The Chalice (51 page)

      
'Ah, yes. How good you are, Diane. I shall try and explain it
to Father.'

      
Diane felt a movement in the pool of mist at her side.

      
'Of course it was his original intention…' Archer's little smile
was almost coy, '… to invite Patrick and his family.'

      
She clutched at the counter, feeling sick with hatred, the loathing
solid and real inside her and also, somehow, existing separately, in the room

      
'If you'd then refused to come, he'd doubtless have sent Patrick
to fetch you and it would all have been horribly embarrassing. Tact, diplomacy
and forethought never being Father's middle names. Don't worry, my dear, I've
talked him out of it.'

      
'Thank you,' Diane said on a long, volcanic breath. 'Thank you,
Archer.'

      
'I'll be on my way then.' Archer slipped a glove over his hand,
paused in the doorway. 'And when is this little paper of yours to be
published?'

      
'Er .. . er, next year perhaps.'

      
'Oh, nothing imminent then?'

      
'We want to get it right.'

      
'Absolutely. I'm sure Father will be delighted to see you deploying
your, ah, new-found journalistic skills.'

      
She saw how cold his eyes were.

      
'Even if it is in our backyard, as it were,' Archer said.
      
'Even if it scorns all our best
endeavours.'

      
He raised a gloved hand. 'Look after yourself, Diane Damned
hippies and squatters are turning this town into a jungle. Drug-dealing.
Burglaries. Muggings. Vandalism.' He caught her eyes. 'Graffiti.'

      
Diane's insides were already pumping like a sewage works as she
slammed the door in his face and barely made it to the kitchen sink before her meagre
carob-bar breakfast came up in a horrid brown fountain.

FIVE

All for Real

Sam tried to gaze casually
out or the print-shop window, his chair angled meaningfully away as Charlotte
rushed out, slammed into her Golf - blatantly parked on the double-yellows,
Daddy being in the same lodge as the chief superintendent - and wafted
imperiously off down Magdalene Street.

      
'Bitch.' He saw two blokes unloading the lights for the Christmas
tree in front of the bank. Some bloody Christmas this was going to be.

      
'What's that, Sam?'

      
'Didn't say a word, Paul.'

      
'Oh. Right. Thought you didn't.' Paul, young Mr Tact, went back
to his work. He didn't like Charlotte, Sam could tell. He guessed the kid was
still a bit scared of high-octane women, not realising they could be just as
half-baked under the gloss.

      
Charlotte, eh? like, what a snotty cow. All the advertising she
could have pointed
The Avalonian'
s
way ... what with working for Stan Pike
and Daddy being chairman of the Chamber of Trade and all this crap. She could
even have put the arm on Pike to give
The
Avalonian
the all-clear to his mates. 'It is not a hippy rag,' Sam had
insisted. 'How many times I got to spell it out? It's a genuine, solid
publication.'

      
'With Diane Ffitch?' Charlotte had replied just now.
'Diane Ffitch
? You call being edited by
that fruitcake solid?'

      
'All right, stuff it, then,' Sam had snarled 'We don't need
Pike, bloody backstreet used-house dealer.'

      
Charlotte. Bloody Charlotte, eh? Things had been very much on the
blink since he'd made that minor scene at the Glastonbury First gig over the
old man and Archer Ffitch. Time to call it a day?

      
Three years, though. Three years of storms and upsets and sexy
making-up sessions. Three years of political arguments and being produced as Charlotte's
bit of rough at too many posh parties.

      
Naturally, she'd backed him all the way in starting up the print-shop,
becoming a local businessman, like Daddy, like Stanlow Pike. When Sam became a
businessman, Charlotte started circling dates on the calendar for the
engagement party. Cracked it at last, brought the anarchist to heel.

      
Charlotte had got Sam the contract for printing all Pike and
Corner's property brochures, which was a major deal.

      
The
major deal ...
until Juanita Carey had come up with the idea for
The Avalonian
. Which little Charlotte, of course, didn't like the
sound of at all, from the outset.
      
Sam lit a cigarette.

      
Another thing about Charlotte was the way she nagged him about
his smoking. like he was already her property and she was making sure he came
with a full warranty. How could a woman of twenty-six come over so bloody
middle-aged? Nil prospect of her moving into the flat without something
official
,
on paper, signed in
triplicate. Twice they'd almost wound it up. Trouble was, she looked so seriously
edible, waiting for him by the market cross, parked on a double yellow. Could
he really stand to see her hanging out for some slimy accountant with a BMW?

      
Difficult one, that.

      
He brightened when he saw Diane crossing the road by the
Christmas tree. She hadn't been in all morning, and after what Paul had said
about her painting the van in the dark he'd kept thinking maybe he should take
a walk up to the shop, check her out. Just that he didn't feel he knew her well
enough to ask why she was behaving like a fruitcake.

      
She didn't come in. She didn't even glance at the shop, just
walked past, like a bloody zombie, people getting out of her way. Sam watched
her cross Magdalene Street and head straight for the Abbey gatehouse. She
didn't go in there either, she turned her back on it, fell against the wall like
a drunk trying to stay upright.

      
What the...?

      
Sam was up and out of the door, not giving himself time to
think.
      
'Diane?'

      
When he ran across the road, a truck driver braking and
blasting his horn, she looked, unseeing, in Sam's direction.
      
He could see that she was shivering
uncontrollably, like a long-term junkie run out of smack. Shit, the girl was
ill.

      
'You all right? Something happened?'

      
'Oh.' Diane looked up, vaguely. 'Sam.'

      
'What's wrong?' A few people staring at them now, but not many
because this was Glastonbury and there wasn't much they hadn't seen in these
streets. 'Only Lady Loony,' he heard one woman with a kid and a shopping bag
say knowingly to another and they both laughed and Sam wanted to kick their
bloody arses halfway to Benedict Street.

      
Diane, face slightly blue, was staring vacantly across the
road to where the two guys were untangling the Christmas tree lights. Sam took
her arm.

      
'Come on. Come for a hot chocolate, Diane.' Easing her away
from the wall. 'Catch your death.'

      
Darryl Davey came past with a couple of mates, nudging each
other and smirking.

      
'Don't you say a fucking word, sunshine,' Sam snarled.
      
Darryl narrowed his eyes and gave
him the finger.

      
Tosser.

'You see ... and this is
strictly off the record ...' The Bishop of Bath and Wells lit a thin roll-up. '...
some of my predecessors have been frankly embarrassed at having Glastonbury in the
diocese.'

      
The Bishop was a compact man in his early forties. He wore
cord trousers and a purple denim shirt, his white clerical band under the
button-down collar. Powys wondered if he always rolled his own cigarettes or
just wanted to appear cool for the local radical rag.

      
'Point being, Joe, the Church of England might have owned the
Abbey for most of the century, but the ambience remains RC, and I imagine many
people still regard us being the landlords as the final insult. Even if we have
tidied the place up, stopped it being treated as a convenient stone quarry for
local builders.'

      
'But the Catholics aren't the problem right now, are they?'
Powys said. 'You've got what we might call an older denomination to contend
with.'

      
'Pagans.' The bishop laughed. 'Be so much easier if the buggers
still wore horns and bones through their noses. But they're quite likely to be
academics in suits.' He nodded towards the window. 'Could be a few hanging
around the cathedral as we speak.' But he didn't seem to regard this as much of
a threat.

      
They were in Wells, a very small city a short drive from Glastonbury.
At a window table in a pub facing the cathedral. The bishop drank Perrier. His
name was Liam Kelly; he didn't sound even vaguely Irish.

      
'But, you see, Joe ... are they really pagans? What you have
today, as we approach the Millennium, is a great yearning for spirituality. We
- the human race - have been everywhere and realised what a terribly small
place the earth is, how finite are its resources.'

      
A micro-cassette machine lay on the table between them, the
bishop pulled it a little closer.

      
'Even been to the moon, and what a dreadful anti-climax that
was. So more people are realising there's only one real voyage of discovery
left to them, and that is inwards. It's a very promising situation.'
 

      
'You think so?'

      
'You don't?'

      
The bishop seemed to see Powys for the first time, to wonder
who he was. Powys hadn't mentioned his proposed book. Diane had arranged the
interview - which, presumably, was why the bishop had agreed to do it; he
hadn't been here long enough to risk offending the House of Pennard. How was he
to know how things stood between Diane and her immediate family?

      
Powys said. 'You don't think inner trips can be a little risky
for some people?'

      
'Are we on or off the record?'

      
'Whatever you like.' Powys stopped the tape.

      
'Look'; I don't know precisely what kind of magazine this is,
ah Joe. But if you can somehow get over the message that I don't regard my visit
to Glastonbury next Thursday as any kind of crusade. Or the pagan element as the
Enemy. I like to believe that we're all working towards the same goal. If, for
instance, some women like to regard the Divinity as having a distinct feminine
aspect, how can I legitimately argue against that? The battle for the
ordination

of women has been fought
and won, and it's a victory I applaud.'

      
Not answering the question. Didn't seem to realise, either,
that
The Avalonian
didn't yet exist
and would hardly be on the streets in time to get over any message about Thursday.

      
'Goddess worshippers,' Powys said. 'You'll be meeting them?'

      
'On Thursday, as I say. Which is simply the shortest day as far
as we're concerned. To them it's Christmas without the Christ - as yet. God, is
that the time already? Sorry about this, but I do have to be in Bath for
lunch.'

      
'Oh,' Powys realised. 'The Solstice. Thursday's the Winter
Solstice. Won't the pagans be having their ... whatever they do?'

      
The Bishop stood up. 'I don't know what they normally do, but
on Thursday, before exchanging opinions about the future of Glastonbury, we
shall go together at dawn to St Michael's Chapel, where I shall conduct a small
service with carols which followers of the, ah, nature religion will find not
incompatible - 'The Holly and the Ivy', this sort of thing.'

      
'St Michael's Chapel ... Look, I'm sorry, I'm not too familiar
with the geography, but that's part of the Abbey, is it?'

      
'No, no.' The Bishop finished his Perrier. 'It's the one on
the Tor.'

      
Powys pocketed his tape machine. 'Let me get this right. You're
going to the top of Glastonbury Tor with a bunch of pagans on the Winter Solstice.
Doesn't it bother you, if you believe…'

      
Bishop Kelly laughed and shook his head. 'The Winter Solstice,
as I say, is merely the shortest day. 'The 'pagans', if we have to use that
term, will be represented by Dame Wanda Carlisle, who I've already met socially
and who is, in all other respects, a delightful person. And the Tor is, ah...'