A Whistling Woman (46 page)

Nick Tewfell was gesticulating in the middle of the group. He was, in fact, being naturally lawful, attempting to get them to stop. He was waving his own placard, which said “Break the Mind-Forged Manacles. No More Compulsory Grammar and Maths.”

Wijnnobel advanced on him. He said

“Stop that! You are an historian. You should know where book-burning leads.”

“This is a revolution,” said Nick Tewfell.

“Against
what
?” said Wijnnobel, advancing, the dark biting in his mind. Every choice he had made appeared to him to be wrong. He wished to hurt someone. He was not used to the feeling.

“Against
you,
” said Nick Tewfell, waving his placard.

The Vice-Chancellor waved his arms at the group, like a farmer scattering fowl.

“Get out. You have done enough damage. Get out.”

Most of the students turned and ran. Nick Tewfell turned, and looked back. He wished to hurt someone. He was not used to the feeling. He glared at the Vice-Chancellor, through one of the undamaged glass cases, which contained two pieces of Renaissance glass, donated by Matthew Crowe, a green German beaker made of Waldglas, or forest glass, so named because it derived its green colour from ferns, and an ornate French beaker, with a helical foot, showing the Expulsion from the Garden, with the inscription
En-la Sueur—de ton visage—tu
mangeras—le payn
.

Nick saw the Vice-Chancellor reflected in the glass cube, and multiplied into an army of ghosts. He had two options, as Eichenbaum would have recognised, fight or flight. He chose the first, raised his placard, and brought it down on the glass case, shattering it and the artefacts inside it. His opponent bent and picked up a handful of the finer fragments, closing his fingers on them. He held up his bleeding hand at Nick Tewfell, and gestured.

“Go away. Get out. Go
away
.”
Many years later, when Tewfell was a minister in Tony Blair's government, he would still wake at night and remember that moment, the unbroken box, the bright unbroken beakers, the broken box, the splinters of glass, the dark-faced tall man with his bleeding fingers, the strange dancing light in the room, which was the torches outside, and the flaring behind his own eyes. The odd thing was, that the Vice-Chancellor had never said anything to anyone about who had broken the glasses. And for a few years, he had hated him for that. And then, as he grew older, he had almost loved him. He had, he saw, come in a way to resemble him.
In another part of the campus, Deborah Ritter had led a foray to release the imprisoned creatures. The Zoology Research Centre was built round an internal quadrangle, with a lawn. The rescuers surged into the laboratories and opened cages, and pens. They overturned glass tanks, and undid the collar of a solitary sheep, which snorted, and remained immobile. They worked by torchlight, their small fires bobbing and dancing as they smashed padlocks and untwisted wire. A procession of tufted ducks wandered satisfactorily out on to the grass, followed by various rabbits and hares, white and piebald, lolloping and scuttling. Mickey Impey picked up several jars and shook out colonies of worms and beetles on to the grass. Deborah Ritter, with kaleidoscope eyes, approached various banked tanks of white rats. They peered out at her, their own eyes—come and
see,
she cried—wonderful rosy crystals, opals with crimson fires in fields of white spikes of furry icicles.

Go, you darlings, cried Deborah Ritter, go and live your lives. She tipped them out on to the floor, where they cowered, cringed, and then began to prospect. She poured out a cage of piebald mice amongst them. One rat snarled and several mice bolted. Mickey Impey, opening a box, was met by a shrilling, and a mouthful of yellow teeth, which fastened on his finger. He shook the angry curled creature to the ground. Ten days later his wound began to froth and fester. Then his hand swelled, and his arm and shoulder blew up into bolsters and went blue. He was in hospital for a month, and wrote several poems about night-nurses and moanings in the dark.

Waltraut Ross released several bandaged cats, some of which trotted off sedately, some of which staggered, and one of which fell over and was still.

Flocks of small birds were poked out of cages, and scrambled and fluttered into the night. The birds were the most satisfactory releases, because they were able to get further than the lawn, the courtyard, and the surrounding corridors.
Someone alerted Christopher Cobb, who looked around for help, and found Vincent Hodgkiss and Marcus Potter. When they reached the Research Centre the revellers, or rescuers, were gone. The grass, the lab floor, the benches, were alive. Hundreds of newly-hatched chicks scuttled along the corridors, desperately cheeping. Ants swarmed over the coffee-making machine. There was a sound in the darkness of clucking, quacking and hissing. Christopher Cobb stood in front of his chaffinch cages, and held out his arms to the sky, as though summoning back the vanished singers. Tears stood in his eyes—Hodgkiss did not know whether he was mourning the creatures he knew, or the years of experimental work lost, or both. A brindled cat with a shaved belly went past, with a half-dead black mouse hanging from its jaws.

“Some of this is bloody
dangerous,
” said Cobb. “God knows where to start. We'll have to kill a lot of these—”

The lights went out. The lights went out in the whole building, which seemed to give a sigh, and settle into blackness. Cobb said “Stay here. Try not to let anything out, or anyone in. I'll get the fire brigade. Or someone. Don't get bitten.”

Vincent and Marcus, neither of whom was either an animal-lover or physically very competent, asked if they should try to put anything back.

“No. Guard the door. Mind the rats. There was only one snake. I can't see her, but she was harmless, a nice creature.”

He went off.

Vincent and Marcus sat down on the grass, by the door, side by side. They peered apprehensively into the gloom, and listened to the slithers and rustles and squeaks around them. There was a smell of soiled sawdust, and a smell of what Vincent thought was formaldehyde. He stared upwards. Above the courtyard, in the midsummer dark, hung a fine curl of new moon. He said

“I did it all wrong. I should have been draconian. I should have moved them on, at the very beginning.”

“Then they'd have won.”

“But all this—this wreckage—”

“If people want wreckage, it happens, somehow.”

They sat in silence. A very large, very damaged cockerel, white, with a jagged crimson crest and tremulous wattles advanced towards them, and retreated. Its tailfeathers were draggled, but the really disgusting thing was its neck, which was plucked bare, and bright crimson, erect above the pouffe of its breast feathers. It came into the range of their vision, saw them, put its head on one side, staring with mad yellow eyes, and backed off, gobbling.

“A non-aggressive male,” said Hodgkiss, gloomily.

Marcus said that when they were in that state, it was very clear to see that they were related to dinosaurs. The beak and the crest, the scaly bits and the snaky bits. Interesting, he said. He seemed somehow less ill at ease, in the darkness, than Hodgkiss had expected. They didn't try to look at each other, only sat side by side, looking at the grey grass and the vague shapes that scurried across it. Hodgkiss saw something make a movement between a lollop and a waddle. He smiled to himself.

“Is that a duck or a rabbit?” he asked his beloved. He said “There are all sorts of people and creatures who fall between categories. Duck-rabbits. Cock-dinosaurs. Crowing hens.”

He moved his hand, like a blind, questing creature, over the blades of dark grass, until his fingers met those long, delicate fingers he had watched for months. And in the dark, the fingers neither shrank, nor evaded. They touched, and gripped and held.

“I've been dreaming about you,” said Marcus Potter's light voice, calmly. “Good dreams. I think—we know in dreams—who we are—what we are—”

“I think we are infinite shape-shifters—in dreams—” said Vincent Hodgkiss, taking a grip on the thin hand, which gripped back. Hodgkiss moved nearer, so that his substantial thigh lay alongside that thin one. He wanted to touch Marcus's hair, but did not want to let go of the hand he had, and thought, this will do, for now. For now, this is enough, and more than I could have hoped.
Wilkie was taking photographs of the fires and the dancers, helped by the TV crew who had been working on the Conference. Frederica, running messages between the wet ashes of the Long Royston show-bedrooms and the chaos of the university administration, saw a large, black-cloaked figure, bent low, running purposefully down the Long Royston drive, away from the building. She thought, let her go, and then thought of Gerard Wijnnobel's face. She began to run herself, but Eva Wijnnobel had a very considerable start, and a surprising turn of speed. Frederica looked around her, and saw Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. She said, breathlessly,

“She's getting away.”

“Who's getting away?”

“That woman. Lady W.”

“Getting away?”

“She was in it. In the march. She—I'm sure she—set, helped to set, the fires, those skoobs, in Long Royston.”

“Skoobs?”

“He asked us to look for her. To get her to come back.”

“I'll get my car. The police are guarding some of the gates, but there aren't enough of them. They'll let me through. We could catch up with her, and—well—talk her into coming back. You do know she's
mad
?”

“Well, that's why. He's been—extraordinary. It's all—
literally
—falling down round him. We could help him. We could get her back.”

“If you call that helping him,” said Luk Lysgaard-Peacock drily.

By the time his little car swung out of the gate of Long Royston, there was no sign of Lady Wijnnobel. And then, some way along the road, Frederica saw a familiar white van. She said

“That's Elvet Gander. I haven't seen him all night, he wasn't
there,
that's odd.”

Two figures, one black, one shimmering and sparkling, stepped out into the road from behind a hedge, and waved down the van. It stopped. They got in. It turned, and went off, bouncing, up the road into the moorland.

“Now what?”

“I don't know. Where are they going?”

“We could guess. We could follow and make sure. Would you like a night-drive over the moors?”

“Why not?” said Frederica.

“Excuse all the snail-stuff rattling about,” said Luk. “I've not had much time, or inclination, to keep the car tidy.”

“Not to worry,” said Frederica. Her spirits lifted as they drove away from the flaring chaos behind them.

The white van drove up, and up, on to the high Moor road, followed, at a discreet but obvious distance, by Luk's small blue Renault. If the driver of the van observed the followers, he neither accelerated nor deviated. There were in any case no turnings off the road which ran along the crest of the moorland. Frederica leaned forward anxiously. Luk told her to calm down.

“I don't see what you're going to do.”

“No. Nor do I.”

In the event, the white van drew up at the gate of Dun Vale Hall. Someone got out—the headlights shone on Elvet Gander's bald dome—unlocked the gate, and drove in. He then returned, and swung the gate closed. Luk had pulled up, some distance away. He imagined that Gander inclined his head, with ceremonious irony, before he vanished behind the gate.

“Now what?”

“Now we go back and tell the Vice-Chancellor where she's gone.”

“I've got a better idea. Now we go up to my cottage—which isn't far—and telephone the University. And have something to eat—I'm starving. I don't know about you.”
Luk thought that taking another woman—any other woman, including this one, whom he alternately disliked and felt a kind of armed truce with—to Loderby—would in some way exorcise the painful memory of his—it now seemed to him—absurd wooing of Jacqueline. Frederica thought, because it was the way her life seemed to go, and because she had dreamed it, that perhaps Luk intended to make love to her. These were the new days of sexual liberty, when love-making was more likely than not. Frederica also thought, for she had been there many times, that if this was a beginning, it was the beginning of an ending, that was the way it went. She thought she was sorry, because she had been interested in his lecture and his fierceness, and then gave a little snort of laughter, remembering the subject of the lecture.

“What are you laughing at?”

“I was remembering your lecture.”

“Hah.”

“It was brilliant.”

“Thank you.”

“It should have been depressing, and was the opposite.”

“Thank you.”

They drew up in the dark, and Luk found his keys. He explained that he hadn't used the cottage for some time, and put on some lights. He said he would telephone the University, found a bottle of wine, and poured Frederica a glass.

“Make yourself at home,” he said vaguely, waving a welcoming hand. “Light some candles, it looks sad with the electric light.”

He sat down by the telephone in the narrow hall, and began what was a long and patient attempt to get through to the beleaguered University. The lines were engaged, or down. He thought laterally, tried Vincent Hodgkiss without success. Behind him, he heard Frederica Potter going into the bathroom. He heard the lavatory flush. He heard her running down the stairs, and striding up and down in his kitchen and study. He wondered if she would or wouldn't, did or didn't. She seemed rather pleased with herself. Cocky. She would do as she pleased. Did he want to be what would please her? He got through to a policeman on a walkie-talkie on the campus, and relayed the message that Lady Wijnnobel had been seen going into Dun Vale Hall. With Elvet Gander the psychoanalyst. And the singer, Paul Ottokar. Yes, he thought that was all he had to say.
Frederica had done nothing feminine to make things comfortable, except, as instructed, to light candles and put out the electric lights. She was prowling up and down, picking things up, the skull, the shells, the feathers, putting them back where they had been arranged. She said