Treasures of Time

by Penelope Lively

  ‘Yorkshire and back in one day?’

  ‘It’s no distance,’ said Tony, surprised. ‘What’s the problem? A quick run up the M1, that’s all. Fancy it?’

  ‘Yes. I rather think I do. Thanks.’

  Tony’s car crouched above the road. It was long and low and sleek, with two seats into which you lowered yourself and were at once lapped in squashy leather: there were token concessions only to back seat passengers and luggage. Travelling, there was an awareness of faintly whistling tarmac only a few inches beneath. The map that Tony pulled from the leather pocket at his side showed an England held in a network of lines snaking out from London, probing out to the far west, up to the far north, shooting a bolt into East Anglia, tying up the Midlands. There were no county boundaries marked, no physical features, no places other than those snared by the motorway system. In the margin were scribbled names and numbers: Brm 1¼, Manch 2½, N’Castle 4½, Exeter 3. Tony spread the thing out for a moment over the wheel, ran a finger upwards, and said ‘Something under three should do it. You turn off soon after the Leeds road.’ He began to weave, with opportunist skill, through the early morning London traffic.

  Tom said, ‘What exactly was this series?’

  ‘The series?’ There was a fractional hesitation. ‘Oh, I’m not sure it would be your cup of tea, Tom, truth to tell. It was a thing we did on way-out theories to do with places, with the landscape. Nutty stuff, I suppose, most of it, but you know people have the most tremendous taste for that kind of thing. These lines linking churches and prehistoric things and whatnot – leys – that may have some sort of mysterious force. And the powers that are supposed to be held by particular places, we had some people down in Somerset who do some funny stuff with a big stone down there, a kind of healing ceremony, there was a bloke who swore blind he’d been cured of cancer. And some straight ghost stuff, a rather good sequence at Kenilworth at night, there was something very weird on the film but I must say I’m not convinced the cameraman didn’t fake it up a bit. It was a natural for the cameramen – we got some very elegant film – and frankly it was very popular too. The letters are still coming in.’ He shot a sideways glance at Tom. ‘People really are awfully keen on this kind of thing, you know. It seems to fulfil a need of some kind.’

  ‘You shouldn’t encourage them.’

  ‘It was a piece of detached journalism,’ said Tony reprovingly. ‘We made our own position quite clear: uncommitted.’

  ‘Which particular brand of nut is this lady we’re going to see now?’

  ‘Well, it was astrology of a kind, but not quite that. She has this theory that in some parts of England the signs of the zodiac are sort of stamped on the landscape, outlined by old tracks and field boundaries and the edges of woods and roads and so forth.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tom, ‘what for?’

  ‘That’s not made absolutely clear, of course. At Glastonbury, apparently you get the lot – Pisces and Aquarius and so on – and it’s all something to do with Arthur, she isn’t too explicit about that.’

  ‘I daresay she isn’t.’

  ‘It’s all frightfully far-fetched of course, but you can more or less see what she means when she shows you her maps and things. We tied it in with all the rest of the Glastonbury stuff. She used to live there, but I gather she ran into some kind of trouble with the authorities, she does push her views rather and of course not everyone has much time for it.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, if she was going round claiming that Somerset County Council is guided by unseen forces.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all quite cranky,’ said Tony. ‘One’s perfectly well aware of that, of course. You don’t find it just a bit intriguing all the same?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a pause. They were on the motorway now, gliding up the fast lane, the car a private capsule of tinted glass. Tom went on, ‘Sorry – it’s just that personally I don’t have any time for people attributing psychic energy to bits of Somerset or Wiltshire or wherever.’

  ‘Oh, I take your point. But it goes on, that you can’t deny. Always has. After all, that place with the peculiar name we went to…’

  ‘Charlie’s Tump?’

  ‘That’s right. I mean, Kate was saying it’s called that because of some dotty local belief that Charles I hid there, when in fact he can’t ever have gone near the place.’

  ‘Oh yes, true enough. People have always needed to explain the inexplicable – the physical world and the past both fall into that category. That’s why the place is littered with Devils’ Dykes and Giants’ Causeways and suchlike…’ – Tony nodded sagely – ‘but we’re supposed to know better now. We shouldn’t still be inventing the past. Or using it as a convenience.’ Except, of course, he thought, that we all do that all the time, in our separate ways. He felt with guilt that perhaps he had been a bit dogmatic: Tony, after all, meant well. But Tony did not seem offended, and indeed after driving for a while in silence was now talking about something quite different. ‘Sorry – what?’

  ‘I said ever thought of crossing the Atlantic? Seeing as how things aren’t too good here, jobwise.’

  ‘No,’ said Tom. After a moment, he added ‘It’s not that I think this place owes me a living. More I’d feel it something of a defeat if it couldn’t find a use for me. Also, it so happens I like it here.’

  Tony nodded. He flicked the radio control. ‘… black school-leavers’ said a news-reading voice. ‘A spokesman for the Department of Employment and Industry said the latest figures showed little improvement in the overall situation…’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Tony, stabbing another button: the car was filled with Brahms. ‘That do?’ ‘Grand’ said Tom, staring out at a scenic countryside, pleasantly decorated with grazing animals, its dirt or damp or smells eliminated by a layer of tinted, laminated glass. ‘I approve of this kind of jaunt,’ said Tony. ‘It unwinds me. We’ll lunch at Pontefract I think, I don’t go for motorway caffs and there’s a rather nice pub there.’ They sped north, amid convoys of traffic; Tom sat in a pleasurable torpor, listening to the music, looking out from time to time at fields and villages and distant church spires, that desert England ignored by Tony’s map.

  Over lunch, Tom had been amazed at the calm and familiarity with which, evidently, Tony sped about the place. He had been here only last week, en route for Scotland. Bristol the day before yesterday; Wales next week; Carlisle on Thursday. Oh, he said, that’s one of the things I like about my line of work, you’re out and about a lot, you see the world all right. He treated the country like an enlarged Underground system, popping without consideration from station to station: he knew hotels and eating-places from Edinburgh to Southampton, traffic-dodging short cuts in every city centre. He was perplexed by Tom’s interest. ‘It’s just,’ Tom explained, ‘that I was brought up to treat travel with deference, not to be undertaken lightly or without a great deal of forward planning and the habit has stuck. Also, I’ve never had enough money to move around. And I can’t drive. And I haven’t got a car.’

  They reached their destination, a village near Fountains Abbey, in the early afternoon. Tom, in response to Tony’s suggestion that he look in for a few minutes and meet this Mrs Harbottle, said he thought he might do that – ‘If you don’t think she’ll spot my aura of scepticism?’ ‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Tony. ‘She’s used to it, I imagine. You might find it amusing anyway – and you can slope off after a bit and leave me to talk business.’

  The bungalow was set back from the lane in a lush and leafy countryside; it seemed to wallow in greenery. Mrs Harbottle, opening the door, said ‘Ah. Mr Greenway. As good as your word. Come along in with you.’ Her voice was loud, and of confident gentility. Tony said, ‘This is my colleague, Tom Rider.’ They were ushered down a passage that smelled of cat, and into a sitting room overlooking tipping fields in which black and white cows grazed like cardboard cut-outs, all pointing the same way.

  Mrs Harbottle was a stout woman of sixty odd. She wore a tweed j
acket over a jersey that showed the outline of corsetry beneath; thick stockings hung in reptilian wrinkles on her legs; her hair escaped in wisps from a perfunctory arrangement of netting and hair pins at the back. She said, ‘Had a good drive up? By the way if either of you need the doings it’s first right at the end of the passage.’ She began to talk to Tony, with enthusiasm, about letters that had been forwarded to her after the programme. ‘Put me in touch with all sorts of fellow spirits,’ she said. ‘Really smashing.’

  Tom looked round the room. There was a lot of brass and chintz. A pile of parish magazines and the Church Times on a table suggested religious involvement of some kind. On the wall were framed coloured photographs of pleasing views.

  The door burst open and a labrador bounded into the room, wagging its tail furiously. It rushed at each of them in turn and then proceeded to make a sexual assault on Tony’s leg. Mrs Harbottle dragged it away, saying, ‘Naughty boy. Mr Greenway doesn’t like that.’ She pushed the dog down beside her chair. ‘Did you see my programme, Mr er –, there’s a few things I’m not happy about but on the whole I think it gave quite a good picture of our work.’

  Tom said, ‘I didn’t, I’m afraid. Tony’s been telling me something about it.’

  ‘I’d like you to take a copy of my book. It’s written in collaboration with my colleague Alfred Binns, of Bath.’ She reached out to the table beside her and took from a pile a thin volume, wearing the imprint of a private press, and entitled The Green Fuse. It bore the signs of the zodiac on the cover, super-imposed on a colour photograph of a bit of rural England. ‘Five pounds ninety’ said Mrs Harbottle. ‘The title comes from a poem by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. If Mr Greenway has been telling you about my work you may recognize the reference. “The force that through the green fuse drives…” ’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Tom, putting the book back on the table. ‘I haven’t got six pounds, I’m afraid. It’s an interesting use of the quotation, I must say.’

  Mrs Harbottle heaved herself out of her chair. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I must find you a copy of our monthly magazine. You may like to take out a sub – four fifty a year.’ She went out of the room.

  ‘Christ,’ said Tom. The labrador had also got up and was approaching Tony’s leg with renewed interest. Tony put out a foot and shoved it away vigorously. Mrs Harbottle returned with a pile of magazines which she dumped on Tom’s knee. ‘Just have a look through the latest issue, it’ll give you an idea. I can let you have that number for fifty pence, since we’ve a few left over.’

  The magazine, in format, looked much like the Church Times. In a central spread, someone had been taking appalling liberties with the Ordnance Survey map of part of Hereford-shire. The correspondence column was kicking around the idea that the road-system of inner London, if properly interpreted, reveals the outline of Sagittarius. Some fellow-traveller, in a lengthy article, was discussing the properties of rays emanating from a pattern of bird-shapes, eyes and the letter S detectable in the contour-lines of the Pyrenees. Tom was reminded of one of Stukeley’s wilder fancies: the notion that the ground plan of Avebury and its avenues represent a circle penetrated by a snake – ‘an hieroglyphic or symbol of highest note and antiquity’. Putting the pile down firmly on the table he said, ‘No, thank you, Mrs Harbottle. I don’t really go in for this kind of thing.’

  Mrs Harbottle, apparently undisturbed, said, ‘What’s your job, Mr – er…?’

  ‘Rider,’ said Tony. ‘Tom Rider. Tom’s a historian.’

  ‘Then you should be ashamed of yourself’ said Mrs Harbottle with energy. ‘You ought to know we don’t know all the answers. I can see you’re one of those people who refuse to be open-minded.’ She leaned towards him, so that he could see more clearly the ginger hairs that lurked in the folds of her chin and gave her a faint peppery moustache; she wagged a finger at him, ‘There is more to heaven and earth than is dreamed of in all thy philosophy, O Hamlet.’

  Tony cleared his throat. ‘You know,’ he said, with a glance at his watch, ‘I really think perhaps Mrs Harbottle and I had better have our little talk.’

  ‘Right,’ said Tom quickly, getting to his feet. Mrs Harbottle shook him warmly by the hand and said if he was going along to the Abbey he must climb the hill and look down on the complex of buildings and he would see the outline of the Wheel of Fortune pointing to the north-east. ‘The cosmic forces are clearly to be felt,’ she added, ‘if you only let yourself be receptive.’ The labrador followed Tom to the garden gate, sniffing at his trousers.

  He went down the lane, walking quickly, in sunlight quivering through beech leaves – round a corner, and there, straddling the narrow valley, were those golden ruins. He paid his entrance fee and went across the grass, Mrs Harbottle quite forgotten, and Tony; enjoying himself, enjoying the place.

  He found it difficult to define what he felt, confronted by somewhere like this. Or rather, to sort out what he felt: pleasure in the beauty of it; an exasperating uprush of sentiment that had eerie connections with the most despised manifestations of chauvinism and soft-centred Englishry; a springing to attention of the intellect – now what have we here? Who built this, why? How? When? Outrage at the insensitivities of change – car park, appalling twenties housing nearby, quacking transistors all around. Amazement that the thing should be here at all. A confusion of responses – the only certainty being that none were relevant to the original intentions of the place.

  He wandered, for the next hour, guide-book and plan in hand, intent upon windows and cloisters and vaulting. The Abbey was doing good business: tourists dotted the grass precincts like people attending a garden party; plenty of dollars, marks, yen and so forth had clearly been earned; the building’s skilfully arrested decline was a testimony to twentieth century enlightenment. Henry VIII ought to be properly ashamed of himself. The agreeably empty surrounding countryside, of course, was a reminder of the economic basis of monastic life, and a suitable correction to other, more romantic, less realistic feelings that the scenery might inspire. Places are what we know them to be, not what we feel they might be, Tom told himself sternly, and thought again of Tony at Charlie’s Tump, and thence of Kate (who, he realized with a certain guilt, had not crossed his mind all day). He sat down on the grass beside the river, pictured her trotting around her museum, brow furrowed, busy with this and that, thought that it would have been nice to have her here with him now, and fell asleep in the sun.

  He woke to find Tony standing over him, saying with a tinge of irritation, ‘So there you are.’

  ‘Sorry. Too much beer at lunch.’

  ‘We’d better be off, I suppose. Mrs H is all sorted out quite amicably – it didn’t take as long as I’d expected. Sorry she battened onto you like that.’

  ‘Not at all. It was an edifying experience.’

  ‘You come across all sorts of weird types,’ said Tony, as they walked back to the car park, ‘in my business. You get a bit inured, I suppose.’ Back in the car, he glanced at his watch, ran a finger down the map again. ‘We’ll go back via Coventry, if you don’t mind, I want to look in at a factory on the outskirts – it’s a possible for a feature I’m doing later this year, an industrial relations thing. O.K. by you? We’ll be lateish back in London, but I thought we might have dinner somewhere on the way.’

  Somewhere in the Midlands, Tony peeled off the motorway, sped down dual carriage-ways, glanced once or twice at some type-written notes he took from his pocket, fetched up at a factory entrance where he wound the car window down for a brief, purposeful exchange with the man at the gate. He said to Tom, ‘This should take ten–fifteen minutes.’

  ‘I’ll wait in the car.’

  One could not but be impressed at the dexterity of Tony’s approach to life: confident, unflappable, deflected neither by doubts nor diffidence, free-wheeling about the place, moving on, leaving behind. Here am I, thought Tom, with discontent, untravelled, unlessoned, frequently uneasy. Certainly unsure. Prone to guilt. Infirm of pu
rpose. Inconsistent.

  Ten minutes passed. He surveyed what was to be seen of the landscape – the tarmac, wire-enclosed industrial estate, the factory buildings, the parking lots. Boredom was setting in. What did they make here? Car components, presumably, from the familiar name at the entrance. Which, though? A shift came out, and cars and bicycles eddied around him, quite a few black faces, people talking in accents that were of everywhere and nowhere. I don’t know about places like this, he thought, even though I grew up among them, even though most of my friends’ fathers worked in them. You didn’t listen to what the grown-ups were saying, it wasn’t that interesting. Since then, I’ve not been there. Still, where I come from at least you’d know where you were from the way people spoke.

  He sat there, half listening to the flat, unrevealing voices around him, half reading a two-day-old newspaper from the back seat of Tony’s car.

  Tony said, ‘Sorry to be so long. Couldn’t find the chap I’d phoned.’

  ‘Satisfactory?’

  ‘Not really. There are some snags I don’t think we’d be able to get round.’ He didn’t expatiate. Back on the dual carriageway he said, ‘You know – I think if you don’t mind I’ll pop into the shopping precinct for a moment – there’s just time before the shops shut. I’ve remembered this is where I left a jacket to be cleaned weeks ago – we were on an overnight stop here, another industrial thing, and some idiot poured half a bottle of wine over me at dinner. I put it in for two-hour cleaning and then the bloody thing wasn’t ready by the time we left. I wouldn’t mind getting it back, it was a good jacket.’

  Dual carriage-ways and roundabouts swept them in a gentle curve above the suburbs: acre upon acre of dinky housing estates, spruce in the sunlight, indicated with pleasant rural-sounding names – Tile Hill, Broad Lane, Stivichall. Tony swung from lane to lane: City Centre, Ring Road, North, South, East, West. Buildings grew; traffic slowed and thickened; pedestrians appeared. They plunged into the maw of a multi-storey car park, swung up ramps, down ramps, slotted the car away, clattered down concrete stairs, emerged into a concourse of plate-glass windows and flocking people. ‘Hang on,’ said Tony, ‘just let me get my bearings. Somewhere by Marks and Spencer, I think it was.’ They walked a half mile or so, past Boots, Dolcis, the British Home Stores, Dorothy Perkins, W. H. Smith, Sainsbury’s. ‘Funny,’ said Tony, ‘I could have sworn…’ They retraced their steps: Curry’s, Lloyds Bank, Halifax Building Society, John Collier, Woolworth’s. Tony halted, bathed in muzak from the Wimpy Bar. ‘You know, I’ve made an idiotic mistake,’ he said. ‘It was Nottingham, not Coventry. I was beginning to feel there was something not quite right. Sorry about that.’