Jenni Mills - The Buried Circle

‘They’ve never got one of those ouija whatsits?’

‘It’s not ghosts they’re after. Miss Chapman says Mrs Oliver wants to help them find buried stones. Mr Keiller thinks there’s some under the ground that was never broken up.’

How educated people can be so outright stupid is beyond me. Mr Keiller was as clever as they come, but he’d invite an old phoney in a floaty dress to sit at his dinner-table. Or maybe she wasn’t so old. There was rumours Miss Doris Chapman, his official artist, was going to be the third Mrs K, but that wouldn’t have stopped him giving the eye to another good-looking woman.

‘They in’t looking for stones tonight? In the pitch dark?’

‘How would I know?’

We came round the corner of the stable block to the wrought-iron gate of the Manor garden. All the downstairs windows of the house was lit up, and we could hear music. Not one of Mam’s dance bands but heavy thudding like I imagined jungle drums would sound.

‘That’s Stravinsky.’ Davey surprised me. How come he knew who was making that racket? ‘Mr Keiller likes modern music’

‘Call that modern?’ I said. ‘Voodoo music, more like. Modern’s Jack Hylton or Billy Cotton. How do you know what Mr Keiller likes, anyway?’

But he never replied because at that moment the front door of the Manor opened and light splashed down the gravel path between the lavender beds. There was laughter mixed in with the music, then some shushing, and in the doorway was Mr Keiller himself.

‘Bloody hellfire,’ says Davey His hand squeezed my arm and hurt, though I don’t think he meant to. ‘What is he carrying?’

Mr Keiller was in his tails, white tie and all. Sometimes at night he’d wear his kilt, but tonight it was trousers and the real film-star look. They always dressed formal for dinner at the Manor. He was a tall man who filled the doorway bottom to top; no mistaking him, with his long elegant legs. There was a lamp over the door, but his face was in shadow because he had stopped under the lintel, waiting for everybody else to catch up. The light fell instead on the thing in his hands. He was holding it carefully, as if it was fragile, his arms held away from his body so the bottom of the thing was level with his chest and the top maybe an inch or two below his chin. Davey started to laugh, quietly in case they heard us, and I could feel his hands digging into my arms as he stood behind me, peering over the wall, his chin parting the back of my hair. I was glad it was dark because I could feel myself going red: oh, I knew what Mr Keiller was carrying, all right. Davey’s breath was hot on my ear, and he was awful close behind me, and I could feel the same kind of thing that Mr Keiller had in his hands butting at my back through our clothes.

Mr Keiller steps forward, and the light falls on his high shiny forehead and his handsome rich man’s face that’s tanned but not weathered. He’s got a long, straight nose and a strong, wide mouth and a full head of hair, never mind that he’s in his forties. The thing falls into shadow and I’m happy about that–what would Mam think?–though something makes me want to see it again, something to do with Davey’s breath that’s a bit faster than it ought to be when we’re standing still.

Out of the door behind Mr Keiller come a couple of ladies, carrying cocktail glasses, so maybe they hadn’t even started dinner yet, never mind it was gone half past nine. Miss Chapman was one of them, in a long silky dress with a wrap the same pale shade round her shoulders. Moonlight had stolen all the colours. As she walked under the lamp she was trying to look serious, like him, but I could see she wanted to giggle. The other was a middle-aged lady in flouncy stuff and a white fur stole, who could’ve been Mrs Oliver. Her face was a mask under too much powder. Behind them were three or four men, and two more ladies. One stumbled as she stepped onto the path, and the other shouted, ‘Alec, darling, your cocktails have malicious potency!’ I recognized them as the people staying at our guesthouse, and all of them carried candles, long white tapers that sent flickering light along the gravel path. They milled about under the trees, waiting for Mr Keiller to take the lead. He stood a little apart, the white thing cradled in the crook of one arm. One of the other ladies came up to him, and as they chatted, I saw his free hand steal casual like round her back, where Miss Chapman and the other guests couldn’t see, and rub her bottom.

We’d been watchers all our short lives, Davey and I: people who waited on tables and polished cars and cleared up after rich people. But when it came down to it, the only difference was they had more money. In the moonlight, drunk, they acted silly as any fool. That younger man at the back, with hair that flopped over his eyes and a cigarette in his hand, sauntering about like he owned the place, he was one of the archaeologists–I’d seen him in the fields with a notebook and a measuring tape. I wanted to be following them, a pale ghost in my own silky dress. All you had to do was believe you deserved to be among them, and act ridickerlus as they did.

The heavy Manor door shut with a thud and coming out of the porch was Mrs Sorel-Taylour, the short, buxom lady that was Mr Keiller’s secretary, keeping her distance to make sure nobody thought she was so daft as the rest. She was carrying a torch instead of a candle.

Mr Keiller raised the gurt white pizzle up high–had to call it that, didn’t know any other word for it, then, and right enough it was near as big as a bull’s or a stallion’s. Moonlight poured down on it, making it look like bewitched silver. Everybody bowed to it. Davey pulled me back into the shadow of the stable wall, in case they came our way, but there was no need because Mr K led them instead round the corner of the house into the more private bit of the garden where we couldn’t see what they was up to.

‘Whew,’ said Davey softly. ‘What do you think they’re going to do there?’

I didn’t want to think about it, but I did think about it, and Davey’s fingers on my arms. And Mr Keiller’s face too, solemn like it was carved out of stone, holding up the thing made of glimmering chalk like the high Downs. For all that what we’d seen was silly, it stirred something else in me, something I couldn’t explain. Magic, some of it to do with floaty dresses and film stars, but some of it the old sort of magic. The sort that makes me feel cold now, makes me need to feel warm again, but there in’t no fire that’ll warm that kind of cold once you have it in your bones.

‘Mad as hares,’ I said. ‘Maybe that medium lady’s going to raise the dead to ask ‘em where they put them stones.’

‘More’n the dead they’ve raised,’ said Davey, sliding himself against my back, all accidental-like. ‘We in’t going to see any more tonight.’

‘Don’t think that means you’ll get a cuddle,’ I said. But something had stirred in me, too, and I didn’t understand what it was.

As the sun starts to sink towards the dykes on Wednesday afternoon, the car park of the Red Lion is already filling, several cars displaying blue disabled badges. Wednesday is biker’s night at the pub, but the Harleys and Beamers won’t roar into the village until later. The public meeting to show the 1938 cine footage has been timed to lure out older people before dark, but Frannie showed no enthusiasm for coming along, though it was filmed during the years she grew up in Avebury. Despite my best efforts to persuade her, I left her at home in her slippers, settled in front of the TV with a pot of tea and a packet of gingernuts.

The letter I found down the side of her armchair has been bothering me all week. It looked like it’d been there a long, long time–possibly since right after she moved back to Avebury, four years ago. I don’t know how to raise the subject with her: she’ll accuse me of prying again, and maybe get upset, the way she did when I was trying to find out more about Davey Fergusson.