The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  I take a sip of his unfinished pint, glancing round the pub again. There will be people here who knew Fran when she was a girl. Unfortunately, most of them were probably too young to have picked up the gossip of the day. Still, someone sent that letter, and he or she could be in this room. Although I know John’s right, really, there’s no way Keiller could have been my grandfather, I can’t help spinning the idea round. That smile…so exactly Margaret’s, I’m amazed John couldn’t see it. I cremated all my photographs of my mother–part of my sad Goth phase again–but Fran has a little one, in her bedroom, of Margaret in her teens, with white lipstick and three layers of false eyelashes. Maybe she keeps others, too, locked away in the bureau.

  You know, Ind, one day you might regret that, said Fran on the day I burned my mother’s things. Never get ‘em back, that’s for sure. Then she stumped away to the garden shed to fetch the rake, and spread the ashes of the bonfire across the flowerbed.

  I’m heading for the loo, admiring the dark-eyed cameraman’s profile as he tips back his head to swallow the last of his lager, when the TV woman and I nearly collide in the doorway.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says.

  ‘My fault, not looking where I’m going.’ We both stand back to let the other through first, then, when neither moves, step forward simultaneously.

  ‘You first.’

  ‘No, you. There’s more than one cubicle in there, anyway.’

  Of course, when we go in, they’re both occupied. A sickly manufactured scent of rose pot-pourri hangs in the air, and a volley of old-lady farts comes from behind one of the doors. We exchange smiles.

  There’s never going to be a better moment.

  ‘This programme you’re doing…’

  ‘If it gets commissioned. Not always a given, these days.’

  ‘Would you be interested in an idea for it?’

  This look comes over her face, the one that says she’s had a million people offer her ideas and only two and a half have ever been remotely any good. It’s replaced immediately by a polite, bland mask. ‘Try me.’

  ‘Next spring’s the seventieth anniversary of Keiller starting work in the circle.’ I’m gabbling to spew it all out fast before one of the toilet doors opens. ‘I understand about commissioning, I’ve worked for Mannix and other TV companies–’ (go on, India, tell a really big lie about your qualifications to keep her listening, and hope your nose doesn’t grow to give it away) ‘–and I did a master’s at Bristol University in archaeology and media, with my thesis on Keiller’s work. Only he never finished–you’ll know this. He never managed to reconstruct the whole circle.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She’s interested now, I can tell–in fact I’ve a feeling she could be way ahead of me.

  ‘So I thought…’

  ‘You want to finish the job for him and put up the rest of the stones.’

  ‘Well, no, not actually all the stones.’ I’m explaining now in the bar. My bladder aches because I never did get round to that pee. The TV woman marched me straight out and collared the white-haired man, who was talking to Carrie Harper over by the windows.

  ‘Daniel, you’ve got to hear this.’

  ‘Ibby, I’m talking to someone.’ Rude to her, though he was schmoozing Carrie like she was lady of the Manor.

  ‘Seriously, it’s a really good idea.’

  His eyes went hard, and for a moment I thought he was going to cut her down to size in front of Carrie and me, but instead he said smoothly, ‘Would you excuse us a moment, Mrs Harper?’ I could tell he’d already sussed that Carrie wasn’t going to be as much use to him as she’d like to think, since she only arrived in Avebury ten years ago. Now she’s hanging onto the edge of the conversation, as I explain my Big Idea. I’ve pulled open the curtains to show them. There’s a fine view, across the darkening roadway, of the space where Frannie’s parents’ guesthouse stood.

  ‘Doesn’t matter which stone. The Second World War interrupted Keiller’s excavations, so nearly half the outer circle hasn’t been touched–there could be twenty or more buried stones in the north-east quadrant alone. The point is to do something that would get press coverage and set people talking about Avebury and Keiller again.’ And secure me a job on this production.

  ‘India’s family have lived in the village for generations,’ says Ibby. Weird name. Maybe she was conceived on Ibiza. ‘She works with the National Trust.’ In the caf, but they don’t need to know that. Lucky that Michael isn’t here to put them straight. I raise my eyebrows at Carrie in the hope she’ll keep her mouth shut.

  ‘So you could get us permission to film?’ says White Hair. His name is Daniel Porteus.

  ‘Well, that would be up to someone higher than me. But I’m sure…’

  He doesn’t seem to have noticed that I’m making most of this up as I go along. ‘It’s bloody brilliant. I like it already. Can I get you a glass of wine?’ He shoots a triumphant smile at Ibby. ‘Get us a bottle, lb. Merlot, if they have it. All right for you, um, India? So what exactly is it you do for the Trust?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Carrie butts in. ‘India, don’t want to interrupt or anything, but I think I saw your gran out the window. She could break a leg, you know, walking round the dykes in the dark.’

  There’s still enough light in the sky to outline the small figure making its uneven way along the top of the bank, near a clump of beech trees.

  ‘Fran!’

  She stops, turns and waits, thank goodness. A waxing moon is coming up over the horizon, and as I dash through the stones, there’s a disconcerting glimpse of it, like a tilted D, between Frannie’s bandy elastic-stockinged legs.

  The grass is slippery with frost. My ankle goes over with a sickening twist. Daren’t stop, so I go hobbling on, terrified that Frannie will start slithering down the bank into the darkness of the ditch and her ankle will go too, pitching her over and snapping her leg like the dry old twig it is. At her age, broken bones can kill.

  ‘Stop right there. I’ll come and get you.’ A risky strategy: out of sheer cussedness she might do the exact opposite. Panic’s making me breathless.

  She sits down, plonk, on a big tree root curving out of the hard, chalky slope. The wind rattles the bare beeches. A smile cracks her face, as if this is a game. She must know it’s going to be hard to get her up again. She’s not even wearing a coat, for God’s sake. Her feet are in slippers, soaked.

  My breath scrapes in my chest from the climb up the bank, and the fear. ‘What are you doing?’ I puff.

  Frannie lifts a hand and brushes her fringe off her forehead, a 1940s starlet posing for the camera, the rising moon backlighting her hair and turning it silver. She stares straight ahead over the stone circle, gaze lasering between the pair of massive entrance stones. Something in the inner circle has caught her attention. There’s movement down there, someone in a long dark coat, a bluish light that could be torch or camera-phone. Frannie shakes her head, chewing over some possibility that apparently she regrets having to reject.

  Then she says, like she’d heard me thinking the exact same words earlier this evening in the pub: ‘They never comes back, that’s for sure.’

  CHAPTER 8

  1938

  They never comes back and goodness only knows the place they’ve gone to. But sometimes I think they’re out there in the moonlight, and I have to go to see.

  Our mam used to say that the two roads that cross in the middle of Avebury–the main Swindon road running north-south, and Green Street that was the old Saxon way going east-west–were like big blood vessels carrying time through the village. Because they was so old now the walls had gone thin, and time sometimes bled out one way or t’other. Mam’d reach out her hand to me in the hospital and I’d see the bruises, the places where her blood leaked out under the skin because, after all the injections, her veins were too wore out to hold it in any more. I see the same bruises on my arms now, old-lady bruises, and I think that’s how time has become for me, now I’m eighty-whatsit. The past leak
s into the present, and who’s to say the present doesn’t leak into the past?

  If I’d been a bit bolder and let Davey take me into the stones that night, instead of watching what happened in the Manor gardens, would we have come through? There’d’ve been a kiss and a cuddle and a warming of the hands inside his coat. Then, all in good time, maybe our mam would’ve had her way, tinned-salmon sandwiches and banns read out, and two of us beside the old font with the snake carved on it when the vicar dips his fingers to wet the babby’s head.

  There’s a photo of Davey in the back of the drawer in the dressing-table, in the box where I keep all me bits and pieces. It was taken later, in the war, after he’d enlisted with the Raff. He’s grinning at the camera with his forage cap at a jaunty angle; somewhere out of view there’ll be a cigarette between his fingers, because he smoked something terrible after he joined up, but they had them for free, or near as, at the NAAFI. Perks of the job. Blowing smoke rings into the face of Death, hoping she’d squint her eyes and not see him. It’s black-and-white, so you can’t see them golden-green eyes of his that never seemed to match right with his thick brown hair. That hair stood up like a lavatory brush if he didn’t cut it every couple of weeks, but after he joined the air force he Brylcreemed it flat, with a little finger-wave at the front, curly as Mam’s marcel. It used to creep forward over his eye when he was hot and bothered. Me wayward tendril, he called it.

  He’s grinning at the camera in that photograph, but what I sees now is the hurt in his face. Frannie, he says to me, what did you want to go and do that for?

  Yes, I say, but you wasn’t exactly whiter than whatsit, was you? Didn’t understand then, but I reckon you had your secrets too, up on Windmill Hill on that motorbike. How was it you caught Mr Keiller’s eye so he give you a job? But no good asking: he and Mr K never come back, for all I go looking in the moonlight.

  Percy Lawes had set up his movie camera on the bit of green opposite the Red Lion when I got off the Swindon bus coming home after my Thursday-afternoon shorthand class. There was a group of kids hanging round him as usual.

  ‘Back down the high street,’ he was saying to Heather Peak-Garland and her pals. ‘Go on. You were too quick for me last time. I didn’t get you all in the picture.’

  They trooped down the road towards the shop.

  ‘Further.’

  Back they went again, almost to the school.

  ‘Further.’

  I left them to it and crossed the road. I had decisions to make, about what I was going to do with my life–didn’t intend spending it all being a skivvy for Mam and Dad–and the best place to think was in among the stones. There was a big old lad fallen on his side that I liked to curl up on when I needed time and space to myself. The Rawlins boys used him as a sliding stone, tobogganing down his polished flank to land with a splash in the puddle at the bottom, then clambering back on over and over till they near wore out the seat of their pants. But today they were dancing round Percy having their pictures took on that camera of his, so I had the stone to myself.

  Except no sooner had I settled myself, pulling up the collar of my wool coat and shoving my hands in my pockets, than the breeze blew the sound of voices my way.

  It was two of the archaeologists that worked for Mr Keiller. You could tell they was archaeologists because one was carrying a tall measuring pole painted black-and-white, and the other had some sort of survey equipment on folding legs. They were over by one of the few stones that was still standing in this part of the field. One had his back to me, bending over his tripod. The other, holding the pole, was the same tall, languid fellow with sloping shoulders and floppy hair I’d seen in the Manor gardens. They’d either not seen me or thought me not worth the noticing.

  ‘Keep the flaming pole steady, Cromley,’ shouted the shorter one. He had darker, wavy hair, and a thick tweed jacket. ‘You’re waggling it about like a wog with an assegai!

  ‘It’s too bloody cold to stand still,’ yelled the other. ‘This’ll have to be the last one. The light’ll be going soon.’

  They were both young men, in their twenties, with carrying voices, like they didn’t care who heard ‘em say what. I wondered what made them want to spend their lives digging up old stones, but maybe it wasn’t that brought them here: maybe it was Mr Keiller. You could imagine him marching up to some smart young lad, coming all innocent out of a college gateway in Oxford or Cambridge, and saying, Follow me. And they would.

  ‘There,’ said the tall one called Cromley, lowering the pole. The rays of the low sun caught his soft little moustache, the colour of Demerara sugar above fine, sculpted lips. ‘That’s where there should be a stone buried, if the spacing’s constant. And another…’ He moved along the rim of the ditch, sweeping the pole over the grass, then stopping and jabbing the ground with it. ‘The next here.’ Finally he speared the striped stick into a molehill, and took out his cigarette case to light up. The match flared and fizzed.

  The dark-haired chap ignored him, dipping a long pointed nose towards his notebook. He took his time writing something, then folded the legs of the tripod.

  ‘You know, Piggott…’ The taller man was using the pole like a hiker’s staff as they walked back in my direction, his cigarette trailing from the fingers of his other hand. ‘AK’s driven off to London again with the Brushwood Boy. Don’t you think someone ought to enlighten Doris?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Piggott, revealing a glimpse of big, flat teeth. There was irritation in his voice, and he looked quite red in the face, though that was maybe the cold.

  I didn’t hear any more, because I felt suddenly shy and thought they might laugh at me for being a gurt grown girl climbing on the stones like the children did. Besides, the light was fading, and the moon coming up already, and Mam would be wondering where I’d got to. I slid off the stone, tugged my skirt down, and ran off between the trees, before they reached where I’d been sitting.

  Running back the way I’d come, running widdershins. First time I didn’t think to follow the light round the circle, like my mam always told me.

  CHAPTER 9

  The hobble across the circle seems to take for ever, Fran’s hand on my arm tightening every time her soaked slippers skid on the frosty grass.

  ‘I’m going to take you into the pub,’ I say.

  No response. Frannie glares straight ahead, brows knitting in concentration. We cross the road, and as we approach the light on the outside of the Red Lion, she lifts her eyes up and stares at it as we pass underneath, like she’s never seen it before.

  Although the snug is still packed with reminiscing villagers, the main bar is almost empty. My grandmother settles herself in the corner, sees Carrie coming out of the Ladies and waves. But weather conditions haven’t entirely returned to normal on Planet Fran: still cloudy, with patches of freezing fog.

  ‘Where are my cigarettes?’ She pats her cardigan pockets. ‘You got one on you, Meg?’

  ‘I’m India, and you know I don’t. I’ll bring you a packet with the drinks.’ Which would be better: whisky or hot coffee? I order both, scribble my mobile number on a scrap of paper for the TV people, and ask Carrie to look after Frannie while I fetch the car.

  The shortest way home is through the field, but after several days’ rain, the Winterbourne’s nearly as high as the bridge. Moonlight glimmers on water round the foot of Silbury Hill, and without a doubt the meadow will be one big sucky bog. The path’s never been tarmacked: locals claim that’s another of the ways Keiller and the National Trust exiled ordinary folk from Avebury Better to take the longer, dryer way: along the lane, past the outlying cottages with their thatch and Range Rovers.

  At night I don’t much like either route, my townie instincts not yet comfortable in the darkness of the countryside. Something’s made me more than usually twitchy this evening. The tiniest whisper of wind in dead beech leaves. I could swear that was a footstep behind.

  Nobody. I know there’s nob
ody there.

  All the same, I cast an uneasy glance over my shoulder as I take the fork for Trusloe. In the far distance there’s a light, moving slowly in the darkness across the slopes of Windmill Hill. Telling myself it can only be a late dogwalker, I sprint along the last stretch of lane towards the streetlight.

  Frannie becomes suspiciously quiet once I persuade her into the passenger seat of the Peugeot.

  ‘You’re sure you’ll be OK?’ asks Carrie, as I close the car door. ‘I don’t mind coming along if you need a hand. She seems fine, now, but…’ Neither of us can define what but is.

  ‘Did she say anything to you about what she was doing there?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Come over for supper next week,’ says Carrie. ‘Both of you. You’re not getting out enough, India. What do you do in the evenings? We’ve hardly seen you since Christmas.’

  What do I do? I watch television with my grandmother. I know every twist of the plotline of EastEnders and Holby City. After she’s gone to bed, I open a bottle of wine–bugger the new-year resolution–and play Free Cell on the computer. Can only manage the card games, these days; too much blood and destruction in anything else.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind a quiet life,’ I say. ‘After London–you know…’ Too late I realize that the wave accompanying this, meant to convey I’m weary of the shallow pleasures of the metropolis, makes it look as if I’m rudely batting away Carrie’s invitation. ‘I’d love to come to supper some time,’ I add. ‘If Frannie’s…up to it.’

  All through the conversation, my grandmother sits in the front seat with a puzzled, shut-up-don’t-interrupt-me expression on her face, like she’s working out a difficult sum in her head.

  On a cold February night, Trusloe seems bleaker than ever, looming out of the windy darkness under rags of cloud backlit by the glow of Swindon to the north. There are not enough streetlamps, and most windows are unlit. On our road everyone, apart from the couple next door who make amateur porn films in their living room, apparently heads for bed straight after supper. Either that or they still use blackout material for curtains.