by A. S. Byatt
And she held the door for him, and made a bob, and turned back the corner of the sheet and whisked out of the room on silent feet, with downcast eyes.
He was afraid of hurting Eugenia. He was also, more obscurely and more urgently, afraid of smutching her, as the soil smutched the snow in the poem. He did not come to her pure. He had learned things—many things—in the raffish dancing places in Pará, in the sleep-time after dancing in the villages of the mulattoes, which it was better not to remember here, though the knowledge might have its uses. He saw her sitting up in the bed, which was huge, and curtained, and piled high with goose-feather quilts, and white-lace-trimmed pillowcases, and soft bolsters, a soft nest in a severely frowning box. How the innocent female must fear the power of the male, he thought, and with reason, so soft, so white, so untouched, so untouchable. He stood there, with his hands at his sides.
‘Well,’ said Eugenia. ‘Here I am, you see. Here we are.’
‘Oh my dearest. I cannot believe my own happiness.’
‘You will catch cold, if you cannot believe it enough to come—to come in.’
She was wearing a nightgown in broderie anglaise, and the well-brushed hair fanned over her shoulders. Her face danced before his eyes in the candle flames, around which a single moth was dancing and darting, a buff ermine. When he approached her, slowly, slowly, in fear of his own wrongful knowledge and power, she gave a little laugh, suddenly blew out the candle, and plunged under the bedclothes. When he found his way inside she held out her invisible arms to him and he reached for her softness, discovering it by touch. He held her to him strongly, to still the trembling, his and hers, and said into her hair, ‘I have loved you from the first moment I saw you.’
She answered with a series of soft, wordless, moaning sounds, half-frightened, half like a bird settling. He stroked her hair, and shoulders, and felt her arms twine round him, surprisingly strong and certain, and then the flicker of her legs against his. Down and in, she plunged and pulled, into the dark, warm nest, almost suffocating, its heat increasing, and with it a sprouting damp, on his skin, and hers, between them.
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said, and her little moans and cries and intimations of pleasure and invitation increased in urgency as she twisted, laughing, first against him, then away. He followed her for a little, meeting her hot little hands with his, gathering courage to touch her breasts, her belly, the small of her back, and she answered with little sighs—of fear, of content, he did not know. And when, finally, his own urgency overcame him, and he went into her with a shivering cry, he felt her sharp little teeth on his shoulder, as she took him in, throbbing, aching and falling away.
‘Oh,’ he said, in the warmth and the wet, ‘you are honey, you are so sweet, my dearest.’ He heard a strange chuckle, something laughing and weeping together, in her throat. He thought of the mysteries of knowledge, of what men and women, no less than the creatures, could do if they followed their instinct, unafraid. She was darting her hot face, the cold white Eugenia, into his neck, and kissing him repeatedly where his vein pulsed. Her fingers were wound in his hair, her legs were wound in his, and this was Eugenia, of whom he had said he would die if he could not have her.
‘Oh my beloved,’ he said, ‘we are going to be so happy, we are going to be so happy together, it is overflowing.’
And she chuckled, and rolled on her back, and pulled at him, and asked for more. And when they slept, uneasily, he woke in the dark dawn to see her huge eyes fixed on his face, and found her hands touching his private places, and the little sobbing sounds starting again, asking for more, and more, and still more.
And then the maid knocked at the door, with the hot water and the morning tea and biscuits, and Eugenia rolled away, quick as a lizard on a hot stone, and disposed herself, immobile, a sleeping beauty, her rosy face peaceful under her hair.
And so he lived happily ever after? Between the end of the fairy story with its bridal triumph, between the end of the novel, with its hard-won moral vision, and the brief glimpse of death and due succession, lies a placid and peaceful pseudo-eternity of harmony, of increasing affection and budding and crowing babes, of ripe orchards and heavy-headed cornfields, gathered in on hot nights. William, like most human beings, expected this in some quiet corner of his emotions, and, although he would not have said so, if asked, he would have been properly cautious about the unknown future. Certainly he expected some kind of intimate new speech to develop between himself and his wife, and expected her, vaguely, to initiate it. Women were expert in emotional matters, and much of what preoccupied him—his ambition, his desire to make discoveries, his wish to travel—seemed inappropriate subject matter for such delicate explorings. For the first few weeks of his marriage he felt that their bodies spoke to each other in a kind of fluttering bath of molten gold, a kind of radiant tent of silky touch and shimmering softness, so that long, tender silences were a natural form of communion during the mundane grey daylight. Then one afternoon, his wife came to him with downcast eyes and said in a composed whisper that she believed she was with child; that she believed they could expect a happy event. If his first emotion was a stab of fear, he was quick to hide it, to caress and congratulate her, to turn her laughing around and tell her that she looked quite different, a new creature, wonderfully mysterious. She smiled quickly and briefly to herself on this, and then said that she did not feel quite herself, that she was a little peaked, somewhat nauseous, no doubt quite naturally. And as quickly as the door to his bliss had opened, it snapped shut again, the golden garden of the nights, the honey and the roses. He slept alone, and his wife slept alone in her white nest, and swelled slowly, developing large breasts and a creamy second chin, as well as the mound she carried before her.
With her pregnancy, Eugenia disappeared into a world of women. She slept a great deal, rising late, and retiring again during the afternoons. She busied herself on making little lacy clothes, gossamer shawls, ruched bonnets, and tiny stockings. She sat for hours staring into her mirror at the creamy round of her face, whilst behind her her maid brushed and brushed out her hair, which grew sleeker with every long stroke. Her ankles swelled; she lay upon sofas, an unopened book to hand, staring into vacancy. In due course the waiting came to an end, the doctor was summoned, and Eugenia retired to her bedroom in a crowd of nurses and chambermaids, one of whom, after a period of almost eighteen hours, announced to William that he was the happy father of not one, but two living infants, both female, both doing well. Busy women slid past William as he took in this information, carrying buckets of unidentifiable slops, and baskets of soiled linen. When he went in to see Eugenia, she was lying back on freshly starched pillows, her hair dressed with a soft blue ribbon, her body below the chin hidden under pristine coverlets. His daughters lay beside her in a basket, like two eggs in a box, bound up like tiny mummies, small faces with fleeting stains of red and ivory and slate-blue crumpled under pinned hoods. There was a smell of lavender, from the sheets, and all sorts of suppressed, furtive-seeming birth-smells, milky and bloody, still lingering. William bent to kiss his wife’s cheek, which was cold, though there were beads of sweat in her hairline and along her upper lip. Eugenia closed her eyes. He felt huge, dirty, bloated, wrong in that room, amongst those odours. Eugenia gave a little sigh—no words.
‘I am very proud of you,’ William said, feeling his male voice croak and rasp in the layered softnesses.
‘You must go now, she is exhausted,’ the midwife told him.
The babies were named Agnes and Dora, and christened by Harald in the chapel. By then they had faces. Identical faces, identical mouths opening at identical moments, identical cheekbones and blue eyes. They resembled Harald himself, they had bred true to stock. They had a faint white down on their pulsing little heads. ‘Like cygnets,’ William said to Eugenia, when he found himself, unusually, sitting beside her in the parlour when the nursemaid brought the babies down for their daily visit to their mother. ‘You are like swansdown and t
hey are like cygnets. They don’t seem to resemble me at all.’
Eugenia, muffled in silk shawls, put out a hand from amongst them and took his.
‘They will, you know,’ she said, with a new matronly wisdom. ‘I’ve seen ever so many babies, they change from week to week, even from day to day. Resemblances run across their little faces like clouds, papa today, grandpapa tomorrow, Aunt Ponsonby on Tuesday and great-grandmama at Friday dinner-time. It’s because they’re so soft, the dears, so plastic, you’ll suddenly see your own chin on Agnes and one or other of your grandmothers smiling out of Dora’s eyes, if you’re patient.’
‘I’m sure you are right,’ said William, noticing with surprise and pleasure that the little round hand was still in his, that the soft fingertips were still in his palm.
The little girls were being suckled by a wetnurse, Peggy Madden, who did not resemble William’s fantasies of such a person, which were of someone Junoesque and everywhere abundant and generous, with ample arms and ample lap, as well as the capacious bosom. Peggy Madden was a thin creature, with a long neck like a crane, and wiry arms. She wore an earth-coloured dress, buttoned to under her chin, under a dark blue apron, in general. Her breasts under this discreet, unobtrusive cloth could be seen to be disproportionate, prominent globes, unrelated to her trim waist and slight shoulders. The sight of these gave William an uncomfortable consciousness of corresponding swelling in his own body. However, the existence of Peggy had restored Eugenia’s body to use, and William, on retiring, found the door into her bedchamber invitingly open, and a warm fire flickering beyond. He stepped into its glow, and was received into the bed, with the same cosy nuzzlings, the same flaring ecstasy, the same little cries as before, only that the skin was softer and more stretched, that the breasts where he laid his triumphant head were larger and sugar-sweet, that the centre lay softer and more enfolded. And the whole pattern was played out again, the brief weeks of pleasure, the long months of expansive and exclusive languor, the nest-making, the birth of his son, another white-headed cygnet, and again, exactly the same, until he had a second pair of twin daughters, Meg and Arabella. Eugenia said that the boy’s name must be Edgar, and that was the only time he demurred, or tried to assert himself. There was an Edgar in every generation of Alabasters, Eugenia said, her lips pushed firmly out, her capacious chin tucked in. William said that his son was not an Alabaster but an Adamson, and that he would wish to give his child a name from his own family, however undistinguished.
‘I do not see why,’ said Eugenia. ‘We do not see your family, or speak, or seem likely to do so. Your family does not come here, and Edgar will not know them, I suppose. We are your family, and I think you must own we have been good to you.’
‘More than good, my dear, more than good. Only—’
‘Only?’
‘I should like something of my own. And my son is my own, in some sense.’
She brooded over this, puzzled. Then she said pacifically, ‘We could call him William Edgar.’
‘Not my name. My father’s. Robert. Robert is a good English name.’
‘Robert Edgar.’
It seemed ungracious to dispute the Edgar, after that. And the child was known as Robert, and sometimes William thought he saw his own alert look on the little creature’s face, though mostly the child, like all five children, was an Alabaster, a pale, clean-cut, nervous creature. Five in three years was, even in those days, a large and rapid family, a mass of tumbling child-flesh like a litter of puppies, William once caught himself thinking. For he was not happy. He had perhaps never been exactly happy, though he had had what he desired, what he had written in his journal he had desired.
He was unhappy for many reasons. Most of all, and every day, he worried that he had lost his sense of purpose, even vocation. He could not ask Harald to help him make another expedition, when his children were so new and so small—it looked ungracious. He did go back to the cataloguing of Harald’s collection, and put in hours and days and weeks of work in mounting specimens, inventing ingenious forms of storage, even comparing, under the microscope, African ants and spiders with those from Malaya and the Americas. But the collection was so random, so intermitted, that he was frequently discouraged. And such work was not what he had been made for. He wanted to observe life, not dead shells, he wanted to know the processes of living things. He made the analogy, sometimes, almost bitterly, between Harald’s collection of wing-cases and empty ribcages, elephant’s feet and Paradise plumes, and Harald’s interminably circular book on Design, which rambled on from difficulty to difficulty, from momentarily illuminated clearing to prickling thicket of honest doubt.
The more the two of them looked at fur and teeth and flower and beak and proboscis the more he himself became aware of a huge, inexorable random constructive force, not patient, because it was mindless and careless, not loving, because it was remorseless in its discarding of the ineffectual or the damaged, not artistic, because it needed no wonder to fuel its subtle and brutal energies, but intricate, but beautiful, but terrible. And the more he delighted in his own observations of its gradual workings the more vain and pathetic he felt Harald’s attempts to throw a net of theology over it, to look into its working and churning for a mirror of his own mind, to demand of it kindness, or justice. He would sometimes argue almost fiercely with Harald—he always felt some kind of inhibition about saying with complete clarity what he believed, because he felt indebted to the older man, deferential, and also protective. And he was arrogant enough to believe that if he said all he truly thought, he would cast his patron and father-in-law into complete despair. And he had enough human kindness in him to shrink from that.
But this holding back added to the loneliness that was his other problem. He had been lonely in the Amazon forests. He had sat by a fire in a clearing, listening to the howling monkeys, and the buzz of wings, and had thought to himself that he would have given anything to hear a human voice, a conventional question, ‘How are you?’, a bland comment on the weather, or the monotonous taste of the food. But he had also a sense of himself, there—a thinking being, living by sharpened wits, a mind in a fragile body, under the sun and the moon, bathed in sweat and river-steam, punctured by mosquitoes and biting flies, senses alert for snakes and creatures on which he could feed. Here, in the midst of the enclosed and complicated society of the country house, he was lonely in a different way, though he was hardly ever exactly alone. He had no place inside the female society of kitchen, nursery, or pretty parlour. His little ones were passed from hand to hand, from wetnurse, to nanny, to nursemaid, they were wheeled in perambulators and fed with bottles and spoons. His wife dozed and sewed and her attendants fed and groomed her. The other girls were away doing this and that, they dressed and undressed and played complicated games in the evenings with spillikins and alphabet cards, with boards and dice. The young men were not often there, and when they were, were smoky and noisy. He liked Robin Swinnerton, who seemed to like him, but relations between Eugenia and Rowena had cooled since Rowena had remained childless whilst Eugenia bred, and the Swinnertons were often away on journeys to the Lakes, or to Paris or the Alps.
The servants were always busy, and mostly silent. They whisked away behind their own doors into mysterious areas into which he had never penetrated, though he met them at every turning in those places in which his own life was led. They poured his bath, they opened his bed, they served his meals and removed his dishes. They took away his dirty clothes and brought back clean ones. They were as full of urgent purpose as the children of the house were empty of it. Once, rising at five-thirty because he could not sleep, he had gone through a door towards the kitchen, intending to slice himself some bread and walk down to the river, to watch the dawn on the water. He had surprised a kitchenmaid, a diminutive little black sprite with a mob cap, carrying a broom and two large buckets, who gave a little cry on seeing him unexpectedly, and dropped one bucket with a clang. Catching the signs of movement he looked into this bucket a
nd saw a seething mass of black beetles, several inches deep, stumbling and waving legs and feelers, slimed with something glutinous.
‘What are you doing?’ he had said.
‘I have been emptying the traps,’ said the child. She was no more than a child. Her mouth trembled. ‘When I come down, the scullery’s arun with the creatures, Sir. I have to set traps at night, Miss Larkins showed me how, you put molasses in one of them deep tins, and they fall in and can’t right themselves. And then I have to take them out and pour boiling water on them. You’d be amazed, Sir, how they come back, no matter how many of ’em you boil to death. I hate the smell,’ she said, and then, as though afraid of this human statement, snatched up her bucket. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said, vaguely, sure she was somehow in the wrong.
The idea flashed across his mind of making a study of these beetles, which were so plentiful and so unwanted.
‘I wonder if there’s a way of observing how they breed. Could you procure me two dozen large, healthy specimens, do you think—for a consideration, of course—’
‘They eat just about anything,’ she said, ‘I do suppose. Those are disgusting creatures, they crack under your feet in the early morning. I don’t think Miss Larkins’d like me to collect any alive if it’s all the same to you, she wants ’em boiled, and fast, before the gentry gets out of bed. I’ll ask her for you, but I don’t suppose it’ll be liked.’
Her breath had a faint taint discernible from some distance. Both the molasses and the struggling, crackling insects had a sharp, sickly smell. He backed away, forgetting his bread. She picked up the buckets, her muscles tightening above her frail shoulders, along her thin neck. Her back had a curve in it. She was a poor thing. He could not begin to imagine her life, her habits of mind, her hopes and fears. She became confused in his memory with her imprisoned Coleoptera, struggling and hopeless.