Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture that mistrusted love, “in love,” romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed.
One night they fell asleep, side by side, on Maud’s bed, where they had been sharing a glass of Calvados. He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
They did not speak of this, but silently negotiated another such night. It was important to both of them that the touching should not proceed to any kind of fierceness or deliberate embrace. They felt that in some way this stately peacefulness of unacknowledged contact gave back their sense of their separate lives inside their separate skins. Speech, the kind of speech they knew, would have undone it. On days when the sea-mist closed them in a sudden milk-white cocoon with no perspectives they lay lazily together all day behind heavy white lace curtains on the white bed, not stirring, not speaking.
Neither was quite sure how much, or what, all this meant to the other.
Neither dared ask.
Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his “self” as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion. Nor did he desire to know who Maud essentially was. But he wondered, much of the time, what their mute pleasure in each other might lead to, anything or nothing, would it just go, as it had just come, or would it change, could it change?
He thought of the Princess on her glass hill, of Maud’s faintly contemptuous look at their first meeting. In the real world—that was, for one should not privilege one world above another, in the social world to which they must both return from these white nights and sunny days—there was little real connection between them. Maud was a beautiful woman such as he had no claim to possess. She had a secure job and an international reputation. Moreover, in some dark and outdated English social system of class, which he did not believe in, but felt obscurely working and gripping him, Maud was County, and he was urban lower-middle-class, in some places more, in some places less acceptable than Maud, but in almost all incompatible.
All that was the plot of a Romance. He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously; a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him, as the expectations of Romance control almost everyone in the Western world, for better or worse, at some point or another.
He supposed the Romance must give way to social realism, even if the aesthetic temper of the time was against it.
In any case, since Blackadder and Leonora and Cropper had come, it had changed from Quest, a good romantic form, into Chase and Race, two other equally valid ones.
During his stay he had become addicted to a pale, chilled, slightly sweet pudding called Îles Flottantes, which consisted of a white island of foam floating in a creamy yellow pool of vanilla custard, haunted by the ghost, no more, of sweetness. As he and Maud packed hurriedly, and turned the car towards the Channel, he thought how much he would regret this, how the taste would fade and diminish in his memory.
Blackadder saw the Mercedes when he and Leonora came back to the hotel in the evening. He was feeling strained. Ariane had indeed given Leonora a photocopy of Sabine’s journal, which he had attempted to translate for her, with a fair degree of success. He had been pulled along, initially, by the sheer force of her presence, and her insistence that Roland and Maud had snuck off together to steal a scholarly march on both of them. He had suggested, when they were possessed of the journal, that they should come home and order a good translation and pursue their investigations. Leonora, who had asked Ariane a lot of questions about Roland and Maud, was concerned that they were “on to something” and should be tracked across Finistère. If the weather had been bad Blackadder might yet have insisted on returning to his burrow, the tools of his trade, his typewriter, his telephone. But the temptress sun shone, and he ate a couple of good meals and said that now he was here, he would come to look at Kernemet and its surroundings.
Leonora drove. Her driving had panache and swoop, but was not comfortable. He sat beside her, wondering how he had got talked into all this. Her perfume filled the car, which was a hired Renault. It was a perfume of musk and sandalwood and something sharp that affected Blackadder in contradictory ways. He believed he found it suffocating. Underneath he sensed something else, a promise of darkness, thickness, flesh. He looked down once or twice at Leonora’s naked expanse of shoulders and bound breasts. Her skin, close up, had very fine wrinkles all over its dark gold, wrinkles not of old age but of a mixture of earlier softening and sun-toughening. He found these moving.
“I don’t understand Maud,” Leonora was saying. “I can’t figure out why she dashed off without a word to me, since that letter was mine after all, if property comes into it, which between friends I didn’t think it did, and we were friends, we’d pooled our ideas and written joint papers, all those things. Perhaps your Roland Michell is some kind of macho boss-man. It doesn’t figure.”
“He’s not. He’s not forceful. It’s his major failing.”
“It must be love.”
“That doesn’t explain Ariane Le Minier.”
“It sure doesn’t. What a turn-up. Not only a lesbian but a Fallen Woman and Unmarried Mother. Every archetype. I guess this is the hotel. Where they seemed to be staying. Maybe they’re back now.”
She began to turn into the hotel car park, only to find her way blocked by the Mercedes, which appeared to be backing awkwardly across the gateposts.
“Fuck off,” said Leonora. “Fuck off, asshole.”
“Oh dear,” said Blackadder. “That’s Cropper.”
“Well, he’ll have to fuck off. He’s obstructing the gateway,” said Leonora magisterially, honking several times with great vigour. The Mercedes went backwards and forwards, part of a series of precise adjustments designed to insert it into a parking-space that would just, but barely, contain it. Leonora rolled down the window and cried out, “Listen, you bastard. I don’t have all night. I’ll be through in a second. Just hold off, can you?”
The Mercedes advanced and retreated.
Leonora advanced into the gateway.
The Mercedes pulled across it.
“For Chrissake, clear the entrance, you prick,” shouted Leonora.
The Mercedes retreated a little, slanting itself further.
Leonora put her foot firmly on the accelerator. Blackadder heard a reverberating clang and felt a jar along his spine. Leonora swore again and put the Renault into reverse. There was a sound and a sensation of tearing metal. The bumpers were locked and the two cars, like two bulls with crumpled horns, locked together. Leonora continued to reverse. Blackadder said nervously, “No, stop.” The sound of the Mercedes’ angry purr ceased abruptly. The dark window rolled down and Cropper put out his head. He said, “Arrêtez s’il vous plaît. Nous nous abîmons. Veuillez croire que je n’ai jamais rencontré de pires façons sur les routes françaises. Une telle manque de politesse—”
Leonora swung open her door and shot out a nak
ed leg.
“We speak good American,” she said. “You arrogant pig. I remember you from Lincoln. You nearly killed me in Lincoln.”
“Hello, Mort,” said Blackadder.
“Ah,” said Cropper. “James. You have damaged my car.”
“I damaged it,” said Leonora. “Owing to your bad manners and lack of signals.”
“This is Professor Stern, Mortimer,” said Blackadder. “From Tallahassee. The editor of Christabel LaMotte.”
“In search of Bailey and Michell.”
“Exactly.”
“They’ve checked out. Three hours back. No one knows what they did here. Or where they went.”
Blackadder said, “If you put your back to your bumper, Mortimer, and I sit on ours, we might disengage them by joggling and swaying.”
“It will never be the same,” said Cropper.
“Are you staying here?” said Leonora. “We could discuss it over a drink. I don’t know what the insurance on this car hire runs to.”
It was not a pleasant dinner. Cropper was more put out than Blackadder had seen him, by the damage to his car, or by the flight of Roland and Maud, or by the presence of Leonora. He ordered lavishly, a huge platter of fruits de mer to start with, a mound of shells and whiskers and stony carapaces, surrounded by seaweed on a metal pedestal, followed by a huge boiled sea-spider or araignée, a hot angry scarlet, crusted with bumps and armoured crestings, waving a multiplication of feelers. He was provided with an armoury of implements for this feast, like a mediaeval torture chamber, pincers and grippers, prods and corkscrew skewers.
Blackadder ate hake abstemiously. Leonora ate lobster and talked about Kernemet.
“So sad, only the foundations and the orchard wall, nothing left. The menhir’s still there but the house is quite gone. Do you know what happened to LaMotte after she came here, Professor Cropper?”
“No. There are some letters in America in my possession, which describe her whereabouts in 1861. But about the time you speak of, the end of 1860, no. But I shall find out.”
He wielded a claw-cracker and a serpent-tongued pick. The heap of debris on his plate was higher than the original creatures had been, every sweet white morsel extracted.
“I intend to have those letters if I can,” he said. “And I intend to find out the rest.”
“The rest?”
“What became of their child. What they concealed from us. I intend to know.”
“It may lie concealed forever in the grave,” said Blackadder, raising his glass to the fierce and melancholy face across the table. “May I propose a toast? Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. May they rest in peace.”
Cropper raised his glass.
“I’ll drink to that. But I shall find out.”
They parted at the foot of the stairs. Cropper bowed to Blackadder and Leonora and took himself off. Leonora put a hand on Blackadder’s arm.
“He’s kinda scarey, so intense, he takes it all personally. As though they did it to deceive him. Personally.”
“So they probably did. Among others. Shakespeare foresaw him, writing that curse.”
“I’m glad I scraped his great hearse. Do you want to come up with me? I feel all sad, we could comfort each other. It makes me sentimental, the sea and the sun.”
“It’s nice of you, but no thank you. I’m touched and grateful and glad you brought me here—I shall probably regret it forever—but better not. I’m not—” he wanted to say “up to it” or “in your class” or simply “strong enough,” but all those sounded vaguely insulting.
“Not to worry. Pity to complicate a good working relationship, hunh?”
She kissed him good night, with considerable force, and strode away.
The next day, they were driving quietly along a side road, having decided to make a small detour and take in the chapel with Gauguin’s wooden Christ, when they heard behind them a strange and fearsome sound. It combined a cough with a regular rhythmic thump followed by a scraping wheeze. It was like a beast in pain, or a creaking cart with an uneven wheel. It was the Mercedes with a crushed mudguard and an obviously damaged fan-belt, which overtook them, grinding, at the next junction. Its driver was again invisible, its wound painfully prominent.
“Horrid,” said Leonora. “Sinister.”
“Cropper is the Ankou,” said Blackadder, with sudden wit.
“Of course he is,” said Leonora. “We should have known that.”
“He won’t catch Bailey and Michell at that rate.”
“Nor shall we.”
“There isn’t much point to catching them, I suppose, really. We could have a picnic.”
“Let’s do that.”
24
Maud sat at her desk in Lincoln and copied out a useful passage of Freud for her paper on metaphor:
It is only when a person is completely in love that the main quota of libido is transferred on to the object and the object to some extent takes the place of the ego.
She wrote: “Of course ego, id and super-ego, indeed the libido itself, are metaphorical hypostasisations of what must be seen as”
She crossed out “seen” and wrote “could be felt as.”
Both were metaphors. She wrote: “could be explained as events in an undifferentiated body of experience.”
Body was a metaphor. She had written “experience” twice, which was ugly. “Event” was possibly a metaphor, too.
She was wholly aware of Roland, sitting behind her on the floor, wearing a white towelling dressing-gown, leaning up against the white sofa on which he had slept during his first visit, and on which he slept now. She felt the fuzz of his soft black hair, starting up above his brow, with imaginary fingers. She felt his frown between her eyes. He felt his occupation was gone; she felt his feeling. He felt he was lurking.
If he went out of the room it would be grey and empty.
If he did not go out of it, how could she concentrate?
It was October. Her term had begun. He had not gone back to Blackadder. He had not gone back to his own flat, except once, after repeated telephone calls that failed to rouse Val, to make sure she was not dead. There had been a large notice, propped against an empty milk bottle: GONE AWAY FOR SOME DAYS.
He was writing lists of words. He was writing lists of words that resisted arrangement into the sentences of literary criticism or theory. He had hopes—more, intimations of imminence—of writing poems, but so far had got no further than lists. These were, however, compulsive and desperately important. He didn’t know whether Maud understood—saw—their importance, or thought they were silly. He was wholly aware of Maud. He could feel her feeling that he felt his occupation was gone, and that he was lurking.
He wrote: blood, clay, terracotta, carnation.
He wrote: blond, burning bush, scattering.
He annotated this, “scattering as in Donne, ‘extreme and scattering bright,’ nothing to do with scattergraphs.”
He wrote: anemone, coral, coal, hair, hairs, nail, nails, fur, owl, isinglass, scarab.
He rejected wooden, point, link, and other ambivalent words, also blot and blank, though all these sprang (another word he hesitated over) to mind. He was uncertain about the place of verbs in this primitive language. Spring, springs, springes, sprung, sprang.
Arrow, bough (not branch, not root), leaf-mould, water, sky.
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
He said, “I’ll go out, so you can think.”
“No need.”
“I’d better. Can I buy anything?”
“No. It’s seen to.”
“I could get a job, a job in a bar or a hospital or something.”
“Take time to think.”
“There isn’t much time.”
“One can make time.”
“I feel I’m simply lurking.”
“I know. Things will change.”
“I don’t know.”
br /> The telephone rang.
“Is that Dr Bailey?”
“Yes.”
“Is Roland Michell there?”
“It’s for you.”
“Who?”
“Young, male and well-bred. Who is that, please?”
“You won’t know me. My name is Euan MacIntyre. I’m a solicitor. I wanted to talk to you—not to Roland—or at least Roland will be very welcome, I’ve got things to say to him, too. But I’ve got something interesting to communicate to you.”
Maud covered the mouthpiece and communicated this to Roland.
“How about dinner in the White Hart at say seven-thirty tonight? Both of you.”
“We’d better,” said Roland.
“Thank you very much,” said Maud. “We’d love to.”
“I don’t know about love,” said Roland.
They went into the bar in the White Hart that evening with some apprehension. It was the first time they had gone out publicly as a couple, if that was what they were. Maud was dressed in bluebell blue, her hair well-anchored, gleaming. Roland looked at her with love and despair. He had nothing in the world but Maud—no home, no job, no future—and these very negatives made it impossible that Maud would long go on taking him seriously or desiring his presence.
Three people were waiting for them. Euan MacIntyre in a charcoal suit and a golden shirt; Val, shining in a putty-coloured glossy suit over a plum-colored shirt; and a third person, tweedy and fluffy-haired about his bald patch, whom Euan introduced as “Toby Byng. We both own a leg of a horse. He’s a solicitor.”
“I know,” said Maud. “Sir George’s solicitor.”
“That’s not why he’s here, or not exactly why.”
Roland stared at sleek Val, who had the shine of really expensive and well-made clothes, and more important and unmistakable, the glistening self-pleasure of sexual happiness. She had had her hair done in a new way—short, soft, shaped, rising when she tossed her head and settling back to perfection. She was all muted violets and shot-silk dove-colours, all balanced and pretty, stockings, high shoes, padded shoulders, painted mouth. He said, instinctively, “You look happy, Val.”