by A. S. Byatt
‘It is very easy to learn,’ said Mrs Papagay, ‘and hard to get out of the mind once it is lodged there.’
She pulled her feather scarf tighter round her neck with her free hand, and recited at random.
‘But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er, She shall press, ah, nevermore!’
‘It is certainly vivid,’ said Mr Hawke dubiously. ‘It portrays obsessive grief, of which you, in your profession, with your gifts, Mrs Papagay, must see more than enough. I was much struck with the apposite nature of some of the communications this evening to the situation of Mrs Jesse. “Because thou hast turned from thy first love.” There is a certain delicacy often felt as to the advisability of second marriages, particularly now it is known that the integral human partner survives the Grave, as spirit. It may be felt that to take a second partner is wrong. What is your opinion on this matter, Mrs Papagay?’
‘In India,’ said Mrs Papagay, ‘I believe it is enjoined on widows to place themselves beside their dead masters on the funeral pyre, and voluntarily submit themselves to incineration. I find that hard to imagine, yet it is done, it is even, we are told, usual.’
She had tried to imagine, the silk-robed woman, exalted, stepping up the heap of scented wood to embrace the embalmed dead flesh. She tried to imagine the flames. She imagined quite successfully the frantic involuntary struggle of the unwilling, whose young life revolted, and the dark hands and severe faces that brought down, that bound, that overcame.
‘But in a Christian society,’ persisted Mr Hawke. ‘Mrs Jesse, for instance, did she do well, or ill?’
‘Mrs Jesse was only betrothed to the young man,’ Mrs Papagay demurred. ‘There had been no marriage.’
‘As to that,’ said Mr Hawke, ‘Swedenborg teaches, as you know, that true conjugial love comes to us all but once, that our souls have one mate, one perfect other half, whom we should seek ceaselessly. That an angel, properly speaking, joins two parts in one, in conjugial love. For in a heavenly Marriage, and Heaven is a Marriage, of and in the Divine Human, truth is conjoined with good, understanding with will, thought with affection. For truth and understanding and thought are male, but good, will and affection are female, we are taught.
‘So two married partners in Heaven are not called two, but one angel, and this is what is meant, Swedenborg tells us, by the Lord’s words: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female. And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” ’
‘That is very beautiful and very true,’ said Mrs Papagay, vaguely. Her imagination could not hook itself into good and will and truth and understanding; these were cold null little words, like identical sixpences, dropped, chink, chink, in the collection dish on a Sunday. She could imagine ‘one flesh’, the beast with two backs, Arturo had said, and a delicious sensation of melting and vanishing in warmth all down the front, from the breast to the key in the lock that held them.
Mr Hawke patted her hand, as it lay demurely on his arm, with his free hand. He said, ‘Swedenborg describes the conjugial blisses of the Heavens in the most delightful, the most—iridescent way. He tells us that in the innermost heaven conjugial love—which is a state of innocence, Mrs Papagay—is represented by various beautiful objects, such as a lovely virgin in a bright cloud, such as atmospheres bright as diamonds, and sparkling as though with carbuncles and rubies. All the angels, Mrs Papagay, are clothed, corresponding to their natures, as all things in heaven correspond. The most intelligent angels have garments which glitter as with flame, and some are resplendent as with light, while the less intelligent have garments of clear or opaque white without splendours, and the still less intelligent have garments of various colours. But the angels of the innermost Heaven are naked.’
Mr Hawke, a little out of puff, paused for effect, and patted Mrs Papagay’s gloved hand, where it lay on his arm, with his own. Mrs Papagay was distracted by the word ‘carbuncles’, which she always, when reading or hearing about Heaven, saw in their earthly or fleshly sense, as distended, painful lumps of hard flesh on foot or nose or buttock. So there are carbuncles on the Divine Human, something irrepressible in her—something to do with Arturo—tried to say.
‘Swedenborg,’ said Mr Hawke portentously, ‘was the first religious founder to give to the expression of sexual delight the central place in heaven that it holds in many of our hearts on earth—to divine, and to constate, that earthly love and Heavenly Love, are truly One, at their highest. This is a noble, a daunting understanding, of our nature and our true duty do you not think?’
‘Better to marry than burn,’ said Mrs Papagay reflectively, quoting the gloomy admonition of the misogynist Saint Paul, but thinking of her own state of mind and body. Mr Hawke made her aware of his own discreet burning at her side.
‘And yourself, Mrs Papagay. For yourself, would you consider at any point a second marriage? Does your spiritual nature feel itself in search of its soul-mate? I hope you do not consider the question impertinent. I do not mean it so. It comes from a lively—a very lively—concern for your welfare, your nature—to which mine is drawn, as you, with your sensitivity, will already have perceived.’
And that, thought Mrs Papagay, was well negotiated. She said, ‘Bravo’ to him in her mind, for that. He was asking her for something, but leaving open a decent retreat into the purely spiritual for both of them. He was frank, and he was devious. ‘Bravo’, Mrs Papagay said to herself, looking at the dark sea, and thinking of Arturo under it. Was Arturo her soul-mate, the other half of her angel? She did not know. She only knew that Arturo had satisfied her body in ways to her previously unimaginable, had touched her with a thousand delectable flames, that she missed daily his smell, male, salt, tobacco, dryness, desire, inside her nostrils and her belly. And the body which had given her such delight was washing in shreds and fragments somewhere in all that cold weight of water. The automatic writing had used some of his private nonce-words, ‘little pudy hand,’ it had said. ‘Look at your pudy hands and feet, little Lilias,’ Arturo had said. She did not know if ‘pudy’ was a mis-translation of a word from one of his many tongues, or a word made up for what he liked to lick and stroke. She supposed it was almost certain that some quirk of her own mind had put Arturo’s word into Mrs Hearnshaw’s Amys’ message. But maybe it had been Arturo, telling her he was there.
‘I hardly know, Mr Hawke,’ said Mrs Papagay. ‘I was happy with Captain Papagay, and I grieve for him, and I am resigned to a lonely life on this earth. I make do as best I can. I try to be good and active. It is true that I miss the married state. Most women do, I suppose. Most human beings; it is after all natural. I do not know about “soul-mates”. I have seen men and women consumed by love for each other, and I do not aspire to that state, I cannot imagine what it might be like. But the comfort of a shared hearth—of a shared life—of mutual affection—I do confess to desiring, however hard I try to be satisfied with my present lot.’
‘I have never experienced that happiness and comfort, Mrs Papagay. Once it seemed I might—but the cup was taken from me at the last moment, as my lips approached its brim. I too became resigned to the half-life of solitude. I do not think that at that time I had found my one soul-mate, though it appeared to me then that this was so
. Swedenborg says that the Lord in His Divine Human understands that men may make many earthly marriages in a sincere search for the One true soul-mate, and does not condemn these marriages, as he condemns adulteries undertaken in levity of spirit.’
Mrs Papagay found this hard to answer. She said, ‘Do you suppose there could be uncertainty, Mr Hawke, as to the identity of … such a person?’
‘I think there could, Mrs Papagay. I think a man may look at many women and wonder, is it she, is it she? and be in true doubt. I have certainly wondered. I have never recognised.’
They walked on in silence, and Sophy Sheekhy glided behind them in her dove-coloured boots.
They reached Mrs Papagay’s house, where they were accustomed, all three, to take a glass of port or sherry, before Mr Hawke went on his way. It was a tall, thin, terrace-house, with a door-knocker in the shape of a fat fish, which Arturo had liked, and of which Sophy Sheekhy was fond. Betsy, the maid-of-all-work, was instructed to light a fire for them on cold Winter evenings when they came back exhausted from the seances. It burned brightly in the grate of the parlour, which was on the first floor, behind tall, narrow windows, a tall narrow room. Mrs Papagay busied herself with glasses and decanters. Mr Hawke stood in the hearth and warmed his legs. Sophy Sheekhy sat at a distance from the fire and the other two, leaning back in her chair, and closing her eyes. Mr Hawke addressed her.
‘Are you much fatigued, my dear, by your experiences today? The creature you described was certainly strange—too strange to be a product of the imagination, a wonderful gift.’
‘I am very tired,’ said Sophy Sheekhy. ‘I do not think I shall be able to digest a glass of port. I will take a little milk, if I may, Mrs Papagay, and retire early. I am very uneasy. Something is unfinished. I feel weighed upon. I need to be calm and still. ’
Indeed, she could hardly raise her eyelids to accept the milk, and her limbs were marbly weight. She sipped, and Mr Hawke savoured his port, and the fire flared up a little, dispelling the mixture of smokiness and sea fret that seemed to hang in the room.
Sophy Sheekhy rose dreamily and went away to bed. Mr Hawke sat in an armchair facing his hostess. Mrs Papagay, moving to replenish his glass, caught sight of herself in the mirror over the table, and thought she had not wholly lost her looks. Her colour was high, but livery, healthy, her large dark eyes were still shaded by good black lashes, her nose was sharp and arched but within the bounds of elegance, and she had not put on, or lost, too much flesh. She met her own eye, challenging, questioning, and glimpsed Mr Hawke behind her, sizing up her waist, her hips, with a look she knew. He is going to speak, she was suddenly convinced. He is going to commit himself and require an answer.
She took her time with the decanter, thinking what to say. She would be much better off as a respectable married woman. She did need company, she needed gossip, someone to concern herself with, and Sophy Sheekhy had no social ways or curiosity; she lived in another world, very precisely. Mr Hawke might be trained to laugh a little, to relax his solemnity, a lascivious man like that could not be all pure sermonising behind the closed doors of a good home. I hold back, she told herself, from what may be my best chance. I must at least be moderately encouraging, I must respond with cautious warmth, that will be best, give him space and see what he is and does.
Mr Hawke cleared his throat with a loud ‘Hem’. ‘I should like to revert to the subject of our previous talk, Mrs Papagay. I should like to make it—in a hypothetical way—more personal. Here we do sit by a fireside, very easy in each other’s company, I would say, very natural, enjoying the good things of life and sharing also high ideals, high intuitions, pressing intimations—’ He was carried away in a direction in which he had not meant to go, but his preaching style was too much for him, ‘—pressing intimations of the unseen, the spirit world, crowding upon us on every side, close and wonderful.’
‘Indeed,’ said Mrs Papagay. ‘It is so, and we should give thanks.’
That rang a little untrue, she thought.
‘I have hoped’, said Mr Hawke, ‘that I have lightened your loneliness a little with my—concern—with my—understanding—with my affection, may I say, Mrs Papagay?’
‘I have felt it,’ said Mrs Papagay with deliberate solemn vagueness. He doesn’t know if he’s in a church or a drawing-room, she thought. Will he ever? In a bedroom, will he distinguish? Would he—and his wife—pray lengthily at the bedside, or even—her imagination was setting off again—during the act?
‘Lilias,’ said Mr Hawke. ‘I should like to feel I had the right to call you Lilias.’
‘It is a long time since anyone has called me Lilias,’ said Mrs Papagay.
And then Mr Hawke did a terrible thing.
‘Job,’ he said, ‘my name is Job,’ and cast himself bodily at Mrs Papagay as she sat on her cherry-coloured velvet sofa, missing his footing perhaps, she thought afterwards, perhaps he only meant to sit at her feet, or to kiss her hand, but as it was he cast his small rotund person more or less into her black silk lap, like Mrs Jesse’s Pug suddenly taking a lumbering leap on to the sofa, so that his hands scrabbled at her bosom, and his breath, heavy with port wine, invaded her lips and nostrils. And Mrs Papagay, that cautious woman of the world, screamed out and pushed automatically at him with strong rejecting hands, so that he bounced back on his bottom on to the hearthrug, clutching at her ankles, and making a wheezing noise from a purply face.
VII
Emily Jesse lit the oil-lamp and considered the automatic writing. The servant, a blowsy, self-assertive, hysterical girl, with a tendency to faint in a haze of sherry fumes and a daemonic capacity to cause the evaporation of whisky in decanters and silver teaspoons in boxes, cleared away the teacups and poked the dying fire. Captain Jesse paced up and down in the window, looking out at the stars, and murmuring about the weather, as though he were trying to steer the house to some distant port across deep gulfs. You could not see the sea from this window, but you might have thought you could, the way he looked out. He murmured mathematical observations, and commented to himself on the visibility of Sirius, of Cassiopeia, of the Pleiades. ‘Stop talking, Richard,’ said Emily automatically, frowning over the papers. She had once overheard her sister-in-law, Emily Tennyson, telling someone that Alfred absolutely had to leave home, on some excuse or other, if he had warning that Captain Jesse was coming, for Captain Jesse babbled indiscriminately and Alfred had need of absolute calm in order to compose his poetry. ‘She wraps Alfred up like a mummy and does his buttons like a baby,’ Emily Jesse would say to herself uncharitably, but only to herself, for the Tennysons were close, close, and fiercely attached to each other, all of them, except poor Edward in his lunatic asylum, and they had tried their best to love and encompass him too, until it became clear they couldn’t. Alfred had composed well enough, and better than now, in the cramped and inventive racket of the Rectory, which had so delighted Arthur in 1829, in 1830, those few weeks, when their angry father had been away in France, and they had all been in blossom, expansive and playful. Alfred had been a great poet then, and was a great poet now, and Arthur had recognised that fact early, and with a delightful, strengthening and calm certainty.
She considered the handwriting of the messages, so unlike Sophy Sheekhy’s innocent loops and circles. It was somewhere between Arthur’s small quick hand, and Alfred’s, also small and quick, but less pinched. It staggered a little, here and there. It had Arthur’s characteristic small d, hooked backwards at the top, but not always. It had such a d in both ds of ‘dead’—’Never forget our Lady who is dead’—and also in the controversial and troubling Theodicaea. The messages were all undoubtedly to do with Arthur, and perhaps she should have cried out, in pain and longing, as Mrs Hearnshaw had, as she saw his words, in a passable rendering of his hand. But she had not. She had questioned. She had dissembled. She knew, for instance, she the Lady of her Arthur’s eternal devotion, Monna Emilia, min Emilie, dearest Nem, dearest Nemkin, that these lines of Dante were not only
from the Vita Nuova, but from Arthur’s own translation of Dante’s poems of devotion to his dead Lady, Monna Beatrice, done so little before his death. ‘L’amaro lagrima che voi faceste’ he had given her to translate, teasing her for her bad memory, her faulty constructions. ‘The bitter weeping you made’, addressing the poet’s own eyes, which had briefly rested on another maiden, when they ‘had a bounden duty and they ought / Never forget our Lady who is dead’. The spiritualist newspapers, the members of the New Jerusalem Church, would be overwhelmed that any message so pretty, so private, so appropriate, could be sent to one mourner. But there was more—beside the by now habitual citation of In Memoriam, there was the Theodicaea. A. H. H. had written the ‘Theodicaea Novissima’ for those exclusive intelligences the Cambridge Apostles, who pronounced it wholly original and very fine. He had argued that the reason for evil was God’s need for love—for the passion of love—which had caused Him to create the finite Christ as an object of desire, and a Universe, full of sin and sorrow, to provide an adequate background for this passion to work itself out in. The Incarnation, Arthur had argued, had made human love—‘the tendency towards a union so intimate, as virtually to amount to identification’—one with Divine Love, so that Christ’s loving death was a way to God. Here it became obscure, to Emily, how evil was so necessary to this Love, how Arthur could be so sure. The essay was abstract and boiled with human passion. Arthur had wished she had not read it.
I was half inclined to be sorry that you looked into that Theodicaea of mine. It must have perplexed rather than cleared your sight of those high matters. I do not think women ought to trouble themselves much with theology: we who are more liable to the subtle objections of the Understanding, have more need to handle the weapons that lay them prostrate. But where there is greater innocence, there are larger materials for a single-hearted faith. It is by the heart, not by the head, that we must all be convinced of the two great fundamental truths, the reality of Love, and the reality of Evil. Do not, my beloved Emily, let any cloudy mistrusts and perplexities bewilder your perception of these, and of the great corresponding Fact, I mean the Redemption, which makes them objects of delight instead of honor.
