Angels and Insects

by A. S. Byatt

  Lady Alabaster spent her days in a small parlour, with a view over the lawn. This room was a lady’s room, and had dark pomegranate-red wallpaper, sprinkled with sprigs of honeysuckle in pink and cream. It had thick red velvet curtains, often partially drawn against the sun: Lady Alabaster’s eyes were weak, and she frequently had the headache. There was always a fire lit in the hearth, which at first did not strike William, who had arrived in early Spring, as anything unusual, but brought him out in sweat under his jacket as Summer advanced. Lady Alabaster appeared to be immobilised, by natural lethargy more than by any specific complaint, though she waddled, more than walked, when she progressed along the corridors to eat luncheon or dine, and William formed the impression that under her skirts her knees and ankles were hugely, maybe painfully, swollen. She lay on a deep sofa, under the window, but with her back to it, oriented towards the fire. The room was a nest of cushions, all embroidered with flowers and fruit and blue butterflies and scarlet birds, in cross-stitch on wool, in silk thread on satin. Lady Alabaster had always an embroidery frame by her, but William never saw her take it up, though this proved nothing—she might have laid it aside out of courtesy. She did, in her fading voice, point out to him the work of Eugenia, Rowena and Enid, Miss Fescue, Matty and the little girls, for his admiration. She had several glass cases of dried poppy-heads and teazles and hydrangeas, and several little footstools, over which guests and servants stumbled on their way into the dimness. She seemed to spend most of her day drinking—tea, lemonade, ratafia, chocolate milk, barley water, herbal infusions, which were endlessly moving along the corridors, borne by parlourmaids, on silver trays. She also consumed large quantities of sweet biscuits, macaroons, butterfly cakes, little jellies and dariole moulds, which were also freshly made by Cook, carried from the kitchen, and their crumbs subsequently removed, and dusted away. She was hugely fat, and did not wear corsets except for special occasions, but lay in a sort of voluminous shiny tea gown, swaddled in cashmere shawls and with a lacy cap tied under her many chins. Like many well-fleshed women, she had kept some bloom on her skin, and her face was moony-bland and curiously unlined, though her pale eyes were deep in little rolling pits of flesh. Sometimes Miriam, her personal maid, would sit by her and brush her still lustrous hair for half an hour at a time, holding it in her deft hands, and sweeping the ivory-backed brush rhythmically over and over. Lady Alabaster said that the hair-brushing eased her headaches. When these were very bad, Miriam would apply cold compresses, and wipe her mistress’s eyelids with witch hazel.

  William felt that this immobile, vacantly amiable presence was a source of power in the household. The housekeeper came and went for her instructions, Miss Mead brought the little girls to recite their poems and tables, the butler carried in documents, Cook came and went, the gardener, wiping his boots, brought in pots of bulbs, little posies, designs for new plantings. These people were often ushered in and out by Matty Crompton, and it was Matty who came to seek William in his stable for what turned out to be his instructions.

  She stood in the shadows in the doorway, a tall, thin dark figure, in a musty black gown with practical white cuffs and collar. Her face was thin and unsmiling, her hair dark under a plain cap, her skin dusky too. She spoke quietly, clearly, with little expression. Lady Alabaster would be glad if he would take a cup of tea with her when his work was finished. He had undertaken quite a labour of love, it appeared. What was that he had in his hand? It looked quite alarming.

  ‘It has become detached from whatever specimen it was attached to, I think. Several parts of several specimens have become detached. I keep a special box for the most puzzling. This hand and arm obviously belong to some fairly large quadrumane. I see you might suppose they were those of some human infant. I can assure you they are not. The bones are far too light. I must look to you as if I were practising witchcraft.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Matty Crompton. ‘I did not mean to make any such suggestion.’

  Lady Alabaster gave him tea, and sponge fingers, and warm scones with jam and cream, and said she hoped he was comfortable, and that Harald was not overburdening him with work. No, said William, he had a great deal of spare time. He opened his mouth to say that it had been agreed that he should have some spare time, to write his book, when Matty Crompton said, ‘Lady Alabaster expressed the hope that you might be able to spare a little time to help Miss Mead and myself with the scientific education of the younger members of the family. She feels that they should profit from the presence amongst us of such a distinguished naturalist.’

  ‘Naturally, I should be happy to do what I can—’

  ‘Matty has such good ideas, Mr Adamson. So ingenious, she is. Tell him, Matty.’

  ‘It is nothing much really. We already go on collecting rambles, Mr Adamson—we fish in the ponds and brooks, we collect flowers and berries, in a very disorganised way. If you would only accompany us, once or twice, and suggest a kind of aim for our aimless poking about—show us what is to be discovered. And then there is the schoolroom. It has long been my ambition to set up a glass-sided beehive, such as Huber had, and also some kind of viable community of ants, so that the little ones could observe the workings of insect societies with their own eyes. Could you do this? Would you do this? You would know how we should set about it. You would tell us what to look for.’

  He said he would be delighted to help. He had no idea how to talk to children, he thought to himself, and even believed he did not like them, much. He disliked hearing their squeals when they ran out over the lawn, or through the paddock.

  ‘Thank you so very much,’ said Lady Alabaster. ‘We shall truly profit from your presence amongst us.’

  ‘Eugenia likes to come on our nature rambles,’ said the quiet Matty Crompton. ‘She brings her sketchbooks whilst the young ones go fishing, or collect flowers for the press.’

  ‘Eugenia is a good girl,’ said Lady Alabaster vacantly. ‘They are all good girls, they are none of them any trouble. I am much blessed in my daughters.’

  He went on nature rambles. He felt coerced into doing this, reminded of his dependent status by the organisation of Miss Mead and Matty Crompton, and yet at the same time he enjoyed the outings. All three elder girls sometimes came and sometimes did not. Sometimes he did not know whether Eugenia would make one of the party until the very moment of setting out, when they would assemble on the gravel walk in front of the house armed with nets, with jam-jars on string handles, with metal boxes and useful scissors. There were days when his morning’s work became almost impossible because of the tension in his diaphragm over whether he would or would not see her, because of the imagination he lavished on how she would look, crossing the lawn to the gate in the wall, crossing the paddock and the orchard under the blossoming fruit trees to the fields which sloped down to the little stream, where they fished for minnows and sticklebacks, caddis grubs and water-snails. He liked the little girls well enough; they were docile, pale little creatures, well buttoned up, who spoke when they were spoken to. Elaine in particular had a good eye for hidden treasures on the undersides of leaves, or interesting boreholes in muddy banks. When Eugenia was not in the party he felt his old self again, scanning everything with a minute attention that in the forests had been the attention of a primitive hunter as well as a modern naturalist, of a small animal afraid amongst threatening sounds and movements, as well as a scientific explorer. Here the pricking of his skin was associated not with fear, but with the invisible cloud of electric forces that spangled Eugenia’s air as she strolled calmly through the meadows. Perhaps it was fear. He did not wish to feel it. He was only in abeyance, until he felt it again.

  One day, when they were all occupied on the bank of the stream, including both Eugenia and Enid, he was drawn into speaking of his feelings about all this. There had been a great fall of spring rain, and various loose clumps of grass and twigs were floating along the usually placid surface of the stream, between the trailing arms of the weeping willows and the groups of wh
ite poplar. There were two white ducks and a coot, swimming busily; the sun was over the water, kingcups were golden, early midges danced. Matty Crompton, a patient huntress, had captured two sticklebacks and trailed her net in the water, watching the shadows under the bank. Eugenia stood next to William. She breathed in deeply, and sighed out.

  ‘How beautiful all this is,’ she said. ‘How lucky I always feel to live just here, of all spots on the earth. To see the same flowers come out every spring in the meadows, and the same stream always running. I suppose it must seem a very bounded existence to you, with your experience of the world. But my roots go so deep …’

  ‘When I was in the Amazons,’ he answered simply and truthfully, ‘I was haunted by an image of an English meadow in spring—just as it is today, with the flowers, and the new grass, and the early blossom, and the little breeze lifting everything, and the earth smelling fresh after the rain. It seemed to me that such scenes were truly Paradise—that there was not anything on earth more beautiful than an English bank in flower, than an English mixed hedge, with roses and hawthorn, honeysuckle and bryony. Before I went, I had read highly coloured accounts of the brilliance of the tropical jungle, the flowers and fruits and gaudy creatures, but there is nothing there so colourful as this is. It is all a monotonous sameness of green, and such a mass of struggling, climbing, suffocating vegetation—often you cannot see the sky. It is true that the weather is like that of the Golden Age—everything flowers and fruits perpetually and simultaneously in the tropical heat, you have always Spring, Summer and Autumn at once, and no Winter. But there is something inimical about the vegetation itself. There is a kind of tree called the Sipó Matador—which translates, the Murderer Sipó—which grows tall and thin like a creeper and clings to another tree, to make its way up the thirty, forty feet to the canopy, eating its way into the very substance of its host until that dies—and the Sipó perforce crashes down with it. You hear the strange retorts of crashing trees suddenly in the silence, like cracks of gunshot, a terrible and terrifying sound I could not for some months explain to myself. Everything there is inordinate, Miss Alabaster. There is a form of the violet, there—see, here are some—that grow to be a huge tree. And yet that is in so many ways the innocent, the unfallen world, the virgin forest, the wild people in the interior who are as unaware of modern ways—modern evils—as our first parents. There are strange analogies. Out there, no woman may touch a snake. They run to ask you to kill one for them. I have killed many snakes for frightened women. I have been fetched considerable distances to do so. The connection of the woman and the snake in the garden is made even out there, as though it is indeed part of some universal pattern of symbols, even where Genesis has never been heard of—I talk too much, I bore you, I am afraid.’

  ‘Oh no. I am quite fascinated. I am glad to hear that our Spring world in some sense remains your ideal. I want you to be happy here, Mr Adamson. And I am most intrigued by what you have to say of the women and snakes. Did you live entirely without the company of civilised peoples, Mr Adamson? Among naked savages?’

  ‘Not entirely. I had various friends, of all colours and races, during my stay in various communities. But sometimes, yes, I was the only white guest in tribal villages.’

  ‘Were you not afraid?’

  ‘Oh, often. Upon two occasions I overheard plots to murder me, made by men ignorant of my knowledge of their tongue. But also I met with much kindness and friendship from people not so simple as you might suppose from seeing them.’

  ‘Are they really naked, and painted?’

  ‘Some are. Some are part-clothed. Some wholly clothed. They are greatly given to decorating their skins with vegetable dyes.’

  He was aware of the limpid blue eyes resting on him, and felt that behind her delicate frown she was considering his relations with the naked people. And then felt that his thoughts smutched her, that he was too muddied and dirty to think of her, let alone touch at her secret thoughts from his own secret self. He said, ‘Those floating grasses, even, remind me of the great floating islands of uprooted trees and creepers and bushes that make their way along the great river. I used to compare those to Paradise Lost. I read my Milton in my rest-times. I thought of the passage where Paradise is cast loose, after the Deluge.’

  Matty Crompton, without lifting her eyes from the stream surface, provided the quotation.

  ‘then shall this mount

  Of Paradise by might of waves be moved

  Out of his place, pushed by the horned flood,

  With all his verdure spoiled, and trees adrift,

  Down the great river to the opening gulf,

  And there take root an island salt and bare,

  The haunt of seals, and orcs, and sea-mews’ clang.’

  ‘Clever Matty,’ said Eugenia. Matty Crompton did not answer, but made a sudden plunge and twist with her fishing net and brought up a thrashing, furious fish, a stickleback, large, at least for a stickleback, rosy-breasted and olive-backed. She tipped it out of the net into the jar with the other captives, and the little girls crowded round to look.

  The creature gasped for a moment and floated inert. Then it could be seen to gather its forces. It blushed rosier—its chest was the most amazing colour, a fiery pink overlaid, or underlaid, with the olive colour that pervaded the rest of it. It raised its dorsal fin, which became a kind of spiny, draconian ridge, and then it became an almost invisible whirling lash, attacking the other fish, who had nowhere, in their cylindrical prison, to hide. The water boiled. Eugenia began to laugh, and Elaine began to cry. William came to the rescue, pouring fish from jar to jar until, after some gasping on grass, he had managed to isolate the rosy-waistcoated aggressor in a jar of his own. The other fish opened and closed their tremulous mouths. Elaine crouched over them.

  William said, ‘It is very interesting that it is only this very aggressive male who has the pink coat. Two of the others are male, but they are not flushed with anger, or elation, as he is. Mr Wallace argues that females are dull because they keep the nests in general, but this father both makes and guards his own hatchery until the fry swim away. And yet he remains an angry red, perhaps as a warning, long after the need to attract a female into his handsome house has quite vanished.’

  Matty said, ‘We have probably orphaned his eggs.’

  ‘Put him back,’ said Elaine.

  ‘No, no, bring him home, let us keep him awhile, and put him back when we have studied him,’ said Miss Mead. ‘He will build another nest. Thousands of fish eggs are eaten every minute, Elaine, it is the way of Nature.’

  ‘We are not Nature,’ said Elaine.

  ‘What else are we?’ asked Matty Crompton. She had not thought out her theology, William said to himself, without speaking out loud. Nature was smiling and cruel, that was clear. He offered his hands to Eugenia, to help her up the bank of the stream, and she took hold with her hands, gripping his, through her cotton gloves, always through cotton gloves, warmed by her warmth, impregnated by whatever it was that breathed from her skin.

  It was difficult to know what Harald Alabaster did all day. He did not go out, as his sons did, though he was occasionally to be observed taking a solitary twilight stroll amongst the flower-beds, his hands clasped in the small of his back, his head down. He did not appear to occupy himself with what he had so assiduously, if indiscriminately, collected. That was left to William. When William went to the hexagonal Studium to report progress, he was given a glass of port or sherry, and listened to intently. Sometimes they spoke—or William spoke—of William’s projected work on the social insects. Then one day Harald said, ‘I do not know whether I have told you I am writing a book.’

  ‘Indeed you have not. I am most curious to know what kind of book.’

  ‘The kind of impossible book everyone now is trying to write. A book which shall demonstrate—with some kind of intellectual respectability—that it is not impossible that the world is the work of a Creator, a Designer.’

  He sto
pped, and looked at William under his white brows, a canny, calculating look.

  William tried silently to weigh up the negative: ‘it is not impossible’.

  Harald said, ‘I am as aware as you must be that all the arguments of force are upon the other side. If I were a young man now, a young man such as you, I would be compelled towards atheistic materialism by the sheer beauty, the intricacy, of the arguments of Mr Darwin, and not only Mr Darwin. It was all very well then for Paley to argue that a man who found a watch, or even two interlocking cogs of a watch, lying on a bare heath, would have presumed a Maker of such an instrument. There was then no other explanation of the intricacy of the grasp of the hand, or the web of the spider, or the vision of the eye than a Designer who made everything for its particular purpose. But now we have a powerful, almost entirely satisfactory explanation—in the gradual action of Natural Selection, of slow change, over unimaginable millennia. And any argument that would truly seek to find an intelligent Creator in His works must take account of the beauty and force of these explanations, must not sneer at them, nor try to refute them for the sake of defending Him who cannot be defended by weak and partial reasonings …’