I heard (again) the story of the Third Nanny, who Diane believes to be the spirit of the High Priestess of Avalon, Dion Fortune, half a century dead. The truth is, I can't take this stuff anymore. Even rather read Colonel Pixhill's Diary – at least the old boy was a confirmed pessimist. I used to think that, at the very worst, New Age was fun. I got a buzz out of being the mysterious woman who sold books full of arcane secrets and therefore I must know most of them. I don't really know precisely when I stopped getting a buzz out of it, or precisely why, but I suspect that seeing what it had done to Diane was at least a factor. When your birth coincides with the death of your mother and your father blames you for that and you grow up in an all-male household of the worst kind, you become susceptible to the most absorbent kind of fantasy, and you start to live in your head most of the time. And when what's outside of your head happens to be Glastonbury, on the legendary isle of Avalon, and every time you look out of your bedroom window there s the magical Tor on the horizon.. what hope is there for you? Because she could always escape into her secret world, Diane let her family bounce her around, from relative to relative, boarding school to boarding school. Never known any other life, thought it was quite normal. Suddenly, at the age of twenty-seven she wakes up m Yorkshire in an arranged job, with an arranged marriage on the horizon, and she thinks, this is ridiculous, I'm a grown -up now, a person in my own right For the first time, a rebel. She finds a suitably outrageous way out, sends back her ring, joins the raggle-taggle gypsies. Been a long time coming; most of her contemporaries made their absurd gestures of independence at the age of about sixteen.
And because she really knows this is a fairly adolescent kind of stunt, Diane has to make it Significant by throwing the esoteric cloak over everything. Oh, it was meant… part of the great cosmic design… I was summoned back… I had magic signals from the Tor. It's my destiny! Well, bullshit, obviously, but if she goes around telling people about it at this end of town, they'll just all screech. Wow, too much man, far out, and set her up as Avalon's Seer of the Week. Meanwhile, indigenous locals will shake their heads and mutter about what an awful cross old Pennard has to bear, with that Lady Loony. And here's me in the middle again. Pennard already hates me for exposing an unstable child to an unlimited supply of occult literature (I hate me for that as well, but it could've been worse, she might have gone to Ceridwen). And now I've blackmailed the noble lord into letting the family madwoman loose in Glastonbury again, and he and Archer are going to be in a constant state of tension about what she might do to discredit the House of Pennard before the next Election. And when the Ffitches get tense – as amply demonstrated last night – they can do damage. The British aristocracy's full of genetic anomalies, and Archer – well, he's sort of Diane in negative, I suppose: hard and dark where she's nice and squashy and sort of pastel-coloured. But just as loopy, I reckon, in his way. Everything in Glastonbury inevitably becomes EXTREME. Who said that? Me, I suppose. New Age mystic turned born-again agnostic. I'd decided that healthy scepticism was the key to survival in this town, but if you 're a sceptic what's the point of being here anyway? Should I get out now, do you think, before something erupts? I don't know. Maybe I need a man again. Maybe I need a guru. Or God.
Talking of Whom, I'm told the Bishop of Bath and Wells has been making overtures to the New Age community. There's to be some sort of conference at which Liberal Christians are to 'interface' with well intentioned Green pagans to try and build a framework for possible Spiritual Bonding in the run up to the Third Millennium.
Only in Glastonbury.
Are we ALL going mad, or what?
And can anybody out there help us? Don't answer that. Can't anyway, if I'm not sending it. Goodnight. What's left of it.
Part Two
The pseudo-occultism of the present day, with its dubious psychism, wild theorising and evidence that cannot stand up to the most cursory examination, is but the detritus which accumulates around the base of the Mount of Vision.
ONE
The Welsh Border
It was a moody frontier town squashed between dark English hills and even darker Mid Wales hills. The stone cottage was at the end of a deep-sunk dirt track, two, three miles beyond the huddled town of Kington.
Locating the place by car had been a problem for publisher Ben Corby, who hadn't travelled much outside London for a couple of yean now, except on planes. And who had always – despite his enthusiasm for The Old Golden Land – found the countryside basically hostile.
So this place immediately gave him the creeps.
It was a low cottage, barrack-block long, the last of the light making its windows opaque and sinister, like Mafia sunglasses. No sooner had he switched off the ignition than something came rushing out at his car: a black and white dog or maybe a big cat. Something disturbing about it, the way it moved. Ben nervously wound his window down as a shadow edged around a door at one end of the long cottage.
'OK, Arnold.' Was the voice familiar? Was it him?
Ben's headlights showed that the animal was, in fact, a dog.
And that it had only three legs.
Uncanny, The disabled dog was just sitting there in the headlights, not barking, not even blinking. Ben didn't get out; a three-legged dog was probably a dog with a grudge.
'It's a friend,' the dog was told by the shadow. 'Possibly.'
Possibly. He'd come to the right place then. And the author of The Old Golden Land was evidently prepared for the worst.
Half an hour later, relieved to be out of the wild country and by a warmish wood-fire with a can of lager on the arm of his chair, Ben came, in his blunt Yorkshire fashion, to the point.
'Be suicide, mate. For all of us.'
The dog lay on his intact side, eyes open and a furry stump pointing at Ben as if it was his fault, the dog having only three legs.
'If we go with this, we might as well pulp our entire back-catalogue. Britain's premier New Age publisher does not put out a book advising people to hang up their dowsing rods and trade in their tarot cards for a pack of Happy Families.'
The dog lay on a sheepskin rug under a table with a converted paraffin lamp on it. Next to this Ben had dumped Joe's manuscript: Mythscapes: The Old Golden Land Revalued.
Joe Powys stared into the fire. Ben thought, Where's his woman? Why just him and a three-legged dog?
He'd been on at Joe to write a book about what really happened at Crybbe and Joe had said nobody would believe it. He'd agreed finally to produce a follow-up to his New Age classic, The Old Golden Land, and here it was… and the bloody thing was anti-New Age. Not to say anti meditation. Anti-fortune telling. Anti-ghost-hunting.
But only as much as Hitler had been anti-Semitic.
'So, Joe. How do you propose to live?'
Powys raised his eyebrows. Hair fully grey now (prematurely, just about). But the face on the back of the book could still help unload a few thousand copies on wispy, wistful ladies.
'You're still a young… youngish guy. And almost – you can't deny it – a cult figure, once, an icon. So, OK, you've had a change of heart, unfortunately a seriously uncommercial one. You want to talk about it?'