The Buried Circle (26 page)

‘I have to be back before long,’ I said. But all the same I sat next to him on the flat surface of the box tomb. Birds sang all around, threatening and warning each other:
don’t
let me catch you at
that, don’t
let me catch you at
that
.

Between us and the sun was a row of white headstones.

‘You know who they are, don’t you?’ said Mr Cromley. ‘I come here to pay my respects, because who else will, apart from their families?’ He pointed at a stone carved with a pair of wings in a laurel wreath.
‘Per ardua ad astra
. The hard way to the stars.’

‘Royal Air Force?’ I asked.

‘Royal Flying Corps, when they joined up. These are men–boys, probably–who were learning to fly here in the Great War. Died before they made it to the front line. Some might’ve come down in that field beyond the fence.’

I jumped down to look. He was right, boys, most of them: you could see from the dates. Some headstones carried a message from their mams and dads. A pressure came in my chest, and my eyes prickled. ‘They never got to fight?’ I asked, climbing back onto the box tomb next to him.

He nodded. ‘I can see them, can’t you, carrying their kitbags into the barracks, with such hopes of glory? Maybe they’d weighed up their chances in a dogfight against a German ace. But a mistake on a training circuit? Nobody imagines he’ll go that way.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor sods. I find it inexpressibly sad.’

O wondrous peace, sang the congregation in the church, in thought to dwell on excellence divine; to know that nought in man can tell how fair Thy beauties shine.

‘Will there be another war?’ I asked him.

He blew air down his nose like an impatient horse. ‘Of course there’ll be another war. The Jewish financiers who run this country will see to that, whatever the old appeaser Chamberlain hopes. And another row of headstones. Another bad joke on the part of God. More brave souls, who hoped for glory and never touched it.’

‘You have souls on the brain,’ I told him.

He glared at me. ‘Maybe because it could be my soul hovering over a chunk of white marble. Everything will change, you know.’ Then he sighed. ‘I forget you’re so young, Heartbreaker. How fair
thy
beauties shine. Smoke?’

I shook my head. He selected a cigarette from a silver case and slipped it between his lips; he’d given up that silly pipe. There was the creak of the church door behind us, footsteps in the porch. The service had ended. As Mr Cromley took out matches and lit up, we could hear the congregation crunching down the gravel path, chattering away to each other. Goodness knows what they thought of us, silhouetted against the sinking sun like a courting couple.

‘I blame the Communists,’ I said, hoping to prove I knew something about politics. I’d heard Dad say that to Mam, listening to the news on the wireless.

Mr Cromley laughed. ‘There you go again, Heartbreaker. No, Mr Hitler’s the villain, and will have to be stopped somehow, or we’ll all be speaking German in ten years’ time.’ He took a pull on his cigarette, then blew a perfect smoke ring into the still air. ‘I don’t like dancing to the tune of our Semitic brethren, but that’s a far lesser evil than a mad housepainter in charge.’

A robin fluttered from a chestnut tree and perched on one of the white headstones. Mr Cromley twisted round to watch the last of the congregation pass through the lich-gate.

‘I hate it,’ he said. ‘All this pious bleating, hoping to save their souls. It achieves nothing. My father was a churchgoer, but it didn’t stop him being blown to bits the week the armistice was signed.’

‘How old were you?’ I asked.

‘Six.’ He sounded cold and dismissive, like I’d asked a stupid question. ‘War’s the great leveller, Heartbreaker. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. D’you know, where I’m lodging in Trusloe Cottages, farm labourers can’t afford the rents of the houses the council built for them? Things have to change, and perhaps war’s the only way to do it.’

I didn’t know what to say. Times was hard for a lot of families on the land, I knew that. But they always had been. How was a war going to sort that out? But Mr Cromley was looking at me intense, like. ‘Haven’t seen you since the picnic,’ he said. ‘Alec is right, she is a first-class bitch.’

‘He’s going to marry her, isn’t he?’ I said.

‘Fraid so.’ He tapped me lightly on the chin. ‘Thing is, Heartbreaker, you’re younger and prettier, but her father’s a major-general. Your father keeps a guesthouse, and soon he won’t have even that questionable status. I hear he’ll be a tobacconist.’ Mr Cromley said it like you’d say ‘toilet attendant’.

Tears pricked behind my eyes. Dad, in his cheap off-the-peg suit, Mam ironing the hand-stitched table mats. All they’d worked for, the guesthouse with its clean sheets and towels changed every day, meant nothing. Clean sheets could never take me where I wanted to be. I swung my legs up onto the tomb, and wrapped my arms round my knees, looking away towards the dipping sun at the end of the graveyard, willing the tears back where they came from. The row of white headstones confronted me like a row of sinister, even teeth.

‘You really have fallen for him, haven’t you?’ Mr Cromley sounded amazed. ‘You poor little thing.’

Best not to say anything. I wasn’t so green I didn’t see Mr Cromley as a dangerous fellow to confide in.

‘How old are you, Heartbreaker?’

‘Sixteen,’ I lied.

‘A mature woman in the Neolithic. You’d probably have at least a couple of babies by now. In fact, you could be considered middle-aged, given that life expectancy wasn’t much over thirty.’ He threw away his cigarette. ‘Are you still a virgin at sweet sixteen?’

I went hot. ‘No gentleman would ask that.’

He reached out a hand and lifted my skirt back from my knee. I went completely still. The evening breeze played over the bare skin above my stocking top.

‘Do you know how I made Alec’s acquaintance, Miss Robinson?’ Every time he repeated my name it was like an incantation. ‘We were both members of–how shall I put it? A small group of gentlemen with certain interests in common. My uncle recommended me. We would meet for drinks at someone’s club, then repair to a flat in South London where a young woman would assist us in our experiments in ritual. And I’m not talking about what goes on in there…’ He nodded towards the church. ‘Religion’s a crutch. I’m talking about a
tool
. There are ways of harnessing the cosmos to help someone determined. What you will shall be.’ His finger began stroking my thigh, circling above the top of my stocking. ‘We’d take turns, Miss Robinson. One after another with the same woman. Do you know what I’m talking about?’

‘Enough to know I don’t want to hear it.’ But my breathing gave me away. I was remembering what had happened at the picnic, Mr Cromley holding my arms, Mr Keiller towering over me…The two of them becoming confused in my mind, changing places, turning in mazy circles like Mr Cromley’s insistent finger.

‘Alec is a highly sexualized man. He’s curious, likes to try different experiences. Sometimes our experiments would be about withholding.’ The finger abruptly stops stroking. ‘Withholding can create very powerful magic. And sometimes–’ the finger lightly brushes my skin again, this time on the inner thigh ‘–sometimes it would be about giving.’

Our breath hung in the air between us, his finger a light pressure on my leg. My skin ached. I wanted that finger to move again, but it didn’t.

‘Are you a giving person, Miss Robinson?’

‘I don’t think you should be talking like this.’

‘I could make a gift of you to Alec. Or vice versa.’

I lifted his hand off my thigh, swung my legs off the tomb and jumped to the ground, dusting fragments of stone off the back of my skirt. ‘I’m not a parcel, Mr Cromley.’

I didn’t turn round as I stalked away into the glimmering evening, but I knew he was watching me all the way down the yew-shaded path.

CHAPTER 21

‘Not Druids,’ says Martin, as we approach the Red Lion. ‘Please tell me there won’t be Druids.’

A lively wind shoos the clouds across the night sky. Wiccans celebrate rituals according to the moon, and tonight is the first full moon after the vernal equinox–which also makes it Easter on Friday. The campsite behind the car park has already sprouted a few tents: pagans of various persuasions who’ve started their bank-holiday break early.

‘Of course there will be Druids. Also witches, goddess worshippers and–’

‘Enough. My father will be rotating in consecrated ground. I told you he was a vicar, didn’t I? Broad-minded, ecumenical, but nevertheless drew the line at sacrificing goats.’

What is this masculine obsession with goats? ‘There will be no goats,’ I say firmly. ‘Not so much as a gerbil.’

But Martin is clambering onto an archaeological hobby-horse. ‘The point is there never were Druids at Avebury. Druids came several thousand years later, and hung around sacred groves, not stone circles. And, frankly, what we know of Druids today is all nineteenth-century construct–started by a load of rich, middle-aged Victorian men with nothing better to do than dress up in white sheets and silly hats and hold secret rituals.’

‘Don’t let our Druids hear you talking like that. They take it very seriously’

‘Is your chum the shaman going to be there?’

‘Not tonight. He’s taken a party of men to camp in the Savernake Forest on a discover-your-inner-wild-man weekend.’

‘Wish I’d known. Sounds right up my street.’

The cottages look cosy, glowing curtains drawn against the night, chimneys emitting thin streams of smoke that the wind tosses into the ragged clouds. Sensible villagers, warm villagers, unbothered by the full moon, hunkered around their fires watching the
Ten o’clock News
and the late film. On the corner of the main road, the pub is a blaze of light. The pagans generally gather at the tables outside, but we’re early.

‘Inside for a drink to warm us up?’ suggests Martin, as we cross the road. ‘Or, put it another way, I am not freezing my bollocks off on a bench waiting for Druids. I’ve more time for Wiccans, mind. Another completely made-up faith, invented mid-twentieth century, but there’s something about a Wiccan that appeals to my lapsed Anglicanism. Did you know there are actually Christian Wiccans too?’

He gives me a naughty sideways grin as we go inside.

Martin’s all right, really. Now I know him better, I can’t imagine why I fancied him, except that something can happen between the filmer and the filmed. They spend so long staring into each other’s eyes through either end of a camera.

‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ I ask, as he sets two whiskies on the table. ‘If that question isn’t off-limits.’

‘It is, actually’ Martin’s voice is unexpectedly sharp.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’

‘No, no.’ He sits down heavily. ‘I should be saying sorry. It’s a sore point at the moment. Tell me about the men in your life instead. I couldn’t help noticing there seemed to be something between you and that bloke from the National Trust.’

‘What,
Michael?
My best Outraged-of-Avebury ‘I like older men, but he’s old enough to…’

‘Don’t come the innocent with me, flower. You’re far too young to pull it off.’ Martin raises his whisky glass. ‘Here’s to bad boys who break our hearts. No, I mean the other one. The Midnight Cowboy. Mr Stroke My Stubble in his fancy boots. My, don’t you blush easily?’

‘Oh, him. Well, there is a history. Past tense.’

‘Sorry, now I’m being appallingly nosy. You don’t have to tell me anything.’

‘No.’ The level in my whisky glass is sinking unnervingly fast. ‘Well, yes. Thing is, he’s married. Works here, goes home every weekend. Anyway, it was a one-off mistake. I’m not stupid enough to think he’s going to leave her.’

‘Oh, petal, they never do. Believe me, been there, done that. You’re better off without him. Good God, was that a pair of antlers going past the window?’

‘It’ll be Trevor.’

Outside, pagans have started to assemble: some thin girls in jeans sharing a spliff with an even skinnier bloke with dreads; three or four middle-aged Druid couples in white robes; a group of wary-eyed young men kitted up in heavy fleece jackets against the biting wind. There are about twenty in all. A few I’ve met through John: Beech Tear and Wind Rose, always stalwarts on such occasions, Moon Daughter, again, sitting by herself, and a rather scary woman who lives at the other end of Trusloe, with long white hair and piercing blue eyes.

As this is a Wiccan occasion, Trevor, a former estate agent and now a full-time practitioner of Gardnerian witchcraft, is presiding.

‘I was expecting something…well, a bit more sinister,’ murmurs Martin. ‘He looks like Eric Morecambe. Jolly with glasses.’

‘Eric Morecambe was before my time, but I don’t imagine he had waist-length hair.’

‘And the–er–reindeer on the top of his staff. I’m sure it started life as a Christmas-tree ornament.’

‘Pagans believe in recycling. Live lightly on the earth is one of the Wiccan tenets.’

The outfit changes with the season, but tonight Trevor’s resplendent in furry moon boots, velveteen dressing-gown, and a Bob-the-Builder hat, sprayed silver, to which he has Superglued a pair of antlers, thus representing the Horned God. His consort, Michelle, who shares his Georgian house in Marlborough, is either Diana or Hecate: John did explain Wicca to me once but I wasn’t paying attention. She’s in a full-length dark blue cloak, with the hood thrown back, her bobbed hair dressed with a diaphanous blue scarf sewn with silver stars and moons. Rumour has it she’s someone important in marketing at Asda’s head office.

Trevor raps his staff on the ground. ‘Think we ought to get going in a minute or two, people. Drink up and, if you wouldn’t mind, save the bar staff a job on a cold night, take your glasses back into the pub.’ He turns to Martin and me. ‘Haven’t seen you two before, have I? Merry meet. Oh, sorry, it’s India, isn’t it? You look different somehow’

‘I was blonde last time.’ I introduce Martin. Trevor’s delighted: he’s addicted to
Time Team
. Scratch a pagan and you find an amateur archaeologist–and sometimes vice versa. I wander off and leave Trevor explaining why, in his opinion, dowsing can be as reliable as geophysics in revealing archaeology under the soil. Martin has a polite but strained expression on his face. Lady pagans are popping into the pub for a last pee, while the gentlemen head into the darkness to water Mother Earth; coats are being buttoned against the chill, hats pulled down over ears, bottles of mead, the midnight tipple of choice for your average Wiccan, already stashed in backpacks.