Dry Bones

by Richard Beard

  Despite the bone between my fingers, I could see no evidence that the grave had been disturbed or damaged.

  Intrigued, I decided to extend my investigation, and my second line of rational enquiry took me to the Basilique de Notre Dame, up by the station. It was Geneva’s largest Catholic church, and clearly thriving on the unashamed hoodoo of virgin births and a bleeding Jesus and the hell of fire without end. Blurred by candle-light and incense, I made my circuit in a clockwise direction, looking out for relics. First, though, I bought some candles from a rack, and lit one to Dad. Then I lit one for Davy, and although the candles were a cream colour, the wax they burnt was black. I wasn’t superstitious, but I didn’t like it. I shouldn’t imagine the Catholics liked it, either.

  The Basilica’s proudest relic was the leg-bone of St Clothilde, wife to Clovis, King of the Franks, and with her sister Chrona the foundress of Christian Geneva. Unfortunately, she was out on loan, to an exhibition making a tour of southern Italy. In St Clothilde’s place, as a temporary exhibit, I found the bones of St Ursula, a British queen from the third century who’d promised to marry a routinely tyrannical German. On two conditions. He had to convert to Christianity. And as an escort across the North Sea, Ursula would require eleven virginal companions, each in her own ship with a thousand attendant virgins. After several convivial years in Cologne, Ursula announced that she and her female attendants would be walking to Rome to meet the Pope. On their way back, all 11,012 of them were savagely massacred, by Huns. The bones were gathered up, and venerated ever after as relics.

  However, these bones on temporary display in Geneva’s Basilica were fakes. It was a progressive exhibit, demonstrating the irrepressible potency of the human urge to believe. The bones were well-documented frauds from the sixteenth century, no earlier, and probably about 1520.

  At the cemetery, and then the Basilica, I’d been hoping to make sense of the unexpected Becketness which had come over me yesterday. I didn’t seem to have made much progress. I tossed Davy’s foot-bone in the air, and caught it two-handed, over St Ursula. There must be some way I could approach this predicament objectively, even scientifically, as a conundrum with a practical solution. Good science would always conquer superstition, as in the case of Davy’s famous safety-lamp. In that instance, prior to Davy’s fool-proof lamp, underground mining explosions caused by firedamp had often been blamed on a foul-tempered god, called Gwillam.

  Since yesterday’s intercession by Becket, I had some serious questions to ask about relics. What were they, exactly, and what could they do? Did they offer a channel through which supernatural power was made available for the needs of everyday life? Had I at last found an infallible means of changing for the better, and correcting my many failings?

  Humphry Davy had been comfortable with the idea that substances change, according to different electrical states, or chemical arrangements, or temperatures. Matter was constantly modifying and adapting in character. Perhaps bones, after death, could also generate some imperfectly known power. The possibility couldn’t be excluded from any unprejudiced scientific enquiry.

  I therefore vowed to establish, using approved scientific methods, whether the essence of a human life could somehow implode, at the moment of death, into the physical remains left behind.

  The lab conditions I had available to me were primitive. The church apartment was on the third floor of a sixties block, opposite a cosmetics packing-plant. There was coloured glass in the upper panels of the interior doors, mostly amber but also random red and green, and the woodblock flooring was yellow. The Chaplain had wilfully left behind everything he disliked about the Church of England, including a set of table-mats with etchings of county-town castles, and the pastoral answer-machine always blinking with many messages.

  I skipped through the first nine, none of which was new. Message 10 was Stella, asking me if I was feeling any better. Message 11 was Rifka, who wanted me to phone her mobile, something about the church. And message 12 was Rifka again. But women weren’t interesting to me, not today. Today was the investigation of bones, and for that I’d be needing the best possible light.

  The living-room and adjoining bedroom both had windows over the street. However, for the purposes of my experiment, and despite cupboards packed with the Chaplain’s cheap sherry, his instant cake-mixes and other false economies, I selected the kitchen.

  It was 11.43 a.m. Wearing the cleanest of my blue-black cardigans, at the kitchen table beneath the scientific flicker of the striplight, I began my objective examination of the bone allegedly a relic of the English scientist Sir Humphry Davy. There was nothing ghoulish about it, just a bit of man with the meat off, about an inch across and an inch thick, like an uneven dice, and according to a diagram in the apartment’s Illustrated Oxford Dictionary, a possible match for several of the small bones in the puzzle of the human foot. A visual examination was inconclusive: it was a grey colour, white moving to grey via yellow and brown, like a bad tooth, or a Sunday lamb-bone on a Monday. It also had that same rough tongueish texture I’d noticed in Becket’s toe.

  Stop. Concentrate. Was it in any way out of the ordinary? Was there any special power which lingered, at first obscurely but then growing, some sense of inverted magnitude radiating from this tiny and compact bone? I wanted to know if this relic of Sir Humphry Davy could act like Becket had, like a relic known to be holy. Could the character of Humphry Davy, like sanctity, be expected to rub off?

  I rubbed the foot-bone in a particular way against the outside sleeve of my cardigan, like a polishing of Newton’s apple. Closing my eyes, I was then almost persuaded by the illusion that there emanated, very faintly, a perfumed smell which lifted my spirits, like a sweet remembered pleasure. I blinked my eyes open, and stared amazed at the fragment of bone.

  I rubbed it again, more fiercely this time, against my chest and then my stomach, like a nylon block I was making electric.

  There it was again, that smell of pearl and pink, the odour of sanctity. I frowned, then crossed the hallway to the bedroom, where the window was open over the stutter of cars across tram-lines. On the other side of the street, beyond a stretched grid of second-storey tram-cables, white-coated women in the windows of the packing-plant were assembling gloss-finish boxes, their fingers repetitive and delicate.

  The mid-air cables crackled like crisp-packets, and an orange Geneva tram scattered blue sparks as it rattled beneath the window.

  Before now, during deliveries to the cosmetics plant, I’d been able to smell the candied arrival of nail-varnish.

  I latched the window. Back in the kitchen, I put some water into a saucepan to boil, and from the maximum gas I lit a cream-coloured candle I’d bought at a bargain price from the votive stocks of Geneva’s Basilica. Holding the foot-bone at the very ends of my fingers, I steadied the candle beneath it, and observed its reaction to naked flame. In the heyday of saintly relics, the Middle Ages, authentic remains were thought immune to fire. The immediate consequence of this received wisdom, in the ingenious 1300s, was the vigorous production of fake relics made from asbestos.

  In my own controlled experiment, Davy’s foot was slowly staining black, though I wasn’t sure whether scientifically this counted as damage. I kept it in the flame, remembering my first chemistry set, aged about ten. All through Boxing Day, and well into the night, I tried to make things go bang while my brother Tom was allowed to fail at alchemy, because he was older. This memory, appearing from nowhere, made me suspect I’d always been interested in science, though I hadn’t fully acknowledged it until now.

  The Catholic flame scorched my fingers and I yelped, jumping up and dropping both bone and candle. I stamped out the flame, shaking off my fingers then sucking at the burn. This was science at the frontier of the nineteenth century, approximate and unsterilised, and in bursts of rapid experimental progress injury was an occupational hazard. The water reached boiling-point, hissing on to the gas. I flipped it down to simmer, then crawled under the table, lookin
g for Davy’s foot-bone. It had skittered beneath the fridge. I hooked it out, wiped it off, and popped it into the boiling water, setting the timer for twenty minutes.

  Twenty minutes later, in the simmering saucepan, I had an elixir. It was easy, if you knew how. The water which had boiled the bone was now an infusion of Sir Humphry Davy. I poured a small taster into an ecumenical mug, and swilled it round, to cool it. I sniffed it, blew on it, took a last look into it. And then I drank it.

  It tasted faintly like chicken. Anyway, it was inoffensive, so I poured the rest of the elixir out of the saucepan and into the mug. After drying off the bone, I swallowed the lot. The taste of eternity needed more salt. Otherwise, nearly all my original questions remained unanswered.

  Fortunately, Sir Humphry Davy had never been scared of the difficult questions. Such as: are hydrogen and nitrogen, at the usual temperatures of the atmosphere, bodies of the same character in the aeroform state as zinc and quicksilver in the heat of ignition? Back then, it was like asking about angels. The answer, as it happened, was 2K + 2NH3 = 2KNH3 + H2, which would always be unsatisfactory, even if it was right and God was a very clever chemist and this was the answer to everything.

  Davy was soon conceding that the human condition could never be entirely explained by the emerging laws of chemistry, and my own recent experiments inclined me to agree. Davy coped with this disappointment by teaching himself to fish. He became an expert angler, but only after conscientiously fulfilling his many obligations to the Royal Society.

  He was with me in my pocket as I dutifully checked for recent e-mails. Among the Chaplain’s newsgroups, and a circular from Lambeth Palace, there were two new messages. The first was a reminder from the Rassemblement des Eglises Chrétiennes de Genève (subject: ‘Today’s Meeting’). I left that one alone while I moved my things into the Chaplain’s emptied closets. Everything I owned fitted inside a military parson’s kit-bag I’d inherited from Dad, and along with my own stuff I also had Dad’s unsafe razor, and in case of emergency his favourite red chasuble (of no obvious use to Mum or Tom).

  Then I went back to the computer and the second new message, meant for me personally but sent via the parish address. It was from Helena (subject: ‘you two-faced bastard’).

  Davy’s marriage, only last year at the age of thirty-three, was in those days considered late. He wrote at the time that his life began on the night his proposal was accepted. But it wasn’t a success. He and Mrs Apreece remained childless, and, as Lady Davy, Jane Apreece refused to stay inert at home as the domestic base-element Davy had hoped for. She insisted on doing things. Whenever they were apart, Davy could summon a romantic wistfulness for the ideal of love. More often, when they were together, he thought of her as a distraction, a restless inconvenience who coerced him into busy and often wasteful trips to Bath. As the years went by, the unhappiness of their marriage became notorious, and the bad temper of both parties was often remarked upon. In fact, most observers judged their union a rationalised compromise from the start: they’d been growing older, with no one close to offer comfort.

  I opened Helena’s message.

  No relationships were perfect, and because absence had softened my heart, I was ready to be persuaded by any improvement on celibacy. Helena wanted to fly over. She wanted to know if I was still alive. Was it true that I’d been ill?

  I was still alive, yes. But I was not two-faced, of all things. Admittedly I’d changed in the last few years, as everyone had. I wasn’t the same person: my skin had entirely replaced itself, and practically none of my atoms had survived that summer we’d fallen in love.

  I shut down the machine. As founder of London Zoo, Davy’s interest in natural history had introduced him to the reproductive charm of the ragworm. The female chases the male until she gets hold of him. She then eats him, and he explodes inside her, fertilising her eggs. And then she, too, dies. The baby ragworms grow, or live on, or triumph. Anyway, they’re the only survivors.

  If I was going to escape that fate in Geneva, and continue my scientific research into bones, I’d need to find a job. Davy was a Theist, recognising that theology and science have much in common, partners in a common quest for understanding. He saw no necessary contradiction. Both proceeded as if there was a truth out there to be discovered, a system of organisation worthy of praise, a purpose as a ground of hope. I could therefore continue my scientific research and work as a churchman, the only job for which I was even half qualified.

  I consulted the Chaplain’s folder of wealthy institutions, his wish-list of benefactors, and, feeling confident they’d want to support my life of genuine enquiry, I made a call to the Centre for European Nuclear Research. CERN, a twenty-minute bus-ride from Geneva’s city-centre, is an isolated campus of 10,000 scientists, and beneath the surrounding mountains they’ve constructed a twenty-seven-kilometre atom-velodrome, whizzing quarks and gluons in opposite directions and hoping for spectacular collisions. The invisible particles collide. The scientists watch.

  It was at CERN that the Higgs-Boson particle was first identified. Until very recently, this particle represented the holy grail of nuclear physics, explaining why the universe has mass and how everything holds together. Before they found it, it was known to nuclear physicists as God’s particle, and they pursued it with the same fervour once reserved for saints and angels. Then they found it, they have it. We have it. But now they’re looking for something else.

  That morning I couldn’t interest the Director of Human Resources in the forgiveness of sins. He said it didn’t seem important. The Press Office showed no curiosity in eternal life, not even hypothetically. They weren’t even prepared to experiment.

  Undeterred, I was accompanied by Davy’s foot to the regular Saturday lunch-time meeting of the Rassemblement des Eglises Chrétiennes de Genève. The minister from the American church smiled horribly at me, wishing I were dead, asking me how long I was planning to stay. ‘And what about your church?’

  ‘I still have the key.’

  ‘But no furniture. And no congregation. Buddy.’

  He was undoubtedly an American, but he was also formerly a Germanic Dutch Nordic Scandinavian, with unbreakable ice in his soul. I didn’t argue, but my leg closest to Davy cramped for the whole hour as God’s Protestant intermediaries discussed greenhouse gases and genetically modified crops, and our moral responsibility to the planet, or the people, or even both. The Lutherans disagreed with the American Episcopalians who disagreed with the Southern Baptists and the Dutch Reform Church.

  As the Anglican representative, I agreed with everybody.

  Over our sandwich lunch, watching God’s most junior deputies grin and pick their teeth, it occurred to me that I moved far too infrequently among superior people. I felt a nagging sense of underachievement, suspecting that in another life, in Geneva, instead of this I’d almost certainly have been roistering in gravy with Byron and Scrope Davis at the Villa Diodati. Church-folk these days had no class, and whatever her other failings, mostly of a personal nature, Mrs Apreece was at least the widow of Shuckburgh Apreece (the baronet’s son). She was also a cousin of Sir Walter Scott, actually.

  I remembered Rifka’s suggestion from yesterday of a possible visit to Moholy’s villa. Today, unlike yesterday, I was tempted. Men like me, with talent but no family, had only a limited number of opportunities in life, and Davy was barely forty-nine years old when crippled with palsy. In only fifteen years’ time, I could be paralysed and wracked with regret for the many things I’d never done.

  For the sake of scientific investigation, I therefore put my personal difficulties to one side, and surrendered myself to the delayed effect of elixir of Sir Humphry Davy. With a social boldness that was otherwise unlike me, I phoned the number Rifka had left on the answering machine, and between us we deftly arranged a visit to Moholy’s villa, five miles out along the more fashionable southern bank of the lake.

  ‘A word of warning,’ Rifka said. ‘He has mood swings. He can be a monster
, so be careful. And don’t say anything stupid.’

  I decided to walk. I had my walking-boots, confident they’d come in useful in mountainous Switzerland, and also some knee-length walking-shorts. I topped these with a tartan shirt and a green tie, because, despite being small and unexceptional, I still knew how to show myself off to advantage.

  The pedestrian route to the villa was bordered by the magnificence of Lake Geneva. On one side. And on the other by a dual carriageway. I gazed out over the glass-calm water, and the reflected mountains of the French Jura looked sublime, like spilt religion. Oh most magnificent and noble Nature!, but the rest of the verse escaped me, and then I tripped over my own feet.

  But I didn’t fall over. An Italian lorry sounded its horn, and then a higher-pitched builder’s van, but I ignored the speeding traffic. Instead, I felt myself seduced by reality observed, at least to the left of me, and a sense of the breathing seam that sustains all life. It was a religion of lakeside grass and flowers, placid water, mountains, and nature as an experience of the holy.

  Over an hour later, just beyond a lay-by and a bus-stop, the path stopped abruptly at a wall marked Private Property. The dual carriageway kinked inland to the right of a strand of houses, like scale models of French châteaux, each now with private lakeside frontage. Three or four properties along, I found the high iron gates to Moholy’s villa. They were open, and at the end of a white gravel drive there was a silver Mercedes, a Jeep, and a pair of ornamental trees in slatted pots either side of the villa’s open double-doors. A small bird clung upside down to a first-floor window-frame, pattering the glass with its beak, aiming at dead flies trapped in the webs of spiders.