The Weaver Fish (8 page)

10

Anna looked across the table at her friend. Having rustled impatiently through the newspaper for several minutes, he was suddenly concentrated in his reading. She waited.

Tøssentern folded the broadsheet neatly into quarto. ‘Apparently, there was an interesting lecture in our town last night. Quite dramatic, by the sound of it—at least, the
Tribune
sent their theatre critic to write an account of it.'

He resumed reading for some seconds, while Anna watched. They were sitting in their newly refurbished conservatory, extended into a rear garden that provided both privacy and natural light. Since the balloon crash in the Ferendes he was spending more time at home, and renovations at Chaucer Road seemed part of some instinctual re-domestication that Anna hoped would promote his recovery.

‘Read it to me.' Anna reached out for her tea.

‘It's by Simon Vestry, headed “Speechless, Eloquent and Very Personal”.'

Tøssentern placed the paper on the breakfast table.

‘What do you think?' he asked.

Anna was staring into the garden. ‘Interesting. I usually enjoy Vestry's reviews. What do you make of this one, though—is he the deceiver or the deceived?' She reached for the paper and glanced at the article.

‘You're unconvinced in some way?'

Anna was surprised at the circumspection in his voice.
‘Of course I'm unconvinced. I'm unconvinced because it's preposterous. Starting with the name “Spoker”—what is that, past tense of speaker? Do we know if Sidney Spoker even exists? And “Barnabas Bending”. That is surely satirical.'

‘I wish I'd been there.' This came with a slightly rueful note.

‘Assuming it actually happened, Edvard. Anyway, deception is like lust—nearness weakens the senses. You might have been manipulated along with the others.'

‘What about Vestry's question?' Tøssentern sounded a little defensive.

‘Yes.' She thought for a few seconds. ‘Impressive if it's real. In that case I'd like to know more about the Speaker. If it is genuine, why would someone devote themselves to such supreme service?'

‘I know,' said Tøssentern. ‘Equally, if it's not genuine, why would they bother, when one or other seems perfectly able to produce a scholarly lecture?'

They were both looking out at the slowly moving figure of Thornton, their gardener, who was clipping an ancient hedge. Anna tried to imagine those inaudible movements conveying meaning different from the act they witnessed.

She was also thinking that Edvard's normal analytic self seemed oddly blunted, and wondered how that fitted with his general unsettledness of recent months. It had crossed her mind that he was depressed. But here, at least, was an enthusiasm to encourage, if also an uncharacteristic credulity to temper. She spoke first.

‘Perhaps we should investigate—decide whether Spoker's choreography in the chair is differentiable enough to convey vocabulary and syntax, all that abstraction, and emotion. Find correlations with the text; there's the secret, surely.'

She recognized her own curiosity increasing as she spoke. Tøssentern needed no persuasion.

‘I'll find out where the lecture tour is going.' He reached out to reclaim the paper.

11

Sir. It has come to my attention that I am reported in your pages to have been present at a certain event in Cambridge recently. Moreover, I am said to have raised sympathetically, in a public discussion, the matter of legal reform.

I must object most strenuously to these falsehoods. I was nowhere in the vicinity of the place described. Whilst there is, indeed, an old lecture room in this village too, it has, I believe, no especial connection to chemistry. In any event, I was not there either. On the evening in question I was giving solace in the home of a parishioner who had lately lost her husband in the most distressing of circumstances, on which I shall not here elaborate except to say that it was not for the first time. I am pleased to relay that with further ministry she is making a wonderful recovery and at last bridge night was quite cheery.

Above all, I am most aggrieved to be portrayed a proponent of criminal code modernization, to which I am emphatically opposed. There are many who can attest to my good character in this regard.

On another matter, I take this opportunity to announce our upcoming programme of Postlepilty Symposia, the first to be on the subject of ‘Recognizing Cant'. Enquiries are welcome and can be directed to my curate's office.

Might I conclude with a note for naturalists among your readers: the year's first swints alighted Sunday last.

Yours etc
Barnabas Bending MA
The Vicarage
Meniscus Pond Common
Postlepilty nr Ely, Cambs

Simon Vestry replies:
I thank your correspondent for his illuminations. As other alert readers would also have appreciated, ‘The Reverend Barnabas Bending' was a whimsical invention to meet the urgent need of anonymity in the course of a serious experiment, whilst by its nonsense giving assurance that it could not possibly attach to a real person. I congratulate the author on a most delicate titration of hyperbole into brine, and for his amusing meta-statement on existential drift, the economy of conceits and proto-Christian fictive irony. Should he care to supply a believable name and address I would be pleased to negotiate a schedule of identity sharing.

12

In the weeks following, their enthusiasm for investigating the Spoker event slowly dissipated, replaced by more urgent matters. Tøssentern had been invited to deliver a lecture to the Lindenblüten Society, and his publisher's deadline for the MacAkerman work was looming. And he wasn't completely well. Regular visits to Addenbrooke's Hospital for blood tests seemed to wear him down, despite the results documenting progressive recovery from the profound anaemia, protozoal attack and immune compromise his system had survived.

Anna had been busy clinically, and rather preoccupied with acute staffing problems at the Compton. She continued to keep a professional eye on Edvard's mood, with a view to referring him to a colleague. Returning from the dead, whatever expression it took, was not easy on the mind.

One thing arising out of the Spoker business that did maintain their interest was the daily correspondence in the
London Tribune
regarding the existence of a Rev Barnabas Bending. Letters came from archbishops, aldermen, parishioners, university registrars, schoolmasters, military officers and others purporting to have that name, or not, on some list, or know that person, or not, in the community. Amongst these, and by far the most ill-tempered, and increasingly shrill, were those from individuals claiming actually to be that person not present at the Spoker lecture on the night in question. Simon Vestry, after his first reply, maintained a discreet, and probably infuriating, silence.

To Anna and Edvard, the mystery became more diverting than Spoker himself, and they had spent a recent Sunday afternoon driving up to Ely in search of Postlepilty and its vicarage. They
weren't successful and somehow, relaxing in a serene and charming village teashop, their quest was deflated of all urgency.

This morning they were sitting again at the breakfast table, where Tøssentern picked up the
Tribune
and, as had become his habit, opened it first at the Letters page. He hunched forward. ‘Listen to this, Anna.'

‘Goodness,' said Anna. ‘Poor man, if he's really out there. Declared non-existent by some crude plebiscite.'

‘Democracy isn't perfect,' said Tøssentern. ‘But now the idle will swarm to another paranoia, you'll see.'

Anna stood up from the table. At the garden door she stopped and asked, ‘Edvard, you weren't the author of any of those, were you? The first, perhaps?'

‘No, no, no. How could I fail to find Postlepilty if I lived there?' It was clear that no confession would be forthcoming, at least this morning, and she turned back to the door.

‘I'm going to check progress in the greenhouse.'

While she was in the Ferendes, Anna had listened to many accounts of the central nervous effects of the local seki fruit, particularly its toxicity after fermentation. She naturally wondered if it might contain novel psychotropic ligands that her basic science colleagues at the Compton Institute would be pleased to research. She had sent some seki seeds back to Cambridge with a request to their gardener, Thornton, that he deal with them as best he could.

The result was startling; several vines were now at least three
metres tall, straining to reach the glasshouse roof. Thornton was smart, and methodical. He had sought advice about an appropriate Latin square design, experimenting with different feeding regimes and soil chemistry, and was recording all this in a slightly grubby exercise book. Although he had the appearance, and in some ways the demeanour, of an unreformed poacher, there was formal horticultural training somewhere in his past.

When she entered the greenhouse, Thornton was high on a stepladder in front of the seki vines. Hearing her, he reached up to a roof beam to brace himself before looking down.

‘Watch yourself, Miss Anna, there are glass shards up here could fall.'

Anna retreated a few steps to a workbench, consulting the logbook while she waited. This morning there was already an entry, a single neatly written word: ‘Swints'.

A few minutes later, Thornton carefully descended the ladder, holding in one hand the remnants of a broken glass tile. He crossed over to Anna and held out the shards, pointing to a bright yellow stain on many of the broken edges.

‘Swint blood,' he said, then placed the pieces in a bucket stored below the bench. His hands were protected by aged red-leather mittens, and he rubbed the palms together to dislodge glass splinters.

‘Swints got in?'

He nodded. ‘Six.'

‘How did you get them out?'

Thornton had been facing away, leaning over the bucket. Now he turned to look at Anna, and she was slightly shocked to see the emotion in his eyes. His usual nature was matter-of-fact with little display even of humour, or enthusiasm. Now he looked about to cry. She had seen him like this only once, when telling him that Edvard was missing and thought to have died. He answered by gesturing toward the other end of the greenhouse, where the furnace was alight.

‘They were all dead, Miss.'

He had noticed some broken glass amongst the seki pots, and stepped over to retrieve it, returning to dispose of it into the bucket. ‘Fly all that way, then die here. Whole family. Very sad.'

‘They broke in? Broke the glass? Was it already cracked?'

‘Not cracked. They broke it, right there.'

He pointed, rather needlessly it seemed to Anna, to the defect in the roof above the stepladder. After a few seconds, she reconsidered; Thornton was never one to act needlessly. She looked at the roof again. The missing pane was directly above the highest reach of the tallest seki vine.

‘Do you think the seki attracted them in some way, Mr Thornton?'

Thornton had his back to her. He was leaning over the bench measuring out a sheet of glass.

‘They all had the leaf in their beaks, Miss.'

Anna felt a sudden chill. She walked around the bench in order to see Thornton's face. He glanced up for a moment, then returned to scoring the glass. Neither spoke for several minutes. Eventually Anna said, ‘It can't have poisoned them, could it?'

‘Couldn't say,' he replied. ‘Very quick if it did.'

Using the edge of the workbench, he broke the pane along his score line.

‘First one, died of bleeding, I'd thought.'

‘But they all had seki leaf in their beaks?'

‘I said, Miss.'

He had fitted a work belt and loaded it with some tools and a silicone extruder. At the base of the ladder he stopped, his back to Anna, looking at the floor. He stayed like that for several seconds. Then he said something barely audible. Anna repeated what she thought she heard.

‘Crust?'

Thornton turned his head toward her. He still spoke quietly, but this time she understood.

‘They were crossed, Miss. Placed themselves in the cross.'

Anna felt the chill again. ‘Show me, please, Mr Thornton. Exactly.' She collected six assorted paint and lacquer tins from the benchtop and positioned them within his reach.

He took each singly, and placed it meticulously on the floor, below the largest seki plant. The six formed an unmistakable Christian cross. She now discerned a small yellow bloodstain where he had positioned the first.

Even Anna was moved. Thornton seemed to have lost all will and had seated himself on the floor, leaning back against the stepladder, his eyes closed. But she had to ask, ‘Exactly like that?'

He shook his head, looking up, eyes red with distress. ‘More perfect,' he whispered hoarsely.

Anna stared at him, at once sympathetic and disturbed. Then she looked around the greenhouse. She had always loved this miniature crystal palace of exotic scents, luxuriance, and sensory contradiction that somehow combined absurd fragility with elemental defiance. Now she was seeing only the great overbearing vines, the cross, and the flaming incinerator, its newly stigmatized warmth escaping through the broken roof.

She thought of her first taste of seki fruit with Nicholas, that almost religious advent in her being that was both surprising and familiar. And within the exquisiteness of that memory she was confronted by the mixture of truths in her own motivation; that the long, unnatural journey of the seed from the Joseph Plateau was less for science than for sensuality.

She thought of the swints, driven to fly, their blood changing during migration from dark red in the south to brilliant yellow in the north—deceiving ornithologists for centuries that they were two species rather than one. And she remembered the old traditions, hardly taken seriously, that they were always seen thriced, and whatever the privations of their flight they alighted only on property of the Church.

She looked again at Thornton, a man burdened and diminished and made solitary by his knowledge. And in the moment, being around him, her concern and caring were muted by an oppressiveness and affecting superstition that she needed to resist.

For relief, and her own reassurance, she turned to the door. Only minutes before she had entered there with delight; now she stood as interloper in a strange and inhospitable, hermetic place.

But for now, in an act of wilful desecration, she collected the paint tins and returned them to the bench, undoing their symbolism by studied rearrangement. Then she gathered a
canvas chair stored beneath a potting table and unfolded it before Thornton.

‘Sit here,' she said with authority, ‘I'm going up to the house to bring us back some tea.'

Thornton lifted himself from the floor, grasping the ladder for support. He dragged the chair some further distance from the vines and settled into it, looking toward the door.

‘Can you explain it, Miss?'

When it was realized that the two varieties of
swint
were actually one, the single species was newly designated
tinctoria.
This reflected a belief that the mechanism of blood colour change was akin to that seen in certain indicator chemicals known to be responsive to some ambient condition (such as litmus and pH). In fact, the chemical physiology is far more complex. The northern yellow blood cell (xanthocyte), which performs the same oxygen-carrying function as the southern erythrocyte, arises from a distinct cell line, and the two differ in chemistry, morphology and rheology. The molecular substrate for oxygen carriage in the xanthocyte is a heteroglobin in which the analogue of the heme moiety is also built on a (albeit radically altered) porphyrin ring but, fundamentally, this attaches gold in place of iron. As in haemoglobin, there are four metallic atoms per macromolecule, each binding one oxygen molecule cooperatively (evidenced by the shape of the oxygen–heteroglobin dissociation curve). Protein-complexed gold and iron are alternately stored and mobilized within a specialized lobule of the liver known to early anatomists (astoundingly, as it turns out) as the
bursa alchemica.
The dietary source of gold is thought to be the seki vine, which is believed to concentrate the metal in alluvial soils, and on which the swint appears to be an obligate feeder. The reason for the switch to gold heteroglobin in the northern hemisphere remains a mystery, but current conjecture focuses on whether magnetic field sensitivity might be improved in the absence of noise from circulating iron. If so, this would confer a survival advantage in navigational efficiency during migration. Unfortunately, it also conferred a disadvantage: the reader may recall an influential quasi-documentary entitled
In Gold Blood
which exposed a short-lived, despicable industry in trapping and slaughtering swints in order to harvest their gold. Had those perpetrators first consulted a numerate physiologist, they would have learned that their projected precious-metal yield was miniscule, and saved themselves much effort and the condemnation of world clergy.

Regarding the latter, incidentally, it needs to be stated that the Church has not otherwise been a selfless advocate for this creature. The identification of the swint with the Sacred dates at least to the first century, when several sources (
Book of Teachers, Iconoclastes,
the
Apostolikon,
and the
Gospel of St Ignorius
) describe three birds (a Trinity) alighting on Calvary, and bleeding gold onto the Cross. These testaments, and the iconology they invite, suffer an unrestful accommodation within the Catholic canon, being quite definitely out of favour now for nearly a millennium.