Home? The implications made her feel faint. She wobbled about, wanting to climb back into the van, submerge like a fat hippo in a swamp. Several times on the journey, she'd thought very seriously about dropping out of the convoy, turning the van around and dashing back to Patrick, telling him it had all been a terrible, terrible mistake.
And then she'd seen the vinegar shaker on the high chip shop counter at lunchtime and a spear of light had struck it and turned it into a glistening Glastonbury Tor. Yes! she'd almost shrieked. Yes, I'm coming back!
With company. There must be over thirty pilgrims here now, in a collection of vehicles as cheerful as an old fashioned circus. At least it had been cheerful when she'd joined the convoy on the North Yorkshire moors – that old army truck sprayed purple with big orange flowers, the former ambulance with an enormous eye painted on each side panel, shut on one side, wide open on the other. But several of the jollier vehicles seemed to have dropped out. Broken down, probably. Well, they were all frightfully old. And fairly drab now, except for Diane's van and Headlice's bee-striped bus.
Mort's hearse had slunk in next to the bus. There was a mattress in the back. Mort had offered to demonstrate Love over Death to Diane once; she'd gone all flustered but didn't want to seem uncool and said it was her period.
Mort climbed out. He wore a black leather jacket. He punched the air.
'Yo, Headlice!'
'OK, man?'
'Tonight, yeah?'
'Yeah,' said Headlice. 'Right.'
Mort wandered off down the field and began to urinate casually into a gorse bush to show off the size of his willy.
Diane turned away. Despite the unseasonal warmth, it had been a blustery day and the darkening sky bore obvious marks of violence, the red sun like a blood-bubble in an open wound and the clouds either runny like pus or fluffy in a nasty way, like the white stuff that grew on mould.
Diane said, 'Tonight?'
'Up there.' Headlice nodded reverently at the Tor where a low, knife-edge cloud had taken the top off St Michael's tower, making it look, Diane thought – trying to be prosaic, trying not to succumb – like nothing so much as a well-used lipstick sampler in Boots.
But this was the terminus. They'd travelled down from Yorkshire, collecting pilgrims en route, until they hit the St Michael Line, which focused and concentrated energy across the widest part of England. They might have carried on to St Michael's Mount at the tip of Cornwall; but, for Pagans, the Tor was the holy of holies.
'What are you – we – going to do?' Diane pulled awkwardly at her flouncy skirt from the Oxfam shop, washed-out midnight blue with silver half-moons on it.
'Shit, Mol, we're pagans, right? We do what pagans do.'
'Which means he don't know.' Rozzie cackled. Her face was round but prematurely lined, like a monkey's. Ropes of black beads hung down to her waist.
'And you do, yeah?' Headlice said.
Rozzie shrugged. Diane waited; she didn't really know what pagans did either, apart from revering the Old Gods and supporting the Green Party. They would claim that Christianity was an imported religion which was irrelevant to Britain.
But what would they actually do?
'I wouldn't wanna frighten you.' Rozzie smirked and swung herself on to the bus.
From across the field came the hollow sound of Bran, the drummer, doing what he did at every new campsite, what he'd done at every St Michael Church and prehistoric shrine along the Line: awakening the earth.
Diane looked away from the Tor, feeling a trickle of trepidation. She supposed there'd be lights up there tonight. Whether it was just the bijou flickerings of torches and lanterns, the oily glow of bonfires and campfires…
… or the other kind. The kind some people called UFOs and some said were earth-lights, caused by geological conditions.
But Diane thought these particular lights were too sort of personal to be either alien spacecraft or natural phenomena allied to seismic disturbance. It was all a matter of afterglow. Not in the sky; in your head. In the very top of your head at first, and then it would break up into airy fragments and some would lodge for a breathtaking moment in your throat before sprinkling through your body like a fine shiver.
Bowermead Hall, you see, was only three and a half miles from the town and, when she was little, the pointed hill crowned by the St Michael tower – the whole thing like a wine-funnel or a witch's hat – seemed to be part of every horizon, always there beyond the vineyards. Diane's very earliest sequential memory was looking out of her bedroom window from the arms of Nanny One and seeing a small, globular light popping out of the distant tower, like a coloured ball from a Roman candle. Ever so pretty, but Nanny One, of course, had pretended she couldn't see a thing. She'd felt Diane's forehead and grumbled about a temperature. What had happened next wasn't too clear now, but it probably involved a spoonful of something tasting absolutely frightful. You're a very silly little girl. Too much imagination is not good for you.
For a long time, Diane had thought imagination must be a sort of ice-cream; the lights too – some as white as the creamy blobs they put in cornets.
Years later, when she was in her teens, one of the psychologists had said to her, You were having rather a rough time at home, weren't you, Diane? I mean, with your father and your brother. You were feeling very lonely and… perhaps… unwanted, unloved? Do you think that perhaps you were turning to the Tor as a form of…
'No!' Diane had stamped her foot. 'I saw those lights. I did.'
And now the Tor had signalled to her across Britain. Called her back. But it wasn't – Diane thought of her father and her brother and that house, stiff and unforgiving as the worst of her schools – about pretty lights and candyfloss sunbeams. Not any more.
FIVE
Unwrapping a creamy new beeswax candle, Verity laid it down, with some trepidation, on a stone window ledge the size of a gravestone.
Still not sure, not at all sure, that she could go through with this.
It was late afternoon, but, even with all its hanging lights on, the room was as deep and shadowed as the nave of an old parish church.
The best-known old buildings in Glastonbury, apart from the Abbey, which was ruined – so tragic – were the one-time courthouse, known as the Tribunal, and the George and Pilgrims inn, both in the High Street, both mellow and famously beautiful.
And then there was Meadwell.
Which was hunched among umbrella trees about a mile out of town, to the east of the Tor. And was terribly, terribly old. But not famous, not mellow and not what one would call beautiful.
Rather like me, thought Verity, who looked after Meadwell for the Pixhill Trust and ran it as a sort of guesthouse. Most of the time she was decidedly not a sad or introspective or timid person. But tonight was the night of the Abbot's Dinner – and, as the sourly humid November day dwindled into evening, she realised that her little cat, Stella, had still not come home.
Of course this was not the first time. Nor was Stella the first cat to decide that, despite the veritable army of mice, it simply did not wish to live at Meadwell.
But tonight being the night of the Abbot's Dinner, Verity could not bear to be entirely alone.
Because Meadwell was so venerable, Grade Two listed and starred, little could be done to relieve the dispiriting gloom resulting from tiny, mullioned windows which must never be enlarged, oak panelling too delicate to disturb and enormous beams so oppressively low that even little Verity was obliged to stoop.
A touch of whitewash between the beams might have lightened the atmosphere a little, but there were sixteenth-century builders' marks to be protected. Also, in two of the upstairs rooms without panelling, repainting of the walls was forbidden because of what was described as Elizabethan graffiti – words, names perhaps, carved and burned into the sallow surface.