A Whistling Woman (34 page)

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.
There it was again, the running sheet of blood he had no choice but to see. It welled fantastically out of Daniel's dark hair and ran in glistening sheets and runnels over his thick brows and heavy cheeks, catching on the corners of his mouth as he drank the green soup, pouring down the stalwart neck muscles, collecting in the sweater-neck, brimming up and over and sliding down over shoulders and cable-stitching, breast and belly under wool. The vision was always precisely detailed: he saw little splashing drops from beard-stubble to neckline, he saw a steady drip from the thick hair-root. He saw, he did not imagine, red, gushing, shining, coagulating. It was sent, and must not be spoken of. He had the idea of Daniel as a kind of dark volcano of matter, gushing blood like hot lava. He thought briefly that maybe this was a sign that he was a demon, the demon. He rejected this. The man was fat, and he did not like fat men, they repelled him, and the repulsion was unworthy, to be fought against. The blood, he thought, was his own demon, it was blood he poured over Daniel, not Daniel's blood in a visionary fountain. Daniel ate. He raised his spoon, the green soup went into the disgusting dark cave of his mouth, between the paling of thick ivory teeth, over the carpet of slimy tongue. Daniel broke bread, and turned with a smile to Jacqueline, saying how good warm brown bread was, putting a thick smear of golden fat butter on the bread, masticating, masticating. Joshua Ramsden put down his own spoon, leaving his soup untouched. The fountain of blood dried up abruptly. Daniel's shining surfaces became again dusty, drab, and matt. Ramsden drank a little water from a clay goblet made by Clemency Farrar. Lucy asked him if he was not hungry, and he said no, his needs were small, he had had enough.
The music played on. They played “The Lord of the Dance,” and they played “The Holly and the Ivy,” improvising, the clarinet playing the voice parts, the guitar running round and over and under, catching, losing, strumming. The two bodies moved together, gold heads nodding to each other, toes tapping, fingers leaping, stopping, rippling. Only Zag's mouth was smiling widely, ecstatically, and John's was tight round his reed. Two angels, said one Quaker lady to another. Oh the rising of the sun, and the running of the deer ...
After the meal, they gathered to say good-bye to their guests, who had to reach the road in time for the last bus, as the winter evening closed in. Marcus managed to make his way to Ruth, who was helping to clear the table. Lucas Simmonds hovered behind him. Daniel tapped Lucas on the shoulder, and turned him, asking how he was, leading him firmly away.

“Hi, Ruthie.”

“It's good to see you here. It's good to see everyone here.”

“Are you happy?”

Her guileless eyes met his, her hands fluttered up and crossed on her breast like an angel in a painting.

“Isn't it obvious? Isn't this wonderful? To have a glimpse was something, but this is more than a glimpse, this is steady, and real ...”

He put out a wavering hand, and touched her. She shrugged. He said

“I'm glad if you're happy.”

“Well
look
glad. Better, come back often. Best, join us. You only live once, I think. You have one chance.”

She was plumper than she had been, as a graceful girl. He felt nothing. He felt nothing. He felt the damp heat under Lucas Simmonds's bundling sweater and flannels, across half the room.

“Well, go safely,” said Ruth, turning away.

“We'll keep an eye on you,” said Marcus.

“Don't say that—” said Ruth. “That sounds menacing. I'm happy. I'll pray for you.”

She turned away, with a load of dishes, and her plait swung behind her with its own life.
On the doorstep, Joshua Ramsden spoke to Daniel.

“You haven't felt the call to join the Hearers?”

“I haven't.”

“Those who know you better—the Canon, Gideon—they value you.”

“The Canon is much missed in the crypt. The calls don't diminish.”

“Like Mary, he has chosen the better part.”

“Well, Mr. Ramsden, I'm a Martha, as you know. Of the earth, earthy.”

“The poor earth.”

“I go about in it,” said Daniel, and grinned. Will was standing, for once, next to him, his gaze fixed on Ramsden.

“Your son?” said Ramsden. “You can see it, in his look—”

Daniel was afraid. The fear came from nowhere and was wild. He said

“We must be off. We've a bus to catch.”

The silver head nodded, dismissing them.

They climbed up again, to the road on the ridge. In the metal sky, white doves and pearly pigeons were flying back to Dun Vale Hall, to roost. As they walked, they scattered whole flocks of wandering half-wild hens, chirring anxiously, scurrying on yellow scaly legs. One or two plump overweight turkeys lumbered alongside, gobbling. In the distance, a sheep coughed, and a dog howled.

“You didn't like him,” said Will, addressing his father, as he rarely did.

“I don't say that. He means good. He means to be a good man.”

“You weren't respectful to him.”

“What do you mean, respectful?”

“He was trying to—to—be friendly to you. You pushed him off.”

“I didn't mean to. I think what's going on is dangerous.”

“
I
think it's exciting. New. Not boring.”

“Ah well, if your only criterion is not to be
boring
—”

“You never listen to what I say.”

“You never say anything.”

“Well, I was saying something. And you weren't listening.”
They went on up, amongst more creatures, some sheep, a young pig, a flock of black pullets, all making their way down.

Chapter 17

In January Bowers & Eden published both
Flight North
and
Laminations. Flight North
received little attention. It was reviewed amiably in certain fantasy-science-fiction roundups, and amongst Books for Older Children—but most of the reviewing in this area had been before Christmas.
Laminations,
on the other hand, was widely reviewed. There were headings like “Only Disconnect,” “A Scissors-and-Paste World,” or “I Ching for Intelligent Chicks.” There were also articles on Frederica, describing her as “a new mini-personality,” “the fausse-naive face through the Looking-Glass,” or “the Intelligent Woman's Guide to doing your own Writing in your Spare Time.” Both the reviewers who liked
Laminations
and those who didn't referred to it as “clever.” The hostile ones added “facile” and qualified clever—“merely clever,” “irritatingly clever.” The friendly ones compared the cut-up technique to Burroughs and Jeff Nuttall, but said that the woman writer lacked the lunge for the jugular or the absolutely subversive intention of these models. They asked if the whole added up to more than the sum of its snipped-off torn-up parts and concluded that on the whole, it probably didn't, it was just very clever.

Frederica had her photograph taken for the
Evening Standard,
leaning on the railing by her basement, wearing high boots and a maxi-coat, with a Russian-style fur hat, faintly Anna Karenina. Hamelin Square residents peered out of windows, or crowded behind the photographer with bikes and footballs. Frederica was also photographed for
Nova
magazine, on the set of
Through the Looking-Glass,
in colour, her face reflected and refracted in the various mirrors, screens and transparent partitions of the set. She was wearing a tight-sleeved, tight-waisted bottle green dress in wool crêpe, with a very demure white collar. It was a good photograph, full of slivers of geometrical overlay, bones and edges, repeated wary eyes, ripples of red hair. “These fragments I have shored against my ruin,” began the article that went with the image. This line had haunted Frederica, who had rejected it as an epigraph to her book only because it was such a cliché, a line everyone quoted in every context. She had always had an image in her mind of a boat on a beach surrounded—like a kind of cubist painting—with a defensive wall or buttress of broken stones and pebbles and pieces of carved angels and ancient Greek winged victories or the breasts of Diana of Ephesus. She knew really there was no beach, no shore, no boat. Only the Prince d'Aquitaine in the abolished tower, temporarily shored up. With quotations.

She had not told her parents that she had written the book. She felt about her father as most of her generation felt about Dr. Leavis, that anything she could conceivably produce must fall short of his high requirements. Her writing was clandestine notes, out of his gaze. She had not even thought of advancing a writing career as a reason for not moving to the North, because she did not think of herself as a writer, or of her writing as a career. She was not now either writing or planning anything other than more of the same, more laminations, more discontinuous jottings, and anyone, really, could do that. She felt a writerly distaste for her own product, now it was out in the open. Once she saw a student reading it on a bus, which pleased her—it was another cliché—but she never opened it herself. It had a nice enough cover, made of Escher-shapes, scissors where the gaps made Chad faces. She didn't even send Bill and Winifred one. If they had noticed its existence, they didn't mention it.

Most beginning writers intend to impress, placate or shock imaginary parents. Real ones are a different matter.
Large envelopes began to arrive from Freyasgarth. They were addressed not to Frederica, but to Leo. They contained reading exercises, carefully constructed with phonics, and vowels, and exercises on the ambiguous and the counter-intuitive, from Agatha Mond's
Flight
North
. They were scenes Leo would know, and sentences he would have heard, but arranged by plan, readable by a halting reader. They contained instructions for Leo and Frederica.
This is to practise c, ck, s,
qu. This is long vowels.
Mother and son sat down and read. Leo was obsessed. He had a day of spelling everything with ph. Phish, phunny, phood, elephant, pheasant, cornphlakes. Frederica laughed, and Leo laughed uproariously. Frederica showed him “laugh.” He said
“It is too
much.”
He laughed. He tried out lauph.

He said “Thano says his mum says you make her laugh on the telly. Are you
meant
to be funny?”

He was worried.

“Well, witty anyway. Yes, funny, I think. People are meant to laugh.”

“That's OK then. She says you talk too fast.”

“Everyone talks too fast, on telly.”

Leo was reassured.

Through the Looking-Glass
became a regular programme on the new BBC2. Wilkie tried to cast his net wide, and to choose topics that were neither predictable nor related to each other. During the first quarter of 1969, the programme included:

Benjamin Lodge, who had produced Alexander Wedderburn's plays,
Astraea
and
The Yellow Chair,
and who had a new Theatre of Cruelty–based production of
The Cenci,
opening at the Dolphin Theatre. He was talking, in the first flush of excitement, about the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain's powers of theatrical censorship. He discussed it with Jude Mason, author of the novel
Babbletower,
which had survived a trial for obscenity (on appeal), and was selling steadily. The subject for discussion was censorship, the historical person discussed was D. H. Lawrence. The
object
lay before Frederica in a round box tied with a crimson ribbon. When she produced it, it turned out to be an enormous, springing tangle of dark curly hair—whether real or fake was not clear, on the screen. Lodge and Jude discussed, wittily, the current musical
Hair,
the fashion for long hair amongst hippies and students, Kenneth Tynan's
Oh, Calcutta!
and the public display of pubic hair, and, more darkly, Sacher-Masoch and fur, fetishism and androgyny. Jude Mason, who had been made to cut his long, greasy, grey hair for the trial, had grown it again, and peered out fishily from amongst its locks, looking like a hobgoblin. Frederica's own hair was demurely held back under a—crimson—Alice band. The set was decorated with images of the Queen of Hearts crying “Off with his head.”

The programme subsequently discussed sleep, undergrounds (playing knowing games with the Underground, the Tube, and the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, as well as Alice's Rabbit-hole), war heroes (opposing an articulate general and a bemedalled pop star). Who are the Germans? (with a Beuys lump of fat, a German film director and an American actor who played German generals in war films). Also
The
Outsider,
with Colin Wilson and an articulate and dangerous-looking James Baldwin.

There was also an interesting programme on babies and infants, with a Natural Childbirth expert and a child psychologist, discussing Bowlby's theories of maternal bonding and the effect on his own generation of having been left to scream for regulated periods. The person discussed was William Blake—“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” and “Infant Joy.” The object was a rather sinister bone teething-ring, with a silver jester, dangling little bells, attached. Tenniel's version of Lewis Carroll's baby-into-pig careered from time to time across the screen. There was a good discussion of the shift in sensibility which led to the Flower Children and the valuing of the infant spontaneity which the Age of Reason had suppressed.

Wilkie suddenly had a wild idea for a programme on ball games, and spent some time trying to find articulate snooker, tennis, football, golf players, declaring that the rules and the geometrical and physical constraints of all the different games were fascinating. In the end he staged a splendid conversation between a physicist interested in dynamics and trajectories, and a syllabic poet who was also an Oxford don and a fiendish croquet player. The object was a mediaeval ball-and-cup game from a museum. Frederica had always despised sport, most especially team games. She suddenly had a brief vision of all kinds of human ingenuity to which she had paid no attention.

She could not bear to be caught out, asking an ignorant question, making a foolish observation. She learned to skim, to recognise pitfalls, to skip from essential to essential, to recognise the skeletons of ideas and activities she could neither articulate nor understand. She was training some kind of provisional, short-term or half-term memory. It was exciting, and not wholly satisfying.
She began to be recognised, in streets, in shops, picking up Leo and Saskia from school. Also at parties. People thought they knew her, when they did not, and thought they knew what she would say before she said it. She had always supposed that it would be exciting to have a face that flashed into public consciousness. Charisma, the papers said, mini-charisma, in a mini-personality. She found, rather grimly, that being a personality thinned her sense of being a person. She had a face which was a mask, a film, a projection, something which stood between the people she met and her ability to listen to them, watch them, or speak directly to them, since they had this idea of her, from somewhere, to which they addressed their remarks. She dreamed, predictably perhaps, after the programme on the Virgin Queen, of Elizabeth's mask in old age, painted an inch thick, with the black eyes trapped behind it. She dreamed she was walking across Hamelin Square carrying this white mask on a pole in front of her. Behind the pasteboard the real woman (she was and was not inside her body; she was also a pitying, anxious watcher) was wearing a bra and an open shirt and nothing else at all. The street-children gathered and laughed at the thin naked buttocks and the cold toes.
Charisma in the extra-mural class was another matter. She went on lecturing to her disparate group of grown-ups, and what took fire, from time to time, were ideas. She lectured on Dostoevsky's
Idiot
. This phantasmagoric tale appears to have an ineluctable shape. It is one of the few novels where the end is as great and as satisfying as all that has gone before, leaves no sense of let-down, or half-measure, or thinness, or turning-away of imaginative intensity. Was this, Frederica asked the class, because of, or in spite of, the fact that Dostoevsky
did not know
from serial episode to serial episode, what would happen, or even if his characters were good or evil, innocent or guilty? His notes existed—the whole phantasmagoria was
in flux
for the whole length of the writing. Frederica felt complete, and passionate, and unselfconscious, considering this narrative miracle. It contained Western myth—the innocent sick Prince Myshkin was a figure of Christ, and his innocence, his good will, moved Frederica as the New Testament did not.

In the same way, teaching
The Great Gatsby,
she read out the scene in which the murderer comes through the yellowing trees to find Gatsby in the pool

... he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a
high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked
up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he
found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was
upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being
real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously
about ... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through
the amorphous trees.

Frederica admired this passage, and had made tidy notes on it, as the culmination of her lecture. Note, she had said, the implications for
American
literature, of the phrase about the “new world,” “material without being real.” Note, she had written, that Gatsby has created his whole world out of his Platonic idea of himself, his romantic dream, and it is disintegrating.

But as she read it out, she caught the full force of the achieved simplicity of every word in that perfectly created paragraph about destruction, that perfectly, easily coherent paragraph about disintegration. She felt something she had always supposed was mythical, the fine hairs on the back of her neck rising and pricking in a primitive response to a civilised perfection, body recognising mind.

She stopped in mid-sentence, and began again, urgently. Look, she told them, I've just
really seen
how good this paragraph is. Think about the adjectives, how simple they look, how right every single one is, out of all the adjectives that could have been chosen. Look at “unfamiliar” and think about a man who had made up his own heaven and earth, who
was
his own family. Look at “frightening leaves” which are flatly bald and menacing, but lightly so. “What a grotesque thing a rose is.” The idea of intricate natural perfection undone in one atmospheric and one psychological adjective—which is also an ancient
aesthetic
adjective.

And then, “raw” describing sunlight—where did he find that? Raw is cold, not heated, raw is bare and open, raw is unripe and with “scarcely created” it suggests a virgin world either at the shivering beginning or the end of time, when it doesn't hold together. And from these sensuous adjectives—grotesque, raw—we move to mental ones—new, material, not real—and the solid creation disintegrates into phantasmagoria, fantasms, ghosts, dreams—
like
air, not even really air, and then finally, the wonderful rendering of shapelessness, the “amorphous” trees.

And if you use the negative Greek word, amorphous, you carry with it all the positive Greek words for shape, and form, metamorphosis, morphology, Morpheus the God of Sleep. What Fitzgerald has done, quickly, briefly, and
clearly,
is to
undo
what art and literature have done over and over again, the image of the human mind at home in the beauty of the created garden, with the forms of trees and the colour of the sky and the grass, and the intricate natural beauty of the rose.