by A. S. Byatt
MAY 8TH
She is back. We were at table, my father and I, sadly enough, going over yet again our talk of where we might have looked, or whether she went away in the two carts or the innkeeper’s trap that went through the village on that fateful day, when we heard wheels in the courtyard. And before we were up, there she was in the doorway. This second sight of her—a revenant in broad day—was more terribly strange than her first coming in the night and the storm. She is thin and frail, and she has pulled in her clothes with a great heavy leather belt. She is as white as bone, and all her bones seem to have dispossessed her flesh, she is all sharp edges and knobs, as though the skeleton were trying to get out. And she has cut off her hair. That is, all the little curls and coils are gone—she has a kind of cap of dull pale spikes, like dead straw. And her eyes look pale and dead out of deep hollows.
My father ran to her, and would have put his arms tenderly round her, but she put up a bony hand and pushed him back. She said,
“I am quite well, thank you. I can stand on my own feet.”
And so, with great care, and with what I can only call a proud creeping, she made her way, infinitely slowly, but always upright, to the side of the fire and sat down. My father asked if we should not carry her upstairs, and she said no, and repeated “I am quite well, thank you.” But she accepted a glass of wine and some bread and some milk, and drank and ate almost greedily. And we sat round, open-mouthed, and ready to ask a thousand questions, and she said: “Do not ask, I beg you. I have no right to ask favours. I have abused your kindness, as you must see it, though I had no choice. I shall not abuse it much longer. Please ask nothing.”
How can I write what we feel? She forbids all normal feeling, all ordinary human warmth and communication. Does she mean, that is, does she fear or expect, to die here, when she talks of not abusing our kindness much longer? Is she mad, or is she very clever and secret, is she working out a plan she has always had, since her coming here? Will she stay, will she go?
Where is the child? We are all in an agony of curiosity, which she has cleverly, or desperately turned against us, making it seem a kind of sin, prohibiting all normal solicitude and questioning. Is it live or dead? Boy or girl? What does she mean to do?
I will write here, for I am ashamed, and yet it is an interesting part of human nature, that it is impossible to love where there is such lack of openness. I feel a kind of terrible pity when I see her thus, with her bony face and cropped head, and imagine her pain. But I cannot imagine it well, because she forbids it, and in a strange way her prohibition turns my concern into a kind of anger.
MAY 9TH
Gode said, if you take the shirt of a little child and float it on the surface of the feuteun ar hazellou, the fairy fountain, you may see if the child will grow to be lusty, or if it will be weak or die. For if the wind fills the arms of the shirt, and if the body of it swells and moves across the water, the child will live and flourish. But if the shirt is limp, and takes water, and sinks, the child will die.
My father said, “Since we have neither child nor shirt, this divination is not much use.”
She made no little shirts, during those months, only pretty pen-cases and my scissor-case, and the mending of sheets.
She stays in her room mostly. Gode says she is not fevered, nor in decline, but very weak.
Last night I had a nightmare. We were by the side of a great pool, very black, with a surface like jet, lumpy, with a sheen on it. We were surrounded by hollies, a thick hedge of them—when I was a girl, we used to pick the leaves, and prick our fingers ever so slightly from thorn to thorn, moving around the circumference, “Il m’aime, il ne m’aime pas.” I taught this to Christabel, who said holly was better for this game of chance, which in England is played with the petals of daisies, which they tear off, one by one. In my dream I was afraid of the holly. I feared it as one automatically fears snakebite, if something rustles in the undergrowth.
In my dream we were several women by the edge of the water—as in many dreams it was not possible to see how many—I was aware of some behind my shoulders crowding me. Gode was launching a small parcel—at one point this was all swaddled and wrapped, like pictures of the hiding of Moses among the bulrushes. At another point it was a stiff little nightshirt, all pleated, which sailed out into the centre of the pool—there were no ripples—and then raised its empty arms and struggled with the air, and tried to heave itself out of the thick water, which swallowed it very slowly, more like mud or jelly than water, more like liquid stone, and all the time the thing twisted and waved its—so to speak—hands, for it clearly had no hands.
It is clear enough what all this is about. But the vision changes my sense of the shape of events. When I ask myself, now, what became of the child, I see the black obsidian pool, and the lively white shirt going down.
MAY 10TH
A letter came today for my father from M. Michelet, and enclosed in it one for Christabel. She took it composedly enough, as though she had been expecting it, and then when she saw it properly, caught her breath and put it aside, unopened. My Father says M. Michelet writes that it is sent by a friend, upon a hope rather than a certainty that Miss LaMotte might be with us. He asks us to return it to him, if she is not here, and it goes undelivered. All day she did not open it. I do not know when or if she did.
Note to Maud Bailey from Ariane Le Minier.
Dear Professor Bailey,
Here the journal ends, and the notebook almost ends. It is possible that Sabine de K. took it up in another book; if so, it has not yet been found.
I made up my mind not to tell you much of its content, as I wished you, perhaps a little childishly, to have the narrative shock and pleasure that I had from discovering it. When I return from the Cévennes we must compare notes, you and I and Professor Stern.
I was certainly under the impression that students of LaMotte believe her to have lived a secluded life, in a happy lesbian relationship with Blanche Glover. Do you know of any lover or possible lover who might have been the father of this child? The question imposes itself—was the suicide of Blanche connected to the history related in this text? Perhaps you can enlighten me?
I should also tell you that I have made efforts of my own to discover whether the child survived. The convent of St Anne was the obvious place to look, and I have been there and have convinced myself that there is no trace of LaMotte in their somewhat scanty records. (Much was cleared out under a zealous Mother Superior in the 1920s who believed dusty papers were an unnecessary waste of space and nothing to do with the timeless mission of the sisterhood.)
I still suspect the Curé, if only because there is no one else, and I cannot quite believe the child was born and murdered in a barn. I imagine it may well not have survived, however.
I enclose a few English poems and parts of poems I found among Sabine’s things. I have no access to any specimen of LaMotte’s handwriting, but I think they may be hers, and confirm the view that all was not well?
Sabine’s story after these events is part happy, part sad. She published the three novels I wrote of, of which La Deuxième Dahud is much the most interesting, and depicts a heroine of powerful will and passions, an imperious mesmeric presence, and a scorn of the conventional female virtues. She is drowned in a boating accident, after having destroyed the peace of two households, and whilst pregnant with a child whose father may be her meek husband or her Byronic lover, who drowns with her. The strength of the novel is its use of Breton mythology to deepen its themes and construct its imaginary order.
She married in 1863, after a prolonged battle with her father to be allowed to meet possible partis. The M. de Kergarouet she married was a dull and melancholic person, considerably older than she was, who became obsessively devoted to her, and died of grief, it was said, a year after she died in her third child-bed. She bore two daughters, neither of whom survived into adolescence.
I hope all this has been of interest to you, and that we may compare ou
r findings at leisure at some later date.
May I say finally, as I hoped to be able to say during our brief meeting, how much I admire your work on liminality. I think from that point of view too, you will find poor Sabine’s journal interesting. La Bretagne is full of the mythology of crossing-places and thresholds, as she says.
Mes amitiés
Ariane Le Minier
A page of scraps of poems. Sent by Ariane Le Minier to Maud Bailey.
Our Lady—bearing—Pain
She bore what the Cross bears
She bears and bears again—
As the Stone—bears—its scars
The Hammer broke her out
Of rough Rock’s ancient—Sleep—
And chiselled her about
With stars that weep—that weep—
The Pain inscribed in Rock—
The Pain he bears—she Bore
She hears the Poor Frame Crack—
And knows—He’ll—come—no More—
It came all so still
The little Thing—
And would not stay—
Our Questioning—
A heavy Breath
One two and three—
And then the lapsed
Eternity—
A Lapis Flesh
The Crimson—Gone—
It came as still
As any Stone—
My subject is Spilt Milk.
A white Disfigurement
A quiet creeping Sleek
Of squandered Nourishment
Others in heavy Vase
Raise darkly scented Wine—
This warm and squirted White
In solid Pot—was mine—
And now a paradox
A bleaching blot, a stain
Of pure and innocent white
It goes to Earth again—
Which smelled of summer Hay
Of crunching Cow—Divine—
Of warm flanks and of love
More quiet, more still—than mine—
It runs on table top
It drips onto the Ground
We hear its liquid Lapse
Wet on soft dust its sound.
We run with milk and blood
What we would give we spill
The hungry mouths are raised
We spill we fail to fill
This cannot be restored
This flow cannot redeem
This white’s not wiped away
Though blanched we seem
Howe’er I wipe and wipe
Howe’er I frantic—scour
The ghost of my spilled milk
Makes my Air sour.
20
I press my palms on
Window’s white cross
Is that Your dark Form
Beyond the glass?
How do they come who haunt us
In gown or plumey hat
Or white marbling nakedness
Frozen—is it—That?
Their remembrances haunt us
A trick of a wrist
Loved then—automatic—
Caught at and kist
Gone now to what melting
Of flesh and bone
Infinite Graces
Bundled—in One
Do not walk lonely
Out in the cold
I will come to you
Naked and bold
And your sharp fingers
Featly might pick
Flesh from my moist bones
Touch at the quick—
My warm your cold’s food—
Your chill breath my air
When our white mouths meet
It mingles—there—
—C. LAMOTTE
Ordinarily, Mortimer Cropper would not have minded how long it took to wear down Sir George. In the end he would have been there, sitting inside the dilapidated mock-castle, listening to the little woes of the invalid wife (whom he had not met but imagined vividly; he had a vivid imagination; it was well regulated of course, his major asset in his craft). And at night he would have turned over the delectable letters, one by one, searching out their hints and secrets, passing them across the bright recording eye of his black box.
But now, because of James Blackadder, there was no time for patience and finesse. He must have those papers. He felt real pangs, a kind of famishing.
He gave his lecture, “The Art of a Biographer,” in a fashionable City church whose Vicar liked people to come, and eclectically made sure they did, with guitars, faith-healing, anti-racist rallies, vigils for peace and passionate debates on the camel and the eye of the needle, and sexuality in the shadow of AIDS. He had persuaded the Vicar, whom he had met at an episcopal tea party, that biography was just as much a spiritual hunger of modern man as sex or political activity. Look at the sales, he had urged, look at the column space in the Sundays, people need to know how other people lived, it helps them to live, it’s human. A form of religion, said the Vicar. A form of ancestor worship, said Cropper. Or more. What are the Gospels but a series of varying attempts at the art of biography?
He saw that the lecture, already scheduled, could be used. He wrote discreet letters to various academies, friendly and inimical. He rang up the Press and said that a major discovery was to be unveiled. He interested the directors of some of the new American banks and financial institutions that were expanding in the City. He invited Sir George, who did not reply, and the solicitor, Toby Byng, who said it would be very interesting. He invited Beatrice Nest, and saved her a front-row seat. He invited Blackadder, not because he thought he would come, but because he liked to imagine Blackadder’s annoyance at receiving the invitation at all. He invited the US Ambassador. He invited the radio and the television.
Cropper loved lecturing. He was not of the old school, who fix the audience with a mesmeric eye and a melodious voice. He was a hi-tech lecturer, a magician of white screens and light-beams, sound-effects and magnifications. He filled the church with projectors and transparent cages of promptings which helped him, like President Reagan, to orchestrate with impromptu naturalness a highly complicated presentation.
The lecture, in the dark of the church, was accompanied by a series of brilliant images on the double screens. Huge oil-portraits, jewel-bright magnified miniatures, early photographs of bearded sages among broken arches of Gothic cathedrals, were juxtaposed with visions of the light and space of Robert Dale Owen University, of the sparkling sheen of the glass pyramid that housed the Stant Collection, of the brilliant little boxes that preserved the tresses of Randolph’s and Ellen’s woven hair, Ellen’s cushion embroidered with lemon-trees, the jet brooch of York roses on its cushion of green velvet. From time to time, as if by accident, the animated shadow of Cropper’s aquiline head would be thrown, as if in silhouette, across these luminous objects. On one of these occasions he would laugh, apologise, and say half-seriously, carefully scripted, there you see the biographer, a component of the picture, a moving shadow, not to be forgotten among the things he works with. It was in Ash’s time that the intuition of historians became a respectable, even an essential, object of intellectual attention. The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject’s life.…
At this point in the lecture Cropper had himself lit again, briefly. He spoke with careful simplicity.
“Of course, what we all hope for and at the same time fear, is some major discovery that will confirm, or disprove, or change at the least, a lifetime’s work. A lost Shakespeare play. The vanished works of Aeschylus. Such a discovery was made recently when a collection of letters from Wordsworth to his wife were found in a trunk in an attic. Scholars had said that Wordsworth’s only passion was his sister. They had confidently called his wife dull, and unimportant. Yet here, after all those years of marriage, were these letters, full of sexual passion on both parts. History has had to be rewritten. Scholars have taken humble pleasure in rewrit
ing it.
