his teacher, to Alix and Liz and two Japanese tourists and the old lady in a felt hat. ‘Gosh, isn’t he lucky, to have ended up here!’
Liz, Alix and the old lady had all smiled: the old lady had spoken up. ‘Not very lucky up to that point, young man!’ she had admonished him, pointing to the writings on the wall announcing the probable sequence of events that had led to his death and his body’s recovery. The schoolfriends had laughed, Alix and Liz had laughed, and the little boy himself had smiled broadly, unabashed, his freckled face with its gap tooth and small nose open as a flower, open as a book that all might read, open as innocence. He knew what he meant. And of course, as Alix and Liz agreed over their lentil soup, they knew what he meant too, there was something rather wonderful, rather lucky even, about such defiance of time, about Lindow Man’s role as a link and a messenger from the underworld, about such arbitrary, quirkish, museum-venerated fame.
‘I wonder if people would pay to be put in museums after their death?’ ponders Alix.
‘Well, the Egyptians did, in a sense,’ says Liz. ‘And the Chinese. And the holy saints of the Catholic Church that hang around under altars in Italy.’
‘The saints didn’t pay,’ says Alix, reprovingly. ‘They were preserved by sanctity.’
‘Sorry,’ says Liz.
Liz and Alix have had a good afternoon. Alix is pleased to have caught up with the exhibition before it closes and wonders if she has not become more conscientious about attending cultural events in London now that she does not live so near them. She has come down on the Rapide Coach and is spending the night with Liz. They have a lot to talk about.
They discuss Bog People in general, the poems of Seamus Heaney, the Bog Man of Buller, P. V. Glob, the excavations of Ian Kettle, P. Whitmore’s interest in corpses and Ancient Britain, and Alix’s notion that the story of Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes should be adapted for television.
‘Why don’t you write it yourself?’ asks Liz.
‘I’m too busy. And anyway, I can’t write.’
‘Get Beaver to write it. It’s his period.’
‘Oh, he’s well past it.’
They discuss Beaver, briefly. Beaver claims to have an ex-mistress living in elderly seclusion on the shores of Lake Maggiore.
‘You should get him to send you to visit her,’ suggests Liz. ‘In some pleasant month. Like May. Or June.’
‘He says she’s the subject of his Novara sequence,’ says Alix. ‘But she disputes this. At length, and illegibly.’
The conversation moves to their friend Esther Breuer, who now lives in Bologna, and who has it would seem dropped from their lives as from this volume. They do not hear from her often. She has been translated into another world. They miss her, but not perhaps as much as they thought they would. Maybe she will come back, maybe not. She is living with an Italian Etruscan scholar, Elena Volpe, sister of Esther’s dead admirer, Professor Claudio Volpe. Esther had lived for years, unknowingly, in a flat in the same building as P. Whitmore, in North Kensington, at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, and his arrest had in part led to her departure. The house in which Esther and P. Whitmore lived has now been demolished, and a row of what Liz says must be Small Industrial Units has been erected on the site. They will, according to Liz, never be occupied, and already look derelict. ‘The area is too much for them,’ reports Liz to Alix. ‘They haven’t a hope, they died before they began.’
Liz and Alix drop the subject of Esther, as she has dropped them, and move on to Charles and Carla Davis (a subject new to Alix, who has not seen Charles for a year or two). They allude to the long silence of their friend Stephen Cox, who is somewhere in Kampuchea, and is said to be writing a play about Pol Pot.
‘Are they quite mad, these men, to want to go to such disagreeable places?’ asks Liz, rhetorically.
They speak of Liz’s step-grandchild Cornelia, and Alix expresses regret that her older son Nicholas and his consort Ilse have not yet had a baby. They have made do, so far, with one of Liz’s tabby cat’s kittens, which has already had kittens of its own.
Then they move, with slightly sinking spirits, to the financial problems of Liz’s sister Shirley and her husband Cliff Harper.
‘I told her to get independent advice,’ said Liz. ‘I don’t know why she doesn’t just leave him. He’s making her life a misery. Why not quit? The children have all left home, why doesn’t she just clear off?’
‘People don’t just leave their husbands, up in Northam,’ says Alix.
‘Don’t they? I thought that had all changed.’
‘Swift and Hodgkin argue that the divorce rate is 20 per cent higher among the professional and semi-professional classes and the petty bourgeoisie in the south than it is in the north and the north-east,’ says Alix.
‘Really? And what do Swift and Hodgkin have to say about Scotland?’
‘They don’t cover Scotland,’ says Alix.
They both laugh, although they agree it is not a laughing matter. But, as Liz points out, she is not her sister’s keeper, and anyway she doesn’t understand business. ‘I thought of asking Charles to give her some advice,’ says Liz, ‘but frankly, Charles is in a terrible mess himself. He owes money all over the place. It’s on a grander scale than Cliff’s mess, so I don’t suppose he’ll ever have to pay up, but it does rather make one distrust his judgement.’
Alix says that her opinion on such matters is not worth having, and that moreover she has a feeling that Shirley doesn’t really like her. ‘She doesn’t really like me, either,’ says Liz. ‘In fact, that’s probably why she doesn’t like you.’
They abandon Shirley as a lost cause, and move on to grander themes: prison visiting, insanity, Foucault, Lacan, the oddity of French intellectuals, the grandeur of Freud, the audacity of Bernard Shaw, the death penalty and social attitudes towards.
‘I mean, really,’ asks Liz, mellowed by a plateful of Toulouse sausage and swede-and-potato mash, ‘really, do you think P. Whitmore ought to be alive or dead? Do you think there’s any point in keeping P. Whitmore alive?’ She stirs the green salad.
‘I don’t know,’ says Alix, slowly. ‘I suppose one can argue that he’s a kind of – a kind of living experiment. A kind of Lindow Man in a glass coffin. That we can learn from him if we can learn how to. I suppose that’s what I think.’
‘Shaw would have had him polished off. Painlessly, of course,’ repeats Liz, who has already made this point earlier in the conversation.
‘As no use to society, I suppose?’ says Alix. ‘As a meaningless sport of nature, like a dog with two heads? Well, yes, I can see that.’
‘And he, what does he think? All those American murderers seem to long to end up on Death Row. They are after the publicity. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Or so we are told.’
‘I don’t think P. Whitmore wants to be hanged,’ says Alix. ‘No, I don’t really think he wants that. He wouldn’t be so interested in the Romans and so worried about his tinned peas if that’s what he wanted. Would he? But then, I think, I have to think, that he wants to understand what he did. And he probably doesn’t at all, I’m simply projecting on to him my desire to understand what he did. In some way . . . it sounds absurd, but I don’t think he’s all that interested in what he did. As though it’s not quite real to him. You know what I mean? Is there a name for that?’
‘Plenty,’ says Liz, the expert. ‘But they don’t explain much.’
‘No,’ says Alix. ‘It’s circular, really. Naming and observing, observing and naming. One can never tell what it’s really like, inside his head. Any more than one can tell what it’s like inside the head of those guys who bumped off poor Dirk Davis.’
‘Or