Sandlands Page 13

  A pair of doubled blankets insulated him comfortably enough from the hard oak floorboards, and his folded coat made a serviceable pillow. It was only the cold which kept unconsciousness at bay. Not until the warmth from his hot-water bottle, filled from the camping kettle on his portable Calor stove, had permeated the wool of his hiking socks would his feet lose their chill and make sleep possible. Meanwhile he lay on his back and waited, counting bricks instead of sheep.

  He remembered the care home, in his father’s last days: the whispered words at the bedside that he knew Dad couldn’t hear. He thought, too, of the University Library and all its store of cumulated knowledge – but distantly, as if from another time, another life. How human voices were captured there, frozen, mothballed in ink and paper. And here? How many words, how many memories, could be held in a million bricks?

  It had been a calm night outside, overcast and starless, the sea as close to a millpond as he had known it. But the tower was never silent. Even on the most breathlessly still of nights, there were whisperings in the bricks. He sometimes wondered if it was really the sea – some subterranean echo or vibration, rippling up through the walls from the shingle on which they stood. Or perhaps an illusion, a trick of the mind, like the echo of the waves heard in a seashell. Yet, for all that, there was a paradoxical realness and solidity about the voices here, an immediacy – yes, that was the word for it: immediate, unmediated – which recalled with a sudden sharp pang the early days of his scholarship, that quickening of the blood he had thought to have lost. A connection thought severed, rejoined.

  Slowly, the heat from his body crept out to fill the air pockets of his sleeping bag and, at last, he felt the first softenings of warmth in the stiff woollen fibres which encased his toes. He rolled on to his side and shut his eyes.

  It might be cold here in the barrack room but it was never lonely. His brow, his nose and mouth lay close to the brickwork. Fleetingly, he thought he caught the scent of antiseptic, masking stale urine, but it danced away from him and instead he breathed in tar and damp canvas, woodsmoke, rum and spindrift. And the name that formed felt familiar on his lips.

  ‘William?’

  Into the stillness multiplied the murmuring reply.

  It was Finlay, the young ginger-haired porter, who handed Jenny the lunchtime post from her pigeonhole the following Wednesday.

  ‘Ernie not on duty today?’

  ‘He’s on nights this week. Be in later.’ Finlay scratched a freckled nose. ‘Anything I can help with?’

  ‘Well... I suppose you might give him a message.’

  What to say, though, that wouldn’t be indiscreet? Finlay displayed a commendable Aberdonian caution in many things but he could be like a fishwife when it came to gossip.

  Her source, at any rate, was beyond impeachment: the redoubtable Sue, whose duties included the cleaning of both Dr Whybrow’s rooms and Jenny’s own study on the adjacent staircase, and who had switched off her hoover on the landing that morning to pass admiring comment on Jenny’s lattice-laced black knee boots, before informing her mysteriously that he was ‘back at it’. ‘He’ turned out to be Dr Whybrow, and the evidence that of his desk, on which, Sue explained, there lay beside the computer a stack of A4 printed sheets, topped with the felt pen injunction PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. This, he had informed her warningly, was ‘the book’.

  ‘It hadn’t shifted, not for ages. Of course he’s been away a lot recently, but even before that, it hadn’t been touched in months. Crying out for a duster over it. Anyway, evidently he’d been back on Monday – been through the room like a dervish, he had. And the pile was nearly twice as high. Lots of clean new papers, and not a speck of dust in sight.’

  ‘Really? That’s great. Thanks, Sue.’

  It was proof. He was writing again; his mojo had been restored. Dr Whybrow was back on his book. And making great progress by the sound of it, too. Whatever he’d unearthed in that tower of his, it must be something big.

  ‘Tell Ernie—’ Jenny gazed thoughtfully at Finlay, then suddenly grinned. ‘Just tell him Dr Whybrow is unblocked.’

  * * *

  A pale November sun rose from below the sea to speckle the beach with silver and send the elongated shadow of the Martello tower zigzagging away behind across the ridges and furrows of the dunes. It lent the tower’s brickwork a milky glow, so that it almost appeared to be lit from within. The sea lay lulled, each soft breaker spreading and dying to silence before the next one rose.

  Whybrow had wakened early, and sat, still in his sleeping bag and with his coat wrapped around his shoulders, leaning against the wall of the tower: on his lap, a pad of notepaper, his fountain pen on the blanket beside him. All around was emptiness and dust, which, although his gaze ranged over it, he did not see. The air was alive with listening.

  He tipped his head back until it rested on the old, roughened surface; he closed his eyes and smiled. Then he picked up his pen.

  A Curiosity of Warnings

  Cycling in the countryside, along all those leafy Suffolk lanes had seemed a seductive idea when Bill was back in Finsbury Park with its one-way systems and potholes and tailbacks of the road-enraged.

  The three-mile cycle ride from the little railway station was hardly an endurance trial but Bill hadn’t been on a bike since he’d moved to London and it took a bit of getting used to again, whatever they said. As did rural navigation, not greatly assisted by signposts buried deep in summer hedgerows, nor by a station bearing the name of the small town of Wickham Market but situated in reality several miles from there at a village called Campsea Ashe. He wasn’t convinced about the machine he’d been given either, by the rental firm. They’d brought it from Ipswich in a white van with a toothy, grinning cartoon bicycle on the side and the legend Mister Bike – We Deliver. It had far too many gears and made disconcerting grinding noises every time he tried to shift them, so he’d stuck doggedly to seventeenth for the last mile and a half.

  A bike, however, had seemed appropriate to the purposes of Bill’s trip. In fact, he felt self-consciously – almost ludicrously – like the protagonist of an M. R. James ghost story. How else to arrive at the hostelry chosen for his short vacation, the avowed purpose of which was to visit the locations of ‘A Warning to the Curious’, than on a bicycle like young Paxton in the tale? The victims of James’s hauntings seemed almost always to be academics like Bill himself, generally ‘antiquarians’ such as Paxton was described – which Bill supposed his own post as Lecturer in Early Modern History at King’s College London might give him some claim to be. They pitched up in all innocence of dark events to come, with a backpack on their shoulders very much like the one that was threatening to unbalance him on corners now, except in stout canvas, no doubt, rather than grey-and-orange Gore-Tex. Dr Paxton in ‘A Warning’ had put up at the Bear in ‘Seaburgh’, which Bill took to be Aldeburgh, while he himself was booked in at a village pub some way inland. The Ship, it was called, though it must be six miles from the sea, and as he rested his calves to freewheel down a curved incline, there it was, swinging into view ahead on the right. The inn sign which hung from the gable end depicted the popular notion of a Viking longship, with its high prow and stern, striped sail and shields along the gunwales. In fact, he thought, as he slowed to peer up at the sign, the name was more likely to be a corruption of ‘Sheep’. He’d have to look it up.

  The motorbike came out of nowhere. Bill caught the blast of noise only as it screamed round the high-hedged bend behind him, and moments afterwards the powerful broadside cuff of wind as it sped narrowly past him at a giddying angle to the tarmac. Here in the dip of the road a dusting of sand lay loose across the surface and as he braked Bill felt its treacherous shift, just as he saw the motorbike’s rear tyre slide sideways into the contours of a skid. For a breathless split second, time stood still as he waited for the inevitable tipping point: the wheels that spun in empty air as leather rasped over gravel, followed by the shock of impact, the sickening crunch of steel an
d fibreglass and bone. A split second only – and then the machine righted itself, before roaring away up the hill beyond the pub at full throttle. Bill wobbled to a ragged halt in the gutter, relieved to regain first his balance and then, by fluttering degrees, his normal pulse rate. Bloody desperado – a menace to sensible road users. And yet there was something approaching exhilaration in making it here in one piece, in defiance of protesting muscles and stuntmen on motorbikes.

  He hauled the hired bicycle alongside a low wall at the front of the Ship and engaged in battle with the intransigent D lock supplied by Mister Bike.

  The unaccustomed exertion of the ride had sharpened Bill’s appetite for beer and pub grub and at soon after six he was first in the bar. Or almost the first: at the far end with her newspaper propped against the ice bucket and a half-empty pint glass in front of her leaned a young woman of twenty or so.

  She glanced up at him, then pulled a face. ‘Sorry about earlier.’

  Bill stared.

  ‘On the bike.’ Her mouth corners plunged further: sad clown without the painted tears. ‘I’m afraid I cut you up a bit.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. So that was...?’

  He replayed the mental picture of the slight youth in motorbike leathers and black helmet, the mirrored visor, and tried to map it on to the ponytailed girl in front of him in summer dress and sandals, her face now resolving back to a smile.

  ‘Me, yes.’

  ‘Who nearly killed me?’ Though actually, she was the one more likely to have died.

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that. Buy you a drink? Oh, and the pie’s bloody good, if you’re eating. Raymond – the landlord here – is a miserable old sod, but his pie crust is poetry.’

  So they shared a table and the last two portions of steak and kidney, brought over by an unsmiling Raymond, and she told him her name was Freya, and about the excavation she was working on, down at the churchyard.

  ‘Seems to be the site of an earlier building. Saxon, maybe monastic.’

  ‘So you’re an archaeologist?’

  ‘Well, sort of. Archaeology student. I’m just a grunt – gang labour, except there’s only one of me. It’s not even paid – but they put me up at the youth hostel and keep me in beer and steak pie.’

  ‘Another antiquarian, in fact.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Bill half smiled, shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  Spearing a carrot with her fork, she flourished it at him. ‘How about you? On holiday?’

  ‘Well, I suppose you might call it a pilgrimage.’ He hadn’t supposed there’d be anyone he’d tell about it. It seemed rather eccentric, somehow, his literary jaunt – old-fashioned, even self-indulgent. But Freya listened without judging.

  ‘So what did he do here, this Paxton bloke?’

  ‘He found the missing Anglo-Saxon crown.’

  ‘That was helpful of him. Who’d lost it?’

  ‘Raedwald, King of the East Angles, so the story goes.’

  She laid down her knife and took a swig of bitter. ‘Isn’t he the Sutton Hoo chap? The one in the burial ship?’

  ‘It’s a theory, I think, yes. Anyway, this silver crown of Paxton’s was one of three that were said to be buried at intervals along the coast here to keep East Anglia safe from invasion. One had already been found and melted down, back in the seventeenth century, and another was supposed to have been swept away by the encroaching sea. But that left the third one, and Paxton fancied having it.’

  ‘Careless of the fate of East Anglia?’

  ‘Careless indeed. Anyway, he meets the rector at a church that James calls Froston – I think it’s based on Friston, up the road there just past Snape. And this rector person tells him how there’s a local family called the Agers, who were guardians of the third and final crown, sworn to protect it with their lives. There was an old father, William Ager, who died, and then his son, another William, who camped out at nights to watch over the crown and apparently caught his death that way, too, while still only in his twenties. He was the last of the line, the son, so of course his ghost takes over on guard duty.’

  ‘Oh, dear – I think I can guess where this is going. Paxton tries to steal the crown and the ghost gets him?’

  ‘Well, not straight away, oddly. He finds the burial place – a barrow or tumulus above the beach with a knot of fir trees on it – and he digs up the crown and takes it back to the inn where he’s staying. But as soon as he touches it, he starts to see the ghost out of the corner of his eye – a man watching him, who disappears when he looks straight at him. Dark shadows lurking behind him, following him. You know the sort of thing. So he decides to put the crown back.’

  ‘Quite right, too. Give the East Angles back their heritage. Like restoring the Elgin marbles.’

  ‘Right. But then the ghost gets him anyway.’

  ‘Bit harsh.’ The sad clown face again. ‘What’s’it do to him? Scare him to death? Apoplexy of terror?’

  ‘It chases him along the beach in the fog and he falls off an old pillbox and smashes his skull. A coastal battery, you know.’

  Freya had finished her pie and was sitting back in her chair, retying her ponytail and looking thoughtful.

  ‘When was this story written, then? I was imagining Edwardian gothic.’

  ‘1925 – or that’s when it was published, anyway.’

  ‘And they had pillboxes here in the First World War? I think of them as being built to keep out Hitler.’

  ‘Some, evidently. I suppose they thought the Germans were coming in 1914 as much as in 1940.’

  ‘And 614 – or whenever it was Raedwald was knocking about. Except that would be my lot, not the Germans.’

  Momentarily puzzled, Bill frowned at her.

  ‘Vikings – Norsemen. Freya’s a Norse name.’

  ‘And you’re from Denmark? Or your family are?’

  She grinned and shook her head. ‘Basildon. Another pint?’

  It was perfect weather for the cycle ride to Friston the following afternoon, and Bill was getting the hang of the bike; he was using a range of gears from fourteenth to eighteenth. But the church, when he arrived, was disappointing: pretty enough, but heavily restored in the nineteenth century. The porch was plain and bare, with none of the ‘niches and shields’ that James described – and certainly no sign of the coat of arms with the three Anglo-Saxon crowns. In the graveyard, wading knee-deep through yellowing grass and meadowsweet and overblown, head-heavy poppies, he found no Ager tombstones. It should be no surprise – fiction was fiction, after all – but he felt a sense of deflation nonetheless, and on the way back the hills seemed all to be against him and the sun was oppressive on his back. His collar chafed and he was sure his neck was burning.

  After a shower he found himself hoping that Freya would be in the pub again, to commiserate on his failed mission. She was.

  ‘There’s more pie,’ she informed him by way of greeting. ‘Turkey and ham.’ But through a mouthful of béchamel and shortcrust pastry she tendered little sympathy. ‘So Froston isn’t Friston. It’s somewhere else – or he just made it up.’

  For some reason her robust dismissiveness rather cheered him up. ‘What about you, then? Did you despoil any historic treasures today? Rob any good graves?’

  ‘We don’t do that any more.’ For once, she really seemed in earnest. ‘Archaeologists – we’re not like the gold-digger in your story. Those days of pot-hunting are long past – plundering the pyramids, stripping bare the sacred sites of other civilisations to sell the loot or cart things off and put them on display. Self-enrichment, self-aggrandisement.’

  ‘Cultural imperialism? But it’s Suffolk you’re digging up, not Byzantium or Asia Minor.’

  She nodded, her brows drawn to a small crease. ‘But it’s just another sort of imperialism, isn’t it? The know-it-all present lording it over the past. The Victorians were terrible for it – and right through to the twenties and thirties, too.’

  ‘So what are you doing now, if you’re
not trying to know everything?’

  At that, the crease smoothed away and she smiled at him. ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’re still appalling know-it-alls. We dig things up, but then we photograph and catalogue, record and document, and as often as not we put things back. It’s not the finds so much as the findings. Not the objects but the stories they tell.’

  ‘So – you’re no longer looking for the Holy Grail?’

  The smile widened. ‘Nor the Arc of the Covenant, either. That Indiana Jones has a lot to answer for.’

  Now it was Bill’s turn to be sober. ‘I’m not sure the ghost of William Ager would make the distinction. I suspect for him it’s disturbing things in the first place that’s the sacrilege. The past just needs leaving well alone.’

  For a while they attended to their pie in silence. Bill thought of fields where the soil had yielded its ancient possessions not to the archaeologist’s trowel but to the tractor, working them up to the surface to be broken and scattered beneath the blade of the plough. He thought of artefacts lost to the wind and rain and sea: to coastal erosion, as at Dunwich, which he had visited as a boy with his grandmother, and seen broken headstones and human bones, shockingly naked and white, sticking through the sandy cliff at grotesque angles like trauma-shattered limbs, so that he’d thought it must be a battlefield until Gran told him it was just an old cemetery, going over the edge.

  Recalling him from his meanderings, Freya said, ‘There are still holy grails, it’s just that they’re not things any more.’

  ‘So they’re... what?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Explanations? Connections?’ She must have been working in a vest; there was a line of fragile white at each side in the golden brown, further out along her collarbone than the straps of her dress. His own neck prickled.

  ‘Like us, then – like historians. Except my delving is all above ground. In county record offices, not tumuli. I do the Civil War. It’s all old documents – letters, court rolls.’