A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  Later, Agatha told Frederica that Mary had confided in her. “She’s one of the lucky ones,” said Agatha. “She looks lovely, she doesn’t have spots, she hasn’t got cramps, and feels she ought to have, she’s just slipped into it.”

  “Are you sure? She doesn’t look old enough.”

  “Of course I’m sure. She’s a most practical young woman.”

  “I’m a dreadful failure, Agatha. If I was a real human being—she should have told me. Not you. If not my mother, me.”

  The dead are very present at Christmas. Sweet and terrible, Stephanie flickered in Frederica’s body.

  Agatha said, not quite truthfully, that the Curse was a rite of passage, that non-family was the right choice. She also knew Frederica wasn’t who you would tell.

  Frederica started to say to Agatha that the whole gathering was a gathering of non, or not-quite family, incomplete units like two sides of a square, or one of Richard Gregory’s illusory hanging wire cubes, which turned out to have quite different properties. But she did not say it to Agatha, because remarking on that to Agatha brought up the never-mentioned subject of Saskia’s absent, unnamed, unknown father. Saskia did appear, more than any other human child Frederica knew, to be the product of parthenogenesis.

  Bill Potter had spent the whole of Frederica’s childhood inveighing against the Virgin Birth. What are we to think, he would shout, of a squeamish set of monks who can’t bear the thought of normal human bodies and have to invent all this farrago of an untouched, intact girl—with a lovely pure odourless inside, and a benign cuckold of a husband-to-be—producing the Incarnation, so to speak, at half-cock. The Word became Flesh, he would roar, but only nice girlish flesh, not real rough-and-tumble affectionate flesh. They had disgusting imaginations, those monks. Frederica had wished he would shut up, and had accepted his arguments. Hearing his voice raised again as she went in to high tea on Christmas Eve, before the carols, she assumed he was making his annual protest. But he was not. He had been testing the assembled children—Leo and Saskia, William and Mary—on their knowledge of the biblical narrative and had found them wanting. They knew about the ox and the ass, but were ignorant of the Slaughter of the Innocents. They knew about angels singing to shepherds, but had not been told about Lucifer and his fall. He sang the prophecies of Isaiah from the Messiah and they looked blank. He recited

  The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

  And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

  And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.

  They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

  The children looked blank. Bill said “No one knows the Bible any more.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought that should bother you,” said Daniel.

  “How can they read Milton, and Lawrence, and Dickens, and Eliot without knowing their Bibles?”

  “It wasn’t written for that purpose. If it’s not needed, it will all have to be rethought. Scripture isn’t a literary matter. If Canon Holly is right, and God is dead, and we must dismantle the mythology, all your stuff goes with it, I’d have thought.”

  He looked both pugnacious and amused, Bill thought. He said

  “You can’t just take everything away—at once—”

  “Why not? It’s what the Revolution is supposed to do.”

  “What Revolution?”

  “The one the students want. The New World. We can’t imagine it, they say, because we’re stuck in the dead past. You and me both,” said Daniel, grinning blackly at his father-in-law. Bill’s once-red hair was ash-silver, and his temper was damped. He grinned back, ruefully.

  When they set out for Church, in the dark, for the midnight carols, Bill put on his fleece-lined jacket.

  It was Frederica who said, astounded “You don’t—you never come. You never come.”

  “Are you ordering me not to?”

  “I’m commenting. You can’t expect us not to comment.”

  “I thought I would go to hear my granddaughter sing a poem by Christina Rossetti. Since the old order is about to pass away, according to Daniel.”

  “I wasn’t prophesying. Only commenting.”

  “Are you going to tell us what you do think is happening?”

  “No,” said Daniel. He had put on his dog-collar for the evening as a symbolic gesture, he was not sure of what. “I’m not. I’m only one man. One priest.”

  “But you have to say you’re glad I’m joining your flock,” said Bill.

  “I don’t. I’m not sure I am. You’re subversion incarnate. But I am glad we shall hear Mary sing together.”

  The Potter family filed into St. Cuthbert’s Church. Frederica held Leo’s hand, going up the path, although he was almost too old. They were another unfinished family, like Agatha and Saskia. Leo had received a very large parcel from his father, which he had brought, unopened, and put under the tree. Will was walking, not with his father, but with Winifred. Bill and Daniel were together. Mary was in the vestry with the choir. The church was hung with holly and ivy, with boughs of fir and pine, with golden baubles and silver starbursts. There was the old, good smell of leaves, and candlesmoke, and stone very faintly warmed.

  The congregation was large. It was augmented this year by a contingent from Dun Vale Hall, the Anglican members of the Hearers. Gideon had come with Clemency, and Canon Holly in a long black shaggy overcoat, and Ruth shepherding a group of children—Lucy Nighby’s three children, in knitted hats, the little one wearing a pink eye-patch, and three others. There were one or two more children. Gideon and Clemency’s four, now in their twenties, were absent, though only Daniel knew them well enough to notice this. Gideon and Canon Holly also wore their dog-collars. Gideon wore the embroidered coat Zag had given him at the Solstice, gold sun and flowers on hide and wool. Clemency wore a swooping maxi-coat in black velvet, which made her look, Frederica thought, like the Wicked Queen, at least from the back. She had a black velvet cap with a long scarlet silk tassel. The congregation stole surreptitious glances. They were curious about the Hall.

  Jacqueline Winwar came in late. Last year she had been part of the Potter grouping. This year, she was solitary, and looked ill. She bent her head—hatless—in prayer, looked up, and saw Ruth, who smiled freely and brilliantly at her old friend, transfiguring her own rather waxily serious little face.

  The choir filed in. The organ struck up. Saskia observed audibly that they looked like angels, and so they did, in their white starched tents, fluted and floating. They all carried candles, which they then placed in glass holders before them. They were all ages, from mothers and aunts through retired churchmen and youths with acne to children, and almost not-children, like Mary. They had—she had—scarlet ribbons round their white frilled necks. Frederica thought of the guillotine, and Daniel thought of sacrificial lambs, and was overcome with grief for his daughter, her grave round face, her red-gold hair, her quiet, easy, precise movements, until he saw that the grief was for Stephanie, whose form moved like a ghost in and round her daughter’s. There was the cast of her eyelid, there was the curve of her neck and the pulse in it, there was the golden cheek in the light of the flame. He shook himself. Mary was Mary and alive. He was Daniel, and was mostly alive. He saw her tongue moisten her lips as she prepared to sing.

  They sang “The Holly and the Ivy.”

  The holly bears a blossom

  As white as lily-flower

  And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

  To be our sweet Saviour.

  The holly bears a berry

  As red as any blood

  And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

  To do poor sinners good.
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  Mary sang descant. Her young voice rose to the stone and moved over it and descended again, air in a stone chamber. The candle flames flickered and leaped. Mary’s shadow moved like a ghost on the stone; she was still, but the flame was not. They sang “We Three Kings.” Daniel hummed the verse about myrrh.

  Sorrowing, sighing,

  Bleeding, dying,

  Sealed in the stone-cold tomb:

  O—Oh—

  Star of wonder, star of night ...

  The Vicar, who looked like a farmer, asked Miss Godden, the headmistress of the Freyasgarth school, to read the Epistle, which was Hebrews I:I. She read well, respecting Cranmer’s rhythms, trenchant and matter-of-fact about mystery, infinity, and the divine Man who was co-eternal with it. As angels are not, St. Paul insists.

  God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee ... And again, when he bringeth in the first-begotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him. And of the angels he saith, Who maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire ...

  Frederica was always moved by angels. She looked up into the roof of the church, and small, stony, solid ones stared down at her, between stony feathers. Great impossible sailing beings, half-human, half-bird, creatures of a threshold. She looked at Agatha, who had invented the terrible Whistlers of Flight North, and thought that her mind naturally inhabited the world of living metaphor which was myth and fable, whereas she, Frederica, was confined to stitching and patching the solid, and you could still see the joins.

  Miss Godden read serenely on.

  And thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the work of thine hands: they shall perish, but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed; but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.

  Hark the Herald Angels sing ...

  Veil’d in flesh the Godhead see

  Hail the Incarnate Deity ...

  Daniel sang for the pleasure of the sound, and behind him heard Gideon’s golden voice, louder and clearer, and beside him a small creaking, unaccustomed throaty voice, Bill Potter, singing Charles Wesley’s hymn, in Freyasgarth Church.

  The Vicar announced that they had the great good fortune to have in their midst the well-known—indeed, he dared to say, famous Canon Adelbert Holly, one of the most lively and up-to-date of our new dispensation of theologians. Canon Holly had agreed to say a few words to mark this joyous occasion. He would speak on the meaning of the Incarnation in a time of doubt and trouble. He would speak of things that changed, in order to remain steadfast, and not to fail.

  Canon Holly creaked past Daniel’s pew end, to take the pulpit. Daniel smelled his smell, years, months, weeks, days and hours of stale smoke and exhaled tobacco. Canon Holly, like Daniel, and also like Gideon, had put on his dog-collar. His white hair was very long, hippy and patriarchal, even angelic. He began, rather importantly, by saying that he knew he was famous for his elucidation of, indeed his enthusiastic embrace of, the new Death of God theology. The term was a paradox, but then theology, words about God, a theory, a discourse, a human logos about God, was in itself a paradox.

  He leaned over the edge of the pulpit, white head between black hunched shoulders, and said amiably

  “I can see you all thinking, the old chap’s going to drone on for hours and we shall never get to our mince-pies. Well, I’m not. But I do prefer to say something real, rather than a few nice platitudes, telling you to be good, turn round like stray sheep, pat you on the head and so on. This is God’s house, it was built for God, to hold Faith and Hope, yes and Love inside its walls, to shelter their growth and aspiration.

  “But where is God? Where do we meet Him, in daily life, at prayer, in the horrors of recent unredeemed history, where is He to be found?

  “Theologians have marked a steady distancing of God from the earth. As the excellent lady read out to you, God once spoke directly to men, to Abraham and Moses, and later for a time He sent angels, who visited men, and prophets, through whom His Voice spoke like a trumpet of flame. But of late He has gone away. He is not present. When Nietzsche declared that He had died, he described a state of affairs people recognised, which was why people were so disturbed by Nietzsche.”

  He smiled blithely upon them, the radiance of his good will mitigated by his stained teeth and his fluttering jowl, his very apparent mortality. He said that at the moment of the Incarnation the Eternal Unchanging God had emptied himself out—the word was Kenosis—had shrunk his infinity, which was timeless, and poured it into finite flesh. When God became Man, said Adelbert Holly, the timeless entered history. The infinite became finite. The circular became a linear arrow. That which had no beginning and no end became a begun infant, with its umbilical cord full of blood and its blind mouth full of milk, and the blood and the milk were doomed in due course to find the end of everyman, sooner or later, to suffer and to die. Some believed that the message of Death of God theology was that it was incumbent upon all mortals to learn to live in this world, with no sense of heaven, and no fear of Hell, beyond hell on earth, of which we know something, each in our degree. But I say to you, said Canon Holly, that when God died as God and became Man, He entered History, and the joy of the mystery of His Birth is repeated daily in historical time, as is, of course, the sorrow of the mystery of His death, which has become infinitely finite.

  He smiled beatifically. Frederica felt irritated. The remarks were almost meaningful, but not quite, they were in the end a game with language. But then, the Canon thought they meant something. What? She frowned.

  They sang more carols. The candles flickered more wildly as they burned down in their glass cylinders. Finally, Mary stood up to sing “In the Bleak Midwinter,” and as she did so, the choir took up their candles and extinguished them, so that the only light was the tall candles round the creche at the crossing of the aisles. She sang high and clear. Frederica the unmusical heard the sound, and made sense of it because of the poet’s words, could even see that the singing voice added a lightness, a soaring, to those words.

  In the bleak midwinter

  Frosty wind made moan,

  Earth stood hard as iron,

  Water like a stone;

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

  Sno-ow on snow,

  In the bleak midwinter,

  Lo-o-ong ago.

  It was a good poem. It was an uncompromising description of elemental solids—snow, water, ice, iron, stone, with the adjective at work, bleak. And, Frederica thought, the wind moaned, which is a human sound, and there was the woman with the boy child. The earth moaning. And then, infinity.

  Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him

  Nor earth sustain;

  Heaven and earth shall flee away

  When He comes to reign ...

  Lovely, lovely, economical words, Frederica thought, fast, fast. Sustain is perfect. The earth can’t either hold him up, or keep Him alive.

  Enough for Him whom cherubim

  Worship night and day,

  A breastful of milk

  And a mangerful of hay ...

  Mary’s voice grew sweeter as she negotiated her way through angels, maiden kiss, shepherd and lamb, to the human heart. Her father saw her voice beat in the channel of her throat, in the movement of her lips, across the shimmer of her teeth, as she moved her lovely head with the rhythm, and the curtain of
her thick red-gold hair swung in the light of her one remaining candle. Beside him, Bill Potter coughed unhappily, phlegm rising and suppressed in his dried channels. There was no life in Stephanie Potter, but life that had come from this cross old man had moved in her, had mixed with his own, which had come from his cross old mother and his unknown father, and there it was now, briefly alight in the shadows, singing of milk, and fleece, and snow.

  Why had he called her Mary? It was a plain name, and a weight. He thought confusedly of Adelbert Holly’s idea that God had emptied himself out of heaven. Bill coughed again, and Daniel thought that God had walked quietly out of this stone building, too, he was present in his absence only, and that was why the old man had felt able to cross the threshold, for the live force that had once held the stones together, which had once urged “Put off thy shoes, for this is holy ground,” had flickered and ceased to burn.

  “Gi-i-ive my heart,” sang Mary. And bent her head over the glass before her, and blew out the candle, and stood, head bowed, in the spiral of waxy smoke.

  Daniel heard his own heart. Thump, thump, in his ears. Pumping blood. It was all there was, and one day, it would stop.

  Bill cleared his throat again.

  “Like an angel,” he said.

  “Hmn?” said Daniel, thickly.

  “She sings like an angel, our Mary.”

  “Aye,” said Daniel. “She does.”