The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [48]
So when today’s Druids meet to observe Alban Eiler, they could indeed be following a tradition observed through the ages at Avebury. The sun god meets the awakening spring goddess, Eostre–from whose name we derive both ‘Easter’ and ‘oestrogen’. Sap rises, green things stir, the life force returns to the earth.
Dr Martin Ekwall,
A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury,
Hackpen Press
CHAPTER 12
1938
You can’t help who you fall for, can you?
To begin with I hardly saw Mr Keiller at the Manor. He was always somewhere else. Up and down to London, or off to Scotland. Most of the time we didn’t know where he was.
‘He’ll be skiing,’ said Cook, hopefully, if we hadn’t seen him for three or four days. He’d been a champion when he was younger, and at one time trained the British ski-jump team. But, no, he’d turn up late that very evening, with guests, demanding supper at midnight.
Mrs Sorel-Taylour had introduced me, suitably Kirby-gripped, on my first day. ‘This is Miss Robinson, who’ll be helping with the cataloguing.’
He was in the Map Room, sitting on a high draughtsman’s stool, looking at some photographs laid out under an Anglepoise lamp. Its light was the only splash of brightness. Everything in there was brown–velvet curtains, window seats, carpet. Even the walls were covered in brown leather.
He turned to inspect me, but I don’t think he was much interested by what he saw, a fifteen-year-old girl in a cheap jacket-and-skirt costume, with finger-waved hair and a scrubbed country face. ‘Do you write clearly?’ You could hear the w in write.
‘Very,’ said Mrs Sorel-Taylour, before I could open my mouth. ‘That’s why I took the child on.’ Did I imagine that tiny stress on ‘the child’? ‘She will, of course, be under my direct supervision.’
‘Good,’ he said. He was bored already, wanting to return to his pictures. The one on top was strange, but familiar too. It took a moment to work it out, then I saw it was a photograph of Avebury from the air. It had been taken late in the day because the shadows were long.
He must have been watching my face. ‘You recognize it.’ The soft upper-class w sound again, instead of the r.
‘I can see our guesthouse. There.’
‘Ah, that Robinson. I thought I’d seen you before.’ I could smell the oil on his sandy brown hair, sweet and spicy. The parting, on the right, was straight as a metal rule, the hair slicked back from a high, smooth forehead. ‘Do you know who you’re descended from?’
‘The monkeys, my mam says.’
He laughed. ‘The biggest monkey round here in the eighteenth century was Tom Robinson. They called him Stonebreaker Robinson, because he destroyed so many of the stones from the circle–broke them up for building material and road surfacing. Did you know that?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It seems to me entirely appropriate that we should put a Robinson to labour setting right what he destroyed. You shall serve your time in the museum on his behalf.’ He had a habit of dipping his chin and crinkling up his eyes when he smiled. ‘Of course, you might not be descended from him, but we shall never know, shall we? So I shall always assume you are and, on high days and holidays, give you twenty strokes of the lash as additional penance.’
I looked helplessly at Mrs Sorel-Taylour. Her mouth was a tight red seam.
Mr Keiller turned back to his photograph but his eyes stayed crinkled and happy, a smile rippling round his mouth.
Big crates arrived from London, full of what Mam called ‘stuff’. So many bits of broken pot and flakes of stone that Mr Keiller had dug up from Windmill Hill when he’d come there in the 1920s, or from Mr Peak-Garland’s fields when he’d rebuilt the Avenue that leads up to the circle. Not to mention the bits and pieces they found from the circle itself in the last year, when they started putting back the stones. It was all