by A. S. Byatt
‘Not unlike some savages,’ said her husband. ‘Those who sailed with Captain Cook used to tell how the savages in New Zealand seemed unable to see the ship anchored in the harbour. They went about their business as though it wasn’t there, as though everything was the same as ever, fishing and swimming, you know, making their fires to roast their catch and all that, whatever they get up to. But the moment boats were lowered and put off from the ship the men became as it were visible, and caused great agitation, great lining-up on the beach and waving, great shrieking and dancing. But the ship they just couldn’t seem to see. You’d think analogy might have operated, they might have thought it was some great white winged thing, some spirit power or what not, if they couldn’t see it as a ship, but no, they couldn’t see it all, it appears, not at all. Now this tends, to my mind, to support the theory that the spirit world may be juxtaposed with this, may riddle it through and through like weevils in bread, and we might just not see it because we haven’t developed a way of thinking that allows us to see it, d’you see, like your Mercurials or Mercurians, who didn’t want to know about fields and things, or like the proper Angels, who can only see the sun as thick darkness, poor things.’
Aaron the raven, perched on the arm of the sofa, chose this moment to raise both his black wings in the air, almost clapping them, and then to settle again, with a rattling of his quills and various stabbing motions of his head. He took two or three sideways steps towards Mr Hawke, who retreated nervously. Like many creatures who cause fear, Aaron seemed to be animated by signs of anxiety. He opened his thick blue beak and cawed, putting his head on one side to observe the effect of this. The lids of his eyes were also bluish and reptilian. Mrs Jesse gave an admonitory tug on his leash. Mr Hawke had once asked the origin of his name, supposing it to have something to do with Moses’ brother, the High Priest who wore the god-designed bells and pomegranates. But Mrs Jesse replied that he was named for the Moor in Titus Andronicus, a play of which Mr Hawke had no knowledge, not having the Tennysons’ erudition. ‘A sable creature, rejoicing in his blackness, Mr Hawke,’ she had said, shortly. Mr Hawke had said that ravens were generally birds of ill omen, he believed. Noah’s raven, in Swedenborg’s interpretation of the Word, had represented the wayward mind wandering over an ocean of falses. ‘Gross and impenetrable falsities,’ he said, looking at Aaron, ‘are described in the Word by owls and ravens. By owls because they live in the darkness of the night, by ravens because they are black, as in Isaiah 34, 11, “the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it”.’
‘Owls and ravens are God’s creatures,’ Mrs Jesse replied on that occasion with some spirit. ‘I cannot believe that anything so delightful and soft and surprised as an owl can be a creature of evil, Mr Hawke. Look at the screech-owls who cried back to Wordsworth’s Boy, and his mimic hootings. My own brother Alfred was most successful in that line as a boy, he could imitate any bird, and had a whole family of owls who came to his fingertips for food when he called, and one who became a member of our household and travelled about on his head. He had a room under the roof of the Rectory, under the gable.’ Her face softened at the thought of Somersby as it always did. She took out a little leather bag and offered the raven a small scrap of what looked like liver, which he took with another quick stab, tossed, turned, and swallowed. Mrs Papagay was fascinated by Mrs Jesse’s scraps of flesh. She had seen her covertly put away the remnants of the roast meat from the dinner table into her pouch for the bird. There was something unsavoury about Mrs Jesse, as well, of course, as something pure and tragic. Sitting there with the staring bird and the sharp-toothed, bulge-headed monstrous little grey dog, she was like a weathered, watching head between gargoyles on a church roof, Mrs Papagay momentarily thought, over which centuries of wind and rain had swept as it stared, fretted and steadfast, out to the distance.
Mr Hawke proposed that if they were ready, they should constitute their circle. A round table, covered with a fringed velvet cloth, was pulled out into the centre of the room, and Captain Jesse manhandled the chairs into position, addressing them as though they were living creatures, come along now, don’t be awkward, that will do for you. Mrs Jesse produced a sufficiency of paper and various pens and pencils, and a large jug of water with glasses for everyone. They sat down, in semi-darkness, lit only by the flickering flames of the fire in the grate. Mrs Papagay reported that this was how it was done in the most advanced spiritualist circles. The spirits appeared to fear bright light, or to be incommoded by it—its rays were of the wrong constitution, a dead scientific gentleman had once explained through the lips of the American medium Cora V. Tappan—an ideal climate for their appearance would be soothing violet light. Emily Jesse liked the firelight. She did most sincerely believe that the dead lived and were eager to speak to the living.
Like her brother Alfred, like the thousands of troubled faithful for whom he partly spoke, she felt a pressing and threatened desire to know that the individual soul was immortal. Alfred as he got older got more and more vehement on the subject. If there were no afterlife, he shouted at his friends, if it were proved to him that was so, he would jump into the Seine or the Thames, he would put his head in the oven, he would take poison or fire a pistol at his own temple. She said to herself often Alfred’s lines:
That each, who seems a separate whole,
Should move his rounds, and fusing all
The skirts of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul,
Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet.
She liked that. ‘Is faith as vague as all unsweet’ was a good line. But she liked the firelight too with part of her ancient childhood self, expecting marvels. They had played country games by the fire, the eleven children cramped into the pretty Rectory, had told each other terrifying tales and magical visions. The old man, their father, had been half-mad with rage and disappointment and frustrated intellect. And drink, if the record was kept truly. Half the children had suffered from melancholia—one, Edward, never mentioned, was permanently confined in an asylum in York. Septimus lay in the hearth and sorrowed and Charles had taken to opium dreams. Yet they had been happy, she remembered, they had been happy. They had taken pleasure in the dark. They had seen strange things and recounted them with gusto. Horatio, her youngest brother, walking home in the dusk past the Fairy Wood, between Harrington and Bag Enderby, had seen a ghastly human head, apparently severed, running along inside the wood, staring at him over the hedge. Alfred himself had slept with some ceremony in his father’s own bed, less than a week after his father’s death, desirous, he said, of seeing his ghost. The Rectory had been so unaccountably quiet without his father’s howling and crashing that the girls had begged him not to attempt to arouse that perturbed spirit. But Alfred had clung to his idea, somewhere between the ghoulish and the awestruck. He had closed himself into that stuffy room and put out his candle. And had passed a quiet night, he reported the next morning, thinking much of his father, his bitterness, his misery, his towering intellect, his fits of piercing reasonableness, straining to see him stride, tall and thunderous, past the bed. Or clutch at your throat,’ said Horatio, ‘you disrespectful creature.’ ‘No ghost would appear to you, Alfred,’ said Cecilia. ‘You are too vague to see one, you are not receptive.’ ‘Ghosts do not appear to men of imagination, I believe,’ said Alfred, and went on to tell of a cowman who had seen the ghost of a murdered farmer, with a pitchfork protruding from his ribcage. Arthur Hallam had described to her how Alfred had read his one and only paper, entitled Ghosts, to the Apostles in Cambridge, that learned society of young men who were going to change the world into something altogether more just and delightful. ‘You should have seen him, dearest Nem, so abominably handsome and so abominably shy and hang-dog, propping up the fireplace and peering at his pages, and then putting on the voice of the tale-teller by
the chimney-corner in Sidney and frightening the life out of us with his gruesome visage.’ He had once read the first part of the paper to the assembled Somersby Tennysons.
He who has the power of speaking of the spiritual world, speaks in a simple manner of a high matter. He speaks of life and death, and the things after death. He lifts the veil, but the form behind it is shrouded in deeper obscurity. He raises the cloud, but he darkens the prospect. He unlocks with a golden key the iron-grated gates of the charnel house, he throws them wide open. And forth issue from the inmost gloom the colossal Presences of the Past, majores humano; some as they lived, seemingly pale, and faintly smiling; some as they died, still suddenly frozen by the chill of death; and some as they were buried, with dropped eyelids, in their cerements and their winding sheets.
The listeners creep closer to each other, they are afraid of the drawing of their own breaths, the beating of their own hearts. The voice of him who speaks alone like a mountain stream on a still night fills up and occupies the silence …
Arthur had loved their story-telling circles, the crowd of them, adding a dramatic touch, a dying fall to each other’s telling. Arthur’s house, he said, was correct and formal. His brother and sisters and himself were the survivors of a family almost as numerous as the Tennysons. They were watched anxiously for signs of decline, they were treasured and protected, they were exercised in virtue and taught rigorously. They did not run wild in fields nor tumble in hedges, nor shoot with bows and arrows, nor ride wildly across country. I love you all, he had told the Tennysons, his thin face flushed with happiness, aware of conferring happiness, for they loved him too, he was beautiful and perfect, he was to be a great man, a Minister, a philosopher, a poet, a Prince. Matilda had called him King Arthur and crowned him with bay-leaves and Winter aconites. He was patient with Matilda, who was a little odd, a little gruff and abrupt, who had been dropped on her head in infancy and somehow damaged. Matilda, unlike Alfred, certainly saw apparitions. She and Mary had seen a tall white figure—shrouded from head to foot—progressing along the Rectory lane and vanishing through the hedge in a place where there was no gap. Matilda had been affected to tears, she had wept and howled like a dog, and rolled on her bed, in mortal terror. A few days later it was Matilda who had walked to Spilsby and collected at the Post Office that terrible letter.
Your friend, Sir, and my much loved Nephew, Arthur Hallam, is no more—it has pleased God, to remove him from this his first scene of Existence, to that better World, for which he was Created.
He died at Vienna on his return from Buda, by Apoplexy, and I believe his Remains come by Sea from Trieste.
IV
Mr Hawke arranged them. He sat between Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay, with a copy of the Bible, and a copy of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell in front of him. Mrs Jesse was next to Mrs Papagay and on her other side was Mrs Hearnshaw. Captain Jesse sat between Mrs Hearnshaw and Sophy Sheekhy, in a kind of parody of dinner-party placement when there were insufficient men. It was Mr Hawke’s custom to begin the proceedings with a reading from Swedenborg and a reading from the Bible. Emily Jesse was not quite sure how he had made himself so central a figure, since he had exhibited no mediumistic powers up to that point. She had been glad at first, when she told him of their promising, if alarming results from their early cautious spiritual experiments, that he had asked to be included. Like her eldest brother, Frederick, and her sister, Mary, she was a dedicated member of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, and also a convinced spiritualist. Whilst the spiritualists claimed Swedenborg, who had made such momentous journeys into the interior of the spirit world, as a founder of the faith, many of the more orthodox Swedenborgians looked askance at what they saw as the loose and dangerous power-play of the spiritualists. Mr Hawke was not an ordaining minister in the New Church, but a wandering preacher, ordained to speak but with no society to govern, a grade, as he never tired of explaining, referred to by Swedenborg as sacerdos, canonicus, or flamen. He sat with his back to the fire and read out:
‘The Church on earth before the Lord is One Man. It is also distinguished into societies, and each society again is a Man, and all who are within that Man are also in Heaven. Every member of the Church also is an angel of heaven, for he becomes an angel after death. Moreover, the Church on earth, together with the angels, not only constitutes the inward parts of that Grand Man, but also its outward parts, which are called cartilaginous and osseous. The Church brings this about because men on earth are furnished with a body in which the spiritual ultimate is clothed with a natural. This makes the conjunction of Heaven with the Church, of the Church with Heaven.
‘Today’s reading from the Word,’ he went on, ‘is taken from the Book of Revelation, the twentieth chapter, verses 11 to 15.
‘And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.’
The passage from Revelation sent a frisson of accustomed delight through the frame of Mrs Papagay, who loved its sonorous booming and its lurid colours, scarlet, gold, white and the black of the Pit. She loved too, and had loved since childhood, all its strange visions and images, the angels rolling up the scroll of the heavens and tidying them away forever, the stars falling out of the sky into the sea like a rain of golden fiery globes, the dragons and swords, the blood and the honey, the swarms of locusts and the hosts of angels, those creatures at once pure white and fiery-eyed, casting down their golden crowns around a glassy sea. She had asked herself often and often why everyone loved the ferocious Saint John and his terrible vision so, and had answered herself variously, like a good psychologist, that human beings liked to be terrified—look how they enjoyed the nastier Tales of Mr Poe, pits, pendulums, buried alive. Not only that, they liked to be judged, she considered, they could not go on if their lives were not of importance, of absolute importance, in some higher Eye which watched and made real. For if there were not death and judgement, if there were not heaven and hell, men were no better than creepy-crawlies, no better than butterflies and blowflies. And if this was all, sitting and supping tea, and waiting for bed-time, why were we given such a range of things guessed at, hoped for and feared beyond our fat bosoms confined in stays, and troubles with stoves? Why the white airy creatures towering, the woman clothed with the sun and the Angel standing in it?
Mrs Papagay was not good at giving up thinking. Their practice was to sit in silence, composing the circle, holding hands lightly, to join them into one, waiting, passive mind for the spirits to use, to enter, to speak through. At first they had used a system of raps and answers, one for yes, two for no, and every now and then they were still startled by great peals of banging from beneath the table, or shakings of the surface below their fingers. But mostly now they waited until the spirits gave signs of their presence, and then proceeded to automatic writing—all might hold pencil over paper, all, except Captain Jesse, had produced scripts, long or short, which they had studied and interrogated. And then, if it was a good day, the visitors would speak through Sophy, or more rarely, through herself. And once or twice, Sophy could see them, she could describe what she saw to others. She had seen Mrs Jesse’s dead nephew and nieces, the three children of her sister Cecilia—Edmund, Emily, and Lucy, dead at thirteen, nineteen, and only last year at twenty-one. So slow, so sad, Mrs Papagay thought, though the spirits said how happy and busy they were in
a land of Summer amongst flowers and orchards of wonderful light. It was the marriage of this sister, Cecilia, which had been celebrated at the end of In Memoriam as the triumph of Love over Death, with the bride’s little slippered feet, Mrs Papagay could just see them, tripping on the tablets of the dead in the old church. But we live in a Vale of Tears, Mrs Papagay had to conclude, we need to know that there is Summerland. The unborn child who was the future hope of the Laureate’s poem had come and gone, like A. H. H. himself. With whom, for some reason, they were none of them, not even Sophy Sheekhy, able to establish communication.
The firelight made shadows on walls and ceilings. Captain Jesse’s mane of white hair stood out like a crown, his beard was god-like, and Aaron’s smooth black head appeared in a smoky and wavering silhouette. Their hands were fitfully lit. Mrs Jesse’s were long and brown, gipsy hands with glinting red rings. Mrs Hearnshaw’s were softly white, covered with mourning rings containing the hair of the lost in littler caskets. Mr Hawke’s were muddy, with a few gingery hairs on them. He took good care of his nails, and wore a little signet ring with a bloodstone. He was given to making little pats and squeezes of encouragement and reassurance to his neighbours. Mrs Papagay could also feel his knees, which occasionally rubbed her own, and, she was sure, Sophy Sheekhy’s. She knew, without having to think about it, that Mr Hawke was an excitable man in that way, that he liked female flesh, and thought much and very frequently about it. She knew, or thought she knew, that he liked the idea of the cool pale limbs of Sophy Sheekhy, that he imagined undoing that smooth unornamented bodice, or running his hands up those pale legs under the dove-coloured dress. She knew, with slightly less assurance, that Sophy Sheekhy did not respond to this interest. She saw Sophy’s pale hands, creamy-pale even under the nails, motionless and at rest in his grip, with no answering sweat, Mrs Papagay was sure. Sophy seemed to have no interest in that kind of thing. Part of her spiritual success might be due to this intact quality of hers. She was a pure vessel, cool, waiting dreamily.