Possession (67 page)

V
al was in the stand at Newmarket, watching the empty track, straining her ears for the sound of the hooves, seeing the small bunch of dust and regular surging turn into a stream of shining muscle and brilliant silk, and then come past in a flash, bay, grey, chestnut, bay, so much waiting for so short a time of thundering life. And then the release of tension, the sweat-streaked beasts with flaring nostrils, the people congratulating or shrugging.

“Who won?” she said to Euan MacIntyre. “It was so quick, I didn’t see.” Though she had cried out with the rest.

“We won,” said Euan. “He won, The Reverberator. He was great.”

Val flung her arms around Euan’s neck.

“We can have a celebration,” said Euan. “Twenty-five to one, not bad, we knew he would come good.”

“I bet on him,” said Val. “To win. I put some money on White Nights, each way, because its name was nice, but I bet on him to win.”

“There,” said Euan. “You see I’ve cheered you up. Nothing like a gamble and a bit of action.”

“You didn’t tell me it was so beautiful,” said Val.

It was a good day, an English day, palely sunny, with patches of mist out at the edges of vision, out at the invisible end of the track, where the horses gathered.

Val had had the idea that racecourses were like the betting shops of her childhood, smelling of beer and fag ends and, it seemed to her, sawdust and male piss.

And this was grass and clean air and a sense of cheerfulness, and the dancing lovely creatures.

“I don’t know if the others are here,” said Euan. “Want to look?”

Euan was part of a syndicate, two solicitors, two stockbrokers, who each owned a part of The Reverberator.

They made their way round to the winner’s enclosure, where the horse stood and quivered under his rug, a bright bay with white stockings, streaked black with sweat, which rose from him in steam and joined the mist. He smelled marvelous, Val thought, he smelled of hay and health and effort which was—loose, which was free, was natural. She breathed his smell and he ruffled his nostrils and tossed his head.

Euan had talked to the jockey and trainer. He came back to Val with another young man, whom he introduced to her as Toby Byng, one of the partners. Toby Byng was thinner than Euan, with a freckled face and a small amount of curly fair hair, over his ears only. His bald patch was like a pink tonsure. He wore cavalry twill and affected an elegant waistcoat, a flash of dandified peacock under his town-and-country tweed jacket. He had a soft smile, briefly incoherent with pleasure, because of the horse.

“I’ll buy you dinner,” he said to Euan.

“No, no, I’ll buy you. Or at least, could we crack a bottle of champagne, now, because I’ve got other plans for tonight.”

The three of them wandered off, amiably, and bought champagne, and smoked salmon, and lobster salad. Val had not done anything that was simply designed for pleasure, she thought, since she could remember, unless you counted a film, or a pub-evening.

She looked at her programme.

“The horses’ names are jokes. White Nights, by Dostoevsky out of Carroll’s Alice.”

“We are literate,” said Euan. “Whatever your sort might think. Look at The Reverberator. His sire was James the Scot, and his dam was Rock Drill—I think the idea was that drills reverberate and Henry James, the American, wrote a story or something called The Reverberator. A horse’s name has to contain an allusion to the names of both its parents.”

“They are poems,” said Val, who felt increasingly full of pale gold goodwill and champagne.

“Val is interested in literature,” said Euan to Toby, having patently tried to think of a way of explaining Val that didn’t include Roland.

“I’m by way of being a literary solicitor,” said Toby. “Which isn’t my line at all, I don’t mind telling you. I’ve got involved in the most ferocious wrangle about a correspondence between dead poets that someone’s just discovered. The Americans have offered my client huge sums for the manuscripts. But the English have got onto it, and are trying to have the whole lot declared of national importance, and stop the export. They seem to hate each other. I’ve had them both in the office. The Englishman says it will change the face of international scholarship. They only get to see specimen letters one at a time—my client’s a cranky old sod, he’s not letting the whole collection out of his hands.… And now the Press have got onto it. I’ve had TV journalists and gossip columnists phoning in. The English professor’s gone to see the Minister for the Arts.”

“Love-letters?” said Euan.

“Oh yes.
Complicated
love-letters. They wrote a lot, in those days.”

“Which poets?” said Val.

“Randolph Henry Ash, whom we did at school, and I never made head nor tail of, and a woman I’d never heard of. Christabel LaMotte.”

“In Lincolnshire,” said Val.

“Oh yes. I live in Lincoln. You know about it?”

“Dr Maud Bailey?”

“Ah yes. They all want to see
her
. But she’s disappeared. On
holiday, no doubt. It’s the summer vacation. Scholars do go away. She found them—”

“I used to live with an Ash scholar,” said Val, and stopped, wholly disconcerted by her own automatic past tense.

Euan put his hand over hers, and poured more champagne.

He said, “If they are
letters
, there must be a complicated question of ownership and copyright.”

“Professor Blackadder has called in Lord Ash. He seems to own the copyrights on most of the Ash papers. But the American—Professor Cropper—has got the manuscripts of almost all the letters in his library—and he’s the editor of the big edition of letters—so his claim makes sense. The Baileys seem to own the manuscripts themselves. Maud Bailey seems to have found them. Christabel was an old spinster who died in the room where the letters were found—hidden away in a doll’s cot or something—Our client is very sore that he wasn’t told—by Maud B—what they were
worth—”

“Perhaps she didn’t know.”

“Perhaps. They’d be quite glad, all of them, if she came back.”

“I shouldn’t think she will,” said Val, looking at Euan. “I should think she’s got reasons for staying away.”

“All sorts of reasons,” said Euan.

Val had never ascribed Roland’s sudden disappearance to anything other than a desire to be with Maud Bailey. She had, in a moment of rage, telephoned Maud’s flat, only to be told by a rich American voice that Maud was away. When asked where, the voice said with a mixture of amusement and rancour, “I am not privileged to know that.” Val had complained to Euan, who had said, “But you didn’t
want
him, did you, it was over?” Val had cried, “How do you know that?” and Euan had said, “Because I’ve been watching you and assessing the evidence for weeks now, it’s my job.”

So here she was, staying with Euan, in the house by the stables. In the cool of the evening they walked round the yard, so well
swept, so orderly, with the large-eyed long heads peering out over the stable doors, and inclining gracefully to accept apples, with wrinkling soft lips and huge, inoffensive, vegetarian teeth. The low brick house was covered with climbing roses and wistaria. It was the sort of house where breakfast was kidneys, bacon, mushrooms, or kedgeree in silver dishes. The bedroom was designed, and full of cream and rose-coloured chintz, frothing around solid old furniture. Val and Euan made love in a kind of cavern of rosy light, and looked out of the open window onto the dark shadows and subdued night-scent of real roses.

Val looked down at the naked length of Euan MacIntyre. He was like his horse in reverse. All the central part of his body was pale—ranging from buff to very white. But his extremities were brown, as The Reverberator’s were white. And he had the same face. Val laughed.

“ ‘O love, be fed with apples while you may,’ ” she said.

“What?”

“It’s a poem. It’s Robert Graves. I love Robert Graves. He stirs me up.”

“Go on, then.” He made her say it twice, and then recited it himself:

“I like that,” said Euan MacIntyre.

“I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think yuppies liked poetry. Don’t be vulgar and simplistic, dear Val.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know—more to the point—why you like
me.”

“We work together, don’t we? In bed?”

“Oh yes—”

“One knows that sort of thing. And I wanted to see you smile. You were torturing a lovely face into an expression of permanent disappointment, and soon it would have been too late.”

“An act of charity.” Half in the Putney Val’s voice.

“Don’t be silly.”

But he had always loved mending things. Broken models, stray kittens, grounded kites.

“Look, Euan, I’m no good at being happy, I shall mess you up.”

“That depends on me. On me too, that is. ‘O love, be fed with apples while you may.’ ”

T
he irruption, or interruption, occurred at the Baie des Trépassés. It was one of Brittany’s smiling days. They stood amongst the sand-dunes and watched the wide waves crawling in quietly from the Atlantic. The sea wove amber-sandy lights in its grey-green. The air was milk-warm, and smelled of salt, and warm sand, and distant sharp leaves, heather or juniper or pine.

“Would it be so magical, or sinister, without its name?” Maud asked. “It looks bland and sunny.”

“If you knew about the currents you might find it dangerous. If you were a sailor.”

“It says in the
Guide Vert
that its name comes from a corruption of “boe an aon”
(baie du ruisseau)
into “boe an anaon”
(baie des âmes en peine)
. It says that the City of Is was traditionally in those marshes at the river-mouth. Trépassés, trespassed, passed, past. Names accrue meaning. We came because of the name.”

Roland touched her hand, which took hold of his.

They were standing in a fold of the dunes. They heard, from beyond the next sandhill, a loud transatlantic cry, rich and strange: “And
that must be the Ile de Sein, right out there, I’ve always dreamed of seeing that place, where the nine terrible virgins lived who were called Seines or Sénas or Sènes after the island, which is
Sein
, which is a fantastically suggestive and polysemous word, suggesting the divinity of the female body, for the French use
sein
you know to mean both breasts and womb, the female sexual organs, and from that it has also come to mean a fishing-net which holds fish and a bellying sail which holds wind, these women could control tempests, and attract sailors into their nets like the sirens, and they built this funeral temple for the dead druids—a dolmen I suppose it was, another female form, and whilst they constructed it there were all sorts of taboos about not touching the earth, not letting the stones
fall
to the earth, for it was feared the sun or the earth would pollute them or be polluted by them, just like the mistletoe, which can only be gathered without touching the earth. It has often been thought that Dahud Queen of Is was the child of one of these sorceresses, and when she became Queen of the Drowned City she became Marie-Morgane, a kind of siren or mermaid who drew men to their death, and it is thought she was a relic of a matriarchy as the Sènes were, in their floating island. Have you read Christabel’s
Drowned City?”