by A. S. Byatt
William heard a tap on his outer door, which then opened quietly, to admit a dark figure. It was Miss Crompton, still in her day clothes, which consisted of a long black silk skirt, and a grey poplin shirt. She stood inside his door, and beckoned, without speaking. William got out of bed and wrapped himself in his dressing gown. He followed her silently along the corridor and up another flight of stairs, on to a long landing carpeted serviceably in cord, and through a door into what he saw immediately was her bedroom. She put her candle down on the little dressing-table. The room was narrow, like a high box, with one hard upright chair and a narrow bed with a cast-iron bedhead, and a precisely folded white dimity bedspread. There was a tiny bookcase, in dark oak, and books everywhere there could be, under the chair, sticking out in boxes under the bed, under the dressing-table. On the back of the door were hooks, where there hung the small wardrobe he knew so well. Under the window was a small chest of drawers, on which stood a glass, with a few teazles and poppyheads in it. That was all.
‘Please take a chair,’ said Miss Crompton. ‘I hope you don’t think this is too conspiratorial.’
‘No,’ he said, although he did, in part. He was troubled to be closed away with her, in her private place.
‘You wished to talk,’ she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and seeming a little at a loss for how to begin.
‘You sent me a word, tonight,’ he said. ‘And someone sent for me to come back to the house, today, when I was not wanted. When I was anything but wanted.’
‘I didn’t send for you,’ she said. ‘If that is what you are thinking. There are people in a house, you know, who know everything that goes on—the invisible people, and now and then the house simply decides that something must happen—I think your message came to you after a series of misunderstandings that at some level were quite deliberate—’
There was another silence. They were very awkward together, now they were on her territory, the little territory she commanded.
‘But you know what I saw,’ he said.
‘Yes. There are people in houses, between the visible inhabitants and the invisible, largely invisible to both, who can know a very great deal, or nothing, as they choose. I choose to know about some things, and not to know about others. I have become interested in knowing things that concern you.’
‘I have been used. I have been made a fool of.’
‘Even if that is so—it is not the most important thing. I want to know—what you feel. I need to know what you will do.’
The oddness of her way of putting it struck him, but he did not remark on it. He answered heavily, as best he could, ‘I find that—my most powerful feeling—is that I am free. I ought to feel—shocked, or vengeful, or—or humiliated—and from time to time, I do feel all these things—but mostly, I feel—I can go now, I can leave this house, I can return to my true work—
‘I cannot, of course. I have five children and a wife, and no income—though I might seek employment—’
‘There was talk of equipping a further Amazon venture—’
‘I cannot now take one Alabaster penny. You must see that, you see everything, I begin to think. I must go away, and soon. And never return. Retribution is not my business. I will—I will ask Edgar for money, for Amy—I do not care how that may appear, I will ensure that Amy has an income for life—and then I will go. And never return. And never return.’
The phrase was exciting him. He said, ‘You are all I shall miss here. I have never felt—not in my heart of hearts—any warmth to all those—white children—’
‘This may be of the moment.’
‘No, no. I can go. I shall go. My book—our book—will provide a little—more can be earned.’
‘I have sold my Fairytales,’ said Matty Crompton.
‘I cannot take—you were not offering—I am sorry—’
‘I have taken certain steps,’ said Miss Crompton, in a tense voice. ‘Entirely subject to your approval. I—I have a Banker’s Draft from Mr George Smith that should be more than sufficient—and a letter from Mr Stevens offering to negotiate the sales of specimens as before—and a letter from a Captain Papagay, who sails from Liverpool for Rio in a month’s time. He has two berths free.’
‘You are truly a good Fairy,’ said William with an edge of rebellion. ‘You wave your wand, and I have everything I desire before I can think of desiring it.’
‘I watch, and contrive, and write letters, and consider your nature,’ said Matty Crompton. ‘And you do desire it. You have just said so.’
‘Two berths—’ said William.
‘I shall come with you,’ said Miss Crompton. ‘You have filled me with a great desire to see all those Paradisal places and I shall not rest until I have seen the great River and felt the air of the Tropics.’
‘You cannot do that,’ said William. ‘Think of the fever, think of the terrible biting creatures, think of the monotonous insufficient food, of the rough men out there, the drunkenness—’
‘Yet you wish to return.’
‘I am not a woman.’
‘Ah. And I am.’
‘It is no place for a woman—’
‘Yet there are women there.’
‘Yes, but not of your kind.’
‘I do not think you know what kind of woman I am.’
She rose, and began to pace, like a prisoner in a cell, in a little room. He was quiet, watching her. She said, ‘You do not know that I am a woman. Why should that not continue as it is? You have never seen me.’
Her voice had a new harshness, a new note. She said, ‘You have no idea who I am. You have no idea even how old I am. Have you? You think I may be of an age between thirty and fifty, confess it.’
‘And if you know so precisely what I think, it is because you must have meant me to think it.’
What she said was nevertheless true. He had no idea, and that was what he had thought. She paced on. William said, ‘Tell me then, since you invite the question, how old are you?’
‘I am twenty-seven,’ said Matty Crompton. ‘I have only one life, and twenty-seven years of it are past, and I intend to begin living.’
‘But not in the rainforest, not in the Amazons. There is Esmeralda, which looks like Paradise on Earth, until you see that all the houses are closed, that all the life is vegetable, not animal, that a poor man’s face is crusted with Mosquitoes, and his food is alive with them, and his hands running blood. The place is in many ways an Inferno—’
‘But you will go back there.’
‘My work is there. And I know how to live that life.’
‘I will learn. I am strong. I have not lived softly, contrary to appearances. I am resourceful. You need not heed me, once the voyage is over.’
‘It is a daydream.’
‘No. It is what I will do.’
He hardly recognized the ironic practical Miss Crompton of earlier times. She paced and turned. She swung on her heel, with her hand on her hip.
‘Miss Crompton, Matty—’
‘My name’, she said, ‘is Matilda. Up here at night there is no Matty. Only Matilda. Look at me.’
And she put up her hands to her head and undid the plaits of her hair over her ears, and shook it out, and came and stood before him. And her face between the dark tresses was sharp and eager and hungry, and he watched how trimly she turned and said, ‘I have seen your wrists, Matilda. I dreamed about them now and then. You have—remarkable—wrists.’
‘I only wanted you to see me,’ said Matilda, less confidently, once she saw that he had indeed seen her. He saw that her cheekbones were high and sharp, and her mouth was hard, not soft, but full of life. He saw how quick she turned at the waist, and thought quickly of a greyhound. He said, ‘I don’t think that was all you wanted.’
‘I want you to be happy,’ said Matilda, fiercely.
William stood up, and looked her in the eye, and put his hands on her waist.
‘I will be,’ he said. ‘I will be.’
He pulled her against him, the unyielding Matty Crompton, the new hungry Matilda.
‘Shall I stay here?’ he said. ‘Or shall I go back, now?’
‘I should like you to stay,’ said Matilda. ‘Though it is not comfortable here.’
‘If we are to travel together, you will find we look back on this as a Paradise of comfort.’
And in a way, in many ways, they did.
Two more pictures. William went to see Eugenia to communicate to her his decisions. She had put it about that she was ill, and had her meals brought to her in her room, which was not unusual enough to cause any comment in the household. He sent her a message by her maid, saying that he wished to discuss certain arrangements with her. When he came in, he saw that she had paid great attention to her toilette. She was dressed in silvery-grey silk, with bright blue ribbons, and had a posy of rosebuds at her breast. She looked older; the calm glaze had gone from her look, and was replaced with a new softness, a new overt sensuousness.
‘So you have decided,’ she said. ‘What is to be my fate?’
‘I must confess I am more interested in my own. I have decided to leave you. I shall set out on an expedition to explore the further reaches of the Rio Negro. I have no intention of returning to this house.’
‘I suppose you will wish me to write a cheque for your passage, for your expenses and so on.’
‘No. I have written a book. The money from that will suffice.’
‘And—shall you speak to anyone—shall you—tell?’
‘Who can I tell, Eugenia, whom I should not destroy in the telling? You must live with yourself, that is all I can say, you must live with yourself as you can.’
‘I know it was bad,’ said Eugenia. ‘I know it was bad, but you must understand it didn’t feel bad—it grew little by little, out of perfectly innocent, natural, playful things—which no one thought wrong—I have never been able to speak to any other living soul of it, you must forgive me for speaking to you—I can see I have made you angry, though I tried to make you love me—if I could have spoken to anyone, I might have been brought to see how wrong it was. But—he thought it wasn’t—he said—people like making rules and others like breaking them—he made me believe it was all perfectly natural and so it was, it was natural, nothing in us rose up and said—it was—unnatural.’
‘Breeders know’, said William curtly, ‘that even first-cousin marriages produce inherited defects—increase the likelihood—’
Eugenia cast down her lashes. ‘That is a cruel thing to say.’
She was clasping her own hands nervously in her lap. She had the curtains half-drawn against the sunlight and to hide the shadows of tearstains. She was lovely, and complacent, and amoral, and he sensed that she was now waiting for him to go, so that she could resume her self-nurture and self-communion. At some level, what had happened was inconvenient to Eugenia, and he was about to remove the inconvenience, himself. He said, ‘Morpho Eugenia. You are very lovely—’
‘It has not done me good,’ said Eugenia, ‘to look pretty, to be admired. I would like to be different. ’
But William could not take that seriously, as he watched her compose her mouth, and open her wide eyes, and look hopefully up at him.
‘Goodbye, Eugenia. I shall not come back.’
‘You never know,’ she replied vaguely, her attention already sliding away from him, with a pretty little sigh of relief.
And the second picture is very different. Imagine the strong little ship, Calypso, rushing through the mid-Atlantic night, as far from land as she will be at any point on this voyage. The sky is a profound blue-black, spattered with the flowing, spangled river of the Milky Way, glittering and slippery with suns and moons and worlds, greater and smaller, like spattered seed. The sea is a deep blue-black, ribbed with green, crested as it turns, with silver spray and crinkled crests of airy salt water. It too is swarming, with phosphorescent animalcules, the Medusae, swimming with tiny hairs, presenting a kind of reverse image of the lavish star-soup. William and Matilda are standing on deck, leaning over the rails, watching the ship’s nose plunge down and on. She is wearing a crimson shawl, and a striped scarf in her hair, and the wind stirs her skirts round her ankles. William’s brown hand grips her brown wrist on the rail. They breathe salt air, and hope, and their blood swims with the excitement of the future, and this is a good place to leave them, on the crest of a wave, between the ordered green fields and hedgerows, and the coiling, striving mass of forest along the Amazon shore.
Captain Arturo Papagay, whose first command this is, comes past, and smiles his rich, mixed smile, white teeth in a golden-brown face, laughing dark eyes. He has brought Mr Adamson a curiosity. It is a butterfly, found by a midshipman in the rigging. It is amber-gold, with dusky borders to its wings, which are a little dishevelled, even tattered. It is the Monarch, says William, excited, Danaus Plexippus, which is known to migrate great distances along the American coast. They are strong fliers, he tells Matilda, but the winds can carry them hundreds of miles out to sea. Matilda observes to William and Captain Papagay that the wings are still dusty with life. ‘It fills me with emotion,’ she says. ‘I do not know whether it is more fear, or more hope. It is so fragile, and so easily crushed, and nowhere in reach of where it was going. And yet it is still alive, and bright, and so surprising, rightly seen.’ ‘That is the main thing,’ says Captain Papagay. ‘To be alive. As long as you are alive, everything is surprising, rightly seen.’ And the three of them look out with renewed interest at the points of light in the dark around them.
The Conjugial Angel
I
Lilias Papagay was of imagination all compact. In her profession this was a suspect, if necessary, quality, and had to be watched, had to be curbed. Sophy Sheekhy, who saw with her eyes, and heard in her ears, the unearthly visitants, was apparently more phlegmatic and matter-of-fact. They made a good pair for this reason, as Mrs Papagay had intuited they might, when her next-door neighbour, Mrs Pope, had flown into strong hysterics on hearing her new nursery-governess talking to Cousin Gertrude and her infant son Tobias, both drowned many years ago. They were sitting at the nursery table, Sophy Sheekhy said, and their clothes, though perfectly fresh and dry, gave off an odour of salt water. They wanted to know what had become of the grandfather clock that used to stand in the nursery corner. Tobias had liked the way the sun and moon followed each other with smiling faces on its dial. Mrs Pope, who had sold the clock, wanted to hear no more. Mrs Papagay offered asylum to the composed little Miss Sheekhy, who packed up her few belongings and moved in. Mrs Papagay herself had never progressed beyond passive writing—admittedly voluminous—but believed Sophy Sheekhy might work marvels. She did from time to time astonish and amaze, though not frequently. But this parsimony itself was a guarantee of authenticity.
On one late, stormy afternoon in 1875 they were proceeding along the Front, in Margate, to take part in a séance in Mrs Jesse’s parlour. Lilias Papagay, a few steps ahead, wore wine-dark silk with a flounced train and a hat heavy with darkly gleaming plumage, jet-black, emerald-shot, iridescent dragonfly blue on ultramarine, plump shoulders of headless wings with jaunty tail-feathers, like the little wings that fluttered on the hat or the heels of Hermes in old pictures. Sophy Sheekhy wore dove-coloured wool with a white collar, and carried a serviceable black umbrella.
The sun was setting on the grey water, a great dusky rose disk, the colour of a new burn-mark, in a bath of ruddy gold light poured between the bars of steely cloud, like firelight from a polished grate.
‘Look,’ said Lilias Papagay, waving an imperious gloved hand. ‘Can’t you just see the Angel? Clothed with a cloud and with a rainbow on his head, and his face as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. And in his hand a little book open.’
She saw his cloudy thews and sinews bestride the sea; she saw his hot red face and his burning feet. She knew she was straining. She desired so to see the invisible inhabitants of the sky sail about their business, and
the winged air dark with plumes. She knew that that world penetrated and interpenetrated this one, grey solid Margate equally with Stonehenge and Saint Paul’s. Sophy Sheekhy observed that it was indeed a spectacular sunset. One of the angel’s fiery legs flared and extended, leaving momentary rosy ripples on the dull water. His swollen grey trunk bowed and twisted, wreathed with gold. ‘I never tire of looking at sunsets,’ said Sophy Sheekhy. She had a pale face like a full moon, a little pitted with craters from a mild attack of pox, and shadowed here and there with freckles. She had a large brow, and a full, colourless mouth, the lips habitually lying restfully together, like the folded hands. Her lashes were long, silky, and almost invisible; her veined ears could be seen in part, under heavy wings of hay-coloured hair. She would have been unsurprised to be told that the sun and moon are constant sizes to the apprehension of the human eye, which confers on them bearable dimensions, roughly the size of a guinea coin. Whereas Mrs Papagay, with William Blake, would have divined an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty.’ Or with Emanuel Swedenborg, who saw great companies of celestial creatures sailing through space like flaming worlds. A gathering of angry gulls was disputing a morsel in mid-air; they rose together, screaming and beating, as Mrs Papa-gay’s angel dislimned and grew molten. His last light cast a momentary flush across Sophy’s white face. They quickened their step. Mrs Papagay was never late.