A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  Waltraut Ross released several bandaged cats, some of which trotted off sedately, some of which staggered, and one of which fell over and was still.

  Flocks of small birds were poked out of cages, and scrambled and fluttered into the night. The birds were the most satisfactory releases, because they were able to get further than the lawn, the courtyard, and the surrounding corridors.

  Someone alerted Christopher Cobb, who looked around for help, and found Vincent Hodgkiss and Marcus Potter. When they reached the Research Centre the revellers, or rescuers, were gone. The grass, the lab floor, the benches, were alive. Hundreds of newly-hatched chicks scuttled along the corridors, desperately cheeping. Ants swarmed over the coffee-making machine. There was a sound in the darkness of clucking, quacking and hissing. Christopher Cobb stood in front of his chaffinch cages, and held out his arms to the sky, as though summoning back the vanished singers. Tears stood in his eyes—Hodgkiss did not know whether he was mourning the creatures he knew, or the years of experimental work lost, or both. A brindled cat with a shaved belly went past, with a half-dead black mouse hanging from its jaws.

  “Some of this is bloody dangerous,” said Cobb. “God knows where to start. We’ll have to kill a lot of these—”

  The lights went out. The lights went out in the whole building, which seemed to give a sigh, and settle into blackness. Cobb said “Stay here. Try not to let anything out, or anyone in. I’ll get the fire brigade. Or someone. Don’t get bitten.”

  Vincent and Marcus, neither of whom was either an animal-lover or physically very competent, asked if they should try to put anything back.

  “No. Guard the door. Mind the rats. There was only one snake. I can’t see her, but she was harmless, a nice creature.”

  He went off.

  Vincent and Marcus sat down on the grass, by the door, side by side. They peered apprehensively into the gloom, and listened to the slithers and rustles and squeaks around them. There was a smell of soiled sawdust, and a smell of what Vincent thought was formaldehyde. He stared upwards. Above the courtyard, in the midsummer dark, hung a fine curl of new moon. He said

  “I did it all wrong. I should have been draconian. I should have moved them on, at the very beginning.”

  “Then they’d have won.”

  “But all this—this wreckage—”

  “If people want wreckage, it happens, somehow.”

  They sat in silence. A very large, very damaged cockerel, white, with a jagged crimson crest and tremulous wattles advanced towards them, and retreated. Its tailfeathers were draggled, but the really disgusting thing was its neck, which was plucked bare, and bright crimson, erect above the pouffe of its breast feathers. It came into the range of their vision, saw them, put its head on one side, staring with mad yellow eyes, and backed off, gobbling.

  “A non-aggressive male,” said Hodgkiss, gloomily.

  Marcus said that when they were in that state, it was very clear to see that they were related to dinosaurs. The beak and the crest, the scaly bits and the snaky bits. Interesting, he said. He seemed somehow less ill at ease, in the darkness, than Hodgkiss had expected. They didn’t try to look at each other, only sat side by side, looking at the grey grass and the vague shapes that scurried across it. Hodgkiss saw something make a movement between a lollop and a waddle. He smiled to himself.

  “Is that a duck or a rabbit?” he asked his beloved. He said “There are all sorts of people and creatures who fall between categories. Duck-rabbits. Cock-dinosaurs. Crowing hens.”

  He moved his hand, like a blind, questing creature, over the blades of dark grass, until his fingers met those long, delicate fingers he had watched for months. And in the dark, the fingers neither shrank, nor evaded. They touched, and gripped and held.

  “I’ve been dreaming about you,” said Marcus Potter’s light voice, calmly. “Good dreams. I think—we know in dreams—who we are—what we are—”

  “I think we are infinite shape-shifters—in dreams—” said Vincent Hodgkiss, taking a grip on the thin hand, which gripped back. Hodgkiss moved nearer, so that his substantial thigh lay alongside that thin one. He wanted to touch Marcus’s hair, but did not want to let go of the hand he had, and thought, this will do, for now. For now, this is enough, and more than I could have hoped.

  Wilkie was taking photographs of the fires and the dancers, helped by the TV crew who had been working on the Conference. Frederica, running messages between the wet ashes of the Long Royston show-bedrooms and the chaos of the university administration, saw a large, black-cloaked figure, bent low, running purposefully down the Long Royston drive, away from the building. She thought, let her go, and then thought of Gerard Wijnnobel’s face. She began to run herself, but Eva Wijnnobel had a very considerable start, and a surprising turn of speed. Frederica looked around her, and saw Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. She said, breathlessly,

  “She’s getting away.”

  “Who’s getting away?”

  “That woman. Lady W.”

  “Getting away?”

  “She was in it. In the march. She—I’m sure she—set, helped to set, the fires, those skoobs, in Long Royston.”

  “Skoobs?”

  “He asked us to look for her. To get her to come back.”

  “I’ll get my car. The police are guarding some of the gates, but there aren’t enough of them. They’ll let me through. We could catch up with her, and—well—talk her into coming back. You do know she’s mad?”

  “Well, that’s why. He’s been—extraordinary. It’s all—literally—falling down round him. We could help him. We could get her back.”

  “If you call that helping him,” said Luk Lysgaard-Peacock drily.

  By the time his little car swung out of the gate of Long Royston, there was no sign of Lady Wijnnobel. And then, some way along the road, Frederica saw a familiar white van. She said

  “That’s Elvet Gander. I haven’t seen him all night, he wasn’t there, that’s odd.”

  Two figures, one black, one shimmering and sparkling, stepped out into the road from behind a hedge, and waved down the van. It stopped. They got in. It turned, and went off, bouncing, up the road into the moorland.

  “Now what?”

  “I don’t know. Where are they going?”

  “We could guess. We could follow and make sure. Would you like a night-drive over the moors?”

  “Why not?” said Frederica.

  “Excuse all the snail-stuff rattling about,” said Luk. “I’ve not had much time, or inclination, to keep the car tidy.”

  “Not to worry,” said Frederica. Her spirits lifted as they drove away from the flaring chaos behind them.

  The white van drove up, and up, on to the high Moor road, followed, at a discreet but obvious distance, by Luk’s small blue Renault. If the driver of the van observed the followers, he neither accelerated nor deviated. There were in any case no turnings off the road which ran along the crest of the moorland. Frederica leaned forward anxiously. Luk told her to calm down.

  “I don’t see what you’re going to do.”

  “No. Nor do I.”

  In the event, the white van drew up at the gate of Dun Vale Hall. Someone got out—the headlights shone on Elvet Gander’s bald dome—unlocked the gate, and drove in. He then returned, and swung the gate closed. Luk had pulled up, some distance away. He imagined that Gander inclined his head, with ceremonious irony, before he vanished behind the gate.

  “Now what?”

  “Now we go back and tell the Vice-Chancellor where she’s gone.”

  “I’ve got a better idea. Now we go up to my cottage—which isn’t far—and telephone the University. And have something to eat—I’m starving. I don’t know about you.”

  Luk thought that taking another woman—any other woman, including this one, whom he alternately disliked and felt a kind of armed truce with—to Loderby—would in some way exorcise the painful memory of his—it now seemed to him—absurd wooing of Jacqueline. Frederica thought
, because it was the way her life seemed to go, and because she had dreamed it, that perhaps Luk intended to make love to her. These were the new days of sexual liberty, when love-making was more likely than not. Frederica also thought, for she had been there many times, that if this was a beginning, it was the beginning of an ending, that was the way it went. She thought she was sorry, because she had been interested in his lecture and his fierceness, and then gave a little snort of laughter, remembering the subject of the lecture.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “I was remembering your lecture.”

  “Hah.”

  “It was brilliant.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It should have been depressing, and was the opposite.”

  “Thank you.”

  They drew up in the dark, and Luk found his keys. He explained that he hadn’t used the cottage for some time, and put on some lights. He said he would telephone the University, found a bottle of wine, and poured Frederica a glass.

  “Make yourself at home,” he said vaguely, waving a welcoming hand. “Light some candles, it looks sad with the electric light.”

  He sat down by the telephone in the narrow hall, and began what was a long and patient attempt to get through to the beleaguered University. The lines were engaged, or down. He thought laterally, tried Vincent Hodgkiss without success. Behind him, he heard Frederica Potter going into the bathroom. He heard the lavatory flush. He heard her running down the stairs, and striding up and down in his kitchen and study. He wondered if she would or wouldn’t, did or didn’t. She seemed rather pleased with herself. Cocky. She would do as she pleased. Did he want to be what would please her? He got through to a policeman on a walkie-talkie on the campus, and relayed the message that Lady Wijnnobel had been seen going into Dun Vale Hall. With Elvet Gander the psychoanalyst. And the singer, Paul Ottokar. Yes, he thought that was all he had to say.

  Frederica had done nothing feminine to make things comfortable, except, as instructed, to light candles and put out the electric lights. She was prowling up and down, picking things up, the skull, the shells, the feathers, putting them back where they had been arranged. She said

  “It’s like a bower-bird’s bower. I’m sorry, that just came to mind. I love the peacock feathers and honesty in the jar on the turning of the stair. They are such very beautiful things.”

  “Unlucky,” said Luk.

  “You are the one who is against astrology—and superstition—and all that. Peacock feathers are completely improbable, completely beautiful things. I heard what you had to say about Darwin feeling sick every time he saw one. I don’t think even you can think up a useful evolutionary explanation for all those colours, and that sheen, and hundreds of eyes. I’ve seen them put them up in great fans, Crowe had some. They creak, and they quiver, and up they go, and they rustle ...” She laughed. “They’re absurd, and breath-taking. Every time.”

  Luk looked at her, thin and bony and energetic, with candle-light in her tangle of red hair. He said

  “You are covered with bits of burned stuff, and your face looks as though you’ve pushed it in a bonfire. Do you want a bath?”

  “Have you got hot water?”

  “Of course I have. A gas geyser, instant hot water, I’ll light it. I’ll get you a towel. And then, I’ll make you a meal. It won’t be much—my emergency rations—but it feels like a week since I last had food.”

  “Me too.”

  She was wearing a smart, tight party-dress, shot brown silk. It was torn at the neck, water-stained and smoke-stained.

  “I could lend you a dressing-gown. This is like a bad film.”

  “It is, isn’t it? That’s fun, isn’t it?”

  Her uncertainty made him confident.

  “Oh yes. Go and have your bath.”

  He found plastic packs of pumpernickel, a tin of pressed ham, a jar of olives, a tin of black cherries. He found several bottles of wine, and busied himself with corkscrews and tin-openers. He heard the sounds of female flesh in water, of the rattle of his geyser, of the choked gurgle of his primitive drainage. She came down damply, in his grey dressing-gown, her hair trailing wetly over her shoulders, her face thinner, more ordinary, more real without its spiky mascara and spangled eyeshadow.

  “I had to wash my hair. It was full of horrible things.”

  “I could rub it for you.”

  “I did my best. Thank you. It’ll dry out.”

  She ate voraciously, hunched in an arm-chair, and would have eaten more, if there had been any. He remembered his store of bitter chocolate and Kendal Mint Cake, for his snail expeditions, and broke off several pieces for both of them. He filled her glass frequently, and she drank recklessly, which would have been a good sign if he had been sure what he wanted, or how he wanted it, he thought confusedly, having drunk quite a lot himself.

  He said, “Well?”

  Frederica thought, that is the end of the wooing, and the beginning of the sex, and the end of the, the end of the, the end.

  The sex was good, despite the wine. Luk was aggressive, successful, and then (reasonably) grateful. Frederica liked him. She liked the excitement of his unknown, new, movements and smell. She liked his hair and his beard. She felt sad. She said, tentatively, her mouth close to his ear, “I dreamed about you.”

  Luk kissed her mouth. “It couldn’t have been anything good,” he said.

  She did not answer.

  They slept entangled, as though their bodies belonged together. In the morning they were formal and cautious, with that complicated courtesy adult humans use to show they have not been using another human for selfish purposes. There was no milk and no butter, so they had black coffee and more pumpernickel.

  Frederica spoke sagely of the felling of Theobald Eichenbaum. She said she had read the pamphlet, and it was of course distasteful, but she felt, many people might feel, there but for the grace of God ...

  Luk said he didn’t believe in God, or his grace, and things looked different if you were a European, people had had to make difficult choices, and other people remembered. He said his father had been one of the few Danes who had really fought in the Resistance. He had trained with the British Army and gone back—had been dropped by parachute—with the Commandos. He wasn’t very tolerant of people who had accommodated themselves—and then claimed that they hadn’t.

  “Was that how you came to be half-English?”

  “Not exactly. He met my mother when they were both Christian missionaries in Ethiopia. That was why he came back here.”

  “Are they still alive?”

  “Oh, yes. Still very Christian. I didn’t take that job in Copenhagen because I can’t cope with all that at close quarters.”

  He was not looking at her. It was not lovers beginning to share their pasts. She thought he was—fighting some other battle, involved in some other snarl. And he was not interested in her, in Frederica, he had asked nothing about John Ottokar, and nothing ... nothing ...

  “Wijnnobel is European. He knew Tinbergen, who spent the war in a concentration camp, and refused to be let out as a privilege. Pinsky lost much of his family in the death-camps. They don’t forgive, even if they choose to forget.”

  “Eichenbaum was a prisoner. He paid.”

  “He was a prisoner of the Russians. Because he was in the German army, in the end. There’s paying, and paying.”

  They drove back again, after breakfast. Luk took Frederica to the door of her parents’ house. He said he had better go and help with the damage-assessment. He kissed her very gently and abstractedly. He said

  “Thank you.”

  Thank you is the end, thought Frederica, going into the house. Thank you. Thank you for the use of your body. Thank you very much.

  Vincent Hodgkiss and Marcus Potter ate breakfast in Vincent’s flat, and could not stop smiling. Vincent said once “You’re not sorry?” and Marcus said “You know very well I’m not.”

  The Vice-Chancellor appeared at the Academic B
oard with heavily bandaged hands. He gave a clear, unemotional summing-up of the damage, financial and material. He said errors had been made, not least by himself, and that matters were now, to a large extent, in the hands of the police. Abraham Calder-Fluss said he wished it to be on record that the Conference had—up to the final incursion from outside—been highly successful. This must not be forgotten.

  The Professor of Sociology said that, in view of the considerable expense of repairing the buildings, and the very strong feelings of the student body, it would be wise to reconsider the preparatory year of maths and languages. It was anomalous in British education. It was creating ill-will. It should, in his view, be scrapped. A strand of cultural studies could then be offered across the board ...

  Lyon Bowman said “I see our student representatives are not with us.”

  Calder-Fluss said “I noticed the film people recording some of the—events. Whilst it can certainly be argued that such film will be useful to the police in their enquiries, there were certain unfortunate moments—certain matters—which I hope they can be persuaded not to make public.”

  Wilkie said “We’ve got her on film. Stomping along in a black cloak with a great rod, and waving them on.”

  “You can’t use that,” said Frederica.

  “It’s a newsman’s dream.”

  “You’re not a newsman. You’ll kill him.”

  “He got it all wrong.”

  “They got it all right.”

  “It was a campaign, it was planned, there was no good outcome. They’ve all buggered off, caravans and everything. Struck camp. Buses-full, going back down the A1.”

  “They’ll boil up somewhere else. Wilkie, please don’t put her on the telly. He—it was right of him to—let her do her own thing. But he shouldn’t have to—be punished for it.”