Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide: A Collection of Short Stories. Fay Weldon
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 she’d turn up in their camper van and spend the rest of the night on site. Matt said we were crazy but went along with it. Indeed, he said he’d relieve his wife at six and stay until 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