Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  Roland looked at Maud to see if she might laugh and saw that she was smiling, an embarrassed, fierce smile, but a smile.

  He laughed. Maud laughed. He said, “It’s exhausting. When everything’s a deliberate political stance. Even if it’s interesting.”

  “Celibacy as the new volupté. The new indulgence.”

  “If it is you should relax into it. Tell me—why do you always cover your hair?”

  He thought for a moment he might have offended her, but she only looked down, and then answered with a kind of academic accuracy.

  “It’s to do with Fergus. With Fergus and with its colour. I used to wear it very short—sheared short. It’s the wrong colour, you see, no one believes it’s natural. I once got hissed at a conference, for dyeing it to please men. And then Fergus said, the shaved style was a cop-out, a concession, it made me look like a skull, he said. I should simply have it. So I grew it. But now it’s grown, I put it away.”

  “You shouldn’t. You should let it out.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because if anyone can’t see it they think and think about it, they wonder what it’s like, so you attract attention to it. Also because, because …”

  “I see.”

  He waited. Maud untied the head-square. The segments of the plaits were like streaked and polished oval stones, celandine yellow, straw-yellow, silvery yellow, glossy with constricted life. Roland was moved—not exactly with desire, but with an obscure emotion that was partly pity, for the rigorous constriction all that mass had undergone, to be so structured into repeating patterns. If he closed his eyes and squinted, the head against the sea was crowned with knobby horns.

  “Life is so short,” said Roland. “It has a right to breathe.”

  And indeed his feeling was for the hair, a kind of captive creature. Maud pulled out a pin or two and the mass slipped, and then hung, still plaited, unbalanced on her neck.

  “You are an odd man.”

  “I’m not making a pass. You know that. I just wanted to see it let out once. I know you will know I’m telling the truth.”

  “Yes, I do. That’s what’s so odd.”

  She began slowly to undo, with unweaving fingers, the long, thick braids. Roland watched, intently. There was a final moment when six thick strands, twice three, lay still and formed over her shoulders. And then she put down her head and shook it from side to side, and the heavy hair flew up, and the air got into it. Her long neck bowed, she shook her head faster and faster, and Roland saw the light rush towards it and glitter on it, the whirling mass, and Maud inside it saw a moving sea of gold lines, waving, and closed her eyes and saw scarlet blood.

  Roland felt as though something had been loosed in himself, that had been gripping him.

  He said, “That feels better.”

  Maud pushed aside her hair and looked out at him, a little flushed.

  “All right. That feels better.”

  15

  And is love then more

  Than the kick galvanic

  Or the thundering roar

  Of Ash volcanic

  Belched from some crater

  Of earth-fire within?

  Are we automata

  Or Angel-kin?

  —R. H. ASH

  The man and the woman sat opposite each other in the railway carriage. They had an appearance of quiet decorum; both had books open on their knees, to which they turned when the motion of the carriage permitted. He was indeed leaning lazily back into his corner, with crossed ankles, indicating a state of relaxation. She had her eyes for the most part cast demurely down at her book, though she would occasionally raise a pointed chin and look intently out at the changing countryside. An observer might have speculated for some time as to whether they were travelling together or separately, for their eyes rarely met, and when they did, remained guarded and expressionless. Such an observer might have concluded, after a considerable period of travelling, that the gentleman admired, or felt a considerable interest in, the lady. When she was most determinedly looking at her book, or the flashing fields and vanishing cattle, his eyes would rest on her, speculative or simply curious, it was very hard to tell.

  He was a handsome man, with a flowing head of very dark brown hair, almost black but with russet lights in its waves, and a glossy beard, a little browner, the colour of horse-chestnuts. His brow was expansive, the organ of intellect well-developed, though he was equally well endowed with the bumps of compassion and fellow-feeling. He had black brows, a little rough and craggy, under which very large dark eyes looked out at the world steadily enough, fearless but with something held in reserve. The nose was clearcut and the mouth firm and settled—a face, one might think, that knew itself and had a decided way of taking in the world. His book was Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which he took in, when he applied himself, with concentrated speed. His clothes were elegant without ostentation. The hypothetical observer might have been unable to decide whether his subject pursued an active or a contemplative life: he looked accustomed to decision, and yet also one who “had thought long and deeply.”

  The lady was dressed elegantly if not in the first flight of fashion; she wore a grey-striped muslin dress over which she had cast an Indian shawl with marine-blue and peacock paisleys on a dove-grey ground; she had a small grey silk bonnet, under the brim of which appeared a few white silk rosebuds. She was very fair, pale-skinned, with eyes, not unduly large, of a strange green colour which transmuted itself as the light varied. She was not exactly beautiful—her face was too long for perfection, and not in the first flush of youth, though the bones were well-cut and the mouth an elegant curve, no pouting rosebud. Her teeth were a little large for an exacting taste, but they were strong and white. It was hard to tell whether she was a married lady or a spinster, and hard too, to decide what her circumstances might be. Everything about her was both neat and tastefully chosen, breathing no hint of extravagance, but betraying no signs of poverty or skimping to the curious eye. Her white kid gloves were supple and showed no signs of wear. Her little feet, which appeared from time to time as the carriage movement displaced the large bell of her skirt, were encased in a gleaming pair of laced boots in emerald green leather. If she was aware of her travelling companion’s interest, she showed no sign of it, unless it were that her eyes were studiously averted from his person, and that circumstance might have indicated only a proper modesty.

  It was indeed only when they were well beyond York that the question of their relationship might have been resolved, for the gentleman leaned forward and asked, very earnestly, if she was quite comfortable and not tired. And by then there were no other passengers, for the most part had changed trains, or reached their destination at York, and none was proceeding beyond Malton and Pickering, so that the two were alone in the carriage. She looked directly at him then, and said no, she was not in the least tired; she considered for a moment and added precisely that she was not in a state of mind that allowed of tiredness, she believed. Whereupon they did smile at each other, and he leaned forward and possessed himself of one of the little gloved hands, which lay still and then clasped his. There were matters, he said, that they had an urgent need to discuss before they arrived, things which they had had no time or peace to make clear in the haste and turmoil of setting off, things to which there was a degree of awkwardness attached, which he hoped, with resolution, they could overcome.

  He had been planning this speech since they left King’s Cross. He had been quite unable to imagine how he would say it, or how she would respond.

  She said she was listening attentively. The little hand in his curled and crisped. He gripped it.

  “We are travelling together,” he said. “We decided—you decided—to come. What I do not know is whether you would wish—whether you would choose—to lodge and manage yourself separately from me after this point—or whether—or whether—you would wish to travel as my wife. It is a large step—It is attended with all sorts of in
convenience, hazard and—embarrassment. I have rooms reserved in Scarborough where a wife could well—find space. Or I could reserve other rooms—under some false name. Or you may not wish to take this step at all—you may wish to be lodged separately and respectably elsewhere. Forgive this baldness. I am truly trying to discover your wishes. We left in so exalted a state—I wish decisions could arise naturally—but you see how it is.”

  “I want to be with you,” she said. “I took a vast step. If it is taken, it is taken. I am quite happy to be called your wife, wherever you choose, for this time. That is what I had understood I—we—had decided.”

  She spoke quickly and clearly; but the gloved hands, in their warm kid, turned and turned in his. He said, still in the quiet, dispassionate tone they had so far employed: “You take my breath away. This is generosity—”

  “This is necessity.”

  “But you are not sad, you are not in doubt, you are not—”

  “That doesn’t come into it. This is necessity. You know that.” She turned her face away and looked out, through a stream of fine cinders, at the slow fields. “I am afraid, of course. But that seems to be of no real importance. None of the old considerations—none of the old cares—seem to be of any importance. They are not tissue paper, but seem so.”

  “You must not regret this, my dear.”

  “And you must not speak nonsense. Of course I shall regret. So will you, will you not? But that, too, is of no importance at this time.”

  They were silent, for a time. Then he said, choosing his words carefully, “If you are to come with me as my wife—I hope you will accept this ring. It is a family ring—it belonged to my mother. It is a plain gold band, engraved with daisies.”

  “I too have brought a ring. It belonged to a great-aunt, Sophie de Kercoz. It has a green stone—look—jade—a simple stone, with an engraved S.”

  “You would prefer not to accept my ring?”

  “I did not say that. I was giving proof of foresight and resolution. I shall be happy to wear your ring.”

  He peeled off the little white glove, and pushed his ring over her fine one with its green stone, so that the two lay together. It fitted, though loosely. He would have liked to say something—with this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship—but these good and true words were doubly treacherous to two women. Their unspoken presence hung in the air. He seized the little hand and carried it to his lips. Then he sat back and turned the glove reflectively in his hands, pushing its soft leather pockets back into shape, one by one, smoothing their fine creases.

  All the way from London, he had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination’s work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her and the mystery, the whiteness of her, which was part of her extreme magnetism, and the green look of those piercing or occluded eyes. Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. Yet here she was, and he was engaged in observing the ways in which she resembled, or differed from, the woman he dreamed, or reached for in sleep, or would fight for.

  As a young man he had been much struck by the story of Wordsworth and his solitary Highland girl; the poet had heard the enchanted singing, taken in exactly as much as he had needed for his own immortal verse, and had refused to hear more. He himself, he had discovered, was different. He was a poet greedy for information, for facts, for details. Nothing was too trivial to interest him; nothing was inconsiderable; he would, if he could, have mapped every ripple on a mudflat and its evidence of the invisible workings of wind and tide. So now his love for this woman, known intimately and not at all, was voracious for information. He learned her. He studied the pale loops of hair on her temples. Their sleek silver-gold seemed to him to have in it a tinge, a hint of greenness, not the copper-green of decay, but a pale sap-green of vegetable life, streaked into the hair like the silvery bark of young trees, or green shadows in green tresses of young hay. And her eyes were green, glass-green, malachite green, the cloudy green of seawater perturbed and carrying a weight of sand. The lashes over them silver, but thick enough to be visibly present. The face not kind. There was no kindness in the face. It was cut clean but not fine—strong-boned rather, so that temples and slanting cheeks were pronounced and solid-shadowed, the shadows bluish, which in imagination he always touched with green too, but it was not so.

  If he loved the face, which was not kind, it was because it was clear and quick and sharp.

  He saw, or thought he saw, how those qualities had been disguised or overlaid by more conventional casts of expression—an assumed modesty, an expedient patience, a disdain masking itself as calm. At her worst—oh, he saw her clearly, despite her possession of him—at her worst she would look down and sideways and smile demurely, and this smile would come near a mechanical simper, for it was an untruth, it was a convention, it was her brief constricted acknowledgement of the world’s expectations. He had seen immediately, it seemed to him, what in essence she was, sitting at Crabb Robinson’s breakfast table, listening to men disputing, thinking herself an unobserved observer. Most men, he judged, if they had seen the harshness and fierceness and absolutism, yes, absolutism, of that visage, would have stood back from her. She would have been destined to be loved only by timid weaklings, who would have secretly hoped she would punish or command them, or by simpletons, who supposed her chill look of delicate withdrawal to indicate a kind of female purity, which all desired, in those days, at least ostensibly. But he had known immediately that she was for him, she was to do with him, as she really was or could be, or in freedom might have been.

  The lodgings were kept by a Mrs Cammish, a tall woman with the heavy-browned frown of the Northmen in the Bayeux Tapestry, who had also, in their long ships, settled this coast. She and her daughter carried up the quantities of baggage—hatboxes, tin trunks, collecting boxes, nets and writing-desks—a collection whose very bulk made the enterprise seem respectable. Left in the solidly furnished bedroom to take off their travelling clothes, they were struck dumb, and stood and stared. He held out his arms, and she came into them, saying however, “Not now, not yet.”

  “Not now, not yet,” he said agreeably, and felt her relax a little. He led her across to the window, which gave a good view, over the cliff, of the long sands and the grey sea.

  “There,” he said. “The German Sea. Like steel, with life in it.”

  “I have often thought of visiting the Breton coast, which is in some sense my home.”

  “I have never seen that sea.”

  “It is very changeable. Blue and clear one day and the next furiously dun and swollen with sand and everywhere sodden.”

  “I—we—must go there too.”

  “Ah, hush. This is enough. Maybe more than enough.” They had their own dining-room, where Mrs Cammish served a huge meal that should have fed twelve, on plates rimmed with cobalt blue and spattered with fat pink rosebuds. There was a tureen of buttery soup, there was boiled hake and potatoes, there were cutlets and peas, there were arrowroot moulds and treacle tart. Christabel LaMotte pushed her food across her plate with her fork. Mrs Cammish told Ash that his lady was a bit peaky and clearly in need of sea air and good food. Christabel said, when they were alone again, “It is no good. We eat like two small birds, in our house.”

  He watched her remember her home, stricken for a moment, and said easily, “You must not be intimidated by landladies. But she is right. You must enjoy the sea air.”

  He watched her. He noted that she assumed no manners that might be thought wifely. She handed him nothing. She did not lean forward intimately, she did not defer. She watched him with her sharp look when she thought herself unobserved, but not with solicitude, nor yet with affection, nor yet with the greedy curiosity he could not suppress in himself. She watched him as a bird watches, the sort
that is chained to a stand, some bright-plumed creature of tropical forests, some gold-eyed hawk from northern crags, wearing its jesses with what dignity it could muster, enduring man’s presence with a still-savage hauteur, ruffling its feathers from time to time, to show both that it tended itself with respect, and that it was not quite comfortable. So she pushed back the wrists of her sleeves, so she held herself in her chair. He would change all that. He could change all that, he was tolerably certain. He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings. He said, “I have an idea for a poem about necessity. As you said in the train. So seldom in a life do we feel that what we do is necessary in that sense—gripped by necessity—I suppose death must be like that. If it is given to us to know its approach, we must know we are now complete—do you see, my dear—without further awkward choices, or the possibility of lazy denial. Like balls rolling down a smooth slope.”

  “With no possibility of return. Or like armies advancing, which could in fact turn back, but cannot believe it, have wrought themselves to a pitch of singleness of purpose—”

  “You may turn back at any point, if—”

  “I have said. I cannot.”

  They walked by the sea. He watched their footprints, his in a straight line by the water’s edge, hers snaking away and back, meeting his, wandering, meeting again. She did not take his arm, though once or twice, when they coincided, she took hold of it, and stepped along beside him rapidly for a time. They both walked very quickly. “We walk well together,” he told her. “Our paces suit.”