A Secret Alchemy (8 page)

I pull myself together. “It certainly does,” I say. “Only it’s
battles
. There were two—1455 and 1461. The first one was—where’s
the market square?” Lionel waves ahead of us. “That wasn’t much more than a skirmish, but Henry VI was wounded in the neck and captured by the Yorkists. The second one was much bloodier.”

Neatly he maneuvers so that he’s walking between me and the road again, escorting me. The verb’s irresistible, although whether it’s this, or his ushering arm each time we pass a lamppost and he stands back for me to go before him, I can’t decide. Adam had good manners, but more as one thoughtful human being to another than this careful, codified male-to-female dance that is as seductively restricting as the boned and stiffened New Look frocks that Aunt Elaine so carefully cut and sewed for Izzy. Above us, plastic and steel and glass fronts are welded onto a muddle of brick and rendered buildings so that only the sideways-leaning upper windows and sagging roof-trees betray their age. There are rows of cars and parking meters, electric-lit advertisements and municipal hanging baskets, and a fine Edwardian encaustic plaque on a bank that was once the Castle Inn, commemorating the death of the Duke of Somerset.

A heavy truck comes growling up Holywell Hill, each gear-change a gasp then a grunt. Once, the hill was barricaded by Somerset’s men, defending the king from his own cousin of York, the most powerful man in the realm. Beneath the yellow lines, the asphalt, the cobbles, the crushed stone is the very earth they tried to hold. It would make a difference how many held a bow, how many a sword, how many a pike; whether they were confident in God’s help or fearful of damnation; if they were hungry, drunk, or weak with terror. It mattered how sturdy their helmets and breastplates were, how strong their arms and shoulders, where they mustered and how steadfastly they stood.

What did it mean to do these things for someone you knew only as the name of your allegiance? God, or the King, or His Grace of York? To use everything that you were made of in that cause, your body and mind, your strengths and weaknesses, and know it might not be enough?

What did it mean for my father, no more than school soldiering behind him, a creator who said in a letter that he had no allegiance except to art, to find himself under fire in the deserts of Iraq and the slaughter at Coriano? That my grandfather was too old for the call-up by months but had a brother killed on the Somme, and friends dead at Vimy Ridge, the Piave River, and others he could tell over like a litany? That Grandmama’s brother was kicked to death for being a conscientious objector? That Uncle Gareth never mentions Tobruk at all?

It’s not, exactly, my own world, because I only see it through the gray dust of newspaper photographs and newsreel reports. But it’s the backdrop to their lives and even in my childhood the rubble under my feet. Once I went to Mark’s home, and even then there were rows of houses like broken teeth and craters full of rubble and spears of rosebay willowherb. What had he left behind after he finished work at lunchtime on Saturday? His wages, that was it. But it turned out that where he lived was no home, just a yard full of scrap and what I later worked out was stuff his drunken father thought he’d be able to patch up and sell once he was sober. His brother, I knew, was in prison, which was something I couldn’t even imagine: a real person—sort of, because he was Mark’s brother—being a criminal.

A yard and a couple of rooms of half-rotted clapboard behind Rope Street, it was almost in the looming shadow of the ships’ hulls where they lay in the gray ocean of Greenland Dock. I re
member my fascinated horror at the cold and food-encrusted kitchen stove, the stinking earth privy at the far side of the yard, and the flea-bitten dogs I thought must be strays until I saw Mark feed them and sweep their mess out of the yard with the absentmindedness of long habit.

“Well, thank you very much,” he said, picking up my bike from where I’d left it on the cobbles. “Very good of you. Did Miss Butler get to finish her drawing before it rained, by the way? The one of the hens?”

“Izzy? No. But the rain stopped, so maybe she’s doing it now.”

“That’d be good. She was very cross when Mrs. Butler told her to come in. It’s going to be good, that print.”

“Izzy always gets cross if she has to stop working.”

He smiled, at me and sort of not at me, I thought. “Better go before it starts raining again. See you on Monday.”

“Okay,” I said.

The little door in the big gate rattled, then banged open. A man came in and stared at me. “What’s this?” He had a local voice only sort of slurry, not like Mark’s, and he smelled.

“Just something I left at work, Dad,” said Mark quickly.

“Wages? You owe me.”

“No, just a book.” Which was a lie. I hadn’t known Mark could lie.

Mark’s father looked at me. “You one of them, then?”

I nodded. I wasn’t frightened, I told myself, because Mark was there, and then I saw by the way Mark had his hand in his pocket, clenched around his pay packet, that he was frightened too.

Mark’s father held out his hand to me and I knew it would be very rude not to shake it, though I didn’t want to. It sort of
wobbled, but his grip hurt. “John Fisher. How d’you do? Want that bike? I’ll give you a good price for it.”

It took me a minute to understand what he meant. And when I did, I didn’t know what to do, because maybe it would be rude to refuse that too.

“Of course she wants it, Dad,” said Mark, and I was so relieved I nearly burst into tears. “Leave her alone. How’s she going to get home?”

“Only asking. Don’t get anywhere in this world if you don’t ask, do you, missy?”

One of the dogs was doing a mess in the corner again.

Mark took the handlebars of my bike as if he was going to wheel it over the bottom bit of the gate for me, and suddenly he was between me and his father, and even though I knew he was frightened I felt safe. “Better be off or Mrs. Butler’ll be wondering where you’ve got to.”

I never went there again, and the world it was part of was slowly filled in and leveled and turned into concrete, then glass, and now heritage brick. But after he disappeared I dreamed more than once of Mark walking away, against the old backdrop of that world, silently, as people do in dreams: just one little figure in an endlessly shifting panorama of gray-faced humans, trains, and signs and lampposts ticking past, and behind him the shards of monochrome buildings in a scarred and cratered world.

When I got home, Izzy was back lying on her front by the hen run, drawing. Obviously Aunt Elaine hadn’t spotted her, because she wasn’t on a rug but flat down on the wet grass. Her legs were across the path and I couldn’t get my bike past.

“Izzy, can you move?”

No answer and no movement, except for her pencil, flicking in the feathers then stabbing one beady eye into the paper of her sketchbook.

“Izzy!”

Still no answer. Cross, I ran my front wheel gently into her leg. It left a grubby mark. She turned her head. “What?”

“Can you move?”

Without another word she bent her legs up and I squeezed past, put my bike in the shed, and went in to wash my hands at the kitchen sink. Aunt Elaine was cooking. I scrubbed and scrubbed at my right hand, until the smell of Mark’s father was gone and all there was left was carbolic.

“Is Izzy deaf?” I asked Aunt Elaine, while I scrubbed.

She was cutting me a piece of bread. “No, why?”

“She never hears things when she’s drawing.”

“Nor do you when you’re reading. Do you want jam or butter or dripping on your bread?”

“Butter and jam,” I said, though I knew perfectly well I wouldn’t get it.

“No, one or the other, you know that. And
please
. It’s because you’re concentrating—you on your book, Izzy on her drawing.”

“Uncle Gareth says you always used to have both. Dripping, then.”

“That was when the Press made money,” said Aunt Elaine, putting the plate of bread on the table with the jar of dripping, and going back to chopping carrots.

“But that’s because it’s stories,” I said, pinching a bit of carrot from the pile. “Izzy, I mean. The stories are inside my head. I’m inside my head. You can’t be inside your head when you’re drawing; you have to be looking out of it.” I took another bit of carrot.

“No more stealing, or there won’t be enough for the daube.”

“The what?”

“The stew. A French sort of stew.”

“Will I like it?”

“Yes,” Aunt Elaine said firmly, taking a jar out of the cupboard and trying to open it. “Drat!”

Lionel came wandering in. “Mum, where’s Dad?”

“Still at the office. Homework?”

“Algebra. I’ve got stuck. The old boy’s given us an O-level paper.”

“Uncle Gareth’s in the workshop,” I said, through bread-and-dripping.

“Finish your mouthful first, child,” said Aunt Elaine. “Lionel, can you open this jar before you go?”

He took it and struggled. When he did get the lid off, his hand slipped. Juice and some dark things like pointy cherries went on the floor.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Olives, for the daube. I got Uncle Robert to buy them at that Polish delicatessen, for a treat, last time he went up to the Saint Bride’s Library. Pick them up and run them under the tap, will you? They’re delicious, you’ll love them. And give the floor a wipe.”

I can’t remember if I did like them. I suspect now that they were small and black and bitter and only the grown-ups did, and that more for nostalgia for dusty art-student holidays in out-of-the-way corners of Italy before the war than anything else. But I do remember thinking for a long time about me reading in my head, and Izzy looking out of hers, and whether it was the same thing or not.

I have to write about Anthony and Elizabeth looking out from my mind, of course, establishing facts from colophons and margi
nalia. There are annals and account books to examine, images and emblems to decode. It’s like Izzy’s drawings: I can’t write what’s in their heads, not really, any more than she can draw what’s in the hens’ minds except as it shows in what their bodies actually
do
. But to make a story I need to be in my
own
head, I think vaguely, then call myself to attention because Lionel’s talking again.

“So, with such an unusual property, and it being a listed building—developers are always wary of that—rather than waiting for offers to dribble in, the best option seems to be to auction the Chantry.”

“
Auction
it?”

“Yes. And the furniture and so on—anything that none of us wants. Most of the good stuff’s either been distributed or sold already, of course. The Press equipment, too, if Gareth doesn’t want to take it somewhere else.”

He might be discussing the dismantling of an office block. “But…”

He turns toward me. “Una, I know it’s sad. But there really is no choice. I’ve gone over and over the figures. It’s very sad, but there we are…Now, here’s where I thought we would lunch. I hope you won’t think I’m very eccentric if I keep my gloves on? A touch of eczema, you know.”

I didn’t, it must be a recent thing. I only realize something of what it’s really about when we’re settled in the restaurant and Lionel takes out a clean handkerchief. Then, discreetly below the edge of the table but unmistakably, he polishes each piece of cutlery and even the glasses. My suspicion that something odd is going on is confirmed when we finally walk down the hill after lunch to his plump, bright white house and he unlocks a small vault’s-worth of locks before disarming the burglar alarm and
asking me if I’d mind very much leaving my shoes in the hall. Some of my hippier friends do this, especially the Scandinavian ones, but
Lionel
?

I say nothing about that, however, as we go in our stockinged feet into the dauntingly spotless drawing room. It smells of polish and everything gleams. The mantelpiece is full of ornaments, the paint so shiny and dustless that they stand in a pool of their own reflections: a pair of candlesticks without candles, let alone the drips of wax that Aunt Elaine never had time to scrape off, a thickly engraved invitation or two, a Dresden shepherd and shepherdess courting one another in conventional gestures from opposite ends. And in the center is a small sculpture. It’s abstract, no bigger than could be held in two cupped hands, a clean curve of metal that gleams cloudily, like a crescent moon made real. I’d like to pick it up.

“Is that one of Fergus’s?” I say to Lionel. “It’s beautiful. What’s it made of?”

“It’s pewter, apparently. Spun pewter,” he says, but doesn’t elaborate, so I imagine Fergus tucked away in a secret tower, stooped like Rumpelstiltskin over a wheel, spinning base metal into a whirl of silver moonlight.

“Picked something up in town the other day that might interest you. It reminded me of the Chantry.” He unlocks a glass-fronted bookcase.
Le Morte Darthur
in a late-nineteenth-century art binding and wrapped like all the others in the crackling clear plastic of the antiquarian book dealer. The silvery whirl has spun my mind too. I don’t open it, look at the title page, the dates, the colophon. A book’s created to hold words, yet words are not what I’m thinking. It’s the weight in my hand as I take it from him, the corners pressing into my other palm. I turn it over, pull off the plastic clothing, run
my finger down the spine, feeling the raised bands like vertebrae and the tooled dips of title and author. Then I turn it again, open it, and furl the pages so that they tickle past my thumb, hesitating at each illustration plate, then flickering on, giving off a faint breath of paper and age. Under my palms the binding is smooth and warm and smells of beeswax. The brown calfskin is inlaid with green and amethyst leather and tooled with gold, curling round the book to suggest a lake, a sword, a grail, the colors so cleanly cut that there’s scarcely a join to be felt, only the slip from one to the next under my fingers, like the swell of muscles under a man’s skin.

I look up, and my cheeks are suddenly as hot as if Lionel—my brother in all but name—knows what I’m thinking. I haven’t thought much like that, not since Adam got ill. It takes me by surprise and I look down at the book again, and see that the pages have stopped flickering at a print of Sir Kay, Arthur’s foster brother and seneschal, scorning the new-come stranger he’s nicknamed Beaumains for his beautiful hands. You can just see the vanishing ring on Beaumains’s finger.