Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  The wind stirred the silk fringes of Dr Bailey’s too-rich headgear. It ruffled Roland’s black fur. He pushed his hands in his pockets and stepped a little behind her as she strode. No one else seemed to be about, although it was term. He asked Dr Bailey, where were the students and she told him that today, Wednesday, was a non-teaching day, reserved for sports and study.

  “They all disappear. We don’t know where. As if by magic. Some of them are in the library. Most aren’t. I don’t know where they go.”

  The wind ruffled the dark water; orange leaves made its surface jagged and sloppy at once.

  She lived at the top of Tennyson Tower—“It was that or Maid Marian,” she remarked, as they swung its glass door, her voice distantly scornful. “The Alderman who funded it wanted it all called after Sherwood folk. Here is the English Department and the Arts Faculty Office and History of Art and also Women’s Studies. Not our Resource Centre. That’s in the Library. I’ll take you. Would you care for coffee?”

  They went up in a paternoster lift that cranked regularly past its otherwise vacant portals. These doorless lifts unnerved Roland; she stepped in precisely and was lifted above him before he dared follow, so that he was already clambering onto the pedestal she occupied when he lunged forward and up, almost too late. She did not remark on this. The walls of the paternoster were mirror-tiled, bronze-lit; she flashed at him from wall to wall, hotly. Out again she came precisely; he tripped on this threshold too, the floor lifting beneath him.

  Her room was glass-walled on one side, and lined floor to ceiling with books on the others. The books were arranged rationally, thematically, alphabetically, and dust-free; this last was the only sign of housekeeping in that austere place. The beautiful thing in that room was Maud Bailey herself, who went down on one knee very gracefully to plug in a kettle, and produced from a cupboard two blue and white Japanese mugs.

  “Take a seat,” she said crisply, indicating a low upholstered bright blue chair where students no doubt sat to have their work handed back. She handed him walnut-coloured Nescafé. She had not taken off the headdress. “Now, how can I be of help to you?” she said, taking her own seat behind the barrier of the desk. Roland meditated strategies of evasion of his own. He had vaguely imagined, before meeting her, that he might be able to show her Xeroxes of the purloined letters. Now he knew he could not. Her voice lacked warmth. He said, “I am working on Randolph Henry Ash. As I wrote to you. It’s just come to my attention that he might have corresponded with Christabel LaMotte. I don’t know if you have any knowledge of such a correspondence? They certainly met.”

  “When?”

  He handed her a copy of his transcript of Crabb Robinson’s Journal.

  “That might be mentioned in Blanche Glover’s diary. We’ve got one of her diaries in the Resource Centre. It covers that period—she began it when they moved to Richmond. The papers we have in our Archive are essentially the contents of Christabel’s desk when she died—she expressed a wish that they should be sent to one of her nieces, May Bailey, ‘in the hope that she may come to care about poetry.’ ”

  “And did she?”

  “Not as far as I know. She married a cousin and went off to Norfolk and had ten children and ran a large household. I’m descended from her—she was my great-great-grandmother, which makes me Christabel’s great-great-great-niece. I persuaded my father to let us lodge the papers in the Archive when I came here. There isn’t a lot of material, but it’s important. Manuscripts of the Tales, lots of undated lyrics on random little slips of paper, and of course all the revisions of Melusina, which she rewrote at least eight times, always changing it. And a commonplace book, and a few letters from friends, and this one diary of Blanche Glover’s, just for three years. I don’t know if we once had more—no care was taken of them, I’m sorry to say—none has come to light.”

  “And LaMotte. Did she keep a journal?”

  “Not as far as we know. Almost certainly not. She wrote to one of her nieces advising against it. It’s a rather good letter. ‘If you can order your Thoughts and shape them into Art, good: if you can live in the obligations and affections of Daily Life, good. But do not get into the habit of morbid Self-examination. Nothing so unfits a woman for producing good work, or for living usefully. The Lord will take care of the second of these—opportunities will be found. The first is a matter of Will.’ ”

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  “It’s an interesting view of it. That’s late—1886. Art as will. Not a fashionable view for a woman. Or maybe for anyone.”

  “Do you have her letters?”

  “Not many. A few family ones—admonitions like that, recipes for bread-baking and wine-making, complaints. Others exist, not many from the Richmond period, one or two from visits she made to Brittany; she had family there, as maybe you know. She doesn’t seem to have had intimate friends, except Miss Glover, and they didn’t need to correspond, since they shared their house. The letters haven’t been edited—Leonora Stern’s trying to get something together, but there’s little to go on. I suspect Sir George Bailey at Seal Court may have something but he’s not willing to let anyone look. He threatened Leonora with a shotgun. I thought it might be better if she went there—she’s from Tallahassee, as you no doubt know—rather than myself, since there’s an unfortunate history of litigation and unpleasantness between the Seal Court family and the Norfolk one. But Leonora’s approaches had a most unfortunate effect. Most unfortunate. Yes. Well. And how did you come to form the opinion that Randolph Henry Ash was interested in LaMotte?”

  “I found an unfinished draft of a letter to an unidentified woman in a book of his. I thought it might be her. It mentioned Crabb Robinson. He said she understood his poems.”

  “That doesn’t sound very probable. I wouldn’t have thought his poems would appeal to her. All that cosmic masculinity. That nasty anti-feminist poem about the medium, what was it, Mummy Possest? All that ponderous obfuscation. Everything she wasn’t.”

  Roland considered the pale incisive mouth with a kind of hopelessness. He wished he had not come. The hostility towards Ash somehow included himself, at least in his own eyes. Maud Bailey went on: “I’ve checked my card index—I’m working on a full-length study of Melusina—I’ve only found one reference to Ash. It’s from a note to William Rossetti—the MS is in Tallahassee—about a poem he published for her.

  “ ‘In these dim November days I resemble nothing more than that poor Creature of RHA’s Fantasy, immured in her terrible In-Pace, quieted perforce and longing for her Quietus. It takes a Masculine Courage to find pleasure in constructing Dungeons for Innocents in his Fancy, and a Female Patience to endure them in sober fact.’ ”

  “That’s a reference to Ash’s Incarcerated Sorceress?”

  “Of course.” Impatiently.

  “When was it written?”

  “1869. I think. Yes. Vivid but not much help.”

  “Hostile if anything.”

  “Exactly.”

  Roland sipped his coffee. Maud Bailey reinserted the card into its place in her file. She said, looking into the box, “You must know Fergus Wolff, he must be at your college, I think.”

  “Oh yes. It was Fergus who suggested I should ask you about LaMotte.”

  A pause. The fingers moved busily, tidying. “I know Fergus. I met him at a conference, in Paris.”

  A little less crisp, the voice, a little less elderly-authoritative, he thought unkindly.

  “He told me,” said Roland, neutrally, watching for a sign of her consciousness of what Fergus might have said, of how he might have spoken. She compressed her lips and stood up.

  “I’ll take you to the Resource Centre.”

  The Lincoln Library could not have been more different from the Ash Factory. It was a skeletal affair in a glass box, with brilliant doors opening in glass and tubular walls, like a box of toys or a giant ConstructoKit. There were dinging metal shelves and footfall-deadening felt carpets, pied-piper red and
yellow, like the paint on the stair-rails and lifts. In summer it must have been bright and baking, but in wet autumn slate-grey sky lay like another box against its repeating panes, in which lines of little round lights were reflected, like Tinkerbell’s fairylights in her Never-Never-Land. The Women’s Archive was housed in a high-walled fish-tank. Maud Bailey settled Roland into a tubular chair at a pale oak table, like a recalcitrant nursery-school child, and put before him various boxes. Melusina I. Melusina II. Melusina III and IV. Melusina Unassigned. Breton Poems. Poems of Devotion. Misc Lyrics. Blanche. In this box she showed him a long thick green book, a little like an accounts book, with sombre marbled endpapers:

  A Journal of Our Home-Life.

  In Our House in Richmond

  Blanche Glover

  Commenced on the day of our setting up house.

  May 1st May Day 1858

  Roland took it up respectfully. It did not have for him the magnetic feel of the two letters that were folded into his pocket, but it represented the tease of curiosity.

  He was worried about his Day Return ticket. He was worried about Maud’s limited patience. The journal was written in an excited and pretty hand, in short rushes. He skimmed it. Carpets, curtains, the pleasures of retirement, “Today we engaged a Cook-general,” a new way to stew rhubarb, a painting of the infant Hermes and his mother, and yes, Crabb Robinson’s breakfast.

  “Here it is.”

  “Good. I’ll leave you. I’ll fetch you when the Library shuts. You’ve got a couple of hours.”

  “Thank you.”

  We went out to breakfast with Mr Robinson, a pleasant but prosy old gentleman who told us a complicated tale of a bust of Wieland, retrieved by himself from unworthy oblivion, to the great delight of Goethe and other literary eminences. Not much of interest was said, and certainly not by shadowy me, though that is as I would have it. Present were Mrs Jameson, Mr Bagehot, Ash the poet, without Mrs Ash, who was indisposed, and some younger members of the London University. The Princess was much admired and rightly. She spoke great good sense to Mr Ash, whose poetry I cannot like, though she professed to like it greatly, which naturally flattered him. He lacks, in my view, the lyrical flow and intensity of Alfred Tennyson, and I doubt his seriousness. His poem about Mesmer is a great puzzle to me, as I cannot tell with any certainty what is his attitude to Animal Magnetism, whether mocking or endorsing, and this is so with other of his work, so that often one is led to wonder whether there is not a great pother of talk about nothing much. For my part, I endured a long disquisition on the Tractarians from a young and opinionated university liberal. He would have been much surpris’d to know my true Opinion on these matters, but I did not chuse to let him be so much familiar, I kept mum, and smiled and nodded as best I might, keeping my Thoughts to myself. But I was almost glad when Mr Robinson decided to tell the company at large of his Italian journeyings with Wordsworth, who desired to be back at home with every step they made, and could only with the utmost difficulty be persuaded to look about him.

  I too desired to be at home, and was glad when we were able to close our own dear front door behind us, and be gathered in to the silence of our little parlour.

  A home is a great thing, as I had not courage to say to Mr Robinson, if it is certainly one’s own home, as our little house is. When I think of my previous existence—of all I thought I could reasonably expect of the rest of my life, an allowed place at the extreme corner of someone’s drawing-room carpet, a Servant’s garret or no better, I give thanks for every little thing, which is unspeakably dear to me. We had a late luncheon, cold fowl and a salad got up by Liza, walked in the Park in the afternoon, worked, and in the evening had a dish of warm milk and white bread, sprinkled with sugar, quite as Wordsworth himself might have done. We played and sang together, and read aloud a little of the Faerie Queene. Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise. Surely Richmond is Beulah, I said to the Princess, who said it was only to be hoped no wicked Fairy envied us our pleasant lot.

  Nothing further, for three and a half weeks, except simple meals, walks and readings, music and Blanche’s plans for paintings. Then Roland found a sentence which could have been something or nothing. Nothing if you were not looking carefully.

  I have been wondering whether to attempt, in oils, a subject from Malory, the imprisoning of Merlin, maybe, by the damsel Nimue, or the solitary Maid of Astolat. My brain is filled full of vague images, but no clear vision of one necessary thing. I have sketched oak trees in Richmond Park all week—all my lines are too light for the thick solidity of their girth. What draws us to make pretty what should express Brute Power? Nimue or the Lily Maid would require a model and the Princess can hardly be asked for so much of her time, though I hope she may think the time spent on “Christabel before Sir Leoline” was not wholly wasted. I paint so thinly, as though my work were unlit stained glass that requires a flood of light from beyond and behind to illuminate and enliven it, and there is no beyond and behind. Oh I want Force. She has hung “Christabel” in her bedroom where it catches the morning sun and shows up my imperfections. She is much exercised about a long letter which arrived today, which she did not show me, but smiled over, and caught up and folded away.

  There was nothing at all, except Roland’s own need and concern, to suggest that the long letter might be his own letter. It could have been any letter. Had there been more? Three weeks later he found another meaningful/meaningless sentence.

  Liza and I have been busy with our apple-and-quince jelly; the kitchen is veiled and festooned in dripping jelly-muslin, ingeniously caught up amongst the legs of inverted chairs, like spiderwebs. Liza burned her tongue, testing whether it would set or not, and being too greedy to taste or anxious to please. (Liza is greedy. I am sure she consumes bread and fruit in the middle of the night. Coming down to breakfast I find raw, slanting cuts I never made on the loaf in the crock.) The Princess did not help us this year. She was getting her Literary Letter ready to post, though she denied this, and said she was hurrying to finish the Glass Coffin for the book of tales. I believe she is writing fewer poems. Certainly she does not show me them, of an evening, as we were used to do. All this correspondence is detrimental to her true gifts. She is in no real need of epistolary adulation. She knows her own worth. I only wish I were as sure of mine.

  Two weeks later:

  Letters, letters, letters. Not for me. I am not meant to see or know. I am no blind mouldiwarp, my Lady, nor no well-trained lady’s maid to turn my head and not see what is stated not to concern me. You need not hurry them away to lie in your sewing-basket or run upstairs to fold them under your handkerchiefs. I am no Sneak, no watcher, no Governess. A governess is what I am most surely not. From that fate you rescued me, and you shall never, for one moment, one little moment, suppose me ungrateful or making claims.

  Two weeks later:

  So now we have a Prowler. Something is ranging and snuffing round our small retreat, trying the shutters and huffing and puffing inside the door. In old days they put mountain ash berries and a cast horseshoe over the lintel to frighten away the Fairy Folk. I shall nail some up now, to show, to prevent passage, if I may. Dog Tray is nervous of prowlers. His hackles go up on his shoulders, as a wolf’s would, when he hears the Hunter. He gnashes the empty air. How very small, how very safe, is a threatened dwelling. How large the locks seem, how appalling would be their forcing and splintering.

  Two weeks later:

  Where is our frankness of intercourse? Where the small, unspeakable things we used to share in quiet harmony? This Peeping Tom has put his eye to the nick or cranny in our walls and peers shamelessly in. She laughs and says he means no harm, and is incapable of seeing the essential things we know and keep safe, and so it is, so it must be, so it must always be. But it amuses her to hear him lolloping and panting round our solid walls,
she thinks he will always be Tame, as he is now. I cannot claim to know better, I know nothing, I never have known very much, but I fear for her. I asked her how much writing she had lately done, and she laughed, and said she was learning so much, so very much, and when it was all learned she should have new matter to write about and many new things to say. And she kissed me, and called me her dear Blanche, and said I knew she was a good girl, and very strong, and not foolish. I said we were all, all foolish, and in need of divine strength to help us out when we were weak. She said she had never so much felt its presence, its immediacy, as lately. I went up to my bedchamber and prayed, as I have not prayed—from desolation—since I prayed to leave Mrs Teape’s house and thought I should never be answered. The candle flame ran huge shadows like grasping fingers across the ceiling in the draught. I could put some such running, grasping lines of light and shadow around Nimue and Merlin. She came in to me as I knelt there and raised me up, and said we must never quarrel and that she would never, ever, give me cause to doubt her, and I must not suppose she could. I am sure she meant what she said. She was agitated; there were a few tears. We were quiet together, in our special ways, for a long time.

  Next day:

  The Wolf is Gone from the Door. Dog Tray’s hearth is his own. I have begun on the Lily Maid of Astolat, which suddenly seemed best.