The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [16]
‘Told you Cernunnos protected us.’ One of the volunteers examines its partner’s Gore-Texed shoulder while I’m wrestling with my wellies. ‘Your coat’s bone dry. It was tipping down while we crossed the circle, but not a drop landed on us.’ A waft of mandarin essential oil (for alertness) hits my nose as I pad past them on stockinged feet into the main office.
The estate wardens’ desks are a wasteland of empty coffee mugs and neglected paperwork. On the far side of the room, Lilian’s head is down, stabbing fingers telling her keyboard what’s what. She looks up and gives me a quick nod. ‘He’s expecting you.’ The property administrator’s door is open.
Michael’s at his desk, immaculately turned out in a tweedy country-gent-ish sort of way, jacket, shirt collar peeping over the crew neck of a bobble-free cashmere sweater, which he must shave along with his chin every morning. Everybody else pads about indoors in socks, but he’s in leather brogues, a spare pair he keeps at the office to avoid muddying them, polished to military brilliance. Photos of wife, children and a grinning black Labrador are aligned just so on the desktop. The distance between them, determined by some golden architectural mean, hasn’t varied so much as a nanometre since I first came in September to ask for a job.
He’s on the phone. It must be to Head Office, because his voice is perfectly polite but his face is all screwed up. ‘First-aid kits, right,’ he’s saying. ‘Of course we check them. Yes, regularly. But, come on, it’s February. There isn’t much call for Wasp-Eze in February.’ He waves to me to sit down. I haul a chair over and park it on the opposite side of the vast desk. His paperwork isn’t as organized as his photos. The filing trays threaten to avalanche, and the area around the phone is littered with yellow Post-it notes. One of them probably refers to me, but it’s hard to read upside-down.
‘I take your point,’ Michael continues. ‘Yes, it’s windy here too. I agree, we don’t want any accidents. I’ll get a warden onto it right away. Though Graham’s up to his eyes. Have you looked at the possibility of cover to replace Morag?…Right. See you at the meeting next week.’ He puts the phone down, not gently, and rubs his eyes. ‘Bloody-Health-and-Safety.’ In Michael’s mouth it has contemptuous capitals and hyphens. ‘It gets more ridiculous every day. I’m an architectural historian. Checking first-aid kits every six months is a waste of my…’ Finally, he works out who I am. ‘India. Of course. Yes, I asked you to come over, didn’t I?’
‘Corey said…’
‘Corey? Oh, yes, at the caf…’ He stares out of the window, brown eyes unfocused. ‘You didn’t see any strange Druids hanging about by the museum, did you? Strange, that is, in the sense of not the local ones we know and love.’
‘There were a couple of men in frocks, looking cold.’
‘Damn.’ He lifts a couple of piles of paper. ‘Damn, damn. Got a letter here somewhere from some bloody Reclaim-the-Ancient-Dead group. They want us to give our skeletons back to the Druids. Not that they came from them in the first place, said skeletons being five thousand years old and modern druidism going back roughly two hundred, at a generous estimate.’
‘They wouldn’t say that.’
He stops quarrying the paper mountain, and gives me a surprised look. ‘You’re not a pagan, are you?’ I shake my head, and he resumes the search. ‘Thank God. Bane of my bloody life. Give me a nice quiet Palladian mansion for my next job, where all I’ve got to worry about is room stewards dropping dead of old age. You didn’t hear that, by the way. I hugely respect our Druid brethren, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to hand over our skeletons. Hang on a minute…’ He reaches for a pair of half-moon glasses.