Phil Rickman - The Chalice

Jim let her steer him into the little parlour behind the shop, past the antiquarian section, where the books were kept behind glass, most of them heavy magical manuals from the nineteenth century. Jim had flicked one open the other week and found disturbingly detailed instructions 'for the creation of elemental spirits'. He suspected it didn't mean distilling your own whisky.

Which reminded him. 'Erm… that Laphroaig you had. Don't suppose there's a minuscule drop left?'

That rather depends how many minuscule drops you've had already,' Juanita said cautiously. Damn woman knew him rather too well.

'One. Swear to God. Called at a pub called the Oak Tree or something. Nerves shot to hell after a run-in with a container lorry from Bordeaux. One small Bells, I swear it.'

She looked dubious, puckering her lovely nose. In the lingering warmth of this year's strange, post-Indian summer, she was wearing a lemon yellow off the shoulder thing, showing all her freckles. Well, as many of them as he'd ever seen.

'Just that you're looking… not exactly un-flushed, Jim.'

'Hmmph,' said Jim. He let Juanita sit him down in an armchair, planting a chunky tumbler in his drinking and painting hand. She had quite a deep tan from sunning herself reading books on the balcony at the back. While most women her age were going frantic about melanoma,

Juanita snatched all the sun she could get. Must be the Latin ancestry.

Watching her uncork the Laphroaig bottle with a rather suggestive thopp, Jim thought, Ten years… ten years younger would do it. Ten years, maybe fifteen, and she'd be at least within reach.

He coughed, hoping nothing showed. 'Erm… Happened to cycle past Don Moulder's bottom field on the way back. Guess bloody what.'

'New Age travellers?'

'Nothing gets past you, does it?' Jim held out his glass. 'Arrogant devils. Bloody- thieving layabouts.'

'Not quite all of them.'

As she leaned over to pour his drink, Jim breathed in a delightful blend of Ambre Solaire and frank feminine sweat, the mixture sensuously overlaid with the smoky peat musk of the whisky. Aaaaah… the dubious pleasure of being sixty-two years old, unattached again, and with all one's senses functioning, more or less.

'I'm sorry…' Shaking himself out of it and feeling the old jowls wobble. 'What did you just say?'

'I said at least one of them isn't a thief. Besides, oddballs have always drifted towards Glastonbury. Look at me. Look at you.'

'Yes, but, Juanita, the essential difference here is that we saved up our hard-earned pennies until we could do it in a respectable way. We didn't just get an old bus from a scrapyard and enough fuel to trundle it halfway across the country before it breaks down and falls to pieces in some previously unsullied beauty spot. You see, what gets me is how these characters have the bare-faced check.. .'

'Because Diane's with them.'

'… to call themselves friends of the buggering planet, when they… What did you say…?' Jim had to steady the Laphroaig with his other hand.

Juanita poured herself a glass of probably overpriced white wine from Lord Pennard's vineyard and lowered herself into a chintzy old rocking chair by the Victorian fireplace. There was a small woodstove tucked into the fireplace now, unlit as yet, but with a few autumn logs piled up ready for the first cold day.

Jim said, 'I'm sorry, I don't quite understand. You say Diane's back? Diane s with them? But I thought…'

'We all did Which is…' Juanita sighed. 'I suppose, why I got them the field.'

Jim was bewildered. ' You got them the buggering field?'

He'd thought she was over all that. Might have been Queen of the Hippies 1972, but she was fully recovered now, surely to God.

Juanita said. 'Comes down to the old question: if I don't try and help her, who else is going to?'

'But I thought she was working in Yorkshire?' The idea of Diane training to be a journalist had struck Jim as pretty unlikely at the time, considering the girl's renowned inability to separate fact from fantasy, 'I thought she was getting married. Peter somebody.'

'Patrick. It's off. Abandoned her job, everything,'

'To become a New Age buggering traveller?'

'Not exactly. As she put it, she kind of hitched a lift. They were making their way here, and she…'

Juanita reached for her cigarettes.

'… Oh dear. She said it was calling her back.'

Jim groaned. 'Not again. Dare I ask what, specifically, was calling her back?'

'The Tor.' Juanita lit a cigarette. 'What else?'

Jim was remembering that time the girl had gone missing and they'd found her just before dawn under the Thorn on Wearyall Hill, in her nightie and bare feet. What was she then, fifteen? He sank the last of the Laphroaig. He was too old for this sort of caper.

'Lady Loony,' he said. 'Do people still call her that?'

The ancient odour had drifted in as soon as Diane wound down the van window, and it was just so… Well, she could have wept. How could she have forgotten the scent?

The van had jolted between the rotting gateposts into Don Moulder's bottom field. It had bounced over grass still ever so parched from a long, dry summer and spiky from the harvest. Diane had turned off the engine, sat back in the lumpy seat, closed her eyes and let it reach her through the open window; the faraway fragrance of Holy Avalon.

Actually, she hadn't wound down the window, as such. Just pulled out the folded Rizlas packet which held the glass in place and let it judder to its favourite halfway position. It was rather an old van, a Ford something or other – used to be white all over but she'd painted big, silly pink spots on it so it wouldn't stand out from the rest of the convoy.

The smell made her happy and sad. It was heavy with memories and was actually a blend of several scents, the first of them autumn, a brisk, mustardy tang. And then woodsmoke – there always seemed to be woodsmoke in rural Somerset, much of it applewood which was rich and mellow and sweetened the air until you could almost taste it.

And over that came the most elusive ingredient: the musk of mystery, a scent which summoned visions. Of the Abbey in the evening, when the saddened stones grew in grace and sang to the sunset. Of wind-whipped Wearyall Hill with the night gathering in the startled tangle of the Holy Thorn. Of the balmy serenity of the Chalice Well garden. And of the great enigma of the West: Glastonbury Tor.

Diane opened her eyes and looked up at the huge green breast with its stone nipple.

She wasn't the only one. All around, people had been dropping out of vans and buses, an ambulance, a stock wagon. Gazing up at the holy hill, no more than half a mile away. Journey's end for the pagan pilgrims. And for Diane Ffitch, who called herself Molly Fortune because she was embarrassed by her background, confused about her reason for returning and rather afraid, actually.

Dusk was nibbling the fringes of Don Moulder's bottom field when the last few vehicles crawled in. They travelled in smaller groups nowadays, because of the law. An old Post

Office van with a white pentacle on the bonnet was followed by Mort's famous souped-up hearse, where he liked to make love, on the long coffin-shelf. Love is the law, Mort said, Love over death.

Headlice and Rozzie arrived next in the former Bolton Corporation single decker bus repainted in black and yellow stripes, like a giant bee.

'Listen, I've definitely been here before!' Headlice jumped down, grinning eerily through teeth like a broken picket fence. He was about nineteen or twenty; they were so awfully young, most of these people. At that age, Diane thought, you could go around saying you were a confirmed pagan, never giving a thought to what it really meant.