The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  ‘So what kind of rituals did they go in for when it was first built?’ I ask, reaching for my coat. ‘Sacred mysteries, I suppose. A socking great bank and ditch, to keep the uninitiated out.’

  ‘There’s another way of looking at it,’ says Martin. ‘Maybe the bank and ditch were supposed to keep something in.

  CHAPTER 22

  1938

  Miss Chapman never did apologize. She avoided me from then on, whenever she came to see the excavation work, stalking around with her arm through Mr Keiller’s and her nose in the air. Mr Cromley was keeping his distance too. That irked me. I needed him to explain what all that weird talk in the graveyard had been about.

  They’d found a barrowload of broken bits of stone under one of the cottages they’d taken down, which Mr Young was putting together like a jigsaw puzzle by the gate onto the high street. Mr Cromley was helping him. How did they know which bit went where? Peculiar old thing it looked, too, when it was finished, stuck together with metal rods and seams of cement. It was time to pack up for the day, but Mr Keiller was back from a trip to London, doing the rounds to see what had been going on in his absence, and nobody dared stop work while he was on site. Mr Cromley and Mr Young were still hard at it, and I was trying to finish a drawing of a newly discovered stone hole, further along the circle. I’d lost confidence, and it wouldn’t come right, especially with Mr K breathing down my neck.

  ‘You know, young Donald’s going to be a brilliant archaeologist, eventually,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘He has a questioning mind, and he doesn’t give up.’ Mr Cromley was holding up a piece of stone, turning it this way and that, running his long fingers over the broken edges. ‘He’ll puzzle away till he finds an answer. Loses me, though, when he starts on about theoretical physics and all the other gen he picked up at Cambridge. Too clever for his own good sometimes.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem a happy person,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘Well, losing his father so young–he and his mother having to rely on that uncle of his…’

  ‘He said something about his uncle.’ I remembered what Mr Cromley had told me, about the men and their club. I didn’t believe it for a minute–nobody would do that, would they? Not Mr Keiller, surely.

  I have made studies of various branches of the erotic impulse…

  Mr Keiller stopped smiling. ‘Yes, his uncle’s a strange chap. Has a high-powered post with the Air Ministry, but he’s also said to be one of the foremost ritual magicians in London.’ He laughed at my disbelieving expression. ‘Well, maybe civil-service politics and the occult aren’t such strange bedfellows after all. Can’t say I took to him on either of the occasions I met him. Donald won’t hear a word said against him, of course. Hero-worships the man.’

  Miss Chapman had come through the gate, and stopped to talk to Mr Cromley. My jaw tightened with jealousy. Seemed to me she wasn’t happy unless she had everyone dancing attendance. Her smile was lazy, confident.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss Robinson,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘Doris has probably come to remind me we have dinner guests tonight.’ He started across the grass towards her, then checked himself and turned back, his hand delving in his blazer pocket.

  ‘Almost forgot. I picked up something for you in London, at Mowbray’s.’ He pulled out a square, flattish rosewood box. ‘Go on, open it.’

  Stamped on the inside were the magic words ‘Winsor & Newton’. It held a tray of coloured pans and a ceramic palette, even a tiny dish to hold the water. A slip of paper fluttered to the ground; I picked it up. The names of the paints on it were like an incantation: cerulean blue, cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson, burnt sienna, raw umber, Payne’s grey.

  ‘It’s a field set,’ said Mr Keiller, looking pleased as punch at my delight. ‘All the basics, so you can paint wherever you please. Open the drawer–there’s a sable brush in there and a sponge, and space for your pencils. I’ve had your name put on the lid, too.’ There was a small brass square set into the rosewood, Frances Robinson engraved in sloping script. The watercolour set was far more expensive than anything I could have afforded. I couldn’t speak, my eyes filling with tears. I had never seen anything so beautiful.

  ‘There,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘And now I really have to answer Doris’s call.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I croaked after him.

  Mr Cromley had put down his jigsaw piece of stone and was staring. Miss Chapman leaned towards Mr Keiller as he came up to them, and whispered something in his ear. He looked back towards me, and waved.

  ‘Would you mind awfully, Heartbreaker? Doris thinks she left her sketchbook at the bottom of the Avenue. Could you fetch it? Leave it at the side door. One of the housemaids’ll take it if we’re dressing.’

  The sketchbook was there, by the very last stone in Mr Peak-Garland’s field, and so was a case with a broken pencil in it, a banana skin, a glass with her lipstick on the rim, and a dirty handkerchief. Abandoned, for someone else to pick up, a menial like me. I threw the banana skin and the handkerchief into the hedge, picked up the glass and the drawing things, and set off back uphill.

  Mr Cromley was waiting for me, about halfway up the Avenue, leaning against one of the tall stones that Mr Keiller had put back up when he began work at Avebury. The light was fading over Waden Hill in the west. A wind shivered the grasses.

  He didn’t say anything, for once, only linked his arm in mine. We walked up the slope together. There’s a trick of the land, where Mr Peak-Garland’s field levels out: the Avenue twists, and the henge comes into view all of a sudden. It never fails to take me with a shock, and I always draw breath, like I’ve never seen it before, though I’ve come up that slope a thousand and one times. Mr Cromley’s arm tightened and drew me against him.

  ‘Magic,’ he said. ‘The circle builders wanted to hide it until the very last moment.’ Over a dip in the bank we could see the new stones Mr Keiller had put up that summer, and beyond them the backs of the cottages and the church tower poking through the trees. ‘But look how the terrain rises again, concealing what takes place in the inner circles. You think you’ve arrived, but there’s still a way before you’re admitted to the sanctum.’ His breath was warm on the side of my face. We crossed the road and came into the circle.

  As we passed between the two big entrance stones, I dropped Miss Chapman’s sketchbook and bent to pick it up. Mr Cromley’s hand touched my back and his fingers danced along my spine. ‘I’ll take those to the Manor for you,’ he said. ‘I might owe you an apology. For some…rather wild things I said last time we talked.’

  ‘No apology necessary.’

  ‘Shall we stroll through the stones?’ His grey eyes took the clothes off me, and I didn’t care one bit.

  There was a three-quarter moon rising already like a screaming face. We skirted the backs of the cottages, in the wild part of the circle the dig hadn’t yet reached. Only a few tall stones still stood there, as they had for five thousand years. It was the heart of the circle, Mr Keiller had said, where a tall obelisk had towered above everything else. A yellow lamp shone in Mam’s kitchen window; I could see her moving between refrigerator and table, setting out plates for the guests, lifting lace doilies to unveil the supper dishes. Mr Cromley’s hand was fire on my arm. A flock of sheep glimmered in the last of the light. Bats skimmed over us on their way to the ditches.

  ‘Your uncle,’ I said. ‘Is he really a magician?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Cromley ‘He’s taught me a lot about understanding the laws of the universe. We work with energy, like a physicist. Some people would call those powers gods or demons, but I prefer to think of them as…natural forces. If you understand them, you can manipulate them, and bend the cosmos. What you will shall be.’

  A shiver ran through me. He made it sound so logical, like anybody might do it.

  ‘Have you heard of the Ordo Templi Orientalis?’ he went on. ‘Never mind. There’ve been some remarkable experiments…the results not so far removed from what physicists themselve
s have begun to consider. At Magdalen College in 1933, I met a remarkable man, Erwin Schrdinger, with an interest in Vedanta, a Hindu philosophy. He didn’t last long there. The university couldn’t swallow him living with two women at once. His theories, though–extraordinary. He believes scientists influence the results of their experiments simply by acting as observers. What you will shall be.’

  ‘Show me,’ I said. ‘I won’t believe it else.’

  ‘Are you sure you want me to?’ His cool grey eyes looked into mine to dig out the truth.

  ‘Yes.’ My arms were rippling with goose-bumps and there was electricity at the root of every hair on my head.

  He led me through the field behind the cottages, to the edge of the circle, where a single stone lay fallen among the bushes under the shade of deep-skirted trees. It was full dark under there, and the screaming moon peeked at us through the branches.

  ‘Lie on the stone.’ Mr Cromley took off his green Morven Institute blazer, and spread it carefully across the sarsen. I climbed onto the stone, afraid to make myself so vulnerable, so instead of lying I sat with my knees drawn up again, like I had on the tomb in Yatesbury churchyard. Mr Cromley sat cross-legged opposite me at the lower end of the fallen stone. His white shirt glowed faintly in the darkness. ‘You thirsty, Heartbreaker?’ He pulled a hip flask out of his back pocket and unscrewed the top. ‘Only a mouthful, it’ll warm you up.’

  He leaned towards me, and I saw the light of the moon reflected in his eyes. I took a deep swallow, for courage, anticipating the fire of whisky or brandy to run down my gullet, but whatever Mr Cromley kept in his flask was sweet and cold, a sword of ice through my warm core. It matched the white moon in his eyes. I took off my cardigan and folded it for a pillow, feeling in its pocket the comforting shape of the rosewood watercolour set. The thought of who had given it to me made me warm. I lay back, feeling unexpectedly dreamy under the rustling trees.

  Mr Cromley had slipped off the stone without me noticing.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. His movements seemed slowed. He was circling the stone, sprinkling droplets from the flask at each quarter rotation, saying something so quiet I couldn’t catch it, a rhythmic kind of mutter that was like soft fingernails scratching gently inside my head.

  ‘I’ve opened a circle,’ he said, coming back to sit on the stone by my feet, and leaning over me, ‘and called elemental energies into it. Air, Fire, Water, Earth. Can you feel them? Wind, heat, tides and gravity.’ Seemed to me I felt a breeze rippling the leaves and running over my skin, a warmth spreading through my body again, the flow of my blood, the weight of my body holding me down on the stone.

  ‘This is not a trick,’ he said again. ‘This is how it feels to enter the vortex, at its shallowest rim. I love this time for working magic: neither full day nor dark night. We’re between worlds, Heartbreaker.’ His fingers moved over my face. ‘Can you feel it? It’s like dipping your toes into the edge of the sea, letting the shallowest of waves break over them, feeling the suck of the water as it recedes again, while your feet sink into wet, sliding sand…’

  His voice was like slow, soft piano music, the fingers of one hand stroking my cheeks and lips, the other cradling the back of my head and kneading the bones of my skull. He was leaning right over me now, and I couldn’t see the moon in his eyes any longer, but I could feel his lips brushing gently over my skin, the lightest of pressures. He let his torso sink against mine, hardly touching me, his body almost no heavier than his breath on me. All my nerves were alive, my skin trying to reach up to mould itself to his through our clothes. I opened my eyes–when had I shut them?–and saw his were closed above me, the eyelids fluttering, his mouth slightly open, his face concentrated and ecstatic, like pictures of saints when they go to their martyrdom.

  ‘Sssh,’ he whispered. ‘I know what you’re thinking, now, Heartbreaker, when we breathe together like this…You want this to go on for ever, and it will, so long as we’re in the vortex, but I don’t want to take you all the way in. It’d be too much for you yet.’

  The chill of evening air slipped between us as he lifted himself off the stone. Drowsily I watched him moving round it, whispering again to the four quarters. I tipped my head back and looked upwards, with a deep sense of peace. The moon lifted itself above the branches. It was no longer screaming: now it smiled.

  Mr Cromley came back and sat on the stone. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Marvellous,’ I said. ‘What did you do to me?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You did it all yourself. Remember, what you will shall be.’

  He helped me sit upright. I’d expected to feel woozy, but I was amazingly clear-headed. I could’ve done anything. Miss Chapman? She thought she was something, but if she treated me like a slut again…

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Mr Cromley. ‘You’ve only had a taster.’

  ‘Did your uncle teach you that?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s only basic technique. If we went further…’

  ‘Is this why you came to Avebury?’

  He shook his head. ‘An experienced ritualist can act anywhere. It gives me a thrill, that’s all, to use the energies of once-sacred places: they can be very powerful. I’m sure there’s something here, something the circle-builders left behind. Maybe something they were afraid to take with them. Next time…’ But then he shook his head. ‘Perhaps not. You’re very young.’

  ‘You told me that back then, I’d have been an old married woman by now.’

  He laughed. ‘What I meant was that next time we’d be going further in all sorts of ways. It’s customary to…you know. Have sex. It feeds the energies in the circle.’

  Silence hung between us. There was a pulse beating between my legs. I took his hand. ‘Feel that.’

  His fingers slid over the silky surface of my knickers. He leaned forward and whispered in my ear, ‘Maybe I could persuade Alec to be there as well. He has a keen interest in ritual magic’

  Seemed to me the night was full of whispers as he moved down the length of the stone.

  CHAPTER 23

  Steve’s eyes, deep black holes containing the immensity of all space, are haunting my sleep again. I mention it casually to John while he works on my feet.

  ‘I keep telling you,’ he says, ‘belief’s a powerful thing. Creates crop circles, starts wars.’ He pulls on my toes, one by one, rotating them in their sockets. ‘Way I see it, all of you in the helicopter that afternoon were in the space between worlds. One of you died in the vortex, the rest came out. Whether that’s mysticism or psychology, I don’t give a flick. Nobody’s unchanged after an experience like that.’

  As I leave his cottage, he presses something into my hand. A purple crystal.

  ‘What’s this for?’

  Amethyst. Helps you sleep. Also very powerful protection, if you think you’re under psychic attack.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. Who’d be attacking me?’ I try for a light, sceptical laugh.

  ‘You tell me.’

  Utter, utter crap.

  It comes as a shock to find a letter at home, forwarded from London. It’s from Steve’s father, accusing me of putting the crash footage on YouTube.

  I storm down to Big Avebury to buy a stamp and post my reply, an indignant rebuttal pointing out that as I no longer work for Mannix TV I don’t have access to their video. The post office is already shut for the day.

  I sit on a bench in the churchyard to calm down. It’s a balmy evening, warm for late April. A lawn mower buzzes from one of the gardens off the high street, and the scent of cut grass fills the air. A man on the opposite side of the road is trying to unload a slab of granite worktop from the back of a Range Rover, with the help of a woman in True Religion jeans moaning that it’s too heavy, he’ll have to wait until Joshua turns up from London at the weekend. The stereo is blasting Robert Miles’s Dreamland across the street. I’ve never seen either of them before. Avebury is becoming a village of second-homers, with stainless-steel cooker hoo
ds and fridges with water-coolers. I wonder if this couple has yet experienced an Avebury Solstice, and if it will chase them back to London in a hurry.

  The letter to Steve’s father is still in my hand. Perhaps I shouldn’t send it or, at least, wait a day and write something more considered. Folding it and tucking it into my pocket, my fingers encounter a smooth, cool shape: John’s piece of amethyst. It’s a deep purple with layers of white streaks folded into it. Margaret used to tuck similar stones under our pillows in the van. Keir was fascinated by Mum’s crystals and used to squat on the floor for hours, lining them up, rearranging them.

  As usual, the thought of Keir makes the black crystal, the shiny lump of onyx in my head, twist for the light. Fathers and sons…By an enormous effort, I shove it back where it should stay, in the darkest corner, and reach for one of the brighter memory crystals instead, one that shows Keir and me racketing around the Downs that summer of 1989. We roamed all over by ourselves. In Bristol you had to tell Mum where and with whom and what time you’d be back, and mostly she said no anyway, so this was paradise.

  ‘You can go anywhere you like,’ she said, tidying away Keir’s sleeping-bag. He’d left it in a heap on the floor of the van in Tolemac. ‘But stay together. And watch out for the cars when you cross the road.’ No problem–we were used to traffic. And don’t go in the church,’ she added, as an afterthought. ‘That’s a bad place for pagans.’

  So that was one of the first places we went.

  * * *

  Going into the church was Keir’s idea. Dare you.

  I’m not afraid.