Alchemy. Maureen Duffy

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      I turn to the index. There’s no mention of Boston. I try Gilbert. And there he is: Adrian; I look up his entry. It’s in a section where the writer says: ‘I shall now pass to the illustrious Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke’ under the heading: ‘Of Learned Men that had Pensions Granted to them by the Earls of Pembroke’. First comes the bit about Gilbert, confirming Amyntas’ story in the memorial, and then pay dirt.

      There lived in Wilton, in those days, one Mr Boston, a Salisbury man (his father was a brewer there) who was a great chymist, and did great cures by his art. The Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke did much esteem him for his skill, and would have had him to be her operator, and live with her, but he would not accept of her Ladyship’s kind offer. But after long search after the philosopher’s stone, he died at Wilton, СКАЧАТЬ