Babel Tower (78 page)

Frederica’s thoughts run uneasily on genetic similarities and differences, machine-men and seed-flower species, stones, paper and scissors. She thinks that the DNA which is the fetish of the turned-on has probably very little, though not nothing, to do with the DNA of
Helix hortensis,
in the food-processor, on the slides, under the microscope, of Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. She would rather know what Lysgaard-Peacock knows, but is closer, even when trying to understand the snails, to the language of Leary.

•   •   •

Long legal envelopes continue to arrive, even in the summer, even in Freyasgarth. Frederica opens one and finds a thick document, with a covering letter from Arnold Begbie, who says, with studied neutrality, that it appears that, upon reflection, “your husband, the respondent” has decided to add to his Answer, already filed, “a prayer for counter-relief” on the grounds of desertion, mental cruelty and frequent adultery. The respondent has applied to the registrar for leave to amend his answer and to enter the cross-petition, and this leave has been granted.

Mr. Begbie says that he wishes to point out to his client that her husband is required to make specific allegations of her own misconduct, but is not required to divulge the evidence upon which he will rely to prove this misconduct. The question of desertion is clear, and the question of mental cruelty is related to this and to the removal of the child, Leo Alexander. The allegations of adultery are numerous and precise. Mrs. Reiver has not elected to include a discretion statement in her own petition, and has assured Mr. Begbie that the question did not arise. He would therefore be grateful to know how she would like him to proceed. She will note that the new prayer for counter-relief does include a prayer for the court’s discretion in the matter of the cross-petitioner’s own adultery.

Mr. Begbie also wishes to inform Mrs. Reiver that all the persons cited in the cross-petition’s allegations of adultery must be named as co-respondents and served personally with notices of the petition; they may then choose whether to enter an appearance, if they wish to defend the proceedings, or take part in any other way. If these persons do not wish to contest the proceedings, they need do nothing.

Mr. Begbie will be grateful to receive Mrs. Reiver’s further instruction as soon as possible.

Frederica looks at the counter-petition. It is long, and detailed. It is fact and fiction. It names Thomas Poole, Hugh Pink, John Ottokar, Paul Ottokar and Desmond Bull, and speaks of acts of intimacy, public embraces, and nights spent under the same roof. It claims custody of the child of the marriage, Leo Alexander. It is a snake of black language, tied with red tape in an impeccable bow. Frederica’s first, easiest, simplest emotion is that she has made a fool of herself in not
telling
Arnold Begbie about what she calls, to herself, “the end of my
celibacy.” Her second is rage that Begbie, whom she neither really likes nor really trusts, should need to know where she has lain down, whose skin she has touched, by whom she has been penetrated. It is
private,
she thinks. She then takes in the implications of the serving of the petitions on Thomas Poole (who may simply be ruefully sensible) and on the Ottokars. Can Nigel claim damages against John Ottokar? Can Paul be called to give evidence? They have vanished into the Spirits’ Tigers: she cannot see John wanting to maintain their uncertain, delicate, tentative love or liking in a witness box before a judge. He is not ready, and may never be, and she may not want him to be, now, or yet, or ever, how can she tell, but the law and Nigel will make it be solid, be cut and dried—
cut,
and
dried
—gone … And some, though not all, of this, is true, and will the court, whose ways are not her ways, suppose she is a woman sensible enough to keep Leo? It is the Swinging Sixties, but the courts are run by old men in eighteenth-century wigs, with nineteenth-century outward morals, and she will be pulped, mashed, humiliated,
destroyed.

She has taken the horrid envelope to her bedroom, to read in peace. She cannot speak of this to her parents. She begins to weep, blindly, uselessly, furiously. The door opens. It is Daniel.

“What is it, Frederica?”

“Look!”

He looks.

“Half of it’s lies.
Lies.
”

“You’ll get your divorce, one way or the other.”

“Yes, but
Leo.
Who will get Leo?”

Daniel sits on the bed.

“They usually give the child to the mother.”

“But I look
horrible
in that document, feckless and frightful. And they’ve got everything, the pony, the Right School …”

“But you want him with you?”

“It isn’t a question of want or not want. We
have
to be together. He saw that. I thought I could leave him, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t have, not ever—”

She thinks of Daniel, a good man, as she is not a good woman, walking away from Will and Mary. She has always wondered how he could have done that, and has not asked, and will not ask. But she looks at him, red-eyed, stricken with guilt.

“Oh, Daniel.”

He holds her. She lies on his shoulder and weeps, with more and more abandon. He strokes her hair, his mouth set grimly. They hear Mary pass, singing, singing in tune and clearly, as no Potter ever has.

“Your daughter can sing in tune.”

“My dad could. He used to sing th’
Messiah,
in the big choirs.”

“She sounds happy.”

“Human beings are tough.”

T
HE
C
OUNCIL OF THE
W
ISE
(1)

Frederica finds herself, almost by accident, at a meeting in the offices of Bowers and Eden in Elderflower Court to discuss the organisation of the defence of
Babbletower.
Rupert Parrott’s solicitor is a cautious small man called Martin Fisher; another solicitor has been found to represent Jude, also a small man, called Duncan Raby. Martin Fisher is dapper and silvery; Duncan Raby is sleek and dark and can bend his fingers backwards, which he does, with little cracks, in moments of agitation. Godfrey Hefferson-Brough, QC, is to lead for Parrott’s defence; Samuel Oliphant, QC, has been retained to represent Jude. Hefferson-Brough is large and craggy, with tree-trunk bones and red-veined cheeks and sharp eyes under tangled eyebrows. Samuel Oliphant is one of those whippet-like lawyers who look as though they are on the scent of a fine point even in repose; he has colourless, apologetic hair, and fine bones which are transformed by a wig into blades and edges. These four and their clerks are present at this meeting—other lawyers will come and go from time to time during the succeeding months. When Frederica arrives at Bowers and Eden with a heap of annotated manuscripts from the slush heap, she finds Jude in the entrance lobby, surrounded by his miasma, asserting in his sawing voice that decisions are being made without him, behind his back, undercover. Parrott is protesting, pink-faced and tense, that Jude would not be here if things were being hidden from him. The sawing voice rises: “I overheard your
secretary,
Parrott, saying to
someone,
it would be
easier
without the
author present,
he can be very
temperamental,
very
difficult
—”

Frederica says, “Oh, shut up, Jude. You are having your cake and eating it. If ever you do overhear things like that it’s your
civilised duty
to ignore them, and anyway, you know in your terms it’s a compliment, you
like
to be thought temperamental and difficult. Everyone’s doing their best.”

“What do
you
know about it?” says Jude, still truculent, but milder.

“I know you,” says Frederica. “I know how much Rupert has done for you. I think you should shut up.”

“We are having a Council of the Wise,” says Parrott. “I think you should join us. I think your advice would be of help. This is just a little preliminary gathering—some experts, mostly Bowers and Eden authors—Professor Marie-France Smith has agreed to come along, and Roger Magog. They wrote well of the book, very well, they will advise us. And I’ve persuaded Phyllis Pratt to give us her thoughts, yes. You are a part of our deliberations, and you brought both Mrs. Pratt and Jude to our attention. You could come and help on the Eng. lit. front.”

They sit round a shiny oval mahogany table in an upper room Frederica had not even known about; it smells musty and unused, but with an overtone of past nuts, and old apples. Rupert Parrott sits at one end, flanked by pairs of lawyers. Frederica and Jude sit at the other. Also present are Canon Holly, representing the Church, Elvet Gander, representing mental health and the sciences of the soul, Marie-France Smith and Roger Magog, and a squat person with red ringlets and a red beard, both mildly matted, with merry blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses and an open-necked madras-checked shirt, who is introduced as Avram Snitkin, an ethnomethodologist. Jude lays his long grey hands on the mahogany and asks earnestly, “What is an ethnomethodologist?”

“That is hard to say,” Snitkin replies cheerfully, “since no two ethnomethodologists can agree on a definition of ethnomethodology. We have very beautiful conferences, discussing the meaning of the term ‘ethnomethodology.’ ”

“And you can’t give me a working definition?” says Jude. “A court will require a working definition.”

“We study what people actually think they are doing when they are in the process of doing whatever they do. As opposed to the things sociologists think that people think they do when they perform acts already classified and categorised by sociologists, in certain ways.”

“You are sociologists?”

“Many of us, most of us, spring from that discipline. The classic ethnomethodological study was the bugging of a jury room in order to observe, without any interference in the data by
overt
observers, what function jury members believe themselves to be performing
in qua
jurors—what jurors think jurors are. Do I make you any wiser?”

“Oh yes,” says Jude.

“And where did you ‘bug’ this jury room?” asks Samuel Oliphant, articulating the inverted commas.

“In California, don’t worry,” says Snitkin, smilingly.

“Dr. Snitkin has made a study of the uses that people—men—make of—of
risky
published material,” says Rupert Parrott. “That is why I invited him to this gathering. He believes that pornography performs a useful social function. That it, so to speak,
siphons off
—”

“An unfortunate metaphor,” says Jude. “Very I must point out that my book is not pornographic. It is in that context
emetic.
It will be better if we do not use the word ‘pornographic’ about it.”

“Let me call this meeting to order,” says Parrott. “The idea of this meeting is to exchange ideas between lawyers and persons who might be thought to be experts, in the new fields of ‘expertise’ in the literary and social value of works of art which are supposed to ‘tend to deprave and corrupt’ the general public. When
Lady Chatterley
was triumphantly acquitted, the defence produced an impressive file of the great and the good, poets, professors, bishops and one young girl, to say that the book was full of tenderness and sweetness and light and advocation of married fidelity. The prosecution relied on reading aloud ‘bouts’ of explicit sexual description, and rhetorically and famously asking ‘Is this a book you would allow your wife and daughters, or your servants, to read?’ It is my opinion, and the opinion of the legal advisers who are here today, that the prosecution of
Babble-tower
will be different from the prosecution of
Lady Chatterley
, because the book is different, but not only for that reason. There is scope for ‘experts’ who are not simply literary critics or respected public figures. I won’t go on, now, but will hand over the conduct of proceedings to those who will guide us.”

Frederica looks round the table. Marie-France Smith is a surprise; she is a tall, slender, blond, elegant woman, with a strikingly beautiful face, long hair tied back with a black velvet bow, and an expression of gentleness and wary tension combined. Phyllis Pratt, the novelist, is the shape of the cottage loaf she described in her novel,
Daily Bread;
she has little fat curls, dark and silver, on her ample head, smile-lines moving up into round cheeks from soft mouth and eye-corners; she wears a serviceable jersey trouser suit in bottle green with a flowered Liberty shirt under it, sprinkled with honeysuckle. Canon Holly’s ragged silver mane and his smoke-stained, lupine teeth she knows well. Magog is meaty and energetic and restless. Elvet Gander
has a bald head and a precise, distinguished, long-nosed, carved-looking face, with a wide, controlled mouth and deep-set dark grey eyes above high, clean-cut cheekbones. His head is the head of a tall man, a grandee, though when he stands, his body is surprisingly short and slightly bowed, with long hanging arms and bowed legs. His skin has a grey cast—not an unhealthy putty-grey, like Jude’s, but a polished granite, stony.