It struck me suddenly how young everybody was here — everybody but me, that is. None of them was interested in the brickwork.
The big station clock reached eleven-thirty, and I hadn’t done a damn thing all morning. In the afternoon, I told myself, I would resume the good fight. For now, I shut down the computer, gathered my jacket,
and walked out for an early and long lunch.
It was a gray day, unseasonably cold for mid-September. I bought a small orange juice and an avocado and bacon sandwich from a Pret A Manger. I walked as far as Saint Katherine’s Dock before settling to a bench and eating.
Then, restless, cold, reluctant to go back to work, I walked toward Liverpool Street.
On impulse I stopped into a cybercafй. It was half empty, despite the time of day, and the customers were either eating or chatting rather than logging on. I bought my time credits and a tall latte, and sat at an empty terminal, placing myself as far from anybody else as possible.
I logged onto my home email account, got into a search engine, and typed “Mary Queen Virgins” into the query line.
Of course I could have done this at work; most people would, I suppose. But my strict but useless sense of what was right tripped me up. I had always felt uncomfortable purloining the firm’s resources, from computer time to paper clips, always aware that in the end somebody somewhere would have to work a little harder to make up for my petty theft. Or perhaps it was just that I wanted to keep my private affairs out of the office.
Most of the results were dross: straightforward crank sites put up by religious nuts of one kind or another, a remarkably large number of churches with similar names, and the usual irritating clutter from the high schools and colleges that have developed the antisocial habit of placing the entire contents of their course materials on the public Internet, thus baffling every search engine yet devised. I skimmed past most of this stuff. I felt confident I could discard anything from outside Europe — in fact from outside the single-currency Euro zone, since I knew my father had once used euros.
At last I hit on a major-looking site. “THE PUISSANT ORDER OF HOLY MARY QUEEN OF VIRGINS — About Us — Information — Contact Us — Site Map — Genealogy Resources …” The URL showed it was based in Italy.
I dug into the link, and found myself facing a WELCOME screen. The wallpaper behind the lettering and icons was the face of the Madonna, taken from a medieval painting I didn’t recognize, a beautiful, sad, impossibly young visage. Beside her was a kind of corporate logo, a twist of chrome: it might have been an extended infinity symbol, or an outline of two fish face to face. The background colors were pale blue and white, colors I had always associated with my mother’s statues of the Virgin, and, just looking at the screen I felt oddly rested, oddly at home. As did, no doubt, every other Catholic boy logging on from around the world.
I poked around in the site. There were plenty of smiling female faces and beautiful old buildings. It was a busy design, I thought with my software professional’s eye, but it seemed to be comprehensive, with language options in English (the default), Italian, Spanish, French, German, and even Japanese, Chinese, and some Arabic tongues.
The order, it seemed, was an ancient Catholic grouping based in Rome itself. They were making money by offering a subscription genealogy service — something like the famous Mormon site, to which they had links, but if anything more comprehensive. Since I was calling from a UK address I was offered a range of British-focused resources, including a deeds database spanning from 1400 to 1900, five hundred maps of the UK, Ireland, and Europe, a charter of baronial pedigrees that went as deep as the thirteenth century, and information from censuses up to the end of the twentieth century. There was even a Titanic passenger list. They had 350 million names indexed and cross-referenced over five hundred years, boasted the pop-ups.
I skimmed through most of this stuff, wondering what it had to do with my father. As far as I know he had never been much interested in family trees — and certainly, if he had been paying a thousand quid a month for these services, he hadn’t had anything to show for it.
But then my eye was caught by a user ID in the contact line: casella24. My mother’s maiden name had been Casella.
I fired off a quick email, telling casella24 of my father’s death, and asking for details of his contacts with the order. Always assuming I had the right place.
I finished my coffee, logged off, and made my way back to work.
At the end of the afternoon Vivian took me out for the drink she had promised.
We made our way to a bar just off Liverpool Street. Called the Sphinx, the place had been made over several times during my working life in London. Now it was done out in faux brickwork painted a dull yellow, and specialized in acrid Egyptian coffee. It actually had loose sand scattered on the floor. But somehow the atmosphere worked.
Over the long bar was a series of TV screens. Most of them were tuned to music and sports, and somewhere a tinkling pop song was playing. But one screen carried a news channel. The newsreader was a girl with an achingly beautiful face, and over her shoulder was an image I recognized: it was the glistening tetrahedron that had been found in the Kuiper Belt. Evidently the Anomaly was still news, even days after my conversation with Peter. I felt vaguely surprised to see it again. The association brought back unwelcome memories of Manchester.
Vivian ordered a glass of house white and sipped it slowly. She asked me about the funeral. I tried to tell her something of my feelings of dislocation.
“Midlife crisis,” she said immediately. “Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
“I always looked forward to the twenty-first century. I just didn’t plan on being old in it. I mean, look at these arseholes …”
The gathering in the bar was a typical London noncommunity. There were some small groups at the tables scattered over the sandy floor, but an awful lot of people were alone, at the tables or the bar or walking across the floor — alone, that is, save for their cell phones, which they worked persistently.
“So young, and so fucking arrogant, as if they own the place. They walk around as if London were built yesterday, a playground just for them. And look at the way they thumb away at those damn phones.” I mimicked texting. “Another few years and kids will be born that are all giant thumbs and no brains, hopping around on knuckle joints.”
“You’re ranting, George,” Vivian said with her usual even good humor. “Maybe you’re right about the phones, though. It is an odd way to live, isn’t it, to ignore the people physically with you while contacting friends who might be hundreds of miles away? You’d think the new technology would bring us together. Instead it seems to be pushing us apart.”
That was why I’d always liked talking to Vivian. I didn’t know anybody else who would make such observations.
She was a solid-framed woman who wore business suits that were crumpled enough to show she didn’t take herself too seriously. She looked healthy; I knew she used a gym, and as a mother of two small daughters her home life must be active enough. Her hair was close-cropped over a broad face, with a small flattish nose and pale brown eyes. She had no cheeks, no chin, and would never have been called beautiful save by a lover, but in the frankness and humor of her gaze I had always known I was in the presence of a solid, grounded personality. To put it another way she was one of the few human beings to have slipped through Hyf’s recruitment filter.