Babel Tower Read online

  Wijnnobel asks what kind of research can be done. Lyon Bowman describes the work of James McConnell, editor of the Worm-Runners’ Digest, who has trained planaria, flatworms, simple organisms, to avoid bright light, which they associate with electric shock.

  “And then he chops up the trained beasties and feeds them to a group of naïve beasties, who absorb their molecules and, he claims, their learning with them—because the cannibals also avoid light, and the control naïve worms rush gaily towards it. I find it hard to credit, myself. What fear of the butcher, what desire for grass pastures, should I not have absorbed from my steak and kidney?”

  Hodgkiss says, “The question is, whether the word ‘information’ means the same in all cases, that of immunology, that of the DNA, that of the mind of the scientist building a computer, or whether you are all thinking by analogy, which is dangerous. I am not enough of a scientist to answer my own question.”

  Marcus looks quickly at him: he has put his finger on something Marcus has felt to be wrong in all this without having the linguistic interest to sort it out.

  Bowman says, “There are physiological changes—very rapid ones—in growing brains—which later cease to happen. I should look there.”

  Marcus has a momentary sense of the shape of what he wants to know, wants to find out. He feels it as a shape in his own brain, an embryonic form of an idea which cannot be formed in words, or even in a diagram, though it is tantalisingly close to one, it is a sort of a form of a thought-not-thought. How does he know it is there at all? Also it is to do with Bowman’s work, not Scrope’s, but he knows that, before he knows what “it” is that he is looking for. And yet, when he finds it, it will feel like recognition, he thinks, not cognition, not a line scratched on a pale, blank, even tabula rasa. He thinks of his brain. He thinks of it as long, powerful feathers curled in a skull shape, layer in layer. He thinks of this wordless thinking as preening, smoothing, until all the little hooks and eyes connect and the surface is glossy and brilliant. He does not know if this analogy is useful or misleading or both at once. He has begun to know enough about science to know that scientific thought moves along in such metaphors and analogies, which it must both use and suspect. He thinks it would be interesting to talk to Hodgkiss. He continues to stand quiet and silent, looking attentive. Calder-Fluss talks about Schrödinger’s intuition in the 1940s that genes were crystals—“and there are the aperiodic crystals of the DNA in the double helix. And this raised, in Schrödinger’s mind, the idea that life, organic life, feeds on both order—the aperiodic crystals—and also disorder—random atomic vibrations and collisions. And then we begin to see that the whole universe might be an information system—of messages flowing through crystals amongst parasitic noise—and human thought then becomes a way of transmitting order between parts of the universe—of informing it—”

  Their thoughts are interrupted by a crashing noise and a disorderly scuffle at the other end of the room, where the women, the wives, are gathered, quietly discussing, according to Crowe’s hypothesis, washing machines and clothes. Frederica is now part of this group, which consists also of Mrs. Bowman, dark and solid in a printed silk dress, Mrs. Scrope, a faded blonde in a little black dress, Mrs. Rennie, a large woman, Mrs. Müller, an awkward woman, Lady Calder-Fluss, a small, sharp, watchful woman, and a tall, square figure, in a burgundy shot-silk cocktail dress with a square-cut low neck, who is Lady Wijnnobel. She has square-cut dark hair with a fringe, large mixed-coloured eyes, a gold bracelet, a cigarette, and a glass of orange juice. Frederica is the only woman in the group who is not surprised to see her. Everyone else has known that the Vice-Chancellor is married, and that his wife never appears in public. She is vaguely rumoured to be “ill,” and it is understood that she is never asked after. There is a rumour that she is a Bertha Rochester, mad and shut away. But here she is, in the flesh, contributing nothing to the discussion, staring at the carpet or occasionally at the Marsyas, rocking slightly as though her feet are uncomfortable in the medium-high heels she wears.

  The women are discussing, not clothes, not washing machines, but depression. They describe the fear of waking up and the difficulty of getting up, the long days that rush by and the long days that drag, listening to the clock, to the radio, and the washing. They discuss the Calverley doctor, and whether or not he will prescribe pills, and whether or not pills will help, and whether or not one ought to take pills, and how bad it is to be bad-tempered with children, and a common feeling that children are like fat jugs into which their life is being poured, like rushing electrical vehicles for which they, the women, provide energy which is not entirely re-generated, like young healthy carnivores (says Fleur Bowman with a smile) who consume the maternal flesh with the Weetabix and Alphabet Pasta in a smiling and automatic way. They say they blamed their mothers for being depressed and that they are now depressed. Brenda Pincher asks, can they not work, and they begin a long choral account of the ways in which they have tried this—a bit of typing one did get, one evening class Mrs. Rennie taught, but the baby-sitter never came; Lady Calder-Fluss surprisingly confesses that she wanted to go back to scientific research, to do a Ph.D., but her husband thought it better not.

  The sociologist, Brenda Pincher, does not contribute to this discussion, or conversation, or sharing. She listens intently: she is under-dressed in brown wool, and has longish pale hair. She does speak, however, to ask Frederica who she is, and what she does. Frederica says she is separated from her husband, and trying to make a living by teaching and writing reports for publishers, and, she hopes, other things. She says it is difficult to look after her son and work. Lady Wijnnobel says, “Your husband should provide for you so that you need not work.”

  “I don’t want to take money from him, not for myself anyway. And I like to work, I need to work, I need to think.”

  “Did you have the same ideas about work before the birth of your son?” asks the sociologist.

  “You should not have had a child,” says Lady Wijnnobel, “if you are not prepared to care for him.”

  She sounds extremely angry: her voice is thick, her face a dark red.

  “I can’t care for him if I’m not myself,” says Frederica.

  “You were not created to care for yourself,” retorts Lady Wijnnobel, swaying on her heels and looking at the ground. “He who loses his soul shall save it.”

  Frederica in turn becomes angry.

  “I don’t think you know enough about me to know what I should do with my life.”

  “I can see you are not a good woman,” says Lady Wijnnobel very loudly.

  Frederica finds that her hand is working away in her pocket, to push off her wedding ring. She looks round at the women, who look at the ground with unhappy fixed smiles, all except Brenda Pincher, who asks, in an impersonal sort of voice, “How do you know she is not good, Lady Wijnnobel?”

  “I can see round her head a flame of wickedness. She desires to destroy her man and her son,” says Lady Wijnnobel, with thick decisiveness. “These things can be seen, if you have an eye to see them.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Frederica. “I’ll go away.”

  “You will stay where you are told to stay,” says Lady Wijnnobel, “and listen to what I have to say to you.”

  Camilla Scrope runs and pulls at the Vice-Chancellor’s sleeve, as his wife advances angrily on Frederica, her hand raised, to scratch, to grip, to hold back; it is not clear.

  “Eva!” says Gerard Wijnnobel.

  “I must speak my mind.”

  “No, my dear, you must not. You must say you are sorry, and come home now. Now, Eva. Say you are sorry.”

  He puts his arm round his wife and leads her away.

  Mrs. Rennie says, “I knew we ought not to be talking about depression. I knew I’d been told she’d been inside Cedar Mount. I knew I ought to stop talking about depression and so the only remarks I could think of were about that.”

  “I think she’d been drinking,” says Mrs. Müller.
r />   “Heavily,” says Lady Calder-Fluss. “I noticed. It is a great pity.”

  Nobody speaks directly to Frederica, who feels that she is somehow branded as “not a good woman” even though something is clearly very wrong with Eva Wijnnobel.

  She manages to push off her wedding ring, at last, and thinks of Frodo Baggins, the Hobbit, pushing off his ring of invisibility.

  Brenda Pincher says to her, drawing her aside, “And how did you react to all that?”

  “Oh, with automatic guilt. I am not a good woman. She saw it. How would you react?”

  “Much the same, I expect.”

  She wanders away. Frederica considers her: she is one of the university teachers, an insider, not an outsider, but there she is, relegated to the other halves, the spouses, the merely social appendages. She wonders idly what she is working on, and, as Alexander comes to look for her, forgets Brenda Pincher.

  Brenda Pincher retires to Matthew Crowe’s panelled lavatory, where she opens her shoulder-bag and takes out a tape-recorder, of which she changes the tape. She has embarked on an interesting research project on the lives and conversational preoccupations of university wives, which she will extend to a larger one, she thinks, on the motherhood and married lives of educated women, in due course. She collects their speech habits, their sentences, their regrets, their hopes, their circular discussions, their pregnant silences, as Lyon Bowman collects patterns of dendrites and glia. She will write a book, in the early 1970s, called Hen-parties, which will be a huge bestseller and change many lives, including her own. Now, she wonders whether it would be ethical to erase Lady Wijnnobel’s outburst, and knows it would, and cannot do it, out of aesthetic attachment to the disproportionate rage, the moral fury from nowhere. Though she herself does not find the rich redhead in the expensive dress likeable, by any means. Arrogance is recognisable on first sight. She thinks she is someone, thinks Brenda Pincher with unfocused distaste, slotting in another tape.

  IX

  The winter, closing in on the mountains around La Tour Bruyarde, brought on a certain lassitude and disaffection among the inhabitants. Icy draughts whistled and flapped along the twisting corridors and through the great halls, under the doors of stone-walled chambers and down the vertiginous stairs in the turrets and cellars. They huddled in wool and fur and the new pleasures of the flesh seemed less rosy and enticing. The Lady Roseace’s face developed a porcelain pallor and her red lips were tinged with blue, cyclamens rather than clove-sweet pinks. The folk still gathered daily to hear the inspiring confessions of the storytellers of the day, to devise playful chastisings and subtle recompenses for pains inflicted and endured, but these occasions too were infected by cold and damp, and many desired not to strive but to sleep, or to go south to the sun and the bright ocean.

  Culvert took to walking from room to room in the Tower, always finding a door he had never before opened, a cupboard whose contents were unknown, a glory-hole that breathed decay or a new loft full of hanging bats and thick-twisted cobwebs.

  He went also from chapel to chapel, making an inventory of the images of human life therein, the dim limbs and bursting eyes on walls and reredos, the carved, twisted bodies, the empty stares of angels. When he had first come, in the full flush of his zeal for human reason and human passional energies, he had caused many such votive objects to be taken down and carried away, with the object of repainting the walls with lovelier fancies, tributes to beauty of form and freedom of desire, to the joys of copulation and the delights of orgiastic eating, truths, he had said to the other inhabitants, to replace repressive lies and dark imaginings. But now, in the winter, and in the first itching of his first moment of doubt or boredom, he came to ask himself how these images came to be there, what need had created them, to what sick string in the human heart they vibrated.

  “Our Projector has discovered Religion,” said Turdus Cantor to Colonel Grim, as they stood in furred gowns on a balcony, watching the solitary promenade of their companion deep below them.

  “He inveighed most mightily against it,” said Colonel Grim, “in his fiery youth. Priests, he said, were poisoners, poisoners of minds and persecutors of young and tender instincts.”

  “One extreme of passion may become its opposite,” said Samson Origen, who was standing at a little distance, unseen in a dark hood. “Hatred may become love. Only a studied indifference can maintain its nature steadily.”

  “We shall see changes, then?” said Turdus Cantor.

  “Our Projector is curious to dissect and galvanise human nature,” said Colonel Grim. “Religion is an intrinsic part of human nature.”

  “I have travelled much,” said Samson Origen, “and have met with no society without a religion.”

  “And you yourself,” asked Colonel Grim, “do you hold by any faith, or follow any rite, or pray to any God?”

  “I do not. It is natural to human creatures to seek illusion, to tell tales, to make up powers. I make an unnatural effort: I stare into the dark, and abstain from imagination. It is a destructive way, and the rewards are meagre. But I am compelled to it by my nature.”

  Meanwhile Culvert went from the Mary Chapel to the empty shrine of the Bleeding Heart, and deciphered, candle in hand, the Stations of the Cross in many styles by many artists, from the workmanlike and earthy to the thrilling and rococo. He was, he believed, a reasonable being, a student of happiness and a not-inconsiderable analyst of human nature. It had been his deep belief that the stories of religion were mere lies foisted on a credulous public by fat power-loving priests, bishops and cardinals, and he believed he understood the roots of the desire for power, the desire to control human desires and human hearts. He had been drawn in his rebellious youth to the gay and anarchic tales of Grecian deities, lustful, cruel and capricious, and had been wont to say that their captiousness could never exceed that of a baleful Deity who could complacently equate the slow torture of one man, and that his own son, indeed, his own self in some arcane sense, with the remission of payment for all the centuries of all the evil done by all the torturers of all human tribes and families. But now in the dark days Culvert was revising his understanding, which he now deemed to have been too facile, too youthfully energetic. He wandered from flagellation to flagellation, from bleeding, handcuffed, naked figure to bleeding, handcuffed, naked figure and asked himself to what deep lust in universal human nature these sights corresponded. He did not believe it was so easy as barter of guilt for white-washed innocence, blood spilt for a new infantile freedom of action. No, no, he thought, we desire to see the infliction of pain in order to contemplate its mystery and to stiffen our courage and dread for our day of need, when we shall know it in truth. And then he thought, This too is a superficial understanding. For we take pleasure, if we are truthful, in the observance of the infliction of pain, in the thrill of the knife slitting the nostril, the nates, the veins in the wrists, the anal rose, in the heavy descent of the axe-blade through hair and skin, through gristle and muscle and sinews, through red flesh and spurting blood and pearly bone and soft red-brown bone marrow. And then he thought, This too, is not all, for we are pleased to imagine, to anticipate, the start of our own blood in fresh wounds, the heat of the sheet of it running along thigh and breastbone, the sting, the smart, the lively writhing of the nerve-ends, this we desire, if truth were told. We envy the meek figure with his bruised shanks and his bloody face, we envy him a knowledge we have not.

  And so he pursued his quest, from particular to particular constructing the universal. There on ancient cracked boards were Germanic sufferers with snarling agonised lips, with black gouts of blood in hair matted with thorns and oozings, with lacerated rib-cages dripping darkly, with grim, foundering buttocks and knees and calves spattered with thick dark strokes of pain. There by contrast were sweet Italian innocents all prettily crimsoned on ivory and snow and linen, skins laced with trickles and seepings like bright ribbons, down sweetly complacent faces; there were ecstatic Baroque brothers of these initiates,
rolling hot eyes to the complicit Sky, panting with red tongues, spreading the cockles of armpit and groin to the gaze and lash of the torturers, who were grave-faced and detached, or greedy and corpulent, or troll-like and toothless, or snarling and canine, or dull and beastly, but always satisfied, always taking satisfaction from the bliss of blood or a job well done. As the artist took pleasure, Culvert told himself, pulling his fur robe tighter with a thrill of horrified pleasure in response, pleasure in the infinity of ways of representing the red lips of a wound or the tender bruised mound of a whip-welt. Is this, the analyst of human nature asked himself, the worship of Death or the worship of Beauty and Pleasure? And he answered himself, to his own satisfaction, The one is the other, and a kind of dark delight invaded his whole frame with a shivering heat, freezing and burning.

  So he went on his way, musing on the cruelties of religion, or the religion of cruelty, and came to a winding stair which went down and down, smelling of mouldering growths and old wet stones, down, along, round, down, and his candle flame swayed and bowed and stank in the shadows. And at the foot of the stair was a round door in the stone, which opened with a great key, opened easily, for the wards of the lock were well-oiled, although it appeared forgotten. And inside the door was a Lady Chapel, which, although it appeared to be in the bowels of the earth, was lit fitfully through a stained-glass window, depicting a throned woman in rich blue robes, wearing a golden crown and a sweet smile, with a wheel of seven great swords stuck in her heart and a great apron of blood welling from her wounds to her breast and her lap, and running in tongues of crimson down her blue gown to the flowered mead she sat on. And on the left wall was a great painting of a woman white as stone, and staring, bearing on her knee the bruised and broken body of her son, a foul thing with gaping mouth and dislocated shoulders, with swollen ribs and trailing, piteous pierced hands and feet. And this image was framed in flowers, red roses, white lilies, blue irises, the only colour, where all else was stony and shadowed and veined with grey. And on the right was a painting, tenderly done, of a young girl bending her head over a new-born babe cradled against her naked breast, and the babe was swaddled tight in bandages, and had tight-closed bruised eyes and a mottled, purpled skin, a clammy skin it seemed, as the new-born and the newly-dead have, both.