I went back to the tent to tell Rose about my find. She was lying on her sleeping bag. She was excited by the news and wanted to see the stream for herself. As she pulled on her boots, she told me about a passage in Vivien’s journal describing how the stream had flooded the surrounding meadow, and in a later entry, how the water turned a polluted milky green. As we walked down through the woods, I reminded Rose that Vivien accused Francis of being indifferent to the sighting of a kingfisher flying upstream.

  Rose said, ‘When you get your hands on the poem, you’ll forgive Blundy everything.’

  She too washed her hands and face in the stream. She also drank from it. I would never do that. A rotting animal could be lying half-submerged upstream. Radioactivity was another consideration. We went back to the tent. We were happier. Only now did we realise that if Vivien wanted the Corona to be found, she would not have heaved a slab of limestone over it. Tomorrow we would keep to the plan and dig the next hole further along the east–west line. We agreed on everything, our moods matched and we were walking hand in hand.

  After a bad half-hour, I had the stove working again. We warmed up a can of vegetable soup and ate it with slices of protein cake sliding about on its surface. Later, we lay in our sleeping bags, in absolute darkness, exhausted, though it was barely eight thirty. We gossiped about department colleagues for a while, then were silent. I reached for her hand. She took mine, gave a squeeze, a stroke with her thumb, then withdrew. I understood a ‘no’ or ‘not yet’. The expedition had given us good cover for not confronting our situation. My thoughts were now clear. I wanted us to continue. Rose’s brief scene with Kevin Howard still lay between us, quietly suppurating. I was baffled as well as angry. To probe would be heard as accusation and bring on another row when we were already on a cliff edge. But I had my theories. A taste of youth, a jolt to recall me from my obsessions, the thrill of the illicit – consensual sex with graduate students was no longer a sackable offence, but it was still frowned on by the older professors who might cook up some other charge and throw her out. I knew the kind of fight Rose and I would have – my emotional illiteracy against her flagrant betrayal. Each believing an apology was owed. Usual stuff. Could we engage with such banality? I had rehearsed a muscular notion: only by being together, sharing difficulties as we had yesterday and today and solving them, could we act out, rather than analyse, our best path into the future. A typical evasion, I could hear her say, but her silence was evasion too. A hand squeeze and a thumb’s brief caress in the dark kept my hopes alive while seeming to forbid discussion. There was our route, eight degrees east of south, a non-talking cure or the slow poison of silence. Nothing induces sleep so handily as a looped thought. I was soon oblivious.

  A metre or a metre-fifty along our east–west line? Back at the site in the bright early morning, we tossed a coin. The head of our republic’s president, Mary Tyndall, gleamed in the wet grass: one metre fifty. We soon hit the same network of roots. This time, we accepted the work would be slow and we knew what to do. We were forty centimetres deep when we drove down our probe. It sank unobstructed sixty-five centimetres before hitting an obstruction. We stopped for lunch – bread and the last of the protein cake – and then kept on with sawing and digging. We had lost the sun to a bank of dark cloud. That, and the brevity of the late-winter twilight depressed us. We should have been out of our sleeping bags in the morning while it was still dark.

  Around half-past four, the edge of the spade caught something so hard that it sent an electric pain through my elbow. Another rock. I dug clear limestone brash and clay. What we saw rarely, if ever, occurs in nature. We were looking at the outlines of a right angle. When we leaned in to look closer, our heads blocked our light. We had forgotten to bring the headlamps from the tent. As we cleared the soil away, we could make out the corner of some kind of container, and a hint between the dirt of dulled metal. We froze. We looked at each other but said nothing. It was not a moment of exultation. It was awe. One thing to have a hypothesis about some numbers in a notebook, another to dig down on that lead and find a steel box, put there by someone we felt we knew. Vivien had wanted us, strangers from an unknowable future, to find what she had buried. We took turns to touch the cold metal of that grubby corner embedded at a tilt in the floor of our excavation.

  The president’s head had served us well. The container extended under the earth, away from the dairy. If the tossed coin had shown tails, we would have missed it. Digging it clear would take time and the rational option was to start in the morning. But we were not feeling rational. I fetched the lamps, more water and our last chunk of bread from the tent. On the way back, I could not help myself, I broke into a run, like a child on its way to a spectacular treat. It took us an hour and a half to get our treasure clear. We burrowed into the side of our pit, above our find, and then dug round it with care. At seven thirty, as it started to rain hard, we lifted the steel container onto the grass. We used our bare hands to clear away most of the remaining sticky mess of clay, earth and limestone crumbs. It was a smooth case, like a piece of luggage without a handle. It was secured by two clasps which were encrusted with a white foamy substance which felt as hard as coral. Like the professionals we were not, we recorded dimensions in a notebook. Sixty-five by forty, and twenty centimetres deep. We guessed its weight. I thought two kilos, Rose four. She took off her coat and wrapped it round the case, I carried the lamps and water bottles, and we retreated through the downpour to our camp.

  Our dirt-smeared steel treasure lay between the sleeping bags in the squalid disorder of the tent. It had a sinister appearance, like a piece of advanced technology of unknown purpose, dispatched across light years by another civilisation. As we shivered in our bags, hoping to dry out before we slept, there was nothing to do but stare at our prize by the light of one lamp and try to forget how hungry we were. But sleep was not possible alongside a sealed box whose radioactive contents were stimulating every nerve end in my body. Nine hours until sunrise. We should have brought a bottle of local poitín in anticipation of success. For a while we talked through the expedition and our initial doubts, of our growing feeling of triumph, and of various mishaps that we now recast as comedy. We celebrated ‘Vivien’s stream’, how finding it and washing in it had boosted us. We would open the case in the documents room of the university library with the help of a technician. Vivien must have called on expert help, for the container was unlike anything we had ever seen. Then, mid-sentence, Rose trailed off significantly. I thought she was about to change the subject and say something hopeful about our future. But her breathing settled into its familiar steady tread. I turned off the lamp.

  For the third successive night, I was alone in the dark. How was I to sleep when the Corona, most precious document in the world, lay between my wife and me like a small child come in the night to share our bed? Like many people, when I lay sleepless in the dark, my thoughts sometimes drifted towards death. A history of the years that lay between us and the Blundys could easily confine itself to the stories of those who died before their time. So numerous they formed mountains behind us, the accumulated victims of global heating, nuclear battles, drowned cities, ruined economies, shattered ecologies, untamed viruses. The kids I taught thought no more of those victims than Vivien’s students troubled themselves too much with the dead of medieval famines and plagues or the slaughtered of the Napoleonic Wars or the victims of the twentieth-century Holocaust. Vivien and Francis had the massed dead right at their backs. They grew up in the aftermath of civilised Europe’s long civil war, 1914 to 1945, when scores of millions died. During the Blundys’ lifetime, there were enforced famines, invasions, genocide, drought and savage local wars. They could see what was coming next. When 2.4 degrees above pre-industrial levels was recorded, early in the twenty-second century, no one was surprised. And this despite the cooling effect of previous nuclear exchanges. Like us, the Blundys had good reason to think they might be living at the end of time. And this was what we had in common: even if we occasionally thought of history’s victims, we went on loving, playing, cooking, surviving somehow, attending or, Vivien, Rose and I, teaching classes, on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mabel Fisk and the rest. Francis liked to quote T. S. Eliot’s ‘Teach us to care and not to care’. Sonorous lines, but empty, for no one ever needed that lesson. We can’t care. We are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts, and they matter less. Whether Jack and Jill can pull their marriage together trumps what happened at Thermopylae. There would always be the eccentrics who cannot get their heads out of the past. I included myself and my colleagues along the department corridor who knew all that could ever be known about their sixteenth-century subjects. But we had no choice. Our ultimate loyalties must be to the loud and ruthless present.

  I was aware of my heartbeat growing heavier as if someone or something outside the tent was walking towards me. Foolish fears. I thought again of Adam Smith’s ‘there is a great deal of ruin in a nation’. A nation is so large and full of things and ideas that it takes a lot of determined folly to ruin it all. So with the planet. We wrecked much of it, but not everything. Here was the other story, not of the dead but of the descendants of the survivors, whose three-word history was bleakly simple: we scraped through. Devastated cities came back to life or were established elsewhere, just as they always had been. Significant parts of the knowledge base were preserved. Many institutions crawled through the gaps between catastrophes. People lived at poverty level, but they lived. When the rising curve of global temperatures met the descending curve of population numbers and industrial activity, nature seized the moment and pushed up through the ruins. Constant destruction, constant reinvention. Sail through the clear waters of the Cotswold Islands and be delighted by what’s starting to come back.

  We might one day lose our internet, or be reduced much further to become subsistence peasants, or dissolve into widely separated bands of hunter-gatherers eking a hard life from a degraded biosphere. But I doubted it. There were knowledge centres across the habitable world. Ours was in the Pennines. It contained indestructible illustrated handbooks of simple step-by-step instructions. How to make high-temperature fire; how to melt sand with lime and soda to make glass; how to grind and polish a lens; how to build a simple microscope and look through it to develop a germ theory of disease. Literacy will have to survive, at least for some. There were other handbooks on crop rotation, childcare, pulleys, printing, soap, human rights, electricity, how to make painkiller out of willow bark, how to combine copper with tin to make bronze, and hundreds of other basics that took thousands of years to develop. Then, so informed, we will start cutting down the trees again, digging for iron ore and eating the mammals and fish that flourished in our absence. Round we go. Each time we fail, or calamities overwhelm us, we will come back from a slightly higher place. Rising and falling, we would continue to scrape through. Like one of nature’s rhythms, spring and autumn, when the earth breathes in then exhales carbon dioxide. With civilisation barely 10,000 years old, an eyeblink of time, we hardly know our cycles yet. My optimism says that with each one, we will adapt and improve. Slow progress, and how soothing and deceptive, to avert the gaze from individual suffering and think in the inhuman long term. In 500 years there might still be a Literature Department somewhere on the planet. In 5,000? Five million?

  We were up at sunrise and packed with surprising efficiency. The case fitted into a backpack as we had hoped. Like siblings competing over a new toy, we both wanted to carry it, but I could not deny Rose. We packed the tent away and left it with the stove in the undergrowth. It was comforting to pretend to each other that we might come back. We brought the sleeping bags in case we could not find our boat. I went to the site and filled in our two pits. I drove the fork into the softened ground as a marker for whoever might want to come after us. I left the spade leaning against a tree. Back at the camp, I paused to make a mental farewell to the Blundys’ garden, to the imagined smooth lawns and richly tangled flower beds by the barn where the poet worked, the gate to the path meandering down the valley to the footbridge. It no longer had such power over me.

  With the compass showing us our route, 172 degrees, we set off and covered the ground easily with lighter packs and our hands free. But we did not see our waymarks, nor did we remember passing a large tree blackened by a lightning strike. The boggy stretch did not appear. We made another detour around brambles, but this patch was far bigger. It was hard holding a course through overgrown forest. When Rose was walking in front of me, I could not take my eyes off her bulging backpack. Tiredness exaggerated my exhilaration. I was walking on air, not watching where I was putting my feet as we came down a slope. I tripped on a root, fell hard and gashed my knee. Cleaning up the wound with dirty hands took a long time. Now I was walking with a limp and every step hurt. Though our progress was slower, we still made it to the cliff above the shore by early afternoon. The return was two hours quicker than the outward journey.

  But no sign of Jo’s boat, for we were facing across a different bay, narrower, with longer headlands reaching into the channel, blocking our view along the coast. So, east or west, left or right? We turned east because the way looked easier, but there was a gully to descend and climb, then another, but even when we made it onto the neck of the headland, we could not see the water below. We descended to get a better look and soon we had gone too far down to think of climbing back up. It was a long scramble to the shore. On some sections we slid on our backsides, clinging to trees to break our speed.

  East was the lucky choice. Still twenty metres above the shore, we parted some branches and saw Salty a mile away, anchored off the next headland. An hour later we were climbing onto the rocky outcrop where Jo had set us down. Three blasts of the whistle brought her on deck. Within twenty minutes we were on deck too, embracing like old friends. We took out our find to show her. It touched us, the way she punched the air and hooted. There were two bottles of a local apple brandy waiting and a vegetable stew. The bunk room through the galley appeared palatial. Its stowaway table of polished wood spoke of a rich civilisation. There was a narrow shower-stall that gave a thin trickle of lukewarm water. We had left on board a set of clean clothes. While Rose took the first shower, I cleaned the steel container. Then it was my turn, and though by then the water was running cold, it was a fine thing to step out, shivering but free of dirt and encrusted blood, and into the towel that Rose held open for me.

  From outside in the dusk we heard again the echoing sound of a loon and its mate’s reply from far away. The stew – turnips, carrots, potatoes – and our success brought Rose and me to a state of bliss. We raised our cups in a toast, brandy for the captain and me, herb tea for Rose. I lifted the case onto the table.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Forget professional procedures. We should open it now. There’ll never be a better moment.’

  Rose agreed. Jo fetched a screwdriver and hammer. The white substance around the clasps was lime deposit. A few gentle taps and it fell away. In a mock ceremony, Rose and I stood side by side holding the clasps.

  ‘Ready?’ Jo said. ‘Then … open!’

  Nothing happened. The lid needed to be prised open with the screwdriver. It came up with a squeak and a musty smell filled the cabin. What we saw was a disappointment. Another case fitted snugly inside the first. It was made of tough continuously welded plastic. No going back now. We had to cut it open. Jo brought out every cutting tool she had on board. Again, another discussion. The idea was to make an incision with a sharpened chisel, then use a bolt-cutter to slice open the sides. But chisel and hammer made no impression. We used a hand-drill to make a line of holes, which we joined up and enlarged with a keyhole saw. The blades of the bolt-cutter were too big, and we took turns with the saw again. That done, the cutter could gain purchase. But this plastic was tough. Each cut needed two of us on the bolt-cutter’s long handles. Getting round four sides took an hour.

  We sat back and Jo poured herself and me another drink and topped up Rose’s tea. We were too tired this time for ceremonies. As we lifted the top half of the case clear, a shower of crystals poured across the table. No one spoke. We were looking at two packages embedded in moulded foam. One was tapered and almost as long as the container and perhaps thirty or forty centimetres across at the wider end. The other was rectangular, about twenty by thirty. Both were thickly wrapped in a semi-transparent material. The larger object was surprisingly light. Through the wrapping I made out something dark in the centre, like a chrysalis, a creature waiting to be born. As I turned the object in my hands, light was refracted through the plastic and caused the thing inside to appear to move, to writhe. I had watched too many horror films in my early teens. I discerned a curving line of a deep brown colour and, at the narrow end, something black with short protruding arms. Of course.