Alchemy

I’m sitting with my feet up on the desk pretending to be Philip Marlowe when the phone rings. Marlowe’s still the best when the phone hasn’t rung for days and the overdraft’s fast growing its fungoid web over the bank balance. Marlowe’s cool. I know Warshawski’s more my century. I ought to feel most at home with her but it’s Marlowe when the going gets tough. There’s just one problem though with my impersonation. By now I should have a tray full of dead butts. But I never learned how to inhale when we all tried it out in break at thirteen, behind the kitchen block where the smoke wouldn’t notice. And he was older than my mid thirties too. Forty at least; that was how Bogey played him anyway and he was the definitive.

‘Is that Lost Causes?’ The voice is light, male, what used to be called ‘cultured’.

‘It is.’

‘Do you do tribunals? Employment disputes?’

I do anything but I don’t say so. ‘Would you be applying for legal aid?’

"That won’t be necessary. Will you represent me?’

‘I need to see clients before I commit myself.’

‘Who am I speaking to? Would it be you taking my case?’

‘My name is Green, Jade Green. We’d better make an appointment Mr…?’

‘Dr Gilbert, Adrian Gilbert. I feel…if it could be as early as possible.’

‘Is tomorrow too soon?’ I try to keep any eagerness out of my voice.

‘Not at all. That will suit me very well.’

‘Ten o’clock then?’

‘Excellent.’

‘Just tell me who the plaintiff is?"

‘Defendant. The defendant is the University of Wessex. Till tomorrow,’ and he’s gone.

While he was speaking I’d opened a case file under his name and then this second one. I keep two files: the first I let the client see and the other is for myself, encrypted so that, in theory, only I have access, except that any twelve-year-old hacker could probably be into it quick as a traditional cat burglar up a drainpipe.

Next I run a check on him. Nothing in criminal listings. Nothing in the medical file. Not that sort of a doctor then or at least not accredited. Idly I try a general search by name. And bingo. ‘Adrian Gilbert. Died 1604.’ Oh great, ‘Uterine brother to Sir Walter Raleigh.’ So my guy is either an impostor or a fantasist.

I try the University of Wessex. I’ve never heard of it but I see it has its own website, the minimum requirement for existence nowadays, as a validation, a sure sign that you’re in business and up there with the big boys. Founded 1999. Not redbrick. Not even old poly. A private Thatcherite-style endowment, on the site of a former teacher training college. On the fringes of a London dormitory that might just qualify it for the Wessex brand. A ‘uni’ only in name. My intellectual snobbery is showing. We are the last generation who can afford it. Who am I to judge now, in these shapeshifting days?

Wessex campus is split between several sites. They show us a picture of the chapel. Nineteenth-century basilica style, a brick rotunda that must have been part of the original college, dedicated to St Walburgha. A fast train service to London every half hour: commutable. A global pharmaceutical giant has its base in the town and helps to fund the science faculty. Wessex offers the usual mishmash of courses, from artificial intelligence to sports tourism, boasting of its something for everyone policy. I wonder which of these Dr Adrian Gilbert fits into. I scroll through the list of subjects but it doesn’t name the teaching staff. Just as I’m about to click off I spot theology almost at the end of the line, with only tourism and youth studies tagging along behind. It stands out in its long gown and Geneva bands like silk bloomers among the Knickerbox flimsies. Well, tomorrow I’ll find out. It’s time to change into my leathers, get my boots on, helmet, gloves and wheel out the bike for my evening delivery. If Dr Adrian Gilbert could see me now would he be impressed or would he want to withdraw his case?

The Chinese takeaway I deliver for is a small family business in a quiet suburb. When their only son decided to try his luck in Australia they lost their errand boy. ‘Why,’ I asked when I’d been there a couple of months, ‘why me?’ There must have been plenty of young immigrants, students even, from Hong Kong families applying for the job in Loot. Mr Gao’s pale face with its delta of wrinkles had smiled fleetingly. ‘You are not Chinese; you are girl. There are many bad people run Chinese takeaway delivery. Deliver drugs, demand money. They don’t trouble you English girl.’

I found it hard to believe the triads had moved in on carriers of egg fried rice and bean curd but if Mr Gao thought so it was enough. They were a quiet close family, apart from Tommy who got away. Mr and Mrs Gao cook in the steaming, succulent kitchen behind, with a clashing of woks and metal pans. Mary takes the orders in the shop and over the phone. She’s shy and plain. Probably she would have liked to marry and have children but who is there for her to meet in Streatham Hill, unless a visiting cousin? I flirt with her a little when I call for my orders but I don’t think she understands. She ducks her head and smiles at me under her deep fringe, shadowing the liquorice pupils which are her only claim to attraction. As a young girl she must have had acne that’s left her skin lumpy and pitted. Sometimes I imagine putting my lips to it and saying: ‘It’s okay; you’re beautiful.’ At the end of my stint she hands me my brown paper carrier with the little silver oblong dishes under their cardboard caps that hold my freebie supper. Every night there’s something different so that I’m never sated. Mary always remembers what I’ve had the night before.

I didn’t mean to put all this in, even for my eyes only. The program asks me if I want to save it when I try to shut down. The ghost in the machine prompts us all the time to consider our own motives, our needs, our desires. If you don’t save, all will be lost. And yet it can always be found. Confiscated by the police, the computer gives up its secrets like any prisoner singing under the lash, rack, thumbscrew, electric prod, Chinese water torture. So why shouldn’t I save it just for myself? What have I got to hide?

Dr Gilbert buzzes the intercom on the dot of ten, before I’ve even got my feet up. My office is home as well as workplace but he isn’t to know that yet. Behind the desk is a partition with a door in it that leads to the kitchen, shower room and my student-style bedsit. Originally a warehouse, it was converted at the end of the nineties, leaving exposed minimalist steel girders and yellow London Brick walls. In its own way it’s related to the Wessex campus. Gilbert should feel at home. I tell him to come up. As yet there’s no lift, only stone steps and iron banisters.

When he puts his head round the door I see he’s a youngish Dr Who, collar-length brown hair, bow tie and granny glasses. As I get up he comes forward putting out a hand of slim manicured fingers.

‘I’m very grateful to you for seeing me so soon.’

‘Have a chair. Would you like a coffee?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Not at all.’ I go over to the filter machine where the glass goldfish bowl is gently seething. ‘Milk, sugar?’

‘Just milk thank you.’

I turn back from my coffee maker with our steaming cups. I can see he’s ‘all of a twitch’, as my mother would say. I’m afraid he might drop the cup and scald himself but he gets it safely down on my desk. ‘Did you find me easily, the office I mean?’ I’m trying to reassure him, to give him time to gather his wits. I guess he’s not used to the paraphernalia of the law.

‘I looked it up in the A-Z. I used to know London quite well but you get out of the habit…’

I open the top drawer of my desk and take out pad and pen. ‘I’ll need to make some notes.’

‘Of course. Where shall I begin?’

‘Tell me first about you. Date of birth, full name, address.’

The recitation of these simple facts steadies him. I could put them straight into my laptop of course but this sometimes frightens people, especially older people and Gilbert comes into that category though he’s only forty-nine. It’s more a cast of mind.

He takes me methodically through his degree and previous employment, before we get to Wessex and the immediate problem.

‘I have been accused by a small group of students of trying to corrupt their minds by teaching Satanism and perversion.’

Long ago when I started in independent practice I wanted to put up a favourite cartoon of mine showing the inside of a confessional box, with a monk leaning forward to listen to the supplicant on the other side of the grille and a sign above the monk’s head which reads: ‘Do not sound too surprised.’

‘Dangerous allegations.’

‘Very dangerous. I was summoned before the dean and disciplinary council. It was the students’ word against mine. They were believed. I was suspended and sacked.’

‘Sacked?’

‘I was on a short-term contract. When my first suspension ran out I expected to return to college, and my teaching, but a second suspension was slapped on, that took me to the end of my contract. I was told it would not be renewed.’

‘Why should the dean and council have believed them rather than you? Couldn’t you get other students to testify in your favour?’

‘They were too frightened. Ms Green…’ Gilbert hesitates, ‘you may find this hard to believe. You may even think it is mere paranoia on my part, but the college has been taken over by a sect, a fundamentalist group.’

‘What sort of sect?’ Far from suspecting him of paranoia, I see shades of the Rushdie fatwa rushing towards me, and find myself less than enthralled at letting loose a whole farrago of death threats, riot and arson. Still, a job is a job.

‘Extreme evangelical Christian.’

‘Creationist, Happy-Clappy?’ I’m showing off a bit.

‘Neither. This is something new. From America. The mother church, as they call it, has put money into the University of Wessex. The dean is their appointee. Many of the students are American.’

‘In these days of the internet, sects tend to be global. Didn’t the last immolation take place in Switzerland?’

‘There was a later one, in Zambia I seem to remember, but in both cases the cult originated in the States or had US links.’

‘Those students who accused you, are they American?’

‘Some of them. Not all. What would be their position in English law? Would it make a difference that they aren’t British subjects?’

‘The college must abide by UK employment law if it’s within the UK.’

‘So I can take them to an industrial tribunal?’

‘Employment tribunal. Yes, at this preliminary stage, as far as I can see. But I should warn you, Dr Gilbert, that going to law is often at the very least a disappointment, if not a down-right mistake. Think of Oscar Wilde, not to mention others in our own time. What exactly did the students allege?’

‘There were many things, among them that I distributed pornographic material to them.’

‘And did you?’

‘One person’s pornography is another’s truth. For example there was a poem about an erotic relationship between a Roman soldier and Christ on the cross which was prosecuted as an obscene libel. I think that was the term. You are too young to remember the case.’

‘But not too young to have studied it, if only for its rarity. Did the material you distributed fall into that category?’

‘Not quite.’

‘You said you were accused of Satanism. What exactly is your subject, Dr Gilbert?’

‘This particular course is on the history of science showing how it developed from earlier disciplines…’

‘Like?’

‘What some would call alchemy.’

‘And you? What would you call it?’

‘Proto-chemistry is a less emotive term. The great Liebig himself said that to him alchemy was merely the chemistry of the Middle Ages.’

I was remembering the big old Liebig condenser in a glass case in the school lab like some medieval retort.

‘The alchemists have had a pretty bad press since Ben Jonson, as charlatans and cheats.’

‘You are familiar with the work of Jonson, Ms Green? Somewhat unusual in a lawyer I should have thought.’

‘I only switched to law halfway through my degree. I began with the humanities.’

‘And why was that?’The tables have been suddenly and subtly turned. I’m now the one being questioned.

‘I decided there was no money in teaching English literature at ‘A’ level until I qualify for a pension. I would find that life too…’

‘Dull? Believe me, Ms Green, in my experience the academic life can be far from dull.’

‘I need to see a copy of the material you distributed.’ Perhaps he had been foolish, had thought young minds were more flexible, instead of less, often rigid with preconceptions, and fear of humiliation or exposure to the unknown. At thirty-six I’m a lot mellower, more tolerant than I was at sixteen.

‘It wasn’t just the material I distributed. That should have been harmless enough. After all I’m not a complete fool. I know about the duty of care and in loco parentis. I’ll give you copies of course but the real damage, the evidence used against me, came from what I didn’t circulate, that was stolen from my briefcase when I left it, carelessly I now realise, lying on a desk during a coffee break. Someone must have photocopied the lot and put the original back.’

‘Then it wasn’t stolen?’

‘The theft of intellectual property by illegal copying is a crime.’

‘Yes of course but one that’s hard to prove. What exactly was copied?"

‘Stolen. It’s a manuscript.’

‘By you?’

‘No, no. It dates back to the early seventeenth century.’

‘Then it’s no longer in copyright.’

‘But it’s mine. I am the owner.’

‘I think we would find it difficult to make much of a case out of that. I’m sorry, we’ll need something better, stronger.’

‘But the use to which it was put, to discredit me, blacken my reputation.’

‘I shall need to see it before I can go any further, decide whether to take your case, whether I think you indeed have a case.’ I see him wilt but I’m determined to get back the initiative in this interview.

‘Surely I qualify as a lost cause.’

‘Even with a cause that seems lost I have to see at least a chance of winning, otherwise I wouldn’t make a living.’ There’s no need to tell him about the night job. ‘I work on a no win no fee basis you see.’

‘I’m willing to pay you a retainer, just for your advice and…and support. Since this began I’ve felt very isolated, alone.’

‘You’re not married?’

‘No, and you?’

I hold up my ringless left hand. ‘When can you let me have the material?’

He opens his briefcase and takes out a thick wad, bound in a blue plastic cover. ‘I have a copy here.’

‘How do I know it’s the same as the original?’

"You’ll have to trust me. The original is in cipher. This is a kind of translation.’