Chapter 18 #3
‘I think the word you want is Borrower ,’ Victor said, still laughing, and then Zoe had to laugh too. She’d heard all the jokes before, but told in the right way by the right person, they were still funny, even to her.
As they walked towards the site of Alex’s intended camping field, Victor whistled so loudly it seemed to bounce from the hillsides.
Alex was in a good mood – Zoe considered that it might be the most cheerful she’d ever seen him.
Perhaps the fresh air made him happy too, or perhaps it was a sense of anticipation at what they might find.
Or maybe it was the company, which was certainly doing a lot to improve Zoe’s mood too.
Digging about in a muddy field looking for ancient odds and ends wasn’t what she’d imagined she’d be doing with her Saturday off, but it had come as a welcome surprise.
And wasn’t life full of little moments like this: unexpected, totally out-of-the-blue pleasures? Wasn’t that how it ought to be?
‘So Billie seems good?’ she asked Alex as they followed in the wake of Victor’s longer strides.
‘It’s hard to say for sure, but I think so.
She’s opening up a bit more. I thought about what you said,’ he continued, his gaze trained on the path ahead.
‘You know, about talking to her, telling her I’m there for her no matter what.
She was a bit…Well, I feel as if we were both a bit embarrassed, to be honest – we don’t talk like that.
But I’m glad I said something because she didn’t really answer it, but I think she understood. Thanks.’
‘No need to thank me. It was your doing.’
‘But I needed that kick up the backside to make me see that I had to do something. Are you always right about everything like that?’ he added, giving her a sideways look.
She smiled up at him. ‘Annoying, isn’t it?’
‘Infuriating.’
‘Keep up, you two!’ Victor called behind him, laughing as he did. ‘It’ll be dark at this rate.’
‘It’s barely eleven!’ Zoe shouted back. ‘Don’t be so bossy!’
‘If I’d known you were going to be such a slave driver, I wouldn’t have invited you!’ Alex added.
‘Too late now,’ Victor shouted back. ‘You’re stuck with me.’
Zoe lowered her voice. ‘Bless. He’s excited. Like a little kid. He was the same at the paddock – couldn’t wait to get done and come over here. Isn’t it cute?’
‘I have to admit, I’ve been looking forward to more searching myself. I’ve got no patience for the task, and I will be complaining if I don’t find a chest full of gold in the first ten minutes, but I’m still up for it.’
‘So that’s why I’m here, is it? To keep you both in line.’
‘I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.’
Victor stopped for a moment and scanned the landscape. ‘Where did you say it was?’ he asked, turning to watch Alex and Zoe catch up.
‘Over on that plateau.’ Alex pointed to a spot that was perhaps another two or three minutes’ walk away. ‘You can just about see where I’ve been digging there.’
‘Your eyes are better than mine,’ Victor said, ‘so I’ll take your word for it. At least I know where I’m going now.’
He started to walk again, and Zoe and Alex followed.
Before too long she could see the beginnings of some foundations, which Alex had clearly intended to create many more of before he’d got distracted by his first find.
A meandering trench of different depths spilled out from that original section.
It was hardly precision engineering, and Alex said as much as he noticed her looking.
‘I probably ought to try and make it more methodical. I expect if we had professionals up here, they’d do that and get better results.’
‘Will there be any professional digging?’ Zoe asked.
‘I don’t know. The expert I’ve been speaking to says there’s nothing of enough significance yet for that, though he’s happy to take what I do find off my hands for cataloguing, and if the department decides there might be a reason to come up, they’ll get in touch with me.’
‘But you still want to dig?’
He turned to her with a smile. ‘How could I resist? I wouldn’t be able to rest knowing there might be something amazing under the soil here and I’d never tried to find it.’
Zoe had to smile; his enthusiasm was infectious. She’d never been interested in this sort of thing before but found herself fascinated now. ‘What do you think you’ll find?’
‘I don’t know. I have no clue what sort of things might be there. It would be incredible to find something of value, like jewellery or something, but I doubt that’s going to happen. It’s more likely to be everyday stuff.’
Victor was already walking the length of haphazard trench when Zoe and Alex got there.
‘What do you reckon?’ Alex asked.
‘I reckon you’ve made a lovely mess,’ Victor replied.
‘I know, and it’ll get a lot messier by the time I’ve finished. Shall we get cracking?’
Victor flicked a switch on his detector while Alex meddled with his own, trying to remind himself how it worked. After a minute or so, he had it set and handed it to Zoe. ‘You’re chief detector today.’
‘What are you going to do now I have your metal detector?’
‘I’m going to prod about with my big stick to see what I hit.’
‘Well, that sounds technical.’
‘You’re impressed, right? You must be.’
‘Oh yes.’ Zoe raised her eyebrows and nodded very deliberately. ‘ Very impressed…’
‘You know, you gave me that same look Billie gives me when she thinks I’m being a total spanner. I don’t know what it is that all the women I know seem to think I’m an idiot.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t,’ Zoe said with a smile.
‘If that’s the case, she has a funny way of showing it.’ He rubbed his hands together, surveying the ground he’d already dug. ‘I’ll start here. You go and pick a spot – I don’t think it matters where. Give it a sweep and see what you can find.’
‘How will I know if I’ve found something?’
‘Oh, you’ll know,’ he said with a grin. ‘You’ll be able to hear the alarm on that thing in Windermere when it goes off.’
Zoe wandered to a spot a few feet away that was still covered by wild grasses and began to move the detector back and forth, slowly and methodically. She had no clue what she was doing, but she suspected none of them really did so that was all right. In fact, it was funny.
She looked up to see Victor doing the same as her with his detector, a look of concentration on his face so serious and absorbed that it seemed faintly ridiculous.
Alex wasn’t faring much better. He’d told her he’d poke about in the mud, and that was exactly what he was doing.
He had a large rod and was prodding it into the soil at random intervals, waiting for a moment to see if he hit anything and then trying again in a different place when he didn’t.
After ten minutes, despite working in silence, none of them had hit anything at all.
‘Well, this is a thrill a minute, isn’t it?’ Alex said, looking up.
‘You said you had no patience, but I thought you’d last a bit longer,’ Zoe said, taking off one of her earphones to listen to him.
‘Did I say that?’
Victor looked up and noticed them talking and then took off his headphones too. ‘Who’s got the flask?’
‘Not me,’ Zoe said. ‘I was a last-minute addition, and I didn’t know I needed to bring a flask.’
‘Neither did I,’ Alex said.
‘Hopeless,’ Victor said and then took one from his bag. ‘Only two cups, I’m afraid, because I didn’t know I’d need more, but if someone doesn’t mind sharing…’
‘You have a drink first,’ Alex said to Zoe. ‘I don’t mind wiping out the cup and using it again afterwards.’
‘Is there some of Corrine’s cake?’ Zoe asked, taking a drink from Victor.
‘Of course there is – what do you take me for? Ginger or lemon drizzle?’
‘Oooh, lemon, please!’ Zoe held out her hand, and Victor put a small parcel in it. ‘Thank you! And thank you, Corrine. How do you stay so slim, married to the world’s best baker?’
‘I must walk it off. Corrine says it’s black magic, the amount I eat in a day.’
‘I think she’s right.’
‘Cake?’ Victor asked Alex.
‘I’m getting some too? I’ll take whatever’s going – don’t want to deprive anyone of their favourite.’
‘There’s plenty to go round,’ Victor said, handing another wrapped slice to Alex before digging in the bag for his own and sitting on a mound of earth to unwrap it.
The mug was hot but comforting in Zoe’s hands as she sipped at her tea and munched on her cake, gazing out over the landscape.
‘I could do this every day,’ Alex said as he stood at her side and followed her gaze.
‘It’s funny, when I bought Hilltop, it was a pure business decision.
It was the right place for the right price at the right time.
But since I arrived here, I’ve started to get attached to it in a way I never expected. ’
‘You didn’t move here because you were drawn by some mystical force?’ she asked wryly.
‘Were you?’
‘Oh yes, it was called a job offer.’
He grinned. ‘Money then. I think mine might have been a very similar motivation.’
‘Disappointingly cynical, eh?’
‘I prefer not to think of it as cynical, but I’ll admit there was more logic than emotion involved.
I thought it was the sort of place people would want to come on holiday, so of course it’s a lovely part of the world.
But there are lots of lovely parts of the world and…
I don’t know, but I can’t imagine them feeling so…
’ He shrugged as he bit into his cake. ‘Healing, I think that’s it.
Standing here, looking at all this’ – he nodded at a majestic panorama of rolling fields, valleys and hilltops crowned by cloud – ‘it’s so peaceful, so much bigger than us, it sort of puts your life in perspective, doesn’t it?
And I think that’s good, knowing that your problems can be shrunk down like that.
Because our place in the bigger picture is tiny. ’
‘I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or not. I do think you’re right, though. Feeling small…makes me feel lost.’
‘It makes me feel free. Any mistakes I make are a blip – they don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.’
‘That sounds a bit like shrugging off responsibility to me.’
‘I don’t mean it like that. Obviously I’m still going to take seriously what I have to do for Billie.
I want to provide for her, and I want to make her life good, but in the end, how much of what I do really matters?
I’ll be here for a moment, and then poof, I’m gone.
Just like the people who left those arrowheads I found. ’
‘I get it, but I prefer to think what I do matters a lot.’
‘Ah, well, that’s probably true. It probably matters more. After all, you’re bringing the next generation into the world, and without them, there is no future me trying to make one of your descendants understand what they’re saying…very badly, I might add.’
It had been a wholly unexpected foray into philosophy that Zoe didn’t fully comprehend and hadn’t seen coming, but she appreciated the sentiment behind it.
As she turned back to the hills and valleys laid out before them, she agreed on one point – being here was sort of healing.
In the peace of this landscape, it was hard to believe there were struggles going on beyond it.
It was also easy to imagine a simpler life, one where eating and sleeping and working hard and loving the people around you were all that mattered, the sort of life the people who’d left the arrowheads behind must have had.
‘More cake?’ Victor asked as he scrunched up a bit of greaseproof paper and dropped it into his bag.
‘I’m full up for now,’ Zoe said.
‘I’ll take some more.’ Alex wandered over to Victor’s seat.
‘Have my cup now too,’ Victor added. ‘I’m done. I’ve got some water here to give it a rinse…’
As they worked out how best to clean the cup and then filled it for Alex, Zoe watched.
The day she’d first met Alex she’d been struck by his looks.
Now that she knew him better, his looks seemed to matter less.
She still liked them, but it wasn’t his warm smile that made her think of him when he wasn’t there.
It wasn’t his patient and soulful dark eyes that made her want to watch him when he wasn’t aware of her gaze.
There was an aura, an indefinable something that she simply found magnetic, a feeling that grew stronger every time their paths crossed.
She hadn’t yet worked out what it meant, but she couldn’t deny that it was becoming worryingly addictive.
He was complicated, but she wanted to figure him out.
He came with problems that she wanted to solve.
As these thoughts ran through her head, he turned and caught her eye, and she blushed, tearing her gaze away and taking a gulp of her tea. ‘This is a perfect cuppa. Is Corrine good at everything?’
‘I’ll have you know I made the tea,’ Victor said. ‘But yes, she is good at everything. Why do you think I snapped her up all those years ago?’
‘Because you thought she was beautiful and funny and intelligent.’
‘Oh, that too, but mostly I tasted one of her dinners and then never looked at another woman again.’
Alex and Zoe both laughed.
Victor poured a tea for Alex, offered Zoe a top-up, which she took, and then screwed the lid back onto the flask.
They chatted about what they might find that day, what they hoped to find and revisited their earlier conversation about what they’d do with the money if they struck gold.
Alex was adamant that Zoe would have a cut of the spoils, leading to Victor weaving a pretend scenario of treachery which involved him taking Zoe’s cut and denying she was ever there, and by the end of it they were all laughing so hard, she could barely sip her tea without snorting it back down her nose.
Then they picked up their tools and began work in earnest, buoyed by a warm drink and a sugary snack and a sense of camaraderie Zoe had never expected to find with her two neighbours.