Alchemy. Maureen Duffy

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СКАЧАТЬ nagging and prodding, pulling on a hangnail of dispute in the hope of drawing blood. With half my mind I’m turning over Gilbert’s case and what I’ve had time to read of Amyntas Boston’s memorial. So far it’s hard to see the harm in it. But then it’s all a matter of viewpoint and selection. What exactly did Gilbert distribute to his students and what commentary did he give them on the material? I pull a sheet of paper towards me and start to put down questions I should ask him. And suddenly I realise that I’m already hooked. In my head I’ve taken on this case I don’t really understand or see the shape of. I want more background.

      I’ll run another check on the website for Wessex Uni but I think I need more than they may decide to tell me, more than the acceptable face of the college in competition with all its rivals. I need to go there, see for myself, get the feel. I finish my plateful, put the cardboard lids over the remains to be heated up for lunch tomorrow, pressing down the frilled soft metal rims, and stack the little dishes in the fridge. Then I go through to my office to surf for Wessex and input my thinking so far.

      Is it Amyntas Boston’s memorial that’s turning this, that ought to be just case notes, into a diary, a commonplace book of my own? I must watch myself. I’m in danger of becoming one of those dreary, pitiful loners whose only relationships are on screen, pseudonymous trawlings. ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ That was in our GCE set-book anthology. The last lines had a bleakness I still remember in moments when they might be best forgotten.

      And how the silence surged softly backward

      When the plunging hoofs were gone.

      There were ghostly listeners in that otherwise empty house, like the silent observers of messages we send out into cyberspace, that can log on to you, track you down and even offer you stuff you haven’t asked for, porn sites and cheap fags, enticements to fly away or join a cult.

      Tomorrow I’ll pay Wessex a visit. It can’t take more than an hour from London. What excuse can I give to get on to the campus if they’re very security minded? I could be considering enrolling for a course, needing application forms and a full brochure, more than I can download from their website. Or I could be delivering something. A letter to the principal. Make a note of his name: the Revd Luther Bishop. Or I could just ring for an interview with him. Tell the truth. Say I’ve been asked to represent Dr Gilbert and I want to hear his, the college’s, side of the case. Tell the truth until you’re forced to lie.

      He might refuse to see me or it might take time to get an appointment. I need to be doing something. After all this is potentially the most interesting case I’ve had since I set up on my own. True it’s only a tribunal not a full court or even magistrates’ but compared with the messy divorce settlements, hedge and right of way claims, conveyancing and inheritance squabbles that have come my way it is High Court stuff. I can see me as a legal Lara Croft slaying ghostly monsters or Buffy slapping down vampires, except that I’m not sure Gilbert isn’t himself some kind of shapechanger or at least charlatan.

      Already I’m empathising with that dead girl, Amyntas Boston. If she was tried for witchcraft who did she have to defend her? What would I plead if I could go back to her time and her trial? I wouldn’t be allowed of course. In spite of Portia, who anyway had to dress up as a young man, not many women would have had the knowledge, let alone the chance, to stand up in court except as witnesses or defendants.

      ‘A Daniel come to judgement. O wise young judge.’ What was Shakespeare getting at with his boy, girl, boy impersonations, especially there in The Merchant? That it was all right to pretend, to lie, to turn nature and society upside down in the interest of justice? Or was it just about what women will do for love? None of the guys in the play are worthy of her. Won’t she get bored with Bassanio after a few years of marriage and children? So many of the plays call out for a sequel, a what happens next to his Olivia, Rosalind, Kate, Beatrice. Maybe they’ll be widowed and take over the running of vast estates like Amyntas Boston’s countess. It’s the soft ones he provides an endstop to with death: Cordelia, Ophelia, Desdemona.

      Then there’s the female physician in what’s it called, who cures the king and gets her man as reward. Maybe he based cool women like that on the Mistress Fittons he saw around the court, flouting convention in a flurry of cloak and feathered bonnet.

      Amyntas Boston’s final sentences I read last night sound as if s/he was falling in love with the countess, a Cherubino or Rose Cavalier situation, the kind of admission you’d pounce on in court. ‘Please turn to File E, item 29. Have you got it? Please read it carefully. Do you recognise those words? Do you remember writing them? What precisely did you mean by them?’ Is this the witchcraft Amyntas was accused of, where the beloved becomes pure gold and everything else is dross? Until you find only food’s gold and a heart turned to stone.

      I shut down the file. Tomorrow, I’ll have an expedition to Wessex. There’s a bus from the station and to the campus if I don’t want to bike it and risk frightening the horses in my helmet and leathers. On the other hand it would be good to roar up like Nemesis or the US cavalry. Or a witch on a motorised broomstick if that’s what they want to see.

      In the end I’ve decided for the full frontal and I’m on my way this morning, a dark wedge parting the air, at one with my bike, like any centaur, except that I have to feel she’s both metal and flesh. On a bike you ride astride. With a scooter you’ve got your legs together. Next stop sidesaddle. Did witches straddle or sidesit on their broomsticks? I’m in danger of falling into verse, a kind of incantation, as I zoom down the M3 leaving the saloons almost standing still. On past, zip between and away. ‘Poop-poop, poop-poop,’ translated into modernish as ‘zoom zoom, zoom zoom’. We’re the incarnate sound the rap car drivers try to conjure from their stereos: ‘boom boom, boom boom,’ while they wait in traffic snarls. We divide the airwaves, the bike and me. If we could go fast enough we’d hear the sound barrier crash open behind us. As it is we hardly dare hit a ton in case the fuzz is lurking somewhere behind a camera. Still it’s great hacking and yawing between the dawdling cars, the dinosaur container lorries, and their pot-bellied liquid carrier cousins. In no time there’s the junction six sliproad and I must sidle across the lanes and settle down to a respectable thirty. I pull in to a layby and study the map I downloaded from the Wessex website. Then I’m off again, weaving a leisurely route round the outskirts of the town that boasts on a hoarding that it’s home to the international pharmaceutical making pills for ills, and on the hit list I remember, of animal rights activists.

      Down Wessex Road now towards the campus. Which came first, the name of the road or the uni? It was St Walburgha before, so someone must have taken inspiration from the location or nobbled the council to change the name. I cruise towards the first cluster of buildings and I’m stopped dead by a high gated iron fence. Fuck! No storming arrival then with a spectacular purring of the engine in low gear, and skirl of tyres to wake the dead. Drifting right up to the gate I cut the juice and prop the old girl up on her stand. I swing my leg over, take off my helmet and go up to the gate.

      It’s the right place. A neat brass plate says so. There’s an entry phone and a numeric pad to open the side panel of the gate to let pedestrians in. But you have to know the code. That’s very clear. I stare at it, willing it to open, for someone to come through and hold it conveniently ajar for me. Beyond I can see grounds with grass, shrubs and winding gravel paths. Way back are buildings, some old brick, others new, glass, steel and what must be concrete under the pale recon stone cladding. I can just make out the octagonal chapel of St Walburgha almost hidden by dark azaleas, where Anglican nuns once taught aspirant scholarship girls to teach.

      I go back to the bike and get out my mobile. Gilbert must give me the entry code.

      ‘Where are you?’

      ‘I’m outside the fence like Love Locked Out.’

      ‘In СКАЧАТЬ