‘I am reminded,’ she said, ‘of a remark overheard by E. M. Delafield at Corfe Castle in Dorset and immortalised by her in The Diary of a Provincial Lady. A woman standing near the “Lady” said to her companion, “That bit looks as if it had fallen off somewhere.” ’ Laura surveyed the debris with an indulgent eye. ‘There is enough work here to keep the young men out of mischief for weeks,’ she said, ‘never mind what’s fallen off where.’
Shortly after returning home, Dame Beatrice received another letter from Bonamy:
‘Dear Godmother,
‘We have been outflanked! What do you think? Tom and I had hardly made our preliminary survey when two other interested parties turned up, although, thank goodness, they are not treasure-hunters like ourselves and neither will they be given any clue to our intentions.
‘One party seems to consist of a man and four women. The plump woman is his wife, then there are a gorgeous one, a little, thin one and a six-footer – a most intimidating young female, from whom, I should think, John Betjeman drew his portrait of the Olympic Girl. She makes me feel like the ‘unhealthy worm’ he refers to as himself.
‘The first hint we got that this gang were on the premises was when Tom spotted the caravan parked at the foot of the hill. The other party consists of two men and the first we knew of them was on our return from lunch at a pub-cum-hotel in the village. A couple of workmen were putting up a notice outside the gatehouse which read: Scientific work in progress. No admittance.
‘Of course Tom asked what the hell and the men said they didn’t know. They were only carrying out orders. While we were arguing, the other parties turned up and warned us off. I took over from Tom, as there were ladies present and his language, even in these lax times, is apt to be unguarded, and pointed out that we had a vested interest and must be allowed admittance to the site. I informed them that we were undergraduates and that we had permission from the landowner to work on the ruins. I spoke of vacation commitments and a thesis we had to write. I spoke well and eloquently.
‘It turns out that the larger party want to make a survey of the site with a view to restoring the various parts of the castle – the flanking-towers, the postern gates and all that sort of thing – while the two men are planning to dig for evidence of a Saxon cemetery or a Danish tomb, or some such. They want to dig trenches and shift rubble and make sections and all those sort of Sir Mortimer Wheeler things which modern archaeologists do when digging up the past.
‘Well, thank goodness, we were all civilised enough to come to an understanding. The big party did not see that their work would interfere with that of the archaeologists, so that was all right, and Tom and I have offered assistance to both sides. In the end I think Tom and I may be the gainers, as it seems navvies have been hired to do some of the heavy work, so here’s hoping that, among the lot of us, somebody uncovers our well!’
‘I wonder what effect, if any, the notice at the gatehouse will have on the general public,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘My bet is that they’ll respect it,’ said Laura. ‘The sort of people who would go to look at a ruined castle would be law-abiding. Others will think it’s something to do with nuclear power and the atom bomb, or else that an oil-rig is going to be set up. Those are the things people connect with warning notices nowadays. They may stand and stare, but they won’t encroach. That’s my view.’
‘You appear to have your finger on the public pulse.’
‘I do better than that. I test its blood pressure,’ said Laura, ‘a thing the politicians seldom do.’
‘In any case, five able-bodied men and the Olympic Girl, plus a posse of strong-armed workmen, should be intimidating enough to keep even the most intrepid sightseer at bay,’ commented Dame Beatrice. ‘It occurs to me to wonder whether Bonamy and Tom have done wisely in offering their services to the others.’
‘I don’t see that they had much option. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” is the only sensible motto in these unheroic times,’ said Laura.
There was a lengthy postscript to Bonamy’s letter:
‘In case you may know any of them, Edward and Lilian Saltergate are the married couple, both of them architects, and both have impressive letters after their names. His are B.Arch., ARIBA, and she is MA and FSA. The girls they have with them are Fiona Broadmayne (the large, hefty one) and Priscilla Yateley (the little, thin one). As for the third girl, the glorious Helen of Troy, to our horror she turns out to be a college lecturer and a Ph.D. Her name – just for the record, because it’s no use for anything else – is Dr Susannah Lochlure, and I can tell you the “lure” is there all right. She is the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley, but also a Fellow of the Historical Association. “ ’Tis true ’tis pity, and pity ’tis, ’tis true.”
‘Tom had marked her down as his bit of crumpet while we are here, and says he is devastated now he knows that she ranks among the untouchables, but it doesn’t so far seem to have affected his appetite. She really is the most gorgeous bit of plum cake, though.
‘I don’t think Tom would have stood much chance with her, anyway, even were she less exalted than turns out to be the case. The two chaps who are proposing to dig up the landscape are a middle-aged man named Professor Veryan and a much younger fellow, a don at Veryan’s university, called Nicholas Tynant. He belongs to the elf-lock-over-the-forehead school of thought, looks shockingly like the portraits of Rupert Brooke, and is obviously keeping a proprietorial eye on the lovely Susannah.
As for the sweet girl undergraduates, they are both very definitely non-starters from Tom’s point of view. Priscilla shrinks and wilts if anybody so much as looks in her direction and is hardly what one would call an armful, anyway, and Fiona is utterly terrifying, apart from the fact that she quite obviously despises the male sex and is half a head taller than either of us, besides having a presence (to put it politely) which blots out the landscape.
‘So what with Priscilla (I have a hunch she writes poetry!) almost swooning at the sight of us, Fiona utterly despising us, and Susannah, that glorious goddess, unaware, it seems, of our existence, we are dependent on the motherly kindness of the plump, unruffled Mrs Saltergate. She and Saltergate talk of taking a holiday cottage in the village instead of staying for two months in their hotel. If that comes off, we may be able to wheedle her into getting our bibs and tuckers washed for us, otherwise we shall have to use the launderette in the nearest town, and that costs money.
‘On the surface, everybody seems to conform to one known type or another, so I do not think any one of them would be worthy of your scalpel. Meanwhile Tom and I are confident that, between Saltergate’s reconstructions and Veryan’s excavations, our well will get itself expertly uncovered and then our real fun will begin. We were somewhat taken aback at first when we found there were to be all these cuckoos in our nest, but now, although I think both parties will work Tom and me until our sweat bedews the hillside – Veryan has already laid off two of the four workmen he had hired to do the digging – our gains will more than off-set our losses. Perhaps you will pop along and watch us at work some time? It will be a scene to strike pity and terror into the human heart.’
2
Castle in the Sand
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From the keep there were views of the sea. To the north-east were the shallow waters of the wide estuary beyond which Laura had seen the castle. To the south-west was the open sea in the direction of Holdy Bay, although the town itself was tucked away behind its hills.
Between the castle and these two wastes of water were the moors. The village at the foot of the castle hill had begun as a collection of huts for the Saxons who had toiled to build the Norman castle. It now lived by tourism. There were no farms in the immediate neighbourhood, for there was neither agricultural land nor pasture. In fact, it was difficult to understand why the village had survived into the twentieth century to enjoy the benefits of the tourist trade and the invasion and almost total takeover by retired people of rather more than average means.