by A. S. Byatt
In fact, he had tried unsuccessfully to sell two different stories based on the confessions (or inventions) of his class. They offered themselves to him like raw oysters on pristine plates. They told him horror and bathos, day-dreams, vituperation and vengeance. They couldn’t write, their inventions were crude, and he couldn’t find a way to perform the necessary operations to spin the muddy straw into silk, or turn the raw bleeding chunks into a savoury dish. So he kept faith with them, not entirely voluntarily. He did care about writing. He cared about writing more than anything, sex, food, beer, fresh air, even warmth. He wrote and rewrote perpetually, in his caravan. He was rewriting his fifth novel. Bad Boy, his first, had been written in a rush just out of the sixth form, and snapped up by the first publisher he’d sent it to. It was what he had expected. (Well, it was one of two scenarios that played in his young brain, immediate recognition, painful, dedicated struggle. When success happened it appeared blindingly clear that it had always been the only possible outcome.) So he didn’t go to university, or learn a trade. He was, as he knew he was, a Writer. His second novel, Smile and Smile, had sold 600 copies, and was remaindered. His third and his fourth—frequently rewritten—lay in brown paper, stamped and restamped, in a tin chest in the caravan. He didn’t have an agent.
CLASSES RAN from September to March. In the summer he worked in literary festivals, or holiday camps on sunny islands. He was pleased to see the classes again in September. He still thought of himself as wild and unattached, but he was a creature of habit. He liked things to happen at precise, recurring times, in precise, recurring ways. More than half of most of his classes were old faithfuls who came back year after year. Each class had a nucleus of about ten. At the beginning of the year this was often doubled by enthusiastic newcomers. By Christmas many of these would have dropped away, seduced by other courses, or intimidated by the regulars, or overcome by domestic drama or personal lassitude. St. Antony’s Leisure Centre was gloomy because of its high roof, and draughty because of its ancient doors and windows. The class themselves had brought oil heaters, and a circle of standard lamps with imitation stained-glass covers. The old churchy chairs were pushed into a circle, under these pleasant lights.
HE LIKED THE LISTS of their names. He liked words, he was a writer. Sometimes he talked about how much Nabokov had got out of the list of names of Lolita’s class-mates, how much of America, how strong an image from how few words. Sometimes he tried to make an imaginary list that would please him as much as the real one. It never worked. He would write allusive equivalents—Vicar, say, for Parson, Gold, for Silver, and find his text inexorably resubstituting the precise concatenation that existed. His current class ran:
Abbs, Adam
Archer, Megan
Armytage, Blossom
Forster, Bobby
Fox, Cicely
Hogg, Martin
Parson, Anita
Pearson, Amanda
Pygge, Gilly
Secrett, Lola
Secrett, Tamsin
Silver, Annabel
Wheelwright, Rosy
He consulted this for pointless symmetries. Pygge and Hogg. Pearson and Parson. The prevalence of As and absence of Es and Rs. He had kept a register, for a time, of surnames reflecting ancient, vanished occupations—Archer, Forster, Parson, Wheelwright. Were there more in Derbyshire than in other places?
Then there was the list of the occupations, also a flawed microcosm.
The most recent work they had produced was:
He had learned the hard way not to involve himself in any way in their lives. When he first moved into the caravan he had had a conventional enough vision of its warm confinement as a secret place to take women, for romping, for intimacy, for summer nights of nakedness and red wine. He had scanned his new classes, fairly obviously, for hopefuls, measuring breasts, admiring ankles, weighing pink round mouths against wide red ones against unpainted severe ones. He had had one or two really good athletic encounters, one or two tearful failures, one overkill which had left him with a staring, shivering watcher every night at the gate of his paddock, or occasionally peering wildly through the caravan window.
Creative writers are creative writers. Descriptions of his bedlinen, his stove, the blasts of wind on his caravan walls, began to appear, ever more elaborated, in the stories that were produced for general criticism. Competitive descriptions of his naked body began to be circulated. Heartless or cowering males (depending on the creative writer) had thickets, or wiry fuzzes, or fur soft as a dog fox, or scratchy-bristly reddish outcrops of hair on their chests. One or two descriptions of fierce thrusting and pubic clamping were followed by anticlimax, both in life and in art. He gave up— ever—taking women from his classes on to his unfolded settee. He gave up, ever, talking to his students one at a time or differentiating between them. The sex-in-a-caravan theme wilted and did not resuscitate. His stalker went to a pottery class, transferred her affections, and made stubby pottery pillars, glazed with flames and white spray. As the folklore of his sex life diminished he became mysterious and authoritative and found he enjoyed it. The barmaid of the Wig and Quill came round on Sundays. He couldn’t find the right words to describe her orgasms—prolonged events with staccato and shivering rhythms alternating oddly—and this teased and pleased him.
He sat alone in the bar of the Wig and Quill the evening before his class, reading the “stories” that were to be returned. Martin Hogg had discovered the torture which consists of winding out the living intestines on a spindle. He couldn’t write, which Jack thought was just as well—he used words like “gruesome” and “horrible” a lot, but was unable, perhaps inevitably, to raise in a reader’s mind any image of an intestine, a spindle, pain, or an executioner. Jack supposed that Martin was enjoying himself, but even that was not very well conveyed to his putative reader. Jack was more impressed by Bobby Forster’s fantasy of the slaughter of a driving examiner. This had some plot to it—involving handcuffs, severed brake cables, the removal of signs indicating quicksands, even an unbreakable alibi for the mild man who had turned on his tormentor. Forster occasionally produced a sharp, etched sentence that was memorable. Jack had found one of these in Patricia Highsmith, and another, by sheer chance, in Wilkie Collins. He had dealt with this plagiarism, rather neatly, he thought, by underlining the sentences and writing in the margin “I have always said that reading excellent writers, and absorbing them, is essential to good writing. But it should not go quite so far as plagiarism.” Forster was a white-faced, precise person, behind round glasses. (His hero was neat and pale, with glasses which made it hard to see what he was thinking.) He said mildly, on both occasions, that the plagiarism was unconscious, must have been a trick of memory. Unfortunately this led Jack to suspect automatically that any other excrescent elegance was also a plagiarism.
HE CAME to “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves.” Cicely Fox was a new student. Her contribution was hand-written—with pen and ink, not even felt-tip. She had given the work to him with a deprecating note.
“I don’t know if this is the sort of thing you meant when you said ‘Write what you really know about.’ I was sorry to find that there were so many lacunae in my memory. I do hope you will forgive them. The writing may not be of interest, but the exercise was pleasurable.”
How We Used to Black-lead Stoves
It is strange to think of activities that were once so much part of our lives that they seemed daily inevitable, like waking and sleeping. At my age, these things come back in their contingent quiddity, things we did with quick fingers and backs that bent without precaution. It is today’s difficult slitting of plastic wraps, or brilliantly blinking microwave LED displays, that seem like veils and shadows.
Take black-leading. The kitchen-ranges in the kitchens of our childhood and young lives were great, darkly gleaming chests of fierce heat. Their frontage was covered with heavy hasped doors, opening on various ovens, large and small, various flues, the furnace itself, where the fuel went
in. Words are needed for extremes of blackness and brightness. Brightness included the gold-glitter of the rail along the front of the range, where the tea-towels hung, and the brass knobs on certain of the little doors which had to be burnished with Brasso—a sickly yellowish powdery liquid—every morning. It included also the roaring flame within and under the heavy cast-iron box. If you opened the door, when it was fully burning, you could hear and see it—a flickering transparent sheet of scarlet and yellow, shot with blue, shot with white, flashing purple, roaring and burping and piffing. You could immediately see it dying in the rusty edges of the embers. It was important to close the door quickly, to keep the fire “in.” “In” meant contained, and also meant, alight.
There were so many different blacks around that range. Various fuels were burned in it, unlike modern Agas which take oil, or anthracite. I remember coal. Coal has its own brightness, a gloss, a sheen. You can see the compacted layers of dead wood—millions of years dead—in the strata on the faces of the chunks of good coal. They shine. They give out a black sparkle. The trees ate the sun’s energy and the furnace will release it. Coal is glossy. Coke is matt, and looks (indeed is) twice-burned, like volcano lava; the dust on coal glitters like glass dust, the dust on coke absorbs light, is soft, is inert. Some of it comes in little regular pressed cushions, like pillows for dead dolls, I used to think, or twisted humbugs for small demons. We ourselves were fed on charcoal for stomach upsets which may explain why I considered the edibility of these lumps. Or maybe even as a small child, I saw the open mouth of the furnace as a hell-hole. You were drawn in. You wanted to get closer and closer; you wanted to be able to turn away. And we were taught at school, about our own internal combustion of matter. The ovens behind other doors of the range, might conceal the puffed, risen shapes of loaves and teacakes, with that best of all smells, baking yeast dough, or the only slightly less delightful smell of the crust of a hot cake, toasted sugar, milk and egg. Now and then—the old ranges were temperamental—a batch of buns in frilled paper cups would come out black and smoking and stinking of destruction, ghastly analogies of the cinder-cushions. From there, I thought, came the cinders that fell from the mouths of bad children in fairy-tales, or stuffed their Christmas stockings.
The whole range was bathed in an aura of kept-down soot. In front of our own, at one time, was a peg-rug made by my father, by hooking strips of colourful scraps of cloth—old flannel shirts, old trousers—through sacking, and knotting them. Soot infiltrated this dense thicket of flags or streamers. The sacking scalp was stained sooty black. The crimsons and scarlets, the green tartans and mustard blotches all had a grain of fine, fine black specks. I sometimes thought of the peg-rug as a bed of ribbon seaweed. The soot was like the silted sand in which it lay.
Not that we did not brush and brush ceaselessly, to cleanse our firesides of this falling, sifting black dust. It rises lightly, and falls where it was, it whirls briefly, when disturbed, and particles may settle on one’s own hair and scalp, a soot-plug for every pore in the skin of the hands. You can only collect so much; the rest is displaced, volatile, recurring. This must be the reason why we spent so much time—every morning—making the black front of the black stove blacker with black-lead. To disguise and tame the soot.
“Black-lead” was not lead, but a mixture of plumbago, graphite, and iron filings. It came as a stiff paste, and was spread across, and worked into all the black surfaces, avoiding the brassy ones of course, and then buffed and polished and made even with brushes of different densities, and pads of flannel. It was worked into every crevice of every boss on that ornate casting, and then removed again—the job was very badly done if any sludge of polish could be found encrusted around the leaves and petals of the black floral swags along the doors. I remember the phoenix, who must, I think, have been the trademark of that particular furnace. It sat, staring savagely to the left, on a nest of carved crossed branches, surrounded by an elaborate ascending spiral of fat flames with pointed tongues. It was all blackest black, the feathered bird, the burning pyre, the kindled wood, the bright angry eye, the curved beak.
The black-lead gave a most beautiful, subtle and gentle sheen to the blackness of the stove. It was not like boot-blacking, which produced a mirror-like lacquer. The high content of graphite, the scattering of iron filings, gave a silvery leaden surface—always a black surface, but with these shifting hints of soft metallic lightness. I think of it as representing a kind of decorum, a taming and restraining both of the fierce flame inside and the uncompromising cast iron outside. Like all good polishing—almost none of which persists in modern life, for which on the whole we should be grateful—the sheen was built up layer by infinitesimal layer, applied, and almost entirely wiped away again, only the finest skin of mineral adhering and glimmering.
The time is far away when we put so much human blood and muscle into embellishing our houses with careful layers of mineral deposits. Thinking of black-lead made me think of its opposite, the white stone and ground white-stone powder with which we used, daily, or more often, to emphasise our outer doorsteps and windowsills. I remember distinctly smoothing the thick pale stripe along the doorstep with a block of some stone, but I cannot remember the name of the stone itself. It is possible that we simply called it “the stone.” We were only required to stone the step when we didn’t have a maid to do it. I thought of holystone, blanching stone (perhaps a fabrication) and a run through the Oxford English Dictionary added whetstone and sleekstone, a word I hadn’t known, which appears to refer to something used on wet clothes in the laundry. Finally I found hearthstone, and hearthstone powder, a mixture of pipeclay, carbonate of lime, size and stoneblue. “Hearthstone” was sold in chunks by pedlars with barrows. I remember the sulphur in the air from the industrial chimneys of Sheffield and Manchester, a vile, yellow, clogging deposit, which smeared windows and lips alike, and stained the brave white doorsteps almost as soon as they were stoned. But we went out, and whitened them again. We lived a gritty, mineral life, with our noses and fingers in it. I have read that the black-lead was toxic. I thought of the white-lead with which Renaissance ladies painted their skins and poisoned their blood. “Let her paint never an inch thick, to this favour shall she come.” I remember the dentists, giving us gobbets of quicksilver in little corked test-tubes, to play with. We spread this on our play-table with naked fingers, watching it shiver into a multitude of droplets, rolling it back together again. It was like a substance from an alien world. It adhered to nothing but itself. Yet we spread it everywhere, losing a silvery liquid bead here, under a splinter of wood, or there, in the fibres of our jumpers. Quicksilver too is toxic. No one told us.
Hearthstone is an ancient and ambiguous idea. In the past, the hearth was a synecdoche for the house, home, or even family or clan. (I cannot bring myself to use that humiliated and patronised word “community.”) The hearth was the centre, where the warmth, the food and the burning were. Our hearth was in front of the black-leaded range. We had a “sitting-room,” but its grate (also regularly black-leaded) was always empty, for no one visited formally enough to sit in its chilly formality. Yet the hearthstone was applied to what was in fact the lintel or limen, the threshold. Northerners keep themselves to themselves. The hearthstone stripe on the flagstone step was a limit, a barrier. We were fond of a certain rhetoric. “Never cross my threshold again.” “Don’t darken my door.” The shining silvery dark and the hidden red and gold roar were safely inside. We went out, as my mother used to say, feet first, on our final crossing of that bar. Nowadays, of course, we all go into the oven. Then, it was back to the earth out of which all these powders and pomades had been so lovingly extracted.
Jack Smollett realised that this was the first time his imagination had been stirred by the writing (as opposed to the violence, the misery, the animosity, the shamelessness) of one of his students. He went eagerly to his next class, and sat down next to Cicely Fox, whilst they waited for the others to arrive. She was always punctual, and
always sat alone in the pews in the shadow out of the multi-coloured light of the lampshades. She had fine white hair, thinning a little, which she gathered in a soft roll at the back of her neck. She was always elegantly dressed, with long, fluid skirts, and high-necked jumpers inside loose shirt-jackets, in blacks, greys, silvers. She wore, invariably, a brooch on her inner collar, an amethyst in a circle of seed-pearls. She was a thin woman; the flowing garments concealed bony sharpness, not flesh. Her face was long, her skin fine but paper-thin. She had a wide, taut mouth—not much lip—and a straight, elegant nose. Her eyes were the amazing thing. They were so dark, they were almost uniformly black, and seemed to have retreated into the caverns of their sockets, being held to the outer world by the most fragile, spider-web cradle of lid, and muscle, all stained umber, violet, indigo as though bruised by the strain of staying in place. You could see, Jack thought fancifully, her narrow skull under its vanishing integument. You could see where her jaw-bone hung together, under fine vellum. She was beautiful, he thought. She had the knack of keeping very still, with a mild attentive almost-smile on her pale lips. Her sleeves were slightly too long and her thin hands were obscured, most of the time.
He said he thought her writing was marvellous. She turned her face to him with a vague and anxious expression.
“Real writing,” he said. “May I read it to the class?”
“Please,” she said, “do as you wish.”
He thought she might have difficulty in hearing. He said:
“I hope you are writing more?”
“You hope . . .?”
“You are writing more.” Louder.
