by A. S. Byatt
They made a sort of camp near the earthed and closed mouth of the barrow. Lucas, who tended to treat Marcus as a kind of human dowsing twig, or divining rod, or maybe, Marcus grimly thought, exposed on this hummock top surrounded by blackish clouds, as a lightning conductor, now plucked at his blazer elbow and asked if he had any sense of the nature of the place, any awareness of anything there. Marcus said, rather irritably, “Let go of me, I can’t think if you touch me,” and wandered away along the side of the hummock, trying dutifully to empty his mind. He reiterated hopefully that he was hungry. Lucas replied, equally irritably, that they should do their work on empty stomachs, that was well known. Look at the Eucharist. When their work was done, they could have their picnic, of which there was a lot, and very good too. He giggled. Marcus went on walking, listening to earth and air, sniffing, staring. The tumulus was old, and silent. Inside, there was earth, and dust, and earthy, dusty particles of air. Things grew on it. Things here were mingled: out of earth, grass, and thistles, out of bones, earth: water ran through it all, and came out, and fed things, and evaporated. He put a hand on the grassy flank of the thing: it had its own warmth. He went down, and found a blue flower. He called to Lucas, “Here’s a blue one. I’ve found a blue one. A lovely blue.” Lucas trotted up, smartly, and became very excited. The blue flowers rose on fluted tall cups on smooth stalks, an inch or so high. Their leaves were in a little rosette at the base of the stalk.
“Don’t pick it,” Lucas cried. “It’s rare. Up here, very rare, very rare indeed. That’s a spring gentian. You get them up here very infrequently – there are more in the Burren, but no one could say they weren’t rare. It’s a sign. Here, where it is, we must carry out the experiment. Wait, I’ll bring the aconites. And maybe milk. Shall we pour milk, a kind of libation? The country people did.”
Marcus sat on the grass and considered the rare gentian. Lucas came and laid the other plants, aconite and wood mercury and fern round the gentian. He poured a small glass beaker of milk from the thermos, and set it beside the flower. After thought, he crossed some of the stems of some of the flowers. He said to Marcus, “I’ll also have one of your pennies. And with one of mine, we shall have an offering. You took coins to the underworld. And I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that gentians are torches of the dead.”
The blue flower had a very airy outdoor look. Marcus said, “I don’t think we ought to try to call up the dead.” “No, no, not that. We want a way in, a way through, to another dimension. I only mean a light to see by. Now, how? What did they do, the wise old ones in such places? They danced. They danced fast enough to make the cosmos dance with them, part of them, till they could see the dance of particles … That’s why dervishes whirl, to free the mind, to have power over the solid parts –”
Marcus dropped his straw-coloured head. He said, “I can’t whirl like a dervish.” He stared at the little circle of flowers. It looked silly. It looked glittering and significant. Lucas crossed his wrists and held out his hands.
“If we hold hands – crossed – over this spot. Then do you see, we shall form your intersecting pattern – and if this is a Place of Power, we are over another intersection – of two realms – we shall align ourselves with the powers of this place –”
“Owger –”
“That’s a name. You might as well say, grass, gentian, dog mercury, aconite, earth, air, water …”
“I feel a fool.”
“Please try. Please at least try, after all this trouble.”
Marcus held out his hands, bony and long, and they were clasped in Lucas’s thick square ones. It was the first time they had deliberately prolonged any contact by touch since the experiment began. Marcus, limp, was gripped: Lucas gripped.
“Lean back. Clear your mind utterly. Now …”
The grip tightened and then strained. Their feet moved fast and faster. The heavy sky swung and swooped: the hill lurched and hovered; their feet tamped, stamped, shuffled, and whirled: Marcus heard his own voice nervously and wildly laughing: Lucas was making a strange hooting; in their ears the air became a high-pitched shrill singing. They went faster: now and then, in the middle of the spinning cocoon of his vision, whipping lines of grey and brown and gold and green and flesh, Marcus saw the blue point of the flower. From outside, had anyone been there to see, they looked less like whirling dervishes than school-children who spin in playgrounds in such tense figures of eight in order to disorient themselves, to laugh, scream, stumble, stop and see the school, iron railings, goal-posts, wheel solemnly past.
They spun themselves out of laughter into a panting silence. The rhythm of their feet became delicately automatic. What happened then had the inconclusiveness of much reported occult experience. Neither of them remembered the end of the spinning. Both certainly woke, at different ends of the barrow, both having the impression that they had been sleeping heavily. Marcus opened his eyes to blackness on the cold hillside, so for what seemed a very long time he thought it was night and could not remember where he was. He stared into the black, which took on the aspect of a tunnel when he saw a white disk which grew and shimmered towards him, opaque and milky until, when he could no longer see round the circumference, he saw undifferentiated paleness as he had seen undifferentiated dark. Then, bit by bit, as in lifting fog, he saw his surroundings: the ridged hillock, the poor fields, the barrow-mouth, the standing stone gate, against which he was propped. He stood up, and went uncertainly back to where they had gone round. The gentian was still there. The beaker was empty. There was a half-crown, possibly spun out of someone’s pocket, on the flowers. From the opposite end of the barrow Lucas staggered. Marcus’s ears, or the air, or just possibly the tumulus, made a shrill singing sound in his head. Lucas put his hands on Marcus’s shoulders: Marcus solemnly reciprocated: they stood, heads down, breathing heavily. They bent down and picked up the beaker, and the half-crown, which Lucas pocketed.
They had the picnic some miles away. Salty beef sandwiches, a thermos of tomato soup, apples and cheese and heavy fruitcake were very strengthening. Marcus, looking back as they opened the car door, had seen a thick twisted column of different-coloured light, amber maybe, compared to the slate-grey of the sky, which rose like boys’ books’ depictions of waterspout or hurricane, or like the rooted bole of a transparent, measureless tree, up and up over the tump, sending threads of seeking, aery root down between cleft and stone, along ridge and under ledge. He did not at that time tell Lucas about this. He did not want Lucas either to have, or to be unable to find, words for what they had done. After a moment or two of frantic chewing he noticed that besides beef he could smell fear, in Lucas, in the tiny car. So he said mildly, “I don’t think we should talk about this, now, maybe ever.” Lucas’s round sweaty face came up from his sandwich. Marcus said, “I know we shouldn’t talk.” He hoped he was making it better for Lucas. If not, there was nothing he could do.
When they got home, they realised that neither of them had checked the period of blackness on his watch.
27. Coronation
Before June 2 that year most of the people collected in Mrs Thone’s drawing room had never seen a television broadcast. Amongst these were all the members of the Potter family, Felicity Wells, the Parrys and Lucas Simmonds, who was very excited, and had told Marcus that both Coronation and television might provide fruitful experiences of the transmission of power. There were six little boys there, some of whose parents owned sets, and the Ellenbys, who were sophisticated, having visited various parishioners who had not turned the thing off whilst offering tea or sherry to the Vicar. There was also Alexander, who had hoped to be invited to Long Royston by Crowe, and had not been. In the middle of the morning Mrs Thone answered the doorbell and found on the step Edmund Wilkie and a strange girl. He had heard, Wilkie said blandly, that she was keeping open house. This was Caroline. He wondered if they might call. All the streets of Calverley and Blesford were emptied of their folk and desolate: it was like a death or a disaster: they needed peo
ple. They were up for Crowe’s jollifications that night but found themselves a little previous. He came past Mrs Thone into the hall, pulling his girl by the waist, dropping a lengthy scarf and a globular crash helmet on Mrs Thone’s oak chest. Mrs Thone ushered him in. He had been a thorn in Dr Thone’s flesh. He had broken every rule; he had created emotional, intellectual and moral factions whilst adhering to no one but himself. He had conspicuously claimed that his conspicuous success was in spite of, and not because of, the efforts of Dr Thone and the community. Basil Thone nevertheless felt a not uncommon perverse affection, not for Wilkie’s intellect, which he mistrusted, but for the pure difficulty he presented. Like many teachers he was compelled to love the most complex problem, not the ninety and nine. Like many prodigal sons, Wilkie returned from time to time, to re-establish, to flaunt, to exact and to reject this unreasonable liking. It was not shared by Bill Potter. Bill admired Wilkie’s mind, despised his posturing, argued his morals on their merits and did not much care what happened to him. This was largely because he had little time for psychology as a part of the cultural hierarchy. So when Wilkie came into Mrs Thone’s rose and silver room, Dr Thone, rosy-faced himself, with a silver flow of hair the boys believed, without evidence, to be a toupée, rose to greet him joyfully. Bill grunted, and settled deeper into his chair. Wilkie, still clutching his girl, flashed happy nods of greeting at his acquaintance: Bill, Alexander, Stephanie, Frederica, Geoffrey Parry. He raised his voice above the orotundities of Richard Dimbleby, and told them that this was Caroline. Caroline was dark and thin, with the urchin hair and prominent slender bones then fashionable, a skipping walk and little ballet-like slippers which made her ankles seem tiny and her calves curving.
“Look,” said Frederica, “the Queen’s coming out.”
“What a farce really,” said Wilkie’s girl.
Miss Wells made a distressed little noise.
“Sit down,” said Alexander repressively to Wilkie, “do.”
In those days, neither the public nor the private mores that went with the intrusive camera-eye and the obtrusive screen were established. The official BBC report on the coverage of the Coronation enquired of itself, “Might there not be something unseemly in the chance that a viewer could watch this solemn and significant service with a cup of tea at his elbow? – there were very real doubts …” Most of the Press was democratically statistically ecstatic. “The Coronation brings the tiny screen into its own, turns it into a window on Westminster for 125,000,000 people … All these millions from Hamburg to Hollywood will see her coach jingle through rejoicing London this very day … 800 microphones are ready for 140 broadcasters to tell the world Elizabeth is crowned. But today is television’s day. For it is television, reaching out to the Queen’s subjects, which will give a new truth to the Recognition of the Monarch on her Coronation Day … ‘And the Queen, standing up by King Edward’s Chair, shall turn and shew herself unto the People …’ ”
They called it the tiny screen and they called the Queen, repeatedly, delightedly, a tiny figure, exclaiming also repeatedly, how erect and undaunted she was, however exhausted by the long ceremony and the weight of all those robes and the exceedingly heavy crown. Diminutives and superlatives proliferated as they stared at the flickering grey and white shadows, sparking shoots of light off metal and gems, a matt and twinkling tiny doll, half an inch, an inch, two inches, a face maybe eight inches across, grave or graciously beaming, a black and white smiling image of pleated linen and cloth of gold and shimmering embroideries in mother-of-pearl shades – pink, green, rose, amethyst, yellow, gold, silver, white, embroidered bands of golden crystal, graduated diamonds and pearls. Crisping black waved locks and a mouth black with presumably red lipstick since an unslicked mouth in those days was naked. Squared postage-stamp-sized, envelope-sized, columns of pin-headed marching men, soft tapestry-stitch flowerbeds of dotty undifferentiated faces and hats in crowds after crowd, the same and not the same, gun-carriages, tiny coroneted breeched peers, windows, choirboys, regalia, greyly swirling, with Dimbleby’s thick rolling voice informing, and crashes of psalm and anthem accompanying all this flow, formation, dissipation, reformation.
What did they truly make of it? The Press used blandly lyrical, spasmodically archaic, uneasily hortative words about a New Elizabethan Age.
“The bright promise of tomorrow is of a second Elizabethan age when the expanding resources of science, industry and art may be mobilised to ease every man’s burden and produce new opportunities of life and leisure.
“Yet these are the years when the first atomic clouds have drifted between us and the sun. If anything at all is plain it is that many a generation will be robbed of its future unless there can be established a settled peace …”
Winston Churchill’s rhetoric had its own note of archaising certainty, heavy with worn and inherited rhythms.
“Let it not be thought that the age of chivalry belongs to the past. Here, at the summit of our world-wide community, is the lady whom we respect, because she is our Queen, and whom we love because she is herself. Gracious and noble are words familiar to us all in courtly phrasing. Tonight they have a new ring in them because we know that they are true about the gleaming figure whom Providence has brought to us in times when the present is hard and the future is veiled.”
Dubiety intruded oddly into affirmations of promise and significance. The Daily Express, in an imperial Leader, quoted sonorously and incongruously
The glories of our blood and State
Are shadows, not substantial things,
glossing this gloomy thought with the explanation that they were shadows, that was, unless commoners and Queen dedicated themselves to “high aims” and pursued these with “tenacious purpose”.
The News Chronicle, on Everest, wavered between uneasy blasts of acclaim and contortions of verbal and moral embarrassment. It also produced an irrelevantly uncertain piece of great English verse, this time Browning:
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp
Or, what’s a heaven for?
It was lyrical about “the cold, beautiful, cruel, desirable peak of the Earth, beyond man’s grasp – decade after decade”. It was not quite prepared, although it flirted cloudily with the concept, to say that the Coronation and conquest of Everest indicated the coming of the new Imperium, Heaven on Earth, Golden Age, Cleopolis or any such conjunction of temporal imperfection and eternal satisfaction. Instead, it ruminated:
“These islands are fluttering with flags; and now another flag flutters half a world away, on the pinnacle of the earth. It is the same emblem.
“What is it in this news that must stir the deep pride of a nation? It is the sense that ail is possible: it is the elation of the knowledge that the age of Elizabeth II is opening dramatically and magnificently. Let them scoff who will, but there is a quality about this news that lifts it higher than the headlines it makes.
“An earlier age would have called it a Sign. Being unsure what that can mean, we are inclined in this age to be embarrassed by any such extravagance of language.”
In 1973 Frederica saw Alexander, on an adult education programme on the television, give a lecture on changing style in public communications, illustrated with words and pictures culled, like these extracts, from the events of June 2 1953. Alexander analysed shrewdly, Frederica thought, the flimsy vocabulary, the trumped-up, wilfully glistening sentiments which juxtaposed words now no longer permissible, like gleaming, drifting, visionary, jingling, glittering et caetera, Churchill’s courtly phrasing, itself already vapid, with the new awkward technologico-Benthamite pieties about the “resources” of science, industry and art, these three, “mobilised” to ease every man’s burden to produce new “opportunities” of life and “leisure”. If the easing of burdens, Alexander said, ran back in unbroken rhetorical lines through Bunyan to Christ, morally weighty, heavy with dead resonance, “resources”, “mobilising”, “leisure” were hopefully vague new abstractions to conjure, with
their own jargon, their own telling redeployment of words with old useful meanings smaller and more precise. The truth was, Alexander said in 1973, invoking some abstractions of his own, and of that time, the huge misguided nostalgic effort of archaism had been a true shadow of blood and state, a real fantasy and trick of fame. The truth was and had been that the party was and had been over. He ended his programme, predictably, with Low’s impressive cartoon, broken Union Jacks, limp dolls, deflated and burst balloons, empty glasses, blank screen. The new language and the old, he said, and their uneasy marriage, were vacant, as events had proved.
Frederica, in 1973, thought he oversimplified. What he said was part of the media’s pervasive receding narcissism, mirror on mirror mirrored and their peripheries endlessly commented on by commentators. In 1953 Alexander tried to write, to discourse, in verse, about history and truth. In 1973 he criticised, in prose, modes of communication. There were other truths. There had been, Frederica considered, some sort of innocence about the rejoicing at that time (when she was a sharp but unobservant seventeen). There was no duplicity, only a truly aimless and thwarted nostalgia, about the pious enthusiasms of the commentators. And the people had simply hoped, because the time was after the effort of war and the rigour of austerity, and the hope, despite the spasmodic construction of pleasure gardens and festival halls, had had, alas, like Hamlet’s despair, no objective correlative. But they had been naturally lyrical. Their lyricism had turned out to be wandering and threadbare, but nothing had replaced or succeeded it. After the threadbare lyric had come threadbare “satire”, a sluggish and ponderous anti-rhetoric, a laboured passion for deflating almost anything. Low had been tough, but much of what followed was only shrill.