by A. S. Byatt
He was therefore not pleased to hear, as he sipped his sweet roseate drink, a voice above him asking if he would mind terribly if he was joined.
He started and gulped. The other swept out a chair.
“I see we had the same idea. Peace and quiet. Coincidence. I like coincidences, don’t you?”
Marcus made an indeterminate gesture with his head. He had managed to recognise the intruder, who was Lucas Simmonds, the Junior Science man at the school. Simmonds must have been rising thirty, though he looked some years younger, clean, fresh, pink, with brown curls and rather large brown eyes. His shoulders, under heathery tweed, were square and his bottom was slightly heavy for his neat torso. His shirt was very clean indeed, his flannels only slightly less so. He smiled a frank smile at Marcus, who looked away.
Marcus attended a general science class given by Simmonds to extend the cultural range of A Level candidates. This course was desultory at best, easily deflected by the brighter boys who liked to confuse Simmonds with awkward questions, which was easy, since he seemed to be a slow thinker, all too ready to give up if his planned proceedings were interrupted. He was, however, curiously immune to teasing, and would simply abandon trying to teach and attempt cheerfully and inadequately to respond to what was said, no matter how absurd. Quite bright boys thought they were scoring off him. Very bright boys believed he was simply not clever enough to see what they were aiming at. Marcus thought the real explanation was at once too simple and too insulting for boys to grasp. Simmonds simply did not care whether they learned anything or not. People should be able to recognise indifference, Marcus considered. He himself respected it. Throughout the general science class he sat quietly amid the uproar, drawing. He drew, on pieces of graph paper, a pattern of spirals moving through concentric diamonds. The point of this exercise was to avoid, yet indicate and deal with, the point at the centre where all the lines converged on infinity. One way of doing this was to draw the lines almost invisibly pale, so that the preformed network of the graph paper supported and restrained their vanishing. Once Simmonds had come up behind him and looked down on the current pattern for some time, nodding and smiling silently. Marcus remembered this. He did not like to be overlooked.
“You’re sure I’m not intruding? What do you recommend? I see you’re having a milk shake. I’m partial to those myself. Waitress – another milk shake – whatever my friend here has got, the pink. And a doughnut. Two doughnuts? No? One doughnut then, but perhaps two milk shakes more, yes. Thanks.”
Marcus had one and a half frothy pink glasses in front of him. They were not things you could bolt.
“Funny we should meet. I came in here quite on the spur of the moment, never been in before in my life, but you were a bit on my mind, so to speak, so I take it as meant, one of those coincidences that are meant. Do you believe in those? Never mind. You were on my mind because you keep cropping up at staff meetings. Not happy in your work, they wonder. Not happy in yourself. Baffled, they seem to be. Wedderburn says you won’t act in his play. Don’t look so worried. Nobody really sees why you should.”
Marcus made a strangled sound.
“No need to look so betwattled. I expect I’m butting in where I’m not wanted. Just thought I might help.”
“Thanks.”
“Not at all.”
“I’m all right, thanks. I just can’t act. If that’s what they’re on about.”
“Oh, but you can. I saw Hamlet, you know.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t like it.”
“I could see you didn’t. Very moving, very unhappy. Oh yes.”
Simmonds took a long pull on his milk shake, puffing one or two minuscule raspberry bubbles into the air as he did so. Marcus, fastidious, wiped one off the back of his left hand. He remembered Ophelia.
All those nights, stripping the wrecked garlands and crumpled white dress from his body, the wrong body, he had been in such trouble, his hands not his hands, the only words in his head her chilly plaints, his hair not his hair, prickling ghoststruck under the mat of long blonde hair he lifted off, nightly. Her breaking song he heard from some lost part of himself crying to get out, to come back in, which? It was like being “spread” only without the sense of thin air and extended space – out of himself, but only to be cabined and confined in strange clothes and clogging skin of greasepaint, rubber breasts and her shroud wound and knotted round his limbs. He had heard singing and screaming and had never known if he had sung or screamed afterwards.
“Alarming thing, acting,” said Simmonds. “Culture excuses all, in modern eyes, but earlier folk knew better. Those old Puritans knew very well you could get taken over, the soma, that is, the physico-chemical body, they knew it could be devil’s work. Dangerous to tinker with consciousness unless you’re very sure what you’re doing. Some people have closed consciousness, of course, come to no harm. Some revel in power over others, exhibitionists and mesmerists and so on. Not you.”
Marcus did not very much understand most of this, although Simmonds’s phrase “taken over” did uncannily express the sense of his Ophelia-experience, which he was determined never to repeat.
“Very struck by your performance, I was,” said Simmonds. “More like a medium than an actor. A vehicle for another consciousness. I’m by way of being a student of consciousness myself – in a scientific way. I think we’re not adventurous enough. I don’t mean all that arty-crafty spiritualism, you must understand, crystal balls and so on, and séances and mumbo-jumbo left over from the garbage of old rites. Equally I don’t mean the pure laboratory stuff where you never get beyond counting coloured pips blindfold on playing cards, or bending the law of averages through a few degrees. No, we ought to start with people who can be seen to have special gifts of consciousness – that might extend the limits of human power. Which is why I’m interested in you, young Potter, very interested indeed.”
“I don’t,” said Marcus. “Lots of people could act Ophelia.”
“I know that. But you have other gifts, have you not? A perfect pitch? A capacity for solving mathematical problems without the usual contortions of ratiocination?”
Marcus stared silently. He never spoke of these things.
“Have I spoken out of turn? You do well to be cautious with such gifts. In the wrong hands they can prove terrible. Like the capacity to let other forces inhabit your body. Powers for good or evil. Maybe I should explain my position.”
One of the uncomfortable properties of this dialogue, heavily weighted as it was to one side, was that it appeared to be arousing contradictory emotions in Simmonds. On the one hand he was extraordinarily cheerful, wreathed in smiles and winks of boyish goodwill. On the other, he was clearly unduly agitated: he was sweating, and kept mopping his brow, pink as the raspberry milk shake, with a crumpled paper napkin. Marcus neither invited nor forbade him to “explain his position”. Indeed, he was incapable of either. So Simmonds went on.
“I’m a religious man, I suppose you might say, in a scientific way. I’m interested in the laws of organisation of the universe. Big organisations, big organisms, planets and galaxies, little organisations, little organisms, Lucas Simmonds, Marcus Potter, mice and microbes. Yes. We don’t begin and end with our bodies. All through history men have had techniques for getting beyond the physico-chemical soma. Good and bad. Prayer and dance, science and sex. Well and ill used. Some people find it easier than others. Now, in the beginning God formed, or informed, do you see – FORM, IN FORM – the inert mass of things. If you are not informed by God, you can be informed by lesser, or worse things, or both.”
“I don’t see.”
“I know. I am telling you.”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“I know. That’s of no importance, old chap, if G. believes in you. I’ve been watching you for some considerable time and it’s my considered opinion that He does. As an inlet for force or form.”
“No.”
“Tell me how you did the mathematics?”
“I can’t do it any more.”
“Since when?”
“Since I – told – someone – how it was done.”
“Aha. You betrayed your vision. The old prophets were punished for that.”
“Listen. It wasn’t a vision. It wasn’t a religious thing. It was a kind of trick.”
“You have no concept of what a religious thing might be. However, be that as it may. Why can’t you do it now?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“You don’t want anything. I’ve been watching you, I know. Have you ever thought, it might be to do with that? A power, a gift, you turned your back on.”
Marcus had not thought that. He had, as has been said, sedulously avoided thought. It was possibly true that his general sense of having no place in the world, no hope, no solidity, as well as the recurrence of odd and disturbing tricks of his constitution, like the “spreading”, might well date from his loss of the maths. Simmonds took on the double appearance of mind-reading mage and interfering maniac.
“Please – as a scientific experiment – try to remember.”
“Look – it was very scary. I’m trying to forget.”
“I won’t hurt you. I only want to know. Not to do anything to you.”
His father had brought a professor of mathematics. Marcus had been put through his tricks. They – father and professor – had been very excited. He began to speak.
“I thought for ages anyone could do it. I thought it was the normal way of seeing. The normal way of seeing a problem, that is. I don’t know how anyone can see what is in anyone else’s head. I don’t know how or why they should try –”
“Don’t get excited. Just tell me. It’s of no importance if I don’t fully understand.”
“It might help.”
Marcus was coming to share Simmonds’s view of himself as someone urgently in need of help.
“Well – I used to see – to imagine – a place. A kind of garden. And the forms, the mathematical forms, were about in the landscape and you would let the problem loose in the landscape and it would wander amongst the forms – leaving luminous trails. And then I saw the answer.”
“Can you tell me what the landscape garden looked like?”
“No, no.”
This was where he had broken down, last time. Under their eyes, greedy and proud. This was the vanishing point where it had all gone, a cone or triangle of black descending, a cone or triangle of black rising, his mind the pressure point at the meeting of these ambivalent solids or planes. He had crashed face down on the table in a dead faint. He had embarrassed his father. He had been put to bed and told to take it easy. After that he had never done it again; had known categorically that he could not do it again.
“When I did try to tell, I fainted. And after that I couldn’t, ever again, I couldn’t …”
“Of course. That is usual, with such gifts. Tell me now. It can do no harm now.”
“You see – it was important to see only obliquely – out of the edge of the eye – in the head – the kind of thing it was, the area it was in, but never to look directly, to look away on purpose, and wait for it to rise to form. When you’d waited, and it was there in its idea, you could draw the figure or even say words to go with it. But it mustn’t be fixed, or held down, or it … It was important to wait and they, the people asking, were pressing on me, how could I be patient, how could I, so I tried to fix, to fix, to fix … and it was no good.”
“I understand. In part. What were the forms like?”
“Forms,” said Marcus, incomprehensibly, as though this was self-evident. “They changed shape. They weren’t exactly solid or not. Plane geometry, and surfaces floating sort of, and things not exactly like trees or flowers. Or you might walk in a field without thickness amongst series after series of planes – all dimensions – shifting. Not real landscape. In the head. But not like other things in the head, like if I try and remember Ramsgate or Robin Hood’s Bay. Bits were landscape—any old field or wood – bits not at all … Oh, I can’t.”
Simmonds frowned, puzzled, put out authoritative hands to clasp Marcus’s wrists and withdrew them abruptly. He murmured, “Fascinating. Fascinating.”
Marcus remembered now those lost and shining fields for which he had not grieved because he had been too afraid to imagine them sufficiently to think of loss. He remembered, not with words, but as a floating shadow, how sensuously delightful the place had been, how clear and clean, how bright, airy and open.
“I think,” Lucas Simmonds was saying, “I think my stab in the dark was right. You do have direct access to the thought forms, the patterns, that inform and control us. What you need, and I can provide, indeed, by a providential coincidence have come here to offer to provide, is the spiritual discipline to make all that safe and evolving. In late years we’ve too much concentrated attention on soma at the expense of psyche. Bodily control, physical control, of ourselves, our world, our universe, we are gaining in large measure. Consider the microscope, telescope, radio-telescope, cyclotron, bevotron. Pitch and frequency, colour and light. Thinking machines a man cannot emulate though he can design. And we, where are we? We have lost what primitive techniques we once had for communicating with the consciousness that Informs us. You are peculiarly gifted. You could – with support, with intelligent experimental planning – develop new techniques. How about it?”
Marcus intensely disliked loud sounds and bright lights. He had not been told, then, that asthmatics can pick up higher frequencies of sound than the average man, but he was to be told, and to believe it. Now for a moment he felt his head suspended on wires, with fine, fine metal rods piercing it painfully through its orifices, crossing and grinding with a cruel music in the skull, extending to infinity. He shook his head to shake away the vision and the long rods moved with it, pressing sharp on the yielding matter and cavities of his mind.
He didn’t want Simmonds. Simmonds would not restore the fair fields.
“Of course you appreciate that it’s hard not to utter gobbledegook, astral bodies, auras and ectoplasms – I don’t mean all that stuff – I mean your ways of taking in the universe, Potter.”
“Sir, I can’t. I want leaving alone.”
“But you told me, and you haven’t blacked out, now.”
“No.”
“You feel better.”
“No. No. No.”
“I think you’ll find it will make sense. I think coincidence will bring us together again. In the meantime, I’ve said my say. I’ll pay your bill, don’t move.” Simmonds stood up. He smiled cheerily. “There are no real accidents, in God’s universe, remember.”
“I don’t believe in God. All this stuff doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Simmonds’s pink face creased in pain and then snapped out again, like expanded elastic, into a smiling blandness.
“When something happens that does make sense of what I’ve said – as I’ve no doubt, no doubt, it will – come to me. That’s all I ask. Remember I’m there. The rest will be taken care of.”
7. Prospero
In March, black and gusty, Matthew Crowe set about to inform and enliven the local community. The Festival was to be his magnum opus. He meant to call into being music and flowers, midnight shout and revelry, dancing tipsy and solemn, a realisation of a Royal Progress, with incidental mock-chivalric tourney and goose fair, besides the staging of Alexander’s Astraea. He moved with unbelievable vigour up and down across North Yorkshire, from cathedral close to fishing village, from officers’ messes to workingmen’s clubs in mining villages, prodigal with ideas, promises and cash. Alexander, when he could be spared, went with him, fascinated by what amounted to a genius for organisation. He himself stood on platforms looking handsome and reserved whilst Crowe spun out his eloquence over local bodies large and small, Mothers’ Unions, Townswomen’s Guilds, Sewing Circles and Garden Groups. There was something in his manner as absolute as that of Lord Beaverbrook requiring women at war
to hurl aluminium, zinc baths and iron railings onto scrap mountains for national munitions, or Savonarola calling the ladies of Florence to repent, save their souls, and cast their false hair and jewels into his bonfire. Crowe worked up his Yorkshire bodies to perform prodigious labours, requiring those same grim energies which, already figments of nostalgia, they had expended on knitting abb wool into comforters or digging for victory. He too required clothes and jewels – any bits of glittering paste or bright or glossy cloth, to be pooled, remade, refurbished to furnish queens and fine ladies. He required skills – real embroidery on kirtles and farthingales which would, he declared, be works of art and museum pieces in their own time. He wanted the country combed for real old English receipts: frumenty, verjuice, boar’s heads, salmagundy. He wanted everyone, this spring, to make the land remember its old sweetness and loveliness, to make the too-much loved earth more lovely with the real old flowers, the sweet-smelling ones, lavender, wallflowers, ladslove, clove gilliflower and matted pink.
He wooed the men too, pursuing the territorial army, the Young Farmers, builders, bakers, Boy Scouts, asking for horses, candy stalls, wagons, palanquins, pavilions. He encouraged the rejuvenation of church monuments, the regilding of rows of dead Elizabethan infants in the Minster, the purchase of bulletproof glass cases to display ancient hidden chalices. He passed through little coastal towns where men had been driven from cottages and villas by the tempests, raging winds and pouring tides of that terrible January and February. He prodded sympathetically at slimy carpets and rotted wallpaper and gave out cash for their renovation. The colours of the Festival of Britain sprouted incongruously, then, amongst the old slate, grey and white: cottage walls, garage doors, imitation American ranch fences were palely bright in sky blue, acid primrose, occasional harsh heliotrope. Later in the year, Crowe told Alexander, he would see to it that mock Tudor houses in suburbs of Calverley and Blesford would be decked with mock Tudor scented hedges and bunting with mock Tudor roses and odds and sods on.