The Chalice

FIFTEEN

The rain was easing as Juanita walked quickly along High Street. She'd made up her mind: she would ring Jim once more and then take a drive up there.

She caught sight of her reflection in the darkened window of the veggie-bar. From a distance of five feet, in an almost sophisticated ensemble, under an umbrella, backlit by the golden streetlamp, she could almost be a refined version of the sylph with the headdress on the front of that long-ago Avalonian.

Maybe she ought to change before going to Jim's.

The door of the former Holy Thorn Ceramics – its sign had gone – opened suddenly, making her heart race, some primitive part of her quite ready to see the goddess standing there in all her dark glory.

But it was only Tony Dorrell-Adams and a suitcase.

'Tony?'

He scowled at first, then saw her, the way she was dressed.

'Oh. Hi, Juanita. You look… normal.'

'Thanks.'

'You know what I mean.' She could almost feel the accumulated sorrow and the bafflement vibrating around him.

'Yes. I do. I'm sorry, Tony, I really am.'

'I bet you are.'

His car was parked by the kerb, an old Cavalier hatchback. He put his suitcase on the wet pavement, released the rear door.

'Look,' Juanita said. 'I'm not part of this, you know.'

'You're a woman. That makes you part of it.'

'Why don't you come over to the shop, have a cup of tea? Talk about it? You can't leave like this. Can't just give up.'

'Watch me,' Tony said. 'I've been given the car. Wasn't that kind? I get custody of the car so I've got the means to remove myself. It would be appreciated if I do this quietly, while everybody, including my wife, is in the protest meeting.'

Tony threw the suitcase into the boot and slammed the door, lamp-lit drops ricocheting into the night like angry sparks.

'This stinks, Tony.'

'Oh, no. This is Glastonbury. It's too holy to stink.'

Tony wiped rain out of his eyes. Probably rain.

'Where will you go?'

'Back to teaching, I expect. I'll find something. Naturally, I'll fight the cow for everything I can get. She wants to keep this place open, she'll have to get some money from her precious Sisters of the fucking Cauldron. Not that anybody's going to want to buy pot goddesses with big… I'm sorry, I'm sorry. OK, maybe you weren't involved. In which case. I'd watch my back if I were you.'

'They can't touch me.'

'No?' He looked her in the eyes, half pitying. 'They can touch anybody, destroy anything. Christ, I used to think we were ultimately inseparable, Domini and me. Meeting of minds, spiritually attuned. Good sex. Bit of a blip, stupid fling that meant nothing, but this was going to be where we got it all together again. That chap who works in your shop…'

'Jim.'

'Jim, yeah. He said last night that this was the last place you should come to repair your marriage. Wise man. There should be barbed wire around this town.'

'Come and have a drink.'

'No. I've got to get out of here.' He wiped his eyes again; it certainly wasn't rain this time. 'I don't claim to understand any of this. I won't be able to explain it to anyone. I wish I could, but I can't.'

'Just hang on a minute, OK? One minute.'

Juanita gave him the umbrella to hold and ran across the road to the bookshop. She was back inside the minute to find Tony standing at the kerb, arms by his side, the umbrella pointing at the pavement. Soaked through and he didn't seem even to have noticed it was raining. She shoved the book into his cold, damp hands.

'What's this?'

'You said you wished you understood. It might help.'

He peered at the book, 'I can't see'

'It's Colonel Pixhill's Diary.'

'Oh. That.' He didn't seem impressed. 'Domini had one, threw it away.'

'People do,' Juanita said. 'Some people do. He can make you feel very depressed. Until something like this happens and then maybe he's the guru you've been searching for. I'm not even supposed to sell it to people unless they specifically ask, so I'm giving it to you. Read it when you get to wherever you're going.'

'Harlow, Essex. Harlow New Town. My parents live there. No legends. No history to speak of. A real sanctuary. Thanks. Thanks for the book.' Tony raised a hand, unsmiling, climbed into his Cavalier and started the engine.

But it was a while before he could pull out into the road, and a while before Juanita could cross it. Because of the sudden traffic.

From a distance, it looked like a motorbike. When she saw what it was, Juanita went weak.

A bus with only one headlight and an engine like a death-rattle. Then a converted ambulance with NATIONAL ELF SERVICE across its windscreen. And then a hump-back delivery van, the kind the Post Office used to have, only with a window punched in the side. And then an old hearse. And more of the same, gasping and limping through the endless rain, a mobile scrapyard.

Oh no.

Juanita shrank into the Holy Thorn doorway, both hands around the umbrella stem. Holding the thing in front of her like a riot-shield, as they rumbled past and clattered past and groaned past, under the diffident, crane-necked gaze of the seen-it-all Glastonbury streetlamps.

The convoy from hell.

The umbrella shook rigidly in Juanita's hands. A sick ritual on the Tor, followed by a death. And they had the nerve, the arrogance, to come back.

Maybe they'd returned for the meeting – that was all poor old Woolly needed.

But no. She watched them proceed like a ramshackle funeral cortege, along High Street. For Chilkwell Street. For Wellhouse Lane. And the Tor.

The house lights dipped dramatically and Archer Ffitch became a powerful silhouette against a pure white rectangle.

He was suddenly so much like their father. Because all you could see was his shape, thicker but no hint of fat. Because you couldn't see their mother's moist lips and their mother's grey eyes. Because, like Father, he seemed at his most relaxed standing up, or erect on a hunter. And he was awfully relaxed at the moment.

'I want to show you some pictures,' he said. 'I want to show you a possible solution. But I want, first of all, to make it clear that I am acting here not as a politician but as a concerned resident of this area. What I am about to outline is a preliminary proposal, to be tossed around the democratic arena, adjusted, refined and perhaps, at the end of the day – who can tell? – rejected. I hope this will not be the case, because I believe it is the only way to correct an unhealthy imbalance in this fine old town.'

The hall was hushed.

'I believe,' said Archer, 'that the only solution to the problem must lie in restricting the activities of hippies, travellers and undesirables, without in any way diminishing the rights of local people.'

Archer lifted a hand and a picture appeared on the screen behind him: the top of Glastonbury Tor, the St Michael tower ruling the screen from top to bottom.

'The Tor,' said Archer, 'is the property of the National Trust, a body responsible for making our nation's heritage accessible to the general public, and none of us would wish that to be otherwise.'

The next picture was an aerial photograph, looking down on the St Michael tower and the discoloured grass around it.

'I have been unable to establish,' said Archer, 'precisely how many tons of earth have been replaced here in recent years because of erosion caused by human feet. Or how many sheep have been killed by uncontrolled dogs. I would hate to estimate how many tons of human excreta have remained unburied by people flouting the fairly unenforceable laws about camping out on the Tor. And there are no records of how many innocent people – and children – have been disturbed or disgusted by the most shameless and perverse sexual shenanigans taking place in full public view. Is this – I ask you now – what we expect of a National Trust site?'

The response was immediate and deafening.

Diane didn't reply; she was struggling with a terrible sensation of foreboding. Oh, Archer would be canonised, all right. Archer was very good at sincerity.

The slide changed to a less dramatic picture: a close-up of an Ordnance Survey map intersected by hand drawn black lines. Archer tapped the map on the screen with a pen.

'Let us first of all ask ourselves why these members of what they like to describe as an Alternative society flock like lemmings to this tiny hill. It is because of an unfortunate legacy.'

Archer paused.

A memory came to Diane of a Christmas when she was seven or eight, a Boxing Day afternoon spent hiding in her bedroom, trying to read her book and blank out the sound of the hunting horn. She'd fallen asleep in her mother's old rocking chair and awoken to find…

'… a legacy of nonsense from that most unstable of decades, the nineteen-sixties, when a so-called culture founded upon psychedelic drugs and led, I imagine, by bearded gurus from Tibet decided that the Tor was A Place of Power… where many so-called ley-lines intersect. The fact that no archaeologist or anyone with even basic common sense gives any credence whatever to this famous rubbish…'

He would know, of course, that the person in Glastonbury most obsessed with leys was Councillor Woolly Woolaston, whose reputation would be seriously eroded tonight.

Diane briefly closed her eyes.

And remembered half waking in her mother's chair that Boxing Day and stroking fur. She'd wanted a dog as a pet; her father had refused; he said dogs were for working and hunting, dogs were for outside.

Archer was laughing. '… gullible and rootless people who believe that they can get 'high' on Glastonbury Tor. With or without the use of mind-altering drugs. Is this what that august body, the National Trust, exists to promote?'

This was just awful.

'Now the Tor,' Archer said, 'is, as my friend Mr Daniel pointed out a few minutes ago, a pretty place on a summer's day. A place where, doubtless, some of you would like to take your children or visiting relatives, were you not afraid of what they might see.'

'Or tread in,' Griff Daniel commented from a few yards along the stage.

'Quite. I'm also quite sure that none of you would wish to go there at night, or on some pagan solstice, or for the purpose of altering your perceptions… So let me outline to you a comprehensive plan.'

As a new slide appeared on the screed, Diane remembered sleepily stroking the fur in her lap, wondering vaguely why her skirt was wet and her hand sticky. Oh dear, perhaps the puppy had…

But it hadn't been a puppy at all. It was a fox. Or rather its head. A trophy from the Boxing Day hunt. One of its eyes was missing. Its jaws had been prised open. Its needly teeth gleamed with blood. Blood from its neck had soaked through Diane's Christmas kilt.

The old image brought tears of horror and pity to Diane's eyes. She blinked them away, tried to focus on the screen. The picture on the screen was not of Glastonbury, but it was instantly familiar.

Diane remembered Archer denying having anything to do with the fox's head, denying it with such appalled vigour and absolute sincerity that, by the end of the afternoon, Father was almost accusing Diane of having planted it to get her brother in trouble. Blooded at last, eh? Archer had whispered in her ear as they left the room.

On the screen, storm clouds glowered over the grey sentinels of the world's most famous prehistoric monument, Stonehenge.

'No…' She clapped a hand over her mouth.

He couldn't. He couldn't be suggesting…

But Archer didn't do anything he wasn't fairly sure of. Archer hated the thought of ever looking silly. Which, always the picture of sober sincerity, he never did. Diane stood up slowly, her back to the rear wall. She fell as cold as marble. Realising she'd always hated him; it just never seemed right to loathe your only brother.

Archer explained his proposal simply and concisely, connecting with the fears and prejudices of his audience. Diane felt an undercurrent of excitement in the hall, as if each person was linked to the people on either side, to the front and the rear, by a thin copper wire. With the ceiling lights out and Stonehenge still on the screen, she looked down and thought she saw a softly glowing net, a grid of pulsating energy.

She felt an utter despair. And something else that squirmed inside her, wanting to get out.

'So you see,' Archer was saying, 'there is a very clear and obvious precedent for these restrictions. All I need to know at this stage, is… do you, the people of Glastonbury, want it to happen?'

'Too bloody true,' a man shouted out. 'Soon as possible.'

And there were other cries of affirmation and support. A mindless response, the most alarming sound Diane could ever remember having heard.

She couldn't see Archer's eyes across the darkened hall, but she knew they were focused on her. As their gazes locked, triumph with dismay, an odd smell came to her: salty, earthy and fleshy. Not the fresh-blood, violent-death smell of the poor fox. More like the inside of an old- fashioned butcher's shop. There was a horrible warmth to it and a sour kind of voracious life; it pulled at her stomach; she felt disgusted, and somehow strengthened.

On her other side, in the dark canal of the aisle, she knew that a shadow-form crouched, could feel it rising with her own bruising fury.

She moved into the aisle. At once, something swirled around her denimed legs. There was a roaring in her head.

The stage seemed miles away, the screen a distant window. 'Archer!' Diane called out in a voice so loud and precise that it scared her.

Silence made a hollow in the hall. Diane felt as if she was standing in mercury.

Oh my God, what am I doing?

Her jaw fell. She felt limp and soaked with sweat.

'I…'

Heads turned. People recognising her at once.

'I…'

No…

She could feel a cool but urgent pressure. A hand on her wrist. Resist, it said. Resist.

'Nanny?'

People began to laugh as Diane turned, stumbled and ran sobbing from the hall.

Juanita called Jim, for the eighth time that day, on the cordless from the upstairs sitting room. Come on, come on, answer the damned phone, you stupid, proud, opinionated old bastard.

The phone still ringing out, she went through into her bedroom, put on the lights, flung herself on the bed, kicked off her shoes. She was still wearing her grey jacket, all dressed up for Woolly's meeting. She started to laugh, halfway to tears.

No answer. He might be in bed. He might be lost in his painting. He might simply be drunk. But with the travellers camped in Wellhouse Lane, there was no way she was going up there to find out.

Juanita lay back, suddenly fatigued, and gazed moodily at the picture on the wall opposite. The table lamps either side of the double bed were perfectly placed to bring out the subtleties of Jim's twilight masterpiece, the tight red thread over the Somerset Levels.

She lay on the bed, half closing her eyes so that there was nothing but that rosy slit and she thought, Sorry Jim. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…

He rumbled himself into his old khaki shirt, covering his bare chest. Stood there feeling very confused. And not too well. His throat was burning. The thick air was full of flitting shadows, so was his head, and it ached dully.

Where had he been?

His palette lay on the edge of the worktable. He saw that all the colours on it were dark. There was a smell of turps, more than a smell; he could taste it; he could taste the buggering turps.

The bottle of white spirit was on the floor at his feet, upright but empty. Jim tell to his knees beside the bottle.

He gagged, wiped the back of a hand across his lips, smelled it. Clutched at his throat. He'd finished the whisky… and drunk the buggering turps. He tried to spit; his throat was too dry. He had a sickening image of his tongue, like a flattened toad on the floor of his mouth. He covered his face with his paint-smeared hands and sank to his knees, sending the empty turps bottle skittering away.

What had he done?

As he tried to pick himself up, long-suppressed images of his old life burst like blisters. In the spouting pus of memories, he saw the wife he'd deserted: bloody Pat, poor bloody Pat, all she wanted was for him to be ordinary, pursue his pension, relegate his art to evening classes, Jim's hobby – how he'd hated that word; nobody in Glastonbury had a paltry hobby; coming to Glastonbury was a buggering quest.

For a Grail.

Jim staggered to his feet, self-disgust and revulsion fluttering frantically in his stomach, as if he'd swallowed a small bird. His insides felt raw, abraded, as if the wings of the bird were tipped with razor blades. He looked round for something to touch, either to prove he wasn't asleep or to wake him up. All he saw were the three metal easels in a Tor shape.

With a feeling of explicit foreboding, Jim advanced on the conical formation, the three canvases, which should be aglow with the holy fire of dusk.

All three were black. He'd painted every square buggering inch black.

Jim began to weep. Went to the fire for warmth, where he found all the logs reduced to black, smouldering husks.

Then where was the light coming from? How could he even see the black paintings? In a last, vague hope that this was all a sour, whisky dream, he stumbled to the sunset window.

And saw… the rearing ash tree, something hanging from a branch… two yellow moons, the source of the bleak light in the room.

He saw – it couldn't be, it just couldn't be – that the yellow moons were the weak and vapid headlights of an old black bus, parked where no bus could possibly park, in his small, square garden, surrounded on four sides by a horn-beam hedge.

Jim cowered, hands over his face. He'd gone mad.

Black. Black, black, black – sound of the rain slapping at the windows. He turned his back on the window, peered in dread through his fingers at a room which was cold and drab and full of failure, reeking of regret.

He began to moan aloud. He'd broken through the darkness expecting images of such intensity that they would fuel his paintings forever, make them burn with Rembrandt's inner light and vibrate with the wild energy swirling in Van Gogh's cypresses. So that Juanita, his beautiful Juanita, would be drawn into the vortex. He'd thought she was already there with him, thought he'd seen her face in the sunset window.

But there was nothing, after all, on the other side of the darkness but a darker darkness, and he'd done something very bad. Killed it. He'd killed a beautiful dusk.

Jim began to scrabble in the hearth, among the ash and cinders and the exhausted, flaking logs grizzling on the stone. Had to get it back. The sacred energy. Had to relight the dusk.

Impulsively, he snatched a handful of greasy paint-rags from the worktable, thrust them into the fireplace. For kindling, he snapped his long brushes, the ones oozing black paint, the black he'd avoided for years, like Monet.

It was the right thing to do. A sacrifice.

He groped for the matches on the mantelpiece, struck in three at once and watched the paint-rags flare and hiss until the broken brushes began to crackle.

Logs. He needed more logs. Apple logs from local orchards which burned sweet and heady. Avalonian sunset.

Behind his eyes he saw his lovely Juanita as she'd been the day he'd first arrived in Glastonbury, his middle-aged life a fresh canvas. He saw her leaning in the doorway of her shop: summer dress, brown arms, those gorgeous, ironic, frankly sensual brown eyes.

Woman of Avalon.

He was warmed. For him, she was always standing in the doorway of her shop.

But the flames were fading; he needed flames to feed her image.

Jim picked up the coffee table he used as a palette, swung it round by the legs and smashed it into one of the supporting pillars. Smashed it again and again into the iron-hard oak until the table was in fragments. Then fed the pieces to the fire, and watched the oil and varnish flash golden.

He pulled out a flaming table-leg, held it aloft like a sconce. He was the god of the Tor again.

Was there time? Oh yes.

Jim felt almost triumphant as he plunged the blazing log into the nearest canvas. No blackness now. He watched Juanita's warm, brown eyes glistening with compassion. She held out her arms and he reached for her.

The cottage began to fill with a red fog. Through it, he saw the generous mouth, darkly sparkling eyes under the tumble of hair.

Until, with a soft smile of regret, she turned away and walked back into her bookshop.

Sorry Jim. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

He watched the shop door slowly close.