by Unknown
Fay tasted metal.
'Oh . . . !'
Her eyes widened, a movement went through her, like an earth tremor along a fault line. Her hands thrust the microphone away, revolted.
The mike fell out of its stand and over the end of the table where it dangled on its flex. Fay sat there wiping the back of a hand over her lips.
'What the hell . . . ?' said the voice in the cans. 'Fay? Fay, are you there?'
'Oh Lord, we humbly beseech you, look down upon us with compassion . . .'
Eyes tensely closed, Murray was trying to concentrate. He could still smell bleach from the bathroom, although they were downstairs again now, in the sitting-room that was full of repressed emotions, deep-frozen. In the shadow of the pulpit-sideboard.
Churchlike. More churchlike, anyway, than a bathroom.
But the Church was not a building. He, in this dark little parlour, at this moment, was the Church.
Two feet away ... an eighteen-year-old girl in holed jeans and a straining tank top. A girl he didn't think he liked very much any more. A girl with a glistening dab of sweat over her upper lip.)
And, because there was nothing to help him in The Book of Common Prayer, he must improvise.
'. . . look down with compassion, Lord, on our foolish fancies and fantasies. Lift from this house the burden of primitive superstition. Hold up your holy light and guide us away from the darkened recesses of our unconscious minds . , .'
His voice came back at him in a way he'd never experienced before in prayer. Not like in church, the words spinning away, over the congregation and up into the rafters. Or muted, behind bedside screens, against the chatter and rattle and bustle of a hospital ward.
Here, in a room too crowded with still, silent things for an echo, it all sounded as slick and as shallow as he rather suspected it was. He was stricken with isolation - feeling exposed and raw, as if his veneer of priestly strength was bubbling and melting like thin paint under a blowlamp.
Murray ran a damp finger around the inside of his clerical collar. He realized in horror that the only ghost under exorcism in this house was his own undefined, amorphous faith.
As if something was stealing that faith, feeding from it.
His collar felt like a shackle; he wanted to tear it off.
He knew he had to get out of here. Knowing this, while hearing his voice, intoning the meaningless litany.
'Bring us, Lord, safely from the captivity of our bodies and the more insidious snare of our baser thoughts. Lead us . . .'
Her voice sliced through his.
'I think it likes you. Vicar,' Tessa said sweetly.
His eyes opened to a white glare. The girl was holding the cracked shaving mirror at waist-level, like a spot lamp, and when she tilted the mirror, he saw in it the quivering, flickering image of a cowering man in a dark suit and a clerical collar - the man gazing down at his hands, clasping his rearing penis in helpless remorse, in a tortured parody of prayer.
Murray screamed and fled.
A few moments later, when he tumbled half-sobbing, half-retching into the street, he could hear her laughter. He stood with his back to a lamppost, sob-breathing through his mouth. He looked down and felt his fly; the zip was fully fastened.
He felt violated. Physically and spiritually naked and shamed.
A door slammed behind him, and he still thought he could hear her laughing. At intervals. As if whatever had got into her was sharing the fun.
CHAPTER V
THE bitch doesn't get in here again. Not ever. Under any circumstances. You understand?'
Max was pulsing with rage. Rachel had seen it before, but not often.
Offa's Dyke Radio had run the item on its lunchtime bulletin - from which, Rachel had been told, the story had been picked up by a local freelance hack and relayed to the London papers. Several of which had now called Epidemic's press office to check it out.
And Goff s secretary in London had phoned Goff in time for him to catch the offending Offa's Dyke item on the five o'clock news.
'That report . . . from Fay Morrison, our reporter in Crybbe,' the newsreader had said unnecessarily at the end.
'Fay Morrison? Guy Morrison?' Goff said.
Rachel shook her head. 'Hardly likely.'
"Yeah,' Goff accepted. And then he spelled it out for her again, just in case she hadn't absorbed his subtext. When he wanted the world to know about something, he released the information in his own good time. He released it.
'So from now on, you don't talk to anybody. You don't even think about the Project in public, you got that?'
'Maybe,' Rachel said, offhand, tempting fate, 'you should fire me.'
"Don't be fucking ridiculous,' Max snapped and stormed out of the stable-block to collect his bags from the Cock. He was driving back to London tonight, thank God, and wouldn't be returning until Friday morning, for the lunch party.
When she could no longer hear the Ferrari arrogantly clearing its throat for the open road, Rachel Wade rang Fay, feeling more than a little aggrieved.
They shouted at each other for several minutes before Rachel made a sudden connection and said slowly, 'You mean Guy Morrison is your ex-husband?'
'He didn't tell you? Well, of course, he wouldn't. Where's the kudos in having been married to me?'
Rachel said, thoughtlessly, 'He's really quite a hunk, isn't he?'
A small silence, then Fay said, 'Hunk of shit, actually.'
'Max was right,' Rachel said. 'You're being a bitch. You did the radio piece as a small act of vengeance because your ex had pushed your nose out.'
'Now look . ..'
'No, you look. Guy's programmes wouldn't have affected anything. You'd still have had the stories for Offa's Dyke Radio, and you'd have had them first. I do actually keep my promises.'
Fay sighed and told her that the truth was she was hoping to do a full programme. For Radio Four. However, with a TV documentary scheduled, that now looked like a non-starter.
'So I was cutting my losses, I suppose. I really didn't think it'd come back on you. Well ... I suppose I didn't really think at all. I over-reacted. Keep over-reacting these days, I'm afraid. I'm sorry.'
'I'm sorry, too,' Rachel said, 'but I have to tell you you've burned your boats. Max has decreed that you should be banned from his estate forever.'
'I see.'
'I can try and explain, but he isn't known for changing his mind about this kind of thing. Why should he? He is the deity in these parts.'
In the photograph over the counter, Alfred Watkins wore pince-nez and looked solemn. If there were any pictures of him smiling, Powys thought, they must be filed away in some family album; smiling was not a public act in those days for a leading local businessman and a magistrate. It was perhaps just as well - Alfred Watkins needed his dignity today more than ever.
'Don't forget,' Powys said, 'he'll be watching you. Any joss-sticks get lit, he'll be very unhappy.'
'No he won't,' Annie said. Annie with the Egyptian amulet, still living in 1971, before the husband and the four kids. 'He fancies me, I can tell by the way he smiles.'
'He never smiles.'
'He smiles at me,' Annie said. 'OK, no joss-sticks. If you're not back by tomorrow I'll open at nine, after I get rid of the kids.'
'I'm only going to Kington.'
'You're going back to the Old Golden Land,' Annie said, half-smiling. He'd shown her the letter from Henry's neighbour, Mrs Whitney. 'Admit it, you're going back.'
'What happens?' Andy says- 'Well, you go around the stone thirteen times and then you lie on the fairy hill and you get the vision. You see into the future, or maybe just into yourself. According to the legend, John Bottle went round the stone and when he lay on the mound he went down and down until he entered the great hall of the Fairy Queen with whom he naturally fell in love. It was so wonderful down there that he didn't want to leave. But they sent him back, and when he returned to the real world he became a great seer and prophet.
; 'Of course . . - Andy ate a black olive -', . . he could never settle in the mundane world, and he knew that one day he'd have to go back . .
Powys drove his nine-year-old Mini out of the city, turning off before the Wye bridge.
In essence, Alfred Watkins had been right about the existence of leys. Powys felt this strongly. And Henry Kettle had been better than anybody at finding where the old tracks ran, by means of dowsing.
'After all these years,' he'd said once to Powys, 'I still don't know what they are. But I know they're there. And I know that sometimes, when you're standing on one, it can affect you. Affect your balance, like. Give you delusions sometimes, like as if you've had a few too many. Nothing psychic, mind, nothing like that. But they do interfere with you. Sometimes.'
They might interfere with you when you were walking along them, with or without your dowsing rods. Or when you were driving along a stretch of road which happened - as many did - to follow one of the old lines. Many accident blackspots had been found to be places where leys crossed.
Coincidence.
Of course. And you could go crazy avoiding stretches of road just because they happened to align with local churches and standing stones. Nobody really went that far.
Certainly not Henry. Who, you would have thought, was too experienced a dowser ever to be caught out that way.
But when an experienced dowser crashed into a wall around an ancient burial mound, it demanded the kind of investigation the police would never conduct.
He didn't expect to find anything. But Henry Kettle was his friend. He was touched and grateful that Henry had bequeathed to him his papers - perhaps the famous journal that nobody had ever seen. And the rods, of course, don't forget the rods. (Why should he leave his rods to a man who couldn't dowse?)
Powys left Hereford by King's Acre and headed towards the Welsh border, where the sun hung low in the sky. During his lunchbreak, he'd spent half an hour with the OS maps of Hereford and eastern Radnorshire. He'd drawn a circle around the blob on the edge of the town of Crybbe where it said:
The Tump
(mound)
He'd taken a twelve-inch Perspex ruler and put one end over the circle and then, holding the end down with one finger, moved the ruler in an arc, making little pencil marks as he went along, whenever he came upon an ancient site. When the ruler had covered three hundred and sixty degrees he took it away and examined all the marks- haphazard as circles and crosses in a football-pool coupon.
And stared into the map like a fortune-teller into a crystal ball or the bottom of a teacup. Waiting for a meaningful image or a pattern to form among the mesh of roads and paths and contour lines . . . mound, circle, stone, church, earthwork, moat, holy well . . .
But from a ley-hunter's point of view, it was all very disappointing.
There was a large number of old stones and mounds all along the Welsh border, but the Tump didn't seem to align with any of them. The nearest possible ancient site was Crybbe parish church, less than a mile away. He looked it up in Pevsner's Buildings and established that it was certainly pre-Reformation - always a strong indication that it had been built on a pre-Christian site. But when he drew a line from the Tump to the church and then continued it for several miles, he found it didn't cross any other mounds, churches or standing stones. Not even a crossroads or a hilltop cairn.
The ley system, which appeared to cover almost the whole of Britain and could be detected in many parts of the world, seemed to have avoided Crybbe.
'Bloody strange,' Powys had said aloud, giving up.
What the hell was there for Henry Kettle to dowse in Crybbe? Why had Max Goff chosen the place as a New Age centre?
Powys came into the straggling village of Pembridge, where the age-warped black-and-whites seemed to hang over the street instead of trees. Driving down towards Kington and the border, he felt a nervousness edging in, like a foreign station on the radio at night. He rarely came this way. Too many memories. Or maybe only one long memory, twisted with grief.
Fiona, Ben's girlfriend, laughing and burrowing in one of the bags for the bottle of champagne. 'Better open this now, warm shampoo's so yucky.'
Ben holding up a fresh-from-the-publisher copy of the book. On the cover, a symbolic golden pentagram is shining on a hillside. In the foreground, against a late-sunset sky, a few stars sprinkled in the corners, is the jagged silhouette of a single standing stone. Across the top, the title. The Old Golden Land. Below the stone, in clean white lettering, the author's name, J. M. Powys.
And below that it says. With photographs by Rose Hart.
Rose looks at you, and her eyes are bright enough to burn through the years, and now the pain almost dissolves the memory.
Ben saying, 'A toast, then . . .'
But Andy is raising a hand. 'There remains one small formality.'
Everybody looking at him.
'I think Joe ought to present himself to the Earth Spirit in the time-honoured fashion.'
Forget it, you think. No way.
'I mean go round the Bottle Stone. Thirteen times.'
Fiona clapping her hands. 'Oh, yes. Do go round the stone, Joe.'
CHAPTER VI
Henry's place was the end of a Welsh long-house, divided into three cottages. The other two had been knocked into one, and Mrs Gwen Whitney lived there with her husband.
Powys arrived around eight-thirty, driving through deep wells of shadow. Remembering Henry coming out to meet him one evening round about this time, his dog, Alf, dancing up to the car.
That night, twelve years ago, Powys pleading with Henry: 'Come on . . . it's as much your book as mine. The Old Golden Land by Henry Kettle and Joe Powys.'
'Don't be daft, boy. You writes, I dowses. That's the way of it. Besides, there's all that funny stuff in there - I might not agree with some of that. You know me, nothing psychic. When I stop thinking of this as science . . . well, I don't know where I'll be.'
And an hour or so later: 'But, Henry, at the very least. . .'
'And don't you start offering me money! What do I want any more money for, with the wife gone and the daughter doing more than well for herself in Canada? You go ahead, boy. Just don't connect me with any of it, or I'll have to disown you, see.'
Silence now. The late sun turning the cottage windows to tinfoil. No dog leaping out at the car.
Mrs Whitney opened her door as he walked across.
'Mr Powys.' A heavy woman in a big, flowery frock. Smiling that sad, sympathetic smile which came easily to the faces of country women, always on nodding terms with death.
'You remember me?'
'Not changed, have you? Anyway, it's not so long.'
'Twelve years. And I've gone grey.'
'Is it so long? Good gracious. Would you like some tea?'
'Thank you. Not too late, am I?'
'Not for you, Mr Powys. I remember one night, must have been four in the morning when we finally heard your car go from here.'
'Sorry about that. We had a lot to talk about.'
'Oh, he could talk, Mr Kettle could. When he wanted to.' Mrs Whitney led him into her kitchen, 'I think it looks nice grey,' she said.
Later, they stood in Henry's cell-like living-room, insulated by thousands of books, many of them old and probably valuable, although you wouldn't have thought it from the way they were edged into the shelves, some upside down, some back to front. On a small cast-iron mantelshelf, over the Parkray, were a few deformed lumps of wood. Local sculpture, Henry called it. He'd keep them on the mantelpiece until he found more interesting ones in the hedgerows, then he'd use the old ones for the fire.
Mrs Whitney handed Powys a battered old medical bag. 'This was in the car with him. Police brought it back.'
A thought tumbled into Powys's head as he took the bag. 'What about Alf?'
'Oh, old Alf died a couple of years back. He got another dog - Arnold. Funny-looking thing. I says, "You're too old for another dog, Mr Kettle." "Give me a reason to keep on living," he s
ays. Always said he couldn't work without a dog at his side. Arnold, he was in the car with Mr Kettle, too. He wasn't killed. A lady's looking after him in Crybbe. She'll have her hands full. Year or so with Mr Kettle, they forgot they was supposed to be dogs.'
Powys smiled.
'Daft about animals, Mr Kettle was. He's left half his money - I didn't put this in the letter - half his money's going to a dog's shelter over the other side of Hereford. Daughter won't like that.'
'Henry knew what he was doing,' Powys said. 'What's going to happen to the house?'
'She'll sell it. She won't come back, that one. She'll sell it and it'll go to some folks from Off, who'll put a new kitchen in and one of them fancy conservatories. They'll likely stop a couple of years, and then there'll be some more folks from Off. I don't mind them, myself, they never does no harm, in general.'
Powys opened the medical bag. The contents were in compartments, like valuable scientific equipment. Two remodelled wire coat-hangers with rubber grips.
Mrs Whitney said, 'There's a what-d'you-call-it, pendulum thing in a pocket in the lid.'
'I know,' Powys said. 'I remember.'
'Mr Kettle had his old dowsing records in . . . you know, them office things.'
'Box files.'
'Aye, box files. Must be half a dozen of them. And there's this I found by his bed.'
It was a huge old black-bound business ledger, thick as a Bible. He opened it at random.
. . . and in the middle meadow I detected the foundations
of an old house from about the fifteenth century. I got so
engrossed in this I forgot all about finding the well. . .
He could hear Henry chuckling as he wrote in black ink with his old fountain pen, edge to edge, ignoring the red and black rules and margins.
He turned to the beginning and saw the first entry had been made nearly twenty years earlier. Out of four or five hundred pages, there were barely ten left unfilled. End of an era.
