The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [106]
I work my way through the letters, sorting them into piles by date. You can almost smell the late-night brandy on the blue copies, Keiller’s personality pushing through the page. He’s so obviously a charmer, used to getting his own way; also, less attractively, an obsessive and a hypochondriac. An extrovert, by all accounts, yet he’d grown up a lonely boy, both parents dead before he was eighteen, fascinated by witchcraft and the stone circles he found on his solitary walks on the Scottish moors. Loved flying, skiing, fast cars. Opiniated, a ruthless enemy waging war on slipshod archaeology, a tyrant with an explosive temper…
Somehow it’s nearly one o’clock already. By now Frannie will be comfortably ensconced at the Harpers’ with a glass of sweet sherry in her hand, admiring the Crown Derby dinner service and chattering through the open doorway to Carrie in the kitchen.
Or will she be sitting silently in the living room with that vacant, preoccupied glaze on her face?
Of course not. She’s fine. She’s become forgetful, but all old ladies are forgetful. She’s still the same Fran she’s always been…
Always? Fact is, Fran was nearly sixty when I was born. I’ve only ever known her as an elderly woman. And now the active, vigorous Fran who helped raise me is disappearing too, all her different personas fading: the walker who taught me the names of wild flowers, the china collector who used to raid Devizes junk shops, the Greenham granny who took the bolt-cutters from Margaret to snip the perimeter fence, and held my small hand when we embraced the base.
Under my fingers, thin blue paper rustles as I lay it on the appropriate pile. May 1939. Who were you then, Frannie, when you typed some of these? The person who had sent the anonymous letter knew.
anyone with eyes in their head at the Manor knew what was going on the Devil was at work there As I lift out the last set of blue sheets from the box file, one slides from the sheaf, and a name jumps out at me.
Davey Fergusson.
Thank God it’s raining. When I dial Martin’s mobile, he answers almost immediately. A background of music and chatter makes it difficult to hear what he’s saying.
‘We’re in the pub, petal. Would’ve been mad to go underground today. Hang on…’ The chatter peaks as he turns away from the phone. A male voice is asking him what he wants to eat. ‘…saut, not fries. Sorry, India, I’m back with you.’
‘Who was that?’
‘Nobody for you to get excited about. My friend’s boyfriend.’
‘I thought you were staying with someone special this weekend?’
Martin sounds like his teeth are clenched. ‘That fell through. He had cold feet.’
Anyway, look, I found something in Keiller’s letters,’ I tell him. ‘My grandfather’s name. I mean, the name of the man Frannie says is my grandfather. But the context is…weird. Keiller’s going on about someone he calls the Brushwood Boy, who might or might not be Davey Fergusson, and there’s someone else mentioned whose name is Paul. It’s kind of confusing, and not clear which of them he’s talking about, but he says: His eyes are lustrous…lots of stuff about the effect on Keiller being electric and bursting into song with an ecstatic expression on his face.’
‘Is this by any chance a letter to Piggott?’ asks Martin.
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s the way they wrote to each other–homoerotic public-schoolboy banter. Although I sometimes think there was more to it than that: they were genuinely trying to define the mysteries of love in an age that sent you to prison for touching another man’s willy. Keiller had an engineering background, remember, so he wanted to understand the mechanics of attraction, be it male to female or male to male. Poke it, probe it, give it a test run, see if it fell to bits. Look, scan the letter, email it, and I’ll take a closer look.’
‘Do you understand this reference to the Brushwood Boy? Was it a song, or something, of the period?’
The sigh coming down the line