Merinder's House

I once had the privilege of witnessing an archaeological excavation, conducted under circumstances which were considered, by some, to be untimely. Out of the ground came stones of the most remarkable calibre, and no-one knew how they had survived for so long when they were held together by such fragile means.

Some were enormous, and many were broken and enigmatic, and some also told stories. In fact, the stones were tending towards confirming what local people had said all along, but this was a little inconvenient as the place was not a particularly popular one with policymakers, and whilst the discoveries were coveted by the authorities, the stories they told were a little misplaced. The fact that no-one could agree on the stories was immaterial, or should have been, but somewhere in the aftermath of the excavations, the need to be definitive arose.

The stones became a bone of contention, and especially ownership. Initial assumptions that the stones might remain in the care of the local people provoked a swift and violently decisive reaction to the contrary by the authorities. Apparently, if they remained there, an amorphous general public would have to travel too far to see them. The fact that the authorities were engaged in their own battle to retrieve their treasures from an even more centralised location was rather an inconvenient argument which emerged at the wrong time.

But secrets have a peculiar mind of their own, and one of the stones vanished. Everyone saw it emerge from the ground, and there were even images of it, taken by someone who was watching carefully when others were preoccupied with procedures, volumes and timescales. It was inscribed, and may even once have marked someone’s grave, and then been used for something else, again and again and again.

When the collection was counted and catalogued, however, the stone had gone. Only a handful of people, who had been watching carefully and listening to the stories, remembered that it had been there, and enquired after the stone. The authorities had no knowledge of it, and did not remember seeing it. They did, however, try to trace it along the circuitous path of conservation experts who had handled the other stones, and no-one could recall ever having seen it.

Perhaps – and here is the real story – it remains where it lay, so that one tale is untold and holds a space open for the rest, because, in the end, it is the secrets and the unsolved mysteries which survive, not the solutions.

Jane Coutts, who recently wrote Merinder’s House, Scottish fiction with a European flavour.