The anticipated heat of summer has finally caught up with us here in South Australia, where we had been lulled into an almost dreamlike state by regular gentle rains and days that had all the ambience of Baby Bear’s porridge … not too hot, not too cold but just right.
Hotter days, in the intervals of being the responsible adult and finding suitable occupation for sweltering infants, or doing the rounds of the troughs and making sure all the stock have water, or checking once again that important documents are all still in a go-bag in case of bushfires (there have been five so far this season, all within a 9km radius of my home) lend themselves well to the pleasures of re-reading.
I say re-reading rather than reading, because my brain turns to mush in the the heat and new information is likely to become lost in the slush, whereas turning the pages of an old friend can provide much comfort. Lately I have been revisiting ‘Possession’ by A S Byatt, having been reminded of it when the author sadly shrugged off this mortal coil in December last year.
Her descriptions are so vivid that I can smell the dust on the musty book in the British Library whose fragile pages are explored by one of the chief protagonists (I can also smell the cat pee that soaks through the ceiling of his basement flat) along with the early summer meadow she conjures in the concluding pages.
I purchased my copy in 1991, while lumberingly pregnant with my youngest child. It was tucked into a shelf at a charity shop, having already been through three sets of hands (the logarithmically reducing prices all recorded on or inside the front cover) and have absolutely no intention of parting with it.
The novel is satisfyingly thick and brilliantly written, and essentially follows two academics as they follow and connect threads that reveal a hitherto unknown connection between two poets (Randolph Henry Ash, based loosely on Robert Browning and Christabel LaMotte, inspired by Christina Rossetti) who meet the mid 1800s, their portraits so exquisitely drawn that the book might easily be mistaken for an actual history given how skilfully Byatt creates poems in their distinct styles. In the course of their exploration the researchers follow a trail north to Whitby, where the mention of the jet jewellery of Yorkshire whips me sharply back in time with every re-reading. My mother had at one time a jet necklace, purchased in a junk store in Melbourne. I used to run it through my fingers as a child marvelling at the weight of it, the blackness of it and how in the light, oil slick rainbows shimmered over the faceted surfaces. It may be that I was wrong and it could just have been glass but there is now way of knowing now, whatever was left of it on February 16, 1983 is long buried under the concrete slab my parents poured between the still-standing stone walls of our home when the house was being reconstructed. It had been a Victorian house, coincidentally built in the era in which ‘Possession’ was set, beginning its life as a four bedroom cottage used as a summer house and then extended over the years as a rambling single storey abode with creaking wood floors (dancing was not permitted when the gramophone was in use, as the needle would skip) and some curious late fifties additions to either end, resplendent with a thick layer of the sort of cement spackle coating perfectly described by motoring enthusiast Richard Hammond as “batter for houses” during a program about driving in Scotland.