I’m telling this to her. ‘Oh he is very careful, Jade. He has his attendance sheet signed regularly at the college to show he is real student.’
‘Well if there’s ever anything I can do to help…’
‘That is kind of you, Jade.’
I realise she doesn’t know what I do when I’m not riding delivery for them. ‘It’s just that I studied law…’ I trail off, not wanting to put myself forward, not wanting them to think they’ve been deceived and I’m not what I’ve seemed these past few months.
‘I will remember, Jade, if there is any trouble, thank you.’
In the morning I’m up betimes as old Pepys had it, determined to get some answers out of Gilbert. His cheque has been lying in my desk drawer since he gave it to me while I make up my mind whether I’m taking his case or not. Now I think I’ll have a look at his writing and see if I can tell anything from it. I take out the cheque, still folded neatly in half as he passed it across the desk. I never look at clients’ cheques in front of them, out of some deep-seated embarrassment about money learnt from Linda and Rob. First it would be rude, as if you doubted their honesty. Second, it would infringe one of the sacred tenets such as: never flash your cash in public or even count it; never inspect cheques or query bills. The financial delicacies of a vanished age when a gentleman’s word was his bond and to show an interest in lucre, your own or someone else’s, was vulgar and bourgeois. Now we reel from fraud to scandal with our creative accounting and ethos of grab-all-you-can in this free-market free-for-all where the Darwinian survival of the fittest is jungle law.
I flatten the cheque and study the writing. Very small and neat like a monastic script. The date, my own name, the amount. Hang about. It isn’t Gilbert’s signature. The name on the cheque is Alastair Galton. I can’t wait for his buzz on the entry phone to confront him. I’m trying out opening questions in my head such as ‘Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you playing at?’ But while I’m waiting I run a quick search on this new name and get a complete blank. At least Adrian Gilbert existed, once upon a time. This guy is totally unknown. The buzzer sounds; punctual as usual. I let him in. I say good morning, shake hands and sit him down. I’m careful not to address him by name.
‘You haven’t paid in my cheque, Ms Green.’
The breath is almost knocked out of me by his audacity. ‘That’s because I didn’t recognise the name on the cheque,’ I lie.
‘I rather expected you to query it on the telephone.’
‘You told me when we first met that you were Dr Adrian Gilbert.’
‘The “Dr” is correct.’
‘Why did you give me a false name? I warned you about trying to deceive your own lawyer.’
‘Yes, you did. Quite properly. But you see when I first came to you, you weren’t my lawyer. I knew nothing about you. I wanted to see how suitable you were before I entrusted my case to you. You are, after all, very young and…’
‘And a woman?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Dr Galton, if that is your name, there’s enough gender discrimination in the legal profession already without you adding to it.’
‘Have you decided to represent me?’
‘Have you decided you really want me to with my obvious disabilities?’
‘I haven’t cancelled the cheque.’
‘And I haven’t paid it in. So we have reached some kind of stalemate.’
‘Stasis equilibrium, you could say.’
What the fuck am I doing with this guy? Do I need all this? ‘I think we should begin again. Your name is really Alastair Galton?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you pick the name of Adrian Gilbert?’
‘I regard him as some sort of spiritual ancestor.’
‘Why are you anxious to identify with a long dead necromancer, the friend of John Dee who was both self-deceiving and deceived others and was conned in his turn?’
‘I see you have been doing your homework, Ms Green. That’s good. Gilbert was in many ways a brilliant man. He lived at a time still deficient in information whereas, we’re told, we live in the information society although I’m not ever quite sure what that means, and perhaps we too are deceiving ourselves. You know as well as being a respected physician he was involved in navigation and the quest for the Northwest Passage. He was a fine mathematician, a would-be discoverer who never put to sea.’
‘An astrologer?’
‘So was Sir Isaac Newton, a scientific genius comparable in his own field to Shakespeare, in a time when astrology and true astronomy shaded into each other.’
‘Still, why pick his name?’
‘Because he is part of the story. And also I wanted to give you a clue, an Ariadne’s thread to follow to see whether you could find your way out.’
It may indeed be my way out. You were testing me.’
‘And you have come through splendidly if I may say so.’
‘Dr Galton, there’s something you should understand now before we go any further, if we are to go further. I may be younger than you and female but I will not be patronised. It wouldn’t be the first time either that I turned something down because I refused to be patronised.’
Suddenly I see the counsel room at Settle and Fixit and the senior partner, Henry Radipole, saying to James Chalmers, and only half joking: ‘Can’t you keep your wife under control?’ when she had tried to intervene in the discussion of a case they’d both been working on.
It’s difficult for a man of my generation…’
‘I know you are in your late forties. Young enough to know better. Who is Dr Alastair Galton?’
There’s a pause while he decides what to tell me. I stare him out across the desk.
‘Very well then. I am nobody. I tell you to save you the trouble of looking because you will find nothing on me in any reference book. I once published a monograph on white witches, long out of print. You, I imagine, will have looked me up on that thing,’ he waves a hand at my desktop PC, ‘and the internet where they will know nothing of me either. I still prefer books myself of course. I see that electric gadget not as an instrument for greater knowledge and freedom but as an instrument for censorship, as a spoon-feeder which supplies you with what other people think you should know. You will find my doctorate in the records of the University of London at Senate House, together with a copy of my thesis.’
‘What was it on?’
‘Oh, witchcraft of course.’ He smiles.
‘They gave you a doctorate for that?’
‘It was presented as a revisitation of Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe which a number of people, academics that is, in the seventies had tried to discredit.’
I’m lost. I don’t know where this conversation is going. ‘To get back to your CV.’
‘I followed the usual course, a BA in history, and my doctorate. Then I found a nice little post in a teacher training college.’
‘The original before Wessex, St Walburgha?’
‘Exactly so.’
‘Presumably you weren’t engaged to teach young ladies witchcraft.’
Galton, as I now have to think of him, even gives another little smile. ‘That was my private research. I taught them just the conventional history they would need to pass on to their pupils.’
‘So you stayed when Wessex took over?’
‘I