by A. S. Byatt
“This may prevent nuclear war. They have a Bomb, you know, they may be driven to let it off. Everyone’s against them, fighting for survival, history conspiring …”
“I don’t think …”
“You don’t know. I worked for British Intelligence, you know. On some very hush-hush research. All those trips to eastern university conferences weren’t what they seemed. I know my way around. In Israel everyone’s in Intelligence. They have to be. I recognized it in Miriam immediately. I can’t get her to trust me. I want the Israelis to accept this. In token of good faith. British good faith.”
Mrs Smith was driven to ask, in a small voice, what “this” was, though not, she hoped, as though she really wanted to know. Across the road the man in a dark overcoat lit a cigarette, shifted his umbrella, looked through the café window, looked back at the gentlemen’s shirts in their bold colours, scarlet stripes, roseate flowers, black and gold paisley. He did not look the sort of man to wear such shirts.
“The music department in this university has made an instrument — constructed a machine — that disintegrates solid bodies with sound waves. By shaking them. Sound broadcast by this instrument at certain frequencies disorientates people completely. Drives them round the bend. Arabs are peculiarly susceptible to sound. They hear a greater frequency range. I’m taking these plans to the Israeli embassy.”
“How terrible,” said Mrs Smith.
“Of course it’s terrible. Life is terrible. Destroy or be destroyed. What I want you to do is keep the duplicate plans safe — just sit here and keep them safe — and if I’m not back in one hour take them to one of these people in the BBC Music Department. The BBC’s full of spies. I know them. I have the list.”
“Terrible I meant,” said Mrs Smith, “to use the music. The music …”
He brushed this aside. “I’ll give you £100. £500. Just for half an hour. As an insurance?”
“I don’t want anything to do with it.” Mrs Smith stood up. “I don’t like it. I’m going.”
“Oh no,” said Conrad. “Oh no, you don’t. You may be part of the plot, after all. You will stay here where I can see you.”
He clasped Mrs Smith’s wrist. The man on the opposite pavement looked at them again, pulled his hat over his eyes, became absorbed in the contemplation of a pair of black velvet slippers, embroidered with a pair of gold stags’ heads. Mrs Smith thought of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Her desire to get out of this story, international incident, paranoid fantasy, became overmastering. She tried to pull away.
“I’m going, I’m afraid. I have work to do.”
“You can’t go out there. Those people have poison-darts in their umbrella-tips. Fatal. No known antidote.”
“No, they don’t,” said Mrs Smith.
Mrs Smith pulled. “You have got to help.” She raised her handbag and banged it against Conrad’s bald head and red ear. He, breathing loudly, grabbed her crisp white shirt by the collar. Both pulled. The shirt came apart, leaving most of one sleeve and the left front portion in Conrad’s hand. The restaurant proprietor, assuming rape, approached from behind the bar. Conrad’s parcel fell under the table. As he bent towards it, Mrs Smith, her face scratched, one lace-covered breast exposed, ran out into Jermyn Street, attracting the brief, unsmiling attention of the window-watcher. When she was at the corner of Jermyn Street she heard Conrad’s voice, plaintive and wild, “Come back, help me, help me.”
Mrs Smith ran on, down Duke of York Street, along St James’s Square, into the solid Victorian mahogany sanctuary of the London Library, which, at its inception, at the behest of Thomas Carlyle, historian and founder member, stocked the fiction of only one writer, George Eliot, who he believed had so deep an insight into the thought and nature of the times that her work was classified, by him, as philosophy.
In the mahogany ladies’ room, with water from a Victorian brass tap, Mrs Smith mopped her face and wept for the music. She would have to borrow a cardigan to go home respectably. She had lost some virtue. (In the old sense of that word, from the Latin, virtus, manliness, worth, power; and in newer ones too.) She was shaken. She was a determined and practical woman and would go back to work, however her elation had been broken.
Conrad was mad. She would not inhabit his plot of deathly music-machines and lethal umbrellas.
How precarious it was, the sense of self in the dark bath of uncertainty, the moment of knowing, the certainty that music is the one thing needful.
“Death destroys a man,” said Forster, the liberal humanist, the realist, who died on that day. “The idea of death saves him.” It would take more than Conrad’s local madness to deflect or deter Mrs Smith.
I have to record, however, that only two weeks later she went to see a surgeon in the Marylebone Road. She had a pain in her side, not much, not a bad pain, a small lump, a hernia.
She had a sort of growth, said the surgeon, a thickening of old scar tissue. He thought it would be better if he took it out.
“Not just now,” said Mrs Smith. “I am busy, I have a lot of work to do, I work best in the summer, it’s the school holidays. In the autumn.”
“Next week,” said the surgeon, and added in answer to her unspoken question, “It is certainly benign.”
This is not what he said to Mr Smith, and indeed, how could he have said with such certainty, before the event, what it was, malignant or benign?
Mrs Smith, during the three weeks that in fact supervened before she entered the hospital, went as usual to the London Library. She stared a lot out of the window and tried to think of short tales, of compressed, rapid forms of writing, in case there was not much time.
THE CHANGELING
He wore a blazer of crushed-strawberry pink and cream and black stripes and a straw boater, about which he was not confident. He took it on and off, and turned it like a wheel in two hands in front of his flannels. “This time I have a real challenge for you,” he said. Some of the garden-party guests had obeyed the injunction, “Edwardian dress”, on their invitations, and some had not, so that leg o’mutton sleeves and silk parasols stood side by side with knee-length silk shirtwaisters and uncovered heads. Josephine Piper was wearing a long grey cotton skirt, a high-necked blouse, and an anachronistic straw hat of her own, not because she liked dressing-up, but because she always complied with requests, if possible, out of courtesy. She inclined her head to Max McKinley, whilst watching the polite little boys trot busily over the even and sunlit lawns, carrying sausage rolls, miniature pizzas, devils-on-horseback, made in the school kitchens. It was a progressive school: boys were taught cookery. “What sort of challenge?” she asked Max McKinley, smiling. She liked Max, not only because he liked and seemed to understand her writings, though that had been the beginning of the friendship and collaboration. Years ago, now, back in the 1960s when her son was the same size as these little ones, he had asked her, then relatively unknown, to come and talk to his boys about her work. And in due course Peter, her son, had come to the school.
Max said, “I want you to have a boy called Henry Smee for a few months. He’s a brilliant boy, but not easy. He needs a warm, normal, intelligent house. I think” — Max leaned closer — “he needs you.”
“Why?”
“I think — you’ll see — I think Henry Smee is Simon Vowle in The Boiler-Room. It is quite striking.”
“How terrible,” said Josephine, who had invented Simon Vowle, in a light enough voice. “How terrible for Henry Smee.”
“It is terrible. I’m sure you can help him. I’m sure.”
“You always ask the impossible,” said Josephine, not displeased.
“He goes to Cambridge in the autumn. I’ve got him a summer job in a library. He needs a normal life and some understanding.”
“I can try,” said Josephine. “You’d better introduce us.”
She was always very moved and enlivened by the energy of Max’s care for his boys. He imagined every quiver, every spasm of young suffering: every boy was new and strang
e to him: he believed something could be done for all of them: he never gave up. In his place Josephine would long ago have retreated into impersonal efficiency, but she did not tell him that. She did not for a moment believe that Henry Smee had anything to do with Simon Vowle, except in Max’s hyperactive imagination. Owing to a series of social activities and evasions she was unable to check on this before Henry Smee was delivered in person, to her house.
The house was a large Victorian house in South London, a well-proportioned, comfortable, rambling house, far too big for Josephine alone, and too big, even in the days of her household, which had briefly consisted of her husband and son, and then only of herself and Peter. After the stroke of luck which had been Max’s invitation to speak at King Edmund’s School, and Peter’s acceptance there as a weekly boarder, she and Peter had tried to fill the bedrooms, surround the dining-table, with guests whom, when they were alone together, they called the Lost Boys. Orphaned boys who would otherwise have spent the school holidays in empty dormitories. Boys whose families were abroad, diplomatically or on business. A taciturn Zulu prince. A nervous, tearful vegetarian Indian from Mauritius. The boy who had been found stealing and selling transistors and calculators to pay for drugs. The boy who ran away to join a saffron-robed and shaven-headed sect and had come back capable only of intermittent attention and prolonged bouts of sleeping. Josephine and Peter talked over these boys, late at night, in their absence, sharing their knowledge of their fears, their secret hopes, their relations with the outside world. Peter told Josephine things which she never claimed to know, never referred to when talking to the boys, but delicately, she hoped, allowed for and adapted to. Peter was a very sharp observer of other people’s fears. He observed with a concern more akin to Max McKinley’s enthusiasm than to Josephine’s cool and practical categorizing. For a year or two he had worshipped Max McKinley and then had inexplicably cooled. But by then much of Peter’s behaviour was inexplicable or heart-breaking.
After Peter had gone, Josephine continued to accommodate temporary Lost Boys. She did not put them to sleep in Peter’s room, which she kept brushed and dusted and ready for his possible return. They slept, as the earlier Lost Boys had slept, in cosy attics where they could play music without disturbing Josephine’s silence. She swept out such an attic for Henry Smee and put a bunch of flowers from her garden on the desk, to welcome him.
Max brought him and stayed to supper. They had supper in the kitchen, a warm room, gleaming with russet and scarlet and copper, heated by a Swedish steel solid-fuel heater which was fed with wooden logs and smelled of bonfires. It was not, nevertheless, an imitation farmhouse kitchen, but urban and domestic, its walls hung with used and useful tools, its wooden shelves cleanly supporting scarlet plates and bowls of nuts and fruit. Throughout this first meal Max and Josephine talked somewhat feverishly, addressing more than half their remarks to Henry Smee who said nothing, nothing at all, did not even clear his throat.
Josephine had in fact been shocked when she saw Henry Smee. He did — and equally did not — look like Simon Vowle. You could have used, Josephine could have used, the same little groups of words indifferently to describe either. He was excessively thin and pale, with lank, colourless hair, moon-glasses and a long fragile head on hunched shoulders, the sharp bones standing out on cheek and chin. The words would have fitted, had been written by Josephine, but the image did not. An artist playing with a pencil could have reproduced immediately the down-pull of the mouth-corner, the side-wind of the thin neck, drawn back, fastidious, nervous. An invented face never has this wholeness or quiddity. If you write “moon-glasses” those you inwardly “see” and the chin is vague and unfocused. So also with the precise degree of colourless colour in fine hairs. It came to Josephine that Max, whenever he thought of Simon Vowle, now saw this face, as she herself had to struggle, thinking of Philip Marlowe, not to see Humphrey Bogart. The fact that this irritated her was the first intimation of the problem.
Max went home, and left Josephine alone with Henry Smee, who said he would go to bed, and went up, soundlessly, clinging to the banisters for support.
Over the next weeks they breakfasted together, Josephine and Henry, and met again for supper, on days when Josephine was in. She tried to talk to him, in spite of a reluctance which was partly an aspect of her own reticent nature, and partly inspired by a kind of force-field which emanated from Henry’s tense and paradoxically limp figure. She talked to him about the university, where he would go, and about fine points of translation into and out of Latin, Greek and French, about which, in his small non-resonant voice, he could be very sharp. He never offered to help prepare these two meals, nor to clear a plate, nor to dry one. He held his knife and fork as if they were both too heavy and too crude for his purposes. He had a habit of stasis: if he got himself into a room he would then stand, every nerve, she could feel it, desperate to maintain his upright and immobile body. It was as though he was imprisoned in plate-glass, or fighting invisible streams of violent pressure. He had to be invited to move from door to chair, to sit, to stand, to bring his plate, which he held before him as a mechanical toy drummer holds his drum, on rigid arms between rigid fingers. Sometimes Josephine thought he was afraid of dropping her plates and sometimes that he felt it was not his place to have to touch them. He did not join in conversations she started in praise of the humanity of Max McKinley — he looked his look, which could be read as scornful or desperate, depending on her mood, rather than his. She had been told he was musical: she urged him to make use of the piano and of Peter’s record-player. He replied that the piano was out of tune and that the quality of sound on the record-player was distressing to his ear. She imagined him in some fine aural torment and wished he could have smiled, looked self-deprecating as he spoke. She began to be afraid of him. She began to fear supper and to listen for his feet going up to his attic, and then to listen in fear for his door to open again, for him to begin his slow, deliberate, desperate-seeming descent.
The subject of Josephine’s writings was fear. Rational fear, irrational fear, the huge-bulking fear of the young not at home in the world. Every writer, James says, discovers his or her subject matter early and spends a lifetime elaborating and exploring it. That may or may not be generally true, but it was certainly true of Josephine Piper. Her characteristic form was the long novella: her characteristic hero a boy, anywhere between infancy and late adolescence, threatened and in retreat. Some of these boys were actually mutilated or killed, driven away in cars with no inner door handles, rushed stumbling through urban jungles at knifepoint, ritually tormented by gangs of other boys in public school dormitory or state school playground. If they were hurt it was always fast and unexpected: the subject was not violence but fear. Often they were not hurt: they suffered from a look, an exclusion, a crack in a windowpane, a swaggering bus conductor keeping order on the top deck because he himself was afraid for his life. Josephine’s work had been compared to Kafka as well as to Wilkie Collins and James himself. The Boiler-Room, whose central figure was Simon Vowle, was a surreal story of a boy in a boarding school who had built himself a Crusoe-like burrow or retreat in the dust behind the coiling pipe-system of the coke-boiler in the school basement and had finally moved in there completely, making forays for food and drink at night. It had a macabre end: Josephine Piper did not let her characters off. It had been described, with the usual hyperbole, as the last word on institutional terrors in schools. Josephine Piper could make an ordinary desk, a heap of football boots, a locked steel locker, tall and narrow, bristle with the horror of what man can do to man.
She recognized fear in Henry Smee, though she had no idea what he was afraid of, or whether his fears were real or phantasmagoric. She recognized something else too, from her own experience; the inconvenience, to the pathologically afraid, of an excessive gift of intellectual talent. Poor Henry could not but enjoy a grammatical dispute or the strict form of complex music: he perceived order and beauty, he remembered forms and pattern
s, he was doomed to think. He could not take up hiding as a way of life. She herself had been afraid as a child — where else could such knowledge have come from? — and had been so clever that it had had to be noticed, she could not hide it in silence and stammering, she had had to read and remember and in the end, as Henry was now doing, to go out at least temporarily into a world where these things mattered.
He developed an inconvenient habit. He would not speak, over breakfast or supper, and Josephine slowly ceased to persist in questionings that received monosyllabic or nodding answers. But he roamed the house at two, at three in the morning, in his pyjamas and dressing gown, and once or twice she came down, fearing intruders, to find him sitting in the kitchen, with a mug of Nescafé, staring at the stove. On these occasions, though he did not confide in Josephine, he showed an extraordinary willingness to talk. He would talk very quietly, so that she had to strain to hear him, offering, she imagined, the flotsam and jetsam of his thoughts, disconnected observations about the use of learning Latin quantities, or the economy of Stravinsky, or a longish disquisition on the Cambridge syllabus, with a parenthetical remark that he hoped that he didn’t have to share supervisions, he found it hard to be in a room with more than one person at once. This was the most personal thing he said, and yet, yawning and low in blood-sugar, Josephone was aware that he was telling her as best he could what or how he was. The trouble was that she did not want to know. What she could face about what Henry was telling her she already knew. And fear is infectious.
Fear is perhaps also hereditary. Josephine’s mother had had a mild and for others disagreeable case of agoraphobia, which had worsened as she grew older, with what Josephine’s father, bewildered, socially embarrassed, lonely, called indulgence. When Josephine was five or six her overwrapped mother would take her overwrapped daughter as far as the local school and had been known to go as far as the public library. By the time Josephine was fourteen, at boarding school, Josephine’s mother rarely ventured outside her bedroom, and became giddy even in the back garden. She had never said — Josephine had never supposed it would be worth asking — what she feared, and her daughter had been left to imagine. She remembered her mother veering in agitation out of a bus queue in which they had been standing side by side in uncompanionable silence, running up the road, dropping books and paper bags of plums and carrots. What was frightening about bus stops? It was more understandable that the doorbell should arouse terror. Josephine, who had had to negotiate the Kleen-e-ze man, the meter-readers, the doctor himself, saw all these as menacing. How much more menacing were the laughing large girls in the school dormitory, who threw pillows, who launched themselves on each other’s beds, who ragged and mocked the thin child she was, shaking in her liberty bodice? She had been saved, if she had been saved, by the solitary and sensuous pleasure of writing out her fear. Already in the boiler-room of St Clare’s School she was writing clumsy tales of justified terror, of bounding packs of girls who accidentally squeezed the last breath out of their pathetic prey, of lost, voiceless sufferers locked in cupboards and accidentally forgotten. The boiler-room had been thick with coal-dust: a scree of coke sloped up to a closed and cobwebbed window under the area and the pavement. If she opened the boiler door the flames hissed and roared and the coke-dust glittered here and there. She collected things: a blanket, a bicycle lamp, an old sweater, a biscuit tin, a special box for pens, a folder that lived there. She squeezed into her burrow, through pipe-gaps too narrow to take a larger girl or member of staff. Sometimes she sacrificed bad writing to the boiler, whose angry red turned briefly golden. When she wrote about Simon Vowle the coke-smell came back in its ancient fustiness and bitterness. Simon Vowle was an exorcism. The woman who could make and observe him was not doomed to relive her mother’s curious arrested life — was not?