Possession (10 page)
Authors: A.S. Byatt
“And was jealous.”
“Of course.”
“And the literary letters she refers to? Is it known who they were from? Or if they were connected to the ‘prowler’?”
“Not as far as I know. She had abundant letters from people like Coventry Patmore who admired her ‘sweet simplicity’ and ‘noble
resignation.’ Lots of people wrote. It could have been anyone. You think it’s R. H. Ash?”
“No. I just—I think I’d better show you what I have.”
He brought out the photocopies of his two letters. Whilst she was unfolding them, he said, “I should explain. I found these. I haven’t shown them to anyone else. No one knows they exist.”
She was reading. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I kept them to myself. I don’t know why.”
She finished reading.
“Well,” she said, “the dates fit. You could make up a whole story. On no real evidence. It would change all sorts of things. LaMotte scholarship. Even ideas about
Melusina
. That Fairy Topic. It’s
intriguing.”
“Isn’t it? It would change Ash scholarship, too. His letters are really rather boring, correct and distant really—this is quite different.”
“Where are the originals?”
Roland hesitated. He needed help. He needed to speak.
“I took them,” he said. “I found them in a book and I took them. I didn’t think about it, I just took them.”
“Why?”
Stern but much more animated. “Why did you?”
“Because they were alive. They seemed
urgent
—I felt I had to do something. It was an impulse. Quick as a flash. I meant to put them back. I will. Next week. I just haven’t, yet. I don’t think they’re
mine
, or anything. But they aren’t Cropper’s or Blackadder’s or Lord Ash’s, either. They seemed private. I’m not explaining very well.”
“No. I suppose they might represent a considerable academic scoop. For you.”
“Well, I wanted to be the one who does the work,” Roland began innocently, and then saw how he had been insulted. “Wait a minute—it wasn’t like
that
at all, not like that. It was something
personal
. You wouldn’t know. I’m an old-fashioned textual critic, not a biographer—I don’t go in for this sort of—it wasn’t
profit—
I’ll put them back next week—I wanted them to be a secret. Private. And to do the work.”
She blushed. Red blood stained the ivory.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I should be; it was quite a reasonable assumption and I can’t begin to imagine how anyone would
dare
to whip two manuscripts like that out of sight—I’d never have the nerve. But I do see you weren’t thinking in these terms. I do really.”
“I just wanted to know what happened next.”
“I can’t let you Xerox Blanche’s diary—the spine won’t stand it—but you can copy it out. And go on hunting through those boxes. Who knows what you’ll find. No one was hunting for Randolph Henry Ash, after all. Can I book you a guest room until tomorrow?”
Roland thought. A guest room seemed infinitely attractive; a quiet place where he could sleep without Val, and think about Ash, and take himself at his own pace. A guest room would cost money he hadn’t got. Also there was the Day Return.
“I have a Day Return ticket.”
“We could change that.”
“I’d rather not. I am an unemployed postgraduate. I haven’t got the money.”
Now she was wine-red. “I hadn’t thought. You’d better come back to my place. I’ve got a spare bed. It’s still better than buying another ticket now you’re here—I’ll cook supper—and tomorrow you can look at the rest of the Archive. It would be no trouble.”
He looked at the shiny black trace of the faded brown writing. He said, “All right.”
Maud lived on the ground floor of a red-brick Georgian house on the outskirts of Lincoln. She had two large rooms, and a kitchen and bathroom constructed from what had been a warren of smaller domestic offices; her own front door had once been the tradesmen’s entrance. The University owned the house; the upper floors were university flats. The kitchen, quarry-tiled, looked out onto a courtyard paved in red brick with various evergreen shrubs in tubs.
Maud’s living room was not what might have been expected of
a Victorian scholar. It was bright white, paint, lamps and dining-table; the carpet was a Berber off-white. The things in this room were brilliantly coloured in every colour, peacock, crimson, sunflower, deep rose, nothing pale or pastel. Alcoves beside the fireplace held a collection of spotlit glass, bottles, flasks, paperweights. Roland felt wakeful and misplaced, as though he was in an art gallery or a surgeon’s waiting-room. Maud went away to make supper, refusing offers of help, and Roland called the Putney flat, where there was no reply. Maud came through with a drink and said, “Why don’t you read
Tales for Innocents?
I’ve got a first edition.”
The book was scuffed green leather, with faintly Gothic lettering. Roland sat on Maud’s huge white sofa by the wood fire and turned the pages.
Now there was once a Queen, who might have been thought to have everything she could desire in the world, but had set her heart on a strange silent bird a traveller had told of, which lived in the snowy mountains, nested only once, raised its gold and silver chick, sang once only, and then faded like snow in the lowlands.…
There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come, nor set a fire so that smoke did not pour into the room, a useless, hopeless, dreaming daughter, to whom her mother would often say that she should try to fend for herself in the wild wood, and then she would know the value of listening to advice, and of doing things properly. And this filled the perverse daughter with a great desire to go even a little way into the wild wood, where there were no plates and no stitching, but might well be a need of such things as she knew she had it in herself to perform.…
He looked at the woodcuts, which were described on the title page as “Illustrations by B.G.” A female figure with a scarfed head, flying apron and great wooden shoes, standing in a clearing surrounded by
dark pine trees full of white eyes among their crossing arms of needles. Another figure, wrapped in what appeared to be netting hung with little bells, beat netted fists against a cottage door whilst squashed, lumpen faces leered behind upper windows. A little house, surrounded by the same black trees, at the foot of which, his chops on the whited steps, his sinuous length curved around its corner in a dragon-clasp, the long wolf lay, whose hairs were cut in harmony with the incisive feathering of the trees.
Maud Bailey gave him potted shrimps, omelette and green salad, some Bleu de Bresse and a bowl of sharp apples. They talked about
Tales for Innocents
, which, Maud said, were mostly rather frightening tales derived from Grimm and Tieck, with an emphasis on animals and insubordination. They looked together at the one about the woman who had said she would give anything for a child, of any kind, even a hedgehog, and had duly given birth to a monster, half-hedgehog, half-boy. Blanche had drawn the hedgehog-child in a Victorian high chair at a Victorian table; behind it were dark panes of cupboard glass, before it a huge intruding hand, pointing to its dish. Its face was blunt and furred and screwed up as though about to burst into tears. Its prickles were round its ugly head like spined rays of a halo, and descended its neckless shoulders, criss-crossing, to meet the incongruity of a starched, frilled collar. It had blunt little claws on its stubby hands. Roland asked Maud what the critics made of this. Maud said that Leonora Stern believed it represented Victorian women’s fear, or any woman’s fear, of giving birth to a monstrosity. It was related to Frankenstein, the product of Mary Shelley’s labour pains and horror of birth.
“Do you think that?”
“It’s an old story, it’s in Grimm, the hedgehog sits on a black cock in a high tree and plays the bagpipes and tricks people. I think you can understand things about Christabel from the way she wrote her version. I think she simply disliked children—the way many maiden aunts must have done, in those days.”
“Blanche is sorry for the hedgehog.”
“Is she?” Maud examined the little picture. “Yes, you’re right. Christabel isn’t. It becomes a very resourceful swineherd—multiplies its pigs on forest acorns—and ends up with a lot of triumphant slaughter and roast pork and crackling. Hard for modern children to stomach who grieve for the Gadarene swine. Christabel makes it into a force of nature. It likes winning, against the odds. In the end it wins a King’s daughter, who is expected to burn its hedgehog-skin at night, and does so, and finds herself clasping a beautiful Prince, all singed and soot-black. Christabel says, ‘And if he regretted his armoury of spines and his quick wild wits, history does not relate, for we must go no further, having reached the happy end.’ ”
“I like that.”
“So do I.”
“Did you start work on her because of the family connection?”
“Possibly. I think not. I knew one little poem by her, when I was very small, and it became a kind of touchstone. The Baileys aren’t very proud of Christabel, you know. They aren’t literary. I’m a sport. My Norfolk grandmother told me too much education spoilt a girl for a good wife. And then the Norfolk Baileys don’t speak to the Lincolnshire Baileys. The Lincolnshire ones lost all their sons in the First World War, except one invalid one, and became rather impoverished, and the Norfolk Baileys hung on to a lot of the money. Sophie LaMotte married a
Lincolnshire
Bailey. So I didn’t grow up with the idea that I had a poet in the family, by marriage of course. Two Derby winners and an uncle who made a record ascent of the Eiger, that’s the sort of thing that
mattered.”
“What was the little poem?”
“The one about the Cumaean Sibyl. It was in a little book I once got for Christmas called
Ghosts and Other Weird Creatures
. I’ll show you.”
He read
Who are you?
Here on a high shelf
In webbed flask I
Hook up my folded self
Bat-leather dry.
Who were you?
The gold god goaded me
Sang shrieking sang high
His heat corroded me
Not mine his cry.
What do you see?
I saw the firmament
Steady the sky
I saw the cerement
Close Caesar’s eye.
What do you hope?
Desire is a dowsed fire
True love a lie
To a dusty shelf we aspire
I crave to die.
“It’s a very sad poem.”
“Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong. The Sibyl was safe in her jar, no one could touch her, she wanted to die. I didn’t know what a Sibyl was. I just liked the rhythm. Anyway, when I started my work on thresholds it came back to me and so did she.
“I wrote a paper on Victorian women’s imagination of space.
Marginal Beings and Liminal Poetry
. About agoraphobia and claustrophobia and the paradoxical desire to be let out into unconfined space, the wild moorland, the open ground, and at the same time to be closed into tighter and tighter impenetrable small spaces—like Emily Dickinson’s voluntary confinement, like the Sibyl’s jar.”
“Like Ash’s Sorceress in her
In-Pace.”
“That’s different. He’s punishing her for her beauty and what he thought of as her wickedness.”
“No, he isn’t. He’s writing about the people, including herself, who thought she
ought
to be punished because of her beauty and wickedness. She colluded with their judgment. He doesn’t. He leaves it to our intelligence.”
A disputatious look crossed Maud’s face, but all she said was “And you? Why do you work on Ash?”
“My mother liked him. She read English. I grew up on his idea of Sir Walter Ralegh, and his Agincourt poem and Offa on the Dyke. And then
Ragnarök.”
He hesitated. “They were what stayed alive, when I’d been taught and examined everything else.”
Maud smiled then. “Exactly. That’s it. What could survive our education.”