can compete with Mrs Gao’s chicken chow mein, her sweet and sour pork, her crispy aromatic duck, her sauced king prawns. They have their regulars for home delivery, some as I know from a longish way off, and the locals who’ve come there since the seventies when the Gaos first opened up. I wonder silently whether Mary herself sees a little light in this sudden darkness, that life might be different, Streatham Hill left behind at last and Bruce Lee’s successor kicking down first the door and then the counter to carry her off. If she does she doesn’t voice any such rebellion but shares her parents’ worried expressions.
Tonight my saddlebox is packed full for a dinner party in Clapham Old Town’s elegant heart where the tele presenter and his architect wife will boast over the steaming dishes, transferred daintily to the blue and white bowls and salvers, of ‘this little place we always go to, so authentic’.
‘Hi, Jade,’ Diana Bosco says as she opens the door. ‘How’s it going?’ She takes the thick brown paper carrier bags I hand her, without waiting for an answer. The first time she saw me helmeted in the dazzling burst of security light, she stepped back quickly, half closing the door on its chain. I took off my helmet.
‘Oh my God, I was really afraid back there but you’re a girl. I get so nervous opening up after dark. Will you always bring our order? I’ll feel much safer if you do. In future I’m going to ask if you’re on that night before I get in the food.’
‘I don’t work at weekends unless there’s an emergency.’
‘What about Friday?’ She flashes out the question.
‘I’m there on Fridays as a rule.’
‘Then that’s when we’ll have our dinner parties.’
So I bring her comfort food and she makes the gesture of concern that salves her conscience, and doesn’t ask whether I like to ride around in the dark and cold, and often wet, or skidding on the mush of fallen plane leaves big as saucers, like the dog’s eyes in the fairy tale, with rain slashing at my face through the visor and the other traffic trying to crush or shoulder me into the gutter.
Tonight it’s clear and moonlit. The rest of my drops are in a tight radius from the kitchen, out and back, out and back, out and back. This is the boring bit when you begin to lose concentration, cut familiar corners. At last I drop off the final order and am free to head home with my own supper in the box behind. Coming out I had to weave through cars, buses and vans fleeing the city. Now the road’s almost deserted. I ride by the lit pub windows of Brixton with their customers aswim inside like koi or darker mullet, and jostling queues for clubs held back by brawny bouncers: thin-clothed kids shivering in the damp air. I zoom on past the drowsing Oval and into the theatreland of Old and New Vics where the Thai and Italian restaurants are still packed and noisy. Their doors open to let in the post-play crowd and let out the wafts of garlic, olive oil, wine and coffee to sting the palates of passers-by. Then it’s into the grim underpass beside the glass canopy and grandiose steps of Waterloo Station, the automatic gunfire of my engine bouncing back off walls and roof, and down to my own train-shaken pad. I haul the bike into its ground-floor garage and climb up to my familiar shell, wondering again what was warehoused inside these walls to be trained down to Dover or what exotics could have waited here to be carried off. One day I mean to look it all up and know for sure. I peel off my leathers and run my hand through my hair flattened by the helmet.
In the back kitchen I get an open bottle of Pinot Grigio out of the fridge, pour myself a big glass while a plate is warming, lay out my silvery dishes, spoon and chopsticks, and switch on the late review to watch while I eat. The interviewer is nagging and prodding, pulling on a hangnail of dispute in the hope of drawing blood. With half my mind I’m turning over Gilbert’s case and what I’ve had time to read of Amyntas Boston’s memorial. So far it’s hard to see the harm in it. But then it’s all a matter of viewpoint and selection. What exactly did Gilbert distribute to his students and what commentary did he give them on the material? I pull a sheet of paper towards me and start to put down questions I should ask him. And suddenly I realise that I’m already hooked. In my head I’ve taken on this case I don’t really understand or see the shape of. I want more background.
I’ll run another check on the website for Wessex Uni but I think I need more than they may decide to tell me, more than the acceptable face of the college in competition with all its rivals. I need to go there, see for myself, get the feel. I finish my plateful, put the cardboard lids over the remains to be heated up for lunch tomorrow, pressing down the frilled soft metal rims, and stack the little dishes in the fridge. Then I go through to my office to surf for Wessex and input my thinking so far.
Is it Amyntas Boston’s memorial that’s turning this, that ought to be just case notes, into a diary, a commonplace book of my own? I must watch myself. I’m in danger of becoming one of those dreary, pitiful loners whose only relationships are on screen, pseudonymous trawlings. ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ That was in our GCE set-book anthology. The last lines had a bleakness I still remember in moments when they might be best forgotten.
And how the silence surged softly backward
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
There were ghostly listeners in that otherwise empty house, like the silent observers of messages we send out into cyberspace, that can log on to you, track you down and even offer you stuff you haven’t asked for, porn sites and cheap fags, enticements to fly away or join a cult.
Tomorrow I’ll pay Wessex a visit. It can’t take more than an hour from London. What excuse can I give to get on to the campus if they’re very security minded? I could be considering enrolling for a course, needing application forms and a full brochure, more than I can download from their website. Or I could be delivering something. A letter to the principal. Make a note of his name: the Revd Luther Bishop. Or I could just ring for an interview with him. Tell the truth. Say I’ve been asked to represent Dr Gilbert and I want to hear his, the college’s, side of the case. Tell the truth until you’re forced to lie.
He might refuse to see me or it might take time to get an appointment. I need to be doing something. After all this is potentially the most interesting case I’ve had since I set up on my own. True it’s only a tribunal not a full court or even magistrates’ but compared with the messy divorce settlements, hedge and right of way claims, conveyancing and inheritance squabbles that have come my way it is High Court stuff. I can see me as a legal Lara Croft slaying ghostly monsters or Buffy slapping down vampires, except that I’m not sure Gilbert isn’t himself some kind of shapechanger or at least charlatan.
Already I’m empathising with that dead girl, Amyntas Boston. If she was tried for witchcraft who did she have to defend her? What would I plead if I could go back to her time and her trial? I wouldn’t be allowed of course. In spite of Portia, who anyway had to dress up as a young man, not many women would have had the knowledge, let alone the chance, to stand up in court except as witnesses or defendants.
‘A Daniel come to judgement. O wise young judge.’ What was Shakespeare getting at with his boy, girl, boy impersonations, especially there in The Merchant? That it was all right to pretend, to lie, to turn nature and society upside down in the interest of justice? Or was it just about what women will do for love? None of the guys in the play are worthy of her. Won’t she get bored with Bassanio after a few years of marriage and children? So many of the plays call out for a sequel, a what happens next to his Olivia, Rosalind, Kate, Beatrice. Maybe they’ll be widowed and take over the running of vast estates like Amyntas Boston’s countess. It’s the soft ones he provides an endstop to with death: Cordelia, Ophelia, Desdemona.
Then there’s the female physician in what’s it called, who cures the king and gets her man as reward. Maybe he based cool women like that on the Mistress Fittons he saw around the court, flouting convention in a flurry of cloak and feathered bonnet.
Amyntas Boston’s final sentences I read last night sound as if s/he was falling in love with the countess, a Cherubino or Rose Cavalier situation, the kind of admission you’d pounce on in court. ‘Please turn to File E, item 29. Have you got it? Please read it carefully. Do you recognise those words? Do you remember writing