Babel Tower (76 page)

“We had a good few days in Goathland.”

“More than good.”

There is a constraint in him.

“Do you want to come for a bit? Do you have any holiday?”

She never invites him: she always waits for him to move. This time, she has exposed herself.

“Of course I want to come. Of course I do.”

“But?”

“I have ten days owing to me.”

“But?”

“You
know
what the ‘but’ is, Frederica. The Spirits’ Tigers are having a month-long Retreat, at Four Pence. They’ve got people coming from Timothy Leary’s League for Spiritual Discovery. And some
Buddhists. And Elvet Gander. And of course Paul. He wants me to come. Gander’s writing again.”

He looks at the starched white tablecloth. He does not look at Frederica. He says, “Paul asked me to ask you if you’d come.”

“God, no,” says Frederica, quick as a flash, with automatic revulsion. She looks at his brooding face, turned down, lit a little by the shine of the clean cloth in the dark green room. “I’m sorry, John. I don’t mean to sound nasty. But I’m not religious and I
hate group things,
I hate them, I hate pressure on me to lose myself, I can’t bear it, I won’t.”

“I told him you wouldn’t. I told him why. I told him what you’ve just said.”

“And?”

“He said, that’s exactly why she
ought
to come, she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.”

“Probably he’s right. But I’ll go on not knowing, if you don’t mind. I’ll put a lot of books in a bag, and go north, and read and write, and be part of my family, which is a group I’ve got no choice about belonging to.”

“I shall lose you.”

“Who can tell? We have to decide what’s important. I can’t imagine
you
—not the you I know—in some sort of ecstatic group love-in, all moaning and humming and confessing, if you want to know. But everybody has all sorts of sides to them. There are things about me
you
can’t possibly imagine.”

“It isn’t like that. It isn’t moaning and humming.”

“I know. I’m unfair. I think we ought to stop talking about it.”

“The Quaker silence,” says John Ottokar, and does not finish the sentence.

“The Quaker silence?” says Frederica.

“When I was a boy, the silence made other people bearable for me. And more than that. You could sit there—they were all quite ordinary—and after a time, after a time of silence—everyone was quiet—you lost—not your
self
exactly—but all the mess of—the
fuss
of your life—you were all quiet together. It wasn’t that everyone became one, or anything—I couldn’t bear that any more than you could. It was just that they were
true
—
truer
—than before—to be truthful, I don’t really want them to be Tigers—I just liked the quiet, the truth. Look, Frederica, this really is a thing words can’t deal with. I keep saying
‘true’ and you don’t know what I’m talking about, it doesn’t
represent
what I’m talking about.”

“Perhaps I do.”

“It’s something I can’t really do without, anyway. Not having known it. I don’t think there’ll be much of it—if any—at Four Pence this summer. But there’s the other thing too, I’ve got to look after Paul, that’s how it is.”

“I understand all that.”

At this moment, she loves him, she would use the word “love,” for what she feels about his careful truthfulness.

“I shall lose you,” he says.

“I don’t know,” she says, trying to be as honest as he is. “I shouldn’t have sounded so nasty, but it is true, I can’t really bear it, all that, Tigers and chemical ecstasy and hugging-encounters, I really feel—”

“Repelled.”

“Yes.”

“So do I. Really. I shouldn’t go. For myself. Only Paul—”

“You wanted to be separate.”

“I do. But
really.
Sometimes I think Gander could help us through.”

“Do you?”

“Not with much conviction. I don’t know
what
I think. The trouble with Paul is, he does. I’m the tough one, in one sense, but he’s the one with convictions, and feelings, he
dives
—”

“I can’t cope with both of you.”

“Fair enough. I shall lose you.”

He stares at the tablecloth. Frederica bites lemon tart. Her tongue tastes sweetness and sharpness. She has no need of any chemical: the tart is sweet, is sour, is unforgettable.

“It is up to you,” she says.

He lifts his head.

“I shall come with you. I won’t lose you. It matters to me. We’ll make our own quiet, up there on the moors.”

His hand moves to touch hers, on the white cloth. She has a moment of fear—has she promised more than she can give, has she
taken on
the complicated coils of the brotherhood?

“No promises,” he says, hearing this thought in the silence. “Just a summer holiday. A good one.”

She takes hold of his hand. His skin is dry, and warm, and good. They get the bill, and go on the Underground, back to Kennington.

When they come back to Hamelin Square, there are more people than usual on the pavements. The Agyepongs are out, and also the Utters, and the small man with the little Austin is standing behind it. The door of Number 42 is open—not the area door, but the upper door, and framed in it are Leo, Saskia and their substitute-granny, peering anxiously out. As John Ottokar and Frederica emerge from the pan-handle, so to speak, of the square, into the frying-pan itself, a golden figure leaps up the area steps, three at a time, and crosses to the central mud patch in three long balletic, scissor-like jumps. This figure has flying gold hair and a long, shimmering, shining robe, a kind of sleeved gown in transparent plastic shot with rainbow colours, like oil spilled in a puddle on the road. The plastic makes a hissing and swishing noise. The figure’s arms are full of something which he places carefully in the old chair which lolls against the broken bedstead on the mud, where the bonfire’s charred traces can still be seen. He bends over the chair, and Hamelin Square is suddenly full of music, not pop music but Brunnhilde’s fire music from the end of
The Valkyrie.
It is not clear why no one moves forward, but no one does. He produces a straw-cased Chianti bottle, from which he pours libations into the chair, and then, sweeping in a great circle round the edge of the mud patch, over various towers of books, which can now be seen to ring the whole circle. He is singing, or humming, not Wagner, but some ecstatic blending moan. He dances, extending his arms in the light of the street lamps. It becomes clear that inside his plastic robe he is naked except for a swirling design of gold and burgundy body paint, spiralling round his arms and legs, making targets of his nipples, crossing in arching branches over his belly under his erect cock in its golden bush. As they watch, he produces a cigarette lighter and sets fire to the skoob turrets, of which there are seven, all of them quite high. His face too is painted, a snarling cat mask under the blond flying hair. He skips from burning books to burning books, making obeisances, mopping and mowing. He sings, he dances. “Ite Bacchae. Io Zagreus.” It is absurd and frightening. The books flare and then burn sullenly, smelling bad and smoking. He returns, pouring more paraffin from the Chianti bottle. Frederica, at first paralysed like everyone else by the noise and the flickering flames and the strangeness, is suddenly galvanised by a dreadful fear. She pulls her
hand away from John’s and runs forward, kicking at the nearest skoob tower, to demolish it. The books are somehow fused together, and fall together, a falling tower, spitting sparks. Frederica can read their spines. They are her books, and not only her books, but part of herself, the books she has been teaching to her civilised extramural class.
The Castle, The Trial, The Idiot, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Mans-field Park, La Chute, The Age of Reason, Lord of the Flies, Free Fall, Women in Love, Howards End.

Rage takes hold of Frederica, rage unreasoning and wild, rage all too reasoning and justified, for all her notes, all her work, are written into the flyleaves of these burning books. She tries to kick the books apart to extinguish the flames, she rushes to the next tower—
Paradise Lost, Euripides, Dr. Faustus
—and the cloaked figure swoops at her from behind the bedstead,
yowling,
as she puts it to herself, finding
le mot juste
even in the conflagration.

“
I’ll kill you,
” she howls at Paul-Zag, “let me get at you,
I’ll kill you
—”

“I can’t be killed,” he intones. “I am born from the flames I don’t burn I am not consumed.”

“Rubbish,” says Frederica. “
You will pay for this
—”

She tries to grasp him: his skin is hot and slippery under her hands, which are now smeared with gold and wine-dark grease. She grabs hold of the flying plastic, which is now very hot and limp and feels as though it will melt. He leaps back towards the centre of the square, and sets light to the old chair, in which is the Chianti bottle, which explodes, sending a tower of flame at the dark sky, singeing the blond locks badly and melting one side of the robe, which, as plastic does, shrivels and shrinks in the heat, producing its own stink and its own thick smoke. Frederica is divided between murderous rage and the desire to retrieve, to extinguish, to protect her books. She moves towards the next tower and is forestalled by Paul-Zag, who dances forwards, bends down, and before her horrified eyes clasps the whole structure protectively to his breast. There is now a terrible smell of burned flesh, as well as burned plastic and burned books. Paul falls over backwards in the mud. Frederica kicks her sullenly smouldering books away from his charred breast and belly. John Ottokar—too late, weeping—arrives at Frederica’s side. Paul lies on his back and looks up at the haze of streetlight, the black-let-down-with-orange-and-sodium-silver sky, the very distant, diminished stars. He is not yet in
pain; that will come. Marie Agyepong appears with a pot of zinc-and-castor-oil ointment. Paul looks at Frederica out of sly and inhuman eyes, their lashes painted and weeping black and red tears on his gilded cheeks. The sky, he announces, is full of great spiders spinning, it is swarming with octopods in every colour, it is thick with crawling worms and maggots who eat flesh and spit blood, they must all hide, but there is nowhere to hide. Brunnhilde shrieks defiance and submission. Frederica thinks she can see her enemy summing up, cannily, the effect of his pronouncements on the assembled company, all now creeping up on the mud patch. “He is high,” says Marie Agyepong, “that’s most of it, he’s on a bad trip.”

“I am high,” says Paul. “I am in a high place, I shall leap down and my angels will hold me up, you’ll see, I am on a bad trip and the spiders are coming after me, I shall fall and great will be the fall thereof and when I fall it will all fall, all that’s holding it
up
will drag it
down,
you’ll see, whether you want to or not, you’ll have to see.”

“It
hurts,
” he says suddenly, and begins to moan frantically.

“I sent for an ambulance,” says Marie Agyepong. “He’s burned quite bad, they’ll have to take him to the burns unit in Roehampton.”

And indeed, the sirens can be heard, coming round the corner, into the square.

John Ottokar says he will go with his brother, in the ambulance.

Frederica, having comforted Leo, spends the night sorting the burned books from the almost intact, the black paper from the scorched brown and yellow, the ashes from the written words. She weeps quietly, once the kindly neighbours have gone home. John Ottokar does not ring from the hospital. He does not ring the next day, either.

XVIII
 

After Paul-Zag’s demonstration, there is no further word from the Ottokars. Frederica listens for the telephone for a day or two, and then flares into something resembling her old anger. She goes to visit Desmond Bull, in his studio. She admires the masks and the collaged staring eyes; she drinks beakers of Bull’s Blood, she falls, queasy with red wine, turpentine and anger, into the arms of Bull on the mattress on the studio floor. Bull is a no-nonsense lover, like a steam-hammer, she thinks, which is what she needs. A bang, a bonk, abandon. She bites his shoulder, she scratches his ribs and buttocks, she urges him on, like a wild woman. She is under the protection of the Pill; they meet, theoretically, as equals. No finesse, no holding back, no exploration, no discovery. But a reasonable amount of pleasure, a not unpleasant throbbing and bruising, a salutary moment or two of oblivion. Followed, in due course, by a meal of pasta asciutta, rigatoni seeping hot tomato and melted creamy cheese, and a heated discussion of Patrick Heron’s striped paintings. It is equality, possibly, Frederica thinks, pushing the twins back into her mind’s caverns. She wonders if she is behaving like a man. She can feel the marks of her own teeth in her lips; she can feel the swelling where his cheekbone has ground on hers. The lineaments of satisfied desire, she does not say. Desmond Bull asks after Jude Mason and his book. It has gone quiet, Frederica says, it’s the fallow season for lawyers.

She goes north, alone. She is fretting; she does not know what to do, with her summer, or with her life. She misses Leo, and yet, guiltily, feels free without him; she will not think about the Ottokars, and has nothing to do with her freedom. It is a warm summer: she sits on the
lawn behind the Freyasgarth house, looking onto the moors, and reading novels for review (there are not many, the supply dries up in the summer) and the texts for her next year’s teaching.
Death in Venice
and
Daniel Deronda.
It takes her a day or two to realise how much older her father looks; he is becoming a little deaf, his steps are careful, even tentative, his opinions are advanced, also, more tentatively. Daniel arrives, two days after Frederica, to see Will and Mary, to rest for a few days. He too thinks Bill looks older.