A Whistling Woman (42 page)

Burn me up burn me up, make me fire make me light,
Eat my skull eat my heart, eat my bo-ones so-o white.
We are one, we are many, we are many, we are one.
We are god, we are lymph, we are god, we are gone.

Leo looked at Paul-Zag's face, in its swinging hair, in the incense-smoke. He felt he didn't want him to notice him, and he felt he didn't want to be there. So he wriggled away from Will, who was nodding with closed eyes, with the music, and crawled on his stomach to the edge of the booth, and went out. He took a deep breath, forgetting the smell, and then told himself it was no worse, really, than Sooty's stall when Sooty had just pissed in the straw. There was no one to whom he could speak of the loss of Sooty. He wandered along a branch of the internal pathway, and came to the Mother Goose at the wicket-gate, and Deborah Ritter reading to a smallish assembly of children. He thought he was too big for such community tale-telling, which reminded him of school. And he didn't like the paper sunflowers, much, or the cardboard cabbages. But he heard a sentence he knew, and turned back to listen.

“Unlikely though it may seem,” said the Whistler to Dracosilex,
“there are things we have in common.”

Artegall thought there could be no two creatures less similar than the
tall birdwoman, with her long neck and soft, soft overlapping feathers
and down, and the flint-lizard, who moved little but his golden eyes, like
slivers of light in soot. The wind ruffled all the Whistler's plumage, so
that she looked light enough to blow away like a cloud, and vanish in an
airstream. Whereas Dracosilex was squat and compact, even his strong
claws only sketched on his rocky body, unless he needed to move. Little
threads of fire flickered constantly along his black back.

“We are both neither one thing nor the other,” said the Whistler,
mournfully. The Whistlers had many moods, of which mournfulness was
only one. They could scream with joy in the wind, they could scold, they
could sing in harmony. Dracosilex chuntered to himself quietly enough.
He had two moods only. Stolidity, verging on inertia, and incandescence,
which terrified everyone. At the moment, he was stolid.

“We are neither birds nor women,” said the Whistler. “And you are
neither snake nor stone. What runs in your veins is not blood, but stone-light, and what runs in ours is not human kindness, but veins of sorcery
full of sky and air. We can never have mates, for we would have to
choose, men or birds, and we will not give up our feathers.”

As for him, Dracosilex said, he and his kind appeared when certain
so to speak knots formed in the silica. It makes eggs that make us, he
said. There is never more than one of us, in any mountain range.

Leo stood and listened, just outside the gate. When Deborah Ritter had closed the book, she smiled amiably at Leo, and asked him if he liked the story.

“Oh yes. It's my story.”

“
Your
story?”

“I'll show you,” said Leo. He opened the gate, and went in.

“It's dedicated to me. For Leo and Saskia, it says. We were
told
this story.”

“How wonderful,” said Deborah Ritter, politely. She said “So you know the writer of this book? She must have a lot of money.”

“Not really,” said Leo. “We all live in a very
mean,
that is
ordinary
place. We are not really a family, but we are like a family. We are two women, and two children, and this story was told for us ...”

He was happily settled, lecturing the assembled children, with some of his mother's arrogance, on life in Hamelin Square when Will caught up with him, and pulled him away. Will was embarrassed. And a little annoyed that a sense of responsibility had made him leave the singing. They walked home in a complex silence.

Gerard Wijnnobel looked at his wife across the breakfast table. She was eating fiercely, forkfuls of scrambled egg, great gleeful snatched bites of butterbright toast. He said

“Eva, I have tried not to restrict your freedom, or dictate your actions in any way. You must do me the justice of recognising this.”

Lady Wijnnobel chewed. She smiled through the chewing.

“Please listen to me. I do ask you
not to do this
.”

She swallowed, and smiled.

“You cannot prevent me.”

“No,” said Wijnnobel, patiently. “I cannot. But I have never before asked you—myself—for a concession, a consideration. Please consider what is at stake. With the Conference so near. And the volatile situation with regard to the students.”

“Hmnf. All my life has been subordinated to your whims and your
importance
. Now, I am asked to speak for myself. And you try to prevent me. It is all of a piece.”

It is not, he told her in his mind. It is not so. Not quite or altogether so.

“Free speech,” said his wife, through more toast. “You b'lieve in free speech.”

“Oh, yes.”

“And
I
am asked to speak—on the air, in person—about what I believe. And you try to prevent me.”

“It is a bad moment.”

“You mean, you don't like what I say. But you can't stop me saying it, Gerard, unless you restrain me. Bodily, so to speak. Bodily.”

He looked down at the table, and saw his own wooden face in the polished wood.

It came to him that since she would not listen, his speech had made things worse. God knew, he thought, what she would now do, if, for instance, he were to appeal over her head to Edmund Wilkie, who must in any case have thought of all these matters—his own problems—before making this—on the face of it—dangerous and absurd proposal.

As she often did, Eva appeared to read his mind.

“The young man came to hear one of my weekly lectures,” she said. “To assess me, no doubt, to assess my presence of mind, and so forth. He said he was very impressed. He said there is a great deal of interest in astrology, these days.”

“So there is,” said Wijnnobel, truthfully.

“Well then,” said his wife. “It is natural that I should be approached. And natural that I should accept. Please think no more of it.”

Gerard Wijnnobel, daunted, lowered his crest in defeat.
John Ottokar stood in the doorway of his university room, and tried to prevent Frederica from leaving. They had not been to bed together. Frederica had not felt able to be naked in front of this man who knew every inch of her skin, outer and inner. She wanted to be separate. She wanted to be gone. She was not thinking. John was both thinking and speaking, as though she might be able to hear him. His voice churned in her mind like water at the bottom of some deep pothole, vaguely audible. He said that he had come to her classes, all those years ago, to learn how to speak, and now he was speaking and she must listen. She must help him, she must save him, for he was being torn apart and destroyed. In the days before she had taught him to speak, he said, he had had maths and mutterings, mutterings with
him,
which no one understood. Except God, maybe, and Frederica did not like God. He had wanted to be—he said, his language faltering—an
individual
in an ordinary world—and she was the way, she must not let him go. He had tried to—to keep steady through work—but work was full of terrible things, it was soul-destroying. I work to prove the individual is nothing, said John Ottokar, eloquently. Frederica stood and waited, inside the door. I want you to marry me, said John Ottokar, and we will make a good home for Leo, and you can do whatever you want, whatever you want.

She had been attracted to his grace and self-assurance, and now these were gone. She had a terrible sense of a weight of responsibility and an even more violent urge to escape, to get out, to go away. Instinct had got her into this, and instinct was hoisting her out by the hairs, and reason and humanity were nowhere. She waited for him to finish speaking, which took a long time, for he had become good with words, and appeared to believe he was pleading for his life.

Then she said she had to go.

John Ottokar said she was a bitch.

Frederica said that was very true, she was, she saw she was.

She said, let me out.

He lowered his crest in defeat and she went out. She was leaving for London the next day.
She wept in bed, for what seemed like hours, a pillow over her head, out of consideration for Leo, in the next room, who must not hear a grief that was not his.
When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed that she was running between trees, naked among the ribbons of her cut dress. Someone was behind her, was gaining on her, had grabbed her from behind and hoisted her high, driving an anonymous cock in between her arrested legs. Someone was stroking her hair, and she twisted round to see who, for she hated lovemaking in dreams, she fought invasion and involuntary surrender. She was lifted up, and up, ridiculously high, always with the rigid thing between her legs. Her face saw a face between the leaves of the canopy, and her mind had a momentary memory of Alice's encounter with the angry bird. The face was the face of Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, and he was laughing.
The Vice-Chancellor watched
Through the Looking-Glass
alone in his drawing-room. The curtains were open, and the stars were scattered across a clear sky, interspersed with thin cloud, and the purposeful linear winking of man-made lights. The Alice-in-a-box-of-mirrors set was decorated with the vanishing grins of the Cheshire Cat, interspersed with fishbones and nursery stars. Frederica wore black, with a necklace of spherical green glass beads. Gander sat on her right hand, white-robed, perspiring in the white lights. Eva was on her left, arrayed in a velvet gown of dull purple, with a boat-shaped neck and a heavy gilded collar, with inset stones, almost certainly of symbolic significance. Someone had smoothed her thick hair into a sleek form, and had sprayed it into a crisped solidity, like meringue-crust, cinder-black.

He saw immediately that she was very nervous. Her nostrils were flaring, her breathing was laboured, she was dabbing at her red-red lips with a screwed-up tissue. Little spheres of sweat stood on her frowning forehead, above the huge, uncompromising eyebrows. The one thing he had not thought to worry about was whether she would be afraid, or made ill again by the experience. He was angry with himself: he had been concerned simply with what she might say, and how she might say it.

He watched Frederica Potter, who must by now be experienced in reading nervous states. She embarked on a series of banal, easy questions. Astrology wasn't anything so simple as fortune-telling columns in newspapers, was it? Astrology had always been there, hadn't it, it had been used to explain history and the human psyche and the movements of the heavenly bodies? Eva began to make her usual cumbersome, angry, faintly threatening assertions. Like a bull, he thought, no, a cow, hurling itself at a fluttered pink silk cloak. She felt better for getting her mouth open, as everyone did. She said that the moon pulled the seas, which was hard for common sense to credit, and small human lives were part of large cosmic movements. And over the ages, people, some people, had learned to read these movements and connections finely. Astronomy, put in Gander, was the child of astrology, as chemistry was the child of alchemy, and there were two ways of looking at ancient things, one of which was to understand that they were deeply human, deeply human, not just errors but clues to our own nature, as our genes and chromosomes also were. Also our dreams. All had their limitations. All their power.

They discussed Dr. John Dee, who was the evening's personality, his occult knowledge, its human consequences. They discussed the fact that many contemporary cultures and communities still did nothing without consulting an astrologer. Gander said that the counter-cultural movement was aware of old spiritual forms, was deeply into their renewal, their so to speak
re-volution
into the Light once more ...

They looked at the object, which was a Renaissance celestial globe, showing the creatures spread across the dark, crab and scorpion, bull and ram, goat and fishes. Frederica said that as a little girl she had always thought of these as the stuff of poetry, made-up things, that weren't there, and yet were there, because you said they were there. She couldn't get her mind round the celestial globe, she said, because it wasn't a real thing, what was out there was infinity, this was just an imaginary spherical skin, unlike a terrestrial globe.

Lady Wijnnobel said, with a toothy smile that wasn't really placatory, that Frederica must have been, must be, quite a
silly
little girl, since these forms were poetic truth, but also truth in a form that all those—she waved her arm dismissively, shaking the frame of the set—molecules and things—couldn't express, couldn't begin to express. Her voice took on its liquid, beating note. She spoke of how the Creator had wanted to make a world in which He had created ensouled creatures linked with every conceivable area of nature in the most profound sense. Every ensouled creature had its form, pincer and horn, fin and feeler, that connected it to the whole universe at one particular point. The old myths knew this. Modern man dissected everything with his senses and had made a new ignorance. “Instinct is a deeper and wiser guide to the totality of nature, to the ultimate wisdom, than ordinary human understanding. True, we humans fly, we swim, but unnaturally, but awkwardly, at what a cost to earth, to water, to air. Now, the signs are the forms which head us
back
...”

The camera held her wide, urgent, stressful face. Gerard Wijnnobel stood up, as though embracing the glass box, or breaking it, could stop her flow. Frederica Potter said, conversationally, lightly,

“You know, it's hard on those of us who have the
human
signs. If you buy a pottery mug, or a place-mat, or something, with your own sign on it, you get a beautiful form if it's a crab or a scorpion or the fishes, and usually you get not bad goats and rams and bulls. Even Sagittarius is OK. But the Virgin and the Twins they always come out simpering and sentimental. They look like Disney's Snow White, or ghastly mass-made statuettes of the Virgin Mary, with sweet little doll-faces. I know, because I'm the Virgin.”