by A. S. Byatt
I cannot describe the air to you. It is like no other air. Our language was not designed to distinguish differences in air; it runs the risk of a meaningless lyricism or inexact metaphors—so I will not write of it in terms of wine or crystal, though both those things came into my mind. I have breathed the air of Mont Blanc—a chill light clean air that comes off the remote glaciers and has the purity of those snows, touched with the resin of pine and the hay of the high meadows. Thin air, as Shakespeare said, the air of vanishing things and refinements beyond apprehension by our senses. This Yorkshire air, the moorland air, that is, has no such glassy chill—it is all alive, on the move, like the waters that thread their way through the heath, as it does with them. It is visible air—you see it run in rivers and lines over the shoulders of bald stones—you see it rise in aery fountains and tremble over the heath when it is hot. And the scent of it—sharp, unforgettable—clean rain tossed and the ghost of ancient woodsmoke—and the cold clearness of brook water—and something fine and subtle all of its own—oh, I cannot describe this air, it expands a man’s mind in his head, I do believe, and gives him extra senses he knows nothing of, before coming on these heights and ranges.…
There was more pleasure for Roland and Maud in their walk, the next day, along the becks to the fosses. They walked out from Goathland and saw the threads and glassy interrupted fans of the Mallyan Spout; they scrambled along river paths above the running peaty water, and crossed moorland, scrambling down again to riversides. They found magical patches of greensward between rocks, mown by the incessant attention of nibbling sheep, surrounded by standing stones and mysterious clumps of spotted purple foxgloves. Strange transparent insects whirred past; dippers ran in the shallows; in one marshy place they disturbed whole groups of newly-shining young frogs, which leaped up in little showers of water under their feet. Over lunch, which they ate in one of the grassy clearings near the Nelly Ayre Foss, they discussed progress. Roland had been reading Melusina in bed and was now convinced that Christabel had been in Yorkshire.
“It has to be here. Where do people think it is? It’s full of local words from here, gills and riggs and ling. The air is from here. Like in his letter. She talks about the air like summer colts playing on the moors. That’s a Yorkshire saying.”
“I suppose if it is, no one has noticed it before because they weren’t looking. That is—her landscapes were always supposed to be really Brittany, claiming to be Poitou, and heavily influenced by Romantic local colour—the Brontës, Scott, Wordsworth. Or symbolic.”
“Do you think she was here?”
“Oh yes. I feel certain. But I’ve no proof that will stand up. The Hob. The Yorkshire words. Perhaps my brooch. What I can’t understand, still, is how he could write all those letters to his wife—it makes me wonder—”
“Perhaps he did love his wife, too. He does say ‘when I come back.’ He always meant to go back. And he did—we know that. If Christabel was here, it wasn’t a question of running away—”
“I wish we knew what it was a question of—”
“It was their business. It was private. I will say though, I feel Melusina is very like some of Ash’s poems— The rest of her work isn’t at all. But Melusina sounds often as though he wrote it. To me. Not the subject matter. The style.”
“I don’t want to think that. But I do see what you mean.”
The Thomason Foss is reached along a steep track from Beck Hole, a small hamlet in a fold of the moorland hills. They walked to it that way, rather than descending from the moors, so as to approach the pool below the fall. The weather was very lively and full of movement; huge white clouds sailed in a blue sky, above dry stone walls and woodland. Roland discovered on the surface of one of the walls a series of shining silver mates, which proved to be the openings of the lairs of tunnel spiders, who rushed out, waving fierce grasping arms and jaws, when even a thread of their structure was troubled by a straw. Towards the Foss the path descended steeply and they had to clamber among boulders. The water fell amongst a naturally cavernous circle of rocks and lowering brows, in which various saplings struggled for a precarious living; it was dark and smelled cold, and mossy, and weedy. Roland looked at the greenish-goldish-white rush of the fall for a time and then transferred his gaze to the outer edges of the troubled and turning pool. As he looked, the sun came out, and hit the pool, showing both the mirror-glitter from the surface, and various live and dead leaves and plants moving under it, caught as it were in a net of fat links of dappled light. He observed a curious natural phenomenon. Inside the cavern, and on the sides of the boulders in its mouth, what appeared to be flames of white light appeared to be striving and moving upwards. Wherever the refracted light off the water struck the uneven stone, wherever a fissure ran, upright or transverse, this same brightness poured and quivered along it, paleness instead of shadow, building a kind of visionary structure of non-existent fires and non-solid networks of thread inside it. He sat and watched for a time, squatting on a stone, until he lost his sense of time and space and his own precise location and saw the phantom flames as though they were the conscious centre. His contemplation was interrupted by Maud, who came and sat beside him.
“What’s absorbing you?”
“The light. The fire. Look at that effect of light. Look how the whole cave roof is alight.”
Maud said, “She saw this. I’m sure she saw this. Look at the beginning of Melusina.”
Three elements combined to make the fourth.
The sunlight made a pattern, through the air
(Athwart ash-saplings rooted in the sparse
Handfuls of peat in overhanging clefts)
Of tessellation in the water’s glaze:
And where the water moved and shook itself
Like rippling serpent-scales, the light ran on
Under the liquid in a molten glow
Of seeming links of chain-mail; but above
The water and the light together made
On the grey walls and roof of the dank cave
A show of leaping flames, of creeping spires
Of tongues of light that licked the granite ledge
Cunningly flickered up along each cleft
Each refractory roughness, creeping up
Making, where shadows should have been, long threads
And tapering cones and flame-like forms of white
A fire which heated not, nor singed, nor fed
On things material, but self-renewed
Burnt on the cold stones not to be consumed
And not consuming, made of light and stone
A fountain of cold fire stirred by the force
Of waterfall and rising spring at once
With borrowed liveliness.…
“She came here with him,” said Maud.
“Even this isn’t proof. And if the sun hadn’t struck out when it did I wouldn’t have seen it. But it is proof, to me.”
“I’ve been reading his poems. Ask to Embla. They’re good. He wasn’t talking to himself. He was talking to her—Embla—Christabel or— Most love poetry is only talking to itself. I like those poems.”
“I’m glad you like something about him.”
“I’ve been trying to imagine him. Them. They must have been—in an extreme state. I was thinking last night—about what you said about our generation and sex. We see it everywhere. As you say. We are very knowing. We know all sorts of other things, too—about how there isn’t a unitary ego—how we’re made up of conflicting, interacting systems of things—and I suppose we believe that? We know we are driven by desire, but we can’t see it as they did, can we? We never say the word Love, do we—we know it’s a suspect ideological construct—especially Romantic Love—so we have to make a real effort of imagination to know what it felt like to be them, here, believing in these things—Love—themselves—that what they did mattered—”
“I know. You know what Christabel says. ‘Outside our small safe place flies Mystery.’ I feel we’ve done
away with that too—And desire, that we look into so carefully—I think all the looking-into has some very odd effects on the desire.”
“I think that, too.”
“Sometimes I feel,” said Roland carefully, “that the best state is to be without desire. When I really look at myself—”
“If you have a self—”
“At my life, at the way it is—what I really want is to—to have nothing. An empty clean bed. I have this image of a clean empty bed in a clean empty room, where nothing is asked or to be asked. Some of that is to do with—my personal circumstances. But some of it’s general. I think.”
“I know what you mean. No, that’s a feeble thing to say. It’s a much more powerful coincidence than that. That’s what I think about, when I’m alone. How good it would be to have nothing. How good it would be to desire nothing. And the same image. An empty bed in an empty room. White.”
“White.”
“Exactly the same.”
“How strange.”
“Maybe we’re symptomatic of whole flocks of exhausted scholars and theorists. Or maybe it’s just us.”
“How funny—how very funny—that we should have come here, for this purpose, and sit here, and discover—that—about each other.”
They walked back in companionable silence, listening to birds and the movement of weather in trees and water. Over dinner that night they combed Melusina for more Yorkshire words. Roland said, “There’s a place on the map called the Boggle Hole. It’s a nice word—I wondered—perhaps we could take a day off from them, get out of their story, go and look at something for ourselves. There’s no Boggle Hole in Cropper or the Ash Letters— Just not to be caught up in anything?”
“Why not? The weather’s improving. It’s hot.”
“It wouldn’t matter. I just want to look at something, with interest, and without layers of meaning. Something new.”
Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone’s primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place.
They took a simple picnic. Fresh brown bread, white Wensleydale cheese, crimson radishes, yellow butter, scarlet tomatoes, round bright green Granny Smiths and a bottle of mineral water. They took no books.
The Boggle Hole is a cove tucked beneath cliffs, where a beck runs down across sand to the sea, from an old mill which is now a youth hostel. They walked down through flowering lanes. The high hedges were thick with dog-roses, mostly a clear pink, sometimes white, with yellow-gold centres dusty with yellow pollen. These roses were intricately and thickly entwined with rampant wild honeysuckle, trailing and weaving creamy flowers among the pink and gold. Neither of them had ever seen or smelled such extravagance of wildflowers in so small a space. The warm air brought the smell of the flowers in great gusts and lingering intense canopies. Both had expected one or two flowers at most, late modern survivors of thickets seen by Shakespeare or painted by Morris. But here was abundance, here was growth, here were banks of gleaming scented life.
There is not exactly a beach, under the cliff. There is a stretch of sand and then shelf after shelf of wet stone and ledges of rock-pools, stretching away to the sea. These ledges are brilliantly coloured: pink stone, silvery sand under water, violent green mossy weed, heavy clumps of rosy-fingered weeds among banks of olive and yellow bladderwrack. The cliffs themselves are grey and flaking. Roland and Maud noticed that the flat stones at their bases were threaded and etched with fossil plumes and tubes. There was a notice: “Please do not damage the cliffs; respect our heritage and preserve it for all of us.” Ammonites and belemnites were on sale in Whitby. A young man with a hammer and a sack was nevertheless busy chipping away at the rock-face, from which coiled and rimmed circular forms protruded everywhere. A peculiarity of that beach is the proliferation of large rounded stones that lie about like the aftermath of a bombardment, cosmic or gigantic. These stones are not uniform in colour or size; they can be shiny black, sulphurous yellow, a kind of old potato blend of greenish waxy, sandy, white or shot with a kind of rosy quartz. Maud and Roland walked along with their heads down, saying to each other, “Look at this, look at this, look at this,” distinguishing stones for a moment, with their attention, then letting these fall back into the mass-pattern, or random distribution, as new ones replaced them.
When they stopped and spread their picnic on a rock, they were able to look out, to take a large view. Roland took off his shoes; his feet were white on the sands like things come up out of blind dark. Maud sat on the rock in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. Her arms were white and gold; white skin, glinting hairs. She poured Perrier water from its green flask, declaring its pure origin, Eau de Source; its bubbles winked in cardboard cups. The tide was out; the sea was far away. The moment had come for a personal conversation. Both felt this; both were mostly willing, but inhibited.
“Will you be sorry to go back?” Maud.
“Will you?”
“This is very good bread.” Then, “I have the impression both of us will be sorry.”
“We shall have to decide what—if anything—to tell Blackadder and Cropper.”
“And Leonora. Who will be arriving. I am apprehensive about Leonora. She carries one away in the force of her enthusiasm.”
Roland could not quite imagine Leonora. He knew somehow that she was large and now imagined her suddenly like some classical goddess in draperies, pulling the fastidious Maud along by the hand. Two women, running. Leonora’s writings made him imagine more than that. Two women …
He looked at separate Maud, in her jeans and white shirt under the sun. She still wore a scarf—not the silk turret now, but a crisp cotton one, green and white squares, tied under her hair in the nape of her neck.
“You will have to decide what to say to her.”
“Oh, I have decided. Nothing. Until at least you and I have reached some—end—or decision. It won’t be easy. She is—she is—invasive. An expert in intimacy. She reduces my space. I’m not very good with that sort of thing. As we were saying. In a way.”
“Perhaps Sir George will make a move.”
“Perhaps.”
“I don’t know what will happen to me when I get back. I’ve got no real job, as you know—only bits of sufferance teaching and the piecework on the edition. I depend on Blackadder. Who writes dull references about me, making me sound even duller. I can’t tell him all this, either. But it’s going to make it harder to just go on. And then there’s Val.”
Maud was looking not at him but at an apple, which she was dividing into paper-thin wafers with a sharp knife, each with its half-moon of bright green rind, its paper-white crisp flesh, its shining dark seeds.
“I don’t know about Val.”
“I’ve never talked about her. Better not. I feel I shouldn’t. I’ve lived with her since I went to university. She’s the breadwinner. I suppose I’m here partly on her money. She doesn’t like her work—temping and things—but she does it. I owe her so much.”
“I see.”
“Only it doesn’t work. Not for any good reason. But because of the—because—I have this vision of the white bed—”
Maud put a little fan of apple curves onto a paper plate and handed it to him.
“I know. I had this thing with Fergus. I expect you heard.”
“Yes.”
“I expect he told you. I had a bad time, with Fergus. We tormented each other. I hate that, I hate the noise, the distraction. I remembered something, thinking about what you said—about the sea anemone and the gloves and Leonora on Venus Mount. Yes. I remember Fergus had a long patch of lecturing me on Penisneid. He’s one of those men who argue by increments of noise—so that as you open your mouth he says another, cleverer, louder thing. He used to quote Freud at me at six in the morning. Analysis Terminable and Interminable. He got up very early. He used to prance around th
e flat—with nothing on—quoting Freud saying that ‘at no point in one’s analytic work does one suffer more from a suspicion that one has been preaching to the winds than when one is trying to persuade a woman to abandon her wish for a penis’—I don’t think he—Freud—is right about that—but anyway—there was something intrinsically ridiculous about this silly shouting—before breakfast—letting it all hang out—I couldn’t work. That was how it was. I—I felt battered. For no good reason.”