The Buried Circle (41 page)

Told myself I wasn’t frightened of him. That the war had taken away my fear because there was so much fear all around you; when boys were getting shot to pieces in the sky, there wasn’t room in the world for any more. But I was still afraid of what he could tell.

What you begged to do, as I recall

I changed my ways. Every evening I jumped off the bus at the stop before Avebury, or the stop after, and walked into the village by a route that avoided the pub. Staring out of my attic window, I could see the grey-blue uniforms below on the pub forecourt and hear the men’s chatter as it grew dark. Sometimes Mr Cromley was among them, striking a match on the bark of the tree, the flame showing me his face. I thought about finding a room in Swindon instead, close to work, but that would’ve been double the journey to visit Mam and Dad, and more of a worry to them. And what was I to tell Mr Keiller? That I couldn’t come to any more of his tea parties because I was afraid of meeting Mr Cromley there? The summer was passing fast, and I’d already turned down two invitations.

No, I was not the sixteen-year-old girl who had cowered at the end-of-season party three years ago. I wouldn’t be driven out of my home. The next time Mr Keiller had one of his tea parties, I dressed in the better of my two summer frocks and tottered up the path between the lavender beds on my highest, bravest heels.

This time the staff had set two long trestle tables in the garden, and there were deckchairs on the lawn. Mr Cromley was not there. My legs went rubbery with relief. I sat with a couple of friendly boys from Aberdeen, with accents I could barely follow, until I saw the dark-haired Glaswegian with the tin foot arrive, limping, dot-and-carry-one.

There was no sign of the boy with bandaged hands.

‘Where’s your blond friend?’ I asked, joining him at the table to pour myself another cup of tea.

Saddest smile I ever saw.

‘The grafts didn’t take. Became infected. They took his hands off on Friday.’

I wanted to kick the table leg. Wasn’t fair. Why did it always happen to the nice ones?

‘You’re a kind girl for asking,’ said the Glaswegian. ‘You remind me of my girl back home.’

‘The chap your friend pulled out of the plane,’ I said. ‘Did he make it?’

He shook his head. All for nothing, then. I sometimes despaired of God. What was He doing up there? Having a bloody tea break, while the world tore itself to pieces? My own hands were trembling, the cup and saucer playing a clinky little trio with the teaspoon so I had to put them down.

On the other side of the lawn, Mr Keiller was talking to Mr Piggott, in his brown army uniform, on leave for the weekend and spending it with his wife in Marlborough. I wanted to say hello, so I patted the Glaswegian’s arm and promised him I’d be back in a tick.

‘Don’t make such a thing of it, Stuart,’ Mr Keiller was saying, in a low voice. It struck me how sad his eyes were. Mrs Keiller was in London, nursing, and though she was supposed to come home to the Manor alternate weekends, there were whispers she hadn’t turned up for weeks. ‘Whatever you’ve heard is greatly exaggerated, I assure you. Doris and I are travelling up to Scotland in September for a few weeks.’

So there were no more tea parties until October, and that was when Mr Cromley snared me again.

Mr Keiller was in a black mood the Sunday afternoon after his return from Scotland. ‘That’s it,’ he said, to Mrs Sorel-Taylour. The flames from the fire in the huge grate made his face ruddy. I should have been talking to the airmen–I could see that boy with the artificial foot, again, trying to attract my attention, the rubber tip of his walking-stick squeaking on the oak floorboards–but instead I was hanging on the edge of their conversation, sick to hear Mr K so depressed. ‘I can’t carry on at Avebury. The house in Scotland is falling to pieces under the tender mercies of His Majesty’s Army, and I haven’t the money to keep on both establishments. I’ve told Young I’m closing the museum in November. We’ll stow the finds safely in the outbuildings, but the sooner I persuade a buyer to take the Manor off my hands, the better.’

‘You know what this is about, don’t you, Miss Robinson?’ said Mr Cromley, sauntering over from the tea table, with a cigarette between his fingers. Even though I’d braced myself for him to be there, I could feel my nerves tighten as he came up to us, his plate piled high with egg-and-cress sandwiches. The Manor hens must have been on overtime. ‘The poor old Barber Surgeon. It’s taken the heart out of him. Tell them, Alec’

‘The Royal College of Surgeons took a direct hit, earlier in the summer,’ said Mr K. ‘Frightful mess, and the least of their priorities was what had happened to our bones, but it looks definite now that the Barber Surgeon’s skeleton was destroyed in the fire. They can’t locate him anywhere.’

‘You know what I think?’ said Mr Cromley. ‘We should hold a requiem for the poor chap. All Hallow’s Eve next week, Alec. Samhain. The night of the dead. Let’s hold another of your jolly ceremonies in the garden. Dinner, cocktails, good company, and we’ll raise a glass or two to your statue of Pan.’

‘Pandemonium,’ said Mr Keiller, gloomily, looking out of the window where yellow leaves drifted across the lawns and piled against the box hedges. ‘The principle of Chaos governs the world, now.’

‘Ah, the trick is to control your demons,’ said Mr Cromley. ‘It’ll be fun. Miss Robinson will assist, won’t you, Heartbreaker?’

‘Count me out,’ I said, quick, not wanting to be part of anything Mr Cromley had his fingers in. ‘I’ll be…on fire watch that night.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Keiller. He had brightened. ‘Of course you’ll be there, Heartbreaker. Join us for dinner. It won’t be quite the sort of fare we used to enjoy, but we can dress in our finest and laugh in Mr Hitler’s face. We’ll assemble for cocktails at eight.’

I couldn’t suppress a shiver of excitement. I’d never been invited to a proper dinner before. The thought of being among a procession like the one I’d watched in the Manor garden, all that time ago with Davey, filled me with joy. This, after all, was what I’d wanted, the magic of being part of that crowd.

‘Donald, I leave you to be Master of Ceremonies. Bring one or two young chaps from the base, if you like. Let’s give those demons a run for their money’

I felt uneasy then, but what could go wrong at the Manor? This wasn’t some hole-and-corner ritual in Swindon with Mr Cromley and his creepy uncle; wasn’t a ritual so much as a party. Mr Keiller would be there, and plenty of others, and I’d be safe. But as I left the Manor, Mr Cromley caught up with me by the gate.

‘You
will
be there, Heartbreaker,’ he said. ‘By command of the Marmalade King. And if you’re not…’ He shook his head. Amazing how far the sound of a single whisper carries at Avebury.’

I stood in the topiary garden at the Manor House on Hallowe’en night, shivering in my thin evening dress, ill-wishing Mr Cromley hard as I could. Moonlight glimmered on the pool between the box hedges behind the Library Wing. He’d made me leave the dinner inside to stand outside in the cold dressed as Isis or Diana, some old moon goddess anyway, in a long glittery white cloak, a black mask hiding my face. Another of Donald’s carnivals, all smoke and mirrors and a cheat from arse to tip.

I wouldn’t have gone along with it, but I was afraid of his threat. Any hint of what I’d done would’ve killed Mam. She was proper ill, now: some days she couldn’t keep any food down at all. The doctor had told Dad it was nerves, lot of women suffered the same with the war, and Dad believed him, but I didn’t. Mr Cromley’s poison would eat away what was left of her.

He was drunk tonight and so more dangerous still. He was the only one, for a start, who understood what I was doing there, for it had been plain from the moment I arrived that I was out of place. Mr Keiller, with his usual expansive generosity, had invited me on the spur of the moment, and he probably never meant it serious. Even Mrs Sorel-Taylour’s eyebrows rose a little when she saw me in my borrowed pale blue crpe. The dress belonged to one of the nurses at the hospital. It was too big for me and gaped at the bosom, for all I’d tried to pin it to my brassire, and there was a stain near the side seam, which wouldn’t come out though I’d soaked it over and over in cold water. I’d hoped it would be dark enough in the Manor for no one to notice, but every electric light was blazing away behind the blackout like there was no war on, and I had to pull my woollen wrap lopsided to hide the mark.

Donald Cromley must have known how it would be, but he had let me make a fool of myself because it suited him. There had been about twenty people at the party when I arrived. Mrs Sorel-Taylour’s was the only friendly face so I made my way across the room towards her, passing two slick-haired airmen I’d never seen before. One of them was with a girlfriend, lovely in a red silk evening frock, but smelling of Chanel and pig muck.

‘Marvellous to have an excuse to slip into something pretty,’ she was saying, in a cut-glass accent. ‘Being a land girl’s terrific fun, of course, you meet such interesting types…’ She tossed back her waterfall of hair, like Veronica Lake’s, and eyed my dress. ‘A great leveller, war, isn’t it?’

‘Cocktail, Heartbreaker?’ said Mr Cromley, blocking my path and holding out a tall glass with something oily and amber swirling in its depths. ‘Ready to dance for your dinner later?’ His eyes flicked to the tunnel between my breasts. He was flushed, and seemed to find it hard to focus.

‘Frances,’ said Mrs Sorel-Taylour, behind him, ‘how lovely to see you.’ There was an edge to her voice. She took my arm and steered me away from Mr Cromley and his golden glass. ‘There’s fruit punch over here.’ She leaned over to whisper: ‘Donald is already the worse for wear, I’m afraid, and would like everyone else to be that way too.’

I wanted that drink. It might have given me courage. Why had I been so stupid to think I was one of these people? But I let Mrs Sorel-Taylour find me a soft drink, still whispering: ‘He and Mr K have had an argument. Donald took it upon himself to invite his uncle: so discourteous to Alec, without as much as a by-your-leave. When Mr Keiller found out, this afternoon, he made Donald telephone his uncle and cancel the invitation. Stood over him in the office while he did it.’

I felt myself go hot and cold with the mention of Mr Cromley’s uncle. Thank God Mr Keiller had forbidden it. He was by the fireplace, talking to a tall lady in violet satin. She was looking at him in a way I didn’t like.

‘Mrs Keiller was hoping to be here, but telephoned this morning to say she would be needed in London after all,’ added Mrs Sorel-Taylour, and frowned in the direction of the violet lady. Mr Keiller looked up and saw me. He seemed puzzled for a moment, then gave me a brisk nod. He’d forgotten he’d invited me, I could tell.

The drinking went on far too long; it was quarter to ten before we sat down at the table. Mrs Sorel-Taylour saved me from the humiliation of standing ignored at the edge of conversations by introducing me to the other airman, the one without a girl. From his accent–the vowels too flat, the
gs
a little too carefully pronounced–I could tell he was a fish out of water too, and he stuck to me gratefully for most of the evening, while Mrs Sorel-Taylour left us and clamped herself to Mr Keiller’s side like a watchful chaperone. The airman turned out to be a wireless operator from Mr Cromley’s old squadron, on leave for the week from their base in Kent, and he was the worse for drink too.

‘You know why old Donald’s so het up, don’t you?’ he said. ‘He’s not happy flying circuits round Yatesbury–too tame. But there’s a question mark over whether they’ll allow him back when the squadron moves to Colerne.’

‘Why?’ I asked, but he ignored me.

‘Not looking forward to Colerne, myself. Have to learn a whole new set of gubbins when we fly the de Havilland Mosquito.’

‘Should you be telling me that?’ I said. ‘My fellow usually keeps mum about what he flies.’ Davey had passed his exams in the summer, top of his class, and had been posted to a night-fighter squadron in East Anglia. His tight-lipped letters gave little away about his job, though I gathered he was kept busy patrolling the coast and chasing German bombers. But they revealed far too much about his feelings for me, and his longing for a transfer back to Wiltshire.

‘Pilot or wireless op?’ asked the airman. He wasn’t interested enough to wait for my reply. ‘Anyway, Don shouldn’t fret. He’ll be operational before Christmas, I bet–too good a pilot to waste in training, though I hope to Christ Yatesbury will have calmed him down.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Silly bastard was taking too many risks. Final straw was when he chased a bomber all the way to France, against orders I might add, and was shot up so badly he only just made it home on one engine. It looked touch and go, and he told his wireless op to bale out. Don brought the plane down safely, but Tony landed in the drink, and washed ashore dead. After that, word went round the squadron he was bad luck. No one wanted to fly with him.’

Donald was very drunk by now, sitting close to Mr Keiller near the middle of the table and doing his best to compete for the attention of the woman in the violet dress. For all my fear of him, I could pity him that night. He’d always been a good-looking boy. When you caught him unguarded, there could be gentleness in his face, but he seemed to want to slough off that side of himself. And I knew, because I’d seen it in the house in Swindon, that he was terrible frightened of his uncle. I wouldn’t have liked to be the one to tell him he shouldn’t come to the party.

The clock chimed the quarter hour. Forty-five minutes to midnight. The dessert plates were being cleared. Mr Keiller looked at Mr Cromley. Mr Cromley lurched to his feet, banging his cake fork against his glass, leaving a yellow smear of custard. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he slurred, ‘when you have finished your coffee and brandy, please assemble in the Library to prepare for our sss-solemn ritual in honour of the late Barber Surgeon of Avebury’ On cue the door of the dining room swung open, and the surly housemaid came in, carrying two tall coffee pots. She scowled when Mr Cromley beckoned to me and I stood up, full of dread, aware of curious eyes on me all around the table.