Angels and Insects (26 page)

But it was not for that, she knew in her heart of hearts, that she travelled to séances, that she wrote and rapped and bellowed, it was for
now
, it was for more life
now
, it was not for the Hereafter, which would be as it was, as it always had been. For what had lain in wait for her, a dubious widow, in straitened circumstances, but constriction and tedium? She could not bear to sit and gossip of bonnets and embroidery and the eternal servant problem, she wanted
life
. And this traffic with the dead was the best way to know, to observe, to love the living, not as they were politely over teacups, but in their
secret selves, their deepest desires and fears. They revealed themselves to her, to Lilias Papagay, as they would never have done in usual society. Mrs Jesse, for instance, was not rich, but she was a gentlewoman, Captain Jesse’s family were landed gentry. Mrs Papagay would not have mixed socially with the Jesses if it were not for the democracy of the Spirit World.

Mrs Jesse was a small, handsome woman in her early sixties, with an imposing head which sometimes appeared too large for her slight body. She had very clear blue eyes in a deep-lined, brown-skinned gipsyish face, with a strong profile. Her fine dark hair, streaked with grey, was still abundant; she wore it in delicate bandeaux, falling at the sides of her face. She had bird-hands and a bird-sharp look, and a surprisingly deep resonant voice. Mrs Papagay had been much surprised by its strong Lincolnshire accent. Mrs Jesse was given to emphatic pronouncements—on the first occasion Mrs Papagay had met her, there had been a discussion of the process of grief, and Mrs Jesse had nodded sagely, ‘I know that. I have felt that,’ like a kind of tragic chorus. ‘I have felt everything; I know everything. I don’t want any
new emotion. I know what it is to feel like a stoän.’ If this vatic, repetitive note reminded Mrs Papagay of Mr Poe’s terrible Raven with his ‘Nevermore’, this was partly because Mrs Jesse was always accompanied by her own pet raven, Aaron, who was secured to her wrist by a leather leash and was fed from a sinister little pouch of raw meat which travelled with it. Aaron came to the séances, as did Pug, an elephant-coloured beast, with tiny ivory teeth resting on his drooping lips, and intelligent, bulging brown eyes. Pug was insensible to the fluctuations of emotion round the table, and tended to lie snoozing on the couch, occasionally even snoring, or emitting other wet, explosive animal noises at the most sensitive moments. Aaron too provided occasional distractions at times of intense concentration—a rattle of claws, a sudden raucous cry, or the rustle of his feathers as he shook himself.

Mrs Jesse was the heroine of a tragic story. In her youth, when she was nineteen, she had loved and been loved by a brilliant young man, a university friend of her brother’s, who had visited the Rectory where the family lived secluded, and had almost immediately seen that they were soul-mates, and asked her to be his wife. Fate, initially in the shape of the young man’s worldly and ambitious father, had intervened. He was forbidden to see her, or to form an engagement to her, until his twenty-first birthday. This day had come and gone: despite continuing absence and opposition the lovers had persisted faithfully in their truth to each other. The engagement had been announced—the young man had spent a family Christmas with his beloved and her family. Devoted letters had been exchanged. In the Summer of 1833 he had travelled abroad with his father, and had written to her—Ma douce amie—from Hungary, from Pesth, on the way to Vienna. Early in October Mrs Jesse’s brother had received a letter from the young man’s uncle. Mrs Papagay knew its beginning by heart. She had heard it in Mrs Jesse’s deep melancholy voice; she had heard it, word for word, in Captain Jesse’s light ruminative babble.

She had come downstairs, the young woman, hearing the post arrive, hoping, and had had that read out to her by her stricken brother, and the world had gone from her darkened eyes, she had fallen in a deep faint from which the awakening had been more terrible, more shocking, than the first blow, so she told it, and so Mrs Papagay believed it, even experienced it, so intense was the telling. ‘It appears’, Mrs Jesse would narrate, ‘that he went so quietly, so imperceptibly, that his father was able to sit by the fire with him, supposing they were both companionably reading, until it struck him that the silence was too prolonged, or maybe that something was amiss, we do not know, and
he
does not remember. For when he touched my dearest Arthur, his head was not in a wholly natural position—and he did not reply—so a surgeon was sent for, and a vein opened in his arm and another in his hand—all to no avail, he was gone forever.’

For a year after this black day she had kept herself closed in her bedchamber, prostrated with pain and shock, reappearing to her family and friends—Mrs Papagay imagined the scene not from within the young woman’s body, as she did the first shock, but through the wondering eyes of the assembled company, as she crept
into the room, painfully and proudly erect, in the deepest mourning, but with one white rose in her hair, as her Arthur loved to see her. She was back in the world but not
of
the world, she was soul-sick and dwelt in shadows. Too late, too late, as is always the case in tragic tales, the harsh father repented his cruelty, and his son’s beloved was invited to that house where she had never come with her lover, became the bosom friend of his sister, the ‘widowed daughter’ of his sorrowing mother, the recipient, so it was put about, of a generous annuity of £300 per annum. These things are always secret and are always known, gossip whispers from drawing-room to drawing-room, generosity is praised and at the same time questioned sneeringly for motive—to buy affection? to alleviate guilt? to ensure perpetual devotion? This last had clearly not been wholly or perfectly achieved, for there had been Captain Jesse. Quite how or where he had come into the picture Mrs Papagay did not know. Gossip put it about that the marriage had been a cruel disappointment both to old Mr Hallam and to Mrs Jesse’s brother, Alfred, Arthur’s great friend. Mrs Papagay had been shown—in the
strictest
confidence—a letter from the poetess Elizabeth Barrett (before she became Mrs Browning and before she herself joined the happy band of Spirits) in which she characterised Mrs Jesse’s behaviour as a ‘disgrace to womanhood’ and ‘a climax of
badness’
. Miss Barrett referred contemptuously to Captain Jesse—then in 1842, Lieutenant Jesse—as a ‘lubberly Lieutenant’. She despised both bride and groom for accepting the continuation of the annuity which old Mr Hallam had with great generosity not withdrawn. And she rose to a climax of indignation over what Mrs Papagay was sometimes disposed to think was a poetic and romantic touch, the naming of the first son, Arthur Hallam Jesse. ‘That last was a desperate grasp at a “sentiment”—and missed!’ pronounced Miss Barrett, all those years ago. Perhaps
Mrs Browning
would have been more charitable? Mrs Papagay wondered. Her sympathies were so wonderfully enlarged by her own flight and marriage.

Mrs Papagay herself liked to think of this naming as a gage of perpetuity, a Life-in-Death for the dead lover, an assertion of the wondrous community of the Spirit World, for believers. For had not the Lord himself said, ‘In Heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage.’ Though again, Emanuel Swedenborg, who had been there, had seen the marriages of the Angels, which corresponded to the Union between Christ and His Church, and so knew differently, at least could expatiate on
why
Our Lord had said that, when conjugial love was so important to Angels. To be called Arthur Hallam Jesse had not been entirely fortunate for the elder son, as it turned out. He was some kind of military man, but seemed to live in a world of his own, perhaps because, like Captain Jesse’s, his bright blue eyes saw very little beyond his nose. He had, like his father and brother, a face both romantically handsome and gently amiable. Old Mr Hallam was his godfather, as he was also godfather to Alfred’s elder son, also piously named in memoriam, though this was not disapproved of in the same way, since Alfred Tennyson had written
In Memoriam
, which had made Arthur Hallam, A. H. H., an object of national mourning nearly twenty years after his death, and had later caused the nation somehow to confound his young promise with the much-mourned Prince Albert, let alone the legendary King Arthur, the flower of chivalry and soul of Britain.

Sophy Sheekhy knew large runs of
In Memoriam
by heart. She liked poems, it appeared, though she could never get interested in novels, a curious quirk of taste, Mrs Papagay thought. She said she liked the rhythms, it put her in the mood, the rhythms first, then the meanings. Mrs Papagay herself liked
Enoch Arden, a
tragic tale of a wrecked sailor who returned to find his wife happily married, with children, and died in virtuous self-abnegation. The plot resembled the plot of Mrs Papagay’s aborted novel, in which a sailor, having been the single survivor of a vessel burned in mid-ocean, and having been rescued after many weeks floating on a raft under the hot sun, imprisoned by amorous Tahitian princesses, taken off
by pirates, pressed by a man-of-war who had overcome the pirates, wounded in a great battle, returned to his Penelope only to find her the wife of his hated cousin and mother of many little ones with his features but not his. This last Mrs Papagay thought was a fine, tragically ironic touch, but her imagination was not equal to fire, slavery, Tahiti or the press-gangs, although Arturp had often enough made these live vividly for her as they walked the Downs or sat by the fire by night. She missed Arturo still, the more so because no second lover had presented himself to distract her. She was particularly fond of one of the Laureate’s lyrics about the dangers of the return of the dead.

‘ “Ah dear, but come thou back to me,” ’ Mrs Papagay murmured to herself, along with the Queen and countless other bereaved men and women, in one great rhythmic sigh of hopeless hope. And so she felt too, it was certain, Emily Tennyson, Emily Jesse, the love the young man had tasted with half his mind and not touched, for she called on him at their meetings, she desired to see and hear him, he was alive to her, though gone for forty-two years, almost twice the length of his stay on earth. They had never succeeded unambiguously in communicating with him—not even Sophy Sheekhy—and Mrs Papagay, a connoisseur of self-deception and vain images, could only admire the integrity with which Mrs Jesse refused squarely to be seduced by simulacra, or peevish spirits, to drive tables with her own knees or to urge herself and Sophy to greater efforts. ‘He has gone a long way away, I think,’ Sophy had said once, ‘he has a lot to think about.’ ‘He always had,’ said Mrs Jesse. ‘And we are told we do not change beyond the grave, only continue in the path we are in.’