Still life, p.46
Still Life,
p.46
Through time to times anon
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance – that is I;
The eternal thing in man
That heeds no call to die.’
He made quite a little occasion out of the reading, drew them together, held their eyes.
‘Cold comfort,’ he said. ‘But something?’
Winifred was moved by this. Marcus was not.
Frederica sat in the little library she had imagined, on a window-seat with a long, worn tapestry cushion, and looked out over mown lawns in spring rain to a little brick bridge over the moat with water in it. The room was beautiful and alien, furnished in green and dull gold and rose, with much-loved old mahogany, Chinese jars of pot-pourri, and the books, the unopened library of a dead gentleman, the letters of Lord Chesterfield, Gibbon, Dr Johnson, Macaulay, Scott, Kingsley and The Lays of Ancient Rome into which the child, Nigel Reiver, had dipped on wet days, like these days of her first visit. Nigel’s two sisters, Olive and Rosalind, who do not come into this story and knew nothing of what had passed of it, had presided over the tea, of which the remnants were in front of them, on a low table. Georgian silver teapot, reflecting firelight and misty outside light, delicate Spode cups, a platter of fine sandwiches, a crumbled half chocolate cake, on a lightly starched damask cloth on a large dark tray. There was a silver creamer, and a saucer of sliced half-rounds of lemon, glistening and acrid. The two sisters, wearing heathery tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters, were like Nigel, dark, and blunt, slightly sullen, and full of bodily life.
Frederica was not sure why she had been asked, just now, or why she had agreed to come. Nigel was the one person who seemed able to encourage her to cry out, to beat against him. But this was not her place. On the first day she had been startled by the size of it – unlike Long Royston, Bran House was an ordinary dwelling-place, so that its dairies and conservatories, outhouses and stables seemed endless, as Crowe’s showier, more palatial ones had not. She had walked with Nigel through the fields to the home farm, surprised that a man could own so many free-growing trees, so much wild grass, part of the earth. She had not expressed this surprise. She had stood outside a pen of pheasants, bright birds strutting higgledy-piggledy inside wire, ridiculous in their confinement, had seen strings of drooping rooks and moles drying in death on a gatepost.
She had a pretty bedroom with a white-curtained fourposter and crocheted cotton cushions, all white. It was like a book. At night Nigel came in barefoot, silent and powerful from start to finish. She had envied Stephanie the certainty of her desire for Daniel who, however improbably, had been what Stephanie wanted, in a way she, Frederica, had managed to want no one. Confusedly she thought she had perhaps relied on Stephanie to do for both of them things she herself feared doing, perhaps couldn’t do. Let me in, let me in, Nigel was in the way of saying, and she could not tell, it was true, sometimes, where he began and she ended, they were in a way joined. Was that what Stephanie had meant, had had? The idea of her sister was always monstrous, because always dying. If she remembered some good thing, cycling side by side, tea in Wallish and Jones, an argument about The Winter’s Tale which Stephanie loved and Frederica could not swallow, the imagined Stephanie became rigid and horrible and then she began, sweating, to weep. She had not had the courage to see her in her coffin before she was shut away. She had thought she had a good courage, could fling herself at things, but she could not do that. Nigel was the only person to whom she had confessed this, and he had understood, as he understood, she believed, blind moments of terror or passion. She thought of this again in the middle of his long thrusts that night and began to cry, trying to be soundless, and he held her tightly, against the dark. He was very much alive. His house, and his watching sisters, were alien, but he was very much alive. In the night she clutched him and in the day they walked in the rain over his ground retracing his ancient paths, noticing signs of life, a whirr of green wings, a startled jack rabbit, the tremor of a hawk.
Later than both these, Alexander answered his door in Great Ormond Street and had to go down a flight of stairs to the main front door, where his visitor kept up a steady, drilling ring. On the step was a figure black and filthy, bearded and dishevelled in an old raincoat and scored and grit-planed boots. Alexander took a step back and then recognised Daniel, who had lost much of his fat, whose black clothes hung on him under the raincoat.
‘May I come in for a bit? I need a warm place. And a shave. And a phone. I thought of you. You wrote me a good letter, that was mostly why. Can I come in?’
Alexander let him in, provided a bath, and offered food. He would have offered clothes, but they would not fit, even now. He made a heaped plate of gammon and eggs, brown bread and mushrooms, tomatoes, all of which Daniel consumed, sitting at a low table in front of Alexander’s fire. He had grown a vast, matted beard, which he had trimmed in the bathroom, but not removed. He spoke between mouthfuls in small bursts. The flat was pale and peaceful, straw and gold and blond wood: a lot of light came through high, fine-framed Georgian windows. Alexander had taken to housekeeping in a minimal but punctilious way. He made yogurt as Elinor had done, and had put a vase of irises on his desk, next to his little image of the ‘Breakfast Table’.
‘I’ve been walking,’ said Daniel. ‘I walked most of the way. Sometimes I got buses. Slept out – sometimes – sometimes in transport digs and such. Won’t bore you with all that. Don’t think I knew where I was going, rightly – the idea was to finish myself off, tire myself out, like – go to nothing.’
How could he say? He had fought his flesh, punished it, and spoken to no one for week after week, treading heavily from surface to surface, tarmac, grass, sand, heather, indifferently, realising what ‘tramp’ meant. He remembered his feet moving, and the regularity of the movement taking the life from his mind, from himself, from what had happened.
‘Nearly did finish myself off. With walking. And not eating. Got as far as St Bennet’s. You know those people – they take anyone in, dossers, vagabonds, suicides, drunks. I knew a man who’d gone there. By the time I got there I was in a right state – filthy, wi’ pneumonia, couldn’t talk, might as well have had lockjaw. Put me dog-collar in a pocket the second day – funny I went out in it at all, but I did, it was a kind of notice hung on, to start with, this is what I am, coming to nothing. They got me in hospital. I’ve been helping out a bit. Waste of public funds. Now I help out there. But it’s time I came back to life.’
On his walls Alexander had large images of the Sower and the Reaper, made for him by Charles Koninck, larger than life, or canvas, swarming with yellow and violet light. He knew very well that a casual visitor, most visitors, might see in them the usual bourgeois brightening-up. He knew also that the painter had wished to make images that anyone, that everyone, could hang in their room to cheer themselves up. Daniel’s gaze passed them indifferently. Alexander lived with them to live with the idea of extremities he didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, know. He looked at Daniel and didn’t know him either, what drove him, what had almost brought him to nothing.
‘What will you do?’
‘I can’t go back to housekeeping. Once, I wanted to – now, I don’t know. I hope I can go on working at St Bennet’s, until something turns up. With the down-and-outs. But first I must square things with the bishop. They don’t know who I am at St Bennet’s. I thought I’d try myself – my real self, you know – out on you, to see if it held together.’
‘Will it?’
‘It might.’
‘I’m glad you came.’
He pushed aside the debris of Daniel’s huge meal and poured coffee from a blue enamelled Polish pot, into a golden Vallauris pottery breakfast cup.
‘Coffee. To put some life into you.’
Daniel was twisting something in his fingers. It was the dog-collar.
‘Thanks.’
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Copyright © A.S. Byatt 1985
Cover Illustrations © Aitch
A.S. Byatt has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This edition published by Vintage 2018
First published in Vintage in 1995
First published in hardback by Chatto & Windus in 1985
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ISBN 9781448162789
A S Byatt, Still Life
