Lovers and Newcomers

Amos was also watching the work. He was in an excellent humour. Something that was ingenious, fitting and intricately designed was going to be created here out of nothing, on the rim of a field in an attentive landscape. Satisfaction that construction was at last under way spilled all through him. His sense of happy anticipation even increased when the digger momentarily halted and he caught the sound of laughter and raised voices close at hand. As soon as he saw Katherine he raised his arm and waved, beckoning the visitors across. Miranda and Colin followed her, picking their way past the contractors.

‘We thought we’d come and see what’s happening,’ Miranda called to him.

‘Progress,’ he shouted back.

The three of them scuttled towards him, bundling out of the path of the digger and gathering to inspect the work.

Amos put a proprietorial arm around his wife’s shoulders.

In the course of their married life Katherine and he had lived in a dozen houses, from the first cramped terrace to the latest sprawling mansion in half an acre of suburban garden. He thought of all the different property viewings, the potential homes with actual merits to be decoded from the hyperbole of various estate agents, the subsequent measurings and deliberations, and the final compromises that had to be made in order to fit a family within a set of walls, like a crab into a pre-existing shell, with the boys arguing over who was to have the bigger room and Katherine saying that really she was going to miss the old house. Now for the first time his family would have a home designed around it, not the other way around. Not that they were any longer precisely a family, of course; Sam and Toby had their own places, he had seen to that. But they would still come. Children took a long time to detach themselves nowadays, he had noticed, if they ever really did so.

Now his wife turned her head and remarked to Colin and Miranda that she couldn’t imagine what their home was going to be like when it was finally built.

‘There’s so much space, and air and sunshine. It’s hard to picture what a house will look like plonked down here.’

Amos frowned. Her vagueness as well as her choice of words irritated him.

‘Darling, you’ve seen all the plans a thousand times. Drawings, computer simulations, every single stage of the process.’

She only shook her head, and laughed.

‘I know. Weird, isn’t it?’

Miranda had brought a basket. ‘I thought we should have a celebration,’ she announced, to cover the momentary awkwardness. She led the way to a vantage point under the trees and unpacked a bottle of champagne and a carton of orange juice. Amos waved to the workmen and followed the others.

Miranda had found a reason for a celebration almost every other day at Mead. It was as if she were the entertainments secretary and they were freshmen newly arrived at university, needing scheduled social events and copious supplies of drink to kick-start their friendships. Four days ago Selwyn had announced that a major phase of his demolition work was complete, and they had gathered between the ceiling props and barrows of rubble to admire the open space and to drink wine poured into the plastic mugs that were all Polly had been able to muster. It was two in the morning before they finally dispersed to bed. Amos had joked that he wasn’t sure he could stand the pace and Selwyn countered that he couldn’t see why not, since they had little else that was significant to occupy them these days. At that point Polly took his arm and guided him off to bed in the tarp shelter.

Miranda threw herself into all these events, carrying the others on the tide of her high spirits. She was already screwing the plastic feet into a set of picnic wineglasses as they sat down in a row on the dry turf. Colin leaned back against a tree trunk. He was tired, but he raised his glass when Miranda handed it to him.

‘Here’s to the perfect house. May you live like a king, Amos. A solar-heated, green-spirited monarch.’

‘What about me?’ Katherine demanded. They all turned to look at her.

‘And a queen, K, of course,’ Colin added.

They sipped champagne and watched the digger as it rolled to and fro like a sturdy toy. The sun rose higher above the trees, but the outlines of the copses and field crests in the distance were blurred by mist, suggesting a cold night to come. The digger came up with another hopper full of earth, and they heard the note of the engine change as the driver backed up a short distance.

He jumped from the cab and walked across to look down into the trench. At the same time, the young man who had been watching slid his hands out of his pockets and walked briskly to the edge.

Amos was leaning on one elbow. He propped himself a little higher to see what was going on.

The digger driver returned to his seat and Amos nodded his approval, but then the man turned off the engine, dismounted once more and hurried away towards the site office. The other workmen stopped what they were doing.

‘What now?’ Amos groaned.

‘Maybe he’s found some buried treasure,’ Miranda teased, but she sat up straighter too. ‘After I’ve gone and sold the land to you, as well.’

‘It’s some bloody annoying thing. I just know it.’

The site manager left the Portakabin. There was now a cluster of hi-vis jackets and helmets gathered about the raw slit in the ground. Amos launched himself to his feet. He charged off with his head down and his elbows jutting at an angle. His trousers rippled over his broad shanks. Rather uncertainly, Katherine got up and followed him.

‘Better take a look?’ Colin murmured to Miranda. She was already on her feet.

A line of gulls settled on the roof of the stationary digger. They rotated their heads as if they were waiting for a curtain to go up. A sharp smell of sour earth and torn roots hung in the air.

A few inches below the surface the cut edges of turf, roots and a few inches of topsoil gave way to dense earth, packed with stones. Protruding from the bottom of the trench, where a band of earth seemed to be darker than elsewhere, Miranda saw what appeared to be a long piece of flint. It was grey, clogged with dirt, and splintered where the sharp edge of the digger blade had smashed into it. The young man ignored her, and everyone else. He knelt to examine the find.

‘Just caught my eye, didn’t it?’ the digger driver was saying to the other workmen. He was big with a red face, his yellow helmet perched above it looking much too small for his head.

‘Right you are, Alan. Let’s take a look,’ the site boss said. He vaulted into the trench, but the young man snatched at the collar of his jacket and pulled him back.

‘Wait there,’ he snapped, with surprising authority. ‘Everyone, just stand where you are.’

Silence fell over the little group. Even Amos hesitated.

The young man slid down into the trench. With his right thumb he rubbed the earth from the protruding flint, stroking it as if it were a baby’s fist. Then he took out a tiny trowel, and with infinite care began to scoop the debris from around it.

‘Who is he?’ Colin murmured.

‘The archaeologist,’ Amos said curtly.

‘The what?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. It’s the planning regulations. One of the hoops you have to jump through to get anything done. The county bloody archaeologist assessed the site, told me and the architect that there was a minimal chance of there actually being any old bits of Roman pottery or anything else buried here, but he was sending someone in on a watching brief just in case. Someone I end up paying for, naturally. That’s him.’

It was obvious to Miranda now that what was protruding from the ground was not a flint but a broken bone. She watched intently, only half hearing Amos’s tirade.

The archaeologist gently worked the bone free. He placed it in a bag, carefully labelled the exterior, and laid it on the lip of the trench.

‘Right, then. Let’s get going again,’ Amos called.

The men shuffled, and the archaeologist continued to ignore them all. He was kneeling again and scraping at the earth. A moment later he came up with a smaller bone. He cupped it in his palm and brushed away the dirt.

Amos trampled forwards. Miranda wanted to restrain him, and when she caught Katherine’s eye she knew she felt the same.

Amos called, ‘Look. I know you’ve got a job to do. But I can’t allow the remains of some animal to hold up the work of an entire site crew for half a morning.’

The second bone went into a separate bag.

Amos raised his voice. ‘It’s a dead…’ there was a second’s hesitation while he searched his mind for a farm animal, any animal ‘…cow.’

The archaeologist did look up now. Beneath the plastic peak of his helmet his face looked startlingly young, almost unformed. To Colin, standing beside Miranda at the end of the trench, his features seemed vaguely familiar. Until recently he would have searched his memory for where and when, and what they might have done together.

‘These are human remains,’ the young man said.

A deeper pool of silence collected. Bowing his head, one of the workmen took off his helmet and held it awkwardly across his chest. Shocked, Miranda gazed down into the freshly sliced earth at the bottom of the trench, and then at the labelled bags. Who was it, buried here in this peaceful place? Who, and when?

Amos broke in again, ‘This is my land. We have all the necessary permissions in place to build a house right here, and that’s what you are delaying.’

Katherine put her hand on his arm. ‘Amos, please.’ But he shook it off. He marched to Alan’s side and tried to nudge him backwards towards the digger. The two of them performed a tiny dance with their chests puffed out. The gulls rose in unison from their perch, their wingbeats loud in the stillness. Alan scratched the back of his head under his hard hat and retreated a couple of reluctant steps, followed by the site manager making pacifying gestures. Miranda reached for Colin’s hand and held it, but her eyes were still fixed on the disturbed ground. Amos measured up to the contractor and Alan, as if he were going to manhandle them back to work. His face was red and he was puffing slightly. Amos was not used to having his orders ignored. For a moment it looked as if he might win, as Alan placed his boot on the step of the machine and prepared to climb up.

The archaeologist put down his trowel. He stood in front of the digger with his hand raised.

‘Work at this site is temporarily suspended,’ he said, ‘pending further investigation.’

‘On whose authority?’ Amos demanded.

‘On my own, for the time being,’ the young man answered. ‘I am just going to notify the police, and the coroner’s office.’

‘The police? The police?’ Amos came to a standstill, his arms flopping to his sides.

Katherine looked at her husband, then turned away from him.

‘What is it? Who was it?’ Miranda murmured.

The workmen were already filing cheerfully in the direction of their caravan, pulling off their helmets as they went.

‘I’m sorry,’ the young archaeologist said to Miranda and Amos and the others. He had a stud in his nose, and ropes of hair pulled back and buried under the loose collar of his plaid flannel shirt. His hands, heavy with dirt, hung loose at his sides. Colin tried to recall where he had seen him before.

‘I can’t say for certain, not immediately, but I’m fairly sure, based on what I can see, that this is not a recent interment. But I’ve got to act by the book.’

Miranda lifted her head. Her face was white. ‘Recent? What does that mean? I’ve lived here for more than twenty years. It’s my home. This was my husband’s land, he grew up here. Who would be buried in a spot like this?’

‘Are you sure these are human bones?’ Colin asked.

‘Yes, I am. There is part of a femur, and a patella.’ He tried to sound authoritative but a flush coloured his face, showing up the scattered pocks of healed acne. He was probably in his early twenties. Hardly a match for Amos, Colin thought, the poor kid.

The archaeologist continued, speaking directly and gently to Miranda because of the shock in her eyes. ‘The way the thigh and the knee were uncovered makes me think that the corpse may have been buried in a semi-crouching position. The remainder of the skeleton will be there, almost definitely.’ He raised his hand and pointed to the wall of the trench. Grass roots and a few bruised daisies overhung it.

‘How long ago?’ Miranda asked.

‘I’ll really have to check with my field supervisor. I’m not all that experienced.’ His colour deepened. ‘There are tests, of course. But he’s probably prehistoric. That would be my guess. Bronze Age, or Iron Age. Something like two thousand years old.’

‘Two thousand?’ Amos muttered, in spite of himself.

They looked out over the plateau of grass and the sweep of farmland and dappled country beyond it.

The regular perspective tilted, and swung out of alignment. Miranda steadied herself against Colin’s arm. She and the others had been thinking about their present concerns, she realized, and speculating only about the new house and next month and next year, but now their attention was forcibly dragged back through the centuries. Under the thin skin of earth, hardly more than two spade-depths below the grass, lay history. Silently she wondered what this landscape had looked like so long ago, and who it was who had come out of the opaque past to be uncovered in front of them.

Miranda found that she was shivering.

Amos recovered himself first. ‘The local CID are going to be most helpful with that, then.’

‘It’s a formality, sir. But this is a human body.’

‘How long is all this going to take? As a formality, of course?’

The archaeologist met his eye. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Let’s find out, shall we?’

Amos went to the site manager’s Portakabin and Miranda could see him vigorously making his points while the builder shook his head and fended him off with raised hands. Then Amos took out his mobile phone. Colin walked away and stood at a little distance, apparently contemplating the view. Katherine and Miranda were left at the side of the trench.

Seeing Miranda’s pallor Katherine asked, ‘Are you all right?’

Almost to herself Miranda said, ‘I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it before, but bones are so intimate when you’d really expect them to be quite dry and inanimate, wouldn’t you? It’s so apparent that once there was flesh and sinews and smooth skin. We were looking at a person’s leg, part of the body of a real person who lived and breathed, and then you have to take in the fact that they’ve been lying there in the ground for thousands of years. Jake and I used to come here sometimes and have a picnic, looking out over this view. It rather changes the picture, doesn’t it?’

Katherine touched her arm. ‘Do you want to go back to the house?’

Miranda was grateful for her concern. Realizing that she was still holding her picnic glass, she tipped the residue of her drink into the grass. The plastic was smeared and there was a scum of orange pulp sticking to the sides.

‘No, I want to see what’s going to happen. Champagne seems suddenly a bit off key, though, doesn’t it? Shall we go back and just sit down for a bit?’

They could hear Amos still shouting on the telephone. The archaeologist had made some calls too, and now he took out a camera and started snapping the open trench from various angles. The workmen were gathered around the caravan with their sandwiches and copies of the Sun.

The two women went back to their vantage point and sat down. Miranda dropped the empty champagne bottle into her basket and unscrewed the foot of her glass. It was becoming clear that they were going to have to wait some time for any developments. Miranda rested her chin on her knees. She had been thinking about Jake, and the quiet graveyard of Meddlett church where he was buried. Then her thoughts switched to Colin as she watched him strolling down to the distant fence marking the boundary of what had once been Miranda’s land and was now Amos’s.

She asked suddenly, ‘K? Do you think Colin is any happier living here with us, or is he just going through the motions?’

‘Of living, or trying to be happy?’

‘Doing one, while feeling obliged to attempt the other. There’s a glass wall around him, don’t you think? Ever since Stephen was killed. It’s as if he’s here because of not knowing where else to be? Although, come to think of it, maybe he’s not alone in that. Do you remember the times when we all used to live our lives, not just inhabit a corner of them?’

Katherine turned to look at Miranda’s face. After a moment she answered, ‘I don’t know what it must be like for Colin. Polly may know more, with her and Colin being so close, but probably none of us can do more than imagine. But, yes. He has put up barriers. Do you remember how exuberant he used to be?’

‘I do. The Ibiza trip?’

Laughter chased the sadness out of Miranda’s eyes as they acknowledged the memory.

In the mid-1970s, when Amos was insisting to Katherine that he was going to marry her so she had better get to know and like his friends, he had rented a holiday villa near San Antonio and invited a dozen people for a summer holiday. In the party were Miranda and the actor she was at that time considering as a potential husband, and Colin and the man with whom he had recently fallen in love.

Stephen was five years older than Colin. He was a compact, rather unsmiling businessman who didn’t try very hard to integrate himself into the group. He didn’t particularly enjoy the island nightlife, he didn’t take any drugs or even drink very much, and it was obvious that he had only come on the holiday because he wanted to be with beautiful and extrovert Colin, whatever that might take.

It was a big enough group to absorb his differences without them seeming particularly noticeable, Miranda recalled, and in any case it was the time when Amos was remodelling himself as a traditionalist barrister and upholder of family values, which was much more remarkable and amusing to them all.

One day, when most of them were too sunburned and hungover to do anything but lie in the shade beyond the pool, Colin and Stephen whiled away the siesta hour by dressing up.

Miranda remembered waking up from a nap. Done up as Carmen Miranda, ‘As a tribute to you, of course,’ he had told her, Colin was kneeling precariously on a lilo in the middle of the pool. He was wearing a flamenco skirt, a bra top, gold hoop earrings, full make-up and a hat made out of a laden fruit bowl topped with a crest of bananas. He wobbled to his feet and began to strum a guitar. He managed a passable samba rhythm and a warble of ‘Bananas is My Business.’ But even with this apparition in front of them, it was Stephen they were all gaping at. He was arranged on a second lilo, two legs crammed into one leg of a pair of lime green trousers and two feet into a single swimming flipper. He was slowly combing the strands of a very old and matted long blonde wig to tumble over his hairy chest and looking at Colin with a parody of adoration that very clearly had real devotion embedded in it.

That was the first inkling that Miranda or any of Colin’s friends had of the extreme contradictions in Stephen’s nature. There were, they understood, all kinds of warring elements concealed under the solid exterior. It suddenly became much less surprising that Colin found him so interesting.

It was only a few seconds before Carmen Miranda very slowly and with great dignity tilted sideways into the water. Stephen neatly caught the guitar as it fell past him. Miranda’s actor cine-filmed the whole sequence.

‘I wish I had that film,’ Miranda sighed. ‘I’d give anything to see it again.’

‘Do you ever see whatshisname? The actor?’ Katherine wondered.

‘No. What was his name? Although in fact, I did see him about three years ago. In an episode of Holby City.’

‘Any good?’

Miranda laughed delightedly. ‘As a psychopathic father on the run while his teenaged daughter haemorrhaged in casualty? Absolutely excellent. I’ve probably got some photographs of the Carmen Miranda event in a box somewhere.’

‘We should get the old pictures out.’

‘Maybe.’

Katherine said, ‘It’s good to have these shared memories. It’s historic glue.’

Miranda considered for a moment, and then asked, ‘Do you ever feel that you’re only inhabiting your life, K?’

Katherine studied the patch of turf framed by her knees. There were ants busy between the blades of grass. Then she lifted her head. The archaeologist had descended into the trench once again.

‘I did. Sometimes. I think being here has changed that.’

‘Has it?’ Miranda was pleased. ‘Has it really?’ She seized on any confirmation that the Mead collaboration was working as she hoped.

Katherine said quickly, ‘Of course, I had Amos and the boys, and work, and people coming to dinner, all those things, so I wasn’t exactly lonely, but I did feel that I was sort of watching from the sidelines rather than pitching into the scrum myself. And I would use a bloody rugby metaphor, wouldn’t I, as if even the language for framing my own experiences has to be borrowed from my menfolk?’

She attempted a laugh at this, while Miranda only raised her eyebrows.

‘But I feel different here, being with you and Colin and Selwyn and Polly. It’s old ground, yet new at the same time. There’s a sense of anticipation, definitely hopeful anticipation. It’s not all to do with the glass house, although of course that’s exciting.’ She made this dutiful nod out of habit, and consideration to Amos and Miranda herself. ‘It’s almost a rebirth, isn’t it? A completely different way of living, and that leads to general crazy optimism, which is rather at odds with the reality as far as Amos and I are concerned.’

There was a pause. This was quite a long speech, for Katherine.

‘Any news about that?’ Miranda asked, treading carefully.

The reason for Amos’s departure from London and the law wasn’t discussed at Mead, although everyone knew that everyone else knew about it. She was relieved when Katherine answered matter-of-factly.

‘About whether the young woman is finally going to press charges? The most recent notion is that she won’t. I think she may be on dangerous ground because she almost certainly reciprocated some of Amos’s attentions, at least to begin with. Then she probably withdrew, and he naturally refused to accept her withdrawal, and then he would have crossed the line between pursuit and harassment somewhere along the way. I imagine that would all be rather delicate to prove in court, don’t you? Particularly against an adversary like Amos.’

Katherine picked a blade of grass and thoughtfully chewed on it.

‘Now he’s left the chambers that may be enough to satisfy her. I don’t know if he’ll go back to the Bar some day. If he’ll need to, that is. I don’t mean for the money, God knows he’s got enough of that piled up, but just to stay the Amos he is, in his own estimation. That’s why this new house, seeing it take shape here, is so important. It gives him a reason for being. He’s not the kind of man who retires to the golf course, particularly against his will. He’s been bored, lately, and it makes him more difficult.’

There were opposing notes of sympathy and of dismissal in her words, chiming together, that took both women a little by surprise.

‘Yes, I can see that,’ Miranda agreed.

Colin turned back from the boundary fence. He walked slowly, on a wide arc, but he was drawn steadily back to the trench. The young archaeologist was still on all fours, gently scraping with his trowel. He was so absorbed in what he was doing that he didn’t hear Colin’s approach, and it was the shadow falling across his work that made him jump. He jerked upright on his knees but his expression relaxed as soon as he saw that it wasn’t Amos.