The Buried Circle (19 page)
‘Leave me, India. I had a bad night last night, and wore meself out walking to Big Avebury. Just need a bit of sleep and I’ll be fine.’ She rolls over and pulls the bedcovers up to her chin.
There’s a frowsty, stale smell in here. The bedroom–dining room as was–is crammed with furniture. The drop-leaf dining-table is pushed against the wall, with a mirror hanging over it. As well as her bureau, there’s a wardrobe, a chest of drawers by her bed, and an open-fronted cabinet with what she calls her ‘knickknacks’–china figures I wouldn’t give house room to, but she seems to think they’re the last word in elegance, and a couple of really hideous pots I made for her at junior school. Everything seems to have accumulated a thick layer of dust since I was last in here, but Frannie insists she should be left to do her own cleaning.
I don’t like this ‘tired’, though. She’s been sleeping later and later in the mornings, and Frannie always used to be out of bed with the lark. Maybe she is ill.
‘Let me take your temperature.’
‘No.’ Muffled, stubborn. All the same I open the top drawer of the bedside chest, where she keeps a variety of first-aid bits and pieces, to look for the thermometer.
My God. A nauseating smell pours out.
There’s a half-eaten sandwich in there, green with mould. It might once have been ham. ‘Frannie…’
‘Aren’t you gone yet?’ she grunts.
‘What’s this?’ My voice is sharper than I mean it to be.
‘What’s what?’ She rolls over to look at me. ‘Pooh, what’s that stink?’
‘There’s a mouldy sandwich in your drawer. No wonder you’re ill.’
‘I’m not ill. And I didn’t put it there.’
‘For Chrissake, Frannie, who else?’ I’m shouting now, I’m so angry. How dare she not look after herself? I’m always telling her to keep an eye on sell-by dates and chuck stuff out before it goes off–at her age food poisoning is
serious
, for God’s sake…
‘Oh, India, I don’t know. Chuck it out and leave me to sleep.’ Her eyes are watering, and now there’s a horrible choking lump in my chest because I don’t mean to shout at her, but I’m so frightened she’ll go away and leave me.
‘I’m sorry’ I reach out and stroke her hair. Her shiny eyes meet mine and there’s fear in hers too. Then she smiles at me, as sunny as she ever was.
‘My mam used to do that,’ she says. ‘You’re a good girl, India.’
I was a good girl. Mam always used to say that. You sometimes have the devil in you, Frannie, but you’re good-hearted.
I broke her heart, I know I did. She was in the hospital when I moved away from Avebury, later, and she knew why I was going.
There was only one conversation. ‘I’ve eyes in my head, Frances,’ she said. ‘Don’t think you can fool me, like you can your father. I won’t tell him, though. It would kill him. I know I can trust you to do the right thing.’
It killed her instead. My lovely little mother, dancing with the tea-towel to Ambrose and Henry Hall. She waited and waited for me to do the right thing, and I didn’t. I reckon
I
was what killed her.
The trees had gone and all our secret places was laid bare. It wasn’t only the blacksmith’s and the pigsties: no end of cottages came down, no end of people left the village.
Why d’you want to work for that ol’ devil?
Walter had said, the day we watched the blacksmith’s demolished. But there was plenty who would, a gang of maybe twenty local men already employed to start digging once the museum was finished, and others queuing behind for jobs, because Mr Keiller paid more than the farmers did, and sometimes he treated them better.
Mrs Sorel-Taylour had a cold, a real streamer. She was all pink round the eyes, and her voice was like a piece of cracked old pot. We were in the museum. Mr Keiller was in the back room talking to Mr Young about plans for the new season–I could see the brim of his Panama through the open doorway–and Mr Piggott and Mr Cromley were on their knees unpacking another crate from Charles Street.
‘Blow me down,’ said Mr Piggott. ‘Alec! I’ve found Felstead.’
Mr Keiller came through and knelt beside him. ‘Well, I’m damned. I thought I asked them to save the skeletons till last.’
The crate seemed awful small for a whole skeleton. There was a screeching sound as Mr Cromley wrenched out the last nails, and began pulling out the protective straw. Mrs Sorel-Taylour sneezed.
Mr Keiller looked up. ‘Mrs S-T! Would you kindly take your germs elsewhere. Any more explosions like that and Felstead will be dust.’ I was trying for a glimpse of what was in the box, but Mr Piggott’s big head was in the way.
‘It’s ody a head code,’ said Mrs Sorel-Taylour, trying for dignity through sinuses brimming with snot.
‘It sounds awfully bad,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘I’m serious. I’d rather you went home. I don’t want to delay the start of the excavation if everybody goes down with it.’
‘I really can’t justify–’
‘I can, and I will, Mrs Sorel-Taylour.’ Suddenly he was really angry, shouting at her. It was terrifying how quick he’d gone from joking to blind rage. I shrank back against the table, and Mr Piggott began edging the box of finds out of the way. ‘You work for me. At this moment, I would prefer you not to be working for me. Go home. You may come back when you’re well again.’
‘But…’
‘On your feet, Mrs Sorel-Taylour. Pick up your pencil and your shorthand pad, and
walk!
Mrs Sorel-Taylour sniffed. Mr Keiller’s jaw clenched. She walked, unhooking her coat from the peg by the door.
They ignored me.
‘Bloody woman,’ said Mr Keiller, as soon as she was gone. ‘She knows my chest is delicate.’
‘You have to look after yourself,’ said Mr Piggott. ‘God knows, Alec, you work hard enough for ten Sorel-Taylours, and you’re irreplaceable.’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘I needed her to type some letters. Cromley, be a good chap…’ Mr Cromley jumped to his feet, delving in his jacket pocket and pulling out a small squarish package, wrapped in a brown envelope and bound with a rubber band. But Mr Keiller rocked back on his heels, shaking his head. ‘No, dammit, don’t go after her–she’d only spread her microbes over the Discavox.’
He would notice you if he needed you.
‘Miss Robinson.’ There was a wheedling note in his voice. ‘How is your typing?’
‘Excellent, sir,’ I said, trying to answer like Mrs Sorel-Taylour would.
The package came whizzing through the air towards me. Luckily I caught it.
‘Two blue carbons,’ he said. ‘Drop them with the fair copies into the Map Room for me to sign before you leave tonight. Now, Piggott, let’s get this bloody dog out of its box.’
Canis familiaris felstedensis
. I had to spell it out longhand among the Pitman’s. Then cross it out again.
‘Alec, you can’t label it that,’ said Mr Piggott. ‘You got into trouble before.’
‘Nothing wrong with naming the creature after a Derby winner. Looks like a greyhound, anyway’
‘Cross it out, Miss Robinson,’ said Piggy Eyes. No sense of humour. Well, he did have one, but it was silly and cruel. ‘It’s called
canis familiaris palustris!
Whatever the blazes that meant.
I wanted to see the human skeletons that had been dug up at Windmill Hill ten years before, but those hadn’t come down from London with the dog bones. There was supposed to be a child’s skeleton, which they called Charlie, and a tiny baby.
‘Yooman sacrifice,’ said Mr Piggott, trying to mimic a village accent. ‘Arrr, Martha, ‘tes awful strange what our great-grandmamas was up to.’
He and Mr Keiller were behaving like over-excited schoolboys, without Mrs Sorel-Taylour’s presence to restrain them, and that display of temper might never have happened. I had the feeling they were both vying for my attention, Mr Keiller because he could never stop until he had caught you up in his web, Mr Piggott because whatever Mr Keiller did, he had to copy.
‘Stop playing the fool, Stu Pig,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘Don’t pay any attention, Miss Robinson. He knows perfectly well there is no evidence how those infants died. The puzzle is why their bones are complete when the rest of the human bone we found on Windmill Hill is fragmented. Still, we may find human remains to shed some light when we dig the henge.’
‘You hope,’ said Stu Pig. That was a good name for him, I thought. ‘You hope, you hope, you hope.’
‘Nothing so abstract as hope,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘I
plan
. Stop giggling. Young will disapprove. I’ve set him to draw a survey of where he thinks the buried stones could lie, and if the rain’s cleared I could do with fresh air. Let’s leave the delightful Miss Robinson to get on with my letters.’
Mr Cromley had been keeping quiet. When I got to my feet to fetch the dictation machine, I caught his eyes on me, cool, grey and thoughtful.
The dictation machine was an extraordinary fandangle that Mr Keiller had brought back from somewhere overseas, America, I suppose, or maybe Switzerland. It was his favourite toy, housed in a polished walnut box with a hinged lid. Mrs Sorel-Taylour had shown me how to work it. It was like magic. Mr Keiller recorded his voice on it, but instead of engraving it onto a phonograph, the machine used plastic tape. She told me you had to be careful not to hold it near a magnet or somehow it would all be gone.
By day it was kept in the Map Room, where he liked to work, but at night it was taken up to his dressing room so he could talk into it whenever the mood came over him to write a letter, which it often did. When he was full of enthusiasm he’d sometimes write to the same person several times in a day. He’d go on late into the night, his voice coming and going as he paced up and down the room, suddenly getting loud when he sat down and remembered to lean in to the recorder. It was a funny feeling being alone with him talking right in your ear, out of the machine.
I collected it from the Map Room and took it to our office above the stable block. The packet Mr Keiller had lobbed at me contained three of his little tapes. But which came first? One was marked ’6 April, VGC. The other two had question marks pencilled on their boxes, so I picked up the one that was dated. I had never used the machine before by myself, but I set everything up like Mrs Sorel-Taylour had shown me, and sat back with my shorthand pad at the ready. Mrs Sorel-Taylour was so fast at typing she could almost keep up with the machine, but she said I shouldn’t try that because I’d make too many mistakes that way and Mr Keiller liked a nice clean copy without words xxxed out or smudges left by the correcting rubber.
I turned the knob to start and, with a clunk, the machine let out Mr Keiller’s voice, hissy and a bit slurred, so I could tell this had been dictated late last night with a brandy in his hand.
‘My dear Childe,’ the machine said to me. ‘So glad you rejected cannibalism…’
You got used to this kind of stuff. He was writing to one of his professor friends about some excavation up in the Orkneys. More old bones, more bits of pot. ‘If you find yourself in this part of the world in the early summer, perhaps you would care to join us for the grand opening of our museum…’ The smooth voice with its soft rs, hissing out of the machine like steam, made me sleepy. My shorthand looked like something that had been dug out of the ground too. ‘Yours, Alec’
Another letter began. Made me smile because it was to Mr Piggott’s mother. She was always worrying about her precious Stuart–a gurt grown man, mind, and about to get married, though for the life of me I couldn’t understand what kind of woman would want him–and it was a joke between me and Mrs Sorel-Taylour that poor old Mr K had to keep writing back to reassure her Mr Piggott was well and happy and his fingers not being worked to the bone. ‘This work–I always prefer not to call it
my
work proprietorially–is a perfect religion to me…’
That was him all over: our high priest, inspiring us to do The Work. If Mr Piggott laboured all hours, it was because Mr K had bewitched him, like the rest of us. Reckon I wasn’t the only one half in love.
There was a clunk. Time to change the tape; they didn’t last long. Which came next? Judging by the question marks, Mr Keiller didn’t know either, though it wasn’t like him to be muddled. He was usually so exact.
I eeny-meeny-miny-mo’d. But this one couldn’t be to Mrs Piggott.
‘…a turmoil of apprehension. I have, at different times of my life, made studies, more or less cursory and sometimes merely superficial, of various branches of the erotic impulse–’ I stopped the machine. My face was hot, and I was glad I was alone in the office. What would Mrs Sorel-Taylour have said? This had to be the wrong tape. I turned over the box. There was a date, after all, in small neat letters, half erased: ‘9 Oct’. Mr Cromley had picked up an old recording by mistake, maybe one that Mr Keiller had meant to wipe and use again. I couldn’t imagine Mrs S-T typing a letter like this, but she must have.
What did he mean, studies of the erotic impulse? I remembered ideas Davey sometimes whispered to me. I thought of that thing made of chalk, and the giggling ladies, as they followed Mr Keiller into the hidden part of the garden.
My fumbly fingers kept making mistakes so it was seven o’clock before I’d typed clean enough versions of the letters, with the blue copies he asked for. It was pitch black outside.
I shut off the lights in the museum. No need to lock the door: who’d want all them bits of broken old pot? It was dark over the cobbles, but soon as I came round the end of the stable block, light spilled out of the Manor House windows onto the lawns.
I went up the path, and knocked.
The butler, Mr Waters, was too grand to answer the side door, so when it swung open there was the housemaid behind it. She came from over Bassett way, and was always snappy with me, for I was clerical, a career girl, and she was a domestic. ‘The master’s upstairs, dressing for dinner,’ she said.
‘I’ll leave everything in the Map Room, then.’ I’d brought the dictation machine over, and it was heavy. She stood back reluctantly.
As I was lugging it through the long, dark passageway, with its old maps and engravings on the wall, I heard heels on polished wood. Mr Keiller came off the bottom of the stairs and round the corner and nearly collided with me. He was in a beautiful black suit and I thought again of film stars. He was maybe a bit old to be in the pictures but he had a lovely strong jaw and if he smiled his eyes crinkled like Errol Flynn’s. The fact he was so tall always made me feel a shy little thing. I could feel myself blushing.