Ruth smiles. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t.’
Clough shrugs, looking rather rueful. ‘Bone boxes are in the van. Post-mortem’s set for tomorrow, nine o’clock.’
‘Does Nelson know?’
‘He said to say he’d see you there.’
‘Thanks.’ Ruth has a last few words with Ted before heading back to her car. Clough calls after her. ‘Look after that baby of yours. She’s a little star.’
Wonders will never cease, thinks Ruth as she drives off into the night. Kate has turned her into a nervous wreck and Clough into a human being. Whatever will she accomplish in the next four months of her life?
The first thing that Ruth hears as she approaches Shona’s house is the sound of crying. More than crying; this is screaming, wailing, the sound of a banshee in full-throated howl. The neat terraced house seems almost to be pulsating with the noise. Ruth runs up the path but Shona has opened the door before she reaches it. A scarlet- faced monster squirms in her arms.
‘I’m sorry, Ruth. I’ve tried everything. Lullabies, classical music, ride-a-cock-horse. The lot. She’s been at it for nearly an hour. I think she must be ill or something.’
Ruth reaches out her arms for Kate who takes a deep breath, leans into her mother’s neck and instantly falls asleep. The silence feels immense, far more than mere absence of sound.
‘My God.’ Shona sounds both awed and rather resentful. ‘All she wanted was her mum.’
‘She’s probably just cried herself to sleep,’ says Ruth, speaking gruffly to hide how she feels. This has never happened before. Secretly she has never felt before that she is any better than anyone else with Kate. It is her mother, comfortably upholstered and full of maternal authority, or Sandra, who have seemed like the real experts. Ruth may feel that she knows Kate but she has never been sure that the compliment is returned. Until now.
Juggling Kate with what now seems to be practised ease, she follows Shona into the sitting room. The normally stylish room bears the signs of Shona’s struggle to placate the baby. A half-full bottle of milk rolls on the polished wood floor and CDs of suitably soothing classics lie scattered over the sofas. The TV is showing some primary coloured children’s programme and an open bottle of wine sits on the coffee table.
Shona follows Ruth’s glance. ‘Didn’t even have time to get myself a glass.’
Ruth doesn’t comment on the fact that Shona has been drinking while in charge of her baby. It’s her fault, her lack of contingency planning, that has led to Shona having to cope with a screaming baby all afternoon and she’s grateful – if slightly worried at the urgency with which Shona now grabs a glass and fills it to the brim.
‘Do you want some?’ asks Shona as an afterthought.
‘No thanks. I’ve got to drive.’
‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ says Shona, not moving.
‘It’s okay,’ says Ruth. ‘I ought to be going.’ She starts to arrange Kate in her car seat, an unnecessarily complicated device bought for her by Cathbad.
‘How was the dig? Things looked pretty busy when I left you. What did you find?’
Ruth looks over her shoulder at Shona, who is sitting cross-legged in an armchair, her bright red hair falling over her eyes. In the past she has had reason to distrust Shona’s interest in her work but she feels that she, or Kate, owes her something, information at the very least.
‘Six skeletons,’ she says. ‘They look comparatively recent.’
‘Good God, Ruth,’ says Shona, sounding almost amused. ‘Are you going to be mixed up in another murder?’
‘I wasn’t exactly mixed up in the last one,’ says Ruth with asperity. ‘Unless you count a madman trying to kill me.’
‘I would definitely count that.’
‘Well, in this case, I’ve simply been called in to examine the bones. Look at how they’ve been buried and so on.’
‘Mmm.’ Shona looks unconvinced. ‘I saw the mad Irishman there,’ she says. ‘And that purple-haired bitch. Anyone else from the university?’
Ruth looks curiously at Shona as she struggles with the last strap. Shona also works at the university, teaching English, but for the last year she has been having an affair with Ruth’s boss, Phil. Just before Christmas, much to everyone’s surprise, Phil left his wife for Shona. Ruth isn’t sure if Shona herself wasn’t rather shocked by this development. Certainly she hasn’t rushed to move Phil into her house. He is renting a flat nearby ‘while the kids get used to the situation’. Presumably Shona knows a good deal about the workings of the archaeology department. Ruth wonders why she dislikes Trace so much.
‘Steve and Craig from the field team,’ she says. ‘I thought Phil might look in.’
‘Oh, he had a meeting with some sponsors,’ says Shona vaguely.
‘How are things?’ asks Ruth, not sure that she really wants to know. She gets on all right with Phil, he’s a decent enough boss, but that’s as far as it goes. He’s very much the new style of archaeologist, obsessed with technology and appearing on television. Ruth has always got the impression that Phil regards her as a throwback, an expert in her own field but a grafter, a plodder, not someone suited to the centre stage. Which suits her fine. Their working relationship works. She just doesn’t particularly want to get to know Phil in his new guise as her best friend’s partner.
‘Oh, all right,’ says Shona, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers. ‘His wife’s being a cow.’
‘Well, it must be difficult for her,’ offers Ruth. ‘They were married for… how long?’
‘Fifteen years. But it hadn’t been working for the last five.’
Not for the first time, Ruth wonders how Shona, who is, after all, an astute literary critic, can be so gullible when it comes to men. Who says the marriage hadn’t been working for the past five years? Phil, presumably. Ruth has met Phil’s wife, Sue, at various department functions over the years and the couple always seemed perfectly comfortable together. They have two children, boys, who must be teenagers by now.
‘Fourteen and twelve,’ says Shona, in answer to Ruth’s question. ‘I get on brilliantly with them.’
Ruth can believe that this is true. She imagines Shona, with her beauty and vivacity, utterly charming the two boys. Whether the infatuation, on either side, will last, is another matter.
Ruth picks up Kate’s bottle, blanket and the various stuffed toys that have become strewn around the room. Shona makes no move to help her, just stays curled up in her chair, sipping her wine. She obviously feels that her work is done and, really, Ruth agrees with her.
Ruth stuffs the last toy in the nappy bag and says, ‘Thank you, Shona. I’m sorry you had such an awful time of it.’
‘That’s okay,’ says Shona, not denying that it was awful. ‘Any time.’
‘I’m praying Sandra will be better tomorrow,’ says Ruth.
Driving home across the Saltmarsh, she thinks about her friendship with Shona. They met when Ruth first started working at the University of North Norfolk, but they only really got to know each other on the henge dig. When Ruth looks back to that time – Erik’s ghost stories around the camp fire, the smell of peat smoke in the morning, the wind whistling through the rushes at night, the unforgettable first sight of the henge, black against the blue-grey sand – she thinks of Shona, her red hair flying out behind her as she ran over the sand dunes like a sea sprite shouting ‘It’s here! The henge is here!’ Shona had been Ruth’s first real friend in Norfolk and Ruth values her friends highly. Ever since adolescence, when her parents retreated into the church, putting their relationship with God, it seemed, above their relationship with her, Ruth has relied on her friends for support. She has never been one for the gang. She is bemused by her students, with their hundreds of friends on Facebook or Bebo. Are these real friends, people who would look after your cat or drive you home from hospital, or are they just an amorphous mass, happy enough to leave cute messages (lol!) on your wall but completely removed from your everyday life? How can you have three hundred close friends?
Ruth has always preferred just two or three. Alison and Fatima at school, Caz, Roly and Val at university, Josephine Dumbili from that holiday in Crete. And now Shona. As, over the years, Fatima, Caz and Val acquired husbands and children (Roly is gay and Alison determinedly single in New York) they seemed to move, inexorably, further away from Ruth and she relied more and more on Shona, who sometimes seemed her only ally in a world of motherhood, family holidays and smug Round Robins at Christmas (‘This year Ellie joined Sophie and Laura at the grammar school’). When she found out that Shona had been lying to her for years, ever since the henge dig in fact, the betrayal hit Ruth hard. But her need for Shona was too strong and their friendship mended itself, not quite as
