by A. S. Byatt
R.H.A.”
“You were wrong about the scandal,” said Sir George to Roland, with a complicated mixture of satisfaction and accusation. Roland felt a huge irritability mounting inside himself, mild though he knew himself to be, compounded of distress at hearing Lady Bailey’s faded voice stammer across Randolph Henry Ash’s prose, which sang in his head, reconstituted, and also of frustration because he could not seize and explore these folded paper time-bombs.
“We don’t know until we’ve read it all, do we?” he retorted, creaky with self-restraint.
“But it might put a cat among the pigeons.”
“Not exactly. The importance is literary—”
Analogies raced through Maud’s mind and were rejected as too inflammatory. It’s as though you’d found—Jane Austen’s love letters?
“You know, if you read the collected letters of any writer—if you read her biography—you will always get a sense that there’s something missing, something biographers don’t have access to, the real thing, the crucial thing, the thing that really mattered to the poet herself. There are always letters that were destroyed. The letters, usually. These may be those letters, in Christabel’s life. He—Ash—obviously thought they were. He says so.”
“How exciting,” said Joan Bailey. “How very exciting.”
“I must take advice,” said Sir George, stubborn and suspicious.
“So you shall, my dear,” said his wife. “But you must remember that Miss Bailey was clever enough to find your treasure. And Mr Michell.”
“If, at any time, sir—you would consider giving me—us—access to the correspondence—we could tell you what was there—what its significance to scholarship was—whether an edition might be possible. I have seen enough already to know that my work on Christabel must be seriously altered in the light of what you have in these letters—I wouldn’t be happy going on without taking them into account—and that must be true of Dr Michell’s work on Ash too, just as true.”
“Oh yes,” said Roland. “It might change the whole line of my thought.”
Sir George looked from one to the other.
“That may be so. That may well be so. But are you the best people—to trust with the reading?”
“Once it is generally known,” said Roland, “that these letters exist, everyone will be at your door. Everyone.”
Maud, who was afraid of exactly this possibility, glowered whitely at him. But Sir George, as Roland had calculated, was more alarmed at the thought of pilgrimages of Leonora Sterns than aware of the possibilities of Cropper and Blackadder.
“That won’t do at all—”
“We could catalogue them for you. With a description. Transcribe—with your permission—some—”
“Not so fast. I shall take advice. That’s all I can say. That’s fair.”
“Please,” said Maud, “let us know, at least, what conclusion you come to.”
“Of course we will,” said Joan Bailey. “Of course we will.”
Her capable hands stacked those dry leaves in her lap, ordering, squaring.
Driving back in the dark, Roland and Maud communicated in brief businesslike bursts, their imaginations hugely busy elsewhere.
“We both had the same instinct. To play it down.” Maud.
“They must be worth a fortune.” Roland.
“If Mortimer Cropper knew they were there—”
“They’d be in Harmony City tomorrow.”
“Sir George would be a lot richer. He could mend that house.”
“I’ve no idea how much richer. I don’t know anything about money. Perhaps we should tell Blackadder. Perhaps they ought to be in the British Library. They must be some sort of national heritage.”
“They’re love letters.”
“It seems so, certainly.”
“Perhaps Sir George will get advised to see Blackadder. Or Cropper.”
“We must pray not Cropper. Not yet.”
“If he gets advised to come to the University, he may simply get sent to me.”
“If he gets advised to go to Sotheby’s, the letters’ll vanish, into America or somewhere else, or Blackadder’ll get them if we’re lucky. I don’t know why I think that’d be so bad. I don’t know why I feel so possessive about the damned things. They’re not mine.”
“It’s because we found them. And because—because they’re private.”
“But we don’t want him just to put them into a cupboard?”
“How can we, now we know they’re there?”
“Do you think we might agree—a kind of pact? That if one of us finds out any more, he or she tells the other and no one else? Because they concern both poets equally—and there are so many other possible interests involved.…”
“Leonora—”
“If you tell her, it’s halfway to Cropper and Blackadder—and they have much more punch than she has, I suppose.”
“It makes sense. Let’s hope he consults Lincoln University and they send him to me.”
“I feel faint with curiosity.”
“Let’s hope he makes his mind up soon.”
But it was to be some considerable time before any more was heard of the letters or of Sir George.
6
His taste, that was his passion, brought him then
To bourgeois parlours, grey and grim back rooms,
All redolent of Patriarchal teas,
Pacing behind a lustrous, smiling Jew,
All decorous, ’twixt brute mahogany,
Meuble or chest, and solid table, clothed
Smug in its Sabbath calm, in indigo,
Faded maroon and bistre cotton stripes—
He’d see, perhaps, extracted one by one,
From three times locked, but plumply vulgar drawers
From satchels soft of oriental silk,
To spread in ordered and in matched array,
So tenderly unmuffled and revealed
The immemorial amethystine blue
Of twenty ancient Damascene glazed tiles
As bright as heaven’s courts, as subtle-hued
As living sheen upon the peacock’s neck.
And then his soul was satisfied, and then
He tasted honey, then in those dead lights
Alive again, he knew his life, and gave
His gold, to gaze and gaze.…
—R. H. ASH, The Great Collector
The bathroom was a long narrow rectangle, space-saving, coloured like sugared almonds. The fitments were a strong pink, tinged with a dusky greyish tone. The tiled floor was a greyish violet. With little bunches of ghostly Madonna lilies—they were of Italian design—on certain tiles, not all. These tiles extended halfway up the walls, where they met a paisley vinyl paper crawling with busy suckered globules, octopods, sea-slugs, in very bright purple and pink. There were toning ceramic fitments, in dusty pink pottery, a lavatory-paper holder, a tissue-holder, a toothmug on a plate like those huge African lip-decorations, a scallop-shell holding pristine ovoids of purple and pink soap. The slatted, wipe-clean vinyl blind represented a pink dawn, with rose-tinged bulbous cumuli. The candlewick bath-mat, with its hide-like rubber backing, was lavender-coloured and so was the candlewick crescent snugly clutching the lavatory pedestal and so was the candlewick mob-cap cushioned protector worn by the lavatory lid. On the top of this, alert for house-sounds, and urgently concentrating, perched Professor Mortimer P. Cropper. It was 3.00 A.M. He was arranging a thick wad of paper, a black rubber torch, and a kind of rigid matt black box, just the size to fit on his knee without bumping the walls.
This was not his milieu. He enjoyed in part the spice of the incongruous and the prohibited. He wore a long black silk dressing-gown, with crimson revers, over black silk pyjamas, crimson-piped, with a monogram on his breast-pocket. His slippers, mole-black velvet, were embroidered in gold thread with a female head surrounded by shooting rays or shaken hair. These had been made in London, to his specification. The figure was sculpted on the por
tico of the oldest part of Robert Dale Owen University, the Harmonia Museum, named after the ancient Alexandrian academy, that “bird-coop of the muses.” She represented Mnemosyne, Mother of the Muses, though few now recognised her without prompting, and she was most often taken, by those with a smattering of education, as the Medusa. She appeared also, not too ostentatiously, at the head of Professor Cropper’s letters. She did not appear on his signet ring, an imposing onyx with the impression of a winged horse, which had once belonged to Randolph Henry Ash, and now reposed on the pink washbasin where Cropper had just washed his hands.
His face in the mirror was fine and precise, his silver hair most exquisitely and severely cut, his half-glasses gold-rimmed, his mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a neat belt and the faraway ghost of a gunbelt.
He pulled a string and the bathroom heater fizzed into slow action. He pushed down a switch on his black box, which also fizzed a little, and glowed briefly with light. He switched on his torch and balanced it in the washbasin, illuminating his work. He switched off the light, working flaps and switches in a practised darkroom way. Out of the envelope, with delicate finger and thumb, he drew a letter. An old letter, whose folds he pressed skilfully flat before inserting it into his box, closing the lid, locking, switching.
He was greatly attached to his black box, a device he had invented and perfected in the 1950s, and was now reluctant to abandon in favour of newer or slicker machines, since it had served him well over the decades. He was adept at acquiring invitations into the most unlikely houses where some relic of Ash’s hand might be found; once there he had come to the conclusion that it was necessary to make some record, privately, for himself, of what he found, in case the owner subsequently proved reluctant to sell, or even to allow copies to be made, as had been known, once or twice, most detrimentally to the cause of scholarship. There were cases where his clandestine pictures were the only record, anywhere in the world, of documents that had vanished without trace. He did not think that would be the case here; he was reasonably sanguine that Mrs Daisy Wapshott would part with her defunct husband’s inherited treasure once she knew what size of cheque might be exchanged for it—a modest figure would do perfectly well, he was of the opinion. But odd things had happened in other cases, and if she dug her heels in, he would not have another chance. Tomorrow he would be back in his comfortable hotel in Piccadilly.
The letters were not much. They were written to Daisy Wapshott’s husband’s mother, who appeared to have been called Sophia, and appeared to have been Randolph Henry’s godchild. He could check who she was, later. He had been told about Mrs Wapshott by a nosy bookseller of his acquaintance who “did” local auction sales and told Cropper of anything interesting. Mrs Wapshott had not brought the letters to the sale; she had been helping out with teas, but had told Mr Biggs about what were always called “Grummer’s tree-letters from that there poet.” And Mr Biggs had mentioned them in a P.S. to Cropper. And Cropper had spent six months tempting Mrs Wapshott, with tentative queries and finally the information that he “just happened to be passing by.…” This was not quite so. He had passed from Piccadilly to the outskirts of Preston, specifically and specially. And here he was, amongst the candlewick, with the four little messages.
Dear Sophia,
Thank you for your letter and for your very accomplished drawings of ducks and drakes. As I am an old man, with no children or grandchildren of my own, you must forgive me if I write to you as I should to any dear friend who had sent me something pretty that I shall treasure. How well-observed was your upended duckling, busy among the roots and grubs in the pond-bottom.
I cannot draw so well as you, but I think gifts should be reciprocated, so here is a lopsided version of my namesake, the mighty Ash. It is a common and magical tree—not as the mountain ash is magical, but because our Norse forefathers once believed it held the world together, rooted in the underworld and touching Heaven. It is good for spearhafts and possible for climbing. Its buds, as Lord Tennyson observed, are black.
I hope you will not mind me calling you Sophia and not Sophy. Sophia means wisdom, the heavenly Wisdom that kept things in order before Adam and Eve foolishly sinned in the garden. You will no doubt grow up to be very wise—but now is your playing-time, and your time for delighting with ducks your elderly admirer
Randolph Henry Ash
This effusion had a rarity value. It was the only letter written to a child that Mortimer Cropper knew to be in existence. Ash in general had a reputation for impatience with children. (He was not known to be tolerant of his wife’s nephews and nieces, against whom he was heavily protected.) This would entail a subtle adjustment. Cropper photographed the other letters, which were accompanied by drawings of a Plane, a Cedar, and a Walnut, and put his ear to the bathroom door to hear if Mrs Wapshott or her fat little terrier was stirring. In fact, after a moment, he ascertained that both were snoring, on different notes. He tiptoed back across the landing, squeaking once on the linoleum, into his frilled box of a guestroom, where, on a glass-topped, kidney-shaped dressing-table, doubly skirted in puce satin and white net, he had placed Randolph Ash’s pocket-watch in a heart-shaped dish, decorated with gardenias.
He breakfasted in the morning with Daisy Wapshott, a comfortable bosomy lady in a crêpe-de-chine dress and a pink angora cardigan, who waited on him, despite his protestations, with a huge plate of ham and eggs, mushrooms and tomatoes, sausages and baked beans. He ate triangular toasts, and marmalade from a cut-glass dish with a swinging lid and a scallop shell spoon. He drank strong tea from a silver pot under a teacosy embroidered to resemble a nesting hen. He abominated tea. He was a black-coffee drinker. He congratulated Mrs Wapshott on her tea. From the windows of his own elegant house he could have seen a formal garden, and beyond it the sages and junipers of the mesa, and the mountain heads rising out of the desert into a clear sky. Here he saw a strip of lawn, along which ran plastic fencing separating it from identical strips on each side.
“I spent a very comfortable night,” he told Mrs Wapshott. “I am extremely grateful to you.”
“I’m glad you found my Rodney’s letters of interest, Professor. He inherited them from his Mum. Who’d come down in the world, if he was to be believed. I never met his family. I married him in the War. Met him fire-fighting. I was a lady’s maid in them days, Professor, and he was a gentleman, anyone could see. But he never had no inclination for any kind of work, really. We kept the shop—general haberdashery—to tell the truth, I did all the work, and he just smiled at the customers, half shame-faced. I never knew exactly where he got them letters. His Mum gave them to him—she said he might be the literary one and they were letters from a famous poet. He did show them to the Vicar, who said he didn’t think they was of much interest. I did say as I’d never part with them, Professor. They aren’t much, really, just letters to a kid about trees.”
“In Harmony City,” said Mortimer Cropper, “in the Stant Collection in the University there, I have the largest and finest collection of Randolph Henry Ash’s correspondence anywhere in the world. It is my aim to know as far as possible everything he did—everyone who mattered to him—every little preoccupation he had. These small letters of yours, Mrs Wapshott, are not much, maybe, on their own. But in the global perspective they add lustre, they add detail, they bring the whole man just that little bit more back to life. I hope you will entrust them to the Stant Collection, Mrs Wapshott. Then they will be preserved forever in the finest conditions and purified air, controlled temperature and limited access, only to accredited scholars in the field.”
“My husband wanted them to go to Katy. Our daughter. In case she was the literary one. That’s her bedroom you’re sleeping in, Professor. She’s been left home now ever such a long time—she’s got a son and daughter of her own—but I keep her room just so, for her to come back to, i
f things get on top of her. She appreciates that. She was a teacher before the children. She did teach English. She often expressed an interest in Grummer’s tree letters. That’s what we always called them. Grummer’s tree letters. I couldn’t possibly think of letting you have them without so much as asking her. They’re hers, in a sort of way—in trust, if you see what I mean.”
“Of course you should consult her. You should say we would naturally give you an advantageous price for these documents. When you speak to her you should mention that. We have very ample funds, Mrs Wapshott.”
“Very ample funds,” she repeated after him, vaguely. He was aware that she thought it would be ill-bred to ask him what sort of price he might offer, and that suited him very well, that gave him room to manoeuvre, as he calculated that the richest dreams of her modest avarice would be unlikely to reach the sort of sum he would willingly pay on the open market. He was rarely wrong in these cases. He could most frequently foretell to a dollar what some country curate or school librarian might suppose he could demand, both before and after professional advice.
“I shall have to think about it,” she said, troubled, but implicated. “I shall have to see what’s best.”
“There’s no hurry,” he assured her, finishing his toast, wiping his fingers on his damask napkin. “Only one thing—if anyone else should approach you about these documents, it would be kind if you remembered I showed an interest first. We all have our little academic courtesies, but some of us are quite prepared to go behind each other’s backs. I should like your assurance that you will do nothing with these short letters without consulting me first. If you feel able to give it. I can also assure you that you will find it to your advantage to consult me.”