Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (23 page)

   
And Goff s secretary in London
had phoned Goff in time for him to catch the offending Offa's Dyke item on the
five o'clock news.

   
'That report . . . from Fay
Morrison, our reporter in Crybbe,' the newsreader had said unnecessarily at the
end.
   
'Fay Morrison? Guy Morrison?' Goff
said.
   
Rachel shook her head. 'Hardly
likely.'
   
"Yeah,' Goff accepted. And then
he spelled it out for her again, just in case she hadn't absorbed his subtext.
When he wanted the world to know about something, he released the information
in his own good time.
He
released it.

   
'So from now on, you don't talk
to
anybody
. You don't even
think
about the Project in public, you
got that?'

   
'Maybe,' Rachel said, offhand,
tempting fate, 'you should fire me.'

   
"Don't be fucking ridiculous,'
Max snapped and stormed out of the stable-block to collect his bags from the
Cock. He was driving back to London tonight, thank God, and wouldn't be
returning until Friday morning, for the lunch party.

   
When she could no longer hear
the Ferrari arrogantly clearing its throat for the open road, Rachel Wade rang
Fay, feeling more than a little aggrieved.

   
They shouted at each other for several
minutes before Rachel made a sudden connection and said slowly, 'You mean Guy
Morrison is your
ex-husband
?'

   
'He didn't tell you? Well, of
course, he wouldn't. Where's the kudos in having been married to me?'

   
Rachel said, thoughtlessly, 'He's
really quite a hunk, isn't he?'

   
A small silence, then Fay said,
'Hunk of shit, actually.'

   
'Max was right,' Rachel said.
'You're being a bitch. You did the radio piece as a small act of vengeance
because your ex had pushed your nose out.'

   
'Now look . ..'

   
'No,
you
look. Guy's programmes wouldn't have affected anything. You'd
still have had the stories for Offa's Dyke Radio,
and
you'd have had them first. I do actually keep my promises.'

   
Fay sighed and told her that
the truth was she was hoping to do a full programme. For Radio Four. However,
with a TV documentary scheduled, that now looked like a non-starter.

   
'So I was cutting my losses, I
suppose. I really didn't think it'd come back on you. Well ... I suppose I
didn't really think at all. I over-reacted. Keep over-reacting these days, I'm
afraid. I'm sorry.'

   
'I'm sorry, too,' Rachel said,
'but I have to tell you you've burned your boats. Max has decreed that you
should be banned from his estate forever.'

   
'I see.'

   
'I can try and explain, but he
isn't known for changing his mind about this kind of thing. Why should he? He
is
the deity in these parts.'

In the photograph over the counter, Alfred Watkins wore pince-nez and
looked solemn. If there were any pictures of him smiling, Powys thought, they
must be filed away in some family album; smiling was not a public act in those
days for a leading local businessman and a magistrate. It was perhaps just as
well - Alfred Watkins needed his dignity today more than ever.

   
'Don't forget,' Powys said, 'he'll
be watching you. Any joss-sticks get lit, he'll be very unhappy.'

   
'No he won't,' Annie said. Annie
with the Egyptian amulet, still living in 1971, before the husband and the four
kids. 'He fancies me, I can tell by the way he smiles.'

   
'He never smiles.'

   
'He smiles at
me
,' Annie said. 'OK, no joss-sticks. If
you're not back by tomorrow I'll open at nine, after I get rid of the kids.'
   
'I'm only going to Kington.'

   
'You're going back to the Old
Golden Land,' Annie said, half-smiling. He'd shown her the letter from Henry's
neighbour, Mrs Whitney. 'Admit it, you're going back.'

'What happens?' Andy says-
'Well, you go around the stone thirteen times and then you lie on the fairy
hill and you get the vision. You see into the future, or maybe just into
yourself. According to the legend, John Bottle went round the stone and when he
lay on the mound he went down and down until he entered the great hall of the
Fairy Queen with whom he naturally fell in love. It was so wonderful down there
that he didn't want to leave. But they sent him back, and when he returned to the
real world he became a great seer and prophet.

   
'Of course . . - Andy ate a black olive -', . . he could never settle
in the mundane world, and he knew that one day he'd have to go back . .

Powys drove his nine-year-old Mini out of the city, turning off before
the Wye bridge.

   
In essence, Alfred Watkins had
been right about the existence of leys. Powys felt this strongly. And Henry
Kettle had been better than anybody at finding where the old tracks ran, by
means of dowsing.

   
'After all these years,' he'd
said once to Powys, 'I still don't know what they are. But I know they're
there. And I know that sometimes, when you're standing on one, it can affect you.
Affect your balance, like. Give you delusions sometimes, like as if you've had
a few too many. Nothing
psychic
,
mind, nothing like that. But they do
interfere
with you. Sometimes.'

   
They might interfere with you
when you were walking along them, with or without your dowsing rods. Or when
you were driving along a stretch of road which happened - as many did - to
follow one of the old lines. Many accident blackspots had been found to be places
where leys crossed.

   
Coincidence.

   
Of course. And you could go crazy
avoiding stretches of road just because they happened to align with local
churches and standing stones. Nobody really went that far.

   
Certainly not Henry. Who, you
would have thought, was too experienced a dowser ever to be caught out that
way.

   
But when an experienced dowser
crashed into a wall around an ancient burial mound, it demanded the kind of
investigation the police would never conduct.

   
He didn't expect to find
anything. But Henry Kettle was his friend. He was touched and grateful that
Henry had bequeathed to him his papers - perhaps the famous journal that nobody
had ever seen. And the rods, of course, don't forget the rods. (Why should he
leave his rods to a man who couldn't dowse?)

   
Powys left Hereford by King's
Acre and headed towards the Welsh border, where the sun hung low in the sky.
During his lunchbreak, he'd spent half an hour with the OS maps of Hereford and
eastern Radnorshire. He'd drawn a circle around the blob on the edge of the
town of Crybbe where it said:

The Tump

(mound)

   
He'd taken a twelve-inch
Perspex ruler and put one end over the circle and then, holding the end down
with one finger, moved the ruler in an arc, making little pencil marks as he
went along, whenever he came upon an ancient site. When the ruler had covered
three hundred and sixty degrees he took it away and examined all the marks-
haphazard as circles and crosses in a football-pool coupon.

   
And stared into the map like a
fortune-teller into a crystal ball or the bottom of a teacup. Waiting for a
meaningful image or a pattern to form among the mesh of roads and paths and contour
lines . . . mound, circle, stone, church, earthwork, moat, holy well . . .

   
But from a ley-hunter's point
of view, it was all very disappointing.

   
There was a large number of old
stones and mounds all along the Welsh border, but the Tump didn't seem to align
with any of them. The nearest possible ancient site was Crybbe parish church,
less than a mile away. He looked it up in Pevsner's Buildings and established
that it was certainly pre-Reformation - always a strong indication that it had
been built on a pre-Christian site. But when he drew a line from the Tump to
the church and then continued it for several miles, he found it didn't cross
any other mounds, churches or standing stones. Not even a crossroads or a
hilltop cairn.

   
The ley system, which appeared
to cover almost the whole of Britain and could be detected in many parts of the
world, seemed to have avoided Crybbe.

   
'Bloody strange,' Powys had
said aloud, giving up.

   
What the hell was there for
Henry Kettle to dowse in Crybbe? Why had Max Goff chosen the place as a New Age
centre?

   
Powys came into the straggling
village of Pembridge, where the age-warped black-and-whites seemed to hang over
the street instead of trees. Driving down towards Kington and the border, he
felt a nervousness edging in, like a foreign station on the radio at night. He
rarely came this way. Too many memories. Or maybe only one long memory, twisted
with grief.

Fiona, Ben's girlfriend,
laughing and burrowing in one of the bags for the bottle of champagne. 'Better
open this now, warm shampoo's so yucky.'

   
Ben holding up a fresh-from-the-publisher copy of the book. On
the cover, a symbolic golden pentagram is shining on a hillside. In the
foreground, against a late-sunset sky, a few stars sprinkled in the corners, is
the jagged silhouette of a single standing stone. Across the top, the title.
The Old Golden Land. Below the stone, in clean white lettering, the author's
name, J. M. Powys.

   
And below that it says. With photographs by Rose Hart.

   
Rose looks at you, and her eyes are bright enough to burn through
the years, and now the pain almost dissolves the memory.

   
Ben saying, 'A toast, then . . .'

   
But Andy is raising a hand. 'There remains one small formality.'
   
Everybody looking at him.

   
'I think Joe ought to present himself to the Earth Spirit in the time-honoured
fashion.'

   
Forget it, you think. No way.

   
'I mean go round the Bottle Stone. Thirteen times.'

   
Fiona clapping her hands. 'Oh, yes. Do go round the stone, Joe.'

CHAPTER VI

Henry's place was the end of a Welsh long-house, divided into three
cottages. The other two had been knocked into one, and Mrs Gwen Whitney lived
there with her husband.

   
Powys arrived around eight-thirty,
driving through deep wells of shadow. Remembering Henry coming out to meet him one
evening round about this time, his dog, Alf, dancing up to the car.

   
That night, twelve years ago,
Powys pleading with Henry: 'Come on . . . it's as much your book as mine.
The Old Golden Land
by Henry Kettle and
Joe Powys.'

   
'Don't be daft, boy. You
writes, I dowses. That's the way of it. Besides, there's all that funny stuff
in there - I might not agree with some of that. You know me,
nothing psychic
. When I stop thinking of
this as science . . . well, I don't know where I'll be.'

   
And an hour or so later: 'But,
Henry, at the very least. . .'

   
'And don't you start offering
me money! What do I want any more money for, with the wife gone and the
daughter doing more than well for herself in Canada? You go ahead, boy. Just
don't connect me with any of it, or I'll have to disown you, see.'

   
Silence now. The late sun
turning the cottage windows to tinfoil. No dog leaping out at the car.

   
Mrs Whitney opened her door as
he walked across.

   
'Mr Powys.' A heavy woman in a big,
flowery frock. Smiling that sad, sympathetic smile which came easily to the
faces of country women, always on nodding terms with death.

   
'You remember me?'

   
'Not changed, have you? Anyway,
it's not so long.'
   
'Twelve years. And I've gone grey.'
   
'Is it so long? Good gracious. Would
you like some tea?'
   
'Thank you. Not too late, am I?'