by A. S. Byatt
Beatrice hated writing. The only word she was proud of in this correct and dull disquisition was “conversation,” which she had chosen in preference to the more obvious “dialogue.” For such conversation Beatrice would have given everything, in those days. Reading those poems, she obscurely knew, offered her a painful and as it seemed illicit glimpse of a combination of civilised talk and raw passion which everyone must surely want, and yet which no one—as she looked round her small world, her serious Methodist parents, Mrs Bengtsson running her University Women’s Tea Club, her fellow-students agonising over invitations to dance and whist—no one seemed to have.
We two remake our world by naming it
Together, knowing what words mean for us
And for the others for whom current coin
Is cold speech—but we say, the tree, the pool,
And see the fire in air, the sun, our sun,
Anybody’s sun, the world’s sun, but here, now
Particularly our sun.…
Ash told her and she heard him. She did not expect to hear such things from anybody else; nor did she. She told Professor Bengtsson that she wished to write her doctoral dissertation on Ask to Embla. He was very doubtful about this. It was uncertain ground, a kind of morass, like Shakespeare’s sonnets. What Contribution to Knowledge did she hope to make, could she be sure of making? The only safe PhD in Professor Bengtsson’s view was an Edition, and he really would not recommend R. H. Ash. He had a friend, however, who knew Lord Ash, who had deposited the Ash papers in the British Museum. It was known that Ellen Ash had kept a journal. Editing that might be a suitable undertaking—something certainly new, modestly useful, manageable and related to Ash. When she had completed that task, Miss Nest would be excellently situated to branch out.…
So it had been. Miss Nest had settled uneasily in front of the boxes of papers—letters, laundry lists, receipt-books, the volumes of the daily journal and other slimmer books of more private occasional writing. What had she hoped for? Some intimacy with the author of the poems, with that fine mind and passionate nature.
Tonight Randolph read aloud to me from Dante’s sonnets in his Vita Nuova. They are truly beautiful. Randolph pointed out the truly masculine energy and vigour of Dante’s Italian, and the spiritual power of his understanding of love. I do not think we will ever tire of these poems of genius.
Randolph read aloud to his wife daily, when they were in the same house. The young Beatrice Nest did try to imagine the dramatic effect of these readings, but was not helped by the vague adjectival enthusiasm of Ellen Ash. There was a sweetness, a blanket dutiful pleasure in her responses to things that Beatrice at first did not like, and later, immersed in her subject, came to take for granted. By then she had discovered other, less bland, tones of voice.
I can never say enough in praise of Randolph’s unvarying goodness and forbearance with my feebleness and inadequacies.
That, or something like that, recurred like the regular tolling of a bell throughout these pages. As is common with extended acquaintance with any task, topic or human being, Beatrice had an initial period of clear observation and detached personal judgment, during which she thought she saw that Ellen Ash was rambling and dull. And then she became implicated, began to share Ellen’s long days of prostration in darkened rooms, to worry about the effect of mildew on damask roses long withered, and the doubts of oppressed curates. This life became important to her; a kind of defensiveness rose up in her when Blackadder suggested that Ellen was not the most suitable partner for a man so intensely curious about all possible forms of life. She became aware of the mystery of privacy, which Ellen, for all her expansive ordinary eloquence, was protecting, it could be said.
There was no PhD in all this. One might have been discovered by the feminist movement, or by some linguistic researcher into euphemism and indirect statement. But Miss Nest had been brought up to look for Influences and Irony and there was little of either here.
Professor Bengtsson suggested she compare the wifely qualities of Ellen Ash with those of Jane Carlyle, Lady Tennyson and Mrs Humphry Ward. You must publish, Miss Nest, said Professor Bengtsson, glittering in matutinal icy determination. I cannot give you work, Miss Nest, without evidence of your suitability, said Professor Bengtsson, and Miss Nest wrote, in two years, a small book, Helpmeets, about the daily lives of wives of genius. Professor Bengtsson offered her an assistant lectureship. This was a great pleasure and terror to her—on the whole more pleasure than terror. She discussed with students, mostly female, swing-skirted and lip-sticked in the Fifties, mini-skirted and trailing Indian cotton in the Sixties, black-lipped under Pre-Raphaelite hairbushes in the Seventies, smelling of baby lotion, of Blue Grass, of cannabis, of musk, of unadulterated feminist sweat, the shape of the sonnet through the ages, the nature of the lyric, the changing image of women. Those were the good days. Of the bad days, which were to come later, before she took early retirement, she did not care to think. She never crossed the threshold, now, of her old college. (Professor Bengtsson had retired in 1970 and died in 1978.)
She had a minimal private life. She lived, in 1986, and had lived for many years, in a tiny house in Mortlake. Here occasionally she had entertained groups of students, less and less frequently as she sensed her growing irrelevance to the deliberations of her department, as Bengtsson was succeeded by Blackadder. No one had come there since 1972. Before that there had been parties with coffee, cakes, a bottle of sweet white wine, and discussion. Those girls in the 1950s and 1960s had thought of her as motherly. Later generations had assumed she was lesbian, even, ideologically, that she was a repressed and unregenerate lesbian. In fact her thoughts about her own sexuality were dominated entirely by her sense of the massive, unacceptable bulk of her breasts. These, in her youth, she had flattened uncorseted under tunic dresses and liberty bodices, allowing them freely to develop their own muscles, as the best medical advice then suggested, stretching and sagging them, in the event, irremediably. Another woman might have flaunted them, might have carried them proudly before her, moulded grandly about a cleavage. Beatrice Nest bundled them into a drooping, grandmotherly bust-bodice and stretched over them hand-knitted jumpers decorated with lines of little tear-drop-shaped holes, which gaped a little, pouted a little, over her contours. In bed at night she felt them fall heavily sideways over the broad case of her ribs. In her cubbyhole with Ellen Ash she felt their living weight, in all its woolly warmth, brush against the rim of her table. She imagined herself grotesquely swollen, looked modestly down and met no one’s eye. It was to these heavy rounds that she owed her reputation for motherliness, a rapid stereotypic reading which also read her round face and pink cheeks as benign. When she was past a certain age, what had been read as benign was read, equally arbitrarily, as threatening and repressive. Beatrice was surprised by certain changes in her colleagues and students. And then, finally, accepting.
On the day of Mortimer Cropper’s proposed luncheon, she was visited by Roland Michell.
“Am I disturbing you, Beatrice?”
Beatrice smiled automatically. “No, not particularly. I was just thinking.”
“I’ve come up against something—I wondered if you could help. Do you happen to know if Ellen Ash says anything anywhere about Christabel LaMotte?”
“I don’t remember anything.” Beatrice sat smiling, as though her lack of memory clinched the matter. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Is there any way of checking?”
“I could look at my card index.”
“I’d be very grateful.”
“What sort of thing are we looking for?”
Roland experienced a not uncommon desire to poke, prod or startle Beatrice, who sat monumentally still, with the same fussy little smile on her face.
“Just anything really. I came across some evidence that Ash was interested in LaMotte. I just wondered.”
“I could look at my card index. Professor Cropper is coming at lunchtime.”
�
�How long is he here this time?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say. He said he was coming on from Christie’s.”
“Could I see your card index, Beatrice?”
“Oh, I don’t know, it’s all a bit of a muddle, I have my own system, you know, Roland, for recording things, I think I’d better look myself, I can better understand my own hieroglyphics.”
She put on her reading glasses, which dangled over her embarrassment on a gilt-beaded chain. Now she could not see Roland at all, a state of affairs she marginally preferred, since she saw all male members of her quondam department as persecutors, and was unaware that Roland’s own position there was precarious, that he hardly qualified as a full-blooded departmental male. She began to move things across her desk, a heavy wooden-handled knitting bag, several greying parcels of unopened books. There was a whole barbican of index boxes, thick with dust and scuffed with age, which she ruffled in interminably, talking to herself.
“No, that one’s chronological, no, that’s only the reading habits, no, that one’s to do with the running of the house. Where’s the master-box now? It’s not complete for all notebooks you must understand. I’ve indexed some but not all, there is so much, I’ve had to divide it chronologically and under headings, here’s the Calverley family, that won’t do … now this might be it.…
“Nothing under LaMotte. No, wait a minute. Here. A cross-reference. We need the reading box. It’s very theological, the reading box. It appears”—she drew out a dog-eared yellowing card, the ink blurring into its fuzzy surface—“it appears she read The Fairy Melusina, in 1872.”
She replaced the card in its box, and settled back in her chair, looking across at Roland with the same obfuscating comfortable smile. Roland felt that the notebooks might be bristling with unrecorded observations about Christabel LaMotte that had slipped between Beatrice’s web of categories. He said doggedly, “Do you think I could see what she said? It might be”—he rejected “important”—“it might be of interest to me. I’ve never read Melusina. There seems to be a revival of interest in it.”
“I tried once or twice in the old days. It’s terribly long-winded and impenetrable. Gothic, you know, Victorian Gothic, a bit gruesome, in places for a lady’s poem …”
“Beatrice—could I just cast my eyes over what Mrs Ash said?”
“I’ll just see.” Beatrice rose from her table. She put her head into the metal dark of a khaki filing-cabinet inside which the yearly volumes of the Journal lay. Roland observed her huge haunches under herring-bone tweed. “Did I say 1872?” Beatrice called from inside her echoing box. Reluctantly she produced the volume, leather-bound, with marbled end-papers in crimson and violet. She began to turn the pages, holding the text up, between Roland and herself.
“Here,” she finally pronounced. “November 1872. Here she begins it.” She began to read aloud: “Today I embarked on The Fairy Melusina, which I bought for myself in Hatchard’s on Monday. What shall I find there? So far I have read the rather long preamble which I found a little pedantic. I then came on to the knight Raimondin and his encounter with the shining lady at the Fontaine de Soif which I liked better. Miss LaMotte has an unquestionable gift for making the flesh creep.”
“Beatrice—”
“Is this the sort of thing you were—?”
“Beatrice, could I possibly read that for myself, to make notes on it?”
“You can’t take it out of the office.”
“Perhaps I could perch at the corner of your table. Would I be terribly in your way?”
“I suppose not, no,” said Beatrice. “You could have that chair if I lifted that heap of books off it—”
“Let me do that—”
“And you could sit opposite me then, if I cleaned that corner of my table—”
“So I could. Thank you.”
They were engaged in space clearing when Mortimer Cropper appeared in the doorway, making everything appear dingier in comparison to his suave elegance.
“Miss Nest. How pleasant to see you again. I trust I’m not too early. I could always come back again.…”
Beatrice was flustered. A heap of papers sighed sideways and fanned out on the floor.
“Oh dear. I was ready, Professor, I was quite ready, only Mr Michell wanted to enquire … wanted to know …”
Cropper had detached Miss Nest’s shapeless mackintosh from its hook and was holding it for her.
“Glad to see you, Michell. Making progress? What did you want to know?”
His clearcut face was composed of pure curiosity.
“Just checking on Ash’s reading of some poems.”
“Ah yes. Which poems?”
“Roland was enquiring about Christabel LaMotte. I couldn’t remember anything … but there turned out to be a minor reference … you may sit there whilst I have lunch with Professor Cropper, Roland, if you try not to disturb the order of things on my desk, if you promise not to take anything out of here.…”
“You need help, Miss Nest. Your task is too huge.”
“Oh no. I do much better alone. I should not know what to do with help.”
“Christabel LaMotte,” said Cropper, musing. “There’s a photograph in the Stant Collection. Very pale. Not sure if it was the effect of near-albinism or a defect in the printing. Probably the latter. Was Ash, do you think, interested in her?”
“Only very marginally. I’m just checking. Routinely.”
When Cropper had shepherded his charge out, Roland settled at his table corner and turned the pages of Randolph Ash’s wife’s journal.
Still engaged in reading Melusina. An impressive achievement.
Have reached Book VI of Melusina. Its aspirations to cosmic reflection might be thought to sit uneasily with its Fairytale nature.
Still reading Melusina. What diligence, what confidence went to its contriving. Miss LaMotte despite a lifetime’s residence in this country, remains essentially French in her way of seeing the world. Though there is nothing to which one can take exception in this beautiful and daring poem, in its morals indeed.
And then, several pages later, a surprising and uncharacteristic outburst.
Today I laid down Melusina having come trembling to the end of this marvellous work. What shall I say of it? It is truly original, although the general public may have trouble in recognising its genius, because it makes no concession to vulgar frailties of imagination, and because its virtues are so far removed in some ways at least from those expected of the weaker sex. Here is no swooning sentiment, no timid purity, no softly gloved lady-like patting of the reader’s sensibility, but lively imagination, but force and vigour. How shall I characterise it? It is like a huge, intricately embroidered tapestry in a shadowed stone hall, on which all sorts of strange birds and beasts and elves and demons creep in and out of thickets of thorny trees and occasional blossoming glades. Fine patches of gold stand out in the gloom, sunlight and starlight, the sparkle of jewels or human hair or serpents’ scales. Firelight flickers, fountains catch light. All the elements are in perpetual motion, fire consuming, water running, air alive and the earth turning.… I was put in mind of the tapestried hunts in The Franklin’s Tale or in The Faerie Queene, where the observer sees the woven vision come alive under his wondering eyes, so that pictured swords draw real blood, and the wind sighs in pictured trees.
And what shall I say of the scene in which the husband, a man of insufficient faith, bores his peephole and observes his Siren-spouse at play in her vat of waters? I should have said, if I was asked, that this scene was best left to the imagination, as Coleridge left Geraldine—“a sight to dream of, not to tell.” But Miss LaMotte tells abundantly, though her description might be a little strong for some stomachs, especially maidenly English ones, who will be looking for fairy winsomeness.
She is beautiful and terrible and tragic, the Fairy Melusina, inhuman in the last resort.
The sinuous muscle of her monster tail
Beating the lambent bath t
o diamond-fine
Refracting lines of spray, a dancing veil
Of heavier water on the breathless air
How lovely-white her skin her Lord well knew,
The tracery of blue veins across the snow.…
But could not see the beauty in the sheen
Of argent scale and slate-blue coiling fin.…
Perhaps the most surprising touch is that the snake or fish is beautiful.
Roland gave up any idea of having lunch himself to copy out this passage, mostly because he wanted to give it to Maud Bailey, who must be excited at this contemporary female enthusiasm for her admired text, but also because he felt that extravagant admiration of this sort, from Ash’s wife for a woman whom he was already thinking of as Ash’s mistress, was perhaps unexpected. Having copied it out, he turned the pages idly.
My recent reading has caused me for some reason to remember myself as I was when a young girl, reading high Romances and seeing myself simultaneously as the object of all knights’ devotion—an unspotted Guenevere—and as the author of the Tale. I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither, but the mistress of a very small household, consisting of an elderly poet (set in his ways, which are amiable and gentle and give no cause for anxiety), myself, and the servants who are not unmanageable. I see daily how Patience and Faith are both worn down and hagged with the daily care of their broods and yet shine with the flow of love and unstinted concern for their young. They are now grandmothers as well as mothers, doted on and doting. I myself have come to find of late a kind of creeping insidious vigour come upon me (after the unspeakable years of migraine headache and nervous prostration). I wake feeling, indeed, rather spry, and look about for things to occupy myself with. I remember at sixty the lively ambitions of the young girl in the Deanery, who seems like someone else, as I watch her in my imagination dancing in her moony muslin, or having her hand kissed by a gentleman in a boat.