Angels and Insects Read online

  ‘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.

  Acknowledgments

  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.

  Illustration

  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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