Treasures of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

rude, Kate, if I may say so. And the fact remains that the things are mine to do what I like with, so please don’t sit there with “And what would Daddy have said?” written all over your face, because the truth is I’m sure Hugh would have seen my point entirely and if he’d been just a mite more efficient about money, poor darling, this wouldn’t be necessary.’ She went out of the room, turning at the door to say, ‘If anyone felt like getting on with the washing-up, that would be simply lovely.’
    Kate started to slam dishes into the sink with dangerous fervour. Tom said to Nellie, ‘What exactly was the thing that was sold?’
    ‘It was a small votive object – chalk, a female fertility…’ and then her treacherous speech had failed her and her voice had trailed off and in the pause he had said informatively, ‘Oh yes – neolithic, I expect, like that thing from Grime’s Graves in Norfolk, there are those flint-mines there, you know, where they found that curious little chalk figure in one of the shafts.’
    It was surprising she had nodded with such tolerance. He sweated now at the recollection and decided that Kate’s assertions of her aunt’s niceness were quite correct.
    The house was full of bits and pieces, it was true. He had wandered round, that morning, examining the monochrome detritus of prehistory – the uniformly beige display of pots and bowls and weapons – and had thought that it was perhaps this unrewarding front that had got the subject into trouble from the start. Laura had clearly had her way with the drawing room: there, shelves and cases held only the cheerful delicacy of some good eighteenth and nineteenth century china, and one or two pieces of modern pottery. But elsewhere Hugh Paxton’s collections of pots in a state of collapse, of pots resurrected, of flints and axes and spears, of gangrenous metal pins and brooches, of bones and funerary urns, dominated the house. Just throwouts, really, Laura had said, the best stuff went to the museums, of course. And yes, indeed, it was like the random loot of some nineteenth century clerical antiquarian – a studyful of ‘things of interest’ unrelated to time and place. Or those mysterious objects passed from hand to hand by a panel of archaeologists in that old television game that he remembered as a child – chunks of pot or metal held up for assessment and definition.
    And that, of course, he thought, is the basic problem – what, in the end, can you do with a subject that depends entirely on the survival of material objects? No wonder it’s kept going off the rails, ever since the Saxons supposed the Roman towns were built by giants. Giants, gods, druids… A vehicle for every kind of expedient theory, the most malleable aspect of the past, prehistory. And the most treacherous. They get it all nicely sorted out into a chronological sequence, at last – the three ages – and then along come all sorts of disconcerting cultural overlaps that won’t fit in, and cultural parallels in the eastern Mediterranean or wherever, and they have to work out a new explanation – the invasionist theory. And then someone dreams up radio-carbon dating and blows everything sky high – Stonehenge far older than Mycenae, northern megalithic tombs earlier than any other stone buildings, and everybody has to take a deep breath and start all over again. How do you feel – when it becomes irrefutably clear that your life’s work has been based on a misapprehension? That you had been assembling the jigsaw puzzle all wrong and had better break it up and start again?
    Not absolutely, of course. All that carefully collected evidence would still do – the product of all those wet or hot or windy weeks at Windmill Hill or Durrington Walls or Charlie’s Tump or wherever. It was the interpretation of it that must be chucked out. Though at least for good rational scientific reasons – not abandoned as a sop to religious mania, like poor old