Babel Tower Page 3

  Other members of the assembled company were the young Narcisse, pale, gentle and hardly more than a boy, full of tremulous self-doubt and sudden starts of eagerness; the careful Fabian, who had shared Culvert’s student freedoms and had been a voice of caution in his wilder enterprises; and an older man, who called himself Turdus Cantor, and was wrapped in a heavy cloak, appearing to find the mountain air, even in the fresh sunlight, chill. Fabian’s brave wife, Mavis, was there, and with them were their three children, newly named Florian, Florizel and Felicitas. More children had set out, two families with their own young and orphaned cousins, but these were not expected to reach the bridge for a few days, since their journey was necessarily slower. Three younger women, clustered together and speaking in low voices, were the raven-haired Mariamne and the palely glimmering twin girls, Coelia and Cynthia. There were also the servants in charge of carts and pack animals—of these, who were appointed to become companions with the rest, once their destination was reached, more will be told at a later date.

  Culvert looked around him, and laughed, and said:

  “So far we have come, through risk and dread, and now we shall enter into the possession of our own lives and our own ways of living. La Tour Bruyarde, where you will be received, had lapsed into disuse in my grandfather’s time. Its stones were plundered for the walls of barns and chapels, its halls were empty and the vines were creeping through the broken windows. But much work has been done, many suites and chambers have been restored, the necessary offices are in order, although as you will soon see, the building work will continue above our heads, to make all more secure and harmonious.

  “All of you, I think, know something of my plans in making our retreat here. I wish our new lives to be an experiment in freedom—freedom in large things, in education, in government of our society, in shared labour, in the life of the mind and the life of the passions. Attention will be paid to things that may appear to be lesser things—art, dress, food, the decoration of our living quarters, the cultivation of our plants and trees. These will all be debated amongst us and made new in ways now only partly to be imagined, as we live our passionate and reasonable lives with goodwill. Petty restrictions will be done away with. New combinations will be instituted. Those who desire one thing greatly shall be satisfied, and so shall those who wish to flutter like butterflies from flower to flower.

  “When we and our fellow labourers have crossed this bridge, and when Damian and Samuel have waited here another seven days in hope of the wagon with the children, and other straggling companions, we shall take axes and cut the supports away from the bridge, which will render us unassailable from this direction, from where our danger comes.”

  “Will it,” asked Fabian, “render us also unable to escape from this valley?”

  “We hope no one will ever wish to escape. But also of course no one should be prevented—we are designing a community of entire freedom—and to the south there are narrow passes through the mountains and ways in which, with difficulties no greater than we have just faced, anyone might come out. But I hope we shall all be living in such pleasure, and delight, and mutual usefulness, that such wishes would be far indeed from your thoughts.”

  “Far indeed,” said Roseace, smiling, and spurring on her horse to be the first to set foot on the bridge. So they passed over in safety, some averting their eyes from the giddy chasm below, in which a sullen torrent roared over sharp black basalt, dimmed by stream and spray, forever out of reach of the direct warmth of the sun. Fabian clasped his young son to his breast so that the boy should not look down, but the boy’s sister gazed about her in all directions fearless and laughing. And so, talking animatedly of the haven they were so soon to see and enter, the company entered the rocky defile which would open on the Valley of Faisans.

  Frederica seems set on coming into the wood, where Hugh is, rather than inviting him over to her side. She hands the boy into Hugh’s hands and comes down quickly herself, rejecting assistance. She is as thin as ever, her sharp face still bony.

  They wander along the paths between the trees. They do not know how to talk to each other. Once they met daily and discussed everything, Plato, the tanks in Budapest, Mallarmé, Suez, metre. This makes it harder, not easier, to ask for narratives of the six years that have passed. They mention old friends. Alan is teaching art history at the Samuel Palmer School of Art, Hugh says. He thinks he is also writing a few articles. He travels to Italy. Tony is doing rather well as a freelance journalist. He even does some television. Hugh himself is still writing, yes, he is still writing, it is the poetry that matters, he tells Frederica, who makes an affirmative noise, nodding her scarfed head, staring down at beech mast. He makes his living teaching, he says, but he would like not to. A publisher has offered him some reading, but it would only be for a pittance. Poets can only expect pittances, says Hugh Pink to Frederica, who makes the same, slightly suffocated, affirmative noise. She does not ask about Raphael Faber, whose poetry-reading group they once both attended. Hugh tells her that Raphael’s poem “Lübeck Bells” has been published. He says it is much admired by those who can see what it is.

  “I know,” says Frederica.

  “Do you still see Raphael?” asks Hugh innocently. Hugh was in love with Frederica and Frederica was in love with Raphael, but that was in what seems to him in this wood another country, another time, his youth, which is already gone.

  “Oh no,” says Frederica. “I’ve lost touch with everyone from that time.”

  “You were writing for Vogue,” says Hugh, who had found that almost as odd as this manifestation in jodhpurs and jacket. Frederica was intellectually stylish but hardly part of the world of consumer delights and chic gossip.

  “I did for a bit. Before I married.”

  Hugh waits. He waits for an account of Frederica’s marriage.

  She says, “My sister was killed. I don’t know if you knew. And I married Nigel not long after, and Leo was born, and I was quite ill, for a bit. You don’t realise at first, Hugh, what a death is going to do to you.”

  Hugh asks about the death. He did not know Frederica’s sister, who was older than Frederica, had also been at Cambridge, he believed, but had lived in Yorkshire, where Frederica came from. He could not remember Frederica talking much about a sister. She had always seemed to be a kind of solitary, one-off creature, fierce and striving.

  Frederica tells him about her sister’s death. He realises that this narrative is practised, this is the way she has found it convenient—possible—to tell it. Her sister, she says, was married to a vicar and had two small children. And the cat brought in a bird, a sparrow, which took refuge under the refrigerator, and her sister had pulled it out and reached under it, and the fridge was not properly earthed. She was very young, says Frederica. Afterwards, she says wryly, we all suffered from shock. Shock waves, she says grimly. Waves and waves of shock. How terrible, says Hugh Pink, prevented from imagining by Frederica’s matter-of-fact tone.

  “And Nigel looked after me. I’d never needed looking after before, but Nigel looked after me.”

  “I didn’t know Nigel.”

  “He was around. He wasn’t at Cambridge, he just visited. His name’s Reiver, the family have a house, an old house, Bran House, just over those fields, those are their fields, over that stile.”

  They walk on. The boy holds Frederica’s hand. He shuffles dead leaves with quick kicks.

  “Look, Leo,” says Frederica. “Conkers. Over there.”

  One or two gleam, polished ruddy-brown, through split spiked green balls lined with creamy-white. They lie in a drift of chestnut leaves, in a hollow.

  “Go and get them,” says Frederica. “We always used to be so excited when we found any. We didn’t often, local boys had always combed the ground first. They threw stones at the branches, to bring them down. They were a great event. Every year. I never used to make holes and fight with them. Boys did, but I just kept them until they were dull and shrivelled, and then I threw them
out. Every year.”

  The boy pulls at Frederica’s hand. He will not gather the conkers without her. He pulls, and she follows, picking them up amongst the dead leaves and offering them to him—“humbly” is the word that comes to Hugh Pink.

  Hugh says to Leo, “Do you like to put strings through them?”

  The boy does not answer.

  “He’s like his father,” says Frederica. “He doesn’t talk much.”

  “You don’t,” says the boy. “You don’t talk much.”

  “When your mother and I were friends, before,” says Hugh Pink, “when we were younger, she never stopped talking.”

  Frederica straightens herself jerkily and begins to walk again, leaving the other two amongst the conkers. Hugh’s foot uncovers a monster, a solid glistening globe, bursting its cape. He offers it to Leo, who hands him Frederica’s offerings, in order to inspect this. Hugh says, “I’ve got a little bag here I had sandwiches in. You could put them all in there, to carry them.”

  “I could,” says Leo. “Thanks.”

  He drops the chestnuts solemnly into Hugh’s bag, hands it back to Hugh, and puts up his hand to be held. Hugh takes it. He cannot think of anything else to say. Leo says, “Come to tea in my house, now.”

  “Your mummy hasn’t asked me.”

  “Come to tea.”

  They catch up with Frederica.

  “This man,” says Leo. “This man is coming to tea, in my house.”

  “That would be nice,” says Frederica. “Come to tea, Hugh. It isn’t far.”

  Once this is agreed, the boy suddenly appears to feel free to run about, and begins to make little journeys into the undergrowth, pocketing feathers, shells, and a tuft of fur. Hugh says, “You’ve done a lot of living, Frederica. Real things have happened to you.”

  “Having things happen to you and living” says Frederica. She begins again. “They aren’t the same thing. I suppose they must be the same thing. I used to be so sure about living. I wanted.”

  The sentence has no object and no end, apparently.

  They climb the stile, and cross into the afternoon fields, where a heavy white horse is grazing, where a bird is singing in a thorn bush, where Hugh trips on a molehill and rights himself. He has a feeling he can’t find words for, although it is to do with his poetry. It is a feeling he thinks of as the English feeling, though in fact it may be simply a human feeling about death. It is a brief knowledge of his own temporary body, all the soft slippery dark organs, all the minute interlocking bones, all the snaking, fizzing, prickling veins and nerves. It is the knowledge that he is inside this skin, and it is intensely pleasurable because it always goes with a sense of the huge sweep and intricacy and age of what is outside hair, skin, eyeballs, nostrils, lips and the helix of the ear. It is the irrational pleasure of a creature in the fact that its surroundings were there long before its own appearance, and will be there long after. It was not a possible pleasure, Hugh thinks, before he had lived a certain time, before the repeated crossings of local earth, in his case England, had become part of the form of the soft pale mass in his skull, part of the active knowledge of his sight and smell and taste. You cannot have this particular pleasure in living, Hugh tells himself, before you have begun to know you are dying. He thinks it tends to come in this sort of landscape—bitten grass, exposed stones, bush, tree, hill, horizon—because generations of his ancestors, thousands and millions of years before towns and cities, and still after, have had this sense in this sort of place. The cells remember it, Hugh thinks. Every inch of this turf has absorbed, he supposes, knuckle-bones and heart-strings, fur and nails, blood and lymph. There are equally strong feelings in cities, which also turn the mind like whirlpools, but not this one, which is essentially green, and blue, and grey. The thing which can flash into the brain a memory of this thing is the repeated reading of words which, like turf and stones, are part of the matter of the mind: the Immortality Ode, say, the Nightingale, Shakespeare’s sonnets. There again the pleasure of the sense of one’s own vanishing briefness—Hugh stumbles—is part of the pleasure in the durable words.

  Sometimes he fears this feeling is no longer general, that few in his world would recognise it, and those who did would be suspicious, would call it stock response, silly pastoral. But still the smell of the earth, the moving lips of the horse in the grass, the tree’s black twigs on the grey air, move him, living and dying.

  He says none of this. He picks himself up and walks onwards. He watches Frederica’s son, trudging sturdily across the pasture. He tries to remember what it was like to be so small, to have the sense that years are very nearly infinite, other seasons unimaginably far away, as they would be to a man on a planet that took half a lifetime to circle its sun.

  • • •

  Beyond the next gate, over the brow of the meadow, is Bran House. Hugh Pink sees that it does indeed have a moat, not metaphorical, behind which is a high encircling wall, inside which are a tiled roof and Tudor chimney pots. The wall is both blank and beautiful, made of old, soft red bricks, crumbling here and there, encrusted with mosses and lichens, stonecrop and houseleeks, ivy-leaved toadflax and wild snapdragons. Branches—fruit trees, a cedar in the distance—rear above the wall.

  “How beautiful,” says Hugh.

  “It is,” says Frederica.

  “What a place for Leo to grow up,” says Hugh, still thinking of his “English” feeling.

  “I know,” says Frederica. “I know it is a wonderful place.”

  “We go in through the orchard,” says the child, running on ahead. Round a corner is a humped wooden bridge, over the moat, and a door in the wall.

  As they go through the trees, Hugh says, “I never thought of you as the mistress of a country house.”

  “Nor did I,” says Frederica.

  “Only connect,” says Hugh vaguely, thinking of Margaret Schlegel at Howards End. The phrase itself produces a renewed wash or swoop of English feeling.

  “Don’t say that,” says Frederica, sounding more like the woman he once knew than she has done all afternoon. Leo is busy wiping his boots on a bootscraper. A door opens, and a woman appears, middle-aged, in woollen stockings and tongued brogues, who takes him in, an arm around his shoulder, telling him it is tea-time.

  “This is Pippy Mammott,” says Frederica. “Pippy, this is my friend Hugh Pink. We were at university together. Leo invited him to tea.”

  “I’ll put out more cups,” says Pippy Mammott. She strides off, holding Leo’s hand. Hugh and Frederica cross a tiled hall, past a turning square staircase, into a drawing-room, with window-seats and comfy sofas.

  “They’ll bring tea,” says Frederica. “They’ll bring Leo. Nigel isn’t here. He’s working, I suppose. He works for his uncle’s shipping business, he goes off for days or weeks and comes back.”

  “And you,” says Hugh. “What do you do?”

  “What does it look as though I do?”

  “I don’t know, Frederica. When I last saw you you were all flaming and ferocious. You were going to be the first woman Fellow of King’s and have your own TV programme and write something—in some new form—”

  They have not sat down. Frederica is staring out of the window. Two women come into the room and are introduced to Hugh as Olive and Rosalind Reiver, Nigel’s sisters. The tea is brought on a trolley, and handed about by Pippy Mammott. Olive and Rosalind sit side by side on a sofa covered with pink and silver-green blowsy blooms printed on linen. They are square, dark women, with strong bones, and shadows on their upper lips. They wear comfortable jumpers, one oatmeal, one olive, tweed skirts and opaque stockings over strong, shapely legs. Their eyes are like Leo’s, large, dark and lustrous, under heavy dark brows. They ask Hugh Pink all the questions Frederica has not asked. What does he do, where does he live, is he married, doesn’t he love their beautiful part of the country, how can he bear to live in a city with the stench and the crowds and the machines, would he like to see the grounds, the home farm? Hugh says he
is on a walking holiday and is a long way from his next stopping place. Olive and Rosalind say they can run him over in no time in the Land Rover, and Hugh says, no, that is not the point of a walking-tour, and he must be on his way soon, now, before the light goes. They accept this without demur. They say he is very right to stick to his project, they approve of that, they say, there is no way as good as walking to see the real country. Pippy Mammott hands out scones, slices of cake, tea, more tea. The boy ferries between his mother and his aunts, showing things first to one, then the other. Pippy Mammott takes his hand and says it is time to go, now. Leo says, “I want to stay here,” but is led away. “Say good-bye to Mr. Pink,” says Pippy Mammott. “Good-bye,” says the boy, not bashfully.

  Hugh decides he ought to go. It is true about the light and he feels he ought to go. Frederica sees him to the door, and then walks out with him down the long drive to the front gate, to set him on his way.

  “Do you come to London, ever?”

  “Not really. I used to. It didn’t work out.”

  “You should come and see us all. Alan and Tony. Me. We miss you.”

  “You could write. You could write about poetry.”

  “Try and come. You seem to have lots of help—”

  “It isn’t help.”

  She stands awkwardly, helpless. He wonders if he can kiss her. He doesn’t exactly want to. Her old restless energy is in abeyance and with it her sexual sharpness. He puts his arms rather suddenly round her and brushes his face with hers. She flinches and stiffens and then hugs him fiercely.