‘Yeah. It is what happens. Anyway.’ Olivia sighed. The conversation had followed a familiar pattern, with her own anxieties temporarily allayed by Alexandra’s reassurances. ‘I forget what you’re doing tonight?’
‘Meeting Cam and Laure. Might go out after. You?’
‘Film, something foreign, can’t remember what it’s called. Tom wants to see it.’
‘Speak later, then?’
‘Yeah. Thanks, Alph.’
‘Love you. I’ve got to go now. Bye, sis.’
‘Me too. Bye. Wait – I’ll give Ben a call, shall I? I don’t know what he and Nic are doing. I haven’t seen them, either.’
‘Do that. Bye.’
Alexandra crammed her phone into the pocket of her black jeans and slid through the queue at the coffee counter. She had seven minutes of her lunch hour left. She would talk to Olivia at least once more, perhaps twice, before bedtime.
The Davies girls were monozygotic, or identical, twins.
At their birth their father had exclaimed in rapture, holding the squalling crimson scraps against his heart, ‘These two are my world, from this day onwards. They are my Alpha and my Omega.’
The family story went that Selwyn had tried to insist that the babies should be christened accordingly, but Polly firmly opted for what she called nice, normal names.
Polly’s mother had agreed. ‘Lovely. Not letters, or Zebedee or Dusk or Cowslip, or whatever poor little children seem to get landed with nowadays.’
It made no difference though. To their family, their baby brother Ben, and most of their friends, the twins for ever bracketed the Greek alphabet between them. To each other and to the rest of the world apart from employers, airlines and the DVLC, they were Alph and Omie. Two halves of a whole, one another’s best and closest ally.
Not that they were all that much alike, at twenty-five, even to look at. From their Facebook profiles, it would have been difficult to deduce a relationship. Alexandra worked in retail marketing, and lived alone in a rented glass and steel studio flat near Bethnal Green. She wore monochrome clothes with a decidedly Japanese influence, and intended to set up her own company within five years. Olivia lived with her boyfriend in his chaotic flat off Shepherd’s Bush Road. She was a freelance illustrator, working from home, and was usually dressed in a picturesque scramble of rainbow knits and tie-dye.
Because they lived at opposite ends of town, the two girls didn’t see each other all that often, not more than twice or even once a week. The principal link between them, as vital as their umbilical cord had once been, was their pair of mobile phones. They always had exactly the same make and model. It was really weird, Omie said, but she had lost hers one night because it had fallen out of her pocket and dropped down the toilet when she was at a club, and she had been
way
too grossed out to reach down and fish it out again. But then less than twelve hours later, Alph had had her bag with her phone inside it stolen from beneath her desk by a sneak thief who had slipped into her office while she was down the corridor talking to her boss and everyone else was out at lunch.
The twins consulted each other, and then agreed on the new model.
They talked or texted each other all the time, the little chirrup of a ringtone or bleep of an arriving message so familiar that they presented no barrier to the seamless dialogue between them.
The digger driver reversed smartly away from the trench. A flock of gulls rose from the raw earth and banked over the ochre tree tops, wheeling back as the machine trundled off to dump its hopper-load of soil and flints on a swelling mound. It was a soft, windless morning. The grinding of the digger and the cries of the gulls carried a long way in the still air.
Two workmen towed a heavy roll of polythene sheeting from the back of a truck whilst the site manager in a fluorescent jacket and hard hat talked on his mobile at the door of the Portakabin office. On the lip of the trench a young man in a helmet was standing alone with his hands in his pockets. He studied the loads of earth as they were sliced and scooped away, from time to time glancing over at the contractor or his client. He was the first person at the site to notice two women and a tall, thin man strolling towards them from the direction of the main house. He sighed to himself. They were entitled to be here, of course, but in his experience visitors at an excavation meant nothing but delays and questions. He didn’t know Mrs Meadowe personally, but he came from Meddlett where she had the reputation of being unfriendly. He stuck his hands deeper in his pockets and concentrated on the digging.
Amos was also watching the work. He was in an excellent humour. Something that was ingenious, fitting and intricately designed was going to be created here out of nothing, on the rim of a field in an attentive landscape. Satisfaction that construction was at last under way spilled all through him. His sense of happy anticipation even increased when the digger momentarily halted and he caught the sound of laughter and raised voices close at hand. As soon as he saw Katherine he raised his arm and waved, beckoning the visitors across. Miranda and Colin followed her, picking their way past the contractors.
‘We thought we’d come and see what’s happening,’ Miranda called to him.
‘Progress,’ he shouted back.
The three of them scuttled towards him, bundling out of the path of the digger and gathering to inspect the work.
Amos put a proprietorial arm around his wife’s shoulders.
In the course of their married life Katherine and he had lived in a dozen houses, from the first cramped terrace to the latest sprawling mansion in half an acre of suburban garden. He thought of all the different property viewings, the potential homes with actual merits to be decoded from the hyperbole of various estate agents, the subsequent measurings and deliberations, and the final compromises that had to be made in order to fit a family within a set of walls, like a crab into a pre-existing shell, with the boys arguing over who was to have the bigger room and Katherine saying that really she was going to miss the old house. Now for the first time his family would have a home designed around it, not the other way around. Not that they were any longer precisely a family, of course; Sam and Toby had their own places, he had seen to that. But they would still come. Children took a long time to detach themselves nowadays, he had noticed, if they ever really did so.
Now his wife turned her head and remarked to Colin and Miranda that she couldn’t imagine what their home was going to be like when it was finally built.
‘There’s so much space, and air and sunshine. It’s hard to picture what a house will look like plonked down here.’
Amos frowned. Her vagueness as well as her choice of words irritated him.
‘Darling, you’ve seen all the plans a thousand times. Drawings, computer simulations, every single stage of the process.’
She only shook her head, and laughed.
‘I know. Weird, isn’t it?’
Miranda had brought a basket. ‘I thought we should have a celebration,’ she announced, to cover the momentary awkwardness. She led the way to a vantage point under the trees and unpacked a bottle of champagne and a carton of orange juice. Amos waved to the workmen and followed the others.
Miranda had found a reason for a celebration almost every other day at Mead. It was as if she were the entertainments secretary and they were freshmen newly arrived at university, needing scheduled social events and copious supplies of drink to kick-start their friendships. Four days ago Selwyn had announced that a major phase of his demolition work was complete, and they had gathered between the ceiling props and barrows of rubble to admire the open space and to drink wine poured into the plastic mugs that were all Polly had been able to muster. It was two in the morning before they finally dispersed to bed. Amos had joked that he wasn’t sure he could stand the pace and Selwyn countered that he couldn’t see why not, since they had little else that was significant to occupy them these days. At that point Polly took his arm and guided him off to bed in the tarp shelter.
Miranda threw herself into all these events, carrying the others on the tide of her high spirits. She was already screwing the plastic feet into a set of picnic wineglasses as they sat down in a row on the dry turf. Colin leaned back against a tree trunk. He was tired, but he raised his glass when Miranda handed it to him.
‘Here’s to the perfect house. May you live like a king, Amos. A solar-heated, green-spirited monarch.’
‘What about me?’ Katherine demanded. They all turned to look at her.
‘And a queen, K, of course,’ Colin added.
They sipped champagne and watched the digger as it rolled to and fro like a sturdy toy. The sun rose higher above the trees, but the outlines of the copses and field crests in the distance were blurred by mist, suggesting a cold night to come. The digger came up with another hopper full of earth, and they heard the note of the engine change as the driver backed up a short distance.
He jumped from the cab and walked across to look down into the trench. At the same time, the young man who had been watching slid his hands out of his pockets and walked briskly to the edge.
Amos was leaning on one elbow. He propped himself a little higher to see what was going on.
The digger driver returned to his seat and Amos nodded his approval, but then the man turned off the engine, dismounted once more and hurried away towards the site office. The other workmen stopped what they were doing.
‘What now?’ Amos groaned.
‘Maybe he’s found some buried treasure,’ Miranda teased, but she sat up straighter too. ‘After I’ve gone and sold the land to you, as well.’
‘It’s some bloody annoying thing. I just know it.’
The site manager left the Portakabin. There was now a cluster of hi-vis jackets and helmets gathered about the raw slit in the ground. Amos launched himself to his feet. He charged off with his head down and his elbows jutting at an angle. His trousers rippled over his broad shanks. Rather uncertainly, Katherine got up and followed him.
‘Better take a look?’ Colin murmured to Miranda. She was already on her feet.
A line of gulls settled on the roof of the stationary digger. They rotated their heads as if they were waiting for a curtain to go up. A sharp smell of sour earth and torn roots hung in the air.
A few inches below the surface the cut edges of turf, roots and a few inches of topsoil gave way to dense earth, packed with stones. Protruding from the bottom of the trench, where a band of earth seemed to be darker than elsewhere, Miranda saw what appeared to be a long piece of flint. It was grey, clogged with dirt, and splintered where the sharp edge of the digger blade had smashed into it. The young man ignored her, and everyone else. He knelt to examine the find.
‘Just caught my eye, didn’t it?’ the digger driver was saying to the other workmen. He was big with a red face, his yellow helmet perched above it looking much too small for his head.
‘Right you are, Alan. Let’s take a look,’ the site boss said. He vaulted into the trench, but the young man snatched at the collar of his jacket and pulled him back.
‘Wait there,’ he snapped, with surprising authority. ‘Everyone, just stand where you are.’
Silence fell over the little group. Even Amos hesitated.
The young man slid down into the trench. With his right thumb he rubbed the earth from the protruding flint, stroking it as if it were a baby’s fist. Then he took out a tiny trowel, and with infinite care began to scoop the debris from around it.
‘Who is he?’ Colin murmured.
‘The archaeologist,’ Amos said curtly.
‘The
what
?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. It’s the planning regulations. One of the hoops you have to jump through to get anything done. The county bloody archaeologist assessed the site, told me and the architect that there was a minimal chance of there actually being any old bits of Roman pottery or anything else buried here, but he was sending someone in on a watching brief just in case. Someone
I
end up paying for, naturally. That’s him.’
It was obvious to Miranda now that what was protruding from the ground was not a flint but a broken bone. She watched intently, only half hearing Amos’s tirade.
The archaeologist gently worked the bone free. He placed it in a bag, carefully labelled the exterior, and laid it on the lip of the trench.
‘Right, then. Let’s get going again,’ Amos called.
The men shuffled, and the archaeologist continued to ignore them all. He was kneeling again and scraping at the earth. A moment later he came up with a smaller bone. He cupped it in his palm and brushed away the dirt.
Amos trampled forwards. Miranda wanted to restrain him, and when she caught Katherine’s eye she knew she felt the same.
Amos called, ‘Look. I know you’ve got a job to do. But I can’t allow the remains of some animal to hold up the work of an entire site crew for half a morning.’
The second bone went into a separate bag.
Amos raised his voice. ‘It’s a dead…’ there was a second’s hesitation while he searched his mind for a farm animal, any animal ‘…
cow
.’
The archaeologist did look up now. Beneath the plastic peak of his helmet his face looked startlingly young, almost unformed. To Colin, standing beside Miranda at the end of the trench, his features seemed vaguely familiar. Until recently he would have searched his memory for where and when, and what they might have done together.
‘These are human remains,’ the young man said.
A deeper pool of silence collected. Bowing his head, one of the workmen took off his helmet and held it awkwardly across his chest. Shocked, Miranda gazed down into the freshly sliced earth at the bottom of the trench, and then at the labelled bags. Who was it, buried here in this peaceful place? Who, and when?
Amos broke in again, ‘This is my land. We have all the necessary permissions in place to build a house right here, and that’s what you are delaying.’