The Chalice

FOUR

The ancient odour had drifted in as soon as Diane wound down the van window, and it was just so… Well, she could have wept. How could she have forgotten the scent?

The van had jolted between the rotting gateposts into Don Moulder's bottom field. It had bounced over grass still ever so parched from a long, dry summer and spiky from the harvest. Diane had turned off the engine, sat back in the lumpy seat, closed her eyes and let it reach her through the open window; the faraway fragrance of Holy Avalon.

Actually, she hadn't wound down the window, as such. Just pulled out the folded Rizlas packet which held the glass in place and let it judder to its favourite halfway position. It was rather an old van, a Ford something or other – used to be white all over but she'd painted big, silly pink spots on it so it wouldn't stand out from the rest of the convoy.

The smell made her happy and sad. It was heavy with memories and was actually a blend of several scents, the first of them autumn, a brisk, mustardy tang. And then woodsmoke – there always seemed to be woodsmoke in rural Somerset, much of it applewood which was rich and mellow and sweetened the air until you could almost taste it.

And over that came the most elusive ingredient: the musk of mystery, a scent which summoned visions. Of the Abbey in the evening, when the saddened stones grew in grace and sang to the sunset. Of wind-whipped Wearyall Hill with the night gathering in the startled tangle of the Holy Thorn. Of the balmy serenity of the Chalice Well garden. And of the great enigma of the West: Glastonbury Tor.

Diane opened her eyes and looked up at the huge green breast with its stone nipple.

She wasn't the only one. All around, people had been dropping out of vans and buses, an ambulance, a stock wagon. Gazing up at the holy hill, no more than half a mile away. Journey's end for the pagan pilgrims. And for Diane Ffitch, who called herself Molly Fortune because she was embarrassed by her background, confused about her reason for returning and rather afraid, actually.

Dusk was nibbling the fringes of Don Moulder's bottom field when the last few vehicles crawled in. They travelled in smaller groups nowadays, because of the law. An old Post

Office van with a white pentacle on the bonnet was followed by Mort's famous souped-up hearse, where he liked to make love, on the long coffin-shelf. Love is the law, Mort said, Love over death.

Headlice and Rozzie arrived next in the former Bolton Corporation single decker bus repainted in black and yellow stripes, like a giant bee.

'Listen, I've definitely been here before!' Headlice jumped down, grinning eerily through teeth like a broken picket fence. He was about nineteen or twenty; they were so awfully young, most of these people. At that age, Diane thought, you could go around saying you were a confirmed pagan, never giving a thought to what it really meant.

'I mean, you know, not in this life, obviously,' Headlice said, 'In a past life, yeah?' Looking up expectantly, as though he thought mystic rays might sweep him away and carry him blissfully to the top of the holy hill. 'Hey, you reckon I was a monk?'

He felt at the back of his head. Where a monk's tonsure would be, Headlice had a swastika tattoo, re-exposed because of the affliction which had led to his extremely severe haircut and his unfortunate nickname.

Rozzie made a scoffing noise. 'More like one of the friggin' peasants what carted the stones up the hill.'

She'd told Diane that the swastika was a relic of Headlice's days as some sort of a teenage neo-fascist, neo-skinhead. Headlice, however, pointed out that the original swastika was an ancient pagan solar symbol. Which was why he'd had one tattooed on the part of him nearest the sun, see?

He turned away and kicked at the grass. His face had darkened; he looked as if he'd rather be kicking Rozzie. She was a Londoner; he was from the North. She was about twenty-six. Although they shared a bus and a bed, she seemed to despise him awfully.

'I could've been a fuckin' monk,' Headlice said petulantly. Despite the democratic, tribal code of the pilgrims, he was obviously very conscious of his background, which made Diane feel jolly uncomfortable about hers. She'd been trying to come over sort of West Country milkmaidish, but she wasn't very good at it, probably just sounded frightfully patronising.

'Or a bird,' she said. 'Perhaps you were a little bird nesting in the tower.' She felt sorry for Headlice.

'Cute. All I'm sayin' is, I feel… I can feel it here.' Punching his chest through the rip in his dirty denim jacket. 'This is not bullshit, Mol.'

Diane smiled. On her own first actual visit to the Tor – or it might have been a dream, she couldn't have been more than about three or four – there'd been sort of candyfloss sunbeams rolling soft and golden down the steep slopes, warm on her sandals. She wished she could still hold that soft, undemanding image for more than a second or two, but she supposed it was only for children. Too grown-up to feel it now.

Also she felt too… well, mature, at twenty-seven, to be entirely comfortable among the pilgrims although a few were ten or even twenty years older than she was and showed every line of it. But even the older women tended to be fey and childlike and stick-thin, even the ones carelessly suckling babies.

Stick thin. How wonderful to be stick-thin.

'What it is…' Headlice said. 'I feel like I'm home.'

'What?' Diane looked across to the Tor, with the church tower without a church on its summit. Oh no. It's not your home at all, you 're just passing through. I'm the one who's…

Home? The implications made her feel faint. She wobbled about, wanting to climb back into the van, submerge like a fat hippo in a swamp. Several times on the journey, she'd thought very seriously about dropping out of the convoy, turning the van around and dashing back to Patrick, telling him it had all been a terrible, terrible mistake.

And then she'd seen the vinegar shaker on the high chip shop counter at lunchtime and a spear of light had struck it and turned it into a glistening Glastonbury Tor. Yes! she'd almost shrieked. Yes, I'm coming back!

With company. There must be over thirty pilgrims here now, in a collection of vehicles as cheerful as an old fashioned circus. At least it had been cheerful when she'd joined the convoy on the North Yorkshire moors – that old army truck sprayed purple with big orange flowers, the former ambulance with an enormous eye painted on each side panel, shut on one side, wide open on the other. But several of the jollier vehicles seemed to have dropped out. Broken down, probably. Well, they were all frightfully old. And fairly drab now, except for Diane's van and Headlice's bee-striped bus.

Mort's hearse had slunk in next to the bus. There was a mattress in the back. Mort had offered to demonstrate Love over Death to Diane once; she'd gone all flustered but didn't want to seem uncool and said it was her period.

Mort climbed out. He wore a black leather jacket. He punched the air.

'Yo, Headlice!'

'OK, man?'

'Tonight, yeah?'

'Yeah,' said Headlice. 'Right.'

Mort wandered off down the field and began to urinate casually into a gorse bush to show off the size of his willy.

Diane turned away. Despite the unseasonal warmth, it had been a blustery day and the darkening sky bore obvious marks of violence, the red sun like a blood-bubble in an open wound and the clouds either runny like pus or fluffy in a nasty way, like the white stuff that grew on mould.

Diane said, 'Tonight?'

'Up there.' Headlice nodded reverently at the Tor where a low, knife-edge cloud had taken the top off St Michael's tower, making it look, Diane thought – trying to be prosaic, trying not to succumb – like nothing so much as a well-used lipstick sampler in Boots.

But this was the terminus. They'd travelled down from Yorkshire, collecting pilgrims en route, until they hit the St Michael Line, which focused and concentrated energy across the widest part of England. They might have carried on to St Michael's Mount at the tip of Cornwall; but, for Pagans, the Tor was the holy of holies.

'What are you – we – going to do?' Diane pulled awkwardly at her flouncy skirt from the Oxfam shop, washed-out midnight blue with silver half-moons on it.

'Shit, Mol, we're pagans, right? We do what pagans do.'

'Which means he don't know.' Rozzie cackled. Her face was round but prematurely lined, like a monkey's. Ropes of black beads hung down to her waist.

'And you do, yeah?' Headlice said.

Rozzie shrugged. Diane waited; she didn't really know what pagans did either, apart from revering the Old Gods and supporting the Green Party. They would claim that Christianity was an imported religion which was irrelevant to Britain.

But what would they actually do?

'I wouldn't wanna frighten you.' Rozzie smirked and swung herself on to the bus.

From across the field came the hollow sound of Bran, the drummer, doing what he did at every new campsite, what he'd done at every St Michael Church and prehistoric shrine along the Line: awakening the earth.

Diane looked away from the Tor, feeling a trickle of trepidation. She supposed there'd be lights up there tonight. Whether it was just the bijou flickerings of torches and lanterns, the oily glow of bonfires and campfires…

… or the other kind. The kind some people called UFOs and some said were earth-lights, caused by geological conditions.

But Diane thought these particular lights were too sort of personal to be either alien spacecraft or natural phenomena allied to seismic disturbance. It was all a matter of afterglow. Not in the sky; in your head. In the very top of your head at first, and then it would break up into airy fragments and some would lodge for a breathtaking moment in your throat before sprinkling through your body like a fine shiver.

Bowermead Hall, you see, was only three and a half miles from the town and, when she was little, the pointed hill crowned by the St Michael tower – the whole thing like a wine-funnel or a witch's hat – seemed to be part of every horizon, always there beyond the vineyards. Diane's very earliest sequential memory was looking out of her bedroom window from the arms of Nanny One and seeing a small, globular light popping out of the distant tower, like a coloured ball from a Roman candle. Ever so pretty, but Nanny One, of course, had pretended she couldn't see a thing. She'd felt Diane's forehead and grumbled about a temperature. What had happened next wasn't too clear now, but it probably involved a spoonful of something tasting absolutely frightful. You're a very silly little girl. Too much imagination is not good for you.

For a long time, Diane had thought imagination must be a sort of ice-cream; the lights too – some as white as the creamy blobs they put in cornets.

Years later, when she was in her teens, one of the psychologists had said to her, You were having rather a rough time at home, weren't you, Diane? I mean, with your father and your brother. You were feeling very lonely and… perhaps… unwanted, unloved? Do you think that perhaps you were turning to the Tor as a form of…

'No!' Diane had stamped her foot. 'I saw those lights. I did.'

And now the Tor had signalled to her across Britain. Called her back. But it wasn't – Diane thought of her father and her brother and that house, stiff and unforgiving as the worst of her schools – about pretty lights and candyfloss sunbeams. Not any more.