Babel Tower (12 page)

Daniel asks Bill, watching him tidy away his post, what news he has of Frederica.

“None,” says her father. “She doesn’t deign to communicate. If I didn’t know her better I’d say she’d cast us off as vulgar relations, but
I do know her better—she was properly brought up, as far as
that
goes, she may be an intellectual snob but she’s no social snob and
I absolutely refuse to believe
she married that man out of any desire to rise in the world of saddle-thumping bottoms and hunt balls. Now and then she sends a packet of snaps of the little boy. I notice she isn’t on them. We’ve got lots of pictures of him
on his pony
and
boating on lakes
—”

“Nothing wrong with ponies—”

“You know very well what I mean, Daniel. Very well. She’s bitten off more than she can chew. I can’t say I liked him—that
Nigel
—when we did meet, and I can’t say I’d choose to spend any more time in his company even if I was asked, which I won’t be. No, no good will come of it. She’s closed off from us, like Beauty and the Beast, like Gwendolen and Grandcourt, and one of these days she’ll turn up with bag and baggage, I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s not a patient creature, our Frederica, she might have been knocked sideways, but she’ll stand up again one of these days, and look around, and—”

“I don’t see how you can state all that, Bill,” says his wife. “You’ve no evidence for any of it. She may be very happy.”

“Do you think so? Do you think so?”

“No. But I don’t know. And there’s the little boy.”

“She’s my daughter. I know her. Something got into her. Something was always getting into her. She needed someone like you, Daniel, someone like us.”

Daniel says, “You wouldn’t even come to my wedding, you monster. You made everyone’s life a misery. You can’t just say we’re alike, now.”

“Well, we are. That was a battle of like with like. This isn’t. I should think the attraction of that
Nigel
was exactly that he wasn’t like us, that he had nothing to do with us. Well, there are lots of people who have nothing to do with us who would make better husbands for Frederica is all I can say—”

“You don’t
know
, Bill. You’re just hurt,” Winifred says.

“No, I’m not hurt. I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned that if one of your daughters is dead, you just have to feel glad the other’s
alive
, even if she won’t come to see you, that’s what. You get things in perspective. What’s alive is alive, and kicking, I suppose. Frederica was always kicking. I’ve upset Daniel. I didn’t mean to. I’ll take myself off and write to Alexander. Daniel, you
know
how things are between us, don’t pucker up.”

“I know,” says Daniel. “Give my best to Alexander. He’s a good man.”

Marcus says he must go, and Jacqueline goes with him. Daniel shakes Marcus’s hand, which is no longer, he notices, limp like a dead fish. Marcus is a perfectly ordinary intellectual-looking thin young man, with longish pale brown hair, and glasses. Daniel asks Jacqueline if she still sees Gideon Farrar.

“No. I gave all that up. It suddenly seemed not to mean anything. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say that. I never liked it, myself.”

“It does Ruth good. And it does her
no good
, too, in some ways, I think.”

“Indeed.”

Mary goes to bed, for a regulation prescribed rest, and Daniel is left alone with Winifred, in the quiet kitchen of Bill’s beautiful house. Winifred says, “Honestly, Bill is
too much.
He worries a lot about Frederica. He misses her—and then, with Stephanie gone—he feels it more, that she seems to have abandoned us. I hope you think it’s funny that he’s decided you’re like him. I hope it doesn’t seem a final insult.”

“No, no. The fire’s gone out in that chimney. We should shake hands. Anyway, it’s half-time. It’s our duty to acknowledge truths. Half-truths included.”

“And Will will come round,” says Winifred, who wants everything to be calm, to be good, to be well.

“Why should he? What I did to him—what I did—was wicked, was preposterous. Look at it coldly, look at it straight: a woman dies, a man is left with two kids, so he walks out one day and
just leaves them
—so they’ve lost two at a stroke—how can that be forgiven?”

“But you can’t look at it coldly, Daniel—you have to see how it was
then
—you were half-mad, and were doing them no good—and you can’t say we haven’t looked after them well.”

“I don’t. You’ve done wonders. They are
safe
kids. They have a home. A family. I’m not a family. I know all that.”

“And for Bill. It has been important to him to have Will—he
plays
with Will—he couldn’t play with Marcus, you know—he was awful—these things can’t be redeemed—but he has done well, and it makes him happy.”

“I didn’t abandon my kids to make Bill happy.”

“I know that.”

“Before I met her—Stephanie—I had this idea of my life. At the edge, just over the edge. Where people weren’t managing. When we
were married—I tried ordinary happiness—I were lucky, we were happy—some of the time—and both of us knew what a
chance
it was, what the odds were against it—and what we’d—abandoned for it—her work, her books, her friends—my—my need to live where it’s dangerous. Yes, that’s it. Where it’s dangerous. And when she died—I were pushed back, into
that
world—as though I shouldn’t have tried to hoist myself out of it into a sunny shelf, wi’ her—but a life, wi’out her—I couldn’t—I thought.”

“Daniel. I know. Don’t hurt yourself.”

“There’s more.
Then
I felt—I were dangerous to
them
—Will and Mary. That I could do them no good, that they’d got to be got away from what were happening to me—for their own good—I really thought that—”

“It may have been true.”

“Yes, but now. But
now.
Now there’s Marcus—looking like—like an ordinary being,
laughing
with that girl, Jacqueline—and here’s me—with my son hating me—how can I tell you? The world’s changed, and Will and Mary have changed—disaster is my job, Winifred, I know what—the living look like, as opposed to the walking dead. They’re the living.”

“And you’re the walking dead.”

“That’s it. I’m not. Not exactly. Only some of the time. Only
really.
Hell. I can do what the living do, I can eat my breakfast, I can think how lovely Mary looks, eating hers, I can find Bill funny, going on about Frederica, I can
smile
—I’ve got out of that—that
clear black state
—you see the world through a veil of coal, you know—”

“I know.”

“And now I don’t. How can I go back to what I do in London and leave Mary, when she were so nearly dead, and I wasn’t there? How can I let Will hate me so? I can tell you—it’s still truer that I’m the walking dead than that I’m so to speak resurrected. I love the smell of your toast, but it’s only because I remember it, not because I notice it. You know? I don’t know if you know. I think almost all human beings walk about over the crust of some
pit
they know is yawning for them—almost everyone has things they’d rather not see in their mind’s eye—
daren’t
let their thoughts start up—I’m no different from anyone.”

“You’re different because you say it. Because you see it in other people. Because you look at it, and work with it, instead of sidling away or looking in another direction. Those people in London need
someone. There aren’t many around like you. You can’t be all things to all men.”

Every morning the company in La Tour Bruyarde were awoken by delightful sounds of pipes and cymbals and fresh young voices. The Lady Paeony had formed the children into an enthusiastic choir, who sang their
aubades
in corridors and courtyards. No one was irritated by these dulcet sounds, which were most carefully kept sweet and low, so that pillowed heads only turned and lifted to hear more clearly. The assembled company broke their fast together in the Great Hall, and were served with bread freshly baked in the great ovens of the castle, with honey, and currant jellies, and little dishes of clotted cream and jugs of foaming milk from the cows who grazed on the grassy slopes below the fortress. The Lady Roseace had discovered the cowsheds, where the heavy gentle beasts were milked, and the dairy, where their milk was churned and sieved and skimmed and whipped, quite by accident, as she daily discovered new regions of their sequestered realm. She had cried out with delight upon entering the dairy thus unawares, and indeed from a rather dank and mouldering passage, which she had believed to be a shortcut to the latrines. It was a place of order and beauty, cool and glimmering, with earthenware tiles on its floor, and many varieties of tiles on its walls and working surfaces, tiles darkly green and richest lapis-blue, tiles sprigged with forget-me-nots, and decorated with blue milkmaids on white glaze, with windmills and weathercocks and other innocent country creatures. A large young woman with round red forearms was patting butter, and another was pouring a great flood of sweet, warm, foaming milk into an earthenware pancheon. The Lady Roseace had wandered delightedly round this quiet place, touching cool surfaces, tasting cheeses with a pink finger, and had finally walked from the dairy down a flagged passage into a byre where a young man and a young woman were milking two creamy-golden cows, in that smell of straw and mild piss and animal heat which is unforgettable as rose gardens. She watched entranced as the ten fingers pressed and coaxed and squeezed and tickled and stripped, and the two large udders softly shuddered and contracted under the finger-tips, and the teats sprang and started, and the white liquid spurted and hissed into the pails. The
young man’s face was pressed into the hairy groin of the cow, and both were softly beaded with sweat.

The Lady Roseace thought no employment could be more delightful, and said as much to Culvert, when he came into her rosy boudoir that morning, as he always came, to discuss the day’s doings. She asked him who the delicious people were who inhabited the dairy and the byre, and he replied that they were the dairymaids and the cowman, those who had always had charge of those places. Inspired by the idea of the skimmer, and the butter-pats, and perhaps also by the memory of the warm, fragrant flank of the cow, the Lady Roseace said that this was a trade she would like to learn, and that it was their intention, was it not, to abolish the status of servants and masters, so that ideally there should surely be no dairymaid and no cowman?

Indeed, that was so, replied Culvert, and no one was more conscious of the urgent need to proceed with that project than he himself. Indeed, since their arrival in the Tower, he had busied himself with the writing of a Memorandum which should form the basis for a discussion of the best way to set about the division of labour in the community and in the economic circumstances in which they found themselves. And he had found, he went on, abstractedly inserting his hand in its customary place between Roseace’s full breasts, and playing elegantly with her right nipple, that the consideration of the division of labour had entailed the consideration of all sorts of diverse other things, such as the system of education that might prove most fruitful, and ideas about desirable modes of dress, and new forms of language. His brain was in a turmoil, protested Culvert, transferring his delicate fingering to the left nipple and leaving the right one straining upright. The Lady Roseace stared dreamily out of the window, and shuddered agreeably, and said again that she would like to work in the dairy, she was very attracted to the idea of the dairy. She said also, as she sank dreamily to her knees on the goatskin rugs, and felt Culvert parting her moist thighs with his hard hand, that perhaps he should discuss division of labour with the whole company before his complex Memorandum was entirely complete. Otherwise they might think, she said, her voice frilling and shivering with bliss as he opened her lower lips, that he believed himself to be the master and architect, and not only one of a free and equal society, as they had agreed, she said, getting out the word “agreed” before a long wordless moan of bliss overtook it.

Culvert addressed the assembled company in the place he called sometimes the Theatre of Tongues and sometimes, though less often, simply the Theatre of Speech. There were other theatres, as we shall see, the Theatre of Mime, for instance, the Theatre also of Cruelty, in other parts of the citadel. The Theatre of Tongues had once been a chapel, like some of the other theatres, the Theatre of Sacrifice, for instance, and there were of course also other chapels in the Tower, some of them disused, some of them no more than an anchorite’s cell, some of them adapted to other purposes, garderobes maybe, or wine-stores, or places for the strict examination of souls and bodies. No count of the chapels had ever come up with exactly the same number as any other, and so it was also, with even more exorbitant margins of error, with the other rooms in that place.

The Theatre of Tongues was so called partly at least because in the gloom of its upper vaulting could still be seen an ancient frieze depicting tongues of flame, boiling upwards like pyres or faggots and descending also like crowns. The walls were crumbling and the fresco damaged. Some believed the tongues of flame to be part of a lively depiction of hell-fire, and their case was partly borne out by the presence of a soot-black demon over the south door, brandishing eight arms, each holding a wailing infant, with his mouth, full of gnashing white fangs, ready to ingest them. But others believed that the flames were the relics of a depiction of the Pentecostal descent of the Spirit, and explained the shadowy stick-like figures barely visible beneath the tongues as the Apostles waiting in the Upper Room. They too had visual proofs, of a kind, for there was a faded frieze of bishops’ mitres that ran beneath all.