Angels and Insects (30 page)

Three quick, affirmative raps.

‘Is it a spirit we know?’

A whole plethora of raps.

Captain Jesse said, ‘I make that fifteen. Fifteen. Five times three. Five spirits we know, you know. It may be your little ones, Mrs Hearnshaw.’

Sophy was invaded by Mrs Hearnshaw’s pain and hope and fear, like a great beak tearing at her. She cried out, involuntarily.

‘It may be an evil spirit,’ said Mr Hawke.

Mrs Papagay said, ‘Do you wish to speak to us?’

Two raps for indecision.

‘To
one
of us, maybe?’

Fifteen raps again.

‘Is it to Mrs Hearnshaw you wish to speak?’

Three raps.

‘If we hold the pens, will you guide them? Will you tell us who you are?’

‘Who shall write?’ Mrs Papagay asked the visitors. She went through the circle in turn, and the spirits fixed upon her, Mrs
Papagay, as she had hoped and believed they might. She could feel the pull between Mrs Hearnshaw and Sophy, a pull of pure pain and a kind of glittering emptiness, and she knew instinctively she must take a hand, if the hunger was to be met and not magnified. She wanted a
good
message for the poor bereft woman, she put up a little prayer to the Angels for comfort, let her be comforted, she said to them in her mind, before taking up the pen and dutifully emptying her mind for the messages to run through to her fingers.

There was always a moment of fear when her hand began to move, without any volition on her part. Once, visiting a cousin on the South Downs, she had been taken to see a water-diviner at work, who had held a forked hazel-twig over a meadow, which had suddenly risen and writhed under his hands. He had looked at the dark girl between her sceptical town parents, and held the thing out to her, saying, ‘Try, you, try it.’ She had looked at it as though it was a knife, and her father had laughed and said, ‘Go on, Lilias, it’s naught but a twig of wood.’ And at first it had been wood, cut wood, dead wood, and she had begun to advance woodenly across the grass, feeling foolish. And then suddenly something had poured along it and in it, had caused it to rear and buck and writhe in her hands and she had screamed out in such real fear, that everyone had believed, no one had thought of mocking. This experiment it was easy now to adduce as an early knowledge of the powers of animal magnetism. Mrs Papagay recounted it in spiritualist circles as a moment of spiritual force, pouring through her fingers, an early indication of what powers she might have. But at the time it had made her sick with fear, and now, always, taking up the pen, however full of prayer and hope, she was sick also with a kind of animal fear. For pens could take over as hazel twigs did. The hazel twig bucked and twisted between the child’s hands and what? Running unseen channels of cold water under the earth. And the
pen, the pen bucked and twisted between her passive fingers and what letter-forming force?

Mrs Papagay’s passive writing tended to begin with a kind of hither and thither searching among strings of words which as it were
hooked into each other
, until out of the scribbling rose a message or a face, as a rambling pencil might slip into the depiction of speaking eyes under a broad brow, might change tempo from aimless marks to urgent precise depiction. The pencil wrote:

Hands hands across hands hand over under above between below hands little pudy hands pudy plumpy hands Ring a Roses hands tossed with tangle on a bald on a bald street skull not skull soft head heaven gates opened in small head cold hands so cold such cold hands no more cold ring a roses AMY AMY AMY AMY AMY love me I love you we love you in the rosy garden we love you your tears hurt us they bum our soft skins like ice bums here cold hands are rosy we love you
.

We grow in a rose garden. We are your Amys. We watch you we watch over you we watch everything you do you shall come to us not soon not soon
.

‘Shall I know you?’ the woman asked. She said to Emily Jesse, ‘I remember the scent of their little heads.’

We are older now. We grow we learn wisdom. The angels smile on us and teach us wisdom
.

‘Have you any particular advice for your mother?’ said Mrs Papagay.

The pen took a long scrabbling curve across the paper and
suddenly began to write incisively, not in the rounded childish script it had so far used.

We have seen a new brother or sister take form as an earthly seed growing in the dark, we rejoice in the hope for that child in the dark earth and in this rose garden. We wish you to wait for her with hope and love and trust and without fear, for if it is willed for her to come quickly to this summer land she will be happier and you will bear the pain in that certainty as you may bear the pain of her coming bear the pain of her going our death dear Mother death dear we love you and you must love her. You must not give her Our Name. We are here and we live forever and we share Our Name but that suffices. We are five fingers of one rosy hand
.

Mrs Hearnshaw appeared to be in the process of dissolution. Her flesh quaked and shook, her large face was slippery with a warm sheet of tears, her neck was damp, her great breasts quivered, her arms enclosed patches of wetness. She said, ‘
What
shall I call her? What name?’

There was a pause. Then painfully, in capital letters,
‘ROSA’
. A longer pause.
‘MUNDI’
.

Then, in the incisive hand,

Rosamund, Rose of this Earth so we hope she may stay with you a little and make you happy on your dark Earth dearest Mama it is not given to us to know if it will be so and we shall love to have a new Rose in our Ring if it must be but she will be strong if you are strong she will live in your earth many years we trust and hope dearest death Mother
.

It was a quirk of Mrs Papagay’s automatic writing to form the word ‘death’ when it clearly meant ‘dear’, and vice versa. It ran away with itself, and the sitters had decided not to attach too much significance to it, apart from Mr Hawke, who had wondered whether there was a hidden meaning or intention in the closeness
of the two words. Mrs Papagay was somewhat appalled at the certainty with which the spirits had proclaimed both that Mrs Hearnshaw was expecting another little one and that this little one would be a girl. She
preferred
the messages to be more tactfully ambiguous, like those of the Delphic Oracle. Mrs Jesse was mopping up Mrs Hearnshaw with a crumpled handkerchief which had also been used to wipe her own fingers after feeding Aaron. Sophy Sheekhy had gone a kind of opaque pearly colour, and was immobile as a statue. Mr Hawke picked, as he
would
, on the scientifically verifiable aspect of all this so sweetly touching writing.

‘This is a genuine prophecy, Mrs Papagay. Which may be either true or false.’

Another salt flood overwhelmed Mrs Hearnshaw. ‘Oh, Mr Hawke, but that is just the
heart
of the matter. What they say is so. I have known for only a week with any certainty—and I have said nothing to anyone, not even to my dear husband—but it is certainly as they say, I am expecting another child, and to be truthful I was in a state of much greater dread than hope, which after my experience is to be understood, I think, and not blamed, and the dear little ones have seized on my fear and understood it and tried to console me.’ Great sobs clucked in her large white throat. ‘I did all I could—to prevent—I had quite given up
hoping
—I felt only dread, only dread—’

Mrs Papagay’s irrepressible imagination rushed into Mrs Hearnshaw’s conjugal bedroom, aghast, prurient, excited. She saw the large weeping woman brushing her hair—she would have a rather good ivory brush, yes, and a little cheval glass, and would be wearing a kind of black silk peignoir, a
mourning
peignoir, she would be brushing her thick hair and would have taken off all that jewellery, those jet and ebony crosses and lockets, the mourning rings and bracelets, they would be lying sadly in front of her between the candles, like a little shrine to the five Amys. And he would come in, little Mr Hearnshaw, he was a little man, like a black wasp, with a lot of black stiff whiskers
to make him look bigger, to puff him out, and a crest of coarse black hair like a horse’s hogged mane on his head. And he would have a sort of little sign that
that
was what he wanted. Perhaps he would come up quietly and lift a tress or two and kiss the nape of her sad neck, or massage it with his fingers, if he had the imagination. And the poor woman’s head would droop lower and lower, for she wanted to do her conjugal duty but she was afraid, she was afraid right at the beginning, of the seed rushing in … Mrs Papagay rapped her rampant imagination severely on the head but it rushed on. Mr Hearnshaw clutched Mrs Hearnshaw and propelled her towards the bed. Mrs Papagay constructed the bed, gave it red velvet curtains and then made them vanish on grounds of inverisimilitude. It was a big
dark
bed, she was sure, and ample, like Mrs Hearnshaw; it had a purple silk eiderdown and fresh lavender-smelling linen sheets. It was a bed that had to be climbed, and Mrs Hearnshaw climbed slowly, having taken off the peignoir and being clad now in white cotton, with broderie anglaise trimmings, threaded with black ribbons. Her big breasts swung inside the bell of this as she leaned over the bed, climbing in, with him close behind her, holding on to her big haunches, that was how Mrs Papagay saw it, the little prickly man,
pushing her in
like a sow into a sty. She saw his white legs below his striped nightshirt, covered with criss-crossing black hairs, like scribbling. They were thin, strong,
angular
legs, not comfortable.

And then the dialogue.

‘My dear, I
must …
’

‘No, please. I have a headache.’

‘I must, I must. Be kind to me, dear. I
must
.’

‘I cannot bear it. I am afraid.’

‘The good Lord will take care. We must do His Will and trust in His Providence.’

With his whiskers bristling on her face, and the little hands pulling at her ample flesh, and the little sharp knees working closer to the white flanks.

‘I do not know if I—’

Mrs Papagay, in a rush of indignation saw the little man mount and pump, pump, possessed in a male way, unregarding. Then she was contrite and angry with herself for her own dramaturgy, which had provoked her indignation, and tried to imagine it otherwise—two disconsolate people, who loved each other, turning to each other in the dark, out of their separate griefs, holding each other for comfort, and out of the warmth of comfort, naturally enough, the prick of desire. But that didn’t feel natural as the first scene did. Mrs Papagay returned to the present of the séance—all this action having flickered into life and out of it in a brief minute—and wondered whether other people told themselves stories in this way in their heads, whether everyone made up everyone else, living and dead, at every turn, whether this she knew about Mrs Hearnshaw could be called knowledge or lies, or both, as the spirits had
known
what Mrs Hearnshaw had confirmed, that she was indeed
enceinte
.

‘There is something in the room,’ Sophy Sheekhy announced dreamily. ‘Between the sofa and the window. A living creature.’

All looked towards this dark corner—those opposite Sophy
Sheekhy, especially Emily Jesse, who was directly opposite her, turning their heads and craning their necks, seeing only the dim outlines of Mr Morris’s pomegranates and birds and lilies.

‘Can you see it clearly?’ asked Mrs Papagay. ‘Is it a spirit?’

‘I can see it clearly. I don’t know what it is. I can describe it. Up to a point. A lot of the colours don’t have names.’

‘Describe it.’

‘It is made up of some substance which has the appearance of—I don’t know how to say this—of—
plaited glass
. Of quills, or hollow tubes of glass all bound together like plaits of hair or those pictures you see of the muscles of flayed men all woven together—but these are like molten glass. It appears to be very hot, it gives off a kind of bright
fizzing
sort of light. It is somewhat the shape of a huge decanter or flask, but it is a living creature. It has flaming eyes on the sides of a high glassy sort of head, and it has a long, long beak—or proboscis—its long neck is slightly bent and its nose or beak or proboscis—is tucked into its—into the plaits of—what in a way is its fiery breast. And it is all eyes, all golden eyes,
inside
 … it has in a way plumes, in three, in three layers, all colours—I can’t do the colours—it has plumes like a great mist, a ruff under its—head—and a kind of cloak round its centre—and I don’t know if it has a train or a tail or winged feet, I can’t see, it’s all stirring about all the time, and shining and sparking and throwing off bits of light and I get the feeling, the sensation, it doesn’t like me to describe it in demeaning human words and comparisons—it didn’t like me saying “decanter or flask”, I felt its anger, which was hot. It does wish me to describe it, I can tell.’