Babel Tower Read online

  “They didn’t see him hurt me. They saw me shortly after.”

  “Hearsay evidence is not admissible.”

  “He can’t have Leo.”

  Daniel keeps watch in the dark in St. Simeon’s Church. Orange street light glares through the jumbled stained glass of the windows, producing a muted glare of acid colours on stone, which occasionally flare differently as headlights pass in the street. He sits in the shadow, behind a Victorian pillar, looking at the faded reproductions of Rubens’s Deposition and Holbein’s Dead Christ which Canon Holly has hung over the altar. It is October 28th and Daniel wishes to give thanks for, to contemplate, the ending of an evil. On this day the House of Commons, in a free vote, has passed the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Bill. Daniel sits in the presence of whatever haunts the dark stone and meditates on the panoply, the grisly ceremony, the ghoulish cruelty, of what has just been done away with. What he has felt, all his life since he first became aware of the pain of death, is not, mostly, a sympathetic identification with the sufferer, though that is part of it. He has seen and he has imagined the man or woman in the dock seeing the judge’s black cap, hearing the sentence pronounced, having to do things that belong to the still living, walk back to the cell, eat, speak, defecate, breathe, as a human being certainly dead, a human being whose existence is the knowledge that in ten days, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one day, ten hours, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ten minutes, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, they will come with the hood and ropes, and the dead legs must walk to the gallows and the trap. A death is a death, and this death is a peculiarly horrible death, because of its certainty, because of its public enactment, because it is unnatural, as many other murders are not unnatural. But a death is a death, Daniel knows. Many wait in pain. All human beings come there. What horrifies him about the infliction of capital punishment is the horror it spreads into the whole society which enacts it, connives at it, decrees it. The breath of evil in the court officials, the policemen and -women, the counsel at the bar, the judge, who together must enact the sick drama that leads to the killing. The evil that can be smelled in the cells and in the warders and in the other prisoners who witness the agony, with furtive glee or sick horror. The pleasure in pain that thrills in the press and in the sickened, the profoundly infected, imagination of the people as they imagine what can’t be imagined, whether with a murderous delight, or a bloody righteous wrath, or with the unwilling, terrified, damaged identification with the sufferer’s terror, which was his own response as a child. In Calverley he had met a blabbering man, a shaking man, who was a priest who had attended executions in Calverley Gaol, and had lost his mind in a mixture of guilt, terror and revulsion. A society that can make these mechanisms, Daniel believes, is a sick society, and if it cannot be called an inhuman society, it is only because cruelty is human, cruelty is part of our nature, as it is part of the nature of no other creature. (The warmongering chimpanzee is a discovery of the future.)

  Daniel sits in the church and destroys in his mind, one by one, the elements of the narrative and the drama. He thinks of them all soberly, gagging as he always gags as he pronounces in his head “to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul.” He imagines the black cap and the posy on the judge’s desk, the condemned cell and the last walk as Saint Ignatius Loyola taught his followers to picture and meditate on the Stations of the Cross, bringing the agony of the God-Man vividly to life, step by step in the darkroom of the brain, blood, sweat, broken bones, the stink, the roar, the failing muscles, the spitting crowd, the piercing thorns, the failing thighs and knees, the crunching shock of the nails. These things are obscene, and the obscenity is not in the murderous impulse, but in the ingenuity that devised and devises the long-drawn-out agony, the spectacle, the complicity of participants and passers-by. He cannot really see, in the dark, either the heavy, pearly, meat-stiff fall of Rubens’s painted flesh, or the grim, stretched, leathery cadaver of the Holbein. Those two knew what flesh was, its beauty and intricacy, its mixtures of rose and wax, blue and grey, shadow and fatty sheen. They painted it at the moment of its dissolution, with aesthetic pleasure in their own power, love of the flesh as it was and would not be, alive in their steady contemplation of death. This is Christ, the divine man, a man tortured and executed, and perhaps, Daniel thinks, it is right after all to find God here, where human ingenuity in evil is most crassly lively and most disingenuously self-righteous. And it is good to thank whatever is for the end of evil, at least in this time and in this place. In later years, when the freedom of the 1960s is spoken of, Daniel will always think of this quiet dark night, when he cleared his imagination’s charnel-house and torture-chamber of their gibbering ghosts, and ended sitting in a dark blue silent dome of night darkness, soft and cool and still.

  A week before, exactly a week before the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Bill, in Hyde, in Cheshire, Ian Brady, twenty-six, a stock clerk, and Myra Hindley, twenty-three, a shorthand-typist, were charged with murdering Lesley Ann Downey, aged ten, whose body had been found buried in peat in the Pennine moors six days earlier. Brady was also charged with the murder of Edward Evans, aged seventeen. If the chronology had been a little different, Daniel will think, often, would he have had his quiet night?

  Agatha Mond comes down to Frederica’s basement to collect Leo for school. It is her day. She has Frederica’s post in her hand. There are two fat foolscap envelopes, a small brown one, and one covered with small “Victorian scraps”—angels’ heads and bullfinches, a lily and a rose. Leo is struggling with the zip of his anorak, with which he refuses to accept any help. He frowns. Frederica mimes distress and fury over his head to her friend, opens the foolscap letters rapidly, not because she is eager to know their contents, but because she dreads them, and formless dread is always worse than the known and delimited. A letter from Nigel’s solicitor, Guy Tiger, is enclosed in a letter from her own solicitor, Arnold Begbie. The letter is about Leo. It is not the first. Nigel has taken to dispatching a steady stream of these legal documents. He does not write letters himself: language is not his medium. He has never written letters to Frederica. She has no box of dead love-letters to consider with incredulity or regret. Begbie’s covering note says that the present letter requires careful thought. Frederica, unable to speak because of Leo, snatches up the dressmaking shears with which she has been making chains of paper men for her son, holds up the letter to Agatha, and mimes its destruction.

  “Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,” says Agatha. They grin. The quotation makes them both feel better. They do not question why this should be so: they are women who share a certain culture.

  “Blind Fury is about right,” says Frederica savagely.

  “Courage,” says Agatha.

  Leo zizzes his zip to a triumphant snap. He and Saskia and Agatha depart.

  Frederica reads the letter again.

  Dear Mrs. Reiver,

  I am instructed by my client, Mr. Nigel Reiver, to put to you, through your solicitors, Messrs. Begbie, Merle and Schloss, some considered proposals for the welfare of your son, Leo Alexander Reiver.

  My client wishes me to state clearly that the present separation between you is not of his seeking, and that his urgent wish is that you should return, with your son, to the matrimonial home and seek a reconciliation. He rejects entirely the imputations of cruelty and adultery set out in your Petition for Divorce, and seeks earnestly to prove to you that he is prepared to forgive your own desertion, which was entirely without cause, and without any previous warning, discussion or attempt to settle your supposed differences reasonably and amicably.

  My client particularly and with great sorrow regrets your unprovoked and unconsidered decision to take with you his and your son, the said Leo Alexander Reiver. He believes that this action was not in the best interests of his son, who was a happy child, living in a cheerful and stable household, i
n which there were several relatives and a very loving housekeeper prepared to care for him and bring him up in the world into which he was born and where he will, in due course, take his rightful place as owner of Bran House.

  My client is informed that you have taken the child to live in a deprived and socially unstable area of London. He is informed that you inhabit a basement flat in what could be described as a near-slum; that you arrange constantly changing and intermittent care for the boy whilst you absent yourself to earn money by part-time employments of various seasonal kinds. My client does not feel that this way of life is in the interests of his son. He has proposed, very generously, paying you a reasonable sum of money as maintenance for his son and yourself, so that whilst the said Leo Alexander is in your care you would be able to devote your full attention to him. My client believes that, if your abrupt departure from the matrimonial home was, as you have stated, to seek employment, your own priorities make you less fit to have the care and control of so small a child than those women who could give him their complete attention, in the comfortable home and healthy country surroundings where he grew up. My client believes that the boy’s interests would best be served by his immediate return to the home he has known since birth. He would, of course, if you persist in your present way of life, grant you generous access to the boy, and would always make you welcome at Bran House, as its mistress, or as a visitor, as you may choose.

  My client is also extremely concerned and distressed by the provisions you have made, without consulting him, for his son’s education. On social and educational grounds, and with the welfare of the child uppermost in his mind, he begs you to reconsider your decision to send the boy to the William Blake School in Kennington, which he does not consider a suitable environment for a boy born into his family, or with Leo’s expectations. The sons of the Reiver family have for the past three generations attended Brock’s Preparatory School in Herefordshire and Swineburn School in Cumberland. It is my client’s heartfelt hope and expectation that he will be able to give his son the excellent education he himself had, and that Leo may be educated amongst his peers, including several of his second and third cousins already at the schools.

  In the present circumstances, my client proposes that his son be sent forth-with to Brock’s School, where we have ascertained that a place will be held for him. As you are aware, my client will sue for custody of his son if and when your Petition for Divorce reaches the courts. He still earnestly hopes to avoid this eventuality by persuading you to return to the matrimonial home. In the interim, he suggests that it will be the fairest, most appropriate, and most beneficial arrangement if Leo is moved immediately to Brock’s Preparatory School, where both his parents will be free to visit him on equal terms. His request is both reasonable and generous, and he hopes that you will give it your immediate and sympathetic attention …

  She reads the second legal letter, which tells her that the fixing of a date for the hearing of her divorce has been deferred, since the Respondent has asked for time to prepare his case. She opens the brown letter, which contains a very small cheque from the Crabb Robinson Institute, and the one with stickers, which is an invitation to “A Studio Debauchery” from Desmond Bull. Bull has become interested in collage, of which the cherubs and lilies are an outpost. He is making a large picture of layers of faces, from past and present, newspapers and paintings, with Robespierre’s eyes in Marilyn Monroe’s face above Bronzino’s Fraud’s scaly tail, or with Roosevelt’s seated figure cut into Titian’s seated Pope. This work is at a chaotic stage, and varies from the banal to the suddenly witty and shocking. Desmond Bull is cheerfully certain that any day now Frederica will join him on his studio mattress. She likes his paintings: she likes him: what follows is obvious. Frederica, because of John Ottokar, cannot claim that she is prejudicing her legal freedom by this move, and is even tempted to make love to Bull to reassure herself that she is not tied to John Ottokar. Because of John Ottokar, she has started to take the Pill, which is making her heavy and bad-tempered, unless it is life that is making her heavy and bad-tempered. She has eaten two packets of pills now, day by day, one in September and one in October, and John Ottokar has vanished for almost exactly that period of time. Desmond Bull’s blatant campaign has its attractions for that reason too: it gives the Pills some point.

  She has not told Arnold Begbie about John Ottokar. There are various reasons for this, involved and at cross-purposes. Begbie will think she was lying when she said she had not committed adultery or incontinence or whatever the law calls it. This matters because she feels judged by Begbie, which ought to be nonsense, but is not. And then, to tell Begbie about John Ottokar is to make the relations with John Ottokar more solid, more real, than either she or John Ottokar wants to think they are. They are not adultery, which is serious: they are just sex. “Just sex” does not stand the glare of legal light upon it. It is as partial a description as “incontinence” or “adultery”: it is provisional and does not bear looking at. There are no words with which Frederica feels able to explain her relations with John Ottokar to Arnold Begbie.

  • • •

  Frederica feels wild and oppressed. She takes the sharp shears and slices Guy Tiger’s letter in two, vertically, and then again horizontally, and then again, until she has a handful of rectangular segments. This will not get rid of it, she reflects gloomily. More copies can endlessly be quartered, like the heads of the hydra. She picks up the pieces and lays them out on the desk. “A happy child living in Brock’s School.” The art students are excited by William Burroughs and his cut-ups. Frederica rearranges Tiger’s letter into a kind of consequential structure. So.

  A happy child living in Brock’s School where there were several relations held for him prepared to care for him and will sue for custody of his son which he was born and when Petition for Divorce reaches the rightful place as owner of Bran hopes to avoid this eventuality my client is informed return to the matrimonial home, a deprived and socially unstable environment, suggests that it will be best that you inhabit a basement, the most beneficial arrangement a near-slum; that you arrange immediately to Brock’s preparatory intermediate care for the boy, parents will be free to earn money part-time. His request is both kinds. My client does not care for the boy and he hopes that you in the interests of his son immediate and sympathetic paying you a reasonable would best be served by persist in your present way devote your full attention that if your abrupt access to the boy and would always find the matrimonial home as House or as its mistress or as a employment less fit to have the small child who was extremely concerned and distressed by their complete attention without consulting him, for his stable household, in sending the boy to the William Blake relatives and a very loving housekeeper into his family or bring him into the world into the Reiver family he will in due course have taken the child to live in Cumberland it is my client’s area of London, he is informed he himself had what could be described as his peers including several constantly changing and sins already at the schools whilst you absent yourself his son be sent forthwith employments of various seasonal proposals for the welfare of Messrs Begbie, Merle and Schloss we have ascertained that the present separation is between his urgent wish for imputations of cruelty in the matrimonial home in the Interim to forgive your own desertion to settle your supposed differences and decision to take with you Alexander Reiver with great sorrow regrets persuading you to return to Swineburn School and to women who could give care and control of so heart-felt hope and expectation may be educated among money as maintenance in the comfortable home environment for a boy born your own priorities make departure from the welfare of the child.

  • • •

  Lawyers are concerned to make unambiguous statements with unquestionable conclusions; Frederica’s cut-up has therefore less beauty than a cut-up of some richer text might have, but it does approximate to a satisfactory representation of her confusion, of her distress, of her sense that the apparent irrefutable clarity of Nige
l’s solicitor’s arguments is a nonsense in her world. She considers it. She finds the Burroughs a student has pressed upon her—“This is the voice of now, this is where it was going, fragments shored against my ruin and all that, just try this, this is the voice of now, this is release, this is the ultimate.”

  “Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about.”

  “All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of re-arranged cut-ups. Cutting and re-arranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his colour of vowels. And his ‘systematic derangement of the sense.’ The place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colours tasting sounds smelling forms.”

  Frederica considers this. It is both attractive and repellent as a way of seeing, as a way of acting. Frederica is an intellectual, driven by curiosity, by a pleasure in coherence, by making connections. Frederica is an intellectual at large in a world where most intellectuals are proclaiming the death of coherence, the illusory nature of orders, which are perceived to be man-made, provisional and unstable. Frederica is a woman whose life appears to be flying apart into unrelated fragments: an attempt to tear free from the life of country houses and families; a person who for two months has been a female body chemically protected from the haunting fear of conception; an angular female body symbiotically tied to a rushing, small, male red-headed energy, whose absence itself is sensed as a presence and as a claim; a mind coming to grips with the fact that English literature is a structure half connected to and half cut off from a European literature which was transfigured by Nietzsche and Freud; a person in a basement with not enough money; a memory containing most of Shakespeare, much of seventeenth-century poetry, much, too, of Forster, Lawrence, T. S. Eliot and the Romantics, a chancy baggage which once seemed a universal, reasonable necessity; a Petitioner in a Divorce Court; a wanderer in studios; a judge of the works of such as Phyllis Pratt and Richmond Bly. Frederica is a woman who sits at her desk and re-arranges unrelated scraps of languages, from apparently wholly discrete vocabularies: legal letters, letters about the Initial Teaching Alphabet from Leo’s school; Leo’s first written words, which are BUS and MAN; the literary texts and the quite other texts that dissect these texts; her reviews, her readers’ reports, which do not use the critical vocabulary she has acquired, for this is useless in three-hundred-word segments. She is a being capable of turning her attention from a recipe for an omelette aux fines herbes to the Tractatus, from Dr. Spock to the Bible to Justine. Language rustles around her with many voices, none of them hers, all of them hers.