Jago Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a hiccough with the glaze. Too many things came out dingy brown. I haven’t got much sellable stuff. A few things from last term.’
    ‘I’m sure it’ll be lovely.’
    ‘Most people will be stoned anyway,’ said Derek, nearly giggling. ‘They’ll make up their own colours.’
    A pause. Wendy’s lips thinned momentarily. Derek would get a reasonable talking-to later, Paul was sure. He felt sorry for the man, intuiting that he’d been dragged by his girlfriend into Jago’s sect and was liable to be stuck with it. Until the Reverend gave the Beatles’ Double White one spin too many and called for a bloodbath, or, depressed by an income-tax investigation, decided it was time to try out the Kool-Aid and cyanide cocktail on his congregation.
    ‘But I’m firing again tonight. I think I know where I went wrong. I’m not used to this big kiln. If it turns out okay, I’ll have some pretty things. I hope. I’ve also got a couple of boxes of Mike and Mirrie Bleach’s pots. They’re supposed to replace the work that sells from the shop, but nobody will mind if they go during the festival.’
    ‘That’s great.’ Wendy clacked her beads. ‘We’ll put you down for a table. Come over to the Agapemone when you can, and pick a site. We don’t lock up or anything. We try to be really open, and anyone can come to one of our meals or Tony’s services. There’s no real mystery. We’d like to have you. Both.’
    ‘Thanks, I’m a bit busy with my thesis, but—’
    ‘We’d love to drop over,’ said Hazel. ‘There’s blow all else to do out here.’
    Hazel took Paul’s hand. Hers was dry, and he felt slip-clay powder between their palms.
    ‘You must come. He’ll like you. And you’ll like Him. Tony.’
    Paul had known whom Wendy meant. The Reverend Anthony William Jago. In photographs, he had eyes like Robert Powell as Jesus and the three-weeks-dead expression Paul associated with William S. Burroughs.
    Post addressed to ‘The Lord God, Alder’ was apparently delivered to him.
    ‘We must be going,’ Wendy said. ‘So much to do, so little time to do it in.’
    When Wendy and Derek had gone, Hazel got a different vase for the flowers and filled it with precious water. Then she went back to work, and Paul was left to his books.

2
    L eaning on his cherry-wood stick, Danny Keough rested. Not wanting to strap himself into his old Volkswagen because of the heat, he had decided to go round the outlying farms on foot. Inside, the car smelled like burning tyres. Still, it might have been better than punishing his trick knee on this long hike. The old wound was playing up, and a permanent haze had settled on his brain. He had not been smitten by the sun like this since 1947, his stint in Palestine.
    Maybe somebody would give him a lift to the Maskell farm. It was unlikely. On the levels, you could see cars coming from a long way away. There was nothing in sight except a blue van pulled up on the verge a hundred yards down the road. This was a B-route anyway, not wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other without one having to back up into a lay-by. It was only here to serve Maskell and a few smaller farmers. The tarmac was springy, the patches laid down in spring to fill in potholes were bitumen black and tacky. Across the ditches, rubbery fields were moistened only by rancid remains of long-dead grass. The ditches were mainly muddy depressions streaked with pale, cracked earth. Although these were the wetlands, there wasn’t much wet this year.
    It would be a bad year. And Jago’s jamboree would only make it worse. Last Christmas, they had sent him an anonymous present. Inside the thin square parcel was a gramophone record. ‘Don’t Stop the Carnival’ by the Alan Price Set. He should have laughed. This was not a carnival, this was a zoo. The hippies were animals. Despoiling the countryside, breaching the peace, disturbing the livestock, interfering with people, raising a racket.
    He was late with his