A Whistling Woman (51 page)

“Libra, the Scales. The one inorganic, man-made sign.”

“You see. You're proud of it. You make the meaningless connection. You're human.”

“I never said I wasn't.”

“You're an artist, like the bower-birds.”

“Bower-birds are particularly nasty to female bower-birds. They tempt them in, trample them, and beat them up, and drive them out. To make space for the next female.”

“That's very unpleasant.”

“It's natural. It happens. And it isn't a good analogy. Hodder Pinsky would warn you against it. Human beings aren't bower-birds, though I imagine we may have an enormous number of identical genes. Come to bed?”

They were gentle, because of exhaustion, and considerate, because of a new respect for each other, and therefore, as happens between men and women, felt the fact of the strangeness—the fact that they were, essentially, strangers—more intensely than the first anonymous time. Frederica thought of Jacqueline, and felt—for the first time in her life—a stab of pure sexual curiosity about another woman, and then a stab of jealousy. She was interested in this. Maybe jealousy was an important part of normal sexual behaviour—it was certainly so in novels—and therefore significant. You do not know another person, even when his sleeping face on the pillow, very close to your own, has a small, pleased smile on its mouth.
Over breakfast, they talked of their separate futures, with cautious respect. Luk said the new developments in electrophoresis were making rapid nonsense of years of patient research in population genetics. Science was like that. Things became untrue, disproved overnight. There were greater differences being found between neighbouring groups of snails than between humans and cows. He needed to move on. He was thinking of American labs—and some in Japan—where work was being done on relations between mammals which showed where creatures diverged under pressure of natural selection. Molecular clocks were eliminating natural history, he said. He wanted to be in on it.

Frederica said she wished she was as sure of anything. She said she would go back to London and go on with the television. She said it was every girl's ambition to be an air hostess, and now she was an air hostess. Whereas what she wanted, was to
think
.

What about? asked Luk, out of sexual contentment, thinking of the energy of her wiriness, in bed and out.

Frederica said she had wanted to think out the nature of metaphor. She had thought of writing a thesis, once, on religious metaphor in the seventeenth century. This was interesting, because seventeenth-century religious poets—and allegorical storytellers—used all sorts of elaborate metaphors—scientific, sensuous, philosophical—to describe a state of heavenly contemplation that was none of these things, that was said explicitly
not to be
able to be figured.

Luk the heir of Grundtvig and Kierkegaard was interested in this. She said “I had the idea—it wasn't mine, it was very common in the 50s—that the seventeenth century was when people really
stopped believing
as they once had. When all those words—like creation, like real—became riddles. I thought, if you looked at the metaphors you could trace the thinking processes, you could see how the mind works.”

She said “I wanted to find a place to start understanding everything. Including why certain forms of language appear to be so perfect and beautiful. I've not got a first-rate mind. I shan't think up a new problem, or a new language. But it may not matter, because language is something we all have, with a long history, it's
in common
.”

She stopped, confused.

“Well—” said Luk. “You could go back to universities.”

“That's what John said. It would make more sense for Leo. But then I saw, I don't
want
to be in an English Department, stuck with Eng. Lit. I saw that when you were talking, when Hodder Pinsky was talking, I saw the world was bigger. In my air-hostess cabin I can have Simon Moffitt explaining the Amazon flora and fauna—and Pinsky—and you, if you weren't so cross. Explaining genes, and chromosomes, and the language of the
DNA
. You know, the
new
metaphors, the ones now, are in that box. Wars are in that box, and beliefs, and persuasion, just as they were in
Paradise Lost
but infinitely more so.”

“And a lot of nonsense, and a lot of mind-twisting, and advertisements, and political haranguing—”

“Yes, but it's interesting, it's
what is
—” She drew circles on the breakfast table with a finger. “I'm simply confused, that's what I am. I'm a mess.”

“I don't see why. What about Edmund Wilkie? He's respected by perceptual psychologists. And he puts things in your Pandora's box.”

“It's harder for a woman.”

“And so? You must just whistle harder. Louder. You won't do either perhaps quite as successfully as you would have done a straight university ‘career.' But you'll
know more
.”

“That's what matters.”

“Of course.”

And if he had said, you are lovely, and if he had said, I want you exclusively to be
mine,
and if he had said again, “thank you,” Frederica would not have been so perturbed in body and mind. The laminations were slipping. Fire was re-arranging them in new patterns. She was full of life, and afraid.

Chapter 27

January 1970

Frederica sat in the basement in Hamelin Square, methodically and ruthlessly stripping the petals—one by one—from a huge and handsome hothouse chrysanthemum, a ruddy bronze one, given to her by the poet Hugh Pink, with whom she had set up a group to read
Paradise Lost
and
The Faerie Queene,
in winter evenings. The bruised petals gave off the winter smell, the funeral smell, of those flowers.

“To bleed, not to bleed,” said Frederica. She glowered at the flower. “To bleed, not to bleed.”

Leo came in. He said “
Don't
do that. It was beautiful. Don't do it.”

His head was a shining bronze mass.

“I'm sorry. I was worrying about something.”

The plucked flower had a forlorn coppery crest.

“The flower hadn't done anything. Hugh gave it to you.”

“Hugh hasn't done anything. Nobody has. It's OK. Go to school. You'll be late.”

When Leo had gone, Frederica finished the dismantling. It ended on “To bleed.” Like most oracles, it was wrong.
Frederica's life had appeared to be taking on a new, fluent, elegantly provisional shape. She had started work on a series of programmes on painting, for educational television, with Alexander and Wilkie. This meant interesting journeys to Amsterdam, to see Van Gogh, to Madrid, to see Velázquez, to Venice, to see Titian. She was working again on the metaphors. She was discussing making programmes about the chemistry of thought, with Wilkie and Lyon Bowman. There was Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. She discussed him with no one, and he and she did not discuss themselves in relation to each other. They were wary, they were pleased to meet, they survived separation equably. They did not use those words,
love, in love,
which both, for different reasons, felt to be dead words. It did not occur to Frederica to think of sleeping with anyone else, or to want anyone else. She had space to breathe and be—and so had he—and they met eagerly and happily. That would do.

She and Leo had gone North for Christmas, and Luk had come to Freyasgarth, and Frederica had said nothing to anyone. He was her private life. Marcus had made even more elaborate Christmas decorations, explaining the Fibonacci series to Leo and Saskia, drawing sunflowers and fircones. Marcus was happy. He was going to Cambridge, where he had a Fellowship in mathematics at St. Michael & All Angels. Vincent Hodgkiss was also going to Cambridge. He had resigned as Dean, after the invasion, and had been given a Readership in Philosophy. He had bought a small house in Newnham village, which he and Marcus were to share. He was not present at Christmas—he was not in any sense part of the family. But Marcus said “Vincent says—” with almost complete ease, and everyone smiled encouragement.
Jacqueline Winwar came, too, with Daniel. Daniel and Luk had discussed whether or not to tell her that Ruth had, so to speak, bequeathed her the baby. Luk said roughly that it would be cruel to do anything of the kind, and he was having no part in it. The baby, who was suffering from malnutrition, exhaustion, and various after-effects of its difficult birth, was in Blesford Hospital, in the wards where her mother had once been a nurse. Daniel visited her. She was very quiet. He decided against telling either Gideon or Clemency Farrar where she was, unless they asked, which they did not. They had moved away, no one knew where.

He did, however, go to see Jacqueline Winwar. He told her what Ruth had said, and where the child—who seemed not to have shaken off the name, Sophy, given to her by Eva Wijnnobel—was. Jacqueline, who had had a good Christian upbringing, stared out of the window with a set face, and then stared at Daniel.

“Why me?”

“You were her real friend. Outside that place.”

“Then I
ought
—”

“She made bad choices for herself. She can't impose one on you, unless you want it.”

“I want to do what's right.”

“And it's hard to think that what's right, might be what you want
for
yourself,
because the world we grew up in said, always put others before yourself. You don't want this child.”

No, said Jacqueline, she wanted to go to Paris and work with French neuroscientists on the electricity and chemistry of memory. That is who I am, said Jacqueline. She said, more anxiously, that she had also
got
to get away from Lyon Bowman. Who treated his lab like—like a harem, who stole results, who—who was good at the science, and full of energy, and kept giving her things, like giving her
sugar-plums
—things like an introduction to Pinsky's Filaments group—but she wanted to be herself, herself alone, which meant, Daniel must understand, not thinking about
herself,
but about the work, the experiments, the synapses and the axons that did the thinking. I
can't do that
with a baby, said Jacqueline, her face white. Poor Ruthie. How
silly
. I suppose Gideon ...

“No one knows for certain,” said Daniel. He said, he supposed Gideon might know. He said, he didn't propose to talk to Gideon, and Jacqueline said that was wise. She said “It isn't your baby, it isn't your problem—” Daniel said, it was his problem, he had been given it. So to speak.

“If you have, I have.”

“No. Because what I do, is deal with intractable problems. What you do, is neuroscience.”

I don't want to be a human being, said Jacqueline, feeling suddenly that she was very lonely in the world, that her choice of work had deflected or distorted her unthinking life.

Daniel did what he never did, and put his arms round her. Jacqueline thought, he doesn't
do
that, he's the opposite of Gideon.

“Listen, it's
your life,
” said Daniel. “My son says I'm not a religious, and as a not-religious, I say, be who you are. You've changed. I like you as you are.”

Jacqueline put her face up to be kissed. Daniel kissed her. He knew a woman who was breaking up a good marriage because she could not have a child, and the adoption authorities considered her too old. She might be kind to Sophy.

“I'm glad you told me, though,” said Jacqueline. “I wouldn't like not to have known—”

“No, you like to know things,” said Daniel. “I know.” He kissed her again, less gently. He was not quite sure what he was doing, but nothing seemed to hold him back.

Neither Jacqueline nor Daniel said anything about any of this, in the Christmas family gathering. Frederica watched Jacqueline and Luk talking, and felt an almost-pleasant prickle of jealousy. Jacqueline and she herself were part of a new world of free women, women who had incomes, work they had chosen, a life of the mind, sex as they pleased. It was interesting. She preened herself. Luk, despite his polemic about redundant males, appeared to be preening himself also. She would take that as it came. She had time, she thought.
And now, suddenly, she had no time. She was afraid she was pregnant, and then sure she was pregnant, and she had no idea what to do. Pregnancy disturbs the balance of body and mind, and is hard in any case on women like Frederica, who do not give in gracefully, who cannot let slip the habit of logical thought, who do not slumber easily. Her fight against bodily vagueness made her wild, without making her decisive. She went over and over possible courses of action, and all of them appeared impossible. Uncertainty is a terror to women like Frederica, and is paralysing.

She thought of telephoning Luk, of writing to him, and did not know what she wanted to say, or what she wanted to happen, or what he would want to happen. She wanted to be clear before she said anything, and she was
not
clear, and time went by, and time went by, as it does in pregnancy, slowly, slowly, but inexorably.

Luk had wanted to marry Jacqueline. He had never said anything, ever, about wanting to marry Frederica.

Moreover, she herself had been quite sure she did not want to be married again. This second pregnancy brought back banished memories of the first, the terror of being trapped by her own body, by two other people's bodies, of being
shut in
.

There were practical things. The television. People did not employ pregnant women to look like Alice in Wonderland on or in the Box.

And the exhaustion to come, and the sleeplessness, and the closing jaws of the trap of caring for someone as she cared for Leo. In both senses, cared for. Looked after, as best she could. Loved. Oh yes. Loved.

Leo and Luk, Luk and Leo. They had nothing to do with each other. She could not ask Luk to care for Leo. She could not break Leo's present strange family-structure. He was happy with her and Agatha and Saskia. She thought about families. All the recent movements—the student Left, the dreamier counter-culture, the religious communities, had seen the nuclear family as a static thing, a source of oppression, the wrong kind of social forms and structures. Who is the father was an outdated Victorian question.

She did not talk to Agatha, who was away more frequently, possibly because of the success of her book. Frederica believed she should think it out for herself, and could not think.

The obvious answer was, the logical answer was, to stop it now, quickly, and stop thinking.

Frederica did nothing. Not exactly nothing. She played fair, minimally fair. She went to a clinic, not to her own doctor, she bought some vitamins, she felt stupid.

The cells divided energetically. They streamed in purposeful sheets, contracting and expanding. They put out filopodia which attached to the wall of the blastula. They made a neural tube.

Frederica felt sick. The biological clock ticked with the tides and layering of the cells.

Because she could not think what to say to Luk, because of what she was more and more frantically and obsessively
not
saying, she did not say very much. They had kept in touch with carefully casual phone-calls and letters. These dwindled. Frederica thought that if Luk really minded the dwindling, he might ask about it. He didn't. He sent bits of news about the rebuilding of the University and asked if she was coming North.

Not in the foreseeable future, said Frederica.

She was dully angry.

She disliked her body.

She smiled well enough on the television. She had to.

If you don't look at it, it isn't there.

It divided, and increased. The clock ticked.

The person who was looking at her, Leo, said he didn't know what had got into her.

Frederica said, neither did she.
In April, she went with Alexander and Wilkie to Holland, to film paintings. They went to the Van Gogh Museum, and filmed Van Gogh's
Reaper,
blue in the gold field of corn ready for cutting. They went to The Hague, on a train, to film Vermeer's
View of Delft,
which Frederica knew from reproductions, and from Proust's descriptions of the death of Bergotte in front of it, but had never seen. She was bundled in an anorak, over a useful shapeless tunic in navy blue. She sat on the Dutch train, and thought it would not be long before Wilkie noticed, Wilkie was astute, Wilkie was quick. Wilkie was excited by the idea of the
View
of Delft,
which he believed had been painted with the help of a
camera
obscura,
a mirror-lens in a dark space, so that the drops of water painted on the painted side of the painted boats appeared as perfect spheres, which from that distance they could not have been.

On their way into the Mauritshuis, they stopped on its dignified steps, to look at the dark water of the moat, which perfectly reflected the white swans sailing placidly on it. The camera crew had gone ahead to set up. A man, a woman and a child, a girl, were leaning on the stone balustrade, considering the swans. The man had his arm about the girl's shoulder. The woman stood with her body pressed slightly against his. A family. And then they turned, and the tall man straightened, and Frederica and Alexander recognised them. Agatha and Saskia Mond, smiling, and Gerard Wijnnobel, the Dutchman. A family.

There was a moment when Agatha clearly thought of pretending not to have seen them. Then she looked up at Gerard Wijnnobel, who smiled.

“So you see,” she said.

“I see,” said Frederica.

“It was too early to say anything. We needed time—”

Stories raced through the minds of both Alexander and Frederica, stories they could never substantiate or deny, stories of committee-journeys, meetings,
what
had been said to Saskia, when, of the death of Eva Wijnnobel, of the lovers meeting, talking ...

No one spoke.

Wilkie said “We've a film to make.”

Wijnnobel said “What are you filming?”

“The
View of Delft
.”

“A mystery of survival and renewal. They say it has been so much restored that the brush-strokes Bergotte so lovingly traced on the little patch of yellow wall are no longer the ones we see. But it is still there.”

He gathered his family, bowed to Frederica and Alexander, and they walked off.

Filming is long and tiring, the lights are hot (even if the great
View
is protected from them) the repetitions which must look more and more spontaneous are exhausting. Frederica asked Alexander sprightly questions about the still panorama, and he spoke of what it had meant to writers—to Proust—something that endured—great art which lasted longer than life. Frederica struggled with a haze of female somnolence, and thought the “petit pan de mur jaune” was sandy, was almost orange. It was partly because she was tired—and making the effort not to think about Agatha until later—that they had to record so many versions of what would be reduced to an amiable ten-minute chat. The paintings brooded and shone around. Shadowed seventeenth-century gilded faces under fantastic hats and helmets. Huge impossible vases of flowers, striped and spotted, red, blue, white, pink, tiger-gold, against heavy stone windows opening on glimpsed paradisal depths of plain and forest. Wilkie and Alexander went off to look quickly at other rooms, whilst the crew packed and removed the cameras. Frederica sat on a long leather seat in front of the
View of
Delft
and went to sleep. She went into a very deep, very brief sleep, a drowse of defeat.