Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  Maia Bailey smiled up at them serenely. They read her face now in the light of Christabel’s letter, and thus saw it, amongst all its silvery spangles and shine of ageing, as a happy confident face, wearing its thick wreath with a certain ease, and feeling pleasure, not drama, in the occasion.

  “She looks like Christabel,” said Maud. “You can see it.”

  “She looks like you,” said Roland. He added, “She looks like Randolph Ash, too. The width of the brow. The width of the mouth. The end of the eyebrows, there.”

  “So I look like Randolph Henry Ash.”

  Roland touched her face. “I would never have seen it. But yes. The same things. Here, at the corner of the eyebrow. There, at the edge of the mouth. Now I have seen it, I shall always see it.”

  “I don’t quite like it. There’s something unnaturally determined about it all. Daemonic. I feel they have taken me over.”

  “One always feels like that about ancestors. Even very humble ones, if one has the luck to know them.”

  He stroked her wet hair, gently, absently.

  Maud said, “What next?”

  “How do you mean, what next?”

  “What happens next? To us?”

  “You will have a lot of legal problems. And a lot of editing to do. I—I have made some plans.”

  “I thought—we might edit the letters together, you and I?”

  “That’s generous, but not necessary. You turn out to be a central figure in this story. I only got into it by stealing, in the first place. I’ve learned a lot.”

  “What have you learned?”

  “Oh—something from Ash and Vico. About poetic language. I’m—I—I have things I have to write.”

  “You seem angry with me. I don’t understand why.”

  “No, I’m not. That is, yes, I have been. You have your certainties. Literary theory. Feminism. A sort of social ease, it comes out with Euan, a world you belong in. I haven’t got anything. Or hadn’t. And I grew—attached to you. I know male pride is out of date and unimportant, but it mattered.”

  Maud said, “I feel—” and stopped.

  “You feel?”

  He looked at her. Her face was like carved marble in the candlelight. Icily regular, splendidly null, as he had often said to himself.

  He said, “I haven’t told you. I’ve got three jobs. Hong Kong, Barcelona, Amsterdam. The world is all before me. I shan’t be here, you see, to edit the letters. They aren’t to do with me.”

  Maud said, “I feel—”

  “What?” said Roland.

  “When I feel—anything—I go cold all over. I freeze. I can’t—speak out. I’m—I’m—not good at relationships.”

  She was shivering. She still looked—it was a trick of her lovely features—cool and a little contemptuous. Roland said, “Why do you go cold?” He kept his voice gentle.

  “I—I’ve analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of possession if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and—”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don’t want that. It kept happening.”

  “It needn’t.”

  “Even you—drew back—when we met. I expect that, now. I use it.”

  “Yes. But you don’t want—do you—to be alone always. Or do you?”

  “I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on doing my work. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don’t want to think of that going. You understand?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “I write about liminality. Thresholds. Bastions. Fortresses.”

  “Invasion. Irruption.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s not my scene. I have my own solitude.”

  “I know. You—you would never—blur the edges messily—”

  “Superimpose—”

  “No, that’s why I—”

  “Feel safe with me—”

  “Oh no. Oh no. I love you. I think I’d rather I didn’t.”

  “I love you,” said Roland. “It isn’t convenient. Not now I’ve acquired a future. But that’s how it is. In the worst way. All the things we—we grew up not believing in. Total obsession, night and day. When I see you, you look alive and everything else—fades. All that.”

  “Icily regular, splendidly null.”

  “How did you know I used to think that?”

  “Everyone always does. Fergus did. Does.”

  “Fergus is a devourer. I haven’t got much to offer. But I could let you be, I could—”

  “In Hong Kong, Barcelona and Amsterdam?”

  “Well, certainly, if I was there. I wouldn’t threaten your autonomy.”

  “Or be here to love me,” said Maud. “Oh, love is terrible, it is a wrecker—”

  “It can be quite cunning,” said Roland. “We could think of a way—a modern way—Amsterdam isn’t far—” Cold hand met cold hand.

  “Let’s get into bed,” said Roland. “We can work it out.”

  “I’m afraid of that too.”

  “What a coward you are after all. I’ll take care of you, Maud.”

  So they took off their unaccustomed clothes, Cropper’s multicoloured lendings, and climbed naked inside the curtains and into the depths of the feather bed and blew out the candle. And very slowly and with infinite gentle delays and delicate diversions and variations of indirect assault Roland finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him, so that there seemed to be no boundaries, and he heard, towards dawn, from a long way off, her clear voice crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in pleasure and triumph.

  In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.

  POSTSCRIPT 1868

  There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

  Two people met, on a hot May day, and never later mentioned their meeting. This is how it was.

  There was a meadow full of young hay, and all the summer flowers in great abundance. Blue cornflowers, scarlet poppies, gold buttercups, a veil of speedwells, an intricate carpet of daisies where the grass was shorter, scabious, yellow snapdragons, bacon and egg plant, pale milkmaids, purple heartsease, scarlet pimpernel and white shepherd’s purse, and round this field a high bordering hedge of Queen Anne’s lace and foxgloves, and above that dogroses, palely shining in a thorny hedge, honeysuckle all creamy and sweet-smelling, rambling threads of bryony and the dark stars of deadly nightshade. It was abundant, it seemed as though it must go on shining forever. The grasses had an enamelled gloss and were connected by diamond-threads of light. The larks sang, and the thrushes, and the blackbirds, sweet and clear, and there were butterflies everywhere, blue, sulphur, copper, and fragile white, dipping from flower to flower, from clover to vetch to larkspur, seeing their own guiding visions of invisible violet pentagrams and spiralling coils of petal-light.

  There was a child, swinging on a gate, wearing a butcher-blue dress and a white pinafore, humming to herself and making a daisy chain.

  There was a man, tall, bearded, his face in shadow under a wide-brimmed hat, a wanderer coming up the lane, between high hedges, with an ashplant in his hand and the look of a walker.

  He stopped to speak to the child who smiled and answered cheerfully, without ceasing her creaking swinging to and fro. He asked where he was, and the name of the house in the narrow valley below, which he knew, in fact, very well, and so went on to ask her name, which she told him was May. She had ano
ther name, she said, which she did not like. He said perhaps that might come to change, names grew and diminished as time ran on: he would like to know her long name. So she said, swinging more busily, that her name was Maia Thomasine Bailey, and that her father and mother lived in the house down there, and that she had two brothers. He told her that Maia was the mother of Hermes, thief, artist and psychopomp; and that he knew a waterfall called Thomasine. She had known a pony called Hermes, she said, fast as the wind, she could tell him, and she had never heard of a waterfall with a name like Thomasine.

  He said, “I think I know your mother. You have a true look of your mother.”

  “No one else says that. I think I look like my father. My father is strong and kind and takes me riding like the wind.”

  “I think you have a look of your father too,” he said then, and put his arms around her waist, very matter-of-fact and brief, so as not to frighten her, and lifted her down onto his side. They sat there on a hummock and talked, in a cloud of butterflies, as he remembered it with absolute clarity, and she remembered it more and more vaguely, as the century ran on. Beetles ran about their feet, jet and emerald. She told him about her pleasant life, her amusements, her ambitions. He said, “You seem extraordinarily happy,” and she said, “Oh yes, I am, I am.” And then he sat quietly for a moment or two, and she asked him if he could make daisy chains.

  “I will make you a crown,” he said. “A crown for a May Queen. But you must give me something, in exchange.”

  “I haven’t got anything to give.”

  “Oh, just a lock of hair—a very fine one—to remember you by.”

  “Like a fairy story.”

  “Just so.”

  So he made her a crown, on a base of pliant twigs from the coppiced hedge, and wove in it green fronds and trails of all colours, ivy and ferns, silvery grasses and the starry leaves of bryony, the wild clematis. And he studded it with roses and honeysuckle and fringed it with belladonna (“but you know that you must never eat this,” he said and she replied scornfully that she knew all about what she must not eat, she had been told often enough).

  “There,” he said, crowning the little pale head. “Full beautiful, a fairy’s child. Or like Proserpine. Do you know

  “that fair field

  Of Enna, where Proserpine, gathering flowers,

  Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis

  Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain

  To seek her through the world?”

  She looked at him, proud and still a little scornful, holding her head steady under its burden.

  “I have an aunt who is always telling me poems like that. But I don’t like poetry.”

  He took out a little pair of pocket scissors, and cut, very gently, a long lock from the buttercup-gold floss which fell about her shoulders in a great cloud.

  “Here,” she said, “I’ll plait it for you, to keep it tidily.”

  Whilst her little fingers worked, and her face frowned over her work, he said, “I am sorry you don’t like poetry, as I am a poet.”

  “Oh, I like you,” she hastened to say. “You make lovely things and don’t fuss—”

  She held out the finished plait, which he wound in a fine coil, and put into the back of his watch.

  “Tell your aunt,” he said, “that you met a poet, who was looking for the Belle Dame Sans Merci, and who met you instead, and who sends her his compliments, and will not disturb her, and is on his way to fresh woods and pastures new.”

  “I’ll try to remember,” she said, steadying her crown.

  So he kissed her, always matter-of-fact, so as not to frighten her, and went on his way.

  And on the way home, she met her brothers, and there was a rough-and-tumble, and the lovely crown was broken, and she forgot the message, which was never delivered.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A. S. Byatt is famed for her short fiction, collected in Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Her full-length novels include the Booker Prize–winning Possession and the trilogy sequence of novels The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower. She has also published four volumes of critical work, of which Imagining Characters is the most recent. She lives in London.

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  BABEL TOWER

  Frederica’s husband’s violent streak has turned on her. She flees to London with their young son and gets a teaching job in an art school, where poets and painters are denying the value of the past and fostering dreams of rebellion, which hinge upon a strange, charismatic figure, the unkempt and near-naked Jude Mason.

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  Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student, decides to escape postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. A tantalizing yarn of detection and desire, The Biographer’s Tale is a provocative look at “truth” and our perennial quest for certainty.

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  THE CHILDREN’S BOOK

  When children’s book author Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of a museum, she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined.

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  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

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