Possession (54 page)

They were closed in a cabin on the
Prince of Brittany
. It was night: they could hear the steady throb of the engines, and beyond and around them, the huge heavy rush of the sea. They were both faint with over-excitement. They had stood on deck and watched the lights of Portsmouth glare and dwindle. They had stood apart, not touching, though earlier, in London, full of obscure emotion, they had rushed into each other’s arms. Now they sat side by side on the lower bunk and drank duty-free whisky and water from toothmugs.

“We must be mad,” said Roland.

“Of course we are mad. And bad. I lied shamelessly to Leonora. I’ve done worse—I nicked Ariane Le Minier’s address when she wasn’t looking. I’m as bad as Cropper and Blackadder. All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous. This one’s got a bit out of hand. But the bliss of breathing sea air and not having to share my flat with Leonora for the next few weeks—”

It was odd to hear Maud Bailey talking wildly of madness and bliss.

“I think I’ve just lost everything I’ve ever had or cared about. My bit of job in the Ash Factory. Val. Which means my home because it’s her home, she pays the rent. I should feel frightful. I probably shall. But at the moment I feel all—clear in the head—and
single
, if you know what I mean. I suppose it feels so good because of the sea. I’d just feel silly if I’d gone to earth in London.”

They were not touching. They were sitting amicably close and not touching.

“Oddly,” said Maud, “if we were obsessed with each other, no one would think we were mad.”

“Val thinks we are obsessed with each other. She even said it was healthier than being obsessed with Randolph Ash.”

“Leonora thinks I’ve rushed away in response to a telephone call from a lover.”

Roland thought, All this giddy clear-headedness is dependent on our not being obsessed with each other.

He said, “These are clean narrow white beds.”

“So they are. Do you prefer top or bottom?”

“I’m indifferent. And you?”

“I’ll take the top.” She laughed. “Leonora would say it’s because of Lilith.”

“Why Lilith?”

“Lilith refused to take the inferior position. So Adam sent her away and she roamed the Arabian deserts and the dark beyond the pale. She’s an avatar of Melusina.”

“I don’t see that it matters, top or bottom,” Roland said stolidly, perfectly aware of the absurd range of this comment between mythography, sexual preference and distribution of bolted bunks. He felt happy. Everything was absurd and at one. He turned on the shower.

“Do you want a shower? It’s salt.”

“So it is. A sea-water shower under the sea. We
are
under the sea, in this cabin? After you.”

The water hissed and pricked and calmed. Outside, the same water ran darkly, carved by the bulk of the huge craft, and beyond that supporting the rush and balance of unseen life, schools of porpoises and threatened singing dolphins, moving and darting masses of mackerel and whiting, the propulsive canopies of the medusa, the phosphorescent semen of herrings which Michelet, mixing his genders and functions as he had a habit of doing, called the sea of milk,
la mer de lait
. Roland lay peacefully on his inferior bunk, and thought of a magical sentence of Melville’s about schools of—what was it exactly?—rushing beneath the pillow. He heard the shower-streams break and rattle on Maud’s invisible body, which he imagined to himself gently and vaguely, without urgency or precision, white as milk, turning this way and that in the jets and the rising steam. He saw her ankles as she climbed the ladder, white and fine, in white cotton and an air of fern-scented powder and
damp hair. He felt a great contentment, that she should be shelved there, invisible and inaccessible, but there. “Sleep well,” she said, “good night,” and he answered, the same. But for a long time he did not sleep, only lay wide-eyed in the dark, listening voluptuously for small creaks and rustles, sighings and shiftings, as she moved above him.

Maud had telephoned Ariane Le Minier, who was about to set out for a holiday in the South but had agreed to see them briefly. They drove peacefully to Nantes in good weather and met over lunch in a surprising restaurant, mysteriously and brilliantly decorated in fin de siècle Turkish tiles with pillars and jewelled stained glass. Ariane Le Minier was young, warm, and decisive, with ink-black hair carved into a precise geometric form, angled at the nape, across the brow. The two women liked each other; they shared a passionate precision in their approach to scholarship, and discussed liminality and the nature of Melusina’s monstrous form as a “transitional area,” in Winnicott’s terms—an imaginary construction that frees the woman from gender-identification. Roland said very little. It was his first French meal in France and he was overcome with precise sensuality, with sea food, with fresh bread, with sauces whose subtlety required and defied analysis.

Maud’s task was delicate. She needed to be given access to Sabine de Kercoz’s papers without exactly saying why and without explaining the relationship between her request and Leonora’s absence. This seemed initially to be made more difficult by Ariane’s imminent departure. The papers were locked away and access was not really possible in her absence. “If I had known you were coming …”

“We didn’t know ourselves. We turned out to have this small holiday. We thought of travelling through Brittany and seeing LaMotte’s family home—”

“There is nothing to see, alas. It was burned down at the time
of the First World War. But simply to see Finistère and the Bay of Audierne—under which Is traditionally lies—and the Baie des Trépassés—the Bay of the Dead—”

“Have you found out anything else about the visit LaMotte made in the autumn of 1859?”

“Ah. I have a surprise for you. Since I wrote to Professor Stern I have made a discovery—I have found a
journal intime
kept by Sabine de Kercoz which covers almost all LaMotte’s visit. I think Sabine was imitating George Sand in keeping such a journal—and, for that reason, wrote in French rather than in the Breton which might have seemed natural.”

“I cannot say how much I should like to see that—”

“I have a further surprise for you. I have made you a photocopy. To show to Professor Stern, and because I have such great admiration for your work on Melusina. And to make up for my absence and the closure of the archive. The photocopier is a great democratic invention. And we should share our information, should we not—it is a feminist principle, co-operation. I think you will be very surprised by the contents of this journal. I hope we may discuss their implications when you have read it. I shall say no more now. One should not spoil surprises.”

Maud expressed surprise and gratitude in some confusion. What Leonora would say was sharp in her mind. But curiosity and narrative greed were sharper.

The next day they drove through Brittany to the end of the earth, to Finistère. They drove through the forests of Paimpont and Brocéliande, and came to the quiet enclosed bay of Fouesnant, where they found a hotel at le Cap Coz, a hotel which combined the wind-battered ruggedness of the North with something dreamier and softer and more southern, which had a terrace and a palm tree, looking down through a copse of almost Mediterranean pines to a circling sandy bay and a blue-green sea. There, over the next three
days, they read Sabine’s journal. What they thought will be told later. This is what they read.

S
ABINE
L
UCRÈCE
C
HARLOTTE DE
K
ERCOZ.
J
OURNAL
I
NTIME
.
B
EGUN, AT THE
M
ANOIR DE
K
ERNEMET
,

OCTOBER
13
TH
1859.

The blank space of these white pages fills me with fear and desire. I could write anything I wished here, so how shall I decide where to begin? This is the book in which I shall make myself into a true writer; here I shall learn my craft, and here I shall record whatever of interest I may experience or discover. I have begged the notebook from my dear father, Raoul de Kercoz, who uses these bound volumes for his notes on folklore and his scientific observations. I began this writing task at the suggestion of my cousin, the poet, Christabel LaMotte, who said something that struck me most forcibly. “A writer only becomes a true writer by practising his craft, by experimenting constantly with language, as a great artist may experience with clay or oils until the medium becomes second nature, to be moulded however the artist may desire.” She said too, when I told her of my great desire to write, and the great absence in my daily existence of things of interest, events or passions, which might form the subject matter of poetry or fiction, that it was an essential discipline to write down whatever there was in my life to be noticed, however usual or dull it might seem to me. This daily recording, she said, would have two virtues. It would make my style flexible and my observation exact for when the time came—as it must in all lives—when something momentous should cry out—she said “cry out”—to be told. And it would make me see that nothing was in fact dull in itself, nothing was without its own proper interest. Look, she said, at your own rainy orchard, your own terrible coastline, with the eyes of a stranger, with my eyes, and you will see that they are full of magic and sad but of beautifully various colour. Consider the old pots and the simple strong platters in your kitchen with the eyes of a new Ver Meer come to make harmony of them with a little sunlight and shade. A writer cannot do this, but consider what a writer
can
do—always supposing the craft is sufficient.