by A. S. Byatt
The usual gathering was assembled in Mrs Jesse’s parlour. It was not a comfortable room; Mrs Jesse had not the knack of comfort; it was a bit dusty, the polish a bit scratched, the lace curtains a little frayed. There were many books, in glass-fronted cases, and various collections of stones and shells gathering dust in bowls and boxes. A telescope stood in the window, its brass excellently polished, and various other nautical instruments, a sextant, a chronometer, compasses, occupied a cabinet of their own. There was also, bright on crimson velvet, Captain Jesse’s Médaille de Sauvetage en Or, specially struck for him by the Emperor Napoleon III, and the Silver Medal of the Royal Humane Society, a moony dinner-plate-sized object. Captain Jesse had won both these awards since his retirement to Margate, where he had, no less than three times, in the absence of a regular lifeboat, roused the fishermen, and launched a boat, himself taking the tiller, to rescue ships foundering in gales and high seas. He had saved the entire crew on each occasion, a French ship, an English ship, and a Spanish ship. This was before Mrs Papagay had made his acquaintance, but she never tired of hearing the details of these wholly practical and wholly romantic rescues. She saw it all, she lived it all, the turmoil of the waters with their lashing crests and their howling, dissolute walls, the scream and roar of the gale, the points of stars amongst racing storm-clouds, the pinpricks of lantern lights in the furious dark, the steadfastness of Captain Jesse, making fast wet ropes with expert hands, clambering here and there on streaming, tilting decks, descending a watery staircase to a bubbling, swirling cabin to rescue the tiny French cabin boy, making the light, semi-conscious body safe in his own lifebelt, although, like too many captains, he was unable to swim. ‘Richard does not know what fear is,’ Mrs Jesse would say, in her resonant solid voice, and the Captain would nod shyly and murmur that it did seem to have been left out of his makeup, he just did what seemed best at the time without counting the cost, he had no doubt but that fear was useful to the majority of men, but it did seem to have been left out of his makeup, he could claim no credit for it, indeed, true courage was only possible to those who felt fear, but he was like the prince in some fairy story or other, he couldn’t remember which, and didn’t rightly know what such a thing was, though he supposed he had observed its operations in others, when he stopped to think about it, which he perhaps didn’t do often enough, no, he didn’t think often enough. Captain Jesse’s conversation was copious and indiscriminate, surprising in so statuesque a man of action.
He was standing in front of the chimneypiece, tall and upright with his white hair and full white beard, talking to Mr Hawke, who combined many offices, deacon in the New Jerusalem Church, editor of the Spiritual Leaflet, agent for the Seamen’s Relief Fund, co-ordinator of the evening meetings. Mr Hawke had nothing hawk-like in his appearance; he was a little round man, an appley man, Mrs Papagay thought, with a spherical belly and spherical shining red cheeks, over which waved tufts of tawny hair under a round pink bald cranium. He was in his fifties, she judged, and unmarried. Both he and Captain Jesse were men who kept up a steady flow of talk, without too much listening to the responses of the other. Mr Hawke was a theological connoisseur. He had been a Ritualist, a Methodist, a Quaker, a Baptist, and had now come to rest, permanently or temporarily, in the Church of the New Jerusalem, which had come into being in the spiritual world in the year 1787 when the old order had passed away, and that Spiritual Columbus, Emanuel Swedenborg, had made his voyages through the various Heavens and Hells of the Universe, which he was shewn was in the form of a Divine Human, every spiritual and every material thing corresponding to some part of this infinite Grand Man.
Captain Jesse and Mr Hawke were both drinking tea. Captain Jesse was speaking about the cultivation of tea on the mountain slopes of Ceylon, describing tea as he had drunk it, ‘aromatic and fresh-tasting, Sir, like an infusion of raspberry-leaves here, tea transported in lead-lined caskets has always a musty overlay to its taste for those who have experienced it where it is grown, out of simple terra-cotta bowls no bigger than this salt-cellar, it tastes of the earth, Sir, and of the sun, a true nectar.’ Mr Hawke was speaking simultaneously of Swedenborg’s incessant coffee-drinking, to the noxious effects of which some less than glorious spirits had ascribed his visions.
‘For coffee, acting on a pure temperament, will they say produce excitability, sleeplessness, abnormal activity of mind and imagination and fantastic visions—also loquacity. I credit these effects of coffee, I have observed it to be so. But he is a medical pedant who would try to pour the Arcana or the Diarium out of a coffee pot. Nevertheless a truth may be hidden here. God made the world, and therefore everything in it, including, I suppose, the coffee-bush and coffee-bean. If coffee disposes to clear-seeing, I do not see that the means injures the end. No doubt seers are as regular fabrics as crystals, and not a drug or berry is omitted from their build, when it is wanted. We live in a material time, Captain Jesse—apart from metaphysics, the time is gone by when anything is made out of nothing. If the visions are good visions, their material origin is also good, I think. Let the visions criticise the coffee and vice versa.’
‘I have known hallucinations to be brought on by green tea,’ replied Captain Jesse. ‘We had a Lascar seaman who regularly saw demons in the rigging until he was induced by a mate to curtail the quantity he imbibed.’
Mrs Papagay moved towards Mrs Jesse, who was sharing the sofa with Mrs Hearnshaw, and handing out tea in cups garlanded with fat rosebuds and bright forget-me-nots. Mrs Hearnshaw was in deep mourning, all black silk, with a black lace cap on her abundant chestnut hair, and a large ebony locket dangling from a chain of carved jet links on to her rounded bosom. Her skin was creamy and her eyes large and limpid brown, but there were blue-grey hollows round them, and her mouth was both pinched and drooping. She had just buried the fifth little Amy Hearnshaw in seven years—they had had brief lives ranging from three weeks to eleven months, and were survived by little Jacob, a sickly pretty boy of three years. Mr Hearnshaw allowed Mrs Hearnshaw to come to the séances, but would not attend himself. He was headmaster of a small school, and held solid Christian beliefs of a gloomy kind. He believed that his daughters’ deaths were tribulations sent by God to test him and punish him for his shortcomings of faith. But he did not go so far as to suggest that there was anything essentially wrong or untoward in the spiritualist activities—angels and spirits thronged the pages of the Old and New Testaments. Mrs Papagay believed that he allowed his wife to come to the séances because otherwise he found the rich violence of her grief intolerable and embarrassing. It was his nature and his profession to repress displays of excessive emotion. If Annie were comforted, his house was calmer. Or so Mrs Papagay, a great weaver of narratives from tenuous threads of looks, words and feelings, supposed he might reason.
Mrs Papagay liked stories. She spun them from bobbins of gossip or observation; she told them to herself at night, or when walking in the streets; she was tempted constantly to step too far in tittle-tattle in order to receive reciprocal nuggets of other lifelines, other chains of cause and effect. When she found herself a widow, without means, she had considered writing stories for a living, but her skills in language were unequal to it, or the movement of the pen in purposeful public writing inhibited her—for whatever reason, what she wrote was stilted, saccharine rubbish, not of interest even to her own eagerness, let alone any anonymous reader’s. (The automatic writing was different.) She had married Mr Papagay, a master mariner of mixed racial origin, because, like Othello with Desdemona, he entranced her with tales of his deeds and sufferings in faraway places. He had been drowned ten years ago, in the Antarctic, or thereabout, or so she believed, since the Calypso had never been seen since, and nor had any of its crew. She had attended her first séance really in order to find out whether she was or was not a widow, and had been answered, as is so often the case, ambiguously. The medium on that occasion, an amateur, flushed with the recent discovery of her powers, had dictated a message from Arturo P
apagay, identifying his black wavy hair, his gold tooth, his cornelian seal-ring, and claiming to tell his dearest darling love that he was at rest, and wished her to be calm and glad as he was that the time was coming when the first heaven and the first earth should pass away, and there would be no more sea, and God should wipe away all tears from their eyes.
Mrs Papagay was not quite sure that this message did emanate from Arturo, whose endearments were briefer and cruder and naughtier, and who would have been quite unable to be complacently happy at rest in a world where there was no more sea. Arturo had to be doing, and the sea drew him like a magnet, its smell, its breath, its shifting, dangerous weight, going down and down. When Mrs Papagay tried the automatic writing on her own for the first time, she received, she thought, indisputable messages from Arturo, then or now, alive or dead, tangled in seaweed or in her memory. Her respectable fingers wrote out imprecations in various languages she knew nothing of, and never sought to have translated, for she knew well enough approximately what they were, with their fs and cons and cuns, Arturo’s little words of fury, Arturo’s little words, also, of intense pleasure. She said dreamily, ‘O, are you dead or alive, Arturo?’ and the reply was ‘Naughty-lus tangle-shells sand sand break break breaker c.f.f.c. naughty Lilias, infin che’l mar fu sopra noi richiuso.’
From which she concluded that on the whole he was probably drowned, not without struggle. So she put on mourning, took in two lodgers, tried her hand at a novel, and lived more and more in the passive writing.
Little by little she had made herself part of the community of those who sought to make contact with the spirit world. She was a welcome addition to séances in private houses, for in her presence the unseen visitors always rapped more busily and sent messages both more detailed and more surprising than the vague assurances they were given to. She began to be able to go into trance, an experience somewhat like a fainting-fit, hot, cold, clammy, nauseous and distressing in its lack of control to someone as sharp and orderly as Mrs Papagay. She was aware, from the other end of some cream-coloured, maggot-coloured, reticulated tunnel, of her own boots thrashing the carpet, of her poor throat-strings straining as harsh voices spoke through her. She realized that she had not until now been quite sure that the passive writing was not done by some other part of her coherent Self. Through her a good spirit called Pomona and a mischievous and interfering one called Dago spoke alternately. She went into trance less often now she had Sophy Sheekhy as a companion, for Sophy seemed to slip easily into some other world, leaving behind her a creature clay-cold, whose breath barely misted a silver spoon. She reported strange visions, and strange sayings, she was able to tell, with astonishing exactness, where lost objects and lost relations were to be found. Mrs Papagay was convinced that Sophy could make the spirits materialise if she chose, like the famous Florence Cook and her control Katie King. Sophy, who was slow to evince curiosity, and slow to see her own interests, said, ‘Why?’ and added that she could not imagine why the dead should want to have their bodies back, it was so much better to be as they were. They didn’t exist to perform circus tricks, said Sophy Sheekhy. That would hurt them. Mrs Papagay was too intelligent not to take her point.
They had now insensibly, with a certain small cunning, slipped from the world of the purely amateur and private experiment to the delicately arranged world of the paid mediums. Nothing vulgar—‘gifts’ from the gentlemen who arranged these matters, fees for consultations (‘It is my right, Mrs Papagay, if I call upon your skills as I might upon those of a minister of the Church, a great musician, or a healer. We must all of us have the wherewithal to keep body and soul together, until the blessed moment when we step over the bourne to join those Others, Beyond’).
Mrs Papagay was an intelligent, questioning kind of woman, the kind who, in an earlier age, would have been a theologically minded nun, and in a later one would have had a university training in philosophy or psychology or medicine. She asked herself from time to time large questions, such as why had the Dead just now, just recently, with such persistence, chosen to try to break back into the land of the living with raps, taps, messages, emanations, materialisations, spirit-flowers and travelling bookshelves? She did not know much history, though she had read all the novels of Walter Scott, but she imagined that there must once have been a time when they went further away, and stayed there. In the days of the Disciples and of the Prophets before them, it was true, the lovely angels had sailed in and out of people’s lives, bringing with them bright soft lights, heavenly music, and a rush of mysterious importance. The Church Fathers too had seen them and some had seen unquiet spirits. Hamlet’s father had walked and the sheeted dead had squeaked and gibbered in the streets of Rome—there had always been, Mrs Papagay was quite sure, odd little local apparitions in highways and byways and old dwellings, things that went bump, or gave off disagreeable smells or enchanting twangs, things that came and stared gruesomely or made you feel chilled to the bone and mournful, the boggart, the bogle, the tenacious presence of some cross dead farmer or young woman in terrible pain.
But these recent armies of the night, uncles and aunts, poets and painters, innocent infants and uproarious drowned sailors, who stood it seemed behind every chair and were imprisoned in every cupboard, who congregated thickly in the garden and trooped together up the stairs, where had they suddenly come from, what did they require? On the walls of old churches, behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel, they could be seen in their old accustomed places sitting in serried ranks in the gold-crowned heavenly congregation, moaning and writhing in the arms of black goat-foots with hot red tongues on their way down to the nether pit. Were they displaced now by new knowledge? The stars rushed and shone in vacant spaces, they were suns which could engulf this little world in fire, like an orange-pip on coals. Below the pit were the green fields of New Zealand and the red deserts of Australia. Mrs Papagay thought, we know that now, we imagine that it is so, up and down are losing their grip on us. And yet we cannot bear the next thought, that we become nothing, like grasshoppers and beef-cattle. So we ask them, our personal angels, for reassurance. And they come, they come to our call.
But it was not for that, she knew in her heart of hearts, that she travelled to séances, that she wrote and rapped and bellowed, it was for now, it was for more life now, it was not for the Hereafter, which would be as it was, as it always had been. For what had lain in wait for her, a dubious widow, in straitened circumstances, but constriction and tedium? She could not bear to sit and gossip of bonnets and embroidery and the eternal servant problem, she wanted life. And this traffic with the dead was the best way to know, to observe, to love the living, not as they were politely over teacups, but in their secret selves, their deepest desires and fears. They revealed themselves to her, to Lilias Papagay, as they would never have done in usual society. Mrs Jesse, for instance, was not rich, but she was a gentlewoman, Captain Jesse’s family were landed gentry. Mrs Papagay would not have mixed socially with the Jesses if it were not for the democracy of the Spirit World.
II
Mrs Jesse was a small, handsome woman in her early sixties, with an imposing head which sometimes appeared too large for her slight body. She had very clear blue eyes in a deep-lined, brown-skinned gipsyish face, with a strong profile. Her fine dark hair, streaked with grey, was still abundant; she wore it in delicate bandeaux, falling at the sides of her face. She had bird-hands and a bird-sharp look, and a surprisingly deep resonant voice. Mrs Papagay had been much surprised by its strong Lincolnshire accent. Mrs Jesse was given to emphatic pronouncements—on the first occasion Mrs Papagay had met her, there had been a discussion of the process of grief, and Mrs Jesse had nodded sagely, ‘I know that. I have felt that,’ like a kind of tragic chorus. ‘I have felt everything; I know everything. I don’t want any new emotion. I know what it is to feel like a stoän.’ If this vatic, repetitive note reminded Mrs Papagay of Mr Poe’s terrible Raven with his ‘Nevermore’, this was partly because Mrs Jesse was always
accompanied by her own pet raven, Aaron, who was secured to her wrist by a leather leash and was fed from a sinister little pouch of raw meat which travelled with it. Aaron came to the séances, as did Pug, an elephant-coloured beast, with tiny ivory teeth resting on his drooping lips, and intelligent, bulging brown eyes. Pug was insensible to the fluctuations of emotion round the table, and tended to lie snoozing on the couch, occasionally even snoring, or emitting other wet, explosive animal noises at the most sensitive moments. Aaron too provided occasional distractions at times of intense concentration—a rattle of claws, a sudden raucous cry, or the rustle of his feathers as he shook himself.
Mrs Jesse was the heroine of a tragic story. In her youth, when she was nineteen, she had loved and been loved by a brilliant young man, a university friend of her brother’s, who had visited the Rectory where the family lived secluded, and had almost immediately seen that they were soul-mates, and asked her to be his wife. Fate, initially in the shape of the young man’s worldly and ambitious father, had intervened. He was forbidden to see her, or to form an engagement to her, until his twenty-first birthday. This day had come and gone: despite continuing absence and opposition the lovers had persisted faithfully in their truth to each other. The engagement had been announced—the young man had spent a family Christmas with his beloved and her family. Devoted letters had been exchanged. In the Summer of 1833 he had travelled abroad with his father, and had written to her—Ma douce amie—from Hungary, from Pesth, on the way to Vienna. Early in October Mrs Jesse’s brother had received a letter from the young man’s uncle. Mrs Papagay knew its beginning by heart. She had heard it in Mrs Jesse’s deep melancholy voice; she had heard it, word for word, in Captain Jesse’s light ruminative babble.
