‘And the turtle,’ I asked, ‘if it is one?’

‘Oh, he was put in for fun! Since the place looked like an alchemist’s den, as you called it, I made a proper job of the decorations.’

Much later when I was puzzled by the gold and its origin it occurred to me that there was no better disguise for the alchemist than admitting to a stranger that he amused himself by pretending to be one.

He opened a velvet-lined drawer and showed me some of his work: bracelets, pendants and ash trays like little scallop shells, which were delicate enough for the butt ends of a millionairess. He had a genius for pure form rather than decoration. When I praised his simple and effective taste, he obviously thought that I had chosen the right words and was pleased.

‘Form!’ he said. ‘Yes, form is essential for craftsmanship, but not enough. There must also be inspiration.’

He hesitated and then added almost reluctantly, ‘Mr Colet, I cannot resist showing you what I mean.’

I had noticed that between two of the windows was a short crimson curtain over a curved shelf. He pulled a string which drew back the curtain and exposed a casket of ebony and ivory with both the Cross and the Pentacle – an odd combination – engraved on the door. He drew a key from his pocket and unlocked the casket, revealing a two-handled vessel of gold. I had never seen anything like it, nor could I guess its function. It was too tall for an amphora or bowl and most resembled a cauldron, swelling out from the base and in again to a slight neck above the handles and below the rim. It stood about a foot high, with its smooth womb a little less. The curves of pure gold seemed to provide their own light and were as near perfection as any Chinese masterpiece of jade or porcelain. Since it was well above eye level I could not judge its weight, but felt sure he was justified in claiming to be inspired – certainly by some ancient style.

I had only time to exclaim my admiration before he shut and locked the casket, closing as it were all further comment. I didn’t attempt any. I came down to earth and asked him if he had a market for such pieces.

‘Yes. Every so often I go up to London with my wares and sell them. If buyers do not think them saleable they can always melt them down.’

In that case he could not make a profit after buying his gold, but I gave the question no further thought. Profit was of no importance if he were only training himself and preparing a memory which, according to him, would be preserved from one existence to another. An absurd faith, but no madder than some. At least it was service which was remembered, not the erotic adventures of some oriental princess.

Verging on comedy rather than mystery was the spiritual pilgrimage of Major Matravers-Drummond. Since he was the only other guest, and his room was next door to mine, we were able to relax together at the day’s end with his private bottle of whisky. He was Gloucestershire born and bred, with his home in a valley of the dark line of the Cotswolds which closed the eastern horizon across the river. Retired from the Household Cavalry, he had taken to religion and even entered a seminary to be trained as a parson.

‘Threw me out, Piers! Quite right too! My view of eternity was too far from the Book of Revelations.’

‘But what are you doing in this nest of reincarnationists when you are an earnest Christian?’ I asked.

‘I search, old boy. Look on me as a wandering friar! If Simeon chooses to believe that he is training to be a human god, I don’t argue. At bottom he and his disciples long for ways of life that have been lost. No harm in that – I do myself. Started as a child. Something in me is still a British Roman of the age of Arthur, watching Christianity and civilisation collapse around him.’

I could understand that. Brought up on those rich and gentle hills, surrounded by the shards of Roman villas and travelling still by Roman roads, an obsession with the farming, the fighting and the decaying towns at the end of the Empire was natural enough.

‘And you think that collapse will come again?’

‘If it is the will of God. All I feel is great sympathy with the past, which might be memory.’

As bad as the rest of them, I thought. He’s going to tell me that he rode with Arthur’s cavalry which smashed the Saxons at Badon and became – though no one knows why – a legend.

‘And what were you?’

‘I am. That’s all. No beginnings, no ends. After death one is present both in past and future. Sometimes in life too!’

A bold and compassionate man he turned out to be, but at that first intimate chat with him I feared he was too preoccupied with the violence of his former profession and more likely to have been a carrion crow than a proconsul. He had no patience with the druidical drop-outs who showed such exaggerated respect for Marrin.

‘Druids! Pah!’ he snorted. ‘You say you’ve seen his golden chalice. What do you think of it?’

‘Remarkable workmanship.’

‘Blasphemy – that’s what I think of it! Some of those chaps believe that Simeon has remade the Grail!’

I couldn’t at first see what he meant. If the Grail ever existed, it couldn’t be remade. But yes, he said, it could. It was the holiest symbol of Christianity after the Cross. Its spiritual meaning was eternal. Its physical form could be fashioned again and again.

‘I suspect those fellows use it in vile heathen rites,’ he exclaimed.

My Arthurian major was of course tempted to dream of Marrin’s cauldron as the Grail, but it seemed to me that his logic was just as fantastic. If the Grail was an eternal symbol of human longing, the heathen could benefit from its power as well as anyone else. For the first time it occurred to me – then only as a flight of fancy – that the cauldron could be older than the traditional Grail and the memory of it perhaps the origin of the myth. In that case Marrin had not made it, but found it.

I stayed on at Broom Lodge. My interest was not only in subsistence agriculture and monastic industry. I dislike writing of the other interest, for details would be in the worst taste if they became public. But this confession is for the police, should it ever be necessary for me to defend myself. Otherwise it will be seen only by the red squirrel which has discovered me and suspects that I turn over the white leaves of my notebook to look for nuts. He at least will forgive me if I show my delight in love under the oaks.

I think that other guests at Broom Lodge must have been intimidated by the abbess or in a hurry to get away or, like the major, too perplexed by the past in the present and the future in the past. I am not, I know, particularly attractive to women. I have a narrow, thin-lipped, dark face and a lean body hardened by travel in search of evidence which archaeologists are too busy with tombs and temples to discover. I have also a lean mind which fails to notice birthdays, moods, hair and other surface femininities when deeply engaged in what has been called dream statistics: a fair description though intended to hurt. So I was surprised to notice – some things I do notice – that Elsa was unmistakably trying to draw attention to herself and, like an awkward young girl, interrupting conversations.

‘You must come and see the mines,’ she said to me on the third afternoon.

The main collieries of the Forest are abandoned, leaving remarkably little industrial mess behind. The seams were rich and there was no gas but, as the shafts deepened, the costs and difficulties of pumping out the water became prohibitive. The shape of the Forest is an irregular crater, not at all obvious to the eye among sharply contoured wooden hillocks but pulling into itself any stream on its way to the Severn.

Free mines, however, are still worked, and anywhere in a clearing you may come upon a syndicate of two or three exploiting their shallow shaft with pick, shovel and a little tramway to the surface. Dells and hollows which seem a pleasant freak of nature were once mines, some of them worked by Celts and Romans for iron, before it was discovered that the black rock close to the surface would burn.