by A. S. Byatt
He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.
She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead.
The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry the wheels of his chariots?
Her wise ladies answered her, yea, she returned answer to herself,
Have they not sped? have they not divided the prey; to every man a damsel or two; to Sisera a prey of divers colours, a prey of divers colours of needlework, of divers colours of needlework on both sides, meet for the necks of them that take the spoil?
So let all thine enemies perish, O LORD.
I love the rhythms of that. I love to think of those seventeenth-century bishops, in a world where bishops were regularly burned for believing, or not believing, things, making those rhythms. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead. I don’t know what Hebrew rhythm they were echoing, but the English is done with heavy monosyllables, strokes of the hammer, strokes of the axe, and yet it flows, too. All those rhythms and phrases are vanishing from our world. My mother, every time she opened the fridge, would say, ‘Here is the butter in a lordly dish,’ and when I found it in the Bible, it was a piece fitting into a cultural jigsaw. It is a long time ago. The fridge was our first, and very new. In the war, our milk and butter were in earthenware pots under wet muslin veils, weighted with little heavy clay beads, red and blue.
When I did the Grenadine commercial, I made a red silk tent that made great pools of red light on a glittery sandy floor. The politically incorrect desert warrior poured the crimson juice from a kind of Venetian claret jug. There was a lordly dish on a low table, with a great swirling pyramid of something creamy that caught the pink light. Lara, who is my assistant director and wants my job, says you can’t make images like that any more. People have the wrong associations to desert warriors and captive pale maidens. She just looked blank when I told her that I’d also been playing with the image of Persephone, eating pomegranate seeds in the underworld, with dusky-skinned gloomy Dis. I had a lovely plate of the seeds, too, another richer, if less lordly, dish, next to the buttery stuff, little bits of pink jelly, glistening. I shouldn’t have told her about Persephone; it convinced her even more that I’m passé, in need of replacement, encumbered with dead cultural baggage. I might have done better to tell her about my other idea, about hand grenades being called grenades, like Grenadine, because they resemble pomegranates, in shape, and in being full of explosive seeds. What a delicious metaphor, sheets of red juice, explosions of extreme sensuality, sheets of red blood. Attached to nothing, it’s just the quirky way my mind works. I got a First at Cambridge, writing Empsonian essays unpacking complicated multiple metaphors. Unpacking’s a more modern word, we didn’t use it then, you could make a film where you opened a velvet ball and floods of red silk and light filled the screen – what would you use that for? It’s odd to be a pointless poet who doesn’t make poems, only commercials for fruit drinks. I enjoy that. It’s never dull. Lately it’s become a bit frightening.
Anyway, Jael. Why do I remember Jael? Metaphors. I do know – I have always known – that I felt a faint click of symmetry as I drove the point of my pencil into the paper. Pencil, peg. Another detached image, like the grenade. Pointed. Pointless. I do know also that whenever I remember that patch of fierce colour I remember, like an after-image, a kind of dreadful murky colour, a yellow-khaki-mustard-thick colour, that is the colour of the days of our boredom. For we were not unhappy girls, we were cared-for, nice, clever girls, and we were bored. It’s quite hard to think back to that time. All the buildings were the same colours, green and cream. We wore milk-chocolate-coloured gymslips over khaki-coloured shirts, with what we then amiably called nigger-brown ties. I do not believe any of us thought of the nasty meaning of those words, nigger-brown, we just recognised the colour. Ignorance, innocence, boredom. It’s strange how I hesitate, out of fear, to write down the true fact that we used that word, in that unloaded way. It’s so long ago, we shall be judged without being imagined. All the excitement of life was in books. Jane Eyre, with her burning bed-curtains, or being punished in the Red Room (I’ve made films with both those images, fire insurance and children’s furniture). Ivanhoe charging, Robin Hood in the dappled green light with his bow, Eliza escaping across the breaking ice, wolves and narwhals, volcanoes and tidal waves, excitement was all in books, none of it, nothing at all, seeped out into life. We were the pre-television age, and we cannot – that is, the absolute quality of our boredom cannot – be imagined by those who grew up with the magic lantern, the magic window on the world, the Pandora’s box peopling the world with temptations and emotions and knowledge and other places and people in the corner of the lounge/sitting room/front room. I know young people now have a worked-up nostalgia for an imaginary time when families communicated, people made things, played games, instead of passively watching. Now and then we did. I remember the physical pleasure of frenzied playground skipping. I remember the passionate life with which I invested a collection of lead ponies. But mostly – apart from books – I remember this smeared, fuggy, limited light of boredom, where you couldn’t see very much or very far, and the horizon was unimaginable.
Human beings are human beings, Lara and the cameramen might say. You must have had loves and hatreds, friends and enemies, then, as now. We did have gangs. We had two gangs, in our class, to be precise. They were called, unimaginatively, after their ‘leaders’. One was Wendy’s gang, and the other was Rachel’s gang. Wendy’s gang was bigger, because Wendy was the most popular girl in the class, which was surprising, perhaps, since she was also both the cleverest girl and the best at sports, more or less. She came top in English, and top in Maths (and top in Scripture, as far as I can remember – Scripture, as I said, didn’t count). She won races, particularly long-distance ones, particularly the junior school cross-country run. Wendy was good-looking in a completely inoffensive, unexceptionable way. She had honey-blonde hair, blue eyes, a broad brow, a wide mouth. She was tall, but not too tall, she was developing into a woman, but not awkwardly. She was a nice girl. It wasn’t fair that she should have everything, and be nice with it, but that was how it was. She was the person in the parable of the talents who was given ten talents and industriously made another ten talents. (Did I see myself as the servant with the one talent, who hid it in the earth in case it got stolen?) Rachel was dark, and sinewy, good too at games but not at all in Wendy’s class as an academic high-flyer. Rachel had deep-set brown eyes, and straight black plaits, and long fine hands, and an indefinable sexiness, nothing to do with puberty. It was Wendy who had the beginnings of breasts. Rachel was thin and wiry. Wendy was going to pass the eleven-plus into the senior school with no problem, whereas Rachel’s future was uncertain, and she showed a mild sulky rebelliousness to the teachers. I should think Rachel’s gang was about a third the size of Wendy’s. The girls in it were naughtier, less conformist. In the context, you must understand, of our all being totally respectable nice girls.
Wendy’s gang, at playtime, sat around on the low stone wall round the netball courts and Rachel’s gang met in the bushes, in the sooty Victorian laurel-bushes near the gate into the school grounds.
I think, looking back, that Rachel had leadership qualities, and that Wendy didn’t – she was simply too agreeable, her gang clustered round her because she was a star whose star quality was a perfect normality. Looking back, I think you could call it grace. She did things – things she was asked to do, things she was expected to do, things she mildly liked to do – as well as she could, and was briefly surprised to find that no one else could do them anywhere near
as well. Whereas Rachel was moody. You had to be on the right side of her, or she picked on you. No, I can’t remember any instance of her picking on anyone, nothing so precise. Just an atmosphere, a smoke, of possible danger.
There was a fringe of girls, like myself, who hung around the edges of the gangs, not sure if we were admitted as members or not. Because we weren’t sure, we were also uncertain what the gangs did. What was being discussed, in secret whispers, in smuggled notes in Scripture lessons, in the bogs. We thought, if we could be in the inner circle – both gangs had an inner circle of about four or five acolytes and the Leader – we would be part of something that was going on, we would be less bored.
I know now, I know the secret of what was going on. It was nothing at all. Or at least, all that was going on was the self-perpetuation of the structure of the gangs, the inner circles, the outer circles, the tension between Wendy’s gang in the sun and Rachel’s in the shade. We were in a green suburb of an industrial town, and when we crossed the town, on winter afternoons, to go home to tea, we saw real gangs, that is, active gangs, boys with bicycle chains, boys with knives and heavy boots, boys whose doings were reported in the papers, sometimes. We hurried past, looking unfrightened, walking together, safety in numbers. But our gangs were not gangs. Nothing ever happened.
Or at least, I think nothing happened. No, change that, something happened, but I do not remember how.
I had the idea, because I read so many books, that treachery would make the gangs interesting. A girl could betray the secrets of one gang to the other, if she could find any secrets to betray. I think I was interested in treachery because of the charm of Rupert of Hentzau. I hadn’t met that other charmer, Edmund in King Lear, I’m fairly sure. I may have hit on some narrative universal: what is interesting about boring gangs has to be treachery. It was a silly idea, because, as I said, there were no secrets, no plans of battle, no battles, nothing to betray. I watch Lara betraying me with all the inventiveness of her, our, fraught and hyperactive trade, and I look back on the innocent child I was, with my dreams of drama, with a sad pity. Our world is full of a buzz about surveys which have been commissioned which show that one boring commercial can lose the audience for the whole commercial break round it, can even diminish the audience for the television programme into which our break breaks. She is putting it about, in whispers, that another soft-drinks firm has done a survey that shows that both my Spanaranja and my Grenadine films are infecting whole slots with boredom and apathy. I think, myself, she invented not only the findings, but the survey. It was, I have to admit, a resourceful idea, which will leave a question hanging like smoke in the atmosphere, even if I manage to get rid of the survey or demolish its hypothesised findings. She’s quick, and she’s brave. She lives in a world of interactive computer-generated gladiators, bomb-lobbers, kamikaze scantily clad dolls, headsmen with swords and laser-duellists my reactions aren’t quick enough for. She can fill screens with blood I shall drown in, at the touch of her glossy black fingernails.
I did have another idea, I think, about Wendy and Rachel. I thought, if some girl stretched a dark cord across the path, in the cross-country run, she could bring down Wendy in her pride as she strode past, leaving the way clear for Rachel, who would be impressed and grateful. It would be a real secret, something would really have happened, that could never be told. It would be real treachery, not just giggling and whispering. Rachel would be able to recognise the degree of difference, between talk and something really happening, for once. I didn’t have this idea, particularly, because I was in love with Rachel and hated Wendy. Or the other way round, because I was in love with Wendy, and she spurned me for her inner circle. She never exactly spurned anyone – her inner circle got there through the greater persistence of their greater desire. I don’t think I was in love with either of them, or with anyone, except Sir Lancelot, and Rupert, and Saladin, and Mr Rochester. I was afraid of being annihilated by boredom, of there never being anything else. Once I thought about talking to Rachel about my idea about the cord, of course, I saw how impossible the idea was. She wouldn’t have listened, and might have reacted quite nastily, or been put off, or even scared. The scenario of her secret gratitude was just that – a tenuous scenario, and I abandoned it. I was sorry, because I knew where the good place to stretch the cord would be, between the trees in a copse on the climb round the rough scree near the old quarry. There was cover for the traitor to retrieve the cord, and get away, in the confusion. The traitor would be dressed for the race, but would have skipped a large part of the circuit, cutting straight through the trees.
The thing that happened was, that Wendy, running easily, and well ahead of everyone else, did stumble and fall, in exactly that place. She fell quite a way, down the scree, and hit her head very nastily on a sharp stone, and broke a vertebra and a rib, and was in hospital for quite a long time. She was unconscious for quite a long time, too, and when she did come round was, to use a cliché which is conveniently to hand, ‘never the same again’. A light went out. She took the eleven-plus with the rest of us, and didn’t pass. Neither did Rachel, or not to our very superior school, and after a time I heard no more of either of them. I don’t know what became of Wendy after the Secondary Modern. I have a very clear memory of the piece of cord – sort of fairly thick garden twine, such as my father had in his shed, a dark khaki-green twine, completely invisible over dead leaves and puddles. I have the opposite of Alzheimer’s, I remember things I really think didn’t happen. After all, my job is scenarios, is finding props, is imagining lighting, the figure entering the frame, and ACTION. I remember Jael because the story doesn’t quite make sense, the emotions are all in a muddle, you are asked to rejoice in wickedness. I remember Jael because of the delicious red, because of the edge of excitement in wielding the pencil-point, because I had a half-a-glimpse of making art and colour.
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
(detail), Diego Velázquez, c. 1618
Christ in the House of
Martha and Mary
Cooks are notoriously irascible. The new young woman, Dolores, was worse than most, Concepción thought. Worse and better, that was. She had an extraordinary fine nose for savours and spices, and a light hand with pastries and batters, despite her stalwart build and her solid arms. She could become a true artist, if she chose, she could go far. But she didn’t know her place. She sulked, she grumbled, she complained. She appeared to think it was by some sort of unfortunate accident that she had been born a daughter of servants, and not a delicate lady like Doña Conchita who went to church in sweeping silks and a lace veil. Concepción told Dolores, not without an edge of unkindness, that she wouldn’t look so good in those clothes, anyway. You are a mare built for hard work, not an Arab filly, said Concepción. You are no beauty. You are all brawn, and you should thank God for your good health in the station to which he has called you. Envy is a deadly sin.
It isn’t envy, said Dolores. I want to live. I want time to think. Not to be pushed around. She studied her face in a shining copper pan, which exaggerated the heavy cheeks, the angry pout. It was true she was no beauty, but no woman likes being told so. God had made her heavy, and she hated him for it.
The young artist was a friend of Concepción’s. He borrowed things, a pitcher, a bowl, a ladle, to sketch them over and over. He borrowed Concepción, too, sitting quietly in a corner, under the hooked hams and the plaits of onions and garlic, and drawing her face. He made Concepción look, if not ideally beautiful, then wise and graceful. She had good bones, a fine mouth, a wonderful pattern of lines on her brow, and etched beside her nose, which Dolores had not been interested in until she saw the shapes he made from them. His sketches of Concepción increased her own knowledge that she was not beautiful. She never spoke to him, but worked away in a kind of fury in his presence, grinding the garlic in the mortar, filleting the fish with concentrated skill, slapping dough,
making a tattoo of sounds with the chopper, like hailstones, reducing onions to fine specks of translucent light. She felt herself to be a heavy space of unregarded darkness, a weight of miserable shadow in the corners of the room he was abstractedly recording. He had given Concepción an oil painting he had made, of shining fish and white solid eggs, on a chipped earthenware dish. Dolores did not know why this painting moved her. It was silly that oil paint on board should make eggs and fish more real, when they were less so. But it did. She never spoke to him, though she partly knew that if she did, he might in the end give her some small similar patch of light in darkness to treasure.
Sunday was the worst day. On Sunday, after Mass, the family entertained. They entertained family and friends, the priest and sometimes the bishop and his secretary, they sat and conversed, and Doña Conchita turned her dark eyes and her pale, long face to listen to the Fathers, as they made kindly jokes and severe pronouncements on the state of the nation, and of Christendom. There were not enough servants to keep up the flow of sweetmeats and pasties, syllabubs and jellies, quails and tartlets, so that Dolores was sometimes needed to fetch and carry as well as serve, which she did with an ill grace. She did not cast her eyes modestly down, as was expected, but stared around her angrily, watching the convolutions of Doña Conchita’s neck with its pretty necklace, the tapping of her pretty foot, directed not at the padre whose words she was demurely attending to, but at young Don José on the other side of the room. Dolores put a hot dish of peppers in oil down on the table with such force that the pottery burst apart, and oil and spices ran into the damask cloth. Doña Ana, Doña Conchita’s governess, berated Dolores for a whole minute, threatening dismissal, docking of wages, not only for clumsiness but for insolence. Dolores strode back into the kitchen, not slinking, but moving her large legs like walking oak trees, and began to shout. There was no need to dismiss her, she was off. This was no life for a human being. She was no worse than they were, and more of use. She was off.