by A. S. Byatt
“The fact that demons are always regarded as the spirits of those who have died recently shows better than anything the influence of mourning on the origin of belief in demons. Mourning has a quite specific psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivors’ memories and hopes from the dead. When this has been achieved, the pain grows less and with it the remorse and self-reproaches and consequently the fear of the demon as well. And the same spirits who to begin with were feared as demons may now expect to meet with friendlier treatment; they are revered as ancestors and appeals are made to them for help.”33
Might we not argue, in extenuation of our desire to behold what is hidden, that those whose disapproval made demons of them to their nearest and dearest, are now our beloved ancestors, whose relics we would cherish in the light of day?
NOVEMBER 27TH 1889
The old woman trod softly along the dark corridors, and climbed the stairs, standing in uncertainty on various landings. From the back—we are going to see her clearly now—from the back and in the shadow, she might still have been any age. She wore a velvet dressing-gown, and soft embroidered slippers. She carried herself upright and without creaking, though her body was comfortably fleshed out. Her hair hung in a long pale plait between her shoulders; in the light of her candle, it could have been palest gold, though it was creamy white, a soft brown turned.
She listened to the house. Her sister Patience was sleeping in the best spare room, and somewhere on the second floor her nephew George, now an aspiring young barrister, slept too.
In his own bedroom, his hands crossed, his eyes closed, Randolph Henry Ash lay still, his soft white hair framed by quilted satin, his head pillowed on embroidered silk.
When she found she could not sleep, she had gone to him, opened his door quietly, quietly, and stood, looking down, taking in the change. Immediately after death, he had looked like himself, gentled and calmed after the struggle, resting. Now he was gone away, there was no one there, only an increasingly carved and bony simulacrum, the yellowing skin stretched taut over peaks of bone, the eyes sunk, the jaw sharp.
She looked at these changes, murmured a prayer into the blanket of silence, and said to the thing on the bed, “Where are you?”
The whole house smelled, as it did every night, of extinguished coal fires, cold grates, old smoke.
She went into her own little writing-room, where her escritoire was covered with letters of condolence, to be answered, and the list of those invited to tomorrow’s funeral, checked. She took her journal out of her drawer, and one or two other papers, looked irresolutely at the heap, and slipped out again, listening to sleep and death.
She went up another flight, towards the top of the house, where Randolph’s workroom was, from which it had been the business of her life to exclude everyone, anyone, even herself. His curtains were open. Light from a gas-lamp came in, and light from a full moon too, swimming silvery. There was the ghost of the smell of his tobacco. Heaps of books on his desk, from before that last illness. The feeling of him working was still in that room. She sat down at his writing-table, putting the candle in front of her, and felt, not better, that was the wrong thought, but less desolate, as though whatever was still present here was less gaunt and terrible than what slept, or lay as still as stone, down there.
She had his watch in her dressing-gown pocket, with the few papers she had brought up. She took it out and looked at it. Three. Three in the last morning he would be in the house.
She looked around at the glass-fronted bookcases, vaguely reflecting multiplied flames back at her. She opened a drawer or two, in the desk, and found sheafs of paper, in his hand, in others’; how was she to judge and decide the fate of all this?
Along one wall was his botanical and zoological collection. Microscopes in their wooden cases, hinged and latched. Slides, drawings, specimens. The Wardian cases containing sealed worlds of plant life, misted with their own breath, the elegantly panelled marine aquarium, with its weeds, its Actinia and starfish, against which M. Manet had painted the poet amongst his ferns, suggesting a world perhaps of primaeval vegetable swamp or foreshore. All this must go. She would consult his friends at the Science Museum as to a suitable home for it. Maybe it should be donated to an appropriate educational institution—a Working Men’s club, a school of some kind. There had been, she remembered, his special airtight specimen box, glass-lined and sealed. She found it where it was kept; he was orderly in his habits. It would be ideal for her purpose.
There was a decision to be made and tomorrow would be too late.
He was a man who had never really had a serious illness, until this last one. And that was long-drawn-out; he had been confined to his bed for the last three months, with both of them knowing what was coming, though not when, nor how fast. They had both, during those months, lived in that one room, his bedroom. She had been close to him at all times, adjusting his air or his pillow, towards the end helping him to feed, reading to him when even the lightest book became too heavy. She thought she could feel his needs and discomforts, without words. The pain too, there was a sense in which she had shared the pain. She had sat quietly beside him, holding the papery white hand, and felt his life ebb, day by day. Not his intelligence. At the beginning there had been a feverish piece of time in which, for some reason, he had become obsessed by the poems of John Donne, had recited them to the ceiling, in a voice both resonant and beautiful, puffing away the fronds of beard from his mouth. When he couldn’t find a line he called, “Ellen, Ellen, quickly, I am lost,” and she had had to riffle and seek.
“What would I do without you, my dear? Here we are at the end, close together. You are a great comfort. We have been happy.”
“We have been happy,” she would say, and it was so. They were happy even then, in the way they had always been happy, sitting close, saying little, looking at the same things, together.
She would come into the room and hear the voice:
“Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.”
He carried out his dying in style. She watched him working it out, fighting the pain, the nausea, the fear, in order to have something to say to her that she would remember later, with warmth, with honour. Some of the things he said were said as endings. “I see why Swammerdam longed for the quiet dark.” Or, “I tried to write justly, to see what I could from where I was.” Or, for her, “Forty-one years with no anger. I do not think that many husbands and wives can say as much.”
She wrote these things down, not for what they were, though they were good things to say, but because they reminded her of his face turned towards hers, the intelligent eyes under the damp creased brow, the frail grip of the once-strong fingers. “Do you remember—dear—when you sat—like a water-nixie on that stone—on that stone in the weeds at the—the name’s gone—don’t tell me—the poet’s fountain—the fountain—the Fontaine de Vaucluse. You sat in the sun.”
“I was afraid. It was all rushing.”
“You did not look—afraid.”
Most of what they shared, after all, after all was done, was silence.
“It was all a question of silence,” she said aloud to him, in his workroom, where she could no longer expect any answer, neither anger nor understanding.
She laid out the objects involved in her decision. A packet of letters, tied with faded violet ribbons. A bracelet of hair she had worked, from his hair and her own, over those last months, which now she meant to bury with him. His watch. An unfinished letter, undated, in his own hand, which she had earlier found in his desk. A letter to herself, in a spidery hand.
A sealed envelope.
Trembling slightly, she took up the letter to herself, which had come a month ago.
Dear Mrs Ash,
I believe my name will not be strange to you—that you know something of me—I cannot imagine you cannot—tho
ugh if by chance my letter is an absolute surprise I ask your pardon. I ask your pardon, however things may be, for intruding on you at this time.
I am told Mr Ash is ill. Indeed the papers report so, and make no concealment of the gravity of his state. I am reliably told that he may not live long, though of course I ask your pardon again if I am in error, as I may be, as I must hope to be.
I have writ down some things I find I wish, after all, that he should know. I am in a state of considerable doubt as to the wisdom of putting myself forward at this time—do I write for my own absolution or for him—I cannot know. I am in your hands, in this matter. I must trust to your judgment, your generosity, your goodwill.
We are two old women now, and my fires at least are out and have long been out.
I know nothing of you, for the best of reasons, that nothing has been said to me, at any time.
I have writ down, for his eyes only, some things—I find I cannot say, what things—and have sealed the letter. If you wish to read it, it is in your hands, though I must hope, if it can be, that he will read the letter, and decide.
And if he cannot or will not read it … oh, Mrs Ash, I am in your hands again, do with my hostage as you see fit, and have the right.
I have done great harm though I meant none to you, as God is my witness, and I hope I have done none—to you that is, or nothing irretrievable.
I find I shall be grateful for a Line from you—of forgiveness—of pity—of anger, if you must—will you—go so far?
I live in a Turret like an old Witch, and make verses nobody wants.
If in the goodness of your heart, you would tell me what becomes of him—I shall praise God for you.
I am in your hands.
Yours
Christabel LaMotte
So for the last month of his life she had carried these two letters, hers and that sealed one, in her pocket, like a knife. In and out of his room, in and out of their time together.
She brought him posies she had arranged. Winter jasmine, Christmas roses, hothouse violets.
“Helleborus niger. Why are green petals so mysterious—Ellen? Do you remember—when we read Goethe—metamorphoses of plants—all is one—leaves—petals—”
“That was the year you wrote about Lazarus.”
“Ah, Lazarus. Etiam si mortuus fuerit … Do you think—in your heart of hearts—we continue—after?”
She bowed her head and looked for the truth.
“We are promised—men are so wonderful, so singular—we cannot be lost—for nothing. I don’t know, Randolph, I don’t know.”
“If there is nothing—I shall not—feel the cold. But put me in the open air, my dear—I don’t want—to be shut in the Abbey. Out in the earth, in the air. Yes?
“Don’t cry, Ellen. It cannot be helped. I am not sorry. I have not—done nothing, you know. I have lived—”
Outside his bedroom, she wrote letters in her head:
“I cannot give him your letter, he is calm and almost happy, how can I disturb his peace of mind at this time?”
“You must understand that I have always known of your— How to find a word? Relationship, liaison, love?”
“You must understand that my husband told me, long ago, freely and truthfully, of his feeling for you, and that the matter, having been understood between us, was set aside as something past and understood.”
Too much repetition of “understood.” But better.
“I am grateful to you for your assurance that you know nothing of me. I might reciprocate truthfully by saying that I know nothing essential of you—only a few bare necessary facts—and that my husband loved you, that he said he loved you.”
One old woman to another. Who described herself as a Witch in a Turret.
“How can you ask this of me, how can you break up this short time I have with him, the life we have, of small kindnesses and unspoken ties, how can you menace my last days, for they are mine too, he is my happiness, which I am about to lose forever, can you not understand that, I cannot give him your letter.”
She wrote down nothing.
She sat beside him, weaving their hair together, pinning it to a band of black silk. At her throat, the brooch he had sent from Whitby, the white roses of York carved in black jet. The white, or whitish, hairs, on the dark ground.
“A bracelet of bright hair—about the bone. When my grave is broken up again—ha, Ellen? Always—that poem—thought of that poem—as ours, yours and mine—yes.”
It was one of his bad days. He had moments of clarity, and then he could be seen to wander, his mind wandering—where?
“Odd thing—sleep. You go—all over. Fields. Gardens. Other worlds. You can be—in another state—in sleep.”
“Yes, dear. We don’t know much about our lives, really. About what we know.”
“Summer fields—just in a—twinkling of an eyelid—I saw her. I should have—looked after her. How could I? I could only—hurt her—
“What are you doing?”
“Making a bracelet. Out of our hair.”
“In my watch. Her hair. Tell her.”
“Tell her what?”
“I forget.”
His eyes closed.
The hair was in the watch. A very long, very fine, plaited chain of very pale gold hair. She had it on the desk before her. It was tied with pale-blue cotton, neatly.
“You must understand that I have always known, that my husband told me, long ago, freely and truthfully, of his feelings for you.…”
And if she did write that, it would be no more and no less than the truth, but it would not ring true, it would not convey the truth of the way it had been, of the silence in the telling, the silences that extended before and after it, always the silences.
They had sat by the library fire, in the autumn of 1859. There had been chrysanthemums on the table, and coppery beech leaves and some strangely changing bracken, fawn and crimson and gold. And that had been the time of his glass vivariums, the time of the silkworms, which had to be kept warm, and so were in this warmest room, drab little buff moths, and their fat rough little cocoons on bare twigs, his study of metamorphosis. She was copying out Swammerdam and he was walking to and fro, watching her work, thinking.
“Stop writing for a moment, Ellen. I have something I must tell you.”
She remembered the rush of her own feelings. Like silk in the throat, like nails in her veins, the desire not to be told, not to hear.
“You need not—”
“I must. We have always been truthful with each other, whatever else, Ellen. You are my dear, dear wife, and I love you.”
“But,” she said. “Such sayings always lead on to but.”
“For the last year perhaps I have been in love with another woman. I could say it was a sort of madness. A possession, as by daemons. A kind of blinding. At first it was only letters—and then—in Yorkshire—I was not alone.”
“I know.”
There had been a silence.
She repeated, “I know.”
He said, “How long?” his proud crest fallen.
“Not so long. Nor through anything you did or said, that I saw. I was told. I had a visitor. I have something to restore to you.”
She had hidden the first Swammerdam in her swing-table, and now brought it out, in its envelope, addressed to Miss LaMotte, Bethany, Mount Ararat Road, Richmond.
She told him, “The passage about the Mundane Egg in this version is superior, I think, to what we have here.”
More silence.
“If I had not told you—about this—about Miss LaMotte—would you have restored this to me?”
“I don’t know. I think not. How could I? But you have told me.”
“Miss Glover gave you this?”
“She wrote twice, and came here.”
“She said nothing hurtful to you, Ellen?”
The poor mad white-faced woman, in her neat, worn boots, pacing and pacing, in all those skirts they had all worn then,
clasping and unclasping her little dove-grey hands. Behind her steel-framed glasses she had had very bright blue eyes, glassy blue. And the reddish hair, and a few orange patches of freckling on the chalky skin.
“We were so happy, Mrs Ash, we were all in all to each other, we were innocent.”
“I can do nothing about your happiness.”
“Your own happiness is ruined, is a lie, I am telling you.”
“Please leave my house.”
“You could help me if you chose.”
“Please leave my house.”
“She said very little. She was venomous and distraught. I asked her to go away. She gave me the poem—as evidence—and asked for it back. I told her she should be ashamed to steal.”
“I do not know what to say, Ellen. I do not expect to see her—Miss LaMotte again. We were agreed that—that this one summer must see the end—of—the end. And even if that were not so—she has vanished, she has gone away—”
She had heard the pain in that, had noted it, had said nothing.
“I cannot explain, Ellen, but I can tell you—”
“No more. No more. We will not speak of it again.”
“You must be angry—distressed—”
“I don’t know. Not angry. I don’t want to know any more. Let us not talk of it again. Randolph—it is not between us.”
Had she done well, or ill? She had done what was in her nature, which was profoundly implicated in not knowing, in silence, in avoidance, she said to herself, in harsher moments.