by A. S. Byatt
Once she said, “I know I am a great trouble to you, ma cousine. I am unrewarding and sick and small-minded. You should let me sit here, and think of other things.”
“I want you to be comfortable and happy here,” I said.
She said, “God did not endow me with very much capacity for being comfortable.”
I was hurt that, although I have been running this house almost since I was ten years old, my cousin deferred to my father in all practical matters and thanked him for acts of foresight or hospitality of which he would have been quite incapable, though full of good will.
The big dog, too, refused to eat. He lay inside her room, with his nose to the door, flat on the ground, rising stiffly twice a day to be let out. I brought titbits for him too, which he refused. She watched me try to speak to him, passively at first, without encouraging me. I persisted. One day she said, “He will not respond. He is very angry with me, for taking him away from his home, where he was happy, and reducing him to terror and sickness on that boat. He has a right to be angry, but I did not know a dog could bear a grudge for so long. They are believed to be foolishly forgiving and even Christian towards those creatures who pretend to own’ them. Now I think he means to die, to spite me for having uprooted him.”
“Oh no. It is very cruel of you to say that. The dog is unhappy, not spiteful.”
“It is I who am spiteful. I plague myself and others. And good Dog Tray who never harmed any creature.”
I said, “When he comes downstairs, I will take him out in the orchard.”
“He will not come, I fear.”
“And if he does?”
“Then your patience and kindness will have wrought something with my gentle dog, if not with me. But I believe him to be a one-man dog, or I should not have brought him. I left him for a little, recently, and he refused to eat until I returned.”
I persisted, and little by little he came more willingly, did the tour of the yard, the stables, the orchard, made himself at home in the hall, left his post at her door and greeted me with a push of his great muzzle. One day he ate two bowls of chicken soup his mistress had rejected, and waved his great tail in pleasure thereafter. When she saw this, she said, sharply enough, “I see I was mistaken about his exclusive loyalty too. I should have done better to leave him where he was. All the magic glades of Brocéliande are not worth a good run in Richmond Park to poor Dog Tray. And he might have given comfort—”
Here she broke off. I affected not to notice, for she was obviously in distress and not given to confidence. I said, “When the good weather comes you and I may take him walking in Brocéliande. We may make an excursion to see the wilderness of the Pointe du Raz and the Baie des Trépassés.”
“When the good weather comes, who knows where we may be?”
“Will you leave us then?”
“Where would I go?”
That was no answer, as both of us well knew.
FRIDAY
Gode said, “In ten days, she will feel strong.” I said, “Have you been giving her herb-stew, Gode?” for Gode is a witch, as we all know. And Gode said, “I offered. But she would not.” I said, “I will tell her your potions do nothing but good.” And Gode said, “Too late. She will be better by Wednesday week.” I told Christabel this, laughing, and she said nothing, and then asked what Gode could magic? I told her, warts and colic and childlessness and women’s pains, coughs and accidental poisoning. She can set a limb and deliver a child, Gode can, and lay out a corpse and resuscitate the drowned. We all learn that here.
Christabel said, “And she never kills what she cures?”
I said, “No, not to my knowledge, she is very scrupulous and very clever, or very lucky. I would trust my life to Gode.”
Christabel said, “Your life would be a great trust.”
“Or any man’s,” I said. She frightens me. I see her meaning, and she makes me afraid.
As Gode predicted, she grew stronger, and when in the beginning of November we had three or four clear days, as can happen on this chancy changing coast, I drove her and Dog Tray to see the sea, in the bay at Fouesnant. I thought she might run with me along the beach, or climb rocks, despite a chill wind. But she simply stood at the edge of the water, with her boots sinking into the wet sand, and her hands tucked into her sleeves for warmth, and listened to the breakers and the gulls crying, quite still, quite still. Her eyes were closed when I came up to her, and with every breaker her brows creased in a little frown. I had the fanciful idea that they were beating on her skull like blows, and that she was enduring the sound, for reasons of her own. I went away again—I have never met anyone who so gave the impression that normal acts of friendliness are a deadly intrusion.
TUESDAY
I was still determined that we should talk about writing together. I waited until one day she seemed relaxed and friendly; she had offered to help me to darn sheets, which she does much better than I do—she is a fine needlewoman. Then I said, “Cousin Christabel, it is true that I have a great desire to be a writer.”
“If that is true, and if you have the gift, nothing I can say will change the outcome.”
“You know that cannot be true. That is a sentimental thing to say, cousin, forgive me. Much could prevent me. Solitude. The lack of sympathy. The lack of faith in myself. Your contempt.”
“My contempt?”
“You judge me in advance, as a silly girl, who wants she knows not what. You see your idea, not me.”
“And you are determined I shan’t persist in that error. You have one of the gifts of the novelist at least, Sabine, you persist in undermining facile illusions. With courtesy and good humour. I stand corrected. Tell me, then, what do you write? For I suppose you do write? It is a métier where the desire without the act is a destructive phantom.”
“I write what I can. Not what I should like to write but what I know. I would like to write the history of the feelings of a woman. A modern woman. But what do I know of that, in these granite walls somewhere between Merlin’s thorny prison and the Age of Reason? So I write what I know best, the strange and the fantastic, my father’s tales. I have written down the legend of Is, for instance.”
She said she would be happy to read my story of Is. She said she had written an English poem upon the same subject. I said I knew a little English, not much, and should be glad if she would teach me some. She said, “I will try, of course. I am not a good teacher, I am not patient. But I will try.”
She said, “Since I came here, I have not attempted to write anything, because I do not know what language to think in. I am like the Fairy Mélusine, the Sirens and the Mermaids, half-French, half-English and behind these languages the Breton and the Celt. Everything shifts shape, my thoughts included. My desire to write came from my father, who was not unlike your father. But the language in which I write—my mother-tongue exactly—is not his language, but my mother’s. And my mother is not a spiritual woman, and her language is that of household minutiae and female fashion. And English is a language full of little blocks, and solid objects and quiddities and unrelated matters of fact, and observation. It is my first language. My father said that every human being needs a native tongue. He withdrew himself and spoke to me only in English, in my earliest years, he told me English tales and sang me English songs. Later I learned French, from him, and Breton.”
This was the first confidence she made to me, and it was a writer’s confidence. At the time, I did not think so much about what she had said about language, as about the fact that her mother was alive, for she said she “is not a spiritual woman.” She was in great trouble, so much was clear, and had turned not to her mother, but to us—to my father, that is, for I do not think I counted for anything in her decision.
SATURDAY
She read my story of King Gradlon, the Princess Dahud, the horse Morvak, and the Ocean. She took it away on the evening of October 14th and returned it two days later, coming into my room and putting it into my hands brusquely, with
a funny little smile. She said, “Here is your tale. I have not marked it, but I have taken the liberty of writing one or two notes on a separate sheet.”
How shall I describe the happiness of being taken seriously? I could see in her face when she took the tale that she expected to find sentimental vapourings and rosy sighs. I knew she would not, but her certainty overwhelmed mine. I knew I must be found wanting, one way or another. And yet I knew that what I had written was written, that it had its raison d’être. So I awaited her inevitable disdain with half my soul, and with the other knew that it ought not to be so.
I seized the paper from her hands. I ran through the notes. They were practical, they were intelligent, they acknowledged what I had tried to do.
What I had meant was to make of the wild Dahud an embodiment as it were of our desire for freedom, for autonomy, for our own proper passion, which women have, and which, it seems, men fear. Dahud is the sorceress whom the Ocean loves and whose excesses cause the City of Is to be engulfed (by that same Ocean) and drowned. In one of my father’s mythological recensions the editor says, “In the legend of the City of Is may be felt, like the passing of a whirlwind, the terror of ancient pagan cults and the terror of the passion of the senses, let loose in women. And to these two terrors is added the third, that of the Ocean, which, in this drama, has the role of Nemesis and fate. Paganism, woman and the Ocean, these three desires and these three great fears of man, are mingled in this strange legend and come to a tempestuous and terrible end.”
On the other hand, my father says, the name Dahud, or Dahut, in ancient times, signified “The good sorceress.” He says she must have been a pagan priestess, as in an Icelandic saga, or one of the virgin priestesses of the Druids in the Ile de Sein. He says even that Yes, maybe, is the vestigial memory of an other world where women were powerful, before the coming of warriors and priests, a world like the Paradise of Avallon, the Floating Isles, or the Gaelic Síd, the Land of the Dead.
Why should desire and the senses be so terrifying in women? Who is this author, to say that these are the fears of man, by which he means the whole human race? He makes us witches, outcasts, sorcières, monsters.…
I will copy out some of Christabel’s phrases which particularly pleased me. I should in all honesty copy out also those criticisms she made of what was banal or overdone or clumsy—but these are engraved on my mind.
Some comments of Christabel LaMotte on Dahud La Bonne Sorcière by Sabine de Kercoz.
“You have found, by instinct or intelligence, a way which is not allegory nor yet faux-naïf to give significance and your own form of universality to this terrible tale. Your Dahud is both individual human being and symbolic truth. Other writers may see other truths in this tale. (I do.) But you do not pedantically exclude.
All old stories, my cousin, will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale which must be there—in this case the angry Ocean, the terrible leap of the horse, the fall of Dahud from the crupper, the engulfment etc etc. And yet to add something of yours, of the writer, which makes all these things seem new and first seen, without having been appropriated for private or personal ends. This you have done.”
FRIDAY
After the reading, things went better. I cannot recount all, and yet we are now nearly at the present time. I told my cousin what a great relief it had been to me to have my work read as my work, and by someone who knew how to value it. She said this experience was rare in any writer’s life, and one would do better neither to expect nor to rely on it. I asked her if she had a good reader and she frowned a little and then said briskly, “Two. Which is more than we may hope for. One too indulgent, but with intelligence of the heart. One, a poet—a better poet—” She was silent.
She was not angry, but she would say no more.
I think it must happen to men as well as to women, to know that strangers have made a false evaluation of what they may achieve, and to watch a change of tone, a change of language, a pervasive change of respect after their work has been judged to be worthwhile. But how much more for women, who are, as Christabel says, largely thought to be unable to write well, unlikely to try, and something like changelings or monsters when indeed they do succeed, and achieve something.
OCTOBER 28TH
She is like Breton weather. When she smiles and makes sharp, clever little jokes, one cannot imagine her otherwise—as the coast here may smile and smile in the sun, and in the sheltered coves at Beg-Meil may grow round pines and even a date-palm, which suggest the sunnier south, where I have never been. And the air may be soft and gentle, so that, like the peasant in Aesop’s tale, one takes off one’s heavy coat, one’s armour, so to speak.
She is much better, as Gode said she would be. She and Dog Tray go for long walks together, and also with me, when I am invited or when she accepts my invitation. She insists also on taking part in the daily life of the household, and it is in the kitchen, or mending by the fire, that we have our closest talk. We talk much of the meanings of myths and legends. She is very desirous of seeing our Standing Stones, which are some way away, along the cliff—I have promised to go there with her. I told her that the village girls still dance round the menhir, dressed in white, to celebrate May Day—they move in two circles, one clockwise, one widdershins, and whoever slackens and tires so that she falls, or touches the stone in any way, is mercilessly cuffed and kicked by the others, who all set on her as a flock of gulls will attack an intruder, or one of their own weaklings. My father says this rite is a relic of ancient sacrifice, perhaps Druidic, that the fallen one is a kind of sacrificial scapegoat. He says the Stone is a male symbol, a phallos; and the women of the village go to it in the dark night and clasp it, or rub it with certain preparations (Gode knows but Father and I do not) to have strong sons, or to have their husbands return safely. My grandfather said the church spire was only this ancient stone in a metamorphic form—a slate column, he said, instead of granite, that was all—and the women huddled beneath it like white hens, as in earlier times they danced before the other. I did not quite like to hear that said and hesitated to repeat it to Christabel, for she has Christian belief of some kind certainly. But I did say it, for her mind is fearless, and she laughed, and said it was so, the Church had successfully taken in and absorbed, and partly overcome, the old pagan deities. It was now known that many little local saints are genii loci, Powers who inhabited a particular fount or tree.
She said also, “So the girl who stumbles in the dance is also the Fallen Woman and the others stone her.”
“Not stone,” I said, “not now, only blows with the hands or feet.”
“Those are not the most cruel,” she said.
FRIDAY
What is strange is that she seems to have no life anywhere but here. It is as though she had walked in out of that storm like some selkie or undine, streaming wet and seeking shelter. She writes no letters and never asks if any have come for her. I know—I am not foolish—that something must have happened to her, something terrible, I imagine, from which she fled. I ask her nothing about that, for it is so very clear that she does not wish to be asked. But occasionally I arouse her anger, without meaning to.
For instance, I asked her about the curious name of Dog Tray and she began to tell me that he had been named as a joke, for a line in Wm Shakespeare’s King Lear—“The little dogs and all—Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, see they bark at me.” She said, “He used to live in a house where there was a Blanche and where I was jokingly called Sweetheart—” and then she turned her face away and would say no more, as though she choked. Then she said, “In the nursery rhyme, of Mother Hubbard, in some versions, the Dog who finds the cupboard bare is called Dog Tray. Maybe he was truly named for that old woman’s dog, who found nothing but disappointment.”
NOVEMBER 1 TOUSSAINT
Today the storytelling begins. Everywhere in Brittany the storytelling begins at Toussaint, in the
Black Month. It goes on through December, the Very Black Month, as far as the Christmas story. There are storytellers everywhere. In our village, the people gather round the workbench of Bertrand, the shoemaker, or Yannick, the smith. They bring their work and warm each other with their comfortable presences—or with the heat of the forge—and hear the messengers in the dark that is thick outside their thick walls, the unexplained crack of wood, or flap of wings, or creaking at worst, of the axles of the bumpy cart of the Ankou.
My father made a habit of telling me tales, every night during the two Black Months. This year will be the same, except that Christabel is here. My father’s audience is not as numerous as Bertrand’s or Yannick’s and to tell the truth his tale-telling is not as dramatic as theirs, it has that scholarly courtesy which is part of him, a pernickety insistence on accuracy—no Pam! or Pouf! of demon or wolf-man. And yet he made me believe absolutely in the creatures of his myths and legends, over the years. He would open his tale of the Fontaine Baratoun, the Fontaine des Fées, in the magical forest of Brocéliande, with a scholarly register of all its possible names. I can recite the litany: Breselianda, Bercillant, Brucellier, Berthelieu, Berceliande, Brecheliant, Brecelieu, Brecilieu, Brocéliande. I can hear him say, pedantic and mysterious, “The place shifts its name as it shifts its borders and the directions of its dark rides and wooded alleys—it cannot be pinned down or fixed, any more than can its invisible inhabitants and magical properties, but it is always there, and all these names indicate only one time or aspect of it.…” Every winter, he tells the tale of Merlin and Vivien, always the same tale, never twice the same telling.
Christabel says her father too, told her tales in winter. She seems ready to be part of our fireside circle. What will she tell? Once we had a visitor who told a dead tale, a neat little political allegory with Louis Napoleon as ogre and France as his victim, and it was as though a net had drawn up a shoal of dull dead fish with loose scales, no one knew where to look, or how to smile.