Possession (61 page)

I have considered writing her a letter, setting out our fears and knowledge, on the grounds that she reads easier than she speaks, and could reflect alone upon these careful words. But I cannot conceive how to cast such a letter, or how she would respond.

TUESDAY

During all this late time she has been very good to me, in her way, discussing this and that, asking to see my work, embroidering me, in secret, a little case for my scissors, a pretty thing with a peacock on it in blue and green silks, all eyes. But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.

Today we were able to be in the orchard, under the cherry blossom,
talking of poetry, and she brushed falling petals off her full skirt with apparent unconcern. She talked of
Melusina
and the nature of epic. She wants to write a Fairy Epic, she says, not grounded in historical truth, but in poetic and imaginative truth—like Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
, or Ariosto, where the soul is free of the restraints of history and fact. She says Romance is a proper form for women. She says Romance is a land where women can be free to express their true natures, as in the Ile de Sein or Síd, though not in this world.

She said, in Romance, women’s two natures can be reconciled. I asked, which two natures, and she said, men saw women as double beings, enchantresses and demons or innocent angels.

“Are all women double?” I asked her.

“I did not say that,” she said. “I said all men see women as double. Who knows what Melusina was in her freedom with no eyes on her?”

She spoke of the fishtail and asked me if I knew Hans Andersen’s story of the Little Mermaid who had her fishtail cleft to please her Prince, and became dumb, and was not moreover wanted by him. “The fishtail was her freedom,” she said. “She felt, with her legs, that she was walking on knives.”

I said I had terrible dreams of walking on knives since reading that tale, and that pleased her.

And so she talked on, of the pains of Melusina and the Little Mermaid; and of her own pain to come, nothing.

Now I am clever enough to recognise a figure of speech or a parable, I hope, and I see that it could well be thought that she was telling me, in her own riddling way, of the pains of womanhood. All I can say, is that at the time it did not feel so. No, her voice flashed, with all the assurance of her needle when she sews, fabricating a pretty pattern. And under the dress I swear I saw
that
move, which was not her, and was not acknowledged by all her brightness.

A
PRIL
30

I can’t sleep. I shall take the gift she gave me and
write
, then, write what she has done.

We have been looking for her for two days. She went out yesterday morning to walk up to the church, as she has increasingly done over these last weeks. It turns out that the villagers have seen her, standing they say for long periods, and tracing the history of the life and death
of the Virgin round the base of the Calvary, leaning against it to catch breath, tracing the little figures with her fingers “like a blind woman” one said, “like a carver” another said. And she has spent hours in the church praying too, or sitting quietly, that we knew, that all of us knew, we and the people, with her head covered with a black shawl and her hands clenched in her lap. They saw her yesterday, as usual, go in. No one saw her come out, but she must have come out.

We didn’t begin to look until dinner-time. Gode came and stood in my father’s room and said, “I should take out the horse and trap, Monsieur, for the young woman is not back, and her time was near.”

And our minds filled with terrible pictures of my cousin fallen and in pain, perhaps in a ditch or a field, or maybe a barn. So we took out the horse and trap, and drove all along the roads, between the stone walls, looking into hollows and isolated huts, calling sometimes, but not often, for we felt a sort of shame, for ourselves that we had lost her, for her that she had strayed, in the state she was in. This was a horrid time, for all of us I know, for me most certainly. Every inch was painful—I think
uncertainty
is maybe more painful than any other emotion, it both drives one on and disappoints and paralyses, so that we went on in a mounting kind of suffocation and bursting. Every large dark patch—a gorse bush with a rag caught on it, an abandoned worm-eaten barrel—were objects of terrible hope and fear. We climbed up to the Lady Chapel and peered in through the mouth of the Dolmen, and saw nothing. And so we went on until it grew dark, and then my father said, “Heaven forbid she has fallen over the cliff.”

“Perhaps she is with one of the village people,” I said.

“They would have told me,” said my Father. “They would have sent for me.”

Then we decided to search the shore—we constructed great torches, as we do for times when boats are driven on the coast and there are survivors, or wreckage, to be picked up. Yannick built a small fire and my father and I ran from cove to cove, calling and waving our torches. Once I heard a crying sound, but it was only a disturbed gull’s nest. We went on like that, without food, without respite, under the moon, until after midnight, and then my father said we must go home, news might have come in our absence. I said, surely not, they would have sent to find us, and my father said, they are too few to tend a sick woman and fetch us from here. So we went home with a sort of
half-hope, but there was nothing and no one, except Gode, who had been conjuring the smoke, and said nothing would be known before the morrow.

Today we aroused the neighborhood. My father, his pride and his hat in his hand, knocked at all the doors and asked if anyone had knowledge of her—and all denied it, though it was established that she had been in the church in the morning. The peasants came out and searched the fields and lanes again. My father went to see the Curé. He does not like to see the Curé, who is not an educated man, and embarrasses both himself and my father by knowing that he should try to argue with my father’s religious views, which he must see as most irreligious. For he dare not argue—he would lose and he would lose respect in the neighbourhood, if it were known that he had interfered with M. de Kercoz, however much in the interest of his immortal soul.

The Curé said, “I am sure Le Bon Dieu has good care of her.”

My father said, “But have you
seen
her, mon père?”

The Curé said, “I saw her in church this morning.”

My father thinks the Curé may know where she is. For he did not offer to come out and join the searchers, as he should surely have done, if his mind had been unquiet? But then again, the Curé is fat and closed up in his fat, and unimaginative and stupid and might well have simply supposed that the searching was being adequately done by the young and agile. I said, “How should the Curé know?” And my father said, “She might have asked him for help.”

I could not imagine how anyone could ask the Curé for help, let alone in such a circumstance. He has staring eyes and a blubber mouth and lives for his stomach. But my father said, “He visits the Convent of St Anne, on the road into Quimperlé, where the Bishop has made provision for the care of cast-out and fallen women.”

“He could not send her
there,”
I said. “It is an unhappy place.”

Yannick’s sister’s friend, Malle, was brought to bed there, when her parents cast her off and no one claimed her child, for no one, it was said, could be certain whose it was. Malle claimed that the nuns pinched her and made her do penance of foul scrubbing and carrying all sorts of dirt, when she was barely delivered. The child died, Malle said. She went into service as a housemaid in Quimper, with a chandler’s wife, who beat her unmercifully, and did not live long.

“Perhaps Christabel asked to go there,” my father said.

“Why should she do that?”

“Why should she do anything she has done? And where is she, for we have searched and searched? And no one has been cast up from the sea.

I said we could at least ask the nuns. My father will drive down to the Convent tomorrow.

I feel sick at heart. I am afraid for her, and angry too, and sorry for my father, a good man burdened with grief and anxiety and shame. For now we all know, that unless she has had an accident, she has run away from our offer of shelter. Or else they suppose we cast her out, which is also a disgrace, as we never should.

But perhaps she is lying dead in some cave, or on the shore of some cove we cannot climb to. Tomorrow I will go out again. I cannot sleep.

MAY
1
ST

Today my father drove to the convent and back. The Mother Superior gave him wine, he says, and said no one answering Christabel’s name or description had been brought to the convent that week. She said she would pray for the young woman. My father asked to be told if she found her way there. “As to that,” said the nun, “that depends on what the woman herself says, seeking sanctuary.”

“I wish her to know that we offer her, her and her child, a home with us, and care for as long as she requires it,” my father said.

And the nun: “I am sure she must already know that, wherever she is. Perhaps she cannot come to you, in her trouble. Perhaps she will not, for shame, or for other reasons.”

My father tried to tell the nun about Christabel’s mad obstinacy in silence, but she became, apparently, brusque and impatient, and turned him away. He did not like the nun, who, he says, enjoyed her power over him. He is much set back and depressed.

MAY
8
TH

She is back. We were at table, my father and I, sadly enough, going over yet again our talk of where we might have looked, or whether she went away in the two carts or the innkeeper’s trap that went through the village on that fateful day, when we heard wheels in the courtyard. And before we were up, there she was in the doorway. This
second sight of her—a revenant in broad day—was more terribly strange than her first coming in the night and the storm. She is thin and frail, and she has pulled in her clothes with a great heavy leather belt. She is as white as bone, and all her bones seem to have dispossessed her flesh, she is all sharp edges and knobs, as though the skeleton were trying to get out. And she has cut off her hair. That is, all the little curls and coils are gone—she has a kind of cap of dull pale spikes, like dead straw. And her eyes look pale and dead out of deep hollows.

My father ran to her, and would have put his arms tenderly round her, but she put up a bony hand and pushed him back. She said,

“I am quite well, thank you. I can stand on my own feet.”

And so, with great care, and with what I can only call a proud creeping, she made her way, infinitely slowly, but always upright, to the side of the fire and sat down. My father asked if we should not carry her upstairs, and she said no, and repeated “I am quite well, thank you.” But she accepted a glass of wine and some bread and some milk, and drank and ate almost greedily. And we sat round, open-mouthed, and ready to ask a thousand questions, and she said: “Do not ask, I beg you. I have no right to ask favours. I have abused your kindness, as you must see it, though I had no choice. I shall not abuse it much longer. Please ask
nothing.”

How can I write what we feel? She forbids all normal feeling, all ordinary human warmth and communication. Does she mean, that is, does she fear or expect, to
die
here, when she talks of not abusing our kindness much longer? Is she mad, or is she very clever and secret, is she working out a plan she has always had, since her coming here? Will she stay, will she go?

Where is the child?
We are all in an agony of curiosity, which she has cleverly, or desperately turned against us, making it seem a kind of sin, prohibiting all normal solicitude and questioning. Is it live or dead? Boy or girl? What does she mean to do?

I will write here, for I am ashamed, and yet it is an interesting part of human nature, that it is impossible to love where there is such lack of openness. I feel a kind of terrible pity when I see her
thus
, with her bony face and cropped head, and imagine her pain. But I cannot imagine it well, because she forbids it, and in a strange way her prohibition turns my concern into a kind of anger.

MAY
9
TH

Gode said, if you take the shirt of a little child and float it on the surface of the
feuteun ar hazellou
, the fairy fountain, you may see if the child will grow to be lusty, or if it will be weak or die. For if the wind fills the arms of the shirt, and if the body of it swells and moves across the water, the child will live and flourish. But if the shirt is limp, and takes water, and sinks, the child will die.

My father said, “Since we have neither child nor shirt, this divination is not much use.”

She made no little shirts, during those months, only pretty pen-cases and my scissor-case, and the mending of sheets.

She stays in her room mostly. Gode says she is not fevered, nor in decline, but very weak.

Last night I had a nightmare. We were by the side of a great pool, very black, with a surface like jet, lumpy, with a sheen on it. We were surrounded by hollies, a thick hedge of them—when I was a girl, we used to pick the leaves, and prick our fingers ever so slightly from thorn to thorn, moving around the circumference, “Il m’aime, il ne m’aime pas.” I taught this to Christabel, who said holly was better for this game of chance, which in England is played with the petals of daisies, which they tear off, one by one. In my dream I was afraid of the holly. I feared it as one automatically fears snakebite, if something rustles in the undergrowth.

In my dream we were several women by the edge of the water—as in many dreams it was not possible to see
how
many—I was aware of some behind my shoulders crowding me. Gode was launching a small parcel—at one point this was all swaddled and wrapped, like pictures of the hiding of Moses among the bulrushes. At another point it was a stiff little nightshirt, all pleated, which sailed out into the centre of the pool—there were no ripples—and then raised its empty arms and struggled with the air, and tried to heave itself out of the thick water, which swallowed it very slowly, more like mud or jelly than water, more like liquid stone, and all the time the thing twisted and waved its—so to speak—hands, for it clearly had
no
hands.