A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  “I’m not coming. I don’t like religion. I don’t like groups. As you know,” she said to John.

  “I might just go and see if Paul’s OK. I promised the parents I’d go and see. Jacqueline’s right, there’s safety in numbers.”

  “They don’t bite, do they?” said Frederica.

  “They might,” said Daniel. “Anything might happen. We shall look in on them.”

  Frederica found herself briefly alone with Jacqueline. She asked politely how the other woman’s work was going, and got a surprisingly detailed answer about neurotransmitters, axons, calcium ions, and the difficulty of the equations, which made Marcus’s help absolutely necessary. She did not listen precisely to this answer, but did respond to the tone of enthusiasm in the sharpened voice, the sense of urgency in the expression of the newly-narrowed face. Jacqueline had always looked nice, and placid, and now she looked driven, and edgy, and unwell.

  “You’ve been ill?” said Frederica, when Jacqueline came to a break in her explanation.

  Jacqueline understood that Frederica had not understood what she had been saying. Her flicker of light went out. She said

  “I’ve had problems. I’m fine now. I just need to get some clear results ...” She said politely “I saw you in the Box. It’s all very witty. Must be great fun to do.”

  “It’s a way of earning a living. I have to earn a living.”

  They stared guardedly at each other. Both had a sense of a cold space in their own heads, which they needed to protect, and yet were afraid of. Jacqueline thought briefly of describing to Frederica the muddle and horror of the miscarriage, and decided to keep quiet. Frederica was not a woman with whom you could be woman-to-woman, even if you were both trying to be something else as well. Frederica had an uncomfortable apprehension that Jacqueline knew what she wanted, knew what she was doing, much better than she herself did, and this was not a pleasant feeling, for she was used to being at least probably the cleverest person in the room, and was also used to Jacqueline being just a nice girl, a friend of Marcus. She could have said, how hard do you find it, being an obsessed intellectual, and a woman too, does your own biology bother you? But she didn’t. She said brightly, distantly

  “You ought to come on the Programme and tell everyone about neurotransmitters and all those things.”

  Jacqueline said it was probably incomprehensible. Frederica registered a very small barb.

  The others came back, in anoraks and woollen caps, ready to go to Dun Vale Hall. Will had added himself to the party. Daniel had tried to dissuade him, telling him clumsily it would bore him—Daniel never knew how to speak to Will. Will said he was fond of Ruth, and didn’t see why he shouldn’t go to see the community. Ruth had, he said, particularly asked him, himself to come.

  The journey to Dun Vale Hall needed half an hour in a country bus, and another half-hour’s walk. Marcus sat down next to Will—Jacqueline thought he might be avoiding her, not out of hostility but simply because he was embarrassed by the explosion of emotion in the Non-Maths Group. John Ottokar went and sat alone, staring out of the window at the frosty moor, with old snow in its hollows, and a steel sky beyond the rim of the horizon. The first part of the bus journey ran along a ridge, with moor on each side, and valleys falling into dales beyond. Jacqueline found herself sitting with Daniel. For a time they didn’t speak. Then they discussed the events that had led to the formation of the Hearers. Jacqueline said that Ruth sounded ecstatic. She asked if Daniel had been interested in joining. He said no, he didn’t like groups, and was not overfond of leaders. As she knew.

  “You belong to the Church.”

  “Barely. The stones hold together just about, when I go into the building. I dream of ruins. I work in a bomb-site, in a ruin, listening to voices without faces. I seem to fit in better, there.”

  “You care about people,” said Jacqueline. “It’s beginning to look to me as though I don’t.”

  Daniel sat quietly for a moment as the bus rumbled on. He said into the machine-noise

  “You don’t look well. You do look different. Alerted.”

  “My work’s going well. I keep finding things. Things about the chemistry of memory—that might change the way we look at brains. It’s agonising when it goes wrong, and when it falls into place, it’s beautiful.”

  She added, with a dry little laugh, “My mother said at Christmas, it was taking too much out of me. I ought to relax, she said, look around me, get married and so on. She said time was running out. She can’t listen to two consecutive sentences about cell-structure without her mind switching back to cleaning the oven, and planning the next hols. She said I was eating myself up, and no man would look at me. Really, she said all that. I was put out. I don’t know why I’m telling you all that.”

  “It’s my job, listening. She was saying what she wanted from you. It’s her right. But I’d say, you know where you’re going, and you must go there.”

  “I was going to marry Luk. I said yes, and then I said no. It was a dreadful mess, he’s furious. And unhappy. I didn’t tell my Mum all that.”

  “Why did you say no?” he asked easily, with no preconceptions of the answer. She replied truthfully

  “Because I didn’t want to. Because—because I want to concentrate on what I’m doing. Because I don’t want to be split. I didn’t know I was like that. I always assumed everything would fall into place, work and life and sex and so on. It won’t.”

  Daniel sat silent, and did not offer soothing sounds, such as the banal remark that this could all change, or the banal reinforcement, that what she wanted must be fine for her. He listened with his large body to the beating of her heart and the whirring of her head, and took in her fingers on her knees, clasping and unclasping. After a moment she said, as though answering what he wasn’t saying

  “I thought I was pregnant, actually. I thought I was, and it seemed right to go on with it, and marry. And I wasn’t. And then I couldn’t. The whole thing was just wilful from start to finish, I wanted to be human, and I’m—not.”

  “I see.”

  “And I’ve messed up Luk.”

  “He seems tough, to me.”

  “He’s writing a paper on the problems of meiosis and the redundant male.”

  Daniel laughed. Jacqueline’s face turned to his with a new smile, a wary, thinking smile.

  “You can laugh,” she said. “It was appalling. It’s appalling to find out you’re not quite human. I always thought I was interested in people ...”

  “There are very many ways of taking an interest in people.”

  “Well, you do.”

  Daniel looked out of the window at the earth and the air and the frozen grass and bracken. He said, not looking at Jacqueline

  “If you are to go on—looking at people like watches with broken springs—you end up as precise and detached as a scientist staring down a microscope and watching bacteria swarming. You get diagnostic. It gets steely. It’s not like ordinary love.” His heavy head turned to stare at the back of his son’s head, and Jacqueline, who was in fact a quick observer, saw his cheek-muscles tighten. “It might incapacitate you for ordinary love.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about yourself.”

  “It does no good, in my profession. You probably haven’t.”

  They sat in silence, as the bus rumbled on. Their thoughts ran in the same direction. Jacqueline said

  “Gideon is interested in Gideon and ordinary love.”

  “He is. He has a lot of it to spare.”

  “I worry about Ruthie.”

  “I know. You always have.”

  “Gideon doesn’t.”

  “We don’t know. I think he doesn’t.”

  “This new man, Daniel. What’s he like? This Joshua Ramsden?”

  Daniel waited, as the bus bumped on a stone.

  “He’s a religious man. He loves the Light. He wants to love God. He is sick—physically, he has fits—he knows extremes. He’s—”
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  “He’s?”

  “Oh, I was going to say, he’s dangerous. But I’ve no right. I’m just going on the pattern of how it always is, the vision, the intensity, the excess, the—the violence. Maybe it’ll be contained, this time. You can feel it crackling. He means well. Indeed, he means the best—”

  Jacqueline had a sudden vision of the beautiful zigzag of intensifying spikes produced by her oscilloscope, its beauty and its meaning. The electric charge of matter, running through a single giant neurone. Connecting. She laughed. Daniel asked why. She told him how his words had produced her image. He said, there you are. The best in your case is clear enough. Get on with it, girl. He felt her shoulder-blades unhunch.

  The bus left them on the top of a ridge. They walked down and down, into the valley. They could see Mimmer’s Tarn glimmering in the cold bright air, at the other end of the valley. Jacqueline and Marcus knew where they were, because it was where they had so often come, to count the snails. It felt different, now. Jacqueline looked at Marcus, whose hands were deep in his pockets, whose head was down. She asked if he was worried about Ruth. He shrugged.

  “It was Ruth you really fancied,” said Jacqueline.

  “Was it?”

  “I think she thought so. But you didn’t say anything.”

  “What was the point? She had other ideas. These ideas.”

  Marcus needed to see Ruth, because he was afraid of Vincent Hodgkiss. The philosopher had put his sense of himself, always fragile, in doubt. He had sat there in the flickering candle-light and had entranced Marcus’s mind, where it lay coiled and hidden inside Marcus. He had stared at Marcus’s mind with glittering eyes, and spoken to it with serpent-tongue, and it had crept out and revealed itself. And then Marcus had noticed that the flames of attention were playing roughly over his body, which felt both transparent and incandescent. Anyway, hot. He did not like this heat. He wished to retreat, and felt himself to have been warmed into molten glass.

  He needed to remember what it had felt like to want to touch Ruth, with her heavy gold twined hair, with her clean soft whiteness.

  He did not go so far, in his wishes, as to hope that Ruth could be persuaded to leave the Hearers. He just wanted to see her and want her, to restore his sense of his own direction. His own nature. He said silently to the rimy moorland, I need a sign, a little sign, that’s all.

  He thought that it would be interesting one of these days, to talk out Fibonacci with Jacqueline. She appeared to be getting satisfactorily over whatever had been the problem.

  When they came to Dun Vale Hall they were expected; the telephone, at this point, still connected the community to the outside world. The door was opened by Clemency Farrar in an enveloping white apron, smiling very brightly. When she opened the door, they smelled the wonderful smell of baking bread, and baking biscuits or cakes, sugary and brown. Other Hearers were gathered on the flagstones of the entrance hall, under the balcony where Luk Lysgaard-Peacock had watched with the wounded children. It was warm and bright in the dark wood and stone space. There were candles and bowls of floating night-lights. There were wreaths of evergreens, holly and yew and ivy. Paul-Zag skipped out and embraced his brother, Canon Holly shook Daniel’s hand in a Manichaean shake, Ruth in a white dress and white stockings put up a warm cheek for Jacqueline to kiss, and smiled brightly at Marcus. Gideon Farrar gave everyone a bear-hug and a slap on the back. He was wearing his embroidered sheepskin and his red-gold hair was flowing on his shoulders. Canon Holly wore a sheepskin too, a little awkwardly. It was cold in the Hall, although there was so much light, and such a good smell of warm work in the ovens.

  They went into the dining-hall, where a meal awaited them. There was one long table, holding about thirty or thirty-five people, pushed fairly close together, on folding chairs. The table was spread with large white cloths, and heaped with food—warm loaves, plates of buns and biscuits, bowls of eggs, wooden bowls of various fruits, apples and pears, plums and boiled prunes and crab-apples and blackberries, fruits of the country around. They all sat down in an amiable huddle, though certain people clearly had places reserved for them. At the head of the table Lucy Nighby (also in a large white apron) and Clemency Farrar flanked the seat where presumably Joshua Ramsden would sit. Daniel sat down at the other end, not at the foot itself, which was occupied by Canon Holly, but next to him. Gideon sat in the centre of the long side, flanked by Ruth and Ellie, with a little group of Quakers opposite him, and the children, Lucy’s three, and three others, clustered round them. Jacqueline sat next to Daniel. Marcus thought of sitting next to Ruth, but could not, for she was occupied with various children near her. Elvet Gander went up to John Ottokar and invited him to take the seat next to him. John declined, and went to sit with the Quakers. Gander followed him, leaning over his shoulder.

  “We have music during meals, as we have readings of poetry and religious texts. Zag plays and sings for us. We should be honoured if you would play with him.”

  “I don’t have my clarinet.”

  “We have one; chance, or fate, or in this case Milly Fisher provides. A little seasonal music? “The Lord of the Dance?”

  Paul put the clarinet, assembled, with a new reed and oiled wood, into his brother’s hand.

  Clemency Farrar and Lucy Nighby went out to the kitchens and returned with two dark cauldrons of steaming soup, which they placed on the side-table where the serving-ladles were.

  The woman on the other side of Jacqueline said

  “We made it ourselves, out of what we’ve got. It’s a concoction of potatoes and leeks and sprouts and nettles and broccoli tops and carrots and cows’ milk and goats’ milk and a dash of Marmite. And some herbs. It’s pretty good. It’s vegetable. Are you a vegetarian?”

  “No,” said Jacqueline.

  “Are you a Quaker, or C. of E. or something else?”

  “I’m a scientist.”

  “In your view, does that preclude religious belief?”

  “I don’t know if it need. In my case it does.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To see an old friend.”

  “Is it easy, being a woman scientist? Do you face problems?”

  Jacqueline was irritated by the small brown woman’s persistent questioning. She said

  “Your turn. Why are you here? What is your profession?”

  “Oh,” said Brenda Pincher, rearranging her cutlery. “I’m a seeker, a researcher, a looker-on.”

  “Do you live here, or are you visiting?”

  “I live here. I’m part of the original Group. Daniel knows me.”

  Daniel said vaguely that he did. He had forgotten, if he had ever known, her profession. She deflected Jacqueline’s attention by leaning across her and asking Daniel a series of questions, how was he, what did he think of residential communities, what were his views of Manichaeism ...

  Joshua Ramsden came in. He stood and looked gravely down the table at the assembly, letting his glance rest on each face. His eyes, they all thought, searched their minds, noted tangles, combed knots. Marcus saw Ruth blush and smile, although her hand was next to Gideon’s hand spread on the table. The man, Jacqueline thought, was a beautiful man. There was a draught in the room, which, like the entrance hall, was cold, apart from the heat of their contiguous bodies, and the steam of the vegetable pottage. Gideon sat majestically, taking up more than one man’s space, on the long side of the table, like Leonardo’s Christ at his Last Supper. Ramsden stood like a pillar, carved and still, making them all still. He said “Let us eat, no more than is needful, for our bodies are only temporary means for our spirits, we live in husks, and it is right that they should fall away. Take the goodness of the fruits of the earth in sorrow and in gratitude, and think of a time when there shall be no bodily needs, but only pure light. Think of the Light, as you eat those living things in which it is captured.”

  As he spoke, Marcus felt a latecomer slide plumply into the empty space beside him. A voice he knew said “Very fine, ver
y fine, but it will be a delicious soup, I saw it in the making.”

  Marcus knew the very smell, unchanged, of the body next to him, a fat smell with an acid edge of anxiety. He knew the comfortable chuckle with the note of stress under it. He knew, even, the pressure of that soft buttock. He did not look up. He ceased almost to breathe.

  Lucas Simmonds, whose attentions, both religious and religiously amorous, had led to Marcus’s earlier collapse into terror and incoherence, noticed who his meal-companion was. He began to babble.

  “It’s you. I’ve prayed and prayed for this moment. It’s you. Are you here? Are you staying? I have suffered so long over where you were and how you were living, and how you thought of me, how you judged me, whether you had a place in your heart and mind ...

  “This is a good place. This is my resting-place after my trials and tribulations. Here there is a Man who sees into the heart of things, Marcus. Do say you are staying, that you too—”

  “No,” said Marcus. He looked up, desperately, and saw that Joshua Ramsden, from far away, had seen him. It was as though the man could feel his terror, his disgust, his concern, his paralysed soul.

  Ramsden stood up.

  “We will have music,” he said. “We will eat in silence, and hear Zag and his brother, who will lift our minds to the Light. We will forget ourselves.”

  Joshua Ramsden surveyed his people from his distant seat. He noted harmony and disharmony, heat and cold, fear and elation, greed and moderation in eating, belief and scepticism. When his eyes rested on one or another, that one or another inevitably raised his or her head and his eyes held their eyes for a long look, of searching, of trust. He saw, as it were, spiritual forms of matter around faces and figures. Young Marcus, whom he did not know, was surrounded by a brittle cage of icicles. Full of light, but icicles, meltable. The man next to him who had just come was covered in sweat like a roasting carcass: it fell in great gouts, soaking his curly head and his woolly clothing. Brenda Pincher was always an eyeless ball of fur, which quivered. He came, staring onwards, having dealt with Gideon’s flowing milk and honey, to Daniel Orton.