A Whistling Woman (49 page)

Mocked, tricked, Daniel Orton and Bill Potter wept, and pushed away their tears.
Afterwards, there was the usual rejoicing and celebration. Bill Potter tried to tell Daniel about his revelation—after all, he had shared it with him—but Daniel was pushing through the crowds, looking for his daughter. So he told Frederica. “I've just
understood
. Never too old. Never too old to understand something. The thing about the late comedies—the thing is—that what they do, the effect they have, isn't anything to do with fobbing you off with a happy ending when you know you witnessed a tragedy. It's about art, it's about the necessity of art. The human need to be
mocked with art
—you can have a happy ending, precisely because you know in life they don't happen, when you are old, you have a right to the
irony
of a happy ending—because you don't believe it. Are you listening?”

Frederica was abstractedly looking for a scientist. Who was putting his coat on, to leave.

Daniel found Mary. He wanted to say, “Whatever you do, don't die.” He hugged her. She danced, a human girl, within his arms' circle, and said “I got it
right,
I remembered it all, every word—as though it just spoke itself ...”

Winifred came up, and said “Lovely, lovely Mary. Has anyone seen Will?”

“He was sitting next to you,” said Daniel.
“Well, he got up and went out—just after the sheep-shearing scene—and I thought he'd gone to the lavatory—it is some way, in this building. But he didn't come back.”

“Perhaps he went home,” said Daniel. He thought, and then said “I'll go and look.”

“He's only sulking,” said Mary. She didn't say why. She didn't have to, and was a nice girl.

Will was not at home. He had been at home, it was slowly established, because his anorak and his bicycle were gone, and his desk-drawers were open and tumbled, though nobody knew what had been taken, since his privacy was always respected, and he lived in a horrible mess.

The bicycle was the worrying thing.

It was possible he had just gone out for a long ride and possible he would simply come back. There was also the pit of other possible things. And general uncertainty over what to do. Also, it was a foul November night, and thick mist was rolling in over the Yorkshire moors, making the roads very dangerous, and the sheep-tracks and footpaths treacherous or impossible.

Various small excursions were made into the wall of fog. Schoolfriends were called, and knew nothing. The night went past. In the morning, the police reported that a lone cyclist had been seen by a farmer, riding furiously along the edge of Mimmer's Tarn, in the fog, which had opened briefly, like a curtain, and revealed him in the headlights.

Leo said “He used to go to listen to that Zag, playing. When there was that tent. He liked his playing. I didn't.”

Daniel drove out with Frederica to Dun Vale Hall, and was told by the long-haired young men on the gate that they had seen no one. And no, he could not come in.

Frederica said that Luk Lysgaard-Peacock went in and out through the Pale, she happened to know, to check on his snails.

Luk arrived at Freyasgarth in his blue Renault. The family was tense and desperate. Mary sat weeping in a corner, feeling that her moment of glory had precipitated disaster, and feeling also, as siblings do, that disaster would
have to be
her fault. Bill was telephoning. Leo was white and shaking. Luk watched Frederica, who paid him no attention beyond a brief welcoming smile, talking to the boy. She was not telling him it would all be right. She was telling him that there were things to do. Her sharp face was concentrated and
grown-up,
with a look Luk had never seen before. When he and Daniel left for Dun Vale Hall she was sitting with the boy in her arms. Both were staring out of the window, grimly composed. They were very like each other.

The moorland fog was still thick when Luk and Daniel went through the Pale. They strode down across heather and fields, towards the Hall, and were able, because of the fog, to come to the back gate of the farmyard unseen. Coils of air and water wound themselves round them, thick and grey. The watchful geese began an invisible honking. Daniel pointed. The bicycle was leaning against an outbuilding.

“Now what?” said Luk.

“Now we fetch him out,” said Daniel.
They strode, a heavy dark man, a brisk, fiery man, across the yard and into the kitchen. The kitchen was full of women who with slowed movements were washing, and preparing food. They all wore the same long pale dresses. The atmosphere was steamy, an indoor fug to match the fog. The room was hung, as with tapestries, with the white on white embroidered cloths, with motifs of suns, moons and stars, sunflowers, melons and grapes. They hung also like banners from the long racks on pulleys which in the old days had carried the laundry. They were spread over the dressers and chests of drawers on which were groups of candles and nightlights. There was a smell of fur and feathers, dog and sheep and hens.
Someone said that visitors were not welcome.

Daniel said he had come to fetch his son.

Someone else said his son was not there.

Daniel said he intended to look for him.

Luk stood in the doorway, poised and watchful.
Daniel pushed through the women and out into the hall. The house was an old house. It had harboured Puritans and Non-conformists. Wesley had preached from its kitchen table. Daniel stood at the foot of the staircase and looked briefly up at the murky stained glass window which showed, though he could not see it, Christian and Hopeful crossing the Jordan to reach the heavenly City, “and the trumpets sounded for them on the other side.”

A dark figure stood on the turning of the stair. It was Eva Wijnnobel. She looked, Daniel thought, hunting a word,
mummified
. Her hair was glossy as ever, her eyes painted, her lips red. Her gaze was not fixed. She stared, not at him. She said

“You should not be here.”

“I have come for my son.”

“You may not find him. If he is here, he has, like Mary, chosen the better part.”

“Nonsense,” said Daniel.
He pushed past her, and the embalming smell of her perfumes. She said

“You have no place here.”

“Indeed not. I am going, as soon as I have found my son.”

He went on up, trying doors, looking into dormitories and cluttered cupboards. Finally he opened the door of a long attic and was met by a disorienting glitter of light, like ripples of reflection in underwater caverns, like the streams of sparks off revolving mirror-spheres in dance-halls. There was indeed such a sphere, hanging from the ceiling.

The room was a box of mirrors—lined with mirrors, and mirrors behind mirrors, crazily reflecting each other. There was a television, showing white noise. There were low tables, with candles of all kinds in glass dishes of all kinds. There were huge white cushions or bolsters on which, in white dresses, sat the male Hearers, or some of them. He saw Gideon, he saw Canon Holly, in their trailing white shirts, two dried-up wrinkled old walnuts, with tired eyes. He saw Lucas Simmonds, his cherubic face beaming over his innocent garment. He did not see Will, but he did see Zag, wearing his white shirt over his silver tights, like a crusader's surcoat, lolling on a heap of pillows. He did not see Gander, he did not see John Ottokar.

“I have come for my son.”

“I don't think you'll find him. Here.”

“Then I should like to speak to Joshua Ramsden.”

“He doesn't speak to strangers,” said Zag.

“Then I shall have to go and look for him,” said Daniel.

He had, in fact been consulted by Kieran Quarrell at Cedar Mount, who was troubled over the present state of the Therapeutic Community, and had been sent to Daniel because Daniel had been present at Four Pence, had worked with Holly at St. Simeon's, was felt to be a man with his feet on the ground. Quarrell had told Daniel the story of the eleven-year-old Joshua, and the fate of his father.

Daniel lifted up his shaggy head and roared. “WILL. If you're there, come out, come here. WILL. COME HERE NOW.”

Two doors opened simultaneously, one from a cubby-hole under the eaves, one from behind an avenue or rank of mirrors at the far end of the room. From the cubby-hole Will crawled and stumbled. His face was tear-stained. He stood up, and fell down. He said “They gave me sugar-cubes, white sugar-cubes.”

“They should not have done that,” said Daniel.

Joshua Ramsden, who had come through the other door, came into the middle of the room, and stood facing Daniel, his hands behind his back.

“I came for my son,” said Daniel.

They looked at each other. Ramsden saw Daniel's dark features in the middle of a series of images of himself, standing at the threshold of an infinity of reflected doors, half-obscured by the veil of blood which spread on the mirrors like a curtain.

Daniel blinked and saw the blood, blinked again, and it was gone. He said

“A bad trip is not a spiritual journey. You should not hurt young boys. He is coming home.”

“Home?” said Ramsden. “What does that matter in the face of the evacuation and the expulsion? There is a battle going on. He chose to fight it. He may not have been ready, or strong enough.”

For a moment Daniel felt the strangeness, the distance, of the other man, who was far away, in the mental worlds in which the lost, and the contemplative, and the brave, and the foolhardy, wander. It was a place where he had once briefly hoped to go. The man was a priest, in a way he had not been, and would not be.

He stood, his legs planted apart like an axeman, and confronted the tall, swaying figure with its bent head and white crest.

“You look ill, Joshua Ramsden. It is all going away, like water down a funnel. You are killing yourself. You need rest.”

Joshua Ramsden looked at the mirrors and the light, and the mirrors and the blood and the Light. He moved and spoke in a howling chorus of invisible voices. He heard his father, explaining that the pure fields of white light were just beyond the dissolution, that he had always known that, and had acted in wisdom, as Joshua must now do, having failed to die at the proper time.

“I am a Priest of the Light,” he said, “and the outcome is uncertain, as Mani knew. It is in the balance.”

“You look very ill, Joshua Ramsden. I think you should get looked after.”

“It will not be long now.”

“You've got a right to kill yourself, but not other people.” He folded his son in his heavy arms.

Ramsden saw the woman's dead mouth, and the slipped false teeth.

Daniel saw Stephanie's dead lip, curled back, as he saw it daily.

They looked at each other.

“Go home,” said Ramsden. “What is happening here, is happening.”

Daniel gestured at the room, the objects, the robes.

“Don't you see, all this is
only human
? It's bringing out of the cupboards and boxes of the mind what's stuffed in there, and boxing yourself in yourself, and suffocating in yourself. It's
more human
than not being religious at all, and whistling to yourself out there on the moor. But it's
only
human.”

“What do you know? You refuse to see the mystery.”

“I know that humanism isn't enough either. Making any sort of religion out of
being human
is a failure. The Religion of Humanity is a sugary sweet compared to the truth of things. It's just a dummy for babies, you and I are agreed on that. My son says, I'm not a religious. He may be right. I do the things somebody has to do since religion died in the world. Not for ‘humanity's' sake, but because we are religious beings, and caring for each other is what is left of what we used to know or believe about how everything worked. I am a religious, and God isn't a man, and I don't know what It is. There. Now, I'll take my son.”
Will crouched down on the floor, and shivered and sobbed. Daniel crouched beside him and put his arms round him.

“Listen to me, Will. I worry about thankless down-and-outs, yes and neurotic rich women with drug habits and night terrors, because someone must, because nothing is quite hopeless. It's laid on us, but I don't know what laid it. If you can't see what Mary saw, then you must make do with Martha, who lived with what's solid. That's all there is. All the stones were put on top of each other to make places where people would think about kindness and about what's solid without coming to bits. Which is easy to do, to come to bits, believe me, the difficult thing is not to. Now, come home.”

Will came, staggering, looking with huge eyes at dissolving frames and lintels and receding tunnels. The stairs were a horrible hazard, but the figure on them had vanished, leaving her unmistakable odour. Daniel guided his son back into the kitchen. He saw Ruth, standing by the sink, arrested in the peeling of a carrot.

“And you, Ruth? Are you coming?”

She opened her mouth. No sound came out. She rushed from the room. Luk, still just over the back threshold, felt someone push something into his hand. Ruth rushed back. She pushed a bundle at Daniel, who had to let go of Will to take it. It was a very small, very weak baby, wrapped in a scrap of blanket.

“Take it!” said Ruth. “Take it away. I'm not coming. I don't want it. Take it.”

“Take her,” said Clemency Farrar's scraped voice.

Daniel, still concentrating on Will, gave the little creature, which moaned and murmured, but did not cry, to Luk. Luk said

“Does she have a name?”

“No,” said Ruth.

“Sophy,” said Lucy Nighby from a dark corner. “Eva calls it Sophy.”

Ruth said to Luk “Give it to Jacqueline.”

It took them a very long time to get back to the gap in the Pale, and the Renault. Will kept falling over, seeing precipices in front of him where there was only blackened heather, muttering that there were creatures gathering round with eyes, with little lights, with fires. Luk carried the baby, very inexpertly, and thought that if there was one thing he knew, it was that Jacqueline didn't want a baby. The mist swirled and metamorphosed itself like a huge living creature, clutching the surface of the moor, putting out trailing, probing fingers and inserting stumpy limbs, flowing, condensing, expanding, a breathing, clammy skin. Will sat down again and said he was suffocating, he couldn't go on. Luk said it was water vapour. Will said the heaven was trying to smother the earth. Daniel said, well, it hasn't yet, and it won't.
What had been pushed into Luk's hand turned out to be a letter, addressed to Dr. Avram Snitkin, at an address in London. It didn't have a stamp, so one was found (by Winifred) and stuck to it, and it was posted. The English do not open other people's letters. Frederica knew who Snitkin was, but not where he was. Marcus, who had seen him in the Teach-Inn, did not know who he was.