Babel Tower Page 46

  No one present can remember how many minutes’ warning the radomes give of the approaching cataclysm: four minutes, six? twelve? Prepare to meet thy doom, says Frederica. We shall melt in a flash. Not necessarily, says Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. Death can fall through the air and melt silently and invisibly into grass, into milk, into our teeth and our bones. Though it need not come flying in over the North Sea from Siberia. A local accident is just as sure. There was an accident in Cumberland not long ago; it was hushed up; but the strontium is in the bones of children who were under the blowing cloud. I measure it, in the shells of snails, he says. He shows John and Frederica a box of striped snail shells. In certain snail populations, he says, a band of strontium can be detected in the shells. He has a friend who studied much larger snails—Partula suturalis, on the Mooréa atoll, near where the French explode their test bombs. He was using bands of strontium to measure the growth of the shells, and was expelled by the French when this came to their attention. “I’ve found concentrations of it in Lancashire populations,” he says. “You take the shell, and embed it in a transparent gel, and cut it vertically with a fine diamond saw, so that you have a beautiful spiral—a Fibonacci spiral—and you can date events on the spiral, by measuring minerals …”

  John Ottokar asks about Lysgaard-Peacock’s work. He is studying population genetics, he tells them: several populations of the striped snails, Helix hortensis (or later Cepaea hortensis) and Helix or Cepaea nemoralis were studied in the 1920s and 1930s to record the predominance or rarity of certain patterns—variations in stripes, their number and thickness, their absence, their colour. “If we look at them now, we hope to see Darwinian selection in action,” he says. “We have populations in various habitats—hedgerows and roadsides, various woods, beech, oak, and mixed—and we look for changes in snails with changes in environment. Some are pink, some are yellow, and there is evidence that unhanded snails are more numerous in beech-woods, and striped snails in hedgerows, where they may be disguised from thrushes. We came here because there is a thrush’s anvil here where we collect the broken shells—as you see—and count the numbers, and their changes in pattern.”

  There is indeed a large stone in the roadside verge surrounded by smashed fragments of shell, some open and showing the spiral column, gleaming in the centre, some like crushed eggs.

  “But the thrushes are diminishing,” says Jacqueline. “Several of the anvils are abandoned: the thrushes have been killed by the pesticides in the food chain, we think; they eat fat shiny worms full of parathion or dieldrin, or heptachlor, and if they are not poisoned they can become infertile, or produce monstrosities, the poisons damage the DNA, change their genes as surely as radiation does—the thrushes we study here are still here and still singing and still breaking snails on the anvil—but in many places they are gone. And then we expect to find changes in the snail populations.”

  Frederica shivers: there is something uncanny in this conversation about man-made death falling silently through air and water and matter, through leaves and fur and flesh and bones and bony shells, here in the moorland air, face to face with the silent vision of the watching, listening, towering white spheres. John Ottokar and Jacqueline Winwar talk to each other with the indignant fear of their generation, with the wrath against their elders that they are still young enough to feel.

  Frederica turns over the shells collected by Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. She looks at the lovely coils and spirals, the helical houses of the vanished creeping creatures, horned, slimy, glistening, seven-thousand-toothed. Lysgaard-Peacock shows them to her—pink and yellow, single-banded and multi-striped. Helix hortensis, he tells her, has a white lip—“a lovely, ivory-white, gleaming lip,” he says poetically, whilst Helix nemoralis can be distinguished by a jet-black lip, “a glossy black.” From his chosen language she can see that he loves the creatures he studies.

  “They carry their history on their outsides,” he says, “on their backs you can read their genetic make-up.”

  “And you can read that Darwin was right, that natural selection changes the genes of the population?”

  “Not exactly,” says Luk. “There are puzzling things. If strict Darwinian theory was true, populations under the same selective pressures should become more and more genetically homogeneous—but this isn’t so. They show a surprising genetic polymorphism. All sorts of forms persist when strict theory might suggest that they should have vanished. There are fossil populations of Cepaea nemoralis tens of thousands of years old with just as much variety of shell colour and banding patterns as we find today.”

  “Perhaps there are different selective pressures—”

  “I like to quote Bacon,” says Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. “On diversity, I like to quote Bacon. I try to read the language of the DNA on the backs of my snails, and I think of what he said. ‘It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many millions of faces, there should be none alike: now, contrary, I wonder as much, how there should be any. He that shall consider how many thousand several words have been carelessly and without study composed out of 24 letters; withal how many hundred lines there are to be drawn in the Fabrick of one man, shall find this variety is necessary.’ The alphabet of the DNA has only four letters, but they can produce an apparently infinite variety. Even in snails.”

  Frederica considers Lysgaard-Peacock’s own face. His beard is very strong and stiff and russet, cut neatly and full of vigour. His mouth amongst the red spikes and spines is soft and secret. His eyes are deep-set. His ears are pointed. He is foxy. He is not unlike herself, in that, and his colouring is roughly related to her own—people might suppose, wrongly, seeing the four human beings together, that these two were related, she thinks. She smiles at him, and he smiles back, not wholly present in his smile, thinking about snails and the DNA. Frederica’s glance slides on to John Ottokar, with his wide brow, his shining head, his spine, known and touched vertebra by vertebra. She says to Luk, “Some faces are alike. John has an identical twin. I don’t know him.”

  Lysgaard-Peacock hands her two shells, both yellowish-green and unmarked.

  “Geneticists love twins,” he says. “Most particularly twins with different histories.”

  “You must ask him,” says Frederica.

  “I may,” says Luk. He hands her another shell, this one boldly divided by spiral dark stripes on a pale ground. “A present,” he says.

  John and Frederica come back to Goathland in the evening. They walk in the dusk through the village, where the black-faced sheep stare with yellow, inhuman eyes. Something tugs at Frederica’s memory. She came here once, in a bus, on a trip, and had what she has now docketed as an interesting and instructive experience with a traveller in dolls. The sight of a sheep and a thorn bush brings back this person, Ed, in his interesting and repelling fleshiness, but it also brings back a thought. It was a thought about her own separateness, and the power that was possibly inherent in keeping things separate—sex and language, she thinks, ambition and marriage, what was I thinking? She remembers she was thinking about Racine, and the rhythmic movement of her feet, comfortably in time with the rhythmic movement of the feet of John Ottokar, brings back the couplet in the landscape to which it was wholly irrelevant then, and for that reason interesting, for that reason compelling:

  Ce n’est pas une ardeur dans mes veines cachée

  C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée

  She remembers, and with it her delight in the balance of the lines, the way they pivot on the caesura and are both separated and joined by the rhyme. She says the verse out loud, and John Ottokar puts his hand over her buttocks, lovingly, and laughs, and says, “Precisely.” Frederica stops in her tracks, dizzy with sex, and puts her arms tightly round him: watched by sheep, and by the man who was reading Lady Chatterley in the rosy restaurant, they embrace, they kiss, they walk on. They lean together. Frederica’s mind, a dark snake burrowing in darkness, looks for a word which then seemed the key to power and safety. She remembers her di
stress that Stephanie had apparently found happiness with Daniel. She thinks of Forster and Lawrence, only connect, the mystic Oneness, and her word comes back to her again, more insistently: laminations. Laminations. Keeping things separate. Not linked by metaphor or sex or desire, but separate objects of knowledge, systems of work, or discovery. In her pocket her fingers touch Luk Lysgaard-Peacock’s snail shells, two greenish and one striped. Are the stripes laminations, or organic growths? The layer of strontium, exposed by the diamond saw in the spiral form, is a layer—an accident in Cumberland, a time of fall-out in the air—what is she saying? Partly that even fear of death in the air is not all-consuming or all-pervading. She has the first vague premonition of an art-form of fragments, juxtaposed, not interwoven, not “organically” spiralling up like a tree or a shell, but constructed brick by brick, layer by layer, like the Post Office Tower. The radomes are on the moor and are seen amongst the heather and the neolithic stones and barrows, but their beauty is in the difference as well as in the simultaneity of the vision.

  She is feeling for something, and doesn’t know what it is, cannot push the thought further. Laminations. Separation. I was thinking about the Virgin Queen, and the power of her solitude and her separation, the fact that her power and her intelligence were dependent upon her solitude and her separation.

  “What are you thinking?” says John Ottokar, and takes her shoulders, and turns her face to his. “You’ve gone away from me. Where? What are you thinking?”

  Desire moves round the column of Frederica’s spine like the spiral of a helter-skelter, round which she spins screaming with fear and delight.

  “I had an idea for a book called Laminations.”

  “Why Laminations?” he says later, in the bedroom. At the time, he simply smiled and nodded.

  “I haven’t thought it out. It’s to do with what was in the lectures, the Romantic desire for everything to be One—lovers, body and mind, life and work. I thought it might be interesting to be interested in keeping things separate.”

  “I know about that,” he says, sitting naked on the edge of the bed. The lights are out, but the room is full of pale moonlight. “I know what it is like to be afraid of being two separate creatures confined in one skin.”

  They are naked and cool in the night, sitting companionably on the edge of the bed. On an impulse she touches his sex, the two balls moving loose and separate inside the cool bag of skin. The penis shrinks like a soft curled snail, and then swings out blindly, a lumbering and supple serpent becoming a rod or a branch. Two in one, thinks Frederica, as his arms go round her. You might think, she thinks, as their bodies join, that here are two beings striving to lose themselves in each other, to become one. The growing heat, the wetness, the rhythmic movements, the hot breath, the slippery skins, inside and out, are one, are part of one thing. But we both need to be separate, she thinks. I lend myself to this, the language in her head goes on, with its own rhythm, I lose myself, it remarks with gleeful breathlessness, I am not, I come, I come to the point of crossing over, of not being, and then I fall away, I am myself again, only more so, more so. His face, post coitum, is calm like an Apollonian statue. There is no clue to what is inside his brain-box. I love that, says Frederica’s chatty linguistic self, I love not knowing, I love it that I don’t know him.

  Daniel sits companionably with his father-in-law on the Freyasgarth lawn, making a daisy-chain for his daughter. The fat pink-tipped flowers are scattered across his black thighs, where she has strewn them. The two men sit in deckchairs on the grass and watch the young girl, barefoot in a sky-blue dress, strut and pirouette and swoop in front of them. Her reddish-gold hair falls in a silky curtain about her calm, round face. There are two ways of making daisy-chains. One is to pierce the end of each stalk, and thread the next flower through the green until its head catches. The other is to select a tough daisy with a powerful stalk and thread it through the heads of several others, piercing each at the nape and pushing up through the golden pollen circle, making a thicker, more luscious petalled rod, all pink and white and feathery. Daniel made a bracelet by this method, but Mary exclaimed at the cruelty and extravagance, and he is now making a long green garland, studded intermittently with florets. It goes slowly: split stems curl back and are discarded. Mary runs up and down, bringing handfuls of flowers. Bill says she is denuding his lawn and making it look conventional and respectable.

  “There’ll be new ones tomorrow,” says Mary. “There always are. The more you pick, the more they come.”

  The blue dress is no more than a floating triangle of cotton, held on by shoe-string straps. Her skin is freckled and new and lovely. She bends down, and straightens. Bill says to Daniel, “She reminds me. She is very like, very like.”

  “The movements of the neck. The wrists.”

  The dead woman is dreadfully present. The two men measure each other’s apprehension of her absence. Mary jumps high, fluttering her flying feet. They applaud Mary. Bill says, “When you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’th’ sea, that you might ever do / Nothing but that, move still, still so—”

  “What is that?” says Daniel.

  “Nothing,” says Bill. “A play I used not to like. I begin to see the point of it.”

  Mary’s dance brings her past in a rush, feet thudding on the grass. She says, “There’s a car coming.”

  Daniel thinks it will be Agatha Mond and Saskia. But it is not. Winifred brings the visitors out: it is Frederica, completely unexpected, and a blond man, completely unknown. Frederica considers Mary, who is slightly out of breath, and looks at Daniel, seeing the same ghost. Their faces twist, and then are stoical.

  Daniel sees that Frederica is shining with sex like a sunbather rubbed with butter. Her sharp face has its old edge, a keenness, a glitter, which makes him see that he preferred the recent, more battered, subdued Frederica. He sees a kind of black space walking in the garden, which is his absent wife. Frederica says, “Jacqueline Winwar tells me you are entertaining Agatha here.”

  “She is visiting Professor Wijnnobel about her committee. She suggested coming over, so Saskia could meet Mary.”

  Frederica prickles. “It’s odd she didn’t say anything. To me.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s my family. I feel it’s odd. I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

  “You are here, now, anyway,” says Daniel, equably.

  He is being disingenuous. He has noticed, now and then, a speculative gentleness in the way Agatha Mond looks at him. He has thought he noticed (and then dismissed the idea) a particular carefulness of intention when she handed him a plate, or a glass of wine. Nothing much. He likes Agatha Mond. He was, he realises, looking forward to a quiet talk with her in the sunshine, in the north, a step or two forward in discovery. She is a secret woman. He was looking forward to finding out a few things. This—apart from his feelings about Mary and Will (who has gone off on a hike with the local scouts)—is the first personal feeling he has had, the first mild wish he has formulated, since … And now Frederica is here in a great cloud of sex and self-importance like a swarm of bees and a too-sweet smell of honey. Winifred is offering tea to John Ottokar, who is praising the landscape, shyly. He does not look entirely happy. He is standing apart from the family group.

  Agatha and Saskia arrive in a hired Mini, a yellow Mini with black trimmings. Agatha is surprised to see Frederica but apparently delighted. She is wearing a woven straw hat and a shift with big, innocent white daisies on a navy ground. Her skin has gone browner in the few days she has been away from London. Her arms are smooth and bare: Daniel wonders what it would be like to run his lips over them, and says, “I’m glad you could make it. Would Saskia like juice? Mary has been dancing.”

  “I dance,” says Saskia.

  “It’s such a pity Leo isn’t here,” says Winifred. “On his birthday, too.”

  Frederica has said nothing about Leo’s birthday. She has been trying not to think of it, of him, of what he will be doing. Everyone
looks at her, and looks away. John Ottokar wanders off and looks at a rosebush, very intently, as though none of this is to do with him. Agatha turns to Bill and says that she is in the north because she is drafting the Report of the Steerforth Committee, and has been discussing the technical chapter, the controversial chapter, on grammar, with Professor Wijnnobel. She says she has read the evidence Bill submitted to the committee, with great interest. She would like to talk to him about the relations between reading literature and the new stress on the children’s own writing, “ ‘creative’ writing, only I do shy away from that word, I do dislike it.”

  “Usage will sanctify it,” says Bill, “if your Professor Wijnnobel is to be believed. Why do you balk at it?”

  “Daniel might agree. It feels blasphemous, it has a faint tainted air of blasphemy hanging around it. I notice you use a religious metaphor, ‘sanctify.’ ”

  “On purpose,” says Bill, delighted.

  “Of course. What do you think, Daniel?”

  “Creative? It doesn’t seem blasphemous to me. Ugly, though. It makes me think of white elephants at jumble sales, raffia lampshades and pottery rabbits and paper flowers.”

  They laugh.

  Marcus arrives, with Jacqueline. They fetch chairs and make a tea party on the lawn. Birds can be heard, and the hum of bees. John Ottokar is ill at ease. Jacqueline brings Marcus to him, introduces them, says that they have artificial intelligence in common, since Marcus is mapping algorithms in the brain and John is mapping them in shipping traffic. The two men begin to speak of computer languages and their relative strengths and weaknesses. John Ottokar relaxes; he becomes a professional man at a family tea party. Frederica is regretting having come. She had formed some demonic image of Agatha Mond invading her own world, the world of her origins, and this is hard to square with the calm figure discussing teaching methods with Bill Potter, discussing the interesting split in the committee between supporters of Will to Power, and supporters of Eros. “All they are united in,” says Agatha Mond, “is opposition to Mickey Impey, who wants to ‘liven up the Report’ by writing little gnomic epigrams for every chapter.” She gives an example: