Possession by A.S. Byatt Page B

face was blunt and furred and screwed up as though about to burst into tears. Its prickles were round its ugly head like spined rays of a halo, and descended its neckless shoulders, criss-crossing, to meet the incongruity of a starched, frilled collar. It had blunt little claws on its stubby hands. Roland asked Maud what the critics made of this. Maud said that Leonora Stern believed it represented Victorian women’s fear, or any woman’s fear, of giving birth to a monstrosity. It was related to Frankenstein, the product of Mary Shelley’s labour pains and horror of birth.
    “Do you think that?”
    “It’s an old story, it’s in Grimm, the hedgehog sits on a black cock in a high tree and plays the bagpipes and tricks people. I think you can understand things about Christabel from the way she wrote her version. I think she simply disliked children—the way many maiden aunts must have done, in those days.”
    “Blanche is sorry for the hedgehog.”
    “Is she?” Maud examined the little picture. “Yes, you’re right. Christabel isn’t. It becomes a very resourceful swineherd—multiplies its pigs on forest acorns—and ends up with a lot of triumphant slaughter and roast pork and crackling. Hard for modern children to stomach who grieve for the Gadarene swine. Christabel makes it into a force of nature. It likes winning, against the odds. In the end it wins a King’s daughter, who is expected to burn its hedgehog-skin at night, and does so, and finds herself clasping a beautiful Prince, all singed and soot-black. Christabel says, ‘And if he regretted his armoury of spines and his quick wild wits, history does not relate, for we must go no further, having reached the happy end.’ ”
    “I like that.”
    “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