They had five days. They decided to go to the seaside places on the first two of these-Filey, Flamborough, Robin Hood's Bay, Whitby. Then they would retrace Ash's inland walks by rivers and waterfalls. And leave a day for what might come up.
Roland's bedroom had blue-sprigged rough wallpaper and a sloping roof. The floor was uneven and creaky; the door was old with a latch and sneck as well as a monumental keyhole. The bed was high, with a stained dark wooden head. Roland looked round this small private place and felt a moment of pure freedom. He was alone. Perhaps it had all been for this, to find a place where he could be alone? If his solitude was disturbed by a memory of the last time he had slept near Maud Bailey, of their electric encounter outside Sir George's wonderful bathroom, of the electric shock, Ash's "kick galvanic," that had passed between them, he hardly admitted it to himself. The wall between their rooms was a mere lath-and-plaster partition, and he heard mysterious movements, close at hand, and imagined, briefly, the long vanishing serpent of her dragon kimono in Lincolnshire. But that was not in the real world, he told himself. Was it? He slid into bed and began on his familiarisation with Christabel LaMotte. Maud had lent him Leonora Stern's book on Motif and Matrix in the Poems of LaMotte. He leafed through the chapter headings: "From Venus Mount to the Barren Heath"; "Female Landscapes and Unbroken Waters, Impenetrable Surfaces"; "From the Fountain of Thirst to the Armorican Ocean-Skin":
And what surfaces of the earth do we women choose to celebrate, who have appeared typically in phallocentric texts as a penetrable hole, inviting or abhorrent, surrounded by, fringed with-something? Women writers and painters are seen to have created their own significantly evasive landscapes, with features which deceive or elude the penetrating gaze, tactile landscapes which do not privilege the dominant stare. The heroine takes pleasure in a world which is both bare and not pushy, which has small hillocks and rises, with tufts of scrub and gently prominent rocky parts which disguise sloping declivities, hidden clefts, not one but a multitude of hidden holes and openings through which life-giving waters bubble and enter reciprocally. Such external percepts, embodying inner visions, are George Eliot's Red Deeps, George Sand's winding occluded paths in Berry, Willa Cather's canons, female-visioned female-enjoyed contours of Mother Earth. Cixous has remarked that many women experience visions of caves and fountains during the orgasmic pleasures of autoeroticism and shared caresses. It is a landscape of touch and double-touch, for as Irigaray has showed us, all our deepest "vision" begins with our self-stimulation, the touch and kiss of our two lower lips, our double sex. Women have noted that literary heroines commonly find their most intense pleasures alone in these secretive landscapes, hidden from view. I myself believe that the pleasure of the fall of waves on the shores is to be added to this delight, their regular breaking bearing a profound relation to the successive shivering delights of the female orgasm. There is a marine and salty female wave-water to be figured which is not, as Venus Anadyomene was, put together out of the crud of male semen scattered on the deep at the moment of the emasculation of Father Time by his Oedipal son. Such pleasure in the shapeless yet patterned succession of waters, in the formless yet formed sequence of waves on the shore, is essentially present in the art of Virginia Woolf and the form of her sentences, her utterance, themselves. I can only marvel at the instinctive delicacy and sensitivity of those female companions of Charlotte Brontë who turned aside when she first came face to face with the power of the sea at Filey, and waited peacefully until, her body trembling, her face flushed, her eyes wet, she was able to rejoin her companions and walk on with them.
The heroines of LaMotte's texts are typically watery beings. Dahud the matriarchal Sorceress-Queen rules a hidden kingdom below the unbroken waters of the Armorie Gulf. The Fairy Melusina is in her primary and beneficent state a watery being. Like her magical mother, Pressine, she is first encountered by her husband-to-be at the Fontaine de Soif, which might be construed as either the Thirsty Fountain or The Fountain which satisfies Thirst. Although the second may seem "logical," in the female world which is in-formed by illogic and structured by feeling and in-tuition, a sense can be perceived in which the Dry Fountain, the Thirsty Fountain, is the hard-to-access and primary signification. What does LaMotte tell us of the Fontaine de Soif?
Her poem draws extensively on the prose romance of the monk Jean d' Arras, who tells us that the Fountain "springs from a wild hillside, with great rocks above, and a beautiful meadow along a valley, after the high forest." Mélusine's mother is discovered by this fountain singing beautifully, "more harmoniously than any siren, any fairy, any nymph ever sang." They are perceived, that is, by the male view, as temptresses, allied with the seductive powers of Nature. LaMotte's fountain, by contrast, is inaccessible and concealed; the knight and his lost horse must descend and scramble to come to it and to the Fairy Melusina's "small clear" voice "singing to itself" which "sings no more" when the man and beast disturb a stone on their damp descent.
LaMotte's description of the ferns and foliage is Pre-Raphaelite in its precision and delicacy-the "rounded" rocks are covered with a pelt 01 mosses, worts, mints and maidenhair ferns. The fountain does not "spring" but "bubbles and seeps" up into the "still and secret" pool, with its "low mossy stone" surrounded by "peaks and freshenings" of "running and closing" waters.
This may all be read as a symbol of female language, which is partly suppressed, partly self-communing, dumb before the intrusive male and not able to speak out. The male fountain spurts and springs. Mélusine's fountain has a female wetness, trickling out from its pool rather than rising confidently, thus mirroring those female secretions which are not inscribed in our daily use of language {langue, tongue)-the sputum, mucus, milk and bodily fluids of women who are silent for dryness.
Melusina, singing to herself on the brink of this mystic fountain, is a potent being of great authority who knows the beginnings and ends of things-and is, as has been pointed out, in her aspect of water-serpent, a complete being, capable of generating life, or meanings, on her own, without need for external help. The Italian scholar Silvia Veggetti Finzi sees Melusina's "monstrous" body in this sense as a product of female auto-erotic fantasies of generation without copulation, which female desire, she says, has received very little expression in mythology. "We find it most frequently in myths of origin as an expression of the chaos which precedes and justifies cosmic order. Of this kind is the Assyro-Babylonian myth of Ti'amat, or the myth of Tiresias, who saw the primordial reproduction of serpents and measured the superior quality (plus-valore) of female desire and the mythemes [mitemt] of the vegetable cycle of lettuce."
Roland laid aside Leonora Stern with a small sigh. He had a vision of the land they were to explore, covered with sucking human orifices and knotted human body-hair. He did not like this vision, and yet, a child of his time, found it compelling, somehow guaranteed to be significant, as a geological survey of the oolite would not be. Sexuality was like thick smoked glass; everything took on the same blurred tint through it. He could not imagine a pool with stones and water.