Possession

by A.S. Byatt

And over the mantel, Christabel before Sir Leoline—yourself caught like a statue with coloured light striking garishly across you and an equally frigid Dog Tray. Who ranged, busily seeking, with his hackles like porpentine quills and his soft grey lip wrinkled in a snarl—truly, as you say, he at least does not love me, and once or twice threatened my composed attention to the excellent seed cake, and rattled cup and saucer. And no porch with tumbling flowers—all vanishing froth and fantasy—but stiff tall Roses like a thicket of sentinels. I think your house did not love me, and I should not have come

I must die in his debt. He is my friend And will forgive me. Write that hope. Then write For her, for Antoinette de Bourignon (Who spoke to me, when I despaired, of God’s Timeless and spaceless point of Infinite Love) That, trusting her and Him, I turn my face To the bare wall, and leave this world of things For the No-thing she shewed me, when I came Halting to Germany, to seek her out. Now sign it, Swammerdam, and write the date, March, 1680, and then write my age His forty-third year. His small time’s end. His time— Who saw Infinity through countless cracks In the blank skin of things, and died of it.

That glass of water you hold to my lips, Had I my lenses, would reveal to us Not limpid clarity as we suppose— Pure water—but a seething, striving horde Of animalcules lashing dragon-tails Propelled by springs and coils and hairlike fronds Like whales athwart the oceans of the globe. The optic lens is like a slicing sword. It multiplies the world, or it divides— We see the many in the one, as here, We see the segments of what once seemed smooth, Rough pits and craters on a lady’s skin, Or fur and scales along her gleaming hair.

Lay out this creature on the optic disk, Lay bare the seat of generation The organs where the new lives lie and grow, Where the eggs take their form. She is no King But a vast Mother, on whose monstrous flanks Climb smaller sisters, hurrying to tend Her progeny, to help with her travail, Carry her nectar and give up their lives If needs be, to save hers, for she is Queen, The necessary Centre of the Brood.

I ask myself, did Galileo know Fear, when he saw the gleaming globes in space, Like unto mine, whose lens revealed to me— Not the chill glory of Heaven’s Infinite— But all the swarming, all the seething motes The basilisks, the armoured cockatrice, We cannot see, but are in their degrees— Why not?—to their own apprehension— I dare not speak it—why not microcosms As much as Man, poor man, whose ruffled pride Cannot abide the Infinite’s questioning From smallest as from greatest? [Desunt cetera.]

Strange narrow-chested sheep bound away, scattering stones, and swaying their woolly integument in the air like banks of weed in the sea-water—heavy and slow—They stare from crags—I was about to write inhumanly—but that goes without saying—they have a look almost daemonic and inimical, for domesticated animals. You would be interested by their eyes—yellow with a black bar of a pupil—horizontal, not vertical—which gives them their odd look.

“And Christabel? Is anything known about her in June 1859?” “There’s nothing at all in the Archive. Nothing until Blanche dies in 1860. Do you think—?” “What happened to Blanche?” “She drowned herself. She jumped from the bridge, at Putney—with her clothes wetted and her pockets full of big round stones. To make sure. She’s on record as admiring the heroism of Mary Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempt from the same bridge. She obviously noted that Wollstonecraft found it hard to sink, because of her clothes floating.”

Maud waited. Beatrice described helplessly her true experience: “When I started on it, I thought, what a nice dull woman. And then I got the sense of things flittering and flickering behind all that solid—oh, I think of it as panelling. And then I got to think—I was being led on—to imagine the flittering flickering things—and that really it was all just as stolid and dull as anything. I thought I was making it all up, that she could have said something interesting—how shall I put it—intriguing—once in a while—but she absolutely wasn’t going to. It could be an occupational hazard of editing a dull journal, couldn’t it? Imagining that the author was deliberately baffling me?” Maud looked back at Beatrice, baffled.

“A Professor Stern came. From Tallahassee. She wanted to know—to know—to find out about Ellen Ash’s sexual relations—with him—or anyone. I told her there was nothing of that kind in this journal. She said there must be—in the metaphors—in the omissions. We were not taught to do scholarship by studying primarily what was omitted, Dr Bailey. No doubt you find me naive.” “No. I occasionally find Leonora Stern naive. No, that’s the wrong word. Single-minded and zealous. And she may have been right. Maybe what you find baffling is a systematic omission—”

And yet, to live in a time which has created a climate of such questioning … surely, after all, Herbert Baulk has cause for anxiety. He tells me I should not trouble my intellect with questions which my intuition (which he qualifies as womanly, virtuous, pure and so on and so on) can distinguish to be vain. He tells me I know that my Redeemer liveth, and looks eagerly for my assent to his proposition as though my assent provides him with strength also. Well, I assent. I do assent. I do know that my Redeemer liveth. But I should be grateful on earth if Herbert Baulk could respectably resolve his intellectual doubts so that our prayers could be full of honest praise and robust faith in a watchful Providence, rather than darkly riddling, as at present. It is late for me to be writing this. I should not work so late if I was not alone—apart from the servants—in the house.

Among these letters was one requesting an interview with me personally in a matter of great importance, the writer said, to me myself. This too is not unusual—many, especially young women—appeal to me in order to come into close quarters with my dear one. I replied civilly that I did not grant personal interviews to strangers, as too many were requested, but that if the writer had anything very particular to communicate I would beg her in the first instance to write to me with some indication of the matter in question. We shall see if this produces anything or nothing, pertinence, or, as I suspect, something vague and crazed.

Oh how can I make you trust me? You must. May I trespass on your time and come to see you? I shall not need to stay long—but I have that to tell you—for which you may come to thank me—or not—but that is no matter—you must know— I may be found at all times at the address which heads this letter. Believe me oh believe me, I wish to stand your friend. Yours most sincerely Blanche Glover Maud closed her face and dropped her eyelids on what must be a glitter of pouncing.

Beatrice Nest’s face was bland and patiently questioning. “It isn’t only my secret,” Maud hissed. “Or I wouldn’t have been disingenuous. I—I don’t know what I’ve found, yet. I promise I’ll tell you first when I do. I think I know what Blanche Glover told her. Well, one of two or three things it might have been.” “Was it important?” asked the grey voice, with no indication of whether the “importance” was scholarly, passionate or cosmic. “I don’t know. It might change our views of—of his work, I suppose, a bit.” “What do you want of me?” “A Xerox of those two letters. If it can be done, a copy of the Journal, between those dates. Not to tell Professor Cropper. Or Professor Blackadder. Yet. We discovered this ourselves—” Beatrice Nest seemed to think for a longish time, her face propped in her hands. “This—what you’re so excited about—it won’t—it won’t expose her to ridicule—or—misapprehension? I’ve become very concerned that she shouldn’t be—exposed is the best word I suppose—exposed.” “It isn’t primarily to do with her.” “That is not necessarily reassuring.” A maddening silence. “I suppose I shall trust you. I suppose I shall.”

She stepped. He side-stepped. She stepped the other way. He was there. He put out a strong hand and clasped it like a handcuff on her wrist. She saw the egg-white bed. “Don’t be like that, Maud. I want to talk to you. I’m suffering terribly in about equal amounts of curiosity and jealousy. I can’t believe you’ve got involved with sweet useless Roland and I can’t understand what you’re doing haunting the Crematorium here, unless you have.” “Crematorium?” “Ash Factory.” He was pulling on her arm while he talked so that her body and her briefcase were leaning towards his body, which put out its remembered flickers of electrification. “I need to talk to you, Maud. Let me buy you a good meal. Let’s just talk. You’re the most intelligent woman I know. I miss you terribly, you know, I should have said that, too.”

“I even had a theory about water and fountains. I told you Ash’s post-1860 poetry had this elemental streak—water and stones and earth and air. He mixes up geysers from Lyell with Norse myth and Greek mythical fountains. And Yorkshire waterfalls. And I wondered about the Fountain of Thirst in Melusina.” “How?” “Well, is there an echo here? This is out of Ask to Embla. It possibly links that fountain to the one in the Song of Songs, as well. Listen: “ ‘We drank deep of the Fountain of Vaucluse And where the northern Force incessantly Stirs the still pool, were stirred. And shall those founts Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed?’ ” Maud said “Say that again.” Roland said it again. Maud said, “Have you ever really felt your hackles rise? Because I just have. Prickles all down my spine and at the roots of my hair. You listen to this. This is what Raimondin says to Mélusine after he is told she knows he has looked at her in her marble bath and broken the prohibition: “ ‘Ah, Mélusine, I have betrayed your faith. Is there no remedy? Must we two part? Shall our hearth’s ash grow pale, and shall those founts Which freely flowed to meet our thirsts, be sealed?’ ”

The fountain does not “spring” but “bubbles and seeps” up into the “still and secret” pool, with its “low mossy stone” surrounded by “peaks and freshenings” of “running and closing” waters. This may all be read as a symbol of female language, which is partly suppressed, partly self-communing, dumb before the intrusive male and not able to speak out. The male fountain spurts and springs. Mélusine’s fountain has a female wetness, trickling out from its pool rather than rising confidently, thus mirroring those female secretions which are not inscribed in our daily use of language (langue, tongue)—the sputum, mucus, milk and bodily fluids of women who are silent for dryness.

Roland laid aside Leonora Stern with a small sigh. He had a vision of the land they were to explore, covered with sucking human orifices and knotted human body-hair. He did not like this vision, and yet, a child of his time, found it compelling, somehow guaranteed to be significant, as a geological survey of the oolite would not be. Sexuality was like thick smoked glass; everything took on the same blurred tint through it.

On the other side of the plaster-and-lath partition Maud closed The Great Ventriloquist with a snap. Like many biographies, she judged, this was as much about its author as its subject, and she did not find Mortimer Cropper’s company pleasant. By extension, she found it hard to like Randolph Henry Ash, in Cropper’s version. Part of her was still dismayed that Christabel LaMotte should have given in to whatever urgings or promptings Ash may have used. She preferred her own original vision of proud and particular independence, as Christabel, in the letters, had given some reason to think she did herself.

Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body—and language—all language. And all vegetation in pubic hair.” Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, “And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It’s really powerlessness.” “Impotence,” said Maud, leaning over, interested. “I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn’t the point. We are so knowing. And all we’ve found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and so we’re imprisoned in ourselves—we can’t see things. And we paint everything with this metaphor—” “You are very cross with Leonora.” “She’s very good. But I don’t want to see through her eyes. It isn’t a matter of her gender and my gender. I just don’t.”

Maud put the locket down. She asked to see the clasped-hand FRIENDSHIP brooch, which the old woman reached in from the window. Roland was studying a card of brooches and rings made apparently from plaited and woven silks, some encircled by jet, some studded with pearls. “This is pretty. Jet and pearls and silk.” “Oh, not silk, sir. That’s hair. That’s another form of mourning brooch, with the hair. Look, these ones have IN MEMORIAM round the frame. They cut it off at the deathbed. You could say they kept it alive.” Roland peered through the glass at the interwoven strands of fine pale hair. “They made all sorts of it, very ingenious. Look—here’s a plaited watch-chain out of someone’s long locks. And a bracelet with a pretty heart-shaped clasp, ever such delicate work, in dark hair.”

Over lunch, which they ate in one of the grassy clearings near the Nelly Ayre Foss, they discussed progress. Roland had been reading Melusina in bed and was now convinced that Christabel had been in Yorkshire. “It has to be here. Where do people think it is? It’s full of local words from here, gills and riggs and ling. The air is from here. Like in his letter. She talks about the air like summer colts playing on the moors. That’s a Yorkshire saying.” “I suppose if it is, no one has noticed it before because they weren’t looking. That is—her landscapes were always supposed to be really Brittany, claiming to be Poitou, and heavily influenced by Romantic local colour—the Brontës, Scott, Wordsworth. Or symbolic.” “Do you think she was here?” “Oh yes. I feel certain. But I’ve no proof that will stand up.

“I’ve been reading his poems. Ask to Embla. They’re good. He wasn’t talking to himself. He was talking to her—Embla—Christabel or— Most love poetry is only talking to itself. I like those poems.” “I’m glad you like something about him.” “I’ve been trying to imagine him. Them. They must have been—in an extreme state. I was thinking last night—about what you said about our generation and sex. We see it everywhere. As you say. We are very knowing. We know all sorts of other things, too—about how there isn’t a unitary ego—how we’re made up of conflicting, interacting systems of things—and I suppose we believe that? We know we are driven by desire, but we can’t see it as they did, can we? We never say the word Love, do we—we know it’s a suspect ideological construct—especially Romantic Love—so we have to make a real effort of imagination to know what it felt like to be them, here, believing in these things—Love—themselves—that what they did mattered—” “I know. You know what Christabel says. ‘Outside our small safe place flies Mystery.’ I feel we’ve done away with that too—And desire, that we look into so carefully—I think all the looking-into has some very odd effects on the desire.” “I think that, too.”

“I know what you mean. No, that’s a feeble thing to say. It’s a much more powerful coincidence than that. That’s what I think about, when I’m alone. How good it would be to have nothing. How good it would be to desire nothing. And the same image. An empty bed in an empty room. White.” “White.” “Exactly the same.” “How strange.” “Maybe we’re symptomatic of whole flocks of exhausted scholars and theorists. Or maybe it’s just us.”

Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone’s primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place. They took a simple picnic. Fresh brown bread, white Wensleydale cheese, crimson radishes, yellow butter, scarlet tomatoes, round bright green Granny Smiths and a bottle of mineral water. They took no books.

He’s one of those men who argue by increments of noise—so that as you open your mouth he says another, cleverer, louder thing. He used to quote Freud at me at six in the morning. Analysis Terminable and Interminable. He got up very early. He used to prance around the flat—with nothing on—quoting Freud saying that ‘at no point in one’s analytic work does one suffer more from a suspicion that one has been preaching to the winds than when one is trying to persuade a woman to abandon her wish for a penis’—I don’t think he—Freud—is right about that—but anyway—there was something intrinsically ridiculous about this silly shouting—before breakfast—letting it all hang out—I couldn’t work. That was how it was. I—I felt battered. For no good reason.” Roland looked at Maud to see if she might laugh and saw that she was smiling, an embarrassed, fierce smile, but a smile. He laughed. Maud laughed. He said, “It’s exhausting. When everything’s a deliberate political stance. Even if it’s interesting.” “Celibacy as the new volupté. The new indulgence.

If he loved the face, which was not kind, it was because it was clear and quick and sharp. He saw, or thought he saw, how those qualities had been disguised or overlaid by more conventional casts of expression—an assumed modesty, an expedient patience, a disdain masking itself as calm. At her worst—oh, he saw her clearly, despite her possession of him—at her worst she would look down and sideways and smile demurely, and this smile would come near a mechanical simper, for it was an untruth, it was a convention, it was her brief constricted acknowledgement of the world’s expectations. He had seen immediately, it seemed to him, what in essence she was, sitting at Crabb Robinson’s breakfast table, listening to men disputing, thinking herself an unobserved observer. Most men, he judged, if they had seen the harshness and fierceness and absolutism, yes, absolutism, of that visage, would have stood back from her. She would have been destined to be loved only by timid weaklings, who would have secretly hoped she would punish or command them, or by simpletons, who supposed her chill look of delicate withdrawal to indicate a kind of female purity, which all desired, in those days, at least ostensibly.

They had their own dining-room, where Mrs Cammish served a huge meal that should have fed twelve, on plates rimmed with cobalt blue and spattered with fat pink rosebuds. There was a tureen of buttery soup, there was boiled hake and potatoes, there were cutlets and peas, there were arrowroot moulds and treacle tart. Christabel LaMotte pushed her food across her plate with her fork. Mrs Cammish told Ash that his lady was a bit peaky and clearly in need of sea air and good food. Christabel said, when they were alone again, “It is no good. We eat like two small birds, in our house.” He watched her remember her home, stricken for a moment, and said easily, “You must not be intimidated by landladies. But she is right. You must enjoy the sea air.”

He thought of his hopes and expectations and the absence of language for most of them. There were euphemisms, there were male group brutalities, there were books. He did not want, above all, to think at this time of his own previous life, so he thought about books. He walked up and down by that sharp-smoky fire of seacoals and remembered Shakespeare’s Troilus: What will it be When that the wat’ry palate tastes indeed Love’s thrice-repured nectar? He thought of Honoré de Balzac, from whom he had learned much, some of it erroneous, some of it simply too French to be useful in the world he still lived in. The woman upstairs was part French and a reader. It might explain her lack of diffidence, her surprising matter-of-fact directness. Balzac’s cynicism was always nevertheless romantic—such greed, such gusto.

He had thought, the ultimate things, she did not know, and here was ancient proof. He stood, sponge in hand, and puzzled over her. Such delicate skills, such informed desire, and yet a virgin. There were possibilities, of which the most obvious was to him slightly repugnant, and then, when he thought about it with determination, interesting, too. He could never ask. To show speculation, or even curiosity, would be to lose her. Then and there. He knew that, without thinking. It was like Melusina’s prohibition, and no narrative bound him, unlike the unfortunate Raimondin, to exhibit indiscreet curiosity.

He saw her white hands like stars on the grey stone and he saw the red creatures run through and around them. Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an hour-glass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped together, with such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small circumference. He remembered an odd linguistic fact—the word for waist in Italian is vita, is life—and this must be, he thought, to do with the navel, which is where our separate lives cast off, that umbilicus which poor Philip Gosse believed had had to be made by God for Adam as a kind of mythic sign of the eternal existence of the past and the future in all presents.

All dazed with glamour was he, in her gaze. She ministered unto his extreme need And his face took the brightness of her glance As dusty heather takes the tumbling rays Of the sun’s countenance and shines them back. Now was he hers, if she should ask of him Body or soul, he would have offered all. And seeing this, at last, the Fairy smiled.

That night, they sat in Maud’s flat and Maud translated Dr Le Minier’s letter for Leonora, who said, “I got the general gist of it OK but my French is primitive. What it is to have an English education.” Maud had unthinkingly sat down in her usual place in the corner of her white sofa under the tall lamp, and Leonora had plumped down next to her, one arm along the sofa behind Maud’s back, one buttock bumping Maud’s when she bounced. Maud felt threatened and tense, and almost got up, once or twice, but was restrained by an exigent and unhelpful English sense of good manners. She was aware that Leonora knew exactly how she felt, and was amused.

Leonora came to the bed and folded Maud into her bosom. Maud fought to get her nose free. Loose hands met Leonora’s majestic belly and heavy breasts. She couldn’t push, that was as bad as submitting. To her shame, she began to cry. “What is it with you, Maud?” “I told you. I’m off the whole thing. Right off. I did tell you.” “I can relax you.” “You must be able to see you have exactly the opposite effect. Go back to bed, Leonora. Please.” Leonora made various rrr-ooof noises like a large dog or bear, and finally rolled away, laughing. “Tomorrow is another day,” said Leonora. “Sweet dreams, Princess.”

Am I writing this for Christabel to see, as a kind of devoir—a writer’s exercises—or even as a kind of intimate letter, for her to read alone, in moments of contemplation and withdrawal? Or am I writing it privately to myself, in an attempt to be wholly truthful with myself, for the sake of truth alone? I know she would prefer the latter. So I shall lock away this volume—anyway during its earliest life—and write in it only what is meant for my eyes alone, and those of the Supreme Being (my father’s deity, when he does not seem to believe in much older ones, Lug, Dagda, Taranis. Christabel has a strong but peculiarly English devotion to Jesus, which I do not wholly understand, nor is it clear to me what her allegiances are, Catholic or Protestant).

When I think of mediaeval princesses running their households during the Crusades, or prioresses running the life of great abbeys, or St Theresa as a little girl going out to fight evil, as George Sand’s Jacques says, I think a kind of softness has overcome modern life. De Balzac says that the new occupations of men in cities, their work in businesses, have turned women into pretty and peripheral toys, all silk, perfume and full of the fantaisies and intrigues of the boudoir. I would like to see silk floss and experience the atmosphere of a boudoir—but I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write. Is this too much? Is this declaration vapouring?

She is not elegant, but studiously neat and carefully dressed, with a jet cross on a silk rope around her neck, and elegant little green boots. She wears a lace cap. I do not know her age. Maybe thirty-five. Her hair is a strange colour, silvery-fair, almost metallic in its sheen, a little like winter butter made from milk from cows fed on sunless hay, the gold bleached out. She wears it—not becomingly—in little bunches of curls over her ears.

I think it must happen to men as well as to women, to know that strangers have made a false evaluation of what they may achieve, and to watch a change of tone, a change of language, a pervasive change of respect after their work has been judged to be worthwhile. But how much more for women, who are, as Christabel says, largely thought to be unable to write well, unlikely to try, and something like changelings or monsters when indeed they do succeed, and achieve something.

“And the room smelled of apple blossom and ripe apples together, Jeanne said. And Jeanne married the butcher and bore him four sons and two daughters, all of them lusty, but ill-disposed for dancing.” No, I have not told it like Gode. I have missed out patterns of her voice and have put in a note of my own, a literary note I was trying to avoid, a kind of prettiness or portentousness which makes the difference between the tales of the Brothers Grimm and La Motte Fouqué’s Undine.

“You move too quickly for me to argue,” I said sullenly enough, “But I have read about table-turning and spirit rappings in Papa’s magazines and I say it sounds like conjuring tricks for the credulous.” “You have read accounts by sceptics,” she said, all fire. “Nothing is easier to mock.” “I have read accounts by believers,” I said staunchly. “I have recognised credulity.” “Why are you so angry, Cousin Sabine?” said she. “Because I have never heard you say what was silly before now,” I said, and that was true, though doubtless it was not why I was angry. “One may conjure real daemons with drawing-room conjuring tricks,” said my father, meditatively.

I dislike the hatred, which seems to come from outside myself and take possession of me, like some great bird fixing its hooked beak in me, like some hungry thing with a hot pelt and angry eyes that look out of mine that leaves my better self, with her pleasant smile and her serviceableness, helpless. I fight and fight and no one seems to notice. They sit at table and exchange metaphysical theories and I sit there like a shape-changing witch, swelling with rage and shrinking with shame, and they see nothing.

At the end of his lecture, Cropper would take out Ash’s large gold watch, and check with it his own perfect timing: 50 minutes 22 seconds, this time. He had given up his naive youthful practice of publicly claiming the watch, with a little joke about continuity, Ash’s time and Cropper’s. For although the watch had been purchased with his own funds, it was arguable that by his own arguments it should be stowed away safely in the Stant cabinets.

He went to the London Library, at the top of which is an excellent shelf of spiritualist writings, and asked for The Shadowy Portal, which was out to another reader. He tried the British Library, whose copy had been, he was informed by a polite note, destroyed by enemy action. He sent off to Harmony City for a microfilm, and waited. James Blackadder, with none of Cropper’s gusto, was picking his way through the London Library’s Shadowy Portal. He too had begun in total ignorance of the movements of Christabel LaMotte, and lacked Cropper’s certain knowledge of any connection between LaMotte and Hella Lees in 1861. But he had picked up an earlier reference to Mrs Lees in a letter Sir George had tried to intrigue him with, and he was engaged in a thorough rereading of Ash’s known work and life round the crucial months of 1859.

If the retention of these old letters in this country is truly in the national interest, this young man appeared to be saying, with his vulpine smile and slight snarl, then Market Forces will ensure that the papers are kept in this country without any artificial aid from the state. He added, as he saw Blackadder to the lift, through corridors smelling faintly of brussels sprouts and blackboard dusters, like forgotten schools, that he had had to do Randolph Henry Ash for his A-Level, and hadn’t been able to make head or tail of him. “They did go on so, don’t you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously,” he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths. As it creaked up, Blackadder said, “That’s not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.” “So pompous, don’t you think?” returned the young man, smoothly impervious, closing the professor into his box.

She smiled on Blackadder and made him feel, briefly, wholly welcome and desired. She then became businesslike, fetching out her pad and saying, “Well, what’s important about Randolph Henry Ash?” Blackadder had an incoherent vision of his own life’s work, a fine line here, a philosophical joke tracked down there, a sense of the shape of many men’s interwoven thought, none of which would go bluntly into words. He said, “He understood the nineteenth-century loss of religious faith. He wrote about history—he understood history—he saw what the new ideas about development had done to the human idea of time. He’s a central figure in the tradition of English poetry. You can’t understand the twentieth century without understanding him.” Ms Patel looked politely baffled. She said, “I’m afraid I never heard of him until I got onto this story. I did a literature course in my degree, but it was in modern American literature and postcolonial English. So tell me why we should still care about Randolph Henry Ash?” “If we care about history at all—” “English history—

Blackadder looked rather wildly about his dimly-lit, porridge-colored box. He was getting claustrophobia. He was wholly unfitted for one-sentence claims on behalf of Ash. He could not detach himself from Ash enough to see what was not known. Ms Patel looked a little despondent. She said, “We’ve got time for three questions and a quickie to finish on. How about my asking you what is Randolph Ash’s importance to our society now?” Blackadder heard himself say, “He thought carefully and didn’t make up his mind in a hurry. He believed knowledge mattered—” “Sorry, I don’t understand—” The door opened. A bright female voice said, “I’ve brought your other speaker. This is right, isn’t it, this is the last item on Events in Depth? This is Professor Leonora Stern.”

Somewhere in the locked-away letters, Ash had referred to the plot of fate that seemed to hold or drive the dead lovers. Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others. He tried to extend this aperçu. Might there not, he professionally asked himself, be an element of superstitious dread in any self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognises that it has got out of hand? That recognises that connections proliferate apparently at random, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle, which would, of course, being a good postmodernist principle, require the aleatory or the multivalent or the “free,” but structuring, but controlling, but driving, to some—to what?—end. Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable.

One night they fell asleep, side by side, on Maud’s bed, where they had been sharing a glass of Calvados. He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase. They did not speak of this, but silently negotiated another such night. It was important to both of them that the touching should not proceed to any kind of fierceness or deliberate embrace. They felt that in some way this stately peacefulness of unacknowledged contact gave back their sense of their separate lives inside their separate skins. Speech, the kind of speech they knew, would have undone it. On days when the sea-mist closed them in a sudden milk-white cocoon with no perspectives they lay lazily together all day behind heavy white lace curtains on the white bed, not stirring, not speaking. Neither was quite sure how much, or what, all this meant to the other. Neither dared ask.

In the real world—that was, for one should not privilege one world above another, in the social world to which they must both return from these white nights and sunny days—there was little real connection between them. Maud was a beautiful woman such as he had no claim to possess. She had a secure job and an international reputation. Moreover, in some dark and outdated English social system of class, which he did not believe in, but felt obscurely working and gripping him, Maud was County, and he was urban lower-middle-class, in some places more, in some places less acceptable than Maud, but in almost all incompatible.

Perhaps your Roland Michell is some kind of macho boss-man. It doesn’t figure.” “He’s not. He’s not forceful. It’s his major failing.” “It must be love.” “That doesn’t explain Ariane Le Minier.” “It sure doesn’t. What a turn-up. Not only a lesbian but a Fallen Woman and Unmarried Mother. Every archetype. I guess this is the hotel. Where they seemed to be staying. Maybe they’re back now.”

“I intend to have those letters if I can,” he said. “And I intend to find out the rest.” “The rest?” “What became of their child. What they concealed from us. I intend to know.” “It may lie concealed forever in the grave,” said Blackadder, raising his glass to the fierce and melancholy face across the table. “May I propose a toast? Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. May they rest in peace.” Cropper raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that. But I shall find out.”