The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

  Matty pushed the sheets of paper away. He spoke slowly, massaging the bridge of his nose and the tired eye muscles. ‘I think that people should do what they’re good at, Merlin. When it comes to war reporting, you’re one of the best in the world.’

  ‘So everyone keeps telling me.’

  ‘And now, just when you could be getting your own network series and I want you accessible here in New York for meetings, what are you doing? You’re going back to some god-forsaken part of Europe, messing around taking pictures on your own camera. Its years since I moved you out of that Robert Capa dream before you too stepped on a mine with a camera glued to your eyeball. So, listen to me. Are you trying to put the clock back twenty-five years or something? Merlin Freeman the Boy Reporter?’

  ‘I’ll level with you.’ Merlin tried another tack. ‘The story’s not the greatest, Matty. It’s really just an excuse to spend some time with this girl.’

  Matty loved his clients’ confessions. ‘You’re asking me to give you an alibi. Why didn’t you say so?’

  He picked up the colour photograph of Jay and nodded. ‘I don’t blame you. By the way, how’s Carole?’

  Merlin flinched at the name of his second wife. ‘She’s getting married again next month.’

  ‘To a human being this time, I hope?’

  Merlin sorted the prints and sheets of typescript into two piles. He picked one up and pushed the other back across the desk towards Matty. ‘See what you can do. Sell the story to someone, promise?’

  ‘How long have I got? It may take a decade or so. When do you go back to Europe?’

  ‘Right now, if I can find a cab downstairs.’

  ‘And there’s me thinking you were in a hurry! Now just supposing the network want to reach you and talk about this trivial million-dollar series they have on their mind, how do I reach you back there in Europe, wise guy?’

  ‘Same number I gave you before. You remember Leila Dor, the painter?’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You fixed an exhibition of her paintings once in Albany or Buffalo or someplace up-state as a favour to me.’

  ‘Of course!’ Matty clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘I have total recall of all your old girlfriends. How could I ever forget one?’

  Merlin stood grinning in the open doorway. ‘Be a good guy, Matty. Help me set up this piece of harmless moonlighting. All I want out of you is an alibi.’

  ‘Merlin, I’ll do it. You know why?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll tell me, Matty.’

  Matty flicked Jay’s photograph with a nicotine stained thumbnail. ‘Better you should spend some time making a play for this schikse ice princess here, than depress yourself again, working on all that massacre shit.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘And, Merlin!’ Matty shouted through the closed door, ‘For Christ’s sake stay near a telephone, will ya? If those guys at the network say they wanna talk to you, I want your little tukhas on the next plane back here. Right?’

  Back against the door, Merlin placed his right hand across his chest, allegiance-to-the-flag style. ‘I promise, Matty. I promise.’

  *

  The twice-weekly Olympic Airways flight from Athens touched down at Malaga International airport on the Costa del Sol with a mixed bag of passengers. Half were Greek and Spanish; the rest were from all over the Middle East and Asia, having come together in the transit lounge at Athens.

  In the first-class section Salem Chakrouty undid his seat belt as the plane taxied towards the Arrivals building. His brother Kassim had shaved off his luxuriant black moustache and beard before leaving Beirut. It made his face look younger, reminding Salem of boyhood holidays spent together: outings along the coast to Tyre and Sidon or expeditions into the mountains while their parents worked at the hotel. Then they had called each other Big Brother and Little Brother although the age difference between them was only four years. These were among Salem’s happiest memories.

  He looked up to find the hostess reminding him about his luggage in the overhead locker. He smiled thanks and started to follow the other passengers out of the plane when Kassim pulled him back into the seat. They were alone in the compartment. ‘Just one thing, my brother,’ he said quietly. ‘As long as we are in the airport buildings, my name is Mohammed Ishaq and I am from Pakistan. We talked on the flight in English, if anyone should ask.’

  He took from an inside pocket a worn blue British passport. ‘So do not talk to me, in case you forget and call me Kassim. In fact, it would be better if you ignore me altogether. You are not used to these things. So I shall take a taxi from the airport and meet you tonight at our cousin’s house.’

  ‘Why should you need to use a different name?’ Salem wondered.

  ‘It is safer.’

  ‘Have you enemies in Spain, my brother?’

  The first-class passengers had all disembarked and a stream of tourist-class travellers were now slowly shuffling through the cabin. Keeping his voice low, Kassim said, ‘Don’t forget: Mohammed Ishaq. But better you don’t talk to me at all.’

  By the door the hostess stood waiting. ‘Thank you for flying with us today,’ she said. ‘Do fly Olympic again.’

  ‘Oh, I shall,’ smiled Kassim.

  Behind her, the door to the flight-deck was ajar. The co-pilot was still in his seat, going through a check-list. Kassim dropped his passport and airline ticket on the floor. As the hostess bent to pick them up for him, he pushed the door wider and took a good look at the instrument panel layout.

  *

  ‘It’s called what?’ Merlin clamped his free hand over his ear. The crowd noise in the departure lounge at JFK made it hard to hear a word of Matty’s gravel voiced delivery.

  ‘The Other Side,’ Matty repeated.

  ‘What the hell kind of magazine is that? I never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s printed in California. Where else? And sold to the recently bereaved who want to get in touch with the dear departed. You fill in a form at the mortician’s agreeing to take out a year’s subscription and Dr Death gets a kickback, so he’s pleased, the publisher is pleased, and you get the magazine. That’s how it works.’

  ‘Are you putting me on?’

  ‘I am not,’ Matty shouted. ‘You wanted a commission in a hurry, so I got you one. This is a magazine that’ll buy any crap about the supernatural. But I warn you, Merlin, your text will be rewritten in house style. You wouldn’t wanna read it after those guys have finished working on it! Take my advice, let me strike out the by-line clause in the contract.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Matty.’

  ‘There’s an advance of five hundred dollars, with five hundred on acceptance. Oh, and they want all rights in text and photographs.’

  ‘I’ll try not to spend it all at once.’

  ‘You asked for it, Merl.’

  ‘You’re a wonder, Matty.’

  ‘Have fun and don’t worry about those of us who sit in offices doing all the work for you.’

  ‘I won’t.’ Merlin relinquished the phone to a polite Indian gentleman wearing polished black shoes and no socks. He squeezed onto a seat between two very fat African ladies in colourful dresses and sat smiling at the departure board, which winked conspiratorially at him. The London flight was delayed an hour, but that did not matter one bit. He closed his eyes and tried to remember when he had last felt euphoric at an airport. Angry, frustrated, worried, harried … Yes, all those things. But happy? That had to be a long way back. It must have been on his embarkation leave before going to Vietnam, before everything changed at My Lai. The feeling he had inside him was called: Going Home.

  Chapter 6

  After the heady experience of being toasted in champagne by Andy Burrows at a private viewing of the unedited videotape, Jay’s taxi deposited her back in the real world which had a pile of dirty laundry in the bathroom and unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. It was late but she was too psyched-up to sleep. She switched on the television, flicked through the channels and sw
itched it off again. There was a pile of letters behind the front door: bills and publicity circulars. There was nothing recent on the fax machine except Carl’s list of the dates cancelled after the concert at Canterbury, which left the next two weeks blank in her diary.

  She listened to the messages on her answering machine with a notepad beside her, her mind elsewhere. There were four calls from Merlin, and Carl had sent a bouquet of roses by Interflora. They sat beside the telephone on the hall table with the hand-written card reading: I never heard playing like that in my life. Love, CM. She put into her video recorder the cassette that Andy Burrows had presented to her and sat down to watch it. There was no question that the performance of the group was almost perfect, but it was her own playing that astonished her: it was better than faultless. Whatever the cause of her trauma on stage in the Chapter House, it appeared to have lifted her musicianship up to a higher plane. The more she thought about it, the less it made sense.

  She was still asleep five hours later when the doorbell rang and she found Merlin with dark designer stubble standing on her doorstep in a creased denim suit, asking for change to pay the taxi: ‘The cab driver wants twenty-five pounds. Does that sound to you like the right amount?’

  ‘Where have you come from?’

  ‘Heathrow airport. I’ll pay you back when the banks open.’ He took her money and went back to pay the driver, dumped a pair of well-worn leather cases inside her hallway and asked, ‘Am I welcome? You don’t look too pleased to see me.’

  Jay smoothed sleep tousled hair back off her face. She was not certain what she did feel about Merlin’s sudden reappearance.

  ‘I didn’t plan to arrive like this,’ he said. ‘The intention was to knock on your door with a bouquet of roses but thanks to the jet stream my flight got in before the shops were open.’

  ‘Someone else looked after the roses.’

  ‘So I see.’ Merlin picked up the card. ‘Who’s CM?’

  ‘A boyfriend,’ she teased.

  Merlin took a deep breath. He pointed to the bedroom door. ‘Is he in there?’

  Jay was looking at him, examining the curly hair, the brown eyes, the olive skin. He was somehow much cleaner-cut than she remembered, as though she had seen him before, in that Biblical expression, through a glass darkly and now saw him for the first time face-to-face. Out of nowhere came a physical desire to make love to him, so strong that it was a pain in her belly. She wanted to touch him, kiss him, get hold of his flesh and feel his hands on her face and neck and breasts.

  Merlin was waiting for a reply.

  She turned away to hide the flush of desire on her face, never having wanted a man so strongly before. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s not.’

  To cover her inner turmoil, she went into the kitchen and made coffee. They sat drinking it in her living room with its huge window overlooking Hampstead Heath and watched the sun come up.

  ‘Must cost a fortune to have an apartment like this,’ was Merlin’s comment. Staring at her face framed by a halo of long blonde hair backlit by the sun, he was inwardly just as disturbed as she was. Hard to see against the light, her face tugged at layers of memory.

  Jay had pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater. She sat, her legs curled under her on the window seat opposite Merlin. ‘You look different,’ she said, blaming him for her own feelings.

  ‘It’s the shiny nose,’ he grinned. ‘I’m a newshound that’s picked up a scent.’ He told her about the visit to Dürnstein and the second sirventès and that he had sold the idea of a psychic treasure hunt to a magazine. To impress her, he lied and said it was National Geographic. He made no mention of finding the head of Eleanor in the museum.

  ‘So the news hound has set me up as his truffle pig,’ Jay summed up. ‘I snuffle around, leading you to medieval poems from which you deduce where the treasure is. You write the story and make a fortune.’

  ‘Right!’ he smiled. ‘How do you feel about it?’

  ‘What makes you think I have the time for all this in my busy schedule?’

  Merlin’s face fell. He had not even thought about that. ‘Well,’ he mumbled, ‘I guess we can do it in bits and pieces, a few days at a time, whenever you’re free.’

  Jay knew there were two whole weeks empty in her diary but there were things she wanted to sort out for herself. At Canterbury she had played worse than ever in her life; at Oakham she had played better than ever before. One day her brain wouldn’t work at all, the next she could conquer the world. And then there was the confusion of feelings about Merlin himself: that awful gut-wrenching desire fighting her brain that said, stay cool this is a good-looking man who is far too used to having his own way with women.

  ‘Do you always find a story to trap a girl with?’ she asked. ‘Or is this some special honour?’

  Merlin stood up to stare out of the window at the view.

  ‘I won’t fence around with you, Jay.’ He turned to face her. ‘I admit that the idea of making a story out of this treasure hunt began as a joke. But remember, at Châlus it was your joke, not mine. Then I wanted to use it as an excuse to get to know you, but it’s more than that now. I think there really is a story here.’

  ‘What made you change your mind?’

  ‘A lot of things. One is: I bought a book about Queen Eleanor when I was in New York. She was one hell of a lady. I don’t know quite where to begin.’ He left the room and Jay heard him unzipping his bags in the hallway. She cradled the coffee cup in her hands. On the window ledge sat the neighbours’ cat. She could hear it purring through the glass as it watched three sparrows eating crumbs that someone had thrown onto the grass for them. I’m the cat, she thought. Merlin is what I want and this story of his is the crumbs that bring him within reach. So, if I pretend to go along with it …

  The cat leaped. Two sparrows made it into the air. The other was a crumpled parcel of feathers in the cat’s mouth. Jay got up off the window seat, disgusted and thinking: This is not like me. It simply isn’t the way my mind works. She decided to say no to his plan, whatever it was. First she had to sort out what was going on in her brain. Then, if Merlin was still around, she’d see …

  He came back into the living room with a book that had several markers sticking from between the pages and a large brown envelope from which he took two black-and-white prints.

  Jay was unimpressed by the pictures. ‘You told me you used to be a photographer. Why are they so fuzzy?’

  ‘Grain,’ he explained. ‘It’s deliberate. Now just answer one question. Who is the woman?’

  ‘Me.’ She picked up one of the photographs. ‘This is the one you took at Châlus after we climbed down from the arrow slit.’

  ‘And the other? Where did I take that?’

  She looked at the second photograph, trying to remember. ‘I don’t know where you took that one, Merlin. You’ve cropped it so tight on my face that I can’t see the background.’

  He tapped the photograph in her hand. ‘This one is not you.’

  She looked again and laughed uncertainly. ‘Then it’s my double.’

  ‘It is the face of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.’

  As Merlin told her about the carved column in the Metropolitan Museum, Jay’s eyes went from the picture he was holding in front of her to his eyes and from there to the picture he had taken at Châlus.

  ‘So,’ he finished, ‘if your family can trace itself back to the Plantagenet line, Queen Eleanor was almost certainly an ancestor of yours. And, as you can see, you’re her double.’

  ‘That’s creepy,’ said Jay, meaning the picture.

  ‘There’s more.’ Merlin opened the book on the table. ‘Tell me where you made that television recording?’

  Jay put down the two photographs. ‘Oh, I never told you how it went.’

  Merlin put a hand on her arm to stop her. ‘Just answer my question. Where was it?’

  ‘A place called Oakham Castle.’

  ‘Oak-ham,’ he murmured. ‘In Rutlandshire, right
?’

  ‘Oakum,’ she corrected his pronunciation. ‘It’s a twelfth-century hall near Leicester.’

  ‘Whatever, I’m going to tell you how you played.’ He looked very serious. ‘You lost your nerve again completely. Am I right?’

  Tight-lipped with anger at whatever game he was playing with her, Jay snapped, ‘I told you, I didn’t lose …’

  ‘Okay,’ he tried to calm her. ‘Relax. Just tell me whether the same thing happened at Oak-ham as at Canterbury.’

  ‘You couldn’t be more wrong.’ Despite herself, Jay had to laugh at Merlin’s visible disappointment. ‘I played like a bloody angel! I’ve got a videotape you can watch, if you don’t believe me.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Well, that’s another theory to chuck in the waste bin. You’re telling me that you played your flute perfectly, with no troubles at all?’

  ‘It wasn’t the flute,’ she said. ‘Concert flutes weren’t invented in the Middle Ages. They’re orchestral instruments that came in much later. In the Chinon Ensemble, I play several different recorders, some percussion and a bowed viol. And I sing, you know that. What are you getting at?’

  ‘I made an inspired leap in the dark.’ Merlin was mocking himself. ‘Confucius say: Man who jump in dark land in wrong place.’ He hefted the book. ‘According to this scholarly work, there are four known likenesses of Eleanor that have survived the centuries. One is from a church in Langon, France. That’s the one I photographed in the cloister in New York.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘The second is in a place I never heard of, a little church at Chaniers, near Bordeaux.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it, either.’

  ‘A third is in Bordeaux Cathedral where Eleanor was married to the French king, Louis.’

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ Jay interrupted. The image of the head lit by the shaft of sunlight in the cathedral was clear in her mind for a split second. It matched the face in the photograph perfectly, complete to the half-smile on the lips.

  ‘When was this?’

  She frowned. Why was it so hard to remember? She felt the panic come back and fought it, trying to remember. ‘It was on the day you went to Austria, I think.’