Angels and Insects (29 page)

Mrs Papagay was not good at giving up thinking. Their practice was to sit in silence, composing the circle, holding hands lightly, to join them into one, waiting, passive mind for the spirits to use, to enter, to speak through. At first they had used a system of raps and answers, one for yes, two for no, and every now and then they were still startled by great peals of banging from beneath the table, or shakings of the surface below their fingers. But mostly now they waited until the spirits gave signs of their presence, and then proceeded to automatic writing—all might hold pencil over paper, all, except Captain Jesse, had produced scripts, long or short, which they had studied and interrogated. And then, if it was a good day, the visitors would speak through Sophy, or more rarely, through herself. And once or twice, Sophy could see them, she could describe what she saw to others. She had seen Mrs Jesse’s dead nephew and nieces, the three children of her sister Cecilia—Edmund, Emily, and Lucy, dead at thirteen, nineteen, and only last year at twenty-one. So slow, so sad, Mrs Papagay thought, though the spirits said how happy and busy they were in a land of Summer amongst flowers and orchards of wonderful light. It was the marriage of this sister, Cecilia, which had been celebrated at the end of
In Memoriam
as the triumph of Love over Death, with the bride’s little slippered feet, Mrs Papagay could just see them, tripping on the tablets of the dead in the old church. But we live in a Vale of Tears, Mrs Papagay had to conclude, we need to know that there is Summerland. The unborn child who was the future hope of the Laureate’s poem had come and gone, like A. H. H. himself. With whom, for some reason, they were none of them, not even Sophy Sheekhy, able to establish communication.

The firelight made shadows on walls and ceilings. Captain Jesse’s mane of white hair stood out like a crown, his beard was god-like, and Aaron’s smooth black head appeared in a smoky and wavering
silhouette. Their hands were fitfully lit. Mrs Jesse’s were long and brown, gipsy hands with glinting red rings. Mrs Hearnshaw’s were softly white, covered with mourning rings containing the hair of the lost in littler caskets. Mr Hawke’s were muddy, with a few gingery hairs on them. He took good care of his nails, and wore a little signet ring with a bloodstone. He was given to making little pats and squeezes of encouragement and reassurance to his neighbours. Mrs Papagay could also feel his knees, which occasionally rubbed her own, and, she was sure, Sophy Sheekhy’s. She knew, without having to think about it, that Mr Hawke was an excitable man in
that
way, that he liked female flesh, and thought much and very frequently about it. She knew, or thought she knew, that he liked the idea of the cool pale limbs of Sophy Sheekhy, that he imagined undoing that smooth unornamented bodice, or running his hands up those pale legs under the dove-coloured dress. She knew, with slightly less assurance, that Sophy Sheekhy did not respond to this interest. She saw Sophy’s pale hands, creamy-pale even under the nails, motionless and at rest in his grip, with no answering sweat, Mrs Papagay was sure. Sophy seemed to have no interest in that kind of thing. Part of her spiritual success might be due to this intact quality of hers. She was a pure vessel, cool, waiting dreamily.

Mrs Papagay also knew that Mr Hawke had considered her own possibilities as a source of creature comfort. She had caught his eye on her breast and waist, involuntarily speculative, she had felt his warm fingers massage her palm, at moments of excitement. She had met his eye, once or twice, as he weighed up her full mouth and her still-youthful coils of hair. She had never offered him any voluntary encouragement, but she had not, as she could have done, repelled him once and for all when he looked too long or brushed against her. She was trying to weigh it all up. She believed any woman who put her mind to it could
have
Mr Hawke for the asking, if only that woman were reasonably buxom and inclined to
him. Did she want to be Mrs Hawke? The truth was she wanted Arturo, she wanted what Swedenborg would call the ‘conjugial delights’ of her married life. She wanted to sleep with male arms round her in the scent of marriage-sheets. Arturo had taught her much and she had been an apt pupil. He had gained courage to tell his wide-eyed wife of what he had seen in various ports, of women who had entertained him—he went so far, and further, as he saw that his surprising wife did not take umbrage, but evinced detailed curiosity. She could teach Mr Hawke, or some other man, a thing or two, could Lilias Papagay, that would surprise him. If she could bring herself to it, after Arturo. She had a terrible nightmare once, about embracing Arturo and finding herself engorged with a great sea-eel, dragon or sea-serpent, which had somehow half-absorbed or half-extruded parts of him. Though the occasional dream in which he returned, as it were, ‘to the life’ hurt almost more, on waking. ‘ “Ah, dear, but come thou back to me,” ’ said Mrs Papagay to herself, to her dead man. Her outside thumb found itself measured, and rubbed, by Mr Hawke’s stiff outside thumb. She tried to compose her mind to the purpose of the meeting. She reproached her own backsliding by looking at the expectant strain on Mrs Hearnshaw’s large soft face.

Sophy Sheekhy was much better at emptying her mind than Mrs Papagay. Indeed, before Mrs Papagay had led her to make a profession of it, she had been constantly delighted, alarmed and embarrassed by slipping and sliding in and out of different states of consciousness as she might slip and slide her body in and out of its various garments and coverings, or in and out of warm water or cold Winter air. One of her favourite biblical readings, and one of Mr Hawke’s too, because it allowed him to reflect on the experiences of Swedenborg, was Saint Paul’s anecdote in II Corinthians 12.

She liked the equivocal repeated phrase ‘whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth’. It described many of her own states and could be used, like poetry, with its repeated hum of rhythm, to induce such states. You went on saying it to yourself until it became at first
very strange
, as though all the words were mad and bristling with shiny glass hairs, and then very simple and meaningless, like clear drops of water. And you were there and not there. Sophy Sheekhy sat there like a grey nun with her face turned down, and something saw. Saw what? Sophy herself did not feel there was a great discontinuity between the creatures and objects met in dreams, the creatures and objects glimpsed through windows, or out over the sea-wall, the creatures and objects called up by poems and the Bible, or the creatures which came from nowhere and stayed awhile, could be described to other people, seen, smelled, heard, almost touched and tasted—some were sweet, some were smoky. Lying in bed at night, waiting for sleep, she saw processions of all kinds, sometimes in the dark air, sometimes bringing with them their own worlds, strange or familiar, desert dunes, scrubby heaths, the interior of dark cupboards, the heat of fires, orchards heavy with fruit. She saw flocks of birds and clouds of butterflies, camels and llamas, little naked black men and the sheeted dead with bound jaws, bolt upright and shining. She saw burning lizards and families of golden balls, large
and infinitesimal, she saw transparent lilies and walking pyramids of glass. Other indescribable creatures wandered through her consciousness—something like a purple firescreen with fringed silvery arms came by, open and shut, emitting a feeling of great contentment, and a kind of orange hedgehog of agony blew up and exploded in front of her. Many of these she never tried to describe to anyone else. They were her world. But some of the things which came, or could be called up, were whole human beings, with faces and histories, and she had learned slowly and painfully that she was required—from both sides it seemed—to mediate between these and those others who neither saw nor heard them. The more the weight of hope, the more the sucking whirlpool of grief
here
that called and called, the harder it became for Sophy Sheekhy to do as she was asked, to invite these
particular
comers among all others to make their stay and speak. They strangled her, she felt sometimes, the living not the dead.

Today she sensed, composing herself, that the room was full of activities. It was her habit to look slowly round the circle, ‘seeing’ the members of it in an abstracted way, weighing up as it were in her blood and bones their preoccupations and motions of the mind, and then to cast off, and listen. Often outside the living circle she saw another, of creatures pressing in, desiring and hearing, desiring an audience, ready to give a whirligig performance or to chuckle or to howl. She looked calmly at her hands, at Mr Hawke’s finger stroking the web between hers, and made hers chill as the dead, cold as stone, so she was sitting there with a heavy marble hand, its life shrunk back to her heart. She looked at Mr Hawke and saw in his place, as she often did, a kind of flayed terracotta red creature, somewhat resembling Pug, or a glazed statue of a Chinese lion, or a satin pincushion with glass-headed pins in it, a thing the colour of the angrily shining tip of that Part of Mr Pope which he had held straining stiffly upwards in front of him, the day he sleepwalked into her garret making husky little groans before she left her body
entirely cold like a dead fish, cold like a marble peach when he put his hot hand on it, and jumped back, burnt by ice.

Mrs Papagay she saw as Mrs Papagay, because she loved her as she was, though she saw her head all crowned with the feathers of peacocks and lyrebirds and whitest ostriches, like a South Seas Queen. Mrs Hearnshaw she often saw all wet and gleaming with water on fat rolls as a mermaid risen from the waters, as a huge sealion on a rock, wailing to the sky. Sometimes she seemed to see through Mrs Hearnshaw as through a huge vase or calyx in which forms faintly struggled like peaches in a jar. And next to Mrs Hearnshaw, holding her own other hand, Captain Jesse. Once, looking at him, she had seen a great white plumed creature, a creature with huge powerful wings and a fierce beak confined inside his body, compressed inside his ribs, like something caged, staring out with golden inhuman eyes. Later, she was sure it was later, Captain Jesse had shown her his engravings, of the great white Albatross which he had seen on his Polar explorations. He had told her a great deal about the wastes of snow and the dogs who pulled the sleds and had pale blue eyes and were eaten when they were exhausted. He had told her about crevasses where men sank without trace in sheets of green ice like emeralds—the Poet was right, Captain Jesse told Sophy Sheekhy, it is just such a green, the emerald, that is scientifically
exact
, my dear, and very creditable.

As for Mrs Jesse, Sophy Sheekhy saw her sometimes young and beautiful, in a black dress, with a white rose in her raven hair, as
he
loved to see her. A disinterested stare at almost anyone, she had discerned, could reveal the ghost of the girl they had once been, and simultaneously the old crone they were to become. She saw Mrs Jesse as a witch, too, wrapped and hooded in black black rags and tatters, with a pointed chin and a sharp nose and a toothless crumple of a mouth. The girl waited and waited, and the old woman’s wrinkled hands lay beside the raven’s claws or caressed the flaccid roll of fat on Pug’s neck.

*   *   *

‘Shall we try singing a little?’ Mrs Papagay suggested. It fell to her to conduct the approach to the Spirit World after Mr Hawke had asserted the authority of the Word. Her own favourite hymn was Bishop Heber’s ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’, a taste she shared with the Laureate and with Sophy Sheekhy, who felt transfixed with glass spears of pure joy at the verse

Mrs Hearnshaw however had a predilection for ‘There’s a home for little children’ and

So they sang both of those, lifting their joined hands rhythmically in a circle, feeling the power run from finger to finger, an electric pulse along which the lines of communication could open to the land of the dead.

The fire died a little. The dark thickened. Sophy Sheekhy said, clear and cool, ‘There are spirits here, I feel them, also I can smell roses. Is anyone else aware of a strong perfume of roses?’

Mrs Papagay said she believed she also caught their scent. Emily Jesse drew in a great breath in her nostrils and thought she detected the ghost of roses across the livery breath of Aaron and the lingering residues of one of Pug’s farts, which everyone was far too well-bred
to remark upon. Mr Hawke was going, ‘Sniff, sniff, sniff,’ and Sophy told him gently to be still, that things would not be manifest if he strained, that he must give way, be passive, receive. And suddenly Mrs Hearnshaw cried out, ‘Oh, I have it, I have it, it came wafting by me like gardens in Summer.’ Mrs Papagay said, ‘It is given to me that we are to imagine a rosegarden with hedges of roses, and arches of roses, and soft lawns, and great beds of roses of every colour, red and white and cream-coloured and all the pinks, and golden-yellow, and colours never imagined on earth, roses blushing like fire, roses with hearts of heavenly blue and gleaming black velvet—’

They imagined. The delightful odour was now perceived by everyone. The table beneath the circle of hands began to thrum and shift. Mrs Papagay said, ‘Is there a spirit there?’