Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  “He said there were so many Dead, in the boat, on the crests of the waves, that he felt a panic of terror for being so crowded. For though they were all insubstantial so he could put his hand this way or that, yet they packed around him, and shrilled their wild cries on the waves, so many, so many, as though the wake of a ship would have not a flock of gulls calling after it, but the sky and the sea solid with feathers, and every feather a soul, so it was he said, after.

  “And he said to the dancing child, ‘Shall we put to sea in this boat?’

  “And the thing was still and would not answer.

  “And he said, ‘So far I have come, and I am very greatly afraid, but if I may come to her, I will go on.’

  “And the little thing said, ‘Wait.’

  “And he thought of her among all the others out on the water, with her thin white face and her flat breast and her starved mouth, and he called after her ‘Wait,’ and her voice howled back like an echo,

  “ ‘Wait.’

  “And he stirred the air, that was full of things, with his arms, and shuffled his clever feet among the dust of the dead on the boards of that boat, but all was heavy, and would not move, and the waves went rolling past, one after another, after another, after another. Then he tried to jump in, he says, but could not. So he stood till dawn and felt them come and go and well in and draw back and heard their cries and the little thing that said,

  “ ‘Wait.’

  “And in the dawn of the next day he came back to the village a broken man. And he sat in the square with the old men, he in the best of his manhood, and his mouth slackened and his face fell away and mostly he said nothing, except ‘I can hear well enough’ or otherwise ‘I wait,’ these two things only.

  “And two or three or ten years ago he put up his head and said, ‘Do you not hear the little thing, dancing?’ And they said no, but he went in, and made his bed businesslike, and called his neighbours and gave Jeanne the key to his seachest and stretched himself out, all thin as he was and wasted, and said, ‘In the end I waited longest, but now I hear it stamping, the little thing is impatient, though I have been patient enough.’ And at midnight he said, ‘Why, there you are, then,’ and so he died.

  “And the room smelled of apple blossom and ripe apples together, Jeanne said. And Jeanne married the butcher and bore him four sons and two daughters, all of them lusty, but ill-disposed for dancing.”

  No, I have not told it like Gode. I have missed out patterns of her voice and have put in a note of my own, a literary note I was trying to avoid, a kind of prettiness or portentousness which makes the difference between the tales of the Brothers Grimm and La Motte Fouqué’s Undine.

  I must write what I saw, and worse, if I can, what I thought. As Gode’s story went on, I saw Christabel knit faster and faster, with her shining head bent over her work. And then after a time she laid her work by, and put her hand to her breast and to her head, as though she was hot, or had not enough air. Then I saw my father take that wandering little hand and hold it in his. (It is not so little, neither; that is a poeticism; it is a strong enough hand, nervous but capable.) And she let him hold it. And when the tale was over, he bent his head and kissed her hair. And she put up her other hand and clung to his.

  We looked so like a family, round that fire. I have been used to thinking of my father as old, old. And of “my cousin” Christabel as a young woman something of my own age, a friend, a confidante, an example.

  But she is in truth much older than I am, if still nearer in age to me than to him. And he is not old. She told him his hair was not grey, that he was not old like Merlin.

  I do not want it that way. I wanted her to stay, to be a friend, to be a companion.

  Not to replace me. Not to replace my mother.

  Those are distinct things. I have not aspired to my mother’s place, but my place is what it is because she is not there. And I do not want another to have the care of my father, or the first right to hear his thoughts or his discoveries.

  Or steal his kiss, write it, that is what I felt, or steal his kiss.

  I did not offer to embrace him when we went to bed. And when he put out his arms, I went in and out of them quickly, stiff and dutiful. I did not look to see how he received this. I ran up to my room, and closed the door.

  I must guard myself from behaving improperly. I have no right to resent a natural kindness, to fear an event he might think I should welcome, for I have complained often enough of the dull life we lead here.

  A thief in the night, I want to cry, a thief in the night.

  Better write no more.

  NOVEMBER

  My father takes much pleasure in her company these days. I remember when I was glad when she began to talk to him, for I thought then she would not go away and our household would be livelier. She asks him good questions, better than I do, or did, for her interest is newer and she brings him new information, different reading, her father’s and her own. Whereas all my ideas—save those which are mine, and do not interest him, for he would see them as trivial and female and ungrateful—all my ideas that would interest him are his own. And of late, before she came, I had not shown much interest in all this, the eternal mist and rain and the angry Ocean and Druids and dolmens and all those old magics. I wanted to know about Paris, and walk its streets in trousers and boots and an elegant jacket, like Mme Sand, free and not in the vapourising solitude. So maybe I failed him, thinking of myself and thinking—in part—that he had failed me, not seeing I might have other needs. He treats her with such respect, his voice comes to life when he tells her things. He said today it did him so much good to feel her interest in his ideas. Those were his very words. “It does me so much good to feel you take an interest in these recondite matters.”

  They talked over our midday meal about the intersection of this world and that other. He said, as he has often said, that in our part of Brittany—la Cornouaille, l’Armorique—there is a persistence of the ancient Celtic belief that death is simply a step—a passage—between two stages of a man’s existence. That there are many stages, and this life is one, and that many worlds exist simultaneously, round and about each other, interpenetrating perhaps here and there. So that in uncertain areas—the dark of night, or sleep, or the curtain of spray where the solid earth meets the running Ocean, which is itself always a threshold of death for men who cross and recross it—messengers might hover between states. Such as Gode’s little dancing thing. Or owls or those butterflies who have been known to be blown in off the salt wastes of the Atlantic.

  He said that the Druid religion as he understood it had a mysticism of the centre—there was no linear time, no before and after—but a still centre—and the Happy Land of Síd—which their stone corridors imitated, pointed to.

  Whereas for Christianity this life was all, as the life was our testing-ground, and then there were Heaven and Hell, absolute.

  But in Brittany a man could fall down a well and find himself in a summer land of apples. Or catch a fish-hook on the bell tower of a drowned church in another country.

  “Or walk through the gate of a barrow into Avallon,” she said.

  She said, “I have been asking myself whether the current interest in the spirit-world is an indication that the Celts have the right view of these matters. For Swedenborg went into the world of spirits and saw, he says, successive states of being, all being purified, all with their own homes and temples and libraries in their own kinds. And of late there have been many moved to seek apparent messages from the debatable lands beyond the veil that separates this world from the next. I have seen a few small unexplainable acts, myself. Spirit-wreaths brought by unseen hands, shining white, of unearthly beauty. Messages tapped painfully out by little hands that found this mode of communication infinitely clumsy for their now-refined nature, and yet persisted, out of love for those left behind. Music played by invisible hands on an accordion placed under a velvet pall out of reach of all. Moving lights.”

  I
said, “I do not believe that these drawing-room tricks have anything to do with religion. Or with whatever it is that we hear in our streams and fountains here.”

  She seemed surprised at my vehemence.

  “That is because you make the mistake of supposing that spirits dislike vulgarity as much as you do. A spirit may speak to a peasant like Gode, because that is picturesque, she is surrounded by Romantic crags on the one hand and primitive enough huts and hearths on the other, and her house is lapped by real thick mortal dark. But if there are spirits, I do not see why they are not everywhere, or may not be presumed to be so. You could argue that their voices may well be muffled by solid brick walls and thick plush furnishings and house-proud antimacassars. But the mahogany-polishers and the drapers’ clerks are as much in need of salvation—as much desirous of assurance of an afterlife—as poets or peasants, in the last resort. When they were sure in their unthinking faiths—when the Church was a solid presence in their midst, the Spirit sat docile enough behind the altar rails and the Souls kept—on the whole—to the churchyard and the vicinity of their stones. But now they fear they may not be raised, that their lids may not be lifted, that heaven and hell were no more than faded drawings on a few old church walls, with wax angels and gruesome bogies—they ask, what is there? And if the man in shiny boots and gold watch-chain or the woman in bombazine and whalebone stays, with her crinoline hoop-lifter for crossing puddles—if these fat and tedious people want to hear spirits as Gode does, why may they not? The Gospel was preached to all men, and if we exist in successive states, the materialists among us must waken in this world and the next. Swedenborg saw them sweat unbelief and rage like heaps of glistening maggots.”

  “You move too quickly for me to argue,” I said sullenly enough, “But I have read about table-turning and spirit rappings in Papa’s magazines and I say it sounds like conjuring tricks for the credulous.”

  “You have read accounts by sceptics,” she said, all fire. “Nothing is easier to mock.”

  “I have read accounts by believers,” I said staunchly. “I have recognised credulity.”

  “Why are you so angry, Cousin Sabine?” said she.

  “Because I have never heard you say what was silly before now,” I said, and that was true, though doubtless it was not why I was angry.

  “One may conjure real daemons with drawing-room conjuring tricks,” said my father, meditatively.

  NOVEMBER

  I have always thought of myself as an affectionate being. I have complained of not having enough people to love, or make much of. I do think it is true to say I have had no experience of hatred until this time. I dislike the hatred, which seems to come from outside myself and take possession of me, like some great bird fixing its hooked beak in me, like some hungry thing with a hot pelt and angry eyes that look out of mine that leaves my better self, with her pleasant smile and her serviceableness, helpless. I fight and fight and no one seems to notice. They sit at table and exchange metaphysical theories and I sit there like a shape-changing witch, swelling with rage and shrinking with shame, and they see nothing. And she changes in my sight. I hate her smooth pale head and her greeny eyes and her shiny green feet beneath her skirts, as though she was some sort of serpent, hissing quietly like the pot in the hearth, but ready to strike when warmed by generosity. She has huge teeth like Baba Yaga or the wolf in the English tale who pretended to be a grandmother. He gives her my tasks when she asks him for employment, and salts the wound by saying “Sabine was finding all this copying burdensome, it is good to have other so-skilled hands and eyes.” He strokes her hair as he passes her, the coil on her neck. She will bite him. She will.

  At the time I write this I know I am absurd.

  And when I write that, I know I am not.

  NOVEMBER

  Today I set out for a long walk along the cliff. It wasn’t a good day for a walk, there were great solid patches of mist and spindrift—and quite a powerful wind. I took Dog Tray. I did not ask her if I might. I took pleasure in the idea that he will follow me anywhere now, although she said he was a dog who loved exclusively and once only. He loves me, I am sure, and his mood suits mine, for he is a sorrowful and reserved sort of beast, he makes his way purposefully in the weather, but he does not play, or smile, as some dogs do. His love is a sad offer of trustfulness.

  She came after me. That has never happened. All those times when I hoped she might come or follow, she never came, unless I begged, or cajoled for her own good. But when I walk to escape her, she comes running after, hurrying a little without wishing to be seen to hurry, in her great cape and hood, with the silly umbrella flapping and creaking in and out in the wind and of no particular use at all. That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

  There is the walk which passes all the monuments—the Dolmen, the fallen menhir, the little Lady Chapel with its granite image on its granite table, not so different from the rough stone of the first two, and probably made from part of one or the other.

  She caught me up and said, “Cousin Sabine, may I go with you?”

  “As you will,” I said, with my hand on the dog’s shoulder. “As you please, of course.”

  We walked a little, and she said, “I fear I have offended you in some way?”

  “Not in the least, not at all.”

  “You have all been so kind to me, I have truly felt I have found a sanctuary, a kind of home, here in my father’s country.”

  “My father and I are glad of that.”

  “I do not feel you are glad. I have a sharp tongue and a thorny exterior. If I have said anything—”

  “You have not.”

  “But I have intruded into your peace? Yet you did not seem wholly satisfied with your peace—in the beginning.”

  I could not speak. I quickened my step and the dog loped after.

  “All that I touch,” she said, “is damaged.”

  “As to that, I know nothing, for you have told me nothing.”

  It was she who was silent, then, for a time. I walked quicker and quicker; it is my country, I am young and strong; she had some difficulty in keeping up.

  “I cannot tell,” she said, after a time. Not plaintively, that is not her way, but sharply, almost impatiently. “I cannot make confidences. It is not in me. I keep to myself, I survive in that way, only in that way.”

  And that is not true, I wanted to say, but did not. You do not treat my father as you treat me.

  “Perhaps you do not trust women,” I said. “That is your right.”

  “I have trusted women—” she began, and did not finish. Then “That did harm. Great harm.”

  She sounded portentous, like a sibyl. I went quicker. She sighed after a little and said her side hurt her, she would go back. I asked if she needed to be accompanied. I asked in such a way that pride must make her refuse, as it did. I put a hand out to the hound, and willed him to stay, which he did. I watched her turn back with her hand to her side and her head down into the wind, toiling a little. I am young, I thought, and should have added “and bad,” but did not. I watched her go and smiled. Part of me would have given almost anything for things to have been as they were before, for her not to be melodramatic and pitiful, but all I did was smile and then stride on, because I am at least young and strong.

  [Note by Ariane Le Minier]

  Here there are some pages missing, and what is written becomes perfunctory and repetitive. I have not made photocopies of the rest of this month until the evening of Christmas. You may see this material if you wish.

  CHRISTMAS NIGHT 1859

  We all went to hear Mass at the church at midnight. My father and I always go. My grandfather would not enter the church; his principles were republican and atheist. I am not sure that my father’s religious beliefs would please the Curé, if he were to discuss them with him, which he does not. But he believes strongly in the continuance of the life of the community, the Breton peop
le, which includes Christmas and all its meanings, old and new. She says she is a member of the Church of England in England, but that here the faith of her fathers is the Catholic faith, in its Breton form. I think that the Curé would be surprised to know what she thinks also, but he seems to welcome her into his church, and respects her isolation. She has been going up to the church more and more during Advent. She stands in the cold, looking at the work of the sculptor of the Calvary, the crude figures carved with such effort out of intractable granite. Ours has a good St Joseph, holding the ass, on the way to Bethlehem (our church is dedicated to St Joseph). My father spoke of how in our country the animals in the barns have speech on the night of the Nativity, when all the world is reconciled to its maker in primeval innocence, as it was in the days of the first Adam. She said, the Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the death of Nature—at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry out on that night Weep, Weep, the great god Pan is dead. I said nothing. I watched him put his cloak round her shoulders and lead her up to our place in the front of the Church, and saw it, God help me, as a prefiguration of our life to come.

  It is always so beautiful when the candles are lit to signify the new world, the new year, the new life. Our heavy little church is not unlike the cave where the birth of Jesus is so often pictured. The people knelt and prayed, shepherds and fishermen. I knelt too, and tried to turn my confused thoughts into some kind of charity and goodwill, to pray in my way. I prayed, as I always pray, that the people would understand the spirit in which my father keeps those festivals only that he considers universal—for him, the nativity is the winter solstice, the turning of the earth to the light. The Curé is afraid of him. He knows he should remonstrate, and dare not.