Babel Tower Read online

  “I’m glad you were there in that wood. You will keep in touch, Hugh—”

  “Of course,” says Hugh.

  The telephone babbles and quacks and purrs. Ginnie Greenhill tells, “Sex is so much a matter of how you feel about yourself. Oh, I know there are ideas about what is normally attractive, normal proportions as you put it, of course, yes, I do know—”

  Babble, quack, purr, babble, a series of plosives inside the black shell.

  “No, I’m not underestimating repulsion, of course it exists, it would be silly to underestimate it. But on the other hand there’s such a variety of people around, such curiosity and goodwill—”

  Canon Holly examines Daniel’s log.

  3.00–3.30. Woman who dare not go out of her room. No name, London voice, said she will call again. Daniel.

  3.30–4.05. Unnamed caller, left home and children on impulse a year ago, she says. Northern voice. “I have done wrong.” Reacted strongly against suggestion we might get in touch with family. Daniel.

  4.15–4.45. Steelwire. There is no God, as usual. Daniel.

  Canon Holly lights another cigarette. He is in his late fifties, handsome in a lean, long-faced, lined way, like a well-bred horse, with deepset eyes and long strong teeth, nicotine-stained. He is interested in Steelwire but has never picked up one of his calls. He himself is an expert on God. He has written a successful and controversial book called Within God Without God and has been seen on the television, supporting the Bishop of Woolwich and Honest to God. Within God Without God argues in a riddling and witty way that to lose the comfortable Old Man Up There, or for that matter the Friend of Little Children wandering amiably in the pastures beyond the stars, was to discover a Force which made all men Incarnate Words, Incarnate Souls, as Christ had shown. Godwithin, the Canon wrote, had not made us fearfully and wonderfully as a craftsman might pinch and poke a ball of inanimate dirt or clay. He made us much more fearfully and wonderfully because He was the inherent Intelligence in the first protozoa clinging together in the primal broth, because He had grown with us and still grew with us, He grew and divided in every cell of our growing and dividing body from egg to fertile parents. He was and is as Dylan Thomas has so beautifully put it, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

  Daniel is not sure how far Canon Holly’s theological position differs from atheism or pantheism. He himself is temperamentally no theologian, only an instinctively religious man who is no longer sure what that word, “religious,” means. He suspects also that his own position does not differ from that of Canon Holly. He sees that the Canon’s thought works in a Christian framework of prayer, biblical references, ritual and theology, and that these things are part of the Canon’s liveliness, his personal history, his self. Daniel is a watchful man. He thinks the Canon would shrivel if he were obliged to follow his own reasoning, his own metaphors, outside the walls, so to speak, of the Church, the singing, the ritual, the imposed duties. Daniel thinks also that he himself would not shrivel. Perhaps, given his very shaky assent to almost all the doctrines of his Church, he ought to go and live and work outside it. He stays, partly, because he needs the impersonality of the absolute requirement of virtue. He needs to be required, for instance, to be patient with Steelwire. This kind of work—without the impersonal sanction—becomes something different, more self-indulgent, something unnatural and perhaps unwholesome.

  Within the walls, Canon Holly’s sense of God working in all his cells like yeast gives him a bounding energy, at once touching and irritating. He is a founder-member of a group called Psychoanalysts in Christ, and has written a second book, Our Passions Christ’s Passion, on sexuality and religion, drawing extensively on Freud and Jung, anthropologists and religious historians, William Blake, William James, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. John of the Cross. This book has had an even greater success than Within God Without God and has raised questions amongst the Church hierarchy, who wisely diverted him, along with Daniel, who was then recovering from a kind of breakdown, to the counselling centre, combined with a branch of the Listeners, in St. Simeon’s. Canon Holly loves the work, he loves the callers, he loves Daniel and Ginnie and all the others. He listens to the incoming calls with an open-mouthed total attention, alert, shining-eyed, every sinew straining to leap into help, participation, communion. It is the sort of enthusiasm of which the Listeners have to be shrewdly suspicious. But it works. Daniel sees it at work, he hears the Canon’s slightly husky voice urge on the hesitant:

  “Go on, you needn’t be afraid. Tell me, tell me, I cannot be shocked, I do assure you.” Daniel sees that help is given and received. But he would not bring his own problems to Canon Holly. He would sooner set them out before Ginnie Greenhill’s bland smile and comfortable nod. Ginnie Greenhill does not need, as far as he can see, to be told anyone’s troubles, and yet she comes to listen. He has no idea why she does. He has not asked. He believes that a certain distance between them makes their work easier.

  Ginnie Greenhill puts down the telephone with a little sigh.

  “Another masturbator?” enquires Canon Holly.

  “Not exactly. I didn’t like this one. He’s taken to following a girl from his work everywhere she goes. He says he’s full right up of her, he’s bursting with her, he doesn’t sleep for the idea of her. He wants her to notice him but he knows he repels her.”

  “Does he?” asks Canon Holly.

  “I could answer, How do I know? Judging from my own reactions I’d say I imagine he does, yes. People usually do if they think they do, don’t they? You get more mistakes in the other direction. Though I remember one man who came here after weeks of going on about his awfulness and he was a big handsome brute who only needed to lose a few pounds and hold his head up. Odd how people see themselves.”

  “You handled him well,” says the Canon, savouring the handling. “Real warmth, no false promises.”

  He brings out a letter from the Bishop in answer to an idea of his own for a sexual therapy workshop in St. Simeon’s. Problems could be pooled, and professional advice given to unprofessional helpers. Ginnie Greenhill makes tea for all of them, and observes that in her view a money-management workshop would be just as helpful to a large number of callers.

  “To listen to you, Ginnie dear,” says the Canon, “one would think you were a frightful prude, ready to shy away from the first hint of bodily passion or misery. And one would be quite wrong, because I’ve heard you dispensing perfect acceptance and common sense to the most hurting and hurtful people.”

  Ginnie’s knitting needles tap rhythmically. She bends her head over her wool. She says, “I do think, Canon, that the modern Church does somehow seem to be about sex, that does seem to be what it cares about, if I may say so.”

  The Canon is bright with glee. He lights another cigarette and sucks greedily.

  “The Church has always been about sex, dear, that’s what the problem is. Religion has always been about sex. Mostly about denying sex and rooting it out, and people who are trained to deny something and root it out become obsessed with it, it becomes unnaturally monstrous, that’s why current moves to be more accepting and celebratory about our sexuality are so exciting—we may work with this force and not against it—”

  “I thought,” says Ginnie Greenhill, “that religion was about God, and about death. About how to live with the idea of death, that’s what I thought it was.”

  And death too, the Canon begins on a run, what is death but part of sex, the germ cell is immortal but the sexually divided individual is doomed, it is sex that brought death into the world …

  The telephone rings. The Canon leans forward.

  “This is the Listeners. Can I help you?

  “Yes, he’s here. I’ll fetch him. One moment. Don’t go away.”

  He hands the receiver to Daniel, his hand cupped over the mouthpiece, holding in wisps of bitter smoke. “One of yours.”

  “Yes. This is Daniel. Who is that?”

  “This is Ru
th. Do you remember me, I used to come to the Young Christians, with Jacqueline, when you were up here, in Yorkshire?”

  He has a vision of her, pale oval clear-cut face, heavy-lidded eyes, the long solid plait of pale hair falling between her shoulders.

  “Of course I remember you. Can I help?”

  “I rang to say I think you ought to come. Mary’s had an accident, she’s unconscious in Calverley Hospital. Her grandmother’s with her, she’s by the bed. I work in the Children’s Ward, I think you know that, I said I’d find you.”

  Daniel is without words. He sees dancing mounds and hollows of egg-boxes humping like earthquakes.

  “Are you there, Daniel?”

  “Yes.” His mouth is dry. “What happened to her?”

  “She has a head injury. She was found in the playground. Some other little girl may have run into her, we don’t know, she couldn’t have fallen off anything, from where she was.

  “Are you there, Daniel?”

  He cannot speak. Ruth’s little voice, as used as his own to dispensing comfort, says, “She’ll almost certainly be all right, the wound’s in the front of the head, not the back, and that’s good. The skull’s stronger there. But I thought you’d want to know, you’d want to be here.”

  “Yes,” says Daniel. “Yes of course. I’ll come right away. I’ll get a train and come straight there, tell them all I’ll come straight there. Thank you, Ruth.”

  “She’s in the best place,” says the far-away voice. “She’ll be cared for as well as possible, you know.”

  “I know. I’ll see you soon.”

  He puts down the phone and sits staring into the cubicle, a heavy man, shaking.

  “Can we help?” says Canon Holly.

  “My child’s been hurt. In Yorkshire. I’ve got to go.”

  “You need hot sweet tea,” says Ginnie. “Which you shall have. And the Canon will get King’s Cross about trains, won’t you? Do you know what happened, Daniel?”

  “No. They don’t seem to know. She was found in the playground. I must go.”

  The Canon has dialled and is listening to the burring tone.

  “How old is she?”

  “Eight,” says Daniel.

  He never talks about his children, and Holly and Ginnie never ask. They know his wife was killed accidentally and that he has children in Yorkshire, living with grandparents. He visits them, they know that, but he does not talk about these visits. Ginnie brings more tea and sweet biscuits—sugar for shock is one of their stocks-in-trade. The Canon suddenly begins to write down train times. At least, Ginnie says, Daniel has only a few minutes’ walk to King’s Cross, he can buy a toothbrush somewhere on the way. She asks practically about the child’s state.

  “She’s not conscious. They say she’ll almost certainly be all right, I expect they mean that, they’d be careful what they say, wouldn’t they?”

  “They would have to, yes.”

  “She’s only a little thing,” says Daniel.

  But he cannot see Mary’s face, conscious or unconscious. He sees Stephanie, his wife, lying on the kitchen floor, with her lip pulled back over damp teeth. This is who he is, the man who looked at that face. This is what she is, a terrible face; this sight persists in his brain. This is her after-life. He is hunted through his waking life by that face, he has developed the cunning of a hunted creature who twists and darts to avoid anything in the passages of the brain that might trigger, might switch on, that remembered face. There are words, there are innocent, pleasant memories, there are smells, there are whole people, whom he avoids with ferocity in case they call up that dead face. He even paints his dreams with black ink, he clamps his dreaming head with a vice of will, he never slips into dreaming that face and waking with the memory.

  He has told himself that survivors, like himself, quite commonly feel they are dangerous to others, to other survivors. He does indeed feel that he is dangerous to Will and Mary, his children, though that is not the whole story, is not the whole reason why they are in Yorkshire and he is here in St. Simeon’s, under the tower.

  And now it is as though he has hurled a rock at his small daughter, or pushed her from a high place.

  “There’s a train in fourteen minutes,” says Canon Holly, “and another in an hour and fourteen minutes. You can’t make it in fourteen minutes.”

  “I can try,” says Daniel. “I can run.”

  He sets off up the steps.

  La Tour Bruyarde must have been almost invulnerable in its great days, long ago. As the company approached it across the plain and the mountain meadows that surrounded it, they saw how thick and frowning was its outer wall, crumbled and breached in many places, here rising proudly, there lying in a dense arrested fall of mossy blocks crusted on the hillside. Men could be seen on the ramparts and in the clefts, repairing the structure. They wore brightly coloured singlets, cerise, royal blue, scarlet, which gave their labours an appearance of cheerfulness. The Lady Roseace imagined she heard them singing, that a faint hum of musical noise was borne to them on the air.

  Within the confine of the wall could be seen not one but many towers, and of all shapes and sizes, as though this citadel had been put up at random over the ages, all made of the same stone hewn from the same mountainside, but otherwise startling in their variety, square and conical, simply stolid and highly decorated, with turrets, with slate cones, with small lancet windows glinting like eyes, with galleries and turrets, with encrustations of ivy and other creeping life-forms. Many of these turrets appeared to be either unfinished or partly demolished, it was not always easy to say which, and the bright patches of colour of the workers’ vests could be seen moving along these high ledges and opened rooftops. As they rode up the causeway which ascended the Mount or Mound a thin sound of cheering and welcome could be heard from high above them, and fruit and flowers were jubilantly thrown under their advancing feet.

  They rode in between two great gate-towers, not, as the Lady Roseace had prefigured it to herself, into a central courtyard, but into a kind of dark tunnel, between walls which might be the sides of buildings or might be solid rocks, and which wound its way onward into the dark bowels of the place, lit occasionally by shafts of light in the gloom from high loopholes, and occasionally, at the darkest points, by lanterns hanging on smoke-blackened hooks from the stone. When they finally emerged they were in a well-like confine, with layer upon layer of dwellings towering above them, one corridor upon another, a Baroque balcony abutting a Gothic cloister, a series of classical windows, in elegantly diminishing proportions as they rose higher, under an unfinished thatched roof that might have suited a mediaeval byre. Some of the windows shone with myriad coloured lights, and some were gaping sockets with cracked arches. The sky was far, far away, it seemed to the Lady Roseace at that moment of arrival, and an intense blue, as the sky is when it is far, far away, scratched and scribbled on by the fingers and teeth, the stumps and domed skulls of the roofline.

  The Living Quarters

  Culvert led the Lady Roseace into the living quarters prepared for her. They travelled along many passages, through many doors and arches, up many flights of stairs and down almost as many, it seemed, so that she was quite amazed by their intricacy. Her door was hidden behind an embroidered hanging on a wall in a long gallery. She could not see what was depicted on the hanging, for the light was flickering and fitful, but had the impression of many heaped limbs energetically writhing, of spherical breasts pointing skywards and of watermelons, it seemed, bursting open on greensward.

  Inside, all was rosy light. At first the Lady Roseace believed that she was in an internal chamber bathed in firelight, and then she saw that she was in a boudoir whose elegant windows were covered with a veil of translucent rosy silk, through which the sunlight poured. The room was sparsely furnished—there was an inlaid escritoire in rosewood, and a prie-dieu in the same wood upholstered in rose-coloured velvet, the most softly comfortable kneeling place possible to imagine. The rest of the furnishin
gs were in a more oriental style, low divans, inlaid with ivory, spread with silk cushions of every size and shape, soft silken carpets woven with Persian roses and pinks and crimson-tipped daisies, huge soft floating daybeds, inviting languor, and hung with what appeared in that light to be flesh-coloured sealskins and cashmere shawls and rosy fox-furs. She ran through into the bed-chamber, which had a high huge bed like a galleon, hung about with richly embroidered silken curtains and floating with muslins and nets. Everywhere on little tables and chests were fantastically luminous bottles and flasks, breathing soft perfumes of flowers and musks. A body—many bodies—might vanish entirely in the soft cushionings and quiltings of that secret bed.

  The Lady Roseace walked from room to room, exclaiming and touching, fingering silks and ivories, tortoise-shells and lustres, satins and furs and feathers. When she drew back the silk curtain from the window and let in the daylight, the rosy fire died away in many of the fabrics and artefacts, revealing a new subtlety of snow-whites and creams and ivories, of northern furs and southern bones and tusks, of silvery threadwork and palest gold silk quilting.

  A close inspection would reveal, in time, that this richness was a light covering over stony coldness and crumbling, that the flagstones were stained and chipped, and the walls flaking away. But they were covered for now with bravely stiff tapestries and draperies, all white and rose-red in honour of the Lady Roseace. There was a most exquisite depiction, all in reds and whites, roses and flesh tints, of the chaste Diana bathing under snowy branches by a silver spring, and of the lovely young Actaeon, part ruddy youth, part milk-white stag, and all laced and interlaced with gouts of brilliant crimson blood, which dripped also from the bright white teeth of the pale hounds, as they reached elegantly for his extended, panting throat …

  The Coming of the Children

  Towards mid-afternoon on the third day the company were gathered on a great balcony, drinking and discussing what was next to be done towards increasing the pleasure and fruitfulness of their life together. Serving men and women poured foaming ale and crimson and golden wine, constantly replenishing beakers and glasses. It had been decided that there should be no more servants and masters—decided, that was, by the masters, for the servants had not as yet been informed or consulted about this project—but no agreement had been reached about the time and manner of this great change in the relations of the population of the Tower. All that was agreed was that it should be debated fully when the whole company was gathered together and what had been set in motion could be deemed to be truly begun.