by A. S. Byatt
She had never read his letters. She had never, that is, gone through his papers out of curiosity, idle or directed, she had never even sorted or pigeon-holed. She had answered letters for him, letters from readers, admirers, translators, loving women who had never met him.
One day, during that last month, she went upstairs, her two letters, open and unopened, in her pocket, and looked through his desk. This filled her with a superstitious bodily fear. His workroom had a cold light, in the daytime, because of a skylight, which now at night showed a few stars and a running smoky cloud, but on that day had been clear blue and blank.
So many scraps of poetry. So many heaps of ends of leaves of paper. She pushed away the thought that she would be responsible for all this. She was not, now. Not yet.
When she found the unfinished letter, it was as though she had been guided to it. It was tucked away, at the back of a drawer full of bills and invitations, and should have taken hours to find and not the few minutes in fact needed.
My dear,
I write each year, round about All Souls, because I must, although I know—I was about to say, although I know that you will not answer, although I know no such thing with certainty; I must hope; you may remember, or forget, it is all one, enough to feel able to write to me, to enlighten me a little, to take away some of the black weight I labour under.
I ask your forgiveness freely for some things, of which I stand accused, both by your silence, your obdurate silence, and by my own conscience. I ask forgiveness for my rashness and precipitance in hurrying to Kernemet, on the suppositious chance that you might be there, and without ascertaining whether or not I had your permission to go there. I ask your forgiveness, above all, for the degree of duplicity with which, on my return, I insinuated myself into the confidence of Mrs Lees, and so disastrously surprised you. You have punished me since, as you must know, I am punished daily.
But have you sufficiently considered the state of mind which drove me to these actions? I feel I stand accused, also, by your actions, of having loved you at all, as though my love was an act of brutal forcing, as though I were a heartless ravisher out of some trumpery Romance, from whom you had to flee, despoiled and ruined. Yet if you examine your memories truthfully—if you can be truthful—you must know that it was not so—think over what we did together and ask, where was the cruelty, where the coercion, where, Christabel, the lack of love and respect for you, alike as woman and as intellectual being? That we could not honourably continue as lovers after that summer was, I think, agreed by both—but was this a reason for a sudden pulling down of a dark blanket, nay, a curtain of sheet steel, between one day and the next? I loved you entirely then; I will not say now, I love you, for that would indeed be romance, and a matter at best of hope—we are both psychologists of no mean order—love goes out, you know, like a candle in one of Humphry Davy’s jars, if not fed with air to breathe, if deliberately starved and stifled. Yet
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life, thou might’st him yet recover.
And perhaps I say that only for the pleasure of the aptness in quoting. That would have made you smile. Ah, Christabel, Christabel, I force out these careful sentences, asking for your consideration, and remember that we heard each other’s thoughts, so quick, so quick, that there was no need of ending speeches—
There is something I must know and you know what that is. I say “I must know” and sound peremptory. But I am in your hands and must beg you to tell me. What became of my child? Did he live? How can I ask, not knowing? How can I not ask, not knowing? I spoke at length to your cousin Sabine who told me what all at Kernemet knew—which was the fact only—no certainty of outcome—
You must know I went there, to Brittany, in love, and care, and anxiety, for you, for your health—I went eager to care for you, to make all well as far as could be—Why did you turn away from me? Out of pride, out of fear, out of independence, out of sudden hatred, at the injustice of the different fates of men and women?
Yet a man who knows he has or had a child and does not know more deserves a little pity.
How can I say this? Whatever became of that child, I say in advance, whatever it is, I shall understand, if I may only know, the worst is already imagined and put behind me—so to speak—
You see, I cannot write it, so I cannot post you these letters, I end by writing others, less direct, more glancing, which you do not answer, my dear demon, my tormentor … I am prohibited.
How can I ever forget that terrible sentence cried out at the ghastly spirit-summoning.
“You have made a murderess of me,” was said, blaming me, and cannot be unsaid; I hear it daily.
“There is no child” came through that silly woman’s mouth, in a great groan, in what mixture of cunning, involuntary exclamation, genuine telepathy, how can I tell? I tell you, Christabel—you who will never read this letter, like so many others, for it has passed the limit of possible communication—I tell you, what with disgust, and terror, and responsibility, and the coiling vestiges of love gripping my heart, I was like to have made a murderer of myself in good earnest—
She took this letter gingerly by its corner, now, as though it were a stunned biting creature, wasp or scorpion. She made a little fire in Randolph’s attic gate, and burned the letter, turning it with the poker until it was black flakes. She took the sealed letter and turned it over, thinking of adding it, but allowed the flames to die down. She was quite sure that neither he nor she would have wanted his own letter to persist; nor would Christabel LaMotte, with its implicit accusations—of what? Better not to think.
She made a little fire, for warmth, with wood and a few coals, and huddled over it in her nightgown, waiting for the light to catch and the warmth to rise.
My life, she thought, has been built round a lie, a house to hold a lie.
She had always believed, stolidly, doggedly, that her avoidances, her approximations, her whole charade as she at times saw it, were, if not justified, at least held in check, neutralised, by her rigorous requirement that she be truthful with herself.
Randolph had been complicit. She had no idea how the story of their lives looked to him. It was not a matter they discussed.
But if she did not know, and occasionally look at, the truth, she had a sense that she was standing on shifting shale, sliding down into some pit.
She thought of her sense of the unspoken truths of things in terms of a most beautiful passage from Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which she had read out one evening to Randolph, who had been excited by the passage immediately preceding it, about the Plutonian theory of the formation of rocks.
She had written it down.
It is the total distinctness, therefore, of crystalline formations, such as granite, hornblende-schist, and the rest, from every substance of which the origin is familiar to us, that constitutes their claim to be regarded as the effects of causes now in action in the subterranean regions. They belong not to an order which has passed away; they are not the monuments of a primeval period, bearing inscribed upon them in obsolete characters the words and phrases of a dead language; but they teach us that part of the living language of nature, which we cannot learn by our daily intercourse with what passes on the habitable surface.
Ellen liked the idea of these hard, crystalline things, which were formed in intense heat beneath the “habitable surface” of the earth, and were not primeval monuments but “part of the living language of nature.”
I am no ordinary or hysterical self-deceiver, she more or less said to herself. I keep faith with the fire and the crystals, I do not pretend the habitable surface is all and so I am not a destroyer nor cast into outer darkness.
A few flames made their sinuous way upwards. She remembered her honeymoon, as she did, from time to time, and deliberately.
She did not remember it in words. There were no words attached to it, that was part of the horror. She had never spoken of it to anyone,
not even to Randolph, precisely not to Randolph.
She remembered it in images. A window, in the south, all hung about with vines and creepers, with the hot summer sun fading.
The nightdress embroidered for these nights, white cambric, all spattered with lovers’ knots and forget-me-nots and roses, white on white.
A thin white animal, herself, trembling.
A complex thing, the naked male, curly hairs and shining wet, at once bovine and dolphin-like, its scent feral and overwhelming.
A large hand, held out in kindness, not once, but many times, slapped away, pushed away, slapped away.
A running creature, crouching and cowering in the corner of the room, its teeth chattering, its veins clamped in spasms, its breath shallow and fluttering. Herself.
A respite, generously agreed, glasses of golden wine, a few days of Edenic picnics, a laughing woman perched on a rock in pale blue poplin skirts, a handsome man in his whiskers, lifting her, quoting Petrarch.
An attempt. A hand not pushed away. Tendons like steel, teeth in pain, clenched, clenched.
The approach, the locked gateway, the panic, the whimpering flight.
Not once, but over and over and over.
When did he begin to know that however gentle he was, however patient, it was no good, it would never be any good?
She did not like to remember his face in those days, but did, for truthfulness, the puzzled brow, the questioning tender look, the largeness of it, convicted of its brutality, rejected in its closeness.
The eagerness, the terrible love, with which she had made it up to him, his abstinence, making him a thousand small comforts, cakes and tidbits. She became his slave. Quivering at every word. He had accepted her love.
She had loved him for it.
He had loved her.
She turned over Christabel’s letter.
She howled. “What shall I be without you?” She put her hand over her mouth. If they came, her time to reflect was gone or lost. She had lied to them too, to her sisters, implied a lie in her bashful assertions that they were supremely happy, that they had simply had no good fortune with children.…
That other woman was in one sense his true wife. Mother, at least briefly, of his child, it seemed.
She found she did not want to know what was in the letter. That, too, was better simply avoided. Not known, not spoken about, not an instrument of useless torture, as it would be if seen, whether its contents were good or bad.
She took the black japanned specimen box, with its oiled silk pocket in its glass lining, and put the letter in it. She added the hair bracelet—here, in white age, they were intertwined—and curled the long, thick thread—it was no more—of the blonde plait from his watch, inside the bracelet. She put in the tied bundles of their love-letters.
A young girl of twenty-four should not be made to wait for marriage until she is thirty-six and her flowering long over.
She remembered from the days of the Close, seeing herself once, naked, in a cheval glass. She must have been barely eighteen. Little high breasts, with warm brown circles. A skin like live ivory and long hair like silk. A princess.
Dearest Ellen,
I cannot get out of my mind—as indeed, how should I wish to, whose most ardent desire is to be possessed entirely by the pure thought of you—I cannot get out of my mind the entire picture of you, sitting in your white dress among the rosy teacups, with all the garden flowers, the hollyhocks, the delphiniums, the larkspur, burning crimson and blue and royal purple behind you, and only emphasising your lovely whiteness. And you smiled at me so kindly today, under your white hat with its palest pink ribbons. I remember every bunch of little bows, I remember every gentle ruffle, indeed it is a shame I am not a painter, but only an aspiring poet, or you should see how I treasure every smallest detail.
As I shall treasure—until death, theirs alas, and not mine, not for centuries yet, for I need a very long lifetime to love and cherish you, and must spend another such lifetime, alas proleptically, waiting for the right to do so—I shall treasure, I say, those flowers you gave me, which are before me as I write, in a very fine blue glass vase. I love the white roses most—they are not open yet—I have decades of their time, days at least of my own longer and most impatient duration in which to enjoy them. They are not a simple colour, you know, although they look it. They contain snow, and cream, and ivory, all quite distinct. Also at their heart they are still green—with newness, with hope, with that fine cool vegetable blood which will flush a little, when they open. (Did you know that the old painters gave an ivory glow to a rich skin by painting on a green base—it is a paradox of optics, strange and delightful.)
I lift them to my face and admire them. They are mildly fragrant, with a promise of richness. I push my enquiring nose in amongst them—not to hurt or derange their beautiful scrolling—I can be patient—each day they will unfold a little—one day I will bury my face in their white warmth—Did you ever play that childhood game with the huge opium poppy buds—we did—we would fold back the calyx and the tightly packed silk skirts, one by one—all crumpled—and so the poor flaunting scarlet thing would droop and die—such prying is best left to Nature and her hot sun, which opens them soon enough.
I have composed over 70 lines today, mindful of your injunctions to be busy, and avoid distraction. I am writing about the pyre of Balder—and his wife, Nanna’s grief for him—and Hermodur’s brave and fruitless journey to the Underworld to have him released by the goddess Hel—it is all most violently interesting, dear Ellen, an account of the human mind imagining and inventing a human story to account for the great and beautiful and terrible limiting facts of—existence—the rising and vanishing of the golden Sun, the coming of blossom (Nanna) in the Spring—her shrivelling in the Winter—the recalcitrance of dark (the goddess Thöck who refused to mourn for Balder, who was no use to her, she said, living or dead). And is not this the subject for great modern poetry as much as for the mythy speculations of our forefathers?
But I would rather be sitting in a certain garden—in a certain Close—among green and white roses—with a certain—decidedly a certain—young lady in white with a grave brow and a sudden sunny smile—
Ellen read no more. They could go with him. And wait for her.
She thought of putting the jet brooch he had sent from Whitby into the box, but decided against it. She would wear it at her throat, when they drove out to Hodershall.
She put more coal and more pieces of wood on the fire, and made a brave little blaze, by the side of which she sat down to manufacture the carefully edited, the carefully strained (the metaphor was one of jelly-making) truth of her journal. She would decide later what to do with that. It was both a defence against, and a bait for, the gathering of ghouls and vultures.
And why were the letters so carefully put up then, in their sealed enclosure? Could she read them, where she was going, could he? This last house was no house, why not leave them open to the things that tunnelled in the clay, the mites and blind worms, things that chewed with invisible mouths, and cleansed and annihilated?
I want them to have a sort of duration, she said to herself. A demi-eternity.
And if the ghouls dig them up again?
Then justice will perhaps be done to her when I am not here to see it.
She thought, one day, not now, not yet, I will put pen to paper and write to her, and tell her, tell her, what?
Tell her he died peacefully.
Tell her?
And the crystalline forms, the granite, the hornblende-schist, shone darkly with the idea that she would not write, that the Protean letter would form and re-form, in her head, that it might become too late, too late for decency, absolutely too late. The other woman might die, she herself might die, they were both old and progressing towards it.
In the morning she would pull on her black gloves, and pick up the black box, and a spray of those white scentless hothouse roses that were all over the house, and set out on his la
st blind journey.
I am in your hands.
22Recorded by Swinburne in a letter to Theodore Watts-Dunton. A. C. Swinburne, Collected Letters, Vol. V, p. 280. Swinburne’s poem, “The Old Ygdrasil and the Churchyard Yew,” is supposed to have been inspired by his emotions on the passing of R. H. Ash.
23Reported in The Times, November 30th 1889. The reporter remarked “several comely young maidens, in floods of unembarrassed tears and a large gathering of respectful working men, beside the Literary Lions.”
24Ellen Ash, in a letter to Edith Wharton, December 20th 1889, reprinted in The Letters of R. H. Ash ed. Cropper, vol. 8, p. 384. A similar expression of her intention occurs in an unpublished passage of her Journal, written two nights after the poet’s death. The Journal is shortly (1967) to appear, edited by Dr Beatrice Nest, of Prince Albert College, London University.
25I have spent long hours walking in this countryside, and have observed the way the earth characteristically lies in layers, and throws up the dark flints embedded in the white chalk, which shine in the ploughed fields like snow.
26This Shakespeare, and those violets, repose now in the Stant Collection in Robert Dale Owen University, where they are preserved.
27 See, for instance, the letter to Tennyson, in the Stant Collection (August 24th 1859), which is wholly bordered by a series of such formalised trees, the roots and branches intermingling, not unlike a William Morris repeating pattern. Stant MS no 146093a.
28The Latin is Ille hic est Raphael timuit quo sospite vinci rerum magna parens et moriente mori.
29John Donne, “Death Be Not Proud,” Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner, p. 9.
30An irritable comment of F. R. Leavis in Scrutiny, vol. XIII, pp. 130–31: “That the Victorians took Randolph Ash seriously as a poet is sufficiently evinced by the seriousness of their obituary panegyrics, which claimed, like his bathetic tombstone, supplied by his wife, that he was the equal of Shakespeare, Milton, Rembrandt, Raphael and Racine.”