1990: Octavia Mallard
Letter to Viola, in London
Your last letter stirred up a whole gallery of half-forgotten things—those long, draughty winters in Surrey, the smell of polish and lavender in Aunt’s drawing room, and that enormous, dust-coloured trunk she kept under the window seat. I can see it even now, with its flaking brass corners and the peculiar little key tied to its handle with a ribbon so faded that no original colour could be guessed at.
Do you remember the great family book that lay inside? It was always spoken of, in capital letters, as The Little Book of Fitzartur Foibles, and, true to form, was treated with the reverence usually reserved for relics or legal documents. Aunt would lift it out with a small, reverent sigh, place it upon the table, and, with some ceremony, insert the key into the ornate silver clasp. The sound of the mechanism lifting—a little sigh and click—always seemed to release something more than a mere lock, as if stories themselves were a presence impatient to be let loose.
I have been thinking of one tale in particular, one that I had, until recently, almost forgotten. It concerned a Duchess—though which Duchess or of where was never said—who vanished overnight, taking with her all her jewels, her collection of hats, and, most curiously, her milliner. The story was read to us as though it were history, though I suspect it was one of those family fables that only pretend at genealogy. I remember there was something about a sapphire—thick, vivid, and impossibly blue. I was enraptured by that description. Even now the word sapphire sounds deep and cool, as though the vowels themselves were cut with precision, each syllable catching a glint of light. I used to imagine I could hear its colour.
What intrigues me, looking back, is not the tale itself but its persistence. Why does such a fragment return now, uninvited? Perhaps because in my work these days I am increasingly preoccupied with how language carries cultural sediment—the way a word retains the ghost of an earlier world. That sapphire, described by Aunt half a century ago, lives somewhere between the story and the sound. It was never only a jewel, was it? It was a vessel for everything “blue” meant to our childish minds—mystery, rarity, the shimmer of aristocracy, and the melancholy of things beyond our reach.
I sometimes wonder whether those old stories were meant to instruct or to enchant. They seem now to have done neither directly but left us with a lexicon of associations more enduring than any moral. When I hear my students speak about “semantic memory”, I think of Aunt turning that tiny key, setting free not sense alone but whole constellations of tone and texture. Language is so much more than description; it is resurrection. Every telling reanimates its own ancestry.
How strange that the mind recalls what the heart has not consciously summoned. A Duchess, a sapphire, a vanished milliner—perhaps this is the linguist’s inheritance: to wonder not what was meant, but why we remember it in words.
You are here: States of Grace > Biography