The Chalice

'Can't harm him now.' Powys stood up. 'How about I run you a bath?'

'The story's not over. I saw his hat, I… I've been blocking this out, OK. You're the first person to hear this. I'd virtually talked myself into believing I'd imagined it. Until that copper…'

'Jim's cat.'

'When they hold the inquest on Jim, early in the new year, I'm going to have to give evidence. I'm going to have to explain why I ran at the house, why I…'

'I know.' Powys gently squeezed her shoulders.

'You don't know. That's the point. Nobody knows. They all think I threw myself on the bonfire all trussed up like some Indian wife. Even I…'

The phone rang. 'Ignore it,' Powys said. 'They'll leave a message. Go on.'

'What if it's Diane?'

'Diane wouldn't phone. She doesn't even know you're out of hospital.'

The ringing was cut off, snatched away by the answering machine.

'All right,' Juanita said. 'There's an ash tree overhanging the cottage, one of the branches almost touching the window. His hat was hanging from it. I was standing there with Diane and Don Moulder, hoping to God Jim wasn't within a mile of that fire, and I saw his hat. No mistake. Not a bunch of dead leaves, not a piece of cloth. It was the damned hat. I was furious. The travellers were blocking the road. I thought, they've set fire to his cottage and they've left his hat. A message. A taunt. So I – I mean. OK, irrationally, I can see that now – I just went after it. I tore my skirt and wrapped it round my face and I just…'

'OK,' he gripped her shoulders. 'Was he very attached to that hat?'

'Inseparable. Wore it riding his bike. Wore it painting in his garden.'

'In Celtic magic,' Powys said, 'a man's soul is in his head. The Celts kept heads in streams and wells. They made stone heads. Sorry, I'm thinking aloud, you don't want to hear this crap.'

'No, go on.'

'I was just thinking that if they went through all the ceremony of an execution, a beheading. And then they just took his hat

…'

'He still died, didn't he?' Juanita said quietly. 'Within two days.'

'Possession of a man's hat, especially when that hat was such an essential part of what he was, would, they might think, give them access to his head. To his soul. To put thoughts there. To arouse certain feelings. Emotions. Sorry, I'm…'

Theorising. He felt very uncomfortable. This was the kind of theorising he'd sworn he was never going to do again.

'Emotions.' Juanita looked up at him. 'What did Diane tell you? About Jim and me?'

'That you just wanted to be friends.'

'OK. The situation was he'd left his wife. To come to the Vale of Avalon and paint. That was his dream. His Gauguin fantasy. Except the only vaguely dusky female he knew was me. And in all those years we just enjoyed each other's company. We had laughs. And he looked at me and he patted my bum, and that was as far as it went and as far as he wanted it to go. Sure, he'd say, "If only I'd known you when I was younger," that sort of stuff. He enjoyed all that, the banter, the what if… But the truth was he didn't want to get involved with a woman again. Certainly wouldn't have one in his cottage. She might've fractured the idyll, messed up his routine.'

She was looking at the painting of the thin, red, glowing line.

'He was an obsessive painter. Increasingly. Obsessed with the mystery. That night, he was absolutely outraged at what the travellers were doing on the Tor. Spiritual vandalism. Maybe he sensed more than I did. He'd certainly become very attuned to the dusk. To the ending of a beautiful day.'

Nine o'clock passed and, with it, that last small hope – that Diane would arrive to open the shop.

Powys and Juanita sat in the shop and didn't open for business.

Juanita told herself the girl was scatty, easily deflected and sometimes she would let you down. Also that Diane was a grown woman and could look after herself, that to think otherwise was patronising and insulting.

So why did she feel desperate with anxiety?

The answering machine didn't do much to relieve it.

'Diane, it's Matthew Banks. That article of mine, for your dummy edition. We're going to have to scrap it. Something absolutely awful's happened. Please call me.'

TWO Our First Christmas Tree

'Should they have let you come home?'

Matthew Banks was a very tall, spare, fastidious-looking man in his fifties. Waiting for him to arrive, Juanita had told Powys how Banks had sold the family garden centre to finance his self-published books on plant-lore. A fanatic, she said, but he knew his stuff.

'I can treat you,' Banks said, 'I can make you something up to put on those hands. You needn't have had grafts. Potato peelings. Forms a kind of skin.'

'Never mind, Matthew, too late.' Juanita was impatient. 'This is J.M. Powys, by the way, the author and, er, descend- ant of J.C. Powys.'

'Ah.' Banks inspected Powys down his half-glasses. 'The Old Golden Land. You know, I…'

'And his dog, Arnold,' Juanita said. 'Let's not mess about. It opens at nine-thirty, doesn't it?'

Outside, the sleet was gathering force and every lamppost and signpost seemed to have one of those Glastonbury First stickers with the white slash across the Tor.

Banks tore one off as he passed. 'This should be stopped. You know we're going to turn tomorrow's Solstice Service into a sort of small-scale protest against this Tor lunacy. All the more urgent with Bowkett's blasted bill. If the Bishop is so keen on developing a sort of ecumenical attitude towards paganism, let him speak out against this.'

'You'd better make sure it is a small demo,' Juanita muttered through her scarf as they crossed into Magdalene Street. 'Or you'll be playing directly into their hands.'

She found herself glancing at every passing woman in the futile hope that one of them might turn out to be Diane

'It will be discreet and dignified.' Banks strode through the Abbey gates, his jaw jutting.

It was Powys's first visit to the Abbey. Pity, he was thinking, that it should be at a time like this. For a reason like this.

They reached the modern visitor centre, where Banks was nodded through by the attendant but Powys paid for himself and Juanita. There were showcases inside the centre, and relics of stone and pottery, books and leaflets on sale, glossy pictures of sunset silhouettes. The centre-piece was a scale model of the original abbey in all its soaring, honeyed splendour. There were also several information boards, the first one telling the story of Joseph of Arimathea, said to have settled here with eleven disciples in AD63.

And so – Juanita pale and muffled and following a three-legged dog – they entered the holyest erthe in all England: thirty-six acres of lawns and ruins. The reason for Glastonbury.

There was a tall wooden cross set in a vast lawn greying under a skim of sleet. The cross was modern but timelessly simple. Despite its size, it had humility; it said, We're not even trying to compete.

Powys saw the Abbey ruins stark beyond it. They'd always reached him, these ancient, spoiled places. More than palaces, more than cathedrals.

But there was no time to explore the ruins. Matthew Banks was striding, stork-like, towards a well-preserved grey chapel with a tiled roof and a tiny bell-tower.

On a small, walled lawn, with a path going by, stood a little tree. Arnold edged towards it.

'Perhaps not, Arnold,' Powys said.

Matthew Banks bit off a short, arid laugh. 'It really doesn't matter now.'