"So do I."
"Did you start work on her because of the family connection?"
"Possibly. I think not. I knew one little poem by her, when I was very small, and it became a kind of touchstone. The Baileys aren't very proud of Christabel, you know. They aren't literary. I'm a sport. My Norfolk grandmother told me too much education spoilt a girl for a good wife. And then the Norfolk Baileys don't speak to the Lincolnshire Baileys. The Lincolnshire ones lost all their sons in the first World War, except one invalid one, and became rather impoverished, and the Norfolk Baileys hung on to a lot of the money. Sophie LaMotte married a Lincolnshire Bailey. So I didn't grow up with the idea that I had a poet in the family, by marriage of course. Two Derby winners and an uncle who made a record ascent of the Eiger, that's the sort of thing that mattered. "
"What was the little poem?"
"The one about the Cumaean Sibyl. It was in a little book I once got for Christmas called Ghosts and Other Weird Creatures. I'll show you.
He read
Who are you?
Here on a high shelf
In webbed flask I
Hook up my folded self
Bat-leather dry.
Who were you?
The gold god goaded me
Sang shrieking sang high
His heat corroded me
Not mine his cry.
What do you see?
I saw the firmament
Steady the sky
I saw the cerement
Close Caesar's eye.
What do you hope?
Desire is a dowsed fire
True love a lie
To a dusty shelf we aspire
I crave to die.
"It's a very sad poem."
"Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong. The Sibyl was safe in her jar, no one could touch her, she wanted to die. I didn't know what a Sibyl was. I just liked the rhythm. Anyway, when I started my work on thresholds it came back to me and so did she.
"I wrote a paper on Victorian women's imagination of space. Marginal Beings and Liminal Poetry. About agoraphobia and claustrophobia and the paradoxical desire to be let out into unconfined space, the wild moorland, the open ground, and at the same time to be closed into tighter and tighter impenetrable small spaces-like Emily Dickinson's voluntary confinement, like the Sibyl's jar."
"Like Ash's Sorceress in her In-Pace.”
“That's different. He's punishing her for her beauty and what he thought of as her wickedness."
"No, he isn't. He's writing about the people, including herself, who thought she ought to be punished because of her beauty and wickedness. She colluded with their judgment. He doesn't. He leaves it to our intelligence."
A disputatious look crossed Maud's face, but all she said was
"And you? Why do you work on Ash?"
"My mother liked him. She read English. I grew up on his idea of Sir Walter Ralegh, and his Agincourt poem and OfFa on the Dyke. And then Ragnarôk. " He hesitated. "They were what stayed alive, when I'd been taught and examined everything else."
Maud smiled then. "Exactly. That's it. What could survive our education."
She made him up a bed on the high white divan in her livingroom-not a heap of sleeping-bags and blankets but a real bed, with laundered sheets and pillows in emerald green cotton cases. And a white down quilt, tumbled out of a concealed drawer beneath. She found him a new toothbrush in its unbroken wrap, and said, "It's a pity about Sir George. Being such a curmudgeon. Who knows what he's got? Have you ever seen Seal Court? Victorian Gothic at its most tracery-like, pinnacles and lancets, deep in a dell. We could drive out there. If you think you've got time. I very rarely feel any curiosity about Christabel's life-it's funny-I even feel a sort of squeamishness about things she might have touched, or places she might have been-it's the language that matters, isn't it, it's what went on in her mind-"
"Exactly-"
"I've never bothered much about Blanche's Prowler and that sort of thing-it didn't seem to matter who it was, only that she thought something existed-but you've stirred something up-"
"Look," he said. He fetched the envelope out of his case. "I brought them with me. After all, what else could I do with them? They're faded but…"
Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else… I feel, I know with a certainty that cannot be the result of folly or misapprehension, that you and I must speak again-
"I see," she said. "They're alive."
"They don't have ends."
"No. They're beginnings. Would you like to see where she lived? And ended, indeed?" He was visited by a memory of a cat-pissed ceiling, of a room with no view.
"Why not? Since I'm here."
"You go in the bathroom first. Please."
"Thank you. For everything. Good night."
He moved gingerly inside the bathroom, which was not a place to sit and read or to lie and soak, but a chill green glassy place, glittering with cleanness, huge dark green stoppered jars on water-green thick glass shelves, a floor tiled in glass tiles into whose brief and illusory depths one might peer, a shimmering shower curtain like a glass waterfall, a blind to match, over the window, full of watery lights. Maud's great green-trellised towels were systematically folded on a towel-heater. Not a speck of talcum powder, not a smear of soap, on any surface. He saw his face in the glaucous basin as he cleaned his teeth. He thought of his home bathroom, full of old underwear, open pots of eyepaint, dangling shirts and stockings, sticky bottles of hair conditioner and tubes of shaving foam.
Later, Maud stood in there, turning her long body under the hot hiss of the shower. Her mind was full of an image of a huge, unmade, stained and rumpled bed, its sheets pulled into standing peaks here and there, like the surface of whipped egg-white. Whenever she thought of Fergus Wolff, this empty battlefield was what she saw. Beyond it lay, if she had chosen to conjure them up, unwashed coffee cups, trousers lying where they had been stepped out of, heaped dusty papers ring-stained with wineglasses, a carpet full of dust and ashes, the smell of socks and other smells. Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance. The Paris conference where she had met Fergus had been on Gender and the Autonomous Text. She had talked about thresholds and he had given an authoritative paper on "The Potent Castrato: The phallogocentric structuration of Balzac's hermaphrodite hero/ines." The drift of his argument appeared to be feminist. The thrust of his presentation was somehow mocking and subversive. He flirted with self-parody. He expected Maud to come into his bed. "We two are the most intelligent people here, you know. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen or dreamed about. I want you, I need you, can't you feel it, it's irresistible." Why it had been irresistible, Maud was not rationally sure. But he had been right. Then the arguments had begun. Maud shivered.