The Chalice (5 page)

      
And over that came the most elusive ingredient: the musk of
mystery, a scent which summoned visions. Of the Abbey in the evening, when the
saddened stones grew in grace and sang to the sunset. Of wind-whipped Wearyall Hill
with the night gathering in the startled tangle of the Holy Thorn. Of the balmy
serenity of the Chalice Well garden. And of the great enigma of the West:
Glastonbury Tor.

      
Diane opened her eyes and looked up at the huge green breast
with its stone nipple.

      
She wasn't the only one. All around, people had been dropping
out of vans and buses, an ambulance, a stock wagon. Gazing up at the holy hill,
no more than half a mile away. Journey's end for the pagan pilgrims. And for
Diane Ffitch, who called herself Molly Fortune because she was embarrassed by
her background, confused about her reason for returning and rather afraid,
actually.

Dusk was nibbling the fringes
of Don Moulder's bottom field when the last few vehicles crawled in. They
travelled in smaller groups nowadays, because of the law. An old Post
Office van with a white pentacle on the bonnet was followed by Mort's famous
souped-up hearse, where he liked to make love, on the long coffin-shelf.
Love is the law
, Mort said,
Love over death.

      
Headlice and Rozzie arrived next in the former Bolton
Corporation single decker bus repainted in black and yellow stripes, like a
giant bee.

      
'Listen, I've definitely been here before!' Headlice jumped
down, grinning eerily through teeth like a broken picket fence. He was about
nineteen or twenty; they were so awfully
young
,
most of these people. At that age, Diane thought, you could go around saying
you were a confirmed pagan, never giving a thought to what it really meant.

      
'I mean, you know, not in this life, obviously,' Headlice said,
'In a
past
life, yeah?' Looking up
expectantly, as though he thought mystic rays might sweep him away and carry
him blissfully to the top of the holy hill. 'Hey, you reckon I was a
monk?'

      
He felt at the back of his head. Where a monk's tonsure would
be, Headlice had a swastika tattoo, re-exposed because of the affliction which
had led to his extremely severe haircut and his unfortunate nickname.

      
Rozzie made a scoffing noise. 'More like one of the friggin'
peasants what carted the stones up the hill.'

      
She'd told Diane that the swastika was a relic of Headlice's
days as some sort of a teenage neo-fascist, neo-skinhead. Headlice, however,
pointed out that the original swastika was an ancient pagan solar symbol. Which
was why he'd had one tattooed on the part of him nearest the sun, see?

      
He turned away and kicked at the grass. His face had darkened;
he looked as if he'd rather be kicking Rozzie. She was a Londoner; he was from
the North. She was about twenty-six. Although they shared a bus and a bed, she
seemed to despise him awfully.

      
'I
could've
been a
fuckin' monk,' Headlice said petulantly. Despite the democratic, tribal code of
the pilgrims, he was obviously very conscious of his background, which made
Diane feel jolly uncomfortable about hers. She'd been trying to come over sort
of West Country milkmaidish, but she wasn't very good at it, probably just
sounded frightfully
patronising
.

      
'Or a bird,' she said. 'Perhaps you were a little bird nesting
in the tower.' She felt sorry for Headlice.

      
'Cute. All I'm sayin' is, I feel ... I can feel it here.' Punching
his chest through the rip in his dirty denim jacket. 'This is not bullshit,
Mol.'

      
Diane smiled. On her own first actual visit to the Tor - or it
might have been a dream, she couldn't have been more than about three or four -
there'd been sort of candyfloss sunbeams rolling soft and golden down the steep
slopes, warm on her sandals. She wished she could still hold that soft, undemanding
image for more than a second or two, but she supposed it was only for children.
Too grown-up to feel it now.

      
Also she felt too ... well, mature, at twenty-seven, to be
entirely comfortable among the pilgrims although a few were ten or even twenty
years older than she was and showed every line of it. But even the older women
tended to be fey and childlike and stick-thin, even the ones carelessly
suckling babies.

      
Stick thin. How wonderful to be stick-thin.

      
'What it is ...' Headlice said. 'I feel like I'm home.'

      
'What?' Diane looked across to the Tor, with the church tower
without a church on its summit.
Oh no.
It's not your home at all, you 're just passing through. I'm the one who's...

      
Home? The implications made her feel faint. She wobbled about,
wanting to climb back into the van, submerge like a fat hippo in a swamp.
Several times on the journey, she'd thought very seriously about dropping out
of the convoy, turning the van around and dashing back to Patrick, telling him
it had all been a terrible, terrible mistake.

      
And then she'd seen the vinegar shaker on the high chip shop
counter at lunchtime and a spear of light had struck it and turned it into a
glistening Glastonbury Tor.
Yes
!
she'd almost shrieked.
Yes, I'm coming
back!

      
With company. There must be over thirty pilgrims here now, in
a collection of vehicles as cheerful as an old fashioned circus. At least it
had
been cheerful when she'd joined the
convoy on the North Yorkshire moors - that old army truck sprayed purple with
big orange flowers, the former ambulance with an enormous eye painted on each side
panel, shut on one side, wide open on the other. But several of the jollier
vehicles seemed to have dropped out. Broken down, probably. Well, they
were
all frightfully old. And fairly drab
now, except for Diane's van and Headlice's bee-striped bus.

      
Mort's hearse had slunk in next to the bus. There was a mattress
in the back. Mort had offered to demonstrate Love over Death to Diane once;
she'd gone all flustered but didn't want to seem uncool and said it was her
period.

      
Mort climbed out. He wore a black leather jacket. He punched
the air.
      
'Yo, Headlice!'

      
'OK, man?'
      
'Tonight, yeah?'
      
'Yeah,' said Headlice. 'Right.'

      
Mort wandered off down the field and began to urinate casually
into a gorse bush to show off the size of his willy.
      
Diane turned away. Despite the
unseasonal warmth, it had been a blustery day and the darkening sky bore
obvious marks of violence, the red sun like a blood-bubble in an open wound and
the clouds either runny like pus or fluffy in a nasty way, like the white stuff
that grew on mould.
      
Diane said, 'Tonight?'

      
'Up there.' Headlice nodded reverently at the Tor where a low,
knife-edge cloud had taken the top off St Michael's tower, making it look,
Diane thought - trying to be prosaic, trying not to succumb - like nothing so
much as a well-used lipstick sampler in Boots.

      
But this was the terminus. They'd travelled down from
Yorkshire, collecting pilgrims en route, until they hit the St Michael Line,
which focused and concentrated energy across the widest part of England. They
might have carried on to St Michael's Mount at the tip of Cornwall; but, for Pagans,
the Tor was the holy of holies.

      
'What are you - we - going to do?' Diane pulled awkwardly at
her flouncy skirt from the Oxfam shop, washed-out midnight blue with silver
half-moons on it.

      
'Shit, Mol, we're pagans, right? We do what pagans do.'

      
'Which means he don't know.' Rozzie cackled. Her face was
round but prematurely lined, like a monkey's. Ropes of black beads hung down to
her waist.

      
'And you do, yeah?' Headlice said.

      
Rozzie shrugged. Diane waited; she didn't really know what
pagans did either, apart from revering the Old Gods and supporting the Green
Party. They would claim that Christianity was an imported religion which was
irrelevant to Britain.

      
But what would they actually
do
?

      
'I wouldn't wanna frighten you.' Rozzie smirked and swung
herself on to the bus.

      
From across the field came the hollow sound of Bran, the drummer,
doing what he did at every new campsite, what he'd done at every St Michael
Church and prehistoric shrine along the Line: awakening the earth.

      
Diane looked away from the Tor, feeling a trickle of trepidation.
She supposed there'd be lights up there tonight. Whether it was just the bijou
flickerings of torches and lanterns, the oily glow of bonfires and campfires …

      
... or the other kind. The kind some people called UFOs and
some said were earth-lights, caused by geological conditions.

      
But Diane thought these particular lights were too sort of
personal
to be either alien spacecraft
or natural phenomena allied to seismic disturbance. It was all a matter of
afterglow. Not in the sky; in your head. In the very top of your head at first,
and then it would break up into airy fragments and some would lodge for a breathtaking
moment in your throat before sprinkling through your body like a fine shiver.

      
Bowermead Hall, you see, was only three and a half miles from
the town and, when she was little, the pointed hill crowned by the St Michael tower
- the whole thing like a wine-funnel or a witch's hat - seemed to be part of
every horizon, always there beyond the vineyards. Diane's very earliest
sequential memory was looking out of her bedroom window from the arms of Nanny
One and seeing a small, globular light popping out of the distant tower, like a
coloured ball from a Roman candle. Ever so pretty, but Nanny One, of course,
had pretended she couldn't see a thing. She'd felt Diane's forehead and
grumbled about a temperature. What had happened next wasn't too clear now, but
it probably involved a spoonful of something tasting absolutely frightful.
You're a very silly little girl. Too much imagination
is not good for you.

      
For a long time, Diane had thought imagination must be a sort
of ice-cream; the lights too - some as white as the creamy blobs they put in
cornets.

      
Years later, when she was in her teens, one of the psychologists
had said to her,
You were having rather a
rough time at home, weren't you, Diane? I mean, with your father and your brother.
You were feeling very lonely and... perhaps ... unwanted, unloved? Do you think
that perhaps you were turning to the Tor as a form of...

      
'No!' Diane had stamped her foot. 'I saw those lights. I
did.'

      
And now the Tor had signalled to her across Britain. Called her
back. But it wasn't - Diane thought of her father and her brother and that house,
stiff and unforgiving as the worst of her schools - about pretty lights and
candyfloss sunbeams. Not
any more
.

FIVE

A Simple Person

Unwrapping a creamy new
beeswax candle, Verity laid it down, with some trepidation, on a stone window
ledge the size of a gravestone.

      
Still not sure, not
at
all
sure, that she could go through with this.

      
It was late afternoon, but, even with all its hanging lights
on, the room was as deep and shadowed as the nave of an old parish church.

      
The best-known old buildings in Glastonbury, apart from the
Abbey, which was ruined -
so
tragic -
were the one-time courthouse, known as the Tribunal, and the George and
Pilgrims inn, both in the High Street, both mellow and famously beautiful.

      
And then there was Meadwell.

      
Which was hunched among umbrella trees about a mile out of
town, to the east of the Tor. And was terribly,
terribly
old. But not famous, not mellow and not what one would call
beautiful.

      
Rather like me, thought Verity, who looked after Meadwell for
the Pixhill Trust and ran it as a sort of guesthouse. Most of the time she was
decidedly
not
a sad or introspective or
timid
person. But tonight was the
night of the Abbot's Dinner - and, as the sourly humid November day dwindled
into evening, she realised that her little cat, Stella, had still not come
home.