A Secret Alchemy (12 page)

Yes, I mourned Aunt Elaine quietly and with a kind of joy for what she’d been and what she’d been to me; my mourning was simple. Whereas for Adam…even after two years of it creeping ever nearer I hadn’t expected the unbearable, outraged pain that flayed me in the weeks after his death. Even after two more years sometimes it still flays me, and leaves me shivering and raw for whatever cold winds of memory are passing.

I’m shivering now. The Chantry house was always shabby, but today the kitchen smells of unemptied dustbins and stale grease. In the hall and up the stairs there are patches on the walls where pictures once were. The table I remember always having a big vase of summer flowers, or scarlet-berried rowan, or pussy-willow bursting into bud has gone, and where it stood is a bucket, half full of brownish water whose source is betrayed by a bubbling, peeling patch on the blue starry ceiling high above our heads.

“I’ve kept the dining room for an office,” Uncle Gareth’s saying, as he unlocks the door, “but I had to sell the Rennie Mackintosh table and chairs.” The browsing rabbits my father painted on the plaster below the bay window are still there, the colors of grass and fur and beady eyes still bright because they don’t get the sun, whereas the fat purple grapes and twisting vine stems around the fireplace have faded almost to nothing. It’s stuffy, as if the windows haven’t been open for years, and the dry office-smell of dusty files and fax machines has a damp underlay of mildew.

“Shall I open a window?” I ask.

“Yes, do.”

“You’ve still got the Perrault cabinet, then?”

“I hadn’t the heart to get rid of it. And Lionel said it isn’t worth the embarrassing kind of sum the Mackintosh furniture was, so that was a relief.”

I look at the cabinet and am glad. Its oak doors are a landscape of my childhood in themselves: across the four upper ones a long-forgotten great-aunt carved the tale of Beauty and the Beast, and across the bottom doors Puss strides in his boots.

“Which reminds me,” Uncle Gareth goes on. “I’ve been going through the attics, and I found the plaster casts of Izzy’s
Stations of the Cross
, only I can’t really manage to get the boxes downstairs, and I wondered if you could give me a hand.”

“Of course.”

We go upstairs, my feet knowing how the treads turn, my hand moving along the banister rail, curving and rising around the well of the hall. The closed doors on the landing ahead seem blank and alien, the posters pinned to them as crude and loud as the rock music I heard last time.

We go up the narrow attic stairs. “It’s the end one. Mark’s room,” says Gareth, and I’m suddenly skinned again. Is it the way Gareth says it, or is it me? It’s as if he’ll be there, reading, or mending something, just as he was whenever I had cause to tap on the door and deliver a message. And yet there were years, after he left, when it wasn’t his room but someone else’s.

It was about three years after he’d first started work at the Press that his father was sent to prison and he came to live with us. Of course he could stay, said Grandmama when Uncle Gareth asked her, and very welcome, the poor lad, whatever his father’s done. She’d have to ask something for board and lodging, but only a shilling or two.

I was eleven. I remember Mark coming back that evening, pushing his bike because it was hung with bags and parcels. What a lot of stuff, I thought. But when I tapped on the door with the clean towels Aunt Elaine had only just got dry, because it was a
damp, drizzly autumn, he’d unpacked it all into neat piles on the bed, and it seemed very little for a whole life: a too-big suit and a few worn and mended shirts, some collars even worse, boots patched and repatched, washing things on the washstand, copies of
Picture Post
, some Penguins, and several other books carefully shrouded in brown paper, with the titles in neat ink capitals. If I screw up my eyes in my memory I can almost read them: Stanley Morison’s
First Principles of Typography
and Fisher’s
Compendium for Printers and Buyers of Printing
. No photographs, and the only pictures not his, but the ones that had been on the walls for as long as I could remember: a color print of Manet’s
The Bar at the Folies Bergères
, and the three Man Ray photograms that my father had sent from Paris and I knew—though he never said so—that Grandpapa didn’t really like.

“Aunt Elaine says is there anything you need? And it’s supper time.”

He took the towels from me—they were threadbare too—and looked around the room. “I’ve got everything, thanks.”

“Supper’s in the kitchen,” I said, leading the way downstairs, though it wasn’t as if he didn’t know his way around the house. He’d mended enough bits of it, one way and another. When we got there, he saw the table laid and said, “I thought the family’d be in the dining room.”

“Oh, the dining room’s far too much trouble, these days,” said Aunt Elaine, taking the fish pie out of the oven. “Move that print off the table, would you? We all just muck in together.” Lionel appeared, a bit vague and distant, the way he always was on Greek homework nights, and went to the sink to scrub the ink from his fingers. Mark stood there holding the print. “You’re still at school, then?” he asked Lionel.

“Yes, more’s the pity.”

“Not boarding-school?”

“No, Mum and Dad don’t approve of them. Grammar school. But we play rugger, so that’s all right. Do you?”

“No, only soccer. Haven’t played much since I left.”

“What’s Izzy doing?” said Aunt Elaine, as Uncle Gareth came in from the workshop and went to the sink in his turn. “Una, child, go and give her a shout, would you? And take that print and put it in the studio out of the way.”

I took it from Mark and went out as Uncle Gareth was asking him if he was settling in all right upstairs. The picture was round and reminded me of the big, messy flower bed in the middle of summer. I turned it over, the way everyone at home always did, even with plates before dishing up, if they thought they were interesting:
Robert Delaunay, Circular Forms, Sun and Moon, 1912–1913, Zürich Kunsthaus
. When I’d put it away, I went to the bottom of the stairs and shouted up to Izzy three times. But she didn’t answer, and on his way past to the kitchen Uncle Robert told me to go up and find her in her room, instead of raising the roof.

She was standing at the easel by the window and the linseed oil and turps smell was thick enough to touch, almost. “Supper,” I said, but my voice didn’t seem to get through and she didn’t turn around. “Aunt Elaine says supper.”

“All right. Coming.” She didn’t even look at me then, just cleaned her brush and mixed some ultramarine and laid a streak of it in the sky of her canvas, then more. I didn’t ask but it looked like Avery Hill, and she was painting the night as if it was dark searchlights, reaching down to the tiny little people on the ground. I waited another minute, but I didn’t dare say anything. I
don’t think she even noticed when I gave up and went back down and told Aunt Elaine she was coming.

The fish pie wasn’t bad, though Aunt Elaine hadn’t put hardboiled eggs in it, which was the bit I really liked. Still, I got one on Sundays if the hens were laying. Mark ate his quickly, and lots of bread, as if he’d been hungry for a long time.

Izzy didn’t come down till we were halfway through. She washed her hands and sat down, but you could tell she hadn’t really noticed anything, not even that Mark had arrived. She was staring into space as if she could see her painting printed on the kitchen blind. Uncle Gareth was telling Aunt Elaine and Grandpapa about an illustrator he’d found, and Grandmama was scraping out the dish to find everyone at least a little bit of a second helping. Mark wasn’t talking: he was looking at Izzy as if he’d never seen her before in his life.

The Stations of the Cross
are piled into a couple of boxes: full-size plaster casts of the foot-square stone originals that Izzy carved. This attic seems completely dry, and they don’t feel too damp, though I see a corner’s crumbled off Jesus falling for the second time, and on Saint Veronica’s cloth the image of Jesus’ face has cracked. The two boxes are heavy, but they stack easily enough onto each other, so, leaving Uncle Gareth to see if there’s anything else he’d like a hand with while I’m here, I carry them downstairs and bump the office door gently open. To save my back I dump them on the Perrault chest rather than the floor, and with the thud a photograph falls flat on its face. I pick up the frame, but the smashed glass lies there with the photograph facedown. It’s another print of the same image of Mark and, still wedged into the frame, is a letter. A few lines are visible.

“Thank you, Una, my dear,” Uncle Gareth is saying, as he comes into the room, carrying a smallish painting. “That’s such a help.”

“I’m sorry, that photo fell over when I put the box down,” I say, gesturing from a safe distance.

He shifts the painting under one arm and reaches to turn the frame down on its face on top of the broken glass. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll deal with it later.” He holds out the painting. “Here. I couldn’t find anything else to carry down, but this you must have. I could never have sold it. I think you’ve got its pair.”

It’s one of my father’s oil paintings, painted, Izzy says—and she should know—just before he left New York in 1939.
Dawn at East Egg
, and Uncle Gareth’s right, I’ve got
Evening at West Egg
on the wall of the sitting room in Sydney. Tears sting in my eyes. “But it’s yours. You brought them back from America. I remember you telling me how you smuggled them out.”

He smiles. “Yes. Not that I had much time to worry about them with you to look after. I hadn’t had much practice with little ones. But you were so good, even when you were being seasick. As long as you had Smokey Bear, you were all right. And now I’m giving this to you. They should be together.”

“Well…if you’re sure…I know just where I’d put it.” I hold it out to see it better. “There’s a pair of windows, with just the right space between…You know, I always wondered why he didn’t give them their real names. Why he used the
Gatsby
ones.”

“
The Great Gatsby
was his favorite book—”

“I never knew that.”

“Didn’t you? It was. So American, that obsession with innocence corrupted. But I think it was really so that he could do what he wanted. If he didn’t call them what they were on the map, he didn’t have to stick to the literal truth. He could make the patterns—use the colors—that said what he wanted to say.”

“I’ve never thought of it like that, but it makes sense. Are you sure?”

“Well, I shan’t have much room, I imagine, wherever I end up living. Take them all, if you like, the cabinet as well. I wish I could give you the rabbits.”

I take
Dawn at East Egg
to the window: the lights on the pier are caught and multiplied in the still, dark water into a necklace of jewels, and broken by the wash of an early speedboat, gray as a ghost, heading out of the bay to the open sea.

Outside the window the light trembles and I look up.

Mark’s standing in the garden.

No—yes—he is—it
is
Mark. Real, not a dream. Not this time.

“Mark?”

“Una?”

He’s—oh, I don’t know how he is, just that he’s here. “It
is
you.”

“Yes.”

I can see and hear him, but not reach to grip his hand. “The back door’s open.”

“Of course,” he says, and vanishes. For a mad moment I wonder if it’s my hallucination haunting me: that I’ve dreamed him. Then I turn and look at Uncle Gareth.

It’s as if he’s dead: not moving, not breathing, and only two
new purplish stains over his cheekbones tell me that he’s alive.

I take his hand and I can feel his pulse lurching through the paper-thin skin inside his wrist. And I know why. I don’t understand, not yet, but I know why. It’s Mark.

But I say, “You all right? You should sit down.”

He nods, follows me toward the door for a few steps, then turns away and sits down sideways on one of the cheap, not-Mackintosh chairs, and I go out into the hall and toward the back door, to find Mark.

Elysabeth—the 4th yr of the reign of King Edward the Fourth

I was mopping blood from Dickon’s chin when my father rode in
from Stony Stratford. It was not long after Saint George’s Day, that I remember, for there had been a solemn feast held by the King, to which my parents and I had been bidden.

“The King comes to hunt in Whittlebury Forest tomorrow. What has the child done to himself?”

“Knocked out a tooth, sire. Only a milk tooth and it was loose anyway, and not before time now he’s breeched. There, pet, put it safe under your pillow and see what the fairies bring you. Now go and find Cook, and tell him you may have a sweetmeat for being a brave boy.” Dickon ran off through the screens and I heard him calling for Mal. “Sire, does the King come here?”

“Yes. We meet in the forest at sunrise, and he dines here. He seems in no hurry to go north, though we hear worse tidings by the day.” He took a turn about the hall, then made for the screens. “Where is your mother?” He stopped. “No, I must speak first to you, Ysa. Come into the Great Chamber that we may be private.”

One of the lads was sweeping, for the recent rains had brought in much dirt. My father waited until he had ducked his head and scuttled away, but then he seemed to know not how to begin.

“Sire, does something trouble you?”

He looked at me, full of thought. I cannot forget the tale of how he died, but chiefly I remember that look: as if he chose his words, then weighed them before he spoke. “Daughter, the King has spoken more than once of how much he esteems your company.”

“I am honored, of course, though he has not been in it so very often, and always with many others present. He puts all to whom he speaks at ease.”

“The King is not a man who is slow to make friends, and I have seen him laugh with you more than once. And when you are absent he asks me how you do, and whether you are well. Ysa, I think he would like it if he might be in your company much more often.”