by A. S. Byatt
It occurs to me to think—if salt water and fresh water may so patiently—and with such inevitable blind causation—give form to these white marble caves and churches and inhuman Figures by sculpting with chisel, or by moulding with the pressure of the threads of water growing to a head in the spring, and cutting fine channels with droplets and the thrust of gravity—
If this mineral force can create such forms as stalactites and stalagmites—why may not the channels of the ear or the vesicles of the heart—over millennia—respond to pressure and direction—?
How may what is born, is formed by gradual causes, transmit this form to its offspring—transmit the type—tho the individual may fail? This if I mistake not, is not known. I may cut off a sprig of a tree—and grow a whole tree—roots and crown and all from that—and how may that be? How does the twig-slip know to form root and branch?
We are a Faustian generation, my dear—we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know.
Lyell tells us also of many villages on this coast which have been engulfed by the waters—such are Auburn, Hartburn and Hyde as well as Aldbrough, which has moved inland. I have not been able to find that there are myths or legends connected with these melancholy vanished communities—as I believe there are, for instance, in Brittany—but fishermen have found relics of houses and churches out on sandbanks in the midst of the sea.… However, if there is no drowned city of Is to torment my nights with underwater bells calling, I have found a homely English sprite, a Hob, who inhabits a Hole, called naturally a Hob Hole. This genial Hob cures the whooping cough (known in this part of the world as the kink-cough). This Hob Hole is a cave in the cliff near the village of Kettleness—which fell into the sea, one dark December night in 1829, sliding downwards all of a smooth piece.
You will be beginning to think I am in danger of drowning, or being engulfed in brine and sand. A wave whipped away a net I had left carelessly by my side when feeling in a deep pool on Filey Brigg for a recalcitrant Polyp—but I am unscathed, apart from a few honourable scratches from barnacle-crusts and infant mussels. I shall be restored to you in two weeks’ time—with all my dead wonders of the deep—
“Mortimer Cropper claims to have traced every step of that holiday,” Roland told Maud. “ ‘The long tramp to Pickering along the Roman Road must have made the Poet as footsore as it made me, though his keen eye must have remarked even more to please and interest him than I could see in these later times.…’ ”
“He didn’t imagine Ash had a companion?”
“No. Would you, reading those letters?”
“No. They read exactly like the letters of a solitary husband on holiday, talking to his wife of an empty evening. Unless it’s significant that he never says ‘Wish you were here’ or even ‘I wish you could see’—that’s all a textual critic could make of it. Apart from the obvious reference to drowned Is which we knew he already knew about. Think about it—if you were a man in the excited state of the writer of the Christabel letters—could you sit down every evening and write to your wife—in front of Christabel, it would have to have been? Could you produce these—travelogues?”
“If I thought I must—for her sake—Ellen’s—I might.”
“It would require quite horrible self-control and duplicity. And they look such peaceable letters—”
“They do seem to be reassuring her—from time to time—”
“We would read that in, though, once we supposed—”
“And Christabel? Is anything known about her in June 1859?”
“There’s nothing at all in the Archive. Nothing until Blanche dies in 1860. Do you think—?”
“What happened to Blanche?”
“She drowned herself. She jumped from the bridge, at Putney—with her clothes wetted and her pockets full of big round stones. To make sure. She’s on record as admiring the heroism of Mary Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempt from the same bridge. She obviously noted that Wollstonecraft found it hard to sink, because of her clothes floating.”
“Maud—is it known why?”
“Not really. She left a note saying that she couldn’t pay her debts and that she was a ‘superfluous person,’ ‘of no utility’ in this world. She hadn’t a penny in the bank. The coroner diagnosed a temporary female imbalance of the mind. ‘Women are known for strong and irrational alterations of temperament,’ he said.”
“Women are. Feminists use that argument about car accidents and exams—”
“Don’t get distracted. I take your point. The thing is—scholars have always assumed Christabel was there—she gave evidence saying she’d been ‘away from home at that time’—I’ve always assumed that meant a day or a week or two at the most—”
“What time of year did Blanche die?”
“June 1860. For a year before that we’ve nothing about Christabel—nothing but the Lincolnshire letters, that is. And some fragments of Melusina, we think, and a few fairy tales she sent to Home Notes including—wait a minute—one about a Hob who cures whooping cough. Not that that proves anything.”
“He could have told her that story.”
“She could have read it elsewhere. Do you think she did?”
“No. Do you think she went to Yorkshire?”
“Yes. But how can it be proved? Or disproved?”
“We could try Ellen’s journal. Do you think you could approach Beatrice Nest? Without saying why, or connecting it with me?”
“That shouldn’t be difficult.”
A troupe of infant ghouls, white-sheeted and livid-green-faced, gambolled into the coffee room, and cried out for more juice, more juice, more juice. A child in a leotard and warpaint pranced beside them, the lines of his body more than apparent, a savage putto. “What would Christabel have thought?” Roland asked Maud, who said: “She invented enough goblins. She knew well enough what we are. She doesn’t seem to have been hampered by respectability.”
“Poor Blanche.”
“She came here—to this church—before she made up her mind to jump. She knew the Vicar. ‘He suffers me as he suffers many maiden ladies with imagined pain. His Church is full of women, who may not speak there, who may embroider little stools but must not presume to offer sacred paintings—’ ”
“Poor Blanche.”
“Hullo?”
“May I speak to Roland Michell?”
“He’s not here. I don’t know where he is.”
“Could I leave a message?”
“If I see him, I can give him one. I don’t always see him. He doesn’t always read messages. Who’s speaking?”
“My name is Maud Bailey. I just wanted him to know I’ll be in the British Library tomorrow. To see Dr Nest.”
“Maud Bailey.”
“Yes. I wanted to talk to him first, if possible—in case anyone—it’s rather delicate—I just wanted him to know—so he could make arrangements. Are you still there?”
“Maud Bailey.”
“That’s what I said. Hullo? Are you there? Who cut us off? Damn.”
“Val?”
“What?”
“Is anything wrong?”
“No. Not particularly.”
“You’re behaving as though something is.”
“Am I? How am I behaving? It makes a change for you to notice I’m behaving at all.”
“You haven’t said anything all evening.”
“That’s not unusual.”
“No. But there are ways of not saying anything—”
“Forget about it. It’s not worth bothering about.”
“All right. I’ll forget.”
“I shall be out late tomorrow. That should suit you.”
“I can work late in the BM. No problem.”
“You’ll enjoy that. There was a message for you. People seem to think I’m an eternal secretary, just taking down messages.”
“A message?”
“Very de haut en bas. Your friend Maud Bailey. She’ll be in the Museum t
omorrow. I don’t recollect the details.”
“What did you say to her?”
“Now I’ve got you all worried. I didn’t say anything. I put the phone down.”
“Oh Val.”
“Oh Val, Oh Val, Oh Val. That’s all you ever say. I’m going to bed now. I must turn in for my long day tomorrow. A huge income-tax fraud, isn’t that exciting?”
“Does Maud say I should … or shouldn’t … did she mention Beatrice Nest?”
“I don’t recollect, I told you. I shouldn’t think so. Fancy her being in London, Maud Bailey.…”
If he had had it in him to raise his voice, to shout Don’t be so ridiculous, and mean it, things might never have come to this.
If there had been more than one bed in the flat he could have used his natural defence, which was self-enfolded inattention. He woke now most mornings stiff with keeping himself to the edge of the mattress.
“It’s not what you seem to think.”
“I don’t think anything. It’s not my place to think anything. I’m not told anything. I don’t share anything, so I don’t think anything. I’m a superfluous person. Never mind.”
And if this was in some terrible sense, not Val, where was she, lost, transmuted, in abeyance, what should he, what could he do? How was he responsible for this lost Val?
Maud and Beatrice began badly, partly because they found each other physically unsympathetic, Beatrice like an incoherent bale of knitting-wool and Maud poised and pointed and sharp. Maud had constructed a sort of questionnaire about Victorian wives, under headings, and worked her way slowly round to the question, which did interest her, of the nature of the reason for Ellen’s writing.
“I’m very keen to know if the wives of these so-called great men—”
“He was a great man, in my opinion—”
“Yes. If their wives were content to rest in their husbands’ glory or felt that they themselves might have achieved something if conditions had been favourable. So many of them wrote journals, often work, secret work, of very high quality. Look at Dorothy Wordsworth’s marvellous prose—if she had supposed she could be a writer—instead of a sister—what might she not have done? What I want to ask is—why did Ellen write her journal? Was it to please her husband?”
“Oh no.”
“Did she show it to him?”
“Oh no. I don’t think so. She never says so.”
“Do you think she wrote it for publication, in any form?”
“That’s a harder question. I think she knew it might be read. There are several sharp comments in it about contemporary biographical habits—rummaging in Dickens’s desk before he was fairly buried and that sort of thing—the usual Victorian comments. She knew he was a great poet and she must have known they would come—the scavengers—sooner or later if she didn’t burn it. And she didn’t burn it. She burned a lot of letters, you know. Mortimer Cropper thinks Patience and Faith burned them, but I think it was Ellen. Some are buried with her.”
“Why do you think she wrote the journal, Dr Nest? In order to have someone to talk to? As an examination of conscience? Out of a sense of duty? Why?”
“I do have a theory. It’s far-fetched, I think.”
“What is your theory?”
“I think she wrote it to baffle. Yes. To baffle.”
They stared at each other. Maud said, “To baffle whom? His biographers?”
“Just to baffle.”
Maud waited. Beatrice described helplessly her true experience: “When I started on it, I thought, what a nice dull woman. And then I got the sense of things flittering and flickering behind all that solid—oh, I think of it as panelling. And then I got to think—I was being led on—to imagine the flittering flickering things—and that really it was all just as stolid and dull as anything. I thought I was making it all up, that she could have said something interesting—how shall I put it—intriguing—once in a while—but she absolutely wasn’t going to. It could be an occupational hazard of editing a dull journal, couldn’t it? Imagining that the author was deliberately baffling me?”
Maud looked back at Beatrice, baffled. She saw the outline of stalwart strapping under the so-soft speckled wool of Beatrice’s bolster-like front. The wool was basically powder-blue. It was hugely vulnerable. Beatrice dropped her voice. “I expect you think I’ve very little to show for all these years of work on these papers. Twenty-five years to be precise, and sliding past at increasing speed. I’ve felt very conscious of that—that slowness—with the increasing interest shown by—your sort of scholar—people with ideas about Ellen Ash and her work. All I had was a sort of sympathy for the—helpmeet aspect of her—and to be truthful, Dr Bailey, a real admiration for him, for Randolph Ash. They said it would be better to—to do this task which presented itself so to speak and seemed appropriate to my—my sex—my capacities as they were thought to be, whatever they were. A good feminist in those days, Dr Bailey, would have insisted on being allowed to work on the Ask and Embla poems.”
“Being allowed?”
“Oh. I see. Yes. On working on the Ask and Embla poems.” She hesitated. Then: “I don’t think you can imagine, Miss Bailey, how it was then. We were dependent and excluded persons. In my early days—indeed until the late 1960s—women were not permitted to enter the main Senior Common Room at Prince Albert College. We had our own, which was small and slightly pretty. Everything was decided in the pub—everything of import—where we were not invited and did not wish to go. I hate smoke and the smell of beer. But should not therefore be excluded from discussing departmental policy. We were grateful for employment. We thought it was bad being young and—in some cases, not in mine—attractive—but it was worse when we grew older. There is an age at which, I profoundly believe, one becomes a witch, in such situations, Dr Bailey—through simple ageing—as always happened in history—and there are witch-hunts—
“You will think I am mad. I am trying to excuse twenty-five years’ delay—with—personalities—You would have produced an edition twenty years ago. The truth is also, I wasn’t sure it was right. If she would have liked what I was doing.”
Maud felt a heat of fellow-feeling, unexpected and powerful. “Can’t you give up? Do your own work?”
“I feel responsible. To myself, all those years. To her.”
“Could I see the journal? I’m particularly interested in 1859. I read his letters to her. The Yorkshire ones. Did she get to Huxley’s lecture?”
Was this too blatant? Apparently not. Beatrice raised herself slowly and extracted the volume from a grey steel cabinet. She clasped it for a moment defensively.
“A Professor Stern came. From Tallahassee. She wanted to know—to know—to find out about Ellen Ash’s sexual relations—with him—or anyone. I told her there was nothing of that kind in this journal. She said there must be—in the metaphors—in the omissions. We were not taught to do scholarship by studying primarily what was omitted, Dr Bailey. No doubt you find me naive.”
“No. I occasionally find Leonora Stern naive. No, that’s the wrong word. Single-minded and zealous. And she may have been right. Maybe what you find baffling is a systematic omission—”
Beatrice thought. “That I may grant. Something is omitted. I fail to see why it must be presumed to be—that kind of thing.”
This dogged and flushed minor defiance struck another chord of fellow-feeling in Maud, who edged her chair closer and looked into the rumpled weary face. Maud thought of Leonora’s ferocity, of Fergus’s wicked playfulness, of the whole tenor and endeavour of twentieth-century literary scholarship, of a bed like dirty egg-white.
“I agree, Dr Nest. In fact I do agree. The whole of our scholarship—the whole of our thought—we question everything except the centrality of sexuality—Unfortunately feminism can hardly avoid privileging such matters. I sometimes wish I had embarked on geology myself.”
Beatrice Nest smiled and handed over the journal.
ELLEN ASH’S JOURNAL
JUN
E 4TH 1859
The house is echoing and silent without my dear Randolph. I am full of projects for improvements in his comfort to be effected whilst he is away. The study curtains and those in his dressing-room must come down and be beaten out thoroughly on the line. I am in doubts as to the wisdom of attempting to wash the upper ones. The drawing-room pair I attempted have never been the same, either as to lustre or as to the “hang” of their folds. I shall set Bertha to a diligent beating and brushing and see what can be done. Bertha has been somewhat sluggish of late; she comes slowly when called and leaves tasks not rounded-off (the silver candlesticks, for instance, which have streaks of tarnish under the rims or the buttons on R’s nightshirt, which are still deficient). I wonder if something is amiss with Bertha. After the uncertainties and dilapidations—and yes, violence and destruction—wrought by her predecessors I had hoped that Bertha would continue to be the half-invisible busy birdlike presence she commenced with so successfully. Is she unhappy or unwell? Both I fear but do not wish to think. Tomorrow I will ask her directly. She would be surprised if she knew what courage, and of what variable kinds (as to the disturbance of both her comfortable goings-on and my own) this requires of me. I lack my mother’s force of character. I lack many things in which my dear mother was both proficient and naturally greatly endowed.
Above all, when my dear one is away, I miss our hours of quiet reading to each other of an evening. I wondered whether to go on with our study of Petrarch, where he left off, and decided against it; it loses too much without his beautiful voice bringing to life the ancient passion of the Italian. I read a chapter or two of Lyell’s Principles of Geology in order to share with him his enthusiasm for his study, and was equally charmed by the intellectual gravity of Lyell’s vision and chilled by his idea of the aeons of inhuman time that went to the making of earth’s crust—which is still, if he is to be believed, perpetually in process of making. And where may hide what came and loved our clay? as the Poet asked finely. I do not—unlike the Reverend Mr Baulk—feel that this newly-perceived ancient state of things impinges on our settled faith in any decisive way. Perhaps I am unimaginative or too instinctive or intuitive in my trust. If the Tale of Noah’s Deluge turns out to be a fine poetic invention, shall I, the wife of a great poet, thereby cease to pay attention to its message about the universal punishment of sin? If the exemplary Life and mysteriously joyful Death of that greatest and only truly good Man were to be thought of as inventions that would be differently threatening.