Babel Tower Read online

  “They know what you think about in bed,” says Amanda Harvill, who clearly finds Murphy attractive. “No, they don’t,” says Murphy. “I can have the most luscious bird in my arms and be completely fired up and part of my mind will be worrying away about share prices and coffee crops and board politics. And the novelist will get the bird right, perhaps, and not have a clue about all the other pockets.”

  The discussion moves to the Goat and Compasses. Jude Mason continues to accompany the class. They find a long table against a wall, and occupy all of it. George Murphy sits between Amanda Harvill and Rosemary Bell, the hospital almoner, who is a Marxist, and tends to involve herself in ideological conflict with Ghislaine Todd, the psychoanalyst. On this occasion, Rosemary and Ghislaine are almost in alliance against George and his views on life and work. Both are sympathetic, for quite different reasons, to the desire for wholeness and self-identity Frederica has diagnosed in Birkin, Ursula, Helen and Margaret; both are much more ready to accept Mr. Wilcox’s complacent stupidity and Lawrence’s beetle-miners’ animal degradation as truths. George smiles with irritating superiority and says they are utopian pastoralists, the pair of them. His dark suit is well cut but crumpled a little at the waist and inside the elbows. Amanda Harvill stares at him with faded blue eyes under bright blue starry eyelids. Frederica can see her thin hand, caged in its gold circles, resting on Murphy’s knees. Jude’s smell rises richly from his trousers and his coat-skirts and the lank locks of his grey hair. He is next to Frederica. Opposite them, leaning back into a dark corner, is John Ottokar in his bright domino.

  Frederica says to Jude, “Sister Perpetua had a point.”

  “My mana?” says Jude. “I use the flesh against the flesh. I am undesirable and without desire, a good state.”

  Frederica shifts in her seat.

  “Shall I go further away?”

  His smell has elements of bacon and elements of rancid butter, elements of sweat and elements of stale beer, though she has never seen him drink, and he is now sipping a grapefruit juice.

  “No. I can put up with you. So I might as well.”

  He considers Frederica. “You are not without desire.”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Not here. You stand up before us, and we watch you, we scan, we surmise.”

  “I am without desire, because I have to be,” says Frederica. “I am required by law to be without desire until I can get divorced.” Her eyes lift and meet those of John Ottokar in his bright plumage. It is like being blinded by a torchbeam. She drops her eyes. Jude shifts in his garments, wafting his air around her. She says to John Ottokar, “I like your jumper. A new departure.”

  “I couldn’t resist the principle of its construction.”

  “Does it have one?”

  “Haven’t you worked it out? It’s the perfect combination of order and chaos. Every other triangle—reaching round and round or up and down—is in the strict order of the spectrum, from violet to dark red. And between the building-blocks of order, everything is random, yellow and orange and pink and green in any order, as they come. I like that. When I worked it out, I liked it. I couldn’t afford it, but I bought it.”

  He does not take his eyes off Frederica.

  “Frederica is required by law to be without desire,” Jude tells John Ottokar.

  “Difficult,” says John Ottokar, smiling.

  “Likely to provoke the opposite reaction, all things considered,” says Jude. “Like most things prescribed and required. We want the opposite.”

  John Ottokar smiles. Frederica stares into her wineglass, slightly flushed, and remembers Babbletower. Jude knows about desire and its quirks. She looks at John Ottokar’s triangles and tries to imagine him under them. He must not be desired, and Frederica has always wanted what she cannot have. His skin is taut and his shaved moustache glints gold. His eyes are kind, she thinks, but is not sure. She says, “Do you think about your work all the time, like George?”

  “It haunts my dreams. I am writing a programme for oil tankers. I plot their courses round the world and work out the optimal deployment of the fleet. My machine speaks to me. Off the coast of Nigeria, I put in a ship and my machine prints out WHAT SHIP. THERE IS NO SHIP. I dream about other things, too,” says John Ottokar, looking at Frederica.

  “My work is gone from me,” says Jude. “Rupert Parrott has my work and I am bereft. I sit in the British Museum, reading about the perfectibility of mankind. It is chastening, chastening.”

  At closing time, they all go into the street. Frederica sets off for the Northern Line on the Underground. John Ottokar, his radiance concealed under a black PVC raincoat, accompanies her. So does Jude.

  “Shall I see you home?” says John Ottokar. Frederica stands on the pavement next to him and finds she is very slightly trembling. “I will see you home, too,” says Jude. “I live your way. I live in Stockwell. We will go home together.”

  “I never knew where you lived,” says Frederica to Jude, looking at John Ottokar.

  “No one does,” says Jude. He says, “I’m not much protection for a lady on the Underground. They attack me, the louts, when they’ve drunk a little, they take exception to my nature. You, on the other hand, you two, would be protection for me, as far as you go.”

  John Ottokar says, “Do you look like that because you want to be attacked?”

  “I look like this because I must. It is my nature to look like this, this is my self-identity and true nature, this is my Birkin-in-Mexico, my costume for crossing the Rainbow Bridge, connecting the prose and the passion, and if I am despised and rejected of men, I must e’en bear it. I cannot wear a mask,” says Jude, leering at John Ottokar in his shiny surcoat and his many-coloured jumper.

  “And you are asking me to come home with you as protection?”

  “No, no, as protection for Frederica. You may leave me to my fate in the Oval. I go down to the end of the black line on my own. But you could significantly reduce the odds in favour of my being stripped and whipped, wounded and set upon.”

  • • •

  They travel together in silence. John Ottokar gets out, with Frederica, at the Oval, abandoning Jude to his possible fate: they see his grey face impassive at the window as the lighted carriages whisk into the dark. Being forced up against Jude’s scent in a crowded carriage has an anaphrodisiac effect on the other two: they walk, apart, through the dark streets, into Hamelin Square, and turn, still apart, on the doorstep. Frederica does not invite John Ottokar in. The street lamps make rivulets of golden and silver light on the planes and creases of the PVC.

  “I’ll give you a ring,” says John Ottokar. “If that’s OK.” His voice is casual.

  “That’s OK,” says Frederica. She goes in, out of the dark. A step has been taken.

  But he does not phone, and the next week he is not in the class.

  Arnold Begbie receives a reply from Nigel Reiver’s solicitor. This states that his client intends to defend the divorce, denies the matrimonial offences with which he is charged, and requests immediate discussions in the matter of access to his son, Leo Alexander. Frederica says she does not want to see Nigel; she is afraid of him, and she does not want to upset Leo. Begbie says she will strengthen her case if she appears to be reasonable, unless she expects Nigel to treat either her or her child with violence. Not Leo, says Frederica. He loves Leo. Images of Nigel and Leo float before her mind’s eye; Nigel blown up like a demon, roaring and fire-eyed, blue-black and electric. Leo with her hair and Nigel’s eyes, her mouth and Nigel’s stocky shoulder-set, with his own white, intent, frightened face. Some small, rigid sense of justice in her points out that a child has only one father, whom it is almost always better to know than to imagine. She agrees to see Nigel, in Arnold Begbie’s office.

  She expects him to glower with rage and hatred. He sits there in Begbie’s chair, with the lattice shadows across his dark face, the set of his body hidden inside his dark suit, and gives her an intent, business-like look
. He is a whole, living, complicated human being, not a demon. She does not know him. She remembers the fierce and delightful movements of his naked body. He says, “Of course, I still hope that you will come back to me.”

  “Why? We weren’t happy. I drove you mad. You expected me to be something I wasn’t.”

  “We have Leo,” says Nigel, using an unfair verb. “We could try.”

  “I can’t,” says Frederica.

  They stare at each other.

  “Let me see Leo. Anyway. Let him come home for a holiday.”

  “Home.”

  “Back to where he was born, then, where he grew up, if you want to be pedantic. Let him run in the country. Let me see him. He’s my son. I love him. You can’t deny that, you’re too straight to deny that.”

  “I know you love him. He loves you.”

  “There is no need to hide him from me. I promise not to upset him.”

  “Mrs. Reiver,” says Begbie, “is afraid you will not return the boy at the agreed time.”

  “I shall not want to return him, of course. But I am not fool enough to suppose I shan’t do myself a lot of harm by hanging on to him. And I am not monster enough—whatever Frederica thinks—to hang on to a boy who wants to be somewhere else.”

  Frederica is not sure that the last remark is true. But it sounds very reasonable.

  “Give me Leo for a month in the summer.”

  “It’s too long. He’ll worry.”

  “Three weeks. If I promise never to discuss—what will ultimately happen—and not to try and persuade him to stay for ever. Let him ride Sooty and run in the fields. He’ll be happy. He’ll think things are better. He must miss Bran House a bit. It will be his, one day.”

  “OK,” says Frederica. “Three weeks.” She knows so little about children, so little even about Leo. She has made some sort of instinctive judgement about how long Leo will be happy to revisit his old places before he becomes either afraid of losing her, or afraid of losing his old life again—which, which? What is best for Leo?

  “If he doesn’t want to come at all, you must accept that. I promise to try and make it seem easy for him to come.”

  “I trust you,” says Nigel. Then with a flash of anger. “I don’t know why I should, I don’t know why I should ever trust you with anything again.” And then he bites back the anger and is a mildly smiling man in a suit.

  Frederica speaks to Leo. She asks him, would he like to go back to Bran House for three weeks in the summer? With you, he says immediately, as she knew he would. No, she says, with Daddy. Who wants to see you. Very much. She continues doggedly. All over England she imagines people grinding out these sad sentences. We can’t get on together any more but we both love you, we both want to see you. Leo pinches his lips together and considers. He closes his face and excludes her from his considerations. She thinks of her nephew, Will, who will not forgive his father. How can Leo forgive her? How long is three weeks? asks Leo, unanswerably, since she cannot return to the imagination of stretches of time in a small child’s mind. I shall miss you, in three weeks, she says, drily, casually, desperately. It is in answer to this remark that Leo informs her, equally drily and casually, that he thinks it might be quite nice to go.

  He goes in July. He will spend his fifth birthday at Bran House. By then the extra-mural classes are closed for the summer, and the art students are undergoing their final assessments. There are few books, if any, for review, and Frederica’s income is reduced to the small sums she is paid by Rupert Parrott for reading his slush heap. Agatha is preoccupied: she is writing the first draft of the Report of the Steerforth Committee. Frederica goes upstairs as usual to prepare Saskia’s tea, on the next day when it is her turn to prepare Saskia’s tea. Agatha comes home to find her friend and lodger reading Tolkien to Saskia on the sofa where the readings take place. Saskia scrambles down from the sofa and runs to her mother, who gathers her up in her arms. Frederica begins to weep. Her face spreads with salt water. Agatha sits next to her and strokes her hair, puts an arm round her thin shoulders. Saskia touches her wet cheeks. Frederica weeps. She wants to tell Agatha: I have ruined Leo’s life. But cannot, in front of Saskia. Agatha gives her coffee, and biscuits with chocolate icing, and suggests that Frederica take a holiday. “Saskia and I are going away, too,” says Agatha, not saying where they are going. “So you are free. Eat some more biscuits. You need blood sugar. No one is perfect. Human beings survive. Leo loves you and you love Leo.”

  “It isn’t enough.”

  “It has to be.”

  Later, Frederica wonders again about Saskia’s father. Are they going to a secret rendezvous with this unknown person? Agatha appears to have solved the problem of the second parent by annihilating him.

  XII

  When Agatha and Saskia have gone, Frederica is alone in the house. It seems to expand and float, it is full of scattering bright air. London summers are dry and dusty, but inside the white-painted basement Frederica experiences a giddiness, a sense that she is blowing away like an untethered balloon. She cannot sleep. She is racked by desire—for Leo, for whom she weeps, for work (what has happened to her huge ambitions?), for love (there has always been someone, Alexander, Raphael Faber, to whom the threads of love could be hooked and pulled taut). She tries to think of work—what does she want to do, to make? She thinks, Perhaps I shall go back to Cambridge and talk to Raphael about doing my Ph.D. after all. Perhaps I will go back into the British Museum and start reading about Milton and metaphor. The moment she has this thought, Paradise Lost invades her mind in bright apparitions: Adam and Eve entertaining the angel made of translucent air in the bowery, blossoming, fruitful garden, Satan and Beelzebub floating dull and fiery on the dark infernal lake, the glistening glossy snake wreathing and coiling its sinister way across the enamelled paradisal lawns. This is what it is to be human, thinks Frederica, more than a little mad—to entertain such guests, such mythic beings made of language and light.

  All the same, somehow, the idea of Raphael and Cambridge is not entirely delightful. There is something “bygone” about the Cambridge lawns and the Cambridge cloisters, the teacups and the tobacco.

  What do I really want? Frederica asks herself, with her blood beating in her empty head in her empty room. And cannot answer. Solitary Frederica is an unreal being, because Leo exists.

  • • •

  She decides to telephone Leo. It is the second day of his absence. She is afraid to hear Bran House on the end of the line, afraid of all the people there, except Leo, afraid too of what Leo may have become, may think of her.

  “Bran House,” says the telephone, in a female voice, comfortable, that she cannot place. It is Pippy Mammott.

  Frederica says, “Could I speak to Leo, please?”

  A silence. Frederica can hear the polished hall, the muted heavy doors.

  “I should like to speak to Leo,” says Frederica, rather relieved that she does not have to name herself.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” says the voice, answering her first remark.

  “I just want to say hullo to him. To keep in touch.”

  “So did others.”

  “I know.” She does not want to expatiate, or to plead with Pippy. Who also loves Leo. “Is he there?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “Could you look?”

  Another silence.

  “No, he isn’t there. He’s out.”

  “Will you tell him I called? Could he call back?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “He might want to,” says Frederica, unable to say “Please” to Pippy Mammott.

  “He might not,” says Pippy “Best not to disturb, if you want my opinion, as I’m sure you don’t.”

  Frederica, hearing hatred, puts the phone down, carefully. She is shaking. Tears brim.

  She decides to call round her friends. She speaks to Hugh, to Alan, to Tony, to Alexander, to Daniel, to Edmund Wilkie. She decides to have a party. She speaks to Desmond B
ull and to Rupert Parrott. Rupert has a wife Frederica has never met, Melissa. He asks if she may come to the party. Tony too has now a girlfriend, Penny Komuves. He will bring Penny. Wilkie is back with his old girlfriend, Caroline, of the Astraea days. They have both been involved with others, and have now returned. They will all bring bottles, as Frederica has no money. Tony Watson says he has rediscovered Owen Griffiths, who used to love Frederica in Cambridge and is now working in the Labour Party’s research department. Frederica decides against inviting Thomas Poole, perhaps out of fear of “the public domain,” perhaps out of fear of complications. She does not think of inviting Jude Mason, but is unsurprised when he appears with Daniel, to whom he has attached himself.

  It is a good party. The voices mix, mingle and oppose.

  “Did you get to the poetry festival at the Albert Hall?”

  “No, but some friends did. They said it was wild.”