Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “No you can’t.” “Yes, I can.” “No you can’t.” “Yes, I can.”

  “It was true and not true,” says Paul.

  Frederica has not seen them together since the bonfire night. Leo and Clement and Thano start singing. “Anything you can do, I can do better.” Frederica thinks: I thought the problem was, the two of them, fighting over me. She has the sexual self-confidence, over-confidence perhaps, of her curious historical position, brief and anomalous, a Cambridge woman when there were eleven men for every woman. They were princesses, those women, though ordinary enough, in fact. Now she sees that it is not that, not so much that, that is the problem. She is in competition with each brother for the attention of the other, and must lose. They sit at ease, smiling at each other, thrusting out their identical fists, paper, scissors, stone, with no winner, no loser, no difference.

  She thinks: They are like the two blades of a pair of scissors. She thinks: If we are two, we are two so, as stiff twin compasses are two. She thinks, with an internal mad laughter, “Those whom God hath joined together let no woman put asunder.” She has a brief memory of their joined bloody bodies, John’s and hers. She feels Desmond Bull’s hand, making a firm secret curl behind her buttocks, strong, steady. She does not push it away.

  They sing another song. Everyone joins in.

  “I’ll sing you one-oh.

  Green grow the rushes-oh.

  What is your one-oh?

  One is one and all alone

  And ever more shall be so.”

  Saskia and Agatha raise clear voices. Thano sings strongly. It is a good, friendly party. “I’ll sing you two-oh. Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-oh. One is one and all alone, and ever more shall be so. I’ll sing you three-oh. Green grow the rushes-oh. What are your three-oh? Three, three, the Rivals.”

  “You’re out of tune, Frederica.”

  “I expect I am, Paul. I always am. I told you, I’m not musical. I’m tone-deaf.”

  “We could teach you. You probably aren’t really tone-deaf. Almost no one really is incurably tone-deaf. You could learn.”

  “No, I couldn’t. I can’t. I’ll shut up, since my singing offends you. I’ll be the audience.”

  Desmond Bull’s fingers wrinkling the cloth on her buttocks. The two faces opposite, both with eyebrows quizzically and ruefully raised, the charming expression identical, the same.

  “Go on,” says Leo, crossly.

  “Three, three, the Rivals. Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-oh. One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.”

  Laminations

  Instructions for use. Your Pills are presented in separated bubble-strips, clearly marked with the days of the week. Press each pill out of its bubble and swallow it with water at the same time each day. It is important not to miss a day: if you do, you may not be fully protected. When you have taken three weeks’ supply of pills, you must take none for the next week, during which bleeding may occur. This bleeding may be scanty, though occasionally it may be copious, more than your usual menstrual bleedings. This bleeding is break-through bleeding, and cleanses the womb: it is not a “period,” and should cause you no discomfort. If heavy bleeding occurs and persists after several cycles of the Pill you should see your doctor, who may prescribe an alternative dosage.

  The herald brought the little glass slipper to the house of the three sisters, and there was great excitement there. The eldest stepsister claimed that the slipper was hers, and would fit her; the stepmother measured her foot against the delicate shell and declared that it would never go in. “It is a small price to pay for the hand of a Prince and half a kingdom,” said the stepmother then. “Be resolute, and I will take a slice from your heel with this knife, and the foot will slide in.” So they did as she suggested, and the eldest sister came before the herald and the young Prince and stretched out her fat leg proudly and turned her foot in the shining shoe. But the herald observed that gouts of dark blood were welling up inside it and brimming over, and he asked the sister to take off the shoe again, and she did so, and her wound was visible to all, and she was shamed and disgraced. Then the second sister, no whit discouraged by her sister’s failure, tried to force the pretty shoe over her knobby foot, but it would not go, no matter how she struggled and shoved. So her mother took the little axe with which they killed the hens, and quick as a flash chopped off her big toe, and bandaged it, and then they were able to force the foot in, and the second sister hobbled proudly into the presence of the Prince. But the brown bird in the tree that flowered on Cinderella’s mother’s grave called out, “There is blood in the shoe, there is blood in the shoe,” and when the herald came near he saw that the shoe was full of blood and the second sister was faint with pain. So she too was disgraced, and went away to weep and sulk. And the herald asked, “Are there no more young women in the house?” And the stepmother said, no, but the father said, “There is only Cinderella, in the ashes, in the kitchens.” So Cinderella was sent for, and she came, and stretched out her pretty little foot, all grimed as it was with ashes, in its cheap stocking, and the shoe fitted exactly, like a glove. And when the Prince saw that the shoe fitted exactly, he recognised his beautiful dancing partner in the little skivvy, and said, “What was lost is found, and this is the bride my heart is sworn to.” And they both rode away together, past the brown bird singing in the weeping tree.

  Quaere. Who cleaned the coagulated blood out of the shoe, twice over, before Cinderella inserted her virginal toes?

  Under a Tree I saw a Virgin sit

  The red and white rose quartered in her face.

  Just at the stroke when my veins start and spread

  Set on my neck an everlasting Head.

  “I take no such pleasure in life that I should much wish it, nor conceive such horror in death that I should greatly fear it; and yet I say not, but if the stroke were coming, perchance flesh and blood would be moved with it and seek to shun it.” (Elizabeth I)

  The Trial: Day 11

  “You had a conversation with Gran, did you not?”

  “No, she shouted down: ‘What is all the noise?’ I said: ‘It is just the dog barking’—not that the tape-recorder had dropped on my toes as was alleged I had said.”

  “But this was during the shouting?”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “It is very odd that she should ask the question after the noise had ceased.”

  “No; she was probably awakened from her sleep and had got out of bed to come to the bedroom door.”

  “You were quite determined that the old lady should not interfere?”

  “Yes, I shouted up so that she would not come down. If she had come down she might well have dropped dead with shock.”

  “There were spots of blood on your shoes?”

  “Yes. It was probably splashed on. Possibly because the shoes had been left in the living-room. I had been out in my high-heeled shoes.”

  “The trial is now in its eleventh day. Have we heard this suggestion before, that the shoes were in the room, and that you were not wearing them that night?”

  “No.”

  “Let me see the shoes, please. Is there any trace of blood inside those shoes, as far as you know?”

  “No.”

  “Your feet were inside the shoes and your feet were taking whatever blood fell upon that area?”

  “No.”

  “Are you now wearing the high-heeled shoes you were wearing that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I see one of them, please?” (Shoe handed to the Attorney-General). “Is that the shoe you were wearing to go on the moors?”

  “Yes, I went in the car. I always wear high-heels outside. We were not going to walk on the moors. We were just going to park.”

  The Story of Stone

  Peter Stone, a sculptor, a student at the Samuel Palmer School. A slight, bowed young man, with a pitted, ashy skin, loose lips, and a shock of colourless hair always full of stone
-dust. He was working, I was later told and shown, on a kind of minor marble menhir, white with pinkish veinings, which was in the Dip Show, or Degree Show. It was an erect cylindrical form, with a gently rounded top, which had been chipped and worked into a crazed, dimpled, sinewy surface, so that the marble glittered here and there, and did not have the smoothness one easily associates with marble. It was not very big; three feet perhaps. Having learned to look for subversion and opposition in new works of art, I decided that this was an act of defiance against the welded metal or moulded plastic and fibre-glass sculptures: Stone’s carving was the only carved work in the Show, that year.

  I invigilated the final examination he took: final in every sense. He must have been sitting in about the third row back: one of the big studios had been set out with temporary desks. He came in smiling broadly, and sat down staring around, and writing nothing. He was twitching and fidgeting. He began to write. His handwriting was very large and vacant. He kept coming up to the front for more paper. He asked to be excused, left the room briefly, came back and wrote a few more large words, asked for more paper, rushed out to be excused, dust falling from his hair, came back, wrote more words. Because they were all art students, no one paid much attention to this behaviour. Finally he reached a point where he was writing one large, childishly formed word per sheet, rushing back and forwards, writing another. A sheaf of paper rose in front of him. Finally he rushed out and did not return. “Stoned,” one of the other students said. We laughed, and finished our work. I gathered up his papers at the end of the exam. He had written only one sentence, over and over, in huge round letters, YOU CAN’T GET BLOOD OUT OF A STONE.

  Later we discovered that he had run down the Holborn up escalator, on to the Central Line platform, and had opened his arms and jumped into the path of an approaching train. He was killed, instantly they said, as they always do. Perhaps he thought he could fly. Perhaps he was in despair over his exams. No one knew. There must have been a great deal of blood. The train driver collapsed and has been unable to start work again. This story is almost too neat, as though the language had constructed it, not it the language, blood and stones, but it is a true story, a story of our times, uncanny only because of the too great, glittering precision of the language.

  Why a Tongue impressed with honey from every wind?

  Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?

  Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror, trembling and affright?

  Why a tender curb on the youthful burning boy?

  Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?

  The Virgin started from her seat, and with a shriek

  Fled back unhindered till she came into the vales of Har.

  But Shelob was not as dragons are, no softer spot had she save only her eyes. Knobbed and pitted with corruption was her age-old hide, but ever thickened from within with layer on layer of evil growth. The blade scored it with a dreadful gash, but those hideous folds could not be pierced by any strength of man, not though Elf or Dwarf should fuse the steel or the hand of Beren or of Túrin wield it. She yielded to the stroke, and then heaved up the great bag of her belly high above Sam’s head. Poison frothed and bubbled from the wound. Now splaying her legs she drove the huge bulk down on him again. Too soon. For Sam still stood upon his feet, and dropping his own sword, with both hands he held the elven-blade point upwards, fending off that ghastly roof; and so Shelob, with the driving force of her own cruel will, with strength greater than any warrior’s hand, thrust herself upon a bitter spike. Deep, deep it pricked, as Sam was crushed slowly to the ground.

  No such anguish had Shelob ever known, or dreamed of knowing, in all her long world of wickedness. Not the doughtiest soldier of old Gondor, nor the most savage Orc entrapped, had ever thus endured her, or set blade to her beloved flesh.

  Observer May 8th, 1966 (Maurice Richardson)

  “If those two were sane they’d have gone mad long ago.” I was rather impressed by this comment—by a local hall porter—on the psychology of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Behaviour so atrocious can only be described in terms of Irish or Hegelian logic, the logic of contradictions. How does one begin to explain it?

  It is all very well to say that we were all once polymorph—perverse infants, and that Mr. Everyman’s unconscious teems with sado-masochistic impulses. True, of course. But there is nothing impulsive about their dreadful calculated performances and the elaborate decoying that must have preceded them. I find it less difficult to empathise with Jack the Ripper than with these two. Odd how one always calls them Brady and Myra.

  The other peculiar feature here is the dual element. Folie à deux in which two people go mad together is not unknown. An hysteric who falls in love with a psychotic will share the psychotic’s delusions as long as they are together. Separate them, and the hysteric recovers, while the psychotic remains insane. And according to Freud hysterical women may share the perversions of their lovers.…

  In the dock: Brady is thin, bony, rather gangling. Lean face with straight nose jutting out under his rather flat forehead. His dark brown hair is neat and tidy, yet looks faintly dusty. His clothes—grey suit, pale blue shirt, ultramarine, mildly artistic tie—are dateless, not like those of David Smith, who goes in for the gear. One of the first things you notice about him is his bad colour: pale mud. He really does look terribly sick.

  Myra by contrast is blooming. Her hair, naturally brown, has been changing colour from week to week. First silver-lilac, then bright canary blonde. She is a big girl with a striking face: fine straight nose, thinnish curved lips, rather hefty chin, blue eyes. Full face she is almost a beauty. The Victorians would have admired her.

  She wears a black-and-white speckled coat and skirt and a pale blue shirt open at the neck: it matches Brady’s. I suspect she imitates everything he does, even to always keeping her handkerchief neatly folded. At a glance she looks as smartly turned out as a duchess, but when you look closer you see at once that this is mass-produced supermarket chic: there is an ambience of bubblegum and candyfloss.

  Both take copious notes and lean over the front of the dock to prod their solicitor, the eupeptic Mr. Fitzpatrick, with a pencil. Occasionally they offer each other a packet of mints. Once during David Smith’s evidence Myra flashes Brady a quick bright smile. When he goes into the witness box she gazes at him. When it is her turn, he draws faces on his scribbling pad.

  Tea—yes—with some of the hosts of detectives working on this case. We talked about modern youth, violence, censorship, permissiveness and all that. One of them, who is a bit of a sociologist and has a highly specialised knowledge of swinging Manchester, thought there was a dangerous current of perversion in the air. “Kinky” had become a household word. He’d seen a shop advertising: NEW LINE IN KINKY RAINCOATS. Why, he said, don’t they label them raincoats for sexual perverts and be done with it? He said it twice over. This may be an unduly puritan reaction: it is quite a common one. We shall encounter it more often as a result of this case.…

  I haven’t myself dreamed about the case at all, but occasionally in court towards the end of the afternoon I’ve caught myself lapsing into fantasies. These have taken the form of carrying out vengeance on the accused, which shows how careful you have to be. Once, I said to myself: If I were to put on Batman’s gear, swoop down on the dock, which I could easily do from my seat in the gallery, what would the News of the World pay for my life story?

  I lie awake at 2 a.m. because some race-going son of Belial—there are night clubs now even in Chester—has jammed the horn of his car. I try to find a suitable text in Sartre’s Saint Genet which a kind local friend has lent me: he thinks that Brady might conceivably turn into his opposite. I’m afraid he has a long way to go, and he lacks Genet’s talent. How about this?

  “Thus the evil doer is the Other. Evil—fleeting, artful, marginal evil—can be seen only out of the corner of one’s eye and in others … The Enemy is our twin brother, our image in the mirror … For peac
e-time Society has in its wisdom created what might be called professional evil doers.

  “These evil men are as necessary to good men as whores are to decent women. They are fixation abscesses. For a single sadist there is any number of appeased, clarified, relaxed consciousnesses. They are therefore very carefully recruited. They must be bad by birth and without hope of change.”

  H’m. I think I know what Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson would say to that. And I rather think I agree with him. We’ve had rather a surfeit of evil up here.

  The summer holidays return. Leo will go to stay at Bran House; it is as though there were a regular pattern of life, and Frederica half-hopes that Leo thinks there is, but it is no such thing, it is all provisional and full of violence and threats of violence. The lawyers’ letters fly. She cuts them up and pastes them into Laminations. She considers her own summer plans. Perhaps she will go back to Yorkshire.

  Whilst she is thinking this out, John Ottokar telephones. He is at work; she has never seen where he works or where he lives, which she believes is somewhere in Earls Court. She imagines his place of work as a large space full of huge, clean, quietly humming machines, with walls of glimmering blue-grey screens showing graphs, and the columns of the strange binary language they print out on interleaved concertinas of pristine paper. She imagines him surrounded by other decorous, suited people, some of them—she is not sure about this—in surgical white coats. She imagines cool, metal venetian blinds, and shining steel furniture. It is probably nothing like this, but this is what she imagines. He says, “Can you come out to dinner with me?”

  “I should think so. I can get a baby-sitter. Agatha’s working late, I know. I can ask a student.”

  “Chez Victor,” he says. “Eight o’clock.”

  Frederica likes Chez Victor. It is small, and dark, and simple and sophisticated, and truly French; the food is French French food and reminds her, amongst dark green paint and etched glass, of the heat of Provence, M. et Mme. Grimaud, wine and garlic. She wears a black linen shift, well above her knees, and a silk shawl, black, embroidered with creamy cabbagey roses and golden lilies, with a long, shimmering fringe. She has learned to line her eyes with a black, surprised stare, and to lengthen her lashes; nothing can make her angular quickness look doll-like, but this is as near as she will ever get. She has painted her wide mouth creamy-brown, a pale colour, which does not wholly suit her. John Ottokar is wearing his suit. Frederica loves to see him in his suit. She is afraid of having to live her life amongst the unkempt, the meagrely bearded, the sagging and woolly, the deliberately ill-defined. She likes edge. John Ottokar in his suit, with his long, blond, well-cut hair, has edge. He looks good in Chez Victor: a serious man eating a serious meal. They have pâté, soupe de poissons, skate in black butter, an entrecôte sauce béarnaise, pommes dauphinoises, an excellent salad, a perfect tarte au citron. They discuss the coming summer.