eight when he had to get to work. Surely by then Riley’s would have got their act together and organised a watchman, and the archaeologists would turn up to do whatever they were required to do under statute.
I sat and watched the sun set and the moon rise, and the white bones began to glimmer in their graves. I thought I could hear the sound of Romans marching, but that was imagination, or a distant helicopter. I drifted off to sleep. It wasn’t at all creepy, I don’t know why: it should have been. There was a kind of calm ordinariness in the air. My earlier distress was quite gone. At about eleven Mabs turned up with a massive flashlight and a camping chair and table and some sandwiches and coffee. She’d been through to Susie on the phone. We sat quietly together until Susie relieved us: bump, bump, bump, in the camper van. Mabs took me home and I slept really soundly, though in the morning my back was bad again.
I rang the Bishop’s Palace to ask about reinterring the bodies. I couldn’t get through to the Bishop but I explained the situation to some kind of sub-Canon and he said they were well aware of it, and since the graves were lying north to south, they were not Christian burials in the first place, but pagan and nothing to do with the Church. It was up to the civil authorities to do what they decided was best. The University of Birmingham had tendered for the contract: the site was to be photographed and mapped—there had indeed been a Roman villa on the site, as well as a pottery and a graveyard—but take off a layer and the country was littered with them. The bones? They’d be placed in sealed plastic bags and taken off to the research department at Birmingham for medical or other research.
‘Pagan?’ I enquired. ‘I thought we were all ecumenical, now.’
But no. Ecumenical did not extend to heathens. I pleaded without success but the bishopric was unmoved, nor would they put me through to anyone else. I thought about withdrawing my triptych from the cathedral in protest but couldn’t bear to do that.
I went down to the site later in the day. The whole world seemed to be out and about in the hot sun, and not a scrap of shade. The graveyard area was roped off, there were security guards, the JCBs buzzed away at the far end of the site, archaeological students peered and measured. A handful of old ladies from Rumer had brought chairs and were sitting round the one that I was beginning to see as the master grave—it was lead-lined, decorated, and larger than the others. They were knitting. They were like Furies, or the Norns, or some kind of Greek chorus—but knitting. Well, this was Rumer. An ice-cream van plied its wares: word was beginning to get round: people were turning up in cars to stare and marvel.
Earth-moving machinery rumbled, turned, groaned and clanked in the distance, but management—you could tell them by their grey suits and pale faces, sweating in the heat—were everywhere. Pam was in urgent conversation with a grizzled man in a hat looking rather like Harrison Ford who was sitting on the end of the master grave making notes and taking photographs. A helicopter swept to and fro over the site, presumably doing the aerial survey the Canon had spoken of.
‘What’s with the old ladies?’ I asked Pam. ‘I didn’t know they knitted.’
‘They’re from the church,’ she said. ‘They’re making a knitted patchwork tapestry to auction for charity. They usually sit and do it in the church hall but they felt like some fresh air and all trooped around here.’
‘Isn’t that rather peculiar?’ said I.
‘No more peculiar than you and Susie sitting out here all last night,’ said Pam. ‘The archaeologists aren’t very friendly. They’re on the developers’ side. Well, they’re the ones who’re paying. They’re making a survey of the site, then they’re sealing it and the shopping mall goes ahead on top of it’
‘I’ll call the newspapers,’ I said. ‘It’s a scandal.’
‘The living have to exist and do their shopping,’ said Pam. ‘Along with the mall go sixty starter homes, a foot clinic with accommodation for six nurses, and an Internet cafée free for under-eighteens. Riley’s put out a press release today.’
‘It’s still a temple to Moloch,’ I said. ‘And personally I have no intention of worshipping him.’
Susie came up. She had a party of A-level pupils with her, the cream of the bunch, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, making notes as to the manner born.
‘They reckon the villa dates from around the first half of the first century,’ said Susie. ‘And the graveyard too. I reckon it’s something really special but they can’t afford to admit it’
I remonstrated with the Harrison Ford lookalike: there had to be some kind of ceremony, I said. He couldn’t just pack the skeletons up in plastic bags so they lay on dusty shelves for ever. He spoke Nottingham, which was rather a pity, not Hollywood. He dismissed me as a middle-class busybody. The life of the real world had to go on. It couldn’t be forever caught up in its past. Fine words, I thought, for an archaeologist. A trahison des clercs. Even the academics had forsaken us, and bowed down before Mammon. We had quite a row, which he won. When I got to the station to meet the children I was still quite pink with anger.
They had bought computer games with them. I took them down to the site: they were moderately interested, out of politeness, but not much.
‘They’re just old bones,’ they said. ‘Chill, Mum,’ and went into a chorus of dem bones dem bones dem dry bones; I supposed they’d seen piles of bodies on TV in their time. I always looked away at the horrors. I turned on the news to find out what was going on in the world. An official drought had been declared. Hosepipe bans had been imposed in most parts of the country. That would put paid to the lettuces, already struggling, and the gooseberries would be tiny and sour.
Their father was going to marry again. That was okay be me, and by them. They seemed to like her. We were all on good terms. It’s always rather a shock, though. The children said I should marry again; it was easier for them if there was someone to look after me. I said I didn’t need looking after and they laughed hollowly.
That night we stood around the special grave, the master grave, the grave of the tallest soldier, in the moonlight. There was Susie, Pam, Carter Wainwright and I. Riley’s didn’t run to a night watchman. Carter was a hippie silversmith: he made the kind of jewellery Pam loved to wear: crystals set in silver: a kind of feng shui approach to the art of jewellery. Beads that brought you luck: earrings to focus the chakra required. I couldn’t stand that woozy kind of thing, really, but he was a nice enough fellow. Even quite good-looking for a pagan. And not married.
‘I don’t see how we can be sure he wasn’t a Christian,’ I said. ‘People travelled a lot in those days. For all we know these are the bones of the centurion John Wayne played in the film, the one who took Jesus’ robe after the crucifixion and was converted. Why are people so sure such things can’t be?’
‘Because it’s so very unlikely,’ said Carter Wainwright. I bet he was christened something like Kevin Smith and changed his
