Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  “And we don’t?”

  “At some point in history their self-value changed into—what worries you. A horrible over-simplification. It leaves out guilt, for a start. Now or then.”

  She closed The Great Ventriloquist and leaned over the ledge on which she was curled, and extended a hand.

  “Shall we move on?”

  “Where? What are we looking for?”

  “We’d better start looking for facts as well as images. I suggest Whitby, where the jet brooch was bought.”

  My dearest Ellen,

  I have found much that is curious in the town of Whitby, a prosperous fishing village at the mouth of the river Esk—it is a sloping town, crowding down in picturesque alleys or yards and flight after flight of stone stairs to the water—a terraced town, from the upper layers of which you seem to see, above a moving sphere of masts and smoking chimneys all about you, the town, the harbour, the ruined Abbey and the German Ocean.

  The past lies all around, from the moorland graves and supposed Killing Pits of the Ancient Britons to the Roman occupation and the early days of Christian evangelism under St Hilda—the town in those days was called Streonshalh and what we are accustomed to think of as the Synod of Whitby, in 664, was of course the Synod of Streonshalh. I have meditated among calling gulls in the ruins of the Abbey and have seen older darker things—the tumuli or houes on the moors, and temples perhaps druidical, including the Bridestones, a row of uprights at Sleights, thought to be one side of an avenue of a stone circle, such as Stonehenge. Certain details may bring these long-vanished folk suddenly to life in the imagination. Such are the finding hereabouts of a heart-shaped ear-ring of jet in contact with the jawbone of a skeleton; and a number of large jet beads cut in angles, found with a similar inmate of a barrow, who had been deposited in the houe with the knees drawn upward to the chin.

  There is a mythical story which accounts for the standing stones which appeals to my imagination, as suggesting the liveliness of ancient Gods in comparatively modern times. Whitby has its own local giant—a certain fearsome Wade, who with his wife Bell, was given to tossing about casual boulders on the moors. Wade and Bell were, like the Hrimthurse who built the wall of Asgard, or the fairy Melusina, builders of castles for ungrateful men—they are credited with the construction of the Roman Road across the moor to the delightful town of Pickering—a regular road, built of stones on a stratum of gravel or rubbish from the sandstone of the moor. I intend to walk this road, which is locally known as Wade’s Causey, or Causeway, and was believed to have been built by Wade for the convenience of his wife Bell, who kept a giant cow on the moors, which she travelled to milk. One of the ribs of this monstrous ruminant was on show in Mulgrave Castle and was in fact the jawbone of a whale. The tumuli or houes on the moorland are heaps of boulders carried by the diligent Bell in her apron, whose strings occasionally broke. Charlton believes that Wade is simply a name for the ancient God Woden. Thor was certainly worshipped in Saxon times at the village of Thordisa which stood at the head of the Eastrow beck. So the human imagination mixes and adapts to its current preoccupations many ingredients into new wholes—it is essentially poetic—here are a Whale and Pickering Castle and the old Thunder God and the tombs of ancient Briton and Saxon chieftains and the military greed of the conquering Roman armies, all refashioned into a local giant and his dame—as the stones of the Roman road go to the construction of the dry stone walls, to the loss of archaeology and the preservation of our sheep—or as the huge boulder on Sleights Moor, thrown by Bell’s giant child and dented by her iron ribcage—was broken up for road-mending—and I came along that road.

  I have been visiting the local jet industry here, which flourishes and has produced work of a high standard of craftsmanship. I have sent you a piece—with a little poem to accompany it—with my great love, as always. I know you like well-made things; you would be truly delighted, for the most part, by the curious manufactures that go on here—adornments may be made from many things—ancient ammonite worms find new lives as polished brooches. I have been interested also by the reformation of fossil remains into elegant articles—a whole burnished tabletop will display the unthinkably ancient coils of long-dead snail-things, or the ferny stone leaves of primitive cycads as clear as the pressed flowers and ferns that inhabit your prayer-book. If there is a subject that is my own, my dear Ellen, as a writer I mean, it is the persistent shape-shifting life of things long-dead but not vanished. I should like to write something so perfectly fashioned that it should still be contemplated as those stone-impressed creatures are, after so long a time. Though I feel our durance on this earth may not equal theirs.

  The jet, you know, was once alive too. “Certain scientific thinkers have supposed it to be indurated petroleum or mineral pitch—but it is now generally accepted that its origins are ligneous—it is found in compressed masses, long and narrow—the outer surface always marked with longitudinal striae, like the grain of wood, and the transverse fracture which is conchoidal and has a resinous lustre, displays the annual growths in compressed elliptical ones.” I cite this description from Dr Young, though I have seen such raw lumps of jet in the working-sheds, yes, and held them in my hands, and been moved unspeakably by the traces of time—growing time long, long, unutterably long past—in their ellipses. They may be contaminated by an excess of siliceous matter in some cases—a craftsman carving a rose, or a serpent, or a pair of hands may suddenly come across a line or flaw of silex or flint in the material and be driven to desist. I have watched such craftsmen work—they are highly specialised workers—a carver may pass a brooch on to another who specialises in incising patterns—or gold or ivory or bone-carving may be joined to the jet.

  All these new sights and discoveries, my dear, as you may imagine, have started off shoots of poetry in every direction. (I say shoots in Vaughan’s sense, “Bright shoots of everlastingness,” where the word means simultaneously brightness of scintillation and flights of arrows, and growth of seeds of light—I wish you would despatch to me my Silex scintillans, for I have been thinking much about his poetry and that stony metaphor since I have been working on the rocks here. When your jet brooch comes, I beg you will stroke it and watch how it electrically attracts scraps of hair and paper—it has its own magnetic life in it—and so has always been made use of in charms and white witchcraft and ancient medicines. I divagate without discipline—my mind runs all over—I have a poem I wish to write about modern discoveries of silex-coated twigs in ancient artesian wells, as described by Lyell.)

  Now let me know how you are—your health, your household doings, your reading—

  Your loving husband

  Randolph

  Maud and Roland walked round Whitby harbour and up and down the narrow streets that radiated steeply from it. Where Randolph Ash had noticed busyness and prosperity these noticed general signs of unemployment and purposelessness. Few boats were in the harbour and those there were appeared to be battened down and chained up; no motor sounded, and no sail flapped. There was still a smell of coal smoke, but it carried, for them, different connotations.

  The shop-fronts were old and full of romance. A fishmonger’s slab was decorated with gaping skeletal shark-jaws and spiny monstrosities; a sweet-shop had all the old jars and pell-mell heaps of brightly-coloured sugary cubes and spheres and pellets. There were several jewellers specialising in jet. They stopped outside one of these: HOBBS AND BELL, PURVEYORS OF JET ORNAMENTS. It was tall and narrow; the window was like an upright box, along the sides of which were festooned rope upon rope of black and glistening beads, some with dangling lockets, some many-faceted, some glossily round. The front of the window was like a sea-chest of wave-tossed treasure, a dusty heap of brooches, bracelets, rings on cracked velvety cards, teaspoons, paperknives, inkwells and a variety of dim dead shells. It was the North, Roland thought, black as coal, solid, not always graceful craftsmanship, bright under dust.

  “I wonder,” said Maud, “if it would be a good
idea to buy something for Leonora. She likes odd pieces of jewellery.”

  “There’s a brooch there—with forget-me-nots round the edge and clasped hands—that says FRIENDSHIP.”

  “She’d like that—”

  A very small woman appeared in the door of the box-shop. She wore a large apron covered with purple and grey florets, over a skinny black jumper. She had a small hard, brown-skinned face under white hair drawn into a bun. Her eyes were Viking blue and her mouth, when she opened it, contained apparently three teeth. She was puckered but wholesome, like an old apple, and the apron-dress was clean, though her stockings sagged at the ankles over thick black laced shoes.

  “Come in, luv, and look around. There’s plenty more inside. All good Whitby jet. I don’t hold with no imitations. You won’t find better.”

  Inside the counter was another glass sarcophagus, inside which were tumbled more strings and pins and heavy bracelets.

  “Anything you like the look of, I can easy get out for you.”

  “That looks interesting.”

  “That” was an oval locket with a vaguely classical carved figure, full-length, bending over a flowing urn.

  “That’s a Victorian mourning locket. Probably made by Thomas Andrews. He was jet-maker to the Queen. Those were good days for Whitby, after the Prince Consort died. They liked to be reminded of their dead in those days. Now it’s out of sight, out of mind.”

  Maud put the locket down. She asked to see the clasped-hand FRIENDSHIP brooch, which the old woman reached in from the window. Roland was studying a card of brooches and rings made apparently from plaited and woven silks, some encircled by jet, some studded with pearls.

  “This is pretty. Jet and pearls and silk.”

  “Oh, not silk, sir. That’s hair. That’s another form of mourning brooch, with the hair. Look, these ones have IN MEMORIAM round the frame. They cut it off at the deathbed. You could say they kept it alive.”

  Roland peered through the glass at the interwoven strands of fine pale hair.

  “They made all sorts of it, very ingenious. Look—here’s a plaited watch-chain out of someone’s long locks. And a bracelet with a pretty heart-shaped clasp, ever such delicate work, in dark hair.”

  Roland took the thing, light and lifeless, apart from its gold clasp.

  “Do you sell many of these?”

  “Oh, now and then. Folk collect them, you know. Folk’ll collect anything, given time. Butterflies. Collar-studs. Even my old flatirons, as I used right up to 1960, when our Edith insisted on getting me an electric one, I had a man round, asking. And there’s a lot of work in that bracelet, young man, a lot of care went into that. And solid gold, 18-carats, which was expensive for them times, when you got pinchbeck and such.”

  Maud had a row of brooches laid out on the top of the counter.

  “I can tell you know a good piece. Now, I’ve got a real good carved piece you won’t see any more of—language of flowers, young man—clematis and gorse and heartsease—which is to say Mental Beauty and Enduring Affection and ‘I am always thinking of you.’ You should buy that for the young lady. Better than old hair.”

  Roland made a demurring noise. The old woman leaned forward on her high stool and put out a hand to Maud’s green scarf.

  “Now that’s a good piece such as you won’t come across easily—that looks to me like the best of the work out of Isaac Greenberg’s Baxtergate undertaking—such as was sent all over Europe to Queens and Princesses. I’d dearly like a close look at that piece, mam, if you could—”

  Maud put up her hands to her head, and hesitated between unpinning the brooch and pulling off the whole head-binding. Finally, awkwardly for her, she did both, putting the scarf on the counter, and then unpinning its carefully constructed folds and handing the large black knobby thing to the old woman, who trotted away to hold it up in the dusty light from the window.

  Roland looked at Maud. The pale, pale hair in fine braids was wound round and round her head, startling white in this light that took the colour out of things and only caught gleams and glancings. She looked almost shockingly naked, like a denuded window-doll, he at first thought, and then, as she turned her supercilious face to him and he saw it changed, simply fragile and even vulnerable. He wanted to loosen the tightness and let the hair go. He felt a kind of sympathetic pain on his own skull-skin, so dragged and ruthlessly hair-pinned was hers. Both put their hands to their temple, as though he was her mirror.

  The old woman came back and put Maud’s brooch on the counter, switching on a dusty little Anglepoise to illuminate its darkness.

  “I’ve never seen aught quite like this—though it’s clear enough one of Isaac Greenberg’s pieces, I reckon—there were a piece of his at t’Great Exhibition with corals and rocks on, though I’ve never seen a mermaid and the coral—with her little mirror and all. Where did you come by that, mam?”

  “I suppose you might call it a family heirloom. I found it in the family button box when I was really quite young—we had a huge dressing-up box full of old buckles and buttons and bits and bobs—and it was just in there. I’m afraid nobody liked it much. My mother thought it was just hideous Victorian junk, she said. I suppose it is Victorian? I took it because it reminded me of the Little Mermaid.” She turned to Roland. “And then lately of the Fairy Melusina, of course.”

  “Oh, it’s Victorian. I sh’d say it’s earlier than the death of the Prince Consort in 1861—there was more playful pieces before that—though always the sad ones predominated. Look at th’ workmanship in that waving hair and the lifelikeness of the little tail-fins. What they could accomplish in them days. You wouldn’t get work like that nowadays, not nowhere. It’s forgotten and gone by.”

  Roland had never closely approached Maud’s brooch, which depicted indeed a little mermaid seated on a rock, her glossy black shoulders twisted towards the surface, modestly obviating any need to carve her little breasts. Her hair snaked down her back, and her tail snaked down the rock. The whole was enclosed in what he had taken to be twigs and now saw, through the old woman’s eyes, to be branching coral.

  He said to Maud, “You inherited some of Christabel’s books.…”

  “I know. I never thought. I mean, this brooch has always been there. I never thought to ask where it came from. It—it looks quite different in this shop. Among these other things. It was—it was a joke of mine.”

  “Perhaps it was a joke of his.”

  “Even if it was,” said Maud, thinking furiously, “even if it was, it doesn’t prove she was here. All it proves is, he bought brooches for two women at once.…”

  “It doesn’t even prove that. She could have bought it for herself.”

  “If she was here.”

  “Or anywhere they were sold.”

  “You should look after that piece,” the old woman put in. “That’s unique, I should say, that is.” She turned to Roland. “Won’t you have the flower-language piece, sir? It would be a real companion-piece to the little mermaid.”

  “I’ll take the FRIENDSHIP brooch,” said Maud quickly. “For Leonora.”

  Roland wanted badly to own something, anything, in this strange sooty stuff which Ash had touched and written about. He did not in fact want the ornate flower-piece and could think of no one to whom he might give it—these things were definitely not in Val’s style, not in either of her styles, old or new. He found, in a green glass bowl on the counter, a pile of loose unrelated beads and chips which the old woman was selling at 75p each and sorted out for himself a little heap of these, some round, some flattened and elliptical, a hexagon, a highly polished satin cushion.

  “Personal worry beads,” he told Maud. “I do worry.”

  “I noticed.”

  14

  They say that women change: ’tis so: but you

  Are ever-constant in your changefulness,

  Like that still thread of falling river, one

  From source to last embrace in the still pool

  E
ver-renewed and ever-moving on

  From first to last a myriad water-drops

  And you—I love you for it—are the force

  That moves and holds the form.

  —R. H. ASH, Ask to Embla, XIII

  My dearest Ellen,

  Today I varied my regimen of dissection and magnification by a long stride from foss to foss, or force to force, around the Dale of Goathland or Godeland—do you not admire the way we here see language in the making, in the alternative names, both accepted, for these things. These names were given by the ancient Vikings—the Danes settled these parts and embraced Christianity, whilst the wilder Norwegian pagans tried to invade from Ireland and the North—to meet defeat at Brunanburh. They left few traces of their 250 years of farming and fighting here—only words and names, which vanish and decay as W. Wordsworth has observed.

  Mark! how all things swerve

  From their known course, or vanish like a dream;

  Another language spreads from coast to coast;

  Only perchance some melancholy Stream

  And some indignant Hills old names preserve,

  When laws, and creeds, and people all are lost!

  There are two constituent brooklets of the Mirk Esk, the Eller Beck and the Wheeldale Beck, which have their juncture at a place called Beck Holes—and along these Becks are many fine fosses—the Thomasine Foss, Water Ark and Walk Mill Fosses—and then the Nelly Ayre Foss and Malyan’s Spout—a particularly impressive hundred-foot fall into the sylvan ravine. The effect of light and shade, both in the changing green of the pensile foliage and the depths of the pools, and in the racing clouds which bring dark, light and dark again, was particularly fine. I climbed up onto Glaisdale and Wheeldale moors—where these becks have their sources in small rills which bubble up amongst the heather and grit. The contrast between the cool dappled world of the little dales—and the shady caverns and pools into which the forces rush and hurry to be swallowed in quiet—and the open spaces where for dark mile upon mile nothing seems to stir and nothing sounds save a surprising harsh wailing cry of a bird—or a chipping sound of another—this contrast is so absolute and yet so natural—and the water running from one world to another—a man might think that here, in this rough north was, if not Paradise, the original earth—rocks, stones, trees, air, water—all so solid and immutable, apparently—and yet shifting and flowing and fleeting in the race of light and the driving cloaks of shadow, that alternately reveal and conceal, illuminate and smudge its contours. Here, dear Ellen, and not in the fat valleys of the south, one has a sense of the nearness of those remotest men whose blood and bones made our blood and bones and live still in them—Briton and Dane, Norseman and Roman—And of things infinitely more remote—creatures who once walked here when the earth was hot—Dr Buckland investigating the cave of Kirkdale in 1821 discovered a den of hyenas with bones of tiger, bear, wolf, probably lion and other carnivora, elephant, rhinoceros, horse, ox, and 3 species of deer as well as many of the rodentia and birds, consumed by the hyenas.