Page 28 of The Start of the Story
I nodded. I was dry enough but the oilskins were like being a boil-in-the-bag cod and I was heating up. I hoped Connor wasn’t going to take too long.
‘I’m going for a walk around. You’ll wait here? Only if you move, I might not be able to find you again and I can’t bear the thought of trudging around calling pathetically.’ He gave me another smile, which I could only see the edges of, and set off away across the manor site, with his hood pointing downwards to indicate that his eyes were on the ground.
Mist swirled. The far-off group of archaeologists came and went as the air thickened and then dispersed, cloud settling over the hills for a good long downpour but being displaced by the constant pressure of the wind, and Connor became a black shape crouching occasionally over the peat. I could have called over to him, but the wind was too strong for my voice to have carried. It was currently whipping the hood of my oilskins, so the material dipped and bulged and flicked water into my eye.
I turned my back to the wind and leaned into it with my hands in my pockets. The pressure was somehow pleasing, pushing at me until I had to step or lose my balance, almost like another presence. Almost like a hug, I caught myself thinking. Almost as though the wind were a crowd, a shoulder against mine here, a force in my lower back there, making me move along with it.
How long since I’d had a hug? A long time. People had hugged me at the funeral, but those had been brief arms across me, embraces of sympathy. Since then I’d actively repelled any attempt at bodily contact, because it hadn’t been Elliot. The last time I’d had one of those full-on squeezes that threatens to knock the breath from you, it would have been that final day. Elliot, leaving for work because ‘I can’t let them down, we’ve got wainscotting up to our eyeballs’, despite the fact that he was off colour and lacking in his usual energetic frenzy.
I stepped again, one foot landing in a peaty squelch where water was wearing away at the moor’s surface. I’d thought it all through before. If Elliot had stayed at home, would I have stayed with him? Would I have been there when his heart had stopped so catastrophically? Could I have got help to him in time, while I punched and pummelled away at his chest trying to keep him alive long enough for an ambulance to arrive?
Or would I have trusted that he’d be fine and left him in bed with a thermos of tea, instructions to call me if he felt worse, and gone to the office anyway? To come home and be faced with…
I shook my head and the rain splattered off my hood in a mist of diamond drops. I went over this regularly, less regularly now, of course, but still, whenever I dreamed of Elliot the dreams would be followed by this relentless examination of my actions.Could I have done anything differently? Would it have changed anything?The doctors had said no, that nothing could have been done, Elliot had been dead within seconds. Even if I had been standing over him with a defibrillator and oxygen tank, I couldn’t have saved him. It was a message that, even now, I wasn’t sure had sunk in.
I stood with the wind hugging me and the rain crying alongside me. The nearest I got to physical contact these days, the nearest I could stand.
I suddenly felt very, very lonely.
‘I see what you mean.’ The words were shouted at me across the moor. ‘Nothing left of the manor.’
‘I did warn you.’ I brought myself back from the brink of self-pity. ‘The whole site was stripped bare more than seventy years ago.’
‘I did have a bit of a poke.’ Connor advanced on me, rain running down his waterproofs. ‘And I found this.’
He came closer still and formed enough of a windbreak for me to be able to raise my hood to look at what he was holdingout. Balanced on his palm, as though he were offering a lump of sugar to a nervous horse, was a tiny square object, with a glazed top.
‘I give in.’ I stepped again to keep my balance.
‘Tessera.’ The small square blew off his hand and bounced down into the heather and mud at his feet. ‘Bugger and feck.’
We both crouched and began patting our way through the undergrowth, the wiry heather stems flicking more water up into our faces as the rain ran into new angles of our clothing. Connor was as black and shiny as a seal, rustling his way through the whin bushes in a desperate attempt to retrieve his tile, and it was all so incongruous and ridiculous that I let out a short laugh that I hadn’t intended.
‘You finding this funny?’ He didn’t sound as irritated as his words suggested.
‘Ludicrous, really,’ I said, tugging my hood further down over my face. ‘So you’ve found a Roman mosaic? In the manor?’
‘No, just a – ah, here it is.’ He grabbed at the mud for a moment and then straightened up so suddenly that a raft of spray caught me in the eye. Caught by surprise, I flicked my head back and more rain got under my hood, blinding me, so I stayed down, shaking my head. ‘Are you all right there?’
‘Water in my eyes,’ I muttered.
‘Come on up, now.’ Connor took my arm, oilskins crumpling into a greasy second skin under his touch, and pulled me to my feet. I rose from the depths of the twiggy heather, shedding water like Venus arising, and had to take several tiny steps to balance myself so that I didn’t hurtle into him. I did tread on his foot but we were both wearing boots so stout that you could have shod a horse with them, so he probably didn’t feel it.
I did. I felt the unexpected contact all the way from that clutched arm to the stompy toes.Touch. A presence.
‘So…’ I tried to keep my voice light, but it bent under the weight of worry and also a little from the water that ran into my mouth, channelled from my hood, ‘…there’s definite sign of Roman occupation?’
Connor took half a step back so our waterproofs were no longer crackling against one another. ‘A tessera does not a villa make,’ he said. ‘It could have come in on soil from somewhere else. But it does mean I’m going back to the documents. If therewasa villa out here, then there’s every chance there might have been a town close by. A farming settlement associated with the villa, anyway.’
I couldn’t help it, I turned my head towards the site of my stone, still stretched out somewhere in the undergrowth further along the hillside. ‘And… more research?’
‘Oh, yes. Goes without saying. This could be a really important discovery, a Roman settlement out here. Not quite the “fringes of Empire”, but close.’
Then he set off back towards the car, a stomping black object trudging over the shrubby undergrowth as the rain streamed down around him, leaving me biting my lip and worrying for the future of my folkloric stone.
13
I sat at my desk with the lamp illuminating the room, in a quiet puddle of simulated cosiness while the rain blanked out the sky. I’d laid out the format of the book, stories about the high moor with the stone at the centre of it all; stories about fairies and hobs, ghosts and spook lights, and if the teller hadn’t mentioned the stone then I’d found a way to weave it in somehow, with cross references to fairyland. We had the man who’d encountered a fairy procession on a journey home from market, mysterious lights that led travellers astray and were said to be fairies trying to drown humans in bogs, the fairies apparently held regular markets on the stone and would occasionally pop up in farms, doing helpful chores. Things were going well. With some lavish illustrations of the moor in summer, lots of stretches of heather and trickling moorland streams, a scattering of ‘it is said’ and some spooky shots under a full moon – the book was all under control.
