by A. S. Byatt
I saw that she was not kneeling, and then that she was lowering herself, after all, rather carefully, as though she felt faint. When we were seated again, after the candles were lit, I looked to see if she was well, and understood. She was leaning back, in the corner of the bench, with her head against a pillar and her eyes and lips tightly closed, wearily closed, but not patiently. She was shadowed, the church-shadows swallowed her, but I saw she was pale. She had her hands clasped under her bosom, and some trick of the twist of her body, some ancient protectiveness in those hands made me see clearly what she had concealed and what I, a good countrywoman and mistress of a household, should have understood long ago. I have seen too many women hold their hands so to be mistaken. Leaning like that, I could see how she is stout. She came to us for sanctuary indeed. Much, if not all, is explained.
Gode knows. She is quick-eyed and wise about these things.
My father knows, I think, he must have known for some time, if not before she came. What he feels is pity and protectiveness, I see it now; I have read sentiments that did not exist except in my own fevered imagination.
What shall I say or do?
DEC. 31
I see I shall dare to say nothing to her. I went up to her room in the afternoon, with a gift of barley sugar and a book I had borrowed in earlier times before I grew angry. I said to her,
“I am sorry to have been so disagreeable, Cousin. I have been misunderstanding things.”
“Indeed,” she said, not so agreeably. “I am glad you find it to be a misunderstanding.”
“Oh, I know how things are, now,” I said. “I wish to be good to you. To help you.”
“You know how things are now, do you?” she said slowly. “You know how things are. Do we ever know that about a fellow-creature? Tell me then, Cousin Sabine, how do you think things are with me?”
And she stared at me with her white face and her pale eyes, defying me to speak. If I had, if I had uttered it, what could she have done or said? It is so, I know it. But I stammered, I did not know what I meant, I believed I had made her unhappy, and then, as she stared on, I burst into tears.
“Things are well enough with me,” she said. “I am a grown woman, and you are a young girl, full of the fancies and instability of youth. I can look after myself. I do not desire help from you, Sabine. But I am glad you are no longer so full of rage. Rage hurts the spirit, as I know to my cost.”
I felt she knew all, all I had suspected and feared and resented. And that she did not choose to forgive me. And then I was angry again, in my turn, and went out still weeping. For she says she does not need help, but she does, she has already requested it, that is why she is here. What will become of her? Of us? Of the child? Shall I speak to my father? I still feel she is like Aesop’s frozen serpent. A figure of speech may get hold of your imagination even when its appositeness is worn away. In which case which of us is the serpent? But she looked at me so coldly. I wonder if she is a little mad.
[LATE JAN]
Today I made up my mind to speak to my father about Cousin Christabel’s state. I have thought of it once or twice, but something has always prevented me. Possibly a fear that he too may reprove me. But the silence lies between me and him. So I waited until she had gone away to the church—any practised eye could tell her condition by now, for sure. She is too little in stature to disguise it.
I went in to my father and said very quickly, before I could be deflected from my purpose, “I wish to talk to you about Christabel.”
“I have noticed, with regret, that you seem to show her less affection than you did.”
“As to that, I do not think she wants my affection. I misunderstood. I thought she was growing so close to you that I—that there was no space left for me.”
“That was most unjust. Both to her and to me.”
“I know now, for I have seen, father, I have seen her condition, which is unmistakable. I was blind, but now I see.”
He turned his face away to the window and said, “I do not think we should speak of that.”
“You mean, you do not think I should.”
“I do not think we should.”
“But what is to become of her? Of the child? Are they to stay here always? I am the mistress of this house, I wish to know, I need to know. And I wish to help, Father, I wish to help Christabel.”
“The best way to help her seems to be by maintaining silence.”
He sounded puzzled. I said, “Well, if you know what she intends, I am content, I will be quiet and say no more. I only wish to help.”
“Ah, my dear,” he said, “I know no more than you do, of what she intends. I am as much in the dark as you are. I offered a home, as she requested—‘for some time’ was all she said in her letter. But she has not allowed me to speak of—the reason for her need. Indeed, it was Gode who enlightened me, very early. It may be that she will turn to Gode, when the time comes. She is our kin—we offered sanctuary.”
“She must speak of her trouble,” I said.
“I have tried,” he said. “She turns it all aside. As though she wished to deny her state, even to herself.”
FEBRUARY
I have noticed that I have lost pleasure in this journal. For some time now it has been neither writer’s exercise nor record of my world, only a narrative of jealousy and bafflement and resentment. I have noticed that writing such things down does not exorcise them, only gives them solid life, as the witch’s wax dolls take on vitality when she warms them into shape before pricking them. I did not start this journal to be a confidante for my spying on another’s private pain. Also I am afraid that it might be read, by accident, and misconstrued. So, for all these reasons, and as a kind of spiritual discipline, I shall give it up for the time being.
APRIL
I am witnessing something so strange, so strange I must write about it, though I said I would not, in order to help myself to understand. My cousin is now so big, so ripe, so heavy, it must be soon, and yet she has allowed no word of discussion of her condition or her expectations. And she has us all under some spell, for no one of us dare take her to task, or bring into the open, to be spoken of, what is already in full view and yet hidden. My father says he has several times tried to make her speak of it, and has always been unable. He wants to tell her that the child is welcome; it is, as she is, our kin, whatever its origins, and we will care for it and see it is well brought up and wants for nothing. But he says he cannot speak, and this for two reasons. One, that she daunts him, she prohibits him absolutely with her eye and manner from opening the subject, and though he knows he is morally required to do so he cannot. The second is that he is truly afraid that she is mad. That she is somehow fatally split in two, and that she has not let her conscience and public self know what is about to happen to her. And although he feels she must be prepared he fears also to set about it wrongly and shock her into complete alienation and frenzy and despair, and perhaps kill both. He heaps little loving-kindnesses upon her, and she accepts all, gracefully, like some princess, as a kind of due, and talks to him of Morgan le Fay, Plotinus, Abelard and Pelagius as one rendering courteous payment for favours. Her mind is clearer than ever. She is quick and razor-sharp and witty. My poor father feels, as I do, a growing sense of madness in himself, to be driven by courtesy and what was once a pleasure into these elaborate disputations and recensions and recitations, when what should be talked of is solid flesh and practical provisions.
I said to him, she is not so unknowing, for her clothes have been let out, around the waist, under the arms, with firm enough lines of stitching, with intelligent care. He said he doubted but that was Gode’s work, and we resolved that if we had neither courage nor hardness enough to confront Christabel we would at least find out what Gode knew, whether she had been privileged, as was possible, even probable, with any confidence. But Gode said no, the needlework was not hers, and Mademoiselle had always turned the conversation, as though she had misunderstood, when Gode had offered hel
p. ‘She drinks my tisanes, but as though she did it indulgently to please me,’ Gode said. Gode said she had known cases like it, of women who had resolutely refused to know their state and yet had been brought to bed as sweetly and easily as any heifer in the barn. And others, she said, more gloomily, who had broken themselves up fighting, and so killed either or both, mother and child. Gode thinks we may leave it to her—she will know by certain sure signs when the time is come, and will give my cousin drinks to calm her, and then bring her to her senses all practically at the last. I think Gode has the measure of most men or women, at least where they are most animal and instinctive, but not at all certainly of my cousin Christabel.
I have considered writing her a letter, setting out our fears and knowledge, on the grounds that she reads easier than she speaks, and could reflect alone upon these careful words. But I cannot conceive how to cast such a letter, or how she would respond.
TUESDAY
During all this late time she has been very good to me, in her way, discussing this and that, asking to see my work, embroidering me, in secret, a little case for my scissors, a pretty thing with a peacock on it in blue and green silks, all eyes. But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.
Today we were able to be in the orchard, under the cherry blossom, talking of poetry, and she brushed falling petals off her full skirt with apparent unconcern. She talked of Melusina and the nature of epic. She wants to write a Fairy Epic, she says, not grounded in historical truth, but in poetic and imaginative truth—like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or Ariosto, where the soul is free of the restraints of history and fact. She says Romance is a proper form for women. She says Romance is a land where women can be free to express their true natures, as in the Ile de Sein or Síd, though not in this world.
She said, in Romance, women’s two natures can be reconciled. I asked, which two natures, and she said, men saw women as double beings, enchantresses and demons or innocent angels.
“Are all women double?” I asked her.
“I did not say that,” she said. “I said all men see women as double. Who knows what Melusina was in her freedom with no eyes on her?”
She spoke of the fishtail and asked me if I knew Hans Andersen’s story of the Little Mermaid who had her fishtail cleft to please her Prince, and became dumb, and was not moreover wanted by him. “The fishtail was her freedom,” she said. “She felt, with her legs, that she was walking on knives.”
I said I had terrible dreams of walking on knives since reading that tale, and that pleased her.
And so she talked on, of the pains of Melusina and the Little Mermaid; and of her own pain to come, nothing.
Now I am clever enough to recognise a figure of speech or a parable, I hope, and I see that it could well be thought that she was telling me, in her own riddling way, of the pains of womanhood. All I can say, is that at the time it did not feel so. No, her voice flashed, with all the assurance of her needle when she sews, fabricating a pretty pattern. And under the dress I swear I saw that move, which was not her, and was not acknowledged by all her brightness.
APRIL 30
I can’t sleep. I shall take the gift she gave me and write, then, write what she has done.
We have been looking for her for two days. She went out yesterday morning to walk up to the church, as she has increasingly done over these last weeks. It turns out that the villagers have seen her, standing they say for long periods, and tracing the history of the life and death of the Virgin round the base of the Calvary, leaning against it to catch breath, tracing the little figures with her fingers “like a blind woman” one said, “like a carver” another said. And she has spent hours in the church praying too, or sitting quietly, that we knew, that all of us knew, we and the people, with her head covered with a black shawl and her hands clenched in her lap. They saw her yesterday, as usual, go in. No one saw her come out, but she must have come out.
We didn’t begin to look until dinner-time. Gode came and stood in my father’s room and said, “I should take out the horse and trap, Monsieur, for the young woman is not back, and her time was near.”
And our minds filled with terrible pictures of my cousin fallen and in pain, perhaps in a ditch or a field, or maybe a barn. So we took out the horse and trap, and drove all along the roads, between the stone walls, looking into hollows and isolated huts, calling sometimes, but not often, for we felt a sort of shame, for ourselves that we had lost her, for her that she had strayed, in the state she was in. This was a horrid time, for all of us I know, for me most certainly. Every inch was painful—I think uncertainty is maybe more painful than any other emotion, it both drives one on and disappoints and paralyses, so that we went on in a mounting kind of suffocation and bursting. Every large dark patch—a gorse bush with a rag caught on it, an abandoned worm-eaten barrel—were objects of terrible hope and fear. We climbed up to the Lady Chapel and peered in through the mouth of the Dolmen, and saw nothing. And so we went on until it grew dark, and then my father said, “Heaven forbid she has fallen over the cliff.”
“Perhaps she is with one of the village people,” I said.
“They would have told me,” said my Father. “They would have sent for me.”
Then we decided to search the shore—we constructed great torches, as we do for times when boats are driven on the coast and there are survivors, or wreckage, to be picked up. Yannick built a small fire and my father and I ran from cove to cove, calling and waving our torches. Once I heard a crying sound, but it was only a disturbed gull’s nest. We went on like that, without food, without respite, under the moon, until after midnight, and then my father said we must go home, news might have come in our absence. I said, surely not, they would have sent to find us, and my father said, they are too few to tend a sick woman and fetch us from here. So we went home with a sort of half-hope, but there was nothing and no one, except Gode, who had been conjuring the smoke, and said nothing would be known before the morrow.
Today we aroused the neighborhood. My father, his pride and his hat in his hand, knocked at all the doors and asked if anyone had knowledge of her—and all denied it, though it was established that she had been in the church in the morning. The peasants came out and searched the fields and lanes again. My father went to see the Curé. He does not like to see the Curé, who is not an educated man, and embarrasses both himself and my father by knowing that he should try to argue with my father’s religious views, which he must see as most irreligious. For he dare not argue—he would lose and he would lose respect in the neighbourhood, if it were known that he had interfered with M. de Kercoz, however much in the interest of his immortal soul.
The Curé said, “I am sure Le Bon Dieu has good care of her.”
My father said, “But have you seen her, mon père?”
The Curé said, “I saw her in church this morning.”
My father thinks the Curé may know where she is. For he did not offer to come out and join the searchers, as he should surely have done, if his mind had been unquiet? But then again, the Curé is fat and closed up in his fat, and unimaginative and stupid and might well have simply supposed that the searching was being adequately done by the young and agile. I said, “How should the Curé know?” And my father said, “She might have asked him for help.”
I could not imagine how anyone could ask the Curé for help, let alone in such a circumstance. He has staring eyes and a blubber mouth and lives for his stomach. But my father said, “He visits the Convent of St Anne, on the road into Quimperlé, where the Bishop has made provision for the care of cast-out and fallen women.”
“He could not send her there,” I said. “It is an unhappy place.”
Yannick’s sister’s friend, Malle, was brought to bed there, when her parents cast her off and no one claimed her child, for no one, it was said, could be certain whose it was. Malle claimed that the nuns pinched her and ma
de her do penance of foul scrubbing and carrying all sorts of dirt, when she was barely delivered. The child died, Malle said. She went into service as a housemaid in Quimper, with a chandler’s wife, who beat her unmercifully, and did not live long.
“Perhaps Christabel asked to go there,” my father said.
“Why should she do that?”
“Why should she do anything she has done? And where is she, for we have searched and searched? And no one has been cast up from the sea.
I said we could at least ask the nuns. My father will drive down to the Convent tomorrow.
I feel sick at heart. I am afraid for her, and angry too, and sorry for my father, a good man burdened with grief and anxiety and shame. For now we all know, that unless she has had an accident, she has run away from our offer of shelter. Or else they suppose we cast her out, which is also a disgrace, as we never should.
But perhaps she is lying dead in some cave, or on the shore of some cove we cannot climb to. Tomorrow I will go out again. I cannot sleep.
MAY 1ST
Today my father drove to the convent and back. The Mother Superior gave him wine, he says, and said no one answering Christabel’s name or description had been brought to the convent that week. She said she would pray for the young woman. My father asked to be told if she found her way there. “As to that,” said the nun, “that depends on what the woman herself says, seeking sanctuary.”
“I wish her to know that we offer her, her and her child, a home with us, and care for as long as she requires it,” my father said.
And the nun: “I am sure she must already know that, wherever she is. Perhaps she cannot come to you, in her trouble. Perhaps she will not, for shame, or for other reasons.”
My father tried to tell the nun about Christabel’s mad obstinacy in silence, but she became, apparently, brusque and impatient, and turned him away. He did not like the nun, who, he says, enjoyed her power over him. He is much set back and depressed.