Alchemy

by Maureen Duffy

  That day had come a present for my lady from her noble brother Sir Robert Sidney in Flushing where he was governor. It was long and encased in a box for safety. The box was marked for the laboratory at Ramsbury. I was to open anything that was so labelled in case it should contain any substance that might decay or suffer from being kept too long enclosed. The box contained a long wooden funnel with what seemed ground glasses as from spectacles set at either end. A note said:

  Dearest sister,

  I send of you here a Dutch trunk which be all the fashion in Flanders since one invented it. It makes small things at a distance come bigger and closer and may be most useful in hunting to espy the game before it espy you or at sea to watch for land, or other ships as Spanish privateers or treasure ships from the Indies. Perhaps you may have the good fortune of being the first to make it known to Her Majesty who will surely find it of sovereign use and will reward you in return.

  Your loving bro.

  Taking up this novelty I went back into the garden with it questioning whether, if it indeed had the properties Sir Robert had written of, it might answer the doctor’s doubting of the position of the fixed stars. I leant it upon the trellis of an arbour pointing towards the sky and put my eyes to the larger end of the funnel. At first I saw nothing but blackness. Then I turned back towards the house and saw the door into it with the candle burning inside shrunk to faerie size as if I must bend down and crawl to go back in. Even then I would be too big and could only put my eye to the door as if it were the window into another country of pygmy people and dwarves.

  Next I reversed the trunk so that one eye only was at the smaller end and held it steady against the trellis again to look at the heavens, this time in that quarter where the moon sat, letting fall her light upon the garden. I moved the trunk slowly from east to west and north to south to try whether I could catch the moon in my glass. Of a sudden she swam before me like as a great bladder of light, and her face which we see smiling down upon us as a sign of God’s goodness, though some say to sleep with the full light of the moon upon you brings madness, was no longer the features of a man in the moon, as my lady’s brother Sir Philip has writ in his poem of the moon but like the shadows of mountains where men might live and walk as he yet also writ.

  Are beauties there as proud as here they be?

  Do they above love to be lov’d, and yet

  Those lovers scorn whom that love do possess?

  I had heard my father speak of one Tycho Brahe who had caused to be built upon an island near the Danish capital a laboratory, called Uranienborg, where he worked at discoveries for the King of Denmark and in particular helped by his sister, my father said, though he could not remember her name, at mapping the stars on a brass globe of the heavens as an aid to mariners. Now I made bold to look at the fiery planet Mars that seemed to jump at me out of the darkness, and then again at a star nearby. And it seemed to me that if Dr Gilbard was right then Brahe plotted the stars in vain upon a fixed sphere and that the whole universe might be in motion and unimaginable distances lie before us where the stars swam, as we see in a prospective painting by a skilled hand that on a flat board there seem to be men walking afar off in a fair landscape beyond where the eye may reach.

  And I was caught up on a sudden in a vision, a great spiral of light made of many stars that turned slowly above me like to a wheel as I looked up into the night and that seemed as if it might draw the earth and me with it into an ever deeper ocean of sky. I determined therefore to look no more on the heavens lest I should be made mad as punishment for staring too hard into the face of God and his mysteries.

  They must be very short on applications: they’ve actually rung my mobile while I’m getting kitted up to go to the Gaos. I’m taken off guard and don’t recognise myself at first, especially since I’m standing in front of a full-length mirror in my leathers.

  ‘Ms Cowell?’

  ‘Ms Lucinda Cowell?’

  ‘Hello. Yes?’

  ‘You applied to Wessex University to do a short summer course as part of an MA.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Unfortunately our short courses are only accredited for US further degrees.’

  ‘Oh I see.’ Think, Jade. Something convincing now. Where’s your imagination? My mind’s gone blank.

  ‘I’m not sure if that matters. I mean a US master’s is recognised here, for some purposes at least.’

  ‘Well of course if it’s all right with you, we would be happy to consider your application.’

  ‘There’s also the value of being in an academic ambience, the motivation factor. I think I need the stimulus of a learning culture.’

  ‘Oh I think we can lay claim to provide you with that. When would you be available for interview? An interview would clearly provide the best opportunity to assess our mutual expectations.’

  ‘When are you offering?’

  It’s a date close enough so that I don’t lose interest but far enough away not to give the impression of overeagerness. We fix on it. The voice gives me instructions on how to get there. I don’t let on that I already know. I’ll take the staid train they suggest from Waterloo rather than roaring up on the bike.

  ‘What are you up to, Jade?’ Joel asks as we swig our pints the next evening.

  I’m in a difficulty. I need to keep him on side but in the dark. I need his help. But I also have a sense that this whole enterprise could go horribly wrong in some way I can’t foresee and if I’m going down I don’t want to drag him down with me. Someone has to stay outside to bake the cake with a file in it and provide the getaway car.

  ‘I can’t tell you much. Client confidentiality. And also I don’t really understand much of what’s going on myself. But I’m very grateful for the postbox. I don’t want to be tracked down.’

  ‘Who’s looking for you?’

  ‘Maybe nobody. I just don’t know.’

  ‘Sounds dodgy to me.’ And later as we give each other the fraternal kiss goodbye he says: ‘Take care. If you need any help ring me.’

  I feel a sense of relief. Joel’s not your expected pasty office worker. He’s into the gay gym culture of body building, not just for fashion and pretty pecs but with a helping of judo on the side to dish out to anyone who thinks they can rough him up, who thinks a queen’s easy meat to mess with.

  As the interview day looms I’m increasingly anxious. What do I wear as a mature student working on a thesis? Somehow jeans and a T-shirt don’t seem right. But then my court blacks are too severe. I might find myself addressing him as your honour. I settle for something in between. Black of course. I’m into black whether on the bike or off it. It gives me a persona, a mask. A touch of the intellectual, the sophisticate, the gothick.

  I’ve had my usual stand-off dialogue with Dr Alastair Galton, whom I still want to call Adrian Gilbert, especially since I’ve read Amyntas’ account of his original. Not that Galton’s stout. It’s the manner; the inner man. The feeling that he waits to see if I will fall into some trap he’s set so that he can put me down, exercise the petty tyrant’s power over the weak. He makes me paranoid but that doesn’t mean, as the old psychiatrist’s joke has it, that he isn’t trying to trip me. Only that part of the game is that I must know he is.

  I tell him that any fees for Wessex I have to sign up to will be put on his bill.

  ‘I’ll be interested to hear who’s taken my place.’ I can imagine the little supercilious moue he’s making as he speaks. Who needs videophones? ‘Someone must be teaching the history of religion. It’s written into the syllabus. What did you say was the subject of your thesis?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘I feel I should know what I’m paying for.’

  ‘I don’t see that you really need to know, since in any case I shan’t be doing it.’

  ‘Won’t you have to present a synopsis, for instance to the tutor overseeing it?’

  ‘I shall tell them this course is only a preliminary to identify wheth
er there’s a real topic there.’

  ‘I still think I should know. I might be able to give you some advice on presentation.’

  ‘The social significance of cross-dressing in Elizabethan theatre. Or some variation on that.’

  ‘I wonder who they’ll offer you as overseer.’

  ‘I may not get that far.’

  ‘You will. I shall be all agog to hear how you get on.’

  Why do I always feel such pressure from him? His final comment could be a perfectly friendly statement of interest but something in me reads it as a threat. ‘Report back to me at once or else…’ Or else what? Galton has no hold over me, except my being half hooked on the case. Somehow he knows he’s got me, as if he could look inside my head, lift the top off and watch me thinking as they do with wretched laboratory animals.

  ‘Listen,’ I say to Joel the night before my Wessex interview. ‘I think someone other than the client ought to know where I’m going tomorrow, in case anything happens. I mean if I don’t come back.’ Put like that it sounds so melodramatic. Oates going out into the blizzard. I may be gone some time.

  ‘Are you certain you want to get into this, Jade?’

  ‘It’s just a precaution. I’m probably being overcautious, hearing things that go bump in the night. I’ll phone you tomorrow evening just to let you know you can stand down. Here’s the address.’

  ‘Hang on while I switch to record.’ Joel always has everything that opens and shuts in the new technology. ‘Sounds innocent enough,’ he says at the end.

  ‘Who knows what lurks behind the closed doors of academe?’ I joke, more to keep up my own spirits than his.

  I knock back a bottle of wine and fall asleep in front of University Challenge, not even trying to beat the buzzer, to wake with a start and stagger to bed. Remember, Jade, you’re still a lawyer not a lapsed gumshoe. You’re going on a recce that’s all, to get the feel of the place.

  This morning the sky’s the familiar London grey of too-often washed blankets, pre-duvet, with a dismal rain not fine enough to be called soft, insidious, soaking. I phone rail enquiries for train times. Pick one that’ll get me there at the appointed hour with enough leeway for contingencies, signal failure, breakdown, off the rails, suicide, that could be a catalogue of the ills modern flesh is heir to. I swathe myself in a black plastic shortie mac, put up my umbrella and dare the rush-hour traffic across to the station, climbing the main steps against the almost irresistible lava flow of those on the way in, commuting from urban villages with their executive estates of Barratt Homes, pony clubs and bridge nights, enlivened by an occasional partner-swapping evening if the broadsheets are to be believed.

  I get a seat among those wise enough to be going the other way, to drop salary for the luxury of being able to breathe en route to and from the office while still keeping a toehold in the capital. We sit, not touching or speaking, hunched into our newspapers or paperbacks, wired up to earplug headphones or dozing through the fractured south London suburbs down to the leaf-fringed lawns of Hampshire.

  The rain is stopping as I leave the station, and a sudden break in the clouds lights up the wet surfaces, bead-droplets and transient bubbles, with refracted sunshine, giving that spurious lift to the spirits our fickle weather generates in its better moments, and that people in more stable climates don’t understand, the switchback of mood that comes from living a perpetual pathetic fallacy. I find the promised bus and climb in among the frail, clinging on grimly for a taste of freedom, and young mothers, probably single, distraught with toddlers’ buggies and hung round with plastic bags of shopping. I decide it must be character rebuilding for me to sometimes see how the other half travels, not to be always riding jackboot past them.

  Wessex has its own bus stop outside the remembered iron gate. This time I buzz the intercom and state my business to the voice from within. ‘I’ve an appointment with the dean, Revd Luther Bishop.’ Surely it’s a false name.

  ‘Do come in. Dr Bishop is expecting you.’

  So at last I get to go through the gate, like Alice shrunk to the right size by the magic bottle. Or was it the mushroom? I’m in a new reception area tacked on to the older building in conventionally cheerful laminates and glass to impress with an immediate apprehension of sweetness and light. There’s nothing murky about our courses and staff, it says. We’re the first rung of the ladder to success. Well, don’t knock it, Jade. You and Roger both had to climb up this way out of Acton Primary School. Galton’s route was different I suspect. Prep school, very minor independent. Nothing too fancy but still an easier route, especially back then, with his thirteen years previous on me.

  The receptionist directs me to a spindly tube of plastic chair, chic minimalist. There’s a display of tidy magazines and supplements to the educational trade. I’d like to pick one out to give myself something to do but I don’t want to disturb their neat arrangement or risk dropping any on the gleaming straw coloured parquet, followed by an undignified, bum-in-the-air, scramble to pick them up. Am I observed? There were closed-circuit cameras beyond the gate but I can’t see anything here. At least not without craning my neck and showing my hand.

  A door marked ‘Secretariat’ opens to the right and a youngish woman in neat grey slacks and a white polo neck, nipped in waist, full breasts, ‘like two white hills all covered in snow’, clacks across the parquet in elegant sandals. I know at once that she’s Mary-Ann Molders and feel a lift of confidence at my advantage. ‘You don’t know me, baby, but I know all about you.’

  ‘Ms Cowell?’ She’s extending a hand. Glasses hang round her neck on a cord. She’s brought her pen out with her as if she can only pause a moment to attend to me and then I must stop cluttering up her day.

  ‘I put out my hand. “That’s right.’

  Her grip is just right. The palm slightly cold to the touch. Sweat, sticky would be inefficient.

  ‘Dr Bishop can see you now.’ Does she think the name sounds fake?

  ‘Aren’t the students back yet? It seems very quiet.’

  ‘We’re not in full spate, that’s true. Just mainly staff, and some students who’ve been called in, specially to run by some problems before term begins.’

  I’m following her through a swing glass-panelled fire door into a bright corridor with one windowed length looking out on a quadrangle as if we’re in some mediaeval cloister. She knocks briskly but not too loudly on a light oak door marked ‘Dean’.

  ‘Come,’ a voice calls.

  Molders opens the door and holds it back for me. I murmur a thankyou and slip inside. She closes it behind us. A man is rising from a desk in front of me and leaning forward to stretch out a hand. He’s tall, heavily built, a little flushed, with crinkly gingerish hair. For a moment I’m stunned. I’d expected him to be black. The name, the gospel style setup of the Temple, the physical website presence of Apostle Joachim with his honeyed sincerity, had all led me down a steep path of misconception. You’d better stick to conveyancing, Jade. Marlowe would be ashamed of you.

  ‘Ms Cowell. We’re pleased you want to join us.’ The voice has a hint of post-colonial. South African maybe. Then it clicks. Not post-colonial. Old colonial. What I’m getting is the last traces of Northern Ireland Protestant, a much overlain whiff of polemic and intolerance. I reach out for the hand which bristles with stiff gingery hairs.

  ‘Well, thank you for seeing me so quickly,’ I say. ‘Of course we don’t know yet if what I want to do can fit into your curriculum.’

  ‘I’m sure something to our mutual advantage can be worked out. I see you have a degree in law from Sussex. Yet your subject for the proposed thesis seems to lie in a very different direction.’

  ‘It’s a return to my first love.’ Always stick as much to the truth as possible when lying. ‘I began in English studies but then I became disillusioned with the career prospects. It was that time in the eighties when we were all urged to get on, to pursue our own success and that meant making money in a high-powered job.’r />
  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Certainly more than I would have as a new teacher.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I want something different.’ Here’s where the truth and I have to part. ‘I’ve managed to save enough to study for a further degree while I reconsider what to do with my life, what I really want. Maybe in the end I’ll decide to go back to the law after all. I always have that option in our increasingly litigious society. But at least I’ll have given myself the time to reconsider.’

  ‘And what made you choose Wessex, Ms Cowell?’

  I’ve rehearsed for this one. It’s such a standard. ‘I wanted a small campus where I could have time to think. Big campuses can suck you into too much activity. I need the quiet and space to get my head straight. I see your short course, very informal, unstructured as a chance to explore.’

  ‘You would of course have to have a supervisor, just to make sure you weren’t wasting your time. We expect our further degree students to keep in contact via bi-monthly meetings, seminars with a tutor, in your case presumably the head of English.’

  ‘Or history,’ I offer.

  ‘Yes indeed. I’ll see who is willing to take you on. After all it will be more work for one of them.’

  And more money for you I think.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to see round the campus while you’re here. I’ll ask Ms Molders to give you the guided tour. Then perhaps we can speak about your impressions before you go.’

  ‘Do you have an open day for potential students?’

  ‘Many institutions do of course. But I prefer to see people on a one-to-one basis. Our intake is quite small and selective.’ We both stand and he presses some kind of intercom I haven’t noticed before.