The Buried Circle (16 page)
‘Widdershins!’ Mr Cromley was delighted. ‘Must tell Alec. Widdershins is the direction he’s chosen to take excavating the circle.’
‘Well, my mam would say he was storing up trouble for himself.’
‘Perhaps he is. In more ways than one.’ He gave a rueful grin. ‘Sorry about the ragging in there. Piggott and I don’t entirely see eye to eye. For all his schoolboy bluster, he’s a prude. Won’t admit these places were about sex and death.’
‘I think you’re trying to shock me, Mr Cromley.’
‘Merely making an academic case for ritual magic in the Neolithic’ He threw me a mischievous look, then glanced up at the church clock. ‘I’m so sorry, but I’m expecting a telephone call in the Manor from my uncle. He’s visiting friends in Wiltshire, and we’re hoping to arrange dinner this week. Otherwise, I’d happily…initiate you in the mysteries. But there’ll be other opportunities. Strikes me you’re a lot brighter than you let on, Miss Robinson.’ He raised an eyebrow like other men might raise a hat, and let himself into the Manor garden through the wrought-iron gate.
So I went back to the guesthouse and hung around the kitchen, pinching scraps for a sandwich, while Mam toiled over preparations for the evening meal, and ran in and out of the dining room with lunch for any guest who hadn’t gone out for the day. She threw me an impatient glance and the tea-towel, and I ended up, as I often did, doing the washing-up. Then when I started shooting worried glances at the clock, she touched my hair and said, ‘Go on, I can manage without you–you’ve more important things to do.’ I can feel her fingers now, after all these years, smoothing my curls.
I ran across the road to the barns again, in the hope Davey was back and I’d sneak ten minutes with him before I had to return to Mrs Sorel-Taylour. But he was off to London again with Mr K, according to Philip the other driver, and staying overnight.
A few days later Mrs Sorel-Taylour and I were in the office upstairs, typing up notes Mr Piggott had dictated, when there was a terrible bang from outside. A couple of years later a noise like that would have sent us scurrying under the table, thinking German planes were bombing us, but this was still six months before Mr Chamberlain and his piece of paper and it hadn’t sunk in, to me at least, that there was a war coming.
Mrs Sorel-Taylour rose straight-backed, flapping a hand to tell me I should stay sitting. She stalked over to the window–there was only one, in the end wall, with faded chintz curtains–but I dare say she couldn’t see much, not being very tall.
There was another bang like the crack of doom.
‘It in’t the trees again?’ I asked. Two years ago, they’d cut down the trees that grew over the banks and dynamited the stumps. A gurt piece of wood had gone clean through Mr Peak-Garland’s cowshed roof, and Mr Keiller liked to tell the story of how Mr Piggott had been hit on the head by another lump. Pity it didn’t bash some of his brains out, I thought. He had far too many of them, and knew it. I’d seen cartoons he’d drawn of people in the village and it seemed to me he always made us out to look fools.
‘Isn’t
, Frances.’ Mrs Sorel-Taylour was waging war on my Wiltshire ways. ‘That wasn’t explosives, it was a demolition ball. It’ll be the blacksmith’s.’
‘Can we go and look?’
She checked her watch. ‘It’s almost lunchtime. Make sure you’re back a few minutes before half past one.’
I was down the steep narrow stairs and out across the cobbles before you could say Fran Robinson. I wanted to see this.
The blacksmith’s wasn’t the first building to go. Rawlins’s garage, hard by the Adam and Eve stones, which Mr Keiller called the Cove, had already gone. Mr Rawlins didn’t mind. Shabby wooden shack, yard full of old tyres and bits of cars, backed by a row of four cottages with leaky thatch. Rawlins needed space for his new petrol pumps, his second wife and all his kids, so he thought it a great deal when Mr Keiller offered him in exchange a piece of land outside the village on the Swindon road. Even lent him three hundred pounds to build a gurt new flat-roofed house that looked like an Egyptian picture palace. Our dad was impressed, but our mam used to wince every time she went past it. Mr and Mrs Tibbles from the cottages, Curly and Mary King, and the old lady who always wore black, who also lived in the row, faded out of our lives. I thought they’d all gone to Marlborough, but I wasn’t sure.
There was another bang as I came round the side of the church. It looked like there was a fog rolling down the village street, and the lich-gate was shrouded in yellow dust. A cheer went up, there was a creaking noise, then a crash.
By the time I was through the gate, there was no thatch left on the blacksmith’s shop, except for one corner, and no front, and not much by way of side walls either. The straw clung to the last bit of chimney-stack like Mr Hitler’s moustache. Half the village had gathered, far as I could tell, including all the lads who should’ve been in school, and the teachers with them too. There was a crane swinging a wrecking ball, and a group of our men, wearing dungarees and thick leather belts, were going to work with sledgehammers on what was left. The dust caught the back of your throat.
I was standing next to old Walter, who lived up Green Street. He shook his head. ‘What a day. Never thought I’d live to see this.’ His lip was trembling, and he wiped at the corner of his mouth with a wrinkled arthritic hand. ‘Pigsties are coming down too before nightfall. An evil day. I’m going home while I still have one to go to.’ He began shuffling up the street, blinking against the cruel dust. He’d served in Sudan under General Gordon, they said, and been wounded in the head, then come home and lived with his old mother until she died on the same day as the King two years ago. Suddenly he stopped and turned, taking in this time who I was. ‘Why d’you work for that ol’ devil? It’ll be
your’n
next.’
Another great crash and the back wall of the blacksmith’s came down. Now there was nothing left but a jagged amputation, a ghost of a house, rubble where people I knew had once lived and worked and had babies. And all the little boys in the village were cheering.
He’s waiting for me by the Land Rover, leaning against the open passenger door with one foot on the step. Jeans this time, black ones. A pair of aviator sunglasses. And those stupid cowboy boots he had on the night I met him.
‘This wasn’t my idea,’ I say, before he can get a word in. ‘Understand? This is the one and only time I’m ever going to mention what happened between us. I’d rather not be showing you round, but it seems nobody else has time to do it.’
He starts laughing. Bastard. Then he peers over the sunglasses and sees I’m serious.
‘Sorry. Sorry, Indy’ He takes the glasses off, folds them, tucks them into his shirt pocket and strides round to the other side of the vehicle. ‘Get in. By the way, I’ve the change from your twenty.’
‘My what?’
‘The twenty-pound note you gave me on the train. Remember? Before you did a runner at Reading.’
Ha, ha. I throw my rain jacket into the footwell, feeling stupid. But I had to say something to make the position clear.
‘Why did you give the job to
him?’
I asked Michael, without thinking, when I heard last week. I’d strolled into his office hoping to persuade him to give me more work with the wardens, and it came as a shock to have my fears confirmed.
‘D’you know him, then?’ Michael straightened the photograph of his children, which I’d knocked off its precise axis on the desk.
I’d well and truly stitched myself up. ‘I met him once. He struck me as a bit of a loudmouth.’
‘Really? I wouldn’t have said that.’ Michael gave me a particularly beady stare, and I discovered I was kicking the leg of my chair like a petulant schoolgirl.
‘And he’s a helicopter pilot, not an archaeologist.’
‘Which is an excellent skill to bring to the job. He’s studying aerial survey, among other things, and it’s about time we looked again at Avebury from the air, especially with these new Lidar techniques that can even penetrate woodland. You do realize this placement is part of his MA? We’ve an arrangement with the university.’
‘Oh.’
‘Works out perfectly to give us cover while Morag’s away. He won’t be here full time. There might still be a day here and there for you. But you’ll be pretty busy, anyway, with those television people.’
Will I? Not a word from Daniel Porteus since I emailed him a list of the stills I’d found, and no dates fixed for filming.
‘Tell you what,’ Michael adds, with the gleeful expression of a man handing out sweeties. ‘Why don’t you do a day for us next Monday? You can show Ed round.’
‘Hope the anti-freeze is topped up in this vehicle,’ says Ed, as I climb into the Land Rover: his, not the National Trust’s, and in only marginally better condition. ‘Your expression could ice a small lake. Pardon me for asking, but what was so awful about what we did? You seemed to appreciate it at the time.’
‘I wouldn’t have, if I’d known you were married. You waited to break that snippet of news until afterwards.’
‘Ah.’ He clips on his seatbelt. ‘Only…there didn’t seem to be an appropriate moment to mention it.’
‘You’re doing it again.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Being flip about it.’
‘I’m
never
flip about my marriage.’ He starts the engine before I’ve closed the passenger door, and we’re spraying gravel on the Manor driveway while I try to get the seatbelt fastened. It’s become twisted somehow inside the reel, and I haven’t managed to straighten it out when we come to a sudden halt.
I turn round to see him looking at me. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Which way? Left, right? You’re supposed to be giving me the guided tour, remember?’
‘Oh. Right.’ Right takes us between the henge banks, past the massive diamond-shaped Swindon Stone, and into the circle. ‘Follow the road round by the Red Lion, then we’ll go down the Avenue to where the equipment’s kept at West Kennet Farm. Graham asked us to pick up a chainsaw.’
He guns the engine and we move out between the Manor gates onto the main road. It’s a sunny, blustery day, cloud shadows scudding over the high Downs, a bit chilly but what do you expect in March? At least it isn’t raining. But those cowboy boots will take some punishment when we go up to the Long Barrow. There’s a lake of mud at the bottom end of the track.
Anchors on again. Dead halt.
‘What the fuck’re
they
doing?’
‘Oh, no. Druid procession.’ I’m scanning the fluttering white robes in the hope of spotting a friendly face. ‘I hope Michael knows…They’ll be trying to Reclaim their Ancient Dead.’
‘What?
‘Someone delivered a leaflet to the Trust. Part of the spring equinox celebrations–they’re complaining about the skeletons in the museum. This’ll be a protest march.’
Strung out across the road, at great personal peril given that it’s the main route from Swindon, the Druids are doing a stately dance to the sound of a drum. They are led by a mountainous man with a grey beard and dreadlocks. Next to him, a fire-eater juggles blazing clubs, the flames deceptively transparent in the sunlight. Bringing up the rear, a man in a wheelchair is doing wheelies in time with the beat.
‘This lot aren’t from round here,’ I say. ‘The local Druids wouldn’t let them interfere with the traffic. That’s a blind corner–you can’t see what’s coming.’ A screech of brakes behind underlines this. One massive supermarket lorry in a hurry could flatten us all. ‘We ought to move them off the road.’
A car hoots angrily from the back of the queue. The grizzled Druid swings round and blows his horn in answer. His is bigger and louder.
And sod you too,’ says Ed, one hand on the steering-wheel, peering cautiously out of the Land Rover window, the new cowhand clasping the reins against the pommel of his saddle while he surveys the milling herd. ‘Now I remember why I prefer flying.’
I open my door, ready to jump down.
‘Hang on.’ He turns off the engine. ‘I think I should be gallant here. Allow me to exercise my natural authority.’ He grins at me, unclips his seatbelt and hops onto the road.
The procession ignores us.
‘Before I attempt to sort this lot out, do you know any of them?’ he asks, as I join him. ‘You sure there are no locals?’
‘Might or might not help if the Avebury Arch-Druid was here because not all the Druid groups recognize his authority.’ There are about twenty protesters, divided almost equally between men and women: several in white robes, and not a soul I’ve seen before. ‘Sorry. You’re on your own here, Ed.’
‘What do you mean, I’m on my own? You’d better back me up.’
‘Right behind you. But I thought I heard you volunteering to exercise your natural authority’
‘I’m not proud. This could be a two-person authority job.’
Judging by the rising chorus of hoots from the backed-up traffic, it won’t take a Sainsbury’s lorry to create bloodshed and mayhem if the Druids stay on the road much longer. Their dance is taking them slowly towards the crossroads in the centre of the village. They’ve almost reached the pub car park, the perfect opportunity to herd them out of danger, if only they’d pay attention. Ed could either jog ignominiously after them, or–
‘EXCUSE ME!’ He’s gone for the more dramatic option, hands on hips to summon the necessary lung power. ‘NATIONAL TRUST! WOULD YOU KINDLY GET OFF THE ROAD SO WE CAN DISCUSS THIS WITHOUT ANYONE GETTING RUN OVER?’
The only response is another contemptuous horn blast. The drum beats louder and faster, and there’s a lot more energetic twirling of white robes. A she-Druid with a wraparound skirt seems to be deliberately flashing her knickers.
‘Politeness doesn’t always work,’ I tell him. ‘But don’t be tempted–’
Too late.
At least he doesn’t break into a run, which would be humiliating, but his long legs take him at remarkable speed through the twirling dancers and up to the grizzled Druid with the horn. Resisting the temptation to cover my eyes, I follow.
‘…any
fucking
idea how fucking dangerous this is?’ Ed is saying, as I catch up. ‘This is the main road from Swindon, not a fucking pagan playground.’