The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  We all understood why he was in a rush.

  Mr Cromley’s dagger was an old bronze thing. He’d stolen it from a museum in Oxford where he’d worked for a time. He had a pewter cup, and he mixed the stuff in it with the dagger. It wasn’t like before, at the stone, when I could feel the control radiating from his hot skin, and the strange dreaminess carrying me along with all the weirdness. This time something was making him tense, like he was afraid of getting it wrong. He’d lit candles all round, fat white ones like they have in church. They dragged the double bed away from the wall, into the middle of the room. Then Mr Cromley opened a circle around it, like he had around the stone. North, East, South and West. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The tall, older man stood watching, nodding, like he approved. He didn’t say a thing.

  I was scared, but I couldn’t help myself laughing, because Mr Cromley was so solemn. In the cut-out eyeholes his eyes narrowed like he was cross with me for not taking it more serious. There was an insect, a big late-in-the-season blowfly, buzzing round and round the room, swooping at the candle flames and bumping into the windowpane.

  They laid me back on the bed, and I went limp like Mr Cromley had told me to, while they lifted my arms above my head and tied a cord round my hands. He had explained what would happen weeks ago, but it had sounded special then. Now I could see myself in the cloudy mirror on the wardrobe door: I looked like a plucked chicken, shivering in the unheated bedroom, goose-bumps on my skinny arms and legs. Mr Cromley drew a pattern on my stomach, and on each breast, and on my face, with the dagger. His hand was shaking so much I was afraid it would slip and cut me. Then he stood up with a sigh of relief, unravelled the cord around his waist, and opened his arms wide, so that his robe fell open. The other man, silent still, lifted the robe off his shoulders, picked up the cord from the floor and, as Mr Cromley leaned over me, lashed his back with the knotted end.

  It hurt like a dagger, and he couldn’t seem to get it in properly, and then it was all gush and stickiness.

  He collapsed onto me and I brought my bound arms down over his head in a clumsy embrace, because it seemed like the thing to do. His back was rigid under my fingers like a boy who’s messed up.

  The tall man was angry, I could tell. Donald had spoiled the ritual. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes glinted through the eyeholes of the mask, and his mouth was set hard beneath it.

  But the tall man was gentle with me. He smoothed my hair, and he let his finger trail over my dry lips.

  ‘Spit,’ he said, a whisper. The first time he’d spoken. ‘Lick my finger.’

  The wrecking ball was there by half past eight. I stood outside with the others, the wind nipping at me through my thin cardigan. Old Walter was letting himself out of his little cottage across the road. He shuffled through the wooden gate, and smiled a bleak smile when he saw me in the waiting crowd. He didn’t stay to watch but shuffled down Green Street towards the crossroads.

  This time the crowd was silent, not like when the blacksmith’s place came down. There was dread in the air, a dull resentment, and a sense of awful expectancy, like they were waiting for an execution.

  ‘Anything on the wireless this morning?’ I asked the woman standing next to me, Mrs Paradise, the blacksmith’s wife. She shook her head.

  Yesterday Hitler’s troops had rolled into the Sudetenland. The BBC had broadcast the sound of an air-raid siren, an awful howl that set your teeth on edge. We were expecting to be at war any day now, though Mr Keiller’s view was that Hitler and Mr Chamberlain probably had a secret understanding, and would carve up the world between them. ‘Let ‘em have Russia,’ he’d said, standing outside the caravan on the dig site, hands on his hips, as he often stood when he was making a pronouncement. ‘That’s what the Germans would really like to get their hands on, to give old Joe Stalin and his Communists their marching orders.’ He spoke like he knew what was what. Mrs Neville Chamberlain had been to see the dig in August; maybe she’d let slip something over lunch.

  Three men set ladders against the side of the guesthouse, and began to strip the lead off the roof. When they had finished, the wrecking ball was trundled into place.

  I turned my face away, felt as much as heard the swish of air, the crumbling impact. Someone put an arm round me. When I looked up, there was my bedroom, a yawning cave with smashed floorboards and torn flowered wallpaper.

  Couple of days after the guesthouse came down, Mr Chamberlain was on the radio and in the newspapers. Peace for our time, he says. Flapping a piece of paper like a magician producing a dove.

  ‘You lied to me,’ I said.

  Mr Cromley, still in his leather mask, was coming out of the bathroom, a towel round his waist. The other man had already gone.

  ‘Don’t pretend,’ I went on. ‘Who was that? I know it wasn’t Mr Keiller.’

  Mr Cromley sighed. He reached up, unfastened the back of his mask and took it off. His hair was damp and flattened to his head.

  ‘It was my uncle, of course. You’re very lucky, Heartbreaker. Your virginity was taken by the best ritual magician in Europe.’ There was bitterness in his voice because it should have been him.

  ‘He smelled wrong for Mr Keiller,’ I said. ‘I’m not stupid.’

  ‘No, of course you’re not,’ he said, his voice as cold as his uncle had felt, pushing into my warm core. ‘A stupid girl is one who doesn’t understand how fragile her grip is on what she holds dear. How easy it would be, for instance, to lose her job because of a careless mistake, a thoughtless word to the wrong person. How disappointed her parents would be in her. How shocked people in Avebury would be if they knew what she had allowed herself to do. Begged to do, as I recall’

  I was barely sixteen, and I believed him.

  PART FOUR

  Fire Festival

  Beltane–May Eve, the night of 30 April–is a fire festival. It marks the point in the agricultural year when cattle were moved to new pasture to graze the spring grass. Bonfires were lit; young men and women jumped over them to prove their bravery, then paired off in the darkness.

  Today May Day is associated with jolly folk customs: maypole dancing, morris men. We have a vague sense that all this phallic symbolism must be something to do with fertility, and indeed it is. The main concern of agricultural societies is always fertility.

  Whether our forefathers (and mothers) actually carried out sexual rituals in stone circles like Avebury is a moot point. Every time an archaeologist discovers rock carvings that appear to show men copulating with women, or each other, or even, in one celebrated case, cattle, it is hailed as proof that sex was an integral part of prehistoric religious ritual. On the other hand it could also be prehistoric graffiti, of roughly the same significance as a spray-painted penis on a warehouse wall.

  Dr Martin Ekwall,

  A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury,

  Hackpen Press

  CHAPTER 25

  1939

  May’s a white month in Wiltshire. Stitchwort and three-cornered leek and wild garlic in the hedges, horse-chestnut candles bowing down the branches above. On the juicy green Downs, lambs looking like they’ve been laundered. None of it lasts.

  May Eve 1939 was cold and stormy as a curse, though.

  ‘The witches’ Beltane, Miss Robinson.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Mr Keiller.’

  ‘My dear girl, call yourself a countrywoman? Rural types are supposed to be in touch with the pagan calendar.’

  ‘Not me. I go to church.’

  We were in the library, rain lashing the diamond-paned windows. I was delivering another batch of typing, waiting by the table with his fountain pen for him to sign the letters. Mr Keiller was all restless energy, pacing round making plans and pulling out books from the shelves instead of getting down to his correspondence. He’d wanted to know where the maypole went, and did we still do the dancing? He come over all of a tizz when he discovered it used to be set up at the back of the Methodist chapel, right by the tall obelisk
stone he reckoned marked the dead centre of the circle–or would have, if it hadn’t been pulled down and broken up hundreds of years ago.

  In the lamplight, his eyes were golden, on fire.

  I held out the fountain pen. He took it, his fingers touching mine needlessly, lingering a moment. Last summer I’d have revelled, but now I flinched: when Mr Keiller touched me, my mind had lurched sickeningly to Mr Cromley. He hadn’t been seen in Avebury since the end of last year, thank God.

  Mr Keiller let go my hand. ‘Poor little Heartbreaker. How are you going to manage now your Brushwood Boy is leaving?’

  ‘Leaving? Who?’ It didn’t sink in immediate.

  ‘Your young man.’ Mr Keiller’s face furrowed. ‘Good Lord, I’m sorry. I assumed you knew Davey’s enlisting with the RAE He came to me for a reference last week.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘But Davey and I…’ I wasn’t sure how to finish.

  ‘Is that what this is all about? A lovers’ tiff? I am sorry–I’ve made it worse, haven’t I?’ His rueful grin made my stomach muscles twist. I was glad it hadn’t been him, in the house by the cemetery, but then again, part of me wished it had.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No reason he should tell me. It’s…been that way between us for a while.’

  ‘Well, fair enough.’ Mr Keiller was embarrassed. ‘I thought…Davey’s a handsome young fellow and he said to me a while back…but you are young for an understanding, I suppose.’

  ‘There’s going to be a war, Mr Keiller,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s too young for anything.’ He was looking at me, puzzled. I didn’t know what I was trying to tell him either. Everything seemed so mixed up now: Davey going, the place I’d been born rubble. The Blackshirts had been marching for peace, or so they claimed, in London, someone had carved MOSLEY WILL WIN in the side of Silbury Hill, and it seemed to me there were no certainties left in the world. Not even love, whatever that was. People said Mr Keiller and Miss Chapman–I couldn’t think of her as Mrs Keiller–were already arguing almost every night.

  ‘Don’t be too quick to grow up, Heartbreaker,’ he said.

  They’d married in the autumn, as soon as the dig was over. No fuss, no grand wedding. I’d always thought her a bit of a ragbag, preferring comfortable clothes to fashionable, but when she came back to Avebury after their November honeymoon in Paris, she was as smart as silk drawers, in a toque hat and fur coat. The gossip was that Mr Keiller made her sign an agreement before they married to say she wouldn’t use her allowance to buy furs and jewellery without his consent. I don’t think he trusted wives, and we all understood that, in spite of her father being the major-general, the new Mrs K wasn’t out of the very top drawer.

  The smile was triumphant, when she arrived back at the Manor with varnish on her nails instead of paint under them. The eyes were scared.

  ‘She’s a clever woman, or he wouldn’t have married her,’ said Mr Cromley, half under his breath, standing behind me at the 1938 MIAR end-of-season party. ‘But I reckon it’s only just dawned on her what she’s taking on. Wouldn’t you say so, Piggott?’

  He’d done it deliberate, come up behind me unexpected when the toasts were due, so it would look odd if I walked away. This was the first time I’d seen him for weeks, because he’d vanished from Avebury only days after the ritual in Swindon, well before the season was finished, and I’d prayed he wouldn’t come back for the party. My skin crawled to have him so near.

  We were supposed to be celebrating but no one seemed very cheerful. There was little huddles and whispers about how the marmalade money was finally running out.

  ‘None of our concern what happens in that marriage,’ said Mr Piggott, tartly. Mr Cromley’s remark might have been designed to catch him on the raw, because Stu Pig’d recently married too, and he didn’t look like my idea of a radiant husband. His wife Peggy was over the other side of the room, and there was an atmosphere between them. ‘You planning on coming back for the dig next year?’

  ‘Bet you ten bob there won’t be a dig next year,’ said Mr Cromley. ‘Even if she doesn’t bleed him dry. Word to the wise. Don’t wait to be conscripted. Grab yourself a commission before the balloon goes up. That’s what I’m doing.’

  ‘Easy for those with an uncle in the Air Ministry’

  ‘Connections, Stu. That’s what it’s all about.’

  Mr Cromley had behaved as if nothing had happened between us. He seemed sure enough he’d frightened me into keeping quiet. And me? I’d never speak out–it’d kill Mam. The tobacconist’s shop in Devizes was dragging her down. She was thinner. Her hair looked dry, like dead moss in a bird’s nest. Her skin seemed papery, and she had a yellowy colour. No, I’d do anything to protect her from knowing what I’d done, but I never let myself cry over that day. They were scum, him and his uncle. Magic, my arse. It was a game to them. Pass the Parcel. Unwrap it. Take turns.

  Davey was there at the party, face like misery. I felt sorry for him: he always gave his heart too easy. He idolized Mr Keiller, didn’t think Miss Chapman was right for him at all. I thought I guessed how it had been: driving about together up and down to London, stood to reason they was close and Davey had opinions. But I’d never seen him so wretched. If he could have sunk into the wood panels of the wall, clasping his beer glass, he would have.

  He and I weren’t clever. We didn’t have connections. I went over to him and laid a hand on his arm. He put his hand over it, slopping some of his beer on the polished oak floor.

  ‘It’s all over, Fran.’ His golden eyes were swimming; he was very drunk, and I’d never seen him that way. ‘You, me, and–Mr Keiller, he was special, deserves better than her. Didn’t think I’d mind, but I do.’

  ‘I know you do,’ I said. There was plenty to mind, for both of us. We’d both had our souls caught and eaten, one way or another.

  So, as the new season started, we were a depleted team–no Mr Piggott, no Mr Cromley–and the atmosphere on the dig was jittery. No one was sure when the fighting would start, but for all Mr Chamberlain’s bits of paper, there wasn’t a living soul optimistic enough to think we could avoid war now.

  And Davey going, too. The day after my conversation in the Library with Mr Keiller, I found him in the barn, his legs sticking out under one of the cars.

  ‘What’s this I hear about you joining the air force?’

  He trundled himself out and sat up, propping himself against the side of the car. Oil had dripped on his hair, making it look like wet corrugated iron. ‘What’s it to do with you?’

  ‘Well, I hope it isn’t anything to do with me. I don’t want you flying off and getting killed on my behalf.’

  ‘I won’t be flying anywhere. I’m going in as ground crew. And, no, it’s nothing to do with you. When I heard Mr Cromley had enlisted, I thought it was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ I kicked the car tyre, inches away from his thick head. ‘You don’t mean to tell me you admire that…that…’

  ‘He went in because there’s a war coming. I call that brave.’

  ‘He went in so he could grease his way into a cushy desk job, like his uncle.’

  ‘He’s a pilot, Fran. Nothing cushy about that. Stop kicking the Hispano’s tyres. They cost a lot to replace. Anyway, we’ll all be in sooner or later.’

  ‘But what about the excavations? Mr Keiller needs you.’

  ‘No, Mr Keiller doesn’t need me, not any more. He says he’s proud to spare me for the RAE He has Philip to drive him if he dun’t drive himself, and he won’t be racing the cars this summer. Everything’s different this year.’

  It was. Mr Keiller’s inconstant demons let him down, and stole away both his time and his money before he could finish. He dug up the stones of the inner circle on the south side of the village, many as he could find, and set them in concrete. But he didn’t get round to finishing the rest of the great outer circle. Before summer was over, he’d joined up himself: part-time duty with the Special Constabulary. There was ta
nks chewing the grass along the Avenue, and the soldiers scratched their initials on the stones.

  ‘Have you ever noticed, Miss Robinson, that the Encyclopaedia Britannica classifies intelligence into three separate types?’ said Mr Keiller. ‘Human, animal and military. In that order of preference, I think.’

  On the first of September, the first evacuees arrived in the village, seventy girls and boys from the East End of London, along with their teachers. The blackout was already in force. In Devizes, Dad and Mam walked me to the bus stop, late at night, and it was so dark we went in a chain, holding hands.

  A couple of days later, we was at war. Seeing as how everybody else was doing their bit, I thought it time to do mine too. I found a job in the almoner’s office in the hospital at Swindon.

  CHAPTER 26

  Beltane approaches, and weekend pagans gather again. Ed’s on campsite patrol Friday night: as I leave the caf, I see him in the distance, climbing into the National Trust Land Rover and gunning it down the gravel drive, aviator shades in place like a cop in a seventies movie. Asking me to lie about what I remember of the crash is unforgivable. I’m annoyed with myself for wanting to wave him down and jump in beside him.

  Martin and the film crew appear briefly, shoot some fire-juggling in the circle on Saturday afternoon, then leave once dusk falls, Martin heading for Bath to spend the rest of the weekend with a friend of his, caving in the Mendips.

  But by quarter to ten on Sunday it’s raining heavily. Martin won’t be potholing today.

  ‘Better drive you down to church,’ I tell Frannie, though I’m still in my pyjamas, an old towel wrapped round head. ‘Give me twenty minutes to rinse the colour off and dry my hair.’

  ‘That’d be smashing,’ she says. Her voice is bright, but her eyes have loose brownish-purple pouches beneath, and her skin has a tired, yellowy tinge. The doctor can find nothing physically wrong, but has suggested a social worker should call to see her this week, and she’s been worrying about that. ‘You don’t have to wait around, though–Carrie Harper’ll give me a lift back. Her sister usually gets out the car for church.’ She spoons down the last of her porridge. ‘Must find me collection money.’