The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [63]
I collected it from the Map Room and took it to our office above the stable block. The packet Mr Keiller had lobbed at me contained three of his little tapes. But which came first? One was marked ’6 April, VGC. The other two had question marks pencilled on their boxes, so I picked up the one that was dated. I had never used the machine before by myself, but I set everything up like Mrs Sorel-Taylour had shown me, and sat back with my shorthand pad at the ready. Mrs Sorel-Taylour was so fast at typing she could almost keep up with the machine, but she said I shouldn’t try that because I’d make too many mistakes that way and Mr Keiller liked a nice clean copy without words xxxed out or smudges left by the correcting rubber.
I turned the knob to start and, with a clunk, the machine let out Mr Keiller’s voice, hissy and a bit slurred, so I could tell this had been dictated late last night with a brandy in his hand.
‘My dear Childe,’ the machine said to me. ‘So glad you rejected cannibalism…’
You got used to this kind of stuff. He was writing to one of his professor friends about some excavation up in the Orkneys. More old bones, more bits of pot. ‘If you find yourself in this part of the world in the early summer, perhaps you would care to join us for the grand opening of our museum…’ The smooth voice with its soft rs, hissing out of the machine like steam, made me sleepy. My shorthand looked like something that had been dug out of the ground too. ‘Yours, Alec’
Another letter began. Made me smile because it was to Mr Piggott’s mother. She was always worrying about her precious Stuart–a gurt grown man, mind, and about to get married, though for the life of me I couldn’t understand what kind of woman would want him–and it was a joke between me and Mrs Sorel-Taylour that poor old Mr K had to keep writing back to reassure her Mr Piggott was well and happy and his fingers not being worked to the bone. ‘This work–I always prefer not to call it my work proprietorially–is a perfect religion to me…’
That was him all over: our high priest, inspiring us to do The Work. If Mr Piggott laboured all hours, it was because Mr K had bewitched him, like the rest of us. Reckon I wasn’t the only one half in love.
There was a clunk. Time to change the tape; they didn’t last long. Which came next? Judging by the question marks, Mr Keiller didn’t know either, though it wasn’t like him to be muddled. He was usually so exact.
I eeny-meeny-miny-mo’d. But this one couldn’t be to Mrs Piggott.
‘…a turmoil of apprehension. I have, at different times of my life, made studies, more or less cursory and sometimes merely superficial, of various branches of the erotic impulse–’ I stopped the machine. My face was hot, and I was glad I was alone in the office. What would Mrs Sorel-Taylour have said? This had to be the wrong tape. I turned over the box. There was a date, after all, in small neat letters, half erased: ‘9 Oct’. Mr Cromley had picked up an old recording by mistake, maybe one that Mr Keiller had meant to wipe and use again. I couldn’t imagine Mrs S-T typing a letter like this, but she must have.
What did he mean, studies of the erotic impulse? I remembered ideas Davey sometimes whispered to me. I thought of that thing made of chalk, and the giggling ladies, as they followed Mr Keiller into the hidden part of the garden.
My fumbly fingers kept making mistakes so it was seven o’clock before I’d typed clean enough versions of the letters, with the blue copies he asked for. It was pitch black outside.
I shut off the lights in the museum. No need to lock the door: who’d want all them bits of broken old pot? It was dark over the cobbles, but soon as I came round the end of the stable block, light spilled out of the Manor House windows onto the lawns.
I went up the path, and knocked.
The butler, Mr Waters, was too grand to answer the side door, so when it swung open