by C F Dunn
Just a few simple lines:
All this fair, and soft, and sweet,
Which scatteringly doth shine,
Shall within one Beauty meet,
And she be only thine.
And perhaps, had it been anyone else, I would view this as mere flirtation, an attempt to seduce, but because it was him and I wanted it to be true, I read the lines with a hope of future fulfilment he neither stated nor promised, but which nonetheless lay in the colour of the words.
I recognized the lines vaguely, and wasn’t sure how to respond, so I merely texted him back with the word “Marvell?”, then racked my brain for some appropriate rejoinder, but each that nearly hit the mark spoke of love, or death, or God – and nothing quite seemed to say what I wanted without saying too much or not enough. In the end, I settled for a horribly misappropriated verse from Henry Vaughan, because it was the nearest I could get to saying I missed him without resorting to cloying sentimentality:
He is all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit lingering here;
His very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth linger here.
I sent the text with a silent apology to the poet for mutilating his verse and a hope that Matthew wouldn’t turn out to be a purist who resented liberties being taken with the lines.
He replied almost immediately: “Vaughan?!”
And I sent back: “Sort of.”
That was the last I heard from him and, to prevent my descent into anxiety-ridden brooding, I spent my time buried in work, which is what I should have been doing in the first place.
Matthew had been right, I didn’t even have the strength to get to the history department, so I invited my group over to my apartment for tutorials. The sessions benefited from the addition of coffee and donuts for the group, so they went particularly well, and the tension of the previous meetings dissolved. Whatever prejudices Leo might have held, he wisely kept them to himself. Aydin brought the first part of his thesis, translated and ready for my scrutiny. It was impressive; the additional time spent with his girlfriend had greatly benefited his English. I complimented him on both his work and his grammar, and he beamed hugely.
Working with my group again helped me get back on track with my own research. Elena and Matias ferried my laptop and some books from my tutor room, and I made a section of my new living area by a window into a temporary study.
As soon as I could, I emailed my parents to ask about my grandmother. Still no change; she might continue to exist in the limbo that represented life for the next five years, or have another stroke and die tomorrow. We agreed we didn’t know which would be preferable for her at the moment.
“Your mother needs a situation report, Emma. How are you getting on over there?” Dad asked, using my sister’s computer. I gave him a positive spin on all my work and told him I’d had ’flu but was much better now. My mother wanted to know if I was eating properly and taking the vitamins and minerals she gave me before I left the country to make up for my inadequate diet. I winced guiltily, glancing over to the kitchen where an impressive array of bottles sat unopened. I confirmed I could see them right now but neglected to say anything else; she wasn’t fooled.
We were blessed with another series of days of blazing colour as the sun ripped through the multi-hued canopy, throwing the ground beneath into a constantly moving glow. I sat outside on one of the benches under the trees, wrapped against the cold, although I could tell that my British coat would be no match for a winter in Maine. Students and lecturers kept up a steady flow along the path in front of me and, although alone, I could not fear Staahl out here in the colours of the sun, as he was a creature of the shadows – as washed-out and formless as a half-remembered nightmare.
I kept Matthew’s books with me for company, bit by bit unravelling the workings of the Italian cleric’s mind as revealed by his detailed descriptions of the interrogation techniques he used. His humility and compassion would have been touching were he writing a treatise on the care of the sick, but his singular objective was the healing of the soul, and nothing could be more pressing in this life or the next. I could take only so much at any one time, despite the beauty of Matthew’s flowing script, and I laid the books down, and raised my face to the sun.
“Ah, we are all come to worship the sun.”
I opened one eye. Siggie sat down and picked the Italian treatise off my knee. She raised her eyebrows as she took in the graphic illustrations.
“A little light reading for your convalescence, no?”
I smiled cheerfully at her. “It keeps me focused. How do you know about the ’flu?”
She tapped my leg jovially. “It’s a small campus, Emma, and a little gossip goes a long way when there is nothing else to talk about.”
I failed to see how, even given a dearth of anything else to discuss, my catching ’flu could be remotely interesting to anyone else.
“’Flu?”
She smiled. “Not perhaps the ’flu, no, but then there is a certain young man who seems to have taken a fancy to you, much to the disappointment of one or two of his students, I presume.”
I looked at her sharply; I had no idea Matthew and I were linked in any way unless Elena had been talking. I didn’t like my private life being the subject of gossip; I’d seen the results of lies and tittle-tattle scattered throughout history too many times to pretend they meant anything other than trouble. I attempted to appear entertained by the thought.
“What are they saying – these campus crows?”
“That he didn’t get as far as he would like with you, and he is not used to being thwarted. I must say, he wasn’t looking his normal jubilant self this morning.”
A sudden intake of breath caught my throat and I coughed hard to stop the resulting tickle. “You’ve seen him today?” I choked out eventually.
She patted my back, looking surprised. “Is that so strange? He gave a lecture to my students on an aspect of statistics I never understood; I don’t know why we have to include so much math in psychology; I think I will rewrite the course.”
“Maths, statistics…? You mean Sam?”
“Yes, of course, who else would I be referring to?” Her eyes twinkled from their deep-set sockets. She took Matthew’s translation from where it still lay on my lap and opened it. Her greying eyebrows twitched when she saw the fine script. “How is the elusive Dr Lynes, by the way?”
I retrieved the pocketbook from her hands and closed it.
“As far as I’m aware he is his usual self; I haven’t heard otherwise, have you?”
She laughed unexpectedly, a deep, good-natured laugh. “Ah, I know when I am being told to mind my own business,” she chortled. “But you know, Emma, this is my business.” She tapped the little leather treatise once with a finger. “Saul and I have a draft paper we would like you to look over if you have the time; we have made reference to some historical texts you will probably know, but we need them validated. Saul would ask Kort Staahl, but I think we need a more… let’s say, balanced view, if you understand me.” She looked sideways at me but all I could do was stare.
“Staahl is not a historian; why ask him?”
Momentarily taken aback, Siggie placed a placating hand on my arm. “There’s no need to take offence; Saul wanted to get this checked out quickly and you had ’flu and Kort is an authority on such texts from a literary point of view, so he…” She peered at me. “Emma, is something the matter?”
I didn’t know whether to laugh at my sheer stupidity or at my blind presumption that Staahl had been following me, and I reflected ruefully on the rapidity with which I had condemned him. Few academics specialized in our specific area, and to find two of them within the same university pushed the boundaries of coincidence. In that light, did it seem so peculiar he wanted to discuss the subject with me? The keys must have fallen from my bag in the diner after all. Was my ego so very inflated that I assumed his attention must be for some purp
ose other than academia? I might not like the man, but that didn’t make him a monster.
I shook my head slowly as I came to the reluctant conclusion that I must have been wrong about him.
“No, nothing’s the matter, I just realized something and yes, of course, I’ll be delighted to help out if I can.” I rubbed a hand tiredly over my eyes.
Siggie beamed. “That is very good, thank you; and now I have worn you out and you must go inside before you get cold.”
It was indeed getting cold although the late-afternoon sun warmed the sky with colours of fire. I stood up and, as I did so, Matthew’s transcription dropped to the ground. Siggie bent to pick it up before I could. She handed it back to me, her eyes on my face.
“Beautiful, quite beautiful; I don’t know anybody who writes like that any more.”
I smiled down at the little notebook, but didn’t answer her unvoiced question.
At night, the temperature dropped below freezing, the sky revealing a richness of stars in an intensity and detail not seen in the light-polluted sky of my urban home. I leaned out of my window as far as I could, my duvet the only protection against the frost, and gazed at the sky until my neck ached and I felt compelled to retreat into the warmth of my room. I lay awake, my thoughts drifting listlessly between the journal and the man that endangered its pole-position in my affections, and decided I could put it off no longer.
The first fall of leaves lay scattered across the path on my way towards the library, my legs still unsteady from a lack of exercise. The foliage scrunched satisfyingly underfoot and, were it not for my fragile state, I would have been tempted to kick them into eddies of colour. As it was, I entered the library out of breath and shaking.
The librarian sat where I left her last, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to find she grew roots where her legs should have been. Her thin, shrivelled face peered up as I wheezed to her desk, using it as support until I could breathe more easily.
“How are you, Professor? I haven’t seen you for a long time; I wondered when you would be back.” Her thin, dry voice rattled but her eyes were as sharp and bright as the first time we met.
“Thank you for remembering. I was wondering if you could help me locate the Richardson journal?”
The woman’s face lit. “Yes, of course!” she said, as if she had been waiting for this moment as much as I. She unfolded herself from the chair, her thin body cracking as she straightened, and led the way to the lift.
Instead of rising to the floor containing the history section, we descended into the basement.
“This is where we keep our most precious manuscripts,” she said, her voice an awed whisper. We approached a glass door in a wall of concrete and she tapped in a four-digit code on the entry box. The door slid silently into the wall; immediately the air changed, becoming filtered and without taint.
“The vault is kept at a constant temperature and humidity to protect the contents – some of them date back two thousand years,” she announced like a tour guide. She stopped at a series of long, head-high shelves on which archive boxes stood guard, shielding their contents.
“This is what you are looking for.” She pulled a plain box forward and took it to a reading table, lifting the tight lid and revealing a shabby, brown, leather bag with a fold-over flap secured with a simple horn toggle, like the sort you find on a duffle coat. She slid the book from its cover.
“It was kept in this – that’s why it’s so well preserved.” She indicated the crumpled bag, just big enough to fit the book in.
“Has anyone else ever read it, to your knowledge?” I asked, without taking my eyes from the book.
“Not in all the years I have been here, no. Do you want to hold it?” she offered.
I nodded wordlessly, swallowing hard against the core of desire that threatened to have me reach out and possess the journal at once. She placed it carefully in my hands. It was the first time I had seen the original and, as far as I knew, the hand-written copy of a section of it that I possessed was the only one in existence. The black leather volume – little bigger than A5 in size – felt heavy and thick, its cover creased and cracked with extreme age. A long, black, leather strap had once wrapped around the book, tying it shut; now truncated, it remained hanging redundantly from the back cover. The edges of the journal were chewed and rubbed through long years of use but, remarkably, the interior survived intact. Holding it after such an eternity, I could imagine the impact of seeing your new-born child for the first time: waiting, imagining, dreaming until it finally lies in your arms, an entity so entirely unknown but already beloved.
“I have waited so long to see this,” I almost choked, pressing my lips together to suppress the wave of emotion.
She indicated a chair with a hand. “Take as long as you like.”
I felt her eyes on my back as I sat down and placed the ancient volume on the book supports that protected the spine from splitting; then I opened the cover, and forgot she was even there.
Nathaniel Richardson had been an early settler in the American Colonies. He left England in the 1650s or thereabouts, taking his family with him to start a life in the New World, recording, in some detail, the trials and tribulations his family endured. But before he left, he acted as steward to a family in the tiny county of Rutland, and the early part of his journal charted the day-to-day account of his management of the land they owned. The segment of the account my grandfather bequeathed to me represented the only section transcribed by Ebenezer Howard after he purchased the journal from a private collection in the 1880s. He started his transcription part of the way through – from Richardson’s arrival in the Colonies – and concentrated on the American years; but he died before he completed it.
On his death, some of the contents of the house were auctioned to provide funds for the new college, and a young visiting academic from Cambridge – with no money and an insatiable desire for knowledge – bought the transcribed version in a box of assorted papers, and took them back to England with him. The original journal lay undiscovered in the library until the academic – now a professor of history – began asking questions, and a series of telegraphic messages led to the rediscovery of the journal among the forgotten books of Howard’s old library.
The professor intended returning to America to transcribe the rest of the journal, but war intervened, and the shrapnel lodged in his left lung prevented him from travelling. Largely unknown outside academic circles, the journal lay undisturbed. It might have remained so but for the moment when my grandfather recognized the same fire in my eyes that had driven him all his life and, when he died, he left me a box of postcards, some academic memoirs, and a wedge of old, hand-written papers to remember him by.
The book lay open on the reading table in front of me – my holy grail – as my grandfather’s before me. I had delayed seeing it, touching it, reading it, because I knew it would totally dominate my life to the detriment of all my other academic duties. It had been my obsession and my desire for as long as I recalled.
Except now, the book had a rival.
The tight, taut style unfamiliar – the words cramped to save space and paper – letters split where the quill gave out, or smudged where the ink failed to dry before his hand touched it: it was everything I lived for in my work. I closed my eyes and let out a long breath as if held for all those years. But before me in my mind’s eye, instead of the image of the small black book, warm blue eyes explored mine, reaching inside to read me. My eyes blinked open and I looked down. Minutes passed, then slowly and with deliberate care, I reached out to pick up the journal and gently slid it back into its bag, positioned it in the box, and softly replaced the lid.
The librarian looked startled as I emerged from the lift. She opened her mouth to say something, but closed it when she saw the look on my face. I said nothing as I left the building and headed back to my apartment, my ambition as unfulfilled as my desire.
Chapter 13
A Waiting Game
/> I CONSIDERED MYSELF TO BE SELF-SUFFICIENT and had been most of my adult life. Barely out of my teens when I met Guy, the emotional transition between home and university had been bridged by a man nearly twenty years older than me. Since I made the decision to exorcise him from my life and my degree, I resisted all efforts to engage in any other relationship. There were several Sam-like individuals at Cambridge, their attempts at courtship predictable, blatant and ultimately resistible, but I had never met anyone like Matthew.
Still convalescent and with plenty to do, I managed the first two days without him with little difficulty. Matthew said he would only be gone for a few days at the most, but by the third day the waiting was wearing at my nerves. By the fourth day, the empty sensation at the very heart of me grew to a hole, which I eventually recognized for what it was: a sense of loss.
I found myself waking before dawn after a restless night and, unable to sleep, lay mulling over our conversations, reliving every touch, every look. As the hours passed, I began to doubt what happened, reducing his words and actions to mere semblances of friendship. By morning, he became the doctor and I the patient, and nothing more.
I dragged myself out of bed and showered and brushed my teeth automatically. I consumed breakfast mechanically, sitting cross-legged on the deep window-seat, staring without seeing past the flickering trees, leaves dancing frantically against the stiffening breeze. I contemplated doing some work and prodded the laptop into life. Its face glowed expectantly, but the iridescent fish swam irritatingly across the screen and I closed the lid a little too emphatically. I slouched upstairs to Elena’s room in the hope she might be there. She recognized the symptoms at once and offered a cure.
“C’mon, Emma, you are thinking too much, you are…” She looked across to Matias who was reading the morning newspaper and wasn’t paying attention. “Matias? Emma is… what is the word…?” She located it in Russian.