The Chalice

'Pictures? Oh. Him. Ah well,' Powys said, 'I never claimed to be related.'

Dan Frayne leaned forward, put on a mysterious whisper.

'Why, then? Doesn't he like you cashing in on his name, or what? Why's he doing this to you?'

They switched to a nearby wine bar, where everybody seemed to know Dan Frayne. I'm not trying to impress you,' he said. 'I need this. I need to be surrounded by dozens of people who know me superficially. Superficially. That's important.'

Joe Powys liked people who were full of nervous energy. They couldn't hide what was on their minds, came out with it, rarely lied.

'I used to have this shop in Glastonbury. Brrr.' Frayne shuddered. 'Bad news, Joe. I mean, for me. Too much closed-in, heavy stuff.' He spread his arms. I like to be surrounded by lightweights. I am not a heavy person.'

Powys looked around. Everybody else in the glass and leather bar looked, to him, to be pretty intense.

'No, no,' said Frayne. 'This is really superficial. Money is superficial. I love saying that. People think I'm crazy. Like, "Get outa here, you old hippy, what do you know about the real world?'"

Powys smiled.

'Well, it's true. I'm an old hippy. But – this is the point – I'd rather be an old hippy among the suits. I'd rather publish straight books than be down in the basement with Ben Corby, peddling esoterica. Ben, he copes with it because he's not a hippy and he really does value money and possessions. This make sense to you?'

'Possibly.'

'Now you're being cautious. You're like I was when I came out of Glastonbury.'

'You make it sound'. Powys said, 'like coming out of Pentonville.'

Dan Frayne became quite sober, I never go back to Glastonbury. I can't function there. I can't stand to be an old hippy among old hippies. In Glastonbury you don't know anybody superficially. You know them intensely, deeply, intimately. You know their star signs and the colour of their auras. Amazing. They don't have superficial in Glastonbury. They either put their arms around you and hug you till you squeak or they ignore you. Listen, this book of yours, I've been reading it. I see Ben's point. I'd've binned it too. Golden Land was OK, this one I'd've binned.'

'Well, thanks,' Powys said.

'Except…' Dan held up both hands '… I noticed something. I noticed that in neither of those books do you ever refer to the celestial city. Not the merest mention in the index, the only earth-mysteries tomes in the history of the cosmos that don't go banging on about the legends of Glastonbury.'

'No mystery about that. I've just never been.'

Dan Frayne pretended to pass out with shock.

'Put it this way. If your name was Constable and you were a bit of a painter, would you buy a bungalow near Flatford Mill?'

'Ben Corby would,' said Dan Frayne.

'Ben Corby would buy the mill.'

'This is true,' Dan said.

'But anyway, it'd been done. To death. Everybody discussing earth-mysteries has to do Glastonbury. I'd got nothing new to contribute.'

'When did that ever put a writer off?'

'Anyway,' Powys said. 'Now you know, you can bin the book with a clear conscience.'

Gloom descended. You spend a long time isolated in the country, it's not easy psyching yourself up to come to London with what looks like a begging bowl.

'I'll tell you something,' Dan Frayne said. 'Mythscapes. I would've dumped the book, but I still like the idea because it's an antidote to the New Age that isn't written by either a sceptic or a born-again Christian. It's that bit different. I just think it would be a better book, a more interesting book, a book with wider commercial appeal… if it was also about, uh…'

'Don't say it.' Powys felt a certain big book winging through the air, over fields and hills, through towns and industrial estates, on the great ley-line leading to…

'Glastonbury,' Dan said. 'As it really is. Today. The pressures it imposes on people living in Jerusalem Builded Here. The tensions between the Christians and the New Age pagans. Reflecting a friction that's been there in Glastonbury for centuries, millennia…aeons, I don't know.'

Silence. Or the nearest you could get to silence in a wine bar in Wapping.

'Well ' Powys stood up. it's been nice meeting you.'

'Aw, come on, Powys, siddown. Hear me out, man.'

Dan signalled to a waitress dressed like Powys's idea of a top drawer call-girl. 'Same again, Estelle. The thing is…'

He put his briefcase on the table between them. 'Can I talk to you? Do you mind? Personal stuff?'

"What happened to superficial?'

'I just want to tell you why. Explain the background to this. Hey you look pretty rough, did I tell you that?'

'I drop a lot of Valium,' Powys said. 'Go on.'

'OK,' Dan said, 'I didn't know much about Glastonbury except everybody said it was Camelot and Jerusalem rolled into one and you could get high there without drugs. So twenty-odd years ago I went out West with my lady. If I'm honest, Glastonbury wasn't the major pull. It was her. Gorgeous is not the word, but I'm only a publisher, never been good with words.'

He took a large, brown envelope from the briefcase, slid out a photograph and handed it to Powys. It was from the days when coloured photos tended to come out all blue and mauve. It showed a girl in a long white dress standing in a shop doorway. Over the door was a sign, hand painted in vaguely psychedelic Celtic lettering. Carey and Frayne, it said.

Powys said. 'What about "lustrous"?' He peered at the picture again. '"Mesmerising"? "Iridescent"?'

'Half-Spanish,' Dan said. 'Well, Mexican, I suppose. Her father was a British doctor working out in middle America after the War, met this Latin beauty and brought her back to Blighty. Result: an English rose with a hint of something more exotic. She was a few years younger than me. I was, as you can imagine, a man-of-the-world figure, with a set of Grateful Dead albums and a regular supply of you-know-what. Golden days, Joe.'

'I was too young.'

'That's what they all say. Thank you, Estelle, that's super. Keep the change. Buy yourself some woolly socks.'

Dan Frayne watched Estelle's bottom all the way to the bar and explained how his lady had had a small legacy from granny, and he'd sold his Triumph Vitesse and they'd run away to the Isle of Avalon where they'd rented a little shop to specialise in secondhand books and underground magazines and privately published hippy stuff about UFOs and ley-lines.

'You think you've arrived in the Elysian Fields. You think you'll be there forever. Then it starts to get to you. It's like a spiritual hothouse. What you think of as your spirit grows like rhubarb in shit. Amazing.'

Dan swallowed some golden beer.

'Suddenly you've got more bloody spirit than you can cope with, and you can't breathe for it. I'm on paradise island with the most beautiful girl in the world, and we… we'd fight. All the time. Over nothing. Over anything. You're pulled to extremes. No half measures. No compromises. Everything's a big issue in Avalon. Everybody you know is a healer and a seeker after wisdom. There are days in August when the air's like incense. I couldn't stand it. To cut a long, long, long story short, I pissed off.'

His mood had changed.

'Broke me up, leaving her, but I wouldn't go back. I didn't trust myself. You know?'

'Because you might have stayed,' Powys said. 'Tried again.'

Dan Frayne nodded rigorously, I'd've stayed, and after a few months it would've been exactly the same. I've never been back. She stayed. She's stubborn. And, all credit to her, the shop's grown and it's a good business now. We've kept in touch. Not so much now. I'm married, three kids, you see the problem.'

Powys glanced at the photograph of the girl in the doorway

Dan said. 'The only way I'd have gone back to Avalon was with the family- as insulation, and how would she have felt then? Don't get me wrong, she wasn't always alone – you know, this and that, over the years.'