She was not quite so sure, for some reason, but she didn’t say so. The tall, straight young back that sauntered away down-river, to come about in a wide circuit via the fence of the curator’s garden, and the box hedge that continued its line, maintained too secure an assurance, and too secret a satisfaction of its own, in spite of the dexterity with which it had removed itself from censure. This Boden observed other people’s taboos just so far as was necessary, but he went his own way, sure that no values were valid but his own. Still, he removed himself, if only as a gesture. That was something.
‘You did that very nicely,’ she said, surprising herself.
‘I try my best,’ he said, unsurprised. ‘After all, I’ve been sixteen myself. I know it’s some time ago, but I do remember, vaguely. And I’m not sure it isn’t all your fault.’
She felt sure by then that it was not; she was completely irrelevant. But she did not say so. She was beginning to think that this Gus Hambro was a good deal more ingenuous than he supposed; but if so, it was an engaging disability in him.
‘I was going to show you the laconicum,’ he said, and he turned and snuffed like a hound across the green, open bowl, and set out on a selected trail, nose to scent, heading obliquely for the complex of standing walls where several rooms of the ancient baths converged. The amber brickwork and rosy layers of tile soared here into the complicated pattern of masonry against the pale azure sky.
‘You see? That same floor we’ve been crossing reaches right to here, one great caldarium, with that hypocaust deployed underneath it all the way. And just here is the vent from the heating system, the column that brought the hot air directly up here into the room when required.’
It was merely a framework of broken, blonde walls, barely knee-high, like the shaft of a huge well, a shell withdrawn into a corner of the great room. Over the round vent a rough wooden cover, obviously modern, was laid. Gus put a hand to its edge and lifted, and the cover rose on its rim, and showed them a glimpse of a deep shaft dropping into darkness, partially silted up below with rubble.
‘Yes—it would take some money and labour to dig that lot out! Wonder what happened to the original cover? It would be bronze, probably. Maybe it’s in the museum, though I think some of the better finds went to the town museum in Silcaster.’
‘This is what you call the laconicum?’ she asked, drawing back rather dubiously from the dank breath that distilled out of the earth.
‘That’s it. Though you might, in some places, get the word laconia used for small hot-air rooms, too. They could send the temperature up quickly when required, by raising the cover—even admit the flames from the furnace if they wanted to. Come and have a look round the museum. If you’ve time? But perhaps you’ve got a long drive ahead,’ he said, not so much hesitantly as enquiringly.
‘I’m staying at “The Salmon’s Return”, just upstream,’ she said. ‘Ten minutes’ walk, if that. Yes, let’s see the museum, too.’
It was a square, prefabricated building, none too appropriate to the site, but banished to the least obtrusive position, behind the entrance kiosk. It was full of glass cases, blocks of stone bearing vestigial carving, some fragments of very beautiful lettering upon the remains of a stone tablet, chattering schoolboys prodding inquisitively everywhere, and the young teacher, perspiring freely now, delivering a lecture upon Samian ware. Boden was not among his listeners, nor anywhere in the three small, crowded rooms. By this time Charlotte would have felt a shock of surprise at ever finding that young man where he was supposed to be.
They made the round of the place. A great deal of red glaze pottery, some glass vessels, even one or two fragments of silver; tarnished mirrors, ivory pins, little bronze brooches, a ring or two. Gus, tepid about the collection in general, grew excited about one or two personal ornaments.
‘See this little dragon brooch—there isn’t a straight line in it, it’s composed of a dozen quite unnecessarily complex curves. Can you think of anything less Roman? Yet it is Roman—interbred with Celtic. Like the mixed marriages that were general here. This kind of ornament, in a great many variations, you can locate all down this border. In the north, too, but they differ enough to be recognisable.’
She found the same curvilinear decoration in several other pieces, and delighted him by picking them out without hesitation from the precise and formal Roman artifacts round them.
‘Anything that looks like a symbol for a labyrinth, odds on it’s either Celtic or Norse.’
It was nearly closing time, and the school party, thankfully marshalled by its young leader, was pouring vociferously out into the chill of the early evening, and heading with released shouts for its waiting coach. The last and smallest darted back, self-importantly, to inscribe his name with care in the visitors’ book, which lay open on a table by the door, before allowing himself to be shepherded after his companions. On impulse, Charlotte stopped to look at what he had added in the ‘Remarks’ column, and laughed. ‘Veni, vidi, vici’, announced the ball-pen scrawl.
‘You should sign, too,’ said Gus, at her shoulder.
She knew why, but by then it was almost over in any case, for when was she likely to see him again? So she signed ‘Charlotte Rossignol’, well aware that he was reading the letters as fast as she formed them.
‘Now may I drive you back to the pub?’ he said casually, as they emerged into the open air, and found the studious young man of the kiosk waiting to see his last customers out, one finger still keeping his place in a book. ‘I’m staying there, too. And as it happens, I didn’t walk. I’ve got my car here.’
The car park was empty but for the elderly gentleman’s massive Ford, which was just crunching over the gravel towards the road, an old but impressive bronze Aston Martin which Charlotte supposed must belong to Gus—it sent him up a couple of notches in her regard—and the school bus, still stationary, boiling over with bored boys, and emitting a plaintive chorus of: ‘Why are we waiting?’ The driver stood leaning negligently against a front wing, rolling himself a cigarette. Clearly he had long since trained himself to tune out all awareness of boys unless they menaced his engine or coachwork.
And why were they waiting? The noise they were making indicated that no teacher was present, and there could be only one explanation for his absence now.
‘He’s lost his stray again,’ said Gus, halting with the car keys levelled in his hand.
‘Here he comes now.’ And so he did, puffing up out of the silvered, twilit bowl of Aurae Phiala, ominous at dusk under a low ceiling of dun cloud severed from the earth by a rim of lurid gold. A glass bowl of fragile relics closed with a pewter lid; and outside, the fires of ruin, like a momentary recollection of the night, how many centuries ago, when the Welsh tribesmen massed, raided, killed and burned, writing ‘Finis’ to the history of this haunted city.
‘Poor boy!’ said Charlotte, suddenly outraged by the weariness and exasperation of this ineffectual little man, worn out by a job he had probably chosen as the most profitable within his scope, and now found to be extending him far beyond the end of his tether. ‘Whoever persuaded him he ought to be a teacher?’
‘He’s not that far gone,’ Gus assured her with unexpected shrewdness. ‘He knows when to write off his losses.’
The young man came surging up to them, as the only other responsible people left around. ‘I beg your pardon, but you haven’t seen one of my senior pupils around anywhere, by any chance? A dark boy, nearly seventeen, answers—when he answers!—to the name of Gerry Boden. He’s a professional absentee. Where we are, he is most likely not to be. Sometimes with escort—chorus, rather! This time, apparently, without, which must be by his own contriving. I’m missing just one boy—the magnate himself.’