'Because Diane's with them.'
'… to call themselves friends of the buggering planet, when they… What did you say…?' Jim had to steady the Laphroaig with his other hand.
Juanita poured herself a glass of probably overpriced white wine from Lord Pennard's vineyard and lowered herself into a chintzy old rocking chair by the Victorian fireplace. There was a small woodstove tucked into the fireplace now, unlit as yet, but with a few autumn logs piled up ready for the first cold day.
Jim said, 'I'm sorry, I don't quite understand. You say Diane's back? Diane s with them? But I thought…'
'We all did Which is…' Juanita sighed. 'I suppose, why I got them the field.'
Jim was bewildered. ' You got them the buggering field?'
He'd thought she was over all that. Might have been Queen of the Hippies 1972, but she was fully recovered now, surely to God.
Juanita said. 'Comes down to the old question: if I don't try and help her, who else is going to?'
'But I thought she was working in Yorkshire?' The idea of Diane training to be a journalist had struck Jim as pretty unlikely at the time, considering the girl's renowned inability to separate fact from fantasy, 'I thought she was getting married. Peter somebody.'
'Patrick. It's off. Abandoned her job, everything,'
'To become a New Age buggering traveller?'
'Not exactly. As she put it, she kind of hitched a lift. They were making their way here, and she…'
Juanita reached for her cigarettes.
'… Oh dear. She said it was calling her back.'
Jim groaned. 'Not again. Dare I ask what, specifically, was calling her back?'
'The Tor.' Juanita lit a cigarette. 'What else?'
Jim was remembering that time the girl had gone missing and they'd found her just before dawn under the Thorn on Wearyall Hill, in her nightie and bare feet. What was she then, fifteen? He sank the last of the Laphroaig. He was too old for this sort of caper.
'Lady Loony,' he said. 'Do people still call her that?'
FOUR
The ancient odour had drifted in as soon as Diane wound down the van window, and it was just so… Well, she could have wept. How could she have forgotten the scent?
The van had jolted between the rotting gateposts into Don Moulder's bottom field. It had bounced over grass still ever so parched from a long, dry summer and spiky from the harvest. Diane had turned off the engine, sat back in the lumpy seat, closed her eyes and let it reach her through the open window; the faraway fragrance of Holy Avalon.
Actually, she hadn't wound down the window, as such. Just pulled out the folded Rizlas packet which held the glass in place and let it judder to its favourite halfway position. It was rather an old van, a Ford something or other – used to be white all over but she'd painted big, silly pink spots on it so it wouldn't stand out from the rest of the convoy.
The smell made her happy and sad. It was heavy with memories and was actually a blend of several scents, the first of them autumn, a brisk, mustardy tang. And then woodsmoke – there always seemed to be woodsmoke in rural Somerset, much of it applewood which was rich and mellow and sweetened the air until you could almost taste it.
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…