A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  “She doesn’t get it from our side. We’re tone deaf.”

  Afterwards they stood and ate mince-pies round the crèche. This crèche was white and gold. The figures were Italian, large white glazed china figures, descendants of della Robbia. The creche itself, the stable, was made of real straw and wood. Inside, the figures were white and sleek. The Virgin, at one with her white veiling, the stolid ox, the shaggy ass, all blanched white, as was the infant, chubby in his stick-cradle. St. Joseph stood, as he always stands, puzzled, redundant and slightly apart, his hands folded and set in their glaze, his beard snowy. There was a white lamb nestling by the cradle and white doves on the thatched roof. The other colour was gold. Gold angels hung suspended around the great gold tinsel star over the rafters. Golden apples, made of stuffed silk, gold-painted holly and ivy were heaped around the place where the footlights would have been if it was a stage. Night-lights in glasses surrounded the apples and leaves.

  “Pretty,” said Saskia.

  Mary joined them, disrobed and breathless. Gideon and Clemency hurried up and congratulated her. Will stood apart, with his grandfather, in the dark shadows. Gideon sipped hot punch, and talked of his sense of the new community at Dun Vale Hall, of the spirit moving like yeast, of the energy released like the hens and turkeys, into freedom.

  “You should have seen them stretch and scurry. All those feathers being preened and shaken. It’s the sort of gesture you dream of, and then find you’re actually making—”

  Ruth said “Some of the down is actually growing back on their poor bare necks.”

  Gideon stroked the long snake of her gold plait down her back, which she still wore, though she was no longer a girl.

  “We all feel it. It’s going to be like ancient monasteries, a religious house, where a core of contemplatives inhabit, and others come to rest and recuperate and escape the busy world, and still others come through, as it were, on the crossroads of their life, to catch a glimpse of how things can be ... We mean to have open days for children, storytimes—Ruth will be in charge—days of prayer, days of singing and dancing ...”

  Jacqueline Winwar asked how Gideon and Clemency’s own children were. Frederica, partly still exalted by Rossetti’s hard absolute words and Mary’s voice, partly anxious now to go home, looked distractedly at her. She was not sure she would have recognised Jacqueline. She had been a glossy nut-brown girl, and had become a sharp woman who looked somehow emptied out. She had become thin, her mouth was tighter, her bones more pronounced. It suited her. The removal of her comfortable persona made her real intelligence visible.

  Gideon said all his children were fine, just fine, they were making their way in the world, finding their way, falling over and struggling up again, like everyone’s children. “Jeremy’s away in India—he’s on a spiritual pilgrimage—Tania’s working with a wonderful group of creative people selling unusual clothes in Carnaby Street—Daisy’s training to be a social worker—she feels a call, because she has a black skin, to work in black communities—Dominic’s living in a squat, mixing with those who live on benefit and choosing to share their lot and their life-style. He’s finding his way, he’s finding his way. I sometimes wish it wouldn’t take them so long to find a settled life-style, but that’s only because I’m an old unregenerate bourgeois fuddy-duddy. Really, I admire their courage. You have to.”

  Clemency Farrar looked at Daniel, and looked away. She knew that Daniel knew that Dominic had been arrested for receiving stolen goods, more than once. She did not know that Daniel knew that Tania was usually silly with an increasingly large mix of hemp and LSD. She knew Daniel did not know that they had not heard from Jeremy for two years, and did not know whether he was alive or dead. She had burned the letter Jeremy had sent, saying he hoped he would find a peace that would mean he need never come back and that it was necessary to him to cut all ties whilst he looked. She stared blankly at the white china Madonna with her plump white infant. She knew Daniel knew that Daisy, a black child with a white name, had repudiated her adoptive parents, had moved to a place where all her neighbours were black, and lied routinely about her origins and upbringing.

  Gideon stroked the gold snake of Ruth’s plait, and held out his arms to Jacqueline, who had been part of his Church Youth Group, when Daniel was his curate. He said

  “You must particularly come and meet the Hearers, Jacquie, love. Ruthie would be so glad, so happy. We all should.”

  Jacqueline evaded the embrace.

  “Please,” said Ruth. She said “You should hear Joshua Ramsden. He is the most marvellous man. The most ... You can’t imagine. You must see.”

  Her face was white and ecstatic. There was an edge in her voice.

  “I might,” Jacqueline said.

  “And Daniel. And Marcus, you must all come, you must all come,” said Ruth. “And see what we have done, how different everything is, how real, how new.”

  Jacqueline said she had a complicated experiment she was looking after single-handed.

  “And you come too,” said Ruth to Mary. “We sing a lot. They would love your lovely voice there. Everyone would love it.”

  She nestled against Gideon’s shoulder, and smiled at them.

  Later, they remembered this.

  Under the Christmas tree the next morning, among the presents, were two identical books for Leo and Saskia, from Agatha. Saskia found hers, first. Leo was sitting amongst a heap of gilt paper considering his present from his father, which was an inordinately large mechanised tank, complete with guns which flashed, smoked, and ejected whining pellets. Saskia opened the book, peaceably. It was from Agatha, and was an advance copy of Flight North, which was out in the New Year. It had a dramatic dustjacket, largely in black and white, with flashes of crimson and scarlet. The lettering, in crimson, ran across a line of snowy turrets or mountain peaks, on top of which black cockerels crowed in silhouette against a red sky. The group of travellers stood in silhouette by a thorn-bush, bottom left, and in the centre the Whistlers hovered on extended white wings, with bird-necks, female faces and human hair. Saskia gave a little cry, and clutched the book to her chest. Agatha said “Look at the dedication.”

  Saskia read it. “For Saskia and Leo, who listened to this story. With love.”

  Leo looked up from his tank.

  “You’ve got one,” said Saskia, busily. “You’ve got one, too. It’s dedicated to us.”

  Leo crawled across the floor amongst the wrappings, and found his neat package. He undid the ribbon, and folded the paper. He studied the cover, and looked at the dedication. Saskia hugged her mother. “I didn’t know, I didn’t know,” she said.

  “It was hard enough keeping the secret.” Agatha was equable. She was good at secrets.

  “It looks quite different, quite, in real printing,” said Saskia. She opened the book and read, at random

  “All your book-learning will be of no use in the wilderness,” said the page-boy to the Prince.

  “We shall see, as to that,” said Artegall. “Books describe the world, and are useful. It is only that I have never been permitted to go outside my study. That will change now.”

  “We must all go together,” said Dol Throstle. “And we must pretend, if we are found, to be one family, so we shall be harder to find. You must pretend to be brothers.”

  “That is a good idea,” said Artegall.

  “You won’t find it easy,” said Mark.

  “Wait and see,” said Artegall.

  Everyone congratulated her on her reading. Leo opened his book, and held it close to his face.

  “No one has seen the Whistlers and lived,” said the thrush. “Indeed even to hear them is fatal. They glide or fly like grey shadows and make a high whistling sound at the edge of what other creatures can hear ...”

  He closed the book with a snap. He went and kissed Agatha.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For the dedication.”

  His face was hot, shining with the reflected colours of the lights on
the tree. He went quickly out of the room, shutting the door carefully behind him. Frederica’s straining ears heard him creep up the stairs. Daniel and Winifred congratulated Agatha, and Saskia’s book was examined and exclaimed over.

  Bill said to Frederica “He wasn’t reading, was he? He had it by heart.”

  Frederica found tears in her eyes.

  “He won’t admit he doesn’t read. I don’t know what to do. He has your—our—temper. He’s proud.”

  “You have to do something now, or it’s too late. Better someone else, not you, at least at first. Can I talk to him? Can I talk to Margaret Godden at the Freyasgarth school? She always had all her first class reading before they went up. Then she got a directive, saying they shouldn’t be driven, they should learn in their own good time, when they were ready. It doesn’t work.”

  Frederica stared at him. The tears brimmed.

  “You can’t teach him and cry over him. Let me try. Can’t do much in a short holiday. Can make a start. I’ve become a reformed character. Patience itself. And anyway, I was always a good teacher. And he reminds me of myself, Frederica. I had trouble starting—”

  “You did?”

  “I used to play that trick. Reciting from memory. I recognised the look.”

  Frederica never knew what her father said to her son. She overheard the beginning of the conversation, the sound of Bill’s voice, reasonable, quiet, adult, man-to-man, and she crept away. Later she saw the two walking together into the village, two stocky, wiry creatures, one flaming, one faded. They called on Margaret Godden, the Freyasgarth headmistress, who later came to see Frederica, with a professional diagnosis of Leo’s reading. Leo came back skipping. He and Bill vanished again into Bill’s study. She heard her son’s voice making primitive sounds. a. b. c. (s) d. s.n.a.(ay)k.(silent e). The s.n.a.k.e. ate (ay-t silent e) the a.p.p.l. (silent e). U.n.d.e.r. the tree. ee. I saw a d.r.a.g.o.n. The m.a.n. and the w.o.m.a.n. are under the tree in the g.ar.d.e.n. The snake is in the tree. The apple is on the tree. The snake smiles. He g.i.v.es the apple to the w.o.m.a.n.

  In this case, said Miss Godden, in the beginning must be phonics. Your son is not severely dyslexic—he reverses his writing, but his memory retains letters and forms in a normal way. He is a boy who needed to be taught to analyse the sounds of letters, and he appears to have been given the “freedom” to find his own way with “Look and Say.” I suspect he was under some strain at the moment when he was being required to recognise “aeroplane” and “house” and “machine.” He is a boy who needs—as most of us need—precise forms of thought into which to stitch or slot his discoveries and inventions. Most of us are enabled by knowing the alphabet by heart, without thinking about it, and the possible sounds of the letters. As most of us are enabled by knowing the patterns of the multiplication tables, both visually and aurally. It is not helpful to expect children, as many modern teachers do, to discover multiplication and division for themselves, or to organise their own idiosyncratic alphabet. Rote learning is not a form of torture or inhibition. It is a tool. Also a pleasure. In the case of a child like your son, whose memory is organised in his particular way, it is a necessity. No one should make a means into an end. You don’t learn the alphabet in order to know it, but in order to use it. But knowing is a human pleasure. Like perspective drawing, or staying afloat in water.

  Miss Godden was tall, with a mass of hair like white wool. She wore a straight-down fir-green woollen dress, and had a face at once severe and kind. She had brought with her a box of hand-made reading cards she had made for children like Leo, cards where the words were interesting, where there were rhymes and tales of adventure, not only washing-up and going out to a shop in a car. Later cards had sound-games. “Though I peer through the boughs I shall hear no sound.” She left the box with Bill. The man and the boy closed themselves into the study and chanted together. Frederica heard Leo singing on the stairs. “The single silly starling stands and sings in the stinging rain. The rain hisses. The rain sings. The wind blows the rain.”

  Bill told Frederica that Leo was making giant strides. It was all coming together. Frederica burst into tears.

  “What’s all this about? Margaret Godden says he’ll be fine. He’ll learn. He’ll catch up.”

  “We shall be back in London in ten days. He’ll be back at that school.”

  Bill said “You wouldn’t consider leaving him here for a while? He’d be happy at the Freyasgarth school. It’d suit him. We’ve got Will and Mary—”

  “I can’t.”

  “Think about it. Not forever. Just a term would make all the difference. Little boys go away to school at his age.”

  Frederica wept as though she herself was the small child, facing separation. After a moment, Bill put an awkward hand on her heaving shoulder.

  “You’re my child. I care about you, too. You must do what you want.”

  “What ought I to want?” asked Frederica, wildly. Leo came in, and stared. His mother never wept. He squared his shoulders and looked enquiringly at Bill. He said “What’s wrong?”

  Bill said “Nothing much. Honest. I’ll look after her. You run along. I don’t mean, go away, run along or anything. I mean, it’s really OK, I’ll look after her.”

  They exchanged a shrewd, measuring glance. Leo went away. Frederica wiped her eyes and sniffed. Bill said

  “He’s as sharp as a needle. As quick as a fox. And wise for his years.”

  “He’s had to be.”

  “Don’t start crying again. We’ll sort it out.”

  John Ottokar came back from Christmas with his parents in Welwyn Garden City. Paul-Zag had stayed behind, with the Hearers. Leo greeted him at the door with a leap into his arms, crying John O, John O, John O, is back. Bill and Winifred welcomed him. Agatha and Saskia were away, visiting professional acquaintances of Agatha’s on the UNY campus. After tea, Bill took Leo off to do reading-exercises. Leo said to John “I’m reading a document which Grandpa and Miss Godden have specially constructed for me ...” He said “It’s to do with Agatha’s story. It’s printed, you have to see it, I’m reading it—”

  “He’s happy,” said John to Frederica, when they were alone. He held her in his arms, and kissed the top of her head. He touched her spine. It shivered with its own pleasure. “Are you happy? Did you have a good Christmas?”

  Frederica said that it had been an odd Christmas. She told him most, but not all, of her thoughts about their odd incomplete family groupings, the single mothers, the grandparents-and-grandchildren, lone Daniel. She laughed drily over the idea of St. Joseph with the child who wasn’t his, and the angels and the ox and the ass. She told him about the surprising alignment of Miss Godden, Bill Potter, Leo and the reading-scheme. She did not mention Stephanie. She said that Bill had suggested—she didn’t know if he was serious—leaving Leo there for a term. She said it made sense. She said she didn’t know what to do. She said she was responsible for Leo’s odd life. John Ottokar’s intelligent fingers massaged the nape of her neck, which prickled with grateful warmth. She asked, had John had a good Christmas.

  John said, not really. He had been a token. His parents were worried about Paul. They thought Paul was taking drugs. They didn’t know what sort of life he’d got into. I was a reflection of his absence, said John Ottokar. As usual. I was there, but I wasn’t, because I was only me, myself. One child to them is half a child.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh yes, I’m sure.”

  He turned the conversation back to Leo’s reading-progress. Frederica said Leo said his mind was a maze of mirrors, he saw mirror writing, or his hands traced it. He would be happy here, she told John Ottokar. Inner cities aren’t good for strung-up children. Her tenacious mind had a grip on that idea, and others were peripheral.

  John said

  “It all seems to lead one way, to my mind. I think we should get married, and you should find work here—in the University perhaps—and Leo could go to the school—and we should be a family, a m
an and a woman and a boy—at least one boy—” he said, and smiled a nervous, empty, anxious smile. Frederica bristled.

  “That disposes of me very simply.”

  “No, love, listen, think. You don’t like him being in the city. I’m here, we’re right together, there’s the moors and the fresh air, and the University’s humming with life.”

  “And my life?”

  “I’m not saying Leo and I are your life. I am saying, I think you can do something, anything, anywhere—you’re a great teacher, teaching is here—I am asking, because you’re the best thing I’ve got, have ever had, I have to try—”

  He was gentle, and anxious, and something in him expected defeat. That expectation filled Frederica with self-distaste and a brief desire to hurt.

  “And Paul?” she said.

  “Paul’s in there with the Hearers. I have to have my own life.”

  “And I’m to be that life.”

  “Yes.”

  His arms were round her. Her body warmed to his. Her mind was cold and clear and unhappy.

  “Is it important to be a television personality?” John asked, with false innocence.

  Frederica snapped. “No. It’s work. It’s fun.”

  Fun is a foolish, weak word. John stroked her flanks. She could feel her guts pull, and the empty space in her head. She had a vision of a man and a woman and a boy, walking over the moors, hand in hand. She remembered Nigel and his fierceness. She had married Nigel because she had listened to her body. And she did not have nothing to show for it, she had Leo. Could she do it again, for gentleness? What did she want? She didn’t like herself.

  At this point the doorbell rang. It was Jacqueline Winwar, who had come to propose to Daniel and Marcus—and John, since they found him there, and anyone else—a visit to the Hearers at Dun Vale Hall. To see how Ruth was. She said it would be easier to go in a body. Daniel, who had known she was coming, appeared from his room, and said he was ready. He went to look for Marcus. He thought Marcus would be disinclined to come, but Marcus said he was ready. Jacqueline asked John if he wanted to join the party. John looked at Frederica.