The Chalice

TWO

Standing under the swinging sign of The George and Pilgrims, Joe Powys watched Diane Ffitch walking down from Carey and Frayne, hands plunged into her coat pockets, a beret plopped on tangled brown curls, a stiff-backed folder under her arm.

She smiled shyly. 'This is awfully good of you. Although, I mean, it might actually be OK. It might just make the journey.'

'Then again, it might fall off.' He went to unlock the Mini.

'Well. Yes. I suppose so.'

Returning to the inn tonight, Powys had encountered her in the car park. Sitting in her pink-spotted van with the engine running; it was making a noise like a small aeroplane.

Diane had said, Does this mean it's sort of broken?

It was only a hole in the silencer, but it looked like a very old exhaust system. Not safe to drive it to Bristol, especially at night.

Diane squeezed into the Mini, put her folder behind the seat. 'At least, there's a place at the hospital where you can go and get a cup of tea or something. While you're waiting.'

'Or,' Powys said, 'perhaps I could pop in and see her for a couple of minutes. Just so I can tell Dan something.'

'Oh gosh.' Diane fluttered, embarrassed. 'Bit of a prob, there, actually. She won't see anyone. Well, you know, except me. She's in quite a bad way. I mean emotionally, too.'

'Yeh, I can imagine' Powys drove up High Street. The headlights of an oncoming car flash-lit a yellow poster in the window of an empty shop. It said, LET'S TAME THE TOR.

'She's feeling a lot of guilt about Jim's death. One way and another. I mean, she was sort of… sort of close to him. But I think not as close as he would've liked, if you see what I mean.'

'Oh. Right.'

'I mean, no one's saying he… you know…'

'Killed himself?'

'No one's saying that. He just seems to have got rather drunk and careless. People have been muttering about the Artistic Temperament. Meaning drink. But he actually wasn't like that. He was terribly balanced, really. Ever so stoical. Even after a few drinks.'

Diane went quiet for a while, a big girl squashed on to a tiny bucket scat in a car so small that she and Powys were almost touching.

'I do find it easy to talk to you,' she said at last. 'So I'm going to say it. I think…' She took a deep breath 'I think this was, you know… meant.'

They were leaving town. Powys saw, in his rear-view mirror, the sign that said:

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 holyest 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 hardback. 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 side-ward. '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 tunes 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.