Red Bones - Ann Cleeves [4]
But Evelyn was a local volunteer and she needed training and Hattie needed to keep her on side. Hattie knew she didn’t handle volunteers well. She was impatient and expected too much from them. She used language they had no hope of understanding. Today wouldn’t be easy.
They’d woken again to sunshine, but now a mist had come in from the sea, filtering the light. Mima’s house was a shadow in the distance and everything looked softer and more organic. It was as if the surveying poles had grown from the ground like willows and the spoil heap was natural, a fold in the land.
The day before, Sophie had marked out a practice trench a little way off from the main site and dug out the turf. She’d exposed roots and a patch of unusually sandy, dry soil and levelled the area with a mattock so the practice dig could begin. The topsoil had been dumped on the existing spoil heap. Everything was ready when Evelyn turned up at ten, just as she’d said she would, wearing corduroy trousers and a thick old sweater. She had the anxious, eager-to-please manner of a pupil sucking up to the teacher. Hattie talked her through the process.
‘Shall we make a start then?’ Hattie knew Evelyn was enthusiastic, but really the woman should be taking this more seriously, making notes for example. Hattie had gone through the methods of recording a site in some detail, but she wasn’t sure Evelyn had taken it all in. ‘Do you want to have a go with the trowel, Evelyn? We wouldn’t sieve everything in a site like this, though we might work it through the flotation tank, and every find would need to be set in context. You do understand how important that is?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘And we work from the known to the unknown so we always trowel backwards. We don’t want to tread on the things we’ve already uncovered.’
Evelyn looked up at her. ‘I might not be working for a PhD,’ she said, ‘but I’m not daft either. I have been listening.’ It was gently said but Hattie felt herself blushing. I’m no good with people, she thought. Only with objects and ideas. I understand how the past works but not how to live with people in the present.
The older woman squatted in the trench and began to scratch tentatively with the trowel, beginning in one corner, scraping away the upper layer of soil, reaching up to tip it into the bucket.
She frowned like a child concentrating on routine homework. Over the next half hour, whenever Hattie glanced across to her, there was the same expression on her face. Hattie was just about to check on Evelyn’s work when the older woman called over to her.
‘What’s this?’
Hattie stretched and went to see. Something solid was revealed against the lighter colour of the sandy soil and the particles of shell. Hattie was excited despite herself. This was a fragment of pottery perhaps. Imported pottery would give the house the status she hoped for. They’d dug the practice trench away from the excavated dwelling precisely because they didn’t want the amateurs to come across any sensitive finds, but perhaps they’d stumbled across a midden, even an extension to the house itself. She crouched beside Evelyn, almost pushing her away, and brushed the soil away from the revealed object. It was not pottery, though it was reddish-brown, the colour of clay. Bone, she saw now. As an undergraduate she’d expected old bone to be white or cream or grey and had been surprised at the richness of the colour. A large piece of bone, round, she thought, though only a fraction had been uncovered.
She was disappointed, but tried not to show it. Beginners were thrilled by their first finds. In the Shetland digs they were always