Angels & Insects: Two Novellas

by A. S. Byatt

  My dear Sir,

  At the desire of a most afflicted family, I write to you, because they are unequal, from the Abyss of grief into which they have fallen, to do it themselves.

  Your friend, Sir, and my much loved Nephew, Arthur Hallam, is no more—it has pleased God to remove him from this his first scene of Existence, to that better World, for which he was Created …

  Poor Arthur had a slight attack of Ague—which he had often had—Order’d his fire to be lighted—and talked with as much cheerfulness as usual—He suddenly became insensible and his Spirit departed without Pain—The Physician endeavour’d to get any Blood from him—and on Examination it was the General Opinion, that he could not have lived long—

  She had come downstairs, the young woman, hearing the post arrive, hoping, and had had that read out to her by her stricken brother, and the world had gone from her darkened eyes, she had fallen in a deep faint from which the awakening had been more terrible, more shocking, than the first blow, so she told it, and so Mrs Papagay believed it, even experienced it, so intense was the telling. ‘It appears’, Mrs Jesse would narrate, ‘that he went so quietly, so imperceptibly, that his father was able to sit by the fire with him, supposing they were both companionably reading, until it struck him that the silence was too prolonged, or maybe that something was amiss, we do not know, and he does not remember. For when he touched my dearest Arthur, his head was not in a wholly natural position—and he did not reply—so a surgeon was sent for, and a vein opened in his arm and another in his hand—all to no avail, he was gone forever.’

  For a year after this black day she had kept herself closed in her bedchamber, prostrated with pain and shock, reappearing to her family and friends—Mrs Papagay imagined the scene not from within the young woman’s body, as she did the first shock, but through the wondering eyes of the assembled company, as she crept into the room, painfully and proudly erect, in the deepest mourning, but with one white rose in her hair, as her Arthur loved to see her. She was back in the world but not of the world, she was soul-sick and dwelt in shadows. Too late, too late, as is always the case in tragic tales, the harsh father repented his cruelty, and his son’s beloved was invited to that house where she had never come with her lover, became the bosom friend of his sister, the ‘widowed daughter’ of his sorrowing mother, the recipient, so it was put about, of a generous annuity of £300 per annum. These things are always secret and are always known, gossip whispers from drawing-room to drawing-room, generosity is praised and at the same time questioned sneeringly for motive—to buy affection? to alleviate guilt? to ensure perpetual devotion? This last had clearly not been wholly or perfectly achieved, for there had been Captain Jesse. Quite how or where he had come into the picture Mrs Papagay did not know. Gossip put it about that the marriage had been a cruel disappointment both to old Mr Hallam and to Mrs Jesse’s brother, Alfred, Arthur’s great friend. Mrs Papagay had been shown—in the strictest confidence—a letter from the poetess Elizabeth Barrett (before she became Mrs Browning and before she herself joined the happy band of Spirits) in which she characterised Mrs Jesse’s behaviour as a ‘disgrace to womanhood’ and ‘a climax of badness’. Miss Barrett referred contemptuously to Captain Jesse—then in 1842, Lieutenant Jesse—as a ‘lubberly Lieutenant’. She despised both bride and groom for accepting the continuation of the annuity which old Mr Hallam had with great generosity not withdrawn. And she rose to a climax of indignation over what Mrs Papagay was sometimes disposed to think was a poetic and romantic touch, the naming of the first son, Arthur Hallam Jesse. ‘That last was a desperate grasp at a “sentiment”—and missed!’ pronounced Miss Barrett, all those years ago. Perhaps Mrs Browning would have been more charitable? Mrs Papagay wondered. Her sympathies were so wonderfully enlarged by her own flight and marriage.

  Mrs Papagay herself liked to think of this naming as a gage of perpetuity, a Life-in-Death for the dead lover, an assertion of the wondrous community of the Spirit World, for believers. For had not the Lord himself said, ‘In Heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage.’ Though again, Emanuel Swedenborg, who had been there, had seen the marriages of the Angels, which corresponded to the Union between Christ and His Church, and so knew differently, at least could expatiate on why Our Lord had said that, when conjugial love was so important to Angels. To be called Arthur Hallam Jesse had not been entirely fortunate for the elder son, as it turned out. He was some kind of military man, but seemed to live in a world of his own, perhaps because, like Captain Jesse’s, his bright blue eyes saw very little beyond his nose. He had, like his father and brother, a face both romantically handsome and gently amiable. Old Mr Hallam was his godfather, as he was also godfather to Alfred’s elder son, also piously named in memoriam, though this was not disapproved of in the same way, since Alfred Tennyson had written In Memoriam, which had made Arthur Hallam, A. H. H., an object of national mourning nearly twenty years after his death, and had later caused the nation somehow to confound his young promise with the much-mourned Prince Albert, let alone the legendary King Arthur, the flower of chivalry and soul of Britain.

  Sophy Sheekhy knew large runs of In Memoriam by heart. She liked poems, it appeared, though she could never get interested in novels, a curious quirk of taste, Mrs Papagay thought. She said she liked the rhythms, it put her in the mood, the rhythms first, then the meanings. Mrs Papagay herself liked Enoch Arden, a tragic tale of a wrecked sailor who returned to find his wife happily married, with children, and died in virtuous self-abnegation. The plot resembled the plot of Mrs Papagay’s aborted novel, in which a sailor, having been the single survivor of a vessel burned in mid-ocean, and having been rescued after many weeks floating on a raft under the hot sun, imprisoned by amorous Tahitian princesses, taken off by pirates, pressed by a man-of-war who had overcome the pirates, wounded in a great battle, returned to his Penelope only to find her the wife of his hated cousin and mother of many little ones with his features but not his. This last Mrs Papagay thought was a fine, tragically ironic touch, but her imagination was not equal to fire, slavery, Tahiti or the press-gangs, although Arturp had often enough made these live vividly for her as they walked the Downs or sat by the fire by night. She missed Arturo still, the more so because no second lover had presented himself to distract her. She was particularly fond of one of the Laureate’s lyrics about the dangers of the return of the dead.

  That could the dead, whose dying eyes

  Were closed with wail, resume their life,

  They would but find in child and wife

  An iron welcome when they rise:

  ‘Twas well, indeed, when warm with wine,

  To pledge them with a kindly tear,

  To talk them o’er, to wish them here,

  To count their memories half divine;

  But if they came who past away,

  Behold their brides in other hands;

  The hard heir strides about their lands,

  And will not yield them for a day.

  Yea, though their sons were none of these,

  Not less the yet-loved sire would make

  Confusion worse than death, and shake

  The pillars of domestic peace.

  Ah dear, but come thou back to me:

  Whatever change the years have wrought,

  I find not yet one lonely thought

  That cries against my wish for thee.

  ‘ “Ah dear, but come thou back to me,” ’ Mrs Papagay murmured to herself, along with the Queen and countless other bereaved men and women, in one great rhythmic sigh of hopeless hope. And so she felt too, it was certain, Emily Tennyson, Emily Jesse, the love the young man had tasted with half his mind and not touched, for she called on him at their meetings, she desired to see and hear him, he was alive to her, though gone for forty-two years, almost twice the length of his stay on earth. They had never succeeded unambiguously in communicating with him—not even Sophy Sheekhy—and Mrs Papagay, a connoisseur of self-deception and vain images, co
uld only admire the integrity with which Mrs Jesse refused squarely to be seduced by simulacra, or peevish spirits, to drive tables with her own knees or to urge herself and Sophy to greater efforts. ‘He has gone a long way away, I think,’ Sophy had said once, ‘he has a lot to think about.’ ‘He always had,’ said Mrs Jesse. ‘And we are told we do not change beyond the grave, only continue in the path we are in.’

  III

  The sofa on which Emily Jesse sat with Mrs Hearnshaw was high-backed and ample, covered with a printed linen designed by William Morris, which showed a trellis of dark boughs, at once randomly crossing and geometrically repeating, on a mysterious deep green ground, the colour, Emily thought, with the inveterate romanticism of her family, of deep forests, of holly thickets, of evergreen glades. The boughs were studded with little star-like white flowers, and between them loomed pomegranates, crimson and gold, and small crested birds in blue and rose, with creamy speckled breasts and crossed bills, a kind of impossible hybrid of exotic Amazonian parrakeets and the English mistle thrush. Emily was not houseproud—she believed there were higher things in life than crockery and Sunday roasts—but she took pleasure in the sofa, in Mr Morris’s weaving of a kind of formal, solid series of magical objects which recalled to her childhood days in the white Rectory in Somersby, when the eleven of them had played at the Arabian Nights and the Court of Camelot, when her tall brothers had fenced on the lawn with foils and masks crying, ‘Have at thee, toad-spotted traitor!’ or defended the little bridge over the subsequently immortalised brook with staves against the village boys, like Robin Hood. Everything was double there, then—it was real and loved, here and now, it was glittering with magic and breathing out a faint cold perfume of a lost world, a king’s orchard, the garden of Haroun al-Raschid. The windows of the Gothic dining-room which their furiously energetic father, the Rector, had built with his own hands and the help of his coachman Horlins, could be seen doubly by the active imagination, embrasures to frame ladies in the latest modes, ready to slip away to trysts, or magic casements behind which Guenevere and the Lily Maid waited with beating hearts for their lovers. Mr Morris’s sofa acknowledged both worlds; it could be sat on, it hinted at Paradise. Emily liked that.

  There had been a yellow sofa in the Somersby sitting-room where Mrs Tennyson sat with her mending and the little ones tumbled like a basket of puppies or waves on a choppy sea, surging round her. Here Emily had sat alone with Arthur, that one Christmas visit, beautiful Arthur with his carved features and his air of knowing about the vagaries and coquetries of the female sex. He had put his arm round her shoulder, her accepted lover, and his fastidious mouth had brushed her cheek, her ear, her dark brow, her lips. She could remember to this day how he had trembled, ever so slightly, as though his knees were not quite controlled, and she herself had been stricken by fear—of what, she could not quite remember now, of being overwhelmed, of responding inappropriately or inadequately, of losing herself? His lips were dry and warm. He had written often about the yellow sofa, after that, it had loomed in his letters, a mysterious solid object of oblique import, mixed with Chaucerian sighs out of some ideal Romance.

  Alas min Emilie

  Alas departing of our compagnie

  Alas my hertes quene.

  He had missed both beginning and end of this lamenting cry:

  Allas, the deth! allas, myn Emelye!

  Allas, departyng of our companye!

  Allas, myn hertes queen! alias, my wyf!

  which she said to herself still, from time to time. ‘ “Allas, myn hertes quene, allas, myn wyf,” ’ which she had never become. Poor Arthur. Poor vanished Emily with her long dark ringlets and her white rose. After this delicate embrace she had been so agitated in body and mind that she had kept her bed for two days though his scanted visit was a bare two weeks. She had written him from her seclusion little notes in charmingly inept Italian (or so he pronounced it) which he corrected for her, patiently, and returned, with the page marked where he had kissed it. Poverina, stai male. Assicurati ch’io competisco da cuore al soffrir tuo. A verray parfit gentil knight, Arthur.

  Mrs Hearnshaw was not noticing the sofa. She was speaking her grief to Emily, to Sophy Sheekhy, who had settled on a footstool near them.

  ‘She seemed so strong, you know, Mrs Jesse, she waved her arms so lustily and kicked with her little legs and thighs, and her eyes saw me so quietly, all swimming with life. My husband says I must learn not to attach myself so to these tiny creatures who are destined to stay with us so briefly in time—but how can I not, it is natural, I think? They have grown under my heart, my dear, I have felt them stir there, with fear and trembling.’

  ‘We must believe they are angels, Mrs Hearnshaw.’

  ‘Sometimes I am able to do so. Sometimes I imagine horrors.’

  Emily Jesse said, ‘Speak what is in your mind, it will do you good. Those of us who are wounded to the quick, you know, we suffer for all the others, we are appointed in some way to bear their grief too. We cry out for them. It is no shame.’

  ‘I give birth to death,’ said Mrs Hearnshaw, speaking the thought she walked about with, constantly. She could have added, ‘I am an object of horror to myself,’ but forbore. The mental image of the mottled limbs, after convulsion, of the rough, musty clay bed, was always with her.

  Sophy Sheekhy said, ‘It is all one. Alive and dead. Like walnuts.’

  She saw very clearly all the little forms, curled in little boxes, like the brown-skinned white lobes of dead nuts, and a blind point like a wormhead pushing into light and airy leafage. She often ‘saw’ messages. She did not know whose thoughts they were, hers or another’s, or whether they came from Outside, or whether everyone saw similar messages of their own.

  They were joined by Captain Jesse and Mr Hawke.

  ‘Walnuts?’ said Captain Jesse. ‘I have a great partiality for walnuts. With port wine, after dinner, they can be most tasty. I also like green, milky ones. They are said to resemble the human brain. My grandmother told how they were used in certain country remedies which might be closer to magic than to medicine. Would that be a correspondence that might interest Emanuel Swedenborg, Mr Hawke? The encephaloform walnut?’

  ‘I do not remember having seen any animadversion on walnuts in his writings, Captain Jesse, though they are so voluminous, some reference may indeed be hidden away there. The thought of walnuts always makes me think of the English mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich, who was shewn in a vision all that is like a nut in her own hand, and told by God Himself, “All shall be well, and thou shalt see thy self that all manner of thing shall be well.” I think what she may have seen may have been the thought of some Angel, as it appeared in the world of Spirits or in the world of men. She may have been in a sense a precursor of our spiritual Columbus. He relates, you know, how he himself saw a beautiful bird in the hand of Sir Hans Sloane, in the Spirit World, differing in no least detail from a similar bird on earth, and yet being—it was revealed to him—none other than the affection of a certain Angel, and vanishing with the surcease of the operation of that affection. Now, it appears that the Angel, being in Heaven, would not be aware of this indirect forthgoing in the world of Spirits, for the angels see all in its highest Form, the Divine Human. The highest angels, we are told, are seen as human infants by those approaching them from below—though this is not how they appear to themselves—because their affections are born of the union of the love of good—from an angel-father—and of truth—from an angel-mother—in conjugial love.

  ‘And Swedenborg himself saw birds during his sojourns in the Spirit World and it was revealed to him that—in the Grand Man—rational concepts are seen as birds. Because the head corresponds to the heavens and the air. He actually experienced in his body the fall of certain angels who had formed wrong opinions in their community about thoughts and influx—he felt a terrible tremor in his sinews and bones—and saw one dark and ugly bird and two fine and beautiful. And these solid birds were the thoughts of the angels, as h
e saw them in the world of his senses, beautiful reasonings and ugly falses. For at every level everything corresponds, from the most purely material to the most purely divine in the Divine Human.’

  ‘Very strange, very strange,’ said Captain Jesse, somewhat impatiently. Himself a great talker he could not listen passively whilst Mr Hawke unravelled for the assembled company all the threads of connection between the Divine Human and local lumps of clay. Once started, Mr Hawke was driven to go on, expounding the Arcana, and the Principia, the Clavis Hieroglyphica Arcanorum Naturalium et Spiritualium, the mysteries of Influx and Vastation, Conjugial Love and Life After Death, for it was only in the act of exposition that Mr Hawke could hold all the balls of his system, so to speak, up in the air at once, an arc of theological tumbling and juggling, which Sophy Sheekhy saw briefly, during his excursus on birds, as a flurry of pouter pigeons and collared doves.

  ‘In that world, in the spiritual world,’ said Mr Hawke, ‘they have their light from the spiritual sun, and cannot see our corresponding material sun, from our dead world. It appears to them as thick darkness. There are also some quite ordinary spirits who cannot bear material things, for instance, those from the planet Mercury, who correspond in the Grand Man to the memory of things, abstracted from material things. Swedenborg visited them and was allowed to show them meadows, fallowlands, gardens, woods and streams. But they hated that, they hated their solidity, they like abstract knowledge, so they meticulously filled the meadows with snakes and darkened them, and turned the streams black. He had more success with showing them a pleasant garden full of lamps and lights, because those appealed to their understanding, as lights represent truths. Also lambs, which they accepted, as lambs represent innocence.’

  ‘Not unlike some preachers,’ said Mrs Jesse. ‘The spirits of the planet Mercury. Only able to think in abstractions related to abstractions.’