Babel Tower Page 32

  “I don’t know if that would work,” she says weakly. She may be being hysterical. Leo could go for a fortnight and come back. He might come back.

  She is sure in her bones that he would not.

  “What do you think, Leo?” says Nigel. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “It isn’t fair,” says Frederica. “How can you make him choose?”

  “You made him choose,” says Nigel with sudden violence. “You took him off against his will, against my will, without a word, with your shoddy friends in a vulgar way—”

  “He came—”

  “Ah. So he came. So in that case you were prepared to leave him then. So you can let him come back now. Bran House is where he belongs. So are you coming, Leo?”

  “Not without Mummy.”

  “Just for a week or two, with or without Mummy. If you can persuade her to come, so much the better—if not—”

  “You can’t do this to Leo. Let him go to his grandmother now, let’s talk this out without him.”

  “Leo. Are you coming? Come with me. Come home.”

  “Listen, Nigel. I can’t ever come back, I should never have come in the first place, and so far it’s all my fault because of that. All. I think we should get a quiet divorce and think things out quietly. As for Leo, he chose to come with me and he is with me. Later, when we have a—an official arrangement—”

  “There won’t be one. If you think I’m going to give you the pleasure of divorcing, you can think again. You are my wife and my son’s mother as far as I’m concerned. I don’t go back on my word.”

  “I’m not ever coming back. You know that, really.”

  “Leo! You come. Now. Get your train, and come.”

  “Leo—go and find Grandma. I’ll try and explain to—to your father—”

  “Bitch!” says Nigel. He walks up to Frederica and grabs her shoulders. Frederica flinches and struggles. “Bitch!” says Nigel. “Manipulative bitch.” He flicks her about the face with his palm. “Don’t you dare—” he says, thick with sudden rage. Leo begins to scream. He screams and screams. Everyone appears. Daniel goes up to Frederica, and Nigel lets go. Leo runs to Winifred.

  Bill says, “It looks as though you’d better get going.”

  “It’s nothing,” says Nigel.

  “It isn’t nothing,” says Frederica.

  “Come on,” says Daniel, and takes Frederica and Leo away, holding both their hands. Bill continues to glare at his second son-in-law.

  “I don’t say who’s right and who’s wrong,” says Bill, “for I don’t know, and no one’s perfect. I do say, you’d better get going, until Frederica says she wants to see you. We are her flesh and blood.”

  “Leo is my flesh and blood.”

  “We know that. But now isn’t the moment. Please go. Christmas statistically breaks up thousands more marriages than it sustains, they say. Try again later. Please go.”

  Nigel is about to say something belligerent, notices Bill’s scars from his last visit, desists, and goes, slamming the door.

  Perhaps because Nigel has united them, the family take pleasure in one another’s company on Christmas Day. Winifred and Mary have made the house pretty, as the house in Masters’ Row was never made pretty. Christmas dinner is traditional and tastes good; the turkey is well cooked, the bread sauce bland and spicy together, the stuffing full of herbs and interest. Frederica and Bill talk animatedly about her next term’s novel course. She talks to her father about talking to adults, and about teaching Women in Love. They discuss the problem of Birkin, who is a teacher, not a writer.

  Bill says, “You can go away from Lawrence and get in a frightful rage with him—a silly man, even at times a bad man—and pompous—and then you come back and open the book and there’s the language, and the vision, shining at you, with authority, whatever that is.”

  “I didn’t understand about teaching. I thought it was dry. But it isn’t. It makes things more real—another world, that is also this world—more real in this world—you can’t say things like that.”

  “That is what is missing from old Birkin, Frederica. He doesn’t have a way of doing that.”

  “And next term,” says Frederica. “Madame Bovary, The Idiot, Middlemarch, The Castle, Anna Karenina, I think Mansfield Park, perhaps La Nausée—”

  Life, she wants to say, though it is books she is talking about, and her life, her angry husband, who has a Bluebeard’s cupboard full of rubbery pink flesh and has been taught silent slaughter, her life is simmering away elsewhere. She smiles at her father, and imagines his life differently, a class in Scarborough reading Bleak House, a class in Calverley coming to grips with Paradise Lost. She imagines him imagining dinosaurs striding through the foggy London streets and angels shining in the distance through the trees of the Garden.

  In the afternoon she helps Will and Leo to put the train together. The three of them make a good team: Frederica helps Leo unobtrusively, so that he knows the train is his, and can fit the pieces without Will becoming impatient or snatching. At the same time she asks Will’s advice, which he gives. Daniel watches them. He offers help, once, but Will snatches the piece of rail from his hands and fits it somewhere quite different. Daniel thinks that there is nothing motherly, even so, about Frederica. She is thin, she is quick, she is nervous: the two boys treat her neither as an adult nor as an equal but as something in between. Leo treats her almost as a prisoner, putting out a small imperious hand to pull her back if she strays too far away. He remembers Stephanie saying that no one played in their childhood, and sees that it is a process to which Frederica is applying her intelligence, that does not come naturally to her.

  His son, he thinks, will never forgive him. His son, like him, is single-minded. He himself loved one person, and now she is gone, he survives best without feelings of his own. Will intuits this, feels abandoned, and does not forgive. Daniel can foresee a time when they will both regret being so set in themselves, when it might be too late, but he can do nothing. He cannot get through to Will, because they both are as they are. Mary, on the other hand, requires love of him, expects it, creates it where it seemed impossible. He goes off to look for her.

  “You ought to talk to your father,” says Frederica to Will.

  “I don’t really want to,” says Will.

  “Probably you do and don’t,” says Frederica. “Most people are like that, with fathers.”

  “I more don’t. He went away, just like that. I’m all right without him.”

  “He was broken up—” says Frederica, as she might to an adult. “He was just broken up, he couldn’t go on, they were too close, he and she, he took it worse than other people might. You must try to understand. You are very like him. Something in you must understand.”

  “It almost doesn’t matter what I understand,” says Will. “I can’t be different. I was broken up too. You know.”

  “I know.”

  Leo clambers up Frederica, and puts his arms like a vice round her neck. Will watches. Frederica almost pushes Leo away, and then holds him tight. Will says, “I get on as best I can.”

  “I see,” says Frederica, across her son’s hair. Will puts in the last piece of rail, completing the circuit.

  “Now the power source,” he says. “And the engine. Will it go? Will the points work?”

  “Let Leo push the switch.”

  “Come on, Leo.”

  The train receives its power and begins its rush round the miniature landscape, into a tunnel, through a station, past a platform. Leo switches it on, off, on, off.

  “Don’t blow it up,” says Will. “Gently. Try the turntable.”

  The two heads bend over the rail. Daniel comes back.

  “My father drove an engine,” he says to Will. “Your grandfather.”

  Frederica sees Will think about getting up and going away. He moves the points, instead, rushing the train behind a sofa.

  “Will has made an amazing track,” says Frederica.

  The li
ttle train rushes powerfully round, and round, and round.

  The good temper persists into Boxing Day. Some of the party are invited to drinks that evening in Matthew Crowe’s wing of his Elizabethan house at Long Royston, the rest of which now belongs to the University of North Yorkshire. Alexander Wedderburn has spent Christmas with Crowe, and will be there. It is a long drive from Freyasgarth, but Frederica, Bill and Marcus set out in Bill’s car, with Marcus driving. Daniel stays with his children, with Winifred, and Leo.

  Crowe serves champagne in his panelled study, under his painting of the flayed Marsyas. He is older: his rubicund face is more hectic, his hair sparser, he has shrunk. Frederica has put on the Courrèges dress, telling herself that she has brought nothing else suitable, telling herself also that by an effort of will she can make it hers, and shear it of its associations with Nigel. Today, too, she looks beautiful.

  The room is full of people. Some of them Frederica recognises: there is Alexander, talking to the Vice-Chancellor, Gerard Wijnnobel. There is Edmund Wilkie, dark and rapid, fatter than he was, talking to the philosopher Vincent Hodgkiss, and a slight dark man who turns, and is Raphael Faber. Frederica feels the slight shock human beings feel on seeing a lover, a beloved, unexpectedly. He looks quickly at her, and away. He must be staying with Hodgkiss, his old friend. Crowe takes Bill away to talk to Wijnnobel and Alexander, who are talking about the Steerforth Committee and the teaching of English. Frederica follows: she is unready for Raphael. Alexander puts an arm round her shoulder and asks if she is well. The discussion resumes. The committee, it appears, has become divided into two camps, not so much about the English language as about teaching methods. Alexander describes these camps, following Arthur Beaver’s distinction, as those of Eros and the Wille zur Macht. Those who believe in love and freedom, and those who believe in rules and authority. Grammar, Wijnnobel says, has somehow become involved in this because of the confusion between rules prescribed by those in power, and rules or laws discovered in what might be called nature. It is an old argument, with a new twist. He is at ease, as far as he is ever at ease. Bill says the secret of good teaching is to know those taught and to care more about what is being taught. Frederica has a sudden memory of Jude Mason interrupting her Lawrence lecture with Nietzsche. “Only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity.” She begins an anecdote.

  “I am trying to teach D. H. Lawrence to a group of art students who don’t believe they need to know about the past, don’t believe they ought to know about the past, and I am constantly interrupted by a kind of naked grey-skinned androgynous model with a sawing voice and long grey hair who recites bits of Nietzsche—”

  They laugh. They talk about teaching.

  Marcus finds some of his colleagues. Professor Sir Abraham Calder-Fluss is there, a small man with rough white hair and a neat white moustache. He is a biochemist who has worked on protein synthesis in pigeon brain-cells and has a cautious interest in the new disciplines of neuroscience. With him are Jacob Scrope, whose field is artificial intelligence, and Lyon Bowman, who does delicate physiological work on the structure of the cells of the brain, the dendrites, the synapses, the axons, the glia. Scrope is handsome in a carved way, like a mediaeval monk, with a long lined face and cropped hair: Bowman is shorter, and fleshy, with a red mouth and dark curls. Marcus’s research, tentatively entitled “The Computer as a Model for the Activity of the Brain,” is being conducted under the supervision of Scrope, who is constructing primitive computers with different algorithms to mimic the processes of perception and learning. Marcus does not wholly like Scrope, but he does like Bowman and is both moved and repelled by the Golgi-stained slices of brain tissue with which Bowman works, the complicated branching forest of nerve cells, the spaces. He likes the mathematical work and is good at it, but he is not wholly sure whether what he is doing is what he wants to do. Wilkie is interested in Scrope’s computer models, which can be related to his own work on perceptual scanning and the recognition of forms. How much information, he has been finding out, does the eye need before it can say: This is a tree, this is a face. He has been studying illusions: the brain seems to fill in spaces in its own blind spot, left blank in a pattern, like a tablecloth, with more of the same, with imaginary, hypothetical tablecloth.

  The scientists discuss memory, the chemistry of thought, the mechanics of vision.

  The teachers discuss the political connotations of requiring, or permitting, children to learn poems, mathematical tables, the alphabet.

  Matthew Crowe detaches Frederica from the teaching group, and takes her over to talk to the Dean of Languages, Professor Jurgen Müller, and the English Professor, Colin Rennie, who is a Scot, and whose subject of study is the novels of Walter Scott. This group is attached to the group containing Hodgkiss and Raphael Faber. Crowe says to Frederica, “I involve myself as best I may in the University which is growing up round me. I try to follow Gerard Wijnnobel’s Renaissance ideals and mix the arts and the sciences in some idea of Learning or Thought, but you see how they divide, how they discuss amongst themselves. And then over there is a sociology teacher, Brenda Pincher, and all the wives, they make their own group and talk about whatever women talk about, no doubt. It can’t be clothes, their clothes are uniformly horrible, don’t you think, whereas you are resplendent. If it isn’t an impertinence, which it is, how did you come to be able to afford that dress, my dear? I heard you were married, you must have made a very splendid marriage to have that dress.”

  “I made a disastrous marriage, it has all gone wrong, I am in despair, the dress was a propitiatory present which I shouldn’t have put on, because I won’t be propitiated, but it was all I had—or perhaps I couldn’t resist it. Are you satisfied?”

  “No. I want to know everything. But later. Look out of my window. See the towers encroaching on my Elizabethan paradise. The Language Tower. The Evolution Tower. The Mathematics Tower. The Social Studies or Social Sciences Tower—they are quarrelling about the name—which isn’t finished. They haven’t built all the layers of connecting walkways yet. I believe it will look like a beehive.”

  Müller and Rennie do not want to talk to Frederica. They are having an amicable argument about Lukács’s view that Scott is the major European novelist among the British. Müller has written on Nietzsche, Freud, Mann and the end of European cultural continuity. Rennie has written on Scott, Goethe, Balzac and George Eliot. They are heavyweights. They suppose a young woman in a Courrèges dress is a bore. They move closer together and turn their shoulders. Raphael greets Frederica, and asks if she remembers Vincent Hodgkiss. Hodgkiss is not physically memorable; he always appears different, when met again. Frederica smiles at him. Raphael says, “And how is marriage suiting you, Frederica? You appear to be blooming.”

  “Blooming” is not a word she would have expected from this precise, secret person. It carries a note of hostility, she feels, which is undeserved and irrelevant.

  “Marriage is not suiting me. I turn out to be bad at it.”

  “I see,” says Raphael.

  There is a silence whilst Frederica thinks about Raphael, whose lectures she attended, at whose feet she sat, whom she loved, in terms of Eros and Wille zur Macht. He, like Crowe, for different reasons, seems smaller, as though a light has gone out. It is fearful, the realisation that we no longer love what we desperately loved and desired. It is a kind of death, and also, Frederica sees, a lightness, a beginning of freedom. This face, this intent face, is just a face.

  “We were discussing our host’s painting of Marsyas,” says Vincent Hodgkiss. “Raphael does not see how he could live with it. Raphael thinks he should burn it. Ceremoniously.”

  Frederica feels a perverse desire to defend the picture, which has always given her a frisson of terror, disgust, and then pleasure of some kind. She looks at it, the faun bound to the tree, his pelt at his feet, his lips drawn back from his pointed teeth, his whole body glistening dark red with the gouts of blood that are about to burs
t forth into fountains. His anatomy is lovingly accurate; his bloody muscles fold over his shoulder-blades and belly.

  “It is about art. And pain—”

  “I know that,” says Raphael, as though her simplicity is contemptible. “But it is wrong. It is bad.”

  “Very fashionable,” says Hodgkiss. “Have you seen the Marat-Sade? Through the howls of the mad and the victims and the executioners, the new world, the new truth.”

  “Don’t be silly,” says Raphael, putting down his friend with the same impatient contempt he showed Frederica. “All that is simply disgusting, Schadenfreude, something in ourselves we should recognise and look away from. I do not say we do not need to know it. I say we should not indulge bad imaginings.”

  “It’s powerful,” Frederica persists.

  Raphael smiles sweetly at her.

  “It’s something that shouldn’t be seen. Simply. I shall go and look out of the window at the nice abstract humanitarian towers.”

  He goes. Hodgkiss lingers a moment, and then wanders over to join Wijnnobel, who has approached the scientists, thus linking the scientific and the language-teaching groups. They are discussing the search for the elusive engram, the trace of a vision, a touch, a voice, a thought, left, where? In a body, to be recalled. The idea of the “molecules of memory” is currently exciting both biochemists and artificial-intelligence workers. Abraham Calder-Fluss explains for Hodgkiss’s benefit. “The idea is that it is possible that learned information, as well as genetic coded information, might be retained in and transmitted by very large molecules, such as the DNA and the RNA. And this idea received reinforcement from the immunological study of proteins, since antibodies recognise intruders into organisms, remember them, encode the information in some way, and prepare themselves to resist subsequent invaders. So we wonder, in turn, if the roots of our own memories, the structure of our own consciousness, are to be found in these amazing macromolecules.”