Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  Afterwards, they all go to the pub. The pub is called the Goat and Compasses and has a rather clever swinging sign with a Satanic albino goat wielding a compass rather in the manner of Blake’s Urizen. It is a dark brown-leather-and-open-fireplace pub, with electric imitation coals; there are a lot of mock-vellum lampshades on mock-candles. They have their own very dark brown table in a deep dark corner, with high settle-like benches along two sides and several mock-mediaeval stools. A good half of the class always go there, and intense relationships are formed. The whole group offers advice on Una Winterson’s marital problems, or listens to Humphrey Maggs’s views on Harold Wilson, on capital punishment, on homosexuality, the concerns of the day. They do these things in the light of Madame Bovary, of Dostoevski’s Idiot, of Proust. Frederica finds she does not want to sit near Thomas Poole, who has come with them and is deep in conversation with the battling Freudian and Marxist. She takes the opposite corner of the table, and finds herself sipping red wine next to John Ottokar. She tells him his paper was splendid. She says, “You never talked, before.”

  “I don’t talk. I thought it was time.”

  “I don’t really know what you do.”

  “I write computer programmes. For a shipping firm. I am a mathematician.”

  “George Murphy came to the class because of his Lambretta.”

  “I came to learn language. I’ve never used language. I grew up without it.”

  “I have a mathematical brother who’s suspicious of language.”

  “My situation is complicated. I am an identical twin, and we were both mathematicians. We grew up speaking a kind of private language—almost a silent language—of signs and gestures. We closed everyone out. No one could reach us. We were like a child and a mirror that spoke to itself. I think it frightened us, but when we were frightened, it intensified—our need of each other. We didn’t relate outwards. And at the same time, we were each other’s prison.”

  “Did you have the same friends?”

  “No friends, until we went to university. We tried to go to different universities, but that didn’t work—we started in different places and ended up in the same one. We fought. We both wanted to work in artificial intelligence, and by then we both wanted the other to do something else. It was like being torn in two—being half and half. If we saw each other by accident, it was like seeing ourselves when we had thought we were invisible. I can’t explain. Anyway. I had a hard time talking to people. Except in computer languages. Algo. Fortran. Cobol. But I saw it wasn’t enough. I sat through meal after meal saying nothing. I met girls, and said nothing. Then I got my job.”

  “And your brother?”

  “He went another way. I may tell you, some day, not now. We had problems. He found—a way of talking I don’t like. I needed badly to learn language in a—detached?—way. Not personal language. You don’t follow. I’m sorry.”

  “You use language with great assurance. Look at your Kafka paper. As you must know.”

  “I’m interested in whether you think if you don’t speak. I felt like—like an ape learning, or Adam in the Bible, writing that paper, making myself think thoughts. I thought, Did I think all those things before I had to write them?”

  “Did you?”

  “Oh yes. But not in words. In shapes. In feelings. Those words, the word ‘shape,’ the word ‘feeling’ don’t quite describe what I mean, what I thought.”

  He has an eloquence, Frederica thinks, which is aware of itself but innocent; he uses words well and with glee because they all appear to him new-minted. She says, “I’m glad you came here to learn language.”

  “Not only that,” he says in a low voice. “I come for another reason.”

  Frederica looks at him.

  “One that does and doesn’t need words,” he says. “I want you,” he says, quickly and quietly.

  She is aware of the whole of him, blond smile, fierce intent eyes, his hands on the table, his legs and feet beneath it, near her own but not touching. She responds for a moment, in silence, with a fast flood of blood to her heart and her pale face. He smiles. She does not. He watches her trouble. He stands and walks away to fetch more drinks. He is a grown man, not a student; he is older than she is. The three words have changed everything: and nothing, for she has known, before, how things were. But now they are spoken.

  On the way home, Thomas Poole congratulates her on her class. She is a born teacher, he tells her. The group has a life of its own. She remembers that he had used the word “therapy,” and is angry. Books are not therapy, she thinks, they are understanding, they are thinking. She is still out of breath because of the fierce certainty of John Ottokar. She says, “My solicitor says I’ve got to move out, but I don’t know where to go. He says I can’t go on living with you and hope to get a divorce.”

  Thomas Poole says, “I had hoped you would stay permanently.” His voice does not expect her to say she will.

  “I can’t,” says Frederica, striding along in the dark. “I’ve got to find somewhere innocent and unexceptionable. I don’t see how.”

  She asks Daniel if he knows where she can live. He does not. She asks Tony, Alan, Hugh Pink, who are also unable to help. It is Alexander, who found her her first refuge, who comes up with her second. He sends her to see Agatha Mond.

  X

  Two people walk into Hamelin Square on a cold February day. Hamelin Square is not a square: it is a spoon-shaped cul-de-sac, in Kennington, in a part of London south of the river, where there are acres of buildings and no public green spaces that are not small, flat, and surrounded by wire fences. There are many wide, straight, dusty main roads, some of them lined with elegant Georgian rows of houses. There are many small tunnels and mazes of housing of every age, Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, wartime prefabs in faded pinks and blues, and abutting these tiny homes are tall towers in monumental rectangular concrete, balcony above balcony, grey against the sky. Hamelin Square consists of early-nineteenth-century houses, with elegant long windows, decreasing in size for three floors, and basement areas reached by steps. These houses are quite pretty, in a slightly pinched way; diminished models of the grander Georgian houses on the roads. They are in an extraordinarily mixed state of repair. Some are gentrified, with bright white paint, window-boxes, brass doorknockers and pretty curtains. Some are crumbling, with dirty net curtains on sagging wires, and blistered paint. One or two are gay and incongruous in West Indian mixes of bright dark blues, plum pinks and acid greens. In the centre of the spoon-bowl is a patch of mud that is not a green, on which are two old car-seats, a rotting mattress, a new and bloodstained bright pink baby-doll nightdress.

  The two people progress slowly. Frederica’s natural aggressive stride is impeded by the slow progress of her companion. She is wearing a long black cloak-like coat over a knitted grey tunic, over green tights and high black boots. She is carrying a dull gold breast-plate and bossed shield, and looks a little like Britannia on the pennies, or the ghost of Britomart. Her companion is wearing corduroy trousers, a blue hooded jacket with silver fur, and a large gold helmet, whose plastic visor descends, imprisoning his head, every few steps, and has to be pushed up again. He is alternately brandishing and trailing a large gold plastic sword with a jewelled hilt, which is too large for him and impedes his progress further. If Frederica offers to carry the sword, he stands still, stubborn with fury, and strikes his head so that the visor falls yet again.

  Frederica is a woman who goes everywhere in a rush, in a trajectory. This creeping progress is alien to her. So is the knot of love that winds her round the small figure of her son, so that she feels his steps in her feet, his small angry bones in her gut. She has not been able to work out how far she should consult him on the proposed house-moving. She remembers, she thinks, that at four her own head was whirling with adult thoughts and understanding, all wholly uncommunicated. She supposes Leo must be the same, but does not know. He is happy at Thomas Poole’s. He likes Waltraut Röhde, he likes Simon. He has to m
ove or Frederica cannot escape his father. Frederica does not know how anyone can go on bearing so much guilt, so much emotion to be organised and endured. She says, “We could stick the visor up temporarily with plasticine; then you could see.”

  “I might want it down, if an enemy approached.”

  “We could stick it up in the street, so you could walk faster.”

  “A street is where an enemy might be, I should think.” He brandishes the sword, and stands, yet again, stock-still.

  If this woman, in this house, doesn’t love him, I shall hate her, thinks Frederica.

  She has never really had a woman friend. Girls at school disliked her for being clever and she accepted this, as her due, both as a compliment and as a punishment. Cambridge meant men, to love and talk to.

  They arrive at Number 42, at the point of the spoon. It is decorously done up: the door is new black paint, the windows are white, the bricks are repaired, there are no window-boxes. Frederica holds up the visor when they mount the steps. It falls again, when they ring the door bell. Agatha Mond sees them, as she opens the door, against the winter light, black-cloaked, gold-gleaming, helmeted and booted. “Come in,” she says. “I’ve made tea.”

  • • •

  Agatha lives on the top two floors of the house. The arrangement they are discussing is that Frederica and Leo should rent the basement and ground floor, for a low rent and some reciprocal baby-sitting. Agatha’s part of the house is spotlessly clean. The curtains and sofa are rich, dark and bright with William Morris’s Golden Lily; the walls are white and studded with prints and paintings, some abstract, some nineteenth-century, some Doré Dante illustrations, some of John Martin’s images of Paradise, Chaos and Pandemonium with swarms of small bright angels like light-emitting bees. In the kitchen Matisse’s Jazz prints sit also on a white wall, amongst earthenware jugs and bowls, Sabatier knives, a mixture of old blue-and-white plates on a dresser. In one corner is a playhouse, solidly built of wood and beautifully painted with crimson and white climbing roses and blue columbine. It does not occur to Frederica to think that this order is the result of a frantic morning’s cleaning in her honour. She diagnoses the brown jar of graded wooden spoons, large and small, deep and flat; the clean tea-towels on scarlet hooks; the well-used but scrubbed chopping board; the glass jars full of coffee beans, cereals, tea, brown sugar, white sugar. Here is natural order, in which someone takes pleasure. There are two kitchen windows, and two blinds, emerald green and sky blue, which are happy together.

  Agatha Mond gives Frederica tea in an old Spode cup and squeezes orange juice for Leo, to whom she also gives a large moon-like biscuit with a smiling face iced on it. For this, he consents to take off his helmet. As he does so, Saskia Mond, dark and wiry in a corduroy pinafore dress and a skinny blue jumper over scarlet tights, appears from her room. She and Leo stare unsmiling at each other and retreat to the sides of their respective mothers. The two women sit facing each other, neither on the sofa, both alone in hard armchairs, as far away from each other as possible.

  I can’t live here, Frederica thinks. I can’t keep this up. I might just as well go now.

  “When I bought the house,” says Agatha Mond, “which I did very cheaply, because in those days none of these houses were done up, I always intended to share it. So I made two separate entities. There are two kitchens, two bathrooms, although it’s so small. And then I’ve never quite felt I could—or that I had to—but I go away so much at the moment, with the committee—and Alexander said he thought you and I might get on …”

  Her face is composed and severe. She addresses Frederica as though Frederica were a meeting. All her features are perfectly proportioned; her eyes are large and dark but not melting.

  “Logically, I thought,” says Agatha Mond, “that two women with the same interests—and with children the same age—could make a really sensible arrangement—as long as we thought it out—and built in safeguards for if we didn’t like each other—and a reasonable set of rules so we don’t start by annoying each other inadvertently. I never have shared—but I’m sure most sharing founders on silly little misunderstandings that could have been foreseen.”

  Frederica says she is sure that that is quite right.

  “It would get harder and harder to discuss difficulties, once the arrangement was established,” Agatha Mond persists.

  Frederica thinks: She is actually very nervous. She is naturally managing. She is also afraid, for herself, for her daughter. I should perhaps just go. She looks up from her knees and catches Agatha’s look directly, and sees her own thoughts being read.

  “Of course I am nervous,” says Agatha. “It is our children who are involved as well as ourselves. But I am right, we would need rules. If you wanted to come.”

  “I must go somewhere,” says Frederica. “I’m all right where I am, in a way, but it might prejudice my—attempt to get divorced. I think I should say—I don’t have much income, but I don’t want to earn it by baby-sitting. I will do my share, of course, but I must work or I’ll die.”

  “Of course. That is understood. That is why we need to think it out.”

  There is a silence. Agatha offers to show Frederica the vacant half of the house. This consists of a ground floor—two rooms and a kitchen, and a basement, containing a bedroom and a kitchen. Everything is white, the new bath, the walls, the worksurfaces in the tiny kitchen, the table surrounded by pale wooden chairs. It is surgically anonymous; the floors are sanded and varnished wooden boards.

  “I didn’t want to impose my taste,” says Agatha Mond. “One can hate other people’s colours; life can be unbearable with other people’s idea of cheerfulness or quietness, don’t you think?

  “I thought the two households would live separately altogether—apart perhaps from one meal a week, or a fortnight, to be decided; the two women would need to make the acquaintance of each other’s children, to know them well. I have a visiting surrogate granny, for difficult evenings, who also irons and polishes; her services could be shared, by arrangement. There should be no feeling that either should ever invite the other to any dinner party or anything—and they would have to be extraordinarily careful about borrowing things—though I think arrangements could and should perhaps be made about the Hoover, perhaps only the Hoover …”

  Her voice is full of doubt. Frederica stares around at the bare white walls, the sparkling white tiles. She has no home-making talents: she has never needed any.

  Leo needs a home.

  Agatha Mond’s voice is full of efficient clarity, fear, and doubt. She is a Civil Servant, vulnerable through her child.

  “Do you have parties?”

  “Oh no. But that’s because I don’t like large parties. I’m quite sure, by arrangement …”

  Frederica says, “I don’t think it would work. I don’t think I should come here. I don’t think my way of life—”

  She has no idea what her way of life is. Agatha Mond says, “I quite understand, I do understand—”

  Both their voices are drowned by screaming from above. Both women, simultaneously, imagine both children torturing and being tortured. They turn and run, fast. They are young and agile.

  Saskia, weeping violently and gesturing with pointy fingers, is dancing round the playhouse. Inside there is a blunted crashing and the fabric is swaying as though it is about to burst. Agatha says to Saskia, “Are you shut out?” and Frederica calls to Leo, “Are you shut in?” Saskia stops crying enough to gasp, “He’s stuck in. I can’t get him out.” She then resumes her shrill wailing. Agatha kneels down. Leo is hopelessly entangled, his sword at an angle blocking the doorway, his visor jammed down, his head beating like a giant beetle against the window. Agatha persuades him to keep still. She moves the sword, patiently, inch by inch, manoeuvres the angry small body round it and extricates it. She shows Leo how to take off his helmet in the confined space and wriggle free. She extricates the helmet. The two children sit on their mothers and sob with damp red cheeks.
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br />   “I made a cake,” says Agatha Mond, smiling now the danger of house-sharing has been averted. “We may as well eat it.”

  It is a very good cake. It is a golden cake, containing translucent vermilion glace cherries, shaped into a Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house, thatched with chocolate icing, with blue-curtained windows in yellow brick walls, up which grow climbing flowers on spiralling green stems, surrounding an arched green door. It has barley-sugar twisted chimney-pots, quite Elizabethan, and two doves sitting on the roof. Leo and Saskia carry their slices into the playhouse, into which they both fit, leaving the armour outside the door. Frederica crosses the room to look at the pictures on each side of the chimney-breast. They are facsimiles of the contrary “Nurse’s Song” and “Nurses Song” from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Innocence is on the left, the poem contained in the arms of a weeping willow, in a pink-and-gold sunset glow. The nurse sits at the base of the tree, perhaps sewing, perhaps writing. Beside her, two rose-coloured slender girls hold hands in an arch, under which, into the warm light, the rest of the circle are dancing.

  When the voices of children are heard on the green

  And laughing is heard on the hill,

  My heart is at rest within my breast