A Secret Alchemy (21 page)

“Set up some kind of trust. We were going to meet up and discuss it.”

“We?”

“Gareth, Mark, and me. And Lionel. Can you come?”

“Yes, of course. When?”

“This evening at the Chantry. Lionel can get there for about six. I’m bringing food.”

“Hold on, my diary’s across the room.” A clunk as she puts the receiver down on the table. I wait, and try not to remember a different, sweating dream, as dark as the ship’s bulk, which looms over me still because it was of Mark.

“Una? I’m busy this afternoon. Could make it for about eight, though. Is that any good?”

“I’m sure that’ll be fine. See you then.”

“Yes,” she says, and puts the phone down.

After the earlier rain it’s turned into a beautiful afternoon, the sun lying warmly across brick and slate and even concrete, and catching my bare shoulder through the taxi window as we cross the river. On Blackheath the wide-winged mowers are out, working their way to and fro across the high green curve like galleons
hull down across an ocean, so that the cut-grass scent rolls in at the taxi window.

When we reach the Chantry, I’m lifting the carrier-bags of food out of the taxi’s boot when Mark appears. “Want a hand?”

“Don’t worry, there isn’t much. I just raided Marks & Spencer.”

He’s shirtless, his chest old-gold in the sun as he approaches, pulling off heavy gardening gloves. He’s caught our cousinly habits: we brush cheeks in a greeting kiss and the point of his shoulder is hard under my hand. I can smell lawnmower oil, and the scent of him that I’ve known almost all my life. I turn away to pay the driver, and when I turn back, he’s picked up the bags.

“We’re sitting outside,” he says. “By the workshop.”

“Is there anywhere to sit in that jungle?”

“Been tidying up a bit.”

He has indeed: three full bin-bags squat on the fiercely shorn lawn, and when we round the bulk of the house I see rugs and a table on the patch outside the workshop where the midsummer sun lingers longest. Gareth gets up as I approach and greets me with a laugh and a hug, which seems stronger and more substantial than before. I fetch plates from the kitchen, giving them a surreptitious wash, and put out the food. The wine’s still cold. Mark disappears, and reappears shirted and clean, only slightly damp around the edges. We’re topping up our glasses when the deep hum of an expensive engine, then the clunk of a car door, announce Lionel.

He’s wearing driving gloves and he seems pleased to see Mark, though they shake hands with the brisk neutrality of long-standing business acquaintances. Mark outlines everything Gareth, he, and I have been talking about, as clearly and clear-headedly as if he were presenting to a board of directors: forming a trust to own the
house, raising money to restore it, and opening to the public, with an exhibition of its history, perhaps in the undercroft; using the chapel ruins as the roots of a beautiful new building to be a gallery or, more accessibly, an art and exhibition space; above all, keeping the Press going, so that the Chantry isn’t a dead, didactic piece of history but a living, breathing, working world. “And offering the chapel gallery for hire. Much easier to raise money if we can demonstrate some kind of community benefit,” he finishes.

Lionel has listened to it all without his expression changing, and only his still-gloved hands and fidgeting fingers showing signs of life. “But would the money be forthcoming? Forgive me, Gareth, I’m playing Devil’s advocate here, but with such an apparently attractive idea…It’s easy enough to get capital grants, but running costs are different. The financial footing needs to be absolutely sound. It’s not as if the Press was ever financially solid, even in its heyday before the war.”

“We managed,” says Gareth. “It wasn’t always easy, and it would never have been something to tempt the money-men. At least, not without compromising what we did beyond redemption. But that wasn’t the point. And now…This would be a different thing altogether.”

He discussed the restoration of the chapel eagerly enough: he can remember the Courtaulds entertaining their Gainsborough Studios stars at Eltham Palace in the twenties, and the sense of a ruin living again as Eltham did has caught our imaginations, I think. But now I can’t tell from his tone if the difference—the change to the Press itself—is something he welcomes or not.

“It’s certainly the way things are going,” says Lionel, pulling out one of those leather note-holders and a gold pen. “Heritage, and so on. But whether it’s viable for a relatively small, unknown
place like the Chantry…Gareth, what sort of figures are we talking about? For the restoration?”

Gareth shakes his head. “No idea. Mark?”

“Restoring to conservation standards? Very roughly? Hundred thousand, perhaps, a hundred and fifty including consultants? Fifty thousand for the gallery? Always cheaper to build from scratch. Then there’s the fitting out. Say a quarter of a million altogether? More if there are salaries involved.”

“Thank you, Mark.” Lionel makes a note. “Una? Anything to add?”

“Well, I won’t say it’s none of my business, but I certainly shouldn’t have a casting vote when I’m not going to be here.” I’m not looking at Mark, I’m looking at Gareth, but my skin knows that his eyes are on me. “But of course I’d like it to be saved and kept even sort of in the family. And if it was restored, I’d love to give back some of the Chantry things I’ve got: furniture and so on. And letters and stuff, if Uncle Gareth’s idea of keeping the archive here does work.”

Mark catches my eye and smiles.

Lionel notices. “And Mark—forgive me—how do you see your role in this? When you’ve only just come back?”

Mark hesitates, but more, I fancy, from picking his words than from uncertainty about what he wants to say. “That’d be for the trustees to decide. I’ll help however I can till I get another job. Needn’t be any time soon. And I do know what I’m doing with projects like this.”

“You always did,” I say.

“Of course,” says Lionel. “Well, we’d be very grateful. And the family—this putative trust—wouldn’t expect you to work without remuneration.”

Uncle Gareth makes a sudden movement, as if to stop Lionel saying any more. There’s a nasty little pause before I think to say, “Shall we have something to eat? Izzy said not to wait for her.”

There’s business of plates and glasses and food but again, as if they’re thin lines of light, I feel the web that nets us together. Affection, attraction, suspicion, indifference.

Love.

Grief.

As I eat, I can’t help but watch Mark. His plate’s on the ground in front of him. Even with his knees bent up, his legs cross more of the rug than any Pryor’s ever would. He looks up, our eyes meet.

Even if he’d reached out his hand—his beautiful, long-fingered hand—and actually touched my cheek I couldn’t be more shaken.

What is this heat? Memory’s powerful. But this, is this about the past?

I was grown up by then and talking to Mark, working with Mark, referring to Mark, had all become easy enough, because the paths for that were well laid. The longer what I knew—thought—felt—went unspoken, the more manageable it was, and even the despair became a settled thing, a known quantity, a thick, stable layer at my core. I even sometimes thought he’d forgotten what I’d said, and sometimes thinking so hurt more, and sometimes it hurt less.

My first year at the university was done, too, and I’d grown up some more there. Compared to many of my fellows, I was sophisticated in the extreme, because I knew couples who weren’t married: we’d had them staying, and some were even names the more arty had heard of. My clothes were odd, but I knew every detail of the facts of life—an amazing number of the girls didn’t,
not really—and wasn’t there something about my parents? But I’d learned, too: about girls who’d gone on hunger strike till allowed to go to university; uncles who grabbed at you when no one was looking; mothers who burned books and other mothers who lied to fathers because you’d gone to the library again; homes that were always clean, homes that had no books, homes that had horses and parlor maids, homes where you—the first ever—were given a fire in the Sundays-only parlor so you could study. I’d even found myself in dark corners with hours—well, minutes—till I had to be back in my hall, and a young man…I felt enough to enjoy it, and knew enough to know it didn’t matter.

I knew enough, and felt enough, and still it didn’t matter, because none of it was Mark.

It must have been August or September of my first long vacation. The medieval stones of Bermondsey Abbey were only just below the new skin of tarmac and paving slabs. I remember the day we uncovered a third column-base, and knew we really had discovered the cloisters. At the end of work I raced home on my bicycle, grubby and sweating, and found Mark kneeling outside the kitchen window, unblocking a drain. He squatted back on his heels and listened as I poured out what the county archaeologist had said, what Professor—what was his name?—had said, what it might mean that the spacing of the columns was…whatever it had measured. I could still feel the heavy brass at the end of the tape between my earth-stained fingers, and feel the grip of the postgraduate student who was holding the other end vibrating with excitement as we pulled it taut. I told Mark how we were trying to work out what it had been like, where the nuns had lived and how, these women some of whose names were known, whose births and deaths might be recorded, royal names even—it was a
royal haven, founded in the twelfth century. I could—any of us on the dig could—go to the Public Records Office and find out who they were. It wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done.

“Una, that’s great! That you can see it now! Just under your feet.” Mark rubbed his forearm across his brow and winced. Where his hair had hidden it I saw a bruise, new and angry, with the graze barely skinning over. I remembered his father was out of prison again.

I couldn’t stop myself: I reached out my hand to touch it as I might touch a hurt of my own. He turned his head away, flushing red under his summer-gold skin, and went back to digging muck from the drain. “Go on,” he said, in a muffled voice, and at the memory something stirs painfully in my throat that might almost be tears.

The chitchat is desultory, not taking up much of my attention. Is Mark really thinking of the Chantry’s past, as I am? Or is it my mind that fills this other—this Mark-shaped person sitting in the sun—with
my
moments,
my
memories, and believes them to be his? I can’t know him, I can’t feel what he feels or see what he sees, any more than I can read Elizabeth and Anthony in their books. I want to reach forward and shake him, push myself through the envelope of his body and find whatever’s there, inside him. I want to know what he knew, what he was thinking, what I was to him then.

Because you didn’t love me, my memories howl. But I was something to you, wasn’t I? You were glad of my help when you were mending your bike or a press, you smiled at me if I came into the workshop, you mended the latch on my window. We were friends, we always had been. Sometimes I wanted to tell someone. Izzy I would have, normally, but not about Mark, because…And Uncle Gareth? But Mark wasn’t one of us, and I didn’t know what he or
anyone would do, or say, if they knew I loved him and he didn’t love me. Maybe Uncle Gareth would try to talk to Mark, and then Mark’d hate me, or be embarrassed, or try to avoid me. I couldn’t have borne that. Or even…he might have left. Uncle Gareth might have said he ought to leave, and he had nowhere to go. It would have been my fault, and I would have lost him forever.

I couldn’t destroy what I loved most. Better to live with it as it was.

But despair couldn’t smother desire. I knew enough about sex to know what I felt when Mark pulled his shirt over his head and washed under the pump in the yard, and what I felt was wonderful and frightening: so much stronger than what I felt for the boy or two I kissed in the dark corners of university, and so strange. Of course I knew the facts, but I was no less in the dark about it all mentally and emotionally than my friends were. I don’t think I understood how wanting it addles your brain as much as his; perhaps they thought that if they didn’t mention it, we wouldn’t want it. Only of course we did. Even if the “him” wasn’t the one you really longed for. But not wanting it was worse.

Sex started for me on the sofa in the church-hall room we’d borrowed as headquarters for the Bermondsey dig, after everyone else had gone home in the teatime dark. It was cold, I remember, so it must have been at the end of the dig. I should have been going home myself. Aunt Elaine would chat to me over her shoulder while she made the supper, as if I was still of an age to be doing my homework at the kitchen table, and Uncle Gareth would pull a funny face and pat my shoulder. Mark would look around and smile, then turn back to the fence he was mending or the stack of books he was packing. Then Izzy’s voice would call him across the garden, and I would be alone again. Perhaps it was those moments when
I knew with devastating certainty that he would only ever be kind and helpful to me, that he would always go when Izzy called…If I made a conscious decision at all, it was because of those moments.

His name, I’m fairly sure, was Miller—Nigel Miller—and he’d just finished his first year too, at Bristol, I think. All summer I kept feeling his gaze between my shoulder blades. After a while I noticed that as soon as I put my hand up in the morning dig meetings to volunteer for a job, he would offer to join me. Or I’d be sitting with a mug of tea or a sandwich, thinking about Mark, and I’d look up and find Nigel staring at me. We chatted while squatting side by side, scraping earth from lumps of Norman stone, though Grandmama would have said he didn’t have much conversation. But he kept looking at me, he kept saying my name even when he didn’t need to, he seemed to have perfect recall of everything I’d ever said to him.

On a rare day when I went to work wearing a skirt, he asked very tentatively why I didn’t more often, and was a bit surprised when I said, “Because it gets in the way.” His attention was like an uncomfortable lamp turned onto me, making me feel hot inside my skin, and aware all the time of myself, crouching, stretching, fingers brushing carvings, sweat-damped strings of hair escaping my ponytail to stick to my cheek.