Cold Earth, page 4
‘Good morning, Nina. You didn’t sleep too well?’
‘I hope you weren’t disturbed.’
Jim looked improbably clean and freshly shaven beside Yianni’s stubble and grimy sweatshirt. Shaving seemed so unlikely, with icy water and no mirror, that I wondered if he used depilatory cream instead. He watched as I tried to push strands of greasy hair back into my plait. Or maybe Americans get their chins lasered before going abroad.
‘Well, you can’t help your dreams.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
Ben came across the field from the river, looking invigorated.
‘Is it more of the same today?’ I asked. ‘Digging?’
Yianni pulled his sleeve down over his hand and lifted the lid of the pan at his feet. A cloud of apple-scented steam drifted between us.
‘That is what we’re here for,’ he said.
‘I know. I’m just wondering when we start finding things.’
‘When we find them. That’s archaeology.’
Jim ran a broad hand through his combed hair.
‘What got you interested in Greenland, Nina?’
Behind me, I heard Catriona start rustling in her tent.
‘I like the far North,’ I said. ‘I always have. Hence the thesis, really. I thought there might be some good travel grants, and I fancied a few months in Iceland. Though that was before I met my partner.’
‘Less keen on travelling now?’
Not less keen. Only that the price of separation from you is too high to pay.
‘He works,’ I said. ‘In a map and print gallery. He can’t get six months off to go to Iceland and follow in the footsteps of William Morris. And I don’t need to, really. In fact the imaginary nature of Iceland in Victorian poetry is the whole point of my thesis, but it would be fun. And there are grants.’
Catriona crawled out of her tent. She hadn’t brushed her hair either.
‘I thought Iceland was amazing,’ she said. ‘I wanted to paint everything. I’d like to go back with oils and great big canvases.’
‘You paint?’ asked Jim. As if he’d worked it out for himself.
‘I’m better at painting than research,’ she said, sitting down. ‘I didn’t go to art school because I thought I ought to do something more practical. And now I’m writing a doctoral thesis on medieval history.’
‘Did you bring paints here?’ I asked.
She looked at the sky and the sea. ‘Yes. I’ve always wanted to paint proper ice. I sometimes wonder if I specialise in the North Atlantic because I like painting the light.’
‘You won’t get proper ice, you know,’ said Yianni. ‘At least, I hope not.’
‘It’s pretty good,’ said Catriona. ‘I’m not complaining.’
After breakfast, while Ben and Jim were down at the river rinsing plates and Ruth was in her tent, presumably enacting one of her beautifying rituals before facing the day’s stones and sheep, Catriona went to her tent and came back with an artist’s pad. It was my turn to make lunch and I had been considering ingredients and scanning the ground for wild herbs.
‘Did the Greenlanders eat angelica?’ I asked. ‘It’s all over the place. You can buy it candied, at home. Recipes tell you to use it to decorate trifle.’
‘If it’s edible I should think they ate it,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see my paintings? I thought you were interested.’
‘I’d love to,’ I said. Which I meant, except that even four years in your company has not taught me to say intelligent things about visual art. I cannot, really, get beyond what I like and dislike. Sorry.
But Catriona’s paintings are beautiful. She paints in Skye, watercolours, mostly seascapes, and she makes the wateriness part of the interpretation, as if it’s overflowed from what she’s looking at onto the page. There are shapes in her seas that bulk and turn like seals, or drowning men.
‘Do you exhibit?’ I asked. ‘These are fantastic. Have you done any here?’
‘Not yet. I’m thinking about it. It’s why I came, to be honest. Don’t tell Yianni.’
‘I won’t. But he wouldn’t mind. I came because it sounded fun. Because I thought I’d probably like remembering it later on.’
‘But you’re his friend. I’m meant to be here for work. I had a few paintings in an exhibition in Edinburgh last year. Just a local gallery. Nothing big.’ The book in her hand shook a little.
‘It sounds exciting to me,’ I said. ‘Did they sell?’
She nodded, biting her lip and smiling like a child remembering Christmas.
‘So the gallery wants more?’
‘Mm. Well, they want to look at more. They might not like them, of course. Those ones were less abstract.’
‘These look lovely to me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know much about it, but I do get stuck in galleries while my partner’s networking. I get bored, usually, but I could look at these for a long time.’
‘I’m glad you like them,’ she said.
Ben and Jim were coming back, carrying the dishes in the wicker basket so uncharacteristically provided by Yianni for the purpose. It’s like the one old Mrs Rabbit takes to buy five currant buns and a loaf of brown bread.
‘I’ll put them away,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell people.’
I wasn’t sure what I wasn’t telling people.
‘I won’t,’ I promised.
After lunch – crispbread and tinned tuna with mayonnaise from a jar – Jim asked Yianni if he could look at his e-mail. I’d been trying to postpone asking for as long as possible, knowing that Yianni would get cross about what he regards as recreational use of the connection, and knowing also that no amount of e-mail would be any replacement for your voice in my ear and your arms around me.
‘Is there a special reason?’ Yianni asked. ‘Once a week was what I said in the briefing. The satellite connection’s expensive, you know.’
‘No.’ Jim scraped at a smear of mayonnaise with his finger. ‘I just worry about my family, is all. There are a lot of poultry farms where I’m from. I haven’t picked up any news in a while.’
‘What would you do?’ asked Yianni.
‘I don’t know. Nothing, I suppose. It’s just kind of strange, though. I guess we get used to 24/7 news. I’m an internet junkie, at home.’
‘Me too,’ said Ben. ‘I always get a shock when I look at my history. How much time I spend on-line when I think I’m working. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, if people wrote their theses faster before the internet.’
‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Catriona. ‘Imagine all that extra time tracking down information. And travelling to libraries. Seems only fair, the internet gives us time and we give it to the internet.’
‘I threw away the network cable for my laptop,’ said Ruth. She was breaking a piece of crispbread into smaller and smaller bits. ‘I have to go up to campus for the internet. You can’t do anything about the news, anyway.’
‘You don’t use the net at all?’ asked Ben. ‘You don’t check your e-mail?’
She shrugged. The bits of crispbread were so small she had to crumble them between finger and thumb.
‘Most days. I go in most days anyway. There’s not much that can’t wait a day. People could call me.’
Could. It didn’t sound as if they did.
‘Anyway,’ said Yianni, ‘I think we’ll stick to once a week. And please don’t spend long browsing, it really is unbelievably expensive. We can take turns if you like, allocate days, and then someone can have a look at the headlines a few times a week. Use it this evening if you like. But me, I’m enjoying the break. Ruth’s right, there’s nothing we can do about news. Concentrate on what’s here. There should be enough discoveries up there. Speaking of which?’
We started to get up. Catriona stacked the melamine beakers we used for water, chlorine-scented by the ‘purifying tablets’ that are supposed to counteract whatever people catch from sheep shit, and Ruth gathered the plates. She had a French manicure, new or at least touched-up since we got here. You know, that thing with three layers of nail polish that your sister does.
Up at the farmhouse, we had at last finished lifting the turf. Before the ground dried out, you could see lines and shapes in the soil, and Ruth and Yianni arranged stakes and string around the colour changes. I expected a plan of something to emerge from the ground, but it didn’t.
‘Right,’ said Yianni. ‘Trowels, now.’
He handed round what looked like plasterer’s trowels, and allocated sections of the main hall. I found myself between Jim and Catriona. Yianni showed me how to dig, as if scooping spoonfuls from the crumbly soil, and I settled to work, alternately kneeling and squatting by the fallen walls. The sun was out, and I looked away from a worm writhing in the roots of the torn-up turf. I hadn’t been going long enough to get bored when my trowel scraped something hard.
‘There’s something here!’ I said.
‘’S probably a potsherd,’ said Catriona. ‘I’ve got some, look.’
She had a small handful of flat brown things which she was collecting on a stone. I brushed the earth away from where I was digging with my fingers. She watched and laughed.
‘You get used to them,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten. The first ones are exciting.’
I picked it up, lighter and flatter than stone, a rough rectangle about an inch across.
‘Earthenware,’ said Catriona. ‘Here, put it in a bag.’
There are little plastic Ziploc bags of the sort used for beads or cheap earrings at home, but instead of a price you write where you found the thing in relation to the grid of string, the date and the finder’s initials. You could almost reconstruct the site, later, and I suppose that’s what they do in museums.
‘Is this Norse, then? The last person to touch it was one of the Norse Greenlanders?’ I asked, touching it through the bag.
‘Probably,’ said Catriona. She kept on digging. ‘I mean, it’s in the right place. As far as we know, no one else has been round here dropping plates. The Inuit didn’t fire pots. Of course, it could be later, though in a way that would be more interesting since we don’t think there’s been anyone later. We’ll find hundreds of them, honestly. By the end of today you’ll be putting them back because you can’t be bothered to go get a bag.’
Jim stopped and looked up. ‘I hope not.’
‘No, OK, not here. I’ve been on digs where people did. Do you think we’ll find willow pattern here?’
‘Willow pattern?’
My grandparents had willow pattern, including a cake-stand which my grandmother used to cover with doilies and home-made meringues, scones and fruit cake. She taught me about turning the oven off and leaving the meringues overnight.
‘It’s a running joke. Wherever you are, whatever the site, there’ll be willow pattern. You’d think Wedgewood paid people to drop fragments into Roman remains. I think you’ve got to go back to the Bronze Age to escape willow pattern.’
‘Or cross the Atlantic,’ said Jim. ‘But I’ve heard about it.’
My trowel struck something else and I pulled out another potsherd, darker and thicker.
‘It’s not from the same thing,’ I said.
‘They almost never are,’ said Catriona. ‘If three match, start paying attention.’
She added another one to her pile.
‘How do they get here?’ I asked. ‘I mean, does it mean the Norse Greenlanders smashed a lot of plates? And left them on the floor?’
‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Catriona. ‘More likely, they just had an awful lot of pots. There wouldn’t have been many other kinds of container. And if this house was inhabited for, say, three hundred years, you’d expect a lot of bits and pieces.’
I hadn’t thought about that, the idea that the farms were really old when they were abandoned. I had imagined people bailing out of a new and insecure situation, but most of the settlements were at least the equivalent of Georgian. As old as your parents’ house.
‘Why do you think they left? If they did?’ I asked. ‘I know nobody knows, but what do you think?’ I couldn’t help glancing out to sea, checking the horizon.
Catriona went on burrowing with her little trowel.
‘Probably a bit of everything,’ she said. The roots under her fingers were dusted with a crumbly loam that looked like coffee grounds. If Yianni serves up any more weak instant coffee I might be tempted to try them. ‘Some of the farms must have been marginal even in good years, and when temperatures fell they’d have been unsustainable. And I think there is evidence for the erosion theory. That the farming techniques they were using exhausted the land after a while. There must have been some raids by fishermen once the cod banks were discovered, there are a good few burnt buildings. And when that happened in the west of Ireland they tended to take all the young people as forced labour. We don’t really know how many Greenlanders went to America or what happened to them, and we’ve no idea how many went back to Iceland. It’s not a dramatic story, my version, but I can imagine that over a century or two lots of young people might have left and the older ones have done less and less on the land. It’s happened in parts of the Highlands and Islands even in the last century.’
‘So you think it was one of Ben’s liminal settlements?’ I started to dig again.
‘Kind of. But politically as well as ecologically liminal. They needed amicable contact with the rest of the Norse world and they had no way of defending themselves against the fishermen.’
Jim was working through his patch as if winter were on the way and he was planning to hibernate in it, but he paused for a moment.
‘It’s not the PC version, but I bet there were clashes with the Inuit. When the mini Ice Age came and the Inuit came down here. Two sets of people competing for the same resources during the winter, there’s no way there wasn’t conflict. And think about the way the sagas write about the Inuit, it’s obvious they thought they were savages. Barely human.’
‘Maybe,’ said Catriona. She pulled out another piece of earth and brushed it off, then dropped it. ‘Just a stone, that one. But the odd scuffle wouldn’t finish off all these scattered farms.’
‘And there was the Black Death,’ added Jim. He was frowning at his little earthworks. ‘That thing they say, anyone who left Iceland with it would have been dead before they got to Greenland. My supervisor says, the thing is, you don’t have to be alive to give someone the plague.’
Or any other kind of virus. My pulse quickened. Catriona pushed her hair behind her ears.
‘Yes,’ she said. She put her trowel down and started to arrange her potsherds against the handle, nudging each one with her forefinger until they were perfectly aligned. ‘I don’t think this is the time to think about that, is it, but the burial patterns right along the coast are wrong. Epidemics leave mass graves.’
Mass graves again. I realised I was holding my breath and tried to exhale.
‘You wouldn’t get mass graves with all these isolated farms,’ said Jim. ‘And there are a few where whole families have been found in the beds or around the house.’
My hand shook. ‘Can we stop talking about epidemics, please? I’m going to the loo.’
I put my trowel down and stood up. Everything went black and I stood there, trying to remember how to breathe. It’s like driving, breathing. The more you think about how to do it, the harder it gets. I stepped blindly over the fallen walls and looked down at my pink tent and thought about the books inside it. I could hear the running river and the wind over the tall grass outside the hall, where centuries of people throwing things out made the soil rich and the wild plants strong.
I am in the infield again, sitting among flowers and tall grasses that grow to my shoulders. I am only a few feet from the little boy, and I can see him watching his uncle and his brother-in-law playing chess. It is early June, one of those weeks when the sun does not set but glides towards the western horizon at intervals that seem much more than a day. It looks like evening because the shadows have lengthened out across the valley until the byre’s shade reaches nearly to the water at the bottom of the hill, but no one is going to bed. The bustle of daytime is over. The woman has taken the baby down to the river, saying to the boy that she hopes he might have some memory of the changing light and chiming water when everything is still and dark in the winter. The summer seems endless, but when winter comes, the women and children especially will spend enough time in bed in the darkness to last anyone through the weeks of light.
The men are playing chess outside – no sense in being indoors when the sun is warm on the turf and the ground hums with the business of insects – and the boy sits on the short grass, facing the bay and pretending to play with the boat his uncle carved for him last winter. He isn’t playing. He is fascinated by the chess board his uncle has made and particularly by the little people which came from the old country. They are made of a smooth, heavy stone, better than the soapstone the Greenlanders use for such things. You can polish soapstone and it’s good to touch, but these shine with a clearer light and they are cold to the skin, even in the sun or by the fire in winter. They look like opaque ice. The farmer is putting his brother’s pawns on the ground beside him as he captures them, and the boy edges nearer. When the woman comes up from the river and stops to show the baby to his uncle, the boy picks one up and puts it in his sleeve. He knows enough not to move away at once, as if he has done something with which he does not like to be associated. After a while he crosses the shaded field and goes to sleep in the hayloft, curling up like a mouse in the straw. It is warm and light, but straw is flammable and I watch over him as if I might be able to save him.
I have not had an unbroken night since leaving home. The bad dreams are so vivid I am afraid to go back to sleep, and the cold, dead light of the early hours is not reassuring. I am beginning to feel slow and sleepy in the day, especially during the bright hours after lunch when the morning’s work and talk have dimmed my memory of the night. At home, when my thoughts drift through an underwater haze in the afternoon hours, distant from the momentum of starting the day and the pressure of finishing it, I walk the length of the reading room, under the gaze of the dead scholars on the walls and the more or less living ones draped across the desks, and drink six or seven tiny waxed paper cups of very cold water from the cooler outside the ladies’. (Sometimes I meet someone there and we agree that since we’re not achieving much anyway, we might as well go to the café. Sometimes I go food shopping and then home to cook with the Afternoon Play, but I expect you already knew that my cooking is not fuelled entirely by devotion to your pleasure. Once or twice I have even bought chocolates from the Maison des Chocolatiers and spent the rest of the afternoon eating them in the cinema, watching Hollywood romantic comedies to which you and everyone else I know would prefer two hours in front of a screensaver. I have found my reputation for diligent scholarship very liberating.)
