'How did my mother die?'
I wondered when you would ask that.
'They told me what she died of. They never told me how she…'
Go on.
'I don't know what I'm asking.'
I think you do.
Sometimes she awoke thinking it was morning. Thinking she'd slept a very long time. Sometimes it was as if she'd only minutes before closed her eyes. Sometimes she felt relaxed, sometimes frightfully agitated. Always this question at the back of her mind.
'Someone… someone said she was pushed downstairs.'
Well, there you are. You do know, don't you? Do you need the bedpan again? Nurse, fetch a bedpan, please.
'Why won't you tell me? You were there. No one knows more than you.'
Because you must work it out for yourself. And decide what to do about it.
'Who pushed her?'
You know who pushed her. You were very small. Not yet born. But you know. Your mother told you. Through the blood.
SEVEN
And slowly it all began to make a kind of incredible sense.
As he read page after page of primitive typescript, Powys lost all contact with his surroundings. He was entering Pixhill's Avalon.
Here was the lost heart of the diaries. Insert the missing chapter, the missing parts of existing chapters and what you had was no longer the aimless ramblings of a man without a discernible purpose, but the record of a tense, thirty year defence campaign by the stoical old soldier and – whether she was aware of it or not – a little spinster who could not See.
First, there was the section of the introduction bridging the void between Pixhill's vision of the Tor in a stifling tank and his arrival in Glastonbury. It opened with the Colonel back home, in a military hospital, where…
… trying to pin down the image, I produced drawing after drawing of the conical hill I had seen and showed it to everyone who came through the ward. They looked at my rough efforts, to humour me, I suppose, and shook their heads. Until, one day, a dapper man in a good-quality brown suit came to visit me. He pulled a chair close to the bed and took from an inside pocket one of my drawings which he said one of the doctors had passed on to him. 'Glastonbury Tor,' he said. 'In Somerset. There is no mistaking it. It is a place we ourselves have been made aware of lately.' 'We?' I said suspiciously. At which he took out his wallet and produced his papers. Quite an eye-opener. My visitor, one Stanley Willett, turned out to be a highly placed civil servant in the War Ministry. Intelligence, I guessed, for these fellows will never say as much. He then began to question me closely about my apparent obsession with Glastonbury Tor. He started to throw names at me, one in particular. Had I had any contact, he demanded, with a certain Violet Mary Firth, known to her readers as Dion Fortune? Well, of course, the name meant nothing at the time and it seemed to me that whatever line of research he was pursuing, I could be of no great assistance. But this was wartime. No time for secrets between fellows on the same side. I therefore, feeling somewhat embarrassed, related to Willett the circumstances of my vision in the desert. To my surprise, he neither laughed at me nor attempted to belittle the experience. My life, I suppose, would have been happier if he had. 'Do you think the doctors would mind if I were to smoke?' he asked. 'Hardly,' I said. 'All the doctors smoke. Keeps this place going, tobacco.' We both smoked in silence for some time and then he sat back and observed me shrewdly through his rimless spectacles. 'We've been studying your record, Pixhill. You're a man of intellect rather than action who nevertheless adapted to his circumstances with courage and resourcefulness. We could send you back to the front when you 're fit to leave here.'
'As I fully expect you will,' I said. 'Or we could send you to Glastonbury.' He held up my drawing. 'To the Hill of Visions. A very significant spot. Did you know that? Think carefully before you answer.' My immediate notion was that the Tor concealed some clandestine bomb-proof HQ. It would explain the Secret Service's concern, if some shell shocked patient at a military hospital was turning out crude drawings of a secret subterranean refuge for Mr Churchill's War Cabinet. But it was nothing so orthodox. For Mr Stanley Willett was to be my first introduction to Miss Dion Fortune and The Watchers of Avalon.
Powys sat up. So Fortune had been Pixhill's 'teacher'. How had Diane known? Pure guess? Wishful thinking?
He'd read about the Watchers of Avalon but, apart from DF, he didn't know who they were or precisely what they'd got up to.
He went outside to check on Arnold, let him out to relieve himself. Arnold did this on a rear wheel of the Mini and then immediately hopped back into the car.
It was nearly dark now and the snow was as fluffy as a sheepskin on the roof of the Mini. Against the snow, Meadwell looked even darker,
Violet Firth/Dion Fortune, said Willett, was an unqualified Freudian psychologist who had been drawn into the occult and had become a member of a rather fashionable magical society of the period known as The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, among whose better-known adherents had been: poet WB Yeats and that sinister shyster Aleister Crowley. Miss Firth (or Mrs Evans, as she was then, though parted from her husband) went on to form her own occult fraternity called the Society of the Inner light, which drew together her interest in both Christian and pagan mysticism. It was this loose organisation which interested Willett and his colleagues. For Dion Fortune, it seemed, had joined the War.
We all knew of Hitler's obsession with the occult and Himmler's Aryan fantasies centred on his medieval Schloss. Dion Fortune, it seemed, was convinced the Nazis were using black magic against the Allies and that a suitable defence should be fashioned to harness the 'group mind' of the nation and shield our islands from this alleged psychic onslaught. Members of the Society of the Inner Light throughout Britain were therefore recruited into the Watchers of Avalon and given their instructions in a series of monthly bulletins from DF herself, working both from London and from her home on the very flank of Glastonbury Tor. As Willett understood it, they were all to meditate at a prearranged time, simultaneously visualising the same powerful cabalistic symbols and forming a kind of psychic wall around these islands. They were taught to visualise, as the mystical beating heart of the British psyche, a place referred to as the Cavern Under the Hill of Vision. Each week, the minds, the souls, the inner consciousness of the members of the Society of the Inner Light would 'gather' here. Glastonbury Tor, of course. I saw my own drawing with new eyes. 'Seemed harmless enough to us,' Willett said, 'last thing we'd want to do is discourage this biddy. If all the hare-brained mystics in the country are turning their minds to Hitler, it can't harm anyone's morale. But we would to keep an eye on them. That's where you come in, Pixhill. You've had a rough time. Spot of convalescence in order, I think. Nice place. Somerset.'
'Oh dear,' I said. I felt an excitement tinged with a very definite trepidation. I remember wondering what the Cricketer had let me in for now. 'Perhaps, in a week or so, you could drift along to Glastonbury,' Willett suggested. 'Tell a few people about your, ah, vision. See who you encounter. If these people trust you, we'd like you to stay there. Keeping us informed from time to time about what exactly is going on.' My eyes widened. 'You mean as a sort of secret agent? A spy? Me? I was never a master of subterfuge. Not much of an actor, you know.' Willett chuckled. 'Precisely. You have an honest ingenuous face, Pixhill. And I really don't think we should use words like spy, do you? Thing is – what we really want to know – is all this mumbo jumbo having any actual effect? The fact you, yourself, stuck in a tank in Libya were getting pretty unmistakable pictures of their so-called Hill of Vision may well suggest that something is being… transmitted.'