Possession (82 page)

I have been Melusina
these thirty years. I have so to speak flown about and about the battlements of this stronghold crying on the wind of my need to see and feed and comfort my child, who knew me not. She was a happy soul—a sunny creature, simple in her affections and marvellously
direct
in her nature. She loved her adoptive parents most deeply—Sir George too, who had not a drop of her blood in his beef-veins, but was entranced by her prettiness and good nature, which was as well for her and me
.

Me she did not love. To whom can I say this but to you? She sees me as a
sorcière,
a spinster in a fairy tale, looking at her with glittering eye and waiting for her to prick her poor little finger and stumble into the brute sleep of
adult truth.
And if my eye glittered with tears she saw them not. No, I will go on, I fill her with a sort of fear, a sort of revulsion—she feels, rightly, a
too-much
in my concern for her—but misreads that, which is most natural, as something
unnatural.

You will think—if the
shock
of what I have had to tell you has left you any power to care or to think about my narrow world—that a
romancer
such as I (or a true dramatist, such as you) would not be able to keep such a secret for nigh on thirty years (think, Randolph, thirty years), without
bringing about some
peripeteia,
some
dénouement,
some secret hinting or open scene of revelation. Ah, but if you were here, you would see how I dare not. For her sake, for she is so happy. For mine, in that I fear—I fear the possible horror in her fair eyes. If I told her
—that—
and she
stepped back?
And then I swore to Sophie that it should be a condition of her kindness that it was absolute and irrevocable—and without Sophie’s goodwill there would have been no home and no support for her
.

She laughed and played like Coleridge’s limber elf ‘Singing, dancing to itself’—do you remember our letters of
Christabel?
She cared nothing for books, nothing. I wrote her small tales, and they were bound and printed, and I gave them to her, and she smiled sweetly and thanked me, and put them by. I never saw her read them for pleasure. She loved to ride, and to do archery, and played boys’ games with her (so-called) brothers … and in the end married a visiting cousin she had tumbled in haystacks with as a tiny staggering little thing of five. I wanted her to have an untroubled life and so she did—but it is not mine, I am not of it, I am the spinster aunt who is not loved.…

So I am punished, in some sort, for keeping her from you
.

Do you remember how I wrote to you of the riddle of the egg? As an
eidolon
of my solitude and
self-possession
which you threatened whether you would or no? And destroyed, my dear, meaning me nothing but good, I do believe and know. I wonder—if I had kept to my closed castle, behind my motte-and-bailey defences—should I have been a great poet—as you are? I wonder—was my spirit
rebuked
by yours—as Caesar’s was by Antony—or was I enlarged by your generosity as you
intended?
These things are all mixed and mingled—and we loved each other
—for
each other—only it was in the end for Maia (who will have nothing of her ‘strange name’ and is called plain May, which becomes her)
.

I have been so angry for so long—with all of us, with you, with Blanche, with my poor self. And now near the end “in calm of mind all passion spent” I think of you again with clear love. I have been reading
Samson Agonistes
and came upon the dragon I always thought you were—as I was the ‘tame villatic fowl’—

Is not that fine? Did we not—did you
not flame, and I catch fire? Shall we survive and rise from our ashes? Like Milton’s Phoenix?

I would rather have lived alone
, so,
if you would have the truth. But since that might not be—and is granted to almost none—I thank God for you—if there
must
be a Dragon—that He was You—

I must give up this writing. One more thing. Your grandson (and mine, most strange). His name is Walter and he chants verses to the amazement of his stable- and furrow-besotted parents. I have taught him much of the
Ancient Mariner:
he recites the passage of the blessing of the snakes, and the vision of the glittering eye of the ocean cast up to the moon, most feelingly, and his own eyes are bright with it. He is a strong boy, and
will live.

I must close. If you are able or willing—please send me a sign that you have read this. I dare not ask, if you forgive
.

Christabel LaMotte”

There was silence. Maud’s voice had begun clear, expressionless, like matt glass, and had ended with suppressed feeling.

Leonora said, “Wow!”

Cropper said, “I knew it. I knew it was something
vast—”

Hildebrand said, “I don’t understand—”

Euan said, “Unfortunately, illegitimate children couldn’t inherit at that time. Or you, Maud, would be the outright owner of the whole mass of documents. I
suspected
something like this might be
the case. Victorian families often looked after bastards in this way, hiding them in legitimate families to give them a decent chance—”

Blackadder said, “How strange for you, Maud, to turn out to be descended from both—how strangely appropriate to have been exploring all along the myth—no, the truth—of your own origins.”

Everyone looked at Maud, who sat looking at the photograph.

She said, “I have seen this before. We have one. She was my great-great-great-grandmother.”

Beatrice Nest was in tears. They rose to her eyes and flashed and fell. Maud put out a hand.

“Beatrice—”

“I’m sorry to be so silly. It’s just so terrible to think—he can’t ever have read it, can he? She wrote all that for no one. She must have waited for an answer—and none can have come—”

Maud said, “You know Ellen. Why do you think she put it in the box—with her own love-letters—”

“And their hair,” said Leonora. “And Christabel’s hair, it must be, the blond—”

Beatrice said, “She didn’t know what to do, perhaps. She didn’t give it to him, and she didn’t read it—I can imagine that—she just put it away—”

“For Maud,” said Blackadder. “As it turns out. She preserved it, for Maud.”

Everyone looked at Maud, who sat whitely, looking at the picture, holding the manuscript.

Maud said, “I can’t go on thinking. I must sleep. I’m exhausted. We shall think of all this in the morning. I don’t know why it’s such a shock. But.” She turned to Roland. “Help me find a bedroom to sleep in. All these papers should go to Professor Blackadder, for safe-keeping. I’d like to keep the photograph, just tonight, if I may.”

Roland and Maud sat side by side on the edge of a four-poster bed, hung about with William Morris golden lilies. They looked at the photograph of Maia’s wedding-day, in the light of a candle, held
in a silver chamber-candlestick. Because it was hard to see, their heads were close together, dark and pale, so that they could smell each other’s hair, still full of the smells of the storm, rain and troubled clay and crushed and flying leafage. And underneath that, their own particular, separate human warmths.

Maia Bailey smiled up at them serenely. They read her face now in the light of Christabel’s letter, and thus saw it, amongst all its silvery spangles and shine of ageing, as a happy confident face, wearing its thick wreath with a certain ease, and feeling pleasure, not drama, in the occasion.

“She looks like Christabel,” said Maud. “You can see it.”

“She looks like you,” said Roland. He added, “She looks like Randolph Ash, too. The width of the brow. The width of the mouth. The end of the eyebrows, there.”

“So I look like Randolph Henry Ash.”

Roland touched her face. “I would never have seen it. But yes. The same things. Here, at the corner of the eyebrow. There, at the edge of the mouth. Now I have seen it, I shall always see it.”

“I don’t quite like it. There’s something unnaturally
determined
about it all. Daemonic. I feel they have taken me over.”

“One always feels like that about ancestors. Even very humble ones, if one has the luck to know them.”

He stroked her wet hair, gently, absently.

Maud said, “What next?”

“How do you mean, what next?”

“What happens next? To us?”

“You
will have a lot of legal problems. And a lot of editing to do. I—I have made some plans.”

“I thought—we might edit the letters together, you and I?”

“That’s generous, but not necessary. You turn out to be a central figure in this story. I only got into it by stealing, in the first place. I’ve learned a lot.”

“What have you learned?”

“Oh—something from Ash and Vico. About poetic language. I’m—I—I have things I have to write.”

“You seem angry with me. I don’t understand why.”

“No, I’m not. That is, yes, I have been. You have your certainties. Literary theory. Feminism. A sort of social ease, it comes out with Euan, a world you belong in. I haven’t got anything. Or hadn’t. And I grew—attached to you. I know male pride is out of date and unimportant, but it mattered.”

Maud said, “I feel—” and stopped.

“You feel?”

He looked at her. Her face was like carved marble in the candlelight. Icily regular, splendidly null, as he had often said to himself.

He said, “I haven’t told you. I’ve got three jobs. Hong Kong, Barcelona, Amsterdam. The world is all before me. I shan’t be here, you see, to edit the letters. They aren’t to do with me.”

Maud said, “I feel—”

“What?”
said Roland.

“When I feel—anything—I go cold all over. I freeze. I can’t—speak out. I’m—I’m—not good at relationships.”

She was shivering. She still looked—it was a trick of her lovely features—cool and a little contemptuous. Roland said, “Why do you go cold?” He kept his voice gentle.

“I—I’ve
analysed
it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of
possession
if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and—”

“Beautiful.”

“Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don’t want that. It kept happening.”

“It needn’t.”

“Even you—drew back—when we met. I expect that, now. I use it.”

“Yes. But you don’t want—do you—to be alone always. Or do you?”

“I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on
doing my work
. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don’t want to think of that going. You understand?”

“Oh yes.”

“I write about liminality. Thresholds. Bastions. Fortresses.”

“Invasion. Irruption.”

“Of course.”

“It’s not my scene. I have my own solitude.”

“I know. You—you would never—blur the edges messily—”

“Superimpose—”

“No, that’s why I—”

“Feel safe with me—”

“Oh no. Oh no. I love you. I think I’d rather I didn’t.”

“I love you,” said Roland. “It isn’t convenient. Not now I’ve acquired a future. But that’s how it is. In the worst way. All the things we—we grew up not believing in. Total obsession, night and day. When I see you, you look
alive
and everything else—fades. All that.”

“Icily regular, splendidly null.”

“How did you know I used to think that?”

“Everyone always does. Fergus did. Does.”

“Fergus is a devourer. I haven’t got much to offer. But I could let you be, I could—”

“In Hong Kong, Barcelona and Amsterdam?”

“Well, certainly, if I was there. I wouldn’t threaten your autonomy.”

“Or be here to love me,” said Maud. “Oh, love is terrible, it is a
wrecker—”

“It can be quite cunning,” said Roland. “We could think of a way—a modern way—Amsterdam isn’t far—” Cold hand met cold hand.

“Let’s get into bed,” said Roland. “We can work it out.”

“I’m afraid of that too.”

“What a coward you are after all. I’ll take care of you, Maud.”

So they took off their unaccustomed clothes, Cropper’s multicoloured lendings, and climbed naked inside the curtains and into the depths of the feather bed and blew out the candle. And very slowly and with infinite gentle delays and delicate diversions and variations of indirect assault Roland finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him, so that there seemed to be no boundaries,
and he heard, towards dawn, from a long way off, her clear voice crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in pleasure and triumph.