Sarah Perry on Hilary Mantel’s death: A source of love has been extinguished

There is a blackbird on my desk. It is small, this blackbird, and plump; it is eyeing me with a yellow eye too sharp to be entirely kind. It is printed on a card measuring four inches square, and this card has become softened and dented with time. Inside the card – in thick black ink drawn out from the nib of a fountain pen, or possibly a feather quill – Hilary Mantel, a woman I loved, has written that she hopes I am well, and happy, and happily at work.

All afternoon I have kept this card on my desk, occasionally lapsing into tears. The grief I feel is that of an apprentice for their master, and a subject for their prince, but it feels peculiarly as if a source of love has been extinguished. That was the particular gift of Hilary Mantel: that this creature of piercing wit and intelligence, whose visions of the human and inhuman were often so gleefully black, was unfailingly, placidly kind.

With all the fond remembrance of a lover, I recall my first sight of her. I was studying the Gothic for a PhD, and sat at noon on a strip of grass outside a classroom reading Beyond Black, her novel. Hilary Mantel, I thought. Never heard of her. Still, I’d been told I ought to read it, and I had been raised to obedience. I opened the book. “Teatime in Enfield,” I read. “Night falling on Potter’s Bar.” I put the book down. Noon in summer, and gooseflesh on my arms. Who on earth was this woman, and what on earth was she up to here? I could not have told you how I knew that genius squatted in those phrases, only that it did.

I went on reading. The day receded. The gooseflesh did not. I had never read anything like it, because there was nothing like it: to me her voice rose above her peers like that of a tenor above a chorus of schoolboys. It wasn’t only that the prose was rich without indulgence, and elegant without self-regard; it was the sense that a great unstoppable mischief was at work, poking away at me until I was in a state of delicious discomfort and convinced I’d find the devil in the downstairs toilet. (Discomfort attends me now, in fact: did that blackbird on my desk wink? I have turned the card over. I would put nothing past her.)

That was the first day I loved her; I have loved her every day since. I was young then, and did not know that in the years that followed her writing on infertility and sickness and religion would attend me like a wise companion, albeit a companion with a habit of sticking out a foot to trip me should I become complacent. (To be a writer who loves Mantel is to be kept humble: you do not close The Mirror and the Light and look on your own manuscript with anything but contempt.)

A man’s reach, they say, should exceed his grasp. I daresay: but nothing was beyond the grasp of Mantel. If it’s a pitiless scrutiny of modern politics and royalty you want, you want her; if it’s an unflinching engagement with sickness and suffering you want, you assuredly want her. Historical fiction of such richness that to read it is to think you sit beside a hanging tapestry, hearing the executioner sharpen his axe? Hilary Mantel. Dry, mordant interrogation of familial love? Hilary Mantel. Goodness, wickedness, devils both real and imagined: all subordinate to her pen. It is rare for a novelist to achieve much beyond having entertained, and done well, that is a noble craft. But Mantel attained the status of a national conscience, and if this caused her to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged readers, that is only meet and right: a conscience is no use at all if it isn’t sharp enough to prick.

I met her only once. I’d been invited to a literary festival in Budleigh Salterton where she lived, and could think of nothing but the possibility that I might meet the woman who’d been kind enough to write to me sometimes, and whose work represented for me the height of what any human could reasonably hope to attain with their allotted span. Seated on a hard chair in a church deconsecrated for the day, I spotted her in the audience, and recall there being a taste like that of a copper penny on my tongue: she existed, she really did, and now she would hear every foolish thing I would say, and it would be necessary to hurl myself into the English Channel in my shame.

Afterwards, she came towards me through the crowd. How small she is, I thought. In photographs I saw an imposing woman, but in fact she was quite little; when she took my hands and kissed me twice I discovered her skin was exceedingly thin and soft, as if she had been woven out of silk, and not grown like mortals out of flesh and blood. I don’t recall what she said, only that she grasped my hands with kindness, and looked at me for a while with eyes that glittered as if they had facets.

All afternoon, I have wondered what it means for a great writer to die. Is Homer dead? Is Woolf? Is any voice silent as long as it is heard? There will be no day when we do not need her, and no day when we cannot find her. Thomas Cromwell is examining his apple trees, and that old devil Fludd is knocking at the chapel door. The blackbird is winking on my desk, and the ink on the card is still wet. The queen is dead. Long live the queen.