A Whistling Woman (41 page)

Wilkie, who had every television director's desire to work with luxuriating coils and heaps of overmatter, agreed happily. He said he hoped his programme—his eventual programme—would be true to the purpose of the gathering, which he respected enormously, enormously. Hodgkiss again felt uneasy.

The discussion moved on to the content of the various papers—the pure sciences, the applied sciences, the human sciences, the arts, the humanities, languages, maths, philosophy, even sport. Frederica looked distractedly out into the garden. The Barbara Hepworth wound its paradoxically weightless volute of weight around its captured air and silent strings. Frederica thought the easy, banal and invigorating thought, There's a woman who has
done
things. With heavy hammers and mallets and chisels, she imagined vaguely. Her attention was recaptured, as attention has statistically been observed to be, by a reference both to a person and to a subject she understood. Raphael Faber was coming to speak on Proust's metaphors for the activity of the mind. Wijnnobel announced this with enthusiasm, and Hodgkiss permitted himself a prim little ironic smile. He said he was sure the paper would be a high point among high points.

Frederica saw a ring of snow-capped mountains on a horizon where none were. She was reading
The Lord of the Rings
aloud to Leo, and found her mind taken over by Tolkien's absolute landscapes and battles. “There shall be counsel taken,” her mind had been muttering irrelevantly all morning, “stronger than Morgul spells.” What a shivered, splintered mess her own mind now was. She remembered a much younger Frederica, who had had some idea of metaphor as the flicker of fiction and connection in a world of religious belief, in what she had thought were the last days of the power and certainty of religious belief, in the days of
Paradise Lost
. She remembered demanding—or abjectly begging?—to write a thesis on religious metaphor with Raphael Faber, who had turned her away with a glass screen, a division, he was a modernist, he worked in French. And why should a Mallarmé expert not understand
Paradise Lost,
Frederica thought angrily in the mist of her own past, and then grinned at herself. (The grin was observed and misinterpreted by Hodgkiss, who was thinking about naked Raphael with his own grin.)

Frederica looked at the assembled academics and wondered why her own mind began to move so swiftly, so surely, in places where people were discussing ideas which had nothing (little) to do with what she was thinking about. An idea of herself in a library with time to pursue the nature of metaphor until she had understood it—well, until her understanding was quite other than it was now—overwhelmed her with sadness. She had made a wrong choice. She sat about dressed as a clever metaphor, in an easy-to-grasp metaphorical glass box, like a mermaid in a raree show, and posed trivial superficial questions with trivial superficial brightness. She saw herself as a mayfly on water, and changed the metaphor to one of those copper-coloured dragonflies that dart and glitter. She looked at the assembled academics, and saw, not as Hodgkiss did, the windings and manœuvres of small territorial jealousies and large ambitions, but an angelic group of humans dedicated to thought, to thinking things
through,
thought Frederica, staring mistily through the Hepworth stone tunnel.

Gerard Wijnnobel was in fact talking about the artificial invisible barriers between disciplines. He said it was natural for the mind to erect them and to work within them—they were forms, philosophy, bio-chemistry, grammar—to which the Towers of the University gave a metaphorical solidity. But such forms were scaffolds, he said, such towers were lookouts, from which other forms could be seen, to which other forms could be linked. The world was infinitely multifarious and its elements were simple and could be seen from infinite viewpoints, in infinite rearrangements.

Frederica, not quite listening, though later she remembered every word, for half her attention was enough for memory, thought of John Ottokar, and his idea that she should work here, with these people, on these things—

Vincent Hodgkiss looked at Gerard Wijnnobel with love, and saw him as the Architect of Babel. An architect who, contrary to a quick imagining of such a person, was intent not upon chaos, but upon the discovery and communication of extraordinary order.

His love for the Vice-Chancellor had always included the rhythm of Browning's poem, “A Grammarian's Funeral,” in which a group of mediaeval disciples bear their dry-as-dust, detail-obsessed, time-defeated teacher to his last resting-place on the peak of a high mountain. “Leave him, still loftier than the world suspects / Living, and dying.” Most people read that poem as a comic condemnation of a life drained of humanity by minute obsessions. And so it was, and yet it was not, because a fine excess was to be finely human, and grammar was
essentially
human, Hodgkiss thought. He thought Gerard Wijnnobel would not thank him for thinking of him in terms of funeral elegies, when he was concentrating on his work.

At this point in the discussion, silence fell, as Lady Wijnnobel, accompanied by Odin and Frigg, crossed in front of the window, resolute and angry-looking. For a moment she stood, her big face under a vaguely academic tricorned hat peering in at them. Then she swung away, and stomped off across the lawn, leaving a trail in the damp grass.

Elvet Gander said, when she had gone through the hedge, “She is very diligent and very much appreciated in your, so-to-speak, shadow-entity.”

Wijnnobel said nothing. Wilkie asked Gander, what does she teach? Astrology, said Gander. He added that he himself had recently become very interested in astrology. He added that it was an ancient form of thought—of experience—
in
which, so to speak, generations had lived.

Hodgkiss saw his moment, and asked lightly if Gander had any idea how the Anti-University might propose to react to the Conference. Gander said he guessed many of them might attend, if permitted. He said, abstractedly, that he didn't suppose there'd be trouble from them, if that was the question. He thought they were humming along with their own affairs. Humming along. Hodgkiss thought Gander looked unwell. He was thinner, and had aged. He seemed, somehow, perpetually distracted.
They stood and chatted over coffee. Wilkie and Gander considered the uncompromising reductive mystery of the Mondrians. Wilkie said it wasn't clear to him why human beings were driven to reduce their world to minimal elements. Horizontals and verticals, particles and pixels, it might be wired into the way the brain worked. Maybe a Mondrian was a map of a brain, Mondrian's brain, anyone's brain. Gander looked restlessly about him and fixed his gaze on the Rembrandt astrologer. He said he himself was becoming more and more involved in more elementary, that was, more elemental, forms of experience. The word “primitive” was probably nonsense.

Freud began as a neurologist, said Gander. He made his map of the mind like a three-storeyed house, with the Id rampaging in the basement and the Superego frowning away under the eaves. It was all in the end
personal,
said Gander. Carl Gustav was an old charlatan, but old charlatans know things—about things—about the general consciousness—that tight-arsed ironists like the supremely rational Sigmund don't pay enough attention to. What things? said Wilkie. Gander's hooded eyes stared over his head. Gods and demons, said Gander. Forces of nature. Things you meet in the great dreams, not the nagging little personal ones. The things behind the forms people thought up for mystery, like alchemy and astrology. Those kids, he said, waving vaguely in the direction of the encampment beyond the garden, beyond the University, those kids in the counter-culture are playing with the things of the spirit as though they were clouds of coloured smoke, or—corn-dollies—or—or mugs with pretty crabs and scorpions and bulls and lambs painted on them for birthdays.

No harm in that, necessarily, said Wilkie.

I think there's harm, said Gander. Ideas are stronger than individuals, so are forms of the spiritual life, they twist, they pull. They mould.

Lyon Bowman came up and said he hoped Wilkie was going to televise his paper on chemical and electrical communication in neurones.

Wilkie said, oh yes. He was still considering the psychoanalyst. He had just had an interesting idea.

Frederica was surprised to be tapped on the shoulder by the Vice-Chancellor. He wanted to show her something, he said. His long, nut-cracker face smiled down on her. “It's a new project,” he said, leading her out of his study, and away into the antechamber of the Hall of Long Royston, with its minstrels' gallery. This space now contained several free-standing glass cases. “We are building a collection to show the history of this house, and the history of the University,” he said. “As you see, most of our space is still empty. But I have something here which is of interest to you, perhaps.”

The box contained Alexander Wedderburn's drawings for the costumes for
Astraea
in 1953. It contained also some of the costumes, and photographs of the actors and actresses. There were ribbons and embroideries, bum-rolls and ruffs, a fox-coloured cone of artificial curls, a necklace of fake pearls and false enamel. There was Marina Yeo, photographed in black and white, dying regally on a monstrous cushion. There was the glass-and-wire crown, the musical instruments, rebeck and lute, pipes and tambours. There was Wilkie, playing Sir Walter Raleigh, much thinner and wearing his own look of intelligent mischief. There was Alexander, holding hands with Frederica and Marina Yeo, in a photo-call of the entire pinheaded motley New Elizabethan cast. There was her old school-teacher, Felicity Wells, who had died on a school trip, quite suddenly, in front of the Bayeux tapestry, her finger raised to explain that here was the death of Harold, the last English King. Marina Yeo was not dead, but was crippled with arthritis, her hands twisted into claws, her legs bowed. She had been—to an extent—saved by the television, on which she played spiteful and super-sharp detecting ladies in serial thrillers, swathed in chiffon, holding herself up in arm-chairs.

And there was Frederica, running in her shift past the fountain with the naked putti, her red hair streaming, her thin legs visible through the streamers of her scissored skirts.

She stared at the uninhabited dresses and the lifeless faces in their airless space.

Time had not stopped there, oh no.

All the photographs were black and white (and grey, of course).

The silks and satins and nylons and rayons had faded—and were a little stained—but not much.

She smoothed her real hands over her real gaudy skirt, and felt the ground under her feet.

“Interesting,” said the Vice-Chancellor. “I was wondering if you had kept—if you have any—mementos?”

Frederica said she didn't think she had. Certainly nothing significant.

They walked back to join the others in the study.

Wilkie said he had had a brilliant idea, he would tell her later.

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Chapter 22

Luk Lysgaard-Peacock went to look for John Ottokar. He should not have needed to go and look for him, for it was working hours, and he should have been beside his machinery. Luk's calculations continued to burgeon. He walked across the increasingly inhabited campus, where buildings were still going up, and asked people if they had seen John Ottokar. He came on him—or rather, them—unexpectedly, in the grassy amphitheatre in front of the Henry Moore statue of the King and Queen.

They were sitting facing each other, astride a stone bench strategically placed for those who wished to sit and contemplate the statues, and the moorland behind them. They were both wearing jeans and the rainbow-coloured tabard-like sweaters, which were striking enough singly, and which John, recently, had seemed to have abandoned. They were leaning in towards each other, and apparently arguing—their long, pageboy hair swung along the sides of their heads, which they tossed first forwards, then sideways, in emphasis or denial. Their arms flung out, or gestured, in symmetrical reverse, left and right, right and left. He wondered if they were mirror-twins, as he had wondered before, and never asked. It seemed too personal a question, and unwanted. Their knees were touching. Luk had the thought, looking up at the King and Queen, that they were like a two-headed playing-card, the Knave of Hearts or of Diamonds. He had no idea which was which. He thought that it was curious that a duplicated reality appeared to be less, not more, real than a singularity.

When he came up to them, they both became still, and turned their same faces on him, with the same questioning look.

He saw which was which, because one had differently-glittering fingernails, blue, black, pink, green, as he pushed back his hair.

He said he had another problem, with his figures. Paul-Zag said “We have problems, ourselves, too.” He smiled sweetly. John continued to stare, emptily. Luk said he was pretty desperate, in a matter-of-fact voice. “Desperate's a relative term,” said Paul-Zag. “There's desperate and desperate.”

Luk did not know what he would have done, if at this point Frederica Potter had not appeared, with her red-headed son, looking determined and anxious. Paul-Zag sat on his fingers. They stared their identical stare at the newcomers.

“Hi, John O,” said Leo, vaguely, to both.

“I was looking for you,” said Frederica to John.

“Nice of you,” said John. “You didn't say you were coming.”

“I did, in general. I wasn't sure when, in particular. I'm here now.”

“So I see.”

The twins were taking up the whole of the stone seat. The others had to remain standing. Frederica asked Paul how the community was, with an effort of courtesy.

“Great things are happening,” said Paul. “We're building a Pale. We're enclosing our own ground. We may become an enclosed order, so to speak.”

“Enclosed?”

“Not coming out. No one coming in,” said Paul-Zag. “We aren't good enough at cultivating quite yet. We're working it out.”

Luk said “Where does it go—where will it go—this Pale?”

“Round and round. Round all the land inside. To keep it from exploitation and destruction. To preserve it.”

All
the land, asked Luk, who had been upon the moors and had seen a wandering group of diggers, and a small white van full of planks, at a distance.

Paul-Zag said
yes, all
. He said it was good for body and soul to work so hard. Then, he said to John, we shall all have to choose.

“You come in and out,” said Frederica. “You come and play your music. In that tent, in the Anti-University. I know, because Will comes and listens. He thinks you're the greatest.”

Paul-Zag swayed back and forwards on the bench. He said that would come to an end, it would all come to an end. He said inanely that it was the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music, and winked knowingly at Frederica, who felt as though he had spat at her.

On the gravel road below them, the same small white van drew up, the one Luk had seen up on the moorland. It was being driven by Elvet Gander, who parked it, and came up into the King and Queen's amphitheatre. He nodded pleasantly at Frederica, acknowledged Luk, patted Leo on the head, and said to Paul he was glad he had found him, he would give him a lift back to the Hall. Paul stood up, looking down, his arms hanging. John moved his leg, so that he was now sitting rigidly on the bench, facing the others, almost in an imitation of the pose of the bronze figures. Gander said to him

“You want to come?”

John did not answer. “Not yet?” said Gander pleasantly. He said to Paul “Not yet.”

Luk said to Gander “I'm told you're enclosing the land.”

“So it would appear. A symbolic reality of some importance. A space for contemplation, for concentration.”

“A concentration camp.”

Gander waved a dismissive hand. “Not worthy of you, Mr. Peacock. A
bad
joke. Be careful with words, they hurt.”

He led Paul away to the van, where he, though not Paul, turned back to wave amiably enough at John and the others. The van gave off a curious winking glitter as it drew away. It appeared to be full of mirrors, piled against each other, their planes distributing light.

Luk, worried now about his snail populations as well as his figures, turned to expostulate with John Ottokar.

John Ottokar said to Frederica “Well, shall I? What do you think? Shall I go in there?”

“Don't be silly. You don't want to. It's all nonsense. It's all increasingly frightening
nonsense
. You know that.”

“I do, do I? And you know me, do you? You think you can do away with the god I grew up with, just because you choose to call Him nonsense?”

“
John
—” said Frederica.

“I'd better get on with this stuff of Luk's,” said John, snatching at Luk's folder of figures. Luk opened his mouth to explain his problem, and John strode away without waiting to listen.

Frederica and Luk sat together on the bench, beneath the statues. Frederica wanted to cry, or to shout, but not in front of Lysgaard-Peacock, who had rebuffed her the last time they had met. She said, in a small voice

“It is all nonsense.”

“Of course it is. But not to him, apparently.”

“I can't understand how
anyone
can believe—can seriously believe—”

“Can't you? I can. I did myself, once. I don't now. Then it was clear to me—that there was—oh—” he was embarrassed—“God. And now it's quite clear that there isn't, or anyway, nothing we can know or care about.”

They sat together in silence for a moment. Leo had wandered off to inspect the statues.

Frederica said “I behaved badly. As usual.”

“Not particularly. He's been in an odd mood. I've been pushing him around, with figures.”

There was a silence, not uncompanionable. Luk said “If they put their damned Pale round my snail populations ...”

“Surely they can't. Surely they'll let you in.”

“Why? Why should they?”

Frederica subsided into silence. Luk said

“It can't be easy, there being two of them.”

“It isn't.” Frederica thought and then said “It's hellish. I was so determined not to give in—that is, not to let it—them—
it
—get me down.”

“Hard to see how it will change,” said Luk, with the gloomy satisfaction of a man whose own life is going badly. “Though if that one gets concentrated in a
camp
—this one—”

“He came up here to get away from him. And now he's back.”

“He's good at his job,” said Luk. “Indispensable. I'm writing this paper for the conference. Snarled-up in maths. He's been very good.”

“He is good,” said Frederica. She thought they should stop talking about her own problems, and asked how Jacqueline was.

“As far as I know, absolutely fine.”

There is a whole narrative in the words “As far as I know.” Frederica nodded quickly. She asked what Luk's paper was about.

“The disadvantages of sex for Darwinian adaptation. The cost of meiosis, if that means anything to you—the splitting of fertilised cells to form the zygote. Uses up a lot of energy compared to other methods.”

“Other methods?”

“Parthenogenesis. Clones. Budding.”

“I see. Well, I don't, but I'm interested. I shall listen to your paper.”

“Twins, of course, are a sort of clone. In some cases. Or one can be a bud of the other. We think. He doesn't like my research. He doesn't like the idea—from the
religious
point of view—that what we call altruism is a kind of machinery of self-propagative interest. And he doesn't like my views about the redundancy of the male.”

A small smile flickered over Luk's intent face, as he thought of the satisfactory lining-up of his evidence and his argument, however involved and difficult it was proving to be.

“What matters,” he said, “is getting things as right as we can. Describing the world
as it is
.”

“Oh yes,” said Frederica. “I wonder if I ought to go after him?”

“Do you want to?”

Frederica thought about it. “I've got to sort it out.”

“You might let him take a run at my figures, first,” said Luk Lysgaard-Peacock.

Men, thought Frederica, as Leo came up and put his arms round her, neither bud nor clone, but himself. She smelled the hay and fur smell of his hair. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock moved along the bench, stood up, and walked away.

“See you,” he said.

“Sure,” said Frederica.

Will and Leo went into the Teach-Inn. Leo wrinkled his nose at the intense smell of sewage and incense mixed. Will had become a silent and solitary teenager, dark like his father, slighter in build, with his father's dark eyes and his mother's milder mouth, which in him, at this age, often looked sullen. He seemed to like Leo, and was happy enough to take him about, despite the five-year age-gap.

He said “You've got to hear this mind-blowing music. If he's playing. He comes and goes.” Leo said “OK,” amiably but without enthusiasm. Like his mother, he was impervious to the enchantment of music. He was explaining to Will, as they negotiated the earthy paths between the booths, that since he got his new family he didn't really see it any more. He said his new step-brother and sister were younger than him. He said that when he did go to visit his father, he couldn't go riding. Sooty was dead, and the new family, Robin and Emma, had got new little ponies that were much too small for anyone Leo's size. They were called Shellover and Petit Gris. Shelly and Petty for short, said Leo. I'd look ridiculous if I went on them, so I don't. Even if I was asked, which I'm not, actually. Shame, said Will, who was listening for sounds, which he heard. He's there, said Will. Now you'll hear something. Blow your mind. Leo said, had Will noticed the funny smell. Naturally, said Will. You get used to it.

Leo was surprised, on entering the singing-space, to see that the singer was John O's unnerving brother, though he realised at once that he went with the smell. He was sitting on a tallish three-legged stool, bent over his guitar, from which ribbons dangled, crimson, gold and silver. He was wearing his jester's jerkin and his fingernails were painted alternately black with white whorls and white with black whorls. He also had glittery eyelids. His audience was mixed, and rapt. A few hippies, a large number of boys and girls more or less Will's age, a group of student-looking people from the University. They were all sitting on a kind of oriental floor of patchwork cushions. It was quite dark. It was a dull day, and the light through the canvas roof was dimly ruddy. Leo opened his mouth to say that this was only Paul O, and Will hushed him, and pulled him down among the gathering on the cushions. Leo listened to the strumming. There was no microphone. Simply the flow of the music, and then, the clear singing voice.

Leo thought that if Tolkien had been describing this music he would have said that it was like the endless rippling and eddying of a brook, with rapids and whirlypools. There were quite a few Tolkienish people in the audience, people with silvery bands round their brows and those sort of flimsy shirts which flared out to pointy cuffs and dangled. Leo didn't like to see them. They looked sort of made-up and unreal, and in some way diminished the shining reality of the Tolkien-world in his head. He felt Will next to him settling into the cushions, and glanced at his face, which was smiling vaguely and gently.

The song wasn't really vague and gentle, though it twanged and rippled in an endless sort of way.

O the One and the Many, the Many and the One
The fire in the flame, the crystal in the cone,
The brain in the skull and the red thread in the bone
The air going by, and the shadow in the sun.

Flakes of flame in the flint, flakes of ice on the moon
Flakes of green in the leaf, we are many we are one
We are one, we are many, flakes of ash on your sleeve
We are eaten, we are whole, we return, we stay, we leave.

A bubble on the ocean, a flower on the loom
A worm in a loam-maze, a day's-eye in the gloom
We are one we are many, we are many we are one
We spin the thread and twist it, and cut it when it's done.

I am god I am maggot I am minstrel I am string
I am mind I am matter I am motion I am thing
I am gun I am bullet I am many I am one
I can kill and resurrect you I am god when you are gone.

O the feast and the firelight O the goat and the skin
O the horns and the knuckles and the dancing and the din
O the One and the Many, O the Many and the One
O the dancing and the dreaming, until the feast is done.
Until we have consumed ourselves and feast and fire are done.