The Buried Circle. Jenni Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ snorts. ‘Archaeological Satan, more like. He’s the reason you didn’t grow up in a posh house in the village.’

      ‘You make it sound like it was personal,’ I say. ‘He was only…’

      ‘Trying to achieve a vision? So was Hitler, round about the same time.’

      The camera fixes its cold fishy eye on us, but only for a moment. The cameraman has decided we’re the wrong age to be interesting tonight. Instead the lens settles on Carrie Harper, chair-to-the-parish-council (all said quickly on one breath so you won’t mistake her for something that can be bought in Ikea), resplendent in orange cable knit and a pair of flared jersey trousers that probably date from her heyday in the seventies. But the rustles and whispers have reached a pitch: a man with white hair strides to the front, by the big plasma screen that’s usually for the football. He waves the remote control at us, like a conductor’s baton, and the room falls silent.

      ‘Welcome,’ he says. ‘We’re going to show you a film. I could tell you what it’s about, but I think most of you know far better than I do.’ The oldies laugh; go on, Mister, flatter us, we like that. ‘It was found at the back of a wardrobe, six months ago, and eventually ended up at my production company for cleaning and transfer to DVD.’ He looks round, taking in their rapt faces, and smiles, a broad grin, directed at them but also at the camera with its pulsing red light. ‘It’s rather special, because it’s a record of the way this village was in the late 1930s. Some of you are in it, and that would be interesting enough in itself. But, more importantly, it opens a window on a critical year for archaeology.’

      John turns and winks at me.

      ‘Nineteen thirty-eight. A year in which Avebury was transformed by the man we’ll see on this footage. We’re going to film you as you watch it, as part of a documentary we’re hoping to sell to Channel 4 or the BBC. Everyone happy?’ Nods and grunts, presumably enough to count for assent. ‘Right. Let’s run it.’ He raises the remote and presses play.

      White scratchy lines flicker over a black background. A square of light appears, not quite filling the screen. I’ve been expecting one of those countdowns you see on old cine film, 5-4-3-2-1, or at least a clock with a sweeping second hand, but the picture’s there immediately, and Percy Lawes himself swaggers up to the camera, Jack-the-lad puffing on his cigarette with a knowing smile, enjoying his Hitchcock moment. Frannie remembers him: he figures in her stories of the old days. He was the son of the landlord of the Red Lion, thought himself a bit smarter than the rest, with his little hat and his cine-camera. He went off to Calne or Chippenham or somewhere like that to be a piano teacher, then died a bachelor, and his films would have died with him, except his nephew was curious about the contents of the battered film cans he discovered while clearing his uncle’s effects. On the screen Percy doffs his hat, as if he knows we’re going to be watching in his dad’s old pub nearly seventy years later.

      The picture jumps and there’s the village street, not the same as today but recognizable. A dozen or so kids come running up the lane, right up to the camera, laughing. All the people in the audience break out talking and nudging each other, all these old people who are seeing themselves suddenly as they were then. There’s one old lady crying, and in the flickering TV light I can make out in the audience’s faces some of the same features that show on the screen, blurred now with age, plump rosy cheeks that have slipped like melting Christmas candles down their faces, eyes that are clear in then milky now with cataracts.

      It’s the little kids who are crowding close to Percy’s camera, but behind them a few older ones hang back, giggling. Could that be Frannie, her hand over her mouth to hide her grin, with a bobbed hairstyle like the Queen wore when she was a princess? Too late, the scene’s changed, racehorses being walked out along the high street to the Gallops, long-gone Classic winners whose bones now moulder under the downland.

      Now heavy horses, pulling the haywains, and men in cloth caps pitchforking hay onto the ricks. It’s in black-and-white, but Percy Lawes was good with that cine-camera, knew how to use the light. No sound, but you can see the men laughing and joking with one another, easy with their work even though they were being filmed. Suddenly that’s gone too, and we’re inside the stone circle, watching a massive stone with ropes and pulleys wrapped round it, and men with crowbars heaving and tugging to get it upright.

      And there he is, sitting on a camp stool, sketching or writing up his notes, it’s hard to make out which. The man himself. AK, Alexander Keiller, who moved into the Manor House in 1937 to reshape Avebury. He’s wearing a Panama hat and a blazer, all long elegant legs and knees and elbows on the tiny stool, working on his pad, not bothering to acknowledge the camera, as arrogant and insouciant as an old-time squire. The smile lifting the corners of his mouth–he knows he’s being filmed–is familiar. Where the hell have I seen those features and that expression before?

      No. It can’t be. But it is: the smile on the poster at the back of Frannie’s wardrobe, the smile Margaret used to wear when she knew someone was photographing her. She was tall and beautiful and kind of arrogant as well, with her strong nose and high forehead. At Greenham, journalists made a beeline for her, and when she danced naked on top of the trilithons at Stonehenge, one midsummer dawn, tossing her long thick hair and with that exact same smile on her mouth, someone snapped it and turned it into a poster. They never comes back, that’s for sure.

      But maybe that smile did. The thought explodes like a firework in my head, though it isn’t so much a revelation as the confirmation of an idea that’s been quietly creeping up on me over the last few days.

      It explains the letter tucked down the side of Frannie’s armchair. Might even be the reason she didn’t want to come this evening. Most crucially, it makes sense of the date on my so-called grandfather’s headstone, of Frannie’s reluctance to talk about him. Because if David Fergusson wasn’t my grandfather, who was?

      Next to me, John leans across and stubs out his rollie, and the sweet tarry scent of grass comes bursting up from the ashtray.

      I touch his arm and whisper so no one else will hear.

      John frowns and shakes his head. ‘You have to be wrong, Indy,’ he whispers back. ‘That’s never in a million years your grandad.’

      After the film, the white-haired man tells us to have a break and more drinks before they start the discussion proper. Everyone in the room is a bit red-eyed, including John, only in his case it’s the weed. Even the TV woman blows her nose. The camera sweeps the room, relentlessly prying into then, all the weepy conversations that have broken out as people remember their childhood and how England used to be before supermarkets and television and tractors.

      ‘I’m going,’ says John, unexpectedly, picking up his lighter and tobacco pouch.

      ‘Won’t you stay?’ I was fizzing, but now I’ve gone flat. He’s probably right. It’s impossible Keiller and Frannie had any relationship. Or, if not impossible, highly unlikely: wrong age, wrong class. I’ve let myself be carried away by some old biddy’s poison-pen letter, hinting at scandal, but what was going on at the Manor could mean anything. It might not even relate to the time Keiller lived there.

      ‘You don’t want me cramping your style when you chat up telly people.’ John stands up, squeezes my shoulder. ‘You need a massage.’ And he’s gone, limping through the tables, his narrow bony back the full stop it’s always been at the end of our conversations.

      I take a sip of his unfinished pint, glancing round the pub again. There will be people here who knew Fran when she was a girl. Unfortunately, most of them were probably too young to have picked up the gossip of the day. Still, someone sent that СКАЧАТЬ