noted their continuing existence with surprise. Cats’ saucers usually get trodden on, or fall from slippery hands or are knocked off steps. These ones, she supposed, were just good at survival. And the months went by and somehow they all just believed it wouldn’t happen again, except Sarla, who was clearly sceptical of their claims that the cups were self-motivating, and assumed they got thrown in a family row. And perhaps they did? Perhaps they were all just firmly in denial, as the counsellor at work whom Oriole was required to see every month—firm policy, to remove stress—assumed to be the case.
And then on Oriole’s birthday, her thirty-fourth, a whole year from the first occasion, the fourth cup came rattling out of the cabinet, breaking the glass as it came, nearer her ear than ever. Hugh and Clive insisted on calling their father the Bishop about an exorcist, the fifth cup followed, Oriole capitulated, Sarla refused to come and sweep up, and here Oriole was, sitting on the floor, picking up pieces again, while Clive and Hugh wondered if her quarter Jewishness would stop the normal procedures of the Christian Church.
Sarla, finished with Titania and the ass, deigned to come in to see what was going on. The sixth cup flew through the broken glass and whistled by her head and got the door behind her. Sarla began to shriek and wail. She sank to her knees; she called upon Allah in her extremis. Clive went to put his arms around her.
‘Get me away from here,’ Sarla wailed. ‘Stand not upon the order of our going,’ she wept into his manly jacket shoulder, over and over. ‘Stand not upon the order of our going.’ ‘Pascal’s wager,’ said Hugh to Oriole, ignoring the noise, putting down the phone. ‘Father says remember Pascal’s wager.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Oriole. Sarla stopped being noisy to say, ‘Blaise Pascal, French philosopher, Pascal’s wager. You might as well be a believer. If it’s true and you believe you don’t go to hell. If it isn’t true, there isn’t a hell to go to. You can’t lose.’
Hugh and Clive regarded Sarla with admiration: more, Oriole felt, than they had ever regarded her, Oriole, even on the occasion when she had paid over a cheque for more than a million pounds, to pay for Hugh’s new state-of-the-art workshop. She stood up and went to the phone and dialled 1471 and then 3.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Hugh.
‘I need to speak to your father the Bishop,’ she said. She did. ‘This is Oriole,’ she said, ‘the woman you are glad is not actually your daughter-in-law, but only your son’s partner while he gets through his twenties. It is not my grandmother’s cups you need to send your magicians after, or my grandmother’s ghost, or this house, or the memory of my father who went to prison, it is I who need to exorcise your son. If the ghost of my dead grandmother comes to me slapping me round my ears, sacrificing everything she ever held dear, those bloody cups, why then I need her around. I am not a quarter Jewish, I am wholly Jewish, Jewishness comes through the mother’s side, not the father’s, and I am a direct descendant through the ages back to Israel. And I am not going to let this line stop here, after all that suffering, all that clambering out of horror, generation after generation, not for the sake of a few miserable Elizabethan lutes, some ugly Flemish virginals, or the comfort and convenience of your two idle sons. Call an exorcist around if you want, but I won’t be here to receive them. I am off to find a nice Jewish boy and have a baby.’
She slammed the phone down and went upstairs and emptied the Dree pills down the loo, and took her little sports car into the night and after that they heard only from her lawyers, writing from an address in north London.
It was my cleaner Susie who first told me what was happening at the site. ‘Cleaner’ is the word Susie uses to keep me in my place: she seems rather more like a friend and ally, but she enjoys these social distinctions. She’s the policeman’s wife: she comes up to my rackety household and helps out because she’s bored, or so she says, and points out that I’m an artist and not a housewife by nature, as she is. Everyone should do what they’re good at in this life, she maintains. She, by implication, is good at housework: I am not.
I’m a professional sculptor. The children are with their father during term time, but I still needed help to keep domestic matters under control. I live in the village of Rumer in Kent, outside Canterbury, in a farmhouse. At the time I had two goats, two dogs, three cats, a pet hen, and an electric kiln in the barn. I did a lot of work in papier-mâchée, and it tended to creep out of the studio in shreds and scraps, and was even worse than clay for mess. If there’s too much mess I can’t concentrate. If there’s no food in the fridge I don’t stop to eat: then I’m too hungry to work. Susie kept things in balance. I believe her to be some kind of saint. Calling her the cleaner is rather like calling Moses the jobbing gardener because he smote the rock. If I say this kind of thing to her she seems immeasurably shocked.
Susie’s husband worked in town and though he was always kind to me, I would not want to be the criminal who crossed him. He has managed to build the fanciest bungalow in the village,and Susie keeps a perfect garden. Rumer is a pretty, peaceful and prosperous place and has won the best-kept village in Kent competition two years running, having survived BSE, foot-and-mouth, the falling off of the tourist trade—it has some good Roman ruins—and kept its village store and post office. But Susie is right: as a place it can get a bit boring. My two children, in their teens, try not to show it but are always happy to get back to town at the end of the holidays.
But nothing happens and nothing happens and then all of a sudden everything happens, in places as in people’s lives, and what was to happen, what was to be described in the papers as ‘The Affair of the Rumer Site’, was to take everyone by surprise.
Susie had a part-time job at the local comprehensive school, as a personal counsellor. It was her task to take alienated and troubled children under her wing, get them to school if they were truanting, sit with them in class if they were school refusers, help them with lessons they didn’t understand, and stay with them in the playground if they were bullied. She was not trained in any way to do it—the school can’t afford anyone expensive—but there is something about her apparently stoical presence, which means the pupils seem to accept her as one of their own. She is passionately on the children’s side: only occasionally does she raise her eyes to heaven and shrug. Hopeless, why waste the State’s money and my time. Let them go free.
One Friday afternoon in mid-July she turned up with the ironed sheets, disturbed and upset. (I have never yet ironed a sheet: Susie will not make a bed without first doing so. She has an ironing press: I have not.) The weather had been very hot: drought had set in: it was in that curious inconclusive patch of time after exams have finished and school hasn’t yet shut up shop for the summer. I’d been trying to finish the ceramic triptych I was working on before the children came down for the summer, and had managed it with a day to spare. I was exhausted and dehydrated, after days with the kiln, and still not quite back in the real world.
Now here was Susie sitting at the kitchen table actually crying. She said she had taken a group of her rejectees, as she called them, down to see the site. She’d thought the children would be really interested to see the unearthed graves and the skeletons still lying there, two thousand years on. But they had been indifferent, looked at her as if she was crazy to take them all the way in the heat to
