The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ I ask, as he sets two whiskies on the table. ‘If that question isn’t off-limits.’

  ‘It is, actually’ Martin’s voice is unexpectedly sharp.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’

  ‘No, no.’ He sits down heavily. ‘I should be saying sorry. It’s a sore point at the moment. Tell me about the men in your life instead. I couldn’t help noticing there seemed to be something between you and that bloke from the National Trust.’

  ‘What, Michael? My best Outraged-of-Avebury ‘I like older men, but he’s old enough to…’

  ‘Don’t come the innocent with me, flower. You’re far too young to pull it off.’ Martin raises his whisky glass. ‘Here’s to bad boys who break our hearts. No, I mean the other one. The Midnight Cowboy. Mr Stroke My Stubble in his fancy boots. My, don’t you blush easily?’

  ‘Oh, him. Well, there is a history. Past tense.’

  ‘Sorry, now I’m being appallingly nosy. You don’t have to tell me anything.’

  ‘No.’ The level in my whisky glass is sinking unnervingly fast. ‘Well, yes. Thing is, he’s married. Works here, goes home every weekend. Anyway, it was a one-off mistake. I’m not stupid enough to think he’s going to leave her.’

  ‘Oh, petal, they never do. Believe me, been there, done that. You’re better off without him. Good God, was that a pair of antlers going past the window?’

  ‘It’ll be Trevor.’

  Outside, pagans have started to assemble: some thin girls in jeans sharing a spliff with an even skinnier bloke with dreads; three or four middle-aged Druid couples in white robes; a group of wary-eyed young men kitted up in heavy fleece jackets against the biting wind. There are about twenty in all. A few I’ve met through John: Beech Tear and Wind Rose, always stalwarts on such occasions, Moon Daughter, again, sitting by herself, and a rather scary woman who lives at the other end of Trusloe, with long white hair and piercing blue eyes.

  As this is a Wiccan occasion, Trevor, a former estate agent and now a full-time practitioner of Gardnerian witchcraft, is presiding.

  ‘I was expecting something…well, a bit more sinister,’ murmurs Martin. ‘He looks like Eric Morecambe. Jolly with glasses.’

  ‘Eric Morecambe was before my time, but I don’t imagine he had waist-length hair.’

  ‘And the–er–reindeer on the top of his staff. I’m sure it started life as a Christmas-tree ornament.’

  ‘Pagans believe in recycling. Live lightly on the earth is one of the Wiccan tenets.’

  The outfit changes with the season, but tonight Trevor’s resplendent in furry moon boots, velveteen dressing-gown, and a Bob-the-Builder hat, sprayed silver, to which he has Superglued a pair of antlers, thus representing the Horned God. His consort, Michelle, who shares his Georgian house in Marlborough, is either Diana or Hecate: John did explain Wicca to me once but I wasn’t paying attention. She’s in a full-length dark blue cloak, with the hood thrown back, her bobbed hair dressed with a diaphanous blue scarf sewn with silver stars and moons. Rumour has it she’s someone important in marketing at Asda’s head office.

  Trevor raps his staff on the ground. ‘Think we ought to get going in a minute or two, people. Drink up and, if you wouldn’t mind, save the bar staff a job on a cold night, take your glasses back into the pub.’ He turns to Martin and me. ‘Haven’t seen you two before, have I? Merry meet. Oh, sorry, it’s India, isn’t it? You look different somehow’

  ‘I was blonde last time.’ I introduce Martin. Trevor’s delighted: he’s addicted to Time Team. Scratch a pagan and you find an amateur archaeologist–and sometimes vice versa. I wander off and leave Trevor explaining why, in his opinion, dowsing can be as reliable as geophysics in revealing archaeology under the soil. Martin has a polite but strained expression on his face. Lady pagans are popping into the pub for a last pee, while the gentlemen head into the darkness to water Mother Earth; coats are being buttoned against the chill, hats pulled down over ears, bottles of mead, the midnight tipple of choice for your average Wiccan, already stashed in backpacks.

  I sit down on one of the benches, remembering drums at dawn, the eastern sky flushing gold, Margaret dancing, a land of lost content. Until I turned eight, this was a way of life. Now all I feel is cold and bored and faintly resentful. If I were a pagan still, I’d be a Hedgewitch, like Moon Daughter: do-it-yourself rituals alone under a starry sky.

  The moon pops out like a white traffic light, and Trevor leads his ragged troop across the main road and through the gate onto the grass. Someone flashes a torch; someone else stumbles with a muffled shit. I stir reluctantly from the bench and attach myself to the end of the procession. Moon Daughter holds open the gate to the stones, with a shy smile. Moonlight pouring down over the circle reveals Trevor and Martin a long way ahead, already passing through the massive entrance stones, deep in conversation. Trevor breaks off to pat the Devil’s Chair as if he’s reassuring an old friend–all for the best in the best of all possible worlds–then he and Martin are hidden in the shadow of the beeches. A ewe calls to its lamb, the gate clicks again, the moon flicks behind a cloud and disappears.

  And the skin over my shoulder blades is prickling because, although I was the last to leave the pub, there is someone behind me.

  Steve.

  Don’t be silly. I know it isn’t Steve. Steve is dead and the dead don’t come back–at least, not to people like me. I turn my head, catching no more than a glimpse of someone disappearing between the stones of the inner circle. The breeze rattles the beech branches. High overhead, winking lights and the distant rumble of a plane returning to Lyneham.

  Suddenly Moon Daughter, too, seems a long way ahead in the darkness, an indistinct shape passing the Devil’s Chair.

  That is Moon Daughter, isn’t it?

  The far-off note of the plane’s engine changes as I run to catch her up. The winking lights are losing height, wheeling, dropping steeply downwards, coming closer. And then the throbbing starts, a great white beam stabs down out of the sky, my heartbeat ratchets up, I can hardly catch my breath–

  Not a plane at all. A helicopter.

  There it is, over Waden Hill, racing towards me, following the path of the stones in the Avenue, its white searchlight fingering the contours of the muddy fields. I shrink back against the Devil’s Chair, convinced against all sense it’s hunting for me. But then comes the roar of a car engine, screaming into a gear change as it shoots round the bend. Headlights blaze across the grass as it takes the road through the circle. The helicopter sweeps overhead, trying to pin the car with its searchlight. For a moment it catches it, a silvery hatchback with four baseball-capped heads silhouetted inside, and then the car skids across the curve by the Red Lion, narrowly missing the car-park wall, and disappears in the direction of Swindon, the helicopter in pursuit.

  ‘Bloody pigs,’ says Moon Daughter, child of the rebellious sixties, waiting for me and holding the gate by the bank open. ‘Hope they get away.’

  Fifteen seconds earlier, if she hadn’t waited for me, she’d have been crossing the road as the silver car raced round the corner.

  If there was anyone behind me, they’ve gone. I let the gate shut, click, and follow Moon Daughter in the wake of Trevor’s ritual procession, sunwise, round the perimeter of Avebury.

  It’s an involved route: past the social centre, through the visitors’ car park, along the side of the village cricket pitch, across the high street, then through the tall wrought-iron gates onto the Manor driveway. Eventually we end up at the main road again, at the northern entrance to the circle. Trevor recommends the agile enter by crawling under the side of the Swindon Stone. The megalith is diamond-shaped, and one corner juts to meet the fence, leaving a gap just big enough for–

  Martin emerges with mud on his knees and elbows, and a happy grin.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d squeeze through that,’ I tell him.

  ‘I’m a caver. You learn Houdini wriggles for tight spots. Your turn,
I think. Go back and come through the proper way.’

  ‘Not on your nelly.’ I’m not risking another pair of jeans.

  Trevor leads us to the Adam and Eve stones, all that remains of the three-sided Cove at the heart of the northern inner circle. He stretches out his arms, beaming. Obediently we form a circle, my left hand clasping Martin’s hairy paw, my right in the clammy grip of one of the stick-thin girls, who’s giggling a lot.

  ‘Merry meet!’ Trevor casts an approving eye round his enlarged coven. ‘No, hang on a minute–first full moon since the equinox, we should balance the circle. Can we rearrange ourselves so we go boy, girl, boy, girl?’ There’s some shuffling and I end up with a white-robed, spike-haired Druid on my right.

  ‘Merry meet!’ calls Trevor again.

  ‘Merry meet,’ we all chorus obediently. Two deep voices are coming from behind us: tallish lads wearing sheepskin caps with earflaps, standing self-consciously apart. Martin raises his eyebrows enquiringly.

  ‘Northern tradition,’ I whisper. ‘Odin, Valhalla, all that manly stuff. Big in Yorkshire. They think it’s cissy to hold hands in a circle.’

  Trevor invokes the elemental spirits: East, South, West and North; Air, Fire, Water and Earth. He does it in a quiet, thoughtful way that I much prefer to the American Druid’s bluster on the day of the museum protest. With each invocation we drop hands and spin to face in the correct direction. At the end Trevor’s partner, Michelle, lights a lantern and sets it in the middle before stepping back and joining hands to complete the circle.

  ‘We’ve got some good energies going already tonight,’ says Trevor. ‘Everybody step back one pace. No, keep holding hands–feel the pull on your arms. It’s all about balance. Dark and light in equilibrium…’

  Across the circle, clear eyes in the lamplight meet mine. The corkscrew curls under the woolly hat seem familiar but I can’t remember why.

  ‘Stirring the energy…’ Trevor starts to move the circle, sunwise. The man opposite keeps his eyes fixed on me as the circle moves faster and faster. ‘Opening the vortex,’ calls Michelle, her scarf slipping, hair flying round her face. ‘Let’s hold it within ourselves…’ I have no idea what we’re supposed to be doing, but the motion is dizzying and exhilarating. The moon comes out again, the clouds have silver rims, stars wink between the branches of the trees, and I can hear a soft panting growing louder in my ears, like the breathing of the whole universe…The Druid next to me stumbles on the uneven ground, jerking my arm, and the movement somehow communicates itself round the circle to Trevor. He starts to slow, brings the circle to a halt, then drops his arms.

  ‘Brilliant,’ says the spike-haired Druid, squeezing my hand in a bone-crunch grip. ‘Utterly brilliant. Trev, I’ve some mead in my backpack, shall I pass it round?’

  ‘Have ours instead. Made from our own honey’ Michelle flourishes the bottle, Trevor produces a cup from his furry satchel, pours the mead into it, holds it up to the moon, then both he and Michelle take turns in stirring it, he with a black-handled knife, she with a white. The cup goes from hand to hand round the circle, while one of the stoned girls reads a poem. The Druid produces his bottle anyway, and that, too, is passed round. The mead scalds my gullet like sugary heartburn. I offer the bottle to Martin, who hesitates, then wipes its neck surreptitiously on his sleeve before drinking.

  ‘All we need now is some drumming,’ says the keen Druid next to me. ‘I brought my bongos.’

  Trevor nips the idea firmly in the bud. ‘Bit late at night for drumming. Sorry’

  ‘Aw, we always have drumming. Wouldn’t be the same without drums.’

  ‘We get complaints, George. Some of us live round here. You can drum at the campsite if you want to–that’s far enough away from the village.’

  ‘Always have drums,’ repeats George the Druid, in a sulky mutter.

  ‘Is that it?’ whispers Martin, in my other ear. ‘Bloody hope it is, before I have to freeze my bollocks off listening to another poem.’

  Michelle has hooded the lantern. Trevor begins his closing incantation, sending the elemental spirits back to the four quarters. The circle breaks up and with shouts of merry part! echoing in our ears, we stumble across the uneven ground towards the gate in the lane and make our way back to the cottage where Martin is staying, a National Trust property that was once home to an eminent academic in her declining years, now used to house visiting archaeologists.

  ‘Well, that was an experience.’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’ I ask.

  ‘I could have done without the hug-a-hippie bit at the end.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have said that if it had been those lads from the northern tradition.’

  ‘Or that pretty boy across the circle, who was giving you the eye.’

  ‘Did you think so? Not really my type,’ I say regretfully. ‘Tediously predictable, looking for a dad and all that, but I usually go for older men. Preferably bastards.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think the Midnight Cowboy’s entirely a bastard,’ says Martin, as we walk up the path. He stops under the porch light, fumbling for the key. ‘Can I tempt you in for a farewell jar? I’m away early tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t want my gran worrying.’

  ‘Won’t she be asleep?’

  ‘Oh, all right, then.’

  The cottage is essentially one up, one down, with kitchen and utility room tacked on like an afterthought. Martin tickles the fire in the living room, while I uncork the bottle of red wine on the table. There is a small sofa, but Martin sprawls on the floor.

  ‘So how did you wind up with these TV people, petal?’ he asks. ‘They’re exploiting you ruthlessly, you know.’

  ‘It’s the way television works now.’ I swirl my glass to make a whirlpool in the wine. Another vortex: one I can control. ‘You have to prove your worth before they give you a job. And I couldn’t take on a contract in Bristol or London for the moment. I’m starting to think Frannie’s too old to be living alone, but an old people’s home would kill her.’

  Martin says nothing, looking at me steadily. It’s the first time I’ve articulated my dilemma, and I’m grateful he doesn’t offer advice.

  ‘Anyway,’ I continue, ‘there is this–other reason. Bit of an obsession of mine. My grandfather.’

  ‘You know, you sound like you’re half in love with Keiller yourself Martin has a dubious expression on his face, after hearing me out. ‘He could’ve had a fling with your grandmother, I suppose, he was free with his favours. Four wives, numerous mistresses, and I’ve always suspected he might’ve swung both ways as well. But you do realize there are no known Keiller offspring, legit or otherwise? Either he really didn’t like kids or he was firing blanks.’

  It doesn’t sound promising.

  ‘And that anonymous letter doesn’t really say much, does it? Any idea who sent it?’

  ‘There was this woman who was a housemaid at the Manor, died not long ago. I don’t know anything about her, but Frannie practically snarled the only time she mentioned her.’

  ‘Dead end, then.’ Martin sounds disappointed: another lost interviewee. ‘But the line that implies devil worship at the Manor–Keiller was interested in witchcraft, and there’s an account of at least one bizarre ceremony in the garden, though I doubt he was taking it seriously.’ He leans over to pour more wine into my glass. ‘Ritual magic was one of the growth spiritual industries of the twenties and thirties. James Frazer’s Golden Bough had raised interest in anthropology and magic. There was an idea that Eastern mysticism held the key to knowledge Westerners had lost, and the Ordo Templi Orientalis were invoking Isis and Ishtar and God knows what else in London and Paris. Aleister Crowley–and don’t give me any of that pagan tosh about how he had an unfairly poor press, he was a deliberately bad lad into cocaine and shagging anything on legs, and he loved being called the Great Beast–was supposedly the most accomplished ritual magician of his time. If you ask me, it owed a lot to hypnotism, and Tantric sex technique. But these people
genuinely thought they were onto something, tapping into the hidden forces of the universe. Crowley supposedly managed to summon the goat god Pan, but the experience nearly destroyed him. Mind you, we only have Denis Wheatley’s word for it, and you should never trust a novelist, especially one who admired Mussolini and wrote spicy thrillers with titles like The Devil Rides Out!

  ‘Was Christopher Lee in that one?’

  ‘Probably. All sounds deeply iffy now, but some of Crowley’s beliefs, like the power of will, are the ancestors of modern fads like cosmic ordering.’

  ‘You’re saying it was exactly the kind of fashionable hobby Keiller would have thrown himself into?’

  Martin lifts up his glass to admire the colour of the wine. ‘Well, yes and no. In some ways they had a lot in common–neither had to work for a living, both were borderline psychopaths who flew into a tantrum if crossed, and blew an inherited fortune on their obsessions. Keiller was certainly interested in magic, from an academic point of view. But he was too much a rationalist to be the Beast of Avebury Though, mind you–’ he puts down the glass, and levers himself to his feet to peer out of the small back window onto the stone circle ‘–I’m not a superstitious bloke, but in a long career of digging up ancient places, this is one of the strangest. It’s something to do with people living inside the henge. Not many stone circles where you can do that, are there? You could take a tent and doss down temporarily inside the Rollrights or Stanton Drew–but there isn’t a village built inside either. Nobody ran a high street through the middle of Stonehenge. People have been going to bed every night inside this circle for a couple of thousand years–leaving layer upon layer of history and belief all over the site.’

  He blows out the candle on the window ledge, draws the curtain to shut out the darkness, then throws another log on the fire. ‘It’s not just ghosts of Neolithic farmers, doing whatever they did. It’s generation after generation, reshaping their beliefs on these stones, but probably coming up with remarkably similar stuff. Fertility and death. The endless round.’ A rueful smile twists his mouth. ‘Sorry, petal, ignore me–it’s the vicar’s son lecturing again, I’m afraid, after several glasses too many. Blame the mead.’