'OK, Powys,' Brendan Donovan said. 'I may possibly be able to accommodate a five-minute argument. The full half hour would require an appointment.'
Some years ago. Professor Brendan Donovan, of the Edinburgh University department of parapsychology, had reviewed the revised, mass-market paperback of The Old Golden Land for The Scotsman. Perhaps the most complimentary phrase in this review had been 'whimsical drivel'. Powys, unschooled in the etiquette traditionally observed between reviewer and reviewed, had telephoned Dr Donovan for a meaningful discussion. Others had followed over the years. Brendan Donovan had mellowed. Slightly.
'If you wish to discuss the spirit-path theory of ley-lines, with particular reference to linear anomalies in the Peruvian desert,' he said now, 'you'll find me a touch more amenable than I may have been regarding so-called earth-energies. Only a touch more, you understand, because ley-lines, of course, do not exist.'
'Poltergeists,' Powys said bluntly.
'Heavens,' Donovan said. 'My weak spot.'
'I know.'
'That is, Powys, so long as you do not attempt to try my patience by allowing any contentious words to intrude. Like, say, 'ghost'.'
'How about psycho-kinetic energy generated by a disturbed adolescent?'
'Well-trodden ground. Much safer.'
'In that case, how about psycho-kinetic energy generated by someone for whom adolescence is no more than a slightly feverish memory?'
'Like, who?' said Donovan.
'Like me.'
'Hmm,' Donovan said. 'Give me two minutes to summon a cup of fortifying coffee. I shall call you back.'
Well – let's be reasonable here – it wasn't Arnold, was it?
Nobody really knows what goes on down there. In the subconscious. Nobody knows what seeds planted in the psyche of a small child will start to germinate in the adult and with what effects.
OK. the trigger.
Joe Powys is alone, his woman has resumed her career, left him behind in a cottage in the sticks. Subconsciously, he knows she isn't coming back. His book has been rejected. And his home is not really his home; it's still Henry Kettle's, even though Henry is dead, because Henry had identity, which Joe doesn't have any more, maybe never did have.
The subconscious grows into mid-life crisis. Who is Joe Powys? Even the guy's name isn't real!
The subconscious gets extremely resentful. It reverts to the persona of a disturbed adolescent. It finds a focus for all that resentful energy.
Uncle Jack.
Bloody Uncle Jack.
'Well, it's interesting, Powys,' Brendan Donovan said, it possesses a certain flawed logic. However, I still have a problem with it.'
'Well, of course you do. What I'm doing here is groping for the psychological solution. I haven't said anything about the elements you don't like – power of place, earth-force, the thinness of the veil on the Welsh Border.'
'But it's there by implication, isn't it? Because the house was the home of this water-diviner. Kettle, it is more receptive, its atmosphere remains charged.'
'I didn't say that.'
'And therefore is capable of transforming the frustration of its unhappy occupant into psycho-kinetic energy, yes?'
'Well… could be.'
'Discounting all that, which I am, of course, predisposed to do, out of hand… the problem I have with all this is that the adolescent energy we suspect may cause poltergeist phenomena is essentially a sexual energy. I assume, Powys, you have not begun to find satisfaction in scourging yourself with barbed wire or something.'
'Occasionally I beat myself with Henry's old dowsing rods. Apart from that… Of course, he may have done.'
'Who?'
'John Cowper Powys always liked to think of himself as some kind of sado-masochist.'
'Ah. So you're obsessed with this man,' Donovan said.
'Curiously, I hardly ever thought of him. I'd forgotten that book was even on the shelf. Consciously, I'd forgotten.'
'Which book are we talking about?'
'A Glastonbury Romance. His masterpiece. About twelve hundred pages.'
'Haven't read it. Life's too short for fiction. What's it about?'
'It's basically a West Country soap-opera set in the 1920s. Far as I can remember, it's about people in pursuit of their ideas of the Holy Grail and the tensions between spiritual and commercial demands and people getting their rocks off, spiritually and sexually. I may be wrong, it's a long time since I breezed through it.'
'And this same book every time?' asked Donovan.
'Every time.'
'Too neat,' said Donovan. 'Too neat to be true.'
'Ah. You think I'm lying.'
'Indeed. I'm a scientist. What proof can you show me?'
'I've got a witness.'
'Your publisher. How very convenient.'
'Isn't it?' Powys admitted gloomily.
'Be a marvellous story for your own next publication.'
'No chance.'
'Before I could give a useful opinion, you would have to precipitate this book from its shelf under laboratory conditions. But then you knew that.'
'Brendan, if you bumped into your late granny at the tea machine, you'd make her take out her teeth under laboratory conditions.'
'And in the present circumstances, of course, my findings would have to include the probability of an author in decline attempting to kick-start his flagging career.'
'I knew you'd say that, too.'
'So why did you telephone me?'
'I'm a masochist. Runs in the family.'
Brendan Donovan laughed. 'Do you know what I might do in your place?'
'Resign,' Powys said.
'I might go to Glastonbury and open myself to all the wonderful earth-forces in the hope that my Grail awaited me there.'
'No, you wouldn't.'
'I wouldn't. I'm explaining what I might do if, perish the thought, I were you. Forget it, I probably had Glastonbury on my mind in a negative context, having received this very morning a review copy of a book even more foolish than your own revered opus. By an American, of course, one W. Pelham Grainger, PhD, who wants us all to enrich our lives by bonding with the living darkness. Absolute tosh. He lives near Glastonbury, as it happens. My, my, I must remember to record this coincidence in my Arthur Koestler Appreciation Society Diary.'
Powys shook his head.
'Away with you,' Donovan said. 'Away to your Avalon.'
'Thanks very much,' Powys said. 'I'll expect your bill in the mail.'
'My meter records… let me see… twenty five minutes!'
'Prove it,' Powys said. 'Laboratory conditions.'
TEN
