Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide: A Collection of Short Stories. Fay WeldonЧитать онлайн книгу.
It was my cleaner Susie who first told me what was happening at the site. ‘Cleaner’ is the word Susie uses to keep me in my place: she seems rather more like a friend and ally, but she enjoys these social distinctions. She’s the policeman’s wife: she comes up to my rackety household and helps out because she’s bored, or so she says, and points out that I’m an artist and not a housewife by nature, as she is. Everyone should do what they’re good at in this life, she maintains. She, by implication, is good at housework: I am not.
I’m a professional sculptor. The children are with their father during term time, but I still needed help to keep domestic matters under control. I live in the village of Rumer in Kent, outside Canterbury, in a farmhouse. At the time I had two goats, two dogs, three cats, a pet hen, and an electric kiln in the barn. I did a lot of work in papier-mâchée, and it tended to creep out of the studio in shreds and scraps, and was even worse than clay for mess. If there’s too much mess I can’t concentrate. If there’s no food in the fridge I don’t stop to eat: then I’m too hungry to work. Susie kept things in balance. I believe her to be some kind of saint. Calling her the cleaner is rather like calling Moses the jobbing gardener because he smote the rock. If I say this kind of thing to her she seems immeasurably shocked.
Susie’s husband worked in town and though he was always kind to me, I would not want to be the criminal who crossed him. He has managed to build the fanciest bungalow in the village,and Susie keeps a perfect garden. Rumer is a pretty, peaceful and prosperous place and has won the best-kept village in Kent competition two years running, having survived BSE, foot-and-mouth, the falling off of the tourist trade—it has some good Roman ruins—and kept its village store and post office. But Susie is right: as a place it can get a bit boring. My two children, in their teens, try not to show it but are always happy to get back to town at the end of the holidays.
But nothing happens and nothing happens and then all of a sudden everything happens, in places as in people’s lives, and what was to happen, what was to be described in the papers as ‘The Affair of the Rumer Site’, was to take everyone by surprise.
Susie had a part-time job at the local comprehensive school, as a personal counsellor. It was her task to take alienated and troubled children under her wing, get them to school if they were truanting, sit with them in class if they were school refusers, help them with lessons they didn’t understand, and stay with them in the playground if they were bullied. She was not trained in any way to do it—the school can’t afford anyone expensive—but there is something about her apparently stoical presence, which means the pupils seem to accept her as one of their own. She is passionately on the children’s side: only occasionally does she raise her eyes to heaven and shrug. Hopeless, why waste the State’s money and my time. Let them go free.
One Friday afternoon in mid-July she turned up with the ironed sheets, disturbed and upset. (I have never yet ironed a sheet: Susie will not make a bed without first doing so. She has an ironing press: I have not.) The weather had been very hot: drought had set in: it was in that curious inconclusive patch of time after exams have finished and school hasn’t yet shut up shop for the summer. I’d been trying to finish the ceramic triptych I was working on before the children came down for the summer, and had managed it with a day to spare. I was exhausted and dehydrated, after days with the kiln, and still not quite back in the real world.
Now here was Susie sitting at the kitchen table actually crying. She said she had taken a group of her rejectees, as she called them, down to see the site. She’d thought the children would be really interested to see the unearthed graves and the skeletons still lying there, two thousand years on. But they had been indifferent, looked at her as if she was crazy to take them all the way in the heat to look at a few old bones, and one of the girls, Becky Horrocks, had tossed her cigarette into an open grave.
‘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