The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  I will wait around,’ I call after her. I could put in some time at the museum…’ Sorting out the Keiller archive for Michael has taken much longer than expected, my days off from the caf usually occupied with filming.

  ‘Not your television thing again.’ Frannie can’t understand why the programme isn’t finished yet. But Ibby is working on several other productions at the same time.

  ‘Not exactly. You know, they’d still like to interview you.’

  ‘I told you, no,’ says Frannie. ‘Don’t like this digging over the past. Get a job on Flog It!, that’s my advice. I’m sure they don’t spend nearly so much time on that. Anyways, you take long as you want in your old archive. Carrie Harper’ll offer me a roast lunch, if I know her.’

  ‘I could cook a roast…’

  ‘No need, Margaret.’ Frannie’s briskly in control, the raspberry hat jammed over her curls. Shame she has me confused again with my mother. ‘Just because we live in the same house doesn’t mean we have to be on top of each other. You do your thingy, I’ll do mine.’

  Having dropped Frannie at the lich-gate, I drive round to the staff car park. Graham’s red Mazda is about to pull out. I draw up beside him and wind my window down.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Trouble at the campsite in the wee small hours. Over-enthusiastic drumming. One of the locals rang and hauled me out of bed first thing this morning to read the riot act. Not that it’ll make any difference. They wait till I’m gone, then start up again.’ He sighs. ‘Thank God I’ve an appointment with a chainsaw tomorrow. This wind’ll bring down a hell of a lot of dead wood.’

  He drives off. In the distance, the sound of drums pulses raggedly from the campsite, as I battle with gusts to open the car door before letting myself into the staff entrance of the building.

  The museum is open, but there are hardly any visitors, and the volunteer manning the desk has his nose buried in the Sunday papers. Upstairs, the attic office is cold and gloomy, but this time there’s a convector heater under the table and I plug it in before settling down with the last unsorted box of Keiller’s correspondence.

  I like offices when no one else is around. In London I often used to tube or bus it into Mannix TV at weekends. I could have finished the same tasks in the flat, on my laptop, but the Australians were always around. Six months on I can hardly remember their names.

  I work my way through the letters, sorting them into piles by date. You can almost smell the late-night brandy on the blue copies, Keiller’s personality pushing through the page. He’s so obviously a charmer, used to getting his own way; also, less attractively, an obsessive and a hypochondriac. An extrovert, by all accounts, yet he’d grown up a lonely boy, both parents dead before he was eighteen, fascinated by witchcraft and the stone circles he found on his solitary walks on the Scottish moors. Loved flying, skiing, fast cars. Opiniated, a ruthless enemy waging war on slipshod archaeology, a tyrant with an explosive temper…

  Somehow it’s nearly one o’clock already. By now Frannie will be comfortably ensconced at the Harpers’ with a glass of sweet sherry in her hand, admiring the Crown Derby dinner service and chattering through the open doorway to Carrie in the kitchen.

  Or will she be sitting silently in the living room with that vacant, preoccupied glaze on her face?

  Of course not. She’s fine. She’s become forgetful, but all old ladies are forgetful. She’s still the same Fran she’s always been…

  Always? Fact is, Fran was nearly sixty when I was born. I’ve only ever known her as an elderly woman. And now the active, vigorous Fran who helped raise me is disappearing too, all her different personas fading: the walker who taught me the names of wild flowers, the china collector who used to raid Devizes junk shops, the Greenham granny who took the bolt-cutters from Margaret to snip the perimeter fence, and held my small hand when we embraced the base.

  Under my fingers, thin blue paper rustles as I lay it on the appropriate pile. May 1939. Who were you then, Frannie, when you typed some of these? The person who had sent the anonymous letter knew.

  anyone with eyes in their head at the Manor knew what was going on the Devil was at work there As I lift out the last set of blue sheets from the box file, one slides from the sheaf, and a name jumps out at me.

  Davey Fergusson.

  Thank God it’s raining. When I dial Martin’s mobile, he answers almost immediately. A background of music and chatter makes it difficult to hear what he’s saying.

  ‘We’re in the pub, petal. Would’ve been mad to go underground today. Hang on…’ The chatter peaks as he turns away from the phone. A male voice is asking him what he wants to eat. ‘…saut, not fries. Sorry, India, I’m back with you.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Nobody for you to get excited about. My friend’s boyfriend.’

  ‘I thought you were staying with someone special this weekend?’

  Martin sounds like his teeth are clenched. ‘That fell through. He had cold feet.’

  Anyway, look, I found something in Keiller’s letters,’ I tell him. ‘My grandfather’s name. I mean, the name of the man Frannie says is my grandfather. But the context is…weird. Keiller’s going on about someone he calls the Brushwood Boy, who might or might not be Davey Fergusson, and there’s someone else mentioned whose name is Paul. It’s kind of confusing, and not clear which of them he’s talking about, but he says: His eyes are lustrous…lots of stuff about the effect on Keiller being electric and bursting into song with an ecstatic expression on his face.’

  ‘Is this by any chance a letter to Piggott?’ asks Martin.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘It’s the way they wrote to each other–homoerotic public-schoolboy banter. Although I sometimes think there was more to it than that: they were genuinely trying to define the mysteries of love in an age that sent you to prison for touching another man’s willy. Keiller had an engineering background, remember, so he wanted to understand the mechanics of attraction, be it male to female or male to male. Poke it, probe it, give it a test run, see if it fell to bits. Look, scan the letter, email it, and I’ll take a closer look.’

  ‘Do you understand this reference to the Brushwood Boy? Was it a song, or something, of the period?’

  The sigh coming down the line almost blows my ear off. ‘Don’t suppose they teach Kipling any longer in schools?’

  ‘I saw the film,’ I say defensively. ‘When I was about five.’

  ‘I don’t mean Jungle Book, idiot. Kipling also wrote a lot of short stories about manly young chaps keeping the Empire going. The Brushwood Boy is about a handsome fellow, frightfully good at cricket, et cetera, who resists the charms of all the ladies swooning over him. Instead he longs for an ideal woman whom he meets in his dreams, by a brushwood fire on a beach. Eventually he meets her for real. And she’s been dreaming the exact same dream–he’s her Brushwood Boy. Their souls have been meeting every night since they were children, and they know each other immediately’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘God, your generation have no bloody souls, do you? Yes, yes, it’s hideously sentimentalized, but it’s about falling in love.’

  So now I’m more confused than ever. Instead of being dazzled by my grandmother, it’s my grandfather Keiller fell for?

  Keiller was gay? I asked Martin. My grandfather was gay? Even though he was with my grandmother?

  Another of his gusty sighs. You don’t have to be gay to sleep with men, apparently. Or be straight to marry. Well, excuse me, I knew that, but Martin seemed to have some other agenda he was pursuing. Finally I heard a woman’s voice in the background saying, For Chrissake give it a rest, Martin, and he suddenly shut up and said we’d talk when he was next in Avebury. That could be weeks away.

  A blast of wind rattles the window. If Davey and Keiller had something going, could Frannie have had any idea? Or maybe there was no affair, unfulfilled yearnings all round. Or maybe none of it was serious, except in an ex
perimental sense. How can you ever be sure what really happened? Even if you were there?

  I pack the box files away, and shrug on my coat, hoping fresh air will clear my head. It’s still raining hard, but that doesn’t matter.

  It does, of course. The wind keeps whipping my hood off, and the hems of my jeans are wicking water up my legs before I’ve even gone a couple of hundred yards. Rain lashes into my face. The stone circle is deserted, everyone with any sense being snug under thatch.

  My grandfather’s ghost seems more elusive than ever. If it was that complicated, maybe I can understand why Fran doesn’t talk about it: time wounds all heels, but you don’t have to go on limping, as my mother used to say. How much would Fran have told her?

  The wind buffets me along Green Street, whipping tiny waves into the puddles and pushing me towards the open countryside. We never talked much, either, Mum and me, and now I wonder how much of that was down to the way we are in my family, or to Margaret not wanting to acknowledge her own wrong choices. Married young and regretted it, walked out on her husband, heading into the sunrise with a bunch of musicians she met while working the nightshift in a motorway service-station caf. Until I came along to cramp her style, Mum would be on the hippie trail through the Far East, or with Angelfeather, achieving her fifteen minutes of fame as a poster girl when she danced naked on the Stonehenge trilithons, out of her head on acid as the sun rose. For years she was Blu-Tacked on student bedsit walls, Midsummer Meg next to Che Guevara and Slowhand Clapton.

  Whatever she felt about her daughter’s behaviour, I never once heard my grandmother utter a word of criticism, even after Midsummer Meg danced right out of my life, and Social Services sent me to live with Frannie in Chippenham. Three, four, five years passed. She’s travelling abroad, said Frannie. In Thailand now. Or Australia. Or Africa. Cards came, signed ‘Mum’, in increasingly shaky writing, on birthdays and at Christmas, parcels too. They always had a Chippenham postmark. All, that is, apart from the last parcel. That came from Goa, where Meg had fallen off the stage and broken her neck. A silver chain with a moonstone pendant, a couple of batik scarves, a silk sari, a copy of The Road Less Travelled, a diary that was near enough blank pages, and her passport. Not much to leave your daughter, and I burned the lot, apart from the pendant, which I gave to Oxfam. Wish I hadn’t now.

  So the last place I saw my mother was…

  Tolemac. The wind rushes with a noise like floodwater through the branches of the little wood, stripping the blossom from the wild cherries. Beads of pearly water cling to the barbed wire of the fence. Still a few threads from my torn jeans wrapped around it. Don’t remember any decision to come here, or any of the walk. The rain’s easing off; when I push back my hood, my hair clings to my wet face. There’s a glow through the trees. Someone has lit a fire.

  Gunmetal cloud, racing above the tossing branches, makes the wood an even gloomier prospect than usual. I should phone Graham, not tackle this myself…Only there probably wouldn’t be any signal on the mobile, even if I hadn’t left it in the car in the staff car park.

  Quickly, so I don’t have time to change my mind, I hop over the fence, careful not to leave my trouser seat there this time.

  The wet leaves on the ground muffle my footsteps. The grey ghost shape of a bender looms between the trees, the polythene rattling and flapping. The fire’s the other side, in a clearing. Whoever lit it has found dry kindling: it’s a good blaze, whipped up by the wind racing through the branches.

  The dog looks up, tilting its head and cocking its ears as if it had been expecting me.

  On the other side of the fire, cool eyes with flames dancing in them watch my approach. Now I remember where I saw those eyes before: at the full-moon ceremony, yes, but before that on the Ridgeway, a cold clear afternoon at Imbolc. A trilby jammed over those corkscrew curls, and a perfect arse, side-stepping down the hillside.

  ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘It’s May Eve. Jump.’

  So I grin at him, and take a flying leap over the fire.

  CHAPTER 27

  1940–1941

  Seize the day, Frances, my dad used to say, when I visited them in Devizes. Enjoy yourself while you can, it’s later than you think.

  Only way to be in wartime. That first winter of the war, seemed like time was at a standstill though everything was changing. Village school became an air-raid shelter. Land girls at Manor Farm; evacuees in the Manor house–kept well out of Mr Keiller’s way, needless to say. The whole country was on the move, people crammed into buses and trains, silent, morose, bored, shunting through stations with no names, through landscapes where the signposts had all been took down. The weather froze, great festoons of ice hanging from the telegraph wires, inches thick, bowing the lines almost to the ground. One of the men who’d raised the Barber Surgeon’s stone died of pneumonia. The sound of trees cracking was like gunshots. Mr Keiller was now a police inspector with the Special Constabulary, and Miss Chapman–Mrs Keiller, I should say, still couldn’t get used to that–went to London to be a nurse. Mr Piggott was in the army, to everyone’s surprise. ‘Thought he was a blinking pacifist,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘I used to tell him he’d be the first to be shot.’ There was next to nothing going on by way of excavation, though Inspector Keiller was first on the scene, measuring the craters and poking round in the mess, when Jerry ditched a bomb on the East Kennet long barrow.

  A room came free in the attic of the Lodge, in the heart of the village. So I give up my place down the road in the draughty old house in Winterbourne Monkton, that I’d found after Mam and Dad went to Devizes, and moved in sharpish before it could be requisitioned for unhappy Londoners. That was the day the thaw started. Spring came. From my window I watched the evacuees learning to maypole dance, somebody’s damn fool idea of making them feel at home. They kept getting the ribbons tangled, and picked fights with the village children for laughing. Eventually they were all moved back home.

  Every morning I caught the early bus to Swindon, to work at the hospital. My war was fought on a sea of paperwork, chitties for this, dockets for that. I did the rounds of the wards, handing out chocolate and cigarettes to the wounded men, and I don’t mind saying that the odd square made its way into my mouth. Thought I’d grown up before the war, that afternoon in the terraced house across from the cemetery, but I never, not until I met those sad boys with their burned skin shiny as cellophane. They and their friends asked me out dancing plenty of times, but it didn’t seem fair to say yes when I knew I wouldn’t so much as hold hands at the end of the evening.

  But Davey–Davey and I had come to an understanding, like.

  By the start of 1941 he was stationed at Wroughton airfield, not far out of Swindon. Wroughton was a maintenance unit, preparing planes from the factories to be sent all over the country: easy work for a good mechanic like Davey. He used to wait for me outside the hospital gates on a Friday or a Saturday night to take me dancing. He seemed happy enough with that. He never kissed me, we never held hands. If he told his pals at the airbase I was his girl, I didn’t mind. It stopped any other fellow trying to cut in while we were dancing.

  You had to go dancing. What else could you do? I’d bring my dance dress with me on the bus and change at the hospital, in the room with bunks that we used when we were on fire watch. One of the other girls would kneel behind me and draw a line of black pencil down the back of each bare leg while I put on my lipstick in the mirror. Then I’d do the same for her.

  Sometimes the air-raid warning went while we were in the hall, siren playing a duet with the trumpets from the dance band, but we’d step on while the wardens tried to shoo us out down to the shelter. ‘If your number’s on the bomb, your number’s up,’ one of the girls at the hospital used to say, fatalistical, and she was right because she died when her dad’s Anderson shelter took a direct hit.

  Davey had a car, an old Baby Austin he’d bought with money Mr Keiller had given him when he left Avebury. He kept it in a lockup garage in town, over by th
e railway yards. One night the garage was bombed, and a piece of masonry went through the tin roof of Davey’s car, so he salvaged a sheet of steel from the railwaymen and welded it onto the top. Wouldn’t have won any races after that, and the welds leaked when it rained, but he could drive me home after the dance.

  Some nights I was on fire-watching duty at the hospital, up on a cold rooftop waiting for the bombers’ drone. Rest of the time, if the bus wasn’t cancelled because of an air raid, I went home to Avebury. As the blacked-out bus lumbered out of the town, its shaded headlamps casting only a faint gleam on the road ahead, sometimes there’d be lights on the hills.

  Davey knew what was up there. Hush-hush, mum’s the word. One of his mates at the airbase had helped build a dummy town on the top of the Downs near Barbury, a burning ghost to fool the bombers and lure them away from Swindon and the railway yards. There were other decoys on the hills around: fake airfields called Q-sites, runways with goose-necked flares that no plane ever took off from.

  Sometimes, when he was driving me home, we parked up under Hackpen Hill, near the White Horse that the grass’d been allowed to grow over, to stop the bombers using him as a landmark. Along the ridge in the moonlight were the chalk ramparts of the old hillfort at Barbury Castle. Funny to think it’d been built thousands of years ago, by men with spears and bows and arrows; now it held an anti-aircraft battery.

  ‘I’m going away,’ said Davey. ‘I’m being transferred to Scotland. Training for air crew.’ It was the spring of ‘41, awful dark in the car, but the moon was up, showing he’d taken off his forage cap and was twisting it in his hands. He never tried to kiss me now. I felt sorry for him; I should have let him be, so he could find another girl who would love him back properly, but he seemed happy enough to be with me.