Sandlands Read online

  ‘Less muddy, at least.’

  ‘Just a bit of dust and mildew, sometimes.’

  ‘No risk of sunburn.’

  His gaze loitered on the bronzed shoulders. ‘No. No sunburn.’

  ‘And you dig up secrets, not Anglo-Saxon crowns.’

  He nodded, sitting back in his chair and sipping his beer. It was true: betrayals and chicaneries, dark deeds dragged out and exposed to daylight, these were his stock-in-trade.

  Freya leaned intently forward. ‘The thing about secrets is, they’re not like a silver crown. Once you’ve unearthed them, they cannot be put back.’ She sought his eye and he saw that she was only half laughing. ‘So you see, it’s you the vengeful ghosts of the past should be pursuing, not me.’

  ‘I read your story.’ Tonight’s pie was chicken and leek, and they had carried it outside on to the terrace, leaving the bar to a leather-hatted melodeon player singing a song about a foggy night at sea. Freya was attacking her plate with vigour. ‘Online, yesterday evening. I read “A Warning to the Curious”.’

  ‘And? What did you think?’ He found he really wanted to know.

  ‘Well, I ended up going to sleep with the light on, if that makes you happy.’

  He grinned. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘And since that day,’ announced the melodeonist through the open bar door, ‘we’ll roam the bay, until we find the Navy Island gold.’

  Freya waved her beer glass. ‘I was thinking, though. He was spookily prophetic, wasn’t he, your M. R. James? The barrow on the hill, overlooking the water where the enemy ships might come. The buried Anglo-Saxon treasure. Even the possible Raedwald connection. It’s all exactly like Sutton Hoo, isn’t it? But you say he wrote the story in 1925. That’s more than a decade before they started to dig at the Hoo.’

  ‘Yes... But I suppose they knew there could be something there. I mean, the mounds were pretty obvious, sitting there for all to see. And there’d been looting in the past, things already found. Coins and so on.’

  ‘...a man names Bones took a chest ashore...’

  Freya impaled a potato and nodded eagerly. ‘Right. And did you know they’d found that ship at Snape as well?’

  ‘At Snape?’

  ‘I looked it all up last night. Don’t you love the Internet? They found an Anglo-Saxon burial ship on Snape Common – it was excavated back in the 1860s. Not as big as the one at Sutton, and the grave goods were missing – probably been raided by earlier looters. But I wondered if maybe James knew about it.’

  ‘...he killed his men, and cursed their souls; to roam as ghosts, and protect the gold...’

  ‘Maybe he had even visited the site there, at Snape,’ Freya persisted.

  ‘An archaeology fan?’

  ‘Well, why not? He was a medieval scholar, wasn’t he?’

  One evening on Wiki and she seemed to know more about it all than he did. ‘It’s true that’s very nearby,’ he said. ‘To the places in the story, I mean. Snape Common practically backs on to Friston.’

  ‘There you are, then.’ Her eyes gleamed triumphantly. They were, he noticed, a sun-dappled hazel green.

  Inside the bar now an elderly woman was singing, strongly but tunelessly, about a lover gone to sea to face the foe amid the blund’ring cannons’ roar. There was history, he thought, that wasn’t buried in the earth or hidden in old papers. He would have made some observation of the kind to Freya but, before he could frame the thought, she said, ‘Speaking of archaeology fans, you should come and visit my dig some time. It’s only me and the prof – not even her, some days – and I’m sure she won’t mind. Come along and I’ll give you the tour. If you’re interested in a hole in the ground three metres square and a bit of old wall.’

  ‘Since you sell it so well, how can I resist? Thank you. And actually, I’ve been meaning to get down to the church. It’s the other reason I came – apart from M. R. James, and a holiday, of course.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘My family came from here, you see – my grandmother’s family. I used to come and stay when I was a kid. She lived in Southwold then, but she was born here in the village. I thought I might take a poke round the gravestones, maybe look at the parish register, and see what I can find.’

  ‘The old family tree thing?’

  ‘Not quite that.’ He had an historian’s disdain for fashionable genealogy, with its obsessive box-ticking. Pure snobbery, no doubt. ‘But family history, anyway.’

  ‘Parish records...’ Freya’s mouth, above the rim of her pint, was flirting with a smile. ‘Do I scent dust and mildew? A busman’s holiday as well as a pilgrimage?’

  By the weekend, even Freya had had her fill of pub pie. ‘D’you fancy a barbecue? A proper beach barbecue, I mean?’

  They bought the fish from one of the fishermen’s sheds on the beach at Aldeburgh: little flat dabs, locally caught, six of them for a fiver.

  ‘Six?’

  Freya wafted a breezy hand. ‘Oh, we’ll need three each, there’s nothing on them.’

  ‘What are dabs, anyway?’ He’d never seen them in Sainsbury’s.

  ‘No idea. But you’ll see – they taste like the North Sea. ’Cept without the sewage, obviously.’

  She was right. The driftwood they gathered had been salted and seasoned by the sea until it was light as balsa; once they’d persuaded a match to light and not blow out, it caught like straw, and the shingle drew in air to whip the flames. Freya had brought kitchen foil, a lemon and a penknife; she gutted the fish with a nonchalance that was almost alarming. They were cooked in minutes and, eating scaldingly with his fingers and through mouthfuls of small bones, Bill had never tasted anything more delicious.

  If the fire had lit readily and burned quickly it nevertheless died slowly, leaving them to lie back on their elbows and stare into the winking embers, or watch for the occasional flurry of rising sparks. It was strange, he thought, how the assortment of broken planks and branches kept their shape: empty, glowing crimson hulls, hollowed inside to little but hot air, first by the seawater and then by the fire. One touch and they would no doubt fall to ash.

  Dust to dust. Like the timber ribs of the exhumed burial ship at Sutton Hoo, which turned to powder as soon as exposed to air.

  ‘Is that the Martello tower? The one in the story?’ Freya’s words seemed to come to him from another time and place rather than from just across the fire. He blinked at her through the trickle of smoke.

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  It lay along the beach, beyond them to the south, a massive squat cylinder of sombre grey brick – or in fact more a quatrefoil than a cylinder, with its four great clustered towers.

  ‘No wonder they were worried about invasion, those Ager blokes. The ones who were guarding Raedwald’s crown. I mean, it’s everywhere, isn’t it? The physical threat of it. Those concrete pillboxes in all the fields on the way down here, waiting to defend the coast from two lots of Germans who never came. And then that bloody big thing, too. Whole garrisons of soldiers, watching for the French who never came either.’

  Before that the Spanish, who’d sailed straight past, already defeated and in tatters. ‘Luckily for us,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’ Through the darkness and the shimmer of rising heat he could make out the light in her hazel eyes. ‘Or maybe not lucky. Maybe there really is some powerful protective magic at work along this coast.’

  ‘What about your lot, though?’ He offered a smile, hoping to see her return it, but her expression remained distant, dreamy. ‘The Danes – the Vikings. They came, all right.’

  Came and saw and conquered; or rather, they came and raided and went away – or came and married and settled. But it was tempting to believe in Freya’s talismanic sorcery, even so. Lying here in the glimmer of the dying firelight, hearing the slop and suck of breaking waves at the waterline, there was a powerful sense of the collapsing telescope of time. He felt he knew what they must have felt, those long-dead ancestors, as they listened for the lap
of the feared Norsemen’s oars, or watched for lights where no lights should be, out in the shifting mass of indigo and grey that stretched from beach to horizon. Did the cries of gulls and terns transform into the far-off calls of warrior sailors, hastily hushed, as they hauled up the sail to drift in stealth towards the shore? But there was no seaborne invader now to threaten these shores. It was a long time since Bill’s parents had lived with the threat of the Soviet tanks rolling westwards towards them across Germany and Holland. These days the spectre was just a lone stranger with a rucksack – or even a neighbour, student, colleague – though surely not here on the Suffolk coast.

  There was still some warmth coming from the burnt-out husks of firewood as well as from the seared pebbles surrounding and beneath. But August was more than half over and the sun was gone already, and with it much of the day’s heat. It felt suddenly like summer’s end. Maybe the sea cooled slower than the air – or faster (Bill was no physicist) – or perhaps it was the sudden drop in temperature, but whatever the reason, a sea mist had formed above the breakers. At first there were only wisps of haze, like steam over a heated outdoor pool, but gradually they merged and increased in density, before starting to rise and roll up the banked shingle of the beach. The Martello tower was already shrouded in white to halfway up its walls. Then towards them, as Bill watched, there stretched a slow, unfurling, vaporous finger.

  Freya was staring in the same direction. Her bare shoulders hunched in a shudder.

  ‘You’re cold. Here – take my sweater.’

  Instead she sat up, brushing sand and pebbles from her jeans and vest. ‘Thanks, but this shingle is bloody uncomfortable, anyway. I think I might head back.’

  There were no evening buses to or from the village, and Bill had balked at the idea of riding pillion behind Freya on the motorbike; besides, she had no spare helmet. So he’d met her here with the hired pushbike, and now faced a lonely eight-mile cycle home. He kicked shingle over the remnants of the fire – a good Boy Scout – and walked with her back to where they’d left the bikes, behind the sea wall. The path along the top of the wall was deserted, so he might have kissed her then, as he’d have liked to have done, but as she bent to free the disc lock of her motorbike she shivered again, as if a shadow had crossed her grave, and Bill was filled with the unformed, haunting sense of its being too late.

  The sea fret hugged the shoreline, so that as he rose on his pedals to mount the hill out of the town it fell away behind him and he was out into pale, clear moonlight. But, glancing back as he paused at the summit to catch his breath, he saw that the mist had shifted and risen, too, so as to create the sensation that it was following him. The road wound between tall hedges and the moon cast shifting, fractured shadows across his way. There was no sound but the creaking of the bike’s saddle springs and the whir of its wheels, so that when a pheasant, startled from sleep, rose beating from the hedge he was as shaken as the bird, and his heart hammered hard in his chest. The bicycle’s front light gave out a watery beam, lighting a small patch of tarmac which served only to throw everything around it into deeper darkness. The pattern of the filament resembled a skull as it ran and jumped along in front of him; he found himself trying not to look directly at it.

  From his right loomed suddenly the huge, dark outline of a pylon, and behind it a phalanx of others, marching in from the sea at Sizewell armed with countless gigawatts of atomic power, crackling and buzzing, seeking the shortest route to earth.

  All he could think of, all the long way home with the mist at his tail and the leaping shadows tormenting him, was the story, the ‘Warning to the Curious’. How the narrator, walking close between hedges, would sooner have been in the open, where he could see if anyone was visible behind him. And young Paxton muttering over and over, ‘I don’t know how to put it back.’ Then, finally, Freya’s voice. You dig up secrets, not Anglo-Saxon crowns. And, Once you’ve unearthed them, they cannot be put back.

  The final week in August – the last week, too, of Bill’s holiday – built to a fever of oppressive heat. The fields around the village lay dusty and inert beneath a haze of heavy air; even the stateliest trees appeared to droop and wilt. It was far too hot for long cycle rides. His room was airless – too airless even for reading in comfort – and in the bar of the Ship the only company was Raymond, the publican, growing gloomier the more the thermometer rose, and two indistinguishable regulars, George and Jim, who were scarcely more cheerful and sat playing endless games of cribbage. He saw almost nothing of Freya, who took to downing a quick pint after work and disappearing to the youth hostel to sit in the cool and write up her notes from the excavation. That, too, was coming to an end.

  ‘We’re clearing out early. I uncovered a layer of ash. If we haven’t found much, that’s maybe why – it might have been sacked by the Danes.’

  ‘By your lot.’

  ‘Yeah – by my lot.’

  The Friday was the hottest day so far, a treacly, damp, impenetrable heat which felt too thick for breathing. With his return to London looming, Bill remembered that he hadn’t yet been to the church, either to visit the archaeological dig or to research his grandmother’s family. A knock at the rectory door had furnished him with the key to the vestry in which the parish registers were kept; the pretty and heavily pregnant young woman whom he took at first to be the rector’s wife but further conversation revealed in fact to be the rector assured him that they dated back to the eighteenth century. Dragging the bicycle out of the side shed where Raymond had grudgingly let him store it, he set off towards the church. It was almost five, but he had put off his expedition until he hoped the swelter might be starting to subside, and to an hour which Freya had mentioned as being more conducive to digging in a heatwave. In fact, if anything, both heat and humidity were worse than before, but cloud was massing from the west and the sky had taken on an angry, greyish-purple hue which surely meant the weather was soon to break.

  As he locked up his bike by the church gate he could almost smell the approaching rain. The breeze had stilled, leaving the air dull and leaden. Even the birds had quietened. There was no activity at what he took to be the excavation site; the square trench near the tower was covered over with tarpaulins. They must not have been working this afternoon at all, or else were starting very late or had knocked off early to avoid the storm.

  Inside the church it was cooler, which was some relief, but the air tasted stale and held no stir of movement. The vestry door was to the left of the chancel arch, just as the rector had described to him: a heavy oak door below a simple gothic arch, the old wood much patched and repaired. Beside it, in the final bay of the nave, was a stained-glass window – early Victorian, by the colouring and manner, with its elongated figures and elaborate folds of drapery. It depicted Mary in the centre panel, holding the Christ child as if he were made of Dresden china – which, indeed, he did somewhat resemble. On either side stood unknown saints with extravagantly curling beards; one held an open book and one a giant golden key. But what caught Bill’s attention was something above and behind the three principals, where stylised leaves and lilies wreathed the upper portions of the lights and among them a banner unfurled, its ends elegantly scrolled. The field was a brilliant blue and on it a simple blazon: three repeated images in silver-white argent, each with three distinctive trefoil tines, familiar in heraldic design. There was no mistaking them – the three Anglo-Saxon crowns.

  Bill saw that his hand was trembling as he slotted the vestry key into the lock, and resolved to pull himself together. It must be the hot weather: too much sun, addling his mind and making him a prey to foolish notions. He’d find Gran in the parish registers, make his notes, then return to the pub and take a long cool bath. If he hurried, he might even make it back before the storm broke.

  It was in the third book of the marriage register that he found the entry. Manning, his mother’s maiden name. Edith Ann Manning – that was his grandmother. He read the lines twice, three times, but the informa
tion refused to be grasped; it dodged and danced and taunted him, defying comprehension.

  15th June 1938

  Charles Edward Manning

  bachelor of the parish of Little Glemham

  son of Thomas and Jane Manning

  to

  Edith Ann Ager

  spinster of this parish

  daughter of William and Elizabeth Ager

  Bill closed the register with a snap that sounded abnormally loud in the stifling air. Consumed by an urgency for which he couldn’t fully account, he pushed it back between the other volumes on the shelf, then blundered from the vestry, fumbling in his impatience to lock the door, and on out into the churchyard, Freya and the dig forgotten, almost running now to where he’d left his bike. Already the first few bloated drops of rain were beginning to fall, wetting the path in haphazard splashes and saturating the unnaturally early dusk with moisture. It was suddenly cold.

  His fingers shook so that he struggled with the bicycle lock, and by the time he was mounted and pushing off along the lane the rain was coming down in earnest: a fierce, unrelenting downpour. It was rain so dense that it almost had solid shape, like vertical columns of water. The surface of the road fizzed and steamed beneath his tyres where cold liquid met heated tarmac, while overhead the power lines sputtered and hissed in warning. Bill’s hair and face were soon drenched, water cascading down his brow and temples and into his eyes. It tasted metallic on his lips; it ran from his chin in rivulets.

  The secrets of the past, he thought. Family secrets. You dig up secrets and they cannot be put back. He was an Ager. No Paxton, but an Ager; the watcher, not the watched. Why was he impelled to flee? If there was a ghost at his heels, it could only be his own.

  For a moment the slate of the sky was lit to an eerie yellow. Then came a rumble that could be the first roll and judder of thunder, or the growl of an approaching engine, blurred by the drum of rain. Blindly, with head down and eyes screwed tight against the stinging torrent, Bill pedalled into the storm.