Alchemy (6 page)

Instead of clubbing I took to going home at the weekends, hanging out with the parents, the black labrador, the ginger cat and my brother’s family, the other members of our extending clan if they happened to be visiting. I knew Mam was worried about me, that she and Dad lay in bed in the morning talking around what I was or wasn’t doing. I said I was studying for my Bar exams, which was true, and that didn’t leave much time or energy for anything else.

In true English style nothing was said of course. But there
was no mention of Mr Right coming along either. Only once Roger my brother looked at me straight and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be getting married.’

I looked straight back at him. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘So I’ll have to provide the grandchildren.’ Two years later he did, marrying Jenny, a schoolfriend’s sister who got conveniently pregnant on their Barcelona honeymoon. It left me free and gave my parents a new topic of concern. I began to think about moving up and into chambers, becoming a real lawyer instead of just a legal adviser to a small firm, drawing up contracts and leases, and keeping them the right side of company law.

‘So you’ll be able to get us out of trouble,’ Dad said when I told them I’d been called to the Bar.

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘I fancy one of those anti-capitalism demos myself. What about you, Linda?’ I knew he was only half joking. After taking early retirement when British Rail was privatised Dad was helping out at the local union branch office.

‘I might have a go at that Leylandii hedge they’ve planted next door if it grows any higher.’

They were proud of having put me and Roger through university and we were both careful not to let a distance come between us as we moved away from Acton, further into London, Roger to the trendy Notting Hill semi his accountancy fees could afford, and me to the anonymity of Earl’s Court.

Why am I dredging all this stuff up? Because, I suppose, it’s been lying there at the bottom of the pit that’s my stomach, a lumpy mess of potage, part birthright, part the indigestible experience I’ve swallowed whole over my thirty-odd years. Maybe it’s time to spew it all up and start again if you ever can. Marlowe was a dedicated melancholic for all his wisecracks so perhaps he isn’t the best role model for me after all. I’ve got to put all this aside and get back to Adrian Gilbert: I have to get into Wessex. Why don’t I just pick up the phone tomorrow morning,
get the number off their website, and see what happens. I pour myself another glass of wine. Decision time.

I dream I’m in somewhere cold and dark, lying on straw. I know my clothes are filthy and my hair matted. Then I’m talking to someone I can’t see. ‘I can help you,’ I say. ‘I can defend you.’ There’s a shrill buzzing noise. It’s the alarm going off. My heart is thudding somewhere up in my throat and I’m slippery with the acid sweat of nightmare or the killer night fevers of consumption and Aids.

As I butter my toast and drink my coffee I bone up on tribunal procedure which isn’t something I’ve had to do before, and rehearse what I’m going to say when I get through to Wessex. Then I think I’ll try to see if the Temple of the Latent Christ has its own website. I log on and search via the ridiculously named Google. Bingo.

They have indeed and it tells me there are branches of the Temple in Switzerland, Peru, Swaziland and the UK. It even invites punters to sign on for courses at Wessex. The fees seem astronomical but maybe things have changed since I left Sussex and these aren’t as bad as I think. Now I can listen, and watch, an address by a bishop. The site also offers me almost instant ordination if I will subscribe to their beliefs, become a member of their church, as I suppose I have to call it. ‘Unlike other sites offering immediate ordination we offer only to the committed who have subscribed to the tenets of our faith. You may choose to be a lay member or one of the chosen, the elect who may perform certain ceremonies as prescribed by the council of bishops and elders under the guidance of our Father in Christ, Apostle Joachim after a period of probation.’

I wait for the address. First comes some unidentified but unmistakably numinous music, tonal religious candy floss. Then the bishop, or should I say the Apostle, against a desert background like that in pictures of St Jerome in the wilderness, except that there’re no friendly lion and lamb lying down together.
The Temple of the Latent Christ it seems is every one of us. So far not too far from certain wings of traditional Christian theology. But it’s also all the committed wherever they may be. Shots of smiling faces and uplifted hands, brown and pink and black. We are all bound together once we have dedicated ourselves. No going back.

Most religions have an opt out clause, except I’ve read somewhere, the Parsees’ Zoroastrians where you can’t get in and you can’t get out. I’ve frozen the frame on ‘His Charisma’. Now we go on. The Temple rejects the later Christian accretions of the Synoptic Gospels and bases its teachings on the scriptures of the Dead Sea Scrolls and those writings, the Apostle would not call them apocrypha, rejected by those who have perverted the true faith, together with Revelation. I begin to smell Gnosticism, usually somewhere at the heart of DIY Christian sects, the new evangelicals of our corporatist culture.

Joachim is clean-shaven and smiling gravely. He gestures with shapely hands; expanding and contracting his meaning, pushing out into the world leaving his vulnerable heart unguarded and then drawing his audience back into it. He isn’t a passionate orator like Paisley or Martin Luther King. This is new style, low key, almost murmured. Nevertheless I can see that it could be hypnotic. In case we miss anything, bullet points are texted across the wilderness behind his head, in a verbal nimbus. Christ is latent in all of us individually, only asking to be found. He is to be ‘accessed’, he smiles a little at the term, ‘by identification with the suffering servant, by giving yourself up to sacrifice. There are places, temples where the committed and the elect have all things in common and live in chastity until the coming of the kingdom. These places are temples because of those who live there, not because of brick or concrete.

‘Now through the internet anyone can join in, in spirit. Virtual reality is God’s gift of the latter day. Anyone, anywhere in the world, who wishes can enter into the new kingdom of
God, the new covenant, by becoming a member of the Temple which will ensure them the password, the key to the kingdom.

‘And there’s no time to lose. Apocalypse, in the shape of global warming and finally a meteorite strike that sends the remnants of earth spinning into the sun’s gravity field for our last baptism of fire, can happen at any moment. What after all is time? As the old hymn had it: “A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone.”

‘Unlike the creationists who interpret those parts of the received scriptures literally, and refuse the promised revelations, the Temple with the knowledge given us by modern science, under God’s eye knows this now to be literally true. I don’t say it will come tomorrow, only that it will come, that we are living in the latter days of John’s Revelation and then the children of darkness shall perish and only the children of light be saved to enter another, some scientists claim, the eleventh, dimension, the heavenly kingdom of a more radiant universe, where we shall find the promised mansions.’

I hear him winding up for the crunch. ‘The scrolls from the Dead Sea give us the rule of the covenant by which we should live. There are those who live in the world following the rule as best they can but susceptible to many temptations. Then there are those, the elect as they are called, who live together in a community. It was out of such a community in the desert that John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth came. But the time wasn’t right. The children of darkness overcame the children of light through God’s will, for nothing happens without his will. Now the time has come again for those who will listen and act. It is your choice: obliteration or eternal life beyond this finite universe. To know more, to take the first step towards salvation fill in the form that will appear on the screen and email it to: [email protected].’

Wait. The mesmeric voice has got to me. I’m almost about to click on to the first box that comes up asking me if I want
to continue. If I do I’ll be traceable. Maybe I am already. I click on the close window and exit, pursued by what? A tracking system, a virus that will eat up all my data, the following click of a mouse more potent than the bear that ate up Antigonus in
The Winter’s Tale?
Let me out.

Is Wessex a temple as Joachim defined it? And what does the bit about identifying with the suffering servant and preparing for sacrifice mean? Then there’s the idea of having all things in common like the early Christians. The Temple seems to be harking back to the Essenes, though Joachim didn’t use that word, the desert sect that was said to be the origin of John the Baptist preaching his doom message in the wilderness. But Jesus didn’t go for all that rule stuff. They hated him for breaking the rules, drinking wine, allowing his disciples to pick ears of corn on the Sabbath and eat the grains when they were hungry. Let’s look up Essenes in the on-line encyclopedia. See if anything fits.

‘Sect (Second century BC to First century AD) which together with the Sadducees and Pharisees made up late Jewish political and religious life before the Diaspora. Rejected temple sacrifice. Referred to in Dead Sea Scrolls. Practised an early communism and strict adherence to their religious rule, including celibacy for the elect. Massacred by the Romans. Their centre at Qumran deserted in AD 68 after the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem.

Well, there’s the property in common. A beautiful concept but very dangerous in the wrong hands. Who keeps the purse strings? Joachim and his cronies? Is the principal of Wessex one of the elect? Or is it a perfectly ordinary college being used as a cover? Did they plan to get rid of Gilbert because he wouldn’t join their club?

Strange that he doesn’t seem too worried by all this, except insofar as it’s lost him his job. Maybe I’m making too much of the Temple lot. Maybe they just see Wessex as a way of getting a bit of money out of overseas students. Where’s their centre,
their home base then? Here in this country or somewhere else? The States, Switzerland, Africa? Or perhaps you don’t need a centre. If you have the internet your organisation can be as amorphous as the universe itself. The terrorists who hole up in caves or on mountain tops in real locations have got it all wrong. They should be fluid. They’re still too physical. Real horror will be virtual, in a cloud of unknowing. As fantastical as a James Bond movie or a Playstation game. The Great Dictator will flood all our screens with images of violence and horror, brainwashing us until we give in. Orwell saw it all over half a century ago. How we could be duped by a semblance of reality, by shots in a war that may not exist at all. Mam and Dad have told me about the Cold War and what that did to their young lives and maybe it was just another con.

What a strange blend of pseudo science and history whoever started it has dreamt up with the Temple of the Latent Christ. And do they believe it themselves, or is it just a money-spinning scam? I want to know more but I’m scared of being identified if I simply pretend to join, though I can see I might have to if I can’t get at them any other way. What must your needs be to make you want to sign up to such a group?

I can understand about young men who feel themselves outside the society they were born into on some grotty estate in the Midlands, looking for dignity and conviction in belief and action, seeing the white male ceiling above them they can never climb through, much as it’s been for women. And still is. That’s partly why I’m sitting here with Lost Causes on my nameplate. To get anywhere those boys have to start from some sort of middle class, even if that may be just up from the corner shop, if they aspire to accountancy, law, business management.

Like my sometime boss Drewpad Singh who steered me through my first weeks at Settle and Fixit. I should have got to know him better, asked him more but I was too obsessed with Helen once the lightning struck. And if you’re unemployed
because the mills and sweatshops your parents came to this cold country to work in have closed, the rackety machines are all stitching away busily in some corner of an old empire, the bright clothes tumbling to the ground at half the UK minimum wage in Indonesia, Morocco, Quanjiao, then what do you do? How do you make yourself a place in this world where we can all see how the other half lives? Maybe Mr Goa’s nephew will end up joining the Triad boys on their bikes running the protection racket in the takeaway trade. Or do his law degree and find himself defending them. Maybe I should offer him a job, except that I can’t even make enough to keep myself.

I had awaited the return of Dr Adrian Gilbert, who had been on a visit to his friends and estate in Devon, on our arrival at the Great House with some flutterings of fear because of my father’s talk of his choleric temper and my lady’s own apprehension that he would not be pleased at finding a new young physician at her side. And so it proved.

The second day of our stay at Wilton she took me to view her laboratory there which was in size and variety of vessels and means for performing all kinds of experiments so far superior to our little room at Ramsbury, as I now saw it, where before I had thought it spacious and equipped with everything needful for our work. There were many delicate glass retorts and cups as well as of clay, and polished lenses for magnification. There were lodestones and a set of sailors’ needles pointing north. One wall was of cupboards whereof each drawer was neatly labelled with the name of the herb or mineral within. There were two furnaces, great and small, scales for weighing greater quantities and a fine balance for the littlest. There were also glass boxes with curiosities inside them as snake skins, a monkey’s skull, a dried bat pinned to a board and many fine big crystals that glinted rose pink, opal, sapphire and emerald in the light from the long windows.

‘That quadrant was given to the late earl by Sir Walter Raleigh on his return from his voyage of discovery to the Caribees,’ my lady said pointing to a fine instrument lying beside a pair of globes. ‘Should you like to make experiments here?’