The cover was a fine, delicately-composed, atmospheric photograph of a shallow bowl of meadows beside the silver sweep of a river, the whole foreground patterned with a mesh of low walls in amber stone and rosy, fired brick and tile, with two broken pillars to carry the accented rhythms up into a sky feathered with light cloud. Charlotte gazed at it, fascinated. A landscape obviously planned, disciplined, tamed long, long since, and long since abandoned to the river, the seasons and the sky; and not a human soul in sight. A less cunning photographer might have felt the urge to place a single figure, perhaps close to the columns, to give life and scale. This one had understood that Aurae Phiala was dead, and immense, needing no meretricious human yardstick to give it proportion.
‘But it’s beautiful!’ she said, and voice and accent had become wholly French for one moment. ‘This is where he spent those last few days?’ she said. ‘Before he caught that flight into Turkey?’
‘Yes. He knew the site from many previous visits, though I think he had never organised a dig there himself. The curator is an old friend of his, a fellow-student, I believe. But less distinguished.’
‘So Uncle Alan would be with friends, when he stayed there? And he went straight from this place, to catch his plane?’
‘So I understand. It is an attractive picture,’ said Mr Stanforth, with patronising tolerance. ‘Wonderful what a first rate photographer can do with even unpromising material. But you’ll see what Doctor Morris has to say about the place.’
‘Where is it?’ she asked, still viewing the sunlit, fluted hollow with pleasure and wonder.
‘Somewhere on the Welsh border, I believe. The text and maps will show you exactly where. The name means something like “the bowl of the gentle wind”. Apparently an ideal climatic site. But you’ll discover all about the place if you read it.’
Clearly he hardly believed that she would stay the course. She wondered if he himself had survived it. She closed the little book between her palms, and put it away in her handbag. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I look forward to setting foot in my uncle’s field.’
She was not sure herself how much in earnest she was, at that stage; and if she had had any other agreeable reading matter to fill up her evening, she might never have started on Aurae Phiala at all. But she had no concert, and no engagement socially, since she knew hardly anyone in London, the small hotel in Earls Court was not productive of amusing company, and the television was surrounded by a handful of determined fans watching a very boring boxing match. Charlotte returned almost gladly to the recollection of her morning interview, and in retrospect it seemed to her far more strange and mysterious than while it was happening. She had never been brought face to face with her great-uncle, and never devoted any conscious thought to him. He became real and close only now that he had vanished.
Such a curious thing for an established and respected elderly gentleman to do, now that she came to consider it seriously. How old would he be now? Her grandmother, his elder sister, would have been seventy if she had been still living, and there were several years between them. Probably sixty-three or sixty-four, and according to the photographs she had seen in newspapers and geographical magazines, and his occasional appearances on television, he looked considerably younger than his age, and very fit indeed. Say a well-preserved sixty-four, highly sophisticated, speaking at least three languages, enough to get him out of trouble in most countries, and with a select if scattered network of friends and colleagues all across the Middle East, to lend him a hand if required. And on his last known move obviously still in full control of his actions. A taxi had dropped him and his luggage at the main railway station, he had walked in through the entrance with a porter in attendance; and that was that.
On the face of it, a man about whom the whole world knew, whose life was an open book—no, a succession of books. But what did she really know about him? She roamed back thoughtfully into childhood memories, hunting for the little clues her mother and grandmother had let fall about him, and the sum of them all was remarkably meagre. A handsome, confident man, who had managed to retain his friends without ever letting them get on to too intimate ground. No wife ever, and (as far as anyone knew!) no children anywhere, but all the same, his kinswomen had spoken of him tolerantly, even appreciatively, as an accomplished lady-killer, evading marriage adroitly but finding his fun wherever he went. An eye for the girls at sixty no less than at twenty; and silver-grey temples, blue eyes and a Turkish tan were even more dangerously attractive than youth. He played fair, though, her mother had said of him generously. Not with the husbands, perhaps, but with the ladies. They had to be more than willing, and as ready as he to part without hard feelings afterwards. Doubtful if he ever dented a heart; more than likely he gave quite a number of hearts a new lift after they’d imagined the ball was over for them.
It seemed she did, after all, know a few significant things about him. He lived as he chose, one foot in home comforts, the other shod for roaming. She understood now what Mr Stanforth had meant by describing him as a man who had deliberately evaded certain responsibilities and involvements, and even kept his affairs in scrupulous order mainly to avoid being badgered, or giving anyone a hold on him. And she thought suddenly, with a totally unexpected flash of dismay and sympathy: My God, you overdid it, didn’t you? You were so successful at it that in the end you could vanish without leaving a soul behind sufficiently concerned about you to kick up a fuss—only a solicitor worried about the legal hang-ups, and especially the money!
Sympathy, of course, might be misapplied here. For all she knew, so far from being lonely and deprived at this moment, he might well be taking his mild pleasures in his usual fashion, with some lady chanced upon by pure luck in the wilds of Anatolia. In which case he would surface again when it suited him. All the same, the image of his isolation remained with her, and made her feel uneasy and even guilty towards him.
So it was partly out of an illogical sense of obligation that she began to read his book on Aurae Phiala. Eighty or so acres of Midshire by the river Comer, close by the border of Wales. A recreation city, apparently, for the officers of the garrison at Silcaster, and the legions tramping the long course of Watling Street. The account he gave of it was detailed, detached and distinctly unenthusiastic. A place of historical interest in its small way, especially for its sudden death at the end of the fourth century, after the legions that were its life and its protection had been withdrawn. But otherwise a site very unlikely to repay much further examination, and hardly worth spending money on, while so many more promising sites waited their turn to snatch a crumb of the meagre and grudging funds available. In plan after plan and page after page, Doctor Morris amended the estimates even he had given in articles previously published, and disputed various claims made for Aurae Phiala by other authorities. Their aerial photographs he subjected to destructive scrutiny, the light crop lines they detected under the unbroken fields he dated several centuries later than the sacking of Aurae Phiala, the dark crop marks emerging so strongly in contrast he refused to consider as early Roman military lines, but set well back into pre-Roman settlement. (A light, sandy sub-soil, Charlotte learned, provided a first-class ground for crop-marks, since crops growing over ancient foundations tend to ripen and show yellow while the rest of the field is still green. And the crop marks that show dark instead of pale are likely to lie along the lines where timber walls stood, prior to the stone.)
In short, Doctor Morris was bored with Aurae Phiala, and succeeded in making it slightly boring for his readers. Charlotte found herself intrigued by his handling of some of his colleagues who took views different from his own. His deference, while he refuted their conclusions, was careful and considerate. Even, perhaps, a little cagey? She felt almost sorry for Professor M. L. Vaughan, who was obviously in the same rank as her self-confident great-uncle, and differed from him on almost every point.