Joel worked for the NHS as an accountant and taught an evening course at his local uni upgraded from an old poly. Now there are so many of those about you’d wonder why anyone would think it worthwhile to start something like Wessex. There has to be an ulterior motive in its founding, as a front for the Temple of the Latent Christ or some kind of fundraising scam. I pick up the phone and dial their number. Maybe a more oblique approach than rattling the bars of the gates will get me further.
Listening to the recorded voice on the other end I make notes. At the end I press hash and leave Joel’s name and address, an arrangement we have for when I want to stay anonymous. He’ll ring me when a message or packet comes. I’ve asked for the full kit of courses and application forms. The anonymous but faintly North American and female voice tells me: ‘Wessex University is closed right now. We shall reopen on 3 May. Meanwhile you can visit our website…’ I think it’s time I saw Dr Adrian Gilbert again.
‘Can you come to my office? The college is still closed but now I’ve read more of the Boston memorial there are questions, issues I think we should discuss.’
I arrange for him to come the next day. It doesn’t seem a problem. He has plenty of time on his hands. I can spend the intervening hours carrying on with Amyntas, as I think of him/her, and reading up on tribunal procedure. Meanwhile I search for traces of Amyntas Boston on the internet, surfing the International Genealogical Index, that useful tool set up by the curious theology of the Mormons of Salt Lake City. There are only births and marriages. Deaths don’t interest them since the purpose of the Index is to retrospectively initiate your ancestor into the true church and thereby guarantee them immortality. Briefly I wonder where the dead have been hanging out all this time waiting for their resurrection on screen. Still, out of strange acorns useful oak trees grow.
But there’s no mention of Amyntas or Amaryllis being born in Salisbury at the right sort of time or at all. There is a Robert Boston nearby at Broad Chalke who married Margaret Brown on 26 September 1588, the year of the Armada; and they had two daughters in the following two years, Joan and Mary. And that’s all.
Where else to go? I try the surname Boston and am sent to a History of Wiltshire by John Aubrey. The index says just: ‘Boston, Salisbury physician.’ But it’s enough to get me out of my chair and pacing the room. I print out the reference. I need a library. At last somebody knows, knew about a Salisbury Boston and a physician at that. Is it her dad or Amyntas herself? I have to find out. I try booksearch.com.
Well at least they’ve heard of John Aubrey but they can only offer me a second-hand classic reprint of his Brief Lives, though it does look as if it’s the same guy. So I need a library and not any old library. I need the best. I need to get on my bike and head for Euston and the Inca courts of the British Library itself. Though now I think it might be asking for my darling to be nicked to abandon it in the backstreets of Euston. I lock up the office and pick my way past the morning drunks under their newspaper wrappers through the stinking gloom of the underpass up into the airy station concourse with its Eurostar promise of not-too-distant foreign parts of wine and women if not song, and into the gullet of the tube, almost running down the escalator steps while the halt and old hang on to the right-hand rail.
An hour later I’ve filled in the form with family history, seventeenth century as my area of study, got my pass, and am climbing up to the reading room, hushed, packed with seekers and the acolytes who serve them. There’s more than one copy of my book. Which shall I go for? Not the earliest because it’s in a special category, hedged around with access barriers no doubt to stop it being stolen. I wonder what it would fetch on the antiquarian market.
I decide on an edition of 1848 as a compromise and sit back to wait for it. Then I think I could use the time seeing what I can find on the open shelves and I’m just about to get up and browse when, hey presto, here’s my book. It’s a bigger size than books today, with thick cardboardy yellowed pages. It’s been mended at some time and when I open the dried-blood cover it lies very flat as if exhausted, worn out. A faint memory comes to me. Is it the smell or the feel of the thick paper? The memory is of being about six and walking in crocodile through the Acton streets, always it seemed shrouded in winter, from our primary school to the redbrick Gothic of the public library where we were allowed to choose our books in the children’s section with its low, brightly painted chairs, posters and smell of damp wool. Outside in the streets we passed among people who must have been young but seemed old to us, walking about in clothes as bright as our kiddy furniture, young men like the dandies in history books with cavalier hair. Fluid, always on the run, they seemed to dance along the muddy streets. Their pastel flairs were stained six inches up the leg with the puddle water thrown up by passing cars. Yet I remember they appeared cheerful and trusting, unlike my parents, Rob and Linda, born in that unimaginable, except to them, before-the-war time and tarred with its sobering brush.
I turn to the index. There’s no mention of Boston. I try Gilbert. And there he is: Adrian; I look up his entry. It’s in a section where the writer says: ‘I shall now pass to the illustrious Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke’ under the heading: ‘Of Learned Men that had Pensions Granted to them by the Earls of Pembroke’. First comes the bit about Gilbert, confirming Amyntas’ story in the memorial, and then pay dirt.
There lived in Wilton, in those days, one Mr Boston, a Salisbury man (his father was a brewer there) who was a great chymist, and did great cures by his art. The Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke did much esteem him for his skill, and would have had him to be her operator, and live with her, but he would not accept of her Ladyship’s kind offer. But after long search after the philosopher’s stone, he died at Wilton, having spent his estate. After his death they found in his laboratory two or three baskets of egg shells, which I remember Geber saith, is a principal ingredient of that stone.
I head for the photocopying department. My find lies like the philosopher’s stone itself faintly glowing in my briefcase as I make my way home again.
Geber, Geber, who was Geber? Google tracks him down: ‘Jabir ibn Hayyan, known to the Western world as Geber, Muslim alchemist of the eighth century. Put forward the Sulphur Mercury theory of the origin of metals based on abstraction from experiments with naturally occurring red ore or cinnabar, a form of mercury oxide which when heated produces quicksilver and sulphurous fumes. According to this theory fire was sulphur or brimstone; mercury was water. Not however the substances themselves but the abstractions: combustibility and fusibility.’ Wow!
That’s Amyntas’ experiment before the countess’ ladies. You can see how those old alchemists were trying to feel their way to some universal theory that would explain everything. Wasn’t that what Einstein was after towards the end of his life? Every so often along comes someone with a discovery or a theory that seems to have the answer: particle physics, relativity, static state cosmology, DNA and the genome. But there’s always another question unanswered beyond it, even if the theory itself stands up. A new dimension, a micro universe we can’t see into or space we can’t penetrate. Will we ever? Or will we destroy ourselves or be smashed into our elements by an asteroid before we can find out? Every new thing we discover only seems to make the universe bigger and us smaller. Shrinking man. There ought to be pride in what we know but mostly there’s only fear. Is that why so many attempts at an alternative answer are popular now? Because we can’t face it. It’s too big for us. Like the Temple of the Latent Christ offers its believers. Do what we tell you and you’ll be all right, saved when the universe blows apart.
Maybe I’m wrong to be digging into all this. What seemed a simple case to make some bread is leading me into a cross between Star Wars and The Moral Maze. Heavy bananas, Jade. Cool it. Get back to the kitchen and cook up something solid. Get real.
An evening with the Gaos pushing out the noodles and chop suey will bring me down to earth.
‘Mary,’ I say as she hands me the small