The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  ‘Mum!’ cried Phoebe. ‘Don’t guilt trip me like that! You didn’t sell him – you don’t sell children! You had him adopted. You talked about it to me – I remember. You were going bananas. There was nothing to eat, everything was crazy, and all these people were coming to Tirzah when it was really terrible there and sticking it out because they wanted to have a child so much and they couldn’t. You saw a chance – for my little brother.’

  She gave James a sharp, quick grin. ‘So he’d do good for himself, that was the idea.’

  ‘I was frightened for all of us, and I could do something for him . . .’ Her mother put out a hand and gripped Phoebe’s arm. ‘Nobody else would look after you but me. He was a beautiful child – and he was a boy. Boys were really precious. Lots of girls were up for adoption, but not many boys.’

  ‘Do you remember who helped you arrange the adoption? Anything about the family?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Ella, ‘I was watching for the right people. They were a couple in the hotel. Professionals, from Enoch. I watched their ways for days – they were waiting for the nuns to bring them a child, but it was slow. You know you can tell a lot from things in hotel rooms. I picked them out for Phoebus. They were good people.’

  ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have told them,’ said Ella to Phoebe, as they stepped back into the now drizzly street. To herself, she was thinking, They know now what I am, an infection, a criminal, a parasite, a woman who sells her own child to keep alive.

  Phoebe said, ‘That went very well, Mum. You were excellent.’ She took her mother’s arm as they renegotiated their way up Cantelowes High Street. ‘I think they’re going to help us.’

  Oh my daughter, thought Ella, Now I’m leaning on your arm, now it’s you who’s tugging me out of the past.

  In the Bed & Breakfast where they were lodged, two stops down the line from Cantelowes, Ella was watching television one evening. She was waiting up for Phoebe, who’d found a job waitressing in a cybercafé in return for a sort of hourly wage, plus tips; the franchise holder wasn’t declaring her to his employer, and she wasn’t telling The Fanfare.

  Phoebe had told her to watch the telly, especially the news; that way she’d learn about Albion and about Enoch, and pick up the language more quickly. So Ella sat, on the edge of one of their beds with the blotchy bedspread round her, the remote in her hand, watching the screen perched at the end of an anglepoise arm up in the corner of the room.

  A documentary item came on, in the chatty local bulletin that followed the national news: Ella couldn’t follow exactly, but the interviewer was poking about trying to tease alight some dispute. Something about a name being changed, of a community college, or was it a school? A school for teachers. No, it was the bar, for now they were filming a sign being taken down, with a painting of a man with one eye and one arm.

  ‘Several of the members of the governing body of the King Edward I Teacher Training College have expressed their anger that the students have changed the name of the student bar from The Trafalgar, commemorating the great victory at sea of Admiral Nelson, to the imprisoned leader of the ANC, Nelson Mandela.’ A brief interview followed with one of the aggrieved governors: ‘This is a very sad moment,’ he was saying, ‘When the history of what made this country great is set at nought by the very people who will have responsibility for teaching the next generation.’

  The reporter resumed: ‘We asked one of the student teachers what reasons lay behind their decision . . .’ A young man appeared, jostled in among a mixed group in the bar, confidently facing the camera, defending the change.

  Ella wasn’t able to hear enough to decipher what he was saying in the hubbub of the packed bar. But something about his looks and quick delivery made her spring stiff-backed to attention, to get closer, to try and capture every detail of his fleeting appearance, to see the shape of his ears. But the screen was mingy, the definition blurred, the item brief.

  Yet, at the first glimpse of Kim McQuy in action, Ella was possessed by a burning, raging, joyful certainty:

  such a one as you is what I dreamed you’d turn into when I think of you now it’s hard you were so small but you were a charmer not quite like this one because you were full of laughter and you there on the screen are a little earnest but something about the way your head moves and your eyes in those days Phoebe was always fussing you were the sunny one but you used to take charge even from a very young age and so I knew I could trust you if I let you go that you’d escape the fate that was to be ours the anger that drives us across the face of the earth and never a place to come to rest is it you or one such as you brought up in the ways and the language and the manners of Albion and the safety –

  ‘I saw someone like Phoebus on the television tonight,’ Ella told her daughter when she came back, fractious from small tips from dimwit web users. ‘Very like him.’

  ‘How like him?’

  ‘I couldn’t see very well; he flashed past. But there was something that shot through me. If he was here in person, I know I’d know. I’d have an even stronger sense. But even on that screen, I felt it was him, him as I hoped he’d turn out if he became one of them, if he grew up here in Albion.’

  Phoebe was sceptical. They struggled together, frequently, over this matter. Phoebe wanted to trace her twin, using official means, but her mother only wanted, she kept repeating, to know that he was flourishing, so that she could die happy.

  ‘He looks older than you, but then he belongs to this place and to its time . . .’

  ‘You’ll always be seeing my brother, because you don’t know where to look. When I’ve my own homepage, I’ll put out a notice – something coded, so that we don’t get a lot of nutters replying.’

  ‘I trust my instincts. They got us through, till now.’

  ‘But you’re morbid,’ Phoebe objected. ‘I just want us three to be real again. Saved on the hard drive, not flitting about all volatile in memory.’

  ‘That young teacher—’ Ella continued later, talking into the sulphurous glow from the street lamp outside, which filled their room through the dusty and drooping curtains when they switched off the bedheads’ tubes of neon. ‘That’s how I think Phoebus might have become – someone so at home here he can speak his own mind on the television news. It’s what I wanted for him. To become someone who doesn’t look backwards, but ahead. Someone who can take his own path. Time is his. Choice, too.’

  ‘Mum, what’re you tripping about now? That bloke could be anyone. My brother could be on the streets, he could be a merchant banker, he could have moved away . . . out. Fate isn’t going to take you to him just like that sitting on your bottom in a B & B: life isn’t a fairy tale. We’re going to have to do a search. With documents and evidence and investigations. So go to sleep now. And stop blathering.’

  2

  At The Blue Moon

  Kim McQuy came in through the door of The Blue Moon: he looked tired, but his quick movements made him flicker, as if a lamp was playing on his face. Hortense Fernly, waiting for him at the back of the café, blinked at the illusion. When he came near, the peculiar effect persisted. He sat down and pulled off his tie.

  ‘I’ve come straight from a school meeting,’ he said, rolling it up quickly and putting it in the breast pocket of a jerkin, lined with a tightly curled fleece, rather warm for the season, but a lot more stylish than she expected. His pale trousers were high-cut, sailor-fashion, making him look younger than the first time she saw him, and the determinedly smoothed and tidy haircut that had betrayed the cheap hack of a high street barber’s had grown out since the last time, when she’d met him briefly in the Archives. She wondered whether he was gay: maybe his effusions were just a form of camp?

  ‘Have you asked for something?’ He was looking around for the waitress.

  ‘You go to the counter to order. I was waiting for you.’

  ‘There was a long, long argument about a car boot sale. Yes, we should let the playground be used, yes, it’ll raise money. No, they�
�re a fence’s paradise. And back and forth it went.’

  ‘What would you like? I’ll go. You’ve probably had a tougher day.’

  In the end they both went up to the counter; he picked out a cake from the revolving glass cabinet and carried the coffees to their table.

  In spite of his sharper look, there hung around Kim McQuy some whiff of the asylum, she felt. Or perhaps not the asylum, but the stage, as if the real person was somewhere absent from the scene, and only responding with a part of himself. Of course, she told herself, this is the effect of babbling into the ether over long nights: the nerd syndrome.

  These reasons for caution didn’t diminish her curiosity; on the contrary, they quickened it as he sat down opposite her and let his eyes rest on her face and then look down at her hands where they were placed around the cappuccino. He had lights in his eyes, too, something almost feverish in their large pupils.

  ‘It’s good to see you there, in person,’ he said. ‘After so long. In the flesh.’

  At the word, she flinched. Waiting for him, she’d been reading papers for a meeting the next day, or rather, pretending to read them, as in spite of her resolve not to attach any importance to this young man and his self-dramatising, she was rattled and expectant and furious with herself all at once. Sometimes in recent weeks, a patch of Kim’s flesh, smoothly encased in tight, gleaming, burnished skin, would float into her consciousness crying out, as if endowed with lips and a tongue, Kiss me, kiss me hard, kiss me long, kiss me. The same skin that she now viewed sternly, noting how a disposable razor had clearly travelled rapidly over his stubble that morning for it was already well sprouted at six in the evening.

  There was no reason to imagine that Kim McQuy meant the things that he wrote to her in any way that any ordinary person might take responsibility for; he was given to hyperbole, he was a manic preacher, like one of those mad reforming saints who wrote ten thousand letters to kings and queens and popes and potentates, addressing them all as ‘Beloved’ and covering them in effusions and protests of undying adoration so that anyone now would think the writer was aiming to jump into bed with every one of his correspondents. But things weren’t the same today. Who knows the etiquette of the Internet? Intimacy at long range, whisperings from galactic distances.

  Wild protestations of sincerity and exaggeration were the marks of the fanatic, Hortense knew. But, but, but. He wasn’t insincere in the manner of her Museum director. It was a question of depths, of emotion. He struck her as a mixture of bad boy and head prefect, what teachers used to call ‘leadership material’, with all the dangers that implied; and there was just enough of a streak of the rebel in her to want to flirt with the risk Kim presented; though what that risk might be she couldn’t imagine.

  In her husband Daniel’s absence, Hortense did not see her life as empty at all; she was always busy. But the schoolteacher from Cantelowes had opened up gaps in time she hadn’t known existed, he’d rent the fabric of her daily routine, and erupted through the rent, as if on winged feet, like one of those visual devices that whisper in the ears of black figure paintings on the vases in her care – Persuasion, Fear or Grief taking possession. Or, Seduction. Whenever she began thinking about Kim’s oddness, his claims to hear messages, his messianic delusions, images of him stirring up trouble melted before sudden, blazing flashes of him in some intimate connection with her: peeing in her bathroom as she watched him from her bed or taking off his socks sitting on the edge of it while she smoothed with her fingertips the hair on his chest and belly (did he have hair on his chest and belly?). She couldn’t think how or why these pictures came to her. She had even considered going to the doctor’s to ask for some sedative to stop the images coming on in her head – though she’d be hard put to describe what the matter was. Was she going to turn into that poor woman who kept having orgasms because some section of her brain was wired up all wrong? Or perhaps this is what happened to nuns, like those madwomen who were always administering clysters, supposedly to prevent diabolical visitations, but more likely to excite themselves to frenzy?

  All she knew was that the fantasies had started, intermittently but vividly, after they had bent over Meeks’s aborted magnum opus of translation and editing and Kim had put his index finger to his lips and tapped the middle of his mouth and said, all of a sudden, ‘This is the most expressive part of a face: Leto told me it’s called the “philtrum” – did you know that?’ and while saying it, looked at her mouth and at the shallow indentation just above her upper lip until she felt the blood pounding to her temples and had to shuffle the fragments in front of her to defuse the shock of his focus on her mouth.

  She’d inspected herself carefully that night, in the half-length mirror on her wardrobe door: what did he mean when he used all those words to her? Looking at her body, she decided that she must not mind him, not for one moment. It was all hot air: her flesh was puckered on her thighs and stomach and silvered with a craquelure that every beautician’s window identified as orange peel cellulite, the curse of adipose, middle-aged, women’s flesh. She was now bearded where she should have been springily tufted: the cruellest Vanitas masters were sharp-eyed and the invective of spoiled erotomaniacs like Horace wasn’t that far wrong, in spite of the indignation of outraged women, diagnosing misogyny. Misogyny, thought Hortense, has its reasons. So, with her usual clever, ratiocinating mental processes, she revolved Kim McQuy’s daily attentions, and held them down. But all this subduing of her fantasies hadn’t succeeded in quelling her excitement, as she well knew. The morning of their meeting in The Blue Moon, she’d found herself discarding four different outfits before twisting the last failure, her beloved full-pleated skirt, into a ball and hurling it across the room, and now, now that he had come in looking startlingly kempt, she felt incredibly hot all of a sudden and needed to take off her favourite cotton lacework cardigan with tiny buttons to reveal the most boring white T-shirt of her entire range, discoloured by faulty washing on a hot cycle several years ago. Not that Kim seemed in the least bit interested in her clothes.

  ‘Hetty, it’s you,’ he was now saying. ‘At last.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘I feel it’s been a century since I saw you. And so much has happened.’

  She made an effort to keep to the ostensible reason for their meeting, and began briskly, as soon as the cakes arrived – a slice of orange for her, thick chocolate for Kim, who professed himself ravenous after a day with stroppy kids, exhausted by weeks of term.

  ‘It’s really on account of this tangle of paganism and Christianity, of fantasy and fact,’ Hortense launched in, clutching at her role as scholar, ‘that our Hereward Meeks threw in the towel. Like so many men of his time he was thrown into utter desperation by Darwin and the fossil record and the scientific revolution and the discrepancy with Revelation and the Creation etc etc, and consequently he was hell-bent on finding outside proofs for the truth of the Book: he and hundreds like him had high hopes of archaeology. But stuff like these linen bandages and papyri didn’t help the cause: the material is such a mish mash of traditions, even the keenest soldier of God couldn’t exactly unfurl it and march under its banner. And when he found that . . . well, the tomb was empty, the shroud shrugged off . . . that was the limit.’

  ‘This is excellent,’ said Kim. ‘The cake.’ He laughed. ‘And what you’re saying, I know. The same story, the same mystery. Only it stars a woman. That’s blasphemy.’ He laughed.

  Hetty ignored his lightness of mood. ‘Of course, some ingenious minds argued that the resemblances were there to prepare the way: Isis and baby Horus look just like the Virgin Mary and Jesus because God in his wisdom planned it like that, as a forerunner, a prototype, to smooth the path. Putting the fossils in the earth like giving Adam and Eve navels: unnecessary, but aesthetic. This material isn’t like that: it’s not prophetic . . .’

  ‘Not of that faith, no,’ said Kim, licking his chocolate-covered fork.

  ‘Of other things? Maybe. You know I’m not going along with you
on that score – but this material is history, too. For our time. Which is where you come in.’

  Kim said: ‘Can we go out somewhere else? Get a drink somewhere? I don’t feel I’m getting you here – but some lady at a meeting, with a tray of coffee or tea brought in. I’d really like a beer.’

  ‘I’ve got to get home.’

  ‘Not yet.’ He paused. ‘We can stay here, if you really want to. Another coffee? Let me get them.’

  She shook her head.

  So Kim stayed put. ‘Skipwith seems to me just as important to the story of the Leto Bundle coming here,’ he began. ‘He should figure in the display. He’s easier to get across, too, than Meeks.’

  ‘Yes, and there’s a lot of visuals, too, related to him we could use. But just let me finish about Meeks.’

  ‘Yes, teacher.’

  As Hortense talked on, she was wondering, Had she mistaken the meaning of his messages? of his talk? Perhaps his crazed expressions were just so many more of his delusions, cut from the same stuff as his prophecies? He listened to her when she talked of the Leto’s history, but he said he wanted to put the past behind him, but needed to show its slipperiness and unreliability. But she could hardly accept that. ‘We’re too much into the business of forgetting’, she’d written to him. She wanted him to rely on the past. What had he replied? Something about hidden files, about the past being full of memories that have been drowned, and drowned for ever – that to have some kind of a known history is already a privilege many miss out on. What about the unstoried, untold, unremembered?