John Preston - The Dig

“Are you all right?” he said. “You’re shivering. Here, let me put my coat around your shoulders.”

“No, please…”

“But it’s no trouble.”

He draped his coat around me. As hard as I could, I tried to stop this jumping and twitching in my veins.

“Why don’t you tell me how you first became interested in archaeology?”

“You can’t possibly want to know that.”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know.”

And so I told him how, when I had been a child, a friend of my uncle’s had come for lunch one day. I couldn’t have been more than five or six at the time. A keen numismatist, he had given me a coin that he told me dated from the time of Augustus. I knew about Caesar Angustus from Bible reading. At least I knew that Christ had taken out a coin and told his disciples to render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s and unto God the things that were God’s.

“I don’t know why exactly,” I said. “I don’t think it was anything the man said, not directly, but I became convinced that the coin I’d been given was the same coin that Christ had showed the disciples. It made such a big impression on me, I can’t tell you. For years afterwards I used to take the coin out and marvel at being able to touch it myself. I used to think it would bring me luck.”

“And did it?”

“I’m not sure. I suppose it must have done.”

“Then what happened?”

With no prompting at all, I told him how my uncle and aunt had insisted that I become a debutante. How at one of the balls I’d attended I had met a young man who said that he was going off to excavate an Iron Age village in Bosnia. At the end of the evening, I’d asked if I could go with him.

“What did he say to that?”

“He was a bit taken aback at first, but after a while he said yes.”

“You mean you went off on your own with this person that you’d only just met?”

“It was all perfectly above board, I assure you. We were out there for a month — we both had the most marvelous time. Then, when I came back, I applied to study archaeology at University College.”

“How did your uncle and aunt react?”

“Oh, they were absolutely furious. They thought I had let the family down. And myself, of course. On my twenty-first birthday, my uncle told the maid to set my place on his right-hand side. He said I was no longer a member of the household. I was only a guest. The next morning I left. I’m sure they were relieved to see the back of me. I can’t really blame them. I was very troublesome, you see. I always have been. Even as a child, I never stopped asking questions. That was bad enough, but what made it even worse was that their answers never seemed to satisfy me.”

Rory gave a shout of laughter.

“There,” I said, relieved to have finished. “That’s all there is to me.”

“I’m sure it isn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“There must be lots of things you haven’t told me.”

“About what?”

“Well, for instance, you haven’t told me how you met your husband.”

“Stuart?”

“Yes,” he said, amused. “Stuart.”

“He was my tutor,” I told him. “At the university.”

“And did you know straightaway?”

“Did I know what straightaway?”

He paused. “It’s none of my business,” he said.

“Tell me. I don’t mind.”

“I just wondered if you knew straightaway that you wanted to marry him.”

“Not straightaway, no,” I said. “But we had a lot in common. Shared interests are very important, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s never happened to me. I wish it had, but it hasn’t. Not yet anyway. Still, I live in hope…”

We sat in silence. I rested my head against the bark of the tree. The only sounds were the occasional rustle in the undergrowth and the odd splash from the river. I could no longer see Rory. I could only hear him breathing.

After we had sat there for a while I said, “Now it’s your turn.”

“Oh, there’s nothing much to tell. Nothing as dramatic anyway.”

“Let’s see, I already know where you were brought up. Where they make jam. Why don’t you tell me what made you become interested in photography?”

“I suppose — I suppose it seemed a way of trying to fix moments as they went past. To try to capture them and give them some physical existence. Stop them from being lost forever. Not that it necessarily works like that.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Not really. For instance, do you know why there aren’t any people in photographs of Victorian London? Take a look sometime. In early pictures, the streets are completely deserted. Obviously, they weren’t deserted. It was just that the plates needed to be exposed for such a long time that people — moving people — didn’t register at all. Occasionally, you can see a misty outline, but nothing more. It’s a strange thought, isn’t it? All these ghostly, transparent people making no lasting impression…” He broke off. “I don’t know if that makes any sense.”

“Yes. Of course it does.”

“Really?”

“It makes perfect sense. That’s why I wanted to study archaeology. So much of life just slips by, and with so little to show for it. I suppose I wanted to make sense of what does endure.”

Rory had rolled over towards me. I could see the pale oval of his face close to mine. “That’s it!” he said. “That’s it exactly! Especially now. I mean, what do you think people are likely to find of us in 2,000 years’ time? Do you think they might find this thermos and wonder who it belonged to? Who drank from this cup? And even if they do wonder, they’ll never know. Not about us. Who we were. What we were thinking and feeling at the time. At best, only this thing will have survived. Everything else will simply have disappeared.”

Once more we sat in silence. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure if I trusted myself to. I could feel the blackness in my nostrils. It was like inhaling tar. I found myself remembering a story I must have read as a child, about an old lady who sneezed and her whole body flew into pieces.

“I wonder…” said Rory.

“What?”

“I’m just wondering if we should move. We’re not having much luck here, are we? What do you think?”

“If you like.”

The air felt sharper and colder when I stood up. Rory insisted that I keep his coat around my shoulders. We walked down to the water and made our way along another path. After a few hundred yards, it veered away from the river and through a farmyard. Then came a sharp left-hand bend. The path started to climb back up the bank. I could see Rory’s cap bobbing about in front of me. There was sand underfoot now. My shoes slipped as the gradient grew steeper. Rory stopped and held a bramble out of my way.

As we began climbing up a long, shallow ditch, it occurred to me that this was almost certainly the same route used to haul the ship up from the river to the mound. Once, in this same ditch, hundreds of men had heaved and pushed. Moving the great ship from its natural home to a new, unfamiliar element. Hundreds of men, all feeling that another world lay just beyond their reach, perhaps just beneath their feet. I tried to imagine them now, materializing between the trees. Hauling on ropes and bending their backs. A distant clamor rising all round. Momentarily, they knotted before me, and then slipped away.

Rory turned his torch on again. We were close to the top of the ridge now. The ground reared into a kind of lip before starting to flatten out. I could see his tent, the guy ropes fanning out. There were some pots and pans outside the entrance, soaking in a bowl of water.