The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

  Jay fought through the layers of suggestion that blocked her memories.

  ‘I took an overdose,’ she stammered. ‘That’s what happened.’

  ‘Let’s get this straight.’ Merlin was staring into her eyes, very close. His voice was gentle. Jay knew this was not a reporter chasing a story, but a man who wanted to know these things because he cared.

  ‘You took an overdose because you lost your embouchure?’ he suggested.

  ‘No.’ Jay spoke slowly, groping for the details. ‘I took some pills from Daddy’s case. The one he carried when he did his house calls.’

  ‘Why’d you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jay shook her head and tried to pull away from him.

  ‘Tell me, Jay,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve got to tell me.’

  She was choking on the words that would not come.

  ‘It’s simple,’ said Leila calmly. ‘Why does any girl of nineteen swallow a load of pills? You had boyfriend trouble, that’s why.’

  Merlin felt the tension drain out of the hand he was holding. Jay laughed and laughed until she felt too weak to continue and collapsed on Merlin’s shoulder to get her breath back.

  ‘I never had any boyfriends,’ she gasped. ‘I was too busy practising the flute for that. No boy was important enough to kill myself for.’

  ‘So what was important?’ Merlin asked quietly.

  Jay felt her flesh crawl as the memory came back and then flitted away again. She licked her dry lips. Again she choked on the words, but this time they came out. ‘We’d been to stay here in St Denis for the Easter holidays.’

  They waited for her to go on. In the gathering dusk, there was a look of horror in Jay’s eyes, as though she were witnessing events unfold on a screen in mid-air which the others could not see.

  ‘On the way back to England, Daddy decided to make a diversion and visit Chinon Castle.’

  ‘Chinon? Like the name of your ensemble?’ Merlin’s voice made Jay turn and search his face.

  Uncertainly she returned his smile. ‘It was there I saw something terrible.’

  ‘Like what?’ Merlin’s voice was a whisper.

  ‘All I remember is that I fainted, right there in the castle courtyard. And the next day, when I picked up my flute to practise, I couldn’t make a sound.’

  *

  ‘I feel so safe with you,’ said Jay. She lay with her head on Merlin’s bare chest.

  ‘You should.’ His hand stroked her hair. ‘I’m like St George. I stab the dragons of our time in the heart with a well aimed paragraph. It’s more effective than an oaken stake through a vampire’s chest.’

  ‘You’re laughing at me now.’

  Merlin raised himself on one elbow and looked down at her face framed by the blonde hair that spread over the pillow. ‘That is one thing I’ll never do, I promise.’

  They were lying in her parents’ large, old fashioned double bed in the cottage. Merlin traced Jay’s profile with a finger. ‘I told you my nickname when I put that dressing on your hand at Châlus. Did I magic the pain away this time?’

  She shook her head playfully. ‘I think you’ll have to try again, doctor.’

  ‘Where does it hurt?’ His hand touched her breasts, and then her lips. ‘Here? Or here?’

  ‘Lower,’ she breathed. Jay closed her eyes and felt his fingers and lips and tongue loving her, lulling her with a gentle rhythm like a boat moving on a low swell. And then she was swimming in warm water, the colours changing as she blossomed like a flower, her body separating into petals as the climax welled up and up to finish in her brain. She heard herself cry out his name and then Merlin was holding her to him and kissing her face and it all began again.

  Much later he asked, ‘Any pain now?’

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘What are you thinking about, Merlin? You look so serious.’

  He grinned. ‘Post coitum omnia animalia tristia sunt.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could speak Latin.’

  ‘Just a few quotations, that’s all.’

  What was on Merlin’s mind was the difference between Jay’s responsive, tender, feminine love-making and the almost masculine aggression of the way she had used him during the night at Old Sarum. The woman in his arms now was the one he had fallen in love with. Looking at her head on the pillow beside him, he asked, ‘Do you trust me?’

  Jay’s eyes searched his for a long time.

  ‘Tell me,’ he whispered. ‘Tell me what you saw at Chinon.’

  Immediately her body went rigid. ‘No please,’ she begged.

  Merlin held her in his arms until she relaxed. ‘It’ll be okay,’ he insisted.

  ‘You promised, Merlin.’

  ‘Just this once,’ he urged. ‘And then we’ll never ever talk about it again. Tell me what you saw.’

  Jay shivered in his arms but he held her tight. ‘I almost can,’ she said. ‘It’s as though I’m seeing someone I know at the end of a street and I run towards them but they get smaller and go round the corner. And when I get there, they’re even smaller and vanishing round the next corner. And the next. Like a diminuendo in vision instead of sound.’

  ‘Let it go.’ Merlin buried his head in her thick blonde hair. ‘Let’s try another angle. Tell me what happened after Chinon. When you got home to England, you swallowed the pills. To escape from whatever you saw?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And you couldn’t play a note?’

  ‘The chronology’s all mixed up,’ she said. ‘But it was something like that.’

  ‘And you got your embouchure back through hypnotherapy?’

  ‘No.’ Jay lay still, remembering. In Merlin’s arms, for the first time she wasn’t frightened to grope through the mists. ‘It was the strangest thing,’ she said, wondering at it herself. ‘After a couple of weeks I was really depressed. My mother went up to London one day to visit her sister. She bought me back a present, some music I’d never heard before. It was a set of recordings by David Munrow.’

  ‘I’ve heard the name.’

  ‘That was the first medieval music I’d ever listened to. And something wonderful happened, Merlin.’

  Jay swivelled her head to look into his face. In his eyes she saw only concern for her. ‘When I heard Munrow’s music, I knew that I could play again, but that I had to play Early Music, like he did. There was an old descant recorder in the house which I’d had at junior school. I picked it up and started playing medieval songs by ear from the cassettes. I remember the first one I learnt. I’ll play it for you.’

  She started getting out of bed.

  ‘Where are you going?’ from Merlin.

  ‘To get one of my recorders.’

  ‘Hold on.’ He pulled her back in the bed. ‘You’re telling me that your block just disappeared the moment you began playing this medieval music?’

  ‘That’s right. I returned to music college the next day. From then on, I played recorders, shawms, pipes – all the medieval instruments. And overnight I became a far better musician than I had ever been before.’

  ‘And you never had another problem until that evening, ten days ago, when whatever happened, happened in Canterbury cathedral?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Merlin watched Jay walk to the door. The sight of her nakedness aroused his lust. ‘Don’t be long,’ he called after her.

  Jay rummaged in her bags, dumped in the unheated small bedroom, and took out a simple descant recorder. She hurried shivering back to the warm bed where Merlin lay waiting.

  ‘Later,’ he said, trying to take the recorder from her.

  ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘I want to play you the first song I taught myself.’

  He lay on one elbow, watching. It was a strangely erotic experience: Jay’s lips pursed on the mouthpiece, her long fingers caressing the instrument, her breasts resting on her arms, the nipples tantalisingly erect and the strange, almost oriental melody she was playing. He lay spell-bound, unwilling to move in case he br
oke the magic of the moment.

  Jay lowered the recorder to sing a verse of the song.

  ‘What’s it about?’ he asked softly, kneeling over her.

  Jay watched Merlin’s hands cup her breasts, gathering them like water into which he plunged his face. ‘It’s a strange song. Not a love song, nor a lament. It was written by Bertrand de Born, a troubadour who was accused of being Eleanor of Aquitaine’s lover.’

  ‘And did he write songs in praise of her breasts or the little mole on her neck?’ Merlin pulled her closer so that he could kiss it.

  Jay rubbed her face in his curly hair, inhaling the smell of him. ‘It’s a warning,’ she murmured, ‘about false wearers of the Cross. Be on your guard against them, Bertrand says: kar li sunt aussi felon que l’Sarazin. For they are as treacherous as the Saracen.’

  Part IV

  Chapter I

  In the vineyards and the small ploughed fields of the narrow valleys that led down to the plain of the Dordogne, the heads of early-rising farmworkers turned to watch the unusual spectacle of an elderly man with crew-cut hair, clad in track suit and trainers, running hard through the clinging early morning ground mist. He was accompanied by an athletic-looking young man whose blond hair and blue eyes marked him as a foreigner from the other side of the Rhine. As the runners passed, greetings were called in the patois: Holá! or Adéou!

  Hermann Kreuz did not hear them; his entire attention was turned inward on the functioning of his body. With each step the iron-willed septuagenarian monitored his heart-beat, lung capacity and the performance of his muscles as he did each morning on the exercise track which followed the perimeter of the Valle de los Cantos. Alongside him, a blond bodyguard kept pace silently, running with the spring of youth in his step and a film of sweat on his naked chest.

  Back at the hotel in St Denis, Kreuz handed his muddy outer clothes and shoes to the bodyguard. Naked except for a pair of brief shorts, he made himself comfortable among the puddles on the riverside terrace for the rest of his morning work out to the surprise of the other residents eating their breakfast in the restaurant of Chez Dominique. Kreuz ignored their curious stares. One hundred press-ups were followed by a punishing schedule of pull-ups, knee bends, then twisting and bending exercises on the wet tiles. He returned to his room where his personal masseuse gave him a vigorous full-body massage. After a cold shower, Kreuz ate his usual breakfast of dried fruit and nuts.

  *

  Merlin was waiting for the kettle to boil when he heard the peremptory knocking on the kitchen door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called in English and repeated: ‘Qui y a-t-il?’ He opened the door slightly and peered round the edge to see, standing outside in the light drizzle, a visitor in a blue flannel blazer over a white polo neck sweater and grey worsted trousers. With his air of well-groomed health and self assurance, Hermann Kreuz would have looked more in place on the deck of a yacht in Cannes harbour than standing in the muddy driveway of a Dordogne cottage.

  Taking him for one of Jay’s neighbours, Merlin asked, ‘Puis je vous aider?’

  ‘You are Freeman?’ The question was in English.

  ‘That’s right.’ Merlin felt an instant dislike for the man on the doorstep.

  ‘I may come in, out of the rain?’ Taking the answer for granted, Kreuz stepped inside. He viewed the untidy kitchen with distaste and brought his gaze back approvingly to Merlin’s well-muscled body, naked except for a pair of under-shorts.

  ‘Kreuz!’ He extended a hand which crushed Merlin’s in a grip of steel.

  ‘Freut mich sehr, Herr Kreuz.’ Merlin winced at the unnecessary pressure.

  The German smiled thinly. ‘Herr Doktor Kreuz.’

  ‘Doctor as in medicine?’ Merlin poured hot water onto the coffee in the filter.

  ‘I am an art historian, Mr Freeman.’

  Merlin was searching in the wall cupboards for sugar, opening one door after another. ‘Are you a neighbour, Dr Kreuz?’

  ‘I am here because I was given your name by an old comrade, Baron Rudolf Kempfer.’

  ‘So, you’re the friend Kempfer mentioned: the one who translated the Dürnstein sirventès.’

  ‘That is correct.’

  Merlin poured coffee into two cups for Jay and himself, and asked, ‘Do you take coffee, Dr Kreuz?’

  ‘Not since fifty years. Caffeine is like all drugs, very bad for the nervous system, therefore also for the brain. Take my advice and drink only pure spring water. A man with a good body like yours should take care of it.’

  His back to the visitor, Merlin grinned to himself at Kreuz’s little lecture. He picked up the two mugs. ‘Well, thanks for the advice, doctor, but I’ll risk the poisoned cup now and again.’

  Kreuz nodded. He was aware that most people found his ideas cranky. ‘I am here to discuss with you the matter of the sirventès at Châlus Castle.’

  Merlin yawned, ‘Well, I’m sorry about that, but the story’s been dropped, for personal reasons.’

  Kreuz’s alarm showed on his face. ‘That is not possible. I have travelled a thousand kilometres to discuss with you.’

  ‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ said Merlin. ‘You could have checked before coming. I did give Kempfer a telephone number. And right now I’m getting cold and so’s this poison I’ve been making.’

  ‘Two cups?’ queried Kreuz. ‘You are staying here with a Miss French, according to my information.’

  ‘It’s her house.’

  ‘Then kindly permit one more question. Would this lady be the person Kempfer referred to as your collaborator in the matter of the sirventès?’

  ‘Yeah, but I told you. That’s finished with. Sorry.’

  Kreuz spoke as though he had not heard Merlin. ‘I should like to invite both you and her to take lunch with me at the hotel where I am staying, Chez Dominique. There we may have a discussion.’

  ‘Sorry, Doctor, but I already told you …’

  ‘I have some information to which Miss French has a right, Mr Freeman,’ said Kreuz smoothly. ‘It is very important she should talk with me. Shall we say lunch at 12.30 hours?’

  ‘I don’t know if we’ll be free.’

  Merlin kicked the kitchen door closed, leaving Kreuz to let himself out. In the bedroom, his irritation with the visitor evaporated at the sight of Jay’s head on the pillow.

  ‘What kept you?’ she asked.

  Between laughs, Merlin impersonated for her the visitor’s mannerisms, exaggerating Kreuz’s German accent. ‘You missed a great act, honey,’ he finished out of breath.

  ‘I heard the voices.’ Jay sat up and sipped her coffee. ‘So he invited us to lunch? It could be fun.’

  Merlin disagreed. ‘I have something in mind that will be a lot more fun than taking lunch with Herr Doktor Kreuz. Come here.’

  *

  Salem closed the door. They were in the small bedroom of his cousin’s flat above the kebab stall in Torremolinos, where the children had been moved into their parents’ room to make room for the brothers.

  ‘Where have you been all night?’ he asked Kassim who had just come in.

  Kassim looked tired but had in his eye the glint of a hunter who knows that he is on the right trail. He threw himself on the bed fully clothed and shut his eyes.

  ‘I looked for you at the mosque after evening prayers, but you were not there,’ Salem complained. ‘I looked all over Malaga and Torremolinos for you.’

  Kassim had spent the last thirty-six hours travelling to Munich and back, there to interview a lean blond man with needle-scarred arms who had recently been released from prison after serving seven years for drug offences that had got him thrown out of the German Olympic team at the 1984 Winter Olympics.

  The former bodyguard had started compulsively scratching himself; his skin was itching all over. ‘It’s ten years since I was down there working for Kreuz,’ he said. ‘He was over sixty then but the tough old bastard used to give me and the other guards a good hard run every morning. We we
re all Olympic or sub-Olympic standard, so what do you make of that?’

  For a generous payment, the man had talked freely to Kassim about the year he had spent in Spain, working for Kreuz.

  Salem looked at the children’s drawings and paintings pinned to the wall above Kassim’s head. ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘I did not mean to treat you like a child. I was worried, that is all.’

  ‘About what?’ There was a smugness in Kassim’s voice.

  ‘About these mysterious friends you spend all the time with, my brother. They sound like criminals to me, with their false names and papers, their expensive cars and fat wallets.’

  ‘They are comrades in the struggle.’

  ‘There’s a war in Spain now?’

  Salem’s sarcasm fell flat. ‘There is a war everywhere,’ said Kassim. ‘Those who pretend otherwise are conspiring with the enemy.’

  Through the thin partition wall, Salem heard his cousin’s wife reading a story in halting Spanish to her two children. The children were correcting her pronunciation. The small domestic scenes he witnessed daily in the flat were tugging at Salem’s heart. It was a long time since he had thought so much about his dead wife and children. ‘Then I am your enemy,’ he muttered. ‘I understand nothing of these things you say.’

  ‘You understand nothing,’ Kassim agreed. ‘But you can be useful, all the same.’ He twisted in the bed and pulled a wad of bank-notes from a hip pocket. He peeled off a handful and tossed them with a bunch of keys to Salem. ‘There is a car outside, a Subaru pickup with a covered back. Take it and buy the things on this list while I sleep. I shall need them tomorrow.’

  Salem read the list. ‘A rabbit?’ he queried.

  ‘It must be alive. Buy it in the market.’

  ‘And a canister of CS gas? Where will I find that?’

  ‘In a drugstore. Old ladies carry them in their handbags, so say it is for your widowed mother who is nervous of being mugged, if you are asked. You had better buy several cans but go to different shops and buy one in each.’

  ‘Two used blankets, light brown or khaki …’ Salem continued reading the shopping list.

  ‘Buy them in a market, too.’