The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [68]
“Yes,” said Frank.
“I am at such a cusp. Your God has removed his presence as though it had never been. He sheds no light, he illuminates nothing, all is thick grey cloud, or empty night full of pointless points of brightness whose order is nothing to do with me, but not yet menacing. It will be. Today I am lucid.”
“Yes,” said Frank.
“I tell you, young man, of things you cannot really imagine. I must unburden myself. I wish to tell you the tale of my werewolf-changes, so that perhaps the telling may release me. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes,” said Frank, who was physically alarmed by the big body trembling beside him. “So far, yes.”
“I may be what you may call mad, tomorrow,” said Fludd. “It will not seem so to me then, but from here I see it with nausea. Each visitation is worse. There was no hint of it when I was a child. I was a choirboy with his head separated from his little body by a great pure white starched collar. If I flicked my own tiny pudenda no one knew and it was all innocent. And the sun shone all the time, round and bright like my collar. And then I began to become a man, and my voice broke, and my collar was taken from me, and my body—you understand—grew a life of his own, not under my control. I had terrible imaginings. I liked to hunt things. Creatures. Frogs and rabbits. I made clay images of them with love, and I destroyed them ingeniously, also with love. Do you understand? I see you do not. I have chosen my confessor intelligently. For you are a person of integrity, and will not speak of this. I went to Art School, and made drawings of the naked—men and women both—and imagined, aha, drawing them in quite another sense, like chickens. I made private drawings of drawing. I walked up and down the Haymarket like Rossetti you understand—looking at the flesh for sale, and slid into my double life in the end with ease. I found a young woman whose trade it was to understand men like me, and gratify their imaginings. I visited her—more and more frequently—and imagined hurting her, more and more ingeniously—and loved her, with my sunny self, more and more deeply and innocently. There was nothing, nothing we could not talk of, and in her presence—in her cheap bed, young man, Father, I became whole, and cleansed. She was called Maria. She was a Maria Magdalena who washed away sins, and she was Venus Anadyomene to me, though she was ill-nourished I think since birth, my artist’s eye saw she was puny, though my lover’s eye saw her breasts as globes of milky marble, and the tuft between her legs as the bushes surrounding the gate to Paradise Lost—and Regained.” He stopped. Frank thought, this is practised rhetoric, he has told this tale before, and polished it. It may be a fiction, or simply a version. He wondered how he knew these things.
“Do I embarrass or excite you, young man? Father?”
“No,” said Frank, though he was both embarrassed and minimally aroused in his own flesh. “No, I am here to listen.”
“I know, naturally, that I was not her only lover,” said Fludd. “She had her trade, it was part of her Self. Or so I thought. Maybe she was only a lost, impecunious young creature, driven by pure hunger and cold to offer heat and hearing which I took for understanding. I think differently of it from day to day, from phase to phase of my own moon-cycle. I did form the intention of making her my wife. I needed her so abjectly. It was when I found her that I found my vocation—fingers in clay running with water, fingers puddling in divine female flesh—I made vessels that were metaphors for her and our dealings with each other, coiled mermaidens and fern fronds uncurling—oh, it was all innocent enough, despite her trade and my madness.”
He stopped. Frank had a crazy moment when he wondered if this Magdalen had become Seraphita Fludd, and if that explained her inhibited stiffness.
Fludd was doing something which Frank saw was wringing his hands; he thought he had never seen it done before. Fludd said
“The next bit is nasty. You are the first person to whom I