Possession by A.S. Byatt Read Free Book Online Page A

manuscripts. He had in those days of innocence seen the Edition as a finite task that would lead on to other things.
    He had research assistants, in fluctuating numbers, whom he despatched like Noah’s doves and ravens into the libraries of the world, clutching numbered slips of paper, like cloakroom tickets or luncheon vouchers, each containing a query, a half-line of possible quotation, a proper name to be located. The hub of a Roman chariot, tracked through Gibbon’s footnotes. “The dangerous dreamed melon of the sage” which turned out to come from the dream of Descartes. Ash had been interested in everything. Arab astronomy and African transport systems, angels and oak apples, hydraulics and the guillotine, druids, and the grande armée, catharists and printer’s devils, ectoplasm and solar mythology, the last meals of frozen mastodons and the true nature of manna. The footnotes engulfed and swallowed the text. They were ugly and ungainly, but necessary, Blackadder thought, as they sprang up like the heads of the Hydra, two to solve in the place of one solved.
    He thought often, in his dim place, of how a man becomes his job. What would he be now if he had become, say, a civil servant allotting housing finance, or a policeman, poring over bits of hair and skin and thumbball prints? (This was a very Ash-like speculation.) What would knowledge be, collected for its own sake, for his own sake, that was, for James Blackadder, with no reference to the pickings, digestion and leavings of Randolph Henry Ash?
    There were times when Blackadder allowed himself to see clearly that he would end his working life, that was to say his conscious thinking life, in this task, that all his thoughts would have been another man’s thoughts, all his work another man’s work. And then he thought it did not perhaps matter so greatly. He did after all find Ash fascinating, even after all these years. It was a pleasant subordination, if he was a subordinate. He believed Mortimer Cropper thought himself the lord and owner of Ash, but he, Blackadder, knew his place better.
    He had once seen a naturalist on the television who seemed to him to be an analogue of himself. This man went out with a pouch and gathered up owl-pellets, which he labelled, and later, took apart with forceps, bathed in glass beakers of various cleansing fluids, ordering and rearranging the orts and fragments of the owl’s compressed package of bone, tooth and fur, in order to reconstitute the dead shrew or slow-worm that had run, died, and made its way through owl-gut. He was pleased with this image and momentarily considered making a poem out of it. Then he discovered Ash had been beforehand with him. He had described an archaeologist:
    Finding out ancient battles from the shards
    Of shattered blades or mashed and splintered bones,
    Or broken brain-pans, as the curate reads
    The death of vole or slow-worm in the dried
    Packets the tidy owl ejects, cast out
    By white death floating by on softest sails
    The bloody hook curved in the downy ruff.…
    Then Blackadder could not think whether he had noticed the screen naturalist because his mind was primed with Ash’s image, or whether it had worked independently.

    Roland emerged from tunnels of shelving into Blackadder’s icily lit domain. Paola smiled at him and Blackadder frowned. Blackadder was a grey man, with a grey skin and iron-grey hair, which he wore rather long, because he was proud that it was still so thick. His clothes, tweed jacket, cord trousers, were respectable, well-worn and dusty, like everything else down there. He had a good ironic smile when he smiled, which was very infrequently.
    Roland said, “I think I’ve made a discovery.”
    “It will probably turn out to have been discovered twenty times already. What is it?”
    “I went to read his Vico and it’s still crammed with his manuscript notes, bursting with them, between every page. In the London Library.”
    “Cropper will have been through