LITMIR.BIZ

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was crossing the low ceilinged living room, bearing a tray, with a pot of tea.

      ‘A habit I collected in China. Green tea. Cha!’

      Julia’s friend was originally from Antwerp: she was a demure, wise and graciously elegant sixty-two-year-old Belgian. So her mother tongue was Flemish – but her English was nearly as good as her French. Annika was also an archaeologist, although semi-retired. As two single women in the macho world of archaeology, they had bonded almost as soon as Julia had arrived in Lozère.

      While her hostess decorously tipped the porcelain teapot, Julia stared around. Annika’s taste in décor consistently fascinated her: the drawings, the paintings, the elegant sketches, the wistful etchings of winter scenes, of skaters and frozen lakes. Maybe from Belgium, or Holland.

      Annika stood, and returned to the kitchen, to fetch some cake.

      Taking advantage of the moment, Julia looked further along the wall. Hanging next to those wintry, Breugel-ish scenes were several prints of French cave paintings. Julia recognized the lions from Chauvet, and the ‘sorcerer’ of the Trois Freres. And there, on the far wall of the sitting room, a picture of the Hands of Gargas, from the Gargas cave in the mid Pyrenees: stencils of hands made on cave walls, by men, women and children: in the early Stone Age.

      Sitting here in this weather-beaten cottage, aged thirty-three, Julia could still vividly recall the day she first saw the Hands of Gargas. In a way those hands were the reason she was here.

      In her mind she relived the scene.

      She was fifteen when it happened. As a special treat, as part of a long holiday in France, her mother and father had taken her to see the great ancient caves of the Dordogne and the Lot. Lascaux and Cougnac, Rouffignac and Pech Merle. With their famous and glowing cave-paintings.

      There, confronted by these stunningly ancient tableaux – some painted 20,000 years ago, even 30,000 years ago – Julia had almost cried, ravished by their primeval yet timeless loveliness.

      But that was only the beginning. After the Dordogne they had driven south, to the Pyrenees, to go and look at Gargas. And the Hands. And where Cougnac and Pech Merle had delighted, the Hands of Gargas had troubled her, and truly moved her.

      They were just plain, simple, humble stencils of human hands: but they were so silently poignant, so piercingly mute. And so vividly new. It was as if a stone age family had walked into the cave just an hour before Julia, and placed their hands against the rockface, and blown the paint through a straw around the fingers, creating the stencil. Somebody had indeed lifted up a little child in one section of the cave – or so it was supposed by the experts – so the tiny infant hand could be stencilled alongside the adults’.

      Why?

      And why were so many of the hands disfigured? Julia had wondered this then even as she wondered it now. Why the disfigurement? Fingers were severed or bent in most of the Hands of Gargas. No one knew the reason. Since the discovery of the cave in the nineteenth century, many theor ies had been provided for these ‘mutilated’ hands – a hunting code, a disease, frostbite, a ritual and tribalistic disfigurement – yet none of them really fitted.

      A great conundrum.

      And so it was the Hands that had decided Julia’s fate. Standing in Gargas feeling giddy and awkward and flustered and adolescently attracted to the young French student who was their guide, Julia had resolved – there and then – to make these precious subterranean cloisters her world. At that moment she had resolved to study prehistory; and then to become an archaeologist.

      To solve the puzzles.

      At first her parents had been pleased by her impetuous decision: their precious daughter had a charming vocation! But when the teenage ideal evolved into twenty-something reality, things had changed. After her degree in Toronto she’d left for Europe, to do her PhD in London; and then the guilt really kicked in, the guilt of an only child leaving her family, and pursuing a career instead of giving them grandchildren. As if to compound her sense of error, her subsequent career had begun to disappoint, it had all tailed off into a mediocre teaching job at a mediocre London college.

      Soon after that, and much as she loved her parents, the weekly transatlantic phone calls from her mother and father had become an unspoken ordeal, a silent yet insidious reproach: No I am not coming home, Yes I am still ‘just teaching’, No I haven’t got a fiancé, No there is no prospect of grandchildren. Goodbye Dad, goodbye Mum.

      Goodbye.

      Julia sighed and shook her head.

      Annika set a plate of sweet cakes on the table – and spoke.

      ‘You must understand Ghislaine, he is a disappointed man. A very disappointed man, but determined too.’

      Julia knew that Annika and Ghislaine went way back. They were the same age. They had been friends, apparently, for decades. Annika had worked under the ludicrous Ghislaine since the 1970s, across France, now in Lozère.

      She leaned forward.

      ‘Annika, do you mind if I ask a personal question?’

      The older woman shrugged, in a neutral way, and pulled her grey cashmere cardigan a little tighter around her shoulders. ‘Not at all. You have told me all of your life! Why not ask me about mine.’

      ‘Were you and Ghislaine . . . were you . . .’

      ‘Lovers. Yes.’

      ‘In Paris?’

      ‘1969. We shared political ideals. We were at the Sorbonne together. We learned Maoism together! We even went to China together in the early seventies. Hence, Julia, the tea.’ The late middle aged lady pursed her slightly over-lipsticked lips, to take a hot sip, then she set down the handle-less porcelain cup.

      ‘So?’

      ‘Do not blame him, Julia, for the way he acts and is. He has . . . beliefs, even now. Beliefs which brought him here. And me. There was a time we shared ideals as well as kisses, and we were both interested in the caves, in prehistory. Archaeology.’ The two women simultaneously looked at the wall pictures, the Hands of Gargas. Open and closed, fingerless and mutilated.

      ‘Of course we are no longer together now. We do not share kisses.’ The smile was brief and unmirthful. ‘But we are still friends, after a fashion. A la mode. I will not betray him. He is a sad man, conflicted. And he has his family name.’

      Julia was frustrated, and bewildered.

      ‘Why won’t he take my find seriously?’

      ‘What makes you think he doesn’t take it seriously?’

      The way he just dismissed me! Sacked me!’

      Annika squinted at Julia, then she looked out of the window, where the wind was searching amongst the stones, lamenting its widowhood. ‘Perhaps he takes you very seriously. Therefore his reaction. He is conflicted, as I say.’

      ‘But what does that mean?’

      ‘I cannot explain. There are mysteries in Ghislaine’s past. But it is not for me to reveal, not for me to shine the lamp on the cavern wall. But do not think less of yourself. That is all.’

      Annika was always a little evasive; self consciously mysteri ous in her thoughts. But this was a seriously new level of annoying coyness. Even though she liked and admired Annika, Julia couldn’t help thinking: get over yourself.

      She tried again:

      ‘What did he mean by “the collection in Prunier”.’

      ‘You can Google this yourself.’

      ‘I did. And I found out. Prunier is a tiny village, twenty kilometres away. North Lozère.’

      ‘Yes, I know.’

      ‘So I went there, Annika. And there’s nothing there. I expected a collection of some sort. A small museum of archaeology,

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