“What’s absorbing you?”
“The light. The fire. Look at that effect of light. Look how the whole cave roof is alight.”
Maud said, “She saw this. I’m sure she saw this. Look at the beginning of Melusina.”
Three elements combined to make the fourth.
The sunlight made a pattern, through the air
(Athwart ash-saplings rooted in the sparse
Handfuls of peat in overhanging clefts)
Of tessellation in the water’s glaze:
And where the water moved and shook itself
Like rippling serpent-scales, the light ran on
Under the liquid in a molten glow
Of seeming links of chain-mail; but above
The water and the light together made
On the grey walls and roof of the dank cave
A show of leaping flames, of creeping spires
Of tongues of light that licked the granite ledge
Cunningly flickered up along each cleft
Each refractory roughness, creeping up
Making, where shadows should have been, long threads
And tapering cones and flame-like forms of white
A fire which heated not, nor singed, nor fed
On things material, but self-renewed
Burnt on the cold stones not to be consumed
And not consuming, made of light and stone
A fountain of cold fire stirred by the force
Of waterfall and rising spring at once
With borrowed liveliness.…
“She came here with him,” said Maud.
“Even this isn’t proof. And if the sun hadn’t struck out when it did I wouldn’t have seen it. But it is proof, to me.”
“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.”
“Sometimes I feel,” said Roland carefully, “that the best state is to be without desire. When I really look at myself—”
“If you have a self—”
“At my life, at the way it is—what I really want is to—to have nothing. An empty clean bed. I have this image of a clean empty bed in a clean empty room, where nothing is asked or to be asked. Some of that is to do with—my personal circumstances. But some of it’s general. I think.”
“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.”
“How funny—how very funny—that we should have come here, for this purpose, and sit here, and discover—that—about each other.”
They walked back in companionable silence, listening to birds and the movement of weather in trees and water. Over dinner that night they combed Melusina for more Yorkshire words. Roland said, “There’s a place on the map called the Boggle Hole. It’s a nice word—I wondered—perhaps we could take a day off from them, get out of their story, go and look at something for ourselves. There’s no Boggle Hole in Cropper or the Ash Letters— Just not to be caught up in anything?”
“Why not? The weather’s improving. It’s hot.”
“It wouldn’t matter. I just want to look at something, with interest, and without layers of meaning. Something new.”
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.
The Boggle Hole is a cove tucked beneath cliffs, where a beck runs down across sand to the sea, from an old mill which is now a youth hostel. They walked down through flowering lanes. The high hedges were thick with dog-roses, mostly a clear pink, sometimes white, with yellow-gold centres dusty with yellow pollen. These roses were intricately and thickly entwined with rampant wild honeysuckle, trailing and weaving creamy flowers among the pink and gold. Neither of them had ever seen or smelled such extravagance of wildflowers in so small a space. The warm air brought the smell of the flowers in great gusts and lingering intense canopies. Both had expected one or two flowers at most, late modern survivors of thickets seen by Shakespeare or painted by Morris. But here was abundance, here was growth, here were banks of gleaming scented life.
There is not exactly a beach, under the cliff. There is a stretch of sand and then shelf after shelf of wet stone and ledges of rock-pools, stretching away to the sea. These ledges are brilliantly coloured: pink stone, silvery sand under water, violent green mossy weed, heavy clumps of rosy-fingered weeds among banks of olive and yellow bladderwrack. The cliffs themselves are grey and flaking. Roland and Maud noticed that the flat stones at their bases were threaded and etched with fossil plumes and tubes. There was a notice: “Please do not damage the cliffs; respect our heritage and preserve it for all of us.” Ammonites and belemnites were on sale in Whitby. A young man with a hammer and a sack was nevertheless busy chipping away at the rock-face, from which coiled and rimmed circular forms protruded everywhere. A peculiarity of that beach is the proliferation of large rounded stones that lie about like the aftermath of a bombardment, cosmic or gigantic. These stones are not uniform in colour or size; they can be shiny black, sulphurous yellow, a kind of old potato blend of greenish waxy, sandy, white or shot with a kind of rosy quartz. Maud and Roland walked along with their heads down, saying to each other, “Look at this, look at this, look at this,” distinguishing stones for a moment, with their attention, then letting these fall back into the mass-pattern, or random distribution, as new ones replaced them.
When they stopped and spread their picnic on a rock, they were able to look out, to take a large view. Roland took off his shoes; his feet were white on the sands like things come up out of blind dark. Maud sat on the rock in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. Her arms were white and gold; white skin, glinting hairs. She poured Perrier water from its green flask, declaring its pure origin, Eau de Source; its bubbles winked in cardboard cups. The tide was out; the sea was far away. The moment had come for a personal conversation. Both felt this; both were mostly willing, but inhibited.
“Will you be sorry to go back?” Maud.
“Will you?”
“This is very good bread.” Then, “I have the impression both of us will be sorry.”
“W
e shall have to decide what—if anything—to tell Blackadder and Cropper.”
“And Leonora. Who will be arriving. I am apprehensive about Leonora. She carries one away in the force of her enthusiasm.”
Roland could not quite imagine Leonora. He knew somehow that she was large and now imagined her suddenly like some classical goddess in draperies, pulling the fastidious Maud along by the hand. Two women, running. Leonora’s writings made him imagine more than that. Two women …
He looked at separate Maud, in her jeans and white shirt under the sun. She still wore a scarf—not the silk turret now, but a crisp cotton one, green and white squares, tied under her hair in the nape of her neck.
“You will have to decide what to say to her.”
“Oh, I have decided. Nothing. Until at least you and I have reached some—end—or decision. It won’t be easy. She is—she is—invasive. An expert in intimacy. She reduces my space. I’m not very good with that sort of thing. As we were saying. In a way.”
“Perhaps Sir George will make a move.”
“Perhaps.”
“I don’t know what will happen to me when I get back. I’ve got no real job, as you know—only bits of sufferance teaching and the piecework on the edition. I depend on Blackadder. Who writes dull references about me, making me sound even duller. I can’t tell him all this, either. But it’s going to make it harder to just go on. And then there’s Val.”
Maud was looking not at him but at an apple, which she was dividing into paper-thin wafers with a sharp knife, each with its half-moon of bright green rind, its paper-white crisp flesh, its shining dark seeds.
“I don’t know about Val.”
“I’ve never talked about her. Better not. I feel I shouldn’t. I’ve lived with her since I went to university. She’s the breadwinner. I suppose I’m here partly on her money. She doesn’t like her work—temping and things—but she does it. I owe her so much.”
“I see.”
“Only it doesn’t work. Not for any good reason. But because of the—because—I have this vision of the white bed—”
Maud put a little fan of apple curves onto a paper plate and handed it to him.
“I know. I had this thing with Fergus. I expect you heard.”
“Yes.”
“I expect he told you. I had a bad time, with Fergus. We tormented each other. I hate that, I hate the noise, the distraction. I remembered something, thinking about what you said—about the sea anemone and the gloves and Leonora on Venus Mount. Yes. I remember Fergus had a long patch of lecturing me on Penisneid. 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 it is you should relax into it. Tell me—why do you always cover your hair?”
He thought for a moment he might have offended her, but she only looked down, and then answered with a kind of academic accuracy.
“It’s to do with Fergus. With Fergus and with its colour. I used to wear it very short—sheared short. It’s the wrong colour, you see, no one believes it’s natural. I once got hissed at a conference, for dyeing it to please men. And then Fergus said, the shaved style was a cop-out, a concession, it made me look like a skull, he said. I should simply have it. So I grew it. But now it’s grown, I put it away.”
“You shouldn’t. You should let it out.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because if anyone can’t see it they think and think about it, they wonder what it’s like, so you attract attention to it. Also because, because …”
“I see.”
He waited. Maud untied the head-square. The segments of the plaits were like streaked and polished oval stones, celandine yellow, straw-yellow, silvery yellow, glossy with constricted life. Roland was moved—not exactly with desire, but with an obscure emotion that was partly pity, for the rigorous constriction all that mass had undergone, to be so structured into repeating patterns. If he closed his eyes and squinted, the head against the sea was crowned with knobby horns.
“Life is so short,” said Roland. “It has a right to breathe.”
And indeed his feeling was for the hair, a kind of captive creature. Maud pulled out a pin or two and the mass slipped, and then hung, still plaited, unbalanced on her neck.
“You are an odd man.”
“I’m not making a pass. You know that. I just wanted to see it let out once. I know you will know I’m telling the truth.”
“Yes, I do. That’s what’s so odd.”
She began slowly to undo, with unweaving fingers, the long, thick braids. Roland watched, intently. There was a final moment when six thick strands, twice three, lay still and formed over her shoulders. And then she put down her head and shook it from side to side, and the heavy hair flew up, and the air got into it. Her long neck bowed, she shook her head faster and faster, and Roland saw the light rush towards it and glitter on it, the whirling mass, and Maud inside it saw a moving sea of gold lines, waving, and closed her eyes and saw scarlet blood.
Roland felt as though something had been loosed in himself, that had been gripping him.
He said, “That feels better.”
Maud pushed aside her hair and looked out at him, a little flushed.
“All right. That feels better.”
15
And is love then more
Than the kick galvanic
Or the thundering roar
Of Ash volcanic
Belched from some crater
Of earth-fire within?
Are we automata
Or Angel-kin?
—R. H. ASH
The man and the woman sat opposite each other in the railway carriage. They had an appearance of quiet decorum; both had books open on their knees, to which they turned when the motion of the carriage permitted. He was indeed leaning lazily back into his corner, with crossed ankles, indicating a state of relaxation. She had her eyes for the most part cast demurely down at her book, though she would occasionally raise a pointed chin and look intently out at the changing countryside. An observer might have speculated for some time as to whether they were travelling together or separately, for their eyes rarely met, and when they did, remained guarded and expressionless. Such an observer might have concluded, after a considerable period of travelling, that the gentleman admired, or felt a considerable interest in, the lady. When she was most determinedly looking at her book, or the flashing fields and vanishing cattle, his eyes would rest on her, speculative or simply curious, it was very hard to tell.
He was a handsome man, with a flowing head of very dark brown hair, almost black but with russet lights in its waves, and a glossy beard, a little browner, the colour of horse-chestnuts. His brow was expansive, the organ of intellect well-developed, though he was equally well endowed with the bumps of compassion and fellow-feeling. He had black brows, a little rough and craggy, under which very large dark eyes looked out at the world steadily enough, fearless but with something held in reserve. The nose was clearcut and the mouth firm and settled—a face, one might think, that kne
w itself and had a decided way of taking in the world. His book was Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which he took in, when he applied himself, with concentrated speed. His clothes were elegant without ostentation. The hypothetical observer might have been unable to decide whether his subject pursued an active or a contemplative life: he looked accustomed to decision, and yet also one who “had thought long and deeply.”
The lady was dressed elegantly if not in the first flight of fashion; she wore a grey-striped muslin dress over which she had cast an Indian shawl with marine-blue and peacock paisleys on a dove-grey ground; she had a small grey silk bonnet, under the brim of which appeared a few white silk rosebuds. She was very fair, pale-skinned, with eyes, not unduly large, of a strange green colour which transmuted itself as the light varied. She was not exactly beautiful—her face was too long for perfection, and not in the first flush of youth, though the bones were well-cut and the mouth an elegant curve, no pouting rosebud. Her teeth were a little large for an exacting taste, but they were strong and white. It was hard to tell whether she was a married lady or a spinster, and hard too, to decide what her circumstances might be. Everything about her was both neat and tastefully chosen, breathing no hint of extravagance, but betraying no signs of poverty or skimping to the curious eye. Her white kid gloves were supple and showed no signs of wear. Her little feet, which appeared from time to time as the carriage movement displaced the large bell of her skirt, were encased in a gleaming pair of laced boots in emerald green leather. If she was aware of her travelling companion’s interest, she showed no sign of it, unless it were that her eyes were studiously averted from his person, and that circumstance might have indicated only a proper modesty.