This Curious Light

 

I recently finished reading a novel by the English novelist, Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975). A Wreath of Roses is set just after World War II in an English town in the summertime. Two young women come to stay with their former teacher, Frances, who since retiring has become a painter of some renown. The main plot revolves around one of the younger women, Camilla, and her relationship with a charming but disconcerting stranger whom she meets on a train. But it is Frances who provides the powerful core of the story, Frances who Taylor hints may be dying and cannot stop thinking about the notion of immortality.

“The moonlight was enough to read by, the air humid as the inside of a flower. Orion seemed to hang and swing out across the sky like a man on a trapeze and, lifting her head, she thought, ‘One glance at the sky finishes religion for me. I know then that we and all the clutter we have made upon the face of the earth – our fantasies and our myths – count for nothing. The scum of little houses, the Parthenon itself, all of our frail properties, will fly like dust into the abyss. For all civilizations are like elaborate campings-out, a complicated picnic in the face of nature’s discomforts. And upon this impermanence we set up our easels and paint our pictures. What goes onto the canvas is the ticking of our hearts, the pulse of our lives. Yet when we die, what will happen? Other men and women will paint over our work; or those manifestoes of ours against the indifference of the world will lie, face down, among old books and ornaments in junk-shops, in attics... In the end, my heart-beats, my life’s work will fade away along with the rest, the Parthenon will go down on its knees like an aged elephant, and the embalmed words of the great will count for no more than Liz and Camilla chattering away up there in the lighted bedroom.’”

Interest in Taylor was revived in 2012 when two of her novels – Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek – were reissued by New York Review of Books. (Click here to read reviews in the New York Times and The Guardian.) Themes that reoccurs throughout her quiet, domestic novels are how women in the mid-20^th century can find ways to express themselves and the struggle to capture the world through art.

Here is Frances picnicking on a hill with her guests when the weather takes a turn, and she suddenly sees the act of painting, which has been her sustaining happiness, in a new light.

 “The blue was thickening into lavender as if evening were coming already. ‘This curious light,” Frances began, and then stopped. She put her parasol away and shaded her eyes with her hand, looking to left and right along the valley. She sighed, ‘Oh it flies away,’ she thought, striking her hands together in her lap, ‘It can’t ever be caught or described. For it is one earth one moment and another earth in a second or two. Life itself is an unfinished sentence, or a few haphazard brush-strokes. Nothing stays. Nothing is completed. I can make nothing whole from it, however small. Pinned down, like a butterfly, it ceases to be itself, just as the butterfly becomes something else; dead, unmoving, its brightness gone. The meaning of a painting is a voice crying out: I saw it. Before it vanished, it was thus. An honest painting would never be finished; an honest novel would stop in the middle of a sentence. There is no shutting life up in a cage, turning the key with a full-stop, with a stroke of paint.’” 

“Before it vanished, it was thus.” That’s all the motivation one should need to paint, write, create. Producing a personal testimony of a moment of vision, sufficient unto itself – regardless of the outside world’s approbation or scorn. Words worth pasting to our laptops or easels and remembering as we carry on with the ticking of our hearts and the pulse of our lives.


 

Tongues of Men and Angels

 

This week I finally got around to seeing Joe’s Wright’s extraordinary movie Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightley at her least mannered and most impressive. I remembered the critics as being widely divided about the staging of the movie’s action within an old theatre, some seeing it as “deliberate, showy artifice” (Chicago Reader) and “artistic hubris” (New York Times), while others declared it “an intoxicating spectacle” (USA Today) that “sings, dances, and finally soars” (Washington Post).

In my humble opinion, it was a triumph. I’d had my own doubts about how the setting would work, but they were swept away almost immediately by the beauty and originality of the visual effects. The movie has been called hyper-stylized, which is true but the staging not only didn’t deflect attention from the characters and their tortured emotions, it actually enhanced the unfolding of the drama. Click here to see a video about the genesis of Joe Wright’s concept.

The movie is choreographed (by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui) more like ballet than a traditional stage play, which added a welcome freshness to the depiction of the social context in which Anna’s doomed love story unfolds. The costumes (by Jacqueline Durran) are utterly stunning – just enough off-center to surprise and dazzle but not distract.  And once again (see my earlier post about his adaption of Parade’s End) Tom Stoppard does an extraordinary job of extracting the heart and soul of novel and transferring its essence to the screen.

Of course seeing the movie took me back to the book, which has long been on my top five list of novels for its complex characters and immaculate structure. All the climactic scenes that had resonated with me in Tolstoy's book were gratifyingly made flesh in the film. For example, take the ballroom scene where young Kitty Shcherbatsky, who had expected to receive a proposal of marriage from Count Vronsky, sees that he has eyes for no one but Anna. Compare Joe Wright's depiction of the scene here (note the innovative choreography) with Tolstoy’s description below:  

“[Kitty] saw that they felt as if they were alone in the crowded ballroom. And she was struck by the bewildered look of submission on Vronsky’s face, usually so firm and self-possessed – an expression like that of an intelligent dog conscious of having done wrong. If Anna smiled, he smiled in reply. If she grew thoughtful, he looked serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She was charming in her simple black gown, her rounded arms were charming with their bracelets, charming the firm neck with the string of pearls, charming the unruly curls, charming the graceful, easy movements of her little hands and feet, charming the lovely, animated face: but in that charm there was something terrible and cruel.”

 

And here’s a still (above) and Tolstoy’s description (below) of the climactic horse race where Vronsky has a terrible fall and Anna cannot hide her feelings from her husband or the rest of the aristocratic crowd that surrounds her:

“... at that moment the race began and all conversation ceased. Karenin, too, fell silent as everyone stood up and turned towards the stream. Karenin was not interested in the race and so did not watch the riders but began listlessly scanning the spectators with his weary eyes. His eyes rested on Anna. Her face was pale and set. She was obviously seeing nothing and nobody but one man. Her hand convulsively clutched her fan and she held her breath. He looked at her and hurriedly turned away... when Vronsky fell and Anna moaned aloud there was nothing very out of the way in it. But immediately after, a change came over Anna’s face which was positively unseemly. She completely lost her head. She began fluttering like a caged bird, at one moment getting up to go, at the next turning to Betsy.

      ‘Let us go, let us go,” she said.

      But Betsy did not hear her. She was leaning over and talking to a general who had come up to her.  Karenin approached Anna and courteously offered her his arm.

      “We can go if you like,” he said in French; but Anna was listening to what the general was saying and did not notice her husband.

      ‘He’s broken his leg too, they say,” said the general. “This is beyond everything.’ ....

      She now saw an officer running across the course towards the pavilion, from the place of Vronsky’s accident. Betsy waved her handkerchief to him. The officer brought news that the rider was not killed but the horse had broken its back.

      On hearing this Anna sat down hurriedly and hid her face behind her fan. Karenin saw that she was weeping and that she was unable to keep back either her tears or the sobs shaking her bosom.”

 
All I can say is see the movie and read the book - in whatever order you prefer. They are both masterpieces.

 

Blessed are the Peacemakers

Senator Mitchell surrounded by colleagues on the Congressional Iran-Contra Committee - July 1987

On July 13, 1987, I was standing around with my colleagues in the offices of London Weekend Television (where I worked at the time) watching live TV coverage of the US Congress’s hearings into the Iran-Contra affair. The Reagan administration had been accused of selling arms illegally to Iran and funnelling the proceeds to the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua in direct contravention of the law.

Marine Lieutenant Oliver North had been a key staff member for the National Security Council, which was the government body accused of carrying out these illegal operations. For several days resplendent in his be-medalled uniform Colonel North had testified to the committee, defiantly claiming responsibility for the illegal scheme and for covering it up when word of the scheme had leaked out to the media. He was brash, unrepentant, and adamant that his actions – though illegal – were right. He claimed to have defied the law of the land because of the intensity of his love of God and Country.

On this particular day, it was the turn of a bespectacled wonky-looking Senator to question Colonel North. As his allotted time drew to a close, the Senator in a gentle New England drawl made a powerful statement (watch it here) that firmly but with great courtesy undermined the bombastic testimony of Colonel North.

“Of all the qualities the American people find compelling about you, none is more impressive than your obvious deep devotion to this country. Please remember that others share that devotion and recognize that it is possible for an American to disagree with you on aid to the Contras and still love God and still love this country as much as you do.

Although he is regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics, and in America disagreement with the policies of the government is not evidence of lack of patriotism... Indeed, it’s the very fact that Americans can criticize their government openly and without fear of reprisal that is the essence of our freedom and that will keep us free.”

This legislator with the large, red-framed glasses and a way with words was Senator George J. Mitchell, Democrat of Maine. From that moment on, I became his devoted fan and I wasn’t alone. The Senator received thousands of letters and phone calls of support from people who were delighted that someone had finally said what they’d been thinking throughout the long investigations into the Iran-Contra affair.

Senator Mitchell went on to be elected Majority Leader of the Senate in 1988 and to fight for health care reform alongside then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. But it wasn’t until after he had retired from the Senate in 1994 that he went on to his greatest achievement so far – brokering a hard-fought peace agreement that ended the decades-long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland.

In the Senate, he had garnered a reputation for being a skilled, patient, and judicious mediator between sometimes implacable opponents and that was what made President Bill Clinton see him as the ideal man for the Northern Ireland job.  

For more than two years, Mitchell flew back and forth across the Atlantic every week – from New York, to London, to Belfast, and back again. The fact that he came to be enormously respected by all factions was the glue that kept the talks going, but as the negotiations neared a climax in April 1998, his master stroke was to set a rigid deadline. As he explained in his 1999 book Making Peace, he told the delegates:

“When we start on Thursday morning, it has to be clear to everyone that we’ll continue until we finish, one way or the other. There can be no discussion of a pause or a break...There’s not going to be a break, not for a week, not for a day, not for an hour. We’re here till we finish. We’ll either get an agreement or we’ll fail to get an agreement. Then we’ll all go out together and explain to the press and the waiting world how we succeeded or why we failed.”

His determination worked. At 5pm on April 10, 1998 - Good Friday – Senator Mitchell was able to announce to the world that “the two governments [of the UK and Ireland] and the political parties of Northern Ireland have reached agreement.” When the agreement was put to the ballot, it was overwhelmingly welcomed by the population on both sides of the border - 71.2 percent of people in Northern Ireland and 94.39 percent in the Republic of Ireland voted Yes. And in the 15 years that have followed, violence in the Province has been minimal and the two communities – Catholic and Protestant – have lived together in cautious harmony.

The Irish writer Colum McCann has called Mitchell “The most incredible politician that I know of from our times, for certain.” In an article in the New York Times in March of this year called “Remembering an Easter Miracle in Northern Ireland,” McCann wrote, “Mr. Mitchell’s great skill was that he learned to embrace silence. He sat at his table and listened to speech after speech... He was unpaid and initially unheralded, but he fell in love with the people and allowed them to talk through their vitriol... He kept listening. He tolerated death threats. He pleaded, he cajoled. And even after the agreement was signed, he understood that only history would bring it home."    

In his most recent novel, Transatlantic, McCann – a National Book Award recipient – ventures to fictionalize George Mitchell’s thoughts and feelings as he strives to bring peace to Northern Ireland.

“Welcome to Belfast International. Contents in the overhead bin may have shifted during flight. The stewardesses fuss with his jacket. He is whisked through security once more, out past the small café and the newsagent’s where he takes a quick glance at the newspaper headlines on the small metal racks. Nothing of damage. A good sign. Outside, the vague smell of farmland manure hangs in the air. Three cars waiting. Gerald, his driver, greets him with a nod and a lift of the case. In the car Gerald passes back a sheet of numbers. A small jump in his chest that it might be bad news, but it’s the baseball scores, copied from Reuters, handwritten. He scans them quickly. Opening Day. Ah, yes, Hail and hallelujah. The Sox have won.”

Thus can great political acts inspire literature.

Holding the signed Good Friday Agreement - with Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahearne (left)
and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (right)- April 1998

Where the Sky Meets the Sea

Bali Ha'i - a still from the 1958 movie South Pacific

Across just a short stretch of ocean from Tahiti lies the mysterious island of Moorea, nine miles NW to be precise. According to Polynesian legend, the island’s volcanic ridges constitute the second dorsal fin of the fish that became the island of Tahiti – that’s how close the two islands are. Anyone standing on the shores of north-western Tahiti has a magnificent view of Moorea’s dramatic jagged skyline, made famous around the world by the film South Pacific, in which it appeared as a stand-in for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s invented island of Bali Ha’i.

Throughout many years of research in library reading rooms and hunched over my computer, I’d read account after account of this awe-inspiring view of Moorea and had come to think of it as being almost a mythical place, like Shangri-La - or indeed Bali Ha’i itself.

Herman Melville (the author of Moby Dick) wrote in 1842 of the “the romantic elevations of Eimeo [the old name for Moorea], high above which a lone peak... shot up its verdant spire.” Thirty five years later, the Scottish artist, Constance Gordon-Cumming described the island as looking “weirdly grand; huge basaltic pinnacles of most fantastic shape towering from out of the sea of billowy white clouds, which drifted along those black crags.” In 1891, the American painter John La Farge brought an artist’s perspective to his description of the sunsets behind Moorea, “the fantastic island that has made a distance of blue and gold to our days at Papeete... even in the evening or in the afterglow, when the sunset lights up in yellow and purple the sky behind it.”  

In 1914, the American writer and traveller Frederick O’Brien described Moorea as:

“the most astonishing sight upon the ocean that my eyes had ever gazed on... Its heights were not green like Tahiti’s, but bare and black … a long sierra of broken pinnacles and crags which had all the semblance of a weathered and dismantled castle... The confused mass of lofty ridges resolved into chasms and combes, dark, sunless ravines, moist with the spray of many waterfalls, which nearer became velvet valleys of pale green, masses of foliage and light and shadow. The mountains of Moorea were only half the height of Tahiti’s, but so artfully had they been piled in their fantastic arrangement that they seemed as high, though they were entirely different in their impress upon the beholder.”

And in 1951, James Michener, whose stories of his wartime experiences in French Polynesia were the source for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s libretto for South Pacific, wrote, “From Tahiti, Moorea seems to have about 40 separate summits: fat thumbs of basalt, spires tipped at impossible angles, brooding domes compelling to the eye. But the peaks that can never be forgotten are the jagged saw-edges that look like the spines of some forgotten dinosaur.” 

I longed to stand where these people had stood, looking out at that haunting island with its primordial mountainous skyline, but the cost of a trip to Polynesia was more than my husband and I could justify. But in late November 2007, encouraged by my then agent, we took a leap of faith, maxed out a credit card, and got on a plane to Tahiti so I could see the place I was writing about with my own eyes. 

After a long delay at LAX and an eight-hour flight across the Pacific, we arrived in Tahiti at night, dog tired and travel stained. We were driven in a rickety cab through the humid darkness to our hotel. It was very late and we were dying for sleep, but the air conditioning in our room refused to work, which meant a laborious process of repacking and moving to another room before we could fall into bed.  

We woke next morning to a hot and beautiful day. Our room looked out onto the cargo ships docked in the port of Papeete and the green hills behind the town. An interesting view, especially as everything in Tahiti related in some way to my book, but with nothing very fantastical or mystical about it. But then my husband, who had gone off to explore the hotel while I showered and dressed, came back to the room in a state of suppressed excitement. He led me down a flight of stairs and out to the edge of the hotel’s infinity pool and pointed.

And there it was on the horizon, looking exactly as I expected, exactly how it had been described. And that was the moment when I realized I was finally there, standing in the land where I’d been living in my imagination for so long - and promptly burst into tears.

Moorea in the morning

 

 

Moorea in the evening

 

Daisy Buchanan in the South Seas

The House of the Columns, Mahina, Tahiti

 

During my recent reread of The Great Gatsby, I was surprised to discover this sentence: “Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months’ trip to the South Seas.”

Thus began the troubled marriage of Daisy Fay from Louisville with the “low thrilling voice... bright eyes, and bright passionate mouth” and Tom Buchanan of Chicago with his “sturdy physical egoism” and “peremptory heart.” I began to wonder how it might have been if Tom and Daisy Buchanan, in the course of their South Pacific honeymoon, had set foot on the island of Tahiti.

According to the novel, the couple left for their wedding trip in June 1919. Their most likely route to Tahiti would have been via San Francisco on a steamship of the Union Line. After 10 days of shipboard life, they’d have arrived in the port of Papeete, with a pilot boat guiding the steamer through the gap in the reef. “Going to the ship” was still a ritual for Tahitians because the sea was still their main lifeline, even though the island was now connected to the rest of the world by telegraph. So every time a ship docked, the whole town came down to the Quay du Commerce dressed in their best, most gaily colored clothes to greet returning family members, arriving colonial officials, or visiting dignitaries. 

As the Buchanans came ashore, they would have noticed that the temperature was no more than a balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit. June is a winter month in the southern hemisphere, which means that the couple wouldn't have had to contend with the stifling heat and monsoons of the Tahitian summer.

They had arrived only a few months after the end of the terrible Spanish flu epidemic that had decimated Tahiti’s population. A majority of the older generation had been wiped out, taking with them most of the accumulated knowledge of the island’s ancient heritage and customs.

It was also less than a year since the end of World War I. The war had cut off the flow of American and European visitors to the island that had been more or less continuous since the mid-1800s. The flow would resume with a vengeance the following year – 1920 – with the arrival of the American painters, Jerome Blum and George Biddle, the Russian writer Elsa Triolet, the French writer Marc Chadourne, and – most significantly ‒  the American writers Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall who went on to write Mutiny in the Bounty and many other books about Polynesia.

There were no proper hotels on the island in 1919 – just a lodging-house called the Annexe. Its rooms contained only a double bed with mosquito netting, a chair, and sometimes a bureau. The showers and toilets were on the ground floor, and none of the rooms had a door, only a half-length curtain to let the air circulate from the verandas. For Tom and Daisy, used to drinking mint juleps in a suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York, it would have been quite a culture shock.

But it’s unlikely they would have had to resort to such basic accommodation. As soon as they stepped off the ship, the Buchanans would have produced letters of introduction from other Americans and instantly been swept up into the generous embrace of the Salmon and Brander family.  

For many years, the main point of contact for visitors had been the family paterfamilias, Tati Salmon, the chief of the Teva clan, but he had died six months earlier in the flu epidemic. His oldest son had also died of the same disease on the same day, and as a result, Tati’s younger son, Mote Salmon, was now chief of the Tevas. As soon as Mote knew the Buchanans were in town and in need of accommodation, he would have put his father’s house in Papeete at their disposal, complete with a cook and various attendants.  

Mote would also have arranged for the young couple to come to stay at the family’s house at Papara for a traditional taamanu or feast of roast suckling pigs, breadfruit, taro, fei (wild bananas), and freshwater shrimp – all wrapped in banana leaves and cooked under hot stones in an oven dug into the ground (ahima’a). The diners would sit cross-legged under a bamboo awning, each woman crowned with an elaborate wreath of native flowers and the men with others made from pandanus leaves. They would eat the food with their fingers from banana leaf plates, using coconut half-shells filled with water as finger bowls.  

Mote’s cousin, Norman Brander, was another enthusiastic and generous host. One American visitor in the early 1920s described Norman as “...a very highly cultured and delightful man... He is very English until he hears Tahitian music, whereupon he becomes Tahitian. His eyes begin to sparkle and he cannot keep his feet still.” Although Norman had only recently lost his wife in the flu epidemic, he is still likely to have treated Daisy and Tom to one of his famous fifteen-course Chinese dinners in Papeete (almost a quarter of the city’s 3,000 inhabitants were Chinese and many had opened restaurants). And he would no doubt have invited them to stay at the Brander family’s beautiful House of the Columns at Mahina, which he had inherited from his brother. Shaded by rows of enormous coconut palms, the French colonial house faced out over a beach of black volcanic sand to the lagoon and the roaring Pacific beyond the reef – a perfect paradise for any honeymoon couple.

Back in Papeete, the Buchanans would have called at the house on Broome Road to pay their respects to ex-Queen Marau, now almost 60 years old and large of girth. The Queen, always regal, was mostly gracious to guests but could sometimes be difficult. George Biddle described her behavior at a Christmas gathering in 1920, “The old dowager Marau... was in an execrable temper. She cast a damper over the festive family gathering. They are all mortally afraid of her.”

Ex-Queen Marau

 

But the Queen’s daughter, 32-year-old Princess Takau, was always a charming hostess to overseas travellers, organizing expeditions to beauty spots in the island’s interior. Biddle was impressed with her, “Takau is a woman of dignity and intelligence... She speaks French perfectly but with a charming soft drawl... She is interested in art and... is proud of her ancestry and the legends and folk art of her people.” Her friendliness and ease with guests did not prevent her from having a strong sense of her own status. Disappointed in the quality of singing at a himene that she had organized for Biddle, she interrupted the singers and “...spoke to them quite sharply. She upbraided them for singing with so little spirit; told them she had expected a better performance... She spoke with great self-assurance and simplicity. Her words were a royal command and galvanized the himene.” No doubt the Buchanans would have found the Princess to be equally solicitous on their behalf.  

Princess Takau Pomare

 

Although the Buchanans’ visit to Tahiti is merely a fiction of mine (by way of F. Scott Fitzgerald), this is a very real depiction of the open-handed hospitality extended to foreign guests by the Salmon-Branders over many years.  

After all of this Polynesian abundance, it was time for the Buchanans to get back on the steamer to the United States. By August, they were in Santa Barbara where Daisy discovered she was pregnant and that her husband had cheated on her with a chambermaid from their hotel. Four years later on Long Island, Daisy encountered an old flame, and the tragic and iconic story that is The Great Gatsby began to unfold.

 

The Restless Eye

"Night Windows"  Edward Hopper, 1928

Staying with the early decades of the 20^th century, I am reading The Great Gatsby for maybe the fifth or sixth time and continue to marvel at its linguistic perfection. Here still are the eternal images that define the book – Daisy and Jordan Baker in the windswept drawing room with the billowing curtains, the enormous bespectacled eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg towering over the ash farm by the train tracks, Gatsby stretching out his arms to the light at the end of the dock. But this time I was struck by a passage that I had swept by on my previous readings, a passage that brought to mind the evocative urban paintings of Edward Hopper.

In 1922, Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a young man from the Midwest who is learning the bond business in the “white chasms of lower New York.” In the evenings he would have dinner at the Yale Club and then stroll down Madison Avenue and over 33rd Street to Pennsylvania Station to take a train out to his solitary little house on Long Island.

“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.”

 

 

Drawing the Tides

 

Adelaide Clemens as Valentine Wannop in "Parade's End"

Back in the early spring, I was reading and blogging about Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy about the social upheavals that preceded and were prompted by World War I. The novels had recently been dramatized by the BBC and HBO in a version brilliantly adapted by Tom Stoppard.
 
One of the three leading characters is Valentine Wannop, the young pacifist suffragette who is in love with Christopher Tietjens, the complicated hero who is out of step with the age. Valentine is a strong, confident young woman who is utterly sure of her feelings for Tietjens but utterly unaware of what happens behind the bed curtains.

“Of the physical side of love she had neither image nor conception. In the old days when she had been with him, if he had come into the room in which she was, or if he had merely been known to be coming down to the village, she had hummed all day under her breath and had felt warmer, little currents passing along her skin. She had read somewhere that to take alcohol was to send the blood into the surface vessels of the body, thus engendering a feeling of warmth. She had never taken alcohol, or not enough to produce recognisably that effect; but she imagined that it was thus love worked upon the body ‒ and that it would stop for ever at that!

But, in these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her. It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you are drawn towards it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself. The moon so draws the tides.”

It was this ignorance about the mechanics of sex on the part of young women in the early 20^th century, which leads my character Celia into profound and heartbreaking trouble in Albion’s Millennium. Brought up by fond but physically distant parents, deprived of any closeness with men, the only person with whom she was likely to experience any semblance of natural physical relations was her boisterously affectionate older brother. And of course it made her particularly unprepared for this kind of encounter:

"...in the midst of the din and clamour of voices and the clink of knives and forks, Celia remembered being in the lane from the Mummersford estate farm late one hot afternoon, angry with Makepeace for some quarrel they’d had. There was the smell of new-mown grass from somewhere, but the lane was very dry. She raised little explosions of dust with every step. Every leaf in the hedgerow that grew high above the lane had its sheen of dust. She ran her finger over one, exposing the dark, earthy green underneath. The leaf was like the tongue of an animal with a groove down the middle. She’d been carrying a stick, a stout oak branch, satisfyingly gnarled yet with bark smooth to the touch. Perhaps the quarrel with Makepeace had been over the stick, she couldn’t remember. She had used the stick to whack the hedgerow, making the dust fly in billowing sheets of white. It was satisfying to hit out at the hedgerow till the sweat curled under her arms, hearing the vegetation crack and bend under her blows. It made her feel powerful to make the dust fly and the hedge crack, as Makepeace in their quarrel had made her feel thwarted, small, and completely insignificant.

So she was not afraid at first when the man stepped through the scrim of dust she’d raised as if onto a stage. He was dressed in a shabby coat with frayed cuffs, that much she saw immediately, and his boots were very worn. A tinker, a beggar man on the road to the big house, poaching maybe. Celia glanced down at his hands, expecting to see a rabbit trap, its brutal teeth slick with blood. But what he held reverently in grimy open palms protruded from the opened buttons below his leather belt, something long and hard, mottled and wrinkled like a root pulled from the earth. It twitched and writhed and seemed to reach towards Celia with a life of its own, and the more she stepped back, the more it seemed to grow towards her like a monstrous plant."