The Chalice (63 page)

      
'What if it's Diane?'

      
'Diane wouldn't phone. She doesn't even know you're out of
hospital.'

      
The ringing was cut off, snatched away by the answering machine.

      
'All right,' Juanita said. 'There's an ash tree overhanging
the cottage, one of the branches almost touching the window. His hat was
hanging from it. I was standing there with Diane and Don Moulder, hoping to God
Jim wasn't within a mile of that fire, and I saw his hat. No mistake. Not a
bunch of dead leaves, not a piece of cloth. It was the damned hat. I was furious.
The travellers were blocking the road. I thought, they've set fire to his
cottage and they've left his hat. A message. A taunt. So I - I mean. OK, irrationally,
I can see that now - I just went after it. I tore my skirt and wrapped it round
my face and I just...'

      
'OK,' he gripped her shoulders. 'Was he very attached to that
hat?'

      
'Inseparable. Wore it riding his bike. Wore it painting in his
garden.'

      
'In Celtic magic,' Powys said, 'a man's soul is in his head.
The Celts kept heads in streams and wells. They made stone heads. Sorry, I'm
thinking aloud, you don't want to hear this crap.'

      
'No, go on.'

      
'I was just thinking that if they went through all the
ceremony of an execution, a beheading. And then they just took his hat ...'

      
'He still died, didn't he?' Juanita said quietly. 'Within two
days.'

      
'Possession of a man's hat, especially when that hat was such
an essential part of what he was, would, they might think, give them access to
his head. To his soul. To put thoughts there. To arouse certain feelings.
Emotions. Sorry, I'm ...'

      
Theorising. He felt very uncomfortable. This was the kind of
theorising he'd sworn he was never going to do again.

      
'Emotions.' Juanita looked up at him. 'What did Diane tell
you? About Jim and me?'

      
'That you just wanted to be friends.'

      
'OK. The situation was he'd left his wife. To come to the Vale
of Avalon and paint. That was his dream. His Gauguin fantasy. Except the only vaguely
dusky female he knew was me. And in all those years we just enjoyed each
other's company. We had laughs. And he looked at me and he patted my bum, and
that was as far as it went and as far as he wanted it to go. Sure, he'd say, "If
only I'd known you when I was younger," that sort of stuff. He enjoyed all
that, the banter, the what if... But the truth was he didn't want to get
involved with a woman again. Certainly wouldn't have one in his cottage. She
might've fractured the idyll, messed up his routine.'

      
She was looking at the painting of the thin, red, glowing line.

      
'He was an obsessive painter. Increasingly. Obsessed with the
mystery. That night, he was absolutely outraged at what the travellers were
doing on the Tor. Spiritual vandalism. Maybe he sensed more than I did. He'd
certainly become very attuned to the dusk. To the ending of a beautiful day.'

Nine o'clock passed and,
with it, that last small hope - that Diane would arrive to open the shop.

      
Powys and Juanita sat in the shop and didn't open for business.

      
Juanita told herself the girl was scatty, easily deflected and
sometimes she would let you down. Also that Diane was a grown woman and could
look after herself, that to think otherwise was patronising and insulting.

      
So why did she feel desperate with anxiety?

      
The answering machine didn't do much to relieve it.

      
'Diane, it's Matthew
Banks. That article of mine, for your dummy edition. We're going to have to
scrap it. Something absolutely awful's happened. Please call me.'

TWO

Our First Christmas Tree

'Should they have let you
come home?'

      
Matthew Banks was a very tall, spare, fastidious-looking man
in his fifties. Waiting for him to arrive, Juanita had told Powys how Banks had
sold the family garden centre to finance his self-published books on
plant-lore. A fanatic, she said, but he knew his stuff.

      
'I can treat you,' Banks said, 'I can make you something up to
put on those hands. You needn't have had grafts. Potato peelings. Forms a kind
of skin.'

      
'Never mind, Matthew, too late.' Juanita was impatient. 'This
is J.M. Powys, by the way, the author and, er, descend- ant of J.C. Powys.'

      
'Ah.' Banks inspected Powys down his half-glasses.
'The Old Golden Land
. You know, I…'

      
'And his dog, Arnold,' Juanita said. 'Let's not mess about. It
opens at nine-thirty, doesn't it?'

      
Outside, the sleet was gathering force and every lamppost and
signpost seemed to have one of those Glastonbury First stickers with the white
slash across the Tor.

      
Banks tore one off as he passed. 'This should be stopped. You
know we're going to turn tomorrow's Solstice Service into a sort of small-scale
protest against this Tor lunacy. All the more urgent with Bowkett's blasted
bill. If the Bishop is so keen on developing a sort of ecumenical attitude
towards paganism, let him speak out against this.'

      
'You'd better make sure it is a small demo,' Juanita muttered
through her scarf as they crossed into Magdalene Street. 'Or you'll be playing
directly into their hands.'

      
She found herself glancing at every passing woman in the
futile hope that one of them might turn out to be Diane

      
'It will be discreet and dignified.' Banks strode through the
Abbey gates, his jaw jutting.

It was Powys's first visit
to the Abbey. Pity, he was thinking, that it should be at a time like this. For
a reason like this.

      
They reached the modern visitor centre, where Banks was nodded
through by the attendant but Powys paid for himself and Juanita. There were
showcases inside the centre, and relics of stone and pottery, books and
leaflets on sale, glossy pictures of sunset silhouettes. The centre-piece was a
scale model of the original abbey in all its soaring, honeyed splendour. There
were also several information boards, the first one telling the story of Joseph
of Arimathea, said to have settled here with eleven disciples in AD63.

      
And so - Juanita pale and muffled and following a three-legged
dog - they entered the holyest erthe in all England: thirty-six acres of
 
lawns and ruins. The
 
reason for Glastonbury.

There was a tall wooden
cross set in a vast lawn greying under a skim of sleet. The cross was modern
but timelessly simple. Despite its size, it had humility; it said,
We're not even trying to compete.

      
Powys saw the Abbey ruins stark beyond it. They'd always
reached him, these ancient, spoiled places. More than palaces, more than
cathedrals.

      
But there was no time to explore the ruins. Matthew Banks was
striding, stork-like, towards a well-preserved grey chapel with a tiled roof
and a tiny bell-tower.

      
On a small, walled lawn, with a path going by, stood a little
tree. Arnold edged towards it.

      
'Perhaps not, Arnold,' Powys said.

      
Matthew Banks bit off a short, arid laugh. 'It really doesn't
matter now.'

      
The Thorn. Another descendant of the staff of Joseph of
Arimathea. This one was like the kind of tree a child draws, with its thin,
grooved trunk and its clouded mesh of branches.

      
'I've seen the one on Wearyall Hill,' Powys said. 'Which is
the actual?'

      
'They all are,' Banks said. 'Wearyall Hill was where the first
one grew, but there's been a greater continuity of Holy Thorns here. This is
the one most people see. For most visitors, this is
the
Holy Thorn. The one that flowers at Christmas. Should he
flowering now '

      
The Thorn wasn't in flower yet, although Powys could see what
looked like buds.

      
Juanita said, 'Are you sure about this, Matthew? I mean, I
don't know much about these things, but it looks as if it might flower.'

      
'Of course I'm sure,' Matthew Banks said harshly 'It's dying.'

      
Juanita put out an inexperienced hand. The tree was like a
curled-up hedgehog; you couldn't get inside it. She'd discovered, a little
surprised, that she was crying quietly. It was only a tree, for God's sake. And
whatever had happened here, it hardly compared with the arboreal massacre found
by Sam Daniel.

      
'It was a bad summer,' Banks said. 'Phenomenally dry, into
August. And then ...'
      
'The Blight?'

      
'Which went on until the end of November. And then winter came
in with a crunch. The strange part is, I examined the tree less than a week ago
and it was thriving.
      
'I'd stand by that. It was ready to
flower, as I say.'
      
'But if it wasn't lack of water?'
Powys said.
      
'There
is
lack of water.' Banks bent, snapped off a twig easily between
finger and thumb.
     
'Look. Feel it. Embrittled.
Parched inside. This doesn't happen overnight.'

      
'No.' Cold on the outside, Juanita thought as Powys accepted the
twig. Parched and arid inside.
Like me.
      
Damn it, this wasn't the Holy Oak.
It wasn't the Holy Giant Redwood. It wasn't even much of a myth: an old guy
shoves his stick in the ground and it turns into the kind of arboreal runt that
gardeners rip up and feed into the shredder. And yet that was why...

      
'There's a poetic truth about this little tree,' she said.

      
'Yes,' Powys said.

      
'You know what Pixhill said.'

      
'Oh please,' Banks snapped. 'Must we bring that man into this?'

      
'Pixhill had a dream, right?' Powys tossed the twig to the
foot of the tree. 'Or claimed he had. Anyway, he goes all apocalyptic.
Dreamt I saw the Dark Chalice in the sky
again, and the Meadwell was spewing black water from Hades and …'

      
'Stop it!' Banks shouted. 'Merciful God, are things not bad
enough? Must we talk like this?'

      
'Must we ... ?' Juanita stared at him in despair. 'Did it ever
occur to you, Matthew, that not talking like this is what's allowed this
situation to develop? You've all been so airy-fairy, peace and love, open up
the healing forces of nature, that you haven't noticed it growing.'

      
Matthew Banks recoiled.

      
'Until it's everywhere.'

      
But he obviously didn't want to face anything apocalyptic. Not
what Glastonbury mysticism was about.

      
'In
Avalon of the Heart
,'
Powys said, 'Dion Fortune described the Thorn as our first Christmas tree. I
like that.'

      
Juanita's eyes widened, 'I know what you're thinking. Do I?'

      
'I can't say that
I
do.'
Banks was obviously feeling himself being pushed from centre-stage. 'What
are
you saying?'

      
'He's thinking about the other Christmas tree'

      
'Oh, this is stupid.' Banks backed away from them.

      
'I don't think it is, Matthew. There's a malaise in this town.'

      
Powys said, 'I dreamt I saw the Dark Chalice in the sky again,
and the Meadwell was spewing black water from Hades and...'

      
'And I saw that Joseph's
Holy Thorn'
, Juanita said,
'had
withered in the earth and...'

      
'Stop it! Pixhill was a paranoid, sick old man.'

      
'
... and the Feet which
walked in ancient times
,' Juanita was amazed she could remember this stuff,
'had walked again in the winter-hardened
fields of Avalon. But this time...
'

      
Banks walked away in anguish, his head bowed like a monk's.