Читать книгу The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills - Страница 14

‘What time do you call this for going out?’ my mam said.

There was a big old moon through the kitchen window, sending down splashes of silvery light like someone was chucking paint about. The wireless was playing dance-band music, Ambrose and His Orchestra, ‘There’s A Small Hotel’, bit of a laugh really since they was playing at the Savoy. Mam was doing the drying-up, dancing round the kitchen flicking the tea-towel in time with the music, marcel wave bobbing. Da, da, diddly dit, doo. Gliding with her arms held stiffly round nothing, pretending she was dancing the foxtrot with Fred Astaire. She loved that tune.

I hung my white apron on the hook behind the door and took off the white cuffs Mam made me wash out by hand every night because we only did a proper boil wash for the towels and sheets on Mondays.

‘Scrub them cuffs, mind,’ she said automatically.

‘I’ll do them later.’

‘Now, Frances.’

‘I’ll put them in soak.’

Mam narrowed her eyes but gave up for once. She was in a good mood because the guesthouse was full with friends of Mr Keiller, posh gents and ladies from London who were all having dinner at the Manor tonight in their evening dress, even though they was having to pay us full board. My dad insisted on that. If you want come-as-you-please, he told people, you’d be better off at the pub. But Mr Keiller’s friends were rich enough not to care what they paid, and we’d had an easy time serving supper, only a man walking the Ridgeway, and a couple of mad old biddies staying with us the weekend, who held hands under the table.

‘Where do you think you’re off to anyway?’ Mam said to me, as she hung up the tea-towel to dry by the range. A small-boned woman, she was, like me, inclined to be plump, though lately she’d slimmed down a bit. ‘You’re going nowhere till we’ve put the leavings away’ There was a twinkle in her eye.

I said nothing, and played for time by twiddling the dangly bits on the doily as I hung it over the cut-glass bowl of trifle. We had the only Frigidaire in the village, apart from Mr Keiller’s up at the Manor, but Mam didn’t trust it because it made a noise, and preferred to keep things in the larder. It was more hygienic, she said. Closed space like the fridge, running with water, stood to reason germs would breed. Besides, though Mr Rawlins’s big Crossley generator supplied us with the electric, the wind often brought down the power lines he’d rigged from tree to tree through the village, and then we was all back to oil lamps.

‘Are you meeting someone?’ Mam slapped a net cover over the ham joint like she was nailing down a butterfly.

As usual, her curiosity made me want to wriggle. She couldn’t wait for me to get a proper feller and bring him home. Only left school last summer, but Mam’d have me married off the minute I showed the slightest interest in a lad. She’d wed at seventeen. She’d been in service, living away from home since she was thirteen, and that was where she met Dad, though he was more than a dozen years older.

Me, I’d rather have died than bring Davey back for Sunday tea to be quizzed over tinned-salmon sandwiches. So where do you come from, Davey? Stevenage? A pause while they tried to work out where that was. Further off than Hungerford, is it? Town boy, then? Eyebrows would lift, oh, yes, they would. And your dad? Scottish? Oh…

‘None of your busies,’ I said. Might as well have said, yes, Mam, clear a space on the calendar to get them banns read out in church. She winked.

* * *

There was a bit of a tired old wind batting at the beech trees, nothing much but enough to bite, as I slipped out of the back door and through the tall rows of bean sticks, which Dad had never bothered to take down last year. The ground was soft and claggy but not too wet underfoot: it’d been a mild January and there was no frost. I unlatched the garden gate into Green Street. Dad didn’t like us using the front door: he said it was for the guests, and my job to wash the tiles in the hallway every morning.

There was a light on in Tommy’s cottage, him that’d been a drummer boy in the Boer War. No electric there–Tommy didn’t want it or couldn’t afford to pay Mr Rawlins for it, so the soft yellow glow of an oil lamp spilled out of his top window. Funny place, that cottage, damp as all-get-out, and cold even on a sunny day. There’s places like that in the village and I always walked faster past them. Still do. Some nights, too, you’d think you heard drums coming from the north of the circle, but Dad said that was only the wind in the trees, or Mr Rawlins’s generator.

I made my way along Green Street towards the middle of the village. There was a lot of noise coming from the Red Lion: Mr Keiller’s men. They gathered there of an evening and some was staying there too, the archaeologists who ran the digs. Mr Keiller would book all the bedrooms for the season while they was digging, which was usually June to September; but Mr Young and Mr Piggott had carried on sorting the finds all through the winter. This year it would be a long season, I’d heard, because they wouldn’t stop until they had the western half of the stone circle complete.

That was Mr Keiller’s mad dream, you see: to put up all them stones the way they’d been. Don’t ask me how he could’ve known what Avebury was like five thousand years ago, but he reckoned he had the measure of it. Good luck to him, I used to think, though there was plenty of people in the village thought it all a load of old tosh and bad luck, too, to mess with what was long gone. When I was small, you’d be hard pressed to say you could see them stones forming any sort of circle whatsoever. Until last year there’d bin trees growing that hid the banks, and most of the stones was laying down like dead soldiers, hidden among bushes and trees and in people’s gardens. Folk in times gone by had knocked down stones and buried them and broke them up and now half the village is the stones, walls and whole cottages built out of them.

I’m going off at a whatsit. A tangerine, as my mam used to say. That night, Davey was waiting for me at the crossroads under the trees. He gives me a kiss on the cheek, and then because he’s getting bolder by the day, one on the lips, even though anyone could have seen us in the light from the lamp on the outside of the Red Lion. Then he steps back, and looks meaningful towards the dark field.

I shook my head. That was a step too far. In the part of the circle Mr Keiller hadn’t turned his hand to yet, which is to say most of it, the wild part where the cottage gardens ended and the trees and bushes still grew tangled, the darkness would have been full of whispers. There’d’ve been some out there doing their courting even in winter. People like to give themselves a good shiver under a big old haunted moon. Tell you summat else’d surprise you. We used to hug them stones, same as they hippies do today. They was warm, see, even on a cold day. Don’t ask me why. They held summer’s heat all winter under veils of grey-green lichen. That’s why courting couples used to go there, not just for privacy, or whatever magic was left in them–for warmth, too. That’s what it all comes down to, in’t it, needing a bit of warmth?

But I wasn’t ready for any of that with Davey. He was my first beau, three or four years older than me. He’d been working at the stables over Beckhampton when I first saw him, on top of a big bay in a string of racehorses walking out up Green Street headed for the Gallops, but now he had a job with Mr Keiller at the Manor, looking after his cars, and sometimes he even drove Mr K about, though there was a proper chauffeur who was Davey’s boss. From horses to horsepower, Davey said. He preferred motors because they didn’t kick.

I’d first talked to him at a village cricket match last summer, ever so clean in his whites. Not very tall, but he was sturdy at the wicket, a big hitter and he could run like blazes. Clever, too, in his bowling. He coached the younger boys on Saturdays, if he wasn’t busy with his chammy leather cleaning the cars.

His dad had been a bookie who bullied his son into an apprenticeship at a racing stable in the hope he’d pass on useful tips. Too late: Davey were hardly started when Mr Fergusson miscalculated the odds at Brighton, couldn’t pay out, and hanged hisself with a halter under the stands. Davey’d stuck out the job at Beckhampton for two more miserable years–everyone knew the trainer took his fists to the boys when the temper was on him. But then he met Mr Keiller and somehow he wangled a job. A Scottish surname maybe helped.

We linked arms under the trees, and he pretended to lay his head on my shoulder like he was too tired to hold it up, as we walked down the track that leads to the back of the barns and the duckpond, glimmering under the moon. He had a typical stable-lad’s build with narrow hips and strong arms; shame he hated the horses so much because he’d have been perfect for a jockey. But Mr Keiller owned racing cars, and was involved with the speedway course near Wroughton, so Davey had his taste of speed working for him.

The great dark shape of the church loomed above the trees. Our footsteps rang on the frosty cobblestones Colonel Jenner had laid between his barns, which belonged to Mr Keiller now. In the colonel’s day there’d been Jersey cows, and pale creamy butter made at the Manor twice a week, which you could buy for a shilling a pound. Wasn’t many in the village could afford it, but we bought it for the guests. The livestock had all gone now. Mr Keiller didn’t bother with cattle and horses and hay. He’d decided to convert the building where the colonel stabled his polo ponies into a museum, to keep skelling-tons and bits of old pot, and he parked his cars in the barns, where the bats did their doings on them if Davey didn’t cover them over with tarpaulins.

In Colonel Jenner’s day we’d never have walked in the dark through the stableyard, and I didn’t feel right doing it now. But Davey had heard something special was happening at the Manor, some sort of party that was more than a few posh people coming for dinner.

‘What kind of a party?’ I asked.

‘There’s a spiritualist down from London. Mrs Oliver.’

‘Hoping to catch sight of the White Lady, is she? She’d do better hanging round the Red Lion looking for Florrie.’

‘Florrie only comes out for men with beards.’

They was our local ghosts. Florrie got thrown into the well at the pub when her husband caught her with her Cavalier lover. There was some likewise tale about the White Lady, and a powerful scent of roses wafting along with her, but don’t tell me they come back because I never seen anything like them, nor expect anyone else would if they hadn’t downed a few pints of Mr Lawes’s best beer.

‘They’ve never got one of those ouija whatsits?’

‘It’s not ghosts they’re after. Miss Chapman says Mrs Oliver wants to help them find buried stones. Mr Keiller thinks there’s some under the ground that was never broken up.’

How educated people can be so outright stupid is beyond me. Mr Keiller was as clever as they come, but he’d invite an old phoney in a floaty dress to sit at his dinner-table. Or maybe she wasn’t so old. There was rumours Miss Doris Chapman, his official artist, was going to be the third Mrs K, but that wouldn’t have stopped him giving the eye to another good-looking woman.

‘They in’t looking for stones tonight? In the pitch dark?’

‘How would I know?’

We came round the corner of the stable block to the wrought-iron gate of the Manor garden. All the downstairs windows of the house was lit up, and we could hear music. Not one of Mam’s dance bands but heavy thudding like I imagined jungle drums would sound.

‘That’s Stravinsky.’ Davey surprised me. How come he knew who was making that racket? ‘Mr Keiller likes modern music’

‘Call that modern?’ I said. ‘Voodoo music, more like. Modern’s Jack Hylton or Billy Cotton. How do you know what Mr Keiller likes, anyway?’

But he never replied because at that moment the front door of the Manor opened and light splashed down the gravel path between the lavender beds. There was laughter mixed in with the music, then some shushing, and in the doorway was Mr Keiller himself.

‘Bloody hellfire,’ says Davey His hand squeezed my arm and hurt, though I don’t think he meant to. ‘What is he carrying?’

Mr Keiller was in his tails, white tie and all. Sometimes at night he’d wear his kilt, but tonight it was trousers and the real film-star look. They always dressed formal for dinner at the Manor. He was a tall man who filled the doorway bottom to top; no mistaking him, with his long elegant legs. There was a lamp over the door, but his face was in shadow because he had stopped under the lintel, waiting for everybody else to catch up. The light fell instead on the thing in his hands. He was holding it carefully, as if it was fragile, his arms held away from his body so the bottom of the thing was level with his chest and the top maybe an inch or two below his chin. Davey started to laugh, quietly in case they heard us, and I could feel his hands digging into my arms as he stood behind me, peering over the wall, his chin parting the back of my hair. I was glad it was dark because I could feel myself going red: oh, I knew what Mr Keiller was carrying, all right. Davey’s breath was hot on my ear, and he was awful close behind me, and I could feel the same kind of thing that Mr Keiller had in his hands butting at my back through our clothes.

Mr Keiller steps forward, and the light falls on his high shiny forehead and his handsome rich man’s face that’s tanned but not weathered. He’s got a long, straight nose and a strong, wide mouth and a full head of hair, never mind that he’s in his forties. The thing falls into shadow and I’m happy about that–what would Mam think?–though something makes me want to see it again, something to do with Davey’s breath that’s a bit faster than it ought to be when we’re standing still.

Out of the door behind Mr Keiller come a couple of ladies, carrying cocktail glasses, so maybe they hadn’t even started dinner yet, never mind it was gone half past nine. Miss Chapman was one of them, in a long silky dress with a wrap the same pale shade round her shoulders. Moonlight had stolen all the colours. As she walked under the lamp she was trying to look serious, like him, but I could see she wanted to giggle. The other was a middle-aged lady in flouncy stuff and a white fur stole, who could’ve been Mrs Oliver. Her face was a mask under too much powder. Behind them were three or four men, and two more ladies. One stumbled as she stepped onto the path, and the other shouted, ‘Alec, darling, your cocktails have malicious potency!’ I recognized them as the people staying at our guesthouse, and all of them carried candles, long white tapers that sent flickering light along the gravel path. They milled about under the trees, waiting for Mr Keiller to take the lead. He stood a little apart, the white thing cradled in the crook of one arm. One of the other ladies came up to him, and as they chatted, I saw his free hand steal casual like round her back, where Miss Chapman and the other guests couldn’t see, and rub her bottom.

We’d been watchers all our short lives, Davey and I: people who waited on tables and polished cars and cleared up after rich people. But when it came down to it, the only difference was they had more money. In the moonlight, drunk, they acted silly as any fool. That younger man at the back, with hair that flopped over his eyes and a cigarette in his hand, sauntering about like he owned the place, he was one of the archaeologists–I’d seen him in the fields with a notebook and a measuring tape. I wanted to be following them, a pale ghost in my own silky dress. All you had to do was believe you deserved to be among them, and act ridickerlus as they did.

The heavy Manor door shut with a thud and coming out of the porch was Mrs Sorel-Taylour, the short, buxom lady that was Mr Keiller’s secretary, keeping her distance to make sure nobody thought she was so daft as the rest. She was carrying a torch instead of a candle.

Mr Keiller raised the gurt white pizzle up high–had to call it that, didn’t know any other word for it, then, and right enough it was near as big as a bull’s or a stallion’s. Moonlight poured down on it, making it look like bewitched silver. Everybody bowed to it. Davey pulled me back into the shadow of the stable wall, in case they came our way, but there was no need because Mr K led them instead round the corner of the house into the more private bit of the garden where we couldn’t see what they was up to.

‘Whew,’ said Davey softly. ‘What do you think they’re going to do there?’

I didn’t want to think about it, but I did think about it, and Davey’s fingers on my arms. And Mr Keiller’s face too, solemn like it was carved out of stone, holding up the thing made of glimmering chalk like the high Downs. For all that what we’d seen was silly, it stirred something else in me, something I couldn’t explain. Magic, some of it to do with floaty dresses and film stars, but some of it the old sort of magic. The sort that makes me feel cold now, makes me need to feel warm again, but there in’t no fire that’ll warm that kind of cold once you have it in your bones.

‘Mad as hares,’ I said. ‘Maybe that medium lady’s going to raise the dead to ask ‘em where they put them stones.’

‘More’n the dead they’ve raised,’ said Davey, sliding himself against my back, all accidental-like. ‘We in’t going to see any more tonight.’

‘Don’t think that means you’ll get a cuddle,’ I said. But something had stirred in me, too, and I didn’t understand what it was.