by John Metcalf
He moved brandy glasses and coffee cups to one side and brushed away crumbs with the edge of his hand, clearing and cleaning a space between them.
“But what I really wanted to show you,” he said, bending down again and then reappearing, “was this.”
He placed on the table between them a black box.
Rob touched it with his fingertip, following its lines. It was about ten inches long and five or six inches high. Its four corner uprights were in the form of pilasters with Ionic scroll capitals.
“How very elegant!” said Rob.
“What it is,” said James, “is a lead box, lined with untreated birch and covered with very superior black-dyed goatskin. The actual casket is lead, to preserve the faint odour of musk they give off.”
“What give off?”
“We get boxes and mounts and settings made for us by an old chap not long retired from Asprey’s—just down the street. They were granted the Royal Warrant by Queen Victoria and have held it under every monarch since.”
“What’s in it?”
James eased up the lid and turned the box around to reveal two brown balls.
They once had been gilded and the gilt was now time-worn, thinned, the brownness showing through. One ball was nearly the size of a golf ball, the other slightly smaller. The freckly gold-brown reminded Rob of truffles dusted with cocoa powder.
“Can I touch?”
James nodded.
“What are they? Stones?”
James made a snorty-giggly noise.
“Well stones they are,” he said, “but stone they’re not.”
“So what are they?”
Rob waited.
“Those examples,” said James, “are huge.”
“So tell me what they are.”
“Quite possibly the largest examples known.”
“Stop fucking about, Jimbo!”
“Stop fucking about, James,” said James.
Rob made a gesture with his right hand of concession.
“They’re Bezoars,” said James, “and Bezoars are gallstones of the Bezoar goat.”
“Gallstones,” repeated Rob.
“Of Caprus aegagrus,” said James.
Rob eyed the stones.
“And do they smell?”
James made a help-yourself gesture and Rob lifted the heavy box. ‘Musk,’ James had said. He breathed in the slightest smell, very faintly marshy, boggy, but it might just have been the birch lining. And he was a bit pissed anyway.
“What do you think?” said James.
“Gallstones as in, like, kidney stones?”
James nodded.
Rob shrugged.
“Rob, Rob, you have no idea of how highly valued these were. That our examples are gilded suggests their preciousness. They’ve been prized for centuries as an antidote to poisons. The writings of the Alchemists, the Hermetic literature is full of references to them, the various Arabic treatises, the Al Bituni texts, even our own Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century makes reference to them in his Opuses.
“As to these, we have some rather tantalizing provenance connecting them to Ranjit Singh, ‘Lion of the Punjab,’ or at the very least to his court. He was the Amritsar chap. Gilded the Golden Temple. Nothing we could actually assert but… tantalizing. Some of this sort of material began to appear on the market in England following Sir Francis Younghusband’s punitive expedition into Tibet in 1903. Caravans of loot—caravans—were strung along the trails leading back into India. The slaughter and looting were so widespread it raised a popular outcry. And the looting was not merely inside Tibet itself. We do have some indirect documentation linking these Bezoars to Lord Curzon, he, of course, being the Viceroy and the actual instigator of the Tibet incursion, family letters, at some remove, from Younghusband relatives to Curzon himself. Nothing involving Ranjit Singh, of course—he was early nineteenth century—but in a period of turmoil precious artifacts tend to travel. Nothing specific enough though. You can, however, see the richness of the history swirling around Bezoars.
“And here’s yet another tidbit. Years ago now, I’ve seen the catalogue—Christie’s I believe it was—Doctor Dee’s silver bracelet came up for auction. You know of the good Doctor?”
“Just the name,” said Rob, “and that he was an alchemist.”
“Doctor Dee was an alchemist,” said James, “and also a quite genuine experimental scientist, though at the same time he was an astrologer, practiced crystallomancy, staged plays and masques, translated, amassed a magnificent library—volumes still around in the market—but all in all he was a fraud, a flamboyant fraud, a favourite for a time at Elizabeth’s court. You can see his pink glass speculum in the British Museum, came to them from Walpole’s Strawberry Hill collection.”
James stopped and looked blank for a second or two.
“His bracelet,” prompted Rob.
“Right!” said James. “His bracelet had all kinds of hocus-pocus charms dangling from it and one of them—guess what? In a tiny, silver cage, a Bezoar.”
“Well,” said Rob, “I can see they’re interesting if one knows everything you’ve been telling me, but I still wouldn’t want to sit looking at them. And I can’t see how looking at them could, you know, what you were saying earlier about osmosis.”
“Believe me,” said James, “I’ve—”
“I believe that’s true, that osmosis idea, of something made,” interrupted Rob, “something that’s been crafted with artistic intention—dish, bowl, dagger—but these are just, well, curios, aren’t they? Like a pretty shell, an ammonite or—remember we saw an armadillo once in a junk shop? Curled up with its tail in its mouth to make a handle and lined with satin to make a lady’s sewing basket? Remember that?
“So what’s the point? What does Oldfield’s see in these Bezoars? Who’d want to buy gallstones? They’re just two stone balls. They might just as well be—what?—two stone cannon balls. And I wouldn’t want to commune with them either.”
“Well, for a start,” said James, “they’re incredibly rare. But that aside, there’s absolutely no call to use the word ‘commune’ in that sarcastic manner.”
“But nothing gets us away from the fact,” said Rob, “that we’re just dealing with the accidental product of a diseased goat.”
“You’re being insultingly prosaic, Robert.”
“No insult intended—come on! It’s just that, in this instance, I think prosaic’s what’s called for.”
“In my world, Robert, prosaic is rarely called for.”
Those two “Roberts” signalled, he realized, one of Jimbo’s familiar mercurial changes of mood, but in the heat of the matter he said, “How about copralites?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said—”
James gave an indrawn ttt of exasperation.
“Even if they were gilded,” said Rob, in turn annoyed, “would you ascribe value to two balls of coprolitic shit rolled up by a dung beetle?”
“Why,” said James, “why—exactly—are you attempting to provoke me?”
Rob heard the familiar setting-in of frost, the hauteur.
“Oh, come off it, Jimbo! We’re not thirteen and arguing in your bedroom still.”
“I can interpret your manner,” said James, “in no other way than as an attempt to belittle me.”
Rob shook his head.
“An ineffectual attempt.”
James closed the casket lid, pressing with his thumbs on the front corners. He lifted up his briefcase and set it on the table, Scraping back his chair, he stood and eased the casket into its baize bag and settled the bag into the briefcase.
He glanced at his watch ostentatiously.
“Oh, don’t take umbrage, Jimbo. Please.”
“‘James,’” said James. “‘James.’”
> Still sitting, Rob watched him start away.
“The cost of your wining and dining,” James threw back over his shoulder, “has been defrayed by The Old Curiosity Shop.”
*
His night reflection in the window.
Perhaps a third of the seats were occupied, businessmen mostly, blue or black suits, City men by the look of them, bowler hats and Evening Standards, black shoes glinty.
He watched the man on the seat across the aisle struggling to undo, from its cardboard-and-cellophane containment, a triangle-packaged sandwich. After picking with his fingers, he had tried with his teeth, and was presently addressing it with his nail-clippers.
Rob kept coming back to
Jimbo
James
He did not know quite what to make of the evening’s sad collapse. He was used to Jimbo’s moods and rages and oratorical performances, but the evening had surprised perhaps both of them in its eruption. It was an eruption startling to him as it was happening, yet now—
The sandwich man had got half of it out but had ruptured it in the extraction. Through the railway, smell of hot dust and hot oil mingled with what he very privately thought of as the smell of electricity, salmon on the air—
—yet now, in the gentle rocking and creak of the railway carriage, the clash was beginning to feel far less surprising, was beginning to feel as if he had been released, as if at last he had unburdened himself.
He kept returning to the nag of why he’d been unwilling to share with Jimbo the real gen about Cecilia, why he’d felt the need not to leave himself vulnerable when for so long they’d shared everything.
Phrases, odds and sods of James’ conversation, were playing in his mind.
…the ardent and attractive young.
I, of course, being the attractive forementioned.
I am, what shouldn’t say so myself, squire, personable…
…despatched to hotel suites to charm certain clients…
Wondered if it was these remarks that had made him wary. Wondered what, if anything, had been implied in “certain clients,” wondered what might have distinguished such clients, other than, say, indecision, made them certain clients. Wondered, as he’d been wondering all evening, and unable to quite make up his mind, if Jimbo was wearing on his eyelids a subtle trace of blue eyeshadow.
Though really, he knew.
Had Jimbo felt Cecilia as a wedge into their friendship? Almost certainly so. He’d made his hostility no secret. In the time they’d been more and more apart, though—pressure of schoolwork, his preoccupation with Cecilia, Oxford—Bristol—he’d slowly come to realise that Jimbo’s hostility towards Cecilia wasn’t so much about Cecilia herself or Cecilia as girl. Cecilia could have been anyone. Jimbo’s designs upon the world were far too grand and monstrous for him to have been provoked by Cecilia as girl or Cecilia as person, a sixth-form girl with, as Jimbo had once remarked, “fat lips.”
ankle socks
stalwart calves
Jimbo’s hostility towards Cecilia was towards Cecilia as interloper undermining his expectation of…
expectation of… the word fealty suggested itself.
not exactly the right word…
He’d felt constraint and wariness because any intimacies about sex with Cecilia, or, more to the point, perhaps any talk of sex itself, would have admitted into the conversation something dangerous.
What did “dangerous” mean?
Though really he knew.
The sandwich man had finished wiping mayonnaise from his fingertips and was looking about him in a helpless manner for somewhere to deposit the paper serviette. Rob watched covertly, quite fascinated by what he would do.
Rob preferred Jimbo to James. He felt that James was perhaps betraying Jimbo. Not in a calculated way. There was too much of the old Jimbo in the way, but…
He could see that Jimbo probably couldn’t resist the lure of antique beauty, the piratical—what had he said?—barracuda—the hunt, the chase, the acquisition of the quarry. Probably couldn’t resist the seduction of being, in his world, among the elect.
He could imagine Jimbo, or James, rather, in his white room’s austerity, communing with bronze, gouache, Roman glass iridescent in its slow decay.
Rob felt for all this.
Conceded without quibble.
How could he not?
But he wanted no part of flummery. Bezoars. He mistrusted a world that could so easily and imperceptibly steer one towards the shallows of interior decoration, a world where caskets worked to flatter contents.
Gilded goat gallstones
Whatever the history, the provenance, it seemed to Rob that a gallstone, whatever properties it was believed in earlier centuries to have possessed, and whether gussied up in gold, bronze, or chrome with knobs on, was nothing more than a brown stone-like ball dug out of a goat’s insides.
In my world, Robert, prosaic is rarely called for.
But it was in his.
It was precisely the prosaic, he was beginning to understand, that he wanted to grasp.
Clattering suddenly across rails, the train heeling into a slow curve.
LOUGHBOROUGH JUNCTION
The shuffle of the train, the slow creaking of the carriage in that odd silence trains seemed to impose, the journey’s suspended time, there swam into his mind’s eye the cat, the butcher’s cat.
Captured in a sentence whose sounds and rhythm he stubbornly stood by
The ginger-and-white cat sat on the pavement outside the butcher’s so fat its tongue stuck out.
*
Rob and Charlie Denton and Peter Villiers, a pub acquaintance who played darts at the Green Bush and who was apprenticed to a joiner and carpenter, stood together on the pavement in sight of the judas door of the massive gate of Bristol’s Horfield Prison.
At a minute or two past six, the door opened and Stanley Shakespeare stepped over the iron-bound ledge. Handshakes and hugs and Pete passed round his silver hip flask and they drank ceremonial whisky.
Stan was another Green Bush acquaintance, a Jamaican who had come to Bristol as a child. His improbable name had caused him lifelong trouble. His father, Royston Shakespeare, had been a cook and deckhand on one of the West Indies boats but had disappeared when Stan was small. He was… Rob had more than once tried to sum him up but Stan was difficult to define. Usually affable, he could become dangerously violent if he felt insulted. He sometimes seemed a little simple but wasn’t. Sometimes he was flush and generous, sometimes on the dole. He called himself a handyman, painted things, dug gardens, carted junk, worked from time to time for a moving company, lived with his mother, squired preposterous tarts.
From week to week he also offered, at bargain prices, sets of steak knives, Le Creuset pots and casseroles, Black & Decker power tools, Stanley chisels.
Stanley chisels said one Green Bush wag, get it?
There was much discussion in the bar about what the word “fence” really meant and the general consensus was that Stanley wasn’t your real fence so much as what you might call a sub-fence.
If The Green Bush was in deep discussion—Cyprus, say, and Makarios, or whether it really was, as rumour had it, Lord Bolton, starkers except for a maid’s apron, serving them other Cabinet Ministers at the orgy—Stan would sit listening, looking from face to face. Sometimes he surprised Rob. Odd things were lodged in his mind. One St. Patrick’s Day he had put green vegetable dye and Rose’s Lime Juice in his beer. What you doing that for? Not exactly Irish, are you, mate?
Saint Patrick, he’d explained, was a slave but he’d excaped.
Rob looked this up later and was surprised.
The Green Bush consensus was that Stanley was no criminal mastermind, a bit bent but nothing egregious or really untoward, his little activities more peccadillo than what you’d call crimin
al. And he played useful darts.
That morning he had finished serving three months for assault.
I was riding my bike late, late and this copper stops me and he says what’s your name and I said Shakespeare an’ he slap my head so I took exception, din’ I?
The incident and the sentence had not been reported in the Western Daily News, so at the bar of The Green Bush what the actual charge had been was much discussed. Various legal tags were bandied about: Assault, Battery, Affray, Grievous Bodily Harm, Aggravated Assault…
What! Grievous Bodily Harm with a bicycle pump?
Well, it was more Stan that was aggravated, wasn’t it?
Doesn’t matter—not if it was a copper. Not even with a feather, not if it was a copper.
Charlie, Rob, and Peter took him for a proper breakfast at the Adora Grill—eggs, bacon, fried Gammon steak, fried bread, fried potatoes, and grilled tomatoes.
fuck porridge!
They outlined the plans for this special day. After he’d seen his mum, they’d come round to his place at about ten o’clock and then—they revealed that that night Count Basie and his band—
“The New Testament Band, they call it,” interrupted Charlie—they were playing at the Colston Hall and they’d got tickets for all of them—“and there’s Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis,” said Pete—
and they had to honour the Count so they were going to John’s Hatters in the Centre to buy fedoras—they had money, don’t worry about it—and white shirts and did he have a tie and it was at eight o’clock.
They drank beer in the afternoon and felt self-conscious in their hats.
What?
I was just thinking.
What?
What he’s doing with that Charlotte bird.
*
As the house lights went down and the stage lights swelled, the band began to file onto the stage, first Sonny Payne seating himself behind the drums on risers slightly higher than the piano and starting to mark a steady rhythm with brushes, shimmering hints on the high-hat, Eddie Jones beside him, raising up his bass, Freddie Green starting to play chords across the beat, a slow blues emerging. Then the trombones in the back row—Charlie Denton, who had the band recordings on Verve and Capitol, whispering their names—Henry Coker, Al Grey, Benny Powell. Then the trumpets filed on and sat behind their stands also in the back row, Snooky Young, Wendell Culley, Thad Jones, that one, that one, that’s Joe Newman. Then the reeds behind the front-row stands—Bill Graham and Marshall Royal on alto sax, Charlie Fowlkes on baritone, Frank Wess on tenor and flute, and also on tenor, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis.