Adam Palmer: The Boudicca Parchments

Whenever he travelled by plane, he thought of Charlotte, scion of Pennsylvania aristocracy. Perhaps because travelling by air reminded him of their jet-setting lifestyle between the two worlds of New York and London, bringing back a flood of memories and endless speculations about maybes and might-have-beens.

They were childless and not by choice — a “George and Martha” couple was the way he sometimes described it. But although he felt that he had it in him to be a great father, that was not the main problem for their marriage. The problem was that in the eyes of his wife, he lacked ambition. Success to Charlotte, whether social or academic, was measured by how high one rose through the relevant hierarchy. Daniel, on the other hand, believed in the motto of an old school that he had attended briefly: rather use than fame . He didn’t feel that he was lacking in ambition. It was the quality rather than the quantity of his ambition that set him apart from Charlotte.

That and their differing sources of pleasure. She loved the high life, he liked the academic life. Her world was that of the salon; his, the ivory tower. To her, happiness meant haute cuisine dining and shopping at Harrods or Bloomingdales. To him it meant pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge and driving back the boundaries of ignorance.

Yet he was by no means all work and no play. He loved spending time with his young nieces and enjoyed outward-bound activities with his teenage nephews. In the winter months, he was equally good at keeping them occupied with kitchen table science. On one occasion, he had taught the boys how to make a radio out of household items like a rusty old razor blade, a pencil, a plastic bottle and some wire. To their amazement he then improved it by adding some foil, greaseproof paper, a brass nail, a coin and a lemon (which he described as “the battery”). He had download the information on how to do it from the internet and then challenged them to do a project of their own, making a shortwave radio, using a broken saucepan as the main component. They came through with flying colours.

These were simple pleasures that Charlotte never understood. To her, even the idea that two adolescent boys could prefer a home-made radio that you had to strain to hear with an earpiece, over a cool, hi-graphics video-game, contradicted the stereotypes that she had read about — as well as her assumptions about human nature. In the perennial conflict between the Having Mode of life and the Doing Mode, she found happiness in luxury possessions and the company of well-bred but ultimately shallow people. Daniel believed in the dictum of popular philosopher Cyril Joad, that happiness was the “by-product of purposeful activity.” And soirees with some latter-day “New York 400” were not his idea of purposeful activity.

This was ironic really, because he had first met Charlotte at a University function. But then again, as he recalled, the function was in honour of some rich donor, so it represented that awkward meeting point between academia and philanthropy, when scholarship and Mammon pay mutual homage to one another, with a mixture of envy and guilt.

Relaxing in his first class seat, he tried to remember if there had ever been a time when he had seen her looking anything other than comfortable. The only time he could think of was the event that had triggered their divorce: when he had caught her in flagrante delicto with one of his students. And even then, she had tried to put him on the defensive, reminding him of all the times he had regaled her with tales of his female students flirting with him and how he seemed flattered rather than merely amused by it. He responded by trying to make her recognize the difference between being subject to temptation and succumbing to it. But even then he felt as if he was talking to her in a foreign language.

Troubled by these painful memories, he slept a fitful sleep through most of the flight. But even though the sleep was punctuated by episodes of awakening, it was a ten and a half hour flight and so he was relatively fresh when he picked up the hired Audi A4 at Luton Airport. His own car was at Heathrow, but he decided that as he was going to be meeting the abominable Martin Costa in Hertfordshire, he may as well fly into Luton, so the drive would be shorter.

On the drive to Ashwell, through leafy country lanes, he tried not to think too much about his ex-wife, still less of the man he was going to meet. Martin Costa was an odious little spiv — a prostitute of academia — who had turned from incisive thought and the pursuit of knowledge to legerdemain and the pursuit of the quick and easy buck.

Paradoxically it had been the opposite with Daniel. It was his adolescent interest in sleight of hand that had led to his academic development. Because with his new found confidence in his skills at wowing an audience with illusions, he gained a sense of self-belief that led him to try harder in school. No longer satisfied with being in the “top third” of his class, he sought to be the best, at least in those subjects that interested him. That meant languages, history and even subjects that his school didn’t actually teach like psychology and cultural anthropology.

The fact that he went to a Jewish school was also helpful in forming his specialization. Although he no longer adhered with any great feeling to the faith of his childhood, he developed a powerful interest in Jewish history, which was taught at the school. He also found himself paying more attention in religious studies classes. He wasn’t interested in theology as such, but he was interested in human thought and in language — how it developed and the strange discrepancies between classical Hebrew and its modern counterpart.

Not sure what street the Three Tuns was in, he had set his SatNav for Ashwell. But by mistake, he had accepted the device’s suggestion of Ashwell and Morden Station, where he found himself looking at a pub called The Jester . Not quite sure of the etiquette of such situations, and not wanting to ask for directions to another pub without at least buying a drink, he parked and stepped out of the car. The first thing he noticed, was the all-pervasive smell of horse manure, which as a lifelong townie, he put down as being the rural norm.

In the pub, not wanting to touch alcohol while driving, he ordered a diet coke. While he was drinking at the bar, he engaged the barman in conversation and discovered that he was not actually in Ashwell at all, but rather two miles away from the village. He took the opportunity to obtain directions and proceeded down a narrow country road past isolated houses, parched fields of golden corn and a path leading to a trailer park, according to the signpost. The speed limit was 40 mph, but it dropped to 30 when he reached the pinch point that marked the entrance to the village.

Inside the village, he asked for directions again and found himself driving past a traditional village green on which a game of cricket was in progress. Except that this was no ordinary cricket game. For some reason, all the players were in fancy dress. As he slowed down to rubberneck, he spotted a school-master — complete with gown — Batman, Robin Hood, a soldier in camouflage fatigues, a turtle, a very out-of-place tiger and an equally out-of-season Santa Claus. It wasn’t clear whether this was a weekly occurrence or a special occasion — and he couldn’t escape the feeling that he had strayed into a real-life Wicker Man scenario — but he noticed children and parents watching the event, albeit in small numbers.

He was still mulling over the cricket game’s poor attendance when he parked the Audi in the quiet village street a few yards past the sub-post office. As he crossed the road to the red brick building that was Three Tuns , he heard the clip-clopping of horse’s hooves. Standing outside the pub, he turned to watch as two pretty young women in their early twenties rode by on horseback. Their image as rural young ladies was marred somewhat by the fact that one of them was sporting a couple of visible tattoos