The Magus of Hay(121)

‘What’s it called?’

‘Order of— Hold on, I got the note here. The Sun in Shadow?’

The phone went silent.

‘George…?’



‘The Nazis?’

‘That a fact? This guy just said Left-Hand Path. If he’d said like, Extreme Right—’

‘The Order of the Sun in Shadow once contacted me to place a display ad seeking members. All a bit ambivalent, but it didn’t look too harmful at the time, so we ran it and they didn’t pay, despite repeated invoices. I’d imagine having a customer who collects fascist occult literature wouldn’t be terribly good for your image.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ve promised now. You kept a contact address, phone number for this guy?’

Across the room, Robin heard a yelp of triumph, saw Kapoor throwing his mobile in the air and catching it.

‘—always keep contact details of people who owe me money,’ George said. ‘I’m just looking through the file. How’s Betty?’

‘She’s good,’ Robin said. ‘She’s always good.’

‘Yep, here he is. Moved from his original address in Radnorshire, to Solihull. Quite a reputable address – well, suburban-sounding anyway. You want that or just the number?’

‘Both, if that’s OK.’

Robin wrote it all down in Jones’s notebook.

‘Just keep my name out of it, Robin. These are unlikely to be terribly nice people.’

‘Yeah, the word Nazi was kind of a hint in that direction.’

‘I’m serious, Robin.’

‘I’m truly grateful to you, George,’ Robin said. ‘Heil Hitler.’





54

Poppet


‘EACH OF THEM stationed in a chosen spot,’ Claudia said, ‘at a prearranged time.’

‘Physically?’

‘Initially, yes. Someone might, for example, stand at the confluence of the brook and the Wye, down on that little beach near the sewage works where the King was found.’

Here, on the edge of night, Hay-on-Wye reduced to a serrated silhouette against a band of fading red, it all sounded entirely logical, disturbingly persuasive. But Merrily, uncomfortable with it, found she’d put the cross back around her neck.

‘If you can have a group of people with the same focus,’ Claudia said, ‘working with perfect synchronicity in a sympathetic atmosphere, the results can be amazing. Think of the transcendent power of Gregorian chant in a cathedral.’

‘So you’d have a group of trained initiates, all focused on the creation of a successful economy founded on books?’

‘Nothing so simplistic. You don’t concentrate on making booksellers rich. You refine it to something which is, at once, more amorphous and more exact. Think of it in its purest form – illumination, a whole ethos founded upon the word. Doesn’t matter whether it’s the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita or Dan Brown. Knowledge begins with the word.’

‘Knowledge, enlightenment… books?’

The moon had come out, not far from full. Claudia’s broad face shone.



‘Because books were central to the aspiration, Peter liked to involve writers. They’d come individually to Hay and Peter, or one of his group, would introduce each of them to a particular spot, perhaps linked to their personality, and show them how to store the images – the sights, the sounds, the atmosphere of the place – in their imaginations. So that, even if they were hundreds of miles away, they’d be able to visualize and to project themselves into a location.’

‘That couldn’t’ve happened overnight.’

‘No. Some people, it would take a year, two years, of daily practice. And not everyone stayed the course. Using writers was not invariably a good idea. Bruce Chatwin dropped out quite quickly – more interested, I suspect, in what he could get out of it for a novel or a travel book. For something like this to work, it has to be separated from all personal desire. One must maintain a level of complete detachment from what one wants to achieve. That’s why most of the people involved were, as they say hereabouts, from Off.’

‘Is that why the Convoy were involved?’

‘Sorry? Oh, you mean the travellers? Before my time, I’m afraid. Yes, a very convenient human resource in the nineteen eighties. Introduced to Peter by… who was that chap?’

‘Jeremy Sandford?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Supporter of the homeless. Expert on travellers and magic mushrooms.’

‘Then it would have been. The mushrooms were never used in the actual working but seem to have been useful for pre-conditioning. Opening people’s minds to the limitless possibilities. The wider your horizons, strange as it may seem, the easier it is to sharpen your focus.’