Jenni Mills - The Buried Circle

We sit in silence for a while, watching the log on the fire catch, John puffing his roll-up.

‘Is that pilot bloke still texting you?’ he asks eventually.

‘Not since I told him to piss off.’

‘Right.’

‘I know it hasn’t got anything to do with what happened but it feels like another thing that was wrong about that day’

‘Indy, people make dubious decisions all the time without the universe throwing a moral tantrum. Forget your bad experience at uni. Sleeping with a married man doesn’t always unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’ He stands up again to relight his roll-up from the candle. ‘Not that I’m recommending it, you understand.’

I glance pointedly at the green scarf. ‘You shag married women.’

‘I’ve learned to manage their expectations.’ John chucks his dog end into the fire, lifts the mugs off the reflexology stool and pulls it into position. ‘Can’t be bothered with the couch. Get your shoes off.’

‘Anyway,’ I attempt to muster some dignity as I haul off my socks, ‘I think I might be ready to resurrect my career in television, after all. Did you see the notice at the post office? Bloody hell, that hurts.’

‘Stress always collects in the soles of the feet.’

‘Fran!’ I call, as I open the glazed front door into the hallway. Usually at this time of day she’s in the living room watching one of those TV programmes that, by some miracle of demography, unite both elderly people and kids. Instead she’s in front of the hall mirror trying on a hat like a hairy raspberry.

‘Does this make me look like an old lady?’

‘It makes you look mad.’

‘It’ll do, then.’ She grins, then frowns. ‘What time is it? I’m sure Carrie Harper said she’d drive me to Devizes to do a supermarket shop. Or have I got muddled again?’

Fran has a relentless social life that revolves around people from church–every one at least twenty years her junior. I check the calendar on the back of the kitchen door. Under today’s date, in her shaky writing, it says, ’6 p.m. Broad Hinton W.I.’.

I’m snapping on rubber gloves and plugging in the vacuum cleaner before she has her coat out of the cupboard. Never enthusiastic about housework, Fran has recently decided it’s not worth the effort at all, so I grab every opportunity to clean unhindered.

‘What got into you? In’t you the girl I could never get to keep her bedroom tidy?’

‘Sorry. Once I start…’

‘Well, I wish you’d stop. I feel exhausted watching. You in’t thinking you’ll go fiddling in my room? Because don’t. Can look after it meself.’ ‘I wouldn’t dare.’ There’s little point in fiddling in her room, as I discovered when I tried a few months ago to find Margaret’s birth certificate there. An immense old-fashioned bureau in one corner holds Fran’s bank statements, chequebooks and personal detritus, and it is locked. The key is probably under her pillow, but Fran knows I’d never steal it. What a person chooses to lock away is private: that’s our rule, drawn up in the years when I kept a teenage diary. ‘Anyway, when was the last time you dusted in there?’

But I’m saying it to her back. The doorbell rings: her lift to W.I. She jams the hairy raspberry on her head, and stumps out of the front door: fully-functional Fran, because it wouldn’t do to be daffy in front of her friends.

The letter is jammed down the side of her armchair in the living room, the high one she finds more comfortable than the others. Could have been there a day, a week, months, years even, creased, with a strange greasy feel that makes me think it’s been handled over and over again. My fingers snagged the corner of it while I was plumping the cushions. I smooth out the paper–pale grey, torn off a pad, a curl of gum still attached to the top. Impossible to know whether it slipped down accidentally, or was pushed there deliberately, to hide it.

You have a nerve, it says. Typed, on an old-fashioned typewriter, not a computer. No address, no ‘Dear Mrs Robinson’ or ‘Dear Frances’, no punctuation.

Saw you in Church You have a nerve coming back after all these yrs not even bothring to pretend you married There are people here whom remember why you went away to Swindon no better than you ought to be Your dear mother would be turning in her grave good job she didnt live to see it But anyone with eyes in their head at the Manor knew what was going on the Devil was at work there I saw you call him in the garden with your five point star and your mask You should burn up wher you stand.

One final, vicious full stop.

I turn over the envelope again, pale grey to match, a brown teacup ring on the corner. No postmark, hand-delivered. It’s addressed to MISS–capital letters and underlined–Prances Robinson.

I fold the letter back into the envelope and put it on the coffee-table with this week’s Bella and the Radio Times . Then something–embarrassment? Fear?–makes me slide it back down the side of the chair where it came from.

‘What time do you call this for going out?’ my mam said.

There was a big old moon through the kitchen window, sending down splashes of silvery light like someone was chucking paint about. The wireless was playing dance-band music, Ambrose and His Orchestra, ‘There’s A Small Hotel’, bit of a laugh really since they was playing at the Savoy. Mam was doing the drying-up, dancing round the kitchen flicking the tea-towel in time with the music, marcel wave bobbing. Da, da, diddly dit, doo. Gliding with her arms held stiffly round nothing, pretending she was dancing the foxtrot with Fred Astaire. She loved that tune.

I hung my white apron on the hook behind the door and took off the white cuffs Mam made me wash out by hand every night because we only did a proper boil wash for the towels and sheets on Mondays.

‘Scrub them cuffs, mind,’ she said automatically.

‘I’ll do them later.’

‘Now, Frances.’

‘I’ll put them in soak.’

Mam narrowed her eyes but gave up for once. She was in a good mood because the guesthouse was full with friends of Mr Keiller, posh gents and ladies from London who were all having dinner at the Manor tonight in their evening dress, even though they was having to pay us full board. My dad insisted on that. If you want come-as-you-please, he told people, you’d be better off at the pub. But Mr Keiller’s friends were rich enough not to care what they paid, and we’d had an easy time serving supper, only a man walking the Ridgeway, and a couple of mad old biddies staying with us the weekend, who held hands under the table.

‘Where do you think you’re off to anyway?’ Mam said to me, as she hung up the tea-towel to dry by the range. A small-boned woman, she was, like me, inclined to be plump, though lately she’d slimmed down a bit. ‘You’re going nowhere till we’ve put the leavings away’ There was a twinkle in her eye.

I said nothing, and played for time by twiddling the dangly bits on the doily as I hung it over the cut-glass bowl of trifle. We had the only Frigidaire in the village, apart from Mr Keiller’s up at the Manor, but Mam didn’t trust it because it made a noise, and preferred to keep things in the larder. It was more hygienic, she said. Closed space like the fridge, running with water, stood to reason germs would breed. Besides, though Mr Rawlins’s big Crossley generator supplied us with the electric, the wind often brought down the power lines he’d rigged from tree to tree through the village, and then we was all back to oil lamps.

‘Are you meeting someone?’ Mam slapped a net cover over the ham joint like she was nailing down a butterfly.

As usual, her curiosity made me want to wriggle. She couldn’t wait for me to get a proper feller and bring him home. Only left school last summer, but Mam’d have me married off the minute I showed the slightest interest in a lad. She’d wed at seventeen. She’d been in service, living away from home since she was thirteen, and that was where she met Dad, though he was more than a dozen years older.