‘Are you doing research here?’ she asked, and turned to face him.
Leaning over the glass counter of his booth, the young man in charge was deep in conversation with an elderly gentleman draped with cameras, and she was gazing into the face of quite a different person. The small shock of surprise disturbed her judgement for a moment, and the awareness of feeling and looking disconcerted inclined her to resent him, and to look for and find impudence in an approach which would have seemed perfectly excusable in a resident scholar. For that matter, she might not have been far out in thinking him impudent; his manner was innocence itself, his deference if anything delicately overdone, as though he were ready to come down off his high horse the moment she came down off hers, and didn’t anticipate that the descent need be long delayed. He had the wit to keep talking.
‘It began as a sort of rest-station and leave resort, as seasonal and artificial as a seaside fun-fair. And then it grew, and traders and service providers thought it worthwhile to settle here and go into business. They brought their families, some of them intermarried with time-expired soldiers who chose to settle here, too, and it grew into a real, life-and death town, where everyone had a stake sunk so deep that when the legions started to leave, the locals still couldn’t get out. Everything they had was here. No, I don’t belong here, I’m only visiting,’ he ended disarmingly, coming roundabout to the answer to her question. ‘It’s my subject, that’s all. But I could see what you were thinking. It is a beautiful place.’
He was taller than she by only a few inches, and slenderly built, an athletic lightweight in a heather tweed sportscoat and grey cords. He had a thick crop of wiry hair the colour of good toffee, and heavy eyelashes many shades darker, as lavish as on a Jersey cow, fringing golden-brown eyes of such steady and limpid sincerity that she felt certain he could not possibly be just what he seemed. The face that confronted her with so much earnest goodwill and innocence, and with, she felt mistrustfully, such incalculable thoughts behind it, was square and brown, with a good deal of chin and nose to it, and an odd mouth with one corner higher than the other. He could have been anything from twenty-five to thirty, but not, she judged, beyond thirty. He did not look like a wolf, but he did look like a young man with an eye for a girl, and techniques that would bear watching.
‘How kind of you,’ she said, balancing nicely on the edge of irony, in case a few minutes more of this should see him running out of line to shoot, and make it desirable to jettison him, ‘—how kind of you to tell me all about it!’
‘Not at all!’ he said, and had the grace to flush a little; she even had a fleeting suspicion that he enjoyed the ability to flush at will. ‘How kind of you not to resent being told! I get carried away. Amateurs do. And this one I really like. Look at that hillscape over in Wales!’ Fold on fold, rising gently from the water-meadows, the foothills receded in softening and paling shades of blue into the west. ‘No wonder the men who’d served out their time put their savings into market stalls and little businesses, tanneries, dye-works, gardens. Nobody knew the risks better than they did. It was a brave gamble, and in the end they lost it. But it was a stake worth throwing for.’
‘I should have thought,’ said Charlotte, trapped into genuine interest and speculation, ‘that they’d have built just a little further from the river. Weren’t they for ever in danger of floods? Look at the height of the water now.’
‘Ah, now, that’s interesting. You see, the Comer has changed its course since the third century. Exactly when, we don’t know, it may have been as late as the thirteenth century before it cut its way through. Come on down, and I’ll show you.’ And he actually took her arm, quite simply and confidently, and rushed her on the wings of his enthusiasm down through the green complexities of the bowl, between the crisp, serrated walls, across the fragments of tiled pavement, past the forum pillars, down to where the emerald turf sloped off under a token wire barrier to the riverside path and the waters of the Comer.
Here, at close quarters, the fitful, elusive silver congealed into the turgid brown flood she had seen upriver, a silent surge of water looking almost solid in its power, sweeping along leaves and branches and roots and swathes of weed in its eddies, gnawing away loose red layers of the soil along this near bank, and eating at the muddy rim of the path. The speed of its silent, thrusting passage dazzled her eyes as she stared into it. The snows in Wales had lain long, and the spring rains had been heavy and protracted; the Comer drank, and grew quietly mad.
‘That’s it!’ she said, fascinated. ‘That’s what I meant. Would you choose to live close by that?’
‘But look across the river there. You see how the level rises? Gently, but it rises, look right round where I’m pointing, and you’ll see there’s a whole oval island of higher ground. In Roman times the river flowed on the far side of that. Aurae Phiala was close enough for fishing, close to two good fords, in all but the flood months, and safe from actual flooding. In a broad valley like this you inevitably get these S-bends, and this was the biggest one. By the Middle Ages the river had gradually cut back through the neck of land at this side of the rise, until it cut right through to where it runs now. You can still trace the old course by the lush growth of bushes and trees. Look, a regular horseshoe of them.’
She looked, and was impressed almost against her will, for everything was as he said. Alders and willows and rich grass and wild rose briars described a great, smooth horseshoe shape that was still hollowed gently into the green earth, with such authority that it had been acknowledged in perpetuity as a natural boundary, and a single large field hemmed within it.
‘Probably if they ever raise the funds to do a proper dig here, they’ll find the town had a guard outpost on that hillock. Not that the tribesmen would attempt anything more than a quick raid by night, not until the legions were withdrawn. And if they ever did set out to open up this place,’ he said consideringly, ‘there are a dozen more important places to begin, of course.’
‘Why haven’t they ever? Labour isn’t a problem, is it? I thought there were armies of students only too anxious to join digs in the long vacation.’
‘It isn’t the labour, it’s the money. Excavation is a costly business, and Silcaster hasn’t got enough money or enough interest.’
‘Oh?’ she said, surprised. ‘I thought it was Ministry property.’
‘No, it’s privately owned. It belongs to Lord Silcaster. He keeps it up pretty decently, considering, but it’s all done on a shoe-string, it has practically to pay for itself. The curator has a house downstream there, among the trees—you can see the red roof. And the only other staff seems to be that young fellow in the kiosk, and I rather think he’s working for peanuts while he mugs up a thesis.’
‘And a gardener-handyman,’ said Charlotte, her eyes following the vigorous heave and surge of the mole-brown water as it tore down past them and ripped at the curve of the bank, lipping half across the trodden right of way. It had been higher still, probably some three or four days earlier, for it had bitten a great red hole in the shelving bank, like a long wound in the smooth turf, and left the traces of its attack in half-dried puddles of silky clay and a litter of sodden leaves and bushes. Round this broken area a big, blond young man in stained corduroys and a donkey jacket was busy erecting a system of iron posts striped in red and white, and stringing a rope from them to cordon off the slip.