had a pile of books, two or three open, and a large loose-leaf notebook at his table in a corner of the booth. It was early in the season yet, and he probably had long periods of inactivity to fill up between visitors; but he was not going to be left at leisure for long this time, for in the gravelled car park outside the enclosure a large bus was just disgorging a load of loud and active schoolboys, shepherded by a frantic youth hardly older than the eldest of his charges. The schools were evidently back after Easter. Charlotte took her ticket, and went on into the enclosure of Aurae Phiala. Once round the low barrier of the gatehouse and the prefabricated museum building, with her back turned on the plateau along which the road cruised towards distant Silcaster, the shallow, silver-green bowl of the book-jacket opened before her, wide and tranquil. There, even on this windy and showery day of late April, there was a stillness and a warmth, and in the flower-beds that had been laid out among the stretches of lush emerald turf the daffodils and narcissi were at least two weeks ahead of their fellows in the outer world. It was a naturally sheltered basin, a trick of the undulating meadows along the Comer. Narrow, gravelled paths led forward into the maze of low, broken stone walls, the pale ground-plan of a dead settlement. Delicately placed on a slight ridge, left-centre and midway between gatehouse and river, the surviving columns of the forum balanced, lifting the eyes to the exactly right focal point in a sky of scintillating, tearful blue feathered with airy clouds. Two groups of higher walls clustered below in the hollow of the bowl. And everywhere the orderly, skeletal bones of foundations, brittle and austere, patterned the brilliant grass.
The distant border of the enclosure was the river itself, sweeping in serpentine curves round the perimeter. From where she stood it shimmered in silver under a glancing sun, though upstream at the inn, where she had seen it close to, it rolled darkly brown and turgid, and laden with the debris of bushes, for the spring thaw had come late and violently, bringing down an immense weight of snow-water from the mountains of Wales. They were constructing a series of weirs upstream, so they had told her at ‘The Salmon’s Return’, which would eventually control this annual predator, but for this year, at least, it surged down irresistibly as ever, biting acres out of its banks as it cornered, like a ferocious animal frustrated. Its wildness and this elegiac calm met, circled each other, and survived. The demon passed, not once for all, but constantly, and the dead turned over in their sleep, and went on dreaming.
From here, where she stood orientating herself to the unknown photographer’s vision of Aurae Phiala, and sharing his revelation, even that violent force, at once protection and threat, seemed charmed into tameness, passing on tiptoe by this idyllic place.
‘Idyllic! You’re perfectly right,’ said a voice just behind her shoulder; a male voice, pitched almost apologetically low, to make its uninvited approach respectable and respectful. And she was quite sure she had not said a word aloud! How did he know what she was thinking? It was a liberty. But wasn’t it also a compliment? ‘That’s why they chose it,’ the voice said, diverting her possible resentment before she could even be aware of it herself. ‘It was a pleasure city, quite unreal like all its kind. And then it turned real—always the beginning of tragedy. People walked a tightrope here, in search of a secure living, just like today. And history walked out on them, and left them to die. It happens to most paradisial places. That’s the irony.’
Many times during this pocket lecture she could have turned and looked at her instructor, and put him clean out of countenance merely by looking; but she had not done it because she was so sure that he was the young man from the entrance booth, a licensed enthusiast, and entitled to his brief moments of emotional escape. His bus-load of senior schoolboys were all over Aurae Phiala by this time, gushing downhill towards the river like streams in spate, and no doubt he was free for a minute or two to breathe again and care about his own theories and idylls. Besides, she liked his voice. It was low-pitched and reverentially modulated, a nice, crisp, modest baritone. And knowledgeable! She had a respect for people who knew their subject, and she was here to discover Aurae Phiala; he could be very useful to her.
‘Are you doing research here?’ she asked, and turned to face him.
Leaning over the glass counter of his booth, the young man in charge was deep in conversation with an elderly gentleman draped with cameras, and she was gazing into the face of quite a different person. The small shock of surprise disturbed her judgement for a moment, and the awareness of feeling and looking disconcerted inclined her to resent him, and to look for and find impudence in an approach which would have seemed perfectly excusable in a resident scholar. For that matter, she might not have been far out in thinking him impudent; his manner was innocence itself, his deference if anything delicately overdone, as though he were ready to come down off his high horse the moment she came down off hers, and didn’t anticipate that the descent need be long delayed. He had the wit to keep talking.
‘It began as a sort of rest-station and leave resort, as seasonal and artificial as a seaside fun-fair. And then it grew, and traders and service providers thought it worthwhile to settle here and go into business. They brought their families, some of them intermarried with time-expired soldiers who chose to settle here, too, and it grew into a real, life-and death town, where everyone had a stake sunk so deep that when the legions started to leave, the locals still couldn’t get out. Everything they had was here. No, I don’t belong here, I’m only visiting,’ he ended disarmingly, coming roundabout to the answer to her question. ‘It’s my subject, that’s all. But I could see what you were thinking. It
He was taller than she by only a few inches, and slenderly built, an athletic lightweight in a heather tweed sportscoat and grey cords. He had a thick crop of wiry hair the colour of good toffee, and heavy eyelashes many shades darker, as lavish as on a Jersey cow, fringing golden-brown eyes of such steady and limpid sincerity that she felt certain he could not possibly be just what he seemed. The face that confronted her with so much earnest goodwill and innocence, and with, she felt mistrustfully, such incalculable thoughts behind it, was square and brown, with a good deal of chin and nose to it, and an odd mouth with one corner higher than the other. He could have been anything from twenty-five to thirty, but not, she judged, beyond thirty. He did not look like a wolf, but he did look like a young man with an eye for a girl, and techniques that would bear watching.
‘How kind of you,’ she said, balancing nicely on the edge of irony, in case a few minutes more of this should see him running out of line to shoot, and make it desirable to jettison him, ‘—how kind of you to tell me all about it!’
‘Not at all!’ he said, and had the grace to flush a little; she even had a fleeting suspicion that he enjoyed the ability to flush at will. ‘How kind of
‘I should have thought,’ said Charlotte, trapped into genuine interest and speculation, ‘that they’d have built just a little further from the river. Weren’t they for ever in danger of floods? Look at the height of the water now.’
‘Ah, now, that’s interesting. You see, the Comer has changed its course since the third century. Exactly when, we don’t know, it may have been as late as the thirteenth century before it cut its way through. Come on down, and I’ll show you.’ And he actually took her arm, quite simply and confidently, and rushed her on the wings of his enthusiasm down through the green complexities of the bowl, between the crisp, serrated walls, across the fragments of tiled pavement, past the forum pillars, down to where the emerald turf sloped off under a token wire barrier to the riverside path and the waters of the Comer.
