The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

  ‘You are this lady’s husband, sir?’ the driver asked anxiously.

  ‘That’s right.’ And to Jay, Merlin said: ‘Can you stand up?’

  She stood up.

  ‘No bones broken?’ he asked.

  Jay shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Please be certain, lady,’ said the driver. ‘I have witnesses.’

  A crowd had gathered. Merlin waved his arms to clear a passage. ‘Okay, folks, the show’s over. The lady had a fall but luckily the driver saw her in time. I don’t think his vehicle even touched her.’ He led Jay through the throng away from an approaching traffic policeman, and slipped inside a cafe where he ordered a large brandy for her. Jay swallowed the entire glass in one gulp as though it were water and choked. Some colour came back into her cheeks.

  She turned to Merlin and searched his face. ‘Oh, thank God it’s you,’ she said, clutching his hand with both of hers. They were icy cold.

  ‘Who else would it be?’ he asked.

  She clung to him so tightly that he could feel her whole body wracked with sobs. ‘Oh God, Merlin! Take me away from this terrible, terrible place.’

  Back at the hotel, Jay’s room had not yet been made up. From the courtesy tray, he made a cup of tea for her, sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her hand until the shivering stopped. She was pleading they should leave Chartres right away, but he insisted they would go after she had had a hot bath and a rest. Only then did he ask what had happened.

  ‘I was following you into the cathedral,’ Jay closed her eyes. She did not want to talk about it.

  ‘Take it slowly.’ The pressure of his hand on hers said, It’s okay. I’m here.

  ‘You went on ahead.’ She paused. ‘I wanted to call after you, to wait for me. I didn’t want you to leave me alone. But I couldn’t talk, Merlin. I couldn’t open my mouth. It was like at Canterbury when my fingers wouldn’t play the flute.’

  ‘And then?’ he prompted.

  ‘Then I was … pushed backwards.’

  ‘Pushed? By whom?’

  Jay shook her head. ‘No one. There was nobody near enough. Not near me, but inside me. Something sucked all the energy out of me and threw me away like an empty can.’ She searched his eyes. ‘You think I’m mad?’

  Merlin shook his head. He realised that Jay was talking about exactly the moment when he had felt that strange sensation in the maze but first he looked for a rational explanation: ‘Perhaps you stumbled on the steps? Or caught your heel on an uneven stone?’

  Jay shut her eyes to concentrate. There was something else too. Why was it so hard to remember and verbalise what had just happened?

  ‘The same thing …’ She ran out of words.

  ‘The same thing what?’ Merlin was worried by the look of anguish on her face.

  A shudder ran though Jay’s whole body. ‘I’m trying to remember.’

  He waited until her eyes opened.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ she said. Her eyes begged him no to say she was going mad. ‘The same thing happened at Bordeaux cathedral, I think.’

  Merlin looked sharply at her. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘I nearly walked under a taxi. It was as though my brain was switched off. One minute I was in the cathedral and the next thing I knew, I was standing in the middle of the road. I heard the brakes squeal and the driver shout at me but I didn’t know how I’d got there. Oh God, what’s happening to me?’

  She was shivering uncontrollably again. Merlin put another blanket on the bed and smoothed her hair. ‘Right now I want you to have a sleep. Then we’ll go back to the cathedral together and you can show me exactly where …’

  Jay gripped his hand tight. ‘I’m not going back there, Merlin. Ever.’

  ‘Okay. Relax.’ He spoke soothingly. ‘You don’t have to go back. But I do. There’s something I have to check out. I shan’t be long. Just give me an hour.’

  Back at the cathedral, tourists were filtering through the door past the spot where Jay had fallen. The Dutch coach had gone. Merlin walked into the ancient building and retraced his footsteps to the centre of the maze. He stepped onto and off the centre point several times. There was no effect, although, casting his mind back, he was certain that he had seen a flash of light and felt that strange sensation of goose pimples. No, he corrected himself. It had been more like the sensation when a comb is passed over the back of one’s hand and the hairs all rise, attracted by the minute charge of static electricity, but a hundred times more powerful.

  He sat in one of the chairs to reason out what might have occurred. From the little he had read about telluric energy, it functioned in some ways similarly to electricity. So, what if the centre point of the maze was like a terminal on a battery? To complete a circuit, there had to be two terminals, a positive and a negative. Connect a bulb to one pole only and nothing happens – as when he stepped onto the centre of the maze and Jay was not near. But if she were somehow linked with him as far as the telluric forces were concerned, then she must have been in contact with the other terminal at the moment when …

  He walked back to the door, opened it and found himself staring at Jay’s face. It was, if anything, more of a likeness than the head on the column in the Romanesque Cloisters at New York. The full-length, life-size carving was of a woman wearing a crown and with a prayer book in the right hand pressed piously against her breast. The drapery of the simple, ankle-length dress was stylised but the face was startlingly natural. The sitter seemed to be repressing a smile at some inward knowledge. It was a portrait executed with loving attention to detail. Jay’s broad brow, strong nose, full lips and her long hair, here coiled in tresses, were unmistakable.

  The sculpture was one of a pair. The other was of a weak-faced, monkish man who was looking disapprovingly at the woman beside him. There was nothing in the guide book to say who the two figures were, so Merlin asked one of the sacristans. The stream of information in rapid French was only comprehensible because he was already pretty certain what the man was saying.

  The two carvings on the west portal were of King Louis and Queen Eleanor of France, placed there after a visit to Chartres by the royal couple to give thanks for their safe return from the Second Crusade in 1149.

  Merlin walked back to the doorway to photograph the face of stone. In the view finder, Jay seemed to be smiling at him. He zoomed in to check his focus. Through the telephoto lens he could clearly see a small bump in the stone, at the base of the neck on the left side. He had not seen it before because it was almost concealed by the low neck line of the carved dress. A fault? A piece of bad carving? No, the workmanship was so precise and of such quality, it was no accident. The anonymous twelfth century sculptor had intended the small bump to be there. Merlin lowered the camera, walked back to the carving and put out a hand to touch the stone, running his fingers down the neck, across the bump and down to the collar bone. The small protrusion in the stone was exactly where the mole was on Jay’s neck.

  Chapter 11

  ‘You’re like two different women,’ said Merlin.

  He drove off the motorway and parked in a recreation area where they walked hand in hand between the leafless trees. It was sunny but cold and both were wearing anoraks. Merlin put an arm around Jay’s shoulders, feeling protective. ‘At one moment you’re the beautiful woman I fell in love with on the tow-path, that day with Leila. And then some influence changes you completely am I right?’

  ‘It’s more worrying than that,’ said Jay. ‘It’s as if there is someone else struggling for possession of my body and my brain. I think I’m going mad.’

  ‘No.’ Merlin tried to make himself sound certain.

  ‘Then how do you account for what happens?’

  He chose his words carefully. ‘I think that you’re a very sensitive person who should not be exposed to certain things or certain places that have a connection with this ancestress of yours. For Chrissakes, she was one hell of a powerful person, Jay! Think what it took in tho
se days for a woman to dump her husband who was the King of France and then marry the guy who becomes King of England, next day! And don’t forget that Eleanor incited Henry’s own sons to rebel against him, not once but several times. That’s why he locked her up for fifteen years. Even after that, she grabbed the reins of power the day she was released and ruled England as regent until Richard could get there. After fifteen years in gaol and at the age of sixty-five, that took some doing! Before she died, her children or grandchildren were kings and queens of every country from Ireland to the Holy Land. The more I learn about her, the more I think she was the most powerful person in medieval Europe. If she’d been male and ruled in her own right, her name would be up there in lights alongside Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.’

  Jay leaned against Merlin’s shoulder. She wanted him to go on talking. He was beginning to make sense of her own tortured wondering.

  ‘So let’s accept that you are, what’s the word? Suggestible to her influence,’ he continued. ‘Instead of deliberately going to places with an Eleanor connection, we’ll keep well away. And I’m betting all these experiences will stop happening.’

  Jay stopped and looked into his eyes. ‘You really don’t think I’m crazy, Merlin?’

  For a second he was going to tell her about the veiled woman, but then decided it would not help her. Better she thinks I’m sane as a rock … ‘Let’s give it a try,’ he said, hugging her. ‘This damned ghost hunt, treasure hunt or whatever it was, is finished. We’ll stop the night in St Denis and tomorrow we take off for somewhere warm, to lie on a beach and get to know each other like any normal couple.’

  Jay buried her face in his collar. He felt so strong, so dependable. She wanted him to hold her for a long time. There was none of the awful, gut wrenching lust to use him for her pleasure, just a peaceful sensation of floating in his arms.

  *

  From across the river, St Denis was like an illustration to a book of fairy tales. The setting sun tinted the higgledy-piggledy buildings under their sheltering limestone cliff a delicate golden pink colour.

  Leila lifted her glass of wine. ‘Cheers. Let’s drink to my sense of balance.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Jay.

  Leila lowered her voice mysteriously. ‘Dom suspects I have a new lover. I have to walk a narrow line and not fall off either side.’

  ‘Which means Dom’s suspicions are well founded?’ Merlin guessed.

  ‘Sort of,’ Leila giggled. ‘But the new guy is also jealous of Dom. So I’ve told him that’s all over.’

  ‘And it isn’t?’ Jay asked.

  ‘No way!’

  ‘How can you sort of have a new lover?’ Merlin wondered.

  ‘Sort of means it won’t last,’ Leila explained. ‘But Mr This-week has bought three of my paintings, so I don’t want it to end just yet.’

  ‘What you’re talking about,’ he decided, ‘is prostitution in kind.’

  They were sitting on a makeshift veranda outside Leila’s house watching the sun go down. At the end of the overgrown garden, the Dordogne flowed past in full flood. For once the house was full of food which Leila had bought in a mad shopping spree. It had to be eaten because the fridge no longer worked, so Jay and Merlin were helping her to consume a bizarre mixture of oysters and pâté de foie gras and terrine de rillettes and smoked magret de canard, washed down with a local sparkling wine.

  The food was marvellous but somehow the conversation only flowed in fits and starts, despite all Leila’s efforts. They were in the middle of a long silence when Leila said, ‘Oh Christ, I quite forgot, Merlin. Your agent rang. He said to call him back.’

  ‘Matty? He rang today?’

  ‘No. Yesterday, or was it the day before?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’

  She smiled disarmingly. ‘Too busy balancing. Didn’t want to fall off the wire. Sorry.’

  Merlin departed in the direction of the telephone.

  When he had gone, Leila said, ‘Jay, honey, it’s none of my business, but I hope you guys know what you’re doing. I mean, neither of you look like you’re having fun, working on this crazy story of Merlin’s. And frankly, you worry me. You look like you haven’t slept for a week.’

  Jay caught sight of her face distorted in her friend’s enormous sunglasses. ‘We’re calling it a day, Leila,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow morning we drop everything and head for the Costa del Sol, to lie on the beach and get to know each other.’

  Leila crushed her cigarette in the ashtray and glanced at the door through which Merlin had disappeared. ‘That sounds to me like a good idea.’

  Merlin returned, looking puzzled. ‘Matty says he didn’t call you.’

  ‘Did I say Matty?’ Leila looked surprised. ‘No, it wasn’t him that called. I’d have recognised the gravelly smoker’s voice and the rag trade wit. So I wonder who it was?’

  The conversation ground to a halt again. Suddenly Merlin turned to Leila and said: ‘You’ve known Jay for years. How long?’

  She started, her thoughts elsewhere. ‘Oh, ten years, I guess. Let’s see, I came here for the first time just to paint for a few weeks in the summer of 1981. So, ten years exactly.’

  He placed the year in his own memory. ‘I was in Lebanon that summer. And Jay, was she here? Did you meet her then?’

  ‘I remember it clearly.’ Leila turned to Jay and put a hand on her arm. ‘Don’t take this wrong, honey, but your parents … At first they seemed such nice people, but they sure as hell were driving you pretty hard for a girl of nineteen.’

  ‘In what way?’ Merlin was chewing the food absently, tasting nothing.

  ‘It’s a long time ago, Merlin,’ Leila pleaded.

  ‘Try and remember.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Jay blurted.

  ‘Why in hell don’t you leave the poor girl alone?’ asked Leila. ‘You’re not on some fucking news story, Merlin, so leave it alone, huh?’

  ‘I’ve got to know,’ Merlin insisted.

  His hand grasped Jay’s firmly to stop her getting up. ‘What did Leila mean, when she said your parents were driving you pretty hard?’

  It was Leila who answered: ‘You godammed journalists never give up, do you? So I’ll tell you. Jay was a kid on holiday and they made her practise her flute six or eight hours a day.’

  ‘Nobody made me,’ Jay protested. ‘Don’t you understand? I wanted to become a professional musician more than anything in the world. I’d have practised twelve hours a day to make it.’

  ‘What got me was their attitude to you.’

  ‘Attitude?’ From Merlin.

  ‘They acted like they were Jay’s keepers. She never went anywhere without one of them tagging along. I even had a struggle to get her mother to let her come swimming with me in the afternoons, as though she was six years old or something and couldn’t go off with a friend for a dip in the river!’ Leila turned to Jay. ‘Then there was that good looking Swedish boy here who fancied you. Name like a burglar … Larsen, was it? The way your parents scared him off, wow!’

  ‘They were possessive?’ Merlin looked from Jay to Leila for confirmation.

  ‘And how!’ Leila laughed, her earrings jingling. ‘But the creepiest thing …’ She grabbed Jay’s arm. ‘Do you know why I palled up with you, that summer?’

  Jay shook her head. ‘I didn’t think about it.’

  ‘Well, Christ, I was a divorcee of twenty-five,’ Leila laughed. ‘Worldly wise and going through men like Mars bars! So why should I pal up with a sheltered virgin of nineteen?’

  ‘Why did you?’ asked Merlin.

  ‘I felt sorry for Jay. She was a beautiful girl, being hidden away from the world. I thought she needed some fun. And as to those creepy hypnosis sessions every morning with her father … Yuck, I thought that was legalised incest!’

  Merlin leaned forward and knocked the bottle over. He let it fall to the ground. Wine glug-glugged onto the grass. ‘Why did you have hypnosis from your father?’ he asked J
ay.

  ‘He’s a doctor. He uses hypnosis for his patients.’

  ‘But were you ill?’

  Jay felt distressed. She looked from Leila to Merlin. ‘If you weren’t the two people I trust most in the whole world,’ she said uncertainly, ‘I’d just get up and walk away from this grilling.’

  Merlin squeezed Jay’s hand. Leila was still holding her other arm.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he urged. ‘If you had hypnosis regularly as a kid, that could explain why you’re more than averagely suggestible. It’s important.’

  Jay licked her lips. They were dry. ‘It started when I was fifteen,’ she said.

  ‘The hypnosis?’ from Merlin.

  A nod. ‘At first Daddy said it was to help me relax. I used to get terrible pains in my neck muscles from playing too long. And then, he said he could help me be a better player.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘I had to count from five down to one. Then I was like asleep and I suppose he talked to me.’

  Leila lit a cigarette one-handed. ‘It was worse than I knew, then. Your parents were trying to turn you into a musical zombie.’

  Jay shook her head. ‘Sometimes it was a big help. There was a time I couldn’t play at all because I lost my embouchure.’

  ‘Explain,’ ordered Merlin.

  Jay pursed her lips and blew. He plainly didn’t understand, so she explained: ‘I couldn’t get the proper sound when I blew into the flute. My lips just could not do it.’

  ‘And why was that?’ Leila asked.

  ‘It happens to people. Some of them never play again.’

  ‘And your father gave you a lot of hypnosis sessions to get you through this?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘But why did it happen to you in the first place?’ Merlin asked.

  Jay was silent.

  ‘Something happened,’ he suggested. ‘Something triggered it off.’