Alchemy

‘I’m very grateful to you for seeing me so soon.’

‘Have a chair. Would you like a coffee?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Not at all.’ I go over to the filter machine where the glass goldfish bowl is gently seething. ‘Milk, sugar?’

‘Just milk thank you.’

I turn back from my coffee maker with our steaming cups. I can see he’s ‘all of a twitch’, as my mother would say. I’m afraid he might drop the cup and scald himself but he gets it safely down on my desk. ‘Did you find me easily, the office I mean?’ I’m trying to reassure him, to give him time to gather his wits. I guess he’s not used to the paraphernalia of the law.

‘I looked it up in the A-Z. I used to know London quite well but you get out of the habit…’

I open the top drawer of my desk and take out pad and pen. ‘I’ll need to make some notes.’

‘Of course. Where shall I begin?’

‘Tell me first about you. Date of birth, full name, address.’

The recitation of these simple facts steadies him. I could put them straight into my laptop of course but this sometimes frightens people, especially older people and Gilbert comes into that category though he’s only forty-nine. It’s more a cast of mind.

He takes me methodically through his degree and previous employment, before we get to Wessex and the immediate problem.

‘I have been accused by a small group of students of trying to corrupt their minds by teaching Satanism and perversion.’

Long ago when I started in independent practice I wanted to put up a favourite cartoon of mine showing the inside of a confessional box, with a monk leaning forward to listen to the supplicant on the other side of the grille and a sign above the monk’s head which reads: ‘Do not sound too surprised.’

‘Dangerous allegations.’

‘Very dangerous. I was summoned before the dean and disciplinary council. It was the students’ word against mine. They were believed. I was suspended and sacked.’

‘Sacked?’

‘I was on a short-term contract. When my first suspension ran out I expected to return to college, and my teaching, but a second suspension was slapped on, that took me to the end of my contract. I was told it would not be renewed.’

‘Why should the dean and council have believed them rather than you? Couldn’t you get other students to testify in your favour?’

‘They were too frightened. Ms Green…’ Gilbert hesitates, ‘you may find this hard to believe. You may even think it is mere paranoia on my part, but the college has been taken over by a sect, a fundamentalist group.’

‘What sort of sect?’ Far from suspecting him of paranoia, I see shades of the Rushdie fatwa rushing towards me, and find myself less than enthralled at letting loose a whole farrago of death threats, riot and arson. Still, a job is a job.

‘Extreme evangelical Christian.’

‘Creationist, Happy-Clappy?’ I’m showing off a bit.

‘Neither. This is something new. From America. The mother church, as they call it, has put money into the University of Wessex. The dean is their appointee. Many of the students are American.’

‘In these days of the internet, sects tend to be global. Didn’t the last immolation take place in Switzerland?’

‘There was a later one, in Zambia I seem to remember, but in both cases the cult originated in the States or had US links.’

‘Those students who accused you, are they American?’

‘Some of them. Not all. What would be their position in English law? Would it make a difference that they aren’t British subjects?’

‘The college must abide by UK employment law if it’s within the UK.’

‘So I can take them to an industrial tribunal?’

‘Employment tribunal. Yes, at this preliminary stage, as far as I can see. But I should warn you, Dr Gilbert, that going to law is often at the very least a disappointment, if not a down-right mistake. Think of Oscar Wilde, not to mention others in our own time. What exactly did the students allege?’

‘There were many things, among them that I distributed pornographic material to them.’

‘And did you?’

‘One person’s pornography is another’s truth. For example there was a poem about an erotic relationship between a Roman soldier and Christ on the cross which was prosecuted as an “obscene libel”. I think that was the term. You are too young to remember the case.’

‘But not too young to have studied it, if only for its rarity. Did the material you distributed fall into that category?’

‘Not quite.’

‘You said you were accused of Satanism. What exactly is your subject, Dr Gilbert?’

‘This particular course is on the history of science showing how it developed from earlier disciplines…’

‘Like?’

‘What some would call alchemy.’

‘And you? What would you call it?’

‘Proto-chemistry is a less emotive term. The great Liebig himself said that to him alchemy was merely the chemistry of the Middle Ages.’

I was remembering the big old Liebig condenser in a glass case in the school lab like some medieval retort.

‘The alchemists have had a pretty bad press since Ben Jonson, as charlatans and cheats.’

‘You are familiar with the work of Jonson, Ms Green? Somewhat unusual in a lawyer I should have thought.’

‘I only switched to law halfway through my degree. I began with the humanities.’

‘And why was that?’The tables have been suddenly and subtly turned. I’m now the one being questioned.

‘I decided there was no money in teaching English literature at ‘A’ level until I qualify for a pension. I would find that life too…’

‘Dull? Believe me, Ms Green, in my experience the academic life can be far from dull.’

‘I need to see a copy of the material you distributed.’ Perhaps he had been foolish, had thought young minds were more flexible, instead of less, often rigid with preconceptions, and fear of humiliation or exposure to the unknown. At thirty-six I’m a lot mellower, more tolerant than I was at sixteen.