The Chalice, page 30
GLASTONBURY
Ancient Isle of Avalon
He felt a tingle of unreality at the very base of his spine. This is a town ruled by legend, secretly governed by numinous rules.
Bollocks.
He glanced at Diane. She was looking directly at him. He could see her face very clearly. Its openness seemed to belie everything he’d read about her in the letter from Juanita Carey to Dan Frayne.
Lady Loony. Arnold was sitting placidly on her knee, her arms around him.
Let it go, said his Wiser Self. Don’t react. Change the subject.
Joe Powys sighed. His Wiser Self had quit years ago, disillusioned.
‘Meant?’ he said. ‘How exactly do you mean, “meant”?’
Dan Frayne had said, ‘I’ve rung the hospital and she won’t speak to anyone. I’ve rung this Diane Ffitch, can’t get a word of sense. Just goes on about this fucking Pixhill. Jesus, Joe, all I want is to know what’s going on. Christ, forget the book if you like, go for a winter bloody break at Harvey-Calder’s expense. Just help me.’
Powys had driven down a week ago under deep, grey skies, the famous Tor looking passive, disconnected. As though this crazy plan to have it fenced off had already diminished it.
He’d booked into The George and Pilgrims, into a dark room with an uncurtained four-poster bed and Gothic windows edged with richly coloured stained glass. From his window, if he leaned far enough out, he could see the bookshop, Carey and Frayne.
On the first day, Powys had walked Arnold round the streets, buying flimsy, small imprint books on the Grail, the Goddess, King Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea.
On the second day, he’d led the dog halfway up the Tor and then carried him to the top, where mist over the Levels obscured the views and a man with a red beard and two pigtails played a tuneless tin whistle into the wind battering the empty, hollowed-out church tower.
On the third day, he’d driven up through a housing estate to Wearyall Hill, where no signpost marked the path to the Holy Thorn. It proved to be a wind-thrashed little tree, absolutely alone on the hillside, protected only by a wire-netting tube. There were views to both the Tor, to the right, and the Abbey ruins behind the town centre. Of all the places he’d been in Glastonbury, this was somehow the most moving. He’d wished Fay had been here to share the moment and then, feeling as lonely and exposed as the Thorn, he had blinked away tears.
On the fourth day, he’d planned to visit the Abbey which was totally hidden from view until you went under a medieval gatehouse in Magdalene Street and paid your admission fee. He’d left it until last, maybe worried he’d be disappointed. This would be an unfortunate reaction to the holyeste erthe in all England.
Finally he’d decided to save it, and gone into Carey and Frayne.
Waiting until there were no customers. Noting five paperback copies of The Old Golden Land. Watching Diane working on a laptop behind the counter. And then going over to request a copy of the little book he’d already read four times.
Diane had fumbled under the counter. The seaweed-green volume of Colonel Pixhill’s diaries, as the letters had implied, was not exactly on display.
‘I know your face.’ Diane looking up to meet his eyes, as if the exchange of a Pixhill was a secret sign, like a masonic handshake. ‘Don’t I?’
‘Shouldn’t think so.’
But she’d surprised him, diving across the shop for a copy of The Old Golden Land. A bit unnerving because …
‘Hang on, there’s no author picture on the paperback.’
‘No.’ Diane had blushed. ‘But there was on the hard-back. It lived in my locker, you see, for an entire term.’
It was lunchtime. She’d closed the shop, taken him into a little room behind, made some tea. Kneeling down with a saucerful for Arnold, as if a three-legged dog was yet another sign. As he was to learn, Diane Ffitch was always spotting signs and symbols.
It emerged that she’d been packed off at sixteen to this absolutely frightful private school near Oswestry, all outdoor pursuits and lukewarm showers, feeling like a fish out of water on the cold Welsh Border, so far from the mystery and allure of Avalon, feeling so utterly miz the whole time. Until Juanita had thoughtfully sent her The Old Golden Land.
Inspired by the book, she’d found a Bronze Age burial mound on the edge of the school grounds, seen how it aligned with the village church and then a hill fort on the horizon … and realised that the Welsh Border was actually quite mysterious, not such a ghastly place after all.
Powys had told her about Dan Frayne’s proposal, Diane never taking her eyes off him. After a while he’d begun to feel a little uncomfortable. ‘I’m messing up your lunch hour.’
‘I’ve not been having one actually. Takes up too much time. I tend to just sort of nibble things.’
Telling him about the magazine she was trying to put together, determined to have it all organised for when Juanita came out of hospital because she’d need something to take her mind off everything.
Well, Powys said, if there was anything he could do to help … Thinking that working unobtrusively on a little local magazine would get him discreetly into the centre of things in Glastonbury, and if there was to be a book …
He felt her eyes somehow looking into him.
‘We can use all the help we can get,’ she said. ‘In Avalon.’
The following day, again in her lunch hour, she’d taken him to see the guy at SAMPRINT, who’d struck Powys as being fairly cynical about The Avalonian venture but at least had never heard of The Old Golden Land. He’d made a big fuss of Arnold, asked how he’d lost his leg.
‘A farmer shot him. Accused him of worrying sheep. But it was a fit-up.’
Sam the printer said, ‘What did you do?’
‘His shotgun kind of wound up in the river,’ Powys said. ‘It was a family heirloom.’
Sam had shrugged approvingly. Then Diane had asked Powys if he’d interview the new Bishop of Bath and Wells about his attempts to reconcile Christian and pagan elements. Again, Powys had begun to feel detached from reality. It was like a half-waking morning dream where you watched yourself being drawn into unfolding situations, too lazy to pull yourself out.
Even after reading the Pixhill diaries.
‘All I know is it’s itching like hell,’ she said.
This nurse was small and bossy but not unsympathetic. She was called Karen.
‘That’s a good sign. Let’s have a look.’ She leaned across the bed, the only one in the sideward. ‘Hey, don’t back off. It won’t hurt.’
‘Sorry. Oh, I do need to get out of here.’
‘Don’t we all? Only some of us have to feed our kids. Just be glad we’re not kicking you out before your time. You get the best bits now – relaxing and being looked after and not having to worry. That’s the idea, anyway.’
‘Sorry. I’m just a natural-born ungrateful bitch.’
The looking-after bit – that was the worst of all. You had to drink from a baby-cup with a spout, sometimes with a nurse holding the cup, although recently she’d learned how to grip it between her wrists, so long as it wasn’t hot tea or coffee.
What she hadn’t learned was how to turn on taps with her toes, and obviously she couldn’t sink her boxing-glove bandages into hot water, so they had to give her a bath – sitting there with her arms in the air having her bits washed. The unutterable degradation of it.
Juanita sighed. ‘I thought I’d be out in a week.’
‘Well, we didn’t order you to develop pneumonia.’
Because of the pneumonia – caused, they said, by shock – they’d had to delay the skin-grafts. You couldn’t have a general anaesthetic with lungs seemingly committed to becoming a no-go area for oxygen. They’d pumped her full of antibiotics, but it was two weeks before they could get around to pulling the skin off her thighs and applying it to her hands.
For all that time, she actually hadn’t wanted to smoke. Now the need was acute. This morning, she’d got Karen to take her down the corridor and put one in her mouth, unlit.
The fury was building too. But that was irrational, wasn’t it?
‘There you go.’ Karen straightened up. ‘Everything’s fine. They’ll probably take the dressing off again in the morning.’
‘Do they have to? Can’t I wear a permanent dressing?’
‘It’s only you who’ll notice most of the time.’
‘Exactly.’
The sight of the bandage balls at the end of her arms still inflicted horrendous, scorched images of Jim fragmenting in his jagged, molten cage, falling at last into her arms because … because, Oh God, I couldn’t turn away from him again.
And then, like a wound slowly turning septic, the other insidious imaginings would begin to manifest.
‘You were very lucky,’ said Karen, who cleaned her teeth and – God help us – wiped her bum. ‘You want to thank your lucky stars.’
‘Sorry. Thanks, lucky stars. Actually, they tell me it was the lucky Afghan. But for the Afghan, my tits would’ve been jacket potatoes.’
‘Don’t think about it, all right?’
‘Sure,’ said Juanita. She looked down at her pure white cotton nightdress and the image of the jacket potatoes brought her to a decision. ‘Listen, I need to ask you something.’
Diane asked him, ‘Who was John Cowper Powys?’
It had been an easy run to the hospital, along the M5. Powys explored the parking area for a space.
‘He was a famous author.’
‘I know that. I mean, to you. What relation?’
‘Forget it,’ Powys said. ‘Not your problem.’
‘In the diaries,’ Diane said, ‘there’s a bit where Pixhill comes into Glastonbury and meets his teacher, whom he doesn’t identify, and John Cowper Powys, who he thinks he isn’t going to like much. But he seems to get on with him in the end.’
‘I’m glad somebody could.’
‘The suggestion is that Colonel Pixhill and Mr Powys were involved in something together. It …’ Diane hesitated. ‘It’s become very important to me to find out what this was.’
He said nothing. He was finding that if you asked Diane direct questions you were apt to scare her off. Better to wait.
‘Because, you see, the other person, the teacher, the person Colonel Pixhill doesn’t name … I think that was someone close to me. He writes several times about visiting his spiritual teacher. Twice he mentions going up Wellhouse Lane. Which was where … where she lived.’
Diane went quiet.
‘You think his teacher was a she,’ Powys said carefully. ‘Why do you think that?’
‘Because she’s my teacher too,’ Diane said, not looking at him. ‘That is, she was … my nanny.’
Powys did some quick calculations. They were clearly not edging around the same person.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought we might have been talking about a woman who lived in a converted army hut at the foot of the Tor.’
She turned to him. They were in a shadowed area of the car park but he didn’t need much in the way of lights to know her eyes were aglow.
‘Diane,’ Powys said. Very carefully, treading eggshells. The sound of a distant ambulance echoed the warning sirens going off in his head. ‘Dion Fortune died more than twenty years before you were born.’
Diane considered this.
‘I don’t think she would consider that a problem,’ Diane said eventually.
‘Sorry.’ The nurse rearranged the bedclothes over the cage thing that prevented them touching Juanita’s upper thighs, where the skin had been removed. ‘Ruth who?’
‘Dunn. Nursing sister.’
‘What, here?’
‘Don’t know where she was. It might not even have been anywhere in the West Country, but it probably was.’
‘Don’t recall. Friend of yours?’
Juanita laughed shortly.
‘Like that, is it? I can ask the girls tomorrow. Anything in particular you want to know about her?’
‘Just … whatever. Look, Diane’s here, don’t say anything to her about this, OK?’
‘Offended you in some way, has she, this Dunn woman?’
‘No,’ Juanita said. ‘She paid me a compliment.’
What lovely slender hands
Ceridwen had said.
Juanita stared grimly at the white boxing gloves. They covered scar tissue and transplanted skin. But not the unspeakable memory of gripping a melting, metal easel and staring into Jim Battle’s fried eyes.
THREE
Doesn’t Matter
With her hair around her shoulders, no makeup and the pristine white shift, she looked very young, Diane thought. Like a recumbent version of the sylph on the front of the old Avalonian.
But awfully vulnerable, with her hands inside those enormous bandages.
‘They’re taking them off tomorrow,’ Juanita said.
‘That’s super.’
‘Least it means I can get out of here.’
‘When?’
‘I’m thinking about it.’
‘You mean you’ll discharge yourself,’ Diane said disapprovingly. She really didn’t think Juanita was ready to face Glastonbury. She never spoke of the fire or Jim.
Juanita said, ‘You know, you’re looking distinctly washed-out. You’ve lost weight. Are you eating?’
‘Sure. It’s just been a bit sort of frenzied, what with people placing orders for Christmas, and … look, I wanted to get your opinion on this.’
She pulled her folder on to her knees.
The artwork had The Avalonian across the top in lettering which was only modestly Celtic. The rest of the front cover was a black-and-white photograph of the Tor, surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence with two searchlight towers.
‘We got the fence from one of those postwar pictures of Belsen or somewhere. Paul put it all together on his computer.’
With a practised elbow, Juanita prodded a pillow into the small of her back and studied the mock-up.
‘I’m impressed. But it doesn’t make any secret of where we stand on the issue, does it? I mean, Belsen?’
‘I’ve also written to Quentin Cotton, asking if he’d like to write a piece expressing his views.’
‘Not Archer? Not Griff?’
‘This way neither Sam nor I have to deal with estranged relatives.’
‘You and Archer are officially estranged?’
‘I don’t know, I haven’t spoken to him. Oh. Gosh. I meant to say. You know who his new constituency agent is?’
‘Domini Dorrell-Adams?’
‘Oliver Pixhill.’
Juanita’s eyes widened.
‘It’s true. Woolly rang to tell me just before I came out. Apparently, the constituency party isn’t awfully well off at the moment so Archer offered to bring his own agent. Free of charge, as it were.’
Juanita’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s the scam?’
‘He just wants somebody he can trust, I suppose.’
‘Oliver’s a shit,’ said Juanita. ‘Even as a kid he was a shit, so I’m told.’
Diane shrugged. ‘Archer’s a shit. Do you think we should run the contents along the bottom or down one side?’
‘You could start off a column aligned with the The in the masthead. If you see what I mean. Actually, as an example of a first issue I suspect there ought to be something less hardline contentious up-front, less in-your-face.’
‘Oh.’ Diane was crestfallen. ‘I just had the idea, and …’
‘And it’s a really good idea, Diane, and it looks terrific, but for the dummy maybe we need to be a little pragmatic. Hey, is Pixhill married or anything? Girlfriend?’
‘Oh, really.’ Diane felt herself blush.
‘Public schoolboys together.’ Juanita raised an eyebrow. ‘Both late thirties, unattached.’
‘It’s an appealing thought,’ Diane concluded, ‘but I don’t think Archer is actually gay. Just doesn’t have regular girlfriends.’
‘Never mind, Tory Central Office’ll find him a nice fiancée before the election. Then they’ll part amicably when he wins. You watch.’
‘I don’t want to watch.’
‘No.’ Juanita lay back on the pillows. ‘I can’t help thinking we might have stopped it. And shafted the Glastonbury First movement along the way.’
Obviously meaning the Headlice thing. But as it had turned out, it was just as well they hadn’t been to the police. Wearing her Avalonian hat, Diane had made a legitimate call to Street and learned from a detective sergeant that it was no longer a murder investigation. A post mortem had revealed that the young man, now formally identified as Alan Carl Gallagher, aged twenty, missing from his home since last summer, had had a weak heart and had taken a large quantity of drugs. It was very borderline now, the sergeant said, off the record.
‘I still think somebody’s been got at,’ Juanita said. ‘You can’t just dismiss head injuries.’
‘They virtually have.’
The sergeant had said the injuries were not sufficiently serious to have caused Alan’s death. He might have been in a fight; he could just as easily have been stumbling around stoned out of his head and been superficially struck by a car. Or walked into a tree and then staggered back into his bus. Driven it into the woods because he couldn’t see where the hell he was going. None of the travellers they’d spoken to had admitted knowing him, but then they wouldn’t, would they? As for the false number plates on the bus, well, it was hard to find any of these hippy wrecks with genuine plates.
‘Was it his own bus?’
‘I don’t know,’ Diane said. ‘I haven’t seen it.’
It would be easy to tell. If, for instance, there were yellow stripes under some of the black. She’d been thinking a lot about the bizarre episode with the girl, Hecate, and the children with their spray cans. Somebody had told them to spray the bus black. To make it less conspicuous, less identifiable?
‘I think the travellers killed him,’ she said.
There’d been bad magic on the Tor that night. Colonel Pixhill would have understood, would have recognised what she’d seen in the sky. And again in the fire.
Powys was waiting for Diane in reception, a styrofoam cup in his hand. In a baggy sweater and jeans, he still looked a lot like his picture on the back of The Old Golden Land, although he must have been ever so young when that came out. At school, other girls had photos of Tom Cruise in their lockers; she dreamed about dishy J. M. Powys, earth-mysteries writer. How could she not trust him now?
