Babel Tower Read online

  “As I expected,” says Alan.

  “We are here,” says Bull. “You can show us Vermeer.”

  “I never went to lectures at eleven in Cambridge,” says Frederica practically. “They destroyed the whole morning’s work.”

  “Nor did I,” says Alan, who is writing an extremely neat column of Os in his class register.

  “There’s a movement amongst them,” says Bull. “They really believe the past is dangerous, is a kind of death. They think it destroys their originality. They think academic talk is anti-art. But mostly they believe in making a rupture, making a revolt, making a new world.”

  “Vermeer is not my idea of an oppressor,” says Frederica.

  “Perhaps I am,” says Alan. “I tell them I think he solved problems quietly in the corners of his paintings that they take whole pretentious blown-up canvases to explore, and went on, and solved more, and then more—”

  “The size is part of the point,” says Bull.

  “I do know that. I do understand that. It doesn’t interest me much—”

  The sawing voice says from the front row, “Why are we waiting?”

  The paintings, or not the paintings, but light shadows of them, thin skins of colour transfused and transfixed by the stream of light, appear on the screen. A woman pouring eternal creamy-white milk from a jug, in a plane of light, a woman weighing gold dust, intent faces closed on their own meditation, knowing somehow, Frederica thinks, that this moment of concentration is to stretch out into eternity, or at least, into an unhuman stretch of time. The geometry of maps, of carpets, of the panes of glass in half-open windows, mediating light, mediated by light. The View of Delft, with the yellow patch of roof and the perfect spherical bubbles of light on the wet sides of the ships. A meditation intense, quiet, concentrated and apparently without any touch of anger, or hurt, or aggression. Alan shows how certain lights are made in the camera obscura. He does what his own new light-beam, his own lenses, can do, and shows Frederica and Desmond Bull what Vermeer could never have seen, a painted blush, a poised mouth, hairs, the light on a wet eyeball so close that they are resolved into flickering movements of a lost brush in paint now fixed. And then he draws back, and there is a woman, in a room, playing a spinet, weighing gold dust, pouring milk.

  When Alan has finished, the sawing voice says, “You could weep, couldn’t you?”

  It is not clear how this is meant to be taken. Therefore it is not answered. Bull says, “Painters complain, art historians complain, that everyone these days only sees transparencies, which are the colours of light, not the colours of pigment. And so they get the wrong ideas, they see wrong, these people say. I say, this is new, it exists, we see all this light—we can learn from it—we could even learn to paint things to be transparent—”

  Alan says, “They talk about slashing Rembrandts and Vermeers because young painters don’t get enough attention. Such anger—”

  “Just Oedipal,” says Frederica. “Possibly.”

  “Oedipus felt guilty, my dear. These people feel they are waging a holy war. The young against the old and the dead.”

  “They will grow old themselves,” says Frederica, who throughout the increasing youthfulness of the sixties fails to understand how the professionally young fail to understand that they will grow old.

  “They may not,” says the sawing voice. “They are working up magics to stop time. They are making timeless moments, they are reversing its direction.”

  The woman pours the milk from her jug. The jug will never empty, her careful wrist will never lift.

  “And do you think,” says Jude Mason, “that in another thousand years, or two hundred, not to be overweening, my own stringy limbs and my not-very-clean face will shine off screens in theatres in times to come?”

  “I should think,” says Bull, “that all your images are made in materials with built-in obsolescence, if you want to know.”

  “Writing is safer,” says Jude Mason, “if you want to perpetuate yourself. I am writing a book.”

  “Everyone is writing a book,” says Frederica, thinking rather hysterically of Richmond Bly.

  Frederica is aware that Desmond Bull finds her attractive. This is not particularly flattering since it is clear that he also finds a good half of the women students attractive, and possibly some of the teachers. But it does stir a flicker of new-old life in her, a kind of readiness. He wanders into her little office, where she is sitting screened off from the Foundation studio, where the students are still experimenting with Jude’s grey flesh in an alembic of light.

  “Would you like to come and look at the work, one lunchtime? I’ve got a studio in Clerkenwell, we could go in my van.”

  “I ought to go home and see my son. I do try to get home for lunch.”

  “It wouldn’t take long. You’d like it. Your son’s got all your life.”

  “I ought not.”

  “But you will.”

  She goes with him. He buys a French loaf and a packet of salami and a bottle of Valpolicella and they get into the van. Frederica knows that this is something he does often and often. Only the woman changes. She does not mind this. She likes Bull: she likes the way he knits his brow when thinking. Shut in the van with him, with a faint odour of garlic struggling with a strong smell of exhaust and an even stronger smell of turpentine and white spirit emanating from Desmond Bull, she thinks drily that painters must be at a disadvantage as far as pheromones go. Bull’s smile, his strong body, his quick hands are attractive, but the smells are certainly not. She sits upright beside him and discusses Jude Mason.

  “Nobody knows where he lives,” says Bull. “He picks up his letters from a poste restante in Soho. You might say he was pathetic, tho’ he’s got a perfect right to his own style, dirt and all—but he isn’t, quite, he’s got a sort of integrity. Richmond Bly thinks he’s mad.”

  “I think Richmond Bly’s mad.”

  Frederica bites back the story of The Silver Ship.

  “Madder than Blake. Silly-mad. I agree.”

  The studio is two large rooms built over a warehouse, and is entered up an iron ladder. The smell of paint thinner intensifies, killing the last of Frederica’s hunger. The rooms are very large, but the living space is very small, since both rooms are walled in with large canvases on stretchers, several deep. In the centre of each room is a double mattress, with rumpled pillows and a bright Scandinavian blanket. On the floor of one of the studios is a Baby Belling and an electric kettle. In the other is a very small fridge.

  “Sit down, make yourself comfortable. It’s very basic. You can have a party, or an intimate cuddle, in here. I call these two rooms the Divided Self of Desmond Bull. On your left, modern art post-Rauschenberg. On your right, the Scottish European, the guilty painterly painter. Where would you like to be?”

  “How can I tell, if all I can see is the backs?”

  “You want me to turn them?”

  “That’s what I came for, isn’t it?”

  Desmond Bull pulls the cork and gives Frederica a plastic cup of red wine. It is not very nice red wine. It is sour. He puts an arm round her shoulder.

  “Oh, I dunno,” he says. “Come and look at my etchings and all that. Why don’t we sit down and have a bit of a chat, and so on, and a drink, and then think about the work?”

  He puts a hand on her breast. Frederica puts a friendly hand on his hand. Somewhere inside her, her body tries to respond. This arouses a series of protesting tugs of pain and misery in her inflamed interior. Desmond Bull gives her a warm and turpentiney kiss. Frederica says, “I’m a bit off all this at the moment. Just at the moment, it won’t go. And I want to see the work. I did come to see the work.”

  Bull is momentarily disconcerted. Frederica thinks with amusement that he would be much less worried to show her his naked body than these hidden images. And that the idea of sex, of possible sex, has turned her into a girl, the girl (at the moment) in his eyes, whereas when they talk, she is someone. He says, “Well, w
here shall we start?” and then, “It’s a bit private, you see, all this. I do it to sell it, but I do it all by myself here, it’s a kind of frenzy, I do it by myself, and then it has to be looked at, it has to go out and be public.” He says, “I’m a bit of a schizophrenic.” It is a very fashionable word. But when he turns the canvases round, Frederica sees what he means.

  In the left-hand studio, the work is made by someone in the grip of the idea that art is everything and that everything can be seen as art. There is a sense in which it is a junk shop. One work is made of hundreds and hundreds of electric wires, stripped, coiled, layers thick like thick impasto, and all colours, woven red and black fat wires, heavy-duty blue plastic wires, orange, brown, green, acid yellow, like nests, like tangles, like barbed-wire fences, like cartoon roses. Another is rows of pebbles. “One from every garden of every house in my mother’s street. Each pebble represents a suburban garden. This one is fat and green. That one is rather thin and sort of russet. They are in rows like the houses they come from.” He pauses. “The woman who goes with that stodgy grey one wears curlers and has cancer. The one with that quartzy one is a dishy blonde who comes out on her doorstep in a dressing gown.”

  “How am I supposed to see all that?”

  “You can’t. But once I tell you, you know it, don’t you, you can’t unknow it. You can look at the subtle colours of the pebbles, see, the variety of the colours—I love this blood-coloured one with blue flecks, the lady who goes with that wears desperate, sad, broken high-heeled yellow shoes and keeps swaggering and staggering. Each of the pebbles has a number, that’s the number of the house.”

  “Which is your mother?”

  “That’s the right question, you see, do I or don’t I distinguish her in that row of pebbles? Which is my mother?”

  “Forty-two is dried melon seeds. All the rest are stones. Ergo, forty-two is your mother.”

  “She’s got cancer, too. Of the ovaries. She’s shrivelling. I told you, these things are sort of private.”

  “It’s a row of stones—” Frederica struggles. “Can it mean anything to me without your talking?”

  Desmond Bull is turning things round, bringing colours and forms and objects into the studio, further reducing its open space. He exhibits a gaudy and strangely pleasing collage of flowered shirts, pressed very flat, blue with yellow daisies, pink with red poppies, orange with purple hibiscus.

  “You can go out of your mind with looking at these colour combinations,” he says. “Shop windows scream at you. You know?”

  He turns more. Black canvases, white canvases, some shiny and uniform, some with the black and white smeared over colour, which stares faintly through, a hairstreak of crimson here, a veiled patch of delicious apple green there, yellow ochre under a black stain, indigo under smoke.

  “Rauschenberg erased de Koonings, he just painted over them. On the principle that there was art lying around all over the world, and that there was talent all over, you just make what you need, what you see now. These are all erasures of my own work. There are old paintings of mine struggling around under the black and white. I can remember what some of them are—that one was a rather good Cubist self-portrait, that one I think was a Bonnard-ish sort of a window into a garden that wouldn’t give up being derivative—yes, look, there’s a bit of apple blossom under the black—”

  “Did you erase them because you liked them or because you didn’t?”

  “Both. Both. Paintings I was too fond of and ones that I rather loathed.”

  “It’s all very theoretical.”

  “It is. It’s passionate too, that’s what gets me, that’s why I do it. It comes out of a sort of idea about art—being everything—and everything being art—and this is a bit like taking LSD—all the world begins to explode and implode with glittery meaning. I’m sorry you won’t come to bed with me. It breaks the tension.”

  “That’s a good reason for sex.”

  Frederica is still baffled by her own relation to the mysterious/ordinary pebbles.

  “The thing about the pebbles is, they are no good to me without me being inside your head. All I can do with them, is get my own row of pebbles. Or whatever. Shirts, or a collage of chocolate papers, you know?”

  “You won’t forget my pebbles.”

  “I won’t,” says Frederica, almost irritated by this fact. “Of course I won’t.” And she never does.

  “If people give you pebbles,” says Bull, “it’s no good. And for pebbles read anything. I had a girlfriend who always turned up with bags full of shirts she thought I might like. I made a collage once of her offerings—one for each fuck—but it was a half-hearted affair.”

  When the bottle of wine is drunk, and another, found in the bedclothes, has been opened, Desmond Bull moves into the second studio. This time he does not speak; he moves from wall to wall, humping the canvases and grunting, and offering no more comment than “a painting of masks,” “another painting of masks,” “another painting of masks,” “a painting of masks on fire.”

  Frederica too does not speak. She does not know enough about paintings to comment on the paint, or even to think accurately about it. She has been in the Art School long enough not to try to convert it into narrative, although the masked figures half-invite this. They are very unsettling; they are articulated skeletons, or studio-articulated lay figures wearing masks that are full of extremely articulated expressions of horror, delight, the rictus of sexual bliss, the smirk of flirtation, the disintegrating template of age, and are at the same time purely flat, purely patterns of well-laid patches of paint, related planes, or a band of dark floating seed-shapes that read suddenly, in another light, as dark hollow eyes in the light, on the paint, in the painted light. Some of the colours are sombre and brilliant, reds, flames, golds, Veronese blues. And some are pale, bluish pinks on thick chalky white, candle-wax colours with touches of transparent blood-pink, and here and there a yellow hand, and here and there a sky-blue foot.

  “It’s about the impossibility of figurative painting,” says Bull.

  “About what it feels like to be a human body in an abstract world,” says Frederica, cleverly, catching his thought.

  “I hadn’t put it quite that way. I like that. Have some more wine.”

  “I like the pinks.”

  “That’s Ensor. His pinks are staggering. I’m still learning. You might say the masks are Ensor—but the masks are mine too, they aren’t his, his kind of grisly carnival isn’t what I’m doing, mine’s about Greek tragedy too, about coming from behind a front.”

  “As though the erased paintings were trying to talk,” says Frederica, inspired. He looks at her very sharply.

  “Something like that. You’re a clever girl. One of these days, when you’re not off it, you must come back and we’ll have a good long friendly ruck, if you understand that.”

  Can one fuck erased paintings? Frederica thinks giddily. And is a naked prancing man a mask for a brain and a pair of eyes watching and watching and trying to make sense?

  “I ought to get back to my son,” she says. “I’m glad I saw the work.”

  Back in the Bloomsbury flat Leo is sitting companionably with Thomas Poole and Simon. He does not run to greet her, but this is a form of punishment; his averted eyes are full of trouble and punishing anger. Thomas Poole, too, looks at Frederica as though she were a desirable woman. He says, “Mr. Parrott rang. And Hugh Pink. You are in demand. And Tony Watson, who thinks he has talked the New Statesman into letting you review some books.”

  “Good. I’m tired.”

  “I’ll bring you a cup of coffee. Sit down and I’ll bring you a coffee.”

  He stands up. She feels guilty. She should have been home hours ago. Thomas Poole touches her hair on his way out to the kitchen. Leo says, “Sometimes you can hate people quite a lot.”

  “Who? Who do you hate?”

  He does not answer. After a bit, he says, “I hate not knowing where people are. I like it when people are where
I know where they are. At Bran House, I knew where everyone was.”

  “I don’t go for long. I always come back. I’m earning our living.”

  “We once had a living.”

  Frederica cannot speak. He creeps to her side, and puts his arms round her waist.

  “Never mind,” he says, as she might have said.

  She bends her head to his. She smells his hair. She has no choices. She imagines suddenly a film in which a sagacious dog travelled hundreds of miles, back along the scent, or the magnetic field, which pulled from what it knew and loved. This hair she could distinguish in a room piled high with other heads. This note she would hear through all others. This person is the centre. It is not what she would have chosen but it is a fact, it is a truth stronger than other truths. It is a love so violent that it is almost its opposite.

  “We hate people when we love them,” she says. “Sometimes.”

  VIII

  Frederica, Leo and Daniel travel north for Christmas, sitting together on the crowded train like the nuclear family they are not. Thomas Poole is hurt that Frederica and Leo have not stayed to make a family Christmas in the Bloomsbury flat: Christmas is a time when somebody is always hurt. Both Frederica and Daniel are afraid of going back into the family from which Stephanie is absent. Frederica is also aware of having behaved badly to her parents, who do not know Leo. They are fetched to Freyasgarth from Calverley station by Marcus, who says little but seems calm, which was not always the case. As they drive out along the moorland roads Frederica’s heart lifts: it is grey, it is dark, it is windswept, it is the north from which she comes.

  She is taken aback by the beauty of the new house. It is Winifred, not Bill, who meets her on the doorstep, a Winifred smiling with unquestioning delight and weeping a little—“Frederica, Leo,” touching both with a warmth that in the earlier days would have been reserve and holding back. Frederica finds that she too is weeping. Leo clings to her leg and watches. Behind Winifred is Mary, who runs at Daniel, and is lifted in his arms. Behind Mary is Bill, smaller than Frederica remembers him, paler and less fiery, waiting to see what his daughter will do. Frederica rushes forward and kisses him too. Marcus carries suitcases to pretty bedrooms looking out on moorland. They are all vaguely aware that Frederica’s return from her long sulk or evasion is and is not the restoration of the lost daughter. Stephanie will not return. Winifred embraces Daniel. Bill shakes his hand. Exclaiming with pleasure, sniffing with emotion, the family moves into the living room, which is in the dark of a winter afternoon, except for a tall Christmas tree, shining with multicoloured lights, red, blue, green, gold, white, and decorated, by Winifred and Mary, with the magical golden wire hexagons and polyhedrons made eleven years ago by Marcus for Stephanie’s Christmas tree.