Is silver water, woven with red.
For their excessive wickedness
In days of old, was this distress
Come on them, of transparency
And openness to every eye.
But still they’re proud, their haughty brows
Circled with gold.…
Deep in the silence of drowned Is
Beneath the wavering precipice
The church-spire in the thickened green
Points to the trembling surface sheen
From which descends a glossy cone
A mirror-spire that mocks its own.
Between these two the mackerel sails
As did the swallow in the vales
Of summer air, and he too sees
His mirrored self amongst the trees
That hang to meet themselves, for here
All things are doubled, and the clear
Thick element is doubled too
Finite and limited the view
As though the world of roofs and rocks
Were stored inside a glassy box.
And damned and drowned transparent things
Hold silent commerce.…
This drowned world lies beneath a skin
Of moving water, as within
The glassy surface of their frown
The ladies’ grieving passions drown
And can be seen to ebb and flow
In crimson as the currents go
Amongst the bladderwrack and stones
Amongst the delicate white bones.
And so they worked on, against the clock, cold and excited, until Lady Bailey came to offer them supper.
When Maud drove home that first evening, the weather was already changing for the worse. Clouds were darkly gathering; she could see through the trees a full moon, which, because of some trick of the thickening air, seemed both far away and somehow condensed, an object round and small and dull. She drove through the park, much of which had been planted by that earlier Sir George who had married Christabel’s sister Sophie, and had had a passion for trees, trees from all parts of the distant earth, Persian plum, Turkey oak, Himalayan pine, Caucasian walnut and the Judas tree. He had had his generation’s expansive sense of time—he had inherited hundred-year-old oaks and beeches and had planted spreads of woodland, rides and coppices he would never see. Huge rugged trunks came silently past the little green car in the encroaching dark, rearing themselves suddenly monstrous in the changing white beam of the headlight. There was a kind of cracking of cold in the words all round, a tightening of texture, a clamping together that Maud had experienced in her own warm limbs as she went out into the courtyard and cold ran into her constricted throat and pulled tight something she thought of poetically as the heartstrings.
Down these rides Christabel had come, wilful and perhaps spiritually driven, urging her little pony-cart on to the ritualist eucharist of the Reverend Mossman. 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. The mental pony-cart bowled along, with its veiled passenger. The trees went up, solid. A kind of elemental clanging accompanied the disappearance of each into the dark. They were old, they were grey and green and stiff. Women, not trees, were Maud’s true pastoral concern. Her idea of these primeval creatures included her generation’s sense of their imminent withering and dying, under the drip of acid rain, or in the invisible polluted gusts of the wind. She was visited by a sudden vision of them dancing, golden-green, in a bright spring a hundred years ago, flexible saplings, tossed and resilient. This thickened forest, her own humming metal car, her prying curiosity about whatever had been Christabel’s life, seemed suddenly to be the ghostly things, feeding on, living through, the young vitality of the past. Between the trees the ground was black with the shining, sagging wet rounds of dead leaves; in front of her, the same black leaves spread like stains on the humping surface of the tarmac. A creature ran out into her path; its eyes were half-spheres filled with dull red fire, refracted, sparkling and then gone. She swerved, and nearly hit a thick oak stump. Ambiguous wet drops or flakes—which?—materialised briefly on the windscreen. Maud was inside, and the outside was alive and separate.
Her flat, with its unambiguous bright cleanliness, seemed unusually welcoming, apart from the presence of two letters, caught in the lips of the letterbox. She tugged these free, and went round, closing curtains, putting on many lights. The letters too were threatening. One was blue and one was the kind of tradesman’s brown with which all universities have replaced their milled white crested missives in the new austerity. The blue one was from Leonora Stern. The other said it was from Prince Albert College; she would have supposed it was from Roland, but he was here. She had been not very polite to him. Even bossy. The whole business had put her on edge. Why could she do nothing with ease and grace except work alone, inside these walls and curtains, her bright safe box? Christabel, defending Christabel, redefined and alarmed Maud.
Here is a Riddle, Sir, an old Riddle, an easy Riddle—hardly worth your thinking about—a fragile Riddle, in white and Gold with life in the middle of it. There is a gold, soft cushion, whose gloss you may only paradoxically imagine with your eyes closed tight—see it feelingly, let it slip through your mind’s fingers. And this gold cushion is enclosed in its own crystalline casket, a casket translucent and endless in its circularity, for there are no sharp corners to it, no protrusions, only a milky moonstone clarity that deceives. And these are wrapped in silk, fine as thistledown, tough as steel, and the silk lies inside Alabaster, which you may think of as a funerary Urn—only with no inscription, for there are as yet no Ashes—and no pediment, and no nodding poppies engraved, nor yet no lid you may lift to peep in, for all is sealed and smooth. There may come a day when you may lift the lid with impunity—or rather, when it may be lifted from within—for that way, life may come—whereas your way—you will discover—only Congealing and Mortality.
An Egg, Sir, is the answer, as you perspicuously read from the beginning, an Egg, a perfect O, a living Stone, doorless and windowless, whose life may slumber on till she be Waked—or find she has Wings to spread—which is not so here—oh no—
An Egg is my answer. What is the Riddle?
I am my own riddle. Oh, Sir, you must not kindly seek to ameliorate or steal away my solitude. It is a thing we women are taught to dread—oh the terrible tower, oh the thickets round it—no companionable Nest—but a donjon.
But they have lied to us you know, in this, as in so much else. The Donjon may frown and threaten—but it keeps us very safe—within its confines we are free in a way you, who have freedom to range the world, do not need to imagine. I do not advise imagining it—but do me the justice of believing—not imputing mendacious protestation—my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage—
Shattering an Egg is unworthy of you, no Pass time for men. Think what you would have in your hand if you put forth your Giant strength and crushed the solid stone. Something slippery and cold and unthinkably disagreeable.
Maud felt reluctant to open Leonora’s letter, which had an imperious and accusing air. So she opened instead the brown one and saw it was worse, it was from Fergus Wolff, with whom she had had no communication for over a year. Certain handwriting can turn the stomach, after one, after five, after twenty-five years. Fergus’s was, like much male writing, cramped, but with characteristic little flourishes. Maud’s stomach turned, the vision of the tormented bed rose again in her mind’s eye. She put a hand to her hair.
Dear Maud, never forgotten, as I hope I’m not either, quite. How are things in damp old Lincolnshire? Do the fens make you melancholy? How is Christabel? Would you be pleased to hear I have decided to give a paper on Christabel at the York conference on metaphor? I thought I’d lecture on
The Queen of the Castle: Wha
t is kept in the Keep?
How does that strike you? Do I have your imprimatur? Might I even hope to be able to consult your archive?
I should deal with contrasting and conflicting metaphors for the fairy Melusine’s castle-building activities. There’s a very good piece by Jacques Le Goff on “Melusine Défricheuse”; according to the new historians she’s a kind of earth spirit or local goddess of foison or minor Ceres. But then you could adopt a Lacanian model of the image of the keep—Lacan says, “the formation of the ego is symbolised in dreams by a fortress or stadium [any stadiums in Christabel?]—surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips—dividing it into two opposite fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form symbolises the id in a quite startling way.” I could complicate this with a few more real and imaginary castles—and a loving and respectful reference to your own seminal work on the limen and the liminal. What do you think? Will it wash? Will I be torn by Maenads?
I was inspired to write partly by the excitement of this project, partly because my spies tell me that you and Roland Michell (a dull but honourable contemporary of mine) have been discovering something or other together. My chief spy—a young woman who is not best pleased by the turn of events—tells me you are spending the New Year together, investigating connections. I am naturally consumed by curiosity. Perhaps I will come and consult your archive. I do wonder what you make of young Michell. Don’t eat him, dear Maud. He isn’t in your class. Academically, that is, he isn’t, as you may have discovered by now.
Whereas you and I could have had the most delectable talk about towers above and under water, serpent tails and flying fish. Did you read Lacan on flying fish and vesicle persecution? I miss you from time to time, you know. You weren’t wholly nice or fair to me. Nor I to you, you will say—but when are we ever? You are so severe with male shortcomings.
Please give me the go-ahead on my siege-paper.
Much love as always
Fergus
Dear Maud,
I find it odd that I haven’t heard from you for maybe two months now—I trust all is well with you, and that your silence indicates only that your work is going well and absorbing all your attention. I worry about you when you are silent—I know you haven’t been happy—I think of you with great love as you progress—
When I last wrote I mentioned I might write something on water and milk and amniotic flud in Melusina—why is water always seen as the female?—we’ve discussed this—I want to write a big piece on the undines and nixies and melusinas—women perceived as dangerous—what do you think? I could extend it to the Drowned City—With special reference to non-genital imagery for female sexuality—we need to get away from the cunt as well as from the phallus—the drowned women in the city might represent the totality of the female body as an erogenous zone if the circumambient fluid were seen as an undifferentiated eroticism, and this might be possible to connect to the erotic totality of the woman/dragon stirring the waters of the large marble bath, or submerging her person in it as LaM. tellingly describes her. What do you think, Maud?
Would you be prepared to give a paper at the Australian meeting of the Sapphic society in 1988? I had in mind that we would devote that session entirely to the study of the female erotic in nineteenth-century poetry and the strategies and subterfuges through which it had to present or dis-cover itself. You might have extended your thinking about liminality and the dissolution of boundaries. Or you might wish to be more rigorous in your exploration of LaMotte’s lesbian sexuality as the empowering force behind her work. (I accept that her inhibitions made her characteristically devious and secretive—but you do not give her sufficient credit for the strength with which she does nevertheless obliquely speak out.)
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.
It would do you good to come out here and experience the hectic storm and stress of American Women’s Studies. I could find you a post as soon as you wanted it, no problem. Think about it.
In the interim, go and leave my love at Her grave—use the shears if you’ve time, or inclination—it made my blood boil to see how she was neglected. Put some more flowers down in my name—for the grass to drink—I found her resting-place unbearably moving. I wish I thought she could have foreseen she was to be loved as she should be loved—
And I send you all my love—and wait for an answer this time
Your
Leonora
This letter posed and shelved a moral problem: when and how much was it wise or honourable to tell Leonora about the discovery? She would not particularly like it. She did not like R. H. Ash. Still less would she like being put in the position of not having known about it, if she continued to write confident papers on Christabel’s sexuality. She would feel betrayed and sisterhood would be betrayed.
As for Fergus. As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him. She was annoyed at his proposal for a siege-paper, without knowing how much it was manufactured ad hoc to annoy her. She was also annoyed by his arcane reference to Lacan and flying fish and vesicle persecution. She decided to track this down—method was her defence against anxiety—and duly found it.
I remember the dream of one of my patients, whose aggressive drives took the form of obsessive phantasies; in the dream he saw himself driving a car, accompanied by a woman with whom he was having a rather difficult affair, pursued by a flying fish, whose skin was so transparent that one could see the horizontal liquid level through the body, an image of vesicle persecution of great anatomical clarity.…
The tormented bed rose again in her mind’s eye, like old whipped eggs, like dirty snow.
Fergus Wolff appeared to be slightly jealous of Roland Michell. It was clever, if obvious, to describe him to Maud as “not in your class.” Even if she noticed the transparency of this device, the label would stick. And she knew Roland was not in her class. She should have been less ungracious. He was a gentle and unthreatening being. Meek, she thought drowsily, turning out the light. Meek.
The next day, when she drove out towards Seal Court, the wolds were blanched with snow. It was not snowing, though the sky was heavy with it, an even pewter, weighing on the airy white hills that rolled up to meet it, so that the world seemed reversed here too, dark water above circling cloud. Sir George’s trees were all fantastically hung with ice and furbelows. She parked just outside the stable yard on an impulse and decided to walk to the winter garden, built for Sophie Bailey and much loved by Christabel LaMotte. She would see it as it had been meant to be seen, and store the memory to be shared with Leonora. She trod crunchingly around the kitchen-garden wall and up a yew alley, festooned with snow, to where the overlapping, thick evergreens—holly, rhododendron, bay—enclosed a kind of trefoil-shaped space at the heart of which was the pool where Christabel had seen the frozen gold and silver fish, put there to provide flashes of colour in the gloom—the darting genii of the place, Christabel had said. There was a stone seat, with its rounded snow-cushion which she did not disturb. The quiet was absolute. It was beginning to snow again. Maud bowed her head with the self-consciousness of such a gesture, and thought of Christabel, standing here, looking at this frozen surface, darkly glowing under blown traces of snow.
And in the pool two fishes play
Argent and gules they shine alway
Against the green against the grey
They flash upon a summer’s day
And in the depth of wintr
y night
They slumber open-eyed and bright
Silver and red, a shadowed light
Ice-veiled and steadily upright
A paradox of chilly fire
Of life in death, of quenched desire
That has no force, e’en to respire
Suspended until frost retire—
Were there fish? Maud crouched on the rim of the pool, her briefcase standing in snow beside her, and scraped with an elegant gloved hand at the snow on the ice. The ice was ridged and bubbly and impure. Whatever was beneath it could not be seen. She moved her hand in little circles, polishing, and saw, ghostly and pale in the metal-dark surface a woman’s face, her own, barred like the moon under mackerel clouds, wavering up at her. Were there fish? She leaned forward. A figure loomed black on the white, a hand touched her arm with a huge banging, an unexpected electric shock. It was meek Roland. Maud screamed. And screamed a second time, and scrambled to her feet, furious.
They glared at each other.
“I’m sorry—”
“I’m sorry—”
“I thought you were overbalancing—”
“I didn’t know anyone was there.”
“I shocked you.”
“I embarrassed you—”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“I followed your footsteps.”
“I came to look at the winter garden.”
“Lady Bailey was worried you might have had an accident.”
“The snow wasn’t that deep.”
“It’s still snowing.”
“Shall we go in?”
“I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Are there fish?”
“All you can see is imperfections and reflections.”
The work time that followed was a taciturn time. They bent their heads diligently—what they read will be discovered later—and looked up at each other almost sullenly. Snow fell. And fell. The white lawn rose to meet the library window. Lady Bailey came with coffee, silently rolling, into a room still with cold and full of a kind of grey clarity.