Alchemy

‘Serial partnerships. “Going steady” it used to be called. They stay home or visit each other’s pads and cook what they’ve seen on the tele. There were some really dishy young guys there though and everyone was on something: pot, pills, speed. Who knows? You have to be to rave on like that all night.’

‘Where can we go then?’

‘The pub and a pizza, and then the pub.’

It was our usual routine. Only I’d fancied something different.

Joel is one of the most stable things in my life. We met when he was being cautious over boy-shags-boy encounters at the height of the Aids scare, when people had just found out that what they’d been doing in fun was killing them. For some it was already too late. Joel and I found ourselves going to too many hospitals followed by too many funerals. That was before they found the drugs to put it on hold. Sometimes I didn’t even know the guy but I’d go along so Joel didn’t have to face it alone, wondering what was happening in his own bloodstream and when the trodden-on rake would jump up and smack him in the face, a favourite image of Dad’s for disaster lying in wait.

What first brought us together was his accent. ‘You come from Gateshead?’ I said.

‘How do you know?’

‘My parents sound just like you.’

‘So what happened to you?’

‘I was born here. Corrupted from birth.’

I can do it of course, talk like Mam and Dad, but it’s fake, imitation, acting. Like assuming a foreign language that you know well. Sometimes my parents make the duty trip to see ageing relatives. ‘Gateshead Revisited,’ Dad cracks. I’ve gone with them when I was still at school, seeing the streets where they were born, touring the homes of great-aunts and cousins. Feeling just that: a tourist. Roger always managed to slide out of it somehow with exams or football: a game he couldn’t miss.

‘It’s the Sunday dinners I can’t face,’ he once admitted to me. ‘As if time had stood still up there with meat and two veg, Yorkshire pudding swimming in gravy, tinned fruit and ersatz topping.’ His corners are smoother or rounder than mine and he can trade on being a man and the indulgent smiles that still brings to excuse him. At home with Jenny it’s watercress soup and pasta with pears belle Helene, or whatever manifestation of the latest nouvelle cuisine, the fashionable foodie commonplace for a time until the next chic chef woks it out.

‘What’s all the excitement?’ Joel asked after we’d sat down with our pints, his Guinness, mine bitter. It was a bit of old Gateshead I’d learned from Dad and still stuck to. It will all change now with the opening of the Baltic Museum and the gentrification of the Northeast.

I wasn’t ready to tell Joel I’d fallen for someone at the office party. After all nothing might come of it. She might not seek me out and if she bumped into me, or more likely sidled past in the corridor, she’d avoid eye contact, perhaps pretend we hadn’t met at all. No it was too soon for confession. There would have to be something to confess first. So I stalled with: ‘I was afraid we might be getting set in our ways, stale, that’s all.’

My passion for the older woman had begun after uni though it didn’t extend to Margaret Thatcher who was still reigning at the time. I found myself speculating about other members of staff, wondering if they saw through me or if I was as opaque to them as they were to me. Not that I was hiding anything. They could infer what they liked from my not taking part in the girl chat of the staff ladies’ loo. Susie Jubal was one, power dressing CEO whose smooth black suiting, elegant sheer tights and high heels gave me a frisson whenever I was called in to draft a new contract. Not that I had much time for dalliance with the hard evening graft of Bar studies. Even my visits to another sort of bar with Joel had to become rare treats or necessary diversions.

Joel worked for the NHS as an accountant and taught an evening course at his local uni upgraded from an old poly. Now there are so many of those about you’d wonder why anyone would think it worthwhile to start something like Wessex. There has to be an ulterior motive in its founding, as a front for the Temple of the Latent Christ or some kind of fundraising scam. I pick up the phone and dial their number. Maybe a more oblique approach than rattling the bars of the gates will get me further.

Listening to the recorded voice on the other end I make notes. At the end I press hash and leave Joel’s name and address, an arrangement we have for when I want to stay anonymous. He’ll ring me when a message or packet comes. I’ve asked for the full kit of courses and application forms. The anonymous but faintly North American and female voice tells me: ‘Wessex University is closed right now. We shall reopen on 3 May. Meanwhile you can visit our website…’ I think it’s time I saw Dr Adrian Gilbert again.

‘Can you come to my office? The college is still closed but now I’ve read more of the Boston memorial there are questions, issues I think we should discuss.’

I arrange for him to come the next day. It doesn’t seem a problem. He has plenty of time on his hands. I can spend the intervening hours carrying on with Amyntas, as I think of him/her, and reading up on tribunal procedure. Meanwhile I search for traces of Amyntas Boston on the internet, surfing the International Genealogical Index, that useful tool set up by the curious theology of the Mormons of Salt Lake City. There are only births and marriages. Deaths don’t interest them since the purpose of the Index is to retrospectively initiate your ancestor into the true church and thereby guarantee them immortality. Briefly I wonder where the dead have been hanging out all this time waiting for their resurrection on screen. Still, out of strange acorns useful oak trees grow.

But there’s no mention of Amyntas or Amaryllis being born in Salisbury at the right sort of time or at all. There is a Robert Boston nearby at Broad Chalke who married Margaret Brown on 26 September 1588, the year of the Armada; and they had two daughters in the following two years, Joan and Mary. And that’s all.

Where else to go? I try the surname Boston and am sent to a History of Wiltshire by John Aubrey. The index says just: ‘Boston, Salisbury physician.’ But it’s enough to get me out of my chair and pacing the room. I print out the reference. I need a library. At last somebody knows, knew about a Salisbury Boston and a physician at that. Is it her dad or Amyntas herself? I have to find out. I try booksearch.com.

Well at least they’ve heard of John Aubrey but they can only offer me a second-hand classic reprint of his Brief Lives, though it does look as if it’s the same guy. So I need a library and not any old library. I need the best. I need to get on my bike and head for Euston and the Inca courts of the British Library itself. Though now I think it might be asking for my darling to be nicked to abandon it in the backstreets of Euston. I lock up the office and pick my way past the morning drunks under their newspaper wrappers through the stinking gloom of the underpass up into the airy station concourse with its Eurostar promise of not-too-distant foreign parts of wine and women if not song, and into the gullet of the tube, almost running down the escalator steps while the halt and old hang on to the right-hand rail.

An hour later I’ve filled in the form with family history, seventeenth century as my area of study, got my pass, and am climbing up to the reading room, hushed, packed with seekers and the acolytes who serve them. There’s more than one copy of my book. Which shall I go for? Not the earliest because it’s in a special category, hedged around with access barriers no doubt to stop it being stolen. I wonder what it would fetch on the antiquarian market.

I decide on an edition of 1848 as a compromise and sit back to wait for it. Then I think I could use the time seeing what I can find on the open shelves and I’m just about to get up and browse when, hey presto, here’s my book. It’s a bigger size than books today, with thick cardboardy yellowed pages. It’s been mended at some time and when I open the dried-blood cover it lies very flat as if exhausted, worn out. A faint memory comes to me. Is it the smell or the feel of the thick paper? The memory is of being about six and walking in crocodile through the Acton streets, always it seemed shrouded in winter, from our primary school to the redbrick Gothic of the public library where we were allowed to choose our books in the children’s section with its low, brightly painted chairs, posters and smell of damp wool. Outside in the streets we passed among people who must have been young but seemed old to us, walking about in clothes as bright as our kiddy furniture, young men like the dandies in history books with cavalier hair. Fluid, always on the run, they seemed to dance along the muddy streets. Their pastel flairs were stained six inches up the leg with the puddle water thrown up by passing cars. Yet I remember they appeared cheerful and trusting, unlike my parents, Rob and Linda, born in that unimaginable, except to them, before-the-war time and tarred with its sobering brush.

I turn to the index. There’s no mention of Boston. I try Gilbert. And there he is: Adrian; I look up his entry. It’s in a section where the writer says: ‘I shall now pass to the illustrious Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke’ under the heading: ‘Of Learned Men that had Pensions Granted to them by the Earls of Pembroke’. First comes the bit about Gilbert, confirming Amyntas’ story in the memorial, and then pay dirt.

There lived in Wilton, in those days, one Mr Boston, a Salisbury man (his father was a brewer there) who was a great chymist, and did great cures by his art. The Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke did much esteem him for his skill, and would have had him to be her operator, and live with her, but he would not accept of her Ladyship’s kind offer. But after long search after the philosopher’s stone, he died at Wilton, having spent his estate. After his death they found in his laboratory two or three baskets of egg shells, which I remember Geber saith, is a principal ingredient of that stone.

I head for the photocopying department. My find lies like the philosopher’s stone itself faintly glowing in my briefcase as I make my way home again.

Geber, Geber, who was Geber? Google tracks him down: ‘Jabir ibn Hayyan, known to the Western world as Geber, Muslim alchemist of the eighth century. Put forward the Sulphur Mercury theory of the origin of metals based on abstraction from experiments with naturally occurring red ore or cinnabar, a form of mercury oxide which when heated produces quicksilver and sulphurous fumes. According to this theory fire was sulphur or brimstone; mercury was water. Not however the substances themselves but the abstractions: combustibility and fusibility.’ Wow!

That’s Amyntas’ experiment before the countess’ ladies. You can see how those old alchemists were trying to feel their way to some universal theory that would explain everything. Wasn’t that what Einstein was after towards the end of his life? Every so often along comes someone with a discovery or a theory that seems to have the answer: particle physics, relativity, static state cosmology, DNA and the genome. But there’s always another question unanswered beyond it, even if the theory itself stands up. A new dimension, a micro universe we can’t see into or space we can’t penetrate. Will we ever? Or will we destroy ourselves or be smashed into our elements by an asteroid before we can find out? Every new thing we discover only seems to make the universe bigger and us smaller. Shrinking man. There ought to be pride in what we know but mostly there’s only fear. Is that why so many attempts at an alternative answer are popular now? Because we can’t face it. It’s too big for us. Like the Temple of the Latent Christ offers its believers. Do what we tell you and you’ll be all right, saved when the universe blows apart.

Maybe I’m wrong to be digging into all this. What seemed a simple case to make some bread is leading me into a cross between Star Wars and The Moral Maze. Heavy bananas, Jade. Cool it. Get back to the kitchen and cook up something solid. Get real.

An evening with the Gaos pushing out the noodles and chop suey will bring me down to earth.

‘Mary,’ I say as she hands me the small brown carrier bags to pack into my vacuum box, ‘I hope your cousin is careful to have all his papers in order. The police are very hard on illegals these days.’

Mary often interprets for her parents when a precise meaning is important. That’s why I’m telling this to her. ‘Oh he is very careful, Jade. He has his attendance sheet signed regularly at the college to show he is real student.’

‘Well if there’s ever anything I can do to help…’

‘That is kind of you, Jade.’

I realise she doesn’t know what I do when I’m not riding delivery for them. ‘It’s just that I studied law…’ I trail off, not wanting to put myself forward, not wanting them to think they’ve been deceived and I’m not what I’ve seemed these past few months.

‘I will remember, Jade, if there is any trouble, thank you.’

In the morning I’m up betimes as old Pepys had it, determined to get some answers out of Gilbert. His cheque has been lying in my desk drawer since he gave it to me while I make up my mind whether I’m taking his case or not. Now I think I’ll have a look at his writing and see if I can tell anything from it. I take out the cheque, still folded neatly in half as he passed it across the desk. I never look at clients’ cheques in front of them, out of some deep-seated embarrassment about money learnt from Linda and Rob. First it would be rude, as if you doubted their honesty. Second, it would infringe one of the sacred tenets such as: never flash your cash in public or even count it; never inspect cheques or query bills. The financial delicacies of a vanished age when a gentleman’s word was his bond and to show an interest in lucre, your own or someone else’s, was vulgar and bourgeois. Now we reel from fraud to scandal with our creative accounting and ethos of grab-all-you-can in this free-market free-for-all where the Darwinian survival of the fittest is jungle law.

I flatten the cheque and study the writing. Very small and neat like a monastic script. The date, my own name, the amount. Hang about. It isn’t Gilbert’s signature. The name on the cheque is Alastair Galton. I can’t wait for his buzz on the entry phone to confront him. I’m trying out opening questions in my head such as ‘Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you playing at?’ But while I’m waiting I run a quick search on this new name and get a complete blank. At least Adrian Gilbert existed, once upon a time. This guy is totally unknown. The buzzer sounds; punctual as usual. I let him in. I say good morning, shake hands and sit him down. I’m careful not to address him by name.

‘You haven’t paid in my cheque, Ms Green.’

The breath is almost knocked out of me by his audacity. ‘That’s because I didn’t recognise the name on the cheque,’ I lie.

‘I rather expected you to query it on the telephone.’

‘You told me when we first met that you were Dr Adrian Gilbert.’

‘The “Dr” is correct.’

‘Why did you give me a false name? I warned you about trying to deceive your own lawyer.’

‘Yes, you did. Quite properly. But you see when I first came to you, you weren’t my lawyer. I knew nothing about you. I wanted to see how suitable you were before I entrusted my case to you. You are, after all, very young and…’

‘And a woman?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Dr Galton, if that is your name, there’s enough gender discrimination in the legal profession already without you adding to it.’

‘Have you decided to represent me?’