Treasures of Time

by Penelope Lively

  It was probably that moment that had committed him to what he was now doing, he thought, running his finger down a page of the B.M. catalogue, noting with irritation another sequence of titles that would have to be looked at. He glanced at the clock and saw with relief that it was twelve-forty, a not too unrespectable knocking-off time to meet Kate at one, given that it was a nice day for a leisurely walk to the pub and a browse maybe in the bookshop on the way.

  She was late. He ordered two Ploughman’s Lunches, pleased by the inappropriateness of this in Gower Street, and sat waiting for her below a display of pre-war railway advertisements, the delights of Devon and Cornwall as promised by the G.W.R. Disorderly files of schoolchildren, headed for the Museum, flowed past the windows. Kate herself was currently engaged on the organization of a new project whereby an assortment of choice objects from a number of a different museums were to be arranged into a permanent travelling exhibition available to provincial museums and educational establishments: it was carefully devised to interest people of about fourteen and called ‘Our Island Heritage’. It was bedevilled with administrative problems and causing Kate much bother.

  She arrived, and said gloomily, ‘Ma rang.’

  ‘She’s well, I hope?’

  She shot him a suspicious look. ‘Why shouldn’t she be? She always has been. Or are you being satirical or something? I never know for sure. Sometimes you’re making fun and I don’t absolutely know, it’s off-putting.’

  ‘I thought it was interesting,’ said Tom. ‘Isn’t that interesting – not instantly being sure what people mean?’

  ‘No. It’s unsettling. And I wish she wouldn’t ring the Museum, I’ve asked her not to. She just says but darling I always used to ring Hugh at the Council nobody minded at all. And when I say well that was different, he was the head of it after all, I’m just a Grade II Assistant and it annoys people to have to come chasing up to Archives to find me she says well Kate I expect if you work hard you’ll do quite well in the end.’

  Tom laughed.

  ‘She says why don’t we go down this weekend.’

  ‘Why don’t we, then?’

  ‘She’s got this person from the BBC coming, the one who’s doing the programme on Dad.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And people for lunch on Sunday.’

  ‘What sort of people?’

  ‘People who live in Wiltshire and find things to do,’ said Kate morosely.

  ‘Where I come from,’ said Tom, ‘they go to a lot of trouble not to do anything they haven’t got to.’

  He had discovered with surprise, on his arrival in the southern white-collar counties, the furious busyness of the professional classes. You could not hold your head up in society, it seemed, if you were unable to claim intolerable pressures, both inside an occupation and, even more, outside it. At a sherry party in his supervisor’s house, he had listened with interest to a group of (he gathered) unemployed women vying with one another in their accounts of lives with never a spare moment, dizzy in the service of Parent Teacher Associations, Conservation Societies, adult literacy campaigns and ornithology. Going home again, he found himself taking a new view of his parents’ untroubled appreciation of the eight hour day and the five day week. If he had asked his father if he was busy, he would have stared in incomprehension: if you were at work, you were at work, and if you were at home you were at home, and that was all there was to it. He said to Kate, ‘Well, all I can say is they don’t have this problem with leisure in Rotherham. They aren’t even ashamed of it.’

  She left him at the tube station, and he walked back to the Museum alone and sat down again in front of his pile of books, his loose-leaf files, his card index box. Two and half centuries away, William Stukeley, out of doors in the fresh air of May 1721, stumped around the Wiltshire downs, measuring lumps and bumps in the turf and doing his bit to free the landscape of fantasy.

  Kate did the shopping on her way back to the museum: meat for a goulash, a nice chunk of cheese, some household bits and pieces. She had said to Tom ‘Don’t be late, the thing I’m going to cook won’t keep’ – meaning, don’t skive off for a drink with some crony when the Reading Room shuts – and he had replied in that light way of his that might or might not conceal crossness, do you have to keep taking the magic out of living in sin, Kate? And this had preyed on her mind all afternoon. Do I nag? she had thought, am I going to be that kind of wife? Am I possessive? Ought we to be living together, or have we spoilt things? Does he love me as much as I love him?

  She fretted and analysed, while scouring reference books and inventories, telephoning that unhelpful man at the V and A, comparing glossy photographs of Viking shields. And, flicking through back numbers of Antiquity in search of a reference to the stuff from that Orkney hoard, she found an article by her father, and read it, hunched over the trestle table with a dozen other things she ought to be doing and the afternoon half gone already: ‘… the vexed question of the British faience beads and whether or not they are of local provenance, my personal belief being that…’

  Beads. Not faience beads from the Bronze Age that may or may not be a Mediterranean importation and hence a worry to archaeologists for many years, but glass beads from Woolworths, bright reds and blues and greens and orange like gum-drops. My beads that I am making into a necklace for Mummy, threading them on a string with a big needle, sitting here on the hall floor with my tongue sticking out a bit because I have to think hard what I am doing, the beads are slippy and I keep dropping them, and I am making a pattern with them too so I have to be careful which one I put next.

  It is a beautiful necklace.

  And I take it to her in her bedroom, where she is getting ready, sitting at the dressing-table with her face things in front of her, pots and bottles that I musn’t ever touch. ‘Lovely, Kate,’ she says. ‘Isn’t that pretty.’ And she puts it down on the table beside her and goes on doing things to her hair. And I say ‘Aren’t you going to wear it, aren’t you going to put it on?’ and she laughs and says, ‘But sweetie it doesn’t go with my frock, does it? Look, the colours simply swear at each other,’ and she holds it up against her neck, against the green-blue frock she is wearing, and laughs again. And I stand there. I say I think it looks nice. I see our faces side by side in the mirror. She sees our faces too and she says don’t talk in that whiny voice, Kate, and don’t stick your lip out like that, that’s not pretty at all, you’ll grow up with a face like that if you go on doing it and no one will ever want to marry you. She is making her hair into curls with her finger, and then she puts the comb down and powders her nose and looks at herself very carefully in the little mirror with the silver handle. ‘Run and play now, darling,’ she says, ‘I’m in a hurry, I’m going out to lunch.’

  I go downstairs. I sit on the terrace at the place where there is an ants’ nest between the stones, and watch the ants. Presently, I poke the ants with a twig and they all run about in a fuss; I squash some of them; it is unkind but I go on doing it.

  Aunt Nellie is in the study, writing things. I go in and say, ‘I’ve made a necklace for you, Aunt Nellie.’ Aunt Nellie says it is a lovely necklace. She puts it on over her brown jersey and she gives me a bit of paper and a pencil and goes on with her writing, and I write too, I make lists like Aunt Nellie.

  I look at the necklace, round Aunt Nellie’s neck. It looks funny; it looks wrong. Aunt Nellie is not a necklace kind of person.

  Laura said, ‘And this is my daughter Kate, and her young man Tom Rider. Tony Greenway, from the BBC. Tom is writing about somebody frightfully obscure for his thesis, and then he is hoping to be a lecturer somewhere or other, is that right, Tom?’

  Tony Greenway, Tom thought, had a beautifully perfected line in deference combined with professional confidence kept discreetly in check. He stood at the fireplace in his brown velvet jacket and spectacles that made him look a little like Mahler, and said all the right things to Laura. He turned to Kate and made sensible, well-informed conversation abo
ut the museum scene. He said to Tom, with a nice warm smile ‘We can’t have missed each other by too much at Oxford, I imagine. I must say I envy you – I’d have liked to do post-graduate stuff but no way, I didn’t get a respectable enough degree.’

  Laura was thinking that Tony Greenway improved on acquaintance. She had been disappointed at first meeting. To begin with, he was much younger than she had expected. Somehow, she had imagined a more imposing, more distinguished-looking person – someone like Huw Weldon or Lord Clark – and instead here was this thin shortish young man in these rather informal clothes, not a lot older than Kate’s Tom. She had sat opposite him at one of the window tables in the Ailsford Arms, fretfully crumbled her roll and tried to conceal her feelings of anti-climax. He was, at any rate, satisfyingly deferential and obviously frightfully impressed by Hugh and everything and the kind of life one had led. ‘Well, no,’ she said, ‘I didn’t in fact go with Hugh on excavations all that often. I mean, a lot of it is very routine you know, the exciting part is often sorting things out afterwards and of course one did a lot of that. I suppose my part was more seeing to it that things ran smoothly, I’ve always been a sociable sort of person’ – she beamed at him over the pâté, warming as she talked – ‘more so than Hugh, really, and of course one knew all sorts of fascinating people then, Danehurst was always full of visitors, one entertained, well, rather more than one does nowadays, and…’

  Now, over Saturday night dinner, Tony Greenway was outlining his plans for the programme. He turned frequently to Laura, to say things like ‘If, of course you feel that that is the kind of thing we should do…’, ‘But what I do terribly want is suggestions from yourself…’

  Laura progressed through graciousness to girlish conspiracy. She opened a second bottle of wine. Kate looked glum. Nellie said little and appeared watchful.

  ‘Tom and Kate will take you up to Charlie’s Tump tomorrow,’ said Laura. ‘I always find it frightfully windy up there, it’s not really my cup of tea. And any other of the sites you might want for filming, Kate knows where everything is. And I’ll look through the old photos to see what might be useful – there are some rather super ones of us all on the Brittany dig, in, goodness it must be nineteen forty something.’

  ‘What would be marvellous,’ said Tony, ‘would be if there was anything we could use to give a personal slant – diaries, letters. Did he keep a diary on excavations?’

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ said Laura, ‘I’ve really no idea, I…’,

  Nellie said sharply, ‘No, he didn’t.’

  Alone with Tom in the drawing room after dinner, while the women cleared up, Tony dropped suddenly his role of deferential guest. He stretched out in an armchair and said, ‘What’s so fascinating about this kind of assignment is that you never know what you’re going to dig up. Smoke?’

  ‘Not perhaps the most felicitous word, in this instance.’

  Tony laughed. ‘I don’t mean, of course, past scandals or anything like that – just that if things work out you can get a kind of unexpected twist on a person, show him from various angles, that kind of thing. I want to talk to more of Paxton’s old colleagues, students – the family is only a part of it. I’ve had a word with one or two people already and one’s beginning to get a picture. I say, Mrs P must have been a bit dashing, when young, from the look of her.’

  Tom said, ‘Mmn. I daresay,’ and then, ‘Do you know much about archaeology?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Tony, with attractive candour. ‘But one picks things up fairly quickly, you know, that’s what this job’s all about. I’m an information man, through and through. Now obviously what’s interesting about the Paxton career structure is radiocarbon dating and its implications. By the way, you’re not an archaeologist, are you? Who is this obscure bloke you’re doing a thesis on?’

  ‘He isn’t particularly obscure, as it happens. He’s called Stukeley.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Tony Greenway, propping a cushion behind his head.

  For some reason hard to pin-point, he was not altogether unlikeable. In fact, he wasn’t really unlikeable at all, which was odd, given practically everything he said and, apparently, thought. There was a kind of deep residual self-deprecation about him: when he said ‘God, I envy you, doing something really serious,’ he meant it, even if, with the next breath, he was offering all sorts of half-baked but obviously deeply-felt opinions about anything and everything.

  ‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘he was a doctor originally, but his first interest was always antiquarianism…’ He outlined Stukeley’s career, noting that Tony’s listening had a professional quality to it, the listening of someone for whom anything may be grist to a mill ‘… he was actually, bar John Aubrey, the first efficient field-archaeologist, his surveys of Avebury and Stonehenge are excellent, and a lot of his conjectures about things are very nearly right – he grasped the idea of a long sequence of prehistoric cultures, and the probability of continental invasions, and he thought about visible remains in groups – barrows or hill-forts or whatever – and tried to interpret them in the light of the actual historical evidence available at the time. But then – what’s interesting is that then he was ordained, and he went off his rocker – at least went off his scientific rocker – and produced wild fantasies about the Druids. That Stonehenge was a Druidical creation and that the Druids themselves were a priestly sect who came to England from Phoenicia after the Flood and set up a kind of patriarchal religion closely allied to Christianity – in other words that they were the true ancestors of the eighteenth century Church of England. It all fitted in very nicely, you see – then you could claim the most renowned site of antiquity for the Church. It’s all illustrative of the shift from the rational to the romantic and the decline of the seventeenth century scientific approach – but I s’pose what intrigues me most is someone manipulating the past for his own intellectual ends. Rather grubby intellectual ends – shoring up the status of the C of E.’

  Tony said, ‘Fascinating.’ He went on, thoughtfully, ‘You know, I’m wondering if I couldn’t use him in some way, this chap. Once the twentieth century gurus series is in the can I’m going to be involved in something rather big about religious sects. I can’t help wondering if…’

  ‘Stukeley? Oh, no, I don’t think he’d make good television at all,’ said Tom decidedly.

  ‘Druids…’ Tony went on, warming to the idea. ‘I like it. I like it a lot.’

  ‘I can’t see it working,’ said Tom desperately. Whatever Stukeley’s own transgressions, the idea of him being mauled around in this way was somehow outrageous. ‘It would be bookish,’ he added with cunning. ‘Very difficult to present it without being bookish.’

  Tony nodded reflectively. ‘I daresay you’re right,’ he said after a moment or two.

  Was it possessiveness, or natural good taste, that made the idea of a televised Stukeley so repellent? Either way, Tom felt a surge of relief at having, apparently, scotched the project. It occurred to him that there was an interesting parallel in Tony’s instinctive need to ‘use’ Stukeley and the utilitarianism of the early antiquaries – the determination to make intellectual, or other capital out of our ancestors. He would have liked to share this perception with Tony, but decided it might be unwise: that, too, might spark something off. In any case, Tony had now turned to other matters and was talking enthusiastically about possible locations for filming.

  Kate was at her stiffest. She sat beside Tony in the passenger seat of the car and gave wooden explanations of interesting landscape features. They drove south to Stonehenge and joined several hundred other people busily eroding the Wiltshire topsoil. ‘Those are the Aubrey holes,’ said Kate. ‘And that is the Mycenean dagger, only of course it isn’t really, and that’s the Heel Stone.’ Tony looked despondent and said he doubted if one would ever get anything very effective here. They went back to the car park where Tony suggested ice creams all round. Kate asked for a Neapolitan Nut Bonanza. ‘It’s twenty-five pence,’ she said. �
��Is that all right? I’ll pay.’ ‘Look,’ said Tony, ‘you can have half a dozen if you like. It’s all on the BBC.’ Kate suddenly grinned, and Tom remembered why he loved her.

  Back in the car, headed for Avebury, Tony said, ‘I gather he was a bit of a colourful figure, your father? I’ve been talking to a few people and that’s the impression one gets.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Kate, ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. I don’t know really.’

  ‘People speak very warmly of him.’

  Kate, her neck mottled, appeared much taken with some distant aspect of the scenery.

  ‘I wondered,’ Tony went on, ‘if you’d like to come on the programme for a few minutes – just talk about him quite informally. You know – how you remember him, that kind of thing.’

  ‘I’d be hopeless,’ said Kate, in a choked voice. ‘No, really, I’d rather not.’ To one who did not know her, she might have been suffering from reborn grief rather than outrage.

  ‘I quite understand,’ said Tony respectfully. They drove on in silence.

  It was late afternoon when they got back to Avebury, and dusk by the time they had finished there. Kate said, ‘We really ought to be going soon – I don’t want to be too late back in London. Perhaps we should leave Charlie’s Tump for another time.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ said Tom. ‘He’s got to see it, it was your father’s big dig after all.’ Kate allowed herself to be led back to the car.