by A. S. Byatt
“Daddy, please don’t start. Please don’t. I do mean what I say. It is my life. Please don’t.”
“Your life. And what the hell do you think that will be, married to the curate? Chat and hassocks and Brownies and Mothers and Fayres. You’re totally unfitted for that sort of non-existence. Like a race-horse in a milk-float. You’ll go crazy in a week if you aren’t, as I said, already. And he must be mad, or totally without imagination, to expect it of you. Not that he looks as though imagination’s his strong point.”
“Daddy –”
“And then there’s his faith, such as it is, in these latter days. I take it you don’t share that, you haven’t gone as far as that –”
“No, but –”
“No but?”
“His work, his work is good, I respect his work.”
“It isn’t your work, you fool, it doesn’t require your gifts, and it does require things you haven’t got. The man can’t have thought at all. His Vicar’ll never permit it. My God, Stephanie, you aren’t going to tell me you can honestly want to go and join an institution with St Paul’s views on women, and views, no doubt, about breeding and the sanctity of recurrent parturition. You’ll become a cow. A cow and a slave and a tweedy tea-pourer. You can’t.”
“I wish you would stop it. You are making a thing of Daniel. You have no right to do that.”
Bill turned histrionically to Alexander.
“I am at fault. I am at fault, I must be. I have failed somewhere. All my children lack guts, they lack real guts and persistence. They creep and sidle away from the real challenges. My son is a moony fool, and my daughter wants to marry a lie and a totem and bury her one talent –”
“You are at fault,” said Frederica. “You are at fault because you do what you’re doing now. You make it impossible for us to do what you want us to do because you make it seem totally repulsive by the way you go on. I should think she’s marrying the curate just to spite you, just to shut up your voice grinding on and on so sure what’s right and good …”
“Frederica be quiet,” said Winifred. “And Bill. Be quiet. You are doing irreparable damage.”
“I’m trying to stop irreparable damage, you lunatic. Do you want the girl to marry a fat curate?”
“No. I don’t. But I don’t think it matters, what we want. It’s her decision, and I shall stand by her.”
“You’ll get no thanks. She’s intent on flouting us.”
“No,” said Stephanie chilly. “Whatever you – and Frederica – think – it’s nothing to do with you. I love Daniel. It wasn’t an easy thing. And you are making it all much worse. But you won’t change anything. So please, don’t go on.”
Bill gathered up a tall pile of books topped by an ashtray and flung them at her. She bent sideways. The books landed, fluttering and thudding, around her: the ashtray hit a small lamp, which exploded, scattering glass and a smell of burning. Stephanie picked up two books. Her hands were shaking. Alexander saw that there was a crusty thin line of foam at Bill’s mouth-corners. He averted his eyes and said, “I think you shouldn’t say any more. And I feel it isn’t right for me to be here. And Stephanie is very distressed.”
“Very distressed,” said Bill. “Very distressed. And so she should be and so am I. Very distressed. All right. I won’t say any more. I shan’t mention this topic again, ever. You may do what you like, of course, but whatever it is, I want no part in it, so you will kindly not bother me with it ever again.”
He glared round the room, nodded curtly at Alexander, and slammed himself out. Winifred, her face expressionless, went after him.
“I told you it would be awful,” said Frederica.
“You didn’t help,” said Stephanie.
“I tried,” said Frederica.
“Hardly,” said Alexander.
Stephanie had wrapped her arms round herself and was shivering. Alexander went over to her.
“Are you all right?”
“Probably. I feel sick.”
“You shouldn’t try so hard to be reasonable.”
“We were brought up to be reasonable.”
“Hardly,” said Alexander.
“Oh yes we were. To believe in reason and humanity and personal relations and tolerance. You can reinforce any precept with any technique. I shall never feel the same for him after this.”
Her voice was thin and small. Alexander had a nasty moment’s doubt as to whether it was Bill or Daniel she would never feel the same for. Frederica declared robustly, “He’ll come round. He does.”
“And if he does I shall have been through all this for nothing. I shall be expected to pretend it doesn’t really matter. That’s what he does to us, what he always does, so we are in the wrong to mind what he says, because he explains he didn’t exactly mean it. So you become guilty of letting ugly words go sour in your head because they’ve been unsaid.”
“You can’t afford to mind what’s absurd.”
“No.” Very coldly.
“Stephanie – go and talk to Daniel. Now. As soon as you can.”
“Daniel? I can’t tell him about this. That would be terrible. I can’t …”
“It’s his business,” said Alexander, gently. Stephanie began to cry in great panicky gulps.
“I can’t remember him. I can’t remember him properly. It’s not as though I hadn’t had my own – debates with myself – about those things – the Church –”
“But Daniel’s there,” said Alexander, “and real.” He put his arms round her and she smelled the fragrance of Old Spice. She could not say that his own unreality, in that sense, and his presence now, exacerbated her uncertainties. She clung to him and wept and he stroked her hair, over and over.
Frederica sat unremarked on the sofa. She felt shaken and invigorated. Their lives had been punctuated by such gales of rage. This was by no means the first broken lamp. They lived by a myth of normality, an image of closed family safeties and certainties. But there were rips and interstices through which the cold blasts howled, had always howled and would howl. That had its exhilarating aspect. Howls, grimaces, naked unreason were not, as the Potter ethic and aesthetic said, temporary aberrations. They were the stuff of things. If you knew they were there you could act, truly. She uncurled, patted Stephanie, who winced, on the shoulder, and went out.
“The trouble is,” said Stephanie, “I feel unfit to live.”
“Nonsense.”
“No, truly. He makes me feel like that. I don’t think it’s a sensible thing to feel, I just do.”
“You placate him like Jehovah. That’s no good.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No, because it makes it worse. For him, too.”
“I should be dead. I want not to be.”
“You want to marry Daniel Orton.”
Having said this, he kissed her, drily and gently, on the mouth. She dropped her head on his shoulder, and so they sat, for some time. She could not remember Daniel, it was true.
21. The Traveller in Dolls
Frederica offered her gifts, with a flourish and an apology, to Stephanie. Stephanie thanked her, and said she really need not have bothered. Stephanie was clever enough, Frederica considered, to know how hurtful such remarks about not bothering can be. She tried to make allowances for stress, but thought Stephanie should have recognised that she was under considerable strain herself.
She was suffering from a generalised wrath, inspired by a kind of illicit sex-film, blurry and full of hiatuses, which ran constantly in her head and elsewhere. Daniel, however fat, had become monstrously interesting: willy-nilly Frederica’s imagination lifted the clerical shirt and rolled down the clerical trousers, measured the weight of the mountain belly or fleetingly saw the gleeful prancing of Stephanie’s soft white and his craggy and hirsute black. She exposed herself to the air, which was not penetrating but encased her in claustrophobic heat. She snarled at everyone, postured and boasted, and elicited a response only from the mirror. Winifred suggested that she
go for a good long walk and get some fresh air. This released Frederica like a spring: she took the bus to Calverley, from where she intended to take a further bus onto the North Yorkshire Moors, and tramp.
Behind Calverley Minster, in which she wandered for a rapid fifteen minutes, was the bus yard. Frederica mounted a brown bus that was going to Goathland and Whitby, and settled back against the window, hoping vaguely for the sense of disembodiment a good journey can confer. A man came and sat beside her. She ritually rose, subsided, indicating concession of space, drawing in her skirt. Her neighbour immediately swelled to fill the space. The bus drew away, out of Calverley. She glanced quickly at the man. He wore a hairy, reddish-brown suit, inside which he was very solid. The square hand on the knee next to her wore a gold signet ring. She looked out of the window.
Outside Calverley, the bus began to climb. Frederica, loosed from grumble and heat, began to think. She thought about Racine. They were doing Phèdre for A Level. Miss Plaskett, the French teacher, set them to write endless character analyses: they had done Phèdre, Hippolyte, Aricie, Oenone but not yet Thésée. A Level took that form. Somehow what they were doing made Racine seem exactly like Shakespeare and Shakespeare exactly like Shaw – last term she had done Joan, Dunois, Cauchon, de Stogumber in exactly the same way. One was required to discuss the function of the characters in the plot, and on top of that, like cream on a trifle, what extra individuality they had, what intrinsic nature, unique and separate. The other thing they did, which made Shakespeare like Racine, but not like Shaw (who was indeed rather recalcitrant to the good, professional A Level candidate), was trace recurrent images. Blood and babies in Macbeth, blood and light and dark in Phèdre. This made both Shakespeare and Racine seem very like Alexander Wedderburn. (Shaw was more difficult. If you did not repeat his own polemical points you had almost nothing left to say. If you were any good, it was most unsatisfactory, repeating someone else’s, even the author’s, remarks about what his play was about. He had made that kind of commentary redundant. There must be some other kind, but she was damned if she knew what it was.)
Whereas what struck one, meeting Shakespeare and Racine, was the difference, in the whole frame of the work. There ought to be a way of describing the difference. Compare and contrast Phèdre and Cleopatra as portrayals of passionate women. No, no. It was not really to do with the unities either, which felt like a red herring.
It was to do with the Alexandrine. You had to think differently, the actual form of your thought was different, if you thought in closed couplets, further divided by a rocking caesura, and if you thought in French, in a limited vocabulary.
Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée.
C’est Vénus toute eutière à sa proie attachée.
Four segments of a proposition, balanced, balanced, even in this most extreme statement, and think of the effect of emphasising cachée and attachée by the rhyme. Did one see Venus toute entière? She had without thinking always seen a formless crouching thing, dropped from a branch, claws extended, involved in the struggling body like Stubbs’s lion and horse. The outer ripping up the inner. But the verse form separated the clutcher from the clutched whilst linking them inexorably. Something like that. Now if one wrote, Frederica thought, on the thought processes of the Alexandrine – one might get somewhere – see how argued comparatively the images were, not fluent as in Shakespeare. She grinned a grin of pure pleasure, sitting staring out at what was by now a distinctly moorland landscape, the road bordered by uneven banks and expanses of wiry grass and trembling cotton grass, the earth humping and folding and cracking away to the horizon in granite and heather and bracken plots.
The man next to her encroached. It was usually true that the person on her own side took up an unfair proportion of the seat. This man’s large bottom was warm on hers. His forearm overlapped her space. When the bus swung round a corner he put out a hand, clasped her knee, righted himself, and said,
“Sorry. Bit unsteady.”
“Not at all.”
“Going far?”
“Goathland.”
“You live there?”
“No, no.”
“Sightseeing?”
“A day out.”
“Likewise. Got a day to spare, thought I’d view the wilds. On your own?”
“Yes.”
“Likewise.”
Economical, Frederica thought. He relaxed into silence again. His bottom grew larger and closer. His lapel nudged her breast. His breathing was noticeable. She put her face on the window and studied the landscape. Last year’s browns, faded biscuit bracken, old heather, on this year’s raw earth and coming greens. There was art without landscape, before it, maybe after it. Racine for instance, would have had no interest in shades of bracken, and Mondrian, whom she had just discovered, almost certainly had none either. If you lived up here, you supposed landscape was of the essence, you had a Brontesque sense of using it to think and perceive with but at the same time it was in the way. You could neither see it nor through it, it was thickened with too many associations. Momentarily she envisaged an imaginary London flat, possibly Alexander’s, smooth pale woods, much white, closed curtains, soft light, artificial shapes, squared, rounded, streamlined, touches of cream and gold. She grinned again, which again aroused speech in her neighbour.
“Got any tips about what to do in this place?”
“No. They say it’s very pretty.”
“They do. Might take a stroll, stretch the old legs, eh? Funny, me taking a trip on my day off, seeing I travel by way of business. I’ve been all up and down this county this week. Huddersfield, Wakefield, Bradford, York, Calverley. Off to Harrogate Toy Fair. I’m in the toy trade. You’d think I’d want to keep still on my day off, but I find I’m restless.”
Frederica nodded cautiously. The man said, with a surprise flare of irritability, “You get lonely travelling. It’s hard to keep up house and family, if you’ve got to travel. I pour money into that home, I pour it, you’d not believe, but I get no benefit of it, unless you count the pleasure of knowing they’re better off than they’d otherwise be. Nothing personal. You can’t expect to be part of things, like if you came home regular for your tea. I sometimes feel I’m resented, if I turn up, making trouble, like, so I don’t, if I can help it, any more, I don’t put myself out dashing around, straining myself, I send a nice postcard and stay put, take a little trip or two like this, see a thing or two, chat to people. I find it’s more pleasant in the long run, less disillusioning.”
“Yes,” said Frederica, who never came to know who inhabited that home, parents, wife or children. “My sister’s getting married. So we’ve got chaos.”
“I bet, I bet,” said the brown man, with huge sympathetic force.
When they got to Goathland the coach stopped outside a pub. It was cold: on the irregular village green geese walked, and moorland sheep trailed, munched, glowered, trotted away. Frederica’s companion said, “Buy you a drink.” She thought of saying no, but wanted to see inside a pub, where she had never been. Asked what she would drink, she said “whisky”, which she had had for colds, with honey, and felt was more appropriate to the place where they were than sherry, or gin and lime. The man bought her two whiskies, and talked to her about dolls.
“Now you wouldn’t think it, but the Huns make much sweeter dolls than what we do. Real pretty little faces, soft hair, ever so natural, ever so delicate. Our own average doll’s a real hard-faced little thing, with cheeks like red marbles and rattly eyes like little stones, and they don’t stop them clattering when you tip them. Surprising the kids like most of them at all, with their blood-red sweetie pie mouths and cutie expressions, which make you a bit sick if you really look at them, which I don’t, of course, in the run of things, my job being to sell the product. Mind you, kids’ll love anything, I often think they don’t really see what they’re cuddling at all, any old rag, or clothes-peg, or rubber contraption’d do most kids if they’d decided on it to cuddle. I’
ve noticed that. But if you’re in a position to make comparisons you get a sort of sense of the ideal. I’d really like to see a natural doll, you know, a soft one, with real wrinkles like babies have, one that drank and wet and all that, with those useless little legs real babies have. I could design one but the trade wouldn’t touch it, much too ugly, no hair, all that bulgy tummy, they wouldn’t contemplate it. Pity that. Pity about little boy dolls too. Just permissible if black or Dutch, costumes on over nice smooth nothings. I wonder if the kids ever ask where the little cockle or winkle or widdler or whatjumcallit they see on self and brothers is. We wasn’t made to be so bashful, it persists throughout life. More whisky? No harm in accuracy, wouldn’t you say? But if I tried it, I’d be prosecuted.”
“I’m sure. I had a nice rubber doll. Her name was Angelica. But her stomach perished. Her vest melted into it. It was horrible.”
“Too hot, I expect you got her. Talcum powder helps, with rubber. Now take hair. Take hair. The Huns are better at hair, too. They’ve got a much better range of colours – quite realistic – our stuff’s all raven black or platinum blonde or occasionally auburn, if you can call it that. Henna’d I’d say. But the Huns make quite natural looking hair and space the tufts better, not in regimented rows as you might expect of them, but natural like, all over the head, some of them real pretty, as I said. It destroys your faith in Made in Britain, it does really, and I don’t want to have to praise the Huns, I assure you. Not me. I’ve seen too much. Though mind you, not the Huns, nor the British or anyone else could get hair so lovely and soft and unusual as yours is. Such a marvellous shade, really unique, if you don’t mind the remark.”
“Thank you,” said Frederica, with irrelevant dignity.
“Not at all. Now, I was in the occupying forces in Germany and I can tell you artistic dolls is the last thing you’d want to think Germans could do. Lampshades of human skin, more like, and walking skeletons, same as what we saw when we marched in to liberate those Polish death camps. I tell you what reminded me of them; I went in the Minster and there was those figures of corpses and skeletons those old bishops used to keep on the bottom shelf, of their tombs, to remind themselves. Think of a host of those twittering at you, and smelling something awful when you came in. Turn your stomach and your nerves for good that would. You couldn’t think they were human, tho’ they were what you’d come for. More whisky? No. How about a bit of a walk round?”