Alchemy (8 page)

That night as I lay on my pallet outside my lady’s door I thought that the actor’s life was strange personating others, for I felt a confusion in my own mind that Amyntas-Amaryllis must now be Piers. Yet when I thought on the words that I must say which the countess had written, it was not Astrea I praised not even the great queen she personified but my own queen.

Naught like to her the earth enfolds.

And as I lay there I saw in the half-light from a lantern far off, a shape glide into the passage and towards her door. It stayed beside me and I could hear its breathing in the gloom and smell the pomander that hung on its belt. I judged it to be a man for there was no rustle as from lady’s skirts. I let my hand creep towards the little dagger I had bound about my leg under my nightshirt, for I distrusted the great house since we had come there and the many unknown persons about me. Feigning sleep I was yet ready to leap up and defend myself. The shape stood a minute or two beside me as if deliberating and truly a quick thrust of a rapier and I would have been dead. Whether that was in his mind I have never known but at last while I breathed heavily as deep in slumber he turned silently away, leaving me sick with fear either for my life or for my sex.

For I had begun at last to see those changes in my body that might unmask me and show me up as an imposture. When I had held my lady’s nightshift against my face and smelled her perfume, as when I put my hand between her sheets, I was aware of my heart keep intemperate time and a sweet tingling in my secrets, then a little gush between my thighs. After when I examined myself I was still moist as with a thick milky dew that I was afraid might appear as a stain on my slops if I should
be seated so I took care to remain standing. I determined to wear some rag of linen always about my loins.

Also I felt a little ache and swelling in my breasts though not such as would appear beneath my doublet and shirt but only if I should be surprised naked without my nightshirt which I made sure never to be. Nevertheless I determined to bind my breasts for greater safety. I did not yet wish to lose my life as Amyntas for Amaryllis, to be confined by skirts and forced to consider marriage but would serve my lady as long as I could.

And while I lay there on my pallet I felt for the first time a fear of what would become of me, how I should make my living. Cast out by my countess I could only practise as a wise woman or a midwife and I had no mind to marry, to become subject to a husband and bear children. Perhaps I could continue in disguise in some place where no man knew me but that was to lose sight of my lady and daily intercourse with her. Suddenly my life which seemed so sweet and easy had been darkened by that shadow standing over me and all seemed at risk that before had been secure.

‘Secrets’: what a sweet word for it. Or them. Like bees thrusting into the trumpet bodies of newly opened flowers. And not like cunt that rhymes with grunt, hunt, runt, stunt and National Front. All hard rude masculine monosyllables. The female organ as devourer, a mouth with teeth that would chop a prick down to size. Not petalled softness. Just an excuse for violence and rape. A word to be shouted back in defiance or orgasm, that can be used for men as well as women. ‘You fucking cunt!’ I suppose the American equivalent is motherfucker. The ultimate insult. Coney, cunni was gentler. And pussy. Each with a slightly different feel to it.

My delight is a coney in the night

When she turns up her furry tail.

A fun bunny. Whereas pussy is more dangerous, with claws, naughty and a bit spiteful. Twat is just contemptuous, taken over by schoolboys and shouted on the bus going home.

After the boat docked at Westminster I walked back along the Embankment elated with booze and lust, not wanting to go tamely home to my studio flat. The city was afloat on the river, the floodlit Shell building, Somerset House and on the opposite bank, the County and Royal Festival Halls were moored ships that seemed to rise and fall with the dark waters as they leaned over their own reflections. Other drunks came towards me out of the night but I was too exultant and pissed to care. I was fireproof, more alive than for years. Would she seek me out? Would I ever hear from Helen Chalmers, my charmer, again?

The bridges were slung across the Thames on ropes of stars. I turned up Beaufort Street, crossed over King’s Road where London was still swinging its Friday night away. Then memory goes blank. I must have gone on up Dovehouse Street over Fulham Road and up into Earl’s Court, got out my keys, unlocked the house door and climbed up to my first-floor flat but in the morning I remembered nothing after I left the river and my vision of the floating city.

My clothes were hung up neatly. There was an untouched glass of water by the bed.

Saturday morning. Nothing could happen for two days. How to pass this time? I could call up Joel and we’d go to Heaven. I felt like dancing. I was still high.

‘You wouldn’t like it,’ he said when I told him my great idea.

‘Why not? I haven’t had a dance since for ever.’

‘That’s the point. We’re too old. It’s strictly for kids now.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I thought the same as you. You know: haven’t been for a long time. Check it out. It took me half an hour queuing to get in. I thought the bouncers on the door gave me a funny look. I left after another half hour. It was embarrassing. Nobody over twenty. Thirty you might as well be on crutches.’

‘Where do all the thirty-year-olds go then?’

‘Serial partnerships. “Going steady” it used to be called. They stay home or visit each other’s pads and cook what they’ve seen on the tele. There were some really dishy young guys there though and everyone was on something: pot, pills, speed. Who knows? You have to be to rave on like that all night.’

‘Where can we go then?’

‘The pub and a pizza, and then the pub.’

It was our usual routine. Only I’d fancied something different.

Joel is one of the most stable things in my life. We met when he was being cautious over boy-shags-boy encounters at the height of the Aids scare, when people had just found out that what they’d been doing in fun was killing them. For some it was already too late. Joel and I found ourselves going to too many hospitals followed by too many funerals. That was before they found the drugs to put it on hold. Sometimes I didn’t even know the guy but I’d go along so Joel didn’t have to face it alone, wondering what was happening in his own bloodstream and when the trodden-on rake would jump up and smack him in the face, a favourite image of Dad’s for disaster lying in wait.

What first brought us together was his accent. ‘You come from Gateshead?’ I said.

‘How do you know?’

‘My parents sound just like you.’

‘So what happened to you?’

‘I was born here. Corrupted from birth.’

I can do it of course, talk like Mam and Dad, but it’s fake, imitation, acting. Like assuming a foreign language that you know well. Sometimes my parents make the duty trip to see
ageing relatives. ‘Gateshead Revisited,’ Dad cracks. I’ve gone with them when I was still at school, seeing the streets where they were born, touring the homes of great-aunts and cousins. Feeling just that: a tourist. Roger always managed to slide out of it somehow with exams or football: a game he couldn’t miss.

‘It’s the Sunday dinners I can’t face,’ he once admitted to me. ‘As if time had stood still up there with meat and two veg, Yorkshire pudding swimming in gravy, tinned fruit and ersatz topping.’ His corners are smoother or rounder than mine and he can trade on being a man and the indulgent smiles that still brings to excuse him. At home with Jenny it’s watercress soup and pasta with pears belle Helene, or whatever manifestation of the latest nouvelle cuisine, the fashionable foodie commonplace for a time until the next chic chef woks it out.

‘What’s all the excitement?’ Joel asked after we’d sat down with our pints, his Guinness, mine bitter. It was a bit of old Gateshead I’d learned from Dad and still stuck to. It will all change now with the opening of the Baltic Museum and the gentrification of the Northeast.

I wasn’t ready to tell Joel I’d fallen for someone at the office party. After all nothing might come of it. She might not seek me out and if she bumped into me, or more likely sidled past in the corridor, she’d avoid eye contact, perhaps pretend we hadn’t met at all. No it was too soon for confession. There would have to be something to confess first. So I stalled with: ‘I was afraid we might be getting set in our ways, stale, that’s all.’

My passion for the older woman had begun after uni though it didn’t extend to Margaret Thatcher who was still reigning at the time. I found myself speculating about other members of staff, wondering if they saw through me or if I was as opaque to them as they were to me. Not that I was hiding anything. They could infer what they liked from my not taking part in the girl chat of the staff ladies’ loo. Susie Jubal was one, power dressing CEO whose smooth black suiting, elegant sheer tights
and high heels gave me a frisson whenever I was called in to draft a new contract. Not that I had much time for dalliance with the hard evening graft of Bar studies. Even my visits to another sort of bar with Joel had to become rare treats or necessary diversions.

Joel worked for the NHS as an accountant and taught an evening course at his local uni upgraded from an old poly. Now there are so many of those about you’d wonder why anyone would think it worthwhile to start something like Wessex. There has to be an ulterior motive in its founding, as a front for the Temple of the Latent Christ or some kind of fundraising scam. I pick up the phone and dial their number. Maybe a more oblique approach than rattling the bars of the gates will get me further.

Listening to the recorded voice on the other end I make notes. At the end I press hash and leave Joel’s name and address, an arrangement we have for when I want to stay anonymous. He’ll ring me when a message or packet comes. I’ve asked for the full kit of courses and application forms. The anonymous but faintly North American and female voice tells me: ‘Wessex University is closed right now. We shall reopen on 3 May. Meanwhile you can visit our website…’ I think it’s time I saw Dr Adrian Gilbert again.

‘Can you come to my office? The college is still closed but now I’ve read more of the Boston memorial there are questions, issues I think we should discuss.’

I arrange for him to come the next day. It doesn’t seem a problem. He has plenty of time on his hands. I can spend the intervening hours carrying on with Amyntas, as I think of him/her, and reading up on tribunal procedure. Meanwhile I search for traces of Amyntas Boston on the internet, surfing the International Genealogical Index, that useful tool set up by the curious theology of the Mormons of Salt Lake City. There are only births and marriages. Deaths don’t interest them since the
purpose of the Index is to retrospectively initiate your ancestor into the true church and thereby guarantee them immortality. Briefly I wonder where the dead have been hanging out all this time waiting for their resurrection on screen. Still, out of strange acorns useful oak trees grow.

But there’s no mention of Amyntas or Amaryllis being born in Salisbury at the right sort of time or at all. There is a Robert Boston nearby at Broad Chalke who married Margaret Brown on 26 September 1588, the year of the Armada; and they had two daughters in the following two years, Joan and Mary. And that’s all.

Where else to go? I try the surname Boston and am sent to a
History of Wiltshire
by John Aubrey. The index says just: ‘Boston, Salisbury physician.’ But it’s enough to get me out of my chair and pacing the room. I print out the reference. I need a library. At last somebody knows, knew about a Salisbury Boston and a physician at that. Is it her dad or Amyntas herself? I have to find out. I try booksearch.com.

Well at least they’ve heard of John Aubrey but they can only offer me a second-hand classic reprint of his
Brief Lives,
though it does look as if it’s the same guy. So I need a library and not any old library. I need the best. I need to get on my bike and head for Euston and the Inca courts of the British Library itself. Though now I think it might be asking for my darling to be nicked to abandon it in the backstreets of Euston. I lock up the office and pick my way past the morning drunks under their newspaper wrappers through the stinking gloom of the underpass up into the airy station concourse with its Eurostar promise of not-too-distant foreign parts of wine and women if not song, and into the gullet of the tube, almost running down the escalator steps while the halt and old hang on to the right-hand rail.

An hour later I’ve filled in the form with family history, seventeenth century as my area of study, got my pass, and am
climbing up to the reading room, hushed, packed with seekers and the acolytes who serve them. There’s more than one copy of my book. Which shall I go for? Not the earliest because it’s in a special category, hedged around with access barriers no doubt to stop it being stolen. I wonder what it would fetch on the antiquarian market.

I decide on an edition of 1848 as a compromise and sit back to wait for it. Then I think I could use the time seeing what I can find on the open shelves and I’m just about to get up and browse when, hey presto, here’s my book. It’s a bigger size than books today, with thick cardboardy yellowed pages. It’s been mended at some time and when I open the dried-blood cover it lies very flat as if exhausted, worn out. A faint memory comes to me. Is it the smell or the feel of the thick paper? The memory is of being about six and walking in crocodile through the Acton streets, always it seemed shrouded in winter, from our primary school to the redbrick Gothic of the public library where we were allowed to choose our books in the children’s section with its low, brightly painted chairs, posters and smell of damp wool. Outside in the streets we passed among people who must have been young but seemed old to us, walking about in clothes as bright as our kiddy furniture, young men like the dandies in history books with cavalier hair. Fluid, always on the run, they seemed to dance along the muddy streets. Their pastel flairs were stained six inches up the leg with the puddle water thrown up by passing cars. Yet I remember they appeared cheerful and trusting, unlike my parents, Rob and Linda, born in that unimaginable, except to them, before-the-war time and tarred with its sobering brush.