The House At Sea’s End

Which was Archie? The gangly boy in front, trying not to smile but obviously delighted to find himself alongside these hardened veterans? The one with his hat at a jaunty angle, gas-mask in hand? Perhaps the serious one with glasses. Which of the older men was Buster Hastings? The scary-looking fellow with the walrus moustache or the fat one with buttons straining? Maybe the one looking vaguely in the wrong direction… Of course, that must be Sea’s End house in the background. He recognises the grey stone but realises that the picture must have been taken at the back of the house, in the garden that has since fallen into the sea.

Archie’s newspaper is still folded back at yesterday’s TV. He has ringed the programmes he wanted to watch. Countdown, Coronation Street, Panorama, an afternoon film matinee of Went the Day Well? The shaky blue pen makes Nelson feel suddenly very sad.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing here. Let’s go and see the doctor.’

‘No signs of satanic ritual then, boss?’

‘Show some respect,’ growls Nelson. Even as he says it, though, he remembers how Archie described Buster Hastings yesterday. ‘Hell of a chap,’ he had said.

A real old devil.

Ruth, like Judy, has taken the day off. Tatjana is arriving tomorrow and the spare room is still full of old boxes so she has dropped Kate at Sandra’s. She stopped off for strengthening croissants, has made a pot of coffee and is now preparing to transform the room into a bijou boudoir, suitable for someone with American standards of hygiene and comfort. The trouble is, for the last twenty minutes she has been sitting on the floor reading an article about Ian Rankin from a two-year-old copy of the Guardian (found at the bottom of one of the boxes). It is only the arrival of Flint, purring and standing on Ian’s face, that brings her back to the job in hand. Jesus, how do people ever tidy anything? She moves stuff from one box to another but it is still there, in the way. How do people like her sister-in-law ever manage to have houses where everything is shut away in cupboards and all the storage jars actually contain the thing they say they do? Ruth’s sugar jar contains small flint flakes, evidence of prehistoric tool-making. Coffee is full of miscellaneous pens and Tea is a strange herbal mix of Cathbad’s, almost definitely hallucinogenic.

That’s another worry. Cathbad’s ridiculous naming-day party. It’s tomorrow night and Cathbad seems to have invited half the university. And now Tatjana will be there too. What will she think about a crowd of pagans dancing around the inevitable bonfire? Ruth has never discussed religion with Tatjana. She knows that Tatjana, like Nelson, was brought up as a Catholic, but living through a civil war tends to change people’s perceptions of good and evil. Ruth shivers; she hopes that they can get through these few weeks without ever discussing life or death or any of the points in between. They will have nice, civilised chats about archaeology, admire Kate, drink white wine and visit Norwich Castle. The past does not need to intrude at all.

What the hell is in this box? Old sample bags full of dust and pieces of flint, lecture notes, a model of a Stone Age causewayed enclosure made for the university open day, complete with plastic sheep, a theatre programme (A Little Night Music – when had she ever gone to see that?) and, oh my God, a picture of Ruth, Peter and Erik standing by the henge, as triumphant as if they had made it themselves.

She peers more closely at the photo. Christ, she is wearing a bikini top. She must have been at least three stone lighter then. Erik is in a billowing white shirt that has a faintly druidical feel. Peter is wearing a Chelsea football vest; his face red and sweaty. It had been a hot summer, she remembers. Working in the sun all day had been hard; they all wore hats, Ruth’s a wide-brimmed straw number, Peter’s one of those legionnaire’s caps with a flap at the back, Erik’s a jaunty panama. In the photo Erik is waving his hat, very white against the improbably blue sky. Now Erik is dead and the henge has disappeared, its timbers taken to a nearby museum to be preserved. Cathbad and the other druids had protested violently. ‘They belong to the wind and the sky,’ Ruth remembers Cathbad shouting, his purple cloak flying out behind him as he took his position in the centre of the sacred circle. ‘They are not yours to take, to bury in some soulless museum.’ Erik had sympathised but the university, who was funding the dig, had insisted. And now the timbers lie in an artificially controlled climate behind smoked glass, no longer a henge, just some oddly shaped pieces of wood.