The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [107]
‘I saw the film,’ I say defensively. ‘When I was about five.’
‘I don’t mean Jungle Book, idiot. Kipling also wrote a lot of short stories about manly young chaps keeping the Empire going. The Brushwood Boy is about a handsome fellow, frightfully good at cricket, et cetera, who resists the charms of all the ladies swooning over him. Instead he longs for an ideal woman whom he meets in his dreams, by a brushwood fire on a beach. Eventually he meets her for real. And she’s been dreaming the exact same dream–he’s her Brushwood Boy. Their souls have been meeting every night since they were children, and they know each other immediately’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘God, your generation have no bloody souls, do you? Yes, yes, it’s hideously sentimentalized, but it’s about falling in love.’
So now I’m more confused than ever. Instead of being dazzled by my grandmother, it’s my grandfather Keiller fell for?
Keiller was gay? I asked Martin. My grandfather was gay? Even though he was with my grandmother?
Another of his gusty sighs. You don’t have to be gay to sleep with men, apparently. Or be straight to marry. Well, excuse me, I knew that, but Martin seemed to have some other agenda he was pursuing. Finally I heard a woman’s voice in the background saying, For Chrissake give it a rest, Martin, and he suddenly shut up and said we’d talk when he was next in Avebury. That could be weeks away.
A blast of wind rattles the window. If Davey and Keiller had something going, could Frannie have had any idea? Or maybe there was no affair, unfulfilled yearnings all round. Or maybe none of it was serious, except in an experimental sense. How can you ever be sure what really happened? Even if you were there?
I pack the box files away, and shrug on my coat, hoping fresh air will clear my head. It’s still raining hard, but that doesn’t matter.
It does, of course. The wind keeps whipping my hood off, and the hems of my jeans are wicking water up my legs before I’ve even gone a couple of hundred yards. Rain lashes into my face. The stone circle is deserted, everyone with any sense being snug under thatch.
My grandfather’s ghost seems more elusive than ever. If it was that complicated, maybe I can understand why Fran doesn’t talk about it: time wounds all heels, but you don’t have to go on limping, as my mother used to say. How much would Fran have told her?
The wind buffets me along Green Street, whipping tiny waves into the puddles and pushing me towards the open countryside. We never talked much, either, Mum and me, and now I wonder how much of that was down to the way we are in my family, or to Margaret not wanting to acknowledge her own wrong choices. Married young and regretted it, walked out on her husband, heading into the sunrise with a bunch of musicians she met while working the nightshift in a motorway service-station caf. Until I came along to cramp her style, Mum would be on the hippie trail through the Far East, or with Angelfeather, achieving her fifteen minutes of fame as a poster girl when she danced naked on the Stonehenge trilithons, out of her head on acid as the sun rose. For years she was Blu-Tacked on student bedsit walls, Midsummer Meg next to Che Guevara and Slowhand Clapton.
Whatever she felt about her daughter’s behaviour, I never once heard my grandmother utter a word of criticism, even after Midsummer Meg danced right out of my life, and Social Services sent me to live with Frannie in Chippenham. Three, four, five years passed. She’s travelling abroad, said Frannie. In Thailand now. Or Australia. Or Africa. Cards came, signed ‘Mum’, in increasingly shaky writing, on birthdays and at Christmas, parcels too. They always had a Chippenham postmark. All, that is, apart from the last parcel. That came from Goa, where Meg had fallen off the stage and broken her neck. A silver chain with a moonstone pendant, a couple of batik scarves, a silk sari, a copy of The Road Less Travelled, a diary that was near enough blank pages, and her passport.