The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  ‘Indy? That you?’

  I swing round, then realize the voice is coming from ahead. A shadowy, long-legged figure is clambering over the fence from Green Street, close to Martin’s cottage.

  ‘Ed!’ I shout. ‘Over here!’ My knees seem to be folding under me, and I’m shaking so much the stars are juddering.

  A light snaps on in one of the houses that back onto the circle, a sash window rattles. Someone yells, ‘For Christ’s sake, what the hell is going on?’ A rich, well-educated voice, like Michael’s only much fruitier. ‘We’ve had virtually a whole fucking week of this shit–go back to the campsite so some of us can sleep or I’ll call the police.’

  But Ed’s already reached me, his arm coming under mine to support me.

  ‘How did you get here so fast?’ I ask.

  Everything happening in moments now, pictures in crystal. I must be feverish, because the sky is still pulsing with that strange light.

  ‘Is that real?’ I ask Ed, leaning heavily on him as he swings open the gate to the lane.

  ‘Don’t see it often. Noctilucent cloud. Summer phenomenon, to do with the sun’s rays below the horizon illuminating ice crystals in high cirrus. Even more amazing from the air–rippling right across the northern horizon while I was flying home. Magic’

  It all washes over me. I start gabbling about Bryn, under the stone, losing blood.

  Get to the hospital as fast as you can, Indy

  ‘Go,’ says Ed, in Martin’s cottage, the phone at his ear. ‘If you’re sure you’re OK to drive? The police can come and find you at the hospital. I’ll deal with the ambulance–when I raise a signal.’

  ‘Upstairs is better.’ Still shaking, I pull his fleece on over my cardigan. ‘Could you see us? When you flew over? Where did you land the helicopter?’

  ‘At Yatesbury, of course.’ Ed stops halfway up the stairs. ‘Why do you keep going on about the helicopter?’

  ‘I must have blacked out, then.’

  He shakes his head, punching 999 into the phone again. ‘Just go–thank Christ. Ambulance, please, and police–might be an idea to send a fire crew as well…’

  The car keys are still on the top of the chest, next to my handbag. I snatch them up and run out of the cottage.

  Don’t let me be too late.

  Driving out of the stone circle, my gut tells me I already am. Bad luck, Indy, widdershins. Maybe it happened hours ago. The moonless countryside is alive with light when it shouldn’t be. The pale lichens on the huge diamond-shaped Swindon Stone are glimmering under the weird electric-blue ripples of cloud. Feel like I’m driving along one of John’s spirit paths, hearing the blackbird’s song again, afraid of what my skin is telling me now, wondering if I would recognize the gleam of her spirit as it passed me in the night on its way home.

  Everything so huge and complicated, it won’t go into words.

  At the hospital, the car park is deserted apart from John’s pickup. Almost drowned in the glare of light from the glass doors, a small red cinder glows: the tip of a roll-up cigarette.

  ‘Sorry, Indy,’ says John. He catches sight of my face, as I slow from a breathless run. ‘No, don’t panic’ He stands up, drops his rollie and wraps me in a hug. ‘It’s OK. I meant sorry for calling you back unnecessarily. She’s fine. They stopped the bleeding: it was a fibroid, a big one, but not cancerous. She came through the op and she’s going to be all right.’

  PART EIGHT

  Sunwise

  ‘Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards.’

  Soren Kierkegaard

  CHAPTER 58

  Lammas, 2006

  ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I said. ‘Harry would do it better.’

  ‘Harry has bronchitis. I could hire another cameraman, but you’ve worked on this shoot the whole way through and you know what it’s about and you know my style. So…’

  ‘Are you going to be there?’

  ‘Not in the helicopter, no. I’m going to be on the ground, filming with the other camera. It’ll be you and Ed on your own in the air. I’ll pay you…’

  I move the phone away from my head so she won’t hear, and take a long swallow of red wine. It tastes vile. They’re raising the stone again early next week, pouring concrete round the base this time. No more accidents. No more walking ancestors. The weather forecast’s good, and Ibby wants aerial shots.

  ‘So, will you do it?’

  ‘Sorry, Ibby. I don’t feel up to it.’

  A sigh: Ibby calculating whether it was worth trying to push it any further. She decided not. ‘Fine, India. I understand.’

  A lot of people having to do a lot of understanding at the moment.

  There are not many idle moments in the caf now the holiday season has started. When Ed comes in, the queue stretches almost to the door, and Corey and I are red in the face and sharp with one another. He waves and backs out.

  Half an hour later things have calmed down, and when Ed reappears, Corey says, ‘Take your break now, while it’s quiet.’

  I pick up a couple of bottles of elderflower press and join him at one of the wooden tables outside. The day is sticky hot, under a sun like an over-boiled egg. The duckpond is shrunken, the purple flags flagging, a marshy stink coming off a layer of green scum over the surface. Waitress genes make me pile the dirty crockery onto a tray and take it back to the kitchen before I sit down.

  ‘So what couldn’t wait?’ I ask, unscrewing the bottle top, and taking a mouthful.

  ‘Ibby said you won’t do the aerial filming.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Care to change your mind?’

  ‘Not really.’

  He sighs. People are doing a lot of sighing over me lately. ‘You’re depressed.’

  ‘That’s your expert opinion, is it? Or are you about to suggest I see a psychotherapist?’

  ‘I value my tender parts too much.’ Ed smiles hopefully. I glare back. ‘And it wasn’t an opinion, it was more a question.’

  ‘Well, maybe I am,’ I concede. ‘Everything is so unresolved.’

  A corrosive silence falls.

  Drinking my elderflower, moodily staring at the thick green stew of the duckpond, I take a tally of unfinished business. Item one, Bryn, in hospital, outrageously lucky not to have lost his foot–Ed said the paramedics discussed amputating it on the spot, but they managed to lever up the stone and slide him out, though the mashed bones will leave him limping for the rest of his life. He’s charged with attempted murder–not mine, as it happens, I only rate an assault charge, but for an attack on Fergus’s mother that left her with three broken ribs, a cracked pelvis and a fractured skull. Item two, the inquest on last year’s crash–opened day before yesterday, adjourned for another fortnight. Item three, my relationship with Ed–where the hell’s that going? He and his wife may have separated, but he’s still married to her, and still in his smelly caravan. Item four, my nonexistent career–nothing on the horizon, unless I look for a course in Advanced Cappuccino-frothing. Added to all of that, I don’t understand what happened in the stone circle: Ed’s theory being that adrenalin can do weird things to your head, and John’s being something along the lines of advanced chaos magic.

  And, finally, Frannie. Out of hospital, but in a convalescent home, for the time being. Unexpectedly loving it, revelling in the attention.

  ‘So?’ Ed delicately interrupts my self-absorption.

  ‘So…maybe I’m entitled to feel…like I’m in a murky, overgrown duckpond. Waterlogged. Weedy. Earthbound.’

  ‘Duckpond, in fact, half empty,’ suggests Ed, helpfully.

  ‘Not a duck in sight.’

  ‘Fuck it, you’re not depressed,’ he says. ‘You’re shit scared of being in that helicopter again.’

  So, my legs are dangling. My non-existent testicles are dangling. My bum, perched on the edge of the open helicopter door, has gone entirely numb. Below me is a good six or seven hundred feet of nothing. Below that is hard Wiltshire chalk,
with a skimpy dressing of barley. The helicopter’s shadow races across it, a tiny black insect dwarfed by the bigger shadows of the clouds.

  ‘OK?’ says Ed’s voice in the headphones.

  ‘OK.’ I don’t mean it. I’m not OK at all. But there is a dim chance that if I say it, I might start to believe it. This time, thank God and Ibby’s budgeting, I’m in the hire company’s strongest harness, the camera attached to its most solid mount, my feet on its broadest footrest.

  ‘I could have done this on my own, you know,’ says Ed. ‘Fixed a remote controlled mini-DVC to the outside, flown the chopper and taken the pictures myself. You’re redundant, really, Robinson.’

  ‘And they’d be crap pictures.’

  He turns his head and gives me a grin. ‘What makes you so sure yours will be any better?’

  ‘Please keep your eyes on the instrument panel’

  ‘You’re enjoying this really.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘And you look delicious trussed up in that bondage rig.’

  The straps tighten across my body as we bank over the Kennet and Avon canal and turn back northwards, the helicopter’s snub nose lifting to take us over the Downs.

  ‘Know what that is down there?’ says Ed. ‘Easton Down. D’you suppose the nighthawks ever found their crash site?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  In spite of my misgivings, the flight is exhilarating, on an afternoon perfect for aerial filming. The helicopter is flying over dusty August fields, Silbury wobbling in the heat haze like a greeny-gold blancmange. Ibby, wielding the other camera, will be darting round the trussed stone, the students hauling on the ropes, timing it for the helicopter to arrive as they lever it finally upright. The invited audience of local dignitaries includes Druids, Wiccans, and anyone connected with the village in the thirties.

  ‘Want me to take her down lower when we fly along the Avenue?’ says Ed in my headphones. ‘For a better shot?’

  ‘No,’ I say. I don’t feel ready for that yet. ‘I like this helicopter better, you know.’

  ‘Better?’

  ‘It’s dinkier. And a lot less sinister-looking than that big black bugger you flew the racing people home in–what did you call it? The R44?’

  ‘This is the R44.’

  ‘But it’s not black.’

  ‘Never been black.’

  ‘It looked black, that night.’

  Ed banks the helicopter into a turn across the main road. ‘Why do I have the feeling this conversation is at cross purposes?’ he says. ‘Far as I know, you’d never set eyes on the R44 until I strapped you into it half an hour ago.’

  ‘You flew over the circle that night. Really low. With the racing people.’

  There’s a long, puzzled silence. The tall stones of the Avenue flick past below.

  ‘I didn’t,’ says Ed, eventually.

  ‘Well, it looked low to me.’

  ‘I mean I didn’t take her over the circle. I’ve told you. Avebury is a PAZ–Permanent Avoidance Zone–unless you clear over-flying it for a special project like the filming today. That was a joke, about flying over the cottage. I wouldn’t have risked being caught buzzing the circle late at night with the inquest coming up.’

  ‘Somebody flew over. I…heard it. Saw it. The downdraught was what dislodged the stone…’ My voice trails off into the hiss and crackle of Ed’s scepticism over the headphones.

  ‘Is this why you kept asking where I’d landed that night?’ Ed banks the helicopter across the A4. ‘I’m not going to say you dreamed a helicopter, Indy, but it doesn’t sound likely, so late. Might have been the military, I suppose, on a night-flying exercise. But definitely, most definitely, not me. Now–I am going in low when we clear the brow of the hill. You OK with that? It’ll give you much better pictures.’

  Before I have time to react, the helicopter is swooping down towards the southern rim of the circle. Ed banks the craft in a slow turn westwards, over the stones Keiller re-erected in 1938, then north towards the high street and the church tower poking through the trees. Avebury is laid out beneath us: museum, dovecote, duckpond, caf, another arc of reconstructed stones, then we’re turning again, over the Swindon Stone and into the bare north-eastern quadrant, dotted with grubby sheep. We cross Green Street almost at treetop level. Going sunwise. Round, and round again.

  Without having to think, I’m adjusting the focus, though we’re still too high on the second pass to make out individuals in the crowd gathered around the stone, but I know she’s there. She didn’t need much persuasion, after all. We come round again, sunwise, lower, and I can pick her out this time, standing a little apart from the rest with John and Martin flanking her.

  ‘Your grandmother’s waving,’ says Ed.

  Completely wrecking the shot, of course. Ibby, with a camera on her shoulder, is making her way across to tell her off about it, gently, since this is her first outing from the convalescent home. Frannie’s dressed in her best, the raspberry hat topping a white blouse and custard yellow skirt. From above she looks like a sherry trifle.

  The note of the rotors changes, and I can feel myself tightening up in panic, but when I whip round to see what’s happening at the controls, Ed’s leaning back, relaxed, his hand light on the stick, feet easy on the pedals. We come round the circle again, the camera catching a flare from the late-afternoon sun over the beech trees. The archaeology students are putting tension on the ropes that truss the stone–modern technology’s toughest, this time, no more honeysuckle–heaving it upright. I feel something tighten, then release in me. Frannie, bless her, waves again. Weather on Planet Fran occasionally misty, but sun breaking through. She hasn’t once talked about the attack, and I’m inclined to think she genuinely doesn’t remember: that, and the complicating factor of the operation, being the reason she doesn’t figure in the charges against Bryn. The helicopter is turning west again, a slow, circular unwinding, round and round until everything is done. Or undone.

  It will be all right, won’t it? The inquest, my non-existent career, my stuttering relationship…I turn off the camera, and look back, and Frannie’s still waving.

  In the end, it’ll be all right. People find ways through. Or round. Or something. So long as they keep going sunwise.

  Ed lands the helicopter on the cricket pitch, which won’t please Outraged of Avebury He lets the rotors settle, then climbs out to undo my harness.

  ‘Not so bad, was it?’ he says. ‘Or am I going to have to make you pay a valeting charge?’

  ‘Piece of piss,’ I say.

  ‘Yep, that’s what I was afraid of.’

  Martin’s approaching over the grass. Ed releases the final strap, and I slide under the camera mount and onto terra firma.

  ‘So, did my grandmother agree to be interviewed?’

  Martin shakes his head. ‘Not even after an afternoon of my boyish charm.’

  ‘I think she might be immune to boyish charm. Though she has taken, unaccountably, to Ed.’ Under the trees at the edge of the field, a billow of yellow catches my eye. ‘She’s here?’

  ‘Sitting on the bench. She’s hoping for a helicopter ride, I think. Wanted me to escort her along the path to watch you land.’

  Ed laughs. ‘Your gran’s outrageous.’ He unclips the camera from the mount and hands it to me, glancing at his watch. ‘Tell her sorry, not today, I promised to have the chopper back by five. I’ll fix a trip next week, if she feels up to it. See you in the pub in an hour?’

  Martin and I walk across the grass. He starts to say something as we reach the trees, but the noise of the rotors drowns it, the down-draught lashing the heavy green foliage above the bench where Frannie’s sitting.

  ‘What did you say?’ I have to yell to make myself heard.

  ‘Your grandmother keeps asking me about the badger sett on Windmill Hill. Said she saw me on the telly talking about it.’

  ‘What have you told her?’

  ‘That we have to apply for a licence to dig, not to me
ntion funding, and it’s unlikely we’d have either in place until next year or the year after, at the very earliest.’

  ‘I don’t know why she’s so het up about it.’

  ‘Het up? She seemed curious, that was all. Said something about preferring me to dig there than that devil, by which I assume she means Keiller.’

  I glance towards the bench. Frannie waves, a custard yellow blur under the tossing leaves.

  ‘I have to rejoin the crew,’ says Martin. ‘I’ll leave the pair of you to it.’

  He disappears through the gate, and I sit down next to Frannie on the bench, as the helicopter rises above the cricket pitch.

  She grins at me, the old Frannie peeping through the mask of wrinkles. We sit for a while, not saying anything, watching the helicopter grow smaller and smaller in the sky as it banks away towards Yatesbury. Then she turns to me as the noise of the rotors finally fades to nothing.

  ‘Met Davey on this field. 1937. I were just turned fifteen.’

  ‘He wasn’t my grandfather, was he?’ I say.

  She shakes her head. There’s a long silence. Finally she says, ‘Might be time for me to tell you about him.’

  CHAPTER 59

  January 1945

  Life rolls on, dun’t it? Either you get on with it or you fall to bits, and I could hear our mam in heaven, whispering to stiffen the spine, Frances. There was bad things happening every day in the war; didn’t seem right to dwell on what had happened or what might have been.

  In the last winter of the war, a cottage came free and I moved back to Avebury for a while, with Dad. There was no more digging in the circle, no more stones put up. Come the beginning of 1943, Mr Keiller had sold all the land he owned at Avebury to the National Trust, 950 acres, bar the Manor, twelve thousand pounds for the lot. Wasn’t much of a return for all the money he’d spent digging. He claimed he’d been planning it since the war started, but something had knocked the heart out of him. Maybe it was financial worries, maybe it was Mrs Keiller carrying on in London, but I thought I knew better. He went on living in the Manor, and the Scottish soldiers and airmen from the convalescent home still came for tea. The tall Glasgow boy with the tin foot had been given a desk job at Lyneham, and he appeared at the Manor whenever he could, waiting to be allowed back to operations with his squadron up north.