‘Hey, there’s brickwork breaking through there!’ Charlotte’s companion said with quickening interest, and set off to have a closer look. The cordoned area was much bigger than they had realised, for several square yards of the level ground on top had subsided into ominous, shallow holes, here and there breaking the turf, and the slope down to the river path, once dropping gradually a matter of fifteen feet or so, now sagged in red rolls of soil and grass. The gardener had completed his magic circle, and was hanging three warning boards from the stanchions, with the legend boldly and hurriedly slashed in red paint: DANGER! KEEP CLEAR!
By a natural enough process, this injunction immediately attracted the most unruly fringe of the school party, straying from the group of their fellows in the forum. They came like flies to honey, not the heedless junior element, either, but a knot of budding sophisticates in their teens, led by a tall, slim sixteen-year-old on whose walk, manner and style all the rest appeared to be modelling themselves.
The young teacher, observing this deliberate defection, broke off his lecture to raise his voice, none too hopefully, after his strays. ‘Boys, come back here at once! Come here and pay attention! Boden, do you hear?’
The boy who must be Boden heard very well. His strolling gait became exaggeratedly languid and assured. One or two of his following hesitated, wavered and turned back. Most of the others hovered diplomatically to make it look as if they were about to turn back, while still edging gingerly forward. Boden advanced at an insolent saunter to the stretched rope. The gardener, suddenly aware of him, reared erect to his full impressive six-feet-two and stood still, narrowly observing this unchancy opponent. The boy gazed back sweetly, forbearing from touching anything, and daring anyone to challenge his intentions. He was a good-looking boy, and knew it. He was pushing manhood, and much too well aware of that, though he believed himself to be much nearer maturity than he actually was. Twice he advanced a hand with deliberate teasing towards the hook that sustained the rope on the posts, and twice diverted the gesture into something innocuous. The gardener narrowed long, grey-blue eyes and made never a move. The boy stretched out a foot under the rope, and prodded with the toe of a well-polished shoe at the edge of one of the ominous cracks in the grass. The gardener, with deliberation, put down the spade he held, and took one long step to circle the obstruction between them.
The boy gave an amused flick of his head, swung round unhurriedly—yet not too slowly, either—and sauntered away with a laugh, his admirers tittering after him. Distant across the grass, the young teacher, with opportunist alacrity, chose that moment to calclass="underline" ‘That’s better, Boden! Come on, now, quickly, you’re holding up the whole party.’
‘The secret of success with performing fleas,’ said Charlotte’s self-constituted guide startlingly, diverted even from his Roman passion, ‘is to synchronise your orders with their hops. Our unfortunate young friend seems to know the principle, whether he can make it work or not.’
The gardener stood a moment to make sure that his antagonist was really retiring, then turned back to complete his work. His eye met Charlotte’s, and his face flashed into a sudden brief, almost reluctant smile. ‘Flipping kids!’ he said in a broad, deep country voice, with a hint of the singing eloquence of Wales.
‘They give you much trouble normally?’ asked the young man.
‘What you’d expect. Not that much,’ he allowed tolerantly. ‘But that one’s a case.’
‘You know him?’ the young man asked sympathetically.
‘Never seen him before. I know his sort, though, on sight.’
‘Oh, I don’t know… he’s just flexing his muscles.’ He looked over his shoulder, to where the youthful shepherd was fretfully hustling his flock from the forum into the skeleton entrance of the baths. ‘He’s got a teacher bossing him around who’s about four years older than he is, if that, and a lot less self-confident, but holding all the aces. Not that he plays them all that well,’ he admitted, thoughtfully watching the harried youngster trying to be as tall as his tallest and most formidable charge. ‘And of course,’ he said aside to Charlotte, with a devastating smile, ‘having a girl like you around doesn’t make their problem any easier for either of them.’
‘I could go away,’ Charlotte offered, between offence and gratification.
‘Don’t do that!’ he said hastily. ‘Each of them would blame the other. And you haven’t seen half what’s here to be seen yet.’ He turned back to the gardener. ‘When did this slip happen?’
‘This morning. Water’s been right up over the path two days or more, I reckon it’s loosened part o’ the foundations under here.’ He stood at the edge of the slope, looking down the line of his cordon and into the turgid water. ‘Who’d get the blame, I ask you, if some young big-head like him got larking about in that lot, and the whole thing caved in and buried him alive? I don’t reckon they’d allow as a rope and three notices was enough. It’d be me for it, me and Mr Paviour and his lordship—ah, and in that order! But they expect us to keep the place open for ’em. We got stated hours, nobody lets us off because the Comer floods.’
His deep, warm western voice had risen into plangent eloquence, indignant and rapt. And Charlotte was suddenly aware of him as a person, and by no means an unintelligent person, either; but above all a vital presence, to be ignored only at the general peril. He was built rather heavily even for his height, a monumental creature admirably suited to these classic and heroic surroundings; and his face was a mask of antique beauty, but crudely cut out of a local stone. She could see him as a prototype for the border entrepreneur trapped here in the decline and fall of this precarious city, the market-stallholder, the baths attendant, the potter, the vegetable grower, any one of the native opportunists who had rallied to serve and exploit this hothouse community of time-expired settlers and pay-happy leave-men. He had a forehead and nose any Greek might have acknowledged with pride, and long, grey-blue eyes like slivers of self-illuminating stone, somewhere between lapis-lazuli and granite. His fairness inclined ever so slightly towards the Celtic red of parts of Wales, an alien colouring in both countries. He had a full, passionate, childlike mouth, generously shaped but brutally finished; and his cleanshaven cheeks and jaw were powerful and fleshless, pure, massive bone under the fine, fair skin. It was easy to see that his roots went down fathoms deep in this soil, and transplanting would have destroyed everything in him that was of quality. There was nowhere else he belonged.
Charlotte said, on an impulse she only partially understood: ‘Don’t worry about him. In an hour they’ll be gone.’ And just as impulsively she turned to check on the movements of that incalculable swarm of half-grown children who were causing him this natural anxiety. The boys and their uneasy pastor were moving tidily enough into the first green enclosure which must be the frigidarium of the baths, emerging in little, bulbous groups from between the broken walls of the entrance. She saw the stragglers gather, none too enthusiastically, but not unwillingly, either, and waited for the last-comers. Something was missing there. It took her a few minutes to realise what it was. The teacher, selfconsciously gathering his chicks about him, was now the tallest person in sight. Where had the odious senior, Boden, gone, somewhere among those broken, enfolding walls? And how had he shed his train? The numbers there looked more or less complete. He was a natural stray, of course. He needed the minimum of cover to drop out of sight, whenever it suited him. But at least he was well away from here. No doubt something else had diverted his attention, and afforded him another cue to spread confusion everywhere around him.