Babel Tower (5 page)

Frederica tells him about her sister’s death. He realises that this narrative is practised, this is the way she has found it convenient—possible—to tell it. Her sister, she says, was married to a vicar and had two small children. And the cat brought in a bird, a sparrow, which took refuge under the refrigerator, and her sister had pulled it out and reached under it, and the fridge was not properly earthed. She was very young, says Frederica. Afterwards, she says wryly, we all suffered from shock. Shock waves, she says grimly. Waves and waves of shock. How terrible, says Hugh Pink, prevented from imagining by Frederica’s matter-of-fact tone.

“And Nigel looked after me. I’d never needed looking after before, but Nigel looked after me.”

“I didn’t know Nigel.”

“He was around. He wasn’t
at
Cambridge, he just visited. His name’s Reiver, the family have a house, an old house, Bran House, just over those fields, those are their fields, over that stile.”

They walk on. The boy holds Frederica’s hand. He shuffles dead leaves with quick kicks.

“Look, Leo,” says Frederica. “Conkers. Over there.”

One or two gleam, polished ruddy-brown, through split spiked green balls lined with creamy-white. They lie in a drift of chestnut leaves, in a hollow.

“Go and get them,” says Frederica. “We always used to be so excited when we found any. We didn’t often, local boys had always combed the ground first. They threw stones at the branches, to bring them down. They were a great event. Every year. I never used to make holes and fight with them. Boys did, but I just kept them until they were dull and shrivelled, and then I threw them out. Every year.”

The boy pulls at Frederica’s hand. He will not gather the conkers without her. He pulls, and she follows, picking them up amongst the dead leaves and offering them to him—“humbly” is the word that comes to Hugh Pink.

Hugh says to Leo, “Do you like to put strings through them?”

The boy does not answer.

“He’s like his father,” says Frederica. “He doesn’t talk much.”

“
You
don’t,” says the boy. “
You
don’t talk much.”

“When your mother and I were friends, before,” says Hugh Pink, “when we were younger, she never stopped talking.”

Frederica straightens herself jerkily and begins to walk again, leaving the other two amongst the conkers. Hugh’s foot uncovers a monster, a solid glistening globe, bursting its cape. He offers it to Leo, who hands him Frederica’s offerings, in order to inspect this. Hugh says, “I’ve got a little bag here I had sandwiches in. You could put them all in there, to carry them.”

“I could,” says Leo. “Thanks.”

He drops the chestnuts solemnly into Hugh’s bag, hands it back to Hugh, and puts up his hand to be held. Hugh takes it. He cannot think of anything else to say. Leo says, “Come to tea in my house, now.”

“Your mummy hasn’t asked me.”

“Come to tea.”

They catch up with Frederica.

“This man,” says Leo. “This man is coming to tea, in my house.”

“That would be nice,” says Frederica. “Come to tea, Hugh. It isn’t far.”

Once this is agreed, the boy suddenly appears to feel free to run about, and begins to make little journeys into the undergrowth, pocketing feathers, shells, and a tuft of fur. Hugh says, “You’ve done a lot of living, Frederica. Real things have happened to you.”

“Having things happen to you and living” says Frederica. She begins again. “They aren’t the same thing. I suppose they must be the same thing. I used to be so sure about living. I wanted.”

The sentence has no object and no end, apparently.

They climb the stile, and cross into the afternoon fields, where a heavy white horse is grazing, where a bird is singing in a thorn bush, where Hugh trips on a molehill and rights himself. He has a feeling he can’t find words for, although it is to do with his poetry. It is a feeling
he thinks of as the
English
feeling, though in fact it may be simply a human feeling about death. It is a brief knowledge of his own temporary body, all the soft slippery dark organs, all the minute interlocking bones, all the snaking, fizzing, prickling veins and nerves. It is the knowledge that he is
inside
this skin, and it is intensely pleasurable because it always goes with a sense of the huge sweep and intricacy and age of what is
outside
hair, skin, eyeballs, nostrils, lips and the helix of the ear. It is the irrational pleasure of a creature in the fact that its surroundings were there long before its own appearance, and will be there long after. It was not a possible pleasure, Hugh thinks, before he had lived a certain time, before the repeated crossings of local earth, in his case England, had become part of the form of the soft pale mass in his skull, part of the active knowledge of his sight and smell and taste. You cannot have this particular pleasure in living, Hugh tells himself, before you have begun to know you are dying. He thinks it tends to come in this sort of landscape—bitten grass, exposed stones, bush, tree, hill, horizon—because generations of his ancestors, thousands and millions of years before towns and cities, and still after, have had this sense in this sort of place. The cells remember it, Hugh thinks. Every inch of this turf has absorbed, he supposes, knuckle-bones and heart-strings, fur and nails, blood and lymph. There are equally strong feelings in cities, which also turn the mind like whirlpools, but not this one, which is essentially green, and blue, and grey. The thing which can flash into the brain a memory of
this
thing is the repeated reading of words which, like turf and stones, are part of the matter of the mind: the Immortality Ode, say, the Nightingale, Shakespeare’s sonnets. There again the pleasure of the sense of one’s own vanishing briefness—Hugh stumbles—is part of the pleasure in the durable words.

Sometimes he fears this feeling is no longer general, that few in his world would recognise it, and those who did would be suspicious, would call it stock response, silly pastoral. But still the smell of the earth, the moving lips of the horse in the grass, the tree’s black twigs on the grey air, move him, living and dying.

He says none of this. He picks himself up and walks onwards. He watches Frederica’s son, trudging sturdily across the pasture. He tries to remember what it was like to be so small, to have the sense that years are very nearly infinite, other seasons unimaginably far away, as they would be to a man on a planet that took half a lifetime to circle its sun.

•   •   •

Beyond the next gate, over the brow of the meadow, is Bran House. Hugh Pink sees that it does indeed have a moat, not metaphorical, behind which is a high encircling wall, inside which are a tiled roof and Tudor chimney pots. The wall is both blank and beautiful, made of old, soft red bricks, crumbling here and there, encrusted with mosses and lichens, stonecrop and houseleeks, ivy-leaved toadflax and wild snapdragons. Branches—fruit trees, a cedar in the distance—rear above the wall.

“How beautiful,” says Hugh.

“It is,” says Frederica.

“What a place for Leo to grow up,” says Hugh, still thinking of his “English” feeling.

“I know,” says Frederica. “I know it is a wonderful place.”

“We go in through the orchard,” says the child, running on ahead. Round a corner is a humped wooden bridge, over the moat, and a door in the wall.

As they go through the trees, Hugh says, “I never thought of you as the mistress of a country house.”

“Nor did I,” says Frederica.

“Only connect,” says Hugh vaguely, thinking of Margaret Schlegel at Howards End. The phrase itself produces a renewed wash or swoop of English feeling.

“
Don’t say that
,” says Frederica, sounding more like the woman he once knew than she has done all afternoon. Leo is busy wiping his boots on a bootscraper. A door opens, and a woman appears, middle-aged, in woollen stockings and tongued brogues, who takes him in, an arm around his shoulder, telling him it is tea-time.

“This is Pippy Mammott,” says Frederica. “Pippy, this is my friend Hugh Pink. We were at university together. Leo invited him to tea.”

“I’ll put out more cups,” says Pippy Mammott. She strides off, holding Leo’s hand. Hugh and Frederica cross a tiled hall, past a turning square staircase, into a drawing-room, with window-seats and comfy sofas.

“They’ll bring tea,” says Frederica. “They’ll bring Leo. Nigel isn’t here. He’s working, I suppose. He works for his uncle’s shipping business, he goes off for days or weeks and comes back.”

“And you,” says Hugh. “What do you do?”

“What does it look as though I do?”

“I don’t know, Frederica. When I last saw you you were all flaming and ferocious. You were going to be the first woman Fellow of King’s and have your own TV programme and write something—in some new form—”

They have not sat down. Frederica is staring out of the window. Two women come into the room and are introduced to Hugh as Olive and Rosalind Reiver, Nigel’s sisters. The tea is brought on a trolley, and handed about by Pippy Mammott. Olive and Rosalind sit side by side on a sofa covered with pink and silver-green blowsy blooms printed on linen. They are square, dark women, with strong bones, and shadows on their upper lips. They wear comfortable jumpers, one oatmeal, one olive, tweed skirts and opaque stockings over strong, shapely legs. Their eyes are like Leo’s, large, dark and lustrous, under heavy dark brows. They ask Hugh Pink all the questions Frederica has not asked. What does he do, where does he live, is he married, doesn’t he love their beautiful part of the country, how can he bear to live in a city with the stench and the crowds and the machines, would he like to see the grounds, the home farm? Hugh says he is on a walking holiday and is a long way from his next stopping place. Olive and Rosalind say they can run him over in no time in the Land Rover, and Hugh says, no, that is not the point of a walking-tour, and he must be on his way soon, now, before the light goes. They accept this without demur. They say he is very right to stick to his project, they approve of that, they say, there is no way as good as walking to see the real country. Pippy Mammott hands out scones, slices of cake, tea, more tea. The boy ferries between his mother and his aunts, showing things first to one, then the other. Pippy Mammott takes his hand and says it is time to go, now. Leo says, “I want to stay here,” but is led away. “Say good-bye to Mr. Pink,” says Pippy Mammott. “Good-bye,” says the boy, not bashfully.

Hugh decides he ought to go. It is true about the light and he feels he ought to go. Frederica sees him to the door, and then walks out with him down the long drive to the front gate, to set him on his way.

“Do you come to London, ever?”

“Not really. I used to. It didn’t work out.”

“You should come and see us all. Alan and Tony. Me. We miss you.”

“You could write. You could write about poetry.”

“Try and come. You seem to have lots of help—”

“It isn’t
help
.”

She stands awkwardly, helpless. He wonders if he can kiss her. He doesn’t exactly want to. Her old restless energy is in abeyance and
with it her sexual sharpness. He puts his arms rather suddenly round her and brushes his face with hers. She flinches and stiffens and then hugs him fiercely.

“I’m glad you were there in that wood.
You will keep in touch
, Hugh—”

“Of course,” says Hugh.

The telephone babbles and quacks and purrs. Ginnie Greenhill tells, “Sex is so much a matter of how you feel about
yourself
. Oh, I know there are ideas about what is
normally
attractive, normal proportions as you put it, of course, yes, I do know—”

Babble, quack, purr, babble, a series of plosives inside the black shell.

“No, I’m not underestimating repulsion, of course it exists, it would be silly to underestimate it. But on the other hand there’s such a
variety
of people around, such curiosity and goodwill—”

Canon Holly examines Daniel’s log.

Canon Holly lights another cigarette. He is in his late fifties, handsome in a lean, long-faced, lined way, like a well-bred horse, with deepset eyes and long strong teeth, nicotine-stained. He is interested in Steelwire but has never picked up one of his calls. He himself is an expert on God. He has written a successful and controversial book called
Within God Without God
and has been seen on the television, supporting the Bishop of Woolwich and
Honest to God. Within God Without God
argues in a riddling and witty way that to lose the comfortable Old Man Up There, or for that matter the Friend of Little Children wandering amiably in the pastures beyond the stars, was to discover a Force which made all men Incarnate Words, Incarnate Souls, as Christ had shown. Godwithin, the Canon wrote, had not made us fearfully and wonderfully as a craftsman might pinch and poke a ball of inanimate dirt or clay. He made us much more fearfully and wonderfully because He was the inherent Intelligence in the first protozoa clinging together in the primal broth, because He had grown with us and still
grew with us, He grew and divided in every cell of our growing and dividing body from egg to fertile parents. He was and is as Dylan Thomas has so beautifully put it, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

Daniel is not sure how far Canon Holly’s theological position differs from atheism or pantheism. He himself is temperamentally no theologian, only an instinctively religious man who is no longer sure what that word, “religious,” means. He suspects also that his own position does not differ from that of Canon Holly. He sees that the Canon’s thought works in a Christian framework of prayer, biblical references, ritual and theology, and that these things are part of the Canon’s liveliness, his personal history, his self. Daniel is a watchful man. He thinks the Canon would shrivel if he were obliged to follow his own reasoning, his own metaphors, outside the walls, so to speak, of the Church, the singing, the ritual, the imposed duties. Daniel thinks also that he himself would
not
shrivel. Perhaps, given his very shaky assent to almost all the doctrines of his Church, he ought to go and live and work outside it. He stays, partly, because he needs the impersonality of the absolute requirement of virtue. He needs to be required, for instance, to be patient with Steelwire. This kind of work—without the impersonal sanction—becomes something different, more self-indulgent, something unnatural and perhaps unwholesome.