The Buried Circle. Jenni Mills
Fran. Then something comes to me out of nowhere.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask,’ I say.
Frannie pauses with the glass halfway to her lips. There’s a wary expression in her eyes. ‘Yes?’
‘Grandad.’
The story I’ve been told is that Grandad’s plane fell out of the sky a few months before my mother was born. But Fran has never talked about him, and the impression grew, during childhood, that it was better not to ask: the briefest of answers would escape through tight lips. Now I’m all too conscious that one day the opportunity to find out more will be gone for ever.
‘Which one?’ Her eyes have slid away from mine, and she’s put down the water glass to fiddle with a bean that has escaped onto the tablecloth. Have I upset her? Surely not, he died more than sixty years ago. Then the weirdness of her response hits me.
‘What d’you mean, which one? You never met my father, let alone his family’
‘Course I didn’t. No bloody idea about his lot. Could all’ve bin in Reykjavik prison far as I’d know. Your mother had terrible taste in men. Family trait, mind.’
I take this to be a reference to my unfortunate affair with the tutor at uni, which ended in an abrupt return to Chippenham and floods of tears. Although it brought the near implosion of my degree, Fran was amazingly non-judgemental. I wondered if she’d been through something similar when she was young, though I never liked to ask. She’d have told me not to be nosy, same as she always did if I asked anything that struck her as invasive. Personal information, in Fran’s book, is something to be offered, if you’re lucky, rather than extracted.
‘I mean your husband,’ I say, knowing I’m crossing a boundary from the uneasy look on her face. ‘What was his name? David?’ I’d seen his photograph once, when I was a kid and nosing through the drawers of Fran’s dressing-table. It was in a polished rosewood box, Fran’s name engraved on the lid, that must once have contained a watercolour set, though its pans were empty and scrubbed clean. Now it held only a faded watercolour sketch of the stone circle, seen through the window of one of the cottages, an early sun lengthening the shadows of the stones, and Grandad’s picture. Even with the ageing parted-and-slicked-back hairstyle men affected in the 1940s, he seemed hardly more than a boy: a Brylcreemed cowlick falling over his forehead, wide, heavy-lidded eyes, and a cheeky grin. When I’d asked whose photo it was, Fran had been surprisingly curt.
Lovely chap. Navigator in the RAE Hardly trained, then he was killed. Long time ago, though.
Killed on a bombing raid?
A flicker of impatience around her mouth. On a mission, she said firmly. Her lips pursed.
So…
So that was it. Sad, but it happened a lot in the war. Had to get used to it. Frannie had eyes like knives. That’s why I don’t talk about ‘im, easier not to, see?
Her eyes have that same steely flash now. ‘Davey,’ she says. ‘That was his name.’
‘Where’s he buried? You never–’
‘He in’t buried. He’s with what was left of his aeroplane, ashes mostly. There’s a headstone to him in Yatesbury churchyard.’
This is so much more than I’ve gleaned previously that it almost drives the gruesome picture of Grandad’s cindered remains out of my head. ‘Yatesbury? That’s–’
‘Coupla miles away, yes.’
‘So…’
‘India,’ she says, ‘not tonight. I’m bone tired. Don’t mind if I crawl off to bed, do you?’ Her supper is only half finished.
‘Didn’t mean to upset you.’ I take her hand again.
‘You didn’t. All a long time ago. But I don’t like digging them days up, bad time for everyone.’ She pulls her fingers out of my grasp, and stands up, leaning on the table to balance herself. ‘Can I leave you with the washing-up?’
The line of light under Frannie’s door winks out as I sit at the kitchen table after supper, the washing-up done, turning the stem of my wineglass between my fingers, seeing how the overhead light slides inside it and sparkles. My mother had a bag of polished stones she took everywhere, arranging them some nights in a circle on the fold-down table in our travellers’ van. My memory crystals, she’d say. The clear oily one with a rainbow in its heart is a Herkimer diamond. It can remember things for you: you pour thoughts into it and retrieve them later. That milky pink-banded crystal–agate–is layered, like your mind: it helps you tease out memories that are laid underneath each other. The blue boji stone is for healing hurtful ones. This is phantom quartz–see how there’s another crystal inside it, a ghost crystal? It reveals what you’ve forgotten. And that black one’s onyx, a stone for secrets. It will soak up your memories, the dark ones you want to hide.
I’ve managed to forget almost everything that led up to the moment of the crash. What time we took off, how long we were up there, what I filmed, Steve’s instructions in my headset. I hardly even remember the last part, the moment when the helicopter started to spin, the sounds of grinding and tearing as it skidded on its side over the barley field. But I do remember that we spun widdershins. And Steve’s eyes. I don’t think I’ll ever succeed in blanking out Steve’s dead eyes.
Through the party wall comes the thud thud thud of the neighbours’ stereo. It’s chilly: the central heating must have gone off, though it’s not yet ten. The kitchen’s never warm: draughts sneak through its seams from the wind-raked fields. The previous owners were into a fatal pairing of acronyms, DIY and MFI, and the cupboards look very nice, cream Shaker style with big brown doorknobs, but close up, everything’s crooked. The extractor fan in the cooker hood hasn’t worked since the year zero, and if you turn on the grill, smoke pours out of the oven. Frannie hasn’t done a thing to the place in the four years she’s been here.
By my elbow, my mobile phone trills once. A text:
U ever going 2 call me back?
No. My thumbs work furiously. Please leave me alone.
As I come out of the bathroom after cleaning my teeth, the strangeness of Fran’s reluctance to sleep upstairs strikes me. In her old room at the back the bed is stripped, the dressing-table layered with dust, nothing on the floor except my own boxes of stuff. The wardrobe is empty, apart from a cardboard poster tube leaning against the back. I shut the mirrored door again quickly. I know what’s in there: my bloody mother, making an exhibition of herself.
All that can be seen in the blackness of the uncurtained window is my own reflection, backlit by a dingy forty-watt bulb on the landing. I press my nose right up to the glass. Lights, buggerin lights. What was that all about? The bungalows behind are already dark. The light from our bathroom falls on the square of mole-riddled lawn that passes for Frannie’s garden, neglected in a way she would never have tolerated only a year or so ago. In the distance, towards Windmill Hill, there’s a single fuzzy gleam that must be one of the Bray Street cottages. Otherwise the night is a creepy sort of void.
The emptiness of Steve’s stare comes back to me. Slowly, the picture that’s burnt into the back of my head is changing. Now one eye’s fixed on me, the other off beam and staring towards the front of the helicopter. His pupils are huge, both as bleak and black and empty as the night.
Next morning everything seems brighter. Frannie has her hat on, ready to stump off to church with a sunny grin on her face, carrying two cans of carrot soup as her harvest offering.
‘Off to do good works?’
‘Being good in’t what takes a body to church. You don’t want to come?’ Dying to show me off to her friends. My granddaughter, works in telly…
‘I’d