by A. S. Byatt
They stood repeated with dangling arms and parted legs, ciphered mouths, possibly smiling, skulls demarcated like battlefields in zones and hillocks. They were pierced like Victorian Sebastians by long black darts on the end of which appeared, in subdued Italic lettering, the names of parts. They had a look of ancient disuse, as though some maybe Edwardian usher had repeatedly indicated and partially obliterated their salient points with a long rule, and they had since fallen into neglect.
Lucas Simmonds returned and knelt beside him.
“How are you doing now?”
Marcus shook his head miserably.
“Tell me about this light.”
“Sir – I could be getting ill. It could be the aura of an illness? Or fits, or brain trouble. Sir.”
Lucas’s mouth-corners turned up quizzically in the middle of his round pink face.
“Do you really think that? Do you really feel that’s so?”
“How do I know? I’ve not been feeling right, exactly, for weeks. I’ve been …”
There was a tabu about describing tabus. He huddled under the raincoat.
“Please go on. I can probably help. Go on.”
“Well. I can’t concentrate. Not on the right things. Not on work. Too much on the wrong things. I get frightened of things. Not things it makes any sense to … treat that way. Silly things. A tap, a window, stairs. I worry for ages. About things. I must be sort of ill, I must. And now this.”
“We label too many things as illnesses,” Simmonds said, paradoxically clinical in his white coat. “Anything unusual. Anything that changes our conventional habits, often very detrimental to our true well-being. Maybe you are being distracted for good reasons. Please go on to tell me about the light.”
Marcus closed his eyes. Simmonds gripped Marcus’s shoulder with one hand and jumped sharply away again.
“You see, it’s something about the playing fields. Always there, I’ve felt funny. I can get that I don’t know where I am, there, I can get that I can’t find my – I get spread.” Secretively offering the important word as code, or hostage.
“Spread. You mean, out of the body?”
“I don’t know what you mean. You could call it that. It’s a technical trick. I used to be able to make it happen or not, when I was little. Now it’s got out of hand.”
“A technical trick. A technique. I like that, that’s good. You can do it at will?”
“I don’t like doing it. Any more.”
Simmonds’s smile was enamel-bright.
“And did this technique produce the shock? This light you speak of?”
“Oh, no, no, no. I didn’t do anything at all. It did it. I mean, that’s the one thing I’m sure of. It just happened.”
“That’s better. Now. Tell me what it did?”
“How can I? It was frightful. It crowded me out. I was afraid of being – done away with.”
Simmonds wound his hands agitatedly together.
“And you think there’s something wrong with you, boy?”
“I told you. I was afraid. I couldn’t hold together.”
“Maybe you weren’t intended to. Maybe you were in the presence of a Power.”
Marcus found Simmonds’s attitude partly reassuring and partly alarming. It was reassuring that someone seemed confident of recognising and docketing phenomena he had feared only he was aware of at all. It was alarming because Simmonds seemed to have intentions, plans, a vision, in which he was by no means sure he wished to share.
“Photisms,” said Simmonds. “There’s a technical term for it, Potter. Photisms. Experiences of floods of light and glory which frequently accompany moments of revelation. The phenomenon is known.”
“Photisms,” Marcus repeated dubiously. He decided to sit up.
“The explanation of the phenomenon is of course open to scientific doubt. But it is a known experience, recorded and discussed.”
“Oh.”
“For God’s sake,” shouted Simmonds, greatly excited, “does it not occur to you that what you saw may have been more or less what Saul saw on the way to Damascus. What the shepherds saw in the fields at night. They were sore afraid, sore afraid, and so should you be, it’s no joke. You have to be trained, you see, to withstand, to respond to, things like that. Which you are not.”
“I told you, I don’t believe in God.”
“And I told you that was of no importance if He believed in you. Did you say anything aloud, when you saw the photisms?”
“I said, oh God.”
“Precisely.”
“Look here, everyone, people, say that, all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Nothing ‘doesn’t mean anything’. All words are said for reasons. I knew what you said.”
“Anybody might –”
“You are subject to too many coincidences. The most important of which is me. I happen to have the techniques to channel the forces that properly scare you. I’ve been working on ways of training consciousness. Meditation if you like, but scientific. You came to me. You could run away now but God would engineer another nasty shock, and you’d be back.”
“No.”
“I say yes. Tell me about the manifestation.”
“It did something to my sense of scale.”
“Did you see anything?”
“A diagram.”
Lucas Simmonds became enthusiastic. He confused Marcus, he produced pencil and paper, he extracted a drawing.
On paper it looked like nothing. But the memory was still faintly dangerous.
“An infinity symbol,” said Lucas. Marcus diffidently mentioned that it had seemed to indicate a burning glass. Also, Lucas said, an infinity symbol, a symbol of infinite energy passing through a point. They should, would use the symbol as a mantra, an object of joint contemplation and meditation.
Marcus looked at it silently. It looked diminished, as Lucas interrogated it. The whole thing was becoming diminished, safe to handle, wrapped in Lucas Simmonds’s fluent words. Although Simmonds was paradoxically trying to unwrap it. With speech, it all receded, seeming, as it vanished, bright and desirable for the first time.
Simmonds, brightly reasonable, leaned on the teacher’s bench and lectured him.
“The Renaissance was when they got Man’s relationship with Spirit wrong. They revived the old pagan idea that Man is the Measure of all things, which of course is absurd, and that idea did untold damage. Instead of infinity you had to be content with a circle a man could touch at every point.” He drew a crude version of Leonardo’s encircled microcosmic man beside Marcus’s infinity symbol, and smiled peacefully.
“Conjuring with wrong images. Since then we’ve been living in an anthropocentric universe with our eyes and ears and minds shut. What’s called Religion isn’t about inhuman Spirit but about Man and Morals and Progress, which are much less important. And then Science came, which should have given them an inkling, an inkling of the inhuman Powers that Be, but what they did was develop their anthropocentricity into the terrible idea that Man is the Master of all Things. Now that, Potter, is black conjuring, that produced Hiroshima and Satanic mills. Science could have been used, of course, to re-establish the ancient knowledge that Man had his place on a Scale of Being as an intermediary between Pure Matter and Pure Spirit. But they talked about the indomitable human spirit and the empty heavens and lost their chances. Including any chance to deal with, or describe, or even recognise experiences of the kind you’ve just had.”
He was sweating again. His facial muscles twitched. Marcus observed these signs with frigid alarm. What attracted him about Lucas was not yet his theories, but his air of assurance, when he had it, his tweedy normality, that quality so ambivalently dear to all the younger Potters. When he was agitated, Marcus was put out. But today his assurance seemed mostly inspired, if the word could be thought appropriate, and included a sense of the shifts of Marcus’s moods.
“You suspect the language. Science is O.K., it has technical terms. This d
oesn’t, because Man has neglected spiritual forms for somatic ones. You don’t want me to talk about alchemy or auras or even angels I can tell. All those things are misshapen descriptions of things we’ve got askew. In fact, I believe, I do believe the world is trying to evolve out of matter into spirit … Here. I’ve written it out, actually. In a fumbling way. I’d like you to read it.”
He brought out, from his briefcase, a wad of cyclostyled paper.
“You might find some profit …”
It was blurred, much-handled, soft. Marcus read.
The PATTERN and the PLAN
Written by Lucas Simmonds M.Sc.
To the Greater Glory of the Maker.
To show the Ever more Complex Evolving Plan
and Pattern in which and according to which
IT desires us to Play our Part.
“I think we should work together, profitably. It must be your decision, in so far of course,” he laughed, “as no higher Powers take a hand again. The first stage is your reading my book – just to see if you have any comment, to clear the ground. Then I think we might devise a few experiments.
“What shall I do?”
“Do?”
“Now. I feel awful.”
“Now. Now I should go to the Nursery and tell Sister you’ve been sick in the Bilge Lab, and get her to tuck you up in bed. I might come with you, but it’s better not to excite comment, we must keep our secrets close … Just say you were sick.”
“I was sick.”
“Exactly so. I look forward to our next meeting.”
He did not say when that would be, but by now Marcus doubted no more than Simmonds that it would be taken care of.
13. In the Humanist’s House
Frederica, entering Long Royston for the first time, did not take to it. She had meant to. It was a step, several steps, up and out of Blesford. Like Everest, climbed that year, it had always been there, but inaccessible. Now, invited by its owner, she walked across its gardens, planted, according to Crowe’s instructions, more or less in accordance with Francis Bacon’s prescriptions in his essay “Of Gardens”. It was a hideous grey spring, that year, but Bacon’s April flowers, in walled gardens, were struggling out. Bacon liked the breath of flowers on the air. Frederica breathed in: the double white violet; the wallflower; the stock-gillyflower; the cowslip; flower-delices and lilies of all natures; rosemary flowers; the tulippa; the double piony; the pale daffadil; the French honeysuckle; the cherry-tree in blossom; the dammasin and plum-tree in blossom; the white-thorn in leaf; the lilac-tree. It was all in the guide-book, issued with pretty drawings when the gardens were thrown open at Easter and in June. You may, said Bacon, have ver perpetuum, as the place affords. Even in North Yorkshire, though the moorland winds do sorely ruffle. Frederica crunched along the terrace gravel, on which later the play was to be enacted. The breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air than in the hand. Wallflowers are very delightful to be set under a parlour or low chamber window. They were. But those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three: that is, burnet, wild thyme, and watermints. Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure, when you walk or tread. Crowe had provided that pleasure. Frederica saw other people walking and treading in pleached alleys planted with these things, known faces, unknown faces, familiar from photographs and posters. The revels are now beginning, she told herself.
When she got in she was less happy. There was a white-coated butler, who took her macintosh and her name: there was Crowe, who said “how lovely” and passed on, there was a young man in a peacock corduroy jacket, studying a carving, half his face hidden behind huge tinted aquamarine lenses. She thought what she felt was social unease – alarm at being unable to impress herself on this knot of highly articulate, loudly fluting, brilliantly mobile creatures. Social unease always made her aggressive. Later, she wondered whether what daunted her was not Long Royston itself.
They were gathered for a preliminary briefing, to consider costumes, and because Crowe thought it would be fun. They sat down to lunch in the Great Hall, under the minstrels’ gallery, fifteen at table, the prospective principal actors, the triumvirate and the wardrobe mistresses, the wife of the Dean of Calverley and someone Lodge had inveigled from Covent Garden. Marina Yeo was enthroned between Crowe and Alexander, pronouncing on the power of garments. Frederica, at the other end of the table between the aquamarine young man, who had not taken off his goggles, and Jennifer Parry, who was to play Bess Throckmorton, and just qualified, in this huge cast, as a principal, observed her critically.
“Clothes have terrible power, on the stage,” said Miss Yeo. “What one appears to be, there, one is, one is at their mercy, always, to some extent. Some actors impart power to their clothes. Ellen Terry’s daughter would never have her costumes cleaned. They were stiff with her mana. Sybil told me once that when she put on those shimmering beetle-wings that Ellen Terry wore as Lady Macbeth she became simply absolutely fearless. They bore her through the part. Do you know, Alexander, the Oscar Wilde story about those beetle-wings? How he said – the Queen of Scotland – purchased the banquet – a very frugal one – in the local shops – and patronised the local weavers – for her husband’s – drab – kilt. But for her own garments – she shopped – in Byzantium. So it was.”
“I shall never forget your Lady Macbeth,” said Crowe. “I can still see your hands, as though you would wring them away …”
“I preferred the nightdress in that,” said Miss Yeo, “to all those rather square robes I had to cart about …”
“You shall have a lovely nightie to die in, in this,” Crowe told her. “Wait till you see. Clothes to the author’s own design, a novelty.”
“Really,” said Miss Yeo, turning total attention on Alexander, who felt required to woo her. Frederica and Jennifer Parry both watched him to see how he would deal with this requirement, Jennifer covertly, and Frederica with an unabashed stare. As she had expected, he dealt badly, stammering woodenly, obviously insincere, which in fact he was not. Marina Yeo’s face was long and dark-skinned, her hair thick, smooth and greying, her eyes very dark under deeply sculpted lids. Her large mouth was invariably described as mobile. Her neck was very long and had aged like finely knotted wood, without puffiness. She twisted her face about too much all the time, Frederica decided, composing her own stiffly. Frederica had been much impressed by the rigid and mask-like quality of portraits of Elizabeth.
“I didn’t catch your name,” said the creature with the goggles, turning these on her, lifting his face under the high windows so that sparks danced in the iridescent lenses. “I believe I know you.”
“I doubt it. I’m Frederica Potter.”
“Ah. You see I do. Bill Potter’s daughter. The second one, the fierce one.”
Frederica drew back, said “How,” and recognised his manner.
“You are Edmund Wilkie. How odd. Why are you here?”
“I am Sir Walter Ralegh, love. The local prodigy returning to the fold to astonish and confound prophecy. Why are you here?”
“I am Elizabeth. Until Marina Yeo is old enough – or young enough – to do it, to be her. If you see.”
“I see precisely. What fun. You will have to learn her mannerisms. Not difficult, they’re very clear-cut.” He bent his body towards her in a very passable imitation of the actress’s curvilinear attentive stoop.
“I can’t see your face,” Frederica protested. “Those glasses are most off-putting. I don’t remember that you had to wear glasses.”
“I don’t. They’re experimental, my own design, an explanation of the effect of intense colours on mood. I did try those reversing glasses they put on chickens but I only dare wear them in my own place. Guaranteed, when you take them off, to produce oceanic feelings of totality. The top of the world and the bottom identical. Or at least the top and bottom of the stairs since your senses confound your intellect and declare that each is the oth
er. Colours are easier in public life. I have several pairs. Brown, gold, blue, grey smoke, purple smoke, Bristol crimson and conventional rose-tinted. I’m keeping a long and detailed record of my moods and reactions. I get my girl to keep a control record. So far the only thing we’re both dead certain about is that the less you can see me the ruder I am.”
“Everybody,” said Frederica, “seems very proud of being very rude, these days.”
“True. How right you are. A facile way of appearing witty. By all means let’s be revolutionary and polite. Tell me what you think of your alter ego, the other Gloriana?”
Edmund Wilkie was Blesford Ride’s maverick success. At the school he had, with extraordinary facility, passed A-levels both in arts subjects and, subsequently, in sciences. He then left, and went to King’s College Cambridge to become a psychologist, where he was said to be showing unsurpassed brilliance. He had also risen meteor-like to national fame as an actor, had written, directed and acted in a review called Midnight Mushrumps which had had a brief London run and had played a Marlowe Society Hamlet about which Harold Hobson had written, “The most intelligent, least bombastic Prince to grace the stage in my memory”. Frederica was very temporarily in love with him, after a vision of him as Bunthorne, in grass and primrose velvet, in a Blesford Ride Patience. He was the sort of boy schoolmasters secretly hope will come a cropper, so blithe, so arrogant, so effortless, so ingrate had been his academic proceedings. They wrote heavily qualified references which Cambridge ignored.
Gossip columnists were already speculating about whether he would be a great psychologist, an innovatory don or doctor, a brilliant entertainer, a valuable Shakespearean actor. Alexander had thought he might properly be called back to do Ralegh, that man of many parts, climber, poet, mountebank, scientist, atheist, soldier, sailor, historian, prisoner. Ralegh carried a lot of the play’s weight: he was part-chorus as well as character. Wilkie was to Frederica living proof that escape was possible from Blesford to metropolitan speed and glamour. Bill’s vision of her future did not include such things: he was cautious about Wilkie, gloomily testifying that he was sharp-witted and possibly something more.
