Possession (8 page)

It was hard to concentrate. The Midlands went flatly past, a biscuit factory, a metal box company, fields, hedges, ditches, pleasant and unremarkable. Miss Honiton’s book contained, as a frontispiece, the first image he had seen of Christabel, a brownish, very early photograph, veiled under a crackling, protective translucent page. She was dressed in a large triangular mantle and a small bonnet, frilled inside its rim, tied with a large bow under her chin. Her clothes were more prominent than she was; she retreated into them, her head, perhaps quizzically, perhaps considering itself “birdlike,” held on one side. She had pale crimped hair over her temples, and her lips were parted
to reveal large, even teeth. The picture gave no clear impression of anyone in particular; it was generic Victorian lady, specific shy poetess.

At first he did not identify Maud Bailey, and he himself was not in any way remarkable, so that they were almost the last pair at the wicket gate. She would be hard to miss, if not to recognise. She was tall, tall enough to meet Fergus Wolff’s eyes on the level, much taller than Roland. She was dressed with unusual coherence for an academic, Roland thought, rejecting several other ways of describing her green and white length, a long pine-green tunic over a pine-green skirt, a white silk shirt inside the tunic and long softly white stockings inside long shining green shoes. Through the stockings veiled flesh diffused a pink gold, almost. He could not see her hair, which was wound tightly into a turban of peacock-feathered painted silk, low on her brow. Her brows and lashes were blonde; he observed so much. She had a clean, milky skin, unpainted lips, clearcut features, largely composed. She did not smile. She acknowledged him and tried to take his bag, which he refused to allow. She drove an immaculately glossy green Beetle.

“I was intrigued by your question,” she said, as they drove off. “I’m glad you made the effort to come. I hope it will be worth it.” Her voice was deliberately blurred patrician; a kind of flattened Sloane. She smelled of something ferny and sharp. Roland didn’t like her voice.

“It may be a wild-goose chase. It’s almost nothing really.”

“We’ll see.”

Lincoln University was white-tiled towers, variegated with violet tiles and orange tiles and from time to time acid-green tiles. In high winds, Dr Bailey said, these blew off and were a real hazard to walkers. There were often high winds. The campus was fenny-flat, laid out like a kind of chess-board, redeemed by an imaginative water-gardener who had made a maze of channels and pools, randomly flowing across and around the rectangular grid. They were now clogged with fallen leaves, amongst which Koi carp pushed
blunt pearly noses. The University dated from the opulent heyday of expansion and was now slightly grubby and tatty, mortared cracks grinning between the white oblongs under their urban plaque.

The wind stirred the silk fringes of Dr Bailey’s too-rich headgear. It ruffled Roland’s black fur. He pushed his hands in his pockets and stepped a little behind her as she strode. No one else seemed to be about, although it was term. He asked Dr Bailey, where were the students and she told him that today, Wednesday, was a non-teaching day, reserved for sports and study.

“They all disappear. We don’t know where. As if by magic. Some of them are in the library. Most aren’t. I don’t know where they go.”

The wind ruffled the dark water; orange leaves made its surface jagged and sloppy at once.

She lived at the top of Tennyson Tower—“It was that or Maid Marian,” she remarked, as they swung its glass door, her voice distantly scornful. “The Alderman who funded it wanted it all called after Sherwood folk. Here is the English Department and the Arts Faculty Office and History of Art and also Women’s Studies. Not our Resource Centre. That’s in the Library. I’ll take you. Would you care for coffee?”

They went up in a paternoster lift that cranked regularly past its otherwise vacant portals. These doorless lifts unnerved Roland; she stepped in precisely and was lifted above him before he dared follow, so that he was already clambering onto the pedestal she occupied when he lunged forward and up, almost too late. She did not remark on this. The walls of the paternoster were mirror-tiled, bronze-lit; she flashed at him from wall to wall, hotly. Out again she came precisely; he tripped on this threshold too, the floor lifting beneath him.

Her room was glass-walled on one side, and lined floor to ceiling with books on the others. The books were arranged rationally, thematically, alphabetically, and dust-free; this last was the only sign of housekeeping in that austere place. The beautiful thing in that room was Maud Bailey herself, who went down on one knee very
gracefully to plug in a kettle, and produced from a cupboard two blue and white Japanese mugs.

“Take a seat,” she said crisply, indicating a low upholstered bright blue chair where students no doubt sat to have their work handed back. She handed him walnut-coloured Nescafé. She had not taken off the headdress. “Now, how can I be of help to you?” she said, taking her own seat behind the barrier of the desk. Roland meditated strategies of evasion of his own. He had vaguely imagined, before meeting her, that he might be able to show her Xeroxes of the purloined letters. Now he knew he could not. Her voice lacked warmth. He said, “I am working on Randolph Henry Ash. As I wrote to you. It’s just come to my attention that he might have corresponded with Christabel LaMotte. I don’t know if you have any knowledge of such a correspondence? They certainly met.”

“When?”

He handed her a copy of his transcript of Crabb Robinson’s Journal.

“That might be mentioned in Blanche Glover’s diary. We’ve got one of her diaries in the Resource Centre. It covers that period—she began it when they moved to Richmond. The papers we have in our Archive are essentially the contents of Christabel’s desk when she died—she expressed a wish that they should be sent to one of her nieces, May Bailey, ‘in the hope that she may come to care about poetry.’ ”

“And did she?”

“Not as far as I know. She married a cousin and went off to Norfolk and had ten children and ran a large household. I’m descended from her—she was my great-great-grandmother, which makes me Christabel’s great-great-great-niece. I persuaded my father to let us lodge the papers in the Archive when I came here. There isn’t a lot of material, but it’s important. Manuscripts of the Tales, lots of undated lyrics on random little slips of paper, and of course all the revisions of
Melusina
, which she rewrote at least eight times, always changing it. And a commonplace book, and a few letters from friends, and this one diary of Blanche Glover’s, just for
three years. I don’t know if we once had more—no care was taken of them, I’m sorry to say—none has come to light.”

“And LaMotte. Did she keep a journal?”

“Not as far as we know. Almost certainly not. She wrote to one of her nieces advising against it. It’s a rather good letter. ‘If you can order your Thoughts and shape them into Art, good: if you can live in the obligations and affections of Daily Life, good. But do not get into the habit of morbid Self-examination. Nothing so unfits a woman for producing good work, or for living usefully. The Lord will take care of the second of these—opportunities will be found. The first is a matter of Will.’ ”

“I’m not sure about that.”

“It’s an interesting view of it. That’s late—1886. Art as will. Not a fashionable view for a woman. Or maybe for anyone.”

“Do you have her letters?”

“Not many. A few family ones—admonitions like that, recipes for bread-baking and wine-making, complaints. Others exist, not many from the Richmond period, one or two from visits she made to Brittany; she had family there, as maybe you know. She doesn’t seem to have had intimate friends, except Miss Glover, and they didn’t need to correspond, since they shared their house. The letters haven’t been edited—Leonora Stern’s trying to get something together, but there’s little to go on. I suspect Sir George Bailey at Seal Court may have something but he’s not willing to let anyone look. He threatened Leonora with a shotgun. I thought it might be better if she went there—she’s from Tallahassee, as you no doubt know—rather than myself, since there’s an unfortunate history of litigation and unpleasantness between the Seal Court family and the Norfolk one. But Leonora’s approaches had a most unfortunate effect. Most unfortunate. Yes. Well. And how did you come to form the opinion that Randolph Henry Ash was interested in LaMotte?”

“I found an unfinished draft of a letter to an unidentified woman in a book of his. I thought it might be her. It mentioned Crabb Robinson. He said she understood his poems.”

“That doesn’t sound very probable. I wouldn’t have thought his
poems would appeal to her. All that cosmic masculinity. That nasty anti-feminist poem about the medium, what was it,
Mummy Possest?
All that ponderous obfuscation. Everything she wasn’t.”

Roland considered the pale incisive mouth with a kind of hopelessness. He wished he had not come. The hostility towards Ash somehow included himself, at least in his own eyes. Maud Bailey went on: “I’ve checked my card index—I’m working on a full-length study of
Melusina
—I’ve only found one reference to Ash. It’s from a note to William Rossetti—the MS is in Tallahassee—about a poem he published for her.

“ ‘In these dim November days I resemble nothing more than that poor Creature of RHA’s Fantasy, immured in her terrible
In-Pace
, quieted perforce and longing for her Quietus. It takes a Masculine Courage to find pleasure in constructing Dungeons for Innocents in his Fancy, and a Female Patience to endure them in sober fact.’ ”

“That’s a reference to Ash’s
Incarcerated Sorceress?”

“Of course.” Impatiently.

“When was it written?”

“1869. I think. Yes. Vivid but not much help.”

“Hostile if anything.”

“Exactly.”

Roland sipped his coffee. Maud Bailey reinserted the card into its place in her file. She said, looking into the box, “You must know Fergus Wolff, he must be at your college, I think.”

“Oh yes. It was Fergus who suggested I should ask you about LaMotte.”

A pause. The fingers moved busily, tidying. “I know Fergus. I met him at a conference, in Paris.”

A little less crisp, the voice, a little less elderly-authoritative, he thought unkindly.

“He told me,” said Roland, neutrally, watching for a sign of her consciousness of what Fergus might have said, of how he might have spoken. She compressed her lips and stood up.

“I’ll take you to the Resource Centre.”

The Lincoln Library could not have been more different from the Ash Factory. It was a skeletal affair in a glass box, with brilliant doors opening in glass and tubular walls, like a box of toys or a giant ConstructoKit. There were dinging metal shelves and footfall-deadening felt carpets, pied-piper red and yellow, like the paint on the stair-rails and lifts. In summer it must have been bright and baking, but in wet autumn slate-grey sky lay like another box against its repeating panes, in which lines of little round lights were reflected, like Tinkerbell’s fairylights in her Never-Never-Land. The Women’s Archive was housed in a high-walled fish-tank. Maud Bailey settled Roland into a tubular chair at a pale oak table, like a recalcitrant nursery-school child, and put before him various boxes.
Melusina
I.
Melusina
II.
Melusina
III and IV.
Melusina Unassigned. Breton Poems. Poems of Devotion. Misc Lyrics. Blanche
. In this box she showed him a long thick green book, a little like an accounts book, with sombre marbled endpapers: