Manure, brandy, the seawater smells of oyster shells, the perfumes of soaps, tar, tanning, leather, oil from wool fleeces piled around the Leper Chapel. Smells and perfumes mingled into each other as the sun rose. I walked through the thoroughfares, invisible to the ghostly sellers, running my hands over wool, silks, spices, oyster shells; I felt dried hops running through my fingers, the marbling of books on my fingertips; I heard cries, accents from all over England and northern Europe, men and women from Lancashire, Holland, Germany, Yorkshire—chickens, horses, iron, the chains of scales working. Sex, riot, and desire.
“The greatest medieval fair in Europe,” Elizabeth said quietly. “Now that you can smell it, can you see it? Cambridge is just a palimpsest. All of this is. Just one century laid upon another upon another. Nothing is ever quite lost while there are still a few old buildings standing sentinel. Time bleeds here, seeps, perhaps more than anywhere else in the city. You’ll see. Now you have to see the chapel.”
We walked back onto the busy Newmarket Road up the brow of the hill, where the Leper Chapel stood facing the road in a miniature valley of its own. “In Newton’s time it was used for storage; it was semi-derelict,” Elizabeth began, pulling a wrought-iron key from her coat pocket and slipping it into the hole in the door. “Just think, it’s been here for nearly a thousand years from before the city was anything more than a village with a castle and a fort. In the seventeenth century Samuel Pepys would have stood in it and John Bunyan—he used Stourbridge Fair as the model for his ‘Vanity Fair’ scene in Pilgrim’s Progress—which, of course, Thackeray stole for the title of his novel—”
Now I was late for Elizabeth’s funeral, walking towards the Leper Chapel, lost somewhere in Stourbridge Fair with the ghost of a dead woman and a whole host of imagined smells I didn’t know what to do with, and Pepys and Bunyan and Thackeray. “Your fault I’m late, Elizabeth,” I said aloud, stepping to one side to let a woman pass who was pushing a child in a buggy and talking on a mobile phone at the same time. We were both talking to the air, to ghosts.
Time had begun to bleed in the way that it did around Elizabeth. Yes, I had turned my back on Cambridge and you, Cameron Brown, for five years, but the feelings the city dragged from me were always the same—a physical oppression, a sense of mouldy suffocation and bad air, low grey skies on most days suddenly transformed to arcs of blue that made your heart ache. Cambridge made me think of Madame Bovary trying to draw breath in the prim protocols of suburbia and yearning for she knew not what, angry with she knew not what. And yes, like Emma, your eyes were never quite the same each time I saw you—black in shadow, brown in daylight, and close up, like the stem-cell slices you photographed, they had all the richness and variety of hue of medieval stained glass.
Three
It was the smell I noticed first as I pulled the heavy door open and stepped into the dark chapel. Someone had filled the church with blue hyacinths. Though the lights were off, in every corner the Delft blue of the flowers and their emerald leaves gleamed against whitewashed deep-cobbled walls. At the far end of the tiny church, which was not much bigger than a small barn, under the arch and beyond the altar, a projector threw a photograph of Elizabeth aged about thirty onto the far wall. The photographer had called out to her and she had turned towards him, glass of champagne in one hand, cigarette in the other, turned towards the voice and the camera, had smiled and raised her glass, her eyes distant, daydreaming. Just like Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring, I thought, and then I knew I was going to cry.
A CD player, propped upon a pile of red plastic chairs at the back of the church, played Mozart’s “Requiem.” An old woman standing at the door passed me a programme and a packet of tissues in plastic wrapping, printed with red roses, and gestured towards a seat marked “Reserved” on which someone had placed a small sign with my name written in a child’s handwriting and a small smiling daisy in the bottom left corner. I had to cross through the beam of the projector to reach my seat, and as I glimpsed my silhouetted limbs, posture bent apologetically, passing across Elizabeth’s much-magnified face, I remembered a shadow theatre my stepmother had made for my birthday once in the old barn—the screen had been stitched together from white sheets with black boot threads.
Faces turned towards me—how could I have arrived late to a funeral? A woman in black pressed a white silk handkerchief to her face; her mascara had already stained her cheeks and the handkerchief. I heard Elizabeth laughing irreverently somewhere.
Once I’d sat down, I saw the thick dust motes in the beam of light passing down the aisle of the church only inches from my right shoulder—illuminated particles of a photographed Elizabeth, travelling kaleidoscopically through centuries of dust. Elizabeth wasn’t a palimpsest; she was dust. Dust didn’t disappear. Dust was immortal. What dust might a Leper Chapel contain? Fragments of leprous skin, seed spores from the fields, ash from the altar candles.
The music stopped abruptly in mid-aria as a tall man stood up to speak over to my left behind the pulpit. He wasn’t a vicar. There didn’t seem to be a vicar here at all. The tall man had probably been waiting for me to sit down, I thought. Waiting for the last guest, the bad fairy. It was only when you spoke that I could tell it was you—your voice, as deep and rich as it always had been, now breaking. I could see the shape of you, but not your face. You stooped uncomfortably and kept running your hand through your hair as you spoke so that it stood up, spiked and dishevelled.
“My mother chose this place for her funeral—it was very important to her. She called it a guardian of history. She was a historian. She saw herself as a sentinel between her history, her seventeenth century, and what she called ‘the uncountable daily acts of forgetting.’ She used that phrase many times in her work: the uncountable daily acts of forgetting. Those of us who speak today will be writing a kind of collective obituary—we are then the guardians of her life history. But which history are we to tell? What would it mean to tell the history of Elizabeth Vogelsang?”
You looked up. Your carefully modulated words began to break up. You had abandoned the script. I knew what that felt like, the leap from solid ground into air, the rhetorical free fall. I did it more and more in my talks and public addresses now that I was older—balancing on the edge of a cliff and jumping into something that was fragmented but at least stood the chance of escaping the already framed, weary, and laboured phrases in which we find ourselves too often. You went on:
“Which of us will ever know, for instance, what it was about seventeenth-century alchemists that obsessed her? Kept her researching and visiting archives for fifteen years? Which of us will ever know now what she was looking for? I knew many things about my mother—I could tell you the things she loved: blue hyacinths, lilies, her cat Pepys, dark chocolate, her orchard, apple pies, good punctuation, Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Camus.” You smiled, and someone called out, “Chateau Lafite” from the back of the church when you paused. Laughter. You pointed to a patch of light on the cobbled whitewashed wall, light that stretched out tautly and then was gone. “And she loved sun on stone. But I couldn’t tell you what she was looking for. Perhaps I should have asked her. I wish I had.” There was a murmur of understanding from the congregation.
“I keep trying to bring her image into focus in my mind, but the pictures slip away. Some of them are stills and some are moving. I am only just beginning to understand the way grief works. When I think of my mother she is usually bent forward concentrating on a book. My mother,” you said with deliberation, turning your head back towards your script and picking up its safe and orchestrated rhythms, “liked to read. The last time I saw her she was working her way through a pile of maps and manuscripts. She was trying to work out what stood on the ground under the Wren Library before it was built. Not approximately but exactly. She was reading maps and she was reading words, travel accounts and scholars’ journals. She was drawing her own maps. My history of Elizabeth Vogelsang is, then, the history of a woman searching for somet
hing. I don’t think she found it. I think we would know if she had. Two months before she died she was digging down under the foundations of the Wren Library.
“She only read aloud to me once after the days of children’s stories and fairy tales. I was sixteen. She read me her favourite poem. We were eating breakfast, and she read ‘Fifteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.’ Or was it thirteen? I could never remember. Her copy had jam stains on it.”
Now that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness I could see some of the details of your face through tears that had welled but not yet fallen—receding curly hair, stubble, fine features, a badly fitting black suit, a black tie—Elizabeth’s son, Cameron Brown. The Cameron Brown I knew was a man who played games, conjured spells around people, filled rooms with himself. Now you were struggling and diminished.
“I will offer some fragments of my mother to you as the only act of remembrance I am capable of; others here will do better. I have nothing more coherent than that, only memories and pictures and poems. Perhaps that is what a life amounts to in the end. Yesterday, I started looking for her in her copy of Wallace Stevens and in that poem, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and I found that stanza nine goes like this: ‘When the blackbird flew out of sight, / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.’ That’s what’s happened to Elizabeth. She has flown out of sight, but her absence marks the edge of many circles”—your voice broke again—“which we can’t see yet. I looked in the family photo albums to find the edge of one of those circles. So here she is in pictures. Elizabeth Vogelsang. I wish she were here to see them. All I know is that she hadn’t finished. She hadn’t found whatever it was she was looking for.”
Yes, you were right. Elizabeth hadn’t finished. But would she ever have done? Does anyone ever finish? Isn’t it always unfair—death always a kind of outrage? A life ended too soon with jagged and torn edges, a sentence incomplete.
The wind had picked up and the Leper Chapel was now like a ship at sea, its crew and passengers waiting in the hold in the dark while the captain wept. Outside, through the small, high windows, I could see the straining tops of trees and the occasional sheet of wind-tossed newspaper or plastic bag. A window blew open and started to bang against the stone. No one closed it. It banged again, violently, insistently.
Cameron pressed his remote control, stabbing it in the air in the direction of the projector as if in defiance of the wind. A succession of new pictures followed the black-and-white picture of Elizabeth with the champagne glass and cigarette. Someone gave up waiting for Cameron to speak again and turned up the volume on the music: Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” this time.
Family photos in black and white: Elizabeth sitting in a 1950s wedding dress at her wedding reception, shoes off, legs crossed, reading. Behind her, people dancing. Elizabeth holding a fat baby on a tartan rug in the garden, reading, crows circling overhead. Black-and-white family photos passed into colour: Elizabeth standing next to a small boy with black shorts, knee-high socks, and a satchel, book tucked into her apron pocket. Elizabeth and her husband, Franklin, at the beach with a seven-year-old Cameron and friends and their children, in a head scarf and sunglasses, book in hand. Elizabeth in a tree, draped across it like a young leopard, in a black trouser suit, reading a copy of Wallace Stevens with a pale yellow cover—with jam stains. A tall, grown-up Cameron and his parents on holiday in Scotland with friends, Cameron in a heavy black coat and long striped scarf, sitting on the same tartan rug. Mother and son both reading. Glencoe behind them. Then a succession of pictures of Elizabeth with Cameron followed by pictures of Elizabeth with Cameron and Sarah, then a baby, then a second baby. Pictures on beaches—families on beaches—the tartan rug among sand dunes. Elizabeth always on the edge of the picture reading or putting a book to one side so as to smile at a camera.
I was lost in those pictures, lost in Elizabeth’s life, when the woman sitting next to me suddenly put her hand on mine, making me jump. I remember her hand more than her face now, looking back. The veins stood out and the nails were rather too long, like talons.
“I have something—a fleck of dust—in my eye,” the old woman whispered apologetically. “I wonder if you might help me. I can’t seem to get it out. It’s starting to hurt.” I felt my shoulders drop. Some dust in an eye. Nothing more emotionally demanding. An old woman in a navy blue sweater and slacks. A friend of Elizabeth’s.
“Of course. We’d better get you out into the sun.”
“I’ve only got one good eye and now I can’t see from that one, I’m afraid. It might be a little difficult to get out.”
“Take my arm. We’ll be out in a moment.” I tried to sound kind and unpatronising, but I realised to my horror that I sounded like a nurse in an old people’s home. She didn’t seem to mind.
I slipped the old woman’s arm into mine and talked her through the short distance between our seats and the great oak door, past rows of dark-clothed men and women in hats and children holding hymn books. We had to cross the projector beam again—to cross through a photograph of Elizabeth with her grandsons and a copy of a book open in her lap, this time inauspiciously called The Draining of the Fens. Cameron was now reading more poetry. Heads turned towards us when I tripped loudly over a pile of hymn books. Cameron stopped reading for a moment and looked up, but though he looked straight at me, he couldn’t have recognised me in the half-light beyond the projector.
It was when I stumbled that I first noticed the tattoo on the old woman’s right forearm, dark against her white skin. An anchor about three inches long, which rose out of the dark blue of her sweater sleeve under some indecipherable letters. She might have been a sailor recently returned from the sea, swarthy and broad-shouldered, with forearms that were remarkably muscular for a woman who must have been around seventy. But if she had the build of a sailor, she was cross-dressing in the way that large old men passing as women sometimes do—the twinset-and-pearls version of womanhood. Her hair looked as if it had been sculpted. It was probably naturally white but had been dyed a pale orange and curled carefully and hardened with hairspray so that the little tongued curls of hair looked like a wood carving. I imagined her weekly trip to the hairdresser, the curlers and the hairspray, the gentle back-combing, the gossipy exchange of stories.
Outside, in the absence of a bench or other seat, I asked the old woman—she was definitely a woman in the daylight—to lean against the church wall, while I eased open her eyelid and dabbed at the black fleck on her iris with a silk handkerchief I’d found in the bottom of my bag. She began to wince and thank me all at the same time. The eyeball was swollen and heavily veined with blood; the pupil contracted and dilated with the light of the sun and my hand flickering in front of it. The other eye didn’t move at all. It had a milky absence, a dark blue cave filled with white mist. You could see deep into its hollowed-outness. I felt nauseous. Glad I didn’t have to touch that one.
“Well done, well done, it’s out now,” I heard the old woman saying in a high-pitched, rather aristocratic voice that reminded me of the women’s voices in films from the forties. I heard the voice of the woman in Brief Encounter and for a moment the air was filled with steam from steam trains and the sound of Rachmaninoff. The old woman was talking on: “I hope you don’t think me rude, but you do remind me of someone. You have her hair—heavy and silky. It’s remarkable. I’m Dilys Kite. And you?”
“Lydia Brooke.”
“And what are you, Lydia Brooke?”
I didn’t even think before I answered, “A writer.”
A writer. Yes, I was a writer. That was what I was more than anything. Funny. I could think of a whole list of things I wasn’t—a wife, a mother—a whole list of negatives that, for some reason, I wanted to tell Dilys Kite about. Why was that? What was the half-blind woman drawing from me?
“A poet?” she asked, turning her good eye, still bloodshot, towards me.
“No. A writer of novels and now screenplays. But until quite recently I used t
o write pretty much anything for money: legal documents, letters, advertising copy, family histories, and memoirs.”
“And Elizabeth? How do you know Elizabeth?”
“I’ve known her on and off for years. She helped me out with my postdoctoral research and then much later when I was writing my first screenplay. I was living in France then. The film company insisted on a historical consultant. And I remembered Elizabeth. I came to stay with her in Cambridge a few times, and we wrote to each other. She wrote great letters.”
“You did well to find Elizabeth. Find Elizabeth, find the seventeenth century, we always say. She has a gift.”
“You talk about her as if she’s still here.” I put my hand to the back of my neck suddenly. Something—the wind, a twig, a wind-blown leaf—had touched me there.
“Oh, but she is still here. I haven’t seen her yet, but she’s here all right. There are others here too. Don’t you feel them?” Now the milky eye turned upwards under the lid and I found myself looking intently at the tangle of blood vessels on either side of Dilys’s nose, broken, angry veins as if something had bled invisibly beneath. Safe to look there. Better there than anywhere else. I had started to fall.
“He’s here. Over there, leaning against that tree. But not Mr. F. He’s not here. He knew to stay away. Oh, you mustn’t be frightened. And there’s Greswold, Cowley, and the boy.” When she laughed, I glimpsed a gold tooth at the back of her mouth. “They’ve come to pay their respects. And they’ve been waiting for you. There are several people who have been waiting for you.”
I could see nothing, nobody, among the trees where she pointed.
“You’ve taken your time, Lydia,” she said, reaching out her hand, that hand with the veins and the too long nails, and running it tenderly down my hair. “So heavy—I thought as much. Like hair running with water…like heavy copper-coloured satin. Not a kink in it.”
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