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 damp. His fine face was animated. Yes, 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