by A. S. Byatt
We were plunged into darkness.
There was a sound of ratcheting, or switching, and a further, more ominous sound of locks rolling into sockets. It was a violently thick, absolute darkness; if the eyes waited to adjust to it, all they were exposed to was black and more black, complete absence of light. I am a mildly claustrophobic person—I try to keep it in control—and I began immediately to persuade myself that I perceived an increase in the mustiness or fustiness of the air. Things rose in my throat—unuttered, battened-down howls or sobs of fear, a gulp of burning acid. I backed away from the group—I instinctively seek solitude at extreme moments. I felt my way along Linnaeus’s leather-bound volumes, to where I believed the strongroom door to be—whether because I thought I might open it, or because I desired to be first out when it was opened from outside, I don’t know. It was a primitive and ignoble rush towards an exit, even a locked one. Someone said there was a power-cut. Someone else asked if there was anyone in the building who was not locked in with us. Someone else said that it was possible the janitor had gone home. I began to tremble, and continued to shuffle round the wall …
My questing face, my gaping mouth, my desperate nostrils were suddenly muffled in softness—I thought of bats, but it was more as though I had plunged into thick fine moss, which smelled ferny and animal at once, and was suffocating me. I beat out with my hands and encountered yielding soft flesh (under cloth). I slipped to my knees, losing consciousness, and my hands ran down solid thighs, strong knees, warm, muscular. The door opened, and I found myself at the feet of Fulla Biefeld, staring up inside her skirt at the slight wiriness of her pubic hair pressing against what appeared to be alternately crimson and emerald knickers (no doubt an effect of the lack of oxygen to my brain). The stalwart legs were furred with strong, brass-gold hairs. I let myself lose consciousness completely—I felt it coming over me and went along with it, it seemed the best thing. My nose was alive with Fulla Biefeld’s sex. Linnaeus knew nothing about pheromones.
She bent fiercely and solicitously over me. Her hair was a great cage of zigzag lines of honey-light, after the dark. It had odd scarlet flashes in it, as my eyes adjusted. I closed them again, and murmured, deliberately exaggerating my weakness, “Claustrophobia.”
“I thought you meant to trample me down,” she said.
I kept my eyes closed, and my posture submissive.
Someone else brought me a glass of water. After a time I was able to come out, blinking, into the light. The party was breaking up. I arranged, with the librarian, to return, to see whether their archive would produce any sign of the passage of Scholes Destry-Scholes. Fulla Biefeld was hovering near my shoulder. If I wished, she said, she would look over the document I was researching, which appeared to have some anomalies. Who was its author?
Why did I not want to tell her?
“Scholes Destry-Scholes,” I said. “He wrote a biography of Sir Elmer Bole.”
“I don’t know that name.”
“He was a Victorian polymath. Among other things—many other things—he studied leaf-cutter bees near Troy.”
She did not show any particular interest in either Destry-Scholes or Bole. I said I could not give her the typescript, which was not mine, and was my only copy. She said that in that case, if I accompanied her to a pâtisserie in Piccadilly she would glance over it for me, and suggest—if relevant—leads I could follow up. I demurred. She pointed out that I would not meet so very many Swedish-speakers and taxonomic specialists who had also written term papers on Linnaeus’s Lapp journey. This was indisputably true. So I followed her into Piccadilly and sat down to a cappuccino, over a starched tablecloth, under pink lights, surrounded by slightly swooning Muzak. Fulla Biefeld put on wide, narrow oval-lensed glasses, surrounded like those of the male couple in Puck’s Girdle, with iridescent titanium. She frowned over Destry-Scholes’s carbon.
“This is a tissue of truths and half-truths and untruths, I rather suspect.” The Swedish sing-song was more pronounced out of the strongroom. “It is true Linnaeus was interested in superstition and magic. But all this spirit-journey is most unlikely, most. On the other hand, the Furia Infernalis is authentic. There are inauthentic fabrics here suspended from authentic hooks. Why would anyone do that?”
I said I didn’t know. I didn’t. Maybe Destry-Scholes was trying to become a fiction writer. I did not mention the feeling I had had, evolved from the readerly solipsism, that he was trying to deceive or illude me, me personally. I reflected that I had become quite unused to reciprocal conversation. I said flatly that I wasn’t sure where to go next. I might have to give up this project for lack of information. I expected it would be no great loss, I heard myself saying, more especially if what I had found was all a tissue of lies. Fulla Biefeld agreed with this, more forcefully than I could have wished. Conversations, I thought grindingly again, went two ways. Courtesy required me to ask her a question, a quid pro quo. I asked her how she had become a palaeoecologist. She replied, rather crossly, that she did not call herself a palaeoecologist. She was a bee taxonomist. She was a bee taxonomist in training.
Interesting, I said limply. She stared wrathfully at me. Her face is not beautiful. Her nose is sharp, her eyes too deep under the bristling ledges of her pale brows, her mouth too big for her (smallish) face, and set in what is almost a permanent expression of disapproval. Her eyes are not blue but greenish, flecked with brownish streaks. Her eyelashes are actually quite thick, but so pale that they are only visible in certain lights.
“I do palaeoecology as an adjunct to pollination studies,” she said. “Reciprocities between insects and plants and other pollinators have developed over millions and millions of years. Recently there was a very clever disproof of the idea that rats pollinated the ie-ie vine, worked out through the study of bird-specimens collected by nineteenth-century naturalists. There are crops, and wild plants, whose histories we most urgently need to know if we are to preserve them and their habitats. What isn’t fertilised dies out. What is inadequately fertilised doesn’t grow, doesn’t fruit. Too little is known, and whilst we try to find out we lay things waste with crop-spraying, clearance, weedkillers, poisonous plants we have ourselves engineered, imported pollinators, or controlling predators, which in their turn become pests and destroyers. Have you read Silent Spring, Mr. Nanson?”
Indeed I had, I said. I had written a paper on literary and popular-cultural images of induced panic and mass fear. I had contrasted seventeenth-century evil spirits with the idea of Napoleon the bogeyman, and fear of the Bomb and heaps of dead birds in a wasteland in our own time.
“Literary and popular-cultural images,” said this fizzing woman, “are neither here nor there. As you say in English. Neither here nor there. Whereas both here and there and now this species is destroying, every day, 6,000 species perhaps, many unknown, some perhaps essential—certainly essential—to the survival of a whole chain of others.”
“You are an eco-warrior,” I said, with disastrous flippancy. I thought I knew her type. Earnest, covered with natural body-hair, intent on organic living, opposed to modern machines and comforts, believers in Gaia and beyond that in a whole-wheat Whole Earth, absolutely no compromise with commerce or experimentation on animals or embryos, makers of sustainable homes with organic earth closets and gimcrack recycling machines, mysticism of minerals, aromatherapies, ley lines, druidic wisdom of the mistletoe, respect for Aztec flesh-ripping with obsidian knives. I am a modern man, if not a postmodern man. I am an urban animal. Cities are a miraculous invention. We have evolved into city-dwellers, with sewage and electric light. It isn’t natural to live in moss-huts. It’s profoundly unnatural. The earth never was as these Gaia mythographers believed it had been. It was red in tooth and claw. We have the best teeth and claws.
“There are only thirty-nine in the world,” she said.
Hardly a successful life-form, I thought.
“Thirty-nine what?” I asked.
“Bee taxonomists,” she said. “Their
average age is sixty plus. Only two are training a new generation of taxonomists. Both are over eighty, and both are in the New World, where the situation’s less dire. All are men.”
“Does that matter?” Not only an ecologist, a feminist. Feminism was one of the secondary reasons why I had given up post-structuralist theory. There is an (almost) irresistible urge to distort or misrepresent or ignore or overemphasise facts and items of information, in feminist theory. It is also not really possible to say so.
“No,” she said. “It’s just interesting. What matters is the lack of knowledge. The American alfalfa yield plummeted because they thought they could use honeybees instead of the alkali bees that are its natural pollinator. There is a miracle crop—sesbania, a legume—which could feed Ethiopia and hold back desertification—it enriches the soil—but no one has studied the local pollinators, the bees, no one has studied whether there would be enough, or whether any introduced pollinator could live there, and what effect it would have on indigenous bees and other creatures.”
“Well,” I said pacifically, “it’s good that you’re around to rectify that.”
“Thirty-nine,” she said. “It’s urgent. You haven’t understood.”
“In the steps of Linnaeus,” I said.
“Linnaeus,” she told me, “knew nothing about insect pollination. He invented anthropomorphic fairy tales and thought the bees were blundering about damaging the marriage-chambers, accidentally deflowering the virgins, and robbing the seed-stores. He didn’t see—he didn’t need to see—the interdependence of things.”
There was a pause.
“If you could get this document photocopied,” she said, “I could look into it, while I’m working here for the next few weeks.”
I said I wouldn’t wish to take her away from her important work to look into a mere literary puzzle. I said I could do my own research.
“I suppose you mean to spend a few months learning Swedish?” she said scornfully. “I do not see where this project will end. Can you read Latin?”
“Sort of,” I said, truthfully.
“I’m not trying to steal your project,” she said. “Only to be normally helpful. If you don’t want help, that’s a matter of indifference to me.”
I was … I was about to write ashamed, but that isn’t true. I was embarrassed. She was quite right, on all counts. She was a piece of luck, not a threat. Was I afraid she would notice the threadbare thinness of my project? That didn’t really matter, either. She would soon be off to Ethiopia, or wherever. I said I would be very grateful, and would make a photocopy.
“We could do it now, in the Linnean library,” she said. I tagged after her and watched her reproduce my treasure-trove. She folded it, and stuffed it into her capacious handbag. I gave her my address.
“You’ll hear from me if I think of anything,” she said. And strode bouncing away down Piccadilly, the burning bush of her hair simmering behind her.
I began my work (two days a week) at Puck’s Girdle. I have to record that (apart from my haunted desks at the British Library) it was the first human space I had ever enjoyed sharing. It was, as I said, blue and green, with starry lights in a midnight sky—and delicately spangled little desk-lights on threads of metal, cone-shaped, crescent-shaped, making little pools and pencil-streams of brilliance. Not much daylight filtered in through the cardboard Maelstrøm, the Paradise jungle and the Alhambra arcades, though some did, on bright days. Have I said it was spring? We lived in our own softly luminous artificial pool, and moved around it calmly like exploratory fishes. I loved the coffee pot, streamlined stainless steel and glass, that produced endless delicious cappuccino. Along the two sides of the space not occupied by the window and the counter, ran shelves, with books—not brochures—encyclopaedias, atlases, guides to the flora and fauna, the cathedrals and railways, the ships and geysers, the art galleries and sculpture gardens, the temples and arboretums of the world. These expensive and lovely books were attached to the wall with fine stainless-steel chains, and lit by their own downlighters. There were silver-legged stools for customers to perch and browse, stools in many greens, from jade to olive, from apple to evergreen. There were even magnifying glasses, on finer chains. Erik said that they had fitted the chains because of theft, it was true, but he thought they were elegant, and invited long sessions of thought, which he encouraged.
In the back, behind the counter, were a white windowless kitchen and a small bathroom, both minimally and perfectly provided with what was necessary.
My first task was to learn to use the database on the computer. My own is old, grey and cranky. These were new and humming and speedy. My screen was full of sapphire light. I learned to find trains, planes, buses, coaches, horse-caravans, guides, mules, jeeps, car hire, monoplanes, yachts, barges, anywhere, everywhere in the world. I leaned to consult Puck’s Girdle’s extensive list of trustworthy hotels, inns, bed-and-breakfasts, tents, caravans, châteaux, monasteries, caravanserais in every category, and how to update it with customer comments, commendations and complaints. I watched Erik and Christophe feed and expand the imaginations of their customers, casual new ones, and old regulars, of whom there were many, from an expert in medieval stained glass tracking a particular glazier from England across Europe to Assisi, to a bird-watching taxi driver who had been through the Indian jungle, the African savannah, the Amazon, on elephants, in Range-Rovers and dug-out canoes, and wanted something new. A man who wanted to do Italy in a new way was encouraged to retrace Goethe’s Italienische Reise. Another followed the footsteps of Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge in Germany. There was the man who had done all the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars and was embarking on the Hundred Years War. There were followers of Mary Wollstonecraft and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Berengaria and Guenivere. There was also someone who wanted to retrace the journeys of Alfred Russel Wallace. Christophe was trying to interest people in Humboldt in South America. We played games over lunch in the kitchen—Christophe made delicious salads and my complexion improved remarkably—inventing truly extravagant tours, and inventing the customers to whom we would sell them. I say “we.” I am not sure I have ever in my life before said “we” about any group to which I might be thought to belong. There was an ease of belonging between Erik and Christophe, which I have rarely seen. They brushed hands, they touched each other, as they moved about kitchen and office. They appeared to know what the other was doing, without his being in their line of vision, by some perfection of timing and attention. They included me, most gracefully, not as an equal, but as someone involved in this benign purposefulness. One or the other would ruffle my hair, or touch my shoulder as I peered into the screen. I did not make any reciprocal movement of approach. I did not want to. But I was grateful for the brush of fingers, the acceptance. I have to say, I was grateful.
In time, I came to make suggestions. I found my Destry-Scholes research to have surprising uses. We constructed a tour to look at mosaics, taking in the glories of Istanbul and Ravenna, and some arcane churches in Serbia and Macedonia. Erik found a school in Ravenna where travellers could make mosaics according to the ancient methods, cutting the stone and placing the tesserae. We went on from there to construct a tour following Turner to Venice, with practice in his peculiar way of making watercolours, dabbling his fingers in drenched colour on paper. Christophe said we were making schools for forgers, and Erik said forgery was a human pleasure that should be catered for, according to Fourier’s principles. It wasn’t all art—we arranged for someone to be a castaway on an island, and for someone else to prospect for wrecks off the Azores.
Staples of the tours we offered were art-history with a difference. Specialist comparative viewing of Nativities in Germany, Austria, France, Italy and Flanders. Paintings of the Paradise garden across the world. A century of stone angels. At the time when I arrived, Erik and Christophe were researching a tour of Last Judgements on church walls, from Michelangelo to obscure Northumbrian Anglo-Saxons, from Bavaria to Constantinople.
Whilst we were discussing this, an angry-looking man in a raincoat came in and said he did not suppose we could organise a tour of suicide leaps? Places people had jumped from? Erik said he didn’t see why not. Beachy Head, the Reichenbach Falls, Paul Celan’s Paris bridge, certain skyscrapers. Money, said the man in the raincoat, was no inhibiting factor. It was not a very good, nor a very clean raincoat. When he had gone, Christophe said that he had probably sold everything and intended to jump, himself, from one place or another. Should we help him? Erik said (a) people had a right to jump if they wanted to, (b) the travel might quite likely weaken his purpose, and (c) it was an original idea, it added a new dimension.