It’s still dark when Ruth wakes up. The green numbers on her alarm clock say 6.05 a.m. Ruth resolutely closes her eyes but she knows there’s something there, just on the edge of her consciousness, something waiting to pounce, zigzagging its way across her synapses. Ah, there it is. Pandemic. Lockdown. Virus. Death. Ruth sits bolt upright, reaching for the soothing tones of Radio 4. ‘Health Secretary Matt Hancock announces that a temporary hospital called NHS Nightingale will open in London to cope with the rising tide of coronavirus cases . . .’ Ruth switches off the radio. Her phone pings. ‘GOV.UK CORONAVIRUS ALERT,’ says the message, in stress-inducing capitals. ‘New rules are now in force. You must stay at home . . .’
Ruth tries to breathe mindfully, the way Cathbad taught her. In for four, out for eight. Don’t have a panic attack, she tells herself. You’re quite safe as long as you never leave the house. But Ruth must go to the shops today to buy Flint’s gourmet cat food. Strangely, the thought of doing something actually calms her. She gets up and puts on her dressing gown. She’ll go downstairs and have a cup of tea. Then she’ll start planning her day’s teaching. She’s getting to grips with the dreaded Zoom. At first, she treated it like a recorded lecture but now she’s able to be more interactive and is even able to send the students into breakout rooms. Preferably for ever.
Ruth treads carefully across the landing. She doesn’t want to wake Kate. She has a feeling that it’s going to be very hard to occupy Kate all day, especially when Ruth has her own work to do. The worksheets the school has sent seem very dull and, besides, Kate will dash through them in minutes. Thank goodness for the Saltmarsh, miles of blessedly empty marshland full of educational possibilities. They can collect grasses and shells. They can search for Neolithic flint flakes. When the weather gets better, they can paddle or even swim. Surely this nightmare will be over by the summer? But, even as Ruth dreams of shell and grass collages, she imagines Kate refusing to go outside and rolling her eyes at the thought of Neolithic flakes. She must ask Cathbad for some advice. She’s sure that he will have an imaginative curriculum worked out.
Flint is waiting for her in the kitchen, staring pointedly at his empty bowl. Ruth feeds him while she waits for the kettle to boil. Then she takes her tea into the sitting room. The sun is rising over the marshes, turning the distant sea to gold. The Saltmarsh is coming to life, like a photograph developing, the grasses turning from grey to brown to green, the birds ascending from the reedbeds to wheel across the rosy sky. Dawn. Ruth thinks of the picture she found in her parents’ house, ‘Dawn 1963’. Out on this very eastern edge of England, the sunrises are spectacular. Is that why Ruth’s mother took that photo, all those years ago? The shoebox is still by the front door, where Ruth left it when she came back from London. So much has happened in the weeks since then. Ruth clears a space on her desk, which is overflowing with files and books from her office, and rifles through the school photos and adult baptisms until she finds the picture of the cottage. Flint jumps lightly onto the table and starts sniffing the box. Maybe he can just smell Eltham mice, but Ruth takes his interest to be a sign that this is a mystery worth pursuing.
The picture shows all three cottages. To take it the photographer must have been standing on the other side of the road, in the rough grass that segues into the marshes. Was it taken at sunrise? It’s hard to tell because the colours have faded so much. There are no people present, just the three houses and a car. Ruth has no idea of the make. She could ask Nelson or Judy but she thinks they have enough on their plates on the moment. The houses are painted pink and there’s a hedge in front of them. A tree in the garden of the right-hand house seems to be in blossom, which means the picture was taken in spring. The tree’s not there now. The weekenders cut it down when they paved over the front garden.
Ruth moved into her house, 2 New Road, twenty-two years ago. She had been part of a dig that had discovered a Bronze Age henge buried in the nearby sands. The excavation turned out to have long-lasting and devastating consequences, one of which, for Ruth, was a passionate love of Norfolk. Ruth applied for a lecturing job at the University of North Norfolk and bought the cottage, which was then uninhabited. Who had owned it? She has the title deeds somewhere, but she remembers that the previous resident had been an elderly man who had died on the premises, probably in Ruth’s bedroom with its view of the ever-changing marshes. She tries not to think of this fact too often. The house was then passed to his children who had been anxious to sell it as quickly as possible. Ruth got the place very cheaply and had loved it from the first. Even though she had first co-habited with her then-boyfriend, Peter, the cottage had seemed always and only hers, although nowadays Kate and Flint would probably claim joint ownership.
‘What are you doing, Mum?’
Ruth jumps. Even Flint looks up guiltily. Kate is at the foot of the stairs in her Peppa Pig pyjamas, which are slightly too small for her. Her dark hair is standing up around her head. She looks very grumpy and very young.
‘Looking at this picture,’ says Ruth, showing Kate. She’s interested in her reaction.
‘That’s our house,’ says Kate. ‘Why’s it pink?’
‘I think it was taken a long time ago,’ says Ruth. ‘Can you tell why?’ It’s never too early to start home-schooling.
‘Because of the car,’ says Kate, as if it’s a stupid question. Which perhaps it is. ‘And there’s no satellite dish on Sammy and Ed’s house.’
Ruth hadn’t even noticed this. Kate likes the weekenders who sometimes invite her in to watch their superior home entertainment.
‘Let’s have breakfast,’ says Ruth, in her new jolly lockdown tones (lightly tinged with hysteria). ‘Then maybe we can go for an early morning walk.’
‘I hate walks,’ says Kate. She and Flint look at Ruth with identically mutinous expressions.
At nine o’clock Ruth sets out for the supermarket. She leaves Kate watching a Harry Potter DVD. So much for the ‘no screens before lunchtime’ rule Ruth devised last night. But Kate finds the wizarding world very comforting and Ruth hopes it will make her forget that this is the first time she has ever been left alone in the house. At least Kate has Flint, sitting on the sofa watching Dumbledore narrowly, and Zoe next door. Ruth has texted Zoe and put her number in Kate’s phone. ‘NP,’ Zoe texts back. ‘Here if you or Kate need anything’. Ruth is halfway to Lynn before she realises that NP means ‘no problem’.
At the supermarket she is momentarily distracted by the people standing, spaced at odd intervals, around the periphery of the car park. Then she realises that they are queuing. The shop is only allowing a few shoppers in at a time, so the rest are waiting patiently, resting their legs like weary horses, for their turn amongst the consumer durables. Ruth joins the line. She is wearing a scarf tied around her nose and mouth and feels rather ridiculous. Most people are not wearing masks although some have plastic gloves, which immediately makes Ruth think that the handle of her trolley is crawling with coronavirus germs. She must make sure that she doesn’t touch her face before she has a chance to wash her hands whilst singing a suitably revolutionary song. Right on cue her nose starts to itch.
Once inside the shop Ruth catches the panic-buying bug and starts loading her trolley with cat food, toilet roll, wine and other things that suddenly seem essential. Calm down, she tells herself. Most items are in stock, although the pasta and rice aisle is almost empty. She can shop once a week and order things online. She can’t stop herself adding two paperbacks and a jigsaw puzzle of Norwich Cathedral. It takes a long time to get through the checkout but Ruth finds herself feeling almost tearfully grateful to the smiling woman who scans her groceries. She’s not wearing a mask which strikes Ruth as very remiss on the part of the supermarket.
‘Thank you,’ she says, as she pays an eye-watering sum of money on her debit card. ‘It’s so good of you to keep working.’
‘I haven’t got much choice,’ says the woman. ‘But thank you. It’s nice to have some appreciation. People have been shouting at me all morning.’
Ruth drives home feeling grateful that she doesn’t have to go out to work and despairing at the state of the world. Kate, deep in The Prisoner of Azkaban, hardly notices her return. Ruth goes to wash her hands (they already feel chapped and sore) and then starts to put away the shopping. It takes some time because there’s so much of it but, eventually, most things are stowed away. Ruth gives Flint some of his new Kitty Treats, which he ignores, and makes herself coffee.
The film has ended so Ruth prints out a maths worksheet and gives it to Kate.
‘I don’t want to do maths,’ says Kate. ‘I want to read my book.’
‘Oh, all right,’ says Ruth. It’s only eleven o’clock and already she’s failing at home-schooling but she needs to get ready for her eleven thirty lecture.
She feels a rush of satisfaction when she manages to sign into Zoom and another when she sees the faces of her first years appearing. They pop onto the screen, some in kitchens and studies, some clearly still in bed. One youth looks like he’s on a tropical island. ‘You can get special backgrounds,’ he explains in the comment box. Ruth has taken the trouble to angle her laptop so there’s a studious backdrop of bookcases. Unfortunately, it makes her face look huge. She’ll just have to try not to meet her own eyes. Two squares remain black. Does this mean those students haven’t switched their videos on? It’s curiously disconcerting.
At least Ruth knows now to tell the students to mute when they’re not speaking. Her first Zoom session was a nightmare of competing voices, students appearing in startling close-up if they so much as coughed. They are getting better at listening too, though some are clearly on their phones at the same time.
Today’s subject is Artefacts and Materials. Ruth projects pictures of pottery, ceramics and stone tools onto the shared screen and sends the students into breakout rooms to discuss them. Whoosh. It’s like a particularly satisfying magic trick. In real life, even post-graduates make a huge fuss when asked to divide into groups. ‘Can I be with Annie? I need the loo. Have I got time for a coffee?’ Now, one click and they disappear. In the ten minutes’ peace before she summons them back, Ruth checks the attendance list. Everyone is here. Who are the students who won’t show their faces? Ruth checks the list again.
Eileen Gribbon and Joe McMahon.