A Secret Alchemy (2 page)

“Levez-vous, mes filles,”
she said, and when we did I found that my eyes were level with hers. She kissed my cheek. “You’ve grown, Ysa,” she said. “Is all well at Groby?”

“Yes, madam. Lady Ferrars greets you well, and says that, so please you, Sir Edward and Master Grey will be with us on Saint John’s Day, God willing, or the day after.”

She nodded, and when she went to raise Margaret, Margaret stumbled and almost toppled over. My mother kissed her. “You’re weary, daughter. Off to bed with you. Ysa, stay, and we will talk. Mal, will you have wine sent up, please? And Master Wooton, I think we must speak further tomorrow.”

He piled up the books and papers and balanced the inkpot on top. Mal shepherded Margaret out, but not before Margaret had made a face that was meant to show Master Grey kissing me.

“Be so good as to pull my chair to the fire,” said my mother, “and a stool for yourself.” I was glad to do it, for we had washed in cold water for speed’s sake, and I was shivering still.

She lowered herself into her chair and waved that I should sit too, but kept her eyes fixed on the fire. At last, she said, “You know with what purpose Sir Edward and Master Grey will come to Grafton?”

“Yes, madam,” I said. Even in my weariness I felt again a little shiver of fear and heat.

“And you are content?”

“Yes, madam.”

“We are alone, Ysa, you may speak freely. Truly, are you willing to be married to him? It is not…You know Master Grey quite well, of course. And he will have his mother’s title in time. He’s not ill-looking, either, though one could wish him taller. But are you sure that he will be a good husband?”

“I think so. But how can I be sure when I have never had a husband before, nor he a wife?”

“It’s a good match for both families, but your father and I want you to be happy, too. When I was wed for the first time…Well, His Grace of Bedford was a very kind man as well as a very great one. But it is never easy, the business of becoming a wife.”

I wanted to ask, “Was it not easy for you after, when you became my father’s wife?” but did not dare. It could not have been like the marriage they set before me, that was sure. They had loved each other so much, Mal said one evening, when Sir Edward and Lady Ferrars were away and we were sitting over the fire at Groby. They had loved so powerfully that they endured scandal and poverty by being married in secret without asking the King’s permission. “For though he was His Grace of Bedford’s seneschal in Normandy—his deputy—and a knight, he was not more,” Mal had gone on, whisking the next chestnut out of the fire and tossing it to me. “While your lady mother was the second lady of England. And so newly a widow.” I had almost burned my fingers, peeling off the chestnut’s blackened skin. Inside, the flesh was hot and sweet and tasted faintly of burning.

“Yes, madam, I know,” I said now to my mother. “But I shall have you to advise me, and though she would like to, Lady Ferrars has trouble finding fault with how I do my duties or my lessons.”

She reached down and stroked my head. “
C’est bon, ma chère fille!
I am glad to hear it.” I was not sure what of my words had made her glad: that I should do my work well or that Lady Ferrars was annoyed by it. “We might bespeak a hanging from the sisters at Lincoln,” she went on. “Melusina, perhaps, for your ancestry, as well as for good fortune in childbed…But, daughter, if you have any doubts—any matters that you would like to be settled before the contracts are drawn up—you must tell your father, or me, and we will arrange things as best we can.”

I had not thought she would consult my wishes thus. True, provided it was made with due courtesy, my mother listened to any request or complaint that even the lowliest of the household had to make. But on so great a matter of family business as an
eldest daughter’s marriage? I had not expected this, and had no answer ready. And yet, did I truly have no concerns in the matter of my own future? I stared into the flames until my cheeks felt scorched, and realized that I did, but that my doubts were not ones that I could have spoken of to my lady mother, or dictated to a clerk to be written into my marriage deeds.

Una—Monday

There’s scarcely a house’s depth between Narrow Street and
the river: the back of mine hangs over the water. I let myself in and dump my bags in the hall. It all looks clean enough, though it smells of tenants: cigarette smoke, takeaway food, and the cheap furniture that Uncle Gareth let us have from the Chantry so that we could take our own things with us to Sydney. But still, underlying it, I can smell the Thames: wet and cool and slightly rotten. It’s high tide, and in the sitting room the midsummer light is liquid, with sunstruck scraps of silver dancing over the ceiling in the way that Adam loved.

Two years is not long enough to have acquired equanimity. For a while the fog closes in on me, gray and suffocating.

When I can breathe again I stare across the river, trying to find something impersonal to hold on to, something that won’t remind me of Adam, nor yet remind me that he’s dead.

From here there’s little indication of the passing of time, except for the moon-drawn rise and fall of the river. At low tide there are a few yards of rubbish-strewn shingle; at high tide the water runs perhaps six feet below my study window. Rotherhithe on the far bank is too distant to be real; we watched what was renamed Docklands as one might a strange colony of insects.
First the sturdy cranes began to rust and the fog-blackened warehouses emptied. Next they were tramp-haunted shells. Then they sprouted spindly builders’ hoists that vanished as suddenly as they had come, leaving smart little flats and restaurants garnished with industrial chic, the warehouse pulleys shiny and unturning. Now the millennium is only five years away. I never thought I’d see it in without Adam.

When I’m steady I haul my bags upstairs and start unpacking. It was winter at home, and I’ve brought too many sweaters even for an English summer. I unlock the tenant-proof cupboard, find our own clean sheets, and make up the bed. My jet-lagged flesh aches to lie down, and I mustn’t: I’m only in England for a week, and there’s a lot to do.

This isn’t a professional trip; I haven’t got time for archives and seminars and working lunches. I’ve brought plenty of work, nonetheless. On the plane I picked my way through Charles Ross on Edward IV, and compared him with Michael Hicks on Richard III, though I must get down to primary sources soon. Just after Dubai I dropped a photocopy of a research paper that I foolishly hadn’t stapled, and was still apologizing and retrieving pages of references from under people’s feet over Cyprus. No, this isn’t a work trip; it’s to sell the house and see the family. It’s to sign away the last of my English life, and go home.

“It’ll be lovely to see you,” said my cousin Izzy on the phone two weeks ago when, late one evening and two whiskies down, I finally decided to do it, that there was no reason to delay. When we bought the house in Narrow Street, it wasn’t a Queen Anne Residence Convenient for the City; it was a tenement, in a slum. You could almost smell Sherlock Holmes’s opium dens, see the lascars and hear the drunken sailors. Not anymore. There’s every
reason to put the house Adam and I bought when we married—to share for the lifetime that we thought our marriage would be—into the hands of a sharp-suited, slavering estate agent. “And it’s good timing from the practical point of view,” Izzy said. “There’s a bit of paperwork to do with the Chantry. You know the house is going to be sold?”

I hadn’t. Even with Australia no farther away than reaching for the phone, even though Izzy and Lionel are all the brother and sister I have, sometimes news takes a long time to get to me.

“
Sold?
When was that decided?”

“Only last week. I was about to write to you. And it’s not the workshop, not for the moment, just the house. The Press will carry on,” Izzy said, the echo of her brisk, working morning booming off the satellites toward me. “It would be hard to think of the Solmani Press not existing, wouldn’t it? Though I’m afraid it won’t be long. Uncle Gareth’s not getting any younger. If you ring when you get here, shall we have supper? I can fill you in properly then, and we can have a good old catch-up. Lionel’s around; I know he’d love to see you. D’you want me to tell him? Save you the phone call? And Uncle Gareth, of course, he’ll be so pleased. Anyway, have a good flight.”

And now I’m here, and due at Izzy’s at seven. I want to see her, but why must it be like this? Why can’t it be her coming to us? Stupidly, I can’t believe I’ll never be “us” in this house again: Adam’s medics, hard-drinking and funny; my historians, dryer and quieter; Joe and David, the couple next door; someone over from America for a conference; Izzy, perhaps, or even Uncle Gareth. Perhaps I’d had time to cook a big casserole or maybe pasta, perhaps Adam led a foraging expedition to fetch food from the Indian restaurant—they didn’t speak much English there, but it didn’t matter because we were usually the only English custom
ers: they made no concessions with the spicing. There were evenings when hospital pagers went off as regularly as clocks, others when we’d gather at the sitting-room windows in silence to watch the moon and its reflection moving over the waters, or noisily to cheer the fireworks of half a dozen Guy Fawkes displays; once we held a Midsummer’s Eve party, and watched the sun rise, spreading silver gilt across a mother-of-pearl morning.

It’s Midsummer’s Eve any day now. Like a child I want to cry at the smashing of my world, and then at my own impotent petulance. And when I’ve mastered myself, I realize just how much I ache, ache with dreariness, deadness almost. There’s always the fog of missing Adam that fills my head, and hangs between me and everything else, but now all the trains and tubes, airports and aeroplanes seem to have laid a grubby, sterile carapace over my skin. I haul off my shoes, strip off my jeans and T-shirt, and get into the shower. The water’s scalding and fierce, cracking the carapace, bouncing off the bones of my shoulders and running through the roots of my hair like hot fingers. I tip my head back so it streams over my face and fills my ears till all I can hear is water. I want to stay like this forever.

I can’t. I open my eyes and reach for the shower gel, which does hair as well. Someone gave some to Adam for Christmas, ages ago, and I liked the smell so much, and the straightforwardness of it, that I took to using it too. Neck, chest, arms warm and slippery with eucalyptus and mint. When I’m clean, I take some more gel and try to find all the twinges and aches of traveling: shoulder muscles tight under my fingers, sides and lower back so stiff that when I dig my thumbs in it’s as sharp as pinching myself. Even the soles of my feet seem to have knots in them. But at last I must get out, get dry and dressed, must find my England Admin
notebook and ring the estate agent, then make appointments with banks, solicitors, accountants, and stockbrokers.

I pull on sweatpants and a top and go down to the corner shop with the air threading coldly through my still-damp hair. Last time we were here the shop never seemed to have much more than long-life milk and sliced white, but it’s changed hands. I come back with an expensive bagful of organic salad, wholegrain bread, and free-range eggs; the wine’s much better. But I’m suddenly so impossibly weary that I don’t want to eat anything, or even have a drink. “Grief is exhausting,” I remember Adam saying of someone else, some patient’s wife or husband. “It’s like having a permanent leak in your vital systems.” I can do nothing but go to bed, defying travelers’ wisdom and medical sense, and I dream, as always, of Adam.

I don’t remember Izzy’s block of flats being as tall, dark red, and unrelievedly Edwardian as it looks to me in the yellowing evening light. She herself has narrowed and neatened, inside her well-cut black sweater and trousers that make my jeans and T-shirt seem too casual; her hair is short and sharp, more silvery than dark but then she is five years older than me. We hug.

“Una, it’s so good to see you. You’re looking well. How are you? How are things?”

“Fine, thanks. Busy, you know. Sorting out the house and so on.”

She takes my statement at face value. “Of course. Still, it shouldn’t be hard to sell.” And then, like a satellite delay, what I haven’t said reaches her, and she answers it with another hug of my shoulders. “I’m so sorry. But I’m sure it’s the right thing to do.

You must say if I can help.”

Izzy flew out to me when Adam died. There’s nothing else she needs to say. “Of course I will,” I say.

Her studio’s at the back. I stare down into the communal garden, where a blackbird is standing in the now-violet light, his ebony head cocked and his yellow beak ready to stab into the earth. To the left of the great, north-facing window is her Ballets Russes shawl, framed in dark wood and hanging on the wall. The fringes are combed and pressed straight, and the light from the window lies on the glass and makes it hard to see the silky curls of orange and scarlet and peacock blue. Evidently she doesn’t wear it anymore. I remember her trailing around in it at Chantry studio parties. Even the smell of her studio is the same as it was then: the familiar creamy-sharp smell of paper and ink overlies the faint spice of seasoning box-and pear-wood blocks. For a moment I’m wholly, head-spinningly, back in my childhood, watching the way she moved, laughed, talked, and wondering if I’d ever have that ease with all these people, that grown-up kind of belonging.

There are a couple of photographs of Izzy’s daughter Fay, and a charming wood engraving—Izzy’s work—of her digging in the sand at the seaside. But on the workbench I see that Izzy’s sandbag has no half-sketched-out block waiting, and she’s set aside the big lens on its stand.

“You know the Chantry archive’s going to San Diego now I’ve finished cataloging Grandpapa’s letters?” says Izzy to me. “I’ve only got to get it all together now, and it’ll be ready for shipping. They’re going to put everything on microfilm for anyone to look at. Even on a computer. I’m going to get as much publicity as I can when the archive transfers. San Diego are good at that. There might even be enough interest to persuade someone to republish
At the Sign of the Sun and Moon
. Perhaps even a
Collected Letters
.
There’s so much interest in fine printing, these days. I get an inquiry from a researcher every few weeks. Red or white?”