The Janus Stone

Edward pauses, fiddling with an executive toy on the desk. ‘Well, actually he lives with us.’

‘He does?’ Wondering why on earth Spens didn’t mention this before, Nelson asks, ‘Is he in?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Could I speak to him?’

‘Of course.’ But Spens doesn’t move. Finally he says, ‘My father is in the first stages of senile dementia. He can seem lucid, very lucid, but he gets confused very easily. And when he gets confused he gets… upset.’

‘I understand,’ says Nelson, though he doesn’t really. He has never met anyone with dementia and can’t imagine what it would be like living with someone who is slowly losing their sense of themselves. It makes him see Edward and Marion in a rather different light. ‘Must be hard,’ he offers.

‘Yes,’ Spens agrees. ‘Hardest on Marion because she’s at home more. Sometimes, what with my father and the children… though we have an au pair, Croatian girl, very good. And Dad keeps himself busy, has the Conservative Association, the Historical Society, still plays bowls. He’s a silver surfer too. Better with new technology than I am. He’s not an invalid yet.’

The ‘yet’ hangs on the air because the one thing Nelson does know about dementia is that it is irreversible.

‘I’ll get him for you,’ says Edward. He smiles slightly. ‘He’ll probably be pleased. He loves talking about the old days.’

This is certainly true though Edward Spens hadn’t mentioned that the old days included Ancient Rome, the Counter Reformation and the Crimean War. When he can get a word in, Nelson asks, ‘Sir Roderick, do you remember your years at Woolmarket Street?’

‘Remember them?’ Roderick looks at him sharply from under bushy white eyebrows. ‘Of course I do. I remember everything, don’t I, Edward?’ Edward agrees that he does.

‘You would have been, how old?’

‘I was born in 1938. I lived at the house until I left for Cambridge, when I was eighteen.’

That makes him seventy, Nelson calculates. No great age these days. His own mother has recently taken up line-dancing at seventy-three. Roderick Spens could be a decade older.

‘You lived with your parents?’

‘Yes, my father was the Headmaster of St Saviours on Waterloo Road. He taught classics as well.’

‘The school’s not there any more, is it?’

‘No, it closed sometime in the sixties. Great shame. It was an excellent school.’

‘Did you go there?’

‘Yes, it was my father’s school, y’see.’ He looks beadily at Nelson as if suspecting a trap. ‘My mother wanted me to go to Eton but m’father insisted. His word was law in our house.’

Nelson tries, and fails, to imagine one of his daughters saying the same about him. ‘And your sister… Annabelle. Did she go there too?’

Roderick looks confused. ‘Annabelle?’

Edward Spens cuts in. ‘It’s all right, Dad.’ He turns to Nelson. ‘My father still gets upset when he talks about her. She died young, you see.’

‘How young?’ asks Nelson, his antenna up.

‘Five or six, I believe.’

CHAPTER 21

Ruth is at Woolmarket Street. The builders are starting work again tomorrow and she wants to collect the rest of the finds. Not that the other trenches have turned up anything very exciting – some more pottery, some glass, a few coins. But there might be something interesting there and she needs to check that the site is tidy. That’s her job as lead archaeologist. It’s another warm day and it’s surprising how innocuous the site looks in the sunlight. Nevertheless, Ruth finds herself looking over her shoulder every few minutes and jumping when a squirrel runs across the wall in front of her.

Although she still has a plaster stuck rather rakishly over one eye, Ruth feels remarkably well after Saturday’s trauma. The boy doctor had told her not to be alone in the night, ‘in case you fall into a coma’ he explained cheerfully, but Ruth had been so exhausted that she went to bed at nine and slept beautifully with only Flint for company. She’s sure that it was the conversation with Nelson that caused her to sleep so peacefully. He knows. He may be agonised and conflicted and all the rest of it, he may now drive her mad by interfering at every stage in the pregnancy, but at least he knows. She is no longer entirely on her own. And this morning she had a civil, if stilted, conversation with her mother. Ruth didn’t mention any of the events of the last few weeks but assured her mother that she was no longer feeling sick, had more energy, was not doing so much awful digging. ‘I sailed through both my pregnancies,’ said her mother smugly and Ruth is only too happy to allow her this victory.