by A. S. Byatt
“Val might tell her.”
“I’ll get her out of this flat. I’ll get her invited away. Then if Val phones, no answer.”
“I am not a natural conspirator, Maud.”
“Nor am I.”
“I can’t face going home. In case Blackadder … In case Val …”
“You must. You must go home and have a row, and get your passport secretly, and all the papers, and just move out. Into one of those little hotels in Bloomsbury.”
“Too near the BM.”
“Victoria, then. I’ll deal with Leonora and come there. I know one I used to stay in.…”
19
High howled the wind, the Ocean hurled
His mass of crested jet uncurled
Against the sea-wall and the tower
Where Dahud and her paramour
In shuttered silence, silky white
Lay side by side the live-long night.
The people ran about the street
Their fearful voice, their wet hands beat
Against the opposing steely door
All smoothly silent, as before.
Confusedly in Dahud’s arm
He felt presentiment of harm
Raising his ears from her white skin
And heart’s noise, to the people’s din
And beyond them, the growling roar
Of angry Ocean at the door.
“Go to the window,” then said she,
“Tell me the movement of the sea
His colour and his strategy.”
“Lady, his waves are green as glass
The sky is jet, the small skiffs pass
From gulf to gulf like flying things
Soaked through, sucked down, with sodden wings.”
“Then come to me and my embrace—
I will press kisses on your face
Whose heat and sharpness shall occlude
The murmuring of the multitude
The rumble of the waters rude.”
Bewitched, he does her bidding, till
He hears a splashing at the sill
Of the tower’s portal, and he cries,
“Lady, he comes, and we must rise.”
“ ’Tis he must rise,” she answers fast,
“We are safe until the iron gate’s past.
Go to the window, tell to me,
The pace and movement of the sea
His colour and his strategy.”
“Lady, his waves are livid pale
The sky is covered with a veil
Of flying foam, and drowning men
Cry from the crests and sink again.”
“Come and lie still within my arms,
What care we for these weak things’ harms?
I can subdue him with my charms.”
Again he stirs, again he cries,
“The Ocean comes, and we must rise.”
“Go to the window, tell to me
The height and movement of the sea
His colour and his strategy.”
“Lady, his waves are black and boil
Like stinking pitch, like raging oil,
He mounts and mounts, his million jaws
Snatch at the tower with open maws
Fringèd with foam-teeth, curv’d and white
Shape-shifting monsters of the night
Now one, now myriad, open, high.
Lady, I cannot see the sky.
The stars are out, the waters race
Where the town was, over the place
Where steeple pointed, clock-tower smiled.
Now all is turbulent and wild.
There is a sound of grinding chains
The very tower sways and strains
He laughs with rage, flings his fist down.
Now rise up, lady, or we drown.”
—CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE, The City of Is
They were closed in a cabin on the Prince of Brittany. It was night: they could hear the steady throb of the engines, and beyond and around them, the huge heavy rush of the sea. They were both faint with over-excitement. They had stood on deck and watched the lights of Portsmouth glare and dwindle. They had stood apart, not touching, though earlier, in London, full of obscure emotion, they had rushed into each other’s arms. Now they sat side by side on the lower bunk and drank duty-free whisky and water from toothmugs.
“We must be mad,” said Roland.
“Of course we are mad. And bad. I lied shamelessly to Leonora. I’ve done worse—I nicked Ariane Le Minier’s address when she wasn’t looking. I’m as bad as Cropper and Blackadder. All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous. This one’s got a bit out of hand. But the bliss of breathing sea air and not having to share my flat with Leonora for the next few weeks—”
It was odd to hear Maud Bailey talking wildly of madness and bliss.
“I think I’ve just lost everything I’ve ever had or cared about. My bit of job in the Ash Factory. Val. Which means my home because it’s her home, she pays the rent. I should feel frightful. I probably shall. But at the moment I feel all—clear in the head—and single, if you know what I mean. I suppose it feels so good because of the sea. I’d just feel silly if I’d gone to earth in London.”
They were not touching. They were sitting amicably close and not touching.
“Oddly,” said Maud, “if we were obsessed with each other, no one would think we were mad.”
“Val thinks we are obsessed with each other. She even said it was healthier than being obsessed with Randolph Ash.”
“Leonora thinks I’ve rushed away in response to a telephone call from a lover.”
Roland thought, All this giddy clear-headedness is dependent on our not being obsessed with each other.
He said, “These are clean narrow white beds.”
“So they are. Do you prefer top or bottom?”
“I’m indifferent. And you?”
“I’ll take the top.” She laughed. “Leonora would say it’s because of Lilith.”
“Why Lilith?”
“Lilith refused to take the inferior position. So Adam sent her away and she roamed the Arabian deserts and the dark beyond the pale. She’s an avatar of Melusina.”
“I don’t see that it matters, top or bottom,” Roland said stolidly, perfectly aware of the absurd range of this comment between mythography, sexual preference and distribution of bolted bunks. He felt happy. Everything was absurd and at one. He turned on the shower.
“Do you want a shower? It’s salt.”
“So it is. A sea-water shower under the sea. We are under the sea, in this cabin? After you.”
The water hissed and pricked and calmed. Outside, the same water ran darkly, carved by the bulk of the huge craft, and beyond that supporting the rush and balance of unseen life, schools of porpoises and threatened singing dolphins, moving and darting masses of mackerel and whiting, the propulsive canopies of the medusa, the phosphorescent semen of herrings which Michelet, mixing his genders and functions as he had a habit of doing, called the sea of milk, la mer de lait. Roland lay peacefully on his inferior bunk, and thought of a magical sentence of Melville’s about schools of—what was it exactly?—rushing beneath the pillow. He heard the shower-streams break and rattle on Maud’s invisible body, which he imagined to himself gently and vaguely, without urgency or precision, white as milk, turning this way and that in the jets and the rising steam. He saw her ankles as she climbed the ladder, white and fine, in white cotton and an air of fern-scented powder and damp hair. He felt a great contentment, that she should be shelved there, invisible and inaccessible, but there. “Sleep well,” she said, “good night,” and he answered, the same. But for a long time he did not sleep, only lay wide-eyed in the dark, listening voluptuously for small creaks and rustles, sighings and shiftings, as she moved above him.
Maud had telephoned Ariane Le Minier, who was about to set out for a holiday in the South but had agreed to see them briefly. They drove peacefully to Nantes in good weather
and met over lunch in a surprising restaurant, mysteriously and brilliantly decorated in fin de siècle Turkish tiles with pillars and jewelled stained glass. Ariane Le Minier was young, warm, and decisive, with ink-black hair carved into a precise geometric form, angled at the nape, across the brow. The two women liked each other; they shared a passionate precision in their approach to scholarship, and discussed liminality and the nature of Melusina’s monstrous form as a “transitional area,” in Winnicott’s terms—an imaginary construction that frees the woman from gender-identification. Roland said very little. It was his first French meal in France and he was overcome with precise sensuality, with sea food, with fresh bread, with sauces whose subtlety required and defied analysis.
Maud’s task was delicate. She needed to be given access to Sabine de Kercoz’s papers without exactly saying why and without explaining the relationship between her request and Leonora’s absence. This seemed initially to be made more difficult by Ariane’s imminent departure. The papers were locked away and access was not really possible in her absence. “If I had known you were coming …”
“We didn’t know ourselves. We turned out to have this small holiday. We thought of travelling through Brittany and seeing LaMotte’s family home—”
“There is nothing to see, alas. It was burned down at the time of the First World War. But simply to see Finistère and the Bay of Audierne—under which Is traditionally lies—and the Baie des Trépassés—the Bay of the Dead—”
“Have you found out anything else about the visit LaMotte made in the autumn of 1859?”
“Ah. I have a surprise for you. Since I wrote to Professor Stern I have made a discovery—I have found a journal intime kept by Sabine de Kercoz which covers almost all LaMotte’s visit. I think Sabine was imitating George Sand in keeping such a journal—and, for that reason, wrote in French rather than in the Breton which might have seemed natural.”
“I cannot say how much I should like to see that—”
“I have a further surprise for you. I have made you a photocopy. To show to Professor Stern, and because I have such great admiration for your work on Melusina. And to make up for my absence and the closure of the archive. The photocopier is a great democratic invention. And we should share our information, should we not—it is a feminist principle, co-operation. I think you will be very surprised by the contents of this journal. I hope we may discuss their implications when you have read it. I shall say no more now. One should not spoil surprises.”
Maud expressed surprise and gratitude in some confusion. What Leonora would say was sharp in her mind. But curiosity and narrative greed were sharper.
The next day they drove through Brittany to the end of the earth, to Finistère. They drove through the forests of Paimpont and Brocéliande, and came to the quiet enclosed bay of Fouesnant, where they found a hotel at le Cap Coz, a hotel which combined the wind-battered ruggedness of the North with something dreamier and softer and more southern, which had a terrace and a palm tree, looking down through a copse of almost Mediterranean pines to a circling sandy bay and a blue-green sea. There, over the next three days, they read Sabine’s journal. What they thought will be told later. This is what they read.
SABINE LUCRÈCE CHARLOTTE DE KERCOZ.
JOURNAL INTIME.
BEGUN, AT THE MANOIR DE KERNEMET,
OCTOBER 13TH 1859.
The blank space of these white pages fills me with fear and desire. I could write anything I wished here, so how shall I decide where to begin? This is the book in which I shall make myself into a true writer; here I shall learn my craft, and here I shall record whatever of interest I may experience or discover. I have begged the notebook from my dear father, Raoul de Kercoz, who uses these bound volumes for his notes on folklore and his scientific observations. I began this writing task at the suggestion of my cousin, the poet, Christabel LaMotte, who said something that struck me most forcibly. “A writer only becomes a true writer by practising his craft, by experimenting constantly with language, as a great artist may experience with clay or oils until the medium becomes second nature, to be moulded however the artist may desire.” She said too, when I told her of my great desire to write, and the great absence in my daily existence of things of interest, events or passions, which might form the subject matter of poetry or fiction, that it was an essential discipline to write down whatever there was in my life to be noticed, however usual or dull it might seem to me. This daily recording, she said, would have two virtues. It would make my style flexible and my observation exact for when the time came—as it must in all lives—when something momentous should cry out—she said “cry out”—to be told. And it would make me see that nothing was in fact dull in itself, nothing was without its own proper interest. Look, she said, at your own rainy orchard, your own terrible coastline, with the eyes of a stranger, with my eyes, and you will see that they are full of magic and sad but of beautifully various colour. Consider the old pots and the simple strong platters in your kitchen with the eyes of a new Ver Meer come to make harmony of them with a little sunlight and shade. A writer cannot do this, but consider what a writer can do—always supposing the craft is sufficient.
I see I have written a page now, and all that is of value in it is the precepts of my cousin Christabel. That is only right—she is the most important person in my life at present, and moreover a shining example because she is both an acknowledged writer of some importance and a woman, thus a sign of hope, a leader, for all of us. I am not sure how much she relishes this role—indeed I think I know very little of what she inwardly thinks and feels. She treats me, in the gentlest way possible, as though she were a governess and I were a tiresome charge, full of enthusiasms, never still, hopelessly ignorant of life.
If she resembles a governess I am sure that she resembles the romantic Jane Eyre, so powerful, so passionate, so observant beneath her sober exterior.
The last two sentences cause me to think of a problem. Am I writing this for Christabel to see, as a kind of devoir—a writer’s exercises—or even as a kind of intimate letter, for her to read alone, in moments of contemplation and withdrawal? Or am I writing it privately to myself, in an attempt to be wholly truthful with myself, for the sake of truth alone?
I know she would prefer the latter. So I shall lock away this volume—anyway during its earliest life—and write in it only what is meant for my eyes alone, and those of the Supreme Being (my father’s deity, when he does not seem to believe in much older ones, Lug, Dagda, Taranis. Christabel has a strong but peculiarly English devotion to Jesus, which I do not wholly understand, nor is it clear to me what her allegiances are, Catholic or Protestant).
A lesson. Work written only for one pair of eyes, the writer’s, loses some of its vitality, but en revanche gains a certain freedom, and rather to my surprise, adult quality. It loses its desire, female as well as infantile, to charm.
I shall begin this work by describing Kernemet as it is today, at this hour, four on a dark, autumnal, misty afternoon.
I have spent all my short life—which has at times felt very long and dragging to me—in this house. Christabel was surprised, she said, both by its beauty and by its simplicity. No, I will not say what Christabel said, I will record what I myself notice of what is so familiar that in moods of ennui I hardly see it.
Our house is built of granite, like most of the houses on this coast, long and low, with high pointed slate roofs and pignons. It stands in a courtyard surrounded by a high wall, to create a space of quiet inside the wind, as much as to keep out anything. Everything here is built to stand in the streaming winds and beating rain off the Atlantic. The slate is more often glistening with wet than not. I love it also in the summer, when it can shine in the heat. Our windows are deep, and high-arched, like church-windows. Our house has only four major rooms, two upstairs, two down, each with two deep windows, on two walls, to provide light in all weathers. Outside also is a turret, with a dovecot above, and a place for dogs below. Dog Tray,
however, and my father’s brach, Mirza, live indoors. Behind the house, sheltered from the Ocean, is the orchard, where I played as a child, which then seemed infinitely spacious and now is cramped. It too is walled with a wall of dry stones and huge sea cobbles which, the peasants say, “spend” the wind, breaking its force among innumerable holes and crannies. In storms, when the wind is in that quarter, the whole wall sings, a stony song like a pebble beach. The whole of this country is full of the song of the wind. When it blows, the people plant their feet more firmly, and so to speak, sing into it, the men deepening their bass, the women raising their tones.