A Secret Alchemy (31 page)

“What? After five hundred years?”

“Oh, yes. And even though I don’t agree with them—I don’t think the evidence supports it—we should be grateful. Nothing like a really good controversy to get the historians digging away, amateurs and professionals, finding new records, testing the old assumptions. In fact—”

“Una.” He puts his hand on my arm. My heart starts to thud. He’s smiling. “Sssh. Morgan would say, ‘Mourning is allowed too, you know.’”

“I know it is,” I say, and only then wonder which mourning he means.

After we’ve helped Morgan take down her stall and pack her stock into the boot of the car, it seems natural to go to the pub. It’s full of other market people as well as locals and a tourist or two. We
squeeze ourselves around a small table; on another day I’d enjoy seeing a proper pub properly full, but today’s taken its toll and I’m very tired. My bones ache. Mark goes to buy the drinks. Morgan looks tired too, and with a better cause.

“Are you working tomorrow? Doing another market?” I ask.

“Not a market. Got ten days off from work, too,” she says. “I was owed some holiday.”

“So you have another job, as well as the jewelry?”

“I’m a carer. I work in an old people’s home. Living in, some of the time.”

“Are you going away?”

“No. I’m saving up to go and see Mum in the summer. I’ll probably just chill, build up some stock, and see friends and things.”

I could ask if she wants to come with us, I think. Mark would be pleased, surely. And then I wonder whether I would, and why I want her with us. However nice she is—and I’m beginning to like her a lot—she’d inevitably be in the way.

In the way of what?

“Did you make your earrings?”

“D’you know, I came out in such a hurry I don’t know what I put on?” She touches the lightning bolt. “Oh, yes, this is mine. It’s called Thor.”

“You give them names?”

“Well, I do for myself. I’d get confused otherwise. When I’m doing a market, I have to keep track of what I sell: two Excaliburs, a Sun and Moon, and three Merlin’s Globes. Or whatever. Only when it’s cold my fingers don’t write properly and when I get home I have to guess. But the King Arthur things always go well, them and the dragons. I’m always trying to think of new ones.”

“Have you read
The Once and Future King
?”

“Yeah!” she says, her eyes lighting up. “My mum gave it to me after we went to see
The Sword in the Stone
. I don’t think she knew how weird the whole thing is, though. I was only about twelve. And it was sad, in a bitter sort of way. I remember I wasn’t expecting that, the bitterness.”

Mark returns with the drinks and sits down next to Morgan. “How’s your mother? And Keith?” he asks her.

“She’s all right. He had a heart attack and they paid for me to go over at Christmas, but he’s okay now. The snow was unbelievable.”

“Give her my regards when you’re next in touch.”

Is that what marriage, or partnership, and its ending, becomes? A polite nothing? Then I remember Adam’s call when he heard my key in the lock, my heart contracting each time he walked away through passport control and turned back to smile at the last minute, the smell of the back of his neck or his wrist when we lay curled together in bed.

No, marriage does not always come down to polite formulae. What, then, is it that burns in my belly when I look at Mark? The anger squirms again, only it’s not at him, it’s at me, at this flare of desire that blots out Adam and casts our love into darkness.

Desire. I should recognize it for what it is. No good pretending. Some trick of fatigue or grief or delayed shock or affection. Desire. No less but no more. Definitely no more.

Morgan drinks the top off her pint of lager. “So what are you up to, Mark? Still working for the National Trust?”

“Took voluntary redundancy. Looking about me. Only…” He glances at me, and I nod. “Just a possibility. Una’s family’s house might be being restored. I might be helping with that.”

She looks at me. “Oh, yes, I remember. At the—the Chapel?”

“The Chantry,” says Mark.

“I remember Mark used to talk about all of you. Was it the whole family, all living together?” Morgan asks. She sounds as if she really wants to know.

“Yes. My grandparents, my uncles, and my aunt Elaine. My parents were dead, so they were my guardians. And my cousins Izzy—Isode—and Lionel.” Anxiety twinges in me about what, if anything, Izzy might be saying to Fergus. “And always other people, too, like Mark helping to run the Press, or friends staying, or refugees—lots of those after the war. My uncle Gareth still runs the Press, but it looked as if he was going to have to sell it. But now, with Mark on board…But it’s early days.”

“Sounds great, all those people. It was just Mum and me, mostly. Till Mark came along.” She smiles at him, her face and voice unshadowed by anything unsaid but contradictory. Whatever happened then doesn’t seem to have left any pain, any twisting internal unhappiness, any store of silent…anything. “What’s—what’s the name? Isolda?”

“Isode. It’s from Thomas Malory,
Le Morte Darthur
. We all are.” Her eyes light up, so I go on. “Kay, my father, and Elaine, and Gareth, who still runs it. Izzy’s Isode, her daughter’s Fay, and Lionel’s son is Fergus. I’m the only one who doesn’t belong,” I say, and feel something prickle against my skin, as if Mark has suddenly moved. “It’s still Arthurian. Una is from Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene
.” Morgan opens her mouth and I know what she’s going to say. “And you are, too, aren’t you, Morgan?”

“Yeah, I thought she was cool…It must make you feel that all that stuff’s so near. Not Arthurian stuff, but having grandparents, the history. The house—did you say it was a bomb demolished the medieval bit? Was that the Second World War?”

“Yes,” says Mark.

She shakes her head. “I kind of can’t imagine it. I mean, you see all the stuff on the TV, and movies. Probably more than they—you—ever saw then. But it’s…in the streets you know. People you know. Some of the older ones where I work, they’ve got amazing memories, even when they’ve no idea what day it is. There’s one old lady did nursing in the
First
World War, in the trenches and stuff. We had a hundredth birthday party for her not so long ago, and she’s all there. Remember that series on the TV—
Testament of Youth
? She says they got it all wrong.”

Laughing, I stand up to fetch more drinks. “Heaven help anyone trying to re-create the past with eyes as sharp as hers watching.”

“So, this pilgrimage you’re on,” Morgan says when I come back. “Is it to do with your work?” I explain, briefly but as clearly as I can, since she says she didn’t do medieval things in history at school. She nods, then says, “But the pilgrimage thing—”

“That’s Mark’s word for it. I suppose it’s quite suitable, really, though it makes it sound a bit grand. I could look a lot of it up, rather than doing all this driving. But it is…Feeling the distances between the places does help, especially with Anthony.”

“Bit like Zen walking, I suppose.”

“Like what?” I say.

“I thought that was motorcycle maintenance,” says Mark.

“It’s a sort of meditation,” she says, smiling at his amusement, though his implied cynicism—if that was what it was—doesn’t touch her. “You walk somewhere, but you do it noticing everything about getting there.”

“You mean the scenery? Birdsong? The wind?” I ask.

“Yes, but even more your body. If you do it properly it’s like you observe your heel touching the ground, then rolling onto the ball
of your foot and off the ground again, and the other foot doing the other half of the cycle, and the way your arms and hands move, and how your shoulders feel, and so on. It’s about existing in that movement, but you’re still going somewhere, not like when you’re meditating sitting still and where you’re going’s only in your head.”

And as she speaks, as if she’s given me the vision I was denied in the car and at the castle, Anthony is present in me: his body absorbing the movement of his horse, the creak of saddles, the clink of bits and swords, the dust in his nose and the scent of hot, worn leather, and always, part of his bodily existence, the knowledge that where he was going was death.

Later, when Morgan goes to the loo, I can tell Mark’s longing to ask me what I think of her. “She’s lovely,” I say, and he looks delighted. “Is there a boyfriend?”

“Not at the moment.”

“It’s a shame we’ve got to move on tomorrow.” I say no more, and am tickled by my cunning as I watch the idea come to him before I continue: “Otherwise you could spend a bit more time with her.”

“We could…No.”

“What? See if she wants to come with us?”

“Well—yes.”

“Why not? It would be fun.” It would also be safer for me, but I don’t say that, try not even to think it. Safer for what?

“You sure? Don’t want to hijack your pilgrimage. Don’t want to derail our plans.”

“Well, they’re your plans too, and just as much yours to derail…No, seriously, it’s fine. What’s the use of a pilgrimage if you don’t include everything?”

“Everything?”

“Well, if you’re trying to understand what happened…” I say, which is odd, because that’s not why we’re doing this trip, after all.

“Morgan isn’t part of what happened,” he says.

“No, not directly. But you are, and she’s part of you.”

He doesn’t answer me, but not as if he’s lost for words, more as if he’s too busy digesting what I’ve said, and what I haven’t.

The pub’s Saturday-evening full by now, loud and smoky. When he asks Morgan if she’d be free tomorrow for a day trip to York and Sheriff Hutton, she’s straightforwardly pleased and accepts at once. Only when it’s too late does it occur to me that our meeting with Fergus, set up as a friendly aunt-drops-by-before-she-leaves-England visit, could get distinctly tricky. And with Morgan there…I can’t imagine her being embarrassed by anything, somehow, but she’s definitely not part of the Chantry, the family disagreements or even fights.

And then I realize that she won’t mind; she’ll take it at face value. How wonderful, to be able to say and hear things so simply!

It’s arranged. We’ll pick Morgan up first thing in the morning. “Sorry to drag you out of bed so early on a Sunday,” I say.

“Oh, I’m used to it. Besides, it makes sense,” she says.

We decide on a dull motel, which is cheap, predictable, and convenient for collecting Morgan. I go in, leaving Mark waiting by the car to unload the bags if they have a vacancy. “Is that a double room, then?” says the receptionist.

“N-no. Thank you. Two singles,” I say, my skin suddenly burning.

“Would you like them next to each other? I’ve got a couple on the third floor.”

“Yes, please,” I say, because to refuse is to say it matters, and I won’t say that, even though my body’s shouting it. Thank God Mark wasn’t at my side. And if he had been, what would I have done? What would I have wanted to do? Adam, where are you?

I sign the credit-card slip and fail to hear the information about dinner and breakfast at the restaurant next door, drink and snack machines on the landing. There’s apparently no lounge or any neutral space, just floors of rooms. Then I go to the window and wave the two keys at him, and he lifts our luggage from the boot, locks the car, and shoulders through the door into the lobby.

“I’m so tired I hurt,” I say, as we stand outside our respective rooms. “All the driving and—and so on. Shall we just eat in the restaurant?”

“Why not?” he says. “D’you want a rest, or shall we meet in ten minutes?”

“Ten minutes. If I lie down, I might not get up again.”

For a moment, he looks worriedly at me, then nods, and turns away to unlock his door.

It’s not a restaurant but a roadhouse pub. Over tough steak we talk desultorily about tomorrow’s plans. “Morgan won’t mind us discussing business for a bit with Fergus, will she?” I say.

“’Course not. She knows it’s complicated. Besides, she’s not one to be offended.”

“No, bless her,” I say, and the talk turns to other things.

It’s only when we’ve paid the bill and are walking back across the car park toward the motel that he says, “I nearly walked out on them, you know.”

This is what doctors call the hand-on-the-door moment, I think with sudden clarity. “On who? Jean and Morgan?”

“Mary, she was then. Yes. I—Jean had a new job, very busy, meeting new people. And Morgan was going to college and…they just didn’t seem to need me. It got worse and worse. Rows and things. We kept getting across each other. They didn’t want me, I thought. So I said I’d go.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. But we didn’t really talk about it, though Morgan knew. And it wasn’t long after that I discovered about Jean and Keith. They didn’t try to hide it much. I think she wanted me to know, in a way.”

“But she’s forgiven you? Morgan has, surely, hasn’t she?”

“Yes. I’ve—I’ve even forgiven myself. Almost. But I wish I hadn’t even said I was going to leave. It did damage, I know; it hurt Jean, and maybe that’s why…But I thought I was doing the right thing.”

I wonder whether to ask him if he does, after all, want a cup of coffee in one or other of our rooms, but hand-on-the-door moments are just that, Adam used to say. People say things then because they have their hand on an escape route. If you cut that off, they stop talking.

And, besides, I don’t trust myself to be that neutral, compassionate, or even uninterested doctor. There are questions rising from somewhere inside me to sit painfully in my throat. Is that what you thought you were doing to us? I want to ask him. The right thing? To me? Walking out? And why was it different with Jean? Did you love her more than you loved Izzy?

But I can’t say it; I’m so tired that my body’s smarting with old pain rubbed raw and new, and I flinch from what might happen if I did. So many years’ silence isn’t easily or safely broken.

We’ve reached our rooms. His silence makes me hurt. “You
can’t
know
that that was what did it—made Jean…look somewhere else. Maybe it wasn’t. And, besides, you didn’t leave, did you? You stayed.”