A Secret Alchemy (5 page)

“It was a chapel. It’s real medieval. King Arthur mostly,” I said.

He nodded. “Like Lancelot.”

I led him across the lawn and under the apple trees, with his bike wheels making a snake-trail after us in the wet grass. I pointed out the well, the hen run, the stump on the elm where a branch had broken when Izzy was climbing it, and she fell off and broke her arm, too.

In the workshop none of the machines was going and Uncle Gareth heard us talking and came to the door.

“Mark Fisher?” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Mr. Pryor. Mr. Gareth Pryor. How do you do?”

Mark Fisher pulled off his cap, then shook hands. “How do you do, sir?”

“Put your bike in that shed—there—and I’ll show you round. See you later, Una. Thanks for showing Mark the way.”

They disappeared into the workshop. I wasn’t allowed in there unless I was asked, though often if I hung around looking hopeful in the doorway, Uncle Gareth would declare a tea break and say I could come in, and one of the assistants would give me a slurp of tea, sugary the way I liked it, and half a biscuit. But today everyone was busy, stacking and wrapping and cleaning and oiling. I went away, but Aunt Elaine spotted me before I could get back to my dolls and I had to help with the laundry.

I was standing on a box hanging up wet tea-towels when Mark Fisher came out of the workshop again, pulling on his cap.

“Hello,” I said, over the tea-towels.

“Hello,” he said, starting to wheel his bike along the path toward the front. “Look at you, all tall all of a sudden. Did Merlin magic you, then?”

“No. I wish he would.”

He stopped. “What would you ask him for, if you could?”

I thought, I’d ask for a magic carpet like Aladdin so I could fly around the world and find my father’s pictures, but I said my usual answer instead: “Roast chicken and lots of chocolate cake. And a puppy.”

“A puppy of your own?”

“Yes. Only Aunt Elaine says he’d get under her feet.” I could
see he was feeling sorry for me. It was a lie and I didn’t really want a puppy, so it was sort of cheating to have him being sorry for me. I said quickly, “What about you? If there was Merlin.”

“I used to think a job. But I’ve got that now.”

“Are you going to work for Uncle Gareth?”

He smiled like the sun was coming out. “Yes.”

“Oh, good. Are you starting now?”

“Monday, eight o’clock.” He touched his cap to me. “Good-bye till then, Miss Una.”

“Good-bye, Mark. See you on Monday.”

He even knew my name, I thought, and he called me “Miss” as if I was a grown-up, or nearly grown-up like Izzy. I picked up Smokey Bear and Golly from where they’d been playing Pooh-sticks in the rainwater butt, and went in to see if Aunt Elaine had any bits of apple left over from making the Eve’s pudding.

Now as I approach down the path I can hear the slow waltz of a hand-press, and then it goes quiet. Uncle Gareth appears in the workshop doorway. “Una! My dear! I saw you from the window. How are you? Good flight?”

There’s much less of him to hug than there was five years ago, and underneath the oily resin scent of ink and the cleanness of shaving soap he smells of old age. He was never tall; now he’s no taller than me.

“I was so very sorry about Adam, Una, my dear. He was a good man,” he’s saying, and I want to scrunch myself into his arms and know that it’s all right, that Uncle Gareth’s here, that he’s always here, that he’ll never leave me, that it’ll all look better in the morning.

He never did leave me, and neither did Aunt Elaine, until I didn’t need her anymore.

But I still need Adam, and he didn’t want to leave me. He fought every inch of the way, every milligram and blood count, every injection and X-ray, every pill and incision and suture. He used to worry that I’d rather know less of it all, but when I said, “No, it helps to know what they’re doing,” I meant it, and he trusted me enough to believe me. As if coming back to the Chantry has opened the channel to other memories, I suddenly see the hospital rooms, the books, the diagrams. Perhaps because Adam was a doctor himself, his own doctors were unusually frank in their Australian voices. They were kind, they knew what it meant to Adam, and to me, but they were brisk and efficient, too, as hard as the steel and plastic and chemicals they pitted against the creeping malformation, hacking back as best they might against the mere fringes of the ancient, brutal wilderness of life’s own cells. And they lost, and the metastasizing cells, the secondary lesions, the tumors and gangrenes won, and destroyed his body, though never his mind, the body I loved as he loved mine that is still, obstinately, whole.

Uncle Gareth doesn’t let go until I’ve wiped my eyes and blown my nose. Then I look around me. “Izzy said you were living in here now.”

“Yes, the old storeroom makes a very nice bedroom. And, of course, there was all the plumbing ready in the darkroom to make a little kitchen and bathroom. I do very well.”

The workshop, too, looks much as it always did, though the presses have been shoved closer together on the brick floor at one end to make room at the other for a couple of armchairs that I remember, now standing before a two-bar electric fire. One is much more sat-in than the other, I can see, and on the bookcase next to it is a fleet of photograph frames. There’s a small desk covered
with slithering piles of paperwork. Is it the furniture of ordinary life that makes the long, low space seem smaller? No, it’s a physical contraction. At the other end there’s a partition, and beyond it the new storeroom: racks of paper and stacks of books.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“Come and see.” He takes me over to the hand press. “Forgive me if I clean it, would you?” he says. “Bad practice to leave things dirty overnight.”

“I’ll do it,” I say, taking the rag and solvent bottle from his hand. “I haven’t forgotten how. You show me what you’re doing.”

“Only if you put an apron on over that nice frock,” says Uncle Gareth, plucking one from a hook. He always did notice clothes, and that was vaguely in the back of my mind when I was getting dressed this morning, though it’s Uncle Gareth’s habit that calls it a frock, not its own nature, which is Indian-printed cotton. I did get round to ironing it, which I wouldn’t have bothered to normally. The smell of solvent is sharp, as potent as Christmas-tree scent. “It’s a children’s book,” Uncle Gareth is saying. “Well, as much for children as for anyone else.
Jason and the Golden Fleece
. Look, this is one I’ve already folded to see if it works.”

I put the cleaning things to one side. It’s not really a book, in fact, it’s a concertina of heavy, creamy paper, and it reminds me of the reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry, which I was allowed to have when I was in bed with a cold, the story unfolding in space as well as in my mind and before my eyes. The pictures are wood engraving with the words set in type below.

They’re not the cool, marble, long-limbed Greeks we learned at school, whose heirs they said we were. These rough, chunky figures are like gnarled old olive trees clinging to a barren, rocky gorge, somewhere in Asia Minor. They play out their story, but the artist really has studied the Bayeux Tapestry. Here, too, like a counterpoint, a figured bass, is, literally, a figured base: along the bottom of the page runs ordinary life, Black Sea–style. Goats milked and yoked oxen plowing, an eagle seizing a lamb, ships built and rigged, and fleeces used to pan for gold. These are things that make sense of the great loves and jealousies and battles that rage above their heads.

“It’s wonderful.”

“It is, isn’t it? Binder’s nightmare, though, I fear. They’re already cross with us because it’s late. I’m having to work half-press at the moment, not having an assistant. But I’ve had excellent advance orders, enough to make up for the loss on
News from Nowhere
.”

“Goodness, does anyone still read William Morris?”

“Apparently not…” He nods approval of my cleaning of the block in the press. It’s like grooming a horse must be, I sometimes think: the block solid and still, the press standing quietly under my hand but always with the possibility of movement. “Now, tell me your news.”

I tell him a little about what I need to do in this flying visit to London, selling the Narrow Street house and settling everything. And I say more about our—my—house in Sydney, about how the garden slopes down to the cliffs and the steps from there to the beach.

“It must be beautiful. Wish I could see it,” he says.

“Come and visit. Come in November and we’ll show you some sun. They keep telling me I should have a birthday party. Maybe I will.”

He shakes his head. “I couldn’t leave the Press. Not for that long. Or the tenants in the house. They’re very well behaved, whatever Izzy says, but still…” He peers out of the window. “Sun’s over the yardarm, wouldn’t you say? Whiskey all right? I’m afraid I haven’t got any wine. Can’t seem to pick up you young ones’ habit of drinking it on its own.”

“It was you who taught me to like whiskey,” I say, following him into the kitchen that was the darkroom. It’s extremely neat; Uncle Gareth always was, just as his hands were always clean and still are, however inky anyone else got. But the kitchen smells of old dishcloth and it doesn’t look as if he ever cooks. The glasses he gets out of a cupboard are smeary with nearsighted washing-up. Discreetly I rinse them under the tap, and dry them with a piece of kitchen roll, rather than the neatly folded but musty-smelling tea-towel.

“Are you sure you couldn’t come?” I say, when we’re settled in the armchairs. I take a pull at the whiskey. “Is there no one who could mind things for you here? A friend’s offered to do a big party for my fiftieth. Come for that.”

“Really, nobody,” he says, shaking his head again, then looking away. The way his head moves so that he can look at the bookcase at his elbow, as if drawn irresistibly, takes my gaze with it. As clearly as if he’d picked it up I see he’s looking at a photograph of Mark. It’s half-obscured by one of Adam’s and my wedding, but I think it’s an enlargement made from some small part of a lost original. Mark’s grainy and insubstantial, as memories are; the harder you look at
them, the more they break up into dust, and yet you can’t help peering at your memories in the hope that they’ll come clearer.

Mark did leave me—us—the Press—and I never knew why, not really, and we never heard from him again. At last I wrote, but I got no answer. Perhaps it’s because we’re in the workshop that suddenly, somewhere in the depths of me, the old scar starts to ache.

“Doesn’t Adam look handsome in that?” says Gareth, as if neither of us has been looking at Mark. “And what about work? You said in your letter that you were writing about Anthony Woodville.” I explain. “He’s an attractive character, isn’t he?” says Uncle Gareth. “I remember you telling me what was written on the manuscript of his
Dictes and Sayings
. Not Caxton’s printed version, the grand, illuminated manuscript, the one that was presented to the king and queen.”

“It’s marginalia, not contemporary,” I say, and the words swim up from my memory: “‘This Earl was the most learned, valiant, and honorable knight of the world for his time, yet all was exercised with adverse accidents in his life. At length came to achieve the honor of an undeserved death.’ His name is scratched out, too, everywhere it appears in the copy.”

“Is it really? He must have seemed quite a threat, even when they’d killed him…” Uncle Gareth shakes his head, wonderingly. “How young they were, to be fighting over a kingdom. I remember being amazed when I discovered that Shakespeare’s Crookback Dick, whom I used to have nightmares about, was only thirty-three when he was killed at Bosworth.”

“And that he wasn’t crook-backed. At least, the real Richard, Duke of Gloucester, wasn’t…But you’re right. Edward IV was eighteen when he won the battle of Towton, which finished off poor old Henry VI as a king. And he had brothers, and then sons.
All those glamorous Yorkist men. Though no one would have put money on
Richard
ending up on the throne. It’s people whose main use is as inheritors and rulers of land who have power when they’re so young. That’s why gentrywomen were married in their teens—twelve or thirteen, sometimes—and the boys the same. That’s their value.”

“But such boys had to prove themselves, too. Their value was in what they could do.”

“Of course. It’s hard to see it with poor old Henry, mind you. Though going mad was hardly his fault. Not that he was much good before that. Did you know that at the time it was called the Cousins’ War?”

“No, I didn’t. Makes sense, of course. I suppose no one
asked
Henry if he wanted to be a king. It was the Lancaster family business…Do you have a thesis yet? A definite line?”

“No, not yet. It’s centered on their books, but I don’t know what they’ll tell me. The politics are so huge and complicated, they tend to dominate any account. But I’m sure that’s not how it felt at the time. What about all the stuff that was to do with living, having children and day-to-day managing the household? No one’s approached them as I’m planning to. There’s space for that.”

“How much do we know of the books?”

“Well, there’s been good work on what we know of Elizabeth’s, which is very little. And we can work out a lot more for Anthony, because of course he translated quite a lot, and so on. And Edward’s library is well known. He was a great collector, had special caskets made for his favorite books so he could take them with him from palace to palace. Even on campaign. But no one’s brought all that together.”

“And then there’s the princes in the Tower. What’s your view?”

“Of who killed them? And when? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, though I know where I think the weight of probability lies. In a sense, it’s not necessary for the kind of bibliographic study I’m doing. It’s what it must have been like for them, for Anthony and Elizabeth, never knowing what had happened. Where the boys were. If they were alive or dead…” And for the life of me I can’t stop myself going on: “You never heard from Mark, did you?”