In the course of levelling the sand dunes, a certain Jed Foster, a Bellamy skimmer driver (whose sister Sunny was a paraplegic and shared, perforce, my interest in ornithology) perceived a number of what he assumed to be human bones in his sandy load – it is hard to mistake children’s skulls. Contrary to custom and practice, he stopped his engine and got out of his cab to take a better look. He had uncovered, it transpired, what could only be an ancient graveyard – lidless lead coffins, skeletons, artefacts, golden crosses, swords wherever he looked. The bodies were lying east-west, which any earth-mover operator knows means the remains are Christian, not pagan (these are usually laid north-south). There were female bodies too – you could tell they’d once been women because strands of long hair still lay around their skulls, and little shiny stones lay in the form of necklaces beside them, the stones being immortal, only the strings that once had linked them succumbing to time. Four of these female bodies, as Jed observed and shuddered, lay eye socket down – which meant they had been executed, for adultery, or witchcraft, or nagging, or whatever female sin at the time seemed unpardonable. The souls of those buried face down are meant never to rise to their Maker.
Jed Foster was working on his own. The western sun was sinking; the terns and the skuas fought it out in the skies above: a single bittern flew over, croaking: an orangey glow struck over the newly turned land and rendered it beautiful. Jed Foster saw gold gleaming, and silver too. As well as bones he now saw shards of pottery: he saw a buckle and a big-bellied figurine, a fragment of leather: a shoe. He was a good man; he resisted the temptation to loot, he picked up nothing. He backed the skimmer off the site, took up sand from elsewhere and, with his great shovel slowly moving, gently dusted the whole area over until it was thinly and decently hidden. Then he went home, washed, changed, and got to a phone box. He thought it unwise to contact his foreman. He would go straight to the top. First he rang Bellamy House and was put through to Mrs Haverill, who said that no one was able to speak to Sir Bernard, who did Jed Foster think he was: Sir Bernard was not in residence anyway: he was very seldom at Bellamy House: why ever did Jed Foster think he would be? Jed persisted and Mrs Haverill grudgingly gave him a London number to call in the morning, saying she doubted anything Jed Foster had to say would be of the slightest interest, let alone advantage, to Sir Bernard. When Jed Foster got home, and had stopped smarting from his conversation with Mrs Haverill, he told his wife what he had discovered. He knew it was something amazing. He had felt awed, he said. Mrs Foster told Miss Foster, my sister in disability.
As the campaign to Save Our Past got going, at first under the leadership of Mrs Baker and Mr Bliss, then under those more professionally experienced, all this became common knowledge. Sunny Foster was a Heritage enthusiast and believed her duty to the past was greater than her duty to her brother’s employers, although her sister-in-law did not agree: ‘Don’t make a fuss,’ she begged. ‘He’ll lose his job!’ and told everyone everything. It was thanks to Sunny that the first volunteers from Fenedge went out with broom and brush and pan and carefully hand-skimmed sand and soil from the site of the graveyard and the Bronze Age settlement that it served, and the Roman trading estate nearby, and that thereafter half of Fenedge set up camp with folding chairs and thermoses, to guard the site and keep Sir Bernard’s diggers at a distance, while the other half of Fenedge tried to egg the bulldozers on.
‘What is this sentimental nonsense?’ cried the unemployed and homeless of Fenedge, or those about to be so rendered. ‘What we want round here is work and housing and medical care, forget the spotted redshank, forget ancient graveyards and the bones of the dead. What about our living ones, our hips that need replacing?’ ‘Not an inch of this country is not littered with human bones, ancient remains,’ said the realists, the rational, and those with vested interests in the development, ‘if you dig down just a little. What’s so special about this lot? Cranks and lunatics!’ ‘We don’t know,’ sighed the lamenteers, ‘it just somehow seems wrong; not necessary to dig just here: these graves are a sign that we shouldn’t!’ But the high tides of the season were so very high at both new and full moons, as the autumnal flights of the shore waders began, that the Eastern Scheme, as it was now called, was well able to claim necessity rather than choice. Dig we must, and dig right here! So what if the black and white oyster catchers would never again stream sedately by, to be overtaken by the swifter bar-tailed godwit and the grey plover; soon all would be forgotten and the yachts of the rich sail sedately by, also a beautiful sight. And who would care, let’s face it, except obsessive and depressive people with Adam’s apples who had no idea how to run the world? And what came first, the comfort and entertainment of busy humans, or the preservation of an entirely unnecessary and outmoded wildlife? It wasn’t even as if you could eat rare birds: they are hopelessly tough. And what was meant by ‘rare’? There were thousands of them, millions. Sometimes you couldn’t see the land for feathers –
But all these arguments were to come. In the meantime, Jed Foster’s call interrupted a conversation between Driver and Sir Bernard. The latter was in melancholy mood. Envisage it, as I do, closing Decline and Fall. I read too fast.
‘I have everything a man can want,’ Sir Bernard said to Driver, ‘save the one thing. And that’s the one thing you promised me. Everything else I achieved on my own, without you –’ Driver stifled a yawn: he had heard all this before from all kinds of people. Any man with sufficient energy, said Sir Bernard, enough brain and guts can make money. If he has enough money he can walk with kings. If he diets he can lose weight: if he exercises he can become strong. If he studies he can learn a language. If he has power, beautiful women will lie down in front of him. What sensible, energetic man needs you, Driver, in other words, Luck Bringer, whispering in his ear? As a short cut to charisma, perhaps − otherwise, what can it profit a man to lose his soul? These days, surely, a man has his life within his own control.
If Jed Foster had approached his task from the east, not the west, the evening sun would have dazzled him; perhaps he would not have caught the glint of human bones. The relics of the sacred site would have been shovelled up and dispersed amidst somersaulting mountains of sand. Had Sir Bernard not been talking along the lines he was, and so irritating Driver, who is to say that the instant’s decision, in which Jed Foster turned his wheel left instead of right, would not have gone the other way?
‘Where is true love?’ asked Sir Bernard of Driver. He was hanging from wall bars in the gym attached to his private suite at the Ritz: he believed this hanging lengthened his spine: something, certainly, had lately made him taller. Even a man’s height is under his control.
‘I’m working on it,’ said Driver grimly.
‘There’s someone in this world for everyone,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘My problem is not in being loved; it’s in finding someone worth my loving. It’s just a question of finding her. And for this, I grant you, a man needs luck.’
‘Thanks a million,’ said Driver. His lips were quite thin and bloodless, but Sir Bernard was thinking only of the muscles of his upper arms, the stretch in his spine.
‘Whatever happened to the girl back home?’ asked Sir Bernard, dropping to the floor, lithe and light, his one hundred and seventy-five seconds up. It seemed that Carmen’s rejection of him had been erased from his mind. But this often happens: who needs Mephistopheles to misremember the past? Ask any girl who’s just met up with an old flame: or man, ditto.
‘The one with the tits?’ asked Driver.
‘That is not how I think of her,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘It was her soul I responded to.’
‘Well,’ said Driver, ‘as I say, I’ve been working on it, but she’s not easy.’
‘I should hope not,’ said Sir Bernard, and then, forgetting to whom he was talking, if he was ever quite sure, because of the changing shape of Driver, sometimes evanescent, sometimes in the head, sometimes real and cold and eternal as rock, ‘I’m disappointed in you, Driver. All promises and no delivery. If that was how Bellamys carried on, we certainly wouldn’t be top of the tree today. Hurry it up, if you please. I’ve been patient long enough. Now the Eastern Scheme’s underway, it’s time to think about romance. I need a life partner – a mother for my children. See to it.’
At which the phone rang and it was Jed Foster reporting to the very top the presence of skeletons and artefacts in the Eastern Scheme and asking for guidance.
Sir Bernard ascertained that the site was well enough concealed for the time being and said he’d be down with his driver the following morning to make a decision.
‘A lesser man,’ observed Sir Bernard to Driver, ‘would have said, “Bury the lot and be done with it,” but the world needs its visionaries.’
‘You mean there might be more profit in an archaeological theme park than a marina?’ asked Driver.
Sir Bernard’s eyes brightened. He hadn’t thought of that.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Laura. ‘It’s the pits.’
‘Dullsville, Arizona,’ said Carmen. ‘We’ve got the small-town blues again.’
‘At least it’s home,’ said Annie, and burst into tears. They were in the Welcome-In, opposite what is now the Otherly Abled Centre: catching up, as they said, with one another.
‘He was such a pig when it came to it,’ said Annie. ‘He was taking advantage of me, that was all. I thought he was one man and he turned out to be another. I feel such a fool.’
‘You’re sure you’re not just being paranoid?’ asked Carmen.
‘Everyone does housework,’ said Laura. ‘It’s part of the bargain.’
‘What bargain?’
‘Marriage.’
‘I wasn’t even married,’ wailed Annie. There was no reasoning with her. She took her coffee black and refused fudge cake.
I’d watched Annie’s return to Landsfield Crescent. Alan and Mavis had been grudging in their welcome.
‘We’d have come to meet you,’ said Alan, ‘but we had to sell the car. Your mother needed clothes for the wedding. All those smart people. And now there isn’t even going to be one. Couldn’t you have given us more notice? It was inconsiderate of you, Annie. But then consideration was never your strong point.’
‘We can put you up on the sofa, Annie,’ said Mavis, ‘but I can tell you I’ve just about had enough of lugging your suitcases around.’
Alan said, ‘I hope you won’t be unpacking them, Annie. There’s no spare cupboard space.’
‘What happened to my room?’
‘Count Capinski’s using it for psychic therapy,’ said Mavis.
Alan said, ‘Annie, you are our daughter. Nothing can change that. But you have to live your own life. You’re a big girl now and able to make your own decisions. Laura’s only your age and she’s got four children. We gave you a good start, but you can’t be in our pockets all the time. I have a lot on my plate at the moment. I am changing gauges.’
Annie had a little rest on the sofa to get the feeling of being back home – she was very tired. No one asked her what had gone wrong, or why. Mavis seemed to relent and brought her a cup of tea and a slice of shop cake on a plate. Annie took the tea black and puked at the sight of the cake.
Count Capinski observed out of Mavis’s mouth, ‘Your daughter has another self inside her, dear lady, not a very nice one. She is trying to starve it out. She is to be congratulated,’ so Mavis made no attempt to encourage Annie to eat, and Alan was preoccupied with his trains, and besides she had let them both down in the eyes of the neighbours: this pale thin cuckoo of a girl who they’d somehow given birth to, sent home in disgrace from far across the world. Who would marry her now?
Now Annie, Carmen and Laura sat in the Welcome-In Café beneath the awful paintings of local artists, and bemoaned their fate; how every path they took led them back home again and how strange this destiny was. (It is of course not so strange a fate at all: most people die in more or less the same place as they were born, while struggling to get out of it.) But Annie’s return had come like a shower of rain on the desert of their discontent and how it now leapt into life and bloomed; stretching up to heaven like the beanstalk in Jack’s morning garden (if you’ll forgive the mixing of metaphor) blocking out enough light to bring Driver right to their door, without any of the usual preamble. There he was, his face pressed against the steamy glass of the Welcome-In Café, his sharp nose flattened, his tongue out, his grimace lecherous, a little trail of saliva beneath his chin, and how they jumped!
I jumped too because I noticed that Driver’s BMW was parked outside what was soon to be the Otherly Abled Centre, under my window, and the double yellow lines along the kerb had mysteriously disappeared beneath its wheels. Though I thought that might be Alison’s doing – it is her trick to go out at night with a pot of grey paint and a paintbrush the better to facilitate the morning’s parking. How the rain pelted down! And today the BMW looked particularly sinister – not at all the kind of vehicle driven by a rich man in a hurry, but the kind that carries you off to hell: water streamed off its bonnet, glistening in the fluorescent glow of the neon lights that were attached in far too great a number for safety to the crumbling plaster ceiling of the Centre’s Day Room. The building dated, I suppose, from the seventeenth century, and was badly in need of major refurbishment. Rocky on its pins. Better rocky, of course, than not on them at all.
‘It’s him,’ said Laura in panic. ‘It’s Driver.’
‘We were wishing ourselves away again,’ said Annie in terror.
Carmen went to the door and tried to throw it open, but it stuck and quivered, being swollen by the rain, so that the limp bleached gingham of the blue and white café curtains shook down dust and dead flies: the gesture was not nearly so dramatic as she would have wished. She tugged again and it opened and there stood Driver steaming beneath his umbrella. Carmen had shrunk an inch or two, or he had grown.
‘Voyeur!’ she accused him all the same, courage personified, although she trembled. ‘Staring through windows! I’ll report you to the police.’ She had the sense that as she defied him she lengthened and he shrank. He changed his mind and decided to be nice and not strike her dead; at any rate he smiled and his yellow eyes even faded to a quite reasonable blue.
‘That’s my girl, Carmen,’ he said. ‘It’s only me, Sir Bernard’s chauffeur, not some stranger. And a man can look at pretty girls, can’t he, without the world coming to an end?’ He strolled in and shook himself like a dog, and the raindrops that spattered all around the room burnt little black holes where they fell, as if they were sparks. Not that Eddie, the fat man with glasses who served the coffee, noticed, or not till a week later when he got round to sweeping up. The Welcome-In Café may not be as bad as I describe. I can only guess. Others go in and enjoy themselves; not me: no one’s going to take me over there.
‘So howdie, Laura,’ he said. ‘Where are the kids? Got a baby-sitter again? All this gadding about: it’ll come to a bad end. Why have kids if you’re not going to look after them?’
Laura opened her mouth to protest, but Annie nudged her quiet.
‘And how are you, Annie?’ he said. ‘Back from abroad, I hear. Bit of a comedown, isn’t it? Bride sent home on the eve of her wedding? Everyone’s talking.’
Tears of humiliation and resentment sprang to Annie’s eyes.
‘As to little virgin Carmen,’ said Driver, ‘for virgin read spinster. The one who no one wants. The one left on the shelf. The one with a real problem.’
‘My mother said,’ observed Carmen primly, ‘if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all,’ at which he snarled and rumbled a little and then said, ‘Your mother never said anything like that, Carmen. I know your mother well, and if you’re like a daughter to me now you know why,’ and while Carmen gaped he pressed home his advantage, saying, ‘Sir Bernard asked me to ask you, Carmen, if you’d have the goodness to dine with him in the next week or so.’
‘No,’ said Carmen.
‘Why not?’ He stamped his foot, or pawed with his hoof, or was it just that a very large grey truck rumbled by? In any case the ground shook.
‘I don’t like his messenger,’ said Carmen. ‘Coming in here steaming –’
‘Carmen,’ said Laura, ‘just a dinner − please!’
And Annie said plaintively, ‘We’ve been so unlucky, Carmen.’ Carmen turned to look quite savagely at Laura, and at Annie. Driver laughed and said, ‘Only a fool has friends. You’ll change your mind, you’ll see. I’ll be back for you a fortnight today.’
Carmen said, ‘I’d rather die,’ and someone came in to ask if Driver could move the BMW because it was blocking the road. He left the Welcome-In obligingly, as if he were just an ordinary chauffeur in a rather military-style uniform. He moved his BMW from outside my window: the truck driver, who had been manoeuvring to get by, inch by inch, and failed, moved into reverse gear instead of into first and backed through the window at which I sat, bending metal, shattering glass. I had just time to get out of my wheelchair and away, before the truck driver, in his panic, engaged the tipping mechanism and delivered an entire load of what turned out to be balsawood blocks into the room. The wood was so light that no one was hurt. That was fortunate, as everyone said, but I felt it was a matter of degree. Far more fortunate for it not to have happened in the first place. What surprised everyone most, however – the handicapped (as we used to call ourselves, as if human beings were engaged in some kind of race) are more accustomed than most to putting up with circumstances suddenly beyond their control – was that as the lorry crashed through I had got out of my wheelchair and run across the room. I couldn’t repeat the action, though of course I tried. But it had happened, and been witnessed. Dr Grafton denied its possibility and said it was a group hallucination: in fact my chair had been at the back of the room, away from the window, but then he would say that, wouldn’t he? Or Grafton was convinced that I had earned my disability by having undergone an abortion in my youth. (Well, that is to say, the baby underwent it, not me.) I rashly mentioned the event to him as part of my medical history on first coming to Landsfield Crescent and joining his panel of patients.
‘Well, there you are,’ he’d said. ‘That’s what it’s all about, then.’ Dr Grafton didn’t approve of abortion, and felt that the Otherly Abled should just sit or lie quiet and put up with whatever card fate had dealt them. Dr Grafton, in other words, was what used to be called a fatalist; not a good thing, if you ask me, for a doctor to be. But he was the only one around who could write prescriptions which released drugs from the chemist, if he could be so persuaded, and he did at least take an interest.