HY DID MALORY LET LOUIZA DISAPPEAR? WHY DIDN’T HE JUMP up? Why didn’t he play Galahad and leap, or at least slide down the ladder from the steeple and out to wherever the breath of late afternoon had borne her?HY DID MALORY LET LOUIZA DISAPPEAR? WHY DIDN’T HE JUMP up? Why didn’t he play Galahad and leap, or at least slide down the ladder from the steeple and out to wherever the breath of late afternoon had borne her?
The sun was in his eyes. Or rather, there was a vision, a curtain between the floor where Malory sat and the trap door down which Louiza had disappeared. A curtain, or better still, a gentle waterfall of light flowed down from the beveled slats of the roof to the wooden planking of the steeple floor. A dusty host of angels climbed up and down that mid-afternoon sunbeam, flapping their wings to the backbeat of a Hosanna over Malory’s Kit Bag, his Book of Organs, his Universal Tuner.
There was nothing unusual about any of the three. They were as worn and discolored as any of the million keepsakes that other solitary adolescents have adapted to adult use over their own histories. The Universal Tuner was a foot-long piece of twisted metal the ten-year-old Malory had found lying on a cairn in the hills outside Narbonne, that last summer he had spent with his mother. He had never been curious enough to ask about its composition, although it was clearly harder than the lead that made up the better organ pipes. He was thankful for the Universal Tuner’s angular eccentricities, its ability to scratch and bang and pry and cajole thousands upon thousands of pipes into harmonic precision, and its singular economy, as compact as a Swiss Army knife and as ingenious as a Geiger counter for diagnosing and curing the many ailments of the pipe organ, in their multitudinous variety. The Book of Organs was as near a diary as Malory had ever possessed—listing the name, the location, the birth date, baptism, and every subsequent tuning and idiosyncrasy of every organ he had played, tuned, cleaned, or vacuumed free of dust and mouse droppings, going back to the organ of the cathedral of Narbonne.
Both Universal Tuner and Book of Organs had special pockets in Malory’s Kit Bag, which was not lacking in the pocket department. It could hold half-eaten sandwiches, cake wrapped in waxed paper, music folios, and shoe polish. The Kit Bag was the only souvenir Malory possessed of his dead fisherman of a father, although why his father had the bag was a mystery. As far as Malory knew, his father had never been a soldier. In any case the bag was too small to be useful either as a duffel bag or a serious daypack. Green canvas was hardly the kind of waterproof material for a fisherman carrying bait and tackle and a fish or three, no matter how many pockets it had. But the Kit Bag, the one true link to his paternity, was stenciled on the flap in broken capitals:
Tenuous and puerile as Malory realized such attachments were, there were moments in the drafty organ lofts of East Anglia when tracing the letters with his fingertips brought a certain warmth. All three—Universal Tuner, Book of Organs, and Kit Bag—were Malory’s constant companions. Yet something had happened to Malory in the steeple of the church of St. George’s, Whistler Abbey. And in case Malory was too dim to understand the significance, the seraphim of Nature were mobilizing to focus his eyes on the obvious.
The obvious sat in its own pool of atomized afternoon, atop the pebbled and abused cover of the Book of Organs. The Pip, the Pip that Louiza had pried from between the shutters of the steeple, the Pip that had brought Malory’s life into tune. The brown-husked mini-ovum of a Pip that drew the afternoon light into its brownness at the new center of Malory’s expanding universe. The Pip was the obvious cause of Malory’s change—or at least obvious to Malory, who could interpret the beating of his heart, the coursing in his veins, the dizziness of what others simply call love, only through the light and the gravity of his Newton. The Pip brought Louiza and Malory together, the Pip witnessed all that had gone between them. The Pip was the Sun that drew the Moon to the Earth and spun them around one another. The Pip would bring them back together for all time. The Pip would keep company with the Universal Tuner and the Book of Organs in his Kit Bag. The Pip would be his guide.
Malory packed the Pip into a plastic 35-millimeter film canister that he normally used for resin, wedged it safely into a pocket of the Kit Bag, added the Universal Tuner and the Book of Organs, and let gravity pull him back down the ladder to the nave. He was twice as tall when his feet touched the paving stones of the nave as when he had ascended that morning. He was certain that Louiza would be waiting for him outside St. George’s, or in the Orchard, or if not there, then not far away.
“Good afternoon.”
Not Louiza. In the cooler light of the second pew sat the Old Lady.
“Good afternoon, Hercule,” the Old Lady said again.
“Good afternoon—”
“Please,” the Old Lady said. “Come sit for a moment.”
Malory had no desire to sit, had no desire to talk to any old lady—this one, perhaps, in particular.
“Please,” the Old Lady said again. “I will not bite.” The crumbs of French at the edges of the Old Lady’s accent gave the invitation a certain force that Malory—being Malory and therefore incapable of giving offense—could not ignore. Malory sat. “You know who I am, I suppose.”
She was covered in a dusty blue and gray, although the dust, to Malory’s eye, was neither the dust of the angels nor the dust of neglect but more of a powder that softened the threads of her woolen suit, molded the silk at her neck into the ancient pockets of her skin and blended the powdered white of her hair into a hat that Malory would only remember as expensive in the way that history must be. But the sensation that struck Malory with the sharpest power—a power that he was soon forced to recall on many occasions—was the scent of pine and sun, the scent of the four-thousand-year-old yew in the churchyard, one he hadn’t smelled on a human being since the death of his mother nearly twenty years before.
“Mrs. Emery,” Malory said. “Good evening.” He knew she was Mrs. Emery. Old Mrs. Emery who lived alone, it was said, in the gothic pile of Whistler Abbey, a manor that overlooked the yew. Old Mrs. Emery, who for as long as Malory could remember had said nothing to him, but had placed a shilling in his palm following every service. Given the choice, Malory would have sooner spent a night in the churchyard than in Whistler Abbey with Old Mrs. Emery.
“Mrs. Emery,” she repeated. He saw another church, in the Cathar South of France when his mother was still alive, a land as hilly as the fens were smooth, the church where a younger Malory ran for the warmth and all-consuming vibrations of the organ, where he danced on the pedals because his feet could not reach from the bench, while his fist relaxed into a Bach prelude or a Saint-Saëns fantasy. “Hercule,” Mrs. Emery repeated. “I know that we have complex relations.”
Malory had survived by avoiding complexity, by seeking simplicity, in Newton, in Bach. But complexity was clearly the motif of the day—first Louiza with her i = u, her complex nature bound up in a web of numbers built from the square root of –1, and now Mrs. Emery, whose every breath reminded Malory that he had never known his father and had lost his mother at an age when the world was beginning to seem unbearably complex. Both Louiza and Mrs. Emery had found him at St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey. Malory needed tea. Badly.
“Hercule,” Mrs. Emery said. “You are in a rush, I can see.”
“Yes,” Malory said. “Sorry.”
“Don’t let me keep you.” Mrs. Emery didn’t move, and it was clear that she did not mean what she was saying. “But perhaps you can spare a moment for your grandmother.”
His grandmother. Mrs. Emery. Ahh. Malory’s mind began again. Mrs. Emery was his grandmother. There was the word. The Old Lady in the second pew was his grandmother. Like the discovery that goosed Archimedes out of his ancient Sicilian bathtub, the realization that Old Mrs. Emery was his grandmother had a touch of Eureka to it. But the surprise was tempered by a recognition that this was something he had always known. His mother had never spoken of her family. Malory had assumed a chorus of disapproval. Disapproval of his mother, disapproval primed by Sara’s choice of Irish lover, Malory père, a man whose judgment was in inverse proportion to his love.
Was it malice that Old Mrs. Emery felt towards her daughter Sara, towards the Irish lover, Malory’s father? Was it malice on Sara’s part that denied her own mother the knowledge of her grandson? For the first ten years of his life, Malory was only too willing to worship the decisions of his mother. And nothing he learned after her death induced him to develop the faculty of inquiry. Someone arranged for him to study and room at King’s College Choir School. He never asked who. He was at an age where he accepted everything, accepted the academics, the music, the bullying, although his posture was so naïvely open that the worst of the thugs felt it beneath their dignity to bloody a boy who didn’t know how to cower. And he never wondered why he was there.
Was it to this Mrs. Emery, this grandmother, that Malory owed—as unthinkingly, perhaps, as he owed God—his four A levels and subsequent Organ Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge? Was it to her he owed the request of the Master of Trinity that, for a small additional stipend, he play the ten o’clock service at the tiny Norman church of St. George, Whistler Abbey, every other Sunday morning (in such a depleted parish, the church had to share a preacher with Lesser St. Arnulf’s in Cambridge)? It was from the organ loft of St. George’s that Malory saw the gray-haired lady in the second pew every other Sunday. When later he had learned that, like his mother, her name too was Emery and that his stipend was directly transferred from her weekly donation to his pocket, he began to guess at her identity, or rather at his own. With the weight of that possibility, at the height of the organ loft, he felt his abandonment most keenly.
Instead of acknowledging the word grandmother, he made up a fiction to justify his abandonment. He had inherited his love of the organ from Mrs. Emery. Her piety, like his, was merely a stop that she could push in or pull out to create the desired effect, an unspoken linkage of two notes. It was part of a secret they shared. He’d always known and refused to think it odd that the old lady who smiled up at him from her seat on the aisle in the second pew never spoke to him and never approached him save to place a shilling in his palm at the close of service.
“You have known, Malory,” Mrs. Emery said, “I hope you have known for a long time that you had a grandmother who loved you very much, but loved her daughter more.”
Knowledge, Malory thought—tricky business, that.
“It was out of respect for my poor, dead Sara that I never approached you directly when I saw you in St. George’s, or the many times I traveled into town on visiting days at school and ordinary times, and watched and felt the loneliness I had brought upon you and your mother. I expect it was your own love and loyalty to your mother that kept you away from me, stronger than any loneliness imaginable.”
Malory said nothing, holding onto a gothic refusal to degenerate into a Dickensian Pip. But he remembered that final summer in the South of France.
“Whose garden is this, Mother?”
“What do you mean, Hercule?
“Does it belong to Charlemagne?”
“Not everything belongs to Charlemagne,” she smiled. “Not much, in fact. Any more.”
“Then who?”
“It’s yours, Hercule. The garden, the house.”
“It isn’t yours?”
“Some things,” she said, “are just for boys.”
“But this garden is just for me?”
“If you like.”
“Do we like it here?”
“You like the organ in the cathedral, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And the old lady next door? Do you like her?”
“In the big house? I thought this was her garden, her cottage.”
“No, Hercule, it’s yours. The old lady and I are just looking after it for you. Until you are bigger.”
“And the medallion of King David in the cathedral? The one that you say looks like me. Is that mine?”
“One day, perhaps. Who knows?”
“The boys in the market make fun of my name. They say there is a giant Hercule who’s asleep beneath the hills.”
“How do you know what they’re saying if they speak another language?”
“Is it true, Mother? About the giant?”
“If I told you, would you believe me?”
“They say he stood in the ocean and pushed Europe away from Africa. Then he got sleepy and lay down.”
“Not surprising after such hard labor.”
“They say he rose up, the giant, and chased away all the Saracens.”
“The Saracens! Did he?”
“Is he my father? The giant Hercule?”
“I thought you wanted to go to the cathedral, to play the organ.”
“It’s out of tune, mother.”
“Oh, Hercule. You and your ears!”
“But it is. The whole world. England, France, Europe, Africa. Out of tune.”
His mother paused. She tried to smile.
“Then you must tune it, Hercule,” she whispered, “the way the giant Hercule tried to adjust the Strait of Gibraltar.”
Malory said nothing to Mrs. Emery, sitting in the second pew of St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey. He shifted the Kit Bag on his shoulder, the canvas of the strap brushing a light B-flat against the corduroy of his jacket. There was nothing to be said, zero. But not an uncomfortable zero. It was a zero stuffed full of history—addings and subtractings, the products of time and experience and the gain that fills the vacuum of loss.
“I’ve brought you a gift, Hercule,” Mrs. Emery said.
“Ah.”
“No,” Mrs. Emery smiled. “Not the usual shilling. A book.” She handed him a parcel covered in brown paper and string. “An old book. It’s been in the family, which, after all, is your family, at least—” She smiled again at her own inability to disguise her wistful distaste. “At least your mother’s side of the family.”
“Thank you,” Malory said, ever polite, finding a convenient slot for the parcel in the depths of the Kit Bag. “But why?” he asked. “Why today?” He didn’t know why he said it. But in a day of mysteries, it was the question of Pips and fair-haired girls and grandmothers.
“To celebrate your discovery, of course.” Mrs. Emery stood and handed him a coin, her fingers as cool as the paving stones. “Now run across the road and get yourself a cup of tea.”
IT WAS GETTING ON TOWARDS THREE O’CLOCK. BENEATH THE FIRST BUDS of the apple trees, a dozen green-striped lawn chairs were scattered as bait for the hardened tourist who might bicycle or motor or even punt the three miles from the urban towers of Cambridge in hope of the first bucolic pleasures of spring. But Malory needed to warm his brain. He opened the garden door of the Orchard and chose a small table inside near the fire. The single customer, a tall, red-bearded man, was chatting at the till in what Malory guessed was some sort of American accent. He nodded at Malory, but Malory turned to the fire, pretending not to see—not keen to give offense, but not prepared for a third new encounter.
“For you.” The Brazilian wife of the proprietor—Malory had let her twins crawl on the pedals on the organ during several of his tunings—set a cup of tea and a plate of scones in front of him.
“Thank you,” Malory said, “but I only have a shilling.”
“A gift,” the Brazilian said.
“But—”
“Not from me,” she added, and turned back to the till. But the red-bearded American was gone. The Brazilian matron, too, moved away from Malory to clear the remains of what looked like an extensive three-bottle celebratory luncheon.
The parcel, the tea, Malory thought. And above all Louiza. Three gifts in one strange day. One was in his Kit Bag, one was quickly disappearing down his gullet, and one may have vanished forever.
He chewed, he swallowed.
Antonella, he thought. Antonella would know. Antonella would be at the Maths Faculty at the Sidgwick Site. Antonella would do anything for Malory, even search in the records and find clues to lead him to Louiza. Although Malory preferred cycling along the footpath by the river, March was a month of mud, and he was in a hurry. Though Antonella seemed to live at the office, Malory knew that even lonely Italian girls had their limits and he had better hurry.
The favor was not an issue. Antonella was clearly disposed—had been disposed for the better part of the three years she had worked as departmental secretary—to do more than just about anything for Malory. While Malory was only vaguely aware of his power over Antonella, he did know that in the Kingdom of Mathematicians, he as a Historian of Science, with his Beatle hair and bell-bottomed trousers, bestrode the River Cam with the charisma and stature of a Colossus. He couldn’t fail to notice her at the occasions where he was called upon to speak about Newton—at an introductory lecture for promising students or a social for curious old-age pensioners. Antonella was all copper curls and Botticelli bosom packed into a bit of Laura Ashley smocking—impossible to ignore, particularly at the departmental teas when Antonella with her biscuit tin was at her most solicitous. It was Rix, the Head Porter at Trinity—and therefore privy to the dozens of invitations to teas and coffees and esoteric mathematical functions that Antonella delivered by hand—who had first noticed Antonella’s interest.
“Mr. Malory,” he said one severely rainy afternoon, “you’ll forgive my saying so, but there is a new film by Bertolucci at the Arts Cinema. He’s Italian,” Rix added when Malory stared up at him blankly from the crumbling foam of the Senior Common Room sofa. “As such, it might interest a certain young Italian lady.”
“Ah,” Malory said, comprehension swimming to the surface of his embarrassment. “Antonella, you mean?”
“I believe that is the young lady’s name, yes,” Rix answered. “Although I have difficulty with Italian names.”
Malory’s embarrassment disappointed Rix, disappointed Antonella, and failed Bertolucci entirely. Nevertheless, he was sufficiently sussed to know that if Antonella was still at her desk at 4 p.m. of a March evening, he could ask her to search for Louiza in the files of the Maths Department, and she would give him another cup of tea—undoubtedly with two biscuits. But when Malory locked his bicycle and unclipped his trouser cuffs by the red-brick and glass optimism of the Sidgwick Site and ran two flights up the concrete and veneer stairwell to the Maths Faculty, he found Antonella weeping in the corona of a battered black-and-white television set.
“Oh, Malory!” She jumped up and ran to him, shaking in spasms that Malory quickly realized meant he might get neither his answers nor his tea as quickly as he had hoped.
“Antonella!” Malory said, trying to pat helpfulness into her expansive shoulders. “What happened?”
“Guarda!” she sobbed and pointed at the TV. The large-lipped, puppy-faced Anna Ford, whom Malory had always wanted to invite to High Table at Trinity if only to listen to her voice, was just turning to the camera.
“Good evening,” she said. Antonella pulled Malory down onto the edge of her desk, dislodging a stapler and a stack of pencils. “Former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro has been kidnapped in Rome.”
“Capisci?” Antonella turned her eyes, freshly teary to Malory. But Malory didn’t capisce a bit. He couldn’t even understand how he had ever been attracted to the newsreader, no matter how doe-eyed or thick-lipped. He had been pierced by Louiza’s i = u and that was it.
“Mr. Moro’s escort of five police bodyguards were killed,” Anna Ford continued, “when he was snatched at gunpoint from a car near a cafe in the morning rush hour.”
“What is this all about?” Malory asked.
“This morning,” Antonella sobbed anew. “Aldo Moro—he is like your John F. Kennedy.”
Not my John F. Kennedy, Malory wanted to say but let her continue.
“They took him. Kidnapped.”
“They?” Malory asked.
“I do not know,” Antonella said. “Terrorists, Brigate Rosse, Red Brigade. Or maybe not. Maybe just politicians, maybe even the Americans.”
“Americans?” Malory asked. The only American he could picture at the moment, besides John F. Kennedy, was the red-bearded giant at the till of the Orchard.
“There is a war, Malory,” Antonella said. “In my Rome, a war.” She took his left hand in both of hers.
“Ah,” Malory said, with as much sincerity as he could muster. Her eyes really were very pretty, magnified by the lens of tears. And he would have liked to make her feel better, independent of his own need to scan the departmental records. But the best he could say was, “Sorry, I’ve never been to Rome.”
“But I am the one who is sorry!” Antonella jiggled off the edge of the desk and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “You came to see your Antonella, and she is crying.”
Malory reached into what he hoped was the cleaner of the pockets of his corduroy jacket and handed her a handkerchief.
“Antonella,” he said. “I know this is a bad moment. But there is a bit of information. It really would be most helpful.”
“Ma guarda, tesoro,” Antonella said and ran to the bookshelf next to the television. “I am forgetting my Malory.” She flipped on the electric teakettle and reached up to the cupboard for mug, sugar bowl, and biscuit tin in such a way that Malory momentarily forgot what he was so delicately preparing to ask.
“I’m not bothering you?”
“Figurati!” Antonella said, swishing the hot water around the bottom of the teapot in a way that suggested an infinity of other activities. “The old men are all meeting an American. They think he is about to win the Fields Medal and are giving him some sherry. I was about to go home when I thought just a peek at the news, and I saw …” And she shook against Malory as the tea steeped.
“Antonella.” They were now seated comfortably, knee to knee, or rather knees interlocked like the inlay on a backgammon board, Malory biting into a semi-molten chocolate digestive biscuit. “I am looking for—” He began again. “I need to get in touch with one of the faculty’s PhD candidates. Just passed the viva today.”
“Today?” Antonella said. “What is his name?”
“Her,” Malory said. “Her name, actually. She’s a woman. A girl, really. Very young.”
“Oh, Malory!” Antonella laughed and offered the biscuit tin again. “Scherzi! You are playing games with your Antonella.”
“Games?” Malory stopped, biscuit halfway to mouth. “Why games?”
“Because Antonella is the only girl, the only female in the Department of Mathematics. You know that!”
“Yes,” Malory said. “Of course. But Louiza distinctly told me she passed her viva today. For her PhD.”
“Louiza?” Antonella put the biscuit tin behind her, on top of the TV, more in curiosity than in jealousy. “So, you are on the first-name basis with this PhD Louiza?”
“Only first name,” Malory said. “I was hoping you might supply me with a surname, if not an address.”
“Poor Malory,” Antonella said. “But I tell you, there is no Louiza with viva today or yesterday or tomorrow, with or without surnames.”
“No Louizas?”
“No girls. No women. Only Antonella.”
“Ah,” Malory said. “Perhaps,” he pondered, “it wasn’t the Maths Department. Perhaps I need to ask—”
“Perhaps Antonella could find out for you? Perhaps Antonella could help you?”
“Would you?” Malory didn’t realize he was holding Antonella’s hands until she squeezed them with a digestive warmth.
“For Malory?” Antonella said. And if Anna Ford hadn’t interrupted with a fresh bulletin on Aldo Moro, Malory would have been constrained to kiss a second woman in the same day.
“Thank you!” Malory slung his Kit Bag across his shoulder as Antonella drew a full, Roman lip between her teeth at the photo of Aldo Moro on the television. A nice-looking man, Malory thought, as he pressed open the door to the stairwell.
In response, a vibration stopped Malory at the top of the landing, a buzz that came from inside his Kit Bag. The Pip, in its 35-millimeter canister, was announcing something far more than was dreamt in Anna Ford’s philosophy.