John Preston - The Dig

Mr. Brown seemed more relaxed than anyone else, possibly due to his being the only person present without a vested interest. He drank his tea with evident relish and when offered a second piece of cake wagged his finger reproachfully at Grateley as if he was being led into temptation.

When the heartiness gave out, Mr. Piggott nursed the conversation along, talking about how unemployed men had been put to work digging trenches in London parks. Mr. Phillips matched this with an anecdote about how his wine merchant had advised him to lay in extra cases of hock while stocks lasted.

Mr. Reid Moir was evidently about to make a further contribution of his own, but before he could do so Mr. Maynard stole unexpectedly past him with a convoluted story about German soldiers climbing up the Virginia creeper on the outside of his house. This, however, turned out to be a recurrent nightmare suffered by his teenage daughter.

It was only after we had been talking for several more minutes that I realized Mrs. Piggott was no longer in the room. I waited for a while for her to reappear and then, when she did not, went to see if she was all right.

She was standing by herself in the dining room. The curtains had been left half-open. A band of light, wide as a sheet, lay across the table, on which I had placed some photographs of the excavation taken by my nephew.

I spoke as much to alert her to my presence as anything else; I was not sure if she had heard me come in.

“There you are, my dear.”

Still she gave a start. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pretty…”

“No, no. You stay where you are. I put out the photographs thinking that people might be interested and then they completely slipped my mind.”

Together we stood and looked at them. Broadly speaking, they fell into three categories: there were pictures of the ship itself, pictures of people at work on the excavation and pictures of the finds. Among the second category were four pictures of Robert and myself. We were sitting on top of the bank, looking down into the scooped-out interior of the ship. Robert was at my feet with his knees drawn up to his chin. I found it oddly disconcerting that he should be as motionless as I was.

“Is your son not here?” she asked.

“I have sent him away for a few days,” I told her. “To the south coast. I have some cousins there. I felt he needed a change. He has been a little downcast since you all left.”

There were also two pictures of Mrs. Piggott. In both of them she had plainly been unaware that she was being photographed. In one, she appeared to have just straightened up. There were sandy patches on the knees of her overalls and her hair was in disarray. In the other photograph, she was staring at an object which had just been uncovered. The object itself was only partially visible — there was a dimpled section of metal in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture — but the expression on her face was clear enough. She looked awestruck as well as overjoyed, caught at that moment when her face was about to break into a smile.

“Sadly, my nephew is not here either,” I said. “He had hoped to be, but in the end it was impossible.”

“Impossible?”

“Yes, it is simply too far from Aldershot. And I rather doubt if he would have been given permission.”

She stared at me, her face a confused tangle. “I don’t understand.”

“Rory has joined up — the Royal Engineers. I rather assumed you knew. He enlisted as soon as he left here.”

“No,” she said. “No, I didn’t know that.”

She leaned forward over the table. When her hair fell over her face, she made no move to push it away. Instead, she just let it hang there, like a screen.

“Would you like to sit down?” I asked.

She did not reply. After a moment or two, I took her elbow and steered her towards one of the dining-room chairs. Then I sat beside her. “This heat is very draining, isn’t it?” I said. “Would you care for a glass of water?”

She shook her head.

“Is there anything else I can get you?”

“No… No, thank you…”

“Perhaps you would like to be alone?”

Again she shook her head, more adamantly this time.

“Why don’t we just sit quietly for a while?”

Through the gap between the curtains, a corridor of brown grass stretched down to the estuary. Everything was as flat and devoid of color as one of Rory’s photographs. Mrs. Piggott opened her handbag and took out a handkerchief. It had lilies of the valley embroidered around the border. For the first time I noticed that her hands looked more like a girl’s than a young woman’s.

As she sat staring into her lap, all at once it seemed very important that I should say something. It scarcely mattered what. Anything to stop her from giving way. I would not allow that to happen. Not to her, or to either of us.

“Have you both driven up here today?” I asked.

She looked up, her eyes full of tears.

“I have forgotten exactly where you and your husband live.”

“We live in a village… It’s called Rockbourne,” she said, her voice tight with effort. “About ten miles south of Salisbury.”

“Goodness, you have had a long journey. No wonder you are tired out.”

“We set off this morning. At four o’clock. But I’m afraid we were still late.”

“No need to worry about that. Tell me, my dear, do you have any plans now that all this is over?”

Her eyes met mine. There seemed something utterly bereft about her gaze. Yet I felt if I held it for long enough I might bear her up, might prevent her from falling.

“Stuart has been asked to do something by the university,” she said. “Near Uffington in Berkshire. There’s a large Bronze Age fort there.”

“And you will help him, of course.”

She nodded, then gave a flickering smile.

“He plainly depends on you a great deal.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said.

“Do not doubt it, my dear. Not for a moment. You have such a fascinating life.”

“Do I?”

“Most certainly. Work like yours must offer such a sense of satisfaction.”

She did not look away. “Yes…” she said, and lifted her chin slightly. “Yes, it does.”

“And I am quite sure it will continue being a source of great joy to you. Joy as well as sustainment.”

Then I reached out and put my hand on top of hers. It cannot have been long afterwards that Charles Phillips’s head appeared around the door. His eyes went back and forth several times from one of us to the other before he said, “Ah… we were wondering what had happened to you.”

Reid Moir and Maynard have been going on at me all week to try to find out what Mrs. Pretty intends to do with the treasure. I told them both — Reid Moir in particular — that I’d no idea what her plans were. I might have added that they weren’t any of my business either. According to Maynard, Lord Churchman, the tobacco baron, has offered to build a special museum in Woodbridge to house everything in. That’s assuming Mrs. Pretty wants the treasure to be displayed in public. For all I know, she intends to put it back under Robert’s bed.

In the days following the inquest, I had no chance to ask her about this, or anything else. She scarcely ever left the house. I thought that she’d want me to leave — after all, there was nothing left for me to do. But every time I mentioned this to Grateley, I received word back that Mrs. Pretty would like me to stay for a while longer. That’s assuming I had no objection.

I didn’t have any objection, I told him. Part of me wanted to get home and see May, of course. Another part, though, needed the money. But that wasn’t all. Something else kept me there. Despite everything that had happened, I couldn’t bring myself to leave.