The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [14]
Grandad is about halfway along the third row–at least, I assume this is Grandad, because he’s the only Davey or David among the Second World War graves. David Fergusson. Stupidly, I’d been expecting his surname to be Robinson, even though I knew that was Fran’s family name. Either she’d reverted to her maiden name or maybe she’s coy about him because they were never married. No big deal now, but I suppose she’d have wanted to keep it quiet then.
Blackbirds chirp and commute from yew trees to hedge. Autumn sunlight glints on dewy cobwebs slung between the headstones. Davey’s is simple: his name, his age–twenty-four, making him, when he died, a year younger than I am–the date of his death, the words In loving memory. How little there is left to know of a person, then: not even his birth date. I didn’t bring flowers, and I’m sorry for that now. My eyes fill as I imagine what it must have been like for Fran, already pregnant, hearing the news that her baby’s father had been killed, somewhere over England, or France, or Germany. Not even a body to bring home and bury. Then years of coping alone, a widow in her early twenties (or pretending to be), never marrying, earning a living as a clerical assistant in a meat-processing plant, struggling to bring up a wild-child daughter who’d never known her dad…
The daughter. A smoky crystal twists, turns to the light, revealing a pale ghost of itself inside. Something I’d almost forgotten.
My mother’s birth date. Margaret was born in October 1945.
Davey Fergusson was killed in August 1942.
CHAPTER 4
Coming out of St James’s, Carrie Harper asks me if I want to have a bite of lunch with her and her sister. They always have a roast on Sundays. No, I say, my granddaughter’s home now. She works for the telly, you know.
We stand there gossiping, where Percy Lawes used to set up his cine-camera back in the thirties and film us coming out of church, the women showing off their new babies and everybody wearing a hat, even us young girls. A nippy little wind gets up, rattling the dead flowers that need to be cleared from the headstones. It’s a while since I took some to Mam’s grave. Thinking of her, suddenly I’m in that place where all the pathways of time meet and cross and twist round on each other, like the moonlit paths between the box hedges in the Manor garden. My mouth stops working in the middle of whatever it was saying.
‘You all right, Fran?’ asks Carrie.
I give myself a good shake. ‘Goose walked over.’
‘You’re a long way from the boneyard yet, Frances Robinson,’ says Carrie.
But I don’t know about that. Seems to me I never left the bone-yard from that day over in Yatesbury when I found him leaning on the box tomb. Seems to me there’s secrets under stones: near half the circle still buried, and better it should stay that way, especially where India’s concerned. But now there’s people nosing round digging where they shouldn’t. Them lights on Windmill Hill–there’s someone up there, searching, night after night. They in’t found nothing yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
Sometimes I think I knows exactly who it is up there. It’s him, come back again, looking for what’s his.
Wherever you go, Heartbreaker, he said, you take me with you.
PART TWO
Imbolc
Like all prehistoric landscapes, Avebury is as remarkable for what you can’t see as what you can. Apart from what Alexander Keiller started to reconstruct in the 1930s–a stone circle originally comprising about a hundred megaliths, some further stone settings within, the whole enclosed within a bank and a ditch, and the West Kennet avenue sweeping southwards from it–a number of other features in the landscape hint at what must have been a vast complex of monuments in the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age: long barrows, round barrows, and parch marks suggestive of other stone or timber circles, palisades and enclosures. A second avenue winds