Possession (65 page)

Blackadder had written to every public body he could think of who might be concerned with the Ash-LaMotte correspondence. He had lobbied the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, and had requested an interview with the Minister for the Arts,
which had resulted in a dialogue with an aggressive and not wholly gentlemanly civil servant, who had said that the Minister was fully apprised of the importance of the discovery, but did not believe that it warranted interfering with Market Forces. It might be possible to allocate some small sum from the National Heritage Trust. It was felt that Professor Blackadder might attempt to match this sum from private sponsorship or public appeal. If the retention of these old letters in this country is truly in the national interest, this young man appeared to be saying, with his vulpine smile and slight snarl, then Market Forces will ensure that the papers are kept in this country without any artificial aid from the state. He added, as he saw Blackadder to the lift, through corridors smelling faintly of brussels sprouts and blackboard dusters, like forgotten schools, that he had had to do Randolph Henry Ash for his A-Level, and hadn’t been able to make head or tail of him. “They did go on so, don’t you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously,” he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths. As it creaked up, Blackadder said, “That’s not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.” “So pompous, don’t you think?” returned the young man, smoothly impervious, closing the professor into his box.

Blackadder, who had been immersed in
Mummy Possest
and the reminiscences of Hella Lees, felt grimly that Market Forces were invisible winds and odylic currents quite as wild and unpredictable as any interrupted by Ash’s Gaza Exploit. He also felt that Mortimer Cropper had a direct line to infinitely more powerful Market Forces than he himself, in the lower depths of the Museum. He had heard about Cropper’s sermon-lecture, invoking these. He was gloomily considering his next move, when he was telephoned by a television journalist, Shushila Patel, who had an occasional five minutes on the Arts on
Events in Depth
, a late-night news analysis programme. Ms Patel had taken against Cropper because he represented capitalist and cultural imperialism. She had asked around and had been told that James Blackadder was the expert to have on her programme.

At first Blackadder was quietly but fiercely excited at the idea of putting the power of television behind his cause. He was not a
broadcasting academic; he had never written a review outside a learned journal, had never spoken on the radio. He made sheafs of notes, as he would do on a conference paper, on Ash, on LaMotte, on National Art Treasures, on the effect of the discovery of the letters on the wrong interpretations advanced in
The Great Ventriloquist
. It did not occur to him to ask if Cropper would be present in person; he envisaged the broadcast as a kind of potted lecture. As it approached he began to feel a chill of apprehension. He watched the television and observed politicians, surgeons, planners and policemen being sternly and volubly interrupted by hostile interviewers. He woke sweating from nightmares in which he was required to sit his Finals again at a moment’s notice and with new papers on Commonwealth Literature and post-Derridean strategies of non-interpretation, or in which he was asked in a machine-gun stutter of rapid questions, what Randolph Ash had to say about Social Security cuts, the Brixton riots and the destruction of the ozone.

They sent a car for him, a Mercedes driven by a chauffeur with a patrician accent who looked as though Blackadder’s mackintosh would dirty his clean cushions. This did not prepare Blackadder for the rabbit-warren of dusty cubicles and agitated young women in which he found himself on arrival. He sat bemused on a moquette bucket-couch, dating from the mid-1950s, staring at a water-cooler and clutching his copy of the Oxford Standard Ash. He was given a plastic cup of unpleasant tea, and told to wait for Ms Patel, who finally arrived, carrying a clipboard of yellow paper, and sat down beside him. She was extremely beautiful, fine-boned, with her black silk hair in a complicated knot and her neck decorated with a fine silver and turquoise lacy necklace. She wore a peacock blue sari, decorated with silver flowers, and she smelled of something lightly exotic—sandalwood, cinnamon? She smiled on Blackadder and made him feel, briefly, wholly welcome and desired. She then became businesslike, fetching out her pad and saying, “Well, what’s important about Randolph Henry Ash?”

Blackadder had an incoherent vision of his own life’s work, a fine line here, a philosophical joke tracked down there, a sense of the shape of many men’s interwoven thought, none of which would go
bluntly into words. He said, “He understood the nineteenth-century loss of religious faith. He wrote about history—he understood history—he saw what the new ideas about development had done to the human idea of time. He’s a central figure in the tradition of English poetry. You can’t understand the twentieth century without understanding him.”

Ms Patel looked politely baffled. She said, “I’m afraid I never heard of him until I got onto this story. I did a literature course in my degree, but it was in modern American literature and postcolonial English. So tell me why we should still care about Randolph Henry Ash?”

“If we care about history at all—”

“English
history—”

“Not English. He wrote about Jewish history, and Roman, and Italian, and German, and prehistoric, and—English of course—”

Why must the English now always apologise?

“He wanted to understand how individual people at any particular time saw the shape of their lives—from their beliefs to their pots and pans—”

“Individualism. I see. So why should we want to keep this correspondence in this country?”

“Because it may illuminate his ideas—I’ve seen some of the letters—he writes about the story of Lazarus—he was very interested in Lazarus—and about nature study, the development of organisms—”

“Lazarus,” repeated Ms Patel, blankly.

Blackadder looked rather wildly about his dimly-lit, porridge-colored box. He was getting claustrophobia. He was wholly unfitted for one-sentence claims on behalf of Ash. He could not detach himself from Ash enough to see what was not known. Ms Patel looked a little despondent. She said, “We’ve got time for three questions and a quickie to finish on. How about my asking you what is Randolph Ash’s importance to our society now?”

Blackadder heard himself say, “He thought carefully and didn’t make up his mind in a hurry. He believed knowledge mattered—”

“Sorry, I don’t understand—”

The door opened. A bright female voice said, “I’ve brought your other speaker. This is right, isn’t it, this is the last item on
Events in Depth?
This is Professor Leonora Stern.”

Leonora was resplendent and barbaric in a scarlet silk shirt and trousers, faintly Oriental, faintly Peruvian, with woven rainbow-coloured borders. Her black hair flowed on her shoulders, her wrists and ears and visible bosom were hung with suns and stars of gold. She shone in the small space by the water-cooler and emitted pulses of florid and musky scent.

“I expect you know Professor Stern,” said Ms Patel. “She’s the expert on Christabel LaMotte.”

“I was staying in Maud Bailey’s apartment,” said Leonora. “And they called her, and got me, that’s how it was. I’m glad to know you, Professor. We’ve got things to discuss.”

“I’ve been asking Professor Blackadder a few questions about the importance of Randolph Ash,” said Ms Patel. “I’d like to ask you the same questions about Christabel LaMotte.”

“Go ahead,” said Leonora, expansively.

Blackadder watched with a mixture of fine distaste, technical admiration and sheer trepidation as Leonora built up a memorable thumb-nail miniature Christabel. Great neglected poet, little lady with sharp eyes and a sharp pen, great and unflinching analyses of female sexuality, of lesbian sexuality, of the importance of the trivial … “Good,” said Ms Patel. “Excellent, a major discovery, isn’t it? And I shall ask you at the end, what is the importance of this discovery—don’t answer now. It’s time to go to Make-up, or almost. I’ll see you in the studio in about half an hour.”

Left alone with Leonora, Blackadder was apprehensive. Leonora plumped down beside him, her thigh touching his, and took his copy of Ash from him, without asking.

“Better read this now, I guess. I’ve never gone much for Randolph Henry. Too male. Long-winded. Old hat—”

“No.”

“Obviously not. I tell you what, a lot of us are going to have to eat our words when this all gets out in the open, a whole lot of us. I should put this book away, Professor. Uh-hunh. I guess we’ve
got
three minutes
to make out the importance of all this stuff to the great greedy public and that don’t include illustrations. No, you’ve got to make out your Mr Ash to be the sexiest property in town. You’ve got to get them by the balls, Professor. Make ’em cry. Think what you got to say and get it said whatever that pretty creature out there tries to get you to say. If you get me—”

“Oh yes. I—get you.”

“One
thing you’ll get said in the time, and that’s your lot, Professor.”

“I see that. Mmn. One thing—”

“One
sexy
thing, Professor.”

In Make-up, Blackadder and Leonora lay back together, side by side. He submitted to powder-puffs and paintbrush, thinking of the hands of morticians, watching the fine grey cobwebs round his eyes being blocked out by a fine brushload of Max Factor Creme Puff. Leonora had her head back but spoke on, indifferently, to him and the girl.

“I like a lot of colour at the edge of the lids there—load it on, I can take it, I’ve got huge features and striking colouring, I can carry it off OK—as I was saying, Professor, you and I have to have a serious talk. I guess you’re as keen as I am to know the whereabouts of Maud Bailey, hunh? That’s great, how about some of that thundery dark pink under the brow here—and I’d like a manslaying scarlet lipstick, which on reflection I’ll get out of my own bag, you have to be careful with communal body fluids these days, in the nicest possible way, of course—as I say, Professor, or as I didn’t say, I’ve got a pretty good idea about where that young woman’s gone—and your researcher with her—I showed her the way—have you got any of those metallic spangles you can dust on here and there, ma’am, I like to strike the odd shaft of light across the screen, show that the scholarly world’s got its glitter … Red in tooth and claw I am now, Professor, but calm yourself, I’m not out to get
you
. I’m out to strike a blow for Christabel and a punch in the guts of that bastard Mortimer Cropper, who wouldn’t have Christabel on his course and threatened to sue a dear friend of mine for
defamation, he really did. I guess all this makes him look a bit of a fool?”

“Not really. These things happen.”

“Well you got to
say
it makes him look a fool, if you want to keep those papers, don’t you?”

Shushila sat between her guests and smiled. Blackadder watched the cameras and felt like a dusty barman. Dusty grey between these two peacocks, dusty with face-powder—he could smell himself—under the hot light. The moment before the broadcast seemed eternal, and then suddenly, like a sprint race, they were all talking very rapidly and as suddenly silent again. He had only the vaguest recollection of what had been said. The two women, like gaudy parrots, talking about female sexuality and its symbols when repressed, the Fairy Melusina and the danger of the female, LaMotte and the love that dared not speak its name, Leonora’s huge surprise when it seemed that Christabel might have loved a man. And his own voice: “Randolph Henry Ash was one of the great love poets in our language.
Ask to Embla
is one of the great poems of true sexual passion. No one has ever really known whom those poems were written for. In my view the explanation advanced in the standard biography always looked unconvincing and silly. Now we know who it was—we’ve discovered Ash’s Dark Lady. It’s the kind of discovery scholars dream of. The letters have got to stay in our country—they’re part of our national story.”

And Shushila: “You won’t agree with
that
, Professor Stern? Being an American?”

And Leonora: “I think the letters should be in the British Library. We can all have microfilms and photocopies, the problems are only sentimental. And I’d like Christabel to have honour in her own country and Professor Blackadder here, who’s the greatest living Ash scholar, to have charge of the correspondence. I’m not acquisitive, Shushila—all I want is a chance to write the best critique of these letters once they’re available. The days of cultural imperialism are over, I’m glad to say.…”