The Chalice (25 page)

      
'Oh, yes. Very, er ...'

      
He'd seen the plaques decorated with knights and ladies and
heraldry, Morte D'Arthur manuscript stuff; nothing exciting, but that seemed to
be Tony. Nothing too exciting.

      
'Going bloody well. Quite well. People liked it. And the ley-line
stuff I did with Woolly Woolaston. Now we're doing this set of six plates on
Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph and the boy Jesus on the Isle of Avalon. Joseph
collecting the Blood in the Grail. Planting his staff on Wearyall Hill. Damned
collectible. Expensive, but it's a limited edition. That's the way ahead, I
think. Limited editions.'

      
'Indeed.' Jim was bored. He saw Archer Ffitch stand up to
leave. Archer turned and smiled at someone who'd probably been congratulating
him on his candidacy.

      
'It's this bloody goddess group,' Tony said, 'the bloody
Cauldron. That's what changed everything. All female? You know? She goes twice
a week now. It's supposed to be a consciousness-raising thing. Discussion and
meditation. But who knows what goes on behind closed doors. Do
you
know?'

      
Jim shook his head. Never had liked single-sex outfits. Back
at the building society he'd resisted all attempts to get him into the Masons,
even the buggering Rotary Club.

      
'And so now she's been poring over pictures of fat, ugly
Celtic fertility goddesses and producing these ghastly crude female figurines,
sort of Earth-mothers with huge ... you know…'

      
'Boobs?'

      
Tony glanced furtively around and then whispered it.
      
'Vaginas.'

      
He swallowed.

      
'Who the hell's going to buy those things? I said. Finally, I
said it. Tonight. That was all I said - who's going to buy them?'

      
'Reasonable enough question,' Jim said. Lord, not another
range of pot goddesses with giant fannies.

      
'That's what I thought.' Tony slid close to the wall. 'We have
a living to make. I thought it was a reasonable ... reasonable question. So I
asked it. Who's going to buy them? I said. That was it. All I said.'

      
Tony lifted the bottom of his Guernsey sweater, pulled it up
over his stomach.

      
'Look at this.'

      
'Good God, man, what are you doing?' Jim inched away in
discomfort. Was this a preliminary to what they called 'male bonding'?

      
'She ...' Tears forming in the poor chap's eyes. Lord, oh
Lord.

      
'Look, steady on, Tony old chap.'

      
'… She smiled, Jim, and came close ... snuggling up, you know?
Hands inside the jersey, and then ...
      
'Oh my God.' Jim recoiled.
      
'Like a puma.'

      
'Look, hadn't you better have those seen to?'

      
'Savaged me like a puma,' Tony said, displaying livid scratches,
six or eight inches long, still half-bleeding.

      
He began to cry. 'Came here to find love and harmony. And she
savages me. Like a puma.'

THREE

Pixhill

Most people would have flicked
through the pages, reading an entry here, an entry there, get the idea of what kind
of book it was. Not Diane. Diane had to start on page one.

      
Juanita watched brown, wavy hair flop over the girl's face as
her head bowed over the unappealing book.

      
Actually, it was quite gripping, the introduction, in its recounting
of how Pixhill had first been turned towards Glastonbury, a place he'd hardly
heard of.

      
And even in the introduction Diane would discover one or two
parallels, as a young army officer lay in a wrecked tank in the Western Desert
in May, 1942 ...

A
full moon, or very near.

I
expect I was staring up at the damn thing when it happened, head and shoulders out
of the hatch, like a ginger cat I once saw peering out of a dustbin.

       
Don't actually remember any of what
happened immediately before and certainly nothing of the actual impact which,
being a direct hit into the body of the Grant, must have been like having your
legs shot from under you.

       
My driver and co-driver, down below
there, wouldn't have heard the bang either. They must have died at once.
Similarly Corporal Elliman, the gunner, took some chunk of metal, never knew
precisely where it came from, into his brain via the left eye, I think it was.

       
It was Little, Charles Anthony Little,
wireless operator, who caused me the most pain. He was the veteran among us at
thirty-one, almost a father figure to me, his commander, Capt. Pixhill,
twenty-two, and an immature twenty-two to boot, thinking back.

       
Libya, this was, May twenty seventh,
when Rommel pulled a fast one, the old werewolf rising to the moon and having
us cleverly outflanked. By dawn, the desert around Bir Hacheim was a veritable ocean
of metal, but I saw nothing of that. The battle, for me, was a battle with
myself, to block out the pain of my smashed legs and the sounds of war and of Charlie
Little dying. While, out of the morning sky, the arrogant moon still shone down
through the open hatch like some freshly polished medal on a Nazi chest.

What
happened, I quickly worked out, having nothing better to do, was that a
mounting pin from Elliman's machine gun had flown off when the whole damn thing
sprang back with him, and (someone had speculated about the chances of this
only a week or so earlier, but Major Collier said it couldn't happen) took poor
Little in the throat.

       
Not much conversation between us, as you
can imagine. I remember the poor chap blubbing and gurgling. I remember the
smell of cordite and blood and the smoke from a thousand Capstans, the last of
them having fallen from Elliman's lips to his chest and burnt a hole through his
shirt before expiring. I remember the extraordinary agony in my legs when I
tried to reach Little, thinking that if I could pull the damn pin from his neck
he'd be able to talk to me. Conversation. All I craved.

       
I
 
could hardly move at all, so I lay there
shivering and entertaining poor Charlie with what must have been a devastatingly
tedious monologue about my life thus far and how I had hoped to become a
clergyman but war more or less resigned to an obscure career as a history
teacher at some minor public school. My uncle William it was, Archdeacon of Liverpool,
who had talked me out of the clergy.

       
The Church, he said dryly, tended to
frown on young chaps who 'claimed' to have had encounters with angels.

       
Well only the one angel, I assured
Little. The figure of a kindly chap in cricket whites who first bent over my
bed when I was seven and quieted my whooping cough and thereafter was sometimes
vaguely discernible at the edges of my vision, when someone close to me had died
or the situation looked generally black. Each time the Cricketer came out to
bat for me, I would have new energy to pull myself through whatever crisis.

       
After Little died, with a dispiriting
bubbling sound like a wet inner tube with a puncture, I looked around for that
reliable old sportsman, wondering if there was room for him in the turret with
me, but all I could see out of the comers of my eyes was death and dawn and
moonlight, and I thought, this is it, George, not going to come out of this
now, are we? Remember thinking, what IS the bloody point? And that even the
whooping cough would have been a better death.

       
I wondered, quite distantly, how long it
would take for the Door to close. Knew I had a head injury but had kept my
hands away from the cranial region, not wishing to know how serious. I thought
that someone would tell my family I had died a hero.

       
Was this what I had been preserved for?
To die a 'hero's death'? To qualify for membership of the Valhalla Club, endless
booze and loose women for all eternity?

       
Mine would be, in fact, an inglorious
death: the inexperienced, not
  
to say
incompetent junior commander who managed to get all his crew killed first.
After all, if I hadn't been halfway through the hatch, sniffing the desert air,
I too would have been gone by now. I thought of the Cricketer and I saw him not
so much in the image of an angel as some serene, pipe-smoking fool in a Brylcreem
advert, and I thought, it's a joke, it's all a damned joke, there is no purpose
to life, we can have no control over our individual destinies, there is no
'divine guidance' to be had. And I was, for a sick instant, almost in awe of
Hitler, who believed he had been chosen to alter the destiny of the entire
human race.

       
I think it was at that moment that I
lost all desire to survive. The Allies, certainly, would be a sight better off without
me.

       
Equally, though, I had no wish to go out
gasping and weeping bitter tears on the blood-sticky floor of a Grant tank. And
so I wondered how I might pull myself up to the hatch to show my head so that
some sharp eyed Panzer could shoot it off, quick and clean.

       
I lay for a long time, staring up the
circle of smoky blue, at the fading moon tike a chipped shilling, and feeling
the numbness, a sort of permanent shiver, creeping up my lower body and —

       
Well, I suppose you will say I fell
asleep You will say I hallucinated or that it was due to the reaction of
chemicals in my brain. For that is how we prefer to explain such phenomena in
the nineteen-seventies, embarrassed as we are by the term ... vision.

There was a strange sort of
glow in Diane's eyes which Juanita had seen before and found disturbing. Not to
say ominous.

      
'The Cricketer,' Diane said.

      
'Thought you'd spot that. Bit like your revered nanny, huh?
Sits on the edge of the bed with a cool hand on the fevered young brow. Jung
would've loved him.'

      
Diane looked disappointed. 'You're saying this is an archetypal
thing. Sort of projected imagination. A child's comfort figure. My ghost,
angel, whatever was a good nanny, because all my real nannies were nasty, and
Colonel Pixhill's was a cricketer because he was a boy.'

      
'Something like that. Beats lying awake sucking your thumb, I
suppose.'

      
Diane frowned. 'You've changed. You're ever so cynical now,
aren't you?'

      
'Maybe I've come to my senses. I used to be a mystical snob
like the rest, an elitist in a town full of them.'

      
'What you mean is, you used to be a seeker after some sort of
truth,' Diane said primly. 'And now you've stopped searching.'

      
'If you want to put it like that. All the sects and societies and
covens, they all think their particular Path is the True Way and everything
else is crap. I've concluded it's safer to start off on the basis that it's all
crap.'

      
'That's just as bigoted, Juanita.'

      
'Saves a lot of time though, doesn't it?' Juanita pulled her
old blue mac from the back of the parlour door. 'Look, I'm off to the pub, see
if I can find Jim. You coming?'
      
'I think I'd rather like to finish
reading this.'
      
'Thought you would. Just remember
he died a sad, rather isolated old man, deserted by his wife, stuck in a gloomy
farmhouse he couldn't afford to heat and ... Oh, remember not to open the door
for anyone, cream Range Rover or otherwise.'
      
'I won't. Juanita ...'
      
'Mmm?'

      
Diane held up the book, pointed to the tiny writing at the
bottom of the spine, where it said Carey and Frayne.

      
'And yet you published this.'

      
Juanita shrugged. 'Well... at the Pixhill Trust's expense. A
thousand copies, only a few of which have sold since word got round about what
was in it. Left to me, there's no way it would have come out looking like that,
but the Trust were calling the shots and they wanted dark green, no picture, no
blurb, no publicity, no other outlets. It wasn't important if only a few people
bought it. It just had to be ... available.'

      
'Did they say why? I mean, he's been dead nearly twenty years.'