by A. S. Byatt
Mrs Papagay also knew that Mr Hawke had considered her own possibilities as a source of creature comfort. She had caught his eye on her breast and waist, involuntarily speculative, she had felt his warm fingers massage her palm, at moments of excitement. She had met his eye, once or twice, as he weighed up her full mouth and her still-youthful coils of hair. She had never offered him any voluntary encouragement, but she had not, as she could have done, repelled him once and for all when he looked too long or brushed against her. She was trying to weigh it all up. She believed any woman who put her mind to it could have Mr Hawke for the asking, if only that woman were reasonably buxom and inclined to him. Did she want to be Mrs Hawke? The truth was she wanted Arturo, she wanted what Swedenborg would call the ‘conjugial delights’ of her married life. She wanted to sleep with male arms round her in the scent of marriage-sheets. Arturo had taught her much and she had been an apt pupil. He had gained courage to tell his wide-eyed wife of what he had seen in various ports, of women who had entertained him—he went so far, and further, as he saw that his surprising wife did not take umbrage, but evinced detailed curiosity. She could teach Mr Hawke, or some other man, a thing or two, could Lilias Papagay, that would surprise him. If she could bring herself to it, after Arturo. She had a terrible nightmare once, about embracing Arturo and finding herself engorged with a great sea-eel, dragon or sea-serpent, which had somehow half-absorbed or half-extruded parts of him. Though the occasional dream in which he returned, as it were, ‘to the life’ hurt almost more, on waking. ‘ “Ah, dear, but come thou back to me,” ’ said Mrs Papagay to herself, to her dead man. Her outside thumb found itself measured, and rubbed, by Mr Hawke’s stiff outside thumb. She tried to compose her mind to the purpose of the meeting. She reproached her own backsliding by looking at the expectant strain on Mrs Hearnshaw’s large soft face.
Sophy Sheekhy was much better at emptying her mind than Mrs Papagay. Indeed, before Mrs Papagay had led her to make a profession of it, she had been constantly delighted, alarmed and embarrassed by slipping and sliding in and out of different states of consciousness as she might slip and slide her body in and out of its various garments and coverings, or in and out of warm water or cold Winter air. One of her favourite biblical readings, and one of Mr Hawke’s too, because it allowed him to reflect on the experiences of Swedenborg, was Saint Paul’s anecdote in II Corinthians 12.
I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.
And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;)
How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.
Of such an one will I glory: yet of myself I will not glory, but in mine infirmities.
She liked the equivocal repeated phrase ‘whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth’. It described many of her own states and could be used, like poetry, with its repeated hum of rhythm, to induce such states. You went on saying it to yourself until it became at first very strange, as though all the words were mad and bristling with shiny glass hairs, and then very simple and meaningless, like clear drops of water. And you were there and not there. Sophy Sheekhy sat there like a grey nun with her face turned down, and something saw. Saw what? Sophy herself did not feel there was a great discontinuity between the creatures and objects met in dreams, the creatures and objects glimpsed through windows, or out over the sea-wall, the creatures and objects called up by poems and the Bible, or the creatures which came from nowhere and stayed awhile, could be described to other people, seen, smelled, heard, almost touched and tasted—some were sweet, some were smoky. Lying in bed at night, waiting for sleep, she saw processions of all kinds, sometimes in the dark air, sometimes bringing with them their own worlds, strange or familiar, desert dunes, scrubby heaths, the interior of dark cupboards, the heat of fires, orchards heavy with fruit. She saw flocks of birds and clouds of butterflies, camels and llamas, little naked black men and the sheeted dead with bound jaws, bolt upright and shining. She saw burning lizards and families of golden balls, large and infinitesimal, she saw transparent lilies and walking pyramids of glass. Other indescribable creatures wandered through her consciousness—something like a purple firescreen with fringed silvery arms came by, open and shut, emitting a feeling of great contentment, and a kind of orange hedgehog of agony blew up and exploded in front of her. Many of these she never tried to describe to anyone else. They were her world. But some of the things which came, or could be called up, were whole human beings, with faces and histories, and she had learned slowly and painfully that she was required—from both sides it seemed—to mediate between these and those others who neither saw nor heard them. The more the weight of hope, the more the sucking whirlpool of grief here that called and called, the harder it became for Sophy Sheekhy to do as she was asked, to invite these particular comers among all others to make their stay and speak. They strangled her, she felt sometimes, the living not the dead.
Today she sensed, composing herself, that the room was full of activities. It was her habit to look slowly round the circle, ‘seeing’ the members of it in an abstracted way, weighing up as it were in her blood and bones their preoccupations and motions of the mind, and then to cast off, and listen. Often outside the living circle she saw another, of creatures pressing in, desiring and hearing, desiring an audience, ready to give a whirligig performance or to chuckle or to howl. She looked calmly at her hands, at Mr Hawke’s finger stroking the web between hers, and made hers chill as the dead, cold as stone, so she was sitting there with a heavy marble hand, its life shrunk back to her heart. She looked at Mr Hawke and saw in his place, as she often did, a kind of flayed terracotta red creature, somewhat resembling Pug, or a glazed statue of a Chinese lion, or a satin pincushion with glass-headed pins in it, a thing the colour of the angrily shining tip of that Part of Mr Pope which he had held straining stiffly upwards in front of him, the day he sleepwalked into her garret making husky little groans before she left her body entirely cold like a dead fish, cold like a marble peach when he put his hot hand on it, and jumped back, burnt by ice.
Mrs Papagay she saw as Mrs Papagay, because she loved her as she was, though she saw her head all crowned with the feathers of peacocks and lyrebirds and whitest ostriches, like a South Seas Queen. Mrs Hearnshaw she often saw all wet and gleaming with water on fat rolls as a mermaid risen from the waters, as a huge sealion on a rock, wailing to the sky. Sometimes she seemed to see through Mrs Hearnshaw as through a huge vase or calyx in which forms faintly struggled like peaches in a jar. And next to Mrs Hearnshaw, holding her own other hand, Captain Jesse. Once, looking at him, she had seen a great white plumed creature, a creature with huge powerful wings and a fierce beak confined inside his body, compressed inside his ribs, like something caged, staring out with golden inhuman eyes. Later, she was sure it was later, Captain Jesse had shown her his engravings, of the great white Albatross which he had seen on his Polar explorations. He had told her a great deal about the wastes of snow and the dogs who pulled the sleds and had pale blue eyes and were eaten when they were exhausted. He had told her about crevasses where men sank without trace in sheets of green ice like emeralds—the Poet was right, Captain Jesse told Sophy Sheekhy, it is just such a green, the emerald, that is scientifically exact, my dear, and very creditable.
As for Mrs Jesse, Sophy Sheekhy saw her sometimes young and beautiful, in a black dress, with a white rose in her raven hair, as he loved to see her. A disinterested stare at almost anyone, she had discerned, could reveal the ghost of the girl they had once been, and simultaneously the old crone they were to become. She saw Mrs Jesse as a witch, too, wrapped and hooded in black black rags and tatters, with a pointed chin and a sharp nose and a toothless crumple of a mouth. The girl waited and waited, and the old woman’s wr
inkled hands lay beside the raven’s claws or caressed the flaccid roll of fat on Pug’s neck.
* * *
‘Shall we try singing a little?’ Mrs Papagay suggested. It fell to her to conduct the approach to the Spirit World after Mr Hawke had asserted the authority of the Word. Her own favourite hymn was Bishop Heber’s ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’, a taste she shared with the Laureate and with Sophy Sheekhy, who felt transfixed with glass spears of pure joy at the verse
Holy, Holy, Holy! All the Saints adore Thee
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
Cherubim and Seraphim, falling down before Thee
Which wert, and art, and evermore shall be.
Mrs Hearnshaw however had a predilection for ‘There’s a home for little children’ and
Around the Throne of God a band
Of glorious angels ever stand
Bright things they see, sweet harps they hold
And on their heads are crowns of gold.
So they sang both of those, lifting their joined hands rhythmically in a circle, feeling the power run from finger to finger, an electric pulse along which the lines of communication could open to the land of the dead.
The fire died a little. The dark thickened. Sophy Sheekhy said, clear and cool, ‘There are spirits here, I feel them, also I can smell roses. Is anyone else aware of a strong perfume of roses?’
Mrs Papagay said she believed she also caught their scent. Emily Jesse drew in a great breath in her nostrils and thought she detected the ghost of roses across the livery breath of Aaron and the lingering residues of one of Pug’s farts, which everyone was far too well-bred to remark upon. Mr Hawke was going, ‘Sniff, sniff, sniff,’ and Sophy told him gently to be still, that things would not be manifest if he strained, that he must give way, be passive, receive. And suddenly Mrs Hearnshaw cried out, ‘Oh, I have it, I have it, it came wafting by me like gardens in Summer.’ Mrs Papagay said, ‘It is given to me that we are to imagine a rosegarden with hedges of roses, and arches of roses, and soft lawns, and great beds of roses of every colour, red and white and cream-coloured and all the pinks, and golden-yellow, and colours never imagined on earth, roses blushing like fire, roses with hearts of heavenly blue and gleaming black velvet—’
They imagined. The delightful odour was now perceived by everyone. The table beneath the circle of hands began to thrum and shift. Mrs Papagay said, ‘Is there a spirit there?’
Three quick, affirmative raps.
‘Is it a spirit we know?’
A whole plethora of raps.
Captain Jesse said, ‘I make that fifteen. Fifteen. Five times three. Five spirits we know, you know. It may be your little ones, Mrs Hearnshaw.’
Sophy was invaded by Mrs Hearnshaw’s pain and hope and fear, like a great beak tearing at her. She cried out, involuntarily.
‘It may be an evil spirit,’ said Mr Hawke.
Mrs Papagay said, ‘Do you wish to speak to us?’
Two raps for indecision.
‘To one of us, maybe?’
Fifteen raps again.
‘Is it to Mrs Hearnshaw you wish to speak?’
Three raps.
‘If we hold the pens, will you guide them? Will you tell us who you are?’
‘Who shall write?’ Mrs Papagay asked the visitors. She went through the circle in turn, and the spirits fixed upon her, Mrs Papagay, as she had hoped and believed they might. She could feel the pull between Mrs Hearnshaw and Sophy, a pull of pure pain and a kind of glittering emptiness, and she knew instinctively she must take a hand, if the hunger was to be met and not magnified. She wanted a good message for the poor bereft woman, she put up a little prayer to the Angels for comfort, let her be comforted, she said to them in her mind, before taking up the pen and dutifully emptying her mind for the messages to run through to her fingers.
There was always a moment of fear when her hand began to move, without any volition on her part. Once, visiting a cousin on the South Downs, she had been taken to see a water-diviner at work, who had held a forked hazel-twig over a meadow, which had suddenly risen and writhed under his hands. He had looked at the dark girl between her sceptical town parents, and held the thing out to her, saying, ‘Try, you, try it.’ She had looked at it as though it was a knife, and her father had laughed and said, ‘Go on, Lilias, it’s naught but a twig of wood.’ And at first it had been wood, cut wood, dead wood, and she had begun to advance woodenly across the grass, feeling foolish. And then suddenly something had poured along it and in it, had caused it to rear and buck and writhe in her hands and she had screamed out in such real fear, that everyone had believed, no one had thought of mocking. This experiment it was easy now to adduce as an early knowledge of the powers of animal magnetism. Mrs Papagay recounted it in spiritualist circles as a moment of spiritual force, pouring through her fingers, an early indication of what powers she might have. But at the time it had made her sick with fear, and now, always, taking up the pen, however full of prayer and hope, she was sick also with a kind of animal fear. For pens could take over as hazel twigs did. The hazel twig bucked and twisted between the child’s hands and what? Running unseen channels of cold water under the earth. And the pen, the pen bucked and twisted between her passive fingers and what letter-forming force?
Mrs Papagay’s passive writing tended to begin with a kind of hither and thither searching among strings of words which as it were hooked into each other, until out of the scribbling rose a message or a face, as a rambling pencil might slip into the depiction of speaking eyes under a broad brow, might change tempo from aimless marks to urgent precise depiction. The pencil wrote:
Hands hands across hands hand over under above between below hands little pudy hands pudy plumpy hands Ring a Roses hands tossed with tangle on a bald on a bald street skull not skull soft head heaven gates opened in small head cold hands so cold such cold hands no more cold ring a roses AMY AMY AMY AMY AMY love me I love you we love you in the rosy garden we love you your tears hurt us they bum our soft skins like ice bums here cold hands are rosy we love you.
‘Speak, Mrs Hearnshaw,’ said Mrs Jesse.
‘Are you my children? Where are you?’
We grow in a rose garden. We are your Amys. We watch you we watch over you we watch everything you do you shall come to us not soon not soon.
‘Shall I know you?’ the woman asked. She said to Emily Jesse, ‘I remember the scent of their little heads.’
We are older now. We grow we learn wisdom. The angels smile on us and teach us wisdom.
‘Have you any particular advice for your mother?’ said Mrs Papagay.
The pen took a long scrabbling curve across the paper and suddenly began to write incisively, not in the rounded childish script it had so far used.
We have seen a new brother or sister take form as an earthly seed growing in the dark, we rejoice in the hope for that child in the dark earth and in this rose garden. We wish you to wait for her with hope and love and trust and without fear, for if it is willed for her to come quickly to this summer land she will be happier and you will bear the pain in that certainty as you may bear the pain of her coming bear the pain of her going our death dear Mother death dear we love you and you must love her. You must not give her Our Name. We are here and we live forever and we share Our Name but that suffices. We are five fingers of one rosy hand.
Mrs Hearnshaw appeared to be in the process of dissolution. Her flesh quaked and shook, her large face was slippery with a warm sheet of tears, her neck was damp, her great breasts quivered, her arms enclosed patches of wetness. She said, ‘What shall I call her? What name?’
There was a pause. Then painfully, in capital letters, ‘ROSA’. A longer pause. ‘MUNDI’.
Then, in the incisive hand,
Rosamund, Rose of this Earth so we hope she may stay with you a little and make you happy on your dark Earth dearest Mama it is not given to us to know if it will be so and we shall love to have a new Rose in our Ring if it mu
st be but she will be strong if you are strong she will live in your earth many years we trust and hope dearest death Mother.
It was a quirk of Mrs Papagay’s automatic writing to form the word ‘death’ when it clearly meant ‘dear’, and vice versa. It ran away with itself, and the sitters had decided not to attach too much significance to it, apart from Mr Hawke, who had wondered whether there was a hidden meaning or intention in the closeness of the two words. Mrs Papagay was somewhat appalled at the certainty with which the spirits had proclaimed both that Mrs Hearnshaw was expecting another little one and that this little one would be a girl. She preferred the messages to be more tactfully ambiguous, like those of the Delphic Oracle. Mrs Jesse was mopping up Mrs Hearnshaw with a crumpled handkerchief which had also been used to wipe her own fingers after feeding Aaron. Sophy Sheekhy had gone a kind of opaque pearly colour, and was immobile as a statue. Mr Hawke picked, as he would, on the scientifically verifiable aspect of all this so sweetly touching writing.
‘This is a genuine prophecy, Mrs Papagay. Which may be either true or false.’
Another salt flood overwhelmed Mrs Hearnshaw. ‘Oh, Mr Hawke, but that is just the heart of the matter. What they say is so. I have known for only a week with any certainty—and I have said nothing to anyone, not even to my dear husband—but it is certainly as they say, I am expecting another child, and to be truthful I was in a state of much greater dread than hope, which after my experience is to be understood, I think, and not blamed, and the dear little ones have seized on my fear and understood it and tried to console me.’ Great sobs clucked in her large white throat. ‘I did all I could—to prevent—I had quite given up hoping—I felt only dread, only dread—’