And with this family, it had to be more than just paternal interest.
Like she didn't have enough problem:
Mid-December already. The town-centre Christmas tree had just gone up in front of the Victorian Gothic market cross. There was a thin glaze of merriment on the streets – carol singers and also bands of pagan mummers with shamanic drums.
The former Holy Thorn Ceramics – now called the Goddess Shop – had a banner wishing customers a Happy Solstice.
Carey and Frayne had no specific wishes for anyone. Diane had found a box of Christmas ornaments for the bookshop window, including a chubby little electric Santa Claus with coloured lights around his hat which Woolly had made last year in his workshop. She hadn't the heart to display it; it reminded her too much of Jim Battle.
Jim's funeral had been awfully depressing. Woolly had rounded up a bunch of local mourners for the sake of appearances, but there was no family. His abandoned wife, unsurprisingly, had not attended; neither had his son, who also lived in Bristol.
An inquest had been opened and adjourned until the New Year. After taking her statement, the police had told Diane an open verdict was possible, although Accidental Death or Death by Misadventure were more likely. There'd certainly been nothing to suggest. suicide. Unless she knew otherwise?
Diane had shaken her head. In truth, she didn't know what to think.
Through the shop window, she saw a lanky red-haired man in black jeans and one of those lumberjack shirts slapping something to the side of a yellow litter bin on a lamp-post.
Darryl Davey. The biggest boy at Sam Daniel's school, apparently. Like a shark in a goldfish tank. Case of premature development. Shaving at about ten and a dad at sixteen, but now his son's sixteen and Darryl's pissed off that nobody looks up to him anymore. He seemed to be employed by the Glastonbury First people to display their material all over town. Probably illegally, but nobody stopped him. He was certainly quite open about what he was doing now, standing back to admire it.
It was a sticker, about four inches in diameter, like a no entry road sign. Diane went to the window to examine it.
It was horribly effective. You just knew that it was going to be all over the old-established shops and pubs in Glastonbury In the back windows of cars and delivery vans and farm vehicles. On the sides of buses.
The idea of restricting access to the Tor had caught on in a big way… given immediate and urgent impetus by the fire. Before that inaugural Glastonbury First meeting had even finished, fire engines had been struggling to reach the top of a Wellhouse Lane effectively blockaded by travellers' vehicles.
One of those frightful coincidences for which Glastonbury was famous. The local and regional Press had seized the angle, giving a tremendous boost to Glastonbury First. And, of course, to Archer, who had been interviewed on the local TV news.
'Had this system been in operation,' Archer had said soberly and sorrowfully, 'I believe we should not now have a tragedy of this proportion on our hands. I hope these people, wherever they may be skulking, can sleep at night.'
Efforts by the Press to find these particular travellers had, of course, failed. Woolly said they'd never even arrived at the road-protest meeting. Eventually, the rescue services had managed to remove the old bus which had broken down in the road. It apparently had carried no licence disc, and all the other vehicles had gone.
The following day, an entirely innocent travelling couple, just passing through, had returned to their van on the central car park to find all four of its tyres slashed and the words MURDERING SCUM spray-painted along one side. The chairman of Glastonbury First, Mr Quentin Cotton, had appealed for calm and restraint although, as he told the Evening Post, it was understandable that emotions were running high.
Poor Jim Battle would have been sickened.
As the afternoon trailed dismally away, Verity Endicott sat in the deepest corner of the dining hall and welcomed the dark by inhaling it.
Dr Grainger had taught her how to do this. You breathed in, expanding the diaphragm, imagining the air inside your body to be of the same consistency and texture as the atmosphere in the room. And then you directed the smooth, dark air to the extremities of your body, to your hands and feet and along your spinal cord until the restful darkness filled your head. Finally, you exhaled through the mouth, sending some of your essence out into the room. A mingling.
Thus, Verity had taken her first tentative steps along the path to penumbratisation: fusion with the dark. Dr Grainger had spent hours with her over the past few weeks, refusing to take any payment because, he said, Meadwell was 'a real palace of shadows' in which it was a privilege to work.
He was an earnest, humourless man, and Verity seemed to be becoming rather dependent on him. On three occasions, they had meditated together in one of the upstairs rooms, sitting side by side on straight-backed chairs with their hands on their knees, a tincture of moonlight on the rim of a wardrobe. Here, Dr Grainger had instructed her in the techniques of tenebral chakra-breathing which, he said, would put her in tune with the dark physically, mentally and emotionally.
'There are five other stages after this,' he said, 'but it's gonna take you maybe a couple more weeks of nightly exercise before you're ready to move on up.'
Verity clung, with little confidence but certainly no misgivings any more, to the tenebral exercises. The house might be growing ever darker, but the real oppressor was Oliver Pixhill, whose undisguised intention was to dispense with her services, presumably seeing her as the final link with his despised father.
Dr Grainger was right. If she could not love the dark as he did, at least she might learn to live with it. It was her duty to stay, to resist all attempts to force her out. To hold out until…
Until when? Colonel Pixhill had always said she would know. Major Shepherd had said someone would help her, that she would not have to be a canary until she finally succumbed to the gases. All she was sure of was that the person coming to help her was not Oliver Pixhill.
She just couldn't get him out other head. He had never returned, but his sneers lingered. He obviously hated Meadwell too; had he inherited it, he would doubtless have sold it at once. Which was perhaps one of the reasons the Colonel had laid the foundations of the Pixhill Trust.
Verity felt very lonely. Day to day, she seemed to see only Dr Grainger. Wanda never telephoned; she was, it seemed, spending much of her time persuading influential people to support the campaign against the Bath-Taunton Relief Road. And was also, apparently, involved in setting up some sort of Christmas event uniting pagans and Christians in the person of Dr Liana Kelly, the liberal-minded new Bishop of Bath and Wells.
All fine and good in its way. This, surely, was what Glastonbury was about: a healing of ancient rifts. So was Christmas. It should be a time of rejoicing. But on the town streets there were few smiles to be seen. She missed very much the joviality of Mr Battle, with his sketchbook and his bicycle. And the careless elegance of Juanita Carey, even if she was always too busy to talk for long.
Such an unbelievable tragedy. In its wake and in the aftermath of the unpleasantness at Holy Thorn Ceramics, there seemed to be in the air of Glastonbury a cold hostility which Verity had never before experienced. Not what the holy town was about. It was as though Avalon itself- awful thought – was going the way of Meadwell.
At least Woolly looked cheerful, in orange trousers and a yellow jacket over a lurid Hawaiian shirt. But then he always looked cheerful; apart from that one suit, clothes like these were all he had.
His face was doleful though, today.