A Whistling Woman (37 page)

“Evil, you say,” said Jonty Surtees. “You say evil, you don't say incorrect. Evil is out of my vocabulary. Recognising Evil leads to trying to establish a new Heaven and a new Earth, when the things of this world have been burned away.”

Tewfell realised, with an edge of distaste, that Surtees was off on some trip, had expanded his consciousness chemically in one way or another. Tewfell himself was a cautious man. He liked control too much to experiment. And yet, and yet, the thread of sulphurous smoke, the crackle of hidden flames, attracted him.
What if
you didn't compromise,
what if
you broke up the whole rotten structure,
what if
you pulled down the self-important mighty? He thought of what eugenicists had done in Auschwitz; he thought of what the CIA was doing in Vietnam; he thought of the crowding police horses in Grosvenor Square, where he had not been.

“We can't let them come,” said Greg Tod. “We have to take a stand.”

“We
must
let them come,” said Surtees. “We must be quiet, and secret, and plan our campaign, and blow all this apart when it happens, we must get the police to descend in force, and the Press to expose both of these men—these bad men—and with them the complicity of the Establishment ...”

Nick Tewfell said that the television would be there, as the whole conference was to be filmed by Edmund Wilkie.

“We could hijack the film crew,” said Deborah Ritter. “Tell the world how it is.”

A smell of burning molasses was adding itself to the apricot smell. She went back to her cooking. Surtees grinned mightily at Nick Tewfell.

“This is a great day,” he said. “Well spotted, well spied, Nick Tewfell. Keep your beady eye on developments. Keep us posted in our encampment. Will you stop for soup?”

Nick was feeling suffocated, and it was no meal time he recognised. He said no, he must leave, and took Maggie Cringle with him.

Maggie said she just wanted to bob in to the Talk-Inn and see if there was any astrology going on. Astrology was so fascinating.

“Astrology is nonsense,” said Nick Tewfell.

“No more than most things,” said Maggie. “And it's old, and it seems to work, and it's
fascinating
—”

Nick reflected that it might be expedient to see Lady W. in action. She was, she must be, the weak spot in the Vice-Chancellor's armour. It might prove very useful to know what she was up to.

The astrological booth in the Teach-Inn was full of a gloomy hay-coloured light from the canvas roof, spotted by patches of crimson light from two ornamental silver lamps with glass shades which had been arranged provisionally on cast-iron tripods. To the left of the space was a small cast-iron table with Egyptian-looking legs in the form of sharp-breasted sphinxes, painted gilt. On it were terrestrial and celestial globes, an astrolabe, a few peacock feathers in a silvery vase, and some small Egyptian-looking figurines of cats, scarabs, coiled snakes, ankhs, winged messengers, and a hippopotamus. The hippopotamus was painted with an overall design of flowers and leaves, on a bright blue-green ground. There were also various leather-bound books, and some dusty papers. The speaker herself stood behind a brass lectern in the form of an eagle with spread wings. The stem of the lectern was a scaly dragon, whose claw-feet clutched a sphere which was the counterweight to the eagle. The dragon appeared to have no head and the whole impressive object appeared to have been cobbled together from at least two sources. Behind the speaker, flapping on the canvas wall of the tent, was a map of the heavens with the signs of the Zodiac picked out in gold on black, the sidling Crab, the twisting Fish, the majestic Ram, the stolid Bull, the Twins in each other's arms, two-in-one. It was home-made, but not unimpressive. From the lectern dangled a lively home-made Scorpion in black cardboard, gilt paint, and crimson bead-work, its tail poised to strike, its claws open. On each side of the speaker crouched the fat border collies, Odin and Frigg, their noses on their paws, their tails in the dust, their eyes bored somnolent slits. There was a water-dish with DOG in black on gold under the table. The dog-smell mingled with the incense-smell from various candles and incense sticks in glass pots around the space.

The talk on Scorpio had already begun when Nick Tewfell and Maggie Cringle arrived. The audience was small but rapt—several young women with flowing hair and mystic head-bands, some long-haired men in Indian shirts, two with strings of bells round their necks, and some indefinable people in overcoats, hunched against the outside weather, though the tent was full of currents of hot, doggy, incense-laden air cycled by the paraffin stoves behind the speaker. Some of the audience were sitting on oriental kilim cushions and rugs. Near the entrance to the booth, on a campstool he had brought himself, sat Avram Snitkin, the ethnomethodologist, a heap of curly pelt, his own long, uncombed hair flowing into his beard and the unkempt fleece of his Afghan jacket and his fleece-lined felted boots. He was taking notes—to distract attention from the whirr of the recording-machine concealed in his bulky garments. His lips were spread in a perpetual benign smile. He was engaged on one of his many projects—a study of the definition of “charisma” by those who considered themselves “charismatic” and also by those who received, or responded to, or were exposed to, or created, the charisma (if it existed, which was still unproven).

Eva Wijnnobel at least had presence. She wore long, black, voluminous robes, under a black and purple velvet cloak with a huge, Hollywoodish hood. Her very straight black hair was cut with an Egyptian fringe and shone with oils, either natural or applied. Her lips were sculpted with blood-dark lipstick, and her large, black-brown eyes stared from under gilded lids and thick black brows and lashes. Her skin was uniformly whitish, and a little dead-looking. She had a heavily-sculpted gilded breast-plate hanging from gold chains about her neck, dangling tiny bells and charms from its periphery. When she saw Maggie Cringle and Nick Tewfell hesitating in the mouth of the booth, she lifted her arms like a bat, or a great bird, and made a circling movement to draw them in.

“The most terrible, the least attractive, perhaps the most potent and poetic of all the Signs ...

“Welcome, welcome to our midst, please take a cushion. We are discussing a difficult subject, the Sign of Scorpio, which is of all the signs the one a man or a woman would—you might think—least choose to be born under, if we had free-will, which
of course we have not
.

“The Scorpion is a dry, terrible creature, a creature with a scaly, exogenous skeleton, which hides under stones and inhabits deserts, and bears at its tail-tip a terrible secret sting. The time of year allotted to the dominance of this creature by ancient wisdom is the time of the autumnal withdrawal of the sun from the earth, the time of decomposition and disintegration, of analysis not synthesis, of the reduction of living cells to dead excretory products.

“The sign of Scorpio is a Water sign, but it represents not the flowing Spring waters of Pisces, the rising tides, the source of life, nor yet the sun-kissed ocean of Cancer, full of mid-year light, but the dark depths, where the light scarcely penetrates, and matter decays and becomes mud and silt. Scorpions avoid light—they are creatures of darkness. Because of this association with the Dark Forces, the Scorpion has always been viewed as a special entry-point for the forces of evil in the cosmos. It paralyses its prey with liquid poison, it flees the harmony of the creatures and tries to hold what it has greedily to itself. The Scorpio character in human beings is capable of great malice and pleasure-in-suffering. This is so, it has been noted again and again. You may think, we should ask, how may those who are born under this dark Sign mitigate the dangers and restrictions of their destiny?

“I will tell you. For I too was born under Scorpio and suffered for many years from the sense that my path was dark and my ways low and close to the dust. But there are esoteric doctrines which give a different aspect of the Sign. Not completely different, but they change the way this semi-divine Insect plays its part in our personality and our life-pattern.

“Madame Blavatsky, in her Secret Doctrine, describes an ancient time in which
it is said
that ten signs only were known to the Ancients. This was true of the Profane only. The initiates always knew of twelve. For from the time long ago, when mankind was first separated into two sexes, the sign of Scorpio was separated into two, the Scorpion and the Virgin, which are, in the secret doctrine, ineluctably linked, the dark and light images of each other. You will say that this bifurcation still makes only eleven signs. But there is another, wholly secret sign, which is represented for the Profane by a sign added by the latecome Greeks, Libra, the Scales, the only man-made, unliving thing in the Zodiac. I shall not tell you the secret name. I shall say, however, that there is hope for us dark Scorpios in our twinning with the pure light of the Virgin. We are bound as Yin and Yang are bound, and the one gives constant rise to the other.

“In ancient Egypt there was a great ruler named Selek, the Scorpion, and the female form, Selket, is the name of the patron goddess of the white witches, the healing sorcerers, in that civilisation. It is no accident that I myself was born in Egypt under the family name of Selkett. I was twice chosen by the Scorpion goddess. We Scorpions are the interpreters—our sign is the one most closely linked to mysticism, intuition and the occult—the domain of powerful female intelligences. It is true that Scorpio has also always been linked to the destructive aspects of male sexuality. The shape of the creature, the venomous liquid projected from its tail, are sufficient reminder of this. But in mythology it may often represent destructiveness subordinated to female wisdom and power.

“The virgin goddess Artemis sent a Scorpion to kill the hunter Orion who invaded her secret and inviolate Grove. Then she turned them into constellations, and the Scorpion forever pursues the Hunter across the heavenly plains. The goddess Isis had seven scorpions for companions when she fled from Set the destroyer, after he had slaughtered and dismembered Osiris ... St. John the Divine refers to dangerous sects as scorpions, but he failed to understand the esoteric significances ...”

Nick Tewfell was distracted by wondering if he should tell the Vice-Chancellor's wife that a scorpion was not an insect, but an arachnid. He suggested
sotto voce
to Maggie Cringle that they should go home. Maggie demurred. She said she wanted a horoscope. So they waited until the end of the discourse, when the lady walked over and sat behind her table. There was a certain reluctance in the audience either to approach her or to leave the space. Maggie went up to the desk. She asked for a horoscope. Lady Wijnnobel said she must come back privately for that—she would need to take down many many details of precise dates and even hours. “You, of course, are a Pisces,” she told her, with an attacking certainty.

“I am—” said Maggie. “How did you know?”

“A fluid, labile quality in your bearing. A spring-of-the-year hopefulness in your outlook. A softness. A responsiveness. Your transparent garment is a natural choice for a Pisces.”

“And me?” said Nick. He was irritated by now, he wanted to get out of the odours and closeness. “What am I?”

“You ask brusquely, you look keenly. You are a Sagittarian.”

“Wrong,” said Nick. “I'm like you, I'm a Scorpio.”

“I do not think I can be wrong. What is your birth date?”

“November 23rd. Scorpio.”

“On the contrary. By a hairline, a Sagittarian. Strongly
under the
influence
of Scorpio of course, since you are on the cusp. Your horoscope should hold great interest. You have the lumbering animal nature of a horse, docile and amenable, and you have the head and hands of a hunter-warrior, which strike a dreadful dart—the more dreadful, the more furtive, from its contiguity with Scorpio, and Scorpio's subtler sting. A dangerous combination, animal passion and human ingenious
aims,
I think you know already.”

Nick had always pictured his reluctant followers in the Students' Union as the cartoonist Lowe's Trades Union horse, heavy and difficult to manoeuvre. He smiled wryly. He said “Will I succeed in my aims?”

“I am not a
fortune teller
. And I do not know—because I think you do not know—what your aims are. When you do, you will be formidable. I read characters. I do not foretell events.” There was a kind of portentous flirtatiousness on the heavy pale face. Nick thought, she has seen me visiting the Vice-Chancellor, she is playing with me. He felt suddenly threatened.

“Good-bye, then,” said Lady Wijnnobel, before he had moved more than a mouth-muscle.

A little whirr recorded the end of Avram Snitkin's tape. He coughed mildly to cover it. Nick retreated, taking Maggie with him.

Chapter 19

Like the student leader, the Dean of Students felt a need, moral and political, to observe what was going on in the anti-institution. For quite different reasons, most of them to do with his loyalty to, and affection for, Gerard Wijnnobel, he knew he should keep an eye on what Eva Wijnnobel was doing and promulgating. He knew that he himself was inadequate to the tasks of infiltration or confrontation. His instincts were profoundly liberal and
laissez-faire
. He had accepted the post as Dean partly because everyone was obliged to have a turn at exercising authority as opposed to simply thinking, and partly because he wanted to make things easier and more open for students. He was better at dealing with nervous instinctive acts on his own side—restrictions, repressions, exclusions—than he was at dealing with doctrinaire opposition for the sake of opposing, which he recognised, but failed entirely to understand. When he came to look back on the events of the first half of 1969 he wondered if they would have been any different if he himself had not fallen uncharacteristically and violently in love. He had noticed, and named, his emotion about Marcus Potter, in the Non-Maths Group, wryly acknowledging its unlikeliness. He had been quite unprepared for its subsequent obsessive ferocity.

He had known since his school-days that he fell in love with males, not females. As a schoolboy he had had various experimental experiences, both of romantic longing and of brief and ingenious bodily experiments. Since then, without too much repining, he had lived largely in his mind. It had been easy, as a Cambridge don, to be part of a homosexual world that talked continuously about buggery, created and dissolved relationships and affairs. He was reasonably at ease in the company of such men without ever exactly joining in either the intrigues or the promiscuous buggery. He trod a fine line, instinctively and with a certain pride. He was verbally quick—he could make the right jokes and references, he could be seen to share gossip and forms of words. But he was also, he discovered, both a natural ascetic and not beautiful. He thought he ought to mind not being beautiful more than he did, and wrote a paper on beautiful and ugly philosophers which amused his group.

Vincent Hodgkiss thought, being a man of weak desires and not brave, that he might have been driven to be an anachronistic bachelor in any case. He also held a very English aesthetico-moral belief that asceticism should be unostentatious and unremarkable. He would not wear simple worker's clothes, drink tap water exclusively, take hard exercise in walking holidays, or furnish his rooms like Wittgenstein with deck-chairs and card-tables as a symbol of his transitory presence. He believed in protective colouring—a row of fine editions, elegant pale linen curtains, modern glass crafted decanters with good wine in them, Florentine ties and hand-made shoes. He made jokes, but tried to see that they were never malicious. When he was alone in his room—which was much more of the time than he allowed anyone to know—he tried to behave as if no one was there, no personality, simply an observing, self-correcting intelligence. Disembodied, he could almost have said, but he paid fastidious attention to his body, keeping it clean and pleasant, from toenails to teeth, for no one. He liked to encourage a mild amount of speculation as to whom he loved, what he did, with whom. He had a gnomic, prissy look for these occasions, which his friends mocked, affectionately. He wondered if the intense pleasure he felt, alone in his room, as his mind moved into action, was sexual or not. He thought it was, and tried to ensure it was neither narcissistic nor onanistic. That interested him too. He wondered fleetingly if being a thinking woman felt differently, but he knew none, and had nothing to go on.
He was in some sense prepared for falling in love with Marcus Potter, because he had previously, for two years altogether, been hopelessly and occasionally painfully in love with Raphael Faber. He had meant Raphael not to notice this. Raphael himself was an ascetic on principle, with a fastidious hypersensitivity partly owed to his family's wartime experiences in prison camps and invaded cities. But Raphael was a man who used his apparent asceticism to charm and to tempt. He was delicately greedy. He liked to be loved, by both men and women, though he returned love only fitfully, and with cruel intermissions and endings. He liked the dance of flirtation, retreat, advance, turn back, turn face, retreat, advance. If Hodgkiss had wanted to play this game—which he did not—he would only have lumbered ludicrously. He used his intelligence to keep his distance, which prolonged the situation, since the distance aroused Raphael's sexual curiosity, piqued him, led him on. Hodgkiss was tormented by Raphael's carved lips, by the fall of his lovely hair. He wanted to have Raphael to himself, and noted an inconvenient tendency to see everyone as rivals, which Raphael, elegantly and secretly, encouraged.

All this dance went on without a word being spoken. The two men were friends, as they had been before, and were to be again after. It was primitive and civilised. When Hodgkiss—partly to break this spell—decided to move to North Yorkshire—Raphael exhibited an uncharacteristic agitation. He touched his friend, on meeting and parting, as he had not done. He visited late at night—with a serious question about Wittgenstein and silence—and stayed to say “He did sleep with his young men, didn't he? You would know.”

“He didn't see why he shouldn't. He thought it was natural. If he thought he shouldn't, it was for their sakes, not to confuse them.”

“What do you think? Yourself?”

“I hope never to have disciples.”

“You are a good man, Vincent. Would you sleep with me?”

“I should hardly sleep,” said Hodgkiss evasively. Raphael's lips were parted, like a bird about to strike or sing.

“Have you thought about it?”

“You know I have.”

“We could try. Too much thinking and no action is bad for a man.” Vincent was sitting, he remembered, by his fire. His whole body hardened. He tried not to move a visible muscle, and looked, reasonably quizzically, at his friend.

“And what do you think would be the outcome?”

“I don't know. That's why I'm interested, I suppose.”

“We all know,” said the philosopher, “that satisfied desire is the end of desire.”

“
Omne animal post coitum triste
and all that. Don't you die for a bit of post-coital peace?”

“On those terms,” said Vincent, half-angry, half-laughing. “Anything for a bit of peaceful post-coital sadness.”

Raphael should then have taken the lead, and did not. Vincent, overeager, clumsy, hot with embarrassment and obscure anger and simple desire, initiated a quick and clumsy love-making that he still remembered with anxiety and shame. Afterwards he held Raphael's fine body in his arms in the firelight, kissed his collar-bone, and said “That should never have happened.”

Raphael's sharp lips brushed his bald patch, which was the part of his body he most disliked, and Raphael's fingers explored the protrusion of his belly, which was his other place of shame.

“I know. It was an aberration. Let's never speak of it again, shall we?”

“I could murder you, Raphael Faber.”

“No, no. You'll be grateful, you'll see you'll be grateful.”

He was. He was restored to himself, he covered his nakedness. Desire, satisfactorily, failed.
So what was it about Marcus Potter? Hodgkiss was a good teacher. He was proud of his capacity to detect an unexpected range of intelligence in a half-articulate student, as he was proud of his capacity to hand back a half-formed idea, rephrased, added to, so that the student could develop what was still his own idea, recognise where it might lead. He was not a showy teacher, as Socrates must have been, as Wittgenstein, driven, inexorable, certainly was, for all his self-abnegation. He was a watcher. He was at his happiest watching others learning to think clearly. Unlike Wittgenstein also he did not love—particularly—the innocent or the biddable. He loved the thwarted, the secretive, even the lost. He sat in the Non-Maths Group and observed, as nobody else appeared to observe, the marginal and wayward intelligence of Marcus Potter. He observed his mathematical quickness and his sense of the forms of thought, the occasional excited movement of his pale, almost transparent, ineffectual hands, the glimmer of light and life coming and going behind the moony rounds of his glasses.

He began to notice Marcus's body as an expression of Marcus's mind. A disconsolate, disconnected series of gestures, a pale impermanence, as though the inhabitant of the body was not himself quite sure that it had real mass, inhabiting real space. He came to know the hunch of the thin shoulders, the long, gawky line of the hips under the twist of unflattering trousers, the gesture with which the long fingers ran through the fine, nondescript hair, the line of the untouched-looking cheek, averted in embarrassment or modesty, the flicker of the pale lashes over those light and empty eyes. He wanted to make him move easily—his awkwardness now appeared to Vincent to be a fine form of grace, but it was not free, he wanted him to be
easy,
happy in his skin, as the French said. He wanted him not to shrink. He wondered when he had begun shrinking, and why.

The only thing Vincent Hodgkiss knew about Marcus Potter's family was that he was the brother of pushy Frederica, which had genuinely shocked him when he discovered it. He did not like Frederica, whom he considered brash, unsubtle, and conceited. She thought her bony, gingery energy was sexy, whereas her brother's vanishing fineness was infinitely more appealing. Vincent Hodgkiss told himself a Freudian story about the two of them, how Frederica had always demanded the place in the sun, the warmth of attention, had defined herself as the clever one, and her interests as the important ones. The parents must have colluded. He did not know about the dead Stephanie, and thus left her out of his fairy tale. He did not know about Marcus's part in her death.

What he did know—half through intuition, half through intelligent extrapolation from Marcus's flurried remarks—was that someone, a man, had once made terrifying and unwanted advances. Were they unwanted because Marcus was not queer and was repelled? Or because he was, and was afraid? How did this affect his beloved's feelings about himself? What should he do? He was unskilled in campaigns of seduction, or declarations of love. He felt he should do what he did best—teach, listen, give his whole attention—and see what happened.

Among the floating scraps of paper in the air between the Ziggurat and the Evolution Tower was one which singled out the Dean himself, flying over a puddle and up, with a dark streak of mud, to plaster itself across his breast. It advertised a Plural Talk by Greg Tod and Waltraut Ross. “British Culture Is Inert. Why? The Hidden Implications of Ordinary Language Philosophers, esp. Wittgenstein. Why Have We No Sociologists? A Radical Critique ...” It was printed in scarlet on dull flesh pink. Hodgkiss decided it was time to go and listen. He invited Marcus Potter to come with him. He thought he must make some other offering than rich food. Marcus looked startled. Hodgkiss explained that he needed Marcus for cover. He wanted to blend into the audience. Marcus replied that he couldn't blend. Into anything. And that he was ignorant of British Culture, inert or not.

“I need moral support,” said the Dean.

“I'm not support. I always run away from trouble—of any kind.”

“Precisely. You look entirely harmless. Cover, as I said.”

He had the impression that no one had ever discussed Marcus with Marcus before he had taken to doing so. Successive expressions of anxiety, and limited pleasure, flitted across the pale face.

They set out for the Teach-Inn, both wearing duffle coats with the hoods pulled forward. Hodgkiss, silly with love and mildly elated, thought of them as hobbits disguised in elven-cloaks, and then, as they passed successive booths in the thick canvas light, with its pools of candle-flame and pervasive tinkle of bells and spasmodic breathy flutings, he thought of them as Christian and Faithful, making their way through Vanity Fair.

They passed Eva Wijnnobel's booth. Her voice purred darkly in the incense. “Aries the Ram is a warlike Sign. He has triumphant energy and bounding confidence in the youth of the year. A ram touches the earth but he leaps for the heavens. He is unlike the massive Bull, who stands square on his heavy hooves in mire and humus. The Ram is fiery and hot and sprinkles light from his golden fleece ...”

Over another booth was written:
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit
of Music
. Inside a group of musicians played a skein of music, part-oriental, part-jazz. They wore gilded masks. In the centre sat Paul-Zag, in a tunic covered with sequinned flames and silver-scaled trousers. His blond hair swung. He wore a half-mask, with goat-horns, also gilded.

A small child ran across their path, bead-bedecked, crumple-headed. Round a corner was a booth with paper apple-trees and paper geese, and a plywood wicker-gate.
Mother Goose's Orchard. Stories for
Children and Child-like Perennial, Second-Childhood, World-weary, Fools
and Wisemen, No Ending without a New Beginning.
Inside, Deborah Ritter, sitting in a rocking-chair, read aloud.

And Artegall heard the voices of hidden things. The thrush continued to speak, full of itself, scolding. Beyond its clarity, Artegall heard
the whisper of beetles chewing dead wood to sawdust, of spiders hissing
as they spun their fine traps, of giddy flies murmuring as they blundered past the silk threads. He heard the slow cold speech of the worms,
pushing sinuous and blind between compacted layers of leafmould. He
heard the glutinous uncoiling of snails in the sunlight, and the infinitesimal cry of hungry larvae in the ants' nest ...

Marcus observed that there was a pervasive sewery smell. Hodgkiss said, keeping his head down, in a mutter, that he himself should probably be doing something about that. Though some of the land belonged to Dun Vale Hall.