The Buried Circle. Jenni Mills
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Название: The Buried Circle
Автор: Jenni Mills
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежные детективы
isbn: 9780007335695
isbn:
Blackbirds chirp and commute from yew trees to hedge. Autumn sunlight glints on dewy cobwebs slung between the headstones. Davey’s is simple: his name, his age–twenty-four, making him, when he died, a year younger than I am–the date of his death, the words In loving memory. How little there is left to know of a person, then: not even his birth date. I didn’t bring flowers, and I’m sorry for that now. My eyes fill as I imagine what it must have been like for Fran, already pregnant, hearing the news that her baby’s father had been killed, somewhere over England, or France, or Germany. Not even a body to bring home and bury. Then years of coping alone, a widow in her early twenties (or pretending to be), never marrying, earning a living as a clerical assistant in a meat-processing plant, struggling to bring up a wild-child daughter who’d never known her dad…
The daughter. A smoky crystal twists, turns to the light, revealing a pale ghost of itself inside. Something I’d almost forgotten.
My mother’s birth date. Margaret was born in October 1945.
Davey Fergusson was killed in August 1942.
Coming out of St James’s, Carrie Harper asks me if I want to have a bite of lunch with her and her sister. They always have a roast on Sundays. No, I say, my granddaughter’s home now. She works for the telly, you know.
We stand there gossiping, where Percy Lawes used to set up his cine-camera back in the thirties and film us coming out of church, the women showing off their new babies and everybody wearing a hat, even us young girls. A nippy little wind gets up, rattling the dead flowers that need to be cleared from the headstones. It’s a while since I took some to Mam’s grave. Thinking of her, suddenly I’m in that place where all the pathways of time meet and cross and twist round on each other, like the moonlit paths between the box hedges in the Manor garden. My mouth stops working in the middle of whatever it was saying.
‘You all right, Fran?’ asks Carrie.
I give myself a good shake. ‘Goose walked over.’
‘You’re a long way from the boneyard yet, Frances Robinson,’ says Carrie.
But I don’t know about that. Seems to me I never left the bone-yard from that day over in Yatesbury when I found him leaning on the box tomb. Seems to me there’s secrets under stones: near half the circle still buried, and better it should stay that way, especially where India’s concerned. But now there’s people nosing round digging where they shouldn’t. Them lights on Windmill Hill–there’s someone up there, searching, night after night. They in’t found nothing yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
Sometimes I think I knows exactly who it is up there. It’s him, come back again, looking for what’s his.
Wherever you go, Heartbreaker, he said, you take me with you.
Like all prehistoric landscapes, Avebury is as remarkable for what you can’t see as what you can. Apart from what Alexander Keiller started to reconstruct in the 1930s–a stone circle originally comprising about a hundred megaliths, some further stone settings within, the whole enclosed within a bank and a ditch, and the West Kennet avenue sweeping southwards from it–a number of other features in the landscape hint at what must have been a vast complex of monuments in the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age: long barrows, round barrows, and parch marks suggestive of other stone or timber circles, palisades and enclosures. A second avenue winds westwards, towards Beckhampton. A causewayed enclosure, one of the earliest types of Neolithic earthworks, sits atop Windmill Hill.
The past is a story we tell ourselves. There can be no certainties, only surmise. At the start of February, new-age pagans gather in the henge to celebrate the old Celtic festival of Imbolc. In the Middle Ages, people would have met in the village’s Anglo-Saxon church, St James’s, on the same date, and called it Candlemas. Both are festivals of light, of new beginnings: for Christians, Jesus lighting a candle in a dark world; for the pagan Celts a celebration of the first signs of spring penetrating the barren land, the first snowdrop, the first fat lamb suckling at its mother’s teat. Do the origins of such festivals go right back to the first farmers who built the stone circle?
Dr Martin Ekwall, A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury, Hackpen Press
There’s a funny thing about Avebury: can’t rely on mobile phones working here. But it doesn’t stop me trying, faith in technology against all the odds. Coming back down the high street from the post office, I thumb out a text to John to tell him I’d like my feet done this afternoon. On the edge of the stone circle, along from the shop that sells crystals and crop-circle books, you can sometimes pick up a ghost of a signal, but today the message won’t go. There are no bars at all on the display and the little blue screen says searching. Top marks to Nokia for encapsulating the human condition.
The closed sign is still in place on the door of the caf in the courtyard between the barns. As I shake the rain off my umbrella, Corey comes bustling out of the kitchen, looking like she’s been shrink-wrapped in her National Trust T-shirt, apron wound double over Barbie-doll hips.
‘They want to see you in the office. Right away.’
Ouch. Am I up to this? Was sure I didn’t drink that much last night, but my eyeballs seem to have been sanded, then glued into place.
‘What about?’
‘How should I know?’ She glances at the clock on the wall. The shine off the countertop makes my head hurt. ‘You look a bit rough. And, for God’s sake, pin your hair up properly before we have customers in. That red’s, er…unusual.’ The nozzles of the espresso machine are already gleaming because I cleaned them yesterday afternoon when we closed up, but Corey makes a big thing of wiping and polishing each one, while I pull up the hood of my jacket again to stop the sparkle searing my eyes.
‘When you come back, better tackle the toilets.’
‘I did them yesterday.’
‘So do them again.’
‘There’s a limit to how much Toilet Duck a girl can sniff.’
‘Go.’ She stares at my hair again. ‘What do they call that colour? Blood Orange?’
A gust of freezing rain hits me in the face as I open the door again. The puddles are pitted like beaten metal, reflecting a leaden February sky. A couple of Druids are hanging around outside the Keiller museum, wearing donkey jackets over their white robes, cheeks purple with cold above their greying beards. Deep in conversation about some druidy business, they don’t give me a second glance. Under racing clouds, СКАЧАТЬ