Possession

  On the day of Mortimer Cropper’s proposed luncheon, she was visited by Roland Michell.

  “Am I disturbing you, Beatrice?”

  Beatrice smiled automatically. “No, not particularly. I was just thinking.”

  “I’ve come up against something—I wondered if you could help. Do you happen to know if Ellen Ash says anything anywhere about Christabel LaMotte?”

  “I don’t remember anything.” Beatrice sat smiling, as though her lack of memory clinched the matter. “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Is there any way of checking?”

  “I could look at my card index.”

  “I’d be very grateful.”

  “What sort of thing are we looking for?”

  Roland experienced a not uncommon desire to poke, prod or startle Beatrice, who sat monumentally still, with the same fussy little smile on her face.

  “Just anything really. I came across some evidence that Ash was interested in LaMotte. I just wondered.”

  “I could look at my card index. Professor Cropper is coming at lunchtime.”

  “How long is he here this time?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say. He said he was coming on from Christie’s.”

  “Could I see your card index, Beatrice?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, it’s all a bit of a muddle, I have my own system, you know, Roland, for recording things, I think I’d better look myself, I can better understand my own hieroglyphics.”

  She put on her reading glasses, which dangled over her embarrassment on a gilt-beaded chain. Now she could not see Roland at all, a state of affairs she marginally preferred, since she saw all male members of her quondam department as persecutors, and was unaware that Roland’s own position there was precarious, that he hardly qualified as a full-blooded departmental male. She began to move things across her desk, a heavy wooden-handled knitting bag, several greying parcels of unopened books. There was a whole barbican of index boxes, thick with dust and scuffed with age, which she ruffled in interminably, talking to herself.

  “No, that one’s chronological, no, that’s only the reading habits, no, that one’s to do with the running of the house. Where’s the master-box now? It’s not complete for all notebooks you must understand. I’ve indexed some but not all, there is so much, I’ve had to divide it chronologically and under headings, here’s the Calverley family, that won’t do … now this might be it.…

  “Nothing under LaMotte. No, wait a minute. Here. A cross-reference. We need the reading box. It’s very theological, the reading box. It appears”—she drew out a dog-eared yellowing card, the ink blurring into its fuzzy surface—“it appears she read The Fairy Melusina, in 1872.”

  She replaced the card in its box, and settled back in her chair, looking across at Roland with the same obfuscating comfortable smile. Roland felt that the notebooks might be bristling with unrecorded observations about Christabel LaMotte that had slipped between Beatrice’s web of categories. He said doggedly, “Do you think I could see what she said? It might be”—he rejected “important”—“it might be of interest to me. I’ve never read Melusina. There seems to be a revival of interest in it.”

  “I tried once or twice in the old days. It’s terribly long-winded and impenetrable. Gothic, you know, Victorian Gothic, a bit gruesome, in places for a lady’s poem …”

  “Beatrice—could I just cast my eyes over what Mrs Ash said?”

  “I’ll just see.” Beatrice rose from her table. She put her head into the metal dark of a khaki filing-cabinet inside which the yearly volumes of the Journal lay. Roland observed her huge haunches under herring-bone tweed. “Did I say 1872?” Beatrice called from inside her echoing box. Reluctantly she produced the volume, leather-bound, with marbled end-papers in crimson and violet. She began to turn the pages, holding the text up, between Roland and herself.

  “Here,” she finally pronounced. “November 1872. Here she begins it.” She began to read aloud: “Today I embarked on The Fairy Melusina, which I bought for myself in Hatchard’s on Monday. What shall I find there? So far I have read the rather long preamble which I found a little pedantic. I then came on to the knight Raimondin and his encounter with the shining lady at the Fontaine de Soif which I liked better. Miss LaMotte has an unquestionable gift for making the flesh creep.”

  “Beatrice—”

  “Is this the sort of thing you were—?”

  “Beatrice, could I possibly read that for myself, to make notes on it?”

  “You can’t take it out of the office.”

  “Perhaps I could perch at the corner of your table. Would I be terribly in your way?”

  “I suppose not, no,” said Beatrice. “You could have that chair if I lifted that heap of books off it—”

  “Let me do that—”

  “And you could sit opposite me then, if I cleaned that corner of my table—”

  “So I could. Thank you.”

  They were engaged in space clearing when Mortimer Cropper appeared in the doorway, making everything appear dingier in comparison to his suave elegance.

  “Miss Nest. How pleasant to see you again. I trust I’m not too early. I could always come back again.…”

  Beatrice was flustered. A heap of papers sighed sideways and fanned out on the floor.

  “Oh dear. I was ready, Professor, I was quite ready, only Mr Michell wanted to enquire … wanted to know …”

  Cropper had detached Miss Nest’s shapeless mackintosh from its hook and was holding it for her.

  “Glad to see you, Michell. Making progress? What did you want to know?”

  His clearcut face was composed of pure curiosity.

  “Just checking on Ash’s reading of some poems.”

  “Ah yes. Which poems?”

  “Roland was enquiring about Christabel LaMotte. I couldn’t remember anything … but there turned out to be a minor reference … you may sit there whilst I have lunch with Professor Cropper, Roland, if you try not to disturb the order of things on my desk, if you promise not to take anything out of here.…”

  “You need help, Miss Nest. Your task is too huge.”

  “Oh no. I do much better alone. I should not know what to do with help.”

  “Christabel LaMotte,” said Cropper, musing. “There’s a photograph in the Stant Collection. Very pale. Not sure if it was the effect of near-albinism or a defect in the printing. Probably the latter. Was Ash, do you think, interested in her?”

  “Only very marginally. I’m just checking. Routinely.”

  When Cropper had shepherded his charge out, Roland settled at his table corner and turned the pages of Randolph Ash’s wife’s journal.

  Still engaged in reading Melusina. An impressive achievement.

  Have reached Book VI of Melusina. Its aspirations to cosmic reflection might be thought to sit uneasily with its Fairytale nature.

  Still reading Melusina. What diligence, what confidence went to its contriving. Miss LaMotte despite a lifetime’s residence in this country, remains essentially French in her way of seeing the world. Though there is nothing to which one can take exception in this beautiful and daring poem, in its morals indeed.

  And then, several pages later, a surprising and uncharacteristic outburst.

  Today I laid down Melusina having come trembling to the end of this marvellous work. What shall I say of it? It is truly original, although the general public may have trouble in recognising its genius, because it makes no concession to vulgar frailties of imagination, and because its virtues are so far removed in some ways at least from those expected of the weaker sex. Here is no swooning sentiment, no timid purity, no softly gloved lady-like patting of the reader’s sensibility, but lively imagination, but force and vigour. How shall I characterise it? It is like a huge, intricately embroidered tapestry in a shadowed stone hall, on which all sorts of strange birds and beasts and elves and demons creep in and out of thickets of thorny trees and occasional blossoming glades. Fine patches of gold stan
d out in the gloom, sunlight and starlight, the sparkle of jewels or human hair or serpents’ scales. Firelight flickers, fountains catch light. All the elements are in perpetual motion, fire consuming, water running, air alive and the earth turning.… I was put in mind of the tapestried hunts in The Franklin’s Tale or in The Faerie Queene, where the observer sees the woven vision come alive under his wondering eyes, so that pictured swords draw real blood, and the wind sighs in pictured trees.

  And what shall I say of the scene in which the husband, a man of insufficient faith, bores his peephole and observes his Siren-spouse at play in her vat of waters? I should have said, if I was asked, that this scene was best left to the imagination, as Coleridge left Geraldine—“a sight to dream of, not to tell.” But Miss LaMotte tells abundantly, though her description might be a little strong for some stomachs, especially maidenly English ones, who will be looking for fairy winsomeness.

  She is beautiful and terrible and tragic, the Fairy Melusina, inhuman in the last resort.

  The sinuous muscle of her monster tail

  Beating the lambent bath to diamond-fine

  Refracting lines of spray, a dancing veil

  Of heavier water on the breathless air

  How lovely-white her skin her Lord well knew,

  The tracery of blue veins across the snow.…

  But could not see the beauty in the sheen

  Of argent scale and slate-blue coiling fin.…

  Perhaps the most surprising touch is that the snake or fish is beautiful.

  Roland gave up any idea of having lunch himself to copy out this passage, mostly because he wanted to give it to Maud Bailey, who must be excited at this contemporary female enthusiasm for her admired text, but also because he felt that extravagant admiration of this sort, from Ash’s wife for a woman whom he was already thinking of as Ash’s mistress, was perhaps unexpected. Having copied it out, he turned the pages idly.

  My recent reading has caused me for some reason to remember myself as I was when a young girl, reading high Romances and seeing myself simultaneously as the object of all knights’ devotion—an unspotted Guenevere—and as the author of the Tale. 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. I see daily how Patience and Faith are both worn down and hagged with the daily care of their broods and yet shine with the flow of love and unstinted concern for their young. They are now grandmothers as well as mothers, doted on and doting. I myself have come to find of late a kind of creeping insidious vigour come upon me (after the unspeakable years of migraine headache and nervous prostration). I wake feeling, indeed, rather spry, and look about for things to occupy myself with. I remember at sixty the lively ambitions of the young girl in the Deanery, who seems like someone else, as I watch her in my imagination dancing in her moony muslin, or having her hand kissed by a gentleman in a boat.

  I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet about the chaste sweetness of her face and the intuitive goodness shining in her walk. But I now think—it might have been better, might it not, to have held on to the desire to be a Poet? I could never write as well as Randolph, but then no one can or could, and so it was perhaps not worth considering as an objection to doing something.

  Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated, I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on. Randolph, if he were to read this, would laugh me out of such morbid questioning, would tell me it is never too late, would cram his huge imagination into the snail-shell space of my tiny new accession of energy and tell me what is to be done. But he shan’t see this, and I will find a way—to be a very little more—there now I’m crying, as that girl might have cried. Enough.

  Roland slid out of the Ash factory and went home before Cropper or Blackadder could return from lunch and ask him any awkward questions. He was annoyed with himself for creating a situation in which Cropper could discover Christabel’s name. Nothing was wasted on that sharp noticing mind.

  The Putney basement was silent, sensuously entangled with the BM basement by its feline reek. Winter was darkly coming, and dark stains and some slow form of creeping life had appeared on the walls. It was hard to heat. There was no central heating, and Roland and Val had supplemented their one gas fire with paraffin stoves, so that the smell of petrol mingled with the smells of cat and mild mould. It was a cold petrol smell, not a burning one, and there was no smell of cooking, no burning onion nor warm curry powder. Val must be out. They could not afford to keep the hall stove lit in her absence. Roland, without taking his coat off, went to find a match. The wick was behind a cranky hinged door in the chimney, made of a transparent horny substance, smoke-stained and crackling. Roland turned the key, extruded a little wick and set it flaring with a low boom; he hastily closed the aperture, producing a steady blue inverted crescent of flame. There was something ancient and magical about the colour, a clear blue, touched with green and dense with purple.

  There was a little heap of letters in the hall. Two for Val, one self-addressed. Three for him: a request for a library book, a card acknowledging receipt of an article sent to a learned journal, and a handwritten letter that was unfamiliar.

  Dear Dr Michell,

  I hope you will not have taken our silence for rudeness, or something worse. My husband has been making the inquiries he spoke of. He has consulted his solicitor, the Vicar, and our dear friend Jane Anstey who is a retired Deputy County Librarian. None of these had any very clear advice. Miss Anstey spoke very highly of Dr Bailey’s work and of the archive she looks after. She feels it would be entirely proper to allow Dr Bailey to read our treasure trove and give a preliminary opinion on it—especially as it was she who found it. I am writing to you too, since you were present at the finding, and expressed an interest in Randolph Henry Ash. Would you care to come and examine the papers with Dr Bailey, or if you would find this time-consuming suggest someone to come in your place? I appreciate that this would be more difficult for you, coming from London, than for Dr Bailey, who lives conveniently near Croysant le Wold. I would offer to accommodate you for a few days—though this has its difficulties, since we are as you will remember, confined to the ground floor, and the old house is woefully cold in winter. What do you think? How long do you imagine you will need to take stock of our find? Would a week be sufficient? We have visitors over Christmas but none over the New Year if you would care to make a foray to the Lincolnshire Wolds at that time.

  I am still grateful for your gentlemanly and practical assistance on that field-edge. Let me know how you think it best to proceed.

  Yours sincerely

  Joan Bailey

  Roland felt several things at once. Primary elation—a kind of vision of the bundle of dead letters come to rushing life like some huge warm eagle stirring. Irritation at the primacy Maud Bailey seemed to have assumed in the affair that had begun with the discovery of his purloined letter. Practical, calculating anxiety—how to accept the half-invitation to stay without revealing his own extreme poverty, which might make him appear an inadequately weighty person to be entrusted with the letter-reading. Fear of Val. Fear of Maud Bailey. Anxiety about Cropper and Blackadder and even Beatrice Nest. He wondered exactly why Lady Bailey had thought or suggested that he might want to suggest someone else to read the letters—fun, folly, or an edge of uncertainty about himself? How frien
dly was her gratitude? Did Maud want him there to read the letters?

  Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appeared, followed by impeccably creased matt charcoal pinstriped light woollen legs, followed by the beautifully cut lower hem of a jacket, its black vent revealing a scarlet silk lining, its open front revealing a flat muscular stomach under a finely-striped red and white shirt. Val’s legs followed, in powder-blue stockings and saxe-blue shoes, under the limp hem of a crêpey mustard-coloured dress, printed with blue moony flowers. The four feet advanced and retreated, retreated and advanced, the male feet insisting towards the basement stairs, the female feet resisting, parrying. Roland opened the door and went into the area, fired mostly by what always got him, pure curiosity as to what the top half looked like.