give up.'
'Watch me,' Tony said. 'I've been given the car. Wasn't that kind? I get custody of the car so I've got the means to remove myself. It would be appreciated if I do this quietly, while everybody, including my wife, is in the protest meeting.'
Tony threw the suitcase into the boot and slammed the door, lamp-lit drops ricocheting into the night like angry sparks.
'This stinks, Tony.'
'Oh, no. This is Glastonbury. It's too holy to stink.'
Tony wiped rain out of his eyes. Probably rain.
'Where will you go?'
'Back to teaching, I expect. I'll find something. Naturally, I'll fight the cow for everything I can get. She wants to keep this place open, she'll have to get some money from her precious Sisters of the fucking Cauldron. Not that anybody's going to want to buy pot goddesses with big… I'm sorry, I'm sorry. OK, maybe you weren't involved. In which case. I'd watch my back if I were you.'
'They can't touch me.'
'No?' He looked her in the eyes, half pitying. 'They can touch anybody, destroy anything. Christ, I used to think we were ultimately inseparable, Domini and me. Meeting of minds, spiritually attuned. Good sex. Bit of a blip, stupid fling that meant nothing, but this was going to be where we got it all together again. That chap who works in your shop…'
'Jim.'
'Jim, yeah. He said last night that this was the last place you should come to repair your marriage. Wise man. There should be barbed wire around this town.'
'Come and have a drink.'
'No. I've got to get out of here.' He wiped his eyes again; it certainly wasn't rain this time. 'I don't claim to understand any of this. I won't be able to explain it to anyone. I wish I could, but I can't.'
'Just hang on a minute, OK? One minute.'
Juanita gave him the umbrella to hold and ran across the road to the bookshop. She was back inside the minute to find Tony standing at the kerb, arms by his side, the umbrella pointing at the pavement. Soaked through and he didn't seem even to have noticed it was raining. She shoved the book into his cold, damp hands.
'What's this?'
'You said you wished you understood. It might help.'
He peered at the book, 'I can't see'
'It's Colonel Pixhill's Diary.'
'Oh. That.' He didn't seem impressed. 'Domini had one, threw it away.'
'People do,' Juanita said. 'Some people do. He can make you feel very depressed. Until something like this happens and then maybe he's the guru you've been searching for. I'm not even supposed to sell it to people unless they specifically ask, so I'm giving it to you. Read it when you get to wherever you're going.'
'Harlow, Essex. Harlow New Town. My parents live there. No legends. No history to speak of. A real sanctuary. Thanks. Thanks for the book.' Tony raised a hand, unsmiling, climbed into his Cavalier and started the engine.
But it was a while before he could pull out into the road, and a while before Juanita could cross it. Because of the sudden traffic.
From a distance, it looked like a motorbike. When she saw what it was, Juanita went weak.
A bus with only one headlight and an engine like a death-rattle. Then a converted ambulance with NATIONAL ELF SERVICE across its windscreen. And then a hump-back delivery van, the kind the Post Office used to have, only with a window punched in the side. And then an old hearse. And more of the same, gasping and limping through the endless rain, a mobile scrapyard.
Oh no.
Juanita shrank into the Holy Thorn doorway, both hands around the umbrella stem. Holding the thing in front of her like a riot-shield, as they rumbled past and clattered past and groaned past, under the diffident, crane-necked gaze of the seen-it-all Glastonbury streetlamps.
The convoy from hell.
The umbrella shook rigidly in Juanita's hands. A sick ritual on the Tor, followed by a death. And they had the nerve, the arrogance, to come back.
Maybe they'd returned for the meeting – that was all poor old Woolly needed.
But no. She watched them proceed like a ramshackle funeral cortege, along High Street. For Chilkwell Street. For Wellhouse Lane. And the Tor.
The house lights dipped dramatically and Archer Ffitch became a powerful silhouette against a pure white rectangle.
He was suddenly so much like their father. Because all you could see was his shape, thicker but no hint of fat. Because you couldn't see their mother's moist lips and their mother's grey eyes. Because, like Father, he seemed at his most relaxed standing up, or erect on a hunter. And he was awfully relaxed at the moment.
'I want to show you some pictures,' he said. 'I want to show you a possible solution. But I want, first of all, to make it clear that I am acting here not as a politician but as a concerned resident of this area. What I am about to outline is a preliminary proposal, to be tossed around the democratic arena, adjusted, refined and perhaps, at the end of the day – who can tell? – rejected. I hope this will not be the case, because I believe it is the only way to correct an unhealthy imbalance in this fine old town.'
The hall was hushed.
'I believe,' said Archer, 'that the only solution to the problem must lie in restricting the activities of hippies, travellers and undesirables, without in any way diminishing the rights of local people.'
Archer lifted a hand and a picture appeared on the screen behind him: the top of Glastonbury Tor, the St Michael tower ruling the screen from top to bottom.
'The Tor,' said Archer, 'is the property of the National Trust, a body responsible for making our nation's heritage accessible to the general public, and none of us would wish that to be otherwise.'
The next picture was an aerial photograph, looking down on the St Michael tower and the discoloured grass around it.
'I have been unable to establish,' said Archer, 'precisely how many tons of earth have been replaced here in recent years because of erosion caused by human feet. Or how many sheep have been killed by uncontrolled dogs. I would hate to estimate how many tons of human excreta have remained unburied by people flouting the fairly unenforceable laws about camping out on the Tor. And there are no records of how many innocent people – and children – have been disturbed or disgusted by the most shameless and perverse sexual shenanigans taking place in full public view. Is this – I ask you now – what we expect of a National Trust site?'
The response was immediate and deafening.
Diane didn't reply; she was struggling with a terrible sensation of foreboding. Oh, Archer would be canonised, all right. Archer was very good at sincerity.
The slide changed to a less dramatic picture: a close-up of an Ordnance Survey map intersected by hand drawn black lines. Archer tapped the map on the screen with a pen.
'Let us first of all ask ourselves why these members of what they like to describe as an Alternative society flock like lemmings to this tiny hill. It is because of an unfortunate legacy.'
Archer paused.
A memory came to Diane of a Christmas when she was seven or eight, a Boxing Day afternoon spent hiding in her bedroom, trying to read her book and blank out the sound of the hunting horn. She'd fallen asleep in her mother's old rocking chair and awoken to find…
'… a legacy of nonsense from that most unstable of decades, the nineteen-sixties, when a so-called culture founded upon psychedelic drugs and led, I imagine, by bearded gurus from Tibet decided that the Tor was A Place of Power… where many so-called ley-lines intersect. The fact that no archaeologist or anyone with even basic common sense gives any credence whatever to this famous rubbish…'
He would know, of course, that the person in Glastonbury most obsessed with leys was Councillor Woolly Woolaston, whose reputation would be seriously eroded tonight.
