Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  Leo says, “No. I don’t like John Ottokar.”

  “Oh, Leo. Why? He taught you scissors, paper, stone—”

  “He makes horrible scary faces at me when no one’s looking.”

  “He doesn’t—”

  “Through the window. Bits of him go white. Sneery faces.”

  “Why should he do that?”

  “And I don’t like his smell. He has a bad smell.”

  “Leo!”

  “You asked me. You did ask me. If you want him at ve bonfire, you ask him. I expect the smell won’t be too bad out there, not with all the smoke and stuff.”

  “I won’t ask him, if you feel like that.”

  “I don’t feel like anything. I just told you. I just told you, he stinks.”

  Frederica wonders about discussing with Agatha the possibility that Leo is reacting to herself, John Ottokar, and the smell of sex, even though they have been so careful. Or maybe he simply said the worst thing he could think of—which has certainly been effective, if he did, for Frederica now never thinks of John Ottokar without wondering about the smell, real or fantasised, and of what?

  Bonfire Night arrives. Agatha and Frederica have been visited by Giles and Victoria Ampleforth, the owners of the pretty white-painted corner-house in Hamelin Square with its vandalised window-boxes, its renovated Georgian shutters, its polished brass knocker. Giles and Victoria want to join in the fun, want to contribute, do not want to be rejected by the other inhabitants of the square, for they know they represent gentrification, which the local Labour Party vociferously opposes, though its councillors, or some of them, and even some Labour MPs are “doing up” the pretty terraced houses in the sallow and sullen squares of south-east London. Giles is an architect, lean and apologetic; his dusty thatched head and horn-rimmed stare do in fact cover a resolute intention to restore, beautify, save all the houses in Hamelin Square. Victoria is the proprietor of a children’s boutique. Rags, Tags and Velvet Gowns, which sits oddly in the local row of shops between a ferocious Cockney greengrocer and a Pakistani chemist’s shop. She sells fancy dresses and sweaters, and a stock of fat and grinning stuffed lions and tigers and polar bears, home-made and full of bounce. Giles wants to be friends with the Agyepongs and the Utters, a huge matriarchal society of the unemployed, who live behind grimy brocade curtains in Number 17, apparently with no furniture and no carpets, though occasional chairs are hurled through windows, some of which now form part of the base of the bonfire. Victoria has made bowls full of hot cider with bobbing frothy apples in it, and trays of dark, burned, sticky toffee. She is afraid it will be rejected, does not want to bring it out. Agatha says, Nothing venture, nothing win, and, Everybody always likes toffee. But the middle-class households lurk behind their shutters until the festivities have started, which they do when Kieran Utter sets light to the petrol-soaked brown paper at the centre of the pyre, and a roar of flame leaps upwards. Rockets go up from various areas, and patches of red sizzling light, green fountains of sparks, silver geysers, hiss and flare and vanish into black velvet. Frederica and Leo bring out Leo’s box of Roman candles and Vesuvius fountains and peacocks. Leo and Saskia hold sparklers, and wave them solemnly. Someone screams; something hisses. The fire catches and begins to crack and gleam. People come out and stand and stare into it; children run squealing, hide behind cars; Victoria Ampleforth picks up courage and goes round the square with a tray of toffee which everyone accepts happily. She picks up more courage and brings out a stout folding table, behind which she sets up her stall with her hot cider and a collection of Polish enamelled mugs, scarlet and green and blue. The sky is full of puce rain, it is full of silver arrows falling, it is full of humming blue flies. The Guy—Clement and Thano’s Guy—has been built into the pyre in a rotting wicker chair, to which he is tied with string and old knitting wool. “Like a Druid sacrifice,” Agatha says; he lolls and smiles, the flames not yet near him. “It’s a good thing there’s no wind,” says Giles Ampleforth. “This thing is far too big for this square. We ought to have water buckets around.”

  “Mrs. Kennet has got her hose attached in her kitchen,” says Carole Utter. “As per usual.” She takes a swig from a beer bottle. “Two kids got their hair burned last year, and a car got its paint blasted.”

  “I don’t know whose that little Austin is,” says Victoria. “It’s always parked here, but it doesn’t belong to any of the residents.”

  Frederica brings out a basket of oven-roasted chestnuts, which are also acceptable to everyone. Leo says he wants a banger, and Frederica tells him he doesn’t.

  The sky is a gold meadow full of crimson serpents; it is a huge fan of silver fronds; it is indigo lit with orange and sepia and hot yellow and scarlet.

  They drink hot cider, plastic cups of red wine from a box with a spigot, bottles of ale, Tizer by mistake, Coke and rum, sweet sherry, advocaat. Clement and Thano have got strings of Chinese firecrackers; Brian Utter attaches one to the branch of a tree near the little Austin, where it bangs and splutters and crackles and twists, causing Leo to burst into tears, and a small bald-headed man with a moustache to cry out, “Mind my car!”

  The fire is now producing clouds of smoke. It is difficult to see across the square. People are linking arms and singing—“Oh my darling Clementine,” the only song the English can ever get very far with. Across the square, through the smoke, Frederica sees John Ottokar, in his many-coloured patchwork jumper; he is bending to set light to something; he straightens up, and waves at her through the grey billows. She makes her way round to him, with smarting eyes. Whatever he has lit does not rush into the air or explode into shimmers of light. It burns sullenly, a tallish thing, producing a blue flame like a cowl around it.

  “Skoob,” says John Ottokar. It is a new art-form. Book-burning. “Books” backwards. Frederica does not like it. The books are lurid paperbacks. The top one has a pair of breasts bursting out of black lace and a vanishing face above them. The next one down, however, is Tillich’s The Ground of Our Being and below that, Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God.

  “I don’t like book-burning,” says Frederica.

  “That’s why Skoob,” says John Ottokar. “No point burning things nobody cares about.”

  He raises a glass of ink-dark wine to the Guy.

  “Here’s to him. He had the right idea. Explode it all. From underneath. Then there’s a chance of living a real life. Up in flames. Theophany.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Oh no. You may be. Let’s dance.”

  He links arms with a swaying line of residents, and pushes his other arm through Frederica’s. She smells his armpits, acrid, sour, and another smell, thick incense, musky, sweet, sweet. She tries to pull away, and he pulls her tightly to him, his head back, his lovely face ruddy in the reflected flames.

  “Let’s dance.”

  Through the smoke, on the other side of the bonfire, she sees John Ottokar in his multi-coloured sweater.

  She has failed a test she was waiting for.

  • • •

  Little black boys, little white boys with sooty faces, rush like imps, widdershins, as John Ottokar comes round and links arms with Frederica on his left, and the population of Hamelin Square sway, amiably drunken, and sing. “We’ll take a cup of kindness yet/For the sake of Auld Lang Syne.”

  XVI

  Towards midday on the second day, the Lady Roseace and the young Narcisse paused in their headlong flight to allow their horses to breathe, and to give some relief to their own bodies. It was a late spring day, full of hope; they had come through the neck of the mountain pass, and were on a fair plain, where delicious little bosky groves mixed with springing cornfields and hay meadows. In every tree the birds sang as though their tiny throats would burst with the passage of the trills and whistles and gobblings and gurglings of their invariant musical phrases. Butterflies fluttered from flower to flower, or floated along the meadow borders. Crickets rubbed their dry legs monotonously against their thoraxes. The
travellers found a stone basin, into which a fountain ran between mossy stones, and a wild cherry tree, full of fruit, with which Narcisse filled his hat, whilst the Lady Roseace brought out the wine and water flasks, their stock of biscuits and sausages and dried cheese. They were out of the environs of La Tour Bruyarde. They were free, and expected their free food to taste delectable, and so it did. They were free, and so they looked at each other with a new curiosity, dusty and travel-stained as they necessarily were. In the old days, the young Narcisse’s face had been almost too extravagantly lovely, a gold-skinned shield-shape surrounded by luxuriant blue-black curls like clustering grapes. His huge dark eyes, too, had been like grapes, with those long, glistening lashes and perfectly curved wine-dark brows which many women would give much, in cash or kind, to have naturally, and which are almost always the prerogative of the male sex. His cheeks were lovely planes and his chin a perfect, gravely pretty triangle, above which, in the old days, his mouth had had a suspicion of a sulky swelling, a youthful push of a pout. But hard experience had ironed out the roundnesses and plumpnesses and soft dimple-pits of that boyish beauty and replaced it with a melancholy gentleness, a droop of the upper lip, a tension in the lower, that the Lady Roseace found more interesting and more attractive than his primitive self-conscious loveliness. His teeth, as he bit into his biscuit, were as white and even as they had ever been. His neck was strong now; there were muscles under the skin, like a young stag rather than the soft fawn or silken porcelet he had then resembled.

  As for the lady herself, she had worn less well, and kept her face in the shadow of her hood, and her back to the sun as she ate. Her flesh, too, had tightened and pulled, in the curious and wonderful and terrible days of La Tour Bruyarde, and she had visible tendons and moving muscles where no woman was expected to have them who had been properly nurtured in milk and silk; she had lines on the surface that were more indecent, that is to say, improper, than the exposure of pretty nipples or a round white belly would have been, for youth is and was a woman’s best ornament, and this should never be forgotten, particularly by women no longer young. And those pretty nipples, to tell the truth, those rosy buttons of bliss, were not now what they had been, but had slipped, so to speak, down the slopes of the blue-veined alabaster mounds of her breasts, which had themselves slipped, slipped, so that there were fissures and tiny ravines, declines and cuts and crackings in the heaving surface, which was now more like chamois leather (a pretty substance) than heaped snow, or ripe peaches, or whatever other delicate simile excites my reader. But under her travelling gown, her corset gave a youthful apple-shape to these hidden blown roses, and her waist was wonderfully trim, and her thighs, too lean perhaps for the taste of that time, promised for that reason a performative agility, a delectable grip and spring. So thought Narcisse, considering what he could see, and imagining amiably (and generously) what he could not.

  “We shall come to look back on these past days as a bad dream,” said the Lady Roseace, nibbling a sausage, toying with a cherry.

  “We must not forget them, ever,” said the young Narcisse. “For there is a lesson to be learned—about excess, about the metamorphosis of freedom into humiliation and slavery. We must go into the world and preach moderation in all things.”

  “As for me,” said the Lady Roseace, “I mean to become a Quietist, a Retired Person in a rosy cottage far from the rut and muck of human conflict. You may preach if you will, but I shall abstain, from everything, everything, including preaching.”

  “You are too lovely to abstain from everything,” said the young Narcisse, congratulating himself on abstaining from the treacherous phrase “still too lovely.”

  The Lady Roseace met his eye sadly and sweetly.

  “Truly everything,” she said with her lips, and who knows, with her will too, but the young Narcisse read a different message in the disposition of her limbs on the grassy bank where she sat. And he rose up, and went off into the wood, to relieve his bladder and prepare his instrument for singleness of purpose.

  And the Lady Roseace lay back peacefully in the grassy hammock and thought she heard laughter in the air. She thought she heard a kind of yelping laughter, and the babble of many excited voices, and a kind of interwoven music of song and cry and howl. And the clear note, liquid and clamant, of a horn. And she thought, lying there, It is the lord of these fields, out hunting for his pleasure. And she knew it was not. And she hoped, as the excited babble grew nearer, that it would pass by the grove where she was partly hidden. And she knew it would not.

  When Culvert rode into the clearing the Lady Roseace’s dress was covered with the bloody slaver of the hounds’ jowls, and her sleeve was torn and bloody where she had fought them off, and her dress too was torn, between her bubs, to her crotch. And she tried to hold it together, and he said, “I have seen you, more than enough, there is no need for modesty. Let it flap.”

  “Not modesty. Decency,” said the Lady Roseace.

  “You have no right to be decent, and no need, where you are going, which is where you have come from, where the idea of decency was long ago done away with.”

  And the Lady Roseace said, “My dear friend Culvert, whom once I loved as I love my own skin, to save whom I would once gladly have died and thought my life well given, why do you seek to prevent me from leaving La Tour Bruyarde? I am not going to your enemies, for your enemies are my enemies, and if they find me, they will do to me what they would do to you, for we were once one, as you well know. I am going merely because I feel myself old and tired, my sweet friend, and unable any longer to play my part in your grand design of free life within the walls of La Tour Bruyarde. My idealism is quenched, dear heart, but not my sympathy—I desire only to live alone in a country cottage and think of our great hopes, and our great days—and your great achievements in the world you have created. Others can play the part you projected for me, others with stronger hearts and stronger limbs and steadier visions. I am a spent force, Culvert, and not worthy to be in your company. But I remember how in the old days you said—when we planned our freedom in hiding from the Revolutionary Armies—you said that the true principle of our new society should be perfect liberty, to fulfil in harmony every least desire, of body or soul. And now, my dear lord, every least desire of my body and my soul is renunciation. I desire solitude, poverty, inertia, quotidian boredom, things we mocked and despised in our high days, but things which now I believe have a certain value for such as myself, wrung out like old cloths, cracked like dry posts. O Culvert, O magnanimous, subtle Culvert, liberty must include the freedom to leave the group, harmony of desires must include the desire to abstain from desiring? Let me go now, and the people will praise your wisdom and gentleness for generations.”

  “This is simply flattery,” said Culvert then, staring down from his shifting horse, which danced uneasily, and which he controlled completely with the iron resolve in his grim knees. “You should hear yourself, your weak, lying, flattering voice, saying what you do not believe, to save your skin, which is no longer worth saving, which disgusts me. You do not think me magnanimous or wise. You do not think what I have made in La Tour Bruyarde is just or beautiful. You have murmured against me and despised our work; you have sneered and doubted and made our path difficult from the very outset of our Project. We cannot afford to let you go loose and tell lies about us to the weak, unstable outside world. We cannot afford to let you weaken our resolve by opening chinks in our defence, to let you water the strong wine of our purpose with the spittle of fear and indecision and vacillation. Where one weak link parts, the whole chain springs loose and the other links rattle to the ground. No, you must return, foolish woman, and meet the punishment I have designed for you.

  “Where is that young fool, Narcisse?”

  “He is gone. We quarrelled and parted. He is far away.”

  So spoke the Lady Roseace, in her despair, to give the young man a chance.

  Now Narcisse in the deep thicket was frozen in mid-piss, his organ
in his hand, scarce daring to breathe or move, lest he discover himself. And when he heard her thus attempt to save him, he debated with himself whether he should sally out of the thicket to defend her (which was not very possible, with the hound pack and the huntsmen still gathering) or whether he should stay where he was and accept her gift of hiding. But he might have saved his moral niceties, for the hounds picked up his scent and followed him into the brush, where they leaped up at his unbuttoned garments and tore viciously at those parts over which he held his lovely hands, and at the hands too, so that both were mangled to shreds of dangling flesh. And then Culvert came and took him, and bound him upright in his saddle, all bleeding as he was now, and bound the Lady Roseace also, with her torn clothes, and so they rode back to La Tour Bruyarde.

  “We might try to save her,” said Turdus Cantor to Colonel Grim.

  “We must do what is possible,” said Colonel Grim, “which might barely include saving ourselves.”

  “She will be better out of this,” said Samson Origen. “Provided it is quick.”

  It was not quick …

  “And now,” said Culvert to his captive lady, “I shall show you the machine I have prepared for you. I shall explain its intricacies and its sinuosities and its delectable and devilish resorts and triggers, one by one.”

  And he clapped his hands, and a trolley was wheeled on to the stage, on which stood a small, shining, pointed tower or turret, a conical affair, perfectly plain on the surface. And from its base, like the elastic of a dunce’s cap, dangled a leather string, with stirrups.

  “Now,” said Culvert, “when the leather tongues at the base of this ingenious turret are pulled tight in their eyelets round your ankles and securely spiked on their steel prongs; when the tip of the turret has been inserted into that soft place it is designed for, then this smooth cone will open a myriad tiny mouths, from which will issue a myriad tiny tongues, that will lap and lick and titillate, but which are also made of fine steel and tempered blades, and will shave and slice and carve and work, bit by bit, inch by inch.” And Culvert explained to Roseace that this instrument was designed to enter her, and to expand inside her, and blossom at its summit and along its sides with an ingenious series, a veritable forest, of little brushes and soft, probing glove-fingers, which would give intense pleasure, and then of little penknives, and forks, and tweezers, and scissors, and revolving cheese-wires, and whisks, and pincers and probes, which would be triggered by motions, and fluids, and belches, and each other …