He raised a gloved hand. 'Look after yourself, Diane Damned hippies and squatters are turning this town into a jungle. Drug-dealing. Burglaries. Muggings. Vandalism.' He caught her eyes. 'Graffiti.'
Diane's insides were already pumping like a sewage works as she slammed the door in his face and barely made it to the kitchen sink before her meagre carob-bar breakfast came up in a horrid brown fountain.
FIVE
All for Real
Sam tried to gaze casually out or the print-shop window, his chair angled meaningfully away as Charlotte rushed out, slammed into her Golf – blatantly parked on the double-yellows, Daddy being in the same lodge as the chief superintendent – and wafted imperiously off down Magdalene Street.
'Bitch.' He saw two blokes unloading the lights for the Christmas tree in front of the bank. Some bloody Christmas this was going to be.
'What's that, Sam?'
'Didn't say a word, Paul.'
'Oh. Right. Thought you didn't.' Paul, young Mr Tact, went back to his work. He didn't like Charlotte, Sam could tell. He guessed the kid was still a bit scared of high-octane women, not realising they could be just as half- baked under the gloss.
Charlotte, eh? like, what a snotty cow. All the advertising she could have pointed The Avalonian's way… what with working for Stan Pike and Daddy being chairman of the Chamber of Trade and all this crap. She could even have put the arm on Pike to give The Avalonian the all-clear to his mates. 'It is not a hippy rag,' Sam had insisted. 'How many times I got to spell it out? It's a genuine, solid publication.'
'With Diane Ffitch?' Charlotte had replied just now. 'Diane Ffitch? You call being edited by that fruitcake solid?'
'All right, stuff it, then,' Sam had snarled 'We don't need Pike, bloody backstreet used-house dealer.'
Charlotte. Bloody Charlotte, eh? Things had been very much on the blink since he'd made that minor scene at the Glastonbury First gig over the old man and Archer Ffitch. Time to call it a day?
Three years, though. Three years of storms and upsets and sexy making-up sessions. Three years of political arguments and being produced as Charlotte's bit of rough at too many posh parties.
Naturally, she'd backed him all the way in starting up the print-shop, becoming a local businessman, like Daddy, like Stanlow Pike. When Sam became a businessman, Charlotte started circling dates on the calendar for the engagement party. Cracked it at last, brought the anarchist to heel.
Charlotte had got Sam the contract for printing all Pike and Corner's property brochures, which was a major deal.
The major deal… until Juanita Carey had come up with the idea for The Avalonian. Which little Charlotte, of course, didn't like the sound of at all, from the outset.
Sam lit a cigarette.
Another thing about Charlotte was the way she nagged him about his smoking. like he was already her property and she was making sure he came with a full warranty. How could a woman of twenty-six come over so bloody middle-aged? Nil prospect of her moving into the flat without something official, on paper, signed in triplicate. Twice they'd almost wound it up. Trouble was, she looked so seriously edible, waiting for him by the market cross, parked on a double yellow. Could he really stand to see her hanging out for some slimy accountant with a BMW?
Difficult one, that.
He brightened when he saw Diane crossing the road by the Christmas tree. She hadn't been in all morning, and after what Paul had said about her painting the van in the dark he'd kept thinking maybe he should take a walk up to the shop, check her out. Just that he didn't feel he knew her well enough to ask why she was behaving like a fruitcake.
She didn't come in. She didn't even glance at the shop, just walked past, like a bloody zombie, people getting out of her way. Sam watched her cross Magdalene Street and head straight for the Abbey gatehouse. She didn't go in there either, she turned her back on it, fell against the wall like a drunk trying to stay upright.
What the…?
Sam was up and out of the door, not giving himself time to think.
'Diane?'
When he ran across the road, a truck driver braking and blasting his horn, she looked, unseeing, in Sam's direction.
He could see that she was shivering uncontrollably, like a long-term junkie run out of smack. Shit, the girl was ill.
'You all right? Something happened?'
'Oh.' Diane looked up, vaguely. 'Sam.'
'What's wrong?' A few people staring at them now, but not many because this was Glastonbury and there wasn't much they hadn't seen in these streets. 'Only Lady Loony,' he heard one woman with a kid and a shopping bag say knowingly to another and they both laughed and Sam wanted to kick their bloody arses halfway to Benedict Street.
Diane, face slightly blue, was staring vacantly across the road to where the two guys were untangling the Christmas tree lights. Sam took her arm.
'Come on. Come for a hot chocolate, Diane.' Easing her away from the wall. 'Catch your death.'
Darryl Davey came past with a couple of mates, nudging each other and smirking.
'Don't you say a fucking word, sunshine,' Sam snarled.
Darryl narrowed his eyes and gave him the finger.
Tosser.
'You see… and this is strictly off the record…' The Bishop of Bath and Wells lit a thin roll-up. '… some of my predecessors have been frankly embarrassed at having Glastonbury in the diocese.'
The Bishop was a compact man in his early forties. He wore cord trousers and a purple denim shirt, his white clerical band under the button-down collar. Powys wondered if he always rolled his own cigarettes or just wanted to appear cool for the local radical rag.
'Point being, Joe, the Church of England might have owned the Abbey for most of the century, but the ambience remains RC, and I imagine many people still regard us being the landlords as the final insult. Even if we have tidied the place up, stopped it being treated as a convenient stone quarry for local builders.'
'But the Catholics aren't the problem right now, are they?' Powys said. 'You've got what we might call an older denomination to contend with.'
'Pagans.' The bishop laughed. 'Be so much easier if the buggers still wore horns and bones through their noses. But they're quite likely to be academics in suits.' He nodded towards the window. 'Could be a few hanging around the cathedral as we speak.' But he didn't seem to regard this as much of a threat.
They were in Wells, a very small city a short drive from Glastonbury. At a window table in a pub facing the cathedral. The bishop drank Perrier. His name was Liam Kelly; he didn't sound even vaguely Irish.
'But, you see, Joe… are they really pagans? What you have today, as we approach the Millennium, is a great yearning for spirituality. We – the human race – have been everywhere and realised what a terribly small place the earth is, how finite are its resources.'
A micro-cassette machine lay on the table between them, the bishop pulled it a little closer.
'Even been to the moon, and what a dreadful anti-climax that was. So more people are realising there's only one real voyage of discovery left to them, and that is inwards. It's a very promising situation.'
'You think so?'
'You don't?'
The bishop seemed to see Powys for the first time, to wonder who he was. Powys hadn't mentioned his proposed book. Diane had arranged the interview – which, presumably, was why the bishop had agreed to do it; he
