Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  This writing ended, indeed the book ended, abruptly, not even at the end of the year. Roland wondered if there were other diaries. He put little slips of paper in the entries that made up his fragile narrative or non-narrative. There was no evidence to connect the Prowler with the letter-writer, or the letter-writer with Randolph Henry Ash, and yet he felt a powerful conviction that all three were one and the same. If they were, would not Blanche have said so? He must ask Maud Bailey about the Prowler, yet how could he do so without coming clean in some way—about his own interest in the matter? And exposing himself to that censorious and supercilious gaze?

  Maud Bailey put her head round the door.

  “Library’s closing. Did you find anything?”

  “I think so. It may be all in my own head. There are things I need to ask someone, you. Is it permitted to photocopy the manuscript? I simply haven’t had time to copy out what I’ve found. I—”

  “You seem to have had a profitable afternoon.” Drily. Then, as a concession, “Exciting, even.”

  “I don’t know. The whole thing is a wild-goose chase.”

  “If I can help—” said Maud, having packed away Blanche’s pages into their box. “I shall be only too happy. Let’s have coffee. There’s an SCR Coffee place in the Women’s Studies block.”

  “Am I allowed in?”

  “Naturally,” said the frigid voice.

  They sat down at a low table in the corner, under a poster for the Campus Crèche and facing posters for the Pregnancy Advisory Service—“A woman has a right to decide about her own body. We put women first”—and a Feminist Revue: “Come and see the Sorcieres, the Vamps, the daughters of Kali and the Fatae Morganae. We’ll make your blood run cold and make you laugh on the Sinister side of your face at Women’s Wit and Wickedness.” The room was largely uninhabited: a group of women in jeans were laughing in the opposite corner, and two girls were in earnest conversation by the window, pink spiky heads leaning together. Maud Bailey’s excessive elegance was even odder in this context. She was a most untouchable woman. Roland discerned in her a rigorous sense of correctness, or justice, which made her trustworthy, but would likely cause her to disapprove of his own behavior about the letters. Nevertheless, he had decided desperately to gamble on showing her the Xeroxes of the letters because he must know about Christabel LaMotte, and something not himself drove him on. He was forced to lean forward in a kind of pseudo-intimacy and speak low.

  “You know this Prowler Blanche Glover got so worried about? Is anything known about him? The wolf at the door?”

  “Nothing certain. I think Leonora Stern has made a tentative identification with a young Mr Thomas Hearst of Richmond who liked to come and play the oboe with the ladies. They were both accomplished pianists. There do exist two or three letters from Christabel to Hearst—she even sent him a few poems in one, which he kept, fortunately for us. He married someone else in 1860 and drops out of the picture. Blanche may have made up the prowling. She had a vivid imagination.”

  “And was jealous.”

  “Of course.”

  “And the literary letters she refers to? Is it known who they were from? Or if they were connected to the ‘prowler’?”

  “Not as far as I know. She had abundant letters from people like Coventry Patmore who admired her ‘sweet simplicity’ and ‘noble resignation.’ Lots of people wrote. It could have been anyone. You think it’s R. H. Ash?”

  “No. I just—I think I’d better show you what I have.”

  He brought out the photocopies of his two letters. Whilst she was unfolding them, he said, “I should explain. I found these. I haven’t shown them to anyone else. No one knows they exist.”

  She was reading. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I kept them to myself. I don’t know why.”

  She finished reading.

  “Well,” she said, “the dates fit. You could make up a whole story. On no real evidence. It would change all sorts of things. LaMotte scholarship. Even ideas about Melusina. That Fairy Topic. It’s intriguing.”

  “Isn’t it? It would change Ash scholarship, too. His letters are really rather boring, correct and distant really—this is quite different.”

  “Where are the originals?”

  Roland hesitated. He needed help. He needed to speak.

  “I took them,” he said. “I found them in a book and I took them. I didn’t think about it, I just took them.”

  “Why?” Stern but much more animated. “Why did you?”

  “Because they were alive. They seemed urgent—I felt I had to do something. It was an impulse. Quick as a flash. I meant to put them back. I will. Next week. I just haven’t, yet. I don’t think they’re mine, or anything. But they aren’t Cropper’s or Blackadder’s or Lord Ash’s, either. They seemed private. I’m not explaining very well.”

  “No. I suppose they might represent a considerable academic scoop. For you.”

  “Well, I wanted to be the one who does the work,” Roland began innocently, and then saw how he had been insulted. “Wait a minute—it wasn’t like that at all, not like that. It was something personal. You wouldn’t know. I’m an old-fashioned textual critic, not a biographer—I don’t go in for this sort of—it wasn’t profit—I’ll put them back next week—I wanted them to be a secret. Private. And to do the work.”

  She blushed. Red blood stained the ivory.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I should be; it was quite a reasonable assumption and I can’t begin to imagine how anyone would dare to whip two manuscripts like that out of sight—I’d never have the nerve. But I do see you weren’t thinking in these terms. I do really.”

  “I just wanted to know what happened next.”

  “I can’t let you Xerox Blanche’s diary—the spine won’t stand it—but you can copy it out. And go on hunting through those boxes. Who knows what you’ll find. No one was hunting for Randolph Henry Ash, after all. Can I book you a guest room until tomorrow?”

  Roland thought. A guest room seemed infinitely attractive; a quiet place where he could sleep without Val, and think about Ash, and take himself at his own pace. A guest room would cost money he hadn’t got. Also there was the Day Return.

  “I have a Day Return ticket.”

  “We could change that.”

  “I’d rather not. I am an unemployed postgraduate. I haven’t got the money.”

  Now she was wine-red. “I hadn’t thought. You’d better come back to my place. I’ve got a spare bed. It’s still better than buying another ticket now you’re here—I’ll cook supper—and tomorrow you can look at the rest of the Archive. It would be no trouble.”

  He looked at the shiny black trace of the faded brown writing. He said, “All right.”

  Maud lived on the ground floor of a red-brick Georgian house on the outskirts of Lincoln. She had two large rooms, and a kitchen and bathroom constructed from what had been a warren of smaller domestic offices; her own front door had once been the tradesmen’s entrance. The University owned the house; the upper floors were university flats. The kitchen, quarry-tiled, looked out onto a courtyard paved in red brick with various evergreen shrubs in tubs.

  Maud’s living room was not what might have been expected of a Victorian scholar. It was bright white, paint, lamps and dining-table; the carpet was a Berber off-white. The things in this room were brilliantly coloured in every colour, peacock, crimson, sunflower, deep rose, nothing pale or pastel. Alcoves beside the fireplace held a collection of spotlit glass, bottles, flasks, paperweights. Roland felt wakeful and misplaced, as though he was in an art gallery or a surgeon’s waiting-room. Maud went away to make supper, refusing offers of help, and Roland called the Putney flat, where there was no reply. Maud came through with a drink and said, “Why don’t you read Tales for Innocents? I’ve got a first edition.”

  The book was scuffed green leather, with faintly Gothic lettering. Roland sat on Maud’s huge white sofa by the wood fire and turned the pages.

 
Now there was once a Queen, who might have been thought to have everything she could desire in the world, but had set her heart on a strange silent bird a traveller had told of, which lived in the snowy mountains, nested only once, raised its gold and silver chick, sang once only, and then faded like snow in the lowlands.…

  There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come, nor set a fire so that smoke did not pour into the room, a useless, hopeless, dreaming daughter, to whom her mother would often say that she should try to fend for herself in the wild wood, and then she would know the value of listening to advice, and of doing things properly. And this filled the perverse daughter with a great desire to go even a little way into the wild wood, where there were no plates and no stitching, but might well be a need of such things as she knew she had it in herself to perform.…

  He looked at the woodcuts, which were described on the title page as “Illustrations by B.G.” A female figure with a scarfed head, flying apron and great wooden shoes, standing in a clearing surrounded by dark pine trees full of white eyes among their crossing arms of needles. Another figure, wrapped in what appeared to be netting hung with little bells, beat netted fists against a cottage door whilst squashed, lumpen faces leered behind upper windows. A little house, surrounded by the same black trees, at the foot of which, his chops on the whited steps, his sinuous length curved around its corner in a dragon-clasp, the long wolf lay, whose hairs were cut in harmony with the incisive feathering of the trees.

  Maud Bailey gave him potted shrimps, omelette and green salad, some Bleu de Bresse and a bowl of sharp apples. They talked about Tales for Innocents, which, Maud said, were mostly rather frightening tales derived from Grimm and Tieck, with an emphasis on animals and insubordination. They looked together at the one about the woman who had said she would give anything for a child, of any kind, even a hedgehog, and had duly given birth to a monster, half-hedgehog, half-boy. Blanche had drawn the hedgehog-child in a Victorian high chair at a Victorian table; behind it were dark panes of cupboard glass, before it a huge intruding hand, pointing to its dish. Its face was blunt and furred and screwed up as though about to burst into tears. Its prickles were round its ugly head like spined rays of a halo, and descended its neckless shoulders, criss-crossing, to meet the incongruity of a starched, frilled collar. It had blunt little claws on its stubby hands. Roland asked Maud what the critics made of this. Maud said that Leonora Stern believed it represented Victorian women’s fear, or any woman’s fear, of giving birth to a monstrosity. It was related to Frankenstein, the product of Mary Shelley’s labour pains and horror of birth.

  “Do you think that?”

  “It’s an old story, it’s in Grimm, the hedgehog sits on a black cock in a high tree and plays the bagpipes and tricks people. I think you can understand things about Christabel from the way she wrote her version. I think she simply disliked children—the way many maiden aunts must have done, in those days.”

  “Blanche is sorry for the hedgehog.”

  “Is she?” Maud examined the little picture. “Yes, you’re right. Christabel isn’t. It becomes a very resourceful swineherd—multiplies its pigs on forest acorns—and ends up with a lot of triumphant slaughter and roast pork and crackling. Hard for modern children to stomach who grieve for the Gadarene swine. Christabel makes it into a force of nature. It likes winning, against the odds. In the end it wins a King’s daughter, who is expected to burn its hedgehog-skin at night, and does so, and finds herself clasping a beautiful Prince, all singed and soot-black. Christabel says, ‘And if he regretted his armoury of spines and his quick wild wits, history does not relate, for we must go no further, having reached the happy end.’ ”

  “I like that.”

  “So do I.”

  “Did you start work on her because of the family connection?”

  “Possibly. I think not. I knew one little poem by her, when I was very small, and it became a kind of touchstone. The Baileys aren’t very proud of Christabel, you know. They aren’t literary. I’m a sport. My Norfolk grandmother told me too much education spoilt a girl for a good wife. And then the Norfolk Baileys don’t speak to the Lincolnshire Baileys. The Lincolnshire ones lost all their sons in the First World War, except one invalid one, and became rather impoverished, and the Norfolk Baileys hung on to a lot of the money. Sophie LaMotte married a Lincolnshire Bailey. So I didn’t grow up with the idea that I had a poet in the family, by marriage of course. Two Derby winners and an uncle who made a record ascent of the Eiger, that’s the sort of thing that mattered.”

  “What was the little poem?”

  “The one about the Cumaean Sibyl. It was in a little book I once got for Christmas called Ghosts and Other Weird Creatures. I’ll show you.”

  He read

  Who are you?

  Here on a high shelf

  In webbed flask I

  Hook up my folded self

  Bat-leather dry.

  Who were you?

  The gold god goaded me

  Sang shrieking sang high

  His heat corroded me

  Not mine his cry.

  What do you see?

  I saw the firmament

  Steady the sky

  I saw the cerement

  Close Caesar’s eye.

  What do you hope?

  Desire is a dowsed fire

  True love a lie

  To a dusty shelf we aspire

  I crave to die.

  “It’s a very sad poem.”

  “Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong. The Sibyl was safe in her jar, no one could touch her, she wanted to die. I didn’t know what a Sibyl was. I just liked the rhythm. Anyway, when I started my work on thresholds it came back to me and so did she.

  “I wrote a paper on Victorian women’s imagination of space. Marginal Beings and Liminal Poetry. About agoraphobia and claustrophobia and the paradoxical desire to be let out into unconfined space, the wild moorland, the open ground, and at the same time to be closed into tighter and tighter impenetrable small spaces—like Emily Dickinson’s voluntary confinement, like the Sibyl’s jar.”

  “Like Ash’s Sorceress in her In-Pace.”

  “That’s different. He’s punishing her for her beauty and what he thought of as her wickedness.”

  “No, he isn’t. He’s writing about the people, including herself, who thought she ought to be punished because of her beauty and wickedness. She colluded with their judgment. He doesn’t. He leaves it to our intelligence.”

  A disputatious look crossed Maud’s face, but all she said was “And you? Why do you work on Ash?”

  “My mother liked him. She read English. I grew up on his idea of Sir Walter Ralegh, and his Agincourt poem and Offa on the Dyke. And then Ragnarök.” He hesitated. “They were what stayed alive, when I’d been taught and examined everything else.”

  Maud smiled then. “Exactly. That’s it. What could survive our education.”

  She made him up a bed on the high white divan in her living-room—not a heap of sleeping-bags and blankets but a real bed, with laundered sheets and pillows in emerald green cotton cases. And a white down quilt, tumbled out of a concealed drawer beneath. She found him a new toothbrush in its unbroken wrap, and said, “It’s a pity about Sir George. Being such a curmudgeon. Who knows what he’s got? Have you ever seen Seal Court? Victorian Gothic at its most tracery-like, pinnacles and lancets, deep in a dell. We could drive out there. If you think you’ve got time. I very rarely feel any curiosity about Christabel’s life—it’s funny—I even feel a sort of squeamishness about things she might have touched, or places she might have been—it’s the language that matters, isn’t it, it’s what went on in her mind—”

  “Exactly—”

  “I’ve never bothered much about Blanche’s Prowler and that sort of thing—it didn’t seem
to matter who it was, only that she thought something existed—but you’ve stirred something up—”

  “Look,” he said. He fetched the envelope out of his case. “I brought them with me. After all, what else could I do with them? They’re faded but …”

  Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else.… I feel, I know with a certainty that cannot be the result of folly or misapprehension, that you and I must speak again—

  “I see,” she said. “They’re alive.”

  “They don’t have ends.”

  “No. They’re beginnings. Would you like to see where she lived? And ended, indeed?”

  He was visited by a memory of a cat-pissed ceiling, of a room with no view.

  “Why not? Since I’m here.”

  “You go in the bathroom first. Please.”

  “Thank you. For everything. Good night.”

  He moved gingerly inside the bathroom, which was not a place to sit and read or to lie and soak, but a chill green glassy place, glittering with cleanness, huge dark green stoppered jars on water-green thick glass shelves, a floor tiled in glass tiles into whose brief and illusory depths one might peer, a shimmering shower curtain like a glass waterfall, a blind to match, over the window, full of watery lights. Maud’s great green-trellised towels were systematically folded on a towel-heater. Not a speck of talcum powder, not a smear of soap, on any surface. He saw his face in the glaucous basin as he cleaned his teeth. He thought of his home bathroom, full of old underwear, open pots of eyepaint, dangling shirts and stockings, sticky bottles of hair conditioner and tubes of shaving foam.