Alchemy (19 page)

‘Good. I’m glad he thought I got it right.’ Already I was having trouble saying her husband’s name. It seemed to stick somewhere in my chest like a piece of cold potato that won’t go down or rather in this case wouldn’t come up.

‘He said when you pointed out to them the adverse publicity they might attract they backed off into sweet reasonableness. Suppose you weren’t right? Suppose they could have got away with it without any media attention?’

‘It was a risk they weren’t willing to take. And anyway the opposition had nothing to lose by keeping it quiet. As it is Mediatex will try not to use them again. They’ll find that hard of course. Their sales depend on those artists’ names. They can’t afford to drop them all.’

‘You’re not really on the clients’ side are you, Jade?’

‘As a lawyer I’m trained to advise my client and do the best for them. Aren’t we?’

‘Of course we are. But I was asking what you really think.’

‘What do you think? Really.’

‘Oh it’s the old chestnut: investment versus talent. I’m on whichever side pays me.’

‘As we have to be.’ I realised I’d just dodged a twenty-ton artic. A bit of Helen liked living dangerously. I was the legal equivalent of rough trade. A few lawyers develop the art of the maverick, take on the hard cases, the underdogs and get
famous in the process. You see them on TV giving interviews outside the Law Courts while passers-by pause to eavesdrop and get their own mugshots on camera. They become TV personalities, always ready with a soundbite. Tolerated as pinpricks of colourful rebellion in a system geared still to pinstripe conformity. Tolerated because they’re few enough not to disturb the even process of law and, I sometimes think, to give an acceptable face to the heavy hand of repression that fills up our jails to bursting and comes down hard on the dispossessed and desperate. But although she, Mrs Helen Chalmers, my charmer, might dally with the maverick, find a touch of it a turn on, she would always draw back from the edge of the platform as the fast train thundered through the station. Prudent, of course.

Did I know this then, sitting there in the bar with the world going by outside the plate-glass window, able to peer in at us and wonder perhaps? Or is it just hindsight, the backward look clouded by the present and its distancing perspective? I did realise that without James Chalmers’ approval I wasn’t going anywhere in the firm or with Helen and that I’d have to keep on my toes, sharp as a tack and no slouching if I was to stay in the game.

‘How do you feel about Catherine Deneuve?’

‘I think she’s sexier now she’s older.’

‘A weakness for the older woman, Jay?’

‘You’ll be asking me about my mother next.’

We were playing a game of cat and mouse again, hunter and hunted with role-swapping thrown in to raise the temperature so that as soon as I seemed to get close, to have her in my sights, she would turn to run me down like Actaeon’s hounds. I wasn’t used to such heavy calculated flirting. But later in the dark of the cinema as the lovers’ lips came together above the tangle of sheets she took my hand and that’s all I remember of the movie and its simulated passion.

‘Can you get a cab from your place? I didn’t bring the car.
Have you got something drinkable there?’ Wine, I think, at this witching hour. Red.’

Inside my flat I quickly poured her a glass. And then when I’d filled it again, ‘Aren’t you going to take me to bed?’

‘If you’re sure you want to.’

‘I shan’t know till I’ve tried, shall I?’

So I took her hand and led her to my bed.

Even now, years later, I sweat and tremble like Sappho and though I know I don’t look it I can still feel paler than grass, the bleached summer grass of Greece, that she must have had in her mind’s eye. It had been a long time since I’d had a fuck except with myself. I wonder if that’s what Sappho did in the end, poor cow, lying in her bed alone.

I have to get back on the case again, stop this retrospective show filling my head with its private view of old horny, porny images. I have to answer Wessex’s offer of a place. Galton will pay, he says, so nothing should hold me back apart from this lethargy of ancient lust. To work, Jade. Decide where you’re going to put yourself, in English or in history. Ranee or Daniel. Maybe Daniel would be safer. Remember you’re looking – for what? Something to strengthen Galton’s case if he insists on going to tribunal. He wants revenge, his name cleared, damages I suppose, not, surely, reinstatement.

I email my acceptance and put myself down for the history department. Only a week to go and I’m legitimate. I can swan up to the gates any time and flash my credentials. The phone rings suddenly. Someone’s offering me a surprise job, rescuing their house sale from nasty hidden conditions, rights of way they’d forgotten about, a whiff of subsidence that will keep me out of mischief for a few days until Galton’s little problem claims me back. Then there are the Gaos I’ve been neglecting shamefully and the Crusader gathering dust on the ground floor, her engine oil coagulating until she seizes up on me. I get into my leather gear and go downstairs. As I kick her into life I feel
that old pathetic fallacy: the promise of spring even in the Waterloo Cut, growing stronger as I head south where forsythia and almond are beginning to make the best of suburban gardens.

‘– If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ as the man said.

Two days later an instruction pack thuds through my letter box with more details of courses, staff, a plan of the buildings, an acknowledgement of the fee, the registration procedure, rules, no smoking, no games, no jogging, circumspect clothing, no sunbathing or even semi-nudity, and finally the pass code to the gates. ‘We have suffered in the past from unauthorised intruders who have particularly alarmed female students and staff to the point where we have been forced to install security systems and identity cards. Never lend your card to anyone else or allow it to be copied. The system will recognise not only your identity number but the photograph which we have asked you to supply three copies of.’ And Galton thought it was all because of him. The nearer I get to Wessex the thinner his case seems. Maybe they had reason to see him as a real threat to their legal duty of care with his flaky ideas and weird arrogance.

I pick out student parking on the plan. How long will it take me to find out all I need? A month? More? I’ll have to accept Galton’s retainer if I’m to keep the bread on the table. That’ll make him happy. He’ll think again that he’s got me. Then he’ll be so surprised if I just turn and walk away, saying what I’ve seen of the background isn’t enough to justify a demanding letter, let alone go to tribunal with.

Riding the M3 on the first morning I feel a kind of apprehension as if I’m really a student again, a green fresher who doesn’t know the drill, as if I’m up for inspection, not Wessex. And then, when I swipe my card, I’ve keyed in the number, and I hear a click of recognition from the gates that give to my push against them, apprehension is replaced with a kind of exhilaration. I’ve done it. I’m in. I consult the map again and push the
Crusader towards the parking bay for cycles and motorcycles. ‘No cycling in the grounds.’

Arrowed signs direct me to registration. I chain up the Crusader and padlock my helmet in the pannier, smelling faintly of chicken noodles and spring rolls, along with my leathers and boots. I don’t want to frighten the horses. Not yet. I join a stream of carefully dishevelled yet somehow fresh-skinned young women and men, suddenly feeling old. What did we call mature students in my day: the wrinklies?

At registration my credentials are all checked again and under the heading: History on the notice board I find a timetable for interviews by the head of department and the name that’s now mine, L. J. Cowell, Lucy, down for 10.30. So I shall soon meet Daniel, who was so keen to have me as you might say. I consult the plan in the registration pack and head off to the history department.

I both see and hear at once that Daniel Davidson is a handsome cafe-au-lait Afro-American as he gets up from his chair behind his desk, stretches out his hand to shake mine and says the ritual, ‘Welcome to Wessex, Ms Cowell. We hope you’ll be very happy among us and be able to take full advantage of all we have to offer.’

I shake his hand which is dry and slightly scaly to the touch. ‘I’m sure I shall, Dr Davidson.’

‘Now tell me more about your project. Are you sure it would not sit better in an English discipline?’

‘To be honest with you I’m not sure. But then, presumably I can switch if we both feel it would be better environed elsewhere, from the point of view of the research of course.’ I smile, in what I hope is a disarming way, though I may just look like a crocodile about to snap shut.

‘So.’ He puts the tips of his fingers together and leans back in his chair like a professional, imperturbable psychiatrist about to hear some startling revelation. ‘Your subject “cross-dressing
and the Jacobean stage” isn’t new. Do you not think the ground has been well gone over in the past? There’s Spinks for instance. You will realise I felt I had to do a little research on my own account, get up to speed if I am to mindfully oversee your thesis.’

‘Yes but Spinks writes from an exclusively male viewpoint. I feel that the female perspective has been both overshadowed and neglected.’

‘As is so often sadly the case. As too with any black perspective.’

‘Of course. The two so often go side by side if not quite hand in hand.’

‘That would be good to see would it not? Eve and the Hamitic people in union. It brings us of course to the vexed question: ‘Of what colour was Adam?’

I don’t quite get the ‘of course’ but decide to play along with his train of thought even though we seem in one short leap to have got a long way from Shakespeare’s boy-girls. Maybe this is some trick question that determines whether you’re in or out.

‘Well the latest theory says that Eve came out of Africa so presumably Adam did too.’ I’d like to add ‘otherwise we’d have to wonder what Mrs Noah had been up to,’ but bite my tongue. Something tells me this bit of flippancy wouldn’t go down well, and the next minute I’m sure.

‘Ah, but we don’t have truck with the latest theories at Wessex. We rely on The Word. Such pseudo-scientific theorising can be very dangerous, especially to young minds.’

I hear the capital letters round The Word. Tread very softly, Jade.

‘Unless,’ Davidson goes on, ‘you locate the Garden of Eden and therefore the act of creation in Africa. After all The Word is not specific about its location and the old land of the chosen people may be seen as the extreme north of Africa rather than the south of Asia. Egypt where the people were enslaved was, is, Africa.’

Count the angels on the point of a pin. My heart which had been quite cold towards Dr Alastair Galton and his supposed woes, is warming up fast. If this is history as taught at Wessex I can see why he would have been unable to resist sticking a needle into this hot-air balloon and watching the whole thing collapse. And if this is history as taught at Wessex what must the theology department be like?

‘Indeed,’ I nod. ‘Then there is no necessary contradiction between the two.’

‘When in doubt go back to The Word. You will always find the correct answer. It may take a little teasing out by our finite human minds but it is surely there. However we seem to have strayed somewhat from your thesis into deeper waters. I think we have arrived at the point of a mutual trial. I like what I hear of your thinking, Ms Cowell. We must talk some more soon.’

I am being dismissed. I stand up. ‘Thank you so much for your time, Dr Davidson. I’m sure we shall get on just fine together.’ I reach for the hand again that now seems to have a distinct feel of the mummy about it.

Maybe I’ve made the wrong choice of supervisor. The dean had suggested that I saw both Davidson and Raval when I arrived and I’ve jumped the gun and gone for the prophet Daniel. But I can always change my mind though Davidson with his promisingly whacky, yet at the same time potentially frightening, ideas seems just where I need to be. Why do I feel this gulp of apprehension? As if I wasn’t going home at the end of the day. As if something stifling might settle on me and hug me to death.

The students are milling about the corridors like any other kids of their age, even those who seem slightly older than usual, like me. Hard to tell in the ubiquitous jeans, trainers and baggy or fitting tops who’s meant to be ‘mature’. It’s a warm spring day and I can see through the long windows, students sitting on the grass in groups, gossiping and swigging from water or soft-drink bottles. Don’t let your imagination run wild, Jade. All
may indeed be as nice as Apple-pie Molders who is presumably shut in familiarly with her boss, the dean, or juggling with the computer in her office, not mingling with the plebs.

My wanderings have brought me to the octagonal chapel. I try the door but it’s locked. No question then of popping in for a quiet word with whomever. Then I realise there’s a CCTV monitor above the door and wonder what holy gesture I can make for its benefit. Somehow I feel genuflexion or crossing myself would be a bad mistake. I settle my face into an expression of disappointment and turn away sighing.

Mary-Ann Molders told me the chapel was always open. Why should she lie about that? I’ve nearly reached the end of the corridor when I hear voices behind me: faint voices. A group of students streams past, nodding and smiling at each other. ‘Brother! Sister!’ are all the words I can make out. Perhaps that’s all they’re saying. I don’t need to look behind me to know they’ve come from the chapel and now I remember Molders telling me that it’s locked during, what was the word she used? Not services. Gatherings. That’s what they call them.

I remember my nana, Linda’s mother, singing a hymn from her childhood at the Band of Hope on Sunday afternoons in Gateshead: ‘Let’s all gather at the river.’ Then there was the miracle of the loaves and fishes in the Bible, that I studied in RI, a soft option for GCE as it was then, the fragments gathered up into baskets enough to feed another multitude. Then there was something about two or three gathered together in my name. There are plenty of precedents even I can think of for ‘Gatherings’.