just can’t stand it some days.’
Today, he meant. And yesterday. And the day before that. What was he doing? This wasn’t about Garfield, was it? He couldn’t say her name. Claire’s name. He couldn’t put it into words. The feelings that simmered each day. Battened down, as if nothing had happened.
He rummaged in his pocket. He couldn’t find his chewing gum and he was desperate for a smoke, despite having given up years ago. Or maybe what he really needed was a drink. He took another long breath, trying to will the blood pumping through his body to slow. His hands opened and closed, thinking of the club he’d gone to in Derby the other night. He refused to look at Paula now. No, what he really wanted was a shag, a quick, sharp shag like when he and Claire had first got together – the thrill of fumbling, youthful, irresponsible student sex … A million miles and years ago from now.
He could never actually put it into words, but he missed her.
‘Duncan …’
It was Frances. She was standing behind Paula, looking anxiously at her boss. She gave a small gesture to Paula, who nodded and left.
Frances waited until Paula had gone.
‘You need to be careful, Duncan,’ she said. ‘I know you have every reason to be upset, we all do, but … are you sure you should be here? Why don’t you take a few days off? We’ll cope. It’s—’
‘No!’ he said. ‘I’m not taking a fucking holiday.’
He could see Frances wince at the language. He turned to face her.
‘I can’t, not now, there’s too much going on. There are operations lined up, procedures that Tim and Paula aren’t qualified to do. I can’t take time out like that.’
Tim was the other vet, more senior than Paula. Duncan scowled. Did he sound arrogant? Probably, but it was true, they didn’t have the knowledge yet that he had and the whole business was predicated on his expertise. Work, the surgery, it had been his life’s ambition, opening up his own practice. Claire had done a lot to help make that possible. No, he wasn’t having it. Frances had said enough, hadn’t she? She thought she had the right.
He pushed away from the wall and walked towards the road. Frances sighed and turned back to the door to leave. Then at the last minute she swung round.
‘Claire’s gone!’
Her voice carried across the staff car park, louder but sympathetic. Frances had a knack of getting to the crux of a matter regardless of what was being said.
‘She’s not coming back,’ she continued. ‘You need to accept it and let go.’
Duncan didn’t know how to reply. To anyone else, her words would have seemed harsh. Only Frances could get away with saying that. Older and wiser, she’d always been direct. It was one of the reasons Duncan liked working with her.
‘It’s not like that …’ He paused mid-stride. He wasn’t sure that he believed his own words. ‘She’s … she … is still my wife.’ He pushed his hands into his pockets, scrabbling again for the gum.
‘Not anymore,’ she said. There was a bitterness in her words. ‘And then there’s Joe …’
Duncan’s head jerked up. Frances had her hand on the back door again in readiness to leave. Her eyes held his gaze. He didn’t reply. It was the one bone of contention between them. Him and Claire and Joe and … Frances had always taken him to task over Claire and Joe. And he’d let her, hadn’t he? But she didn’t know all of it.
Once more the stockroom door bounced back against the brick wall, the sound reverberating across the car park.
I have often seen them in the fields, further along the valley, slowly pacing the ground. Sometimes one of them drags a spade behind him whilst another holds a spade over one shoulder. Always there are at least two or three of them at a time, leaning forwards over the turf. They hold out their detectors, silhouetted against the trees or frost-blue sky or the morning fog, stalking the field together like a pack of black crows.
Joe discovered metal detecting online. Whilst most boys were either obsessed with football or hunched over their computers playing games, at fifteen, Joe was bashing away at his keyboard discussing early Roman coin types on the metal detecting chat sites.
When he was fourteen, I took him for a long weekend to Northumbria. It was a treat, just for him and me, to make up for the trouble he’d been having in class. I had this idea that if I could tap into his historical curiosity, he’d want to study instead of always feeling forced to comply with school.
Joe hated secondary school, at least in the last few years; the whole uniform and rules thing, the stink of the boys’ toilets, the getting up too early in the morning and forcing himself either to go in with me or catch the bus – he was always half asleep. The studying, exams and books and teachers on his back, day in, day out, essays¸ extracts, questions, long feet stuck out from under his desk, long enough to trip up a teacher. And the girls gossiping in the corridors with skirts that skimmed their thighs and sugar-pink lipstick, tapping on their phones to slag Joe off on Facebook. At least if you believe Joe, that’s what it was like.
They always laughed at him, he’d been convinced of that. Too tall like a stick man, they’d said. Stick Man. Stick Boy. Anything to get a reaction. When he wasn’t sleeping, all he wanted to do was go outside metal detecting, the fresh air banishing his thoughts, the absorbed concentration drowning out his emotions. I’d hated school too, for different reasons, so what could I say?
He’d loved Roman mythology as a small boy, gods and monsters battling for the heavens, or Roman armies marching into war. I thought, what if I took him to Vindolanda, one of the best-preserved Roman forts in the country? It was right on Hadrian’s Wall near the border with Scotland.
It was a huge success. It filled his head with stories of the Roman infantry, military tactics and soldiers guarding against the Picts on the northern reaches of the empire. He pored over the cabinet displays and dragged me from one object to another, fascinated by the layout of the buildings, the sculptures and tablets, the scraps of preserved leather, pottery and metal brooches. Clues to another time, another life.
But it was the coins that had him transfixed. There was a whole wall dedicated to the various coins found on the site. Gold and silver glittering on a white background, lit up by a row of narrow spotlights. He was full of it on the way home, the patterns and designs, the different metal components, the names of the emperors whose heads were engraved on the back.
‘There’s this one coin type, Mum, an aureus. It’s a gold coin from the time of Emperor Nero. He went mad – did you know that? He became emperor when he was only sixteen.’
I laughed at that. ‘Fancy yourself as an emperor, do you, Joe?’
‘Course not,’ he said. He always took me seriously. Then he looked at me. ‘I’m not mad, you know, Mum.’
‘I know that, Joe,’ I said, my gaze turning briefly from my focus on the road.
I flashed a smile at him. He seemed satisfied.
‘He was a treasure hunter. He sent his men into Africa looking for gold. He killed people, though. Murdered Britannicus, his stepbrother, and then his own mother, Agrippina.’ Joe frowned. ‘And his wife. She was called P-p … Pop … Poppaea Sabina.’ He’d hardly paused to catch his breath.
All those names tumbling from his lips. The museum had really captured his interest. I was euphoric. Finally, he was motivated. Finally, you could see how bright he was. I could never remember all that stuff. Back home, even his teachers commented on his sudden