is fascinated by moonlit nights and the sudden sight of ruins. He believes that every building carries an imprint of the past, like a memory, or memories, and that these can be released if the time is right. But what is the right time? I asked him, and he wondered if time itself depends on those who are in time. If time uses us as channels for the past – yes, that must be so, he said, as some people can speak to the dead.
Polidori does not agree. The dead are gone. If we have souls, they do not return. The cadaver on the slab has no hope of resurrection – in this world or the next.
Byron is an atheist and does not believe in life after death. We are haunted by ourselves, he says, and that is enough for any man.
Claire said nothing because she has nothing to say.
The servant brought us wine. It is a relief to have a liquid that is not water.
We are like the drowned, said Shelley.
We drank the wine. The shadows make a world on the walls.
This is our Ark, I said, peopled here, afloat, waiting for the waters to abate.
What do you imagine they talked about, on the Ark, said Byron, shut in with the hot stink of animal? Did they believe that the entire earth sat in a watery envelope, like the foetus in the womb?
Polidori interrupted excitedly (he is a great one for interrupting excitedly). In medical school we had a row of just such foetuses, at varying stages of gestation, all abortions; fingers and toes curled against the inevitable, eyes closed against the light never to be seen.
The light is seen – I said – the mother’s skin stretched over the growing child lets in the light. They turn in joy towards the sun.
Shelley smiled at me. When I was pregnant with William, he used to get on his knees as I sat on the edge of the bed and hold my stomach in his hands like a rare book he hadn’t read.
This is the world in little, he said. And that morning, oh I remember it, we sat in the sun together and I felt my baby kick for joy.
But Polidori is a doctor, not a mother. He sees things differently.
I was going to say, he said, a little resentful at being interrupted (as interrupters are wont to be), I was going to say, that, whether there is a soul or there is not a soul, the moment of consciousness is mysterious. Where is consciousness in the womb?
Male children are conscious earlier than female children, said Byron. I asked him what caused him to think so. He replied, The male principle is readier and more active than the female principle. This we observe in life.
We observe that men subjugate women, I said. I have a daughter of my own, said Byron. She is docile and passive.
Ada is but six months old! And you have not seen her at all since shortly after she was born! What child, male or female, does more than sleep and suck when it is born? That is not their sex; it is their biology!
Ah, said Byron, I thought she would be a glorious boy. If I must sire girls, then I trust she will marry well.
Is there not more to life than marriage? I asked.
For a woman? said Byron. Not at all. For a man, love is of his life, a thing apart. For a woman, it is her whole existence.
My mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, would not agree with you, I said.
And yet she tried to kill herself for love, said Byron.
Gilbert Imlay. A charmer. A chancer. A mercenary. A man of mercurial mind and predictable behaviour (why is it so often so?). My mother jumping off a bridge in London, her skirts making a parachute for her falling body. She did not die. No, she did not die.
That came later. Giving birth to me.
Shelley saw my hurt and discomfort. When I read your mother’s book, said Shelley, looking at Byron, not at me, I was convinced by her.
I loved him for that – then and now – he first told me so when I was a young girl of sixteen, and the proud daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792.
Your mother’s work, said Shelley, shy and confident in that way of his, your mother’s work is remarkable.
Would that I might do something myself, I said, to be worthy of her memory.
Why is it that we wish to leave some mark behind? said Byron. Is it only vanity?
No, I said, it is hope. Hope that one day there will be a human society that is just.
That will never happen, said Polidori. Not unless every human being is wiped away and we begin again.
Wipe every human being away, said Byron; yes, why not? And so we are back to our floated Ark. God had the right idea. Begin again.
Yet he saved eight, said Shelley, for the world must be peopled.
We are a little half-ark here ourselves, are we not? observed Byron. We four in our watery world.
Five, said Claire.
I forgot, said Byron.
There will be a revolution in England, said Shelley, as there has been in America, and in France, and then, truly, we shall begin again.
And how shall we avoid what follows revolution? We have witnessed the French problem in our own lifetime. Firstly the Terror, where every man becomes a spy against his neighbour, and then the Tyrant. Napoleon Bonaparte – is he to be preferred to a king?
The French Revolution gave nothing to the people, said Shelley – and so they look for a strong man who claims to give them what they do not have. None can be free unless first he is fed.
Do you believe that if every person had enough money, enough work, enough leisure, enough learning, that if they were not oppressed by those above them, or fearful of those below them, humankind would be perfected? Byron asked this in his negative drawl, sure of the response, and so I set out to disaffect him.
I do! I said.
I do not! said Byron. The human race seeks its own death. We hasten towards what we fear most.
I shook my head. I was on firm ground now in this ark of ours. I said, It is men who seek death. If a single one of you carried a life in his womb for nine months, only to see that child perish as a baby, or in infancy, or through want, disease, or, thereafter, war, you would not seek death in the way that you do.
Yet death is heroic, said Byron. And life is not.
I have heard, interrupted Polidori, I have heard, that some of us do not die, but live, life after life, on the blood of others. They opened a grave in Albania recently, and the corpse, though one hundred years old, yes, one hundred years old (he paused for us to marvel), was perfectly preserved, with fresh blood visible at the mouth.
Write that story, will you? said Byron. He got up and poured wine from the jug. His limp is more pronounced in the
