The Chalice (42 page)

      
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.

SIXTEEN

The Sunset Window

There was the sound of a
key in the shop door below Juanita's bedroom window.

      
She called out, 'Come on up, Diane.'

      
Was the Glastonbury First meeting over already? Maybe it had
been a total flop, about four people in the audience.

      
Sure. And maybe a UFO had come down on Wearyall Hill and
Joseph of Arimathea had strolled out with his staff and the teenage Christ in
tow.

      
'Juanita, I'm frightfully sorry.' Diane appeared, puffy-eyed
and flustered, in the bedroom doorway. 'I sort of... I couldn't stand to hear
any more.'

      
'That bad, huh?' Juanita sat up and swung her legs from the
bed.

      
'Juanita,' Diane sank down, making the mattress howl. 'You
can't imagine just how bad.'

'They couldn't do it.'
Juanita walked to the window. High Street looked damp, detached and faintly
hostile. 'There's no way they could get that through.'

      
'They got away with it at Stonehenge when all the hippies and
travellers and people went to worship the sun at midsummer and started having
festivals and things and causing chaos. They got a special Act of Parliament to
make it into a restricted area.'
      
'Yes, but...'

      
'And now nobody can get in at all. You have to look at the
stones from behind a fence or through binoculars from across the road or
something.'

      
'But the Tor isn't an ancient monument, apart from the tower.
I mean, it's an ordinary hill ... Well, OK, an extraordinary hill, but you
can't fence off a hill.'

      
'Juanita, they've got it all worked out. It begins with a complete
parking ban in Wellhouse Lane. The next step would presumably be some kind of
tasteful wire-mesh fence, with metal gates, and no access to anyone after
dark.'

      
'That's impossible. Anyone wants to get in, they'll do it.'

      
'It worked at Stonehenge. They say it's a completely sterile
place now. The great temple of the sun where nobody can go in and watch the sun
rise any more or feel the rays on the stone. And now if Archer gets his way,
nobody'll be able to see it set, looking out from the top of the Tor to Brent
Knoll and Bridgwater Bay. There'd be security patrols at the solstices, they'd
have…'

      
Juanita blinked. 'People supported this in there?'

      
'They loved it. No more hippies. No more pagan rituals. The
farmers were ever so excited. There were all these muddy Mendip growls of
approval. "You're one of us, zurr," this sort of thing.'

      
'God,' Juanita said. 'Woolly will blow a fuse. I mean, the Tor
would, you know, lose all its magic, all its mysticism, if you had to buy a
ticket or something.'

      
'Oh yes, rather, and Archer was absolutely up-front about this.
The undesirables don't come to Glastonbury to see the Abbey ruins or the
Tribunal building, they come for the Tor, and if the Tor's no longer
accessible, Glastonbury will lose its magnetism and we'll get "decent"
tourists and "decent" shops and local people will be able to walk the
streets without tripping over drug addicts and if they want to go to the Tor
they'll be able to go at a "civilised" time without having to tread
in faeces and vomit and, oh Juanita, it's just awful, awful,
awful
…'

      
She saw that Diane's eyes were full of tears. Stains all down
her cheeks Which didn't seem as plump as they used to. Was she losing weight?

      
'It's terribly personal for me, you see,' Diane said. 'I've loved
the Tor all my life.'

      
'It won't happen, Diane. There'll be an outcry.'

      
'There was an outcry over the new road, but that's going to happen.
It all depends on who's crying out…'

      
She stopped, fingers at her mouth. Sitting on the edge of Juanita's
bed, she began to sway.

      
'You OK, Diane?'

      
'Oh gosh.'

      
'Diane?'

      
'Crying out. That explains it. It was the Tor crying out.'
      
'What?'

      
The visions. The vinegar bottle ... the salt pot ... the washing-up
liquid. Don't you see?'

      
'I'm afraid not.' But Juanita was awfully afraid she actually
did.

      
'It knew! The Tor knew! The Tor was crying out. Something bad
was coming and the Tor knew, Juanita!'

      
Suddenly, Juanita was rather glad she hadn't taken Diane to
the police station.

      
'It was calling out,' Diane whispered. 'To those who are close
to it.'

      
'Diane, listen to me' Juanita sat down next to her on the bed.
'I hate what Archer and Griff are planning as much as anyone. And I'll fight it
on freedom of access grounds. We can't have them putting Britain behind bars.
But if you start putting two and two together and getting sixteen ...'

      
'Juanita, I know this in my heart. It called me back.'

      
Juanita said gently, 'Colonel Pixhill thought it had called him
back too, and he wasted the rest of his life trying to work out why and never
did, just went bonkers.'