Authors: A.S. Byatt
Monday to Thursday lunchtime I do supply teaching. This varies enormously from school to school. Sometimes I have eager sixth-formers doing
The Winter’s Tale
or
Hamlet
and sometimes I have kids of thirteen and fourteen who cannot keep still or quiet or speak in words of more than one syllable and who do from time to time
frighten
me. I have had a pair of scissors pushed into my ribs and spent a week or two with one eye closed up by a blow with the corner of the Bible. There is something peculiarly
horrible
about going back into the atmosphere of school, which I can’t say I ever enjoyed or liked (an understatement) and despite the violence, the stupidity and the philistinism (all of wch. you might think of as “real”). School has its own closed, tower-of-ivory reality with its own rules and language quite as much as Cambridge colleges. I’m lucky I think because I didn’t
expect
to find it rewarding or exciting—colleagues with high ideals about sharing D. H. Lawrence or Hardy with London teenagers inevitably come to grief—one colleague who spent hours of his own time compiling an anthology of writings about Fire for a group of teenage girls had his classroom set alight amongst witchy shrieks of glee. There is a lot of educational idealism around but I think
Lord of the Flies
got it triumphantly right, and find that most children think so too, in schools where I am allowed to teach it. I hope this doesn’t mean I shall find my head on a sacrificial stake in the playground, on the analogy with my fiery colleague.
Every now and then I meet surprising children—there is a boy called Boris in my present comprehensive with a perfect
ear
, the poetic version of perfect pitch, who gives me great pleasure and
savours
Hamlet’s throwaway rhythms—but I do not want to get attached to any of them, that would make me A Teacher, and I am not. I teach for the books I teach—what I have discovered in
Hamlet
over the last year in Stepney and Tooting Bee and Morden would stagger even you, Frederica. And if I am any good as a teacher it is because I care more about the books than about the kids and some of the kids respect that, and I have a knack of frightening them wch. I think you may be born with or not, so sometimes they listen. I think it’s because they know I don’t
love them and don’t care what they think of me. I thought I’d be a hopeless disciplinarian, but I’m not. I say, “Shut up,” and sometimes
they do
and that gives me pleasure. Who would have thought it?
And then for a day and a half I work for Rupert Parrott. The Papagallo Press is an offshoot of Bowers and Eden, a kind of loss-making highbrow branch where Rupert does things he considers worthwhile—poetry, a few literary novels, even essays. He wants very much to start a monthly journal under the Papagallo imprint, and if he ever does there is a slim chance I may get to be the first editor. But old Gimson Bowers is not too keen, and he controls the lucrative bit of it, the textbooks and the religious books, these days. Bowers is making a lot of money out of a curious theological tome called
Within God Without God
which everyone seems to need. The Papagallo Press is in Elderflower Court, a Covent Garden cul-de-sac, and consists of two dingy offices up a rickety staircase and a basement full of packaging. I love it. I even love all the very bad poems that come in, and I have to send back, because it makes you see how much poetry matters, even to people with no ear, no vocabulary and no thoughts to put together. When the schoolkids say, “Wot’s it
for
, then,” I tell them about how people pick up the pen when their baby’s born or their gran dies or they see a wind in a wood.
Perhaps I will try to describe Parrott, He’s curly, and plump, and not very tall, and public school. Late 30s early 40s. He wears waistcoats, sometimes red or mustard-yellow wool, sometimes sort of brocaded. He has a sweet, pursed-up little mouth, and a slightly high-pitched voice, which makes everyone think he’s more limited than he is, because he fits easily to a stereotype. But he’s actually very bright, and can tell a hawk from a handsaw, and is doing good things. He likes my poetry, but he has reservations, which I accept and respect. I don’t think you’ll imagine him
right
from this description, but it’ll do to start with—you must come and meet him.
I had better stop writing this long letter and go back to marking essays on
Goblin Market.
I have seen both Alan and Tony recently and told them I had seen you and they were delighted—they miss you, they say, and send their love, and hope, as I do, to see you soon. We were callow creatures then and you had so many of us half or altogether in love with you—but that was then—and now we are older and wiser, I suppose.
I think I will include my pomegranate poem, if I work up the courage. Perhaps I will dedicate it to you, if it finds a home. I wonder sometimes if it is still
possible
to write poems about Greek myths—are they not dead, should we not be thinking about quite other things now? But poems about the classrooms and bits of the quotidian seem just as conventional and just as dead-alive to my eye, to my mind, as Demeter and Persephone. Who have been
Powers, Frederica, for much longer than the 1944 Education Act, or Canon Holly and his Inside-Out God. I don’t know what I’m saying. They don’t
feel dead
though of course the poem—I see as I write—is about Death in that sense too. You will see it doesn’t really have an end and that’s because I still don’t know why it got written—I’ll let you know if I find out. Do write back now I’ve found you again.
Lots of love,
Hugh
Pomegranate
Puzzle-fruit, skinny globe, parchment-tough
,
Packed with jelly-cubes stained with
Blood and brown water, containing
Soot-black spheres like fine shot
Containing orchards.
Sherbet in the dark and black-skinned boys
Bring moonsilver plates with melons
Like crimson moons in snakeskins.
Bring burst pomegranates and curled segments
Of orange light with teardrops of tissue
Fat with sweet juice. Bring silver pins
For the seeds, and silver spoons
For the sirops and goblets
For blood-black wine. They sing
Sweet and low in the dark, they sing
Of deserts in moonlight.
She sits in a silver chair
His velvet-dark pupils
Stare, take her in and in
Do not reflect her. Such dark eyes
Are not seen elsewhere. This dim light only
Shines mildly, shines soft black
Blue-white teeth smiling
Between soft black lips.
He is large, he is comely.
His gaze is fixed on her.
She sits in a silver chair.
Picks with pink fingers, listless.
For politesse eats a few seeds.
Pomegranate-taste is almost
No taste, and so surprising. She savours
The absence, she swallows
The dark little spheres in their jelly.
Her throat ripples. Her palate
Considers, remembers
The taste of earth and water, faintly sweet.
He smiles in his darkness.
In the air the old woman ramps.
She is angry, she is dry, there is no moisture in her.
Her breasts are leather, they are dry as her shoesoles.
She has whirlwind and salt in her skirts.
She tramps on, she peers in fissures where hair roots
Shrivel and fail to grip. Bony birds
Peep and cheep. Their eggs are husks
With no flesh in them, no coiled lizard
With damp down, no nubs
To spring into pinions. She stumps
Through dry fields, leaving cracked clay
And dust. She will make earth’s surface dust
All dust. The old woman’s anger
Is single and fearful. Dust blows
And drags in her skirts. She stirs it
With horrible pleasure, extracting
Damp from soil and bones and soft seeds
Pippy Mammott brings this letter to Frederica at breakfast in Bran House. They are all round the breakfast table, looking out over the lawn to the moat and the fields and the woods. Leo is eating a boiled egg with toast soldiers, Olive and Rosalind are eating bacon and egg and fresh mushrooms, which they are praising as they eat. Nigel is helping himself to more mushrooms from the hotplate on the sideboard when Pippy Mammott comes in with the post. She puts his letters
by his plate, and gives two each to Rosalind and Olive and one to Frederica. Then she goes back to her porridge.
The letter is fat and Frederica does not at first recognise the handwriting; she only knows she knows it well. Then she sees what the letter is, and puts the folded poem beside her plate, and considers putting the whole letter away until later, to read in private. She looks up, and sees eyes on her, Pippy’s eyes, Olive’s eyes, so she unfolds the letter and starts to read, smiling to herself a little. Nigel, returning from the sideboard, sees this smile.
“You’ve got a long letter. Who’s it from?”
“An old friend.” She does not look up, she reads. Nigel opens his letters with an unused butter-knife, rip, slash, rip.
“A Cambridge friend?”
“Yes.”
“A good friend, a particular friend?”
“Yes, yes. Let me read my letter, Nigel.”
“It seems a particularly
juicy
letter. Tell us what you’re grinning at.”
“I’m not grinning. It’s a description of teaching in London schools. Read your own letters, Nigel.”
He gets up, and goes back to the sideboard. Olive says the mushrooms are moreish. Nigel ignores this diversionary move. He says, “Share it with us, the joke, Frederica.”
“There isn’t one. Let me finish my letter.”
“It must be a love letter,” says Nigel, silkily, standing behind her. “What’s this you’ve put aside?”
“None of your business.”
Nigel leans over and picks up the folded paper.
“A poem. Nothing to do with you.”
“The young man who came to tea wrote poems,” says Rosalind, mildly enough.
“The young man who came all the way from London to get lost in the Old Forest,” says Nigel. “I wish I’d been here to meet him. I do really. What does he say now he’s found you, Frederica?”
He leans forward, and snatches the letter. His movements are quick and clean; Frederica’s grip is loosed and her letter lost before she can think. He gives a little jump like a fencer and is out of reach, with the table between them. He holds up the letter. He reads:
“Dear Frederica, You said you would like a letter so I am writing one. It was so strange, seeing you in that wood, like a creature from another time, or another world, and with your beautiful son.”
He reads in a clipped, childish voice. He says, “Etcetera etcetera etcetera here it is. ‘I doubt if you even knew how much you meant to me, and it is only since I saw you that I have come to realise just how much I miss your uncompromising intelligence blah blah blah.’ ”
Pippy Mammott says, “Don’t be
naughty
, Nigel.” There is no expectation in her voice of being heard, or heeded.
Frederica says, “Give me that letter.”
Nigel goes on reading out sentences in a faintly silly voice. No one reacts, so after a time he gives up and finishes reading the letter to himself, frowning darkly. Then he opens the poem, and starts on that, with a new mocking edge:
“She sits in a silver chair
Picks with pink fingers, listless.
For politesse eats a few seeds.”
Frederica, rage rising in her, nevertheless notices that, even in the mock-sobbing voice he has now resorted to, he has put the stresses where they should be.
“What kind of nonsense is this?” he asks, bold and confident. “Why can’t it say what it’s about?”
“It does.”
He reads a few more lines, again getting the stresses automatically right, and then gives up.
“Give me back my letter and my poem.”
He cannot quite think what to say next or do next, and looks darkly about, threatening and ruffled. He is quite possibly about to give the papers back to Frederica when she says unwisely, “Where I come from, it is quite unforgivable to take away people’s private papers.”
“You aren’t where you come from. You’re here. Here I don’t like you getting letters from soppy poets, here it isn’t done to keep up with old boyfriends once you’re married with a child.”
“Your beautiful son,” says Leo, in a musing voice, reminding them of his presence.
“Little boys aren’t beautiful, dear,” says Pippy Mammott. “A better word is ‘handsome’ or ‘good-looking.’ ”
Leo repeats mulishly, “Like a creature from another time or another world and with your beautiful son, that’s what it said. Like elves perhaps I thought or hobbits I think he means, you see, we surprised him, he was nice, I liked him.”
Frederica, who has been working up to a roar of rage as full throated as ever her father uttered, stares dumbly.
Leo says, “I don’t like you reading in that silly voice I don’t like it. I myself asked him to tea, I
liked
him, I told you.”
“It’s easy to see he twisted
you
around his little finger,” says Nigel, less dangerous already.
“I don’t know what that means,” says Leo. He looks from one of his parents to the other, trying to think what next to say or to perform to avert disaster.
Nigel says, “Here. Take your letter, then. I hope you mean to write a poem back.”
“I can’t write poems.”
Frederica folds the violated letter, and watches Nigel eat his mushrooms. He stares down at his plate, black, black eyes under long black lashes. Such dark eyes / Are not seen elsewhere. I hate you, Frederica’s head says, I hate you, I hate you, I should never have come here, I cannot
live
here, I have been a fool, a fool, a fool. She holds tight to her letter under the table and chews a little bread, thoughtfully, and thinks of Hugh and Frederica-then, another person. Frederica-then could tell immediately whether a man was or was not attractive to her, whether or not she could bear him to touch her. It had nothing to do with loving the same poems, or finding it easy to tell someone a grief, a success, an idea. There were men she felt potentially
connected to
, and men she did not. She thought about this for a moment, without understanding it. She liked, indeed she loved, Hugh Pink,
much
more than Nigel, she told herself crossly and in panic. But Nigel’s body stirred hers as he angrily dissected mushrooms, and Hugh, whom she had been so pleased to see, gave her the pleasure of an old well-loved book, lost and found again. Not this appalling sense of connection, of being-to-do-with-
her
, which endures. Nigel munches mushrooms.