Possession. A Romance

Chapter 13

Three Ases wandered out from Ida plain

Where the Gods met in council, with clear brows

And joyous voices, knowing then no weight

Of sin, or the world's wryness. All was gleam

Of sun and moon well-wrought, and golden trees

With golden apples inside golden walls.

They stepped into the middle-garden, made

For men not made, drowsed in the lap of Time.

Round their divine bright faces, ceaselessly

Rushed the new air. Beneath their lovely feet

Rose the new grass, and leeks, untouched, uncropped

Green with the living Sap of that first Spring.

They came down to the shore

Where the salt breakers fell on the new sand

With road unheard, and curling crest unseen

Like nothing else, for no man-mind was there

To name, or liken them, in any way.

They were themselves alone, and rose and fell

Changing-eternal, new, not knowing time

Which their succession measures for the mind.

And these three Ases were the sons of Bor

Who slew the Giant Ymir in his rage

And made of him the elements of earth,

Body and sweat and bones and curly hair,

Made soil and sea and hills and waving trees,

And his grey brains wandered the heavens as clouds.

These three were Odin, Father of the Gods,

Honir, his brother, also called the Bright,

The Wise and Thoughtful, and that third, the hot

Loki, the hearth-god, whose consuming fire

First warmed the world, then grown beyond the bounds

Of home and hearthstone, flamed in boundless greed

To turn the world, and Heav'n, to sifting ash.

Two senseless forms, on the wet shore o'the world

Lay at the tide's edge, and were water-lapped,

Rising a little with the creeping wave,

Then slipping back, with motion not their own.

Log-like they lay uprooted, simple forms

Of ash and elder, shorn of their green pride

But not quite dead perhaps, but nourishing

A kind of quickening shrunk back to the core

Of all the woody circles of their trunks.

(Circles of years not lived by the new wood

But sempiternal years, a present past

Stirred into being by the hand of time

As lines of water spired in the new pools.)

The new sun stood in the blue; her chariot's course

Not more than twice completed, who has since

Circled and run from dawn to dawn as Earth

Grows cool and cloudy in the calmer light,

Nor ever fails, nor swerves a pace from true

Till all be swallowed in the final Fire.

All father in her heat felt his own force.

He said: shall these trunks live? and saw the life

The vegetable life, that sang i' th' quick.

Bright Honir said: if these could move and feel

And see and hear, the lines of leaping light

Would speak to ears and eyes. The garden's fruits

Would render life to life. This lovely world

Would be both known and loved, and so would live

An endless life in theirs, and they should hear

And speak its beauties, then first beautiful

When known to be so.

Last he spoke, the dark

God of the hidden flames. He said, "Hot blood

I give them, to make bright their countenance,

To move in them the passionate motion

Which draws them to each other, as the iron

Springs to the lodestone always. I give blood-

A human warmth, red with a human fire

A stream of vital sparks, which if preserved

Speaks each to each divinely, but which spilt

Is mortal ruin till the end of Time

For they are mortal."

And so the laughing Gods, pleased with their work

Made man and woman of the senseless stumps

And called them Ask and Embla, for the ash

And alder of their woody origins.

Odin breathed in the soul, and bright Honir

Gave sense and understanding and the power

To stand and move. The quick-dark Loki last

Knitted the veins of circulating blood

And blew the spark of vital heat, as smiths

Stir fire with the bellows. So a sharp

And burning pain of apprehension

Stirred life in those who had been logs of peace

And thrilled along new channels, till it roared

In new-forged brain and ventricles of blood

And curling membranes of the ear and nose

And last, opened new eyes on a new world.

Now these first men were quite unmanned by light.

The first wet light, of the first days, that washed

Silver and gold the sand, gilded the sea

With liquid gold and silvered every crest

That crisped and curled and wrinkled into smooth.

What had lived by the whispering of the sap

Had feelingly discerned the shivering air

Known dark and light along the rugged bark

Or smoothest treeskin, kissed by warm and cool-

Now saw with eyes, waves of indifferent light

Pour on and over, arch and arch, a gold

And sunny wash, a rainbow fountain, shot

With glints of bright and streams of gleaming motes.

All this they more than saw and less than saw.

Then turning, saw those forms majestical

Wrought by the cunning of the watching gods,

White skins, blue-shadowed and blue-veined, with rose

And tawny gold inwoven, pearly-bright

Untouched unused, and breathing the bright air.

Those four eyes darkened by the burning Face

Of the bright lady of the sky, now saw

The milder circles of each other's gaze

Crowned with curls of glossy golden hair.

And as the steel-blue eyes of the first Man

Saw answering lights in Embla's lapis eyes

The red blood Loki set to spring in them

Flooded hot faces. Then he saw that she

Was like himself, yet other; then she saw

His smiling face, and by it, knew her own-

And so they stared and smiled, and the gods smiled

To see their goodly work, so fair begun

In recognition and in sympathy.

Then Ask stepped forward on the printless shore

And touched the woman's hand, who clasped fast his.

Speechless they walked away along the line

Of the sea's roaring, in their listening ears.

Behind them, first upon the level sand

A line of darkening prints, filling with salt,

First traces in the world, of life and time

And love, and mortal hope, and vanishing.

- RANDOLPH HENRY ASH, from Ragnarôk II. I et seq.

The Hoff Lunn Spout hotel had existed in 1859, though there was no mention of it in Ash's letters. He had stayed at The Cliff in Scarborough, now demolished, and had had lodgings in Filey. Maud had found the hotel in The Good Food Guide, where it was recommended for "Uncompromising fresh fish dishes, and unremitting if unsmiling good service." It was also cheap, and Maud was worried about Roland.

It stood at the edge of the moorland, on the road from Robin Hood's Bay to Whitby. It was long, low, and made of that grey stone which to a northerner signifies reality, and to southerners, used to warm bricks and a few curves and corners, can signify unfriendliness. It had a slate roof and one row of white-sashed windows. It stood in a car park, a largely empty expanse of asphalt. Mrs Gaskell, who visited Whitby in 1859 to plan Sylvia'sLovers, remarked that gardening was not a popular art in the North, and that no attempt was made to plant flowers even on the western or southern sides of the rough stone houses. In spring the dry stone walls are briefly bright with aubretia, but in general, at places like the Hoff Lunn Spout, this absence of vegetation still prevails.

Maud drove Roland up from Lincoln in the little green car; they arrived in time for dinner. The place was kept by a huge handsome Viking woman, who watched incuriously as they carried packets of books up the stairs between the Public Bar and the Restaurant.

The Restaurant had recently been fitted with a maze of high, dim-lit cubicles in dark-stained wood. Roland and Maud met there and ordered what seemed to be a light meal: home-made vegetable soup, plaice with shrimps, and profiteroles. A younger Viking, substantial and serious, served them with all these things, which were good and hugely plentiful, the soup a thick casserole of roots and legumes, the fish an immense white sandwich of two plate-sized fillets containing a good half-pound of prawns between their solid flaps, the profiteroles the size of large tennis-balls, covered with a lake of bitter chocolate sauce. Maud and Roland exclaimed frequently about this gigantism; they were nervous of real conversation. They made a businesslike plan of action.

They had five days. They decided to go to the seaside places on the first two of these-Filey, Flamborough, Robin Hood's Bay, Whitby. Then they would retrace Ash's inland walks by rivers and waterfalls. And leave a day for what might come up.

Roland's bedroom had blue-sprigged rough wallpaper and a sloping roof. The floor was uneven and creaky; the door was old with a latch and sneck as well as a monumental keyhole. The bed was high, with a stained dark wooden head. Roland looked round this small private place and felt a moment of pure freedom. He was alone. Perhaps it had all been for this, to find a place where he could be alone? If his solitude was disturbed by a memory of the last time he had slept near Maud Bailey, of their electric encounter outside Sir George's wonderful bathroom, of the electric shock, Ash's "kick galvanic," that had passed between them, he hardly admitted it to himself. The wall between their rooms was a mere lath-and-plaster partition, and he heard mysterious movements, close at hand, and imagined, briefly, the long vanishing serpent of her dragon kimono in Lincolnshire. But that was not in the real world, he told himself. Was it? He slid into bed and began on his familiarisation with Christabel LaMotte. Maud had lent him Leonora Stern's book on Motif and Matrix in the Poems of LaMotte. He leafed through the chapter headings: "From Venus Mount to the Barren Heath"; "Female Landscapes and Unbroken Waters, Impenetrable Surfaces"; "From the Fountain of Thirst to the Armorican Ocean-Skin":

And what surfaces of the earth do we women choose to celebrate, who have appeared typically in phallocentric texts as a penetrable hole, inviting or abhorrent, surrounded by, fringed with-something? Women writers and painters are seen to have created their own significantly evasive landscapes, with features which deceive or elude the penetrating gaze, tactile landscapes which do not privilege the dominant stare. The heroine takes pleasure in a world which is both bare and not pushy, which has small hillocks and rises, with tufts of scrub and gently prominent rocky parts which disguise sloping declivities, hidden clefts, not one but a multitude of hidden holes and openings through which life-giving waters bubble and enter reciprocally. Such external percepts, embodying inner visions, are George Eliot's Red Deeps, George Sand's winding occluded paths in Berry, Willa Cather's canons, female-visioned female-enjoyed contours of Mother Earth. Cixous has remarked that many women experience visions of caves and fountains during the orgasmic pleasures of autoeroticism and shared caresses. It is a landscape of touch and double-touch, for as Irigaray has showed us, all our deepest "vision" begins with our self-stimulation, the touch and kiss of our two lower lips, our double sex. Women have noted that literary heroines commonly find their most intense pleasures alone in these secretive landscapes, hidden from view. I myself believe that the pleasure of the fall of waves on the shores is to be added to this delight, their regular breaking bearing a profound relation to the successive shivering delights of the female orgasm. There is a marine and salty female wave-water to be figured which is not, as Venus Anadyomene was, put together out of the crud of male semen scattered on the deep at the moment of the emasculation of Father Time by his Oedipal son. Such pleasure in the shapeless yet patterned succession of waters, in the formless yet formed sequence of waves on the shore, is essentially present in the art of Virginia Woolf and the form of her sentences, her utterance, themselves. I can only marvel at the instinctive delicacy and sensitivity of those female companions of Charlotte Brontë who turned aside when she first came face to face with the power of the sea at Filey, and waited peacefully until, her body trembling, her face flushed, her eyes wet, she was able to rejoin her companions and walk on with them.

The heroines of LaMotte's texts are typically watery beings. Dahud the matriarchal Sorceress-Queen rules a hidden kingdom below the unbroken waters of the Armorie Gulf. The Fairy Melusina is in her primary and beneficent state a watery being. Like her magical mother, Pressine, she is first encountered by her husband-to-be at the Fontaine de Soif, which might be construed as either the Thirsty Fountain or The Fountain which satisfies Thirst. Although the second may seem "logical," in the female world which is in-formed by illogic and structured by feeling and in-tuition, a sense can be perceived in which the Dry Fountain, the Thirsty Fountain, is the hard-to-access and primary signification. What does LaMotte tell us of the Fontaine de Soif?

Her poem draws extensively on the prose romance of the monk Jean d' Arras, who tells us that the Fountain "springs from a wild hillside, with great rocks above, and a beautiful meadow along a valley, after the high forest." Mélusine's mother is discovered by this fountain singing beautifully, "more harmoniously than any siren, any fairy, any nymph ever sang." They are perceived, that is, by the male view, as temptresses, allied with the seductive powers of Nature. LaMotte's fountain, by contrast, is inaccessible and concealed; the knight and his lost horse must descend and scramble to come to it and to the Fairy Melusina's "small clear" voice "singing to itself" which "sings no more" when the man and beast disturb a stone on their damp descent.

LaMotte's description of the ferns and foliage is Pre-Raphaelite in its precision and delicacy-the "rounded" rocks are covered with a pelt 01 mosses, worts, mints and maidenhair ferns. The fountain does not "spring" but "bubbles and seeps" up into the "still and secret" pool, with its "low mossy stone" surrounded by "peaks and freshenings" of "running and closing" waters.

This may all be read as a symbol of female language, which is partly suppressed, partly self-communing, dumb before the intrusive male and not able to speak out. The male fountain spurts and springs. Mélusine's fountain has a female wetness, trickling out from its pool rather than rising confidently, thus mirroring those female secretions which are not inscribed in our daily use of language {langue, tongue)-the sputum, mucus, milk and bodily fluids of women who are silent for dryness.

Melusina, singing to herself on the brink of this mystic fountain, is a potent being of great authority who knows the beginnings and ends of things-and is, as has been pointed out, in her aspect of water-serpent, a complete being, capable of generating life, or meanings, on her own, without need for external help. The Italian scholar Silvia Veggetti Finzi sees Melusina's "monstrous" body in this sense as a product of female auto-erotic fantasies of generation without copulation, which female desire, she says, has received very little expression in mythology. "We find it most frequently in myths of origin as an expression of the chaos which precedes and justifies cosmic order. Of this kind is the Assyro-Babylonian myth of Ti'amat, or the myth of Tiresias, who saw the primordial reproduction of serpents and measured the superior quality (plus-valore) of female desire and the mythemes [mitemt] of the vegetable cycle of lettuce."

Roland laid aside Leonora Stern with a small sigh. He had a vision of the land they were to explore, covered with sucking human orifices and knotted human body-hair. He did not like this vision, and yet, a child of his time, found it compelling, somehow guaranteed to be significant, as a geological survey of the oolite would not be. Sexuality was like thick smoked glass; everything took on the same blurred tint through it. He could not imagine a pool with stones and water.

He disposed himself for sleep. The sheets were white and felt slightly starched; he imagined that they smelled of fresh air and even the sea-salt. He moved down into their clean whiteness, scissoring his legs like a swimmer, abandoning himself to them, floating free. His unaccustomed muscles relaxed. He slept.

On the other side of the plaster-and-lath partition Maud closed The Great Ventriloquist with a snap. Like many biographies, she judged, this was as much about its author as its subject, and she did not find Mortimer Cropper's company pleasant. By extension, she found it hard to like Randolph Henry Ash, in Cropper's version. Part of her was still dismayed that Christabel LaMotte should have given in to whatever urgings or promptings Ash may have used. She preferred her own original vision of proud and particular independence, as Christabel, in the letters, had given some reason to think she did herself. She had not yet made a serious study of Ash's poems, with which she was reluctant to engage. Still, Cropper's account of the Yorkshire trip had been thorough:

On a bright June morning in 1859 the Filey bathing-women might have noticed a solitary figure striding firmly along the lone and level sands towards the Brigg, armed with the impedimenta of his new hobby: landing-net, flat basket, geologist's hammer, cold chisel, oyster-knife, paper-knife, chemists' phials and squat bottles and various mean-looking lengths of wire for stabbing and probing. He had even designed his own specimen box, made to be water-tight even in the post, an elegant lacquered metal case containing a close-fitting glass inner vessel, in which tiny creatures might be hermetically sealed in their own atmosphere. He carried also to be sure the sturdy ash-plant from which he was hardly to be parted, and which was, as I have already indicated, a part of his personal mythology, a solid metaphoric extension of his Self. (It is a matter of great regret to me that I have never been able to procure an authenticated examplar of this Wotanstave for the Stant Collection.) He had been observed on earlier forays, stirring rock-pools at twilight with this staff, much in the manner of the Leech-gatherer, to observe the phosphorescence caused by those minute creatures, the Noctilucae, or Naked-Eye Medusas.

If, like many of his kind, pursuing a compulsive migration to the water's edge, he appeared more than a little ridiculous, a kind of gimcrack White Knight of the seashore, with his boots strung around his neck from their knotted laces, let us remember also, that like others of his kind, he was not harmless in his fashionable enthusiasm. The critic Edmund Gosse, that great pioneer of the modern art of biography and autobiography, was the son of the tragically misguided naturalist, Philip Gosse, whose Manual of Marine Zoology was a sine qua non on such collecting expeditions. And Edmund Gosse believed he had observed during his lifetime a rape of an innocent Paradise, a slaughter amounting to genocide. He tells us:

The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life-they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarized. An army of "collectors" has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning idle-minded curiosity.

Even so, not exempt from the blunderings of common men, the poet in search as he put it of "the origins of life and the nature of generation" was unwittingly, with his crashing boots covered with liquid india-rubber, as much as with his scalpel and killing-jar, dealing death to the creatures he found so beautiful, to the seashore whose pristine beauty he helped to wreck.

During his stay in the blustery North, then, Randolph spent his mornings collecting specimens which his indulgent landlady housed in various pie-dishes and "other china receptacles" around his sitting-room. He wrote his wife that it was just as well she could not see the artificial rockpools amongst which he took his meals and in the afternoons worked with his microscope, for her orderly mind would never have tolerated his "pregnant chaos." He made a particular study of the sea anemone-which is abundant in various forms on that coast-thereby, as he himself acknowledged, doing no more than subscribe to a general mania which had overtaken the British, who were keeping the tiny creatures in various glass tanks and aquaria in thousands of respectable drawing-rooms around the land, their murky colours vying with the dusty colours of stuffed birds or pinned insects under glass domes.

Sages and spinster schoolmistresses, frock-coated clergymen and earnest workingmen at that time, all were murdering to dissect, parting and slicing, scraping and piercing tough and delicate tissues in an attempt by all possible means to get at the elusive stuff of Life itself. Anti-vivisection propaganda was widespread and vehement, and Randolph was aware of it, as he was also aware of the charges of cruelty that might be levelled at his enthusiastic operations with scalpel and microscope. He had the squeamishness and the resolution of his poet-nature; he did various precise experiments to prove that writhings which might be thought to be responses to pain in various primitive organisms in fact took place after death-long after his own dissection of the creature's heart and digestive system. He concluded that primitive organisms felt nothing we would call pain, and that hissing and shrinking were mere automatic responses. He might have continued had he not come to this conclusion, as he was willing to concede that knowledge and science laid "austere claims" on men.

He made a particular study of the reproductive system of his chosen life-forms. His interest in these matters dated back some time-the author of Swammerdam was well aware of the significance of the discovery of the ova of both human and insect worlds. He was much influenced by the work of the great anatomist Richard Owen on Parthenogenesis, or the reproduction of creatures by cell fission rather than by sexual congress. He conducted rigorous experiments himself on various hydras and plumed worms which could be got to bud new heads and segments all from the same tail, in a process known as gemmation. He was greatly interested in the way in which the lovely Medusa or transparent jellyfish were apparently unfertilised buds of certain Polyps. He busily sliced off the tentacles of hydra and lacerated polyps into fragments, each of which became a new creature. This phenomenon fascinated him because it seemed to him to indicate a continuity and interdependence of all life, which might perhaps assist in modifying or doing away with the notion of individual death, and thus deal with that great fear to which, as the certain promise of Heaven trembled and faded, he and his contemporaries were all hideously subject.

His friend Michelet was at this time working on La Mer, which appeared in i860. In it the historian also tried to find in the sea the possibility of an eternal life which would overcome death. He describes his experiences in showing to a great chemist and subsequently to a great physiologist a beaker of what he called "the mucus of the sea… this whitish, viscous element." The chemist replied that it was nothing other than life itself. The physiologist described a whole microcosmic drama:

We know no more about the constitution of water than we do about that of blood. What is most easily discerned, in the case of the seawater mucus, is that it is simultaneously an end and a beginning. Is it a product of the innumerable residues of death, who would yield them to life? That is without doubt a law; but in fact, in this marine world, of rapid absorption, most beings are absorbed live; they do not drag out a state of death, as occurs on the earth, where destructions are slower.

But life, without arriving at its supreme dissolution, moults or sheds, ceaselessly, exudes from itself all which is superfluous to it. In the case of us, terrestrial animals, the epidermis is shed incessantly. These moults which could be called a daily and partial death, fill the world of the seas with gelatinous richness from which newborn life profits momently. It finds, in suspension, the oily superabundance of this common exudation, the still animated particules, the still living liquids, which have no time to die. All this does not fall back into an inorganic state but rapidly enters new organisms. This is the most likely of all the hypotheses; if we abandon that, we find ourselves in extreme difficulties.

It can be understood why Ash wrote to this man at this time that he "saw the inner meaning of Plato's teaching that the world was one huge animal."

And what might a stringent modern psychoanalytic criticism make of all this feverish activity? To what needs in the individual psyche did this frenzy of dissection and "generative" observation correspond?

It is my belief that at this point in time Randolph had reached what we crudely call a "mid-life crisis," as had his century. He, the great psychologist, the great poetic student of individual lives and identities, saw that before him was nothing but decline and decay, that his individual being would not be extended by progeny, that men burst like bubbles. He turned away, like many, from individual sympathies with dying or dead men to universal sympathies with Life, Nature and the Universe. It was a kind of Romanticism reborn-gemmated, so to speak, from the old stock of Romanticism-but intertwined with the new mechanistic analysis and the new optimism not about the individual soul, but about the eternal divine harmony of the universe. Like Tennyson, Ash saw that Nature was red in tooth and claw. He responded by taking an interest in the life-continuing functions of the digestive functions of all forms, from the amoeba to the whale.

Maud decided she intuited something terrible about Cropper's imagination from all this. He had a peculiarly vicious version of reverse hagiography: the desire to cut his subject down to size. She indulged herself in a pleasant thought about the general ambiguity of the word "subject" in this connection. Was Ash subject to Cropper's research methods and laws of thought? Whose subjectivity was being studied? Who was the subject of the sentences of the text, and how did Cropper and Ash fit into Lacan's perception that the grammatical subject of a statement differs from the subject, the

"I," who is the object discussed by that statement? Were these thoughts original, Maud wondered, and decided almost necessarily not, all the possible thoughts about literary subjectivity had recently and strenuously been explored.

Elsewhere in his chapter, almost inevitably, Cropper had quoted Moby Dick.

Still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes? It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body. The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist.

She stood by the uncurtained window and brushed her hair, looking up at the moon, which was full, and hearing a few faraway airy rushings off the North Sea.

Then she got into bed, and, with the same scissoring movement as Roland next door, swam down under the white sheets.

Semiotics nearly spoiled their first day. They drove out to Flamborough, in the little green car, following their certain predecessor and guide, Mortimer Cropper in his black Mercedes, his predecessor, Randolph Ash, and the hypothetical ghost, Christabel LaMotte. They walked out, in these footsteps, to Filey Brigg, not sure any more what they were looking for, feeling it impermissible simply to enjoy themselves. They paced well together, though they didn't notice that; both were energetic striders.

Cropper had written:

Randolph spent long hours poring over rockpools, deep and shallow, on the north side of the Brigg. He could be seen stirring the phosphorescent matter in them with his ashplant, and diligently collecting it in buckets, taking it home to study such microscopic animalcules as Noctilucae and Naked-eye Medusae "which are indistinguishable to the naked eye from foam bubbles" but on inspection turned out to be "globular masses of animated jelly with mobile tails." Here too, he collected his sea-anemones (Actiniae) and bathed in the Emperor's Bath-a great, greenish rounded hollow in which a legendary Roman Emperor disported himself. Randolph's historical imagination, ever active, must have taken pleasure in this direct connection with the distant past of the region.

Roland found a sea-anemone, the colour of a dark blood-blister, tucked under a pitted ledge above a layer of glistering gritty sand, pink and gold and bluish and black. It looked simple and ancient, and very new and shining. It was flourishing a vigorous crown of agitating and purposeful feelers, sifting and stirring the water. Its colour was like cornelian, like certain dark and ruddy ambers. Its stem or base or foot held the rock and stood sturdy.

Maud sat on a ledge above Roland's pool, her long legs tucked under her, The Great Ventriloquist open on her knee. She cited Cropper citing Ash:

"Imagine a glove expanded into a perfect cylinder by air, the thumb being removed and the fingers encircling, in two or three rows, the summit of the cylinder, while at the base the glove is closed by a flat surface of leather. If now on that disc which lies within the circle of fingers we press down the centre, and so force the elastic leather to fold inwards, and form a sort of sac suspended in a cylinder, we have by this means made a mouth and stomach…"

"A curious comparison," said Roland.

"Gloves in LaMotte are always to do with secrecy and decorum. Covering things up. Also with Blanche Glover, of course."

"Ash wrote a poem called The Glove. About a mediaeval Lady who gave one to a knight to wear as a favour. It was 'milky-white with seed-pearls.' "

"Cropper says here that Ash supposed wrongly that the ovaries of the Actinia were in the fingers of the glove…”

“I couldn't understand, as a little boy, where the knight wore the glove. Still can't, as a matter of fact."

"Cropper goes on about how Ash meditated on his own name. That's interesting. Christabel certainly meditated on Glover. It produced some fine and disturbing poems."

"Ash wrote a passage in Ragnarôk about the time when the god Thor hid in a huge cave which turned out to be the little finger of a giant's glove. That was the giant who tricked him into trying to swallow the sea."

"Or there's Henry James on Balzac, saying he wriggled his way into the constituted consciousness like fingers into a glove."

"That's a phallic image."

"Of course. So are all the others, in one way or another, I suppose. Not Blanche Glover, exactly."

"The Actinia 's withdrawing. It doesn't like me poking it." The Actinia presented the appearance of a rubbery navel, out of which protruded two or three fleshy whiskers, in the process of being tucked away. Then it was there, a blood-dark, fleshy mound, surrounding a pinched hole.

"I read Leonora Stern's essay 'Venus Mount and Barren Heath.' " Maud hunted for an adjective to describe this work, rejected "penetrating" and settled on "very profound."

"Of course it's profound. But. It worried me."

"It was meant to."

"No, not for that reason, not because I'm male. Because."

"Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects-all the time-and I suppose one studies-I study-literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful-as though we held a clue to the true nature of things? I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes-mediaeval gloves, giants' gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac's gloves, the sea-anemone's ovaries-and it all reduced like boiling jam to-human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body-and language-all language. And all vegetation in pubic hair."

Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, "And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness."

"Impotence," said Maud, leaning over, interested.

"I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn't the point. We are so knowing. And all we've found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and so we're imprisoned in ourselves-we can't see things. And we paint everything with this metaphor-"

"You are very cross with Leonora."

"She's very good. But I don't want to see through her eyes. It isn't a matter of her gender and my gender. I just don't."

Maud considered. She said, "In every age, there must be truths people can't fight-whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we've modified it. We aren't really free to suppose-to imagine-he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely-but not in the large plan-"

Roland wanted to ask: Do you like that? He thought he had to suppose she did: her work was psychoanalytic, after all, this work on liminality and marginal beings. He said instead, "It makes an interesting effort of imagination to think how they saw the world. What Ash saw when he stood on perhaps this ledge. He was interested in the anemone. In the origin of life. Also in the reason we were here."

"They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures-"

"And we don't?"

"At some point in history their self-value changed into-what worries you. A horrible over-simplification. It leaves out guilt, for a start. Now or then."

She closed The Great Ventriloquist and leaned over the ledge on which she was curled, and extended a hand.

"Shall we move on?"

"Where? What are we looking for?"

"We'd better start looking for facts as well as images. I suggest Whitby, where the jet brooch was bought."

My dearest Ellen,

I have found much that is curious in the town of Whitby, a prosperous fishing village at the mouth of the river Esk - it is a sloping town, crowding down in picturesque alleys or yards and flight after flight of stone stairs to the water - a terraced town, from the upper layers of which you seem to see, above a moving sphere of masts and smoking chimneys all about you, the town, the harbour, the ruined Abbey and the German Ocean.

The past lies all around, from the moorland graves and supposed Killing Pits of the Ancient Britons to the Roman occupation and the early daysof Christian evangelism under St Hilda - the town in those days was called Streonshalh and what we are accustomed to think of as the Synod of Whitby, in 664, was of course the Synod of Streonshalh. I have meditated among calling gulls in the ruins of the Abbey and have seen older darker things - the tumuli or houes on the moors, and temples perhaps druidical, including the Bridestones, a row of uprights at Sleights, thought to be one side of an avenue of a stone circle, such as Stonehenge. Certain details may bring these long-vanishedfolk suddenly to life in the imagination. Such are the finding hereabouts of a heart-shaped ear-ring of jet in contact with the jawbone of a skeleton; and a number of largejet beads cut in angles,found with a similar inmate of a barrow, who had been deposited in the houe with the knees drawn upward to the chin.

There is a mythical story which accounts for the standing stones which appeals to my imagination, as suggesting the liveliness of ancient Gods in comparatively modern times. Whitby has its own local giant - a certain fearsome Wade, who with his wife Bell, was given to tossing about casual boulders on the moors. Wade and Bell were, like the Hrimthurse who built the wall of Asgard, or the fairy Melusina, builders of castles for ungrateful men - they are creditedwith the constructionof the Roman Road across the moor to the delightful town of Pickering - a regularroad, built of stoneson a stratum of gravel or rubbish from the sandstone of the moor. I intend to walk this road, which is locally known as Wade's Causey, or Causeway, and was believed to have been built by Wadefor the convenienceof his wife Bell, who kept a giant cow on the moors, which she travelled to milk. One of the ribs of this monstrous ruminant was on show in Mulgrave Castle and was in fact the jawbone of a whale. The tumuli or houes on the moorland are heaps of boulders carried by the diligent Bell in her apron, whose strings occasionally broke. Charlton believes that Wade is simply a name for the ancient God Woden. Thor was certainly worshipped in Saxon times at the village ofThordisa which stood at the headof the Eastrow beck. So the human imagination mixes and adapts to its current preoccupationsmany ingredients into new wholes - it is essentially poetic - here are a Whale and Pickering Castle and the old Thunder God and the tombs of ancient Briton and Saxon chieftains and the military greed of the conquering Roman armies, all refashioned into a local giant and his dame - as the stonesof the Roman road go to the construction of the dry stone walls, to the loss of archaeology and the preservation of our sheep - or as the huge boulder on Sleights Moor, thrown by Bell's giant child and dented by her iron ribcage - was broken up for road-mending - and I came along that road. I have been visiting the local jet industry here, which flourishes and has produced work of a high standard of craftsmanship. I have sent you a piece - with a little poem to accompanyit - with my great love, as always. I know you like well-made things; you would be truly delighted, for the most part, by the curiousmanufactures that go on here - adornments may be made from many things - ancient ammonite worms find new lives as polished brooches. I have been interestedalso by the reformationof fossil remains into elegant articles - a whole burnished tabletop will display theunthinkably ancient coils of long-dead snail-things, or the ferny stone leaves of primitive cycads as clear as thepressed flowers and ferns that inhabit yourprayer-book. If there is a subject that is my own, my dear Ellen, as a writer I mean, it is the persistent shape-shifting life of things long-dead but not vanished. I should like to write something so perfectly fashioned that it should still be contemplated as those stone-impressed creatures are, after so long a time. Though I feel our durance on this earth may not equal theirs.

The jet, you know, was once alive too. "Certain scientific thinkers have supposed it to be indurated petroleum or mineral pitch - but it is now generally accepted that its origins are ligneous - it is found in compressed masses, long and narrow - the outersurface always marked with longitudinal striae, like the grain of wood, and the transversefracture which is conchoidal and has a resinous lustre, displays the annual growths in compressedelliptical ones." I cite this description from Dr Young, though I have seen such raw lumps of jet in the working-sheds, yes, and held them in my hands, and been moved unspeakably by the tracesof time - growing time long, long, unutterably long past - in their ellipses. They may be contaminated by an excess of siliceous matter in some cases - a craftsman carving a rose, or a serpent, or a pair of hands may suddenly come across a line or flaw of silex or flint in the material and be driven to desist. I have watched such craftsmen work - they are highly specialisedworkers - a carver may pass a brooch on to another who specialises in incising patterns - or gold or ivory or bone-carving may be joined to the jet.

All these new sights and discoveries, my dear, as you may imagine, have started off shoots of poetry in every direction. (I say shoots in Vaughan 's sense, "Bright shoots of everlastingness, " where the word means simultaneously brightness of scintillation and flights of arrows, and growth ofseeds of light -I wish you would despatch to me my Silex scintillans^r I have been thinking much about his poetry and that stony metaphor since I have been working on the rocks here. When your jet brooch comes, I beg you will stroke it and watch how it electrically attracts scraps of hair and paper - it has its own magnetic life in it - and so has always been made use of in charms and white witchcraft and ancient medicines. I divagate without discipline - my mind runs all over -I have a poem I wish to write about modern discoveries of silex-coated twigs in ancient artesian wells, as described by Lyell.)

Now let me know how you are - your health, your householddoings, your reading -

Your loving husband

Randolph

Maud and Roland walked round Whitby harbour and up and down the narrow streets that radiated steeply from it. Where Randolph Ash had noticed busyness and prosperity these noticed general signs of unemployment and purposelessness. Few boats were in the harbour and those there were appeared to be battened down and chained up; no motor sounded, and no sail flapped. There was still a smell of coal smoke, but it carried, for them, different connotations.

The shop-fronts were old and full of romance. A fishmonger's slab was decorated with gaping skeletal shark-jaws and spiny monstrosities; a sweet-shop had all the old jars and pell-mell heaps of brightly-coloured sugary cubes and spheres and pellets. There were several jewellers specialising in jet. They stopped outside one of these: HOBBS AND BELL, PURVEYORS OF JET ORNAMENTS. It was tall and narrow; the window was like an upright box, along the sides of which were festooned rope upon rope of black and glistening beads, some with dangling lockets, some many-faceted, some glossily round. The front of the window was like a sea-chest of wave-tossed treasure, a dusty heap of brooches, bracelets, rings on cracked velvety cards, teaspoons, paperknives, inkwells and a variety of dim dead shells. It was the North, Roland thought, black as coal, solid, not always graceful craftsmanship, bright under dust.

"I wonder," said Maud, "if it would be a good idea to buy something for Leonora. She likes odd pieces of jewellery.”

“There's a brooch there-with forget-me-nots round the edge and clasped hands-that says FRIENDSHIP."

"She'd like that-"

A very small woman appeared in the door of the box-shop. She wore a large apron covered with purple and grey florets, over a skinny black jumper. She had a small hard, brown-skinned face under white hair drawn into a bun. Her eyes were Viking blue and her mouth, when she opened it, contained apparently three teeth. She was puckered but wholesome, like an old apple, and the apron-dress was clean, though her stockings sagged at the ankles over thick black laced shoes.

"Come in, luv, and look around. There's plenty more inside. All good Whitby jet. I don't hold with no imitations. You won't find better." Inside the counter was another glass sarcophagus, inside which were tumbled more strings and pins and heavy bracelets.

"Anything you like the look of, I can easy get out for you."

"That looks interesting."

"That" was an oval locket with a vaguely classical carved figure, full-length, bending over a flowing urn.

"That's a Victorian mourning locket. Probably made by Thomas Andrews. He was jet-maker to the Queen. Those were good days for Whitby, after the Prince Consort died. They liked to be reminded of their dead in those days. Now it's out of sight, out of mind."

Maud put the locket down. She asked to see the clasped-hand FRIENDSHIP brooch, which the old woman reached in from the window. Roland was studying a card of brooches and rings made apparently from plaited and woven silks, some encircled by jet, some studded with pearls.

"This is pretty. Jet and pearls and silk."

"Oh, not silk, sir. That's hair. That's another form of mourning brooch, with the hair. Look, these ones have IN MEMORIAM round the frame. They cut it off at the deathbed. You could say they kept it alive."

Roland peered through the glass at the interwoven strands of fine pale hair.

"They made all sorts of it, very ingenious. Look-here's a plaited watch-chain out of someone's long locks. And a bracelet with a pretty heart-shaped clasp, ever such delicate work, in dark hair."

Roland took the thing, light and lifeless, apart from its gold clasp.

"Do you sell many of these?"

"Oh, now and then. Folk collect them, you know. Folk'll collect anything, given time. Butterflies. Collar-studs. Even my old flatirons, as I used right up to i960, when our Edith insisted on getting me an electric one, I had a man round, asking. And there's a lot of work in that bracelet, young man, a lot of care went into that. And solid gold, 18-carats, which was expensive for them times, when you got pinchbeck and such."

Maud had a row of brooches laid out on the top of the counter.

"I can tell you know a good piece. Now, I've got a real good carved piece you won't see any more of-language of flowers, young man-clematis and gorse and heartsease-which is to say Mental Beauty and Enduring Affection and 'I am always thinking of you.' You should buy that for the young lady. Better than old hair."

Roland made a demurring noise. The old woman leaned forward on her high stool and put out a hand to Maud's green scarf.

"Now that's a good piece such as you won't come across easily- that looks to me like the best of the work out of Isaac Greenberg's Baxtergate undertaking-such as was sent all over Europe to Queens and Princesses. I'd dearly like a close look at that piece, mam, if you could-"

Maud put up her hands to her head, and hesitated between unpinning the brooch and pulling off the whole head-binding. Finally, awkwardly for her, she did both, putting the scarf on the counter, and then unpinning its carefully constructed folds and handing the large black knobby thing to the old woman, who trotted away to hold it up in the dusty light from the window.

Roland looked at Maud. The pale, pale hair in fine braids was wound round and round her head, startling white in this light that took the colour out of things and only caught gleams and glancings. She looked almost shockingly naked, like a denuded window-doll, he at first thought, and then, as she turned her supercilious face to him and he saw it changed, simply fragile and even vulnerable. He wanted to loosen the tightness and let the hair go. He felt a kind of sympathetic pain on his own skull-skin, so dragged and ruthlessly hair-pinned was hers. Both put their hands to their temple, as though he was her mirror.

The old woman came back and put Maud's brooch on the counter, switching on a dusty little Anglepoise to illuminate its darkness.

"I've never seen aught quite like this-though it's clear enough one of Isaac Greenberg's pieces, I reckon-there were a piece of his at t'Great Exhibition with corals and rocks on, though I've never seen a mermaid and the coral-with her little mirror and all. Where did you come by that, mam?"

"I suppose you might call it a family heirloom. I found it in the family button box when I was really quite young-we had a huge dressing-up box full of old buckles and buttons and bits and bobs- and it was just in there. I'm afraid nobody liked it much. My mother thought it was just hideous Victorian junk, she said. I suppose it is Victorian? I took it because it reminded me of the Little Mermaid." She turned to Roland. "And then lately of the Fairy Melusina, of course."

"Oh, it's Victorian. I sh'd say it's earlier than the death of the Prince Consort in 1861-there was more playful pieces before that-though always the sad ones predominated. Look at th' workmanship in that waving hair and the lifelikeness of the little tail-fins. What they could accomplish in them days. You wouldn't get work like that nowadays, not nowhere. It's forgotten and gone by."

Roland had never closely approached Maud's brooch, which depicted indeed a little mermaid seated on a rock, her glossy black shoulders twisted towards the surface, modestly obviating any need to carve her little breasts. Her hair snaked down her back, and her tail snaked down the rock. The whole was enclosed in what he had taken to be twigs and now saw, through the old woman's eyes, to be branching coral.

He said to Maud, "You inherited some of Christabel's books…"

"I know. I never thought. I mean, this brooch has always been there. I never thought to ask where it came from. It-it looks quite different in this shop. Among these other things. It was-it was a joke of mine."

"Perhaps it was a joke of his. "

"Even if it was," said Maud, thinking furiously, "even if it was, it doesn't prove she was here. All it proves is, he bought brooches for two women at once…"

"It doesn't even prove that. She could have bought it for herself."

"If she was here."

"Or anywhere they were sold."

"You should look after that piece," the old woman put in. "That's unique, I should say, that is." She turned to Roland. "Won't you have the flower-language piece, sir? It would be a real companion-piece to the little mermaid."

"I'll take the FRIENDSHIP brooch," said Maud quickly. "For Leonora."

Roland wanted badly to own something, anything, in this strange sooty stuff which Ash had touched and written about. He did not in fact want the ornate flower-piece and could think of no one to whom he might give it-these things were definitely not in Val's style, not in either of her styles, old or new. He found, in a green glass bowl on the counter, a pile of loose unrelated beads and chips which the old woman was selling at 75p each and sorted out for himself a little heap of these, some round, some flattened and elliptical, a hexagon, a highly polished satin cushion.

"Personal worry beads," he told Maud. "I do worry."

"I noticed."