by F. G. Cottam
‘You’re going to have to get a trim pretty soon,’ she said. ‘Either that, or get measured up for your armour. It’s your choice, Adam.’ She smiled and raised her glass in a silent toast and sipped. They were sharing a bottle of Chianti.
‘It feels as though choice is becoming a bit of a luxury,’ he said.
‘Well. You have the luxury, here, of being able at least to choose your food.’
They ordered. Then Jane told Adam about the frightening apparition in the forest.
‘And the professor closed the dig on the strength of this?’
She shook her head. ‘He said we were done anyway. Cree was basically an endurance test and I think he felt we’d all endured enough.’
‘What did Martin say about what you saw?’
‘I haven’t told him. I haven’t seen him since the experience. I don’t know if I will tell him, to be honest. I can’t imagine his reaction would be much of a comfort.’
‘You must be aware of that theory,’ he said, ‘the one claiming that nobody knows anyone else really well.’
‘Of course I am. I’m an optimist, so prefer not to subscribe to it. You don’t believe it either. You’re too sentimental.’
‘But I do believe people are capable of surprising us. Martin might be sympathetic.’
‘Well, it’s a life of surprises.’
‘You’ve said that before.’
‘I think there is more to Grayling than meets the eye,’ she said. ‘Do you know anything about his background?’
Adam shook his head. ‘I didn’t even know his Christian name until last night. He’s Professor Grayling to us. He’s S.M. Grayling on the spines of his books. He’s very eminent, both in the field and in the lecture hall. And last night I discovered that he’s Stuart to his friends. Though I suspect he doesn’t have many of those. And I’d say that’s through choice.’
‘I think he’s probably gay,’ Jane said.
Adam laughed. ‘That word seems ridiculous, applied to him. He’s far too serious.’
‘Then I think he’s probably queer.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I reckon he’s been something important in the military,’ Jane said. ‘He’s occupied some clandestine role. He’s disciplined and courageous and can endure a lot.’
Adam thought about what Jane had just said. It was all plausible. It could be a flight of fancy or it could be shrewd judgment, but after his experience of the previous evening, he could not dismiss it out of turn. He pictured McGuire’s swordstick, the lethal ornament gathering dust on its neglected shelf and McGuire’s verdict on the weapon: it long ago earned its retirement from the fray.
Jane tilted back her head and laughed. He saw the rise of her pale neck, lovely between the ropes of burnished hair falling to her shoulders, and the generous sound of her laughter filled their corner space until she stifled it with a hand, blushing. ‘I’ll tell you something you don’t know about Professor Grayling,’ she said. ‘He sings Coldplay songs on karaoke nights.’
‘I think you quite fancy him,’ Adam said. ‘And now he’s gone off to see your father.’
‘He hasn’t yet gone, but he is going. They’re meeting tomorrow in Canterbury.’
‘Is that where your family live?’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ Jane said. ‘But my parents are pretty nomadic people. Their domestic roots have never reached very deep, and I haven’t spoken to either of them for weeks. They were in the Surrey Hills. It wouldn’t be beyond them to have moved to east Kent.’
‘Without telling you?’ Adam did not know whether she was joking or not. ‘Tell me about your father,’ he said.
Their food finally arrived and they began to eat. Adam was surprised at how hungry he was. Jane seemed hungry too. She spoke between mouthfuls. Her words emerged as fluent as a recitation, which it was, he realized, because she was no doubt repeating to him what she had told Grayling on the road aboard the Land Rover earlier in the day.
Sir Rupert Dobb had earned his notoriety and wealth as an architect. He was also a gifted mathematician and an instinctively brilliant engineer. He had patented innovations as disparate as high fidelity speaker drivers and a self-sharpening drill-bit while still an undergraduate. Ideas came very easily to him. But this had never had the effect of making him bored or jaded or complacent.
History fascinated him. So did comparative religions, folklore, philosophy, theosophy and magic. He was an authority on numerology who could play jazz piano with a panache professional musicians respected. His buildings, whatever else they were, were temples to the ecological and environmental principles considered so important over recent years.
‘He sounds fascinating,’ Adam said, ‘much larger than life.’
‘He’s charismatic and generous and entertaining.’
‘But?’
‘He isn’t a very nice man underneath it all. Every child carries the burden of parental baggage, with varying degrees of resentment about what it weighs. I know that. And I don’t think I mind bearing the weight of my father’s reputation.
‘But when he looks at me, I never see anything more than obligation. I don’t think he loves me and I don’t think he ever has. I don’t think he’s any more capable of the emotion than he is of flapping his arms and taking flight as a consequence.’
‘Or walking on water?’ Adam said. He smiled.
‘Oh, I’m fairly sure he can do that,’ Jane said. She smiled back. ‘Read the profiles carried over the years in the quality press, if you doubt it.’
Sir Rupert was almost sixty when his daughters were born. Jane’s theory was that fatherhood was such a glaring omission on his long catalogue of accomplishments that he’d felt compelled to become one. He had wanted a child for the wrong reasons. He had probably wanted a son and heir. He had not wanted a daughter and had certainly not wanted a matching pair of them.
Adam did not really know what to say. Jane’s experience was so far removed from his that he found her predicament difficult to imagine, let alone to sympathize with. Her father had been a willing constant in her life. Even if you ignored the genetic gold she had inherited from him, Adam felt that she had good reason to be grateful.
Love cut both ways, didn’t it? It was possible that from her father’s perspective, he was the one spurned, coldly distanced by his daughter’s unfeeling disdain. Adam’s limited experience of Jane was that she was anything but cold. But without seeing her together with Sir Rupert, he found the situation she described quite difficult to believe.
‘There’s something else,’ she said, biting her lower lip and looking pensive, which he had never seen before. ‘He is hiding something. He’s been hiding it for a long time. He nurses a secret, something corrosive, though he might not think so.
‘He’s always eaten healthily and always exercised, long before it was the fashion. He was a champion middle-distance runner at college, another of his accomplishments, and he kept the running up. I think that the health problems he suffered before Dora and I were born are a consequence of discovering and hiding his secret. I think it has put a strain on him that’s almost been too much for him to bear.’
‘It could be congenital, the heart problem.’
‘There’s no history of heart disease in his family, and he isn’t and never has been overweight. And people as talented as he is aren’t afflicted by the work related stress suffered by the lesser mortals who work for them.’
‘But he was old when you were born. He’s lived a long and eventful life. If there is a secret, it could be anything. That said, you could always ask him.’
‘I could never ask him.’
‘Then you’ll never know.’
‘I asked my mum,’ Jane said. ‘My mum still gets high. She only does it very occasionally, but old hippie habits die hard and life at Dad’s beck and call probably gives her good reason for the odd moment of druggy escape.
‘I was seventeen. Dad was jetting back from some project in Central America. Mum had
half an hour earlier smoked a huge joint in our conservatory. She was listening to Van the Man. My mum can be tricky. You have to be alert to the clues. Van Morrison is as serene as her personal soundtrack gets. She was blissed-out. It seemed a good moment. I sparked up conversation and then asked her outright.’
‘What did she say?’
‘That she had her suspicions. She had harboured them since about five or six years before we were born. Dad was researching one of his amateur projects on some alchemist he suspected had made an important discovery in what we now think of as biochemistry just before the outbreak of the Black Death.’
‘Except that your dad was anything but amateur,’ Adam said.
‘Mum said he found out something. That was her supposition, anyway. He found out something that stopped him looking for anything further. He deleted the files on whatever primitive home computer he was using then, and he burned his written notes on a garden bonfire. With the research abandoned, nothing on the subject was ever completed or published. And he wouldn’t talk about it, either.’
‘That does sound odd.’
‘Mum said he destroyed the source material of his research, Adam. Priceless antique books and formulae scrawled in the Dark Ages on vellum went on to that panicky bonfire.’
‘That could have been the dope talking.’
‘It was so uncharacteristic, Mum said. Dad lives for arcane knowledge. The sources were sacred texts.’
‘OK. I’ll buy it. Your dad hides a fearful secret and maintaining the secrecy is damaging to him. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. Do you want a dessert?’
‘I was reminded of Mum’s story yesterday morning, at the site. We were speculating on what you might have found and Martin was theorizing about history, saying it was stranger than we suppose. What if my dad found out something really terrifying?’
‘Do you or do you not want a dessert?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m the only woman in the Western world who doesn’t like puddings. I want you to take me home.’
He thought her flat incredible. He made no comment about it, but his feelings must have shown. She took his jacket and dispensed with her own coat and hung them somewhere. She switched on lights that illuminated the room at waist level and triggered low music at the same time. She fetched him a beer along with something in a tall glass for herself and they sat on a sofa together, facing a wood-burning stove which she fired into life with a remote console lifted from the low table in front of them.
’I know what you’re thinking. But I paid for this place myself.’
She kicked off her shoes. He felt the tug of desire as they clunked against the hardwood floor and she sighed with something between pleasure and relief and sat back against the plush.
‘You must be one of the Lotto winners who ticked the “no publicity” box,’ he said. ‘I would have remembered your tabloid picture, the pretty face grinning smugly behind the raised glass of champagne.’
She laughed at that. And when she stopped laughing, Adam kissed her. It was a long kiss and when it ended she held him and he felt her hot breath on his neck and knew that her eyes were closed, and that the strength of his embrace was a comfort after the fearful encounter she had undergone the day before in the forest at Cree.
Gradually her hold on him softened. She pulled back her head and looked at him in the firelight. The flames were tiny orange sparks reflected and glittering in the green of her eyes. Her parted lips wore a succulent, ruby hue. Her hands shifted, though her grip on him remained. She held him tenderly, for him now, out of want and not merely the need for whatever refuge his arms might provide her with.
They kissed again. He could smell the rising heat of arousal on her skin beneath the perfume she wore. The perfume was civilized. Beneath it rose the urgent pungency of flesh. A moan of pleasure purred in her throat. In the taste and touch and scent of her, as her body writhed, beneath him now, it was all he could do to remember to breathe.
Its great Gothic cathedral defined Canterbury. It was a place of worship almost a thousand years old. The Black Prince lay under the still splendour of his stone effigy in the crypt. Saint Thomas à Becket had been murdered by knights wielding broadswords before one of the side altars. Some places celebrated their past; others were defined by it, and to Grayling’s mind, Canterbury was one of those. It held the position in his mind occupied elsewhere in Britain by Lewes and Bath and Stratford, and by Edinburgh, where the ghosts of the resurrection men still panted in dark thoroughfares pushing their stolen cadavers on carts through the night.
Sir Rupert came into view. He was standing at the centre of a construction site atop a small hill of sand. Jane Dobb was a tall girl and her height had been inherited from her father. His position at the peak of the hill made supplicants of the men surrounding him. His stature made them seem obsequious. He was holding a blueprint in one hand and as he talked he stabbed at it with a forefinger. The men encircling him were nodding without comment. It was ever thus for him, Grayling thought. This was a man who had spent his professional life surrounded by inferiors who were paid to agree.
He was different from them in another significant respect. To a man, they wore regulation yellow construction helmets. He was bare-headed. His large, shaven dome wore the tan of another continent. Probably he has special dispensation to flout health and safety regulations, Grayling thought. The idea of a falling brick singling out Sir Rupert Dobb seemed unlikely. What brick would dare?
He saw Grayling and stopped, seemingly in mid-sentence. Handing the blueprint to one of the hard hats, he grinned and slithered down his hill of sand. He reached Grayling and they shook hands.
‘How did you get in here?’
‘I walked in through the gate.’
‘I’ll have to beef up site security. They’re supposed to stop and question anyone who looks suspicious.’
‘You just can’t get the staff, these days, Rupert,’ said Grayling.
Sir Rupert put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. ‘It’s been too long, Stuart.’
‘You’re a busy man.’
Sir Rupert looked around. ‘We make willing slaves of ourselves,’ he said. ‘It’s human nature. How is that clever daughter of mine doing?’
‘Outstandingly well, she shines even amid the general brightness.’
‘Then I hope you’re not here to dull the flame. Would you care for coffee or for something stronger?’
‘Coffee would be fine.’
‘We’ll walk to my hotel and take it in the lounge there.’
They walked the short and picturesque route to the riverside inn at which Sir Rupert was a guest. It was a mild day and the old buildings of the city were bathed in gentle afternoon light. It picked out blackened beams and ancient patches of sagging brickwork and Grayling wondered what glass and steel monstrosity would rise from the ground on the site they had just vacated in brutal contrast.
There had been an intimacy about Sir Rupert’s greeting that was unusual considering they had only met on one previous occasion. But that meeting had been unforgettable in its intensity. The man had come to him the way someone guilty of committing some terrible sin might do in seeking absolution from a priest.
Their encounter had been confidential, another feature of the confessional. And Grayling had kept it so, mentioning the subject matter of it to no one in the intervening years. It had been before the birth of the twins. Grayling thought that physically, the time elapsed since then had been kinder to him than to the billionaire knight of the realm whose secret discovery he had, for a quarter of a century, been party to.
His own secret was that he had known what Sir Rupert had told him already. His great challenge in the moment had been to try to look as surprised as he should have been by the revelation. Secrecy burdened some people more than others, he thought. Jane’s architect father lacked his talent and perhaps also his appetite for concealment. Then there were the implications of what he had discovered. He rode roughshod in his profes
sional life over his inferiors, as the cliché would have it. But staring into the abyss had given him a bad case of vertigo and he was a man still haunted by that black and depthless view.
He had sought out Grayling having read his book about the Black Death burials in York. It was a fluke, really. He could equally have gone to a historian specializing in the period. He had been compelled to unburden himself. He did not want any public association with what he had learned. What he really wanted was to forget about it, but that was impossible. He had been fortunate in his choice of confidant, in the professor’s view. He got a more sympathetic hearing than he would have elsewhere, along with the assurance he required.
Grayling had received him in the seclusion of his office at the college. He had been pale and distracted and he had looked like a man who had not slept well for several nights. He had opened with a question. ‘Have you ever heard of a place known only as the land we do not dare name?’
‘No,’ Grayling had lied. ‘The phraseology sounds Arabic. And the metaphysical implication sounds Arabic, too.’
‘Have you heard of an alchemist called Hieronymus Slee?’
And Grayling told his second lie. ‘No,’ he said.
‘He was active in the fourteenth century in Germany and the Low Countries, and later in Russia.’
‘He sounds as though he was running.’
‘He was. And he was running from a formidable foe. I discovered a deposition mentioning him written by a medieval knight named Robert de Morey. Sir Robert was a warlord and sometimes mercenary but of genuinely noble birth and good education. He was literate and schooled.’
‘Where is this going, Mr Dobb?’ The architect was then a decade away from being granted his own title.
‘There was a reason de Morey was charged with the pursuit and execution of Slee. His crime was the creation and nurturing and spread of the plague bacillus. Slee engineered the start of the Black Death. He created the bacteria in a laboratory. The pestilence was deliberate.’
