That night he bicycled down to the Off-License and brought back a bottle of a Cahors from the Pyrenees. There wasn’t much in the pantry she could throw together to fit the moment. But she lit a pair of candles and she talked with Malory; Malory talked with her, about her, asked her about her own children. Antonella looked at the Malory before her, the smaller Malory, the still mobile Malory, the seventy-year-old man, more tonsure than hair, but still the comfortably lost Malory, and she talked about her own lost Matteo, the lost Anna, all the lost years of her marriage. There were tears and there were kisses, their dry, unpracticed lips moistened by Cahors and years of tacit intimacy. And when the time came to separate for the night, Malory took Antonella by the hand to lead her into his room. But neither his bed—her Matteo’s bed—nor Antonella’s own seemed a comfortable option. So they lay in the candlelight in the bay window. And Antonella removed the copper curls that disguised the chemical savannah of her scalp, unzipped and exposed the runnels of operations and rough edges of tests and countless medical ravages she had hidden and perfumed away from Malory’s sight over all these years. For the first time, Malory looked at Antonella. He looked and he saw past the scars, past the gravity that had drawn the skin to the bone and the bone closer to the Earth, the time and the time that had thrown its own disguise over the eternally young Italian woman who loved him. He saw what Antonella had been and what she had grown into. He saw the copper Tuscan curls and the full curves of the Antonella who first opened her biscuit tin to him in the Maths Faculty. And Antonella discovered that, late though he was, barely imaginable as it might seem, her Malory had finally returned.
The next morning was a Saturday. From that same bay window, Antonella watched Malory bicycle off to Histon to teach his seven-year-olds about the pedals. The view out the Coton footpath had changed over the years as Corpus Christi sold land to a developer who shot up a constellation of seventy-two prefabricated cottages that seeped off the Barton Road to the edge of their sports grounds. And if she looked out the right panes of the window, she could see the towers of the Newton Institute, where for more than thirty years she had looked after her mathematicians when the university booted them out of their cozier home at the Sidgwick Site, where the one piece of Antonella that remained was the biscuit tin she had donated to the Faculty. But the view from the center of the bay window was of the Coton footpath. And as Malory bicycled away, the perspective of his diminishing form—as ideal as in any late Renaissance painting—gave her a sense of balance and tranquility.
As soon as Antonella could see no more of Malory out the window, she went to her closet. There, from the carton she reserved for her marriage license, the children’s birth certificates, and two cameos of a pair of dead Romans, she took out a faded envelope holding two more ancient sheets of paper. They had been folded in the Chapbook that Malory had given her to translate. As they were written in English, Antonella had put them aside in this envelope all those many years before and had forgotten to bring them with her translation to Rome. They were Malory’s, of course, and she should have given them to him before. But now was as good at time as any.
They were both written on the same quality paper smelling of comfortable age, embossed with a seven-sided S.
The first:
11 September 1692
Dear Mr. Newton,
I regret to inform you that, on the night of 10 September, after consuming a light supper with a bottle of claret, Her Royal Excellency, the Queen of Septimania, retired to Sanctum Sanctorum for the last time. Enclosed, please find a letter in her hand addressed to you. I rest
your most humble & most
obedient Servant,
Settimio
And the second—although written the day before the first:
10 September 1692
My dearest Isaac,
What we did was simple. Simplex sigillum veri—the simple is the sign of the truth. Isn’t that what you said, twenty-odd years ago? And yet, for twenty-odd years, my letters to you have remained unanswered, my envelopes returned unopened.
Yet what could be simpler than two hearts, two bodies joining together in science and in sympathy? When I left Rome and traveled to Cambridge, I knew that the future of Septimania was beyond my sole power. I needed a second body. And when you left your mother’s garden to travel with me, you knew that your own quest, your own questions were beyond the capabilities of any one man.
You never knew your father. I never knew mine. Yet we solved problems, Isaac, we created life—a child I’d hoped you might lift onto your shoulders the way Aeneas or the giant Hercules bore their futures. Our son of flesh and blood, our twenty-odd-year-old son lives to carry on the line of Septimania. And he will have daughters and they will have sons, and doubtless there will be others who will stand on our shoulders and solve problems which exist beyond our horizons.
I have little faith that you will open this letter, the most recent in the series. If you do, you will understand it is the last, that I have reached my limit.
If you do not, I live still.
Antonella laid the envelope flat upon Malory’s pillow, with a fresh sheet upon which she wrote the single word—Malory.
And then, because she knew it would be her last time at Cranmer Road and worried that Malory might not have taken his key, she left the door unlocked and made her way by foot out Grange Road to the Fen Causeway, past the train station to Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
3/7
HERE ARE CERTAIN MOMENTS IN THE YEAR WHEN ROME—A CITY that has seen its share of awakenings and slumbers—is so deserted that a traveler might imagine that the buildings are equally hollow, a set for a warehoused opera, and that a quick dash behind the Baths of Domitian or the Palazzo Massimo would reveal plywood and braces stenciled with the name CINECITTA in capitals. Only a few other travelers stepped down from Malory’s train, testifying to the emptiness. For all he knew, they might have been choristers on the way to an early morning rehearsal of Tosca. The fountain at the center of the Piazza della Repubblica was dry, the roundabout empty, the newspaper kiosks and bookstalls shut tight. The first light of mid-August picked out the sanpietrini in such pockmarked detail that Malory wondered how the stagehands, the grips, the best boys, or whatever the movie people called them—Antonella always insisted on staying in the Cambridge Arts Cinema to laugh at the credits that, even after decades in England remained exotic—could lay them all down in this brief moment when Rome was deserted. Was this a national holiday, a saint’s day, Malory wondered? Was there a crucial football match or rugby or whatever they played in the summer that had kept the entire population off the streets? Had he purchased a special out-of-class fare that had switched him onto a siding that led to a private Rome? Had it been this quiet when Newton first entered Rome and rode with his college friend up the Aventino to the Villa Septimania?
Malory saw Rome with a transparency and the sensation of a twinkling dark matter, as a breathing city that he hadn’t experienced in the forty-three years since he’d first arrived with only his canvas Kit Bag, his toiletries in Tesco’s plastic, and the letter from his grandmother. He walked along the Via Nazionale, past the English church, the Irish Pub. He crossed by the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, where the street sloped down to its medieval level at the Basilica of San Vitale. He knew there was something Roman below the church, and below that something Mithraic, and so down and down, each blind stone trusting the shoulders of the ones beneath it. He walked past the massive flanks of the insurance agencies that backed onto Trajan’s Forum, past the lonely column graffitied with the Emperor’s conquests over Tibor’s ancestors from which he had long ago surveyed a kingdom of hopeful actors. He crossed Piazza Venezia, turning left at the Palazzo Caetani, where Aldo Moro was found crumpled in the trunk of a red Renault 4 to the horror of Anna Ford and Antonella and half the citizens of Italy. And though Malory knew no more about that mystery than he had all those years before, the transparency with which he walked through Rome assured him that he had ch
osen correctly. Rome. This was where Antonella wanted Malory to bring her.
Antonella was more Roman than Catholic, after all. None of the few members of the Cambridge Maths Faculty who came around to Cranmer Road to give their condolences objected or even noticed when Malory arranged for the Huntingdon Road Crematorium to handle the funeral. Malory couldn’t imagine Antonella imagining a ceremony at Our Lady and English Martyrs, which was such a pale imitation of the churches of her hometown, with none of the Lippis or Caravaggios that made the worm-eaten relics and the waxy air of the altars manageable. He gave no thought to contacting Antonella’s invisible children. Nor did he believe he would stay much longer by himself in the house at the end of Cranmer Road. His decision to bicycle out to St. George’s Church, with what remained of Antonella in the blue marbled biodegradable cardboard box that Huntingdon Road had so solemnly handed over to him, was made in the sincere belief that Antonella had become part of the family, part of Malory’s family, and that it was fitting to scatter her on the ground that held Old Mrs. Emery and in the air that had borne the Pip.
Malory hadn’t visited Whistler Abbey, hadn’t chosen to tune or play its organ since he had returned to Cambridge, hadn’t seen the church since the day of his grandmother’s funeral. Nevertheless, the bicycle path by the river was where both had always been. It was older, much older, as was he, and had resisted the improvements and regulations that generations of planning councils had brought to the Coton and the Histon footpaths. He negotiated its summer dips and baked ridges more nimbly than he had years before. Antonella’s box rode secure inside his Kit Bag, which rested snugly in the basket on his front handlebars. He dismounted in the garden of the Orchard and walked the bicycle across the Cambridge Road, up the ramp to the wooden gate of St. George’s. He had thought of taking Antonella inside, even of carrying her up to the steeple and scattering her ashes through the slats that not only brought air into the bellows but breathed out into the fens beyond. But Malory knew enough physics to know that even if he were fit enough to climb the ladder to the organ loft, there was no going back in time to the afternoon in 1978 when he had been surprised to see a young girl crossing the Cambridge Road from the Orchard, entering the church and climbing the ladder only to see him, Malory.
Instead, Malory wheeled his bicycle around the back of the church and propped it against the yew, unchanged in the brief span of yew-years since Malory had last stood in its shade at the grave of Old Mrs. Emery. The grave itself had been well-tended—he could only imagine the arrangements for its manicure, made long ago by Settimio. Surely this was a safe and comforting place to scatter Antonella, perhaps the one place I might return at least occasionally, Malory thought, although he wondered how much returning there might be for him, how much longer he might be able to straddle a bicycle.
He opened the flap of his Kit Bag, the stenciled letters entirely faded, the strap more hole than canvas and restitched several times, most recently by Antonella herself. The blue marbled box was a simple thing of cardboard, large enough for a cat, small enough to fit in a Kit Bag, but entirely inappropriate for a woman as generous as Antonella. Malory hadn’t been shocked by the phone call from Adden brooke’s. He had felt the force of Antonella’s goodbye that morning as he’d cycled away up the Coton footpath, even if he hadn’t understood all its applications. What surprised him, when he was left alone with Antonella’s body after signing the papers set in front of him, was how warm her hand was in his. It was the same warmth, in the same key, as the warmth he had felt when he read the letters she had left on his pillow. It was the warmth of the Queen of Septimania. It was the warmth of the woman who had loved her Isaac enough to disguise herself more completely than Haroun al Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad, himself. It was the warmth perhaps of Aldana, daughter of Charlemagne, who had cloaked her heart in memory and the thousand and one stories she brought to her bed every night. Natural causes. Malory had no idea from what the Queen of Septimania had died. But he imagined it was from the same “Natural Causes” on the certificate Malory signed below the signature of some anonymous Addenbrooke’s doctor. Antonella had been a queen, was a queen, would always be a queen in whatever part of Septimania still survived in Malory’s universe.
“You know the church, I believe?”
Malory turned. A man, in that confident age between thirty-five and forty-five, before the thinning above and the thickening below signal beginnings of endings.
“I used to tune the organ. Years ago. Many.”
“Ah.” The man squinted up at the steeple, but not even in the vague direction of the organ. “Ten days and she’ll be down.”
“She?” Malory looked at the man.
“The church. Parish raised the funds to knock her down to the ground and build me a new one. Splendid, don’t you think?”
“Knock the church down?” It was late enough in the day that Malory doubted most of what passed through his ears. “And you are?”
“The vicar,” the vicar said, squinting up at the vault again.
“And you intend to knock down St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey?”
“Knock, knock, knock,” the vicar smiled. “What the church eats up in heating bills alone.”
“You can’t be serious?”
The vicar turned and focused on Malory for the first time. “You’re not one of those university preservationists, are you?”
Malory wasn’t certain what he was. He never had been. But he thought back to MacPhearson, to all the red-haired, red-bearded questers devoid of doubt.
“It’s a Norman church,” Malory said. “I’ve seen the entry in Holinshed, it’s been around for …”
“Eight bloody hundred years. Don’t quote the vicar, chapter and verse,” the vicar quoted at Malory. “Eight bloody hundred years old. And the electric is eighty, and the plumbing over a hundred, and the drafts have been around since Noah built his bloody ark. ‘It’s a Norman church,’ he says.” The vicar simpered. “Well so are fourteen hundred other Norman churches in East Anglia alone. I believe we might spare this one and build ourselves a church where elderly gentlemen won’t catch their deaths of colds in the bloody springtime!”
Malory put the box back in the Kit Bag, the Kit Bag back in the basket of the bicycle, and pedaled back to Cambridge. He booked a train ticket the same afternoon—he was too fixed in his ways to approach the city otherwise—a train ticket to Rome for a final visit with Antonella. The transparency of his sight allowed him a view into the depths of his regret—late once again—that only now was he bringing Antonella back to the city she ached to visit on Malory’s arm while she was alive. Still, she was there with him, in a box, as safe as any cat, snug within the sturdy canvas of Malory’s ancient Kit Bag.
Malory walked from the Palazzo Caetani through the Ghetto to the Tevere, the same path he had run with another woman in his arms long before.
“Biscuit?” Louiza had asked then.
Biscuit.
Had she thought of that jog, that walk since then? Had she remembered through the pain of delivery and loss and all those years, how Malory had followed Tibor down to the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, carrying her in his arms? Malory looked over the parapet to where the Tevere spilled over the smallest of waterfalls as it passed the prow of the island, and the plastic bottles and cartons and floating debris of decades was caught in the bubbling eddies at the downriver end, floating in an endless balance between water and gravity.
He left the Isola Tiberina, left the square hulk of the synagogue behind him and walked, slower now, past the Temple of Hercules, the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, survivors of that religious fervor to knock, knock, knock to the ground. Crossing the empty slip road off the Lungotevere, Malory found the shaded entrance to the Clivo di Rocca Savella. The sanpietrini looked no more moss-covered, the pines, the bougainvillea no older or less colorful. The Clivo was empty, the medieval brick walls bare of even a midsummer gecko. No cancello, no entrance, not even a fig leaf or a turban to disguise the id
entity, no omega of a bricked-up arch to suggest that once, long ago, there might have been a hidden door and a villa and a kingdom.
At the top of the Clivo, Malory turned towards the rising bulk of Santa Sabina and in through the iron gate of the entrance to the Giardino degli Aranci. The sun was fully risen, and the odor of the bitter oranges gripped his nostrils. It had been a full day since he had eaten. He set his Kit Bag down upon a concrete bench and picked a piece of fruit from one of the lower branches. The peel came away slowly—he was hot, he was tired, and the skin beneath his nails stung from the juice. He sat on the bench and ate the orange, section by bitter section. The juice ran down his lip and hung suspended from his unshaven chin. He was alone in the garden.
Beneath him lay what remained of Septimania: the bedroom of the portraits of his ancestors; the scarlet cap and cape of the secret cardinal hanging in the wardrobe; the majlis of Haroun, all cedar and cushions; the marble Bernini of Isaac Newton and the Queen of Septimania eternally without the apple; the Sanctum Sanctorum, where Newton and the Queen had made their discoveries, where the Queen had written her lonely letter to the lonely Newton—all of them, Antonella, Malory himself alone in these words; and beneath the words, the kilometers upon miles upon light years of tunnels holding books and wires and information that was declining into antique and ruin with every passing moment. Twenty-three years of his own life passed down there below, eating scones, wandering in the garden, and searching for an answer to a question he may never have understood. Searching for what it meant to be King of Septimania, Holy Roman, Jewish, Muslim, heir to the throne of Science, as if the sum of those titles would add up to One.
What he was, what Malory was, was something else. He was the Hercule of his mother, dreaming of a father and a giant buried beneath the hills of the Pyrenees. He was the organ player of Narbonne, long before he had any notion that the Old Lady up the hill was Mrs. Emery, that Mrs. Emery was his grandmother. He was a seventy-year-old man with a corduroy suit too warm for midsummer Rome and a Kit Bag containing … He opened the flap and set the entire inventory on the bench beside him. A bag of toiletries, including a razor and soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste with perhaps one good squeeze left. The Book of Organs and the Newton Chapbook—the meager remains of his once infinite library. The Universal Organ Tuner, with its memory of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of pipes, but at base only a piece of bent and rusting metal. And finally, the blue marbled box holding what once was a young Italian girl with a biscuit tin, a few kilos of dust.
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