The Chalice

EIGHT

Towers. Everywhere in Glastonbury you were overlooked by towers.

Juanita hurried across High Street. As an established tradesperson, she was permitted a reserved space on the central car park below the fortified Norman tower of St John's.

Like St Michaels on the Tor, over half a mile away, the town's principal church had its own colour chart of moods. In the sunshine of late afternoon, it could be mellow, sometimes almost golden with its four-cornered Gothic crown. But on a dull day it faded to grey and was outshone by the rusty-red tiles on the roofs of the shops and houses packed around it.

And at night it brooded behind its walls and railings. When you looked up, you could no longer make out the four crosses supporting the weather vanes on the highest pinnacles and there was not that sense of the sacred which Glastonbury Abbey always seemed to retain in its ruins, day or night.

There was also a sort of concrete, walled apron where groups of young pilgrims gathered to smoke or chant to bongos and tablas. Which seemed fairly innocent during the day but could be rather menacing after dark

It was also a good place to get yourself mugged, so Juanita very nearly screamed when a shadow moved.

'Oh, my dear, I'm so sorry. Did I scare you?'

'Not at all.' Juanita put a hand to her chest and swallowed. 'Jesus, Verity.'

The little woman wore a quilted body warmer and elflike velvet hat. She carried a shopping bag, even though almost nothing was open.

'Nothing will happen to you here, Juanita. It's a very warm and spiritual spot. And so egalitarian. And the young people know that, and they neither threaten us nor feel threatened.'

'Right,' Juanita said uncertainly. Sometimes you wandered into the church itself and it would be full of young New Age types of indeterminate religion, hugging each other and smiling at everyone. And OK, nobody had actually been mugged in the area recently.

Except, of course, by Verity, who prowled the streets like a small cat because she was lonely when the tourist season was over and there was nobody to stay with her.

'Well, I'm just going to pick up Jim Battle,' Juanita explained, because Verity would keep you talking here for bloody ever. It was rather sad, really, this middle-class, New Age bag lady. 'Going to the pub.'

'I must go too, Juanita,' Verity said surprisingly and actually hefted her shopping bag and half turned. But then she dropped the bait neatly behind her. 'I can't put it off forever.'

Oh God. 'Put what off, Verity?' Juanita was trying not sound over-patient.

'Silly of me, I know. But it's the Abbot's night, you see.'

'Ab…? Oh. Whiting.' Juanita didn't want to hear this at all. Some thoughts were just too damned creepy to carry around with you through darkened streets.

'Poor man,' Verity said. 'He comes for comfort, and there's nothing we can do. They'll still hang him tomorrow.'

Juanita shuddered, couldn't help it. When you knew the circumstances, it wasn't very funny. Verity managed Meadwell, Glastonbury's gloomiest guest house. Abbot Whiting was said to have spent his last night there before he was executed in the king's name. And then they took the Abbey apart and Avalon's dark age began. Every year the Pixhill Trust held a formal dinner in the Abbot's honour.

'I wonder', Verity said wistfully, 'if he will ever be at peace.'

'Well, who knows, Verity. But there's not a lot you can do about it, is there? Look, I have to…'

People say that when there is spiritual unity in the town again, when the Christians and the pagans come together in harmony…'

'Verity,' Juanita said gently, 'old Whiting was a Benedictine monk with no documented pagan leanings.'

'But he was a Catholic, my dear. Therefore a follower of the Goddess Mary. In destroying the Abbeys, Henry VIII was…'

'Yeah, I know. It was a sexist, male-domination trip.'

Propaganda from The Cauldron, the town's fastest-growing goddess group. It was almost a New-Age Women's Institute these days with even people like Verity going to the Outer Circle meetings and lectures. And fashionable since the arrival of the actress, Dame Wanda Carlisle, who was apparently discovering the goddess in herself. They kept urging Juanita to join, but it seemed to have an underlying political agenda. Anyway, the idea of an outfit led by someone calling herself Ceridwen after the Celtic harridan goddess…

'You want to be careful there, Verity. That woman's on a power-trip.'

Verity smiled nervously; although Juanita saw only the gleam of her tiny teeth, she could imagine all the cracks in the walnut face of someone who seemed to have been born to be sixty and sprightly. Verity, surely, was no latent pagan; she could be observed every Sunday toddling along to both morning and evening services at St John's.

'Power,' Verity said. 'Yes. The power to heal and to help people find their way. The Church is embracing spiritual healing again. The Bishop is talking to the alternative worshippers. Glastonbury is becoming whole again. So they say.'

'Do they?" Juanita was slightly incredulous. 'Jesus.'

'If we could help the Abbot find eternal peace after nearly five centuries, wouldn't that be wonderful?'

'Terrific. But if I were you I think I'd just go to sleep and try not to think about it.'

'Oh no! It's my duty to receive the Abbot. Who, thank God, I do not… See…'

'Yes. Well.' Juanita eased herself away. 'Just you look after yourself, Verity.'

She was glad when she'd crossed the shadowed car park and was safely behind the wheel of the Volvo. If Verity was a little unravelled, she was at least in the right place for it.

Dear God, Juanita thought, I used to revel in all this, the excitement of it. A spiritual Las Vegas. The thrill of metaphysical stakes.

A lot had changed Or maybe it was just her. Her agitation threshold had lowered for a start. She worried.

About growing old alone. About the business. About whether selling mystical books was a good and worthy profession any more in a town where mysticism had become a tourist commodity. About Jim Battle, who ate and drank unwisely and what would happen if he ever collapsed with a heart attack over his easel in a little cottage even Hansel and Gretel wouldn't have discovered.

About whether this fourteen-year-old car would start.

'Come… on!'

The Volvo did, though without much enthusiasm, and Juanita was able to get into some serious worrying. About Diane.

Dotty. Confused. Mixed-up. That's all.

That's all?

She edged past the rear entrance of The George and Pilgrims and round into High Street. Followed all the way by Lord Pennard's voice down a telephone nearly ten years ago. A cold voice, a voice honed by Gillette.

You, Mrs Carey. I hold you entirely responsible.

No. She wasn't having that. This town was a positive bazaar of the mystical. If it hadn't been Carey and Frayne it would have been some other bookshop.

Diane had looked so utterly forlorn, shuffling in that first day, another teenage waif appealing for a holiday job. If you could have fat waifs. What was she supposed to say? Be gone with you, you overprivileged hussy?

You didn't know she was maladjusted? Don't tell me you close your ears to the local gossip, Mrs Carey.

Juanita drove past the venerable facade of The George and Pilgrims, where modern pilgrims with Gucci luggage slept in rooms with four-postered beds and sloping walls. Sometimes she drank at the Pilgrims with Jim and the others, amusing themselves by embellishing the Glastonbury legends for earnest German tourists, telling them a clear UFO sighting over the Tor was virtually guaranteed at just before four a.m. on every second Sunday, especially in winter.

As it happened, Juanita had never actually seen a UFO, which was a pretty shameful admission in Glastonbury.

Diane of course, claimed she'd always seen balls of light in the sky over the Tor. Didn't everybody see them?

And the gossips said. It's in the genes, isn't it? Always a danger with the upper classes. Interbreeding. You'll always get one like that, every couple of generations. And they watched her padding down the street. Lord Pennard's strange daughter, and they called her Lady Loony.

It was, admittedly, at the Carey and Frayne bookshop that Diane had discovered the works of Dion Fortune, the Greatest Woman Magician of All Time. Oh, Juanita, I'm so excited. Dion Fortune – Diane Ffitch. Same initials! Diane's nose in a book, munching healthy snacks. Nobody should get fat, for God's sake, on quorn and tofu and carob covered cereal bars.

She'd have found those books anyway, sooner or later. In Glastonbury, the nutter's Mecca, where gateways to altered states seemed as close as the nearest bus stop. Where on nights like this, you could almost see the subtle merging of the layers, the way you could in Jim's paintings.

Further up the street, only one shop was fully lit: Holy Thorn Ceramics, owned by thirtyish newcomers Anthony and Domini Dorrell-Adams. The lights were on because the Dorrell-Adamses were reorganising their window, and…

'Jesus,' Juanita said.

Tony and Domini were together in the window. In fact it was hard to imagine how they could be more together while fully clothed and standing up – Domini arching backwards and you could almost hear the moans.

Only in Glastonbury.

Juanita tried to smile, accelerated away to the top of the High Street. It could be a hell of an aphrodisiac, this town. Well, at first, anyway. Turning into Lambrook Street, she was ambushed by misty moments from twenty-odd years ago, when she'd left Nigel Carey (sad junkie; dead now) and she and Danny Frayne had opened the shop with about two hundred books, mostly secondhand, and a lot of posters. Danny was in publishing now, back in London. And while it still said Carey and Frayne over the shop, and they still occasionally exchanged daringly intimate letters on business notepaper, and now and then had dinner and whatnot in London, Danny – once bitten – never came back to Glastonbury.

Headlights on full-beam, Juanita drove the Volvo off left into secretive, tree-hung Wellhouse Lane, official gateway to the Tor.

Impressionable. That was Diane. Curiously innocent, perhaps deluded. That's all. But if he found she was with the New Age travellers, her father would… what? Have her committed? Juanita was convinced he'd tried something like that once. Jim was right. Lord Pennard was not a terribly nice man.

It was very dark. Juanita drove carefully up the narrowing road, scene of many a near-collision, and took a narrow right, scraping the hedge.

Where the Tor should be visible, there was a night mist like a wall. The lane swooped steeply into a tunnel of trees, and at the end of it Juanita swung sharp left into a mud-packed track until the car could go no farther.

The great ash tree leapt up indignantly, as if rudely awoken by the Volvo's headlights.

She got out. 'Jim?'

A little chillier than of late, and it'd be quite cold on the Tor. Pulling on her coat, Juanita very nearly screamed when hand patted her shoulder.

'My, my.' Jim grinned like a Hallowe'en pumpkin behind his lamp. 'We are being traditional tonight.'

'Say what you like about the Afghan.' Juanita pushed her hair inside the sheepskin. 'But it's damned warm. Help me reverse?'

Jim, also, was dressed for action. In his hat and scarf and overcoat he looked like something from The Wind in the Willows, Mole or Ratty. With Toad's physique, however and probably just as hopeless. But without Jim Battle there'd be nobody quite sane enough to turn to in this kind of crisis.

'Leave the car here, Juanita. Better off walking. Take us about twenty minutes. The old feet can virtually find their own way after all this time.'

'You sound a good deal more cheerful than you did on the phone.'

That's because I haven't been out with you at night for a good while.' She felt his smile.

'Yes. Well. Unfortunately, we won't have time for a candlelit dinner.'

'I've got a bar of chocolate.'

'We'll have it to celebrate, afterwards. How are we going to handle this, Jim?'

'Bloody hell, I thought you were supposed to be in charge. Suppose there's some sort of orgy going on up there? Wouldn't be the first time.'

'In which case, Diane'll be somewhere on the edge looking terribly embarrassed and a bit lost.'

'People do change, Juanita. Erm… before we go any further…'

'That's a myth. People don't really change at all. Sorry, Jim.'

'I was going to say, on the question of heroics…'

Juanita squeezed a bulky, overcoated arm. 'I'm not suggesting you barge into the middle of a bunch of naked squirming travellers and sling her over your shoulder.'

'No, I…'

'I mean, I know you'd do it. If I asked you.'

'Actually, I was thinking more about you. What I'm getting at is, the Tor's a funny place.'

'Tell me about it.'

'Sometimes you can get carried away. You know what I mean?'

'No.' Juanita rammed her fists into the pockets of the afghan. 'Not any more. Carried away is what I don't get.'