Читать книгу The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills - Страница 13

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.