The Chalice (48 page)

      
Even after reading the Pixhill diaries.

'All I know is it's itching
like hell,' she said.

      
This nurse was small and bossy but not unsympathetic. She was
called Karen.

      
'That's a good sign. Let's have a look.' She leaned across the
bed, the only one in the side-ward. 'Hey, don't back off. It won't hurt.'

      
'Sorry. Oh, I do need to get out of here.'

      
'Don't we all? Only some of us have to feed our kids. Just be
glad we're not kicking you out before your time. You get the best bits now - relaxing
and being looked after and not having to worry. That's the idea, anyway.'

      
'Sorry. I'm just a natural-born ungrateful bitch.'

      
The looking-after bit - that was the worst of all. You had to
drink from a baby-cup with a spout, sometimes with a nurse holding the cup,
although recently she'd learned how to grip it between her wrists, so long as
it wasn't hot tea or coffee.

      
What she hadn't learned was how to turn on taps with her toes,
and obviously she couldn't sink her boxing-glove bandages into hot water, so
they had to give her a bath - sitting there with her arms in the air having her
bits washed. The unutterable degradation of it.

      
Juanita sighed. 'I thought I'd be out in a week.'

      
'Well, we didn't order you to develop pneumonia.'

      
Because of the pneumonia - caused, they said, by shock -
they'd had to delay the skin-grafts. You couldn't have a general anaesthetic with
lungs seemingly committed to becoming a no-go area for oxygen. They'd pumped
her full of antibiotics, but it was two weeks before they could get around to
pulling the skin off her thighs and applying it to her hands.

      
For all that time, she actually hadn't wanted to smoke. Now
the need was acute. This morning, she'd got Karen to take her down the corridor
and put one in her mouth, unlit.

      
The fury was building too: But that was irrational, wasn't it?

      
'There you go.' Karen straightened up. 'Everything's fine.
They'll probably take the dressing off again in the morning.'

      
'Do they have to? Can't I wear a permanent dressing?'
      
'It's only you who'll notice most
of the time.'

      
'Exactly.'

      
The sight of the bandage balls at the end of her arms still
inflicted horrendous, scorched images of Jim fragmenting in his jagged, molten
cage, falling at last into her arms because
...
because. Oh God, I couldn't turn away from him again.

      
And then, like a wound slowly turning septic, the other insidious
imaginings would begin to manifest.

      
'You were very lucky,' said Karen, who cleaned her teeth and
God help us wiped her bum. 'You want to thank your lucky stars.'

      
'Sorry. Thanks, lucky stars. Actually, they tell me it was the
lucky Afghan. But for the Afghan, my tits would've been jacket potatoes.'

      
'Don't think about it, all right?'

      
'Sure,' said Juanita. She looked down at her pure white cotton
nightdress and the image of the jacket potatoes brought her to a decision.
'Listen, I need to ask you something.'

Diane asked him, 'Who was
John Cowper Powys?'

      
It had been an easy run to the hospital, along the M5. Powys
explored the parking area for a space.

      
'He was a famous author.'

      
'I know that. I mean, to you. What relation?'

      
'Forget it,' Powys said. 'Not your problem.'

      
'In the diaries,' Diane said, 'there's a bit where Pixhill comes
into Glastonbury and meets his teacher, whom he doesn't identify, and John
Cowper Powys, who he thinks he isn't going to like much. But he seems to get on
with him in the end.'

      
'I'm glad somebody could.'

      
'The suggestion is that Colonel Pixhill and Mr Powys were involved
in something together. It ...' Diane hesitated. 'It's become very important to
me to find out what this was.'

      
He said nothing. He was finding that if you asked Diane direct
questions you were apt to scare her off. Better to wait.

      
'Because, you see, the other person, the teacher, the person Colonel
Pixhill doesn't name ... I think that was someone close to me. He writes
several tunes about visiting his spiritual teacher. Twice he mentions going up Wellhouse
Lane. Which was where ... where she lived.'

      
Diane went quiet.

      
'You think his teacher was a she,' Powys said carefully. 'Why
do you think that?'

      
'Because she's my teacher too,' Diane said, not looking at
him. 'That is, she was ... my nanny.'

      
Powys did some quick calculations. They were clearly not
edging around the same person.

      
'Sorry,' he said. 'I thought we might have been talking about
a woman who lived in a converted army hut at the foot of the Tor.'

      
She turned to him. They were in a shadowed area of the car park
but he didn't need much in the way of lights to know her eyes were aglow.

      
'Diane,' Powys said. Very carefully, treading eggshells.
      
The sound of a distant ambulance
echoed the warning sirens going off in his head. 'Dion Fortune died more than
twenty years before you were born.'

      
Diane considered this.

      
'I don't think she would consider that a problem,' Diane said
eventually.

'Sorry.' The nurse
rearranged the bedclothes over the cage thing that prevented them touching
Juanita's upper thighs, where the skin had been removed. 'Ruth who?'

      
'Dunn. Nursing sister.'
      
'What, here?'

      
'Don't know where she was. It might not even have been
anywhere in the West Country, but it probably was.'
      
'Don't recall. Friend of yours?'
      
Juanita laughed shortly.

      
'Like that, is it? I can ask the girls tomorrow. Anything in
particular you want to know about her?'

      
'Just ... whatever. Look, Diane's here, don't say anything to
her about this, OK?'

      
'Offended you in some way, has she, this Dunn woman?'

      
'No,' Juanita said. 'She paid me a compliment.'

What lovely slender hands.
      
Ceridwen had said.

      
Juanita stared grimly at the white boxing gloves. They covered
scar tissue and transplanted skin. But not the unspeakable memory of gripping a
melting, metal easel and staring into Jim Battle's fried eyes.

THREE

Doesn't Matter

With her hair around her
shoulders, no make-up and the pristine white shift, she looked very young,
Diane thought.
      
Like a recumbent version of the
sylph on the front of the old
Avalonian.

      
But awfully vulnerable, with her hands inside those enormous
bandages.

      
'They're taking them off tomorrow,' Juanita said.

      
'That's super.'

      
'Least it means I can get out of here.'
      
'When?'

      
'I'm thinking about it.'

      
'You mean you'll discharge yourself,' Diane said disapprovingly.
She really didn't think Juanita was ready to face Glastonbury. She never spoke
of the fire or Jim.

      
Juanita said, 'You know, you're looking distinctly washed-out.
You've lost weight. Are you eating?'

      
'Sure. It's just been a bit sort of frenzied, what with people
placing orders for Christmas, and ... look, I wanted to get your opinion on
this.'

      
She pulled her folder on to her knees.

      
The artwork had
The
Avalonian
across the top in lettering which was only modestly Celtic. The
rest of the front cover was a black and white photograph of the Tor, surrounded
by a high barbed-wire fence with two searchlight towers.

      
'We got the fence from one of those postwar pictures of Belsen
or somewhere. Paul put it all together on his computer.'

      
With a practised elbow, Juanita prodded a pillow into the
small of her back and studied the mock-up.

      
'I'm impressed But it doesn't make any secret of where we
stand on the issue, does it? I mean, Belsen?'

      
'I've also written to Quentin Cotton, asking if he'd like to
write a piece expressing his views.'

      
'Not Archer? Not Griff?'

      
'This way neither Sam nor I have to deal with estranged relatives.'

      
'You and Archer are officially estranged?'
      
'I don't know, I haven't spoken to
him. Oh. Gosh. I meant to say. You know who his new constituency agent is?'
      
'Domini Dorrell-Adams?'
      
'Oliver Pixhill.'
      
Juanita's eyes widened.

      
'It's true. Woolly rang to tell me just before I came out. Apparently,
the constituency party isn't awfully well off at the moment so Archer offered
to bring his own agent. Free of charge, as it were.'

      
Juanita's eyes narrowed. 'What's the scam?'

      
'He just wants somebody he can trust, I suppose.'

      
'Oliver's a shit,' said Juanita. 'Even as a kid he was a shit,
so I'm told.'

      
Diane shrugged. 'Archer's a shit. Do you think we should run the
contents along the bottom or down one side?'

      
'You could start off a column aligned with the
The
in the masthead. If you see what I
mean. Actually, as an example of a first issue I suspect there ought to be
something less hard line contentious up-front, less in-your-face.'

      
'Oh.' Diane was crestfallen. 'I just had the idea, and…'

      
'And it's a really great idea, Diane, and it looks terrific, but
for the dummy maybe we need to be a little pragmatic.
      
'Hey, is Pixhill married or
anything? Girlfriend?'

      
'Oh, really.' Diane felt herself blush.

      
'Public schoolboys together.' Juanita raised an eyebrow. 'Both
late thirties, unattached.'

      
'It's an appealing thought,' Diane concluded, 'but I don't think
Archer is actually gay. Just doesn't have regular girlfriends.'

      
'Never mind, Tory Central Office'll find him a nice fiancée
before the election. Then they'll part amicably when he wins. You watch.'

      
'I don't want to watch.'

      
'No.' Juanita lay back on the pillows. 'I can't help thinking we
might have stopped it. And shafted the Glastonbury First movement along the
way.'

      
Obviously meaning the Headlice thing. But as it had turned out,
it was just as well they hadn't been to the police.
      
Wearing her
Avalonian
hat, Diane had made a legitimate call to Street and
learned from a detective sergeant that it was no longer a murder investigation.
A post mortem had revealed that the young man, now formally identified as Alan
Carl Gallagher, aged twenty, missing from his home since last summer, had had a
weak heart and had taken a large quantity of drugs. It was very borderline now,
the sergeant said, off the record.

      
'I still think somebody's been got at,' Juanita said. 'You
can't just dismiss head injuries.'
      
'They virtually have.'

      
The sergeant had said the injuries were not sufficiently
serious to have caused Alan's death. He might have been in a fight; he could
just as easily have been stumbling around stoned out of his head and been superficially
struck by a car.