Angels and Insects Page 24

  Mrs Papagay’s irrepressible imagination rushed into Mrs Hearnshaw’s conjugal bedroom, aghast, prurient, excited. She saw the large weeping woman brushing her hair—she would have a rather good ivory brush, yes, and a little cheval glass, and would be wearing a kind of black silk peignoir, a mourning peignoir, she would be brushing her thick hair and would have taken off all that jewellery, those jet and ebony crosses and lockets, the mourning rings and bracelets, they would be lying sadly in front of her between the candles, like a little shrine to the five Amys. And he would come in, little Mr Hearnshaw, he was a little man, like a black wasp, with a lot of black stiff whiskers to make him look bigger, to puff him out, and a crest of coarse black hair like a horse’s hogged mane on his head. And he would have a sort of little sign that that was what he wanted. Perhaps he would come up quietly and lift a tress or two and kiss the nape of her sad neck, or massage it with his fingers, if he had the imagination. And the poor woman’s head would droop lower and lower, for she wanted to do her conjugal duty but she was afraid, she was afraid right at the beginning, of the seed rushing in … Mrs Papagay rapped her rampant imagination severely on the head but it rushed on. Mr Hearnshaw clutched Mrs Hearnshaw and propelled her towards the bed. Mrs Papagay constructed the bed, gave it red velvet curtains and then made them vanish on grounds of inverisimilitude. It was a big dark bed, she was sure, and ample, like Mrs Hearnshaw; it had a purple silk eiderdown and fresh lavender-smelling linen sheets. It was a bed that had to be climbed, and Mrs Hearnshaw climbed slowly, having taken off the peignoir and being clad now in white cotton, with broderie anglaise trimmings, threaded with black ribbons. Her big breasts swung inside the bell of this as she leaned over the bed, climbing in, with him close behind her, holding on to her big haunches, that was how Mrs Papagay saw it, the little prickly man, pushing her in like a sow into a sty. She saw his white legs below his striped nightshirt, covered with criss-crossing black hairs, like scribbling. They were thin, strong, angular legs, not comfortable.

  And then the dialogue.

  ‘My dear, I must …’

  ‘No, please. I have a headache.’

  ‘I must, I must. Be kind to me, dear. I must.’

  ‘I cannot bear it. I am afraid.’

  ‘The good Lord will take care. We must do His Will and trust in His Providence.’

  With his whiskers bristling on her face, and the little hands pulling at her ample flesh, and the little sharp knees working closer to the white flanks.

  ‘I do not know if I—’

  Mrs Papagay, in a rush of indignation saw the little man mount and pump, pump, possessed in a male way, unregarding. Then she was contrite and angry with herself for her own dramaturgy, which had provoked her indignation, and tried to imagine it otherwise—two disconsolate people, who loved each other, turning to each other in the dark, out of their separate griefs, holding each other for comfort, and out of the warmth of comfort, naturally enough, the prick of desire. But that didn’t feel natural as the first scene did. Mrs Papagay returned to the present of the séance—all this action having flickered into life and out of it in a brief minute—and wondered whether other people told themselves stories in this way in their heads, whether everyone made up everyone else, living and dead, at every turn, whether this she knew about Mrs Hearnshaw could be called knowledge or lies, or both, as the spirits had known what Mrs Hearnshaw had confirmed, that she was indeed enceinte.

  V

  ‘There is something in the room,’ Sophy Sheekhy announced dreamily. ‘Between the sofa and the window. A living creature.’

  All looked towards this dark corner—those opposite Sophy Sheekhy, especially Emily Jesse, who was directly opposite her, turning their heads and craning their necks, seeing only the dim outlines of Mr Morris’s pomegranates and birds and lilies.

  ‘Can you see it clearly?’ asked Mrs Papagay. ‘Is it a spirit?’

  ‘I can see it clearly. I don’t know what it is. I can describe it. Up to a point. A lot of the colours don’t have names.’

  ‘Describe it.’

  ‘It is made up of some substance which has the appearance of—I don’t know how to say this—of—plaited glass. Of quills, or hollow tubes of glass all bound together like plaits of hair or those pictures you see of the muscles of flayed men all woven together—but these are like molten glass. It appears to be very hot, it gives off a kind of bright fizzing sort of light. It is somewhat the shape of a huge decanter or flask, but it is a living creature. It has flaming eyes on the sides of a high glassy sort of head, and it has a long, long beak—or proboscis—its long neck is slightly bent and its nose or beak or proboscis—is tucked into its—into the plaits of—what in a way is its fiery breast. And it is all eyes, all golden eyes, inside … it has in a way plumes, in three, in three layers, all colours—I can’t do the colours—it has plumes like a great mist, a ruff under its—head—and a kind of cloak round its centre—and I don’t know if it has a train or a tail or winged feet, I can’t see, it’s all stirring about all the time, and shining and sparking and throwing off bits of light and I get the feeling, the sensation, it doesn’t like me to describe it in demeaning human words and comparisons—it didn’t like me saying “decanter or flask”, I felt its anger, which was hot. It does wish me to describe it, I can tell.’

  ‘Is it hostile?’ asked Captain Jesse.

  ‘No,’ said Sophy Sheekhy, slowly. She added, ‘It is irritable.’ ‘ “Skirted his loins and thighs with downie Gold / And colours dipt in Heav’n,” ’ said Mrs Jesse..

  ‘Can you see it too?’ said Sophy Sheekhy.

  ‘No. I was quoting the description of the Archangel Raphael in Paradise Lost. “A seraph winged; six wings he wore, to shade/His lineaments divine”.’

  Captain Jesse said, ‘It is interesting about the wings of an angel. It has been pointed out that an angel would need a protruding breastbone of several feet to counterbalance the weight of its wings, like a bird, like a big bird, you know, an arched breastbone.’

  Mrs Jesse said, ‘My brother Horatio was once observing a lady sculptor making a carved reredos for a church and disconcerted her by observing, “Angels are only a clumsy form of poultry.” ’

  ‘Levity, Mrs Jesse,’ said Mr Hawke, ‘at such a moment—’

  ‘The good Lord makes us as we are, Mr Hawke,’ replied Mrs Jesse. ‘He knows that a little levity is in its way an expression of awe, of our own inadequacy to ingest marvels. Are we to suppose that Miss Sheekhy is at this moment contemplating the pure Form of an angel? An angel made of air, like Dr Donne’s—“Then as an Angell, face, and wings / Of aire, not pure as it, yet pure doth weare …” Can an angel be compared to a glass bottle with a proboscis?’

  The séance, even at its most intense, visionary and tragic, retained elements of the parlour game. It was not that Mrs Jesse did not believe that Sophy Sheekhy saw her Visitor; it was patently clear that she did; it was more that there were all sorts of pockets of disbelief, scepticism, comfortable and comforting unacknowledged animal unawareness of the unseen, which acted as checks and encouraged a kind of cautious normalness.

  Mr Hawke said judiciously, ‘It is possible that what Miss Sheekhy sees is the form taken by the thought of an angel in the lower world of the Spirits. Swedenborg has many curious things to tell us of angelic offgivings, reliques of past mental states stored up inwardly for future use. He believed for instance that such offgivings were inserted into infants in the womb as reliques of past states of angelic conjugial love—an affection is an organic structure having life—so we may in certain circumstances be made sensuously aware of it.’

  Mr Hawke, Mrs Papagay thought, would theorise if a huge red Cherub with a fiery sword were advancing on him to burn him to the bone; he would explain the circumstances, whilst the stars fell out of the sky into the sea like ripe figs from a shaken fig-tree.

  Sophy Sheekhy watched the living creature simmer in its brilliant fronds. It was making her feel alternately hot and cold; her skin p
ulsed crimson and then the hot tide dipped and she was again pale and clammy. The flask or vase that was the creature seemed to be full of eyes, to be made up of huge golden eyes the way a mass of frogspawn is made up of jelly. She had the idea nevertheless that all this mass of burning vision did not exactly see her, that the creature’s awareness of the room they were in, and of its inhabitants, was less acute, vaguer, than hers of it. It hummed at her on various painful notes, that hurt cords in her hearing.

  ‘It says, “Write!” ’ she said, in a strangled voice.

  Mrs Papagay looked up, all concern, and saw that Sophy Sheekhy was in real distress.

  ‘Who shall write?’ she asked, helpfully.

  Sophy took up a pencil. Mrs Papagay could see the tendons rigid on her neck. She said to the others, ‘Be very careful. This communication is dangerous and painful to the Medium. Keep very still, and concentrate on helping her.’

  The pen took a little rush, and produced a neat, elegant handwriting, not at all like Sophy’s large schoolgirl spherical characters.

  Thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot.

  Your silliness o’ercasts me much with thought.

  You have a bounden duty and you ought

  Never forget our Lady who is dead:

  Laodicea Laodicea

  The pen wavered and then went back, crossing out ‘Laodicea’ and writing, very slowly and carefully,

  Theodicaea Noviss Novissima. Lost Remains, his loved remains sail the placid ocean-plains thy dark freight. Lost, lost.

  Thy dark freight a vanished life.

  Mrs Papagay could feel the separate yet fused emotion of all the company. Mrs Hearnshaw was awestruck, her breathing laboured. Mr Hawke was alert, his mind trying to decipher. He said, ‘Revelation 3, 15 to 16. The writing commanded to the Angel of the Church of the Laodiceans. “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” We are reproached for lack of zeal. Theodicaea I do not know—it may be that we are not zealous enough in promoting the Kingdom of God in Margate. But the words are not cognate.’

  Captain Jesse said, One of the lines of poetry is from In Memoriam, I believe. It is one of the lines about the ship that bears the dead man home. “Thy dark freight, a vanished life.” It is a line I have always particularly admired, since the weight of the freight, so to speak, is the weight of absence, of what is vanished, a lost life. It is not what remains that is heavy, but what is not there, what is dark, what I believe is a figure called a paradox, is it not? The ship sails in an ominous calm across the placid ocean-plain, it glides like a ghost, the ship bearing …’

  ‘Richard, stop talking,’ said Mrs Jesse. ‘Everyone knows that line is from my brother’s poem. The spirits often speak to us through that poem, it seems to be a particular favourite with them, and not only in this house, where it has its natural central place in our thoughts, but in many others, many others.’

  She turned her dark, fierce face in the half-light on Sophy Sheekhy. At her side the raven rattled his quills, and the little dog showed his sharp little teeth.

  ‘To whom is this message addressed, pray? To whom and from whom?’

  ‘Who is “our Lady who is dead”?’ added Mr Hawke, helpfully, concentrating his agile mind on the spiritual conundrum.

  Sophy Sheekhy stared at the Visitor whose eyes were boiling in a kind of immaterial convection current. She took up the pen again:

  Thy voice is on the rolling air

  I hear thee where the waters run

  Thou standest in the rising sun

  And in the setting thou art fair.

  —Revelation 2, 4

  Mr Hawke pounced. ‘The angel standing in the sun is indeed in Revelation, but he is not Revelation 2, 4, he is in chapter 19, verses 17 to 18 “And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of captains—” ‘

  ‘We all know that text, Mr Hawke,’ said Mrs Jesse. ‘And it is, as you say, Revelation 19, 17 to 18.’

  Captain Jesse had picked up the Bible from the table, and read out helpfully, ‘Here is the verse from chapter 2, verse 4. It is addressed to the Angel of the Church of Ephesus. “Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.” Dear me. How interesting. What can that mean?’

  ‘Who is our Lady who is dead?’ persisted Mr Hawke.

  ‘It is a translation from the Italian, from one of the sonnets of Dante’s Vita Nuova,’ said Mrs Jesse, tartly. ‘The dead Lady is Beatrice, who died at the age of twenty-five and inspired the Divine Comedy. The poet met her at the age of nine and remained faithful to her memory, though he married, after her death. Will our visitor not reveal, Miss Sheekhy, to whom these warnings are addressed?’

  Sophy Sheekhy looked at the boiling eyes and the feathery fringes.

  ‘He is growing fainter,’ she said.

  The pen wrote: ‘Allas the deeth. Allas min E. Allas.’

  ‘It is for you, Mrs Jesse,’ said Mrs Hearnshaw, who was less knowledgeable about Mrs Jesse’s history, and therefore less alarmed by the faintly threatening nature of the messages, interpreted in terms of Mrs Jesse.

  ‘So I supposed,’ said Mrs Jesse. ‘But we do not know from whom. Many spirits, living and dead, may enter the circle, as we all know.’

  She put up her two hands, round her head, with its silver-dark wings of hair, breaking the circle. Stirred by this movement, the raven suddenly put up his great wings and clapped them together, over his head, opening his black beak to show a black, pointed, snaky tongue, and uttering a series of harsh, grating cries. Dark feathered shadows flailed across the ceiling. Pug rose from his slumbers and made a noise, half throaty growl, half strangled snort, followed by an explosive rumbling in his belly. A Lilliputian Vesuvius of coals collapsed in the grate, flaring fitfully scarlet and then crimson, with a puff of gas. Sophy Sheekhy’s visitor was only a few bright lines on the dark, a diagram paler than the golden fruit and the starry white flowers on the sofa behind him, and then nothing. Mrs Papagay drew the proceedings to an end. She would dearly have loved to question Mrs Jesse closely about the meaning of the visitor’s messages, for it was clear to her that they had meaning for Mrs Jesse, very precise meaning, that the spirits had somehow hit home, and that Mrs Jesse was not inclined to share her understanding with the rest of them. They usually took a cup of tea, or of coffee, after their exertions, and discussed the meaning of what had transpired, but on this occasion Mrs Papagay observed that Mrs Jesse was tired and that it would be best if they left.

  Mrs Jesse did not thank her. Captain Jesse began a long rambling speech about the Laureate’s depiction of the sea in his great poem. He pronounced the stanzas about burial at sea to be particularly fine. ‘You might think it was a landsman’s understanding of that ceremony, and you would be right, of course, a landsman is affected differently from a sailor by the ocean. I believe the sea is both more matter-of-fact and more ever-present and dare I say more mysterious to a sailor than to a landsman; it is borne forcibly home to a sailor how far below and around him at all moments is shifting salt water in which he cannot survive, and this perhaps causes him to view our human existence as something precarious and temporary in the nature of things; the landsman has more the illusion of stability and permanences, you know, the landsman is more struck by the disappearance of the corpse in the water, though I have never myself seen a body sink with its white trail of bubbles, the air going so far in the water, you know, and then rising again, being forced to rise, as the body goes more and more slowly into its other element where it will rest—I have never seen this without a constraint of pain and moment of terror—all sailors are afraid of that element, rightly so—and you would be surprised too how many naval men murmur to themse
lves those lines about the mother who prays God will save her sailor son, whilst that exact moment “His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud/Drops in his vast and wandering grave.” “Vast and wandering” is very good, very good indeed. They keep that book under their pillows, these naval men, you know, they appreciate the understanding …’

  ‘Stop talking, Richard,’ said Mrs Jesse.

  VI

  A cab bore Mrs Hearnshaw away. Mr Hawke offered to accompany the other two ladies to their home—it was on his way, it was dark, the walk would benefit all of them. Out on the pavement he attempted to take the arms of both ladies, but Sophy Sheekhy drew back, and they somehow found themselves progressing along the Front with Mr Hawke and Mrs Papagay in front and Sophy walking a few paces behind, like a dutiful child. There were gaslights along the Front, whose yellow flames danced and shimmered. Beyond, the sea was ink-black, with occasional curls of white crests in the small wind. A vast and wandering grave indeed, Mrs Papagay thought. Arturo must be ground white bones by now. It was probable that there had been no one to sew him neatly into a weighted hammock. Ah dear, but come thou back to me. Nevermore, her mind muttered.

  Mr Hawke said, ‘I detest that bird, Mrs Papagay. I think its presence most inappropriate on such occasions. I have tried to point this out, but Mrs Jesse does not choose to hear. The little dog is not an agreeable little dog, it is a smelly little dog, to be blunt, Mrs Papagay. But I sometimes believe that bird is possessed of a malignant spirit.’

  ‘It reminds me irresistibly of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, Mr Hawke.

  ‘Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore—

  Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!’

  Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.” ’

  ‘It is hard’, said Mr Hawke, ‘to divine whether that poem is designed as some macabre exercise of humour, or a genuine response to the sense of loss we feel for the beloved Departed. It has a tantivy tantivy sound that is hard to take seriously in such a melancholy and sinister circumstance.’