by A. S. Byatt
Once she had hypnotised herself this way, and had been found by Mrs Papagay, rigid as stone, standing and staring, cold and clammy to the touch. Mrs Papagay had clasped her in warm arms to a generous bosom, had flung a quilt round her, had fed her on broth when she woke with a start and could not say where she had been. Mrs Papagay had a warm heart, like a comfortable brown thrush in a soft nest. She had felt its flutter and come back unafraid. There had been times in childhood when she had provoked such absences and been less lucky. She had had ways of going outside herself which as a very small child she had supposed were quite natural, ways available to anyone, in the course of daily life, natural as sipping water, or using the chamber-pot, or washing the hands. By holding her breath, in certain ways, or arching her body on the bed and letting it fall again, rapidly, rhythmically, she could find a kind of flying Sophy, hovering mildly near the ceiling and placidly observing the husk, the still pallid husk she had left behind, with its parted lips and closed eyelids. Only her mother, an impatient woman with rough red hands like nutmeg-graters, had brought her back sharply by slapping and shaking, after which Sophy had vomited for a good month, and almost died for lack of nourishment. So she learned to be careful, and to control her outgoings and returns.
Behind her the room was full of rustling, as though it was packed with birds. It was fatigue rushing in her ears, it was white wings she would see if she turned to look. She saw in her mind’s eye doves with golden eyes, doves all over, doves preening themselves on the bedhead and windowsill. She saw their little pink feet, so vulnerable, so naked, so scratchy, strutting and curling, open and shut. She began to hear their liquid voices bubbling amongst the rustling. If she turned round, the room might or might not be full of white wings. She did not know if she made the doves by expectation, or sensed their presence and brought them with her mind to her vision, or whether the doves were there and she merely happened to be able to see them. She could not change them to parrots, or oysters, or roses, with any effort of will, she knew now. They were loose from her, they were talking to each other in their different garglings, comforting, irritable, puffed out, smoothed.
She looked into her eyes, and said, not to herself, ‘Are you there?’ She called on him often, and many times she had sensed him, anxious and elusive, the young man, behind her in the room, like the doves, or the other creatures who from time to time prowled, or slid, or strode there. She could not see him, and he did not speak, but she sensed him there. He wanted to break through, he wanted to make a communication, she believed, using the language she had been taught, since she took up the profession. She believed sometimes that if she were less afraid of him, he might have come long ago. She sensed he was tar away, and cold, and lost, but maybe all this was not so, maybe so good, so perfect a young man would not be cold and lost but would know how to ascend the heavens Mr Hawke described so confidently. She wanted to be of use, to open a gate for him, but he did not come. Only a current of cold air, a space between the warm birds and their peaceful busyness, which made her ask again, ‘Are you there?’ and believe she had been answered in the affirmative.
As a child, too, she had called people up. She had called up people from stories—Rapunzel’s pitiful blinded Prince, poor murdered Abel in the Bible, a child called Micky who had been her closest friend until Mrs Papagay, who appeared in every state, from a sensed air of presence, through an imagined gipsyish, dark-skinned boy, to a more or less flesh-and-blood acquaintance, sitting on the edge of the dresser and drumming it with his heels, whose broken fingernail, or scratched lip, she could from week to week simply see with her eyes. He just was. At other times he almost was, and she bent her will to pull him into being. She told him things which he seemed to understand. He did not tell her things. Sometimes her efforts to conjure up Micky or other desired presences brought unwanted and unexpected visitors. An angry female baby that howled and would not be comforted, a towering cold male presence who wanted to pull at her—Sophy—but who could not see her, she sensed, as well as she saw him, with his blue beard-stubble and protuberant eyes. These were denizens of a different world from the stolidly solid visitors—only five or six altogether—like the drowned relations she had entertained at her first employer’s, or the stout matron looking desperately for a lost watch in Crimond Wood, or the costermonger’s boy who told her he missed his horse although it had kicked him to death, for it had been no fault of old Whitey’s, he had been maddened by pain in his fetlock. None of these solid revenants had ever put their nose inside a séance, to her knowledge, where the visitors were either willed into apparition by their common desire, or half-glimpsed by her own strenuous desire to be of help, or inhabitants of some other dimension, partly apprehended, like today’s wine-bottle Creature with its boiling eyes, much the most vivid so far, but still not solid as apples.
Sophy Sheekhy combed her hair, and the doves rustled and cooed. She wanted so much to find the dead young man for Mrs Jesse, as she wanted to find Captain Papagay for Mrs Papagay, but in some way the very strength of her desire to help held them off. Creatures came, spirits came, wandering into sloppiness and slippage, into emptiness of mind, not into the strain of attention. Yet she sensed he was not far off. There was a cold space amongst the doves where he perhaps waited. She had no idea what he looked like but imagined him pale, with golden curls, a wide brow, craggy, and a Greek sort of mouth. (She knew about the ‘bar of Michelangelo’ both from Mrs Jesse and from In Memoriam.) Mrs Jesse once claimed to have detected his spirit form in a photograph taken of herself in Bristol, but Sophy Sheekhy, who had pored over the blurred figure in a tall hat behind Mrs Jesse’s caped shoulders, could see little more than chalk-white skin and eye-sockets like dark coals. It could have been anyone at all, Sophy Sheekhy thought, though Mrs Jesse’s sister Mary agreed that it was uncannily like Arthur, the face and stance were strikingly like what she remembered of him.
Sometimes she could produce the necessary vague, floating state of mind by reciting poetry to herself. She had not known much poetry before her work at Mrs Jesse’s house, but had taken to it there like a duck to water, which was an apt metaphor; she floated on it, she ducked and dived in its strong flow, it bore her up. Séances, not only at Mrs Jesse’s house, frequently opened with poetic evocations of those gone before. A favourite was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel. It was so beautiful and so sad, Sophy Sheekhy concurred with other readers, the solitary blessed angel leaning out, yearning, over the bar of Heaven, whilst all around her, the pairs of lovers were conjoined in bliss, all their tears wiped away, conjugial angels two-in-one, as Mr Hawke was fond of pointing out, as though Mr Rossetti was an instinctive Swedenborgian. Sophy Sheekhy’s mind was like a river, in the depths of which strong and uncontrollable currents pulled and drove, but was frilled and feathered on the surface with little tossing waves of ordinary female sentimentality. She looked at her own face in the mirror and imagined the face of the Damozel, with her one white rose of Mary’s gift, her corn-yellow hair, her bosom which made the bar she leant on warm. Sophy Sheekhy could see the passionate girl in the tart, etched Mrs Jesse, with her lined hands and folded neck, though she sensed other presences too, something feline, something scissor-like. But it was really the Damozel who entranced her, sometimes literally, in Rossetti’s poem. It was the distances. He knew something she knew. She stared into her eyes in the mirror and recited his Heavenly House.
It lies in Heaven, across the flood
Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge.
Around her, lovers, newly met
‘Mid deathless love’s acclaims,
Spoke evermore among themselves
Their heart-remembered names;
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.
The sun was gone now; the curled moon
>
Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
She spoke through the still weather.
Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together.
‘I wish that he were come to me,
For he will come,’ she said.
Sophy Sheekhy’s arms were wrapped about herself and she was swaying slightly, like a lily on its stalk, like a snake before the charmer, back and forth, her hair lifting and slipping on her shoulders. Her voice was low and pure and clear. As she spoke, she saw the thin flames, the moon curled like a feather, and felt herself spinning away from herself, as sometimes happened, as though she had applied her huge eye to the orifice of a great kaleidoscope where her face whirled like a speck of tinsel amongst the feathery flakes, snow-crystals, worlds. She heard herself saying, as though in answer,
‘He will not come,’ she said.
She wept, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
O God, that I were dead.’
That was another poem entirely. Reciting that made her cold all over. She held tighter to herself for comfort, cold breast on cold ledge of arms, little fingers clasping at her ribs. She was sure, almost sure, sure, that something else breathed amongst the floating feathers behind her. Poems rustled together like voices. She felt a stab of pain, like an icicle between the clutched ribs. She heard the rattle of hail, or rain, suddenly in great gusts on the windowpane, like scattered seed. She felt a sudden weight in the room, a heavy space, as one feels tapping at the door of a house, knowing in advance that it is inhabited, before the foot is heard on the stair, the rustle and clink in the hall. She knew she must not look behind her, and knowing that, began drowsily to hum in her head the richness of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’:
Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:
She clos’d the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air, and visions wide:
No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.
Whatever was behind her sighed, and then drew in its breath, with difficulty. Sophy Sheekhy told him dubiously, ‘I think you are there. I should like to see you.’
‘Perhaps you wouldn’t like what you saw,’ she heard, or thought she heard.
‘Was that you?’
‘I said, perhaps you wouldn’t like what you saw.’
‘It isn’t my habit to like or dislike,’ she found herself answering.
She took her candle and held it up to the mirror, still filled with the superstitious sense, like those poetic ladies, Madeline, the Lady of Shalott, that she must not look away from the plane of glass. The candle caused a local shimmer and gloom in the depths in which she thought she saw something move.
‘We cannot always help ourselves as to that,’ he said, much more clearly.
‘Please—’ she breathed to the glass.
She felt him move in on her, closer, closer. She heard the words of the poem spoken in an ironic, slightly harsh voice.
‘Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet,—
Solution sweet:’
Her hand shook, the face behind her bulged and tightened, sagged and reassembled, not pale, but purple-veined, with staring blue eyes and parched thin lips, above a tremulous chin. There was a sudden gust of odour, not rose, not violet, but earth-mould and corruption.
‘You see,’ said the harsh, small voice. ‘I am a dead man, you see.’
Sophy Sheekhy took a breath and turned round. She saw her own little white bed, and a row of doves preening themselves on the cast-iron bedstead. She saw, briefly, a parrot, scarlet and blue, on the windowsill. She saw dark glass, and she saw him, struggling, it seemed to her, to keep his appearance, his sort-of-substance, together, with a kind of deadly defiance.
She knew immediately that he was the man. Not because she recognised him, but because she did not, and yet he fitted the descriptions, the curls, the thin mouth, the bar on the brow. He wore an ancient high-collared shirt, out of fashion when Sophy’s mother was a small child, and stained breeches. He stood there, trembling and morose. The trembling was not exactly human. It caused his body to swell and contract as though sucked out of shape and pressed back into it. Sophy took a few steps towards him. She saw that his brows and lashes were caked with clay. He said again, ‘I am a dead man.’
He moved away from her, walking like someone finding his feet after a long illness, and sat down on the seat in the window, displacing a number of white birds, who ran fluttering and resettled at the foot of the curtains. Sophy followed him, and stood and considered him. He was very young. His lovers on earth watched and waited for him like some wise god gone before, but this young man was younger than she was herself, and seemed to be in the last stages of exhaustion, owing to his state. She had been told, in the Church of the New Jerusalem, of Swedenborg’s encounters with the newly dead, who refused to believe that they were dead, who attended their own funerals with indignant interest. Later, Swedenborg taught, the dead, who took with them into the next world the affections and minds of this terrestrial space, had to find their true selves and their true, their appropriate companions, amongst spirits and angels. They had to learn that they were dead, and then to go on. She said, ‘How is it with you? What is your state?’
‘As you see me. Baffled and impotent.’
‘You are much mourned, much missed. More than any being I know.’
A spasm of anguish twisted the dull red face, and Sophy Sheekhy suddenly felt in her blood and bones that the mourning was painful to him. It dragged him down, or back, or under. He moved his heavy tongue in his mouth, unaccustomed now.
‘I walk. Between. Outside. I cannot tell you. I am part of nothing. Impotent and baffled,’ he added, quick and articulate suddenly, as though these were words he knew, had tamed doggedly in his mind over the long years. Which might not, of course, appear to him to be years. A thousand ages in thy sight are but an instant gone. She spoke from her heart.
‘You are so young.’
‘I am young. And dead.’
‘And not forgotten.’
Again, the same spasm of pain.
‘And alone.’ The pure self-pity of the young.
‘I would like to help you, if I could.’
It was help he appeared to need.
‘Hold me,’ he said. ‘I imagine—you cannot. I am cold. It is dark. Hold me.’
Sophy Sheekhy stood, white.
‘You cannot.’
‘I will.’
She lay on the white bed, and he walked across to her, in his hesitant, imperfect step, and lay beside her, and she cradled his head and his stench on her cold bosom. She closed her eyes, the better to bear it, and felt his weight, the weight, more or less, of a living man, but a man not breathing, a man inert like a side of beef. Perhaps it would kill her, Sophy Sheekhy thought on the surface of her mind, where the ripples crisped away from the dark pool in a flurry of terror. But the depths of the pool bore her up, her and him both, Sophy Sheekhy and the dead young man. With her chilly lips, carefully, she kissed his cold curls. Could he feel her kiss? Could she warm him?
‘Be still,’ she said, as she would to a fractious child.
He put a kind of hand on to her shoulder, where it burned like ice. ‘Speak. To. Me.’
‘What? What shall I say?’
‘Your name. John Keats.’
‘My name is Sophy Sheekhy. I can—I can say the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. If you would like—’
‘Say that. Yes.’
‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.’
‘He knew,’ he said. ‘The energetic principle of love for the beautiful. I remember. I restored a word to life, for him. Sensuous. My word. Not sensual. Sensuous.’ The husky voice faltered and then took on strength: ‘ “O for a life of sensation rather than thought.” Both gone. Here, both gone. Sophy Sheekhy. Pistis Sophia. Poems are the ghosts of sensations, Pistis Sophia, the ghosts of thoughts, they move in the mind, my dear, and are also thoughts and sensations, both at once. Your bosom warms me, Pistis Sophia, as a frozen snake is warmed. It was Pistis Sophia, the gnostics said, who sent the first snake into Paradise.’
‘Who is Pistis Sophia?’
‘Why, my dear, the Angel in the Garden, before Man. The energetic principle of love for the beautiful. They were young men, Keats and Shelley. I felt kindly to them, they were so young. Speak more. Darkling I listen. Darkling.’
‘Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.’
‘The feel of not to feel it,’ whispered the creature in her arms. It was growing heavier. Breathing was harder. Sophy Sheekhy faltered.
‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down …’
Her companion exhaled. She felt his icy breath pass her ear.
‘Not he: but something which possessed