The Chalice

'Old' being the key word here. JCP, born in the 1870s, had been very old when Joe was born. It really didn't seem at all likely that John Cowper Powys was his father.

Over the years Powys had tossed around a few more likely explanations. Say Mum arrives back in Wrexham with an illegitimate baby and she needs a name for him, and there on the shelf is some book by John Cowper Powys. Which is a nice name and doesn't sound phoney, and so maybe she becomes 'Mrs Powys' until she marries Len.

So the baby who should have been Joe Morris becomes Joe Powys. By the time she marries Len, he's nearly five years old and is used to the name, maybe can't get his mouth so easily around Devereaux, which is Len's name. And because it was JCP who saved her reputation when the chips were down. Mum retains a soft spot for the old guy, and the legend of Uncle Jack, the benefactor, is born.

It's a persistent kind of myth. Joe likes it. And when he comes to write a book about mystical aspects of the British countryside, which turns out to be a minor bestseller, and people ask him if by any chance he's descended from one or other of the famous literary siblings, Theodore, Llewellyn and John Cowper Powys, he… well, he doesn't deny it. And Ben Corby never asked in case the answer was the wrong one.

None of which explained the incidents of the book in the night.

Powys was afraid of ghosts. He didn't used to think he was. He believed in them, believed they were just beyond the boundaries of human understanding, and only just. He used to believe in the tape-recording theory of ghosts: that they were emotional imprints on the atmosphere, events replaying themselves over and over.

Therefore ghosts were harmless.

Harmless, harmless, harmless.

Around nine a.m., Joe looked up from JCP's Autobiography, in which Uncle Jack confesses early on to being some kind of sado-masochist – hence the tortured figure of the self- crucifying Welshman Owen Evans in A Glastonbury Romance.

Powys thought. Masochism?

And went to the phone, scrabbling in the desk drawer for his contacts book. He had misgivings about this, what he might be opening up. And having to endure the scorn, of course. But he made the call anyway.

And was lucky, as it happened. Brendan Donovan had just arrived at the university. Nine a.m. Too early, surely, for really withering rhetoric.

'OK, Powys,' Brendan Donovan said. 'I may possibly be able to accommodate a five-minute argument. The full half hour would require an appointment.'

Some years ago. Professor Brendan Donovan, of the Edinburgh University department of parapsychology, had reviewed the revised, mass-market paperback of The Old Golden Land for The Scotsman. Perhaps the most complimentary phrase in this review had been 'whimsical drivel'. Powys, unschooled in the etiquette traditionally observed between reviewer and reviewed, had telephoned Dr Donovan for a meaningful discussion. Others had followed over the years. Brendan Donovan had mellowed. Slightly.

'If you wish to discuss the spirit-path theory of ley-lines, with particular reference to linear anomalies in the Peruvian desert,' he said now, 'you'll find me a touch more amenable than I may have been regarding so-called earth-energies. Only a touch more, you understand, because ley-lines, of course, do not exist.'

'Poltergeists,' Powys said bluntly.

'Heavens,' Donovan said. 'My weak spot.'

'I know.'

'That is, Powys, so long as you do not attempt to try my patience by allowing any contentious words to intrude. Like, say, "ghost".'

'How about psycho-kinetic energy generated by a disturbed adolescent?'

'Well-trodden ground. Much safer.'

'In that case, how about psycho-kinetic energy generated by someone for whom adolescence is no more than a slightly feverish memory?'

'Like, who?' said Donovan.

'Like me.'

'Hmm,' Donovan said. 'Give me two minutes to summon a cup of fortifying coffee. I shall call you back.'

Well – let's be reasonable here – it wasn't Arnold, was it?

Nobody really knows what goes on down there. In the subconscious. Nobody knows what seeds planted in the psyche of a small child will start to germinate in the adult and with what effects.

OK. the trigger.

Joe Powys is alone, his woman has resumed her career, left him behind in a cottage in the sticks. Subconsciously, he knows she isn't coming back. His book has been rejected. And his home is not really his home; it's still Henry Kettle's, even though Henry is dead, because Henry had identity, which Joe doesn't have any more, maybe never did have.

The subconscious grows into mid-life crisis. Who is Joe Powys? Even the guy's name isn't real!

The subconscious gets extremely resentful. It reverts to the persona of a disturbed adolescent. It finds a focus for all that resentful energy.

Uncle Jack.

Bloody Uncle Jack.

'Well, it's interesting, Powys,' Brendan Donovan said, it possesses a certain flawed logic. However, I still have a problem with it.'

'Well, of course you do. What I'm doing here is groping for the psychological solution. I haven't said anything about the elements you don't like – power of place, earth-force, the thinness of the veil on the Welsh Border.'

'But it's there by implication, isn't it? Because the house was the home of this water-diviner. Kettle, it is more receptive, its atmosphere remains charged.'

'I didn't say that.'

'And therefore is capable of transforming the frustration of its unhappy occupant into psycho-kinetic energy, yes?'

'Well… could be.'

'Discounting all that, which I am, of course, predisposed to do, out of hand… the problem I have with all this is that the adolescent energy we suspect may cause poltergeist phenomena is essentially a sexual energy. I assume, Powys, you have not begun to find satisfaction in scourging yourself with barbed wire or something.'

'Occasionally I beat myself with Henry's old dowsing rods. Apart from that… Of course, he may have done.'

'Who?'

'John Cowper Powys always liked to think of himself as some kind of sado-masochist.'

'Ah. So you're obsessed with this man,' Donovan said.

'Curiously, I hardly ever thought of him. I'd forgotten that book was even on the shelf. Consciously, I'd forgotten.'

'Which book are we talking about?'

'A Glastonbury Romance. His masterpiece. About twelve hundred pages.'

'Haven't read it. Life's too short for fiction. What's it about?'

'It's basically a West Country soap-opera set in the 1920s. Far as I can remember, it's about people in pursuit of their ideas of the Holy Grail and the tensions between spiritual and commercial demands and people getting their rocks off, spiritually and sexually. I may be wrong, it's a long time since I breezed through it.'

'And this same book every time?' asked Donovan.

'Every time.'

'Too neat,' said Donovan. 'Too neat to be true.'

'Ah. You think I'm lying.'

'Indeed. I'm a scientist. What proof can you show me?'

'I've got a witness.'

'Your publisher. How very convenient.'

'Isn't it?" Powys admitted gloomily.

'Be a marvellous story for your own next publication.'

'No chance.'

'Before I could give a useful opinion, you would have to precipitate this book from its shelf under laboratory conditions. But then you knew that.'

'Brendan, if you bumped into your late granny at the tea machine, you'd make her take out her teeth under laboratory conditions.'

'And in the present circumstances, of course, my findings would have to include the probability of an author in decline attempting to kick-start his flagging career.'

'I knew you'd say that, too.'

'So why did you telephone me?'

'I'm a masochist. Runs in the family.'