by A. S. Byatt
“Go on, then.” He made her say it twice, and then recited it himself:
“Walk between dark and dark—a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.”
“I like that,” said Euan MacIntyre.
“I didn’t think—”
“You didn’t think yuppies liked poetry. Don’t be vulgar and simplistic, dear Val.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know—more to the point—why you like me.”
“We work together, don’t we? In bed?”
“Oh yes—”
“One knows that sort of thing. And I wanted to see you smile. You were torturing a lovely face into an expression of permanent disappointment, and soon it would have been too late.”
“An act of charity.” Half in the Putney Val’s voice.
“Don’t be silly.”
But he had always loved mending things. Broken models, stray kittens, grounded kites.
“Look, Euan, I’m no good at being happy, I shall mess you up.”
“That depends on me. On me too, that is. ‘O love, be fed with apples while you may.’ ”
23
The irruption, or interruption, occurred at the Baie des Trépassés. It was one of Brittany’s smiling days. They stood amongst the sand-dunes and watched the wide waves crawling in quietly from the Atlantic. The sea wove amber-sandy lights in its grey-green. The air was milk-warm, and smelled of salt, and warm sand, and distant sharp leaves, heather or juniper or pine.
“Would it be so magical, or sinister, without its name?” Maud asked. “It looks bland and sunny.”
“If you knew about the currents you might find it dangerous. If you were a sailor.”
“It says in the Guide Vert that its name comes from a corruption of “boe an aon” (baie du ruisseau) into “boe an anaon” (baie des âmes en peine). It says that the City of Is was traditionally in those marshes at the river-mouth. Trépassés, trespassed, passed, past. Names accrue meaning. We came because of the name.”
Roland touched her hand, which took hold of his.
They were standing in a fold of the dunes. They heard, from beyond the next sandhill, a loud transatlantic cry, rich and strange: “And that must be the Ile de Sein, right out there, I’ve always dreamed of seeing that place, where the nine terrible virgins lived who were called Seines or Sénas or Sènes after the island, which is Sein, which is a fantastically suggestive and polysemous word, suggesting the divinity of the female body, for the French use sein you know to mean both breasts and womb, the female sexual organs, and from that it has also come to mean a fishing-net which holds fish and a bellying sail which holds wind, these women could control tempests, and attract sailors into their nets like the sirens, and they built this funeral temple for the dead druids—a dolmen I suppose it was, another female form, and whilst they constructed it there were all sorts of taboos about not touching the earth, not letting the stones fall to the earth, for it was feared the sun or the earth would pollute them or be polluted by them, just like the mistletoe, which can only be gathered without touching the earth. It has often been thought that Dahud Queen of Is was the child of one of these sorceresses, and when she became Queen of the Drowned City she became Marie-Morgane, a kind of siren or mermaid who drew men to their death, and it is thought she was a relic of a matriarchy as the Sènes were, in their floating island. Have you read Christabel’s Drowned City?”
“No,” said a male voice. “It is an omission I must rectify.”
“Leonora,” said Maud.
“And Blackadder,” said Roland.
The two could be seen advancing towards the sea. Leonora’s hair was loose, and, as she came out of the shelter of the dunes, was lifted in dark snaking ringlets, by the small sea-wind. She wore a Greek sun-dress in very fine cotton, a swirl of tiny pleats, scarlet patterned with silver moons, held by a wide silver band of cloth above her ample breasts, exposing shoulders dark gold with the glare of no English sun. Her large and shapely feet were naked, and her toe-nails painted alternately scarlet and silver. As she advanced, the wind fluttered the pleats. She held up her arms, with a musical chime of catching bracelets. Behind her came James Blackadder, in heavy shoes and a dark parka over dark creased trousers.
“Over there must be Nantucket, and the soft green breast of the New World.”
“Fitzgerald can hardly have been talking about druidesses.”
“But he made the Earthly Paradise a woman.”
“A disappointing one.”
“Of course.”
Maud said, “They must have got together and worked out where we were.”
Roland said, “If they got here, they must have seen Ariane.”
Maud said, “And read the journal. If Leonora wanted to find Ariane, she would have. And I take it Blackadder reads French.”
“They must be pretty mad with us. Tricking them, taking advantage, they’re bound to think.”
“Do you think we should go and confront them? Or be confronted?”
“Do you?”
Maud put out both her hands and he took them.
She said, “I think we should, and I think we can’t. I think we must go. Quickly.”
“Where?”
“Back, probably.”
“Unenchanted?” said Roland.
“Are we enchanted? I suppose we must start thinking again, sometime.”
“Not yet,” he said quickly.
“No, not yet.”
They drove silently back to their hotel. Turning out of its car park, as they came in, was a large black Mercedes. Because its windows were darkened, Maud could not see, as it passed by, whether Cropper had observed her at the wheel, or not. In any case, the Mercedes did not slacken its speed, but vanished, in the direction they had come from.
The hotel proprietress said, “An American gentleman has been asking if you were here. He says he will dine here this evening.”
“We’ve done nothing wrong,” said Roland, in English.
“No one said we had. He wants to buy what we know, or find out if we know any more. He wants the letters. He wants to have the story—”
“I don’t think we can stop him.”
“We can not help him, can’t we? If we leave, now this minute. Do you think he saw Ariane?”
“He might be following Leonora. And Blackadder.”
“They can fight it out. They can find out the end of the story. I feel it’s bad, I feel I—at the moment I feel I—don’t want to know. Later, perhaps.”
“We can go home, now. Pack our bags and go home.”
“We must.”
They had been in Brittany three weeks. They had supposed, when they made their precipitate flight, that they would spend such time as they stole, decorously in the university library at Nantes. Instead, they found themselves, owing to the closure of the library and the absence of Ariane Le Minier, on holiday, on holiday together, and for the second time that summer. They had separate rooms—with the requisite white beds—but there was no doubt that there was a marital or honeymooning aspect to their lingering. Both of them were profoundly confused and very ambivalent about this. Someone like Fergus Wolff would have known how to take advantage of this state of affairs, and would have assumed that it was natural for, indeed incumbent upon, him to take advantage. But Maud would not again willingly have gone anywhere with Fergus. And she had more than willingly set out with Roland. They had run away together, and were sharply aware of the usual connotations of this act. They spoke peacefully, and with a kind of parody of ancient married agreement of “we” or “us.” “Shall we go to Pont-Aven?” one would placidly ask, and the other would answer, “We might try to see the crucifix that was the original of Gauguin’s Christ Jaune.” They did not, however, discuss this use of the pronoun, although both thought about it.
Somewhere in the locked-away letters, Ash had referred to the plot of fate that seemed to hold or drive the dead lovers. Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist p
leasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others. He tried to extend this aperçu. Might there not, he professionally asked himself, be an element of superstitious dread in any self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognises that it has got out of hand? That recognises that connections proliferate apparently at random, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle, which would, of course, being a good postmodernist principle, require the aleatory or the multivalent or the “free,” but structuring, but controlling, but driving, to some—to what?—end. Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. “Falling in love,” characteristically, combs the appearances of the world, and of the particular lover’s history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. Roland was troubled by the idea that the opposite might be true. Finding themselves in a plot, they might suppose it appropriate to behave as though it was that sort of plot. And that would be to compromise some kind of integrity they had set out with.
So they continued to discuss, almost exclusively, the problems of those dead. They sat over buckwheat pancakes in Pont-Aven, and drank cider from cool earthenware pitchers and asked the difficult questions.
What became of the child?
How or why, in what state of ignorance or knowledge, had Blanche been abandoned? How had Ash and LaMotte parted? Did Ash know of the possible child?
The letter returning the letters to Christabel was undated. When had that been sent? Had there been more contact? A long affair, an immediate rupture?
Maud was muted and saddened by the poems Ariane had enclosed. She interpreted the second to mean that the child had been born dead, and the “spilt milk” poem to be an evidence of a terrible guilt, on Christabel’s part, at the fate, whatever it was, of the infant.
“Milk hurts,” Maud said. “A woman with milk who can’t feed a child, is in pain.”
In terms of Christabel, she too discussed the parodying of plots.
“She wrote a lot about Goethe’s Faust round about then. It’s a regular motif, the innocent infanticide, in European literature at that time. Gretchen, Hetty Sorrel, Wordsworth’s Martha in ‘The Thorn.’ Despairing women with dead babies.”
“We don’t know it was dead.”
“I can’t help thinking, if it was not destined to die, why did she run away? She had gone there for sanctuary. Why didn’t she stay where she was safe?”
“She meant no one to know what happened.”
“There’s an ancient taboo on seeing childbirth. Early versions of the Melusina myth have childbirth instead of the bath.”
“Repeating patterns. Again.”
They discussed also the future of the project, that is, of the research, without knowing where to go next. Back to Nantes was an obvious step, and they condoned their lingering on this ground. Maud said Christabel had stayed with friends in London in the early 1860s—she was unaware of the connection with the Vestal Lights. Roland remembered a glancing reference to the Pointe du Raz in Ash—“tristis usque ad mortem,” Ash had said it was—but that was no guarantee he had come there.
Beyond the future of the project, Roland was worried about his own future. He would have been in a panic if he had allowed himself to think, but the dreamy days, the pearly light alternating with the hot blue, and something else, made it possible to leave thinking in abeyance. Things did not look good. He had simply walked out on Blackadder. He had done the same to Val, who was, he considered, unforgiving and dependent in equal proportion—he would have to go back to be berated, and then how could he leave, where would he go, how should he live?
Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture that mistrusted love, “in love,” romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed.
One night they fell asleep, side by side, on Maud’s bed, where they had been sharing a glass of Calvados. He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
They did not speak of this, but silently negotiated another such night. It was important to both of them that the touching should not proceed to any kind of fierceness or deliberate embrace. They felt that in some way this stately peacefulness of unacknowledged contact gave back their sense of their separate lives inside their separate skins. Speech, the kind of speech they knew, would have undone it. On days when the sea-mist closed them in a sudden milk-white cocoon with no perspectives they lay lazily together all day behind heavy white lace curtains on the white bed, not stirring, not speaking.
Neither was quite sure how much, or what, all this meant to the other.
Neither dared ask.
Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his “self” as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion. Nor did he desire to know who Maud essentially was. But he wondered, much of the time, what their mute pleasure in each other might lead to, anything or nothing, would it just go, as it had just come, or would it change, could it change?
He thought of the Princess on her glass hill, of Maud’s faintly contemptuous look at their first meeting. In the real world—that was, for one should not privilege one world above another, in the social world to which they must both return from these white nights and sunny days—there was little real connection between them. Maud was a beautiful woman such as he had no claim to possess. She had a secure job and an international reputation. Moreover, in some dark and outdated English social system of class, which he did not believe in, but felt obscurely working and gripping him, Maud was County, and he was urban lower-middle-class, in some places more, in some places less acceptable than Maud, but in almost all incompatible.
All that was the plot of a Romance. He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously; a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him, as the expectations of Romance control almost everyone in the Western world, for better or worse, at some point or another.
He supposed the Romance must give way to social realism, even if the aesthetic temper of the time was against it.
In any case, since Blackadder and Leonora and Cropper had come, it had changed from Quest, a good romantic form, into Chase and Race, two other equally valid ones.
During his stay he had become addicted to a pale, chilled, slightly sweet pudding called Îles Flottantes, which consisted of a white island of foam floating in a creamy yellow pool of vanilla custard, haunted by the ghost, no more, of sweetness. As he and Maud packed hurriedly, and turned the car towards the Channel, he thought how much he would regret this, how the taste would fade and diminish in his memory.
Blackadder saw the Mercedes when he and Leonora came back to the hotel in the evening. He was feeling strained. Ariane had indeed given Leonora a photocopy of Sabine’s journal, which he had attempted to transl
ate for her, with a fair degree of success. He had been pulled along, initially, by the sheer force of her presence, and her insistence that Roland and Maud had snuck off together to steal a scholarly march on both of them. He had suggested, when they were possessed of the journal, that they should come home and order a good translation and pursue their investigations. Leonora, who had asked Ariane a lot of questions about Roland and Maud, was concerned that they were “on to something” and should be tracked across Finistère. If the weather had been bad Blackadder might yet have insisted on returning to his burrow, the tools of his trade, his typewriter, his telephone. But the temptress sun shone, and he ate a couple of good meals and said that now he was here, he would come to look at Kernemet and its surroundings.
Leonora drove. Her driving had panache and swoop, but was not comfortable. He sat beside her, wondering how he had got talked into all this. Her perfume filled the car, which was a hired Renault. It was a perfume of musk and sandalwood and something sharp that affected Blackadder in contradictory ways. He believed he found it suffocating. Underneath he sensed something else, a promise of darkness, thickness, flesh. He looked down once or twice at Leonora’s naked expanse of shoulders and bound breasts. Her skin, close up, had very fine wrinkles all over its dark gold, wrinkles not of old age but of a mixture of earlier softening and sun-toughening. He found these moving.
“I don’t understand Maud,” Leonora was saying. “I can’t figure out why she dashed off without a word to me, since that letter was mine after all, if property comes into it, which between friends I didn’t think it did, and we were friends, we’d pooled our ideas and written joint papers, all those things. Perhaps your Roland Michell is some kind of macho boss-man. It doesn’t figure.”
“He’s not. He’s not forceful. It’s his major failing.”