by A. S. Byatt
Of falling water for some small time past,
A wayward, windblown, rushing, chuckling sound,
An intermittent music, bubbling up.
And then he heard, within the water’s voice
A melody more fluent and more strange,
A silver chant that wove its liquid length
Along the hurrying channel of the stream
And wound with that to twist one rope of sound,
Silver and stony. They went on and down
Steady and hearkening, and on either hand
The wet walls narrowed. Then, around a bend
There came an opening, and both horse and man
Stockstill, with humming ear and dazzled eye
Stared at a mystery.
A kind of hollowed chamber in the hill
Sheltered a still and secret pool, beneath
A frowning crag, whose rim was cleft to form
A lip for falling water, white with air
Like streaming needles of a shattered glass
Tossed as it turned, then smoothly combing down
Like one unending tress of silver-white
Holding its form beneath the basin’s rim
By virtue of its force and of the air
Caught in its hurtling substance, spreading out
Like pale and solid livid ice beneath
The black and moss-green dappling of the pool.
A rounded rock stood low among the curl
Of dim-discernèd weeds, whose fronds were stirred
By many little springs that bubbled up
And seeped through coiling strands and stirred the plane
Of the dark water into dimpling life.
This rock was covered with a vivid pelt
Of emerald mosses, maidenhairs and mints
Dabbling dark crowns and sharply-scented stems
Amongst the water’s peaks and freshenings.
The pensile foliage tumbled down the crag
To join the pennywort and tormentil
That wound below and wove a living mat
Dark green, but sparked with gold and amethyst.
And on the rock a lady sat and sang.
Sang to herself most clear and quietly
A small clear golden voice that seemed to run
Without the need to breathe or pause for thought,
Simple and endless as the moving fall,
Surprising as the springs that bubbled up
Now here, now there, among the coiling weeds.
As milky roses at the end of day
In some deserted bower seem still alight
With their own luminous pallor, so she cast
A softened brightness and a pearly light
On that wild place, in which she sate and sang.
She wore a shift of whitest silk, that stirred
With her song’s breathing, and a girdle green
As emerald or wettest meadow-grass.
Her blue-veined feet played in the watery space
Slant in its prism-vision like white fish
Darting together. When she stretched them out
The water made her silver anklet-chains
Glancing with diamond-drops and lucid pearls
Which shone as bright as those about her neck
Carelessly cast, a priceless brilliant rope
Of sapphire, emerald, and opaline.
Her living hair was brighter than chill gold
With shoots of brightness running down its mass
And straying out to lighten the dun air
Like phosphorescent sparks off a pale sea,
And while she sang, she combed it with a comb
Wrought curiously of gold and ebony,
Seeming to plait each celandine-bright tress
With the spring’s sound, the song’s sound and the sound
Of its own living whisper, warm and light
So that he longed to touch it, longed to stretch
If but a finger out across the space
That stood between his blood-stained, stiffened self
And all this swaying supple brilliance,
Save that her face forbade.
It was a face
Queenly and calm, a carved face and strong
Nor curious, nor kindly, nor aloof,
But self-contained and singing to itself.
And as he met her eyes, she ceased her song
And made a silence, and it seemed to him
That in this silence all the murmuring ceased
Of leaves and water, and they two were there,
And all they did was look, no question,
No answer, neither frown nor smile, no move
Of lip or eye or brow or eyelid pale
But all one long look which consumed his soul
Into desire beyond the reach of hope
Beyond the touch of doubt or of despair,
So that he was one thing, and all he was,
The fears, the contradictions and the pains,
The reveller’s pleasures and the sick man’s whims,
All gone, forever gone, all burned away
Under the steady and essential gaze
Of this pale Creature in this quiet space.
A movement in the shadows made him ware
Of a gaunt hound that stood like a dark cloud
Rough-curled and smoky grey, with golden eyes
And patient noble face that snuffed the air
And heard and felt air’s movements motionless,
Alert and motionless behind his dame.
Then Raimondin bethought him of his hunt
And of his crime, and of his later flight,
And bowed low in the saddle where he stood
And begged her, of her grace, to let him drink
The water of the fountain; he was faint
And sore with travelling, and needs must drink.
“My name is Raimondin of Lusignan
And where I go, and what I shall become
I know not, but I crave a place of rest,
A draught of water, for I choke on dust.”
Then said she, “Raimondin of Lusignan
Both who you are, and what you may become—
What you have done, how you may save yourself
And prosper greatly, all these things, I know.
Therefore dismount, and take this cup from me,
This cup of clear spring water from the fount
Whose name is called La Fontaine de la Soif,
The Thirsty Fountain. Therefore, come and drink.”
And she held out the cup, and he came down
And took it from her and drank deep therein.
All dazed with glamour was he, in her gaze.
She ministered unto his extreme need
And his face took the brightness of her glance
As dusty heather takes the tumbling rays
Of the sun’s countenance and shines them back.
Now was he hers, if she should ask of him
Body or soul, he would have offered all.
And seeing this, at last, the Fairy smiled.
17
James Blackadder composed a footnote. He was working on Mummy Possest (1863). He used a pen; he had never learned newer methods; Paola would transfer his script to the glimmering screen of the word-processor. The air smelled of metal, dust, metal-dust and burning plastic.
R. H. Ash attended at least two seances in the house of the famous medium Mrs Hella Lees, who was an early specialist in materialisation, particularly of lost children, and in the touch of dead hands. Mrs Lees was never exposed as a fraud and is still thought of as a pioneer in this field by contemporary spiritualists. (See F. Podmore, Modern Spiritualism, 1902, vol. 2, pp. 134–9.) Whilst there can be no doubt that the poet went to the seances in a spirit of rational enquiry, rather than with any predisposition to believe what he saw, he records the medium’s activities with sharp distaste and fear, rather than with simple con
tempt for chicanery. He also implicitly compares her activities—the false or fictive bringing to life of the dead, with his own poetic activities. For an account (somewhat lurid and imaginative) of these encounters see Cropper, The Great Ventriloquist, pp. 340–4. See also a curious feminist attack on Ash’s choice of title by Dr Roanne Wicker, in the Journal of the Sorcières, March 1983. Dr Wicker objects to Ash’s use of his title to castigate the “intuitive female” actions of his speaker, Sybilla Silt (an obvious reference to Hella Lees). Mummy Possest is of course a quotation from John Donne, “Love’s Alchemy.” “Hope not for minde in women; at their best/Sweetnesse and wit, they are but Mummy, Possest.”
Blackadder looked at all this, and crossed out the adjective “curious” before “feminist attack.” He thought about crossing out “somewhat lurid and imaginative” before Cropper’s account of the seances. These superfluous adjectives were the traces of his own views, and therefore unnecessary. He contemplated crossing out the references to Cropper and Dr Wicker in their entirety. Much of his writing met this fate. It was set down, depersonalised, and then erased. Much of his time was spent deciding whether or not to erase things. He usually did.
A whitish figure slid round the end of his desk. It was Fergus Wolff, who sat down uninvited on the desk corner, and looked down, uninvited, at Blackadder’s work. Blackadder put a hand over his writing.
“You should be up in the sun. It’s lovely weather up there.”
“No doubt. The Oxford University Press is not concerned with the weather. Can I do anything for you?”
“I was looking for Roland Michell.”
“He’s on holiday. He asked for a week off. He’s never had one, that I can remember, when I come to think about it.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“Not at all. North, I think he said. He was very vague.”
“Did he take Val?”
“I assumed so.”
“Did his new discovery lead anywhere?”
“New discovery?”
“He was quite chuffed at Christmas. Discovered a mystery letter or something, I thought he said. I may have been wrong.”
“I don’t remember anything precisely of that kind. Unless you mean all those notes in the Vico. Nothing of great importance there, sadly. Humdrum notes.”
“This was personal. Something to do with Christabel LaMotte. He was quite excited. I sent him off to see Maud Bailey at Lincoln.”
“Feminists don’t like Ash.”
“She’s been seen down here, since. Maud Bailey.”
“I don’t know of anything to do with LaMotte, offhand.”
“I was pretty sure Roland did. But it may have come to nothing. Or he’d have told you.”
“He probably would.”
“Exactly.”
Val was eating cornflakes. She ate very little else, at home. They were light, they were pleasant, they were comforting, and then after a day or two they were like cotton wool. Outside the back area, the roses were drifting down the steps, and the borders were bright with tiger lilies and moon daisies. London was hot: Val wanted to be anywhere else, out of the dust and cat piss. The doorbell rang. When she looked up, expecting perhaps Euan MacIntyre and a dinner invitation, she saw Fergus Wolff.
“Hello, my dearest. Is Roland in?”
“No. He’s gone away.”
“What a pity. Can I come in? Where has he gone?”
“Somewhere in Lancashire or Yorkshire or Cumbria. Blackadder sent him to look at a book. He was a bit vague.”
“Have you a phone number? I need to get in touch with him rather urgently.”
“He said he’d leave one. I was out when he left. But he didn’t. Or if he did, I haven’t found it. And he hasn’t phoned. He should be back on Wednesday.”
“I see.”
Fergus sat down on the old sofa and looked up at the irregular pools and peninsulas of staining on the ceiling.
“Does that strike you as a bit odd, my love, that he hasn’t communicated?”
“I wasn’t being all that nice to him.”
“I see.”
“I don’t know what you see, Fergus. You always see a bit more than there is to see. What’s up?”
“I just wondered—you don’t happen to know where Maud Bailey is?”
“I see,” said Val. There was a silence. Then Val asked, “Do you know where she is?”
“Not exactly. There’s something going on that I don’t understand. Yet, that is. I shall understand it quite soon.”
“She has called him here, once or twice. I wasn’t very polite.”
“A pity. I should so like to know what’s going on.”
“Perhaps it’s to do with Randolph Henry.”
“It is. That’s for definite. Though perhaps it has to do with Maud, too. She’s a formidable woman.”
“They were away at Christmas, working on something.”
“He went to Lincoln to see her.”
“Well, sort of. They both went somewhere or other, to look at a manuscript. Honestly I’ve lost interest in all his footnotes and things and all those dead letters from dead people about missing trains and supporting Copyright Bills and all that stuff. Who wants to spend their life in the British Museum basement? It smells as bad as Mrs Jarvis’s flat up there, full of cat piss. Who wants to spend their life reading old menus in cat piss?”
“Nobody. They want to spend their lives in lovely hotels at international conferences. You didn’t bother to enquire what they were reading?”
“He didn’t say. He knows I’m not interested.”
“So you don’t know exactly where they went?”
“I did have a phone number. For emergencies. If the flat burned down. Or I couldn’t pay the gas bill. In which case there was nothing he could do, of course. Some of us earn money in the enterprise culture and some of us don’t.”
“There may be money in all this. You haven’t still got the telephone number, have you, my love?”
Val went out into the hall, where the telephone stood at floor level, balanced on a heap of papers—old Times Literary Supplements, old book bills, cards with minicab numbers, cards offering discounts on OMO DAZ KODAK MUREX, invitations to Convocation and the ICA. She seemed to know her way around this, and after a moment turned over a Takeaway Indian bill at the bottom of the heap and found the number. No name. Only in Val’s hand, “Roland in Lincoln.”
“Could be Maud’s number.”
“No. It’s not. I know Maud’s. Can I have that?”
“Why not? What do you want to do with it?”
“I don’t know. I simply want to know what’s going on. Do you see?”
“Perhaps it’s Maud.”