Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  Half a bad day, and half, as may happen, a good clear day, one might say, renewed. The furniture-cleaning has gone on well during my somnolent absence and all that—the arm-chairs, the table covers, the lamps, the screen—seems also renewed.

  My importunate visitor came and we talked some time. That matter is now I hope quite at an end and wholly cleared up.

  JUNE

  A Poet is not a Divine being, with an angelic vision. Randolph has always denied that description. He likes to use Wm Wordsworth’s phrase, “a man speaking to men” and is, dare I say it, acquainted with more of the variety and vagaries of human nature than ever Wordsworth was, who looked customarily inward.

  Herbert Baulk came and spoke with great kindness to Bertha, who, as before with me, said nothing, and stood a red-faced block.

  We played chess. I won.

  JULY

  This morning Bertha was found to be slipped away during the night, with all her possessions and some also of Jenny’s, she claims, including a carpet-bag and a woollen shawl. Nothing belonging to this house appears to have been taken, though all the silver is out or ranged accessibly in drawers and cabinets. It may be she mistook the shawl, or that Jenny herself is mistaken.

  Where can she have gone? What should best be done? Should I write to her Mother? There are arguments for and against this—she did not wish her Mother to be told of her condition, but may now simply have taken refuge there.

  I gave Jenny one of my own shawls and one of our own travelling-cases. She was much pleased.

  Perhaps Bertha is gone to the man who [passage crossed out illegibly]

  Should we pursue her? She cannot have taken to the streets, as she is. If we find her, shall we appear retributive? That would not be my intention.

  I have done wrong in her regard. I have behaved less than well.

  Herbert Baulk is not a tactful man. But I knew that when I embarked on this course. I should have

  JULY

  Another bad day. I lay all day in bed with the curtains open, for I became superstitiously afraid of spending so long in a house with drawn curtains. A dull sun shone through rolling mist and fog. At even it was replaced by a smaller duller moon on an inky sky. I was motionless all day, in one position. I had a haven of painlessness and torpor and every other twist and turn was agony. How many days do we spend lying still, waiting for them to end, so that we may sleep. I lay suspended almost as Snow White lay maybe, in the glass casket, alive but out of the weather, breathing but motionless. Outside, in the weather, men suffer heat and cold and fluctuating air.

  When he returns, I must be quick and lively. It must be so.

  Maud said, “She could write. I didn’t immediately see what you meant by baffling. And then, I think I did. On the evidence of that part of the journal—I couldn’t form a very clear idea of what she was like. Or if I liked her. She tells things. Interesting things. But they don’t make a whole picture.”

  “Which of us do?” asked Beatrice.

  “What happened to Bertha?”

  “We never find out. She doesn’t tell. Or even if she went after her.”

  “It must have been terrible for Bertha. She—Ellen—doesn’t seem to see …”

  “Doesn’t she?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She describes her clearly. Poor Bertha.”

  “Dust and ashes,” Beatrice surprisingly said. “Long ago. And the child, if it was born.”

  “How frustrating, though. Not to know.”

  “Professor Cropper found the jet brooch. The very one. It’s in the Stant Collection. On sea-green moiré silk, he told me. I’ve seen a photograph.”

  Maud ignored the brooch. “Do you have any ideas about the hysterical letter-writer? Or does she vanish without trace, like Bertha?”

  “There is not more about her. Nothing more.”

  “Did she keep her letters?”

  “Not all. Most. In bundles, in shoe-boxes. I’ve got them. Mostly fan-letters for him, as she says.”

  “Could we look?”

  “If you’re interested. I have looked at them all, once or twice. I had an idea about writing an article about Victorian precursors of, as it were, fan clubs. But I found it rather sickly when I came to it.”

  “Could I really see?”

  Beatrice turned her impassive stare on Maud’s eager ivory face, and read something there, if not precisely.

  “Why not, I suppose …” she murmured, not moving. “What reason why not?”

  The shoe-box was made of tough black cardboard, cracking with dryness and bound with tape. Beatrice, sighing and sighing, undid this, and there they were, neatly bundled, letter upon letter. They sifted the dates, opened envelopes, pleas for charity, offers of secretarial help, flowing screeds of passionate admiration, written to Randolph and addressed to Ellen. Beatrice checked the date and came up with a screed at once agitated and artistically written, faintly Gothic. And there it was.

  Dear Mrs Ash,

  Please forgive the intrusion upon your most valuable time and attention. I am a gentlewoman, and at present totally unknown to you, but I have something to impart to you which closely concerns both of us and is in my case no less than a matter of life and death. Believe me I speak the cold truth, no more.

  Oh how can I make you trust me? You must. May I trespass on your time and come to see you? I shall not need to stay long—but I have that to tell you—for which you may come to thank me—or not—but that is no matter—you must know—

  I may be found at all times at the address which heads this letter. Believe me oh believe me, I wish to stand your friend.

  Yours most sincerely

  Blanche Glover

  Maud closed her face and dropped her eyelids on what must be a glitter of pouncing. She said, trying to make her voice indifferent, “This looks like it. Any more? This looks like the second letter she mentions. Is the first one there?”

  Beatrice riffled.

  “No. No more. At least—unless this is the same writing. It looks like the same paper. It’s got no heading and no signature.”

  You did wrong to keep my Evidence. If it was not mine, it is also not yours. I beg of you to consider more carefully and to think better of me. I know how I may have appeared to you. I chose my words ill. But what I said was true and urgent, as you will come to see.

  Maud sat, holding this sheet of paper, in an agony of indecision. What Evidence had Ellen kept? And of what? A clandestine correspondence or a trip to the Yorkshire Coast with a solitary biologising poet? What had Ellen felt or understood? Had Blanche handed her the purloined manuscript of Swammerdam? How could she make copies of precisely these documents without alerting Beatrice, and with Beatrice, surely, Cropper and Blackadder? A kind of imperious will in her tapped at her like a hammer, and was interrupted in its coding of a cunning request by Beatrice’s woolly voice. “I don’t know what you’re up to, Dr Bailey. I don’t know if I want to know. You came looking for something and you found it.”

  “Yes,” said Maud in a whisper. She moved her long hands in a gesture of silence at the partition walls behind which lurked Blackadder and the Ash Factory.

  Beatrice Nest’s face was bland and patiently questioning.

  “It isn’t only my secret,” Maud hissed. “Or I wouldn’t have been disingenuous. I—I don’t know what I’ve found, yet. I promise I’ll tell you first when I do. I think I know what Blanche Glover told her. Well, one of two or three things it might have been.”

  “Was it important?” asked the grey voice, with no indication of whether the “importance” was scholarly, passionate or cosmic.

  “I don’t know. It might change our views of—of his work, I suppose, a bit.”

  “What do you want of me?”

  “A Xerox of those two letters. If it can be done, a copy of the Journal, between those dates. Not to tell Professor Cropper. Or Professor Blackadder. Yet. We discovered this ourselves—”

  Beatrice Nest seemed to think for a longish time, her face
propped in her hands.

  “This—what you’re so excited about—it won’t—it won’t expose her to ridicule—or—misapprehension? I’ve become very concerned that she shouldn’t be—exposed is the best word I suppose—exposed.”

  “It isn’t primarily to do with her.”

  “That is not necessarily reassuring.” A maddening silence. “I suppose I shall trust you. I suppose I shall.”

  Maud walked briskly out through Blackadder’s office, where Paola raised a languid hand; the Professor himself was not there. In the outer dark, in the corridor, however, a familiar Aran sweater whitened the murk, familiar gold hair shone.

  “Surprise,” said Fergus Wolff. “Surprise, ha?”

  Maud drew herself up and made a dignified side-step.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “I’m in a hurry.”

  “To do what? Pursue the labyrinthine coilings of the Melusina? Or to see Roland Michell?”

  “Neither.”

  “Then stay.”

  “I can’t.”

  She stepped. He side-stepped. She stepped the other way. He was there. He put out a strong hand and clasped it like a handcuff on her wrist. She saw the egg-white bed.

  “Don’t be like that, Maud. I want to talk to you. I’m suffering terribly in about equal amounts of curiosity and jealousy. I can’t believe you’ve got involved with sweet useless Roland and I can’t understand what you’re doing haunting the Crematorium here, unless you have.”

  “Crematorium?”

  “Ash Factory.” He was pulling on her arm while he talked so that her body and her briefcase were leaning towards his body, which put out its remembered flickers of electrification. “I need to talk to you, Maud. Let me buy you a good meal. Let’s just talk. You’re the most intelligent woman I know. I miss you terribly, you know, I should have said that, too.”

  “I can’t. I’m busy. Let go, Fergus.”

  “Tell me what’s going on at least, go on, do. If you tell me I’ll be fearfully discreet.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “And if you don’t tell me, I shall find out, and consider what I find out to be my own property, Maud.”

  “Let go of my wrist.”

  A large black-uniformed, black-skinned woman appeared unsmiling behind them. “Please read the notices. Silence at all times in the book corridors.”

  Maud wrenched her wrist free and strode away. Fergus called after her “I warned you,” and could be seen going into the Ash Factory, followed by the black wardress, rattling chains of keys.

  Two days later Roland and Maud met in Oodles, the vegetarian restaurant at the end of Museum Street. Maud had brought the collection of xeroxed sheets that Beatrice had given her. She had had another unnerving experience trying to telephone Roland to arrange this meeting; she was also troubled by an enthusiastic letter from Leonora Stern, who had been given a grant by the Tarrant Foundation to come to England, and wrote enthusiastically: “next semester I shall be with you.”

  They stood in a queue and bought tepidly microwaved spinach lasagne; they then took refuge in the underground part of the restaurant, hoping to avoid curious eyes. Roland read Ellen’s journal and Blanche’s letters. Maud watched him and then said, “What do you think?”

  “I think the only certain thing is that Blanche told Ellen something. Showed her the stolen letters, probably? I want to think Blanche did this because Christabel had gone to Yorkshire with Ash. It fits in beautifully. But it isn’t proof.”

  “I can’t think how we could prove it.”

  “I did have certain wild ideas. I thought of going through the poems—his and hers—written about then—with the idea that they might reveal something. I thought if I retraced his steps in Yorkshire—with the idea that she might have been there—and the poems in hand—I might get somewhere. We’ve already found one correlation no one could have thought of who wasn’t looking for a connection. Randolph Ash wrote to his wife about a Hob who cured whooping cough and Christabel wrote a tale about one. And then Ash relates his interest in drowned Yorkshire villages to the City of Is as well as to Lyell. People’s minds do hook together—”

  “They do.”

  “One might find a cumulative series of such coincidences.”

  “It would be interesting, anyway.”

  “I even had a theory about water and fountains. I told you Ash’s post-1860 poetry had this elemental streak—water and stones and earth and air. He mixes up geysers from Lyell with Norse myth and Greek mythical fountains. And Yorkshire waterfalls. And I wondered about the Fountain of Thirst in Melusina.”

  “How?”

  “Well, is there an echo here? This is out of Ask to Embla. It possibly links that fountain to the one in the Song of Songs, as well. Listen:

  “ ‘We drank deep of the Fountain of Vaucluse

  And where the northern Force incessantly

  Stirs the still pool, were stirred. And shall those founts

  Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed?’ ”

  Maud said “Say that again.”

  Roland said it again.

  Maud said, “Have you ever really felt your hackles rise? Because I just have. Prickles all down my spine and at the roots of my hair. You listen to this. This is what Raimondin says to Mélusine after he is told she knows he has looked at her in her marble bath and broken the prohibition:

  “ ‘Ah, Mélusine, I have betrayed your faith.

  Is there no remedy? Must we two part?

  Shall our hearth’s ash grow pale, and shall those founts

  Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed?’ ”

  Roland said, “Shall our hearth’s ash grow pale.”

  “The image of the hearth runs all through Melusina. She built castles and homes; the hearth is the home.”

  “Which came first? His line or her line? There are problems about dating Ask to Embla—which we’re obviously on the way to solving, among other things. It reads like a classic literary clue. She was a clever and hinting sort of woman. Look at those dolls.”

  “Literary critics make natural detectives,” said Maud. “You know the theory that the classic detective story arose with the classic adultery novel—everyone wanted to know who was the Father, what was the origin, what is the secret?”

  “We need,” said Roland, carefully, “to do this together. I know his work, and you know hers. If we were both in Yorkshire—”

  “This is all madness. We should tell Cropper and Blackadder and certainly Leonora and marshal our resources.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “No. I want to—to—follow the—path. I feel taken over by this. I want to know what happened, and I want it to be me that finds out. I thought you were mad, when you came to Lincoln with your piece of stolen letter. Now I feel the same. It isn’t professional greed. It’s something more primitive.”

  “Narrative curiosity—”

  “Partly. Could you manage a few days’ field research at Whitsuntide?”

  “It might present difficulties. Things aren’t easy at home. As you may have noticed. If you and I—went up there—it wouldn’t be liked. It would be misconstrued.”

  “I know, I understand. Fergus Wolff thinks. He thinks. He professes to believe—that you and I …”

  “How dreadful—”

  “He threatened me in the Library with finding out what we were up to. We must watch him.”

  Roland considered Maud’s embarrassment and did not ask what were her feelings about Fergus Wolff. That they were violent was clear. Equally he did not intend to discuss Val.

  “People who are going off on real naughty weekends manage to find excuses,” he said. “Put up smoke-screens. It happens all the time, I’m told. I don’t see why I shouldn’t think of something. Money’s more of a problem.”

  “What you need is a small research grant to look at something not too far away from Yorkshire and not too near either—”

  “Ash did so
me work in York Minster Library—”

  “Something like that.”

  13

  Three Ases wandered out from Ida plain

  Where the Gods met in council, with clear brows

  And joyous voices, knowing then no weight

  Of sin, or the world’s wryness. All was gleam

  Of sun and moon well-wrought, and golden trees

  With golden apples inside golden walls.

  They stepped into the middle-garden, made

  For men not made, drowsed in the lap of Time.

  Round their divine bright faces, ceaselessly

  Rushed the new air. Beneath their lovely feet

  Rose the new grass, and leeks, untouched, uncropped

  Green with the living Sap of that first Spring.

  They came down to the shore

  Where the salt breakers fell on the new sand

  With road unheard, and curling crest unseen

  Like nothing else, for no man-mind was there

  To name, or liken them, in any way.

  They were themselves alone, and rose and fell

  Changing-eternal, new, not knowing time

  Which their succession measures for the mind.

  And these three Ases were the sons of Bor

  Who slew the Giant Ymir in his rage