Alchemy

by Maureen Duffy

  ‘Why exactly did they sack you? How did the Amyntas memorial come into it?’

  ‘I used it to teach the students about alternative philosophies, ways of looking at things, ways of being. And about the evolution of knowledge; how we’ve stumbled down the centuries looking for answers. I handed out extracts from some of Amyntas’ recipes; prescriptions I suppose we would call them now. I took in some of the ingredients and one of those little gas stoves campers have and that we sometimes use in our rituals so that we could try the recipes out.’

  ‘Were they ones that included opiates?’

  ‘Just a mild sedative. The garden poppy. Such a handsome flower, Papaver somniferum, double frilled lilac petals and silvery leaves. They pop up everywhere in my vegetable garden. A gentle calming herb. But some of the students thought they were hallucinating. Word got to the dean. It was all the excuse they needed to get rid of me.’

  ‘Did they think you knew something about what was really going on? Is that why they wanted to get you out of Wessex?’

  ‘Perhaps. But more I think they were afraid I would undermine their influence with the students. I see now that would have spoilt their plans. At the time I thought it was just jealousy and fear of any alternative system of belief.

  ‘There’s one thing I have to tell you, Ms Green, one thing I embroidered a little. I said my copy was stolen. That was a little fiction, a white lie to make my story more convincing. No one apart from you has ever seen the whole thing.’

  ‘I warned you not to lie to your lawyer. What else have you been keeping from me? How was I supposed to do my job on such flawed information? How much did you know about the Temple setup?’

  ‘I know it encouraged people to join their absurd sect. I didn’t know why.’

  ‘Absurd?’

  ‘Manufactured from quasi-scriptural bits and pieces with no real foundation.’

  ‘Couldn’t the same be said of your beliefs?’

  ‘We have a distinct ancestry, an historical basis. Ours is a belief system that encourages the personal development of the individual. That’s why we appeal to many people today.’

  I realise I’m getting nowhere in this conversation. It’s time to go. ‘What will you do now? I think you might find it difficult to get another educational post.’ Maybe it’s a mean thing to say but I’m trying to inject a little reality into his thinking.

  ‘I’ve decided to realise some of the equity in my house. The high priestess and I would like to travel. So I suppose this is goodbye, Ms Green. You’ll send me your final bill. After all you’re not responsible for how things turned out.’

  ‘And the manuscript?’

  ‘Keep it. I don’t need it any more. I’m not at all sure it isn’t a complete forgery anyway. But it’s served its purpose.’

  The line’s gone dead. I feel completely defeated but I’m not sure why. Galton and his high priestess are going off to dance naked hand in hand around the world. He’s even cast doubt on Amyntas, someone I feel I’ve been living with all these weeks but who he says might never have existed. I look at the pile of mail on my desk. The computer is showing thirty-two emails demanding to be opened.

  The future seems empty. Helen’s gone and fading even from my dreams. Is that what the countess is saying in her last aria or what Donne meant with his ‘I am every dead thing’? This absence, nothingness we fall into and that we try to climb out of on the silken ladder of love or the gossamer of faith, the old transforming alchemies that are still as potent as ever.

  The phone is ringing. I pick it up.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Lost Causes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I asylum seeker. Please help.’

  AFTERWORD

  This is fiction. The known facts about the life of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, can be found in Philip’s Phoenix by Margaret P. Hannay, to whom this romance is indebted.

  After her son’s marriage, before building herself a handsome mansion in Buckinghamshire, courtesy of James I, Mary was reported to be enjoying her retirement in the continental town of Spa where she could be seen in company with the Countess of Barlemont taking tobacco and shooting on a pistol range, both being ‘very merry’ and their lodging ‘the court of the English for play, dancing and all entertainment’. She lived until 1621 and died at the age of 62.

  P.S.

  Ideas, interviews & features…

  About the author

  From Accident to Experience

  Louise Tucker talks to Maureen Duffy

  Tell me about your background.

  The family, my mother’s family – because I know nothing about my father’s family at all – are East Enders, from Stratford, but I was born, by accident, on the south coast. My mother and father weren’t married; my father was a wandering Irish labourer and in the IRA, he said. They lived together for a couple of years, partly in London, but when she was pregnant he had a job on the south coast and they went down to Worthing. I was born in hiding down there. Two months after he left, and that was the end of that.

  In my mother’s family there was a lot of tuberculosis among the girls; it was a family of ten and I think there were six girls, four of whom died of TB and another would have died of it if she hadn’t died in the war. My mother was diagnosed at fifteen so when I was a child she was whisked off to various sanatoria, for several months at a time, and I was either put into care, sent to a children’s home or looked after by relatives. After her first bout, which happened when I was about three and a half, we went back to London. Then at the beginning of the war we returned to Worthing because we were offered a very cheap house to rent, on condition that my mother would take her slightly older sister out of the sanatorium and look after her. We were bombed in September 1940 and my aunt was killed, which is how she managed not to die of TB. Having lost everything, the house, the furniture, our clothes, my mother decided that she would evacuate us to her brother in Trowbridge, and we stayed there throughout the rest of the war. But she became increasingly ill and, realizing she was dying, she sent me back to London in 1948 to live with her remaining sister’s family. She was very worried that my stepfather would make me leave school and go out to work and she was determined that I would go to ‘college’, as it was called, if possible.

  So I came back to London, went to the local grammar school and then eventually on to King’s College, London. I was the first in the family to go to university though my cousin did go to teacher training college. I tried to get into Oxford, inspired by one of my teachers, but I was only 17 and at the interview they said go back and have another year in the sixth form. Of course I couldn’t – I was in the care of the council at that point and my grant from them was finishing. So I thought, To hell with this, I’ve got enough A-levels anyway for King’s, so I went. I think I would have been out of my depth at Oxford – I might have been very seduced by academic life instead of writing, and I’d always wanted to be a writer.

  When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

  I was 12 when I decided. I was absolutely made up in my own mind, but with the sort of background I came from obviously nobody had ever been a writer. It was a great

  ‘I was 12 when I decided to be a writer. I was absolutely made up in my own mind, but with the sort of background I came from obviously nobody had ever been a writer.’

  ‘Once you’ve finished writing a book you feel completely bereft, totally lost, miserable and hellish, and you think, “I’ll never write another!”’

  aspiration to become a teacher, so I had to conceal this decision I had made and pretend I was going to teach like everybody else. Even up to when she died in the eighties my auntie was still saying, ‘I know you’re doing very well dear but I do wish you had a proper job’!

  What was the inspiration for your first novel, and how did you start writing it?

  I didn’t want to be a novelist, I wanted to be a playwright but it was virtually impossible. I wrote my first full-length play in
my third year of university and I sent it in for a competition which was the brainchild of Kenneth Tynan, run by the Observer, to find new playwrights. It didn’t win but they asked me to become a member of the Royal Court Writers’ Group so I joined and I was in it with Edward Bond, John Arden and Arnold Wesker. Arnold always says that he did some reading for the competition and he was the one who picked out my play. So I wrote several plays, but meanwhile I’d met a publisher. He was starting a list called New Authors at Hutchinson and said,’Stop wasting your time writing plays that nobody will put on. Write a novel and I will publish it.’ This was a pure con trick since he had no idea, and nor had I, whether I could write a publishable novel. But I was tired of not having an audience since it was incredibly difficult for a woman in those days to be a playwright. The only female contemporaries were Sheila Delaney and Ann Jellicoe and in effect they both had to give up, even though they were the most successful.

  This editor’s request coincided with me trying to make sense of my rather unusual childhood – the drowning man looks at past life routine – so eventually I wrote my first autobiographical novel, which is still in print. That was how I got into novels.

  Alchemy is full of historical detail. How and where did you do your research, and how long did it take?

  I had the Culpeper so that was to hand, and Sidney’s Arcadia and Margaret Hannay’s scholarly biography of the Countess, but I use the London Library extensively, intensively, and I like to be able to carry things away from there. I used to do a lot of work in the Public Records Office and the British Library, but as I said I like to carry things away and surround myself with them. I go on researching – I don’t research and stop – so the book took a couple of years. There’s usually six months’ gestation before I start to write – I’m thinking, reading books, making notes – but the whole thing never takes less than eighteen months. Once you’ve finished you feel completely bereft, totally lost, miserable and hellish, and you think, ‘I’ll never write another book!’ I felt quite drained after Alchemy, particularly because it’s a big book and quite dense. I’m only now ruminating on the next one.

  Both characters encounter gender prejudice. Do you think much has changed? Do women like Jade still come up against such prejudice?

  At the moment, yes. One always hopes it will change, really change, but I saw an article just recently about how few top lawyers

  ‘I love doing plays-they’re much faster to write and you’re also working with people. There’s a wonderful moment when you go to the read-through and it works! It’s so good to witness your work coming alive.’

  ‘Our lives are pretty regimented and dull in many ways. It’s all very nice and comfortable but there is a loss of imaginative food, a loss of contact with the real and the concrete. So people need a sort of compensation, to be transported into something which is not immediately familiar but can feed the imagination.’

  are women. The police and publishing are better; they’ve changed a lot. From time to time I do a head count in the pages of the Guardian Review, and of course the number of men who are reviewed, and are reviewed by men, still enormously outweighs the number of women. Women are reviewed by women, ethnics are reviewed by ethnics…it drives me mad. I feel very equivocal about the Orange Prize; it shouldn’t be necessary, but unfortunately it is, because again and again the Iists and judges are male-dominated. When I was much younger I would have imagined that by now the genders would be level-pegging, and they’re not.

  Many of your novels and plays deal with sexuality, particularly homosexuality, and yet you are not known as a gay writer. Do you think such distinctions and names are helpful or a hindrance, and are they necessary any more?

  I don’t think they’re necessary and I don’t think they’re helpful. I’d much rather people just came to you as a writer. Sometimes you’re exploring the experience of gay characters and sometimes you’re exploring the experience of straight characters. It was necessary when I wrote my third novel, The Microcosm, in the sixties because since The Well of Loneliness there hadn’t been a full-blown treatment of female homosexuality but, having done what I thought was an exploration then, I feel that such distinctions shouldn’t be necessary in 2005. You write about what you want to write about; sometimes it’s one thing and sometimes it’s another.

  Historical fiction is very in vogue. Why do you think that is?

  Our lives are pretty regimented and dull in many ways. It’s all very nice and comfortable – the dishwasher does the dirty work – but there is a loss of imaginative food, a loss of contact with the real and the concrete. So people need a sort of compensation, to be transported into something which is not immediately familiar but can feed the imagination.

  What has been the most satisfying part of your career?

  I love doing plays – they’re much faster to write and you’re also working with people. There’s a wonderful moment when you go to the read-through and it works! It’s so good to witness your work coming alive. A real high was having my play Rites produced at the National Theatre – which was still at the Old Vic at the time – to go in there and see my play, that was great.

  Who are your influences as a writer?

  Oh, there are masses. Lots of poets – John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Milton, John Keats – he was my childhood hero – I was going to be John Keats! James Joyce and Joyce Cary – who is brilliant at interior monologue but is rather out of fashion now – then there was a whole clutch of American writers, especially Steinbeck when I was younger. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Genet and Violette LeDuc were all extremely important too. But you begin to forget who was important to you because you move on.

  Are there any books that you wish you had written?

  The whole of Shakespeare!

  What do you do when you’re not writing?

  I do copyright work for the British Copyright Council, the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society and the Copyright Licensing Agency, among others. If you can improve conditions for writers, for example by encouraging the government of Hungary to set up a public lending right scheme, it is very satisfying. And I like to garden when I can. I find that very therapeutic.

  LIFE AT A GLANCE

  BORN

  * * *

  1933, the year Hitler came to power and the Loch Ness monster was seen.

  EDUCATED

  * * *

  State schools – Trowbridge High School for Girls, the Sarah Bonnell School, Stratford, and King’s College, London

  CAREER

  * * *

  Poet, playwright, novelist and screenwriter. Works for various societies including the Copyright Licensing Agency and the Authors’ Licensing and Collection Society. President of the European Writers’ Congress and the British Copyright Council.

  LIVES

  * * *

  London

  FAVOURITE WRITERS

  Shakespeare

  John Donne

  Robert Browning

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  James Joyce

  Virginia Woolf

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Jean Genet

  Joyce Cary

  François Villon

  William Langland

  Dante

  A Writing Life

  When do you write?

  In the morning.

  Where do you write?

  Sitting in an armchair.

  Why do you write?

  Because I must.

  Pen or computer?

  Pen and notebooks.

  Silence or music?

  Silence.

  How do you start a book?

  An idea comes.

  And finish?

  Last sentence.

  Do you have any writing rituals or superstitions?

  The biro and the notebook are a ritual. I have to have the connection down through the hand, so it’s all longhand. And I can’t write at a desk; I have to be in a comfortable chair. Someone else types it up: I thought if I learnt
to type someone would say you must go and work in an office. I hate typing.

  What or who inspires you?

  I don’t know where it comes from, it just sort of comes. I have an image of something suddenly, then that accretes.

  If you weren’t a writer what job would you do?

  I would probably be an archaeologist. I love digging and delving and reconstructing the past.

  What’s your guilty reading pleasure?

  Favourite trashy read?

  I read the papers and watch telly, especially

  Time Team.

  About the book

  The Alchemy of Words

  By Maureen Duffy

  Like most writers, I’m often asked how I get my ideas for books; how do they come to me? Mostly they begin with an image of someone in a setting that’s a bit blurry round the edges. I carry this about in my head for weeks, sometimes for months, like a faded photograph that, in the opposite of the usual direction from life, gradually becomes stronger, the image more coloured, more solid. The person gets a name, a present, some past, the beginning of a future which is a plot. I begin to write a note or two in a new spiral notebook, opaque notes that sound like nothing to anyone but me, a notebook that I am suddenly obsessively attached to and carry around with me everywhere. The journey, the process has begun, somewhere in a part of the brain Freud called the unconscious, bubbling away on its own like magma under the earth’s crust, a process that can’t be hurried by merely conscious thought.