The Buried Circle

‘You first.’

‘I was going to ask, what have you been doing?’ he says. ‘I mean–what have you been doing with your life?’

‘I’m back in television again. With a Bristol-based independent. Been up for a meeting with Channel 4.’

‘Great.’ He actually looks impressed.

‘You?’

‘Oh, various stuff. The MA, mostly. Did I tell you I’ve been doing a part-time master’s in landscape archaeology? On my way now to a job interview.’

‘You’re not working with Luke any more?’

‘No.’ He props his chin on his hand, looks out of the window. ‘He…well, not to put too fine a point on it, he let me go. Company went bust anyway.’

Dangerous ground. ‘I need a coffee,’ I say. ‘Can I fetch you one from the buffet?’

‘No, let me get them.’ He levers himself upright, feeling in his pockets for change. ‘Bugger. Meant to stop at the cashpoint…’

‘Here, I’ve a twenty needs changing.’ As he takes it from me, our eyes meet.

‘I kept calling you because I wanted to be sure you were OK…’ he begins.

‘I was fine. Well, maybe a bit wobbly to start with, but you know…’

‘Yes. Me too.’

He lurches away down the carriage, long-legged in a pair of neat black trousers and a fine wool jacket that seems absurdly formal next to my memories of him in T-shirt and khaki combats, at the controls of the helicopter.

Interview clothes. He said he was going for a job interview. He’s doing an MA in landscape archaeology.

No. Not that job. Please.

An impossible coincidence. Couldn’t be. Could it?

Wyrd. Never trust the bloody web of connectedness. ‘Ed!’

Several other people in the carriage peer round their seats to see what’s up. There must have been a note of panic in my voice.

He turns round and starts walking back.

‘Where are you getting off the train?’

‘Swindon.’

Where Heelis, the National Trust head office, is.

‘But didn’t you ask him?’ says Corey. She’s polishing the nozzles on the cappuccino machine again. Maybe it’s one of those neuroses, like constantly washing your hands. ‘Your roots need retinting, by the way. I mean, it might not be the assistant-warden job. You said he’s really a pilot, studying archaeology part-time.’

‘Of course I didn’t ask. I jumped off the train at Reading before he came back with the coffees. Sat in the buffet and waited two and a half hours until there was another I could catch with my cheap ticket. Arrived home so late Frannie had already put herself to bed.’

Two customers walk in, a middle-aged husband and wife, shaking raindrops off their parkas. They start a muttered argument beside the homemade cakes. I slide into place behind the till, and Corey flips the top off the milk carton ready to spring into barrista action.

‘So he doesn’t know?’

‘Know what?’

‘That you’re here.’

‘Why would he? It was a one-night stand. We didn’t exactly get around to exchanging life histories.’

‘Apart from him letting slip he was married.’

Out of the corner of my eye I watch the male customer stomping off to inspect the sandwiches and organic crisps. I haven’t been entirely straight with Corey. As far as she’s concerned, Ed is someone I had a fling with in London. No one in Avebury, apart from John, knows I was caught up in the helicopter crash.

What made me act so brazenly last summer? The short answer is too much drink. Steve and I were down from London, overnighting at a pub near the airfield so we didn’t have to wake too early. Very definitely separate rooms, though Steve would have liked it otherwise. Luke and Ed were already waiting in the bar when we arrived, Luke knocking it back like there was no tomorrow, Ed switching to Diet Coke after a couple of beers. Maybe I started flirting because I was nervous Steve might make a move on me. He’d been through most of the women under thirty at the TV company, and I was determined not to join their ranks.

‘Anyway,’ says Corey, ‘if he’s a flyboy, plenty of other places he could be applying for a job. Half a dozen small airfields round here on the lookout for drop-zone pilots or instructors.’

When I first saw Ed, I thought him good-looking in a neglected way: messy dark hair, a lived-in face, dangerously unshaven, deep lines scored either side of his mouth. He had on a crumpled linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a leather coat was slung over the back of his chair. He wasn’t looking at me when we first came in. He was talking to the girl behind the bar. She was one of those snap-me-in-two blondes, like Corey, half my size with hair so straight she must have ironed it and a chenille jumper the colour of butter, beneath which her tits bubbled up in two perfect little spheres. I loathed her on sight.

‘How did you find out he was married?’ asks Corey. The woman in the parka is wielding the cake tongs with an unnecessary amount of clatter as she lifts scones onto a plate.

‘Post-coital confession.’ My fingers hover over the till buttons, as the customer moves on to the lemon drizzle cake. ‘“I should have told you earlier”: that sort of stuff. Marriage on rocks. Wife, she no understand me. Well, he didn’t actually say that last bit, but it was sort of hanging in the air, in the hope I’d fall for the oldest line in the book. They live in some bloody palatial farmhouse in Oxfordshire, no land as such but two socking great barns with it, ripe for conversion. My heart bleeds.’

‘Hot chocolate, please,’ says the woman in the parka, arriving in front of us with a carbohydrate-laden tray. ‘Ray?’

‘Do they do filter coffee?’

‘No, but we do an Americano, which is virtually the same. I should’ve told him at the time that if he was married he could forget it,’ I tell Corey, as she spoons hot-chocolate powder out of the tin. ‘But…you know how it is. You’re so anxious they shouldn’t be spotted leaving your room that you don’t get around to saying anything. I–well, I ignored all his phone calls and texts afterwards, except to tell him to go away’

‘I’m glad to say I don’t know how it is. Not from personal experience, anyway.’ Married to a Devizes policeman for two years, Corey is a devotee of women’s magazines that discuss this kind of thing.

‘Men are so full of shit,’ I say confidently ‘Their problem is they can’t tell the difference between sex and love.’

The woman at the counter snorts.

‘Or would he prefer a latte?’ I ask her.

‘In my book, he’s unfaithful even if he isn’t sleeping with someone else.’ Corey shoves the milk jug under the nozzle of the steamer. She has to raise her voice over the machine’s whoosh. ‘Which would you prefer–a husband shagging you and thinking of someone else, or shagging someone else and thinking of you?’

My creative studies BA had finished a few months and a lot of marks short of what I’d planned when my tutor’s wife started asking herself the very same question. Not that marks had anything to do with it. I’d fallen hopelessly in love with the sod. The exams were a wipeout; I only scraped a pass on coursework. Never again.

The customer’s eyebrows are jigging up and down in a demented dance. ‘Do him an Americano, dear. He doesn’t understand the difference.’

‘The real question is,’ says Corey, spooning froth into the hot-chocolate mug, ‘how do you feel about him now, supposing he had a job here?’

‘I told you. It’s over. I knew that the moment I looked at him and realized I didn’t fancy him any more. Can’t tell you what a relief that was.’