Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  After perhaps two hours, she comes out, and stretches her cramped body. There is silence. He will be waiting for her in the house. Perhaps, she thinks, it will all get out of hand and he will kill me with his commando tricks. She does not really think he will do that. No human being in full possession of life and thought really supposes they are about to die. She thinks if she can just manage to hide in the house until breakfast time—until light—

  She flickers back barefoot and silent round the edge of the stable-yard, across the back yard, to the back door. The air is cold and damp. The sky is overcast. The door is locked and bolted. She stands on the doorstep and thinks what to do next. She feels curiously relaxed. She will have to be let in bedraggled and cold, at dawn, but what will that matter? She breathes a deep sigh.

  “And now what will you do?” he says, behind her, stepping out of the house-corner. He has put on a shirt and a pair of plimsolls. He is holding an axe. Frederica screams at the sight of the axe, as he meant her to. It is not a very big axe, as axes go, a neat, portable, shining little axe.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” says Frederica, doubtfully.

  “I’ll get you,” he says thickly and moves towards her.

  Frederica runs.

  She runs like fury, through the yards, into the orchard, across the orchard, out into the field. He runs after her. He runs better, but she is madder, she runs quite extraordinarily fast, her mouth is wide and fills with cold night air, and drags at it in great gulps. She runs across the field. He laughs, he stands at the top of the slope of the field as she is stumbling down it, he gives a great whoop of laughter, and throws the axe at her.

  She ducks and twists. She cannot see, she will never know how good or bad his aim is or was meant to be. The flat of the axe catches her on her ribs and winds her. She and the axe fall together, its blade bites the flesh of her hip, cuts at her calf. The nightdress reddens very fast, with blood. Frederica lies on her side and stares dumbly at the grass, at a molehill, at the skyline, at the black and grey clouded sky. She is winded. Her eyes hurt. She feels blood and blood, her blood, great hot puddles of it. It has a finality. She stares.

  He runs to her side, he kneels beside her. He is beside himself, he is crying, he tears up her nightdress and makes an efficient bandage to stanch the blood. He says, “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it, you know I didn’t mean it.”

  “What’s mean?” says Frederica incoherently, and lapses into blissful unconsciousness. She comes round in his arms: he is carrying her up the hillside, back into the house. She thinks, I might get some sleep.

  He bandages her up very successfully. He straps her up in sticking plaster and lint, he swabs and stanches. He says, “They’re only superficial cuts, you really don’t need a doctor, I do know what I’m talking about—”

  “Because of the commandos.”

  “It comes in useful. I am terribly sorry. What can I say? I don’t know how I … I do love you … I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “That’s not what it looks like.”

  “I know. Oh, God, I’m sorry. You have to understand—”

  “I understand.”

  “I don’t like the way you say that.”

  “You aren’t meant to.”

  “Please, Frederica.”

  “Go away. I need sleep.”

  “You need sleep.”

  He goes away, obediently. She lies in her bed, and Pippy Mammott brings her breakfast. Pippy Mammott says, “I gather you fell over something in the night.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’d be more careful, if I was you.”

  “What do you mean by that, Pippy?”

  “What I say. I’d be more careful, rushing around in the night.”

  She pretends to be worse than she believes she is. This gives her a kind of space for manoeuvre, though she does not know what she will manoeuvre. Leo comes to see her, and strokes her face.

  “Poor thing. You’re ill.”

  “I fell over. I was silly.”

  “You’ll get better, Daddy says so.”

  “I just need a lot of sleep, Leo, that’s all, I need to keep very very still. I can’t walk very well.”

  “Poor thing. Poor thing.”

  “Leo, don’t cry. I’ll get better. I promise.”

  He weeps and weeps. She sits up and holds him. All this is not good for him.

  “Your face is all bashed, it’s horrible, you must have had a horrible fill.”

  “It was. It was quite horrible. But I’m getting better, you can see. No harm done.”

  “No harm done,” says Leo in a little voice. “No harm.”

  Nigel and Leo go out riding. Olive and Rosalind have gone out too, to help Alice English with her leaflets. Frederica does not know where Pippy is—she might be anywhere—but she is desperate. She gets up, puts on a pair of slacks and a sweater, and goes down the stairs. She can walk perfectly well, although it hurts to do so. She is bruised by the fall, as well as cut by the axe. She stands in the hall, thinking, and then opens the front door and sets out over the gravel. If Pippy is there and is going to stop her, it will be now. There is no sign of Pippy She crosses the moat, at the bridge, and starts to walk down the drive. She has half an idea that if she can get as far as the road, she will flag down a passing motorist. She does get to the end of the drive, and sits down on a bit of wall, at the edge of the empty road, which is very empty. She hears a sound of bicycle wheels and a creaking chain. She stares at her feet. A voice says, “Frederica!” She jumps. She cries out. It is Hugh Pink, on a very large, very old bicycle. They look at each other.

  “What on earth have you done to yourself?”

  “Do I look awful?”

  “You look horrible. Black and blue and yellow and scraped.”

  “I fell over.”

  Hugh puts his bicycle down in the roadside. He gets out a handkerchief and wipes his face.

  “And how did you fall over, Frederica?”

  “Well,” says Frederica. “It was in the course of a marital dispute.”

  “Go on.”

  “I can’t. I shall cry. I don’t want to cry, I want to think what to do. Why are you still here?”

  “I wanted to see you. To see if you were all right. We thought we were making things worse, and we thought we hadn’t any right to interfere, and we thought—we were worried about you.”

  “Thank you,” says Frederica gravely. They sit side by side. She says, “Where are the others?”

  “In the woods, in case you came that way. We rang once or twice, but you weren’t there, they said you couldn’t speak.”

  “I was there.”

  “We knew you were. That’s why we stayed. It seemed rather feeble just to keep patrolling, but you see it worked.”

  “It did. Here we are. They might come any minute. What am I going to do?”

  “Come back to London with us?”

  “How can I? What about Leo?”

  “Well,” says Hugh, “we could bring the Land Rover to the track in the wood, at night. Can you get out? We could be in London before they saw you’d gone. I suppose you can’t just walk out yourself?”

  “I can’t drive.”

  “That’s remiss of you. You’d better learn. I mean it, we could whisk you away tonight, if you want. You look as though you ought to be whisked away, if I may say so. I never took you for a masochist.”

  “I’m not.”

  There is a long silence. Hugh says, “I’m sorry. I expect I spoke out of turn. Forget it.”

  “No, you didn’t. Of course you didn’t. I ought to get out. I’ve made a terrible mess of my life. There’s Leo.”

  “Bring Leo.”

  “How can I? He’s a happy little boy, or would be, if I was happy, he has a good life, he’s loved, he has his ways—I’m not the most—not the central—”

  “No?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I can’t bring a little boy who doesn’t know anything about all this—in t
he middle of the night—”

  “I’m not saying you’re coming for ever, Frederica. Just offering a lift to get away and think. You can arrange for Leo later. To see him, to have him, I don’t know, to make a better arrangement—just coming away with us now can’t be the end, you know.”

  “No.”

  There is another long silence. Hugh says, “You can’t be that good for him, the state you’re in, now.”

  Wounds have their uses. Frederica stays in the spare bedroom, claiming that hers will rest better in solitude. She goes to bed early, undresses and gets into bed with a book. She has no idea what she will do: the idea of a midnight escape is in one way absurd, romantic, ridiculous, and in another appalling. For how can Leo be left? And yet, how can she will her own annihilation, what will she be to Leo, if she is not Frederica? Mummy. It is a word she hates. Why do the English have the same word for a swaddled corpse and cuddly maternity? She thinks for a moment of her sister, Stephanie, like and unlike, mummy in both senses, Frederica thinks grimly. Stephanie too married for sex. It seems improbable, looking at fat Daniel, but Frederica knows it to be true. There they were, the children of a passionate liberal intellectual, and one married the Church and one the Shires, and for what, for sex. She thinks Stephanie was happy. No one is wholly happy, but Stephanie loved Daniel and loved Will and Mary, there was no doubt of that. Stephanie had some capacity to will her own annihilation. Frederica thinks she perhaps married Nigel because Stephanie had married Daniel, and was dead, is dead, will be dead. Stephanie had stepped outside the Cambridge circle of talk and endless discriminations, moral and aesthetic; she had grasped at sensuous happiness. Like Lady Chatterley, walking into the woods to be annihilated, trailing little threads of quotations from Milton’s blindness and Swinburne’s pale Galilean and Keats’s unravished bride of quietness, and Shakespeare’s Proserpina, willing them all to go away, so as to lose herself and find herself in the body, in the spring. And that was our myth, Frederica thinks, carrying on her conversation with Hugh, in her head, that the body is truth. Lady Chatterley hated words, and Nigel has no words, and I cannot do without them.

  I came here, because Stephanie’s death annihilated me, at least temporarily, so I was able to live in my body.

  Leo lived in my body, a temporary visitor, part, not part, separate now.

  Not altogether.

  Who matters to him, “Mummy” here, Frederica there, somewhere where Frederica is Frederica?

  I always resented my own mother’s passive quietness. It was not a life. It was what I do not want. It was what I did not want. It is what I have got.

  Leo. I could steal Leo. But here he is someone, here everyone loves him, here he has a real life, even if I don’t.

  Leo would have a better life here.

  If Leo met me, met Frederica, somewhere else, where Frederica was Frederica, at least there would be some truthfulness. He would be angry, but we would talk.

  Do you really think that?

  No. No. I think if I go I might never see him again. I think if I stay we may both be destroyed. I think that’s melodramatic. I think, even if it’s melodramatic, it’s true. Melodrama happens. Axes are thrown. Commando tricks are used.

  You’re just trying to talk yourself into anger, Frederica. Or fear, enough to leave. You want to leave, that is what you want, even if Leo stays, but you would like to think you ought to leave, too, you would like permission.

  You won’t get it. Leo is your son. You must stay with him or go. You must choose.

  “Now what will you do?” says the melodramatic sneering voice in her head.

  She gets up and begins to dress. The house is dark, the voices are silent, the doors are closed. She is about to commit a crime. She packs nothing; she wants nothing of this life. She is still discussing with herself whether she should go as she goes down the stairs. But her body has taken charge and is creeping with efficient stealth, like a cat burglar, through the kitchens, out of the house.

  It is a very misty night. Frederica sees great grey veils moving in the stable yard, in the yard lights. She stops to pick up a torch from the saddle-room, and then sets off cautious, quick, picking her way in shadows of walls, back where she so frantically ran, into the walled orchard. The mist is mobile: it swirls around, apple trees, cherry trees, bare now, are suddenly silhouetted against it, and then suddenly clear in the light of the moon against a patch of blue-black sky with stars sprinkled on it. There is quite a lot of wind, in sudden gusts. Twigs rattle and creak. She hears her heart in the soles of her feet. She stays at the edge of the orchard, where it is darkest, amongst gooseberry bushes and espaliered pears and apricots. She thinks she hears footsteps padding after her, and stops suddenly to listen, and hears nothing but silence. She is jumpy. A man might spring out with an axe, or a sword or a gun. Or just with quick, efficient, chopping hands. The moon, when it is now and then uncovered, is almost full. The sky is in turmoil. Ribbons and rags and heaps of vapour race and coil.

  She hears another sound in the bushes, a kind of blundering sound, and stops dead, against the wall, crouching. She thinks perhaps it is a badger: there are badgers in the woods which have been known to come into the orchard, that human place between the house and the wild. There is another very small crunching, and then silence. Some creature, foraging.

  She reaches the orchard door, and turns the key, and opens it. Beyond, the field is dark and clammy and open. Behind her there is a sudden rush of running feet and she swings round in fury and turns the blinding light of the torch towards her pursuer. “And what will you do now,” she hears in her head. But there is no face in her torch-beam, only a flurry of sound and then arms clasping her damaged leg like a serpent coil tightening, strong, small arms, and a face buried in her wound and butting it.

  “Leo. Let go. You’re hurting my hurt. My love, let go.”

  “No.”

  “I won’t go anywhere. Come here.”

  There is a kind of exchange of grips in the dark. Frederica lifts her son, who clutches at every part of her as he rises, with wiry hands and almost prehensile feet. Then he is up, his arms in a stranglehold round her neck, his face driven into her collar-bone, the whole of his body glued to hers with furious determination. He is in his pyjamas. His feet are bare. His face is wet. His teeth are clenched.

  “Leo. Leo.”

  He cannot speak. They stand there, then she sits down, the boy still knotted round her neck.

  Many years later, somewhere on the Río Negro, an Indian called Nazareno will bring to Frederica a sloth he has detached from a tree. The sloth is covered with grey hairs and moves slowly, slowly, unable to move really, on the grass in front of the hotel in the clearing. She has three long crescent-shaped nails, and her bowed arms gesture feebly. She stares with round, dark, small, other eyes, without thought or expression. Frederica thinks the creature has a goitre on her neck, a swelling, and then sees it is not so: round the neck of the sloth is wound the child of the sloth, so tight that its lineaments can hardly be discerned, there are simply figures of eight in the strange grey fur and what might be a head lost in what might be a collar-bone. Frederica sees the strangeness of the sloth, and remembers suddenly with total clarity this moment at the gate of the orchard, when her son grips, grips, and tries to burrow back into her body. And she thinks, then, what she cannot think now, standing at the gate: That was the worst moment of my life. That was the worst.

  Leo gets out, “I’m. Coming. With.”

  “It’s all right. I’ll take you back to bed. We’ll go in.”

  “No. I’m. Coming.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I’m tired,” he says. “I’m tired of thinking and thinking what to do, I’m just tired. I want to come. You couldn’t. You can’t. Go without. You can’t.”

  “Leo. Let go a bit. You’re like the Old Man of the Sea. Strangling Sinbad.”

  “Go on,” he says. “Go on. That’s what he said, the Old Man.”

  And Frede
rica ceases to think at all, but sets off again, hurrying and limping, across the field, with the hot child clutched to her breast, clutching with hands and feet. And so, somehow or other, they get over the stile without his hold being relaxed, and set off through the wood, keeping to the ride between the yew trees. Frederica says from time to time, timidly, “Are you all right? Are you comfortable, my darling?” and he does not answer, only grips, heavy and sullen now, inert as if he were asleep, or dead, except that he grips. She sees the dark bulks of the tree trunks, and the clouds racing above the stiff and soughing branches, and she moves in pain, imagining another, younger Frederica, springing along for the joy of freedom. She will remember no man’s body as she will remember this hot, angry, grasping boy: she will remember no pleasure of the flesh, and no pain, as she will remember the touch of these arms, the smell of this hair, the shudder of this effort of breath. Both of us know I meant to leave him, she thinks, as she stumbles on; this will be between us. Her grip on him is as tight as his on her: she can hear their two hearts thud, their breaths are mixed. And when Alan Melville steps out of the trees to meet her, his wavering torch lighting her path on the earth, he thinks for a moment of the lion in Stubb’s absurd and wonderful picture of the great cat clawing for purchase on the shoulders of its white-maned mount and prey, he thinks of demons, before he sees what she is clutching, a small boy, at the end of his resources. Both woman and child have bared teeth and look not quite human.

  “Hullo, Leo,” says Alan, gravely. “Are you coming with us?”

  The boy cannot answer.

  Frederica says, “He took matters into his own hands. Can he come?”

  “I don’t think you can be separated,” says Alan judiciously.

  IV

  … and it was also about that time, the time of the first flourish of the theatrical presentations in the Theatre of Tongues, but before the ceremonies instituted in the Lady Chapel and the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, that the Lady Roseace took to slipping away from La Tour Bruyarde to take solitary rides and rambles in the forest. She would have been hard put to it to explain why she did this, if asked, and thus sought a certain secrecy, in order to evade being asked, and perhaps also in order not to have to clarify to herself why she went. If challenged, she intended to say that her fancy chose solitary riding, as others’ fancies or fantasies chose the actions and rituals now being acted out with much ruddiness of skin and much expenditure of hot pantings and licking of lips in the Theatre of Tongues. But she had a heartfelt wish not to be asked, for the desire of solitude—at least in others—was not a desire upon which Culvert smiled freely. There were still many discussions to be held on how to accommodate the incompatible desires of Damian, Culvert and the Lady Roseace. Culvert was hopeful of the outcome of these debates. The Lady Roseace, contrariwise, prided herself on being no man’s creature. That was still in the springtime of the enterprise.