I have an idea: if we are to be kept here like Arkivists let us each record a story of the supernatural. Yours, Polidori, shall be of the Undead. Shelley! You believe in ghosts …
My husband nodded – I have seen such, surely, but what is more frightening? A visit from the dead, or the undead?
Mary? What say you? (Byron smiled at me.)
What say I?
But the gentlemen were pouring more wine.
What say I? (To myself I say …) I never knew my mother. She was dead as I was born and the loss of her was so complete I did not feel it. It was not a loss outside of me – as it is when we lose someone we know. There are two people then. One who is you and one who is not you. But in childbirth there is no me/not me. The loss was inside of me as I had been inside of her. I lost something of myself.
My father did his best to care for me as a child, motherless as I was, and he did this by lavishing on my mind what he could not give to my heart. He is not a cold man; he is a man.
My mother, for all her brilliance, was the hearth of his heart. My mother was the place where he stood with the flames warming his face. She never put aside the passion and the compassion natural to a woman – and he told me that many a time when he was weary of the world, her arms around him were better than any book yet written. And I believe this as fervently as I believe in books yet to be written, and I deny that I must choose between my mind and my heart.
My husband is of this temper. Byron is of the opinion that woman is from man born – his rib, his clay – and I find this singular in a man as intelligent as he. I said, It is strange, is it not, that you approve of the creation story we read in the Bible when you do not believe in God? He smiles and shrugs, explaining – It is a metaphor for the distinctions between men and women. He turns away, assuming I have understood and that is the end of the matter, but I continue, calling him back as he limps away like a Greek god. May we not consult Doctor Polidori here, who, as a physician, must know that since the creation story no living man has yet given birth to anything living? It is you, sir, who are made from us, sir.
The gentlemen laugh at me indulgently. They respect me, up to a point, but we have arrived at that point.
We are talking about the animating principle, says Byron, slowly and patiently as if to a child. Not the soil, not the bedding, not the container; the life-spark. The life-spark is male.
Agreed! said Polidori, and of course if two gentlemen agree that must be enough to settle the matter for any woman.
Yet I wish I had a cat.
Vermicelli, said Shelley, later, in bed with me. Men have animated a piece of vermicelli. Are you jealous?
I was stroking his long, thin arms, my legs over his long, thin legs. He was referring to Doctor Darwin, who seems to have seen some evidence of voluntary motion in a piece of vermicelli.
Now you are teasing me, I said – and you, a forked biped exhibiting certain signs of involuntary motion at the junction of trunk and bifurcation.
What is it? he said, softly, kissing my hair. I know his voice when it begins to break like this.
Your cock, I said, my hand on it as it gained life.
This is sounder than galvanism, he said. And I wish he had not, for I was distracted then, thinking of Galvani and his electrodes and leaping frogs.
Why have you stopped? asked my husband.
What was his name? Galvani’s nephew? The book you have at home?
Shelley sighed. Yet he is the most patient of men: An Account of the late improvements in Galvanism with a series of curious and interesting experiments performed before the Commissioners of the French National Institute, and Repeated Lately in the Anatomical Theatres of London. To which is added an appendix, containing the author’s experiments conducted on the body of a malefactor executed at Newgate … 1803.
Yes, that one, I said, resuming my vigour, tho’ my ardour had flowed upwards to my brain.
With a fine movement Shelley rolled me onto my back and eased himself inside me; a pleasure I did not discourage.
We have all human life here, he said, to make as we please out of our bodies and our love. What do we want with frogs and vermicelli? With grimacing, twitching corpses and electrical currents?
Did they not say, in the book, that his eyes opened? The criminal?
My husband closed his eyes. Tensing himself, he shot into me half-worlds of his to meet half-worlds of mine, and I turned my head to look out of the window where the moon was hanging like a lamp in a brief and clear sky.
What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Sonnet 54, said Shelley.
Sonnet 53, I said.
He was spent. We lay looking out of the window together at the scudding clouds that speeded the moon.
And you in every blessed shape we know.
The lover’s body imprinted on the world. The world imprinted on the lover’s body.
On the other side of the wall the sound of Lord Byron spearing Claire Clairmont.
Such a night of moon and stars. The rain had starved us of these sights and now they seemed more wonderful. The light fell on Shelley’s face. How pale he is!
I said to him, Do you believe in ghosts? Truly?
I do, he said, for how can it be that the body is master of the spirit? Our courage, our heroism, yes, even our hatreds, all that we do that shapes the world – is that the body or the spirit? It is the spirit.
I considered this and replied, If a human being ever succeeded in reanimating a body, by galvanism or some method yet undiscovered, would the spirit return?
I do not believe so, said Shelley. The body fails and falls. But the body is not the truth of what we are. The spirit will not return to a ruined house.
How would I love you, my lovely boy, if you had no body?
Is it my body that you love?
And how can I say to him that I sit watching him while he sleeps, while his mind is quiet and his lips silent, and that I kiss him for the body I love?
I cannot divide you, I said.
He wrapped his long arms around me and rocked me in our damp bed. He said, I would, if I could, when my body fails, cast my mind into a rock or a stream or a cloud. My mind is immortal – I feel it to be.
Your poems, I said. They are immortal.
Perhaps, he said. But something more. How can I die? It is impossible. Yet I shall die.
How warm he is in my arms. How far from death.
Did you think of a story yet? he said.
I said, Nothing comes when bidden and I lack the power
