Possession. A Romance

Chapter 8

All day snow fell

Snow fell all night

My silent lintel

Silted white

Inside a Creature-

Feathered-Bright-

With snowy Feature

Eyes of Light

Propounds-Delight.

-C. LAMOTTE

They faced each other over the packages in the library. It was bitterly cold; Roland felt as though he should never be warm again, and thought with longing of articles of clothing he had never had occasion to wear: knitted mittens, long Johns, balaclava. Maud had driven out early and had arrived, keen and tense, before breakfast was over, well wrapped in tweed jacket and Aran wool sweater, with the bright hair, visible last night at dinner in the Baileys' chilly hall, again wholly swallowed by a green silk knotted scarf. The library was stony and imposing, with thickets of carved foliage in its vaulted roof and a huge stone fireplace, swept and empty, with the Bailey arms, a solid tower and a small clump of trees, carved on its mantel. Gothic windows opened onto a frosty lawn; these were partly clear glass in leaded panes and partly richly stained Kelmscott glass, depicting, in central medallions, the building of a golden keep on a green hill, fortified and bedizened with banners, entered, in the central medallion, by a procession of knights and ladies on horseback. Along the top of the window ran a luxuriating rose tree, bearing both white and red flowers and blood red fruit together. Round the sides vines were rampant, carrying huge purple grape bunches on gilded stems amongst curling tendrils and veined spreading leaves. The books, behind glass, were leather-backed, orderly, apparently immobile and untouched.

There was a table in the middle, leather-topped and heavy, ink-stained and scratched, with two leather-seated armchairs. The leather had been red and was now brown and powdery, of the kind that leaves rusty traces on the clothes of those who sit there. In the centre of the table was an inkstand, with an empty silver pen tray, tarnished, and greenish glass vessels, containing dried black powder.

Joan Bailey, wheeling round the table, had laid the packages on it.

"I hope you'll be comfortable. Do let me know if you need anything else. I would light the fire for you, but the chimneys haven't been swept for generations-I'm afraid you'd suffocate with smoke, or else we'd set the whole house on fire. Are you warm enough?"

Maud, animated, assured her that they were. There was a faint flash of colour in her ivory cheeks. As though the cold brought out her proper life, as though she were at home in it.

"Then I'll leave you to it. I long to see how you get on. I'll make coffee at eleven. I'll bring it to you."

There was a frostiness between the two of them when Maud brought out her proposals for the way they should proceed. She had decided that they should each read the letters of the poet who interested them, and that they should agree conventions of recording their observations on index cards according to a system she was already using in the Women's Resource Centre. Roland objected to this, partly because he felt he was being hustled, partly because he had a vision, which he now saw was ridiculous and romantic, of their two heads bent together over the manuscripts, following the story, sharing, he had supposed, the emotion. He pointed out that by Maud's system they would lose any sense of the development of the narrative and Maud retorted robustly that they lived in a time which valued narrative uncertainty, that they could cross-refer later, and that anyway they had so little time, and what concerned her was primarily Christabel LaMotte. Roland agreed, since the time constraint was indeed crucial. So they worked for some time in silence, interrupted only by Lady Bailey bearing a thermos of coffee, and the odd request for information.

"Tell me," said Roland, "did Blanche wear glasses?"

"I don't know."

"There's a reference here to the glittering surfaces of her gaze. I'm sure it says surfaces in the plural."

"She could have had glasses, or he could have been comparing her to a dragonfly or some other insect. He seems to have read Christabel's insect poems. People were obsessed with insects at that time."

"What did she really look like, Blanche?”

“No one really knows for certain. I imagine her very pale, but that's only because of her name."

At first Roland worked with the kind of concentrated curiosity with which he read anything at all by Randolph Ash. This curiosity was a kind of predictive familiarity; he knew the workings of the other man's mind, he had read what he had read, he was possessed of his characteristic habits of syntax and stress. His mind could leap ahead and hear the rhythm of the unread as though he were the writer, hearing in his brain the ghost-rhythms of the as yet unwritten.

But with this reading, after a time-a very short time-the habitual pleasures of recognition and foresight gave way to a mounting sense of stress. This was primarily because the writer of the letters was himself under stress, confused by the object and recipient of his attentions. He found it difficult to fix this creature in his scheme of things. He asked for clarification and was answered, it appeared, with riddles. Roland, not in possession of the other side of the correspondence, could not even tell what riddles, and looked up increasingly at the perplexing woman on the other side of the table, who with silent industry and irritating deliberation was making minutely neat notes on her little fans of cards, pinning them together with silver hooks and pins, frowning.

Letters, Roland discovered, are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure. His time was a time of the dominance of narrative theories. Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going. If Maud had been less coldly hostile he would have pointed this out to her-as a matter of general interest-but she did not look up or meet his eye.

Letters, finally, exclude not only the reader as co-writer, or predictor, or guesser, but they exclude the reader as reader; they are written, if they are true letters, for a reader. Roland had another thought; none of Randolph Henry Ash's other correspondence had this quality. All was urbane, considerate, often witty, sometimes wise-but written wholly without urgent interest in the recipients, whether they were his publisher, his literary allies and rivals, or even-in the notes that survived-his wife. Who had destroyed much. She had written:

Who can endure to think of greedy hands furrowing through Dickens's desk for his private papers, for these records of personal sentiment that were his and his only-not meant for public consumption-though now those who will not reread his mar vellous books with true care will sup up his so-called Life in his Letters.

The truth was, Roland thought uneasily, these letters, these busypassionate letters, had never been written for him to read-as Ragnarôk had, as Mummy Possest had, as the Lazarus poem had. Theyhad been written for Christabel LaMotte.

… your intelligence, your marvellous quick wit - so that I may write to you as I write when I am alone, when I write my true writing, which is for everyone and no one - so that in me which has never addressed any private creature, feels at home with you. I say "at home" - what extraordinaryfolly - when you take pleasure in making me feel most unheimlich, as the Germans have it, least of all at home, but always on edge, always apprehensive of failure, always certain that I cannot appreciateyour next striking thought or glancing shaft of wit. But poets don't want homes - do they? - they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds. Now tell me - do you supposewhatI just wrote is the truth or a lie? You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalized love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, butfor its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of unsatisfied love- my dear - and so it may be indeed-for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to being in love, when they do not simply state,that they are in love, that they seek love - -forthis fresh damsel, or that lively young woman - in order to find afresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves. And to tell you the truth, I have always believed I cd diagnosethis state of being in love, which they regard as most particular, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, item, one graceful attitude of body or mind, item, one female history of some twenty-two yearsfrom, shall we say, 1821-1844 - I have always believed this in love to be something of the most abstract masking itself underthe particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet, who assumes and informs both. I wd have told you - no, I do tell you - -friendship is rarer, more idiosyncratic, more individual and in every way more durable than this Love.

Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means - and with absolute sincerity - but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems. You see the fork I have impaled myself on - Nevertheless I reiterate - because you will not bridle at my strictures on either manly devotion to a female ideal - or on the duplicity of Poets - but will look at it with your own Poet's eye - askance and most wisely -I write to you as I write when I am alone, with that in me - how else to put it? you will know, I trustyou know - with that which makes, which is the Maker.

I should add that my poems do not, I think, spring from the Lyric Impulse - but from something restless and myriad-minded and partial and observing and analytic and curious, my dear, which is more like themind of the prose master Balzac, whom, being a Frenchwoman, and blessedly less hedged about with virtuous prohibitions than English female gentility, you know and understand. What makes me a Poet, and not a novelist - is to do with the singing ofthe Language itself. For the difference between poets and novelists is this - that the former write for the life ofthe language - and the latter write for the betterment of the world.

And youfor the revelation to mere humans ofsome strange unguessed-at other world, is that not so? TheCity ofIs, thereverse ofPar-is, the towers in the water not the air, the drowned roses and flying fish andother paradoxical elementals - you see -I come to know you - I shall feel myway into your thought - as a hand into a glove - to steal your own metaphor and torture it cruelly. But if you wish - you may keep your gloves clean and scented and folded away - you may - only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hopand skip and sudden starts of your ink…

Roland looked up at his partner or opponent. She seemed to be getting on with an enviable certainty and speed. Fine frown-lines fanned her brow.

The stained glass worked to defamiliarise her. It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires. One cheek moved in and out of a pool of grape-violet as she worked. Her brow flowered green and gold. Rose-red and berry-red stained her pale neck and chin and mouth. Eyelids were purple-shadowed. The green silk of her scarf glittered with turreted purple ridges. Dust danced in a shadowy halo round her shifting head, black motes in straw gold, invisible solid matter appearing like pinholes in a sheet of solid colour. He spoke and she turned through a rainbow, her pale skin threading the various lights.

"I'm sorry to interrupt-I just wondered-do you know about the city of Is? I.S. I.S?"

She shook off her concentration as a dog shakes off water.

"It's a Breton legend. It was drowned in the sea for its wickedness. It was ruled by Queen Dahud, the sorceress, daughter of King Gradlond. The women there were transparent, according to some versions. Christabel wrote a poem."

"May I look?"A quick glance. I'm using this book."She pushed it across the table.

Tallahassee Women Poets. Christabel LaMotte: a Selection of Narrative and Lyric Poems, ed.Leonora Stern. The Sapphic Press, Boston. The purple cover bore a white linear image of two mediaeval women, bending to embrace each other across a fountain in a square basin. They both wore veiled headdresses, heavy girdles and long plaits.

He scanned The Drowned City. This had a prefatory note by Leonora Stern.

In this poem, as in "The Standing Stones," LaMotte drew on her native Breton mythology, which she had known from childhood. The theme was of particular interest to a woman writer, as it might be said to reflect a cultural conflict between two types of civilisation, the Indo-European patriarchy of Gradlond and the more primitive, instinctive, earthy paganism of his sorceress daughter, Dahud, who remains immersed when he has taken his liberating leap to dry land at Quimper. The women's world of the underwater city is the obverse of the male-dominated technological industrial world of Paris or Par-is, as the Bretons have it. They say that Is will come to the surface when Paris is drowned for its sins.

LaMotte's attitude to Dahud's so-called crimes is interesting. Her father, Isidore LaMotte, in his Breton Myths andLegends, does not hesitate to refer to Dahud's "perversions," though without specifying. Nor does LaMotte specify…

He flicked across the pages of the text.

There are none blush on earth, y-wis

As do dames of the Town of Is.

The red blood runs beneath their skin

And feels its way and flows within,

And men can see, as through a glass

Each twisty turn, each crossing pass

Of threaded vein and artery

From heart to throat, from mouth to eye.

This spun-glass skin, like spider-thread

Is silver water, woven with red.

For their excessive wickedness

In days of old, was this distress

Come on them, of transparency

And openness to every eye.

But still they're proud, their haughty brows

Circled with gold…

Deep in the silence of drowned Is

Beneath the wavering precipice

The church-spire in the thickened green

Points to the trembling surface sheen

From which descends a glossy cone

A mirror-spire that mocks its own.

Between these two the mackerel sails

As did the swallow in the vales

Of summer air, and he too sees

His mirrored self amongst the trees

That hang to meet themselves, for here

All things are doubled, and the clear

Thick element is doubled too

Finite and limited the view

As though the world of roofs and rocks

Were stored inside a glassy box.

And damned and drowned transparent things

Hold silent commerce…

This drowned world lies beneath a skin

Of moving water, as within

The glassy surface of their frown

The ladies' grieving passions drown

And can be seen to ebb and flow

In crimson as the currents go

Amongst the bladderwrack and stones

Amongst the delicate white bones.

And so they worked on, against the clock, cold and excited, until Lady Bailey came to offer them supper.

When Maud drove home that first evening, the weather was already changing for the worse. Clouds were darkly gathering; she could see through the trees a full moon, which, because of some trick of the thickening air, seemed both far away and somehow condensed, an object round and small and dull. She drove through the park, much of which had been planted by that earlier Sir George who had married Christabel's sister Sophie, and had had a passion for trees, trees from all parts of the distant earth, Persian plum, Turkey oak, Himalayan pine, Caucasian walnut and the Judas tree. He had had his generation's expansive sense of time-he had inherited hundred-year-old oaks and beeches and had planted spreads of woodland, rides and coppices he would never see. Huge rugged trunks came silently past the little green car in the encroaching dark, rearing themselves suddenly monstrous in the changing white beam of the headlight. There was a kind of cracking of cold in the woods all round, a tightening of texture, a clamping together that Maud had experienced in her own warm limbs as she went out into the courtyard and cold ran into her constricted throat and pulled tight something she thought of poetically as the heartstrings.

Down these rides Christabel had come, wilful and perhaps spiritually driven, urging her little pony-cart on to the ritualist eucharist of the Reverend Mossman. Maud had not found Christabel an easy companion all day. She responded to threats with increasing organisation. Pin, categorise, learn. Out here it felt different. The mental pony-cart bowled along, with its veiled passenger. The trees went up, solid. A kind of elemental clanging accompanied the disappearance of each into the dark. They were old, they were grey and green and stiff. Women, not trees, were Maud's true pastoral concern. Her idea of these primeval creatures included her generation's sense of their imminent withering and dying, under the drip of acid rain, or in the invisible polluted gusts of the wind. She was visited by a sudden vision of them dancing, golden-green, in a bright spring a hundred years ago, flexible saplings, tossed and resilient. This thickened forest, her own humming metal car, her prying curiosity about whatever had been Christabel's life, seemed suddenly to be the ghostly things, feeding on, living through, the young vitality of the past. Between the trees the ground was black with the shining, sagging wet rounds of dead leaves; in front of her, the same black leaves spread like stains on the humping surface of the tarmac. A creature ran out into her path; its eyes were half-spheres filled with dull red fire, refracted, sparkling and then gone. She swerved, and nearly hit a thick oak stump. Ambiguous wet drops or flakes-which?-materialised briefly on the windscreen. Maud was inside, and the outside was alive and separate.

Her flat, with its unambiguous bright cleanliness, seemed unusually welcoming, apart from the presence of two letters, caught in the lips of the letterbox. She tugged these free, and went round, closing curtains, putting on many lights. The letters too were threatening. One was blue and one was the kind of tradesman's brown with which all universities have replaced their milled white crested missives in the new austerity. The blue one was from Leonora Stern. The other said it was from Prince Albert College; she would have supposed it was from Roland, but he was here. She had been not very polite to him. Even bossy. The whole business had put her on edge. Why could she do nothing with ease and grace except work alone, inside these walls and curtains, her bright safe box? Christabel, defending Christabel, redefined and alarmed Maud.

Here is a Riddle, Sir, an old Riddle, an easy Riddle - hardly worth your thinking about - a fragile Riddle, in white andGold with life in the middle of it. There is a gold, soft cushion, whose gloss you may only paradoxically imagine with your eyes closed tight - see it feelingly, let it slip through your mind's fingers. And this gold cushion is enclosed in its owncrystalline casket,a caskettranslucent and endless in its circularity, for there are no sharp corners to it, noprotrusions, only a milky moonstone clarity that deceives. And these are wrapped in silk, fine as thistledown, tough as steel, and the silk lies inside Alabaster, which you may thin Jiofas a funerary Urn - only with no inscription, for there are as yet no Ashes - and no pediment, and no nodding poppies engraved, nor yet no lid you may lift to peep in, for all is sealed and smooth. There may come a day when you may lift the lidwith impunity - or rather,when it may be lifted from within - for that way, life may come - whereas your way - you will discover - only Congealing and Mortality.

An Egg, Sir, is the answer, as you perspicuously readfrom the beginning, an Egg, aperfect O,a living Stone, doorlessand windowless, whose life mayslumber on till she be Waked - or find she has Wings to spread - which is not so here - oh no -

An Egg is my answer. What is the Riddle?

I am my own riddle. Oh, Sir, you must not kindly seek to ameliorate or steal away my solitude. It is a thing we women are taught to dread - ohthe terrible tower, oh the thickets round it - no companionable Nest - but a donjon.

But they have lied to us you know, in this, as in so much else. The Donjon may frown andthreaten - but it keeps us very safe - within its confines we arefree in a way you, who have freedom to range the world, do not need to imagine. I do not advise imagining it - but do me the justice of believing - not imputing mendacious protestation - my Solitude is my Treasure,the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hopaway - but oh how I sing in my gold cage -

Shattering an Egg is unworthy of you, no Pass time for men. Think what you would have in your hand if you putforth your Giant strength and crushed the solid stone. Something slippery and cold and unthinkably disagreeable.

Maud felt reluctant to open Leonora's letter, which had an imperious and accusing air. So she opened instead the brown one and saw it was worse, it was from Fergus Wolff, with whom she had had no communication for over a year. Certain handwriting can turn the stomach, after one, after five, after twenty-five years. Fergus's was, like much male writing, cramped, but with characteristic little flourishes. Maud's stomach turned, the vision of the tormented bed rose again in her mind's eye. She put a hand to her hair.

Dear Maud, never forgotten, as I hope I'm not either, quite. How are things in damp old Lincolnshire? Do the fens make you melancholy? How is Christabel? Would you be pleased to hear I have decided to give a paper on Christabel at the York conference on metaphor? I thought I'd lecture on The Queen of the Castle: What is kept in the Keep? How doesthat strike you? Do I have your imprimatur? Might I even hope to be able to consult your archive?

I should deal with contrasting and conflicting metaphors for the fairy Melusine's castle-building activities. There's a verygood piece byJacques Le Goffon "MelusineDéfricheuse";according to the new historians she's a kind of earth spirit or local goddess of foison or minor Ceres. But then you could adopt a Lacanian modelof the image of the keep - Lacan says, f(theformation of the ego is symbolised in dreams by a fortress or stadium [any stadiums in Christabel?]- surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips - dividing it into two opposite fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form symbolises the id in a quite startling way." I could complicatethis with a few more real and imaginary castles - and a loving and respectfulreference to your own seminal work on the limen and the liminal. What do you think? Will it wash? Will I be torn by Maenads?

I was inspired to write partly by the excitement of this project, partly because my spies tell me that you and Roland Michell (a dull but honourable contemporary of mine) have beendiscovering something or othertogether. My chief spy - a young woman who is not best pleased by the turn of events - tells me you are spending the New Yeartogether, investigating connections. I am naturally consumed by curiosity. Perhaps I will come and consult your archive. I do wonder whatyou make of young Michell. Don't eat him, dear Maud. He isn't in your class. Academically, that is, he isn't, as you may hâve discovered by now.

Whereas you and I could have had the most delectable talk about towers above and under water, serpent tails and flying fish. Did you read Lacan on flying fish and vesicle persecution? I miss you from time to time, you know. You weren 't wholly nice orfair to me. Nor I to you, you will say - but when are we ever? You are so severe with male shortcomings. Please give me the go-ahead on my siege-paper.

Much love as always

Fergus

Dear Maud,

I find it odd thatI haven't heard from you for maybe two months now -I trust all is well with you, and that your silence indicates only that your work is going well and absorbing all your attention. I worry about you when you are silent -I know you haven*t been happy -I think of you with great love as you progress -

When I last wrote I mentioned I might write something on water and milk and amniotic flud in Melusina- why is water always seen as the female?- we've discussedthis -I want to write a big piece on the undines and nixies and melusinas - women perceived as dangerous - what do you think? I could extend it to the Drowned City- With specialreferenceto non-genital imageryfor female sexuality - we needto get awayfrom the cunt as well asfrom the phallus - the drowned women in the city mightrepresent the totality of the female body as an erogenous zone if the circumambient fluid were seen as an undifferentiated eroticism, and this might be possible to connect to the erotic totality of the woman/dragon stirring the waters of the large marble bath, or submerging her person in it as LaM. tellingly describes her. What do you think, Maud?

Would you be prepared to give a paper at the Australian meeting of the Sapphic society in iç88? I had in mind that we would devote that session entirely to the studyof the female erotic in nineteenth-century poetry and the strategies and subterfuges through which it had to present or dis-cover itself. You might have extended your thinking about liminality and the dissolution of boundaries. Or you might wish to be more rigorous in your exploration of LaMotte's lesbian sexuality as the empoweringforce behind her work. (I acceptthat her inhibitions made her characteristically devious and secretive - but you do not give her sufficient credit for the strength with which she does nevertheless obliquely speak out.)

I think so often of the brief time we had together in the summer. I think of our long tramps on the Wolds and late hours in the library, andscoops of real American ice-cream by your fireside. You are so thoughtful and gentle - you made mefeel I am crashing around in yourfragile surroundings, clumsily knocking down little screens and room dividers you have set up around your English privacy - but you aren 't happy, are you, Maud? There is an emptiness in your life.

It would do you good to come out here and experience the hectic storm and stress of American Women's Studies. I could find you a post as soon as you wanted it, no problem. Think about it.

In the interim, go and leave my love at Her grave - use the shears if you've time, or inclination - it made my blood boil to see how she was neglected. Put some more flowers down in my name - -for the grass to drink - I found her resting-place unbearably moving. I wish I thought she could have foreseen she was to be loved as she should be loved -

And I send you all my love - and wait for an answer this time

Your

Leonora

This letter posed and shelved a moral problem: when and how much was it wise or honourable to tell Leonora about the discovery? She would not particularly like it. She did not like R. H. Ash. Still less would she like being put in the position of not having known about it, if she continued to write confident papers on Christabel's sexuality. She would feel betrayed and sisterhood would be betrayed.

As for Fergus. As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him. She was annoyed at his proposal for a siege-paper, without knowing how much it was manufactured ad hoc to annoy her. She was also annoyed by his arcane reference to Lacan and flying fish and vesicle persecution. She decided to track this down-method was her defence against anxiety-and duly found it.

I remember the dream of one of my patients, whose aggressive drives took the form of obsessive phantasies; in the dream he saw himself driving a car, accompanied by a woman with whom he was having a rather difficult affair, pursued by a flying fish, whose skin was so transparent that one could see the horizontal liquid level through the body, an image of vesicle persecution of great anatomical clarity…

The tormented bed rose again in her mind's eye, like old whipped eggs, like dirty snow. Fergus Wolff appeared to be slightly jealous of Roland Michell.

It was clever, if obvious, to describe him to Maud as "not in your class." Even if she noticed the transparency of this device, the label would stick. And she knew Roland was not in her class. She should have been less ungracious. He was a gentle and unthreatening being. Meek, she thought drowsily, turning out the light. Meek.

The next day, when she drove out towards Seal Court, the wolds were blanched with snow. It was not snowing, though the sky was heavy with it, an even pewter, weighing on the airy white hills that rolled up to meet it, so that the world seemed reversed here too, dark water above circling cloud. Sir George's trees were all fantastically hung with ice and furbelows. She parked just outside the stable yard on an impulse and decided to walk to the winter garden, built for Sophie Bailey and much loved by Christabel LaMotte. She would see it as it had been meant to be seen, and store the memory to be shared with Leonora. She trod crunchingly around the kitchen-garden wall and up a yew alley, festooned with snow, to where the overlapping, thick evergreens-holly, rhododendron, bay-enclosed a kind of trefoil-shaped space at the heart of which was the pool where Christabel had seen the frozen gold and silver fish, put there to provide flashes of colour in the gloom-the darting genii of theplace, Christabel had said. There was a stone seat, with its rounded snow-cushion which she did not disturb. The quiet was absolute. It was beginning to snow again. Maud bowed her head with the self-consciousness of such a gesture, and thought of Christabel, standing here, looking at this frozen surface, darkly glowing under blown traces of snow.

And in the pool two fishes play

Argent and gules they shine alway

Against the green against the grey

They flash upon a summer's day

And in the depth of wintry night

They slumber open-eyed and bright

Silver and red, a shadowed light

Ice-veiled and steadily upright

A paradox of chilly fire

Of life in death, of quenched desire

That has no force, e'en to respire

Suspended until frost retire-

Were there fish? Maud crouched on the rim of the pool, her briefcase standing in snow beside her, and scraped with an elegant gloved hand at the snow on the ice. The ice was ridged and bubbly and impure. Whatever was beneath it could not be seen. She moved her hand in little circles, polishing, and saw, ghostly and pale in the metal-dark surface a woman's face, her own, barred like the moon under mackerel clouds, wavering up at her. Were there fish? She leaned forward. A figure loomed black on the white, a hand touched her arm with a huge banging, an unexpected electric shock. It was meek Roland. Maud screamed. And screamed a second time, and scrambled to her feet, furious.

They glared at each other.I m sorry-I m sorry-

"I thought you were overbalancing-"I didn't know anyone was there."I shocked you."I embarrassed you-"It doesn't matter-"It doesn't matter-"I followed your footsteps."I came to look at the winter garden."Lady Bailey was worried you might have had an accident."The snow wasn't that deep."

It s still snowing."Shall we go in?"I didn't want to disturb you."It doesn't matter."Are there fish?"All you can see is imperfections and reflections."

The work time that followed was a taciturn time. They bent their heads diligently-what they read will be discovered later-and looked up at each other almost sullenly. Snow fell. And fell. The white lawn rose to meet the library window. Lady Bailey came with coffee, silently rolling, into a room still with cold and full of a kind of grey clarity.

Lunch was sausages and mashed potatoes and buttery peppery mashed turnips. It was eaten round the blazing log-fire, on knees, backs to the slatey white-flecked window. Sir George said, "Hadn't you better be getting back to Lincoln, Miss B.? You don't have snow-chains, I suppose. The English don't. Anyone'd think the English'd never seen snow, the way they go on when it comes down."

"I think Dr Bailey should stay here, George," said his wife. "I don't think it's safe for her to go even trying to thread her way through the wolds, in this. We can make her bed up in Mildred's old nursery. I can lend her some things. I think we should get the bed made up and get some hot water bottles in it now. Don't you think so, Dr Bailey?"

Maud said she couldn't and Lady Bailey said she must, and Maud said she shouldn't have set out and Lady Bailey said nonsense, and Maud said it was an imposition and Sir George said that whatever the rights and wrongs of it, Joanie was right and he would go up and see to Mildred's bed. Roland said he would help, and Maud said by no means, and Sir George and Maud went away upstairs to find sheets, whilst Lady Bailey filled a kettle. She had taken to Roland, whom she addressed as Roland, whilst she still addressed Maud as Dr Bailey. She looked up at him on the way across the kitchen, the brown coins on her face intensified by the fire.

"I hope that pleases you. I hope you'll be pleased to have her here. I hope you haven't had some tiff, or something."

"Tiff?"

"You and your young woman. Girl friend. Whatever."

"Oh no. That is, no tiff, and she isn't-"

Isnt?

"My-girl friend. I hardly know her. It was-is-purely profes sional. Because of Ash and LaMotte. I've got a girl friend in London. Her name's Val."

Lady Bailey showed no interest in Val.

"She's a beautiful girl, Dr Bailey. Stand-offish or shy, maybe both. What my mother used to call a chilly mortal. She was a Yorkshirewoman, my mother. Not County. Not a lady." Roland smiled at her.

"I used to share a governess with some cousins of George's. To be company for them. I used to exercise their ponies, whilst they were away at school. Rosemary and Marigold Bailey. Not unlike your Maud. That's how I met George, who decided to marry me. George gets what he's set his mind on, as you see. That's how I took to hunting too. And ended up under a horse under a hedge when I was thirty-five and now as you see."

"I see. Romantic. And terrible. I'm sorry."

"I don't do too badly. George is a miracle. Hand me those bottles. Thank you."

She filled them with a steady hand. Everything was designed for her ease: the kettle, the kettle-rest, the place to park and steady the chair.

"I want you both to be comfortable. George is so ashamed of the way we live-skimping and saving-the house and grounds eat money, just preventing deterioration and decay. He doesn't like people to come and see how things are. But I do love having someone to talk to. I like to see you working away in there. I hope it's proving useful. You don't say much about it. I hope you aren't frozen in that great draughty room…"

"A little bit. But I love it, it's a lovely room… But it would be worth it if it was twice as cold. It doesn't seem possible to say anything about the work yet. Later. I shall never forget reading these letters in that lovely room…"

Maud's bedroom-Mildred's old nursery-was at the opposite end of the long corridor that housed Roland's little guest bedroom and a majestic Gothic bathroom. No one explained who Mildred was or had been; her nursery had a beautifully carved stone fireplace, and deeply recessed windows in the same style. There was a high wooden bed with a rather bulky mattress of horsehair and ticking: Roland, coming in with his arms full of hot water bottles, was reminded as once before of the Real Princess and the pea. Sir George appeared with one of those circular copper dishes that contain a fat stamen of an electric fire, which he directed at the bed. Locked cupboards revealed blankets and a heap of 1930s children's dishes and toys, oilskin mats with Old King Cole on them, a nightlight with a butterfly, a heavy dish with an image of the Tower of London and a faded beefeater. Another cupboard revealed a library of Charlotte M. Yonge and Angela Brazil. Sir George, embarrassed, reappeared with a sugar-pink winceyette nightdress and a rather splendid peacock-blue kimono embroidered with a Chinese dragon and a flock of butterflies in silver and gold.

"My wife hopes you'll find these comfortable. Also I have a new toothbrush."

"You are very kind. I feel so foolish," said Maud.

"Another time might have been better with hindsight," said Sir George. He called them, with pleasure, to the window. "Look at it, though. Look at the trees, and the weight of it on the wold."

It was falling with great steadiness, through a still atmosphere; it was silent and swallowing; distinctions of ledges and contours were vanishing on the hills, and the trees were heavy with capes and blankets glittering softly, curved and simple. Everything had closed in on the house in the hollow, which seemed to be filling. Urns on the lawn were white-crowned and slowly sinking, or so it seemed, in the deepening layers.

"You won't get out tomorrow, either," he said. "Not without a snow plough, which the Council may get round to sending if it lets up enough to make it worth it. Hope I've got enough dog food to go on with."

In the afternoon they read steadily and with more surprise. They dined with the Baileys by the kitchen fire on pieces of frozen cod and chips and a rather good jam rolypoly pudding. They had agreed without real discussion to fend off questions about the letters for the time being. "Well, are they worth anything, or nothing much in your view?" Sir George asked. Roland said he knew nothing about the value, but the letters had some interest certainly. Lady Bailey changed the subject to hunting, which she discussed with Maud and her husband, leaving Roland to an inner ear full of verbal ghosts and the rattle of his spoon.

They went upstairs early, leaving their hosts to their ground-floor domain, now patchily warm, unlike the great staircase and the long corridor where they were to sleep. Cold air seemed to pour down the stone steps like silky snow. The corridor was tiled, in peacock and bronze, depicting formal lilies and pomegranates now thickly softened with pale dust. Over these had been laid long, wrinkling, canvas-like carpets-"drugget?" said Roland's word-obsessed mind, which had met this word in the poems of R. H. Ash where someone-an escaping priest-had "tiptoed on drugget and scuttled on stone" before being surprised by the lady of the house. These runners were pale and yellowish; here and there, where a recent foot had slipped, they had wiped away the dust-veil from the gleam of the tiles.

At the top of the staircase Maud turned decisively to him and inclined her head with formality.

"Well, good night, then," she said. Her fine mouth was set. Roland had vaguely supposed that they might, or should, discuss progress now they were together, compare notes and discoveries. It was almost an academic duty, though he was, in fact, tired, by emotion and the cold. Maud's arms were full of files, clasped against her like a breastplate. There was an automatic wariness in her look that he found offensive. He said, "Good night, then," and turned away towards his own end of the corridor. He heard her behind him tap away into the dark. The corridor was badly lit; there were what he assumed to be inoperative gas-mantels and two miserable 6o-watt lights with saloon-bar coolie metal covers. It was then that he realised that he would have been glad to have discussed the bathroom with her. He assumed it would be polite to wait for her to go first. It was so cold in the corridor that he intensely disliked going up and down it-or standing about in it-in his pyjamas. He decided to give her a good three-quarters of an hour-plenty of time for any female ablutions that could take place in near-ice. In the interim he would read Randolph Henry Ash. He would read, not his notes on the letters, but the battle of Thor and the Frost Giants in Ragnarôk. His room was bitterly cold. He made himself a nest of old eiderdowns and counterpanes, all covered with blue splashy roses, and sat down to wait.

When he came along the corridor in the silence, he thought he had been clever. The heavy, latched door was dark inside its stone arch. There was no sound of plashing or flushing. He was then seized with doubt as to whether the bathroom was in fact empty-how could any sound penetrate that solid oak? He did not want to rattle a locked door and embarrass both her and himself. So he went down on one knee on the putative drugget and put his eye to the huge keyhole which glinted at him and disconcertingly vanished as the door swung back and he smelled wet, freshness, steam in cold air. She nearly fell over him there; she put out a hand to steady herself on his shoulder and he threw up a hand and clasped a narrow haunch under the silk of the kimono.

And there it was, what Randolph Henry Ash had called thekick galvanic, the stunning blow like that emitted by the Moray eel from under its boulders to unsuspecting marine explorers. Roland got somehow on his feet, briefly clutching the silk and letting it go as though it stung. Her hands were pink and slightly damp; the fringes of the pale hair were damp too. It was down, he saw, the hair, running all over her shoulders and neck, swinging across her face, which he meekly supposed would be furious and saw, when he looked, was simply frightened. Did she simply emit the electric shock, he wondered, or did she also feel it? His body knew perfectly well that she felt it. He did not trust his body.

"I was looking if there was a light. So as not to disturb you if you were in there." I see.

The blue silk collar was dampish too. The whole thing appeared in this half-light to be running with water, all the runnels of silk twisted about her body by the fiercely efficient knot in which she had tied her sash. Below the silk hem were the ruffled mundane edge of pink winceyette and slippered sharp feet.

"I waited some time for you to use the bathroom," she said, conciliatory.

"So did I."

"No harm done," she said.

No.

She held out her wet hand. He took it and felt its chill, and the subsidence of something. "Good night, then," she said. "Good night." He went into the bathroom. Behind him, the long Chinese dragon wavered palely away, on its aquamarine ground, along the shifting carpets, and the pale hair gleamed coldly above it.

Inside the bathroom small patches of vapour clung to the basin, small traces of water, and one long wet footprint on the carpet inside showed she had been there. The bathroom was cavernous, built somehow under eaves, which sloped away, leaving a kind of bunker beneath them, in which were heaped maybe thirty or forty ewers and washbasins of an earlier day, dotted with crimson rosebuds, festooned with honeysuckle, splattered with huge bouquets of delphiniums and phlox. The bath stood monumental and deep in the very centre of the room, rising on clawed lion-feet, a kind of marbly sarcophagus, crowned with huge brass taps. It was far too cold to contemplate running water into this, which would in any case have taken forever to fill. Roland was sure that even the fastidious Maud would not have attempted it; to judge from her wet footprints on the cork bath mat, she had washed thoroughly at the basin.

The basin and the lavatory, which stood enthroned on its own pedestal at the dark end of the room, were English and floral and entranced Roland, whose experience had included nothing like them. Both were glazed and fired over a riotous abundance of English flowers whose tangled and rambling clusters and little intense patches seemed wholly random and natural, with no discernible repeating pattern. In the basin, as he filled it, under the hazy surface of the water, lay dog-roses, buttercups, poppies and harebells, a bank in reverse, resembling Titania's if not Charles Darwin's tangled bank. The lavatory was slightly more formalised than the washbasin-diminishing garlands and scattered nosegays swirled down its cascades over lines of maidenhair ferns. The seat was majestic squared mahogany. It seemed sacrilegious to use anything so beautiful for its proper purpose. Roland assumed that Maud had seen such fittings before and was uninhibited by their splendour. He washed himself, rapid and trembling, above winking poppy-heads and blue cornflowers, and on the stained-glass window the ice crackled and set again. There was a gilt mirror over the washbasin in which he imagined Maud examining her perfection; his own furry darkness was only a shadow on it. He was rather sorry for Maud. He had quite decided that she wouldn't have been able to see the romance of the bathroom as he could.

Back in his bedroom he looked out of the window into the night. Yesterday's dark enclosing trees were soft and shining white; across the space of his window snowflakes fell into the square of light and became visible. He should have shut his curtains against the cold but could not so much close out the strangeness outside. He put out the light and watched it all go grey-many greys, silver, pewter, lead- in the suddenly visible moonlight, in which the snowfall was both thicker, more animated and slower. He put on his sweater and socks and climbed into his narrow bed and curled himself into a ball as he had done last night. The snow fell. He woke in the small hours from a dream of great violence and beauty which went back in part to his primitive infant fear of something coming up the lavatory bend and striking at him. In his dream he was hopelessly entwined and entangled with an apparently endless twisted rope of bright cloth and running water, decorated with wreaths and garlands and tossed sprays of every kind of flower, real and artificial, embroidered or painted, under which something clutched or evaded, reached out or slid away. When he touched it, it was not there; when he tried to lift an arm or a leg it prevented him, gripping, coiling. He had the microscopic eye of the dreamer of great dreams; he could linger over a cornflower or inspect a dog-rose or lose his sense of shape in the intricacies of a maidenhair fern. The thing smelled dank in his dream and yet also rich and warm, a smell of hay and honey and the promise of summer. Something struggled to get out, and as he moved across the floor of the room he was dreaming, its ever more intricate train flowed after it, impeding yet increasing its length and circling folds. His mind said, "It is wringing wet" in his mother's voice, censorious yet concerned for it, and noted that "wringing" appeared to be a pun; it appeared to be wringing its veiled hands as it struggled with its wrappings. His mind said a line of poetry-"Despite the snow, despite the falling snow"-and his whole soul was distressed not to be able to remember the great importance of that line, which he had heard, where? when?