Angels and Insects (28 page)

‘Owls and ravens are God’s creatures,’ Mrs Jesse replied on that occasion with some spirit. ‘I cannot believe that anything so delightful and soft and surprised as an owl can be a creature of evil, Mr Hawke. Look at the screech-owls who cried back to Wordsworth’s Boy, and his mimic hootings. My own brother Alfred was most successful in that line as a boy, he could imitate any bird, and had a whole family of owls who came to his fingertips for food when he called, and one who became a member of our household and travelled about on his head. He had a room under the roof of the Rectory, under the gable.’ Her face softened at the thought of Somersby as it always did. She took out a little leather bag and offered the raven a small scrap of what looked like liver, which he took with another quick stab, tossed, turned, and swallowed. Mrs Papagay was fascinated by Mrs Jesse’s scraps of flesh. She had seen
her covertly put away the remnants of the roast meat from the dinner table into her pouch for the bird. There was something unsavoury about Mrs Jesse, as well, of course, as something pure and tragic. Sitting there with the staring bird and the sharp-toothed, bulge-headed monstrous little grey dog, she was like a weathered, watching head between gargoyles on a church roof, Mrs Papagay momentarily thought, over which centuries of wind and rain had swept as it stared, fretted and steadfast, out to the distance.

Mr Hawke proposed that if they were ready, they should constitute their circle. A round table, covered with a fringed velvet cloth, was pulled out into the centre of the room, and Captain Jesse manhandled the chairs into position, addressing them as though they were living creatures, come along now, don’t be awkward, that will do for
you
. Mrs Jesse produced a sufficiency of paper and various pens and pencils, and a large jug of water with glasses for everyone. They sat down, in semi-darkness, lit only by the flickering flames of the fire in the grate. Mrs Papagay reported that this was how it was done in the most advanced spiritualist circles. The spirits appeared to fear bright light, or to be incommoded by it—its rays were of the wrong constitution, a dead scientific gentleman had once explained through the lips of the American medium Cora V. Tappan—an ideal climate for their appearance would be soothing
violet light
. Emily Jesse liked the firelight. She did most sincerely believe that the dead lived and were eager to speak to the living.

Like her brother Alfred, like the thousands of troubled faithful for whom he partly spoke, she felt a pressing and threatened desire to know that the individual soul was immortal. Alfred as he got older got more and more vehement on the subject. If there were no afterlife, he shouted at his friends, if it were proved to him that was so, he would jump into the Seine or the Thames, he would put his head in the oven, he would take poison or fire a pistol at his own temple. She said to herself often Alfred’s lines:

She liked that. ‘Is faith as vague as all unsweet’ was a good line. But she liked the firelight too with part of her ancient childhood self, expecting marvels. They had played country games by the fire, the eleven children cramped into the pretty Rectory, had told each other terrifying tales and magical visions. The old man, their father, had been half-mad with rage and disappointment and frustrated intellect. And drink, if the record was kept truly. Half the children had suffered from melancholia—one, Edward, never mentioned, was permanently confined in an asylum in York. Septimus lay in the hearth and sorrowed and Charles had taken to opium dreams. Yet they had been happy, she remembered, they had been happy. They had taken pleasure in the dark. They had seen strange things and recounted them with gusto. Horatio, her youngest brother, walking home in the dusk past the Fairy Wood, between Harrington and Bag Enderby, had seen a ghastly human head, apparently severed, running along inside the wood, staring at him over the hedge. Alfred himself had slept with some ceremony in his father’s own bed, less than a week after his father’s death, desirous, he said, of seeing his ghost. The Rectory had been so unaccountably quiet without his father’s howling and crashing that the girls had begged him not to attempt to arouse that perturbed spirit. But Alfred had clung to his idea, somewhere between the ghoulish and the awestruck. He had closed himself into that stuffy room and put out his
candle. And had passed a quiet night, he reported the next morning, thinking much of his father, his bitterness, his misery, his towering intellect, his fits of piercing reasonableness, straining to see him stride, tall and thunderous, past the bed. Or clutch at your throat,’ said Horatio, ‘you disrespectful creature.’ ‘No ghost would appear to
you
, Alfred,’ said Cecilia. ‘You are too vague to see one, you are not receptive.’ ‘Ghosts do not appear to men of imagination, I believe,’ said Alfred, and went on to tell of a cowman who had seen the ghost of a murdered farmer, with a pitchfork protruding from his ribcage. Arthur Hallam had described to her how Alfred had read his one and only paper, entitled
Ghosts
, to the Apostles in Cambridge, that learned society of young men who were going to change the world into something altogether more just and delightful. ‘You should have seen him, dearest Nem, so abominably handsome and so abominably shy and hang-dog, propping up the fireplace and peering at his pages, and then putting on the voice of the tale-teller by the chimney-corner in Sidney and frightening the life out of us with his gruesome visage.’ He had once read the first part of the paper to the assembled Somersby Tennysons.

Arthur had loved their story-telling circles, the crowd of them, adding a dramatic touch, a dying fall to each other’s telling. Arthur’s house, he said, was correct and formal. His brother and sisters and himself were the survivors of a family almost as numerous as the Tennysons. They were watched anxiously for signs of decline, they were treasured and protected, they were exercised in virtue and taught rigorously. They did not run wild in fields nor tumble in hedges, nor shoot with bows and arrows, nor ride wildly across country. I love you all, he had told the Tennysons, his thin face flushed with happiness, aware of conferring happiness, for they loved him too, he was beautiful and perfect, he was to be a great man, a Minister, a philosopher, a poet, a Prince. Matilda had called him King Arthur and crowned him with bay-leaves and Winter aconites. He was patient with Matilda, who was a little odd, a little gruff and abrupt, who had been dropped on her head in infancy and somehow damaged. Matilda, unlike Alfred, certainly saw apparitions. She and Mary had seen a tall white figure—shrouded from head to foot—progressing along the Rectory lane and vanishing through the hedge in a place where there was no gap. Matilda had been affected to tears, she had wept and howled like a dog, and rolled on her bed, in mortal terror. A few days later it was Matilda who had walked to Spilsby and collected at the Post Office that terrible letter.

Mr Hawke arranged them. He sat between Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay, with a copy of the Bible, and a copy of Swedenborg’s
Heaven and Hell
in front of him. Mrs Jesse was next to Mrs Papagay and on her other side was Mrs Hearnshaw. Captain Jesse sat between Mrs Hearnshaw and Sophy Sheekhy, in a kind of parody of dinner-party placement when there were insufficient men. It was Mr Hawke’s custom to begin the proceedings with a reading from Swedenborg and a reading from the Bible. Emily Jesse was not quite sure how he had made himself so central a figure, since he had exhibited no mediumistic powers up to that point. She had been glad at first, when
she told him of their promising, if alarming results from their early cautious spiritual experiments, that he had asked to be included. Like her eldest brother, Frederick, and her sister, Mary, she was a dedicated member of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, and also a convinced spiritualist. Whilst the spiritualists claimed Swedenborg, who had made such momentous journeys into the interior of the spirit world, as a founder of the faith, many of the more orthodox Swedenborgians looked askance at what they saw as the loose and dangerous power-play of the spiritualists. Mr Hawke was not an ordaining minister in the New Church, but a wandering preacher, ordained to speak but with no society to govern, a grade, as he never tired of explaining, referred to by Swedenborg as sacerdos, canonicus, or flamen. He sat with his back to the fire and read out:

‘Today’s reading from the Word,’ he went on, ‘is taken from the Book of Revelation, the twentieth chapter, verses 11 to 15.

The passage from Revelation sent a frisson of accustomed delight through the frame of Mrs Papagay, who loved its sonorous booming and its lurid colours, scarlet, gold, white and the black of the Pit. She loved too, and had loved since childhood, all its strange visions and images, the angels rolling up the scroll of the heavens and tidying them away forever, the stars falling out of the sky into the sea like a rain of golden fiery globes, the dragons and swords, the blood and the honey, the swarms of locusts and the hosts of angels, those creatures at once pure white and fiery-eyed, casting down their golden crowns around a glassy sea. She had asked herself often and often why everyone loved the ferocious Saint John and his terrible vision so, and had answered herself variously, like a good psychologist, that human beings liked to be terrified—look how they enjoyed the nastier Tales of Mr Poe, pits, pendulums, buried alive. Not only that, they
liked to be judged
, she considered, they could not go on if their lives were not of importance, of absolute importance, in some higher Eye which watched and made real. For if there were not death and judgement, if there were not heaven and hell, men were no better than creepy-crawlies, no better than butterflies and blowflies. And
if this was all
, sitting and supping tea, and waiting for bed-time, why were we given such a range of things guessed at, hoped for and feared beyond our fat bosoms confined in stays, and troubles with stoves? Why the white
airy creatures towering, the woman clothed with the sun and the Angel standing in it?