Angels and Insects (31 page)

‘Is it hostile?’ asked Captain Jesse.

‘No,’ said Sophy Sheekhy, slowly. She added, ‘It is irritable.’ ‘ “Skirted his loins and thighs with downie Gold / And colours dipt in Heav’n,” ’ said Mrs Jesse..

‘Can you see it too?’ said Sophy Sheekhy.

‘No. I was quoting the description of the Archangel Raphael in
Paradise Lost
. “A seraph winged; six wings he wore, to shade/His lineaments divine”.’

Captain Jesse said, ‘It is interesting about the wings of an angel. It has been pointed out that an angel would need a protruding breastbone of several feet to counterbalance the weight of its wings, like a bird, like a big bird, you know, an arched breastbone.’

Mrs Jesse said, ‘My brother Horatio was once observing a lady sculptor making a carved reredos for a church and disconcerted her by observing, “Angels are only a clumsy form of poultry.” ’

‘Levity, Mrs Jesse,’ said Mr Hawke, ‘at such a moment—’

‘The good Lord makes us as we are, Mr Hawke,’ replied Mrs Jesse. ‘He knows that a little levity is in its way an expression of awe, of our own inadequacy to ingest marvels. Are we to suppose that Miss Sheekhy is at this moment contemplating the pure Form of an angel? An angel made of air, like Dr Donne’s—“Then as an Angell, face, and wings / Of aire, not pure as it, yet pure doth weare …” Can an angel be compared to a glass bottle with a proboscis?’

The séance, even at its most intense, visionary and tragic, retained elements of the parlour game. It was not that Mrs Jesse did not believe that Sophy Sheekhy saw her Visitor; it was patently clear that she did; it was more that there were all sorts of pockets of disbelief, scepticism, comfortable and comforting unacknowledged animal un
awareness
of the unseen, which acted as checks and encouraged a kind of cautious normalness.

Mr Hawke said judiciously, ‘It is possible that what Miss Sheekhy sees is the form taken by the thought of an angel in the lower world of the Spirits. Swedenborg has many curious things to tell us of angelic offgivings, reliques of past mental states stored up inwardly for future use. He believed for instance that such
offgivings
were inserted into infants in the womb as reliques of past states of angelic conjugial love—an affection is
an organic structure having life
—so we may in certain circumstances be made sensuously aware of it.’

Mr Hawke, Mrs Papagay thought, would theorise if a huge red Cherub with a fiery sword were advancing on him to burn him to the bone; he would explain the circumstances, whilst the stars fell out of the sky into the sea like ripe figs from a shaken fig-tree.

Sophy Sheekhy watched the living creature simmer in its brilliant fronds. It was making her feel alternately hot and cold; her skin pulsed crimson and then the hot tide dipped and she was again pale and clammy. The flask or vase that was the creature seemed to be full of eyes, to be made up of huge golden eyes the way a mass of frogspawn is made up of jelly. She had the idea nevertheless that all this mass of burning vision did not exactly see her, that the creature’s awareness of the room they were in, and of its inhabitants, was less acute, vaguer, than hers of it. It hummed at her on various painful notes, that hurt cords in her hearing.

‘It says, “Write!” ’ she said, in a strangled voice.

Mrs Papagay looked up, all concern, and saw that Sophy Sheekhy was in real distress.

‘Who shall write?’ she asked, helpfully.

Sophy took up a pencil. Mrs Papagay could see the tendons rigid on her neck. She said to the others, ‘Be very careful. This communication is dangerous and painful to the Medium. Keep very still, and concentrate on helping her.’

The pen took a little rush, and produced a neat, elegant handwriting, not at all like Sophy’s large schoolgirl spherical characters.

Thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot
.

The pen wavered and then went back, crossing out ‘Laodicea’ and writing, very slowly and carefully,

Theodicaea Noviss Novissima. Lost Remains, his loved remains sail the placid ocean-plains thy dark freight. Lost, lost
.

Thy dark freight a vanished life
.

Mrs Papagay could feel the separate yet fused emotion of all the company. Mrs Hearnshaw was awestruck, her breathing laboured. Mr Hawke was alert, his mind trying to decipher. He said, ‘Revelation 3, 15 to 16. The writing commanded to the Angel of the Church of the Laodiceans. “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” We are reproached for lack of zeal. Theodicaea I do not know—it may be that we are not zealous enough in promoting the Kingdom of God in Margate. But the words are not cognate.’

Captain Jesse said, One of the lines of poetry is from
In Memoriam
, I believe. It is one of the lines about the ship that bears the dead man home. “Thy dark freight, a vanished life.” It is a line I have always particularly admired, since the
weight
of the freight, so to speak, is the weight of absence, of what is vanished, a lost life. It is not what remains that is heavy, but what is not there, what is dark, what I believe is a figure called a paradox, is it not? The ship sails in an ominous calm across the
placid
ocean-plain, it glides like a ghost, the ship bearing …’

‘Richard, stop talking,’ said Mrs Jesse. ‘Everyone knows that line is from my brother’s poem. The spirits often speak to us through that poem, it seems to be a particular favourite with them, and not only in this house, where it has its natural central place in our thoughts, but in many others, many others.’

She turned her dark, fierce face in the half-light on Sophy Sheekhy. At her side the raven rattled his quills, and the little dog showed his sharp little teeth.

‘To whom is this message addressed, pray? To whom and from whom?’

‘Who is “our Lady who is dead”?’ added Mr Hawke, helpfully, concentrating his agile mind on the spiritual conundrum.

Sophy Sheekhy stared at the Visitor whose eyes were boiling in a kind of immaterial convection current. She took up the pen again:

Mr Hawke pounced. ‘The angel standing in the sun is indeed in Revelation, but he is not Revelation 2, 4, he is in chapter 19, verses 17 to 18 “And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of captains—” ‘

‘We all know that text, Mr Hawke,’ said Mrs Jesse. ‘And it is, as you say, Revelation 19, 17 to 18.’

Captain Jesse had picked up the Bible from the table, and read out helpfully, ‘Here is the verse from chapter 2, verse 4. It is addressed to the Angel of the Church of Ephesus. “Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.” Dear me. How interesting. What can that mean?’

‘Who is our Lady who is dead?’ persisted Mr Hawke.

‘It is a translation from the Italian, from one of the sonnets of Dante’s
Vita Nuova
,’ said Mrs Jesse, tartly. ‘The dead Lady is Beatrice, who died at the age of twenty-five and inspired the
Divine Comedy
. The poet met her at the age of nine and remained faithful to her memory, though he married, after her death. Will our visitor not reveal, Miss Sheekhy, to whom these warnings are addressed?’

Sophy Sheekhy looked at the boiling eyes and the feathery fringes.

‘He is growing fainter,’ she said.

The pen wrote:
‘Allas the deeth. Allas min E. Allas.’

‘It is for you, Mrs Jesse,’ said Mrs Hearnshaw, who was less knowledgeable about Mrs Jesse’s history, and therefore less alarmed by the faintly threatening nature of the messages, interpreted in terms of Mrs Jesse.

‘So I supposed,’ said Mrs Jesse. ‘But we do not know from
whom
. Many spirits, living and dead, may enter the circle, as we all know.’

She put up her two hands, round her head, with its silver-dark wings of hair, breaking the circle. Stirred by this movement, the raven suddenly put up his great wings and clapped them together, over his head, opening his black beak to show a black, pointed, snaky tongue, and uttering a series of harsh, grating cries. Dark feathered shadows flailed across the ceiling. Pug rose from his slumbers and made a noise, half throaty growl, half strangled snort, followed by an explosive rumbling in his belly. A Lilliputian Vesuvius of coals collapsed in the grate, flaring fitfully scarlet and then crimson, with a puff of gas. Sophy Sheekhy’s visitor was only a few bright lines on the dark, a diagram paler than the golden fruit and the starry white flowers on the sofa behind him, and then nothing. Mrs Papagay drew the proceedings to an end. She would dearly have loved to question Mrs Jesse closely about the meaning of the visitor’s messages, for it was clear to her that they had meaning for Mrs Jesse, very precise meaning, that the spirits had
somehow hit home, and that Mrs Jesse was not inclined to share her understanding with the rest of them. They usually took a cup of tea, or of coffee, after their exertions, and discussed the meaning of what had transpired, but on this occasion Mrs Papagay observed that Mrs Jesse was tired and that it would be best if they left.

Mrs Jesse did not thank her. Captain Jesse began a long rambling speech about the Laureate’s depiction of the sea in his great poem. He pronounced the stanzas about burial at sea to be particularly fine. ‘You might think it was a landsman’s understanding of that ceremony, and you would be right, of course, a landsman is affected differently from a sailor by the ocean. I believe the sea is both more matter-of-fact and more ever-present and dare I say more
mysterious
to a sailor than to a landsman; it is borne forcibly home to a sailor how far below and around him at all moments is shifting salt water in which he cannot survive, and this perhaps causes him to view our human existence as something precarious and temporary in the nature of things; the landsman has more the illusion of stability and permanences, you know, the landsman is more struck by the disappearance of the corpse in the water, though I have never myself seen a body sink with its white trail of bubbles, the air going so far in the water, you know, and then rising again, being forced to rise, as the body goes more and more slowly into its other element where it will rest—I have never seen this without a constraint of pain and moment of terror—all sailors are afraid of that element, rightly so—and you would be surprised too how many naval men murmur to themselves those lines about the mother who prays God will save her sailor son, whilst that exact moment “His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud/Drops in his vast and wandering grave.” “Vast and wandering” is very good, very good indeed. They keep that book under their pillows, these naval men, you know, they appreciate the understanding …’

‘Stop talking, Richard,’ said Mrs Jesse.

A cab bore Mrs Hearnshaw away. Mr Hawke offered to accompany the other two ladies to their home—it was on his way, it was dark, the walk would benefit all of them. Out on the pavement he attempted to take the arms of both ladies, but Sophy Sheekhy drew back, and they somehow found themselves progressing along the Front with Mr Hawke and Mrs Papagay in front and Sophy walking a few paces behind, like a dutiful child. There were gaslights along the Front, whose yellow flames danced and shimmered. Beyond, the sea was ink-black, with occasional curls of white crests in the small wind. A vast and
wandering grave indeed, Mrs Papagay thought. Arturo must be ground white bones by now. It was probable that there had been no one to sew him neatly into a weighted hammock. Ah dear, but come thou back to me. Nevermore, her mind muttered.