The Chalice (20 page)

      
'Oh, fucking hell ...' His leg muscles turned to porridge. 'You
just did that. Didn't you?'

      
Powys just looked sad.

      
Ben went up close. Peered, horrified, at the pictures. And
then backed off with his hands out, like he'd opened a door and a blast of
winter had hit him full in the chest. He fell back on the sofa, hands on his
knees as if glued there 'Tell me they aren't,' he said.

      
Joe went over to the pictures and carefully turned each one the
right way up.

      
'It's OK. It's happened before. '

      
Ben said, 'You have to get out of here, Joe.'

      
'No.' Powys smiled. 'I know where I am with this.'

      
'Who are they? Those people.'

      
'The old bloke with the beard is Fay's dad, Canon Peters.'
      
'Dead?'

      
'And the woman was called Rachel.''
      
'Girlfriend? She's dead too?'

      
'I didn't know her long enough to put a label on it. We keep
the pictures up there to remind us. In case we get blasé about certain things.'

      
Ben put his hands over his face, rubbed his eyes. 'Where's the
dog?'

      
'Under the table, on his rug.'

      
'Maybe he upset the table, knocked the lamp off.'

      
'Could be,' said Powys.

      
'No it fucking couldn't.' Ben found himself breathing hard
again, closest he could remember ever being to hysteria. 'And, anyway, why was
he howling? He often howl like that?'

      
'Sometimes.'

      
'Why d'you say, It's over? Just now, on the stairs.'

      
He still felt too weak to get up from the sofa.
      
'Hang on,' Powys said. 'What's
Arnold got?' He got down on all fours, scrabbled about under the table, and came
up with something.

      
A book. A big, fat, heavy book.

      
'Now this is new,' he said (nervously? Was that a quiver of
nerves under the voice?).
      
'This never happened before.'

      
He looked up and Ben followed his gaze to the very top
bookshelf under a big, black beam-end to the left of the fireplace. There was
just enough light to show up a gap in the middle of the shelf, the other books
apparently stiff and firm to either side.

      
'It fell off,' Ben said. 'It fell on to the lamp.'

      
'Yeh, looks like it.' Powys's voice was dry and flaky like the
ash in the grate. He held out the book for Ben. It was a real doorstop, about
three inches thick, probably over a thousand pages.

      
Ben couldn't prise his hands from his knees to take it.

      
But he could see the title, in faded gold down the spine, the
author's name across it, the surname in big capitals.

      
POWYS.

      
And because he knew Joe had never written anything half that
long, he figured this must be John Cowper Powys, novelist, mystic, nutter.

      
The title, in smaller lettering, confirmed it.

      
A Glastonbury Romance.

      
Ben was bewildered, spooked almost out of his head. A book, just
one big heavy book, flies off the top shelf, a good nine feet across the fucking
room, smashes a lamp. Smashes the only source of light.
      
'What's it mean?'

      
'I don't know,' Joe Powys said. He put a hand on the mantelpiece
(to stop the hand shaking?).
      
'But it's all harmless, isn't it?'
he said.

TWO

Strange Place, but Good Fun

As Ben ate his breakfast in
Joe's living room, he kept glancing up at the bookshelves, searching out the
middle of the top row.

      
You could read the lettering on the spine easily, at least the
part that said
      
POWYS.

      
He buttered his toast, edging his chair a few inches to the
left.

      
'Let's talk about John Cowper Powys.'
      
'Oh,' said Powys. 'Uncle Jack.'

      
'Uncle Jack? Uncle fucking Jack? You're telling me after all
these years that JCP …?'

      
'Well, I don't know, that's the truth. He had a complicated
personal life.'

      
'You can say that again.'

      
Ben had lain wide awake and cold for what seemed like hours
thinking, on and off, about John Cowper Powys. He'd never actually read
A Glastonbury Romance
, but he'd read one
of the shorter ones (not much credibility for a New Age publisher who'd never
read much JCP) and found it actually not that bad for something published half
a century ago. Joe being a descendant of the great man was just a possibility
they'd hinted at in publicity for
Golden
Land
and never taken that seriously.

      
'He died in - what - sixty-five?'

      
'Sixty-three,' Powys said.

      
'Lived in North Wales, his later years, with this woman who'd
been his secretary or something, right? And you were born ... ?'

      
'Wrexham. In theory, he could have been my father, but I don't
think he was up to it by then. My mother used to talk about an Uncle Jack who
was a famous author, but in those days close friends of your parents were
always aunties and uncles. And Jack was a common name then.'

      
'You remember ever seeing the old guy when you were a kid?'

      
Powys shook his head.

      
'You never ask about him, when you grew up?'

      
'Once. Not long before my mother died. I asked her about this
Uncle lack, the famous author. I said - because I'd heard of Cowper Powys by
then - was he, by any chance, possessed of a middle name beginning with C?'

      
Ben put down the marmalade. 'And she said?'

      
'She said, Uncle Jack? What Uncle Jack?'

      
'Shit. But you could find out.'

      
'Maybe. Who would it help?'

      
'Listen.' Ben glanced at the bookshelf, lowered his voice. 'Suppose
he wants you to.'
      
'What?'

      
'Establish the link.'

      
'Get lost," said Powys. 'You're leaping to conclusions. A
book falls off the shelf...'

      
'Halfway across the room. And the dog howling.'
      
'These things happen. Best thing is
not to react.'
      
'Stone me,' Ben hissed at his toast
in frustration.
      
'It was only a book. Nobody got
hurt.'

      
'Not just a book, Powys. Not just a book. OK, what else we
got? Glastonbury. When were you last in Glastonbury?'
      
'Never been.'

      
Ben put down his knife in astonishment.

      
'You've never been to Glastonbury? The world centre for earth
mysteries? Glastonbury Tor and all the UFOs? Healing rays? The Abbey ruins? The
St Michael Line?'

      
'The St Michael Line's spurious.'

      
'You've never been to Glastonbury?'

      
'Well, you know ...' Powys stood up and started gathering
plates together. He seemed uncomfortable about this, 'I read the
Romance
the first time when I was quite young.
Much of it I didn't understand.'

      
'Isn't it all about sex?'

      
'Yeh, it is really. Mysticism and sex, and how they can both
screw you up. It didn't make me want to go to Glastonbury, made me want to
avoid it. It's a powerful book, though. Tells you a lot about JCP, things you
might not want to know if there's a possibility you were related.'

      
'He had some runny ideas.'

      
'But where did he get them?' Powys said. 'Did he force his
ideas on Glastonbury or did it force them on him?'

      
'Strange place. But good fun. We sell a lot of books there.'

      
'As you would.'

      
'Don't knock it, it's all har ...'

      
Ben stopped himself and looked up at the shelf. Had it moved,
just a fraction of a centimetre?

      
'Keep on saying it,' Powys said. 'Maybe that's best.'

No more than an hour after
Ben had gone back to London, the phone rang, and it was Fay.

      
She'd said she was coming over this weekend, from Hereford. She
was supposed to have come last weekend, but the bloke who owned Offa's Dyke
Radio had apparently arrived in town and she had to stick around for meetings.
      
Powys had thought this was an
excuse and that there was something else in the air she wasn't telling him
about.
      
Fay said now, 'Joe ...'

      
And when she said Joe, he knew it was going to be heavy. Most
of the time she called him Powys; people did, it was a better name than Joe,
had more resonance: whisper it and it sounded as if you were calling the cat.

      
'Joe,' Fay said, 'it's … I've been offered a job.'

      
At the BBC World Service. London wanted Fay back. There was
what they called a six month attachment for a features producer. Six-month
attachments at the BBC were hard to come by these days, now it was run like
ICI.

      
She said, what did he think?

      
He said - what was he supposed to say? - that he thought she
ought to take it. He was about to say he was likely to be down in London himself
soon, seeing this publisher, and maybe they could ...

      
Or maybe they shouldn't.

      
Joe Powys was feeling very alone. Fay was the only person who
understood. Their relationship had involved a lot of comforting each other, of
saying,
Listen, you're not out of your
mind
. And, in the end, the reassurances had themselves served as reminders
of how bad it had been and reminders were useful, except for those invoking
books thrown from shelves.

      
Fay said they'd see each other properly, and Arnold and everything,
before she went.

      
'Well good God, you're only going to London . .

      
'Ah,' said Fay.

      
It wasn't just London. The World Service was planning some
kind of trans Global Christmas linkup under the working title Peace on Earth.
Fay would be involved in producing the European end. From Brussels and places.
      
'Ah,' Powys said.

      
'And then there's a few other things. Paris. Amsterdam. Back
in March.' Fay said. 'Probably.'

      
'Sounds brilliant,' he said, hoping she'd think the hoarseness
was on the line. 'Do it. Don't look back.'

      
But, she said, what about him?

      
Fine, he said. Really. And he told her about the book.

      
The book that Ben Corby was passing on to this guy Frayne at
Harvey-Calder.

      
Not the book which came off the shelf, sailed halfway across the
room and smashed the lamp.

      
'That's wonderful, Powys,' Fay said. 'So you could be back in
business, then.' And there was a silence, and then the conversation became
rather weepy.

Later that morning, Powys
went for a walk with Arnold. They climbed to the top of the hill behind the
longhouse, Arnold indignant at being carried part of the way. From here, you
could see along Offa's Dyke, the earthwork which used to mark the boundary
between England and Wales but was only an approximation these days. The dyke
itself was not exactly the Great Wall of China and probably never had been. It
was just a symbol of an old division.

      
In
The Old Golden Land
,
Powys had argued that borders were very sensitive places, where the veil - yes
that
veil - was especially thin. It was
a place where you might expect to have extraordinary experiences.