The Chalice (45 page)

      
He could have had ten thousand pounds in his hand by now and
he'd said coolly, 'Can I think about this?' Mad? Probably. And cold and lonely
and his hair going greyer. Was ten grand going to change any of that? Plus,
he'd have to write the book with Frayne's ex-girlfriend. Plus...

      
...
what I'd also like from you, right up in the introduction ... don't get up,
don't hit me ... is the Uncle Jack story. The stuff Corby told me about. The
Glastonbury Romance bit. Gives us a hook for the marketing department.

      
Well, sod that for a start. Be like hanging a sign around your
neck that said crank. And somebody with expert knowledge of the Powys family
tree would be sure to come out of the
  
woodwork screaming, CHARLATAN…IMPOSTOR.

      
He was all mixed up. He needed to read some more Dion Fortune.
A calming influence. She'd gone to Glastonbury, another seeker after spiritual
truth, but she hadn't been screwed up by it like the amateurs, like Dan Frayne.

      
Read more Fortune, this was the answer. Slowly. By which time
it would be nearly spring. And perhaps Fay would have come back and they could
go down to Glastonbury together. Maybe Fay could get a radio programme out of
it

      
Joe Powys got up and made some tea for himself and Arnold. Who
was he kidding?

Not long after nine a.m., the
phone rang.
      
'You asked for time to think.'

      
'I'm still thinking,' Powys said. 'This was unusual. At this
stage of the game publishers hardly ever chased you.

      
'What's the problem?' Dan Frayne didn't sound cool any more,
didn't sound laid back, didn't sound superficial.

      
Powys tried to think of an answer. A strange, choked silence
coming down the line.

      
'Listen, you have to get your act together, Joe. You read the
stuff, yet?' Dan Frayne didn't sound right, lacked coherence. 'Her…you know…
letters?'

      
'I've been a bit busy.'

      
'For fuck's sake, Joe. Listen, the thing is, I can't go down there,
you know that I have to be in New York next week anyway.'

      
Powys felt he was missing something. 'Why do either of us have
to go? Where's the urgency?'

      
There was a ragged pause. Then Dan told him, his voice like
there was a dry twig stuck in his throat.

      
'I nearly missed it. Wouldn't have known. It only made a
couple of paragraphs in the national papers. I mean, there are lots of fatal
fires all over the place. They didn't have any names at that stage, anyway.
Relatives hadn't been told.'

      
'I'm really sorry, Dan.' Powys knew there were a lot of questions
he should be asking, but this wasn't the time.

Giving him a big brown Jiffy
bag containing the collected letters of Juanita Carey, Frayne had said,
'Written to me at least three times a year for twenty years. If I wasn't here,
I think she'd still write, to unload the shit. Read and I guarantee you'll see
the book mapped out before your eyes.'

      
Powys read for nearly two hours, Arnold lying gloomily across
his feet, sleety rain coming like tin-tacks at the cottage window.

      
He read about the people of present-day Avalon, as seen by
Juanita Carey.

June,
1989

       
News just in: Alice Flood, the curate's
wife, has left her husband for the guy who runs the Wearyall Wine Bar. The
proposed Astral Festival has been attacked by one of those fundamentalist
Christian sects claiming it'll attract satanic influences. One of the women at
the tourist office in the Tribunal building has resigned because she says it's being
haunted by a ghost in monk's robes and ...

       
Oh hell, just another week in bloody
Avalon.

      
Powys smiled sadly, went back to the earliest letter, April
1975, and discerned a different tone, less cynical, more wide-eyed. Mrs Carey
was writing it while listening to Alan
Stivell's 'totally transcendent' Breton harp music. She was organising an earth
mysteries book fair in Glastonbury and was a little nervous about inviting the
bigger names. Did Danny think Colin Wilson might be persuadable?

      
You never found out whether the book fair had been a success;
Mrs Carey's next letter was about a relationship she was developing with an astrologer
called Matt Rutherford who was 'a bit magnetic around the eyes'. The Matt thing
lasted, on and off, nearly seven years, though Juanita didn't write much about
it. Powys could imagine Dan Frayne seething with jealousy. But the general mood
was changing.

      
In the eighties, the Thatcher subtext - greed is patriotic -
was penetrating Glastonbury. Shops hadn't actually been selling chunks of holyest
erthe in cans, but the possibility was in the air. There were now people in
town who were seeing the New Age as New Money, and one of them was Matt
Rutherford, who set up an agency offering astrological services to
industry,
  
star screening employees and
job applicants to calculate their suitability for particular posts.

      
Juanita Carey had been furious to think that Rutherford was
getting people fired because Pluto and Venus happened to be badly aligned when
they were born.

      
Exit Matt.

      
Quite right too, Powys thought. Mercenary bastard.

      
He became aware that the letters were laying out for him a
ground-plan of post-Fortune Glastonbury. He could see High Street, with all the
New Age shops clustering at the bottom of the hill, near the ancient George and
Pilgrims. He could see the lofty tower of St John's with the war memorial
outside, where the hippies gathered to play and sing with guitars and whistles.
He had a sense of the Abbey ruins amid hidden green acres enclosed by streets
full of shops and strange music. And, on the edge of the town, the tunnel lanes
leading to the pagan enigma of the Tor.

      
I suppose this means
you'll be going now, then, Powys?
After
what's happened.

      
'I suppose so, Arnold.'

      
Powys sighed. On the evidence of the Carey letters, the
contrasts and tensions of Glastonbury hadn't actually altered much in the
sixty-odd years since Uncle Jack had fluttered the dovecotes: commercial interests
squeezing into bed with the spiritual, a lot of seriously screwed-up people and
frustrated visionaries, endless petty disputes, and maybe a wriggling vein of
kinky sex.

      
In the mid-eighties, after Matt Rutherford had left town to
pursue his business interests in - where else? - Los Angeles, Juanita rarely
referred to men.

      
The last letter - very recent - was a cool and cynical overview
of New Age Glastonbury. It also discussed the problems of a scatty female of semi-noble
birth called Diane Ffitch and the publication of the gloomy diaries of a
certain Colonel Pixhill.

      
There was a copy enclosed. It was a dismal dark green with no
picture on the front. Dan had said he really couldn't face reading it.

      
Joe Powys had another look at the photo of the girl in the
white dress, Juanita Carey: iridescent, mesmeric ... If you looked closely you
could make out some kind of amulet around her neck. If you held the picture
away from you you were even more dazzled by the wide, white smile and the
laughing brown eyes.

      
More than all this, Powys had liked her style.

      
He was deeply sad that she couldn't help him now.

Part Four

Mr Powis (sic)... has
fluttered our local dovecotes to a painful extent. Do we behave like that at
Glastonbury? I must have missed a lot. I am afraid that if people make the
Glastonbury pilgrimage expecting to find Glastonbury romance… they will be
disappointed. We do not quite come up to Mr Powis's specifications.

Dion
Fortune
Avalon of the Heart

ONE

After the Fire

The caller said, 'This is
Lord Pennard. I wish to speak to my daughter. Now.'

      
No question, it definitely was him, voice straight out of the
freezer compartment. Sam Daniel, the printer, had seen him around, as you might
say, heard him ordering his huntsmen about. Very big man in these parts, and oh
yes, this was definitely Lord P on the phone, no doubt about that.

      
'Sure it is,' Sam said. 'And I'm the Pope. Now piss off and
stop bothering us or I'll call the police.'

      
Diane looked up from the oldest and simplest of Sam's office
word-processors.

      
'Your old man,' Sam said. 'And not a happy old man, if I'm any
judge. What if he shows up at the door?'

      
'He's left a couple of messages on the answering machine at
the shop,' Diane said. 'I just wipe them off. He won't come here. He's always
employed people to show up at doors for him.'

      
'Fair enough.' Sam turned back to his computer screen. He was
laying out this illustrated feature piece by Matthew Banks, one of the five
million local herbalists, about the Glastonbury Thorn. It listed all the Holy
Thorn trees in and around the town, suggesting which was the oldest and examining
the case for the various thorns being actual descendants of the staff of Joseph
of Arimathea.

      
Complete load of old horseshit, in Sam's view, but Diane said the
Thorn was a potent symbol which united the Alternative types and the locals.
Local people were proud of the Thorn, Diane said. Well, Samuel Mervyn Daniel
was about as local as you could get, and proud was putting it a bit strong.

      
Paul's digital clock said 8.20. Twenty past bleeding eight and
they'd been at work for over an hour, marking up copy, transferring it to the
computer, experimenting with layouts.
      
It hadn't even been light when he'd
unlocked the print-shop. He hadn't had a shave for two days, nor a proper meal,
nor seen any telly, nor been in any fit state to do much with Charlotte.

      
The upper classes. Always been good at getting the peasants
working the clock round for a pittance.

      
Except Diane was always here too, head down, a woman driven. A
lot of grief, a lot of upset inside. But she wasn't letting any of it out, not
in front of Sam Daniel. She had guts, and you didn't expect that. Or else it
was another aspect of her reputed insanity.

      
Diane pushed her chair back. 'I've got to go. Got to open the
shop.'

      
'Bet you've not had any breakfast, have you?'

      
She was losing weight, too. Not that she couldn't afford to lose
a couple of stone, but not this way. And her face was always pale. It was like
somewhere behind her eyes there was always an image of what she'd seen that
night.

      
'Oh, well, you know, I've got some carob bars at the shop.'
Diane pulled her red coat from the peg. The kind of coat you'd think twice about
donating to Oxfam in case the Third World sent it back.

      
Sam raised his eyes to the ceiling. 'Bloody carob bars. I'm
not saying the humble carob hasn't got its place, look, but a slice or two of
toast, soya marg, a dab of Marmite, nothing would've died to bring that to the table,
would it?'

      
'Thank you so much for your concern, Sam.' Diane gathered her
stuff together in a plastic carrier bag. 'Listen, could you let me see a proof,
printout, whatever of the piece on the town-centre enhancement scheme when
you've finished it? No hurry, but if I could have it by three at the latest.. .'

      
Strewth.

      
'Anybody, excluding family, wants to see you, Diane, what
shall I say?'

      
'Oh, send them round to the shop. They'll have to join the
queue. Bye'

      
He watched her through the window walking quickly, head held
high, out of Grope Lane on to Magdalene Street. Gonna crack. Nothing surer.

      
After the fire, and no Juanita, Sam had figured the magazine
idea would be straight down the tubes. But then, the day following the funeral,
Diane had appeared, pale-faced, in the print-shop, a cardboard folder under her
arm. Talking about getting started on The
Avalonian.
Like, pronto.