Possession (56 page)

De Balzac always describes his people’s faces as though they were
painted by the Dutch masters. A snail-curly nose, indicating sensuality, an eye which has red fibrils in the white, a bumped brow. I can’t so describe my father’s eyes, nor his hair, nor his stoop. He is too close. If you hold a book too close to your face in poor candlelight, the characters blur. So with my father. His father, the
philosophe
, the Republican, I remember in the days of my early infancy. He wore his iron-grey hair long, as the Breton nobility used to do, and put it up with a comb. He had a good shapely beard, whiter than the hair. And leather gauntlets, in which he went out to visit, or attend weddings or funerals. The people called him Benoit, even though he was the Baron de Kercoz, as they call my father Raoul. They ask their advice, on matters about which they have no particular knowledge, and matters of which they know nothing. We are a little like bees in the beehive; all will not go well unless they are informed or consulted.

When Christabel came, my emotions were confused, like the waves at high tide, some still advancing, some falling back. I have never really had a female friend or
confidante
—even my nurse and the house-servants are too old and respectful to fulfil the second function, though I love them dearly, especially Gode. So I was ablaze with hope. But also I have never shared my father or my home with another woman, and was afraid I should not like this, afraid of nameless interferences or criticism or at the least embarrassment.

Perhaps I still feel all these things.

How to describe Christabel? I see her now—she has been here exactly one month—so very differently from when she arrived. I shall try first to recapture that first impression. I am not writing for her eyes.

She came on the wings of a storm. (Is that too romantic? It does not give a sufficient idea of all the volume of wind and water that were thrown at our house during that terrible week. If you tried to open a shutter, or step outside the door, the weather met you like an implacable Creature, intent on breaking and overwhelming.)

She arrived in the courtyard when it was already dark. The wheels on the paving stones made a grinding and unsteady noise. The carriage advanced—even inside the yard wall—in little swaying bursts. The horses had their heads down, and their coats were streaming mud and salt-white. My father ran out with his
roquelaure
and a tarpaulin: the wind nearly wrenched the carriage door out of his hand. He held it
open, and Yann put down the steps, and a grey ghost slipped out in the gloom, a huge beast, silent and hairy, making a kind of pale space on the dark. And then behind this very large beast, a very small woman, with a hood and mantle and a useless umbrella, all black. When she was down the steps, she stumbled and fell, into my father’s arms. She said, in Breton, “Sanctuary.” My father held her in his arms, and kissed her wet face—her eyes were closed—and said, “You have a home here for as long as you desire.” I stood in the door, fighting to hold it steady against the blast, with huge stains of rainwater spreading on my skirts. And the great beast pressed himself against me, trembling and muddying me even further with his wet coat. My father carried her in, past me, and put her down in his own great chair, where she lay, half-fainting. I came forward and said I was her cousin Sabine, and she was welcome: she seemed hardly to see me. Later, my father and Yann between them supported her up the stairs, and we saw no more of her until dinner the next evening.

I do not think I can say I liked her, at first. If that is so, it is at least in part because she seemed not to like me. I think I am an affectionate being—I believe I would attach myself lovingly to whoever offered me a little warmth, a human welcome. But whilst my cousin Christabel showed herself full of a near-devotion to my father, she seemed to look on me—how shall I say?—a little coolly. She came down to dinner that first time in a dark-checked woollen dress, black and grey, with a voluminous fringed shawl, very handsome, in dark green with a black trim. She is not elegant, but studiously neat and carefully dressed, with a jet cross on a silk rope around her neck, and elegant little green boots. She wears a lace cap. I do not know her age. Maybe thirty-five. Her hair is a strange colour, silvery-fair, almost metallic in its sheen, a little like winter butter made from milk from cows fed on sunless hay, the gold bleached out. She wears it—not becomingly—in little bunches of curls over her ears.

Her little face is white and pointed. I have never seen anyone so white as she was, that first evening (she is not much better now). Even the inner curl of the nostril, even the pinched little lips, were white, or faintly touched with ivory. Her eyes are a strange pale green; she
keeps them half-hidden. She keeps her mouth compressed too—she is thin-lipped—so that when she opens it one is surprised by the size and apparent strength of her large, very regular, teeth, which are distinctly ivory in colour.

We ate boiled fowl—my father has ordered the stock to be put aside to restore her strength. We ate round the table in the Great Hall—usually my father and I have our cheese, and bowl of milk, and bread, by the fire in his room. My father talked to us about Isidore LaMotte and his great collection of tales and legends. He then said to my cousin that he believed she too was a writer. “Fame,” he said, “travels very slowly from Great Britain to Finistère. You must forgive us if we see few modern books.”

“I write poetry,” she said, putting her handkerchief to her mouth, and frowning a little. She said, “I am diligent and I hope a craftsman. I have no fame, I think, of a kind that would have brought me to your attention.”

“Cousin Christabel, I have a great desire to be a writer. I have always had this ambition—”

She said, in English, “Many desire, but few or none succeed,” and then, in French, “I would not recommend it as a way to a contented life.”

“I never thought of it in
that
way,” I said, stung.

My father said, “Sabine, like yourself, has grown up in a strange world where leather and paper are as commonplace and essential as bread and cheese.”

“If I were a Good Fairy,” said Christabel, “I would wish her a pretty face—which she has—and a capacity to take pleasure in the quotidian.”

“You wish me to be Martha, not Mary,” I cried, with some little fire.

“I did not say that,” she said. “The opposition is false. Body and soul are not separable.” She put her little handkerchief to her lips again and frowned as though I had said something to hurt. “As I know,” she said. “As I know.”

Shortly after that, she asked to be excused, and went to her bedroom, where Gode had set a fire.

SUNDAY

The pleasures of writing are various. The language of reflection has its own pleasure and the language of narration quite a different one. This is an account of how I came to have, in some measure, the confidence of my cousin after all.

The storm continued unabated for three or four days. After that first dinner she came down no more, but kept her room, sitting in the deep alcove of her arched window, which is cut into the granite, and looking out at not much, the sodden orchard, the wall of pebbles, merging into a thick wall of mist, with rounded forms on it, like mist-pebbles. Gode said she ate too little, like a sick bird.

I went in and out of her room as much as I dared without seeming to intrude, to see if there was anything we could do to add to her comfort. I tried to tempt her with a fillet of sole, or a little beef jelly, made with wine, but she would eat only a bare spoonful or two. Sometimes when I came in after an hour or two she would not have moved from her earlier position, and I would feel I had returned indecently quickly, or that for her time did not exist as it did for me.

Once she said, “I know I am a great trouble to you, ma cousine. I am unrewarding and sick and small-minded. You should let me sit here, and think of other things.”

“I want you to be comfortable and happy here,” I said.

She said, “God did not endow me with very much capacity for being comfortable.”

I was hurt that, although I have been running this house almost since I was ten years old, my cousin deferred to my father in all practical matters and thanked
him
for acts of foresight or hospitality of which he would have been quite incapable, though full of good will.

The big dog, too, refused to eat. He lay inside her room, with his nose to the door, flat on the ground, rising stiffly twice a day to be let out. I brought titbits for him too, which he refused. She watched me try to speak to him, passively at first, without encouraging me. I persisted. One day she said, “He will not respond. He is very angry with me, for taking him away from his home, where he was happy,
and reducing him to terror and sickness on that boat. He has a right to be angry, but I did not know a dog could bear a grudge for so long. They are believed to be foolishly forgiving and even Christian towards those creatures who pretend to own’ them. Now I think he means to die, to spite me for having uprooted him.”

“Oh no. It is very cruel of you to say that. The dog is unhappy, not spiteful.”

“It is I who am spiteful. I plague myself and others. And good Dog Tray who never harmed any creature.”

I said, “When he comes downstairs, I will take him out in the orchard.”

“He will not come, I fear.”

“And if he does?”

“Then your patience and kindness will have wrought something with my gentle dog, if not with me. But I believe him to be a one-man dog, or I should not have brought him. I left him for a little, recently, and he refused to eat until I returned.”

I persisted, and little by little he came more willingly, did the tour of the yard, the stables, the orchard, made himself at home in the hall, left his post at her door and greeted me with a push of his great muzzle. One day he ate two bowls of chicken soup his mistress had rejected, and waved his great tail in pleasure thereafter. When she saw this, she said, sharply enough, “I see I was mistaken about his exclusive loyalty too. I should have done better to leave him where he was. All the magic glades of Brocéliande are not worth a good run in Richmond Park to poor Dog Tray. And he might have given comfort—”

Here she broke off. I affected not to notice, for she was obviously in distress and not given to confidence. I said, “When the good weather comes you and I may take him walking in Brocéliande. We may make an excursion to see the wilderness of the Pointe du Raz and the Baie des Trépassés.”

“When the good weather comes, who knows where we may be?”

“Will you leave us then?”

“Where would I go?”

That was no answer, as both of us well knew.

FRIDAY

Gode said, “In ten days, she will feel strong.” I said, “Have you been giving her herb-stew, Gode?” for Gode is a witch, as we all know. And Gode said, “I offered. But she would not.” I said, “I will tell her your potions do nothing but good.” And Gode said, “Too late. She will be better by Wednesday week.” I told Christabel this, laughing, and she said nothing, and then asked what Gode could magic? I told her, warts and colic and childlessness and women’s pains, coughs and accidental poisoning. She can set a limb and deliver a child, Gode can, and lay out a corpse and resuscitate the drowned. We all learn that here.

Christabel said, “And she never kills what she cures?”

I said, “No, not to my knowledge, she is very scrupulous and very clever, or very lucky. I would trust my life to Gode.”

Christabel said,
“Your
life would be a great trust.”

“Or any man’s,” I said. She frightens me. I see her meaning, and she makes me afraid.

As Gode predicted, she grew stronger, and when in the beginning of November we had three or four clear days, as can happen on this chancy changing coast, I drove her and Dog Tray to see the sea, in the bay at Fouesnant. I thought she might run with me along the beach, or climb rocks, despite a chill wind. But she simply stood at the edge of the water, with her boots sinking into the wet sand, and her hands tucked into her sleeves for warmth, and listened to the breakers and the gulls crying, quite still, quite still. Her eyes were closed when I came up to her, and with every breaker her brows creased in a little frown. I had the fanciful idea that they were beating on her skull like blows, and that she was
enduring
the sound, for reasons of her own. I went away again—I have never met anyone who so gave the impression that normal acts of friendliness are a deadly intrusion.

TUESDAY

I was still determined that we should talk about writing together. I waited until one day she seemed relaxed and friendly; she had offered to help me to darn sheets, which she does much better than I do—she is a fine needlewoman. Then I said, “Cousin Christabel, it is
true
that I have a great desire to be a writer.”

“If that is true, and if you have the gift, nothing I can say will change the outcome.”

“You know that cannot be true. That is a sentimental thing to say, cousin, forgive me. Much could prevent me. Solitude. The lack of sympathy. The lack of faith in myself. Your contempt.”

“My contempt?”

“You judge me in advance, as a silly girl, who wants she knows not what. You see your idea, not me.”

“And you are determined I shan’t persist in that error. You have one of the gifts of the novelist at least, Sabine, you persist in undermining facile illusions. With courtesy and good humour. I stand corrected. Tell me, then, what do you write? For I suppose you
do
write? It is a métier where the desire without the act is a destructive phantom.”

“I write what I can. Not what I should like to write but what I know. I would like to write the history of the feelings of a woman. A modern woman. But what do I know of that, in these granite walls somewhere between Merlin’s thorny prison and the Age of Reason? So I write what I know best, the strange and the fantastic, my father’s tales. I have written down the legend of Is, for instance.”

She said she would be happy to read my story of Is. She said she had written an English poem upon the same subject. I said I knew a little English, not much, and should be glad if she would teach me some. She said, “I will try, of course. I am not a good teacher, I am not patient. But I will try.”