by A. S. Byatt
When I last wrote I mentioned I might write something on water and milk and amniotic flud in Melusina—why is water always seen as the female?—we’ve discussed this—I want to write a big piece on the undines and nixies and melusinas—women perceived as dangerous—what do you think? I could extend it to the Drowned City—With special reference to non-genital imagery for female sexuality—we need to get away from the cunt as well as from the phallus—the drowned women in the city might represent the totality of the female body as an erogenous zone if the circumambient fluid were seen as an undifferentiated eroticism, and this might be possible to connect to the erotic totality of the woman/dragon stirring the waters of the large marble bath, or submerging her person in it as LaM. tellingly describes her. What do you think, Maud?
Would you be prepared to give a paper at the Australian meeting of the Sapphic society in 1988? I had in mind that we would devote that session entirely to the study of the female erotic in nineteenth-century poetry and the strategies and subterfuges through which it had to present or dis-cover itself. You might have extended your thinking about liminality and the dissolution of boundaries. Or you might wish to be more rigorous in your exploration of LaMotte’s lesbian sexuality as the empowering force behind her work. (I accept that her inhibitions made her characteristically devious and secretive—but you do not give her sufficient credit for the strength with which she does nevertheless obliquely speak out.)
I think so often of the brief time we had together in the summer. I think of our long tramps on the Wolds and late hours in the library, and scoops of real American ice-cream by your fireside. You are so thoughtful and gentle—you made me feel I am crashing around in your fragile surroundings, clumsily knocking down little screens and room dividers you have set up around your English privacy—but you aren’t happy, are you, Maud? There is an emptiness in your life.
It would do you good to come out here and experience the hectic storm and stress of American Women’s Studies. I could find you a post as soon as you wanted it, no problem. Think about it.
In the interim, go and leave my love at Her grave—use the shears if you’ve time, or inclination—it made my blood boil to see how she was neglected. Put some more flowers down in my name—for the grass to drink—I found her resting-place unbearably moving. I wish I thought she could have foreseen she was to be loved as she should be loved—
And I send you all my love—and wait for an answer this time
Your
Leonora
This letter posed and shelved a moral problem: when and how much was it wise or honourable to tell Leonora about the discovery? She would not particularly like it. She did not like R. H. Ash. Still less would she like being put in the position of not having known about it, if she continued to write confident papers on Christabel’s sexuality. She would feel betrayed and sisterhood would be betrayed.
As for Fergus. As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him. She was annoyed at his proposal for a siege-paper, without knowing how much it was manufactured ad hoc to annoy her. She was also annoyed by his arcane reference to Lacan and flying fish and vesicle persecution. She decided to track this down—method was her defence against anxiety—and duly found it.
I remember the dream of one of my patients, whose aggressive drives took the form of obsessive phantasies; in the dream he saw himself driving a car, accompanied by a woman with whom he was having a rather difficult affair, pursued by a flying fish, whose skin was so transparent that one could see the horizontal liquid level through the body, an image of vesicle persecution of great anatomical clarity.…
The tormented bed rose again in her mind’s eye, like old whipped eggs, like dirty snow.
Fergus Wolff appeared to be slightly jealous of Roland Michell. It was clever, if obvious, to describe him to Maud as “not in your class.” Even if she noticed the transparency of this device, the label would stick. And she knew Roland was not in her class. She should have been less ungracious. He was a gentle and unthreatening being. Meek, she thought drowsily, turning out the light. Meek.
The next day, when she drove out towards Seal Court, the wolds were blanched with snow. It was not snowing, though the sky was heavy with it, an even pewter, weighing on the airy white hills that rolled up to meet it, so that the world seemed reversed here too, dark water above circling cloud. Sir George’s trees were all fantastically hung with ice and furbelows. She parked just outside the stable yard on an impulse and decided to walk to the winter garden, built for Sophie Bailey and much loved by Christabel LaMotte. She would see it as it had been meant to be seen, and store the memory to be shared with Leonora. She trod crunchingly around the kitchen-garden wall and up a yew alley, festooned with snow, to where the overlapping, thick evergreens—holly, rhododendron, bay—enclosed a kind of trefoil-shaped space at the heart of which was the pool where Christabel had seen the frozen gold and silver fish, put there to provide flashes of colour in the gloom—the darting genii of the place, Christabel had said. There was a stone seat, with its rounded snow-cushion which she did not disturb. The quiet was absolute. It was beginning to snow again. Maud bowed her head with the self-consciousness of such a gesture, and thought of Christabel, standing here, looking at this frozen surface, darkly glowing under blown traces of snow.
And in the pool two fishes play
Argent and gules they shine alway
Against the green against the grey
They flash upon a summer’s day
And in the depth of wintry night
They slumber open-eyed and bright
Silver and red, a shadowed light
Ice-veiled and steadily upright
A paradox of chilly fire
Of life in death, of quenched desire
That has no force, e’en to respire
Suspended until frost retire—
Were there fish? Maud crouched on the rim of the pool, her briefcase standing in snow beside her, and scraped with an elegant gloved hand at the snow on the ice. The ice was ridged and bubbly and impure. Whatever was beneath it could not be seen. She moved her hand in little circles, polishing, and saw, ghostly and pale in the metal-dark surface a woman’s face, her own, barred like the moon under mackerel clouds, wavering up at her. Were there fish? She leaned forward. A figure loomed black on the white, a hand touched her arm with a huge banging, an unexpected electric shock. It was meek Roland. Maud screamed. And screamed a second time, and scrambled to her feet, furious.
They glared at each other.
“I’m sorry—”
“I’m sorry—”
“I thought you were overbalancing—”
“I didn’t know anyone was there.”
“I shocked you.”
“I embarrassed you—”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“I followed your footsteps.”
“I came to look at the winter garden.”
“Lady Bailey was worried you might have had an accident.”
“The snow wasn’t that deep.”
“It’s still snowing.”
“Shall we go in?”
“I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Are there fish?”
“All you can see is imperfections and reflections.”
The work time that followed was a taciturn time. They bent their heads diligently—what they read will be discovered later—and looked up at each other almost sullenly. Snow fell. And fell. The white lawn rose to meet the library window. Lady Bailey came with coffee, silently rolling, into a room still with cold and full of a kind of grey clarity.
Lunch was sausages and mashed potatoes and buttery peppery mashed turnips. It was eaten round the blazing log-fire, on knees, backs to the slatey white-flecked window. Sir Geo
rge said, “Hadn’t you better be getting back to Lincoln, Miss B.? You don’t have snow-chains, I suppose. The English don’t. Anyone’d think the English’d never seen snow, the way they go on when it comes down.”
“I think Dr Bailey should stay here, George,” said his wife. “I don’t think it’s safe for her to go even trying to thread her way through the wolds, in this. We can make her bed up in Mildred’s old nursery. I can lend her some things. I think we should get the bed made up and get some hot water bottles in it now. Don’t you think so, Dr Bailey?”
Maud said she couldn’t and Lady Bailey said she must, and Maud said she shouldn’t have set out and Lady Bailey said nonsense, and Maud said it was an imposition and Sir George said that whatever the rights and wrongs of it, Joanie was right and he would go up and see to Mildred’s bed. Roland said he would help, and Maud said by no means, and Sir George and Maud went away upstairs to find sheets, whilst Lady Bailey filled a kettle. She had taken to Roland, whom she addressed as Roland, whilst she still addressed Maud as Dr Bailey. She looked up at him on the way across the kitchen, the brown coins on her face intensified by the fire.
“I hope that pleases you. I hope you’ll be pleased to have her here. I hope you haven’t had some tiff, or something.”
“Tiff?”
“You and your young woman. Girl friend. Whatever.”
“Oh no. That is, no tiff, and she isn’t—”
“Isn’t?”
“My—girl friend. I hardly know her. It was—is—purely professional. Because of Ash and LaMotte. I’ve got a girl friend in London. Her name’s Val.”
Lady Bailey showed no interest in Val.
“She’s a beautiful girl, Dr Bailey. Stand-offish or shy, maybe both. What my mother used to call a chilly mortal. She was a Yorkshirewoman, my mother. Not County. Not a lady.”
Roland smiled at her.
“I used to share a governess with some cousins of George’s. To be company for them. I used to exercise their ponies, whilst they were away at school. Rosemary and Marigold Bailey. Not unlike your Maud. That’s how I met George, who decided to marry me. George gets what he’s set his mind on, as you see. That’s how I took to hunting too. And ended up under a horse under a hedge when I was thirty-five and now as you see.”
“I see. Romantic. And terrible. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t do too badly. George is a miracle. Hand me those bottles. Thank you.”
She filled them with a steady hand. Everything was designed for her ease: the kettle, the kettle-rest, the place to park and steady the chair.
“I want you both to be comfortable. George is so ashamed of the way we live—skimping and saving—the house and grounds eat money, just preventing deterioration and decay. He doesn’t like people to come and see how things are. But I do love having someone to talk to. I like to see you working away in there. I hope it’s proving useful. You don’t say much about it. I hope you aren’t frozen in that great draughty room.…”
“A little bit. But I love it, it’s a lovely room.… But it would be worth it if it was twice as cold. It doesn’t seem possible to say anything about the work yet. Later. I shall never forget reading these letters in that lovely room.…”
Maud’s bedroom—Mildred’s old nursery—was at the opposite end of the long corridor that housed Roland’s little guest bedroom and a majestic Gothic bathroom. No one explained who Mildred was or had been; her nursery had a beautifully carved stone fireplace, and deeply recessed windows in the same style. There was a high wooden bed with a rather bulky mattress of horsehair and ticking: Roland, coming in with his arms full of hot water bottles, was reminded as once before of the Real Princess and the pea. Sir George appeared with one of those circular copper dishes that contain a fat stamen of an electric fire, which he directed at the bed. Locked cupboards revealed blankets and a heap of 1930s children’s dishes and toys, oilskin mats with Old King Cole on them, a nightlight with a butterfly, a heavy dish with an image of the Tower of London and a faded beefeater. Another cupboard revealed a library of Charlotte M. Yonge and Angela Brazil. Sir George, embarrassed, reappeared with a sugar-pink winceyette nightdress and a rather splendid peacock-blue kimono embroidered with a Chinese dragon and a flock of butterflies in silver and gold.
“My wife hopes you’ll find these comfortable. Also I have a new toothbrush.”
“You are very kind. I feel so foolish,” said Maud.
“Another time might have been better with hindsight,” said Sir George. He called them, with pleasure, to the window.
“Look at it, though. Look at the trees, and the weight of it on the wold.”
It was falling with great steadiness, through a still atmosphere; it was silent and swallowing; distinctions of ledges and contours were vanishing on the hills, and the trees were heavy with capes and blankets glittering softly, curved and simple. Everything had closed in on the house in the hollow, which seemed to be filling. Urns on the lawn were white-crowned and slowly sinking, or so it seemed, in the deepening layers.
“You won’t get out tomorrow, either,” he said. “Not without a snow plough, which the Council may get round to sending if it lets up enough to make it worth it. Hope I’ve got enough dog food to go on with.”
In the afternoon they read steadily and with more surprise. They dined with the Baileys by the kitchen fire on pieces of frozen cod and chips and a rather good jam rolypoly pudding. They had agreed without real discussion to fend off questions about the letters for the time being. “Well, are they worth anything, or nothing much in your view?” Sir George asked. Roland said he knew nothing about the value, but the letters had some interest certainly. Lady Bailey changed the subject to hunting, which she discussed with Maud and her husband, leaving Roland to an inner ear full of verbal ghosts and the rattle of his spoon.
They went upstairs early, leaving their hosts to their ground-floor domain, now patchily warm, unlike the great staircase and the long corridor where they were to sleep. Cold air seemed to pour down the stone steps like silky snow. The corridor was tiled, in peacock and bronze, depicting formal lilies and pomegranates now thickly softened with pale dust. Over these had been laid long, wrinkling, canvas-like carpets—“drugget?” said Roland’s word-obsessed mind, which had met this word in the poems of R. H. Ash where someone—an escaping priest—had “tiptoed on drugget and scuttled on stone” before being surprised by the lady of the house. These runners were pale and yellowish; here and there, where a recent foot had slipped, they had wiped away the dust-veil from the gleam of the tiles.
At the top of the staircase Maud turned decisively to him and inclined her head with formality.
“Well, good night, then,” she said. Her fine mouth was set. Roland had vaguely supposed that they might, or should, discuss progress now they were together, compare notes and discoveries. It was almost an academic duty, though he was, in fact, tired, by emotion and the cold. Maud’s arms were full of files, clasped against her like a breastplate. There was an automatic wariness in her look that he found offensive. He said, “Good night, then,” and turned away towards his own end of the corridor. He heard her behind him tap away into the dark. The corridor was badly lit; there were what he assumed to be inoperative gas-mantels and two miserable 60-watt lights with saloon-bar coolie metal covers. It was then that he realised that he would have been glad to have discussed the bathroom with her. He assumed it would be polite to wait for her to go first. It was so cold in the corridor that he intensely disliked going up and down it—or standing about in it—in his pyjamas. He decided to give her a good three-quarters of an hour—plenty of time for any female ablutions that could take place in near-ice. In the interim he would read Randolph Henry Ash. He would read, not his notes on the letters, but the battle of Thor and the Frost Giants in Ragnarök. His room was bitterly cold. He made himself a nest of old eiderdowns and counterpanes, all covered with blue splashy roses, and sat down to wait.
When he came along the corridor in the silence, he th
ought he had been clever. The heavy, latched door was dark inside its stone arch. There was no sound of plashing or flushing. He was then seized with doubt as to whether the bathroom was in fact empty—how could any sound penetrate that solid oak? He did not want to rattle a locked door and embarrass both her and himself. So he went down on one knee on the putative drugget and put his eye to the huge keyhole which glinted at him and disconcertingly vanished as the door swung back and he smelled wet, freshness, steam in cold air. She nearly fell over him there; she put out a hand to steady herself on his shoulder and he threw up a hand and clasped a narrow haunch under the silk of the kimono.
And there it was, what Randolph Henry Ash had called the kick galvanic, the stunning blow like that emitted by the Moray eel from under its boulders to unsuspecting marine explorers. Roland got somehow on his feet, briefly clutching the silk and letting it go as though it stung. Her hands were pink and slightly damp; the fringes of the pale hair were damp too. It was down, he saw, the hair, running all over her shoulders and neck, swinging across her face, which he meekly supposed would be furious and saw, when he looked, was simply frightened. Did she simply emit the electric shock, he wondered, or did she also feel it? His body knew perfectly well that she felt it. He did not trust his body.
“I was looking if there was a light. So as not to disturb you if you were in there.”
“I see.”
The blue silk collar was dampish too. The whole thing appeared in this half-light to be running with water, all the runnels of silk twisted about her body by the fiercely efficient knot in which she had tied her sash. Below the silk hem were the ruffled mundane edge of pink winceyette and slippered sharp feet.