by A. S. Byatt
The silent horse and rider came from the cliffs, contained in their own wind, which troubled the many layers of clothing in which they were wound. The horse, pounding along under fluttering scalloped trappings, stretched a soft white muzzle through a white hood. Its ears were back: its mouth foamed: under its muffling its eyes couldn’t be seen. The rider was cocooned in goldish and whitish veilings, flapping and whipping behind her, bunched in her fists on her breast, together with the loop of scalloped reins and some indistinct wrapped object. The face, still in the moving cloths, was bone-white.
She watched them scud away towards the water and went on, with difficulty. The beach was almost airless now they had taken their disturbance with them. She had to look for something in or under the rocks. She was confident she would remember what it was when she got there. And then the confidence drained away and she knew she had overestimated herself. Her head was empty.
Behind her the pony slopped wearily back along the edge of the sea, which had crept up, rapid and shining, crested now and swaying vigorously, close to her.
She put out a hand and caught the rein. The touch of warm flesh, the soft, barely furred horse-lips, the wrinkling nose, was a shock. She let go. The creature drew up, head hanging. It was not so wild and bright after all – rather heavy, barrel-like, hairy-fetlocked. The rider sagged in the saddle. She felt a weight of responsibility; she must get them moving again at all costs. And she was gripped by that ancient, primal feeling of being in a story one has no desire either to share or to see out.
She looked up at the knot of cloths and fingers on the rider’s breast, and enquired whether it would not be best to go on? The rider, hunched, did not speak, but exuded panic. The primal storyteller communicated to her that the urn must be buried, that the world was drowning. At this she slapped the pony’s solid haunch and it started forward and trotted away in the water.
She looked behind and saw the high glittering wash of water, collected so rapidly in the bay, sweeping towards her.
She began to run, getting nowhere, and smoothly the fleet waters moved after her.
In dreams, if what pursues comes up with what is pursued, the story merely begins somewhere else some other way, failing awakening.
She scrabbled with wet hands under the cliffs near the rocks, weeping a little, far too hot now, making a hole with slithering spangled wet at the bottom, into which its walls perpetually caved and slipped. Elbow deep she tunnelled down, until she reached a rusty iron pipe mouth and a ring of white froth appeared on the dark smooth surface in her hole. She sat on her heels and surveyed her work. This was not the urn, this was sewage, and should be covered up. The urn should not be hidden but multiplied. She was digging in the wrong place. Everything was wrong. She would be punished.
She ran on the rocks. The wish not to be part of this story was stronger, but she was dutiful. Here were shelves of rock on which, as in a druggist’s shop, were ranged rows of alabaster urns, jars and vases, certainly multiplied, corked and lidded, rising through fronds of cushioned bladderwrack and those sleek swollen squares with spiked corners laid by dogfish and called mermaid’s purses. She could not touch these containers, all similar, none identical. She sat down on a heap of that seaweed which is like tough old unbleached linen, its living texture seeming woven, its scalloped edges reminiscent in little of the horse’s trappings. The air had a milky, misty whiteness and was closing in. She had lost the urn that had contained all there was to be saved, although the rocks bristled with other lidded jars containing who knew what ashes or unguents. She should have kept still. She had left undone something essential. She could never walk back over the hissing acres of bladderwrack. The white water was rising, sucking and soughing up the bony cold rocks.
She woke in terror and found her face wet and slippery with tears and her bladder bursting.
When she came back from the lavatory it was impossible to slip back into sleep, which was one reason why she was able to fix and remember the dream with such clarity. Such dreams in any case, in her experience, continued into waking and reason. It was just after dawn, pale violet-grey. She drew her quilt round her shoulders and sat up to apply her mind to the matter.
Ends of verses curled and coiled in vacancy, like clues of thread, like shining ends of flying gossamer. Which is death to hide. Tender curving lines of creamy spray. Cold pastoral. The fleet waters of a drowning world. Thou silent form dost tease us out of thought … Behind these stalked the high forms of high language, ghostly grammatical skeletons of forgotten periods, inchoate remembered cadences and unheard melodies with continuing lines of singing rhythms. She could have wept because they were bleached and vanished, all the same blank whiteness.
There were other emotions involved. One was plain wrath at what had been made willy-nilly of a real, complex and vigorous memory. The roaring wind and blown sea, the local precision and true drama of the day at Filey had been in this dream, without her will, unified, internalised, drained and stilled. High art, modernist shored fragments of allusive high art, pickings, flotsam and jetsam of a foundering culture, had been made of it, but she had not made it. She had called up this impotent ghost of English poetry, but could offer it no blood to make it utter.
It was also a ghastly Freudian joke, working with the reductive simplicity, the obtrusive meanings, of its animated picture-language. Delicately, fastidiously, she sorted out the fronds as it were of this psychoanalytic growth.
Item: bladderwrack was, to an habitual sufferer from post-coital cystitis, a peculiarly painful pun.
Item: the womb-tomb-urn complex was intellectually insulting in its simplicity, and heavily reinforced by seaweeds and holes. One would have to hint, allude, obscure what, in a real dream, apprehended as a real event, sensuous object or motive for action, reduced one to wet tears, frenzy and terror.
Item: digging frantically in order to locate or maybe bury the one precious urn, she had created a deep, bloody wet hole and discovered in it a rusty, frothy parody of the male organ. The associations called up by this were peculiarly nauseating because of the presence, on the real beach, of real rusty, frothy sewage pipes and real blood-coloured clay.
She was also appalled by, indeed she almost succeeded in not noticing, an association she only too neatly made, between rings of froth on the sand and the traces of white round her father’s pinched, enraged hole of a mouth.
Then there was the didactic message. As though dictated by some bookish pythoness from an English sortes Virgilianae. “Which is death to hide” was Milton, talking about literature and the loss of it, talking about blindness, cross-referring his own inertia to the terrible story of the unfaithful servant who cravenly buried the one talent instead of multiplying it. There was the Grecian Urn. Thou still unravished bride of chastity. The non-sensuous sensuality in the mind. Urne buriall. Monumental alabaster. Smooth as monumental alabaster. That was surely far-fetched, dragged from too remote a text. Association looped irrelevances together. White, pale, cold, urn, horse, sky, sea.
The horse had antecedents, of which death on a pale horse was a remote and uncertain avatar. There was an archaic palfrey she couldn’t place, instinct with fear, and some other very precise literary image of a rider hurrying to bury a treasure. This she waited blankly for, conjuring it, with the phrase “fleet waters of a drowning world”, with a kind of contrary after-image of her dream, a humped and trundling dark steed on a reach of black sand, not white, William Wordsworth’s dreamed dromedary.
She called up various other verbal quirks – from Moby-Dick and The Idea of Order at Key West, from Dover Beach and the Tennysonian last battles in the mist. But the didactic centre, she knew, was with Milton and Wordsworth and the urn burial. She got down her old Cambridge Prelude. Wordsworth’s dream occurred in the middle of that unsatisfactory Book V, entitled Books. In this dream, the rider, neither Arab nor Don Quixote, was fleeing the ultimate flood to bury a stone and a shell, which were, in the dream, an impassioned Ode and Euclid’s elements, l
anguage and geometry.
Stephanie read. Some passions are the regular subjects of fiction and some, though certainly passions, are more recondite and impossible to describe. A passion for reading is somewhere in the middle: it can be hinted but not told out, since to describe an impassioned reading of Books would take many more pages than Books itself and be an anticlimax. Nor is it possible like Borges’ poet, to incorporate Books into this text, though its fear of the drowning of books and its determination to give a fictive substance to a figure seen in a dream might lend a kind of Wordsworthian force to the narrative. In Wordsworth’s dream and Stephanie’s the undifferentiated narrator made clear the nature of the events. It is not so easy to describe a careful, conscious reading as an event. What Stephanie found in Books was a superfluous fear, a fear of drowning, of loss, of dark powers, ambivalent about whether it was life or the imagination that was the destroyer, or where these two became one, where, if at all, the undifferentiated narrator tells a solid tale. What she thought she thought, weeping a little, consciously and decorously, was that she should not marry, she had lost, or buried, a world in agreeing to marry, she should go back to Cambridge and write a thesis on Wordsworth’s fear of drowning books. Then she thought this was ludicrous and laughed hysterically. Then she thought she herself was afraid of being in the same place as her attention, body and imagination at once, and that Daniel would require this of her, and there would be no place for urn or landscape in their own terms. But if it was death to hide them, it was, it surely was, death to immure oneself with them. She had no answer, so would do what came easiest, what was already well-fixed, and marry. She turned back to the beginning of the book and began wildly to read it all, as though her self depended on it.
29. Wedding
The Coronation commentaries lavished superlatives on the English genius for ceremonial. The events which constituted the Potter wedding were characterised by muddle, ill-temper, and aspersions on the church service. Bill waited until the arrangements were near completion and then announced that of course they must understand he would not countenance the thing by going into any church. Just in case they had supposed he was going to give his daughter away. Winifred said no, of course, dear, and went away and co-opted Alexander. Like many acquiescent people she was over-decisive when wrought up to it: she neglected to ask Stephanie about this: Stephanie was embarrassed: by then Alexander, who liked ceremonies, had accepted most gracefully.
There was a general feeling that the bride was somewhat unresponsive to events. She had her own sourish thoughts about ceremony. Like most little girls she had played ritually, pruriently, narcissistically, at “my wedding”. Like most citizens she craned to peer into white-ribboned cars to see The Bride pass briefly, some unrecognisable typist, duchess, riding-instructor, schoolmistress whom she would neither see nor recognise again. Primitive societies had ceremonies for circumcision, puberty, hunting, shooting, fishing, birth, marriage and death. Bodies were decorated with knobs, scars, blisters, paint, leaves, flowers and feathers. People marched in the Queen’s wake with slashed cheeks under English hats and helmets. It was habitual. Her distaste for the Church enactment was to do, as was her family’s, with Daniel’s presumed belief in the real efficacy of the ceremony. No God for Stephanie stared down from the rood-beam, nor would touch the ring with true magic, nor knit up handclasp or eyebeams. Nevertheless there she would be, murmuring Cranmer’s prose in a cloud of white veiling. Her thoughts flirted persistently with blasphemies and indelicacies. There was the brute reality of the friend whose new husband, after an ill-judged wedding journey from Keswick to Dover, had put on his pyjamas in the hotel bedroom and had, whilst his bride struggled in the lavatory with a slippery and intransigent Dutch cap, ritually removed the trousers again and sunk, bare buttocks and striped torso, into a snoring torpor on the counterpane, from which he could by no means be waked. Everyone insisted in telling Stephanie such tales. She was glad that both actually and metaphorically it was at least certain that no one could hang her own marital sheets out of the ill-fitting council house window.
Leaving home she had always imagined against a background of thick domestic life and closing family ranks. When the wedding day began the house in Masters’ Row had a stripped, windswept look and there was one large gap in the ranks. Breakfast was very early, and all the women came down bundled in dressing-gowns, unkempt. Bill was not there, nor, it was subsequently discovered, anywhere in the house. On Stephanie’s plate was a brown envelope. In it was a cheque, made out to Stephanie Potter, for £250. This made everybody feel very uncomfortable.
“She won’t be Potter by the time she pays that in,” said Frederica obviously.
“I expect the Bank is used to that,” said Stephanie. Marcus, in flannels and aertex shirt, slid quietly into his chair.
“Where do you think he’s gone?” said Frederica. No one answered. Stephanie pushed away an unchipped egg. Winifred poured tea.
“Do you think he’ll come to any of it?” said Frederica. No one answered that, either.
There was a long silence. Frederica said, “Oh well, if nobody’s got any bright conversation, I think I’ll go and have a nice bath.”
Winifred roused herself.
“Now wait a minute, don’t just dash off, this has to be thought about. It’s Stephanie’s bath that counts, we must think about that, and the boiler, and make a careful schedule, time things …”
“Oh, Mummy, don’t be silly, anyone can go whenever they want, we’ve all got nothing to do and there’s huge deserts of time between now and then because you would insist on doing everything yesterday so now we must all sit and bite our nails for an eternity today, just in case the boiler blows, or the bouquets don’t come and we have to cycle to Blesford and back, or …”
“I get no thanks for trying to organise things smoothly,” said Winifred, tight-lipped. “You all seem to suppose arrangements just make themselves.”
“No, no, that’s just what we don’t suppose. We are complaining of oppressive fixing of hours of boring waiting …”
“I don’t care when I have my bath,” said Stephanie. Winifred, catching her tone, looked at her anxiously. She made an effort. “That is, I go very pink, bright pink, so I must have my bath in time to fade again before …”
“The blushing bride,” said Frederica.
“Shut up,” said Marcus, surprisingly. Everyone turned to stare at him. He got up and went upstairs, into the bathroom.
“Well,” said Frederica, “I shall go after Stephanie, and then I can have a good soak and a good sing and put myself in fettle.”
“No one,” said Winifred, “has time to soak, dear.”
This was not true. Frederica was right, there was too much waste time. A florist’s van came with flowers, Mrs Thone telephoned to say the catering was in hand, Bill stayed away, and nothing else happened. The three women trailed round the house in dressing-gowns, making unnecessary cups of Nescafé, glancing casually out of the windows. The house was full of piles of parcels and temporary spaces where a chair, or a clock, had gone to furnish the maisonette. Frederica knew they should all have been laughing or crying together but Winifred and Stephanie were silent and closed and her clumsy jokes seemed like monstrous acts of aggression or vulgarity, so after a time she did indeed close herself in the bathroom, where she sang with gloomy glee “No Coward Soul is Mine”, “Abide With Me”, and Feste’s cold little song from Twelfth Night. After Winifred had nervously ejected Frederica, Stephanie took a brisk bath – she did not want to look at her body – and wandered, pink, damp, slightly curly-haired into her own bedroom, where she sat on the bed and waited until she could decently begin to get dressed – a time which was still some hours away.
The room, always bare, was now denuded. Her books, her mantelpiece things, the stool, the bedside table, had been carried down to Askham Buildings. The wardrobe contained only clothes she had grown out of, worn out or rejected. In a nervous attempt to occupy herself she had stripped the
bed and folded the blankets, on which she now sat, quietly, not recognising the place, which she could not leave, because it had already gone away. She envied Frederica, who always wanted something – who had indeed carried off a few of the things that had been left, a tapestry cushion, a hair-pin tray, a print of Botticelli’s Primavera whose blank space on the wall was a paler green than the rest, making it all look dusty. She thought of her childhood, and it was nothing to do with her. She thought of Daniel, and decided not to. She thought of Wordsworth, and felt a momentary relief. Winifred knocked at the door and appeared, wearing, under the dressing-gown, a gleaming new corselet. She was carrying yet another cup of Nescafé.
“Do you feel all right, dear?”
“I’m not ill.”
Winifred looked round the room. “It all looks a bit stripped. I thought we might make a study here, for him. I’m sorry he’s being like this.”
“Not your fault. Not unexpected, really.”
“It’s your day. And he’s trying to spoil it.”
Stephanie saw she was weeping.
“I wanted it to be right, for you, a real family wedding, for you …”
“It will be.”
They looked at each other with mirrored despairing patience. Winifred’s hands were tucked in her dressing-gown cuffs, wrapped round her body, for comfort. Stephanie thought, a woman, a house, “a real family …” Did she want to make a “home” for Daniel? What did she want? Frederica burst in, clothed in the yellow poplin, her hair tied back with a long chocolate ribbon. She said,
“Get a move on. I can see Alexander walking across Far Field looking absolutely all pearly grey, and a top hat, imagine the beauty, and here you all are in your underthings. Things are starting. May I borrow that new lipstick you bought, Steph, that softy one. Mine are all altogether too strong for this buttery colour, you need subtlety, and you wouldn’t want a tarty bridesmaid, would you? You wouldn’t lend me a bit of your greeny eyeshadow too, would you?”