A few flames made their sinuous way upwards. She remembered her honeymoon, as she did, from time to time, and deliberately.
She did not remember it in words. There were no words attached to it, that was part of the horror. She had never spoken of it to anyone, not even to Randolph, precisely not to Randolph.
She remembered it in images. A window, in the south, all hung about with vines and creepers, with the hot summer sun fading.
The nightdress embroidered for these nights, white cambric, all spattered with lovers' knots and forget-me-nots and roses, white on white.
A thin white animal, herself, trembling.
A complex thing, the naked male, curly hairs and shining wet, at once bovine and dolphin-like, its scent feral and overwhelming. A large hand, held out in kindness, not once, but many times, slapped away, pushed away, slapped away.
A running creature, crouching and cowering in the corner of the room, its teeth chattering, its veins clamped in spasms, its breath shallow and fluttering. Herself.
A respite, generously agreed, glasses of golden wine, a few days of Edenic picnics, a laughing woman perched on a rock in pale blue poplin skirts, a handsome man in his whiskers, lifting her, quoting Petrarch.
An attempt. A hand not pushed away. Tendons like steel, teeth in pain, clenched, clenched. The approach, the locked gateway, the panic, the whimpering flight.
Not once, but over and over and over.
When did he begin to know that however gentle he was, however patient, it was no good, it would never be any good?
She did not like to remember his face in those days, but did, for truthfulness, the puzzled brow, the questioning tender look, the largeness of it, convicted of its brutality, rejected in its closeness.
The eagerness, the terrible love, with which she had made it up to him, his abstinence, making him a thousand small comforts, cakes and tidbits. She became his slave. Quivering at every word. He had accepted her love.
She had loved him for it.
He had loved her.
She turned over Christabel's letter.
She howled. "What shall I be without you?" She put her hand over her mouth. If they came, her time to reflect was gone or lost. She had lied to them too, to her sisters, implied a lie in her bashful assertions that they were supremely happy, that they had simply had no good fortune with children…
That other woman was in one sense his true wife. Mother, at least briefly, of his child, it seemed.
She found she did not want to know what was in the letter. That, too, was better simply avoided. Not known, not spoken about, not an instrument of useless torture, as it would be if seen, whether its contents were good or bad.
She took the black japanned specimen box, with its oiled silk pocket in its glass lining, and put the letter in it. She added the hair bracelet-here, in white age, they were intertwined-and curled the long, thick thread-it was no more-of the blonde plait from his watch, inside the bracelet. She put in the tied bundles of their love-letters.
A young girl of twenty-four should not be made to wait for marriage until she is thirty-four and her flowering long over.
She remembered from the days of the Close, seeing herself once, naked, in a cheval glass. She must have been barely eighteen. Little high breasts, with warm brown circles. A skin like live ivory and long hair like silk. A princess.
Dearest Ellen,
I cannot get out of my mind - as indeed, how should I wish to, whose most ardentdesire is to be possessed entirely by the pure thought of you -I cannot get out of my mind the entire picture of you, sitting in your white dress among the rosy teacups, with all thegardenflowers, the hollyhocks, the delphiniums, the larkspur, burning crimson and blue and royal purple behind you, and only emphasising your lovely whiteness. And you smiled at me so kindly today, under your white hat with its palest pink ribbons.I remember every bunch of little bows, I remember everygentle ruffle,indeed it is a shame I am not apainter, but only an aspiring poet, or you shouldsee how I treasure every smallest detail.
As I shall treasure - until death, theirs alas, and not mine, not for centuries yet, for I need a very long lifetime to love and cherish you, and must spend another such lifetime, alas proleptically, waiting for the right to do so -I shall treasure,I say, thoseflowers you gave me, which are before me as I write, in a very fine blue glass vase. I love the white roses most - they are not openyet -I have decades of their time, days at least of my own longer and most impatient duration in which to enjoy them. They are not a simple colour, you know, although they look it. They contain snow, and cream, and ivory, all quite distinct. Also at their heart they are still green- with newness, with hope, with that fine cool vegetable blood which will flush a little, when they open. (Did you know that the old painters gave an ivory glow to a rich skin by painting on a green base - it is a paradox ofoptics, strange and delightful.)
I lift them to my face and admire them. They are mildly fragrant, with a promise of richness. I push my enquiring nose in amongst them - not to hurt or derange their beautiful scrolling -I can bepatient - each day they will unfold a little - one day I will bury myface in their whitewarmth - Did you ever play that childhood game with the huge opium poppy buds - we did - we would fold back the calyx and the tightly packed silk skirts, one by one - all crumpled - and so the poor flaunting scarlet thing would droop and die - such prying is best left to Nature and her hot sun, which opens them soon enough.
I have composed over 70lines today, mindful of your injunctions to be busy, and avoid distraction.I am writing about the pyre of Balder - and his wife, Nanna's grief for him - and Hermodur's brave andfruitless journey to the Underworld to have him released by thegoddess Hel - it is all most violently interesting, dear Ellen, an account of the human mind imagining and inventing a human story to account for the great and beautiful and terrible limiting facts of- existence - the rising and vanishing of the golden Sun, the coming of blossom (Nanna) in the Spring - her shrivelling in the Winter - the recalcitranceof dark (thegoddess Tho'ck who refused to mourn f or Balder, who was no use to her, she said, living ordead). And is not this t he subject for great modern poetry as much as for themy thy speculations o f our forefathers?
But I would rather besitting in a certaingarden - in a certain Close - among green and white roses - with a certain - decidedlya certain- young lady in white with a grave brow and a sudden sunny smile -
Ellen read no more. They could go with him. And wait for her.
She thought of putting the jet brooch he had sent from Whitby into the box, but decided against it. She would wear it at her throat, when they drove out to Hodershall.
She put more coal and more pieces of wood on the fire, and made a brave little blaze, by the side of which she sat down to manufac ture the carefully edited, the carefully strained (the metaphor was one of jelly-making) truth of her journal. She would decide later what to do with that. It was both a defence against, and a bait for, the gathering of ghouls and vultures.
And why were the letters so carefully put up then, in their sealed enclosure? Could she read them, where she was going, could he? This last house was no house, why not leave them open to the things that tunnelled in the clay, the mites and blind worms, things that chewed with invisible mouths, and cleansed and annihilated?
I want them to have a sort of duration, she said to herself. A demi-eternity.