The Chalice (33 page)

      
'He had a horrible life,' Diane said. 'He just wanted ... something
he could believe in.'

      
'Don't we all.'

      
As they walked back to the shop, Juanita found herself
thinking of Colonel Pixhill and fancied she could feel wings of foreboding
overhead, like some shadow hang-glider.

NINE

Like, say, 'ghost'

Yesterday Joe Powys had
been to Hereford library and got out everything they had on Uncle Jack Powys.
He'd brought back as many books as he'd been allowed to; they were all spread
out now on his desk back at the cottage, eight of them.

      
It was six fifteen a.m. He'd awoken in the dark thinking about
it, a little scared. Uncle Jack. Uncle bloody Jack?

      
Where did this come from? You grow up assuming a certain
kinship with one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century, there
has to be a reasonable basis for it.

      
But the more Joe Powys investigated, the more he found that
there wasn't.

      
Last night he'd called up relatives he hadn't spoken to since
he was a kid. Joe. Joe Powys. P-O-W …
your
cousin
.
That's right, Mary's son
...'

      
Feeling embarrassed as hell now. Arnold the dog sitting by his
chair, laughing at him, the way he did, with his orb-like brown eyes.

      
None of the relatives had heard of any kind of link with John
Cowper Powys. None of them remembered it being a family name So he was the only
one of them with the surname Powys? What did that say?

      
'I know what you're thinking, Arnold,' Powys said, 'I suggest
you forget it.'

      
Arnold kind of shrugged, lay down and lowered his head to his
paws.

      
One of the relatives had said.
All I remember, Joe, is for a long time we thought you must be Len's
boy. Auntie Mary never discussed it.

      
What his mum used to tell him was that his father had messed
around with bad women and they'd got divorced when he was a baby, and Uncle
Jack had looked after them until Len came along. Later, Powys had figured that
his mother and father had never been married at all, but he didn't push it,
never searched out his birth certificate - pretty sure he'd find out he was
registered under his mum's maiden name. Not Powys.

      
She used to talk about Uncle Jack until he was maybe ten. He
had memories of books by JCP on the shelves when he was small, but not when he
was old enough to read them with any understanding. His mum, in later years,
read only magazines, and when he visited her two years before she died even the
shelves had gone. Now Len was dead too.

      
That last time, when he'd asked his mother who was Uncle Jack
and she'd looked blank, he'd smiled and not pushed it - what did it matter
anyway? True, John Cowper Powys had lived not that far from Wrexham in the last
part of his life. True, his mother had been a district nurse who'd moved around
Merseyside and North Wales and might well have encountered the old bloke, maybe
even nursed him.

      
'Old' being the key word here. JCP, born in the 1870s, had
been very old when Joe was born. It really didn't seem at all likely that John
Cowper Powys was his father.

      
Over the years Powys had tossed around a few more likely
explanations. Say Mum arrives back in Wrexham with an illegitimate baby and she
needs a name for him, and there on the shelf is some book by John Cowper Powys.
Which is a nice name and doesn't sound phoney, and so maybe she becomes 'Mrs
Powys' until she marries Len.

      
So the baby who should have been Joe Morris becomes Joe Powys.
By the time she marries Len, he's nearly five years old and is used to the
name, maybe can't get his mouth so easily around Devereaux, which is Len's
name. And because it was JCP who saved her reputation when the chips were down.
Mum retains a soft spot for the old guy, and the legend of Uncle Jack, the
benefactor, is born.

      
It's a persistent kind of myth. Joe likes it. And when he
comes to write a book about mystical aspects of the British countryside, which
turns out to be a minor bestseller, and people ask him if by any chance he's
descended from one or other of the famous literary siblings, Theodore, Llewellyn
and John Cowper Powys, he ... well, he doesn't deny it. And Ben Corby never
asked in case the answer was the wrong one.

      
None of which explained the incidents of the book in the night.

      
Powys was afraid of ghosts. He didn't used to think he was. He
believed in them, believed they were just beyond the boundaries of human understanding,
and
only
just. He used to believe in
the tape-recording theory of ghosts: that they were emotional imprints on the
atmosphere, events replaying themselves over and over.

      
Therefore ghosts were harmless.

      
Harmless, harmless, harmless.

Around nine a.m., Joe
looked up from JCP's
Autobiography,
in
which Uncle Jack confesses early on to being some kind of sado-masochist -
hence the tortured figure of the self- crucifying Welshman Owen Evans in
A Glastonbury Romance
.

Powys thought.
Masochism?

      
And went to the phone, scrabbling in the desk drawer for his
contacts book. He had misgivings about this, what he might be opening up. And
having to endure the scorn, of course. But he made the call anyway.

      
And was lucky, as it happened. Brendan Donovan had just
arrived at the university. Nine a.m. Too early, surely, for really withering
rhetoric.

      
'OK, Powys,' Brendan Donovan said. 'I may possibly be able to
accommodate a five-minute argument. The full half hour would require an
appointment.'

      
Some years ago. Professor Brendan Donovan, of the Edinburgh
University department of parapsychology, had reviewed the revised, mass-market
paperback of
The Old Golden Land
for
The Scotsman
. Perhaps the most complimentary
phrase in this review had been 'whimsical drivel'. Powys, unschooled in the etiquette
traditionally observed between reviewer and reviewed, had telephoned Dr Donovan
for a meaningful discussion. Others had followed over the years. Brendan
Donovan had mellowed. Slightly.

      
'If you wish to discuss the spirit-path theory of ley-lines, with
particular reference to linear anomalies in the Peruvian desert,' he said now,
'you'll find me a touch more amenable than I may have been regarding so-called
earth-energies. Only a touch more, you understand, because ley-lines, of course,
do not exist.'

      
'Poltergeists,' Powys said bluntly.
      
'Heavens,' Donovan said. 'My weak
spot.'
      
'I know.'

      
'That is, Powys, so long as you do not attempt to try my
patience by allowing any contentious words to intrude. Like, say,
"ghost".'

      
'How about psycho-kinetic energy generated by a disturbed
adolescent?'

      
'Well-trodden ground. Much safer.'

      
'In that case, how about psycho-kinetic energy generated by
someone for whom adolescence is no more than a slightly feverish memory?'

      
'Like, who?' said Donovan.

      
'Like me.'

      
'Hmm,' Donovan said. 'Give me two minutes to summon a cup of
fortifying coffee. I shall call you back.'

Well - let's be reasonable
here - it wasn't Arnold, was it?

      
Nobody really knows what goes on down there. In the
subconscious. Nobody knows what seeds planted in the psyche of a small child
will start to germinate in the adult and with what effects.

      
OK. the trigger.

      
Joe Powys is alone, his woman has resumed her career, left him
behind in a cottage in the sticks. Subconsciously, he knows she isn't coming
back. His book has been rejected. And his home is not really
his
home; it's still Henry Kettle's, even
though Henry is dead, because Henry had identity, which Joe doesn't have any
more, maybe never did have.

      
The subconscious grows into mid-life crisis. Who is Joe Powys?
Even the guy's name isn't real!

      
The subconscious gets extremely resentful. It reverts to the
persona of a disturbed adolescent. It finds a focus for all that resentful
energy.

      
Uncle Jack.

      
Bloody Uncle Jack.

'Well, it's interesting,
Powys,' Brendan Donovan said, it possesses a certain flawed logic. However, I
still have a problem with it.'

      
'Well, of course you do. What I'm doing here is groping for
the psychological solution. I haven't said anything about the elements you don't
like - power of place, earth-force, the thinness of the veil on the Welsh
Border.'

      
'But it's there by implication, isn't it? Because the house was
the home of this water-diviner. Kettle, it is more receptive, its atmosphere
remains charged.'

      
'I didn't say that.'

      
'And therefore is capable of transforming the frustration of
its unhappy occupant into psycho-kinetic energy, yes?'
      
'Well… could be.'

      
'Discounting all that, which I am, of course, predisposed to
do, out of hand ... the problem I have with all this is that the adolescent
energy we suspect may cause poltergeist phenomena is essentially a sexual
energy. I assume, Powys, you have not begun to find satisfaction in scourging
yourself with barbed wire or something.'

      
'Occasionally I beat myself with Henry's old dowsing rods.
Apart from that ... Of course,
he
may
have done.'

      
'Who?'

      
'John Cowper Powys always liked to think of himself as some
kind of sado-masochist.'

      
'Ah. So you're obsessed with this man,' Donovan said.

      
'Curiously, I hardly ever thought of him. I'd forgotten that
book was even on the shelf. Consciously, I'd forgotten.'

      
'Which book are we talking about?'

      
'A Glastonbury Romance
.
His masterpiece. About twelve hundred pages.'

      
'Haven't read it. Life's too short for fiction. What's it about?'

      
'It's basically a West Country soap-opera set in the 1920s. Far
as I can remember, it's about people in pursuit of their ideas of the Holy Grail
and the tensions between spiritual and commercial demands and people getting
their rocks off, spiritually and sexually. I may be wrong, it's a long time since
I breezed through it.'

      
'And this same book every time?' asked Donovan.

      
'Every time.'

      
'Too neat,' said Donovan. 'Too neat to be true.'
      
'Ah. You think I'm lying.'

      
'Indeed. I'm a scientist. What proof can you show me?'
      
'I've got a witness.'

      
'Your publisher. How very convenient.'

      
'Isn't it?" Powys admitted gloomily.

      
'Be a marvellous story for your own next publication.'

      
'No chance.'

      
'Before I could give a useful opinion, you would have to precipitate
this book from its shelf under laboratory conditions. But then you knew that.'

      
'Brendan, if you bumped into your late granny at the tea machine,
you'd make her take out her teeth under laboratory conditions.'

      
'And in the present circumstances, of course, my findings would
have to include the probability of an author in decline attempting to
kick-start his flagging career.'

      
'I knew you'd say that, too.'

      
'So why did you telephone me?'

      
'I'm a masochist. Runs in the family.'

      
Brendan Donovan laughed. 'Do you know what I might do in your
place?'