Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “The audience howled and hooted. And bayed. It was pandemonium.”

  “It was Nüremberg at times. I was there.”

  “Jeff Nuttall and John Latham were painted blue. They were dressed as books, which they destroyed. Everyone danced.”

  “They were all high, they were all spaced out. Adrian Mitchell read a poem about Vietnam.”

  “It was full of enthusiasm and incredibly tedious.”

  “The Americans have dropped paratroops in Vietnam. They are on the offensive. It’s their war now.”

  “Wilson should speak against them.”

  “How can he? Our welfare state is funded by American handouts and subventions.”

  “They want him to send troops. They urge him to send troops.”

  “He’s cunning. He won’t. He won’t give them more than words.”

  “He had no majority in the Commons on the corporation tax. He can’t hang on. There’ll have to be an election.”

  “We shall have Reggie Maudling as Prime Minister. He’ll succeed Alec Douglas-Home.”

  “We shan’t win the next election. We’ll have the Tories back.”

  “I wouldn’t write Wilson off. He’s cunning.”

  “Is it true he’s ruled by someone called Marcia Williams?”

  “Not ruled. He trusts her.”

  “Kitchen cabinet …”

  “Ah, Daniel. Just the man. My theological novelist is trying to take her book back again. First she wanted it back because her husband wouldn’t like it. Now she wants it back because he does. He says it’s a wonderful picture of the Death of God in our society. He sees the stabbed selfish husband as the sacrificial lamb, I think. He wrote me a letter, saying that when the clergyman loses his faith he is the Death of God, and when his wife stabs him, his death opens the way for the Presence of God to be restored, since his Death is incarnate in his doubt.”

  “It sounds very contemporary.”

  “Phyllis Pratt says God will be more thoroughly annihilated if she withdraws the book. She’s writing another, though. It’s got a title. ‘Grind His Bones.’ It’s another theological thriller, she says, about a sexton who composts the vicar and his curate. I can never tell when she’s joking. I won’t withdraw the book. It’s got a cover with a Magritte-like loaf, bleeding gouts of blood.”

  “Dreadful.”

  “Saleable, in the present climate. You wouldn’t talk to Mrs. Pratt about her theological doubts?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Did you hear Patrick Heron at the ICA? He was attacking the Americans. He accused them of cultural imperialism. He thinks it’s a kind of chauvinist modishness, all the critics who go round saying everything good comes out of America.”

  “What he is doing himself,” says Hugh Pink, “is incredibly beautiful. All these floating discs and brilliant fields of saturated colour. It’s like seeing the elements of creation, it’s like seeing angels, except you shouldn’t use analogies for it, it simply is. It makes me feel ill.”

  “Ill, Hugh? Why?”

  “Because it makes me want to write, as though that was the only sensible thing to do. But I hate poems about paintings, I hate the second-hand. I want to do something like that with words, and there isn’t anything, or if there is, I don’t have access to it.”

  “How are you, Jude?”

  “Ill. Impatient. Lost.”

  “The printers are trying to bowdlerise your book. They have queried many of your words in red ink.”

  “I will not have my words touched or changed.”

  “We’ll run it past a lawyer, of course.”

  “I will not be bowdlerised.”

  “Don’t worry. Your book will either offend, or not, as a whole. There isn’t any point in chopping off a few warts.”

  “You console me.”

  “I don’t mean to, necessarily. Are you writing another?”

  “I am too nervous. It is appalling, not to be writing. I have no life. I am no one. So I go to gatherings to which I am not invited.”

  “I would have invited you if I knew where you lived.”

  “I can find my way by other means, as you see. I like your underground home. You would not like mine.”

  “What are you doing, Frederica?”

  “Nothing much. My son is away. I teach, but the teaching’s seasonal. I am trying to get unmarried.”

  “I can’t think why you ever got married. I could find you some work researching at the TV centre. Would you like that? What are you going to do in the long run?”

  “I don’t know. This morning I thought, I might go back to a Ph.D. I’ve discovered I can teach.”

  “Difficult to imagine.”

  “I can.”

  “OK. You can. Those that can’t, teach. What is it you can’t do?”

  “Write a novel? Don’t be nasty, Wilkie. I like teaching. It matters. Ask Alexander.”

  “What does he know?”

  “He’s on a royal commission on teaching. He goes in and out of schools.”

  “Hmm. That might make a good programme. How they learn? What they learn. There are people up in North Yorkshire looking at what the brain does when we learn. Are we a computer, or a jellyfish, or a computing jellyfish? I’m a jellyfish man myself, I think we’re made of flesh and blood and neurones in jelly, but it’s not fashionable. It’s all algorithms. Algorithms. Everything analysed into binary dichotomies. Either/or. Whereas you and I know it’s both—and, and a few more things as well. Now there’s something useful to do, study the memory.”

  “Marcus is doing that.”

  “So he is. He’s turned out well. Surprising.”

  Tony Watson’s new girlfriend, Penny Komuves, is a lecturer at the LSE, daughter of a Hungarian-Jewish economist whose ideas are current in Harold Wilson’s Treasury thinking. She and the cheerful Owen Griffiths chatter away about Wilson’s kitchen cabinet, to which both have an ancillary access; they gossip about Mrs. Wilson’s discomfort in Number 10 and the influence of Marcia Williams. Penny Komuves is short and dark and solid, with a Vidal Sassoon haircut, which suits her. Owen tells stories of George Brown’s drinking. Desmond Bull and Hugh Pink discuss Patrick Heron’s anti-American aesthetic manifesto as though it was at least as important as Ian Smith’s threatened declaration of Rhodesian independence from Britain. Rupert Parrott is different in the company of his wife, who is a rather County girl with a fine-boned face amongst a curtain of silver-blond hair, and angles—rather pretty angles—where less well-bred women have curves. She says almost nothing all evening, turning her head with polite interest from face to face as people speak. The other person who doesn’t speak is Daniel, who had hoped to see Agatha, whom he likes; he mentions this to Alexander, who says he had also hoped to see Agatha. “I think she went to Yorkshire,” says Daniel. “She said she might see me there, if I go up to see Will and Mary.”

  “She didn’t tell me she was going,” says Alexander, with pleasurable sadness. “She sent me a draft of two chapters of our report. She writes very clearly.”

  Frederica chops up dark bread and French bread and celery and chunks of cheese. Jude Mason looms up behind her.

  “You do not appear to be happy. Will you trust me to hand that round?”

  “I am not happy; I think that’s the first personal remark you’ve ever made to me.”

  “I am in your house.”

  “So you feel you should take an interest in me?”

  “No. I feel able to diagnose. You have too many ties. You could have lived as I do, without desire, and then you could have been—”

  “What, Jude?” Frederica is slightly drunk. Jude’s steely face goes in and out of focus.

  “Single-minded. You dissipate yourself. On affections and concerns. Daniel is single-minded. Tollit peccata mundi, to speak blasphemously. I prophesy. You will not be what you have the possibility of being.”

  “That’s cruel.”

  “I am not concerned w
ith kindness. Draw in your tentacles, young woman, all this is trivial, all this chatter. Our deity—I call it Time, Time rules sublunary beings—our deity does not forgive an addiction to the trivial.”

  “You are pompous. And I am not addicted to it. I am stuck in it. And it isn’t trivial altogether. It’s like cells breeding, it is what is.”

  She sees the faces and chatter in her room as a warm brew of potential life and form, infinitely interesting, if only she could find her own proper, her own real relation to it. What is “real”?

  “I am repelled by cells breeding.”

  “Your bad luck.”

  Jude sways. “I have seen things you can’t imagine. Horrors that are nothing.”

  He sits down heavily in Frederica’s desk chair, breaking a glass of red wine on the desk, dropping the breadboard on the carpet. Wine drips. Daniel fetches a floorcloth. Jude closes his eyes. “Stoned,” says Desmond Bull. Jude falls forward on the desk amongst his grey hair.

  “He can’t stay here,” says Frederica.

  “I’ll take him away,” says Daniel. “I’ll stow him in the church.”

  “I’ll help,” says Rupert Parrott. “I feel responsible for him, now.” Melissa Parrott stands up.

  “Get on with it, then. I’ll go out and look for a taxi. If we are responsible, do let’s get on with it.”

  “I can manage,” says Daniel.

  “Rupert says he’s responsible. So let’s get on with it.”

  “Masochist,” says Jude, through loose damp lips, opening one reptilian eye and closing it again.

  The friends go home. Frederica stands on the doorstep and watches them go. The yellow light spills on to the step. Her friends make off towards the Tube, except for Rupert, Melissa, Daniel and the inert Jude, who depart in a black cab. As Frederica turns to close the door, a figure steps out of the shadows of the next doorway, a figure that makes a faint crackling sound. Frederica takes in a gasp of breath and steps up into her own doorway. She cannot see a face: the man wears a soft, wide-brimmed hat, pulled down. She has seen this figure in this hat and the glistening, crackling PVC across the mud-circle a few nights ago, and again, standing motionless on a corner of the square, perhaps a week before.

  “Don’t be afraid. I wanted to see you.”

  The blond face turns up into the yellow light.

  “I was having a party. You should have come.”

  “I didn’t want to. Intrude. Be at a party. I wanted to see you.”

  “You’d better come in.”

  She is afraid, even now she knows it is John Ottokar. He comes up the steps behind her. A car engine in the street coughs into life, and then dies again. Frederica closes them in.

  “Come down, have a coffee.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why have you come?”

  “You know why.”

  He takes his hat off; his arms crackle on the way up, and on the way down. There is the thick, yellow hair, lying glossy and bright.

  Frederica cannot answer him: she knows, and does not know, and will not say she knows.

  “I’ve been watching your house,” he says. His voice is lowered and conspiratorial, although the house is empty. He is a lover, not a thief, yet Frederica is reluctant to tell him the house is empty. He says, “If I can’t have—what I want—I shall lose what I have.”

  Frederica could say, “No, you won’t.” Or she could ask, “What do you want.” She knows what he wants. She asks, “What do you want?”

  “You,” he says intently. “You are what I want. It’s terrible to want anything so much.”

  “Come in,” says Frederica. “You can’t stand here—we can’t stand here—in the entrance.”

  They go down the stairs into the basement. His feet are heavy. His face is heavy. In the class, in the pub, it has always been alert, mildly curious and pleased, responsive. Now it is set into an effort of mindless will. Frederica wants to laugh, and cannot. The tension in his body crosses the air between them. They sit down, on the edges of armchairs, staring across the room.

  “You didn’t come, for weeks. I thought you’d given us up.”

  “My brother was ill. I had to see to some things. I saw to them. It was a bad time. I could only think about you.” He hesitates. “When things went wrong, it became clear to me that I had to—come to you—I’m not making sense.” He hesitates again. “I told you, I’m no good at language. I—I have a picture in my mind of you understanding it all—”

  “All?”

  He bows his head.

  “My—history. Two people in a room. Bodies and histories.”

  Frederica has been thinking about his body, though not about his history, which she cannot imagine. She thinks of all the bodies that have just stumbled and strolled and hurried out of this room: Hugh Pink, white and gingery; Alexander, long and bending; Owen Griffiths, bustling; Tony, brisk, and Alan, elegant; Daniel, solid as a rock and jutting with energy; Rupert Parrott, pinkly gleaming; Edmund Wilkie, fin-de-siècle pale, with heavy dark-rimmed glasses; Desmond Bull, muscular and chemical-tinged; the repugnant Jude, grey and scaley. She likes John Ottokar’s shoulders. She likes his wide mouth. He is a shape she likes. His skin and hair have for her a kind of delineating glitter of interest and electricity, a field, almost, of force, an almost visible aura of movement in the air.

  She says, “I don’t know your history.”

  “No.”

  He stares at the ground. He does not tell her his history. He lifts his head and stares silently at her. Frederica stares back. The looks are like touching each other; they shock. She says, “I must clear up all this mess.” She does not move.

  “Later,” he says. “Not now.”

  He stands up. He crosses the carpet, which seems suddenly to be an immense desert space. He puts a hand on the nape of her neck. She thinks, Do I want this? and raises her face to his. He stares down at her and brings down his mouth like a gold bird striking. But gentle. At the moment of touch, gentle.

  Frederica thinks: Do I want this, do I want this? John Ottokar touches her face, her hair, her long haunches, her small breasts. He touches lightly, lightly, so that her skin begins to desire, half-irritated, half-compelled, to be touched more violently. She puts her own hands on his shoulders. He kisses her face, again, and his fingers question her clothes, a button, a zip, a strap, so that inside these the naked woman is defined and comes to life. And her mind does not cease: Do I want this, do I want this? She stares out of the basement window at the cone of light falling from the street lamp, frowning slightly, lips nevertheless parted with mindless pleasure, and thinks: Do I want this? She remembers her own young greed, and her need to know—about her body, about sex, about male bodies—her indiscriminate clutchings and searchings and muddles and laughter and disgust. She is afraid now, as she was not, then. Her body is used, not furiously ready. She remembers her childish attempts to attract Alexander’s attention and make him want her. She thinks of them as childish now, she thinks of herself as old, on the edge of being undesirable. She thinks that she wanted Alexander because he was remote, the teacher, her father’s friend, tabu. And now, she thinks, there is the same thrill: I am the teacher, I am wanted because I am separate and looked at, there is a boundary of the forbidden to cross. She thinks all this whilst she stands there on her carpet in the lamplight, and her clothes fall slowly around her as John Ottokar’s fingers find their fastenings and make her into a woman, a woman he wants, and has imagined, and has not seen, and now sees. I am thin, thinks Frederica. I have no breasts to speak of, despite Leo. John Ottokar reaches the warm triangle of her pants, slips a large hand inside them, and takes them gently down to her knees, and then, kneeling, below. Frederica puts a hand over the red-gold triangle of hair, and John Ottokar kisses the hand, and the hair, softly.

  He is still wearing all his clothes, including the PVC raincoat. When he moves to kiss her, kneeling before her, his outer casing crackles and whispers loudly, whilst his hair against her hand
is sleek and thick and soft and yellow. Frederica is still thinking: she makes an effort not to think of Leo and Nigel, who become immediately present in the room. Her nostrils remember the smell of Leo’s hair: the closest, the most powerful, the most loved smell of all. She kneels down next to John Ottokar and buries her face in his gold; its smell is good, and alien, and wholesome like bread. She begins to tremble. John Ottokar is shrugging off the PVC skin: inside is a flowered shirt, a shirt like a garden of green chrysanthemums and blue roses, a busy Paradise but well cut, a shirt to go inside a suit, a respectable-shaped shirt but burgeoning with brilliance. Frederica puts timid fingers to its mother-of-pearl buttons. Do I want this? Do I want this? Neither of them speaks. They are separate, and yet intent on connection. The struggle with his shoes is ungainly: Frederica looks modestly away. His trousers are quick, a snakeskin sloughed. His prick is grand and blond and sure of itself. Frederica laughs when it is revealed. They fall together, warm flesh on warm flesh. Do I want this? I want this. I think I want this. I.

  They roll laughing on the carpet, near Jude Mason’s still damp winestain: they clutch, they touch; it takes its way: it is good. No one speaks, but Frederica hears his voice in a drowse, a series of soft meaningless syllables, full of zs and ss, a rush of stuttering ts, a dreamy hum, and then a final strange whistling, like the sharp thin cry of a bird. She swallows her own cry; she will not let go so far; she keeps her pleasure, which is intense, partly secret.

  • • •

  In the morning, the two wake naked in Frederica’s narrow bed. When, finally, they get up, still almost without speaking, John begins to clear away Frederica’s party, still naked, padding in and out of the kitchen with dirty glasses and empty bottles. Frederica sees the bottles and ashtrays and Leo’s toys, a tank, a mechanical dinosaur, an articulated wooden snake.

  “I can’t stay here,” she says. “By myself. I can’t stay here.”

  “We could go somewhere else.”

  “I was thinking of going up to Yorkshire. To see my family.”

  “We could go to Yorkshire. I don’t know Yorkshire. I’m on holiday.”

  “We can’t both go to see my family.”