The House At Sea’s End

‘How are things?’ asks Ruth, not sure that she really wants to know. She gets on all right with Phil, he’s a decent enough boss, but that’s as far as it goes. He’s very much the new style of archaeologist, obsessed with technology and appearing on television. Ruth has always got the impression that Phil regards her as a throwback, an expert in her own field but a grafter, a plodder, not someone suited to the centre stage. Which suits her fine. Their working relationship works. She just doesn’t particularly want to get to know Phil in his new guise as her best friend’s partner.

‘Oh, all right,’ says Shona, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers. ‘His wife’s being a cow.’

‘Well, it must be difficult for her,’ offers Ruth. ‘They were married for… how long?’

‘Fifteen years. But it hadn’t been working for the last five.’

Not for the first time, Ruth wonders how Shona, who is, after all, an astute literary critic, can be so gullible when it comes to men. Who says the marriage hadn’t been working for the past five years? Phil, presumably. Ruth has met Phil’s wife, Sue, at various department functions over the years and the couple always seemed perfectly comfortable together. They have two children, boys, who must be teenagers by now.

‘Fourteen and twelve,’ says Shona, in answer to Ruth’s question. ‘I get on brilliantly with them.’

Ruth can believe that this is true. She imagines Shona, with her beauty and vivacity, utterly charming the two boys. Whether the infatuation, on either side, will last, is another matter.

Ruth picks up Kate’s bottle, blanket and the various stuffed toys that have become strewn around the room. Shona makes no move to help her, just stays curled up in her chair, sipping her wine. She obviously feels that her work is done and, really, Ruth agrees with her.

Ruth stuffs the last toy in the nappy bag and says, ‘Thank you, Shona. I’m sorry you had such an awful time of it.’

‘That’s okay,’ says Shona, not denying that it was awful. ‘Any time.’

‘I’m praying Sandra will be better tomorrow,’ says Ruth.

Driving home across the Saltmarsh, she thinks about her friendship with Shona. They met when Ruth first started working at the University of North Norfolk, but they only really got to know each other on the henge dig. When Ruth looks back to that time – Erik’s ghost stories around the camp fire, the smell of peat smoke in the morning, the wind whistling through the rushes at night, the unforgettable first sight of the henge, black against the blue-grey sand – she thinks of Shona, her red hair flying out behind her as she ran over the sand dunes like a sea sprite shouting ‘It’s here! The henge is here!’ Shona had been Ruth’s first real friend in Norfolk and Ruth values her friends highly. Ever since adolescence, when her parents retreated into the church, putting their relationship with God, it seemed, above their relationship with her, Ruth has relied on her friends for support. She has never been one for the gang. She is bemused by her students, with their hundreds of friends on Facebook or Bebo. Are these real friends, people who would look after your cat or drive you home from hospital, or are they just an amorphous mass, happy enough to leave cute messages (lol!) on your wall but completely removed from your everyday life? How can you have three hundred close friends?

Ruth has always preferred just two or three. Alison and Fatima at school, Caz, Roly and Val at university, Josephine Dumbili from that holiday in Crete. And now Shona. As, over the years, Fatima, Caz and Val acquired husbands and children (Roly is gay and Alison determinedly single in New York) they seemed to move, inexorably, further away from Ruth and she relied more and more on Shona, who sometimes seemed her only ally in a world of motherhood, family holidays and smug Round Robins at Christmas (‘This year Ellie joined Sophie and Laura at the grammar school’). When she found out that Shona had been lying to her for years, ever since the henge dig in fact, the betrayal hit Ruth hard. But her need for Shona was too strong and their friendship mended itself, not quite as strong as before but pretty resilient all the same. Ruth hopes it can withstand Kate, who seems a force more powerful than ten hurricanes, and that scary two-headed beast called Shona-and-Phil.

She is nearly home. The road is raised up over the flat marshland; at night it seems as if you are driving into nothingness, isolated, vulnerable, a prey to the winds that thunder in from the sea, ‘direct from Siberia,’ as the locals always say with pride. Ruth turns on the radio and Mark Lawson’s fruity voice fills the car, telling her about an experimental play that she has never heard of and will never see. Thank God for Radio 4. Ruth prays that Kate will stay asleep and maybe (wonderful thought) sleep all the way through the night. Surely she must be exhausted after all that screaming?