by A. S. Byatt
“Yes, but Leo. Who will get Leo?”
Daniel sits on the bed.
“They usually give the child to the mother.”
“But I look horrible in that document, feckless and frightful. And they’ve got everything, the pony, the Right School …”
“But you want him with you?”
“It isn’t a question of want or not want. We have to be together. He saw that. I thought I could leave him, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t have, not ever—”
She thinks of Daniel, a good man, as she is not a good woman, walking away from Will and Mary. She has always wondered how he could have done that, and has not asked, and will not ask. But she looks at him, red-eyed, stricken with guilt.
“Oh, Daniel.”
He holds her. She lies on his shoulder and weeps, with more and more abandon. He strokes her hair, his mouth set grimly. They hear Mary pass, singing, singing in tune and clearly, as no Potter ever has.
“Your daughter can sing in tune.”
“My dad could. He used to sing th’ Messiah, in the big choirs.”
“She sounds happy.”
“Human beings are tough.”
THE COUNCIL OF THE WISE (1)
Frederica finds herself, almost by accident, at a meeting in the offices of Bowers and Eden in Elderflower Court to discuss the organisation of the defence of Babbletower. Rupert Parrott’s solicitor is a cautious small man called Martin Fisher; another solicitor has been found to represent Jude, also a small man, called Duncan Raby. Martin Fisher is dapper and silvery; Duncan Raby is sleek and dark and can bend his fingers backwards, which he does, with little cracks, in moments of agitation. Godfrey Hefferson-Brough, QC, is to lead for Parrott’s defence; Samuel Oliphant, QC, has been retained to represent Jude. Hefferson-Brough is large and craggy, with tree-trunk bones and red-veined cheeks and sharp eyes under tangled eyebrows. Samuel Oliphant is one of those whippet-like lawyers who look as though they are on the scent of a fine point even in repose; he has colourless, apologetic hair, and fine bones which are transformed by a wig into blades and edges. These four and their clerks are present at this meeting—other lawyers will come and go from time to time during the succeeding months. When Frederica arrives at Bowers and Eden with a heap of annotated manuscripts from the slush heap, she finds Jude in the entrance lobby, surrounded by his miasma, asserting in his sawing voice that decisions are being made without him, behind his back, undercover. Parrott is protesting, pink-faced and tense, that Jude would not be here if things were being hidden from him. The sawing voice rises: “I overheard your secretary, Parrott, saying to someone, it would be easier without the author present, he can be very temperamental, very difficult—”
Frederica says, “Oh, shut up, Jude. You are having your cake and eating it. If ever you do overhear things like that it’s your civilised duty to ignore them, and anyway, you know in your terms it’s a compliment, you like to be thought temperamental and difficult. Everyone’s doing their best.”
“What do you know about it?” says Jude, still truculent, but milder.
“I know you,” says Frederica. “I know how much Rupert has done for you. I think you should shut up.”
“We are having a Council of the Wise,” says Parrott. “I think you should join us. I think your advice would be of help. This is just a little preliminary gathering—some experts, mostly Bowers and Eden authors—Professor Marie-France Smith has agreed to come along, and Roger Magog. They wrote well of the book, very well, they will advise us. And I’ve persuaded Phyllis Pratt to give us her thoughts, yes. You are a part of our deliberations, and you brought both Mrs. Pratt and Jude to our attention. You could come and help on the Eng. lit. front.”
They sit round a shiny oval mahogany table in an upper room Frederica had not even known about; it smells musty and unused, but with an overtone of past nuts, and old apples. Rupert Parrott sits at one end, flanked by pairs of lawyers. Frederica and Jude sit at the other. Also present are Canon Holly, representing the Church, Elvet Gander, representing mental health and the sciences of the soul, Marie-France Smith and Roger Magog, and a squat person with red ringlets and a red beard, both mildly matted, with merry blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses and an open-necked madras-checked shirt, who is introduced as Avram Snitkin, an ethnomethodologist. Jude lays his long grey hands on the mahogany and asks earnestly, “What is an ethnomethodologist?”
“That is hard to say,” Snitkin replies cheerfully, “since no two ethnomethodologists can agree on a definition of ethnomethodology. We have very beautiful conferences, discussing the meaning of the term ‘ethnomethodology.’ ”
“And you can’t give me a working definition?” says Jude. “A court will require a working definition.”
“We study what people actually think they are doing when they are in the process of doing whatever they do. As opposed to the things sociologists think that people think they do when they perform acts already classified and categorised by sociologists, in certain ways.”
“You are sociologists?”
“Many of us, most of us, spring from that discipline. The classic ethnomethodological study was the bugging of a jury room in order to observe, without any interference in the data by overt observers, what function jury members believe themselves to be performing in qua jurors—what jurors think jurors are. Do I make you any wiser?”
“Oh yes,” says Jude.
“And where did you ‘bug’ this jury room?” asks Samuel Oliphant, articulating the inverted commas.
“In California, don’t worry,” says Snitkin, smilingly.
“Dr. Snitkin has made a study of the uses that people—men—make of—of risky published material,” says Rupert Parrott. “That is why I invited him to this gathering. He believes that pornography performs a useful social function. That it, so to speak, siphons off—”
“An unfortunate metaphor,” says Jude. “Very I must point out that my book is not pornographic. It is in that context emetic. It will be better if we do not use the word ‘pornographic’ about it.”
“Let me call this meeting to order,” says Parrott. “The idea of this meeting is to exchange ideas between lawyers and persons who might be thought to be experts, in the new fields of ‘expertise’ in the literary and social value of works of art which are supposed to ‘tend to deprave and corrupt’ the general public. When Lady Chatterley was triumphantly acquitted, the defence produced an impressive file of the great and the good, poets, professors, bishops and one young girl, to say that the book was full of tenderness and sweetness and light and advocation of married fidelity. The prosecution relied on reading aloud ‘bouts’ of explicit sexual description, and rhetorically and famously asking ‘Is this a book you would allow your wife and daughters, or your servants, to read?’ It is my opinion, and the opinion of the legal advisers who are here today, that the prosecution of Babble-tower will be different from the prosecution of Lady Chatterley, because the book is different, but not only for that reason. There is scope for ‘experts’ who are not simply literary critics or respected public figures. I won’t go on, now, but will hand over the conduct of proceedings to those who will guide us.”
Frederica looks round the table. Marie-France Smith is a surprise; she is a tall, slender, blond, elegant woman, with a strikingly beautiful face, long hair tied back with a black velvet bow, and an expression of gentleness and wary tension combined. Phyllis Pratt, the novelist, is the shape of the cottage loaf she described in her novel, Daily Bread; she has little fat curls, dark and silver, on her ample head, smile-lines moving up into round cheeks from soft mouth and eye-corners; she wears a serviceable jersey trouser suit in bottle green with a flowered Liberty shirt under it, sprinkled with honeysuckle. Canon Holly’s ragged silver mane and his smoke-stained, lupine teeth she knows well. Magog is meaty and energetic and restless. Elvet Gander has a bald head and a precise, distinguished, long-nosed, carved-looking face, with a wide, controlled mouth and deep-set dark grey eyes above high, clean-cu
t cheekbones. His head is the head of a tall man, a grandee, though when he stands, his body is surprisingly short and slightly bowed, with long hanging arms and bowed legs. His skin has a grey cast—not an unhealthy putty-grey, like Jude’s, but a polished granite, stony.
The subsequent conversation is conducted by the two solicitors with occasional comments from the two silks. Preliminary discussions are held of lines of argument in defence of Babbletower. psychological, political, literary merit, usefulness as emetic, religious depth. One of the lawyers—Raby—says he feels clergymen can “backfire” as witnesses. It might be possible to agree with the other side not to call clergymen. Canon Holly says that would be a pity, since there is great and genuine theological suffering and profundity in the work. “Convince me,” says Samuel Oliphant, mildly, enticingly, dangerously. “There was a Bishop in the Chatterley case,” says Hefferson-Brough. “Got rather mangled. Said the book promulgated marriage. Got reprimanded by the Archbish, I hear. Cantuor. Not a good precedent, on balance.” Canon Holly says he knows a better Bishop, a radio Bishop with a large following, who might appear, who has thought much about the experience of pain and desolation. Raby says he is against bishops. Martin Fisher says, if they have a Bishop, we should have a Bishop. Jude says bishops are sods and buggers like everyone else. Phyllis Pratt tells Jude that the assembled company is trying to help him; her tone is that of the chairman of the Mothers’ Union (this is before chairwomen and before personified Chairs). Jude says, “I simply thought—” Phyllis Pratt says, “Don’t. Don’t simply think. You have a task to perform, part of which is not to make things difficult for your friends.” Jude says, “Who is my friend, when all men are against me?” “And folie de grandeur, dear,” says Phyllis Pratt, “and premature martyrdom, are both unhelpful.”
Hefferson-Brough says, “Naturally, your appearance will have to be regularised.”
“Regularised?”
“You will have to be tidied up. Short back and sides. Suit. Tie. A good wash. Sine qua non.”
“Oh no,” says Jude. “I am a poor bare forked thing, and such as I am, I am, and as such you must e’en take me, for a man and his clothes are one flesh and cannot be parted. I have as it were and to my own secret deities vowed that neither hair of my head nor nail of my feet and fingers shall I wilfully cut with scissors or injure with files and this state I propose to maintain come hell come high water.”
“Short back and sides,” says Hefferson-Brough.
“It might be best,” says Oliphant, “not to call you into the witness box at all. It might be the most advisable course.”
“It would be extremely foolish not to call me,” says Jude. “I will speak. I will appear and expound and defend my book.”
“I can tell you now,” says Hefferson-Brough, “that if you insist on going into the box looking like that, we may as well go home now. That is what I have to say.”
Duncan Raby changes the subject. He asks about witnesses to literary merit. It is agreed that Anthony Burgess shall be sounded out, since he wrote well of the book. Also Professor Frank Kermode, Professor Barbara Hardy, Professor Christopher Ricks, William Golding, Angus Wilson, Una Ellis-Fermor, and “that chap at Cambridge,” says Hefferson-Brough, “that chap everyone’s always talking about.” “Dr. Leavis,” says Frederica. “Him, yes.” “He wouldn’t appear for Lady Chatterley,” says Martin Fisher. “Although he’s a Lawrence man. I can’t see him liking Babbletower.”
“I was his student,” says Magog. “As a postgraduate. He is cranky and paranoid, though undoubtedly a genius. I think I myself will better represent his critical approach. He is not easy to deal with, and I don’t think he’d agree.”
“We are glad of your support,” says Martin Fisher.
“You represent the teaching profession also,” says Duncan Raby, bending back his fingers.
“I want to put the case that nothing should be suppressed, that censorship is ludicrous and unworkable.”
“Here you must argue for the merits of Babbletower, as an expert on its merits, literary or social,” says Raby.
Magog does not answer this remark. It occurs to Frederica that he has not actually read Babbletower: as a teacher, she is now experienced in the eye-movements, the judicious nod, of those who have not read something they claim to have read. Magog says there are writers on the Steer-forth Committee of Enquiry who might have the requisite gravitas. Alexander Wedderburn, for instance. He himself thinks there is little merit in Wedderburn’s writings but Wedderburn has a good presence and is taught at O Level and A Level, he will impress. Hefferson-Brough says he is exactly the sort of chap who will go down well with a jury.
Tea is served, by Rupert Parrott’s secretary, from a silver teapot into pretty little Crown Derby china teacups. A plate of biscuits is handed round: bourbons, custard creams, squashed flies. Avram Snitkin, sitting next to Frederica, murmurs, “Fascinating.”
“What is?”
“Your British rituals of decision-making. Tea and biscuits. I am thinking of writing a study of the compiling of lists. Who compiled the list of the people who are here to compile the list of the people who will be invited to give evidence for Babbletower? How far is this list a ritual list of people who must be asked but won’t appear? And so on.”
“I suppose an ethnomethodologist would be interested in what happens to a person who defines himself for the duration as an expert witness for the defence of a book, of this book?”
“Indeed. Including an ethnomethodologist.”
On the way out of the publishing house, Frederica finds herself between Jude and Elvet Gander. Jude is morose and unusually silent. Gander says to Frederica, “We have not officially met, I believe, but I know of you.”
“What do you know of me?” Frederica asks, truculent and rattled. Nothing has been heard of John Ottokar since the service of the counter-petition and prayer for relief. He has vanished from her life as though he had never been. A date has been set for the divorce hearing in November. She is afraid.
“Nothing but good,” says Gander, in reply to her question. “You were much in question at a difficult series of sessions in Four Pence this summer. I break no confidences if I say so, I think, and I assume that you too find your situation, shall we say, difficult? Forgive me if I speak out of turn.”
“Perhaps you do. I don’t know that I want to think or talk about—about them, about all that.”
“One of the two brothers took the same line. The other was voluble. I attempted to mediate—to make the silent speak, and the roarer be still. The results were unfortunate.”
Frederica is silent.
“Midnight arson,” says Gander. “Midnight arson, minor explosions, damage to property.”
“The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
“You mock. I do believe there is much truth in that. I would like to help you, but you are not ready to let me. You think I am a charlatan.”
“I don’t.” He waits. “Perhaps I do.”
“You don’t know.”
“I don’t know that I want to know.”
“You may suddenly, quite suddenly, decide that you need me. I am here, if you do. You interest me.”
“Don’t listen to the tempter,” says Jude. “He’ll blow your mind.”
This is an un-Jude-like phrase, in an un-Jude-like vocabulary. It sounds different. It evokes small mines, arson again, explosions.
Gander laughs. “Fair is foul and foul is fair. You do right to mistrust the chance-met. We shall meet again, in easier circumstances. As for you, Jude Mason, I would like to say, this process, this legal process, is going to be a severe test of your exiguous survival machinery. If you need help, I am here.”
“You will help the whole world,” says Jude. “Indiscriminately.”
“No, no. We meet those who need us. We gravitate to them. Karma brings us where they are. We three are walking along this road together for a reason. Or, if we were not, we now are. So I tell you what I see in
your face and your stars and your body language, in case that may be the reason. If not, no harm done, forget it.”
As the divorce hearing approaches, Frederica grows thinner and sharper. She is obsessed by the fear of losing Leo, a person who makes her life difficult at every turn, who appears sometimes to be eating her life and drinking her life-blood, a person who fits into no pattern of social behaviour or ordering of thought that she would ever have chosen for herself freely—and yet, the one creature to whose movements of body and emotions all her own nerves, all her own antennae, are fine-tuned, the person whose approach along a pavement, stamping angrily, running eagerly, lifts her heart, the person whose smile fills her with warmth like a solid and gleaming fire, the person whose sleeping face moves her to tears, to catch the imperceptible air of whose sleeping breath she will crouch, breathless herself, for timeless moments in the half-dark.
She thinks, perhaps, she might be able to talk to Agatha about this terror, but Agatha is preoccupied and evasive, is uncharacteristically short with her. Frederica takes note of her own friends, her particular old friends, Daniel and Alexander, going up Agatha’s stairs, rather than down to her own basement, and tells herself it is natural, Agatha is beautiful and clever, Alexander has always been easy prey for mysterious silence, Daniel needs to get out of himself. Agatha is “working late” a lot, too, which Frederica, asked to baby-sit, regards with sour suspicion. One evening she is baby-sitting when Agatha is still out and Alexander arrives. He comes down to talk to Frederica—“faute de mieux,” Frederica says, jokingly to him, and crossly to herself. Alexander accepts a cup of coffee and tells Frederica what he sees she needs to know and has not bothered to discover, that Agatha is strained to breaking by the practical and political difficulties of the drafting of the Steerforth Report.
Agatha does not discuss her work with Frederica. Frederica does, or did, discuss hers with Agatha—it interests both of them. Alexander leans back on Frederica’s sofa and talks about the committee.