by A. S. Byatt
“What are you doing?” she said now to Maud.
“Reading Blanche Glover’s suicide note.”
“Why?”
“I do wonder where Christabel was, when she jumped.”
“If you can read French, I might be able to help. I’ve got this letter, from Ariane Le Minier, in Nantes. I’ll show you.”
She took up the note.
“Poor old Blanche, what rage, what dignity, what a mess. Did any of the pictures ever turn up? They’d be fascinating. Documented lesbian feminist works.”
“None have ever been found. I suppose Christabel may have kept them all. Or burned them up in distress, we simply don’t know.”
“Perhaps she took them all to that mock-castle with that nasty old man with the gun. I felt like stabbing him with the shears, the pig. They’re probably mouldering in a glory-hole up there.”
Maud did not feel like pursuing the idea of Sir George, though Leonora’s idea was a good, indeed a probable, one. She said, “How do you imagine the paintings, Leonora? Do you think they were any good?”
“I dreadfully want them to have been. She had the dedication. She was sure they were good. I imagine them all pale and tense, don’t you, voluptuous but pale, lovely willowy creatures with heaving breasts and great masses of pre-Raphaelite hair. But if they were really original, we aren’t going to be able to imagine them, until we find them, in the nature of the case.”
“She did one called ‘A Spirit-Wreath and Fair Spirit-Hands at a Seance of Hella Lees.’ ”
“That doesn’t sound very hopeful. But maybe the hands were as good as Dürer’s, maybe the wreath looked like Fantin-Latour. Only in their own way, of course. Not derivative.”
“Do you think so?”
“No, but we should give her the benefit of the doubt. She was a sister.”
“She was.”
That night, they sat in Maud’s flat and Maud translated Dr Le Minier’s letter for Leonora, who said, “I got the general gist of it OK but my French is primitive. What it is to have an English education.”
Maud had unthinkingly sat down in her usual place in the corner of her white sofa under the tall lamp, and Leonora had plumped down next to her, one arm along the sofa behind Maud’s back, one buttock bumping Maud’s when she bounced. Maud felt threatened and tense, and almost got up, once or twice, but was restrained by an exigent and unhelpful English sense of good manners. She was aware that Leonora knew exactly how she felt, and was amused.
The letter was possibly treasure-trove. Maud, by now slightly more skilled at dissimulation than Blanche Glover with Jane, read it out flatly as if it were a routine scholarly enquiry.
“Dear Professor Stern,
I am a French student of women’s writings, here in the University of Nantes. I have much admired your work on the structures of signification of certain women poets, above all Christabel LaMotte, who is interesting to me also, as half-Breton, and drawing very much on her Breton heritage of myth and legend to create a female world. May I say in particular how very just and inspiring I found your remarks on the sexualisation of the landscape elements in The Fairy Melusina.
I am told you are researching materials for a feminist life of LaMotte and have come across something I think may perhaps be of interest to you. I am currently working on an almost unpublished writer, Sabine de Kercoz, who published a few poems in the 1860s including several sonnets in praise of George Sand, whom she never met, but for whose ideals and way of life she had conceived a passionate admiration. There are also four unpublished novels, Oriane, Aurélia, Les Tourments de Geneviève, and La Deuxième Dahud, which I am hoping to edit and bring out in the near future. It draws on the same legend of the Drowned City of Is as LaMotte’s beautiful poem of that title.
As you may already know, Mille de Kercoz was a relation, through her paternal grandmother, of Christabel LaMotte. What you may not know is that in the autumn of 1859 LaMotte appears to have visited her family in Fouesnant. My source is a letter from Sabine de Kercoz to her cousin, Solange, which is amongst the papers—unedited and I believe unexamined since they were deposited here in the University by a descendant of Sabine (who became Mme de Kergarouet in Pornic, and died in childbed in 1870). I enclose a transcript of the letter, and if you find it of interest, I shall of course be delighted to share with you any further informations I may obtain. Mes Hommages.”
“Sorry about the clumsy translation, Leonora. Now for Sabine de Kercoz.
“Ma chère petite cousine,
Our long and tedious days here have been enlivened by the unexpected—at least unexpected by me—arrival of a distant cousin, a Miss LaMotte, residing in England, the daughter of Isidore LaMotte, who collected all the French Mythology and also the Breton tales and folk beliefs. Imagine my excitement—it turns out that this new cousin is a poetess, who has published many works, unfortunately in English, and is highly thought of in that country. She is unwell at present, and keeps her bed, having had a terrible journey from England in the recent storm, and having been forced to remain for almost twenty-four hours outside the harbour walls at St Malo because of a howling gale. And then the roads were almost impassable for flooding water and high winds all the time. She has a fire in her room, and is probably unaware how singular an honour this is, in this austere household.
I liked what I saw of her well enough. She is little and slender, with a very white face (maybe because of the sea) and rather large white teeth. She sat up to dinner on the first evening and said only a few words. I sat by her side and whispered to her that I had hopes of being a poet. She said, ‘It is not the way to happiness, ma fille.’ I said on the contrary, it was only when writing that I felt wholly living. She said, ‘If that is so, fortunately or unfortunately, nothing I can say will dissuade you.’
The wind howled and howled that night, all on one wailing note, without remission, so that one ached, body and soul, for just a moment of silence, which did not ensue until the early hours of the morning, when I was woken from the—tohu-bohu—hurly-burly—by a sudden dropping of the wind, rather than the more usual way, of waking because of sounds. My new cousin did not appear to have slept, in the morning, and my father insisted she should retire to her room with a tisane of raspberry leaves.
I forgot to say that she has brought with her a large wolf-hound, who is called, if I heard correctly, ‘the Dog Tray.’ The poor animal has also suffered terribly in the storm, and will not come out from under the little table in Miss LaMotte’s bedroom where he lies with his ears between his paws. My cousin says that when the weather is better, he can run in the forest of Brocéliande, which is his natural habitat.…”
“That sounds worth investigation,” said Leonora, when Maud had finished. “That’s more or less what I guessed it said. I might go over to Nantes—where is Nantes exactly?—and take a look at what Dr Le Minier has got there. Except that I don’t read old French. You’ll have to come with me, my darling. We could have a fun time. LaMotte and sea food and Brocéliande, what do you say?”
“That at some future date that will be lovely, but just now I’ve got a paper to finish for the York Conference on Metaphor and I’ve got into a horrible knot with it.”
“Tell. Two minds are better than one. What metaphor?”
Maud was at a loss. She had distracted Leonora from Christabel temporarily, only to find herself jounced into discussing a paper which was hardly forming in her mind and which was in fact better left another month to grow in the dark on its own.
“It’s vague yet. It’s to do with Melusina and Medusa and Freud’s idea that the Medusa-head was a castration-fantasy, female sexuality, feared, not desired.”
“Ah,” said Leonora, “I must tell you about a letter I had from a German about Goethe’s Faust, where the chopped-off heads of the Hydra creep about the stage and think they are still something or other—I’ve been paying attention to Goethe recently—the ewig weibliche, the Mothers, all that, the witches, the sphinxes.…”
&n
bsp; Leonora talked on. She was never dull, if always breathless. Maud began to feel safe as the conversation moved from Brittany to Goethe, from Goethe to sexuality in general, and from the general to the particular and the peculiar habits of Leonora’s two husbands which she was given to deploring, and very occasionally celebrating, in a kind of vehement recitative. Maud always thought that there was no more to be known than she herself knew, about the quirks and foibles, the secret lusts and inconsiderate failures, the smells and funny noises and ejaculations verbal and seminal emitted by the poor sap and the meaty-man. She was always proved wrong. Leonora was a kind of verbal Cleopatra, creating appetite where most she satisfied, making an endless pillow-book out of the new oratory of the couch.
“As for you,” Leonora suddenly said. “What’s the state of your own love-life? You haven’t contributed much, this evening.”
“How could I have?”
“Touché. I do go on. But that suits you fine, you’re all uptight about your own sexuality. You were hurt by that bastard, Fergus Wolff, but you shouldn’t have gotten so annihilated, it’s letting the side down. You should branch out. Try other sweet things.”
“You mean women. Just at the moment, I’m trying celibacy. I like it. Its only hazard is people who will proselytise for their own way of doing things. You should try it.”
“Oh, I did, for a month, back in the Fall. It was great at first. I got to be quite in love with myself, and then I thought I was unhealthily attached to me, and should give myself up. So I found Mary-Lou. It’s much more thrilling bringing someone else off—more generous, Maud.”
“You see what I mean about proselytising. Give up, Leonora. I’m happy the way I am.”
“It’s your choice,” said Leonora, equably. She added, “I tried calling you before I flew out. No one knew where you were. Gone off in a car with a man, I was told by the Department.”
“Who? Who said that?”
“That would be telling. I hope you had a good time.”
Maud became like her namesake, icily regular, splendidly null. She said frostily, “Yes, thank you,” and stared tightlipped and white into space.
“Point taken,” said Leonora. “No trespassers. I’m glad there is someone.”
“There isn’t.”
“OK. There isn’t.”
Leonora splashed a long time in Maud’s bathroom and left it covered with little puddles of water, lidless bottles and several different spicy smells of unknown unguents. Maud put the lids back, mopped up the puddles, had a shower between curtains redolent of Opium or Poison, and had just climbed into her cool bed when Leonora appeared in the doorway, largely naked except for an exiguous and unbelted crimson silk dressing-gown.
“A good-night kiss,” Leonora said.
“I can’t.”
“You can. It’s easy.”
Leonora came to the bed and folded Maud into her bosom. Maud fought to get her nose free. Loose hands met Leonora’s majestic belly and heavy breasts. She couldn’t push, that was as bad as submitting. To her shame, she began to cry.
“What is it with you, Maud?”
“I told you. I’m off the whole thing. Right off. I did tell you.”
“I can relax you.”
“You must be able to see you have exactly the opposite effect. Go back to bed, Leonora. Please.”
Leonora made various rrr-ooof noises like a large dog or bear, and finally rolled away, laughing. “Tomorrow is another day,” said Leonora. “Sweet dreams, Princess.”
A kind of desperation overcame Maud. The bulk of Leonora lay on her sofa in her living-room, between her and her books. She noticed a kind of rigorous aching of her limbs, from tense confinement, which was reminiscent of the last terrible days of Fergus Wolff. She wanted to hear her own voice, saying something simple and to the point. She tried to think whom she wanted to speak to, and came up with Roland Michell, that other devotee of white and solitary beds. She did not look at her watch—it was late, but not so very late, not for scholars. She would let it ring, just a few times, and then, if he didn’t answer, ring off quickly, so that if seriously disturbed he would never know by whom. She picked up the telephone by her bed and dialled the London number. She would tell him what? Not about Sabine de Kercoz, but just that there was something to tell. That she was not alone.
Two rings, three, four. The phone was lifted. A listening silence at the other end.
“Roland?”
“He’s asleep. Have you any idea what time it is?”
“I’m sorry. I’m ringing from abroad.”
“That is Maud Bailey, isn’t it?”
Maud was silent.
“Isn’t it, isn’t it, Maud Bailey? Why don’t you leave us alone?”
Maud held the phone silently, listening to the angry voice. She looked up and saw Leonora in the doorway, gleaming black curls and red silk.
“I came to say I’m sorry and have you got anything for a headache?”
Maud put the phone down.
“Don’t let me interrupt you.”
“There was nothing to interrupt.”
The next day, Maud telephoned Blackadder, which was a tactical error.
“Professor Blackadder?”
“Yes.”
“This is Maud Bailey, from the Lincoln Resource Centre for Women’s Studies.”
“Oh yes.”
“I am trying to get in touch with Roland Michell, rather urgently.”
“I don’t know why you should apply to me, Dr Bailey. I never see him these days.”
“I thought he—”
“He’s been away recently. He’s been in poor health since he came back. Or so I assume, since I don’t see him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t see why you should be. I take it you are not responsible for his—ailing state?”
“Perhaps, if you see him, you would tell him I called.”
“If I do, I will. Is there any other message?”
“Could you ask him to call me.”
“About what, Dr Bailey?”
“Tell him Professor Stern is here, from Tallahassee.”
“If I remember, if I see him, I’ll tell him that.”
“Thank you.”
Maud and Leonora, coming out of a shop in Lincoln, were almost killed by a large car, reversing at great and silent speed. They were carrying hobby-horses, with velvet heads on solid broomsticks, beautifully made with flowing silken manes and wicked embroidered eyes. Leonora wanted them for various godchildren and said they looked English and magical. The driver of the reversing car, seeing the two women through smoke-blue glass, thought they looked bizarrely cultish, in flowing skirts and scarfed heads, brandishing their totemic beasts. He made an economical contemptuous gesture at the gutter. Leonora raised her hobby-horse and addressed him, jingling its bells, as slob, prick and maniac. Insulated from her imprecations, he completed his manoeuvre, distressing a push-chair, a grandmother, two cyclists, an errand-boy and a Cortina, which had to reverse behind him the length of the street. Leonora copied down his number plate which was ANK 666. Neither Maud nor Leonora had met Mortimer Cropper. Their power-circle was different—different conferences, different libraries. Maud therefore felt no shadow of threat or apprehension as the Mercedes slid away through the narrow old streets for which it had not been designed.
If Cropper had known one of his cult-figures was Maud Bailey, he would not have stopped; he had registered Leonora’s American voice without much interest. He was on another quest. In a short time the Mercedes was having difficulty with a hay-wain in the twisting little wold roads near Bag-Enderby. He faced out the haywagon, making it pull precariously into a hedge. He kept his window closed and his aseptic leather interior air-conditioned.
The entrance to the drive to Seal Court was festooned with notices—old and greenish, new and red on white, PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT. NO TRESPASSERS. DANGEROUS DOG. PROTECTED PROPERTY. ANY ACCIDENTS YOUR OWN RISK. Cropper drove in. In his experience signboa
rd verbosity was a substitute for, not an indicator of, mantraps. He drove along the beech drive and into the courtyard, where he stopped, engine humming, and considered his next move.
Sir George, with his shotgun, was seen to peer from the kitchen window and then to emerge from the door. Cropper sat in his car.
“Lost your way?”
Cropper wound down his grey window, and saw crumbling stones instead of steely film set. He looked about with a practised eye. Battlements eroded. Doors hung askew. Weeds in the stable-yard.
“Sir George Bailey?”
“Uh-huh. Can I help you?”
Cropper emerged from his car and turned off the engine.
“May I give you my card? Professor Mortimer Cropper, of the Stant Collection, in Robert Dale Owen University, in Harmony City, New Mexico.”
“Some mistake.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I’ve come a long way, just to ask for a few moments of your time.”