The Buried Circle (35 page)
‘What did you tell her?’ Holding my breath.
‘Told her to look on the calendar in the kitchen.’
‘She was playing with you,’ I tell Adele on the phone. ‘Being deliberately obstructive.’
‘Well, I could see on the calendar that she marks off the days. So she clearly has some difficulty with short-term memory’
‘Maybe
I
mark off the calendar. OK, I admit, she does keep track so she knows she’s taken her pills, but I have difficulty remembering which day it is, and I’m twenty-five.’
‘India, you have to accept your grandmother finds it harder to cope than she used to. I did a couple of standard cognitive-function tests on her. Not a perfect diagnostic tool, but it gives us a yardstick. She did significantly worse today than she did six months ago. It’s time we had a proper assessment done. I’ve booked her in for the first appointment I can get.’
Behind me, Fran calls from the lounge: ‘Ind! Forgot to tell you, those buggerin’ lights were there again last night, up on the hill.’
The sun hasn’t yet lifted over Waden Hill as I make my way down the river path, wondering what on earth to do about Frannie. It’s impossible to see
any
hill from her bedroom downstairs. Whatever she sees is in her dreams, which suggests she has trouble sorting what’s real and what’s not.
The early-morning light is pearly, and a white skirt of mist clings to Silbury. Cobwebs beaded with dew are strung across the path. Yesterday, May Day, there would have been people around, but this morning there’s no one on the path, and hardly any early commuters on the A4. No sign of him in the lay-by. I wait a few minutes, scanning the road from Avebury, until I look behind me over the hedge and spot him making his way across the field, Cynon the dog racing ahead.
‘I was expecting you from the other direction,’ I say, going through the gate to meet them. ‘What were you doing up that way?’
‘Spent the night in the Long Barrow.’ He tips back his battered trilby, and brushes ragged curls out of his eyes.
‘That must have been spooky.’ A five-thousand-year-old tomb isn’t my idea of a cosy campsite.
He looks at me as if he doesn’t understand what I’m talking about. ‘It’s beautiful there at night. So quiet.’
‘So dark.’
‘Not with candles. Come on, let’s get to the spring before the world wakes up.’ He sets out confidently across the field. ‘We’ll take the long way–less muddy’
The sun has risen, and our shadows stretch ahead like long peg dolls. Bryn leads towards a plantation of trees clinging to the hillside below the Long Barrow. We skirt the top of the wood, then drop down into the trees, following what can barely be described as a path. He reaches out a hand to help me over a fallen branch. His fingers are dry and warm; he doesn’t let go. It seems perfectly natural, like children holding hands.
‘There she is,’ he whispers.
‘Who?’ I peer through the tree-trunks for an animal: a deer, perhaps.
‘The Goddess.’
There’s a flash of blue, something winking in the sunlight. As we step out of the trees I see her, sitting under a willow by the sparkling water, legs tucked to one side, head slightly bent. She’s the river-daughter, the naiad, the water nymph, iridescent as a dragonfly’s wings, silver-haired, scaly-skinned. A shiver goes through me: she’s beautiful and terrible, and watching me out of the corner of her eye.
A step further and she resolves into humbler parts: a shop dummy, with huge painted eyes, mosaic pieces of china and coloured glass glued all over her like fish scales, a tinsel wig stuck to her bald head. Something so urban ought to be grotesque, here in the middle of a wood with tiny green leaves unfurling overhead, and dog’s mercury and celandines pushing through the leaf-mould at her feet, but instead the effect is graceful, magical. The tree above her is threaded with coloured ribbons.
‘She’s lovely,’ I say. ‘You didn’t make her, did you?’
He shakes his head. ‘Wish I had. It’s a healing place, this.’ Beyond the Goddess, a shallow brown pool trickles away in two streams, sunbeams striking dancing lights on the surface.
I’m still holding his hand. Embarrassed, I slip my fingers out of his grasp, sensing his reluctance to let go. ‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘What for?’
‘Bringing me here.’
‘Are you going to make an offering?’ Bryn digs in his pocket and brings out a scrap of silky blue material, perhaps part of a woman’s scarf, and ties it round a willow branch. It’s the kind of thing my mother would have done. When the fabric rots and falls away from the bough, so will sickness and hurt fall away too…
How Ed would scoff.
‘For you,’ Bryn says. ‘Blue’s your colour. Like hers.’ He nods towards the Goddess.
‘And for your boy?’
The smile lights up his whole face.
I stand on the stepping-stones that jut out into the pool, watching strands of weed ripple in the current. Coins glint in the water, half buried in silt. ‘What’s he called?’
‘Fergus. Means “best warrior”.’
‘How old?’
‘Five.’ He bends to pick a celandine from the bank, and drops it onto the stream before joining me on the stepping-stones. It swirls lazily away in the direction of Silbury. ‘I’m going to bring him here in the summer. We’ll hitch down together, come for Solstice.’
‘Won’t he still be in school?’
‘I’ll bring him out. Educational, I reckon, to come to a place like this.’
‘My mother brought me to Avebury when I was small,’ I say. There are tiny fish in the water, hardly visible against the muddy bottom. Cynon is nosing around the edge of the wood, hoping for rabbits. I hunt for a twig to play Pooh sticks.
‘Will you come for Solstice?’ Bryn asks, unaware that I live here.
I shrug my shoulders and throw my twig into the stream before walking back across the stones to the bank. There are empty tea-light cases scattered around the Goddess’s feet, and I automatically begin to pick them up, my hair as usual coming loose from its pins as I stoop to reach them.
‘Hey, you shouldn’t do that.’ Bryn, from behind me.
‘I was only tidying…’
‘They’re
offerings
. Leave them.’
‘But they’re finished.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Not angry, but determined to get his way. He takes them out of my hand, and places them carefully back on the ground. Straightening up, he turns to face me. His eyes are clear blue, long-lashed. He brushes the hair off my face with careful fingers, and a thrill goes through me. ‘You have lovely hair. Like chocolate.’
The Goddess is watching us, with calm, indifferent eyes. We’re inches apart. What would that soft, sulky mouth taste like? But no, it would be like kissing a damaged flower.
‘Thank you,’ I say again, turning to the path that leads through the wood.
We part on the track to the Long Barrow.
‘Have to get my stuff,’ he says, jerking a thumb in the direction of the barrow. The megaliths ranked at one end jut up on the skyline, making it look like a sleeping dinosaur. He keeps looking steadily at me until I understand, too late, I’m meant to respond to an invitation.
‘I’d better head…um, back where I’m staying,’ I say. ‘So…er, goodbye. Have a nice time with Fergus.’
‘Goodbye,’ he says. ‘Goddess go with you.’ He holds me with his eyes a moment longer, like he’s memorizing the look of me, then sets off briskly up the hill, the dog at his heels. I walk back to the gate, and watch them until they eventually disappear between the tall stones guarding the entrance to the barrow, wondering what it is about him that still feels so hauntingly familiar.
PART FIVE
Earth Magic
One of the ideas about ancient religion that gained currency in the 1930s was that of the Great Goddess, a female deity believed to be common to all primitive cultures, the embodiment of fertility so essential in agricultural societies, and the prototype for later divinities such as Demeter or Isis, or the triple goddesses of Celtic folklore–Maiden, Mother, Hag. Archaeologists produced as evidence big-bellied and breasted figurines from digs in the Near East; Margaret Murray’s claims about witch cults and Robert Graves’s book
The White Goddess
seemed to add body and blood to the theory.
Alas, like most simple and pleasing theories that claim to explain everything, it turned out to be wrong or, at least, unproven and unprovable. (Keiller was one of the first, incidentally, to debunk Murray’s research into witch trials and prove that she had twisted the evidence to fit her thesis.) The big-bellied figurines may or may not have been goddesses. But the idea of the Goddess had caught the popular imagination, and has since proved difficult to shift, particularly among modern pagans.
Dr Martin Ekwall,
A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury
,
Hackpen Press
Mam was terrible thin when I went to see her and Dad in Devizes. I’d taken her eggs from the hens at the Lodge, and a bit of extra butter I’d laid hands on.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ she said, with a weak smile. ‘Keep ‘em for yourself–you’re a growing girl, Frances, you need ‘em more ‘n me.’
‘I
should
have,’ I said. ‘Look at you, Mam. I swear there’s less of you every time I come. Dad working you too hard, is he?’
‘It’s only the Change,’ she said. ‘Some women get fat, some thin down. I’m one of the scrawny old birds.’
She was barely thirty-nine. But I didn’t understand then–or didn’t want to know–how young that was for the menopause. It was a relief to have something to explain the way she looked.
‘How’s Davey?’ she asked. ‘And the village?’ We’d finished Saturday tea and I was at the kitchen table while Mam dried the crocks. She wouldn’t let me help, said I was a guest now, not a skivvy.
‘Oh, Davey’s doing fine,’ I said. Letters came regular from Scotland, where he was in the thick of his navigation training. ‘But I don’t see much of anyone in Avebury. I’m hardly there, working long hours at the hospital. I’m thinking maybe I should find a room in Swindon. It’d be easier all round.’ Especially now Davey was gone. There was no one to drive me home if I missed the last bus.
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said Mam. Her hand slipped, and a couple of spoons dropped with a clatter on the draining-board. ‘I’d worry terrible about you in the air raids.’
‘Swindon hasn’t had much. I’d be safe as…’ Well, no one could say houses were safe any more. But there’d been hardly any bombing there. Bristol was getting it bad night after night, and we all knew what was happening to London, but there was probably as much chance of a bomb landing on me in Avebury as there was in Swindon. More, maybe–the base at Yatesbury was only a mile or two off, and the countryside was full of dozens of little out-of-the-way airfields, as well as Starfish and Q-sites begging the bombers to dump on them. Still, I wasn’t going to explain that to Mam: she worried enough as it was. I took out my cigarettes and looked round for an ashtray.
Mam wrinkled her nose. ‘You want to do that, you go out and join your dad in the garden.’ She peered out of the window at Dad, pink and perspiring, digging over the trench ready to sow his runner beans. The sky was full of massing grey clouds. She hung the tea-towel on the back of a chair and sat down with a sigh. ‘I could do with closing my eyes for five minutes anyway. Have to put up with it in the shop, I suppose, but the smoke makes me sick as a dog, these days.’
Garden was hardly the word for the miserable sunless patch that lay behind the tobacconist’s shop. Dad had done his best and dug up the lawn for a few rows of veg and some raspberry canes but, what with his tool shed and the Anderson shelter, there wasn’t room for much. All the same, he spent what time he could out there, trying to coax green treasure out of the exhausted soil.
‘Needs a bag or two of manure from the Manor,’ he said, straightening up as I came out with my cigarette in my mouth like Bette Davis. ‘Couldn’t get your Mr K to drop some off, could you?’
The idea of Mr Keiller loading sacks of manure onto the back seat of his posh car was absurd enough to make me laugh, which was what Dad intended. ‘No horses at the Manor now,’ I said. ‘If Davey was still here, I bet he could wheedle some from the stables where he used to work.’
‘You heard from him yet?’ asked Dad.
He’d sent me a poem, yesterday. A letter the day before that. And his photo, in his new air-crew uniform, lit like a glamour boy off the films: must’ve had it taken special. He’d been gone hardly a fortnight.
‘He’s a bit homesick,’ I said. ‘Scotland’s a long way…’
Dad gave me one of those looks. He never said much, Dad, but he could convey paragraphs in a look. This look said:
Careful what you’re doing, girl
. He’d heard what I hadn’t said:
Scotland’s a long way, but not far enough
. I knew I shouldn’t have given Davey encouragement, that night after the Starfish, but I couldn’t bring myself to write and dash his hopes all over again. All I could hope was that he would find himself a nice Scottish girl. I wanted Davey to be happy, but I wasn’t the one to make him that way, and I didn’t know how to tell him so. When he said he’d be looking for a posting south as soon as he was trained, I wrote back telling him that would be lovely, couldn’t wait. Thinking to myself, the real action was along the east coast. That’s where they’d send him, wouldn’t they? And so he might be killed, and wouldn’t it be better for him to die thinking I loved him back?
‘I was lucky with your mother,’ was all Dad said.
Waiting at the bus stop, it started to pour. I’d forgotten my umbrella. While I was struggling to hold my coat over my head, a black car came hushing through the puddles. It stopped twenty or so feet beyond me, and came reversing back.
‘Get in before you drown.’ Mr Keiller leaned across to open the passenger door.
He was in his police uniform. I sank into the leather seat, relishing the smell of cigarettes and hair oil.
