Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “I didn’t ask. I didn’t mind, much. What I wanted was a life of my own. He went around with Pijnakker and Shah, doing business with his shipping, I think. They belonged to a lot of clubs in London, where I certainly wouldn’t want to go. There was one called the Honeypot, I remember. And one called Tips and Tassels. I saw a brochure for that once. Oriental waitresses in belly-dancing silk trousers and bras. With tassels. I think Shah had a financial interest in that, I think I heard them saying.”

  “I know those places,” says Begbie, with a note of satisfaction. Frederica watches him sharply. “I know who goes to those places,” says Begbie, looking at Frederica. Frederica says nothing. “High-class call girls and tarts,” says Begbie. Frederica thinks that she knows this, and has not thought about it, because it was nothing to do with her. She wonders what she meant by “nothing to do with her.” She means that she has no proprietary interest in Nigel’s body, she thinks to herself in legal words in the lawyer’s office. She wants her own life. She would not, in theory, mind if he had his, if hers were not house and confinement. Is this so? She remembers her shamed disgust over the filthy pictures. She did not find them amusing. It is very possible that she would not find the Honeypot, or Tips and Tassels, amusing if she were there. Arnold Begbie appears to be hearing her thoughts.

  “Evidence of filthy literature in the respondent’s possession is admissible as evidence for adultery to be inferred,” he says. “If a woman visits a brothel, that is taken as conclusive proof of her adultery. In the case of a man, such a visit provides strong evidence of adultery against him, but is not conclusive.”

  “Interesting,” says Frederica, drily.

  She has the impression that Begbie is taking some sort of pleasure in her general discomfiture, which for him is somehow to do with the imagination of the actions of human bodies, and for her is to do with the discrepancy between what caused her pain and what must be adduced as evidence in order legally to end it. If I had cared more about the Honeypot and so on, she thinks, I might not now be here, because I might have cared more altogether, and then things would have come out differently.

  “If the divorce is defended,” says Begbie, “we need to consider the bars to dissolution of marriage. You must consider: denial of the charge, connivance, condonation and collusion. Your attitude to your husband’s extra-marital activities could well be taken as condonation, if you are not careful. Then there are the discretionary bars. The ones you must consider here are the petitioner’s own adultery or cruelty. Any adultery of your own—I am required by law to put to you—should be recorded in a sealed discretion statement, which will go before the Court.”

  “I haven’t,” says Frederica. “I haven’t—committed—”

  “Both the other side and the Court are likely to wonder whether your relationship with Mr. Thomas Poole was entirely …”

  “Well, it was. It was for convenience. He had children, and a flat, and a job. We shared baby-sitting. He was a friend and colleague of—of my father’s,” says Frederica, avoiding Alexander, genuinely indignant.

  “Good, good. And now you live with another woman. Good. Are you sure there is no one else? If the other side decide to contest the divorce they will seek to know …”

  “No.”

  “And your friends, to whom your husband objected. Were they men, or women friends?”

  “Men.”

  “But he had no cause to be jealous or suspicious?”

  “None. They were my friends.”

  “And always were?”

  “Not always, not all. I—slept with some men, at Cambridge.”

  “Of course. Pre-nuptial incontinence does not come into the domain of public morals. But it may lead to a presumption that you had no objections to sleeping with more than one man: it might lead to questioning about your subsequent conduct.”

  “I haven’t slept with anyone else,” says Frederica. It is curious that although this is true, she feels that she is lying and will be found out. This is possibly because Begbie, who is her solicitor, is disinclined to believe her. Again, he reads her thoughts.

  “Lawyers are temperamentally inclined to question people’s statements,” he says. “Of course I accept that you have been faithful to your husband.”

  “It isn’t a question of ‘being faithful,’ ” says Frederica. “I’m not sure I know what ‘faithful’ means. But I haven’t slept with anyone else.”

  “Very good.”

  Frederica still has the feeling that her solicitor dislikes her. There is something she is not doing or saying that she should be doing or saying. Weeping, perhaps? Lately, any emotion has driven her to dryness. When she was younger, she could scream and weep. But now, she needs to hold herself together. She needs to be competent. And yet she feels that Arnold Begbie does not entirely approve of her dryness and competence.

  Out in the square, she sees the same women and children playing on the grass inside the iron railings with their locked gates. They have shocking-pink knitted hats, warm coats, and near-naked legs and thighs. They pursue a shiny pink-and-blue plastic ball into the bushes. The children laugh and hurtle: the women, in their childish garments, admonish them to “be careful.” Frederica sees herself as a caged or netted beast. She sees something limp and snarling in a barred cage on wheels, in a hunter’s net suspended from a bough. The net is not made by Nigel, who ran after her, panting, in hot blood; and hurled an axe at her, letting her own blood out of her haunch. The net is made by words which do not describe what she feels is happening: adultery, connivance, pre-nuptial incontinence, petitioner, respondent. She tries to think out these words. Adultery has connotations of impurity (adulterated butter, adulterated white flour) or perhaps of theft? Incontinence somehow equates sexual pleasure with lack of muscular control of bowels or bladder: The proper use of the sphincter is to contain, thinks Frederica. These legal words carry with them the whole history of a society in which a woman was a man’s property, and also a part of his flesh, not to be contaminated. And behind continence and incontinence is the alien, ancient, and powerful history of Christian morals. In Cambridge sex was freedom, was individuality, was a gleeful assertion of self-determination, of energy, of choice, however accompanied by an undercurrent of biological terror. We were all cheerfully in revolt, in those days, thinks Frederica, against convention, against bourgeois prudery and caution, against our parents essentially, whom for that purpose, the purpose of necessary revolt, we identified with prudery, coldness, respectability. This language is something quite different from prudery and respectability. It is the harsh language of “the domain of public morals.” It judges me as a member of society, even whilst offering me a way out of the mess I have got myself into by joining society, by getting casually married, because it solved the problem of whether to get married.

  This is the day of the extra-mural class at Our Lady of the Sorrows. Frederica goes back to Hamelin Square, where Leo is having tea with Saskia and the surrogate grandmother, Mrs. Alma Birdseye. Agatha too comes in during this meal. The evening darkens; a gang of children scrabble briefly at the basement window and run away; Agatha and Frederica draw the curtains and let down the blinds, making a softly lit warm space inside. Agatha reads from her story. The travellers have been led into a deep thicket by a muddy imp called Yallery Brown, and it is beginning to snow, great slushy flakes which put out their fire, leaving them in the dark, the real dark, with a thick blanket of wet cloud between them and the moon and the stars. Artegall hears the speech of shrews and rats in the undergrowth, and of owls staring and listening from thorny branches. He hears the voice of slow worms, beneath the wet leaves, beneath the humus, beneath the earth. The shrews and rats listen for the worms, the owls listen for the shrews and rats, the children in the warm room listen and shiver and imagine the fear of the dark. The creatures speak of hunger, and imagine food. The owls do not like the smell of the humans. Suddenly Dol Throstle sees the glimmer of a cold light, far away in a tangle of brambles and bent thorn-
branches …

  “Go on,” says Leo.

  “I can’t,” says Agatha. “There isn’t any more, I haven’t written any more.”

  “But you know it,” says Leo.

  “Not exactly,” says Agatha. “Anything could happen.”

  “Why is the dark?” says Saskia.

  “Because we are on the earth, which rolls round and round and at the same time makes great circles round the sun, so that when it is dark we are on the side facing away from the hot sun, which is a great fiery ball—”

  “Why?” says Saskia.

  “I don’t know,” says Agatha.

  “I’m not afraid of the dark,” says Leo, resting his red head on Frederica’s knee.

  Frederica is afraid. She is afraid of the thicket she is in, of what might happen, of losing Leo, of hurting Leo. These things are in the domain of public morals, now. Someone, somewhere, will judge her. She holds on to Leo.

  She arrives at Our Lady of the Sorrows clutching her lecture on Love and Marriage in Forster and Lawrence. She is consoled by the journey on the Underground. There are so many people, so many faces, so many possible lives going on. People who are real, despite the prevalent fashion for looking like round-eyed pale-faced dolls with shining mouths. People with bald crowns and beehive hair, with flowing locks and bristling fans of curls, with Beatle caps and plastic rainhats, semi-circles of transparent plastic, spotted and dotted with crimson and emerald, purple and orange discs, tied with ribbons over grey curls under folding chins. She is safe and anonymous here, and everyone is interesting. This is the glory of London, her present London, which is several small worlds, Daniel’s church, Hugh Pink’s flat, Rupert Parrott’s dusty office, the house in Hamelin Square, the staff room, the great studios of the Samuel Palmer School, Arnold Begbie’s office and the extra-mural class.

  There is a new whiff, amongst the old cabbage and chalk, on the turning of the stair, a rich, rotten whiff which she recognises without naming it. When she arrives in her classroom, she sees what it was: Jude Mason is sitting isolated in the front row, wearing his filthy blue velvet skirted coat and what appears to be a policeman’s cape. His iron-grey locks spread over the shoulders of this garment, oiled and gleaming. The other members of the group are talking to each other, and not looking at him.

  “I am a vagrant,” he tells Frederica. “Come in literally out of the cold. It is cold in my living place, as I have no cash for the meter. It is cold in the streets. Would it inconvenience you if I took refuge here? The British Library also is closed.”

  “You are not to interrupt everyone,” says Frederica.

  “Or disrupt, or corrupt. I will say nothing at all, if you let me sit quietly in this corner and listen to you.”

  Frederica says to the class, “This is Jude Mason. He works at the Art School. He has written a book which is coming out in a few months.”

  They nod, peacefully. Frederica takes out her notes, and begins to speak of Lawrence and Forster. She speaks of what they have in common: a desire for some kind of whole life, unified experience, complete presence in or on the earth. A dislike for mechanised life, for cities, for fragmentation and dissolution. She speaks of the lost Paradises that haunt Forster’s Sussex and Lawrence’s Nottinghamshire, that send the one in search of wych elms with pig’s teeth, and the other in search of communities of like souls in hot, sunny, “untouched” places. She tries to connect this with the passionate desires of their intelligent women, Margaret and Helen Schlegel, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, for liberty and subjection, for thought and instinct.

  She scans the class. One of the art students, in a skinny black jumper, a skinny black mini-skirt, thick black tights and laced granny shoes, said to her last week, “We have to be different, we are art students, we have to dress differently.” Her friends, all in black on black on black, all with burgundy lips and pale faces, indicated agreement. They are uniformly different. The extra-mural class is heterogeneous. Rosemary Bell has a scarlet woollen shirt and a grey jacket and trousers. Dorothy Brittain has a billowing smock in Liberty wool, patterned with little red and black eyes on fawn. Humphrey Maggs has a collar and tie (white and navy) neatly inside his blue jumper. Amanda Harvill has a long-sleeved, high-necked cream woollen Courrèges-style tunic, stopping well above the knees. She has several gold bracelets on her thin, tanned wrists. Her eyelids today are shining bluebell-blue spangled with gold dust. Ronald Moxon, the taxi-driver, has a donkey jacket over an Aran sweater; Ibrahim Mustafa wears a Beatle-like collarless jacket, navy piped with green, over not quite harmonious grey flannels; Lina Nussbaum has a turquoise longhaired sweater with a cowl neck, Sister Perpetua is black and veiled, Ghislaine Todd has a bottle-green polo-neck under an embroidered waistcoat, Alice Somerville and Audrey Mortimer wear tweed suits over blouses, Una Winterson wears a rust-coloured corduroy shirtwaist dress, and Godfrey Mortimer and George Murphy wear dark suits. Frederica is interested in how much more interesting she finds the suits than the art students’ customary solemn black, and looks for the third suit, which is usually John Ottokar.

  He is not wearing a suit. He is wearing a rainbow-coloured sweater, made of knitted triangles of every bright colour: violet, purple, crimson, orange, yellow, grass green, bottle green, sky blue, dark blue. It is a beautiful, expansive, expensive sweater, with navy ribbing holding it together at collar and cuffs and welt. In his suit he always appeared contained, discreet, smooth, a little paradoxical under the weight of his beautiful bright sculpted golden hair. Now, to go with the sweater, the hair appears to be looser and livelier, very slightly dishevelled at the edges. His body is at ease in this brilliant jerkin: his large face smiles amiably at the room; his blue eyes, under his broad brow, meet Frederica’s fiercely when her look crosses his. He is in a corner, a bright patch, a surprise.

  She remembers he said: I want you.

  He smiles at her.

  She looks at his field of triangles and at Jude’s blue velvet, and thinks of dominos, masks, bright disguises. The art students are dressed as art students. The people here are “ordinary people,” that is to say, separate and heterogeneous people, all already in some sense acting a part, the part of a child or a student, on a junior chair behind a desk, listening to Frederica talking about Lawrence and Forster and sex and death and the earth. Who is John Ottokar? A computer programmer, a man in a suit, a man who doesn’t speak language, a bright patch of triangles? Who is Jude, under his ostentatious disguise? Who is Ghislaine Todd, so neat, so limitedly flamboyant in her flowered waistcoat—a psychoanalyst who hears people’s lives in their total disconnected dullness and their total dreamed coherence; is this person, thinking about Lawrence and Forster and marriage, the same, or another? What is her face like, sitting invisible behind her patient? The same? Which is her “real” face? What is the difference between Humphrey Maggs’s speedwell blue and John Ottokar’s harlequin triangles? Both are brightly not their working uniforms. But the speedwell blue breathes allotments and public libraries, whilst the harlequin is dangerous … But it is not “dressed up” as Jude is dressed up. Or, for that matter, as Sister Perpetua is dressed up, with a starched white band across her forehead and folds of black veiling around her face and shoulders.

  The discussion is wide-ranging. Frederica thinks that an extra-mural class is carried on in the lingua franca, the Common Tongue, it is truly extra-mural, outside the enclosures of academies, disciplines, sects, factions. What the class speaks is gossip at one extreme and precise philosophical discrimination at the other, and the thread of the language they have to construct to speak to each other connects both extremes with a web of knots and separations. These grown-up human beings speak wisely and foolishly of other human beings: Margaret and Ursula, Forster and Lawrence, Birkin and Mr. Wilcox, as though they were (as they are) people they know (and don’t know). They know perfectly well, if reminded, that four of these six beings are actually made of words, are capering word-puppets, not flesh and blood. Godfrey Mortimer, when Frederica makes
this point, makes the point that as far as the class is concerned, Lawrence and Forster are also made only of words: they cannot be touched or tasted, the evidence for their thoughts is considerably more suspect and partial than the evidence for those of Margaret and Ursula. They can talk, they do talk, of what Margaret and Ursula “really wanted” or “should have done” or “might have become,” which Frederica knows to be critically illegitimate and guesses also to be what Lawrence and Forster “might have wanted” their readers to discuss. So we learn to understand. So, to quote Forster and Margaret, we “connect” the prose and the passion, in linguistic and imagining eddies of speculation and comment, understanding and bafflement. The class bring themselves to the text. Amanda Harvill, with a moue and a shudder, opines that the Schlegels are “not real women.” Sister Perpetua says that on the contrary, they are real women, women driven by beliefs about sex and relationships that form and distort their responses. They are not sexually intelligent women, says Sister Perpetua. unlike Ursula Brangwen, who understands the language of the body and how it connects to the language of the mind. It doesn’t always, says Jude Mason, in a three-word intervention unusual, for him, in its brevity. Sister Perpetua says she knows it doesn’t always. (Later, she tells Frederica she told Jude to take a bath, as she thought no one else would. “What did he say?” said Frederica. “He said, ‘I like my pungency, it’s a form of fastidiousness, I keep the People distant,’ ” says Sister Perpetua. “So affected, you can do nothing with those people, there are many at the back door of our convent.”)

  The conversation circles round. George Murphy brings up again the question of the novel and the job. During the earlier discussions of “post-war British fiction” Murphy has sardonically pointed out the limitations of most novelists’ knowledge of most people’s work. Novels, he says, are obsessed with sex and love and God and food, which is fine by him, most people are obsessed by sex and love and God and food. But most people are also obsessed, says George Murphy, by work, by commodities and machines and property, which they do not regard with the contempt and loathing most novelists lavish on these things, but with fascination, obsession, intelligence. Most people, says George Murphy, have relations with groups of people with whom they work, which are not necessarily obsessed with sex and love, though these things come into it. He is interested in Forster’s Mr. Wilcox, who is meant to represent the world of work and money—“along with Leonard Bast,” says Sister Perpetua—and is a crude and villainous fool, however Forster tries to make him interesting or mysterious. And look at Birkin and Ursula, says Murphy. What do they do, the moment they fall in love? They give up their jobs and look for a pre-lapsarian pastoral existence. As though, says George Murphy, the human ingenuity behind machines and institutions was all evil and destructive. No novelist can know me, says George Murphy. They don’t know what I think about all the time.