‘What site?’ I asked. ‘What graves?’ I’d quite forgotten. The row—about building the biggest shopping mall in all Europe on a site designated as an area of natural beauty and scientific interest, just a mile south of Rumer—has been rumbling on for so many years I had assumed it would never be resolved. But apparently it had, the developers had won, work had begun within the day and the bulldozers had been in skimming the site.
So much for the grebes and the greater crested warbler and the lesser toad and the marsh pippin: they would have to fend for themselves. As would the village shop, newsagent and post office. All must bow down in the face of progress: all must be sacrificed to the temple of Mammon. It was monstrous. Though as I sat there at the table with the dogs panting beside me in the heat, the thought of the chilly air around the long stretches of frozen-food cabinets filled me with delinquent delight.
‘They’ve uncovered a Roman graveyard,’ said Susie. ‘Twelve graves still with the bodies in them. And what Pam says is a Druid’s well but you know what she is.’
Pam was the local white witch: she had a mass of long white hair and a penchant for crystals and Goddess worship. She also ran, rather successfully, the local estate agency. She was widowed and had taken on the business after her husband’s death, but had changed her manner of living and dressing. Now she saw faces in the running brook, heard the Great God Pan rustling in the hedges, and suspected any stranger in the village of being an extraterrestrial visitor from the Dog Star Sirius. But she could sell any property she set her mind to. I think she used hypnosis.
‘I hope they stopped work,’ I said and Susie said they had, but only because there was a handful of protesters still parading the site, and they’d seen a skeleton go into the skip along with the top sward, the rare ferns, the lesser celandine and lumps of sticky yellow clay, and had called the police, who came without riot gear, and were very helpful and refrained from observing how quickly they ceased being pigs and scum when anyone actually needed them.
The police had made the JCBs pull back, and Riley’s the developers keep to the letter of the law and call in the archaeologists, no matter how their lawyers protested that they were exempt, and that every day of stopped work cost them at least £100,000. And there the skeletons lay, indecently uncovered—except the one rescued in bits from the skip, now at the county morgue being dated and pigeonholed—waiting for their fate to be decided. There’d been nothing in the local paper, let alone the nationals. Susie reckoned Riley’s had made sure of that. They didn’t want sightseers holding up the work.
‘That’s horrible,’ I said. ‘The age of a body doesn’t make any difference. Two thousand years ago or yesterday, it’s the same thing. It deserves respect’
Susie said what bothered her so about Becky Horrocks, the girl who’d thrown the cigarette stub, was how little she must care about herself, if she cared so little for the dead.
That evening, when the sun stopped baking and a cool breeze got up, Matt and Susie called by and took me down to the site. How parched and dry the landscape looked! I had a bad back from heaving stuff in and out of the kiln and my hands were rough and blistered, but the triptych was ready to go off. It was a commission for Canterbury Cathedral and was part of some European-funded art and religion project. It would be touring the cathedrals of the country over the next year.
I am not a particularly religious person—not like Susie and Matt, who go dutifully to Rumer parish church every Sunday and twice on Christmas Day—but then I was not required to be: just a good artist. The theme of the work was the coming of Christianity to the British Isles, which heaven knew was shrouded in myth and mystery anyway, and my guess was as good as anyone’s.
The centre panel was the child Jesus sailing into Glastonbury around the year AD 10 with his uncle Joseph of Arimathea—a tin trader—and almost certainly myth. The right panel depicted Saint Piran sailing to Cornwall from Ireland in a stone coracle—the stuff of magic, a tale drifted down from the sixth century. On the left was Saint Augustine, riding into Canterbury in AD 597 with his retinue of forty monks, sent by Pope Gregory to bring the gospel to the heathen English, for which there was a basis in history proper. The panels were in bright flower-bedecked colours, designed to glow and shine in the vaulted gloom of the cathedral: light breaking into darkness. I was really pleased with it but doing it had left me exhausted.
I thought perhaps it was exhaustion that made me react as I did. The desolation a handful of JCBs can wreak in a couple of days is extraordinary. The whole valley was down to subsoil: a great stretch of yellow-grey earth taking up the space—perhaps half a mile across and two-thirds of a mile long—between two untouched still green and verdant hills, stretching like tautened muscles on either side of the scar. I began to cry. How could Ihave been so indifferent as to what was going on around me? Matt looked embarrassed.
Susie took me by the hand and led me to a square patch of stony ground, more grey than yellow, which rose above the surrounding clay. She was wearing a neat green shirtwaister and lace-up walking shoes. I was in an old T-shirt, jeans and sandals. Susie always dressed up to go out: now I unexpectedly saw my lack of formality as rash. It made me too vulnerable. The living should dress up to honour the dead.
There were I suppose a dozen graves, running north to south: a few were no more than oblongs let down into bare earth, most were lined with what I supposed to be lead. In the bottom of each lay a skeleton: long strong white bones: some disturbed by animals—rodents, I suppose, or whatever disturbs the dead underground, over centuries—but for the most part lying properly, feet together, finger bones fallen to one side. Scraps of leather remained in the graves: what looked like a belt here, a sandal thong there. I was distressed for them.
‘They can’t just be left here on their own, exposed,’ I said. ‘They’re well dead,’ said Matt. ‘I don’t think they’ll mind.’ The wind got up a little and dust and earth swirled round the graves; already the sharpness of their edges was beginning to dull. If only rain would fall. The green surface of mother earth is so thin, so full of the defiance of the death and dust that lies beneath.
‘I wonder who was here before us,’ said Susie, ‘laying them to rest so long ago. Young strong men: how they’ll have grieved. And we don’t even know their names.’
Matt was stirring the ground with his foot and turning up a few pieces of what looked to me like Roman tile. ‘Reckon there’s another Roman villa round here,’ he said. ‘That won’t make the developers too happy.’ But he reckoned they’d manage to get the archaeologists on their side, and forget about it and build anyway. They’d go through the motions but there was too much at stake to hold up work for more than a week at the most.
Susie and I said we’d take turns grave-watching. It didn’t seem right to leave the graves unattended. I’d take the shift until midnight, then
