Jenni Mills - The Buried Circle

But I won’t give way.

Pressing my nails hard into my palm to stop myself screaming, I reach across and press the button to release her.

While I’m boiling the kettle for her hot-water bottle, Frannie comes into the kitchen wearing her nightie inside out, one strap slipping off a bony, stooped shoulder.

‘You’ll catch your death. Get into bed, or put your dressing-gown on. And your other slippers.’ Her feet are purple. Have I noticed before how scrawny her arms have become, flesh hanging in loose, empty pouches?

She reaches out a swollen-knuckled paw and touches my face. ‘Sorry. Don’t mean to be a trouble.’

‘You’re not a trouble.’ I catch her hand before she withdraws it. It feels like a piece of raw chicken out of the fridge. I squeeze it helplessly, not knowing what else to do. ‘You’re no trouble at all, you old bat.’

She smiles up at me, her eyes showing a ghost of their familiar twinkle. Then she turns and shuffles out of the kitchen. The glow of the lamp in her bedroom backlights her, turning her into a bent shadowy thing crossing the hallway.

Suddenly I recognize what’s been bothering me. Frannie, silhouetted against the sky, stumping along the top of the bank. Going widdershins round the circle, anti-clockwise. She never goes widdershins. Always sunwise, girl. You follows the light. Bad luck else .

Steve’s open eyes…

I will not think about that.

Keiller’s papers are kept in the curator’s old room, tucked under the eaves above the stableyard museum, in a series of box files. Eventually all the Keiller material will be moved to the main offices, but the curator, a world expert on obscure bits of Neolithic pottery that look like digestive biscuit to me, is too busy cataloguing finds from a dig at Stonehenge.

‘There you are,’ says Michael, wheeling a library stool into place. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to be this keen.’

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Thought I should start soonest.’ It’s the morning after the film show, ten minutes short of nine, and my first opportunity to tackle the job of ordering the archive since I’m not on shift in the caf today. The sun is already bright outside the window at the end, but its leaching light doesn’t penetrate the room. Even with the radiators on, the attic office is freezing.

‘Top shelf, photo albums,’ explains Michael. ‘Organized, possibly, by AK himself.’ Bound in brown morocco, the year in gold lettering on their spines. ‘Next shelf down, correspondence–letters received and flimsy copies of letters he sent. Not so organized, I’m afraid, and certainly not complete. His executors threw away anything they didn’t consider strictly relevant to the archaeology.’

‘So nothing juicy in there?’

‘One or two hints, maybe. Haven’t read them all’ Michael scoops up an armful of files and descends with them. ‘The really spicy stuff went on the bonfire. Legend has it that W. E. V. Young–the museum’s first curator–scattered the ashes on the Thames.’

‘Makes it sound like there was something frightfully scandalous.’

‘Well, there were four wives and God knows how many mistresses. He put it about a bit, did old AK. But the big secret–not very well kept, obviously, or we wouldn’t know about it–is supposed to be correspondence relating to what may or may not have been ritual sex magic’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Michael grins wickedly as he steps onto the library stool again. ‘Put it another way, he was a bit kinky. According to the diary of a reputable lady novelist, he asked her to step into a large wicker basket wearing nothing but a rubber mackintosh so he could prod her with an umbrella through the gaps.’

‘The old goat. Did she oblige?’

Michael shakes his head, dumping another armful of box files on the table. Suddenly this is starting to look like a harder task than I’d expected. ‘Which box is which? They don’t seem to be labelled.’

‘Told you they needed organizing.’

I open a box at random. It’s stuffed to the brim with flimsy blue sheets of paper.

‘Those are copies of the letters he wrote. After dinner he’d retire with a brandy snifter and dictate into the small hours. He was a prolific correspondent, employed several secretaries to transcribe. You never know, you might be looking at something your grandmother typed.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Your grandmother worked at the Manor.’

I stare at him. ‘Where on earth did you get that from?’

‘She must have told you,’ says Michael, reprovingly, as if holding me to account for all the neglectful young people who never listen to what their elders tell them. He leans over my shoulder and opens one of the photo albums. ‘Lilian reminded me last week, after you’d left the office. There’s hardly anyone left alive who knew him, so we’re keen to get memories on tape. She’s in here somewhere…’

As he turns the pages, separated by leaves of tissue paper, there are glimpses of men in Panama hats and plus-fours, lean women in droopy skirts. ‘We had a Memories of Avebury day last spring, and I invited the old dears who’d lived in the village all their lives to come and talk about it. Where is the bloody thing? We blew up copies of some of the pictures in the albums… There …’ he lays the album in front of me ‘…and asked people if they could tell us who was in them. Your grandmother didn’t come, but one of the other old ladies identified her…’ He points to a group photograph that takes up most of the page. ‘She told us that was Frances Robinson, who’d done secretarial work at the Manor, and that she’d come back recently to live in Trusloe. Lilian went to see your gran, but couldn’t get a useful word out of her, unfortunately–bless the poor old love, Lilian thought she seemed confused by all the questions. If there’s any chance of you getting her to talk…’

Confused? Or simply being Frannie, keeping her mouth shut? In the picture three women, seated on wooden crates, flank a man who is leaning forward and smiling at the camera. Behind, there is a line of men, standing, most in waistcoats and cloth caps, but the younger ones at the end of the row are in sports jackets.

‘Nineteen thirty-eight,’ says Michael. ‘They’re excavating the southwestern quadrant of the stone circle. Keiller in the middle, of course, with Doris Chapman on his right, soon to become the third Mrs K. Piggott and Cromley at either end of the back row, both cutting their teeth as archaeologists with him. Piggott, as you know, went on to excavate at Avebury long after Keiller was gone–pity about Cromley, though, great loss to archaeology. Keiller thought a lot of his abilities.’

These are people I’m not interested in. Impatient, I pull the album towards me to see better. ‘So which…?’

Michael’s manicured fingernail moves along the photo to the slight figure at the end of the front row, shielding her eyes against the sun. ‘Would you say that was your grandmother?’

She looks shy, younger than the other two women. Although there’s a smile on her face, she seems more solemn than the rest. ‘I don’t know,’ I say slowly, disguising my mounting excitement. ‘Might be Frannie…’ The age looks right, the set of her mouth. ‘To be honest, Michael, couldn’t say one way or the other. Who was it reckoned her to be my gran?’

‘I forget her name. Used to live in a bungalow in Berwick Bassett.’ He lays the tissue paper carefully over the photo, and shuts the album. ‘She worked for Keiller too. Not one of the women in the picture. She was a housemaid.’

After Michael has gone downstairs, I open the brown leather album again and leaf through it, looking for the photo. Archaeologists today wear funny hats, walking boots and woolly jumpers; in most of these pictures Keiller is in suit and tie and golf shoes. He was fabulously rich, the heir to a marmalade fortune, a playboy who loved fast cars and the ski slopes. A good-looking man, too: wide, sexy mouth, oddly haunted eyes.