Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Postscript 1868
Notes
Acknowledgements
Copyright
The History of Vintage
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a captivating love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.
A. S. Byatt is internationally known as a novelist, short-story writer and critic. She has published nine novels, two novellas and four collections of stories, and co-edited Memory: An Anthology. A. S. Byatt was appointed CBE after Possession was awarded the Booker Prize in 1990, and DBE in 1999. Her most recent novel was The Children’s Book.
FOR ISOBEL ARMSTRONG
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
THESE THINGS ARE there. The garden and the tree
The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold
The woman in the shadow of the boughs
The running water and the grassy space.
They are and were there. At the old world’s rim,
In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit
Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there
The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest
Scraped a gold claw and sharped a silver tooth
And dozed and waited through eternity
Until the tricksy hero Herakles
Came to his dispossession and the theft.
Randolph Henry Ash, from
The Garden of Proserpina, 1861
The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing, or rather protruded from amongst the leaves like a bulky marker. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow. The librarian handed it to Roland Michell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room of the London Library. It had been exhumed from Locked Safe no. 5 where it usually stood between Pranks of Priapus and The Grecian Way of Love. It was ten in the morning, one day in September 1986. Roland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St James’s Square.
The London Library was Roland’s favourite place. It was shabby but civilised, alive with history but inhabited also by living poets and thinkers who could be found squatting on the slotted metal floors of the stacks, or arguing pleasantly at the turning of the stair. Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. Here Randolph Henry Ash had come, cramming his elastic mind and memory with unconsidered trifles from History and Topography, from the felicitous alphabetical conjunctions of Science and Miscellaneous – Dancing, Deaf and Dumb, Death, Dentistry, Devil and Demonology, Distribution, Dogs, Domestic Servants, Dreams. In his day, works on Evolution had been catalogued under Pre-Adamite Man. Roland had only recently discovered that the London Library possessed Ash’s own copy of Vico’s Principj di Scienza Nuova. Ash’s books were most regrettably scattered across Europe and America. By far the largest single gathering was of course in the Stant Collection at Robert Dale Owen University in New Mexico, where Mortimer Cropper worked on his monumental edition of the Complete Correspondence of Randolph Henry Ash. That was no problem nowadays, books travelled the aether like light and sound. But it was just possible that Ash’s own Vico had marginalia missed even by the indefatigable Cropper. And Roland was looking for sources for Ash’s Garden of Proserpina. And there was a pleasure to be had from reading the sentences Ash had read, touched with his fingers, scanned with his eyes.
It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air Acts. Roland undid the bindings. The book sprang apart, like a box, disgorging leaf after leaf of faded paper, blue, cream, grey, covered with rusty writing, the brown scratches of a steel nib. Roland recognised the handwriting with a shock of excitement. They appeared to be notes on Vico, written on the backs of book-bills and letters. The librarian observed that it didn’t look as though they had been touched before. Their edges, beyond the pages, were dyed soot-black, giving the impression of the borders of mourning cards. They coincided precisely with their present positions, edge of page and edge of stain.
Roland asked if it was in order for him to study these jottings. He gave his credentials; he was part-time research assistant to Professor Blackadder, who had been editing Ash’s Complete Works since 1951. The librarian tiptoed away to telephone: whilst he was gone, the dead leaves continued a kind of rustling and shifting, enlivened by their release. Ash had put them there. The librarian came back and said ‘yes’, it was quite in order, as long as Roland was very careful not to disturb the sequence of the interleaved fragments until they had been listed and described. The Librarian would be glad to know of any important discoveries Mr Michell might make.
All this was over by 10.30. For the next half-hour Roland worked haphazardly, moving backwards and forwards in the Vico, half-looking for Proserpina, half-reading Ash’s notes, which was not easy, since they were written in various languages, in Ash’s annotating hand, which was reduced to a minute near-printing, not immediately identifiable as the same as his more generous poetic or letter-writing hand.
At 11.00 he found what he thought was the relevant passage in Vico. Vico had looked for historical fact in the poetic metaphors of myth and legend; this piecing together was his ‘new science’. His Proserpine was the corn, the origin of commerce and community. Randolph Henry Ash’s Proserpine had been seen as a Victorian reflection of religious doubt, a meditation on the myths of Resurrection. Lord Leighton had painted her, distraught and floating, a golden figure in a tunnel of darkness. Blackadder had a belief that she represented, for Randolph Ash, a personification of History itself in its early mythical days. (Ash had also written a poem about Gibbon and one about the Venerable Bede, historians of greatly differing kinds. Blackadder had written an article on R. H. Ash and relative historiography.)
Roland compared Ash’s text with the translation, and copied parts onto an index card. He had two boxes of these, tomato-red and an intense grassy green, with springy plastic hinges that popped in the library silence.
‘Ears of grain were called apples of gold, which must have been the first gold in the world while metallic gold was unknown … So the golden apple which Hercules first brought back or gathered from Hesperia must have been grain; and the Gallic Hercules with links of this gold, that issue from his mouth, chains men by the ears: something which will later be discovered as a myth concerning the fields. Hence Hercules remained the Deity to propitiate in order to find treasures, whose god was Dis (identical with Pluto) who carries off Proserpine (another name for Ceres or grain) to the underworld described by the poets, according to whom its first name was Styx, its second the land of the dead, its third the depth of furrows … It was of this golden apple that Virgil, most learned in heroic antiquities, made the golden bough Aeneas carries into the Inferno or Underworld.’
Randolph Henry Ash’s Proserpina, ‘gold-skinned in the gloom’, was also ‘grain-golden’. Also ‘bound with golden links’ which might have been jewellery or chains. Roland wrote neat cross-references under the headings of grain, apples, chain, treasure. Folded into the page of Vico on which the passage appeared was a bill for candles on the back of which Ash had written: ‘The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.’ Roland copied this out and made another card, on which he interrogated himself.
‘Query? Is this a quotation or is it Ash himself? Is Proserpina the Species? A very C19 idea. Or is she the individual? When did he put these papers in here? Are they pre- or post-The Origin of Species? Not conclusive anyway – he cd have been interested in Development generally …’
That was 11.15. The clock ticked, motes of dust danced in sunlight, Roland meditated on the tiresome and bewitching endlessness of the quest for knowledge. Here he sat, recuperating a dead man’s reading, timing his exploration by the library clock and the faint constriction of his belly. (Coffee is not to be had in the London Library.) He would have to show all this new treasure-trove to Blackadder, who would be both elated and grumpy, who would anyway be pleased that it was locked away in Safe 5 and not spirited away to Robert Dale Owen University in Harmony City, with so much else. He was reluctant to tell Blackadder. He enjoyed possessing his knowledge on his own. Proserpina was between pages 288 and 289. Under page 300 lay two folded complete sheets of writing paper. Roland opened these delicately. They were both letters in Ash’s flowing hand, both headed with his Great Russell Street address and dated, June 21st. No year. Both began ‘Dear Madam’, and both were unsigned. One was considerably shorter than the other.
Dear Madam,
Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else. It has not often been given to me as a poet, it is perhaps not often given to human beings, to find such ready sympathy, such wit and judgment together. I write with a strong sense of the necessity of continuing our intere talk, and without premeditation, under the impression that you were indeed as much struck as I was by our quite extraordinary to ask if it would be possible for me to call on you, perhaps one day next week. I feel, I know with a certainty that cannot be the result of folly or misapprehension, that you and I must speak again. I know you go out in company very little, and was the more fortunate that dear Crabb managed to entice you to his breakfast table. To think that amongst the babble of undergraduate humour and through all Crabb’s well-wrought anecdotes, even including the Bust, we were able to say so much, that was significant, simply to each other. I cannot surely be alone in feeling
The second one ran:
Dear Madam,
Since our pleasant and unexpected conversation I have thought of little else. Is there any way in which it can be resumed, more privately and at more leisure? I know you go out in company very little, and was the more fortunate that dear Crabb managed to entice you to his breakfast table. How much I owe to his continuing good health, that he should feel able and eager, at eighty-two years of age, to entertain poets and undergraduates and mathematical professors and political thinkers so early in the day, and to tell the anecdote of the Bust with his habitual fervour without too much delaying the advent of buttered toast.
Did you not find it as strange as I did, that we should so immediately understand each other so well? For we did understand each other uncommonly well, did we not? Or is this perhaps a product of the over-excited brain of a middle-aged and somewhat disparaged poet, when he finds that his ignored, his arcane, his deviously perspicuous meanings, which he thought not meanings, since no one appeared able to understand them, had after all one clear-eyed and amused reader and judge? What you said of Alexander Selkirk’s monologue, the good sense you made of the ramblings of my John Bunyan, your understanding of the passion of Iñez de Castro … gruesomely resurrecta …but that is enough of my egoistical mutter, and of those of my personae, who are not, as you so rightly remarked, my masks. I would not have you think that I do not recognise the superiority of your own fine ear and finer taste. I am convinced that you must undertake that grand Fairy Topic – you will make something highly strange and original of it. In connection with that, I wonder if you have thought of Vico’s history of the primitive races – of his idea that the ancient gods and later heroes are personifications of the fates and aspirations of the people rising in figures from the common mind? Something here might be made of your Fairy’s legendary rootedness in veritable castles and genuine agricultural reform – one of the queerest aspects of her story, to a modern mind. But I run on again; assuredly you have determined on your own best ways of presenting the topic, you who are so wise and learned in your retirement.
I cannot but feel, though it may be an illusion induced by the delectable drug of understanding, that you must in some way share my eagerness that further conversation could be mutually profitable that we must meet. I cannot do not think I am can be mistaken in my belief that our meeting was also important interesting to you, and that however much you may value your seclusion
I know that you came only to honour dear Crabb, at a small informal party, because he had been of assistance to your illustrious Father, and valued his work at a time when it meant a great deal to him. But you did come out, so I may hope that you can be induced to vary your quiet days with
I am sure you understand
Roland was first profoundly shocked by these writings, and then, in his scholarly capacity, thrilled. His mind busied itself automatically with dating and placing this unachieved dialogue with an unidentified woman. There was no year on the letters, but they must necessarily come after the publication of Ash’s dramatic poems, Gods, Men and Heroes, which had appeared in 1856 and had not, contrary to Ash’s hopes and perhaps expectations, found favour with the reviewers, who had declared his verses obscure, his tastes perverse and his people extravagant and improbable. ‘The Solitary Thoughts of Alexander Selkirk’ was one of those poems, the musings of the castaway sailor on his island. So was ‘The Tinker’s Grace’, purporting to be Bunyan’s prison musings on Divine Grace, and so was Pedro of Portugal’s rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, Iñez de Castro, who swayed beside him on his travels, leather-brown and skeletal, crowned with lace and gold circlet, hung about with chains of diamonds and pearls, her bone-fingers fantastically ringed. Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them. It would be possible, Roland thought, to identify the breakfast party, which must have been one of Crabb Robinson’s later efforts to provide stimulating conversation for the students of the new London University.
Crabb Robinson’s papers were kept in Dr Williams’s Library in Gordon Square, originally designed as University Hall, supported by Robinson as a place in which lay students could experience collegiate university life. It would, it must, be easy to check in Robinson’s diary an occasion on which Ash had breakfasted at 30 Russell Square with a professor of mathematics, a political thinker (Bagehot?) and a reclusive lady who knew about, who wrote, or proposed to write, poetry.
He had no idea who she might be. Christina Rossetti? He thought not. He was not sure that Miss Rossetti would have approved of Ash’s theology, or of his sexual psychology. He could not identify the Fairy Topic, either, and this gave him a not uncommon sensation of his own huge ignorance, a grey mist, in which floated or could be discerned odd glimpses of solid objects, odd bits of glitter of domes or shadows of roofs in the gloom.
Had the correspondence continued? If it had, where was it, what jewels of information about Ash’s ‘ignored, arcane, deviously perspicuous meanings’ might not be revealed by it? Scholarship might have to reassess all sorts of certainties. On the other hand, had the correspondence ever in fact started? Or had Ash finally floundered in his inability to express his sense of urgency? It was this urgency above all that moved and shocked Roland. He thought he knew Ash fairly well, as well as anyone might know a man whose life seemed to be all in his mind, who lived a quiet and exemplary married life for forty years, whose correspondence was voluminous indeed, but guarded, courteous and not of the most lively. Roland liked that in Randolph Henry Ash. He was excited by the ferocious vitality and darting breadth of reference of the work, and secretly, personally, he was rather pleased that all this had been achieved out of so peaceable, so unruffled a private existence.
He read the letters again. Had a final draft been posted? Or had the impulse died or been rebuffed? Roland was seized by a strange and uncharacteristic impulse of his own. It was suddenly quite impossible to put these living words back into page 300 of Vico and return them to Safe 5. He looked about him: no one was looking: he slipped the letters between the leaves of his own copy of the Oxford Selected Ash, which he was never without. Then he returned to the Vico annotations, transferring the most interesting methodically to his card index, until the clanging bell descended the stairwell, signifying the end of study. He had forgotten about his lunch.
When he left, with his green and tomato boxes heaped on his Selected Ash, they nodded affably from behind the issue desk. They were used to him. There were notices about mutilation of volumes, about theft, with which he quite failed to associate himself. He left the building as usual, his battered and bulging briefcase under his arm. He climbed on a 14 bus in Piccadilly, and went upstairs, clutching his booty. Between Piccadilly and Putney, where he lived in the basement of a decaying Victorian house, he progressed through his usual states of somnolence, sick juddering wakefulness, and increasing worry about Val.
A MAN IS the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love, indifference and dislike; also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forebears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else too, a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come.
So Randolph Henry Ash, ca 1840, when he was writing Ragnarök, a poem in twelve books, which some saw as a Christianising of the Norse myth and some trounced as atheistic and diabolically despairing. It mattered to Randolph Ash what a man was, though he could, without undue disturbance, have written that general pantechnicon of a sentence using other terms, phrases and rhythms and have come in the end to the same satisfactory evasive metaphor. Or so Roland thought, trained in the post-structuralist deconstruction of the subject. If he had been asked what Roland Michell was, he would have had to give a very different answer.
In 1986 he was twenty-nine, a graduate of Prince Albert College, London (1978) and a PhD of the same university (1985). His doctoral dissertation was entitled History, Historians and Poetry? A Study of the Presentation of Historical ‘Evidence’ in the Poems of Randolph Henry Ash. He had written it under the supervision of James Blackadder, which had been a discouraging experience. Blackadder was discouraged and liked to discourage others. (He was also a stringent scholar.) Roland was now employed, part-time, in what was known as Blackadder’s ‘Ash Factory’ (why not Ashram?, Val had said) which operated from the British Museum, to which Ash’s wife, Ellen, had given many of the manuscripts of his poems, when he died. The Ash Factory was funded by a small grant from London University and a much larger one from the Newsome Foundation in Albuquerque, a charitable Trust of which Mortimer Cropper was a Trustee. This might appear to indicate that Blackadder and Cropper worked harmoniously together on behalf of Ash. This would be a misconception. Blackadder believed Cropper to have designs on those manuscripts lodged with, but not owned by, the British Library, and to be worming his way into the confidence and goodwill of the owners by displays of munificence and helpfulness. Blackadder, a Scot, believed British writings should stay in Britain and be studied by the British. It may seem odd to begin a description of Roland Michell with an excursus into the complicated relations of Blackadder, Cropper and Ash, but it was in these terms that Roland most frequently thought of himself. When he did not think in terms of Val.
He thought of himself as a latecomer. He had arrived too late for things that were still in the air but vanished, the whole ferment and brightness and journeyings and youth of the 1960s, the blissful dawn of what he and his contemporaries saw as a pretty blank day. Through the psychedelic years he was a schoolboy in a depressed Lancashire cotton town, untouched alike by Liverpool noise and London turmoil. His father was a minor official in the County Council. His mother was a disappointed English graduate. He thought of himself as though he were an application form, for a job, a degree, a life, but when he thought of his mother, the adjective would not be expurgated. She was disappointed. In herself, in his father, in him. The wrath of her disappointment had been the instrument of his education, which had taken place in a perpetual rush from site to site of a hastily amalgamated three-school comprehensive, the Aneurin Bevan school, combining Glasdale Old Grammar School, St Thomas à Becket’s C of E Secondary School and the Clothiers’ Guild Technical Modern School. His mother had drunk too much stout, ‘gone up the school’, and had him transferred from metal work to Latin, from Civic Studies to French; she had paid a maths coach with the earnings of a paper-round she had sent him out on. And so he had acquired an old-fashioned classical education, with gaps where teachers had been made redundant or classroom chaos had reigned. He had done what was hoped of him, always, had four As at A Level, a First, a PhD. He was now essentially unemployed, scraping a living on part-time tutoring, dogsbodying for Blackadder and some restaurant dishwashing. In the expansive 1960s he would have advanced rapidly and involuntarily, but now he saw himself as a failure and felt vaguely responsible for this.
He was a small man, with very soft, startling black hair and small regular features. Val called him Mole, which he disliked. He had never told her so.
He lived with Val, whom he had met at a Freshers’ tea party in the Student Union when he was eighteen. He believed now, though this belief may have been a mythic smoothing of his memory, that Val was the first person his undergraduate self had spoken to, socially that was, not officially. He had liked the look of her, he remembered, a soft, brown uncertain look. She had been standing on her own, holding a teacup in front of her, not looking about her, but rather fixedly out of the window, as though she expected no one to approach and invited no one. She projected a sort of calm, a lack of strife, and so he went over to join her. And since then they had never not been together. They signed up for the same courses and joined the same societies; they sat together in seminars and went together to the National Film Theatre; they had sex together and moved together into a one-roomed flat in their second year. They lived frugally off a diet of porridge and lentils and beans and yogurt; they drank a little beer, making it spin out; they shared book-buying; they were both entirely confined to their grants, which did not go far in London, and could not be supplemented with holiday earnings, for these had vanished with the oil crisis. Val had been, Roland was sure, partly responsible for his First. (Along with his mother and Randolph Henry Ash.) She simply expected it of him, she made him always say what he thought, she argued points, she worried constantly about whether she was, whether they both were, working hard enough. They quarrelled hardly at all and when they did it was almost always because Roland expressed concern about Val’s reserve with the world in general, her refusal to advance opinions in class, and later, even to him. In the early days she had had lots of quiet opinions, he remembered, which she had offered him, shyly slyly, couched as a kind of invitation or bait. There had been poems she had liked. Once she had sat up naked in his dark digs and recited Robert Graves:
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
She had a rough voice gentled, between London and Liverpool, as the group voice was. When Roland began to speak, after this, she put a hand over his mouth, which was as well, for he had nothing to say. Later, Roland noticed, as he himself had his successes, Val said less and less, and when she argued, offered him increasingly his own ideas, sometimes the reverse side of the knitting, but essentially his. She even wrote her Required Essay on ‘Male Ventriloquism: The Women of Randolph Henry Ash’. Roland did not want this. When he suggested that she should strike out on her own, make herself noticed, speak up, she accused him of ‘taunting’ her. When he asked, what did she mean, ‘taunting’, she resorted, as she always did when they argued, to silence. Since silence was also Roland’s only form of aggression they would continue in this way for days, or, one terrible time when Roland directly criticised ‘Male Ventriloquism’, for weeks. And then the fraught silence would modulate into conciliatory monosyllable, and back to their peaceful co-existence. When Finals came, Roland did steadily and predictably well. Val’s papers were bland and minimal, in large confident handwriting, well laid-out. ‘Male Ventriloquism’ was judged to be good work and discounted by the examiners as probably largely by Roland, which was doubly unjust, since he had refused to look at it, and did not agree with its central proposition, which was that Randolph Henry Ash neither liked nor understood women, that his female speakers were constructs of his own fear and aggression, that even the poem-cycle, Ask to Embla, was the work, not of love but of narcissism, the poet addressing his Anima. (No biographical critic had ever satisfactorily identified Embla.) Val did very badly. Roland had supposed she had expected this, but it became dreadfully obvious that she had not. There were tears, night-long, choked, whimpering tears, and the first tantrum.
Val left him for the first time since they had set up house, and went briefly ‘home’. Home was Croydon, where she lived with her divorced mother in a council flat, supported by social security, supplemented occasionally by haphazard maintenance payments from her father, who was in the Merchant Navy and had not been seen since Val was five. Val had never, during their time together, proposed to Roland that they visit her mother, though Roland had twice taken her to Glasdale, where she had helped his father wash up, and had taken his mother’s jeering deflation of their way of life in her stride, telling him, ‘Don’t worry, Mole. I’ve seen it all before. Only mine drinks. If you lit a match in our kitchen, it’d go up with a roar.’
When Val was gone, Roland realised, with a shock like a religious conversion, that he did not want their way of life to go on. He rolled over, and spread his loosened limbs in the bed, he opened windows, he went to the Tate Gallery alone and looked at the dissolving blue and gold air of Turner’s Norham Castle. He cooked a pheasant for his rival in the departmental rat-race, Fergus Wolff, which was exciting and civilised, although the pheasant was tough and full of shot. He made plans, which were not plans, but visions of solitary activity and free watchfulness, things he had never had. After a week, Val came back, tearful and shaky, and declared that she meant at least to earn her living, and would take a course in shorthand-typing. ‘At least you want me,’ she told Roland, her face damp and glistening. ‘I don’t know why you should want me, I’m no good, but you do.’ ‘Of course I do,’ Roland had said. ‘Of course.’
When his DES grant ran out, Val became the breadwinner, whilst he finished his PhD. She acquired an IBM golfball typewriter and did academic typing at home in the evenings and various well-paid temping jobs during the day. She worked in the City and in teaching hospitals, in shipping firms and art galleries. She resisted pressure to specialise. She would not be drawn out to talk about her work, to which she almost never referred without the adjective ‘menial’. ‘I must do just a few more menial things before I go to bed’ or, more oddly, ‘I was nearly run over on my menial way this morning.’ Her voice acquired a jeering note, not unfamiliar to Roland, who wondered for the first time what his mother had been like before her disappointment, which in her case was his father and to some extent himself. The typewriter clashed and harried him at night, never rhythmical enough to be ignored.
There were now two Vals. One sat silently at home in old jeans and unevenly hanging long crêpey shirts, splashed with murky black and purple flowers. This one had lustreless brown hair, very straight, hanging about a pale, underground face. Just sometimes, this one had crimson nails, left over from the other, who wore a tight black skirt and a black jacket with padded shoulders over a pink silk shirt and was carefully made up with pink and brown eyeshadow, brushed blusher along the cheekbone and plummy lips. This mournfully bright menial Val wore high heels and a black beret. She had beautiful ankles, invisible under the domestic jeans. Her hair was rolled into a passable pageboy and sometimes tied with a black ribbon. She stopped short of perfume. She was not constructed to be attractive. Roland half wished that she was, that a merchant banker would take her out to dinner, or a shady solicitor to the Playboy Club. He hated himself for these demeaning fantasies, and was reasonably afraid that she might suspect he nourished them.
If he could get a job, it might be easier to initiate some change. He made applications and was regularly turned down. When one came up in his own department there were 600 applications. Roland was interviewed, out of courtesy he decided, but the job went to Fergus Wolff, whose track record was less consistent, who could be brilliant or bathetic, but never dull and right, who was loved by his teachers whom he exasperated and entranced, where Roland excited no emotion more passionate than solid approbation. Fergus was also in the right field, which was literary theory. Val was more indignant than Roland about this event, and her indignation upset him as much as his own failure, for he liked Fergus and wanted to be able to go on liking him. Val found one of her insisting words for Fergus too, one which was askew and inaccurate. ‘That pretentious blond bombshell’ she said of him. ‘That pretentious sexpot.’ She liked to use sexist wolf-whistle words as a kind of boomerang. This embarrassed Roland, since Fergus transcended any such terminology; he was indeed blond, and he was indeed sexually very successful, and that was an end to it. He came to no more meals, and Roland feared Fergus thought this was a function of his, Roland’s, resentment.
When he got home that evening he could smell that Val was in a mood. The basement was full of the sharp warmth of frying onions, which meant she was cooking something complicated. When she was not in a mood, when she was apathetic, she opened tins or boiled eggs, or at most dressed an avocado. When she was either very cheerful or very angry, she cooked. She stood at the sink, chopping courgettes and aubergines, when he came in, and did not look up, so he surmised that the mood was bad. He put down his bag quietly. They had a cavernous basement room which they had painted apricot and white, to cheer it up; it was furnished with a double divan, two very old arm-chairs with curvaceous rolled arms and head-rests, plum and plushy and dusty, a second-hand stained-oak office desk, where Roland worked, and a newer varnished beech desk, where the typewriter sat. These were back to back on the long side-walls each with their Habitat anglepoise, Roland’s black, Val’s rose-pink. On the back wall were bookcases, made of bricks and planks, sagging under standard texts, most of them jointly owned, some duplicated. They had put up various posters; a British Museum poster from the Koran, intricate and geometric, a Tate advertisement for a Turner exhibition.
Roland possessed three images of Randolph Henry Ash. One, a photograph of the death mask which was one of the central pieces in the Stant Collection of Harmony City, stood on his desk. There was a puzzle about how this bleak, broad-browed carved head had come into existence, since there also existed a photograph of the poet in his last sleep, still patriarchally bearded. Who had shaved him, when? Roland had wondered, and Mortimer Cropper had asked in his biography, The Great Ventriloquist, without finding an answer. His other two portraits were photographic copies, made to order, of the two portraits of Ash in the National Portrait Gallery. Val had banished these to the dark of the hall. She said she did not want him staring at her, she wanted a bit of her life to herself, without having to share it with Randolph Ash.
In the dark hall the pictures were difficult to see. One was by Manet and one was by G. F. Watts. The Manet had been painted when the painter was in England in 1867, and had some things in common with his portrait of Zola. He had shown Ash, whom he had met previously in Paris, sitting at his desk, in a three-quarters profile, in a carved mahogany chair. Behind him was a kind of triptych with ferny foliage, to the left and right, enclosing a watery space in which rosy and silver fish shone between pond-weeds. The effect was partly to set the poet amongst the roots of a wood or forest, until, as Mortimer Cropper had pointed out, one realised that the background was one of those compartmentalised Wardian cases, in which the Victorians grew plants in controlled environments, or created self-sustaining ponds, in order to study the physiology of plants and fishes. Manet’s Ash was dark, powerful, with deepset eyes under a strong brow, a vigorous beard and a look of confident private amusement. He looked watchful and intelligent, not ready to move in a hurry. In front of him on his desk were disposed various objects, an elegant and masterly still life to complement the strong head and the ambivalent natural growths. There was a heap of rough geological specimens, including two almost spherical stones, a little like cannon balls, one black and one a sulphurous yellow, some ammonites and trilobites, a large crystal ball, a green glass inkwell, the articulated skeleton of a cat, a heap of books, two of which could be seen to be the Divina Commedia and Faust, and an hourglass in a wooden frame. Of these, the inkwell, the crystal ball, the hourglass, the two named books and two of the others, which had been painstakingly identified as Quixote and Lyell’s Geology, were now in the Stant Collection, where a room had been arranged, Wardian cases and all, to resemble the Manet setting. The chair had also been collected, and the desk itself.
The portrait by Watts was mistier and less authoritative. It had been painted in 1876 and showed an older and more ethereal poet, his head rising, as is common with Watts’s portraits, from a vague dark column of a body into a spiritual light. There was a background but it had darkened. In the original portrait it could be vaguely made out as a kind of craggy wild place; in this photographic reproduction it was no more than thickenings and glimmerings in the black. The important features of this image were the eyes, which were large and gleaming, and the beard, a riverful of silvers and creams, whites and blue-greys, channels and forks resembling da Vinci’s turbulences, the apparent source of light. Even in the photograph, it shone. These pictures, Roland considered, seemed somehow more real as well as more austere, because they were photographs. Less full of life, the life of the paint, but more realistic, in the modern sense, according to modern expectations. They were a bit the worse for wear; the flat was not clean and was damp. But he had no money to renew them.
At the end of the room the window opened onto a little yard, with steps to the garden, which was visible between railings in the upper third of their window. Their flat was described as a garden flat when they came to see it, which was the only occasion on which they were asked to come into the garden, into which they were later told they had no right of entry. They were not even allowed to attempt to grow things in tubs in their black area, for reasons vague but peremptory, put forward by their landlady, an octogenarian Mrs Irving, who inhabited the three floors above them in a rank civet fug amongst unnumbered cats, and who kept the garden as bright and wholesome and well-ordered as her living-room was sparse and decomposing. She had enticed them in like an old witch, Val said, by talking volubly to them in the garden about the quietness of the place, giving them each a small, gold, furry apricot from the espaliered trees along the curving brick wall. The garden was long, thin, bowery, with sunny spots of grass, surrounded by little box hedges, its air full of roses, swarthy damask, thick ivory, floating pink, its borders restraining fantastic striped and spotted lilies, curling bronze and gold, bold and hot and rich. And forbidden. But they did not know that in the beginning, as Mrs Irving expatiated in her cracked and gracious voice on the high brick wall which dated from the Civil War, and earlier still, which had formed one boundary of General Fairfax’s lands when Putney was a separate village, when Cromwell’s Trained Bands assembled there, when the Putney Debates on liberty of conscience were held in St Mary’s Church on the bridge. Randolph Henry Ash had written a poem purporting to be spoken by a Digger in Putney. He had even come there to look at the river at low tide, it was in Ellen Ash’s Journal, they had brought a picnic of chicken and parsley pie. That fact, and the conjunction of Marvell’s patron, Fairfax, with the existence of the walled garden of fruit and flowers were enough to tempt Roland and Val into the garden flat, with its prohibited view.
In spring their window was lit from above by the yellow glow of a thick row of bright daffodils. Tendrils of Virginia Creeper crept down as far as the window-frame, and progressed on little circular suckers across the glass, at huge vegetable speed. Swathes of jasmine, loose from a prolifically flowering specimen on the edge of the house, occasionally fell over their railing, with their sweet scent, before Mrs Irving, clothed in her gardening gear of Wellingtons and apron over the seated and threadbare tweed suit in which she had first enticed them in, came and bound these back. Roland had once asked her if he could help in the garden, in exchange for the right to sit there sometimes. He had been told that he didn’t know the first thing about it, that the young were all the same, destructive and careless, that Mrs Irving set a value on her privacy. ‘You would think,’ said Val, ‘that the cats would do the garden no good.’ That was before they found the patches of damp on their own kitchen and bathroom ceilings, which, when touched with a finger, smelled unmistakably of cat-piss. The cats too, were under prohibition, confined to quarters. Roland thought they ought to look for somewhere else, but held back from proposing it, because he was not the breadwinner, and because he didn’t want to do anything so decisive, in terms of himself and Val.
Val put before him grilled marinated lamb, ratatouille and hot Greek bread. He said, ‘Shall I get a bottle of wine?’ and Val said, disagreeably and truthfully, ‘You should have thought of that some time back; it’ll all go cold.’ They are at a card-table, which they unfolded and folded again, after.
‘I made an amazing discovery today,’ he told her.
‘Oh?’
‘I was in the London Library. They’ve got R. H. Ash’s Vico. His own copy. They keep it in the safe. I had it brought up and it was absolutely bursting at the seams with his own notes, all tucked in, on the backs of bills and things. And I’m ninety per cent sure no one had looked at them, ever, not since he put them there, because all the edges were black and the lines coincided …’
‘How interesting.’ Flatly.
‘It might change the face of scholarship. It could. They let me read them, they didn’t take it away. I’m sure no one knew it was all there.’
‘I expect they didn’t.’
‘I’ll have to tell Blackadder. He’ll want to see how important it is, make sure Cropper hasn’t been there …’
‘I expect he will, yes.’
It was a bad mood.
‘I’m sorry, Val, I’m sorry to bore you. It does look exciting.’
‘That depends what turns you on. We all have our little pleasures of different kinds, I suppose.’
‘I can write it up. An article. A solid discovery. Make me a better job prospect.’
‘There aren’t any jobs.’ She added, ‘And if there are, they go to Fergus Wolff.’
He knew his Val: he had watched her honourably try to prevent herself from adding that last remark.
‘If you really think what I do is so unimportant …’
‘You do what turns you on,’ said Val. ‘Everyone does, if they’re lucky, if there is anything that turns them on. You have this thing about this dead man. Who had a thing about dead people. That’s OK but not everyone is very bothered about all that. I see some things, from my menial vantage point. Last week, when I was in that ceramics export place, I found some photographs under a file in my boss’s desk. Things being done to little boys. With chains and gags and – dirt – This week, ever so efficiently filing records for this surgeon, I just happened to come across a sixteen-year-old who had his leg off last year – they’re fitting him with an artificial one, it takes months, they’re incredibly slow – and it’s started up for certain now in his other leg, he doesn’t know, but I know, I know lots of things. None of them fit together, none of them makes any sense. There was a man who went off to Amsterdam to buy some diamonds, I helped his secretary book his ticket, first class, and his limousine, smooth as clockwork, and as he’s walking along a canal admiring the housefronts someone stabs him in the back, destroys a kidney, gangrene sets in, now he’s dead. Just like that. Chaps like those use my menial services, here today, gone tomorrow. Randolph Henry Ash wrote long ago. Forgive me if I don’t care what he wrote in his Vico.’
‘Oh, Val, such horrible things, you never say –’
‘Oh, it’s all very interesting, my menial keyhole observations, make no mistake. Just it doesn’t make sense and it leaves me nowhere. I suppose I envy you, piecing together old Ash’s world-picture. Only where does that leave you, old Mole? What’s your world-picture? And how are you ever going to afford to get us away from dripping cat-piss and being on top of each other?’
Something had upset her, Roland reasonably deduced. Something that had caused her to use the phrase ‘turn you on’ several times, which was uncharacteristic. Perhaps someone had grabbed her. Or had not done so. No, that was unworthy. Anger and petulance did turn her on, he knew. He knew more than was quite good for him about Val. He went across and stroked the nape of her neck, and she sniffed and stiffened and then relaxed. After a bit, they moved over to the bed.
He had not told her, and could not tell her, about his secret theft. Late that night, he looked at the letters again, in the bathroom. ‘Dear Madam, Since our extraordinary conversation, I have thought of nothing else.’ ‘Dear Madam, Since our pleasant and unexpected conversation I have thought of little else.’ Urgent, unfinished. Shocking. Roland had never been much interested in Randolph Henry Ash’s vanished body; he did not spend time visiting his house in Russell Street, or sitting where he had sat, on stone garden seats; that was Cropper’s style. What Roland liked was his knowledge of the movements of Ash’s mind, stalked through the twists and turns of his syntax, suddenly sharp and clear in an unexpected epithet. But these dead letters troubled him, physically even, because they were only beginnings. He did not imagine Randolph Henry Ash, his pen moving rapidly across the paper, but he did have the thought of the pads of the long-dead fingers which had held and folded these half-covered sheets, before preserving them in the book, instead of jettisoning them. Who? He must try to find out.
IN THIS DIM place
The creeping Nidhogg, with his sooty scales
Gnaws at the great Tree’s root, and makes his nest,
Curled in the knotted maze on which he feeds
R. H. Ash, Ragnarök III
Roland went to Bloomsbury on his bicycle next morning, setting off very early when Val was still applying her workaday face. He went weaving perilously through and through the stinking five-mile worm of traffic across Putney Bridge, along the Embankment, through Parliament Square. He had no office in his old college, but inhabited an office on sufferance, for his few hours’ part-time teaching. Here, in an empty silence, he unpacked his bicycle panniers and went up to the pantry where the bulk of the Xerox squatted amongst unsavoury tea-towels beside a tea-stained sink. Whilst the machine warmed up, in the din and hum of the extractor fan, he took out his two letters and read them again. Then he spread them face down, to be scryed on the black glass, under which the rods of green light floated and passed. And the machine spat out, hot and chemical-scented, spectrograms of those writings, black-rimmed by imaged empty space as the originals were edged by a century’s dust. He was honest: he wrote his debt in the departmental notebook on the draining board. Roland Michell, 2 sheets, 1op. He was dishonest. He now had a fair copy and could slip the letters back unremarked into the London Library Vico. But he did not want to. He felt they were his. He had always slightly despised those enchanted by things touched by the great: Balzac’s ornate walking-stick, Robert Louis Stevenson’s flageolet, a black lace mantilla once worn by George Eliot. Mortimer Cropper was in the habit of drawing Randolph Henry Ash’s large gold watch from an inner fob pocket, and arranging his time by Ash’s timepiece. Roland’s Xeroxes were cleaner and clearer than the faded coppery-grey script of the originals; indeed the copy-ink had a black and gleaming freshness, the machine’s rollers must have been newly inked. But he wanted the originals.
When Dr Williams’s library opened he presented himself and asked to see the manuscript of Crabb Robinson’s monumental Diary. He had been there before, but had to use Blackadder’s name, to remind them, though he had no idea of showing Blackadder what he had found, not yet at least, not until his own curiosity was satisfied and the papers restored.
He started reading in 1856, the year of publication of Gods, Men and Heroes, which Crabb Robinson, indefatigable, had read and commented on.
JUNE 4 Read several dramatic poems from Randolph Ash’s new book. I noted particularly those purporting to be spoken by Augustine of Hippo, the ninth-century Saxon monk, Gotteschalk, and ‘Neighbour Pliable’ from Pilgrim’s Progresshavethe