by A. S. Byatt
‘No. But he is only flesh and blood, I think.’
‘Inhabited by a living spirit, my dear, which can also be dangerous.’
‘I know. But at the moment, I more fear the dead. Let us face him out. He may pass by.’
They stopped, and the following footsteps stopped, and then came on, slower, more hesitant. They stood still under their chosen lamp, clutching their umbrellas. The steps came on, and were seen to belong to a shaggy creature in a shapeless greatcoat and a dark cap. When he came up to them, he stopped stock-still, and stood and looked at them.
‘Why are you following us?’ said Mrs Papagay.
‘Ah,’ said the watcher. ‘It is you. I was not quite sure in the dark, but now I see it is you, plain as plain. I went to your house, and all was dark and closed, but the woman in the next house told me you would be going this way—so I set out—it being cold and wet on the doorstep—and myself having had enough cold and wet for two lifetimes. Don’t you know me, Lilias?’
‘Arturo,’ said Mrs Papagay.
‘Twice wrecked,’ he said tentatively. Once cast away. Did you not get my letters, saying I was sailing for home?’
Mrs Papagay shook her head. She was afraid she was breaking up. Her nerves hurt, her head banged, she was like a stunned cow at the slaughterer’s.
‘I have given you a frightful shock,’ said Captain Papagay. ‘I should have waited on the doorstep.’
Mrs Papagay travelled to the mouth of the grave and was brought back on the wings of the wind. Life was pumped into her heart and lungs and she gave a great whirling cry, ‘Arturo, Arturo,’ and flung away her umbrella, which was caught by the wind and went floating away down the street like a giant dandelion-seed. ‘Arturo,’ cried Mrs Papagay. And she leaped at him, so that if he had not been there and solid to hold her up, she must have dashed herself unconscious on the wet pavement. But he was there, and Mrs Papagay came to rest in his arms, and he opened his greatcoat and pulled her in against him, and she smelled his live smell, salt, tobacco, his own hair and skin, unlike any other hair and skin in the whole world, a smell she had kept alive when it had seemed wiser to let it die in the memory of her nostrils. And he buried his face in her hair, and she put her empty arms around his fullness, lean but lively, remembering his shoulder, his ribs, his loins, crying out ‘Arturo’ into his greatcoat and the wind.
And Sophy Sheekhy stood under the lamp, watching the two of them becoming more and more completely entangled in one, as they clutched and touched and babbled. And she thought of all the people in the world whose arms are aching and empty to hold the dead, and of how in stories, and very occasionally in sober fact, the cold and the sea give back what they have taken, or appear to have taken, and this dark windswept conjunction became in her mind a harmonious whole with the vision of the Jesses’ fireside, and the miracle of the tea. A life in death, Sophy Sheekhy thought, turning discreetly away from Mrs Papagay’s dishevelled rapture to the inky black of the sky and the sea, beyond the lamplight.
Acknowledgments
I should like to thank several people for their help, both practical and bibliographical. Ursula Owen and David Miller lent books on bees and angels. My French publishers, Marc and Christiane Kopylov, hunted through second-hand bookstores in Paris. Lisa Appignanesi lent the whole of Swedenborg’s Arcana Caelestia. Gillian Beer and Jenny Uglow made crucial suggestions for reading. Chris O’Toole at the Hope Entomological Institute in Oxford and someone very patient on the entomological enquiry desk at the Science Museum were extraordinarily helpful and interesting. My daughter Isabel Duffy, Elizabeth Allen, and Helena Caletta, most resourceful of booksellers, were both practical and patient. And Jane Turner, at Chatto & Windus, hunted for illustrations with great imagination, as well as erudition.
A work of fiction doesn’t need a bibliography. But I should like to thank Colonel A. Maitland Emmet, whose The Scientific Names of the British Lepidoptera has given me hours of happy reading and inspired much of Matty’s story ‘Things Are Not What They Seem’. Michael Chinery’s Collins Guide to the Insects of Britain and Western Europe has also given me great pleasure and much information. Anyone interested in A. H. Hallam owes a great debt to the late T. H. Vail Motter, editor of The Writings of Arthur H. Hallam, and to Jack Kolb, editor of his Letters. Christopher Ricks’s great edition of Tennyson’s Complete Works is steadily inspiring. I also owe a great deal to Derek Wragge Morley’s The Evolution of an Insect Society. Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room is an excellent study of female mediums in the nineteenth century. And I learned much, with pleasure, from Michael Wheeler’s Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology.
Finally, this book could not have been written without the resources of the London Library.
Illustration
The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Brian Hargreaves, F.R.S.A., for ten line drawings; the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, for two engravings by John Martin from Milton’s Paradise Lost; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, for two drawings by Edward Burne-Jones from ‘The Days of Creation’ (The First and Second Days), and for the drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: ‘Study for The Blessed Damozel’.
ALSO BY A. S. BYATT
ANGELS & INSECTS
In “Morpho Eugenia,” a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a family whose clandestine passions come to seem as inscrutible as the behavior of insects. And in “The Conjugal Angel,” a circle of fictional mediums finds itself haunted by a real historical personage.
Fiction/Literature
BABEL TOWER
Frederica’s husband’s violent streak has turned on her. She flees to London with their young son and gets a teaching job in an art school, where poets and painters are denying the value of the past and fostering dreams of rebellion, which hinge upon a strange, charismatic figure, the unkempt and near-naked Jude Mason.
Fiction/Literature
THE BIOGRAPHER’S TALE
Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student, decides to escape postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. A tantalizing yarn of detection and desire, The Biographer’s Tale is a provocative look at “truth” and our perennial quest for certainty.
Fiction/Literature
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK
When children’s book author Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of a museum, she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined.
Fiction/Literature
THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE’S EYE
In this collection of fairy tales for adults, the title story describes the relationship between a world renowned scholar of the art of storytelling and the marvelous being that lives in a bottle found in an Istanbul bazaar. Byatt renders this interaction of the natural and supernatural not only convincing, but inevitable.
Fiction/Literature
ELEMENTALS
A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince. Striving to master color and line, a painter solves his artistic problems when a magical water snake appears in his pool. Elegantly crafted and suffused with wisdom, these tales are a testament to a writer at the height of her powers.
Fiction/Literature
THE GAME
The Game portrays the sibling rivalry between Cassandra and Julia who, as little girls, played a game in which they entered an alternate world modeled after Arthurian romance. Now they are hostile strangers, until a man they loved and suffered over reenters their lives.
Fiction/Literature
IMAGINING CHARACTERS
In this innovative book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré bring their sensibilities to bear on six novels they h
ave loved: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, Iris Murdoch’s An Unofficial Rose, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Literary Criticism
THE MATISSE STORIES
Each of these narratives is inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, and each is about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling. Beautifully written, intensely observed, The Matisse Stories is fiction of spellbinding authority.
Fiction/Literature
PASSIONS OF THE MIND
Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath, Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison, or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life.
Literary Criticism
SUGAR AND OTHER STORIES
These short stories explore the fragile ties between generations and the dizzying abyss of loss and the memories we construct against it, resulting in a book that compels us to inhabit other lives and return to our own with knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder.
Fiction/Literature
THE VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN
A tale of a brilliant and eccentric family fatefully divided, The Virgin in the Garden is a wonderfully erudite entertainment in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably.
Fiction/Literature
A WHISTLING WOMAN
Frederica lucks into a job hosting a groundbreaking television talk show based in London. Meanwhile, the University is planning a conference on body and mind, and students are establishing an Anti-University. A Whistling Woman is a thought-provoking meditation on psychology, science, religion, ethics, and radicalism and their effects on ordinary lives.
Fiction/Literature
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com