A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  The cartoon creatures who sauntered and bobbed across the screen during the discussion were mainly from kitchen scenes in Alice. The leg-of-mutton, crowned with his paper frill, dripping with basting-fat, bowing and grinning. An animated capering cruet, salt, pepper, mustard, on spindly legs. A serenely floating flounder on a transparent serving-dish. The master-stroke, visually, was the mixing of these creatures with a bevy of Victorian childish cherubs’ winged smiling curly bodiless heads, who occasionally melted into diminishing Cheshire Cats, and buzzed across the corners of the screen kitchen like swarms of flies.

  With the two savants Frederica had been Alice, the clever and questing girl. With the two women, Wilkie said, he wanted her to create a kind of elbows-on-the-table ka fee-klatsch, the kind of talk women did when not overlooked. And how could they do that, Frederica asked, when they were overlooked intimately by a male camera-crew and studio staff, and even more intimately by the unseen millions? It will be surprisingly easy, Wilkie assured her. I picked you because you aren’t frightened.

  In fact what ensued was a knowing parody, a send-up of a ka fee-klatsch.

  Frederica began with the question Sigmund Freud put to himself, and said he could not answer. What do women want?

  Love, said Julia Corbett. Love, certainty, a family.

  Sex and naughtiness too, said Penny Komuves.

  Only sex is a long thing said Frederica. Because it leads to childbirth and all that is one long biological process. Except that now—with the Pill—women can pick and choose amongst men, and pick and choose whether to breed, or not.

  They discussed whether this would change the way women saw men. Julia said women judged men on things that weren’t apparently sexual, like kindness, like listening, like keeping appointments on time. Like courtesy. Frederica said Darwin had said that male beauty was determined by female sexual selection. So it was odd to live in a world of women’s magazines, women’s advertisements, with women’s bodies decorated for men to look at. Penny said she thought it was mostly women who noticed other women’s clothes. Frederica said, there is Miss World, and the perfect pneumatic body in swim-suit and stilettos. There is pornography. Penny Komuves said that since the peacock and the mandrill had tail-feather and buttock designed to attract females, it was odd that we did not have male beauty parades.

  What would women look for? Julia asked, with mock timidity. Men wrap themselves up in customary suits of solemn black, and cut their hair and shave away their beards.

  Not any longer they don’t, said Penny. They grow it flowing, they wear flowery shirts, they dangle jewellery round their necks. The balance is shifting.

  They discussed the aspects of the male body on which a hypothetical female jury would mark. Y-front advertisements were briefly mentioned. Male buttocks were timorously, and then gleefully, debated. Frederica described an art student whose close-fitting jeans had strategic holes revealing soft, brilliant purple knickers. The three women laughed. Modern women were free to choose, they agreed. To pick and choose. Like their primitive ancestors. Unlike their grandmothers, or even, in most cases, their mothers.

  And where did it get them? Julia Corbett asked. The problem was still there. Women wanted children, women had to care for children, and in a way this only made all the sexual possibilities stressful.

  The Pill, said Penny Komuves, meant that men could insist on sex because an impediment, a danger, had gone.

  The body, said Frederica, wants to be pregnant. The woman often doesn’t. I think of the Queen in Snow-White, seeing the drops of blood on the snow. We fear their appearance, we often fear their absence, worse. We are at war with ourselves, perhaps. After the choice provided by the Pill, there could be the choice of abortion. To decide to separate sex and children, to move both into the area of choice. Could either of you choose abortion?

  No, said Julia. I might think I ought to be able to. But I couldn’t choose it. Or so I think, now.

  Penny Komuves looked briefly frozen, shook her head, and turned the question back to Frederica. Well, would you, she asked. Would you?

  Frederica saw Leo’s face in her mind’s-eye. I might, she said. I might like to feel I had the right. I might not.

  There was a shiver of silence. An angel passing, said Julia Corbett.

  The cartoon cherubs fluttered. The pig-baby peered out of its swaddling-bands.

  The screen showed a series of portraits of George Eliot, the chosen person of the programme. There was the heavy-awkward horse-face, the difficult teeth, the younger woman awkwardly bowing her gross head under the inappropriate ringlets. Tenniel’s ugly Duchess flashed across the screen. Frederica remarked tartly that she had known a man who had felt that an exam question could be set on this great writer, quoting a description of her as a “gaunt, moralistic Dame.” Discuss. Nevertheless, for most of their own discussion, and perhaps because they were on the screen, they circled round the subject of female beauty. Eliot punished her beautiful characters, Julia said. No, said Frederica, she punished those who exploited it, who lived by it. Hetty, cold Rosamund, chilly, terrified, power-crazed Gwendolen. Her warm-blooded heroines were beautiful too. Dorothea, Maggie. But they wanted something else out of life besides sex and marriage, and sex and marriage defeated them. She punished them, said Julia. She punished Dorothea for high-mindedness and Maggie for throbbing with emotion. She made Dorothea decline into marriage with a second-rate journalist, and punished Maggie for sex, with drowning. She couldn’t make a model of a woman who could be free, and creative, and sexy. She couldn’t give her readers any hope.

  “She was free and creative and sexy,” said Frederica. “She must have been the most public adulteress in England, and in the end Queen Victoria commissioned a series of paintings from her books and they tried to bury her in the Abbey.”

  “She had no children,” said Penny. “She knew about contraception, sponges and vinegar.”

  “She looked after G. H. Lewes’s sons,” said Frederica. “She earned their school-fees.”

  “Like a man,” said Julia. “She earned money. Like a man.”

  “She couldn’t let Dorothea found a university, or Maggie write a book,” said Frederica. “She was telling it how it was. How clever women’s lives were.”

  “The pretty women,” said Julia, “are made to want things. China and damask, a bottom drawer full of sheets and tablecloths, a casket full of pretty ear-rings, like Hetty’s. It’s like the advertising world now. Everything still heads towards a rite of passage in a froth of white veiling with an attentive crowd trying to see the face underneath, and imagine what the body under the white lace, or satin, or organza will be doing when it’s naked. And you have a great table of things—like we’ve got here—people have lovingly given you. And afterwards, you see the things were like the cheese in the mousetrap, and there you are in the kitchen, surrounded by them. Staring out of the window—women in novels are always staring out of windows, thinking how to get out, how to be free.”

  “And things,” said Frederica, “brings me to this week’s object, which is: A Tupperware Bowl. Actually, we have three examples for you, because we couldn’t choose which colour.”

  The screen showed three pudding-basins, side by side, one in a pearly rose-pink, one in a duck-egg aquamarine, one in a soft lemon yellow. They were photographed against a white background. They were softly translucent, yet thick-skinned. Their lines were clean, pure, machined, repeating. Their shadows were beautiful, dove-grey, and identical. They had the elegance of an abstract painting.

  Julia said they were lovely. She said they were clean-lined, they were light, they were useful. They were liberating. Look—she gestured—at all that mess on the table, all that fussy silver-cleaning, all that enslavement to objects. I remember hideous bakelite things in the war. These go with machines that do give us time, if we can use it. I put on my washing-machine—which has clean pure lines like this—and it washes, and I write. I agree, it would be useless if I wanted to be a forensic lawyer.
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  Penny Komuves said they were hideous. She said she liked traditional earthenware and brilliant Polish enamel. She said the earth would be piled up with these semi-indestructible shells, peeling and floating. That the Pacific Ocean was bobbing with plastic cups. That they were inhuman.

  Frederica said they were beautiful and empty. They reminded her of rooms with blinds. Of female archetypes. Containers. Grails. Empty until filled. The question was with what.

  Penny Komuves said they were sterile. And reminded her of Dutch caps. Or childhood buckets and spades. But these are not toys, said Penny Komuves.

  Little girls, said Julia, are expected to play with plastic cups and sand and water, and make cakes and tarts and puddings. Boys make bridges and buildings.

  Imaginary cakes, said Frederica, are so much more enticing than real ones. The ghosts of cakes. These are ghost-bowls.

  It was odd, she observed finally, thinking of kitchens and things, that female characters in Victorian fiction are wise, and attractive, and human as little girls, and become monsters, demons, or victims, when they become women. Jane Eyre and Maggie are diminished by womanhood. The Queen of Hearts shouts Off with her head, the Duchess cringes, and Alice, “loudly and decidedly,” says “Nonsense.” Carroll said he pictured the Queen of Hearts as “a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury.” The Cook and the Duchess are no better, and the Looking-Glass Queens are seriously defective. Perhaps we shouldn’t grow up.

  The three women stared at the three blank, bland containers. Do we want to live on our own? Frederica asked the others. More and more of us do. What sort of creatures would we be if we were independent, if marriage didn’t come into it, if men were optional? Julia said, we wouldn’t be like the great virginal heroines of the last century. Florence Nightingale, Emily Davies. We might live as Mary Wollstonecraft wanted us to, in separate establishments, lovingly visiting chosen males, in charge of our own space, our own time. Penny Komuves said that recent scientific research appeared to prove that ice applied to the ovaries could in certain conditions produce parthenogenesis. Then, she said, we wouldn’t need them at all, we could really choose. What would we choose?

  Frederica tapped the Tupperware and produced a hollow rattle. We’d need servants. If we had children. What would they choose. You can’t labour-save all labour.

  Penny said: if we were really free, men would be different.

  Like what? said Julia.

  Softer. Kinder. More fluid. I don’t know.

  The programme ended with the three, faintly baffled, faintly ribald faces, and a nervous gust of laughter.

  Frederica thought, seeing them later, that they were all girl-women. It was in the air, at the time. Penny Komuves had a small, square, slightly puppy-like face, with large dark eyes under a Quant schoolgirl fringe and bob. Julia Corbett, a generation older, had delicate crowsfeet at the corners of her luminous eyes, and a knot of fading red hair, skewered through with enamelled silver pins. She wore a large number of pretty silver rings and bracelets, and a necklace of silver and enamel hearts and flowers. But her dress was girlish—a pale flame-coloured shift, tied prettily under the breasts and cut above the knee. Her make-up was elaborate and faintly doll-like—spiky black lashes, domed cream and frosted blue eyelids, sugar-pink pale lips, and a dab of blusher on the elegant cheek-bones. Penny Komuves was in the wine-dark mode, with blackish lips, grape and silver eyelids, a white mask of a pugnacious face. She wore a skinny jumper under something resembling the gym-slip of Frederica’s school-days, pointed little breasts at the lower edge of a pinafore yoke. Frederica herself wore a semi-transparent indigo shirt with a severe white collar and cuffs—also imitation schoolgirl, also half provocative—and was experimenting with an Alice band (indigo) in the coppery hair she was growing out. Below the shirt, she had a governessy grey long skirt, in poplin, a wide black elastic belt, and little, heeled boots. There were equal elements of dressing-up, parody (of what?) and mask. The carefully made-up faces appeared to hide, not reveal, the thoughts behind them. The frequent laughter was a little eerie. Wilkie said he was pleased. He would get letters of complaint, he said. Frederica said she couldn’t see why. Indecency, said Wilkie. Drops of blood and iced ovaries, not nice. He was right, to Frederica’s surprise. The audience grew.

  Chapter 10

  What do women want?

  Frederica at seventeen would never have believed that she could want celibacy. Since John Ottokar’s departure for Calverley she had slept alone. Her most intense physical pleasure had been to take her tough, angular son in her angular arms, and smell his instantly recognisable hair and the living warmth of his skin. The discussion of sex on Through the Looking-Glass had caused her to wonder, in the abstract, why she didn’t think about it more, or thought about it—she was an honest woman—with a new edge of apprehension. The body wants to be pregnant, she had asserted, and so it did. She had caught her body looking at Wilkie, wondering if he would “do,” considering his incipient portliness critically and his intelligent face with affection. But Wilkie liked young girls. They waited for him, in mini-skirts with swinging hair, at the end of filming. They rode off behind him on his Lambretta, their arms clasped round his waist as hers had been on their one motor-bike journey, in 1953. It seemed like yesterday, and was fifteen years ago. She was led to remember the days of Astraea, and her forcedly chaste, remote desire for Alexander Wedderburn. This was reinforced by an invitation to hear Flora Robson play Elizabeth I at the National Portrait Gallery. The memory led her to invite Alexander and Daniel to come with her.

  On the day before the reading, John Ottokar telephoned from Calverley. He was coming down for the weekend, would she be there, he wanted her. The telephone was suddenly full of sex. Leo was away at his father’s. John is coming, said Frederica to Agatha. Because Agatha never confided in Frederica about her own personal life, or problems—beyond Saskia’s education, or her hopes of promotion, or her impatience with the Permanent Secretary—that is, because Agatha never spoke to Frederica about her sex life, or even said if she had one, Frederica had taken on an air of unnatural discretion with Agatha. John had once said, in a moment of bitterness “I suppose you discuss me—” and Frederica had said, no, as a matter of fact, we don’t. She had added, to reassure him, “Agatha doesn’t talk like that, you can imagine, if you think about it.” And John had laughed.

  So he came, and the small flat was full of heat, and tension, and pleasure, and tension, and concentration on usual, and unusual, suddenly reactivated bits of two rediscovered bodies, stroked, and dampened, and joined, and sucked apart, and Frederica had the usual feeling—this is the real thing—and the new, niggling feeling: “This is the usual feeling.” Now I feel this is the real thing. And outside all this, I am something else, someone else, I walk alone.

  “What are we going to do?” asked John Ottokar. “We can’t live apart like this, it tears you up.”

  And Frederica looked at the beloved head—certainly beloved—on the pillow—and did not know what to answer. For she remembered wanting a beloved head, in the abstract, in the way in which Julia Corbett had said they had all wanted the froth of veiling, the triumphal progress, the virginal white dress over hidden flesh.

  And she did not know what to answer, because she saw that she was happy to live apart, to have times of sex like this, naked, total, fierce times, and times completely without it. And John was unhappy, she thought with unjust malevolence, not because their two heads were not side by side all night every night, but because she evaded him, because he sensed there was more of her when he wasn’t there.

  They had a minor quarrel over Flora Robson and Elizabeth I. John said he was there for so little time, she didn’t need to go. Frederica said she wanted to go. John said, you just want to see those people, Alexander whatsit, Daniel. Frederica said, don’t be silly, I want to see Elizabeth. A Tudor tyrant, said John. You can see her any day.

  Don’t, said Frederica. Don’t make pointless jealous no
ises about nothing. Don’t try and shut me in one room. If we do that to each other, it’s the beginning of the end.

  Isn’t it anyway?

  No. You know there’s only you. You know there’s no one else.

  He came with her to the Gallery. He kissed her on parting, and made a beautiful, possessive sweep of his sure hand, down her spine and round her bottom, claiming her as he let her go. She felt briefly weak, and gave herself a little shake, and went in to see Elizabeth.

  “Creativity,” the third pilot, the last before Christmas, was Wilkie’s idea. Hodder Pinsky, the cognitive psychologist from La Jolla, already invited to Gerard Wijnnobel’s conference, was giving a paper in Oxford on “Order from Noise: the construction of meaning.” It would be a good plan, Wilkie said, to invite him with Elvet Gander, the psychoanalyst. “Is the unconscious mind a system of circuitry and binary gates?” said Wilkie, “or is it the Id, a turbulent beast raging in the dark?”

  Frederica said she was afraid of Elvet Gander. She said she had seen him in action, like an orator, at the trial of Babbletower. His voice throbs, said Frederica. He radiates self-satisfaction. She did not say he was trying to analyse the Ottokars, and that for this reason she herself was part of his mental life. Wilkie said both scientists were prima donnas, both had style, they were natural for Television. Fire and Ice, you’ll see, he told her. You will rise to the occasion.