The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [116]
‘I’ll wait for you at the lay-by on the A4. Half past five, sunrise.’
He lopes off down the lane. Ed, on his own, climbs down from the Land Rover. Instead of following Bryn into the wood, he strides towards me. ‘Who the flick was that?’
‘He’s the one who’s camping in the wood.’
‘I’d worked that out. You never said you knew him. You could have mentioned it this morning, saved me the bother of coming out.’ The lines by his mouth are chiselled more deeply than usual into his cheeks.
‘Hardly your business who I know, is it?’ I say, then regret it.
‘No,’ he says, turning and starting to walk back down the lane. ‘You’re right. None of my fucking business.’
I watch him climb over the fence into Tolemac to remonstrate with Bryn. As arses go, I’d say it’s level pegging.
On the way home, I remember Frannie’s social worker was calling in this afternoon. Frannie’s watching television. There’s a note on the hall table.
Ring me on my mobile. I think we should have your grandmother at the Geriatric Psychiatric Day Centre for assessment.
Frannie looks up from Neighbours.
‘How are you feeling?’ I ask her.
‘Fine.’
‘What about Adele’s visit?’
‘Nosy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Kept wanting to know who the prime minister was. I told her, Smarm Bucket Blair, much good have he done us pensioners. And she must’ve asked three times what day of the week it was.’
‘What did you tell her?’ Holding my breath.
‘Told her to look on the calendar in the kitchen.’
‘She was playing with you,’ I tell Adele on the phone. ‘Being deliberately obstructive.’
‘Well, I could see on the calendar that she marks off the days. So she clearly has some difficulty with short-term memory’
‘Maybe I mark off the calendar. OK, I admit, she does keep track so she knows she’s taken her pills, but I have difficulty remembering which day it is, and I’m twenty-five.’
‘India, you have to accept your grandmother finds it harder to cope than she used to. I did a couple of standard cognitive-function tests on her. Not a perfect diagnostic tool, but it gives us a yardstick. She did significantly worse today than she did six months ago. It’s time we had a proper assessment done. I’ve booked her in for the first appointment I can get.’
Behind me, Fran calls from the lounge: ‘Ind! Forgot to tell you, those buggerin’ lights were there again last night, up on the hill.’
The sun hasn’t yet lifted over Waden Hill as I make my way down the river path, wondering what on earth to do about Frannie. It’s impossible to see any hill from her bedroom downstairs. Whatever she sees is in her dreams, which suggests she has trouble sorting what’s real and what’s not.
The early-morning light is pearly, and a white skirt of mist clings to Silbury. Cobwebs beaded with dew are strung across the path. Yesterday, May Day, there would have been people around, but this morning there’s no one on the path, and hardly any early commuters on the A4. No sign of him in the lay-by. I wait a few minutes, scanning the road from Avebury, until I look behind me over the hedge and spot him making his way across the field, Cynon the dog racing ahead.
‘I was expecting you from the other direction,’ I say, going through the gate to meet them. ‘What were you doing up that way?’
‘Spent the night in the Long Barrow.’ He tips back his battered trilby, and brushes ragged curls out of his eyes.
‘That must have been spooky.’ A five-thousand-year-old tomb isn’t my idea of a cosy campsite.
He looks at me as if he doesn’t understand what I’m talking about. ‘It’s beautiful there at night. So quiet.’
‘So dark.’
‘Not with candles. Come on, let’s get to the spring before the world wakes up.’ He sets out confidently across the field. ‘We’ll take the long way–less muddy’
The sun has risen, and our shadows stretch ahead like long peg dolls. Bryn leads towards a plantation of trees clinging to the hillside below the Long Barrow. We skirt the top of the wood, then drop down into the trees, following what can barely