Angels and Insects (37 page)

‘Don’t speak,’ he said.

She could not lift her hands to move his finger. When she tried to move her lips to speak she found she was in some way kissing the large forefinger. She opened her eyes very fiercely and stared into his, intent, blue, determined. She wanted to say, ‘You look like a pirate boarding a brig,’ but couldn’t speak. She shook her head angrily from side to side. Her hair rustled silky on her shoulders. He picked up a tress of it, with the offending hand. ‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘The most beautiful I’ve ever seen.’

‘You are very foolish,’ said Emily, shaken and disturbed. “I am over thirty years old. I am not a young girl. My days of loving are over. I am resigned to a single life. I am—I am unable to feel.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘All those years, I have felt like a
stone
. I am worn out with feeling. I do not want to feel any more.’

‘I don’t think so. I know you’re not a young girl. You’re older than I am, we both know that, no need beating about the bush. Young girls are boring, fizzing kinds of things, all froth and fuss and romantic notions. Whereas you are a real woman, Miss Tennyson. You ought to be a wife. You aren’t cut out to be a maiden aunt, I know, I’ve watched you ever so sharply. I know you think you
ought
, but you haven’t thought of me, have you? You didn’t expect
me
, did you?’

‘No,’ said Emily, in a small voice. ‘I didn’t.’

Something black and cruel in her wanted to puncture his precarious
self-confidence, to slap him down, to mock, to hurt. And something else wanted to make him happy, to protect him from just such savagery, of which he seemed so blithely unaware. She said, ‘My heart was sealed up, Mr Jesse, when Arthur died. I loved him completely and lost him. That is my history. There can be no more, for me as for him.’

‘I don’t mind your having loved him,’ said Richard Jesse. ‘If you loved him so well, it only proves you can love well and be faithful—as I know
I
can, though untested as yet. We will not forget him, Miss Tennyson, if you marry me—the love can persist. I honour you, I truly honour you, for its depth and constancy.’

‘Maybe you only want to marry me because of that, because of
him
. Maybe you see me as an object of pity—I know you are kind, I do know you are kind. I don’t require to be rescued.’

‘Damn it, it isn’t
rescue
. Can’t you see that? I
told
you, if you would listen, I know we could be comfortable together, I know it in my bones—and my heart and liver and all my nerve-endings. Why can’t I get you to hear the plain truth?’

She was silent. He said, ‘I want so much to take you in my arms. I know I could make you
feel
the tightness of it. These damned chairs—and all these fusty books—they aren’t right—I should like to be able to walk along the beach with you, and listen to the gulls—you’d feel it, then—I’m not in my usual state of mind, I’ve been sleeping badly, working up to this—to this—it’s worse than a battle, any day.’

‘I can’t,’ she said, in a whisper.

‘If you can’t, if you are quite sure you can’t, say it again, and I’ll go, now this minute, and never come back, never see you again. Do you understand? Do you believe me? I mean it. If you can really tell me you won’t—you can’t—you don’t wish to—I’ll go. It will be that hard, I won’t wish to see you again. Do you hear me?’

‘Don’t shout, Mr Jesse. They will all come.’

‘What do they matter?’ he mistakenly demanded. Emily, half-pleased nevertheless at his daring, rose abruptly to her feet, a preliminary perhaps to bidding him farewell. But she said nothing and went nowhere. She stood mute. He took a step towards her—he was taller even than her tall brothers, and darkly handsome, as they were, too—and put his large hands on her shoulders. Then he lifted her from the ground, holding her against his shirt, laying his face gently against hers. His hands and skin spoke to her, he pulled like a magnet, he was strong as a tree, a tree in summer the poet in her head hummed, and she laid her own head on his shoulder, listening to their blood banging and leaping.

‘You are—choking me—I cannot breathe. Mr Jesse. I cannot breathe.’

‘Answer me
now—
’

‘Put me down. I will. I cannot resist you, I see. Put me down. Restore me to equilibrium.’

‘I should like to roar like a lion,’ he said, quietly enough. ‘But that can come later, we may do as we like when we are married.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Emily, on her feet again, with sudden caution.

They had not, of course, done as they liked, though they had done many things together she would never have done as a maiden aunt and the Hallams’ pet. She had allowed, she thought, for the effect of her defection on the Hallams, but not for the consternation and disapproval of the Tennysons, or of the social world. They stood ranged against her in her dark dreams, accusing, hurt and angry. And with them in the dreams stood also a separate creature, the girl in black with a white rose in her hair, as he liked to see it. You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.

Sophy Sheekhy stood in front of her mirror in her white shift. She stared at herself and herself stared back at herself. The mirror on the pine chest reflected the cheval glass by the door so that she stood behind and behind herself on a series of thresholds going white-green into diminishing infinity. She put a finger to the violet shadow under her staring eyes, and her simulacra simultaneously touched their glassy skins. She touched her lips, and leaned forward and breathed on the mirror, and all their faces were misted at once, grey-white mists crowned with pale hair which could have been called colourless, though that would have been wrong, it was hair for which there was no good
word, none of the soft beasts, mouse, or dove, none of the harvest, corn or hay, no metal, gold or bronze, and yet immediately recognisable, ordinary, archetypal, pale hair. So many was no one. She was everywhere and nowhere. She stared into the pupils of her eyes, Sophy Sheekhy’s eyes, all those eyes, into the velvety black point where there was nothing, and there was nothing, there was no one there.

Once she had hypnotised herself this way, and had been found by Mrs Papagay, rigid as stone, standing and staring, cold and clammy to the touch. Mrs Papagay had clasped her in warm arms to a generous bosom, had flung a quilt round her, had fed her on broth when she woke with a start and could not say where she had been. Mrs Papagay had a warm heart, like a comfortable brown thrush in a soft nest. She had felt its flutter and come back unafraid. There had been times in childhood when she had provoked such absences and been less lucky. She had had
ways
of going outside herself which as a very small child she had supposed were quite natural, ways available to anyone, in the course of daily life, natural as sipping water, or using the chamber-pot, or washing the hands. By holding her breath, in certain ways, or arching her body on the bed and letting it fall again, rapidly, rhythmically, she could find a kind of flying Sophy, hovering mildly near the ceiling and placidly observing the husk, the still pallid husk she had left behind, with its parted lips and closed eyelids. Only her mother, an impatient woman with rough red hands like nutmeg-graters, had brought her back sharply by slapping and shaking, after which Sophy had vomited for a good month, and almost died for lack of nourishment. So she learned to be careful, and to control her outgoings and returns.

Behind her the room was full of rustling, as though it was packed with birds. It was fatigue rushing in her ears, it was white wings she would see if she turned to look. She saw in her mind’s eye doves with golden eyes, doves all over, doves preening themselves on the bedhead and windowsill. She saw their little pink feet, so vulnerable,
so naked, so scratchy, strutting and curling, open and shut. She began to hear their liquid voices bubbling amongst the rustling. If she turned round, the room might or might not be full of white wings. She did not know if she made the doves by expectation, or sensed their presence and brought them with her mind to her vision, or whether the doves were there and she merely happened to be able to see them. She could not change them to parrots, or oysters, or roses, with any effort of will, she knew now. They were loose from her, they were talking to each other in their different garglings, comforting, irritable, puffed out, smoothed.

She looked into her eyes, and said, not to herself, ‘Are you there?’ She called on him often, and many times she had sensed him, anxious and elusive, the young man, behind her in the room, like the doves, or the other creatures who from time to time prowled, or slid, or strode there. She could not see him, and he did not speak, but she sensed him there. He wanted to break through, he wanted to make a communication, she believed, using the language she had been taught, since she took up the profession. She believed sometimes that if she were less afraid of him, he might have come long ago. She sensed he was tar away, and cold, and lost, but maybe all this was not so, maybe so good, so perfect a young man would not be cold and lost but would know how to ascend the heavens Mr Hawke described so confidently. She wanted to be of use, to open a gate for him, but he did not come. Only a current of cold air, a space between the warm birds and their peaceful busyness, which made her ask again, ‘Are you there?’ and believe she had been answered in the affirmative.

As a child, too, she had called people up. She had called up people from stories—Rapunzel’s pitiful blinded Prince, poor murdered Abel in the Bible, a child called Micky who had been her closest friend until Mrs Papagay, who appeared in every state, from a sensed air of presence, through an imagined gipsyish, dark-skinned boy, to a more or less flesh-and-blood acquaintance, sitting
on the edge of the dresser and drumming it with his heels, whose broken fingernail, or scratched lip, she could from week to week simply see with her eyes. He just was. At other times he
almost
was, and she bent her will to pull him into being. She told him things which he seemed to understand. He did not tell her things. Sometimes her efforts to conjure up Micky or other desired presences brought unwanted and unexpected visitors. An angry female baby that howled and would not be comforted, a towering cold male presence who wanted to pull at her—Sophy—but who could not see her, she sensed, as well as she saw him, with his blue beard-stubble and protuberant eyes. These were denizens of a different world from the stolidly solid visitors—only five or six altogether—like the drowned relations she had entertained at her first employer’s, or the stout matron looking desperately for a lost watch in Crimond Wood, or the costermonger’s boy who told her he missed his horse although it had kicked him to death, for it had been no fault of old Whitey’s, he had been maddened by pain in his fetlock. None of these solid revenants had ever put their nose inside a séance, to her knowledge, where the visitors were either willed into apparition by their common desire, or half-glimpsed by her own strenuous desire to be of help, or inhabitants of some other dimension, partly apprehended, like today’s wine-bottle Creature with its boiling eyes, much the most vivid so far, but still not solid as apples.

Sophy Sheekhy combed her hair, and the doves rustled and cooed. She wanted so much to find the dead young man for Mrs Jesse, as she wanted to find Captain Papagay for Mrs Papagay, but in some way the very strength of her desire to help held them off. Creatures came, spirits came, wandering into sloppiness and slippage, into emptiness of mind, not into the strain of attention. Yet she sensed he was not far off. There was a cold space amongst the doves where he perhaps waited. She had no idea what he looked like but imagined him pale, with golden curls, a wide brow, craggy,
and a Greek sort of mouth. (She knew about the ‘bar of Michelangelo’ both from Mrs Jesse and from
In Memoriam
.) Mrs Jesse once claimed to have detected his spirit form in a photograph taken of herself in Bristol, but Sophy Sheekhy, who had pored over the blurred figure in a tall hat behind Mrs Jesse’s caped shoulders, could see little more than chalk-white skin and eye-sockets like dark coals. It could have been anyone at all, Sophy Sheekhy thought, though Mrs Jesse’s sister Mary agreed that it was uncannily like Arthur, the face and stance were strikingly like what she remembered of him.