Most people would have flicked through the pages, reading an entry here, an entry there, get the idea of what kind of book it was. Not Diane. Diane had to start on page one.
Juanita watched brown, wavy hair flop over the girl's face as her head bowed over the unappealing book.
Actually, it was quite gripping, the introduction, in its recounting of how Pixhill had first been turned towards Glastonbury, a place he'd hardly heard of.
And even in the introduction Diane would discover one or two parallels, as a young army officer lay in a wrecked tank in the Western Desert in May, 1942…
A full moon, or very near. I expect I was staring up at the damn thing when it happened, head and shoulders out of the hatch, like a ginger cat I once saw peering out of a dustbin. Don't actually remember any of what happened immediately before and certainly nothing of the actual impact which, being a direct hit into the body of the Grant, must have been like having your legs shot from under you.
My driver and co-driver, down below there, wouldn't have heard the bang either. They must have died at once. Similarly Corporal Elliman, the gunner, took some chunk of metal, never knew precisely where it came from, into his brain via the left eye, I think it was.
It was Little, Charles Anthony Little, wireless operator, who caused me the most pain. He was the veteran among us at thirty-one, almost a father figure to me, his commander, Capt. Pixhill, twenty-two, and an immature twenty-two to boot, thinking back. Libya, this was, May twenty seventh, when Rommel pulled a fast one, the old werewolf rising to the moon and having us cleverly outflanked. By dawn, the desert around Bir Hacheim was a veritable ocean of metal, but I saw nothing of that. The battle, for me, was a battle with myself, to block out the pain of my smashed legs and the sounds of war and of Charlie Little dying. While, out of the morning sky, the arrogant moon still shone down through the open hatch like some freshly polished medal on a Nazi chest. What happened, I quickly worked out, having nothing better to do, was that a mounting pin from Elliman's machine gun had flown off when the whole damn thing sprang back with him, and (someone had speculated about the chances of this only a week or so earlier, but Major Collier said it couldn't happen) took poor Little in the throat. Not much conversation between us, as you can imagine. I remember the poor chap blubbing and gurgling. I remember the smell of cordite and blood and the smoke from a thousand Capstans, the last of them having fallen from Elliman's lips to his chest and burnt a hole through his shirt before expiring. I remember the extraordinary agony in my legs when I tried to reach Little, thinking that if I could pull the damn pin from his neck he'd be able to talk to me. Conversation. All I craved. I could hardly move at all, so I lay there shivering and entertaining poor Charlie with what must have been a devastatingly tedious monologue about my life thus far and how I had hoped to become a clergyman but war more or less resigned to an obscure career as a history teacher at some minor public school. My uncle William it was, Archdeacon of Liverpool, who had talked me out of the clergy. The Church, he said dryly, tended to frown on young chaps who 'claimed' to have had encounters with angels. Well only the one angel, I assured Little. The figure of a kindly chap in cricket whites who first bent over my bed when I was seven and quieted my whooping cough and thereafter was sometimes vaguely discernible at the edges of my vision, when someone close to me had died or the situation looked generally black. Each time the Cricketer came out to bat for me, I would have new energy to pull myself through whatever crisis. After Little died, with a dispiriting bubbling sound like a wet inner tube with a puncture, I looked around for that reliable old sportsman, wondering if there was room for him in the turret with me, but all I could see out of the comers of my eyes was death and dawn and moonlight, and I thought, this is it, George, not going to come out of this now, are we? Remember thinking, what IS the bloody point? And that even the whooping cough would have been a better death. I wondered, quite distantly, how long it would take for the Door to close. Knew I had a head injury but had kept my hands away from the cranial region, not wishing to know how serious. I thought that someone would tell my family I had died a hero. Was this what I had been preserved for? To die a 'hero's death'? To qualify for membership of the Valhalla Club, endless booze and loose women for all eternity? Mine would be, in fact, an inglorious death: the inexperienced, not to say incompetent junior commander who managed to get all his crew killed first. After all, if I hadn't been halfway through the hatch, sniffing the desert air, I too would have been gone by now. I thought of the Cricketer and I saw him not so much in the image of an angel as some serene, pipe-smoking fool in a Brylcreem advert, and I thought, it's a joke, it's all a damned joke, there is no purpose to life, we can have no control over our individual destinies, there is no 'divine guidance' to be had. And I was, for a sick instant, almost in awe of Hitler, who believed he had been chosen to alter the destiny of the entire human race. I think it was at that moment that I lost all desire to survive. The Allies, certainly, would be a sight better off without me. Equally, though, I had no wish to go out gasping and weeping bitter tears on the blood-sticky floor of a Grant tank. And so I wondered how I might pull myself up to the hatch to show my head so that some sharp eyed Panzer could shoot it off, quick and clean. I lay for a long time, staring up the circle of smoky blue, at the fading moon tike a chipped shilling, and feeling the numbness, a sort of permanent shiver, creeping up my lower body and – Well, I suppose you will say I fell asleep You will say I hallucinated or that it was due to the reaction of chemicals in my brain. For that is how we prefer to explain such phenomena in the nineteen-seventies, embarrassed as we are by the term… vision.
There was a strange sort of glow in Diane's eyes which Juanita had seen before and found disturbing. Not to say ominous.
'The Cricketer,' Diane said.
'Thought you'd spot that. Bit like your revered nanny, huh? Sits on the edge of the bed with a cool hand on the fevered young brow. Jung would've loved him.'
Diane looked disappointed. 'You're saying this is an archetypal thing. Sort of projected imagination. A child's comfort figure. My ghost, angel, whatever was a good nanny, because all my real nannies were nasty, and Colonel Pixhill's was a cricketer because he was a boy.'
'Something like that. Beats lying awake sucking your thumb, I suppose.'
Diane frowned. 'You've changed. You're ever so cynical now, aren't you?'
'Maybe I've come to my senses. I used to be a mystical snob like the rest, an elitist in a town full of them.'
'What you mean is, you used to be a seeker after some sort of truth,' Diane said primly. 'And now you've stopped searching.'
'If you want to put it like that. All the sects and societies and covens, they all think their particular Path is the True Way and everything else is crap. I've concluded it's safer to start off on the basis that it's all crap.'
'That's just as bigoted, Juanita.'
'Saves a lot of time though, doesn't it?' Juanita pulled her old blue mac from the back of the parlour door. 'Look, I'm off to the pub, see if I can find Jim. You coming?'
'I think I'd rather like to finish reading this.'
'Thought you would. Just remember he died a sad, rather isolated old man, deserted by his wife, stuck in a gloomy farmhouse he couldn't afford to heat and… Oh, remember not to open the door for anyone, cream Range Rover or otherwise.'
'I won't. Juanita…'
'Mmm?'
Diane held up the book, pointed to the tiny writing at the bottom of the spine, where it said Carey and Frayne.
'And yet you published this.'
Juanita shrugged. 'Well… at the Pixhill Trust's expense. A thousand copies, only a few of which have sold since word got round about what was in it. Left to me, there's no way it would have come out looking like that, but the Trust were calling the shots and they wanted dark green, no picture, no blurb, no publicity, no other outlets. It wasn't important if only a few people bought it. It just had to be… available.'
'Did they say why? I mean, he's been dead nearly twenty years.'
'"An obligation'' was all Major Shepherd said. I imagine the Trust thought there ought to be some sort of memorial to Pixhill. Why they sat on the manuscript for so long I've no idea. I only agreed to get it printed because I felt so sorry for old Shepherd, who wasn't in the best of health. Obviously wanted to get the thing off his hands before he passed on.'
Diane held the little green book between her hands and looked thoughtfully at it. Almost as if she was looking into a mirror, Juanita thought. She hoped Diane would continue to find parallels between Pixhill's alleged visionary experiences and her own. And she hoped, as she let herself out of the shop, that by the end of the book the central message would be clear.
Glastonbury buggers you up.
It was a bright night, the crown of St John's tower icy-sharp. On a night like this, this time of year, there ought to be frost. Why wasn't there frost?
All was quiet, save for the clicking of Juanita's heels. Not even the usual semi stoned assembly with guitars and hand-drums around the war-memorial. You could sense tonight the nearness of the Abbey ruins, hidden behind the High Street shops.
But surely, Juanita thought, the whole point of Pixhill's book was that he was saying, don't get taken in by this, don't surrender to the vibes.
He'd come here on the back of a vision. Delirious in his tank on May 27, 1942, he'd imagined himself to be lying out on the sand under that same moon, but when he looked up he saw no battle-smoke – indeed it was awesomely silent.
What he saw was a small bump in the sand, a swelling, something that was buried rising again. There was an eruption – quite silent – and then there it was, huge before him in all its mysterious majesty: a green hill in the desert.
A conical green hill with a church on top.
Next thing, Captain Pixhill awakes on a stretcher and within days is on his way back to England for months of operations on his legs. When he can walk again he's given some sort of admin job at the Ministry and ends the War as a full colonel.
By then, he's discovered Glastonbury, convinced it was the Tor he saw in his Libyan vision after coming so very close to losing his life and his Faith. Convinced this is where his future must lie and inspired to learn that this is where the Holy Grail itself is said to have been brought.
And so, after the War, he comes to Glastonbury, marries a local girl, buys an ugly old house and…
…and what?
As far as Juanita could tell, there was no record of Colonel Thomas George Hendry Pixhill having done anything significant with his life from the moment he arrived to the moment he collapsed with a coronary. He seemed to have moped around the place for thirty years, ingesting the vibes, contemplating the views, tipping his hat politely to every passing female and keeping an occasional diary of, in later years, unremitting pessimism.
For Pixhill, the Holy Grail of his youth had been replaced by the Dark Chalice, presumably a metaphor for an increasingly gloomy world-view. In his last few months he was seeing images of the Dark Chalice everywhere – over the Tor, among the Abbey ruins, above the tower of St John's. Well, he wasn't the only amateur visionary to have gone a bit paranoid towards the end.
'Juanita!' As soon as she entered the pub, Jim was up and beckoning, broad face like an overripe Cox's apple. It was Jim's kind of bar, all wood and stained-glass; he looked like a jolly squire from some eighteenth-century painting.
'Glass of something cold and white, barman, for my friend. Juanita, I was coming to see you. Least, I think I was. Time is it?'
'Time you thought about some black coffee and a sandwich', Juanita said, 'if you're planning to make it home without falling in the ditch.'
He was more than slightly pissed, but at least he was more like the old Battle, and if he waved goodbye to a few more brain cells it would wear away the memory of last night's ordeal all the sooner.
'Had something to tell you, didn't I? The paper. What'd I do with the buggering paper?'
'I think you were sitting on it.' She saw he was not alone. Tony Dorrell-Adams shared his table, looking just as flushed but less convivial.
'Was too. Bit creased, never mind.' Jim retrieved the Evening Post from his chair, placed it on the table, spread it out. 'It's Archer Ffitch. In the paper. Archer's been selected as Tory candidate for Mendip South.'
'I know, Jim. It explains a lot. Hello, Tony.'
Tony nodded, couldn't manage a smile, went back to his beer.
'Yes,' blustered Jim, 'but have you seen what the bastard's saying? Wants this town to be efficient, streamlined, hi-tech, have its own branch of Debenhams, no veggie-bars, no crystals, no mystical bookshops…'
'This is an exaggeration, right, Jim?'
'… no Avalon, no mystery. Wants us, in fact, to be another bland, buggering lay-by on the Euro superhighway.'
'Here, let me read it…'
She saw that people were glancing at him, amused. He was one of those official characters who, like Woolly Woolaston, were allowed, not to say expected, to go over the top. She tried to tug the paper from him.
'Never believe a word I say,' Jim grumbled as the Evening Post tore in two. Juanita collected the segments together and sat down.
'Now, which page?'
'Just look for a picture of a well known smug bastard. Hey, that's another thing. He was in here tonight, was Archer, and guess who he left with… Juanita, are you listening?'
'Yes, just a minute, Jim.'
Juanita had found another story. Or at least a headline. Or, more precisely, the first word of a headline. It made the hubbub around her recede into mush. The word was 'swastika'.
'I think', Jim was saying from, it sounded like, a long way away, 'that this must be the time for you to think seriously about that scheme of yours for relaunching The Avalonian. I can sense dirty work afoot and somebody ought to be saying it. We have to preserve the buggering mystery.'
'I don't know.' Juanita, who had glanced through the swastika story, was sure she'd gone pale, just hoped it wouldn't show under the muted pub lights, I don't know about that anymore.'