A Whistling Woman (20 page)

Penny Komuves said they were hideous. She said she liked traditional earthenware and brilliant Polish enamel. She said the earth would be piled up with these semi-indestructible shells, peeling and floating. That the Pacific Ocean was bobbing with plastic cups. That they were inhuman.

Frederica said they were beautiful and empty. They reminded her of rooms with blinds. Of female archetypes. Containers. Grails. Empty until filled. The question was with what.

Penny Komuves said they were sterile. And reminded her of Dutch caps. Or childhood buckets and spades. But these are not toys, said Penny Komuves.

Little girls, said Julia, are expected to play with plastic cups and sand and water, and make cakes and tarts and puddings. Boys make bridges and buildings.

Imaginary cakes, said Frederica, are so much more enticing than real ones. The ghosts of cakes. These are ghost-bowls.

It was odd, she observed finally, thinking of kitchens and things, that female characters in Victorian fiction are wise, and attractive, and human as little girls, and become monsters, demons, or victims, when they become women. Jane Eyre and Maggie are
diminished
by womanhood. The Queen of Hearts shouts Off with her head, the Duchess cringes, and Alice, “loudly and decidedly,” says “Nonsense.” Carroll said he pictured the Queen of Hearts as “a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury.” The Cook and the Duchess are no better, and the Looking-Glass Queens are seriously defective. Perhaps we shouldn't grow up.

The three women stared at the three blank, bland containers. Do we want to live on our own? Frederica asked the others. More and more of us do. What sort of creatures would we be if we were independent, if marriage didn't come into it, if men were optional? Julia said, we wouldn't be like the great virginal heroines of the last century. Florence Nightingale, Emily Davies. We might live as Mary Wollstonecraft wanted us to, in separate establishments, lovingly visiting chosen males, in charge of our own space, our own time. Penny Komuves said that recent scientific research appeared to prove that ice applied to the ovaries could in certain conditions produce parthenogenesis. Then, she said, we wouldn't need them at all, we could
really
choose. What would we choose?

Frederica tapped the Tupperware and produced a hollow rattle. We'd need servants. If we had children. What would
they
choose. You can't labour-save
all
labour.

Penny said: if we were really free, men would be different.

Like what? said Julia.

Softer. Kinder. More
fluid
. I don't know.

The programme ended with the three, faintly baffled, faintly ribald faces, and a nervous gust of laughter.

Frederica thought, seeing them later, that they were all girl-women. It was in the air, at the time. Penny Komuves had a small, square, slightly puppy-like face, with large dark eyes under a Quant schoolgirl fringe and bob. Julia Corbett, a generation older, had delicate crowsfeet at the corners of her luminous eyes, and a knot of fading red hair, skewered through with enamelled silver pins. She wore a large number of pretty silver rings and bracelets, and a necklace of silver and enamel hearts and flowers. But her dress was girlish—a pale flame-coloured shift, tied prettily under the breasts and cut above the knee. Her make-up was elaborate and faintly doll-like—spiky black lashes, domed cream and frosted blue eyelids, sugar-pink pale lips, and a dab of blusher on the elegant cheek-bones. Penny Komuves was in the wine-dark mode, with blackish lips, grape and silver eyelids, a white mask of a pugnacious face. She wore a skinny jumper under something resembling the gym-slip of Frederica's school-days, pointed little breasts at the lower edge of a pinafore yoke. Frederica herself wore a semi-transparent indigo shirt with a severe white collar and cuffs—also imitation schoolgirl, also half provocative—and was experimenting with an Alice band (indigo) in the coppery hair she was growing out. Below the shirt, she had a governessy grey long skirt, in poplin, a wide black elastic belt, and little, heeled boots. There were equal elements of dressing-up, parody (of what?) and mask. The carefully made-up faces appeared to hide, not reveal, the thoughts behind them. The frequent laughter was a little eerie. Wilkie said he was pleased. He would get letters of complaint, he said. Frederica said she couldn't see why. Indecency, said Wilkie. Drops of blood and iced ovaries, not nice. He was right, to Frederica's surprise. The audience grew.

Chapter 10

What do women want?
Frederica at seventeen would never have believed that she could want celibacy. Since John Ottokar's departure for Calverley she had slept alone. Her most intense physical pleasure had been to take her tough, angular son in her angular arms, and smell his instantly recognisable hair and the living warmth of his skin. The discussion of sex on
Through the Looking-Glass
had caused her to wonder, in the abstract, why she didn't think about it more, or thought about it—she was an honest woman—with a new edge of apprehension. The body wants to be pregnant, she had asserted, and so it did. She had caught her body looking at Wilkie, wondering if he would “do,” considering his incipient portliness critically and his intelligent face with affection. But Wilkie liked young girls. They waited for him, in mini-skirts with swinging hair, at the end of filming. They rode off behind him on his Lambretta, their arms clasped round his waist as hers had been on their one motor-bike journey, in 1953. It seemed like yesterday, and was fifteen years ago. She was led to remember the days of
Astraea,
and her forcedly chaste, remote desire for Alexander Wedderburn. This was reinforced by an invitation to hear Flora Robson play Elizabeth I at the National Portrait Gallery. The memory led her to invite Alexander and Daniel to come with her.

On the day before the reading, John Ottokar telephoned from Calverley. He was coming down for the weekend, would she be there, he wanted her. The telephone was suddenly full of sex. Leo was away at his father's. John is coming, said Frederica to Agatha. Because Agatha never confided in Frederica about her own personal life, or problems—beyond Saskia's education, or her hopes of promotion, or her impatience with the Permanent Secretary—that is, because Agatha never spoke to Frederica about her sex life, or even said if she had one, Frederica had taken on an air of unnatural discretion with Agatha. John had once said, in a moment of bitterness “I suppose you discuss me—” and Frederica had said, no, as a matter of fact, we don't. She had added, to reassure him, “Agatha doesn't talk like that, you can imagine, if you think about it.” And John had laughed.

So he came, and the small flat was full of heat, and tension, and pleasure, and tension, and concentration on usual, and unusual, suddenly reactivated bits of two rediscovered bodies, stroked, and dampened, and joined, and sucked apart, and Frederica had the usual feeling—this is the
real thing
—and the new, niggling feeling: “This is the
usual
feeling.” Now I feel this is the real thing. And outside all this, I am something else, someone else, I walk alone.

“What are we going to do?” asked John Ottokar. “We can't live apart like this, it tears you up.”

And Frederica looked at the beloved head—certainly beloved—on the pillow—and did not know what to answer. For she remembered wanting
a beloved head,
in the abstract, in the way in which Julia Corbett had said they had all wanted the froth of veiling, the triumphal progress, the virginal white dress over hidden flesh.

And she did not know what to answer, because she saw that she was happy to live apart, to have times of sex like this, naked, total, fierce times, and times completely without it. And John was unhappy, she thought with unjust malevolence, not because their two heads were not side by side all night every night, but because she evaded him, because he sensed there was more of her when he wasn't there.

They had a minor quarrel over Flora Robson and Elizabeth I. John said he was there for so little time, she didn't need to go. Frederica said she wanted to go. John said, you just want to see those people, Alexander whatsit, Daniel. Frederica said, don't be silly, I want to see
Elizabeth
. A Tudor tyrant, said John. You can see her any day.

Don't,
said Frederica.
Don't
make pointless jealous noises about nothing.
Don't
try and shut me in one room. If we do that to each other, it's the beginning of the end.

Isn't it anyway?

No. You know there's only you. You know there's no one else.

He came with her to the Gallery. He kissed her on parting, and made a beautiful, possessive sweep of his sure hand, down her spine and round her bottom, claiming her as he let her go. She felt briefly weak, and gave herself a little shake, and went in to see Elizabeth.

“Creativity,” the third pilot, the last before Christmas, was Wilkie's idea. Hodder Pinsky, the cognitive psychologist from La Jolla, already invited to Gerard Wijnnobel's conference, was giving a paper in Oxford on “Order from Noise: the construction of meaning.” It would be a good plan, Wilkie said, to invite him with Elvet Gander, the psychoanalyst. “Is the unconscious mind a system of circuitry and binary gates?” said Wilkie, “or is it the Id, a turbulent beast raging in the dark?”

Frederica said she was afraid of Elvet Gander. She said she had seen him in action, like an orator, at the trial of
Babbletower
. His voice throbs, said Frederica. He radiates self-satisfaction. She did not say he was trying to analyse the Ottokars, and that for this reason she herself was part of his mental life. Wilkie said both scientists were
prima donnas,
both had style, they were natural for Television. Fire and Ice, you'll see, he told her. You will rise to the occasion.
The glass box for this programme had been rhythmically divided into ghostly cells, which could be seen, on closer examination, to be the plastic wells of egg-boxes. Behind the three chairs at the table Tenniel's Humpty Dumpty sat precariously on his gridded wall. There were eggs on the table, and cartoon eggs-with-legs ran across the foreground, pursued in an endless circle by cartoon chickens and cartoon disembodied eyes behind spectacles, observing which might come first. There were also modern versions of the slithy tove—something like badgers, something like lizards, something like corkscrews—and the mome raths—flying green pigs. There were ostrich eggs and Fabergé-decorated eggs and neat drawers of egg-collectors' eggs.

The subject of discussion—agreed in advance by both speakers—was Freud.

The object was a Picasso ceramic. It was not a real one, but a good copy. The studio did not run to the insurance, even in those days, of a real Picasso.
Elvet Gander looked, with his high bald crown and his long marbly face, like another variation on the egg theme. The heavy studio make-up accentuated this pallid look, and also the deep oval lids over his deep-set eyes. He had two characteristic expressions—a brooding stillness, with the lids dropped, and a flashing mesmeric attention when he raised them, and his dark eyes glittered. He was mobile and labile, he gestured with his long fingers, he shrugged and hunched his shoulders, he pursed his big lips, or stretched them in an alarming grin. He was wearing a flowing shirt in tie-dyed blue Indian cotton, embroidered with little stellar mandalas of mirror-glass, and round his neck a silver crescent moon on a leather thong.

Hodder Pinsky was tall, white-gold, and extravagantly symmetrical, Frederica immediately thought, taking his large hand in the Hospitality Room. His hair was a Nordic blond, his face chiselled, his cheek-bones perfect, his long mouth exactly held between control and relaxation. His fingernails were square and elegant. He wore a charcoal flannel suit, a sky-blue shirt, and a tie patterned with a design of reversible cubes, in black and white. His eyes were invisible, because he wore glasses—heavy-framed—with very thick blue lenses. He explained—it was almost the first thing he said—that he wore the glasses not as an affectation, but because he was “purblind, that is, I can see my computer print-out, I can read, but you are an elegant blur.” His voice was American, East Coast, easy. He watched them—Wilkie, Frederica, Gander—with parts of his body that were not his eyes.

On air, Frederica asked them both to say what they thought creativity was.

Pinsky gave a definition in scientific terms. Creativity was the generation of new ideas, new explanations. He was, he said, in agreement with Noam Chomsky that the human mind is born, to use a metaphor,
wired
to construct grammar, and other forms of thought, as beavers are born wired to make dams, or birds to make nests. A human child can make endless new sentences it has never heard before, precisely because it is physiologically formed and ordered to be able to do so. A creative person makes a new idea as a child makes a new sentence. Some are more useful, or more surprising, than others. Some make previously unsuspected connections between things in the world. Part of his own work was to devise computer programmes, and laboratory experiments, to study the thought processes by which new ideas might be generated. To simulate thought. To examine choice.
Gander said that scientists always took scientific discoveries as their paradigm of creativity. Whereas the great work of art—at once unique and universal, at once open to explanation and resistant to categorisation—showed us the true extent of human powers. You would never, he said, make a laboratory programme that would “explain”
King Lear,
you would never simulate in a laboratory the sublime pathos of Beethoven, or the perfect balance of mathematical precision and cosmic understanding in Piero della Francesca's
Baptism of Christ
.

Pinsky said Gander had to explain not only how he recognised “sublime pathos” but what it was, and how people came to agree that they had identified it.
Gander said the great work of art was a raid by the intrepid conscious mind on the inchoate seething mass of the undifferentiated unconscious. The unconscious, Freud has shown, is without any sense of time or space. Its energy is the energy of the pleasure principle, desire, not reality. The great artist descends like Orpheus into the abyss, embraces the demons of his unspeakable desires and fears—of all our unspeakable desires and fears—and returns them to consciousness where he makes an image of them which allows them to be contemplated steadily. So Sophocles went and stared at the Oedipus—lascivious and murderous—who inhabits all infants—and brought back the knowledge of it, so that we might experience the horror as beauty and order. So Shakespeare went with Hamlet, to look at the roots of fratricide, patricide, incest and inhibition—and even deeper, at the desire of all life
to return to inertia,
the secret that the life instincts are all indifferently
death instincts
—and clambered up from amongst the dark roots of time and space to the ordered organic world, to make iambic pentameters which contained the terror—sluggish or stabbing—in the rhythms of time and space, of the conscious mind.

I am a Freudian, not a Jungian, said Elvet Gander. But I have recently come to the conclusion that the Master's religious scepticism was a little limiting. I think Jung may be right in seeing the great work of art as a mandala, a formal design which enables us to contemplate truth.

Pinsky, smiling whitely, said his ambitions were more mundane. But he did believe that cognitive psychology—as opposed to psychoanalysis—which, if Dr. Gander would forgive him, was itself a poem, used language with poetic imprecision and resonance—he did believe cognitive psychology might have something eventually to say about the geometries of mandalas and indeed the regularities and irregularities of iambic pentameters. He was interested in the multifarious, simultaneous operations of the mind, in the way consciousness pictured and ordered the patterns it worked with.

There is, he said, an interesting computer programme called
Pandaemonium,
which is psychologists' everyday comic poetry, not sublime, though it takes its name, I suppose, from the industrious underworld of
Paradise Lost
. This programme has a hierarchy of mechanical demons who are devised, or designed (by us, their masters), to recognise patterns in rushes of random information, to create order from noise. It depends on what we call “parallel processing.” There are the “data demons” who recognise images, and shout. There are the computational demons who recognise clusters of recognised images, and shout. There are the cognitive demons who represent possible patterns, and collect the computed shouts. And there is the “decision demon” who identifies the stimuli by the loudest shouting. The system can learn. It can identify printed letters, and morse code. It may one day understand what is so—unrepeatable—about
Hamlet,
or Beethoven's
Third
.
It will hardly save lives, or sanity, said Gander.

It may organise cities and communities of scientists to make justice—and art—said Pinsky. It may make us wiser about what we are. It may teach us not to misdescribe ourselves. I am not sure that your Freudian unconscious—however beautiful your poetry—exists. I think it is a reification of a fear, or a wish.

Frederica directed the conversation towards Sigmund Freud, whose bearded, bespectacled face, dark-eyed, wise, apprehensive and somehow uncertain, she thought, which was the best thing about it, filled the screen briefly, replacing Humpty Dumpty.
Gander spoke of Freud in much the same terms as he had spoken of Freud's understanding of Oedipus and Hamlet. He used the image of the dauntless hero, his self-analysis an unprecedented feat of discovery. He said the Master had changed the whole cultural world of his time, had changed the way everyone saw their bodies, their minds, their desires and their fears.

Had changed the imagery of daily life, said Frederica. Had changed the form of advertisements, which had gone through being conscious attempts to play on unconscious sexual metaphors and were now blatantly ironic about them.

Gander looked a little baffled. The camera rested on Pinsky's blue lenses. Frederica wondered if he saw advertisements.
Pinsky said he felt that Freud's romantic description of the unconscious mind had detracted from various very useful practical explorations of its workings. For we must all be aware that we lived in a stream of thoughts and observations and stimuli, only a very few of which could be ordered or used at any one time. It was like travelling in the tail of a comet, which was made up of a battering turmoil of lumps of ice and stone and flares of gas. One of the great mysteries of the mind was the storage of memory. Things we have known, and lost, but know we can find again. A name, an event. Why do we remember one thing more than another. How? What is the mechanism?