I showed Professor Belacqua's note to the porter at the entrance to Jordan College and he waved me through. 'Go on, young man. Prof's waiting for you!'
The wind was gusting around the cloisters and threatening to tug my muffler, and Viola, away from me. I had no wish to find out exactly how far I could stand having her taken away from me before it started to hurt, so I caught her in my hand and she burrowed into my pocket.
(I was talking about unsettling dreams before, wasn't I? Like finding yourself walking down the Broad with absolutely no clothes on, or soiling yourself in public, or falling from a high tower. The one which really gets to me is where I'm on a train, or sometimes it's an autobus, and Viola gets left behind by mistake and she's running after me but she can't catch up and we're being pulled further and further apart and it's hurting like the Seven Fires Of Hell and I'm crying out to the driver to stop and he won't or he doesn't hear me because my voice is all tiny and choked and I can't get off and the pain gets worse and worse and worse and I wake up screaming and screaming.
Oh. You have that one too. Sorry.)
I found the Professor's rooms and knocked on the door. 'Come in,' she called out from inside and I went in. She was sitting at her desk in the window, just as I had seen her the first time, but there was another chair placed next to hers.
'Peter!' She smiled at me. 'I'm so relieved you could come this time. I should have known that Sunday would be difficult for you. Would you like some chocolatl?'
'Yes please, Madam Professor.'
'Sit down there, then,' she pointed to the second seat, 'and I'll make some for you.'
I'm sure that her daemon Pantalaimon, who was sitting on the desk, looked up and winked at me again.
The Professor went into her little kitchen and made chocolatl for me and chai for herself, just as she had before. She returned holding a tray loaded with mugs and a plate of orange cakes. How did she know I liked them?
(Professor Belacqua's rooms were, as I later found out, rather unusual. She was the only female professor in the whole of Jordan College and special arrangements had had to be made to accommodate her. Most of the senior academic staff in Jordan had a small suite of rooms, which usually meant a study and a bedroom. They were expected to share bathrooms and privies with the other scholars on their stair. Of course, this wouldn't be right for Professor Belacqua so, despite some of the older and more hidebound dons in the Senior Common Room kicking up a fuss, a set of rooms was converted to provide her with a private bathroom and kitchen.)
I talked over what to do about the next part of my story with Jim, my friend and tame literary expert, while we were sitting in the snug of the Talbot Inn last Thursday lunchtime. You see, if this was a story I was making up for fun, or to sell on the bookstalls, it would all flow along smoothly, one part of the tale leading you, the eager reader, right on to the next one. If I was writing it in that way, as Jim said I should, then the things that happened later would happen now. No, try again.
What I mean is that there wouldn't be the gap between the interesting bits that there actually was. My first visit to Professor Belacqua would have been followed straight away by the business with the gyptians and the IID, as it was called. What Jim likes to call the "story arc", whatever that might mean.
But this was real life, my real life anyway, and I'm a clockmaker's apprentice, not a novelist, so you'll have to put up with what Jim calls a "bald and unconvincing narrative". Bastard.
What actually happened over the next few weeks is that I settled into a new routine. During the days I worked for my master, learning my trade the best I could. In the evenings I worked for myself. You see, I had to study for my City and Guilds exams in my own time. There are a number of qualifications you have to get before you can set up as a master in any Guild craft. Just having your master sign off your testimonial isn't good enough. I had to prove that I could read and write, and perform the simpler arithmetics. There was an ethics test too, which amused me. How could you take an exam in ethics?
Sundays were the same awful drag they ever were. But Saturdays…
Saturdays were the days I really looked forward to. Not to the extent that I didn't pay proper attention to my work during the rest of the week. I'd learned my lesson there. But on those blessed Saturdays, as I mounted the ancient stair to the Professor's rooms, I would feel my heart expanding in my breast, and my spirits lift.
Not that Professor Belacqua gave me an easy time. She had made it clear to me from the first, as we sat at her desk drinking our chai and chocolatl and munching our orange cakes, that learning to read the alethiometer was not a task to be taken up lightly.
'It took me many years of study before I could perform the simplest of readings without using the books.' She pointed to the shelf of well-thumbed books that I had noticed by her desk. 'I still need them for the more complex divinations.'
For a moment, that underlying sadness appeared again on her face. I didn't understand it then.
It was several weeks before she allowed me to touch the instrument again, to my great disappointment. I had to learn to concentrate and use my memory as I had never before. The spinning needle of the alethiometer didn't wait for the reader to make a note of where it stopped, or how often, or in what order. It just carried on whirling and it was up to me to remember what it did.
She gave me memory exercises to do, like remembering lists of names, or long strings of figures and saying them back to her. Sometimes she would interrupt me in the middle of my recitation and make me give her the fifth name in the list, or the third from the end. I often stumbled and got lost and sometimes I would cry out aloud and curse in my frustration.
She put up with my outbursts with great patience and understanding, never losing her temper or mocking my childishness. 'Try again, Peter. The first name in the list was "Henry". See if you can carry on from there in order.'
I screwed up the courage one day to ask her if I should give up my work with Master James. I still had this silly idea that I might be able to study with her every day. I'd live in the College, and…
'No, Peter.' She gave me that grave smile of hers. 'Master James is a good man. I can tell that from looking at you and talking to you. A bad master makes a bad apprentice, so they say. The last thing I want to do is to cause any trouble between you and your master. Besides, these are early days. You have a great deal to learn – about everything. Let's just go slowly, shall we?' She rested her hand briefly on my arm.
And so she twisted my heart around her little finger.
One other thing, which seemed unimportant at the time, happened in early spring, as the grass in the parks was beginning to grow again, and the hedgerows along the lanes starting to flower. Master called me over to his bench (I was polishing a spindle on the small lathe) and showed me an instrument that had been brought in for attention.
'What do you make of that, Peter?' He handed it over to me and I examined it, turning it over in my hands. It was a brass cylinder, about four inches in diameter and three inches high, with a white dial protected by a convex crystal. It looked a little like an autobus speedometer except that the dial was slightly unusual, as it had two hands, one above the other, each pointing to its own scale. The upper scale was calibrated from zero to ten in tenths and labelled "Attitude". The lower scale had no markings at all, but a strip of continuous colour, varying from blue on the left hand side to red on the right. Its legend read "Transvergence", which was a word I had never heard before.
I looked at the back of the instrument, expecting to find a drive shaft, or more likely two drive shafts, or maybe one or two sockets or a mounting point for a Bowden cable, but there was nothing there at all. The back plate was completely blank. It was made of a kind of slick, glossy black material that I had not seen before.
I gave it back to Master James. 'How does it work, Master?'
'I do not know.'
'What are we supposed to be doing with it? What's wrong with it?'
'The person who brought it in complained that the pointers were sticking. I suggested that we might replace the plain bearings with jewelled ones, and she agreed.'
'May I help you with it, Master?' The curious device intrigued me.
'Certainly, Peter.' Master James looked at me over the top of his demi-lune spectacles. 'I'm always pleased to see you taking an active interest in your work.'
The next day we stripped down the instrument and fitted the jewelled bearings. The mystery of how the pointers were driven was solved when we unscrewed the rear panel. There were coils of copper wire wrapped around an iron core and a couple of lodestones connected to the spindles. It must have been operated anbarically. For my own interest I made sketches of the internal layout and tried to work out how the copper wires were connected.
The instrument was collected two days later and five guineas left, which was an extraordinary amount of money for such a simple job. Master slipped an extra florin into my pay packet that Friday.
That was it, really. I could add that my mates in Shoe Lane used to take the mickey out of me for missing out on our Saturday afternoon trips (we had a pub football team, too, although I wasn't much of a player) and make coarse jokes about my dodgy relationship with an older woman (Fred had spilled the beans after I had told him about my visits to the Professor one boozy Friday lunchtime).
Jane got wind of it, too. I can't help it; I feel guilty when I think about how I treated her. She was a nice girl, and she liked me, and I liked her, but she was never in the same intellectual league as Lyra, and though I suppose I could have found a way for us to spend some time together, I'd have been thinking of someone else all the while, and it would have been no better than self-abuse when it came down to it. I kept telling myself that it was all for the best, and that I was being cruel to be kind, but it still felt like snobbishness to me. If I hadn't been so caught up with the Professor, I'd have found a way to treat her fairly. I mean; I'd found a way to balance my work with Master James and my study with her, so why couldn't I be nice to Jane?
If I'd had any sense I'd have mentioned it to the Professor, and she's have smiled her slow smile, and we'd have sat by the fire and drunk kaffee, and talked sensibly about it and she'd have shown me the way I should go. But for that to happen, I would have had to confess my feelings to her, and I could never do that. I was too afraid that she would turn me away if she knew that I had those kinds of feelings, if for no other reason than the strict College rules regarding teachers and their students. It wasn't so long ago, she told me once, that all the teaching and research staff in the College had to be ordained in the Church (which would, of course, have disqualified her as no woman then, or now, can be a minister) and take an oath of celibacy. Celibacy! Didn't she know what sweet torment it was for me to sit so close to her, breathing in the faint musky smell of her skin and hearing her soft voice murmuring ancient wisdom in my ears?
So the days and weeks passed, happily mostly, and spring glowed green, yellow and violet in the gardens and window boxes of the City of Oxford. It should have been a happy time, a good time, a time of new life, new promises and new hope for all of us. But it was not. For there was a word about, spoken out of the side of the mouth in hidden places by frightened men and women. An old word, an ugly word, a word that smelled of fear and times long past, and thought best forgotten. A word that was never spoken when children were around.
Gobblers.
