The Pitcairn Perspectives by Philip Spires - HTML preview

 

Edward Pitcairn’s arrival

 

Two weeks, like most lifetimes, would not be enough. At least that is what he said, unprompted, to Border Force as his passport was being inspected. As directed, he had tried to use one of the automatic readers. “I understand they are called e-gates,” he had said to the apparently uninterested officer. He continued some moments later by suggesting that his slumped, jet-lagged, apologetic stance must have confused the camera which had positioned, focused, refocused, and repositioned, repeatedly before the dreaded ‘Seek assistance’ displayed, prompting him to mumble “I need plenty of that.” He had replaced his glasses, re-adorned his hirsute lower face with the mandatory mask and picked up his carry-on bag which, since Singapore, carried the extra weight of two separate litres of glass-bottled gin. On approaching the desk, he offered, “I think it can’t cope with beards” to the glass-cased woman in uniform while handing over his passport and again freeing his face from the mask. He knew it was a mistake to comment, but this, like most obvious mistakes, he tended habitually to repeat.

The questions arrived and were answered. Arriving from? Singapore. Visited any other country in the last ten days? Indonesia. That’s an amber list country, so do you have a passenger locator form? He presented the readied and stapled two pages, clearly not at all confident that their draft print quality would be acceptable. Though he always felt safer with paper, he had also uploaded a copy from his mobile to the government website, and muttered, “I have it on my phone…” Again, referring to his papers, he apologised for the lightness of the print and then offered a repeatedly rehearsed line about ink cartridges being fiercely expensive on Sawu. It was all wasted effort, as things turned out, because the officer seemed not even to want to inspect the document, either on paper or electronically. Its presence was clearly enough. As the woman behind the glass delivered her rehearsed monologue about the need for quarantine, tests and a readiness for interrogation by telephone, Edward’s thoughts began to wander, the lethargy from his lack of sleep getting the better of reality, his frame visibly sagging under the weight of each sentence. “Ten days in quarantine, then,” he said, nodding. “Two weeks will not be enough,” was again mumbled to himself as he turned away,

He had no luggage to collect, of course, but did have a mobile phone, without which none of this verbatim observation could have been recorded, a mobile that had immediately to be retrieved from the zipped pocket indeterminately placed just above the knee of his mountain trekking modular trousers (dark grey) which, in anticipation of the flight’s fierce air conditioning, he wore with the zipped lower leg attached. The device, consciously weighting against his thigh, had remained untouched while ever the signs told him that to use it might be an offense, but now, relieved of the necessity of proving whom he might be, it could be felt, fondled, extracted, consulted and, possibly, used.

“Here goes,” he whispered as he flipped open the cover of the Yogyakarta Chinese Emporium white plastic case, accessed his contact list, selected Gemma Harness, née Pitcairn, and called. He was down the stairs (escalator taped off in yellow and black stripes) and half-way past the silent retrieval carousels before it connected. It was an answering machine. “Shit!”, he murmured, before speaking loud and clear, voiced raised sufficiently but not excessively, not enough to enable passers-by to share the message, “Gem, I’m here. And in one piece. Still. I’ll be with you in about an hour. Tube willing.”

Almost automatically, he checked his messaging app and found the expected reminder that his contract with MudahComm did not extend to calls made in the United Kingdom and that roaming charges would apply. “It’s the same as using it on Sawu,” he muttered out loud before, “I must remember to use the landline.” He switched off his phone and replaced it in the inside pocket of the jacket he had been carrying awkwardly over his left arm since leaving the aircraft.

Events during transit, save for a private mini fracas in the gents’ toilet with a soap machine that was out of commission, were not worthy of note. He followed the usual signs, obviously embedded somewhere in his reflex actions, given the frequency of his visits, but never actually committed to memory, until he arrived at the Piccadilly Line just a minute before the next train was due. Between London Heathrow and King’s Cross he snoozed, lolled and nodded off. Despite the regularity of his presence on a long-haul flight from Singapore, he had never mastered the art of sleeping on board and, try as he might, sleep now took over when it wished. Throughout the journey, he seemed oblivious to the fact that his priceless carry-on, handle still extended to the pull position, rocked precariously but ever upright in the apparently unclaimed luggage recess of the underground train. Never once did he turn to his left to check its security and never once was that security challenged by any other user of the service. Never once did he seem concerned that his bag contained things that were both unique and irreplaceable.

At King’s Cross he changed to the Victoria Line to take the single stop he needed to arrive at his final destination of Highbury Fields. “I would normally change at Green Park, despite the walk,” he said to the Rasta guy standing beside him as his connection grumbled to its halt at King’s Cross. “But I dozed off...” Edward did not notice the smile that responded, but he did offer his own respectful grunt. He had done his duty.

Edward Pitcairn emerged at Highbury Corner into full, warm sun, similar to that he might have been expected to leave almost a day before in Yogyakarta, had it not been raining. “Holloway Road,” he mumbled to himself as he set off north from the station, “Doesn’t change. Never the same.” And, after a ten-minute plod with his handled carry-on audibly recording the paving stones with clock-like ticks along the more than adequate but largely empty pavement, he turned left and arrived at the door of the outwardly scruffy but prestigious end-of-terrace he now jointly owned with his daughter. It was already after eight.

Access to the house from the street, through the substantial perimeter grey brick wall, was via a barred gate that was usually locked. Edward muttered his thanks that his daughter had anticipated his arrival and had left it open. Manipulating the gate, which had an over-strong closure mechanism and an entry phone, while dragging his bag had been memorably awkward in the past. He rang the doorbell.

He rang the doorbell again.

On the fourth ring, his finger just releasing the button, the heavy panelled door swung open to reveal his granddaughter, Elsie, named after his own long-departed mother’s unused middle name, was ready to greet him. “Grandaddy,” she said in her squeaky, little girl voice. After another year away ‘in the field’ Edward suffered his usual pause of disconnect as he mentally re-associated the stream of clipped squeaks with the leggy and voluptuous twenty-five-year-old who, as ever, at eight in the morning was already made-up like a model to graze at the bowl of muesli and yogurt that she had brought with her to the door. She ate another spoonful as the “Grandaddy” faded into a granular buzz.

Elsie pushed the door right back to allow him to pass, its closure mechanism creaking through its spring’s over-tension as she pushed its weight back further than usual to allow Edward and his carry-on to enter side by side. “I think you have got to go straight up”, she said, the phrase only partially audible between the dried nuts and oat flakes, despite their yogurt lubricant.

The phrase “Is that Grandad, darling?” made its way along the long hall next to the stairs from the depths of the kitchen at the back of the house. “Can you send him up to the top floor? He’s in the front bedroom. It’s all ready.”

“Go have your breakfast, Else. I know the way.” His voice sounded as tired as he looked.

“Tell him I will bring his breakfast up in a few minutes.”

Edward turned towards Elsie, who was just about to slurp another spoon of her sloppy mix and said, “And tell your mother that she doesn’t need to shout. I can hear her quite clearly.” Edward Pitcairn then turned to his right and began to haul himself and his carry-on up to the second floor one step at a time to avoid marking the edges of the stripped but largely unpolished wooden stairs. He stopped after just three lifts, saying, “This is stupid. Why don’t I leave these here?” And with that, he stopped, unzipped the top closure of his bag and retrieved the two litre bottles of gin from Changi Airport duty free. He attempted to hand them to his granddaughter. He looked a little surprised, possibly taken aback, when she shot off down the hall in the opposite direction.

“Else,” he mumbled, as he started slowly up the stairs. “Something Else.”

“We’ve been told to wipe everything with alcohol,” she said over her shoulder.

“Just open the bottle,” he said, quietly, pausing his progress to take a breather.

A moment later it was not Elsie who reappeared with kitchen roll and a bottle of sterilizer, but his daughter Gemma, now fifty but dressed like the nineties student she had never outgrown. He had always called her ‘Gem’, a name that Edward used as a simultaneous summary of her beauty and her significance in his life. Before she spoke, she had already squeezed some of the isopropyl alcohol gel onto the paper towel and had started to rub at the bottles that hung from his right hand over the banister from three steps up. “We have to be strict, Dad,” said Gemma, as she placed the cleansed bottles side by side on the hall table, just beside the landline telephone that no one ever seemed to use anymore, but which Edward again reminded himself he must use, given the punitive roaming charges he could ill-afford to incur. “We don’t know where you’ve been, do we? Go on up and unpack. I’ll bring you a breakfast tray in a minute.”

It was one of those moments where words were unnecessary. The greeting, the expression of love, caring and welcome was implied in Gem’s tone of voice, as well as in her name, despite the habitually brusque, business-like matter-of-fact tone she adopted when addressing her father. It was a tone that Edward liked to describe as ‘parenting in reverse’. Edward turned and continued his now lighter but still awkward ascent.

It was one of those London houses that seemed taller than it was either wide or deep. It had a basement as well, besides that raised ground floor and two above, the top floor alone not having the ceiling height of the others. But still the top floor front bedroom was on a half-landing, raised another five steps above the back of the house. It was normally a cold room, but he realized as the door opened that Gemma had switched on the heating some time before, despite this being May, and inside he was reminded of being outside in Singapore, except he was still dry. He spent a moment looking out of the window, because the house was taller than those opposite and there was a reasonable view of rooftops with their largely redundant chimneys, stacks that he could just remember issuing billowed smoke from coal fires. He turned to inspect the Victorian black-iron grate in his room, now a ‘feature’ with a painted back and a display of dried flowers in a leaded vitrine in front. In his memory, he could still hear the occasional cinder drop through the grille onto the ceramic tiles of the surround. But that had been in the seventies as a newly married university lecturer in this same room, having effectively taken possession of the entire house courtesy of its former owners, John and Mary Stead, his in-laws, accountant partners, competent parents and then newly semi-retired residents of Gloucestershire. He had not even unzipped his bag when the door pushed open on the corner of a wooden tray.

“I have to hand it to you...”

“Recognition at last,” he said,

“You never miss a chance... At least I know already that senility isn’t a problem yet! Dad, I’m sorry about this, but we have to follow the rules. I will have to set this down on the table here by the door and really I shouldn’t come in.”

“Not even for an elbow touch?”

Gemma smiled and offered a bent arm which he met with his own. “It’s all very tiresome, but we have to do it. The numbers are going up...”

“Not where I have come from, Gem. But it won’t last. A virus has no concept of borders.”

“Have your breakfast and we’ll catch up later. I really want to hear about the dig. It sounds like you really have something this time. I’ll come back up in twenty minutes. I’ll sit on the chair on the landing. I’ll bring some coffee – twenty minutes, okay?”

Edward glanced at the steaming bowl on the tray. “Bless you, Gem. Chilli soup noodles - real Indonesian breakfast.”

“English tea...”

“Is there such a thing?” he asked, rhetorically as his daughter descended. Clearly the question was familiar.

Edward stood at the window as he slurped his noodles, the bowl not too hot to cradle in his left hand as the right selected morsels of greenery with chopsticks between the tangles of noodle. The lettuce chunks were still crunchy, the cos leaves having been expertly added torn, not chopped, just a moment before the hot soup was poured into the bowl, and Gem had been liberal with the dried chili, which always made him sweat. The Japanese-style bowl and chopsticks were a little incongruous, but he was not one to complain about cultural syncretism, even if he did generally both notice and remark.

He had followed this same pattern every year, Gemma had said to her part-time partner, Geoff Sullivan, just before her father had arrived. She had described in detail how he would stand at the window to reacquaint himself with the familiar, but above all to note and store even the most minimal change in the view. He would spend several minutes staring at the geometry of the squarish St Mary Magdalene, noting also which of the trees on the compound had grown taller or possibly looked less than healthy. “This year he’ll notice that some of them have gone,” she predicted, accurately as it transpired. He would be able to make out the brickwork of Pentonville Prison, just visible between chimney pots and incorporate any new, taller structures, usually, in this part of London, schools and public buildings, into the internalised schema of his internal mental map. “It comes with being an archaeologist,” Gemma had said to Geoff (she was still embarrassed to say this name she usually described as ‘naff’). “He absorbs every detail before he is prepared to disturb anything, including time.” Gemma and Geoff had shared their alliterative, on and off partnership now for five years, itself begun five years after she had divorced that cheating swine of a husband who had given his good looks to Elsie but had reserved his infidelity for his wife. Elsie had taken the split badly, developed an eating disorder and had needed therapy. At least that was all in the past, Gemma would regularly remark to her daughter. With Geoff, she tended not to mention anything about her past. He responded in kind.

Edward had already placed the emptied bowl on the tray and was well down his second cup of tea from the stainless-steel pot when the door to his room again opened to reveal Gemma just about to occupy the chair on the landing. He himself sat on the chair next to the dressing table, a position which allowed the two to converse face-to-face, two metres apart. She had brought the coffee she promised and had already squeezed the two pot mugs onto the breakfast tray, alongside the empty noodle bowl.

“How was the flight?”

“Long, but no longer...”

“When is your appointment?”

Edward paused for a moment, obviously surprised at his daughter’s insistence that the business be done straight away, before either of them had even attempted to catch up. “Next week, Tuesday.”

“You’ll have to take a taxi...”

“I can go on the tube...”

“You’re not allowed...”

“I came here from the airport on the tube...”

“Apparently that is allowed. It’s called essential travel… as is, in your case, your doctor’s appointment. But once you have reached your destination, you’re supposed to stay there. No more public transport. So you will have to take a taxi.”

“And a taxi is not public?”

“Dad, you’re beginning to sound like a teenager. It’s the rule. We have to tell the driver that you are in quarantine...”

“Ten days, not forty...”

“Pedant! ...and then he sanitizes the taxi seat and door handles when your get out. He’ll take you and then wait to bring you back.”

“It will cost a fortune...”

“Elsie will pay for it. She has a budget for transport. An extra chit in the pile won’t even be counted. Anyway, it’s only down at University College. It’s not far. And the drivers are desperate for work at the moment because no one is travelling. Any idea how long it will take?”

“Not the foggiest... They did a biopsy in Yogyakarta and analysed it there. The results were probably on the same flight as me.”

“I doubt they have to fly...” She was clearly consciously trying not to sound concerned about her father’s health, but she was not succeeding. “So how is everything, dad? How’s your research?”

“The research is going exceptionally well. Really well. Really well indeed, I have to say.” Gemma’s raised eyebrows invited him to continue. “The dig has produced some interesting results since last year. What we don’t have in volume we certainly do have in quality. It’s always going to be hard in that climate. The samples are very sparse and very fragile. But there is no doubt in my mind that we have now proved that Flores Man was not confined to Flores, that he might even have been a regional phenomenon.”

“He and she...”

“Flores Man is a gender inclusive term, Gem, as is my use of ‘he’.” She smiled. He continued. “The sites are still small and most of the finds are still tools, flints, arrow heads and the like. I’ve written and published a detailed analysis of the characteristics as you know, and they are entirely in line with the findings from Flores, indicating that these people were culturally and technically, as well as physically similar. There have been a few bones, but they are really fragile, a bit like wet cardboard when unearthed, but uniquely on our site, less fragile than the ones found on Flores, because it’s a lot drier on Sawu.”

“That must be a real advantage when it comes to analysis.”

“It is, but it’s also proved a handicap of sorts. They tend to be more intact when we uncover them, but they do tend to pulverise immediately on contact with dry air. We have to wet them again and keep them wet, wrap them up and then dry them out in the lab under controlled conditions, adding sealants and stabilisers during the process. It makes the handling of every find a major project. We have nothing definitive yet, but I am convinced they are the same species as Flores Man, but opinions, as you know, differ. It is just as likely that the samples could be seen to represent a different species...”

“Hence the problems with your colleague... Sawu, is it?”

“Everyone at this end gets that confused. Sawu is the place. His name is Sarnu.”

“Sarnie, I could cope with...”

“So could I... One bite and he would be finished...”

“That bad, eh?”

“Probably worse...” Edward paused. It was one of those conversation cadences where everything could be assigned to the unsaid, where what each person brought to the encounter would remain implicitly but imperfectly understood, but also unchallenged. It was a moment also where opportunity marginally poked above risk, and he accepted the challenge. “My paper made a water-tight case around the similarities. The stone tools found on Flores, plus the flint shards, knives and arrow heads, all point to similar techniques being used across both islands. The nature of the materials chosen, the techniques of flaking, the attempts at shaping, they are all similar. The human remains we’ve found, however, are too scant to allow a direct comparison of physiology. What we have also agrees in part with the Flores model, but we still have so little…too little for anyone to say anything definitive.”

Gemma interrupted. “I don’t see the problem, dad. If your findings are correct and your argument fits, isn’t it more likely that your Sawu Man is the same as Flores Man? After all, they are next door to one another...”

“If only it was so simple... One, we can’t yet agree on dating. The organic material we have is all over the place, anything from two hundred thousand to twenty thousand years old. Only new finds that can definitely be associated with our humanoids can clarify that. Second, and because of the problem with the dating, we cannot place our finds at a time when there might have been a land bridge which might have linked that eastern part of the archipelago. Third, without a land bridge, our humanoids would have needed to cross open ocean to have colonised both places, and that particular ocean poses real navigation problems even for today’s sailors. Frankly, those are dangerous waters.”

“And did these people have boats?”

“There’s little evidence at present that they even built shelters for themselves, let alone ocean-going craft... If my argument is to hold water, so to speak, then it relies on there being no water...”

“The land bridge...”

“Precisely... Where was I? Oh yes... and fourthly, there is the interest of Professor Sarnu in establishing his legacy by having Sawu Man named after him, so he is frantically making the case for a homo sarnuensis, not homo sawuensis.”

“It seems such a big fuss over the changing of a couple of letters...”

“It matters. Just imagine Pitcairn with the first letters changed to s and h, rather than p, for instance.”

“How about homo pitcairniensis?”

Edward paused, indicating he had never considered such an option. “I’ve heard more stupid things, but I would be hard pressed to remember when... We’ve even had homo hobbitiensis suggested, because you know they were probably only a metre in height, these folk.”

“So maybe they were a kind of chimpanzee?”

“Theories abound, Gem, theories abound...” There was a lull in the conversation. Gemma obviously still had issues to raise, especially about her father’s health. But she concluded she ought to let him have some time to recuperate.

Gemma got up. “I’ll take your tray down. Do you want a rest, some more coffee?”

He nodded to request the coffee, but then continued, as if the previous thread should be pursued further. “And then fifth, of course, we have Uking.”

Gemma had already bent to retrieve the tray, but the word froze her motion. Her gaze, however, did immediately turn towards her father. “Dad, please, whatever you do, go easy on that one. Elsie turns bright red and goes ballistic even at the mention of the name. The rest of the day could be written off...”

As Gemma picked up the tray and set off downstairs, they exchanged no more words, but both knew what the other wanted to say. For Edward, thoughts remained in his own sphere, where Professor Sarnu, the colleague with whom he was currently involved in a bitter academic struggle and an even more destructive battle for ownership of posterity, was from the same Chinese-Indonesian family that owned over eighty per cent of Uking Terbuka, a property development and financials company originally based in Surabaya, but now a multinational. But for Gemma, Edward’s daughter, however, the name was primarily associated with Uking Palace, a redevelopment of former industrial areas in east London, but close enough to the City to be prime real estate, and, in an irony of coincidence, it was her own daughter, Elsie, who had been and remained the most vociferous opponent of the project, had organized and led demonstrations against it, and had several times appeared in the media to make her case. She had once or twice come close to being arrested at street protests she had herself helped to organise.

“Does she know of the link?” It was clear that Edward was seeking to fill a genuine gap in his knowledge. He had no ulterior motive.

“Of course. She’s left no stone unturned. Like you, she digs up everything she can find, except that she is not looking for fossils.”

“And what drives her opposition - anti-capitalism, anarchism?” This had all come about in the last year, a year of virus pandemic, travel restrictions, lockdowns and, for Edward Pitcairn, the first time he had not travelled home for an appraisal, the only year he had ever held an academic meeting by Zoom. There was a lot that had changed, including the publication of the Uking Palace proposal.

“It’s all about the environment, dad. The planet, green spaces, re-wilding, but it’s serious, hard-edged political campaigning - there’s no cuddly toy stuff. I’ll bring up your coffee.”

“I can come down and save you the trouble.”

“No, you can’t. You’re in quarantine! You,” she said, playfully pointing a parental finger, “have to stay here!”

Edward turned again towards the window as the tray rattled its way down the stairs. Another stare through the window lasted just a couple of minutes before he turned away, moved the unopened bag off the bed onto the floor and lay down, muttering “I’ll take a minute off” to himself as he did so. Ten minutes later, Gemma appeared at the door with his coffee, only to find him fast asleep. She set the tray down again on the table by the door without disturbing him.

On the way down the stairs, she heard the front door close, slamming shut, propelled by its closure. It was Geoff on his way out, off to work. He would be doing just a half day today and then calling at the supermarket on the way home to do the weekend shopping. He was one of the few people left apparently, who could not work from home, being employed by social services as a benefits assessor, specializing in face-to-face interviews. “You ought to be getting danger money these days,” she had told him a few days before, as he was putting on his coat to go out to yet another meeting with yet more different, perhaps infectious clients. She herself, of course, worked from home these days, her academic post in Hackney Metro University no longer suffering direct student contact, but the restriction having placed massive new demands on staff to create online materials. Luckily, her institution had been involved in the creation of such materials for some time, so in her case the transformation from office to home had been relatively smooth. Colleagues in more traditional institutions had found themselves working around the clock to fulfil course requirements at a time when the media regularly featured students demanding refund of their fees on the basis they were not being taught. Pressure, pressure... Media Studies was always a pressure point, what with its generally bad press and apparently permanent vicious internal politics alongside perennial threats of reorganisation.

Gemma by-passed the ground floor and went straight to the basement, where her study, book-lined, paper-strewn was always ready to be occupied. With Geoff away for the morning, she would put in a few Saturday hours to get ahead of her schedule for the following week. Why Geoff still was burdened by what was effectively shift work she never understood. “It’s because the clients are only available when it suits them” was his usual justification, but she never actually believed that, since she knew of no other arm of state bureaucracy that organized its affairs around the demands of its clients. She had offered the observation to her part-time partner on several occasions, but each time it had prompted only a shrug. She herself had never been one to shut up and put up, and she often asked him to complain about his conditions, without success.

By the last step on the way down, her mind was clearly already grappling again with the summary of French Cultural Studies, concentrating on Bourdieu through to Althusser. It was only then that she remembered she had left her laptop upstairs in the kitchen. The present reawakened in her and she took to the steps with a renewed determination to work. One flight of stairs up, she turned to enter the rear of the house and chose to pause again when she saw Elsie, seated at the kitchen table, engrossed in a screen of material on her computer. It was the mother’s unfinished lecture that the daughter was reading.

“I thought you were upstairs, darling, in your room.”

“I came down while you were talking to grandad. I made myself scarce so as not to disturb you. This stuff you’re working on is utterly fascinating.”

“Given what you do, I would have thought that this would be old hat to you.”

“No. Remember I was always focused on production and techniques, never theory, never the philosophy.”

“Philosophy is a bit strong, dear. Let’s call it sociology.”

Elsie smiled. “It is fascinating, though, all this idea about culture being an expression of identity, political as well as social. It makes me wonder how and why such things change. I’m still fascinated to know where Brexit came from, for instance.”

Gemma knew when to avoid an issue. Why, after all, should she want to relive a defeat? “Bourdieu really hasn’t much to say about Brexit.”

Elsie was not to be deterred. “It’s all this talk about culture representing the complexity of the current political reality that interests me, especially in relation to my campaigning. We all know why the planet became an issue, I suppose, but how does that issue interact with the way people act politically? Why is it, for instance, that people don’t see through big developments like Uking Palace for what they are, mere acts of destruction to generate profit?”

“I think you might need a course in analysis, Elsie...”

“I really want to talk to grandad about Uking. He knows the people who own the company, doesn’t he?”

“You are being very simplistic, Elsie. No, he does not know the people who own it. Uking is a multinational corporation with shareholders...”

“The family still own the vast majority of shares.”

“And grandad works with one member of an extended family that would be better described as a clan. And the person concerned is a professor of archaeology, not a businessman.”

“I bet he still has a load of useful insights...”

“And I wish you would call him Edward, like the rest of us. He hates ‘grandad’, ‘grandaddy’ even more.”

“But you still call him ‘dad’...”

The pause Gemma inserted said “that’s different”, but unconvincingly. “That may be, but now I need to do some work. What have you got planned for today?”

“I was hoping to talk with ... Edward...”

“He’s asleep. Let him rest. He’s not well.”

“When is his appointment?”

“Tuesday.”

“Okay. I’ll go upstairs and leave you in peace. I have some things to read.”

Just seconds later, the sound of her daughter’s ascent of the stairs to the first floor faded to silence. Gemma folded the laptop screen down, without completely closing it, unplugged the attached power lead from the socket next to the cooker which also fed a mobile phone on charge and set off along the short hall and again down the steep steps that led to the basement at the rear of the house to return to her study and her desk, which she found so cluttered she had to sweep clear a space for her computer. When Gemma finally sat at her desk and returned to the document she had left unfinished the day before, a feeling of normality visibly began to reimpose some tranquillity on a day that had thus far seemed both disrupted and awkward.