Babel Tower Page 14

  She goes upstairs. Treading heavily. Bang, bang. She closes her bedroom door. Bang. What use is any of it?

  She looks for Tony’s letter, to comfort her. She has not looked at her clutch of letters since she put them away; they are contaminated by rage and bloodshed, which would horrify the writers. She finds Tony’s letter, idealistic and canny, and also finds Daniel’s, with a momentary surge of guilt. He is right. She should write to Bill and Winifred. She cannot. She is afraid of reliving in any way the days of the death of Stephanie. She wishes with part of her that everything had ceased to exist with her sister, her past, her home, everything, for good memories are more painful than bad. The violent ending makes the whole story appalling; Stephanie’s smile, Stephanie’s wisdom, Stephanie’s lazy peacefulness all become ghouls, phantoms, terrible shapeless figures flailing in empty air. What Daniel says is of course right. Bill has lost one daughter and should not therefore lose two.

  She thinks she will write a real letter to Bill, not now, not quite yet. She looks for Edmund Wilkie’s letter and cannot find it. She goes through everything again. It is not there. It was the most personal and the most surprising of the letters—for Wilkie is less her true friend than Hugh, or Alan, or Tony, never loved, as Alexander was. It was also the only sexy letter, the only real provocation to an unauthorised reader. She turns out her drawer—her sweater drawer—where the letters had been hidden. She goes through her desk. Nothing. She becomes very rapidly convinced that Nigel has taken Wilkie’s letter. Wilkie’s letter flares in her mind into something hugely important, the lost object sought in dreams whose discovery will put everything right. She sees the scenes it evoked: the bed full of blood in Scarborough, the Evolution Tower in NYU. Also she begins to relive the pain of the blow in the spine, the torn hair. She feels hatred. Frederica is a fierce woman, but hatred terrifies her. She thinks of Nigel as something dangerous and repulsive, and she feels herself degraded by these feelings, herself sickens her.

  When it is night, she begins to search Nigel’s secret places. She has never opened his drawers, never touched the heaps of paper he leaves lying around. His papers are papers which are inert and a little dusty, not touched with life, as her own are. Now she goes through a heap—on the top of a chest of drawers—a futile and silly thing to do, since he would hardly take Wilkie’s letter and leave it lying around amongst bills and bank statements. She then goes through his sock drawer, an apple-tray of tidy black balls, his shirt drawer, his underpants—so very neatly folded, so clean, so anonymous. She runs through the jackets in the wardrobe, looking inside envelopes crumpled in inside pockets with NIGEL on the outside, scrupulously reading nothing, as though her own lack of prying might protect her from his. She puts things back where she found them, even a sealed condom tucked in a brown envelope. Inside his wardrobe are various locked cases and briefcases. She looks at these, and then, still possessed by the black swollen hatred, she goes back to where she found a cigar box full of little keys at the back of the underwear drawer. This has the appearance of a place where a tidy man puts keys to things which may be lost, vanished or forgotten, keys which may be useful if other keys are lost. Keys which are the male equivalent of the sewing-machine key, the old jewel-box key, the key to the five-year diary that got finished and thrown away in embarrassment. She takes the cigar box over to the deep wardrobe and tries various of the keys on various of the boxes and cases. One largish suitcase gives off, when opened with a very simple key, an odour of decay like ripe cheese. It turns out to contain a wad of clearly unwashed rugger clothing, in various colours—tangerine and black, a sumptuous purple and crimson. There are socks with what she supposes to be ancient mud, liquid in the 1950s, even, caked dust since then—she has never known Nigel to play rugger. She locks it again quickly. The fitting of this key is encouraging, and so she persists through several failures, with a delicious sense of committing an outrage, a justified outrage. She opens another case—a kind of document folder—and finds a mass of school photographs, Nigel at five, Nigel at nine, Nigel in boater and blazer, Nigel black-a-vised amongst rows of staring young men with starting eyes and solid, fleshy mouths. Then a very small, rather complicated, not at all flimsy key—a key which is not one of an endless series randomly distributed, but a special key, with a barrel and fierce little teeth, opens a large rather battered document box not unlike the box brandished by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on Budget Day.

  She has not found Wilkie’s letters. She has found a collection of magazines and photographs. “You know the kind of thing,” one man might say to another, or one woman to another. And nod, with sophisticated understanding. So much flesh, so very stretched over such muscles, such globes, so much clean, silky, peachy skin with a high gloss on it. Such damp holes laid bare, such glistening prongs, such pearly teeth approaching, ingesting, such purple sprouting veins. Such things, such trusses, such tresses, such improbable contortions of such essentially incompressible rubbery flesh. Such glossy pouts, such gouts of blood, such tears, such fear, such good fun, a bit of all sorts. Such inventive angles, a clitoris, an anus, a glans, an uvula, a cascade of this or that or the other liquid or solid. One was called My Bad Little Bedside Book. And another Naughty Girls Well and Truly Punished. The human body is not infinitely various but it is much more various than the range of poses and postures and parts in these pictures. The human erotic imagination appears to have strictly limited matter to work on. Padlocks, chains, thongs, spikes, cages, boots—nothing much has changed since the mediaeval torture-chamber was furnished, apart from the invention of rubber, which has produced some odd embellishments and habits. If you had asked Frederica whether these things did harm, or whether they should be suppressed, she would have given you an orthodox answer, an answer soon to be orthodox in advice columns everywhere, no, they do good, they are simply amusing, if people like them, they’re good. She is quite unprepared for the effect on her own body of seeing these exposed buttocks, these sow breasts, these globular mouths. She thinks quickly of herself, of her own pleasure in the dark—to what extent her response to the pictures is erotic—and she thinks, whilst he is … whilst I am … whilst we are … in his mind he sees … And she is sick, and knows you cannot unsee what you have seen, and that this is of no importance and that it has changed everything in the flickering half-light of her erotic imagination. It is like finding trunks of butchered limbs, she tells herself wildly, hands and feet under the floorboards, I cannot manage to pretend I haven’t seen. One is attracted or repelled and I am repelled, and it is not as Freud says, that attraction underlies repulsion, as with certain ambiguous smells, which I do understand—no, all this, it is simply horribly simple, like fairground dollies, and degrading, however my good liberal mind tries to avoid that judgemental word, degrading, and dirty, for all the pink and orange spanking cleanness of that overblown flesh.

  She thinks of making a bonfire, and this causes her to remember her father making a bonfire in her childhood of her carefully concealed cache of Girls’ Crystals. Poor Bill, how would he compare this with the sickly narratives and Schwärmerei of the Crystals? She can’t tell. Her own erotic imagination works after words, in the not-said; before she knew precisely what men and women did together she imagined Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy naked at last, she imagined Mr. Rochester, but what he brought was a comfortable enfolding containing excitement, and a look of love, of love of her, Jane-Frederica, Frederica-Jane, the beloved.

  If you put your finger on one of these fat breasts, she says to herself, it would spring back at you like a balloon, with a kind of a whine and a kind of a ping.

  She locks up the box and puts it back where she found it.

  In her dressing-gown pocket she finds Wilkie’s letter.

  It is of course possible that it was not herself who put that letter there. She certainly has no memory of doing so.

  Frederica goes into Spessendborough in the Land Rover with Olive, Rosalind, Pippy and Leo. She says she wants to come for the ride, which is
partly true—she needs to get out of Bran House—but she also wants to make private telephone calls, she is not sure to whom; she is almost too cast down to be in need of Wilkie’s sharpness. Spessendborough is a small market town, one end of which is taken up with covered cattle pens and stained concrete yards. The other end is pretty, with an inn—the Red Dragon—a wide High Street along which run old-fashioned shops, a baker, a butcher, a sweetshop, a haberdashery with thick wavery glass windows, and more modern shops, selling more old-fashioned things—local craft pottery, home-made jams and preserves, a chemist’s with coloured bottles. There are side streets of red-brick Georgian houses, and streets beyond them of low cottages with little gardens full of flowers, polished brass knockers, and spick-and-span lace curtains. There are two cafés, the Spinning Wheel and the Copper Kettle, full of dark spindle-legged armchairs with Jacobean chintz cushions and slightly rocky tables, oval and round. For some reason the Reivers always go to the Spinning Wheel, and never to the Copper Kettle. They like to have cream teas in the Spinning Wheel, scones and raspberry jam and Cornish clotted cream. The teapots have knitted teacosies with fluted panels and woolly bows on top. Frederica waits until Pippy has lifted the teapot and then says she has forgotten something at the chemist’s and will be back shortly. There is a phone box just beyond the chemist’s, out of the sight-line of anyone in the Spinning Wheel.

  She has a large collection of pennies, and sixpences, and shillings. She stands in the red box and deploys all these on top of the directories, which are torn and mangled. There is the usual smell—stale tobacco, faint urine, airless dustiness, Bakelite and stone. She picks up the receiver and dials the operator, to whom she recites—making her decision at the last moment—Alan Melville’s number. In the distance she hears the bellow of a protesting cow. She waits and hears clickings and hummings and vacancy and burring, and then suddenly a clear Scots voice.

  “Hullo. Hullo?”

  “Alan?”

  “Yes. Can I help?”

  “Alan, it’s me. Frederica.”

  “Frederica,” he says, in a pleased voice. “What do I say after so long? Are you well? Where are you? Are you ringing for any particular reason?”

  He was always, even when closest, rather agreeably courteous and detached.

  “No. Yes. I needed someone to talk to. I was so glad to have your letter. I feel you’re a long way away—in all sorts of ways, not only miles. It’s lovely to hear your voice, it really is. Damn, the money’s running out. Hang on. That’s better. I’ve put in a shilling, that’ll keep us going.”

  “Can I ring you back? Where is your phone box?”

  “Spessendborough. No, it’s OK. I’ve saved lots of change. I’m ringing from a phone box because—I’m ringing because—I feel I can talk more freely—”

  “Frederica, you don’t sound happy. Is something wrong?”

  “No. Not exactly. No. I’m a bit lonely. That’s what it is.”

  There is a tapping on the glass walls of the box. It is Leo, whose white nose is pressed against the pane, at the level of Frederica’s knees. She looks round. They are all staring in at her from different sides, Olive and Rosalind and Pippy Mammott. They look rather severe, but when they see her looking, they wave and smile, encouragingly.

  “I’ve got to go now, Alan.”

  “But you haven’t said anything, darling, you haven’t even begun.”

  “I’ve got to go. They’re all round the box.”

  “Let them wait a bit.”

  “I can’t talk to you with them watching. I can’t. I’ll go. Give my love to the others. Tell them their letters were—were—”

  “Frederica. Can I ring you back?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. I’ll try again.”

  “You sound really bothered, Frederica.”

  “I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go.”

  “Frederica—”

  “Good-bye. Give my love to Tony and the others. Good-bye—”

  They do not need to criticise, they do not need to ask whom she is calling, they do not need to say, “You said you were going to the chemist’s, and we find you in a phone box,” because all these things are perfectly clear to all of them, immediately. Frederica says, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” and they say, “Not at all, you weren’t, we just happened to come by,” and so they all pile into the Land Rover, Frederica between Pippy and Olive, with Leo on Pippy’s knees.

  Frederica thinks, The idea that I am trapped here is an illusion. I could just get up and go, tomorrow, I could. If I just said “I’m going now,” it is quite likely these three would be glad of it, that’s how it is.

  Leo says, “Your tea was cold. We just wondered where you were.” He puts a small hand into hers, and grips. She is kept rigid by the solid bottoms of Olive and Pippy, pressing against hers.

  Leo develops a passion for the story of Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod. Frederica tries to read him other things, Thomas the Tank Engine, more Hobbits, but night after night he insists on coming back to this rather unsavoury tale. He can recite large parts of it, and particularly enjoys the dénouement, when the fox believes he has killed the badger with a trap.

  “I will bury that nasty person in the hole which he has dug. I will bring my bedding out, and dry it in the sun,” said Mr. Tod.

  “I will get soft soap, and monkey soap, and all sorts of soap; and soda and scrubbing brushes; and persian powder; and carbolic to remove the smell. I must have a disinfecting. Perhaps I may have to burn sulphur.”

  “What is sulphur, Mummy? What is persian powder?”

  “Sulphur is yellow and has a disagreeable smell,” says Frederica, whose style is infected by Beatrix Potter’s own idiom. “Matches have sulphur in them, and fireworks, and so does the smell of bad eggs, which you probably don’t know—eggs don’t seem to go bad these days. It’s a nasty smell.”

  “Tommy Brock must have smelt very nasty if you need a bad-egg smell to get rid of his smell,” says Leo. “What do you think he smelt of?”

  “Like people’s dirty feet when they haven’t washed for months,” says Frederica. “You probably don’t know what that smells like, either.”

  “I’ve smelt Mr. Wigg’s shirt when he’s been gardening,” says Leo. “What a pong, Daddy says, Mr. Wigg makes. Do you think Tommy Brock smelled like Mr. Wigg, Mummy?”

  “Much worse, Leo. And you ought not to say people pong, it’s an ugly word, and you might hurt their feelings.”

  “I like it. Pong. Pong. Ping-pong-ping-pong. Ping is like needles and pong is like Sooty’s piles and pools.”

  “That’s enough of pongs. Let’s get on with the story.”

  “You haven’t told me what persian powder is.”

  “I haven’t, have I? That’s because I don’t know. I told you yesterday I didn’t know.”

  “You could have found out.”

  “I could. How was I to know you would want Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod for a fourth time running?”

  “You could have known. I love Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod. We will have them tomorrow too. I love it when they do horrible things to each other. They are horrible people and they do horrible things and everything is horrible and the little rabbits are all safe after all. Only a bit frightened, they were, the little rabbits. Their mummy wringed her ears, she was worried. How do you wring your ears?”