The Buried Circle. Jenni Mills

Calne or Chippenham or somewhere like that to be a piano teacher, then died a bachelor, and his films would have died with him, except his nephew was curious about the contents of the battered film cans he discovered while clearing his uncle’s effects. On the screen Percy doffs his hat, as if he knows we’re going to be watching in his dad’s old pub nearly seventy years later.

      The picture jumps and there’s the village street, not the same as today but recognizable. A dozen or so kids come running up the lane, right up to the camera, laughing. All the people in the audience break out talking and nudging each other, all these old people who are seeing themselves suddenly as they were then. There’s one old lady crying, and in the flickering TV light I can make out in the audience’s faces some of the same features that show on the screen, blurred now with age, plump rosy cheeks that have slipped like melting Christmas candles down their faces, eyes that are clear in then milky now with cataracts.

      It’s the little kids who are crowding close to Percy’s camera, but behind them a few older ones hang back, giggling. Could that be Frannie, her hand over her mouth to hide her grin, with a bobbed hairstyle like the Queen wore when she was a princess? Too late, the scene’s changed, racehorses being walked out along the high street to the Gallops, long-gone Classic winners whose bones now moulder under the downland.

      Now heavy horses, pulling the haywains, and men in cloth caps pitchforking hay onto the ricks. It’s in black-and-white, but Percy Lawes was good with that cine-camera, knew how to use the light. No sound, but you can see the men laughing and joking with one another, easy with their work even though they were being filmed. Suddenly that’s gone too, and we’re inside the stone circle, watching a massive stone with ropes and pulleys wrapped round it, and men with crowbars heaving and tugging to get it upright.

      And there he is, sitting on a camp stool, sketching or writing up his notes, it’s hard to make out which. The man himself. AK, Alexander Keiller, who moved into the Manor House in 1937 to reshape Avebury. He’s wearing a Panama hat and a blazer, all long elegant legs and knees and elbows on the tiny stool, working on his pad, not bothering to acknowledge the camera, as arrogant and insouciant as an old-time squire. The smile lifting the corners of his mouth–he knows he’s being filmed–is familiar. Where the hell have I seen those features and that expression before?

      No. It can’t be. But it is: the smile on the poster at the back of Frannie’s wardrobe, the smile Margaret used to wear when she knew someone was photographing her. She was tall and beautiful and kind of arrogant as well, with her strong nose and high forehead. At Greenham, journalists made a beeline for her, and when she danced naked on top of the trilithons at Stonehenge, one midsummer dawn, tossing her long thick hair and with that exact same smile on her mouth, someone snapped it and turned it into a poster. They never comes back, that’s for sure.

      But maybe that smile did. The thought explodes like a firework in my head, though it isn’t so much a revelation as the confirmation of an idea that’s been quietly creeping up on me over the last few days.

      It explains the letter tucked down the side of Frannie’s armchair. Might even be the reason she didn’t want to come this evening. Most crucially, it makes sense of the date on my so-called grandfather’s headstone, of Frannie’s reluctance to talk about him. Because if David Fergusson wasn’t my grandfather, who was?

      Next to me, John leans across and stubs out his rollie, and the sweet tarry scent of grass comes bursting up from the ashtray.

      I touch his arm and whisper so no one else will hear.

      John frowns and shakes his head. ‘You have to be wrong, Indy,’ he whispers back. ‘That’s never in a million years your grandad.’

      After the film, the white-haired man tells us to have a break and more drinks before they start the discussion proper. Everyone in the room is a bit red-eyed, including John, only in his case it’s the weed. Even the TV woman blows her nose. The camera sweeps the room, relentlessly prying into then, all the weepy conversations that have broken out as people remember their childhood and how England used to be before supermarkets and television and tractors.

      ‘I’m going,’ says John, unexpectedly, picking up his lighter and tobacco pouch.

      ‘Won’t you stay?’ I was fizzing, but now I’ve gone flat. He’s probably right. It’s impossible Keiller and Frannie had any relationship. Or, if not impossible, highly unlikely: wrong age, wrong class. I’ve let myself be carried away by some old biddy’s poison-pen letter, hinting at scandal, but what was going on at the Manor could mean anything. It might not even relate to the time Keiller lived there.

      ‘You don’t want me cramping your style when you chat up telly people.’ John stands up, squeezes my shoulder. ‘You need a massage.’ And he’s gone, limping through the tables, his narrow bony back the full stop it’s always been at the end of our conversations.

      I take a sip of his unfinished pint, glancing round the pub again. There will be people here who knew Fran when she was a girl. Unfortunately, most of them were probably too young to have picked up the gossip of the day. Still, someone sent that letter, and he or she could be in this room. Although I know John’s right, really, there’s no way Keiller could have been my grandfather, I can’t help spinning the idea round. That smile…so exactly Margaret’s, I’m amazed John couldn’t see it. I cremated all my photographs of my mother–part of my sad Goth phase again–but Fran has a little one, in her bedroom, of Margaret in her teens, with white lipstick and three layers of false eyelashes. Maybe she keeps others, too, locked away in the bureau.

      You know, Ind, one day you might regret that, said Fran on the day I burned my mother’s things. Never get ‘em back, that’s for sure. Then she stumped away to the garden shed to fetch the rake, and spread the ashes of the bonfire across the flowerbed.

      I’m heading for the loo, admiring the dark-eyed cameraman’s profile as he tips back his head to swallow the last of his lager, when the TV woman and I nearly collide in the doorway.

      ‘Sorry,’ she says.

      ‘My fault, not looking where I’m going.’ We both stand back to let the other through first, then, when neither moves, step forward simultaneously.

      ‘You first.’

      ‘No, you. There’s more than one cubicle in there, anyway.’

      Of course, when we go in, they’re both occupied. A sickly manufactured scent of rose pot-pourri hangs in the air, and a volley of old-lady farts comes from behind one of the doors. We exchange smiles.

      There’s never going to be a better moment.

      ‘This programme you’re doing…’

      ‘If it gets commissioned. Not always a given, these days.’

      ‘Would you be interested in an idea for it?’

      This look comes over her face, the one that says she’s had a million people offer her ideas and only two and a half have ever been remotely any good. It’s replaced immediately by a polite, bland mask. ‘Try me.’

      ‘Next spring’s the seventieth anniversary of Keiller starting work in the circle.’ I’m gabbling to spew it all out fast before one of the toilet doors opens. ‘I understand about commissioning, I’ve worked for Mannix and other TV companies–’ (go on, India, tell a really big lie about your qualifications to keep her listening, and hope your nose doesn’t grow to give it away) ‘–and I did a master’s at Bristol University in archaeology and media, with my thesis on Keiller’s work. Only he never finished–you’ll know this. He never managed to reconstruct the whole circle.’

      ‘Uh-huh.’ She’s interested now, I can tell–in fact I’ve a feeling she could be way ahead of me.

      ‘So I thought…’

      ‘You want to finish the job for him and put up the rest of the stones.’

      ‘Well, no, not actually all the stones.’ I’m explaining now in the bar. My bladder aches because I never did get round