Possession. A Romance

Chapter 7

Men may be martyred

Any where

In desert, cathedral

Or Public Square.

In no Rush of Action

This is our doom

To Drag a Long Life out

In a Dark Room.

-CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE

If people thought of Beatrice Nest-and not many did, not very often-it was her external presence, not her inner life that engaged their imagination. She was indisputably solid, and nevertheless amorphous, a woman of wide and abundant flesh, sedentary swelling hips, a mass of bosom, above which spread a cheerful-shaped face, crowned by a kind of angora hat, or thick wool-skein of crimped white hair, woven and tucked into a roll from which lost strands trailed and wandered in all directions. If they thought of her harder, those few people who knew her-Cropper, Blackadder, Roland, Lord Ash-they might add a metaphoric identity. Cropper, it has been noted, thought of her in terms of Carroll's obstructive white sheep. Blackadder, in bad moods, thought of her as one of those puffed white spiders, bleached by the dark, feeling along the threads of her trap from her central lair. The feminists who had from time to time sought access to the Journal saw her as some kind of guardian octopus, an ocean Fafnir, curled torpidly round her hoard, putting up opaque screens of ink or watery smoke to obscure her whereabouts. There had once been those who knew Beatrice-notably, possibly uniquely, Professor Bengt Bengtsson. She had been Professor Bengtsson's student in London from 1938 to 1941, a troubled time, during which male undergraduates had become soldiers, bombs had fallen and food had been scarce. Some women during that time had experienced an unexpected frivolity and freedom. Beatrice had experienced Professor Bengtsson. He ruled the English Department of Prince Albert College. His main love was the Eddas and ancient Norse mythology. Beatrice studied these things. She studied philology, Anglo-Saxon, Runes, mediaeval Latin. She read Masefield and Christina Rossetti and de la Mare. Bengtsson said she should read Ragnarok-R. H. Ash was no mean scholar for his time, and was thought to be a precursor of modern poetry. Bengtsson was tall and gangling and bearded; he had fierce eyes and more animated energy than could be employed in instructing young ladies in the niceties of Nordic roots. He did not, however, direct that energy towards the souls, let alone the flesh, of the young ladies, but abused it daily in the bar of the Arundel Arms, in the company of his peers. In the mornings he was bone-pale and glittering under his blond thatch. In the afternoons he was ruddy and slurred and breathed beer in his stuffy office. Beatrice read Ragnarôk and Ask to Embla. She took a First and fell in love with Randolph Henry Ash. Such loves were once not uncommon. "There are poets," Beatrice wrote in her Finals paper, "whose love poems seem to be concerned neither with praise nor with blame of some distant lady, but with true conversation between men and women. Such is John Donne, though he may also revile the whole sex in certain moods. Such might have been Meredith if circumstances had been happier. A brief attempt to think of other 'love' poets who expect reciprocity of intelligence must persuade us of the pre-eminence of Randolph Henry Ash, whose 'Ask and Embla' poems present every phase of intimacy, opposition and failure of communication, but always convince the reader of the real thinking and feeling presence of her to whom they are addressed."

Beatrice hated writing. The only word she was proud of in this correct and dull disquisition was "conversation," which she had chosen in preference to the more obvious "dialogue." For such conversation Beatrice would have given everything, in those days. Reading those poems, she obscurely knew, offered her a painful and as it seemed illicit glimpse of a combination of civilised talk and raw passion which everyone must surely want, and yet which no one-as she looked round her small world, her serious Methodist parents, Mrs Bengtsson running her University Women's Tea Club, her fellow-students agonising over invitations to dance and whist- no one seemed to have.

We two remake our world by naming it

Together, knowing what words mean for us

And for the others for whom current coin

Is cold speech-but we say, the tree, the pool,

And see the fire in air, the sun, our sun,

Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now

Particularly our sun. . . .

Ash told her and she heard him. She did not expect to hear such things from anybody else; nor did she. She told Professor Bengtsson that she wished to write her doctoral dissertation on Ask to Embla. He was very doubtful about this. It was uncertain ground, a kind of morass, like Shakespeare's sonnets. What Contribution to Knowledge did she hope to make, could she be sure of making? The only safe PhD in Professor Bengtsson's view was an Edition, and he really would not recommend R. H. Ash. He had a friend, however, who knew Lord Ash, who had deposited the Ash papers in the British Museum. It was known that Ellen Ash had kept a journal. Editing that might be a suitable undertaking-something certainly new, modestly useful, manageable and related to Ash.

When she had completed that task, Miss Nest would be excellently situated to branch out…

So it had been. Miss Nest had settled uneasily in front of the boxes of papers-letters, laundry lists, receipt-books, the volumes of the daily journal and other slimmer books of more private occasional writing. What had she hoped for? Some intimacy with the author of the poems, with that fine mind and passionate nature.

Tonight Randolph read aloud to me from Dante's sonnets in his Vita Nuova. They are truly beautiful. Randolph pointed out the truly masculine energy and vigour of Dante's Italian, and the spiritual power of his understanding of love. I do not think we will ever tire of these poems of genius.

Randolph read aloud to his wife daily, when they were in the same house. The young Beatrice Nest did try to imagine the dramatic effect of these readings, but was not helped by the vague adjectival enthusiasm of Ellen Ash. There was a sweetness, a blanket dutiful pleasure in her responses to things that Beatrice at first did not like, and later, immersed in her subject, came to take for granted. By then she had discovered other, less bland, tones of voice.

I can never say enough in praise of Randolph 's unvarying good ness and forbearance with my feebleness and inadequacies.

That, or something like that, recurred like the regular tolling of a bell throughout these pages. As is common with extended acquaintance with any task, topic or human being, Beatrice had an initial period of clear observation and detached personal judgment, during which she thought she saw that Ellen Ash was rambling and dull. And then she became implicated, began to share Ellen's long days of prostration in darkened rooms, to worry about the effect of mildew on damask roses long withered, and the doubts of oppressed curates. This life became important to her; a kind of defensiveness rose up in her when Blackadder suggested that Ellen was not the most suitable partner for a man so intensely curious about all possible forms of life. She became aware of the mystery of privacy, which Ellen, for all her expansive ordinary eloquence, was protecting, it could be said.

There was no PhD in all this. One might have been discovered by the feminist movement, or by some linguistic researcher into euphemism and indirect statement. But Miss Nest had been brought up to look for Influences and Irony and there was little of either here.

Professor Bengtsson suggested she compare the wifely qualities of Ellen Ash with those of Jane Carlyle, Lady Tennyson and Mrs Humphry Ward. You must publish, Miss Nest, said Professor Bengtsson, glittering in matutinal icy determination. I cannot give you work, Miss Nest, without evidence of your suitability, said Professor Bengtsson, and Miss Nest wrote, in two years, a small book, Helpmeets, about the daily lives of wives of genius. Professor Bengtsson offered her an assistant lectureship. This was a great pleasure and terror to her-on the whole more pleasure than terror. She discussed with students, mostly female, swing-skirted and lip- sticked in the Fifties, mini-skirted and trailing Indian cotton in the Sixties, black-lipped under Pre-Raphaelite hairbushes in the Seventies, smelling of baby lotion, of Blue Grass, of cannabis, of musk, of unadulterated feminist sweat, the shape of the sonnet through the ages, the nature of the lyric, the changing image of women. Those were the good days. Of the bad days, which were to come later, before she took early retirement, she did not care to think. She never crossed the threshold, now, of her old college. (Professor Bengtsson had retired in 1970 and died in 1978.)

She had a minimal private life. She lived, in 1986, and had lived for many years, in a tiny house in Mortlake. Here occasionally she had entertained groups of students, less and less frequently as she sensed her growing irrelevance to the deliberations of her department, as Bengtsson was succeeded by Blackadder. No one had come there since 1972. Before that there had been parties with coffee, cakes, a bottle of sweet white wine, and discussion. Those girls in the 1950s and 1960s had thought of her as motherly. Later generations had assumed she was lesbian, even, ideologically, that she was a repressed and unregenerate lesbian. In fact her thoughts about her own sexuality were dominated entirely by her sense of the massive, unacceptable bulk of her breasts. These, in her youth, she had flattened uncorseted under tunic dresses and liberty bodices, allowing them freely to develop their own muscles, as the best medical advice then suggested, stretching and sagging them, in the event, irremediably. Another woman might have flaunted them, might have carried them proudly before her, moulded grandly about a cleavage. Beatrice Nest bundled them into a drooping, grandmotherly bust-bodice and stretched over them hand-knitted jumpers decorated with lines of little tear-drop-shaped holes, which gaped a little, pouted a little, over her contours. In bed at night she felt them fall heavily sideways over the broad case of her ribs. In her cubbyhole with Ellen Ash she felt their living weight, in all its woolly warmth, brush against the rim of her table. She imagined herself grotesquely swollen, looked modestly down and met no one's eye. It was to these heavy rounds that she owed her reputation for motherliness, a rapid stereotypic reading which also read her round face and pink cheeks as benign. When she was past a certain age, what had been read as benign was read, equally arbitrarily, as threatening and repressive. Beatrice was surprised by certain changes in her colleagues and students. And then, finally, accepting.

On the day of Mortimer Cropper's proposed luncheon, she was visited by Roland Michell.

"Am I disturbing you, Beatrice?"

Beatrice smiled automatically. "No, not particularly. I was just thinking."

"I've come up against something-I wondered if you could help. Do you happen to know if Ellen Ash says anything anywhere about Christabel LaMotte?"

"I don't remember anything." Beatrice sat smiling, as though her lack of memory clinched the matter. "I don't think so, no."

"Is there any way of checking?"

"I could look at my card index."

"I'd be very grateful."

"What sort of thing are we looking for?"

Roland experienced a not uncommon desire to poke, prod or startle Beatrice, who sat monumentally still, with the same fussy little smile on her face. "Just anything really. I came across some evidence that Ash was interested in LaMotte. I just wondered."

"I could look at my card index. Professor Cropper is coming at lunchtime."

"How long is he here this time?"

"I don't know. He didn't say. He said he was coming on from Christie's."

"Could I see your card index, Beatrice?"

"Oh, I don't know, it's all a bit of a muddle, I have my own system, you know, Roland, for recording things, I think I'd better look myself, I can better understand my own hieroglyphics."

She put on her reading glasses, which dangled over her embarrassment on a gilt-beaded chain. Now she could not see Roland at all, a state of affairs she marginally preferred, since she saw all male members of her quondam department as persecutors, and was unaware that Roland's own position there was precarious, that he hardly qualified as a full-blooded departmental male. She began to move things across her desk, a heavy wooden-handled knitting bag, several greying parcels of unopened books. There was a whole barbican of index boxes, thick with dust and scuffed with age, which she ruffled in interminably, talking to herself.

"No, that one's chronological, no, that's only the reading habits, no, that one's to do with the running of the house. Where's the master-box now? It's not complete for all notebooks you must understand. I've indexed some but not all, there is so much, I've had to divide it chronologically and under headings, here's the Calverley family, that won't do… now this might be it…

"Nothing under LaMotte. No, wait a minute. Here. A cross-reference. We need the reading box. It's very theological, the reading box. It appears"-she drew out a dog-eared yellowing card, the ink blurring into its fuzzy surface-"it appears she read The Fairy Melusina, in 1872."

She replaced the card in its box, and settled back in her chair, looking across at Roland with the same obfuscating comfortable smile. Roland felt that the notebooks might be bristling with unrecorded observations about Christabel LaMotte that had slipped between Beatrice's web of categories. He said doggedly, "Do you think I could see what she said? It might be"-he rejected "important"-"it might be of interest to me. I've never read Melusina. There seems to be a revival of interest in it."

"I tried once or twice in the old days. It's terribly long-winded and impenetrable. Gothic, you know, Victorian Gothic, a bit gruesome, in places for a lady's poem…"

"Beatrice-could I just cast my eyes over what Mrs Ash said?"

"I'll just see." Beatrice rose from her table. She put her head into the metal dark of a khaki filing-cabinet inside which the yearly volumes of the Journal lay. Roland observed her huge haunches under herring-bone tweed. "Did I say 1872?" Beatrice called from inside her echoing box. Reluctantly she produced the volume, leather-bound, with marbled end-papers in crimson and violet. She began to turn the pages, holding the text up, between Roland and herself.

"Here," she finally pronounced. "November 1872. Here she begins it." She began to read aloud: "Today I embarked on The Fairy Melusina, which I bought for myself in Hatchard's on Monday. What shall I find there? So far I have read the rather long preamble which I found a little pedantic. I then came on to the knight Raimondin and his encounter with the shining lady at the Fontaine de Soif which I liked better. Miss LaMotte has an unquestionable gift for making the flesh creep."

"Beatrice-"

"Is this the sort of thing you were-?"

"Beatrice, could I possibly read that for myself, to make notes on it?"

"You can't take it out of the office.”

“Perhaps I could perch at the corner of your table. Would I be terribly in your way?”

“I suppose not, no," said Beatrice. "You could have that chair if I lifted that heap of books off it-"

"Let me do that-"

"And you could sit opposite me then, if I cleaned that corner of my table-"

"So I could. Thank you."

They were engaged in space clearing when Mortimer Cropper appeared in the doorway, making everything appear dingier in comparison to his suave elegance. "Miss Nest. How pleasant to see you again. I trust I'm not too early. I could always come back again…"

Beatrice was flustered. A heap of papers sighed sideways and fanned out on the floor. "Oh dear. I was ready, Professor, I was quite ready, only Mr Michell wanted to enquire… wanted to know… " Cropper had detached Miss Nest's shapeless mackintosh from its hook and was holding it for her. "Glad to see you, Michell. Making progress? What did you want to know?"

His clearcut face was composed of pure curiosity.

"Just checking on Ash's reading of some poems."

"Ah yes. Which poems?"

"Roland was enquiring about Christabel LaMotte. I couldn't remember anything… but there turned out to be a minor reference… you may sit there whilst I have lunch with Professor Cropper, Roland, if you try not to disturb the order of things on my desk, if you promise not to take anything out of here…"

"You need help, Miss Nest. Your task is too huge."

"Oh no. I do much better alone. I should not know what to do with help."

"Christabel LaMotte," said Cropper, musing. "There's a photograph in the Stant Collection. Very pale. Not sure if it was the effect of near-albinism or a defect in the printing. Probably the latter. Was Ash, do you think, interested in her?"

"Only very marginally. I'm just checking. Routinely."

When Cropper had shepherded his charge out, Roland settled at his table corner and turned the pages of Randolph Ash's wife's journal.

Still engaged in reading Melusina. An impressive achievement.

Have reached Book VI of Melusina. Its aspirations to cosmic reflection might be thought to sit uneasily with its Fairytale nature.

Still reading Melusina. What diligence, what confidence went to its contriving. Miss LaMotte despite a lifetime's residence in this country, remains essentially French in her way of seeing the world. Though there is nothing to which one can take exception in this beautiful and daring poem, in its morals indeed.

And then, several pages later, a surprising and uncharacteristic outburst.

Today I laid down Melusina having come trembling to the end of this marvellous work. What shall I say of it? It is truly original, although the general public may have trouble in recognising its genius, because it makes no concession to vulgar frailties of imagination, and because its virtues are so far removed in some ways at least from those expected of the weaker sex. Here is no swooning sentiment, no timid purity, no softly gloved lady-like patting of the reader's sensibility, but lively imagination, but force and vigour. How shall I characterise it? It is like a huge, intricately embroidered tapestry in a shadowed stone hall, on which all sorts of strange birds and beasts and elves and demons creep in and out of thickets of thorny trees and occasional blossoming glades. Fine patches of gold stand out in the gloom, sunlight and starlight, the sparkle of jewels or human hair or serpents' scales. Firelight flickers, fountains catch light. All the elements are in perpetual motion, fire consuming, water running, air alive and the earth turning… I was put in mind of the tapestried hunts in The Franklin's Tale or in The Faerie Queene, where the observer sees the woven vision come alive under his wondering eyes, so that pictured swords draw real blood, and the wind sighs in pictured trees.

And what shall I say of the scene in which the husband, a man of insufficient faith, bores his peephole and observes his Siren-spouse at play in her vat of waters? I should have said, if I was asked, that this scene was best left to the imagination, as Coleridge left Géraldine-"a sight to dream of, not to tell." But Miss LaMotte tells abundantly, though her description might be a little strong for some stomachs, especially maidenly English ones, who will be looking for fairy winsomeness.

She is beautiful and terrible and tragic, the Fairy Melusina, inhuman in the last resort.

The sinuous muscle of her monster tail

Beating the lambent bath to diamond-fine

Refracting lines of spray, a dancing veil

Of heavier water on the breathless air

How lovely-white her skin her Lord well knew,

The tracery of blue veins across the snow…

But could not see the beauty in the sheen

Of argent scale and slate-blue coiling fin…

Perhaps the most surprising touch is that the snake or fish is beautiful.

Roland gave up any idea of having lunch himself to copy out this passage, mostly because he wanted to give it to Maud Bailey, who must be excited at this contemporary female enthusiasm for her admired text, but also because he felt that extravagant admiration of this sort, from Ash's wife for a woman whom he was already thinking of as Ash's mistress, was perhaps unexpected. Having copied it out, he turned the pages idly.

My recent reading has caused me for some reason to remember myself as I was when a young girl, reading high Romances and seeing myself simultaneously as the object of all knights' devotion-an unspotted Guenevere-and as the author of the Tale. I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither, but the mistress of a very small household, consisting of an elderly poet (set in his ways, which are amiable and gentle and give no cause for anxiety), myself, and the servants who are not unmanageable. I see daily how Patience and Faith are both worn down and hagged with the daily care of their broods and yet shine with the flow of love and unstinted concern for their young. They are now grandmothers as well as mothers, doted on and doting. I myself have come to find of late a kind of creeping insidious vigour come upon me (after the unspeakable years of migraine headache and nervous prostration). I wake feeling, indeed, rather spry, and look about for things to occupy myself with. I remember at sixty the lively ambitions of the young girl in the Deanery, who seems like someone else, as I watch her in my imagination dancing in her moony muslin, or having her hand kissed by a gentleman in a boat.

I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet abut the chaste sweetness of her face and the intuitive goodness shining in her walk. But I now think-it might have been better, might it not, to have held on to the desire to be a Poet? I could never write as well as Randolph, but then no one can or could, and so it was perhaps not worth considering as an objection to doing something.

Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated, I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on. Randolph, if he were to read this, would laugh me out of such morbid questioning, would tell me it is never too late, would cram his huge imagination into the snail-shell space of my tiny new accession of energy and tell me what is to be done. But he shan't see this, and I will find a way-to be a very little more there now I'm crying, as that girl might have cried. Enough.

Roland slid out of the Ash factory and went home before Cropper or Blackadder could return from lunch and ask him any awkward questions. He was annoyed with himself for creating a situation in which Cropper could discover Christabel's name. Nothing was wasted on that sharp noticing mind.

The Putney basement was silent, sensuously entangled with the BM basement by its feline reek. Winter was darkly coming, and dark stains and some slow form of creeping life had appeared on the walls. It was hard to heat. There was no central heating, and Roland and Val had supplemented their one gas fire with paraffin stoves, so that the smell of petrol mingled with the smells of cat and mild mould. It was a cold petrol smell, not a burning one, and there was no smell of cooking, no burning onion nor warm curry powder. Val must be out. They could not afford to keep the hall stove lit in her absence. Roland, without taking his coat off, went to find a match. The wick was behind a cranky hinged door in the chimney, made of a transparent horny substance, smoke-stained and crackling. Roland turned the key, extruded a little wick and set it flaring with a low boom; he hastily closed the aperture, producing a steady blue inverted crescent of flame. There was something ancient and magical about the colour, a clear blue, touched with green and dense with purple.

There was a little heap of letters in the hall. Two for Val, one self-addressed. Three for him: a request for a library book, a card acknowledging receipt of an article sent to a learned journal, and a handwritten letter that was unfamiliar.

Dear Dr Michell,

I hope you will not have taken oursilencefor rudeness, orsomething worse. My husband has been making the inquiries he spoke of He has consulted hissolicitor, the Vicar,andour dearfriend Jane Anstey who is a retired Deputy County Librarian. None of these had any very clear advice. Miss Anstey spoke very highly of Dr Bailey's work and of the archive she looks after. She feels it would be entirelyproper to allow Dr Bailey to read our treasure trove and give a preliminary opinion on it - especially as it was she who found it. I am writing to you too, since you were present at the finding, and expressed an interest in Randolph Henry Ash. Would you care to come and examine the papers with Dr Bailey, or if you would find this time-consuming suggestsomeone to come in yourplace? I appreciate that this would be more difficult for you, coming from London, than for Dr Bailey, who lives conveniently near Croysant le Wold. I would offerto accommodate you for afew days - though this has its difficulties, since we are as you will remember, confined to the ground floor, and the old house is woefully cold in winter. What do you think? How long do you imagine you will need to take stock of our find? Would a week be sufficient? We have visitors over Christmas but none over the New Year if you would care to make aforay to the Lincolnshire Wolds at that time.

I am still grateful for your gentlemanly and practical assistance on that field-edge. Let me know how you think it best to proceed. Yours sincerely

Joan Bailey

Roland felt several things at once. Primary elation-a kind of vision of the bundle of dead letters come to rushing life like some huge warm eagle stirring. Irritation at the primacy Maud Bailey seemed to have assumed in the affair that had begun with the discovery of his purloined letter. Practical, calculating anxiety- how to accept the half-invitation to stay without revealing his own extreme poverty, which might make him appear an inadequately weighty person to be entrusted with the letter-reading. Fear of Val. Fear of Maud Bailey. Anxiety about Cropper and Blackadder and even Beatrice Nest. He wondered exactly why Lady Bailey had thought or suggested that he might want to suggest someone else to read the letters-fun, folly, or an edge of uncertainty about himself? How friendly was her gratitude? Did Maud want him there to read the letters?

Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appeared, followed by impeccably creased matt charcoal pinstriped light woollen legs, followed by the beautifully cut lower hem of a jacket, its black vent revealing a scarlet silk lining, its open front revealing a flat muscular stomach under a finely-striped red and white shirt. Val's legs followed, in powder-blue stockings and saxe-blue shoes, under the limp hem of a crêpey mustard-coloured dress, printed with blue moony flowers. The four feet advanced and retreated, retreated and advanced, the male feet insisting towards the basement stairs, the female feet resisting, parrying. Roland opened the door and went into the area, fired mostly by what always got him, pure curiosity as to what the top half looked like.

The shoulders and chest were as expected; the tie was knitted red and black silk. The face was oval. There were horn-rimmed glasses under a modified 1920s haircut, very short back and sides, moderately long over the brow, black.

"Hi," said Roland. "Oh," said Val. "I thought you were in the Museum. This is Euan Maclntyre."

Euan Maclntyre leaned over and gravely extended a hand downwards. There was something powerful about him, Pluto delivering Persephone at the gate of the underworld.

"I brought Val home. She wasn't feeling very well. I thought she should lie down."

His voice was clear and ringing, not Scots, full of what Roland might inaccurately have called toffee-nosed sounds, or plummy sounds, sounds he had spent his childhood learning to imitate derisorily, hooting, curtailed, drawling, chipping sounds that prickled his non-existent hackles with class hostility. He was obviously waiting to be asked in, with an ease which in earlier novels might have proclaimed the true gentleman, but to Roland and probably to Val suggested nosiness and their own shame. Val drifted slowly and faintly towards Roland.

"I'll be all right. Thank you for the lift."

"Any time." He turned to Roland. "I hope we meet again.”

“Yes," said Roland vaguely, backing down below Val's descent. The Porsche sped away.

"He fancies me," said Val. "Where did he spring from?”

“I've been typing things for him. Last Wills and Testaments.

Deeds of Covenant. Opinions on this and that. He's a solicitor. Bloss, Bloom, Trompett and Maclntyre. Respectable, not sharp, very successful. Office full of photographs of horses. He owns a leg of one, he says. He asked me to go to Newmarket."

"What did you say?"Would you mind what I said?"It would do you good to have a day out," Roland said, and wished he hadn't. "Listen to yourself. It would do you a lot of good. How repellently patronising. “

“Well, I've got no right to stop you, Val."

"I told him you wouldn't like it."

"Oh Val-"

"I should have told him you couldn't care less. I should have gone."

"I can't see why you didn't go."

Oh it you can t see- "What has happened to us?"

"Too much confinement, too little money, too much anxiety and too young. You want to get rid of me."

"You know that isn't true. You know. I love you, Val. I just don't give you a very good time."

"I love you too. I'm sorry I'm so short-tempered and suspicious." She waited. He took hold of her. It was will and calculation, not desire. There were two ways out of this, a row or making love, and the second was more conducive to eventual dinner and a peaceful evening's work and the eventual broaching of the Lincolnshire project.

"It's suppertime," said Val faintly.

Roland looked at his watch.

"No it isn't. Anyway, there's only ourselves to please. We used to do things spontaneously, remember. Pay no attention to clocks. We ought to put ourselves first, now and then."

They undressed and cuddled together for cold comfort. At first Roland thought it was not going to work after all. There are certain things that cannot be done only on will power. The thought of the warm feathers of his letter-eagle produced a stirring. Val said, "I don't want anyone but you, not really," and it almost subsided again. He lit on an image, a woman in a library, a woman not naked but voluminously clothed, concealed in rustling silk and petticoats, fingers folded over the place where the tight black silk bodice met the springing skirts, a woman whose face was sweet and sad, a stiff bonnet framing loops of thick hair. Ellen Ash, constructed from Richmond 's sketch, reproduced in Cropper's GreatVentriloquist. All Richmond 's women have a generic mouth, firm and fine and generous and serious, variable yet related to some ideal type. The mental vision of this woman, half-fantasy, half-photogravure, was efficacious. They comforted each other. Later he would be able to think of a way to ask about Lincoln without saying exactly where he was going or why.