by Manda Scott
Stella leaned on the doorpost and stared in horror at the chaos. ‘Ursula said there was a conference going on. I was expecting something more academic than this.’
‘I don’t think hippies do academic.’ Kit swivelled his chair back to look at the sign. ‘What’s The 2012 Connection?’
Stella grimaced. ‘Don’t ask.’ A yellow Post-it note lay face down in the rose bed to the side. She bent to pick it up and read aloud the neat, sharp handwriting on it.
Stella and Kit. The festival closes at 1:00. I’ll be giving the closing speech from the podium in the centre at 12:55. If you arrive before that, feel free to wander.
She looked at her watch. ‘It’s half past twelve. Shall we see if we can find the podium?’
Bright as a jewelled web, the festival caught them and reeled them in.
Ten yards down the first broad, grassy path, they stopped to buy a pineapple smoothie from a youth with lilac dreadlocks and were persuaded into tasting the wheat-grass juice – ‘It gets better with practice’ – and then ten yards later bought a punnet of strawberries each from a pair of enthusiastic teenagers with polished smiles and matching scarlet T-shirts who charged at least twice what the same thing would have cost on Cambridge market.
Kit was unexpectedly buoyant. As they moved away, he leaned back in the wheelchair and waved an expansive arm at the heaving, good-natured chaos around them.
‘How many people here? Maybe a thousand? Four days of a festival, two punnets of strawberries per person per day, so at a conservative estimate, they’re pulling in somewhere in excess of—’ He tilted his head back to look up at Stella. ‘A Martian and two blue apples. You’re not listening.’
‘I am, honestly.’ She handed him a strawberry to prove it. ‘You were pointing out why we’re poor and will stay that way, because we don’t fleece people for fruit. But I just heard the woman with the weird blonde highlights standing at that microphone say “solar wind” twice in one sentence. Why is anyone talking about astronomy in a nuthouse like this?’
She turned the wheelchair to face the small square marked out in the grass that was the blonde-streaked woman’s domain. ‘And now shifting magnetic poles with earthquakes in their wake. This I have to hear.’
‘And I really don’t.’ Kit braked the chair. ‘I’d fall asleep in ten seconds and the day’s too good for that. There’s a book tent, down there on the right.’ He pointed down the pathway to where a hand-painted banner showing an open book fluttered in the breeze above a blue and white striped tent. ‘We could each indulge our obsessions and meet up in twenty minutes?’
They were back, almost, to the easy company of the time before the cave. Stella stooped to kiss his brow. ‘Sounds good to me.’
She stood a moment watching him manoeuvre his wheelchair through the morass of humanity towards the relative peace of the book tent, then turned the other way and pushed through a small meteoric shower of children watching a tattooed youth juggling nine raw eggs, to come at last to the square patch of grass around the blonde-streaked woman, whose own half-height banner, now Stella was close enough to read it, said, APOCALYPSE: HOW?’
She caught the last five minutes of the talk, and did not stop for the questions. Kit was invisible, drowned under a sea of multicoloured humanity. Stella took the easy route to reach him, meandering slowly through the gap where the juggler had been towards a stall selling handmade leather belts with acrylic buckles shaped as flowers or rainbows and then on down towards the book tent.
She was fingering the belts a little wildly, not seeing particularly and still trying to make sense of what she had just heard, when a deep, classically educated voice to her left said, ‘Rosita Chancellor has been talking out of her arse since the day she was born. You needn’t think we all believe what she says. I’m Ursula Walker. You must be Dr Cody.’
Stella spun on her heel. Professor Ursula Walker was tall and lean with hair darker than it had seemed on the web. She wore a cream linen suit that set her instantly apart from the dreadlocks and nose studs of the festival. Her face was the deep wind-and-weather brown of a serious gardener, not the sprayed-on temporary bronze of the summer amateur. Her hands were fine and expressive, and when they pushed her hair back from her face a single gold earring winked at her right ear, the only hint of solidarity with those around her. She smiled at Stella as if they had known each other for years. Her eyes were a solid steel grey and entirely sane.
She said, ‘For what it’s worth, I do still think that something very, very big is going to happen around the end of 2012. What we’re doing to the planet is not sustainable. I just don’t give much credence to the people who are pinning everything on a blast of solar wind spinning us in the wrong direction and causing tidal waves of unimaginable proportions. It doesn’t seem grounded in any recognizable physics.’
Stella said, ‘My first professor would have called it pseudo-science. We were taught to run screaming from the first hint of it.’
‘Very wise,’ said a voice from behind them both. ‘See? I did tell you she’d have a balanced intellect.’
They turned, together. In the shadows behind was an awning slung between two tents, and, beneath it, a hammock. A long, lean, silver-haired man lay there, reading a sheaf of papers. His eyes were the same dense grey as Ursula Walker’s. On the hottest day of summer, he was wearing a shirt and a college tie.
Ursula sighed. ‘Stella, this is my cousin Meredith Lawrence. Meri, this is Dr Stella Cody and I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t make a difficult experience any more difficult for her than it already is.’
With admirable balance, Meredith swung his legs from the hammock. He was a tall man, and had learned how to fold himself smaller. From the shade at the back of the awning he produced, in order, two folding chairs, a low white table and a flask of tea and sat down.
Sitting, he seemed more compact, and less deliberately provocative. He gave a little bow. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps we should start again. Dr Cody, if I offered you tea, would you stay with me while Ursula goes to do the glad-handing that must happen before she closes this whole sorry mess?’
He had the quiet, self-deprecating humour Stella had met before in the colleges, and the sharpness of mind that she had met less frequently, but craved.
She still held a white plastic cup of wheat-grass juice in her hand. She stared at it a moment, as if considering the offer, then, with care, she set it on the ground at the side of the tent. ‘For tea,’ she said, ‘I’d do anything.’
‘Thank you. Both of you.’ Ursula kissed her cousin briefly, and was gone.
They were left alone with nothing to say. ‘Were you at Bede’s with all the others?’ Stella asked. His hair was deceptive; he was no older than Ursula, a man in his academic prime.
His grey-black brows rose a fraction as he shook his head. ‘Who could compete with Tony and Ursula shining their bright lights to set everyone in the shade? No, I saw the way the wind was blowing. I’m an Oxford man; Magdalen, Classics. Which means you know as much about me as you ever need to: the college defines the youth and the subject the man. Not that there is great call for classical scholars in these days of globalization, but one finds a means to keep body and soul from parting. Milk or lemon?’
Stella said, ‘Lemon, thank you.’ It was a day for new experiences.
His manuscript lay on the hammock. A breeze pushed the pages around and she saw that it was not all script, and there was a coloured image she knew intimately. ‘Is that the stained glass window at Bede’s?’
‘Outside the river rooms. Yes.’ Meredith pulled a wry smile. ‘For my sins, I am the external examiner for yet another post-graduate thesis examining the imagery. The little darling thinks that the complex sigil in the top right-hand corner does not depict the sun and moon together in an anchored conjunction as is generally accepted, but relics of the pre-Masonic Templar traditions denoting the two globes of the world before and after the Fall of Mankind. It’s nonsense, but one mustn’t say so in this era o
f equality and experimentation.’
‘I always thought it was a set of scales, weighing the sun against the moon to show which was heavier,’ Stella said. ‘But then I’m not a classical scholar.’
‘No, only an astronomer.’ Meredith looked at her flatly for a moment, then stretched a long arm back and lifted the folded sheet from amongst the pile. Spreading it flat, he laid it across the whole of the table. The photograph had been taken well, on a day of full sun, carrying the colours beyond the density of glass to a subtler iridescence.
As always, the dragon dominated the picture, from the tip of its tail in the bottom left-hand corner to the majesty of its head in the top right. In that light, it was neither gold nor silver, but shimmered with the not-quite-rainbow of spilled mercury. The unarmoured knight raised aloft his sword, or his lance, or his staff – Stella had never known which – in a futile gesture of self-defence. The sun spread dawn across the eastern horizon. A half-moon hung at the highest point.
Stella put a thumb on each. ‘The sun is rising in the east at the dragon’s back. The moon is in the noon position, up here in the constellation of Virgo. Actually, it’s a waxing moon reaching its zenith at dawn which is a physical impossibility but I assumed that to be poetic licence, to show us that the earth shadowed the moon and the light came from the sun. Up here, in the top right-hand corner, is this sigil you’re talking about, which looks to me exactly like the scales on the Statue of Liberty, except that the sun is on the lower, heavier, side, and the moon is up there, weighing almost nothing. Relatively speaking, of course.’
Meredith Lawrence surveyed her over the top of his teacup for so long she thought he might never speak.
‘If that’s infantile nonsense, you can tell me,’ she said.
‘I would if it were.’ He set the cup down. ‘I could list for you the learned papers written about that window and the number of different interpretations of each of those features, none of which match the clarity, I might even say lucidity, of yours.’
‘I’ve had help,’ Stella said. ‘It’s on the medallion.’
Since the cave, the small bronze disc had been a part of her, taken off to shower and sleep, put back on again at waking and dressing, as necessary as her watch and as little considered. She pulled it now from under her T-shirt and laid it on the unlevel table where the sun made inroads into the dirt and oxide on the bronze.
It was oval more than round, longer from left to right than top to bottom. Here, the dragon was drawn in outline, barely recognizable as the vast, iridescent beast of the stained window. The man was a stick figure, holding aloft his sword-staff.
On the obverse was scratched the sign of Libra with the sun and the moon that she had first seen when she handed it to Kit. She said, ‘There’s less clutter on this, so it’s more obvious. And the scales are depicted as the sign Libra, which is a bit of a giveaway.’
‘May I?’
At her nod, Meredith picked the coin up and held it dangling in the slant-light coming under the awning. Distantly, he said, ‘Cedric Owen designed the window, did you know? The plans were found in the cache with his ledgers and the diamonds that floated Bede’s to the top of the Cambridge pile. It became the college crest only after the diamonds arrived. Before that, you had a wild boar rampant or something equally Plantagenet, but part of the conditions of Owen’s bequest was that the dragon should become the crest and that the window be made and kept in place “until the ende of alle tyme”. Which may or may not be five and a half years from now if we believe anything of what’s going on here this weekend.’
‘Do you?’ Stella asked.
He grinned ruefully. ‘I don’t believe Rosita Chancellor and her threats of global meltdown, but it’s pretty clear that we’re on the downhill slope to self-destruction. We’re an oil-addicted culture living on a planet that’s fast running out of oil. It’s pretty much a moot point now as to whether we pollute ourselves out of existence with the by-products of our overconsumption or blow ourselves to toxic fragments in the wars over the last few tankers of black gold. Either way, there won’t be many folk left to pick up the pieces.’
‘Someone else said as much this morning; that the Maya had destroyed themselves in the space of fifty years and we’re doing the same.’
‘Indeed. And they had cities of half a million people at a time when London could barely scrape together twenty thousand. And not only the Maya. Every city-based civilization has outgrown its primary resources since Gilgamesh cut down the cedars of Lebanon and turned the land to desert. Quite clearly, we have learned nothing at all from history. It’s a particularly depressing thought. Whereas this …’ Meredith rubbed his thumb over the medallion, ‘is easily the most exciting thing I’ve seen in a long time. It is definitely Libra on here, isn’t it? And the sun weighs more than the moon, which is evidently true, although how Owen knew might be a mystery for future scholars. And that dragon is really quite magnificent in its simplicity. Rather better than the stained glass, I would say; far more subtle in its subtexts.’
He handed it back, as one might hand a blown egg, or a small and fragile bird. ‘Would you feel able to tell me where you got this?’
Unexpectedly, she did. ‘In a cave in Yorkshire. It was round the neck of a skeleton. I asked the police. They said I could keep it.’
Ceri Jones had said she should keep it, which was close enough to be true.
‘I see.’ Meredith rubbed the side of his nose. Stella watched the obvious questions rise to his attention and watched him, with some control, set them aside. She looked past him, to the seething, moving crowd, and the small clot of bystanders that was growing to a larger mass in front of three young men, stripped to the waist and tattooed from clavicle to navel, who began to mime the various ways by which the world might end.
At the crowd’s edge was a bubble of space, and within it, a wheelchair. By a trick of the light, Kit was split momentarily in two: at once a buoyant figure sitting in his chair, laughing until the tears streaked his face; and a darker shape, standing, holding a weight of anger that could crush them both. The grim destruction that had hung around him in the doorway to Davy Law’s lab clung there still.
She blinked and it was gone. She might have set it aside, but that Meredith Lawrence said, softly, ‘A young man at war with himself.’
‘He’s lost his inner balance.’ The day had fallen cold. Because it seemed to matter, Stella said, ‘I’m an astronomer, I don’t believe in astrology, but Kit’s a Libran and he needs balance more than he needs air and water. If he goes on as he is, it’ll kill him.’
‘Or you?’
‘Or me.’ She looked away. ‘I don’t know how to bring him back to himself.’
‘Nobody can do that, except him.’ Meredith folded the image of the dragon and set it aside. ‘Although you can perhaps do something for yourself? It seems to me, as an objective observer, that there is a matching imbalance within you that may need to be addressed before your Libran friend can find his own equilibrium.’
She remembered Kit’s voice, dry and careful. If I come with you, it doesn’t mean I’m jealous of a stone. And earlier, You’re in more danger. You’re in love with it. She looked over to him now. In the midst of the clowning, he had fallen fast asleep. ‘Maybe.’
Somewhere in the distance, church bells chimed the hour. The sound filtered through the hubbub of the festival. Stella pushed herself to her feet. ‘I should go and rescue Kit before they turn him into a prop for the pantomime. Thank you for that. It’s been … interesting.’
Meredith stood up with her and held out his hand in a formal goodbye. His tone was lightly mocking, although of himself more than her. ‘Think of it as a learning curve; it’ll make the next few days easier. There is always hope in our endeavours; belief and hope together can move mountains, or at least shift the occasional molehill. Don’t forget that. You can both live through this, I’m sure of it.’
19
The Walker Institute, Lower Hayworth Farmhouse
, Oxfordshire, June 2007
‘THIS IS THE place where Cedric Owen’s ledgers were found. One of my ancestors discovered them a century after Owen’s death bricked up in the bread oven to the right of the fireplace, together with the diamonds that made Bede’s wealthy. Her son wrote the first thesis on their contents in 1698. The obsession has run in the family ever since. Take a seat. I’ll get us something to drink and we can forget the chaos outside ever existed.’
Ursula Walker’s kitchen was a haven of cool peace; a big, high-ceilinged place of flagged stone floors and once-white ceramic sink and stone walls four feet thick that kept out the heat of the day.
Stella sat at the vast oak table, big enough to seat twelve with space to spare. Kit slept opposite her in his wheelchair. The kitchen windows were open, against the heat. Outside, the quality of the noise was changing as seven hundred men, women and children packed their stalls ready to leave.
Inside, Ursula made a leisurely circuit of the room, bringing together a tray of homemade elderflower lemonade and scones. She scooped clusters of ice cubes into three glasses, poured the lemonade, slid the squat tumblers across the wide oak table and came to sit at the short end, between Stella and the sleeping Kit.
Somewhere in the past five minutes, she had shed her cream linen jacket, and with it the formality of the woman who had run the festival. A streak of light crossed her face, smoothing ten years off her age. She raised her glass. ‘I don’t think a festival like this was necessarily the best way to meet. Shall we start again as if it didn’t happen?’
‘Or you could explain why it was here?’ Stella said. ‘You don’t seem the type.’