A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  Luk stared down at the stained glass. The left-hand window showed a man with a sword in a dark valley between pointed peaks. Descending upon him from a dark sky was a leather-winged, sabre-toothed demon, horned, hoofed and clawed. On the right-hand side, under blue sky, a man in a helmet like a magnified snail-shell swam across a blue and purple river towards a golden castle-wall, through slits in which protruded, a little awkwardly, several long golden bronze trumpets. Over the door were four circular lights, arranged like a four-leafed clover, depicting the seasons. A new lamb, skipping in a green field. A striped bee, travelling from a sunflower to a hexagonal honeycomb across cobalt. A spiralling stook of corn on a deep gold ground. A holly-tree in snow, crimson-berried, emerald-leaved, with a fire lit beside it, the scarlet tongues of flame moving up in a spire.

  He heard from a distance, the sirens and horns of the approaching police and the ambulance. They came in, they gathered up the children and took them away to be washed, and stitched, and examined, inside and out. They took away the bloody rake from the nursery and the bloody trowel from the battery. They took away Gunner, on a stretcher, scarlet-swathed, and Lucy, dishevelled and tight-lipped. They went over the farmhouse, measuring, recording, bloodstains, breakages. Luk and Jacqueline and Marcus were interviewed, and their shock and efficacy equally became part of an orderly narrative.

  Luk thought, closing his vigil away in the dark of his mind, that this was the end now, of loose violence at least. But it was not. It was a halt, only. The real beginning, indeed, was still to come.

  The man who was called Josh Lamb was one of the few residents of Cedar Mount who read the local papers put out in the Association Room. He sat in a slippery tan arm-chair and read the Calverley Post’s account of the events at Dun Vale Hall. A violent attack on the family had taken place, the paper said. Both Mr. Nighby and the three children had received serious injuries. All were in hospital, as was Mrs. Nighby, who was suffering from severe shock. The police were investigating. They were waiting for the children to be well enough to help them with their investigation. They were not at present seeking to interview anyone else about the attack or attacks. There was a photograph of Dun Vale Hall, nestled peacefully in the moorland. There were no photographs of the Nighbys.

  The new woman sat on a chair, with her hands folded in her lap. She spoke to no one and looked at nothing. The staff belittled everyone with a kindly use of Christian names, and “dear.” The new woman was Lucy dear. Her face was roundish, her cheeks pink and weathered, her eyes a little sunk. Her hair straggled but Josh thought it probably normally did not. There was blood, clotting in its strands. There was blood running down those soft round cheeks and into her mouth corners. There was blood soaking her blue shirt over her breasts, and dripping into her composed lap. In the old days he had taken the intricate realism of its drip and flow for proof that it was real. Now he knew that it was not there, and that there was nothing he could do about the intricacy, the redundant detail, with which he saw it.

  He thought he should speak to Lucy dear, but his hands and his knees were trembling. Old pictures tried to surge up; he knew what they were, and knew that the veil of blood that clouded his retina was drawn across, mercifully, to close them out. But they unnerved him. He was not sure he could stand. He prayed for strength. The blood grew redder and swifter.

  The nurse came up to him.

  “A cup of tea, Josh? You look a bit off colour.”

  She was in a red mist.

  “That woman.”

  “She’s a bit shocked. She’s had a bad time.”

  “You’re right, I’m off colour. The colours are all bad, bloody colours.”

  He liked jokes that only he, their maker, could untwist. He liked sounding as though he was swearing, when he was being exact.

  The nurse laughed. “Cup of tea cures all ills.”

  “I hate tea.”

  “So you do. I should remember, shouldn’t I? Horlicks, then.”

  He loved Horlicks, sweet, white, malty. He had a sweet tooth. He thought of Ezekiel the prophet, eating the inexpressibly sweet rolls of the scriptures, like honey.

  He put the Largactil that came with it, into his sock. The right moment to speak to the woman would be opened to him. He need only be patient.

  From Elvet Gander to Kieran Quarrell

  My dear Elvet,

  I am growing suspicious about the extent to which I need yr permission to have feelings about my patients. Clinical detachment is a profoundly unnatural state of mind, and all sorts of evil can come of it. It was useful enough in my early days—and nights—in Casualty amongst all that battered flesh and wild and hopeless hangers-on. It was a survival tool. So it gets carried over into psychiatry. We offer our patients what appears to be human contact, human warmth—and we give them a calculated simulacrum of human contact, with no flesh, no blood, no love, no desire. It’s not only medical decorum, of course. It’s primitive egalitarian justice—all my patients have a right to all my attention, potentially, only I’m not equally interested in all of them. And honesty counts for something in squaring up to the world? It must?

  Anyway, this preamble is my excuse for telling you I’ve spent time recently poking about in the case history of the man I told you about, Josh Lamb. He’s had a bit of a relapse. Started seeing things and hearing voices again. Talked away furiously for 3 days to what sounded like a whole jury of inquisitors. I wish I didn’t have my job to do. I’m sure there’s some sort of sense, if one had time to listen, mixed up in all this stuff about light and dark, smudges and stains, aeons and twins, teeth and claws he goes on and on about. We had to put him in solitary. He wasn’t sleeping and neither was anyone else. You’d need to listen for days to sort out the sense, the scenario. A lot of it’s static, just babble. Well, I say that. How do I know?

  Anyway, he calmed down. I am commanded to be still, he said. So I took a bit of a risk, and invited him back into the therapy group. The group seems to do him good, steady him.

  We had a new member, a woman in her thirties, who’s with us since a violent bust-up with her husband (who’s in hospital). She’s a quiet—indeed, totally silent—sensible-looking sort of person. Stabbed her husband with a stainless-steel trowel. He was in the habit of beating her up, that’s known. She has three kids, all of whom were injured in the final set-to. One, the youngest, looked likely to lose an eye, it was bad. They’re in care, now. The husband claims his wife made an unprovoked attack on him and the children with a rake. He says she just went berserk. The problem for the police is that one of the two elder kids supports that story, and the other says, equally positively, that the father hit the mother with the rake, and she then grabbed it. Same with their injuries. One says dad did it, one says mum. Lucy doesn’t speak at all. Hasn’t opened her mouth since the incident. At all. She’s quite docile. She’s been charged with causing “actual bodily harm,” and placed in Cedar Mount until the trial. She agreed to come to the group—at least, she went where she was led. One of the other women—an irascible type—tried to provoke her into speaking. Accused her of not pulling her weight etc., etc.—just trying to look superior and make a nasty atmosphere. Lucy just sat. I wd say she didn’t know where she was. The irascible woman (her name’s Mira), appealed to Lamb—as they do—saying, didn’t he agree, it wd only work if they all made some effort to speak. He said—as near as I can remember—I daren’t write down what they say, at the time, in case I get taken for the Leader or the Recording Angel of the group—he said

  “You can be in another world where there’s too much space and too much meaning to speak. You hear wicked winds blast, you smell snow, you see blood, ordinary speech is like scales of dead skin falling from your scalp at your feet. She can only hear your complaining like dead leaves rustling. What you say may have force here, but not where she is. You should listen to her silence.”

  And Mira said, I’m sorry, which was a first time.

  And Lucy looked at him with tears in her eyes, and open
ed her mouth, and licked her lips, but no sound came out.

  And he said to Lucy

  “What you need to know, is that the good and the evil in the world are equal. You need to know that evil is not subordinate. It is a power, it can overcome. You need to know that you are not evil in yourself, but you are a battlefield, where it can fight and overcome.”

  Or some such thing. It looks a bit flat, written down, what he said. But the atmosphere was electric. Lucy’s tears ran. My own eyes prickled (I record this clinically). The word for the effect he has on the group is “charisma.” I’m beginning to think I’d like to write a paper on charisma. You have it, of course.

  I don’t, I think. I know.

  Anyway, Elvet, I have as I said been doing some research into his history. And found nuggets of sheer gold. He let fall once that he’d been treated by Sam Krabbe, at Newcastle. So I got hold of old Krabbe’s case-histories—with lots of trouble, I’ll spare you the details. And I finally located him, because of old Krabbe’s meticulous cross-referencing.

  He was born, not Josh Lamb, but Joshua Ramsden. Born in Darlington, 1928. His father was an elementary school teacher and a Methodist lay preacher. Joseph Ramsden. Joseph Ramsden was hanged in Durham gaol in 1939 (May) for the murder of his wife, Nellie, and his daughter, Ruth, aged six. Krabbe’s notes say he claimed to have seen an angel, who told him to smother his family, that they might not see the coming holocaust. He appears (Krabbe’s notes are exiguous) to have compared himself to Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and to Jephthah, sacrificing his daughter. He refused to plead insanity. These are the bare bones—Krabbe gives no more details, though I guess I might find more, if I went through the archives of the local papers. Krabbe gives no indication, in the notes I have, of what Joseph Ramsden was like, or what, if anything, Joshua said about him.

  During the war, Krabbe says Joshua says, he was “evacuated” to live with an “auntie,” called Agnes Lamb. (Is anyone? Is it not overdetermined?) National Service as an airman, invalided out with some illness that left him hospitalised for about two years—records not clear. He started a theology degree in Durham in the 1950s, again giving up because he was ill. Krabbe says he thinks he still feels called to the priesthood. He reads, as I think I told you, St. Augustine and Kierkegaard. He says he has always been a “wanderer” (tramp) and chooses to live in poverty. I don’t know whether or not to tell him I’ve found out all these things he has resolutely refused to tell me.

  The thing is, Elvet, the thing is, imagine that man’s life. You can’t. One day there is a family. (Maybe a perfectly ordinary-seeming one, maybe not, we don’t know.) The next, there isn’t. Mother and sister horribly dead. Dad in prison. Young Joshua possibly intended to be dead—or possibly not. Krabbe doesn’t say how he escaped, or indeed how much he knew, or didn’t, of what had happened. Then, after the long-drawn-out process of justice, Dad is dead too, even more horribly dead. I don’t know what he knew of that, what he was told, what he guessed. In my experience you can’t keep that sort of thing wholly secret, it seeps through. What did he think? Who did he think he was? How—you have to ask, in our profession—did he survive, even as disturbed and strange as he is?

  I have to say, he is one of the kindest and gentlest men I have ever met. He has—in the midst of his whirlwind, a comprehensible explicable whirlwind—what seems to be a real wisdom. I do not know how to proceed, but if ever there was a man I wished to help, to cure, to enable, it is him. Which brings me back to where I began. We don’t treat all our patients as equal. This one is slightly phosphorescent.

  All this explains, of course, his interest in the fate of Lucy Nighby and her domestic mayhem. Her arrival coincided with his return to exhibiting deluded and hallucinated behaviour. It would, wouldn’t it? If he knew her story (which was in the papers) and it seeped into his mind.

  Maybe—just maybe—both he and she could benefit from yr Quakerish therapeutic community. How is it all going?

  Chapter 6

  A rash of stickers and posters appeared on the surfaces of the campus. They varied in size and design, in colour and style. There were small, square, white printed ones, usually verbose.

  An intellectual minority remains totally inefficacious if it submits to, or even becomes complacent in, the ghetto prepared for it.

  Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. V. I. Lenin.

  Mao-Tse-Tung-thought, like all true theory, claims to be true before it has been realised, and to be realisable, because it is true.

  These, and others like them, were characterised in very small print as “A preliminary pre-publication of the Anti-University of the Moors.” They were arranged in well-glued patterns on doors, pillars, blackboards, notice-boards, like hop-scotch grids, crosses of Lorraine or schemata for tic-tac-toe. There were also long plastic streamers, in dayglo pink, lime green, banana yellow, attached to window-frames, the branches of trees, goal-posts, rubbish-bins.

  Be intolerant of repressive tolerance.

  Syllabus is oppression. Get out from under the juggernaut.

  Students are the new proletariat.

  Teaching is exploitation.

  Do not submit to e-ducation. You need not be led by the nose. Sit still, stare around, expand your mind.

  Then there were the art-works, painted on sheets and draped over lecterns, painted with gaudy flowers, naked humans, exploding volcanos.

  Pop pills. Stop all ills.

  All you need is your navel.

  Freedom lies in the right use of the arsehole.

  Try not to think.

  Art is orgasm.

  Knowledge is an illusion people have.

  Come into gone. I do assure you. The dreadful has already happened.

  Heaps of leaflets blew between the towers.

  The Anti-University is coming. Anti-knowledge, anti-ignorance, anti-teaching, anti-students, anti-knickers, anti-Christ, anti-Buddha, anti-spinach, anti-bourgeois, anti-art, anti-anti-art, anti-transport, anti-plastics, anti-meat, anti-psychiatry, anti-Wijnnobel, anti-phlogistin, anti-tealeaves, anti-capitalism, anti-hamburgers, anti-fizzy-beer, anti-overweight-currencies-in-your-pocket, anti-white-or-any-other heat of technology, anti-being-anti. (Naturally.)

  Wijnnobel and Hodgkiss met to discuss these manifestations. There was a touch of frost in the autumn air, and the lawn outside the Vice-Chancellor’s window was crisped with it. He poured coffee from a Bauhaus silver pot for Hodgkiss, to whom he was attached, because they were both reasonable, reticent men. He liked the shape of the movement of the streamlined pot, and the curve of coffee, in front of his uncompromising Mondrian. These were the minimal refinements of a complicated civilisation.

  “Where do you think all this is coming from, Vincent?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard of this Anti-University having any physical location. I don’t know who runs it, or will run it.”

  “You don’t have an intelligence service.”

  “I don’t. I don’t believe it’s coming from the Student Union. We have a meeting with Nick Tewfell later this morning. He hasn’t mentioned it.”

  “Curious how put out I find myself to be singled out, by name, for attack.”

  “Not precisely singled. You are lined up with Christ and Buddha.”

  “And spinach. There’s probably no harm in it.”

  The North Yorkshire University had been relatively untouched by the first wave of student revolt. Wijnnobel and Hodgkiss had taken the unusual view that there was much to be said for the student demands for representation on governing bodies, and had accordingly invited Nick Tewfell, the Union President, and one other student-elected member, on to the Governing Body. They did not always make an appearance at meetings.

  Hodgkiss said “If it’s coming from outside, of course, it could escalate into something else.”

  “I think we should do nothing to provoke that. I would even suggest leaving the
stickers in place. Then they will have to stick over their own messages. No laws are being broken. Universities should defend liberties.”

  “Pop pills?”

  “It doesn’t say which pills, does it?”

  “It doesn’t mean iron jelloids.”

  “Some of it,” said Wijnnobel peacefully, pouring more coffee, “is quite funny.”

  He turned to the subject of the Body-Mind Conference now scheduled for midsummer 1969, at the end of the academic year which was just beginning.