by Stephen Silvester
The little face looked up at him, or rather was turned towards him while the gaze was fixed stage right. The eyes were enormous, but they had to be, he supposed. If they had been in proportion to the rest of the face, then the pieces of enamel or glass or gems – he couldn’t make it out – which were the irises would have been too small to work with. The little man also looked a bit glum, perhaps from having to hold a lily (or was it a butterfly on a stick?) in each white-oven-gloved hand. Some had maintained it represented Alexander the Great, but the lily was unlikely to have been his weapon of choice. It was more feasibly Jesus, wielding some outsize keys to the kingdom and fed up with man’s backsliding. Whatever the truth might be, and he was sure that no one would ever know it, he was glad that Alfred’s Jewel was here, even if it now had to share a case with something called the Minster Lovell Jewel, pretty enough in its way, but it had no face.
Time for the pictures. The forest pictures. It was easier now. Over the years they had moved the Jewel all over the place, but now all he had to do was go out, turn right then right again through Early Italian Art and there they were. He always went for The Fire first; on balance he preferred it to The Hunt. He had once tried it the other way round, but had been unsettled by the experience; the chaos of The Fire had seemed even more contrived than the symmetry of The Hunt. But now he went automatically to The Fire, without even glancing at the other picture. Pleasure was to be found in being up close, looking at the details which told him different stories. He had been rebuked a few times in the past for being dangerously near the surface, but they didn’t bother any more; they were used to him. He had once heard a new attendant being told in a stage whisper: ‘Don’t worry about him, he’s a regular. Special,’ this last accompanied by a strange grimace that the maker thought expressive. He had smiled at that.
He started as always with the birds. These were panicking in their usual orderly and sky-filling way, except for a large imaginary specimen with a snipe’s bill and a ptarmigan’s body that seemed to have forgotten to open its wings, as though it had just flopped off a branch of the tree in the middle foreground. The larger animals didn’t seem that bothered by what was going on elsewhere, though the bull might be thought to be bellowing and the bear throwing up. The deer and the pigs were still sauntering off to the left, the satyr-faced deer almost stationary in its calm indifference, the satyr/pig behind it gazing at the viewer smugly, as if to say ‘I started that, you know. And I’ve got away with it.’ It was always from this point that he left the Cosimo.
What he liked about the Uccello was the solidity of the colours and the aloof broccoli-like trees. The picture was all about form, perspective, balance, and should have appealed to his sense of order, but there was something about the balletic crossing of the deer and hounds that disturbed him. And then there was that final tiny deer at the apex of infinity that may just have got away. Or not. He would never know. And that disturbed him even more.
Time to go back to the Jewel. As he looked again at the pale smooth face beneath its shiny lump of quartz he wondered, as he often did, about mediaeval shaving. Did they? Didn’t they? Representations on manuscripts and frescos were of saints and prophets, nearly all of them confidently hirsute. He himself would have liked to sport a solid, sculptured beard like the grimly silent Lewis chessmen, but had only managed to produce a straggling moustache that attracted drops of tea.
Once again he contemplated the inscription: AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN. ‘Alfred ordered me to be made’ was the translation offered. He didn’t like that, was sure the meaning was simpler, but he did like the original syntax, and the idea of the Jewel’s announcing itself. Not quite Kilroy woz ‘ere, more an unsubtle bit of self-praise, the antithesis of an anonymous donation. A better version suggested itself immediately in that gewyrcan. You didn’t need to have delved too deeply into Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer to see that it was the past participle of wyrcan, a word that had hardly changed in a thousand years; he had dipped every now and then into his ninth edition, third reprint copy that hadn’t been new when his mother had slogged her way through it as an undergraduate, but he could never get to grips with it. He had consulted his Concise Oxford Dictionary, which was old (fourth edition, sixth reprint), so it didn’t have words such as computer, chat show, lifestyle or Wi-Fi (though it did have wifie/wify), but this didn’t bother him, as he had no use for such things. Punk was there, but only as a prostitute or rotten wood, and rock was where it had always been, adjacent to a hard place. The dictionary confirmed that work had two past participles. He naturally plumped for the second (pr. rawt, arch. exc. as specified below). Alfred had me wrought, he decided, was it, definitively. Wrought, not unlike fraught, laden with cargo. He liked the sound, rolled it round in his mind and then his mouth, rapped on it alphabetically: bought caught court fought fort fraught (had that already) naught and nought ought and ort (a C.O.D. discovery, that) sought sort taught tort wart (s and all) and back to wrought. Wrought-up (nervous, hysterical, said the C.O.D.). Fraught with woe or danger,
A last look at the pictures. First The Forest Fire, by Piero di Cosimo. Then The Hunt in the Forest, by Paolo di Dono, called Uccello. Signor Uccello. Mr Bird. Cosimo didn’t lend himself to quick or comic translation. Perhaps he was simply cos(i)mic. And the Jewel? Alfred hadn’t actually made it himself, he had had it wrought. By a smith, or smiþ, as it would have been then, whose name would never be known.
His own provenance had been glossed over, too. ‘I’m what was once known as a single mother,’ he had been told.
‘I’d hardly want a double one, would I?’ he retorted in his dissatisfaction. ‘And why Geoffrey? Nobody’s called Geoffrey any more.’
‘Well, you are. I was going to call you Harold, but one has to move with the times.’ And that was that. His mother had been officially retired for some years after having spent her working life immersed in history (and books), finishing as a fellow of Keble. It had always struck him as funny that his mother, a woman, should be a fellow, which seemed a bit like chap or bloke. Don was even worse: Quixote with all his books and his bonkers quest, Juan donning but mostly doffing at the drop of an eyelid. Fellow wasn’t so bad: fellow citizen and fellow-feeling were reassuring and comforting. But his mother still hadn’t managed to wean herself completely from her academic addiction and was always somewhere lecturing or conferring or committing.
In general they rubbed along well enough together, not that their paths crossed that much away from the kitchen table. His mother made a point of cooking an evening meal, believing it important that they eat what she called properly at least once a day. She was also convinced (and was probably right) that he was incapable of feeding himself if for any reason she should not be there. She had tried more than thirty years before to teach him how to cook, for them both, to give her a break now and then, and for himself when she was gone. He had been willing enough – unusual for an adolescent – and once given instruction would carry out a task to the letter and to the end, but then, rather than ask what came next, would just stop, his mind already elsewhere.
He had always been like that, and it had made it difficult for him to find or keep a job. He now worked part-time in a small supermarket, stacking shelves. He had tried other things over the years, including work in the parks and gardens, which, with its pace and limited responsibility, he was suited for until a new time-and-motion broom found him too slow and meticulous, as had most employers everywhere else.
His mother had long ago given up on the cooking lessons. For all her academia she was quite a sensible woman. They would go on as they had; she would go; he would be left and would manage somehow. Or not. She would not be there to see it. At least he had somewhere to live; the house was hers, had been her parents’ and would be his.
Time to go; he had had what he needed for today. The bus stop was just round the corner, in Magdalen Street. He didn’t know the times of his bus, the number 6 to Wolvercote, but it was frequent enough, and if he just missed one, saw it at the lights just as they changed, he would cross over and sit on the steps of the Martyrs’ Memorial watching the world go by; if the weather was fine, that is, as it was today, otherwise he would wait in the entrance to the Odeon and look at the stills, although he never went to the cinema.
Now, as he was fingering the pass in his pocket, a ritual of anticipatory readiness, the bus appeared and they were soon trundling up the Woodstock Road. When he came to himself again he looked down and saw that he was still holding his pass. He reflected that his mother always renewed it for him; he didn’t know why she did, but it was just as well. He put it back in his pocket and stood up as they were nearing his stop. South Parade west, it was called. There must be a South Parade east somewhere, but he had never seen it. His mother was out when he got back. Probably in the Bodleian or at one of her committees or drinking sherry somewhere. It didn’t matter; she would return in time to prepare their evening meal. He went upstairs to his room at the top of the house and looked out of the window, as was his wont. The view was of a row of three-storey terraced houses with recessed gables above two floors of bay windows. It was a mirror image of his side of the street, except that he wasn’t in it. It was a dispiriting outlook. Summertown. Sometimes he thought there weren’t no cure for the Summertown blues; there had been a time when his mother had played a record called Live at Leeds nearly every day, so he knew all of the words, even if in places he didn’t see what they meant in combination. But there was a cure. He would be back there the next day. And the next. Alfred and Cosimo and Uccello would be waiting for him.
Stephen Silvester has lived and worked in Cambridge, the Czech Republic, Morocco, Mexico, London and Montreal, where he is now, and where he seems to have stopped. Some of his work has appeared in The Frogmore Papers, literally stories, Scribble and Sein und Werden.
