Babel Tower (85 page)

Laurence Ounce describes his client as a serious, dynamic young man—much involved in his business, but this is normal, is not a fault or a sin, who has married a girl met whilst she was a Cambridge undergraduate, happy and flourishing amongst the admiration lavished on her in this world of young men. He was aware of her reputation as a sophisticated and
experienced
young woman—though not, perhaps, of the extent, or, one might say, the indiscriminate nature of this sophistication and experience.

He felt, perhaps, that he had carried away the princess for the ball under the eyes of the suitors. He believed, perhaps, the story of the fairytale—“The most surprising people do believe it, my lord, and act upon it, and learn to adjust their naïve expectations with good and bad humour as the case may be.” He believed that they would marry and live happy ever after, that the princess would become lady of the manor and live as her predecessors had lived. But she did not want to, had no intention of being happy ever after. Adjustment was certainly required on both sides—when was it ever not? But Mrs. Reiver would not adjust—she needed her court of young men, her “career,” her books, her “independence,” just as though her marriage vows had never been made, and even though she has a small son who might be thought to be enough occupation for the next few years of the happy ever after. She has admitted, strikingly, that she “withdrew” and “realised she should never have married.” She puts this realisation as
preceding
the cruelty she claims her husband exercised—she is involuntarily honest, even though unstable. She invents a story, of acts of violence committed by her husband. Of acts so suddenly cruel, out of the blue, that she is forced to make a dramatic midnight flight through the woods—“The story is now Bluebeard’s Castle, and the grisly exhibits have been duly viewed in the cupboard”—snatching up her son
as an afterthought
“although she thought he would be better
where he was.” What are we to make of this tale? It is confidently rejected by my client, by the Misses Reiver, by Miss Philippa Mammott. Mrs. Reiver has a first class degree in English. She is an expert in the European novel, on which she has been lecturing with some success, it appears, to Mr. John Ottokar, amongst others enchanted by her rhetoric. She is at home in Dostoevski, Stendhal and Sir Walter Scott. She knows all about axes and women in white robes fleeing through the woods in the dark. My client’s sisters, more prosaic, see
trousers
with hedge-tears typical of barbed wire’s jagged ripping. Are we to believe that these taciturn, churchgoing ladies—“tweedy and boring” as they put it themselves, got together and concocted a foolproof coherent story? And that they then suborned the excellent Dr. Roylance to commit perjury? This is not feudal England, and he is not a retainer. No, the unstable, creative imagination, the
literary cleverness,
is all Mrs. Reiver’s.” Mr. Ounce submits that Mr. Reiver has no case to answer as to the alleged cruelty. Look at these two, he says, and decide who it is safe to believe. In all marital problems there is a balance of right and wrong and it is very rarely all on one side. But in this case it is clear where the guilt lies, as it is clear from Mrs. Reiver’s subsequent behaviour what sort of lifestyle she would naturally choose, left to herself.

When the judge begins to speak, Frederica thinks again: I am too thin. She
has not enough weight.
She is nothing. The things she knows she cannot say and the things she says are not descriptions of what she thinks was and is what happened or is happening. He has not heard her. He will find against her. He looks down from his height, sourly she thinks, wet buried eyes in a sick skin.

He says:

“We old men have to remember that marriages change, that social customs change, that expectations change. You are here in a Divorce Court, in a Christian country where the established Church, to which one of you belongs, believes marriage is for ever and indissoluble. You both desire divorce, although our law requires that you must neither connive nor collude in seeking it, but show cause why you should be divorced, give evidence of matrimonial offences which are sufficient reason for divorce. Mrs. Frederica Reiver, the wife, first sought relief alleging cruelty and adultery. Mr. Nigel Reiver was for some time long-suffering, sought restoration of his conjugal rights in the matrimonial home, and has now, perhaps for sufficient reasons,
decided that his patience will lead nowhere, that his hopes are unrealistic, that his best help is to accept the situation with a good grace.

“I have carefully considered the evidence set before me. Mr. Reiver admits to the adultery of which he is accused, but denies the charges of cruelty. The major charges—the blows and the story of the axe-attack—depend entirely on Mrs. Reiver’s own uncorroborated account. She appears to have complained to no one about this alleged attack within the time which is allowed to make this complaint admissible as evidence of the attack. She appears not to have complained specifically of this attack to the shadowy young men who waited for her in the Land Rover after her flight, though we do have the affidavit of Mr. Hugh Pink that he was told—
eleven days
later—that an axe had been thrown. This evidence we must weigh against the very clear evidence of the Misses Reiver and Miss Mammott, and whilst it is not beyond the bounds of credibility that these respectable bodies should have agreed a story to support their brother and employer, it is my belief that the balance of probability is against it. The same balance of uncertainties applies to the sorry tale of the venereal infection. Mrs. Reiver claims that she could have caught it only from her husband. He does not deny that he has consorted with women from whom he
could
have caught such an infection, but he presented medical evidence that he did not. Mrs. Reiver claims to have seen no friends, male or female, since her marriage, until she ran away. This is contradicted by the evidence of the Misses Reiver and Miss Mammott. Her recent behaviour does not suggest that physical chastity is high enough on her scale of values to render it entirely improbable that she could have contracted the infection elsewhere.

“Her own adultery—subsequent to her desertion, which she does not deny—is amply witnessed and supported. She denies several counts and admits others. We need not go into the truth, or lack of truth of the contested allegations, since what is admitted is enough to show the nature of the case.

“I have some sympathy with both parties to this divorce. Both misunderstood the nature of each other’s commitment, though this might have been more easily remedied than Mrs. Reiver’s petition melodramatically assumes. Mr. Reiver expected to find a wife who behaved like a wife and accepted the constraints upon her freedom inevitably incurred by becoming a wife. Mrs. Reiver assumed that Mr. Reiver admired her as she was, for her intellectual virtues perhaps, and would allow her a latitude he was far from admitting. The
higher education of women has in many ways, I have observed, been very hard upon both men and women. It has encouraged skills and raised expectations which society as it is at present constituted is incapable of fulfilling or satisfying—skills and expectations perhaps incompatible with the fulfilled life of wife and mother. Other women, faced with the realisation of this problem, have perhaps been more patient, more tractable, more resourceful. Mrs. Reiver was young and volatile. She chose to run away.

“Much turns on the alleged axe attack, which is the only substantial act of cruelty alleged. I feel that it is unsafe to accept Mrs. Reiver’s evidence on this point—the balance of probability, which this court is allowed to consider to be adequate—lies with the husband’s account, and the evidence of his household. Mrs. Reiver’s desertion is undeniable.

“Mr. Reiver’s attempts to persuade her to return are well documented and wholly convincing. Both parties have committed adultery: neither has any prospect, apparently, of a second marriage, which might offer a family to the little boy.

“I find for the husband, whose prayer for counter-relief the Court accepts. He is granted a decree nisi. The wife’s petition is rejected.

“In the matter of custody of the son, Leo Alexander. The Court will institute custody proceedings as soon as is reasonably possible. The Court Welfare Officer will visit both parties, and both houses, and will also talk to the boy himself, who is, I understand, articulate and bright. I should like to be able to institute the custody hearing before Christmas, but the Clerk fears that because of pressure of cases this may not be practicable. The Court directs that for the present the child shall stay where he is, with his mother, to disrupt his life as little as possible. Since it is clear that he has been happily travelling between households, the Court also directs that he spend Christmas with his father, arriving on December 24th, returning to his mother on December 27th promptly.”

Frederica stands outside the courtroom in her little black dress. Her visible knees beneath its high hem tremble and knock together. She feels she has been watching a film about a woman whom she rather despises, a silly woman who has been judged and found wanting. On top of this, she feels obscurely, the story of her life has been changed by the way it has been told today—both the true bits, and the velleities, and the flat lies, one part of a new fiction, a new story, in
which she—who is she, does she exist?—is entangled as in a fine, voluminous net. She thinks she does not care who wins the divorce, as long as the divorce happens. She thinks that the story that was told is the story of a woman unfit to have charge of a small boy, whom she does not love enough. She feels she has stepped into a world where the codes, the rules, are different: reading is wicked, is neglect, a movement of love or comfort to one man is simply defined as depriving another of his
rights.
She stands by herself and her knees knock. Words come into her head. “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” Who said that?

Someone comes up behind her and puts an arm round her shoulders. “That was pretty dreadful. Are you OK?” It is Nigel. She flinches, and then turns to meet his eye: he too is involved in this linguistic net laid over bare limbs in a bed, over the axe, over the little boy sleeping, over what can’t be named or defined or understood.

“I’m shaking,” she says.

“You know you don’t have to worry about costs. I’ll pay.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ll talk about Christmas.”

“We will.”

“All’s fair in love and war, heh?”

“No. It isn’t. It isn’t. Some things aren’t. Lies aren’t.”

“I want my son, Frederica.”

“So do I. So do I.”

“I don’t think you do, not really, not deep down. That’s what all this is about. That’s what I’m fighting for.”

He is telling the truth. She bows her head.

“We’ll see,” she says, in a small voice.

“We will. If he comes home, you can come whenever you want, you can take him on holidays, we’ll make it
good,
we won’t exclude you.”

“He wants to stay with me.”

“We’ll see about that.”

He pats her shoulder again, and again she has the double movement of flinching and turning to him.

That night, she dreams. She is outside a high gate, with barbed wire wreathing its top. The weather is darkly hot and stormy. She is not tall enough to peer in through the keyhole, which is high above her head
and massive. She knows no one will come. She looks around for something to stand on, to see in, and finds a kind of rolling platform on wheels, which she knows, as dreamers know, is what is used to roll condemned men, unable to walk, close enough to the hangman. She pushes it towards the keyhole. Its wheels are wooden, and crank and grumble. She mounts the steps and grips the bar in front of her. She can see in. The keyhole is like a long telescopic tunnel. Dark. Beyond is a garden. It is in many ways the Long Royston garden where she played the young Virgin Queen in Alexander’s
Astraea.
It has wide lawns, with croquet hoops and rose trees, and is bordered by a forest of dark boughs, with beautiful ashy black leaves, and golden fruit covered with soot, so that the gold shines dimly, fitfully, through the black dust.

Over the lawns pad great cats. Lions, tigers, black panthers, with gold eyes, with green eyes, with blood on their white fangs, silent and pacing. She knows she has to try and let them out, and that if she lets them out, they will devour her. There is no key. She has the idea that she can pour herself through the keyhole, but this is nonsense. A voice in the head says, “You are thin, you are thin.” She sees that she is indeed thin, she is two-dimensional, a paper woman, a cardboard woman. She watches herself insert herself between the great gates, insubstantial inch by inch, and float above the garden like a kite. At the end of the garden is a kind of shrine, a cave with a stone bed in it, on which is a stone lion, a small lion, which emits a kind of pulsing light, a hot, bright glow. She manages to alight on the grass, and walks towards this creature. All the other great beasts pad behind her. She is in a dress made of red and white paper, which shreds and falls in drifts like petals as she goes forward. She is as she was the young Elizabeth, pursued with scissors by her stepmother, Catherine Parr, and her stepmother’s jocular, amorous husband, Thomas Seymour, intent on shredding her petticoats for fun, or so it was said in Seymour’s trial for treason, for which he lost his head. He lost his head, the voice says in her head, as the grass becomes full of floating red and white fragments between the croquet hoops. Her dress is no longer a dress, it is a paper band round her waist from which hang red and white ribbons, which do not cover the ruddy triangle of her pubic hair. Now, as in the play, she cries out the line of the beggarwoman in the ballad whose red flannel petticoat was cut away—“Lawks a mussy on me, this is none of I.” Figures are hurtling after her, large stone women, red women, white women, howling, “Off with her
head.” If she can reach the stone lion she is safe. The garden grows as she runs. She trips on the hoops, her feet bleed. A red woman pronounces, She thinks she is Una with the lion, but everyone knows that is a lie, a whopper, a terrible tarradiddle, Una was a virgin and virgins don’t have lions.