The Chalice, page 3
He hated the bloody Tor.
Not much over five hundred feet high when you worked it out. Only resembled some bloody green Matterhorn, look, on account of most of the surrounding countryside was so flat, having been under the sea, way back.
So nothing to it, not really.
But look at the trouble it caused. Bloody great millstone round this town’s neck. Thousands of tourists fascinated by all that cobblers about pagan gods and intersecting lines of power.
If it wasn’t for all that old balls, there’d be no New Age travellers, no hippy refugees running tatty shops, no mid-summer festivals and women dancing around naked, no religious nuts, no UFO-spotters. Glastonbury Tor, in fact, was a symbol of what was wrong with Britain.
Also the National Trust bastards hadn’t even given him the contract for installing the new pathway and steps.
Griff Daniel went back to his truck. G Daniel & Co. Builders. It would maybe have said … & Son. If the so-called son hadn’t disgraced the family name.
When it came down to it, the only way you were going to get rid of the riff-raff was by getting rid of the damn Tor. He imagined a whole convoy of JCBs gobbling into the Tor like it was a Walnut Whip, the hill giving way, the tower collapsing into dusty, medieval rubble.
All the way back to his yard on the edge of the industrial estate, Griff Daniel kept thinking about this. It wasn’t possible, of course, not under any conceivable circumstances. You couldn’t, say, put the new road through it, not with a scheduled ancient monument on top, and also it was far too big a national tourist attraction.
But it did make you think.
THREE
Queen of the Hippies
It was rather an antiquated bicycle, a lady’s model with no crossbar, a leatherette saddle bag and a metal cover over the chain. Terribly sedate, an elderly spinster’s sort of machine, fifteen quid from On Your Bike, over at Street. But Jim could get his feet to the pedals without adjusting the seat, and, more to the point, it was the kind of bicycle no youngster would want to be seen dead on.
So at least he could park it in town with an odds-on chance of it not being nicked.
Jim unloaded himself from the bike outside Burns the Bread, in the part of Glastonbury High Street where the Alternative Sector was rapidly chasing the few remaining locally owned shops up the hill.
He was puffing a bit and there was sweat on his forehead. It was rather close and humid. And November, amazingly. He pushed the bike across the pavement and into a narrow alleyway next to the bookshop called Carey and Frayne. Got out his handkerchief to wipe his face, the alleyway framing a neat little streetscene from a viewpoint he’d never noticed before – quite a nice one, because …
… by God …
… above the weathered red-tiled roofs and brick chimney stacks of the shops across the street reared the spiked and buttressed Norman tower of the town centre church, St John’s, and it had suddenly struck Jim that the tower’s top tier, jagged in the florid, late-afternoon sun, resembled a crown of thorns.
While, in the churchyard below, out of sight from here, there was one of the holy thorns, grafted from the original on Wearyall Hill. It was as if the Thorn had worked its way into the very fabric of the church, finally thrusting itself in savage symbolism from the battlements.
Yes, yes, yes. Jim started to paint rapidly in his head, reforming sculpted stone into pronged and twisted wildwood. But keeping the same colours, the pink and the ochre and the grey, amid the elegiac embers of the dying sun.
By God, this buggering town … just when you thought you had it worked out, it would throw a new image at you like a well-aimed brick. Jim was so knocked-sideways he almost forgot to chain his bike to the drainpipe. Almost.
Twenty feet away, a youth sat in a dusty doorway fumbling a guitar. Jim gave him a hard look, but he seemed harmless enough. The ones with guitars usually were, couldn’t get up to much trouble with an instrument that size to lug around. Penny-whistlers, now, they were the ones you had to watch; they could shove the things down their belts in a second, leaving two hands free for thieving.
Over the past eighteen months, Jim had had three bikes stolen, two gone from the town centre, one with the padlocked chain snipped and left in the gutter. Metal cutters, by God! Thieves with metal cutters on the streets of Glastonbury.
‘Jim, you’re painting!’
‘No, I’m not.’ Reacting instinctively. For half his adult life, painting had been something to deny – bloody Pat shrieking, How many bills is that going to pay?
‘New bike, I see.’ The most beautiful woman in Glastonbury bent over the bike, stroking the handlebars. ‘Really rather suits you.’
‘You calling me an old woman?’ Jim pulled off his hat. ‘I’ll have you know, my girl, I’ve just ridden the buggering thing all the way back from Street in the slipstream of a string of transcontinental juggernauts half the size of the QE2. Bloody Europe comes to Somerset.’
‘Just be thankful that bikes are still allowed on that road. Come the new motorway you’ll be banned for ever.’
‘Won’t happen. Too much opposition.’
‘Oh sure. Like the Government cares about the Greens and the old ladies in straw hats.’ She straightened up, hands on her hips, and a bloody fine pair of hips they were. ‘Tea?’
‘Well … or something.’ Jim followed her into the sorcerer’s library she called a bookshop. He helped out here two or three days a week, trying not to look too closely at what he was selling.
He glared suspiciously at one of those cardboard dumpbin things displaying a new paperback edition of the silly novels of Glastonbury’s own Dion Fortune. Awful, crass covers – sinister hooded figures standing over stone altars and crucibles.
‘Over the top. The artwork. Tawdry. Way over the top.’
‘Isn’t everything in Glastonbury these days?’
Well, you aren’t, for a start, Jim thought. He wondered whether something specific had happened to make Juanita distance herself from the sometimes-overpowering spirituality of the town and from the books she sold. You didn’t open a shop like this unless you were of a strongly mystical persuasion, but these days she answered customers’ questions lightly and without commitment, as if she knew it was all nonsense really.
Jim let her steer him into the little parlour behind the shop, past the antiquarian section, where the books were kept behind glass, most of them heavy magical manuals from the nineteenth century. Jim had flicked one open the other week and found disturbingly detailed instructions ‘for the creation of elemental spirits’. He suspected it didn’t mean distilling your own whisky.
Which reminded him. ‘Erm … that Laphroaig you had. Don’t suppose there’s a minuscule drop left?’
‘That rather depends how many minuscule drops you’ve had already,’ Juanita said cautiously. Damn woman knew him rather too well.
‘One. Swear to God. Called at a pub called the Oak Tree or something. Nerves shot to hell after a run-in with a container lorry from Bordeaux. One small Bells, I swear it.’
She looked dubious, puckering her lovely nose. In the lingering warmth of this year’s strange, post-Indian summer, she was wearing a lemon yellow off-the-shoulder thing, showing all her freckles. Well, as many of them as he’d ever seen.
‘Just that you’re looking … not exactly un-flushed, Jim.’
‘Hmmph,’ said Jim. He let Juanita sit him down in an armchair, planting a chunky tumbler in his drinking and painting hand. She had quite a deep tan from sunning herself reading books on the balcony at the back. While most women her age were going frantic about melanoma, Juanita snatched all the sun she could get. Must be the Latin ancestry.
Watching her uncork the Laphroaig bottle with a rather suggestive thopp, Jim thought, Ten years … ten years younger would do it. Ten years, maybe fifteen, and she’d be at least within reach.
He coughed, hoping nothing showed. ‘Erm … Happened to cycle past Don Moulder’s bottom field on the way back. Guess bloody what.’
‘New Age travellers?’
‘Nothing gets past you, does it?’ Jim held out his glass. ‘Arrogant devils. Bloody thieving layabouts.’
‘Not quite all of them.’
As she leaned over to pour his drink, Jim breathed in a delightful blend of Ambre Solaire and frank feminine sweat, the mixture sensuously overlaid with the smoky peatmusk of the whisky. Aaaaah … the dubious pleasure of being sixty-two years old, unattached again, and with all one’s senses functioning, more or less.
‘I’m sorry …’ Shaking himself out of it and feeling the old jowls wobble. ‘What did you just say?’
‘I said at least one of them isn’t a thief. Besides, oddballs have always drifted towards Glastonbury. Look at me. Look at you.’
‘Yes, but, Juanita, the essential difference here is that we saved up our hard-earned pennies until we could do it in a respectable way. We didn’t just get an old bus from a scrapyard and enough fuel to trundle it halfway across the country before it breaks down and falls to pieces in some previously unsullied beauty spot. You see, what gets me is how these characters have the bare-faced cheek …’
‘Because Diane’s with them.’
‘… to call themselves friends of the buggering planet, when they … What did you say …?’ Jim had to steady the Laphroaig with his other hand.
Juanita poured herself a glass of probably overpriced white wine from Lord Pennard’s vineyard and lowered herself into a chintzy old rocking chair by the Victorian fireplace. There was a small woodstove tucked into the fireplace now, unlit as yet, but with a few autumn logs piled up ready for the first cold day.
Jim said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand. You say Diane’s back? Diane’s with them? But I thought …’
‘We all did. Which is …’ Juanita sighed. ‘… I suppose, why I got them the field.’
Jim was bewildered. ‘You got them the buggering field?’
He’d thought she was over all that. Might have been Queen of the Hippies 1972, but she was fully recovered now, surely to God.
Juanita said, ‘Comes down to the old question: if I don’t try and help her, who else is going to?’
‘But I thought she was working in Yorkshire.’ The idea of Diane training to be a journalist had struck Jim as pretty unlikely at the time, considering the girl’s renowned inability to separate fact from fantasy. ‘I thought she was getting married. Peter somebody.’
‘Patrick. It’s off. Abandoned her job, everything.’
‘To become a New Age buggering traveller?’
‘Not exactly. As she put it, she kind of hitched a lift. They were making their way here, and she …’
Juanita reached for her cigarettes.
‘… Oh dear. She said it was calling her back.’
Jim groaned. ‘Not again. Dare I ask what, specifically, was calling her back?’
‘The Tor.’ Juanita lit a cigarette. ‘What else?’
Jim was remembering that time the girl had gone missing and they’d found her just before dawn under the Thorn on Wearyall Hill, in her nightie and bare feet. What was she then, fifteen? He sank the last of the Laphroaig. He was too old for this sort of caper.
‘Lady Loony,’ he said. ‘Do people still call her that?’
FOUR
A Fine Shiver
The ancient odour had drifted in as soon as Diane wound down the van window, and it was just so … Well, she could have wept. How could she have forgotten the scent?
The van had jolted between the rotting gateposts into Don Moulder’s bottom field. It had bounced over grass still ever so parched from a long, dry summer and spiky from the harvest. Diane had turned off the engine, sat back in the lumpy seat, closed her eyes and let it reach her through the open window: the faraway fragrance of Holy Avalon.
Actually, she hadn’t wound down the window, as such. Just pulled out the folded Rizlas packet which held the glass in place and let it judder to its favourite halfway position. It was rather an old van, a Ford something or other – used to be white all over but she’d painted big, silly pink spots on it so it wouldn’t stand out from the rest of the convoy.
The smell made her happy and sad. It was heavy with memories and was actually a blend of several scents, the first of them autumn, a brisk, mustardy tang. And then wood-smoke – there always seemed to be woodsmoke in rural Somerset, much of it applewood which was rich and mellow and sweetened the air until you could almost taste it.
And over that came the most elusive ingredient: the musk of mystery, a scent which summoned visions. Of the Abbey in the evening, when the saddened stones grew in grace and sang to the sunset. Of wind-whipped Wearyall Hill with the night gathering in the startled tangle of the Holy Thorn. Of the balmy serenity of the Chalice Well garden. And of the great enigma of the West: Glastonbury Tor.
Diane opened her eyes and looked up at the huge green breast with its stone nipple.
She wasn’t the only one. All around, people had been dropping out of vans and buses, an ambulance, a stock wagon. Gazing up at the holy hill, no more than half a mile away. Journey’s end for the pagan pilgrims. And for Diane Ffitch, who called herself Molly Fortune because she was embarrassed by her background, confused about her reason for returning and rather afraid, actually.
Dusk was nibbling the fringes of Don Moulder’s bottom field when the last few vehicles crawled in. They travelled in smaller groups nowadays, because of the law. An old Post Office van with a white pentacle on the bonnet was followed by Mort’s famous souped-up hearse, where he liked to make love, on the long coffin-shelf. Love is the law, Mort said. Love over death.
Headlice and Rozzie arrived next in the former Bolton Corporation single-decker bus repainted in black and yellow stripes, like a giant bee.
‘Listen, I’ve definitely been here before!’ Headlice jumped down, grinning eerily through teeth like a broken picket fence. He was about nineteen or twenty; they were so awfully young, most of these people. At that age, Diane thought, you could go around saying you were a confirmed pagan, never giving a thought to what it really meant.
‘I mean, you know, not in this life, obviously,’ Headlice said. ‘In a past life, yeah?’ Looking up expectantly, as though he thought mystic rays might sweep him away and carry him blissfully to the top of the holy hill. ‘Hey, you reckon I was a monk?’
He felt at the back of his head. Where a monk’s tonsure would be, Headlice had a swastika tattoo, re-exposed because of the affliction which had led to his extremely severe haircut and his unfortunate nickname.
Rozzie made a scoffing noise. ‘More like one of the friggin’ peasants what carted the stones up the hill.’
She’d told Diane that the swastika was a relic of Headlice’s days as some sort of a teenage neo-fascist, neo-skinhead. Headlice, however, pointed out that the original swastika was an ancient pagan solar symbol. Which was why he’d had one tattooed on the part of him nearest the sun, see?
He turned away and kicked at the grass. His face had darkened; he looked as if he’d rather be kicking Rozzie. She was a Londoner; he was from the North. She was about twenty-six. Although they shared a bus and a bed, she seemed to despise him awfully.
‘I could’ve been a fuckin’ monk,’ Headlice said petulantly. Despite the democratic, tribal code of the pilgrims, he was obviously very conscious of his background, which made Diane feel jolly uncomfortable about hers. She’d been trying to come over sort of West Country milkmaidish, but she wasn’t very good at it, probably just sounded frightfully patronising.
‘Or a bird,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you were a little bird nesting in the tower.’ She felt sorry for Headlice.
‘Cute. All I’m sayin’ is, I feel … I can feel it here.’ Punching his chest through the rip in his dirty denim jacket. ‘This is not bullshit, Mol.’
Diane smiled. On her own first actual visit to the Tor – or it might have been a dream, she couldn’t have been more than about three or four – there’d been sort of candyfloss sunbeams rolling soft and golden down the steep slopes, warm on her sandals. She wished she could still hold that soft, undemanding image for more than a second or two, but she supposed it was only for children. Too grownup to feel it now.
Also she felt too … well, mature, at twenty-seven, to be entirely comfortable among the pilgrims although a few were ten or even twenty years older than she was and showed every line of it. But even the older women tended to be fey and child-like and stick-thin, even the ones carelessly suckling babies.
Stick-thin. How wonderful to be stick-thin.
‘What it is …’ Headlice said. ‘I feel like I’m home.’
‘What?’ Diane looked across to the Tor, with the church tower without a church on its summit. Oh no. It’s not your home at all, you’re just passing through. I’m the one who’s …
Home? The implications made her feel faint. She wobbled about, wanting to climb back into the van, submerge like a fat hippo in a swamp. Several times on the journey, she’d thought very seriously about dropping out of the convoy, turning the van around and dashing back to Patrick, telling him it had all been a terrible, terrible mistake.
And then she’d seen the vinegar shaker on the high chipshop counter at lunchtime and a spear of light had struck it and turned it into a glistening Glastonbury Tor. Yes! she’d almost shrieked. Yes, I’m coming back!
With company. There must be over thirty pilgrims here now, in a collection of vehicles as cheerful as an old-fashioned circus. At least it had been cheerful when she’d joined the convoy on the North Yorkshire moors – that old army truck sprayed purple with big orange flowers, the former ambulance with an enormous eye painted on each side panel, shut on one side, wide open on the other. But several of the jollier vehicles seemed to have dropped out. Broken down, probably. Well, they were all frightfully old. And fairly drab now, except for Diane’s van and Headlice’s bee-striped bus.
