by Jenni Mills
He turned to inspect me, but I don’t think he was much interested by what he saw, a fifteen-year-old girl in a cheap jacket-and-skirt costume, with finger-waved hair and a scrubbed country face. ‘Do you write clearly?’ You could hear the w in write.
‘Very,’ said Mrs Sorel-Taylour, before I could open my mouth. ‘That’s why I took the child on.’ Did I imagine that tiny stress on ‘the child’? ‘She will, of course, be under my direct supervision.’
‘Good,’ he said. He was bored already, wanting to return to his pictures. The one on top was strange, but familiar too. It took a moment to work it out, then I saw it was a photograph of Avebury from the air. It had been taken late in the day because the shadows were long.
He must have been watching my face. ‘You recognize it.’ The soft upper-class w sound again, instead of the r.
‘I can see our guesthouse. There.’
‘Ah, that Robinson. I thought I’d seen you before.’ I could smell the oil on his sandy brown hair, sweet and spicy. The parting, on the right, was straight as a metal rule, the hair slicked back from a high, smooth forehead. ‘Do you know who you’re descended from?’
‘The monkeys, my mam says.’
He laughed. ‘The biggest monkey round here in the eighteenth century was Tom Robinson. They called him Stonebreaker Robinson, because he destroyed so many of the stones from the circle–broke them up for building material and road surfacing. Did you know that?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It seems to me entirely appropriate that we should put a Robinson to labour setting right what he destroyed. You shall serve your time in the museum on his behalf.’ He had a habit of dipping his chin and crinkling up his eyes when he smiled. ‘Of course, you might not be descended from him, but we shall never know, shall we? So I shall always assume you are and, on high days and holidays, give you twenty strokes of the lash as additional penance.’
I looked helplessly at Mrs Sorel-Taylour. Her mouth was a tight red seam.
Mr Keiller turned back to his photograph but his eyes stayed crinkled and happy, a smile rippling round his mouth.
Big crates arrived from London, full of what Mam called ‘stuff’. So many bits of broken pot and flakes of stone that Mr Keiller had dug up from Windmill Hill when he’d come there in the 1920s, or from Mr Peak-Garland’s fields when he’d rebuilt the Avenue that leads up to the circle. Not to mention the bits and pieces they found from the circle itself in the last year, when they started putting back the stones. It was all stuff to me, too, to begin with, but after a bit what the archaeologists say starts to sink in, so you see how a sliver of flint has a serrated edge that some old fellow chipped there five thousand years ago, or the pattern of nibble marks on a piece of pot jabbed into the clay by an ever-so-patient woman with a tiny bird bone.
We didn’t unpack it–that was a job for the men. All of them used to wear these dark green blazers, like a sports team, with a badge on the breast pocket that said MIAR: Morven Institute of Archaeological Research, after Mr Keiller’s family home in Scotland. At first it made them hard to tell apart at a distance, but it didn’t take long to sort out who was who. There was Mr Young, Mr Keiller’s foreman, small-built, lean and leathery-skinned from the last season, who’d been promoted to supervise the museum. He wasn’t posh like the others, and he had a proper Wiltshire accent, but he’d worked with Mr K for years, and Mr K always listened to his opinion. He was friendly but a bit shy around me, and Mrs Sorel-Taylour said he was awkward with women, never been married. But it was the two younger ones I saw most of: dark, heavy-browed, big-nosed Mr Piggott, who treated me like I wasn’t there, most of the time, and Donald Cromley, the taller, good-looking fellow whose light brown hair used to flop over one eye because he didn’t oil it back.
They would take out each piece from the crates and try to find it in the notes, which had always got lost or separated, then argue over what it was. Once or twice I half expected them to come to blows. Mr Piggott was the older of the two, and the more experienced, though sometimes he behaved like an overgrown schoolboy, but Mr Cromley was the clever young puppy snapping at his better’s heels. Mrs Sorel-Taylour and I had to sit there writing everything down, and later type it all up. When she was satisfied I really did write neatly, she let me do the labels to go with the exhibits in the glass and mahogany cases.
We were in the museum one morning when Mr Cromley dipped his hand into the crate, and Mr Piggott started to giggle when he saw what he’d come up with. ‘You know, Donald, the Americans have an expression,’ he said, ‘which we could adapt for this occasion. “Happy as a Don with two…’”
Mrs S-T shot them a disgusted glance. ‘Gentlemen. Please remember there are ladies present.’
‘She’s a country girl,’ said Mr Piggott. ‘She knows what it is. Don’t you, Miss Robinson?’ The first time, I think, he’d ever addressed me by name.
Of course I knew. Didn’t stop my cheeks being on fire, though. Mr Cromley placed the chalk doo-dah on the table where he had been laying out the finds. It was about four inches long, rough carved, with a bulging knobble at the end.
‘Not amazingly impressive,’ said Mr Piggott, with a scornful twist of his thick dark eyebrows.
‘Ah, but I have four of them,’ said Mr Cromley, delving into the crate, and the pair of them burst out laughing again.
‘Where did they come from?’ I asked, provoking more hoots and snuffles.
‘These are from Windmill Hill,’ said Mrs Sorel-Taylour. ‘I’m sorry, Frances, you’ll have to become used to this sort of thing.’
‘Regeneration,’ said Mr Cromley, recovering himself sudden-like. ‘That’s what ceremonies at Avebury would have been about, in all probability. They may have been left as offerings to the gods. Or the priest may have strapped on a chalk phallus for the ritual.’
‘He never wore one of those!’ I exclaimed. ‘What would he have done with it?’
Mr Piggott went so brick-coloured I thought he’d explode with trying not to laugh. But Mr Cromley pushed back his hair and gave me a look that was almost respectful. ‘That’s actually a very good question.’
‘But not one we should waste time answering this morning,’ said Mrs Sorel-Taylour, briskly. ‘It’s nearly Miss Robinson’s lunch break, and there are at least half a dozen finds in that crate you haven’t begun to look at.’
At twelve thirty exactly Mrs Sorel-Taylour would send me off for lunch, and usually I’d wander across the cobbles to the barn in the hope of finding Davey polishing one of the cars. He wasn’t often there. He’d be on the road, maybe driving Mr Keiller to some dinner in Mayfair, or fetching more boxes of stuff from Charles Street where Mr K had his London house.
Today I wasn’t sure if I was glad or not there was no sign of him. I kept thinking of the great big chalk thing Mr Keiller had been carrying the night Davey and I watched the ceremony in the garden. Whatever had he done with it when they disappeared between the box hedges?
I wanted to ask Mrs Sorel-Taylour what she’d seen. If she was there, it couldn’t have been anything too dreadful, could it? Surely Mr Keiller wouldn’t…
There was a step behind me on the cobbles. I whipped round to see Mr Cromley crossing the stable yard towards the Manor. He’d been there too that night, I remembered, the moonlight silvering his light brown hair. ‘Mr Cromley!’ I called.
He turned and came towards me. ‘What can I do for you, Miss Robinson?’
He was delicate-looking, but strong too. I’d seen him lift them crates effortlessly from the floor.
‘I was interested in what you were saying in there,’ I said. ‘But what I was wondering was…how you know what they did?’
His face lit up in a smile. ‘Always pleased to enlighten the genuinely curious,’ he said, eyes raking me like I was a seed patch. ‘It’s all conjecture, of course, but I’ve made a study of primitive magic, in various parts of the world.’ I’d thought of him as cynical and knowing, but now he seemed surprisingly young and earnest.
‘The urge for ritual is always close to the surface, even in modern life. There must be superstitions in the village connected to the stones.’
‘Only superstition I know is not to go round them widdershins,’ I said. ‘My mam told me that. Always has to be sunwise.’
‘Widdershins!’ Mr Cromley was delighted. ‘Must tell Alec. Widdershins is the direction he’s chosen to take excavating the circle.’
‘Well, my mam would say he was storing up trouble for himself.’
‘Perhaps he is. In more ways than one.’ He gave a rueful grin. ‘Sorry about the ragging in there. Piggott and I don’t entirely see eye to eye. For all his schoolboy bluster, he’s a prude. Won’t admit these places were about sex and death.’
‘I think you’re trying to shock me, Mr Cromley.’
‘Merely making an academic case for ritual magic in the Neolithic’ He threw me a mischievous look, then glanced up at the church clock. ‘I’m so sorry, but I’m expecting a telephone call in the Manor from my uncle. He’s visiting friends in Wiltshire, and we’re hoping to arrange dinner this week. Otherwise, I’d happily…initiate you in the mysteries. But there’ll be other opportunities. Strikes me you’re a lot brighter than you let on, Miss Robinson.’ He raised an eyebrow like other men might raise a hat, and let himself into the Manor garden through the wrought-iron gate.
So I went back to the guesthouse and hung around the kitchen, pinching scraps for a sandwich, while Mam toiled over preparations for the evening meal, and ran in and out of the dining room with lunch for any guest who hadn’t gone out for the day. She threw me an impatient glance and the tea-towel, and I ended up, as I often did, doing the washing-up. Then when I started shooting worried glances at the clock, she touched my hair and said, ‘Go on, I can manage without you–you’ve more important things to do.’ I can feel her fingers now, after all these years, smoothing my curls.
I ran across the road to the barns again, in the hope Davey was back and I’d sneak ten minutes with him before I had to return to Mrs Sorel-Taylour. But he was off to London again with Mr K, according to Philip the other driver, and staying overnight.
A few days later Mrs Sorel-Taylour and I were in the office upstairs, typing up notes Mr Piggott had dictated, when there was a terrible bang from outside. A couple of years later a noise like that would have sent us scurrying under the table, thinking German planes were bombing us, but this was still six months before Mr Chamberlain and his piece of paper and it hadn’t sunk in, to me at least, that there was a war coming.
Mrs Sorel-Taylour rose straight-backed, flapping a hand to tell me I should stay sitting. She stalked over to the window–there was only one, in the end wall, with faded chintz curtains–but I dare say she couldn’t see much, not being very tall.
There was another bang like the crack of doom.
‘It in’t the trees again?’ I asked. Two years ago, they’d cut down the trees that grew over the banks and dynamited the stumps. A gurt piece of wood had gone clean through Mr Peak-Garland’s cowshed roof, and Mr Keiller liked to tell the story of how Mr Piggott had been hit on the head by another lump. Pity it didn’t bash some of his brains out, I thought. He had far too many of them, and knew it. I’d seen cartoons he’d drawn of people in the village and it seemed to me he always made us out to look fools.
‘Isn’t, Frances.’ Mrs Sorel-Taylour was waging war on my Wiltshire ways. ‘That wasn’t explosives, it was a demolition ball. It’ll be the blacksmith’s.’
‘Can we go and look?’
She checked her watch. ‘It’s almost lunchtime. Make sure you’re back a few minutes before half past one.’
I was down the steep narrow stairs and out across the cobbles before you could say Fran Robinson. I wanted to see this.
The blacksmith’s wasn’t the first building to go. Rawlins’s garage, hard by the Adam and Eve stones, which Mr Keiller called the Cove, had already gone. Mr Rawlins didn’t mind. Shabby wooden shack, yard full of old tyres and bits of cars, backed by a row of four cottages with leaky thatch. Rawlins needed space for his new petrol pumps, his second wife and all his kids, so he thought it a great deal when Mr Keiller offered him in exchange a piece of land outside the village on the Swindon road. Even lent him three hundred pounds to build a gurt new flat-roofed house that looked like an Egyptian picture palace. Our dad was impressed, but our mam used to wince every time she went past it. Mr and Mrs Tibbles from the cottages, Curly and Mary King, and the old lady who always wore black, who also lived in the row, faded out of our lives. I thought they’d all gone to Marlborough, but I wasn’t sure.
There was another bang as I came round the side of the church. It looked like there was a fog rolling down the village street, and the lich-gate was shrouded in yellow dust. A cheer went up, there was a creaking noise, then a crash.
By the time I was through the gate, there was no thatch left on the blacksmith’s shop, except for one corner, and no front, and not much by way of side walls either. The straw clung to the last bit of chimney-stack like Mr Hitler’s moustache. Half the village had gathered, far as I could tell, including all the lads who should’ve been in school, and the teachers with them too. There was a crane swinging a wrecking ball, and a group of our men, wearing dungarees and thick leather belts, were going to work with sledgehammers on what was left. The dust caught the back of your throat.
I was standing next to old Walter, who lived up Green Street. He shook his head. ‘What a day. Never thought I’d live to see this.’ His lip was trembling, and he wiped at the corner of his mouth with a wrinkled arthritic hand. ‘Pigsties are coming down too before nightfall. An evil day. I’m going home while I still have one to go to.’ He began shuffling up the street, blinking against the cruel dust. He’d served in Sudan under General Gordon, they said, and been wounded in the head, then come home and lived with his old mother until she died on the same day as the King two years ago. Suddenly he stopped and turned, taking in this time who I was. ‘Why d’you work for that ol’ devil? It’ll be your’n next.’
Another great crash and the back wall of the blacksmith’s came down. Now there was nothing left but a jagged amputation, a ghost of a house, rubble where people I knew had once lived and worked and had babies. And all the little boys in the village were cheering.
CHAPTER 13
He’s waiting for me by the Land Rover, leaning against the open passenger door with one foot on the step. Jeans this time, black ones. A pair of aviator sunglasses. And those stupid cowboy boots he had on the night I met him.
‘This wasn’t my idea,’ I say, before he can get a word in. ‘Understand? This is the one and only time I’m ever going to mention what happened between us. I’d rather not be showing you round, but it seems nobody else has time to do it.’
He starts laughing. Bastard. Then he peers over the sunglasses and sees I’m serious.
‘Sorry. Sorry, Indy’ He takes the glasses off, folds them, tucks them into his shirt pocket and strides round to the other side of the vehicle. ‘Get in. By the way, I’ve the change from your twenty.’
‘My what?’
‘The twenty-pound note you gave me on the train. Remember? Before you did a runner at Reading.’
Ha, ha. I throw my rain jacket into the footwell, feeling stupid. But I had to say something to make the position clear.
‘Why did you give the job to him?’ I asked Michael, without thinking, when I heard last week. I’d strolled into his office hoping to persuade him to give me more work with the wardens, and it came as a shock to have my fears confirmed.
‘D’you know him, then?’ Michael straightened the photograph of his children, which I’d knocked off its precise axis on the desk.
I’d well and truly stitched myself up. ‘I met him once. He struck me as a bit of a loudmouth.’
‘Really? I wouldn’t have said that.’ Michael gave me a particularly beady stare, and I discovered I was kicking the leg of my chair like a petulant schoolgirl.
‘And he’s
a helicopter pilot, not an archaeologist.’
‘Which is an excellent skill to bring to the job. He’s studying aerial survey, among other things, and it’s about time we looked again at Avebury from the air, especially with these new Lidar techniques that can even penetrate woodland. You do realize this placement is part of his MA? We’ve an arrangement with the university.’
‘Oh.’
‘Works out perfectly to give us cover while Morag’s away. He won’t be here full time. There might still be a day here and there for you. But you’ll be pretty busy, anyway, with those television people.’
Will I? Not a word from Daniel Porteus since I emailed him a list of the stills I’d found, and no dates fixed for filming.
‘Tell you what,’ Michael adds, with the gleeful expression of a man handing out sweeties. ‘Why don’t you do a day for us next Monday? You can show Ed round.’
‘Hope the anti-freeze is topped up in this vehicle,’ says Ed, as I climb into the Land Rover: his, not the National Trust’s, and in only marginally better condition. ‘Your expression could ice a small lake. Pardon me for asking, but what was so awful about what we did? You seemed to appreciate it at the time.’
‘I wouldn’t have, if I’d known you were married. You waited to break that snippet of news until afterwards.’
‘Ah.’ He clips on his seatbelt. ‘Only…there didn’t seem to be an appropriate moment to mention it.’
‘You’re doing it again.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Being flip about it.’
‘I’m never flip about my marriage.’ He starts the engine before I’ve closed the passenger door, and we’re spraying gravel on the Manor driveway while I try to get the seatbelt fastened. It’s become twisted somehow inside the reel, and I haven’t managed to straighten it out when we come to a sudden halt.
I turn round to see him looking at me. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Which way? Left, right? You’re supposed to be giving me the guided tour, remember?’