9

The Firing

Back at The Pightle, outside the magic circle of the Decoy Lodge, I woke to the Monday sound of rain. A fine drizzle dripped from the thatch eaves and brought the scent of the box hedge through the open window. When I switched on the radio a sober voice intoned the day’s bad news. I lay there trying to square what I heard with the new enthusiasm derived from Edward and Laura, for I’d left the Lodge around two in the morning, ready to set off with them the next day in search of the horizon.

The whisky had helped, of course, and something anarchic in me responded to Laura’s brightened mood. Edward had become sparkier and we laughed a lot. I remembered peeing with him under the stars, asking questions about the danger of translating a private spiritual vision into social action. After all, fanatic ayatollahs and born-again Christians eager for the Rapture set no encouraging example. He talked about those who had been fired by the spirit but had lost touch with the soul; about unassimilated shadows which foisted evil onto enemies rather than bringing responsibility back home; he talked of tightropes and sword-bridges and the narrow course between the clashing rocks. Then, fastening his zip, he said, “One must trust to that star in man which is the visionary imagination. It wants to live, to thrive. And the star” – he tipped his head in the general direction of the galaxies – “is the perfect symbol for the hope it brings because, like a star, it is glimpsed most clearly from the corner of the eye.”

Heady stuff, and to reject it outright with a condescending intellectual leer would have felt like a return trip down the chute into futility, but now, with the radio offering a bleaker view of things, I was less certain why I’d agreed so eagerly to meet him in the library of the Hall this morning.

Bob came by, his umbrella dripping at the door. Apparently he’d called the previous evening and been surprised I wasn’t there. He was just checking that I hadn’t left for good, was glad that I hadn’t, and was that real coffee he could smell?

I liked Bob. He was predictable but that contrasted happily with Edward’s slippery shifts of mood, and there was nothing abstract about either his neighbourliness or his politics. Both were a generous extension of human decency. For him, humanism and socialism were the logical development of that common sense which was his strength and, perhaps, his limitation. Now he was a retired countryman with time on his hands, looking for company. It felt churlish to tell him that I was in a hurry, that the coffee would have to be quick. In Munding nobody was in a hurry.

“I see,” he said when he learnt that I was meeting Edward. “That where you were last night?”

I nodded, placing a steaming mug before him. He sipped it hot, hummed his appreciation. “So have you found out what it is yet?”

I looked across at him, unconnected.

“His obsession.”

“I’m not sure I’d call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

“He is working on something. In fact, that’s why I’m meeting him. He thinks I might be able to lend a hand.”

“I see. The man he wouldn’t have a use for is now lending a hand.”

I’d forgotten that I’d said that, and was, in any case, already regretting the admission. I was also beginning to see why Edward had been loth to speak openly about his work. Incredulity in one’s listener is a great silencer, particularly when it verges on ridicule, and Bob was likely to prove a milder critic than I had been.

“May one ask what with?”

I had been thinking quickly. “Some historical research he’s doing.”

“I thought he didn’t believe in history.”

“It’s about the Agnew family. Some of Ralph’s ancestors.”

“Did they do something interesting then? Struck me as a dull lot by and large. On the wrong side in the Civil War, profiteering from the Napoleonic Wars, dutifully sending two sons to get butchered in Flanders. Mindless gentry – with a single decent exception. One of them made a stand for repeal of the Corn Laws, which must have taken some guts in this neck of the woods.” Then Bob smiled as if in dawning realization. “Course, I suppose our friend might be interested in old Madcap Agnew. Kindred spirit there perhaps. Notorious boozer and womanizer.”

“I don’t think so.”

But Bob had warmed to the idea. “Your typical Regency rakehell, that one. Declared incompetent in the end and locked away. GPI.” Bob tapped his nose and added, “Syphilis to you. But hardly worth a book, I’d have thought.”

“That’s not what he’s doing.”

“Then what?”

How to answer? How to account for the improbable mating of a dream and – yes, Bob was probably right – an obsession. If I were to try to explain the little I understood about alchemy, it would run through my fingers like water. I would do no better with my dream. Though he had been a psychiatric nurse, Bob attached more value to medication and group therapy than to dream interpretation. He would have steered well clear of the wilder shores of analytic enquiry. He had been a sort of excellent Ambulance Brigade man in a world of psychological casualties, and was in no doubt that the cause of mental stress was largely social: people went mad in a mad world. So far, and no further, would he and Edward have agreed.

I said, “I’ll tell you when I understand it better myself.”

“Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice. Which ancestor is it then?”

“Henry Agnew – mid-nineteenth century – and…”

“The Corn Laws man.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“What else is interesting about him?”

“He was… a poet.”

“Ah, I see. I didn’t know that. Was he any good?”

“I’m not sure.”

Again the dubious regard – it seemed I wasn’t sure of very much. “Nesbit needs help making up his mind?”

“There’s a lot of stuff to read. It’s still in manuscript.”

Lamer and lamer, but Bob was discreet enough not to press. Or perhaps he’d simply lost interest in the diversions of aesthetes. “I should have thought your time would be better spent studying the common people. The leisured classes have had more attention than they deserve. What about the poor beggars who were worked to death to feed them? Have you any idea what it was like round here in those days? Women and kids out in the fields till all hours, gleaning, stone-picking, hauling the wagons when they got bogged down. Life in this place” – a tilt of the head took in The Pightle – “must have been squalid. Short commons, endless insecurity, real fear of losing the roof over their heads, and all the best men cropped – packed off to Botany Bay for poaching. This was a real village once – none of your weekend cottages and retirement homes like mine. And England wasn’t very merry, I can tell you – not in the hungry Forties.” He sighed, shook his head gloomily. “The way things are going, we’ll be back there soon. Victorian values! Power and money with a bit of sanctimonious charity thrown in to square their consciences – that’s what your Victorian gentry cared about. Like this bloody government.”

Listening, I felt still more unsure of the meaning and relevance of Edward’s enterprise. Bob knocked back his coffee, and I was about to stand when he said, “Listen, Alex, I don’t know if I should say this to a poet, but there are some things a damn sight more urgent than the doggerel of a dead country squire. Have you heard the news lately?”

He took in my grimace and sniffed. “Makes you sick. I mean, how the devil did we let things get this way?” He looked up, not expecting an answer, but to fix me with his stare. “It’s our fault – my generation. Two bloody wars and we’re still content to snooze and let that lot get on with it. Gave our power away, you see, and there are always people ready to grab it. Time we woke up again. Are you in CND, Alex?”

“I’m not a joiner, Bob.”

“You should think about it. Bet you didn’t know, for instance, that there’s a nuclear siren right here in the village? In Munding, for God’s sake! Horrible little black box it is, bang over Mrs Jex’s head at the Post Office. A sort of gauge with a dial that shifts from red alert to black alert… to warn of fallout. Mrs Jex says it gives her nightmares. I mean, what’s she supposed to do if it goes off – waddle round the village telling us all to duck? It’s bloody madness. That’ll soon put a stop to Nesbit’s historical research… put a stop to history altogether.”

“He’s not blind to the facts, Bob.”

“But what’s he doing about them – card tricks?”

Casting about, I found only platitude. “It takes all sorts…”

Bob harrumphed but saw the quick glance at my watch. Sighing, he got up. He had tried. At the door he turned. “How’s the girl?”

“Laura? She’s fine.”

A searching moment indicated that it was my motives rather than her welfare that were under question.

The conversation had been unsettling in other ways. As I walked through the drizzle, I imagined showing up at Bob’s CND group and saying, “Don’t worry. It’s okay. If Edward and I can sort out the secret of the Hermetic Mystery your problems are over. It’s all a matter of Pelicans, you see…”

Only Bob, with his experience as a psychiatric nurse, would take me seriously.

No, what drew me to the Hall was personal. Profoundly personal. The aftermath, perhaps, of the panic-stricken self-absorption that had seized my life after Jess’s defection. The sense that something new was needed if I was to learn to breathe on empty air. Booze had not worked. Sex had not worked. Both had ended in the humiliation of that brawl at a dance and me taking a swing at a hapless policeman. It was that sense which had brought me to Munding, which had set me hunting the Green Man in the woods. It had been intensified by the mysterious directive of my dream, and by the provocative conversations with Edward. What I was doing now was no crazier – and no less crazy – than they, but I was not about to pretend that the future of the planet depended on my explorations. Only me – my future: Alex Darken taking another step in the daft jig of his life, pushed from the rear by his own dark dreams. No rationalist after all: a terminal romantic.

Ralph Agnew was standing in the porch of his estate office, talking to his gamekeeper, George Bales, a tall, booted man wearing a green nylon anorak ripped at the sleeve. I’d seen him in the Feathers, surly in his own corner of the Snug, not liked by, not liking, the other villagers. Had I known I was trespassing on his domain, I would never have entered the woods so lightly. He nodded as Ralph greeted me, touched the neb of his flat cap, and walked away.

“You’re looking for Edward, right?” Ralph said. “Expected you sooner. He’s up in the library already.”

“Bob Crossley called in – held me up.”

“No hurry, old chap. Those papers have been there for more than a century. Drop more dust won’t hurt. Glad you and Edward have hit it off. Had a feeling you might. Bit of a shaky start though?”

“He’s an unusual man.”

“A rum’n – that’s what they call him round here. Solid gold, though. Solid gold.”

“Aurum non vulgi.” I smiled.

Ralph narrowed his eyes at me, further dislocating the lopsided twist to his face. “Latin scholar, I hear.”

“Hardly that.”

“Not what Edward tells me. Anyway, you should be some help to him and he needs it. Frankly, what he’s up to… Well, it’s all Greek to me, but so long as it keeps him happy.” He glanced away, almost as though in embarrassment. I had the feeling of a patron drawn deeper than he would have liked into the unpredictable consequences of his generosity – a lonely figure, heir to the Agnew fortune and tradition, yet unmarried, childless, last of his line. Edward could not be typical of his friends, but I remembered that Clive had called him a friend to verse, and that he had read my work. There must be more to this country squire than was disclosed by his clipped mannerisms and his habit of smiling each time he spoke, as though to ease his way through a dubious world. He looked at his watch. “Well, I have an appointment in Saxburgh, and Edward will be wondering where you are.” He leant towards me, confidential. “Take care of him, won’t you? He’s not nearly as tough as he makes out. Been through some bad times, you see.” The smile had gone. The corner of his lips twitched a little with a solemnity which suggested only a matter of some gravity would persuade him to venture this close to the personal. Then, before I could respond, he resumed the seigneurial stance. “You know your way up?”

I did, and to my disappointment, I found Edward alone in the library.

“Thought you’d backed out,” he muttered as I took off my damp coat.

“Sorry. I got held up. Laura not here?”

Edward sniffed and looked away. “Laura has work of her own.” I waited for further explanation and none came. Edward’s fingers drummed on the edge of the desk. I was the new boy at the office, he the old hand wondering what to make of me, but if he was having second thoughts, he dismissed them in a sudden grin. “Right, there are some books I want you to look at – general background to give you the feel of the thing. But I thought we might take a quick look at the muniments room first. Come on through.”

A door from the library led through into an oak-panelled room with tall mullioned windows. “I’ve sorted out all the stuff from our period,” he said. “It’s over there.” He pointed across to where a corner of the room was stacked with coffers, cabin trunks, packing cases, pile upon pile of what looked like shoeboxes and other cardboard containers. “They’re all full of papers,” he said. “You see my problem?”

I saw. But already I was half in love with the old library. I hadn’t been there by daylight before and my bibliophile heart had lifted at the sight of those tall glass cabinets, shelf over shelf of finely bound volumes, each of them a door on the possible. The air was still as a church in there, the rainy light playing through the leaded windows with their view across the parkland and the lake. It was a dream-chamber, redolent of leather and polish and the scented dust of books. And, yes, smelling of centuries of privilege too, of aloof refined seclusion. In the normal run of things I would have had no business there, no access. This, however, was not the normal run of things.

Nor were the books that Edward showed me the kind of thing I would normally have read – not, at least, as anything more than a casual browse among the dustier nooks of human eccentricity. It was like stepping from the main street into a cobbled alley’s curiosity shop – that shock of surprise to discover again what an intricate and peculiar organ the imagination is, what extravagant uses it has found for time.

Even under Edward’s guidance, it proved difficult to feel my way into the texts he gave me to read. They were tantalizingly obscure – no sooner did you think you’d begun to grasp the gist when it slipped through your fingers. Again and again apparently rational lines of argument suddenly congealed into a porridge of images, while some texts dispensed with argument completely and the mind was left to wrestle with Olympian assertions that left Edward’s own rhetoric sounding like cool logic. Witness the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, which was, he assured me, the seminal document of all alchemical thought:

True, without error, certain and most true; that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, for performing the miracles of the One Thing, and as all things were from One, by the mediation of One, so all things arose from this One Thing by adaptation; the father of it is the Sun, the mother of it is the Moon; the wind carries it in its belly; the nurse thereof is the Earth. This is the father of all perfection, or consummation of the whole world. The power of it is integral, if it be turned into earth. Thou shalt separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, gently with great sagacity; it ascends from earth to heaven, and again descends to earth, and receives the strength of the superiors and the inferiors – so thou hast the glory of the whole world; therefore let all obscurity flee before thee. This is the strong fortitude of all fortitudes, overcoming every subtle and penetrating every solid thing. So the world was created. Hence were all wonderful adaptations of which this is the manner. Therefore am I called Thrice Great Hermes, having the Three Parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That which I have written is consummated concerning the operation of the sun.

Faced with such rhapsodic prose I felt it would take more subtlety and sagacity than I could command to make obscurity flee before me.

“But don’t you see?” Edward encouraged. “The whole point is to excite curiosity, to stimulate the sleeping powers of the mind. If I talk about ‘psychic integration’ or reunion with the Divine Archetype, these are abstractions on which the mind has little purchase. But if I speak of a stone that turneth all to gold, or a treasure hidden in the menstruum of whores, then the imagination is set to work. The rational intellect is sidestepped and one must look within. I mean even the highest spirit of Reason which, according to Nicholas of Cusa, guards the gate in the wall around paradise – a wall which is built of contradictions. If we are ever to pass through what Percy Wyndham-Lewis once named the ‘moronic inferno’ into what I call ‘the oxymoronic paradiso’, then responses from a deeper level are required. That’s what these texts demand.”

“You don’t think it’s more likely to put people off altogether?”

“That too is the point. The one-sided man who clings to rationality will dismiss it all as gibberish – a word, incidentally, derived from Jabir, one of the greatest of Arab adepts. If he goes hunting through the texts for a quick recipe for gold or earthly power, he’ll soon get lost and give up. But the man who desires to know himself more completely – however strange and confusing his discoveries may be – he is drawn further within until he finds in the texts a mirror of his own complexity. And – if he is lucky – of the simple secret at its heart.”

“So the language acts as a kind of filter?”

“On one level, yes. But as a poet you will appreciate that some experiences are communicable only through symbols – symbols which lose all virtue in any attempt at paraphrase or analysis. Symbols are the deep grammar of experience, and the alchemist inhabits a symbolic universe. He means precisely what he says – but one must enter the language on its own terms or the meaning vanishes. However, without access to the transforming experience from which those symbols spring, they remain impenetrable.”

“Like much of your own verse?” I hazarded.

Caught on the hop, Edward frowned. For a moment I expected a knuckle-rapping response, but after a brief hesitation, he said, “My verse was obscure because I was obscure to myself. I was a young man then… a young fool. I heard the music but I had no inkling how serious these matters were. Or how dangerous.” He returned from a pained abstraction, and smiled at me a little ruefully. “I was much like you – infatuated with my own talent, worshipping only my own intellect… A crime for which, as Ficino points out, a capital punishment is appointed. And in the symbolic domain the punishment is entirely appropriate – dismemberment, beheading.” His thoughts shifted quickly away. “Ficino. The Asclepian Dialogue of Hermes… Now there’s a text that speaks plainly enough.” He wandered to the shelves and came back thumbing through an old volume. “Listen to this: No one shall look up to heaven. The religious man shall be counted insane; the irreligious shall be thought wise; the furious, brave; and the worst of men shall be considered good. For the soul, and all things about it, shall not only be the subjects of laughter, but shall be considered as vanity. Every divine voice shall, by a necessary silence, be dumb; the fruits of the earth shall be corrupted; and the air itself shall languish with a sorrowful stupor. The language may sound archaic,” he commented, “but he got his facts right. Henry Agnew saw that time coming. Look here.” He showed me the page of the book – the passage had been furiously scored with a pen nib. “Well, it’s here now – and it’s time that silence was broken.” Edward looked up again and stared into my frown. “Stay with it. Eventually things will become clearer. Or better still – ignore the words for the moment. Concentrate on the pictures. I think you’ll find they speak the language of your dreams.”

From the densely stacked bookcases he took down some lavishly illustrated volumes and left me alone to wonder at them. Those illustrations were like admission to someone else’s dreams – at times glowing with visionary fire, at others the pitchblende hallucinations of a tormented mind. Set in rich Venetian palaces or wild surrealist landscapes, they might depict the slow death of a bearded king, or miners at work beneath an enchanted hill. There were chariots driven by demons, pulled by strange winged beasts. Sun kings and moon queens stood in stately adoration of each other or, in other guises, warred. Childish lovers sported in a glass retort. A black three-headed hellhound rent and devoured the pathetic human figures in its power. I was an innocent let loose in an exotic, heraldic kingdom of mythical beasts and grotesque hermaphroditic figures that rose from the copulations of the kings and their sister-queens. Yet in that fantastic cavalcade of monsters, freaks and angels, there were two moments in which I recognized something of myself.

The first was when I came across a picture of a heavily armoured man jousting with a naked woman, like knights at a tournament. He had the sun for his head, she the moon. He was riding a lion, she side saddle on a black gryphon, and they were fighting. But they both had shields against which the lances struck, and the beauty of it was that on her shield was the insignia of the sun, on his that of the moon; so they were each protected by the principle they opposed. The background against which they fought was arid red desert; they might have been fighting to make it green again; yet one had the feeling that if either defeated the other it would be disaster. More eloquently than a thousand words the picture showed the need for, and the difficulty of, reconciliation between the sexes. I began to loosen my armour.

Later I turned a page and uttered a gasp of stunned surprise that made Edward look up from the manuscript he scrutinized. He came across to look at the image open on my lectern: a wild man covered in shaggy green fur was fighting a little lion with a club. The drawing had a sprightly vigorous line, and there was a pleasing rhythmic balance between the sway of the wild man’s body and the crouch of the snarling beast. The Green Man wore a coronet of leaves and a girdle of stems at his waist. The unknown artist had painted the fur with such a delicate brush you felt you might stroke it. The bearded face smiled in its mantle of green hair

“You recognize him?” Edward asked.

I nodded, silent.

“Another dream?”

“I keep bumping into him. I’ve been trying to write about him for weeks.”

Edward looked up from the picture and studied me for a long moment. “Perhaps you will,” he said eventually. “Perhaps you will.”

I wasn’t left to ramble through this new realm for long. Edward brought me a box of Louisa’s file cards and a scholarly Latin dictionary. “Time you got stuck in,” he said. “You’ve seen how much there is to do.”

The plain fact was I had not grasped the magnitude of Edward’s task when he first unfolded it to me. There was a mountain of paper in the muniments room, the neglected monument to decades of industry, neatly handwritten in paling ink. It was worse than a mountain – it was a maze, and how intricate its twists I soon discovered.

I tried to picture what she must have been like, the young woman who had diligently allowed her life to fade away working at this solitary chore. The years of her youth had been sacrificed to her father’s obsession. Why hadn’t she rebelled – gone crazy even? Perhaps she had, but there was nothing mad about the composed face I’d been shown in the portrait and the photograph, only an infinity of patience. That patience must have been well-schooled here, and I would need lots of it myself if I was to follow her tracks from card to cryptic card through all the boxes. Still, I wasn’t being paid – I’d resisted Edward’s offer of money; I was pretty sure he didn’t have much and, for the moment, I didn’t need it. Unpaid, I could drop this when I chose.

Yet once I started work I became increasingly absorbed. The oddly medieval flavour of the Latin notes intrigued me, and there were occasional memoranda in the formal English of Louisa’s day. Here is evidence, I read on one card, that the Pagan Mysteries were instituted pure. And on another: Here it is manifest how the Way of Life is found only through a Death, and that, without the deprival of all other knowledge, Self-Knowledge itself is not to be achieved. An admirable paradox! It was like listening to a voice whispering across time, an eerie sensation that became a frisson when I read: Time was, Time is and Time shall be, but here the Adept stands outside of time within the penetralium of mystery.

Though much of what I translated defied comprehension, it was provocatively enigmatic. I began to see what Edward had meant about secrecy being a great enticer, about how the sleeping powers of the mind might wake. And there was something else. Daunting and preposterous as the task appeared, I was glad to be busy again, of use. When Edward saw that I was willing to work, and that the ground covered in a day could be almost doubled with my help, he relaxed and became more open with me.

As the days passed in the library, I increasingly understood why Laura had been attracted to Edward – the wry, side-spin dart of his humour, the sudden shy warmth of expressed affection, the uncompromising certainty that in all things meaning inhered and the strict honesty which refused glib answers. Had I not worked closely with him I would have seen little of this. He wouldn’t have bothered to show it; I would have been too arrogant to look. But work is a firm bonder, and never more so than when a task is both fascinating and absurdly difficult.

What we were faced with was an enormous puzzle – a cryptic crossword with the clues in Latin, unnumbered, and not much of a grid for guide. I translated the clues and passed them across to Edward, who frowned over them, making entries in his own files, collating cards with texts, referring often to Louisa’s journals and Henry’s copious notes, trying to piece a pattern together. Confronted with such vast heaps of material, one had to think of it as a game. That was how I saw it: Henry and Louisa Agnew, long dead but mysteriously alive under this mountain of paper, were one team; Edward and I the other. It began to feel – though I suppose this is true to the essential beauty of all sport – that we were working together, the four of us, for the love of the game.

Gradually the outlines of the Hermetic myth came clear to me. Like more orthodox Christians, the alchemists maintained that mankind had suffered a fall, but this lapse from grace was not seen merely as a matter of original sin. It was a critical moment in the great experiment of Nature. It was the very access of consciousness – life’s arrival at the moment where it might contemplate and shape its own existence. But consciousness comes at a price, and the price is banishment from the Garden. When we wake, it is to find ourselves alone and separate, trapped in the toils of matter.

There were close links between the alchemists and the gnostics, and for the gnostics the picture was bleaker still. Life in the material world was tragic, they claimed – so evil that it could not be the work of a benevolent God. The universe itself was cracked. It was the creation of the Demiurge, the Archon, the mad lord of this world. It was wrong to value it, wrong to bear children even, for that was only to add to the sum of suffering. It was the task of the spirit to resist complicity, even to the point of burning for this belief – this knowledge – for it was, of course, entirely unacceptable to orthodox Christianity.

For the Christians the only answer to the human plight was trust in the redemptive love of Christ. For the alchemists such passive dependence was not enough. In every human body, they insisted, there remains a spark of the Divine Principle which once irradiated its entire being. Cased in the base metal of our fallen state, this “star-fire” yearns to return whence it came. It longs to be golden again. The alchemists maintained that through the correct disciplines such a return might be made. If one knew how to go about it, the Fall was reversible.

The transmutation of base metal to gold was the paradigm of this sacred task. Unlike the Indian mystics, they did not regard the material world as mere illusion, though they were not blind to its illusory aspects. A seed of star-fire lay imprisoned in all things. It might be freed. Matter itself might be redeemed and made translucent. In working to change the substances, the alchemists also changed themselves. In changing themselves they added their own weight to the effort by which the world itself might be changed. It was clear that their economy was based on no common gold.

But what to make of this? Much as I might personally long for a world where sun and moon danced together and all the trees clapped their hands, it remained intangible. It remained a myth. And, yes, Edward could point out that we live in a time when the very meaning of the word myth has been debased, that it has come to signify only what is untrue, false, misleading, and yes, I could largely agree that it is nevertheless by myths we live, and what matters is how large the contrary truths a myth reconciles in its embrace. But here I still sat, unenlightened, puzzling.

I saw only that, in this magical new view of the world to which I had been introduced, scepticism and openness must be harnessed in tandem if nothing was to be missed. Such an attitude required fresh springs of energy, and the effect – I was delighted to sense it as I woke each day – was to make me more bouncy and mettlesome than I had been for weeks.

For three days I went into the library at the Hall hoping to find Laura there and each day I was disappointed. Each evening when we tidied away our papers, I expected Edward to invite me over to the Lodge for a drink or a meal, and the invitation was not extended. Much as the work fascinated me, and fonder each day as I became of Edward, there was nevertheless a growing sense of frustration. It was Laura who had first recruited me to this task, she who had seen that I might be involved. It was the thought of her that had drawn me back to the Lodge with my dream, and if this odd enterprise had any meaning at all, it must lie, I believed, somewhere between the three of us. Yet studiously, subtly, with no obvious exertion on Edward’s part, Laura and I were being kept at a distance. Was that perhaps what she wanted? Or need I look no further than the old man’s unspoken mistrust of my intentions? I suspected the latter.

It both peeved and amused me. From my angle Edward and I were now firm friends. His charm had seduced me. He had my affection and my loyalty, and I thought I deserved his trust. Yet he had a way of manipulating our conversations onto ground of his choosing where he spoke so admirably that only afterwards did one realize how other issues, other questions, had been delicately sidestepped. So Laura remained, like Louisa herself, a silent, invisible presence between us.

The next day, Edward came late to the library in an untypically gloomy mood. As I worked at my translations, I heard him mutter and grunt at his desk. He seemed fixed in a dour, obsessive concentration that defied approach. It was a hot day. Through the tall leaded windows the bright span of water flittered and shone. It felt absurd that we should be indoors poring over papers when we might have been out there, basking in dappled sunlight, bathing in the lake. I was restless, sticky under the armpits, for the first time a little bored. Laura was more on my mind than Louisa. What was she doing? Had she begun to resent my usurpation of her role as Edward’s collaborator? Our silence about her was ridiculous. I made up my mind to broach the issue over lunch.

I suggested that it was a waste of a glorious day to eat indoors. Why didn’t we make a picnic by the lake? “Might as well,” he agreed. “I’m getting nowhere here.” When we had eaten in silence, I asked him what the trouble was.

“I sometimes think Sisyphus had an easier task,” he said without humour. “Just when you think you’re on to something, it all unravels.”

“Do I detect the voice of the demon Doubt?”

“I don’t know. Take no notice of me. I had a bad night.”

I smelled some recurrence of the tension between him and Laura and looked for a way to open the subject. “It’s a pity that Laura didn’t just ask Louisa what her secret was – when she saw her, I mean.” It had been intended lightly but Edward was not amused.

“I’d rather you didn’t joke about that.”

“You really believe that she saw her?”

“I know she did.”

I sat in silence, waiting.

“And Ralph knows it too. There were details to her description she could have known no other way.”

“I’m impressed.” I caught the dubious lift of Edward’s brow. “It was only the one time?”

“There have been other experiences.”

“Such as?”

“As you clearly don’t trust them, there seems little point in going into them.” His tone was final. A cold silence came between us. After a time I said, “I’m sorry. My flippancy… habit of a lifetime.”

“Not a lifetime. Merely a trick you learnt in college. As a child you would have known better.”

“Before my star-fire dimmed?”

Edward saw that he was teased, and smiled. “Only your brain is dim. But I imagine even that is bright enough to recognize an extraordinary woman when it sees one.”

“No argument. Tell me about her.”

“Laura can speak for herself.”

“Except that I don’t get to see much of her.”

The web of lines around Edward’s eyes wrinkled in a frown. “Your tone would seem to imply that I am some sort of Bluebeard who keeps her incarcerated. The fact is, she is busy.”

“At what?”

“Her own work.”

“Which is?”

Wisdom teeth have been more easily drawn. A long moment passed before he sniffed and said, “She is a potter.”

“Really? I’d no idea. She has a wheel at the Lodge?”

“She doesn’t work with the wheel. Her pots are hand-built. She makes her own glazes from vegetable ash and fires them in a small wood-burning kiln we built together.”

“A sort of practical alchemy?”

“Precisely.”

I began to realize how inadequate my picture of Laura was; that I had made no room in my thoughts for an independent life of her own, let alone one as earthed and pragmatic as the potter’s craft. No wonder I’d seen so little of her. She was busy, making, while Edward and I ballooned through the intellectual stratosphere with nothing to show for our efforts but an increase of paper. I was intrigued by what we were doing, but no one would ever eat or drink from it. It lacked substance – almost as much as had my fantasies that Edward was deliberately keeping us apart. I said, “I’d very much like to see some of her work.”

“I doubt she will let you.”

“Why not?”

“It is a private matter. No one goes into her studio. I have seen little of her work myself, and she won’t thank me for mentioning it. Most of it she destroys.”

“But why?”

“Because she has no wish to add to the sum of things in the world unless they answer. To her dream of the real, I mean. It is very exacting. Also I am quite certain she would wish me to say no more about it.”

“So Louisa isn’t the only one with secrets?”

Again Edward did not smile. “There is much in Laura’s world that is private. It is a matter of protection. She is best understood as a refugee. Her confidence is… fragile.”

I tried to marry this judgement with the memory of the sturdy young woman I’d seen joking in the glade; who had come breezily into The Pightle telling me to water the plants and daring me to a duel of wits with Edward; who had seemed so certain of me over against his cautious vacillation. Fragile was not the first word that would have occurred to me, unless I had overlooked something vital – something which, I remembered, Bob had noted.

As for Edward – it was clear that I’d stumbled onto sensitive ground. He was staring at the lake, regretful perhaps that he’d said too much not to say more. “There have been… difficulties in her life.”

No further question was invited, so I said, “It must get pretty lonely out at the Lodge.”

“She likes it that way.”

But I remembered her asking whether I didn’t go crazy on my own at The Pightle. “Not all the time, surely? I mean, the other night – she seemed to cheer up then. You’re sure she doesn’t need company?”

“I’ve tried to tell her that. But she’s working very hard right now. Perhaps too hard. Now that you’ve freed her a little from my demands, you see…”

I saw that I might, in more than one way, have been used.

“Don’t misunderstand me. She’s very much with us in spirit. What you saw the other night… it happens, yes. We get tired and sometimes we take it out on one another. But…” He turned to look across at me. “We mean a great deal to each other.” There was an appeal in his eyes, almost a throwing of himself upon my mercy. “I helped her through a bad time, you see. One that involved disturbing experiences of her gifts… They weren’t understood. Which is why she still prefers not to speak of them. No one understood their importance until…”

“She met you.”

“Yes.”

His eyes shifted away again. I wondered whether he was not, after all, overprotective. It wouldn’t be the first time that a man had lovingly supported a woman through crisis only to discover that, when she was strong again, his own need was to confine her in a dependent role. There were gentle ways of playing Bluebeard too.

“I wouldn’t want you to think it’s all one way,” he resumed uncertainly. “For me… Well, when we came together… It renewed my own sense of meaning. I had been preoccupied with the alchemical vision for some time, but it had become words, ideas, a mere prejudice in favour of the angels, if you like. But Laura was what I could only think. What I have to struggle for again and again is instinct with her. She makes it real for me. Sometimes I think to her cost…”

Something wondering and recapitulatory in his tone brought to mind the way I had often spoken of Jessin her absence: odd, I thought, the way men tended to prize their partners more highly when they were elsewhere; almost as though the idea of relationship was more satisfactory than its practice. Neither of us had been prepared for this sudden release of feeling; Edward seemed embarrassed by the confession, I embarrassed by his embarrassment, and regretting my earlier ungenerous thoughts… Embarrassing too, the recognition that my interest in Laura remained less innocent than I’d persuaded myself. Edward clearly adored her; I had no wish to hurt him, so perhaps things were best as they were – he and I working alone. But my heart dipped at the thought.

In the meantime Edward had been thinking too. This was the first time he had shared anything personal with me, and that he could let the mask slip a little was a measure of his growing trust. A shy smile hinted that he did not entirely regret it. Then he slapped his thigh, stood up, leaping from embarrassment to action. “But you’re right, dammit. She needs to get out of herself. We all do. We should do something together. We should go to the sea.”

I looked up in amazement at the abrupt shift.

“That’s it.” He clapped his hands together. “Come on.”

“But if she doesn’t want to leave her work…”

“I’ll seduce her. I’ll charm her from the tree. Great God, I’ve become a bore. I’ve forgotten how to laugh. I need to dance again.” He did a sprightly two-step, twirled, and was off across the lawn, shouting, “Come on, Darken. On your feet. Thalassa! The sea, the sea!”

Friends then, the three of us – me sitting in the back of the old Countryman as it rattled along, Edward at the wheel singing Verdi as though he’d just found the key to the Hermetic Mystery, if not that of the aria he’d chosen, while Laura, who had taken some persuading, groaned and laughed beside him. We headed for the north Norfolk coast, careering through the bright afternoon until Edward parked by a staithe where a creek coiled across a salt marsh, and we all piled out. The mastheads of beached yachts tinkled in a stiff breeze. It was a place of sea-pinks and oyster-catchers, where small birds dusted their wings in fennel and made the air smell of aniseed. Mud-bound tide posts staggered out into the creek, and out across the flats a marram-fastened line of sand dunes concealed the distant sea. Edward was the only one of us who had been here before. Clearly he loved the place.

He struck out on the diked path that sheltered a cornfield from the sea wind. It was the still afternoon of a weekday in term time, and we had the world to ourselves.

After a long walk we came out between the dunes and were staring at the sea. The tide was far out over a wide plain of sand but you could see its many colours silvering towards those reaches where sky and horizon misted together. The expanse of beach was so denuded of any trace of the present century we might have stepped out onto a distant planet. Again I wondered at Edward’s way of making me feel like the useless son out of a folk tale who had stumbled by chance into the hollow hills. I stood with the breeze flapping at my collar, watching the spindrift sand, promising that one day I would write about this place. When I turned, I saw Edward dancing on the shore.

“He really needed this.” Laura was standing a little behind me, smiling as the wind tousled her hair.

“He said much the same about you.”

“Then he was right. He usually is… in the end.”

“About everything?”

“About what matters.” She glanced across at me, flicking the hair from her face. “What about you?”

“Oh, I’m usually wrong.”

She caught my smile. “Dumb-bell! I mean how are you?”

How was I? Glad to be here. Feeling good about the air and sea. A little sad suddenly. I said, “Fine. In better shape than I was.”

“That’s good.”

“Also slightly cross-eyed over those texts.”

For a second she was puzzled by the change of tack, then smiled, wrinkling her nose. “They’re really weird, don’t you think?”

“I’m surprised you think so.”

She shrugged, looked out to sea again. “They’re Edward’s thing, not mine. I can’t read them – not for long. They pile up on me. I mean, they’re so dense – the language, the symbols. Like an Austrian church – too full of stuff. I like things simple.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I was beginning to think it was me who was dense.”

But she ignored the joke, looked out across the dune-land expanse, the wide acreage of sand and sea. “They go on and on about Nature, but just look at it. No clutter. Nothing superfluous. Just light and air, changing all the time, moving through places that words won’t reach.”

“But unaware of itself? It needs us to give it voice.”

“Maybe that’s just our need. It has voices of its own – the necessary sounds. Not like all those books. It’s my guess that Louisa came to feel this way – that that’s why she burned her book. I think she might have done it without regret.”

“Does Edward know you feel this way?”

“I’ve never said it before. I’m not even sure what I mean. Perhaps that’s why we sometimes find it hard to talk about her. I have a feeling for her, that’s all, and it frustrates him.” She gave a little snort and smiled across at me almost mischievously. “He claims I have unfair advantages.”

“Your gifts?”

“Just being a woman, I think. He says he has to go bat-fowling for what I take for granted – whatever bat-fowling may be.”

“If it means stumbling about in the dark, I sympathize.”

“But then,” she added, “he has a way of finding the right words – when he’s sure of his ground, I mean. And it’s like magic – everything suddenly takes shape, makes sense. I can’t do that.”

“He’s a poet,” I said, “ – whether he’s writing or not. Do you know why he gave up?”

She shook her head. “He won’t say, and I’ve learnt not to ask. I know there’s a lot of darkness there and he won’t share it. I think he thinks he’s protecting me, but…” She faltered there, shrugged.

“And you find that frustrating.”

“Not really. But it makes me sad. I’d rather have him like this.” She smiled across to where Edward still frolicked on the sand. “I’m glad you’ve helped him back.”

“I wasn’t even sure he liked me at first.”

“That was never true. But he didn’t trust you. I remember after that first night at the Hall he said there was something unnerving about you.”

“Unnerving?”

“If I remember right, he said, ‘There’s something unnerving about such energy so unaware of itself.’ Something like that. It might have been ‘power’.” She thought about it, trying to recollect, then shrugged again. “I told him you were someone who was too used to getting his own way, and probably still dumbstruck that you hadn’t got it. Was I right?”

Her breezy smile left little room for more than a grin of agreement. “Something like that… though I wouldn’t have thanked you for saying so.”

“But I didn’t know you were a big dreamer then. So we were both right.” She looked away, not coyly but with an elusive smile. “The fact is, he likes you very much, and I’m really glad you found each other. It makes my life a whole lot simpler.”

Which was not, in that moment, quite what I wanted to hear, but it was so transparently sincere I had to accept it. After emerging from one three-way wreck so recently, I reminded myself, it would be crazy to look for anything other than simplicity. After a moment I said, “How’s your own work coming?”

“Edward told you about that?”

“A little, but he was very discreet.”

She wrinkled her nose, sighed. “I’m building towards another firing, but it’s slow… getting things right… not getting in my own way. I’ve been too close up against it. I needed a break as much as Edward. Look at him.”

I looked up and saw Edward jumping up and down, performing an elaborate semaphore with his hat.

“He wants us to play. Come on.” She ran down the dune, calling, “Okay, I’m coming.”

I watched smiling as they owled and pussy-catted along the beach. Then she snatched his hat and teased him with it, threatening to throw it in a runnel of seawater among the banks. Edward chased her, shouting, “Rescue, Darken – this trollop has hijacked my hat.” I joined in on Laura’s side with Edward as pig-in-the-middle, windmilling for the hat that sailed like a frisbee between us, until we collapsed, panting with laughter, then stared in silence at the sea.

Laura collected seashells, looking for forms and colours she might work into her pots. She found a shapely length of salt-stained driftwood with a whorled grain. It was water-logged, half-buried in the sand and surprisingly heavy, but she insisted that we bring it back to the car with us. She needed it. It had value.

We had tea in a still half-deserted seaside town, and when we came out of the café, Edward produced from his pocket a tomato-shaped ketchup-holder which had taken Laura’s fancy and amused Edward with its outrageous farting noise. Neither of us had noticed him pocket it. “Steal for you?” he answered Laura’s astonished protest. “I’d do time. I’d swing for you, my dear. I’d willingly die.”

On the way back we stopped at a pub where Edward regaled us, and disturbed the landlord, with hilarious anecdotes of raffish nights around Fitzrovia as a young man. They were elicited by my questions about his earlier career, and most of them seemed new to Laura, for she laughed with unfeignable gaiety, her head at moments held in helpless tears against his chest. “What are you grinning at, Cambridge?” he demanded – he’d given me the nickname after some reference I made to my own past; it was an affectionate pan of coals for my head – “It’s perfectly true. And I should know. I made it up myself.”

“I was grinning,” I said, “because I was thinking how lucky I am to know you two.”

“Lucky he calls it! Such a privilege comes only as the gift of Providence. And if you don’t believe me, ask a Bushman. ‘There’s a dream and it is dreaming us,’ they say. Know a thing or two, those clever little buggers. Damn sight more than that boor behind the bar. I’ve had enough of this particular sip well. Let’s go.”

They dropped me at The Pightle door. I heard them laughing still as the car pulled off down the lane. A little to my own amazement I found myself happy for them.

Two or three weeks passed surprisingly quickly. Apart from the accumulation of translated index cards, Edward and I made little progress, but our humour was good. When he did show signs of depression, I could usually shake him out of it, and we took a schoolboyish delight in finding ways to disconcert Ralph’s snooty man, Talbot, who brought morning coffee and afternoon tea up to the library, and evidently disapproved of both us and our enterprise. Ralph looked in on us every now and then with awkward, undemanding enquiries about our progress, and received Edward’s sardonic remarks with a reticent grace. I was glad to be Edward’s colleague and friend rather than suffering the indignities he subtly laid on his patron. It must have been odd for Ralph, I thought, to feel like an intruder in his own library.

In breaks in our work Edward entertained me with curious stories of the old alchemists. Raymond Lully featured among them, though in apocryphal form, as the subject of a singular conversion experience: inflamed by illicit passion for a married woman, he would brook no denial until she took him to her house and there, in the presence of her husband, bared to Raymond’s astonished eyes a breast almost entirely devoured by cancer. Thereafter he became a missionary of heathen Africa, wrote a seminal alchemical text called the Clavicula, and was reputed to turn himself into a red cock when occasion demanded. He seems to have lost the knack when he most needed it, for he was stoned to death by unimpressed heathens.

Then there was Denis Zachaire, a young gentleman of Guienne, who invested all the money meant for his education in the furnishing of an alchemical laboratory – regrettably to no better effect than the loss of his tutor, who died from the quantity of soot he inhaled. But Zachaire was bitten by the gold bug and wandered around Europe, one jump ahead of the plague, seeking to learn from the motley swarm of alchemists to be found in the abbeys and cities. By his own account, after much expenditure of charcoal and years of failure, he discovered a powder through which he made a successful projection of sufficient gold to pay off his creditors. According to one story (though this was told of others too), he was later murdered in his sleep by a servant who ran off with both the powder and Zachaire’s wife. Alchemy, it seemed, was not an entirely happy affair. The man known as Helvetius might have produced gold which withstood the tests of assayers, but Bernard Trevisan was duped out of a fortune before finally performing the magnum opus, and Thomas Norton prepared the Elixir twice and was twice robbed of it before dying in poverty. Michael Sendivogius was imprisoned by the Emperor Rudolph on pain of yielding his secrets, and it was he who wrote what struck me as fair comment on the Hermetic enterprise in an imaginary complaint of the alchemist to Nature:

Now I see that I know nothing, only I must not say so for I should lose the good opinion of my neighbours and they would no longer trust me with money for my experiments. There are many countries and many greedy persons who will suffer themselves to be gulled by my promise of mountains of gold. Thus day will follow day, and in the meantime the King or my donkey will die, or I myself.

Edward advised me not to be fooled by this open confession of fraud: it was an early exercise in disinformation. Each of the alchemists, he claimed, was in his way an incarnation of Mercurius – the ever-ambiguous tutelary spirit of the Art who promised much and was not to be had for the asking. The true face of the Hermetic philosopher was to be seen in the final picture of the Mutus Liber where the adept and his mystic sister raised their fingers to their lips in the gesture of the secret. This was why Louisa Agnew had chosen the title of that text for her epitaph, and if he and I were ever to unravel that secret, he said, we should get back to work.

Inevitably I saw more of Edward than of Laura. She was hard at work in her jealously private workshop, though she called in briefly at the library from time to time, and I was invited back to the Lodge for meals some evenings. I delighted them once with a return invitation to dine at The Pightle. The soufflé made up in ambition for what it lacked in accomplishment, but the wine was good. We talked a lot, laughed a lot, drank a lot – another round in the warming game of friendship that left me happy at the time, and aching afterwards as I contemplated the lonely bed.

Under question, Edward told me a little more about Laura’s past than she herself was willing to volunteer. Her father was president of his own securities corporation, an East Coast patrician – “a Mammonite”, Edward called him – “a man whose feelings have been arrested by money, power, the dead hand of his ancestors. He’s a kind of Giant Holdfast who both loves and terrorizes his children. His wife is a doer-of-good-works. She keeps their home as clean as a refrigerator and about as warm. Sadly, they lack both the elegant wit of the eastern intelligentsia and the street-irony of those who do not share their advantages. You can smell dead redskins in the woods about the house.”

Pressed more closely, he told me that for a number of years Laura had lived an almost schizophrenic life, symbolized by two quite different wardrobes – one for her parents, the “goody two-shoes” suits, the other for what she believed to be her real self. He claimed that her private world had been little more than an experiment in frenzy, and that a breakdown had been inevitable. It came when her parents pried into her secrets and were horrified by what they found. In particular they were appalled by the discovery that their daughter was deeply in love with a young Jew. Neither Laura nor the young man had been strong enough to withstand their frigidly withering assault.

“After that,” Edward said, “she wouldn’t speak, scarcely ate. She was afraid that her very capacity for love had been defiled. Her feelings were frozen. She had no great wish to live, and slipped into an anorexic depression which kept her to her room, resisting all approaches. She tells me it felt as though she was living in a violent void, that she was losing touch with everything until…” He hesitated, decided, continued. “What happened was the first recurrence of an experience she had not had since she was a child. I really don’t feel free to tell you about this, but it seems to have been both deeply deranging and profoundly helpful. It was also kept intensely private. It happened many times over a period of weeks and, between the… visitations… there were moments when she doubted her own sanity. It can still frighten her, though she has learnt how to handle its tensions, how to guide such experiences and use them. But if you wish to know more you will have to ask Laura. I doubt she will want to tell you.”

I gathered that her parents had seen only that Laura was losing touch with reality. They insisted that she consult a psychiatrist and, fortunately, Laura had the strength to insist that it be a woman. One was found – “a pragmatic, civilized feminist who did not pretend to understand all that had happened to Laura but had the good sense to see that she was a great deal saner than her parents. It was she who eventually recommended that Laura go to a college she knew of – one where she would find an environment supportive of her experience. The college is in Connecticut. It is called the Heartsease Institute. I have a longstanding association with its work. That is where we met, and the rest you know.”

He would say little more, for my questions infringed on what he considered Laura’s private domain. When I asked him about the college, he volunteered only that it was an experimental community of researchers and students – “the kind of imaginative endeavour you will find only in the States”. It offered, I was told, “a variety of approaches to the more inclusive aspects of speculative enquiry into the natural order”.

It seemed an unlikely sort of place, and even more unlikely that Laura’s conservative parents should entrust their daughter to it. “But they were desperate,” Edward answered, “and desperation is often strangely fruitful. Somewhere they knew they had crippled her life, and their own responses were inadequate. They’re sad people really.”

“You’ve met them?”

Edward sighed. “Yes… I tried to talk to her father… by the pool house. Over root beer, would you believe? For a moment I thought he was about to dare to let himself like me, but the wife was watching, alas. Mind you, he was also daunted by the fact that I was some years his senior. The poor devil wasn’t sure whether to call me ‘sir’ or ‘scoundrel’. Had the idea I was after his money, I suppose. And the thought that I was bedding his daughter…” Edward winced mischievously up at me. “You should go to America. The action’s there. It’s the alembick of the age – one that might blow up in all our faces, and yet… I don’t know. I only know that Laura is well out of it.”

“She doesn’t want to go back ever?”

“Why should she? She is much loved here. Her life has meaning now.” Edward looked at his watch. “Cambridge, you’re a great waster of time. I have things to do.”

Reflecting how Laura herself invariably shied away from mention of her gifts, I was left with my thoughts. Either Edward’s account was true, or there was some bizarre pattern of collusion between them – he providing cover for her insecurity, or – equally possible – she reinforcing his. For the life of me, I couldn’t say which was the case.

Later that afternoon he came to me with some of my translations from the index cards. “I’m puzzled by something you’ve turned up,” he said. “These parenthetical references to a mystic brother.”

“Frater mysticus meus,” I said. “My mystic brother, right?”

“Yes, but the term means nothing to me. There’s no precedent for it. The female assistant was known as the mystic sister, but the man was always the Adept, the Master, Magister. Louisa wouldn’t have thought of her father as a mystic brother.”

“Could she have been thinking of her real brother?”

Edward wrinkled his nose dubiously. “He took no interest in the work. He rarely even came down from town.”

I smiled at him. “Perhaps they were in telepathic communication?”

Edward was not amused.

“There was something I noticed about those references,” I added in recompense. “They all looked as though they’d been written at a different time from the rest of the notes on the cards. The ink’s different. Even the handwriting. See what you think.”

Edward studied the original cards – most of them contained quotations from the Rosarium Philosophorum, a text I hadn’t read. They were principally concerned with the Coniunctio Solis et Lunæ, the marriage of the solar and lunar principles. One was from the Arisleus Vision: “With so much love did Beya embrace Gabricus that she entirely absorbed him in her own nature and dissolved him in inseparable atoms.” I’d thought about that one for a long time, wondering who Beya and Gabricus were, and had paid little attention to the note in brackets which had been added afterwards: (Frater mysticus meus.)

“I think you may be right,” Edward said after a moment. “This is closer to the handwriting of her later letters. She must have gone back over the cards much later, when she was old. But what did she mean by it?”

“No clues in the journals?”

“Not as far as I remember. She stopped making entries when she began work on the Treatise. The last entry is in January 1849. She must have been too busy after that. If only she’d kept it up.”

“Was there anything significant about that last entry?”

“Not really. Just her regrets about the Rector’s wife who’d had a miscarriage… Frater mysticus meus.” He whispered the words aloud as though to conjure the hidden meaning from the card.

“You think it might be important?”

“It’s certainly puzzling… But then what isn’t, dammit?”

“Might Laura have some idea?”

“She might,” Edward said dubiously. “I’ll ask her this evening.” Puzzling still, he returned to his desk. I riffled through the shoebox of index cards and found several more with the same cryptic postscript. Marking the places from which they’d come with scraps of paper, I decided to translate them first.

I had another dream that night, less orderly and dramatic than my dream of alchemy, but it felt significant. I was checking the rooms of The Pightle for leaks and other necessary repairs, when I discovered an entirely new wing. There were several rooms, all in good condition, which seemed to have been rented out though I was aware that they remained my responsibility. One room had the smell of a hospital ward, and there were patients asleep there with a nurse in attendance, who was not surprised by my intrusion. I passed down the ward and opened a door at the end of a passage. A whole order of nuns was waiting to welcome me. I remembered that they had been there all along, and wondered how I could ever have forgotten them.

The scene shifted and I found myself at the head of a stairwell, aware that yet another place might be reached but only by somersaulting over the banister and walking my feet down the opposite wall as one might descend a defile in a crag. Others had done it, I knew, but I felt nervous about accomplishing the tricky manoeuvre. Then Laura appeared, and there was something odd in the manner of her appearance. She felt more substantial than the other figures in the dream, almost as though she had troubled to step out of her own dreams to assist me with mine. I was relieved to see her and encouraged by the confidence she gave me. I gripped the banister and swung myself head over heels, then came out on the roof of a tower. When I made my way down its spiral staircase, I found myself in the main thoroughfare of the town where I was born. The dream ended with the thought that if I had known this was the main road, I need not have resorted to the acrobatics that had brought me there.

I woke feeling good, eager to get back to the Hall, but I wrote down the dream first, thinking I would tell it to Edward. Then, over breakfast, I decided I’d keep it to myself.

Edward was in a foul mood, applying himself obsessively to his studies, encouraging no conversation. When we broke for coffee, I asked him whether he’d consulted Laura about the references I’d turned up.

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“Nothing helpful.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“What did she say?”

Edward scowled at me. “Her mind wasn’t really on it. She’s at a crucial point with her own work. We were at cross-purposes.”

“You mean you had a row?”

“Yes, we had a row. Not that it’s any of your damned business.”

Except that I had to live with the aftermath.

It was the first time the old coldness had returned. For a moment I thought he was about to apologize, but he didn’t. He resumed his work. I looked across to where he sat hunched like a crow over carrion, and thought what a cantankerous old sod he could be when he chose.

Around three, Talbot came up to the library with a telephone set in his hand. “There’s a call for you, sir. If you’d care to use the extension plug by your desk, no doubt the estate office will connect you.”

For once Edward was in no mood to bait the man. He glowered at the instrument, plugged it in, then picked up the receiver. I returned my attention to the papers on my desk as Talbot left the room. Though I had the distinct impression that Edward would have preferred me to leave too, he said nothing, merely drummed his fingers on the desk top, then snapped, “Well?” into the receiver.

I heard the faint warble of Laura’s voice but could discern no words.

“Oh for God’s sake, why couldn’t you wait till the weekend? I thought we agreed. You know I’d have helped you then.”

There was a mixture of irritation and concern in his voice. He was shaking his head as he listened.

“I know you’d prefer to do it on your own, but it’s obvious you can’t. You were bound to run into trouble. Do you need me to come right now?”

“…”

“What on earth for?”

“…”

“But that was an accident. My concentration slipped. I’m not about to do it again.”

There was a further prolonged warble, to which Edward replied, “I think we can manage perfectly well on our own.” He swivelled his chair away from me and stared out of the window. “But if you weren’t even sure you wanted me around…”

“…”

“All right. On your own head be it.”

Laura said something else, Edward grunted and put down the phone. His chair swivelled back my way. Again the fingers drummed. “Listen, Laura’s having trouble with a firing. She’s running out of chopped wood and needs help. Last time I practically took my thumb off and apparently she doesn’t trust me not to do it again. She wondered whether…”

“I’d love to,” I said.

It was another stunningly hot, windless day, the sky an unclouded eggshell-blue, the temperature in the high seventies, so it was good to hang my head from the open window of Edward’s car and let the air come pelting at my face. I had never seen a kiln fired before and the unpredictable behaviour of live flame could only add to the already restless sensuality of the afternoon. The prospect exhilarated me.

Yet somehow Edward must be appeased, so I sought to make a virtue of my ignorance, asking questions that would allow him to air his greater experience. He knew what I was doing, and answered only in clipped, unhelpful sentences. “All you have to do is chop. And keep out of her way. She does the whole thing by feel… listening to the kiln.”

“But something’s gone wrong this time?”

“It’s a delicate business. Not like a machine. It’s alive. You have to nurse it along. She must have got the balance wrong and it’s stuck. She should never have tried to do it alone.”

He braked in the yard at the rear of the Lodge, and through the windscreen I saw a plume of smoke rising almost vertically beyond a pantiled outbuilding which I assumed must be Laura’s studio. Edward saw it too and his mood changed. His eyes glinted at me. I saw the excitement there. “Come on then,” he said, “let’s make the elements dance.”

He led the way round the studio. I saw an open shed stacked with timber, graded according to its thickness, and then, as we turned the flint gable, there was Laura crouched before the kiln in a muddle of faggots and fire irons, her rump in the air, legs bare beneath the sawn-off fringes of her denim shorts, wearing a blue-grey sleeveless T-shirt that had ridden up around her waist. One of its shoulder straps had drooped to her upper arm. Her hair was piled at her head, tied in a scarlet bandanna, and when she turned her face to look wanly up at us, there were soot marks on her brow and cheeks where she had wiped away the sweat with the back of her hand. “I can’t get the draught right,” she said. “I need more wind.”

“Where’ve you got to?” Edward demanded.

“About 900, I think. But I’ve been stuck here for ages. It was going fine till I tried for a reduction. Then the temperature dropped and I can’t get it moving again.” She stood up, adjusted the strap at her shoulder, and smiled at me. “Hello. Am I glad to see you.”

Edward crouched to his knees before the firebox and peered into the sickly blaze. “What’s the atmosphere like?”

“Pretty soupy. See what you think.” Laura moved round to the side of the kiln – it was a roughly built cube of firebricks the colour of pale sand, with a bricked-up Norman door arch on one side and a narrow throat at the rear which led to a tall, cast-iron stovepipe wired for support to the studio wall and a bough of a late-flowering cherry tree across the yard. The whole thing had the odd appearance of a brick-built Mississippi steamboat beached and panting to get back to the lake. Laura removed a wedge-shaped bung from the wall and peered in. Sighing, Edward moved round to join her, muttering again that she shouldn’t have started the firing on her own.

“Don’t give me a hard time,” she begged. “I’ve got troubles enough.”

A hand at his brow, Edward squinted into the chamber. “Murky. Too much uncombusted carbon in there. Thought so from the firebox. You’ve choked it.”

“I know I have, dammit. I needed more of the thinner timber, but I can’t fetch, chop and feed it at the same time.”

“What did I tell you? Where’s the bloody hatchet?”

“Edward, I’m not having you chop. Not after last time.”

“Let me,” I put in.

Edward glowered.

“It’s his hands, you see. They’re not steady enough.” Laura shot a quick glance Edward’s way. “It’s stupid, Edward. You know it is. Look, what I really need is to have more of those old floorboards brought round. They’re tinder-dry. They should get it moving again. Would you mind?”

For a moment Edward stood there, assessing her with a cold eye, then he slipped off his linen jacket, and looked at me. “Come on then. Give me a hand.”

Together we brought round a pile of boards and I started chopping while Laura fed the slender faggots to the flame, and Edward tinkered with the loose bricks that controlled the air supply. It was hot beside the mouth of the kiln and I was soon sweating, but the air was bright around me, the narrow prospect of the lake still and cool in the distance. I pulled off my shirt and threw it beyond the woodpile. It felt good to be active again after the days cooped in the library’s shade.

“It’s all a question of balance,” Edward muttered. “All the elements are here. They want to work together.” He stared suddenly at Laura. “You did remember to bless the kiln?”

“Course I did. We just need a bit more breeze, that’s all.”

“We could whistle for one, like sailors,” I said.

“Or work for it,” Edward snapped. “We need to waft the air.” He looked about for a thing to waft with, saw nothing satisfactory, scowled and said, “I suppose I’ll have to find a fan of some sort.”

Laura made a mischievous moue as he walked away.

“He’s been in a bad mood all day,” I said.

“I’m not surprised. We had one hell of a row last night. Look, it’s great of you to come. Edward and I would only have gotten in each other’s hair.”

“My pleasure. At least I know how to chop – if I’m ignorant about everything else you’re doing.”

“It’s very basic really. When the draught’s okay the flame gets drawn over the bag wall at the back of the firebox, then it sweeps round the arch of the kiln chamber, down through the pots into the throat and out up the chimney. That’s the theory anyway. I didn’t reach temperature last time. We had a real struggle, then Edward practically took his hands off. Disaster. But he might be right about this. Kilns are temperamental – if you get the balance wrong, you can feed it till you go blue in the face and get nowhere.”

“What temperature do you have to reach?”

“The glazes flux at 1,280 centigrade.”

“That’s hot.”

“Very hot. You’ll see the whole kiln shake before we get there.”

“How will you know when you’re there?”

“Give it another couple of minutes and I’ll show you. This is coming better. The wood’s just right.” When she was satisfied with the state of the blaze, Laura led me round to the side of the kiln, removed the bung and gestured for me to look in. I felt the heat hit my face as I stared through the opening with narrowed eyes. I saw two small spires through the spyhole, and beyond them the intense red haze of the kiln chamber. The atmosphere was less turbid than I’d expected from Edward’s description – a glowing, orange-red furnace of heat in which I could make out the shadowy profiles of two pots.

“You see the cones? One of them will melt when we reach a thousand. The other goes at glaze temperature. But you can tell from the colour as well.”

“I think the top of one’s bending a bit.”

She pushed me aside, peered into the chamber. “You’re right. And the atmosphere’s cleared. We’re on our way again. Great! You’ve brought me luck. Come on, more wood, more wood. Let’s keep it moving.”

I started to chop furiously again, the dry wood riving and splintering under the hand axe. Laura crouched beside me, feeding the fire with a smooth, regular rhythm, sweat shining at her shoulder blades, the T-shirt damp at her back. When Edward reappeared carrying a wicker carpet-beater, she called, “It’s all right. We’ve done it. We’re on the move.”

He stood disgruntled, staring down at us. Again I felt his displeasure. I tried grinning up at him. “I think you’ve done it between you,” I said. “Made an alchemist of me, I mean. I’ve got the bug.”

He nodded, smiling thinly, and fanned himself with the now redundant carpet-beater.

“We’ll give it another quarter of an hour or so,” Laura said, “and I’ll try for another reduction. What do you think, Edward?”

“They’re your pots,” he answered unhelpfully. Again Laura shot him an uncertain glance, then returned her attention to the fire. “Would anyone else care for a drink?” Edward asked.

“I put some cans in the fridge,” Laura said. “Alex must be gasping. Me too. It’s a great idea.” Edward turned back to the Lodge.

“Reduction?” I asked, pushing across another stack of faggots.

“You cut off the air and starve the atmosphere of oxygen. The atmosphere has to find it somewhere, so it goes after the molecules locked in the glazes and that’s when the real magic happens.” There was a sheen of elation in her eyes, which had widened, sparkling, at the word magic. It was as though she herself were under a spell, transmuted suddenly to a higher pitch, animated and volatile – as the alchemists were altered by their work. Even with the soot stains on her skin – perhaps because of them – I had never seen her look so radiant. Her mouth was open slightly, the tongue damp at her lower lip, her whole face eager, capable of every challenge. I looked and saw nothing remotely fragile there. Then she was aware of my gaze, glanced away, blew a puff of air upwards at her face, pinched the T-shirt between her fingers and flapped it for draught. I returned my eyes to the axe.

By the time Edward returned with a tray of beer cans, the fire was blazing with famished enthusiasm. I lifted the ring pull from the can and drank greedily, for the heat of the day and the kiln’s hot breath had parched my throat. More decorously, Edward lifted his can before drinking. “Here’s to a successful firing, my dear.”

“I’m sure it will be. I can feel it.” She looked up suddenly where a shower of blossom swirled from the cherry boughs. “Even the breeze is getting up. It’s going to be all right.”

“An extraordinary exercise of trust, don’t you think, Cambridge. To craft the pots so patiently from earth and water and then deliver them over to the mercies of fire and air.”

“That’s what I love about it,” Laura said, “ – the risk, the trust.”

“The unpredictability,” Edward added. “The surprise.” He turned to me again. “One never knows what the fire will do, and it has so many aspects. Look at the way this merry rage has risen from the sullen beast we found earlier. Consider the immense energies slowly eating out their heart up there” – he nodded upwards at the sun, dazzling westwards across the lake – “and the Pentecostal flame which brings the gift of tongues. Then there is the darker, unintelligible fire of the inferno, which burns and gives no light.” He grinned across at me darkly. “Nor should one forget the ignis fatuus, familiar as it is to us all.” He took a swig from his can, smacked his lips. “There is a story of a Japanese potter who was commanded by his Emperor to reproduce a marvellous glaze he had chanced upon as a mere hazard of the fire. He tried for years without success until finally, in utter despair, he threw himself into the kiln. When the pots were taken out… Of course, you bright boy, you have anticipated me… Yes, the Emperor’s command had been fulfilled. Which is why, of course, all artists burn.”

Laura had no time for such abstractions. “Come on, Edward,” she interrupted. “Alex needs more planks. Would you mind…”

“As my words appear to have lost their power to charm, I suppose I may as well diminish myself to beast of burden.”

“Don’t try to carry too many at once.”

“I am not yet a total incompetent,” he muttered, walking away. I chopped. Edward came back struggling with a load of planks, and I got up to help him. “I can manage,” he said brusquely, threw them down and went back for more. The pine boards snapped beneath the stamp of my foot. I swung the axe in swift rhythm, glad of the release it gave to the tension I felt building inside and around me. Then, when she judged the moment right, Laura shut down the damper in the smokestack, sealed the air vents, and the whole kiln began to throb and pant black smoke. “Look out,” she cried as tongues of flame blowtorched from the crevices around the bung and came licking back at us from the firebox. A dragon might have been suffocating there. It was hard to believe that this clumsy box of bricks was strong enough to withstand the pressure of its wings. The whole enterprise felt suddenly dark and dangerous. For the first time I began to recognize the power of the forces that Laura was summoning to her need.

Fascinated, I watched the flames gasp for air, the carbon-black exhaust of smoke billowing from the chimney mouth, the throb of imprisoned energies. Laura stood, tall and lithe, glowing with sweat, listening to the growl of the kiln, hands clenched tightly at her sides. Edward came back, dropped the planks, and stared at the kiln as into a mirror of his own increasing frustration. For longer, much longer than I would have dared, Laura held us all there, sustaining the kiln’s turbulent rage, then said quietly, “Alex, take this glove. Go to the damper and open it when I give the word.”

The damper was no more than a thin sheet of steel inserted into the stovepipe. I waited, feeling the heat thrown from the chimney, then Laura cried, “Now!” and pushed open the air vents with a fire iron. I pulled the damper out: it was glowing red-hot along its length. “Great God, look,” Edward shouted, “a pillar of fire,” and pointed upwards where a rush of living flame burgeoned from the chimney like a fiery tulip against the vivid blue of the sky.

“That should have done it,” Laura whispered. Then more briskly, “Quick, we’ll have lost temperature. Keep the wood coming, Alex. We might just catch it right.”

I had been working for more than an hour and my wrists ached from the continuous chopping, but I was filled with an immense exhilaration. The release of flame had swirled right through me. I was as much arsonist as alchemist now, swinging the axe gleefully, impervious to everything but the fire’s appetite. Never in my life had I done anything like this before. I remember thinking that this was what it was to be alive. Even the air I breathed – charred with smoke, sweetened by the scent of surrounding trees – had a different taste. It was the taste of spring at climax, of an afternoon in which, at the touch of the rising breeze, cherry blossom floated from the boughs in a frail pink torrent of petals that drifted through the shimmering heat-haze to cling at the sweat on one’s skin.

Rapt in her attention to the kiln, Laura demanded finer and finer splinters of wood. She slipped them rapidly into the hot mouth where they were instantly consumed in a shower of sparks. Sweat was running from my temples, stinging at the corners of my eyes, and when I paused to wipe them, Edward shouted, “Come on, come on, give me the bloody axe.” I glanced quickly at Laura. “You need a break,” she said. “For God’s sake be careful, Edward.” Reluctantly I handed over the axe and made way for him, then stood, stretching my back.

When I looked at my watch, I was amazed to see that it was well after six. I realized I was hungry and it didn’t matter. There was no way I could care about anything now till this kiln was fired. It would be done this time. If I had to sweat blood, it would be done. But it made sense at least to stretch my cramped legs, so I strolled down to the edge of the lake and lit a cigarette. Sunlight glittered across the water as though that too tingled with golden fire. I remembered what Edward had said about the presence of all the elements, wanting to work together, to meet and merge. And Laura – if she had been earth and water as she shaped her pots, she was now, like Cleopatra, all fire and air.

Alive inside my skin, indifferent to the blister smarting in the soft crook of my thumb, I sensed the world changing round me – a sensation of risk, of things poised on a hot brink where anything might happen and never be the same again. I think I already knew then that I would not return to my job at the Polytechnic, for the security of that monthly cheque had lost all meaning. The job was a cage where the wild man in me fretted and chafed. I could step out between the bars, and a day like this declared every reason for the risk. Why settle for the predictable, it demanded, when nothing truly attuned to the precarious magic of being alive can ever be predicted? I thought about Marcus and Lily, how they would have loved it here – the lake, the kiln, the excitement of the firing. I released a long, tense breath, flicked the stub of my cigarette into the lake, and turned to look back where Edward and Laura squatted before the smoking kiln, for all the world the alchemist and his mystic sister, except that the roles were powerfully reversed, and – I realized suddenly – they were arguing under their breath.

“They’re still too thick,” Laura complained.

“Goddammit, I’m doing the best I can.”

“Every time you fumble, I lose ten degrees. Look, give the axe to Alex. He knows what he’s doing with it. I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Before Edward could answer, she sprang to her feet. “Alex, I’m losing it. Can you come?”

“It’s all right,” Edward growled. “Just have some patience, will you?”

“It’s not me, dammit. It’s the fire. You know this last haul’s the hardest. I’m not going to lose it this time.”

Edward looked on scowling as I came over. There was a long, hot moment in which all three of us were penned in a triangle of critical regard – Laura fiercely indifferent to everything except the health of her blaze; me awkwardly between, holding out my hand for the axe; Edward, old man suddenly, hating his years and his uncertain hands, humiliated, furious with Laura, resentful of my youth and profoundly unwilling to surrender the axe. He held it there like a weapon. For an instant I seemed to be staring into smoke. What I saw was scary enough to make me lower my hand.

“Edward,” Laura said quietly, “be reasonable. Look, why don’t you go and get some food together? I can’t leave this and we’ll all be starving by the time we reach temperature.”

He stared at her incredulously. Her gaze shifted away to where the fire craved fuel, then turned back to him again. “Please, Edward. I can’t cope with everything.”

Ignoring me, cancelling me from the face of the earth, he glowered at her a moment longer through narrowed eyes, then let the axe drop, turned on his heel, and walked away. Laura called after him, half-reproachfully, half in appeal. There was no answer.

Laura and I looked at one another uncertainly. She pushed back her hair where it had slipped from the bandanna, then tried to shrug off the tension with a sigh. “Oh come on, let’s feed the fire.”

I picked up the axe and began to chop. She crouched at the firebox, shooting the wood into its mouth as quickly as it came, then cowered back from the sudden heat as the blaze was roused again. “I’m not going to let him spoil it,” she muttered. “Not this time. This really matters to me.”

“I think I know how he must feel.”

“His feelings aren’t the only important thing in the world.”

“He knows that. Let him cool off. He’ll be all right. I’ve seen him like this in the library – grim as hell one minute, chortling the next.”

“You don’t know him like I do. He’s just impossible sometimes.” She sighed, shook her head and picked up more faggots. “Come on, fire, be sweet to me. We’re nearly there.”

For the best part of an hour, I chopped and Laura fed the flame. We said very little – simply worked together, sweating, sniffing, aware of each other bent in crazy service to this marvellous beast she’d roused. Eventually she got up, removed the bung once more with a gloved hand, and stepped back as a tongue of yellow flame licked out at her. Then, shielding her eyes with her arm, she craned to peer inside. “Oh yes,” she cried. “Alex, come and see. It’s incredible.”

I dropped the axe, wiped my temples and joined her where she held the incandescent bung away from her skin. For a moment I thought the heat from the bunghole might incinerate my brows, but when I squinted beneath an outstretched palm the sight stole my breath. What had been only a dense red glow when I first looked into the chamber was now a torrent of liquid flame. It swirled among pots that tingled and glimmered in a dance of fly ash. The first cone was melted to a puddle, the second was bending in obeisance to the blaze – as I felt myself to be, stooped there before the kiln, wanting to gaze and gaze, but the vision was barely supportable. In the instant before Laura replaced the bung, I understood how that ancient Japanese potter might have flung himself into those dazzling fountains. I turned to share the wonder of it, but she was gazing up at the bloom of flame surging from the chimney’s mouth, and beyond where the evening star glittered against the deepening blue sky. We stood together in silence for a long moment. Her lips opened in a half-dazed smile of speechless delight. She bit her bottom lip, brought her arms together at her chest so that her hands met at her mouth. “We’ve done it,” she whispered into the little cave made by her fingers. “We’ve really done it.” Then she was jumping up and down, turned suddenly, threw her arms around me, eyes tightly closed, squeezing me against her. I tightened my own grip, felt the soft blur of her hair at my cheek. Then her hands were at her back, unclasping mine. “Quick,” she said. “I’ve got to soak the kiln. We need to hold it here for another half-hour. Come on, before it drops.”

I stood, thrown, watching her leap back to the firebox. “Come on,” she cried eagerly, “I need more wood.”

So we were back before the firebox, exhausted and happy, and Laura had just shut down the kiln, when Edward came round into the yard again.

“We’ve done it,” Laura called. “Edward, we’ve done it. I’ve put it to bed. Be happy for me. Be happy, please.”

I gazed across at him, willing him not to wreck this moment. I could see the contention in his wrinkled face. Then an arm lifted, as though of its own accord, and came to rest on the crown of his head. He had missed her moment – he knew he had missed it – yet his eyes softened suddenly, and you could almost see the shadow fall from his shoulders as he twinkled down at Laura where she knelt before her dying fire. As if it was the most natural thing in the world, he said, “God bless you, my dear, I knew all along it would be all right. Come and give me a hug.”

Laughing, she sprang to her feet. He moved towards her, opening his arms, and I saw there were tears at the corners of his eyes. “Well done,” he whispered, eyes closed, holding his cheek against her. “Well done.” They hugged each other in silence for a long time. I stared at the mess of faggots round the hearth of the closed kiln, supernumerary now. Then I heard Edward’s voice. “You too, Cambridge. Come join this orgy of delight. You’ve earned a kiss.”

“That’s right,” Laura exclaimed, “I couldn’t have done it without you. Without both of you.” They each held out a free arm. Smiling, I rose to join them, and when they both pressed their lips to my cheeks I caught the smell of whisky on Edward’s breath. “What Nature leaves imperfect,” he quoted, “we perfect with our Art.” Then we were all clasped in a threefold embrace, Laura calling out her thanks to the sky. I felt Edward’s pressure at my hip wheeling the hug until the three of us circled in a scrum of affection. “Nature takes delight in Nature,” Edward whispered as we turned; then, a little louder, “Nature contains Nature”; and shouting then as though the triumph of the hour was entirely his: “And Nature can overcome Nature.” Laughing, we broke apart.

“I know what my nature needs right now,” Laura said.

“A feast awaits you indoors,” Edward answered. “The burgundy breathes. The chef has done his worst.”

“Wonderful. But there’s a thing I have to do.” She grinned, said, “I’m going to jump in the lake,” and she was off, sprinting and skipping, pulling her T-shirt over her head, round to the front of the Lodge. Edward and I stared at one another. A moment later we heard a splash and a squeal, more splashing, a flutter of duck, whoops of delight. A little blearily Edward laughed.

I said, “That sounds like a good idea.”

“Be my guest.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Should I?”

We were each held for an instant in the other’s dubious quiz. “You’re smelling a little high,” he said, “and we have no shower.”

“What about you?”

“I have already bathed my wounds.”

“Then…”

“After all, there’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”

“She told you?”

“Laura tells me everything… eventually.” He sniffed. “Go on, for God’s sake. Let’s see what you’re made of.” He followed me round to the jetty where Laura’s clothes were scattered across the lawn.

“Come on in,” she shouted. “It’s bliss.” Her hair was loose, shining where it floated on the surface around her head. Smoothly she lifted her arms in a backstroke, then twisted the blur of her body and struck out into the lake with a fluent, practised crawl. Edward watched as I kicked off my shoes and socks, unbuckled my jeans and let them fall. I handed him my watch, stared at his grin for a moment, then slipped out of my shorts and ran out onto the jetty to plunge into the sudden cold shock of the lake. When I surfaced, gasping, the sky was intensely blue and I saw the moon, cratered and radiant, high over the tower on the distant mount.

We were some distance out in the lake when Edward eventually called from the shore that supper was spoiling. Until that moment no single glance had suggested more than shared pleasure in the lake by night, two friends at swim. Laura’s challenge to race back was uttered in that spirit, but she was the better swimmer and reached the jetty strokes ahead of me. She must have known I was watching as she lifted herself from the lake, water running down her long back, the skin glistening in the light cast from the house across the lawn. I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she swivelled to rinse the mud from her legs, then flexed her arms, swept back her hair to shake it, and the motion rippled through her body. She opened her eyes, smiled down where I stood waist-deep in water still – the smile itself a quick gasp on evening air – then she was upright, running along the jetty to where Edward waited with the towels. He wasn’t looking at her – he was looking at me, and there was a snakeskin feel to his face. It was the glance of an instant only. I tried to shake it from my mind as I shook the water from my hair, but I knew what that face felt like from the inside. It was imagining its own absence from the scene, and disbelieving innocence. As far at least as I was concerned, it did so with due cause.

And Laura?

I didn’t know. If she’d relaxed in her skin after the hot work over the kiln, she hadn’t flaunted it; not till that moment, and even then, had she been clothed, the smile might have signified no more than amused affection. But she was frank and inaccessible as a Modigliani nude, and I was back in the green glow of the glade – except that this time I too was observed.

By the time we came to eat, it was evident that Edward was already drunk. He ate little of the meal he’d prepared, but added more than half the wine to the mix of beer and whisky inside him. I tried to engage him in conversation about the analogy between pottery and alchemy, and Laura prompted him to share ideas that had long been familiar to them both, but he showed little interest. Self-consciously, I shifted the ground to literature, regretting that the emblems of alchemy were now too arcane to be of service to modern writers.

“If you’d had your eyes open,” he growled, “you’d have seen that such is certainly not the case,” and muttered “numbskull” under his breath. The charm – that demon glitter of narrowed eyes which had given the lie to all previous insults – was conspicuously absent. He turned to Laura. “The man’s half-educated. Barely that.” He downed more wine. Suddenly I was back in the presence of the unpredictable figure I’d met in the library at Easterness that first night, and as uncertain now as then.

“Who did you have in mind?” I asked.

“I didn’t have anyone in mind. I have them by heart, where they belong.”

“All right. But who?”

“James Joyce modern enough for you? Or is he old hat already? ‘The first till last alchemist’ – that’s what he called himself.” For a moment I thought his tongue had slurred the word, then I remembered Joyce’s fluent way with puns. “But I don’t suppose you’ve taken the trouble to read Finnegans Wake?”

“I had a hard time getting through Ulysses,” I responded as lightly as I could.

“See what I mean?” he demanded of Laura, who gave me a quick, apologetic glance, then looked down at the table.

“It’s been a marvellous day, Edward. Don’t spoil it.”

“Man asked me a question, didn’t he? Or made some asinine observation or other. Don’t remember now. I didn’t start it. Know that.”

“He was just making conversation.”

“And I was just responding. Or am I not permitted to speak in my own house?”

“Tell me about Joyce,” I said quickly, and found myself fixed by a menacing leer. Slowly his head turned from me to Laura. “With Laura’s gracious permission,” he said, sarcasm spacing the words. She sighed and looked away. Then he studied me again, breathing heavily, the corner of his mouth twitching a little. “Joyce knew it… chymical wedding, I mean. More than you’ll ever know. Listen to this: ‘equals of opposites, evolved by a one-same power of nature or spirit, as the sole condition and means of… means of…’” He screwed his eyes, pressed the thumb-knuckle of the hand holding a cigarette into his forehead, struggling to remember, then jerked his head up, scowling. The ash fell from his cigarette on to the tablecloth. “Laura, how’s it go?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Yes you do, dammit. You’re just being pissy with me. How’s it bloody go. Man wants to learn.”

Staring at him coldly, Laura completed the quotation: “as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarized for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies.”

“That’s it. Symphysis of their antipathies. Pure alchemy. Twentieth-century state of the art. Satisfied? Any wiser, you little Cambridge shit? And what about Yeats, for God’s sake? The Rosa Alchemica. Haven’t read that either, I suppose? What do they teach in crammers these days? Manage your own hand-jobs, can you? And then there’s Lowry – sweet, sizzled Malcolm Lowry. He tried. He tried. We’re talking men now. Real men. We’re talking burning ground. None of your navel-lint, tit-licking pen-fuckers so infatuated with the twitchings of the ego they remain sublimely indifferent to the obscene fact that their words are worth less than the flies tormenting the eyelids of an African child. And who gives a toss about litter-a-chewer anyway? Is that what you’re in this for? Scratching round our backyard for pickings to pad your lines out with? That it, eh?”

Laura stepped in to cover my obvious discomfort. “Please don’t do this, Edward.”

“It’s all right,” I murmured.

“It is not all right,” Edward snarled, and pointed an unsteady finger at me. “You stay out of this.” He turned on Laura, with a caustic grin. “Fancy him, do we? That the game? That what it’s about?”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Think I’m blind, do you? Old and blind. That what you think?”

“I think you’ve had too much to drink, that’s all.”

“Liar. Lying bitch.”

I could see the breath shaking in Laura’s voice as she said, quietly, “Edward, if you’re not careful, you might regret this very much.”

He stared at her, swaying in his chair, then all the malevolent rage seemed to collapse inside him. “Done it before,” he muttered. “Done it before,” He looked across at me with watery, beseeching eyes as if he had just told me the entire, intolerable story of his life. His hand was trembling, half-open, on the tablecloth. He looked at the cigarette, almost burnt out between nicotine-stained fingers, and stubbed it on his plate again and again until it was quite crumpled. He sniffed, and looked up at Laura. “You’re quite right, my dear. Darken” – his great, wrinkled head revolved slowly towards me – “forgive. Old fool, you see. The booze. No good for me. Pay no heed.”

“It’s forgotten,” I said, but my own hand was trembling a little as it reached to take the unsteady, hairy hand he offered across the table.

“Hope so. Didn’t know what I was saying.”

There was a long silence in which he sat, nodding, before he released his grip. His free hand reached for the bottle again, then pulled back. He beat the edge of the table with the flat of it – an old gorilla, caged – shook his head as though to clear it, then jerked uncertainly to his feet. The chair would have fallen to the floor had Laura not reached out to catch it. “Had enough,” he said. “Going to bed.” He lurched towards Laura, kissed the crown of her head, and mumbled, “Forgive, forgive,” into her hair.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“Yes, it’s all right. It’s good. It’s as it should be. All is for the best in the most impossible of worlds.” Then he smiled across at me, a doleful witness for his own prosecution, and shambled from the room.

Laura and I sat in tense silence, listening to the creak of the stairs. She opened her lips to speak. I said, “Don’t say it. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I really wanted us to be happy.”

“I know.”

“He’s impossible.”

“But he loves you very much.”

“He needs me.”

“That too.”

“And I owe him…” She closed her eyes, sighed, frowned down at the table where the ash lay like his spoor.

“Does this happen often?”

“It’s been getting worse.”

“Is that my fault?”

She looked up, puzzled by the question. “Why should it be? No, it’s not that. It’s… I don’t know. It’s happened before. I tried to leave him once when he got like this. In the States.”

“And he went to pieces?”

She shook her head. “I did.” When she looked up at me, there was a kind of glazed defiance in her eyes. “I left him because I couldn’t handle the shadow his expectations threw over me… the way he cast me as a member of his dream. I started to think he finally made it impossible for me to be myself.” Again the eyes were lowered. “I came back because I discovered that without him my head splits into a thousand pieces. I couldn’t work, couldn’t feel my way. Nothing made any sense.”

I tried to say that I understood, that I’d felt much the same way when I lost Jess. “But you came through,” she said. “On your own, I mean. Without Edward, I… There are things I can’t explain.”

“Try.”

“Look, if it wasn’t for him…” She had been prepared for none of this, stalled now, changed her mind. “It wouldn’t make any sense to you. He’s the only one who really understands.”

“He told me a little about what happened to you in the States,” I encouraged.

“About Hester?”

Immediately I saw that if Edward had mentioned that name it would have been deemed a great betrayal. “No. Only that you had some very confusing experiences…” I waited. Agitated, she made no move to change the course of the conversation or to end it. I took a further risk. “Who’s Hester?”

She glanced up warily, found nothing but sympathy in my gaze. “That’s just it. She’s not. Not any more. She was an ancestor of mine. She’s been dead longer than Louisa, but…”

I could feel the hairs rise at the back of my neck as I said, “You’ve seen her?”

She nodded, reached for a cigarette and lit it. “I used to. I used to a lot. Whenever things were really bad we’d talk…”

Had Edward told me this, I would not have believed. Even now, despite the patent honesty of her eyes, there was resistance.

“You see what I mean?” she said. “It sounds crazy, right? Well, I was crazy… sure I was, for a time. But not about that.” It was as though she was accruing power over against Edward’s earlier impossible behaviour, against my possible disbelief. “And not about Louisa either… Edward knows it, but he won’t hear. He thinks I’ve got it wrong and…” Her breath came in a shaky release of tension. “That’s one of the things that’s come between us. But – what I was talking about – he knows it’s not crazy. He knows it’s real.”

Whatever the crux of their disagreement, she was not about to disclose it. She had no such trust in me.

I said, “Why shouldn’t it be real? I only have to switch on the news to hear things a whole lot crazier than that.” I’d tried to keep my voice light, coaxing, but she studied me coolly as though she’d picked up my unspoken reservations and would not forget them. The expression on her face read my last remark as no more than a condescending gesture of patient sympathy such as she must have met many times before. Or perhaps she wasn’t considering my words at all, for she said suddenly, “I should stick to clay. That’s real.” And then, a moment later, “Oh God, I was a bitch to him today.”

“Come on, that’s not fair. There’s no point punishing…”

“Look,” she interrupted, “I can’t leave him too long. I know him – he’ll just be lying there miserable…” The appeal in her eyes was asking me to leave.

“You’ll be all right?”

She nodded, summoning strength. I saw the candlelit flash of the little star at her throat; saw too that to contrive a longer stay would only put her under further pressure. Already there were shadows of exhaustion round her eyes. I pushed back my chair and got up. “Well, at least the kiln’s in good shape.”

She smiled, though wanly. “Bless you for that.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

“I’d offer to run you back but…”

“It’s okay. I like to walk.” I saw the mess on the table and said, “Oh God, the dishes…”

“Don’t worry. You’ve done enough. Really.”

At the door I turned to look at her.

“You don’t have to be haunted by the past – or by that abominable old sod upstairs. You’re alive here, now, entirely in your own right. No mother, no father, no ghosts. You’re a kiln-firer. A free spirit. I think it might be an excellent idea if you forgot about everything else for a minute and let me hold you.”

I might have said all of this, and I said none of it. I felt many things for which, in these confused circumstances, there were no permissible words. And it was impossible to tell whether her own gaze held anything more than the bewildered gratitude and regret that were clearly there. So I silently willed her to know that if life with Edward became insupportable, there was a place for her to come. Yet she would have been upstairs with the old man before I was out of the moonlit yard.