by A. S. Byatt
“Alexander,” said Bill. “A surprise. Take a chair.”
“Have half the sofa,” said Frederica, who was extended on it. She was clothed in crumpled school uniform, maroon and white, Blesford Girls’ Grammar. Her fingers were ink-stained to the knuckles. Her ankle-socks were not clean.
Alexander took a chair.
Bill said to his son, “How did you come out in your History Test?”
“Fifty-two.”
“Where were you?”
“I don’t know. Eighth or ninth.”
“It’s not your main subject, of course.”
“No.”
“Show Alexander the cats,” said Frederica to Stephanie, sharp.
Stephanie was crouched over a small table with a pile of exercise books. She uncurled herself and stretched. She was a mild, soft, blonde girl with large breasts, elegant legs, and a rather too tightly rolled pageboy hairstyle. She had just taken a double First at Cambridge and was now teaching at her old school, Blesford Grammar.
“My daughter Stephanie,” said Bill, “has a Samaritan compulsion. We could all be said to suffer for it. She likes to salvage things. Living, half-dead, preferably against odds. Very much against odds in this case, I’d say. Are they dead yet, Stephanie?”
“No. If they get through tonight, they’ve got a reasonable chance.”
“You propose to sit up all night.”
“I suppose so.”
“May I see?” said Alexander, very politely. He would much rather not see. Stephanie pushed the large packing-case beside her chair a few inches in his direction. He leaned over, rapidly, his hair brushing hers, which smelled clean and lively. She was always the same, it seemed, wholesome, moving and speaking economically, creating an atmosphere of slight bodily and mental laziness, alternately comforting and exasperating to others.
In the case were three premature kittens, whose bulging heads feebly bumped and nuzzled each other. Their eyes were seamed with dark yellow crusts. Now and then one opened a pink mouth, showing fishbone fine teeth. They were slick, damp, reptilian, trailing tiny hairless feet.
Stephanie scooped one up; it lay curled in her hand like a foetus.
“I rub them with a flannel, for warmth,” she said, soft. “And feed them very often, with a dropper.”
She reached for the dropper from a saucer in the hearth, pushed back the soft skin from the helpless jaw with a little finger that looked almost brutal, inserted the dropper, squeezed.
“It’s easy to choke them this way, that’s the trouble.” The creature spluttered, gave a miniature heave, flopped into inertia. “That went down, anyway.”
“Where did you get them?”
“From the Vicarage. The cat there died. It was appalling really.” Her voice didn’t change but went on softly stating. “I was having tea with Miss Wells and the curate banged on the door and said the char’s little girl was screaming and screaming in the kitchen. So I went down, and there was the cat … there wasn’t anything to do … she just kept gasping and twisting and gasping and twisting and died.”
“Must you?” said Bill.
Marcus, as far from the kittens as he could be, put his hands between his knees and began to work out a kind of mathematical pattern using knuckles and fingertips.
“There were these, and three born dead. The little girl was in a bad state. I suspect she started it off – picked the poor beast up wrongly. She was quite hysterical. So I said I’d save these, if I could. Getting up all night is a bore.”
The thing in her hand produced a shrill whispering sound, without the force to be a shriek.
Frederica said in her harsh voice, “I didn’t know cats died in childbed. I thought they just popped out. I thought it was only heroines of novels.”
“Something got twisted inside the cat.”
“Poor old thing. What will you do with these?”
“Find them homes, I suppose. If they live.”
“Homes,” said Frederica, making the word thick with irony. “Homes. If they survive.”
“If they do,” Stephanie agreed calmly.
Alexander stood up, slightly sickened by all this brooding and birth-smell, and opened his mouth to explain why he had come. Bill, who had been gathering his forces for speech, started to talk at the same moment. It was a habit of his. Alexander, nevertheless put out, as he always was, closed his mouth and studied Bill. He was a small, thin man, with the lengthy face, hands and feet of someone designed to be taller. He wore flannels, a blue and white checked shirt, open at the neck, a gingery Harris Tweed jacket with leather elbow-patches. His thinning hair had once, presumably, been the same horse-chestnut as Frederica’s and was now fading, with silver flakes like ash on a dying fire. Several long strands floated over a bald crown. His nose was sharp and his eyes a very pale blue: in childhood both Potter girls had given the angry Pied Piper their father’s face, the eyes glittering “like a candle flame where salt is sprinkled”. There was usually an atmosphere of smothered conflagration about Bill – not visible flame, but the uneasy smouldering in the heart of a straw stack, the cracking at the base of a bonfire which might suddenly flare, flare and fall in.
“You can tell me,” he said, driving over Alexander’s conversational opening, jerking his abrupt head in the direction of his son. “How’s he thought to be getting on?”
“Quite well.” Alexander was embarrassed. “That is, as far as I know. He works hard, you know.”
“I know. I know. No, I don’t know. Nobody tells me anything. Nobody says anything to me. Least of all him.”
Alexander looked covertly at Marcus, who seemed simply not to be listening. He decided that this appearance was genuine, however unlikely.
“If I ask,” said Bill. “If I ask, as, being his father, I’m likely to do, I meet – general evasiveness. Nobody will swear to it he’s doing as well as he should. Nobody will offer any useful criticism. Nothing. You’d think the boy didn’t exist. You’d think he was invisible.”
“I only teach his subsidiary English, and I’m quite satisfied …” Alexander began, wondering, as he spoke, what “quite satisfied” in this context meant. The awful thing was that the boy partly was – voluntarily Alexander was sure – invisible.
“Satisfied. Quite satisfied. Now tell me, as a teacher, as an English specialist, as a man of letters, what exactly you take ‘quite satisfied’ to mean …”
“Supper,” said Winifred magisterially in the doorway, as though electrically summoned to their common rescue. The girls rose. Marcus slipped out.
The dining room was both tiny and imitation baronial. It was almost filled by oak and leather: gate-legged table with ponderous, gouty, bulging legs, leather-backed chairs studded with brassy knobs. The walls were papered with imitation raw plasterwork. Over the head of the table hung a very small framed print of Uccello’s Hunt at Night. The very scale of this print led Frederica to suppose until middle life that the thing itself was huge, spanning a whole wall: its real modesty somehow outraged and enchanted her.
The table was spread with a plastic cloth which imitated, with unnatural cunning, white rosy damask on one side and pink-spotted gingham on the other. Winifred belonged to that generation of wartime housewives to whom plastic, any plastic, was a labour saving miracle, and colour, any colour, indisputably liberating and cheering. Today the damask side was laid with the Potters’ heavy ornate wedding-silver, with plastic mats imitating woven rushes, with limp seersucker napkins, obscurely tartan, pulled through silver rings far too wide for them, relics of the ceremony of a solid way of life, weddings, christenings, that the Potters had left partially behind without aspiring to anything more graceful. In the middle of the table were jars: piccallili, H.P. Sauce, mustard pickle, chutney, ketchup.
Frederica and Stephanie, who were both in love with Alexander, were worried about the impression he would have formed of all this. Alexander was informal with a difference, cavalry twill, hacking jacket, suede boots, gold Viyella shirt. His beauty wa
s casual – long soft brown hair falling slightly across a thoughtful brow, everything long and fine and clean-cut and groomed, but delicately so, with no hint of the hearty or plummy. They were afraid he must almost certainly think them vulgar. They would have liked to appear differently before him. Their embarrassment was, however, complicated by the moral certainty that it would be vulgar and wrong in Alexander to hold any views at all about the Potters’ external circumstances. It would equally be vulgar and wrong in the Potters to care at all what views he might form. Finally, the inner life and rectitude were all-important, and not to know that was most vulgar of all – they thought – an anomaly of views that ran right through the Potter character, uniting them all.
Bill, his shirtsleeves rolled up on his pale-veined arms, carved cold mutton, dispensed hot cauliflower and boiled potatoes, and continued to quiz and hector Alexander on his son’s intellectual habits. Obsessive single-mindedness was another strain in the Potter character. According to Bill, Marcus had read no books except Biggles. He demanded to know how unnatural this was. At Marcus’s age Bill had read everything: Kipling, Dickens, Scott, Morris, Macaulay, Carlyle, the lot. Indeed, the Congregational minister had taken Jude the Obscure from Bill at just Marcus’s age and invited Bill’s family and friends to watch him make a burnt-offering of it.
“In the chapel boiler. Opened the little round door into the burning fiery furnace and poked in poor Jude, with tongs. At arms’ length. Sermon on evil thoughts and the arrogance of the half-educated. Meaning me.”
“What did you do?”
“Retaliated in kind. Holocaust. Swept up every missionary pamphlet, Johnny’s pennies bringing eternal joy to the miserable starving heathen, gratitude of lepers for the Word of God and all that rot, when real rot was their problem, not a need for trousers and monogamy and blessed are the meek, who are not blessed. I hadn’t the guts to say a sermon, but I wrote one, God help me, in my best handwriting, and pinned it on the noticeboard, saying auto da fé meant act of faith, which although half-educated I knew, and this was mine, and in my book they were damned for false logic, false values and soppy prose. And for burning Jude before I’d even got to the end.”
Alexander laughed uneasily. “I’m surprised your parents didn’t cast you off.”
“Oh, they did, they did. Of course they did. I walked out of there with a black tin trunk of books and a few clothes the next day, and I’ve never seen ’em since. Win took the girls, once, but I’d not be let darken their doorstep, even if I’d go, which I won’t. No, I took to commercial travelling. Men’s Surgical and Supportive Underwear. Got into Cambridge from Working Men’s Institutes and night schools. Finished Jude. Learned my lesson. What you’ve scraped for and fought for, you value.”
Alexander was impressed by this and was about to say so when Frederica said:
“It’s funny then that you burn our books.”
“I do not burn books.”
“Literature you don’t like, you do. You censor what we read.”
Bill made a gobbling noise.
“Censor. Who wrote to that dried-up old virgin when you were fool enough to get Lady Chatterley confiscated at school? And told her for good measure that it was wicked not to stock The Rainbow and Women in Love in your school library?”
“I didn’t ask you to. In fact, I wish you wouldn’t.”
“The moronic woman replied, I believe, that she had purchased six copies of a work called The Glorious Moment or How a Baby is Born. She seemed to consider this some countervailing proof of liberal-mindedness.”
“She’s shy,” said Stephanie. “She means well.”
Frederica appeared to be enraged. She glared wildly from side to side, apparently in some uncertainty about whether to attack Bill or How a Baby is Born.
“All right, it’s a pretty useless book. Full of diagrams you can get out of any Tampax box anyway. And a lot of stuff about supreme bliss and deep loving trust, and opening the virgin treasure – honestly, what a daft metaphor, there’s nothing in there. And I don’t like her little religious talks on it either, I don’t want my biology contaminating with her religious rhapsodising, no thank you. She doesn’t know anything.”
“But you object when I complain that she sees fit to deprive you of real books and real experience.”
Frederica turned on him.
“You sent us to the horrible Grammar School and then you won’t leave us to deal with it in our own way. You make my life impossible, if you want to know, by always writing letters to the Wells about sex and freedom and literature and all that. If you want to know what I really think, I really think Women in Love is just as corrupting and damaging to all our tender young blossomings as The Glorious Moment or How a Baby is Born. If I thought I’d really got to live the sort of life that book holds up for my admiration I’d drown myself in the Bilge Pond now. I don’t want the immemorial magnificence of mystic palpable real otherness, you can keep it. If you’ve got it. I hope to God Lawrence is lying, tho’ I don’t know how you expect me to tell, tho’ you do make me read him. And you do burn books.”
“I do not burn books.”
“You do. You burned all my Girls’ Crystals and all those Georgette Heyers I borrowed from that almost-friend I once had, and those weren’t even mine.”
“Ah, yes,” said Bill, with sharp retrospective delight. “So I did. Those weren’t books.”
“They were harmless. I liked them.”
“They were prurient fantasy. And vulgar. And untruthful, if that word means anything.”
“I think you could trust me to recognise fantasy when I meet it. A little fantasy never hurt anyone. And it gave me something to talk to other girls about.”
Bill began to speak about literary truth. Alexander looked at his watch, surreptitiously. Winifred wondered, as she often wondered, why Bill found it compulsively necessary to quarrel so disastrously, to argue, for him so crudely, with the one child who had inherited his indiscriminate and gleefully analytic greed for the printed word.
She remembered the episode of the Girls’ Crystals. Bill – it was never known by what inspiration he had been guided to snoop – had found them stowed away in a box under Frederica’s bed. He had carried them out, blazing with wrath and delight, and had incinerated them in the pierced dustbin in which he burned garden rubbish. Crystal after Crystal disintegrated and darkened; ragged scraps of crisping black tissue and pale flames rose and danced on the summer sky. Bill stirred with an iron rod, as though officiating at a rite. Frederica danced round him on the grass, tossing her arms and screaming with highly articulate fury.
Winifred was alarmed by this one of her children. Frederica seemed sometimes possessed by a demon; her end of term reports characterised her style and even handwriting as “aggressive”. Winifred believed it. Stephanie, milder and lazier, was said to be cleverer. Marcus was, Winifred trusted, peaceful and self-contained. These two she admired for meeting wrath with her own stoic patience. Frederica was always so embattled.
Over coffee, Alexander at last managed to introduce the topic of his play. He began roundabout, with a preamble on Crowe and his plans for the new University, to which Bill took instant exception. Bill knew very well, he told Alexander, about the negotiations that had been going on. He had been in at the beginning when there’d been a real hope for something new, something that really had grown straight out of the grass-roots of adult education where it had begun. But he’d lost patience, what with Vice-Chancellors mucking up his syllabus till it was no different from any existing universities’ courses, what with Crowe sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted, and what with the Bishop adding redundant frills and furbelows and theological colleges. All they were going to get was a prettified imitation Oxbridge, with pastiche ceremonial and the older local houses done up with brass knockers and horrible sky-blue Festival of Britain paint for patronising dons. No thank you, he said. His work would have to go on outside all that fuss and flutter as it had always gone on. As for Crowe he
was like an old spider, he’d sit in towers casting out webs for cultural flies and get made Vice-Chancellor, let Alexander mark his words. And the new Renaissance man wasn’t needed thank you – literacy, numeracy, experience at first-hand and articulacy would do fine.
Alexander said there was to be a Festival, and that he himself had actually written a play and would like Bill’s opinion of it. It was to be put on at the Festival. He was lucky. He mentioned Crowe’s plans for the cultural enlivening of the whole locality. He said, dubiously, that he knew Bill would be needed. He said he hoped to be able to give some time, in the summer term, to working on the play, but that this would depend on Bill. By now the euphoria and independence he had felt with Crowe, and on the railway bridge, had left him. He spoke soberly, even apologetically. Bill heard him out, rolling a home-made cigarette in a rubber-and-metal machine, fiddling with raw wisps of gummy dark tobacco, licking his lips, and the fine edge of the cigarette paper, with precision.
“What is it then? A sort of cultural pageant?”
“No no.”
“A blue print for a new Renaissance.”
“No. A play. An historical play. A verse drama. About the queen.” He hesitated. “I wanted to call it A Lady Time Surprised. After that portrait. But we decided on Astraea, because it’s easy to say. And I took a lot of the machinery from Frances Yates on Queen Elizabeth as Virgo-Astraea.”
He could see Bill thinking all this was pretentious and academic in the wrong way.
“Well,” said Bill, “you’d better let me read this work. Is there a spare copy?”
Alexander produced one of Crowe’s cyclostyled scripts. He realised, with a slight shock, that it had simply never crossed Bill’s mind that he might have written a good play. Bill’s tone was that of the schoolmaster, encouraging hard work, but honourably withholding the enthusiasm he was ultimately not going to be able to offer.