The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

  He put down the book and fixed her eyes. ‘And what happened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jay shivered despite the central heating and the warm sunshine coming through the window. ‘Oh God, Merlin, I don’t remember! I felt so weird that day.’

  Merlin’s shoulders slumped. He had been hoping for a lead. ‘Well, never mind. But guess where the fourth one is, Jay?’

  ‘What are you trying to prove?’

  ‘Just guess,’ he shouted.

  ‘Oh, don’t play games!’ She wanted to be alone to work out what was going on inside herself.

  ‘I’ll tell you. The only other likeness of Eleanor is right where you made your television programme, at Oak-ham Castle! It was carved to commemorate the queen’s visit in twelve hundred and something. And I think it had something to do with your playing like an angel that day.’

  ‘A carved head, eight hundred years old? You’re saying it has some kind of magical properties?’ Nothing would have surprised Jay; any kind of explanation would have been better than none.

  Merlin was looking serious. ‘Not the head itself. It’s only important because it proves Queen Eleanor was there, as she had been at Canterbury.’

  Jay wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that the success at Oakham had been all hers. But she knew that was not true. At Canterbury she had been playing within a few paces of where Becket had been murdered. Eleanor must have been there many times during Becket’s friendship with King Henry and afterwards. Had she been there to watch Henry scourged by the monks on the cathedral steps in penance for the archbishop’s death? Was that why she was so angry when she screamed, ‘Damn Becket!’?

  There was no question in Jay’s mind that something had torn her fingers away from the flute, leaving her so shaken that she was physically unable to play a note. Whereas at Oakham …

  She could not put it into words. There was a phenomenon that happened to musicians just a few times in their lives when the music they were playing entered into them and played itself effortlessly as though the spirit of the composer were breathing and fingering the notes for the player. But it wasn’t that. This take-over at Oakham had been different, more intimate and almost like a physical embrace. Canterbury, Oakham and the memories of torture and violence, and the identical face of her ancestress, all seemed to add up to something she did not believe in: psychic possession.

  Merlin repeated his question: ‘This tape of the recording you made at Oakham Castle. I’d like to see it, if I may?’

  Jay pulled the curtains to keep the light out. The cassette was still in the machine. Watching her performance, Merlin was looking for something. Halfway through the programme he leaped off the sofa to stop the video.

  The shot that had attracted his attention was very brief. It began with a low angle close up of Trish’s fingers playing her shawm, a medieval oboe. The cameraman panned right and pulled focus to a close up of a woman’s head. At first, it looked like Jay, then as the focus sharpened it became a carving on the pillar behind Trish. The picture mixed from that close up facing right to a close up of Jay’s profile on another camera facing left. It was a television cliché. Merlin back-tracked and pressed the Pause button. The stop frame now held the two mirror image profiles looking at each other. He knelt beside the video and turned to face Jay.

  He was thinking aloud. ‘Perhaps the fact that it went so well at Oak-ham is something to do with your playing a recorder, not a flute?’

  ‘It’s pronounced Oakum, not Oak-ham. I told you.’ Jay spoke coldly. She was looking not at him but at the screen, thinking: One way or the other, I must lay this ghost. And one way of doing it is to say yes to Merlin’s proposal and spend the next two weeks finding out everything I can about Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  ‘What exactly do you get out of this story?’ she asked.

  ‘A chance to get to know you.’ Merlin switched off the television and the video.

  ‘No.’ Jay turned to face him. She wanted to put the conversation onto an unemotional, non-mystical level. ‘I meant money-wise.’

  He tried to make a joke of it. ‘I never talk about the money side.’

  ‘With me, you do. I put myself out for hire every day, Merlin. I’m quite used to haggling about my fees. Musicians have no false shame, talking about cash.’

  Merlin had not expected his alibi to be tested. ‘Well,’ he swallowed. ‘I get, er … I get an advance of five and another five when they accept my piece.’

  ‘By "five" you mean five thousand dollars?’

  ‘Er, yeah. That’s right.’

  ‘And it’s for National Geographic magazine, you said?’

  ‘Mm. Why?’

  ‘I just wanted to make sure it was worth doing,’ Jay said slowly. ‘I’ve got two weeks free, so let’s do it.’

  ‘That’s great …’ he began.

  She stopped him in his tracks. ‘This is on a strictly business basis, Mr Freeman. We share expenses and we split the fee down the middle: five thousand to you and five thousand to me. How about that?’

  Merlin laughed. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Always,’ said Jay, ‘when I’m talking about money.’

  ‘Okay.’ Merlin took a deep breath, thinking, You really talked yourself into this one, Freeman. The pleasure of getting to know the beautiful Miss Jay French is going to cost you five thousand dollars.

  Chapter 7

  To make a change from the familiar crossing from Dover, Jay had asked Merlin to ring the car-ferry company at Southampton and check the sailing schedules for France while she was out doing some chores so that the flat would be tidy on her return. Waiting for someone to come on the line, with an electronic version of ‘Jingle Bells’ irritating his ear, he leafed absently through the pages of her telephone pad. Every sheet was covered in doodles. There was an entire garden of fantastic flowers and a zoo of weird animals decorating messages which Jay had crossed through. Merlin began deciphering her handwriting. The notes on the pad were all about dates, places and times. A musician’s life, he thought, was not unlike his own.

  The girl in the ferry office was halfway through reading out the list of sailing times when Merlin’s eye was riveted by the repeated scrawl that covered the top half of the page on which he was writing. He rang off and sat studying it for several minutes. Before Jay returned, he sent two sheets from her fax machine to a number in Switzerland, together with a hand-written note.

  *

  At a nearby pub they ate a stodgy lunch of shepherd’s pie, then strolled across the heath to Kenwood House and back, to help the food go down. Back at Jay’s flat, the fax machine had its tongue hanging out. She tore off the single-sheet message.

  ‘Dr Paul Glassner, Graphologie?’ she queried. ‘Never heard of him. It’s from an address in Zurich. Must have come to the wrong number.’

  ‘It’s for me.’ Merlin took the paper from her. The message he read out was very simple: ‘Dear Mr Freeman, So nice to hear from you again! This time you give me an easy job. There is no question. Both the signatures are from the same person, identical. 100 percent so. Regards to your beautiful wife, Paul Glassner.’

  ‘Are you married?’ Jay asked. To her, Merlin did not look like a man who stayed still long enough to have a wife and home.

  ‘Twice,’ he admitted. ‘I just got divorced again.’

  ‘And what does the rest of the message mean?’

  Merlin’s cases were still by the front door where he had dropped them on arrival. From the side pocket of the top one he took the page he had torn from Jay’s telephone pad and pointed to her doodling. ‘You wrote this?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Did you or did you not, Jay?’

  ‘It’s my writing.’

  ‘Where did you get this name from?’

  Jay looked more closely. ‘Ali Anor? I’ve no idea. Maybe it’s a takeout kebab house?’

  ‘You’ve written it a hundred times up, down and sideways.’

  ‘I always doodle when I’m on t
he phone.’

  ‘But why write this name again and again?’ he insisted. ‘It was the top sheet, so I guess you did it last night.’

  ‘It must have been while I was listening to the messages on the answering machine.’

  Merlin looked from her face to the piece of paper in his hand. ‘And you don’t know what this means?’

  ‘Oh come on, Merlin.’ Jay felt impatient. ‘What’s all the mystery?’

  ‘The mystery,’ he said, ‘is that Eleanor’s real name was two words, spelled A-L-I-A and then A-N-O-R. Her mother’s name was Anor, and because the daughter looked so like Mom, she was christened in Latin: Alia Anor. That means "the other Anor" or "the second Anor". I guess you’d know that much.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Later the spelling changed to Ali Anor, then Alianor, Aliénor, Eliénor etc, but that …’ He waved the paper in front of Jay’s eyes. ‘That was how Queen Eleanor spelled her own name.’

  Jay looked at the sheet covered with her writing. ‘I don’t think I knew that, Merlin. But then I have done lots of research from the period for songs and music, so maybe I read it somewhere.’

  From his wallet Merlin took a colour print of the Dürnstein sirventès for which they had been trying to find meanings in the pub over lunch. ‘Look at the signature,’ he said.

  Jay compared the two sheets of paper in his hands.

  ‘When I saw your doodles,’ Merlin continued, ‘I sent them and the signed sirventès by fax to a man I know in Zurich. Doctor Glassner is a graphologist who works for the police there, mostly on forgery cases.’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t think people believe much in that sort of thing, here in Britain.’

  ‘In Switzerland they do,’ he argued. ‘And in Germany it’s used to analyse personality for every job application, accepted as proof of identity in court cases, and even for matching candidates in matrimonial agencies. I met this guy Glassner a year or two back while I was doing a piece on that Arab bank that went bust for a zillion dollars, all tied up with the Noriega drug money. It was a Zurich police inspector who told me just how good Glassner is. To him, handwriting is like fingerprints. He told me no two are ever the same, if you know what to look for.’

  ‘So where does that get us?’

  Merlin weighed the two pieces of paper in his hands. ‘Glassner’s reply means that the same person scribbled on your note pad and signed this sirventès eight hundred years ago.’

  ‘So I look like Eleanor.’ Jay met his gaze and, for a moment, the quizzical smile on her lips was exactly the smile on the column in the Metropolitan Museum. ‘Then why shouldn’t my handwriting resemble hers too?’

  ‘Glassner is not talking about resemblance,’ said Merlin. This is a man accustomed to giving evidence in court, so he doesn’t use words lightly. These two samples of hand-writing are identical, Jay. That’s like having the same fingerprint as someone else.’

  *

  It was mid-afternoon when Jay’s red sports car pulled into the traffic on the North Circular Road.

  They had travelled two miles when Merlin hit the dashboard. ‘Hell, I’m sorry. I’ll have to ask you to go back.’

  Jay swore. Once she had started on a journey, she hated turning back.

  ‘The costumes,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, but it’s important. I meant to tell you to bring along some of the dresses you wear when you play this Early Music.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘It’s part of the contract with National Geographic that I photograph you in costume at the sites we visit,’ he lied.

  ‘You could have said.’

  ‘Blame the jet lag,’ he apologised. It was easier than trying to verbalise the plan that had just come into his mind.

  Jay wheeled the Alpine round in an illicit U turn to a chorus of protesting car horns from other drivers. Back at her flat she thrust several dresses and a wimple into a bag with a couple of recorders. When she returned to the car, Merlin was studying the maps in her AA book. The car boot was already full of her luggage and Merlin’s bags. Jay dumped the extra bag on the back seat and slammed the door.

  ‘I don’t need a navigator,’ she announced. ‘I could drive from here to St Denis without touching the wheel. The car knows the way.’ She screamed out of the cul de sac, burning rubber on the corners and cutting orange lights close. Despite a performance worthy of the circuit at Brands Hatch, by the time they were back on the North Circular, it was blocked with rush-hour traffic in both directions. It took an hour to reach the turn-off for Southampton, only to find that traffic was diverted from the motorway due to a multiple accident.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ Jay fumed, tapping the wheel in yet another jam. ‘At this rate, we’re going to miss the last sailing of the day.’

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ said Merlin. ‘Relax.’

  ‘I thought newsmen were always in a hurry?’

  ‘I’m on leave.’

  Jay leapfrogged a couple of cars.

  Buried in the map book, he grunted. ‘Sal-is-bury … You ever been there?’

  ‘It’s pronounced Saulsbry,’ she corrected his pronunciation. ‘And yes, I’ve played there. What about it?’

  ‘It’s where my family came from, about four generations back. I always meant to visit the place one day, but somehow never got around to it.’

  ‘I thought all you Americans rushed around tracing your roots, the first time you came to Europe?’

  He grinned. ‘That’s like thinking that all you Britishers drive red buses, eat fish and chips and talk wiv a Cockney accent, like.’

  ‘We’re going to miss the boat anyway,’ Jay decided. She was concentrating on her driving but the tension had gone from her voice, now that there was no question of catching the ferry. ‘We could stay the night at Salisbury, if you like. It’s not far out of the way, and you might meet a distant cousin or two.’

  ‘Great,’ said Merlin. ‘I’d like that. According to your book, there’s a wonderful little Tudor pub a few miles outside the town with exquisite French cuisine and a very good cellar. Let’s spend the night there and catch the boat tomorrow morning.’

  Jay accelerated savagely through a gap, throwing Merlin’s head back against the rest. A lorry horn blared at them, very close.

  ‘And by the way, dinner’s on me,’ he said.

  ‘And by the way,’ she reminded him, neatly manoeuvring the car onto the exit ramp between two lorries, ‘you never paid me back the taxi fare this morning.’

  They arrived at the pub after dark. It was called the Castle Mound and was several miles outside Salisbury, near the small village of Old Sarum. Over dinner, Merlin persuaded Jay to talk about herself and her career, but this time she also made him tell some of the realities of his life in the media and not just the funny stories.

  She listened, wondering how a man who had suffered twenty years of guilt for what he had done in Vietnam should choose a profession where he was constantly reliving his own trauma. It did not make sense, but then Merlin, she already knew, was far from being her idea of an unfeeling war correspondent. When they touched, it was more than pleasant. She liked his voice and his attentiveness, the way he dressed and moved. Watching him pay the bill, Jay thought, I can trust that man. If anyone can help me to unscramble what’s happening to me, it’ll be him.

  She let Merlin hold her chair as she stood up.

  ‘We have two bedrooms,’ he murmured, inhaling her perfume.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s the way you want it?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Yes.’

  They walked without talking up the dark oak staircase to the first floor, ancient floorboards creaking underfoot. As Jay was putting the key in her door, she said, ‘You know, I’d usually be really angry at missing the boat, but I’m not.’

  ‘We’re in no hurry.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not rational,’ she said. ‘I just have a musician’s phobia of being late, that’s all.’

  ‘And tonight you’re not ang
ry?’

  She kissed him on the cheek. ‘It was a lovely dinner. Thank you.’ She closed the door before he could return the kiss, and left Merlin staring at the woodwork. Inside the room, Jay leaned against the door. The desire for the man she had just touched hit her in the belly as it had that morning when he first arrived. It left her feeling weak. She moaned softly and grabbed the door knob, hearing Merlin walk away along the corridor to his room. There was the same soft pressure inside her head that had made her think of tumours. Her body became too heavy to keep vertical. Clutching the furniture for support, she lay down on the bed fully clothed and was asleep in seconds.

  *

  Being a light sleeper had saved Merlin’s life on more than one occasion. The smallest alien sound – a metallic click in the jungle, a voice where there should be silence or the faint whistle of a still-distant incoming shell had him instantly awake and taking appropriate action. It was the creak of floorboards in the corridor which woke him. His watch said two a.m. He lay still and listened. The noise came again, this time just outside his room, and the door handle turned. Briefly in the light from the end of the corridor he saw the gleam of Jay’s blonde hair as she slipped inside the room. He heard the sound of her moving softly across the floor, then smelled her perfume as she knelt on the floor beside his bed.

  Wide-awake, Merlin wondered what was going to be the result of his spur of the moment decision to spend the night in a pub literally just across the road from the remains of the castle once known as Salisbury Tower, where Eleanor had been confined for fifteen years by Henry II. If Jay was affected by places where Eleanor had been, what effect would this place have on her?

  An arm reached across him. He felt her long, soft hair brush his face. As they kissed a tremor ran right through her body and into his, like the subdued kick of a low-voltage electric shock. Her tongue and lips reached hungrily for him. A hand grabbed one of his and thrust it inside what felt like a dressing gown, to find that she was naked underneath. He touched her breasts, provoking a moan of pleasure.