'I'm Ruth. Thanks again for saving me.'
He shrugs. 'That's OK. Look, we'd better get you home. My car's over there.'
In the Land Rover, a blessed oasis of warmth and safety, Ruth feels almost elated. She isn't dead, she is about to be driven home in comfort and she has the torque in her pocket. She turns to David, who is coaxing the engine into life.
'How did you know the way back? It was amazing, the way you twisted and turned across the marsh.'
'I know this place like the back of my hand,' says David, putting the car into gear. 'It's weird. There are wooden posts sunk into the ground. If you follow them, it leads you on a safe path through the marsh. I don't know who put them there but, whoever did, they knew the land even better than I do.'
Ruth stares at him. 'Wooden posts…' she whispers.
Yes. They're sunk deep into the ground, sometimes half submerged, but if you know where they are they'll lead you through the treacherous ground, right out to sea.'
Right out to sea. Right out to the henge. Ruth touches the freezer bag in her pocket but says nothing. Her mind is working furiously.
'What were you doing out on a night like this anyway?'
asks David as they drive along the Saltmarsh Road. The windscreen wipers are almost buckling under the weight of water.
'We found something. Over by the car park. I wanted to take a second look. I know it was stupid.'
'You found something? Something old? You're an archaeologist, aren't you?'
'Yes. Some Iron Age bones. I think they might be linked to the henge. Do you remember, ten years ago, when we found the henge?' She dimly remembers David watching the excavations that summer. How terrible that they haven't spoken since.
'Yes,' he says slowly, "I remember. That chap with a pony tail, he was in charge wasn't he? He was a good bloke. I had a lot of time for him.'
'Yes, he is a good bloke.' Funnily enough, there is something about David that reminds her of Erik. Perhaps it's the eyes, used to scanning far horizons.
'So, will there be all sorts of people here again? Druids and students and idiots with cameras?'
Ruth hesitates. She can tell that David thinks the Saltmarsh should be left to him and the birds. How can she say that she hopes there will be a major excavation, almost certainly involving students and idiots with cameras, if not druids.
'Not necessarily,' she says at last. 'It's very low key at the moment.'
David grunts. 'The police were here the other day. What were they after?'
Ruth is not sure how much she should say. Eventually she says, 'It was because of the bones, but when they turned out to be prehistoric they lost interest.'
They have reached Ruth's blue gate now. David turns to her and smiles for the first time. He has very white teeth.
How old is he she wonders. Forty? Fifty? Like Erik, he has an ageless quality.
'But you,' says David, 'you're more interested now, aren't you?'
Ruth grins. 'Yes I am.'
As she opens her front door, the phone is ringing. She knows, beyond any doubt, that it will be Erik.
'Ruthie!' Erik's singsong voice echoes across the frozen miles from Norway. 'What's all this about a find?'
'Oh Erik,' says Ruth ecstatically, standing dripping onto the rug. "I think I've found your causeway.'
It is dark but she is used to that. She stretches out a hand to see if she can touch the wall and encounters cold stone.
No door. There is a trapdoor in the roof but she never knows when that will open. And sometimes it is worse when it does. No use screaming or crying; she has done this many times before and it never helps. Sometimes, though, she likes to shout just to hear her own voice. It sounds different somehow, like a stranger's voice. Sometimes it's almost company, this other voice. They have long talks, sometimes, whispering in the dark.
'Don't worry.'
'It'll all come right in the end.'
'Darkest before dawn.'
Words she can't even remember hearing, though now they seem lodged in her brain. Who was it who told her once that it was darkest before dawn? She doesn't know.
She only knows that the words give her a warm, ticklish feeling, like being wrapped in a blanket. She has an extra blanket when it's cold but even then she shivers so much that in the morning her whole body aches. Sometimes it's warmer and a little light shines through the edges of the trapdoor. Once he opened the window in the roof. Usually it's only open at night when the sky is black, but this time it was bright and blue and it made her eyes hurt. The bars on the window turned into a little yellow ladder. Sometimes she dreams about climbing the ladder and escaping to…
where? She doesn't know. She thinks of the sun on her face and being in a garden where there are voices and cooking smells and cool water falling. Sometimes she walks through the water and it's like a curtain. A curtain. Where? A beaded curtain that you run through, laughing, and on the other side there's the warm light again and the voices and someone holding you tight, so tight; so tight they will never let you go.
And, other times, she thinks there is nothing there at all, beyond these walls. Only more walls and iron bars and cold, concrete floors.
CHAPTER 4
Ruth leaves her parents' house as soon as she decently can after Christmas. Phil is having a New Year's Eve party and, though in truth she would rather chew her own arm off than attend, she tells her parents that it is her duty to go.
'It would be bad for my career. After all, he is head of department.' They understand this alright. They understand that she might go to a party to further her career. It's enjoying herself they wouldn't understand.
So, on 29 December, Ruth is driving along the Mil to Norfolk. It is mid-morning and the frost has gone so she drives fast and happily, singing along to her new Bruce Springsteen CD, a Christmas present to herself. According to her brother Simon, Ruth has the musical taste of a sixteen-year-old boy. 'A tasteless sixteen-year-old boy.' But Ruth doesn't mind. She loves Bruce and Rod and Bryan.
All those ageing rockers with croaky voices and faded jeans and age-defying hair. She loves the way they sing about love and loss and the dark, soulless heart of America, and it all sounds the same; crashing guitar chords against a wall of sound, the lyrics lost in a final, frenzied crescendo.
Singing loudly, she takes the All towards Newmarket.
It hadn't been such a bad Christmas really. Her parents hadn't nagged her too much about not going to church and not being married. Simon hadn't been too irritating and her nephews were at quite interesting ages, eight and six, old enough to go to the park and play at being Neolithic hunters. The children adored Ruth because she told them stories about cavemen and dinosaurs and never noticed when their faces needed washing. 'You've got quite a gift with kids,' said her sister-in-law Cathy accusingly. 'It seems a shame…' 'What's a shame?' Ruth had asked, although she knew only too well. 'That you haven't any of your own. Though, I suppose, by now…'
By now I have resigned myself to spinsterhood and godmotherhood and slowly going mad, knitting clothes for my cats out of my own hair, thinks Ruth, neatly overtaking an overburdened people carrier. She is nearly forty and although it is not impossible that she should still have a child she has noticed people mentioning it less and less.
This suits her fine; when she was with Peter the only thing more annoying than people hinting about possible 'wedding bells' was the suggestion that she might be 'getting broody'. When she bought the cats her mother asked her straight out if they were 'baby substitutes'. 'No,'
Ruth had answered, straight-faced. 'They're kittens. If I had a baby it would be a cat substitute.'
She reaches the Saltmarsh by mid-afternoon and the winter sun is low over the reed beds. The tide is coming in and the seagulls are calling, high and excited. When Ruth gets out of her car she breathes in the wonderful sea smell, potent and mysterious, and feels glad that she is home.