A Whistling Woman (24 page)

He said “I feel like turning cartwheels, I feel like flinging open the window and screaming into the night—she will, she will, and there will be a
child
—I can't tell you how
wonderful
such a child will be, is—”

He said “Look, you'd better sit down on the bed, and have a sip of brandy. Oh, Jacqueline, I do want you to be happy.”

“And I do want you to be.”

“I know. And we can both make—him or her—happy—”

No image of skin or hair or smile crossed Jacqueline's mind. Busy cells. Jelly fingers. Bulging eye-sockets.

Jacqueline said to Marcus, sitting next to him at the Non-Maths Group, “I think I am going to marry Luk.”

Vincent Hodgkiss, sitting behind them, his nose in a book, looked up with interest.

“Wonderful,” said Marcus. “It's what everyone always hoped would happen.”

“Is it?”

“Well, you know, people talked ...”

“They talked?”

“People do talk,” Marcus said vaguely. Hodgkiss thought, no one can be as innocent as Marcus Potter looks. She wanted badly to know what
he
thinks. And he chooses a nice common noun, very vague, “people,” “everyone.” And stares over her shoulder. He watched Jacqueline give herself a little shake, like a dog in the rain. He watched her, at the end of the session, which was on computer programming, walk away with Luk himself. Luk's arm was over her shoulder. A first. Hodgkiss said to Marcus “Do you know anything about Alan Turing's ideas about what mathematical logic
was
?”

“I know about his early machines. Why?”

“I'm writing on Wittgenstein's lectures on mathematical logic in 1939. Turing attended a large number. They developed into arguments between the two. So much that Wittgenstein once refused to teach at all because Turing wasn't there. Odd. Two opposed kinds of genius.”

“What was Wittgenstein saying?”

“I'll tell you. Coffee?”
Luk and Jacqueline began to discuss arrangements. They sat in Luk's tiny cheerful room, and discussed whether to buy a house, or rent a university apartment, when to marry, when to tell Jacqueline's family. Luk described his parents. His father was a Lutheran pastor, with whom he had quarrelled because of his own lack of religious beliefs.

“He would want me to be married in church.”

“I have always gone to church. Then I stopped.”

“You don't want a church wedding? I don't think I could bring myself to go through one of those. Even if I told myself over and over that meaningless words hurt no one.”

“I always thought I wanted—I ought to want—I did want—a proper wedding-day. But it'd be a bit ludicrous anyway, given—”

She touched her belly.

“So, no church wedding. Do we ask anyone, or no one, have a party, or be very private, present them all with a
fait accompli
?”

“My mother would mind that
horribly
.”

“I should meet her, perhaps—” said Luk.

Marriage involved strings of unknown, unrelated persons, who were nevertheless related to the splitting and multiplying cells, to him, or to her.

Jacqueline said

“Could we watch the television? There's this new programme with Marcus's sister, Frederica Potter. The last one was really good. They mix cartoon creatures with real ideas. They talked about mirrors ...”

It was in this way that Frederica's uneasy ribaldry about Free Women, the mock kitchen, the gynaecological
batterie de cuisine,
the hen-party, the
ka fee-klatsch,
the brightly intimate discussion of the Pill, of abortion, of males, of the monthly wait for the drops of blood on white cloth invaded Luk and Jacqueline's life. Jacqueline laughed sardonically, from time to time. Luk felt her relax, as she had not been relaxed during their discussion of their wedding. She laughed a great deal—too much—at Julia Corbett's dismissal of the floating veiling. A kind of ancient prudery—a heritage from his rejected father—came over Luk. He looked at Jacqueline's smiles and was overcome with an irrational hatred for that bouncing and insensitive person, Frederica Potter. Her face filled the screen, her painted eyes, her falsely innocent hair-band, her knowing, conniving grin. He stood up, instinctively, to turn her off. To repel the invader.

“Don't,” said Jacqueline. “It's witty. It hasn't been done before. Don't you like it?”

“No. I think it's nasty and cheap and vulgar.”

“That's because you're a man watching women talking the way women talk.”
The three women were solemnly passing the Tupperware bowls from hand to hand.

“It's hysterical,” said Jacqueline. “I've never seen anything like it.”

“Self-satisfied bitch,” said Luk.

“What?”

“I don't like her. I don't know why.”

“Lots of people don't,” said Jacqueline. “I should think by now hundreds of thousands of people don't. She puts people's hackles up. They like to dislike her. She'll be a success.”

“What a fate,” said Luk, missing the right note of mock-scorn.

Jacqueline did not tell Bowman she was thinking of getting married. He came to her with a job advertisement for a post in Edinburgh, and asked if she would be interested in applying. She bent her head over her bench, and thanked him, and said she would think about it.

“The voltage clamp works?”

“It does now. I had to tinker and fiddle. It does now.”

“You're tenacious.”

“I told you.”

“Keep at it, girl. Keep at it.”
There had been some trouble with the pregnancy test. One had been inconclusive, and a second specimen had been collected, and sent away. The second test result came to the University Health Service, who sent it through to Jacqueline in an inter-departmental envelope that she managed to rescue from the Departmental Secretary.

It was positive. She was quite certainly pregnant.

She felt an immediate urge to go to the lavatory. Her pelvis hurt, her bladder hurt, her body was in turmoil.

Her knickers had a very faint, ruddy brown streak.

And then the blood came. A small, manageable, series of gouts, and—she looked to see—a kind of jelly bundle, with threads, which could have been a plug, or womb-lining. She could not see any sign of the hooked creature which had held on briefly, and let go. Another gout, another. She sat in the lavatory, and wept. She sat for a long time, and wept a great deal. Blood and tears poured out of her. She was appalled by her body, which shook, and trembled, by the sense that emotion was a bodily, unnameable, unmanageable
thing
. She could not call it grief. Or mourning, or anger, or fear.

When she came out, she told the Departmental Secretary that she felt ill and was going home for the rest of the day.

“You look dreadful.”

Bowman, passing, took a look at her puffed, flushed face and said he could confirm that, she looked dreadful.

“Anything I can do?”

“No. Well. If you—if someone—could measure how much tampered carrot the snails in the second row of boxes have or haven't eaten—and the potato—it should be done at 5:00. More or less.”

“I'll see to it. Don't cry, sweetie. It almost certainly isn't worth it.”
Jacqueline went to the remote floor of the Evolution Tower where Luk had his office. He was with a student, whom he dismissed immediately on seeing Jacqueline's desperate face.

“Come in, my love. Sit down. What can have happened?”

She stood with her back to the door. Her nails bit into her clenched hands. Her eyes were screwed up, behind her glasses, and looked mean.

“I've come to say. It was all a mistake. There isn't. I wasn't. I'm
not,
anyway, pregnant. Not any more, if I ever was.”

“Please sit down. It needn't change anything. We can still get married, and ...”

“No. I came to say, I can't. I don't want to get married. I can't. I want to want to get married, but I don't.
It was all a mistake.
”

Tears ran down her face. Her mouth worked.

“You're upset. You must wait—you must calm down—”

He tried to put his arms round the rigid, hunched shoulders. She twisted violently, and pushed him away.

“No, no. We've always understood each other. You know I mean what I say. You must let me know what I want—and I do know.”

“Why?”

“There doesn't have to be a reason. As long as I know. And I know.”

He tried again to touch her, and she whirled round, and ran, hard, down the corridor, into the lift. The blood was hot, and wet. She went home, and went to bed.

Chapter 12

Electric waves travel through space and disperse human faces through the atmosphere, concentrating the image, you might almost say the engram, again, in boxes, through tubes, glimmering and shimmering in the grey out of nowhere, as though the disembodied lurk in waiting in every cupboard, over every rooftop, perched on forked aerials, driving in the wind, eddying in breezes cutting through clouds, in sunlight, and moonlight, and starlight. So Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, sitting down in his rooms in Long Royston to consider the wreckage of his hopes, pressed an idle button and saw Frederica Potter's bony face speed towards him out of a spinning point. She smiled knowingly at him, and he glowered back at her. He told himself he was not immediately turning her off again because he was interested in Hodder Pinsky, who was coming to Wijnnobel's Conference. In fact, he found her a useful focus for his fury.

Like all television watchers, he saw the faces first and the ideas as functions of the faces. An
aggressive
female, an insistent voice, too long a neck, a mistaken coquettish tilt to the chin. The cartoons included an image of Alice as bird-serpent, peering into the birdsnest. Pinsky's glasses made him look shifty and furtive.

Luk didn't like the subject of the discussion, either. He didn't like, and never used, the word “creativity” himself. He considered the mental operations discussed by psychologists under that heading as hopelessly imprecise. The poetic evocations of Gander struck him as hopelessly vapid and pretentious. “None of you are really talking about
anything,
” he told them, scornfully, enjoying disliking them.

The Picasso cock-hen-woman he thought was a monstrosity. And then Pinsky embarked on the story of Freud and the young man who was waiting anxiously to hear that his girl-friend was bleeding, and Luk shivered with disgust at the coincidence, and distaste for the subject matter. He thought of his non-child, for whom he was oddly in mourning, and felt that it was very vulgar of Frederica Potter to keep on harping on menstruation, and pregnancy, in this technical way in public. He was simply repelled by the idea that
Through the Looking-Glass
appeared to be connected in an arcane way to his own life. He did not like Jungian ideas of synchronicity, or ethereal messaging. He was a rational man. He was a fanatically rational man.

His dislike of the word “creative” as applied to human beings had in fact religious roots. He had been thinking of his parents over the last few days, because of his approaching marriage, because of the need to organise a wedding. He had been thinking of them also as a geneticist, because the child he had so clearly imagined would have had their genes, which would have been combined with those of Jacqueline's pleasant parents to make someone quite new. They were about to be ancestors and now were not.

He had been remembering his religious upbringing in Langeland. His father had told him as a child that God had created the world, and that God would, in his own good time, destroy the world. Toger Lysgaard was a follower of Grundtvig, bard, theologian, and world historian. Grundtvig's Christianity was intricately woven into his resuscitation of Norse mythology. “Highest Odin, White Christ,” Grundtvig wrote.

He had asked his father, once, as a little boy “Why is there something, and not nothing?”

His father had replied that the question showed that the boy had a truly religious soul. The answer was, that there was something because the Lord had created it, and had seen that His work was good. And that the Lord maintained it, at every moment, through His loving care, upholding it.

As a boy, Luk had been reasonably devout. Jesus Christ had been his friend, a better friend than any human one. He had tried to be good, and had not been prevented from being curious. As an adolescent he had come to find keeping up his belief strenuous and somehow “thin.” One day, walking amongst trees in a wood, in sunlight, he had had an intense flash of vision, which because of his education he compared to the Pauline flash on the road to Damascus. Except that what he saw—what was revealed by the brilliance of the ordinary light—was that the stories they had told him were stories and were not true. And when he saw that, suddenly everything was differently real, shining with clarity, with particularity, and with a mystery which was to be a calling. He saw flies and worms, leaves and roots transfigured because they were not transfigured, they were what they were. He thought of his religious faith as a horny lens over his eyes which were now washed clean.

His experience was not unusual. But one thing it had in common with the religious conversion of which it was mirror-twin was a tendency to dogmatism, to extremes. His new world was washed clean of human stories. With human stories went other sets of mind, not necessarily connected. He particularly loathed—with a religious intensity—scientific ideas about the “anthropic principle” which claimed that the Universe somehow spread out from the infinitely large to the infinitely small on a scale of which the human body and brain just happened to be the centre. He also did not like, very much, most works of art and most non-religious human stories. He read neither novels nor histories. His time-scale was evolutionary, the forms of his imagination were elastic but always factual. He noted, scientifically, that biologists shared his fiercely defended pragmatic agnosticism. Physicists, for some reason, found it easier to construct or retain beliefs.

He found Frederica's Picasso vase-cock-hen, with its painted eye on its dead clay spout, both ludicrous and faintly obscene. It was an artefact, a form of the non-existent, of nothing. Forms of what was real were always more interesting. He found Frederica ludicrous, too. She was wasting her life. He enjoyed the intensity of his dislike of her. It relieved his grief, and was energising. He was a man who appeared gentler and kinder than he was. Jacqueline's rejection had cast him into some other compartment of himself, where he found a sardonic cynic.

Anger gave him restless energy. He packed a bag, and got out his car, and drove in the dark out into the moorland, back to Gash Fell. He drove through dark pinewoods, and out on to the mountainside where his small house sat, cold and dark. He went in, lit an oil-lamp, and took a torch. His own shadow loomed at him, a bearded demon reaching over white walls and ceiling. He lit stoves, and considered his bower-decorations. He thought he would sweep them all away, in a rite of renunciation, pile them together, skull and shell, burn them and stamp on them.

Then he thought that the objects were objects, and had done nothing. They were what they had been before, and would continue to be. So he disturbed his aesthetic arrangements, piled everything together differently, heaped anyhow. He took the lacquered vase of peacock feathers and honesty out on to the terrace. He had a foolish and satisfying image of himself ripping them apart, the iridescent eyes, the glimmering moony windows, unhooking the hooks and eyes he had so lovingly joined. And throwing them out into the cold wind that was starting up, to whisk around the mountainside, green and gold and pearly, the shreds of his hopes. What was it Jacqueline had said? “I was always told it was unlucky to have peacock feathers in the house.” Nonsense, superstition, rubbish. The feathers had disgusted Darwin and were lovely. They were male excess, and had been rejected. There was still no clear explanation of
why
the bird indulged in such fantastic, costly display.

He thought of the quadrilateral of dividing cells in a sexually engendered embryo, and thought, not for the first time, that the whole business of sex could be argued to be expensive and wasteful. Anything that reproduced itself parthenogenetically could produce twice as many direct descendants for half the energy cost of meiosis and sexual division. The maths was more complicated than that. He thought of his slug experiments, on
Arion ater
and
Arion rufus
which seemed to be proving that populations above a certain altitude reproduced themselves parthenogenetically, were genetically identical, and lived harmoniously. Whereas those who lived in warmer—possibly more disparate—environments, were both male and female, and fought to the death, or consumed each other cannibalistically. Maybe the advantages of sex were to do with environmental variety, or difficulty? To do with dispersal? It came to him that he would write his paper for Wijnnobel's conference on something like “The Cost of Sex and the Redundant Male.” It would amuse him, and be interesting, and could encompass various thoughts he'd been having about kin selection, selfishness, and altruism. Male and female created he them, he thought with self-induced irony, firing himself. Two by two. There are all sorts of other ways of doing it. Microscopic parasitic males, buds, hermaphrodites. He looked at the honesty.
Judaspenge,
Judas money. A window on nothing. An empty seed-pod. Contaminated with grandiose human stories. An empty seed-pod is an empty seed-pod. Sex is sex. Is dispersal, is aggression, is (almost) endlessly diverse and interesting.

He stood in the dark, on his cold terrace, with his jacket-collar up against the wind. He listened to the silence, and the small sounds in the silence, branches, rustlings, hurrying feet, a faint cry of a creature cut off. He had a sense of his house sailing like an ark on a waste of dark water, out into space. The sky was full of stars.