Cold Earth, page 2
Anyway, the little plane from Nuuk was fun. There was a pilot called Anders with shiny muscles, and I sat behind him on a box full of trowels and divided my attention between him easing big levers up and down and the landscape, which was spectacular and interestingly close. It’s hard to estimate distances over snow, but I realised quite how low we were flying when he pointed out some kayaks crossing an inlet like darting fish. It’s not entirely reassuring to be told that it’s safer to skim the ice than to take such a small plane through low cloud, so I imagined a future in which you became an Arctic pilot and we lived in a little house by the sea, with white walls and one of those cast-iron stoves. Which is not to suggest that I will ever consider changing my mind about living within walking distance of purveyors of fairly traded coffee beans and hardback books.
I could hear Americans demonstrating team-building skills and putting up tents with unnecessary self-assurance while I wrestled with my underwear. Even once I’d managed to put my bra on while more or less lying down, I didn’t hurry. I had the feeling that four weeks with the people I could hear out there would be plenty and there was no sense in starting it any earlier than I had to. When I did come out, hair still a mess because there is no way of brushing long hair in a small tent, two men were leading an alarming number of horses across the bright grass down by the shore, and the field looked as if someone had cut-pasted microscope slides of fungus or bacteria onto an Arctic summer landscape. Round and oval tents in unnatural colours had spread across the turf, and the huddle of people on the stones by the river where Yianni had set up the stove looked as if they’d been imported from another image, probably the alumni magazine of some rich American college. I thought I would rather get back in the river than meet a bunch of confident strangers who would have to live with me for the rest of the summer, but I walked towards them, telling myself to listen when they told me their names. I didn’t, you know, when I met you at Charles’s party. When I went down the next morning and told Helen and Claire that there was a man still asleep in my room, they asked who it was and I had to admit that I had no idea. And then I didn’t want you to think I was the kind of woman who slept with men whose names she didn’t know so I couldn’t ask. I looked at your post and would have called you Stephen had you not taken a message for him before I’d quite decided to risk it.
I was still thinking about that when Yianni introduced them so of course I forgot all the names immediately. There were several very clean-looking Americans who could rise from the rocks while holding cups of instant coffee (I thought Americans knew better than to drink instant coffee) and extending large flat hands and open smiling countenances like something out of Thornton Wilder. They were mostly wearing white T-shirts which appeared to have been ironed and were probably going to go on looking like that no matter how much mud and river water came their way. There was also a Scottish girl who appeared potentially congenial except that she exuded peaceful self-confidence, which is doubtless a fine quality to have but unnerving for the rest of us. I know you say people sense unease and become uneasy, a bit like dogs sensing fear and becoming aggressive. All it means is that the bad behaviour of people and dogs is my fault. I don’t know how that’s meant to help.
Everyone stood about as if the rocks had got too hot to sit on after we’d all expressed the statutory and fictional pleasure in first encounters. Reading Henry James, you’d think it’s the Old World that’s meant to be courteous but Americans practise levels of politeness unknown to the English bourgeoisie. The prospect of trying to beat American good manners before breakfast made me feel like a bird in a net. I went and sat on the grass next to the Scottish girl, who looked at the Americans and then at me and sat down too. Pebbles wavered through the clear water at our feet and a white cloud processed across the dark screes above the valley. Yianni turned back to the Primus and began to dole stewed dried fruit from a steaming pan into chipped enamel dishes. I could see that it was filling and would prevent scurvy. The Scottish girl was also watching him and it became clear that one of us needed to say something. I tried to relax my shoulders.
‘Do you think the water is as warm as it looks?’ she asked.
I glanced at her. She was looking at the river with a slight frown, as if she’d lost something in it.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I tried to wash in it earlier. It feels colder than water.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh well. It’s good clean dirt, on digs.’
‘It’ll have to be.’ I couldn’t imagine I’d be able to con myself back into the river now I knew what it was like. ‘We can’t put any soap or shampoo into the water anyway.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No rubbish, no fires, no soap. No picking anything that grows and no planting anything that doesn’t. Good thing the Greenlanders didn’t think like that, isn’t it, there’d be nothing here for us to find.’
‘Maybe they did,’ I said. ‘Maybe that’s what happened. They weren’t raped and pillaged by pirates or starved by climate change and they didn’t all go to America or back to Iceland, they just went green and trod so lightly on the earth that nobody knows they were there.’
‘Maybe,’ said Yianni, passing us each a bowl. ‘But there’d still be bodies. Even if they had wicker coffins. Or ashes. You can’t just disappear the dead. That’s the point about archaeology. People can’t help leaving themselves.’
I shivered. The enamel dish was too hot and I put it down.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve already forgotten your name. I’m awful at listening to introductions.’
‘I’m Catriona,’ she said. ‘And you’re Nina? Are you the one from Oxford, with the scholarship? Yianni told me. You must be really good.’
I have no idea what the right answer to this might be. Yes, I’m brilliant. No, I’m very thick but good at deceiving learned committees. The cloud had nearly passed the mountain.
‘I live in London now,’ I said. ‘My partner has a job there.’
I wondered if you had finished painting the bedroom and how my orchid was responding to your ministrations. I thought of you standing on the step locking the door on a silent flat each morning and returning to the takeaway menus on the mat and the crumbs on the table in the evening.
‘Do you like it?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I miss Oxford. But David likes his job, and I can work just as well in the British Library as the Bodleian. I just happen to prefer old buildings where my friends are to curved wood and strangers.’
‘But you do the nineteenth century, is that right?’
I wondered why Yianni had told her about me and not me about her, and what else he might have said. Do you warn people, before they meet me? I picked up the dish again and prodded a grainy pear.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘English lit. I’m looking at the influence of Old Norse sagas on Victorian poetry. Mostly the Pre-Raphaelites so far, though I’m getting into ghost stories. And then I got a grant. Well, not really. But there’s a bequest fund you can apply to for research-related travel. I just need to write something explaining how being here helps with my doctorate. It doesn’t, really, that’s the whole point, that the Vikings turned into a Victorian fantasy, but I’ll make something up. I’ve always wanted to go to Greenland and Yianni said I could come if I didn’t mind being unskilled labour.’
And when he said ‘unskilled labour’ you put your glass down and said everyone should try manual work once in a lifetime, you in your hand-made shirt, and when we laughed you said you’d helped in the conservation department when you started at Sotheby’s. At least I get soil under my nails. If not worse.
‘You do medieval archaeology?’ I asked.
She nodded. A breeze stirred her Flemish Madonna hair.
‘Faroese, mostly. Early medieval North Atlantic migration patterns. I end up reading bits of oceanography as well.’
‘Has the Atlantic changed in eight centuries?’ I asked.
‘Well, some people think so and some not. Temperatures change but no one’s sure what effect that has.’
One of the Americans leant forward, a short guy with red hair that stood up like thistledown and an All-American jaw-line.
‘Cool thesis,’ he said. ‘Funny how other people’s doctorates are always cooler than mine.’
‘You’re not American,’ I heard myself say.
He looked at me. ‘Should I be?’
The blades of grass are hard to tear, tougher than the green stuff at home.
‘No. I just thought you all were. Sorry.’
‘What’s your doctorate?’ asked Catriona, eating an apricot that lay in her spoon like an egg yolk.
‘Cultivation and foraging in liminal settlement areas in Norway,’ he said. ‘I’m working with Brian Claridge, at Madison.’ He looked at me. ‘So you’re right, I am based in the US. I’m from Sheffield.’
‘Sorry,’ I muttered. You tell me to pretend to be confident.
I took a breath. ‘What are liminal settlement areas?’
‘Places where people can only live in good years,’ said Catriona. ‘Right on the edge of habitability.’
The red-head tipped his bowl. ‘So in northern Norway, you find houses or even villages that seem to have been deserted for a few decades then rebuilt and then deserted again. The main stress factor is plague but short-term variations in climate do it as well.’
I poured juice from my spoon back into the bowl. I could see why he thought other people’s research was more fun. ‘You could use that to analyse the property market.’
‘I expect someone does,’ said Catriona. ‘I met Brian Claridge at the NACR conference last year. Were you there?’
The deceptive All-American jaw was chewing but he shook his head.
The other guy put down his empty plate. He was tall, with those big American shoulders that bespeak a childhood diet of beef full of growth hormones. ‘I’ve got a friend who’s working on the anthropology of surfing at the University of Hawaii,’ he said. He really was American.
We all looked out at the ice gliding across the black water and the river swirling over the pebbles and saw the point of Hawaii.
‘My friend Mike wants one called “Consuming Passions: Restaurants in Twentieth-Century French Film”,’ I offered.
‘But what he actually does is auditory neurophysics.’
‘Sounds more lucrative than French film,’ muttered Yianni. ‘Or medieval archaeology.’
‘I’d like to be in Venice.’ Catriona put her bowl on the rock and stretched out her legs. ‘How about, “Representations of Power in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Portraiture”. Though I always wonder about the stuff that’s never been called up in copyright libraries. You could do something on the unread holdings of the British Library.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I always think the most interesting work would be on the bits of history that got lost. I mean, that’s a lot of the appeal of the Greenlanders, isn’t it? We want everyone to leave a story. And those lost Americans. You know, the early colonists. The ones who just disappeared.’
‘Roanoke,’ said the fake American.
‘Anyway, I bet the unread holdings of the BL are probably mostly railway handbooks and things,’ I said. There were apple rings left cold and wet on my plate and I thought they could probably stay there. ‘That and things people would be too embarrassed to read in Humanities Two. Mills and Boon. Venice sounds better.’
The American woman cleared her throat. Her hair was perfectly tidy, as if she was expecting to be photographed, and I saw that she was wearing make-up, the kind of expensive, cunning make-up that betokens years of practice. It looked as if someone had dropped a Barbie doll on the grass. I found myself fingering a spot on my chin that I’d earlier decided didn’t exist as long as I didn’t have a mirror to see it. I thought The Beauty Myth was compulsory reading for preppie American women, so often in search of victim status.
‘“Reading and Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature,”’ she said. She didn’t sound as American as she looked, one of those voices drifting in the mid-Atlantic that sounds fake whichever side you’re on. Her stewed fruit was still floating like dead goldfish in her bowl. You’d have to be seriously screwed up about food to worry about the calories in a stewed apricot.
‘What in particular?’ I asked. ‘I do nineteenth-century English lit.’
She addressed the ground at my feet.
‘Oh, I’ve always liked Little Women,’ she said. ‘And Laura Ingalls Wilder.’
‘Hoop skirts and home baking,’ I said. ‘There were women in nineteenth-century public life, you know. Qualifying as doctors and campaigning in politics.’
She moved her gaze to my jeans. ‘I know. But there were hoop skirts and home baking as well.’
Yianni stood up.
‘If you’ve all finished breakfast, let’s look around the site. I’ll wash up while you get your notebooks.’
‘Where do I brush my teeth?’ asked the woman with the hair.
Yianni grinned. ‘Anywhere you like. There’s drinking water in the stores tent. But don’t spit the toothpaste.’
‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ She seemed to be asking a rock to the left of his shoulder.
He shrugged. ‘Swallow?’
The fake American smirked.
‘That’s what I did last night,’ I said. ‘It can’t be poisonous.’
She took a breath and then shrugged. ‘OK.’
‘I’m sure we’ll get used to it,’ said the Hawaiian surfer’s friend. ‘Just use less.’ We walked back towards the camp in silence and I watched as the others crawled into their tents. Catriona and then the tall guy came out with spiral-bound notebooks. I’d brought this notebook and one for ‘research’, whatever form that might take, so I found the back of the printout of my flight times that you made while I showered that last morning at home. It occurred to me that pieces of paper would not rise from the turf the way they rise from all flat surfaces at home. I watched a sheep wander between the tents, cropping industriously. The components of vellum are still more readily available here than paper.
Yianni was standing at the other side of the river, among sticks and strings marking out a grid across crumbling stone walls. Even I could see ridges in the turf and oddly square patches of vegetation, and at one side there were lines of stones which I couldn’t imagine had really been there for eight hundred years. A shallow trench still ran from the river through the fallen stones and down to the sea. The medieval Greenlanders had running water, did you know that? And saunas and frozen-food stores in the cellars.
Catriona joined me.
‘Has he already shown you round?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘I only arrived last night. There were all the stores and tools to deal with. I probably know less about the site than you do.’
‘I only know what Yianni’s told me,’ she said. ‘It’s an odd one, easily accessible from the sea but probably inhabited late. Mostly the late ones are inland. The ones you can see from the open sea got raided as soon as the cod fishermen found them undefended.’
We set off across the field.
‘Is that what you think finished them off?’ I asked. ‘Pirate raids?’
Out at sea, the horizon was a straight line where dark water met grey sky. You’d see anyone coming long before they landed. But maybe not before they saw you.
‘Some of them,’ she said. ‘And some of them probably found their farming methods weren’t working anymore when the climate cooled. I don’t think there’s a dramatic end, just life getting steadily more difficult for a few generations, maybe raised mortality and less food, until the people who could leave left. But most of the sites here look more like the Clearances and Ben’s liminal settlement areas than the Potato Famine. There’d be more burials, and mass graves, if they had plague or acute famine.’
I thought about the headlines again. Mass graves. We were coming to the river, and the Americans were already finding stepping stones.
‘Did you hear any news, on your way here?’ I asked.
‘Not especially.’ She put her notebook in the pocket of her green cagoule. ‘Oh, you mean the virus thing?’
‘Mm.’ A fish flicked the surface of the river.
‘It’s just a media panic. I wouldn’t worry. Easy journalism for August. Remember last time, people were actually buying masks and spending God knows how much on fake vaccine on the internet and then the papers lost interest and we got scared about something else. Honestly, by the time we get back everyone’ll be worrying about the property market again.’
‘My partner David says it’s a smokescreen for something else. Either the Americans are going to say terrorists have been spreading germs so we need to invade somewhere else with oil or they have invaded somewhere else with oil but Americans are too scared of other people’s handkerchiefs to notice.’
‘He likes his conspiracy theories, then?’
I looked up. ‘There was that thing about crop sprayers.’
‘Precious little evidence for it.’
Our own Americans were reaching the other side of the river, having repositioned a series of rocks so the woman could avoid getting her feet wet. The tall guy gave her his hand as she made the last jump.
‘Anyway, a proper pandemic might be quite good for the environment,’ said Catriona. ‘It’s probably about the only way of arresting climate change now. Depopulation from the plague did wonders for medieval fauna and flora. But last I heard it was a few children in Delhi, a hypochondriac American vet with a cold and maybe some wild birds. Are you going first or shall I?’
