A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  When Luk was at his far end of the table, he looked like the old, familiar, too familiar Luk. As he came dancing towards her, with his offerings, his bearded face passed from pool of light to pool of light, from candle-light to island of lamp-light. When these fiery lights were under his face he looked unfamiliar. He looked demonic.

  Recent research, she remembered, had shown that children raised together on the Kibbutzim to be good husbands and wives for each other had seemed somehow to share the primitive incest tabu, although they were quite unrelated. They had turned outwards for husbands and wives. She thought about arranged marriages. The quite different fears, and hopes, and excitements there must be when the chosen mate was the Unknown.

  She was trying to arrange her own marriage, on rational grounds. These thoughts too, she could not communicate to Luk.

  Bed-time came. Luk said

  “Shall we go upstairs?”

  Jacqueline nodded.

  “This is just a weekend,” said Luk. “I don’t expect it—necessarily—to lead to anything. I hope, of course. But I want to take it step by step.”

  Jacqueline nodded.

  Luk held out his hand, and led her from the chair to the staircase. Beside him a ghostly grebe whirled on water, wreathing its neck. Rose and plum and azure baboon genitals flashed across his inner eye.

  She stopped on the corner of the stairs and saw the peacock feathers and the honesty, gleaming under the Kelly lamp.

  She said, before she could stop herself

  “I was always told it was unlucky to have peacock feathers in the house.”

  Luk’s voice was light. “Something maybe to do with the evil eye? Superstitious nonsense.”

  “Of course.”

  The little bedroom was cold. There were stars and scudding clouds across the little window. The paisley quilt, the flaming sheets, looked warm. They shivered as they undressed, without ceremony, and dived into them. He had imagined her nakedness in detail as they worked together, but scarcely saw it as she hurried it under the blankets. He could feel it however. He ran his hands all over it, collarbone and spine, breasts and navel, flanks and buttocks, and the unseen bush of dark hair. Timidly, trembling, she touched him in return. This was what he had waited for. He was careful. He was very careful. He could not speak for emotion, but he kissed the vein in her neck, he buried his rough beard in her soft hair. He was visited by an unsolicited and unwelcome memory—in ludicrously complete detail—of Szymanski’s careful experiments, in 1913, on the long and complicated system of mutual stimulation in the giant Roman snail, Helix pomatia, which cumulated—since the creatures were of course, hermaphrodite—in the mutual release of the horny love-shaft, subsequently absorbed, for the calcium it contained, by the now inseminated pair. He touched the inner lip of Jacqueline’s cunt and saw in his mind’s eye the rearing, twisting mantle and the wavering horns of the creatures. It was like being a mediaeval monk tormented by diabolically induced visions. He might have told the old companionable Jacqueline the joke, and exorcised the demons with laughter. But this new, uncertainly responsive, reticent woman was another person, another problem.

  As for Jacqueline, she heard in her mind’s ear “good girl” and her body bucked with retrospective irritation. Luk put his arms round her, held her tight, began to pump with his own rhythm, asking, in a whisper, “Is it all right,” which effectively disturbed her own weak response, before matters were out of his control altogether. Jacqueline squirmed, and twisted her body against his, both desiring and rejecting her own climax, and achieved a small shiver, like a single minor sneeze. Luk gathered her to him, and stroked her along the length of her body, over and over. In his mind, mercifully released from snail-slime and love-darts, he saw his own fingers, repairing the hook and eyes of the bedraggled peacock feathers. And then the blade of the carving-knife on the steel, smoothing the molecules all one way. “My love?” he tried saying, and his love buried her hot, unhappy face in his shoulder, and kissed it, and he felt hot tears.

  So much had hung on that inconclusive embrace. Luk knew that rhythms needed to be learned, and he was not sure Jacqueline was going to give either of them any more time to learn them in. They should have been unable to keep their hands off each other, and were sitting politely apart, at breakfast, in the car. He thought of saying “Next weekend?” and thought of not saying it. When he did say it, Jacqueline said “I need time to think,” and this cool sentence sounded like doom.

  Jacqueline felt desperate. She was behaving badly. She was trashing generous gifts, she was capriciously stirring mud in the river of Luk’s life. She was trying to make sensible decisions about her own life—it was the whole of her own life she was disposing of—and appeared to be unable to make them either rationally or impulsively.

  Over the next few weeks, her work slowed. Bowman noticed it. He came and stood behind her at her bench, touched her shoulder, and then her breast, briefly, and said

  “Everything OK? You look a bit pale.”

  “I’m a winter depressive. I don’t like dark.”

  “You’re heavy-eyed. Take a few days off.”

  “How can I? The experiments need watching.”

  She had missed a period. The time came when she could say she had missed two, except that it was always the same one she had missed. She went more and more frequently in and out of the lavatory, looking for signs, a streak, a drop, of brown, or red, on knicker or paper. Everything remained pristine white. She had been here before, and knew that obsessive expectation delayed the desired flow. She went on long walks, and then rushed again into the lavatory, feeling, she hoped, the hoped-for bar of pain across the base of her belly, the twinge. Nothing. And the next day, nothing. Like a watchman on a high tower, looking for relief across a plain of snow, and seeing no movement, no change, day after day.

  During this time, she dined occasionally with Luk, and talked brightly, alternating “I” and “we” in her descriptions of her future. He took away an image of wilful irresolution.

  She went, in the end, to the university health service. A woman doctor inserted fingers, and cupped her cervix.

  “Oh yes, I think so,” she said. “I think so. I hope you’re happy about this. We’ll do a test, just to be sure.”

  Jacqueline went back to the Evolution Tower and took out a heap of books on embryology. She stared at images of dividing cells, of curved seahorse-like chains of cells with huge bland eyes, of limb-buds and vanishing tails, and transparent frog-fingers and ghost-mouths forming busily out of formlessness, as the messages sped from cell to cell, and the division and building increased and increased. She felt a kind of pain—an imaginary pain—where the knot of new cells was, the invader, clinging to the very inside of her solitary self, using her blood, her food, her DNA. A creature. Not a missed period. A new creature.

  She knew that that made everything easier. She had kept her hopes and fears to herself, but the knowledge needed to be shared. She put on her jacket—it was about eight in the evening—and went round to find Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. She did not want to think—let alone to feel—too much. She must now do what had to be done.

  It was a long time since she had simply turned up in his Long Royston rooms. She had hurried across dark lawns and courtyards, and his little room was bright and lively. He was sitting at his desk, correcting papers. She came in, and stood with her back against the door she had just closed, somehow still clothed with the wintry evening. She held the collar of her jacket to her chin.

  “I appear to be pregnant,” said Jacqueline, baldly, to Luk.

  He stood up. She looked both wild and shrunk. He did not touch her.

  “I’m very pleased. If you are,” he said.

  “It’s a shock.”

  Luk’s imagination danced. He saw a small boy with brown hair, a red-headed girl, their two faces mixed to make a new face. He said

  “Pleased is a daft word, a ludicrous word, as long as you—”

  She stood there.

  “
Jacqueline, you do want—?”

  “I think so. I—I wouldn’t do anything else. It’s a shock.”

  “What I want—what I want—is that we should get married, as soon as we can, and I will look after you—and—the child—and your work, because I know how good you are going to be, you are the real thing, a scientist—”

  She began to cry, her shoulders sagging slightly, whether from relief or despair he could not tell.

  “Will you? If you say you will—”

  “Oh yes. I think this decides everything. I will. I do want to marry you. I do want—”

  He said “I feel like turning cartwheels, I feel like flinging open the window and screaming into the night—she will, she will, and there will be a child—I can’t tell you how wonderful such a child will be, is—”

  He said “Look, you’d better sit down on the bed, and have a sip of brandy. Oh, Jacqueline, I do want you to be happy.”

  “And I do want you to be.”

  “I know. And we can both make—him or her—happy—”

  No image of skin or hair or smile crossed Jacqueline’s mind. Busy cells. Jelly fingers. Bulging eye-sockets.

  Jacqueline said to Marcus, sitting next to him at the Non-Maths Group, “I think I am going to marry Luk.”

  Vincent Hodgkiss, sitting behind them, his nose in a book, looked up with interest.

  “Wonderful,” said Marcus. “It’s what everyone always hoped would happen.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, you know, people talked ...”

  “They talked?”

  “People do talk,” Marcus said vaguely. Hodgkiss thought, no one can be as innocent as Marcus Potter looks. She wanted badly to know what he thinks. And he chooses a nice common noun, very vague, “people,” “everyone.” And stares over her shoulder. He watched Jacqueline give herself a little shake, like a dog in the rain. He watched her, at the end of the session, which was on computer programming, walk away with Luk himself. Luk’s arm was over her shoulder. A first. Hodgkiss said to Marcus “Do you know anything about Alan Turing’s ideas about what mathematical logic was?”

  “I know about his early machines. Why?”

  “I’m writing on Wittgenstein’s lectures on mathematical logic in 1939. Turing attended a large number. They developed into arguments between the two. So much that Wittgenstein once refused to teach at all because Turing wasn’t there. Odd. Two opposed kinds of genius.”

  “What was Wittgenstein saying?”

  “I’ll tell you. Coffee?”

  Luk and Jacqueline began to discuss arrangements. They sat in Luk’s tiny cheerful room, and discussed whether to buy a house, or rent a university apartment, when to marry, when to tell Jacqueline’s family. Luk described his parents. His father was a Lutheran pastor, with whom he had quarrelled because of his own lack of religious beliefs.

  “He would want me to be married in church.”

  “I have always gone to church. Then I stopped.”

  “You don’t want a church wedding? I don’t think I could bring myself to go through one of those. Even if I told myself over and over that meaningless words hurt no one.”

  “I always thought I wanted—I ought to want—I did want—a proper wedding-day. But it’d be a bit ludicrous anyway, given—”

  She touched her belly.

  “So, no church wedding. Do we ask anyone, or no one, have a party, or be very private, present them all with a fait accompli?”

  “My mother would mind that horribly.”

  “I should meet her, perhaps—” said Luk.

  Marriage involved strings of unknown, unrelated persons, who were nevertheless related to the splitting and multiplying cells, to him, or to her.

  Jacqueline said

  “Could we watch the television? There’s this new programme with Marcus’s sister, Frederica Potter. The last one was really good. They mix cartoon creatures with real ideas. They talked about mirrors ...”

  It was in this way that Frederica’s uneasy ribaldry about Free Women, the mock kitchen, the gynaecological batterie de cuisine, the hen-party, the ka fee-klatsch, the brightly intimate discussion of the Pill, of abortion, of males, of the monthly wait for the drops of blood on white cloth invaded Luk and Jacqueline’s life. Jacqueline laughed sardonically, from time to time. Luk felt her relax, as she had not been relaxed during their discussion of their wedding. She laughed a great deal—too much—at Julia Corbett’s dismissal of the floating veiling. A kind of ancient prudery—a heritage from his rejected father—came over Luk. He looked at Jacqueline’s smiles and was overcome with an irrational hatred for that bouncing and insensitive person, Frederica Potter. Her face filled the screen, her painted eyes, her falsely innocent hair-band, her knowing, conniving grin. He stood up, instinctively, to turn her off. To repel the invader.

  “Don’t,” said Jacqueline. “It’s witty. It hasn’t been done before. Don’t you like it?”

  “No. I think it’s nasty and cheap and vulgar.”

  “That’s because you’re a man watching women talking the way women talk.”

  The three women were solemnly passing the Tupperware bowls from hand to hand.

  “It’s hysterical,” said Jacqueline. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Self-satisfied bitch,” said Luk.

  “What?”

  “I don’t like her. I don’t know why.”

  “Lots of people don’t,” said Jacqueline. “I should think by now hundreds of thousands of people don’t. She puts people’s hackles up. They like to dislike her. She’ll be a success.”

  “What a fate,” said Luk, missing the right note of mock-scorn.

  Jacqueline did not tell Bowman she was thinking of getting married. He came to her with a job advertisement for a post in Edinburgh, and asked if she would be interested in applying. She bent her head over her bench, and thanked him, and said she would think about it.

  “The voltage clamp works?”

  “It does now. I had to tinker and fiddle. It does now.”

  “You’re tenacious.”

  “I told you.”

  “Keep at it, girl. Keep at it.”

  There had been some trouble with the pregnancy test. One had been inconclusive, and a second specimen had been collected, and sent away. The second test result came to the University Health Service, who sent it through to Jacqueline in an inter-departmental envelope that she managed to rescue from the Departmental Secretary.

  It was positive. She was quite certainly pregnant.

  She felt an immediate urge to go to the lavatory. Her pelvis hurt, her bladder hurt, her body was in turmoil.

  Her knickers had a very faint, ruddy brown streak.

  And then the blood came. A small, manageable, series of gouts, and—she looked to see—a kind of jelly bundle, with threads, which could have been a plug, or womb-lining. She could not see any sign of the hooked creature which had held on briefly, and let go. Another gout, another. She sat in the lavatory, and wept. She sat for a long time, and wept a great deal. Blood and tears poured out of her. She was appalled by her body, which shook, and trembled, by the sense that emotion was a bodily, unnameable, unmanageable thing. She could not call it grief. Or mourning, or anger, or fear.

  When she came out, she told the Departmental Secretary that she felt ill and was going home for the rest of the day.

  “You look dreadful.”

  Bowman, passing, took a look at her puffed, flushed face and said he could confirm that, she looked dreadful.

  “Anything I can do?”

  “No. Well. If you—if someone—could measure how much tampered carrot the snails in the second row of boxes have or haven’t eaten—and the potato—it should be done at 5:00. More or less.”

  “I’ll see to it. Don’t cry, sweetie. It almost certainly isn’t worth it.”

  Jacqueline went to the remote floor of the Evolution Tower where Luk had his office. He was with a student, whom he dismissed immediately on seeing Jacq
ueline’s desperate face.

  “Come in, my love. Sit down. What can have happened?”

  She stood with her back to the door. Her nails bit into her clenched hands. Her eyes were screwed up, behind her glasses, and looked mean.

  “I’ve come to say. It was all a mistake. There isn’t. I wasn’t. I’m not, anyway, pregnant. Not any more, if I ever was.”

  “Please sit down. It needn’t change anything. We can still get married, and ...”

  “No. I came to say, I can’t. I don’t want to get married. I can’t. I want to want to get married, but I don’t. It was all a mistake. ”

  Tears ran down her face. Her mouth worked.

  “You’re upset. You must wait—you must calm down—”

  He tried to put his arms round the rigid, hunched shoulders. She twisted violently, and pushed him away.

  “No, no. We’ve always understood each other. You know I mean what I say. You must let me know what I want—and I do know.”

  “Why?”

  “There doesn’t have to be a reason. As long as I know. And I know.”

  He tried again to touch her, and she whirled round, and ran, hard, down the corridor, into the lift. The blood was hot, and wet. She went home, and went to bed.

  Chapter 12