by A. S. Byatt
“Oh, I wouldn’t do it for anything. I think she’s fantastic. I was just thinking.”
He looked at Mrs Sugden. “It was really nice of her to ask me to tea. Really nice. I bet you wouldn’t.”
Mrs Sugden had no answer. Her heart thumped.
“You’d be afraid to. Sensible, really. I might be any kind of maniac, how do you know, how does she? You ought to take care.”
And as if to emphasize this, he put out his hand to Wolfgang, who sniffed his fingers and allowed his ears to be scratched.
After that, Mrs Sugden decided that she could not leave him alone with Miss Tillotson. They had to leave together, in which case she would herself be alone with him. It was like that puzzle about the fox and goat and the corn and the boat, or the similar one about cannibals and missionaries. She rose from her chair and said firmly, “Thank you for the tea, Miss Tillotson. I ought to be getting along, and I’m sure Barry ought too. I think we should go now. You must be busy.”
As though she was. As though any of them were.
Miss Tillotson rose, too, graceful and isolated.
“It was very pleasant to have you. I hope you will come again. Can you find your own coat?”
He lounged in a velvet chair, his feet splayed amongst crumbs and dog hairs on the lovely carpet. The schoolmistress in Mrs Sugden spoke. “Come along, Barry. It’s time to go home.”
He was playing with the paperweight. Chunk, slap, from one hand to the other. Mrs Sugden was glad Miss Tillotson could not see him. She stopped short of saying, “Put that down, immediately, exactly where you found it.” And yet he seemed to hear the thought, for he did put it down, he grinned and scrambled to his feet.
“All right, all right, just coming, Miss,” he said, answering her tone.
Miss Tillotson hoped they would come again. Mrs Sugden said, “You must visit me,” out of a dry mouth. Barry said, “Thanks, I’m really grateful, you’ve made my day.”
Mrs Sugden had no idea what Miss Tillotson thought or sensed, or did not sense.
Out on the pavement, she clipped on Wolfgang’s lead, and turned to Barry. She had decided her tactics. She asked him which way he went, already determined to set out in some quite opposite direction, even if it meant walking for a very long time to get home.
“Where do you go now, Barry?”
“Oh. I live over there. Westfield Park, you know.”
“Wolfgang and I go this way.”
“Of course. So you do. It’s been nice meeting you. I really like talking to old ladies. It gives you an interest in life.”
His hands were in his pockets. His jeans pocket bulged. He brought them out, and there was a large open knife, which he tossed smilingly from hand to hand, as he had earlier tossed the paperweight.
“Goodbye,” croaked Mrs Sugden, watching the arc of the blade, uncertain if her legs were hers.
“Goodbye then. We’ll see each other again, for sure. Up and down. I’m around a lot. I’ll look out for you specially.”
She turned away, tugging feebly at Wolfgang. He stood on the pavement, tossing the blade in the air, gawky and smiling.
“Be seeing you,” he said, as she gathered speed. “Be seeing you.”
PRECIPICE-ENCURLED
What’s this then, which proves good yet seems untrue?
Is fiction, which makes fact alive, fact too?
The somehow may be thishow.
ROBERT BROWNING
I
The woman sits in the window. Beneath her is the stink of the canal and on the skyline is a steel-grey sheet of cloud and an unswallowed setting sun. She watches the long lines of dark green seaweed moving on the thick surface of the water, and the strong sweeping gulls, fugitives from storms in the Adriatic. She is a plump woman in a tea gown. She wears a pretty lace cap and pearls. These things are known, are highly probable. She has fine features fleshed — a compressed, drooping little mouth, a sharp nose, sad eyes, an indefinable air of disappointment, a double chin. This we can read from portraits, more than one, tallying, still in existence. She has spent the afternoon in bed; her health is poor, but she rallies for parties, for outings, for occasions. There she sits, or might be supposed to sit, any autumn day on any of several years at the end of the last century. She commands the devoted services of three gondoliers, a handyman, a cook, a maid and a kitchen-maid. Also an accountant-housekeeper. She has a daughter, young and marriageable, and a husband, mysteriously ill in Paris, from whom she is estranged but not divorced. Her daughter is out on a party of pleasure, perhaps, and has been adjured to take her new umbrella, the one with the prettily carved crickets and butterflies on its handle. She has an eye for the execution of delicate objects: it has been said of her that she would exchange a Tintoretto for a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses. She has an eye for fashion: in this year where clothes are festooned with dead humming birds and more startling creatures, mice, moths, beetles and lizards, she will give a dance where everyone must wear flights of birds pasted on ribbons — “awfully chic” — or streamers of butterflies. The room in which she sits is full of mother-of-pearl cabinets full of intricate little artefacts. She is the author of an unpublished and authoritative history of Venetian naval architecture. Also of some completely undistinguished poems. She is the central character in no story, but peripheral in many, where she may appear reduced to two or three bold identifying marks. She has a passion for pug dogs and for miniature Chinese spaniels: at her feet, on this gloomy day, lie, shall we say, Contenta, Trolley, Yahabibi and Thisbe, snoring a little as such dogs do, replete. She also has a passion for peppermint creams; do the dogs enjoy these too, or are they disciplined? One account of her gives three characteristics only: plump, pug dogs, peppermint creams. Henry James, it is said, had the idea of making her the central character of a merely projected novel — did he mean to tackle the mysteriously absent husband, make of him one of those electric Jamesian force-fields of unspecific significance? He did, it is also said, write her into The Aspern Papers, in a purely subordinate and structural role, the type of the well-to-do American woman friend of the narrator, an authorial device, what James called a ficelle, economically connecting us, the readers, to the necessary people and the developing drama. She lent the narrator her gondola. She was a generous woman. She is an enthusiast: she collects locks of hair, snipped from great poetic temples, which she enshrines in lockets of onyx. She is waiting for Robert Browning. She has done and will do this in many years. She has supervised and will supervise the excellent provision of sheets and bathroom facilities for his Venetian visits. She chides him for not recognizing that servants know their place and are happy in it. She sends him quires of hand-made Venetian paper which he distributes to artists and poets of his acquaintance. She selects brass salvers for him. She records his considered and unconsidered responses to scenery and atmosphere. She looks at the gulls with interest he has instilled. “I do not know why I never see in descriptions of Venice any mention of the seagulls; to me they are even more interesting than the doves of St Mark.” He said that, and she recorded it. She recorded that occasionally he would allow her daughter to give him a cup of tea “to our great delight”. “As a rule, he abstained from what he considered a somewhat unhygienic beverage if taken before dinner.”
II
Dear dead women, the scholar thinks, peering into the traces on the hooded green plane of the microfilm reader, or perhaps turning over browned packets of polite notes of gratitude, acceptance, anticipation, preserved perhaps in one of those fine boxes of which in her lifetime she had so many, containing delicate cigarettes on inlaid pearly octagonal tables, or precious fragments of verses copied out for autograph books. He has gleaned her words from Kansas and Cambridge, Florence, Venice and Oxford, he has read her essay on lace and her tributes to the condescension of genius, he has heard the flitting of young skirts at long-vanished festivities. He has stood, more or less, on the spot where she stood with the poet in Asolo in 1889, looking back to Browning’s first cont
emplation of the place in 1838, looking back to the internecine passions of Guelphs and Ghibellines, listening to the chirrup of the contumacious grasshopper. He has seen her blood colour the cheeks of her noble Italian granddaughter who has opened to him those houses where the poet dined, recited, conversed, teased, reminisced. He likes her, partly because he now knows her, has pieced her together. Resuscitated, Browning might have said, did say, roundly, of his Roman murderers and biassed lawyers, childwife, wise moribund Pope and gallant priest he found or invented in his dead and lively Yellow Book. A good scholar may permissibly invent, he may have a hypothesis, but fiction is barred. This scholar believes, plausibly, that his assiduous and fragile subject is the hidden heroine of a love story, the inapprehensive object, at the age of fifty-four, of a dormant passion in a handsome seventy-seven-year-old poet. He records the physical vigour, the beautiful hands and fine white head of hair of his hero. He records the probable feelings of his heroine, which stop short at exalted hero-worship, the touch of talismanic mementos, not living flesh. He adduces a poem, “Inapprehensiveness”, in which the poetic speaker reproves the inapprehensive stare of a companion intent on Ruskin’s hypothetical observation of the waving form of certain weed-growths on a ravaged wall, who ignores “the dormant passion needing but a look To burst into immense life”. The scholar’s story combs the facts this way. They have a subtle, not too dramatic shape, lifelike in that. He scrutinizes the microfilm, the yellowing letters, for little bright nuggets and filaments of fact to add to his mosaic. In 1882 the poet was in the Alps, with a visit to Venice in prospect after a proposed visit to another English family in Italy. She waited for him. In terms of this story she waited in vain. An “incident” elsewhere, an “unfortunate accident” the scholar wrote, following his thread, coupled with torrential rain in Bologna, caused the poet to return to London. He was in danger of allowing the friendship to cool, the scholar writes, perhaps anxious on her behalf, perhaps on the poet’s, perhaps on his own.
III
A man, he always thought, was more himself alone in an hotel room. Unless, of course, he vanished altogether without the support of others’ consciousness of him, and the solidity of his taste and his history in his possessions. To be itinerant suited and sharpened him. He liked this room. It was quiet, on the second floor, the last in a long corridor, its balcony face to face with a great, bristling primeval glacier. The hotel, he wrote, sitting at the table listening to the silent snow and the fraternizing tinkle of unseen cattle, was “quite perfect, with every comfort desirable, and no drawback of any kind”. The journey up had been rough — two hours carriage-drive, and then seven continued hours of clambering and crawling on mule-back. He wrote letters partly out of courtesy to his large circle of solicitous friends and admirers, but more in order to pick up the pen, to see the pothooks and spider-traces form, containing the world, the hotel, the mules, the paradise of coolness and quiet. The hotel was not absolutely perfect. “My very handwriting is affected by the lumpy ink and the skewery pen.” Tomorrow he would walk. Four or five hours along the mountainside. Not bad for an old man, a hale old man. The mule-jolting had played havoc with his hips and the long muscles in his back. At my age, he thought, you listen to every small hurt as though it may be the beginning of the last and worst hurt, which will come. So the two things continued in his consciousness side by side, a solicitous attention to twinges, and the waiting to be reinvested by his private self. Which was like a cloak, a cloak of invisibility that fell into comfortable warm folds around him, or like a disturbed well, whose inky waters chopped and swayed and settled into blackly reflecting lucidity. Or like a brilliant baroque chapel at the centre of a decorous and unremarkable house.
He liked his public self well enough. He was surprised, to tell the truth, that he had one that worked so well, was so thoroughgoing, so at home in the world, so like other public selves. As a very young man, in strictly non-conformist South London, erudite and indulged within the four walls of a Camberwell bibliomaniac’s home, he had supposed that this would be denied him, the dining-out, the gossip, the world. He wanted the world, because it was there, and he wanted everything. He had described his father, whom he loved, as a man of vast knowledge, reading and memory — totally ignorant of the world. (This ignorance had extended to his having had to leave England perpetually, as an aged widower, on account of a breach of promise action brought, with cause, against him.) His father had with consummate idealism freed him for art. My father wished me to do what I liked, he had explained, adding: I should not so bring up a son.
French novelists, he claimed, were ignorant of the habits of the English upper classes, who kept themselves to themselves. He had seen and noted them. “I seem to know a good many — for some reason or other. Perhaps because I never had any occupation.” Nevertheless, he desired his son to have an occupation, and the boy, amiable and feckless, brooded over by his own irreducible large shadow, showed little sign of vocation or application. He amused himself as a matter of course in the world in which the father dined out and visited, so assiduously, with a perpetually renewed surprise at his own facility. He was aware that Elizabeth would have wished it otherwise. Elizabeth had been a great poet, a captive princess liberated and turned wife, a moral force, silly over some things, such as her growing boy’s long curls and the flimsy promises and fake visions of the séance. She too had not known this world that was so important. One such intimate knowledge as I have had with many a person would have taught her, he confided once, unguarded, had she been inclined to learn. Though I doubt if she would have dirtied her hands for any scientific purpose. His public self had a scientific purpose, and if his hands were dirty, he could wash them clean in a minute before he saw her, as he trusted to do. He had his reasonable doubts about this event, too, though he wrote bravely of it, the step from this world to that other world, the fog in the throat, the mist in the face, the snows, the blasts, the pain and then the peace out of pain and the loving arms. It was not a time of certainties, however he might assert them from time to time. It was a time of doubt, doubt was a man’s business. But it was also hard to imagine all this tenacious sense of self, all this complexity of knowledge and battling, force and curiosity becoming nothing. What is a man, what is a man’s soul?
Descartes believed, he noted down, that the seat of the soul is the pineal gland. The reason for this is a pretty reason — all else in our apparatus for apprehending the world is double, viz. two ears, two eyes, etc. and two lobes of our brain moreover; Descartes requires that somewhere in our body all our diverse, our dual impressions must be unified before reaching the soul, which is one. He had thought often of writing a poem about Descartes, dreaming in his stove of sages and blasted churches, reducing all to the tenacity of the observing thinker, cogito ergo sum. A man can inhabit another man’s mind, or body, or senses, or history, can jerk it into a kind of life, as galvanism moves frogs: a good poet could inhabit Descartes, the bric-à-brac of stove and ill-health and wooden bowls of onion soup, perhaps, and one of those pork knuckles, and the melon offered to the philosopher by the sage in his feverish dream, all this paraphernalia spinning round the naked cogito as the planets spin in an orrery. The best part of my life, he told himself, the life I have lived most intensely, has been the fitting, the infiltrating, the inventing the self of another man or woman, explored and sleekly filled out, as fingers swell a glove. I have been webbed Caliban lying in the primeval ooze, I have been madman and saint, murderer and sensual prelate, inspired David and the cringing medium, Sludge, to whom I gave David’s name, with what compulsion of irony or equivocation, David Sludge? The rooms in which his solitary self sat buzzed with other selves, crying for blood as the shades cried at the pit dug by Odysseus in his need to interrogate, to revive the dead. His father’s encyclopaedias were the banks of such blood-pits, bulging with paper lives and circumstances, no two the same, none insignificant. A set of views, a time-confined philosophy, a history of wounds and weaknesses, flowers, clothing,
food and drink, light on Mont Blanc’s horns of silver, fangs of crystal; these coalesce to make one self in one place. Then decompose. I catch them, he thought, I hold them together, I give them coherence and vitality, I. And what am I? Just such another concatenation, a language and its rhythms, a limited stock of learning, derived from my father’s consumed books and a few experiments in life, my desires, my venture in dragon-slaying, my love, my loathings also, the peculiar colours of the world through my two eyes, the blind tenacity of the small, the single driving centre, soul or self.
What he had written down, with the scratchy pen, were one or two ideas for Descartes and his metaphorical orrery: meaningless scraps. And this writing brought to life in him a kind of joy in greed. He would procure, he would soak in, he would comb his way through the Discourse on Method, and the Passions of the Soul: he would investigate Flemish stoves. His private self was now roused from its dormant state to furious activity. He felt the white hairs lift on his neck and his breath quickened. A bounded man, he had once written, may so project his surplusage of soul in search of body, so add self to self … so find, so fill full, so appropriate forms … In such a state a man became pure curiosity, pure interest in whatever presented itself of the creation, lovely or freakish, pusillanimous, wise or vile. Those of his creatures he most loved or most approved moved with such delighted and indifferent interest through the world. There was the tragic Duchess, destroyed by the cold egotism of a Duke who could not bear her equable pleasure in everything, a sunset, a bough of cherries, a white mule, his favour at her breast. There was Karshish the Arab physician, the not-incurious in God’s handiwork, who noticed lynx and blue-flowering borage and recorded the acts of the risen Lazarus. There was David, seeing the whole earth shine with significance after soothing the passionate self-doubt of Saul; there was Christopher Smart, whose mad work of genius, his Song to David, a baroque chapel in a dull house, had recorded the particularity of the world, the whale’s bulk in the waste of brine, the feather-tufts of Wild Virgin’s Bower, the habits of the polyanthus. There was the risen Lazarus himself, who had briefly been in the presence of God and inhabited eternity, and to whose resuscitated life he had been able to give no other characteristics than these, the lively, indifferent interest in everything, a mule with gourds, a child’s death, the flowers of the field, some trifling fact at which he will gaze “rapt with stupor at its very littleness”.
