Babel Tower (58 page)

All the same, somehow, the idea of Raphael and Cambridge is not entirely delightful. There is something “bygone” about the Cambridge lawns and the Cambridge cloisters, the teacups and the tobacco.

What do I really want? Frederica asks herself, with her blood beating in her empty head in her empty room. And cannot answer. Solitary Frederica is an unreal being, because Leo exists.

•   •   •

She decides to telephone Leo. It is the second day of his absence. She is afraid to hear Bran House on the end of the line, afraid of all the people there, except Leo, afraid too of what Leo may have become, may think of her.

“Bran House,” says the telephone, in a female voice, comfortable, that she cannot place. It is Pippy Mammott.

Frederica says, “Could I speak to Leo, please?”

A silence. Frederica can hear the polished hall, the muted heavy doors.

“I should like to speak to Leo,” says Frederica, rather relieved that she does not have to name herself.

“I shouldn’t think so,” says the voice, answering her first remark.

“I just want to say hullo to him. To keep in touch.”

“So did others.”

“I know.” She does not want to expatiate, or to plead with Pippy. Who also loves Leo. “Is he there?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“Could you look?”

Another silence.

“No, he isn’t there. He’s out.”

“Will you tell him I called? Could he call back?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“He might want to,” says Frederica, unable to say “
Please
” to Pippy Mammott.

“He might not,” says Pippy “Best not to disturb, if you want my opinion, as I’m sure you don’t.”

Frederica, hearing hatred, puts the phone down, carefully. She is shaking. Tears brim.

She decides to call round her friends. She speaks to Hugh, to Alan, to Tony, to Alexander, to Daniel, to Edmund Wilkie. She decides to have a party. She speaks to Desmond Bull and to Rupert Parrott. Rupert has a wife Frederica has never met, Melissa. He asks if she may come to the party. Tony too has now a girlfriend, Penny Komuves. He will bring Penny. Wilkie is back with his old girlfriend, Caroline, of the
Astraea
days. They have both been involved with others, and have now returned. They will all bring bottles, as Frederica has no money. Tony Watson says he has rediscovered Owen Griffiths, who
used to love Frederica in Cambridge and is now working in the Labour Party’s research department. Frederica decides against inviting Thomas Poole, perhaps out of fear of “the public domain,” perhaps out of fear of complications. She does not think of inviting Jude Mason, but is unsurprised when he appears with Daniel, to whom he has attached himself.

It is a good party. The voices mix, mingle and oppose.

“Did you get to the poetry festival at the Albert Hall?”

“No, but some friends did. They said it was wild.”

“The audience howled and hooted. And bayed. It was pandemonium.”

“It was Nüremberg at times. I was there.”

“Jeff Nuttall and John Latham were painted blue. They were dressed as books, which they destroyed. Everyone danced.”

“They were all high, they were all spaced out. Adrian Mitchell read a poem about Vietnam.”

“It was full of enthusiasm and incredibly tedious.”

“The Americans have dropped paratroops in Vietnam. They are on the offensive. It’s their war now.”

“Wilson should speak against them.”

“How can he? Our welfare state is funded by American handouts and subventions.”

“They want him to send troops. They urge him to send troops.”

“He’s cunning. He won’t. He won’t give them more than words.”

“He had no majority in the Commons on the corporation tax. He can’t hang on. There’ll have to be an election.”

“We shall have Reggie Maudling as Prime Minister. He’ll succeed Alec Douglas-Home.”

“We shan’t win the next election. We’ll have the Tories back.”

“I wouldn’t write Wilson off. He’s cunning.”

“Is it true he’s ruled by someone called Marcia Williams?”

“Not ruled. He trusts her.”

“Kitchen cabinet …”

“Ah, Daniel. Just the man. My theological novelist is trying to take her book back again. First she wanted it back because her husband wouldn’t like it. Now she wants it back because he does. He says it’s a wonderful picture of the Death of God in our society. He sees the stabbed selfish husband as the sacrificial lamb, I think. He wrote me a
letter, saying that when the clergyman loses his faith he
is
the Death of God, and when his wife stabs him, his death opens the way for the Presence of God to be restored, since his Death is incarnate in his doubt.”

“It sounds very contemporary.”

“Phyllis Pratt says God will be more thoroughly annihilated if she withdraws the book. She’s writing another, though. It’s got a title. ‘Grind His Bones.’ It’s another theological thriller, she says, about a sexton who composts the vicar and his curate. I can never tell when she’s joking. I won’t withdraw the book. It’s got a cover with a Magritte-like loaf, bleeding gouts of blood.”

“Dreadful.”

“Saleable, in the present climate. You wouldn’t talk to Mrs. Pratt about her theological doubts?”

“I’d rather not.”

“
I’ll
talk to her.”

“Did you hear Patrick Heron at the ICA? He was attacking the Americans. He accused them of cultural imperialism. He thinks it’s a kind of chauvinist modishness, all the critics who go round saying everything good comes out of America.”

“What he is doing himself,” says Hugh Pink, “is incredibly beautiful. All these floating discs and brilliant fields of saturated colour. It’s like seeing the elements of creation, it’s like seeing angels, except you shouldn’t use analogies for it, it simply
is.
It makes me feel ill.”

“Ill, Hugh? Why?”

“Because it makes me want to write, as though that was the only sensible thing to do. But I hate poems about paintings, I hate the second-hand. I want to do
something like that
with words, and there isn’t anything, or if there is, I don’t have access to it.”

“How are you, Jude?”

“Ill. Impatient. Lost.”

“The printers are trying to bowdlerise your book. They have queried many of your words in red ink.”

“I will not have my words touched or changed.”

“We’ll run it past a lawyer, of course.”

“I will not be bowdlerised.”

“Don’t worry. Your book will either offend, or not, as a whole. There isn’t any point in chopping off a few warts.”

“You console me.”

“I don’t mean to, necessarily. Are you writing another?”

“I am too nervous. It is appalling, not to be writing. I have no life. I am no one. So I go to gatherings to which I am not invited.”

“I would have invited you if I knew where you lived.”

“I can find my way
by other means,
as you see. I like your underground home. You would not like mine.”

“What are you doing, Frederica?”

“Nothing much. My son is away. I teach, but the teaching’s seasonal. I am trying to get unmarried.”

“I can’t think why you ever got married. I could find you some work researching at the TV centre. Would you like that? What are you going to do in the long run?”

“I don’t know. This morning I thought, I might go back to a Ph.D. I’ve discovered I can teach.”

“Difficult to imagine.”

“I
can.
”

“OK. You can. Those that can’t, teach. What is it you can’t do?”

“Write a novel? Don’t be nasty, Wilkie. I
like
teaching. It matters. Ask Alexander.”

“What does he know?”

“He’s on a royal commission on teaching. He goes in and out of schools.”

“Hmm. That might make a good programme. How they learn? What they learn. There are people up in North Yorkshire looking at what the brain does when we learn. Are we a computer, or a jellyfish, or a computing jellyfish? I’m a jellyfish man myself, I think we’re made of flesh and blood and neurones
in jelly,
but it’s not fashionable. It’s all algorithms. Algorithms. Everything analysed into binary dichotomies. Either/or. Whereas you and I know it’s both—and, and a few more things as well. Now
there’s
something useful to do, study the memory.”

“Marcus is doing that.”

“So he is. He’s turned out well. Surprising.”

Tony Watson’s new girlfriend, Penny Komuves, is a lecturer at the LSE, daughter of a Hungarian-Jewish economist whose ideas are current in Harold Wilson’s Treasury thinking. She and the cheerful Owen Griffiths chatter away about Wilson’s kitchen cabinet, to which both
have an ancillary access; they gossip about Mrs. Wilson’s discomfort in Number 10 and the influence of Marcia Williams. Penny Komuves is short and dark and solid, with a Vidal Sassoon haircut, which suits her. Owen tells stories of George Brown’s drinking. Desmond Bull and Hugh Pink discuss Patrick Heron’s anti-American aesthetic manifesto as though it was at least as important as Ian Smith’s threatened declaration of Rhodesian independence from Britain. Rupert Parrott is different in the company of his wife, who is a rather County girl with a fine-boned face amongst a curtain of silver-blond hair, and angles—rather pretty angles—where less well-bred women have curves. She says almost nothing all evening, turning her head with polite interest from face to face as people speak. The other person who doesn’t speak is Daniel, who had hoped to see Agatha, whom he likes; he mentions this to Alexander, who says he had also hoped to see Agatha. “I think she went to Yorkshire,” says Daniel. “She said she might see me there, if I go up to see Will and Mary.”

“She didn’t tell me she was going,” says Alexander, with pleasurable sadness. “She sent me a draft of two chapters of our report. She writes very clearly.”

Frederica chops up dark bread and French bread and celery and chunks of cheese. Jude Mason looms up behind her.

“You do not appear to be happy. Will you trust me to hand that round?”

“I am not happy; I think that’s the first personal remark you’ve ever made to me.”

“I am in your house.”

“So you feel you should take an interest in me?”

“No. I feel able to diagnose. You have too many ties. You could have lived as I do, without desire, and then you could have been—”

“What, Jude?” Frederica is slightly drunk. Jude’s steely face goes in and out of focus.

“Single-minded. You dissipate yourself. On affections and concerns. Daniel is single-minded.
Tollit peccata mundi,
to speak blasphemously. I prophesy. You will not be what you have the possibility of being.”

“That’s cruel.”

“I am not concerned with kindness. Draw in your tentacles, young woman, all this is trivial, all this chatter. Our deity—I call it Time, Time rules sublunary beings—our deity does not forgive an addiction to the trivial.”

“You are pompous. And I am not addicted to it. I am stuck in it. And it isn’t trivial altogether. It’s like cells breeding, it is
what is.
”

She sees the faces and chatter in her room as a warm brew of potential life and form, infinitely interesting, if only she could find her own proper, her own
real
relation to it. What is “real”?

“I am repelled by cells breeding.”

“Your bad luck.”

Jude sways. “I have seen things you can’t imagine. Horrors that are nothing.”

He sits down heavily in Frederica’s desk chair, breaking a glass of red wine on the desk, dropping the breadboard on the carpet. Wine drips. Daniel fetches a floorcloth. Jude closes his eyes. “Stoned,” says Desmond Bull. Jude falls forward on the desk amongst his grey hair.

“He can’t stay here,” says Frederica.

“I’ll take him away,” says Daniel. “I’ll stow him in the church.”

“I’ll help,” says Rupert Parrott. “I feel responsible for him, now.” Melissa Parrott stands up.

“Get on with it, then. I’ll go out and look for a taxi. If we are responsible, do let’s get on with it.”

“I can manage,” says Daniel.

“Rupert says he’s responsible. So let’s
get on with it.
”

“Masochist,” says Jude, through loose damp lips, opening one reptilian eye and closing it again.

The friends go home. Frederica stands on the doorstep and watches them go. The yellow light spills on to the step. Her friends make off towards the Tube, except for Rupert, Melissa, Daniel and the inert Jude, who depart in a black cab. As Frederica turns to close the door, a figure steps out of the shadows of the next doorway, a figure that makes a faint crackling sound. Frederica takes in a gasp of breath and steps up into her own doorway. She cannot see a face: the man wears a soft, wide-brimmed hat, pulled down. She has seen this figure in this hat and the glistening, crackling PVC across the mud-circle a few nights ago, and again, standing motionless on a corner of the square, perhaps a week before.

“Don’t be afraid. I wanted to see you.”

The blond face turns up into the yellow light.

“I was having a party. You should have come.”

“I didn’t want to. Intrude. Be at a party. I wanted to see you.”

“You’d better come in.”

She is afraid, even now she knows it is John Ottokar. He comes up the steps behind her. A car engine in the street coughs into life, and then dies again. Frederica closes them in.

“Come down, have a coffee.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why have you come?”

“You know why.”

He takes his hat off; his arms crackle on the way up, and on the way down. There is the thick, yellow hair, lying glossy and bright.

Frederica cannot answer him: she knows, and does not know, and will not say she knows.

“I’ve been watching your house,” he says. His voice is lowered and conspiratorial, although the house is empty. He is a lover, not a thief, yet Frederica is reluctant to tell him the house is empty. He says, “If I can’t have—what I want—I shall lose what I have.”

Frederica could say, “No, you won’t.” Or she could ask, “What do you want.” She knows what he wants. She asks, “What do you want?”

“You,” he says intently. “You are what I want. It’s terrible to want anything so much.”