The Crossing Places

When she bought the cats her mother asked her straight out if they were 'baby substitutes'. 'No,' Ruth had answered, straight-faced. 'They're kittens. If I had a baby it would be a cat substitute.

Why is her first reaction to invitations always to think of a way of refusing them?

The past is dead. She, as an archaeologist, knows that better than most. But she knows too that it can be seductive.

Nelson nods again. ‘It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. The worst, the very worst. When you have children, suddenly the world seems such a terrifying place. Every stick and stone, every car, every animal, Christ, every person, is suddenly a terrible threat. You realise you’d do anything, anything, to keep them safe: steal, lie, kill, you name it. But sometimes there just isn’t anything you can do. And that’s the hardest thing.

To lose your child, to have her spirited away like something from a fairy tale, surely that must be every mother’s nightmare.

The wife belongs to a book club. All they do is moan about their husbands. They never talk about the bloody books at all.

You sound quite a fan of archaeology, Harry.' Nelson grunted. ' Lots of its bollocks, of course, but you can't deny they know their stuff. And I like the way they do things. It's organised. I like organisation.

He is tall and dark, with greying hair cut very short and there is something hard about him, something contained and slightly dangerous that makes her think that he can’t be a student and certainly not a lecturer.

Once you have had a child, can you ever go back to being the person you were?

Ruth doesn’t have children and she has never been pregnant. Now that she is nearly forty and thinking that she might never have a child, it all seems such a waste. All that machinery chugging away inside her, making her bleed each month, making her moody and bloated and desperate for chocolate. All that internal plumbing, all those pipes gurgling away, all for nothing.

But for Ruth, that moment when she held Lucy in her arms was a turning point. She knew then that she would do anything to protect Lucy. She knew then what it is to be a mother.

Perhaps it is just that she learnt the value of the maternal cliché, the love that is always the same no matter how many years pass and burns no less strongly by being expressed in time-worn phrases.

Peter is suffering from an attack of nostalgia, she knows the symptoms. She mustn't join in otherwise she'll be swept away too, drowning in a quicksand of the past.

And, as Big Ben tolls mournfully in the background, the old year dies.

Why didn’t the skeleton go to the ball? Because he had no body to dance with.

The Saltmarsh and its henge are completely imaginary. There was, however, a bronze-age henge found in North Norfolk, at Holme-next-the-Sea. For descriptions of this henge I am indebted to Francis Pryor’s marvellous book Seahenge (HarperCollins).

She remembers her mother telling her that animals don’t have souls. Another black mark against God.

Will o’the wisps are lights, often seen on marshland and often on the night of the summer solstice.

cursuses.’ ‘Never heard of it.’ ‘Exactly! It’s a very technical word. It means a parallel ditch with banks on the inner sides.

King’s Lynn was once a huge tidal lake. That’s what Lynn means. It’s the Celtic word for lake.

It is utterly desolate and Ruth has absolutely no idea why she loves it so much.

–El carbono 14 está presente en la atmósfera de la Tierra. Lo absorben las plantas, luego los animales se las comen y nosotros nos comemos a los animales. Total, que todos absorbemos carbono 14, hasta que al morirnos dejamos de absorberlo y el que hay en nuestros huesos empieza a descomponerse. Por eso, medir la cantidad de carbono 14 que queda en un hueso es una manera de saber su antigüedad.