Phil Rickman - The Chalice

'Don't we all? Only some of us have to feed our kids. Just be glad we're not kicking you out before your time. You get the best bits now – relaxing and being looked after and not having to worry. That's the idea, anyway.'

'Sorry. I'm just a natural-born ungrateful bitch.'

The looking-after bit – that was the worst of all. You had to drink from a baby-cup with a spout, sometimes with a nurse holding the cup, although recently she'd learned how to grip it between her wrists, so long as it wasn't hot tea or coffee.

What she hadn't learned was how to turn on taps with her toes, and obviously she couldn't sink her boxing-glove bandages into hot water, so they had to give her a bath – sitting there with her arms in the air having her bits washed. The unutterable degradation of it.

Juanita sighed. 'I thought I'd be out in a week.'

'Well, we didn't order you to develop pneumonia.'

Because of the pneumonia – caused, they said, by shock – they'd had to delay the skin-grafts. You couldn't have a general anaesthetic with lungs seemingly committed to becoming a no-go area for oxygen. They'd pumped her full of antibiotics, but it was two weeks before they could get around to pulling the skin off her thighs and applying it to her hands.

For all that time, she actually hadn't wanted to smoke. Now the need was acute. This morning, she'd got Karen to take her down the corridor and put one in her mouth, unlit.

The fury was building too: But that was irrational, wasn't it?

'There you go.' Karen straightened up. 'Everything's fine. They'll probably take the dressing off again in the morning.'

'Do they have to? Can't I wear a permanent dressing?'

'It's only you who'll notice most of the time.'

'Exactly.'

The sight of the bandage balls at the end of her arms still inflicted horrendous, scorched images of Jim fragmenting in his jagged, molten cage, falling at last into her arms because… because. Oh God, I couldn't turn away from him again.

And then, like a wound slowly turning septic, the other insidious imaginings would begin to manifest.

'You were very lucky,' said Karen, who cleaned her teeth and God help us wiped her bum. 'You want to thank your lucky stars.'

'Sorry. Thanks, lucky stars. Actually, they tell me it was the lucky Afghan. But for the Afghan, my tits would've been jacket potatoes.'

'Don't think about it, all right?'

'Sure,' said Juanita. She looked down at her pure white cotton nightdress and the image of the jacket potatoes brought her to a decision. 'Listen, I need to ask you something.'

Diane asked him, 'Who was John Cowper Powys?'

It had been an easy run to the hospital, along the M5. Powys explored the parking area for a space.

'He was a famous author.'

'I know that. I mean, to you. What relation?'

'Forget it,' Powys said. 'Not your problem.'

'In the diaries,' Diane said, 'there's a bit where Pixhill comes into Glastonbury and meets his teacher, whom he doesn't identify, and John Cowper Powys, who he thinks he isn't going to like much. But he seems to get on with him in the end.'

'I'm glad somebody could.'

'The suggestion is that Colonel Pixhill and Mr Powys were involved in something together. It…' Diane hesitated. 'It's become very important to me to find out what this was.'

He said nothing. He was finding that if you asked Diane direct questions you were apt to scare her off. Better to wait.

'Because, you see, the other person, the teacher, the person Colonel Pixhill doesn't name… I think that was someone close to me. He writes several tunes about visiting his spiritual teacher. Twice he mentions going up Wellhouse Lane. Which was where… where she lived.'

Diane went quiet.

'You think his teacher was a she,' Powys said carefully. 'Why do you think that?'

'Because she's my teacher too,' Diane said, not looking at him. 'That is, she was… my nanny.'

Powys did some quick calculations. They were clearly not edging around the same person.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I thought we might have been talking about a woman who lived in a converted army hut at the foot of the Tor.'

She turned to him. They were in a shadowed area of the car park but he didn't need much in the way of lights to know her eyes were aglow.

'Diane,' Powys said. Very carefully, treading eggshells.

The sound of a distant ambulance echoed the warning sirens going off in his head. 'Dion Fortune died more than twenty years before you were born.'

Diane considered this.

'I don't think she would consider that a problem,' Diane said eventually.

'Sorry.' The nurse rearranged the bedclothes over the cage thing that prevented them touching Juanita's upper thighs, where the skin had been removed. 'Ruth who?'

'Dunn. Nursing sister.'

'What, here?'

'Don't know where she was. It might not even have been anywhere in the West Country, but it probably was.'

'Don't recall. Friend of yours?'

Juanita laughed shortly.

'Like that, is it? I can ask the girls tomorrow. Anything in particular you want to know about her?'

'Just… whatever. Look, Diane's here, don't say anything to her about this, OK?'

'Offended you in some way, has she, this Dunn woman?'

'No,' Juanita said. 'She paid me a compliment.'

What lovely slender hands.

Ceridwen had said.

Juanita stared grimly at the white boxing gloves. They covered scar tissue and transplanted skin. But not the unspeakable memory of gripping a melting, metal easel and staring into Jim Battle's fried eyes.

With her hair around her shoulders, no make-up and the pristine white shift, she looked very young, Diane thought.

Like a recumbent version of the sylph on the front of the old Avalonian.

But awfully vulnerable, with her hands inside those enormous bandages.

'They're taking them off tomorrow,' Juanita said.

'That's super.'

'Least it means I can get out of here.'

'When?'

'I'm thinking about it.'

'You mean you'll discharge yourself,' Diane said disapprovingly. She really didn't think Juanita was ready to face Glastonbury. She never spoke of the fire or Jim.

Juanita said, 'You know, you're looking distinctly washed-out. You've lost weight. Are you eating?'

'Sure. It's just been a bit sort of frenzied, what with people placing orders for Christmas, and… look, I wanted to get your opinion on this.'

She pulled her folder on to her knees.

The artwork had The Avalonian across the top in lettering which was only modestly Celtic. The rest of the front cover was a black and white photograph of the Tor, surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence with two searchlight towers.

'We got the fence from one of those postwar pictures of Belsen or somewhere. Paul put it all together on his computer.'

With a practised elbow, Juanita prodded a pillow into the small of her back and studied the mock-up.

'I'm impressed But it doesn't make any secret of where we stand on the issue, does it? I mean, Belsen?'

'I've also written to Quentin Cotton, asking if he'd like to write a piece expressing his views.'

'Not Archer? Not Griff?'

'This way neither Sam nor I have to deal with estranged relatives.'

'You and Archer are officially estranged?'

'I don't know, I haven't spoken to him. Oh. Gosh. I meant to say. You know who his new constituency agent is?'

'Domini Dorrell-Adams?'

'Oliver Pixhill.'

Juanita's eyes widened.

'It's true. Woolly rang to tell me just before I came out. Apparently, the constituency party isn't awfully well off at the moment so Archer offered to bring his own agent. Free of charge, as it were.'

Juanita's eyes narrowed. 'What's the scam?'

'He just wants somebody he can trust, I suppose.'