Angels and Insects (38 page)

Sometimes she could produce the necessary vague, floating state of mind by reciting poetry to herself. She had not known much poetry before her work at Mrs Jesse’s house, but had taken to it there like a duck to water, which was an apt metaphor; she floated on it, she ducked and dived in its strong flow, it bore her up. Séances, not only at Mrs Jesse’s house, frequently opened with poetic evocations of those gone before. A favourite was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s
Blessed Damozel
. It was so beautiful and so sad, Sophy Sheekhy concurred with other readers, the solitary blessed angel leaning out, yearning, over the bar of Heaven, whilst all around her, the pairs of lovers were conjoined in bliss, all their tears wiped away, conjugial angels two-in-one, as Mr Hawke was fond of pointing out, as though Mr Rossetti was an instinctive Swedenborgian. Sophy Sheekhy’s mind was like a river, in the depths of which strong and uncontrollable currents pulled and drove, but was frilled and feathered on the surface with little tossing waves of ordinary female sentimentality. She looked at her own face in the mirror and imagined the face of the Damozel, with her one white rose of Mary’s gift, her corn-yellow hair, her bosom which made the bar she leant on warm. Sophy Sheekhy could see the passionate girl in the tart, etched Mrs Jesse, with her lined hands and folded neck, though she sensed other presences too, something feline, something scissor-like. But it was really the Damozel who entranced
her, sometimes literally, in Rossetti’s poem. It was the distances. He knew something she knew. She stared into her eyes in the mirror and recited his Heavenly House.

Sophy Sheekhy’s arms were wrapped about herself and she was swaying slightly, like a lily on its stalk, like a snake before the charmer, back and forth, her hair lifting and slipping on her shoulders. Her voice was low and pure and clear. As she spoke, she saw the thin flames, the moon curled like a feather, and felt herself
spinning away from herself, as sometimes happened, as though she had applied her huge eye to the orifice of a great kaleidoscope where her face whirled like a speck of tinsel amongst the feathery flakes, snow-crystals, worlds. She heard herself saying, as though in answer,

That was another poem entirely. Reciting that made her cold all over. She held tighter to herself for comfort, cold breast on cold ledge of arms, little fingers clasping at her ribs. She was sure, almost sure, sure, that something else breathed amongst the floating feathers behind her. Poems rustled together like voices. She felt a stab of pain, like an icicle between the clutched ribs. She heard the rattle of hail, or rain, suddenly in great gusts on the windowpane, like scattered seed. She felt a sudden weight in the room, a heavy space, as one feels tapping at the door of a house, knowing in advance that it is inhabited, before the foot is heard on the stair, the rustle and clink in the hall. She knew she must not look behind her, and knowing that, began drowsily to hum in her head the richness of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’:

Whatever was behind her sighed, and then drew in its breath, with difficulty. Sophy Sheekhy told him dubiously, ‘I
think
you are there. I should like to see you.’

‘Perhaps you wouldn’t like what you saw,’ she heard, or thought she heard.

‘Was that you?’

‘I said, perhaps you wouldn’t like what you saw.’

‘It isn’t my habit to like or dislike,’ she found herself answering.

She took her candle and held it up to the mirror, still filled with the superstitious sense, like those poetic ladies, Madeline, the Lady of Shalott, that she must not look away from the plane of glass. The candle caused a local shimmer and gloom in the depths in which she thought she saw something move.

‘We cannot always help ourselves as to that,’ he said, much more clearly.

‘Please—’ she breathed to the glass.

She felt him move in on her, closer, closer. She heard the words of the poem spoken in an ironic, slightly harsh voice.

Her hand shook, the face behind her bulged and tightened, sagged and reassembled, not pale, but purple-veined, with staring blue eyes and parched thin lips, above a tremulous chin. There was a sudden gust of odour, not rose, not violet, but earth-mould and corruption.

‘You see,’ said the harsh, small voice. ‘I am a dead man, you see.’

Sophy Sheekhy took a breath and turned round. She saw her own little white bed, and a row of doves preening themselves on the cast-iron bedstead. She saw, briefly, a parrot, scarlet and blue, on the windowsill. She saw dark glass, and she saw him, struggling,
it seemed to her, to keep his appearance, his sort-of-substance, together, with a kind of deadly defiance.

She knew immediately that he was the man. Not because she recognised him, but because she did not, and yet he fitted the descriptions, the curls, the thin mouth, the bar on the brow. He wore an ancient high-collared shirt, out of fashion when Sophy’s mother was a small child, and stained breeches. He stood there, trembling and morose. The trembling was not exactly human. It caused his body to swell and contract as though sucked out of shape and pressed back into it. Sophy took a few steps towards him. She saw that his brows and lashes were caked with clay. He said again, ‘I am a dead man.’

He moved away from her, walking like someone finding his feet after a long illness, and sat down on the seat in the window, displacing a number of white birds, who ran fluttering and resettled at the foot of the curtains. Sophy followed him, and stood and considered him. He was very young. His lovers on earth watched and waited for him like some wise god gone before, but this young man was younger than she was herself, and seemed to be in the last stages of exhaustion, owing to his state. She had been told, in the Church of the New Jerusalem, of Swedenborg’s encounters with the newly dead, who refused to believe that they were dead, who attended their own funerals with indignant interest. Later, Swedenborg taught, the dead, who took with them into the next world the affections and minds of this terrestrial space, had to find their true selves and their true, their appropriate companions, amongst spirits and angels. They had to learn that they were dead, and then to go on. She said, ‘How is it with you? What is your state?’

‘As you see me. Baffled and impotent.’

‘You are much mourned, much missed. More than any being I know.’

A spasm of anguish twisted the dull red face, and Sophy Sheekhy suddenly felt in her blood and bones that the mourning was painful
to him. It dragged him down, or back, or under. He moved his heavy tongue in his mouth, unaccustomed now.

‘I walk. Between. Outside. I cannot tell you. I am part of nothing. Impotent and baffled,’ he added, quick and articulate suddenly, as though these were words he knew, had tamed doggedly in his mind over the long years. Which might not, of course, appear to him to be years. A thousand ages in thy sight are but an instant gone. She spoke from her heart.

‘You are so
young
.’

‘I am young. And dead.’

‘And not forgotten.’

Again, the same spasm of pain.

‘And alone.’ The pure self-pity of the young.

‘I would like to help you, if I could.’

It was help he appeared to need.

‘Hold me,’ he said. ‘I imagine—you cannot. I am cold. It is dark. Hold me.’

Sophy Sheekhy stood, white.

‘You cannot.’

‘I will.’

She lay on the white bed, and he walked across to her, in his hesitant, imperfect step, and lay beside her, and she cradled his head and his stench on her cold bosom. She closed her eyes, the better to bear it, and felt his weight, the weight, more or less, of a living man, but a man not breathing, a man inert like a side of beef. Perhaps it would kill her, Sophy Sheekhy thought on the surface of her mind, where the ripples crisped away from the dark pool in a flurry of terror. But the depths of the pool bore her up, her and him both, Sophy Sheekhy and the dead young man. With her chilly lips, carefully, she kissed his cold curls. Could he feel her kiss? Could she warm him?

‘Be still,’ she said, as she would to a fractious child.

He put a kind of hand on to her shoulder, where it burned like ice. ‘Speak. To. Me.’

‘What? What shall I say?’

‘Your name. John Keats.’

‘My name is Sophy Sheekhy. I can—I can say the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. If you would like—’

‘Say that. Yes.’

‘He knew,’ he said. ‘The energetic principle of love for the beautiful. I remember. I restored a word to life, for him. Sensuous. My word. Not sensual. Sensuous.’ The husky voice faltered and then took on strength: ‘ “O for a life of sensation rather than thought.” Both gone. Here, both gone. Sophy Sheekhy. Pistis Sophia. Poems are the ghosts of sensations, Pistis Sophia, the ghosts of thoughts, they move in the mind, my dear, and are also thoughts and sensations, both at once. Your bosom warms me, Pistis Sophia, as a frozen snake is warmed. It was Pistis Sophia, the gnostics said, who sent the first snake into Paradise.’

‘Who is Pistis Sophia?’

‘Why, my dear, the Angel in the Garden, before Man. The energetic principle of love for the beautiful. They were young men, Keats and Shelley. I felt kindly to them, they were so young. Speak more. Darkling I listen. Darkling.’

‘The feel of not to feel it,’ whispered the creature in her arms. It was growing heavier. Breathing was harder. Sophy Sheekhy faltered.

Her companion exhaled. She felt his icy breath pass her ear.

She saw, in the middle of the room, a hand, a long, brown hand, no longer young, tentatively and awkwardly buttoning a nightshirt. She saw the row of buttons. They were wrongly aligned. The hand fumbled at them. It clasped the pleated front of the neck to its chest, as though it sensed, briefly, the cold of their presence.

‘ “Mingled, unrepressed,” ’ said the cold, dull voice in Sophy’s ear. ‘Good, lively words. I knew he would be as great as Keats, as Coleridge saw in Wordsworth the greatest poet since Milton. I loved him for it, you must believe me, Pistis Sophia.’

‘Oh, I do. I do.’

‘I cannot see … I cannot see … Sophia, I cannot see … can you?’

‘Not very well. A little. A hand. An old man, in a nightshirt, in a room with a candle … he is holding his hand up to his face, and—and sniffing at it … he has a beard—shaggy, partly grey—stained at the mouth—he is a handsome old man … I know who he is …’

‘I cannot see.’ The thick, cold fingers were touching her eyelashes as though to feel her vision. ‘He is old, I cannot see him. I partly think I snuff his tobacco. He walked about in a cloud of it, burning and fragrant, and the stale remnants of its old ashes, its dottle … What is he doing?’

‘He is sitting on his bed, turning his hand over and over. He looks puzzled. And very handsome. And a bit absent-minded.’

‘You would think I could hear his thoughts. But I cannot.’