The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [47]
‘Hot chocolate, please,’ says the woman in the parka, arriving in front of us with a carbohydrate-laden tray. ‘Ray?’
‘Do they do filter coffee?’
‘No, but we do an Americano, which is virtually the same. I should’ve told him at the time that if he was married he could forget it,’ I tell Corey, as she spoons hot-chocolate powder out of the tin. ‘But…you know how it is. You’re so anxious they shouldn’t be spotted leaving your room that you don’t get around to saying anything. I–well, I ignored all his phone calls and texts afterwards, except to tell him to go away’
‘I’m glad to say I don’t know how it is. Not from personal experience, anyway.’ Married to a Devizes policeman for two years, Corey is a devotee of women’s magazines that discuss this kind of thing.
‘Men are so full of shit,’ I say confidently ‘Their problem is they can’t tell the difference between sex and love.’
The woman at the counter snorts.
‘Or would he prefer a latte?’ I ask her.
‘In my book, he’s unfaithful even if he isn’t sleeping with someone else.’ Corey shoves the milk jug under the nozzle of the steamer. She has to raise her voice over the machine’s whoosh. ‘Which would you prefer–a husband shagging you and thinking of someone else, or shagging someone else and thinking of you?’
My creative studies BA had finished a few months and a lot of marks short of what I’d planned when my tutor’s wife started asking herself the very same question. Not that marks had anything to do with it. I’d fallen hopelessly in love with the sod. The exams were a wipeout; I only scraped a pass on coursework. Never again.
The customer’s eyebrows are jigging up and down in a demented dance. ‘Do him an Americano, dear. He doesn’t understand the difference.’
‘The real question is,’ says Corey, spooning froth into the hot-chocolate mug, ‘how do you feel about him now, supposing he had a job here?’
‘I told you. It’s over. I knew that the moment I looked at him and realized I didn’t fancy him any more. Can’t tell you what a relief that was.’
This time both Corey and the woman snort.
During my lunch hour, I cross the cobbles to the museum. Chris, at the till, raises his eyebrows. I hand him a mug of hot chocolate: bribery. ‘OK if I go upstairs?’ I ask. ‘More research for those telly people.’
‘Does the curator know?’
‘Checked with her this morning. She said to go ahead.’
He gives me the nod.
Upstairs, I pull on a pair of blue vinyl gloves to leaf through the photo albums. The first item on Daniel Porteus’s list is Destruction of Village. Doesn’t take me long to find the pictures at the start of the 1938 album: black-and-white stills of brawny workmen, braces and cloth caps, fragments of wall and thatch, homes that look as if someone dropped a bomb on them.
Grandfather or no, Keiller really was a bastard.
PART THREE
Equal Night
And that this place may thoroughly be thought True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.
John Donne, Twicknam Garden
Let us be clear: there were no Druids at Avebury until the present day. Druids were a Celtic priesthood (and later a nineteenth-century reinvention) and Avebury fell into disuse long before the Celts arrived in Britain. Indeed, one of its most remarkable aspects is that no Iron Age artefacts at all have been found within the henge. Perhaps people steered clear of the circle at that point in time. So we can safely say that it is highly unlikely that Alban Eiler, the Celtic spring festival, was ever celebrated there during the Druids’ heyday.
Having said that, most cultures celebrate a spring festival at or about the time of the vernal equinox. Certainly some Neolithic monuments–the passages in the tomb at Knowth, in Ireland, for example–seem to be aligned to sunset and sunrise at the equinox (literally, ‘equal night’), on 20/21 March. There doesn’t appear to be any such alignment