A Secret Alchemy Read Online Free Page A

a computer. I’m going to get as much publicity as I can when the archive transfers. San Diego are good at that. There might even be enough interest to persuade someone to republish At the Sign of the Sun and Moon . Perhaps even a Collected Letters .There’s so much interest in fine printing, these days. I get an inquiry from a researcher every few weeks. Red or white?”
    I’m familiar enough with publishers to know that her thinking is almost certainly wishful. And those research inquiries don’t sound enough to fill her days. How does she fill them? Once, she had three projects running most of the time: one in the clean light of early morning; research and reading in the bright, dull light of noon; and another as the sun slanted, picking out the grain and curve of every stone and blade of grass. I can’t see any sign of such things now. Is being the family historian, as she calls it, the only life left to her?
    There are prints on the walls. I can see four that were published as headings to a nicely produced anthology of poems about the seasons. A few years ago I found a copy secondhand in a Sydney bookshop, and gave it to Adam for some small anniversary. “Autumn” is the best, I think now; the foreground is a dried leaf, exquisitely curled, with every vein and rib as exactly and gloriously necessary as the arches of a Gothic window. But though the studio isn’t especially tidy, there’s no sign of fresh ink on the stained central table or any cutting tools or knives or fragments of wood or lino that would suggest work in progress. I wonder how much work she’s getting these days. Most of my childhood drawing and story-writing was on the back of her declared failures. When I was little at the Chantry, and everyone was busy, I used to crawl under her workbench in the studio, and find the tiny scraps lying on the floor, as secret as treasure. The wood ones were impossibly pale and fragile, no more than grains of gold and silver still magically clinging together, while the curls of lino were thicker and browner, reticulated like little caterpillars, still faintly smelling of warm linseed. I’d look up and see Izzy’s legs in their darned stockings and lace-up shoes hitched around the stool’s legs,and hear her heavy breathing. She never minded my being there, unless things were going wrong. Then she’d suddenly tell me to go, not unkindly, but without leaving any room for argument, and I’d crawl out and stand up, picking more debris from where it had stuck into my bare knees, and comforting myself with a hope that there’d be a new cake for tea or that Uncle Gareth would help me with my history homework.
    “Red or white?” asks Izzy, again.
    “Oh, red, please.”
    She heads for the kitchen. “Shan’t be a moment.” I see a copy of At the Sign of the Sun and Moon on the shelf.
    The roundel again on the title page, and a quotation I know by heart because it appears, set small, in every book the Press has ever issued: “As the Edda tells it, in the land of the giants lived a man named Mundilfoeri and he had two children: his daughter Sol was the sun, and his son Mani the moon.”
    I riffle through the pages.
    In 1936 Kay Pryor graduated from the Slade, and decided that the development of his painting would be best served by moving to Paris. He had never been as deeply concerned with the day-to-day work of the Solmani Press as his younger brother, Gareth, and his departure made little difference to the running of it. But, as William wrote in a letter to Beatrice Webb,
    With Kay gone, the house is quieter, but we realise how much his work as a painter has kept all us craftsmen up to the aesthetic mark: as he used to say, in the dramatic manner of the young, he had no allegiance to anything but art. Gareth in particular misses him; hehas looked up to him since they were boys, and it is always he, when some question of design comes up, who says, “What would Kay think? He’d know the answer.” But Kay’s