The dean of classics spoke about the debt the university owed Britton, his contribution to the discipline, yada yada yada. There was no anecdote, no sense of the man, and the don detected Jake’s unease.
“Why not interview Britton’s PhD student?” she suggested. “She accompanied him on a few digs. She’ll be much better placed to flesh out the personality of the man than me.”
But if Jake was expecting some dowdy old thing sniffling into her tea he was mistaken. The moment they were introduced – in Britton’s very office – his heart juddered. Why did she have to be beautiful?
A string of failed relationships followed by a prolonged drought had left Jake incapable of conversation with attractive women. He forgot the basics, like whether you were supposed to hold someone’s eye when speaking to them – and if so, for how long? The hotter the girl the more acute the problem, until he couldn’t look them in the face at all. And so it was with Florence Chung. Oh Christ, he thought. Ooooh Christ.
She was third-generation Chinese, with a flawless complexion (always a turn-on) and a delicate, ethereal beauty. Her eyes were big and brown and on seeing him she smirked, revealing naughty incisors. Jake wondered what her legs were like and knew he would never sleep with her.
“I hear you want to talk to me about Roger?” Florence blinked and on cue her eyes were damp.
Jake stumbled over the condolences; when he grasped for his notepad the tremble in his fingers had returned.
“What was Professor Britton like?” he asked. “As a person.”
“He was passionate about his work,” she said. “And I mean truly passionate. It’s just one of those things you say about dead people isn’t it?” She laughed softly. “But with Roger it was the gospel truth. He lived for the period.”
“Which was ancient religion?”
“Right. But he specialized in the Etruscans. We broke the earth all over Italy and made some important discoveries. It was his dream to piece together the entire Disciplina Etrusca.”
“Sorry, the what? Can you spell that?”
She obliged. “It was the holy text of the Etruscans.”
“Why are the Etruscans so important? If we want this obit to get a decent showing I need to really sell his achievements.”
“They were a fascinating culture,” she replied. “The first home-grown civilization on the Italian peninsula. The Etruscan dialect is unrelated to any other known language – it’s as alien to Indo-European as the Kalahari click language. And they were the go-to people when it came to matters spiritual. If you wanted your fortune told in the ancient world, you’d find an Etruscan.”
Jake chanced eye contact. “As it happens I wrote a story about the Etruscans earlier in the week. About a meeting set up in World War Two, by …”
“By Winston Churchill!” she cried. “I read it. Very weird. I’d love to know more about all that.”
Jake could feel her studying him – it no longer felt like an office in mourning.
“So then,” he said to break the moment. “Tell me more about Etruscan religion.”
“It was a different kettle of fish to Graeco-Roman theology,” she said. “A bit … darker, somehow.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, Greek and Roman Gods were all humanoid figures, running around sleeping with each other and getting plastered on nectar. But the earliest Etruscan Gods were formless, manifesting themselves in the air itself – closer to the modern idea of God, perhaps.”
“How is that darker?”
“Because the Etruscans gave themselves over to their Gods completely – they dominated man’s every activity. The Etruscan religion was pure subordination. In that respect I suppose it was nearer to Islam. ‘Submission’, as Islam translates to.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call Islam a ‘dark’ religion,” said Jake.
“No, me neither,” she snapped. “That’s not what I meant. Anyway, Etruscan religion took submission to a different level. The Etruscans had a real dread of all these dark forces swimming around them. Man was a complete non-entity – he was under the thumb, his fate utterly in the Gods’ hands.”
“Sounds like a barrel of laughs.”
Florence ignored him. “Etruscan religion was all about attempting to divine the will of these dark forces by various means. Like examining livers of sheep, observing the flights of birds, or studying bolts of …” she sighed.
“Lightning,” Jake finished.