’
Beatrice had read that he had a home in France, but no further details so she copied down the number and address.
‘I have to tell you, though, these details must be at least twenty years old.’
Beatrice sat and looked at the number. The lunch with her mother rested uneasily on her stomach and the life of Joseph Troumeg lay scattered on her bed. When the telephone rang it made her jump in surprise.
‘Is that Beatrice? It’s Harry, Harry Wesley from the museum. I was wondering, well, curious to know if you could remember exactly where the skull was found?’
‘Good afternoon, Harry. Yes, it was marked in a couple of places, a tagged steel rod where it was picked up and with a cross reference on the embankment itself. There was a GPS recorded of the location as well, which 4Shore will have.’
‘I was hoping you might show me yourself. But would you like to come to the museum first and I could explain what we’ve done so far?’
There was an assumption on the part of Dr Harold Wesley that she would be free and rather than challenge it, as she might usually have done, Beatrice agreed, glad to shelve the life of the all-too-perfect restaurateur in favour of one far from complete life still in the process of being pieced together.
The new building had been constructed around the remains of the Roman wall which once upon a time guarded the northern approaches to old London, now the Barbican. Beatrice looked at the wall and thought it was like a stone quilt, patched, repaired, extended over the years to produce a solid record of time passing, useless now except as an ornament of curiosity but still powerful.
‘Ah, you must be Beatrice. I’m Harold, Harry Wesley. Pleased to meet you.’
He was wearing a dark blue T-shirt over faded chinos and dirty white trainers edged in grey, not quite what she expected but why should doctors of archaeology come in tweeds and brogues which is what she had imagined. He set off and gestured her onwards with a backward wave of his hand, through two security doors swiped open with a card on a short chain on his belt. At least he had the air of a distracted professor, she thought, arriving in a room of smart grey benches lit by a series of angled lamps giving very specific white light.
‘This is a sort of bone mortuary,’ he said, launching straight in, ‘where we do our post mortems. Slightly late, of course, but better late than never. And, at least in what we do, with no criminal to prosecute at the end. Mind you, we’re always on the look out for villains.’
She continued to follow him to the furthest bench where, lit from below with an opaque white light, and again from above, rested the yellow brown skull. Beatrice was stopped in her tracks the moment she saw it and raised one hand to her mouth, a gesture noted by the doctor.
‘Perhaps you don’t like this sort of thing? Some people don’t.’ It wasn’t spoken sympathetically, more as a matter of fact.
‘No, it’s not that.’ But what it was, she couldn’t quite say except, to herself, that she couldn’t just regard it as a remnant of bone, a relic of history but as the basis of a person.
She was surprised when he picked up on this unspoken thought. ‘We become attached to one or two fragments that come in here, especially those we can, well, put some flesh on as it were.’ He slid onto a high stool in front of the skull and brought to life the computer on a telescopic arm to his right. It revealed a computer image of the skull which he now animated so it turned through three hundred and sixty degrees.
‘And what about this one?’
‘Well, we haven’t formed a relationship just yet. These things take time. This one is still playing hard to get.’
Nothing about the skull could indicate to Beatrice that this had once been the head of a boy or girl but the more she stared at the place where the eyes had been she imagined the face of a young girl that would have existed around them.
‘Why, when you seem to know so much already, can’t you tell the sex?’
Dr Harold Wesley lowered a microscope above the skull and in another backward gestured, offered the seat to Beatrice so that she could look down on a detail of the skull revealed on the computer screen.
Adjusting the microscope, the image showed the line of bone just above one of the eye sockets. ‘The whole shape of the skull, the eye sockets and the development of the teeth, even the few that we have, show that it was probably pre-pubescent, or at least on the edge of puberty.’
For Beatrice Palmenter, her eyes moving between the computer image and the inert skull, there was no doubt it was a young girl and she wanted to reach out and touch the remains as an act of affinity.
He then shifted the microscope and increased its magnification. ‘Here you see a close-up of the upper jaw. Shame we haven’t got the lower but for our purposes this is fine to be going on with.’ With a small wooden stick, he pointed at the screen where one of the remaining teeth looked like a stranded iceberg. ‘There’s no evidence of a third molar here, which would indicate that whatever the gender it was younger than about seventeen.’
The forensic explanations continued under the cold white light, the stick now tracing the edge of the tooth. ‘There are no Harris Lines here, which, if there had been, would tell us that for periods of the life of this individual there was severe malnutrition. And the examination of the dental enamel confirms t
his.’ His tone was all matter of fact.
Again Beatrice looked at the screen and then the skull, amazed at one and the same time at how much the examination had revealed and just how little of the life of this young person was available to them.
‘There is just the slimmest of chances that we may find other pieces of the skeleton when we return to the Thames. If we’re lucky, DNA testing will confirm a connection and, if we’re luckier still, they will be parts more likely to tell us the sex. It’s a long shot, as it always is when a thousand years has come and gone, but that’s what’s exciting, don’t you think?’
For the first time Dr Harold Wesley looked directly at her and she could see the animation in his eyes.
‘Do you have a name for her?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘You’ve decided it’s a girl?’
She looked at the skull and thought of it washing backwards and forwards in the dirty water of the Thames until coming to rest in sight of the tip of the Isle of Dogs under the gaze of the grandiose buildings of Greenwich.
‘We’ll call her Flotsam,’ she said.
Dr Harold Wesley glanced at her and nodded his agreement.
‘Flotsam it is. It’s a word without gender, anyway. But let’s go back to the Thames to be sure, shall we?’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Life goes on, just as the river rises and falls. She takes comfort and strength from its certainty, just as she does from her mother who has returned to her work bench. She sees how she has coped with the death of her husband, tackling what is in front of her, seeing possibilities in the future and not yearning for the past. She watches her mother work at the brooch she has been making for several months, squinting at a detail in the design in the low light. She shares her mother’s excitement as she seals the pattern with gold so that the magnificent stone at its centre has the setting it deserves. Her mother tells her about the brooch and the red stone which she had bought on the quays a year earlier. It is deeper, she says, than any of the garnets she has used in the past, richer and more lustrous. Her mother explains that as soon as she had seen the stone she knew she would use it as the centrepiece of a brooch she would make and give to her daughter the day she became a woman. Her mother puts her hand on to her head and tells her that she thanks the gods for the gift of a child who seems so wise. Her mother moves her fingers over the smooth stone mounted in a gold shield and she takes her mother’s other hand, not for comfort, nor in fear, but to register the start of a journey that she knows is just beginning.
She tells her mother about the arrival of the merchant ship and how she had gone down to the quay to watch it dock, the crew stepping on to land for the first time in perhaps months. She tells of her wonder at the treasures that lay on the deck and how she drifted amongst the new faces to observe the unloading. She hears the Danes have retreated to their camps in Essex ready to attack again. These fierce men appeared to live to fight, intent on the gold and silver in the town’s mint and the position on the river with its bridge and docks. She admires her mother who must live with the threat of death, a black crow on her shoulder. Later she goes down to the docks with her mother and watches her seek out the merchants. She admires these sailors who travel great distances to other lands, browned by the sun and winds, bringing with them their strange smells and exotic goods. One or two boats she has seen before and they have travelled, her mother tells her, hundreds of miles, bringing woven cloth and pottery and taking away finished goods, including her mother’s jewellery. She knows she has inherited from her mother the fascination of this intermingling of people, the excitement of barter and exchange. She can see the foreigners admiring her mother, noting that she is a woman of substance and position, with her neck rings and pendants and the beads on the sweep of her dress distinguishing her so that men would bow before entering a trade. She absorbs this, aware that her mother is beginning a new journey as well. Today she is shown rough pink stones which sparkle with tiny silver points, but they are too rough and she watches how her mother declines them before moving along the quay. Later some of the men get drunk and she hears their strange songs coming from the taverns and boarding houses just up from the river.
And then her mother is stopped by a man who lowers his head before speaking. He asks if she is the woman who makes the jewellery sought by all who came to this port. The question, she knows, demands no answer and he produces a cloth tied with a bow which he opens carefully to spread its contents before her mother. She knows this is no accidental meeting and she sees her mother pick up the bands of gold wire, polished stones in yellow, pale green, glass and garnet with pieces of silver. There is something between the man and her mother that she can’t quite understand but she knows that the man has deliberately sought out her mother, that he knew her from the start. She suspects that he has heard of the death of her father and she watches her mother pull her cloak around her, avoiding his eyes, to examine the precious materials in front of her. He speaks and offers her mother a deal, proposing that she takes them all in return for creating a necklace so beautiful that it would be remarked on whenever it was worn. He is sure that she can achieve this during the month that he will remain in the port. He brings the four corners of the cloth together, reties the bow and hands the bundle to her mother who turns to her, stoops down and kisses the top of her head. The wind catches in the sails of the boats.
CHAPTER NINE
She heard the strange monotone of the foreign telephone and imagined it ringing in the heart of Paris, all other sounds suppressed, the camera moving over the rooftops, the ring getting louder all the time, the location becoming more specific, eventually dropping through open French doors where a light wind is blowing the lace curtains, to the noisy telephone where, in close up, it is stopped by a hand powdered with flour. ‘How dare you interrupt my cooking.’ The words are spoken out of vision, clearly the voice of Joseph Troumeg. The title of the film now appears, JOSEPH TRO UMEG: A LIFE IN FOO D, the letters rearranging themselves like Scrabble pieces until order is achieved.
But there was no answer. She saw from the address the agent had given her that Troumeg’s apartment was in the 19th and not one of the smarter arrondissements down closer to the Seine. She Googled a map of Paris and saw that its location was to the north-east of the Gare du Nord, not far from the Bassin de la Villette. When she had begun seeing him, three years ago, he had told her how he despised mobile phones so she knew that to catch him she would have to try at regular intervals during the day in the hope of finding him at home. She felt an interest stirring in her again and she was grateful, for now at least, that she was not encumbered with a partner with whom she would have to negotiate her movements.
Beatrice had arranged to meet Harold Wesley by the Cutty Sark in Greenwich at midday but the pursuit of the elusive restaurateur had delayed her and unless she hurried she would be late. She need not have worried, for the osteoarchaeologist – she enjoyed saying the word – lived up to her stereotype of an absent-minded professor by arriving half an hour after her, complaining how hard it was to get to this part of the world. She estimated that he was probably five years older than her and he appeared to be wearing the same clothes as the day before. He was fiddling with a GPS receiver as she led him to the foreshore. The tide was just about to reach its lowest point and the river looked forlorn and diminished in the weak midday sun. Even from the embankment steps she could see the short steel rod marking the spot where the skull had been found and the GPS device confirmed this as they arrived. Only now did she realise that he’d had the exact position of the discovery even before he had phoned her. Dr Harold Wesley was engrossed to the point of exclusion and he began a close examination of the area around the marker, placing coloured needles in the ground to show his progress.
‘You’re the film maker, aren’t you?’ he asked with his face still to the stony, muddy ground.
‘I am, but that’s not why I’m here. Did you look me up or did Amanda tell you?’
‘Both.
’ He crouched lower, pulling on a pair of thin rubber gloves, before picking up a small object and turning it over in his hands. ‘Might be human,’ he said, more to himself than her. ‘So why are you here?’
‘I could say because it’s not television, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. I wanted to know more about…’ she nearly said “the skull” but stopped herself… ‘the girl, Flotsam.’ Using the name for the first time felt good, almost a mark of respect.
He appeared not to have heard. ‘Ah, this is interesting,’ he said, holding up what looked like a small glass marble. ‘Might be old, but nothing to do with Flotsam. Why are you glad it’s not television?’ Still not looking at her.
‘It makes a change to be curious about something without compressing it into the form television would like.’
‘I think I understand you.’ He carried on quartering the foreshore, the area around the marker rod now a series of grid lines. ‘But you’re quite good, aren’t you?’
She presumed he had read about the Bafta. ‘I’ve won an award, if that’s what you mean. Aren’t the chances of finding anything relating to Flotsam pretty remote?’
‘It would be a chance in a million to find more of the skeleton, but it would be a dereliction of duty not to try. That’s my job, if you like. I’m compressed by its demands, just as you are in yours.’
Beatrice was quite surprised at this declaration which, again, was made with his back to her.
‘There was a skeleton discovered not far from here,’ he continued as if he hadn’t made the last remark, ‘revealed only at the lowest tide. We had less than two hours to lift it before it would have disappeared for maybe another year. It was about three hundred years old and we managed to find quite a lot of the skeleton nearby. He’d probably been murdered, struck on the head with a sharp object anyway.’
