Living in the Past Read online

  Duncan McDonald hid his face in his hands in the hope that everything might go away. Or, given the weather conditions, dissolve. ‘No. No no no no,’ he said, feeling the grit between his teeth, under his tongue. ‘No. There’s something here. I know there’s something here, we just have to keep digging.’

  The man in front of him sucked at his teeth. ‘Okay, if you say so, you’re in charge. But, honest, Dunc, we’re not coming up with much, few bits of flint, that’s all. No postholes, no domestic rubbish, nothing dateable …’

  Duncan let his hands drop. ‘Up there …’ He pointed in the general direction. ‘Up there is a barrow. Now that barrow was built by somebody. They buried people in there, and those people lived somewhere. Before they died, I mean. And all the research I’ve done supports the idea of some kind of Bronze Age or Neolithic settlement round about here.’ He slumped onto an old beer crate that was doing duty as a chair, being one of the few things that the water went through, rather than into. ‘Och, I dunno, Rich. There’s got to be something.’

  Richard, who, Duncan had to admit, had a point, sucked his teeth again. ‘I suppose we’ve got time yet to find something. Only, I’ve got a team of twenty students up for this dig, and if they don’t get some results then it’s going to be a pretty boring set of papers I have to read through next term.’ Then, to Duncan’s surprise, Richard leaned in close. There was a smell of coffee and peaty damp. ‘You sure about this one, Dunc? I mean, I’ve never known you be wrong before, but, first time for everything.’

  Duncan stared out across the muddy field towards the stream and then beyond, letting his eyes travel up over the stretch of bleak moorland that rose to the hump of barrow on the horizon. Remembered it as it had been in those days of panic and turmoil. It had stood there, solid, unchanging, while his world had been torn apart, and wedged itself into the gaps that had kept his world from healing. A constant presence that there just had to be a reason for. ‘Thirty years I’ve wanted to dig here, Rich. There is something out there and I am bloody well going to find it.’ It was little more than a whisper.

  A moment of quiet and then Richard patted his shoulder. ‘Well, you’re the site director, I’m sure you know best …’ he’d begun, but was interrupted by one of the students, a girl with purple hair and enormous boots, who rushed into the open-sided tent. ‘Doctor Duggleby, Kyle’s found something, it looks like waterlogged wood.’

  Richard sighed. ‘All right, Morwenna, I’ll be down in a sec. It’s probably another bit of old railway sleeper the farmer used to block up a gateway.’ Then he sighed. ‘Coming down to take a look?’

  Duncan sighed too. ‘Might as well. Aye, you could be right, Rich, maybe I shouldn’t have come back up here. Maybe I should just let the past be the past and have done with it.’

  ‘Then you, squire, are in the wrong job.’ Richard pulled his hood up over his head and, without looking back to check whether Duncan was following, plunged out into the deluge again.

  Chapter Three

  2000 BC

  Hen lay back on her bed and watched the sun move across her doorway. She loved these bright, summer mornings, the warmth made everyone more cheerful and the long days made it easier on the whole community. Her eyes closed and she dropped into a half dream, half memory.

  This time of year always reminded her of the day she had first come to this place. The day she met Tor as she wandered, lost and alone, her head ringing with abandonment and utter loneliness, tears fogging her vision. She’d walked and walked and then, suddenly, there had been this man, rising out of the mist like a spirit, surprising her so that she had fallen with a cry into a ditch. Cold, sandy water had soaked and silenced her and the man had scooped her up and held her against him. Had looked into her face with such concern and tenderness that she realised in that moment she had discovered another way to be lost.

  That one dripping instant had changed her life. Hen had lain in Tor’s arms and felt his heartbeat against her, felt the reality of the moment, of the air around her and she had fallen in love in that second with the dark stranger who had pulled her from the water-filled pit. And he, in his turn, had taken her back to the small hut he had built while he cleared the land to claim his settlement, where he tended to her. Made her feel wanted. Taught her the language of his people – difficult at first and the waving of hands and repetitions had made them both laugh. Promised her so much.

  Hen sighed again and nestled down under the rough wool that made her skin itch but kept the night’s chill away. Memory was difficult and she rarely allowed it, but here, safe, warm and with all well in their little community, she could give herself this one luxury. Buoyed in the soft space between waking and sleeping she lay and smiled to herself, trying to summon the energy to slide back the blankets and begin the day, when a shadow stoppered up the sunlight and held it back behind a tall figure.

  ‘Tor?’ Hen struggled to sit upright. ‘Is it you?’

  The shape in the doorway hesitated. ‘It is early, I’m sorry. But I had to come and seek your healing. My son …’

  She felt the cold that wasn’t from the lack of sunlight now. ‘What is it? Is something wrong with the boy?’

  Tor came in now and moved to the fire, where he hunched down, warming his hands as though something had chilled him to the bone. ‘There was … an accident.’ He gathered his woollen cloak more closely around his shoulders. ‘He is hurt.’

  Hen was already up, her heart running in her chest, fleet as a deer. ‘You did right to come for me, Tor. I hope you did not hesitate because of … because of us.’

  The tall man was upright now, kicking in anger at the big log in the fire, sending a pot tumbling to the ground and spilling a liquid, which hissed and spat as it hit the flames. ‘Hesitate? When on the one hand I have …’ He held up a hand and waved his fingers at her. ‘… my family, those I love and protect above all others. And then …’ He shrugged the other hand into the air that still shimmered with the heat from the spread logs. ‘… I have you.’

  She gathered her shift around her and tied her belt. ‘Are you going to stand there complaining at me, Tor, or are we going to see Drustan?’

  He shook his head. ‘His injury pains him but his life is not in danger. I should not have come.’

  Hen’s face twisted, but he was looking elsewhere and her change of expression passed him by. ‘Yes, yes you should,’ she said, gently now. ‘Whatever we are … whatever we were to one another, the boy must come first now. My place here is to prevent suffering. Hurry, take me to him.’

  A moment’s hesitation, then Tor walked out of the house, leaving Hen to follow in his wake, reaching for the bag of healing herbs where it hung, slung across the rafters so that the mice would not be able to get to its precious contents, and checking that her talisman necklace was securely fastened. As she half-ran to keep up with his long strides, she sighed. Tor was right, it was difficult, his loyalties were torn and his life conflicted, and it was all her fault. But the healing defined her, gave her status, gave her reason for her existence in this little community. It was who she was and all she had to hold on to.

  Chapter Four

  I lay in my sleeping bag and tried to convince my brain that it was on retreat. After Jamie, Tabitha had kept taking me on ‘spa days’, as though being laid down in a darkened room with whale song was any kind of break from my normal life. I finally had to tell her that I spent more than enough time at home with the curtains drawn and the sound of wailing, and the addition of nice smells and a woman trying to relocate my ribcage really wasn’t helping. After that she took me to Alton Towers, which made me wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

  But now, trying to sleep at four in the morning, surrounded by the whiff of wet tarpaulin, I could almost find myself longing for roller coasters and sudden drops. They’d be something else to focus on, apart from the wheeeeeeeeee-thrrrrrrrrrppp that was the sound of Tabi
tha snoring at a pitch and intermittency guaranteed to drive Mother Teresa to weigh up the benefits of suffocation.

  I hated being awake this early. The absence of any external stimuli made my brain go into memory overdrive, remembering those times I’d been awake during the night when Jamie and I had first got together, when he’d fold his arms around me and whisper reassurances that would send me back to sleep. And then those same wakings later, when he was ill, when we knew the worst was coming, I would lie and watch him sleep. Pale and thin and always so tired, but he kept his sense of humour, his bright hope, and I had almost … almost been able to convince myself that the doctors were wrong, that he would recover.

  But these days I just woke alone. My brain spun itself through every worry I had ever had, and even came up with new ones – Was my job safe? Had I finished all the paperwork for the exam year? Would my mother, with her social life and her vast network of friends, mind her thirty-four-year-old daughter suddenly living on the doorstep, cramping her style? – and I would toss and turn, my head weighted to the pillow with a weariness I could never sleep away.

  However, tossing and turning in a sleeping bag on a mat so thin that every pebble was not so much cushioned as outlined, was not an option here, so I lay still and listened to the birdsong rising into the air, the creak of canvas and the faint, high trill of Tabs’s really annoying snores.

  Eventually it was either get out of there or pinch her nose, so I dragged myself out of my sleeping bag, pulled clothes over my pyjamas and went out into the freshness of the early day. The moorland, which had been invisible in yesterday’s rain, rose dark and hunched on either side of our camp. There was a sharp smell in the air of peat, smoke and a campful of people with not enough showers to go round.

  I walked, somewhat blearily, along the valley, past the dig and on to where the dale curved around away from the camp to a narrow pinch-point; it was clogged with boulders and other stoney detritus which made me wish I’d paid more attention to the somewhat obsessive geography department at school, who could, no doubt, have told me this was terminal moraine. Or possibly drumlins or something, I had no idea, get caught in that group with your morning coffee and you’d be lucky to escape before lunchtime, carrying rolled up posters of glacial attrition and a second-hand attitude of general indignation.

  Past the turn and the boulders the valley opened out again. There was less moorland here and the hillsides were populated with thin grassland, interspersed with copses of spindly looking birch trees. A wide and shallow river turned the ground into marsh along one side of the valley and then disappeared off into the distance. There were also buildings, either one of those historical recreation sites or a travellers’ campsite; several round huts with eaves that stretched almost to the ground and muddy paths leading to their doors were grouped around a grassy area, with another hut standing alone and distant, fenced off from the others by a sort of driveway made of bedraggled hedging.

  Despite the earliness of the hour, a small boy wearing a very dirty tunic was dragging what was either a very small sheep or a ratty-coated goat by a rope around its horns, and several other children followed, driving the rest of the animals by means of pelting them with bits of earth. There was a lot of general yelling, mucking about and throwing clods at each other going on too, as they drove the small, moulty creatures down to the edge of the river, where the boy released his grip on the horns. The animal shook its head and then started to graze, followed by the rest of the presumed flock. Or herd.

  A woman appeared at the doorway to one of the huts, hands on her hips and an outfit of such rough homespunness that I felt a kind of sympathetic itching break out down my back. She wore a long, brown dress, tied in the middle with a leather thong, so plain and unadorned that I revised my opinion of the place being a travellers’ site to it being some kind of ascetic religious community. Her hair was long and looped around her head, which didn’t really help the appearance that she’d taken ‘grunge’ further than it had ever wanted to go. She didn’t seem to notice me lurking around at the entrance to the village, for which I was grateful. Although I had my enhanced disclosure DBS, which declared me to have no convictions against children (although sometimes, with my current Year Nine group, it was a close-run thing) I didn’t want to have to explain why I was hanging around watching a bunch of young children at this time in the morning. The woman shouted something and the cluster of children broke up, two running towards the hut she was standing by, another three heading off across the hillside, still with much tugging at one another’s clothes, dragging at collars and belts, shrieking and yelling. They were dirty, barefoot and skinny but looked, otherwise, like any other group of kids playing out in the street in the school holidays.

  From a long way off in the distance behind me came the smoker’s cough sound of a reluctant generator starting up and the occasional raised voice drifted to me on the intermittent breeze. I tore myself away from watching the little band of unruly kids with a reluctance I didn’t really understand. I spent huge portions of my working day watching children being children, interspersed with occasional attempts to stop them, but here my eyes were, trying to follow this grubby bunch as they spread out, evidently picking up fallen wood from amid the patchy outbreak of trees that grew like morning stubble up the face of the hills. There was something in their joy at just running about that made me wonder when the last time had been that I had laughed over nothing like that. Enjoyed nothing more complicated than the sun and an open space and having nothing to do for a while, no ties on my time or duties or responsibilities … come to think of it, had I laughed much at all since Jamie died?

  I turned around to head back towards the camp, picking my way over the tumbled rocks. Of course, nobody had expected me to be falling off my chair with fits of giggles in those first few shell-shocked months, but when, gradually, the rest of normal life had come back to me, like pins and needles to numb limbs, where the hell had my sense of humour gone? Watching those children and their small pleasures made me realise that my sense of joy seemed to have permanently left me, buried with Jamie in that tidy, ranked grave in the windy cemetery. And only now was I realising that I actually missed it.

  The site was a lot busier now than it had been when I left. People were standing outside tents stretching, washing faces in bowls of rainwater, sitting on tarpaulins pulling on workboots, all of them looking keen, eager to start the day, throwing heads back to greet the sun which broke, now and again, through the weedy clouds. I felt its warmth across my shoulders and my heart gave a tiny wobble of lift, like a newly fledged bird about to break into hesitant flight.

  ‘Where did you get to?’ Tabs was sitting up in her sleeping bag, scratching her head, which wasn’t helping her hair situation. ‘You’ve not been wandering off, have you?’

  ‘Tabs, I’m thirty-four, I very much doubt that anyone is going to try to lure me into a van with a promise of puppies and sweeties.’

  I was trying to hold on to that little whiff of pleasure that I’d felt outside in the sun, but it was evaporating rapidly in the moist, nylon-smelling atmosphere. Tabitha’s general assumption that I shouldn’t be allowed out alone wasn’t helping either. I began peeling off the clothes I’d put on over my pyjamas and trying to find something else to put on that wasn’t unpleasantly clammy.

  ‘I brought you here to get you away from all that thinking and remembering you’ve been doing. I don’t want you roaming the hills doing a Wuthering Heights on us, all right?’

  Tabitha climbed out of the sleeping bag and, disconcertingly, began stripping off. She’d always been less self-conscious than me, never worried about her body image or what people might think, and while I tried to dress in concealed stages behind our heaped rucksacks, she stretched naked into her clothes in half the time it was taking me.

  ‘Wuthering Heights was set on the other side of Yorkshire,’ I muttered, trying to button a shirt and pull my k
nickers on whilst crouched, which put both knees on the damp tarpaulin floor of the tent, and let me know that this was not going to be a waterproof experience.

  ‘Shut up. And you know what I mean, anyway.’ She flipped open the tent flap, unconcerned about my still half-dressed status being revealed to the world. Although I needn’t have worried, there was nobody paying any attention out on the campsite, where the thin, diluted sun was doing its pathetic best to make the tents steam. ‘Come on, Gray, we can be first up to the catering tent if you hurry. We may have all the time in the world, but bacon is finite.’

  I hurried into the rest of my clothes and followed her up the slope to where the marquee style catering unit stood, old-fashioned canteen tables and chairs lining the floorspace and the sides tied back to let the day in. We’d been beaten to it by a few people, so stood in line with them, our plates held out, all of us dressed in T-shirts, jeans and boots and most people wearing some form of knitted headgear. We looked like the cast of Stomp performing Oliver Twist.

  ‘Whoops, big boss is in.’ Tabs jerked her head towards one of the long tables, at which a man sat. He was so far down the canteen that he was practically jammed against the canvas side, poking at a plate of bacon and egg as though he considered it barely edible, and his dark hair had patches of mud in it. ‘Shall we say hello?’

  ‘What? No, Tabs, let’s leave him to eat …’ I began, but Tabitha was already steamrollering her way down, her fried bread threatening to abandon her plate as she went.

  ‘Hello, I’m Tabitha,’ she said, arriving beside the man and pulling out a chair, swinging her long body in alongside him in one elegant move. ‘You’ve already met Grace, I think.’ I gave a weak smile and an apologetic wave, juggling my mug of tea and my plate. ‘And you’re Duncan Mcleod, yes?’

  ‘McDonald.’ The man jerked his head towards us but didn’t look up from his plate. ‘You the lasses with Millie Tregonwyn?’