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of something tasting absolutely frightful. You're a very silly little girl. Too much imagination
is not good for you.
           For a long time, Diane had thought imagination must be a sort
of ice-cream; the lights too - some as white as the creamy blobs they put in
cornets.
           Years later, when she was in her teens, one of the psychologists
had said to her, You were having rather a
rough time at home, weren't you, Diane? I mean, with your father and your brother.
You were feeling very lonely and... perhaps ... unwanted, unloved? Do you think
that perhaps you were turning to the Tor as a form of...
           'No!' Diane had stamped her foot. 'I saw those lights. I did.'
           And now the Tor had signalled to her across Britain. Called her
back. But it wasn't - Diane thought of her father and her brother and that house,
stiff and unforgiving as the worst of her schools - about pretty lights and
candyfloss sunbeams. Not any more .

 
    FIVE
    A Simple Person
     
    Unwrapping a creamy new
beeswax candle, Verity laid it down, with some trepidation, on a stone window
ledge the size of a gravestone.
           Still not sure, not at
all sure, that she could go through with this.
           It was late afternoon, but, even with all its hanging lights
on, the room was as deep and shadowed as the nave of an old parish church.
           The best-known old buildings in Glastonbury, apart from the
Abbey, which was ruined - so tragic -
were the one-time courthouse, known as the Tribunal, and the George and
Pilgrims inn, both in the High Street, both mellow and famously beautiful.
           And then there was Meadwell.
           Which was hunched among umbrella trees about a mile out of
town, to the east of the Tor. And was terribly, terribly old. But not famous, not mellow and not what one would call
beautiful.
           Rather like me, thought Verity, who looked after Meadwell for
the Pixhill Trust and ran it as a sort of guesthouse. Most of the time she was
decidedly not a sad or introspective or timid person. But tonight was the
night of the Abbot's Dinner - and, as the sourly humid November day dwindled
into evening, she realised that her little cat, Stella, had still not come
home.
           Of course this was not the first time. Nor was Stella the first
cat to decide that, despite the veritable army of mice, it simply did not wish
to live at Meadwell.
           But tonight being the night of the Abbot's Dinner, Verity
could not bear to be entirely alone.
           Because Meadwell was so venerable, Grade Two listed and starred,
little could be done to relieve the dispiriting gloom resulting from tiny,
mullioned windows which must never be enlarged, oak panelling too delicate to
disturb and enormous beams so oppressively low that even little Verity was
obliged to stoop.
           A touch of whitewash between the beams might have lightened the
atmosphere a little, but there were sixteenth-century builders' marks to be protected.
Also, in two of the upstairs rooms without panelling, repainting of the walls was
forbidden because of what was described as Elizabethan graffiti - words, names
perhaps, carved and burned into the sallow surface.
           Of Verity's own presence here there was little evidence
beyond, on a shelf inside the inglenook, a collection of novels by the great
John Cowper Powys, whose sensually extravagant prose was her secret vice and
her refuge. She considered it part of her role not to disturb the house's historic
ambience, to flit mouselike about the place.
           Most of the holiday guests - elderly, educated people, retired
doctors, retired teachers, friends of the Trust - said how much they absolutely loved the house, with its tremendous character . In summer.
           But even high summer entered Meadwell with uncharacteristic
caution, pale sunbeams edging nervously around the oaken doors like the
servants of a despot.