The Maker of Swans

by Paraic O’Donnell

  Chastern taps his teacup again as he talks. Clara waits for him to resume, knowing that she need ask nothing further. Whatever it is that he is telling her, she can see that it exercises him. There is much more that he wishes to say.

  ‘It is not the work itself, of course. Mr Crowe’s work – that is, the work he has had a part in – has never been other than luminous. There is no one living or dead, in fact, who has given us so much that is unquestionably fine. No, the work has never been in doubt, but he himself enjoys no distinction. He has – how might one put this? He has originated many of the most sacred works we have, and yet he has remained unacknowledged, except by those he aided.’

  Fixing his fingernail on the corner of her page, Chastern turns it and draws it towards him. He reads the lines of ‘Kubla Khan’ with what appears to be dim amusement.

  ‘“A person from Porlock”, indeed. Yes, he has been nothing if not discreet. But did you never wonder, my dear, why there was not a single volume among all those in his library that bore his own name? Did you think, perhaps, that his modesty restrained him? If that were so, I must tell you that it would be a thing without precedent among the authors I have known – and I have known, I assure you, a great many. Indeed, some are so enamoured of their own progeny that they can hardly bear to cede their shelves to anything else.

  ‘No, I’m afraid Mr Crowe has not quite told you everything, Clara. He is a writer, certainly, but he is rather more than that. If he were merely a writer, he would be no different from the countless thousands of tinkerers who covet that name, who may contrive, after six or seven hours of arduous nudging, to produce a tolerably beautiful sequence of words and who lack any conviction, even then, as to what duty those words might have in the world. No, Mr Crowe is not merely that.

  ‘What he is, my dear, is the thing that writers wish for. He is what they pray will visit them as they crouch in their bedsitters and fetid box rooms, labouring over pages that have yellowed before they even see the light of day. He is the one they seek when they leave behind the screeching of some inconsolable infant and descend at midnight to the street. They would give anything, on such nights, to possess some little of what is his. And sometimes, Clara, sometimes that is just what happens.’

  Chastern pauses and sits back in his chair. He puts down his teacup and seems to be catching his breath. She takes the opportunity to put down another question.

  Do you mean that he writes other people’s books?

  He glances at the page, but pushes it aside.

  ‘That,’ he says, ‘is a rather inelegant way of putting it. He is not a ghost writer, as we must now say; nothing so coarse and mercenary. He is not some journeyman who turns out squalid memoirs to order. And they are not other people’s books in anything but name. When he chooses to lend his aid – which is seldom now – his patrons must take what they are given, though they are invariably glad to do so. But you are right in supposing that the works are by his hand. And they are of a preternatural brilliance, of course, for that is why he is sought out.’

  Chastern sips minutely from his teacup, returning it to the table with an air of displeasure. He seems to hesitate before resuming. ‘Of course, that is not quite all,’ he says at length. ‘It is not merely upon the page that your guardian achieves the miraculous. But come, let us return to this subject on another occasion. I have already taxed you, I fear, and you may find the rest somewhat abstruse.’

  Clara writes quickly, disregarding the appearance of the letters.

  I read everything. Tell me.

  He studies her for a moment, then gives a cold, sceptical laugh and reaches for his cane. He rises with some difficulty from his armchair and crosses slowly to the window. ‘You must think it a dreadfully bleak place,’ he says softly, ‘coming here in winter as you have. If you had come in June, you might even have found it to your liking. I keep a garden here, you know.’

  Clara turns in her chair. He is looking out, not at the white barrenness of the moors, but towards the walled enclosure immediately beneath the window. Since it too lies under a quilt of snow, she has paid it no particular attention.

  ‘There is a much more splendid garden, of course, attached to my house at the college. But that one is maintained by the university’s own gardeners, and I am scarcely listened to when it comes to what is planted there. One of my predecessors, you see, was excessively devoted to dahlias, a vulgar passion that has been immortalised, God help us, as an article of tradition. At any rate, the garden at this house, whatever its shortcomings, is of my own fashioning. It is here, for instance, that I indulge my fondness for roses. The weather is hardly propitious, of course, but one may keep even tender specimens with high enough walls.

  ‘I favour the old garden roses, naturally. Gallicas, damasks, bourbons – even the names are exquisite, don’t you find? In the matter of colour, I will countenance certain pinks and very occasional pale yellows. No reds, and certainly not the barbarous apricots that are now tolerated. It is white roses, though, that are my truest passion. In them, nature has achieved her most inexpressible perfection.’

  Clara remembers the white roses that were delivered to the house, how agitated Eustace was to find them there.

  ‘What is it, do you suppose, that such perfection consists of?’

  She looks away, distracted by a small tremor of recollection. There was a dream once, a dream that ended with swans.

  ‘The question may be profound or facile,’ he says. ‘Or rather, the answer may be so. In any case, it is a question that all art must answer. Every work of art, if it is to be of value, must give us its account of that perfection. It is not a matter of explication, of course. That is the domain of science. What art must do is attempt, as nature has, to assemble the tissues of beauty for itself. It must construct its own rose from the raw air, endow it with its colour, its small weight, its tender volutes – even its scent. Art must set this thing before us, must assert its reality in the void of our disbelief. It must make it live.’

  Clara strains against the impulse to yawn. She is thankful that she has never been made to go to school. It is this sort of thing, she supposes, that children must endure in classrooms all the time. Chastern now seems only to be explaining something that she has always found luminously obvious, something that must be obvious to anyone who has ever read and loved a book. And he has still not answered her question.

  ‘We may only approach the rose, Clara,’ he says, turning from the window. ‘In art, that is all that we may achieve. It is a limit as inviolable as our own mortality. We may approach the rose, sometimes so closely that we are sated, for an instant, by the illusion. But then it is over, and we move on. We stand before the next painting, we listen to the next string quartet, we trudge towards extinction.’

  Clara thinks of holding up the pages on which she has written her questions. She resists the urge, glancing towards them instead in what she hopes is a pointed manner.

  ‘In his art, Mr Crowe does not merely approach the rose.’ Chastern looks intently at her. He grips the handle of his cane. ‘I can give you no better explanation than that. He is not limited as others are. On the page, there is almost nothing he cannot achieve, and he has crossed even that boundary on a few occasions. Oh, yes. Not often, and it costs him great effort, but he can do it when he is greatly roused.

  ‘That, I confess, is a puzzle to me. It is something that none of his fellows have ever accomplished. He knows of my curiosity, of course, and delights in keeping it unsated. Still, I am not entirely benighted. I have developed certain conjectures. Do you know what I think?’

  Clara shakes her head solemnly.

  ‘I think that there is someone else, someone whose gifts are greater still. This person has remained hidden from me, though not, I think, from Mr Crowe; someone, perhaps, who has remained hidden even from himself – or from herself – whose gifts lie undiscovered, but whose proximity has proved nourishing to your guardian.

  ‘For that person, I rather fan
cy, there is no boundary at all. Nature and its image permeate each other without hindrance, and anything is possible. The rose itself, Clara. Life and death. It is a remarkable thought, is it not?’

  Clara looks down. She fixes her eyes on the page as if she is contemplating this answer, but that is not it. She is no longer thinking about Mr Crowe.

  ‘In any case,’ Chastern goes on. ‘Whatever the nature of these gifts, their exercise, as you might imagine, is attended by grave duties. There is a covenant, you see, that binds all those who do this work. They may destroy what they have themselves created – they do so routinely, indeed, in quest of perfection – but they may not undo what nature itself has wrought. They may not destroy what is living. It is a prohibition that binds Mr Crowe as much as any other, and even he will not lightly be pardoned for breaking it. It is in such matters that I have a certain authority. I am a mere superintendent, of course; no more than a functionary. Nonetheless, when such a violation occurs, it falls to me to restore order.’

  Clara considers all this, then takes up the pen again. How? Can you do what they can? Why would they listen to you?

  Chastern receives the question with a look of chilly amusement. ‘You may well ask,’ he says. ‘My own gifts, admittedly, are rather more modest, but they have proved sufficient to the small office that I hold; they have allowed me, when I must, to bring sanction against those who offend our covenant. What is it, do you suppose, that is craved by those who produce artefacts of beauty? Fame and acclamation? In some degree, yes, but there are those – Crowe is one such – who enjoy no fame whatever, except among their peers.

  ‘No, what they desire most, even those who work from the shadows, is memory. If a thing of beauty goes unremembered, it is as if it never existed. If all they have done is forgotten, they may come to feel – even those as prodigiously gifted as your guardian – that they themselves have been abolished. And it is memory, too, that is drawn upon in the act of creation. It was Mnemosyne, after all, who was mother to all the muses. The rose, you see, is not simply beheld when its likeness is made; it is beheld and cherished, and its image is treasured along with all those the artist has ever seen or touched. Memory is the very fabric of their art. If it is taken away, they have nothing. Even Crowe, for all his prodigious abilities, is susceptible in this regard. He is sentimental at heart, you know, and excessively attached to what little he remembers of his youth. Memories can be so very fragile, don’t you find?’

  Chastern has become agitated in the course of this speech. He pauses now to catch his breath, with both hands folded upon the handle of his cane, his chin raised in satisfaction.

  ‘That, at any rate, is why they listen to me. That is what I can take from them. Your guardian has offended our covenant in the gravest manner. He has done so more than once, in fact, and although the last time was long ago, it remains unaccounted for. I have offered him an amnesty, but only in return for an act of reparation on his part. There is something I wish for myself, Clara, something that will scarcely strain his gifts. I have acted more moderately, I believe, than was warranted by his offence, and yet I fear he will prove too indolent, too heedless, to do me this small service. It is for this reason that you have been brought here, and you will go home, to answer your other rather terse question, when that small thing has been done. Not before.’

  She reaches for the pen and begins, with awkward urgency, to write another question. Chastern, though, is making his way to the door. He glances with cold distaste around the plainly furnished chamber, but does not look at her as he passes.

  ‘I do hope,’ he says, ‘that you continue in your recovery. I will see to it that Nazaire brings more paper.’

  She leaves a word unfinished on the page. Chastern has closed the door behind him, and is gone.

  What happens in the garden begins almost without her knowledge.

  All morning, Clara has been at the writing table as usual. For her first exercise of the day, she has chosen verses from the Old Testament. She has not read very much of it, and can recall only the pages of the Book of Genesis with clarity. Still, it suits her purposes, since many of its verses are of a length that allows her to write them on one line, and to fill an entire sheet with her repeated attempts.

  She has copied a particular verse perhaps half a dozen times when she finds herself imagining the scene it describes. This is something she has not done since she began these efforts. She has been alert, until now, only to the shapes she must imitate, seeing the page of the King James Bible, with its crabbed trains of black letter, as if it were open in front of her. Clara pauses to read the verse.

  And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

  Her left hand is cramped, but not yet so badly that she would normally consider allowing herself to rest. For no reason that she is aware of, she rises from her chair and goes to the window. She looks down at Chastern’s garden, absently opening and closing her aching fingers. Beneath its undisturbed crust of snow, she can guess at little of its appearance in summer. A central path can be discerned, leading towards the high wrought-iron gates. On either side of this path are traces of the garden’s symmetry, of geometrical shapes whose outlines are indistinct beneath the white drifts. On the high stone walls, she sees the stark tracery of what she takes to be his roses, snarled and colourless now, without the tiniest insurgence of green.

  She returns to the desk with no particular thought, with no intention other than to resume her exercise. She copies out the verse another six or seven times, achieving a regularity in her script that she finds mildly satisfying. But she finds, without being conscious of the transition, that she is writing something quite different. The pen – in spite of the discomfort the effort causes – is crossing the page in trembling surges. The words are her own, she thinks, but scrawled in such rapid profusion that she struggles to follow their sense. She sees the word child.

  The word rose.

  The sensation is one she has experienced before only on the periphery of sleep, when her thoughts are warm and motile. She is aware only of a gentle subsidence, of lapsing into something that is not quite thought. She sees nothing, at first, or nothing that is clear to her.

  It begins with the cold. She feels a dense and clutching cold, pressing on her from above, and knows somehow that she must push through it, must drive upwards. This is slow work, and she is hampered by how little she knows of her shape and nature. She has no fingertips now, no nails to claw with. She cannot brace her knees beneath her. She searches outwards, pushing through dark matter in minute surges. She threads her way, from the faintest of her fibres to the places where she thickens, the ropes of her joining and massing against the blunt teeth of the stones.

  She is no longer only mute. She is blind now, and deaf also, but discovers things by other senses, by a quiet seeping of pulses. She knows the knit and clutch of what surrounds her, finds where it is weak, where it is leavened with air. She learns the light without seeing, senses its cadence and flux, its coming richness. She pushes upwards.

  The white cold is easier, after the deadening burden underneath. She has gathered strength now, her urges bundled and intent. She is a closed fist of veins, and near its crust the whiteness yields in a crush of softness. She is in the light then, the limitless depths of it. It comes to her from everywhere, inundates her. She is free and golden. She is above.

  She labours upwards still, and outwards now too, finding nodes of tenderness along her stiffening spine. Through these she pushes urge after urge, splitting and twisting, finding new ways to be everywhere in the light. She claws at it, lusts for it. Hungers for its syrup.

  It is slow, this new spreading, but nothing like the slowness beneath. In the light, she is glutted with splendour. She swells and bursts, is splayed and ramified, repeating herself over and over. She wants to be more, to go on devouring the radiance, to deepen her pulse of sugar.

  She does not know what she has climbed towards unt
il she finds it, a flourish of undiscovered notes in the rising song of growth. She chances upon them at her junctures, finds them suddenly everywhere at her limits, beads of lushness in threes and fives, lolling with new density. She gives them everything, urging sweetness to them through the vast spread of her vessels, lavishing their cores with tiny folds.

  They fatten, these capsules of pursed softness, until she feels herself sag under their sumptuous heft, their intolerable fullness. She is pervaded, slowly but entirely, by the need for their release, by a vast and luxuriant desire that is threaded dimly with fear, with the distant chill of extinction. She trawls the darkness beneath her, tugging wetness from the cram of filth, combing it for the clots and grains that nourish her.

  She needs it, this dredged strength, to force the buds open. The light is not yet high and long enough; there is not enough heat. To gather it, she must push through narrow and incomplete channels, must insist on a great violence of distension and fissioning. It cannot be done without injury. She feels sluggish rivulets of panic, returning to her from her ruptured places.

  She disregards the damage, finds other ways. She is thousands, she is uncountable millions. She is a monstrous instrument of motes and filaments, of sacs and membranes. There is no part of her that cannot be remade, no part she will not sacrifice. She will have her way, will have this done even if there is nothing afterwards that can be saved.

  When the blossoming begins, its shocks are so gentle, so scattered, that at first she fails to realise it is happening, that the calyces are splitting, furling clear as their interiors overwhelm them. It gathers pace quickly, though, and soon it is unmistakable, each bud disclosing itself in a meticulous spasm of delicacy, unclutching its treasure of softness.

  It is beyond her then, driven by its own inexorable pulse; the same extravagant coda repeating at her every extremity. At its height, when it demands no more of her effort, it becomes ecstatic. She is multiplied beyond measure, a constellation of blossom. She is vast and intricate, drunk with light and fashioned from the living air.