The Chalice, page 21
Diane put her arms around the stem of the Celtic cross. Her shoulders shook.
‘They’re appealing to anyone with pertinent information to come forward. Which probably includes anyone who might have seen the boy having his head kicked in by their father’s farm manager.’
Diane laid her cheek against the stone.
‘Diane?’
‘Was it his own bus? That he was found in?’
‘It was a black bus.’
Diane nodded.
‘I really think you need to go to the police,’ Juanita said. ‘Tomorrow. I’ll come with you.’
‘They wouldn’t believe me.’ Diane’s voice was tiny. ‘My father would say I’d made it all up. He’d tell them I was unbalanced. Just like he always does.’
‘They’d still have to check it out.’
But she was right. Juanita sighed. Lord Pennard and Rankin had had a whole day to make provisions for this incident getting out. They’d have something ready, some watertight story. Especially now the boy was dead. Also, Pennard would undoubtedly have connections at chief constable level and beyond. And with Archer’s political career on the line and all it represented in terms of the future wealth and influence of the House of Pennard, there was nothing they wouldn’t do.
‘Listen, I’ll get Jim to look after the shop. While we go to the police station.’
Of course, she’d have to promise Jim first that nothing would come out about the Execution. What a can of worms.
‘They’ll ask why I didn’t report it before,’ Diane said.
‘Because you didn’t know the boy was dead.’ She put a hand on Diane’s shoulder. ‘Come on, Diane Fortune. I’ll make us some hot chocolate.’
An amber streetlamp reddened and Juanita looked up warily.
Diane dabbed her eyes with a tissue. ‘I was wrong about the Pilgrims. They weren’t terribly nice people at all. They made Headlice go into church backwards and they gave him drugs.’
‘Quite.’ Juanita tried not to think about sickles and animal masks. If only she could tell Diane precisely what the nice pilgrims had done to Jim and her. But a promise, unfortunately, was a promise.
‘He had a horrible life,’ Diane said. ‘He just wanted … something he could believe in.’
‘Don’t we all.’
As they walked back to the shop, Juanita found herself thinking of Colonel Pixhill and fancied she could feel wings of foreboding overhead, like some shadow hang-glider.
NINE
Like, say, ‘ghost’
Yesterday Joe Powys had been to Hereford Library and got out everything they had on Uncle Jack Powys. He’d brought back as many books as he’d been allowed to; they were all spread out now on his desk back at the cottage, eight of them.
It was six fifteen a.m. He’d awoken in the dark thinking about it, a little scared. Uncle Jack. Uncle bloody Jack?
Where did this come from? You grow up assuming a certain kinship with one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century, there has to be a reasonable basis for it.
But the more Joe Powys investigated, the more he found that there wasn’t.
Last night he’d called up relatives he hadn’t spoken to since he was a kid. Joe. Joe Powys. P-OW … your cousin. That’s right, Mary’s son …
Feeling embarrassed as hell now. Arnold the dog sitting by his chair, laughing at him, the way he did, with his orb-like brown eyes.
None of the relatives had heard of any kind of link with John Cowper Powys. None of them remembered it being a family name. So he was the only one of them with the surname Powys? What did that say?
‘I know what you’re thinking, Arnold,’ Powys said. ‘I suggest you forget it.’
Arnold kind of shrugged, lay down and lowered his head to his paws.
One of the relatives had said, All I remember, Joe, is for a long time we thought you must be Len’s boy. Auntie Mary never discussed it.
What his mum used to tell him was that his father had messed around with bad women and they’d got divorced when he was a baby, and Uncle Jack had looked after them until Len came along. Later, Powys had figured that his mother and father had never been married at all, but he didn’t push it, never searched out his birth certificate – pretty sure he’d find out he was registered under his mum’s maiden name. Not Powys.
She used to talk about Uncle Jack until he was maybe ten. He had memories of books by JCP on the shelves when he was small, but not when he was old enough to read them with any understanding. His mum, in later years, read only magazines, and when he visited her two years before she died even the shelves had gone. Now Len was dead too.
That last time, when he’d asked his mother who was Uncle Jack and she’d looked blank, he’d smiled and not pushed it – what did it matter anyway? True, John Cowper Powys had lived not that far from Wrexham in the last part of his life. True, his mother had been a district nurse who’d moved around Merseyside and North Wales and might well have encountered the old bloke, maybe even nursed him.
‘Old’ being the key word here. JCP, born in the 1870s, had been very old when Joe was born. It really didn’t seem at all likely that John Cowper Powys was his father.
Over the years Powys had tossed around a few more likely explanations. Say Mum arrives back in Wrexham with an illegitimate baby and she needs a name for him, and there on the shelf is some book by John Cowper Powys. Which is a nice name and doesn’t sound phoney, and so maybe she becomes ‘Mrs Powys’ until she marries Len.
So the baby who should have been Joe Morris becomes Joe Powys. By the time she marries Len, he’s nearly five years old and is used to the name, maybe can’t get his mouth so easily around Devereaux, which is Len’s name. And because it was JCP who saved her reputation when the chips were down, Mum retains a soft spot for the old guy, and the legend of Uncle Jack, the benefactor, is born.
It’s a persistent kind of myth. Joe likes it. And when he comes to write a book about mystical aspects of the British countryside, which turns out to be a minor bestseller, and people ask him if by any chance he’s descended from one or other of the famous literary siblings, Theodore, Llewellyn and John Cowper Powys, he … well, he doesn’t deny it. And Ben Corby never asked in case the answer was the wrong one.
None of which explained the incidents of the book in the night.
Powys was afraid of ghosts. He didn’t use to think he was. He believed in them, believed they were just beyond the boundaries of human understanding, and only just. He used to believe in the tape-recording theory of ghosts: that they were emotional imprints on the atmosphere, events replaying themselves ovargument. The full half-hourer and over.
Therefore ghosts were harmless.
Harmless, harmless, harmless.
Around nine a.m., Joe looked up from JCP’s Autobiography, in which Uncle Jack confesses early on to being some kind of sado-masochist – hence the tortured figure of the selfcrucifying Welshman Owen Evans in A Glastonbury Romance.
Powys thought, Masochism?
And went to the phone, scrabbling in the desk drawer for his contacts book. He had misgivings about this, what he might be opening up. And having to endure the scorn, of course. But he made the call anyway.
And was lucky, as it happened. Brendan Donovan had just arrived at the university. Nine a.m. Too early, surely, for really withering rhetoric.
‘OK, Powys,’ Brendan Donovan said. ‘I may possibly be able to accommodate a five-minute argument. The full half-hour would require an appointment.’
Some years ago, Professor Brendan Donovan, of the Edinburgh University department of parapsychology, had reviewed the revised, mass-market paperback of The Old Golden Land for The Scotsman. Perhaps the most complimentary phrase in this review had been ‘whimsical drivel’. Powys, unschooled in the etiquette traditionally observed between reviewer and reviewed, had telephoned Dr Donovan for a meaningful discussion. Others had followed over the years. Brendan Donovan had mellowed. Slightly.
‘If you wish to discuss the spirit-path theory of ley-lines, with particular reference to linear anomalies in the Peruvian desert,’ he said now, ‘you’ll find me a touch more amenable than I may have been regarding so-called earthenergies. Only a touch more, you understand, because ley-lines, of course, do not exist.’
‘Poltergeists,’ Powys said bluntly.
‘Heavens,’ Donovan said. ‘My weak spot.’
‘I know.’
‘That is, Powys, so long as you do not attempt to try my patience by allowing any contentious words to intrude. Like, say, “ghost”.’
‘How about psycho-kinetic energy generated by a disturbed adolescent?’
‘Well-trodden ground. Much safer.’
‘In that case, how about psycho-kinetic energy generated by someone for whom adolescence is no more than a slightly feverish memory?’
‘Like, who?’ said Donovan.
‘Like me.’
‘Hmm,’ Donovan said. ‘Give me two minutes to summon a cup of fortifying coffee. I shall call you back.’
Well – let’s be reasonable here – it wasn’t Arnold, was it?
Nobody really knows what goes on down there. In the subconscious. Nobody knows what seeds planted in the psyche of a small child will start to germinate in the adult and with what effects.
OK, the trigger.
Joe Powys is alone, his woman has resumed her career, left him behind in a cottage in the sticks. Subconsciously, he knows she isn’t coming back. His book has been rejected. And his home is not really his home; it’s still Henry Kettle’s, even though Henry is dead, because Henry had identity, which Joe doesn’t have any more, maybe never did have.
The subconscious goes into mid-life crisis. Who is Joe Powys? Even the guy’s name isn’t real!
The subconscious gets extremely resentful. It reverts to the persona of a disturbed adolescent. It finds a focus for all that resentful energy.
Uncle Jack.
Bloody Uncle Jack.
*
‘Well, it’s interesting, Powys,’ Brendan Donovan said. ‘It possesses a certain flawed logic. However, I still have a problem with it.’
‘Well, of course you do. What I’m doing here is groping for the psychological solution. I haven’t said anything about the elements you don’t like – power of place, earth-force, the thinness of the veil on the Welsh Border.’
‘But it’s there by implication, isn’t it? Because the house was the home of this water-diviner, Kettle, it is more receptive, its atmosphere remains charged.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘And therefore is capable of transforming the frustration of its unhappy occupant into psycho-kinetic energy, yes?’
‘Well … could be.’
‘Discounting all that, which I am, of course, predisposed to do, out of hand … the problem I have with all this is that the adolescent energy we suspect may cause poltergeist phenomena is essentially a sexual energy. I assume, Powys, you have not begun to find satisfaction in scourging yourself with barbed wire or something.’
‘Occasionally I beat myself with Henry’s old dowsing rods. Apart from that … Of course, he may have done.’
‘Who?’
‘John Cowper Powys always liked to think of himself as some kind of sado-masochist.’
‘Ah. So you’re obsessed with this man,’ Donovan said.
‘Curiously, I hardly ever thought of him. I’d forgotten that book was even on the shelf. Consciously, I’d forgotten.’
‘Which book are we talking about?’
‘A Glastonbury Romance. His masterpiece. About twelve hundred pages.’
‘Haven’t read it. Life’s too short for fiction. What’s it about?’
‘It’s basically a West Country soap-opera set in the 1920s. Far as I can remember, it’s about people in pursuit of their ideas of the Holy Grail and the tensions between spiritual and commercial demands and people getting their rocks off, spiritually and sexually. I may be wrong, it’s a long time since I breezed through it.’
‘And this same book every time?’ asked Donovan.
‘Every time.’
‘Too neat,’ said Donovan. ‘Too neat to be true.’
‘Ah. You think I’m lying.’
‘Indeed. I’m a scientist. What proof can you show me?’
‘I’ve got a witness.’
‘Your publisher. How very convenient.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Powys admitted gloomily.
‘Be a marvellous story for your own next publication.’
‘No chance.’
‘Before I could give a useful opinion, you would have to precipitate this book from its shelf under laboratory conditions. But then you knew that.’
‘Brendan, if you bumped into your late granny at the tea machine, you’d make her take out her teeth under laboratory conditions.’
‘And in the present circumstances, of course, my findings would have to include the probability of an author in decline attempting to kick-start his flagging career.’
‘I knew you’d say that, too.’
‘So why did you telephone me?’
‘I’m a masochist. Runs in the family.’
Brendan Donovan laughed. ‘Do you know what I might do in your place?’
‘Resign,’ Powys said.
‘I might go to Glastonbury and open myself to all the wonderful earth-forces in the hope that my Grail awaited me there.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘I wouldn’t. I’m explaining what I might do if, perish the thought, I were you. Forget it, I probably had Glastonbury on my mind in a negative context, having received this very morning a review copy of a book even more foolish than your own revered opus. By an American, of course, one W. Pelham Grainger, PhD, who wants us all to enrich our lives by bonding with the living darkness. Absolute tosh. He lives near Glastonbury, as it happens. My, my, I must remember to record this coincidence in my Arthur Koestler Appreciation Society Diary.’
Powys shook his head.
‘Away with you,’ Donovan said. ‘Away to your Avalon.’
‘Thanks very much,’ Powys said. ‘I’ll expect your bill in the mail.’
‘My meter records … let me see … twenty-five minutes!’
‘Prove it,’ Powys said. ‘Laboratory conditions.’
TEN
His Stain
‘Bastards.’ Woolly threw the Daily Press on to Juanita’s counter. ‘Bastards, bastards, bastards!’
His roughened elbow poked through a hole in his shapeless orange sweater. The rubber band securing his stringy ponytail had snapped. He looked like an ageing Dickensian street urchin. There were tears in his eyes.
‘I’m so sorry, Woolly,’ Juanita said. ‘But it’s hardly a surprise, is it?’
She could see in his face that, no, it hadn’t been a surprise. But there’d still been that final strand to be snipped before the rope broke and dropped him into the black pit.
She turned the paper around on the counter. The story was front-page lead.
Green Light for M-way
The controversial Bath-Taunton expressway is to go ahead – despite furious protests from environmentalists.
The report of the two-month public inquiry, published today, rejects claims that the proposed route would be a ‘savage rape of Central Somerset’.
But a leading opponent of the plan said last night, ‘We’ll fight them to the last tree.’
The Government claims the road is the only way to end crippling congestion in several small towns and villages, especially during the holiday season.
It will also link the county firmly into the trans-European road network, opening up major industrial and commercial possibilities, according to local authority chiefs who have welcomed the decision.
‘Got a call from the paper late last night asking for a quote,’ Woolly said. ‘Too choked to give a reasoned response, just wanted to get it over that we’d be re-forming the action committee, only it come out a bit stronger, like. Sheesh.’
Mendip Councillor Edward Woolaston, one of the original protesters, said, ‘No way are they going to get away with this. This is going to be a nationwide issue, even a world issue, and we’ll fight them to the last tree.’
Juanita didn’t know what to say. The thought of an enormous public protest with the police and armies of security men guarding the site and people getting hurt made her feel faintly sick.
‘The thing is, Woolly, it just never works. There’ve been so many full-scale road protests and it just leaves everyone beaten and bitter. Look at Newbury … Batheaston … Twyford Down … If the Government decides a road’s going through, it goes through.’
She stared despondently through the window. All the shards of pottery had disappeared from the gutters, which streamed now with dark rain. Apart from Holy Thorn Ceramics being closed, you’d think nothing exceptional had occurred in High Street. Last night’s spark in the air had fizzled out. There was no sign of either Tony or Domini.
‘And the thing is, Woolly, if you organise a militant protest to stop the road, all it does is split the community even more because most of the locals think it’s a good thing. They don’t like the idea of the countryside being ripped up, but if it prevents traffic snarl-ups and children being run over and heavy lorries shaking their foundations … oh hell, you know all this better than I do, a lot of those people voted for you.’
‘And won’t vote for me again if I’m behind this protest,’ said Woolly soberly. ‘But I got to go with my conscience. We’re fighting for the West Country’s right to breathe. We’re fighting for green hills, places to walk, places to be. We’re fighting to stop them selling Britain for scrap. Sorry. There I go again, Councillor bloody Woolaston. It’s all a sham, being a councillor. There is no democracy.’
Juanita pushed the newspaper away. ‘So you want me to tell people … what?’
‘Tell ’em there’s an emergency meeting tonight. Put it round. Seven-thirty. Assembly Rooms. Now they’ve made a decision they won’t hang around. It’ll be bulldozers and chainsaw-gangs on every horizon before we know it. Still, you know how you could help.’
‘They’re appealing to anyone with pertinent information to come forward. Which probably includes anyone who might have seen the boy having his head kicked in by their father’s farm manager.’
Diane laid her cheek against the stone.
‘Diane?’
‘Was it his own bus? That he was found in?’
‘It was a black bus.’
Diane nodded.
‘I really think you need to go to the police,’ Juanita said. ‘Tomorrow. I’ll come with you.’
‘They wouldn’t believe me.’ Diane’s voice was tiny. ‘My father would say I’d made it all up. He’d tell them I was unbalanced. Just like he always does.’
‘They’d still have to check it out.’
But she was right. Juanita sighed. Lord Pennard and Rankin had had a whole day to make provisions for this incident getting out. They’d have something ready, some watertight story. Especially now the boy was dead. Also, Pennard would undoubtedly have connections at chief constable level and beyond. And with Archer’s political career on the line and all it represented in terms of the future wealth and influence of the House of Pennard, there was nothing they wouldn’t do.
‘Listen, I’ll get Jim to look after the shop. While we go to the police station.’
Of course, she’d have to promise Jim first that nothing would come out about the Execution. What a can of worms.
‘They’ll ask why I didn’t report it before,’ Diane said.
‘Because you didn’t know the boy was dead.’ She put a hand on Diane’s shoulder. ‘Come on, Diane Fortune. I’ll make us some hot chocolate.’
An amber streetlamp reddened and Juanita looked up warily.
Diane dabbed her eyes with a tissue. ‘I was wrong about the Pilgrims. They weren’t terribly nice people at all. They made Headlice go into church backwards and they gave him drugs.’
‘Quite.’ Juanita tried not to think about sickles and animal masks. If only she could tell Diane precisely what the nice pilgrims had done to Jim and her. But a promise, unfortunately, was a promise.
‘He had a horrible life,’ Diane said. ‘He just wanted … something he could believe in.’
‘Don’t we all.’
As they walked back to the shop, Juanita found herself thinking of Colonel Pixhill and fancied she could feel wings of foreboding overhead, like some shadow hang-glider.
NINE
Like, say, ‘ghost’
Yesterday Joe Powys had been to Hereford Library and got out everything they had on Uncle Jack Powys. He’d brought back as many books as he’d been allowed to; they were all spread out now on his desk back at the cottage, eight of them.
It was six fifteen a.m. He’d awoken in the dark thinking about it, a little scared. Uncle Jack. Uncle bloody Jack?
Where did this come from? You grow up assuming a certain kinship with one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century, there has to be a reasonable basis for it.
But the more Joe Powys investigated, the more he found that there wasn’t.
Last night he’d called up relatives he hadn’t spoken to since he was a kid. Joe. Joe Powys. P-OW … your cousin. That’s right, Mary’s son …
Feeling embarrassed as hell now. Arnold the dog sitting by his chair, laughing at him, the way he did, with his orb-like brown eyes.
None of the relatives had heard of any kind of link with John Cowper Powys. None of them remembered it being a family name. So he was the only one of them with the surname Powys? What did that say?
‘I know what you’re thinking, Arnold,’ Powys said. ‘I suggest you forget it.’
Arnold kind of shrugged, lay down and lowered his head to his paws.
One of the relatives had said, All I remember, Joe, is for a long time we thought you must be Len’s boy. Auntie Mary never discussed it.
What his mum used to tell him was that his father had messed around with bad women and they’d got divorced when he was a baby, and Uncle Jack had looked after them until Len came along. Later, Powys had figured that his mother and father had never been married at all, but he didn’t push it, never searched out his birth certificate – pretty sure he’d find out he was registered under his mum’s maiden name. Not Powys.
She used to talk about Uncle Jack until he was maybe ten. He had memories of books by JCP on the shelves when he was small, but not when he was old enough to read them with any understanding. His mum, in later years, read only magazines, and when he visited her two years before she died even the shelves had gone. Now Len was dead too.
That last time, when he’d asked his mother who was Uncle Jack and she’d looked blank, he’d smiled and not pushed it – what did it matter anyway? True, John Cowper Powys had lived not that far from Wrexham in the last part of his life. True, his mother had been a district nurse who’d moved around Merseyside and North Wales and might well have encountered the old bloke, maybe even nursed him.
‘Old’ being the key word here. JCP, born in the 1870s, had been very old when Joe was born. It really didn’t seem at all likely that John Cowper Powys was his father.
Over the years Powys had tossed around a few more likely explanations. Say Mum arrives back in Wrexham with an illegitimate baby and she needs a name for him, and there on the shelf is some book by John Cowper Powys. Which is a nice name and doesn’t sound phoney, and so maybe she becomes ‘Mrs Powys’ until she marries Len.
So the baby who should have been Joe Morris becomes Joe Powys. By the time she marries Len, he’s nearly five years old and is used to the name, maybe can’t get his mouth so easily around Devereaux, which is Len’s name. And because it was JCP who saved her reputation when the chips were down, Mum retains a soft spot for the old guy, and the legend of Uncle Jack, the benefactor, is born.
It’s a persistent kind of myth. Joe likes it. And when he comes to write a book about mystical aspects of the British countryside, which turns out to be a minor bestseller, and people ask him if by any chance he’s descended from one or other of the famous literary siblings, Theodore, Llewellyn and John Cowper Powys, he … well, he doesn’t deny it. And Ben Corby never asked in case the answer was the wrong one.
None of which explained the incidents of the book in the night.
Powys was afraid of ghosts. He didn’t use to think he was. He believed in them, believed they were just beyond the boundaries of human understanding, and only just. He used to believe in the tape-recording theory of ghosts: that they were emotional imprints on the atmosphere, events replaying themselves ovargument. The full half-hourer and over.
Therefore ghosts were harmless.
Harmless, harmless, harmless.
Around nine a.m., Joe looked up from JCP’s Autobiography, in which Uncle Jack confesses early on to being some kind of sado-masochist – hence the tortured figure of the selfcrucifying Welshman Owen Evans in A Glastonbury Romance.
Powys thought, Masochism?
And went to the phone, scrabbling in the desk drawer for his contacts book. He had misgivings about this, what he might be opening up. And having to endure the scorn, of course. But he made the call anyway.
And was lucky, as it happened. Brendan Donovan had just arrived at the university. Nine a.m. Too early, surely, for really withering rhetoric.
‘OK, Powys,’ Brendan Donovan said. ‘I may possibly be able to accommodate a five-minute argument. The full half-hour would require an appointment.’
Some years ago, Professor Brendan Donovan, of the Edinburgh University department of parapsychology, had reviewed the revised, mass-market paperback of The Old Golden Land for The Scotsman. Perhaps the most complimentary phrase in this review had been ‘whimsical drivel’. Powys, unschooled in the etiquette traditionally observed between reviewer and reviewed, had telephoned Dr Donovan for a meaningful discussion. Others had followed over the years. Brendan Donovan had mellowed. Slightly.
‘If you wish to discuss the spirit-path theory of ley-lines, with particular reference to linear anomalies in the Peruvian desert,’ he said now, ‘you’ll find me a touch more amenable than I may have been regarding so-called earthenergies. Only a touch more, you understand, because ley-lines, of course, do not exist.’
‘Poltergeists,’ Powys said bluntly.
‘Heavens,’ Donovan said. ‘My weak spot.’
‘I know.’
‘That is, Powys, so long as you do not attempt to try my patience by allowing any contentious words to intrude. Like, say, “ghost”.’
‘How about psycho-kinetic energy generated by a disturbed adolescent?’
‘Well-trodden ground. Much safer.’
‘In that case, how about psycho-kinetic energy generated by someone for whom adolescence is no more than a slightly feverish memory?’
‘Like, who?’ said Donovan.
‘Like me.’
‘Hmm,’ Donovan said. ‘Give me two minutes to summon a cup of fortifying coffee. I shall call you back.’
Well – let’s be reasonable here – it wasn’t Arnold, was it?
Nobody really knows what goes on down there. In the subconscious. Nobody knows what seeds planted in the psyche of a small child will start to germinate in the adult and with what effects.
OK, the trigger.
Joe Powys is alone, his woman has resumed her career, left him behind in a cottage in the sticks. Subconsciously, he knows she isn’t coming back. His book has been rejected. And his home is not really his home; it’s still Henry Kettle’s, even though Henry is dead, because Henry had identity, which Joe doesn’t have any more, maybe never did have.
The subconscious goes into mid-life crisis. Who is Joe Powys? Even the guy’s name isn’t real!
The subconscious gets extremely resentful. It reverts to the persona of a disturbed adolescent. It finds a focus for all that resentful energy.
Uncle Jack.
Bloody Uncle Jack.
*
‘Well, it’s interesting, Powys,’ Brendan Donovan said. ‘It possesses a certain flawed logic. However, I still have a problem with it.’
‘Well, of course you do. What I’m doing here is groping for the psychological solution. I haven’t said anything about the elements you don’t like – power of place, earth-force, the thinness of the veil on the Welsh Border.’
‘But it’s there by implication, isn’t it? Because the house was the home of this water-diviner, Kettle, it is more receptive, its atmosphere remains charged.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘And therefore is capable of transforming the frustration of its unhappy occupant into psycho-kinetic energy, yes?’
‘Well … could be.’
‘Discounting all that, which I am, of course, predisposed to do, out of hand … the problem I have with all this is that the adolescent energy we suspect may cause poltergeist phenomena is essentially a sexual energy. I assume, Powys, you have not begun to find satisfaction in scourging yourself with barbed wire or something.’
‘Occasionally I beat myself with Henry’s old dowsing rods. Apart from that … Of course, he may have done.’
‘Who?’
‘John Cowper Powys always liked to think of himself as some kind of sado-masochist.’
‘Ah. So you’re obsessed with this man,’ Donovan said.
‘Curiously, I hardly ever thought of him. I’d forgotten that book was even on the shelf. Consciously, I’d forgotten.’
‘Which book are we talking about?’
‘A Glastonbury Romance. His masterpiece. About twelve hundred pages.’
‘Haven’t read it. Life’s too short for fiction. What’s it about?’
‘It’s basically a West Country soap-opera set in the 1920s. Far as I can remember, it’s about people in pursuit of their ideas of the Holy Grail and the tensions between spiritual and commercial demands and people getting their rocks off, spiritually and sexually. I may be wrong, it’s a long time since I breezed through it.’
‘And this same book every time?’ asked Donovan.
‘Every time.’
‘Too neat,’ said Donovan. ‘Too neat to be true.’
‘Ah. You think I’m lying.’
‘Indeed. I’m a scientist. What proof can you show me?’
‘I’ve got a witness.’
‘Your publisher. How very convenient.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Powys admitted gloomily.
‘Be a marvellous story for your own next publication.’
‘No chance.’
‘Before I could give a useful opinion, you would have to precipitate this book from its shelf under laboratory conditions. But then you knew that.’
‘Brendan, if you bumped into your late granny at the tea machine, you’d make her take out her teeth under laboratory conditions.’
‘And in the present circumstances, of course, my findings would have to include the probability of an author in decline attempting to kick-start his flagging career.’
‘I knew you’d say that, too.’
‘So why did you telephone me?’
‘I’m a masochist. Runs in the family.’
Brendan Donovan laughed. ‘Do you know what I might do in your place?’
‘Resign,’ Powys said.
‘I might go to Glastonbury and open myself to all the wonderful earth-forces in the hope that my Grail awaited me there.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘I wouldn’t. I’m explaining what I might do if, perish the thought, I were you. Forget it, I probably had Glastonbury on my mind in a negative context, having received this very morning a review copy of a book even more foolish than your own revered opus. By an American, of course, one W. Pelham Grainger, PhD, who wants us all to enrich our lives by bonding with the living darkness. Absolute tosh. He lives near Glastonbury, as it happens. My, my, I must remember to record this coincidence in my Arthur Koestler Appreciation Society Diary.’
Powys shook his head.
‘Away with you,’ Donovan said. ‘Away to your Avalon.’
‘Thanks very much,’ Powys said. ‘I’ll expect your bill in the mail.’
‘My meter records … let me see … twenty-five minutes!’
‘Prove it,’ Powys said. ‘Laboratory conditions.’
TEN
His Stain
‘Bastards.’ Woolly threw the Daily Press on to Juanita’s counter. ‘Bastards, bastards, bastards!’
His roughened elbow poked through a hole in his shapeless orange sweater. The rubber band securing his stringy ponytail had snapped. He looked like an ageing Dickensian street urchin. There were tears in his eyes.
‘I’m so sorry, Woolly,’ Juanita said. ‘But it’s hardly a surprise, is it?’
She could see in his face that, no, it hadn’t been a surprise. But there’d still been that final strand to be snipped before the rope broke and dropped him into the black pit.
She turned the paper around on the counter. The story was front-page lead.
Green Light for M-way
The controversial Bath-Taunton expressway is to go ahead – despite furious protests from environmentalists.
The report of the two-month public inquiry, published today, rejects claims that the proposed route would be a ‘savage rape of Central Somerset’.
But a leading opponent of the plan said last night, ‘We’ll fight them to the last tree.’
The Government claims the road is the only way to end crippling congestion in several small towns and villages, especially during the holiday season.
It will also link the county firmly into the trans-European road network, opening up major industrial and commercial possibilities, according to local authority chiefs who have welcomed the decision.
‘Got a call from the paper late last night asking for a quote,’ Woolly said. ‘Too choked to give a reasoned response, just wanted to get it over that we’d be re-forming the action committee, only it come out a bit stronger, like. Sheesh.’
Mendip Councillor Edward Woolaston, one of the original protesters, said, ‘No way are they going to get away with this. This is going to be a nationwide issue, even a world issue, and we’ll fight them to the last tree.’
Juanita didn’t know what to say. The thought of an enormous public protest with the police and armies of security men guarding the site and people getting hurt made her feel faintly sick.
‘The thing is, Woolly, it just never works. There’ve been so many full-scale road protests and it just leaves everyone beaten and bitter. Look at Newbury … Batheaston … Twyford Down … If the Government decides a road’s going through, it goes through.’
She stared despondently through the window. All the shards of pottery had disappeared from the gutters, which streamed now with dark rain. Apart from Holy Thorn Ceramics being closed, you’d think nothing exceptional had occurred in High Street. Last night’s spark in the air had fizzled out. There was no sign of either Tony or Domini.
‘And the thing is, Woolly, if you organise a militant protest to stop the road, all it does is split the community even more because most of the locals think it’s a good thing. They don’t like the idea of the countryside being ripped up, but if it prevents traffic snarl-ups and children being run over and heavy lorries shaking their foundations … oh hell, you know all this better than I do, a lot of those people voted for you.’
‘And won’t vote for me again if I’m behind this protest,’ said Woolly soberly. ‘But I got to go with my conscience. We’re fighting for the West Country’s right to breathe. We’re fighting for green hills, places to walk, places to be. We’re fighting to stop them selling Britain for scrap. Sorry. There I go again, Councillor bloody Woolaston. It’s all a sham, being a councillor. There is no democracy.’
Juanita pushed the newspaper away. ‘So you want me to tell people … what?’
‘Tell ’em there’s an emergency meeting tonight. Put it round. Seven-thirty. Assembly Rooms. Now they’ve made a decision they won’t hang around. It’ll be bulldozers and chainsaw-gangs on every horizon before we know it. Still, you know how you could help.’
