The Chalice (27 page)

      
Silence.

      
'Good,' said Dr Pel Grainger. 'I congratulate you all. You
have reached what I term First stage Tenebral Symbiosis. Now we can begin.

      
Verity sat with her fingers linked on her knees and felt some
trepidation.

When
I awoke in my room at the George and Pilgrims, sunlight had turned the stained
glass in my window into a nest of gems and I felt at once a different person.
It was the first time since before the War that I had slept the night through
and awoken after sunrise. Or, if it was not the first time, then it certainly
felt like it.

       
This was my rebirth. That morning I
walked through the Abbey ruins, at first appalled at what little remained and
then overcome with a sudden humility and a desire ... to worship.
       
This was something I had never
before experienced; indeed I realised then that I had never really understood
the meaning of
 
'worship'. Before I knew
it, I had fallen to my knees, something I had not been able to do since leaving
hospital, without the most excruciating pain. This time I felt no pain at all,
only a growing sense of wonder.

       
I do not know how long I knelt there in
the wet winter grass, gazing up through the noble arch of the Western Doorway,
Even today it is still possible, in Glastonbury, to kneel alone and undisturbed
in a wide open public place, although I should not care to predict how long
this state of affairs will remain before the worshipper is derided or even
attacked and robbed. But it seemed to me then, and sometimes
still does, that these serene ruins enclose a level of holiness unexperienced
in most of our great surviving cathedrals.

       
And something else: a sadness, which I
perceived then as sweet melancholy but now, it pains me to record, seems closer
to a bitter despair.

       
But I was full of an extraordinary
optimism as, later that morning, I made my way to the Chalice Well, where the
Blood Spring flows and the Arimathean was said to have laid down the Grail.

       
There to meet my Teacher and another
person: the highly controversial writer and mystic Mr John Cowper Powys.

       
Mr Powys, it must be said, was not the
most popular man in this town at this time, due to the publication before the War
of his extremely lengthy novel
A Glastonbury Romance.
       
It is a powerfully volatile tome
which had left me with very much mixed feelings. Although its central
inspiration is the Holy Grail, the Glastonbury it portrays is far from a sacred
haven. Indeed it emerges as a divided community full of 'misfits'. One leading
character is an extremely aggressive entrepreneur and there is a young man
whose spiritual leanings are challenged by a pretty extreme case of sexual
frustration. There is also an unpleasant Welsh pervert of the masochistic type
whose peccadilloes are said to have been derived from aspects of Mr Powys's own
psychology.

       
And so the thought of an encounter with
this depraved and opinionated windbag would normally have completely taken the
shine off the day. However...

Diane looked up from Pixhill's
diary in alarm. Someone was banging on the shop door.

      
Don't open the door for anyone, Juanita had warned, cream
Range Rover or otherwise. Did she really mean that? Juanita had been a little
strange, not only more cynical but seemingly less secure. Rather disturbing;
she'd always been such ... well, such a lovely free spirit, really.

      
Diane rose hesitantly. It was true that Glastonbury was not as
safe as it used to be. Apparently, there'd been a couple of muggings in the
past year, while she was away, and a sexual assault, and as for burglaries ...

      
She opened the door to the shop just a crack. Through the shop
window she could see ... Oh gosh. A sort of floating thing in white.

      
'Oh, Diana!' she heard. 'Don't be tedious. I know you're there.'

      
Oh no. It was that woman, the artist. Domini Something-Thing.

      
'Come on, do open the door. I need your help.'

      
Diane, sighing, went through into the darkened shop. Hadn't
she told the woman she was busy tonight? Cautiously, she unlocked the door.

      
'Oh, Diana, really,' Domini said as though they were old friends.
'It's only me.'

      
She stepped lightly over the threshold. She was wearing a
long, white dress, rather flimsy, a dress for a summer night but she didn't
seem at all cold. Too animated. There was a gold coloured girdle loosely around
her waist, a tore of brass around her neck. She looked ... like a goddess.

      
'It's Diane,' Diane said. 'Not Diana. Look, I'm terribly sorry...'

      
'Oh,' said Domini. 'You should call yourself Diana, it's more
resonant. Diana the huntress.'

      
'I've never been much of a huntress,' said Diane.

      
'No. I suppose you haven't.' Domini looked at her with a
tilted smile. 'You must be quite strong, though. Hold these, would you?' She
reached down behind her to the pavement and came up with a cardboard wine box.
'Be careful, it's rather heavy.'

      
'Wine?' Diane was bemused, her head still full of the Pixhill
diaries.

      
'Lord, no. Follow me.'

      
Domini glided diagonally across High Street, paying no heed to
a motorcyclist who roared through her path. Behaving as though she was made of
air and light and the bike would have passed straight through her.

      
Diane lumbered behind, clutching the cardboard box to her
chest. People had always treated her like a servant. Even servants; her father's
staff were always making her fetch mops and garden tools and things.

      
'Stay precisely there.' Domini had stopped outside her shop.
Holy Thorn Ceramics. The window was in darkness.
      
Domini went into the shop and
returned with another cardboard wine box.

      
Diane stared around, blinking; this was like a silly dream.
The buildings, the familiar mixture of old and older, glistened and glittered
in a Christmas card sort of way, although the night was far too mild for frost.
The street was curiously deserted.

      
'OK, you can put it down now.' Domini dumped her own box on
the flagstones and danced back from it as though it was dirty or radioactive or
something. A wobbling clatter of crockery echoed in the silence.

      
Domini dipped delicately into the box and extracted a white
disc, holding it up towards a street light like a conjuror demonstrating to the
audience.

      
It was a plate, gold-rimmed with a stained-glass-style painting
in the middle, of a bearded man below a towerless Tor with a barefoot boy.

      
'That's rather charming.' Diane said.

      
'Think so, do you?' A white sleeve dropped to the shoulder as Domini's
arm came back, and she tossed the plate into the night like a Frisbee.

      
'My God, what are you ... ?'

      
The plate spun in the air for about twenty yards, flashing in
the streetlight, before smashing into coloured shards in the road. Domini let out
a shrill whoop and shook her golden hair.

      
'Can you feel it, Diana? Can you feel the vibrations, the energy
around us?'

      
She took out a second plate. The picture in the middle showed
a table bearing a golden cup with a shimmering aureole around it. Domini's arm
came back again.

      
'No!' Diane yelled. 'Please ...'

      
Domini lowered her arm and looked at her 'You're right. I'll
wait for a car. Or, better still, a heavy lorry.'

      
'Why are you doing this? Didn't they turn out well or something?'

      
Domini laughed, a drunk's laugh, but there was no aura of
alcohol about her.

      
'Old stock, Diana. As of tonight. Obsolete. The shop's
changing. Holy Thorn Ceramics - that was his idea, too. I know why now, I know
the truth about the Thorn. Holy Mother, can't you feel it yet?'

      
'Yes.' And she could. The night was as sharp as one of the
shards of pottery. Everything was hard and clear. There was no wind. The air
seemed to fizz.

      
Domini spread out her arms like a bird feeling the currents. Diane
didn't like it. She didn't like the feel of Glastonbury since she'd returned -
the unseasonal mildness, summer blight in November, It was as if the weather
had been tampered with, the conditions altered for some purpose.

      
'Look. Don't do this ... Domini. You'll regret it tomorrow, I
know you will.'

      
'Tomorrow? Darling, I spit on tomorrow. OK, look, if you don't
want me to smash them, help me display them. Will you do that, Diana?'

      
Domini began to take plates out of the box, like a child unpacking
toys. She laid each one face up on the pavement in a line, edging down the hill,
dragging the cardboard box behind her.

      
'Well, what are you waiting for? Take the other box. Come
on
, Diana.'

      
'They'll get trodden on.'

      
'Maybe. But if you don't help me I'll tread on them all now.'

      
'This is mad.'

      
'Sanest thing I've ever done. Go on, the bending will do you
good. You're too fat. What's the matter with you? Don't you walk anywhere?
Don't you ever have sex?'

      
She's
out of control. Oh gosh. Humour her. Then get away
.
      
Diane carefully took a plate out of
the box. It showed the bearded man looking up at Christ on the cross.

      
'Can you believe it?' Domini said. 'I actually painted this shit.'

      
'I don't understand.'

      
'Christianity's a brash, male religion which insults women. If
we accept, as I assume we all do, that the so-called Holy Grail is simply an
unsubtle Christianisation of the Celtic chalice, the sacred cauldron of our
ancient wisdom ... We do assume that, don't we, Diana?'

      
'Well …'

      
'In which case, tell me this.' Domini faced her, hands on hips.
'Where does the Bible mention the Grail? Even the Christian propagandists can't
seem to agree whether it was some cup from the mythical Last Supper or whether it
was the vessel which caught the blood dripping from the cross.'

      
'Or both.'

      
'Or neither. It's a myth. It's smoke. The so-called Grail
Quest is a clear cut male-domination trip, an attempt by armed men to steal
Woman's cauldron of wisdom and rape her in the process. Just like the raising
of the Abbey, with its great phallic towers - no, listen! - by a male-oriented Roman
religion on a spot which just happened to be the holy vagina of the supine
Goddess.'

      
'Oh,
really!
' Diane
had heard all this before.

      
'No, come on, think about this ... The Holy Thorn story, OK?
Central character: one Joseph of Arimathea, wealthy merchant, international
wheeler-dealer.'

      
'I think it's a rather lovely story, actually,' Diane said staunchly.
'The old tin trader, who brought Jesus to Avalon as a boy, making that last
journey back with the holy cup. It's really ... resonant. When I'm on Wearyall
Hill sometimes I can imagine it all as an island again and old Joseph being
helped ashore, a bit unsteady, staggering up the hill with the help of his
staff and then, when he can go no further ...'

      
'You really are a big schoolgirl aren't you?' Domini pulled
out her cheeks as if she was going to throw up with contempt. 'Isn't it
obvious? Sticking his staff into the ground ... pulling out his ... staff...
and he pushes it into a sacred landscape formed into the contours of the body
of the Goddess. This man Joseph symbolically
fucks
the Goddess …'

      
'No!' Diane was appalled. 'How can you …?'

      
'And his seed, Diana … his foul seed germinates into a
misshapen, stunted tree full of vicious thorns. A tree which flowers in the
dead of winter against ...'
      
'Oh now, look ...'