Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “Bitch,” says Nigel again, crashing his free fist into her ribs. Frederica is winded. She moves her head again from side to side, moans in pain and disbelief, grips with her teeth and more or less chews, producing rather a lot of blood, filling her mouth. “Bitches bite,” she thinks in a suffocated way, and finds half a moment to wonder about vampires, as the blood runs between her teeth. Then she falls forward, limp, completely inert, dead meat. The oldest trick in the book, the commentating brain thinks. It works. Nigel lets go, stands up to look at the body, and Frederica kicks nastily at his legs with her full force, catching him off balance. He falls, half on the bed, half on the floor, and Frederica, counting the cost to her battered spine, stumbles to her own feet, and flings herself past him into the bathroom, locking the door.

  There is a little pile of poetry books by the lavatory. Frederica likes to sit in there and learn things by heart, keeping something essential alive. There is Yeats, there is Mallarmé, there is Raphael Faber, there is a Shakespeare. Frederica sits on the lavatory lid and opens the Shakespeare. She finds she cannot see the words at all—the air is simmering and her sight seems veiled with a lucid poppy-scarlet. She licks blood meditatively from her lips and her teeth—salt, metal, and something else, she thinks, the taste of life and salt and metal. She is shaking too much to get up and rinse her mouth. Her teeth hurt, too. They are loose in their sockets. She sits there in a studious position, holding the Shakespeare, and breathes bathroom-air—body-smells, watery-smells, ghosts of perfume, a remote tang of bleach. Blood.

  There is a silence. Then there is a shuffling. Nigel is moving about in the bedroom. She waits. There is a sudden explosion of terrible sound: he is battering the bathroom door with something heavy and howling imprecations. The door is solid. The house is solid. It is a house which once did not have many bathrooms, but those that have been added have solid doors. Frederica sits inside, holding Shakespeare, and says nothing. She cannot think what to do. She is a creature to whom impotence and indecision are painful. After this has gone on some time Frederica thinks of the other inhabitants of the house and wonders what they will think, what, if anything, they will do. She thinks Olive and Rosalind and Pippy Mammott will put their heads under the bedclothes and shut their ears. She thinks of Leo, which she has been trying not to do. Will he hear, will he be afraid, who will he blame? Now she feels both guilt, for the first time, and real hatred of Nigel, for the first time.

  The barrage stops as suddenly as it started. She waits for a questing “Frederica?” but there is nothing. The door is so thick she cannot hear exactly what is happening out there. Shufflings, draggings, a crash. Silence. Silence. She looks at Shakespeare, and finds she has got him open at Much Ado about Nothing.

  Benedick: I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?

  Beatrice: As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I love nothing so well as you, but believe me not, and yet I lie not.

  Frederica, skinny and freckled at twelve, Frederica angular and noisy at seventeen, Frederica surrounded by young men in Cambridge at twenty, has always had in her mind, as the image of love, this contented prosaic recognition of inevitability. What is love, what is love, is it just a dangerous idea? There is a kind of twang, and the room goes dark. There is also no line of light under the bathroom door. It is black, black. She cannot see Shakespeare or her own feet. It is the country, there are no street lamps, the window is black, too. She hears her own hot breath, and a drip of water, somewhere. Outside the bathroom door a thick voice asks, with desperate satisfaction, “And now what will you do?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “You can’t stay in there for hours and read now, can you? Come out.”

  She cannot answer. She draws her knees up to her chin, enfolding Shakespeare in her body.

  “I can wait. I can sit here and wait,” says the voice.

  She tiptoes to the door, and says through the keyhole, “You’ll frighten Leo.”

  “And whose fault is that, you bitch, who wishes he’d never been born?”

  There is a renewed battery on the door. Frederica retreats again. Her eyes have got used to the dark. The window is a small, smoky square, midnight-blue-black. She can see the shadows of the jasmine fronds and the creeper leaves. She can see a star or two, bright pinholes behind the glass, stars without identity, isolated from the spread of the sky.

  A long time passes in the dark. Frederica reflects on Daniel’s letter, and his interesting revelation that Bill thinks that Bill and Daniel resemble each other. She recognises the situation she is in, because all her childhood was passed amongst howls of rage, amongst tempests of invective and maudlin reconciliation. She thinks that she married Nigel at least in part because his composed silence appeared to be the opposite of Bill’s wrath, and here she is, now as then, locked in the bathroom, waiting for the storm to subside. Stephanie too married Bill’s opposite against Bill’s wishes. And it is true what Daniel says, he resembles Bill. Fate comes up and hits you behind the head, Frederica thinks ruefully, probing her sore neck, her lumbar ganglion. Mutatis mutandis—Bill talked a lot, and did not hurt. Nigel repeated one word over and over, and hurt a great deal. Leo is an articulate child; perhaps he will not need to hurt people. At the thought of Leo, she begins to snivel again. Her mind puts it to her in a small way. “She is snivelling.” A good, almost onomatopoeic word. Tears run down her nose.

  “Can I come in, Frederica? I won’t hurt you, I’m sorry. I won’t hurt you.”

  If this were Bill, this would be the turning point. Anyway, she is tired out, and fatalistic. She creeps in the gloom and turns the key and retreats again. He comes in very slowly, feeling his way blindly along the wall. He has wrapped one of her cotton petticoats round his damaged hand, his left hand. He puts his other hand on her breast, hot on hot, heavy on pricking.

  “You are a bitch, though,” he says, his voice thick with indescribable things, but no longer aggressive. “Aren’t you? A real bitch, I should have known. Look what you’ve done to my hand.”

  “I can’t see. You ought to put the lights back on, whether you took out the fuse or interfered with the mains. In case—anyone else—wakes.”

  She is whispering.

  “Come with me, then. I don’t want you to do anything silly.”

  “I’m not in a state to.”

  “Come with me.”

  He puts his hand round her wrist. They negotiate the dark house, sidling along walls, padding across landings, taking courage on known staircases. The fusebox is in a kind of safe in the scullery. Nigel lets go of Frederica in order to be able to reach the master switch, which he pulls down with a kind of iron groan or twang. A streak of light appears in the doorway from a light left on in a dim corridor. There is no sound in the house. Nigel pats Frederica’s buttocks, a man encouraging a mare. “There,” he says.

  They make their way more quickly back to their bedroom, lit as it was before only by table lamps and reading lights. It is a horrid scene. The bed is full of emptied bottles of Frederica’s lotions and powders—mostly presents, since Frederica’s favourite perfume is still Johnson’s Baby Powder. The floor is scattered with broken chair legs. The broken chairs lie around like dead animals, amputated limbs in the air. The mirror is monstrously cracked. The curtains are bloodstained, and so, spectacularly, are the sheets and the bedspread. Frederica thinks of Wilkie’s letter, reminding her of her unforgettable defloration, and speaks quickly, in case Nigel too is remembering this.

  “It looks like the scene of a murder.”

  “It does look pretty bad.” He seems rather proud, as well as moderately abashed.

  “I’m not sleeping in here. I’m going to find somewhere else to sleep. Do you think we ought to clear all this up?”

  “No. Why? They can, they’re paid to clear up. Let’s go somewhere else then. We could sleep in your old bed, where you used to stay. Where I came creeping in the night.”

  Frederica th
inks of saying she wants to sleep alone. But she is tired and desperate for sleep, and afraid, more than she cares to admit to herself, so afraid that she is prepared, like many women at many times, to take comfort from the man she is afraid of. So they creep quietly along corridors to the guest room in which she used to sleep, and find the bed made up under a dust sheet, which Nigel pulls to the ground, leaving traces of blood in it. They make love. He is clever and gentle, and leaves the pillows bloodstained, she sees in the morning. The pain in her spine makes it hard for her to come, and once or twice she tries to give up, or to fake, but Nigel insists, he waits, he touches her most secret places, he sings his speechless song in her ear, and in the end, there it is, bliss, she comes, she cries out, her voice and her body shake, and Nigel says, “There you are. That’s all right,” meaningless phrases loaded with many meanings.

  In the dark, lying with him, Frederica says, “You hurt me, badly.”

  “I could have killed you. I learned unarmed combat in the Commandos, doing my National Service. I could kill you any time, just like that, you would hardly notice.”

  Frederica cogitates.

  “Are you saying I’m lucky you didn’t kill me by accident?”

  “Something like that. No, don’t be silly. Just, I’ve been taught how to find where it hurts.”

  “And is that a warning or an apology?”

  “Both, don’t you think? I think it’s better not to talk, talking makes it worse. Sleep on it, let it pass, you liked just now, what we did just now, didn’t you, you were happy, weren’t you?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “I said, don’t talk. You are a talkative silly bitch, Frederica. Talking hurts.” He puts a hand, warm, hard, friendly, over the triangle between her legs. “Trust me. Go to sleep now.”

  The next day, there is a woman washing bloodstains from the wallpaper on the landing. Pippy Mammott is seen with a man in a van, who carries away the broken chairs. There are new sheets, the curtains are replaced, the depleted bottles restored to their places. Nigel goes away again. He kisses Frederica, and Leo, who wraps himself like a great squid around his neck. “Be good,” he says to both of them. “I’ll ring you. Be good.”

  Olive and Rosalind do not talk to Frederica. That is, conversation of a repetitive kind takes place at mealtimes, which take place regularly. Breakfast is quiet, lunch is administrative—“I think I need to go into Hereford for some stuff for the roses, and to get my hair cut, do you want to come?” Tea is rather more determinedly social, which means that the sisters and Pippy Mammott do try to talk to Frederica, which means in practice that they always all talk about Leo, who is always present for tea—lunch he sometimes, usually, has in the nursery. They discuss his achievements, his sayings, Sooty. They always end by saying he will get a big head if this goes on, and the child always puts his hands to the sides of his brow. The first time he did this, it was with genuine alarm because, Frederica could see, he feared his skull was swelling outwards, but now he does it for effect, because his aunts and Pippy Mammott always laugh so much. They sometimes also compare his doings with those of his father at his age. Tumbles are compared, also fear of the dark, “sharpness” and growth. In the early days there was some attempt to tell Frederica about Nigel’s childhood, as though she was full of distress at having been shut out of this golden age, as though she needed, in order to be fully alive, to acquire their knowledge by proxy. This kind of talk happens rarely now, and nothing has succeeded it. Frederica wonders sometimes if Pippy was always there, if she was present during the growing up of Nigel, or if she has assimilated her knowledge from the house and its inhabitants. It would be simple to ask, but Frederica does not ask, just as no one in that house ever asks anything about Frederica’s own past, her parents, her sister, her brother, her sister’s children. She mentions these children from time to time by way of comparison with Leo—she plays the Leo conversations like a board game with herself, scoring increasing points for each repetition of certain clichés, and jackpots for a cliché that can be got to include Nigel, Marcus, Leo and Will in one banal generalisation. The sisters and Pippy know something is wrong with what observations she offers, but they do not know what, and do not, she supposes, greatly care.

  She thinks they talk to each other quite differently when she is not there. Sometimes she hears a passionate buzz of talk behind a closed door, notes of urgency, notes of insistence, notes of pain, notes of laughter, none of which she ever hears face to face.

  She does not want to know. She is not Olive’s kind of person, nor Rosalind’s, nor Pippy Mammott’s. They let her know this, with no cruel intention, seeing no need for kindness, simply making certain things clear. She happens to be there, Nigel happens to want her, she is a necessary part of Leo’s wonderful existence, the house is big, there is room for all of them, she doesn’t say much, she is a bit feeble, really, a bit wet, they all go their own ways, and if she wants an errand done, or a doctor fetched, or a letter posted, they are only too ready to help. Only too happy to help. Helping her integrates her into the way of things. Helping her pleases Nigel and Leo. There is nothing she can do to help them. Except, possibly, keep out of the way, which indeed she does, though they don’t wholly like the manner of her keeping out of the way.

  In the early days of her marriage, she and Nigel treated the house as though it was a honeymoon retreat. They climbed the stairs hand in hand towards the bedroom, at all hours, coffee-time, noon, tea-time and evening. They touched each other, Frederica remembers, handing teacups, pouring wine, They passed the sisters, Pippy, on the stairs, and were unseen, as though they were not there. Frederica, alone and vulnerable, is now retrospectively embarrassed by this bad behaviour, or what she supposes was taken for bad behaviour, since nothing is, or was, said. Nigel is like a Pasha in his palace, she thinks, but cannot say. Leo is a male child in a harem. Leo will be sent away to school when he is eight or so. He will go to the school his father went to.

  Frederica thinks she cannot bear Leo to be sent away to sleep in a dorm with boys. She has seen them cry. It is not good.

  Frederica thinks that when Leo has gone, she can go.

  Frederica thinks that when Leo is eight, she will be thirty-two and her life will be almost over.

  She encounters Olive and Rosalind as one being, but they are not twins. Olive is older than Rosalind, but not by much, and both are older than Nigel, by five or six years, maybe seven—again, Frederica has not asked and is not told. This means they are well into their thirties, and must have thought about marriage themselves, though there is no sign of it. They are married to Bran House. They do not quarrel, they do not even have sisterly spats, which Frederica finds odd and baffling. She tells herself, without conviction, a long story in which they once fought to the death—over a man, over one of them’s passionate desire to leave, to do something else, drive a rally car, nurse in a hospital, take a degree in poultry keeping, go on a Hellenic Cruise—Frederica’s invention fails rapidly—and in her story, after this fight, they were both so battered and afraid that they agreed never to differ again. There is no evidence for this fantasy other than the tendency of their faces to set into masks of mild sullenness when they are unobserved. Like Nigel, they have large dark eyes sunk fairly deep under very definite, solid bars of dark brows. Nigel’s beard is heavy and he shaves twice daily—the mussel-blue shadow from jaw to cheekbone, along the long face, is one of his attractions. All three have darkly shadowed upper lips. The hair on Olive and Rosalind’s heads is neatly cut and solidly controlled. The rest of them is hairy—their tweeds, their handsome, dark-haired legs, their lips. It is not certain that they are unhappy because they look unhappy. Nigel can look intensely gloomy when he is most enjoying himself. It is the set of their faces. Leo has their solemn eyes in a much more volatile geometry.

  They do have their own social life, in which they do not include Frederica. She has gone to one or two County Shows, and has enjoyed the drama of the jump-off, the smell of the horsehair and
leather. She has learned to ride, which she does, in her way, enjoy—riding is the nearest she comes to being part of the alien world she thought would be full of surprises. She likes to ride with Nigel, she likes to canter over grassland with dew on it, she likes to see his neat body bent over the mane of the horse in front of her—this has an immediacy that excites her. She likes to strike out for the horizon. But riding with Olive and Rosalind is not like that. They like a companionable pottering trot, or they like to hunt, which Frederica will not attempt to do, for which they almost invisibly—What do we care what you think is right?—despise her. But riding friends come and go, other families come and go in Land Rovers. One woman, Peggy Gollisinger, an elegant nervous woman smelling overpoweringly of Ma Griffe, did try to make a friend of Frederica. She came once or twice and sat in the drawing-room with the new Mrs. Reiver, launching immediately into an intimate account of her husband’s infidelities, soaking up gin and tonic like a hot bouquet reviving in water with aspirin. Then she fell asleep on the sofa, and Pippy Mammott showed in her chauffeur, who picked her up and carried her away. “That always happens, I’m afraid,” said Pippy to Frederica. “There are those who just don’t get out the gin, no matter what. She doesn’t react too well to that treatment either. A lost soul, poor Peggy, I’m sad to say.” Frederica wondered if she herself had been diagnosed as another potential lost soul.

  Olive and Rosalind’s most substantial friend, most frequently invited, most frequently invoked, is a woman a little younger than themselves, Alice English, petite, energetic, with a floppy mass of silvery-fair corkscrew curls, and a round face with a sharply pointed chin at the bottom of it, and widely spaced, very blue eyes in the top half. Alice is livelier than the Reiver sisters, and tells Frederica several times in the first weeks of their acquaintance, “We must be great friends.” Frederica comes to see that this is because Alice had hopes of Nigel, though she is far indeed from knowing whether these hopes had any justification. Nigel has never mentioned Alice English, but this is no use as evidence in either direction. Alice English occasionally says with determined jauntiness, “I know Nigel thinks” this or that about things, such as the dangers of comprehensive education, or the wrongness of lying to the House, or the importance of an incorruptible judiciary, or the punishments to be inflicted on Communist spies. She comes round more frequently now the battle-lines for the election are drawn—she is something to do with the local Conservative Party Committee—and invokes Nigel’s putative views more and more firmly and frequently. Frederica took a certain pleasure in Alice’s earlier half-confessions. It is pleasant to be in possession of what someone else desires—or at the least reassuring to know that someone desires what you have got. But she cannot sympathise with this new bred-in-the-blood Tory Nigel who would, if he were there, be rousing the shire to fight in the back streets of Worcester for fear of letting in that nasty, sneaky little man Harold Wilson. Alice knows that Nigel thinks Wilson completely unprincipled, completely vicious, completely incompetent. Alice knows that Nigel thinks that Wilson wants to give everyone’s hard-earned savings to scroungers who delight in milking the State to live in luxury in flats they pay next to nothing for, with cars parked outside, and tellys inside, oh yes. Alice even knows Nigel would want Frederica to come and help dissuade the shopkeepers from listening to that twisted man’s blandishments. Nigel has never mentioned politics to Frederica. Frederica assumes he votes Tory—it is part of his illicit attraction, like Don Juan, like Byron, an ultimate, inadmissible sinfulness. She assumes he must know she can’t and won’t vote Tory, though lately she has begun to wonder. If he had ever said anything to her remotely resembling what Alice says she knows he thinks, Frederica might have thought twice about marrying him, for his class would have become—as Alice’s is—aesthetically completely unacceptable. But he has appeared uninterested. And Frederica’s Puritan upbringing has so far had a curious effect on her politics. For whereas both Bill and Winifred are wholehearted members of the Labour Party, by class origin, by instinct and by thoughtful conviction, they have brought up their daughter in that tolerant, non-conformist, cautiously sceptical tradition that requires you to look twice at everything, to look for the good and bad in everything. Bill has his fanaticisms, one of which is a fanatical rejection of fanaticism. So Frederica knows that her gut reaction against the Conservative Party is as questionable, on the face of it, as a gut reaction against homosexuals or Negroes. Homosexuals, Negroes, and Conservative Ladies are human beings, Frederica knows, and believes. Nevertheless when Alice English says, “You must give a hand, Frederica, you must support our people,” Frederica feels ill with instinctive loathing, and replies, in a voice much more her own than is usually heard in that house, “They are not my people.” She thinks. She says, “And I am very glad they are not, I have to say.”