The Buried Circle (45 page)
He was more surprised than I, but recovered himself quickly.
‘Visiting the sick, Heartbreaker?’
I’d have liked to pretend, but I was carrying a folder full of bumph. ‘I work here,’ I said curtly. ‘Hadn’t you figured that out?’
Mr Cromley’s eyes slid to the buff folder, and my varnished nails digging into its flank. ‘Not a nurse, then,’ he said slowly. ‘But hospital clerk seems a bit tame for you. Had you down for a factory girl, stuffing high explosive into bomb casings and sending them on their way to Mr Hitler with your very best wishes.’
‘What are
you
doing here?’ I transferred the folder to the other arm, eyeing my escape route through the doors leading to the ward at the end of the corridor.
‘Hasn’t your boyfriend told you? Half the squadron transferred to Colerne last weekend. The rest will be following shortly, including Davey’
Davey’s letter must have been delayed, or he hadn’t got round to writing yet, though I doubted that. Worried me more that he’d been boasting to Mr Cromley I was his girl.
‘I meant, what are you doing in the hospital?’
‘Dispensing cheer. One of our Polish pilots broke his leg making his escape through a window after a visit to the WAAF quarters at Wroughton. He doesn’t speak much English, so I drove over to bring him cigarettes and condolences in case he was lonely.’ Mr Cromley smiled, his old charming self, like Hallowe’en night had never happened. ‘Entirely unnecessary, it turned out. He seems to have made friends with all the nurses. So I felt a bit of a spare part. Can I buy you a drink? The Goddard Arms is comfortable. I can give you a lift home after.’
‘I’m on fire watch tonight,’ I said. Did he still carry that little dagger of his? And I’m meeting a friend first.’
‘Bring her along,’ he said. ‘Two’s company, three’s even more fun–’
The double doors banged again, and Nell came through them, hauling her cape over her shoulders.
‘We’ve other plans.’ I caught Nell by the arm. ‘Have to deliver these,’ I said to her, brandishing the folder. ‘I know the boys are waiting for us, but I promised Sister…’
Nell’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. She allowed herself to be wheeled round and marched back through the double doors.
‘Goodbye,’ I called over my shoulder to Mr Cromley. ‘I should get your skates on back to Colerne, if I were you. Likely be a raid tonight.’
‘I don’t know what you’re playing at,’ said Nell.
‘Boys
, my foot. But if I wasn’t a respectable engaged woman, I’d gladly take him off your hands. He’s a bobby dazzler.’
‘Don’t be dazzled,’ I said. ‘He’s a sorcerer.’
By the time we came back through the double doors Mr Cromley had gone. We left the hospital, making for Drove Road through the blacked-out Old Town. The moonlight silvered the metal hoops of the unlit lampposts; there was hardly anyone about.
‘We’ve time for a quick one at the Victoria,’ said Nell. More our sort of pub than the ivy-clad Goddard Arms.
‘Not tonight,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be late for fire watch. Mervyn’s on.’ He was one of the older ARP wardens, a retired porter with a pitted nose like the burr on an oak tree, and a stickler about timekeeping–though also such a gent he usually tried to persuade me to kip down for the duration. He thought fire watch was no place for a woman, but was always glad, he said, when it was my turn because he reckoned I brought good luck: never a raid when you’m on duty, he used to say.
‘You’ll stop and have something to eat, though?’ asked Nell. ‘Probably bloody Woolton pie again, but better than dripping toast in the hospital’
‘I like dripping toast.’
‘Reminds me of engine oil.’
We grumbled amiably about food all the way up Cricklade Street. I was bringing a half-dozen eggs from my Avebury landlady for hers, each one wrapped careful in tissue paper and nested in the shoulder bag that was meant to hold my gas mask–which I’d stopped bothering to haul around with me months ago. The ARP wardens would have fined me if they’d caught me without it, but the carry-case came in useful for all manner of cargo.
On the right, the dark pinnacle of Christchurch spire pierced the silver sky: the Old Lady on the Hill, the locals call it. Behind the churchyard lay the overgrown gardens of the Lawn, a crumbling mansion house where the Goddard family used to live. It had been empty for years, though there was a rumour it was to be requisitioned to billet troops. I turned round and checked behind us. A couple of soldier boys were disappearing round the corner a long way off, but no one else was around as we took the fork that was Drove Road.
Nell’s lodgings were about halfway up. Her landlady made a fuss of me, wanted to know all about my family. Devizes, eh: full of soldiers now, was it? Was my young man one of them?
Every time someone asked me if I had a young man, I felt a sense of dread. It was as if denying Davey would be condemning him to death. And here he was, arriving in Wiltshire any day now, and no doubt planning to drive over to see me, soon as he could find petrol for his car. How was I going to explain to him that the night after the Starfish had been a mistake and could never be repeated?
No, I said. He’s not a soldier, he’s in the RAE A navigator.
Though she’s got a pilot officer after her too, said Nell, with a wink.
The landlady’s husband came in from his shift, tired, not saying much. He worked on the railways, and went to get washed while the landlady and Nell took me upstairs to show me the room. The landlady was especial proud of the alarm clock, Canadian made, same as they’d issued to all the railwaymen: you’d have it, she said, he sleeps so light, these days, neither him nor me needs it. The room was comfortable, spacious, with a double wardrobe and a bay window, but I knew immediately I wouldn’t take it.
They asked me to stop for supper, and I looked at my watch and said, no, I’d better be going, old Mervyn was a Tartar for punctuality.
On the way back down Drove Road I was cursing myself for all kinds of fool, because it had been a good room, better than my little attic in Avebury. I could still take it. I hadn’t told them I wouldn’t. But after bumping into Mr Cromley earlier I’d been sure, against all sense, if I’d pulled back the blackout material on that window, instead of their vegetable patch and an Anderson shelter at the end of the garden there’d be a row of tombstones. I couldn’t shake the sickening memory of the bay-windowed house with the cemetery behind, and a voice that said,
Spit. Lick my finger
.
I was nearly at the end of the road when the siren started up. Could’ve gone back to Nell’s landlady’s house easy, and asked to crowd with them into their damp little shelter. They’d be expecting me to dash back, Nell’s hospitable landlady hovering uneasily at the kitchen door while her husband urged her to hurry up, the bombers weren’t going to wait for them to stroll at their leisure to the bottom of the garden.
But if I went back I’d be late for fire watch.
Mervyn wouldn’t mind. He’d have worried, but he’d be happy on his own. He’d enjoy pressing one of the medical students into service.
I hesitated, almost turned. But, no, it’d be letting him down. It wasn’t that far. If I ran, I’d be at the hospital in a jiff.
I started to leg it down the road, hoping I wouldn’t see the shape of a Heinkel or a Junkers crossing the silvery sky towards the spire of Christchurch. The carry-case for my gas mask was banging against my hip, and I realized I’d forgotten to give Nell’s landlady the eggs in it. Probably scrambled by now. I wasn’t scared. I knew I could make it back easy. The street was familiar, and empty: there was only me, and the banshee wail of the siren, no thunder yet of engines in the sky, no oil-saturated wood shavings ready to burst into flames, like that mad night at the Starfish. If I met an ARP warden, he’d only tell me to get a wiggle on back to the hospital.
The slope was gentle but I was flagging as I came up to the low wall that bounded the churchyard, its iron railings spared from being melted down for Spitfires. A breeze rattled the leafless branches of the pollarded trees edging the path to the porch. A shadow came at me from the gateway, a hand caught the cloth of my coat, and fingers dug cruelly into my arm, jerking me almost off my feet.
It was all slow and dim, like I was watching myself then, the shadow tugging me through the gate, its other arm snaking round my neck, a knee in the small of my back forcing me up the steps and onto the churchyard path. He said something, but I couldn’t make it out, because the voice was distorted, and I’d caught enough of a glimpse to know why. It was like looking into the empty stare of a black skull instead of a face. He was wearing a gas mask. For a moment, stupid, I thought it was the ARP warden. He’d tell me there was a gas attack tonight, to put on my own mask, and then he’d have to fine me because he’d discover that I had a mess of raw egg in my carry-case instead.
‘I’m sorry…’ I tried to say, but then my brain started working again. The ARP warden wouldn’t have his arm round my throat, nor stink so powerful of beer.
I heard the sound of the bombers then, coming from the south like fat blowflies homing in on raw meat. He half pushed, half dragged me up the path, and now I reckoned I understood what he’d been saying, because when I struggled the arm tightened across my windpipe, cutting off my air. Time stopped and started, came and went. Between the trunks of the trees I glimpsed Victorian gravestones, an angel leaning at a drunken angle on a pedestal. The night was swirling with lights, searchlight beams, sparks behind my eyes, the white moon, the thunder of the raid starting, streams of tracer and the pulsing glow of incendiaries as he hauled me round the side of the church and leaned against the wall, panting, his arm still crooked tight on my throat. The Old Lady on the Hill spread before us a grandstand view of hell, where a bomb must’ve landed on the railway yards. Behind us the old tangled shrubberies of the Lawn were black and empty. No one courting there tonight. No one to hear me, if his arm slackened and freed my throat enough to scream.
Then suddenly he swings me round so our positions are reversed, and it’s me against the wall, the weight of him pushing my face against the rough stone, and his unmistakable intention pressed into the small of my back like a horrible parody of the night with Davey, watching the procession in the Manor garden.
‘Fucking in a boneyard,’ he whispers. ‘You owe me, Heartbreaker.’ His nail rakes across the side of my face and he tears out my earring: he’s opened a vein, because I feel the slow drip of blood trickling down my neck. Then I realize it in’t his nail, it’s the ragged point of his old bronze dagger; I can see it out of the corner of my eye. More magic, then, the dirty sort that’s only about power.
He releases my throat but his hand’s like a claw on my shoulder. This time I hear him loud and clear. ‘You can turn round,’ he says. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
I told myself I wouldn’t be afraid anyway. I’d decide how I’d be, not let him decide for me. I turned round.
Eyes like a fly. The Insect King.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he repeats. ‘It’s only a mask. And you know about masks, don’t you, Heartbreaker?’
PART SIX
The Sun Stands Still
Without a doubt Solstice–from the Latin
solstitium
, the sun at a standstill–would have been an important occasion for our ancestors who gathered at Avebury. Unlike at Stonehenge, where the midsummer sun rises over the Heel Stone, there seems to be no obvious solar alignment; but for all agricultural societies, it is a critical point in the year. On 21 June, the sun rises at its most north-easterly degree. Morning after morning, as the days have lengthened, its point of appearance has crept in an arc around the world, only to pause before changing course and completely reversing its motion.
Dr Martin Ekwall,
A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury
,
Hackpen Press
‘I’ve found a nice room in Swindon, Mam,’ I said, ‘and you’ve no need to worry because there hasn’t been a raid for more than a couple of months.’ I was holding her hand; she was too exhausted even to sit up in bed. There were only a couple of other patients in the side ward in the cottage hospital at Marlborough. Mr Keiller had fixed it, bless him; he seemed to know all the right strings to pull.
I hadn’t had to offend Nell’s landlady by turning down the room with the bay window because Nell was still living there. Her fianc was missing in action, so the wedding and her plans to move in with his parents had been postponed. Her landlady recommended me to a woman further along the road, and now I was in lodgings hardly bigger than a boxroom. It had a narrow single bed, a chest of drawers, and instead of a wardrobe, a hook on the back of the door. Her husband worked at the railway yards too, and she had a job at the Plessey factory at the far end of Drove Road; it wasn’t so much the money she wanted but the extra ration book in the house. I rarely saw them, except at mealtimes, and spent all the time I could at the hospital. There was more than enough work to keep me busy.
My mother blinked slowly, and sighed. After a while I realized she was trying to raise her head from the pillow.
‘I got eyes in my head, Frances,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t think you can fool me, like you can your father.’ She paused for an effortful breath. ‘I won’t tell him, though. It would kill him. I know I can trust you to do the right thing.’ Her fingers tightened on mine.
* * *
There wasn’t a soul I could have told what had happened that night. When Mr Cromley buttoned up his air-force-blue trousers and left me in the churchyard, he knew he was safe. War hero: DSO, DFC. Reckon I wasn’t the only girl in the blackout who knew she wouldn’t be believed if she cried rape.
God knows how Mam could tell I’d fallen pregnant, and she was the only one, because I was still thin as a stick. She thought the baby was Davey’s, and she wanted me to shame him into marrying me. But he wasn’t some country simpleton who couldn’t add up. Even if he had been, wouldn’t have been fair on him.