Difficult one, that.
He brightened when he saw Diane crossing the road by the Christmas tree. She hadn't been in all morning, and after what Paul had said about her painting the van in the dark he'd kept thinking maybe he should take a walk up to the shop, check her out. Just that he didn't feel he knew her well enough to ask why she was behaving like a fruitcake.
She didn't come in. She didn't even glance at the shop, just walked past, like a bloody zombie, people getting out of her way. Sam watched her cross Magdalene Street and head straight for the Abbey gatehouse. She didn't go in there either, she turned her back on it, fell against the wall like a drunk trying to stay upright.
What the…?
Sam was up and out of the door, not giving himself time to think.
'Diane?'
When he ran across the road, a truck driver braking and blasting his horn, she looked, unseeing, in Sam's direction.
He could see that she was shivering uncontrollably, like a long-term junkie run out of smack. Shit, the girl was ill.
'You all right? Something happened?'
'Oh.' Diane looked up, vaguely. 'Sam.'
'What's wrong?' A few people staring at them now, but not many because this was Glastonbury and there wasn't much they hadn't seen in these streets. 'Only Lady Loony,' he heard one woman with a kid and a shopping bag say knowingly to another and they both laughed and Sam wanted to kick their bloody arses halfway to Benedict Street.
Diane, face slightly blue, was staring vacantly across the road to where the two guys were untangling the Christmas tree lights. Sam took her arm.
'Come on. Come for a hot chocolate, Diane.' Easing her away from the wall. 'Catch your death.'
Darryl Davey came past with a couple of mates, nudging each other and smirking.
'Don't you say a fucking word, sunshine,' Sam snarled.
Darryl narrowed his eyes and gave him the finger.
Tosser.
'You see… and this is strictly off the record…' The Bishop of Bath and Wells lit a thin roll-up. '… some of my predecessors have been frankly embarrassed at having Glastonbury in the diocese.'
The Bishop was a compact man in his early forties. He wore cord trousers and a purple denim shirt, his white clerical band under the button-down collar. Powys wondered if he always rolled his own cigarettes or just wanted to appear cool for the local radical rag.
'Point being, Joe, the Church of England might have owned the Abbey for most of the century, but the ambience remains RC, and I imagine many people still regard us being the landlords as the final insult. Even if we have tidied the place up, stopped it being treated as a convenient stone quarry for local builders.'
'But the Catholics aren't the problem right now, are they?' Powys said. 'You've got what we might call an older denomination to contend with.'
'Pagans.' The bishop laughed. 'Be so much easier if the buggers still wore horns and bones through their noses. But they're quite likely to be academics in suits.' He nodded towards the window. 'Could be a few hanging around the cathedral as we speak.' But he didn't seem to regard this as much of a threat.
They were in Wells, a very small city a short drive from Glastonbury. At a window table in a pub facing the cathedral. The bishop drank Perrier. His name was Liam Kelly; he didn't sound even vaguely Irish.
'But, you see, Joe… are they really pagans? What you have today, as we approach the Millennium, is a great yearning for spirituality. We – the human race – have been everywhere and realised what a terribly small place the earth is, how finite are its resources.'
A micro-cassette machine lay on the table between them, the bishop pulled it a little closer.
'Even been to the moon, and what a dreadful anti-climax that was. So more people are realising there's only one real voyage of discovery left to them, and that is inwards. It's a very promising situation.'
'You think so?'
'You don't?'
The bishop seemed to see Powys for the first time, to wonder who he was. Powys hadn't mentioned his proposed book. Diane had arranged the interview – which, presumably, was why the bishop had agreed to do it; he hadn't been here long enough to risk offending the House of Pennard. How was he to know how things stood between Diane and her immediate family?
Powys said. 'You don't think inner trips can be a little risky for some people?'
'Are we on or off the record?'
'Whatever you like.' Powys stopped the tape.
'Look'; I don't know precisely what kind of magazine this is, ah Joe. But if you can somehow get over the message that I don't regard my visit to Glastonbury next Thursday as any kind of crusade. Or the pagan element as the Enemy. I like to believe that we're all working towards the same goal. If, for instance, some women like to regard the Divinity as having a distinct feminine aspect, how can I legitimately argue against that? The battle for the ordination of women has been fought and won, and it's a victory I applaud.'
Not answering the question. Didn't seem to realise, either, that The Avalonian didn't yet exist and would hardly be on the streets in time to get over any message about Thursday.
'Goddess worshippers,' Powys said. 'You'll be meeting them?'
'On Thursday, as I say. Which is simply the shortest day as far as we're concerned. To them it's Christmas without the Christ – as yet. God, is that the time already? Sorry about this, but I do have to be in Bath for lunch.'
'Oh,' Powys realised. 'The Solstice. Thursday's the Winter Solstice. Won't the pagans be having their… whatever they do?'
The Bishop stood up. 'I don't know what they normally do, but on Thursday, before exchanging opinions about the future of Glastonbury, we shall go together at dawn to St Michael's Chapel, where I shall conduct a small service with carols which followers of the, ah, nature religion will find not incompatible – 'The Holly and the Ivy', this sort of thing.'
'St Michael's Chapel… Look, I'm sorry, I'm not too familiar with the geography, but that's part of the Abbey, is it?'
'No, no.' The Bishop finished his Perrier. 'It's the one on the Tor.'
Powys pocketed his tape machine. 'Let me get this right. You're going to the top of Glastonbury Tor with a bunch of pagans on the Winter Solstice. Doesn't it bother you, if you believe…'
Bishop Kelly laughed and shook his head. 'The Winter Solstice, as I say, is merely the shortest day. 'The 'pagans', if we have to use that term, will be represented by Dame Wanda Carlisle, who I've already met socially and who is, in all other respects, a delightful person. And the Tor is, ah…'
'Just a hill?' Powys couldn't believe this.
'Indeed,' said the Bishop. 'Just a hill.'
'So what are your feelings about this plan to restrict public access?'
The Bishop smiled. 'Good talking to you, Joe. Hope to see you up there.'
Diane went over to sit in her usual red typist's chair. She looked pale as watered milk.
'Go on.' Sam turned on an extra bar of the electric fire and moved to the corner where Paul kept the tea and coffee and Diane's chocolate, everything washed and neatly arranged. 'What did the slimy bastard want?'
'Me for Christmas,' said Diane dolefully. 'At Bowermead. They have a gathering most years, and the awful Boxing Day hunt's been revived, so…'
'Has it now? Well, well. Going, are we?'
'Bowermead? For Christmas? Gosh, no. I might never get out again. They still have sort of dungeons underneath. Anyway, Juanita might be out of hospital by Christmas. She'll need a lot of help.'
'Right,' said Sam. 'Right. Soya cream in your chocolate?'
'Perhaps not. Sam…'
'Good job, we're clean out of soya cream. Sony?'
'Does anything ever, you know, ever happen to you? The way it does to some people. Quite a… a bigger percentage of people than normal, I suppose. In Glastonbury.' Boxing Day hunt, he was thinking. Got to have a go at this one. Especially after that 'MP elect' bollocks. Make Christmas worthwhile, for once. Ring Hughie. Get some of the old crew in from Bristol.