Alchemy. Maureen Duffy

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СКАЧАТЬ head for the photocopying department. My find lies like the philosopher’s stone itself faintly glowing in my briefcase as I make my way home again.

      Geber, Geber, who was Geber? Google tracks him down: ‘Jabir ibn Hayyan, known to the Western world as Geber, Muslim alchemist of the eighth century. Put forward the Sulphur Mercury theory of the origin of metals based on abstraction from experiments with naturally occurring red ore or cinnabar, a form of mercury oxide which when heated produces quicksilver and sulphurous fumes. According to this theory fire was sulphur or brimstone; mercury was water. Not however the substances themselves but the abstractions: combustibility and fusibility.’ Wow!

      That’s Amyntas’ experiment before the countess’ ladies. You can see how those old alchemists were trying to feel their way to some universal theory that would explain everything. Wasn’t that what Einstein was after towards the end of his life? Every so often along comes someone with a discovery or a theory that seems to have the answer: particle physics, relativity, static state cosmology, DNA and the genome. But there’s always another question unanswered beyond it, even if the theory itself stands up. A new dimension, a micro universe we can’t see into or space we can’t penetrate. Will we ever? Or will we destroy ourselves or be smashed into our elements by an asteroid before we can find out? Every new thing we discover only seems to make the universe bigger and us smaller. Shrinking man. There ought to be pride in what we know but mostly there’s only fear. Is that why so many attempts at an alternative answer are popular now? Because we can’t face it. It’s too big for us. Like the Temple of the Latent Christ offers its believers. Do what we tell you and you’ll be all right, saved when the universe blows apart.

      Maybe I’m wrong to be digging into all this. What seemed a simple case to make some bread is leading me into a cross between Star Wars and The Moral Maze. Heavy bananas, Jade. Cool it. Get back to the kitchen and cook up something solid. Get real.

      An evening with the Gaos pushing out the noodles and chop suey will bring me down to earth.

      ‘Mary,’ I say as she hands me the small brown carrier bags to pack into my vacuum box, ‘I hope your cousin is careful to have all his papers in order. The police are very hard on illegals these days.’

      Mary often interprets for her parents when a precise meaning is important. That’s why I’m telling this to her. ‘Oh he is very careful, Jade. He has his attendance sheet signed regularly at the college to show he is real student.’

      ‘Well if there’s ever anything I can do to help…’

      ‘That is kind of you, Jade.’

      I realise she doesn’t know what I do when I’m not riding delivery for them. ‘It’s just that I studied law…’ I trail off, not wanting to put myself forward, not wanting them to think they’ve been deceived and I’m not what I’ve seemed these past few months.

      ‘I will remember, Jade, if there is any trouble, thank you.’

      In the morning I’m up betimes as old Pepys had it, determined to get some answers out of Gilbert. His cheque has been lying in my desk drawer since he gave it to me while I make up my mind whether I’m taking his case or not. Now I think I’ll have a look at his writing and see if I can tell anything from it. I take out the cheque, still folded neatly in half as he passed it across the desk. I never look at clients’ cheques in front of them, out of some deep-seated embarrassment about money learnt from Linda and Rob. First it would be rude, as if you doubted their honesty. Second, it would infringe one of the sacred tenets such as: never flash your cash in public or even count it; never inspect cheques or query bills. The financial delicacies of a vanished age when a gentleman’s word was his bond and to show an interest in lucre, your own or someone else’s, was vulgar and bourgeois. Now we reel from fraud to scandal with our creative accounting and ethos of grab-all-you-can in this free-market free-for-all where the Darwinian survival of the fittest is jungle law.

      I flatten the cheque and study the writing. Very small and neat like a monastic script. The date, my own name, the amount. Hang about. It isn’t Gilbert’s signature. The name on the cheque is Alastair Galton. I can’t wait for his buzz on the entry phone to confront him. I’m trying out opening questions in my head such as ‘Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you playing at?’ But while I’m waiting I run a quick search on this new name and get a complete blank. At least Adrian Gilbert existed, once upon a time. This guy is totally unknown. The buzzer sounds; punctual as usual. I let him in. I say good morning, shake hands and sit him down. I’m careful not to address him by name.

      ‘You haven’t paid in my cheque, Ms Green.’

      The breath is almost knocked out of me by his audacity. ‘That’s because I didn’t recognise the name on the cheque,’ I lie.

      ‘I rather expected you to query it on the telephone.’

      ‘You told me when we first met that you were Dr Adrian Gilbert.’

      ‘The “Dr” is correct.’

      ‘Why did you give me a false name? I warned you about trying to deceive your own lawyer.’

      ‘Yes, you did. Quite properly. But you see when I first came to you, you weren’t my lawyer. I knew nothing about you. I wanted to see how suitable you were before I entrusted my case to you. You are, after all, very young and…’

      ‘And a woman?’

      ‘Well, yes.’

      ‘Dr Galton, if that is your name, there’s enough gender discrimination in the legal profession already without you adding to it.’

      ‘Have you decided to represent me?’

      ‘Have you decided you really want me to with my obvious disabilities?’

      ‘I haven’t cancelled the cheque.’

      ‘And I haven’t paid it in. So we have reached some kind of stalemate.’

      ‘Stasis equilibrium, you could say.’

      What the fuck am I doing with this guy? Do I need all this? ‘I think we should begin again. Your name is really Alastair Galton?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Why did you pick the name of Adrian Gilbert?’

      ‘I regard him as some sort of spiritual ancestor.’

      ‘Why are you anxious to identify with a long dead necromancer, the friend of John Dee who was both self-deceiving and deceived others and was conned in his turn?’

      ‘I see you have been doing your homework, Ms Green. That’s good. Gilbert was in many ways a brilliant man. He lived at a time still deficient in information whereas, we’re told, we live in the information society although I’m not ever quite sure what that means, and perhaps we too are deceiving ourselves. You know as well as being a respected physician he was involved in navigation and the quest for the Northwest Passage. He was a fine mathematician, a would-be discoverer who never put to sea.’

      ‘An astrologer?’

      ‘So was Sir Isaac Newton, a scientific genius comparable in his own field to Shakespeare, in a time when astrology and true astronomy shaded into each other.’

      ‘Still, why pick his name?’

      ‘Because СКАЧАТЬ