The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [102]
I turned my face away, felt as much as heard the swish of air, the crumbling impact. Someone put an arm round me. When I looked up, there was my bedroom, a yawning cave with smashed floorboards and torn flowered wallpaper.
Couple of days after the guesthouse came down, Mr Chamberlain was on the radio and in the newspapers. Peace for our time, he says. Flapping a piece of paper like a magician producing a dove.
‘You lied to me,’ I said.
Mr Cromley, still in his leather mask, was coming out of the bathroom, a towel round his waist. The other man had already gone.
‘Don’t pretend,’ I went on. ‘Who was that? I know it wasn’t Mr Keiller.’
Mr Cromley sighed. He reached up, unfastened the back of his mask and took it off. His hair was damp and flattened to his head.
‘It was my uncle, of course. You’re very lucky, Heartbreaker. Your virginity was taken by the best ritual magician in Europe.’ There was bitterness in his voice because it should have been him.
‘He smelled wrong for Mr Keiller,’ I said. ‘I’m not stupid.’
‘No, of course you’re not,’ he said, his voice as cold as his uncle had felt, pushing into my warm core. ‘A stupid girl is one who doesn’t understand how fragile her grip is on what she holds dear. How easy it would be, for instance, to lose her job because of a careless mistake, a thoughtless word to the wrong person. How disappointed her parents would be in her. How shocked people in Avebury would be if they knew what she had allowed herself to do. Begged to do, as I recall’
I was barely sixteen, and I believed him.
PART FOUR
Fire Festival
Beltane–May Eve, the night of 30 April–is a fire festival. It marks the point in the agricultural year when cattle were moved to new pasture to graze the spring grass. Bonfires were lit; young men and women jumped over them to prove their bravery, then paired off in the darkness.
Today May Day is associated with jolly folk customs: maypole dancing, morris men. We have a vague sense that all this phallic symbolism must be something to do with fertility, and indeed it is. The main concern of agricultural societies is always fertility.
Whether our forefathers (and mothers) actually carried out sexual rituals in stone circles like Avebury is a moot point. Every time an archaeologist discovers rock carvings that appear to show men copulating with women, or each other, or even, in one celebrated case, cattle, it is hailed as proof that sex was an integral part of prehistoric religious ritual. On the other hand it could also be prehistoric graffiti, of roughly the same significance as a spray-painted penis on a warehouse wall.
Dr Martin Ekwall,
A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury,
Hackpen Press
CHAPTER 25
1939
May’s a white month in Wiltshire. Stitchwort and three-cornered leek and wild garlic in the hedges, horse-chestnut candles bowing down the branches above. On the juicy green Downs, lambs looking like they’ve been laundered. None of it lasts.
May Eve 1939 was cold and stormy as a curse, though.
‘The witches’ Beltane, Miss Robinson.’
‘I wouldn’t know, Mr Keiller.’
‘My dear girl, call yourself a countrywoman? Rural types are supposed to be in touch with the pagan calendar.’
‘Not me. I go to church.’
We were in the library, rain lashing the diamond-paned windows. I was delivering another batch of typing, waiting by the table with his fountain pen for him to sign the letters. Mr Keiller was all restless energy, pacing round making plans and pulling out books from the shelves instead of getting down to his correspondence. He’d wanted to know where the maypole went, and did we still do the dancing? He come over all of a tizz when he discovered it used to be set up at the back of the Methodist chapel, right by the tall obelisk stone he reckoned marked the dead centre of the circle–or would have, if it hadn’t been pulled down and broken up hundreds of years ago.
In the lamplight,