Page 25 of A Sky Full of Stars
After a morning of phone calls, paperwork and firming up the final details of his office move to Observatory Field, he was ready for a break. He checked his phone and was pleased to see that Charlotte had texted him with an update about Lorelai.
Lorelai might have hidden those papers on purpose! She seems to think we should spend more time together.
Tristan couldn’t stop the rush of relief as he read the message. Trust his gran to try to meddle in his love life. She’d been dropping hints lately that he ought to be thinking about settling down, no matter how hard he’d tried to dissuade her, and now, with Charlotte as her lodger, her imagination had obviously gone into overdrive. Lorelai clearly needed more to do with her time, he thought.
And yet he couldn’t stop remembering just how easily Charlotte had slotted into his group of friends on Saturday night. She’d chatted with the four of them all evening, and it hadn’t taken long before he’d forgotten how new she was to the village. The memory of their first encounter at the observatory was gradually receding in favour of the smiles and laughs they’d shared around the pub table. There was definitely a part of him that wanted to see her again.
So why didn’t he text her back and suggest it? Charlotte’s message certainly implied she’d be up for seeing him again, and if they didn’t get on when it was just the two of them, then they didn’t have to repeat it.
Grabbing his phone from where he’d put it on his desk, he drafted six possible responses before he settled on the one he finally sent:
Glad to hear Gran’s still capable of getting up to her antics. Do YOU think we should spend some more time together?
He waited for a response, trying to convince himself he wasn’t nervous. When the response came, a few minutes later, he couldn’t help the grin that spread over his face.
I’d like to see you again. Shall we say Saturday? Not sure I’m up for the pub though – Annabelle’s also got her matchmaking hat on!
After replying that he and his car were all hers, and to let him know what she’d like to do, Tristan once again waited.
How well do you know my hometown? Would you be up for a guided tour of some of Bristol’s best spots?
Tristan hadn’t visited Bristol in a long time, and he knew that Charlotte must know it well to make the offer. He was surprised at how keen he was to take her up on her idea, and within seconds he’d texted her back saying yes, he’d love to. They arranged to meet at Nightshade Cottage at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, but when he asked her for a few more details about what they were likely to get up to, she sent him a teasing ‘wait and see’.
He was unaccustomed to handing over control of things to someone else, and for a few moments after they’d arranged things he felt uneasy. What if they didn’t get on and Saturday was a completely awkward disaster? What if they had nothing in common? What if this was just a huge mistake?
Realising that he was beginning to catastrophise, he tried to shut down those thoughts. Painful past experience had taught him that going down that road wasn’t good for him and he had plenty to occupy him between now and Saturday. He made a few more phone calls and arranged to pop in and see Thea on his way back home later. They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of weeks, and he felt as though he needed to check in with her, especially after the debacle with Cora at the school. He knew that Thea was keen to find out about the progress on Observatory Field, and he also wanted to see his niece and nephew. As Thea texted back that she was looking forward to seeing him later, and offering to make him dinner, he looked forward to catching up with her.
26
Charlotte’s week running up to her date on Saturday with Tristan had seen her making steady progress archiving the materials in the series of green metal filing cabinets. She’d managed to subdue the burgeoning curiosity she had about Martin and Laura Ashcombe’s last entries in the files, and gone back to the beginning of the 1980s, when the observatory had become the responsibility of LBAS. She needed to approach the archiving with a clear head, and getting sidetracked by the tragedy of its later years would impede her understanding of the wider context of the place.
She’d been working through the cabinets and bookshelves, carefully putting things of potential historical value into the archive boxes which she’d had delivered to the observatory earlier that week. To the untrained eye, some of the objects might not seem valuable or relevant: she remembered, as an undergraduate, visiting the archives of the University of Bristol School of Drama, and being surprised to see boxes that contained such ephemera as sweet and chocolate wrappers from the 1920s, among other more obviously significant items like a handbag belonging to screen star, Vivien Leigh, complete with a cigarette burn in the lining. Every item had a story, and for the observatory it was no different.
So, it was with equal care that she catalogued the tattered poster that advertised a stargazing event dated 15 March 1983, as she did the star charts and five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks from that era. Sadly, the desktop computer that would have enabled Charlotte to see what was on those disks had long since been consigned to the skip, but some intrepid researcher might well be able to recover the data in future years.
Each entry into the database had a catalogue number that would tally with the main archive at North West Wessex, a brief description of the artefact and the date it was put into storage. Some items were boxed separately, and some were subdivided into sections within a single box, if they were linked. There had been some discussion in recent years about making the best use of space and reducing the carbon footprint of the archive, but for the moment she was sticking to the current way of doing things. In a few years, it might be that items would merely be stored digitally, thus doing away with the need to continually house them somewhere, but Charlotte knew the importance of being able to hold things in her hands, and she hoped that this would be a long way off.
As she reached a predetermined number of files, she was meant to contact the archivist back at the university, who would arrange for them to be collected and a new consignment of archive boxes delivered. After dragging her first set of boxes up through the wood, Charlotte had swiftly realised it would be far easier to get them sent directly to the building. Then, they’d be cross referenced against the digital records she was creating, before being carefully assigned to the archive itself, a climate-controlled space the size of a warehouse.
Progress had been a lot quicker than she’d thought it would be, initially, and she’d worked her way through the mid-eighties files quite quickly. It wouldn’t take as long as she’d estimated to find herself back at the 1995 records that she’d glanced at on her first day here, but as she worked, she was beginning to piece together a more rounded picture of the life of the observatory before the tragedy. The signatures on the charts, notes and records that she kept seeing became more and more familiar, and she was building a mental image of what it would have been like to be a researcher here. The signatures of Laura and Martin Ashcombe were regularly present, and she couldn’t help a little lurch of recognition when she saw one of them at the bottom of a document.
It was clear that they’d spent a lot of time here in the mid to late 1980s, but by the time 1990 rolled around, evidence of their work in the observatory was becoming less frequent. She figured that this must have been after Thea and Tristan’s birth. She knew the twins had been born in April 1990, and so that made sense. Martin’s signature still appeared on records for the first two quarters of 1990, and then Laura’s reappeared in the final quarter of that year. It made Charlotte smile to imagine them bringing the twins up here and introducing them to their passion for the night sky.
How things might have been different if the family hadn’t been hit by such tragedy. Would the observatory still be facing demolition?
By Thursday of that week, Charlotte had set to work on the filing cabinet drawer that marked the final quarter of 1994. She was getting closer to the point where Laura and Martin’s names would disappear from the records forever, and she couldn’t help feeling a wash of melancholy as she pulled the drawer open and carefully began to sift through its contents.
The first few suspension files yielded nothing out of the routine she’d seen for the past decade of records. Star charts, photocopies of glass plates, which had long since been relocated to the North West Wessex archive and even the odd fax from other astronomers, their curling edges straightened by the years in storage, all were carefully placed in the files, as if caught in a time warp. Someone, or a long succession of someones, had been keeping things safe.
Charlotte pulled out a file marked ‘November 1994, Q4, Week 1’ and gently parted the cardboard covers. She’d got used to the musty aroma of documents that had been stored for a long while and ignored the scent that drifted towards her as she began to look through the file.
It was then that she saw it.
Charlotte was more than used to encountering rogue pieces of information; documents that implied one thing, but on further investigation revealed another; suggested truths that became elegantly constructed falsehoods after further investigation and research. But there was something about the document she could see, smack in the centre of the file, that stood out immediately.
‘That’s not possible,’ she murmured as she carefully drew the paperwork out from the plastic wallet it had been shoved into. She eased the fragile, yellowed document out, pausing to carefully remove the discoloured paperclip that held the pages together. Feeling her pulse starting to race in her throat, she began to read.
Preliminary evidence of hitherto undocumented eclipsing binary on the wingtip of Volucris. Although this may be less visible in Q1, will continue to observe over the coming months. Will check with PP at a later date as he may be able to advise.
