Книга - The Buried Circle

The Buried Circle
Jenni Mills


An intriguing literary thriller, ‘The Buried Circle' is a gripping blend of fact and fiction that is impossible to put down.The village of Avebury is one of the most mysterious places in the English countryside. Surrounded by ancient standing stones, crop circles and burial mounds, this is a place where all is not as it seems.Weaving fact with fiction, Jenni Mills's second novel is set in a haunted landscape where the past breaks through into the present. In 1938, the archaeologist Alexander Keiller – a millionaire playboy with a passion for witchcraft and ritual magic – plans to reconstruct Avebury's five-thousand-year-old stone circle. Frannie Robinson and her boyfriend Davey are among those who fall under his dangerous spell, and are nearly destroyed. Seventy years later, Frannie's granddaughter India sets out on her own quest to discover the truth. But digging up the past unearths the unexpected, and may prove lethal…







THE



BURIED



CIRCLE





Jenni Mills

































In memory of my father, Robert Mills, who flew

1916-78



and my mother, Sheila Mills, who danced

1921-2007


I sought for ghosts and sped

Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

Percy Bysshe Shelley,

Hymn To Intellectual Beauty

Time wounds all heels.

Groucho Marx, John Lennon,

and others, including Margaret Robinson




Table of Contents


Part One-Memory Crystals (#u0ef5aa54-cf65-5b8c-80fa-811f6b2ec68b)

Chapter 1 - Lammas, 2005 (#u5b19be62-95c3-5815-84a6-54cf4c1d93c1)

Chapter 2 - Autumn Equinox (#u8c24a47f-aacb-5c3c-9a95-b5653e5f650a)

Chapter 3 (#u445d5f46-1253-5c8b-907b-2119c9862abf)

Chapter 4 (#u8bfe7158-d97b-55ac-b2e5-a40699184fe5)

Part Two - Imbolc (#u05371720-3ed9-5715-9053-91fc48f4f599)

Chapter 5 - Candlemas (#u6eb32764-609c-5cae-9fae-73c771577498)

Chapter 6 - 1938 (#u6008daf2-99ae-50bf-a753-ed1ab93b54b4)

Chapter 7 (#u1b7e2f5f-2e96-5e68-ab32-ea2bc57e44ff)

Chapter 8 - 1938 (#uf702a80b-51da-5554-8c47-286781abbacb)

Chapter 9 (#u5b0bc67b-977e-50a5-87eb-96a6e17e0de9)

Chapter 10 - 1938 (#u3ab8e6f2-d9ba-559d-9930-e3a9a4038cf4)

Chapter 11 (#ua3c82277-e4d9-56c7-b09e-aa2cd54fcf8a)

Part Three - Equal Night (#u41545c50-fcf7-59ef-ba4e-bdd2c0c3a018)

Chapter 12 - 1938 (#u7a5a555c-0596-5c8b-a985-fb5b4442aa02)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 - 1938 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 - 1938 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 - 1938 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 - 1938 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 - 1938 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24 - September 1938 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Four - Fire Festival (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25 - 1939 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27 - 1940–1941 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Five - Earth Magic (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29 - 1941 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32 - 1941 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 37 - 1941 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 39 - 1941–2 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Six - The Sun Stands Still (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 40 - 1942 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 41 - Solstice (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 42 - 1942 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 43 - 1942 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Seven - Killing Moon (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 47 - 29 August 1942 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 49 - 29 August 1942 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 51 - 29 August 1942 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 56 - 29 August 1942 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Eight - Sunwise (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 58 - Lammas, 2006 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 59 - January 1945 (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Jenni Mills (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)










PART ONE Memory Crystals (#uf18fbc97-e764-564b-93d6-6ca1d1406389)


‘History, archaeology, it’s all moonshine, really. We’re only guessing.’

Dr Martin Ekwall,

interviewed on BBC Wiltshire Sound







1942

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he says. The Insect King. ‘It’s only a mask.’

Eyes like a fly, elephant’s trunk that’s long, rubbery…

‘It’s only a mask,’ he says again.

‘I know it’s a mask,’ I says, braver than I feel. But there’s masks and masks. I’ve seen masks. I’ve seen what happens in the moonlight in the Manor gardens.

‘Frannie…’ It’s only a whisper, so I’m not sure if it came out of his mouth or out of my head. He’s at me now, pressing himself against me, and I’m feeling all the bits of him, long gropy fingers and the hard poky bits. There’s a glow in the sky, something burning near the railway yards, searchlights over Swindon, the banshee howl of the warning, and the anti-aircraft batteries have started up.

‘Take it off,’ he says.

‘The mask?’

‘Your flicking robe.’ At least, I think he says robe.

‘Coat.’

‘Whichever.’

‘A bit nippy for that.’ I’m trying to keep it calm, trying to be funny, pretend I’m in control, because this isn’t what I meant to happen. He gives me a push, quite hard, and I’m up against the stone. It’s cold against my back, like moonlight, and scratching at me like fingers through the thin material of my coat. There’s really nowhere to go now.

I would be afraid, but I won’t let myself. You can’t let them have everything. You can’t let them have your fear. You got to keep a bit of yourself. I’m going to put my bit where it’s safe, a long way away from here.

Beech trees, black against a silver sky. Somewhere else the real moonlight is pouring down. Bombers’ moon. A killing moon. Planes like fat blowflies trekking high above the Marlborough Downs. I take myself away, as far as I can, trying not to feel the burning down there, fingers, hands, other things, feels like there’s lots of them all at once, wanting a piece.

A voice whispering again, Frannie, Frannie. It’s terrible dark. There’s a smell of rubber, thick and choking. Hard to breathe. An awful slick, oily smell of rubber…




CHAPTER 1 Lammas, 2005 (#uf18fbc97-e764-564b-93d6-6ca1d1406389)


‘I don’t want to do it,’ I said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. The shots will be fantastic. You’ll love it. Unless you’d like us to use someone else on the series?’

The usual blackmail. If you’re experienced enough to do the job, you can say no. If you’re not quite twenty-five, and desperate to claw a foothold in television, you’ll do anything. I made one last pathetic attempt to get him to change his mind. ‘Seriously, Steve, I’ve never filmed like this before. I’m not properly trained. If this was the BBC, the hazard-assessment form would have it flagged up as a major risk.’

‘There’s a harness, Indy. You’ll be strapped in.’

‘My legs’ll be dangling.’

‘What’s happened to your balls?’

‘My balls, if I had any, would be dangling too.’

So, my legs are dangling. My non-existent testicles are dangling. My bum, perched on the edge of the open helicopter door, has gone entirely numb. Below me is–well, if I were a proper cameraman I’d be better at judging these things, but I’d say a good six or seven hundred feet of nothing. Below that is hard Wiltshire chalk, with a skimpy dressing of ripening barley. The helicopter’s shadow races across it, a tiny black insect dwarfed by the bigger shadows of the clouds.

Steve, crouched behind me, taps me on the shoulder. I turn my head towards him, very, very carefully, in case even this simple movement unbalances me and I go tumbling out to become another shadow on the chalk. He’s saying something, but the wind and the noise of the rotors snatch his voice away. He makes cupping motions with his hands by his ears.

He wants me to put the earphones on so I can hear him–he’s wearing a set with a microphone attached. Like I have, too, only mine are round my neck and not on my ears yet, and to put them on I’m going to have to let go of my death-grip on the door frame.

With both hands.

I send a signal from brain to fingers to unprise themselves. Nothing happens. Fingers know better than brain what’s sensible. They’re going to stay firmly locked onto something solid, thank you very much, until someone hauls me back safely into the interior of the helicopter and there’s no more of this dangling.

Steve taps me on the shoulder again. Maybe if I try just one hand at a time?

My left thumb, fractionally more adventurous than the rest of my hand, comes free. Right. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Clear proof it is possible to move and not fall out of the helicopter. In fact, now my thumb’s no longer involved, the fingers are really not doing that much to secure me, so I might manage to let go altogether that side…

Very good, Indy, but one hand doesn’t seem to be much help getting the headset onto my ears. All I’ve achieved is to get my hair into my eyes. Should have tied it back more securely. The headset has knocked the pins outs. I can’t see. Perfect moment for the helicopter to bank and drop down towards Pewsey Vale.

Oh, God, I’m going to fall out…

Steve’s hands gripping my ribs, hot breath in my ear. ‘Let GO!’ he yells, practically rupturing my eardrum. The shock loosens the other hand. ‘I’ve GOT you.’ His arm snakes round my waist. ‘Now put the flicking headset on.’

‘OK.’ Not that he can hear me until I do. I could spout a stream of hangover-distilled vitriol and the wind would whip it straight out of my mouth into nowhere. ‘I hate you, you spotty little toilet-mouth. I despise the fact you walked straight out of a media-studies degree and into a job as a producer just because your father was a foreign correspondent for ITN, while I’ve had to spend two years hoovering the coke off the edit-suite floor. I loathe that you get to tell me what to do, although I’m the more experienced of the two of us and you’re far and away the biggest twerp I’ve yet met in my admittedly not extensive media career. In fact, right now, because you made me do this horrible, scary thing, I’d be delighted if you leaned over too far and tipped yourself out of the bloody aircraft.’

Of course, I never would say it, don’t really mean it (not all of it, anyway), but imagining it has made me feel a whole lot better. I fumble the headset off my neck and onto my ears, using it as a kind of Alice band to keep my hair off my face.

‘Everything OK back there?’ Ed, the pilot, his voice tinny through the earphones.

‘Marvellous.’

‘Fine.’ Steve and I speak at the same time, both of us lying through our gritted teeth. He wants Ed to think we bear some resemblance to a professional TV crew; I want the man I slept with last night not to notice I’m a gibbering wreck.

Steve–the man I didn’t sleep with–retracts his arm. ‘Comfortable now?’

Comfortable doesn’t seem to be in it, but I feel more secure, and can admit it would be pretty difficult to fall out. Tough webbing straps are digging into my shoulders. They join in a deep V at the waist, meeting the belt that circles my middle and the strap that comes up from the groin. I’m very glad indeed, now I come to think of it, that I don’t have testicles, though to be truthful, life would be less painful without breasts. Wrapped in layers against the wind chill, even though it’s August–a duvet jacket I borrowed from Ed over two fleeces, and thermal long Johns under my jeans–I could still use more padding under the chafing straps.

‘Ready for the camera?’ asks Steve.

‘No.’

‘Look, you’d feel more balanced if you rested a foot on the strut. That’s what most cameramen do.’

‘Steve, I’m not most cameramen. I’m not six foot three. I’d have to be leaning right out of the helicopter for my leg to reach. You saw me try when we were still on the ground.’ I’m taller than scrawny little Steve, but that’s not enough–though it might have something to do with why we haven’t hit it off on this series. The main trouble is that Steve considers himself an expert. He’s been aerial filming more often than I have–which means he’s been out exactly once, and that must have been with a cameraman who had legs long enough to span the Severn Crossing.

‘Well, whatever.’ His real concern is how steady the shot will be. We both know we should have hired a footrest to screw to the helicopter’s landing skids, but it would have cost too much. ‘Now, can we please get a bloody move on? The budget only runs to two hours’ filming up here.’

Budget is, as usual, to blame for everything. The only job my limited experience (and lack of famous father–any father, for that matter) qualifies me for is assistant producer/researcher/camera/dogsbody at Cheapskate Productions, a.k.a. Mannix TV, who are making an entire series (working title: The Call of the Weird) on the televisual equivalent of about two and a half p. Today we are filming episode four, ‘Signs in the Fields’, which is about Wiltshire’s world-famous crop circles, after Stonehenge the county’s main tourist attraction. In fact, one year a farmer with crop circles in his field took more money from visitors than the ticket office at Stonehenge.

It took some doing to screw enough money for aerial filming out of the digital channel that commissioned the series, but crop circles can’t be fully appreciated from ground level. As it is, most of the programme will be made up of interviews in the back bar of the Barge Inn, on the Kennet and Avon canal and right in the heart of crop-circle country, with avid cerealogists, as crop-circle investigators are called. They will tell us (I know because as the series’ researcher I’ve already spent several hours listening to their theories) that only aliens could be responsible for such intricate and portentous patterns. It is simply not possible that such a primitive civilization as our own could have produced them. How could they have been made by humans? they ask, plaintively and rhetorically.

Well, I know the answer to that too. You need a thirty-foot surveyor’s tape, a smallish wooden plank, and a plastic lawn roller, obtainable from any good garden centre. I watched John do it, one moonlit May night in 1998, with a group of his friends who call themselves the Barley Collective. I was supposed to be the lookout but I was laughing so much that an alien mothership could have landed behind and I wouldn’t have noticed. The bizarre thing is that since people like John came out in the 1990s to admit they trample out the crop circles–gigantic art installations, the way John sees them–more people than ever have become convinced they can’t possibly be man-made. Apparently there’s a sociological term for it, John says, something to do with disconfirmation leading to strengthened belief, an idea that also lies at the heart of most religion. I gently put it to one of the cerealogists at the Barge that I’d seen it done, and he almost punched me.

Our time aloft this afternoon is limited, thank God, so limited I doubt we’ll achieve half of what Steve plans. He can’t afford to hire a proper cameraman–or a proper camera-mount, for that matter. Any minute now he’s going to thrust into my unwilling hands a DVC–digital video cam–secured only by a cat’s cradle of bungee cords. Financial constraints also dictated the choice of aircraft. We’re crammed into the back of a helicopter operated by 4XC, the CropCircleCruiseCompany, proprietor a wild Canadian called Luke, chief pilot his best friend Ed, with whom I made the enormous mistake of getting off with last night. Also in the helicopter are five paying passengers, three Americans and a Dutch couple, enjoying one of the aforementioned CropCircleCruises over Mystic Wiltshire. That way Steve hired flying time at a cheaper rate.

If I live, I’ll light a candle to the Goddess.

‘Crop circle coming up at two o’clock.’ Ed’s voice in the headphones. The helicopter lurches as three blond heads, a black ponytail and a bald spot all lean to the right to get a good look.

‘Jesus Christ, will you take the fucking camera off me, or we’ll miss it,’ snaps Steve, pushing the DVC in its sagging net towards me.

‘Relax,’ says Ed. ‘We’ll catch it on the way back.’ Almost as crazy as his friend Luke, who was drinking tequila shots last night in the pub, but fortunately more sober, and he seems to know what he’s doing. More than I can say for my esteemed director. For a moment I can feel sorry for Steve, trying to live up to his father, the famous name a curse tied to his inexperienced neck. I caught his expression while Ed and Luke were strapping me in, back on the ground. He looked like a little boy splashing in the bay, suddenly realizing that’s a big grey fin circling the lilo. Under other circumstances, this should have been fun, but he’s terrified we’ll fail to come back with any usable footage.

‘The best circles aren’t here, anyway, they’re at Alton Barnes,’ adds Ed, levelling the chopper. All I can see of him, if I twist in my harness, is the back of his neck, dark brown hair sticking out under his headset and over his collar. Hair into which I laced my fingers last night. I close my eyes with the embarrassment of it: what was I thinking? And if I’d known he was married…‘I’m going to head north first, to fly over Avebury for these guys.’

My stomach lurches, my gut contracting with the scary falling feeling of coming home.

Avebury: state of mind as much as a landscape. The place my family came from, where my grandmother was born and brought up–until the old serpent entered Eden, as Frannie used to say. A place I never lived in, apart from a few weeks one long-ago summer, but entering the high banks that enclose stone circle and village has always felt, in some strange way, like coming home.

Below us, the summer fields are gold, ochre, tawny, separated by knotty threads of green hedgerow. I’m getting used to the dangling now; it’s almost–but only almost–exhilarating. We fly over the Kennet and Avon canal, a brown ribbon winding away into the afternoon heat haze, little matchbox barges meandering along it, while the helicopter gains height to rise over the escarpment. I can see the long, double-ridged scar of the Wansdyke, an ancient Saxon boundary, bisecting the Downs, then the land folds and drops away and already there’s the ridiculous pudding that is Silbury Hill jutting out of the fog in the distance, so unmistakably not a natural feature that you can understand why CropCircleCruiseCompany makes money out of people convinced it was plonked there by aliens.

I bring the camera viewfinder up to my eye, and Steve’s hand grips my shoulder, helping to steady me while I get used to the weight.

‘Looks fabulous on the monitor,’ comes his tinny voice, breathless with relief. ‘We couldn’t be luckier with the weather, could we? Shame about the haze–makes the horizon a bit murky.’

‘Can you give me a white balance?’ I say, and he leans over me, inhumanly unworried by the yawning void, holding a piece of white paper in front of the lens. I make a quick adjustment, set the focus to infinity, and film the ground like a gold and green carpet being pulled away beneath us. Slowly tilt up to reveal Silbury and the whole damn distant shebang, humps, bumps, ridges and secrets you can only see from above, fading into a wash of pale umber that then shades into an overhead blue so intense it hums. Through the lens, height, motion and scariness are pared down to beautiful. OK, I’m a bit ropy still on the technicals (did I remember to set the toggle switch to daylight?) but this is what I’m good at, composing a picture: colour, angle, geometry.

Euphoria unexpectedly fills me, and I can even admit the sex last night was good; not to be repeated, but maybe forgivable. Guilt sneaks back with the memory of his fingers strapping me into the harness, and I enjoyed that too–why do I get myself into these scrapes? I should have made it clear before breakfast: I don’t do married men, full stop, after a nasty experience with a tutor at college–but there wasn’t time for conversation.

The helicopter loses height as we fly towards West Kennet Long Barrow–‘Just like a big vulva,’ says one of the passengers, the American woman, as I tilt down so it fills the frame–and then banks to the right, so my lovely shot ends abruptly in the clouds. I can hear the gnashing of Steve’s teeth because we’ve missed a close-up. We cross the A4–‘The old Roman road,’ calls Ed–and come over the green shoulder of the hill. A sigh comes out of me. There, at last, the first white tooth of the Avenue. I hadn’t even noticed I was holding my breath. The rotors are saying it: home, home, home. The image in the viewfinder is blurry, the wind pricking water into my eyes. England’s full of little exiles, and one of them happened at Avebury, for my grandmother, sixty-something years ago. One of them happened there for me, too, in 1989, so both of us were, in our own way, expelled from Eden.

Get in the van, Indy. Now

As far as blood relations go, Frannie is all I have. Grandfather, mystery man: not only did I never know him but neither did his daughter, born at the end of the Second World War after he was killed in action. Mother: well, best not to go there, but let’s just say she died, abroad, when I was in my early teens, having left me with my grandmother when I was eight. Father: itinerant Icelandic hippie my mother met in a backpacker’s hostel in Delhi, and never saw again. That was how I came to be called India. Could have been worse–Mum had been doing the world trip and I might have ended up with any name from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar.

We’re almost there, following the Avenue as it marches up the hillside. From above, the double row of stones looks tiny, but at ground level most are taller than a person. A single figure is walking between them, a dog racing ahead, then wheeling back to jump at the legs of its owner.

‘This must be the way they would process,’ comes a Dutch accent, female, in my headphones, separating the syllables. ‘Up from the Romans’ road, led by their priestess…’

Only a few thousand years out, not to mention one or two other errors, like there were no roads, unless you count the Ridgeway. And as for priestesses–well, I wouldn’t mind betting the boys were in charge back then, with the Neolithic equivalent of Steve leading the party. I swing the camera round–‘Great shot,’ breathes Steve, watching the image on the monitor wedged behind the seats–and pan along the course of the reconstructed Avenue, as we approach the village.

If Silbury Hill is an upturned pudding through the camera lens, Avebury is a bowl, an almost perfect circle of grassy banks and a deep ditch, surrounding a vast incomplete ring of stones. Five thousand years or so ago, those banks would have been gleaming white chalk, enclosing an outer circle of more than a hundred megaliths, with two separate inner circles, north and south, and more scattered sarsens within. Half the stones are missing now, like rotted teeth, some replaced with concrete stumps. Two roads meet near the middle, cutting the circle into quarters, and the village straggles along the east-west axis, a scatter of cottages half in and half out of the circle.

‘This is Avebury,’ calls Ed, moving up a notch into archaeological-tour-guide mode. He told me, last night, he’s doing a part-time MA in landscape archaeology with a view to getting into aerial survey. ‘Similar age to Stonehenge, but bigger–biggest stone circle in Europe.’

‘It’s like a giant crop circle, isn’t it?’ says one of the Americans. ‘D’ya think it coulda been, like, a signal to the aliens?’

Ed grunts in a way that could be roughly translated as For Chrissake, beam me up, Scotty. Down below, dots of colour between the stones mushroom into people as the camera zooms in. There’s a gathering over by Stone 78–the Bonking Stone, so-called because it’s conveniently flat–probably a handfasting. Someone is beating a small drum, arms moving rhythmically and flamboyantly, the sound inaudible above the noise of the rotors. I zoom in further, but it isn’t John.

‘We’ll make a couple of circuits,’ says Ed. ‘I’ll go in as low as I can but the National Trust run the place and they don’t like us doing this. Ready? Hang onto your hats.’ The helicopter suddenly banks steeply, throwing me forward. The camera tries to tear itself out of my hands and I feel like I’m about to be diced by the webbing straps. There’s a dizzy glimpse of wheeling megaliths between my legs.

No. No. ‘Hold on. We can’t do this.’

‘Won’t take long, Indy. The Trust won’t have time to identify us. Tell ‘em you bought the footage in. You and Steve can slo-mo the film and it’ll look gorgeous…’

I don’t care about the Trust or the fact we’re filming without a permit. We’re going round the circle widdershins. Anti-clockwise. The bad way.

Always respect the stones, girl. Sunwise, that’s the way you goes round the circle.

‘Can we go the other way?’

‘What?’

‘The other direction, I mean. Clockwise.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says Steve, witheringly. ‘You’re on the left side of the ‘copter. We have to go anti-clockwise, or you’ll be pointing the camera at the fucking sky.’

He’s right, of course. And if I press the point Ed will think I’ve gone barmy. The passengers don’t seem to be concerned that we’re going widdershins. And they’re all probably right–what does it matter if we go the wrong way round?

Except–I never have.

Call me superstitious, but it’s the way I was brought up. Respect the stones, girl, they go sunwise, so should you…

But, as with everything on this production, it seems I have no choice. Widdershins it is. I point the camera away from my dangling feet, and hit the record button.

The helicopter banks away as a dark green Land Rover with the National Trust’s acorn-and-oak-leaves logo on the side comes tearing up the Manor driveway. We managed three circuits and some great pictures, though I say it myself. Hard to go wrong, really, on a day like this–aerial shots always look fab and Ed takes the helicopter round at perfect height and speed.

‘Can we head back over Silbury again?’ asks Steve.

‘No way,’ says Ed, gaining height so rapidly that I’m becoming dizzy. ‘They’d follow along the road, and I don’t want them to identify the helicopter. Some of our work comes from the Trust and English Heritage. You’ve only got about fifty minutes left for the crop circles, anyway, unless you want to pay for another hour?’

‘Fifty minutes?’ squawks Steve. ‘We’ve been filming less than half an hour and I paid up front for two.’

‘Factor in fly-back and landing. Every minute we’re in the air counts.’

‘Oh, great. Now he tells me.’

You have to feel sorry for him. Under all that effing and blinding, Steve hasn’t a clue how the real world turns. He thinks people ought to feel honoured and privileged to be part of his amazing groundbreaking (ha ha) TV production. I ignore the bickering in my headset, and crane my head to look back at Avebury, disappearing behind us.

You’re like the rest of us, our kid, said John to me once, in his flat Brummie voice. Yo-yos. Once Avebury has hold of your string, you have to keep coming back. He’ll be in his cottage on the A4 below, smiling that twisted smile, crushing his roll-up in the ashtray. Look at Frannie. He’s right. After decades of exile, my grandmother sold up the terraced house in Chippenham, where I’d grown up with her, and moved back to Avebury. I thought she was mad. Not how John sees it. He knows why I do my damnedest to resist the pull of Avebury. Her life, Indy. Don’t fret. You need a massage. Or a healing. Drop in and I’ll do your feet.

The Marlborough Downs slide by beneath, a golden landscape sliced by chalky white trackways and dark green hedgerows. Pale grey sarsen stones lie in drifts like grubby sheep. High as we are, the camera lens makes the ground look close enough to tap with a toe. I imagine myself tossing the camera to Steve, jumping down, hiking back to Avebury…It doesn’t help that I feel guilty about Frannie because, in spite of what John says, I haven’t been back, not since Christmas, and I was away again to London on Boxing Day. Could you stay another night? she said, her eyes full of hope. I couldn’t.

Television’s full of wannabes jostling to fill any vacancy. The job at Mannix represents the first time I’ve had anything more long-term than a three-month contract, apart from a set of rip-off merchants in Leeds who took me on for twelve months’ work experience, paying expenses only. (Not much in the way of those while I slept on people’s floors and once or twice in the back of the cameraman’s car.) No wonder I have to grit my teeth, listening to Wonderboy Steve wrangle over how much it will cost to charter the ‘copter for an extra hour. I told him last week we ought to have three hours in the air, not two. But he has the senior job and the mansion flat in Hammersmith, while I’ve the commute from Hades every morning, sharing a bedroom in SW17 with two Australian girls doing the London leg of their round-the-world tour…

‘Indy!’ Mein Führer is about to issue his orders, now he’s told the pilot what’s what. ‘Is that OK with you?’

‘Is what OK with me?’

‘Weren’t you listening?’

‘Of course I was. What I meant was, you’re the director. I do what you ask me.’

‘Fine. Then do it.’

Mmm. Maybe I should have been listening. Never mind, I can wing it.

The ‘copter is banking again steeply. ‘It’s an ankh,’ says one of the American men, pointing at something below. ‘These guys built the Pyramids, you know.’

Really?

The crop circle is lovely, intricate, a series of different-sized circles centred on a long, stave-like axis–nothing like an ankh, as it happens. Inside each big circle are little circles of standing barley. It looks like a radial lay, the crop flattened from the inside of the circle outwards, which some cerealogists will tell you can only be produced by the down-thrust of a hovering UFO’s engine. We’re coming in fast towards it, the helicopter dropping down and down. Damn, the light’s changed. And I’m going to get flare off the sun–but I suppose that’s what Steve wants. Makes it look nuclear-spooky.

The sun goes behind a cloud.

‘Shit,’ explodes my headset. ‘Pull out. Ed, you’ll have to go again.’ I told you, Steve, but you wouldn’t listen, would you? Filming always takes longer than you think.

The helicopter rises in a stomach-emptying corkscrew. ‘You still want the run into the sun, Steve?’ asks Ed. ‘It’ll be out again in a second.’ Even through the headphones, his voice is a turn-on. There’s something unbearably attractive about men and machines and competence. He told me last night that piloting a plane is a technical exercise, but flying a helicopter’s an art form. I grit my teeth and remind myself that he’s married; I don’t do married men.

‘Fine,’ says Steve. ‘But lower, this time, right? I want to feel we’re just above the barley’

‘Can’t go in too low at this speed or we could get yaw.’

None of this means anything. I should have been listening earlier. ‘Don’t we need a shot from higher up?’ I ask.

‘I told you, we’ll do the low shots first. Low as you possibly can, Ed.’

The ‘copter starts its run-in again, skimming the tops of some trees and dipping down towards the barley. ‘Wooo!’ yells one of the Americans. ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning!’

It is a great shot, though, because it feels like we’re in the UFO coming in to land. The crop circle unrolls around us, immense, foreboding, the sun winking at the edge of inflated cumulus clouds as we lift again.

‘There,’ I say, pretty pleased with myself, if I’m honest. That looked professional.

‘We have to do it again,’ says Steve.

‘You’re joking. What was wrong with that?’

‘Too high.’

‘Oh, come on. Any lower and my foot’ll be scraping the ground.’

‘The shot will only work if we’re really low. Let’s go for another approach.’

‘Steve, I’m not happy about going much lower.’ Ed sounds uncertain. ‘You can get some tricky air currents round these fields at low level, not always predictable.’

‘Aw, come on,’ says the Apocalypse Now junkie. ‘Let’s do it. We ain’t scared, are we, guys?’ There’s an embarrassed silence. One of the women shifts a little in her seat. ‘Just a couple of feet lower,’ wheedles Steve. ‘I want that Gladiator shot, skimming the ears of corn. You can do it. I’ve directed moves like this before, and it’s always been fine with other pilots.’ I’m sure this is an out-and-out lie: Steve’s a shameless bullshitter and, if you ask me, they didn’t use a helicopter for the Gladiator shot.

‘O-kaaay’ Never let it be said that Ed is afraid to rise to a challenge, as I remember all too well from last night. He swings the helicopter round, and we start to drop towards the crop circle.

The shot is not so good, whatever Steve thinks. We’re so close to the ground on this pass that we’re losing all sense of the shape we’re flying over. The viewfinder makes it appear we’re travelling much faster. I tilt up to get the flare effect on the sun again, but this time the exposure’s wrong and it looks like an explosion.

‘Slow down!’ yells Steve. ‘You’re flicking it up.’

For once someone else is getting the blame instead of me. But, suddenly, we are going slower, in a horrible, stuttery kind of motion that doesn’t feel right at all. It feels like the tail of the helicopter is trying to pull away, and we’re zigzagging over the flattened barley, coming closer and closer to the ground.

Nobody apart from me seems to think anything’s wrong. The Americans are whooping, and Steve’s yelling: ‘Keep it STEADY, for Christ’s sake!’ But there’s no way I can keep this shot steady, the bungee cords bouncing and the hiccuping motion threatening to pull the camera out of my arms altogether. I take my eye from the viewfinder, and twist round in the webbing straps to tell him so. Behind me, Steve is shaking his head furiously, staring at the monitor, oblivious to everything but the picture. I twist the other way, towards the front. Ed’s shoulders are knotted and writhing under his T-shirt. I remember the feel of those shoulders moving under my fingers, but this time it’s different. He’s fighting the controls. Shit, something is wrong. The note of the engine is rising to a howl. The tail seems to be trying to wrench itself right off. The helicopter is slewing sideways over the barley like a dragonfly with a torn wing. We’re going to crash.

‘Going to be bumpy,’ yells Ed. ‘Brace!’

Now we’re starting to spin. The rotors seem to be getting louder in my head–thoom, thhooom, THHHOOMMM, until everything else is drowned in the noise of beating air and beating blood and vibrating metal. God, the camera. If that comes loose when we crash it’ll bounce around in here like a lethal beachball. I wrap my arms round it, and try to fold myself and it into a foetal curl but the straps won’t let me and everything is shaking so much, the spin dizzying, like being sucked into a whirlpool. How long is this going to take, how high off the ground are we can only be a matter of five or ten feet at most we’re still going too fast what happens when we come down will it blow like in the films the helicopter always explodes in a fireball I don’t want to–

The helicopter hits the ground, bounces, metal tearing with an awful howl, my stomach tries to jump out through my throat, then we hit earth again and the whole thing rolls over and I’m being tumbled backwards, the camera flying out of my arms OW its whipping lead catching me on the ear and I feel sick with pain, someone’s shouting FUCK FUCK FUCK in an American accent and there’s so much noise, grinding, shrieking, smashing glass–

and the sledgehammer shatters the windscreen, my mother calling no no no, blood between my fingers–

All my fault. We shouldn’t have flown widdershins round Avebury. I should have made them take out the right-hand door, and we would have flown sunwise–

And I’d have been underneath the helicopter now, as we grind over the crushed barley and the hard dry chalk, and the metal skin on the right-hand side crumples like paper–

And we stop.

Silence. Blessed silence. Nothing. It’s all stopped, apart from a humming note that must be my ears, and the odd creak and sigh and tick of settling metal. I wait for the sound of running feet through the barley, of some sign there’s someone else alive somewhere, but nothing happens, as I hang in my straps, the helicopter suspended between worlds. I’m holding my breath waiting for the real one to rush back in.

‘Goddamn.’ It’s one of the Americans, his voice a croak. ‘You OK, Ruth?’ Then Ruth starts sobbing and the world is back with a bang, the others going Jeez that was close Didya see how we got caught in like a vortex? and Was it the forcefield of the crop circle that brought us down? and Ed’s voice saying Is everyone all right, take it easy, we’re on our side, be careful how you unbuckle and there’s a groan of shifting metal and everything sways sickeningly and something falls off outside and he shouts I said be careful you fat fuck stop panicking you’ll all be able to climb out through the side door there’s plenty of time it’s only in the movies that they blow up we came in really slowly hit the ground with hardly any force

Steve is uncharacteristically quiet.

He wasn’t belted in, crouched at the back of the helicopter behind me, watching the shots unroll on the monitor. I twist in my webbing straps to see if he’s OK.

He’s lying on his back staring up at me, on the stoved-in wall of the helicopter. It looks like he’s reaching out one hand to catch the camera, which has landed beside him, its eye pointed towards him and the red light still winking, the black plastic rim of the lens smeared with thick red. Colour, angle, geometry: all fit perfectly, all come together to centre the shot on the ugly dent in the side of his forehead.




CHAPTER 2 Autumn Equinox (#uf18fbc97-e764-564b-93d6-6ca1d1406389)


‘India! Been a fair old time since you phoned. Orright? Did you get my birthday card?’

‘Sorry, John. Should’ve been in touch sooner.’

I can picture him in the kitchen of his cottage at West Overton, his feet up on the scarred pine table, setting September sun refracting through the quartz crystals that dangle at the window, making a dappled pattern of light. It’s late enough in the afternoon for his lovely ladies, the middle-aged country wives who drive over in their 4 × 4s for reflexology and a shag, to have gone home. He’ll be rolling a spliff one-handed. There’ll be a home-baked loaf on the breadboard, and maybe even a rabbit suspended by its feet from the hook on the back of the kitchen door, waiting for him to skin and stew it. John grew up in suburban Sutton Coldfield, but he embraced rural life with a vengeance when he moved to Wiltshire after my mother left him. He’s good at it too, maybe because he was once in the army.

‘So, how’s life in the big city? You running the BBC yet?’

‘Not exactly. Um, John, I’m ringing because…’

‘You OK, our kid?’

‘Yeah, fine, just–wanted to ask if you think it’s a good idea to come to Avebury.’

When I tell people I’ve known John for ever, he’ll give me that look that says, Yeah, really for ever, baby girl, because he’s a shaman and into reincarnation and all those books about how life is a spiritual journey and you’ll meet up with the same group of significant people every time round. John believes the three Rs get you through life: reflexology, reiki, and rebirthing. He and my mother were a lopsided kind of item for about five years, though even an eight-year-old could tell the devotion was one way: all his to her. Mum wasn’t the most faithful of partners. Or the best of mothers, when it comes down to it.

When John does my feet, kneading and probing and smoothing with his long reflexologist’s fingers, he says he can feel two big hard knots of anger just back from my toes. I walk on my fury.

‘Why shouldn’t you come back?’ he says. ‘Love to see you. There’s a band Sunday night at the pub in Devizes, if you don’t have to drive back early.’

‘Not just the weekend. I mean for the foreseeable future.’

‘Right.’ There’s a pause, John holding the idea up to the light at his end, turning it carefully this way and that, as he always does. ‘I thought you were involved with some big ghost-watching series for ITV.’

‘UFOs, actually, and it was for a digital channel. That’s been–cancelled.’

‘Bad luck.’

‘Yeah.’

Another pause. I can hear John taking a long, deep drag on his rollie. ‘This wouldn’t have anything to do with a fatal helicopter crash over Alton Barnes way last month, would it? Bunch of Americans and a camera crew, overloaded chopper?’

The tears have started rolling down my face. ‘Oh, John, I’ve fucked up again, I’ve really fucked up this time…’ Voice all choked and clotted. I’m beginning to shudder.

‘Hey, hold on. Way I heard it, the pilot crashed the helicopter, not you. He’ll probably lose his licence.’

‘Yes, but–’

‘No but. Listen, darling girl, you haven’t fucked up. Not then, not now. Believe me, I’m a world expert in fuck-ups. Blame Wyrd, if you like, web of fate, will of God, karma, whatever else carries us through the night, but it was not your fault!

‘You don’t understand. I killed someone. I should have held on to the camera but I didn’t and it killed him, there was this hole in his head, it was awful–I’ll never get another job in television.’ I’ve thought this through. I ponder it every night, sweating when police helicopters fly over the block of flats, while the Australian girls heave and struggle with their lovers on the other side of the thin wall. ‘Who’d want me? I’m bad luck. And, oh, God, John, he’s dead, and I didn’t like him very much but I so wish he wasn’t dead, he was twenty-three, his parents…’ I keep remembering his mother’s stricken face when they came to the office to collect his stuff. Soon as I realized who she was I went and locked myself into the loo. ‘There was this piece about him in Broadcast, saying how talented he was and stuff…’

‘Hey hey hey. You been sitting on this for a month, mithering, all by yourself in London?’

Can’t manage even a yes. John takes gulping silence for confirmation. ‘Listen to me. Get on the train. Don’t even think about driving. Come straight down. I’ll pick you up at Swindon. We can fetch your car some other time. Don’t go to Frannie’s, come to me, for tonight at least. Then tomorrow I’ll drive you back to London, load up your stuff, and…maybe it’s time you came home.’

There it is. The H word. A shudder goes through me, relief this time, though mixed with something darker. Avebury tugging at my string, reeling me back in.

Get in the van, Indy

‘Do you good to hang out at Fran’s as long as it takes.’ John’s gone into fatherly mode, he being the nearest thing I have to a dad, Lars (or whatever the Icelandic backpacker’s name was–I’ve never known) being blissfully unaware of my existence. ‘She always keeps the bed made up, she’d love to see you–there’s more room there than in that shithole of yours in London.’ The voice coming down the phone line is like the water of a hot bath. I can feel myself relaxing, letting the warmth slip over my tense skin. ‘Find a job, nothing demanding. They’re always looking for people in the caf or the shop.’ Easing it all away. I can almost smell the scented steam. ‘Give yourself time. Frannie could do with some help.’

An unexpected drip from the cold tap. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Only that she’s over eighty. Not as spry as she was. And she sold the car a couple of months ago, said she was too old to drive.’ ‘She told me she still walks a couple of miles every day’.

‘Oh, yeah, she’s up and down that path from Trusloe to the post office at Big Avebury, rain or shine. But you might see a change.’ Another long draw on the roll-up. Anyway, that’s not the point. You get your arse down here and we’ll talk everything through.’

I can feel myself getting tearful again. ‘John, I don’t know…’ Because I’m bad luck. I’m widdershins. I’m not safe to be near.

‘None of us know, Indy That’s bleedin’ life. Stop thinking so hard, and live it.’

A dusty golden harvest moon is hanging low on the horizon as I drive my rust-nibbled red Peugeot past the art-deco garage on the road into Avebury, two days later. Alban Elfid, the autumn equinox: strictly speaking, still a few days away, but who cares with a moon like that casting its magic?

Alban Elfid, said John in London this morning, as we loaded the back of his pickup for him to drive ahead with my stuff. Harvest home. Whatever you like to call it. A time for reflection and healing. I know you don’t believe any of it, Indy, but doesn’t matter, I believe it for you. You couldn’t be coming back at a better time.

The road bends, passing a high bank and an enormous diamond-shaped stone, and I’m inside the Avebury circle. It gives me a jolt every time: the stones gleaming like big scary teeth in a smile that sweeps towards the church tower rising out of the trees. My route takes me through the old cottages and the circle, and out again towards Avebury Trusloe, with its grid of twentieth-century former council houses. Poor old Frannie–she’d have loved to live in a thatched cottage in Big Avebury but, buy or let, they’re way beyond reach of her pension. So she’s in Little Avebury, as Avebury Trusloe is known locally, with the rest of the exiles.

Past the cricket field, past the National Trust car park, off the main road, and a bit of a wiggle takes me into the cul-de-sac where Frannie bought Bella Vista, a red-brick semi, after I left home four years ago. Whoever named it was incurably optimistic. It has a view mostly of identical red-brick semis and bungalows, although from the bedroom window, if someone held your ankles, you might glimpse an awe-inspiring panorama of waterlogged fields and the odd telegraph pole. Frannie adores it.

When I climb out of the car, she’s already opened the front door, standing there with a beaming smile bunching the smoker’s wrinkles that seam her cheeks. Suddenly I can’t think why I stayed away.

‘Hello, stranger,’ she says, in her gravelly voice–such a big voice, I always thought, for such a small person. ‘Your bed’s made up. Beans and bacon for tea.’

Our ritual every year when the home-grown runners were ready in the garden at Chippenham. It was the first meal she made me when Social Services left me with her in 1989, the year she took over my upbringing. I’m vegetarian, I said to her. Bollocks, she said. Eight years old? Too young to be vegetarian. You ever tried bacon? ‘Tidn’ really meat.

I give her a hug, feeling the boniness of her back through her lumpy hand-knitted cardigan. I’d swear she’s shrunk: I have to stoop. Her hair’s cut badly–why do hairdressers always hack old people’s hair as if they won’t mind the shape so long as it’s short?–but still the colour of sweet sherry. She seems to think I don’t realize she dyes it; that I never noticed her locking herself in the bathroom every six weeks, leaving clots of purplish foam clinging to the back of the tap after she’d wiped the basin and let herself out.

‘You OK?’ I say to her.

‘I’m OK. What about you?’

‘I’m OK.’ And I am, now I’m home.

I follow her along the hallway to the kitchen. Not quite so spry, maybe, but still a bounce in her step. She is OK.

Then I see the tin on the table.

‘Not fresh beans, then?’ Trying to make it casual, uneasy all the same. Fran never serves tinned vegetables she could grow herself or buy fresh.

‘Lor’ sake, India,’ she says. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’

While Frannie wields the tin opener, humming ballads from the Blitz, I go upstairs to check where John’s put my things. Mostly, it seems, in the front bedroom, where the bed’s made up for me. ‘Fran! Mind if I shift some of my things down into the dining room?’

A clatter, a muffled ‘Oh, buggeration,’ from the kitchen. That sounds like the old Frannie. She comes out into the hall. ‘You can’t, India, I’m sleeping in there.’

‘You what? I lean over the banisters. She’s standing at the foot of the stairs with her hands on her hips.

‘John moved my bed downstairs in the summer.’

‘What’s the matter with upstairs?’ A worm twists in my gut. I can hear myself sounding like a social worker jollying her along. ‘Don’t tell me you’re too old to climb stairs. John said you were down the post office showing them how to hokey-cokey the other week. Left leg in, left leg out, shaking it all about like a spring lamb.’

‘Lights,’ she says. ‘Bloody lights, can’t sleep at night because of ‘em.’

‘Your room’s at the back. No lights out there, apart from the people in the bungalows, and far as I remember their average age is ninety-two. Anyway, you could’ve moved into the other bedroom. I don’t mind swapping.’

There’s a guilty but defiant look on her face. ‘Buggerin’ lights. Keep me awake. Rather be down here.’

‘What brought you back?’ she asks over supper.

‘Bored with London.’ Steve’s staring eyes, which a part of me never stops seeing, accuse me of cowardice, as well as murder, but I can’t burden her with the truth. ‘And to be honest, Fran, I don’t think I’m getting anywhere in television. You need connections, or luck, or mega-talent, preferably all three, and I haven’t any of those.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she says briskly, the way she always does. ‘You’re a clever girl, India. Don’t know where you got it from, but you are. Anyway, you stay here long as you want. John said you needed a good rest.’

‘I’ll find a job.’ I take hold of her hand as she reaches for her glass of water. Her knobbly fingers are cold between my warm ones. ‘Can’t ask you to support me.’

‘You’ve no idea what money I got.’ She’s grinning.

‘Millions, probably, all under the mattress. I don’t care. I’m not going to sponge off you.’

‘Well, that’s a relief. Can I drink my glass of water now?’

I let go of her hand reluctantly. Millions under the mattress wouldn’t compensate if I lost Fran. Then something comes to me out of nowhere.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask,’ I say.

Frannie pauses with the glass halfway to her lips. There’s a wary expression in her eyes. ‘Yes?’

‘Grandad.’

The story I’ve been told is that Grandad’s plane fell out of the sky a few months before my mother was born. But Fran has never talked about him, and the impression grew, during childhood, that it was better not to ask: the briefest of answers would escape through tight lips. Now I’m all too conscious that one day the opportunity to find out more will be gone for ever.

‘Which one?’ Her eyes have slid away from mine, and she’s put down the water glass to fiddle with a bean that has escaped onto the tablecloth. Have I upset her? Surely not, he died more than sixty years ago. Then the weirdness of her response hits me.

‘What d’you mean, which one? You never met my father, let alone his family’

‘Course I didn’t. No bloody idea about his lot. Could all’ve bin in Reykjavik prison far as I’d know. Your mother had terrible taste in men. Family trait, mind.’

I take this to be a reference to my unfortunate affair with the tutor at uni, which ended in an abrupt return to Chippenham and floods of tears. Although it brought the near implosion of my degree, Fran was amazingly non-judgemental. I wondered if she’d been through something similar when she was young, though I never liked to ask. She’d have told me not to be nosy, same as she always did if I asked anything that struck her as invasive. Personal information, in Fran’s book, is something to be offered, if you’re lucky, rather than extracted.

‘I mean your husband,’ I say, knowing I’m crossing a boundary from the uneasy look on her face. ‘What was his name? David?’ I’d seen his photograph once, when I was a kid and nosing through the drawers of Fran’s dressing-table. It was in a polished rosewood box, Fran’s name engraved on the lid, that must once have contained a watercolour set, though its pans were empty and scrubbed clean. Now it held only a faded watercolour sketch of the stone circle, seen through the window of one of the cottages, an early sun lengthening the shadows of the stones, and Grandad’s picture. Even with the ageing parted-and-slicked-back hairstyle men affected in the 1940s, he seemed hardly more than a boy: a Brylcreemed cowlick falling over his forehead, wide, heavy-lidded eyes, and a cheeky grin. When I’d asked whose photo it was, Fran had been surprisingly curt.

Lovely chap. Navigator in the RAE Hardly trained, then he was killed. Long time ago, though.

Killed on a bombing raid?

A flicker of impatience around her mouth. On a mission, she said firmly. Her lips pursed.

So…

So that was it. Sad, but it happened a lot in the war. Had to get used to it. Frannie had eyes like knives. That’s why I don’t talk about ‘im, easier not to, see?

Her eyes have that same steely flash now. ‘Davey,’ she says. ‘That was his name.’

‘Where’s he buried? You never–’

‘He in’t buried. He’s with what was left of his aeroplane, ashes mostly. There’s a headstone to him in Yatesbury churchyard.’

This is so much more than I’ve gleaned previously that it almost drives the gruesome picture of Grandad’s cindered remains out of my head. ‘Yatesbury? That’s–’

‘Coupla miles away, yes.’

‘So…’

‘India,’ she says, ‘not tonight. I’m bone tired. Don’t mind if I crawl off to bed, do you?’ Her supper is only half finished.

‘Didn’t mean to upset you.’ I take her hand again.

‘You didn’t. All a long time ago. But I don’t like digging them days up, bad time for everyone.’ She pulls her fingers out of my grasp, and stands up, leaning on the table to balance herself. ‘Can I leave you with the washing-up?’

The line of light under Frannie’s door winks out as I sit at the kitchen table after supper, the washing-up done, turning the stem of my wineglass between my fingers, seeing how the overhead light slides inside it and sparkles. My mother had a bag of polished stones she took everywhere, arranging them some nights in a circle on the fold-down table in our travellers’ van. My memory crystals, she’d say. The clear oily one with a rainbow in its heart is a Herkimer diamond. It can remember things for you: you pour thoughts into it and retrieve them later. That milky pink-banded crystal–agate–is layered, like your mind: it helps you tease out memories that are laid underneath each other. The blue boji stone is for healing hurtful ones. This is phantom quartz–see how there’s another crystal inside it, a ghost crystal? It reveals what you’ve forgotten. And that black one’s onyx, a stone for secrets. It will soak up your memories, the dark ones you want to hide.

I’ve managed to forget almost everything that led up to the moment of the crash. What time we took off, how long we were up there, what I filmed, Steve’s instructions in my headset. I hardly even remember the last part, the moment when the helicopter started to spin, the sounds of grinding and tearing as it skidded on its side over the barley field. But I do remember that we spun widdershins. And Steve’s eyes. I don’t think I’ll ever succeed in blanking out Steve’s dead eyes.

Through the party wall comes the thud thud thud of the neighbours’ stereo. It’s chilly: the central heating must have gone off, though it’s not yet ten. The kitchen’s never warm: draughts sneak through its seams from the wind-raked fields. The previous owners were into a fatal pairing of acronyms, DIY and MFI, and the cupboards look very nice, cream Shaker style with big brown doorknobs, but close up, everything’s crooked. The extractor fan in the cooker hood hasn’t worked since the year zero, and if you turn on the grill, smoke pours out of the oven. Frannie hasn’t done a thing to the place in the four years she’s been here.

By my elbow, my mobile phone trills once. A text:

U ever going 2 call me back?

No. My thumbs work furiously. Please leave me alone.

As I come out of the bathroom after cleaning my teeth, the strangeness of Fran’s reluctance to sleep upstairs strikes me. In her old room at the back the bed is stripped, the dressing-table layered with dust, nothing on the floor except my own boxes of stuff. The wardrobe is empty, apart from a cardboard poster tube leaning against the back. I shut the mirrored door again quickly. I know what’s in there: my bloody mother, making an exhibition of herself.

All that can be seen in the blackness of the uncurtained window is my own reflection, backlit by a dingy forty-watt bulb on the landing. I press my nose right up to the glass. Lights, buggerin lights. What was that all about? The bungalows behind are already dark. The light from our bathroom falls on the square of mole-riddled lawn that passes for Frannie’s garden, neglected in a way she would never have tolerated only a year or so ago. In the distance, towards Windmill Hill, there’s a single fuzzy gleam that must be one of the Bray Street cottages. Otherwise the night is a creepy sort of void.

The emptiness of Steve’s stare comes back to me. Slowly, the picture that’s burnt into the back of my head is changing. Now one eye’s fixed on me, the other off beam and staring towards the front of the helicopter. His pupils are huge, both as bleak and black and empty as the night.




CHAPTER 3 (#uf18fbc97-e764-564b-93d6-6ca1d1406389)


Next morning everything seems brighter. Frannie has her hat on, ready to stump off to church with a sunny grin on her face, carrying two cans of carrot soup as her harvest offering.

‘Off to do good works?’

‘Being good in’t what takes a body to church. You don’t want to come?’ Dying to show me off to her friends. My granddaughter, works in telly…

‘I’d prefer to get straight first. Unpack, maybe go for a walk. Tell you what, I’ll stroll with you to Big Avebury’

It’s glorious weather: deep blue sky, and the beech leaves shivering in a gentle wind, the first loving nip of autumn. The stones have already snagged the day’s first minibus-load of visiting hippies, who are wandering through the inner circle behind the Methodist chapel-cum-tourist office. Another half-dozen people are marching fat-tyred pushchairs round the top of the banks. Frannie meets one of her friends in the high street, and the pair of them totter through the churchyard together to St James’s. I sit on the bench by the lich-gate, to check the map for the route of my walk. A ragged ‘We plough the fields and scatter…’ floats from the church as I set off.

It takes me nearly half an hour from Avebury at a brisk clip. The fields either side of the broad, level track are indeed ploughed, greyish-white flint scattered across the brown earth. I’m ever hopeful that one day I’ll spot a prehistoric stone arrowhead, a perfect leaf shape, lying on the surface, and every so often something catches my eye–disappointingly, when I stoop to check, always a leaf.

Yatesbury boasted an airfield used during the First and Second World Wars, mostly for training. The RAF closed the base some years ago, and microlights fly out of there now. The church, crouched like a grey rabbit among trees, is silent; Sunday services must rotate from parish to parish. Ancient yews shade the path to its door. An old box tomb leans at an angle defying the laws of geometry. The grass between the graves hasn’t been cut for a while, and the hems of my trousers are soon soaked.

It isn’t difficult to find Grandad’s memorial. At the far end of the churchyard there are several rows of white stones with RAF insignia. Young men’s graves, blank tablets of unlived lives. Like Steve’s. For a moment, I have a creepy sensation of him here too, behind me, sitting with his back against the box tomb watching me as I walk slowly along the ranks of headstones.

Grandad is about halfway along the third row–at least, I assume this is Grandad, because he’s the only Davey or David among the Second World War graves. David Fergusson. Stupidly, I’d been expecting his surname to be Robinson, even though I knew that was Fran’s family name. Either she’d reverted to her maiden name or maybe she’s coy about him because they were never married. No big deal now, but I suppose she’d have wanted to keep it quiet then.

Blackbirds chirp and commute from yew trees to hedge. Autumn sunlight glints on dewy cobwebs slung between the headstones. Davey’s is simple: his name, his age–twenty-four, making him, when he died, a year younger than I am–the date of his death, the words In loving memory. How little there is left to know of a person, then: not even his birth date. I didn’t bring flowers, and I’m sorry for that now. My eyes fill as I imagine what it must have been like for Fran, already pregnant, hearing the news that her baby’s father had been killed, somewhere over England, or France, or Germany. Not even a body to bring home and bury. Then years of coping alone, a widow in her early twenties (or pretending to be), never marrying, earning a living as a clerical assistant in a meat-processing plant, struggling to bring up a wild-child daughter who’d never known her dad…

The daughter. A smoky crystal twists, turns to the light, revealing a pale ghost of itself inside. Something I’d almost forgotten.

My mother’s birth date. Margaret was born in October 1945.

Davey Fergusson was killed in August 1942.




CHAPTER 4 (#uf18fbc97-e764-564b-93d6-6ca1d1406389)


Coming out of St James’s, Carrie Harper asks me if I want to have a bite of lunch with her and her sister. They always have a roast on Sundays. No, I say, my granddaughter’s home now. She works for the telly, you know.

We stand there gossiping, where Percy Lawes used to set up his cine-camera back in the thirties and film us coming out of church, the women showing off their new babies and everybody wearing a hat, even us young girls. A nippy little wind gets up, rattling the dead flowers that need to be cleared from the headstones. It’s a while since I took some to Mam’s grave. Thinking of her, suddenly I’m in that place where all the pathways of time meet and cross and twist round on each other, like the moonlit paths between the box hedges in the Manor garden. My mouth stops working in the middle of whatever it was saying.

‘You all right, Fran?’ asks Carrie.

I give myself a good shake. ‘Goose walked over.’

‘You’re a long way from the boneyard yet, Frances Robinson,’ says Carrie.

But I don’t know about that. Seems to me I never left the bone-yard from that day over in Yatesbury when I found him leaning on the box tomb. Seems to me there’s secrets under stones: near half the circle still buried, and better it should stay that way, especially where India’s concerned. But now there’s people nosing round digging where they shouldn’t. Them lights on Windmill Hill–there’s someone up there, searching, night after night. They in’t found nothing yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Sometimes I think I knows exactly who it is up there. It’s him, come back again, looking for what’s his.

Wherever you go, Heartbreaker, he said, you take me with you.




PART TWO Imbolc (#ulink_0b413e45-5324-58a8-9a34-f01802e51034)


Like all prehistoric landscapes, Avebury is as remarkable for what you can’t see as what you can. Apart from what Alexander Keiller started to reconstruct in the 1930s–a stone circle originally comprising about a hundred megaliths, some further stone settings within, the whole enclosed within a bank and a ditch, and the West Kennet avenue sweeping southwards from it–a number of other features in the landscape hint at what must have been a vast complex of monuments in the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age: long barrows, round barrows, and parch marks suggestive of other stone or timber circles, palisades and enclosures. A second avenue winds westwards, towards Beckhampton. A causewayed enclosure, one of the earliest types of Neolithic earthworks, sits atop Windmill Hill.

The past is a story we tell ourselves. There can be no certainties, only surmise. At the start of February, new-age pagans gather in the henge to celebrate the old Celtic festival of Imbolc. In the Middle Ages, people would have met in the village’s Anglo-Saxon church, St James’s, on the same date, and called it Candlemas. Both are festivals of light, of new beginnings: for Christians, Jesus lighting a candle in a dark world; for the pagan Celts a celebration of the first signs of spring penetrating the barren land, the first snowdrop, the first fat lamb suckling at its mother’s teat. Do the origins of such festivals go right back to the first farmers who built the stone circle?

Dr Martin Ekwall, A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury, Hackpen Press




CHAPTER 5 Candlemas (#ulink_7e165af3-a879-5941-a369-ee6ad8772965)


There’s a funny thing about Avebury: can’t rely on mobile phones working here. But it doesn’t stop me trying, faith in technology against all the odds. Coming back down the high street from the post office, I thumb out a text to John to tell him I’d like my feet done this afternoon. On the edge of the stone circle, along from the shop that sells crystals and crop-circle books, you can sometimes pick up a ghost of a signal, but today the message won’t go. There are no bars at all on the display and the little blue screen says searching. Top marks to Nokia for encapsulating the human condition.

The closed sign is still in place on the door of the caf in the courtyard between the barns. As I shake the rain off my umbrella, Corey comes bustling out of the kitchen, looking like she’s been shrink-wrapped in her National Trust T-shirt, apron wound double over Barbie-doll hips.

‘They want to see you in the office. Right away.’

Ouch. Am I up to this? Was sure I didn’t drink that much last night, but my eyeballs seem to have been sanded, then glued into place.

‘What about?’

‘How should I know?’ She glances at the clock on the wall. The shine off the countertop makes my head hurt. ‘You look a bit rough. And, for God’s sake, pin your hair up properly before we have customers in. That red’s, er…unusual.’ The nozzles of the espresso machine are already gleaming because I cleaned them yesterday afternoon when we closed up, but Corey makes a big thing of wiping and polishing each one, while I pull up the hood of my jacket again to stop the sparkle searing my eyes.

‘When you come back, better tackle the toilets.’

‘I did them yesterday.’

‘So do them again.’

‘There’s a limit to how much Toilet Duck a girl can sniff.’

‘Go.’ She stares at my hair again. ‘What do they call that colour? Blood Orange?’

A gust of freezing rain hits me in the face as I open the door again. The puddles are pitted like beaten metal, reflecting a leaden February sky. A couple of Druids are hanging around outside the Keiller museum, wearing donkey jackets over their white robes, cheeks purple with cold above their greying beards. Deep in conversation about some druidy business, they don’t give me a second glance. Under racing clouds, the limes in the long avenue are threshing wildly as I walk up to the National Trust offices. Everything today is restless movement, and I’m twitching too, nervy as the snowdrops that shiver and ripple in the wind under the trees, hoping this could be about my application for the temporary job of assistant estate warden.

The offices are housed in what was once the Manor’s indoor racquets court, with a mellow but utterly fake Georgian faade. Inside, a row of damp boots stands on the mat by the door. At the notice board, two volunteers, gender indeterminate, mummy-wrapped in layers of woollies and waterproofs and multi-coloured knitted hippie hats, waist-length hair on both, are scrutinizing the rota for checking the public conveniences on the high street.

At your average National Trust property, gentle old ladies and garrulous retired gentlemen volunteer as room stewards. At Avebury, an army of local pagans has been co-opted and given bin-bags, sweatshirts and a suitably spiritual title–the Guardians. They police the activities of their fellow pagans, who persist in leaving offerings around the stone circle. Next to the toilet rota is pinned a phases-of-the-moon chart. There is a connection: pagan festivals linked to the moon mean the lavvies get more use.

‘Told you Cernunnos protected us.’ One of the volunteers examines its partner’s Gore-Texed shoulder while I’m wrestling with my wellies. ‘Your coat’s bone dry. It was tipping down while we crossed the circle, but not a drop landed on us.’ A waft of mandarin essential oil (for alertness) hits my nose as I pad past them on stockinged feet into the main office.

The estate wardens’ desks are a wasteland of empty coffee mugs and neglected paperwork. On the far side of the room, Lilian’s head is down, stabbing fingers telling her keyboard what’s what. She looks up and gives me a quick nod. ‘He’s expecting you.’ The property administrator’s door is open.

Michael’s at his desk, immaculately turned out in a tweedy country-gent-ish sort of way, jacket, shirt collar peeping over the crew neck of a bobble-free cashmere sweater, which he must shave along with his chin every morning. Everybody else pads about indoors in socks, but he’s in leather brogues, a spare pair he keeps at the office to avoid muddying them, polished to military brilliance. Photos of wife, children and a grinning black Labrador are aligned just so on the desktop. The distance between them, determined by some golden architectural mean, hasn’t varied so much as a nanometre since I first came in September to ask for a job.

He’s on the phone. It must be to Head Office, because his voice is perfectly polite but his face is all screwed up. ‘First-aid kits, right,’ he’s saying. ‘Of course we check them. Yes, regularly. But, come on, it’s February. There isn’t much call for Wasp-Eze in February.’ He waves to me to sit down. I haul a chair over and park it on the opposite side of the vast desk. His paperwork isn’t as organized as his photos. The filing trays threaten to avalanche, and the area around the phone is littered with yellow Post-it notes. One of them probably refers to me, but it’s hard to read upside-down.

‘I take your point,’ Michael continues. ‘Yes, it’s windy here too. I agree, we don’t want any accidents. I’ll get a warden onto it right away. Though Graham’s up to his eyes. Have you looked at the possibility of cover to replace Morag?…Right. See you at the meeting next week.’ He puts the phone down, not gently, and rubs his eyes. ‘Bloody-Health-and-Safety.’ In Michael’s mouth it has contemptuous capitals and hyphens. ‘It gets more ridiculous every day. I’m an architectural historian. Checking first-aid kits every six months is a waste of my…’ Finally, he works out who I am. ‘India. Of course. Yes, I asked you to come over, didn’t I?’

‘Corey said…’

‘Corey? Oh, yes, at the caf…’ He stares out of the window, brown eyes unfocused. ‘You didn’t see any strange Druids hanging about by the museum, did you? Strange, that is, in the sense of not the local ones we know and love.’

‘There were a couple of men in frocks, looking cold.’

‘Damn.’ He lifts a couple of piles of paper. ‘Damn, damn. Got a letter here somewhere from some bloody Reclaim-the-Ancient-Dead group. They want us to give our skeletons back to the Druids. Not that they came from them in the first place, said skeletons being five thousand years old and modern druidism going back roughly two hundred, at a generous estimate.’

‘They wouldn’t say that.’

He stops quarrying the paper mountain, and gives me a surprised look. ‘You’re not a pagan, are you?’ I shake my head, and he resumes the search. ‘Thank God. Bane of my bloody life. Give me a nice quiet Palladian mansion for my next job, where all I’ve got to worry about is room stewards dropping dead of old age. You didn’t hear that, by the way. I hugely respect our Druid brethren, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to hand over our skeletons. Hang on a minute…’ He reaches for a pair of half-moon glasses. ‘Mustn’t forget the tree survey. Oh, Lordy, supposed to be done by next Friday. Bloody nightmare being short a warden…’ He gets up and strides over to the door. ‘Lilian! Tree survey! Get Graham onto it, will you? And when did we last check the first-aid kits?’ Lilian’s reply is inaudible. ‘What do you mean, not in living memory? Fix it, woman.’

He sits down behind the desk again and stares. ‘Now, India. Am I right in remembering you used to make television programmes?’

‘Well…’ Can’t help it, I drop my eyes. There’s a hole in the toe of my sock. I cover it quickly with the other foot while Michael’s gleaming brogues accuse me of fudge, if not an outright fib: perhaps I was a little liberal with the facts on my CV. I conquer the urge to wriggle and force myself to meet his eye.

‘“Well” meaning what exactly?’

‘I was mostly only a runner and a researcher.’

‘That’ll do. Bloody hell, where’s the bit of paper? I’ve had a request from a TV company about filming–here it is. They’ve unearthed some old cine footage of the excavations in the thirties, and want to do a programme about Alexander Keiller.’

‘The ones who are holding a meeting at the Red Lion next week? I saw the notice outside the post office. “Were you in Avebury in 1938?”’

‘Your grandmother was here then, wasn’t she?’ asks Michael. ‘How is she, by the way?’

‘Not too bad.’ I really mean not too weird, but it’s complicated to explain.

‘Anyway, this media rabble wants access to the archive. I cast an eye over what we have, and it needs a tidy, in my opinion. I’m reluctant to let TV people loose in there. Would you mind sorting the box files at some point, instead of beating the bounds with Graham?’

This is a blow, because I’ve only recently managed to talk Michael into letting me do the odd day helping the estate wardens, who are soon to become even more short-handed when one of them disappears on maternity leave. Four months’ working part-time in the caf and I’m bored rigid. I’m determined to prove I’m wasted wiping tables but, alas, my BA in creative studies (described on the CV as an upper second, not altogether accurately) doesn’t seem to impress. On the other hand, with the weather so bad, browsing in a cosy archive trumps litter-picking soggy plastic bags any day, not to mention the pervasive odour of Graham’s socks. So I muster a grateful smile. ‘Be delighted.’

‘Rightio.’ Michael stands up, anxious to usher me out before I start plaguing him again for a full-time job. ‘Thought it’d be up your street. And ask your gran what she remembers of AK. They don’t make archaeologists like him today. Shame he never finished what he started.’

As things are still quiet in the caf, Corey sends me to exercise my toilet-cleaning expertise in the education-centre lavatories behind the Barn Museum. We’ve been visited this morning by a party of schoolkids from Salisbury. Half of them forgot to pull the chain, and one was sick in the Gents.

Still, snowdrops under lime trees. Life returns to the frozen land. I can’t help my heart beating a little faster at the thought of a TV crew turning up. It sets ideas buzzing in my head. On the way to fetch a fresh bottle of disinfectant, I check out the display in the Barn Museum on Alexander Keiller’s life, and help myself to a couple of leaflets to refresh my memory of the story every Avebury resident knows: how the Marmalade King bought himself a village and a stone circle.

Mop into bucket, wring it on the squeezer, shake it aloft like a ritual staff, and go cantering sunwise round the Gents bestowing my blessed droplets of disinfectant on the tiles.

Corey cashes up early. The caf has been virtually empty the whole afternoon, the weather deterring all but the hardiest stone-huggers. But the day has saved its best till last. The rain has blown over and the Downs are washed in clear light. Setting out for John’s, I clip the iPod on my belt, and Dreadzone’s ‘Little Britain’ crashes into my ears.

A gust of wind conjures a vortex of dead leaves. A couple of sheep grazing among the stones lift their heads and stare at me, amazed as sheep always are at the sight of humans: life, Jim, but not as we know it. On the high street a few raw-fingered tourists are trying to capture the gap-toothed grin of the circle on their mobiles. There’s said to be a stone buried under the metalled road where I’m walking. Whenever I pass over it, I feel a little shiver, crossing a boundary.

Better respect the stones, girl…

Frannie would tell me stories about growing up in Avebury, playing among the stones. Overgrown, then, hidden among trees and bushes. Loved them stones, we did, but we didn’t think they was anything special, not until…She brought me here to show me where her parents’ guesthouse had been, now an empty green space. Pointing down the high street. Baker’s there. Butcher’s further on, used to slaughter ‘is own meat. That white cottage was the forge. Blacksmith was called Mr Paradise. Sam Pratt, he were the saddler…Wouldn’ believe it today, would you? Nothin’ but a post office, everythin’ else for bloomin’ tourists. Eyes narrowed against the smoke from her cigarette, searching for the lost village, wishing it back. Could imagine ‘em coming along the high street now, ‘cept they never comes back, do they? Nineteen twenties, thirties, when I were a little girl–I tell ‘ee, India, thic there times was magic. Frannie tried to speak what she called ‘nicely’, but Wiltshire dialect crept in whenever she talked about the past. No, they never comes back, that’s for sure. Not the ones you want to, anyway.

She took me to the museum, and showed me the skeleton of the little boy that had been dug up at Windmill Hill, in the 1920s, with his big, misshapen skull. She patted the top of his glass case, and said, You’m still here, then, Charlie. There was a funny smile on her face, the muscles around her mouth twitching, her jaw grinding and wobbling as if her false teeth had worked loose.

Keiller, though…did she ever talk about Keiller? She must have mentioned him–you couldn’t talk about the village in the 1930s without reference to what he did to it, but I don’t remember her banging on about him the way everyone does here, with that mixture of admiration and loathing usually reserved for figures such as Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher and Bill Gates.

I cross the main road on the bend by the Red Lion and follow Green Street through the stones, past the gap in the houses where Frannie’s old home stood. The lane continues beyond the circle, eventually petering out to become a white scar on the flank of the hill: the old coach road from London to Bath, now a chalky, rutted bridleway, known as the Herepath. Thousands of years ago, it might have been another ceremonial route into Avebury. Some people think that since there were stone avenues to south and west of the circle, perhaps rows of stones ran east and northwards too. John swears that by dowsing in the fields he’s found evidence of buried megaliths beside the main road to Swindon.

The skyline is dotted with spiny beech hangers–the Hedgehogs, Wiltshire people call them–planted over ancient round barrows. The Ridgeway, a track even older, runs along the top of the Downs. When dusk gathers, it can feel like the loneliest place in the world up there, peopled only by ghosts.

A small red car with European plates is parked on the verge at Tolemac–the stretch of the lane I like least. The neat, wedge-shaped plantation of pine, ash, wild cherry and beech holds a particular set of memories from my own childhood and still gives me the jitters, all these years later. Bare twigs scrape against each other like dry, bony fingers. This afternoon woodsmoke is in the air: someone’s camping under the trees.

woodsmoke overlaid with the acrid smell of burning plastic, a van on fire, branches above it catching light. A cut on my hand, blood beginning to ooze between my small fingers…

Most of my itinerant childhood is a blur: odd moments caught in the memory crystals. My mother Margaret–Meg to her friends, but always Margaret to me–never had a job, unless you count dancing on stage with Angelfeather at free festivals. In winter we lived on benefits in Bristol, but in summer we followed the band from festival to festival in her decommissioned ambulance, painted purple. Stonehenge, Glastonbury, Deeply Vale, Inglestone Common; we wandered through Wales and stayed in tepees, we joined the women at Greenham and slept under plastic benders. And in 1989, the year they call the Second Summer of Love, we camped in Tolemac: our last summer together. I was eight. That year the ambulance had been replaced by a British Telecom van with windows hacked out of its sides and a door at the back. Because John hadn’t sealed the glass properly, everything leaked if it rained.

The first thing Margaret always did when we arrived at a new place was collect up her crystals, which always fell off wherever she’d put them and rolled around when we were travelling, and arrange them in their proper places. Black tourmaline outside the door, for protection and geopathic stress, in case she’d accidentally parked on a dodgy ley-line. Citrine in the money corner, behind the passenger seat, to dispel negativity and in the hope we might actually make some dosh that summer. Rose quartz behind the driver’s seat, in the equally vain hope that Margaret would find love. The irony was that she could have had love, if only she could have brought herself to accept it, from John. He’d done her van for her but she wouldn’t let him sleep in it with us: he was camping twenty yards away under his old green army poncho, like a faithful dog forced to sleep outside in its kennel. Then Margaret would go out and gather wild flowers to stick in a glass of water on the fold-down table. They’d be shrivelled and wilting by nightfall, but she always convinced herself they’d survive.

‘There,’ she’d say, every time when she finished these rituals. ‘Home.’

Behind me the red car starts up, its engine sounding like an old sewing-machine. I step off the road to give them room to pass, but it slows to a halt and the driver, a girl with hair chopped in a lank brown bob, winds down the window. She’s wearing an expensive mohair sweater. Not one of the campers, then. ‘Excuse me. This road takes us to Marlborough?’ Her accent is Germanic.

‘I’m afraid not. It ends up ahead.’

‘It goes to the Ridgeway, no? It shows it on our map.’

‘You can’t drive the Ridgeway. It’s not allowed. Anyway, you’d never make it without a four-wheel-drive. There’s a farmyard further on where you can turn.’

Her thin olive-skinned face settles into petulant disappointment as she slams the car into gear. The Road Less Travelled turns out to be a No Through Road. Isn’t it always the way? I get a fleeting memory of Margaret’s face the day Social Services took me to Frannie’s. The odd thing is, I remember there being tears in her eyes. Perhaps I’m imagining it, because I’ve always assumed it was a relief to her to be rid of me.

You’re too hard on her, Indy, says John.

The red car comes chugging back with part of the hedgerow attached to its bumpers. I send Margaret’s crocodile tears away with it, pffft, evaporating into the exhaust gases that hang on the frosty air, then wish I could call them back, make the tears real, make her real too. Sometimes I find it hard to recall what she even looked like.

High on the Herepath, the air is exhilarating. Everything is still crisp and clear, a last flush of brilliance before night, though light will already be fading in the fields below. The sun’s dropping fast, an egg-yolk stain seeping up from behind Waden Hill to meet it. I sit down on a sarsen. This one, bum-freezingly cold through my jeans, lives up to its geological past: a stone shaped and tumbled by ice sheets. Sheep baa somewhere below, as a farmer drives the flock into another field. Sound carries weirdly up here, especially on frosty air. John says there are places on the Ridgeway where you can hear voices from within the stone circle itself: Neolithic landscaping was about sound as well as space.

Some way off something splashes, startling me: a boot, maybe, in one of the water-filled ruts on the old chalk track. The gate at the top of the Herepath clicks as someone comes off the Ridgeway. There’s a whistle, and a dog comes racing across the field, like Whip used to when I called him.

He was my dog when I was small, but I lost him at the Battle of the Beanfield. Another of the iconic moments of Alternative History: 1985. I don’t really remember it. It’s a story I’ve been told, caught in crystal. We were among a convoy of a hundred and forty travellers’ vans on the way to Stonehenge, but the police put up a roadblock. Margaret drove after some of the other vans crashing through the hedge into a beanfield. And then it was like some Hieronymus Bosch nightmare, says John, smoke and rage and contorted faces, people slipping in mud and blood, Whip and the other travellers’ dogs barking, screams, moans. Somebody with dreadlocks making a weird ululating noise. Overhead, the dogged whump whump whump of helicopter rotors. John says Margaret was holding me in her arms, but still the police kept on coming, truncheons raised, still they hit her on the shoulder as she turned away to protect me. There’s a picture of John, which was in the newspaper, looking ridiculously young, blood running out of his hair and down his face into his beard, being led away by policemen in riot helmets, made faceless by sunlight reflecting off their Perspex masks. I never saw Whip again. The travellers’ dogs were taken away by the police and put down.

I turn round in time to see the walker bending to pat his dog, then he strides off again down the hill towards me, the animal running ahead at full stretch, leaping the puddles. It’s some sort of small hunting dog, more solidly built than Whip was, with a shaggier coat. It stops a metre short of me, and stares, panting, mouth half open like it’s never seen a girl sitting on a sarsen before.

‘Here, boy.’ I rub my fingers together. It takes a step forward, quivering with curiosity, as its owner follows it towards me.

A dark woollen trilby jammed over light brown corkscrew curls, a long grey scarf wrapped round his neck, a blush of cold on the smooth-skinned cheeks: it makes him look hardly more than a boy, though he’s probably early-to mid-twenties. The cool eyes, half hidden under the tangled fringe, hold mine for a moment, then slide away, gone before I can get out a ‘good evening’. He carries on down the hill towards Avebury. Strong shoulders, hands tucked into the pockets of a brown fleece jacket, legs in mud-spattered skinny jeans. He takes a hand out of his pocket–no gloves–and snaps his fingers. The dog swivels its head after its master, looks back at me, blinks, then races off to follow him.

Reluctantly, I clamber to my feet and start to walk up to the Ridgeway, turning to catch a last glimpse of the twilight walker before he disappears below the curve of the slope. He’s taking the steep, slippy bit fast, with a polka-ish sideways gait like he’s scree-running. Perfect balance. Perfect arse. You have to admire.

John’s home below Overton Hill is not pretty by Wiltshire-cottage standards: instead of thatch and sarsen, it’s square-built of plain red brick, with a tiled roof. Living room downstairs, with a kitchen at the back, like an afterthought; two small bedrooms and a minuscule bathroom upstairs. Seventy years ago, when Fran was a girl, a farm worker and his wife would have brought up half a dozen children here.

I’m half expecting John not to be in, but the door opens almost immediately when I knock. In the living room, the stool he uses for reflexology sessions is drawn up to the sofa, and there’s a green silk scarf on the floor. ‘You haven’t got company?’

John bends down to pick it up. ‘She does that every time. Leaves something so she’s an excuse to pop in and collect it.’

‘Thinking she might catch you at it with one of your other clients?’

He grins. ‘Does make me nervous. Sit down, kettle’s on the stove.’ He disappears into the kitchen, and I settle myself in front of a cheerful fire, checking first that no other female client has left a memento, like a pair of knickers stuffed behind the sofa cushions. In the corner of the room, leather-skinned drums are stacked on top of each other, next to a shelf full of drumming cassettes and books with beefy, muscular titles like The Way of the Shaman, Recognizing Your Power Animal, and Psychic Self-Defence.

‘How’s Frannie?’ he calls from the kitchen.

‘Still refusing to utter another word about Grandad.’

Every time I’ve tried to raise the subject, her eyes fill with tears and her mouth turns down. When I questioned her after seeing the date on Davey Fergusson’s headstone, last autumn, her response was to suggest I’d found the wrong grave marker. Then she told me I’d misremembered Margaret’s birthday. Your mother was always coy about her age, she said.

This was true, but there’s coy and there’s eye-wateringly unbelievable. Margaret liked people to think she was still in her thirties long after she’d hit the big four-oh, but I’m certain I’ve seen 1945 written down. I’d had her passport, once, with a whole parcel of other stuff that had been returned to us after she died in Goa, when I was thirteen–a stupid accident, falling off the side of a stage. That was so Margaret it can make me smile now: she was graceful when she danced, but clumsy in every other setting. I burned everything on a ceremonial pyre. Now I wish I hadn’t.

John returns with mugs of tea. ‘You should stop nagging her. Frannie’ll tell you in her own time–if there’s anything to tell. She OK otherwise?’

‘Fine, I think. Except…’ I stir mine vigorously, then remember I promised myself I’d cut out sugar this week. ‘Except she keeps having air-hostess moments.’

‘Having what? John, in the middle of stoking the fire with another log, stops and turns round. ‘Air hostess?’

‘Calm, polite, smiling, but sort of empty’ I’m groping for words to describe the indescribable, but deep down, very deep down, worrying that it is describable, with some horrible medical term like dementia. ‘I’m not sure if it’s to stop me pestering her about the past, or her way of trying to conceal when she gets confused. You know how air hostesses delete part of their personality. “Please fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, a little turbulence is not any cause for concern.’”

‘Know what I think?’ John kicks the reflexology stool into place between us as makeshift coffee-table, and settles himself in the armchair. ‘Could be TIA.’

‘That some sort of airline?’

‘A mini-stroke. When I was nursing, we used to come across it all the time.’ After he left the army, with a bad case of combat stress, one of John’s jobs was in a geriatric nursing home in Bristol. ‘You find them on the floor, all in a tizz, can’t remember what happened, how long they’ve been there. No paralysis, none of the obvious symptoms of stroke, but it wipes part of their memory. Very common.’

‘You think that has anything to do with not wanting to talk about my grandfather? Like she really can’t remember?’ Relief is sluicing through me. At least John didn’t suggest Alzheimer’s. Maybe it won’t become any worse.

‘Who knows? I’m no expert.’

I hate it when he talks about Frannie as if she’s ill. Makes me want to shout: You’re supposed to be a bloody shamanic healer. Can’t you do something? But he’d only tell me there’s no healing old age. Instead I say: ‘Maybe I should take her to the GP?’

John, not the greatest fan of the NHS having worked on the inside, pulls a face. ‘Half the time what’s wrong with people is the last set of pills the doc prescribed.’ He pulls out his tobacco pouch and papers. ‘Not much can be done about TIA, anyway, apart from putting her on blood-pressure medication, and she’s already on that.’

‘I wish she was closer to the doctor. Why’d she have to move out here, miles from all the stuff old people need?’

John’s faded blue eyes meet mine, telling me I know the answer. She came back to end where she began. Where her mother and father are buried, in the churchyard at St James’s. A neat little roll-up starts taking shape between his fingers. ‘And how are you? he says.

‘Hey, you know. Same old.’

The busy fingers pause. He cocks his head on one side. ‘Different hair. Red for danger, is it, this week?’

‘Think it works?’

‘Honestly?’ He pulls a couple of errant strands of tobacco from the end of the roll-up, and stands up to light it from the candle burning on the mantelpiece. Imbolc, of course: I’d forgotten. John always lights a white candle for Imbolc. ‘No. Prefer you brunette. Remember when you did it blue? Though even that was marginally preferable to the raven-black interlude.’

‘That was my sad Goth phase. I was thirteen. This’ll fade when I wash it.’

John settles back in his chair. The ever-changing colours of my hair, which he maintains are an indicator of the state of my psyche, and I insist are no more than fun, has long been a bone of contention between us. ‘How’s your new-year resolution going?’

‘John. I’m hardly Feckless Young Ladette Binge Drinker of the Decade.’

‘You were putting away a fair bit before Christmas.’

‘You’re not used to what media people drink in London. I was…winding down.’

He shakes his head. ‘Looked more like depression to me. I was worried the helicopter crash had brought back…other stuff.’

‘No.’ I push down hard on a surfacing memory of my mother under the trees in Tolemac, a look of panic on her face. Get in the van, Indy…John, as usual, is spot on the button. ‘Well, perhaps when I first came back…But no. Everything’s cool’

He grimaces. ‘God, you’re like your grandmother. Never willingly admit anything. I remember seeing you surrounded by cardboard boxes in that miserable flat in London and I thought, How come our India’s ended up like Nobby No-Mates?’

This is really not fair. ‘I had plenty of friends–’

John is a master of the single eyebrow-raise.

‘It’s just that in London…it’s harder.’

‘Yeah.’

I glare at him. ‘I still have a lot of friends in television.’

‘Those would be the ones you keep telling me you’re never going to see again, then?’

‘You’re a complete bastard, you know that, don’t you?’

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.




CHAPTER 6 1938 (#ulink_17895d40-a407-5928-bd7c-566bc88b27a5)


‘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.

Me, I’d rather have died than bring Davey back for Sunday tea to be quizzed over tinned-salmon sandwiches. So where do you come from, Davey? Stevenage? A pause while they tried to work out where that was. Further off than Hungerford, is it? Town boy, then? Eyebrows would lift, oh, yes, they would. And your dad? Scottish? Oh…

‘None of your busies,’ I said. Might as well have said, yes, Mam, clear a space on the calendar to get them banns read out in church. She winked.

* * *

There was a bit of a tired old wind batting at the beech trees, nothing much but enough to bite, as I slipped out of the back door and through the tall rows of bean sticks, which Dad had never bothered to take down last year. The ground was soft and claggy but not too wet underfoot: it’d been a mild January and there was no frost. I unlatched the garden gate into Green Street. Dad didn’t like us using the front door: he said it was for the guests, and my job to wash the tiles in the hallway every morning.

There was a light on in Tommy’s cottage, him that’d been a drummer boy in the Boer War. No electric there–Tommy didn’t want it or couldn’t afford to pay Mr Rawlins for it, so the soft yellow glow of an oil lamp spilled out of his top window. Funny place, that cottage, damp as all-get-out, and cold even on a sunny day. There’s places like that in the village and I always walked faster past them. Still do. Some nights, too, you’d think you heard drums coming from the north of the circle, but Dad said that was only the wind in the trees, or Mr Rawlins’s generator.

I made my way along Green Street towards the middle of the village. There was a lot of noise coming from the Red Lion: Mr Keiller’s men. They gathered there of an evening and some was staying there too, the archaeologists who ran the digs. Mr Keiller would book all the bedrooms for the season while they was digging, which was usually June to September; but Mr Young and Mr Piggott had carried on sorting the finds all through the winter. This year it would be a long season, I’d heard, because they wouldn’t stop until they had the western half of the stone circle complete.

That was Mr Keiller’s mad dream, you see: to put up all them stones the way they’d been. Don’t ask me how he could’ve known what Avebury was like five thousand years ago, but he reckoned he had the measure of it. Good luck to him, I used to think, though there was plenty of people in the village thought it all a load of old tosh and bad luck, too, to mess with what was long gone. When I was small, you’d be hard pressed to say you could see them stones forming any sort of circle whatsoever. Until last year there’d bin trees growing that hid the banks, and most of the stones was laying down like dead soldiers, hidden among bushes and trees and in people’s gardens. Folk in times gone by had knocked down stones and buried them and broke them up and now half the village is the stones, walls and whole cottages built out of them.

I’m going off at a whatsit. A tangerine, as my mam used to say. That night, Davey was waiting for me at the crossroads under the trees. He gives me a kiss on the cheek, and then because he’s getting bolder by the day, one on the lips, even though anyone could have seen us in the light from the lamp on the outside of the Red Lion. Then he steps back, and looks meaningful towards the dark field.

I shook my head. That was a step too far. In the part of the circle Mr Keiller hadn’t turned his hand to yet, which is to say most of it, the wild part where the cottage gardens ended and the trees and bushes still grew tangled, the darkness would have been full of whispers. There’d’ve been some out there doing their courting even in winter. People like to give themselves a good shiver under a big old haunted moon. Tell you summat else’d surprise you. We used to hug them stones, same as they hippies do today. They was warm, see, even on a cold day. Don’t ask me why. They held summer’s heat all winter under veils of grey-green lichen. That’s why courting couples used to go there, not just for privacy, or whatever magic was left in them–for warmth, too. That’s what it all comes down to, in’t it, needing a bit of warmth?

But I wasn’t ready for any of that with Davey. He was my first beau, three or four years older than me. He’d been working at the stables over Beckhampton when I first saw him, on top of a big bay in a string of racehorses walking out up Green Street headed for the Gallops, but now he had a job with Mr Keiller at the Manor, looking after his cars, and sometimes he even drove Mr K about, though there was a proper chauffeur who was Davey’s boss. From horses to horsepower, Davey said. He preferred motors because they didn’t kick.

I’d first talked to him at a village cricket match last summer, ever so clean in his whites. Not very tall, but he was sturdy at the wicket, a big hitter and he could run like blazes. Clever, too, in his bowling. He coached the younger boys on Saturdays, if he wasn’t busy with his chammy leather cleaning the cars.

His dad had been a bookie who bullied his son into an apprenticeship at a racing stable in the hope he’d pass on useful tips. Too late: Davey were hardly started when Mr Fergusson miscalculated the odds at Brighton, couldn’t pay out, and hanged hisself with a halter under the stands. Davey’d stuck out the job at Beckhampton for two more miserable years–everyone knew the trainer took his fists to the boys when the temper was on him. But then he met Mr Keiller and somehow he wangled a job. A Scottish surname maybe helped.

We linked arms under the trees, and he pretended to lay his head on my shoulder like he was too tired to hold it up, as we walked down the track that leads to the back of the barns and the duckpond, glimmering under the moon. He had a typical stable-lad’s build with narrow hips and strong arms; shame he hated the horses so much because he’d have been perfect for a jockey. But Mr Keiller owned racing cars, and was involved with the speedway course near Wroughton, so Davey had his taste of speed working for him.

The great dark shape of the church loomed above the trees. Our footsteps rang on the frosty cobblestones Colonel Jenner had laid between his barns, which belonged to Mr Keiller now. In the colonel’s day there’d been Jersey cows, and pale creamy butter made at the Manor twice a week, which you could buy for a shilling a pound. Wasn’t many in the village could afford it, but we bought it for the guests. The livestock had all gone now. Mr Keiller didn’t bother with cattle and horses and hay. He’d decided to convert the building where the colonel stabled his polo ponies into a museum, to keep skelling-tons and bits of old pot, and he parked his cars in the barns, where the bats did their doings on them if Davey didn’t cover them over with tarpaulins.

In Colonel Jenner’s day we’d never have walked in the dark through the stableyard, and I didn’t feel right doing it now. But Davey had heard something special was happening at the Manor, some sort of party that was more than a few posh people coming for dinner.

‘What kind of a party?’ I asked.

‘There’s a spiritualist down from London. Mrs Oliver.’

‘Hoping to catch sight of the White Lady, is she? She’d do better hanging round the Red Lion looking for Florrie.’

‘Florrie only comes out for men with beards.’

They was our local ghosts. Florrie got thrown into the well at the pub when her husband caught her with her Cavalier lover. There was some likewise tale about the White Lady, and a powerful scent of roses wafting along with her, but don’t tell me they come back because I never seen anything like them, nor expect anyone else would if they hadn’t downed a few pints of Mr Lawes’s best beer.

‘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.




CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_c1b07bda-b68f-5f69-9d46-c6a17bf915c8)


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.

Close to the door of the pub, a black 4×4 has drawn up, an orange and white logo on the side: Overview TV. My heartbeat begins to quicken. A woman in a maroon suede jacket and a black polo-neck is unloading a cardboard box from the tailgate, and I follow her in.

Every time I come into the Red Lion, breathing in a comforting smell of beer and cigs and chips, I remind myself that this is where it all began, the renaissance of Avebury, in the inn at the heart of the circle. It’s 1934 or thereabouts. The Marmalade King has, as usual, booked every room in the pub for his staff, and is digging the West Kennet Avenue. Late one night Stuart Piggott is woken by AK hammering on the door of his room. He bursts in like a force of nature. I know what I have to do, he announces–it’s always a have to with AK, always an announcement–I’m going to buy up the whole village. I imagine him lighting a cigarette, pacing up and down Piggott’s room, ignoring the startled archaeologist in the bed and staring through the walls to the dark landscape beyond. Yes, he says, I’ll buy up as much of the place as I can and devote my life to the study of Avebury.

This afternoon the tables in the snug have been rearranged, with chairs facing a screen set up on the far wall. Almost every seat is filled, and the curtains have been drawn, though it’s not yet dark. A young man with deep-set, intense eyes is standing behind a TV camera on a tall tripod, panning round the room and filming people at the tables. They nudge each other and whisper every time they catch the lens pointing their way–no doubt why the cameraman’s jaw is clenched with frustration.

At the back of the room is a long table with a reserved sign. The woman in the suede jacket has set down the cardboard box and is laying out DVDs in neat piles. She glances at me and smiles, as if she knows me, but it’s the professional smile of the TV person, warm and inclusive and utterly meaningless.

‘Hello, girl,’ says a voice beside me, and there’s John, at a table by himself, with a pint at his elbow and the usual scrawny rollup smouldering in the ashtray. ‘Orright? Come and park yourself with me.’

I sit down, checking to make sure I won’t obstruct anyone’s view of the screen, since I’m half a head taller than most women in the room. ‘Didn’t think you’d be here.’

‘Couldn’t miss a chance to appear on the telly.’

‘They aren’t going to be interested in you,’ I say, watching where the dark-eyed young man is pointing his camera. ‘They want people like the Rawlins brothers, who are in the film. You going to spin them your idea about a northern avenue?’ Not that I believe for a second that John’s enthusiasm for dowsing is likely to reveal the archaeological discovery of the decade.

He shakes his head. ‘Get your mates at the National Trust to take the idea seriously and do a full geophysical survey’

‘On the say-so of a mad old hippie with a pair of bent coat-hangers?’

‘You’ll be laughing the other side of your face when I make the cover of British Archaeology! He takes a mouthful of his pint, and tucks back a strand of greying hair that has escaped his ponytail. In 1982 he had short hair and a rifle that killed an Argentinian in the Falklands. ‘No point, though, in pitching it to this TV crew. They’re only interested in Keiller.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Don’t be nave, Indy–you used to work in the business. Telly people get an idea in their heads, that’s the programme they make, never mind the truth. They’ll turn him into a bloody archaeological saint.’

‘Well, he was, wasn’t he, as far as Avebury’s concerned?’

John snorts. ‘Archaeological Satan, more like. He’s the reason you didn’t grow up in a posh house in the village.’

‘You make it sound like it was personal,’ I say. ‘He was only…’

‘Trying to achieve a vision? So was Hitler, round about the same time.’

The camera fixes its cold fishy eye on us, but only for a moment. The cameraman has decided we’re the wrong age to be interesting tonight. Instead the lens settles on Carrie Harper, chair-to-the-parish-council (all said quickly on one breath so you won’t mistake her for something that can be bought in Ikea), resplendent in orange cable knit and a pair of flared jersey trousers that probably date from her heyday in the seventies. But the rustles and whispers have reached a pitch: a man with white hair strides to the front, by the big plasma screen that’s usually for the football. He waves the remote control at us, like a conductor’s baton, and the room falls silent.

‘Welcome,’ he says. ‘We’re going to show you a film. I could tell you what it’s about, but I think most of you know far better than I do.’ The oldies laugh; go on, Mister, flatter us, we like that. ‘It was found at the back of a wardrobe, six months ago, and eventually ended up at my production company for cleaning and transfer to DVD.’ He looks round, taking in their rapt faces, and smiles, a broad grin, directed at them but also at the camera with its pulsing red light. ‘It’s rather special, because it’s a record of the way this village was in the late 1930s. Some of you are in it, and that would be interesting enough in itself. But, more importantly, it opens a window on a critical year for archaeology.’

John turns and winks at me.

‘Nineteen thirty-eight. A year in which Avebury was transformed by the man we’ll see on this footage. We’re going to film you as you watch it, as part of a documentary we’re hoping to sell to Channel 4 or the BBC. Everyone happy?’ Nods and grunts, presumably enough to count for assent. ‘Right. Let’s run it.’ He raises the remote and presses play.

White scratchy lines flicker over a black background. A square of light appears, not quite filling the screen. I’ve been expecting one of those countdowns you see on old cine film, 5-4-3-2-1, or at least a clock with a sweeping second hand, but the picture’s there immediately, and Percy Lawes himself swaggers up to the camera, Jack-the-lad puffing on his cigarette with a knowing smile, enjoying his Hitchcock moment. Frannie remembers him: he figures in her stories of the old days. He was the son of the landlord of the Red Lion, thought himself a bit smarter than the rest, with his little hat and his cine-camera. He went off to Calne or Chippenham or somewhere like that to be a piano teacher, then died a bachelor, and his films would have died with him, except his nephew was curious about the contents of the battered film cans he discovered while clearing his uncle’s effects. On the screen Percy doffs his hat, as if he knows we’re going to be watching in his dad’s old pub nearly seventy years later.

The picture jumps and there’s the village street, not the same as today but recognizable. A dozen or so kids come running up the lane, right up to the camera, laughing. All the people in the audience break out talking and nudging each other, all these old people who are seeing themselves suddenly as they were then. There’s one old lady crying, and in the flickering TV light I can make out in the audience’s faces some of the same features that show on the screen, blurred now with age, plump rosy cheeks that have slipped like melting Christmas candles down their faces, eyes that are clear in then milky now with cataracts.

It’s the little kids who are crowding close to Percy’s camera, but behind them a few older ones hang back, giggling. Could that be Frannie, her hand over her mouth to hide her grin, with a bobbed hairstyle like the Queen wore when she was a princess? Too late, the scene’s changed, racehorses being walked out along the high street to the Gallops, long-gone Classic winners whose bones now moulder under the downland.

Now heavy horses, pulling the haywains, and men in cloth caps pitchforking hay onto the ricks. It’s in black-and-white, but Percy Lawes was good with that cine-camera, knew how to use the light. No sound, but you can see the men laughing and joking with one another, easy with their work even though they were being filmed. Suddenly that’s gone too, and we’re inside the stone circle, watching a massive stone with ropes and pulleys wrapped round it, and men with crowbars heaving and tugging to get it upright.

And there he is, sitting on a camp stool, sketching or writing up his notes, it’s hard to make out which. The man himself. AK, Alexander Keiller, who moved into the Manor House in 1937 to reshape Avebury. He’s wearing a Panama hat and a blazer, all long elegant legs and knees and elbows on the tiny stool, working on his pad, not bothering to acknowledge the camera, as arrogant and insouciant as an old-time squire. The smile lifting the corners of his mouth–he knows he’s being filmed–is familiar. Where the hell have I seen those features and that expression before?

No. It can’t be. But it is: the smile on the poster at the back of Frannie’s wardrobe, the smile Margaret used to wear when she knew someone was photographing her. She was tall and beautiful and kind of arrogant as well, with her strong nose and high forehead. At Greenham, journalists made a beeline for her, and when she danced naked on top of the trilithons at Stonehenge, one midsummer dawn, tossing her long thick hair and with that exact same smile on her mouth, someone snapped it and turned it into a poster. They never comes back, that’s for sure.

But maybe that smile did. The thought explodes like a firework in my head, though it isn’t so much a revelation as the confirmation of an idea that’s been quietly creeping up on me over the last few days.

It explains the letter tucked down the side of Frannie’s armchair. Might even be the reason she didn’t want to come this evening. Most crucially, it makes sense of the date on my so-called grandfather’s headstone, of Frannie’s reluctance to talk about him. Because if David Fergusson wasn’t my grandfather, who was?

Next to me, John leans across and stubs out his rollie, and the sweet tarry scent of grass comes bursting up from the ashtray.

I touch his arm and whisper so no one else will hear.

John frowns and shakes his head. ‘You have to be wrong, Indy,’ he whispers back. ‘That’s never in a million years your grandad.’

After the film, the white-haired man tells us to have a break and more drinks before they start the discussion proper. Everyone in the room is a bit red-eyed, including John, only in his case it’s the weed. Even the TV woman blows her nose. The camera sweeps the room, relentlessly prying into then, all the weepy conversations that have broken out as people remember their childhood and how England used to be before supermarkets and television and tractors.

‘I’m going,’ says John, unexpectedly, picking up his lighter and tobacco pouch.

‘Won’t you stay?’ I was fizzing, but now I’ve gone flat. He’s probably right. It’s impossible Keiller and Frannie had any relationship. Or, if not impossible, highly unlikely: wrong age, wrong class. I’ve let myself be carried away by some old biddy’s poison-pen letter, hinting at scandal, but what was going on at the Manor could mean anything. It might not even relate to the time Keiller lived there.

‘You don’t want me cramping your style when you chat up telly people.’ John stands up, squeezes my shoulder. ‘You need a massage.’ And he’s gone, limping through the tables, his narrow bony back the full stop it’s always been at the end of our conversations.

I take a sip of his unfinished pint, glancing round the pub again. There will be people here who knew Fran when she was a girl. Unfortunately, most of them were probably too young to have picked up the gossip of the day. Still, someone sent that letter, and he or she could be in this room. Although I know John’s right, really, there’s no way Keiller could have been my grandfather, I can’t help spinning the idea round. That smile…so exactly Margaret’s, I’m amazed John couldn’t see it. I cremated all my photographs of my mother–part of my sad Goth phase again–but Fran has a little one, in her bedroom, of Margaret in her teens, with white lipstick and three layers of false eyelashes. Maybe she keeps others, too, locked away in the bureau.

You know, Ind, one day you might regret that, said Fran on the day I burned my mother’s things. Never get ‘em back, that’s for sure. Then she stumped away to the garden shed to fetch the rake, and spread the ashes of the bonfire across the flowerbed.

I’m heading for the loo, admiring the dark-eyed cameraman’s profile as he tips back his head to swallow the last of his lager, when the TV woman and I nearly collide in the doorway.

‘Sorry,’ she says.

‘My fault, not looking where I’m going.’ We both stand back to let the other through first, then, when neither moves, step forward simultaneously.

‘You first.’

‘No, you. There’s more than one cubicle in there, anyway.’

Of course, when we go in, they’re both occupied. A sickly manufactured scent of rose pot-pourri hangs in the air, and a volley of old-lady farts comes from behind one of the doors. We exchange smiles.

There’s never going to be a better moment.

‘This programme you’re doing…’

‘If it gets commissioned. Not always a given, these days.’

‘Would you be interested in an idea for it?’

This look comes over her face, the one that says she’s had a million people offer her ideas and only two and a half have ever been remotely any good. It’s replaced immediately by a polite, bland mask. ‘Try me.’

‘Next spring’s the seventieth anniversary of Keiller starting work in the circle.’ I’m gabbling to spew it all out fast before one of the toilet doors opens. ‘I understand about commissioning, I’ve worked for Mannix and other TV companies–’ (go on, India, tell a really big lie about your qualifications to keep her listening, and hope your nose doesn’t grow to give it away) ‘–and I did a master’s at Bristol University in archaeology and media, with my thesis on Keiller’s work. Only he never finished–you’ll know this. He never managed to reconstruct the whole circle.’

‘Uh-huh.’ She’s interested now, I can tell–in fact I’ve a feeling she could be way ahead of me.

‘So I thought…’

‘You want to finish the job for him and put up the rest of the stones.’

‘Well, no, not actually all the stones.’ I’m explaining now in the bar. My bladder aches because I never did get round to that pee. The TV woman marched me straight out and collared the white-haired man, who was talking to Carrie Harper over by the windows.

‘Daniel, you’ve got to hear this.’

‘Ibby, I’m talking to someone.’ Rude to her, though he was schmoozing Carrie like she was lady of the Manor.

‘Seriously, it’s a really good idea.’

His eyes went hard, and for a moment I thought he was going to cut her down to size in front of Carrie and me, but instead he said smoothly, ‘Would you excuse us a moment, Mrs Harper?’ I could tell he’d already sussed that Carrie wasn’t going to be as much use to him as she’d like to think, since she only arrived in Avebury ten years ago. Now she’s hanging onto the edge of the conversation, as I explain my Big Idea. I’ve pulled open the curtains to show them. There’s a fine view, across the darkening roadway, of the space where Frannie’s parents’ guesthouse stood.

‘Doesn’t matter which stone. The Second World War interrupted Keiller’s excavations, so nearly half the outer circle hasn’t been touched–there could be twenty or more buried stones in the north-east quadrant alone. The point is to do something that would get press coverage and set people talking about Avebury and Keiller again.’ And secure me a job on this production.

‘India’s family have lived in the village for generations,’ says Ibby. Weird name. Maybe she was conceived on Ibiza. ‘She works with the National Trust.’ In the caf, but they don’t need to know that. Lucky that Michael isn’t here to put them straight. I raise my eyebrows at Carrie in the hope she’ll keep her mouth shut.

‘So you could get us permission to film?’ says White Hair. His name is Daniel Porteus.

‘Well, that would be up to someone higher than me. But I’m sure…’

He doesn’t seem to have noticed that I’m making most of this up as I go along. ‘It’s bloody brilliant. I like it already. Can I get you a glass of wine?’ He shoots a triumphant smile at Ibby. ‘Get us a bottle, lb. Merlot, if they have it. All right for you, um, India? So what exactly is it you do for the Trust?’

‘Sorry,’ Carrie butts in. ‘India, don’t want to interrupt or anything, but I think I saw your gran out the window. She could break a leg, you know, walking round the dykes in the dark.’

There’s still enough light in the sky to outline the small figure making its uneven way along the top of the bank, near a clump of beech trees.

‘Fran!’

She stops, turns and waits, thank goodness. A waxing moon is coming up over the horizon, and as I dash through the stones, there’s a disconcerting glimpse of it, like a tilted D, between Frannie’s bandy elastic-stockinged legs.

The grass is slippery with frost. My ankle goes over with a sickening twist. Daren’t stop, so I go hobbling on, terrified that Frannie will start slithering down the bank into the darkness of the ditch and her ankle will go too, pitching her over and snapping her leg like the dry old twig it is. At her age, broken bones can kill.

‘Stop right there. I’ll come and get you.’ A risky strategy: out of sheer cussedness she might do the exact opposite. Panic’s making me breathless.

She sits down, plonk, on a big tree root curving out of the hard, chalky slope. The wind rattles the bare beeches. A smile cracks her face, as if this is a game. She must know it’s going to be hard to get her up again. She’s not even wearing a coat, for God’s sake. Her feet are in slippers, soaked.

My breath scrapes in my chest from the climb up the bank, and the fear. ‘What are you doing?’ I puff.

Frannie lifts a hand and brushes her fringe off her forehead, a 1940s starlet posing for the camera, the rising moon backlighting her hair and turning it silver. She stares straight ahead over the stone circle, gaze lasering between the pair of massive entrance stones. Something in the inner circle has caught her attention. There’s movement down there, someone in a long dark coat, a bluish light that could be torch or camera-phone. Frannie shakes her head, chewing over some possibility that apparently she regrets having to reject.

Then she says, like she’d heard me thinking the exact same words earlier this evening in the pub: ‘They never comes back, that’s for sure.’




CHAPTER 8 1938 (#ulink_af1c2397-52dd-51f3-afbf-e5308d624e0a)


They never comes back and goodness only knows the place they’ve gone to. But sometimes I think they’re out there in the moonlight, and I have to go to see.

Our mam used to say that the two roads that cross in the middle of Avebury–the main Swindon road running north-south, and Green Street that was the old Saxon way going east-west–were like big blood vessels carrying time through the village. Because they was so old now the walls had gone thin, and time sometimes bled out one way or t’other. Mam’d reach out her hand to me in the hospital and I’d see the bruises, the places where her blood leaked out under the skin because, after all the injections, her veins were too wore out to hold it in any more. I see the same bruises on my arms now, old-lady bruises, and I think that’s how time has become for me, now I’m eighty-whatsit. The past leaks into the present, and who’s to say the present doesn’t leak into the past?

If I’d been a bit bolder and let Davey take me into the stones that night, instead of watching what happened in the Manor gardens, would we have come through? There’d’ve been a kiss and a cuddle and a warming of the hands inside his coat. Then, all in good time, maybe our mam would’ve had her way, tinned-salmon sandwiches and banns read out, and two of us beside the old font with the snake carved on it when the vicar dips his fingers to wet the babby’s head.

There’s a photo of Davey in the back of the drawer in the dressing-table, in the box where I keep all me bits and pieces. It was taken later, in the war, after he’d enlisted with the Raff. He’s grinning at the camera with his forage cap at a jaunty angle; somewhere out of view there’ll be a cigarette between his fingers, because he smoked something terrible after he joined up, but they had them for free, or near as, at the NAAFI. Perks of the job. Blowing smoke rings into the face of Death, hoping she’d squint her eyes and not see him. It’s black-and-white, so you can’t see them golden-green eyes of his that never seemed to match right with his thick brown hair. That hair stood up like a lavatory brush if he didn’t cut it every couple of weeks, but after he joined the air force he Brylcreemed it flat, with a little finger-wave at the front, curly as Mam’s marcel. It used to creep forward over his eye when he was hot and bothered. Me wayward tendril, he called it.

He’s grinning at the camera in that photograph, but what I sees now is the hurt in his face. Frannie, he says to me, what did you want to go and do that for?

Yes, I say, but you wasn’t exactly whiter than whatsit, was you? Didn’t understand then, but I reckon you had your secrets too, up on Windmill Hill on that motorbike. How was it you caught Mr Keiller’s eye so he give you a job? But no good asking: he and Mr K never come back, for all I go looking in the moonlight.

Percy Lawes had set up his movie camera on the bit of green opposite the Red Lion when I got off the Swindon bus coming home after my Thursday-afternoon shorthand class. There was a group of kids hanging round him as usual.

‘Back down the high street,’ he was saying to Heather Peak-Garland and her pals. ‘Go on. You were too quick for me last time. I didn’t get you all in the picture.’

They trooped down the road towards the shop.

‘Further.’

Back they went again, almost to the school.

‘Further.’

I left them to it and crossed the road. I had decisions to make, about what I was going to do with my life–didn’t intend spending it all being a skivvy for Mam and Dad–and the best place to think was in among the stones. There was a big old lad fallen on his side that I liked to curl up on when I needed time and space to myself. The Rawlins boys used him as a sliding stone, tobogganing down his polished flank to land with a splash in the puddle at the bottom, then clambering back on over and over till they near wore out the seat of their pants. But today they were dancing round Percy having their pictures took on that camera of his, so I had the stone to myself.

Except no sooner had I settled myself, pulling up the collar of my wool coat and shoving my hands in my pockets, than the breeze blew the sound of voices my way.

It was two of the archaeologists that worked for Mr Keiller. You could tell they was archaeologists because one was carrying a tall measuring pole painted black-and-white, and the other had some sort of survey equipment on folding legs. They were over by one of the few stones that was still standing in this part of the field. One had his back to me, bending over his tripod. The other, holding the pole, was the same tall, languid fellow with sloping shoulders and floppy hair I’d seen in the Manor gardens. They’d either not seen me or thought me not worth the noticing.

‘Keep the flaming pole steady, Cromley,’ shouted the shorter one. He had darker, wavy hair, and a thick tweed jacket. ‘You’re waggling it about like a wog with an assegai!

‘It’s too bloody cold to stand still,’ yelled the other. ‘This’ll have to be the last one. The light’ll be going soon.’

They were both young men, in their twenties, with carrying voices, like they didn’t care who heard ‘em say what. I wondered what made them want to spend their lives digging up old stones, but maybe it wasn’t that brought them here: maybe it was Mr Keiller. You could imagine him marching up to some smart young lad, coming all innocent out of a college gateway in Oxford or Cambridge, and saying, Follow me. And they would.

‘There,’ said the tall one called Cromley, lowering the pole. The rays of the low sun caught his soft little moustache, the colour of Demerara sugar above fine, sculpted lips. ‘That’s where there should be a stone buried, if the spacing’s constant. And another…’ He moved along the rim of the ditch, sweeping the pole over the grass, then stopping and jabbing the ground with it. ‘The next here.’ Finally he speared the striped stick into a molehill, and took out his cigarette case to light up. The match flared and fizzed.

The dark-haired chap ignored him, dipping a long pointed nose towards his notebook. He took his time writing something, then folded the legs of the tripod.

‘You know, Piggott…’ The taller man was using the pole like a hiker’s staff as they walked back in my direction, his cigarette trailing from the fingers of his other hand. ‘AK’s driven off to London again with the Brushwood Boy. Don’t you think someone ought to enlighten Doris?’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Piggott, revealing a glimpse of big, flat teeth. There was irritation in his voice, and he looked quite red in the face, though that was maybe the cold.

I didn’t hear any more, because I felt suddenly shy and thought they might laugh at me for being a gurt grown girl climbing on the stones like the children did. Besides, the light was fading, and the moon coming up already, and Mam would be wondering where I’d got to. I slid off the stone, tugged my skirt down, and ran off between the trees, before they reached where I’d been sitting.

Running back the way I’d come, running widdershins. First time I didn’t think to follow the light round the circle, like my mam always told me.




CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_bcb96e33-ff23-5ad3-aee1-2d7d94eb2afd)


The hobble across the circle seems to take for ever, Fran’s hand on my arm tightening every time her soaked slippers skid on the frosty grass.

‘I’m going to take you into the pub,’ I say.

No response. Frannie glares straight ahead, brows knitting in concentration. We cross the road, and as we approach the light on the outside of the Red Lion, she lifts her eyes up and stares at it as we pass underneath, like she’s never seen it before.

Although the snug is still packed with reminiscing villagers, the main bar is almost empty. My grandmother settles herself in the corner, sees Carrie coming out of the Ladies and waves. But weather conditions haven’t entirely returned to normal on Planet Fran: still cloudy, with patches of freezing fog.

‘Where are my cigarettes?’ She pats her cardigan pockets. ‘You got one on you, Meg?’

‘I’m India, and you know I don’t. I’ll bring you a packet with the drinks.’ Which would be better: whisky or hot coffee? I order both, scribble my mobile number on a scrap of paper for the TV people, and ask Carrie to look after Frannie while I fetch the car.

The shortest way home is through the field, but after several days’ rain, the Winterbourne’s nearly as high as the bridge. Moonlight glimmers on water round the foot of Silbury Hill, and without a doubt the meadow will be one big sucky bog. The path’s never been tarmacked: locals claim that’s another of the ways Keiller and the National Trust exiled ordinary folk from Avebury Better to take the longer, dryer way: along the lane, past the outlying cottages with their thatch and Range Rovers.

At night I don’t much like either route, my townie instincts not yet comfortable in the darkness of the countryside. Something’s made me more than usually twitchy this evening. The tiniest whisper of wind in dead beech leaves. I could swear that was a footstep behind.

Nobody. I know there’s nobody there.

All the same, I cast an uneasy glance over my shoulder as I take the fork for Trusloe. In the far distance there’s a light, moving slowly in the darkness across the slopes of Windmill Hill. Telling myself it can only be a late dogwalker, I sprint along the last stretch of lane towards the streetlight.

Frannie becomes suspiciously quiet once I persuade her into the passenger seat of the Peugeot.

‘You’re sure you’ll be OK?’ asks Carrie, as I close the car door. ‘I don’t mind coming along if you need a hand. She seems fine, now, but…’ Neither of us can define what but is.

‘Did she say anything to you about what she was doing there?’

‘Not a word.’

‘Come over for supper next week,’ says Carrie. ‘Both of you. You’re not getting out enough, India. What do you do in the evenings? We’ve hardly seen you since Christmas.’

What do I do? I watch television with my grandmother. I know every twist of the plotline of EastEnders and Holby City. After she’s gone to bed, I open a bottle of wine–bugger the new-year resolution–and play Free Cell on the computer. Can only manage the card games, these days; too much blood and destruction in anything else.

‘Oh, I don’t mind a quiet life,’ I say. ‘After London–you know…’ Too late I realize that the wave accompanying this, meant to convey I’m weary of the shallow pleasures of the metropolis, makes it look as if I’m rudely batting away Carrie’s invitation. ‘I’d love to come to supper some time,’ I add. ‘If Frannie’s…up to it.’

All through the conversation, my grandmother sits in the front seat with a puzzled, shut-up-don’t-interrupt-me expression on her face, like she’s working out a difficult sum in her head.

On a cold February night, Trusloe seems bleaker than ever, looming out of the windy darkness under rags of cloud backlit by the glow of Swindon to the north. There are not enough streetlamps, and most windows are unlit. On our road everyone, apart from the couple next door who make amateur porn films in their living room, apparently heads for bed straight after supper. Either that or they still use blackout material for curtains.

‘You OK?’ I haul on the handbrake outside Bella Vista.

Frannie stares straight ahead, brows knitted.

‘I said, are you OK?’

‘What have you brought me here for?’

‘So you can go to bed.’

‘I don’t want to go to bed.’ There’s a petulant droop to her mouth. ‘Too buggerin’ early.’

‘Come on, let’s get you out of the car.’

‘India, I’m not a bloomin’ parcel. I’m perfectly capable of getting myself out.’ She’s adopted that posh tone she puts on when she wants to be bloody-minded.

‘Please yourself.’

‘I will.’ Frannie waggles the catch on the car door. ‘Won’t open.’

‘That’s not the way. Stop messing about. Use the handle.’

‘Locked.’

‘It’s not locked.’

Now she’s wrestling with the seatbelt. ‘I’m trapped!

Just for a second, a feeling of utter panic seizes me. I’m close to tears: frustration, grief, despair, the sheer bloody unfairness of having to watch the person you love most in the world start to lose it, all vying for the honour of making me bawl.

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.

No wonder Frannie–if it was Frannie–looked awkward in front of the camera. As well as being hardly out of school–fifteen? Sixteen?–she wasn’t from anything like the same background or class. How did she manage to talk her way into a job on the excavation? I try to remember what else I’ve gleaned about Keiller since I’ve been in Avebury. He was an egalitarian employer, and at least one of his wives worked alongside him as a professional archaeologist. Until he divorced her, that is, and moved on to the next Mrs K.

I stare at the photo. No, it can’t be Frannie. She’d have said something.

But…the letter hidden in her armchair. Anyone with eyes in their head at the Manor knew what was going on.

I pick up one of the box files, and set to work.

As well as Keiller’s letters, the boxes also contain, in no particular order, correspondence from other archaeologists, friends, tradesmen and the occasional nutter. Keiller seems to have replied to everyone, even the weirdos. Did Frannie really type some of these letters? And what else might she have done for the Great Man? Wear a mask and cast a pentangle, like something in sixties Technicolor starring Christopher Lee?

The room is darker. Outside, the sun has disappeared behind heavy cloud. Almost two hours have passed. I stand up to stretch, wondering if I can be bothered to go downstairs to the staff kitchen to warm up. There are several large cardboard boxes in a stack by the door, waiting to be transferred to the main storeroom. I kneel down to lift the lid of one, catching a glimpse of about a billion polythene bags containing tiny fragments of yellowish-white honeycomb, then scramble guiltily to my feet as footsteps rap on the stairs.

Michael.

‘I came to see how you were getting on.’ There’s a hint of reproach in his voice. ‘That’s animal bone from Windmill Hill, by the way.’

‘Sorry. I…was curious.’

‘Thought for a moment you were after our skeletons too. Had another missive this morning from those bloody Druids. Want a coffee? Kettle’s already on.’ I follow him downstairs. ‘Are there skeletons in the cardboard boxes?’

‘Lord, no. Not human, anyway. We only keep Charlie in this building, in his glass case, and I’m sure the Druids aren’t fussed by the dog and the goat on display. All the rest are in secure storage.’ He puts his head round the door into the gallery where one of the volunteers is manning the till. ‘Chris? Fancy a cuppa? Don’t know anyone who’d do a couple of months part-time as assistant warden, do you?’

‘Why won’t you take me on?’ I ask, as Michael returns to the kitchen and sets out a line of mugs.

‘India, you are a splendid woman of many talents but you don’t have the right qualifications. I don’t mind letting you do the odd day, but I’d prefer someone with a grasp of landscape archaeology.’ He dispenses instant coffee into the mugs with unnerving precision. Every spoonful probably has the exact same number of granules. ‘Besides, I understand you’re now archaeological consultant to a film crew.’

This is news to me. I’d been half expecting to hear nothing more from Overview TV. And, oh, shit, if Michael knows–

‘Don’t look so worried.’ Michael clamps the lid onto the coffee jar and swings round to face me, but I can’t look him in the eye. ‘Daniel Porteus called me this morning and asked me to tell you he’d be in touch. He wants you to go to London for some meeting next week. And, no, I didn’t tell them your main function for the National Trust was making cappuccinos. Indeed, I told them on the phone not ten minutes ago that you were labouring in the archive.’

‘Thanks.’ With some difficulty, I meet his eyes, and discover only amusement.

‘We’ve all at some point embellished our CVs. By the way, I like your idea of putting up another stone. Don’t look smug, though, you aren’t the first to have it–nobody’s yet succeeded in persuading a broadcaster to part with enough money to do it. Anyway, how are you getting on with the letters?’

‘Slowly’ I cast around for milk. ‘I can’t help reading them. Hey, you know this woman who says my grandmother used to work at the Manor?’

‘Said,’ says Michael. ‘She died in December. She was something like ninety, mind.’

Damn. ‘Anyone else left who was around then?’

‘That’s what the TV people wanted to know. Gave them all the names I had, but everyone I could think of was at last night’s meeting. Most of them were tots in the thirties. It’s a pity your gran is so confused because, by my reckoning, she’s the last surviving person who worked at the Manor then.’

At home, Frannie is ensconced in her favourite armchair, watching Flog It!.

‘Why do you find it so fascinating?’ I’ve asked her this more than once.

‘All this stuff,’ she says. ‘People’s treasures. Never think it was worth so much, would you? I live in hope, Indy. One day there’ll be something come up and I’ll think, Ooh, blow me down and bugger, I got one of those.’

On the television, someone’s holding up a truly hideous pottery figurine, turning it this way and that so the camera takes in every porcelain dimple and simper.

‘You know these television people want to make a film about Alexander Keiller? I’ve spent the whole morning in the archive sorting out his letters. Michael at the National Trust says you used to be one of AK’s secretaries.’

Frannie rearranges her features to look more than ever like she should be serving drinks on a budget airline, face utterly bland and unreadable. Strikes me you can hide a lot of dirt in wrinkles. ‘How’s he reckon he knows that?’

‘Somebody else who used to work at the Manor.’

‘That’d be the interfering old bitch below stairs. Dead now.’

Well, knock me down with the duty-free trolley. ‘So you did? Work for the Great Man as a secretary?’

‘Before the war I did, yes.’

‘You never told me. What was he like?’

‘You never asked. ‘Sides, told you, I prefer not to ‘member those times. Bad for everyone.’ She heaves herself out of the armchair. ‘Thing about diggin’ up the past, like Mr Keiller did, don’t really know what you’m turning over with your spade, do you?’

‘Where are you going? Your programme’s not finished.’

‘Call of nature.’ She shuffles out of the room. ‘You wait till you’re my age. Getting old’s no fun. No fun at all’

I should wait till tonight, after she’s gone to bed, but I can’t. As the loo door closes, I’m across the room, hand diving down the side of her armchair.

My fingers come up empty. The letter has gone.




CHAPTER 10 1938 (#ulink_b0933c4f-18ae-58b2-928d-8c5b5f8fbe25)


There’s a man on Flog It! with a lovely Victorian cow-creamer. Black Jackfield lustre glaze, he says, little gilt flowers painted on its hide. It has a lid on the top, where you fill it, and the tail curls into a handle so you can lift her up by the arse end and pour the cream out of her mouth. Mr Keiller had one just like it. No, I’m wrong. Our mam had one just like it, and Mr Keiller wanted to buy it off her, but she wouldn’t sell. Said it had belonged to her mother. I wonder what became of it. We never used it. It sat on the Welsh dresser with the Royal Albert.

Mr Keiller collected them. They had a whole room to themselves at the Manor. He had six hundred and sixty-six. Can’t remember why I know how many. I surely to goodness didn’t count the blasted things while I was dusting them. He was particular about who was allowed to touch them, wouldn’t let the housemaid do it, said she had fumbly fingers and he preferred me, even though I was secretarial. I washed them once, with him stood over me while I did it. Made me uncomfortable. I told him to get out a tea-towel and dry them himself, if he didn’t trust me, and that made him laugh.

Six hundred and sixty-six. The number of the Beast. Did he always keep just six hundred and sixty-six, and have to sell one every time he bought one? No wonder some in the village said he was the devil incarnate.

My mam used to say I had the devil in me. She didn’t know the half of it.

My feet were dragging when I crossed the road after getting off the bus. I was about done in. Mam was in the kitchen. The wireless was on, but you could hardly hear it because the Frigidaire was making a terrible racket, somewhere between a wheeze and a beehive-sized hum. It couldn’t cope with the heat when Mam was baking.

‘Any luck?’ she said, without looking up from rolling pastry.

‘No. They all said I was too young.’

I wanted a secretarial job. I couldn’t go on working with Mam and Dad in the guesthouse. Not that it was going to be a guesthouse much longer. Heap of rubble was next on the agenda. Mr Keiller was our landlord, and Mr Keiller wanted us out, so he could knock the place down and put up more of his old stones.

Wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the day he came to call to try to persuade Mam to part with her cow-creamer that he’d heard about from one of his friends who’d stayed with us. Mam said ever so polite she wouldn’t sell, but she was happy to show it to him. She took him into the front parlour where it stood on the dresser, and Mr Keiller spotted the big stone that made the lintel over our fireplace.

‘Sarsen, Mrs Robinson,’ he said. ‘Mind if I take a closer look?’

Well, he’s the landlord, she couldn’t very well say no. Next thing, he’s out of the door saying he’ll be back in a tick. Came back trailed by the dark-haired young archaeologist with the pointed nose and prominent teeth, the one I’d watched surveying the stones, and introduced him as Mr Stuart Piggott. Close up, I didn’t like the look of him. He had sly eyes, which peered into our inglenook and up our chimney while Mr K looked on approvingly. Then they put their heads together and eventually declared that the house was built around one of the stones used to be in the circle, broke up into bits.

‘Well, isn’t that nice?’ said our mam, uneasily.

Mr Keiller looks at her like she’s some insignificant species of small brown bird, interesting maybe to some but not to him; he’s a man for hawks. ‘I’d like to get a closer look at it,’ he says. Standing in our parlour, he was even more handsome than he’d seemed that night in the Manor garden. ‘See those grooves on your lintel? It looks like it may have been a polissoir! Powerful clever, too, knowing all them foreign words.

‘A polly-what?’ says Dad, who’s come in from the garden where he’s been digging up a load of taters for the guests’ dinners.

‘A polishing stone. Where Neolithic people smoothed stone axes. There are several up on the Downs.’ Mostly he sounded like any posh toff, but occasionally his voice took on a soft Scottish lilt; the rs sounding more like ws, but not in a pansyish way. ‘They were probably considered sacred.’

But he’s lost our dad. He has a polite, bemused look on his face, muddy boots dangling from his hand.

‘Don’t see how you’ll get a closer look without climbing the chimney like Santa Claus,’ said Mam, trying for a laugh. And getting your lovely suit all sooty.’

Mr Keiller was looking thoughtful. ‘How much did you say you wanted for that cow-creamer, Mrs Robinson?’

‘Not for sale, Mr Keiller.’

A week after, we had our notice.

Mr K was generous, though. He said if we could be out by the autumn, he’d give Mam and Dad the money for the first year’s lease on their new place. Dad thought that was a good deal. Mam said she didn’t see why they should be bought. Dad said they didn’t have much choice, really, so better take what they could, and we didn’t have hardly any bookings past August anyway. So they cancelled what there was, and found a tobacconist’s shop in Devizes. Dad said he’d be glad to see the back of guesthouse-keeping, and Mam said she was sick to death of changing sheets for Mr Keiller’s snooty friends who were no better than they ought to be, and some of them a lot worse.

That left me. There was a second bedroom in the flat over the tobacconist’s. Bedroom? Boxroom, more like. It was where the old tobacconist stored surplus stock, and it stank–be like sleeping rolled up in a cigar box. You didn’t need three to run a tiny shop like that. I had to find a job. Seemed an opportunity, at first. But now it looked like I was aiming too high.

‘Never mind,’ said Mam. ‘Something’ll come up. You’re a clever girl, Frances. I was ever so proud when you came top in bookkeeping last year in school. Somebody’ll appreciate your talents.’

The Frigidaire gave a cough and fell silent.

‘See?’ said Mam. ‘It thinks you’re something.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It says I’m useless. Too bloomin’ young, like they all keep saying.’

Then Ambrose came on again playing ‘Small Hotel’ and Mam started to cry.

What came up was Mrs Sorel-Taylour, who was Mr Keiller’s secretary.

Mind you, like the parson used to say, God helps them who helps themselves. I’d heard they was short-handed at the Manor, with the digging season to plan for and a museum being built in the stable block. I made sure I bumped into her in the high street, by accident as it’d seem, when I went for bread from the baker’s–oh, what a coincidence–at the exact time I reckoned she’d be on her way down the churchyard path to fetch some of Jack’s lardy cakes to go with Mr Keiller’s morning coffee. The sky was pale blue over the church tower, and a cloud of early midges danced over the drying puddles as I came up to her by the lich-gate, with the loaves under my arm.

‘Mornin’, Mrs Sorel-Taylour.’

‘Good morning, Frances. Shouldn’t you be in school?’

‘Left last year. Working for Mam and Dad, now, though I in’t sure what I’ll do when they move to Devizes.’

For a moment I didn’t think my plan would work. She looked at me as if she had no notion what I was blathering on about. She was a short lady, but very straight in the back, who sang in the Choral Society and gave lectures all over the county on etiquette. Her cream silk blouse with its Peter Pan collar was done right up to the neck, a carnelian brooch hiding the top button. I was a bit scared of her.

Then cogs began to whirr.

‘Rumour has it you’re good with numbers,’ she said, her large dark eyes fixed on mine.

‘Did well in arithmetic in school,’ I said. Won a prize, I did, and Mr Keiller presented it at speech day, which was how Mrs S-T remembered.

‘And you have a neat hand?’

I looked at my fingers. The nail varnish I’d put on last night for seeing Davey was already chipped.

I need someone who can write clearly,’ she said. ‘And shorthand would help.’

‘I’m enrolled on a Pitman’s course.’

‘You type, of course.’ I should have enrolled for that too, but there wasn’t the time as I was still helping most evenings at the guesthouse. ‘What speed?’

‘A hundred and ten,’ I lied. Her eyebrows shot up. Perhaps I’d overdone it. ‘On a good day,’ I added. She must have swallowed one of the midges, because she started to cough and turned away to find a hanky in her bag. ‘Is there a job for me at the Manor?’ I hardly dared hope.

‘Mr Keiller is bringing his collection down from London,’ she said. ‘We need help with cataloguing and typing up his notes on the finds. And there are his letters. He dictates several each day.’ She looked hard at me, not quite a glare but there was disapproval on her long, delicate oval face. ‘You’ll find typing easier with shorter nails. And hair off your face, please, not falling over your eyes. You could try Kirby-grips. Mr Keiller prefers his staff to have a modest appearance.’

What she really meant was that it was easier if Mr Keiller didn’t notice his staff’s appearance. I understood that when I told Davey I had the job. That gave him ants in his pants, all right.

‘Why on earth d’you want to work at the Manor?’

‘So I can stay in the village, not have to move away with Mam and Dad and sleep in that smelly boxroom. I’ll be able to see you more often.’ He had a room over the stables. I’d never dared go up there yet, but I thought of evenings, cosying up with him, the cars gleaming in the dark beneath us, maybe one ticking quietly after Mr Keiller had given it a long run to London.

‘Yes, but…’ He lit a cigarette, cupping his hand round the match. Its flare showed his frown in the darkness. We were sat in the lee of one of the stones, on a rug Davey always brought with him for our courting. I hadn’t yet done everything on that rug that he wanted me to do, but on a cold night we’d both found warm places for our hands.

‘You do want to see more of me, don’t you?’ Perhaps he had his eye on someone else. By now Mam had met him, but she said he was one of those quiet ‘uns, could never tell what he was really thinking. I thought I knew him, but maybe I didn’t.

‘It’s not that,’ said Davey. ‘It’s more…Well’ He looked down at the ground. ‘I’m away a lot, driving Mr Keiller.’

‘But when you’re there…’

‘No, Fran,’ he said. ‘At least…I never know when he’ll want me to do some job. Day or night. You have to jump to it when he has one of his whims, and his temper…’

‘I don’t understand you,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be happy to have your girl a bit closer. So what if he makes demands? It’ll be all the easier to see me when we know each other’s comings and goings. I’ll be working late too sometimes, right across the yard from you…’

‘You never seen a temper like it.’ There was a desperate look in Davey’s eye. ‘Takes against people just like that. You don’t want to work for him–he’ll eat a little thing like you for breakfast. And they say he’s got a roving eye.’

‘I know how to deal with roving eyes,’ I said, bolder than I felt. ‘Get plenty of those at the guesthouse.’

‘Do you now?’ said Davey. He gave a sigh of defeat. ‘How about roving hands? Any good at dealing with them?’

* * *

‘Your young man,’ said Mam. ‘Can I just say this? Be careful, Frances.’

‘Don’t know what you mean.’

I’d brought Davey over for Sunday tea, and he’d arrived with his lavatory-brush hair oiled down and an eager smile on his face. Dad and he seemed to get on–there was a lot of man-to-man chat about horse-racing and cars. But Mam–I’d seen the way her eyes narrowed when she looked at him. I’d stopped telling her everything, and I knew that hurt her.

‘I’d like to see you settled,’ Mam said. She was looking out of the window at the line of hills beyond the stone circle. ‘One of these days. But…Don’t be a tease, Frances. Davey’s a nice boy and he don’t deserve it.’

‘Don’t know what you mean,’ I said, mutinous.

‘I mean he’s gentle and kind. Like I used to think you were. But I don’t know, seeing you together, strikes me to wonder which one wears the trousers, and I don’t think it’s him.’

‘He was on his best behaviour for you,’ I said, desperate not to seem mannish.

Mam’s eyes softened. ‘Maybe I don’t understand girls today, then. But–oh, I don’t know. Still waters, as they say. All the same, I worry he’s too quiet for you. I worry that you’ll set your sights on somebody more dashing.’

The minute it was out of her mouth, I knew she was right, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of pouring my heart out. Davey wasn’t girlish, but he had a soft side, and now we were seeing each other regular, he didn’t seem as exciting as when I’d noticed him first on the back of a tall bay horse stepping delicate-hoofed up the high street, his bony knees and wrists controlling that gurt explosive mass of muscle and power. But I had him, and as Mam used to say, whenever we passed one of the sad spinsters in the village whose sweetheart had died in the Great War, a woman counts herself fortunate to find a decent man and keep him. Mam always said she’d been lucky with Dad, and there weren’t anything exciting about him.

Fair to say, of course, that Mam didn’t tell me everything, and don’t I wish she had. I reckon she already knew it wasn’t right for her to be so tired at the end of every day. Blamed myself for not talking to her, once she was gone. But at that age you think everybody you know’ll be around for ever.

Then again, sometimes it’s right to keep your big gabby mouth buttoned, and if I had, the afternoon Davey took me to visit Mam in the hospital…But no use stirring over might-have-beens.




CHAPTER 11 (#ulink_7023e477-39f1-5b43-b5e8-2b432df1466a)


Fran refuses point blank to discuss her time at the Manor. Doesn’t stop me trying at regular intervals.

‘My memory in’t what it was.’

‘You must remember something.’

She shakes her head stubbornly. ‘Nothing worth the telling. Read the books. They’d have it right, mostly, I ‘spec’.’

‘What about the letters you typed?’

‘Oh, Ind, you can’t expect me to remember those boring old things. Thought they were all in the files, anyway, and you’d read ‘em.’

‘Some of them were burned, apparently.’

Something glitters in her eyes, but she shakes her head again and clatters her spoon into her bowl, signalling it’s time to change the subject. ‘Don’t want any more of this porridge. Anyway, I was thinking in the night.’

‘Always a dangerous thing.’

‘Go on with you. Have me best ideas then. I thought, Why doesn’t our Indy find a job on Flog It? They make it in Bristol. You’d be good on that. Such an interesting programme, one of me favourites.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I tell her, scooping up the cereal bowls and dumping them in the sink. ‘Might have a television job already. I’m off to London, remember, today.’

‘By the way, Ind,’ she says, casually, ‘you in’t seen them buggerin’ lights lately, have you?’

Channel 4 is housed in a scary modern building on Horseferry Road. As we walk under the sheer concave glass sheet suspended above the doors, I keep thinking the whole lot will come crashing down and slice off my head like in The Omen. Even Daniel Porteus looks uncomfortable. He keeps running a hand through his white quiff, which is getting alarmingly spiky.

He’s invited me to help explain my idea to the commissioning editor in London, because Ibby is apparently not good in meetings. ‘Doesn’t butter them up properly,’ he told me on the train. ‘If the commissioning editor suggests something stupid, she can’t conceal her contempt. Tells them they’re wrong.’ As he said it, he shot me a doubtful glance. ‘Your job is to sit there and look fresh-faced. Leave the talking to me. Unless somebody asks you to say something, in which case be brief. And enthusiastic. Don’t argue!

He marches up to the desk and tells them who we are. We sign in and are given name badges. Then we sit on low, curved armchairs in the atrium. Above, a high glassy space is diced by steel cables.

Daniel shifts awkwardly on his seat. ‘They design these specially to make it impossible to get up gracefully,’ he mutters. ‘Puts you at a disadvantage from the start. Especially with dodgy knees.’

‘I suppose you come here a lot?’ I’m not sure how to make conversation with him.

‘I’m not well in, if that’s what you mean,’ he says. ‘The company’s too small, and you need to be London-based to do serious business. Channel 4 commissioners are much happier conjuring ideas off the tablecloth at the Ivy with their mates. They give work to bright young things who remind them of themselves. Doesn’t matter if we had the best concept in the world–’ He breaks off at the sight of a tall, gangly bloke bouncing lithely over the floor as if he had springs in his heels, boing boing, coming our way at a terrific pace.

‘Cameron!’ says Daniel, struggling to his feet. A fork-lift truck would be useful at this moment. The red plastic seat farts as he finally manages to lever his bum up from it. ‘Good to see you! Thanks for sparing the time!’ I can hear the exclamation marks.

‘Daniel!’ Cameron is exclamation-marking back. He’s wearing an oversized tweed jacket that suggests at first glance he bought it at Oxfam, though at a second you’re meant to recognize he paid a fortune for it brand new somewhere much classier. He claps the older man on the shoulder manfully, and kisses me–‘And lovely to see you again!’–like he knows me. Daniel sends me a fierce glance, warning me not to open my mouth and say we’ve never met before.

‘Now–I would have bought you lunch in the canteen, but I’m supposed to be at the Ivy in half an hour.’ Cameron makes it sound such a bore. ‘Come up to the office. You have passes?’ Even I find it hard to keep up as he leads the way at a gallop towards a glass barrier. A tarty brunette I recognize from the last series of Big Brother pushes between us as if she can’t be bothered with these lumbering provincials, but fortunately Cameron waits, cooling his smoking heels and drumming the backs of his fingers against the security gate.

‘You didn’t see that Michael Wood thing the other night on BBC4?’ puffs Daniel, as we hurtle through and head for the stairs.

‘Meant to but we had people round,’ says Cameron, to let us know what a sparkly social life he has. ‘Recorded it, of course–in case I ever have time to watch. Got a pile of DVDs this high. Not enough hours in the day to see our stuff, let alone what the opposition’s up to.’

‘You should try and make time. Brilliant.’ Surely a miscalculation, as now Daniel needs to justify why he liked it, although we’re halfway through a punishing stairs workout at Cameron-pace. ‘If the…rest of the series…is as…good…Did you see it, India?’

‘No. We haven’t–’ Another warning look silences me. Presumably admitting you don’t have digital telly casts you into outer darkness at Channel 4. But here we are at the top of the stairs and Cameron isn’t listening anyway. He sweeps us through a huge open-plan office and into a glass-walled cubicle overlooking a leafy courtyard. Daniel and I sit with our knees by our ears on armchairs that are, if anything, lower than the ones in Reception while Cameron swivels to and fro in a high-backed leather chair.

‘So,’ he says. ‘Archaeology, Daniel. What’s hot?’

‘Did you watch the DVD I sent you?’

‘DVD? My assistant must have it.’

‘Never mind. The point is, we’ve some original archive material, never been shown before. Keiller excavating Avebury’

‘Twenties?’ Cameron is cool, giving nothing away.

‘That’s when Keiller first started work in the area, at Windmill Hill, you’re right, but this film dates from ‘thirty-eight, when he was reconstructing the stone circle. The film was shot by one of the villagers–only a couple of reels, but there might be more somewhere–and I want to use it as the basis of a programme about Keiller remodelling Avebury to fit his idea of how it looked in the Neolithic’

‘New Stone Age,’ I chip in helpfully, because I can see Cameron is looking puzzled. ‘Avebury’s about five thousand years old.’

‘Viewers aren’t much interested in pre-history,’ says Cameron, witheringly. ‘We get better ratings on Time Team for digs that are post-Roman. More to see. Unless it’s an execution site, of course. People like skeletons, preferably mutilated.’

I can hear the faint grinding of Daniel’s teeth. ‘Ah, but this is a story with a double layer,’ he says. ‘Not just Avebury five thousand years ago, but Alexander Keiller, playboy archaeologist, four times married, a string of mistresses, fast cars, pots of money, so obsessed by his vision of the past he moved half the village out of their homes and destroyed a community’ He’s on a roll now. ‘He entirely ignored what would be an archaeologist’s approach today–the fact that monuments like these don’t simply exist at a single point of time but represent continuity. That a village grew up in the henge, perhaps for defensive reasons, that people tried to bury the stones or destroy them, perhaps because they feared them…The story of Avebury doesn’t stop with its abandonment in the Iron Age, or for that matter with Keiller. People are still using the monument as a sacred space today’

‘Pagans,’ says Cameron. He chews a thumbnail and looks out of the window. ‘We used to do a lot about pagans. Not sure…Though I did hear that one of the contestants in the next series of BB is going to be a practising Satanist.’

‘There aren’t Satanists at–’ But Daniel kicks me.

‘That isn’t the best of it,’ he says quickly. ‘Cameron, I brought this to you before I approached the BBC because I think it’s very much your thing, though I know they’d kill for it at White City. Keiller’s vision was never completed. The Second World War got in the way, he ran out of money. The climax of our film is our reconstruction of his reconstruction. We excavate and re-erect one of the fallen megaliths Keiller didn’t have time to raise.’

Cameron’s gaze snaps back from the courtyard. ‘Fuck me. Now that’s a good idea. Positively post-modern.’

I glare at Daniel.

‘India’s actually,’ he admits. ‘She works for the National Trust.’

‘Access?’

‘Sorted.’

‘Presenter?’

‘Narrated, not presented,’ says Daniel.

‘No way,’ says Cameron. ‘Needs a presenter. Someone authoritative but sexy’ He stares out of the window again in case he spots the right person swinging through the trees. ‘There’s this bloke who’s done a brilliant job for us on a Time Team. Hasn’t gone out yet, so you won’t have seen him. Came in as a guest expert, but I’d like to try him on something solo. It’s his field, too–he’s strong on ancient religion and mystery cults. Name’s Martin Ekwall. Big bloke, early forties, looks good on camera, though I’d like to get the beard off him.’

‘That went all right,’ I say, as we cross the concrete bridge back to Horseferry Road.

‘Maybe.’ Daniel Porteus doesn’t look happy. ‘He didn’t even offer us a coffee.’

‘Is that bad?’

‘The breaking of bread signifies membership of the clan.’

‘Oh.’

‘But he did suggest a presenter. They only do that when they’re interested. “Like to get the beard off him.’” Mimicking Cameron viciously. ‘Like to get the pants off him, more like.’ He roots in his canvas briefcase. ‘Look, here’s a list of stuff I’d like you to find in the archive–stills, mostly, Keiller’s own photographs of the excavations. I’m not going back to Bristol this afternoon–meetings lined up at the BBC, different project, though it won’t do any harm to mention this one and put the willies up Channel 4. They all know each other and gossip like mad. I’d buy you lunch at the Ivy just to show that wanker I can afford it, but we’d never get a table. You don’t mind making your own way back?’

He hands me the list, and embraces me with a double air kiss. Behind him, a vast black 4×4 draws up beneath the Omen-style portico. Out steps Steve’s father, the ITN foreign correspondent, wearing dark glasses.

Wyrd.

He stares straight at me, over Daniel’s shoulder, taking off the glasses, as if he recognizes me. He has Steve’s eyes. Then his gaze slides over me, and he turns away into the building, like I’m nothing after all.

As I run up the escalator to the concourse under the sooty vault of Paddington, after detouring via Oxford Street to dispel paranoia by buying myself new jeans, I’m sure I’ll miss the train. If I don’t make this one, I’ll be waiting hours because my cheap ticket isn’t valid in peak period.

Platform four. Three minutes. Can do it if I run…

The doors are slamming but I hop into one of the first-class coaches and wheeze my way down the train. The standard-class carriage beyond the buffet and the one after that are packed, but further down the train, passengers thin out and, joy of joys, there’s a table with only one person at it, head down and absorbed in a pile of printouts. I wriggle out of my coat, plonk it and my bags on the aisle seat, shuffle across towards the window and–

Something cold and liquid explodes in my chest. It can’t be.

My buttocks, hovering an inch above the seat, squeeze instinctively to lift me out of it and, if possible, off the train before it leaves.

He looks up. Fuck. It is. Fuck.

He looks, if anything, more shocked than I feel.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I–I’ll–Just realized. Wrong train. Need the later one.’

‘Bollocks. We’re moving. Sit down. How the hell are you?’

Grey eyes, the North Sea. Too late. Drowned. Turned to stone. Lost.

And, dammit, Mr Cool, acting now like nothing happened, like we never shared a bed, let alone the experience of nearly dying in that helicopter. The train starts sliding out of the station. My bottom, with a will of its own, slowly sinks onto the seat opposite him.

‘Ed.’

The sun slants in through the train windows and sparks highlights in his dark brown hair. The cut’s shorter, though somehow messier: he must have tried gelling it into spikes but instead it appears unbrushed, and his eyes seem muddy and tired–or could I really have forgotten what he looks like?

‘You look…different,’ he says.

‘Do I?’ Renowned for my sparkling wit and ready quips.

‘More…substantial’

‘Fatter. Thanks.’

‘No. Actually I’d say you’re thinner. I meant, somehow tougher…’

‘Great. Older.’

‘More confident. Come on. Stop doing yourself down.’

‘Then stop paying me such overwhelming compliments.’

He looks older, too, than I remember. He must be ten years my senior, at least, in his mid-thirties, maybe knocking forty. As for the attraction between us–well, it’s a scent I dimly remember on the air, but now vanquished by a railway carriage reeking of microwaved baconburger and diesel fumes and frizzling brake linings as we slow for a signal on the track ahead. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself.

‘You never returned my calls,’ he says.

‘I didn’t think it would be a good idea.’

An awkward silence, as we both mull over why it wasn’t a good idea. Apart from my not wanting to be involved again with a married man, any real chance of a relationship went down with the helicopter.

‘So what…’ he starts, same moment as I say: ‘Have you…’

‘You first.’

‘I was going to ask, what have you been doing?’ he says. ‘I mean–what have you been doing with your life?’

‘I’m back in television again. With a Bristol-based independent. Been up for a meeting with Channel 4.’

‘Great.’ He actually looks impressed.

‘You?’

‘Oh, various stuff. The MA, mostly. Did I tell you I’ve been doing a part-time master’s in landscape archaeology? On my way now to a job interview.’

‘You’re not working with Luke any more?’

‘No.’ He props his chin on his hand, looks out of the window. ‘He…well, not to put too fine a point on it, he let me go. Company went bust anyway.’

Dangerous ground. ‘I need a coffee,’ I say. ‘Can I fetch you one from the buffet?’

‘No, let me get them.’ He levers himself upright, feeling in his pockets for change. ‘Bugger. Meant to stop at the cashpoint…’

‘Here, I’ve a twenty needs changing.’ As he takes it from me, our eyes meet.

‘I kept calling you because I wanted to be sure you were OK…’ he begins.

‘I was fine. Well, maybe a bit wobbly to start with, but you know…’

‘Yes. Me too.’

He lurches away down the carriage, long-legged in a pair of neat black trousers and a fine wool jacket that seems absurdly formal next to my memories of him in T-shirt and khaki combats, at the controls of the helicopter.

Interview clothes. He said he was going for a job interview. He’s doing an MA in landscape archaeology.

No. Not that job. Please.

An impossible coincidence. Couldn’t be. Could it?

Wyrd. Never trust the bloody web of connectedness. ‘Ed!’

Several other people in the carriage peer round their seats to see what’s up. There must have been a note of panic in my voice.

He turns round and starts walking back.

‘Where are you getting off the train?’

‘Swindon.’

Where Heelis, the National Trust head office, is.

‘But didn’t you ask him?’ says Corey. She’s polishing the nozzles on the cappuccino machine again. Maybe it’s one of those neuroses, like constantly washing your hands. ‘Your roots need retinting, by the way. I mean, it might not be the assistant-warden job. You said he’s really a pilot, studying archaeology part-time.’

‘Of course I didn’t ask. I jumped off the train at Reading before he came back with the coffees. Sat in the buffet and waited two and a half hours until there was another I could catch with my cheap ticket. Arrived home so late Frannie had already put herself to bed.’

Two customers walk in, a middle-aged husband and wife, shaking raindrops off their parkas. They start a muttered argument beside the homemade cakes. I slide into place behind the till, and Corey flips the top off the milk carton ready to spring into barrista action.

‘So he doesn’t know?’

‘Know what?’

‘That you’re here.’

‘Why would he? It was a one-night stand. We didn’t exactly get around to exchanging life histories.’

‘Apart from him letting slip he was married.’

Out of the corner of my eye I watch the male customer stomping off to inspect the sandwiches and organic crisps. I haven’t been entirely straight with Corey. As far as she’s concerned, Ed is someone I had a fling with in London. No one in Avebury, apart from John, knows I was caught up in the helicopter crash.

What made me act so brazenly last summer? The short answer is too much drink. Steve and I were down from London, overnighting at a pub near the airfield so we didn’t have to wake too early. Very definitely separate rooms, though Steve would have liked it otherwise. Luke and Ed were already waiting in the bar when we arrived, Luke knocking it back like there was no tomorrow, Ed switching to Diet Coke after a couple of beers. Maybe I started flirting because I was nervous Steve might make a move on me. He’d been through most of the women under thirty at the TV company, and I was determined not to join their ranks.

‘Anyway,’ says Corey, ‘if he’s a flyboy, plenty of other places he could be applying for a job. Half a dozen small airfields round here on the lookout for drop-zone pilots or instructors.’

When I first saw Ed, I thought him good-looking in a neglected way: messy dark hair, a lived-in face, dangerously unshaven, deep lines scored either side of his mouth. He had on a crumpled linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a leather coat was slung over the back of his chair. He wasn’t looking at me when we first came in. He was talking to the girl behind the bar. She was one of those snap-me-in-two blondes, like Corey, half my size with hair so straight she must have ironed it and a chenille jumper the colour of butter, beneath which her tits bubbled up in two perfect little spheres. I loathed her on sight.

‘How did you find out he was married?’ asks Corey. The woman in the parka is wielding the cake tongs with an unnecessary amount of clatter as she lifts scones onto a plate.

‘Post-coital confession.’ My fingers hover over the till buttons, as the customer moves on to the lemon drizzle cake. ‘“I should have told you earlier”: that sort of stuff. Marriage on rocks. Wife, she no understand me. Well, he didn’t actually say that last bit, but it was sort of hanging in the air, in the hope I’d fall for the oldest line in the book. They live in some bloody palatial farmhouse in Oxfordshire, no land as such but two socking great barns with it, ripe for conversion. My heart bleeds.’

‘Hot chocolate, please,’ says the woman in the parka, arriving in front of us with a carbohydrate-laden tray. ‘Ray?’

‘Do they do filter coffee?’

‘No, but we do an Americano, which is virtually the same. I should’ve told him at the time that if he was married he could forget it,’ I tell Corey, as she spoons hot-chocolate powder out of the tin. ‘But…you know how it is. You’re so anxious they shouldn’t be spotted leaving your room that you don’t get around to saying anything. I–well, I ignored all his phone calls and texts afterwards, except to tell him to go away’

‘I’m glad to say I don’t know how it is. Not from personal experience, anyway.’ Married to a Devizes policeman for two years, Corey is a devotee of women’s magazines that discuss this kind of thing.

‘Men are so full of shit,’ I say confidently ‘Their problem is they can’t tell the difference between sex and love.’

The woman at the counter snorts.

‘Or would he prefer a latte?’ I ask her.

‘In my book, he’s unfaithful even if he isn’t sleeping with someone else.’ Corey shoves the milk jug under the nozzle of the steamer. She has to raise her voice over the machine’s whoosh. ‘Which would you prefer–a husband shagging you and thinking of someone else, or shagging someone else and thinking of you?’

My creative studies BA had finished a few months and a lot of marks short of what I’d planned when my tutor’s wife started asking herself the very same question. Not that marks had anything to do with it. I’d fallen hopelessly in love with the sod. The exams were a wipeout; I only scraped a pass on coursework. Never again.

The customer’s eyebrows are jigging up and down in a demented dance. ‘Do him an Americano, dear. He doesn’t understand the difference.’

‘The real question is,’ says Corey, spooning froth into the hot-chocolate mug, ‘how do you feel about him now, supposing he had a job here?’

‘I told you. It’s over. I knew that the moment I looked at him and realized I didn’t fancy him any more. Can’t tell you what a relief that was.’

This time both Corey and the woman snort.

During my lunch hour, I cross the cobbles to the museum. Chris, at the till, raises his eyebrows. I hand him a mug of hot chocolate: bribery. ‘OK if I go upstairs?’ I ask. ‘More research for those telly people.’

‘Does the curator know?’

‘Checked with her this morning. She said to go ahead.’

He gives me the nod.

Upstairs, I pull on a pair of blue vinyl gloves to leaf through the photo albums. The first item on Daniel Porteus’s list is Destruction of Village. Doesn’t take me long to find the pictures at the start of the 1938 album: black-and-white stills of brawny workmen, braces and cloth caps, fragments of wall and thatch, homes that look as if someone dropped a bomb on them.

Grandfather or no, Keiller really was a bastard.




PART THREE Equal Night (#ulink_1ff4c5ae-1672-572b-bc99-12b8f55b5800)


And that this place may thoroughly be thought True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.

John Donne, Twicknam Garden

Let us be clear: there were no Druids at Avebury until the present day. Druids were a Celtic priesthood (and later a nineteenth-century reinvention) and Avebury fell into disuse long before the Celts arrived in Britain. Indeed, one of its most remarkable aspects is that no Iron Age artefacts at all have been found within the henge. Perhaps people steered clear of the circle at that point in time. So we can safely say that it is highly unlikely that Alban Eiler, the Celtic spring festival, was ever celebrated there during the Druids’ heyday.

Having said that, most cultures celebrate a spring festival at or about the time of the vernal equinox. Certainly some Neolithic monuments–the passages in the tomb at Knowth, in Ireland, for example–seem to be aligned to sunset and sunrise at the equinox (literally, ‘equal night’), on 20/21 March. There doesn’t appear to be any such alignment at Avebury: but that is not to say categorically there was not one. Keiller never finished his reconstruction, and we have an incomplete picture of the other settings–the Cove, the inner circles and the stone row–that lay inside the main circle.

So when today’s Druids meet to observe Alban Eiler, they could indeed be following a tradition observed through the ages at Avebury. The sun god meets the awakening spring goddess, Eostre–from whose name we derive both ‘Easter’ and ‘oestrogen’. Sap rises, green things stir, the life force returns to the earth.

Dr Martin Ekwall,

A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury, Hackpen Press




CHAPTER 12 1938 (#ulink_c1c37b19-3277-5e38-a419-e2e91195aaa9)


You can’t help who you fall for, can you?

To begin with I hardly saw Mr Keiller at the Manor. He was always somewhere else. Up and down to London, or off to Scotland. Most of the time we didn’t know where he was.

‘He’ll be skiing,’ said Cook, hopefully, if we hadn’t seen him for three or four days. He’d been a champion when he was younger, and at one time trained the British ski-jump team. But, no, he’d turn up late that very evening, with guests, demanding supper at midnight.

Mrs Sorel-Taylour had introduced me, suitably Kirby-gripped, on my first day. ‘This is Miss Robinson, who’ll be helping with the cataloguing.’

He was in the Map Room, sitting on a high draughtsman’s stool, looking at some photographs laid out under an Anglepoise lamp. Its light was the only splash of brightness. Everything in there was brown–velvet curtains, window seats, carpet. Even the walls were covered in brown leather.

He turned to inspect me, but I don’t think he was much interested by what he saw, a fifteen-year-old girl in a cheap jacket-and-skirt costume, with finger-waved hair and a scrubbed country face. ‘Do you write clearly?’ You could hear the w in write.

‘Very,’ said Mrs Sorel-Taylour, before I could open my mouth. ‘That’s why I took the child on.’ Did I imagine that tiny stress on ‘the child’? ‘She will, of course, be under my direct supervision.’

‘Good,’ he said. He was bored already, wanting to return to his pictures. The one on top was strange, but familiar too. It took a moment to work it out, then I saw it was a photograph of Avebury from the air. It had been taken late in the day because the shadows were long.

He must have been watching my face. ‘You recognize it.’ The soft upper-class w sound again, instead of the r.

‘I can see our guesthouse. There.’

‘Ah, that Robinson. I thought I’d seen you before.’ I could smell the oil on his sandy brown hair, sweet and spicy. The parting, on the right, was straight as a metal rule, the hair slicked back from a high, smooth forehead. ‘Do you know who you’re descended from?’

‘The monkeys, my mam says.’

He laughed. ‘The biggest monkey round here in the eighteenth century was Tom Robinson. They called him Stonebreaker Robinson, because he destroyed so many of the stones from the circle–broke them up for building material and road surfacing. Did you know that?’

‘No, sir.’

‘It seems to me entirely appropriate that we should put a Robinson to labour setting right what he destroyed. You shall serve your time in the museum on his behalf.’ He had a habit of dipping his chin and crinkling up his eyes when he smiled. ‘Of course, you might not be descended from him, but we shall never know, shall we? So I shall always assume you are and, on high days and holidays, give you twenty strokes of the lash as additional penance.’

I looked helplessly at Mrs Sorel-Taylour. Her mouth was a tight red seam.

Mr Keiller turned back to his photograph but his eyes stayed crinkled and happy, a smile rippling round his mouth.

Big crates arrived from London, full of what Mam called ‘stuff’. So many bits of broken pot and flakes of stone that Mr Keiller had dug up from Windmill Hill when he’d come there in the 1920s, or from Mr Peak-Garland’s fields when he’d rebuilt the Avenue that leads up to the circle. Not to mention the bits and pieces they found from the circle itself in the last year, when they started putting back the stones. It was all stuff to me, too, to begin with, but after a bit what the archaeologists say starts to sink in, so you see how a sliver of flint has a serrated edge that some old fellow chipped there five thousand years ago, or the pattern of nibble marks on a piece of pot jabbed into the clay by an ever-so-patient woman with a tiny bird bone.

We didn’t unpack it–that was a job for the men. All of them used to wear these dark green blazers, like a sports team, with a badge on the breast pocket that said MIAR: Morven Institute of Archaeological Research, after Mr Keiller’s family home in Scotland. At first it made them hard to tell apart at a distance, but it didn’t take long to sort out who was who. There was Mr Young, Mr Keiller’s foreman, small-built, lean and leathery-skinned from the last season, who’d been promoted to supervise the museum. He wasn’t posh like the others, and he had a proper Wiltshire accent, but he’d worked with Mr K for years, and Mr K always listened to his opinion. He was friendly but a bit shy around me, and Mrs Sorel-Taylour said he was awkward with women, never been married. But it was the two younger ones I saw most of: dark, heavy-browed, big-nosed Mr Piggott, who treated me like I wasn’t there, most of the time, and Donald Cromley, the taller, good-looking fellow whose light brown hair used to flop over one eye because he didn’t oil it back.

They would take out each piece from the crates and try to find it in the notes, which had always got lost or separated, then argue over what it was. Once or twice I half expected them to come to blows. Mr Piggott was the older of the two, and the more experienced, though sometimes he behaved like an overgrown schoolboy, but Mr Cromley was the clever young puppy snapping at his better’s heels. Mrs Sorel-Taylour and I had to sit there writing everything down, and later type it all up. When she was satisfied I really did write neatly, she let me do the labels to go with the exhibits in the glass and mahogany cases.

We were in the museum one morning when Mr Cromley dipped his hand into the crate, and Mr Piggott started to giggle when he saw what he’d come up with. ‘You know, Donald, the Americans have an expression,’ he said, ‘which we could adapt for this occasion. “Happy as a Don with two…’”

Mrs S-T shot them a disgusted glance. ‘Gentlemen. Please remember there are ladies present.’

‘She’s a country girl,’ said Mr Piggott. ‘She knows what it is. Don’t you, Miss Robinson?’ The first time, I think, he’d ever addressed me by name.

Of course I knew. Didn’t stop my cheeks being on fire, though. Mr Cromley placed the chalk doo-dah on the table where he had been laying out the finds. It was about four inches long, rough carved, with a bulging knobble at the end.

‘Not amazingly impressive,’ said Mr Piggott, with a scornful twist of his thick dark eyebrows.

‘Ah, but I have four of them,’ said Mr Cromley, delving into the crate, and the pair of them burst out laughing again.

‘Where did they come from?’ I asked, provoking more hoots and snuffles.

‘These are from Windmill Hill,’ said Mrs Sorel-Taylour. ‘I’m sorry, Frances, you’ll have to become used to this sort of thing.’

‘Regeneration,’ said Mr Cromley, recovering himself sudden-like. ‘That’s what ceremonies at Avebury would have been about, in all probability. They may have been left as offerings to the gods. Or the priest may have strapped on a chalk phallus for the ritual.’

‘He never wore one of those!’ I exclaimed. ‘What would he have done with it?’

Mr Piggott went so brick-coloured I thought he’d explode with trying not to laugh. But Mr Cromley pushed back his hair and gave me a look that was almost respectful. ‘That’s actually a very good question.’

‘But not one we should waste time answering this morning,’ said Mrs Sorel-Taylour, briskly. ‘It’s nearly Miss Robinson’s lunch break, and there are at least half a dozen finds in that crate you haven’t begun to look at.’

At twelve thirty exactly Mrs Sorel-Taylour would send me off for lunch, and usually I’d wander across the cobbles to the barn in the hope of finding Davey polishing one of the cars. He wasn’t often there. He’d be on the road, maybe driving Mr Keiller to some dinner in Mayfair, or fetching more boxes of stuff from Charles Street where Mr K had his London house.

Today I wasn’t sure if I was glad or not there was no sign of him. I kept thinking of the great big chalk thing Mr Keiller had been carrying the night Davey and I watched the ceremony in the garden. Whatever had he done with it when they disappeared between the box hedges?

I wanted to ask Mrs Sorel-Taylour what she’d seen. If she was there, it couldn’t have been anything too dreadful, could it? Surely Mr Keiller wouldn’t…

There was a step behind me on the cobbles. I whipped round to see Mr Cromley crossing the stable yard towards the Manor. He’d been there too that night, I remembered, the moonlight silvering his light brown hair. ‘Mr Cromley!’ I called.

He turned and came towards me. ‘What can I do for you, Miss Robinson?’

He was delicate-looking, but strong too. I’d seen him lift them crates effortlessly from the floor.

‘I was interested in what you were saying in there,’ I said. ‘But what I was wondering was…how you know what they did?’

His face lit up in a smile. ‘Always pleased to enlighten the genuinely curious,’ he said, eyes raking me like I was a seed patch. ‘It’s all conjecture, of course, but I’ve made a study of primitive magic, in various parts of the world.’ I’d thought of him as cynical and knowing, but now he seemed surprisingly young and earnest. ‘The urge for ritual is always close to the surface, even in modern life. There must be superstitions in the village connected to the stones.’





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