And Chris had waited too until the second egg. 'I think I'll go down and have a look at it,' he addressed no one in particular. 'Is that okay, Father?'
'What?' Melanie, at the age of six, didn't know anyone very well, but she knew her brother better than anyone else. 'Me too!'
Larry looked up from his paper. 'Not just you — all of us, dummy2
Chris.' He grinned at Rachel, then at Melanie, and finally at Chris. 'After the washing-up we'll go down and look at old Mrs Griffin's cottage. And then we'll make the rules. Okay?'
And it had been much better than Rachel had expected, after Larry had slashed his way through all the obstacles with a terrifying weapon he had acquired from somewhere, which looked as though it had last been carried by an angry sans-culotte in the French Revolution.
So, finally, they had reached the mouldering wreck of old Mrs Griffin's home: all the paraphernalia of a humble, long-lost and once-upon-a-time existence had still been there, among the nettles and fallen bricks and timbers, and the coarse-leafed growth: broken chairs and smashed furniture, the bits of an immense iron bedstead; the shards of crockery, and bottles and broken bottles — bottles everywhere — and the rusty evidence of tinned food — tins of every shape and size, mixed with rusty springs from an antique armchair mouldering on the edge of the pond.
'What's this?' Melanie held up half of a chamber-pot by its handle. 'Is it for fruit salad?'
'I'll have this, for my bedroom,' Chris, eagle-eyed, held up a pewter candle-stick. But then he'd looked at his father.
'Father — let's go back now.'
Larry looked at his son. 'What's the matter?'
'I don't like the smell.' Chris had balanced himself on a sheet dummy2
of corrugated iron. 'It smells like ... I don't know what —
drains, maybe?'
' Yyyrrrch!' Melanie threw her half-chamber-pot into the pond, raising oily circles of water, to disturb clouds of insects. ' Drains!'
'Let's go back,' Chris had repeated his demand. 'This is a beastly place.'
'Yes,' agreed Melanie. 'And ... I bet she was a witch — old Mrs Griffin!'
So they had gone back.
And it had been all right — even all right while the children ranged far and wide over the moor, and under the hill and over the hill and beyond, on foot and then on bicycle, as times had changed, and public inquiry (and government, and minister) had succeeded public inquiry, and the years had passed over the moor, and overhill and underhill, and Dr Groom's job had developed. And Rachel had been a member of the Women's Institute, and then treasurer, and then secretary. And, in the seventh year, Madam President.
And all their plans had changed, as the motorway had taken a different line, and Underhill Farm survived.
Until that day when Chris — Chris with his voice broken, out of the school choir and into the Junior Colts rugger XV, but Arts-inclined in the run-up to his A-level exams, had cycled dummy2
over to the archaeology unit which was blazing the trail for the new line of the motorway, beyond the edge of the moor —
'Mother — Rachel . . .' (Chris wasn't sure how a chap ought to address his mother: some chaps thought Christian names were OTT, some were still old-fashioned) '. . . you know the old Griffin place — ?'
Long since, Rachel had stopped worrying about the old Griffin place. It was where it had always been, more-or-less.
But after all these years it wasn't one of her problems. 'What about it, darling? The old Griffin place — ?'
'I was talking to a fellow — a Cambridge chap on the dig over the hill, where they're working on that Romano-British village . . . which they think may have some Anglo-Saxon burials . . .'
'Yes, dear?' Rachel was just beginning to acclimatize to that harsh reality of her son's greater knowledge in certain areas
— like matters Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon, as well as sporting.
'He was very interesting — what he said was, I mean.'
She must be careful not to irritate him with her stupidity.
'About archaeology?' She had driven past the excavations only the day before, and had admired the chequer-board regularity of the work in progress.
'About dustmen, actually.'
'Dustmen?' Now she really had to be careful. So ... not another word.
dummy2
'Refuse collectors — garbage men.' Suddenly he was serious.
'You know, if my A-levels go okay ... a big if, I agree ... but if they do, and I can get a place at a decent university ... I wouldn't mind reading archaeology. How do you think Dad would take that?'
Rachel felt assailed on two fronts. 'You'll have to ask him yourself. And it'll be your decision in the end. So long as you don't want to be a dustman . . .'
He looked at her seriously. 'Dustmen have got a lot to answer for.'
'You can say that again.' The weekly struggle to manhandle —
or, all too often, to womanhandle — the dustbins from the kitchen door to the roadside for collection was a sore trial to her. But at least he was changing the subject from a delicate area to a safe one. And, until she had had time to consult Larry — or at least to stop him putting his foot in it — the further away, the better. 'What's all this got to do with the old Griffin place, darling? You know more of it has fallen down since you went away for the summer term? It was in that dreadful storm we had in May — the one that brought down the old plum tree in the orchard.'
'Yes, I know. I had a look not long ago.' He brushed back his hair from his eyes, and looked the image of his father.
'Yesterday, in fact.'
'Yes, darling?' There had been a time when she would have worried about such an exploration, and when it would have been strictly Against the Rules in fact; although, in fact, that dummy2
had been one rule which the children had never broken. But now he was a big boy. But now, also, she was interested.
'Why did you do that?'
He stared at her for a moment. 'Dustmen, Mother — Rachel.
I told you — dustmen. That's the point.'
Rachel could hear her husband clumping finally from the bathroom to the bedroom upstairs. In a moment or two he would be on the back stair, coming down past the little arrow-slit window from which the surviving chimney of the old Griffin place was still just visible through the trees. 'Well, the point eludes me, darling. Because no dustman ever came within half a mile of old Mrs Griffin's dustbins, if she had such things — that's certain.'
' Yes, Mother.' He looked at her a little sadly. 'That is certain.
She didn't — and they didn't. And that is the whole point.'
Still unenlightened, Rachel took refuge in interested (if not intelligent) silence.
And her silence broke him finally. 'It's all still there. For the finding.'
That broke her. 'What is?'
'Everything. Or, anyway, everything she ever broke, or threw away. Or lost.' Suddenly his voice was eager. 'Remember that old pewter candle-stick I picked up there, years ago? That's still in my room?'
The light dawned, even blazed, suddenly illuminating all his designs. 'But . . . it's a horrible place, Christopher — a nasty dummy2
place — '
'No, it isn't, Mother. It's the ruin of an old farm cottage. And there probably has been a farmhouse hereabouts since medieval times. And . . . maybe the site of the old Griffin place was the original farmhouse, because it has its own pond — the Cambridge chap said it might be. But, anyway, because there weren't any dustmen and garbage collectors in the old days, and it's way off the beaten track — everything's still all there, you see!'
'What is all there?' Larry spoke from the open doorway of the back staircase, stooping automatically so as not to knock his head on the beam, years of practice having made him perfect.