Possession

  Euan was part of a syndicate, two solicitors, two stockbrokers, who each owned a part of The Reverberator.

  They made their way round to the winner’s enclosure, where the horse stood and quivered under his rug, a bright bay with white stockings, streaked black with sweat, which rose from him in steam and joined the mist. He smelled marvelous, Val thought, he smelled of hay and health and effort which was—loose, which was free, was natural. She breathed his smell and he ruffled his nostrils and tossed his head.

  Euan had talked to the jockey and trainer. He came back to Val with another young man, whom he introduced to her as Toby Byng, one of the partners. Toby Byng was thinner than Euan, with a freckled face and a small amount of curly fair hair, over his ears only. His bald patch was like a pink tonsure. He wore cavalry twill and affected an elegant waistcoat, a flash of dandified peacock under his town-and-country tweed jacket. He had a soft smile, briefly incoherent with pleasure, because of the horse.

  “I’ll buy you dinner,” he said to Euan.

  “No, no, I’ll buy you. Or at least, could we crack a bottle of champagne, now, because I’ve got other plans for tonight.”

  The three of them wandered off, amiably, and bought champagne, and smoked salmon, and lobster salad. Val had not done anything that was simply designed for pleasure, she thought, since she could remember, unless you counted a film, or a pub-evening.

  She looked at her programme.

  “The horses’ names are jokes. White Nights, by Dostoevsky out of Carroll’s Alice.”

  “We are literate,” said Euan. “Whatever your sort might think. Look at The Reverberator. His sire was James the Scot, and his dam was Rock Drill—I think the idea was that drills reverberate and Henry James, the American, wrote a story or something called The Reverberator. A horse’s name has to contain an allusion to the names of both its parents.”

  “They are poems,” said Val, who felt increasingly full of pale gold goodwill and champagne.

  “Val is interested in literature,” said Euan to Toby, having patently tried to think of a way of explaining Val that didn’t include Roland.

  “I’m by way of being a literary solicitor,” said Toby. “Which isn’t my line at all, I don’t mind telling you. I’ve got involved in the most ferocious wrangle about a correspondence between dead poets that someone’s just discovered. The Americans have offered my client huge sums for the manuscripts. But the English have got onto it, and are trying to have the whole lot declared of national importance, and stop the export. They seem to hate each other. I’ve had them both in the office. The Englishman says it will change the face of international scholarship. They only get to see specimen letters one at a time—my client’s a cranky old sod, he’s not letting the whole collection out of his hands.… And now the Press have got onto it. I’ve had TV journalists and gossip columnists phoning in. The English professor’s gone to see the Minister for the Arts.”

  “Love-letters?” said Euan.

  “Oh yes. Complicated love-letters. They wrote a lot, in those days.”

  “Which poets?” said Val.

  “Randolph Henry Ash, whom we did at school, and I never made head nor tail of, and a woman I’d never heard of. Christabel LaMotte.”

  “In Lincolnshire,” said Val.

  “Oh yes. I live in Lincoln. You know about it?”

  “Dr Maud Bailey?”

  “Ah yes. They all want to see her. But she’s disappeared. On holiday, no doubt. It’s the summer vacation. Scholars do go away. She found them—”

  “I used to live with an Ash scholar,” said Val, and stopped, wholly disconcerted by her own automatic past tense.

  Euan put his hand over hers, and poured more champagne.

  He said, “If they are letters, there must be a complicated question of ownership and copyright.”

  “Professor Blackadder has called in Lord Ash. He seems to own the copyrights on most of the Ash papers. But the American—Professor Cropper—has got the manuscripts of almost all the letters in his library—and he’s the editor of the big edition of letters—so his claim makes sense. The Baileys seem to own the manuscripts themselves. Maud Bailey seems to have found them. Christabel was an old spinster who died in the room where the letters were found—hidden away in a doll’s cot or something—Our client is very sore that he wasn’t told—by Maud B—what they were worth—”

  “Perhaps she didn’t know.”

  “Perhaps. They’d be quite glad, all of them, if she came back.”

  “I shouldn’t think she will,” said Val, looking at Euan. “I should think she’s got reasons for staying away.”

  “All sorts of reasons,” said Euan.

  Val had never ascribed Roland’s sudden disappearance to anything other than a desire to be with Maud Bailey. She had, in a moment of rage, telephoned Maud’s flat, only to be told by a rich American voice that Maud was away. When asked where, the voice said with a mixture of amusement and rancour, “I am not privileged to know that.” Val had complained to Euan, who had said, “But you didn’t want him, did you, it was over?” Val had cried, “How do you know that?” and Euan had said, “Because I’ve been watching you and assessing the evidence for weeks now, it’s my job.”

  So here she was, staying with Euan, in the house by the stables. In the cool of the evening they walked round the yard, so well swept, so orderly, with the large-eyed long heads peering out over the stable doors, and inclining gracefully to accept apples, with wrinkling soft lips and huge, inoffensive, vegetarian teeth. The low brick house was covered with climbing roses and wistaria. It was the sort of house where breakfast was kidneys, bacon, mushrooms, or kedgeree in silver dishes. The bedroom was designed, and full of cream and rose-coloured chintz, frothing around solid old furniture. Val and Euan made love in a kind of cavern of rosy light, and looked out of the open window onto the dark shadows and subdued night-scent of real roses.

  Val looked down at the naked length of Euan MacIntyre. He was like his horse in reverse. All the central part of his body was pale—ranging from buff to very white. But his extremities were brown, as The Reverberator’s were white. And he had the same face. Val laughed.

  “ ‘O love, be fed with apples while you may,’ ” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a poem. It’s Robert Graves. I love Robert Graves. He stirs me up.”

  “Go on, then.” He made her say it twice, and then recited it himself:

  “Walk between dark and dark—a shining space

  With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.”

  “I like that,” said Euan MacIntyre.

  “I didn’t think—”

  “You didn’t think yuppies liked poetry. Don’t be vulgar and simplistic, dear Val.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know—more to the point—why you like me.”

  “We work together, don’t we? In bed?”

  “Oh yes—”

  “One knows that sort of thing. And I wanted to see you smile. You were torturing a lovely face into an expression of permanent disappointment, and soon it would have been too late.”

  “An act of charity.” Half in the Putney Val’s voice.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  But he had always loved mending things. Broken models, stray kittens, grounded kites.

  “Look, Euan, I’m no good at being happy, I shall mess you up.”

  “That depends on me. On me too, that is. ‘O love, be fed with apples while you may.’ ”

  23

  The irruption, or interruption, occurred at the Baie des Trépassés. It was one of Brittany’s smiling days. They stood amongst the sand-dunes and watched the wide waves crawling in quietly from the Atlantic. The sea wove amber-sandy lights in its grey-green. The air was milk-warm, and smelled of salt, and warm sand, and distant sharp leaves, heather or juniper or pine.

  “Would it be so magical, or sinister, without its name?” Maud asked. “It looks bland and sunny.”

  “If you
knew about the currents you might find it dangerous. If you were a sailor.”

  “It says in the Guide Vert that its name comes from a corruption of “boe an aon” (baie du ruisseau) into “boe an anaon” (baie des âmes en peine). It says that the City of Is was traditionally in those marshes at the river-mouth. Trépassés, trespassed, passed, past. Names accrue meaning. We came because of the name.”

  Roland touched her hand, which took hold of his.

  They were standing in a fold of the dunes. They heard, from beyond the next sandhill, a loud transatlantic cry, rich and strange: “And that must be the Ile de Sein, right out there, I’ve always dreamed of seeing that place, where the nine terrible virgins lived who were called Seines or Sénas or Sènes after the island, which is Sein, which is a fantastically suggestive and polysemous word, suggesting the divinity of the female body, for the French use sein you know to mean both breasts and womb, the female sexual organs, and from that it has also come to mean a fishing-net which holds fish and a bellying sail which holds wind, these women could control tempests, and attract sailors into their nets like the sirens, and they built this funeral temple for the dead druids—a dolmen I suppose it was, another female form, and whilst they constructed it there were all sorts of taboos about not touching the earth, not letting the stones fall to the earth, for it was feared the sun or the earth would pollute them or be polluted by them, just like the mistletoe, which can only be gathered without touching the earth. It has often been thought that Dahud Queen of Is was the child of one of these sorceresses, and when she became Queen of the Drowned City she became Marie-Morgane, a kind of siren or mermaid who drew men to their death, and it is thought she was a relic of a matriarchy as the Sènes were, in their floating island. Have you read Christabel’s Drowned City?”

  “No,” said a male voice. “It is an omission I must rectify.”

  “Leonora,” said Maud.

  “And Blackadder,” said Roland.

  The two could be seen advancing towards the sea. Leonora’s hair was loose, and, as she came out of the shelter of the dunes, was lifted in dark snaking ringlets, by the small sea-wind. She wore a Greek sun-dress in very fine cotton, a swirl of tiny pleats, scarlet patterned with silver moons, held by a wide silver band of cloth above her ample breasts, exposing shoulders dark gold with the glare of no English sun. Her large and shapely feet were naked, and her toe-nails painted alternately scarlet and silver. As she advanced, the wind fluttered the pleats. She held up her arms, with a musical chime of catching bracelets. Behind her came James Blackadder, in heavy shoes and a dark parka over dark creased trousers.

  “Over there must be Nantucket, and the soft green breast of the New World.”

  “Fitzgerald can hardly have been talking about druidesses.”

  “But he made the Earthly Paradise a woman.”

  “A disappointing one.”

  “Of course.”

  Maud said, “They must have got together and worked out where we were.”

  Roland said, “If they got here, they must have seen Ariane.”

  Maud said, “And read the journal. If Leonora wanted to find Ariane, she would have. And I take it Blackadder reads French.”

  “They must be pretty mad with us. Tricking them, taking advantage, they’re bound to think.”

  “Do you think we should go and confront them? Or be confronted?”

  “Do you?”

  Maud put out both her hands and he took them.

  She said, “I think we should, and I think we can’t. I think we must go. Quickly.”

  “Where?”

  “Back, probably.”

  “Unenchanted?” said Roland.

  “Are we enchanted? I suppose we must start thinking again, sometime.”

  “Not yet,” he said quickly.

  “No, not yet.”

  They drove silently back to their hotel. Turning out of its car park, as they came in, was a large black Mercedes. Because its windows were darkened, Maud could not see, as it passed by, whether Cropper had observed her at the wheel, or not. In any case, the Mercedes did not slacken its speed, but vanished, in the direction they had come from.

  The hotel proprietress said, “An American gentleman has been asking if you were here. He says he will dine here this evening.”

  “We’ve done nothing wrong,” said Roland, in English.

  “No one said we had. He wants to buy what we know, or find out if we know any more. He wants the letters. He wants to have the story—”

  “I don’t think we can stop him.”

  “We can not help him, can’t we? If we leave, now this minute. Do you think he saw Ariane?”

  “He might be following Leonora. And Blackadder.”

  “They can fight it out. They can find out the end of the story. I feel it’s bad, I feel I—at the moment I feel I—don’t want to know. Later, perhaps.”

  “We can go home, now. Pack our bags and go home.”

  “We must.”

  They had been in Brittany three weeks. They had supposed, when they made their precipitate flight, that they would spend such time as they stole, decorously in the university library at Nantes. Instead, they found themselves, owing to the closure of the library and the absence of Ariane Le Minier, on holiday, on holiday together, and for the second time that summer. They had separate rooms—with the requisite white beds—but there was no doubt that there was a marital or honeymooning aspect to their lingering. Both of them were profoundly confused and very ambivalent about this. Someone like Fergus Wolff would have known how to take advantage of this state of affairs, and would have assumed that it was natural for, indeed incumbent upon, him to take advantage. But Maud would not again willingly have gone anywhere with Fergus. And she had more than willingly set out with Roland. They had run away together, and were sharply aware of the usual connotations of this act. They spoke peacefully, and with a kind of parody of ancient married agreement of “we” or “us.” “Shall we go to Pont-Aven?” one would placidly ask, and the other would answer, “We might try to see the crucifix that was the original of Gauguin’s Christ Jaune.” They did not, however, discuss this use of the pronoun, although both thought about it.

  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. “Falling in love,” characteristically, combs the appearances of the world, and of the particular lover’s history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. Roland was troubled by the idea that the opposite might be true. Finding themselves in a plot, they might suppose it appropriate to behave as though it was that sort of plot. And that would be to compromise some kind of integrity they had set out with.

  So they continued to discuss, almost exclusively, the problems of those dead. They sat over buckwheat pancakes in Pont-Aven, and drank cider from cool earthenware pitchers and asked the difficult questions.

  What became of the child?

  How or why, in what state of ignorance or knowledge, had Blanche been abandoned? How had Ash and LaMotte parted? Did Ash know of the possible child?

  The letter returning the letters to Christabel was unda
ted. When had that been sent? Had there been more contact? A long affair, an immediate rupture?

  Maud was muted and saddened by the poems Ariane had enclosed. She interpreted the second to mean that the child had been born dead, and the “spilt milk” poem to be an evidence of a terrible guilt, on Christabel’s part, at the fate, whatever it was, of the infant.

  “Milk hurts,” Maud said. “A woman with milk who can’t feed a child, is in pain.”

  In terms of Christabel, she too discussed the parodying of plots.

  “She wrote a lot about Goethe’s Faust round about then. It’s a regular motif, the innocent infanticide, in European literature at that time. Gretchen, Hetty Sorrel, Wordsworth’s Martha in ‘The Thorn.’ Despairing women with dead babies.”

  “We don’t know it was dead.”

  “I can’t help thinking, if it was not destined to die, why did she run away? She had gone there for sanctuary. Why didn’t she stay where she was safe?”

  “She meant no one to know what happened.”

  “There’s an ancient taboo on seeing childbirth. Early versions of the Melusina myth have childbirth instead of the bath.”

  “Repeating patterns. Again.”

  They discussed also the future of the project, that is, of the research, without knowing where to go next. Back to Nantes was an obvious step, and they condoned their lingering on this ground. Maud said Christabel had stayed with friends in London in the early 1860s—she was unaware of the connection with the Vestal Lights. Roland remembered a glancing reference to the Pointe du Raz in Ash—“tristis usque ad mortem,” Ash had said it was—but that was no guarantee he had come there.

  Beyond the future of the project, Roland was worried about his own future. He would have been in a panic if he had allowed himself to think, but the dreamy days, the pearly light alternating with the hot blue, and something else, made it possible to leave thinking in abeyance. Things did not look good. He had simply walked out on Blackadder. He had done the same to Val, who was, he considered, unforgiving and dependent in equal proportion—he would have to go back to be berated, and then how could he leave, where would he go, how should he live?