The Buried Circle. Jenni Mills

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.

       CHAPTER 6 1938

      ‘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