Possession (60 page)

NOVEMBER

Today I set out for a long walk along the cliff. It wasn’t a good day for a walk, there were great solid patches of mist and spindrift—and quite a powerful wind. I took Dog Tray. I did not ask her if I might. I took pleasure in the idea that he will follow me anywhere now, although she said he was a dog who loved exclusively and once only.
He loves me, I am sure, and his mood suits mine, for he is a sorrowful and reserved sort of beast, he makes his way purposefully in the weather, but he does not play, or smile, as some dogs do. His love is a sad offer of trustfulness.

She came after me. That has never happened. All those times when I hoped she might come or follow, she never came, unless I begged, or cajoled for her own good. But when I walk to escape her, she comes running after, hurrying a little without wishing to be seen to hurry, in her great cape and hood, with the silly umbrella flapping and creaking in and out in the wind and of no particular use at all. That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

There is the walk which passes all the monuments—the Dolmen, the fallen menhir, the little Lady Chapel with its granite image on its granite table, not so different from the rough stone of the first two, and probably made from part of one or the other.

She caught me up and said, “Cousin Sabine, may I go with you?”

“As you will,” I said, with my hand on the dog’s shoulder. “As you please, of course.”

We walked a little, and she said, “I fear I have offended you in some way?”

“Not in the least, not at all.”

“You have all been so kind to me, I have truly felt I have found a sanctuary, a kind of home, here in my father’s country.”

“My father and I are glad of that.”

“I do not feel
you
are glad. I have a sharp tongue and a thorny exterior. If I have said anything—”

“You have not.”

“But I have intruded into your peace? Yet you did not seem wholly satisfied with your peace—in the beginning.”

I could not speak. I quickened my step and the dog loped after.

“All that I touch,” she said, “is damaged.”

“As to that, I know nothing, for you have told me nothing.”

It was she who was silent, then, for a time. I walked quicker and quicker; it is my country, I am young and strong; she had some difficulty in keeping up.

“I cannot tell,” she said, after a time. Not plaintively, that is not her way, but sharply, almost impatiently. “I cannot make confidences.
It is not in me. I keep to myself, I survive in that way, only in that way.”

And that is not true, I wanted to say, but did not. You do not treat my father as you treat me.

“Perhaps you do not trust women,” I said. “That is your right.”

“I
have
trusted women—” she began, and did not finish. Then “That did harm. Great harm.”

She sounded portentous, like a sibyl. I went quicker. She sighed after a little and said her side hurt her, she would go back. I asked if she needed to be accompanied. I asked in such a way that pride must make her refuse, as it did. I put a hand out to the hound, and willed him to stay, which he did. I watched her turn back with her hand to her side and her head down into the wind, toiling a little. I am young, I thought, and should have added “and bad,” but did not. I watched her go and smiled. Part of me would have given almost anything for things to have been as they were before, for her not to be melodramatic and pitiful, but all I did was smile and then stride on, because I am at least young and strong.

[Note by Ariane Le Minier]

Here there are some pages missing, and what
is
written becomes perfunctory and repetitive. I have not made photocopies of the rest of this month until the evening of Christmas. You may see this material if you wish.

CHRISTMAS NIGHT
1859

We all went to hear Mass at the church at midnight. My father and I always go. My grandfather would not enter the church; his principles were republican and atheist. I am not sure that my father’s religious beliefs would please the Curé, if he were to discuss them with him, which he does not. But he believes strongly in the continuance of the life of the community, the Breton people, which includes Christmas and all its meanings, old and new.
She
says she is a member of the Church of England in England, but that here the faith of her fathers is the Catholic faith, in its Breton form. I think that the Curé would be surprised to know what she thinks also, but he seems to welcome her into his church, and respects her isolation. She has been going up
to the church more and more during Advent. She stands in the cold, looking at the work of the sculptor of the Calvary, the crude figures carved with such effort out of intractable granite. Ours has a good St Joseph, holding the ass, on the way to Bethlehem (our church is dedicated to St Joseph). My father spoke of how in our country the animals in the barns have speech on the night of the Nativity, when all the world is reconciled to its maker in primeval innocence, as it was in the days of the first Adam. She said, the Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the death of Nature—at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry out on that night Weep, Weep, the great god Pan is dead. I said nothing. I watched him put his cloak round her shoulders and lead her up to our place in the front of the Church, and saw it, God help me, as a prefiguration of our life to come.

It is always so beautiful when the candles are lit to signify the new world, the new year, the new life. Our heavy little church is not unlike the cave where the birth of Jesus is so often pictured. The people knelt and prayed, shepherds and fishermen. I knelt too, and tried to turn my confused thoughts into some kind of charity and goodwill, to pray in my way. I prayed, as I always pray, that the people would understand the spirit in which my father keeps those festivals only that he considers universal—for him, the nativity is the winter solstice, the turning of the earth to the light. The Curé is afraid of him. He knows he should remonstrate, and dare not.

I saw that she was not kneeling, and then that she was lowering herself, after all, rather carefully, as though she felt faint. When we were seated again, after the candles were lit, I looked to see if she was well, and understood. She was leaning back, in the corner of the bench, with her head against a pillar and her eyes and lips tightly closed, wearily closed, but not patiently. She was shadowed, the church-shadows swallowed her, but I saw she was pale. She had her hands clasped under her bosom, and some trick of the twist of her body, some ancient protectiveness in those hands made me see clearly what she had concealed and what I, a good countrywoman and mistress of a household, should have understood long ago. I have seen too many women hold their hands
so
to be mistaken. Leaning like that, I could see how she is stout. She came to us for sanctuary indeed. Much, if not all, is explained.

Gode knows. She is quick-eyed and wise about these things.

My father knows, I think, he must have known for some time, if not before she came. What he feels is pity and protectiveness, I see it now; I have read sentiments that did not exist except in my own fevered imagination.

What shall I say or do?

DEC
. 31

I see I shall dare to say nothing to her. I went up to her room in the afternoon, with a gift of barley sugar and a book I had borrowed in earlier times before I grew angry. I said to her,

“I am sorry to have been so disagreeable, Cousin. I have been misunderstanding things.”

“Indeed,” she said, not so agreeably. “I am glad you find it to be a misunderstanding.”

“Oh, I know how things are, now,” I said. “I wish to be good to you. To help you.”

“You know how things are now, do you?” she said slowly. “You know how things are. Do we ever know that about a fellow-creature? Tell me then, Cousin Sabine,
how do you think things are with me?”

And she stared at me with her white face and her pale eyes, defying me to speak. If I had, if I had uttered it, what could she have done or said? It is so, I know it. But I stammered, I did not know what I meant, I believed I had made her unhappy, and then, as she stared on, I burst into tears.

“Things are well enough with me,” she said. “I am a grown woman, and you are a young girl, full of the fancies and instability of youth. I can look after myself. I do not desire help from
you
, Sabine. But I am glad you are no longer so full of rage. Rage hurts the spirit, as I know to my cost.”

I felt she knew all, all I had suspected and feared and resented. And that she did not choose to forgive me. And then I was angry again, in my turn, and went out still weeping. For she says she does not need help, but she does, she has already requested it, that is why she is here. What will become of her? Of us? Of the child? Shall I speak to my father? I still feel she is like Aesop’s frozen serpent. A figure of speech may get hold of your imagination even when its appositeness is worn
away. In which case which of us is the serpent? But she looked at me so coldly. I wonder if she is a little mad.

[
LATE JAN
]

Today I made up my mind to speak to my father about Cousin Christabel’s state. I have thought of it once or twice, but something has always prevented me. Possibly a fear that he too may reprove me. But the silence lies between me and him. So I waited until she had gone away to the church—any practised eye could tell her condition by now, for sure. She is too little in stature to disguise it.

I went in to my father and said very quickly, before I could be deflected from my purpose, “I wish to talk to you about Christabel.”

“I have noticed, with regret, that you seem to show her less affection than you did.”

“As to that, I do not think she wants my affection. I misunderstood. I thought she was growing so close to you that I—that there was no space left for me.”

“That was most unjust. Both to her and to me.”

“I know now, for I have seen, father, I have seen her condition, which is unmistakable. I was blind, but now I see.”

He turned his face away to the window and said, “I do not think we should speak of that.”

“You mean, you do not think I should.”

“I do not think we should.”

“But what is to become of her? Of the child? Are they to stay here always? I am the mistress of this house, I wish to know, I need to know. And I wish to
help
, Father, I wish to help Christabel.”

“The best way to help her seems to be by maintaining silence.”

He sounded puzzled. I said, “Well, if you know what she intends, I am content, I will be quiet and say no more. I only wish to help.”

“Ah, my dear,” he said, “I know no more than you do, of what she intends. I am as much in the dark as you are. I offered a home, as she requested—‘for some time’ was all she said in her letter. But she has not allowed me to speak of—the reason for her need. Indeed, it was Gode who enlightened me, very early. It may be that she will turn to Gode, when the time comes. She is our kin—we offered sanctuary.”

“She must speak of her trouble,” I said.

“I have tried,” he said. “She turns it all aside. As though she wished to deny her state, even to herself.”

FEBRUARY

I have noticed that I have lost pleasure in this journal. For some time now it has been neither writer’s exercise nor record of my world, only a narrative of jealousy and bafflement and resentment. I have noticed that writing such things down does not exorcise them, only gives them solid life, as the witch’s wax dolls take on vitality when she warms them into shape before pricking them. I did not start this journal to be a confidante for my spying on another’s private pain. Also I am afraid that it might be read, by accident, and misconstrued. So, for all these reasons, and as a kind of spiritual discipline, I shall give it up for the time being.

APRIL

I am witnessing something so strange, so strange I must write about it, though I said I would not, in order to help myself to understand. My cousin is now so big, so ripe, so heavy, it must be soon, and yet she has allowed no word of discussion of her condition or her expectations. And she has us all under some spell, for no one of us dare take her to task, or bring into the open, to be spoken of, what is already in full view and yet hidden. My father says he has several times tried to make her speak of it, and has always been unable. He wants to tell her that the child is welcome; it is, as she is, our kin, whatever its origins, and we will care for it and see it is well brought up and wants for nothing. But he says he cannot speak, and this for two reasons. One, that she
daunts
him, she prohibits him absolutely with her eye and manner from opening the subject, and though he knows he is morally required to do so he cannot. The second is that he is truly afraid that she is mad. That she is somehow fatally split in two, and that she has not let her conscience and public self know what is about to happen to her. And although he feels she
must
be prepared he fears also to set about it wrongly and shock her into complete alienation and frenzy and despair, and perhaps kill both. He heaps little loving-kindnesses upon her, and she accepts all, gracefully, like some princess, as a kind of due, and talks to him of Morgan le Fay, Plotinus, Abelard and Pelagius as one rendering courteous payment for favours. Her mind
is clearer than ever. She is quick and razor-sharp and witty. My poor father feels, as I do, a growing sense of madness in himself, to be driven by courtesy and what was once a pleasure into these elaborate disputations and recensions and recitations, when what should be talked of is solid flesh and practical provisions.

I said to him, she is not so unknowing, for her clothes have been let out, around the waist, under the arms, with firm enough lines of stitching, with intelligent care. He said he doubted but that was Gode’s work, and we resolved that if we had neither courage nor hardness enough to confront Christabel we would at least find out what Gode knew, whether she had been privileged, as was possible, even probable, with any confidence. But Gode said no, the needlework was not hers, and Mademoiselle had always turned the conversation, as though she had misunderstood, when Gode had offered help. ‘She drinks my tisanes, but as though she did it indulgently to please me,’ Gode said. Gode said she had known cases like it, of women who had resolutely refused to know their state and yet had been brought to bed as sweetly and easily as any heifer in the barn. And others, she said, more gloomily, who had broken themselves up fighting, and so killed either or both, mother and child. Gode thinks we may leave it to her—she will know by certain sure signs when the time is come, and will give my cousin drinks to calm her, and then bring her to her senses all practically at the last. I think Gode has the measure of most men or women, at least where they are most animal and instinctive, but not at all certainly of my cousin Christabel.