The Chalice, page 24
Scared? Those bastards?
‘… and … and … listen to me, Diane … and they loaded him into his bus and somebody drove it off and dumped it in that wood. Then they got the hell out of Somerset. It makes perfect sense to me. These people will avoid the police even if they’ve done nothing wrong.’
She had to change the subject then because a couple of customers came in, elderly teacherish types, the kind who browsed for ever.
‘Actually …’ Lowering her voice. ‘… I can’t help thinking I may have upset Jim. He was obviously leading up to saying what I didn’t want him to say when Griff Daniel came into the bar and we all ran out into the street. I didn’t see Jim after that.’
‘He’s a nice man,’ Diane said.
‘Yes,’ Juanita carelessly dusted the counter. ‘And only a few years older than Harrison Ford.’
This morning she’d contemplated what looked like a very sad and drooping face in the bedroom mirror and hadn’t fallen into the usual routine of giving herself a what-the-hell consolatory grin before turning away.
Several of Jim’s paintings hung in the flat. One showed a flank of the Tor below which the sun had set, the afterglow concentrated into a thin, vibrating red line, like a bright string pulled taut. It was clear that within a few seconds the line would have gone, and the earth was straining to hold and feel the moment.
Feel the moment. Jim had risen to feel the moment and she’d been horribly relieved when a force of nature called Griff Daniel had knocked him down. But that wouldn’t have been obvious from her face, would it?
Verity put down her tea cloth and stepped into the middle of the kitchen, putting her hands together and closing her eyes as if about to pray. Then, very slowly, she opened them, like the arms of Tower Bridge.
Keeping her wrists joined together and raising her arms, bringing the cupped hands to face-level.
… like a priest presenting the chalice for High Mass, was how Dr Grainger had put it.
She opened her eyes and stared into the space between her hands. The light from the high window unfurled around her like a flag. She felt like a tiny Joan of Arc, the quilted body-warmer serving as a breastplate.
‘Do this every hour,’ Dr Grainger had instructed. ‘And then when night falls and the window turns black – and this is the important part – you continue to do it.’
There was another exercise, which had to be done upstairs. It involved hugging an upright, perhaps the newel post at the top of the stairs, and at the same time feeling the walls closing around her, feeling the house hugging her.
She would assiduously practise both these exercises for a week, as instructed. She would embrace the dark.
She remembered the dramatic effects of the communal exercises led by Dr Grainger at the Assembly Rooms. It was not wrong. She would feel Colonel Pixhill beside her. And poor Major Shepherd. Abbot Whiting she was less sure about now, since the Dinner.
‘That guy has a problem,’ Dr Grainger had said when Oliver Pixhill had gone. ‘He has a problem with his father. I don’t buy what he was saying about the darkness in this house being down to the Colonel’s essence. House this old, it shrugs people off. His problem is personal, I doubt it need concern you.’
‘Oh, but it must, Dr Grainger. You see, he’s a Trustee now. He has influence. The Old Guard, the people who knew the Colonel, they’ve all gone. All gone now. Major Shepherd was the last.’
‘He can fire you, this Pixhill?’
‘It’s not quite as simple as that, if I refuse to leave. Which I shall, most certainly. But … Oh, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, except stay here and wait. There’s no one to advise me. Poor Major Shepherd.’
She’d put a drop of Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy on her tongue, Dr Grainger nodding approval.
‘This major, he was the Colonel’s right-hand man?’
‘They served together in the War. Dr Grainger, it’s not true what Oliver said about the Colonel. He was a good, kind man. He wouldn’t have harmed anyone. He loved people. He loved Glastonbury.’
‘Sure. I’m sure you’re right.’
‘I’m probably speaking out of turn, but perhaps Oliver expected the house to be left to him until the Trust was set up. Oh dear, I don’t even know how or when he became a Trustee. His name was just there.’
‘These trusts, sometimes they like to have a relative. Usually to see that the wishes of the founder are adhered to.’
‘He was just a boy,’ Verity said. ‘What could he know of the Colonel’s wishes?’
Dr Grainger had nodded sagely as Verity put the kettle on the Aga for camomile tea.
‘You see, only two days ago Major Shepherd said that someone would help me. He said things were coming to a head, but if I could hold on …’
‘That’s what he said? If you could hold on, someone would come along who could help you?’
Verity bit her lip. Dr Grainger smiled, brushing a cobweb from the sleeve of his black jacket. It was the kind of jacket that vicars used to wear.
‘Maybe someone did, Verity.’
‘Did?’
‘Come along. To help you.’
‘You mean …?’
‘I told you, I can make it easier for you here. You just have to trust me.’
Thinking of Colonel Pixhill and his desire to experience the Holy Grail, Verity opened her hands, keeping them joined at the wrist.
As if to receive a chalice.
THIRTEEN
A Spiritual Hothouse
Harvey-Calder UK had a new building, near Canary Wharf with its Empire State obelisk. Some London New Age group claimed this was the crossing point of major metropolitan leys, a significant power centre. Ben Corby was probably in the process of publishing a book on it.
Powys stared at the tower. He’d only seen it in pictures before.
He couldn’t believe he’d done this.
Leaving Arnold with Mrs Whitney, he’d driven into Hereford and jumped on the Intercity before he could change his mind. He didn’t even know if there was a train, but he walked into the station five minutes before it got in.
He was getting this feeling of being on a conveyor belt, everything going as smoothly as if it was pre-programmed. As if it was fate.
He’d thought of ringing Fay at the BBC. In the sure knowledge that if she had an engagement tonight, she’d cancel it. She would be there. Whenever. He knew that; he’d be the same. So he didn’t call, it wouldn’t be fair. Also, if he looked to Fay as bad as he’d looked to Mrs Whitney, she probably wouldn’t let him go back home. Which would help neither of them.
*
Dan Frayne’s office was on the third floor. It was all open-plan, like the Stock Exchange, computer terminals everywhere. This maybe told you something you needed to know about publishing in the nineties.
‘Joe Powys,’ Dan Frayne said. ‘Hey. Amazing. Jesus, man, you look all-in. Heavy journey? Bobby, coffee. Coffee OK for you?’
He was probably in his late forties. He had cropped grey hair and an earring with a small green stone in it. His shapeless clothes emphasised how thin he was and made Joe Powys, in clean jeans and a new sweater, feel overdressed. He stared at Powys for a long time over his glass-topped desk.
‘No. You don’t look like him. Not at all. Of course, I’m only going off the pictures.’
‘Pictures? Oh. Him. Ah well,’ Powys said, ‘I never claimed to be related.’
Dan Frayne leaned forward, put on a mysterious whisper. ‘Why, then? Doesn’t he like you cashing in on his name, or what? Why’s he doing this to you?’
They switched to a nearby wine bar, where everybody seemed to know Dan Frayne. ‘I’m not trying to impress you,’ he said. ‘I need this. I need to be surrounded by dozens of people who know me superficially. Superficially. That’s important.’
Joe Powys liked people who were full of nervous energy. They couldn’t hide what was on their minds, came out with it, rarely lied.
‘I used to have this shop in Glastonbury. Brrr.’ Frayne shuddered. ‘Bad news, Joe. I mean, for me. Too much closed-in, heavy stuff.’ He spread his arms. ‘I like to be surrounded by lightweights. I am not a heavy person.’
Powys looked around. Everybody else in the glass and leather bar looked, to him, to be pretty intense.
‘No, no,’ said Frayne. ‘This is really superficial. Money is superficial. I love saying that. People think I’m crazy. Like, “Get outa here, you old hippy, what do you know about the real world?” ’
Powys smiled.
‘Well, it’s true. I’m an old hippy. But – this is the point – I’d rather be an old hippy among the suits. I’d rather publish straight books than be down in the basement with Ben Corby, peddling esoterica. Ben, he copes with it because he’s not a hippy and he really does value money and possessions. This make sense to you?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Now you’re being cautious. You’re like I was when I came out of Glastonbury.’
‘You make it sound’, Powys said, ‘like coming out of Pentonville.’
Dan Frayne became quite sober. ‘I never go back to Glastonbury. I can’t function there. I can’t stand to be an old hippy among old hippies. In Glastonbury you don’t know anybody superficially. You know them intensely, deeply, intimately. You know their star signs and the colour of their auras. Amazing. They don’t have superficial in Glastonbury. They either put their arms around you and hug you till you squeak or they ignore you. Listen, this book of yours, I’ve been reading it. I see Ben’s point. I’d’ve binned it too. Golden Land was OK, this one I’d’ve binned.’
‘Well, thanks,’ Powys said.
‘Except …’ Dan held up both hands ‘… I noticed something. I noticed that in neither of those books do you ever refer to the celestial city. Not the merest mention in the index. The only earth-mysteries tomes in the history of the cosmos that don’t go banging on about the legends of Glastonbury.’
‘No mystery about that. I’ve just never been.’
Dan Frayne pretended to pass out with shock.
‘Put it this way. If your name was Constable and you were a bit of a painter, would you buy a bungalow near Flatford Mill?’
‘Ben Corby would,’ said Dan Frayne.
‘Ben Corby would buy the mill.’
‘This is true,’ Dan said.
‘But anyway, it’d been done. To death. Everybody discussing earth-mysteries has to do Glastonbury. I’d got nothing new to contribute.’
‘When did that ever put a writer off?’
‘Anyway,’ Powys said. ‘Now you know, you can bin the book with a clear conscience.’
Gloom descended. You spend a long time isolated in the country, it’s not easy psyching yourself up to come to London with what looks like a begging bowl.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Dan Frayne said. ‘Mythscapes. I would’ve dumped the book, but I still like the idea because it’s an antidote to the New Age that isn’t written by either a sceptic or a born-again Christian. It’s that bit different. I just think it would be a better book, a more interesting book, a book with wider commercial appeal … if it was also about, uh …’
‘Don’t say it.’ Powys felt a certain big book winging through the air, over fields and hills, through towns and industrial estates, on the great ley-line leading to …
‘Glastonbury,’ Dan said. ‘As it really is. Today. The pressures it imposes on people living in Jerusalem Builded Here. The tensions between the Christians and the New Age pagans. Reflecting a friction that’s been there in Glastonbury for centuries, millennia … aeons, I don’t know.’
Silence. Or the nearest you could get to silence in a wine bar in Wapping.
‘Well.’ Powys stood up. ‘It’s been nice meeting you.’
‘Aw, come on, Powys, siddown. Hear me out, man.’ Dan signalled to a waitress dressed like Powys’s idea of a top-drawer call-girl. ‘Same again, Estelle. The thing is …’ He put his briefcase on the table between them. ‘Can I talk to you? Do you mind? Personal stuff?’
‘What happened to superficial?’
‘I just want to tell you why. Explain the background to this. Hey you look pretty rough, did I tell you that?’
‘I drop a lot of Valium,’ Powys said. ‘Go on.’
‘OK,’ Dan said, ‘I didn’t know much about Glastonbury except everybody said it was Camelot and Jerusalem rolled into one and you could get high there without drugs. So twenty-odd years ago I went out West with my lady. If I’m honest, Glastonbury wasn’t the major pull. It was her. Gorgeous is not the word, but I’m only a publisher, never been good with words.’
He took a large, brown envelope from the briefcase, slid out a photograph and handed it to Powys. It was from the days when coloured photos tended to come out all blue and mauve. It showed a girl in a long white dress standing in a shop doorway. Over the door was a sign, hand-painted in vaguely psychedelic Celtic lettering. Carey and Frayne, it said.
Powys said, ‘What about “lustrous”?’ He peered at the picture again. ‘ “Mesmerising”? “Iridescent”?’
‘Half-Spanish,’ Dan said. ‘Well, Mexican, I suppose. Her father was a British doctor working out in middle America after the War, met this Latin beauty and brought her back to Blighty. Result: an English rose with a hint of something more exotic. She was a few years younger than me. I was, as you can imagine, a man-of-the-world figure, with a set of Grateful Dead albums and a regular supply of you-know-what. Golden days, Joe.’
‘I was too young.’
‘That’s what they all say. Thank you, Estelle, that’s super. Keep the change. Buy yourself some woolly socks.’
Dan Frayne watched Estelle’s bottom all the way to the bar and explained how his lady had had a small legacy from granny, and he’d sold his Triumph Vitesse and they’d run away to the Isle of Avalon where they’d rented a little shop to specialise in secondhand books and underground magazines and privately published hippy stuff about UFOs and ley-lines.
‘You think you’ve arrived in the Elysian Fields. You think you’ll be there for ever. Then it starts to get to you. It’s like a spiritual hothouse. What you think of as your spirit grows like rhubarb in shit. Amazing.’
Dan swallowed some golden beer.
‘Suddenly you’ve got more bloody spirit than you can cope with, and you can’t breathe for it. I’m on paradise island with the most beautiful girl in the world, and we … we’d fight. All the time. Over nothing. Over anything. You’re pulled to extremes. No half measures. No compromises. Everything’s a big issue in Avalon. Everybody you know is a healer and a seeker after wisdom. There are days in August when the air’s like incense. I couldn’t stand it. To cut a long, long, long, story short, I pissed off.’
His mood had changed.
‘Broke me up, leaving her, but I wouldn’t go back. I didn’t trust myself. You know?’
‘Because you might have stayed,’ Powys said. ‘Tried again.’
Dan Frayne nodded vigorously. ‘I’d’ve stayed, and after a few months it would’ve been exactly the same. I’ve never been back. She stayed. She’s stubborn. And, all credit to her, the shop’s grown and it’s a good business now. We’ve kept in touch. Not so much now. I’m married, three kids, you see the problem.’
Powys glanced at the photograph of the girl in the doorway.
Dan said, ‘The only way I’d have gone back to Avalon was with the family as insulation, and how would she have felt then? Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t always alone – you know, this and that, over the years.’
Dan began to unpack the brown envelope. It was full of letters, some hand-written, some printed.
‘When you look like her, there’s no shortage of suitors. But it was clear – you can read this stuff – that she’d built a wall around herself. Maybe that’s how you do it. Survive. You know, mentally.’
‘And this is the woman you wanted to do the book? The definitive Glastonbury exposé.’
Dan Frayne finished his beer.
‘I’m worried about her,’ he said. ‘I get a feeling, I … nothing like that, I’m about as psychic as a microwave oven. I’m just worried. Maybe a little latent guilt. I’m sorry, this isn’t what you expected to hear.’
‘You want to commission a book because you’re worried about a woman you left in Glastonbury?’
‘Um …’ Dan Frayne considered. ‘Yeah.’ He put his glass down. ‘Yeah, I suppose that’s the size of it. Amazing.’
FOURTEEN
Something Hanging from It
It was a Gothic-shaped doorway six steps up at the end of an alley framed by High Street shops. Over the door a sign said: ASSEMBLY ROOMS.
The alternative town hall, in fact. On occasion, Juanita could be induced to admit a certain affection for the place.
Diane said, ‘I’ll let you know what happens, then.’ With her usual fashion flair, she was wearing an old and patched red woollen coat over a baggy turquoise sweatshirt and jeans.
‘Er … slight misunderstanding.’ Juanita smiled innocently. Diane had got away with enough today; because of Jim not showing up they hadn’t made it to the police station. ‘I kind of thought you might go to the other one. Would you mind?’
‘Glastonbury First? But I thought …’
Diane was looking at Juanita’s outfit, which comprised a plain charcoal-grey formal jacket with a skirt, a creamy silk top and a pink chiffon scarf. Not very Assembly Rooms.
‘Would that be a terrible imposition, Diane? I thought you might recognise a few of the people I wouldn’t.’
Diane looked resigned. ‘Do you want me to take notes?’
‘I don’t think so. Let’s not make your Avalonian role too obvious at this stage. Try and blend into the background.’
Some chance of that, Juanita thought, watching Diane drift down the street, as inconspicuous as a pheasant in a chicken run. But at least she wouldn’t be in the same meeting as the predatory Ceridwen.
The church-type wooden doors of the Assembly Rooms had been thrown back to reveal yellow walls, more steps inside and a stand-up poster reading: RESIST ROAD-RAPE.
