by A. S. Byatt
I’ve got quite a bit of political reporting into the papers—two pieces in the Mirror, three in the Statesman, one in the Manchester Guardian. Witty breakdowns of long dull speeches, résumés of election meetings in unvisited places, that kind of thing—I’m making a name for myself, I think—but the real place to be these days is Television, you know—this is the first Election where it will play a major part—poor Lord Home (well, Sir Alec, but it sticks in my throat or ballpoint) has a face like a skull and ill-fitting teeth and you can see these trivial matters nailing down the coffin-lid tighter and tighter on every doorstep, which of course delights me, but I don’t like the mindless malice. They call him Skullface and say he glares at them—like the Evil Eye. The TV’s a Magic Box, Frederica, and its power is only just beginning to stir. I must get into it, I must get on it. Words are wonderful but passé—that’s where the power is, girl, and I’m going there. Your heavy friend from the Socialist Club, Owen Griffiths, has got in on the Labour Party Press Relations, and can be seen from time to time grinning obsequiously on the silver screen—do you watch the box, my dear, or are you above such vulgar amusements in your pre-industrial Retreat? I’ll say for Griffiths he’s understood the essential thing, which is that the box is small—he’s teaching people with the instincts and training of rabble-rousers to be urbane, and intimate, and say things quickly and not repetitively—a lot of them find it so hard—no Great Rally rhetoric for yr. fly Welsh boyo—he gets to tell the big nobs where they go wrong and what they do best—he’ll go far, I predict—but I’m not sure how serious his principles are—
Hugh says you’ve produced a sprog. Difficult to imagine, frankly, but I suppose you handle it with your usual mix of frowning determination and nerve. I meet all sorts of people these days. Old friends were made slower and deeper. We love you, Frederica, come and visit us, come and play, come and work for Victory if you’re allowed. (I suspect you’re not. Now then, Watson, watch it!)
Do you remember Comus? Do you remember the brilliant person who organised all your admirers to come and see you perform—always resourcefully—a débacle? Well, the same extraordinary skill has set in motion a kind of leaflet-dropping-campaign amongst the cows, to show you’re appreciated. Chin up, and imagine a big, hot kiss from
Tony
My dear Frederica,
It is not often I write a letter, but I gather one is in order. So here speaks a voice from the past, and I very much hope from the future, to say, very discreetly now you are a married lady of substance, do you remember a motorbike, and a quite bloody hotel in Scarborough, and my willingness to help out with your more esoteric problems? And a beach in the Camargue, and the terrace at Long Royston, and the smiles of a summer night, and your clear young voice (well, I remember your voice, you can only hear from inside your head, it is the one voice you will never hear, I can tell you professionally). “I will be still as stone, I will not bleed.” The timbre of that voice is gone, inevitably, along with the lights in the trees, and I very much fear the renaissance of the Verse Drama, and will not come back, which is sad.
What are you doing? I am still riding two horses—both aimed at the stars—it cannot go on, I tell myself, I shall tumble in all my pink frills into the sawdust in the ring, to change the metaphor—I work as hard as two men, and have two lives. I have my lab. at North Yorkshire, in the Evolution Tower, where we are doing some very interesting work on the construction of vision, the perception of shapes, visual memory from birth, and that sort of thing. I see yr. brother from time to time, who is involved both with the microbiologists and the new neuroscientists, whose work of course impinges on my own psychological experiments on active brains—they think very highly of Marcus, do Abraham Calder-Fluss and Jacob Scrope, you will be glad to hear. Our idealistic Vice-Chancellor still holds to his vision that all Knowledge is One, and we do talk to each other across institutional boundaries, more than in most places of research. So I tell them that my Other Life—my secret, shameful flirtation with the magic Box—is really One with my serious analysis of how the human brain constructs and recognises faces and boxes, and they more or less buy it, because I do good work, and have good assistants.
I have been making one or two rather elegant little Arts programmes about art and perception, recently. Do you ever watch? You can hardly begin to imagine what will be possible to the screen—to the Box—of art and thought in the next ten or twenty years. We have a cultural instrument in our hands wch. can—which will—transfigure the way we see the world, and so the way we live, for good or ill. Probably for ill—knowing the deep human need for inertia, for ease, for non-thought, but the moment I write that, I see that the opposite is also true—it is human to need complexity, difficulty, thought, and the Box provides it, in its way. This is a more serious conversation than we have ever had, do you realise—because I can’t see you, I’m not distracted by your face and your presence, so I say what I think. Written culture, not Box Culture, sweet Frederica, soon to be relegated to museums and dusty bookshelves. I will tell you a secret—you can’t think in language in the Box. It has to be thought with images, associations, quick flickerings of form. The public fear is that the Box will be used by powerful manipulators to control the Masses—like Huxley’s Soma—but that’s not what interests me. It could be done, but anyone ingenious enough to do it would get bored with wanting to—I mean the scientists, of course, not the politicians, who are simple souls. What interests me is that these new thought-forms will change the molecules in our minds and what they do and can or can’t do—and Shakespeare, and Kant, and Goethe and even Wittgenstein will be just too creaky and hard to bother with—for better for worse, Frederica, I make no judgement.
I didn’t mean to embark on all that. I meant to write a ponderously gallant letter to a vanished flame, and to say, come back to us, come and see us, come and talk. There’s a pilot programme of a TV game guessing literary quotations being made—and as always, they’re desperately short of any women who know any quotations—now you aren’t a famous writer or anything but you are quick-witted and presentable and you know a hell of a lot of quotations—so if you find yourself in London for a bit—give me a ring, I know the producer.
I am told you have a son. What a responsibility. I’m not sure I shall ever be fit to undertake it.
Look after yourself. Write to me. Whilst language is still a valid means of communication.
My love and homage,
Wilkie
Dear Frederica,
I have only just learned that you have a son, so am writing belatedly to congratulate you, and hope you are happy—you vanished rather suddenly from our midst. I think of you often, and do hope you are happy.
As for me, I work in educational television, producing little scenes from various plays and analyses of them. It’s not wholly satisfactory, because one never gets to grips with a complete play, and even as teaching it isn’t satisfactory because I never see the children I am addressing, but it is a pleasant enough life, and my colleagues and the actors I meet are agreeable, and so it goes on. I am not writing at present, though I have one or two ideas, both for television plays and for the theatre.
The most interesting thing that has happened to me is an invitation to be part of a Government Enquiry into the teaching of Language. We have had our first Meeting—we are chaired by an anthropologist who seems reasonable enough so far, and are a mixed bag of well-meaning persons—teachers, linguists, writers, broadcasters, a forensic psychologist and a physicist. We have a heavy programme planned of visits to schools and colleges, and huge heaps of Evidence are already coming in to be studied with care. I have written to yr. father asking him to give his views. He is the best teacher I have ever worked with, or met, and his mixture of down-to-earth practicality and high ideals is what we need, I think. Professor Wijnnobel, the NYU Vice-Chancellor, is one of us, tho’ he is not the Chairman—as he is a grammarian, it was felt he might be too parti-pris I suppose to weave conflicting views together.
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It would make me happy to hear how you are, and your husband and son, of course, also. I think this letter may be rather stilted, but you will read it with yr. usual acumen.
All best wishes,
Alexander
Dear Frederica,
Forgive a word out of the blue, or black, after so long. I was recently in the north—you may have heard that Mary had an accident, quite a serious accident, but is now well and back at school and seemingly happy. Perhaps you didn’t hear, as you seem to have lost touch, as I did. That is why I am writing to you. I have been talking to your father, and I think he would very much appreciate a word from you. That is clergyman-talk for he’s hurt, he’s upset, he wants to hear from you and is too proud to say so. I’m not good at writing letters, and certainly not to you, to whom writing is second nature. Your father did me the honour to tell me he thought we resembled each other (him and me)—there is only you in the world now who would see the full humour and irony of that, so I am telling you. I did not hit him with anything, but agreed with him with Christian mildness, for there’s a bit of truth in it. But the one who is really like him is you, Frederica, and he knows that too, and is not getting any younger. Forgive me for saying so—put it down to professional habits of meddling for God’s sake—but he has already lost one daughter. I don’t know why I don’t mention your mother—she’s a more patient and secret soul—but it was him I talked to. Much to both our surprises.
You don’t need my news. I am still working in the crypt. Holding people back from the edge—sounds melodramatic and often is—who might or might not be better if they just plunged over. It’s a funny specialisation. It suits me, but I see people singing in the streets, and they look queer, which makes me realise I am.
Look after your beautiful son, Frederica. (I saw the pictures you sent them.) I didn’t do well by my son, and I see already I shall regret it for the rest of my life. I expect we shall see each other again, and I hope I know you well enough to be right in thinking you’ll forgive me for interfering—whether or not you do as I suggest. Clergyman-talk again. God bless you.
Love,
Daniel
Nigel watches Frederica open these letters, one after the other. As she reads them she looks up at him, and watches him watch her. She reads Alan’s words, and Tony’s, and Edmund Wilkie’s, and Alexander’s and Daniel’s, with his still, dark silence charged with watchfulness at the other side of the table. There is autumn sunlight on the white tablecloth and the silver spoons, and the dark man watches intently. The letters bring with them vivid ghostly images of friends, Alan’s quiet smile, Alexander’s fading beauty, Tony’s curly humour, the improbable conjunction of Daniel and her father. They remind her of herself as she was, argumentative, passionate, silly, clever. When she rereads them in private—which means her bathroom, which has a window scratched by trailing jasmine fronds and dotted with the advancing suckers of Virginia creeper—the life of the words, and the quick ghosts of the writers, bring with them the presence of the dark watcher. He is more real than they are. She knows his shoulder-blades and his belly, his throat and his dark cock. She thinks of his cock, reading Wilkie’s letter, Alan’s letter, Tony’s letter, and she licks up tears. He is more real than they are, and she is less real than she was.
She does not know if she dare answer all these letters, and put all the answers in the Chinese bowl in the hall, from which the letters are taken. She writes answers, tears them up, and writes other answers, and tears them up. She is afraid. She arranges to go into Spessendborough on market day with Olive and Rosalind, and there she buys a heap of postcards, addresses them, and writes brief notes on all of them saying, “Wonderful to have your letter. Answer coming soon. F.” She has no address for Daniel, but remembers the name of the church and addresses it to the crypt. Olive and Rosalind watch her post these pictures of hills and riverbanks, and summer fields. She fans out the postcards so they can see how little she has written. She does not know why she does this.
Nigel stays at Bran House for a long time. They have good days. They picnic in the hills with Leo, they show him the tracks of deer and badgers. They discuss Leo. Later, Frederica will not remember what they talked about. She remembers his hand on hers in bracken, and a kind of happiness, she remembers two lazy bodies stretched on rugs, and frantic secret mental activity in her own head. She puts off answering all the letters until he goes again, and he does not go.
The next letter he takes is an innocuous brown one, with a typed label, addressed to Mrs. Nigel Reiver. He reaches across as she is about to open it, and says, “Give me that.” She gives it to him; he reads it, and hands it back; it is a routine invitation to a Commemoration Dinner at her old college in Cambridge. “Please indicate the names of any other Old Students you may wish to sit near.”
“Why did you do that?” she asks him.
“I thought you might be planning something. I thought maybe you were going on with what you once said about going back to that place. I got it wrong.” He does not add, I’m sorry, but it is grudgingly in the air.
“Perhaps I shall.”
“I don’t see how you could.”
“I could if—if I really wanted to. I could go up and down. Some time there, some time here. With ingenuity. You come and go.”
“That’s one reason why you can’t.”
“You can’t just say that. It isn’t fair.”
“I don’t see why. You made a commitment. You knew what you were doing.”
“No one ever knows exactly what they are doing—”
“I thought you were so clever. You don’t get married and just go on as though you hadn’t.”
“You don’t change your nature overnight if you get married.”
“Perhaps not. But you change, all the same. I don’t want you to go off here or there as though Leo and I don’t exist. You’ve no need.”
“You can’t think it’s as simple as that.”
“I don’t see why not.”
In the end he is summoned again. Uncle Hubert telephones from Tunis. Nigel prepares to set off for Amsterdam. Frederica finds herself, to her annoyance, hurt and upset that he is going. She does not really know if this is because she will miss him, or because she is angry that he has autonomy and she does not, or because he can leave her so cheerfully. Marriage has its emotions that are part of its elastic cage, that don’t exactly belong to the individual people who happen to be in that marriage. She thinks, I won’t ever be so silly as to get married again, and then thinks how silly that thought is. Since she is married.
She finds Nigel, in their bedroom, reading her letters. It is the day before he is to go. He is sitting on their bed, with Wilkie’s letter in one hand, and Tony’s in the other.
“I was just making sure,” he says, with his gathered, energetic calm, “that you weren’t up to anything.”
Frederica stands still in the doorway.
“And am I?” she says, with the ridiculous heavy irony of such situations.
“I don’t like your friends,” he says. “I don’t like these people.”
“They weren’t writing to you,” says Frederica, studying his face.
“You are just a bitch, really,” he says, in the same collected voice. “Just a silly bitch.”
Frederica once had her father’s capacity for rage. She stands for another moment in the door, tingling with anger in fingers and guts, and then begins to roar. She advances on Nigel and retrieves her letters—Daniel’s is a little torn. She says what is always said in these scenes, that she will not be treated like this, that she will not stay another moment, that she is going, now. She opens wardrobes and flings clothes on the carpet. She finds an old suitcase and begins to throw things into it, weeping and screaming. Her letters, a nightdress, a toothbrush, a bra, a sweater; she can hardly see for tears; the things that must come, books, letters, are too heavy, are too many, the idea of their weight provokes a fresh spout of tears. “I’m going, I’m going, I’m not staying
another minute,” she screams, throwing things, any things, some black silk panties Nigel bought her that she has never worn, higgledy-piggledy into the suitcase. The release of adrenaline is a relief and an excitement. Nigel comes up behind her and takes hold of the red hair in the nape of her neck, and gives it a sharp professional twist. The pain is excruciating. Frederica hears various bones in her neck crack and shift. She thinks, “He has killed her,” stops to marvel at the pronoun, and sees that she is still alive, in possession of her senses, and in pain.
“Silly bitch,” says Nigel again, and gives her some sort of blow—with a knee? with the other elbow?—in the small of the back, again causing major pain with minimal effort. Frederica has never been in a physical fight. Her siblings were both almost uncannily gentle; her father’s rages led to devastated furniture and burned books, but not to hurt flesh. Her schooling was respectable and her tongue caustic; she was not the sort of child to be victimised. This is new. Nigel’s arm is across her face. He is breathing heavily. She opens her mouth and inhales hot cloth. Her tongue touches fuzz. She twists her head and her nose slides past cotton of shirt-cuff, and then skin, skin intimately known, skin acrid with anger. She sinks her teeth into it as best she can. She tastes blood. She cannot turn off some mocking self-censor in her brain that despises her, Frederica, for having to do such vulgar things.