byatt-a-s- possession-a-romance

Chapter 20

I press my palms on

Window's white cross

Is that Your dark Form

Beyond the glass?

How do they come who haunt us

In gown or plumey hat

Or white marbling nakedness

Frozen-is it-That?

Their remembrances haunt us

A trick of a wrist

Loved then-automatic-

Caught at and kist

Gone now to what melting

Of flesh and bone

Infinite Graces

Bundled-in One

Do not walk lonely

Out in the cold

I will come to you

Naked and bold

And your sharp fingers

Featly might pick

Flesh from my moist bones

Touch at the quick-

My warm your cold's food-

Your chill breath my air

When our white mouths meet

It mingles-there-

-C. LAMOTTE

Ordinarily, Mortimer Cropper would not have minded how long it took to wear down Sir George. In the end he would have been there, sitting inside the dilapidated mock-castle, listening to the little woes of the invalid wife (whom he had not met but imagined vividly; he had a vivid imagination; it was well regulated of course, his major asset in his craft). And at night he would have turned over the delectable letters, one by one, searching out their hints and secrets, passing them across the bright recording eye of his black box.

But now, because of James Blackadder, there was no time for patience and finesse. He must have those papers. He felt real pangs, a kind of famishing.

He gave his lecture, "The Art of a Biographer," in a fashionable City church whose Vicar liked people to come, and eclectically made sure they did, with guitars, faith-healing, anti-racist rallies, vigils for peace and passionate debates on the camel and the eye of the needle, and sexuality in the shadow of AIDS. He had persuaded the Vicar, whom he had met at an episcopal tea party, that biography was just as much a spiritual hunger of modern man as sex or political activity. Look at the sales, he had urged, look at the column space in the Sundays, people need to know how other people lived, it helps them to live, it's human. A form of religion, said the Vicar. A form of ancestor worship, said Cropper. Or more. What are the Gospels but a series of varying attempts at the art of biography?

He saw that the lecture, already scheduled, could be used. He wrote discreet letters to various academies, friendly and inimical. He rang up the Press and said that a major discovery was to be unveiled. He interested the directors of some of the new American banks and financial institutions that were expanding in the City. He invited Sir George, who did not reply, and the solicitor, Toby Byng, who said it would be very interesting. He invited Beatrice Nest, and saved her a front-row seat. He invited Blackadder, not because he thought he would come, but because he liked to imagine Blackadder's annoyance at receiving the invitation at all. He invited the US Ambassador. He invited the radio and the television.

Cropper loved lecturing. He was not of the old school, who fix the audience with a mesmeric eye and a melodious voice. He was a hi-tech lecturer, a magician of white screens and light-beams, sound-effects and magnifications. He filled the church with projectors and transparent cages of promptings which helped him, like President Reagan, to orchestrate with impromptu naturalness a highly complicated presentation.

The lecture, in the dark of the church, was accompanied by a series of brilliant images on the double screens. Huge oil-portraits, jewel-bright magnified miniatures, early photographs of bearded sages among broken arches of Gothic cathedrals, were juxtaposed with visions of the light and space of Robert Dale Owen University, of the sparkling sheen of the glass pyramid that housed the Stant Collection, of the brilliant little boxes that preserved the tresses of Randolph's and Ellen's woven hair, Ellen's cushion embroidered with lemon-trees, the jet brooch of York roses on its cushion of green velvet. From time to time, as if by accident, the animated shadow of Cropper's aquiline head would be thrown, as if in silhouette, across these luminous objects. On one of these occasions he would laugh, apologise, and say half-seriously, carefully scripted, there you see the biographer, a component of the picture, a moving shadow, not to be forgotten among the things he works with. It was in Ash's time that the intuition of historians became a respectable, even an essential, object of intellectual attention. The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life At this point in the lecture Cropper had himself lit again, briefly. He spoke with careful simplicity.

"Of course, what we all hope for and at the same time fear, is some major discovery that will confirm, or disprove, or change at the least, a lifetime's work. A lost Shakespeare play. The vanished works of Aeschylus. Such a discovery was made recently when a collection of letters from Wordsworth to his wife were found in a trunk in an attic. Scholars had said that Wordsworth's only passion was his sister. They had confidently called his wife dull, and unimportant. Yet here, after all those years of marriage, were these letters, full of sexual passion on both parts. History has had to be rewritten. Scholars have taken humble pleasure in rewriting it.

"I have to make known to you that an event of similar magnitude has just taken place in the field in which I have the honour to work, the field of Randolph Henry Ash. Letters have been discovered between him and the woman poet Christabel LaMotte, that are going to electrify-to upheave-the relevant associated fields. I cannot quote these letters-I have seen only a small few at this time. I can only express the hope that they may be freely made available to all scholars of all nations, for it is in the interest of international communication, free movement of ideas and intellectual property that they be most widely accessible."

The finale of Cropper's lecture was a product of his passion. The truth was, he had come to love the bright transparencies of the things he had acquired, almost as much as the things themselves. When he thought of Ash's snuff-box, he thought not of the weight of it in his hand, the cold metal warming in his own dry palm, but also now of the enamelled cover magnified on the screen. Ash had never seen such gilded birds of Paradise, such blooming grapes, such deep red roses, though all their colours had been fresher in his time. He had never seen the sheen on the pearly rim as the light touched it through Cropper's projector. At the end of the lecture, Cropper would present this object in hologram, floating in the church like a miraculously levitated object.

"Look," he would say, "at the museum of the future. The Russians are already stocking their museums not with sculptures or ceramics, nor with copies in fibreglass or plaster, but with these constructions of light. Everything can be everywhere, our culture can be, is, worldwide. The original objects must be preserved where the air is best, where breath cannot harm them, as the cave-paintings at Lascaux have been damaged by those who came to marvel at them. With modern technology, mere possession of the relics of the past is of little importance. All that is of importance is that those entrusted with the care of these fragile and fading things should have the requisite skills-and resources-to prolong their life indefinitely, and to send their representations, fresh, vivid, even, as you have seen,more vivid than in the flesh, so to speak, journeying round the world."

At the end of his lecture, Cropper would take out Ash's large gold watch, and check with it his own perfect timing: 50 minutes 22 seconds, this time. He had given up his naive youthful practice of publicly claiming the watch, with a little joke about continuity, Ash's time and Cropper's. For although the watch had been purchased with his own funds, it was arguable that by his own arguments it should be stowed away safely in the Stant cabinets. He had wondered once about juxtaposing it in his, its owner's, hand, with a hologram of itself. But he saw that his emotions, which were violent, about Ash's watch, were private, not to be confused with his public appeals. For he believed the watch had come to him, that it had been meant to come to him, that he had and held something of R. H. Ash. It ticked near his heart. He would have liked to be a poet. He put it on the edge of the pulpit, to time his responses while he took questions, and it beat away cheerfully, whilst the Press took hold of the Unknown Sex Life of Eminent Victorians.

Meanwhile he followed up his vague memory that there had been mention of Christabel LaMotte in the papers of his ancestress Priscilla Penn Cropper. He telephoned Harmony City and asked for a search to be done of P. P. Cropper's correspondence, which he had routinely copied into his computer archives. This produced, by fax the next day, the following letter.

Dear Mrs Cropper,

I am sensible of yr kind Interest in me - across all the wild wastes - shrieking gulls and tossing Ice - of the Atlantic. Indeed it is as strange a thing - that You - in your pleasantly Hot desert - should have knowledge of my small struggles - as that the Telegraph should utter imperatives of Arrest, or sale of Men and Commodities - -from Continent's Rim to Rim. But we live in a time of Change -I am told. Miss Judge, whose elegant Mind is habituated to the Gustsof the Invisible Powers, received an Intuition last night that the Veil of Flesh and Sense shall be rent away - there shall be no more Hesitation or gentle knocking on the Portal - but the Cherubim, the Living Creatures, shall walk the Earth, connected to us. And this she perceives as sheperceives Matter of Fact - the moonlight and firelight in her quiet room - the cat - all sparks of electricity and Rays of starting hairs - coming in out of the Garden.

You say - you are told - that I have some Power - as a Medium. Indeed it is not so. I see not nor hear much that delights and pleasantly - Exhausts - thesensitive Motor - -of Mrs Lees. I have seen Wonders worked by Her. I have heard Twangling Instruments - all diffused through the Air, now here, now there, and in all places at once. I have seen Spirit hands of great beauty, and felt them Warm my own, and melt, or Evaporate in my clasp. I have seen Mrs Lees Crowned with Stars, a true Persephone, a light in Darkness. I have seen also a cake of Violet soap go spiralling like an angry Bird above our heads and heard it utter a strange Hum. But I have no - Skill - it is not skill -I have no Attraction, I Magnetise no vanished beings - they come not - Mrs Lees says they will, and I have Faith. h ave, it seems, a power of Scrying. I see Creatures - Animate and Inanimate - or Intricate Scenes -I have tried the Crystal Ball and also a Pool of Ink in a Dish - wherein I have seen these things: a Womansewing, her face turned away, a great Gold Fish, whose every scale could be reckoned, an ormolu Clock I later - a week or more - -first saw in its Solid Presence on the shelf of Mrs NassauSenior - a suffocatingMass - of Feathers. These things begin - as points of Light - they cloud and thicken - and are present as it were solid.

You ask, as to my Faith. I do not know. I know true Faith when I meetit - as George Herbert who spoke daily to his Lord - chiding him forharshness it may be as:

O thatthou shouldst give dust a tongue To crie to thee And then not heare it crying!

But in his poem "Faith" he does speak - of the Grave - and beyond - in great security.

What thoughmy bodie runne to dust? Faith cleaves unto it, counting ev'ry grain With an exact and most particular trust Reserving allfor flesh again.

With what bodies, think you, with what corporeal nature come they, who crowd against our windows and are made solid in our thick air? Are they the bodies of the Resurrection? Are they, as OliviaJudge believes, manifest in temporary withdrawal of both Matter and Kinetic Force from the indomitable medium? What do we clasp if we are granted the unspeakable Grace - of Clasping- again? Orient and immortal wheat, Mrs Cropper, incorruptible - or the simulacra of our Fallen Flesh?

Dust falls from us daily as we walk, dust of us, lives a little in the air and is Trodden - we sweep away - Parts of Ourselves - and shall all these - -jots and omicra -cohaere? O we die daily - and there - is it all reckoned and gathered, husks restored to gloss and bloom?

Flowersfull - full of Scent - on our Tables - wet with the asperges - of this world - or that? But they wither and die, like any other. I have a Wreath - all brown now - of white rosebuds - will it bloomagain -there?

And then I would ask of you, if you are wise, why those who comefrom, f rom that world - those visitants, those Revenants, those Loved Ones - why are they all so Singly and Singularly Cheerful in their mode of address? For we are taught that there is eternalprogression - perfection by degrees - no sudden Bliss. Why may we not hear the Voices of Righteous Anger? We are guilty towardsThem, we have Betrayed-for our owngood - should they not Chide and be Terrible?

What constraint of Flesh or decorum renders them, I would inquire, so u niformly Saccharine, Mrs Cropper? Is there in our sad Age no wholesome Wrath, divine or human? As for me, I strangely hunger tohear - not assurances of Peace and Sanctification - but the True HumanVoice - of wounds - and woe - and Pain - that I might share it - if it might be - as I should share it - as I wouldshare All - withthose I loved - in my earthly Life

But I run on - maybe incomprehensibly. I have a Desire. I will not tell you what it is, for I am adamant I shall tell none - until -I have - the Substance of it.

A crumb, Mrs Cropper, of living dust, in my hand. A crumb. So far denied…

Your friend, in thought,

C. LaMotte

Cropper decided that this letter showed strong symptoms of derangement. He left its interpretation aside for the moment. It gave him a pang of pure hunting pleasure. He was on the scent. It was in the house of Miss Olivia Judge, at a seance of Mrs Lees, that Randolph Henry Ash had carried out what he had once, in a letter to Ruskin, called "my Gaza exploit," a name by which the episode was generally known in scholarly circles since Cropper, in The Great Ventriloquist, had used it as a chapter heading. In fact this letter was Ash's only reference to the episode, which had presumably given rise to his poem Mummy Possest. Cropper took down his copy of The Great Ventriloquist and looked up his reference:

I do not think you should allow yourself to be taken in by theseghouls and goblins who play with our most sacred fears and hopes,in the desire, often enough simply to enliven the humdrum witha frisson, or to compose, conduct and orchestrate as it were thevulnerable passions of the bereaved and the desperate. I do notdeny that human and inhuman things are maybe made manifestat such times-tricksy little goblins may walk and tap and tremble inkwells-men and women in the dark may hallucinate, asis well known in the case of the sick or the wounded. We haveall, my dear friend, an infinite capacity to be deceived by desire, to hear what we long to hear, to see what we incessantly form to our own eye or ear as gone and lost-this is a near-universal human feeling-easy to play upon, as it is most highly-strung and unstable.

I was at a seance, a week back, where I made myself unpopular to the point of hissing and scratching-by catching at a floating wreath which dropped wet drops on my brow, and finding I was clutching the hand of the medium-one Mrs Hella Lees, who, when not transported, is a sombre enough Roman-looking matron, with a pallid face and dark shadows under liquid blackish eyes-but who can twist and howl and thrash with her arms when the spirits lay hold on her, greatly facilitating the withdrawal of a few fingers from the precautionary hands that clasp hers on the table. We sat in the dark-moony light through the curtains, a glow in the hearth from a dying fire-and saw much the usual things, I suppose, hands appearing (with long trailing muslinish drapes over their joins) above the far edge of the table, a fall of hothouse flowers from the air, the shuffling advance of an armchair from a corner, and the patting of our knees and ankles by somethingu/fe/r)' and certainly warm. And winds in our hair and floating phosphorous lights, you may imagine.

I am convinced as I may be that we are all being practised upon-I will not say by a simple fraud-but by someone who lives by such practising. So I put up my arms, and fished and pulled, and down came the house of cards, as far as I am concerned, with a veritable clattering to the ground of travelling fire-irons and thudding of books and tablelegs and dissonant chords on the concealed accordions and clack of the tongue of the handbell-all, I have no doubt, connected to the person of Mrs Lees by a Lilliputian cat's-cradle of invisible threads. I have been much abused, since, for my Gaza exploit, and indeed called to task for a kind of mental destruction of spirit-matter and sensitive souls. A great bull in a china shop, I felt myself to be, amongst all the floating gauze and tinkling cymbals and soft perfumes. But if it were so, if the departed spirits were called back-what good does it do? Were we meant to spend our days sitting and peering into the edge of the shadows? Much is said of the experiences of Sophia Cotterell, who is said to have held her dead baby on her knee for a quarter of an hour whilst its hands patted its father's cheeks. If this is fraud, playing on a mother's harrowed feelings, it is wickedness indeed. But if it is not -and if the soft loading of the knee be not a goblin or a product of the imagination-does it not still make us tremble with a kind of sick distaste, to see such frenzied dwelling in the dark…?

In any case, here was trickery…

Cropper thought fast. What if LaMotte, who seemed to be at the house of Olivia Judge, had also been present at the Gaza Exploit? An account of this seance existed also in The ShadowyPortal, the autobiographical reminiscences of Mrs Lees. As was her custom, Mrs Lees had protected the names of her clients and the private nature of the messages they had received. There had been twelve people at the seance, of whom three had retired into an inner room to receive particular communications, as the spirit guides had instructed through Mrs Lees. It was clear from Priscilla Cropper's correspondence that Olivia Judge, an active promoter of many good causes, had at that time housed a group of female searchers after enlightenment, in her house in Twickenham. Priscilla Cropper had been in regular communion with Mrs Judge, who sent her regular accounts of the marvels evinced by Mrs Lees, as well as of the progress of other good causes, meetings, for spiritual healing and Fourierist doctrine, the emancipation of women and the proscription of strong drink.

The group in Twickenham was known as the Vestal Lights, a name that Cropper thought to be an affectionate term used among its members, rather than anything more formal. It might be that Christabel LaMotte had joined the Vestal Lights. Cropper was catching up on the biography of LaMotte, hampered by lack of access to the Lincoln papers, and by an incapacity to read the Lacanian riddles in which feminist speculations were couched. He was at this stage unaware of the lost year of LaMotte's life, and not fully apprised of the circumstances of the death of Blanche Glover. He went to the London Library, at the top of which is an excellent shelf of spiritualist writings, and asked for The Shadowy Portal, which was out to another reader. He tried the British Library, whose copy had been, he was informed by a polite note, destroyed by enemy action. He sent off to Harmony City for a microfilm, and waited.

James Blackadder, with none of Cropper's gusto, was picking his way through the London Library's Shadowy Portal. He too had begun in total ignorance of the movements of Christabel LaMotte, and lacked Cropper's certain knowledge of any connection between LaMotte and Hella Lees in 1861. But he had picked up an earlier reference to Mrs Lees in a letter Sir George had tried to intrigue him with, and he was engaged in a thorough rereading of Ash's known work and life round the crucial months of 1859. He had read an article on Actiniae, or sea anemones, without enlightenment, and had noticed an absence of information about Ash in early i860. He had reread Mummy Possest, which he had always thought anomalous in its hostility to its female protagonist and by extension to women in general. He asked himself now if this hitherto unexplained burst of bitterness was connected to the poet's feelings about Christabel LaMotte. Or, of course, his wife.

The Shadowy Portal was a rich violet in colour, with gilded leaves and an embossed design on its cover, of a gilded dove, bearing a wreath, emerging from a keyhole-shaped black space. Inside, glued to the frontispiece, inside a frame of Puginesque arches, was a photograph of the medium, oval in shape. It showed a dark-skirted woman, seated at a table, her heavily beringed hands clasped on her lap, her beaded front hung with jet necklaces and a heavy funereal locket. Her hair, which hung about her face, was black and glossy, her nose aquiline and her mouth large. Her eyes, under heavy black brows, were deepset, and, as Ash had said, shadowed. It was a powerful face, strong-boned and fleshy together.

Blackadder leafed through the introductory matter. Mrs Lees came from a Yorkshire family with Quaker connections and had "seen" grey strangers in an early Quaker Meeting, where she was accustomed to seeing threads and clouds of odylic light run about the heads and shoulders of the Elders. On visiting a pauper hospital, at the age of twelve, with her mother, she had observed thick clouds of dove-grey or purplish light hovering above the forms of the sick, and had been able accurately to predict who would die and who would recover. She had become entranced in a Meeting and had given an oration in Hebrew, a language of which she knew nothing. She had provoked winds in closed rooms, and had seen her dead grandmother perched on the end of her bed, singing and smiling. Rapping, table-shifting and written messages on slates had followed, and a career as a private medium. She had also had some success as a public speaker of Spiritual Discourses, under the control of her spirit guides, who were mostly a Red Indian girl called Cherry (an affectionate abbreviation of Cherokee) and a dead Scottish professor of chemistry, one William Morton, who had had a hard passage working out the debris of his spiritual scepticism before he realised his true nature and his mission to aid and inform those mortals still in the flesh. Some of these Discourses, on such topics as "Spiritualism and Materialism,”

“Physical Manifestation and Spectral Light," or "Standing on the Threshold," were appended to the volume of reminiscences. These discourses, whatever their ostensible subject, all had a certain sameness-possibly the effect of trance-related to "that protoplasm of human speech flavoured with mild cosmic emotion" which Podmore discovered in the "dead level" style and sentiment of another inspired speaker.

Ash's Gaza Exploit had raised her to an unusual pitch of unforgiving wrath.

Sometimes you may hear a positive person say, "The spirits are never able to perform in my presence." Very likely-very likely indeed! But it should be no boast. If it is a fact, it is almost a disgraceful one. The fact that any human beings can take with them an element of such positiveness, a scepticism of such power, that it may overcome the influence of a mind disembodied, is certainly not to the credit of the individual. A positive mind entering a circle or seance for the investigation of spiritualism is like introducing a ray of light into the dark compartment of the photographer when not wanted; or like taking up a seed from under the ground to see if it be growing; or like any other violent intervention in the processes of nature.

A positive mind may well say, "Why can the spirits not show themselves in the light of day as well as in the dark?" Professor Morton's reply to this is that we see how many natural processes are subject to fluctuations in light and dark. The leaves of a plant do not produce "oxygen" without sunlight, and Professor Draper has recently shown that the relative powers of different rays to decompose carbon move through the spectrum thus: yellow, green, orange, red, blue, indigo, violet. Now the spirits have steadily indicated that their materialism is best effected in those rays which are at the blue and indigo and violet end of the spectrum. If a seance could be lit by a violet ray from a prism we might see marvels. I have found that a small quantity of indigo light from a thick pane of glass over a lantern allows our spirit friends marvellous freedom to bring us gifts of a solid kind, or to make themselves airy forms, for a time, from the substance of the medium and of the gases and solids present in the room. They cannot work in harsh light, and past centuries have known this by experiment. Do not ghosts appear at twilight, and the Celtic races meet the messengers of the dead in what they call the Black Month?

Now, a positive mind often brings with it a cloud of odylic fire of a disagreeable red or yellow colour, flaming and angry, which the medium and any other sensitive person may perceive. Or such a person may emit a kind of chill-like the cold rays from the fingers of Jack Frost-which may penetrate the atmosphere and prevent the aura, or the spiritual matter, from accumulating. I feel such freezing presences as a blow in my lungs, even before the cutaneous surface is aware of them. All exosmose action ceases, and the consequence is, there is no atmosphere out of which the spirit can produce manifestations.

Perhaps the most terrible example of the effects of such a presence on the delicate operations of spirit communication is the damage wreaked by the self-regarding behaviour of the poet Randolph Ash at a seance I held at Miss Olivia Judge's house, in the days when that group of marvellously sensitive women, the Vestal Lights, were gathered together under her roof for the purpose of sustained enquiry into spiritual Truth. Miss Judge has a beautiful house, Yew Tree Lodge, in Twickenham, near the river, and many marvellous things have happened there, many gatherings of the living and the departed, many signs and supremely comforting sounds and utterances. Elementals from the water play on her lawns and can be heard laughing at her window in the twilight. Her guests have been distinguished men and women: Lord Lytton, Mr Trollope, Lord and Lady Cotterell, Miss Christabel LaMotte, Dr Carpenter, Mrs de Morgan, Mrs Nassau Senior.

At the date I speak of, we were engaged in a series of profoundly illuminating talks with our spirit friends and guides, and many marvels had been vouchsafed to us. It was made known to me, I think by Lord Lytton, that Mr Ash was greatly desirous of attending a seance. When I demurred-for it is often harmful to disrupt a circle which is working well together-I was told that Mr Ash had experienced a recent loss, and was in great need of spiritual consolation and comfort. I was still doubtful, but the case was forcefully pleaded and I agreed. It was a condition on Mr Ash's part, that no one should know in advance of his identity or purpose in coming, so that, he said, he should not impinge on the naturalness of the circle. I agreed to this condition.

It is not too much to say that upon Mr Ash's entry into Miss Judge's drawing-room I felt a blast of sceptical cold in my face and a kind of choking fog in my throat. Miss Judge asked me if I felt quite well and I said I believed I felt a chill coming on. Mr Ash shook my hand nervously, and the electricity of his touch revealed a paradox to me-beneath the congealed ice of his scepticism burned a spiritual sensitivity and force of unusual power. He said to me in a jocular tone, "So it is you who calls spirits from the vasty deep?" I told him, "You should not mock. I have no power to summon spirits. I am their instrument; they speak through me, or not, as they please, not as I please." He said, "They speak to me too, through the medium of language."

He looked about him nervously and did not address the rest of the assembled company, which included seven ladies and four gentlemen, as well as myself. Of the Vestal Lights, all were present, as at all the previous sittings, to wit, Miss Judge, Miss Neve, Miss LaMotte and Mrs Furry.

We sat around the table in near darkness, as was our custom. Mr Ash was not next to me, but on the right of the gentleman beside me-as was our practice, we all clasped hands. I felt still the weight of cold in my lungs and throat, and had to cough repeatedly, so much so that Miss Judge asked if I were ill. I said I was prepared to try if our friends would speak, but I feared they would not, as the atmosphere was inhospitable. After a time I felt a terrible coldness creeping up my legs and my frame began to tremble greatly. Many trances are preceded by a moment of nausea and giddiness, but the trance into which I now fell was preceded by the shaking of approaching death, and Mr Ritter on my right remarked that my poor hands were as cold as stones. I have no more conscious memory of the events of that seance, but Miss Judge kept notes which I reproduce as they stand:

Mrs Lees shook all over and a strange raucous voice cried out, "Do not force me." We asked if it was Cherry and were told, "No, no, she will not come." We asked who it was again and were told "Nobodaddy" with a horrible laugh. Miss Neve said the undeveloped spirits must be playing tricks on us. Then there was a violent cracking and rapping, and several of us felt our skirts lifted and our knees patted by spirit hands. Mrs Furry asked if Adeline, her baby daughter, was present. The horrible voice cried out, "There is no child." It then added, "Curiosity killed the cat" and other silly phrases. A large book, from the table beside Mrs Lees, was flung across the room amidst laughter.

Miss Neve said that perhaps there was a hostile presence in the room. One of the other ladies present, who had never before displayed any skill as a medium, began to weep and laugh, crying out in German "Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint." A voice spoke through Mrs Lees saying "Remember the stones." Someone present cried out "Where are you?" and for answer we all heard the sound of flowing water and waves, with marvellous distinctness. I asked if there was a particular spirit present who wished to speak to one of our company. The answer came back through Mrs Lees, that yes, there was present a spirit who had had great difficulty in making itself known but might speak if anyone who felt themselves addressed were to follow the medium into the inner room. As she spoke, a marvellously sweet voice said, "I bring gifts of reconciliation," and a white hand was seen hovering above the table, carrying a marvellous white wreath, with the dew still fresh upon it, and surrounded by a crown of silvery lights. The medium slowly rose to go into the inner room, and two of the ladies, both much moved, and indeed sobbing, rose to follow her, when Mr Ash cried out, "Oh, you shall not escape me," and snatched at the air, crying out "Lights! Lights!" The medium collapsed in a dead faint, and another lady fell back in her chair and was soon seen, when the lights were put on, to be without consciousness. Mr Ash was clutching the medium's wrist, which he claimed had been transporting the wreath, though how that could be, considering where it fell, and where the "gentleman" and the medium were found, defies understanding.

Now here was chaos, and considerable danger, all caused by Mr Ash's impulsive and destructive acts. Two delicate organisations disturbed-my own and that of the other lady, who was experiencing her first trance in these desperate circumstances. And the poet seemed quite unaware of the harm he might do to a disembodied mind attempting, heroically and with critical effort, to materialise itself in a new and experimental form. Miss Judge records that I myself lay with a chill and livid face, uttering deep groans. The poet meanwhile compounded his act of folly by releasing my wrist and rushing to the side of the other lady, seizing her by the shoulders, despite urgent assurances from the other Vestal Lights, that it was dangerous to disturb or startle a person so entranced. He was, they tell me, calling out in an uncontrolled and frantic manner, "Where is the child? Tell me what they have done with the child." I understood at the time that Mr Ash was enquiring after the spirit of a departed child of his own, but I am told that this could not be the case, as Mr Ash is childless. At this point a voice spoke through my lips, saying

"Whose were the stones?"

The other lady became very ill, very pale, her breathing irregular, her pulse weak and fluttering. Miss Judge asked Mr Ash to leave, which he refused to do, saying that he wanted an answer, and that he had been "practised upon." I came to my senses at this point and saw him; he looked most horrid and uncontrolled, with veins standing on his brow, and a most thunderous expression. All round him was a fiery mass of dull red actinic light, seething with hostile energies.

He seemed to me in that moment a demon and I asked, weakly, that he should be requested to leave. At the same time two of the Vestal Lights bore away the unconscious body of our friend. This lady did not recover consciousness for two whole days, to the great distress of the company, and when she did, seemed unable to speak and unwilling to eat or drink, so great was the shock to her delicate form of the terrible acts which had taken place.

Mr Ash nevertheless took it upon himself to communicate, as a matter of fact, to various persons, that he had detected "cheating" at the seance, at which he represented his own position as that of a detached observer. He was far from that, very far, as I hope the account of Miss Judge, as well as my own, will bear witness. When he later wrote his cleverly insinuating poem, Mummy Possest, he was taken by the general public as a champion of reason against knavery. Happy are they who have been persecuted for truth's sake-I suppose we must say-but there is no harder blow to bear than indirect malice, bred I am sure of impotent disappointment, for Mr Ash's whole manner was that of a seeker betrayed by his own positivism into the frustration of any communication he might have received.

And for my pain, and that of the other afflicted lady, not a thought, not a flicker of regard!!

Blackadder had written to every public body he could think of who might be concerned with the Ash-LaMotte correspondence. He had lobbied the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, and had requested an interview with the Minister for the Arts, which had resulted in a dialogue with an aggressive and not wholly gentlemanly civil servant, who had said that the Minister was fully apprised of the importance of the discovery, but did not believe that it warranted interfering with Market Forces. It might be possible to allocate some small sum from the National Heritage Trust. It was felt that Professor Blackadder might attempt to match this sum from private sponsorship or public appeal. If the retention of these old letters in this country is truly in the national interest, this young man appeared to be saying, with his vulpine smile and slight snarl, then Market Forces will ensure that the papers are kept in this country without any artificial aid from the state. He added, as he saw Blackadder to the lift, through corridors smelling faintly of brussels sprouts and blackboard dusters, like forgotten schools, that he had had to do Randolph Henry Ash for his A-Level, and hadn't been able to make head or tail of him. "They did go on so, don't you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously," he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths. As it creaked up, Blackadder said, "That's not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.”

“So pompous, don't you think?" returned the young man, smoothly impervious, closing the professor into his box.

Blackadder, who had been immersed in Mummy Possest and the reminiscences of Hella Lees, felt grimly that Market Forces were invisible winds and odylic currents quite as wild and unpredictable as any interrupted by Ash's Gaza Exploit. He also felt that Mortimer Cropper had a direct line to infinitely more powerful Market Forces than he himself, in the lower depths of the Museum. He had heard about Cropper's sermon-lecture, invoking these. He was gloomily considering his next move, when he was telephoned by a television journalist, Shushila Patel, who had an occasional five minutes on the Arts on Events in Depth, a late-night news analysis programme. Ms Patel had taken against Cropper because he represented capitalist and cultural imperialism. She had asked around and had been told that James Blackadder was the expert to have on her programme.

At first Blackadder was quietly but fiercely excited at the idea of putting the power of television behind his cause. He was not a broadcasting academic; he had never written a review outside a learned journal, had never spoken on the radio. He made sheafs of notes, as he would do on a conference paper, on Ash, on LaMotte, on National Art Treasures, on the effect of the discovery of the letters on the wrong interpretations advanced in The Great Ventriloquist. It did not occur to him to ask if Cropper would be present in person; he envisaged the broadcast as a kind of potted lecture. As it approached he began to feel a chill of apprehension. He watched the television and observed politicians, surgeons, planners and policemen being sternly and volubly interrupted by hostile interviewers. He woke sweating from nightmares in which he was required to sit his Finals again at a moment's notice and with new papers on Commonwealth Literature and post-Derridean strategies of non-interpretation, or in which he was asked in a machine-gun stutter of rapid questions, what Randolph Ash had to say about Social Security cuts, the Brixton riots and the destruction of the ozone.

They sent a car for him, a Mercedes driven by a chauffeur with a patrician accent who looked as though Blackadder's mackintosh would dirty his clean cushions. This did not prepare Blackadder for the rabbit-warren of dusty cubicles and agitated young women in which he found himself on arrival. He sat bemused on a moquette bucket-couch, dating from the mid-1950s, staring at a water-cooler and clutching his copy of the Oxford Standard Ash. He was given a plastic cup of unpleasant tea, and told to wait for Ms Patel, who finally arrived, carrying a clipboard of yellow paper, and sat down beside him. She was extremely beautiful, fine-boned, with her black silk hair in a complicated knot and her neck decorated with a fine silver and turquoise lacy necklace. She wore a peacock blue sari, decorated with silver flowers, and she smelled of something lightly exotic-sandalwood, cinnamon? She smiled on Blackadder and made him feel, briefly, wholly welcome and desired. She then became businesslike, fetching out her pad and saying, "Well, what's important about Randolph Henry Ash?"

Blackadder had an incoherent vision of his own life's work, a fine line here, a philosophical joke tracked down there, a sense of the shape of many men's interwoven thought, none of which would go bluntly into words. He said, "He understood the nineteenth-century loss of religious faith. He wrote about history-he understood history-he saw what the new ideas about development had done to the human idea of time. He's a central figure in the tradition of English poetry. You can't understand the twentieth century without understanding him."

Ms Patel looked politely baffled. She said, "I'm afraid I never heard of him until I got onto this story. I did a literature course in my degree, but it was in modern American literature and postcolonial English. So tell me why we should still care about Randolph Henry Ash?"

"If we care about history at all-"

"English history-"

"Not English. He wrote about Jewish history, and Roman, and Italian, and German, and prehistoric, and-English of course-" Why must the English now always apologise? "He wanted to understand how individual people at any particu lar time saw the shape of their lives-from their beliefs to their pots and pans-”

“Individualism. I see. So why should we want to keep this correspondence in this country?"

"Because it may illuminate his ideas-I've seen some of the letters-he writes about the story of Lazarus-he was very interested in Lazarus-and about nature study, the development of organisms-"

"Lazarus," repeated Ms Patel, blankly.

Blackadder looked rather wildly about his dimly-lit, porridge-colored box. He was getting claustrophobia. He was wholly unfitted for one-sentence claims on behalf of Ash. He could not detach himself from Ash enough to see what was not known. Ms Patel looked a little despondent. She said, "We've got time for three questions and a quickie to finish on. How about my asking you what is Randolph Ash's importance to our society now?"

Blackadder heard himself say, "He thought carefully and didn't make up his mind in a hurry. He believed knowledge mattered-"

"Sorry, I don't understand-"

The door opened. A bright female voice said, "I've brought your other speaker. This is right, isn't it, this is the last item on Events in Depth? This is Professor Leonora Stern."

Leonora was resplendent and barbaric in a scarlet silk shirt and trousers, faintly Oriental, faintly Peruvian, with woven rainbowcoloured borders. Her black hair flowed on her shoulders, her wrists and ears and visible bosom were hung with suns and stars of gold. She shone in the small space by the water-cooler and emitted pulses of florid and musky scent.

"I expect you know Professor Stern," said Ms Patel. "She's the expert on Christabel LaMotte."

"I was staying in Maud Bailey's apartment," said Leonora. "And they called her, and got me, that's how it was. I'm glad to know you, Professor. We've got things to discuss."

"I've been asking Professor Blackadder a few questions about the importance of Randolph Ash," said Ms Patel. "I'd like to ask you the same questions about Christabel LaMotte."

"Go ahead," said Leonora, expansively.

Blackadder watched with a mixture of fine distaste, technical admiration and sheer trepidation as Leonora built up a memorable thumb-nail miniature Christabel. Great neglected poet, little lady with sharp eyes and a sharp pen, great and unflinching analyses of female sexuality, of lesbian sexuality, of the importance of the trivial… "Good," said Ms Patel. "Excellent, a major discovery, isn't it? And I shall ask you at the end, what is the importance of this discovery-don't answer now. It's time to go to Make-up, or almost. I'll see you in the studio in about half an hour."

Left alone with Leonora, Blackadder was apprehensive. Leonora plumped down beside him, her thigh touching his, and took his copy of Ash from him, without asking.

"Better read this now, I guess. I've never gone much for Randolph Henry. Too male. Long-winded. Old hat-" No.

"Obviously not. I tell you what, a lot of us are going to have to eat our words when this all gets out in the open, a whole lot of us. I should put this book away, Professor. Uh-hunh. I guess we've got threeminutes to make out the importance of all this stuff to the great greedy public and that don't include illustrations. No, you've got to make out your Mr Ash to be the sexiest property in town. You've got to get them by the balls, Professor. Make 'em cry. Think what you got to say and get it said whatever that pretty creature out there tries to get you to say. If you get me-"

"Oh yes. I-get you."

"One thing you'll get said in the time, and that's your lot, Professor.”

“I see that. Mmn. One thing-”

“One sexy thing, Professor." In Make-up, Blackadder and Leonora lay back together, side by side. He submitted to powder-puffs and paintbrush, thinking of the hands of morticians, watching the fine grey cobwebs round his eyes being blocked out by a fine brushload of Max Factor Creme Puff. Leonora had her head back but spoke on, indifferently, to him and the girl.

'I like a lot of colour at the edge of the lids there-load it on, I can take it, I've got huge features and striking colouring, I can carry it off OK-as I was saying, Professor, you and I have to have a serious talk. I guess you're as keen as I am to know the whereabouts of Maud Bailey, hunh? That's great, how about some of that thundery dark pink under the brow here-and I'd like a manslaying scarlet lipstick, which on reflection I'll get out of my own bag, you have to be careful with communal body fluids these days, in the nicest possible way, of course-as I say, Professor, or as I didn't say, I've got a pretty good idea about where that young woman's gone-and your researcher with her-I showed her the way-have you got any of those metallic spangles you can dust on here and there, ma'am, I like to strike the odd shaft of light across the screen, show that the scholarly world's got its glitter… Red in tooth and claw I am now, Professor, but calm yourself, I'm not out to get you. I'm out to strike a blow for Christabel and a punch in the guts of that bastard Mortimer Cropper, who wouldn't have Christabel on his course and threatened to sue a dear friend of mine for defamation, he really did. I guess all this makes him look a bit of a fool?'

"Not really. These things happen."

"Well you got to say it makes him look a fool, if you want to keep those papers, don't you?"

Shushila sat between her guests and smiled. Blackadder watched the cameras and felt like a dusty barman. Dusty grey between these two peacocks, dusty with face-powder-he could smell himself-under the hot light. The moment before the broadcast seemed eternal, and then suddenly, like a sprint race, they were all talking very rapidly and as suddenly silent again. He had only the vaguest recollection of what had been said. The two women, like gaudy parrots, talking about female sexuality and its symbols when repressed, the Fairy Melusina and the danger of the female, LaMotte and the love that dared not speak its name, Leonora's huge surprise when it seemed that Christabel might have loved a man. And his own voice: "Randolph Henry Ash was one of the great love poets in our language. Ask to Embla is one of the great poems of true sexual passion. No one has ever really known whom those poems were written for. In my view the explanation advanced in the standard biography always looked unconvincing and silly. Now we know who it was-we've discovered Ash's Dark Lady. It's the kind of discovery scholars dream of. The letters have got to stay in our country-they're part of our national story."

And Shushila: "You won't agree with that, Professor Stern? Being an American?"

And Leonora: "I think the letters should be in the British Library. We can all have microfilms and photocopies, the problems are only sentimental. And I'd like Christabel to have honour in her own country and Professor Blackadder here, who's the greatest living Ash scholar, to have charge of the correspondence. I'm not acquisitive, Shushila-all I want is a chance to write the best critique of these letters once they're available. The days of cultural imperialism are over, I'm glad to say…"

Afterwards Leonora took his arm. "I'll buy you a drink," she said. "You need one, I guess. So do I. You did fine, Professor, better than I thought."

"It was your influence," Blackadder said. "What I said was an awful travesty. I apologise, Dr Stern. I didn't mean to imply that you influenced me to travesty, I meant that you influenced me enough to make me articulate at all-"

"I know what you meant. I bet you like malt whisky, you're a Scot." They found themselves in a dim and beery bar, where Leonora shone like a Christmas tree. "Now, let me tell you where I think Maud Bailey is…"