Babel Tower Read online

  He says, “He told me he comforted you when she was killed.”

  “He did. That is true.”

  They stare at each other.

  “It’s not really unusual,” says Daniel, referring to the pain of grief and memory. “It’s all over the place, everybody’s got something. It doesn’t make it any easier.”

  Frederica is grateful he is prepared to share any part of his pain with her. She grips his hand on the table.

  “What will you do?” he asks her. “Get a divorce?”

  “I must. There’s Leo. It won’t be easy.”

  “You need a good lawyer. I know one or two—it goes with the job. I’ll give you a name and a number. You’d best get on wi’ it, get some peace at the end. Where are you living?”

  “With Thomas Poole. It works beautifully. He has an au pair and we all share the baby-sitting. Leo is not a baby. You must come and see him.”

  “I should like that. I work long hours, but I should like that. And I wonder—should we all go back to Yorkshire for Christmas? They’d be glad to see you—you know the reasons, beyond that you’re their child and in trouble. And I’d like Leo to meet Will and Mary. It’s not quite right that they don’t know each other. Blood’s thicker.”

  “Not so much these days. I’ll think. I’m scared. I want to lick my wounds, I don’t want to discuss things, the idiotic things I’ve done.”

  “You won’t need to. Come with me.”

  They discuss Jude, briefly. Daniel describes his gadfly phone calls. Frederica expresses distaste. So does Daniel.

  “He wants us to dislike him,” says Daniel.

  “Then we will,” says Frederica. “We will dislike him intensely, if that’s what he wants.”

  Frederica’s extra-mural class is not in the Crabb Robinson Institute, but in an old elementary school, in Islington, a Catholic school, red, ugly, with a basement canteen serving ham and cheese buns, doughnuts and potato crisps, watery coffee and tannin-tanned tea, a school which has the beautiful and mysterious name Our Lady of the Sorrows. Frederica’s course at Our Lady of the Sorrows has the work-manlike title “Post-War British Fiction.” There is one full-length book on that subject, by an American, which states that post-war British fiction is about rebellious working-class lads from the provinces asserting themselves and finding a voice where once they were mute. It says that this subject is entirely new. Frederica questions this view: has the author of this work never read Lawrence, never read Arnold Bennett? She reads this book and takes a certain aesthetic pleasure in the critical attempt to make interesting what is (compared with Lawrence and Bennett) intrinsically not very interesting, except that everything is interesting if you take a run at it, she tells herself, I will get myself interested in Amis and Wain and Braine and all those others. I will also teach Lord of the Flies and Iris Murdoch. I am myself a provincial person become self-conscious but I cannot like the world of these novels. Lawrence was greedy for knowledge, for learning, he was interested in natural history and cultural history, he felt people should get out of mining villages. These people mostly sneer at such things. They have chips on their shoulders. I will say why this depresses me.

  Her first extra-mural class resembles an Ionesco play. “If there are fewer than seven students,” said Thomas Poole, “the class may have to close. It is pure luck whether people come or not, especially in your area. It is pure luck whether they stay, to some extent. If they don’t, the class will be closed.”

  The class is on the top of the school, up four flights of steep red stone stairs, with an uncompromising metal railing. When Frederica goes into the room, clutching an introductory talk—“Some Trends in Modern British Writing”—she is greeted by the sight of about fifteen people squatting in an uncomfortable circle on small chairs, made for gnomes, for people Leo’s size. There are two youngish men in dark suits, a middle-aged couple, a very pretty girl and a stretched-skinned woman who was once beautiful, a small man in a very clean forget-me-not-blue jumper over a tightly knotted green tie, a severe-looking woman, a large comfortable woman, an elderly man in a tweed jacket, and a nun. Frederica stares at this uncomfortable ring of unrelated faces.

  “They can’t expect you to sit like that,” she says.

  The nun says, “It has been known. Sometimes the only available chairs are infant chairs. I knew a woman who got down and her bones set into that position, and she had to be carried home bent up like a ladder, most unfortunate.”

  “My astronomy class,” says the elderly man, “has more or less acceptable chairs.”

  “I think,” says the blue jersey, “we should do a raid on other classrooms, Miss Potter, and quickly, and decisively.”

  The faces, variegated adult faces, with none of the homogeneity of the art student groups, look up at Frederica in a circle, assessing her, assessing the situation. One of the women has amazing blue-and-silver eyelids. One of the men has pince-nez:

  “Do you know where to raid?” Frederica asks the blue jumper.

  “Two floors down, double classroom, nothing in it pro tem.”

  “We shall get into trouble,” says the large lady.

  “We are all grown-ups,” says Frederica.

  They organise themselves. They find an empty classroom full of junior chairs, small but tolerable. One of the suits hands them to the other, who hands them to a chain of helpers on the stairs. In ten minutes the group is resettled, the discarded infant chairs stacked neatly at the back of the room. Frederica gives her talk. She is nervous; she has no idea who these people are, or why they are there, strangers who have walked in from the London streets, from a day’s work, or perhaps a day’s housekeeping, strangers who perhaps want to know about Post-War British Fiction because they want to write it, or perhaps because they are in need of dinner-party conversation, or perhaps because they desperately need to meet someone, anyone, and find Post-War British Fiction a convenient background noise to accompany these meetings, or perhaps because they have to get out of a house they are shut in, or want to change themselves in some definable or undefinable way.

  At that first meeting the group is not a group, and it is only ignorance of their names and natures that prevents Frederica from coming to the conclusion that they are too heterogeneous to form a group. She takes the register:

  Rosemary Bell (a dark, thin, pretty woman who is a hospital almoner)

  Dorothy Brittain (the large woman, an editorial assistant on A Woman’s Place magazine)

  Amanda Harvill (a beautiful woman, tanned, lined, well over forty, without profession)

  Humphrey Maggs (the speedwell-blue jersey, who turns out to work as a clerk in Social Security)

  Godfrey and Audrey Mortimer (a retired married couple)

  Ronald Moxon (a taxi-driver)

  George Murphy (a stockbroker)

  Ibrahim Mustafa (a research student)

  Lina Nussbaum (an unemployed receptionist)

  John Ottokar (a computer programmer)

  Sister Perpetua (nun and teacher)

  Alice Somerville (retired Civil Servant)

  Ghislaine Todd (a young psychoanalyst)

  Una Winterson (housewife, mother of four children)

  She is new at teaching; she has always said she would never teach; and teaching is in her blood. As she talks, she scans the rows. The two men in city suits sit together at the back (later they will separate). One is dark and one is blond. The dark one meets her eye with a slightly aggressive smile. The blond one stares down at his knees. The married pair smile encouragement. The large lady listens best; she manages to convey an awareness of the rhythms of the structure of Frederica’s argument. Amanda Harvill’s painted eyelids go up and down, up and down: it is not clear that her listening look is listening. Ronald Moxon and Lina Nussbaum fidget and shift. Lina Nussbaum, under a huge frizz of hennaed curls, fidgets worst, and makes a popping sound with her mouth. Sister Perpetua and Humphrey Maggs, accomplished listeners, sit side by side, respectful and thoughtful, and do not move
a muscle. Frederica scans them all for signs of interest and rejection. She weaves a web of attention—a mention of Kafka caused a quick movement of interest in Ghislaine Todd; when his name comes back, Frederica meets the other woman’s eye. Bit by bit, apart from Lina Nussbaum’s popping, and possibly the downward stare of the blond John Ottokar, all the attention is somehow woven together. The questions are at first slow: a kindly one from Audrey Mortimer, a professional one from Humphrey Maggs, who has clearly already read all the proposed Post-War British Novels, a challenging one from Dorothy Brittain, designed to make the atmosphere more electric, a somewhat mischievous one from George Murphy, who has noticed an inconsistency in Frederica’s brief account of the Welfare State. They are all talking to Frederica, not to each other. Frederica refers a tentative remark of Rosemary Bell back to the truculent Mr. Murphy, and for a moment the two exchange embryonic views on the effects of the Welfare State on the British people and on Post-War British Fiction. Threads are being knotted. The group walks down to the canteen and eats and drinks, measuring each other, asking “What do you do?” and “What do you think of C. P. Snow?” and “Did you see the Marat-Sade?” No one speaks to the nun, who appears unconcerned by her solitude, sipping tea. Frederica looks at them all with an incredulous excitement. She thinks of Olive and Rosalind and Pippy Mammott, of the orchard and the moat. At her elbow, Una Winterson, a quiet, fair woman, inquires socially if Frederica is married, if she has children. Frederica does not want to have that conversation; she turns round in irritation and sees a soft face stretched with anxiety. “I have four: they take up so much time; this is the first time I’ve come out on my own for thirteen years. I started a degree in classics once, but I got married in the middle and Mike (my husband) thought it wasn’t worth going on. I do hope I haven’t lost the ability to think. I do sometimes wonder if I have. I don’t think I should ever have the courage to talk aloud in class, you know, that’s why this coffee-break is such a good idea. If the coffee was only nicer.”

  Later, like all groups, this class will develop its closeness and splits, its inner circles and its scapegoats, its ritual lines of alliance and alignment, of opposition and passionate disagreement. Frederica is new to it; she has already sensed that the group must come together, and that this has something to do with her own position, standing up in front of them and speaking for an hour and then, after food and drink, listening, making sure.

  The adult students are unlike the professional students. They desire knowledge and they come from what they think of as the real world, of work, above all, but also of things lived through, marriage, birth, death, success, failure, which are all phantasms to young students trying to find their shapes in the pages of books. The adults are inclined to measure the books against life and find them wanting. “It made me laugh like a drain,” says the taxi-driver of the burning of the blankets in Lucky Jim, “but I’m buggered if I can see why I should spend time talking about it.” George Murphy, the stockbroker, asks with a mocking belligerence why novels are about so little of the world: “the kitchen, forgive me, the media, academe, the novel. Just think a minute,” he says, “what is going on out there, multi-national companies, people getting killed in very new ways in Vietnam, the discovery of the DNA, men in space, and the novel doesn’t seem to have any idea about any of them. Why should I bother?”

  “Why do you? Why do you come?”

  He smiles. “I joined a class to find out how to mend my Lambretta. And for another ten shillings I could have another class. So here I am.”

  “Why do you stay?”

  “Oh, I like to think a bit about life and death and sex. I expect we’ll get on to those things.”

  Frederica gives a lecture about halfway through the term on “Nostalgia for Tolstoi.” She takes her texts from Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing, both of whom express a sharp dissatisfaction with fragmentary modern forms, and consequent moral simplicities and simplifications. The adults, who tend to talk about characters in books as though they were people whose fates were real, important and interesting, seize on this lecture and attack Frederica. Why, they say, can they not read Tolstoi? Why not read, says Dorothy Brittain, Tolstoi and Dostoevski, George Eliot and Thomas Mann, Madame Bovary and Proust? It is agreed that next term this will happen. Frederica does not know, yet, what this decision will do to her.

  Frederica sits in the common-room at the Samuel Palmer School with her good friend Alan Melville. She tells him about the extramural class and Nostalgia for Tolstoi. She says, “It is funny how the tensions in all groups are sexual, whatever else they are.” Alan looks her up and down, and says in his quietly amused Scottish voice, “You seem to be thriving on it. You are beginning to look like the Frederica I remember. Are they all in love with you?”

  “There is one very beautiful one, but he never speaks.”

  “I didn’t ask if you were in love with them. That way does no good. You must realise, they will all be in love with you, because of the nature of groups, and you mustn’t take it personally.”

  “We go out in a group now, to the pub, after. At first only a few went, a kind of inner group, and then they asked me, and I try to include all the others, not just the kind of lively and intense ones.”

  “A good instinct. You are a born teacher.”

  “I am not. This is temporary. I am getting back my ambition but I’ve no idea what to do with it. But I will do such things—”

  They laugh. Frederica thinks what a pure pleasure it is to have a friend who is a man. She looks at his clear-cut fair face and feels full of love for him: he is very attractive, sex is in him, and she has the good sense not to be attracted, for she knows, without knowing how she knows it, that to be Alan’s friend is a durable delight, and to be his lover would be a disaster. And how does she know that, and in what unspoken reservations, in what reticence, in what brief sad silences, does she diagnose disaster? She says, “I do love you, Alan.”

  “I need to be loved. Come to my lecture on Vermeer, after coffee. I have written a wonderful lecture on Vermeer, and I would be glad of your presence.”

  The painter, Desmond Bull, comes up behind them. He too is a Scot, a craggy-looking Scot with gingery eyebrows like furry caterpillars, a heavy, bristling jaw, sharp blue eyes and diminishing fine red-gold hair in a faute-de-mieux tonsure. His chest hair, inside his very open shirt, is abundant and curly and fiery. He wears a matted and unravelling cardigan whose original colour is almost impossible to distinguish: it may have been some sort of blue.

  “I shall come, Alan, I shall come and see your slides of Vermeer. You can count me in.”

  “I’m thinking of applying for a full-time job at Sotheby’s,” says Alan, apparently irrelevantly.

  “You’d be richer. And you wouldn’t find Rituals in your classrooms.”

  “Rituals?” says Frederica.

  “Happenings. Old-fashioned Happenings, organised by Bly. The Calling-Down of Powers. Sub-Golden-Dawn. Most amusing. Here is the man himself.”

  Richmond Bly approaches smilingly, bearing an exquisite Japanese ceramic cup of some sort of herbal tea. The common-room is a kind of heterogeneous repository of works by students—a zebra-striped sofa, a scarlet plastic bench, a few very comfortable Bauhaus leather-and-steel chairs. The walls are hung with paintings, chosen very fairly from amongst the current student trends: two brilliant hard-edged abstract acrylic paintings; a large soft grey abstract whirl; a painting of stick-like figures in a sombre green park, owing something to Lowry, something to Seurat, something to Nolde; a mystical image of floating figures in conical hats. There is also a reproduction of Linnell’s portrait of the mildly agricultural Samuel Palmer, and two of Palmer’s prints of sheep, clouds, trees, dark, light, linear insistence and the mystery of space and vanishing behind the lines. The coffee-pots are variable: a silver one, hand-beaten in the jewellery department, with an extravagant rose agate knob, and an austere and functional steel one from Industrial Design, which does not pour very well. All the
cups are different, heavy stoneware, thinnest porcelain, comic monkey-heads, lop-sided cabbage-forms, perfect globes of rosy glaze.

  “I hear good reports of your classes,” says Bly to Frederica. “The students like them.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I am told you are working for a publisher.”

  “I read for one, in the evenings, yes. Mostly rubbish.”

  “I am looking for a publisher. I have written a book. A rather unusual book, I flatter myself, and such things are, sad to say, hard to place. I wonder if you would care to read it—”

  Frederica says she would be honoured. She adds that she does not know much about publishing—almost nothing—her opinion is not of much worth—

  “You must by now have some inkling of what goes on in the commercial mind. You know the story of J.R.R. Tolkien. His publisher wanted to reject The Lord of the Rings and it was published as a profit-sharing venture—to please the Professor—who is now very rich. The commercial mind fails to understand the public hunger for the stories of romance and mystery.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” says Frederica, staring at the glass table in front of her, under which Bly’s feet are twisting round and round each other in an energy of enthusiasm.

  “My lecture is in ten minutes,” says Alan. “I must see to my slides.”

  “You must take the register,” says Bly. “These students cannot have their degrees without attending art-historical courses. It is a rule.”

  “I know,” says Alan.

  In the lecture theatre, he sets up his slides. Desmond Bull and Frederica sit together under the projector. The time for the beginning of the lecture comes, and goes, and ten more minutes go past, and no one comes. At the end of this time, the door opens, and admits Jude Mason, fully clothed in his dirty blue velvet frock coat and a pair of extremely tight midnight-blue velvet trousers. He does not look at them or speak to them, but sits in the front row, as far as possible from Alan, Desmond Bull and Frederica, meticulously swinging out and arranging the flaps of his coat, folding his hands and bowing his head, as though in church.