The Buried Circle (21 page)
Not everyone’s face works on camera, but Martin’s does, even with the beard. He’s a boyish mixture of earnest and enthusiastic, eyes warm and twinkly, and although the sun shows up the creases at their corners, he’s fit and muscled for a middle-aged bloke. Ed’s wiry, but nowhere near as buff.
‘Oh, Lord, I see what you mean,’ says Martin, coming over to watch a playback on the camera’s LCD screen. ‘I do need to smile more on a closeup.’
‘Relax and enjoy it.’
‘Easy enough for you to say. You try.’
‘Fortunately no one is ever going to ask me to step round the camera to the other side,’ I say. ‘There’s too much of me to be a presenter.’
‘Bollocks, India. Most men prefer a girl with some meat on her bones. You’re tall enough to carry it. You’d look great.’
Does he mean
he
prefers…? We’re standing close. The smell of him is warm, spicy, male.
‘One more?’ he says.
I readjust the tripod and bend to the eyepiece, while Martin faces the camera. ‘That’s good…No, hang on a mo.’
Behind him, Ed has reappeared, strolling across the grass towards us.
‘Before we carry on,’ I say, straightening up, ‘something else I want to show you. Watch the last take again in the viewfinder.’ When he’s beside me, leaning in to the camera, I lean in too, intimate. ‘There–see that thing you do with your hand? It’s a bit flouncy. Fine to use your hands, but you don’t want to look too gay when you do it.’
‘India,’ says Martin, his breath tickling my ear, ‘you do realize, don’t you?’
‘Realize?’
‘I
am
gay.’
Shit. Cold, hot, entire body thermostat throws a breakdown. ‘Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean…’
‘It’s fine, blossom. I don’t make a thing of it, no need to shout it from the rooftops. I just don’t want you getting the wrong idea, given that we’ll be working together.’
‘Right.’ Whatever I say is only going to land me deeper in trouble. I stare fixedly at the LCD screen, my face on fire. ‘I hope you didn’t think…’
‘Er, hi, India. How’s it going?’
‘Oh, hi, Ed.’ At least my blush makes it look like something’s going on between us. ‘Martin’s a natural.’
‘Really?’
My eyes meet his–and find no hint of jealousy, damn it. Either he knows instinctively that Martin presents no threat, or he simply wouldn’t care if we flung our clothes off and got down to it right now on the Bonking Stone.
Over lunch in the Red Lion, Martin flirts outrageously with the curator–is there a woman he doesn’t count as a friend within two minutes of meeting her? The National Trust haven’t yet committed themselves to a dig, but it looks hopeful: Channel 4 have come up with the money, Martin has promised students and expertise, and Ibby arrives tomorrow with a full crew. Filming will take place over the next few months depending on weather and Martin’s academic commitments. Daniel, roughing out a schedule on the back of his paper napkin, leans across the table to interrupt. ‘How are you fixed towards the end of June?’
‘That’s Solstice,’ I say. ‘You don’t want to film then. The place is heaving.’ ‘Great!’ says Daniel. ‘Remember what Cameron said? Channel 4 want pagans. Know anything about modern pagans, Martin?’
‘Not much.’ Martin looks less than enthusiastic. ‘My speciality’s the ancient sort.’
‘Well, now’s your chance to learn. India, can you find out when the next stone-huggers’ shindig takes place?’
‘There’s a Wiccan frill-moon ritual, just before Easter, all comers welcome,’ I tell Martin, after a conversation with John on the pub’s pay phone. We’re watching the stream of cars for an opportunity to cross the main road.
‘That didn’t take long.’
‘I have a friend who’s pagan.’ I give a thumbs-up to Daniel, waiting for us among the stones on the other side. ‘Well, more than a friend. My spirit-father.’
‘Your
what?
‘Equivalent of godfather. My mother held a naming ceremony for me at Stanton Drew stone circle when I was small. But, hey, you don’t want to hear my family history’
‘Of course I do,’ says Martin, with a brave grin. ‘I’m a vicar’s son. Trained to listen sympathetically from birth. Your mum was pagan?’
‘My grandmother says it was a rebellion. Meg married too young, then walked out on her husband and met up with a guy who took her to Stonehenge for the free festival one Solstice. She went back again and again–well, until 1989.’
‘Because the police set up an exclusion zone that year,’ says Martin. ‘Don’t look so surprised, blossom–I was studying for my PhD and my supervisor was digging the outlying barrows. So I remember the good old Second Summer of Love–been there, done that, got the smiley-face T-shirt.’
A gap appears in the traffic, and we scuttle across the road, the camera bag bouncing against my leg. While Martin was excavating at Stonehenge, my mother and I were in Avebury.
Margaret laying out the crystals, offering me the shiny black lump of onyx, the stone for secrets. Me opening my mouth, and the memories of a June afternoon in Tolemac pouring out in a thin grey jet of mist, a helicopter glimpsed through the trees, a column of filthy black smoke pouring into the sky, soaked up by the dark crystal
.
Her voice whispers in my head. Time wounds all heels, but you don’t have to go on limping for ever, do you?
Martin has been saying something I didn’t catch. ‘Pardon?’
‘I said, free festivals weren’t my scene, but I once saw Angelfeather play Glastonbury’
‘You saw my mother then. She danced with them. The bloke who took her to Stonehenge was Mick Feather.’
‘Mick
Feather?
Martin’s goggle-eyed. ‘Your mother was friendly with Mick Feather? Mick Feather, as in “Calling in the Mothership”?’
‘Yep, that Mick Feather.’ One hit only, and that about aliens landing at Stonehenge.
‘Bloody hell,’ says Martin. ‘You have touched glory, young India.’
Mick Feather, skin grimy-tinged as a coalman’s no matter how thoroughly he washed, Keir’s father. Laughing Mick. ‘He wasn’t that famous,’ I say. ‘And it was a crap song.’
‘Iconic,’ sighs Martin. ‘Whatever happened to him?’
And a shudder runs down my spine.
‘No idea,’ I say, crouching on the damp grass to open the camera bag.
Daniel has definite ideas about what has to be said in this piece to camera. ‘Tie it to 1938,’ he says. ‘Same year as the cine footage.’
‘How about saying something about the Barber Surgeon?’ Martin points across the circle to a huge lozenge of a stone. ‘He was discovered that summer, over there. You don’t look keen, India. What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ I say, prickles of electricity running up and down my skin. The Barber Surgeon stone has always been among the stuff of my nightmares.
‘Well, hurry up,’ says Daniel, over his shoulder. ‘Rain’s coming on.’
The clouds are threatening as Martin and I pick up the camera equipment to follow.
‘Was 1938 really the year they found him?’ I ask. ‘Because my grandmother was working for Keiller then.’
Martin almost drops the tripod. ‘Your grandmother worked for Keiller? Is there no end to your surprises? Are we interviewing her?’
‘She refused.’ The first raindrops are already pattering on the back of my coat. ‘But I’m working on it.’
‘Were you there?’ I ask Frannie, at home in Trusloe. Filming had to be suspended after an unsatisfactory twenty minutes’ dodging raindrops, Martin’s beard getting damper and stragglier with every take. ‘Did you actually see them dig up the Barber Surgeon?’
Her eyes are fixed on the TV screen.
‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘I drew him, didn’ I? Mr Keiller took his photograph, but my job was to draw a picture of him under the stone.’
That year the plan was to put back up the stones in the south-western quarter of the circle. There was only two or three showing above ground, but Mr Keiller seemed to think he could find the others that were buried, and even know where the ones had been that was gone for ever. He was like an old wizard: could tell you what had vanished simply by digging in the ground and looking at the soil. Those that had been broken up by old Stonebreaker in the seventeen-somethings, Mr Keiller would mark where they’d stood with a concrete pillar.
The workmen had already cleared the rubbish out of the ditch and dug right down to the chalk, flaying the banks of their green skin. A caravan had been trundled onto the field for a site office. I still had no permanent job, and was reduced to skivvy work all over again, sometimes, dusting Mr Keiller’s collections. He used to watch me, to make sure I didn’t break anything, his eyes narrowed and his lovely strong mouth a bit open, so you could hear his smoker’s breathing sucking at the air.
Heartbreaker
, he’d say,
you have a delicate touch
. I’d run the duster so lightly over the backs of them creamers you could almost see the cows shudder with delight.
Mrs Sorel-Taylour was hanging up her coat when I trailed back into the museum one afternoon after another lunchtime stroll to Windmill Hill. I’d taken my sketchbook: the barrows were a mass of spring flowers. She gave me one of her sterner looks. ‘You’re freckled, Frances. Didn’t you think to wear a hat?’
‘Didn’t know the sun would be so warm.’ While she went into the back office to look for Mr Young, I put my sketchbook down on the mahogany case nearest the door, and peered into the glass top to check my reflection.
The door behind me opened, and Mr Keiller walked in. ‘Miss Robinson! We keep colliding, don’t we?’
I straightened up and backed away. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Keiller.’
‘Don’t be. You’ve gone quite pink. Is it the sun or that beau of yours?’ He picked up my sketchbook. ‘Whose are these? Yours? Heartbreaker, you’ve been hiding proverbial lights under bushels. They’re rather good.’
Hearing his voice, Mrs Sorel-Taylour and Mr Young came out of the back office, Mr Cromley trailing after. Mr Keiller held up a picture of a clover head I’d sketched. ‘Look, Mrs. S-T. Did you have any idea your
protge
was so talented?’
‘He’s summat,’ said Mr Young. He was more used to me now, and always kind, maybe because he understood how it felt to be not so posh as the rest of them. He’d been Mr Keiller’s foreman for years on the digs. ‘Where did you learn to draw so well? That’s almost as good as Miss Chapman could do.’
‘Don’t let her hear you say so,’ said Mr Keiller, flicking back through the pages of my sketchbook. ‘In all fairness, though, you’re right. The portraits are awfully smart. Look at this one: it’s the Brushwood Boy. You’ve really caught a likeness, Heartbreaker. May I have it?’
It was a sketch of Davey. I’d never heard him called the Brushwood Boy; maybe the name came from his mop of wiry hair. Mr Keiller didn’t wait for my nervous nod, and tore the portrait out. He placed it carefully between the pages of his own notebook, and something about the way he did it made me uneasy. Why would he want to keep a picture of Davey? I remembered the two of them on that motorbike, disappearing over the brow of the hill and into the trees.
‘Tell you what,’ he said, his eyes crinkling in a smile. ‘How would you like to help us out on the excavations? What d’you think, Young? Reckon we’ve got room for another artist on the team?’
I couldn’t help it, I was grinning like a mad sheep. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Mr Cromley watching me again. He made me uncomfortable too. I never knew how to read his expression.
Mr Keiller had given the village some land for their cricket pitch, outside the circle on the other side of the bank. Evenings, he goes to watch the game. He stands under the limp leaves of the chestnut trees with their white candles poking through the green, watching the men practise. They’ve been home to wash the dirt of the digging off, and put on clean white shirts and trousers, dazzling against the grass. One or two wear grey flannel bags, and the bowler, a brawny farmhand, is in a navy blue singlet, sweat glistening on his hairy shoulders.
Mr K watched the men, but I was watching him. I’d never seen a tiger except in pictures, but I thought that was what he reminded me of, fierce and sometimes angry and always dangerous.
‘Why does he call you the Brushwood Boy?’ I asked Davey, beside me, waiting his turn to bat. He was all in white.
He shrugged. He’d been trying to catch hold of my hand, but I shoved it firmly in my cardigan pocket. ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘One of his funny ways. Come with me to the dance at the Red Lion?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We–there’s guests arriving that night, promised I’d help Mam.’
‘Suit yourself,’ he said sulkily, his golden-green eyes like bruises.
A woman was making her way down the path. She was in trousers, something you didn’t often see women wear then. She was tall and they suited her figure; they’d have concertina’d round my ankles like a comic turn. As she came closer, I recognized her.
‘Miss Chapman’s all dressed up,’ said Davey. I’d seen her often enough at the Manor, but never to speak to, not that she’d have noticed someone like me. Her usual outfit wasn’t so smart: skirt and clumpy shoes, with paint under her fingernails. She was a major-general’s daughter, people said, who’d studied art in Paris.
‘Alec,’ she called. Mr Keiller took his eyes off the men at practice, and smiled. It lit up his serious face. At the same time, he saw Davey and me.
‘Doris,’ he said. ‘Someone here you should meet. Heartbreaker!’
I trotted over, little lamb that I was.
‘This is Miss Robinson,’ he said to her. ‘You remember, I showed you her sketches.’
Close up, she was languidly pretty. She had a haughty nose, and wide, knowing eyes, with long lashes and lids that drooped seductively. Those eyes slid over my face. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I remember. Not a trained hand, but she has an eye. You should keep practising, my dear.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘Especially now Mr Keiller’s asked me to help with the drawing at the dig.’
Her mouth froze. ‘You didn’t tell me you’d offered her a job, Alec’
‘You couldn’t have been listening. I said to you we need another artist because you’re not here all the time.’