The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  ‘I think I am in love with you,’ he said. ‘Will you marry me?’

  Her rage all at once abated. She started to laugh. Ivo looked hurt.

  ‘That’s a fine reaction to a good Scots proposal,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not … it’s not you I’m laughing at,’ she told him, collecting herself. ‘It’s just … life.’

  ‘Life is very droll,’ he said, ‘as I have heard it said, to the man who thinks. But to the man who feels it is a pain in the testicle.’

  Marie slowly stopped laughing. She looked at Ivo. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking,’ she said.

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘It’s worse than this.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  She saw the hurt look on his face, and was instantly remorseful. He was a rare friend, but she could not possibly marry him. The fact that she did not love him wasn’t so important, or that she was still so young. Her strange upbringing had left her, she knew, immature. To have found a home and a good, kind, interesting husband would have been more than enough. Even the fact that she still loved David didn’t matter: that was impossible anyway. No, the real barrier was that dark, inexorable, inescapable mass blocking the tunnel both of her past and her future. She was trapped here in the tick-tocking present. There was no way out.

  ‘I would like to marry you, Ivo, but it’s not possible. I’d like to tell you why. One day perhaps. Can’t we just go on for a while?’ She knew it was a stupid and impossible thing to ask even as she said it.

  ‘Of course we can,’ he lied.

  ‘I’m so grateful to you,’ she said.

  ‘Gratitude is the most difficult emotion,’ he told her. ‘Don’t be grateful. Gratitude is first cousin to resentment. I have noticed it when I have sometimes excused what you call the local stuff from paying a bill.’

  ‘I won’t ever resent you,’ she said.

  ‘The other thing is,’ he said, ‘I should really tell the Revenue that I am employing you. Do you know your national insurance number? It doesn’t matter if you don’t. We can leave it for a while. Say you are self-employed.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know my number,’ she said. ‘They seem to have missed me out.’

  He smiled. ‘Like the base Indian, they threw away a pearl,’

  She wanted to give him something but she had nothing but herself. She almost asked him if he would like to sleep with her, but she knew instinctively that he would be mortally offended – and he was right. Like so many things around here, it was all a matter of time. The idea of them going upstairs for a quick screw was absurd. It would destroy everything.

  ***

  Christmas at Number 19 Filkins Street was a wonderful affair.

  On Christmas Eve, they had all (except Chrissie who was baby-sitting) gone to the local church for midnight mass. Even Ivo, who stoutly maintained his agnosticism, came along. It was generally accepted in the Duckett family that he was her boyfriend and neither of them felt like correcting the assumption.

  The church was high Anglican and the service practically Roman Catholic, so Marie felt suitably at home, and the Vicar followed the form of the old prayer book which relieved Ivo.

  ‘I was afraid we might be asked to kiss our neighbours,’ he whispered.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ she whispered back.

  ‘I don’t mind kissing you at all,’ he told her. ‘My problem is with the gentleman on my right.’

  She looked and saw a bristly drunk sleeping on his further side. There were a number of drunks in the church but they seemed soothed by the service.

  As the tale of the birth unfolded and the familiar words and music sounded once more across the years to her, Marie – who had given up faith and hope – felt a surge of the greatest charity for that other Mary. She herself was going to need a cattle shed, or the North London equivalent, for her baby. She knew she could not have it with the Ducketts. Chrissie would want to bring in a doctor and the whole story would be out. She would, at some point, have to leave. She looked across at Ivo. He too was watching her.

  ‘Solemn things of mystic meaning: Incense doth the God disclose…’

  Ivo had a fine, light tenor voice. Beside him, the drunk had stirred and was singing bass in perfect harmony. Everyone seemed transformed by the splendour and oddness of it all.

  ‘Gold a royal child proclaimeth, Myrrh a future tomb foreshows.’

  She felt a shiver of apprehension again at the words – fear for the Christ, for everyone. Wasn’t a future tomb lying somewhere down there in the tunnel for her, for all of them?

  The priest was starting his sermon now. ‘…And the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.’

  Perhaps it was indeed true that Christ’s shoulders could carry even a monster’s guilt, but it seemed too much to ask of a baby. Marie had the strangest sensation that she was looking in at the rest of the world, like a hungry child through a window.

  After the service, they went back to the Duckett house for mince pies and mulled wine, which Chrissie had been preparing for their return. Old Duckett rolled himself a particularly fat joint and subsided onto the sofa singing ‘Remember, O thou Man’ in a soft undertone over and over again while his wife regaled them with details of where they would be spending Christmas tomorrow.

  ‘The Brabazon in Perth,’ she said, ‘that’s where we’re going. They have the most wonderful white beach with every possible convenience. And I may say that their champagne, at its best, is a match for anything from Rheims or Epernay.’

  ‘The only thing I know about Perth,’ said Ivo, ‘is that no gentleman wears a kilt south of the railway station.’

  ‘Perth, Australia, dear. Silly boy. Look out for the sharks, now.’

  Chrissie yawned. ‘I’m knackered,’ she said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Will.

  ‘Me too,’ said Tessa.

  ‘Goodnight, everybody.’

  The two of them started off towards his bedroom.

  ‘You’ll be staying, won’t you, Ivo?’ said Chrissie.

  For some reason, neither Ivo nor Marie had thought of this possibility. He blushed.

  ‘Oh no, I’ve got the van…’

  ‘Of course he will,’ said Marie, suddenly.

  Ivo looked at her and smiled in a manner that completely transformed the careful, attentive features. ‘It’s Christmas already,’ he said.

  ***

  ‘My love, my fair one,’ he said. ‘Are you sure it’s all right?’

  He made love to her with a sort of abandoned consideration for he was frightened of squashing the baby, but his watchmaker’s delicacy saw them through without mishap.

  She lay and tried to respond and loved him for being so gentle and so passionate. Her breasts, growing larger now, filled his delight.

  ‘I could float out to sea on them,’ he said, ‘and never be heard of again.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she laughed. ‘I know someone who might need them.’ But even as she said it, she knew that she was wrong. He could float out to sea as far as he liked. The child would be fed by someone else.

  ‘Don’t sigh,’ he said.

  ‘It wasn’t a sigh,’ she told him. ‘That was a gasp.’

  In the morning, there was a stocking hanging at the end of the bed for her.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ he said.

  ‘How on earth did you get it there?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You’re a magician.’

  It was true. There was something of the magus about him. She started opening the packages – all neatly wrapped with watchmaker’s precision.

  ‘A gold watch! You’re mad. It must have cost you a year’s profit.’

  It was the most beautiful little Edwardian wristwatch with an enamelled face and classically delicate hands. It felt as light as a wren’s egg and was hardly bigger. Its back opened revealing her initials, MS.

  ‘I believe it is a genui
ne Fabergé,’ he said. ‘It came into my hands some years ago. I have been looking for a suitable recipient, so it was really convenient when you came along.’

  He helped her put it on and she kissed him.

  ‘That’s not all,’ he said, pushing the stocking nearer. ‘There’s more.’

  There was a frankincense candle. There was a jar of Bain de Mer crystals.

  ‘The nearest I could get to myrrh, I’m afraid. I asked the girl in the shop for myrrh and that’s what she gave me. Mer.’

  ‘Quite near enough,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want to be nearer. A sea-bath’s jollier than embalming fluid. Weren’t you talking of floating out to sea last night?’

  ‘We shall float out together in a sea-bath.’

  She opened the rest of her presents. All of them, including the little musical box that played ‘Scotland the Brave’, betokened his consideration and love for her. It both touched and worried her that he should care about her so much. She judged that he had not had many girlfriends, had probably never been in love. Whatever happened, she felt he was going to be hurt.

  The last present she opened was a lump of coal. It touched her almost more than anything, for Nanny had always put a piece in her stocking.

  ‘Ugh, Nanny. Why did Father Christmas give me coal?’

  ‘It’s for good luck,’ Nanny would say. ‘We always used to find coal in our socks in Pittenween.’

  It became a kind of joke between them. Whenever Nanny went on about the way things were when she was a girl, Marie would say, ‘And we always used to find coal in our socks in Pittenween.’

  ‘So we did,’ said Nanny, ‘so we did.’

  To stop herself thinking about Nanny, Marie went to her cupboard and got out the present she had bought for Ivo. She had been going to give it later, after lunch, but this seemed an appropriate moment. It had involved considerable research and great expense – money she had put aside for the baby – but Ivo was undoubtedly a good cause. She had enjoyed tracking the books down. It had involved a Saturday trip to the Charing Cross Road and many disappointments before she located Iolo Williams’ definitive two-volume opus, published 1868, with lithographic illustrations on The Life and Works of Thomas Tompion, Clockmaker.

  Ivo opened it carefully, looking at her the while. He seemed to have an instinct that he was going to be surprised – but it still didn’t prevent him from being totally astonished. Almost too much so, it seemed, for his eyes filled with tears as he turned the pages.

  ‘This is too much, dear Marie. I have only seen it in the British Museum. I never could find it in a shop and, if I had done, I knew it would be far too expensive to afford. Of all the things I can possibly think of, you have chosen the one that’s … I can’t express it. If I am a magician, you are a witch – a white witch, of course, as befits the season.’

  They smiled at each other and she let him make love to her again for it was Christmas and soon there would be no more opportunity, even for a careful clockmaker.

  Finally they got dressed and went down to coffee and toast. Will and Tessa hadn’t surfaced but Chrissie was doing energetic things with brandy butter in the kitchen.

  ‘Can I help?’ said Marie.

  ‘Everything’s under control. We’re not eating till seven. Why don’t you go out? It’s a lovely day. Lunch when you like.’

  Outside, Nature itself seemed to be celebrating the feast: the sun brilliant in a pale blue sky; ground and trees lightly dusted with icing; cold air making breath come away in great clouds like cigar smoke.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ asked Ivo. ‘Church?’

  ‘Not church, I think. I know we should but…’ But it made her melancholy. It invited thoughts that she didn’t want to face again so soon after last night.

  ‘Sorry, Jesus,’ she said.

  ‘I think he’ll forgive you. Forgiveness is his speciality.’

  ‘You don’t believe in him.’

  ‘Oh, I believe there was somebody called Jesus who lived two thousand years or so ago. He was a remarkable man, no doubt. I just don’t know that he was the son of God.’

  They began walking.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘Have you heard of a book called Shakespeare’s Monkey?’

  ‘No’

  ‘It’s only recently out. But the author argues against the existence of God, saying that the ordering of Nature, the rules of physics if you like, could have evolved by evolutionary trial and error.’

  ‘Like the monkey on the typewriter writing Shakespeare if you gave him long enough?’

  ‘That is his analogy – with a little help from the typewriter, he says, like prodding the monkey when he makes a mistake. But I disagree. I would say God set the fuse and let it spread. In that sense I believe there is a God. But what he is and whether he has the faintest interest in humanity and, if he has, whether he would be mad enough to let his son – and what could we mean by ‘his son’? – come to Earth and take on human form in order to be sacrificed for our sins is another matter.’

  He suddenly broke into a snatch of Handel’s Messiah, echoing the text of the vicar last night.

  ‘“And the Lord hath laid, hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”.’

  A couple coming the other way smiled at them. ‘Happy Christmas.’

  ‘Happy Christmas.’

  ‘So you believe in evil, then?’ She asked.

  ‘Certainly I do.’

  ‘And in sin?’

  ‘Sin is evil but is evil sin?’ he asked.

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Sin is like getting your whites dirty. But evil can’t be white because, if it were, it wouldn’t be evil.’

  ‘But do you?’ she persisted, ‘Do you believe in it?’ It was important that he gave her an answer.

  ‘I believe that we have the choice – to keep our whites white or to splash about in the mire. Most people these days wouldn’t agree with that. Their notion of good and evil has become confused with legality.’

  ‘Do you think that you can inherit sin?’

  ‘According to the Christians we have all inherited sin.’

  ‘Yes, but some people more than others.’

  ‘I suppose there may be a genetic tendency as well as an environmental one. Bad blood and all that.’

  There it was. He had said it. They walked on in silence.

  ‘I’m not as blind as you think, you know, Marie. Is there something eating you? There is, isn’t there?’

  She was tempted to tell him everything there and then while she had the chance. A fleeting notion crossed her mind that the whole course of her life might change if she took it. But the enormity of the thing – on Christmas Day, on Parliament Hill Fields – talking about a massacre not of the innocents but of the defiled, perpetrated by her own father … it was too much.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Just the old Catholic upbringing.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, knowing she was lying. ‘What you need is some good Calvinist hell and damnation.’

  ***

  When they returned, the house reeked of the bonfire smell of hashish. They found the family gathered in the living room eating Christmas cake in a unconvinced, anticipatory sort of way and listening to Mr Duckett reminiscing, as he smoked, about his experiences in the early fifties with hippies and motorbikes in California.

  ‘Compared with this so-called swinging city,’ he said, ‘it was paradise in those days. Oh, man … the light up in the mountains … and that ocean … and the climate. Talk about milk and honey…’

  ‘I shall go there presently,’ said Mrs Duckett, clasping her glass fervently in anticipation.

  ‘Only it wasn’t milk and honey,’ said Mr Duckett, warming to his theme. ‘It was wine and pot … and sex, of course, whenever you wanted it. It was like picking fruit.’

  ‘I shall go there presently,’ repeated Mrs Duckett.

  ‘Steady on, Dad,’ said his daughter. ‘It’s only five. You don’t want to get too
high before dinner. Not in front of our guests.’

  Ivo waved a deprecating hand. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said.

  ‘You’d like a joint?’ asked Mr Duckett.

  ‘It doesn’t agree with me,’ said Ivo. ‘I just fall asleep. I wouldn’t want to miss the goose. But don’t mind me. Please go on.’

  ‘Where was I?’ asked Mr Duckett.

  ‘California,’ said Ivo.

  ‘Ah yes.’ Mr Duckett took a long pull on his joint and was silent for a minute or two as his mind bowled faraway on sandy dirt tracks.

  Marie had tensed at the mention of the land that had been the scene of her father’s disgrace. She listened with a curious premonitory dread.

  ‘It was like paradise but with the Devil in it,’ he said at last. ‘That was what made it interesting. Just the milk and honey would have been boring after a bit. Sun and wine … those golden bodies … we were very relaxed. Weren’t we relaxed?’

  ‘We were very relaxed,’ his wife agreed.

  ‘We will be relaxed again,’ said Mr Duckett.

  ‘Not as relaxed,’ his wife suggested. ‘Not as relaxed as we were. We can never be that relaxed again.’

  Her husband disagreed. ‘We shall see,’ he said.