Angels and Insects (44 page)

‘Stop,’ said Mr Hawke. ’There is an evil spirit present. These are filthy imaginings, which must be put an end to. Turn up the lights,
stop
, Mrs Papagay, we must be strong.”

Aroused by his angry voice, Aaron sidled across the table, knocked over the rose-bowl, and took wing to the mantelshelf, leaving behind him a dark stain covered with white rounds.

‘What can it mean?’ said Mrs Hearnshaw, reading. ‘What can it mean?’

‘It is obscene,’ said Mr Hawke. ‘It is not fit for the eyes of ladies. I believe it is the communication of an evil spirit, to which we should give no more hearing.’

Aaron let out a loud, perhaps affirmative, croak at this, which made them all jump. And Pug, shifting in his sleep, let out a series of popping little farts, and a rich, decaying smell. Emily Jesse, her lips pinched and white, took up the offending paper and carried it over to the fire, into which she dropped it. It curled and crisped, browned and blackened, and flew on ashen wings up the chimney. Mrs Papagay, watching Mrs Jesse, knew that this was their last séance in this house, that something truly
remarkable had happened, and precisely for that reason, no more attempts would be made. She was sorry, and she was not sorry. After Mr Hawke, rumbling, had left alone, and Mrs Hearnshaw’s cab had borne her away, Mrs Jesse made tea for Mrs Papagay and Sophy, and said she had decided it would be wiser to have no more meetings for the present.
‘Something
is playing games with much that is sacred to me, and it is not myself, Mrs Papagay, but can be no one else, and I find I do not wish to know more. Do you think I lack courage?’

‘I think you are wise, Mrs Jesse. I think you are very wise.’

‘You console me.’

She poured tea. The oil-lamps cast a warm light on the teatray. The teapot was china, with little roses painted all over it, crimson and blush-pink and celestial blue, and the cups were garlanded with the same flowers. There were sugared biscuits, each with a flower made out of piped icing, creamy, violet, snow-white. Sophy Sheekhy watched the stream of topaz-coloured liquid fall from the spout, steaming and aromatic. This too was a miracle, that gold-skinned persons in China and bronze-skinned persons in India should gather leaves which should come across the seas safely in white-winged ships, encased in lead, encased in wood, surviving storms and whirlwinds, sailing on under hot sun and cold moon, and come here, and be poured from bone-china, made from fine clay, moulded by clever fingers, in the Pottery Towns, baked in kilns, glazed with slippery shiny clay, baked again, painted with rosebuds by artist-hands holding fine, fine brushes, delicately turning the potter’s wheel and implanting, with a kiss of sable-hairs, floating buds on an azure ground, or a dead white ground, and that sugar should be fetched from where black men and women slaved and died terribly to make these delicate flowers that melted on the tongue like the scrolls in the mouth of the Prophet Isaiah, that flour should be milled, and milk shaken into butter, and both worked
together into these momentary delights, baked in Mrs Jesse’s oven and piled elegantly on to a plate to be offered to Captain Jesse with his wool-white head and smiling eyes, to Mrs Papagay, flushed and agitated, to her sick self, and the black bird and the dribbling Pug, in front of the hot coals of fire, in the benign lamplight. Any of them might so easily not have been there to drink the tea, or eat the sweetmeats. Storms and ice-floes might have taken Captain Jesse, grief or childbearing might have destroyed his wife, Mrs Papagay might have lapsed into penury and she herself have died as an overworked servant, but here they were and their eyes were bright and their tongues tasted goodness.

And when at last they left, they went out into the dark indeed. It was ice-cold, and gusty, with salt water flung in the air, and the sound of water distant and close at once. They thought nevertheless they would walk home, already
apprehensive about making savings. For if Mrs Jesse would hold no more séances and Mr Hawke was angry and hostile, what was to become of them? They hurried towards the sea-front, with the wind behind them, preceded by a bulwark of open umbrellas. After a time, Sophy pulled at Mrs Papagay’s sleeve and tried to shout quietly into her ear.

‘I think we are being followed. There have been footsteps behind us since we left Mrs Jesse.’

‘I think you are right. And now we are stopped, they are stopped. It is only one person.’

‘I am afraid.’

‘So am I. But I believe we should stand our ground—here under this gas-lamp and allow our follower to pass peaceably, or challenge him. We are two, he is only one. I do not wish to go into the maze of alleys behind the fish-market still with a follower. Do you feel brave, Sophy?’

‘No. But he is only flesh and blood, I think.’

‘Inhabited by a
living
spirit, my dear, which can also be dangerous.’

‘I know. But at the moment, I more fear the dead. Let us face him out. He may pass by.’

They stopped, and the following footsteps stopped, and then came on, slower, more hesitant. They stood still under their chosen lamp, clutching their umbrellas. The steps came on, and were seen to belong to a shaggy creature in a shapeless greatcoat and a dark cap. When he came up to them, he stopped stock-still, and stood and looked at them.

‘Why are you following us?’ said Mrs Papagay.

‘Ah,’ said the watcher. ‘It is you. I was not quite sure in the dark, but now I see it is you, plain as plain. I went to your house, and all was dark and closed, but the woman in the next house told me
you would be going this way—so I set out—it being cold and wet on the doorstep—and myself having had enough cold and wet for two lifetimes. Don’t you know me, Lilias?’

‘Arturo,’ said Mrs Papagay.

‘Twice wrecked,’ he said tentatively. Once cast away. Did you not get my letters, saying I was sailing for home?’

Mrs Papagay shook her head. She was afraid she was breaking up. Her nerves hurt, her head banged, she was like a stunned cow at the slaughterer’s.

‘I have given you a frightful shock,’ said Captain Papagay. ‘I should have waited on the doorstep.’

Mrs Papagay travelled to the mouth of the grave and was brought back on the wings of the wind. Life was pumped into her heart and lungs and she gave a great whirling cry, ‘Arturo, Arturo,’ and flung away her umbrella, which was caught by the wind and went floating away down the street like a giant dandelion-seed. ‘Arturo,’ cried Mrs Papagay. And she leaped at him, so that if he had not been there and solid to hold her up, she must have dashed herself unconscious on the wet pavement. But he was there, and Mrs Papagay came to rest in his arms, and he opened his greatcoat and pulled her in against him, and she smelled his live smell, salt, tobacco, his own hair and skin, unlike any other hair and skin in the whole world, a smell she had kept alive when it had seemed wiser to let it die in the memory of her nostrils. And he buried his face in her hair, and she put her empty arms around his fullness, lean but lively, remembering his shoulder, his ribs, his loins, crying out ‘Arturo’ into his greatcoat and the wind.

And Sophy Sheekhy stood under the lamp, watching the two of them becoming more and more completely entangled in one, as they clutched and touched and babbled. And she thought of all the people in the world whose arms are aching and empty to hold the dead, and of how in stories, and very occasionally in sober fact, the cold and the sea give back what they have taken,
or appear to have taken, and this dark windswept conjunction became in her mind a harmonious whole with the vision of the Jesses’ fireside, and the miracle of the tea. A life in death, Sophy Sheekhy thought, turning discreetly away from Mrs Papagay’s dishevelled rapture to the inky black of the sky and the sea, beyond the lamplight.

I should like to thank several people for their help, both practical and bibliographical. Ursula Owen and David Miller lent books on bees and angels. My French publishers, Marc and Christiane Kopylov, hunted through second-hand bookstores in Paris. Lisa Appignanesi lent the whole of Swedenborg’s
Arcana Caelestia
. Gillian Beer and Jenny Uglow made crucial suggestions for reading. Chris O’Toole at the Hope Entomological Institute in Oxford and someone very patient on the entomological enquiry desk at the Science Museum were extraordinarily helpful and interesting. My daughter Isabel Duffy, Elizabeth Allen, and Helena Caletta, most resourceful of booksellers, were both practical and patient. And Jane Turner, at Chatto & Windus, hunted for illustrations with great imagination, as well as erudition.

A work of fiction doesn’t need a bibliography. But I should like to thank Colonel A. Maitland Emmet, whose
The Scientific Names of the British Lepidoptera
has given me hours of happy reading and inspired much of Matty’s story ‘Things Are Not What They Seem’. Michael Chinery’s
Collins Guide to the Insects of Britain and Western Europe
has also given me great pleasure and much information. Anyone interested in A. H. Hallam owes a great debt to the late T. H. Vail Motter, editor of
The Writings of Arthur H. Hallam
, and to Jack Kolb, editor of his
Letters
. Christopher Ricks’s great edition of Tennyson’s
Complete Works
is steadily inspiring. I also owe a great deal to Derek Wragge Morley’s
The Evolution of an Insect Society
. Alex Owen’s
The Darkened Room
is an excellent study of female mediums in the nineteenth century. And I learned much, with pleasure, from Michael Wheeler’s
Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology
.

Finally, this book could not have been written without the resources of the London Library.

The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Brian Hargreaves, F.R.S.A., for ten line drawings; the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, for two engravings by John Martin from Milton’s
Paradise Lost;
the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, for two drawings by Edward Burne-Jones from ‘The Days of Creation’ (The First and Second Days), and for the drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: ‘Study for The Blessed Damozel’.

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