The Chalice (4 page)

      
Griff Daniel went back to his truck.
G Daniel & Co
.
Builders
.
It would maybe have said ...
& Son
.
If the so-called son hadn't disgraced the family name.

      
When it came down to it, the only way you were going to get
rid of the rift-raff was by getting rid of the damn Tor. He imagined a whole
convoy of JC'Bs gobbling into the Tor like it was a Walnut Whip, the hill
giving way, the tower collapsing into dusty, medieval rubble.

      
All the way back to his yard on the edge of the industrial
estate. Griff Daniel kept thinking about this. It wasn't possible, of course,
not under any conceivable circumstances. You couldn't, say, put the new road
through it, not with a scheduled ancient monument on top, and also it was far
too big a national tourist attraction.

      
But it did make you think.

THREE

Queen of the Hippies

It was a rather an
antiquated bicycle, a lady's model with no cross bar, a leatherette saddle bag and
a metal cover over the chain. Terribly sedate, an elderly spinster's sort of
machine, ten quid from On Your Bike, over at Street. But Jim could get his feet
to the pedals without adjusting the seat, and, more to the point, it was the
kind of bicycle no youngster would want to be seen dead on.

      
So at least he could park it in town with an odds-on chance of
it not being nicked.

      
Jim unloaded himself from the bike outside Burns the Bread, in
the part of Glastonbury High Street where the Alternative Sector was rapidly
chasing the few remaining locally owned shops up the hill.

      
He was puffing a bit and there was sweat on his forehead. It
was rather close and humid. And November, amazingly. He pushed the bike across
the pavement and into a narrow alleyway next to the bookshop called Carey and Frayne.
Got out his handkerchief to wipe his face, the alleyway framing a at little
street scene from a viewpoint he'd never noticed before - quite a nice one,
because —

      
...
by God...

      
... above the weathered red-tiled roofs and brick chimney stacks
of the shops across the street reared the spiked and buttressed Norman tower of
the town centre church, St John's, and it had suddenly struck Jim that the
tower's top tier, jagged in the florid, late-afternoon sun, resembled a crown
of thorns.

      
While, in the churchyard below, out of sight from here, there
was one of the
holy
thorns, grafted
from the original on Wearyall Hill. It was as if the Thorn had worked its way into
the very fabric of the church, finally thrusting itself in savage symbolism
from the battlements.

      
Yes. yes, yes. Jim started to paint rapidly in his head, reforming
sculpted stone into pronged and twisted wildwood. But keeping the same colours,
the pink and the ochre and the grey, amid the elegiac embers of the dying sun.

      
By God, this buggering town ... just when you thought you had
it worked out, it would throw a new image at you like a well-aimed brick. Jim
was so knocked-sideways he almost forgot to chain his bike to the drainpipe.
Almost.

      
Twenty feet away, a youth sat in a dusty doorway fumbling a
guitar Jim gave him a hard look, but he seemed harmless enough. The ones with
guitars
usually
were, couldn't get up
to much trouble with an instrument that size to lug around. Penny-whistlers,
now, they were the ones you had to watch; they could shove the things down their
belts in a second, leaving two hands free for thieving.

      
Over the past eighteen months, Jim had had three bikes stolen,
two gone from the town centre, one with the padlocked chain snipped and left in
the gutter. Metal cutters, by God! Thieves with metal cutters on the streets Glastonbury.

      
'Jim, you're painting!'

      
'No, I'm not.' Reacting instinctively. For half his adult life,
painting had been something to deny - bloody Pat shrieking.
How many bills is that going to pay?

      
'New bike, I see.' The most beautiful woman in Glastonbury
bent over the bike, stroking the handlebars. 'Really rather suits you.'

      
'You calling me an old woman?' Jim pulled off his hat. 'I'll
have you know, my girl, I've just ridden the buggering thing all the way back
from Street in the slipstream of a string of transcontinental juggernauts half
the size of the QE2. Bloody Europe comes to Somerset.'

      
'Just be thankful that bikes are still allowed on that road. Come
the new motorway you'll be banned forever.'
      
'Won't happen. Too much
opposition.'
      
'Oh sure. Like the Government cares
about the Greens and the old ladies in straw hats.' She straightened up, hands on
her hips, and a bloody fine pair of hips they were. 'Tea?'

      
'Well ... or something.' Jim followed her into the sorcerer's
library she called a bookshop. He helped out here two or three days a week,
trying not to look too closely at what he was selling.

      
He glared suspiciously at one of those cardboard dump-bin
things displaying a new paperback edition of the silly novels of Glastonbury's
own Dion Fortune. Awful, crass covers - sinister hooded figures standing over
stone altars and crucibles.

      
'Over the top. The artwork. Tawdry. Way over the top.'
      
'Isn't everything in Glastonbury
these days?'
      
Well, you aren't, for a start, Jim
thought. He wondered whether something specific had happened to make Juanita
distance herself from the sometimes-overpowering spirituality of the town and
from the books she sold. You didn't run a shop like this unless you were of a
strongly mystical persuasion, but these days she answered customers' questions
lightly and without commitment, as if she knew it was all nonsense really.

      
Jim let her steer him into the little parlour behind the shop,
past the antiquarian section, where the books were kept behind glass, most of
them heavy magical manuals from the nineteenth century. Jim had flicked one
open the other week and found disturbingly detailed instructions 'for the
creation of elemental spirits'. He suspected it didn't mean distilling your own
whisky.

      
Which reminded him. 'Erm ... that Laphroaig you had. Don't
suppose there's a minuscule drop left?'

      
That rather depends how many minuscule drops you've had
already,' Juanita said cautiously. Damn woman knew him rather too well.

      
'One. Swear to God. Called at a pub called the Oak Tree or
something. Nerves shot to hell after a run-in with a container lorry from
Bordeaux. One small Bells, I swear it.'

      
She looked dubious, puckering her lovely nose. In the
lingering warmth of this year's strange, post-Indian summer, she was wearing a
lemon yellow off the shoulder thing, showing all her freckles. Well, as many of
them as
he'd
ever seen.

      
'Just that you're looking ... not exactly un-flushed, Jim.'

      
'Hmmph,' said Jim. He let Juanita sit him down in an armchair,
planting a chunky tumbler in his drinking and painting hand. She had quite a
deep tan from sunning herself reading books on the balcony at the back. While most
women her age were going frantic about melanoma,
Juanita snatched all the sun she could get. Must be the Latin ancestry.

      
Watching her uncork the Laphroaig bottle with a rather suggestive
thopp,
Jim thought, Ten years ... ten
years younger would do it. Ten years, maybe fifteen, and she'd be at least
within reach.

      
He coughed, hoping nothing showed. 'Erm ... Happened to cycle
past Don Moulder's bottom field on the way back. Guess bloody what.'

      
'New Age travellers?'

      
'Nothing gets past you, does it?' Jim held out his glass. 'Arrogant
devils. Bloody- thieving layabouts.'
      
'Not quite all of them.'

      
As she leaned over to pour his drink, Jim breathed in a
delightful blend of Ambre Solaire and frank feminine sweat, the mixture
sensuously overlaid with the smoky
peat musk
of the whisky. Aaaaah ...
the dubious pleasure of being sixty-two years old, unattached again, and with
all one's senses functioning, more or less.

      
'I'm sorry ...' Shaking himself out of it and feeling the old
jowls wobble. 'What did you just say?'

      
'I said at least one of them isn't a thief. Besides, oddballs
have always drifted towards Glastonbury. Look at me. Look at you.'

      
'Yes, but, Juanita, the essential difference here is that
we
saved up our hard-earned pennies until
we could do it in a
respectable
way.
We didn't just get an old bus from a scrapyard and enough fuel to trundle it
halfway across the country before it breaks down and falls to pieces in some previously
unsullied beauty spot. You see, what gets me is how these characters have the
bare-faced check .. .'
      
'Because Diane's with them.'

      
'... to call themselves friends of the buggering planet, when
they ... What did you say ... ?' Jim had to steady the Laphroaig with his other
hand.

      
Juanita poured herself a glass of probably overpriced white
wine from Lord Pennard's vineyard and lowered herself into a chintzy old
rocking chair by the Victorian fireplace. There was a small woodstove tucked
into the fireplace now, unlit as yet, but with a few autumn logs piled up ready
for the first cold day.

      
Jim said, 'I'm sorry, I don't quite understand. You say Diane's
back? Diane s with
them
? But I
thought...'

      
'We all did Which is ...' Juanita sighed. 'I suppose, why I
got them the field.'

      
Jim was bewildered. '
You
got them the buggering field?'

      
He'd thought she was over all that. Might have been Queen of
the Hippies 1972, but she was fully recovered now, surely to God.

      
Juanita said. 'Comes down to the old question: if I don't try
and help her, who else is going to?'

      
'But I thought she was working in Yorkshire?' The idea of
Diane training to be a journalist
had
struck Jim as pretty unlikely at the time, considering the girl's renowned
inability to separate fact from fantasy, 'I thought she was getting married.
Peter somebody.'

      
'Patrick. It's off. Abandoned her job, everything,'
      
'To become a New Age buggering
traveller?'
      
'Not exactly. As she put it, she
kind of hitched a lift. They were making their way here, and she ...'
      
Juanita reached for her cigarettes.

      
'... Oh dear. She said it was calling her back.'
      
Jim groaned. 'Not again. Dare I ask
what,
specifically
, was calling her
back?'

      
'The Tor.' Juanita lit a cigarette. 'What else?'

      
Jim was remembering that time the girl had gone missing and
they'd found her just before dawn under the Thorn on Wearyall Hill, in her nightie
and bare feet. What was she then, fifteen? He sank the last of the Laphroaig.
He was too old for this sort of caper.

      
'Lady Loony,' he said. 'Do people still call her that?'

FOUR

A Fine Shiver

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.