Possession

by A.S. Byatt

She had been standing on her own, holding a teacup in front of her, not looking about her, but rather fixedly out of the window, as though she expected no one to approach and invited no one.

“There aren’t any jobs.” She added, “And if there are, they go to Fergus Wolff.” He knew his Val: he had watched her honourably try to prevent herself from adding that last remark. “If you really think what I do is so unimportant.…” “You do what turns you on,” said Val. “Everyone does,

All appealed to Miss LaMotte on the question of the rapping spirits; she declined to express an opinion, answering only with a Monna Lisa smile.

Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students: he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to or change it.

Ash had been interested in everything. Arab astronomy and African transport systems, angels and oak apples, hydraulics and the guillotine, druids, and the grande armée, catharists and printer’s devils, ectoplasm and solar mythology, the last meals of frozen mastodons and the true nature of manna. The footnotes engulfed and swallowed the text. They were ugly and ungainly, but necessary, Blackadder thought, as they sprang up like the heads of the Hydra, two to solve in the place of one solved.

There were two daughters of the marriage, Sophie, born in 1830, who became the wife of Sir George Bailey, of Seal Close, in the Lincolnshire Wolds, and Christabel, born in 1825, who lived with her parents until in 1853 a small independence, left her by a maiden aunt, Antoinette de Kercoz, enabled her to set up house in Richmond in Surrey, with a young woman friend whom she had met at a lecture of Ruskin’s.

At first he did not identify Maud Bailey, and he himself was not in any way remarkable, so that they were almost the last pair at the wicket gate. She would be hard to miss, if not to recognise. She was tall, tall enough to meet Fergus Wolff’s eyes on the level, much taller than Roland. She was dressed with unusual coherence for an academic, Roland thought, rejecting several other ways of describing her green and white length, a long pine-green tunic over a pine-green skirt, a white silk shirt inside the tunic and long softly white stockings inside long shining green shoes. Through the stockings veiled flesh diffused a pink gold, almost. He could not see her hair, which was wound tightly into a turban of peacock-feathered painted silk, low on her brow. Her brows and lashes were blonde; he observed so much. She had a clean, milky skin, unpainted lips, clearcut features, largely composed. She did not smile. She acknowledged him and tried to take his bag, which he refused to allow. She drove an immaculately glossy green Beetle.

The books were arranged rationally, thematically, alphabetically, and dust-free; this last was the only sign of housekeeping in that austere place.

“And LaMotte. Did she keep a journal?” “Not as far as we know. Almost certainly not. She wrote to one of her nieces advising against it. It’s a rather good letter. ‘If you can order your Thoughts and shape them into Art, good: if you can live in the obligations and affections of Daily Life, good. But do not get into the habit of morbid Self-examination. Nothing so unfits a woman for producing good work, or for living usefully. The Lord will take care of the second of these—opportunities will be found. The first is a matter of Will.’ ” “I’m not sure about that.” “It’s

I too desired to be at home, and was glad when we were able to close our own dear front door behind us, and be gathered in to the silence of our little parlour. A home is a great thing, as I had not courage to say to Mr Robinson, if it is certainly one’s own home, as our little house is. When I think of my previous existence—of all I thought I could reasonably expect of the rest of my life, an allowed place at the extreme corner of someone’s drawing-room carpet, a Servant’s garret or no better, I give thanks for every little thing, which is unspeakably dear to me.

“I don’t know. The whole thing is a wild-goose chase.” “If I can help—” said Maud, having packed away Blanche’s pages into their box. “I shall be only too happy. Let’s have coffee. There’s an SCR Coffee place in the Women’s Studies block.” “Am I allowed in?” “Naturally,” said the frigid voice.

“It’s a very sad poem.” “Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong. The Sibyl was safe in her jar, no one could touch her, she wanted to die. I didn’t know what a Sibyl was. I just liked the rhythm. Anyway, when I started my work on thresholds it came back to me and so did she.

A disputatious look crossed Maud’s face,

He moved gingerly inside the bathroom, which was not a place to sit and read or to lie and soak, but a chill green glassy place, glittering with cleanness, huge dark green stoppered jars on water-green thick glass shelves, a floor tiled in glass tiles into whose brief and illusory depths one might peer, a shimmering shower curtain like a glass waterfall, a blind to match, over the window, full of watery lights. Maud’s great green-trellised towels were systematically folded on a towel-heater. Not a speck of talcum powder, not a smear of soap, on any surface. He saw his face in the glaucous basin as he cleaned his teeth. He thought of his home bathroom, full of old underwear, open pots of eyepaint, dangling shirts and stockings, sticky bottles of hair conditioner and tubes of shaving foam.

The black artist appeared on the threshold, wrapped in a swirling black cloak, smiling most ferociously, and the little tailor quaked and held up his splinter, thinking his foe would be bound to meet it magically, or freeze his hand in motion as he struck.

“It’s one of her quieter efforts. You see it’s not ascribed. The tombstone mentions her father’s profession, and doesn’t say a word about her own.” Roland felt briefly guilty of the oppressions of mankind. He said mildly, “It’s the poem that sticks in the memory. Rather sinister.”

I don’t know what sort of a state it’s in, but I believe some of her things are still there. The family has occupied less and less of this house since the World Wars, every generation a little less—Christabel’s room was in the east wing that’s been closed since 1918, except for use as some kind of a glory-hole.

Truly I make but a stammering companion, I have no graces, and as for the wit you may have perceived in me when we met, you saw, you must have seen, only the glimmerings and glister of your own brilliance refracted from the lumpen surface of a dead Moon.

His face in the mirror was fine and precise, his silver hair most exquisitely and severely cut, his half-glasses gold-rimmed, his mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a neat belt and the faraway ghost of a gunbelt.

I do not think Mr. Hollingdale ever wrote his great work. He found our desert solitude not to his liking, took in a poetic way to drinking tequila, and finally departed, with no regret on either side.

He was aware also, without wishing in any way to examine this awareness, that his reluctance, or incapacity, to continue in this mode of writing was to do with some prohibition set on writing about his mother, with whom he shared his American domestic life and to whom he wrote, every day when he was abroad, long and affectionate letters. All of us have things in our lives which we know in this brief, useful allusive way, and neglect deliberately to explore.

his first expedition had been to the North Yorkshire Moors and coast where Ash had enjoyed a solitary walking-tour, combined with amateur marine biologising, in 1859.

Men may be martyred Any where In desert, cathedral Or Public Square. In no Rush of Action This is our doom To Drag a Long Life out In a Dark Room. —CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE

Beatrice had an initial period of clear observation and detached personal judgment, during which she thought she saw that Ellen Ash was rambling and dull. And then she became implicated, began to share Ellen’s long days of prostration in darkened rooms, to worry about the effect of mildew on damask roses long withered, and the doubts of oppressed curates.

I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither, but the mistress of a very small household, consisting of an elderly poet (set in his ways, which are amiable and gentle and give no cause for anxiety), myself, and the servants who are not unmanageable.

Letters, Roland discovered, are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure. His time was a time of the dominance of narrative theories. Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going.

What makes me a Poet, and not a novelist—is to do with the singing of the Language itself. For the difference between poets and novelists is this—that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world.

Maud had not found Christabel an easy companion all day. She responded to threats with increasing organisation. Pin, categorise, learn. Out here it felt different.

I think so often of the brief time we had together in the summer. I think of our long tramps on the Wolds and late hours in the library, and scoops of real American ice-cream by your fireside. You are so thoughtful and gentle—you made me feel I am crashing around in your fragile surroundings, clumsily knocking down little screens and room dividers you have set up around your English privacy—but you aren’t happy, are you, Maud? There is an emptiness in your life.

The bathroom was cavernous, built somehow under eaves, which sloped away, leaving a kind of bunker beneath them, in which were heaped maybe thirty or forty ewers and washbasins of an earlier day, dotted with crimson rosebuds, festooned with honeysuckle, splattered with huge bouquets of delphiniums and phlox. The bath stood monumental and deep in the very centre of the room, rising on clawed lion-feet, a kind of marbly sarcophagus, crowned with huge brass taps. It was far too cold to contemplate running water into this, which would in any case have taken forever to fill.

3rd bathroom description

He was rather sorry for Maud. He had quite decided that she wouldn’t have been able to see the romance of the bathroom as he could.

So it often is in this life. We become consistent and orderly too late, on insufficient grounds, and perhaps in the wrong direction.

And you send a poem, and observe wisely that poems are worth all the cucumber-sandwiches in the world. So they are indeed—and yours most particularly—but you may imagine the perversity of the poetic imagination and its desire to feed on imagined cucumber-sandwiches, which, since they are positively not to be had, it pictures to itself as a form of English manna—oh the perfect green circles—oh the delicate hint of salt—oh the fresh pale butter—oh, above all, the soft white crumbs and golden crust of the new bread—and thus, as in all aspects of life, the indefatigable fancy idealises what could be snapped up and swallowed in a moment’s restrained greed, in sober fact.

The truth is—my dear Miss LaMotte—that we live in an old world—a tired world—a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning—by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos—are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision—as moulting serpents, before they burst forth with their new flexible-brilliant skins, are blinded by the crusts of their old one—or, we might say, as the lovely lines of faith that sprung up in the aspiring towers of the ancient ministers and abbeys are both worn away by time and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress.

You understand—in my life Three—and Three alone have glimpsed—that the need to set down words—what I see, so—but words too, words mostly—words have been all my life, all my life—this need is like the Spider’s need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out—the silk is her life, her home, her safety—her food and drink too—and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew—you will say she is patient—so she is—she may also be Savage—it is her Nature—she Must—or die of Surfeit—do you understand me?

Yours to command Randolph Ash

If I have offended you by calling your last long-ago letter contradictory (which it was) or timid (which it was) then you must forgive me.

You see, Sir, I say nothing of Honour, nor of Morality—though they are weighty matters—I go to the Core, which renders much disquisition on these matters superfluous. The core is my solitude, my solitude that is threatened, that you threaten, without which I am nothing—so how may honour, how may morality speak to me?

This agreed—may we not, in some circumscribed way—briefly, perhaps, probably—though it is Love’s Nature to know itself eternal—and in confined spaces too—may we not steal some—I almost wrote small, but it will never be that—some great happiness? We must come to grief and regret anyway—and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities.

Here everything seems primaeval—the formations of the rocks, the heaving and tossing of the full sea, the people with their fishing boats (called cobles in the local speech) which I imagine are not much changed from the primitive if versatile little craft of the early Viking invaders. Here on the shore of the German Ocean I feel the presence of those Northern Lands across its cold grey-green wastes—very different from the close civilised fields of France across the Channel—Even the air is somehow both ancient and fresh—fresh with salt and heather and a kind of absolute biting cleanness, resembling the taste of the water here, which has bubbled deliciously from perforated limestone, and is more surprising than wine—after the turgid Thames.

Maud and Beatrice began badly, partly because they found each other physically unsympathetic, Beatrice like an incoherent bale of knitting-wool and Maud poised and pointed and sharp.

“I agree, Dr Nest. In fact I do agree. The whole of our scholarship—the whole of our thought—we question everything except the centrality of sexuality—Unfortunately feminism can hardly avoid privileging such matters. I sometimes wish I had embarked on geology myself.” Beatrice Nest smiled and handed over the journal.

“I read Leonora Stern’s essay ‘Venus Mount and Barren Heath.’ ” Maud hunted for an adjective to describe this work, rejected “penetrating” and settled on “very profound.”

Folk collect them, you know. Folk’ll collect anything, given time. Butterflies. Collar-studs. Even my old flatirons, as I used right up to 1960, when our Edith insisted on getting me an electric one, I had a man round, asking.

“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.”

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.

She watched him as a bird watches, the sort that is chained to a stand, some bright-plumed creature of tropical forests, some gold-eyed hawk from northern crags, wearing its jesses with what dignity it could muster, enduring man’s presence with a still-savage hauteur, ruffling its feathers from time to time, to show both that it tended itself with respect, and that it was not quite comfortable.

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.

“Ah, how can we bear it?” “Bear what?” “This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?” “We can be quiet together, and pretend—since it is only the beginning—that we have all the time in the world.” “And every day we shall have less. And then none.” “Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?” “No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the midpoint, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.”

He remembered most, when it was over, when time had run out, a day they had spent in a place called the Boggle Hole, where they had gone because they liked the word. She had taken delight in the uncompromising Northern words, which they had collected like stones, or spiny sea-creatures. Ugglebarnby. Jugger Howe. Howl Moor. She had made notes in her little notebooks of the female names of the Meres or standing stones they met on the moors. Fat Betty, the Nan Stone, Slavering Ciss. “There is a terrible tale to be told,” she said, “and a few bright guineas to be earned, of Slavering Ciss.” That too had been a good day, with blue and gold weather, a day that had put him in mind of the youth of the Creation.