Possession. A Romance

Chapter 25

ELLEN ASH'S JOURNAL

NOVEMBER 25TH 1889

I write this sitting at His desk at two in the morning. I cannot sleep and he sleeps his last sleep in the coffin, quite still, and his soul gone away. I sit among his possessions-now mine or no one's-and think that his life, his presence, departs more slowly from these inanimate than from him, who was once animate and is now, I cannot write it, I should not have started writing. My dear, I sit here and write, to whom but thee? I feel better here amongst thy things-the pen is reluctant to form "thee,”

“thy," there is no one there, and yet here is still a presence. Here is an unfinished letter. There are the microscope, the slides, a book with a marker, and-oh, my dear-uncut leaves. I fear sleep, I fear what dreams may come, Randolph, and so I sit here and write. When he was lying there he said, "Burn what they should not see," and I said, "Yes," I promised. At such times, it seems, a kind of dreadful energy comes, to do things quickly, before action becomes impossible. He hated the new vulgarity of contemporary biography, the ransacking of Dickens's desk for his most trivial memoranda, Forster's unspeakable intrusions into the private pains and concealments of the Carlyles. He said often to me, burn what is alive for us with the life of our memory, and let no one else make idle curios or lies of it. I remember being much struck with Harriet Martineau, in her autobiography, saying that to print private letters was a form of treachery-as though one should tell the intimate talk of two friends with their feet on the fender, on winter nights. I have made a fire here, and burned some things. I shall burn more. He shall not be picked by vultures.

There are things I cannot burn. Nor ever I think look at again. There are things here that are not mine, that I could not be a party to burning. And there are our dear letters, from all those foolish years of separation. What can I do? I cannot leave them to be buried with me. Trust may be betrayed. I shall lay these things to rest with him now, to await my coming. Let the earth take them.

Mortimer Cropper: The Great Ventriloquist 1964, Chapter 26, "After Life's fitful fever," pp. 449 et seq.

A committee was hastily constituted to see whether it might not be possible to inter the great man in Westminster Abbey. Lord Leighton went to see the Dean, who was understood to have some doubts about Randolph Ash's religious beliefs. The poet's widow, who had watched devoted and sleepless by his bedside during his last illness, wrote to both Lord Leighton and the Dean to say that it was her wish, as she was sure that it had been her husband's, that he should lie in the quiet country churchyard of St Thomas's Church at Hodershall on the edge of the North Downs, where her sister Faith's husband was Vicar, and where she hoped to lie herself. Accordingly a great number of fashionable and literary personages made their way through the leafy lanes of Downland, on a dripping English November day, when yellow leaves were pashed into mud by the hooves of the horses and the sun was red and low in the sky.[22] The pall-bearers were Leighton, Hallam Tennyson, Sir Rowland Michaels and the painter Robert Brunant.[23] When the coffin had been lowered into the clay, covered with huge white wreaths, Ellen laid upon it a box, containing "our letters and other mementoes" which were "too dear to burn, too precious ever to expose to the public view."[24] Then the grave was filled up with flowers and the mourners turned away, leaving the last sad acts to the spades of the sextons, who engulfed both the ebony casket and the fragile flowers with the local mixture of chalk, flint and clay.[25] The young Edmund Meredith, Ellen's nephew, carried away from the grave's edge a cluster of violets which he carefully pressed and kept among the leaves of his Shakespeare.[26]

In later months, Ellen Ash caused a simple black headstone to be set up, with a carving of an ash tree, showing the spread of both the crown and the roots, such as he would occasionally playfully draw beside his signature in some of his letters.[27] Beneath it was carved Ash's own translation of Cardinal Bembo's epitaph for Raphael, which is carved around Raphael's tomb in the Pantheon, and appeared in Ash's poem about the painting of the Stanze in the Vatican, The Sacred and the Profane.

Here lies that Man, who, whilst he was in Breath

Made our great Mother tremble that her skill

Was overmastered, who now, by his Death,

Fears her own Powers may grow forever still. [28]

Beneath this is written

This stone is dedicated to Randolph Henry Ash, a great poet and a true and kind husband, by his sorrowing widow and wife of more than 45 years, Ellen Christiana Ash, in the hope that "one short sleep past, we wake eternally"[29] where there is no more parting.

Later critics have expressed amusement or scorn at the "bathos"[30] of comparing this prolific Victorian poet to the great Raphael, though both, in the early part of this century, were out of favour. It is perhaps more surprising that there is no contemporary record either of disapproval that the Stone should have no mention of the Christian faith, or possibly, conversely, admiration for the tact with which Ellen had avoided this. What her choice of citation does is to link her husband, through his own poem and Raphael and Bemba, to the whole ambiguous Renaissance tradition, exemplified in the circular Pantheon, a Christian church which was originally in the form of a classical temple. It is not to be supposed that these thoughts were necessarily in her mind, although they may have discussed these matters together.

We cannot avoid speculating about what was contained in the box which was buried with Randolph Ash, and was observed to be still intact when his widow's casket was lowered beside him seven years later.[31] Ellen Ash shared her generation's prudery and squeamishness about the publication of private papers. The claim is frequently made-not least by Ellen herself[32] -that Randolph participated in these scruples. Fortunately for us he left no testamentary indications to this effect, and even more fortunately for us, his widow's carrying out of his supposed injunctions was patchy and haphazard. We do not know what invaluable evidence is lost to us, but we have seen, in these pages, the ample richness of what remains. Nevertheless we cannot help wishing that those who disturbed his rest in 1893 had seen fit at least to open the hidden box, survey it and record for posterity what it contained. Such decisions to destroy, to hide, the records of an exemplary life are made in the heat of life, or more often in the grip of immediatepost-mortem despair, and have little to do with the measured judgment, and desire for full and calm knowledge, which succeed these perturbations. Even Rossetti thought better of burying his poems with his tragic wife and had to demean himself and her in disinterring them. I think often of what Freud said about the relations of our primitive forebears to the dead, who could be seen ambivalently as demons and ghosts, or as revered ancestors:

"The fact that demons are always regarded as the spirits of those who have died recently shows better than anything the influence of mourning on the origin of belief in demons. Mourning has a quite specific psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivors' memories and hopes from the dead. When this has been achieved, the pain grows less and with it the remorse and self-reproaches and consequently the fear of the demon as well. And the same spirits who to begin with were feared as demons may now expect to meet with friendlier treatment; they are revered as ancestors and appeals are made to them for help."[33]

Might we not argue, in extenuation of our desire to behold what is hidden, that those whose disapproval made demons of them to their nearest and dearest, are now our beloved ancestors, whose relics we would cherish in the light of day?

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[22] Recorded by Swinburne in a letter to Theodore Watts-Dunton. A. C. Swinburne, CollectedLetters, Vol. V, p. 280. Swinburne's poem, "The Old Ygdrasil and the Churchyard Yew," is supposed to have been inspired by his emotions on the passing of R. H. Ash

[23] Reported in The Times, November 30th 1889. The reporter remarked "several comely young maidens, in floods of unembarrassed tears and a large gathering of respectful working men, beside the Literary Lions."

[24] Ellen Ash, in a letter to Edith Wharton, December 20th 1889, reprinted in The Letters of R. H. Ash ed. Cropper, vol. 8, p. 384. A similar expression of her intention occurs in an unpublished passage of her Journal, written two nights after the poet's death. The Journal is shortly (1967) to appear, edited by Dr Beatrice Nest, of Prince Albert College, London University.

[25] I have spent long hours walking in this countryside, and have observed the way the earth characteristically lies in layers, and throws up the dark flints embedded in the white chalk, which shine in the ploughed fields like snow.

[26] This Shakespeare, and those violets, repose now in the Stant Collection in Robert Dale Owen University, where they are preserved.

[27]See, for instance, the letter to Tennyson, in the Stant Collection (August 24th 1859), which is wholly bordered by a series of such formalised trees, the roots and branches intermingling, not unlike a William Morris repeating pattern. Stant MS no 146093 a.

[28] The Latin is Ille hic est Raphael timuit quo sospite vinci rerum magna parens et moriente mori.

[29] John Donne, "Death Be Not Proud," Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner, p.9

[30] An irritable comment of F. R. Leavis in Scrutiny, vol. XIII, pp. 130-31:"That the Victorians took Randolph Ash seriously as a poet is sufficientlyevinced by the seriousness of their obituary panegyrics, which claimed, like his bathetic tombstone, supplied by his wife, that he was the equal of Shakespeare, Milton, Rembrandt, Raphael and Racine."

[31] Recorded by Patience Meredith in a letter to her sister Faith, now in thepossession of Marianne Wormald, great-granddaughter of Edmund Meredith.

[32] See above, note 24, and in the unpublished Journal, November 25th 1889.

[33] Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Works (Standard edn 1955), vol. 13, pp. 65-6.

NOVEMBER 27TH 1889

The old woman trod softly along the dark corridors, and climbed the stairs, standing in uncertainty on various landings. From the back-we are going to see her clearly now-from the back and in the shadow, she might still have been any age. She wore a velvet dressing-gown, and soft embroidered slippers. She carried herself upright and without creaking, though her body was comfortably fleshed out. Her hair hung in a long pale plait between her shoulders; in the light of her candle, it could have been palest gold, though it was creamy white, a soft brown turned.

She listened to the house. Her sister Patience was sleeping in the best spare room, and somewhere on the second floor her nephew George, now an aspiring young barrister, slept too.

In his own bedroom, his hands crossed, his eyes closed, Randolph Henry Ash lay still, his soft white hair framed by quilted satin, his head pillowed on embroidered silk.

When she found she could not sleep, she had gone to him, opened his door quietly, quietly, and stood, looking down, taking in the change. Immediately after death, he had looked like himself, gentled and calmed after the struggle, resting. Now he was gone away, there was no one there, only an increasingly carved and bony simulacrum, the yellowing skin stretched taut over peaks of bone, the eyes sunk, the jaw sharp.

She looked at these changes, murmured a prayer into the blanket of silence, and said to the thing on the bed, "Where are you?" The whole house smelled, as it did every night, of extinguished coal fires, cold grates, old smoke.

She went into her own little writing-room, where her escritoire was covered with letters of condolence, to be answered, and the list of those invited to tomorrow's funeral, checked. She took her journal out of her drawer, and one or two other papers, looked irresolutely at the heap, and slipped out again, listening to sleep and death.

She went up another flight, towards the top of the house, where Randolph 's workroom was, from which it had been the business of her life to exclude everyone, anyone, even herself. His curtains were open. Light from a gas-lamp came in, and light from a full moon too, swimming silvery. There was the ghost of the smell of his tobacco. Heaps of books on his desk, from before that last illness. The feeling of him working was still in that room. She sat down at his writing-table, putting the candle in front of her, and felt, not better, that was the wrong thought, but less desolate, as though whatever was still present here was less gaunt and terrible than what slept, or lay as still as stone, down there.

She had his watch in her dressing-gown pocket, with the few papers she had brought up. She took it out and looked at it. Three. Three in the last morning he would be in the house.

She looked around at the glass-fronted bookcases, vaguely reflecting multiplied flames back at her. She opened a drawer or two, in the desk, and found sheafs of paper, in his hand, in others'; how was she to judge and decide the fate of all this?

Along one wall was his botanical and zoological collection. Microscopes in their wooden cases, hinged and latched. Slides, drawings, specimens. The Wardian cases containing sealed worlds of plant life, misted with their own breath, the elegantly panelled marine aquarium, with its weeds, its Actinia and starfish, against which M. Manet had painted the poet amongst his ferns, suggesting a world perhaps of primaeval vegetable swamp or foreshore. All this must go. She would consult his friends at the Science Museum as to a suitable home for it. Maybe it should be donated to an appropriate educational institution-a Working Men's club, a school of some kind. There had been, she remembered, his special airtight specimen box, glass-lined and sealed. She found it where it was kept; he was orderly in his habits. It would be ideal for her purpose.

There was a decision to be made and tomorrow would be too late.

He was a man who had never really had a serious illness, until this last one. And that was long-drawn-out; he had been confined to his bed for the last three months, with both of them knowing what was coming, though not when, nor how fast. They had both, during those months, lived in that one room, his bedroom. She had been close to him at all times, adjusting his air or his pillow, towards the end helping him to feed, reading to him when even the lightest book became too heavy. She thought she could feel his needs and discomforts, without words. The pain too, there was a sense in which she had shared the pain. She had sat quietly beside him, holding the papery white hand, and felt his life ebb, day by day. Not his intelligence. At the beginning there had been a feverish piece of time in which, for some reason, he had become obsessed by the poems of John Donne, had recited them to the ceiling, in a voice both resonant and beautiful, puffing away the fronds of beard from his mouth. When he couldn't find a line he called, "Ellen, Ellen, quickly, I am lost," and she had had to riffle and seek.

"What would I do without you, my dear? Here we are at the end, close together. You are a great comfort. We have been happy."

"We have been happy," she would say, and it was so. They were happy even then, in the way they had always been happy, sitting close, saying little, looking at the same things, together.

She would come into the room and hear the voice:

"Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it."

He carried out his dying in style. She watched him working it out, fighting the pain, the nausea, the fear, in order to have something to say to her that she would remember later, with warmth, with honour. Some of the things he said were said as endings. "I see why Swammerdam longed for the quiet dark." Or, "I tried to write justly, to see what I could from where I was." Or, for her, "Fortyfour years with no anger. I do not think that many husbands and wives can say as much."

She wrote these things down, not for what they were, though they were good things to say, but because they reminded her of his face turned towards hers, the intelligent eyes under the damp creased brow, the frail grip of the once-strong fingers. "Do you remember-dear-when you sat-like a water-nixie on that stone-on that stone in the weeds at the-the name's gone-don't tell me- the poet's fountain-the fountain-the Fontaine de Vaucluse. You sat in the sun."

"I was afraid. It was all rushing."

"You did not look-afraid."

Most of what they shared, after all, after all was done, was silence.

"It was all a question of silence," she said aloud to him, in his workroom, where she could no longer expect any answer, neither anger nor understanding.

She laid out the objects involved in her decision. A packet of letters, tied with faded violet ribbons. A bracelet of hair she had worked, from his hair and her own, over those last months, which now she meant to bury with him. His watch. An unfinished letter, undated, in his own hand, which she had earlier found in his desk. A letter to herself, in a spidery hand.

A sealed envelope.

Trembling slightly, she took up the letter to herself, which had come a month ago.

Dear Mrs Ash,

I believe my name will not be strangetoyou - that you know something of me -I cannot imagine you cannot - though if by chancemy letter is an absolute surprise I ask your pardon. I ask your pardon, however things may be,for intruding on you at this time. a m told Mr Ash is ill. Indeed the papers report so, and makeno concealmentof the gravity of his state. I am reliably told that he may not live long, though of course I ask your pardon again if I am in error, as I may be, as I must hope to be.

I have writ down some things I find I wish, after all, that he should know. am in a state of considerable doubt as to the wisdom of putting myself f orward at this time - do I writefor my own absolution orfor him- I cannot know. I am in your hands, in this matter. I must trust to your judgment, your generosity, your goodwill.

We are two old women now, and my fires at least are out and have long been out. I know nothing of yon, for the best of reasons, that nothing has been said to me, at any time.

I have writ down, for his eyes only, some things - I find I cannotsay, what things - and have sealed the letter.If you wish to read it, it is in your hands, though I must hope, if it can be, that he will readthe letter,and decide.

And if he cannot or will not readit. … oh, Mrs Ash, I am in your hands again, do with my hostage as you see fit, and have the right.

I have done great harm though I meant none to you, as God is my witness, and I hope I have done none - to you that is, or nothing irretrievable.

I find I shall be grateful for a Line from you - of forgiveness - of pity - of a nger, if you must - will you - go so far?

I live in a Turret like an old Witch, and make verses nobody wants.

If in the goodness of your heart, you would tell me what becomes of him -I shall praise God for you. I am in your hands.

Yours

Christabel LaMotte

So for the last month of his life she had carried these two letters, hers and that sealed one, in her pocket, like a knife. In and out of his room, in and out of their time together.

She brought him posies she had arranged. Winter jasmine, Christmas roses, hothouse violets.

"Helleborus niger. Why are green petals so mysterious-Ellen? Do you remember-when we read Goethe-metamorphoses of plants-all is one-leaves-petals-"

"That was the year you wrote about Lazarus.”

“Ah, Lazarus. Etiamsi mortuusfuerit…. Do you think-in your heart of hearts-we continue-after?" She bowed her head and looked for the truth.

"We are promised-men are so wonderful, so singular-we cannot be lost-for nothing. I don't know, Randolph, I don't know."

"If there is nothing-I shall not-feel the cold. But put me in the open air, my dear-I don't want-to be shut in the Abbey. Out in the earth, in the air. Yes?

"Don't cry, Ellen. It cannot be helped. I am not sorry. I have not-done nothing, you know. I have lived-"

Outside his bedroom, she wrote letters in her head: "I cannot give him your letter, he is calm and almost happy, how can I disturb his peace of mind at this time?”

“You must understand that I have always known of your- How to find a word? Relationship, liaison, love?"

"You must understand that my husband told me, long ago, freely and truthfully, of his feeling for you, and that the matter, having been understood between us, was set aside as something past and understood."

Too much repetition of "understood." But better.

"I am grateful to you for your assurance that you know nothing of me. I might reciprocate truthfully by saying that I know nothing essential of you-only a few bare necessary facts-and that my husband loved you, that he said he loved you."

One old woman to another. Who described herself as a Witch in a Turret.

"How can you ask this of me, how can you break up this short time I have with him, the life we have, of small kindnesses and unspoken ties, how can you menace my last days, for they are mine too, he is my happiness, which I am about to lose forever, can you not understand that, I cannot give him your letter."

She wrote down nothing.

She sat beside him, weaving their hair together, pinning it to a band of black silk. At her throat, the brooch he had sent from Whitby, the white roses of York carved in black jet. The white, or whitish, hairs, on the dark ground.

"A bracelet of bright hair-about the bone. When my grave is broken up again-ha, Ellen? Always-that poem-thought of that poem-as ours, yours and mine-yes."

It was one of his bad days. He had moments of clarity, and then he could be seen to wander, his mind wandering-where? "Odd thing-sleep. You go-all over. Fields. Gardens. Other worlds. You can be-in another state-in sleep.”

“Yes, dear. We don't know much about our lives, really. About what we know."

"Summer fields-just in a-twinkling of an eyelid-I saw her. I should have-looked after her. How could I? I could only-hurt her-

"What are you doing?"Making a bracelet. Out of our hair."In my watch. Her hair. Tell her."Tell her what?"I forget."His eyes closed.

The hair was in the watch. A very long, very fine, plaited chain of very pale gold hair. She had it on the desk before her. It was tied with pale-blue cotton, neatly.

"You must understand that I have always known, that my husband told me, long ago, freely and truthfully, of his feelings for you… And if she did write that, it would be no more and no less than the truth, but it would not ring true, it would not convey the truth of the way it had been, of the silence in the telling, the silences that extended before and after it, always the silences.

They had sat by the library fire, in the autumn of 1859. There had been chrysanthemums on the table, and coppery beech leaves and sonie strangely changing bracken, fawn and crimson and gold. And that had been the time of his glass vivariums, the time of the silkworms, which had to be kept warm, and so were in this warmest room, drab little buff moths, and their fat rough little cocoons on bare twigs, his study of metamorphosis. She was copying out Swammerdam and he was walking to and fro, watching her work, thinking.

"Stop writing for a moment, Ellen. I have something I must tell you. She remembered the rush of her own feelings. Like silk in the throat, like nails in her veins, the desire not to be told, not to hear.

"You need not-"

"I must. We have always been truthful with each other, whatever else, Ellen. You are my dear, dear wife, and I love you.”

“But," she said. "Such sayings always lead on to but.”

“For the last year perhaps I have been in love with another woman. I could say it was a sort of madness. A possession, as by daemons. A kind of blinding. At first it was only letters-and then-in Yorkshire -I was not alone."

"I know."

There had been a silence.

She repeated, "I know."

He said, "How long?" his proud crest fallen.

"Not so long. Nor through anything you did or said, that I saw. I was told. I had a visitor. I have something to restore to you."

She had hidden the first Swammerdam in her swing-table, and now brought it out, in its envelope, addressed to Miss LaMotte, Bethany, Mount Ararat Road, Richmond.

She told him, "The passage about the Mundane Egg in this version is superior, I think, to what we have here."

More silence. "If I had not told you-about this-about Miss LaMotte- would you have restored this to me?”

“I don't know. I think not. How could I? But you have told me.”

“Miss Glover gave you this?”

“She wrote twice, and came here.”

“She said nothing hurtful to you, Ellen?"

The poor mad white-faced woman, in her neat, worn boots, pacing and pacing, in all those skirts they had all worn then, clasping and unclasping her little dove-grey hands. Behind her steel-framed glasses she had had very bright blue eyes, glassy blue. And the reddish hair, and a few orange patches of freckling on the chalky skin.

"We were so happy, Mrs Ash, we were all in all to each other, we were innocent.”

“I can do nothing about your happiness.”

“Your own happiness is ruined, is a lie, I am telling you.”

“Please leave my house.”

“You could help me if you chose.”

“Please leave my house."

"She said very little. She was venomous and distraught. I asked her to go away. She gave me the poem-as evidence-and asked for it back. I told her she should be ashamed to steal."

"I do not know what to say, Ellen. I do not expect to see her-Miss LaMotte again. We were agreed that-that this one summer must see the end-of-the end. And even if that were not so-she has vanished, she has gone away-"

She had heard the pain in that, had noted it, had said nothing."I cannot explain, Ellen, but I can tell you-"No more. No more. We will not speak of it again."You must be angry-distressed-”

“I don't know. Not angry. I don't want to know any more. Let us not talk of it again. Randolph-it is not betweenus. "

Had she done well, or ill? She had done what was in her nature, which was profoundly implicated in not knowing, in silence, in avoidance, she said to herself, in harsher moments.

She had never read his letters. She had never, that is, gone through his papers out of curiosity, idle or directed, she had never even sorted or pigeon-holed. She had answered letters for him, letters from readers, admirers, translators, loving women who had never met him.

One day, during that last month, she went upstairs, her two letters, open and unopened, in her pocket, and looked through his desk. This filled her with a superstitious bodily fear. His workroom had a cold light, in the daytime, because of a skylight, which now at night showed a few stars and a running smoky cloud, but on that day had been clear blue and blank.

So many scraps of poetry. So many heaps of ends of leaves of paper. She pushed away the thought that she would be responsible for all this. She was not, now. Not yet.

When she found the unfinished letter, it was as though she had been guided to it. It was tucked away, at the back of a drawer full of bills and invitations, and should have taken hours to find and not the few minutes in fact needed.

My dear,

I write each year, round about All Souls, because I must, although I know -I was about to say, although I know that you will not answer, although I know no such thing with certainty; I must hope; you may remember, orforget, it is all one, enough to feel able to write to me, to enlighten me a little, to take awaysome of the black weight I labour under.

I askyourforgiveness freely for some things, of which I stand accused, both byyour silence, your obdurate silence, and by my own conscience. I ask f orgiveness for my rashness andprecipitance in hurrying to Kernemet, on the suppositions chance that you might bethere, and without ascertaining whether or not I had your permission to go there. I ask yourforgiveness, above all, f or the degree of duplicity with which, on my return, I insinuated myself into the confidence of Mrs Lees, and so disastrously surprised you. You have punished me since, as you must know, I am punished daily.

But have you sufficiently considered the state of mind which drove me to these actions? I feel I stand accused, also, by your actions, of having loved you at all, as though my love was an act of brutalforcing, as though I were a heartless ravisher out of some trumpery Romance, from whom you had to f lee, despoiled and ruined. Yet if you examine your memories truthfully - if you can be truthful - you must know that it was not so - think overwhat we did together and ask, where was the cruelty, where the coercion, where, Christabel, the lack of love and respectfor you, alike as woman and as intellectual being? That we could not honourably continue as lovers after that summer was, I think, agreed by both - but was this a reason for a sudden pulling down of a dark blanket, nay, a curtain of sheet steel, between one day and the next? I loved you entirely then; I will not say now, I love you, f or that would indeed be romance, and a matter at best of hope - we are both psychologists of no mean order - love goes out, you know, like a candle in one of Humphry Davy's jars, if notfed with air to breathe,ifdeliberately starved and stifled. Yet

Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,

From death to life, thou might'st him yet recover.

And perhaps I say that only for the pleasure of the aptness in quoting. That would have made you smile. Ah, Christabel, Christabel, I force out these carefulsentences,asking for your consideration, and rememberthat we heard each other's thoughts, so quick, so quick, that there was no need of ending speeches -

There is something I must know and you know what that is. I say "I must know" and sound peremptory. But I am in your hands and must beg you to tell me. What became of my child? Did he live? How can I ask, not knowing? How can I not ask, not knowing? I spoke at length to your cousin Sabine who told me what all at Kernemet knew - which was the fact only - no certainty of outcome -

You must know I went there, to Brittany, in love, and care, andanxiety, for you, for your health -I went eager to care for you, to make all well a sfar as could be - Why did you turn away from me? Out of pride, out of fear, out of independence, out of sudden hatred, at the injustice of the different fates of men and women?

Yet a man who knows he has or had a child and does not know more deserves a little pity.

How can I say this? Whatever became of that child, I say in advance, whatever it is, I shall understand, if I may only know, the worst is already imagined and put behind me - so to speak -

You see, I cannot write it, so I cannot post you these letters, I end by writing others, less direct, more glancing, which you do not answer, my dear demon, my tormentor… I am prohibited.

How can I ever forget that terrible sentence cried out at the ghastly spirit-summoning. "You have made a murderess of me," was said, blaming me, and cannot be unsaid; I hear it daily.

"There is no child" came through that silly woman's mouth, in a great groan, in what mixture of cunning, involuntaryexclamation, genuine telepathy, how can I tell? I tell you, Christabel - you who will never read this letter, like so many others, for it haspassed the limit ofpossible communication -I tell you, what with disgust, and terror, and responsibility, and the coiling vestiges of love gripping my heart, I was like to have made a murderer of myself in good earnest -

She took this letter gingerly by its corner, now, as though it were a stunned biting creature, wasp or scorpion. She made a little fire in Randolph 's attic gate, and burned the letter, turning it with the poker until it was black flakes. She took the sealed letter and turned it over, thinking of adding it, but allowed the flames to die down. She was quite sure that neither he nor she would have wanted his own letter to persist; nor would Christabel LaMotte, with its implicit accusations-of what? Better not to think.

She made a little fire, for warmth, with wood and a few coals, and huddled over it in her nightgown, waiting for the light to catch and the warmth to rise.

My life, she thought, has been built round a lie, a house to hold a lie.

She had always believed, stolidly, doggedly, that her avoidances, her approximations, her whole charade as she at times saw it, were, if not justified, at least held in check, neutralised, by her rigorous requirement that she be truthful with herself.

Randolph had been complicit. She had no idea how the story of their lives looked to him. It was not a matter they discussed.

But if she did not know, and occasionally look at, the truth, she had a sense that she was standing on shifting shale, sliding down into some pit.

She thought of her sense of the unspoken truths of things in terms of a most beautiful passage from Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which she had read out one evening to Randolph, who had been excited by the passage immediately preceding it, about the Plutonian theory of the formation of rocks.

She had written it down.

It is the total distinctness, therefore, of crystalline formations, such as granite, hornblende-schist, and the rest, from every substance of which the origin is familiar to us, that constitutes their claim to be regarded as the effects of causes now in action in the subterranean regions. They belong not to an order which has passed away; they are not the monuments of a primeval period, bearing inscribed upon them in obsolete characters the words and phrases of a dead language; but they teach us that part of the living language of nature, which we cannot learn by our daily intercourse with what passes on the habitable surface.

Ellen liked the idea of these hard, crystalline things, which were formed in intense heat beneath the "habitable surface" of the earth, and were not primeval monuments but "part of the living language of nature."

I am no ordinary or hysterical self-deceiver, she more or less said to herself. I keep faith with the fire and the crystals, I do not pretend the habitable surface is all and so I am not a destroyer nor cast into outer darkness.

A few flames made their sinuous way upwards. She remembered her honeymoon, as she did, from time to time, and deliberately.

She did not remember it in words. There were no words attached to it, that was part of the horror. She had never spoken of it to anyone, not even to Randolph, precisely not to Randolph.

She remembered it in images. A window, in the south, all hung about with vines and creepers, with the hot summer sun fading.

The nightdress embroidered for these nights, white cambric, all spattered with lovers' knots and forget-me-nots and roses, white on white.

A thin white animal, herself, trembling.

A complex thing, the naked male, curly hairs and shining wet, at once bovine and dolphin-like, its scent feral and overwhelming. A large hand, held out in kindness, not once, but many times, slapped away, pushed away, slapped away.

A running creature, crouching and cowering in the corner of the room, its teeth chattering, its veins clamped in spasms, its breath shallow and fluttering. Herself.

A respite, generously agreed, glasses of golden wine, a few days of Edenic picnics, a laughing woman perched on a rock in pale blue poplin skirts, a handsome man in his whiskers, lifting her, quoting Petrarch.

An attempt. A hand not pushed away. Tendons like steel, teeth in pain, clenched, clenched. The approach, the locked gateway, the panic, the whimpering flight.

Not once, but over and over and over.

When did he begin to know that however gentle he was, however patient, it was no good, it would never be any good?

She did not like to remember his face in those days, but did, for truthfulness, the puzzled brow, the questioning tender look, the largeness of it, convicted of its brutality, rejected in its closeness.

The eagerness, the terrible love, with which she had made it up to him, his abstinence, making him a thousand small comforts, cakes and tidbits. She became his slave. Quivering at every word. He had accepted her love.

She had loved him for it.

He had loved her.

She turned over Christabel's letter.

She howled. "What shall I be without you?" She put her hand over her mouth. If they came, her time to reflect was gone or lost. She had lied to them too, to her sisters, implied a lie in her bashful assertions that they were supremely happy, that they had simply had no good fortune with children…

That other woman was in one sense his true wife. Mother, at least briefly, of his child, it seemed.

She found she did not want to know what was in the letter. That, too, was better simply avoided. Not known, not spoken about, not an instrument of useless torture, as it would be if seen, whether its contents were good or bad.

She took the black japanned specimen box, with its oiled silk pocket in its glass lining, and put the letter in it. She added the hair bracelet-here, in white age, they were intertwined-and curled the long, thick thread-it was no more-of the blonde plait from his watch, inside the bracelet. She put in the tied bundles of their love-letters.

A young girl of twenty-four should not be made to wait for marriage until she is thirty-four and her flowering long over.

She remembered from the days of the Close, seeing herself once, naked, in a cheval glass. She must have been barely eighteen. Little high breasts, with warm brown circles. A skin like live ivory and long hair like silk. A princess.

Dearest Ellen,

I cannot get out of my mind - as indeed, how should I wish to, whose most ardentdesire is to be possessed entirely by the pure thought of you -I cannot get out of my mind the entire picture of you, sitting in your white dress among the rosy teacups, with all thegardenflowers, the hollyhocks, the delphiniums, the larkspur, burning crimson and blue and royal purple behind you, and only emphasising your lovely whiteness. And you smiled at me so kindly today, under your white hat with its palest pink ribbons.I remember every bunch of little bows, I remember everygentle ruffle,indeed it is a shame I am not apainter, but only an aspiring poet, or you shouldsee how I treasure every smallest detail.

As I shall treasure - until death, theirs alas, and not mine, not for centuries yet, for I need a very long lifetime to love and cherish you, and must spend another such lifetime, alas proleptically, waiting for the right to do so -I shall treasure,I say, thoseflowers you gave me, which are before me as I write, in a very fine blue glass vase. I love the white roses most - they are not openyet -I have decades of their time, days at least of my own longer and most impatient duration in which to enjoy them. They are not a simple colour, you know, although they look it. They contain snow, and cream, and ivory, all quite distinct. Also at their heart they are still green- with newness, with hope, with that fine cool vegetable blood which will flush a little, when they open. (Did you know that the old painters gave an ivory glow to a rich skin by painting on a green base - it is a paradox ofoptics, strange and delightful.)

I lift them to my face and admire them. They are mildly fragrant, with a promise of richness. I push my enquiring nose in amongst them - not to hurt or derange their beautiful scrolling -I can bepatient - each day they will unfold a little - one day I will bury myface in their whitewarmth - Did you ever play that childhood game with the huge opium poppy buds - we did - we would fold back the calyx and the tightly packed silk skirts, one by one - all crumpled - and so the poor flaunting scarlet thing would droop and die - such prying is best left to Nature and her hot sun, which opens them soon enough.

I have composed over 70lines today, mindful of your injunctions to be busy, and avoid distraction.I am writing about the pyre of Balder - and his wife, Nanna's grief for him - and Hermodur's brave andfruitless journey to the Underworld to have him released by thegoddess Hel - it is all most violently interesting, dear Ellen, an account of the human mind imagining and inventing a human story to account for the great and beautiful and terrible limiting facts of- existence - the rising and vanishing of the golden Sun, the coming of blossom (Nanna) in the Spring - her shrivelling in the Winter - the recalcitranceof dark (thegoddess Tho'ck who refused to mourn f or Balder, who was no use to her, she said, living ordead). And is not this t he subject for great modern poetry as much as for themy thy speculations o f our forefathers?

But I would rather besitting in a certaingarden - in a certain Close - among green and white roses - with a certain - decidedlya certain- young lady in white with a grave brow and a sudden sunny smile -

Ellen read no more. They could go with him. And wait for her.

She thought of putting the jet brooch he had sent from Whitby into the box, but decided against it. She would wear it at her throat, when they drove out to Hodershall.

She put more coal and more pieces of wood on the fire, and made a brave little blaze, by the side of which she sat down to manufac ture the carefully edited, the carefully strained (the metaphor was one of jelly-making) truth of her journal. She would decide later what to do with that. It was both a defence against, and a bait for, the gathering of ghouls and vultures.

And why were the letters so carefully put up then, in their sealed enclosure? Could she read them, where she was going, could he? This last house was no house, why not leave them open to the things that tunnelled in the clay, the mites and blind worms, things that chewed with invisible mouths, and cleansed and annihilated?

I want them to have a sort of duration, she said to herself. A demi-eternity.

And if the ghouls dig them up again?

Then justice will perhaps be done to her when I am not here to see it.

She thought, one day, not now, not yet, I will put pen to paper and write to her, and tell her, tell her, what?

Tell her he died peacefully.

Tell her?

And the crystalline forms, the granite, the hornblende-schist, shone darkly with the idea that she would not write, that the Protean letter would form and re-form, in her head, that it might become too late, too late for decency, absolutely too late. The other woman might die, she herself might die, they were both old and progressing towards it.

In the morning she would pull on her black gloves, and pick up the black box, and a spray of those white scentless hothouse roses that were all over the house, and set out on his last blind journey.

I am in your hands.