Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  “I don’t know this Drax,” said Hildebrand Ash.

  “A most unpleasant person,” said Mortimer Cropper. “The Schenectady Poetry Fellowship made a presentation to this church of an inkwell Ash had used on his American tour, and some of his books he had signed for American admirers, with his photograph pasted in. They presented a glass case as well, to display the treasures; Mr Drax has sited it in a most obscure corner and covered it with a dusty baize pall and absolutely no external indication of its nature, so that it is entirely missed by the casual visitor.…”

  “Who can’t get in anyway,” said Hildebrand Ash.

  “Precisely. And this Drax is very hostile to being asked for keys by Ash scholars and admirers who wish to pay their respects. He says—he has written to me in letters—that the church is God’s house, not Randolph Henry Ash’s mausoleum. I see no contradiction.”

  “You could buy the things back.”

  “I could. I have offered substantial donations to him even for the loan of the objects. The books are already represented in the Stant Collection, but the inkwell is unique. He replies that unfortunately it is not in the terms of the gift that the objects may be disposed of. He is not interested in ways of altering the terms of the gift. He is positively surly.”

  “We could take them too,” said Hildebrand. “While we were at it.”

  He laughed, and Mortimer Cropper frowned.

  “I am not a common thief,” he said severely. “It is only that box—whose contents we may only guess at—the thought of it decaying in the ground until such time as we acquire the legal right to exhume it—the thought of perhaps never knowing—”

  “The value—”

  “The value is partly the value I set on it.”

  “Which is high,” said Hildebrand, with a question.

  “Which is high even if it contains nothing,” said Cropper. “For my peace of mind. But it will not contain nothing. I know.”

  They took a turn or two about the churchyard. Everything was quiet, English and dripping. The graves were mostly nineteenth-century with some earlier and a few later. The grave of Randolph and Ellen was at one edge of the churchyard, in the shelter of a kind of grassy knoll, or mound, on which grew an ancient cedar and an even older yew, screening the quiet corner from the eyes of anyone on the path to the church door. The railings were just beyond the grave and beyond them a field, closely cropped, of down grass, containing a few stolid sheep and a little stream, bisecting it. Someone had already been digging; green turfs were neatly stacked against the rails. Hildebrand counted thirteen.

  “One for the head and a double row for the length of the … I could do that. I can cut turfs, I take an interest in our lawn. Are you thinking of trying to leave it so it looks undisturbed?”

  Cropper thought. “We could try that. Put it all back real neatly and stow it with old leaves and things, and hope it grows back before anyone notices who might think twice. We should try that.”

  “We could set up a diversion. Leave a trail of false clues so it looked as if we were Satanists, practising a black mass or something.” Hildebrand gave another snort and long high chuckle of solitary laughter. Cropper looked at his heavy pink face and felt twinges of fastidious distaste. He was going to have to spend much more of his time than would be pleasant in this banal creature’s company.

  “Our best hope is that nobody notices. Anything else is bad—if anyone notices at all that the grave has been disturbed, they will also notice our presence here quite likely. And put two and two together. Then we just fake it out. If we find the box and take it away, no one can prove it ever existed, even if they dig again and have a look. Which they won’t. Drax won’t let them. But our best hope—I repeat—is to be unobtrusive.”

  On their way out of the churchyard they passed two other visitors, a man and a woman, green-clad in quilted jackets and Wellingtons against the pervasive rain, blending into the background in an English way. They were examining the sculpted heads of laughing cherubs or baby angels on two tall leaning stones; the little creatures rested their dimpled feet on footstool skulls. “Morning,” said Hildebrand, in his country English voice, and “Morning” they replied, in the same tone. Nobody met anyone else’s eye; it was very English.

  On the fifteenth Cropper and Hildebrand dined together in the restaurant, which was panelled like the bar, and had a cheerful log fire burning in the stone fireplace. Cropper and Hildebrand were to one side of this; a young couple, who had attention only for each other, and who were holding hands across the table, had the other. Cracking oil portraits of eighteenth-century parsons and squires, half obscured and blackened by candle-smoke and thickened varnish, stared down heavily from the panels. They ate by candlelight, salmon mousse in lobster sauce, pheasant with all the trimmings, Stilton, sorbet cassis maison. Cropper savoured it all with regret. He was not going to be able to come back here for some considerable time, and he had enjoyed his visits to this part of the world. He liked the Rowan Tree Inn; it had romantically uneven floors, paved on the ground floor, creaking under carpets above; its corridors were so low and narrow that he was forced to stoop his tall head. The water made strange thumping and hawking sounds, which he treasured as he treasured, with equal love, the endless silver flow in his streamlined, gold-tapped bathroom in New Mexico. Both were good of their kind, snug, cramped, ancient smoky England, and the dry sun, the glass, the airy steel, the expansiveness of New Mexico. His blood was running, he was excited, as he always was when truly on the move, when his mind hung, like the moon, over his trajectory from one earth-mass to another, when he was neither here nor there. Only this time, more than ever. He had spent the time before dinner in his room, running through exercises and routines, limbering up, contorting his muscles, swaying and twisting and punching and coercing his body into suppleness. He liked that. He looked good, still. He stood in front of a cheval glass in his special exercise clothes, long black pants and terry-cloth sweater. He resembled his piratical ancestors, or a film version of them, his silvery hair romantically dishevelled on his brow.

  Hildebrand said, “And tomorrow, USA, here we come. I’ve never been, you know. Only seen it on telly. You’ll have to teach me about giving lectures.”

  Cropper thought that perhaps he could, or should, have done it all entirely alone. But then it would have been absolute theft, absolute intrusion, whereas this way, he was only speeding up a natural process, buying from Hildebrand what would have been his in any case, later, a very little later, if he was to be believed about Lord Ash’s state of health.

  “Where have you parked the Merc?” said Hildebrand.

  “Tell me about your—” said Cropper, casting about for a safe topic of conversation. “Tell me about your gardening, about your lawn.”

  “How did you know about my lawn?”

  “You told me. Never mind why, now. What sort of garden do you have?”

  Hildebrand began a long description. Cropper looked round the dining-room. The honeymoon couple had their heads together over their table. The man, smoothly handsome, in what Cropper recognised as a Christian Dior wool and cashmere jacket in dark peacock, took their joined hands to his mouth and kissed the inside of the girl’s wrists. She wore an ivory silk shirt, displaying an amethyst necklace on a smooth throat, above a purple skirt. She caressed her partner’s hair, evidently in that obsessive and compulsive state that excludes, for brief periods of human lives, all consciousness of other observers.

  “How late shall we have to leave it?” said Hildebrand.

  “We won’t discuss that here,” said Cropper. “Tell me about—about—”

  “Have you told them we’re checking out?”

  “I paid them for tomorrow night.”

  “It’s a good night. Nice and quiet. Good moon.”

  On the way up to their bedrooms they crossed the young couple, both coming out of the wooden telephone cubicle in the hall. Mortimer Cropper inclined his head. Hildebrand said “Goo’ night.”


  “Good night,” said the couple, together.

  “We’re going to bed early,” said Hildebrand. “Done in with the exercise.”

  The girl smiled and took hold of her companion’s arm.

  “So are we. Going to bed. Good night. Sleep well.”

  Cropper waited until one o’clock to go out. Everything was quiet. The fire still smoked. The air was heavily still. He had parked the Mercedes by the car park gate; there was no problem about getting back to the hotel, as the room-keys all had Yale keys attached for the front door. The great car purred away smoothly, across the road, up the track to the church. Cropper parked it under a tree by the church gate, and got out storm lanterns and his newly purchased implements from the boot. It was raining a little; the ground underfoot was wet and slippery. He and Hildebrand made their way in the dark to the Ashes’ grave. “Look,” said Hildebrand, standing in a patch of moonlight between the church and the knoll with the yew and the cedar. A huge white owl circled the church tower, unhurried, powerful and entirely silent, intent on its own business.

  “Spooky,” said Hildebrand Ash.

  “A beautiful creature,” said Mortimer Cropper, somehow identifying his own excitement, his own sense of potency and certainty in his muscles and mind with the measured wing beat, the easy, easy floating. Above the owl, the dragon moved a little, this way, that way, creaking, desisting, catching a desultory air movement.

  They had to move fast. It was a lot of work, potentially, for two men, before daylight. They cut and stacked turf. Hildebrand said, panting, “Do you have any idea whereabouts it might be?” and Cropper realised that although he had indeed a very precise idea, that the thing lay somewhere about the heart of the larger-than-man-size space of the plot of land, this idea had been nurtured in his own hot imagination; he had seen the scene of the box’s reinterment so often, so often in his mind’s eye, that he had invented the place. But not for nothing was he the descendant of spiritualists and Shakers. He gave weight to intuition. “We’ll start at the head,” he said, “and excavate a decent depth, and progress towards the feet in an orderly way.”

  They dug. They threw up an increasing mound, a mixture of clay and flints, chopped ends of roots, small bones of vole and bird, stones, sifted pebbles. Hildebrand grunted as he worked, his bald head glinting in the moonlight. Cropper swung his spade with a kind of joy. He felt he was over some border of the permissible and everything was just fine. He was not a grey old scholar, smelling of the lamp, sitting on his fundament. He was doing, he would find, it was his destiny. He poised his sharp spade above the earth and struck and struck with a terrible glee, slicing, penetrating the sloppy and the resistant. He took off his jacket, and felt the rain on his back with pleasure, and his own sweat trickling between his shoulder-blades and down his breast, with joy. He struck, he struck, he struck. “Steady on,” said Hildebrand, and “Keep going,” hissed Cropper, pulling with his bare hands at a long snake of the yew’s root system, getting out his heavy knife to cut it.

  “It is here. I know it is here.”

  “Go steady. We don’t want to disturb the—disturb—if we can help it.”

  “No. We shouldn’t have to. Keep at it.”

  A wind was getting up. It flapped a little: one or two of the churchyard trees creaked and groaned. A sudden gust lifted Cropper’s discarded jacket briefly from the stone where it hung, and dropped it to the earth. Cropper thought, as he had not precisely thought so far, that at the bottom of the pit he was excavating, lay Randolph Ash and his wife, Ellen, or what was left of them. The storm-light showed only slice-marks of their spades and raw, cold-smelling soil. Cropper snuffed the air. Something seemed to move and swing and sway in it, as if ready to slap at him. He felt for a moment, very purely, a presence, not of someone, but of some mobile thing, and for a moment rested dully on his spade, forbidden. In that moment, the great storm hit Sussex. A long tongue of wind howled past, a wall of air banged at Hildebrand, who sat down suddenly in the clay, winded. Cropper began to dig again. A kind of dull howling and whistling began, and then a chorus of groans, and creaking sighs, the trees, protesting. A tile spun off the church roof. Cropper opened his mouth and shut it again. The wind moved in the graveyard like a creature from another dimension, trapped and screaming. The branches of the yew and cedar gesticulated desperately.

  Cropper went on digging. “I will,” he said. “I will.”

  He told Hildebrand to go on, but Hildebrand couldn’t hear and wasn’t looking; he was sitting in the mud next to a gravestone, clutching the neck of his jacket, fighting the air that had worked its way inside.

  Cropper dug. Hildebrand began to crawl slowly round the rim of Cropper’s excavation. The very bases of the yew and the cedar began to shift, to move laterally and to complain.

  Hildebrand pulled at Cropper’s sleeve.

  “Stop. Go in. This is—beyond the limit. Not safe. Shelter.” Horizontal rain whipped and sliced the flesh of his cheeks.

  “Not now,” said Cropper, poising his spade like a divining rod, and struck again.

  He hit metal. He got down to the earth and scrabbled with his hands. It came up—an oblong thing, covered with corrosion, a nugget recognisably shaped. He sat down, on the adjacent stone, clutching it.

  The wind prised at the church roof and flung off a few more tiles. The trees cried out and swung. Cropper pushed at the box with useless fingers, chipped at a corner with a knife. The wind took his hair and turned it in mad spirals round his head. Hildebrand Ash had his hands over his ears. He edged closer and cried in Cropper’s ear.

  “This? It?”

  “Right. Size. Yes. This is It.”

  “What now?”

  Cropper gestured at the hole.

  “Fill that. I’ll put my box in the trunk of the car—”

  He set out across the churchyard. The air was full of noises. There was a whining, ripping noise, which he saw was the sound of the trees along the track and in the hedgerow whipping to and fro, tossing their crowns of trailing twigs from earth to sky to earth. More tiles cut the air with a sound of their own, and hit the ground, or gravestones, with keen crashing explosions. Cropper hurried on, bearing his box, his face smeared with flying leaves and with streaks of sap. Nevertheless, as he went, he fingered his find, seeking, and touching, the edge of the box’s rim. As he struggled with the gate to the churchyard, which danced dementedly on its hinges, bucked under his hand and so saved him, he heard a sound of something rising and bursting in the earth, as he had seen oil gushers do in Texas, and mixed with this another sound, tearing, straining, creaking so horridly loudly that its creaks were an outcry. Around his very feet the earth quaked and moved; he sat down; there was a sound of rending and a great mass of grey descended before his eyes like a tumbling hill, accompanied by the sweeping sound of a whole mass of leaves and fine branches whipping the moving air. The final sound of all these—except the original rushing, which persisted—was a mixture of drums, cymbals, and theatrical thundersheet. His nostrils were full of wet soil and sap and gasoline fumes. A tree had fallen directly across the Mercedes. His car was gone, and his path back to the inn was barred, by one tree at least, possibly by many.

  He came back towards Ash’s grave, pushing against a howling tide of air, hearing other trees crash all around. As he came to the knoll and turned his storm lantern on it, he saw the yew tree throw up its arms and a huge gaping white mouth appear briefly in the reddish trunk, close to the thick base of the tree, which leaned giddily over, and went on cracking slowly, slowly, descending in a burst of needle-leaves, and finally snapping and shuddering to rest across the grave, obscuring it utterly. He could now go neither forwards nor backwards. He cried out “Hildebrand!” and his own voice seemed to curl uselessly back like smoke in his face. Was he safer nearer the church? Could he get there? Where was Hildebrand? There was a momentary lull and he called again.

  Hildebrand called out, “Help. Help. Where are you?”

  Another voice said, “H
ere, by the church. Hang on.”

  Peering between the branches of the yew, Cropper saw Hildebrand crawling along the grass between the graves towards the church. Waiting for him was a dark figure with a flashlight, whose beam was swung in his direction.

  “Professor Cropper?” said this being, in a clear, authoritative male voice. “Are you all right?”

  “I seem to be trapped by trees.”

  “We can get you out, I expect. Have you got the box?”

  “What box?” said Cropper.

  “Yes, he has,” said Hildebrand, “Oh, get us out of here, this is ghastly, I can’t take any more.”

  There was a crackling sound, like the electric forces that played at Hella Lees’s seances. The figure spoke to the air.

  “Yes, he’s here. Yes, he’s got it. We’re all cut off by trees. Are you OK?”

  Crackle, crackle.

  Cropper decided to run for it. He turned back. It must be possible to circumnavigate the tree in the track—except that there seemed to be other trees, a hedge, a huge scaly barrier reared where none had been.

  “It’s no good,” the figure incredibly said. “You’re surrounded. And there’s a tree on your Mercedes.”

  Cropper spun round, and the beam of the other’s flashlight revealed, peering through the branches, like bizarre flowers or fruit, wet and white, Roland Michell, Maud Bailey, Leonora Stern, James Blackadder, and with streaming white woolly hair descended, like some witch or prophetess, a transfigured Beatrice Nest.

  It took them an hour and a half to scramble back on foot to the Rowan Tree Inn. The Londoners, who had set out in two cars from Mortlake before the storm, but had begun to see its effects before they set out for the church, had brought a small saw from Blackadder’s Peugeot, as well as the walkie-talkie with which Euan had equipped them. Armed with this, and Cropper’s shovels, they scrambled and climbed over and under fallen columns and sighing vegetation, holding out hands to help, pushing, pulling, until they arrived at the road and saw festoons of cable and dark windows. The power was cut. Cropper let them all in to the Inn, still clutching the box. In the hall already were a crew of stranded lorry drivers, motorcyclists and a couple of firemen. The landlord was moving round the hall with candles in bottles. Huge pans of water were boiling on the kitchen Aga. At no other time would the incursion of so many wet, dirty scholars in the small hours have been taken with such casual and unquestioning calm. Pots of coffee and hot milk—and, at Euan’s suggestion, a bottle of brandy—were taken up to Cropper’s room, where his captors accompanied him. Dressing-gowns and spare sweaters were found for all, amongst Cropper’s bags and Hildebrand’s brand-new luggage. It was all so unreal, and the sense of communal survival was so powerful that they sat stupidly good, smiling weakly, damp and chill. Neither Cropper nor the others, curiously, could find force to be angry or even indignant. The box sat between candles, on the table in the window, rusty and earthy and wet. The women, all three clothed in pyjamas—Maud in Cropper’s black silk, Leonora in his scarlet cotton, and Beatrice in peppermint and white stripes belonging to Hildebrand—sat side by side on the bed. Val and Euan had their own clothes and represented normality. Blackadder wore a sweater and cotton trousers of Hildebrand’s. Euan said, “I’ve always wanted to say, ‘You are surrounded.’ ”