Angels and Insects (33 page)

Emily Jesse lit the oil-lamp and considered the automatic writing. The servant, a blowsy, self-assertive, hysterical girl, with a tendency to faint in a haze of sherry fumes and a daemonic capacity to cause the evaporation of whisky in decanters and silver teaspoons in boxes, cleared away the teacups and poked the dying fire. Captain Jesse paced up and down in the window, looking out at the stars, and murmuring about the weather, as though he were trying to steer the house to some distant port across deep gulfs. You could not see the sea from this window, but you might have thought you could, the way he looked out. He murmured mathematical observations, and commented to himself on the visibility of Sirius, of Cassiopeia, of the Pleiades. ‘Stop talking, Richard,’ said Emily automatically, frowning over the papers. She had once overheard her sister-in-law, Emily Tennyson, telling someone that Alfred absolutely
had
to leave home, on some excuse or other, if he had warning that Captain Jesse was coming, for Captain Jesse babbled indiscriminately and Alfred had need of
absolute calm
in order to compose his
poetry. ‘She wraps Alfred up like a mummy and does his buttons like a baby,’ Emily Jesse would say to herself uncharitably, but only to herself, for the Tennysons were close, close, and fiercely attached to each other, all of them, except poor Edward in his lunatic asylum, and they had tried their best to love and encompass him too, until it became clear they couldn’t. Alfred had composed well enough, and better than now, in the cramped and inventive racket of the Rectory, which had so delighted Arthur in 1829, in 1830, those few weeks, when their angry father had been away in France, and they had all been in blossom, expansive and playful. Alfred had been a great poet then, and was a great poet now, and Arthur had recognised that fact early, and with a delightful, strengthening and calm certainty.

She considered the handwriting of the messages, so unlike Sophy Sheekhy’s innocent loops and circles. It was somewhere between Arthur’s small quick hand, and Alfred’s, also small and quick, but less pinched. It staggered a little, here and there. It had Arthur’s characteristic small
d
, hooked backwards at the top, but not always. It had such a
d
in both
ds
of ‘dead’—’Never forget our Lady who is dead’—and also in the controversial and troubling Theodicaea. The messages were all undoubtedly to do with Arthur, and perhaps she should have cried out, in pain and longing, as Mrs Hearnshaw had, as she saw his words, in a passable rendering of his hand. But she had not. She had questioned. She had dissembled. She knew, for instance, she the Lady of her Arthur’s eternal devotion, Monna Emilia, min Emilie, dearest Nem, dearest Nemkin, that these lines of Dante were not only from the
Vita Nuova
, but from Arthur’s own translation of Dante’s poems of devotion to his dead Lady, Monna Beatrice, done so little before his death.
‘L’amaro lagrima che voi faceste’
he had given her to translate, teasing her for her bad memory, her faulty constructions. ‘The bitter weeping you made’, addressing the poet’s own eyes, which had briefly rested on another maiden, when they ‘had a bounden duty and they ought / Never forget our Lady who is dead’. The spiritualist newspapers, the
members of the New Jerusalem Church, would be overwhelmed that any message so pretty, so private, so appropriate, could be sent to one mourner. But there was more—beside the by now habitual citation of
In Memoriam
, there was the Theodicaea. A. H. H. had written the ‘Theodicaea Novissima’ for those exclusive intelligences the Cambridge Apostles, who pronounced it wholly original and very fine. He had argued that the reason for evil was God’s need for love—for the
passion of love
—which had caused Him to create the finite Christ as an object of desire, and a Universe, full of sin and sorrow, to provide an adequate background for this passion to work itself out in. The Incarnation, Arthur had argued, had made human love—‘the tendency towards a union so intimate, as virtually to amount to identification’—one with Divine Love, so that Christ’s loving death was a way to God. Here it became obscure, to Emily, how evil was so necessary to this Love, how Arthur could be so sure. The essay was abstract and boiled with human passion. Arthur had wished she had not read it.

‘I do not think women ought to trouble themselves much with theology.’ She had found that sentence chilling and rebuffing at the time—she had put a lot of work, in a desultory way, into understanding
the involutions and niceties of the Theodicaea, only to arouse one of Arthur’s most
lordly
letters, which always made her, conscious of her provincial lack of social grace, her female lack of educated talk, wince a little with anxiety and some other, undefined feeling. It was hard now, at sixty-four, to remember that Arthur had been only twenty when he wrote that, and twenty-two when he died. He had seemed like a young god. Everyone he knew had known he was a young god. He had not been so lordly when they were face to face, he had been flushed—partly because of the circulatory problem which made him ill, even then—and his hands had been damp, and his narrow mouth anxious. But they had been face to face, in all, for only four weeks before their engagement, and three more short visits before his death. He had treated her like a mixture of a goddess, a house-angel, a small child and a pet lamb. This was, she supposed, not unusual. It had not seemed unusual. She had loved him passionately. She had thought of him most of the time, most days, after that first nervous embrace on the yellow sofa.

She turned back to the spirit writings. They were all, all reproaches, bitter reproaches, aimed to hurt. They were pointed.

Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love
.

Your silliness o’ercasts me much with thought
.

Lost Remains
.

People are always angry and disappointed, thought Emily Jesse. She had wanted so much to speak to lost Arthur, to be reassured that she was forgiven for not having been able to be what Arthur’s sister Julia Hallam called a ‘dedicated
Nun
’. But it might be that Arthur, too, like his family, like Alfred, did not really forgive. She had a letter in her bureau from her nephew, Hallam Tennyson, named like her own son, Arthur Hallam Jesse, for lost Arthur, and
like him, godson to old Mr Hallam, who had been so excessively kind to herself, as a memorial, in memoriam.

She was convinced that it was the sale of the
Remains
that had attracted the spirit displeasure. It might even be Arthur’s own displeasure, though she wanted to hope that Sophy Sheekhy had, through some process of animal magnetism and aethereal telegraphy, managed to communicate the buzzing of Hallam Tennyson’s disapproval, of Alfred’s disappointment. It was true that she should not have sold the
Remains
. It was in execrable taste to have sold the
Remains
, of which old Mr Hallam had had only a hundred copies privately printed, for his son’s close friends and family, the testimony to his genius, tragically cut off. There were writings in there about Dante and divine Love, about sympathy and Cicero. There was the spirited review of Alfred’s
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical
(1830), which had aroused the sneers of the tetchy Christopher North at the young critic’s ‘superhuman—nay, supernatural—pomposity’ and caused a flurry of impotent protective rage in all the Tennysons for both the young men, Alfred, morbidly sensitive to criticism, and Arthur, only apparently, proudly, more robust. There were also poor Arthur’s poems, including those reverently breathed to herself, and some to one of his previous loves, Anna Wintour, whose graces, as young men will, he had enumerated to his Emily,
sitting on the yellow sofa, offering her himself, and all that he had so far become in his short life. Anna’s poems, Emily thought, were on the whole better than her own, more lively, less full of sweet incense and the thrill of sanctification. There was also a poem inviting her, Emily, to enter the Temple of Italian poetry, assuring her that the feast of music, ‘this pleasure thou dost owe me’, would not wrong her gentle spirit

This poem reminded her of her struggles to master Italian, to please him. It was odd that the spirits should have cited with such precision one of his translations from the
Vita Nuova
. He had shown her them with such pride, but they were not in the
Remains
. Old Mr Hallam had taken it upon himself to burn them, finding them ‘rather too literal and consequently harsh’. She had rather liked the harshness—it had a kind of male forcefulness, a kind of directness she had been taught to value. Old Mr Hallam had taken much upon himself, including the guilt of having separated the lovers, and the care of Emily’s sad future, which was to be beside his own sad future. She had tried, she thought. She was not brought up to find the rigorous formality of the Hallams easy. She liked Ellen, the younger sister, who was like Arthur, without the dramatic tension of sexual difference, but with a kind of sympathetic ease. But the friendship had not really survived. Had not survived her marriage, that was.

She had not exactly taken a decision to sell the
Remains
. The house was full of books, and now and then she, or Richard, shipped off a basket or two, to make room for new ones. She remembered now perhaps glimpsing the binding of the
Remains
between other books shifted from the same shelf. She had seen, and pretended not
to see. She hoped Arthur might forgive her. She found the objects which attracted the devotion of his worshippers—including herself, including that desperate fainting girl—almost too much to bear. She was not at all sure Arthur would forgive her. His writings were the best part of himself. His truncated future. She should not have sold the
Remains
, intentionally or unintentionally. She was at fault.

She had never liked the
Remains
, partly at least because it reminded her, always and sickeningly, of that terrible Letter.

‘He died at Vienna on his return from Buda, by Apoplexy, and I believe his Remains come by Sea from Trieste’

She had not liked, in those early days, to think of the terror of the fate of those flesh and blood Remains, and yet had been drawn to do so. The body decayed in earth, the spirit went free. Someone told her Arthur’s heart had been shipped in a separate iron casket. There had been an Autopsy. He had been cut up and wounded, poor Arthur, dead and unfeeling—
‘the Physician endeavour’d to get any Blood from him—and on Examination it was the general Opinion, that he could not have lived long’
. He had been dismembered and searched as he began on the process of his dissolution. She had spent his absence imagining his return—the outstretched hands, the smiling eyes, the large brow with the ‘bar of Michelangelo’ of which he was so proud, in the bone over the eyes. She could not in those days stop herself imagining what was to come of all that. She had not lived next to a churchyard for nothing. The Thing coming so slowly across the sea filled her with horror, which she never expressed to a soul. Arthur himself might have understood. He had introduced a joke about the stinking corpse of the fair Rosamond into his criticism of Alfred’s use of ‘redolent’ to describe the perfumes in the garden of the Arabian Nights. ‘Bees may be redolent of honey; spring may be “redolent of youth and love”; but the absolute use of the word has, we fear, neither in Latin nor in English any better authority than the monastic epitaph on Fair Rosamond:
“Hie jacet in tomba Rosa Mundi, non Rosa Munda, non
redolet, sed olet, quae redolere solet.”
’ Or perhaps he wouldn’t have. You have to be touched to the quick, to touch dead flesh with the imagination and rest there, as she had done in all those months of illness and grief. Alfred too had been there. Alfred too had said nothing, but it was clear throughout
In Memoriam
that his imagination had faced and probed what remained, or ceased recognisably to remain, of that much-loved form.