Possession (47 page)

The staircase was very steep, polished and wooden, with a plum-red runner. Mrs Cammish’s house was well kept. The wood smelled of beeswax and the brass carpet-fittings gleamed.

The bedroom was papered with trellises of monstrous roses on a cabbage-green ground. There was a dressing-table, a wardrobe, a curtained alcove, one armchair with upholstered arms and curly legs, and a huge brass bed on which several feather mattresses lay majestically, as though separating a princess from a pea. On top of all this she sat waiting, under a stiff white crocheted bedspread and a patchwork quilt, holding these high to her chest, peering over. No “sack” here, but a high-necked white lawn nightdress, covered at neck and wrists with intricate goffering and pin-tucks and lacy edges, buttoned with a row of minute linen buttons. Her face was white and sharp and slightly gleaming in the candlelight, like bone. No hint of pink. And the hair. So fine, so pale, so much, crimped by its plaiting into springy zigzag tresses, clouding neck and shoulders, shining metallic in the candlelight, catching a hint, there it was, of green again, from the reflection of a large glazed cache-pot containing a vigorous sword-leafed fern. She watched him in silence.

She had not, as many women might have done, strewn the room or covered the surfaces with female things. On one chair stood a
kind of trembling collapsed cage, the crinoline, with its steel hoops and straps. Under it, the small green boots. Not a hairbrush, not a bottle. He put down his candle with a sigh, and undressed briskly, out of its light, in the shadows. She watched him. When he looked up, he caught her eye. She might have lain with her face turned away, but did not.

When he took her in his arms, it was she who said, harshly, “Are you afraid?”

“Not in the least, now,” he said. “My selkie, my white lady, Christabel.”

That was the first of those long strange nights. She met him with passion, fierce as his own, and knowing too, for she exacted her pleasure from him, opened herself to it, clutched for it, with short animal cries. She stroked his hair and kissed his blind eyes, but made no more specific move to pleasure him, the male—nor did she come to that, all those nights. It was like holding Proteus, he thought at one point, as though she was liquid moving through his grasping fingers, as though she was waves of the sea rising all round him. How many, many men have had that thought, he told himself, in how many, many places, how many climates, how many rooms and cabins and caves, all supposing themselves swimmers in salt seas, with the waves rising, all supposing themselves—no, knowing themselves—unique. Here, here, here, his head beat, his life had been leading him, it was all tending to this act, in this place, to this woman, white in the dark, to this moving and slippery silence, to this breathing end. “Don’t fight me,” he said once, and “I
must,”
said she, intent, and he thought, “No more speech,” and held her down and caressed her till she cried out. Then he did speak again. “You see, I know you,” and she answered breathless, “Yes, I concede. You know.”

Much later, he came out of a half-sleep, imagined he heard the sea, which was just possible from there, and then was aware that she was weeping silently beside him. He put out an arm, and she pushed
her face into his neck, a little awkwardly, not clinging, but pushing blindly to lose herself.

“What is it? My dear?”

“Ah, how can we bear it?”

“Bear what?”

“This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?”

“We can be quiet together, and pretend—since it is only the beginning—that we have all the time in the world.”

“And every day we shall have less. And then none.”

“Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?”

“No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the midpoint, to which everything ran, before, and
from
which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are
now
, and those other times are running elsewhere.”

“Poetic, but not comfortable doctrine.”

“You know, as I know, that good poetry is not comfortable, however. Let me hold you, this is our night, and only the first, and therefore the nearest infinite.”

He felt her face, hard and wet on his shoulder, and imagined the living skull, living bone, fed with threads and fine tubes of blue blood and inaccessible thoughts, running in her hidden cavities.

“You are safe with me.”

“I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.”

In the morning, washing, he found traces of blood on his thighs. He had thought, the ultimate things, she did
not
know, and here was ancient proof. He stood, sponge in hand, and puzzled over her. Such delicate skills, such informed desire, and yet a virgin. There were possibilities, of which the most obvious was to him slightly repugnant, and then, when he thought about it with determination, interesting, too. He could never ask. To show speculation, or even curiosity, would be to lose her. Then and there. He knew that,
without thinking. It was like Melusina’s prohibition, and no narrative bound him, unlike the unfortunate Raimondin, to exhibit indiscreet curiosity. He liked to know everything he could—even this—but he knew better than to be curious, he told himself, about things he could not hope to know. She must have bundled away the tell-tale white nightdress, too, in her luggage, for he never saw it again.

They were good days. She helped to prepare his specimens, and scrambled indomitably over rocks to obtain them. She sang like Goethe’s sirens and Homer’s from the rocks on Filey Brigg where Mrs Peabody and her family had been swept away. She marched indomitably over the moors, the crinoline cage and half her petticoats left behind, with the wind ruffling the pale hair. She sat intent beside a turf fire and watched an old woman cook pikelets on a griddle; she spoke little to strangers, it was he who enquired, who invited confidences and information, who learned them. She said, after he had held a countryman half an hour in talk, learning about the swivens, the burnt moorland and peat-cutting, “You are in love with all the human race, Randolph Ash.”

“With you. And by extension, all creatures who remotely resemble you. Which is, all creatures, for we are all part of some divine organism I do believe, that breathes its own breath and lives a little here, and dies a little there, but is eternal. And you are a manifestation of its secret perfection. You are the life of things.”

“Oh no. I am a chilly mortal, as Mrs Cammish said yesterday morning, when I put on my shawl. It is you who are the life of things. You stand there and draw them into you. You turn your gaze on the dull and the insipid to make them shine. And ask them to stay, and they will not, so you find their vanishing of equal interest. I love that in you. Also I fear it. I need quiet and nothingness. I tell myself I should fade and glimmer if long in your hot light.”

He remembered most, when it was over, when time had run out, a day they had spent in a place called the Boggle Hole, where they had gone because they liked the word. She had taken delight in the uncompromising Northern words, which they had collected like stones, or spiny sea-creatures. Ugglebarnby. Jugger Howe. Howl Moor. She had made notes in her little notebooks of the female names of the Meres or standing stones they met on the moors. Fat Betty, the Nan Stone, Slavering Ciss. “There is a terrible tale to be told,” she said, “and a few bright guineas to be earned, of Slavering Ciss.” That too had been a good day, with blue and gold weather, a day that had put him in mind of the youth of the Creation.

They had come across summer meadows and down narrow lanes between tall hedges thick with dog-roses, intricately entwined with creamy honeysuckle, a tapestry from Paradise Garden, she said, and smelling so airily sweet, it put you in mind of Swedenborg’s courts of heaven where the flowers had a language, and colours and scents were correspondent forms of speech. They came down the lane from the Mill, into the closed cove, and the smell changed to the sharpness of salt, a fresh wind off the northern sea full of brine and turning fish-forms and floating weeds, running away to the northern ice. The tide was in, and they had to make their way tightly under the overhang of the cliff. He watched her move swiftly and surely along. Her arms were spread above her head, her strong small fingers gripping cracks and crannies, her tiny booted feet picking a sure way over the slippery shelves below. The stone was a peculiar gunmetal slate, striated and flaking, dull with no sheen, except where water dripped and seeped from above, bringing with it ruddy traces of earth. The layers of grey were full of the regularly rippled rounds of the colonies of ammonites that lay coiled in its substance, stony forms of life, living forms in stone. Her bright pale head, with its circling braids, seemed to repeat those forms. Her grey dress, with the winds loose in the skirts, blended almost into the grey of the stone. All along those multiplied fine ledges, all through those crazed and intricate fissures, ran hundreds of tiny hurrying spiderlike living things, coloured an intense vermilion. The bluish cast of the grey of the stone increased the brightness of the red. They were like
thin lines of blood; they were like a web of intermittent flame. He saw her white hands like stars on the grey stone and he saw the red creatures run through and around them.

Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an hour-glass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped together, with such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small circumference. He remembered an odd linguistic fact—the word for waist in Italian is
vita
, is life—and this must be, he thought, to do with the navel, which is where our separate lives cast off, that umbilicus which poor Philip Gosse believed had had to be made by God for Adam as a kind of mythic sign of the eternal existence of the past and the future in all presents. He thought too of the Fairy Melusina, a woman
jusqu’au nombril, sino alla vita, usque ad umbilicum
, as far as the waist. This is my centre, he thought, here, at this place, at this time, in her, in that narrow place, where my desire has its end.