The Magus of Hay (22 page)

39

Convoy

H
UW SAID
, ‘W
ELL
?’

‘They’re just appealing for sightings of her car.’

Merrily switched off the radio, climbed out of the Freelander.

‘Nowt new, then.’ Huw nodded towards a small man in a farmer’s woollen shirt and a plaid tie, walking down towards St Mary’s Church. ‘Emrys Walters. Baptist minister. His dad were one of the artisans hired by Eric Gill to tart up the monastery, create a Catholic chapel inside. He raised a hand. ‘All right, lad?’

‘Ow’re you, boy?’

He was older than Huw, probably in his seventies, fit-looking, weathered, short white hair.

‘This is Merrily Watkins, Emrys. Vicar of Ledwardine, over the border.’

‘Ledwardine. Well, now.’ Emrys spoke slowly, shaking hands with Merrily. ‘Gomer Parry lives there, that right?’

Merrily smiled, like you did when anybody mentioned Gomer.

‘Worked with him down in Hay, years back,’ Emrys said. ‘He still piloting that great big…?’

Emrys did the motions of steering pulling levers.

‘JCB? Oh yes. And digs graves, cuts hedges.’

‘Thought I hadn’t yeard he was dead.’

Huw said, ‘Let’s go and sit down, eh?’

*  *  *

The little church had a steadying air. Pews like park benches under the white walls, the gallery with its wooden rails, the message in the white window about the help in the hills. Huw shut the door and they sat at the ends of separate pews and talked about Peter Rector.

‘Never knowed he was back, see,’ Emrys said. ‘Not a whisper. Cusop, well, that’s no distance. Not as I’ve ever been there, mind.’ He shook his head. ‘Drownded. Well, well.’

Huw leaned forward, hands clasped.

‘When you last hear of him, Emrys?’

‘Gotter be twenny, thirty years since left the farm, sure to. We thought he’d gone abroad somewhere, see, and died out there.’

‘Common misconception,’ Huw said. ‘Can I take you back thirty, forty years?’

He got Emrys talking about Peter Rector’s return to Capel after the death of his parents and the publication of his bestselling book, with lots of money to spend.

‘And he did spend some, too,’ Emrys said. ‘Done up all the outbuildings – barns, sheepsheds, the lot. Water, electricity. Kept me in work for over a year, on and off. I was still a young man, then, never made no claim to be an expert tradesman, but I gotter say he always treated me with respect.’

Emrys talked vaguely about the residential courses, with Rector as a kind of guru, as they called them then.

‘He
looked
like a guru, see, with his height and the commanding way he walked. Long black hair, and those eyes – intense way he had of looking at you. Like he could see through your appearance to the core of you. Not everybody liked that. However polite he was, there were plenty who avoided meeting him in the lane, just because of the way he looked at you. What they didn’t understand – he told me this once – was how much pleasure the hills gave him after his years in a POW camp. The air, the freedom.’

‘And the earth-power he found here,’ Huw said to Merrily. ‘The strange energy. The mysticism in the hills. As experienced before him by Father Iggy and Eric Gill.’

‘Ah… Mr Gill.’ Emrys smiled cautiously. ‘Father Ignatius builds the monastery, and he’s mostly forgotten now. Gill just lives in it for a while and he’s the most famous feller ever lived in Capel. Fair bit a gossip about him, even then, mind.’

‘No surprise there, Emrys.’

‘Thing was, ’cordin’ to my father, he was a real nice feller to deal with. Very English, very polite, real enthusiastic. Made you realize what you’d got, living yere. The ole farmers used to go down to Hay market and feel like they was nothing,
from
nothing – thin ole ground, still covered in thick snow a month after all the rest was green. But Mr Gill, he’d tell you he felt privileged to be yere.’

‘Gill was a traditional Catholic, I think,’ Merrily said.

Knowing from Huw’s expression that this wasn’t quite right, but it was too late.

‘Oh aye, lass. As traditional as anybody who went to mass in his own chapel and then kept on having sex with his daughters.’

Merrily said nothing, recalling the sinister little-girl voice of Miss Athena White.

… the necessity of breaking human taboos, pushing the mind and body beyond accepted limits of behaviour. Performing acts regarded by society as hideous…

Wondering how Eric Gill had married passionate Catholicism with serial incest. Had he really confessed his sin… and then done it again and again? Or had he not quite seen it as a sin? Had he managed to find something profanely sacred in it, something spiritually empowering?

She turned to Huw, raised an eyebrow.

‘Aye, I know, lass. If Rector were chaos magic and Father Iggy were chaos religion, Eric Gill… I don’t know what you’d call his combination of devoutness, art and incest. But even he couldn’t keep it up for long, as it were. Four years, Emrys?’

‘Mabbe the winters was too hard, too long. Take some heating, the old monastery. Mabbe the demands was more’n he’d
reckoned on. Moved on to what you might call softer climes, I believe.’

‘And then Peter Rector arrives,’ Huw said.

‘Could be Mr Rector’s parents was here within a year or so of Mr Gill leavin’. Their farmhouse, that’s a couple of miles away, up towards the Bluff, but they used to come down yere to church, and the son he’d go up through the woods to the monastery, to play with the local farm boys.’

‘So,’ Huw said to Merrily, ‘Rector were steeped in the atmosphere here from about the age of ten, all through his formative years before the war. He’d learned about Father Iggy, and the farm lads’d be telling him all the stories about what Eric Gill got up to.’

Emrys said Rector’s parents had been interested in Eric Gill’s stone-carving and drawings. Emrys’s own dad had also learned quite a lot from Gill about carving memorials, and he passed the knowledge on to Emrys, telling him about the man with a posh accent who came out of England and taught you how you make real art out of your biggest natural commodity.

Rector had no talent for stone-carving, Huw said, but he knew about the curious atmosphere of the place, and when he came back, in what you might call vigorous middle age, to claim his inheritance, he’d learned a whole lot more.

‘Keen to try out a few things – and what better place than this? Tiny population and all these absorbent hills.’

‘I bet
you
fancied this parish,’ Merrily said.

‘I’d’ve loved it, lass. But the opportunity never arose, and I ended up further west, where I were born. And this is part of Hay now. Or Hay…’ Huw leaned forward, bizarrely excited ‘… Hay is part of
this
. Feeding off the energy Ignatius found. St Mary’s at Hay is probably the only Anglo–Catholic church in South Wales. Incense, bells and whistles, the lot. And pulling in record congregations when all the others are dwindling.’

‘But that could be just an inspiring vicar.’

‘Could be,’ Huw said lightly. ‘Could be. Or, if you wanted to be fanciful, you might think summat were drifting down the holy Gospel Pass.’

‘Nice idea,’ Merrily said. ‘Now, is anybody going to tell me what Rector was actually doing up here and how it relates to two missing girls?’

It still took a while to come out.

Emrys said, ‘Mr Gill’s was an artistic community, see: his own family, Mr Davy Jones the painter and various staff… including priests. Always a strong religious element. Mr Rector’s, forty years later, was… well, we all thought that was religious, too, and likely so did he.’

‘Nobody really knew what went on,’ Huw said. ‘They only saw – or thought they saw – some of the effects of it. But you might care to speculate about Rector experimenting with the natural energy, enhanced by the yearnings of Father Iggy and Eric Gill. If I were more of a mystic, I might say that the veil between heaven and earth, between here and there, between one kind of existence and another… you might think what went on up here had stretched it tight as a drum.’

Emrys looked uncomfortable. No wonder the people of the Black Mountains had retreated into the starkness and simplicity of their Baptist chapels.

‘Sometimes,’ Emrys said, ‘Rector’s people would walk all the way from the farmhouse to the monastery, before dawn, in complete silence, till they got to the place where the Lady was seen in the eighteen seventies. All arriving in the morning mist.’

Merrily said, ‘You saw this?’

‘And I turned away, Mrs Watkins. I turned away. For, as the Bible says, I was sore afraid.’

‘Who
were
these people? The people who came to study with Rector, and to partake in his… rituals.’

‘Rich people,’ Huw said. ‘Paying to live rough and learn secrets. Famous people – rock stars who wanted summat closer
to home than an ashram in the Himalayas. Rector seems to have liked famous people. Creative people. Artists.’

‘And writers,’ Emrys said. ‘They reckon that in the early years of that Hay Festival, when it was held in the town and these writers and poets used to go to the pubs and the cafés, he’d get into conversation with them. Seemed to be able to attract people to him. When you seen him you thought
he
must be somebody you knowed from the papers or the television. Somebody famous. What’s the word…?’

‘Charisma,’ Huw said. ‘Just like Father Iggy and Eric Gill.’

‘Aye. Same when you seen him walking across the hills… these big, long strides. Like he owned the place. I don’t mean in an arrogant way, I suppose I mean like he
knowed
the place. And it knowed him. On some higher level.’

Even in the earthy acoustic of the chapel, this was getting impenetrable. It still wasn’t clear exactly what form Rector’s residential courses had taken. What he was actually teaching.

‘Put ’em through it, mind,’ Emrys said. ‘The rich folks.’

‘Part of the exercise,’ Huw said. ‘Separate yourself from your normal environment. Be closer to the hard, stony ground.’

‘And havin’ to mix with the Convoy. Not all of them liked that.’

‘Sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘The what?’

‘Convoy,’ Huw said. ‘You must remember the Convoy, lass. The so-called New Age Travellers. The neo-hippies who went round in customized buses, getting stoned and holding moveable festivals. Mostly along the Welsh border on account of the remoteness of it. Until a law got passed making it illegal for more than two or three to travel around, set up camp.’

‘Of course. Yes. Heard people talk about that. Clashes with the police all over the country. Weren’t they demanding the same status as Romany gypsies?’

‘Farmers mostly hated them,’ Huw said. ‘Useless scroungers trespassing on private land, burning fences for camp fires. Not popular in the country towns either. Specially in Hay. Every
autumn a dozen or so knackered owd buses’d arrive on Hay Bluff – holy of holies for the Convoy – where there were a stone circle they could claim for their own and you could pick thousands of magic mushrooms in the season.’

‘Ah.’

‘Psilocybin mushrooms. Poor man’s acid. You made a brew wi’ ’em. Quite effective… I’m told. Anyroad, Peter Rector would involve some of the Convoy folk in his communal activities. His rituals. Which didn’t make him many friends in Hay.’

‘They’d walk over from their camp on the Bluff,’ Emrys recalled. ‘Quite a few at first, but in the end it was just a handful who’d come back.’

‘Why them?’

‘Happen because they were the ones up for owt,’ Huw said. ‘Nowt to lose. Willing to participate in who knows what.’

‘Does either of you know what?’

‘Could be looking at enhanced visualization. Various attempts… by ritual and a combined focus – and happen a pot or two of mushroom tea – to bring summat into existence… a
perceived
existence, if you prefer to retain some scepticism.’

‘Specifically?’

‘Merrily,’ Huw said. ‘You know what we’re talking about.’

‘Sacrilege,’ Emrys said. ‘We turned the other way because he was a friendly man when you knowed him. And he’d brought money into the community.’

Merrily gazed across the nave at the little mouse on the font lid. Thought it might have moved.

‘And did she come?’

Emrys Walters, a non conformist minister from some plain, cold chapel, had turned his head away towards the east window, a hand shaking with the memory of something.

‘Some folks reckon so. Aye.’

40

Mephista

‘I
DIDN
’
T EXPECT
that,’ Merrily said. ‘I didn’t expect any of it. How come we never heard about it at the time? Even you.’

Huw looked at her like she’d just come out of an egg, reminding her that these things still happened, or were perceived as happening, day-to-day, and nobody knew this more than they did, the medieval hackers at the spiritual coalface.

‘It gets blanked out,’ Huw said. ‘Even by the Church. A whole level of human experience trashed as loony-fodder – doesn’t happen, can’t happen, nobody’s that gullible any more. Also, this is Capel-y-ffin, where it were blanked out here the first time because it didn’t fit the religious order of things.’

They watched Emrys Walters getting into his van in front of the farm where the sheepdogs had started barking. The questions Merrily wasn’t sure she wanted to ask were stacking up.

‘You met any of the others who thought they’d seen it?’

‘Nobody else – not round here – wants to talk about it. They don’t know what they saw. They want to forget it. The way they wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been summoned by a combination of rich buggers and mushroom-heads from the hated Convoy.’

‘What did it look like?’

‘Accounts vary. Some say grey, smudgy, soiled, indistinct. No more than a discolouring of the morning mist. Others… radiant. I don’t know, it’s all subjective and I were still up north at the time.’

Emrys’s van rattled into life, coughed out blue smoke. He beeped his horn at them as the van pulled away, and they stood at the side of the lane and considered the possibility of Peter Rector conducting a psychological experiment to see if, through meditation and combined visualization, an image of the Lady of Llanthony might be made perceptible again, nearly a century after its first alleged appearance.

Huw stood staring at the clouds.

‘And how do you feel about that yourself?’ Merrily asked.

‘
I
think… that Peter Rector was, at that time, still a darker man. A man who wanted to play with the elements, if he could, and people’s minds, which he knew he could. Happen for its own sake, or his own gratification or his own psychic development. I can’t see as it’d be for anybody’s good.’

‘And was this when the girls went missing?’

‘You see why it were important for you to know the background first?’ Huw said.

The girls had been from the convoy. One was sixteen, the other in her twenties. They’d vanished while the convoy was camped on Hay Bluff, picking mushrooms. Not the most peaceful gathering; there had been regular confrontations with the police, under pressure from the farmers and a proportion of the towns-folk of Hay to move them on.

Generally speaking, Hay, like all towns, didn’t like the Convoy people. They came down from the Bluff to collect their state benefits, buy their cheap cider, drink it in the streets. Sometimes there was trouble. Shops banned them to protect their stock.

‘And both girls had been to Rector’s gatherings?’

‘As far as I can ascertain, only one,’ Huw said. The younger one. The daughter of what you might call holiday hippies. Owd hippies who wanted to recapture the excitement of their youth, in the Summer of Love. They’d buy an owd bus and join the convoy for a few weeks. Usually they’d be welcomed by the
regular convoy, not least because they had more money. Mephista’s parents… they were in the writer-and-poet bag.’

‘She was really called Mephista?’

‘Kind of name hippies gave their kids. Her dad were a freelance writer who was supposed to be planning a book about life on the road with the Convoy. Her mother took the photos. They might’ve had the heart to finish it if they’d ever seen their daughter again.’

‘Vanished? Just like that?’

‘Mephista were a problem. She didn’t relate to the New Age traveller thing. She wanted city life, clubs – discos as it would’ve been then. The parents dragged her along to Rector’s place if only to keep an eye on her. They were very keen on Rector – well, you would be if you were doing a book. But then one day Mephista was gone and the older woman, too. The older one came and went a lot, used to get lifts into Hay and might not come back for a day or two. Thought to be on the game. So it would’ve been a while before they found out she was gone, too. The camp wasn’t exactly tightly organized, as you can imagine.’

‘Who told you all this?’

‘Emrys. Who else? He’s a good man. He’d go up and chat to the Convoy now and again, see if they needed any help. They never told him to bugger off. He thought they were generally harmless, happy to be up there out of the way. It’s interesting, psilocybin, the mushroom drug, I were reading about that not long ago. Banned now, ranked alongside cocaine, but some experts reckon it’s up there wi’ Prozac as an antidepressant. A natural antidepressant. If you were a homeless hippy, happen it made you feel less like trash.’

‘These girls – neither was ever found?’

‘Nor came back. There was a police investigation, but where do you start? Especially if they don’t want to be found.’

‘If the older one was on the game…’

‘I imagine that worried the parents quite a lot over the years. That Mephista might be down in Swansea or Cardiff or Bristol,
turning tricks, getting ravaged by hard men, hard drugs. They never stopped looking, the parents. They’d keep coming back – Emrys’d see them in the hills, as if it were at all likely their daughter would show up here again.’

‘And Rector?’

‘He’d’ve been checked out at the time by the police. Nothing happened to him. But it all ended soon afterwards, anyroad. Happen it were the missing girls. Anyroad, he went quiet.’

‘He had a breakdown, according to Athena White.’

‘Oh, a
breakdown…’

Merrily shrugged. Huw’s lined face looked bitter, as if Rector had stolen his private vision and trashed it.

‘Farm went on the market and Emrys never saw Peter Rector from that day to this.’

‘Not knowing he was just a few miles away. Under a different name. With a beard.’

‘Ah, let’s go down to Hay, get summat to eat, eh?’

‘Wait.’ They’d reached the Freelander with its hem of crusty mud. A big dome of a hill blocked the eastern horizon. ‘What if he had good reason to think there were bad vibes here? The atmosphere soured.’

‘Your mate White’s evidently still on his side. Bloody owd witch.’

‘I’m not being naive, Huw, but suppose he
had
been infiltrated by some seriously awful people? What I’m thinking, could they have come in through the convoy? Like you said, anybody could join it.’

‘Happen.’

‘And what if he did have a good reason for… making something happen?’

‘What, like introducing Anglo-Catholicism to Hay?’

‘Not sure I was thinking of that, but it’s there. It’s happened.’

‘So,’ Huw said, ‘he finds himself a nice, secluded refuge a few miles away, where it’s not quite as cold and you can grow proper trees, surrounded wi’ nice, middle-class country dwellers.’

‘And begins what Miss White calls his Last Redemptive Project.’

‘Redemptive, eh?’ Huw sank his hands into the pockets of his ancient jacket, looked down at his trainers. ‘To redeem
himself
?’

‘Or the area? Where Father Ignatius failed, presumably, and his church collapsed into a dangerous ruin, and Eric Gill got all excited but then couldn’t stick it for long. And where Rector himself let the past catch up with him. If you keep on walking from Cusop Dingle, this is where you finish up.’

‘And where do
you
go from here, lass?’

‘Don’t know. Sometimes it all looks like a crooked path that leads nowhere other than Richard Dawkins’s back door. Do people like Rector just create a working fantasy? Do we all?’

‘Wasn’t what I meant, lass,’ Huw said gently. ‘I meant are you going to tell Bliss any of this?’

‘What would that achieve? You really think the police are going to follow it up on the off chance it might point up a reason for somebody to have killed Rector? Thus providing a very tenuous link with a missing girl?’

She looked up into the hills, from whence there were no visible offers of help.