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Jack Corstorphine is a man with a rare intuition. He is convinced that the landscape of Europe hides a civilization a million years old. Jadis Markham has a gift for analysis -- she can reach solutions while everyone else is still grappling with the problem. Together, they change the face of prehistory. But prehistory bites back. Forces almost beyond imagination are stirring in Jack and Jadis' world, among the worlds of their friends -- their scientist-priest mentor Domingo, and their adopted son, Tom -- and among the stars. The Sigil is an epic of near-future SF about the nature of the past, religion, love and the nature of humanity. About the author: Henry Gee is a Senior Editor of the international science magazine Nature, where he devised and edited the award-winning Futures series of SF short stories. His previous books include The Science of Middle-earth, Jacob's Ladder and In Search of Deep Time. The Sigil is his first novel.

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The Sigil

Henry Gee

    Prologue

    Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
    A paradise for a sect; the savage too
    From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
    Guesses at Heaven: pity these have not
    Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
    The shadows of melodious utterance.
    John Keats - The Fall of Hyperion

    It's hard to know where to start. I have so much to tell; I have so little confidence in my abilities to tell it (reticence being my usual state, as well as many years as a dry-as-dust academic); and I am of course uncertain of the reactions - even the identity - of you, my audience, except that each one of you will belong to one (or more) of twenty or so different species, and many of you will be out of sympathy with the particular species at the centre of the drama I am about to attempt. My problem, in short, is this: much as though I feel I need to set down this record, I am not at all sure that I want to.
    First to needs, then to wants. Of course, many of you will have good reason to despise human beings. They were the oppressors, the colonisers, the enslavers. Such, at any rate, is the modish view of certain among us whose opinions are constrained by neither memory nor experience. It is easy to knock a straw man, to caricature a thing that is no longer able to respond. While I do not intend to write a political treatise -- the contents should be sufficient proof that it is not -- a primary reason for my writing this memoir is to convince you that the story is more complicated, more compromised - and more painful - than many of you realise, those of you who never met a human being. I lived among them for most of my life, and for most of that I had no reason to doubt that I was one myself.
    A second reason is that, odd as it might seem, if it weren't for the sacrifice made by humanity - I would go so far as the ultimate sacrifice - none of us would be here. Our beloved planet Earth would be a dry, cindered husk floating in black space. It was a close run thing, of course, but in the end we live in a fresh new world, bought with billions of human lives. Those of you who have read some history could counter that a sacrifice is not such if not made knowingly and willingly, and that the human beings who laid down their lives did not know that they were doing it for any purpose whatsoever. At one level, you'd be right, but not at another - proximately, the sacrificial lambs were paralyzed with horror and dread for themselves; the good of the world was the last thing on their minds. Ultimately, however, as a species, their sacrifice prevailed. They died for us: we owe them our existence. Qui tollis peccata mundi, as an old friend of mine once put it (we shall meet him too, I hope).
    This is an unfashionable view, I know. People are entitled to their own opinions, and I own that most will differ from mine. However, I strongly believe that mine is the correct one, because I was there. I lived through it. I knew the people involved. I grew up with them, I worked with them. I have lived inside humanity under the deepest possible cover, for if none of them ever suspected that I was anything other than human (or did not, for a long time), then neither did I. The discovery of my true nature was a shock, followed by isolation from those I loved, as well as those whom logic told me were my own kind.
    So much for needs, and now to wants. My reticence is conditioned, very largely, by my recognition that to some what I am about to discuss will be a highly personal, indeed acutely painful agenda that could - will -- compromise my wider reasons for setting these thoughts in order and offering them to you. However, were these memoirs simply an annalistic treatment of dates and events, they would mean nothing at all to you, the reader. You would not engage with them, and you would, therefore, be out of sympathy with my view that the memory of the human race should be one held in gratitude if not reverence - and not become something dark and twisted, to be reviled. But as I lived through the events described herein, I am able to set down an account which I would say is involved, rather than compromised.
    For example: everyone recalls that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, and that King Harold the Second was killed by an arrow to the eye, fired by the bowmen of William the Bastard. But that's just a bald account, related by nobody who was there at the time. History is written by the victor, so nobody will ever know the pain and panic suffered by the vanquished King in his dying moments. As the force of the arrow snapped his head back, as his vision clouded with red, and then white, and finally black, we could never know - nor be in a position to speculate - that his final thoughts were of resigned futility: that he had tried his best to stem a tide of invasion from both the Danes in the north and the Normans in the south, and that, in his almost certain failure, the halls of his ancestors might welcome him the less, for all that he did his best despite his foreknowledge that on the field of Senlac Hill he would meet his doom. Once again, my argument is all about causation. Proximately, Harold died of a traumatic insult to the brain. His kingdom was lost along with his eye and his life, but his death, in the end was emphatically not about conquest and the fall of dynasties. Ultimately, he died of at least a provisional shame, until his case was judged by his own Angels, his own Gods. This might seem such a small thing, especially when suffered by an insignificant loser. But once we recognize the fact, we can feel his loss all the more keenly: the extinction of the Ancient English civilization by the barbaric Normans becomes, for us, too, a personal loss - particularly as he was denied any chance to purge his guilt.
    And so it is with me. In these notes I wish to express a similarly personal loss, and confess a potential shame which I have come to identify with the spirit of the age - but unlike Harold - who never got his chance -- I should like to purge it, facing down whatever pain and resurgent grief this might cause. Now, I know how pompous this all sounds, but to me, my own story, and that of the world in which I lived, revolves around one, single event for which I feel responsible. A confession, if you like.
    There are three human beings whom I have loved, and so this account is in a great part about them. But one of these three I loved the most, with a fierce and consuming love. I have always been a little reserved and perhaps a little secretive (I am told that this is in my nature) so she may not have realized the true strength of my feelings at the time (although, if I am honest, perhaps she did.) No, that is not the source of my shame. Some rueful embarrassment in later life, perhaps, but hardly worthy of the confessional. My shame comes from the bald fact that I killed her.
    Of course, you might add, once you have read the account, you will see that I did not mean to kill her - quite the opposite. She was full of life - no-one fuller -- and we two wanted to make more life still. In fact, I had no knowledge that I was killing her - how could I have done? By my own logic of causation, you might argue, I should be able to understand all this. And so I do, but acceptance is harder. I do not doubt that these circumstances are both true and extenuating, the fact remains that I killed her as surely as an arrow killed Harold. I have lived with this for far too long, and although I have tried hard to forgive myself, I cannot forget - and I do not, in fact, want to. Therefore I am driven to write this account, whether I will or nill.
    At this point I had planned to say that after you had read this, you might understand, and even sympathize. But in the act of writing this I can now conclude instead that this is not my own ultimate reason for ordering my thoughts here. Naturally, I'd be gratified were you to derive pleasure, even understanding, from their contents - after all, everyone loves to read the intimate doings of others. But that's up to you. No, the final reason, and perhaps the only reason, is that I owe her a great debt. She was a part of my life. A part of me, in fact, in a way that few of you still living will appreciate except by bloodless intellection.
    And so, in the end, this is a love story. It now appears that the concept of love as an ideal, an emotion strong enough to transcend pain, loss, even death, was an uniquely human attribute: in which case it is ironic (for me, at any rate) that our major religion is of human origin and, what's more, founded on the redemptive power of love. Whereas it is quite true that in the modern, post-human world there remains a great deal of sex, this is almost always taken for granted as a mechanistic means of procreation, even when it is not coloured by its frequent and variegated use in ritual observance. But that sex can be an adjunct of love - its glue, its amplifier - is, I dare say, beyond the wit or purview of most people. I own that this is a circumstance that such people cannot help, by their very natures. Indeed, many of them will find much in the account that follows deplorable, perverted, even bestial - if they find it comprehensible at all. I can only hope that they do not consider it maudlin or trite, which I would find a million times worse.
    A mystery remains. Given my own nature, that I should have felt the influence of love so strongly is a puzzle. Was a capacity for love born within me, or did I only acquire it by virtue of my upbringing? If the latter, could my love, as honestly as it appears to have been to me, be in reality a sham, a pale simulacrum of the real thing? I am unable to offer any resolution, and so this account serves - for me, and for no-one else - as expiation only.
    But to begin, as they say, at the beginning. Or, in my case, some while before it.
   
    Chapter 1
   
    (January 2001 - July 2003)
   
    Yþde swa þisne eardgeard ælda scyppend oþþæt burgwara breahtma lease eald enta geweorc idlu stodon.
    Anonymous - The Wanderer
   
    Cambridge is, as it always was, an anomaly, rather distant from anything else at all remarkable. A visitor to Cambridge today will see it much as it was in the Middle Ages, a cluster of picturesque University colleges on a wide river, in the centre of a small market town. Although closely surrounded by several small villages -- Cherry Hinton, Trumpington, Arbury and so on, the homes of the farmers and craftsmen who populate Cambridge's twice-weekly market in the shadow of Great St Mary's - the wider picture is of desolation. Nothing besides cheerless sedge and brackish fen, not even the meanest hovel, now exists between the village of Barnwell and the muddy tidal flats at the remote seaside fishing village of Ely. As for Cambridge itself, the Monastic Orders are different from those that held sway in those far-off days (and the students are, very largely, of different species) but the entire town could be described adequately by this general picture of quiet remoteness.
    How a century can change things. At the very start of the last century, every one of these villages was no more than a suburb of the City, which was alive and crammed with bustle. The religious orders had long been in retreat, replaced by the more immediately potent forces of science and industry, and the swathes of housing required to accommodate all those scientists and industrialists. The fens had been drained, making the land far more extensive than it is now, and oceans of wheat had displaced the mud flats and oystercatchers, the reeds and bitterns.
    It's hard to describe, now, how crowded it was. No - description is easy. It was hard to understand. The streets were perpetually jammed with motor vehicles of all kinds, each accompanied with its slipstreaming flock of bicycles, like a cow has its ox-peckers. People of all kinds (human kinds) surged and jostled along the narrow sidewalks: students, townspeople and tourists alike. Cambridge was then at its zenith as the seat of one of the two great and ancient Universities of England, pulling in the brightest and best of its young people to learn, and once learnèd, to teach.
    The bulk of the students were undergraduates, who came from their own dispersed homes for intense bursts of study that occupied in total less than half the year, spread in eight-week bursts over a frenetic three-year period. This learning was accompanied by leisure activities of all kinds, for if Cambridge undergraduates did anything better than most other people of their age, it was to live. It must have been an exciting time for them, especially compared with the more relaxed schedule today, when students are invariably in the novitiate and combine their studies with routine offices that occupy the whole year, with no distinction between terms and vacations.
    Back then, there was so much to offer, to excite, and you were not obliged to rise at four a.m. and muck out the pigs. They must have lived like the kings of old: but when each new and starry cohort of undergraduates had finally gotten over the euphoria of having been admitted to this select cadre, not to mention the after-effects of all the parties; the full-on assault of invitations to subscribe to the student parachute club (`join us and fall out with your friends'); the geophysical society (`stop plate tectonics NOW!') or the microbiological association (`we do it with culture and sensitivity'); and the liberation of living away, often for the first time, from the tyrannical eye of a parent -- they invariably discovered with a jarring bump that the lectures they were required to attend were, with few exceptions, dreadful. The dons (that is, the resident academics, who were at this time not required to be monks) would rather have been refining exotic superconducting phases of rare-earth-based ceramic materials or dissecting the use of punctuation in Paradise Lost than actually teaching the rudiments of their subjects to students, and so generally did the latter in the most perfunctory way they could.
    After all, despite this fervid activity, there were only as many hours in the day as there are now, and those not spent in tedious meetings with other academics were spent in precious research, or in raising the money required to fund yet further research. (How cynical I seem! If you can detect an edge to these comments, please remember that I was once one of them). If there were corners to be cut, it was in teaching, and the most prominent and frangible corners were the notes lecturers used to teach. Such hours as could have been spent in the long summer vacation to update lecture notes soon disappeared in field trips, conferences and even (whisper it soft) time spent with families. The result was predictable enough. Year on year, a lecturer's notes became progressively more dated. Perhaps the same is true today. I suspect that it is.
    But there were means to ends, and there was, in those crowded times, a ready if not inexhaustible supply of cheap labour to remedy this deficiency: for postgraduate students (that is, those admitted to courses of still higher learning) could, if they were organized and had a mind to, take in small groups of undergraduates, teaching them all those things that their lecturers seemed to have missed, and, not only that, accumulating a reasonable and very necessary income. These small groups were called `supervisions'. Jack Corstorphine was just such a graduate student, and with his tact, reserve, laconic humour - and a reasonable capacity for administration - he soon made a name among hard-pressed college tutors as an accomplished supervisor.
    Then in his second year of a doctoral degree (`Models of land use derived from geomorphology and lithic distributions in the British Palaeolithic'), Jack Corstorphine found supervisions filled a social void. Although attached to a college - as all Cambridge students were obliged to be - he found few attractions in college life. His field work was by necessity solitary; his laboratory work often more so.
    Not that he minded overmuch. Tall, broad-shouldered but rangy, and good-looking in a somewhat angular way, the long, lonely hours of research suited his naturally reticent temperament. And coming from a northern provincial town, where he had attended the local university as an undergraduate, he found Cambridge by turns confusing, exciting and depressing. He felt he should be stimulated by at all, and he was, up to a point. But he felt that nothing he could ever feel about his life and work in Cambridge would ever match the shining-eyed expectations of his parents, on learning that their only child, having been the only one in their family ever to have attended a university at all, was going to crown his study in what, to them, was a city of romantic associations: of punting on the river and May Balls, of strawberries-and-cream, champagne breakfasts and black-tie dinners, like something out of Brideshead Revisited. He hadn't the heart to tell them that his life in Cambridge was - in truth - rather ordinary.
    He enjoyed studying as he came to enjoy teaching, but his real love was the outdoors, tramping alone all over England, refining an already intuitive yet sharp sense of landscape, and how human beings (and other people) had shaped it over millennia. He poked into crabbed caves in the bleak limestone of Derbyshire, the foam-flecked Gower peninsula of south Wales, and bluebell-lined Torbay, trying to picture each scene through a Neanderthal's eyes; he tramped the Vale of Pickering beneath the North York Moors, where some of Britain's earliest farmers had corralled their cattle. For weeks at a time he'd live rough, fishing by day, camping in potholes or under hedgerows at night, returning to his disapproving landlady in Victoria Road stinking, bearded and bright-eyed, like a prophet from one of the more obscure corners of the Old Testament. "I was trying to find out what it must have been like," he would protest, weakly and futilely, as she prodded him (with her broom) towards the bathroom.
    Such was Jack Corstorphine at his most content. But no man can remain solitary for ever, and Cambridge was a maddening and frustrating place for such a man as Jack to find himself cast up: in those relatively short periods of the year when the undergraduates were in season, as it were, life was one big whirl. When they left, all was grey and dull. But by taking supervisions, he got to know quite a few undergraduates, and what he knew, he almost always liked. Even the dimmest Cambridge clod had something special about them. His students here reached greater heights and lower depths than his colleagues from his home town. They seemed more focussed, more colourful, more alive. And none more so than Jade Markham.
    Jack first saw Jade in a fluster of confusion one chilly January morning when she breezed into Jack's office five minutes late. A trio of students from St John's - all big, burly rowers - were already getting their notebooks out. A flutter of apologies - bike puncture, you know, happens all the time - and then Jack started on his prepared notes. Now, this was something that always amazed him. As soon as he drew himself up to speak - putting on his `official' voice - they were all attention. This never happened at his old university, where a patina of well-meaning dullness coated all endeavour, he thought: and (he admitted) it felt good, as a departmental dogsbody, to be treated as an authority, someone who Really Knew. Even then, Jack saw that Jade was just that bit more studious, more attentive, than any of his other students. Her initial lateness was the sole anomaly. Her assignments were always returned on time, and were always substantially better argued than anyone else's. Of course, he reasoned, Jade was very attractive - hardly difficult, given the three well-meaning but cauliflower-eared meatheads that made up the rest of her class. Could he be favouring her because she was the pretty one, the only female, as well as being the one with that extra sparkle? This caused him some anguish - something he laughed about in later years - so he tried a scientific experiment, asking some of his departmental colleagues who knew none of his students personally to rate their work. Jade's always came out on top. "Here's someone with some initiative, some promise", his doctorate supervisor told him, confidentially. "This is first class material, no doubt about that. Such a clarity of thought, of purpose - something only too rare nowadays. She could go far. Keep your eye on her."
    Not that Jack had the slightest intention of averting his gaze, but at least, he reasoned, he could appreciate her better without a guilty conscience. It wasn't long before she began to stalk his idle thoughts: she was long, lean and very leggy, with an open, round face; clear, slightly olive skin, and large, round, dark hazel eyes, so that while lost in thought she looked like a slightly surprised owl. When she spoke, her voice was neither loud nor shrill, but a modulated contralto (the product of a comfortable if not conspicuously wealthy Surrey background) that commanded the room.
    But what always caught Jack's breath was her apparently artless habit, while talking to the class in general - of, say, some arcane process of the evolution of postglacial landforms -- of piling her sprawling mass of very long, straight, glossy dark brown hair on top of her head, thus lifting her long, lovely arms, and thrusting out her small but exquisite breasts, each one crowned with a shapely nipple which could often be seen, if only just, pressing against the fabric of her clothes. Jack, in common with many of the legions of the overworked and sexually frustrated, soon evolved a gradation of female attractiveness. For a woman to pile her hair on her head was the third most alluring thing she could do while still completely clothed. The second most alluring thing was, then, for her to let a single strand of dark hair fall loose down her back, making a contrast against pale and curving shoulders. But the most alluring thing was her studied ignorance of the effect that these two small gestures would have on any male company. Suffice it to say that Jack was entirely lost. And the very moment that her time with him as a supervisor ended, he asked her on a date. And not just any date - but the Clare College May Ball. Oh, thought Jack, if she'd only accept: and if my parents could see me then! And if I should succeed in getting tickets!
    He shouldn't have worried that she might refuse. Jack wasn't to know that Jade was just emerging from the wreckage of an intense long-term attachment with a boy from her home town: a boy who'd only become more jealous and petulant as it became ever clearer that Jade's talents and ambitions would eclipse his own. She didn't show it, but she was finding it hard to sever the connection without being made to feel guilty and wretched. In which case, an old-fashioned, romantic night out with the kindly supervisor -in no way threatening or overbearing, and anyway, kind of nice -- would be just the tonic she needed (or so her girlfriends told her). He was clearly not the type to be jealous or possessive, which would be a relief. His twinkling eye, the way his mouth always seemed to curl upwards on one side as if he was just about to laugh, and (let one not forget!) his trim, yet husky and well-muscled form, gave the lie to the urbane exterior. She secretly suspected - she even dared to hope - that he might even be fun. And the venue! Clare College, on the river itself, with its charming stone bridge, was as romantic a date as anyone could ask for. And if he became attentive to an irritatingly juvenile degree (which would be a bore), or just plain boring (which would be irritating), she could easily lose him in the proliferation of sideshows, rock bands, jazz quartets and food and drink stalls that wafted the lucky guests from dusk until dawn. It was not unknown (she was secretly shocked to learn) for a girl to arrive with one consort and leave with another. And given that Clare May Ball tickets cost an absolute fortune and demand always outstripped supply, what sensible girl could refuse? And if Jade Markham was attractive, she was even more sensible.
    The Ball was an enchantment from beginning to end. After many hours of joyful worry, clucking over this outfit and that, Jade dressed in a plain, black strapless gown that showed off her clear skin, against which her dark eyes made a teasing drama, counterbalanced by her loose, cascading hair. She was perfect company, naturally poised and dignified and never clingy (which Jack wouldn't have minded so much) or bubbly (which he'd have hated), and he - well, he - he was the perfect gentleman he always knew he could be. With such a Lady on his arm, Jack felt like a Lord, like a million dollars, like James Bond, far more than the shy junior scientist he would be when dawn crept up over Clare's lawns and parapets. The night progressed smoothly on a seamless carpet of stars, and, much as he wanted to, he dared not make any obvious pass at her for fear of bruising that fragile magic, of shattering a perfect state of grace which could, with some careful and restrained management, persist indefinitely. Please don't end, he thought, he implored - please don't let it end.
    Jack dropped her off at the door of her house by car, his ageing and beloved if rust-pocked Peugeot 205 Diesel, whose back seat and trunk were littered with maps and paperwork mixed crazily with mud-caked camping and hiking gear: hardly Cinderella's carriage, but a car all the same, a luxury not permitted undergraduates in Cambridge's crowded medieval streets. They said nothing, neither wanting to be the first to break the spell, and so acknowledge, by the simple vehicle of speech, that even two hours after daybreak, the enchanted night had come to an end at last. But she was all excitement, her eyes the brightest things in the car's interior. That he had not made any advance whatsoever she was well aware, and for that she was grateful. Such a contrast with the boys - boys - she'd so far known, all acquisitive, hot hands, groins filled to bursting with unused testosterone, and no idea of how to cultivate the slow-nurtured romance that grown-up women really liked best -- or even any knowledge that such a thing might exist. Grateful, but not satisfied. She'd long been used to compliments, to being told how lovely she was, and soon learned to disregard all but a few as insincere: Jack was the first real man who'd asked her on a date, and while he had treated her with every old-fashioned courtesy, he had not shown any sign of deeper passion or intention. She strongly suspected, however, that Jack was no cold fish, and that not too far beneath the studied shell was a man as passionate as she could wish, and this suspicion teased and tickled her. As it was, however, the situation as it was could go on forever. If he wouldn't make the first move, then she would.
    As they came to a stop he was pulled up sharp by the first thing she said:
    "I'm so sorry about my name."
    "Your name?" Jack, in truth, had been wondering. He didn't think he was a snob, but he'd often wondered how such a name and such a girl went together - they seemed such ill-assorted company.
    "Well, it's like this. It's short for `Jadis'. My parents - my parents! - they were at Oxford, you know, and had a thing about C. S. Lewis."
    "But Jadis, wasn't she...?"
    "Yes, the Witch. You know, between the Lion and the Wardrobe," she paused - "the baddie!" she laughed. "I suppose my parents were expecting me to be a handful."
    "And did they...?"
    "Well, I had to live up to it. Didn't I?" And with that she reached over and kissed him, calmly, warmly and firmly. Her hair brushed his face and shoulders: as their lips came together, hers parted slightly in a sweet admission, her tongue probed out to meet his, questioning, exploring, in a contrast at once forceful and shy. Her mouth was so soft that Jack could hardly imagine anything could be softer without melting. Women, he concluded, revisiting his early classification with the tiny part of his mind not completely absorbed, were attractive because of their contrasts. Jade was soft and yet decisive, firm and yet submissive. What kind of Wicked Witch would ever cradle up into his arms - anyone's arms - quite like this?
    After a long, long moment they pulled apart. She couldn't invite him in, she teased, as she needed to get herself together before travelling home later that same morning. "Run along now", she giggled - "Or you'll turn into a pumpkin!" But as she rose to get out of the car, Jack brushed against her arm: at this, she sprang suddenly back into the car and his arms for another endless kiss. Jack drifted off home like thistledown, and as he had a late breakfast in his digs - still in his rented tux - he might as well have been floating on air. His landlady (who'd seen this all before, many times) permitted herself a rare smirk.
    "Welcome back, Romeo."
    The summer vacation seemed to drag on, but Jack and Jade met, and met again, and somewhere in a wooded dell in South Devon (where Jack was rooting around for some ancient caves forgotten for a hundred years, for clues about Palaeolithic behaviour), they came together.
    In later life neither could remember it without a fond smile: hiking boots, anoraks and rucksacks are hardly the stuff of romance. But to him she looked even sexier in her practical outdoors wear than she had in her ball-gown. Again, he thought, about contrasts. The harsh practicalities of rain gear against the unfeasible softness of her skin. The solid fabric of her hiking shorts against the filigreed nothingness of her underwear. The crabby roughness of the woolly socks against the long, cool smoothness of the inner surfaces of her thighs as she parted them and wrapped them around his hips. And as he came into her, her pure unselfish yielding stood sharply against her otherwise firm decisiveness. This is a girl, he thought, who always got what she wanted. And what she wanted was him, again and again.
    Life for the next two years was a constant bacchic buzz. It was hard to concentrate on work, but Jade, for all her teasing skittishness, could only be a party girl when her own strict, self-imposed timetable let her - and she had work to do. As her final exams approached, Jack and Jade met increasingly rarely. They avoided the temptation of moving in together, so that each meeting was a jewel in their busy lives, a cache of memories to be treasured, and when recalled, yearned for all the more. Jack continued his field work, criss-crossing the ancient landscape of Britain, but where he had once seen bald crags and meandering valleys purely as they were, his mind now infused each vista with erotic overlays. In the curve of a far hilltop at dawn, drenched in the blue of distance, he traced the swelling form of Jade's left hip, sweeping down to shadowed thighs and belly, as they had once lain together in the half-light of a secret, stolen early morning in her room. The clothing of leafy woods that clung in narrow crevices at the bases of shorn and billowing downland ridges became the warm fuzz between her legs that he had once caressed, as gently as he could manage, before she made a small, uncharacterizable sound, licked his earlobe, and then - oh, then! -gathered him inside her. Every curl of smoke from a village chimney stack became the soft cloud of her hair as she unfastened it, letting it tumble over her face, her shoulders, almost as far as the incurving of her waist: in the glint of sun on water - and even the reflection of light on the lenses of his surveying equipment, he saw her wide eyes, in a perpetual expression of happy surprise. Oh, what a basket case he was. But he had his work, too, and a career to pursue. Who knew where he would have to find work after his doctorate, always assuming he got that far? And who knew where Jade would go? He suppressed the thought that in the nomadic world of academic life, let alone the hectic mayfly existence of undergraduates -- they might be parted, and soon.
    At last - and too quickly -- the summer came when Jade took her final exams. She graduated at the top of her class (of course) and when she came out of the Senate House with the result, she was as flushed and excited as a little girl who'd just been given the Christmas present she'd always wanted. On seeing Jack, she turned from the small gathering of her friends, and, running to him, flung her arms round his neck and - before he had even a moment to whisper a word of congratulation -- rained kisses down on him like a summer storm. But as the rain slowed, it became slower, more leisured and more languid - and when they parted - as Jade, in another charming habit of hers, brushed herself down, making her breasts bounce and recoil ever so slightly - she looked up at him with her owlish eyes as if reappraising him all anew.
    "What is it?" he asked.
    "Well, now that's over, I can help you."
   
    Chapter 2
   
    (July 2003)
   
    The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
    Henry David Thoreau -- Walden
   
    To be sure, Jack found himself in need of help - and badly. Just how badly he was reluctant to admit to himself. He knew only too well how a blow to one's self confidence in the final stages of a research degree could destroy everything. He'd seen, so many times, how research students started with so much ebullience, only to find, more than two years later and within sight of the dreadful midnight watch they called `writing up', that what they had accumulated actually amounted to very little. Drifts of accumulated data vanished like April snow in the first, glancing light of critical analysis. Worse, that they had spent those years asking the wrong questions to begin with; that however good the data they had gathered, that there was, in sum, no case to be answered -- or, worse still, that they had, in technical language and with much circumlocution, done something that had been worked out already, but in some other way. Or - worst of all -- that they had simply proved, with certainty and without fear of contradiction, that x equals x. So much time wasted. And more than wasted -- those self-abasing, self-denying years when careers are built, and they might, like their school friends, already be in steady jobs with mortgages and some status in life, rather than living like overgrown students in drabness and in debt.
    But Jack was as tough as the roads he'd tramped for years. He was a rock as hard as the millstone grits around his Yorkshire home town, as eternal as the White Cliffs of Dover. He would let nothing shake him. In any case, his problems were not yet terminal, for he could make out patterns in his data - this, the most exciting sensation a scientist can experience, at least in working hours. He was simply at a loss to understand how they could be systematized.
    As a result of his long pilgrimages, he could view a landscape and immediately sense that people had been there, long ago. Jack had gone far beyond looking for traces of buried roads, post-holes, cave hearths and flint débitage: more than anyone alive, he could look at the angle of a hill-slope, or the way a river curved in its course, and tell that these things had been shaped by the hand of man, even without any other sign - and even accounting for the titanic forces of climate change that had shaped Britain over the past million years, in which glaciers had come and gone, scrubbing entire ranges of hills from the map and altering the courses of rivers over their whole lengths. His talent was so passionately internalized that he could no longer look objectively at its products. That these things were so he had no doubt - but he had no way of demonstrating that the slight and subtle clues he saw were not made by natural forces, unaided. And he'd look a right fool if his thesis committee asked how he knew that - say - the layout of the caves in Cheddar Gorge could not possibly have been natural, and he had had no answer ready save that they just looked like that.
    What he needed was some formal way of comparing his intuitions of ancient human presence in one place with those inspired by somewhere else, and then contrasting both of these with what nature would have created, unaided - a system that would corral the patterns thrown up by his gut reaction, to domesticate them, to make them make sense. But quantifying his intuitions? One might as well try to lasso the clouds. Despite much research and earnest questions to statisticians, no ready method existed - it was all too vague -- and he had neither the means nor the ability to derive such a technique himself. But without such a key he could go no further. In his mind, he could see his thesis: he was so desperate that he could almost taste it, but a barrier at once so intangible and yet so impassable stood between him and completion.
    The frustration was doubly agonizing by his certain knowledge that Britain had been populated for far longer and more intensively than anyone had ever believed or guessed - and his total inability to prove it. Were he simply to step up and say, without supporting evidence, that, say, fifty thousand years ago, Neanderthal Man lived in Britain in organized populations numbering in the tens of thousands, he'd be laughed off the stage as surely as if he'd said he'd discovered Atlantis.
    He had this recurring dream in which he and Jade were at a tropical beach. Jade, in a flowing, colourful sundress and a big floppy hat, stayed on the shore, nose in a huge novel, too engrossed to do more than wave carelessly when he announced he was going for a swim. Cut to himself fifty yards out, and despite all his efforts, in the thrall of a slow riptide which, slowly and surely, took him yet further away from land. He shouted to Jade for help but she didn't seem to notice. Perhaps she was beyond earshot? And just before he woke, his last thought was of being almost sure that Jade had taken off her sundress, and was naked but for the hat, but he couldn't be certain, as she was too far away now to make out very clearly, and he got fewer and fewer glimpses of her, sandwiched between a sunhat that had grown as large as a parasol, and what seemed like a self-generating library of books.
    It could be, he admitted finally, that he'd simply have to chuck it all in as an insoluble problem. Roaming around the countryside had been fun, he thought, but perhaps he lacked the talent to put it all together and make it work as a piece of scholarship. But he was loath to admit this to anyone, not to his parents, and especially not Jade - not yet. He wondered if he'd ever have the courage. And so, helplessly, he clung on.
    Jade's news, on the Senate House lawn, came as something of a revelation, the proverbial bolt from the blue - although he could kick himself for not seeing it coming, even though he was lost in his own worries - worries that he'd not yet had the opportunity to share with her. Their most recent mutual absence had lasted five weeks, while Jade studied for her finals, and Jack kept well away, exploring (in desperation, he thought) a new tack, in southern France.
    Long ago, he recalled from some sodden mental archive (now awash with a flood of incipient panic), she had been marked down as doctorate material. Indeed, how could he forget, as he was the first of her supervisors to spot her talent? (And how dare he, come to that?) But everyone knew that getting a doctorate place as a dead certainty, along with the grants to fund it, meant that the student had to excel in her undergraduate studies beyond almost all measure - to go right off the chart of the ordinary, and launch into new critical territory. And this is what Jade was now trying to get through to him, here on the Senate House lawn, with her expressive lips, the warmth of her hands under his jacket, on his shoulder blades, the cloud of hair brushing his cheeks and chin, the insistent press of her breasts against his ribs. She had graduated with sufficient honours that a doctorate course was hers, whenever she wanted it - and, because it was the starriest starred-first-class degree that anyone had seen for years, she could, pretty much, pick and choose her course -- and her supervisor.
    "I choose you, Jack," she said in a small voice, almost cracked, her eyes softening almost to tears, and puzzled by his momentary stunned shock, his distraction. "Darling Jack, I choose you. But -" she said, regaining (yet another of her charming quirks) a somewhat starchy and old-fashioned composure, as if auditioning for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, "they said you'd have to get your degree first. And a fellowship."
    It would be wrong to say, for Jack, that the clouds parted and the Sun shone. More, that Jade had become the persistent, never-to-be-deterred trickle of water that eventually erodes a secret cavern of breathtaking beauty beneath ragged mountains otherwise impervious to physical assault. But he felt himself smiling, and said something which, for all the intensity of their togetherness, for all its rightness, he'd carefully avoided saying for two years, for if he'd said it out loud, he reasoned, he'd bring the joyous youth of their relationship to a close:
    "I do so love you, Snow Queen." Jade buried her face into the expanse of his chest, and, silently - for she had never done so before - started to cry.
    Hand in hand, they crossed King's Parade and found a perch in a coffee shop, amid the jostling crowds of excited students. Jack was agog with surprise at what Jade now told him. Only her animated smile, the light through the window glancing from her flushed cheeks, her still-glistening eyes, kept him from the remorseful certainty that even with her evident acuity, of which he'd had the first and most intimate knowledge, he had still underestimated her.
    "A little bird tells me -" she began. "Or, actually, two little birds, that you've got stuck."
    He hung his head. Like a schoolboy caught thieving apples. She peered forward, looking up at his face:
    "Don't be so down. One of those little birds is me, remember? Even when we've been, you know - in bed -- you've been miles away."
    "Have I?" He tried to smile, and succeeded, although inside he now felt entirely wretched. This was, after all, her day, not his, and he was spoiling it, and what made it worse, she didn't seem to mind at all.
    "And when I saw you off to France, you looked like leave had been cancelled and you were bound for the Western Front."
    "That bad, eh?" His smile spread. "Well, I did miss you, Snow Queen."
    "And I missed you, too." For all those weeks, the hours spent revising, she had to keep working as fast and as hard as possible to stave off the ghastly ache that scraped away at her insides every time she thought about him - his smile, as if laughing at some long-remembered joke, his lovingly soft grey eyes, his lightly freckled shoulders. He called her his Snow Queen, but to her he was Aslan, the Lion - had he only known it: but she had never told him, for she didn't think she would ever be able to cram the fiery fluster of feelings that assailed her, whenever she thought of Jack, into the confines of language. He had become the Rock on which she had built - what? Herself! She had once been so sure of everything, that she knew what she wanted in life and how to achieve it. But now she could see that she had been nothing but a small child playing among the feet of giants, her assurance a product of her ignorance that the towering limbs all around her even existed. Jack didn't say very much, but what he said was always the right thing to say, and at least he was always there. Without him she was nothing.
    With the books, papers and printouts piled on her desk at three o'clock in the morning, when she'd had to take a break, only herculean effort could keep her away from imagining herself safely encircled in his warm compass; and (oh, and!) how when he was inside her, he was like a great oak beam wrapped in velvet, but so gentle, filling her with such warmth - and how, when she looked up from her dream, all was bare and monochromatic; she was pale, lost and utterly hollow, a discarded husk; and the long weeks stretched far ahead of her. But that was all over now, in the past, and she would say nothing of it to Jack. She leaned further across the small table, her hair haloed by the light through the café window, took both his hands in hers and kissed them very softly, as if she'd dusted them with goose down.
    "Well, you're back now. And here's the deal."
    She explained as they walked down King's Parade and did a circuit around the Backs. While he was away, she said, she'd run into Professor McLennane, a potential doctorate supervisor - and Jack's present one -- in the departmental coffee room, who'd said - well not actually said, but suggested, you know, as it wasn't really any of her business - that Jack had a lot of data, perhaps more than he could cope with, especially as he now should be calling a halt and writing it all up. This going off to France was all very well, but why a new direction now? Jade had explained that Jack - very considerately, she thought -- wanted to keep well out of her way while she was working towards her own finals, and Professor McLennane knew about their domestic situation, you know, which everyone in the department had probably known about for the past couple of years...
    Jack could well imagine the electricity of this exchange, and his heart went out to Jade for playing with fire, all for his benefit. Roger Sutherland McLennane was a bluff, hard-working scientist whose lust for life regularly spilled over into the thickets of impropriety. A smart and still dashingly handsome man who'd just turned sixty, he was the editor of the leading scholarly journal in its field; had papers in Nature more often than most people changed their socks; a wonderful, tolerant (and very rich) wife who had borne him six children; and a fondness of fast, expensive cars, which he would regularly crash. If that weren't enough, he had at least two mistresses - at least, these were the ones whose existence was common knowledge - and his extended periods in the field allowed free expression for his insatiable penchant for deflowering female research students. But if he weren't in the field and had worked his way through all the available and willing victims (and these were surprisingly many, as McLennane was generally regarded as a bit of a dish) he'd always make out with a nurse.
    "Roger by name - and Roger by nature", ran the departmental gossip.
    ]"McLennane's ability as a scientist is very great" one senior don remarked to another at High Table, "exceeded only by his capacity as a nurse-shagger."
    Anyhow, Jade said, as they walked, her eyes focussed inquisitively in the middle distance, McLennane had kind of, you know, leaned over towards her. She remembered, suppressing a giggle, how he had peered down the front of her blouse (which she had left just slightly unbuttoned in case of this very eventuality) - and suggested - confidentially, if you don't mind -- that with her fine analytical brain, and - ahem - other attributes - she might have a look at Jack's data for him? Perhaps give the old man a hand, if he weren't too stubborn to accept it, that is, Jack being something of a lone wolf? Proud man, you know, Corstorphine. But he could be an excellent mentor - of course, you know that, what? -- if he just pulled himself together, get the damned thing out of the way and claim the college fellowship he deserved. He's doing something genuinely new - so rare in this game, don't you know - way beyond most of the rest of us. He Is The Future! And so, my dear girl, are you, by all accounts (shouldn't really be telling you all this, what? Most unethical). Perhaps you could see your way to giving him some - ah - inspiration? Be his muse?
    At this point Jade did that thing with her hair, flashed McLennane her loveliest smile, made her excuses and left, leaving Cambridge's most notorious philanderer a sweet glimpse of heartbreakingly smooth, creamy thigh and the rueful prospect that some conquests would forever remain in the realms of the imagination. Lucky old Corstophine, that's all he could say. But he really hoped the young Markham could help, because his charge was deeply, genuinely -- and possibly intractably -- up shit creek. McLennane honestly believed that Jack was on to something truly new, but he'd exhausted all his own considerable resources trying to help him. Yet McLennane, like Jack, trusted his hunches. Perhaps a younger and nimbler mind could shine a light. His instincts told him that Jade, as well as being a prick-teaser (he thought, with a sigh) had - if her form were anything to go by -- the finest mind ever to be found atop a pair of pins as gorgeous as those. In truth, if MacLennane were forced into a corner, he'd be prepared to admit that this winsome filly (as he'd put it) was their final hope. He had to back her, because she was their last throw.
    As they walked across Clare Bridge their minds filled with reminiscence; they drew closer to each other, stopped and looked at the view: the river as it carried the punting, laughing tourists and students beneath them, like so many pooh-sticks. Jade was entirely aware of the delicacy of the situation: she knew that Jack was exhausted, boxed in, but not as yet sure how or why, and last thing she wanted to do was bruise his pride.
    "Darling Jack, you don't have to say yes..." She began to hesitate, to break up, the unwonted tears were again so close: "... and I won't blame you if you don't - but ..."
    Jack turned and pulled her into his arms, comforting her, stroking her hair as she buried her face into his shirt. Any lesser man, or a man less in love, would have felt stung by what could be seen as a betrayal of trust. But Jack realized (not for the first time) that McLennane was not only a sound judge of character, but would not have suggested such a crazy scheme if he didn't think that he, Jack, could pull it off - and that Jade was the key. How funny it was that a man such McLennane, with all the careless notches on his bedpost, believed at root in the power of love to conquer all adversity. And McLennane had undoubtedly realized that whereas Jack could smell data and connections that eluded all others, then Jade had a quite startling knack for seeing right through the data and grasping the point. Even way back, when she'd sat in Jack's supervisions, she'd solved every problem long before any other student had even begun to organize their ideas, and had come to conclusions which sometimes seemed orthogonal to the evidence, but which, on reflection, usually turned out to be right. And hadn't it been McLennane, back then, who'd advised Jack never to take his eyes off this promising student, lest she leave him standing?
    On the bridge, Jack looked down at this girl in his arms, this extraordinary girl who had given away her moment of triumph to the still-untested and possibly lost cause of helping him complete his work. Now, were one to be objective, as scientists are supposed to be, the whole idea was ridiculous. Here was McLennane - a man whose academic judgment had otherwise never been known to err, despite his recklessness with the feelings of others - putting all his chips on the slim shoulders of a girl who, while her abilities were not in question, was just twenty years old; who had been a postgraduate for less than an hour; and whom he expected to derive some kind of magic formula that all the statisticians Jack consulted were convinced did not exist. Were he a cynic, he'd simply admit that he had nothing to lose.
    But Jack was no cynic: he was a man in love. He longed to say `yes', but could he expose Jade to the chasm of disappointment that was widening between his feet, and risk her career, too? She could - she should - find some safer pair of hands. But in Jade's eyes he saw, beneath the sheen of softness, an edge of fire-hardened flint that could both cut flesh and set a forest in flames. Jade wasn't just some fresh graduate, she was his girl, and he knew what she was capable of. For him to deny her offer of help would be to demean her - and, by extension, him.
    In the end, their fates were bound together, whatever they did - of that he was now absolutely certain.
    "Look up at me," he asked, with determined evenness. His grey eyes, thoughtful with unguessable thoughts, met her broad hazel-brown ones, yearning for resolution, acceptance, absolution. "We're in this together, Snow Queen. Now - what's the question?" His lips broadened into a smile; her eyes sparkled with relief. They kissed, and as they parted, Jack felt a great weight of worry slide quietly from his shoulders and slink into the river. "But I do have one condition, Your Majesty."
    "You have only to name it!" she laughed, mock-serious, her apprehension vanished like smoke, her mood once again of uncrushable joy.
    He knelt down, and heedless of the crowds on the bridge, took her hands and said quite loudly:
    "Jadis -- Snow Queen -- will you marry me?" Most of the passers-by did not notice. But many stopped and smiled, a few applauded; and there were a few wolf-whistles. Jade pulled him up from the ground, not knowing where to look, wondering whether she'd simply fall apart with joy, her tears now quite open and full. The first thing she thought as she composed herself was how, if she was the decisive one, had it been he who had first confessed his love; he who had proposed, hardly an hour later, like one thundering wave after another? Perhaps there was something to be said for intuition, for sensing the moment - especially here, the scene of their first date, just twenty-four months and several geological ages ago. As it was, she was far behind. She had never told him how much he was her anchor. Like him, she had been reluctant to declare her love for fear of spoiling the bloom on a flower that might yet fade.
    She decided right there and then to make it up to him, that afternoon. And evening. And all night. And very early the next morning, as they lay together in her college room, wedged into a single bed, drowsy in a billow of sheets, she said, in a tiny whisper - not entirely sure if he was awake -
    "I love you too, you silly old Lion - so very much, so much it scares me, it hurts. Darling Jack -- hold me, please." But what she did not say was how, in that moment of confession, her mind crested a ridge of hills, and rather than seeing the expected summit, encompassed an unknown vista of opportunity - and of terror. He stirred, and still more than half asleep, pulled her into his embrace and muttered, just on the edge of hearing:
    "I'll always be here for you, Snow Queen. Always".
   
    Chapter 3
   
    (October 2004)
   
    No definition had spoken of the landscape-gardener as of the poet; yet it seemed to my friend that the creation of the landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Edgar Allan Poe - The Domain of Arnheim
   
    "Item: we have a Lion. We have a Witch. And now -- we have a Wardrobe!" announced Jade, flushed and breathless, after they'd heaved the second-hand hulk into the bedroom of the flat they'd rented just after she graduated.
    "But will we still get to Narnia?" said Jack.
    "That, Darling Jack, has yet to be determined," she replied, the steel of her eyes flashing between loose strands of hair.
    It was a one-bedroom Victorian garden flat in Chesterton, which they were paying for from a year's extension of Jack's doctorate grant, extra supervisions, and a few odd research jobs that Jade was doing for McLennane (who'd taken a proprietorial interest in both of them) on the pretext of her studying for a Masters while Jack finished his thesis - a prospect that seemed almost in his grasp, but forever just beyond his reach. The flat was dark and grubby, but it was sound and tolerably dry; the central heating worked at least some of the time; and a pot of paint on a summer Sunday afternoon always works wonders, even were one not to be distracted by trying to paint each other instead of the kitchen ceiling. In any case, Jack - who was never more content than when sleeping rough under a hedge - was pleased to have a base where he could think and work in peace and quiet, and where he and Jade could at least be together without prying landladies or college domestics.
    It also had the loveliest garden: hardly twenty feet by twelve, but surrounded entirely by a high wall, and, being north-east facing, made an evening sun-trap of the high, back wall. Jade rediscovered a fondness for gardening that she thought she'd left behind on her Dad's allotment when, as a little girl, she'd love to grow radishes and sunflowers and pick gooseberries. By the following summer it was a fragrant haven for herbs and cottage-garden flowers. On sunny days, Jack took his supervisions in the garden. He always felt happiest outside. He was, he claimed to a visiting French colleague, the last of the red-hot Palaeolithic lovers, at which Jade flushed and hid behind her curtain of hair.
    At the bottom of the garden was a knee-high raised bed that ran its entire width, restrained by a wall of reclaimed bricks, and in which some unidentifiable species of ornamental acacia grew over an unkempt understory of broom, rosemary and lavender. You could crawl right inside, under the bushes, and make a kind of nest on a carpet of herbs and the crusts of dead leaves, where nobody could find you. It baked in the Sun during the day, unleashing a lush torrent of fragrance, and even after dark, the old brick wall behind would radiate the accumulated heat well into the early hours -- warmth that the bushes would then trap, creating an almost Mediterranean microclimate . It was in the Nest (it was now capitalized), much more than in their first, new double bed, that they made love.
    On late summer evenings Jade and Jack would burrow into the Nest wearing little more than a bottle of wine, two glasses and a smile, and would not emerge until morning - their own private Eden. Jack remembered one chilly dawn awaking in the Nest to find them both slick with dew. A spider had spun drag lines across Jade's pale body, trapping drops of moisture that made a spangled net for the twining, leaf-adorned strands of her hair. Each of her long, dark lashes was crowned with a tiny pearl, just as if she were a sleeping fairy queen. For all that he was stiff, wet and blue with cold, Jack remembered it as a moment when his heart sang.
    And as for supervisions, ever since his best student had become his fiancée, he'd seen very few sparks of talent, or even (it has to be said) of much intelligence. One exception was a dashing and almost unbearably cocky young first-year called Avi Malkeinu, who was Israeli and knew all about Mount Carmel, famous for its honeycomb of caves rich in Neanderthal and modern human remains. Malkeinu had poked around them, boy and man, civilian and soldier, and had some outrageous ideas about the extent and depth of human and Neanderthal occupation in his country - outrageous to all except Jack, who learned as least as much from Malkeinu as Malkeinu did from him.
    Malkeinu got in very well with Jade, and at first Jack was worried. He needn't have been - Jade loved to flirt, but it was never, ever serious. In any case, Malkeinu, for all his affected medallion-man flash and fondness for offensively smelly after-shave, had been raised on an old-fashioned kibbutz where men and women grew up all together in a brash, matter-of-fact way, with none of the mysteries that complicated adolescence elsewhere. Malkeinu would have loved to have seen Jade without her clothes on - sure! What real man wouldn't? She was a babe! But he'd seen lots of beautiful women without their clothes on, quite often several at once, and he earnestly hoped to see lots more. The world was wide, a big new game made for his pleasure. There were no sliding panels about Malkeinu - you just took him as you found him.
    Which is why Jack was perturbed by a visit to his office by two rather shifty-looking characters claiming to represent some student organization or another, who advised him that he shouldn't be teaching Malkeinu as he'd served in the Israeli Defence Forces and was, no doubt, an Evil Agent of Zionist Oppression. Jack did something that he almost never did - get angry. Alarmingly, consumingly angry, so that he shed the shy, quiet academic that he tended to be in Cambridge, and became the wiry, weather-beaten, mad-eyed and rather piratical ranger that he was in the field. He listened quietly to what his visitors had to say, and then, still without meeting their gaze, invited them to go fuck themselves. When they began to remonstrate, he rose from his chair, as if, all of a sudden, he really had become Aslan, the avenger. "Listen, I thought I told you to fuck off," he said, as calmly as his sternly suppressed violence would allow, finally turning his scorchingly unflinching gaze upon them: "and if I see either of you again - or if you harass my friends - I'll fucking rip your fucking bastard heads off and stick them on poles. Understand? Now piss off." He had to say nothing further: in the ferocity of his stare, the grimness of his attitude, the two took flight and never came back.
    For ten minutes Jack remained his chair, his heart racing, his body shaking uncontrollably. He didn't think he had it in him: he'd normally do anything to avoid conflict, and immediately began to worry that there might be repercussions. But what began to dominate his mind, half an hour later, as he walked home through the searing streets -- it was already mid-October and term was in full swing, but the Indian summer had been as hot as a furnace, gathering itself for a final burst -- and seething further with every step, was that he'd heard spiteful rubbish like that before, from people in his own department, especially the social anthropologists: and those archaeologists who read the past not as it was, but through the lenses of current political preoccupation - and yet had the gall to call themselves `scientists'. Neo-archaeologists, processual archaeologists, feminist archaeologists, Marxist archaeologists, post-fucking-processual archaeologists, for God's sake, not to mention those idiots, quite often obscenely obese women from Berkeley or Pasadena, who climbed to the top of tells, stripped off and jiggled their leviathantine tits about for the benefit of some right-on Mother Goddess - as if (and this was the part he found really offensive) as if this charade had anything whatsoever to do with what prehistoric people actually believed or did! And there were people in his department who actually took that stuff seriously - the same people who'd cheerfully scorn a kitsch Hawai'ian hotel luau as having as much connection with authentic Polynesian culture as Mickey Mouse had with Mus musculus, simply because it was a product of capitalist colonialism. Prehistory was forged on the ground, not by political posturing, and it was people like Malkeinu - open-minded people, people only interested in acute observation - who had the best chance of finding out what it was, without prejudice. And they were damning him - because of his origins and national obligations? What utter, dismal, hypocritical crap. No wonder, Jack thought, that he'd spent so much time in the field, away from such pseudery.
    But as he approached Chesterton, and began to calm down, he realized that he was that close to being a pseud himself. Processual-and-whatever archaeology had, at least, been forged in the field as much as his own landscape-based approach, as ways and means to get to grips with patterns seen in data - patterns caused by the interaction of man and nature. But as yet he still had no way of interpreting the patterns he saw. He had to find something soon. Had to. To vindicate himself - and people like Avi Malkeinu.
    Jade, too, had had a rotten day, running errands for McLennane that meant scurrying to and from the University Library for books that didn't exist, when she was quite sure that they did; or if they did exist, were on shelves on the other side of the building; for papers which she wasn't allowed to see, even though she'd phoned ahead and received cast-iron assurances that they would be made available. It didn't help that the library was as hot as an oven, and that she was getting a headache. As she was sure she wasn't due for a period, this suggested that the oppressive weather had built up to its stifling worst before an imminent break - and not before time. In fact, when she paused to count days, she'd had her period about a week and a half before. This probably explained why, right now, she was as randy as a goat, which only added to her feeling of general dissatisfaction. It was about time, she thought, that Jack made some headway with his doctorate, because only then could she get serious about her own.
    She arrived home moments after Jack, determined to make some progress after a hot summer in which very little seemed to have been achieved. As she kicked off her sandals she saw his hiking boots and socks cast off in the hall, still warm; his bag on the kitchen table, papers pouring from it like the innards of a partially eviscerated dogfish. She found him where she knew he would be, in the Nest.
    "Wine?" he offered, barefoot, holding out a full glass of off-licence Shiraz Cab as she sat down next to him on the wall of the raised bed, beneath the lavender and rosemary, fragrant after this unseasonably scorching day.
    "Nicest thing anyone's said to me all day," she replied, taking a generous swig. "Correction," she noted, looking up, her eyes sharp, her lips stained with red, a rivulet running down her chin. "I'm sure you said something even nicer to me this morning."
    "I did...?" His lovely, unforced, unfocussed smile. Whatever clouds had gathered over him were beginning to dissipate. Responding, she warmed to him and snuggled up closer, sitting on the ledge between his legs, leaning back against his chest, completely enfolded by his arms.
    "Yes, you silly old Lion: you said" - she began to laugh - you said that tonight we really must have a brainstorm --"
    "Frankly, Snow Queen, I'd rather pour you some more wine ...", which he did. Then he put down the bottle and stroked her unfastening hair.
    "...and, you said that after the brainstorm, that I really needed a thorough seeing-to."
    "I said that? Doesn't sound like me. Are you sure that was me?" - he ran his fingers down her throat, unbuttoned her blouse, and let his hands steal lightly over her breasts, his fingertips teasing her tightening nipples through the fabric of her bra.
    "Yes, of course it was you," - her laugh was as warm as the wine as she reached her arms above her and pulled his face down to hers.
    "Nope. Can't have been me," he said. "Now, if it were me, I'd have said you needed a good seeing-to before the brainstorm. Nothing like a good seeing-to, you know, for clearing the brain".
    "Well, as it is you, and that's your view, Professor," she said, "why don't we...?"
    But before they could say or do anything else, the clouds broke with a deafening roar, and within seconds they were as drenched as if God had emptied his bathwater on their garden.
    "Aha, Professor!" she exclaimed, "the rainstorm that comes before the brainstorm!"
    "For that dreadful joke, Snow Queen, you really do deserve a good seeing to."
    "I do so agree, Professor," she said: it was the last thing either of them said for a long time.
    As they sat in the warm rain on the edge of the raised flower bed, her head under his chin, he ruffled her damp hair while continuing to unbutton her, peeling off her wet blouse and unfastening her bra, while she luxuriated in his love, his minute attention. She shimmied out of her long skirt and underwear, her feet raising splashy gouts on the lawn, and sat back. The rain coursed over their bodies: his hands slowly explored her breasts, her stiffly puckered, surprisingly dark nipples, her belly (shipping water in her navel), her arms, her upraised throat. She took his right hand in hers (he had a mental picture of a female saint holding a lily) and after kissing his fingertips very gently, placed them between her parted thighs. The weight of the immense drops of rainwater splashing on his fingers contrasted with the steadily radiant, tropical heat from between her cool, rain-washed legs.
    She rose, turned, in naked loveliness as if she were a dancing sprite in the dawn of the world, rain splashing and glancing and making sparks in all directions as it ricocheted from her glistening body, her hair swinging in lazy streamers over her face and breasts -- put one finger on his lips while she unzipped his fly. His cock stood up immediately, and while he was still perched on the edge of the raised bed, she bent down, kissed it, took it in her mouth, licked him, the ends of her heavy hair brushing yet lightly against his loins. Then she arose in languorous slowness and straddled him, gripping his hips with her firm, broad thighs, feeling him deeply, smoothly and hot within her, rocking back and forth, as he cupped her behind with one hand, and with the other, traced the rivulets arcing down the valley of her spine. As they moved, they kissed again, their lips meeting and parting, meeting and parting through the rain curtain, in a butterfly dance. After a minute or two he rose, and, with her legs still wrapped around his waist, picked her up, turned, and - sliding out of her - placed her inside the Nest on a deep carpet of leaves still dry and warm, the foliage above protecting it from the worst of the downpour. She lay there, almost buried in leaves, limbs spread, eyes burning in a soft glow as he shucked off his trousers and underpants.
    But before he could scramble into the Nest and take her again, she laughed skittishly and flipped over on to her knees and elbows, thrusting her leaf-strewn backside at him like a cat on heat, waving it from side to side like a flag, as if she had a tail. Although momentarily taken aback - this was a somewhat new direction for their sexual repertoire - he moved in towards her, feeling the irresistible, cool softness of the backs of her thighs against his groin, her swollen, pitted warmth between. He stroked the inviting curves of her hips, brushing the leaves away; traced the dips of her lower back, moving his hands forward, holding her waist before sliding them over her shoulders, massaging these as she moved back and forth, moaning; then weighed the ripe, hanging fruits of her breasts with their velvety-hard tips, and then, moving his hands back once more, parting her buttocks just slightly, feeling her soft and fuzzy wetness with his fingertips before clasping her waist with both hands and sliding into her as deeply and as fully as he could - and with such sudden and unexpected ferocity that he lifted her knees, for an instant, clear of the ground.
    Waves of electric shock coursed through her as he pounded into her; that she could not see him, could not feel his arms wrapped around her, could not kiss him - in fact, that she was completely passive -- was an alien and slightly frightening sensation. Even though she'd started it, she was not sure she liked it - this anonymous sex, this seeing-to - without the comfort of his face. But she needed him, deeply and with a savage, inhuman craving. His love was lovely, but needs must: she was a creature of decision, and she had decided that what she wanted most of all, right now, was to be fucked: thoroughly, completely, mechanically and forcefully, to have done, and bring this never-ending business with Jack's thesis to a head. She could tell from the way that Jack was throwing himself into her with such explosive violence that something had irked him, too - perhaps even stung him into a kind of remorse that demanded action, some kind of closure. But even after all that, she was beginning to experience the first waves of a slow burn which, if he kept up this relentless, kinetic bombardment - this fucking -- would lead to her own longed-for release. She forgot about the thesis, about the inaction, about her own academic holding pattern, concentrating on her love, her Jack, battering inside her, and when at length he came, in a vast and thunderous spasm, searing her insides with a surging tide that felt like it filled every crevice of her body and being, it was like - well, it was like being wrapped up in a hot cashmere blanket from the inside out. In other words, it had been her loving Jack, all along. With his last, sharp gasps she found herself panting for breath, shaking from head to toe, her soul dissolved, her body spent, collapsing on the bed of leaves, and as she did so, she felt him soften and draw out of her, a sensation both unbearably joyous and excruciatingly painful, all mixed together.
    They lay in each others' arms, exhausted and covered by wet leaves, him in a sodden shirt, her completely naked, saying nothing - their sex had been beyond the experience of either of them. They were both filled with a buzz and a flood of rapture, but in truth slightly embarrassed and awed by the animality of it all. He wrapped her in his arms, and, as the storm passed overhead, she felt herself doze slightly. It was gloaming dusk when she woke, her own Jack - not that animal -- stroking her hair:
    "Come on, Snow Queen," he said, "Time for that brainstorm".
    She could hardly meet his eyes as they made the few steps to the kitchen door and went inside. He made a big bowl of pasta (they were now very hungry indeed) while she showered - she felt she needed it. As the well-behaved and domesticated shower jets coursed over her body, replacing the screaming wildness of the rain, warming and absolving her, and sending the last of the leaves and dirt down the drain, she wondered how it was that sex could ever be separated from love. Men could do that, for sure (a quick chat with Malkeinu - or McLennane - was proof of that) but what about women who did that kind of thing for a living, servicing - fucking -- one faceless man after another as casually as any business transaction? She guessed that one could get used to anything in time, but she found it puzzling, alienating. And besides that, what with the intemperate violence of their sex, the extreme depths to which Jack had penetrated her, she felt sore and bruised, and perhaps even a little ill-used. She did not love Jack any the less - on dark days she felt that if he'd died, she'd simply snuff out of existence, like a candle flame - but this was a stern side of Jack she'd never seen. Somehow, perversely, this made her love him more - and that, she could not yet explain.
    After a supper during which they had hardly spoken they sat on either side of the kitchen table with Jack's papers, in an atmosphere of brittle nervousness. Their clothes, trashed, were shoved into the corner, waiting for a trip to the launderette. Jack had put on a long, white bathrobe (`Property of the Fairbanks Marriott') over faded grey tracksuit bottoms. Jade, her hair scraped back severely and tied in a long plait, wore nothing but a shapeless purple jersey so vast that it came down below her knees, its sleeves so long that she'd had to roll them in great puffs wedged above her elbows. She felt far too sore and bow-legged to wear anything underneath. But for all this informality their conversation was as stilted and as starchy as a job interview going badly, when both parties find nothing to say to fill the yawning pauses. As they discussed how to organize Jack's data, Jack longed to come round to her side of the table, but felt that she'd rebuff him. Jade, for her part, wanted his arms, his touch, and most of all that he should wrap her up like a baby, like a Christmas parcel and - well - to make everything all right. But each was too scared to move. And in any case, they had a job to do first.
    And so they bounced ideas to one another like the sexless talking heads that scientists are supposed to be: Jack, with his clear grey eyes explaining his intuitions, Jade with her hard hazels dissecting them with a cold, insectoid logic, shuffling them, probing them, parrying, throwing them back. Their language was framed in the cool tones of null hypotheses, falsifiability and significance levels, of distribution-free nonparametric tests; of circularity, of particularity and applicability. It seemed to Jade that the tables had been turned. She had become the teacher, he the pupil. Jack felt the same, and with that, the same kind of relief he'd felt when he'd asked her to marry him, of responsibility shared, of no longer being alone.
    But what neither quite realized was that their dispassionate discourse was turning into a loving exchange. As they came to see a shared picture of what Jack's course of action should be, their spoken sentences grew shorter as each one started was completed by the other. Cold eyes once again grew more animated, hands waved. Jade, still talking, rose to put the kettle on; Jack, to finish the drying up. They stood next to each other, at the sink, in their baggy clothes, arguing with force - but no animosity - over the details of what was beginning, almost, to look like an emerging strategy. A part of Jack that had detached from the argument looked face on at Jade in pure wonderment. To be sure, Jade was - how did Avi put it? - a babe - but more than that, she was his love, inseparable, and more than that, his colleague. He'd had enough hints - from McLennane, most of all - but with Jade to sculpt real shapes from the foggy nuances that made up his work, they'd be unbeatable, forever. But Jade was distracted, in full flow - about metadata, integration and whatnot - that he daren't stop her and just tell her - tell her - that he loved her. He didn't want to spoil it: even to touch her, to brush past her by accident, might break the flow of her argument. Even under that wonderfully hideous sack she loved to wear around the house, he could tell she was as taut as a string. She had to work it out of her system, for both of them.
    But then, it happened. Tea over, drying-up done, piles of notes made, they both rose at once in the tiny kitchen and - zap! - Jack's right wrist made a glancing contact with one dangling, purple sleeve, and - zing! - she was in his arms again, face buried once more in his chest, tears flowing uncontrollably. "Do you think you can take it from here?" she asked, looking up at him, red-nosed and eyelids full of water, racked with shuddering sobs, as if she'd had some intellectual orgasm. It had all been building up inside her for weeks - months - the way through the woods, until the tension had become insupportable.
    Later, when she'd calmed down, and Jack had tucked her up in bed, folding himself in behind her with one arm sleepily fingering loose strands of her hair, the other folded across her belly, she thought that perhaps a thorough fucking was all that she'd needed to break the deadlock. `Nothing like a good seeing-to, you know, for clearing the brain', Jack had said - she smiled at the thought.
    But a good seeing-to was good for other things, too. For when Jack's thesis was complete, after two months of sixteen-hour days; after more argument, more computer simulations, more anxiety, more sleepless nights, more testing, more checking and double-checking, and papers in unruly drifts all over the house, Jade discovered something else.
    She was pregnant.
   
    Chapter 4
   
    (December 2004)
   
    With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.
    Charles Dickens - Hard Times
   
    "It was that last trip to France that clinched it ... " Jack had started to explain, uncertainly, to the thesis committee gathered in a lecture room whose heating had been turned off for the winter. It was a dank, dismal day in December and the undergraduates had left town, leaving in their place an arctic chill that enveloped everything in a sullen lassitude. The committee was, clearly, yet to be convinced by his case. He looked to McLennane - as his supervisor, one half of the committee -- for an encouraging sign, a welcoming smile, but his patron averted his gaze: there was a lot at stake for him, too.
    He missed Jade - he missed her terribly, on this day, of all days - but this morning, before he'd left, she had seemed so wound up tight with some matter so internalized that she refused to tell him what it was. But he'd looked so miserable as he turned to leave that she relented, ran towards him and embraced him from behind:
    "I love you, so much, you silly old lion," she had said: "I know you can do it. Now, go and show them what you're made of." He turned to hug her, but said nothing, except, too quietly for anyone to hear but himself -
    "Snow Queen".
    And then he left, walking into town through the cheerless fog.
    In truth, he was worried. The remorseless tension in these final weeks before his thesis defence had taken its toll on both of them. Whereas before he'd been lean and sinewy, now he looked gaunt, and thin. She'd seemed distracted, perturbed, and whereas their lovemaking had always been frequent and rapturous, it had lately petered out to little more than a static, supine embrace. He felt, somehow, that he'd committed some offence, done some wrong, and that - cruelly -- she wouldn't tell him what it was, so he could at least apologise. Their infrequent discussions about marriage, always meant to be put off until after he'd gained that mythical, ever-receding fellowship, had now ceased completely. So what was wrong? No, she wasn't ill, she insisted, turning her eyes away from his questioning face. Yes, she still loved him. Yes, she'd still love him even if he didn't win his doctorate - silly question!
    But her hair seemed, to him, to give the lie to all this - this façade. Her hair was the key to her mood. When she was happy, she would wear it loose, so she could play with it, tease with it, flirt with it. Even if she tied it up, some of it invariably came loose in a mild disarray that always turned him on, her dark eyes flashing like a come-on beneath the wayward strands. And until now, she'd always been happy. But now her dark eyes were dull, from nameless preoccupation or suppressed anger, he couldn't tell: and her hair was tamed, more often than not, into a plait of Presbyterian severity, with no prospect of idle straying.
    As he plodded on, the feet in his mind walked backwards to see if he could work out where things had gone wrong - if indeed they had. He knew he'd taken far too long to get down and write his thesis, trying Jade's patience. And then - yes, that was it - that evening in October, when they'd sat down together and had had the famous brainstorm - perhaps she'd felt that she'd had to do all the work, when it was, after all, his thesis to defend, and his prevarication had meant that her own prospects were forever on hold.
    And - oh, yes -- what happened before the brainstorm. That was it, too. He loved her beyond any words, but as the autumn lengthened and she seemed to recede, almost imperceptibly slowly, it dawned on him that she might have been scared, repelled -disgusted even - by the unexpected and uncharacteristic violence of their sex on that weird, overheated night when the weather finally broke, the night when they'd both been wound up like coiled snakes, ready to strike. If that was the case, then, frankly, he should just die of shame right here. He traced his travels further backwards from that evening in the Nest, through the hot afternoon, to the argument he'd had with those students who'd tried to intimidate him about Avi. And - oh, sweet Christ - he'd taken it all out on her, his one support, the one person most likely to put up with him, lovingly and without complaint. After they'd had the brainstorm, and when, in the days and weeks following had sat down to work furiously at the thesis, they'd never discussed it, the reason why he'd been so very angry - because they were just too, frantically, busy. Not that this would offer any excuse for his behaviour - and she had still brainstormed the thesis into being, gave it birth, gave it life, nursed it to maturity - it was her. Her! And even this morning, she still swore she loved him. Him! So now he thought, in dejection utterly foreign to his usually calm and level nature, that the great gamble had failed. He really didn't deserve this thesis, and he certainly didn't deserve Jade, whose life he'd now so royally screwed up. By the time he got to the department, his mind was clothed in a fog as thick as the one that laced the streets in white, funereal shrouds. Go ahead, make my day. In the end he was just too tired: too tired to panic, too tired to care.
    "Mr Corstorphine - Mr Corstorphine?" This from the tiny but intimidating figure of Professor Ernestine Yanga, the external examiner and the other half of the committee, who, McLennane had said, was famous for saying almost nothing during thesis examinations until near the end, when she'd skewer hapless candidates with the one question they'd been praying nobody would ask. Ah, thought Jack, we must be near the end, then, and this must be the preamble to the famous Difficult Question that McLennane had warned him about. Best to get it over with, and get out. So far, the examination had flowed glutinously past him like a river of sludge making its viscid way down to a black and putrid sea: he'd supplied all the answers so mechanically, that once he'd uttered a word he'd immediately forgotten about it.
    "Mr Corstorphine - you were telling us about your trip to France?"
    "Yes - of course - I'm sorry. As you've read in my thesis, I had accumulated a great deal of data about hominid influence on geomorphology in Britain. But it was very hard to make anything of it. Thanks to some new methods developed in conjunction with a fellow student..."
    "Yes, I see that this is acknowledged. A Miss Markham, isn't it? She has a rare talent."
    Jack said nothing: his lips were pursed together in a thin line of remorse, and despite himself, he could feel tears starting to prick the corners of his eyes.
    "Please continue, Mr Corstorphine..."
    "Yes, sorry ... I had long suspected the existence of a gradient of human influence on the landscape in England, consistent over the past hundred thousand years at least, in an increasing trend from the northwest - where it is hardly significant according to the variants of the nonparametric tests I've used - to the southeast, where it stands out quite strongly from natural influence, but still in places not significantly different from expected natural or stochastic variation."
    "Very good. But enough of Albion's fair shores, I think? You were about to tell us all about France, I believe. Would you like to - er -- enlarge upon that?"
    Jack had had so much to say about France. About how his trip there had changed everything, given him hope - rooting his vague instincts in something more tangible, more real. About how, after looking at the British landscape, scored, ravaged and broken by glaciers at least eight times in the course of almost a million years of human history - glaciers so powerful that they had literally erased rivers as broad as the Severn from the map - his personal antennae had become so tuned to every nuance of landscape that, when he had come at last to a region that had seen a million years of relative and continuous calm, the signs of human influence shone out at him like blinding beacons, rang like fire-bells in the night. Britain had only ever been a sideshow, an outlier: he'd seen immediately what had occurred to no-one, that nothing south of the Loire was wilderness - nothing - and had not been so for a very long time. But right now, he didn't feel like explaining anything. His answers were bland, apathetic, hesitant, whatever. Looking down on the scene, as if he were hanging from the ceiling, he saw McLennane rise slightly from his chair, as if in concern - and then Jack snapped, jarringly, back. He blinked, disoriented. It occurred to him that he must have blacked out.
    With her well-controlled perm, her neat dove-grey two-piece and pearls, Ernestine Yanga could have been the president of the local Womens' Institute, except that she'd been raised in a grass hut on the western shores of Lake Turkana, until the age of five, when her village had been razed by Ethiopian bandits and the rest of her family had been raped, macheted, burned to death, or combinations of all three. She'd only escaped because she'd been a mile away at the time, gathering pathetic twigs for the cooking fire, and sluicing the filthy puddle that passed for the village waterhole into a chipped enamel bucket. On returning home to find it so casually expunged from the face of the Earth, she'd walked thirty miles to the nearest fly-flecked bush town in search of work. By the time she was thirteen she was handy with a Kalashnikov; she'd been a drug courier, a fruit seller, a moneychanger, a news vendor, a prostitute, a pimp, a bandit, a copper's nark, a murderess twice over (once a policeman, whom she'd stabbed after he'd tried to extort further bribes from her pitiful cache of change; the second time, a potential rapist, whom she'd emasculated with his own blunt and rusty panga and left bleeding to death) -- and riddled with at least six chronic, parasitic infections. Having understandably decided that she'd had quite enough of all this, she'd walked to Nairobi and camped out on the steps of the National Museums of Kenya, where she'd decided she'd await the Lord's Salvation. The Lord took the shape of a kindly assistant curator, whose prayers for the Almighty to send him a child to ease his wife's shameful barrenness had now, it seemed, been answered - and who took her in and cleaned her up. A week later she was the illiterate, unpaid assistant to the janitor - and after thirty-five years, the Director of Palaeontology. And now, at the age of fifty-five, what Ernestine Yanga didn't know about the influence of early humans on landforms in the Rift Valley wasn't worth knowing.
    She knew far more than that, however, about the symptoms of human suffering, to which she was as sensitive as Jack's spirit chimed to the shape and history of every hanging valley, every drumlin, every scarp and oxbow. Her reputation as a terrifying examiner was justified - after all, a woman in her situation could never succeed in life without what she called `true grit' (she was an avid fan of old westerns) - but in Jack she saw a good man who'd been worn almost entirely away by worry, and, like so many men, he was suffering as much from injured pride as from lack of food and sleep. He had tried his hardest, but despite all his efforts, all his denial, he'd felt he was not quite up to the task, and this insulted his being, his masculinity. But he need not have been so concerned, she thought. The evidence he had from that final trip to France was right there, in front of them. And from what Roger (such a charming man!) had told her, Jack was a dedicated field worker, the kind of person she preferred infinitely to pallid, deskbound museum types, who so often built their intellectual castles on the sweat of others.
    More importantly, it was clear that Jack fulfilled the first criterion of a doctorate candidate - to venture, without fear, outside the small, cosy nest of knowledge, and into the dark and infinitely greater continent of ignorance that surrounded it. That Jack had ventured so far out that no techniques yet existed to make sense of what he'd found indicated extraordinary fortitude, a brazen and almost breathtaking resolve: if Jack could make no headway with it, then that was hardly his fault, because nobody else (she thought) would have had the ability either. Not McLennane (he'd admitted as much) and certainly not herself. And yet, if Roger had thought the task impossible, he surely would not have assigned it to a doctorate student. This in itself, she felt, indicated that Jack really must be a man of extraordinary talent, and - she thought back to the fortune that had smiled on her on the Museum steps - talent was precious, and must always be nurtured.
    In any case, Jack was not entirely alone, without help. As Professor Yanga understood it, Jack continued to enjoy the best help possible in the form of the acuity of his young associate, Miss Markham, who seemed to believe in him and who, Roger had assured her, would go far - especially if she and Jack continued to work as a team. And Roger's instincts were never wrong. Especially not about attractive young women, and Roger had been very quick to note that Jack's associate excelled in those two virtues as she did in her wit and intelligence. Jack was, indeed, a fortunate man, as fortunate as he was deserving.
    "Mr Corstorphine, of course, I understand. But please don't worry yourself. Oh my, you look so tired", she said, and she smiled - a warm, radiant, motherly smile that made Jack want to dissolve. This woman, this supposedly ferocious, hard-bitten creature who took no prisoners, had smiled at him. She had looked straight at him, into him, and she understood. She knew. And in that moment he knew that there was hope. And so he started again, clearing his throat, which seemed unaccountably to be full of damp sandpaper.
    "I'm sorry - please excuse me. When we think of the French Palaeolithic, we tend to see the landscape as a wilderness, punctuated with some interesting and picturesque cave sites. But that's a view conditioned more by our prejudices about brutish cavemen than by the facts on the ground. When I got there, accustomed as I had been to the far more challenging and - in any case - more sparsely populated British terrain, France looked to me like nothing more than an almost completely artificial, settled - even industrial landscape, continuously shaped by human influence for perhaps a million years."
    "What form does that influence take, Mr Corstorphine?"
    This really must be it, the Difficult Question that went to the heart of the matter. But the Professor continued to smile - and in that, he thought of the loveliness of Jade's enormous hazel eyes as she looked adoringly up at him whenever she was in his arms, an expression that said that he, Jack, was invincible. Now he could not be stopped. The influence takes many forms, he said. Just to take a couple of things more or less at random: virtually no watercourse south of the Loire or west of the Rhône has been natural for any significant part of its length since the Late Middle Pleistocene. At the very least, watercourse curvature has been altered by 16 per cent during the Brunhes magnetostratigraphic interval, with the confidence limits that you'll see on page 176, I think you'll find (the committee members turned to their copies of his thesis as Jack felt, at last, to be in the driving seat). In support of this (he continued), the overall number of river channel infill deposits indicative of buried oxbow lakes is very much less than you'd expect by chance, had nature been left to take its course. This means that something - somebody - has been altering the lower courses of rivers in a systematic way for a very long time. And then there is the general topography. Volcanic activity aside, no hilltop exists in this part of France that has natural surface run-off characteristics, possibly an indication of the former presence of earthworks or other structures. In fact, I could find no grade that has been completely free of human influence over the same period. There's one hill, at a place just not far from Aurignac, called Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards ...
    His mind drifted to when he'd explained all this to Jade, with mounting excitement, promising her that after this wretched thesis defence was over, he'd take her there and show her. It was about a month ago, their last evening sitting out in the Nest before it became too cold: they'd had a bottle of wine he'd brought home from the off-licence. Retreating to the sitting room, she'd removed a stack of printouts from their sagging old sofa, sat down, pulling him warm and close. As usual, she'd worn her shapeless purple sack, but her hair was loose - funny, he'd forgotten that. She didn't always tie back her hair. Not even very often. Why had he forgotten that? How? As he told her about Saint-Rogatien, she looked at him with shining eyes.
    "This is it, Darling Jack", she had said - "This is the key. This proves it. This settles everything." She unbuttoned his shirt - her big brown eyes intent and sweetly cross-eyed with concentration - and rested her soft face on his chest, letting him tousle her hair into a blanket, covering and embracing him. And this was only a month ago? After the brainstorm? Why had he forgotten that?
    He explained to her - to Jade - to Professor Yanga - that his close survey of this unusual landform revealed to him that its geology was entirely at variance with the underlying bedrock and, furthermore, that its location could not be explained in terms of any local, structural faulting. It couldn't be a glacial erratic, either, because there had been no glaciers. Much of the landform had been worn away by wind and weather, but with an estimated original volume at least a thousand times that of Saint Paul's Cathedral -- he was proud to have worked out this comparison - it was just too enormous to have been set down by any kind of fluvial transport short of a catastrophic flood of the kind that had created the scablands of the Pacific Northwest, or which had carved out the English Channel - and there had been no sign of any such activity, either. In fact, its location was inexplicable unless ...
    At this point, on the sofa, Jade had trapped his gesticulating hands in hers, and forced them to encircle her. She'd seemed so warm and content, he'd felt that at any minute she'd start to purr. Why had he forgotten that? As he'd kissed the top of her head, he'd said that the only way to explain Saint-Rogatien - the only way - was that it had was an artificial structure. That someone had put it there. He'd once read about an ancient pyramid at a place called Cholula in Mexico. By the time the conquistadores got there, it had been abandoned for centuries, its masonry stripped away, and was covered in grass and trees. Assuming it was just a hill (after all, that's what it looked like), the Spaniards built a town around it and a church on the top. And that was only a few centuries. Imagine, then, if it had been left for a thousand years, a hundred thousand, a million? It would look just like a hill, revealed as artificial only by its strange geology and situation - and only then if somebody first suspected that something was amiss - which nobody had ever done. But when Jack had seen it, his antennae vibrated into overdrive. He knew it didn't belong there. He just knew.
    By this time Jade had been on the edge of sleep, but not quite.
    "You silly old lion," she had said. "You've just about wrapped it up. The ancestors of the first Neanderthals built gigantic pyramids all over France..."
    "... pyramids that made the Great Pyramid look like a pimple -- and they were doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, Snow Queen."
    "Well then, you don't need statistical methods to prove that, so why worry? That's just basic geology and your wonderful masculine intuition, you gorgeous man, you." She looked up at him, blearily. It occurred to him that her face looked drawn and thin, that what she needed most was sleep, and also that she'd read his mind. "You're right, Darling Jack. Time for you to wrap me up, too, and take me to bed."
    So he'd taken her in his arms and laid her gently on the bed, still in her purple sack, pulling the duvet on top of her. As he'd got in and nestled behind her in their customary two-spoons-in-a-drawer position, she'd pulled his arms up inside her jersey, pressing his hands against her breasts, smoothing them down the hot - too hot - skin of her belly and thighs.
    "I do so love you, Darling Jack. And I want you." And so, still in the two-spoons position, in the darkness, they'd made love as gently as before it had been rough, and then, together, slid slowly off to contented, companionable sleep on a smooth, even grade rather shallower than about one in a couple of hundred (he'd estimated), that of a languidly meandering river that makes its mazy, lazy way down to a delta in which it becomes blissfully lost in oozy, woozy thickets. Why had he forgotten that? Why?
    As if from an immense distance, he thought he heard Professor McLennane and Professor Yanga commending him for a splendid thesis.
    "Congratulations, Doctor Corstorphine!" Hands were shaken, but it was clear to both academics that Jack wasn't really there. They looked worried. The Professors exchanged nervous words that Jack didn't catch, and Yanga left, looking anxious.
    "Come on, Jack, I'm going to take you home," McLennane said as he put his arm around Jack's shoulders, walked him outside into the quad and steered him towards what Jack could have sworn was a Ferrari Testarossa. "Don't worry, old chap - not going to do more than thirty - that's a promise! But I want to get you home fast. Got to break the glad tidings to that lovely girl of yours, eh? I expect you'll be setting a date. And now she can really start work on her own project, after Christmas. And .... I've been meaning to tell you .... That Saint-Rogatien business .... We really do have to get a paper off to Nature. You, me and the lovely Jade can do it together. Her brains, your intuition, and my - er - putting you two together, as it were. I had lunch with the editor the other day, and..."
    Jack lacked the energy to interrupt. He was drained, utterly, to the dregs, alternately assailed by waves of light-headedness and nausea, not helped by the low-slung suspension of a car so obviously unsuited to driving through central Cambridge in a freezing fog that still hadn't lifted after ... how long ago had he left home? He couldn't remember. On the other hand, if he'd stepped out of the car, he didn't think he'd have sufficient energy to walk, or even stand up. He couldn't remember having eaten more than a couple of bites of anything for three days.
    They drew up outside the flat: McLennane had to haul Jack out of the car. When they knocked at the door, there was at first, no answer.
    "Just coming!" - he heard her lovely voice, after a few more seconds: "in the bathroom! Won't be a minute!"
    As soon as Jack had left, Jade collapsed on the sofa, eviscerated, as if her heart had burst from within her and now bounced along the street after the dwindling Jack, the world on his broad shoulders, an old gunslinger who, racked by his internal demons, seemed to be losing the will to fight. But she had things to do, an errand of her own, and so, grimly, she dressed, grabbed her bag, and left the house.
    Poor Jack - her poor, Darling Jack - had never looked so down. But as she was sympathetic (how could she not be?) she was, it has to be said, a little annoyed. Not for the simple fact of his low spirits, his anxiety - anyone could forgive him these! - but perversely, that his mood seemed so entirely out of character, and that was harder to accommodate.
    Not that she didn't mind being there for him, to cheer him up, even for weeks on end: because she didn't. She loved him, and she wanted to make him happy. But where once had stood an imperturbable rock, there had now limped, in the hallway, half-sunk, a fractious, fretful, friable thing she didn't recognize, and didn't want to. Realizing how selfish this was, she wanted her old Jack back, the granite-hard Jack, the Jack who had become her secure foundation, on which she could build castles of her own, and from whose unshakeable ramparts she could launch herself, on her own wings: so that should she ever falter, should she ever go wrong, she could always come home to him -- depending on him to forgive, to love and mend her, to dry her eyes and make everything all right, without question or prejudice. But if he crumbled, she would slip, lose her footing, and they would both fall.
    It was in this resolution that she'd finally - finally - settled, in her own mind, the events and consequences of the rainstorm before the famous brainstorm, when he'd fucked her so hard that she'd been almost too giddy to stand, and so physically sore, inside and out, that she couldn't wear knickers for days for the pain. This sudden and quite unexpected brutality - there really was no other way to put it -- had frightened her then, but after much worry and wonder in the still hours of many troubled nights thereafter, when Jack had lain fretfully asleep beside her, she'd solved the disturbing riddle of why she'd loved him all the more, nonetheless.
    For all her ambition, for all that she wanted to make her way in the world on her own, to succeed by her own lights, she realized that at heart she was an old-fashioned girl, who needed a man around to love, and to be loved by. The man with whom she'd fallen in love was a man's man, with a real man's frustrations, and a real man's pride, always so exposed to injury. But the reason why she loved him so much was that his masculinity had been so lightly worn, so assured that he'd felt no need to prove it, either to be a macho man like Avi Malkeinu, or an irredeemable rogue, like dear old Roger McLennane. This (she blushed to herself) was why she'd been embarrassed when Jack had referred to himself, in company, however self-deprecatingly, as the last of the red-hot Palaeolithic lovers, or whatever it was. This was why his force on that strange night had first seemed so shocking.
    But then, she continued, why should it? Because Jack was so complete a man in himself, he'd never feel the urges to which Avi and McLennane were forever prey, to throw himself into one conquest after another, as if he were not quite sure that he really deserved his manhood, or that it wasn't eternal, a given; nor that he ever felt the need to perpetually advertise the fact. She knew how much of a man he was, and that was enough - that knowledge was theirs alone, a private thing, like the Nest: it was not something she'd much like to share. And after all, it was she, she admitted ruefully, who had led him on, waving her backside at him, inviting him to take her - to take her, as if she were not a human being, but some transaction, and he'd responded - to satisfy her, and no other. She basked in that thought, held on to it, but added that for her then to blame him for her shock, her soreness, would be unfair, for they had both been participants in the act which, in the end, was - as she'd established - a private thing between the two of them, just Jack and herself, as much a part of their love as a shared bottle of wine and any other long, lazy night in the Nest. She realized that if, in the past few weeks, he'd been beating himself up with remorse about it - as she suspected -- then she knew for certain that he really was neither an animal (for all that she called him her lion), nor a man forever seeking to prove his virility, but her own, tender, loving Jack. Hers. And she should make sure he knew it.
    But there was that other thing, too: that when the burning soreness had faded, it was replaced by a nauseating wretchedness that racked her guts out. At first she thought it was a physical after-effect of the pain, or just some psychosomatic backwash of shock and fear, so she had told Jack nothing of it - even had he noticed from behind the tottering turrets of his preoccupation. But when it had continued for weeks, making her feel wan and drained, vitiating desire, it occurred to her that Jack might have proved his masculinity in the most obvious and traditional way possible (she began to perk up at the thought, and reddened a little). There was no need for Jack to make any song and dance about his maleness, she thought - no need at all -- if by virtue of his savagery and his hunger he'd made her pregnant - a tangible badge of his love, and their shared love, together - and also something which she felt, with a strength of possession that surprised her, was something all her own, for all that it bound her closer to him, and made her love him all the more.
    Jade was almost sure she knew, but craved cer