The Chalice, page 28
The whole terrible bloody picture.
Jim’s cottage and the garden were in a little flat-bottomed bowl with a bank rising up behind it and the enormous ash tree, one and a half times as high as the cottage. The bowl looked like a frying pan, with a straight piece of track forming the handle, although she’d never seen it that way before.
But, then, she’d never seen it all lit up like this.
The lower windows of Jim’s cottage were bright and warm, like the welcoming windows of a storybook cottage. Especially the floor-to-ceiling studio window, the sunset window. Looking now as if it had stored up all those thousands of liquid red sunsets and was starting one of its own.
The November night was as warm as a kitchen. The air carried the breathless rise and fall of distant sirens.
Diane and Don Moulder came to stand on either side of Juanita.
‘That’s far enough, Mrs Carey. Brigade’s here now, look.’
The fire-sirens went on and on and got no louder.
‘He’s surely out here somewhere.’ Don Moulder was wiping his eyes with a rag. ‘He’s not daft, isn’t Mr Battle.’
The roof timbers of Jim’s cottage produced a cheerful, crackling as fierce little impish flames began to poke through like gas-jets. And still the sirens went on and on and got no louder. In a gush of panic, Diane realised.
‘Oh, gosh Mr Moulder, they can’t … the fire brigade won’t get through! The whole lane’s clogged with buses and wagons, we couldn’t even get the car past!’
‘Whazzat, Miss?’
‘Travellers. There’s a bus broken down right in the middle of the road.’
‘A buzz?’
‘It’s blocking the road.’ Diane was aware of Juanita pulling open her Afghan coat and ripping at her skirt.
‘Oh my God,’ Juanita said. ‘Oh my God. Look!’ Pointing at the ash tree, something hanging from it.
‘Aye,’ Don Moulder was saying. ‘A buzz. Maybe you seen it. But were it a real buzz? That’s the big question, Miss Diane. Were it a real … Christ, are you mad, woman?’
Beside Diane, a muffled, ragged figure, cloth-faced like a scarecrow, began to run towards the inferno.
The sunset window cracked first, like a gunshot, and then it exploded, a thousand fragments of hot glass blown out at Juanita, muffled like a Muslim woman, a torn-off length of her skirt wound around her face as she threw herself at the cottage.
Diane rushed forward, squealing like a piglet, but Don Moulder grabbed her, both arms around her waist, and held her back.
A huge gush of fire lunged out of the cottage and hit the ash tree with a lurid splash of sparks, like a welding torch in a foundry. Whatever was hanging limply from a branch was lit up very briefly before the flame pounced like a cat on a rat and consumed it.
Diane screamed wildly inside Don Moulder’s arms.
Juanita had disappeared.
Brittle, burning dead leaves from the ash tree danced like frenzied fireflies to the futile warbling of the trapped fire-engines.
As out of the shattered sunset window toppled a frightful thing, a monstrous shape … a fossil tree with rigid projecting branches, a twisted, blackened pylon.
Coughing and retching, with Don Moulder’s leathery farmer’s hands clasped over her spasming stomach, Diane saw just about everything.
She saw that the tree was something entangled and kept upright by a metal artist’s easel. Or maybe two easels, or even three, entwined, fused together into a single, horrific fire-sculpture, all black and flaking.
At the top of this twisted creation was spiked a charcoal ball, like a Hallowe’en pumpkin which had fallen into the bonfire. When the construction teetered, the ball twirled to display …
It was impolite to be sick on someone. Diane found the strength to pull away. Vomiting into the grass, she could still see it.
The grisly twinkle of teeth as the charred remains of Jim Battle toppled into Juanita’s flung-open arms and the cottage roof collapsed into a gush of pumping blood-orange smoke.
Before she fainted on Don Moulder, Diane glimpsed something at the very centre of the billowing.
Obscenely like the hands of a conjuror letting loose a black dove, it was a smoking cup of shadows, a dark chalice.
SEVENTEEN
Of the Heart
The cottage was fine, just as peaceful as it had ever been. Arnold limped contentedly around, Mrs Whitney brought homemade soup and all the books stayed on the shelves. Outside, there was snow on the hilltops and a stack of logs, nicely dried and split, in the old barn.
Winter was at the door, season of rough walks and hot fires, and whatever had been happening inside Joe Powys to cause that period of upset, that blip, it was obviously in remission.
So … fine.
Well, except for the no-Fay aspect, and even that was fine for Fay, who was a people-person and had been getting increasingly restless through the summer. It hadn’t been love – Joe Powys kept telling himself this – so much as mutual need, the need for someone who had also experienced these things to be there when you awoke before dawn, in terror and self-doubt. Would Fay still awake in terror in Brussels or Munich or Amsterdam? Perhaps not.
So, fine. OK. Really.
Anyway, there was another woman now.
*
In hazy sepia, a cheerful, buxom lady in a hat and a long woollen skirt pushes a bicycle with a shopping basket over the handlebars. Colours slowly fading into the picture as she crackles through autumn leaves in a half-wooded lane to a steep and narrow path; at the end of this, a big shed with lace curtains at the windows, the shed built into the flank of a hill of cucumber green rising, almost sheerly it seems from here, to a church tower of grey-brown stone, a church tower without a church.
Her real name was Violet Firth, Evans when she married. She was born in 1890 in North Wales, although her family later moved to Somerset. As a young woman, during the years of World War I, she became quite a successful psychotherapist, initially attracted to the new ideas of Sigmund Freud.
Which she rapidly outgrew, realising there were phenomena of the mind and spirit which Freud could not approach. During this period she discovered she was telepathic, psychic and a natural medium.
She also discovered Glastonbury.
Somebody gave her a redundant army hut and she put it up directly under Glastonbury Tor and it was here that she founded the mystical order which became the Society of the Inner Light.
Powys already knew a little about her. During his research for The Old Golden Land he’d learned that she was the first writer to discuss the psychic aspect of leys, those mysterious alignments of ancient sites across the countryside.
What had put him off further reading was the name under which she produced her novels and magical studies: Dion Fortune. It was developed, apparently, from her family motto Deo Non Fortuna. Not her fault that, from this end of the century, it sounded like a fifties rock and roll singer.
Anyway, this was probably one of the reasons he’d never got around to reading Avalon of the Heart.
‘All hokum, well over the top,’ Dan Frayne had said, presenting him with the paperback to read on the train home. ‘But it left me with a kind of warm glow, you know? Made me feel, yeah, this is The Place. Dangerous stuff, in retrospect.’
Powys read it twice. It was just over a hundred pages long, a personalised guide to Glastonbury and its mysteries in a style which was kind of Helen Steiner Rice meets Enid Blyton.
Dan Frayne was right. It was wonderful.
When he came off the train, he went directly to the Hereford Bookshop (beside a famous ley-line near the cathedral) and ordered everything of Dion Fortune’s still in print. Then went to the library to find out who she was, really.
The book glowed. It was concise, vivid and haunting. It was a love story, about a torrid affair between a woman and a town. It told you exactly why people did what Dan Frayne and this Juanita had done – going to Glastonbury in search of something they couldn’t define.
While Uncle Jack Powys, in a book more than ten times as long, explained why they all failed.
No wonder Fortune hadn’t exactly taken to A Glastonbury Romance, published just two years earlier. Do we behave like that at Glastonbury? she wrote. I must have missed a lot. We do not quite come up to Mr Powis’s specifications.
Mischievously misspelling Powys.
Joe Powys decided he really liked this woman. The night he got home he made a space on the shelf next to the Romance and inserted Avalon of the Heart.
The antidote.
Powys grinned and went to bed and slept the whole night through without interruption. And another six.
But last night he’d been appalled to find himself lying awake almost wishing it would happen again. Having awoken first of all feeling cold, feeling empty, missing Fay. And then wondering, Am I slightly mad?
This was an unnatural situation. Mrs Whitney had said as much. No life, Joe, just you and that dog … walking the hills … hair going greyer … circles under your eyes getting bigger.
And Dan Frayne, before he left London: All I’m asking, Joe, is why not spend a couple of weeks in Glastonbury? Absorb the vibes. I guarantee a pivotal experience … alter your life, one way or the other. If you agree there’s a book in this, I’ll have the first instalment of the advance in the post inside a week. I’m empowered to go to twenty grand, half up-front. Can’t go higher for non-fiction, these are hard times.
Powys, down to his last two thousand in the bank and Golden Land royalties slipping fast, had said, ‘Can I think about this?’
He could have had ten thousand pounds in his hand by now and he’d said coolly, ‘Can I think about this?’ Mad? Probably. And cold and lonely and his hair going greyer. Was ten grand going to change any of that? Plus, he’d have to write the book with Frayne’s ex-girlfriend. Plus …
… what I’d also like from you, right up in the introduction … don’t get up, don’t hit me … is the Uncle Jack story. The stuff Corby told me about. The Glastonbury Romance bit. Gives us a hook for the marketing department.
Well, sod that for a start. Be like hanging a sign around your neck that said CRANK. And somebody with expert knowledge of the Powys family tree would be sure to come out of the woodwork screaming, CHARLATAN … IMPOSTOR.
He was all mixed up. He needed to read some more Dion Fortune. A calming influence. She’d gone to Glastonbury, another seeker after spiritual truth, but she hadn’t been screwed up by it like the amateurs, like Dan Frayne.
Read more Fortune, this was the answer. Slowly. By which time it would be nearly spring. And perhaps Fay would have come back and they could go down to Glastonbury together. Maybe Fay could get a radio programme out of it.
Joe Powys got up and made some tea for himself and Arnold. Who was he kidding?
Not long after nine a.m., the phone rang.
‘You asked for time to think.’
‘I’m still thinking,’ Powys said. This was unusual. At this stage of the game publishers hardly ever chased you.
‘What’s the problem?’ Dan Frayne didn’t sound cool any more, didn’t sound laid back, didn’t sound superficial.
Powys tried to think of an answer. A strange, choked silence coming down the line.
‘Listen, you have to get your act together, Joe. You read the stuff, yet?’ Dan Frayne didn’t sound right, lacked coherence. ‘Her … you know … letters?’
‘I’ve been a bit busy.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Joe. Listen, the thing is, I can’t go down there, you know that. I have to be in New York next week anyway.’
Powys felt he was missing something. ‘Why do either of us have to go? Where’s the urgency?’
There was a ragged pause. Then Dan told him, his voice like there was a dry twig stuck in his throat.
‘I nearly missed it. Wouldn’t have known. It only made a couple of paragraphs in the national papers. I mean, there are lots of fatal fires all over the place. They didn’t have any names at that stage, anyway. Relatives hadn’t been told.’
‘I’m really sorry, Dan.’ Powys knew there were a lot of questions he should be asking, but this wasn’t the time.
Giving him a big brown Jiffy bag containing the collected letters of Juanita Carey, Frayne had said, ‘Written to me at least three times a year for twenty years. If I wasn’t here, I think she’d still write, to unload the shit. Read and I guarantee you’ll see the book mapped out before your eyes.’
Powys read for nearly two hours, Arnold lying gloomily across his feet, sleety rain coming like tin-tacks at the cottage window.
He read about the people of present-day Avalon, as seen by Juanita Carey.
June, 1989
News just in: Alice Flood, the curate’s wife, has left her husband for the guy who runs the Wearyall Wine Bar. The proposed Astral Festival has been attacked by one of those fundamentalist Christian sects claiming it’ll attract satanic influences. One of the women at the tourist office in the Tribunal building has resigned because she says it’s being haunted by a ghost in monk’s robes and …
Oh hell, just another week in bloody Avalon.
Powys smiled sadly, went back to the earliest letter, April 1975, and discerned a different tone, less cynical, more wide-eyed. Mrs Carey was writing it while listening to Alan Stivell’s ‘totally transcendent’ Breton harp music. She was organising an earth-mysteries book fair in Glastonbury and was a little nervous about inviting the bigger names. Did Danny think Colin Wilson might be persuadable?
You never found out whether the book fair had been a success; Mrs Carey’s next letter was about a relationship she was developing with an astrologer called Matt Rutherford who was ‘a bit magnetic around the eyes’. The Matt thing lasted, on and off, nearly seven years, though Juanita didn’t write much about it. Powys could imagine Dan Frayne seething with jealousy. But the general mood was changing.
In the eighties, the Thatcher subtext – greed is patriotic – was penetrating Glastonbury. Shops hadn’t actually been selling chunks of holyest erthe in cans, but the possibility was in the air. There were now people in town who were seeing the New Age as New Money, and one of them was Matt Rutherford, who set up an agency offering astrological services to industry: star-screening employees and job-applicants to calculate their suitability for particular posts.
Juanita Carey had been furious to think that Rutherford was getting people fired because Pluto and Venus happened to be badly aligned when they were born.
Exit Matt.
Quite right too, Powys thought. Mercenary bastard.
He became aware that the letters were laying out for him a ground-plan of post-Fortune Glastonbury. He could see High Street, with all the New Age shops clustering at the bottom of the hill, near the ancient George and Pilgrims. He could see the lofty tower of St John’s with the war-memorial outside, where the hippies gathered to play and sing with guitars and whistles. He had a sense of the Abbey ruins amid hidden green acres enclosed by streets full of shops and strange music. And, on the edge of the town, the tunnel lanes leading to the pagan enigma of the Tor.
I suppose this means you’ll be going now, then, Powys? After what’s happened.
‘I suppose so, Arnold.’
Powys sighed. On the evidence of the Carey letters, the contrasts and tensions of Glastonbury hadn’t actually altered much in the sixty-odd years since Uncle Jack had fluttered the dovecotes: commercial interests squeezing into bed with the spiritual, a lot of seriously screwed-up people and frustrated visionaries, endless petty disputes, and maybe a wriggling vein of kinky sex.
In the mid-eighties, after Matt Rutherford had left town to pursue his business interests in – where else? – Los Angeles, Juanita rarely referred to men.
The last letter – very recent – was a cool and cynical overview of New Age Glastonbury. It also discussed the problems of a scatty female of semi-noble birth called Diane Ffitch and the publication of the gloomy diaries of a certain Colonel Pixhill.
There was a copy enclosed. It was a dismal dark green with no picture on the front. Dan had said he really couldn’t face reading it.
Joe Powys had another look at the photo of the girl in the white dress, Juanita Carey: iridescent, mesmeric … If you looked closely you could make out some kind of amulet around her neck. If you held the picture away from you, you were even more dazzled by the wide, white smile and the laughing brown eyes.
More than all this, Powys had liked her style.
He was deeply sad that she couldn’t help him now.
Part Four
Mr Powis (sic) … has fluttered our local dovecotes to a painful extent. Do we behave like that at Glastonbury? I must have missed a lot. I am afraid that if people make the Glastonbury pilgrimage expecting to find Glastonbury romance … they will be disappointed. We do not quite come up to Mr Powis’s specifications.
Dion Fortune
Avalon of the Heart
ONE
After the Fire
The caller said, ‘This is Lord Pennard. I wish to speak to my daughter. Now.’
No question, it definitely was him, voice straight out of the freezer compartment. Sam Daniel, the printer, had seen him around, as you might say, heard him ordering his huntsmen about. Very big man in these parts, and oh yes, this was definitely Lord P on the phone, no doubt about that.
‘Sure it is,’ Sam said. ‘And I’m the Pope. Now piss off and stop bothering us or I’ll call the police.’
Diane looked up from the oldest and simplest of Sam’s office word-processors.
‘Your old man,’ Sam said. ‘And not a happy old man, if I’m any judge. What if he shows up at the door?’
‘He’s left a couple of messages on the answering machine at the shop,’ Diane said. ‘I just wipe them off. He won’t come here. He’s always employed people to show up at doors for him.’
‘Fair enough.’ Sam turned back to his computer screen. He was laying out this illustrated feature-piece by Matthew Banks, one of the five million local herbalists, about the Glastonbury Thorn. It listed all the Holy Thorn trees in and around the town, suggesting which was the oldest and examining the case for the various thorns being actual descendants of the staff of Joseph of Arimathea.
