The Chalice

Prologue

September, 1919

There she was, lying across the bed, stretched out corner to corner, as though this could relieve the cramp inside caused by the way she'd been used… trifled with and slighted, yes, and humiliated

… as if, as a young woman, she was natural prey, just another little hopping bird in the hawk's garden.

Oh! She might have felt better beating her fists into the pillow, but she'd never have excused herself for that. Not the behaviour of a trained psychoanalyst.

All the same, she would remember telling herself that if she didn't do something about it she'd quite simply implode. So perhaps that was what started the process.

It must have been going on, somewhere, while she was persuading her body into the relaxation procedure – not easy when her stupid mind insisted on re-enacting the appalling business, over and over.

Beginning with his proposal of a small adventure for her. That boyish grin through the bristly little moustache, the kind which all the men she knew seemed to have brought back from the Great War. The bantering baritone, smooth and slick as freshly buffed mahogany. 'Didn't you know, Violet? My goodness, didn't you know – that we still had it here?'

The question causes, as he knew it would, a veritable flutter in her breast.

But Violet, still suspecting some prank, says lightly that she trusts he's speaking metaphorically, as anybody with even a perfunctory knowledge of such matters is aware that the Holy Grail does not exist and never did.

At which he puts down his wine, spilling some. 'The hell it doesn't, you arrogant minx!'

'Except, of course, as a symbol. Doubtless a sexual one.'

It's a numbingly dull and sultry afternoon, summer seeping sluggishly into autumn, and she's tired of his games.

'And what would you know about symbols?' His lips twisting in amusement. 'Or sex, for that matter.'

The room is gloomy: tiny windows and those monstrous black beams. They have not discussed sex. Only violence and pain.

'As much,' she informs him casually (although she's stung by his manner and intimated by his blatant smirk), 'as any advanced student of the methods of Dr Freud.'

'Freud? That ghastly charlatan?' He laughs, oh so confident, now that his own demons are quiet. She decides not to react.

'A passing fad, Violet, you'll see,' leaning back behind his desk, handsome as the devil 'But please – I'm intrigued – define for me this symbolism.'

What's his game now? Oh, she must not give in to the welling hostility. Or, worse, to that other undignified stirring which has made the leather seat feel suddenly hot where she sits. Most humiliating and hardly the response of a trained psychoanalyst.

'So…' He trails a finger through the spilled wine. 'Let's look at this. Joseph of Arimathea… uncle of Christ, provider of his tomb… begs from Pontius Pilate the cup used at the Last Supper and perhaps to collect the blood from the Cross…'

'Yes, a pretty legend, I accept that.'

'And then carries it with him on his missionary voyage to a place in the west of Britain, where a strange, pointed hill can be seen from the sea.'

'Yes.' She's seen it herself – in dreams – as if from the sea: the mystical, conical Tor on the holy Isle of Avalon.

And although she would never admit this to him, she's still secretly thrilled by the legend and has been many times to the place where Joseph was said to have buried the Grail, causing a spring to bubble up, the Chalice Well, which to this day runs red. Chalybeate, of course. Iron in the water.

'Obviously,' she says, 'I would not dispute that Joseph and his followers came to Avalon as missionaries. Or, indeed, that he was responsible for building the first Christian church in England. This is historically feasible.'

'How very accommodating of you. Violet.'

'Although I rather suspect the story that Joseph had once brought the child Jesus here is no more than a romantic West Country myth illuminated by the poet Blake.'

He says nothing.

'And surely, what Joseph introduced to these islands was a faith, not a… a trinket.'

That came out badly, sounding, even to her own ears, more than a little churlish. He smiles at her again, looking replete with superior wisdom.

She rallies. 'The symbolism is clear. The idea of a chalice is well known in Celtic mythology – the Cauldron of Ceridwen, a crucible of wisdom, a symbol of transformation.

Upon which, the legend of the Holy Grail, seen from a twentieth-century perspective, is obviously no more than a transparent Christian veneer.'

'In which case,' he says, musingly, after a pause, 'the Grail would be even more significant, carrying the combined power of two great traditions, Christian and Pagan. Would it not?'

'If there was such a thing, no doubt it would.'

'If there was such a thing…' He considers this for a while, hands splayed on the desk, eyes upraised to the blackened beams. 'If there was such a thing, and it had been secretly held by the monks of Glastonbury until the Reformation… ' He stops.

His eyes are suddenly alight with zealot's fire.

'Oh, really.' Violet almost sniffs. 'Monks were always forging relics to improve the status of their abbeys. Anyway…' Pushing back her chair and standing up. 'I'm a psychologist. Not an historian.'

He also stands, but remains behind the desk. He seems to be considering something. 'Very well. What if I were to show it you? What if I were to show you the Grail itself?'

He's still wearing his uniform. Some of the men wear theirs because they have nothing else. But his wardrobe could hardly be bare or gone to moth. No, he continues to sport his captain's uniform because he knows its power. Over women, of course.

'Ha,' Violet says. Uncertainly.

In spite of herself, in spite of the teachings of Dr Freud and what he has to say about the all consuming power of sex, she is beginning, as she follows this man out of the study and down a dark, low passage, to feel quite ridiculously excited.

In those days, Violet hadn't been terrifically good at containing emotion. Well, she was still a young woman, somewhat less experienced than her confidence might suggest.

She knew she was not what most people would call beautiful and that some men were intimidated by her direct manner. But, others – and quite often the better-looking ones, the ones whose arms might have been around slimmer waists – would seek her out. Faintly puzzled about why they found her attractive.

There had always been two sides to her, which she equated with the Celtic and the Saxon: the airy feyness and the no-nonsense earthiness. Although she'd been born in north Wales, she considered herself (because of her Yorkshire steel-working family) to be chiefly Saxon, as suggested by her flaxen hair and her solid, big-boned body. But she'd always needed the phantasmal fire of the Celts, their inbred cosmic perspective.

These two aspects had fallen unexpectedly into harmony over the past few years, during the Great War; all Europe might have been in roiling, smoking turmoil, but Violet had been curiously at peace.

Not that she was any great pacifist. She'd have quite liked to have been at the Front. To be tested. But the only women's work there was nursing, and she was the first to admit she didn't have the patience for it. Not then.

But staying at home had been a revelation. Elements of what she was had come together in an unexpected way. Serving in the women's land army, raising the crops, feeding the troops: fulfilment in a healthy, practical way, but also wonderfully symbolic. With all the young, strong men away in the forces, England – the essential England, of holy hills and fertile meadows – was at last in the care of women. The girls of the land army had taken on the traditional role of Mother Goddess.

It had changed her. She still found Freud stimulating and exciting and the logic of his methodology unassailable, as far as it went. But there were areas of experience which psychoanalysis could not unveil. And she had lifted up the hem of the curtain and seen wonders.

However, to become truly initiated into the Mysteries, one needed the guidance of human beings who had been there before. And some of them could be… well, pretty unsavoury types in other respects. The sacred quest for enlightenment, it appeared, would often bring out the very worst in people.

One had to go jolly carefully, keeping one's eyes open and, quite frankly, one's legs together.

'Go on then… hold it.'

Vapour is rising from a small candle on the block of stone between them.

'No… please… this is not right!'

'You're wrong. It's absolutely right. Now. For me. For us, Violet…'

It lies in a black cloth between his hands.

'Grasp it.'

'No!'

'Clasp it to your breast.' He extends his arms, the cloth and what lies in it.

'Please… Its black, it's evil… I don't… She's starting to sob.

'But it's what you want, my dear. It's what you've always wanted. This is 1919 and you're a free and enlightened woman… a trained psychoanalyst. Primitive superstition can't touch you now.' Standing between her and the way out, he adds lazily, 'And take off your clothes, why don't you?'

And so Violet was in a fairly hellish state when she flung her soiled body on the bed, making its springs howl. In retrospect she might have been better off rampaging through the grounds, taking it out on the last of the weeds.

The bed had a light green eiderdown, and the wallpaper was salmon pink. Colours of summer. A pleasant room on a sullen autumn afternoon. But it didn't calm her down today. The effects of such abuse did not just quietly fade.

There was an essential conflict here. One could adopt the Christian attitude, turn the other cheek and walk away: very well, I tried to help you… I counselled you, taught you how to control your nightmares from the War… and you took advantage of me. Nevertheless, not my place to be judgemental. As a psychologist.

Ha. Hardly good enough was it? Violet sighed, lay back and let her eyelids fall. The pillows were soft and cool. The back of her head felt heavy, like a bag of potatoes. She let her arms flop by her sides. The anger, still burning somewhere below her abdomen, was at odds, though not uncomfortably so, with the supine state of her body. She was, surprisingly, reaching a state of relaxation. But then, she was getting rather good at that.

Of course…

Violet smiled.

…one could simply allow oneself to go absolutely and utterly berserk.

She began a simple visualisation, letting loose her thoughts, to roam the wildest of terrain, those places of high cliffs and crashing waves, black and writhing trees against a thundery sky. As her body lay on its bed, on a sallow, sunless afternoon in the mellow, autumnal Vale of Avalon, her thoughts stalked the wintry wasteland of cruel Northern myths. In search of a suitably savage instrument of revenge. Oh yes.

She was starting to enjoy her anger and felt no guilt about this. Daylight dripped on to her eyelids like syrup. And in the cushiony hinterland of sleep, in those moments when the senses mingle and then dissolve, when fragments of whispered words are sometimes heard and strange responses sought- Violet's rage fermented pleasurably into the darkest of wines.

'Good dog.'

Its fur was harsh as a new hairbrush. It brushed her left arm, raising goose bumps

It lay there quite still, as relaxed as Violet had been, but with a kind of' coiled and eager tension about it. She could feel it's back alongside her, its spine against her cotton shift. It was lean, but it was heavy. And it was beginning to breathe.

She didn't really question its presence at first. It was simply there. She raised her left hand to pat it. Then the hand suddenly seized up.

So cold.

And Violet was aware that the room had gone dark.

Not dark as if she'd simply fallen asleep and the afternoon had slid away into evening. Dark as in a draining of the light, of the life-force vibrating behind colours. The most horribly negative kind of darkness.

She opened her eyes fully. It made no difference. The wallpaper was a deepening grey and the fogged light inside the window frame thick and stodgy, like a rubber mat. The eiderdown beneath her was as hard and ungiving as a cobbled street.

The fear had come upon her slowly and was all the worse for that. It chilled her insides like a cold-water enema. A rank odour soured the room. The air seemed noxious with evil, almost-visible specks of it above her like a cloud of black midges.

Drawing a breath made her body lurch against the creature lying motionless beside her in the gloom.

And motionless it stayed, for a moment.

Violet knew what she had to do. She lay as still as she could, gathering breath and her nerve.

Then she put out her left hand. Out and down. Until her fingers found the eiderdown, hard as worn stone. There was an almost liquid frigidity around her hand, over the wrist, almost to the elbow, like frogspawn in a half-frozen pond.

It was very hard to turn her head, as though her neck was in a vice, everything she held holy crying out to her not to look.

But look she did. She managed to turn her head just an inch, enough to focus on her left shoulder and follow her arm down and down to where the wrist… vanished.

Somewhere through the greyness she could detect a dim image of her fingers on the eiderdown, while the beast's gaseous body swirled around the flesh of her arm.

As Violet began to pant with fear, it turned its grey head, and the only white light in the room was in its long, predator's teeth and the only colour in the room was the still, cold yellow of its eyes.

I am yours.