Babel Tower Read online

  “Aye,” says Daniel.

  Ruth says, “There’s a kind of folding bed you can put down by her. Try and get some sleep. I’ll be round every fifteen minutes to check her pupils. I’ll keep an eye on both of you.”

  Night comes early in children’s wards. Night comes early, but not complete darkness—angled lamps here and there illuminate tangled hair, spread-eagled monkey-forms attached to tubing and pulleys, a passionate toddler snuffling hotly into a pillow. Ruth produces a toothbrush and a towel from a cupboard, and Daniel tidies himself in a carbolic-drenched lavatory. He pads back through the ward to his daughter. The walls are painted with cheerful pictures, mostly of sheep. The artist seems to have found sheep either fascinating, or easy, or both. Little Bo-Peep, in her hooped skirt and with her crook, stands under a large tree and peers one way, whilst behind her quite a large flock of multi-coloured sheep scamper and bound over a green hummock in the opposite direction, into a blue sky. They are composed mostly of squarish masses of circular brush strokes, out of which poke black ears, black faces and thin, stick-like black legs. Some attempt, not very successful, has been made to foreshorten the fleeing ones. The blue sky is full of solid sheepish clouds. Bo-Peep is drawn from the back, her face hidden by a bonnet, which suggests a failure of confidence in the artist. On the wall facing her, Mary with her little lamb is proceeding along a fence towards a small-windowed hut labelled SCHOOL. Mary is dressed in a crimson jumper and a green skirt. She wears a school beret on fluffy (sheep-like) blond curls, and carries a square brown satchel which seems to weigh nothing. There is something not quite right about the lamb. Perhaps its legs are too short, perhaps its face is too big for its body, perhaps its fixed smile is too human. Mary’s face, on the other hand, is round and empty, apart from smily lips and round pale blue eyes. Some sheep are looking over the fence and staring down on the trotting lamb. Black faces, white faces, horned, woolly.

  Daniel sits beside his daughter. The night flows past. Ruth comes from time to time and turns back the eyelids, with their reddish lashes. “Good,” she says, “good,” and whisks away again.

  Mary’s mouth is a little open. Her teeth are wet. Daniel thinks of Stephanie’s dead face, suddenly, with the full violence of the unprepared—the staring eyes, the raised lip, the wet teeth. He feels—it is no exaggeration—his heart willing itself to stop beating, juddering in his body like an engine in trouble. He feels waves of nausea. He waits for the image to fade as he might wait for the touch of hot metal to stop throbbing. He waits till it is gone, the face in the mind’s eye, and then puts out a heavy finger and closes his daughter’s lip over her teeth. Her lip is warm, warm and soft. He remembers the energy of the bursting teeth in her bony jaw. He touches her cheek, her little shoulder, he takes hold, in the dark, of her cool hand, he says, “Mary—,” he says again, “Mary—”

  Mary wanders in dark blue caverns. She does not walk, she weaves, or floats, or flies, between muscular fanning trunks of huge plants, or veined rocks. It is dark blue, and there is purple, and slate-grey, and there is a kind of dark light in and on it, given off by the pillars, the boughs themselves. She weaves her way and pain runs beside her like a shining wire, it traces her intricate path, but it does not exactly touch her—its light hurts her if she shifts her attention in its direction, its edge, its razor-blade edge, its needle-point, its flames about to break—but she dances with it slowly, she moves as it moves, it moves as she moves, they bow together, they curve and recurve, they keep a distance, in which there is nothing at all, no blue light, nothing, no visible dark, nothing.

  Ruth returns every half-hour. “Good,” she says, peering under the eyelids. “Good.” Daniel sits stolidly, holding his daughter’s hand. Ruth says, “Try and get a little sleep.”

  “I don’t want sleep.”

  “You need it. I don’t think she’ll wake now. They don’t wake—in the deep night—on the whole. You’ll find she’ll wake with the daylight. Shall I bring you a cup of Ovaltine?”

  “I’ll come and get it. Thank you. I need to stretch my legs. I’m all pins and needles, I’m numb.”

  Ruth makes him a cup of Ovaltine in a little kitchen, and they sit by the night nurses’ desk, their faces in shadow, the desk lit by a pool of contained light from a green-shaded desk lamp.

  “We can see her from here,” says Ruth. “It’s designed so we can see everyone from here.”

  Daniel asks Ruth how she is, what she has been doing. He expects some placid, nondescript answer as she sits there, sipping tea, her pale oval face turned down. She says, “If it were not for my spiritual life, this place—this work—would be quite unbearable.”

  He remembers he is a clergyman. This both makes it incumbent on him to answer this remark seriously and provides a way to answer it chattily, which is not the way it was said.

  “I remember you were a very regular member of the Young Christians. Do you still go to St. Bartholomew’s?”

  “Sometimes I do. It is not the same, of course, since Gideon and Clemency went away. The new vicar is not a very spiritual man. He goes through the motions. I shouldn’t say that. How can one know another person’s soul? But—anyway—he doesn’t speak to me. I suppose you are still in touch with Gideon, now, where you are. He is doing such wonderful work.”

  “I’m afraid I live an odd life, very shut away, I don’t see old friends,” says Daniel blandly, his professional voice coming back to him. What he feels for Gideon Farrar, his ex-vicar, is hatred and contempt, which he tries to mitigate with some kind of charitable mental effort, from time to time.

  “I belong to Gideon’s flock, so to speak,” says Ruth. “I am a Child of Joy. I can’t get to many of the main meetings in London, you know, and York, I work such terrible hours here. But he has his Family Gatherings up here on the moors too—the movement has taken on such wonderful life—miracles happen, everyone is—is full of awareness and life. I wish he came more often himself, but Clemency comes, and other family heads, we are all constantly in touch—it is a great joy.”

  “I am very glad,” says Daniel cautiously.

  “I went into this work,” says Ruth, “because I wanted to do some good, to help little children, the innocent who suffer. No one tells children’s nurses, when they go into training, you know, that this is the worst kind of nursing—the worst. You might be glad when the old—slip away—but these little ones—and those who stay here—a long time—are even worse than those who die. You can’t talk about it, of course. I can, to you, because you understand how it is changed—it seems different—if the suffering can be offered to Jesus, can be part of His suffering for us—now and then I really feel that, though I don’t understand it, of course—but then, we do not have to understand—”

  Another voice, ecstatic, confident, is speaking inside her placid, stolid, small notes. Daniel says, “I was hospital chaplain here, you know. I’ve worked here. Not like you, but I have seen what you’re telling me.”

  “You must have been so needed,” says Ruth. “So few understand or can hear—”

  This is not how Daniel remembers it.

  He goes back to his child, who has not moved. Ruth looks again into the unseeing eyes and repeats, “Good.”

  Mary wanders among gentian-dark currents, through the lips of caverns, down falls and along conduits. The inky world swells and sways. There is a far, faint booming in the silence. Someone somewhere feels nausea.

  Daniel dozes uneasily on the truckle bed. He is below the level of Mary’s sleeping form, lifted up above him. His springs creak and groan. She turns, she moves, she flings an arm wide, a small hand touches him. He calls Ruth, who says, “Good,” and checks the pupils again. Dawn comes, and with the dawn the day shift, busy with trolleys, with sponges, with thermometers. Ruth brings Daniel a cup of tea, and tells him she has to go now, but will be there in the evening. Daniel gulps the hot tea and feels it spread in his belly. Mary’s lips move.

  “Look,” he says to Ruth. “Look there—look at her
lips.”

  Mary is somewhere in a chalky cavernous mouth. She is being sucked up, blown up, she wishes to float and settle, like sediment, but the medium in which she is suspended is in turmoil, she will be ejected. Her grape-dark world, her gentian caverns, are shot with angry orange, she sees blood, she sees hot veils, she twists her head this way and that as pain takes hold of it. She sees flat, orange. She opens her eyes.

  “Mary,” he says. “Mary. There you are—”

  She struggles furiously to sit up. She puts hot arms round his neck, she buries her face in his beard, he puts his nose to her living skin, her hot hair, the pulse in her thin neck. All her arms and legs are in turmoil, she worms her way out of the sheets and propels her whole body against him, anyhow. Her arms close in a stranglehold round his neck.

  “My daddy, my daddy,” says Mary, and Daniel kisses her hair, and his eyes are hot.

  “I’m sorry,” says Mary, “I’m sick, I’m sorry,” and Daniel holds a dish for her to vomit. It is all a miracle, her voice, her struggling quickness, the heaving of her small stomach, the sounds of her retching, it is life, she is alive. Daniel wipes her mouth with his own clean handkerchief, he smooths her hair on her brow. He thinks, There are people who would always have known—if they were me, now—that she was alive, that she would wake. But I belong always to those who know she could not have done. He avoids, this time, calling up the dead face.

  Mary is better. The family are at breakfast. Daniel is still in Yorkshire. Canon Holly has told him he has bloody got to stay there for the present, now he is there. His telephone is manned by a new volunteer, a successful trainee, just the ticket. Mary is at home, but not at school. She is resting. She cannot remember anything at all about how she came to be lying there, in the playground. She has said once, she seemed to be in a huge space and something was coming down very fast out of the sky—a big bird, says Mary uncertainly, a shiny dark bird …

  They are all at breakfast. Bill Potter, Winifred, Daniel, Mary, and Will. They are no longer in the graceless house in Masters’ Row where Bill spent his working life, and Winifred brought up her children, and then her small grandchildren. Bill is now sixty-seven and has been retired for two years. For five years before his retirement Winifred dreaded it daily. He was a man whose work was his life. When he was presented with his leaving presents—a small carving done by an ex-pupil, in granite, a recalcitrant material, of a group of stony sheep, the complete Oxford Dictionary and a very large book token—the headmaster, Mr. Thone, had said that to many, Bill Potter was Blesford Ride School, and there had been groans, whistles, cheers, tears, and a violent fit of clapping. Winifred had had a vision of Bill torn out of Blesford Ride like a live tooth with bleeding roots. Also, she feared for herself. Bill was a man to whom it was possible to be married only if he was mostly not there. He expanded like volatile gas, he roared, he flamed, he hammered. She had her own quiet ways, which depended on his absence.

  Bill had revealed in his speech of thanks that he did not intend to stay in Masters’ Row. He had the right to do so, for three years at least, and the school had supposed that he would help out, as his predecessors had, would mark exams, coach university entrants, detach himself bit by bit. It was characteristic of Bill that he had said nothing of his plans to anyone before this speech: there were those in the audience who thought he had made up his mind then and there, in the Hall, listening to the valedictory cheering.

  “I do not intend,” said Bill, “to stick around, getting cross at the way things are done, or contemplating my own mistakes. I am going off in search of beauty. You can laugh. Blesford Ride is a decent enough place, and its gardeners do a decent job, but nobody could call it beautiful. The only God in the Pantheon who has got any good looks to mention is Balder, and he’s dead and gone. I’m going to buy a house up on the moors—I’ve got my eye on one—and it will be a seemly house, and a well-proportioned house—with a garden, which I shall cultivate when I’m not busy—but I shall be busy, I intend to be very busy, those who are not alive are dead, I’ve always said, and I’m not dying, by no means.”

  He was almost in tears, Winifred saw, and one more time she forgave him for excluding her, for rushing at things. He had not asked her if she wanted to move, but she did not want to stay, and perhaps he had known that without needing to ask. She thought the idea of a moorland cottage was folly, and said so. Everyone knew that it was not a good idea to isolate oneself suddenly on retirement, and there were Will and Mary, then eight and six, to consider, what about their schooling, had Bill thought?

  Bill had thought, it turned out. He had found an eighteenth-century grey stone house, in Freyasgarth, a village in a fold of the moors between Pickering and Goathland. Behind the house, with its climbing roses, white and gold, the garden stretched to a dry-stone wall, behind which grazed sheep, on the moorside. In the village was a primary school run by a head teacher called Margaret Godden, who was, Bill explained to Winifred, a real teacher, he had sat in on her classes, the woman had the essence of the matter in her. Miss Godden was large and blond and fortyish and smiling. She had a passion for imparting knowledge, and a patient perfectionism. There were only two other teachers, Mr. Hebble, who took the middle class, and Miss Chick, who took Reception. Mr. Hebble lived in the village, was married, and had four children in the school himself. Miss Chick lived next-door to Miss Godden, and was Miss Godden’s pupil and semblable, also running to fat, and also a perfectionist. Winifred liked both teachers, and was overcome by the yellow and white roses. The inside of the house was graceful and solid; the kitchen had an Aga and a stone larder, there was an outhouse with an ancient pump. Winifred had a vision of living—as Bill had so suddenly said—with beautiful things. With subtle colours, and changing lights, and old wood, and yellow and white roses. She and Bill took to travelling to country auctions, buying chairs, tables, chests, a dresser—it became a shared passion; they talked to each other as in some ways they had never done. Winifred said, “It is like that game you play with yourself, travelling on the top of buses, looking in at windows, thinking, Who would I be if I lived there, what sort of life would I have in that house—”

  “That’s how I found it,” said Bill. “From a bus, coming back from an extra-mural class. You always get that feeling most in the early evening—about houses—when there’s still light in the sky but there’s light inside, too—”

  For a year or two Winifred had a not unpleasant feeling, sitting by an open fire in the evening, polishing an oval table, watering window-boxes, looking down from a wide landing to a stone-flagged hall, its wide step worn by centuries of the dead, going in and out, busy with other lives, that she was a kind of ghost on a kind of stage set, making the appropriate movements for the beauty of the place. And then it became more part of herself—the place where Will’s knee had bled on the stone, the curtains she had sewn sitting in that window and hung in this one, white sprigged with lavender and broom yellow, blowing in when she opened the window. Most surprisingly, Bill does not roar in this house, he does not crowd, he is neither bored nor sulky, he is, as he said he was to be, busy. He has expanded his extra-mural teaching. He makes long journeys up and down the Yorkshire coast, he has classes in Scarborough and Whitby, Calverley and Pickering, talking away about D. H. Lawrence and George Eliot as though their lives depended on it. He has developed an interest in the old itinerant Methodists, who came and spoke fire in these very houses. He is writing a book. It is called, at different times, English and the Community of Culture; Culture in the Community and English; English, Culture, Community. He is away quite enough for Winifred’s peace of mind, and when he comes home, he talks to her about where he has been, what has been said. Miss Godden, Mr. and Mrs. Hebble, Miss Chick, come to dinner, and so do various members of the staff of the University of North Yorkshire, who have bought weekend houses in the hill villages, who tramp past in seasoned boots and woolly socks and admire the roses.

  They have breakfast in the kitchen looking directly
out over the garden to the moors. Bill sits at one end of the table and Winifred at the other. Daniel and Mary are side by side, their two heads bent over bowls of porridge with spirals of treacle, melting gold into mealy-grey. On the other side of the table sits Will, who is now ten, a stocky, dark boy with black eyes under thick black brows. It is absurdly clear who his father is, and it is equally clear that he is not looking at his father, he is not talking to his father. He is eating rather fast and noisily, toast and boiled eggs, ready for school. Bill has unwisely embarked on a discussion of Will’s schooling. He could sit the Scholarship Entrance to Blesford Ride, where, as Bill’s grandson, he would pay much reduced fees, or he could go on to the local state schools and continue to live in Blithe House. Bill says, “Perhaps you would like to visit the school, Daniel, while you’re here.”

  “It depends on Will,” says Daniel.

  “I shouldn’t think there’s much point,” says Will. “Anyway, I want to go to Overbrow Comprehensive. Everyone else is. My friends.”

  “There are things to be said for and against comprehensive schools,” says Bill sententiously. “And things to be said for and against the old establishment. Boys do learn something in the old place, and that matters.”

  “So they do in the comprehensive.”

  “I don’t say they don’t. Perhaps you and your father should go and look at it, together.”

  “You’re the school expert, Grandpa. You come.”

  “We should at least discuss whether you are entered for the exam, Will,” says Bill. He says to Daniel, “He’s very bright, Will is, you must talk to his head teacher, she thinks very highly of him, very.”

  “We can’t discuss it now,” says Will. “I’ve got to go to school.”

  Daniel, who is not stupid, can see his son deliberating over whether to forbid him to talk to the head teacher, and is glad when Will draws back from the blow. Will pushes his chair back with a scrape, puts on his anorak, gathers up his heavy bookbag. Winifred hands him an apple, a shortbread, a flask. He kisses her on the cheek, includes Bill and Mary in a “good-bye” and nods curtly to Daniel. “See you,” he mutters, “later.” Both knit their black brows, tense and puzzled. Will goes.