Dying Fall

the other side of the world. The other cottage is a holiday home owned by a couple who seem to have forgotten its existence, although their son and his university friends sometimes come down for noisy weekends of surfing and partying. Ruth finds herself quite looking forward to these weekends, although Flint hates the smell of dope and Kate is kept awake all night by N-Dubz remixes.
    Bob will be back in July but Ruth knows that this June is probably as good as it will get. By August the sky will be grey and the streets of King’s Lynn full of bored school-children looking for distraction. But now, in term-time with exams in full swing, the unfeeling sun shines for day after unbelievable day. Ruth feels sorry for the children but the good weather has come at the perfect time for her. June is the month of their annual university digwhich, this year, is taking place at a Roman site near Swaffham. Ruth teaches forensic archaeology, her students are mainly postgraduates from overseas, and it seems unfair to expose them to Norfolk in the winter or even the spring. So the June dig will be their first practical assignment. For Ruth, too, it’s her first dig for a while and one which is close to her heart. The Roman remains, which promise to be part of a sizeable settlement, were first discovered by Max Grey, an archaeologist at Sussex University and Ruth’s … But, as ever, at the thought of defining her relationship with Max, Ruth’s mind skitters away in a panic.
    Kate has finished throwing her pasta around and she totters off to look for Flint. Ruth follows, glancing at her watch. Seven o’clock. If she can keep Kate busy for another half hour, she’ll sleep well tonight. Ruth feels pretty tired herself. It’s been a long time since she’s spent the whole day in the open air. She enjoys teaching archaeology but her real love is digging. She loves the mixture of painstaking order and backbreaking work, hauling earth about like a navvy one minute and dusting the sand away from a shard of bone the next. She loves the sight of a neat trench, its sides perfectly straight, the soil below exposed in clear layers. She remembers the moment, here on the Saltmarsh, when she found the body of an Iron Age girl, a bracelet of grass still around one wrist. That was the day when she first met DCI Harry Nelson.
    Kate discovers Flint in the back garden and chases him through the blackberry bushes. Ruth sits on the grassand watches them. She thinks of Max and Nelson and Dan. She was never in love with Dan but, right now, their friendship seems sharper and sweeter than any love affair. She can picture Dan’s face perfectly whereas she would have difficulty recalling the features of Peter, the man she lived with for almost ten years. Similarly, her university years suddenly seemed bathed in a light much brighter than the dusky twilight glow in the garden. She thinks of Gordon Square, the University of London Union, beer at a pound a pint, the night bus, Bilal’s kebab shop, the sound of a radio playing on a still afternoon, Sonia singing ‘You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You’. Why hadn’t she kept in better touch with Dan? She knows that as a working-class girl from South London she had always felt slightly in awe of him, the son of wealthy Islington intellectuals. She remembers that Dan had played the piano to almost concert standard, had been able to tell off-colour jokes in several languages, had spent a year teaching English in Japan. They had been friends and classmates, but in other respects they were worlds apart. When did she last see Dan? She thinks it was at Caz’s wedding. She recalls Dan jamming on a piano with a glamorous girl draped around him like a stole. ‘Keep in touch’, he’d said, scribbling his number on a page ripped from a cheque book. She’d kept the page for years (cheque book! who writes cheques now?) but had never dialled the number.
    Kate starts to cry because she has been scratched by a bramble and Ruth takes her upstairs for her bath. Flintfollows. Ruth has noticed before that, though the cat spends most of his time running away from Kate, he seems keen to stay in her vicinity. He always comes upstairs for the bath and the story and usually sleeps on the landing outside Kate’s bedroom. The strict night-time regime is a fairly recent innovation and Ruth is determined to stick to it. By insisting on bed at half-seven and lights out at eight she has eventually managed to claw some of the