Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  Euan said, “It was folded up in a heap of Sophia’s accounts. It’s clear from these that she found Jane Summers and paid her the bequest. And kept the bit of paper. I imagine she felt she’d done all that was necessary—carried out her sister’s intentions—and simply put the bit of paper away.”

  Maud said, “Does that make the letters mine?”

  “The copyright in unpublished letters is the property of the writer of the letters. The physical letters themselves are the property of the recipient. Unless returned, as these were.”

  “You mean, his letters from her were returned?”

  “Exactly. I believe—well, Toby says—that they contain a letter from him saying that he returns the letters to her possession.”

  “So—if you are right—all the letters are my property, and the copyright in her letters is mine.”

  “Exactly. It isn’t cut and dried. It’s open to be disputed. Sir George could dispute it and probably should. That document isn’t a proper Will, it’s not registered at Somerset House, there are all sorts of loopholes and chinks for contesting it. But my own opinion is, that you should be able to prove your title to the whole collection, his and hers. What is the problem is how we should proceed whilst protecting the interests of Toby here, whose position is ethically very dicey. How may this document come to light without his agency?”

  Toby said, “If Sir George disputes your claim you could spend the whole proceeds on legal fees—”

  “Like Bleak House,” said Val.

  “Exactly,” said Euan. “He might settle. What we need now is a way for this to come to light without Toby deliberately finding it—I think I’ll have to devise a story which makes him my victim—I could persuade him to show me some of the papers in a trumped-up search—and then spring a surprise on him—”

  “Piratical,” said Val, adoring.

  “If you would consider my acting for you—”

  “You won’t make a lot of money,” said Maud. “If the papers are mine, they will go in the Women’s Resource Centre.”

  “Understood. I’m not in it for the money. For the drama, the curiosity, you know? Though I think you should consider that you may have to sell—not to Cropper but to the British Library or somewhere acceptable—to pay off Sir George.”

  Roland said, “Lady Bailey was good to us. She could do with the wheelchair.”

  Maud said, “The Women’s Resource Centre has been disgracefully underfunded since its inception—”

  “If all those papers were in the British Library, you could have microfilms and funding and a wheelchair—”

  Maud looked at him with a fighting look. “If those papers were in the Resource Centre they’d attract funding—”

  “Maud—”

  “George Bailey has been extremely unpleasant to me—and to Leonora—”

  “He loves his wife,” said Roland. “And his woods.”

  “So he does,” said Toby Byng.

  “I don’t think,” said Val, “we should start fighting over what we—you, that is, haven’t got yet. I think we should take it step by step. I think we should drink to Euan, who thought up all this, and think of a next step.”

  “I’ve got one or two more ideas,” said Euan. “But they need a bit of thought and research.”

  “You think I’m being greedy,” said Maud, when they were at home.

  “No, I don’t. How could I?”

  “I can feel you disapproving of me.”

  “You’re quite mistaken. What right have I to disapprove?”

  “That means you do. Do you think I should tell Euan to go away?

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Roland.”

  “It has very little to do with me.”

  That was the problem. He felt marginal. Marginal to her family, her feminism, her ease with her social peers. There were a great many circles here, all of which he was outside. He had begun this—what should it be called—this investigation—and had lost everything—whilst handing to Maud the materials with which she could improve her own lot immeasurably—job, future, Christabel, money … he hated eating dinners he could not have paid for. He hated living off Maud.

  Maud said, “We can’t quarrel now—after everything we’ve—”

  He was about to say they were not quarrelling, when the telephone rang.

  The voice was female, trembling, and very agitated.

  “I wish to speak to Dr Bailey.”

  “This is Maud Bailey, speaking.”

  “Yes. Well. Yes. Oh dear. I have thought and thought about whether I should ring you—you may think I am mad, or you may think I am simply bad—or presumptuous—I don’t know—I could only think of you—and I have sat and thought about it all evening and I only see now how late it is to be ringing anyone, I must have lost all sense of time, I should perhaps ring back tomorrow, that might be better only it might be too late, well, not perhaps tomorrow, but very soon, if I’m right—it was only that you seemed concerned, you see, you did seem to care—”

  “Please—who is that speaking?”

  “Oh dear, yes. I never initiate telephone calls. I am terrified of the telephone. This is Beatrice Nest. On behalf of Ellen Ash. No, not exactly on behalf—except that I do feel—I do feel—that it is for her that I am—”

  “What has happened, Dr Nest?”

  “I’m sorry. Let me try to settle down and speak clearly. I did try to ring you earlier, Dr Bailey, but there was no answer. I didn’t really expect you to answer this call, either, that is why I am so flustered and taken off my guard. Yes.”

  “I do understand.”

  “It is about Mortimer Cropper. He has been here—well not here, I’m at home now of course, in Mortlake, but into my room in the Museum, he has been there several times, looking very particularly at certain sections of the journal—”

  “About Blanche Glover’s visit?”

  “No, no, about the funeral of Randolph Ash. And today he brought young Hildebrand Ash—well he isn’t so young, he’s quite old, and certainly fat, but younger than Lord Ash himself, of course—perhaps you don’t know that Hildebrand Ash will succeed Lord Ash if he dies, when he dies, and he isn’t well, James Blackadder says, he certainly doesn’t answer letters at all—not that I write often, there is no real need, but when I do he doesn’t answer—”

  “Dr Nest—”

  “I know. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I rang back tomorrow?”

  “No. I mean yes. I am sure. I am consumed with curiosity.”

  “I overheard them talking to each other. They believed I had gone—well, out of the room. Dr Bailey, I am absolutely certain that Professor Cropper means to disturb—to dig up—the Ashes. The grave in Hodershall. He and Hildebrand Ash together. He wants to find out what is in the box.”

  “What box?” said Maud.

  Beatrice Nest, with much circumlocution and breathiness, explained what box.

  “He has been saying for years it should be dug up. Lord Ash wouldn’t countenance it, and anyway you have to have a Faculty from the Bishop to disturb an interment, you know, and he could never get one, but he says Hildebrand Ash has a moral right to the box and he himself has a—a right—because he—he—has done so much for Randolph Ash—he says he—I heard him say—‘Why not behave like the thieves who took Impression at Sunrise, why not take it and think of a plausible way to account for whatever we find later?’—I heard him—”

  “Have you spoken to Professor Blackadder?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think you should?”

  “He dislikes me. He dislikes everyone, but he dislikes me more than most. He might say I was mad, or he might think it was my fault that Mortimer Cropper had formed this dreadful plan—he hates Cropper too—I don’t think he would listen. I am sick of small humiliations. You talked to me sensibly, you understood Ellen Ash, you will see how this must be stopped for her sake.” She continued: “I would have tried to tell Roland Michell, but he’s disappeared
. What do you think I should do? What can be done?”

  “Roland is here, Dr Nest. Perhaps we should come to London. We can’t really call the police—”

  “What could we possibly say to them?”

  “Exactly. Do you know the Vicar at the Church where the grave is?”

  “Mr Drax. He doesn’t like scholars. Or students. Or Randolph Ash, I think.”

  “Everybody concerned with this business seems to be very prickly.”

  “And Ash himself was such a generous man,” said Dr Nest, not refuting this judgment.

  “Let us hope he sees off Mortimer Cropper. Perhaps we should go and see him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Let me consult. I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

  “Please—Dr Bailey—hurry.”

  Maud was excited. She told Roland they must go to London, and suggested that they consult Euan MacIntyre about Cropper’s possible courses of action and how to foil them. Roland said that this was a good plan, which it was, in its way, though it increased his own sense of unreal isolation. He lay awake at night, alone in the white bed, and worried. Something that had been kept secret had gone. He and Maud had felt impelled to keep the “research” secret, and whilst it was secret they had silently shared it and each other. Now it was out in the light of common day he saw it somehow diminished by the excited curiosity of Euan and Toby as much as by the hot desire and rage of Cropper and Blackadder. Euan’s charm and enthusiasm had not only smoothed the resentment and sullenness out of Val’s face but had somehow brought a brightness and recklessness to Maud herself. He fancied she spoke more freely to Euan and Toby than she had done to him. He fancied Val took pleasure in taking over the pursuit. He remembered his earliest impression of Maud—managerial, arrogant, critical. She had once belonged to Fergus. Their own strange silent games were the product of chance, of a brief artificial solitude, of secrecy. They could not survive in the open. He did not even know if he wanted them to. He looked for his own primary thought, and said to himself that before Maud came he had had Randolph Ash and his words, and now even that, that above all, had been changed and taken from him.

  He said nothing of all this to Maud, who appeared to notice nothing.

  Euan, consulted the next day, was also excited. They would all go to London, he said, and talk to Miss Nest, and have a council of war. Perhaps they could follow Cropper around and catch him in flagrante delicto. The law was subtly different as to the disturbance of interments in burial grounds and alternatively cemeteries. Hodershall sounded like an Anglican graveyard that would qualify as a burial ground. He and Val would go in the Porsche and meet up with Roland and Maud. Why didn’t they come to his pad and telephone Dr Nest from there? He had a flat in the Barbican, very comfortable. Toby must stay and mind his deedboxes and Sir George’s interests.

  Maud said, “I might stay with my aunt Lettice. She’s an old lady in Cadogan Square. Would you like to come?”

  “I think I shall stay in the Putney flat.”

  “Shall I come with you?”

  “No.”

  It was not the sort of place for her, with its dingy chintz and feline smell. And it was overlaid with memories of his life with Val, with his thesis. He didn’t want Maud there. “I need to think a few things out. About the future. What I am going to do. About the flat, how to pay the rent, or perhaps not to. I could do with a night on my own.”

  Maud said, “Is anything wrong?”

  “I have to think my life out.”

  “I’m sorry. You could come to my aunt’s—”

  “Don’t worry. I’d like to stay alone, that one night.”

  25

  ELLEN ASH’S JOURNAL

  NOVEMBER 25TH 1889

  I write this sitting at His desk at two in the morning. I cannot sleep and he sleeps his last sleep in the coffin, quite still, and his soul gone away. I sit among his possessions—now mine or no one’s—and think that his life, his presence, departs more slowly from these inanimate than from him, who was once animate and is now, I cannot write it, I should not have started writing. My dear, I sit here and write, to whom but thee? I feel better here amongst thy things—the pen is reluctant to form “thee,” “thy,” there is no one there, and yet here is still a presence.

  Here is an unfinished letter. There are the microscope, the slides, a book with a marker, and—oh, my dear—uncut leaves. I fear sleep, I fear what dreams may come, Randolph, and so I sit here and write.

  When he was lying there he said, “Burn what they should not see,” and I said, “Yes,” I promised. At such times, it seems, a kind of dreadful energy comes, to do things quickly, before action becomes impossible. He hated the new vulgarity of contemporary biography, the ransacking of Dickens’s desk for his most trivial memoranda, Forster’s unspeakable intrusions into the private pains and concealments of the Carlyles. He said often to me, burn what is alive for us with the life of our memory, and let no one else make idle curios or lies of it. I remember being much struck with Harriet Martineau, in her autobiography, saying that to print private letters was a form of treachery—as though one should tell the intimate talk of two friends with their feet on the fender, on winter nights. I have made a fire here, and burned some things. I shall burn more. He shall not be picked by vultures.

  There are things I cannot burn. Nor ever I think look at again. There are things here that are not mine, that I could not be a party to burning. And there are our dear letters, from all those foolish years of separation. What can I do? I cannot leave them to be buried with me. Trust may be betrayed. I shall lay these things to rest with him now, to await my coming. Let the earth take them.

  Mortimer Cropper: The Great Ventriloquist 1964, Chapter 26, “After Life’s fitful fever,” pp. 449 et seq.

  A committee was hastily constituted to see whether it might not be possible to inter the great man in Westminster Abbey. Lord Leighton went to see the Dean, who was understood to have some doubts about Randolph Ash’s religious beliefs. The poet’s widow, who had watched devoted and sleepless by his bedside during his last illness, wrote to both Lord Leighton and the Dean to say that it was her wish, as she was sure that it had been her husband’s, that he should lie in the quiet country churchyard of St Thomas’s Church at Hodershall on the edge of the North Downs, where her sister Faith’s husband was Vicar, and where she hoped to lie herself. Accordingly a great number of fashionable and literary personages made their way through the leafy lanes of Downland, on a dripping English November day, when yellow leaves were pashed into mud by the hooves of the horses and the sun was red and low in the sky.22 The pall-bearers were Leighton, Hallam Tennyson, Sir Rowland Michaels and the painter Robert Brunant.23 When the coffin had been lowered into the clay, covered with huge white wreaths, Ellen laid upon it a box, containing “our letters and other mementoes” which were “too dear to burn, too precious ever to expose to the public view.”24 Then the grave was filled up with flowers and the mourners turned away, leaving the last sad acts to the spades of the sextons, who engulfed both the ebony casket and the fragile flowers with the local mixture of chalk, flint and clay.25 The young Edmund Meredith, Ellen’s nephew, carried away from the grave’s edge a cluster of violets which he carefully pressed and kept among the leaves of his Shakespeare.26

  In later months, Ellen Ash caused a simple black headstone to be set up, with a carving of an ash tree, showing the spread of both the crown and the roots, such as he would occasionally playfully draw beside his signature in some of his letters.27 Beneath it was carved Ash’s own translation of Cardinal Bembo’s epitaph for Raphael, which is carved around Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon, and appeared in Ash’s poem about the painting of the Stanze in the Vatican, The Sacred and the Profane.

  Here lies that Man, who, whilst he was in Breath

  Made our great Mother tremble that her skill

  Was overmastered, who now, by his Death,

  Fears her own Powers may grow forever sti
ll.28

  Beneath this is written

  This stone is dedicated to Randolph Henry Ash, a great poet and a true and kind husband, by his sorrowing widow and wife of more than 40 years, Ellen Christiana Ash, in the hope that “one short sleep past, we wake eternally”29 where there is no more parting.

  Later critics have expressed amusement or scorn at the “bathos”30 of comparing this prolific Victorian poet to the great Raphael, though both, in the early part of this century, were out of favour. It is perhaps more surprising that there is no contemporary record either of disapproval that the Stone should have no mention of the Christian faith, or possibly, conversely, admiration for the tact with which Ellen had avoided this. What her choice of citation does is to link her husband, through his own poem and Raphael and Bembo, to the whole ambiguous Renaissance tradition, exemplified in the circular Pantheon, a Christian church which was originally in the form of a classical temple. It is not to be supposed that these thoughts were necessarily in her mind, although they may have discussed these matters together.

  We cannot avoid speculating about what was contained in the box which was buried with Randolph Ash, and was observed to be still intact when his widow’s casket was lowered beside him four years later.31 Ellen Ash shared her generation’s prudery and squeamishness about the publication of private papers. The claim is frequently made—not least by Ellen herself32—that Randolph participated in these scruples. Fortunately for us he left no testamentary indications to this effect, and even more fortunately for us, his widow’s carrying out of his supposed injunctions was patchy and haphazard. We do not know what invaluable evidence is lost to us, but we have seen, in these pages, the ample richness of what remains. Nevertheless we cannot help wishing that those who disturbed his rest in 1896 had seen fit at least to open the hidden box, survey it and record for posterity what it contained. Such decisions to destroy, to hide, the records of an exemplary life are made in the heat of life, or more often in the grip of immediate post-mortem despair, and have little to do with the measured judgment, and desire for full and calm knowledge, which succeed these perturbations. Even Rossetti thought better of burying his poems with his tragic wife and had to demean himself and her in disinterring them. I think often of what Freud said about the relations of our primitive forebears to the dead, who could be seen ambivalently as demons and ghosts, or as revered ancestors: