She nodded, though she hadn’t really offered to leave.
“Gail, I have just been speaking to an old friend of mine. I happened to mention your lack of inspiration for your thesis, and it just so happens that he is leading some expeditions this winter that you might find interesting. He’s short a couple of spaces, and I persuaded him he could do with a PhD student on the books,” he tapped his tablet a couple of times. “I’ve sent you some details. I told him that you are one of the brightest students here, and as such he would be a fool not to offer you a place immediately. I’m sorry I lied, but needs must,” he winked.
Gail flipped open her tablet and the brief summary from David flashed up.
“Egypt?” she gasped.
Ellie looked at the small, colourful, slightly amateurish summary brochure on her screen. She looked at her friend’s face, then back again at the screen. “Egypt, for a month? You can’t do a thesis on Egypt!”
David shook his head. “The Department doesn’t specialise in Egyptology, for sure. But I think your Social Archaeology master’s sets you up perfectly, Gail.”
“It looks interesting, different,” Gail was nodding enthusiastically. “Besides, we’ve touched on Egypt before, in ‘Classical Mediterranean’ and I’m sure there was a first year course that covered it.”
David grinned. “One of mine in fact: ‘The Emergence of Civilisation’.”
“And the cost?” Ellie continued. “It’s for volunteers, Gail. They even underlined that bit, so they’re not going to pay for a free holiday to Egypt for you; you’ll probably even have to fork out for the accommodation and food yourself!”
They looked up at David, who sat on the corner of his desk and put his tablet down. “You’ve both been on digs before, and this is no different: they will have some reasonable accommodation and catering on site. From what I’ve heard it’s in the middle of the desert, so everyone will be in the same situation. As for flights, I can’t imagine they’re too expensive.”
Gail grinned. “I’m sure I can persuade George that it’s a good idea.” She knew she was probably going to have to soften him up a bit beforehand, though.
“Speaking of which, what about George?” Ellie replied. “You can’t just leave him on his own for a month,” she sounded almost sorry for him, “and over Christmas!”
Gail knew this would hardly be a bar: she had no living relatives, her parents having died in a car crash while on holiday in France when she was nine. Her foster parents had younger children to care for now, so they rarely imposed on them for anything more than a coffee and an exchange of presents. For his part, George’s family were spread across three continents and his parents had moved to Canada the year before. Christmas was going to be a quiet affair.
Gail thought about this for a moment and checked her calendar. She looked up at David and smiled. “I’ll think of something, don’t worry.”
“Great!” David clapped. “Look, you still have to apply for a place, but I’ll put in as good a word as I can. In the meantime do some brushing up, I’ve sent you a reading list so you should have some documents waiting for you.” The University library had digital copies of all its textbooks, and free access to most other digital libraries in the academic network. As her master’s supervisor, David was able to select any texts from these resources and assign them to her automatically, at which point they would become available in her tablet’s digital library. “If you want to do this, you need to send me your thoughts on your proposal by the end of next week, that way I can help you to make sure it’s perfect in time for your PhD application deadline.”
Gail thanked him and turned to go, leaving Ellie standing next to David. “Well, are you coming?” she asked her. “We’ve got another study-group in five minutes.”
Ellie looked at David and then laughed. “My God, that Egypt thing really has affected her, hasn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Gail Turner: on time!”
Chapter 2
George was in the living room when Gail got home, stretched out on the settee. His bare feet were resting on a small chair in front of him and his t-shirt was riding up, exposing what had recently become a slightly podgy belly. His short, dark hair was a mess and his face was covered in what he called ‘designer stubble,’ but what Gail called the result of working from home for a whole week. She often joked that as George worked from home, it was as if she was doing the studying and he was living the life of a student.
His career as a marine biologist often meant that he had to go on extended field-trips, though he had so far failed to be sent any further than the freezing waters of the Baltic. In between trips, he spent most of his time building simulation models for micro-organism behaviour.
He was facing the video wall, their latest toy. It had been installed the previous week, and was literally a normal everyday wall, which at the flick of a switch could display from any one of a number of multimedia sources, or even all of them simultaneously. George’s favourite setup was watching the football on eighty per-cent of the wall, with the remaining fifth split between browsing the internet and social feeds. Having just splashed out on such a big gadget, she knew she had leverage for some flights to Egypt if she needed it.
As she sat down beside him she gave him a peck on the cheek, at the same time leaning over and grabbing the remote. Before he could complain she had changed the channel.
“Good day then?” he laughed.
“Not bad, not bad.” She continued to look at the video wall intently. “You?” she asked nonchalantly.
He looked at the wall and smiled: the History channel. When Gail wasn’t watching programs on archaeology she was watching history, and she preferred to view it full screen. She claimed that you simply couldn’t concentrate on more than one source at the same time; anyone who said they could was obviously trying to impress someone. George had thought this to be slightly out of character, considering how she tended to jump from topic to topic at the drop of a hat.
“OK, I suppose,” he sat up and shifted his body to face her on the settee. “I couldn’t do much today because most of our data from Latvia was corrupted, again. Apart from that, just the usual.”
“Corrupted?”
He sighed. “The data from another one of the sensors we put on the seabed came through all garbled, missing half the packet information. It might just be the data transfer, but they’re organising a dive team to go and replace it. Then they’ll send us the memory chips to see if we can salvage anything.”
“That’s the fourth one, isn’t it?”
“Yup,” he said with a sigh. “It’ll push that trip back by a few weeks now, probably at least a month.”
“Pushed back a month, eh? When was that supposed to happen?” she asked, still looking at the wall.
It was a loaded question and he knew it. She had sent him a strange email that afternoon, asking him how much holiday he had left for the year. He only had a couple of weeks. “Late December, early next year. Doesn’t matter now.”
Gail turned to face him with a huge smile on her face. Although she was eager to go to Egypt, going to such an amazing place with George by her side would make it extra special.
“Oh, no. What are you planning?” he asked.
“What do you think of going to Egypt this Christmas?” She could barely contain her excitement.
George took a moment to react. When he did, Gail was reminded why she had married him two years earlier: his smile turned into a grin, and he leant forward to kiss her. “Tell me all about it, honey.”
She had immediately been interested in the idea of going to Egypt for a dig. But as the hours had gone by and she looked ever deeper into the background of the excavations, that interest had turned into raving enthusiasm. She had completed her application form for the dig online and had spent the rest of the afternoon surfing the Internet for more information.