Possession (57 page)

She said, “Since I came here, I have not attempted to write anything, because I do not know what language to think in. I am like the Fairy Mélusine, the Sirens and the Mermaids, half-French, half-English and behind these languages the Breton and the Celt. Everything shifts shape, my thoughts included. My desire to write came from my father, who was not unlike your father. But the language in which I write—my
mother-tongue
exactly—is not his language, but my mother’s. And my mother is not a spiritual woman, and her language is that of household minutiae and female fashion. And English is a language full of little blocks, and solid objects and quiddities and unrelated matters of fact, and observation. It is my first language. My father said that every human being needs a
native tongue
. He withdrew himself and spoke to me only in English, in my earliest years, he told me English
tales and sang me English songs. Later I learned French, from him, and Breton.”

This was the first confidence she made to me, and it was a writer’s confidence. At the time, I did not think so much about what she had said about language, as about the fact that her mother was alive, for she said she
“is
not a spiritual woman.” She was in great trouble, so much was clear, and had turned not to her mother, but to us—to my father, that is, for I do not think I counted for anything in her decision.

SATURDAY

She read my story of King Gradlon, the Princess Dahud, the horse Morvak, and the Ocean. She took it away on the evening of October 14th and returned it two days later, coming into my room and putting it into my hands brusquely, with a funny little smile. She said, “Here is your tale. I have not marked it, but I have taken the liberty of writing one or two notes on a separate sheet.”

How shall I describe the happiness of being taken seriously? I could see in her face when she took the tale that she expected to find sentimental vapourings and rosy sighs. I knew she would not, but her certainty overwhelmed mine. I knew I must be found wanting, one way or another. And yet I knew that what I had written was
written
, that it had its
raison d’être
. So I awaited her inevitable disdain with half my soul, and with the other knew that it ought not to be so.

I seized the paper from her hands. I ran through the notes. They were practical, they were intelligent, they acknowledged what I had tried to do.

What I had meant was to make of the wild Dahud an
embodiment
as it were of our desire for freedom, for autonomy, for our own proper passion, which women have, and which, it seems, men fear. Dahud is the sorceress whom the Ocean loves and whose excesses cause the City of Is to be engulfed (by that same Ocean) and drowned. In one of my father’s mythological recensions the editor says, “In the legend of the City of Is may be felt, like the passing of a whirlwind, the terror of ancient pagan cults and the terror of the passion of the senses, let loose in women. And to these two terrors is added the third, that of the Ocean, which, in this drama, has the role of Nemesis and fate. Paganism, woman and the Ocean, these three desires and these three great
fears of man, are mingled in this strange legend and come to a tempestuous and terrible end.”

On the other hand, my father says, the name Dahud, or Dahut, in ancient times, signified “The good sorceress.” He says she must have been a pagan priestess, as in an Icelandic saga, or one of the virgin priestesses of the Druids in the Ile de Sein. He says even that Yes, maybe, is the vestigial memory of an other world where women were powerful, before the coming of warriors and priests, a world like the Paradise of Avallon, the Floating Isles, or the Gaelic Síd, the Land of the Dead.

Why should desire and the senses be so terrifying in women? Who is this author, to say that these are the fears of man, by which he means the whole human race? He makes us witches, outcasts,
sorcières
, monsters.…

I will copy out some of Christabel’s phrases which particularly pleased me. I should in all honesty copy out also those criticisms she made of what was banal or overdone or clumsy—but these are engraved on my mind.

FRIDAY

After the reading, things went better. I cannot recount all, and yet we are now nearly at the present time. I told my cousin what a great relief
it had been to me to have my work read as my work, and by someone who knew how to value it. She said this experience was rare in any writer’s life, and one would do better neither to expect nor to rely on it. I asked her if she had a
good
reader and she frowned a little and then said briskly, “Two. Which is more than we may hope for. One too indulgent, but with intelligence of the heart. One, a poet—a better poet—” She was silent.

She was not angry, but she would say no more.

I think it must happen to men as well as to women, to know that strangers have made a false evaluation of what they may achieve, and to watch a change of tone, a change of language, a pervasive change of respect after their work has been judged to be worthwhile. But
how much more
for women, who are, as Christabel says, largely thought to be unable to write well, unlikely to try, and something like changelings or monsters when indeed they do succeed, and achieve something.

OCTOBER
28
TH

She is like Breton weather. When she smiles and makes sharp, clever little jokes, one cannot imagine her otherwise—as the coast here may smile and smile in the sun, and in the sheltered coves at Beg-Meil may grow round pines and even a date-palm, which suggest the sunnier south, where I have never been. And the air may be soft and gentle, so that, like the peasant in Aesop’s tale, one takes off one’s heavy coat, one’s armour, so to speak.

She is much better, as Gode said she would be. She and Dog Tray go for long walks together, and also with me, when I am invited or when she accepts my invitation. She insists also on taking part in the daily life of the household, and it is in the kitchen, or mending by the fire, that we have our closest talk. We talk much of the meanings of myths and legends. She is very desirous of seeing our Standing Stones, which are some way away, along the cliff—I have promised to go there with her. I told her that the village girls still dance round the menhir, dressed in white, to celebrate May Day—they move in two circles, one clockwise, one widdershins, and whoever slackens and tires so that she falls, or touches the stone in any way, is mercilessly cuffed and kicked by the others, who all set on her as a flock of gulls will
attack an intruder, or one of their own weaklings. My father says this rite is a relic of ancient sacrifice, perhaps Druidic, that the fallen one is a kind of sacrificial scapegoat. He says the Stone is a male symbol, a phallos; and the women of the village go to it in the dark night and clasp it, or rub it with certain preparations (Gode knows but Father and I do not) to have strong sons, or to have their husbands return safely. My grandfather said the church spire was only this ancient stone in a metamorphic form—a slate column, he said, instead of granite, that was all—and the women huddled beneath it like white hens, as in earlier times they danced before the other. I did not quite like to hear that said and hesitated to repeat it to Christabel, for she has Christian belief of some kind certainly. But I did say it, for her mind is fearless, and she laughed, and said it was so, the Church had successfully taken in and absorbed, and partly overcome, the old pagan deities. It was now known that many little local saints are
genii loci
, Powers who inhabited a particular fount or tree.

She said also, “So the girl who stumbles in the dance is also the Fallen Woman and the others stone her.”

“Not
stone,”
I said, “not now, only blows with the hands or feet.”

“Those are not the most cruel,” she said.

FRIDAY

What is strange is that she seems to have no life anywhere but here. It is as though she had walked in out of that storm like some selkie or undine, streaming wet and seeking shelter. She writes no letters and never asks if any have come for her. I know—I am not foolish—that something must have happened to her, something terrible, I imagine, from which she fled. I ask her nothing about that, for it is so very clear that she does not wish to be asked. But occasionally I arouse her anger, without meaning to.

For instance, I asked her about the curious name of Dog Tray and she began to tell me that he had been named as a joke, for a line in Wm Shakespeare’s
King Lear
—“The little dogs and all—Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, see they bark at me.” She said, “He used to live in a house where there was a Blanche and where I was jokingly called Sweetheart—” and then she turned her face away and would
say no more, as though she choked. Then she said, “In the nursery rhyme, of Mother Hubbard, in some versions, the Dog who finds the cupboard bare is called Dog Tray. Maybe he was truly named for that old woman’s dog, who found nothing but disappointment.”

NOVEMBER
1
TOUSSAINT

Today the storytelling begins. Everywhere in Brittany the storytelling begins at Toussaint, in the Black Month. It goes on through December, the Very Black Month, as far as the Christmas story. There are storytellers everywhere. In our village, the people gather round the workbench of Bertrand, the shoemaker, or Yannick, the smith. They bring their work and warm each other with their comfortable presences—or with the heat of the forge—and hear the messengers in the dark that is thick outside their thick walls, the unexplained crack of wood, or flap of wings, or creaking at worst, of the axles of the bumpy cart of the Ankou.

My father made a habit of telling me tales, every night during the two Black Months. This year will be the same, except that Christabel is here. My father’s audience is not as numerous as Bertrand’s or Yannick’s and to tell the truth his tale-telling is not as dramatic as theirs, it has that scholarly courtesy which is part of him, a pernickety insistence on accuracy—no Pam! or Pouf! of demon or wolf-man. And yet he made me believe absolutely in the creatures of his myths and legends, over the years. He would open his tale of the Fontaine Baratoun, the Fontaine des Fées, in the magical forest of Brocéliande, with a scholarly register of all its possible names. I can recite the litany: Breselianda, Bercillant, Brucellier, Berthelieu, Berceliande, Brecheliant, Brecelieu, Brecilieu, Brocéliande. I can hear him say, pedantic and mysterious, “The place shifts its name as it shifts its borders and the directions of its dark rides and wooded alleys—it cannot be pinned down or fixed, any more than can its invisible inhabitants and magical properties, but it is always there, and all these names indicate only one time or aspect of it.…” Every winter, he tells the tale of Merlin and Vivien, always the same tale, never twice the same telling.

Christabel says her father too, told her tales in winter. She seems ready to be part of our fireside circle. What will she tell? Once we had a visitor who told a dead tale, a neat little political allegory with Louis Napoleon as ogre and France as his victim, and it was as though
a net had drawn up a shoal of dull dead fish with loose scales, no one knew where to look, or how to smile.

But she is wise and partly Breton.

“I could a tale unfold,” she said to me in English, when I asked if she would tell (I know that is
Hamlet
, it is the speech of the revenant and much
à propos
).

Gode always joins us and tells of the year’s trafficking between this world and
that
, the other side of the threshold, which at Toussaint may be crossed in both directions, by live men walking into that world, and by spies, or outposts, or messengers sent from There to our brief daylight.

TOUSSAINT, LATE AT NIGHT

My father told the tale of Merlin and Vivien. The two characters are never the same in successive years. Merlin is always old and wise, and clearsighted about his doom. Vivien is always beautiful, and various and dangerous. The end is always the same. So is the essence of the tale—the coming of the magician to the old Fairy Fountain, the invocation of the fay, their love beneath the hawthorns, the charming of the old man into telling her the spell which can erect round him a solid tower visible and tangible only to himself. But my father, within this framework, has many stories. Sometimes the fairy and the magician are true lovers, whose reality is only this dreamed chamber, which she, with his complicity, makes eternal stone of air. Sometimes he is old and tired and ready to lay down his burden and she is a tormenting daemon. Sometimes it is a battle of wits, in which she is all passionate emulation, a daemonic will to overcome him, and he wise beyond belief, and impotent with it. Tonight he was not so decrepit, nor yet so clever—he was ruefully courteous, knowing that her time had come, and ready to take pleasure in his eternal swoon, or dream or contemplation. The description of the Fairy Fountain, with its cold dark boiling rings, was masterly. So were the flowers which strewed the lovers’ bed—my father was lavish with imagined primroses and bluebells; he made birds sing in dark hollies and yews, so that I remembered my childhood life which was lived
in
tales, so that I saw flowers and fountains and hidden paths and figures of power and despised—no, diminished in my mind—the life of real things, the house, the orchard, Gode.