Possession (42 page)

Roland found a sea-anemone, the colour of a dark blood-blister, tucked under a pitted ledge above a layer of glistering gritty sand, pink and gold and bluish and black. It looked simple and ancient, and very new and shining. It was flourishing a vigorous crown of agitating and purposeful feelers, sifting and stirring the water. Its colour was like cornelian, like certain dark and ruddy ambers. Its stem or base or foot held the rock and stood sturdy.

Maud sat on a ledge above Roland’s pool, her long legs tucked under her,
The Great Ventriloquist
open on her knee. She cited Cropper citing Ash:

“A curious comparison,” said Roland.

“Gloves in LaMotte are always to do with secrecy and decorum. Covering things up. Also with Blanche Glover, of course.”

“Ash wrote a poem called
The Glove
. About a mediaeval Lady who gave one to a knight to wear as a favour. It was ‘milky-white with seed-pearls.’ ”

“Cropper says here that Ash supposed wrongly that the ovaries of the
Actinia
were in the fingers of the glove.…”

“I couldn’t understand, as a little boy,
where
the knight wore the glove. Still can’t, as a matter of fact.”

“Cropper goes on about how Ash meditated on his own name. That’s interesting. Christabel certainly meditated on Glover. It produced some fine and disturbing poems.”

“Ash wrote a passage in
Ragnarök
about the time when the god Thor hid in a huge cave which turned out to be the little finger of a giant’s glove. That was the giant who tricked him into trying to swallow the sea.”

“Or there’s Henry James on Balzac, saying he wriggled his way into the constituted consciousness like fingers into a glove.”

“That’s a phallic image.”

“Of course. So are all the others, in one way or another, I suppose. Not Blanche Glover, exactly.”

“The
Actinia
’s withdrawing. It doesn’t like me poking it.”

The
Actinia
presented the appearance of a rubbery navel, out of which protruded two or three fleshy whiskers, in the process of being tucked away. Then it was there, a blood-dark, fleshy mound, surrounding a pinched hole.

“I read Leonora Stern’s essay ‘Venus Mount and Barren Heath.’ ”

Maud hunted for an adjective to describe this work, rejected “penetrating” and settled on “very profound.”

“Of course it’s profound. But. It worried me.”

“It was meant to.”

“No, not for that reason, not because I’m male. Because.

“Do you never have the sense that our metaphors
eat up
our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects—all the
time—and I suppose one studies—I study—literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful—as though we held a clue to the true nature of things? I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes—mediaeval gloves, giants’ gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac’s gloves, the sea-anemone’s ovaries—and it all reduced like boiling jam to—human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body—and language—all language. And all vegetation in pubic hair.”

Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, “And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It’s really
powerlessness.”

“Impotence,” said Maud, leaning over, interested.

“I was avoiding that word, because that precisely
isn’t the point
. We are so knowing. And all we’ve found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to
us
and so we’re imprisoned in ourselves—we can’t see
things
. And we paint everything with this metaphor—”

“You are very cross with Leonora.”

“She’s very good. But I don’t want to see through her eyes. It isn’t a matter of her gender and my gender. I just don’t.”

Maud considered. She said, “In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight—whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we’ve modified it. We aren’t really free to suppose—to imagine—he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely—but not in the large plan—”

Roland wanted to ask: Do you like that? He thought he had to suppose she did: her work was psychoanalytic, after all, this work on liminality and marginal beings. He said instead, “It makes an interesting effort of imagination to think how they saw the world. What Ash saw when he stood on perhaps this ledge. He was interested in the anemone. In the origin of life. Also in the reason we were here.”

“They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures—”

“And we don’t?”

“At some point in history their self-value changed into—what worries you. A horrible over-simplification. It leaves out guilt, for a start. Now or then.”

She closed
The Great Ventriloquist
and leaned over the ledge on which she was curled, and extended a hand.

“Shall we move on?”

“Where? What are we looking for?”

“We’d better start looking for facts as well as images. I suggest Whitby, where the jet brooch was bought.”

My dearest Ellen
,

I have found much that is curious in the town of Whitby, a prosperous fishing village at the mouth of the river Esk—it is a sloping town, crowding down in picturesque alleys or yards and flight after flight of stone stairs to the water—a terraced town, from the upper
layers
of which you seem to see, above a moving sphere of masts and smoking chimneys all about you, the town, the harbour, the ruined Abbey and the German Ocean
.

The past lies all around, from the moorland graves and supposed Killing Pits of the Ancient Britons to the Roman occupation and the early days of Christian evangelism under St Hilda—the town in those days was called Streonshalh and what we are accustomed to think of as the Synod of Whitby, in 664, was of course the Synod of Streonshalh. I have meditated among calling gulls in the ruins of the Abbey and have seen older darker things—the tumuli or houes on the moors, and temples perhaps druidical, including the Bridestones, a row of uprights at Sleights, thought to be one side of an avenue of a stone circle, such as Stonehenge. Certain details may bring these long-vanished folk suddenly to life in the imagination. Such are the finding hereabouts of a heart-shaped ear-ring of jet in contact with the jawbone of a skeleton; and a number of large jet beads cut in angles, found with a similar inmate of a barrow, who had been deposited in the houe with the knees drawn upward to the chin
.

There is a mythical story which accounts for the standing stones which
appeals to my imagination, as suggesting the liveliness of ancient Gods in comparatively modern times. Whitby has its own local giant—a certain fearsome Wade, who with his wife Bell, was given to tossing about casual boulders on the moors. Wade and Bell were, like the Hrimthurse who built the wall of Asgard, or the fairy Melusina, builders of castles for ungrateful men—they are credited with the construction of the Roman Road across the moor to the delightful town of Pickering—a regular road, built of stones on a stratum of gravel or rubbish from the sandstone of the moor. I intend to walk this road, which is locally known as Wade’s Causey, or Causeway, and was believed to have been built by Wade for the convenience of his wife Bell, who kept a giant cow on the moors, which she travelled to milk. One of the ribs of this monstrous ruminant was on show in Mulgrave Castle and was in fact the jawbone of a whale. The tumuli or houes on the moorland are heaps of boulders carried by the diligent Bell in her apron, whose strings occasionally broke. Charlton believes that Wade is simply a name for the ancient God Woden. Thor was certainly worshipped in Saxon times at the village of Thordisa which stood at the head of the Eastrow beck. So the human imagination mixes and adapts to its current preoccupations many ingredients into new wholes—it is essentially poetic—here are a Whale and Pickering Castle and the old Thunder God and the tombs of ancient Briton and Saxon chieftains and the military greed of the conquering Roman armies, all refashioned into a local giant and his dame—as the stones of the Roman road go to the construction of the dry stone walls, to the loss of archaeology and the preservation of our sheep—or as the huge boulder on Sleights Moor, thrown by Bell’s giant child and dented by her iron ribcage—was broken up for road-mending—and I came along that road
.

I have been visiting the local jet industry here, which flourishes and has produced work of a high standard of craftsmanship. I have sent you a piece—with a little poem to accompany it—with my great love, as always. I know you like well-made things; you would be truly delighted, for the most part, by the curious manufactures that go on here—adornments may be made from many things—ancient ammonite worms find new lives as polished brooches. I have been interested also by the reformation of fossil remains into elegant articles—a whole burnished tabletop will display the unthinkably ancient coils of long-dead snail-things, or the ferny stone leaves of primitive cycads as clear as the pressed flowers and ferns that inhabit your prayer-book. If there is a subject that is my own, my dear Ellen, as a writer I mean, it
is the persistent shape-shifting life of things long-dead but not vanished. I should like to write something so perfectly fashioned that it should still be contemplated as those stone-impressed creatures are, after so long a time. Though I feel our durance on this earth may not equal theirs
.

The jet, you know, was once alive too. “Certain scientific thinkers have supposed it to be indurated petroleum or mineral pitch—but it is now generally accepted that its origins are ligneous—it is found in compressed masses, long and narrow—the outer surface always marked with longitudinal striae, like the grain of wood, and the transverse fracture which is conchoidal and has a resinous lustre, displays the annual growths in compressed elliptical ones.” I cite this description from Dr Young, though I have seen such raw lumps of jet in the working-sheds, yes, and held them in my hands, and been moved unspeakably by the traces of time—growing time long, long, unutterably long past—in their ellipses. They may be contaminated by an excess of siliceous matter in some cases—a craftsman carving a rose, or a serpent, or a pair of hands may suddenly come across a line or flaw of silex or flint in the material and be driven to desist. I have watched such craftsmen work—they are highly specialised workers—a carver may pass a brooch on to another who specialises in incising patterns—or gold or ivory or bone-carving may be joined to the jet
.

All these new sights and discoveries, my dear, as you may imagine, have started off
shoots
of poetry in every direction. (I say shoots in Vaughan’s sense, “Bright shoots of everlastingness,” where the word means simultaneously brightness of scintillation and flights of arrows, and growth of seeds of light
—
I wish you would despatch to me my
Silex scintillans,
for I have been thinking much about his poetry and that stony metaphor since I have been working on the rocks here. When your jet brooch comes, I beg you will stroke it and watch how it electrically attracts scraps of hair and paper—it has its own magnetic life in it—and so has always been made use of in charms and white witchcraft and ancient medicines. I divagate without discipline—my mind runs all over
—
I have a poem I wish to write about modern discoveries of
silex-coated
twigs in ancient artesian wells, as described by Lyell.)

Now let me know how you are—your health, your household doings, your reading—

Your loving husband
Randolph

Maud and Roland walked round Whitby harbour and up and down the narrow streets that radiated steeply from it. Where Randolph Ash had noticed busyness and prosperity these noticed general signs of unemployment and purposelessness. Few boats were in the harbour and those there were appeared to be battened down and chained up; no motor sounded, and no sail flapped. There was still a smell of coal smoke, but it carried, for them, different connotations.

The shop-fronts were old and full of romance. A fishmonger’s slab was decorated with gaping skeletal shark-jaws and spiny monstrosities; a sweet-shop had all the old jars and pell-mell heaps of brightly-coloured sugary cubes and spheres and pellets. There were several jewellers specialising in jet. They stopped outside one of these:
HOBBS AND BELL, PURVEYORS OF JET ORNAMENTS
. It was tall and narrow; the window was like an upright box, along the sides of which were festooned rope upon rope of black and glistening beads, some with dangling lockets, some many-faceted, some glossily round. The front of the window was like a sea-chest of wave-tossed treasure, a dusty heap of brooches, bracelets, rings on cracked velvety cards, teaspoons, paperknives, inkwells and a variety of dim dead shells. It was the North, Roland thought, black as coal, solid, not always graceful craftsmanship, bright under dust.

“I wonder,” said Maud, “if it would be a good idea to buy something for Leonora. She likes odd pieces of jewellery.”

“There’s a brooch there—with forget-me-nots round the edge and clasped hands—that says
FRIENDSHIP
.”

“She’d like that—”