DAVID LODGE CHANGING PLACES.

A Tale of Two Campuses

BRIT. LIT. III

Although some of the locations and public events portrayed in this novel bear a certain resemblance to actual locations and
events, the characters, considered either as individuals or as members of institutions, are entirely imaginary. Rummidge and
Euphoria are places on the map of a comic world which resembles the one we are standing on without corresponding
exactly to it, and which is peopled by figments of the imagination.

1. Flying
High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each
other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. They were protected from the thin, cold air by the
pressurized cabins of two Boeing 707s, and from the risk of collision by the prudent arrangement of the
international air corridors. Although they had never met, the two men were known to each other by name. They
were, in fact, in process of exchanging posts for the next six months, and in an age of more leisurely
transportation the intersection of their respective routes might have been marked by some interesting human
gesture: had they waved, for example, from the decks of two ocean liners crossing in mid-Atlantic, each man
simultaneously focusing a telescope, by chance, on the other, with his free hand; or, more plausibly, a little mime
of mutual appraisal might have been played out through the windows of two railway compartments halted side
by side at the same station somewhere in Hampshire or the Mid-West, the more self-conscious party relieved to
feel himself, at last, moving off, only to discover that it is the other mans train that is moving first However, it
was not to be. Since the two men were in airplanes, and one was bored with and the other frightened of looking
out of the window since, in any case, the planes were too distant from each other to be mutually visible with
the naked eye, the crossing of their paths at the still point of the turning world passed unremarked by anyone
other than the narrator of this duplex chronicle.
Duplex, as well as having the general meaning of two-fold, applies in the jargon of electrical
telegraphy to systems in which messages are sent simultaneously in opposite directions (OED). Imagine, if you
will, that each of these two professors of English Literature (both, as it happens, aged forty) is connected to his
native land, place of employment and domestic hearth by an infinitely elastic umbilical cord of emotions,
attitudes and values a cord which stretches and stretches almost to the point of invisibility, but never quite to
breaking-point, as he hurtles through the air at 600 miles per hour. Imagine further that, as they pass each other
above the polar ice-cap, the pilots of their respective Boeings, in defiance of regulations and technical feasibility,
begin to execute a series of playful aerobatics criss-crossing, diving, soaring and looping, like a pair of mating
blue-birds, so as thoroughly to entangle the aforesaid umbilical cords, before proceeding soberly on their way in
the approved manner. It follows that when the two men alight in each others territory, and go about their
business and pleasure, whatever vibrations are passed back by one to his native habitat will be felt by the other,
and vice versa, and thus return to the transmitter subtly modified by the response of the other party may,
indeed, return to him along the other partys cord of communication, which is, after all, anchored in the place
where he had just arrived; so that before long the whole system is twanging with vibrations travelling backwards
and forwards between Prof A and Prof B, now along this line, now along that, sometimes beginning on one line
and terminating on another. It would not be surprising, in other words, if two men changing places for six
months should exert a reciprocal influence on each others destinies, and actually mirror each others experience
in certain respects, notwithstanding all the differences that exist between the two environments, and between the
characters of the two men and their respective attitudes towards the whole enterprise.
One of these differences we can take in at a glance from our privileged narrative altitude (higher than
that of any jet). It is obvious, from his stiff, upright posture, and fulsome gratitude to the stewardess serving him
a glass of orange juice, that Philip Swallow, flying westward, is unaccustomed to air travel; while to Morris
Zapp, slouched in the seat of his eastbound aircraft, chewing a dead cigar (a hostess has made him extinguish it)
and glowering at the meagre portion of ice dissolving in his plastic tumbler of bourbon, the experience of longdistance air travel is tediously familiar. []
Between the State University of Euphoria (colloquially known as Euphoric State) and the University of
Rummidge, there has long existed a scheme for the exchange of visiting teachers in the second half of each
academic year. How two universities so different in character and so widely separated in space should be linked
in this way is simply explained. It happened that the architects of both campuses independently hit upon the
same idea for the chief feature of their designs, namely, a replica of the leaning Tower of Pisa, built of white
stone and twice the original size at Euphoric State and of red brick and to scale at Rummidge, but restored to the
perpendicular in both instances. The exchange scheme was set up to mark this coincidence.
Under the original agreement, each visitor drew the salary to which he was entitled by rank and seniority
on the scale of the host institution, but as no American could survive for more than a few days on the monthly

stipend paid by Rummidge, Euphoric State made up the difference for its own faculty, while paying its British
visitors a salary beyond their wildest dreams and bestowing upon them indiscriminately the title of Visiting
Professor. It was not only in these terms that the arrangement tended to favour the British participants. Euphoria,
that small but populous state on the Western seaboard of America, situated between Northern and Southern
California, with its mountains, lakes and rivers, its redwood forests, its blond beaches and its incomparable Bay,
across which the State University at Plotinus faces the glittering, glamorous city of Esseph - Euphoria is
considered by many cosmopolitan experts to be one of the most agreeable environments in the world. Not even
its City Fathers would claim as much for Rummidge, a large, graceless industrial city sprawled over the English
Midlands at the intersection of three motorways, twenty-six railway lines and half-a-dozen stagnant canals.
Then again, Euphoric State had, by a ruthless exploitation of its wealth, built itself up into one of
America's major universities, buying the most distinguished scholars it could find and retaining their loyalty by
the lavish provision of laboratories, libraries, research grants and handsome, longlegged secretaries. By this year
of 1969, Euphoric State had perhaps reached its peak as a centre of learning, and was already in the process of
decline - due partly to the accelerating tempo of disruption by student militants, and partly to the counterpressures exerted by the right-wing Governor of the State, Ronald Duck, a former movie-actor. But such was the
quality of the universitys senior staff, and the magnitude of its accumulated resources, that it would be many
years before its standing was seriously undermined. Euphoric State, in short, was still a name to conjure with in
Jie senior common rooms of the world. Rummidge, on the other hand, had never been an institution of more than
middling size and reputation, and it had lately suffered the mortifying fate of most English universities of its type
(civic redbrick): having competed strenuously for fifty years with two universities chiefly valued for being old, it
was, at the moment of drawing level, rudely overtaken in popularity and prestige by a batch of universities
chiefly valued for being new. Its mood was therefore disgruntled and discouraged, rather as would be the mood
of the middle class in a society that had never had a bourgeois revolution, but had passed directly from
aristocratic to proletarian control.
For these and other reasons the most highly-qualified and senior members of staff competed eagerly for
the honour of representing Rummidge at Euphoric State: while Euphoric State, if the truth were told, had
sometimes encountered difficulty in persuading any of its faculty to go to Rummidge. []
The exchange of Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, however, constituted a reversal of the usual pattern.
Zapp was distinguished, and Swallow was not. Zapp was the man who had published articles in PMLA while still
in graduate school; who, enviably offered his first job by Euphoric State, had stuck out for twice the going
salary, and got it; who had published five fiendishly clever books (four of them on Jane Austen) by the time he
was thirty and achieved the rank of full professor at the same precocious age. Swallow was a man scarcely
known outside his own Department, who had published nothing except a handful of essays and reviews, who had
risen slowly up the salary scale of Lecturer by standard annual increments and was now halted at the top with
slender prospects of promotion. Not that Philip Swallow was lacking in intelligence or ability; but he lacked will
and ambition, the professional killer instinct which Zapp abundantly possessed.
In this respect both men were characteristic of the educational systems they had passed through. In
America, it is not too difficult to obtain a bachelor's degree. The student is left very much to his own devices, he
accumulates the necessary credits at his leisure, cheating is easy, and there is not much suspense or anxiety about
the eventual outcome. He (or she) is therefore free to give full attention to the normal interests of late
adolescence sport, alcohol, entertainment and the opposite sex. It is at the postgraduate level that the pressure
really begins, when the student is burnished and tempered in a series of gruelling courses and rigorous
assessments until he is deemed worthy to receive the accolade of the PhD. By now he has invested so much time
and money in the process that any career other than an academic one has become unthinkable, and anything less
than success in it unbearable. He is well primed, in short, to enter a profession as steeped in the spirit of free
enterprise as Wall Street, in which each scholar-teacher makes an individual contract with his employer, and is
free to sell his services to the highest bidder.
Under the British system, competition begins and ends much earlier. Four times, under our educational
rules, the human pack is shuffled and cut - at eleven-plus, sixteen-plus, eighteen-plus and twenty-plus - and
happy is he who comes top of the deck on each occasion, but especially the last. This is called Finals, the very
name of which implies that nothing of importance can happen after it. The British postgraduate student is a
lonely, forlorn soul, uncertain of what he is doing or whom he is trying to please - you may recognize him in the
tea-shops around the Bodleian and the British Museum by the glazed look in his eyes, the vacant stare of the
shell-shocked veteran for whom nothing has been real since the Big Push. As long as he manages to land his first
job, this is no great handicap in the short run, since tenure is virtually automatic in British universities, and
everyone is paid on the same scale. But at a certain age, the age at which promotions and Chairs begin to occupy
a man's thoughts, he may look back with wistful nostalgia to the days when his wits ran fresh and clear, directed
to a single, positive goal.

Philip Swallow had been made and unmade by the system in precisely this way. He liked examinations,
always did well in them. Finals had been, in many ways, the supreme moment of his life. He frequently dreamed
that he was taking the examinations again, and these were happy dreams. Awake, he could without difficulty
remember the questions he had elected to answer on every paper that hot, distant June. In the preceding months
he had prepared himself with meticulous care, filling his mind with distilled knowledge, drop by drop, until, on
the eve of the first paper (Old English Set Texts) it was almost brimming over. Each morning for the next ten
days he bore this precious vessel to the examination halls and poured a measured quantity of the contents on to
pages of ruled quarto. Day by day the level fell, until on the tenth day the vessel was empty, the cup was drained,
the cupboard was bare. In the years that followed he set about replenishing his mind, but it was never quite the
same. The sense of purpose was lacking - there was no great Reckoning against which he could hoard his
knowledge, so that it tended to leak away as fast as he acquired it.
Philip Swallow was a man with a genuine love of literature in all its diverse forms. He was as happy
with Beowulf as with Virginia Woolf, with Waiting for Godot as with Gammer Gurton's Needle, and in odd
moments when nobler examples of the written word were not to hand he read attentively the backs of cornflakes
packets, the small print on railway tickets and the advertising matter in books of stamps. This undiscriminating
enthusiasm, however, prevented him from settling en a 'field' to cultivate as his own. He had done his initial
research on Jane Austen, but since then had turned his attention to topics as various as medieval sermons,
Elizabethan sonnet sequences, Restoration heroic tragedy, eighteenth-century broadsides, the novels of William
Godwin, the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and premonitions of the Theatre of the Absurd in the plays of
George Bernard Shaw. None of these projects had been completed. Seldom, indeed, had he drawn up a
preliminary bibliography before his attention was distracted by some new or revived interest in something
entirely different. He ran hither and thither between the shelves of Eng. Lit. like a child in a toyshop - so
reluctant to choose one item to the exclusion of others that he ended up empty-handed. []
For years Morris Zapp had, like a man exceptionally blessed with good health, taken his self-confidence
for granted, and regarded the recurrent identity crises of his colleagues as symptoms of psychic hypochondria.
But recently he had caught himself brooding about the meaning of his life, no less. This was partly the
consequence of his own success. He was full professor at one of the most prestigious and desirably located
universities in America, and had already served as the Chairman of his Department for three years under
Euphoric State's rotating system; he was a highly respected scholar with a long and impressive list of crease his
salary either by moving to some god-awful place in Texas or the Mid-West where no one in his right mind would
go for a thousand dollars a day, or by switching to administration, looking for a college President's job
somewhere, which in the present state of the nation's campuses was a through ticket to an early grave. At the age
of forty, in short, Morris Zapp could think of nothing he wanted to achieve that he hadn't achieved already, and
this depressed him.
There was always his research, of course, but some of the zest had gone out of that since it ceased to be a
means to an end. He couldn't enhance his reputation, he could only damage it, by adding further items to his
bibliography, and the realization slowed him down, made him cautious. Some years ago he had embarked with
great enthusiasm on an ambitious critical project: a series of commentaries on Jane Austen which would work
through the whole canon, one novel at a time, saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said about
them. The idea was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle, historical,
biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian- allegorical,
ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it; so that when each commentary was
written there would be simply nothing further to say about the novel in question. The object of the exercise, as
he had often to explain with as much patience as he could muster, was not to enhance others' enjoyment and
understanding of Jane Austen, still less to honour the novelist herself, but to put a definitive stop to the
production of any further garbage on the subject. The commentaries would not be designed for the general reader
but for the specialist, who, looking up Zapp, would find that the book, article or thesis he had been planning had
already been anticipated and, more likely than not, invalidated. After Zapp, the rest would be silence. The
thought gave him deep satisfaction. In Faustian moments he dreamed of going on, after fixing Jane Austen, to do
the same job on the other major English novelists, then the poets and dramatists, perhaps using computers and
teams of trained graduate students, inexorably reducing the area of English literature available for free comment,
spreading dismay through the whole industry, rendering scores of his colleagues redundant: periodicals would
fall silent, famous English Departments be left deserted like ghost towns...
As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of
literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like
hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated
the existence of opinions contrary to their own - they even, for God's sake, sometimes changed their minds.
Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They

liked to begin a paper with some formula like,' I want to raise some questions about so-and-so', and seemed to
think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane.
Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys. If
you couldn't answer your own questions it was either because you hadn't worked on them hard enough or
because they weren't real questions. In either case you should keep your mouth shut. One couldn't move in
English studies these days without falling over unanswered questions which some damn fool had carelessly left
lying about - it was like trying to mend a leak in an attic full of dusty, broken furniture. Well, his commentary
would put a stop to that, at least as far as Jane Austen was concerned. []
In Morris Zapp's view, the root of all critical error was a naive confusion of literature with life. Life was
transparent, literature opaque. Life was an open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things,
literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be about: if you were afraid your plane would crash it was about
death, if you were trying to get a girl into bed it was about sex. Literature was never about what it appeared to be
about, though in the case of the novel considerable ingenuity and perception were needed to crack the code of
realistic illusion, which was why he had been professionally attracted to the genre (even the dumbest critic
understood that Hamlet wasn't about how the guy could kill his uncle, or the Ancient Mariner about cruelty to
animals, but it was surprising how many people thought that Jane Austen's novels were about finding Mr Right).
The failure to keep the categories of life and literature distinct led to all kinds of heresy and nonsense: to 'liking'
and 'not liking' books for instance, preferring some authors to others and suchlike whimsicalities which, he had
constantly to remind his students, were of no conceivable interest to anyone except themselves (sometimes he
shocked them by declaring that, speaking personally on this low, subjective level, he found Jane Austen a pain in
the ass). He felt a particularly pressing need to castigate naive theories of realism because they threatened his
masterwork: obviously, if you applied an open-ended system (life) to a closed one (literature) the possible
permutations were endless and the definitive commentary became an impossibility. Everything he knew about
England warned him that the heresy flourished there with peculiar virulence, no doubt encouraged by the many
concrete reminders of the actual historic existence of great authors that littered the country - baptismal registers,
houses with plaques, secondbest beds, reconstructed studies, engraved tombstones and suchlike trash. Well, one
thing he was not going to do while he was in England was to visit Jane Austen's grave. But he must have spoken
the thought aloud, because Mary Makepeace asks him if Jane Austen was the name of his great-grandmother. He
says he thinks it unlikely. []
2. Settling
He found Lets Write a Novel five minutes later. The cover had come away from the spine, which was why
they hadnt spotted it earlier. It had been published in 1927, as part of a series that included Lets Weave a Rug,
Lets Go Fishing and Lets Have Fun With Photography. Every novel must tell a story, it began. Oh, dear, yes,
Morris commented sardonically.
And there are three types of story, the story that ends happily, the story that ends unhappily, and the story
that ends neither happily nor unhappily, or, in other words, doesnt really end at all.
Aristotle lives! Morris was intrigued in spite of himself. He turned back to the title page to check out the author.
A. J. Beamish, author of A Fair But Frozen Maid, Wild Mystery, Glynis of the Glen, etc., etc. He read on.
The best kind of story is the one with a happy ending; the next best is the one with an unhappy ending,
and the worst kind is the story that has no ending at all. The novice is advised to begin with the first kind
of story. Indeed, unless you have Genius, you should never attempt any other kind.
Youve got something there, Beamish, Morris murmured. Maybe such straight talking wouldnt hurt the
students in English 305 after all, lazy, pretentious bastards, most of them, who thought they could write the Great
American Novel by just typing out their confessions and changing the names. He put the book aside for further
reading. []
3. Corresponding
Hilary to Philip
Dearest, [] Do you still want me to send on Let's Write a Novel? What a funny little book it is. There's a whole
chapter on how to write an epistolary novel, but surely nobody's done that since the eighteenth century? Love
from all of us here, Hilary
4. Reading
COUPLE, mid-thirties, fat wife, would like to meet discreet couple.
NESTLING earth couple would like to find water brothers to grock with in peace. [] - small ads., Euphoric
Times

PLOTINUS WOMEN ON MARCH; PEOPLE'S GARDEN FOR PLOTINUS; EXTRAORDINARY MEETING

OF RUMMIDGE STUDENTS UNION COUNCIL - Plotinus Gazette
CONCERNING THE SITE ON POPLAR AVENUE BETWEEN CLIFTON AND KING STREETS Information Office, State University of Euphoria
PARADISE REGAINED - Euphoric Times
RUMMIDGE GRAND PRIX PROPOSED Rummidge Evening Mail
EUPHORIC PROP AND STUDENTS ARRESTED FOR BRICK THEFT - Plotinus Gazette
MILITANT STUDENTS OCCUPY RUMMIDGE UNIVERSITY ASSEMBLY HALL - Rummidge Morning
Post
VISITING PROF AND STUDENTS DISCHARGED - Euphoric State Daily
STATEMENT BY CHANCELLOR BINDE - Release from the Chancellor's Office, State University of Euphoria
DEFEND THE GARDEN! - Manifesto distributed on the streets of Plotinus []
5. Changing
6. Ending
Exterior: BO AC VC10 flying from left to right across screen - afternoon, clear sly. Sound: jet engines.
Cut to: Interior : VC 10- afternoon. Angle on MORRIS and HILARY seated halfway down cabin.
Sound: muted noise of jet engines.
HILARY is turning pages of Harper's, nervously and inattentively, MORRIS yawns, looks out of window.
^pom through window. Shot: eastern seaboard of America. Long Island, Manhattan.
Cut to: Exterior: TWA Boeing 707 flying from right to left across screen - afternoon, clear sky. Sound: noise of
jet engines.
Cut to: Interior: TWA Boeing 707 - afternoon. Sound: cool instrumental version of These Foolish Things'.
Close-up: PHILIP, asleep, wearing headphones, his mouth slightly open. Draw back to reveal DSIRE sitting
next to him, reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. DSIRE looks out of the window, then at her
wristwatch, then at PHILIP. She twists the knob above his head which controls the in-flight entertainment.
Sound changes abruptly to narration of 'The ThreeBears'. []
MORRIS: (TO PHILIP) The paradigms of fiction are essentially the same whatever the medium. Words or
images, it makes no difference at the structural level.
DESIREE: 'The structural level', 'paradigms'. How they love those abstract words.' Historicism'!
PHILIP: (TO MORRIS) I don't think that's entirely true. I mean, take the question of endings.
DESIREE : Yeah, let's take it!
PHILIP : You remember that passage in Northanger Abbey where Jane Austen says she's afraid that her readers
will have guessed that a happy ending is coming up at any moment.
MORRIS: (nods) Quote, 'Seeing in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them that we are all hastening
together to perfect felicity.' Unquote.
PHILIP: Thats it. Well, thats something the novelist cant help giving away, isnt it, that his book is shortly
coming to an end? It may not be a happy ending, nowadays, but he cant disguise the tell-tale compression of the
pages.
HILARY and DSIRE begin to listen to what PHILIP is saying, and he becomes the focal point of
attention.
I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As youre reading, youre aware of the fact that
theres only a page or two left in the book, and you get ready to close it. But with a film theres no way of telling,
especially nowadays, when films are much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent, than they used to
be. Theres no way of telling which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along,
people are behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and were watching them, and at any point the director
chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just end.
PHILIP shrugs. The camera stops, freezing him in mid-gesture.

THE END

DAVID LODGE SMALL WORLD. An Academic Romance

BRIT. LIT. III

Like Changing Places, to which it is a kind of sequel, Small World resembles what is sometimes called the real world,
without corresponding exactly to it, and is peopled by figments of the imagination. Rummidge is not Birmingham, though it
owes something to popular prejudices about that city. There really is an underground chapel at Heathrow and a James
Joyce Pub in Zurich, but no universities in Limerick or Darlington; nor, as far as I know, was there ever a British Council
representative resident in Genoa. The MLA Convention of 1979 did not take place in New York, though I have drawn on the
programme for the 1978 one, which did. And so on.
Caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt.

HORACE

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its
fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Hush! Caution! Echoland!

JAMES JOYCE

PROLOGUE
When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth
with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has
breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every heath, and the young sun has run half his
course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature
prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on
pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences.
The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to
indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on selfimprovement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed the presentation of a paper,
perhaps, and certainly listening to the papers of others. But with this excuse you journey to new and interesting
places, meet new and interesting people, and form new and interesting relationships with them; exchange gossip
and confidences (for your well-worn stories are fresh to them, and vice-versa); eat, drink and make merry in
their company every evening; and yet, at the end of it all, return home with an enhanced reputation for
seriousness of mind. Todays conferees have an additional advantage over the pilgrims of old in that their
expenses are usually paid, or at least subsidised, by the institution to which they belong, be it a government
department, a commercial firm, or, most commonly perhaps, a university.
There are conferences on almost everything these days, including the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. If, like his
hero Troilus at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, he looks down from the eighth sphere of heaven on
This little spot of erthe, that with the se
embraced is
and observes all the frantic traffic around the globe that he and other great writers have set in motion the jet
trails that criss-cross the oceans, marking the passage of scholars from one continent to another, their paths
converging and intersecting and passing, as they hasten to hotel, country house or ancient seat of learning, there
to confer and carouse, so that English and other academic subjects may be kept up what does Geoffrey
Chaucer think?
Probably, like the spirit of Troilus, that chivalrous knight and disillusioned lover, he laughs heartily at the
spectacle, and considers himself well out of it. For not all conferences are happy, hedonistic occasions; not all
conference venues are luxurious and picturesque; not all Aprils, for that matter, are marked by sweet showers
and dulcet breezes. []
He started to get invited to conferences, to be external examiner at other universities, he got himself on the
British Councils list for overseas lecture tours. Hes always off travelling somewhere these days. Hes going to
Turkey in a few weeks time. Last month it was Norway.
Thats how it is in the academic world these days, said Morris Zapp. I was telling a young guy at the
conference just this morning. The day of the single, static campus is over.
And the single, static campus novel with it, I suppose?
Exactly! Even two campuses wouldnt be enough. Scholars these days are like the errant knights of old,
wandering the ways of the world in search of adventure and glory.
Leaving their wives locked up at home?
Well, a lot of the knights are women, these days. Theres positive discrimination at the Round Table. []
PART ONE

April is the cruelest month, Persse McGarrigle quoted silently to himself, gazing through grimy windowpanes
at the unseasonable snow crusting the lawns and flowerbeds of the Rummidge campus. He had recently
completed a Masters dissertation on the poetry of T.S. Eliot, but the opening words of The Waste Land might,
with equal probability, have been passing through the heads of any one of the fifty-odd men and women, of
varying ages, who sat or slumped in the raked rows of seats in the same lecture-room. For they were all well
acquainted with that poem, being University Teachers of English Language and Literature, gathered together
here, in the English Midlands, for their annual conference, and few of them were enjoying themselves. []
At that moment the knots of chatting conferees seemed to loosen and part, as if by some magical impulsion,
opening up an avenue between Persse and the doorway. There, hesitating on the threshold, was the most
beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life. She was tall and graceful, with a full, womanly figure, and a dark,
creamy complexion. Black hair fell in shining waves to her shoulders, and black was the colour of her simple
woollen dress, scooped out low across her bosom. She took a few paces forward into the room and accepted a
glass of sherry from the tray offered to her by a passing waitress. She did not drink at once, but held the glass up
to her face as if it were a flower. Her right hand held the stem of the glass between index finger and thumb. Her
left, passed horizontally across her waist, supported her right elbow. Over the rim of the glass she looked with
eyes dark as peat pools straight into Persses own, and seemed to smile faintly in greeting. She raised the glass to
her lips, which were red and moist, the underlip slightly swollen in appearance, as though it had been stung. She
drank, and he saw the muscles in her throat move and slide under the skin as she swallowed. Heavenly God!
Persse breathed, quoting again, this time from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. []
Hallo, whats your name? she said, peering at his lapel. I cant read these little badges without my glasses.
Her voice was strong but melodious, slightly American in accent, but with a trace of something else he could not
identify.
Persse McGarriglefrom Limerick, he eagerly replied.
Persse? Is that short for Percival?
It could be, said Persse, if you like.
The girl laughed, revealing teeth that were perfectly even and perfectly white. What do you mean, if I like?
Its a variant of Pearce. He spelled it out for her.
Oh, like in Finnegans Wake! The Ballad of Persse OReilley.
Exactly so. Persse, Pearce, PierceI wouldnt be surprised if they were not all related to Percival. Percival, per
se, as Joyce might have said, he added, and was rewarded with another dazzling smile.
What about McGarrigle?
Its an old Irish name that means Son of Super-valour.
That must take a lot of living up to.
I do my best, said Persse. And your own name? He inclined his head towards the magnificent bosom,
appreciating, now, why Professor Swallow had appeared to be almost nuzzling it in his attempt to read the badge
pinned there, for the name was not boldly printed, like everyone elses, but written in a minute italic script. A.
L. Pabst, it austerely stated. There was no indication of which university she belonged to.
Angelica, she volunteered.
Angelica! Persse exhaled rather than pronounced the syllables. Thats a beautiful name! []
I did my Masters thesis on Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot.
Then you are no doubt familiar with Miss Westons book, From Ritual to Romance, on which Mr Eliot drew for
much of the imagery and allusion in The Waste Land?
Indeed I am, said Persse.
She argued, Miss Maiden continued, not at all deterred by this answer, that the quest for the Holy Grail,
associated with the Arthurian knights, was only superficially a Christian legend, and that its true meaning
was to be sought in pagan fertility ritual. If Mr Eliot had taken her discoveries to heart, we might have been
spared the maudlin religiosity of his later poetry.
Well, said Persse placatingly, I suppose everyone is looking for his own Grail. For Eliot it was religious faith,
but for another it might be fame, or the love of a good woman. []
Well, shes been running away from me ever since I first met her.
Ah, a young woman likes to be wooed before she is won.
But I can never get near enough to her to start wooing, says Persse.
Shes putting you to the test.
She certainly is. I was on the point of giving up and going back to Connemara.
No, you mustnt do that. Never give up.

Like the Grail knights?

Oh, but they were such boobies, says Miss Maiden. All they had to do was to ask a question at the right
moment, and they generally muffed it.
Did Angelica happen to tell you where she was going next? Back to Los Angeles?
I think it was Tokyo.
Tokyo? Persse wails. Oh, Jaysus!
Or was it Hong Kong? One of those Far Eastern places, anyway. She was going to some conference or other.
That goes without saying, sighs Persse. The question is, which conference? []
Looking for a girl, said Persse indistinctly.
Looking for the Grail?
A girl. Her name is Angelica. Have some crisps.
No thanks. Nice name. Where does she live?
Thats the problem. I dont know. []
Big Ben strikes nine oclock. Other clocks, in other parts of the world, strike ten, eleven, four, seven, two. Morris
Zapp belches, Rodney Wainwright sighs, Desiree Zapp snores. Fulvia Morgana yawnsa quick, surprisingly
wide yawn, like a catsand resumes her customary repose. Arthur Kingfisher mutters German in his sleep.
Siegfried von Turpitz, caught in a traffic jam on the autobahn, drums on the steering-wheel impatiently with the
fingers of one hand. Howard Ringbaum chews gum to ease the pressure on his eardrums and Thelma Ringbaum
struggles to squeeze her swollen feet back into her shoes. Michel Tardieu sits at his desk and resumes work on a
complex equation representing in algebraic terms the plot of War and Peace. Rudyard Parkinson helps himself to
kedgeree from the hotplate on the sideboard in the Fellows breakfast-room and takes his place at the table in a
silence broken only by the rustle of newspapers and the clinking and scraping of crockery and cutlery. Akbil
Borak sips black tea from a glass in a small office which he shares with six others and grimly concentrates on
The Spirit of the Age. Akira Sakazaki strips the foil from his TV dinner and tunes his radio to receive the BBC
World Service. Ronald Frobisher looks up spare in the Oxford English Dictionary. Philip Swallow bustles into
the kitchen of his house in St Johns Road, Rummidge, avoiding the eye of his wife. And Joy Simpson, who
Philip thinks is dead, but who is alive, somewhere on this spinning globe, stands at an open window, and draws
the air deep into her lungs, and shades her eyes against the sun, and smiles. []
Everybody was talking about this UNESCO chair, said Fulvia. Beind their ands, naturally.
What chair is that? Morris felt a sudden stab of anxiety, cutting through the warm glow imparted by the
whisky and the agreeable happenstance of striking up acquaintance with this glamorous colleague. I havent
heard anything about a UNESCO chair.
Dont worry, its not been advertised yet, said Fulvia, with a smile. Morris attempted a light dismissive laugh,
but it sounded forced to his own ears. Its supposed to be a chair of Literary Criticism, endowed by UNESCO.
343/962 Its just a rumour, actually. I expect Arthur Kingfisher started it. They say e is the chief assessor.
And what else, said Morris, with studied casualness, do they say about this chair?
He did not really have to wait for her reply to know that here, at last, was a prize worthy of his ambition. The
UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism! That had to carry the highest salary in the profession. Fulvia confirmed
his intuition: $100,000 a year was being talked about. Tax-free, of course, like all UNESCO salaries. Duties?
Virtually non-existent. The chair was not to be connected with any particular institution, to avoid favouring any
particular country. It was a purely conceptual chair (except for the stipend) to be occupied wherever the
successful candidate wished to reside. He would have an office and secretarial staff at the Paris headquarters, but
no obligation to use it. He would be encouraged to fly around the world at UNESCOs expense, attending
conferences and meeting the international community of scholars, but entirely at his own discretion. He would
have no students to teach, no papers to grade, no committees to chair. He would be paid simply to thinkto
think and, if the mood took him, to write. A roomful of secretaries at the Place Fontenoy would wait patiently
beside their word-processors, ready to type, duplicate, collate, staple and distribute to every point of the compass
his latest reflections on the ontology of the literary text, the therapeutic value of poetry, the nature of metaphor,
or the relationship between synchronic and diachronic literary studies. Morris Zapp felt dizzy at the thought, not
merely of the wealth and privilege the chair would confer on the man who occupied it, but also of the envy it
would arouse in the breasts of those who did not. []
Philip Swallow was the first to speak. He said the function of criticism was to assist in the function of
literature itself, which Dr Johnson had famously defined as enabling us better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
The great writers were men and women of exceptional wisdom, insight, and understanding. Their novels, plays,
and poems were inexhaustible reservoirs of values, ideas, images, which, when properly understood and

appreciated, allowed us to live more fully, more finely, more intensely. But literary conventions changed, history
changed, language changed, and these treasures too easily became locked away in libraries, covered with dust,
neglected and forgotten. It was the job of the critic to unlock the drawers, blow away the dust, bring out the
treasures into the light of day. Of course, he needed certain specialist skills to do this: a knowledge of history, a
knowledge of philology, of generic convention and textual editing. But above all he needed enthusiasm, the love
of books. It was by the demonstration of this enthusiasm in action that the critic forged a bridge between the
great writers and the general reader.
Michel Tardieu said that the function of criticism was not to add new interpretations and appreciations of
Hamlet or Le Misanthrope or Madame Bovary or Wuthering Heights to the hundreds that already existed in print
or to the thousands that had been uttered in classrooms and lecture theatres, but to uncover the fundamental laws
that enabled such works to be produced and understood. If literary criticism was supposed to be knowledge, it
could not be founded on interpretation, since interpretation was endless, subjective, unverifiable, unfalsifiable.
What was permanent, reliable, accessible to scientific study, once we ignored the distracting surface of actual
texts, were the deep structural principles and binary oppositions that underlay all texts that had ever been written
and that ever would be written: paradigm and syntagm, metaphor and metonymy, mimesis and diegesis, stressed
and unstressed, subject and object, culture and nature.
Siegfried von Turpitz said that, while he sympathized with the scientific spirit in which his French colleague
approached the difficult question of defining the essential function of criticism in both its ontological and
teleological aspects, he was obliged to point out that the attempt to derive such a definition from the formal
properties of the literary art-object as such was doomed to failure, since such art-objects enjoyed only an as it
were virtual existence until they were realized in the mind of a reader. (When he reached the word reader he
thumped the table with his black-gloved fist.)
Fulvia Morgana said that the function of criticism was to wage undying war on the very concept of literature
itself, which was nothing more than an instrument of bourgeois hegemony, a fetishistic reification of so-called
artistic values erected and maintained through an litist educational system in order to conceal the brutal facts of
class oppression under industrial capitalism.
Morris Zapp said more or less what he had said at the Rummidge conference. []
In the event, not many people did like Morris Zapps lecture, and several members of the audience walked out
before he had finished. Rupert Sutcliffe, obliged as chairman to sit facing the audience, assumed an aspect of
glazed impassivity, but by imperceptible degrees the corners of his mouth turned down at more and more acute
angles and his spectacles slid further and further down his nose as the discourse proceeded. Morris Zapp
delivered it striding up and down the platform with his notes in one hand and a fat cigar in the other. You see
before you, he began, a man who once believed in the possibility of interpretation. That is, I thought that the
goal of reading was to establish the meaning of texts. I used to be a Jane Austen man. I think I can say in all
modesty I was the Jane Austen man. I wrote five books on Jane Austen, every one of which was trying to
establish what her novels meantand, naturally, to prove that no one had properly understood what they meant
before. Then I began a commentary on the works of Jane Austen, the aim of which was to be utterly exhaustive,
to examine the novels from every conceivable anglehistorical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, structural,
Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, existentialist, Christian, allegorical, ethical, phenomenological, archetypal, you
name it. So that when each commentary was written, there would be nothing further to say about the novel in
question.
Of course, I never finished it. The project was not so much Utopian as self-defeating. By that I dont
just mean that if successful it would have eventually put us all out of business. I mean that it couldnt succeed
because it isnt possible, and it isnt possible because of the nature of language itself, in which meaning is
constantly being transferred from one signifier to another and can never be absolutely possessed.
To understand a message is to decode it. Language is a code. But every decoding is another encoding.
If you say something to me I check that I have understood your message by saying it back to you in my own
words, that is, different words from the ones you used, for if I repeat your own words exactly you will doubt
whether I have really understood you. But if I use my words it follows that I have changed your meaning,
however slightly; and even if I were, deviantly, to indicate my comprehension by repeating back to you your
own unaltered words, that is no guarantee that I have duplicated your meaning in my head, because I bring a
different experience of language, literature, and nonverbal reality to those words, therefore they mean something
different to me from what they mean to you. And if you think I have not understood the meaning of your
message, you do not simply repeat it in the same words, you try to explain it in different words, different from
the ones you used originally; but then the it is no longer the it that you started with. And for that matter, you are
not the you that you started with. Time has moved on since you opened your mouth to speak, the molecules in
your body have changed, what you intended to say has been superseded by what you did say, and that has

already become part of your personal history, imperfectly remembered. Conversation is like playing tennis with
a ball made of Krazy Putty that keeps coming back over the net in a different shape.
Reading, of course, is different from conversation. It is more passive in the sense that we cant interact
with the text, we cant affect the development of the text by our own words, since the texts words are already
given. That is what perhaps encourages the quest for interpretation. If the words are fixed once and for all, on the
page, may not their meaning be fixed also? Not so, because the same axiom, every decoding is another encoding,
applies to literary criticism even more stringently than it does to ordinary spoken discourse. In ordinary spoken
discourse, the endless cycle of encoding-decoding- encoding may be terminated by an action, as when for
instance I say, The door is open, and you say, Do you mean you would like me to shut it? and I say, If you
dont mind, and you shut the doorwe may be satisfied that at a certain level my meaning has been understood.
But if the literary text says, The door was open, I cannot ask the text what it means by saying that the door was
open, I can only speculate about the significance of that dooropened by what agency, leading to what
discovery, mystery, goal? The tennis analogy will not do for the activity of readingit is not a to-and-fro
process, but an endless, tantalising leading on, a flirtation without consummation, or if there is consummation, it
is solitary, masturbatory. [Here the audience grew restive.] The reader plays with himself as the text plays upon
him, plays upon his curiosity, desire, as a striptease dancer plays upon her audiences curiosity and desire.
Now, as some of you know, I come from a city notorious for its bars and nightclubs featuring topless
and bottomless dancers. I am toldI have not personally patronized these places, but I am told on the authority
of no less a person than your host at this conference, my old friend Philip Swallow, who has patronized them,
[here several members of the audience turned in their seats to stare and grin at Philip Swallow, who blushed to
the roots of his silver-grey hair] that the girls take off all their clothes before they commence dancing in front of
the customers. This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease, it is the terpsichorean equivalent of the
hermeneutic fallacy of a recuperable meaning, which claims that if we remove the clothing of its rhetoric from a
literary text we discover the bare facts it is trying to communicate. The classical tradition of striptease, however,
which goes back to Salomes dance of the seven veils and beyond, and which survives in a debased form in the
dives of your Soho, offers a valid metaphor for the activity of reading. The dancer teases the audience, as the text
teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed. Veil after veil, garment
after garment, is removed, but it is the delay in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the stripping itself;
because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another. When we have seen
the girls underwear we want to see her body, when we have seen her breasts we want to see her buttocks, and
when we have seen her buttocks we want to see her pubis, and when we see her pubis, the dance endsbut is
our curiosity and desire satisfied? Of course not. The vagina remains hidden within the girls body, shaded by her
pubic hair, and even if she were to spread her legs before us [at this point several ladies in the audience noisily
departed] it would still not satisfy the curiosity and desire set in motion by the stripping. Staring into that orifice
we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest, gone beyond pleasure in contemplated beauty;
gazing into the womb we are returned to the mystery of our own origins. Just so in reading. The attempt to peer
into the very core of a text, to possess once and for all its meaning, is vainit is only ourselves that we find I
here, not the work itself. Freud said that obsessive reading (and I suppose that most of us in this room must be
regarded as compulsive readers) that obsessive reading is the displaced expression of a desire to see the
mothers genitals [here a young man in the audience fainted and was carried out] but the point of the remark,
which may not have been entirely appreciated by Freud himself, lies precisely in the concept of displacement. To
read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another,
From one action to another, from one level of the text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never
allows itself to be possessed; and instead of striving to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing. []
I would like to ask each of the speakers, said Persse, What follows if everybody agrees with you? He turned
and went back to his seat. []
Ah. Arthur Kingfisher flashed a sudden smile that was like sunshine breaking through cloud. His long, olivecomplexioned face, worn by study down to the fine bone, peered over the edge of the table at Persse with a keen
regard. That is a very good question. A very interesting question. I do not remember that question being asked
before.
He nodded to himself. You imply, of course, that what matters in the field of critical practice is not truth but
difference. If everybody were convinced by your arguments, they would have to do the same as you and then
there would be no satisfaction in doing it. To win is to lose the game. Am I right?
It sounds plausible, said Persse from the floor. I dont have an answer myself, just the question. []
FAY WELDON THE LIFE & LOVES OF A SHE-DEVIL

BRIT. LIT. III

1
Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of
love. She tells lies.
Mary Fisher is forty-three, and accustomed to love. There has always been a man around to love her,
sometimes quite desperately, and she has on occasion returned this love, but never, I think, with desperation. She
is a writer of romantic fiction. She tells lies to herself, and to the world.
Mary Fisher has $ (US) 754,300 on deposit in a bank in Cyprus, where the tax laws are low. This is the
equivalent of 502,867 sterling, 1,931,009 Deutschmark, 1,599,117 Swiss francs, 185,055,050 yen and so forth,
it hardly matters which. A womans life is what it is, in any corner of the world. And wherever you go it is the
same to those who hath, such as Mary Fisher, shall be given, to those who hath not, such as myself, even that
which they have shall be taken away.
Mary Fisher earned all her money herself. Her first husband, Jonah, told her that capitalism was
immoral, and she believed him, having a gentle and pliable nature. Otherwise no doubt by now Mary Fisher
would have a substantial portfolio of investments. As it is, she owns four houses and these are cumulative worth
depending on the state of the property market anything between half a million and a million dollars. A house,
of course, only means anything in financial terms if there is anyone to buy it, or if you can bear to sell it.
Otherwise a house can only be somewhere to live, or somewhere where those connected with you live. With
luck, the ownership of property brings peace of mind; without this luck it brings aggravation and discontent. I
wish un-luck in property matters on Mary Fisher.
Mary Fisher is small and pretty and delicately formed, prone to fainting and weeping and sleeping with
man while pretending that she doesnt.
Mary Fisher is loved by my husband, who is her accountant.
I love my husband and I hate Mary Fisher.
2
Now. Outside the world turns: tides surge up the cliffs at the foot of Mary Fishers tower, and fall again.
In Australia the great gum trees weep their bark away; in Calcutta a myriad flickers of human energy ignite and
flare and die; in California the surfers weld their souls with foam and flutter off into eternity; in the great cities
of the world groups of dissidents form their gaunt nexi of discontent and send the roots of change through the
black soil of our earthly existence. And I am fixed here and now, trapped in my body, pinned to one particular
spot, hating Mary Fisher. It is all I can do. Hate obsesses and transforms me: it is my singular attribution. I have
only recently discovered it. Better to hate than to grieve. I sing in praise of hate, and all its attendant energy. I
sing a hymn to the death of love.
If you travel inland from Mary Fishers tower, down its sweep of gravelled drive (the gardener is paid
$110 a week, which is low in any currency), through the windswept avenue of sadly blighted poplars (perhaps
this is his revenge), then off her property and on to the main road and through the rolling western hills, and down
to the great wheat plain, and on and on for a hundred kilometers or so, you come to the suburbs and the house
where I live: to the little green garden where my and Bobbos children play. There are a thousand more or less
similar houses, to the east, north, west and south: we are in the middle, exactly in the middle, of a place called
Eden Grove. A suburb. Neither town nor country: intermediate. Green, leafy, prosperous and, some say,
beautiful. I grant you it is a better place to live than a street in downtown Bombay.
I know how central I am in this centreless place because I spend a lot of time with maps. I need to know
the geographical detail of misfortune. The distance between my house and Mary Fishers tower is one hundred
and eight kilometers, or sixty-seven miles.
The distance between my house and the station is one and a quarter kilometres, and from my house to
the shops is 660 metres. Unlike the majority of my neighbours I do not drive a car. I am less well co-ordinated
than they. I have failed four driving tests. I might as well walk, I say, since there is so little else to do, once you
have swept the corners and polished the surfaces, in this place, which was planned as paradise. How wonderful, I
say, and they believe me, to stroll through heaven.
Bobbo and I live at No. 19 Nightbird Drive. It is a select street in the best part of Eden Grove. The house
is very new: we are its first occupants. It is clean of resonance. Bobbo and I have two bathrooms, and picture
windows, and we wait for the trees to grow: presently, you see, we will even have privacy.
Eden Grove is a friendly place. My neighbours and I give dinner parties for one another. We discuss
things, rather than ideas; we exchange information, not theories; we keep ourselves steady by thinking about the
particular. The general is frightening. Go too far into the past and there is non-existence, too far into the future
and there you find the same. The present must be exactly balanced. These days spare ribs are served, Chinese
style, daringly, with paper napkins and finger bowls. It smacks of change. The men nod and laugh: the women
tremble and smile and drop dishes.
It is a good life. Bobbo tells me so. He comes home less often, so does not say so as often as he did.

Does Mary Fisher love my husband? Does she return his love? Does she look into his eyes, and speak to
him without words?
I was taken to visit her once, and stumbled over the carpet a true Kashmiri rug valued at $2,540 as I
approached her. I am six foot two inches tall, which is fine for a man but not for a woman. I am as dark as Mary
Fisher is fair, and have one of those jutting jaws which tall, dark women often have, and eyes sunk rather far
back into my face, and a hooked nose. My shoulders are broad and bony and my hips broad and fleshy, and the
muscles in my legs are well developed. My arms, I swear, are too short for my body. My nature and my looks do
not agree. I was unlucky, you might think, in the great Lucky Dip that is womans life.
When I tripped over the rug Mary Fisher smirked, and I saw her eyes dart to Bobbos, as if this were a
scene they had already envisaged.
Tell me about your wife, she would have murmured, after love.
Clumsy, she would have said. He might have added, if I was lucky, No beauty, but a good soul. Yes, I
think he would have said that, if only to excuse himself and deny me. A man cannot be expected to be faithful to
a wonderful mother and a good wife such concepts lack the compulsion of the erotic.
Would he also have remarked, in guilty and excited mirth, She has four moles on her chin and from
three of them hairs grow? I imagine so; who could resist it, giggling and squealing and tickling in bed, after
love, assessing life?
I am quite sure at some time or other Bobbo would have said, in the manner of husbands, I love her. I
love her but Im not in love with her: not the way Im in love with you. Do you understand? And Mary Fisher
would have nodded, understanding very well.
I know what life is like: I know what people are like. I know that we all make common cause in selfdeception and wishful thinking, and who more so than adulterous lovers? I have time to think about it, when the
dishes are done, and the house is quiet, and life ticks by, and there is nothing to do except wonder whether
Bobbo and Mary Fisher are together now, now how strange time seems! And I think and think and I act each
role, sometimes him, sometimes her. It makes me feel part of the whole both make. I, who have been made
nothing. And then Bobbo rings and says he wont be home, and the children come back from school, and a
strange familiar silence descends upon the house, a thick, white muffling blanket thrown over our lives: and even
when the cat catches a mouse, the yowls and yelps seem to some from a distant place, another world.
Bobbo is a good-looking man, and I am lucky to have him. The neighbours often remark upon it. You
are so lucky, having someone like Bobbo. Not surprising, their eyes go on to say, that hes away every now and
then. Bobbo is five foot ten, four inches shorter than I am. He is six inches taller than Mary Fisher, who has Size
3 feet and last year spent $1,200.50 on shoes. In bed with me, all the same, Bobbo has no potency problems. He
shuts his eyes. For all I know he shuts his eyes when hes in bed with her, but I dont really think so. Its not how
I envisage it.
What I think is that the other women up and down Eden Grove are better than I am at telling themselves
lies. Their own husbands are away often enough. How otherwise but by lies do they live, do they keep their selfesteem? Sometimes, of course, not even lies can protect them. They are found hanging in the garage, or cold and
overdosed in the marital bed. Love has killed them, murderous in its own death, throes, flailing and biting and
poisonous.
And how, especially, do ugly women survive, those whom the world pities? The dogs, as they call us. Ill
tell you; they live as I do, outfacing truth, hardening the skin against perpetual humiliation, until its tough and
cold as a crocodiles. And we wait for old age to equalize all things. We make good old women.
My mother was pretty enough, and ashamed of me. I could see it in her eyes. I was her eldest child. The
image of your father, shed say. Shed married again, of course, by then. Shed left my father long ago, far
behind, despised. My two half-sisters both took after her; they were delicate, fine-boned things. I liked them.
They knew how to charm, and they charmed even me. Little ugly duckling, my mother said to me once, almost
weeping, smoothing my wiry hair. What are we to do with you? Whats to become of you? I think perhaps she
would have loved me, if she could. But ugly and discordant things revolted her: she couldnt help it. She said as
much often enough: not of me, particularly, of course, but I knew the patterns of her thought, I knew what she
meant. I was born, I sometimes think, with nerve endings not inside but outside my skin: they shivered and
twanged. I grew lumpish and brutish in the attempt to seal them over, not to know too much.
And I could never, you see, even for my mothers sake, learn just to smile and stay quiet. My mind
struck keys like a piano dreadfully out of tune, randomly played, never quiet. She christened me Ruth, wanting, I
think, even in my first days, to forget me if she could. A short, dismissive, sorrowful name. My little half-sisters
were called Jocelyn and Miranda. They married well, and disappeared, no doubt into contentment, bathed in the
glow of the worlds admiration.

3
Mary Fisher, dweller in the High Tower! Whats for dinner tonight? Perhaps you dont even know.
Perhaps you leave that to the servants. And whos for company? Perhaps you have yet more lovers to choose
from: to gaze out with you, through plate-glass windows, over harbour and sea; to watch the moon rise and the
sky turn colour? Perhaps you never eat, but with a mind half on food, and half on love to come? Lucky you! But
tonight, whoever else, you shant have Bobbo. Tonight Bobbo is eating with me.
I shall open the French windows from the dining room on to the garden; that is, if the wind doesnt get
up. We have some very pretty night-scented stock growing up the side of the garage. We have double glazing.
The bill for keeping Mary Fishers windows clean was $295.75, only last month. The sum was
transferred from the bank in Cyprus into Mary Fishers housekeeping account. Bobbo, on the occasions he is
home, often brings Mary Fishers accounts with him. I dont sleep much on the nights he is with me: I get out of
bed, quietly, and go into his study and look through Mary Fishers life. Bobbo sleeps soundly. He comes home to
rest, really. To catch up on lost sleep.
I clean our windows myself: sometimes to be tall is quite an advantage.
Tonight, at No. 19 Nightbird Drive, were going to have mushroom soup, chicken vol-au-vents and
chocolate mousse. Bobbos parents are coming to visit. He does not want to upset them, so he will play the quiet
suburban husband and sit, for once, at the head of the table. He will look out on to wallflowers and hollyhocks
and vines. I like gardening. I like to control nature, and make things beautiful.
Bobbo is doing very well in the world. He has become successful. Once he worked humbly as an official
in the Revenue Department but then he resigned, threw caution to the winds, risked his pension and began to do
private tax work. Now he earns a great deal of money. It suits him to keep me tucked away in Eden Grove.
Bobbo has a pleasant apartment in the centre of the city, fifteen kilometres further still to the east, fifteen
kilometres further from Mary Fisher, where he gives occasional parties for his clients, where he first met Mary
Fisher face to face, where he stays overnight when business presses. So he says. I very seldom go to Bobbos
apartment, or his office. I let it be known I am too busy. It would be embarrassing to Bobbo if his smart new
clients saw me. We both know it. Bobbos graceless wife! All very well, I daresay, for an income-tax collector;
hardly for a tax-expert working in the private field, getting rich.
Mary Fisher, I hope that tonight you are eating tinned red salmon and the tin has blown and you get
botulin poisoning. But such hope is in vain. Mary Fisher eats fresh salmon, and in any case her delicate palate
could be trusted to detect poison, no matter how undetectable it might be in other, cruder mouths. How
delicately, how swiftly she would spit de erring mouthful out and save herself!
Mary Fisher, I hope such a wind arises tonight that the plate-glass windows of the tower crack and the
storm surges in, and you die drowning and weeping in terror.
I make puff pastry for the chicken vol-au-vents, and when I have finished circling out the dough with the
brim of a wine glass, making wafer rounds, I take the thin curved strips the cutter left behind and mould them
into a shape much like the shape of Mary Fisher, and turn the oven high, high, and crisp the figure in it until such
a stench fills the kitchen that even the extractor cannot remove it. Good.
I hope the tower burns and Mary Fisher with it, sending the smell of burning flesh out over the waves. I
would go and fire the place myself, but I dont drive. I can only get to the tower if Bobbo drives me there and he
no longer does so. One hundred and eight kilometres. He says it is much too far. []
I know he does the same to her as he does to me, because he told me so. Bobbo believes in honesty.
Bobbo believes in love.
Be patient, he says. I dont intend to leave you. Its just that Im in love with her and at the moment
must act accordingly. Love, he says! Love! Bobbo talks a lot about love. Mary Fisher writes about nothing but
love. All you need is love. I assume I love Bobbo because I am married to him. Good women love their
husbands. But love, compared to hate, is a pallid emotion. Fidgety and troublesome, and making for misery.
My children come in from the midsummer garden. A pigeon pair. The boy, slight like my mother, and
like her given to complaints. The girl, big and lumpy, as I am, voicing a vindictiveness that masks the despair of
too much feeling. The dog and the cat follow after. The guinea pig rustles and snuffles in its corner. I have just
turned out its cage. The chocolate for the mousse bubbles and melts in the pan. This is the happiness, the
completeness of domestic, suburban life. It is what we should be happy with: our destiny. Out of the gutter of
wild desire on to the smooth lawns of married love.
Sez you, as I heard my mothers mother say, on her deathbed, when promised eternal life by the
attendant priest.
4
Bobbos mother Brenda stole around the outside of her sons house at No. 19 Night bird Drive. She had
a playful disposition which her son had not inherited. Brenda meant to surprise Ruth by pressing her nose against
a windowpane. []

Bobbos mother Brenda did not envy Ruths being married to Bobbo. Brenda did not love Bobbo and never had.
She quite liked Bobbo, and quite liked her husband; but even there, feelings were elusive. []
How nicely she does everything, said Bobbos mother to her husband, Angus. How lucky Bobbo is!
[] Shes such a good mother, whispered Brenda to Angus, beckoning him closer to admire. You have to
respect her. [] Shes such a good wife, said Bobbos mother, moved almost to tears. Look at that ironing!
Bobbos mother never ironed if she could help it. [] And what a good husband Bobbo has turned out to be! If
she thought her son was narcissistic, staring so long in the mirror, she kept her thoughts to herself.
But Bobbo looked in the mirror at his clear, elegant eyes, his intelligent brow and his slightly bruised
mouth, and hardly saw himself at all: he saw the man whom Mary Fisher loved. []
5
Now. In Mary Fishers novels, which sell by the hundred thousand in glittery pink and gold covers, little
staunch heroines raise tearful eyes to handsome men, and by giving them up, gain them. Little women can look
up to men. But women of six foot two have trouble doing so.
And I tell you this; I am jealous! I am jealous of every little, pretty woman who ever lived and looked up
since the world began. I am, in fact, quite eaten up by jealousy, and a fine, lively, hungry emotion it is. But why
should I care, you ask? Cant I just live in myself and forget that part of my life and be content? Dont I have a
home, and a husband to pay the bills, and children to look after? Isnt that enough? No! is the answer. I want, I
crave, I die to be a part of that other erotic world, of choice and desire and lust. It isnt love I want; it is nothing
so simple. What I want is to take everything and return nothing. What I want is power over the hearts and
pockets of men. It is all the power we can have, down here in Eden Grove, in paradise, and even that is denied
me.
I stand in my bedroom, our bedroom, Bobbos and my bedroom, and compose my face the sooner to
return to my matrimonial duties, to wifedom and motherhood, and my in-laws.
To this end I recite the Litany of the Good Wife. It goes like this:
I must pretend to be happy when I am not; for everyones sake.
I must make no adverse comment on the manner of my existence; for everyones sake.
I must be grateful for the roof over my head and the food on my table, and spend my days showing it, by
cleaning and cooking and jumping up and down from my chair; for everyones sake.
I must make my husbands parents like me, and my parents like him, for everyones sake.
I must consent to the principle that those who earn most outside the home deserve most inside the home;
for everyones sake.
I must build up my husbands sexual confidence, I must not express any sexual interest in other men, in
private or in public; I must ignore his way of diminishing me, by publicly praising women younger,
prettier and more successful than me, and sleeping with them in private, if he can; for everyones sake.
I must render him moral support in all his undertakings, however immoral they may be, for the
marriages sake. I must pretend in all matters to be less than him.
I must love him through wealth and poverty, through good times and bad, and not swerve in my loyalty
to him, for everyones sake.
But the Litany doesnt work. It doesnt soothe: it incenses. I swerve: my loyalty swerves! I look inside
myself: I find hate, yes, hate for Mary Fisher, hot, strong and sweet: but not a scrap of love, not the faintest,
wriggling tendril. I have fallen out of love with Bobbo! I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs,
unloving, not weeping.
6
[] Now do you see whats happening? Bobbo turned on Ruth. Youve even set my parents
quarrelling! If you see happiness you have to destroy it. Its the kind of woman you are. []
It would serve you right if I went to see Mary, said Bobbo to Ruth, through the keyhole. You have
worked terrible mischief here tonight! You have upset my parents, you have upset your children, and you have
upset me. Even the animals were affected. I see you at last as you really are. You are a third-rate person. You are
a bad mother, a worse wife and a dreadful cook. In fact I dont think you are a woman at all. I think that what
you are is a she-devil!
It seemed to him, when he said this, that there was a change in the texture of the silence that came from
the other side of the door; he thought perhaps he had shocked her into submission and apology: but though he
knocked and banged she still did not come out.
7
So. I see. I thought I was a good wife tried temporarily and understandably beyond endurance, but no. he
says I am a she-devil.

I expect he is right. In fact, since he does so well in the world and I do so badly, I really must assume he
is right. I am a she-devil.
But this is wonderful! This is exhilarating! If you are a she-devil the mind clears at once. The spirits rise.
There is no shame, no guilt, no dreary striving to be good. There is only, in the end, what you want. And I can
take what I want. I am a she-devil!
But what do I want? That of course could be a difficulty. Waverings and hesitations on this particular
point can last a whole life long and for most people usually do. But not, surely, in the case of she-devils. Doubt
afflicts the good, not the bad.
I want revenge.
I want power.
I want money.
I want to be loved and not love in return.
I want to give hate its head. I want hate to drive out love, and I want to follow hate where it leads: and
then, when I have done what I want with it, and not a minute before, I will master it.
I look at my face in the bathroom mirror. I want to see something different.
I take off my clothes. I stand naked. I look. I want to be changed.
Nothing is impossible, not for she-devils.
Peel away the wife, the mother, find the woman, and there the she-devil is.
Excellent!
Glitter-glitter. Are those my eyes? Theyre so bright they light up the room.
18
Mary Fisher lives in the High Tower and considers the nature of love. She does not think its so easy
now. The stars wheel and the tides surge and the salt spray beats upon the thick plate-glass, but Mary Fishers
eyes are turned inward; she no longer delights in these things. She could live in Nightbird Drive, or anywhere,
for all she notices the glory of nature.
Mary Fisher lives in the High Tower with two children and an angry mother and a distant lover and a
sulky manservant. She feels they devour her living flesh. []
Mary Fisher looks at love and sees that it is complicated. For one thing, she is held in sexual thrall by
Bobbo, as indeed quite often the heroines best friend is held by the hero at the beginning of one of Mary
Fishers books, before a purer, more spiritual love strikes the hero and heroine, and best friend gets ditched or
run over, like Anna Karenina, or obliged to munch arsenic, like Madame Bovary. Such is the fate of book
friends. But Mary Fisher is not the best friend; she is the heroine of her own life, or wants to be. The more she
has of Bobbos body, the more she wants it. She desires his good opinion: she will do anything to have it, even
look after his children, her mother, grow old before her time. []
24
Mary Fisher lives in the High Tower and considers the nature of loss, and longing. She still tells lies to
herself; it is her nature. She believes that the rain falls because she is sad, that storms rage because she is
consumed by unsatisfied lust and the crops fail because she is lonely. It has been the worst summer for fifty
years and she is not at all surprised.
It is my opinion that Mary Fisher does not suffer as other people suffer. What she feels now is petulance.
She is bothered by having too much of what she doesnt want her mother and the two children and too little
of what she does want Bobbo, sex, adoration and entertainment.
Mary Fisher lives in the high Tower and finds that food has no taste and the sun has no warmth, and is
surprised.
Mary Fisher should know better. She was brought up in the gutter by a part-time whore of a mother, but
she has wiped all that from her mind. Still she pretends the world is not as it is, and passes the error on. She will
not learn: she will not remember. She has started another novel, The Gates of Desire.
Bobbo builds a new life in the prison library and suffers from depression, and loss of liberty, and the
absence of Mary Fisher, or that part of her he remembers most clearly, the bit where the legs split off from the
body. Sometimes, I imagine, he tries to think of her face. But Mary Fishers features are so regular and so perfect
that they are hard to remember. She is all woman because she is no woman.
Well, time passes: little by little all things proceed to the end I have appointed for them. I do not put my
trust in fate, not my faith in God. I will be what I want, not what He ordained. I will mould a new image for
myself out of the earth of my creation. I will defy my Maker, and remake myself.
I cast off the chains that bound me down, of habit, custom and sexual aspirations; home, family, friends
all the objects of natural affection. Not until then could I be free, and could I begin.

The extraction of so many of my teeth was the first step to the New Me. The dentist did not in fact
remove them all: he filed every alternate tooth down to a point just below the gum line. The pain of the filing
was intense: worse than any the judge inflicted. And the general day-to-day grinding and pounding of what was
left was not pleasant but then nor was living with the judge.
Il faut souffrir, as I pointed out to him, in order to get what you want. The more you want the more you
suffer. If you want everything you must suffer everything. The people in a really lamentable state, of course, are
the ones who suffer at random, and gain nothing. Lady Bissop is a case in point.
I wanted Bobbo to receive a long sentence because my sentence was long. I wanted him put on ice, as it
were, until I was ready for him.
Sometimes I wonder how it is that I can be so indifferent to the mental discomfort I wont say
suffering, because Bobbo is warm and fed, and has no responsibilities of a man who fathered my children, and
who has spent so much time inside my body. The very fact that I wonder disturbs me. I am not all she-devil. A
she-devil has no memory of the past she is born afresh every morning. She deals with the feelings of today, not
yesterday, and she is free. There is a little bit of me left, still woman.
A she-devil is supremely happy: she is inoculated against the pain of memory. At the moment of her
transfiguration, from woman to non-woman, she performs the act herself. She thrusts the long, sharp needle of
recollection through the living flesh into the heart, burning it out. The pain is wild and fierce for a time, but
presently theres none.
I sing a hymn to the death of love and the end of pain.
Look how Mary Fisher squirms and wriggles on the pin of remembered bliss. How she hurts! Moreover,
she hears all too clearly what the villagers say. She has no one now to stop her ears with endearments and
enticements and the lovely flatteries of the flesh. She hears more, in fact, than there is to hear.
Down in the village, or so Mary Fisher believes, they say that the owner of the High Tower is willfully
childless that is to say selfish, that is to say hardly a woman at all. They say she is brutal to her poor mother,
and keeps her locked in a room. They say she is cruel to her lovers children; a really vicious step-mother. They
say she is a marriage-breaker. Some say she drove her lovers wife to suicide, for didnt the poor woman
disappear? They say that in her greed and wickedness Mary Fisher drove her lover to crime, and then, either hot
with lust for her manservant, or angered because her lover, sickened by her nature, wouldnt marry her, betrayed
him: failed to save him from prison.
They say it is people like Mary Fisher who move into a community and put property prices up so that
local people can no longer afford to live in their own village.
Guilt, in fact, speaks into Mary Fishers ears: she mistakes the voice for that of the villagers but she is
wrong. What she hears is herself talking to herself.
And sometimes Andy and Nicola say things which indicate that they, too, think badly of her.
If you cant say anything pleasant, she says, dont say anything at all. But Andy and Nicola take no
notice. They always do the opposite of what Mary Fisher wants. They dont like her. She does not like them. But
they have lost their mother and their father and there is nowhere else for them to go, and they are Bobbos flesh
and blood, and Mary Fisher loves Bobbo, or thinks she does, with so much spirit and in such concentrated
essence it doesnt matter much whether hes there in the flesh or not.
Well, sometimes Mary Fisher thinks that. Only at night, going to sleep, or in the morning, waking, when
the itch of unsatisfied flesh not quite a pain, not quite unendurable, simply uncurable makes itself known,
does she think, yes, the only thing that matters is Bobbos presence with her, here and now. Perhaps what she
feels is lust, not love?
Garcia is triumphant. He is in love, or lust, and not with Mary Fisher. He has made the object of his love,
or lust, one of the village girls, pregnant, and has brought her home to the High Tower to live. Someone,
probably Garcias love, has been stealing Mary Fishers jewellery. All her lovely pieces, mementoes of delicate
passion, relics of fine acts of sexual discrimination, pre-Bobbo, have vanished. The girl, Joan, walks insolently
about the High Tower, with her belly swelling, snickering in corners with Nicola, making Mary Fisher feel
inferior, hardly a woman at all, because she never had a baby, and now, she realizes, never will.
Once Mary Fisher thought she was blessed in her childlessness, spared the degradation, the ordinariness,
the pointlessness of motherhood: no more. She needs something, anything.
Her flesh and her soul call out to Bobbo. She can write to him once a month, and he to her, likewise. She
writes about love, with the practiced skill at her command, and he writes back strange halting letters about the
weather or the prison food, and expressing anxiety about the dog Harness, and the cat Mercy, and the childrens
welfare. []

Mary Fisher cant have the dog put down. Once she could, now she cant. She knows too much: she
knows what Harness would feel. I could murder a dozen dogs with impunity, if it was in my interests. I started
with the guinea pig, and now look! I am a she-devil. I wouldnt be surprised if I wasnt the second coming, this
time in female form; what the world has been waiting for. Perhaps as Jesus did in his day for men, so I do now,
for women. He offered the stony path to heaven: I offer the motorway to hell. I bring suffering and selfknowledge (the two go together) for others and salvation for myself. Each woman for herself, I cry. If Im nailed
to the cross of my own convenience Ill put up with it. I just want my own way, and by Satan Ill have it.
She-devils have many names, and an infinite capacity for interfering in other peoples lives.
33 [] Ruth went to Mary Fishers funeral wearing silky black, and diamonds. She went in a Rolls-Royce, and
did not get out, but watched the funeral from a distance, sitting in the care. [] She measured, in height, five
foot six and a half inches high: round the bust, thirty-eight inches, the waist twenty-four inches, and the hips
thirty-seven. []
Bobbo was there, between two warders. []
You are my wide, he said. Im sorry. I seem to have trouble remembering things. But there was
someone called Mary Fisher. Arent you her?
This is Mary Fishers funeral, said one of the warders, as if to a child. So how can that be Mary
Fisher? []
It seemed to Ruth that at last the time had come to return to the High Tower. She could walk with ease,
even run a little. She could lift a two-pound weight in either hand. Her circulatory problems were under control.
She no longer needed the Hermione Clinic. She no longer needed anyone. She danced with Mr. Genghis in the
dew of the morning, as the sun rose red and round over the escarpment, and with every step it was as if she trod
on knives; but she thanked him for giving her life and told him she was going.
34
Now I live in the High Tower, and the sea surges beneath as the moon circles and the earth turns, but not
quite as it did. Garcia has to clean a different set of windows; the spray falls differently: he marvels at it. Even
nature bows to my convenience. I pay him the same as did his previous employer. What was once too much is
now too little: inflation has eaten away at its value, but he doesnt realise it and I havent told him. Why should
I? If you want to keep servants you must treat them badly. The same, I find, applies to lovers.
Garcia comes often to my bedroom at night, knocking and whispering with love. Just occasionally I let
him in. I make sure Bobbo knows, and suffers; that is the only pleasure I take in Garcias body. To join with him
is a political, not a sexual act, for me if not for him. How emotional men are!
Bobbo loves me, poor confused creature that he has become, pouring my tea, mixing my drinks, fetching
my bag. He has us both in the one flesh: the one he discarded, the one he never needed after all. Two Mary
Fishers. His eyes grow dull, as if he were already an old man. That is what humiliation does. He could have
something done about his thickening eyelids, of course; he could have plastic surgery and be young again, but he
would have to ask me for the money. I wait for him to suggest it, but he doesnt. How weak people are! How
they simply accept what happens, as if there were such a thing as destiny, and not just a life to be grappled with.
Sometimes I let Bobbo sleep with me. Or I take my lovers in front of him. What agreeable turmoil that
causes in the household! Even the dogs sulk. I cause Bobbo as much misery as he ever caused me, and more. I
try not to, but somehow it is not a matter of male or female, after all; it never was, merely of power. I have all,
and he has none. As I was, so he is now.
Good. Life is very pleasant. I sit up in bed in the morning and look out over the landscape. Some people
say Ive ruined it with artificial copses and granite-fountained fish ponds and the rest, but I like it. Nature gets
away with far too much. It needs controlling. I have many friends. I am very hospitable, and charming, and
theres always a nervy excitement at my parties. The foods superb. There is smoked salmon and champagne for
those who care for that kind of thing I have rather more Eastern and exotic tastes myself.
I tried my hand at writing a novel, and sent it to Mary Fishers publishers. They wanted to buy it and
publish it, but I wouldnt let them. Enough to know I can do it, if I want. It was not so difficult after all; nor she
so special.
I am a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious.

FAY WELDON DOWN AMONG THE WOMEN

BRIT. LIT. III

Down among the women. What a place to be! Yet here we all are by accident of birth, sprouted breasts and
bellies, as cyclical of nature as our timekeeper the moon and down here among the women we have no option
but to stay. So says Scarlets mother Wanda, aged sixty-four, gritting her teeth. []
Kim does not answer the telephone. He is out. Susan Watson answers it, in her refined little voice, with its
careful vowels. Her mother voice-trained her on the voyage back from New Zealand where they had spent the
war so as not to disconcert Mr. Watson, Susans father and now Kims boss, with the closed nostril taint of
New Zealand speech.
Scarlet is taken aback. She had assumed Susan to be a stage prop, not a real person. She has never
answered the telephone to Scarlet before. Scarlet has accepted Susan in Kims bed a marionette to be wound up
at bedtime and perform but not as someone with power, opinions, or even feelings.
Susan too is taken aback. But she is welcoming, even eager. Kim is out. But why doesnt Scarlet come
round? Scarlet says shell be there in two minutes.
Susan has a pretty round dolls face, set in a sweet expression, and an obliging disposition.
Susan thinks its marvelous to be married to Kim: she loves playing houses; she even loves Kim.
Susan despises Kims former wives for having failed to make him happy.
Susan is envious that Kim has a past and she has not. Sometimes she worries lest she too, should become
part of Kims past.
Susan likes being much younger than Kim. It is the same kind of showing off as she has always done,
from puffed sleeves as a little girl when no one else had them, to passing round the telegram at school which said
her brother had been killed in action.
Susan wants now to show off in front of Scarlet. She has so much; and poor Scarlet daughter of Witch
Wanda has so little. She got to University, true, but when was a clever woman ever happy? So Susans mother
said when Susan failed her school certificate. Clever women dont make good wives, and in good wifedom lies
happiness. So spoke Susans mother, lying on a beach in New Zealand, while her husband did fire-duty thirteen
and a half thousand miles away.
Susan runs round the flat like a busy little girl, tidying, plumping cushions, putting on bright orange
lipstick. Susan puts on the grill for toast its Sunday and tea-time, after all and prepares to patronize Scarlet.
Susan is eight and three-quarter months pregnant. She has been married nine months. Kim had to marry
her, not because they had f (Susan has barely heard the word, ever) and she was pregnant but because she
wouldnt before they were married.
Susans mother said not to. Now Susans mother knits little woollies and nudges her husband to make
Kim a full partner in the firm; he has already done so but she never listens. Or if she does, she soon forgets.
Down among the women, if you are very careful, and shut your eyes and ears, and keep your knees
together nearly always, you can live quite happily. Susans mother does. It was Susans brother, not Susans
mothers son, who was killed in action. That at any rate is how Susans mother always refers to him. Poor
Susans brother. Not even Susans poor brother.
Susan shows no outward signs of deserving pity. Even now, as she opens the door to Scarlet, her face
barely changes she smiles sweetly on.
Scarlet faints.
Byzantia, noticing a change in her environment, prepares to abandon it. (Nothing will make Simeon
Kims son, Byzantias uncle, poor Susans dead brothers nephew leave Susan except the due processes of
time, pressure and the conjugation of the stars. A ritualist now, and always will be, whatever the inconvenience
to others.)
Oh dear, says Susan. It is her strongest expression. No wonder Kim, having lived through Wanda, is so
devoted to her. He has not yet had time to grow bored. Presently he will get into the habit of saying hes going to
die of boredom, and presently indeed he will. But thats a long way off.
Susan spent several years in New Zealand, where girls are expected to be practical, so she drags Scarlet
inside, and heaves her on to the couch. She has never seen anyone so untidy. Even Scarlets stomach, Susan
notices, is lopsided. Perhaps Scarlet is going to have a lopsided baby? Scarlet wears a wedding ring. It leaves a
green stain. Woolworths, thinks Susan, who is knowledgeable, as well as practical, as well as nice, and often
shops at Woolworths where you get good value for money. She has a streak of parsimony.

Susan feels a surge of pity for this poor messy Scarlet, her step-daughter, who has clearly ruined her life. The
pity is maternal in its essence. And vengeful against dreadful Wanda, who not only once made Kim unhappy, but
without doubt has failed as a mother.
Susan explained to the reviving Scarlet that Kim is out; he will be back within the hour. In the meantime
Scarlet, who looks dreadfully pale (she probably hasnt even been taking her iron tablets), must stay where she is
and rest.
Im sorry, says Scarlet vaguely, to inconvenience you. The carpets here, she observes, are thick and
soft. At home there is only green and yellow lino. Scarlet looks Susan up and down, and hates her for the
following reasons, or if not reasons, feelings:
Scarlet has somehow believed she is the only pregnant woman in the world.
Scarlet, frankly, does not like girls who look like Susan.
Scarlet does not like girls who are married to her father.
Scarlet does not like her fathers wives to be prettier and younger than her mother.
Scarlet does not like women who polish their shoes she herself scorns to do so.
Scarlet does not like women with small feet and long painted nails.
Scarlet does not like women who live upon her fathers money.
Scarlet does not like the thought of other women having more right to this flat than she does.
Scarlet does not like having a step-mother younger than herself.
Scarlet has a pain like a ribbon tightening round her middle which makes her feel sour.
Scarlet does not like the thought of this girl in bed with her father.
Scarlet does not see why the fuck (not for nothing is she her mothers daughter) this girls child should be
legitimate while she, Scarlet, who is morally superior, should give birth to a bastard. []
Scarlet shuts her eyes and tries to contain her rage. Susan just sits with her hands folded and continues to
smile.
Scarlet peeks.
Shes working out a knitting pattern, thinks Scarlet.
But Susan is off where she always goes when she has a minute to spare, and times are tense. She is
walking through the silent kauri forests of New Zealand. Clematis creepers trail down from the high branches.
What light there is catches on its white starry flowers. The trunks are dark, smooth and immense. There is thick
moss underfoot. It is primeval forest no birds, no animals, no sound. Just Susan, back at the beginning of time.
Scarlet calls her back.
I dont think there is much time, says Scarlet enigmatically, more to frighten Susan than because she
believes for one moment she is about to give birth. Susan enquires when the baby is due. No baby, surely, can be
more nearly due than hers, in six and a half days.
Last week, replies Scarlet, as is her pleasure. Susan, for the first time, is put out. Scarlets babys aunt
should surely arrive first. (She is as convinced she is having a girl as Scarlet is that she is having a boy.)
You mean you might have it any minute? her voice squeaks a little. She remembers her mothers
training and lowers it a little. They had a dreadful journey back from New Zealand in an unconverted
troopship. Susans mother caught dysentery and conjunctivitis but managed to ignore even these inconveniences.
Still she paced the deck with the other mothers, released en masse from the dreadful provincial prison of wartime New Zealand, drilling offspring in The Rain in Spain, and other niceties of pre-war England. Susans
mother was not so much brave as obstinate. []
Susan makes a pot of tea, conscious of Scarlets need, but praying that Kim will return and make
everything all right again. Simeon kicks and she cries out, startled, and nearly drops the kettle. She has a vision
of those white pure feet of hers raw, blistered and disfigured for ever. She trembles.
Susan hovers for a moment on the borders of that other terrible world, where chaos is the norm, life a
casual exception to death, and all cells cancerous except those which the will contrives to keep orderly; where
the body is something mysterious in its workings, which swells, bleeds, and bursts at random; where sex is a
strange intermittent animal spasm; where men seduce, make pregnant, betray, desert; where laws are harsh and
mysterious, and where the woman goes helpless.
Susan, in fact, nearly leaves the girls and comes down here among the women.
She thinks of her mother and survives, hauling herself out of the mire, using a lace doily as a foothold.
She lays it on a tray and makes Scarlet lemon tea. There is a fine sweat on Scarlets brow. Still she sits upright,
tightly smiling.

What are people saying about Scarlet these days? All kinds of things. Byzantia bestows on this former
invisible girl the mantle of existence, and thus makes her the easier to snipe at. []
Down here among the women, or up, up, up, in the tower blocks; those rearing phalluses of mans delight.
Down here among the women you dont get to hear about man maltreated; what you hear about is man
seducer, man betrayer, man deserter, man the monster.
What did we hear last week, during our afternoons in the park?
Man leaves his wife, young mother of four. She is waiting to go into hospital for her cancer operation.
He returns from a holiday abroad, stays a couple of hours, and leaves for good, saying, by way of explanation, he
is tired of being married. He probably is, too.
Man runs off with secretary the day his son brings home his first girlfriend.
Man leaves home while his wifes in hospital having the baby. She comes homes to an empty house and
unpaid bills. Yet he visited her in hospital, brought her flowers and grapes no one can understand it.
Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old.
Yesterday L walked with me. A rich girl, clever, cultivated, desiring to marry M, an equally rich and
cultivated person if married already much in the public eye. A suitable match for suitable people. How to
dispose of the unsuitable wife, but kindly, without hurting her? Without mentioning Ls name? For two whole
years, I learn, he professes his love for his wife, whilst making himself as unpleasant to her as he can; finally, in
her distress, it is the wife who asks for a divorce. The consummation to be wished. He acts his hurt surprise, his
indignation, silent joy mounting in his veins. Rushing to the telephone. Shes asked, shes asked! At last! Such
kindness. Can you imagine such kindness? Yes, truly, they imagine they are kind.
Dear God, preserve us from such love.
Down here among the wage-earners, of course, we dont have that class of patience. Out love is less
lofty. Money and law interfere. Let me quote a poem I know. It is called The Poet to his Wife.
Money-and-law / Stands at the nursery door. / You married me what for? / My love was not to get you clothes
or bread, / But make more poems in my head. Ive fathered children. / God! / Am I to die / To turn them out as
fits a mothers eye? I wanted mothering and they, this brood / Step in and take my daily food. Money-andlaw / Stands at the nursery door. / Money-and-law, money-and-law / Has the world in its maw.
Well. []
Byzantia, kind Byzantia, throws a party for her mothers friends, for whom she has a weakness. She
does not offer them marijuana, explaining to Scarlet that she considers them too unstable.
They would have bad trips, she says. All lows, no highs.
Perhaps so will you, at our age, says her mother.
I dont think so, says Byzantia.
We havent done too badly, pleads Scarlet. Theres me with Alec, Jocelyn here with her Ben, Sylvia
with her Peter, and I daresay Audrey will bring her Editor, if she thinks hell have a bad enough time. And even
your step-mother Susan will be able to bring your uncle Simeon.
You amaze me, says Byzantia. Fancy seeing success in terms of men. How trivial, with the world in
the state its in.
Merely as a symbol of success, pleads Scarlet, I dont mean to offer it as the cause.
A symptom more like, says Byzantia, of a fearful disease from which you all suffered. One of you
even died on the way. I think the mortality rate is too high.
When asked to define the disease, Byzantia cannot. Definitions, she says, are in any case no part of her
business. It is enough to tear the old order down.
Byzantia, like her grandmother Wanda, is a destroyer, not a builder. But where Wanda struggled against
the tide and gave up, exhausted, Byzantia has it behind her, full and strong.

ANGELA CARTER THE BLOODY CHAMBER AND OTHER STORIES

The Bloody Chamber

The Courtship of Mr Lyon
The Tigers Bride
Puss-in-Boots
The Erl-King
The Snow Child
The Lady of the House of Love
The Werewolf
The Company of Wolves
Wolf-Alice
Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber

I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning
cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the
great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood,
away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.
And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my mother would be moving slowly
about the narrow bedroom I had left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my little relics, the tumbled
garments I would not need any more, the scores for which there had been no room in my trunks, the concert
programmes I'd abandoned; she would linger over this torn ribbon and that faded photograph with all the halfjoyous, half-sorrowful emotions of a woman on her daughter's wedding day. And, in the midst of my bridal
triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her
child in becoming his wife.
Are you sure, she'd said when they delivered the gigantic box that held the wedding dress he'd bought
me, wrapped up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallized fruit. Are you sure you love
him? There was a dress for her, too; black silk, with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water, finer than anything
she'd worn since that adventurous girlhood in Indo-China, daughter of a rich tea planter. My eagle-featured,
indomitable mother; what other student at the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful
of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand
and all before she was as old as I?
'Are you sure you love him?'
'I'm sure I want to marry him,' I said.
And would say no more. She sighed, as if it was with reluctance that she might at last banish the spectre
of poverty from its habitual place at our meagre table. For my mother herself had gladly, scandalously, defiantly
beggared herself for love; and, one fine day, her gallant soldier never returned from the wars, leaving his wife
and child a legacy of tears that never quite dried, a cigar box full of medals and the antique service revolver that
my mother, grown magnificently eccentric in hardship, kept always in her reticule, in case--how I teased her--she
was surprised by footpads on her way home from the grocer's shop.
Now and then a starburst of lights spattered the drawn blinds as if the railway company had lit up all the
stations through which we passed in celebration of the bride. My satin nightdress had just been shaken from its
wrappings; it had slipped over my young girl's pointed breasts and shoulders, supple as a garment of heavy
water, and now teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudging between my thighs as I shifted restlessly
in my narrow berth. His kiss, his kiss with tongue and teeth in it and a rasp of beard, had hinted to me, though
with the same exquisite tact as this nightdress he'd given me, of the wedding night, which would be voluptuously
deferred until we lay in his great ancestral bed in the sea-girt, pinnacled domain that lay, still, beyond the grasp
of my imagination ... that magic place, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam, that legendary habitation
in which he had been born. To which, one day, I might bear an heir. Our destination, my destiny.
Above the syncopated roar of the train, I could hear his even, steady breathing. Only the communicating
door kept me from my husband and it stood open. If I rose up on my elbow, I could see the dark, leonine shape
of his head and my nostrils caught a whiff of the opulent male scent of leather and spices that always
accompanied him and sometimes, during his courtship, had been the only hint he gave me that he had come into
my mother's sitting room, for, though he was a big man, he moved as softly as if all his shoes had soles of velvet,
as if his footfall turned the carpet into snow.

He had loved to surprise me in my abstracted solitude at the piano. He would tell them not to announce
him, then soundlessly open the door and softly creep up behind me with his bouquet of hot-house flowers or his
box of marrons glacs, lay his offering upon the keys and clasp his hands over my eyes as I was lost in a
Debussy prelude. But that perfume of spiced leather always betrayed him; after my first shock, I was forced
always to mimic surprise, so that he would not be disappointed.
He was older than I. He was much older than I; there were streaks of pure silver in his dark mane. But
his strange, heavy, almost waxen face was not lined by experience. Rather, experience seemed to have washed it
perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach whose fissures have been eroded by successive tides. And sometimes
that face, in stillness when he listened to me playing, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always
disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly
reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay
underneath this mask. Or else, elsewhere. As though he had laid by the face in which he had lived for so long in
order to offer my youth a face unsigned by the years.
And, elsewhere, I might see him plain. Elsewhere. But, where?
In, perhaps, that castle to which the train now took us, that marvellous castle in which he had been born.
Even when he asked me to marry him, and I said: 'Yes,' still he did not lose that heavy, fleshy composure
of his. I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily.
Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed,
funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum.
When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a long, extinguished sigh. I
thought: Oh! how he must want me! And it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I
might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence but because of its very gravity.
He had the ring ready in a leather box lined with crimson velvet, a fire opal the size of a pigeon's egg set
in a complicated circle of dark antique gold. My old nurse, who still lived with my mother and me, squinted at
the ring askance: opals are bad luck, she said. But this opal had been his own mother's ring, and his
grandmother's, and her mother's before that, given to an ancestor by Catherine de Medici ... every bride that
came to the castle wore it, time out of mind. And did he give it to his other wives and have it back from them?
asked the old woman rudely; yet she was a snob. She hid her incredulous joy at my marital coup -- her little
Marquise -- behind a faade of fault-finding. But, here, she touched me. I shrugged and turned my back pettishly
on her. I did not want to remember how he had loved other women before me, but the knowledge often teased
me in the threadbare self-confidence of the small hours.
I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world; my Marquis had been married before, more than once,
and I remained a little bemused that, after those others, he should now have chosen me. Indeed, was he not still
in mourning for his last wife? Tsk, tsk, went my old nurse.
And even my mother had been reluctant to see her girl whisked off by a man so recently bereaved. A
Romanian countess, a lady of high fashion. Dead just three short months before I met him, a boating accident, at
his home, in Brittany. They never found her body but I rummaged through the back copies of the society
magazines my old nanny kept in a trunk under her bed and tracked down her photograph. The sharp muzzle of a
pretty, witty, naughty monkey; such potent and bizarre charm, of a dark, bright, wild yet worldly thing whose
natural habitat must have been some luxurious interior decorator's jungle filled with potted palms and tame,
squawking parakeets.
Before that? Her face is common property; everyone painted her but the Redon engraving I liked best,
The Evening Star Walking on the Rim of Night. To see her skeletal, enigmatic grace, you would never think she
had been a barmaid in a caf in Montmartre until Puvis de Chavannes saw her and had her expose her flat breasts
and elongated thighs to his brush. And yet it was the absinthe doomed her, or so they said.
The first of all his ladies? That sumptuous diva; I had heard her sing Isolde, precociously musical child
that I was, taken to the opera for a birthday treat. My first opera; I had heard her sing Isolde. With what whitehot passion had she burned from the stage! So that you could tell she would die young. We sat high up, halfway
to heaven in the gods, yet she half-blinded me. And my father, still alive (oh, so long ago), took hold of my
sticky little hand, to comfort me, in the last act, yet all I heard was the glory of her voice.
Married three times within my own brief lifetime to three different graces, now, as if to demonstrate the
eclecticism of his taste, he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women, I, the poor widow's child with
my mouse-coloured hair that still bore the kinks of the plaits from which it had so recently been freed, my bony
hips, my nervous, pianist's fingers.
He was rich as Croesus. The night before our wedding -- a simple affair, at the Mairie, because his
countess was so recently gone -- he took my mother and me, curious coincidence, to see Tristan. And, do you
know, my heart swelled and ached so during the Liebestod that I thought I must truly love him. Yes. I did. On his

arm, all eyes were upon me. The whispering crowd in the foyer parted like the Red Sea to let us through. My
skin crisped at his touch.
How my circumstances had changed since the first time I heard those voluptuous chords that carry such
a charge of deathly passion in them! Now, we sat in a loge, in red velvet armchairs, and a braided, bewigged
flunkey brought us a silver bucket of iced champagne in the interval. The froth spilled over the rim of my glass
and drenched my hands, I thought: My cup runneth over. And I had on a Poiret dress. He had prevailed upon my
reluctant mother to let him buy my trousseau; what would I have gone to him in, otherwise? Twice-darned
underwear, faded gingham, serge skirts, hand-me-downs. So, for the opera, I wore a sinuous shift of white
muslin tied with a silk string under the breasts. And everyone stared at me. And at his wedding gift.
His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily
precious slit throat.
After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who'd escaped the guillotine had an ironic
fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red
ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in
rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiance! That night at the opera comes back to me even now... the white
dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood.
I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting
horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I'd never seen, or else had never
acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the
monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away
from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the
way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for
the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my
breath away.
The next day, we were married. []
As soon as my husband handed me down from the high step of the train, I smelled the amniotic salinity
of the ocean. It was November; the trees, stunted by the Atlantic gales, were bare and the lonely halt was
deserted but for his leather-gaitered chauffeur waiting meekly beside the sleek black motor car. It was cold; I
drew my furs about me, a wrap of white and black, broad stripes of ermine and sable, with a collar from which
my head rose like the calyx of a wildflower. (I swear to you, I had never been vain until I met him.) The bell
clanged; the straining train leapt its leash and left us at that lonely wayside halt where only he and I had
descended. Oh, the wonder of it; how all that might of iron and steam had paused only to suit his convenience.
The richest man in France. []
Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea--a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being
continuously on the point of melting. A landscape with all the deliquescent harmonies of Debussy, of the tudes I
played for him, the reverie I'd been playing that afternoon in the salon of the princess where I'd first met him,
among the teacups and the little cakes, I, the orphan, hired out of charity to give them their digestive of music.
And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked
gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements
opening on to the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a
day ... that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the
materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits,
endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!
The tide was low; at this hour, so early in the morning, the causeway rose up out of the sea. As the car
turned on to the wet cobbles between the slow margins of water, he reached out for my hand that had his sultry,
witchy ring on it, pressed my fingers, kissed my palm with extraordinary tenderness. His face was as still as ever
I'd seen it, still as a pond iced thickly over, yet his lips, that always looked so strangely red and naked between
the black fringes of his beard, now curved a little. He smiled; he welcomed his bride home.
No room, no corridor that did not rustle with the sound of the sea and all the ceilings, the walls on which
his ancestors in the stern regalia of rank lined up with their dark eyes and white faces, were stippled with
refracted light from the waves which were always in motion; that luminous, murmurous castle of which I was
the chatelaine, I, the little music student whose mother had sold all her jewellery, even her wedding ring, to pay
the fees at the Conservatoire. []
But, here, it would be easy to be content. In the turret suite he had given me for my very own, I could
gaze out over the tumultuous Atlantic and imagine myself the Queen of the Sea. There was a Bechstein for me in
the music room and, on the wall, another wedding present -- an early Flemish primitive of Saint Cecilia at her
celestial organ. In the prim charm of this saint, with her plump, sallow cheeks and crinkled brown hair, I saw
myself as I could have wished to be. I warmed to a loving sensitivity I had not hitherto suspected in him. Then

he led me up a delicate spiral staircase to my bedroom; before she discreetly vanished, the housekeeper set him
chuckling with some, I dare say, lewd blessing for newlyweds in her native Breton. That I did not understand.
That he, smiling, refused to interpret.
And there lay the grand, hereditary matrimonial bed, itself the size, almost, of my little room at home,
with the gargoyles carved on its surfaces of ebony, vermilion lacquer, gold leaf; and its white gauze curtains,
billowing in the sea breeze. Our bed. And surrounded by so many mirrors! Mirrors on all the walls, in stately
frames of contorted gold, that reflected more white lilies than I'd ever seen in my life before. He'd filled the room
with them, to greet the bride, the young bride. The young bride, who had become that multitude of girls I saw in
the mirrors, identical in their chic navy blue tailor-mades, for travelling, madame, or walking. A maid had dealt
with the furs. Henceforth, a maid would deal with everything.
'See,' he said, gesturing towards those elegant girls. 'I have acquired a whole harem for myself!'
I found that I was trembling. My breath came thickly. I could not meet his eye and turned my head away,
out of pride, out of shyness, and watched a dozen husbands approach me in a dozen mirrors and slowly,
methodically, teasingly, unfasten the buttons of my jacket and slip it from my shoulders. Enough! No; more! Off
comes the skirt; and, next, the blouse of apricot linen that cost more than the dress I had for first communion.
The play of the waves outside in the cold sun glittered on his monocle; his movements seemed to me deliberately
coarse, vulgar. The blood rushed to my face again, and stayed there.
And yet, you see, I guessed it might be so -- that we should have a formal disrobing of the bride, a ritual
from the brothel. Sheltered as my life had been, how could I have failed, even in the world of prim bohemia in
which I lived, to have heard hints of his world? []
And I began to shudder, like a racehorse before a race, yet also with a kind of fear, for I felt both a
strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his
white, heavy flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom in great
glass jars, those undertakers' lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your fingers as if you had dipped them in
turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.
This scene from a voluptuary's life was now abruptly terminated. It turns out he has business to attend
to; his estates, his companies--even on your honeymoon? Even then, said the red lips that kissed me before he
left me alone with my bewildered senses--a wet, silken brush from his beard; a hint of the pointed tip of the
tongue. Disgruntled, I wrapped a neglige of antique lace around me to sip the little breakfast of hot chocolate the
maid brought me; after that, since it was second nature to me, there was nowhere to go but the music room and
soon I settled down at my piano.
Yet only a series of subtle discords flowed from beneath my fingers: out of tune ... only a little out of
tune; but I'd been blessed with perfect pitch and could not bear to play any more. Sea breezes are bad for pianos;
we shall need a resident piano-tuner on the premises if I'm to continue with my studies! I flung down the lid in a
little fury of disappointment; what should I do now, how shall I pass the long, sea-lit hours until my husband
beds me?
I shivered to think of that. His library seemed the source of his habitual odour of Russian leather. Row
upon row of calf-bound volumes, brown and olive, with gilt lettering on their spines, the octavo in brilliant
scarlet morocco. A deep-buttoned leather sofa to recline on. A lectern, carved like a spread eagle, that held open
upon it an edition of Huysmans's L-bas, from some over-exquisite private press; it had been bound like a
missal, in brass, with gems of coloured glass. The rugs on the floor, deep, pulsing blues of heaven and red of the
heart's dearest blood, came from Isfahan and Bokhara; the dark panelling gleamed; there was the lulling music of
the sea and a fire of apple logs. The flames flickered along the spines inside a glass-fronted case that held books
still crisp and new. Eliphas Levy; the name meant nothing to me. I squinted at a title or two: The Initiation, The
Key of Mysteries, The Secret of Pandora's Box, and yawned. Nothing, here, to detain a seventeen-year-old girl
waiting for her first embrace. I should have liked, best of all, a novel in yellow paper; I wanted to curl up on the
rug before the blazing fire, lose myself in a cheap novel, munch sticky liqueur chocolates. If I rang for them, a
maid would bring me chocolates.
I opened the doors of that bookcase idly to browse. And I think I knew, I knew by some tingling of the
fingertips, even before I opened that slim volume with no title at all on the spine, what I should find inside it.
When he showed me the Rops, newly bought, dearly prized, had he not hinted that he was a connoisseur of such
things? Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a
split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while
a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like the scimitar he held. The
picture had a caption: 'Reproof of curiosity'. My mother, with all the precision of her eccentricity, had told me
what it was that lovers did; I was innocent but not nave. The Adventures of Eulalie at the Harem of the Grand
Turk had been printed, according to the flyleaf, in Amsterdam in 1748, a rare collector's piece. Had some
ancestor brought it back himself from that northern city? Or had my husband bought it for himself, from one of

those dusty little bookshops on the Left Bank where an old man peers at you through spectacles an inch thick,
daring you to inspect his wares ... I turned the pages in the anticipation of fear; the print was rusty. Here was
another steel engraving: 'Immolation of the wives of the Sultan'. I knew enough for what I saw in that book to
make me gasp.
There was a pungent intensification of the odour of leather that suffused his library; his shadow fell
across the massacre.
'My little nun has found the prayerbooks, has she?' he demanded, with a curious mixture of mockery and
relish; then, seeing my painful, furious bewilderment, he laughed at me aloud, snatched the book from my hands
and put it down on the sofa.
'Have the nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustn't play with grownups' toys until she's learned how to
handle them, must she?'
Then he kissed me. And with, this time, no reticence. He kissed me and laid his hand imperatively upon
my breast, beneath the sheath of ancient lace. I stumbled on the winding stair that led to the bedroom, to the
carved, gilded bed on which he had been conceived. I stammered foolishly: We've not taken luncheon yet; and,
besides, it is broad daylight...
All the better to see you.
He made me put on my choker, the family heirloom of one woman who had escaped the blade. With
trembling fingers, I fastened the thing about my neck. It was cold as ice and chilled me. He twined my hair into a
rope and lifted it off my shoulders so that he could the better kiss the downy furrows below my ears; that made
me shudder. And he kissed those blazing rubies, too. He kissed them before he kissed my mouth. Rapt, he
intoned: 'Of her apparel she retains/Only her sonorous jewellery.' []
Then I realized, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him--the
silent music, he said, of my unknowingness, like La Terrasse des audiences au clair de lune played upon a piano
with keys of ether. You must remember how ill at ease I was in that luxurious place, how unease had been my
constant companion during the whole length of my courtship by this grave satyr who now gently martyrized my
hair. To know that my naivety gave him some pleasure made me take heart. Courage! I shall act the fine lady to
the manner born one day, if only by virtue of default.
Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great, mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of
keys from some interior hidey-hole in his jacket--key after key, a key, he said, for every lock in the house. Keys
of all kinds--huge, ancient things of black iron; others slender, delicate, almost baroque; wafer-thin Yale keys for
safes and boxes. And, during his absence, it was I who must take care of them all.
I eyed the heavy bunch with circumspection. Until that moment, I had not given a single thought to the
practical aspects of marriage with a great house, great wealth, a great man, whose key ring was as crowded as
that of a prison warder. Here were the clumsy and archaic keys for the dungeons, for dungeons we had in plenty
although they had been converted to cellars for his wines; the dusty bottles inhabited in racks all those deep
holes of pain in the rock on which the castle was built. These are the keys to the kitchens, this is the key to the
picture gallery, a treasure house filled by five centuries of avid collectors -- ah! he foresaw I would spend hours
there. []
Keys, keys, keys. He would trust me with the keys to his office, although I was only a baby; and the
keys to his safes, where he kept the jewels I should wear, he promised me, when we returned to Paris. Such
jewels! Why, I would be able to change my earrings and necklaces three times a day, just as the Empress
Josephine used to change her underwear. He doubted, he said, with that hollow, knocking sound that served him
for a chuckle, I would be quite so interested in his share certificates although they, of course, were worth
infinitely more.
Outside our firelit privacy, I could hear the sound of the tide drawing back from the pebbles of the
foreshore; it was nearly time for him to leave me. One single key remained unaccounted for on the ring and he
hesitated over it; for a moment, I thought he was going to unfasten it from its brothers, slip it back into his
pocket and take it away with him.
'What is that key?' I demanded, for his chaffing had made me bold. 'The key to your heart? Give it me!'
He dangled the key tantalizingly above my head, out of reach of my straining fingers; those bare red lips
of his cracked sidelong in a smile.
'Ah, no,' he said. 'Not the key to my heart. Rather, the key to my enfer.'
He left it on the ring, fastened the ring together, shook it musically, like a carillon. Then threw the keys
in a jingling heap in my lap. I could feel the cold metal chilling my thighs through my thin muslin frock. He bent
over me to drop a beard-masked kiss on my forehead.
'Every man must have one secret, even if only one, from his wife,' he said. 'Promise me this, my wheyfaced piano-player; promise me you'll use all the keys on the ring except that last little one I showed you. Play
with anything you find, jewels, silver plate; make toy boats of my share certificates, if it pleases you, and send

them sailing off to America after me. All is yours, everywhere is open to you -- except the lock that this single
key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room, at the end of a
dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs that would get into your hair and frighten you if you ventured there.
Oh, and you'd find it such a dull little room! But you must promise me, if you love me, to leave it well alone. It
is only a private study, a hideaway, a "den", as the English say, where I can go, sometimes, on those infrequent
yet inevitable occasions when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on my shoulders. There I can go,
you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless.' []
I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me.
Were there jewels enough in all his safes to recompense me for this predicament? Did all that castle hold
enough riches to recompense me for the company of the libertine with whom I must share it? And what,
precisely, was the nature of my desirous dread for this mysterious being who, to show his mastery over me, had
abandoned me on my wedding night?
Then I sat straight up in bed, under the sardonic masks of the gargoyles carved above me, riven by a
wild surmise. Might he have left me, not for Wall Street but for an importunate mistress tucked away God knows
where who knew how to pleasure him far better than a girl whose fingers had been exercised, hitherto, only by
the practice of scales and arpeggios? And, slowly, soothed, I sank back on to the heaping pillows; I
acknowledged that the jealous scare I'd just given myself was not unmixed with a little tincture of relief.
At last I drifted into slumber, as daylight filled the room and chased bad dreams away. But the last thing
I remembered, before I slept, was the tall jar of lilies beside the bed, how the thick glass distorted their fat stems
so they looked like arms, dismembered arms, drifting drowned in greenish water.
Coffee and croissants to console this bridal, solitary waking. Delicious. Honey, too, in a section of comb
on a glass saucer. The maid squeezed the aromatic juice from an orange into a chilled goblet while I watched her
as I lay in the lazy, midday bed of the rich. Yet nothing, this morning, gave me more than a fleeting pleasure
except to hear that the piano-tuner had been at work already. When the maid told me that, I sprang out of bed and
pulled on my old serge skirt and flannel blouse, costume of a student, in which I felt far more at ease with myself
than in any of my fine new clothes.
After my three hours of practice, I called the piano-tuner in, to thank him. He was blind, of course; but
young, with a gentle mouth and grey eyes that fixed upon me although they could not see me. He was a
blacksmith's son from the village across the causeway; a chorister in the church whom the good priest had taught
a trade so that he could make a living. All most satisfactory. Yes. He thought he would be happy here. And if, he
added shyly, he might sometimes be allowed to hear me play ... for, you see, he loved music. Yes. Of course, I
said. Certainly. He seemed to know that I had smiled. []
I took the forbidden key from the heap and left the others lying there.
It was now very late and the castle was adrift, as far as it could go from the land, in the middle of the
silent ocean where, at my orders, it floated, like a garland of light. And all silent, all still, but for the murmuring
of the waves.
I felt no fear, no intimation of dread. Now I walked as firmly as I had done in my mother's house.
Not a narrow, dusty little passage at all; why had he lied to me? But an ill-lit one, certainly; the
electricity, for some reason, did not extend here, so I retreated to the still-room and found a bundle of waxed
tapers in a cupboard, stored there with matches to light the oak board at grand dinners. I put a match to my little
taper and advanced with it in my hand, like a penitent, along the corridor hung with heavy, I think Venetian,
tapestries. The flame picked out, here, the head of a man, there, the rich breast of a woman spilling through a
rent in her dress--the Rape of the Sabines, perhaps? The naked swords and immolated horses suggested some
grisly mythological subject. The corridor wound downwards; there was an almost imperceptible ramp to the
thickly carpeted floor. The heavy hangings on the wall muffled my footsteps, even my breathing. For some
reason, it grew very warm; the sweat sprang out in beads on my brow. I could no longer hear the sound of the
sea.
A long, a winding corridor, as if I were in the viscera of the castle; and this corridor led to a door of
worm-eaten oak, low, round-topped, barred with black iron.
And still I felt no fear, no raising of the hairs on the back of the neck, no prickling of the thumbs.
The key slid into the new lock as easily as a hot knife into butter.
No fear; but a hesitation, a holding of the spiritual breath.
If I had found some traces of his heart in a file marked: Personal, perhaps, here, in his subterranean
privacy, I might find a little of his soul. It was the consciousness of the possibility of such a discovery, of its
possible strangeness, that kept me for a moment motionless, before, in the foolhardiness of my already subtly
tainted innocence, I turned the key and the door creaked slowly back.
'There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer,' opined my
husband's favourite poet; I had learned something of the nature of that similarity on my marriage bed. And now

my taper showed me the outlines of a rack. There was also a great wheel, like the ones I had seen in woodcuts of
the martyrdoms of the saints, in my old nurse's little store of holy books. And--just one glimpse of it before my
little flame caved in and I was left in absolute darkness--a metal figure, hinged at the side, which I knew to be
spiked on the inside and to have the name: the Iron Maiden.
Absolute darkness. And, about me, the instruments of mutilation.
Until that moment, this spoiled child did not know she had inherited nerves and a will from the mother
who had defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-China; My mother's spirit drove me on, into that dreadful place, in a
cold ecstasy to know the very worst. I fumbled for the matches in my pocket; what a dim, lugubrious light they
gave! And yet, enough, oh, more than enough, to see a room designed for desecration and some dark night of
unimaginable lovers whose embraces were annihilation.
The walls of this stark torture chamber were the naked rock; they gleamed as if they were sweating with
fright. At the four corners of the room were funerary urns, of great antiquity, Etruscan, perhaps, and, on threelegged ebony stands, the bowls of incense he had left burning which filled the room with a sacerdotal reek.
Wheel, rack and Iron Maiden were, I saw, displayed as grandly as if they were items of statuary and I was almost
consoled, then, and almost persuaded myself that I might have stumbled only upon a little museum of his
perversity, that he had installed these monstrous items here only for contemplation.
Yet at the centre of the room lay a catafalque, a doomed, ominous bier of Renaissance workmanship,
surrounded by long white candles and, at its foot, an armful of the same lilies with which he had filled my
bedroom, stowed in a four-foot-high jar glazed with a sombre Chinese red. I scarcely dared examine this
catafalque and its occupant more closely; yet I knew I must.
Each time I struck a match to light those candles round her bed, it seemed a garment of that innocence of
mine for which he had lusted fell away from me.
The opera singer lay, quite naked, under a thin sheet of very rare and precious linen, such as the princes
of Italy used to shroud those whom they had poisoned. I touched her, very gently, on the white breast; she was
cool, he had embalmed her. On her throat I could see the blue imprint of his strangler's fingers. The cool, sad
flame of the candles flickered on her white, closed eyelids. The worst thing was, the dead lips smiled.
Beyond the catafalque, in the middle of the shadows, a white, nacreous glimmer; as my eyes accustomed
themselves to the gathering darkness, I at last--oh, horrors!--made out a skull; yes, a skull, so utterly denuded,
now, of flesh, that it scarcely seemed possible the stark bone had once been richly upholstered with life. And this
skull was strung up by a system of unseen cords, so that it appeared to hang, disembodied, in the still, heavy air,
and it had been crowned with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace, the final image of his bride.
Yet the skull was still so beautiful, had shaped with its sheer planes so imperiously the face that had once
existed above it, that I recognized her the moment I saw her; face of the evening star walking on the rim of night.
One false step, oh, my poor, dear girl, next in the fated sisterhood of his wives; one false step and into the abyss
of the dark you stumbled.
And where was she, the latest dead, the Romanian countess who might have thought her blood would
survive his depredations? I knew she must be here, in the place that had wound me through the castle towards it
on a spool of inexorability. But, at first, I could see no sign of her. Then, for some reason--perhaps some change
of atmosphere wrought by my presence--the metal shell of the Iron Maiden emitted a ghostly twang; my feverish
imagination might have guessed its occupant was trying to clamber out, though, even in the midst of my rising
hysteria, I knew she must be dead to find a home there.
With trembling fingers, I prised open the front of the upright coffin, with its sculpted face caught in a
rictus of pain. Then, overcome, I dropped the key I still held in my other hand. It dropped into the forming pool
of her blood.
She was pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes, this child of the land of the vampires who seemed
so newly dead, so full of blood ... oh God! how recently had he become a widower? How long had he kept her in
this obscene cell? Had it been all the time he had courted me, in the clear light of Paris?
I closed the lid of her coffin very gently and burst into a tumult of sobbing that contained both pity for
his other victims and also a dreadful anguish to know I, too, was one of them.
The candles flared, as if in a draught from a door to elsewhere. The light caught the fire opal on my hand
so that it flashed, once, with a baleful light, as if to tell me the eye of God--his eye--was upon me. My first
thought, when I saw the ring for which I had sold myself to this fate, was, how to escape it.
I retained sufficient presence of mind to snuff out the candles round the bier with my fingers, to gather
up my taper, to look around, although shuddering, to ensure I had left behind me no traces of my visit.
I retrieved the key from the pool of blood, wrapped it in my handkerchief to keep my hands clean, and
fled the room, slamming the door behind me. It crashed to with a juddering reverberation, like the door of hell.
[] Assistance. My mother. I ran to the telephone; and the line, of course, was dead.
Dead as his wives. []

When I recovered consciousness, I found I was lying in the piano-tuner's arms and he was tucking the
satin cushion from the piano-stool under my head.
'You are in some great distress,' he said. 'No bride should suffer so much, so early in her marriage.'
His speech had the rhythms of the countryside, the rhythms of the tides.
'Any bride brought to this castle should come ready dressed in mourning, should bring a priest and a
coffin with her,' I said.
'What's this?'
It was too late to keep silent; and if he, too, were one of my husband's creatures, then at least he had
been kind to me. So I told him everything, the keys, the interdiction, my disobedience, the room, the rack, the
skull, the corpses, the blood.
'I can scarcely believe it,' he said, wondering. 'That man ... so rich; so well-born.'
'Here's proof,' I said and tumbled the fatal key out of my handkerchief on to the silken rug.
'Oh God,' he said. 'I can smell the blood.'
He took my hand; he pressed his arms about me. Although he was scarcely more than a boy, I felt a great
strength flow into me from his touch.
'We whisper all manner of strange tales up and down the coast,' he said.' There was a Marquis, once,
who used to hunt young girls on the mainland; he hunted them with dogs, as though they were foxes. My
grandfather had it from his grandfather, how the Marquis pulled a head out of his saddle bag and showed it to the
blacksmith while the man was shoeing his horse. "A fine specimen of the genus, brunette, eh, Guillaume?" And
it was the head of the blacksmith's wife.'
But, in these more democratic times, my husband must travel as far as Paris to do his hunting in the
salons. Jean-Yves knew the moment I shuddered.
'Oh, madame! I thought all these were old wives' tales, chattering of fools, spooks to scare bad children
into good behaviour! Yet how could you know, a stranger, that the old name for this place is the Castle of
Murder?'
How could I know, indeed? Except that, in my heart, I'd always known its lord would be the death of
me.
'Hark!' said my friend suddenly. 'The sea has changed key; it must be near morning, the tide is going
down.'
He helped me up. I looked from the window, towards the mainland, along the causeway where the stones
gleamed wetly in the thin light of the end of the night and, with an almost unimaginable horror, a horror the
intensity of which I cannot transmit to you, I saw, in the distance, still far away yet drawing moment by moment
inexorably nearer, the twin headlamps of his great black car, gouging tunnels through the shifting mist.
My husband had indeed returned; this time, it was no fancy.
'The key!' said Jean-Yves. 'It must go back on the ring, with the others. As though nothing had
happened.'
But the key was still caked with wet blood and I ran to my bathroom and held it under the hot tap.
Crimson water swirled down the basin but, as if the key itself were hurt, the bloody token stuck. The turquoise
eyes of the dolphin taps winked at me derisively; they knew my husband had been too clever for me! I scrubbed
the stain with my nail brush but still it would not budge. I thought how the car would be rolling silently towards
the closed courtyard gate; the more I scrubbed the key, the more vivid grew the stain.
The bell in the gatehouse would jangle. The porter's drowsy son would push back the patchwork quilt,
yawning, pull the shirt over his head, thrust his feet into his sabots ... slowly, slowly; open the door for your
master as slowly as you can ...
And still the bloodstain mocked the fresh water that spilled from the mouth of the leering dolphin.
'You have no more time,' said Jean-Yves. 'He is here. I know it. I must stay with you.'
'You shall not!' I said. 'Go back to your room, now. Please.'
He hesitated. I put an edge of steel in my voice, for I knew I must meet my lord alone. []
So I must go to the courtyard where my husband waited in his London-tailored trousers and the shirt
from Turnbull and Asser, beside the mounting block, with, in his hand, the sword which his great-grandfather
had presented to the little corporal, in token of surrender to the Republic, before he shot himself. The heavy
sword, unsheathed, grey as that November morning, sharp as childbirth, mortal.
When my husband saw my companion, he observed: 'Let the blind lead the blind, eh? But does even a
youth as besotted as you are think she was truly blind to her own desires when she took my ring? Give it me
back, whore.'
The fires in the opal had all died down. I gladly slipped it from my finger and, even in that dolorous
place, my heart was lighter for the lack of it. My husband took it lovingly and lodged it on the tip of his little
finger; it would go no further.

'It will serve me for a dozen more fiances,' he said. 'To the block, woman. No--leave the boy; I shall
deal with him later, utilizing a less exalted instrument than the one with which I do my wife the honour of her
immolation, for do not fear that in death you will be divided.'
Slowly, slowly, one foot before the other, I crossed the cobbles. The longer I dawdled over my
execution, the more time it gave the avenging angel to descend ...
'Don't loiter, girl! Do you think I shall lose appetite for the meal if you are so long about serving it? No; I
shall grow hungrier, more ravenous with each moment, more cruel ... Run to me, run! I have a place prepared for
your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!'
He raised the sword and cut bright segments from the air with it, but still I lingered although my hopes,
so recently raised, now began to flag. If she is not here by now, her horse must have stumbled on the causeway,
have plunged into the sea ... One thing only made me glad; that my lover would not see me die.
My husband laid my branded forehead on the stone and, as he had done once before, twisted my hair
into a rope and drew it away from my neck.
'Such a pretty neck,' he said with what seemed to be a genuine, retrospective tenderness. 'A neck like the
stem of a young plant.'
I felt the silken bristle of his beard and the wet touch of his lips as he kissed my nape. And, once again,
of my apparel I must retain only my gems; the sharp blade ripped my dress in two and it fell from me. A little
green moss, growing in the crevices of the mounting block, would be the last thing I should see in all the world.
The whizz of that heavy sword.
And--a great battering and pounding at the gate, the jangling of the bell, the frenzied neighing of a horse!
The unholy silence of the place shattered in an instant. The blade did not descend, the necklace did not sever, my
head did not roll. For, for an instant, the beast wavered in his stroke, a sufficient split second of astonished
indecision to let me spring upright and dart to the assistance of my lover as he struggled sightlessly with the
great bolts that kept her out.
The Marquis stood transfixed, utterly dazed, at a loss. It must have been as if he had been watching his
beloved Tristan for the twelfth, the thirteenth time and Tristan stirred, then leapt from his bier in the last act,
announced in a jaunty aria interposed from Verdi that bygones were bygones, crying over spilt milk did nobody
any good and, as for himself, he proposed to live happily ever after. The puppet master, open-mouthed, wideeyed, impotent at the last, saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandon the rituals he had ordained for them
since time began and start to live for themselves; the king, aghast, witnesses the revolt of his pawns.
You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that
her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one
hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver and, behind her, the
breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice. And my husband stood stock-still,
as if she had been Medusa, the sword still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that
you see in glass cases at fairs.
And then it was as though a curious child pushed his centime into the slot and set all in motion. The
heavy, bearded figure roared out aloud, braying with fury, and, wielding the honourable sword as if it were a
matter of death or glory, charged us, all three.
On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages
in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a
single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head.
We lead a quiet life, the three of us. I inherited, of course, enormous wealth but we have given most of it
away to various charities. The castle is now a school for the blind, though I pray that the children who live there
are not haunted by any sad ghosts looking for, crying for, the husband who will never return to the bloody
chamber, the contents of which are buried or burned, the door sealed.
I felt I had a right to retain sufficient funds to start a little music school here, on the outskirts of Paris,
and we do well enough. Sometimes we can even afford to go to the Opra, though never to sit in a box, of
course. We know we are the source of many whisperings and much gossip but the three of us know the truth of it
and mere chatter can never harm us. I can only bless the -- what shall I call it? -- the maternal telepathy that sent
my mother running headlong from the telephone to the station after I had called her, that night. I never heard you
cry before, she said, by way of explanation. Not when you were happy. And who ever cried because of gold bath
taps?
The night train, the one I had taken; she lay in her berth, sleepless as I had been. When she could not
find a taxi at that lonely halt, she borrowed old Dobbin from a bemused farmer, for some internal urgency told
her that she must reach me before the incoming tide sealed me away from her for ever. My poor old nurse, left
scandalized at home -- what? interrupt milord on his honeymoon? -- she died soon after. She had taken so much
secret pleasure in the fact that her little girl had become a marquise; and now here I was, scarcely a penny the

richer, widowed at seventeen in the most dubious circumstances and busily engaged in setting up house with a
piano-tuner. Poor thing, she passed away in a sorry state of disillusion! But I do believe my mother loves him as
much as I do.
No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead; I am glad
he cannot see it -- not for fear of his revulsion, since I know he sees me clearly with his heart -- but, because it
spares my shame.
Angela Carter The Werewolf
It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.
Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky
within. There will be a crude icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a
string of drying mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh, brief, poor lives.
To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even
know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of
the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the naf style and there are no flowers to
put in front of them, no flowers grow there, so they put out small, votive offerings, little loaves, sometimes a
cake that the bears come lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight especially on
Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses,
and eat them. Anyone will tell you that.
Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed child born feet first on the night of St
John's Eve will have second sight. When they discover a witch -- some old woman whose cheeses ripen when
her neighbour's do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! follows her about all the time, they
strip the crone, search her for marks, for the supernumary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Then they
stone her to death.
Winter and cold weather.
Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes I've baked for her on the hearthstone
and a little pot of butter.
The good child does as her mother bids -- five miles' trudge through the forest; do not leave the path
because of the bears, the wild boar, the starving wolves. Here, take your father's hunting knife; you know how to
use it.
The child had a scabby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold, she knew the forest too well to fear it but
she must always be on her guard. When she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she dropped her gifts, seized her
knife and turned on the beast.
It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops; any but a mountaineer's child would have
died of fright at the sight of it. It went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her
father's knife and slashed off its right forepaw.
The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when she saw what had happened to it; wolves are less brave than
they seem. It went lolloping off disconsolately between the trees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail
of blood behind it. The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf's paw in the
cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on towards her grandmother's house. Soon it came
on to snow so thickly that the path and any footsteps, track or spoor that might have been upon it were obscured.
She found her grandmother was so sick she had taken to her bed and fallen into a fretful sleep, moaning
and shaking so that the child guessed she had a fever. She felt the forehead, it burned. She shook out the cloth
from her basket, to use it to make the old woman a cold compress, and the wolf's paw fell to the floor.
But it was no longer a wolf's paw. It was a hand, chopped off at the wrist, a hand toughened with work
and freckled with age. There was a wedding ring on the third finger and a wart on the index finger. By the wart,
she knew it for her grandmother's hand.
She pulled back the sheet but the old woman woke up, at that, and began to struggle, squawking, and
shrieking like a thing possessed. But the child was strong, and armed with her father's hunting knife; she
managed to hold her grandmother down long enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump
where her right hand should have been, festering already.
The child crossed herself and cried out so loud the neighbours heard her and came rushing in. They
knew the wart on the hand at once for a witch's nipple; they drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out
into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until
she fell down dead.
Now the child lived in her grandmother's house; she prospered.