Babel Tower (17 page)

It would make me happy to hear how you are, and your husband and son, of course, also. I think this letter may be rather stilted, but you will read it with yr. usual acumen.

All best wishes,
Alexander

Dear Frederica,

Forgive a word out of the blue, or black, after so long. I was recently in the north—you may have heard that Mary had an accident, quite a serious accident, but is now well and back at school and seemingly happy. Perhaps you didn’t hear, as you seem to have lost touch, as I did. That is why I am writing to you. I have been talking to your father, and I think he would very much appreciate a word from you. That is clergyman-talk for he’s hurt, he’s upset, he wants to hear from you and is too proud to say so. I’m not good at writing letters, and certainly not to you, to whom writing is second nature. Your father did me the honour to tell me he thought we resembled each other (him and me)—there is only you in the world now who would see the full humour and irony of that, so I am telling you. I did
not
hit him with anything, but agreed with him with Christian mildness, for there’s a bit of truth in it. But the one who is really like him is you, Frederica, and he knows that too, and is not getting any younger. Forgive me for saying so—put it down to professional habits of meddling for God’s sake—but he has already lost one daughter. I don’t know why I don’t mention your mother—she’s a more patient and secret soul—but it was him I talked to. Much to both our surprises.

You don’t need my news. I am still working in the crypt. Holding people back from the edge—sounds melodramatic and often is—who might or might not be better if they just plunged over. It’s a funny specialisation. It suits me,
but I see people singing in the streets, and they look queer, which makes me realise I am.

Look after your beautiful son, Frederica. (I saw the pictures you sent them.) I didn’t do well by my son, and I see already I shall regret it for the rest of my life. I expect we shall see each other again, and I hope I know you well enough to be right in thinking you’ll forgive me for interfering—whether or not you do as I suggest. Clergyman-talk again. God bless you.

Love,
Daniel

Nigel watches Frederica open these letters, one after the other. As she reads them she looks up at him, and watches him watch her. She reads Alan’s words, and Tony’s, and Edmund Wilkie’s, and Alexander’s and Daniel’s, with his still, dark silence charged with watchfulness at the other side of the table. There is autumn sunlight on the white tablecloth and the silver spoons, and the dark man watches intently. The letters bring with them vivid ghostly images of friends, Alan’s quiet smile, Alexander’s fading beauty, Tony’s curly humour, the improbable conjunction of Daniel and her father. They remind her of herself as she was, argumentative, passionate, silly, clever. When she rereads them in private—which means her bathroom, which has a window scratched by trailing jasmine fronds and dotted with the advancing suckers of Virginia creeper—the life of the words, and the quick ghosts of the writers, bring with them the presence of the dark watcher. He is more real than they are. She knows his shoulder-blades and his belly, his throat and his dark cock. She thinks of his cock, reading Wilkie’s letter, Alan’s letter, Tony’s letter, and she licks up tears. He is more real than they are, and she is less real than she was.

She does not know if she dare answer all these letters, and put all the answers in the Chinese bowl in the hall, from which the letters are taken. She writes answers, tears them up, and writes other answers, and tears them up. She is afraid. She arranges to go into Spessendborough on market day with Olive and Rosalind, and there she buys a heap of postcards, addresses them, and writes brief notes on all of them saying, “Wonderful to have your letter. Answer coming soon. F.” She has no address for Daniel, but remembers the name of the church and addresses it to the crypt. Olive and Rosalind watch her post these pictures of hills and riverbanks, and summer fields. She fans
out the postcards so they can see how little she has written. She does not know why she does this.

Nigel stays at Bran House for a long time. They have good days. They picnic in the hills with Leo, they show him the tracks of deer and badgers. They discuss Leo. Later, Frederica will not remember what they talked about. She remembers his hand on hers in bracken, and a kind of happiness, she remembers two lazy bodies stretched on rugs, and frantic secret mental activity in her own head. She puts off answering all the letters until he goes again, and he does not go.

The next letter he takes is an innocuous brown one, with a typed label, addressed to Mrs. Nigel Reiver. He reaches across as she is about to open it, and says, “Give me that.” She gives it to him; he reads it, and hands it back; it is a routine invitation to a Commemoration Dinner at her old college in Cambridge. “Please indicate the names of any other Old Students you may wish to sit near.”

“Why did you do that?” she asks him.

“I thought you might be planning something. I thought maybe you were going on with what you once said about going back to that place. I got it wrong.” He does not add, I’m sorry, but it is grudgingly in the air.

“Perhaps I shall.”

“I don’t see how you could.”

“I could if—if I really wanted to. I could go up and down. Some time there, some time here. With ingenuity.
You
come and go.”

“That’s one reason why you can’t.”

“You can’t just
say
that. It isn’t
fair.
”

“I don’t see why. You made a commitment. You knew what you were doing.”

“No one ever knows exactly what they are doing—”

“I thought you were so clever. You don’t get married and just go on as though you hadn’t.”

“You don’t change your nature overnight if you get married.”

“Perhaps not. But you change, all the same. I don’t want you to go off here or there as though Leo and I don’t exist. You’ve no need.”

“You
can’t
think it’s as simple as that.”

“I don’t see why not.”

In the end he is summoned again. Uncle Hubert telephones from Tunis. Nigel prepares to set off for Amsterdam. Frederica finds herself,
to her annoyance, hurt and upset that he is going. She does not really know if this is because she will miss him, or because she is angry that he has autonomy and she does not, or because he can leave her so cheerfully. Marriage has its emotions that are part of its elastic cage, that don’t exactly belong to the individual people who happen to be
in
that marriage. She thinks, I won’t ever be so silly as to get married again, and then thinks how silly that thought is. Since she is married.

She finds Nigel, in their bedroom, reading her letters. It is the day before he is to go. He is sitting on their bed, with Wilkie’s letter in one hand, and Tony’s in the other.

“I was just making sure,” he says, with his gathered, energetic calm, “that you weren’t up to anything.”

Frederica stands still in the doorway.

“And am I?” she says, with the ridiculous heavy irony of such situations.

“I don’t like your friends,” he says. “I don’t like these people.”

“They weren’t writing to
you
,” says Frederica, studying his face.

“You are just a bitch, really,” he says, in the same collected voice. “Just a silly bitch.”

Frederica once had her father’s capacity for rage. She stands for another moment in the door, tingling with anger in fingers and guts, and then begins to roar. She advances on Nigel and retrieves her letters—Daniel’s is a little torn. She says what is always said in these scenes, that she will not be treated like this, that she will not stay another moment, that she is going,
now.
She opens wardrobes and flings clothes on the carpet. She finds an old suitcase and begins to throw things into it, weeping and screaming. Her letters, a nightdress, a toothbrush, a bra, a sweater; she can hardly see for tears; the things that
must
come, books, letters, are too heavy, are too many, the idea of their
weight
provokes a fresh spout of tears. “I’m going, I’m going, I’m not staying another minute,” she screams, throwing things, any things, some black silk panties Nigel bought her that she has never worn, higgledy-piggledy into the suitcase. The release of adrenaline is a relief and an excitement. Nigel comes up behind her and takes hold of the red hair in the nape of her neck, and gives it a sharp professional twist. The pain is excruciating. Frederica hears various bones in her neck crack and shift. She thinks, “He has killed her,” stops to marvel at the pronoun, and sees that she is still alive, in possession of her senses, and in pain.

“Silly bitch,” says Nigel again, and gives her some sort of blow—with a knee? with the other elbow?—in the small of the back, again causing major pain with minimal effort. Frederica has never been in a physical fight. Her siblings were both almost uncannily gentle; her father’s rages led to devastated furniture and burned books, but not to hurt flesh. Her schooling was respectable and her tongue caustic; she was not the sort of child to be victimised. This is new. Nigel’s arm is across her face. He is breathing heavily. She opens her mouth and inhales hot cloth. Her tongue touches fuzz. She twists her head and her nose slides past cotton of shirt-cuff, and then skin, skin intimately known, skin acrid with anger. She sinks her teeth into it as best she can. She tastes blood. She cannot turn off some mocking self-censor in her brain that despises her, Frederica, for having to do such vulgar things.

“Bitch,” says Nigel again, crashing his free fist into her ribs. Frederica is winded. She moves her head again from side to side, moans in pain and disbelief, grips with her teeth and more or less
chews
, producing rather a lot of blood, filling her mouth. “Bitches bite,” she thinks in a suffocated way, and finds half a moment to wonder about vampires, as the blood runs between her teeth. Then she falls forward, limp, completely inert, dead meat. The oldest trick in the book, the commentating brain thinks. It works. Nigel lets go, stands up to look at the body, and Frederica kicks nastily at his legs with her full force, catching him off balance. He falls, half on the bed, half on the floor, and Frederica, counting the cost to her battered spine, stumbles to her own feet, and flings herself past him into the bathroom, locking the door.

There is a little pile of poetry books by the lavatory. Frederica likes to sit in there and learn things by heart, keeping something essential alive. There is Yeats, there is Mallarmé, there is Raphael Faber, there is a Shakespeare. Frederica sits on the lavatory lid and opens the Shakespeare. She finds she cannot see the words at all—the air is
simmering
and her sight seems veiled with a lucid poppy-scarlet. She licks blood meditatively from her lips and her teeth—salt, metal, and something else, she thinks, the taste of
life
and salt and metal. She is shaking too much to get up and rinse her mouth. Her teeth hurt, too. They are loose in their sockets. She sits there in a studious position, holding the Shakespeare, and breathes bathroom-air—body-smells, watery-smells, ghosts of perfume, a remote tang of bleach. Blood.

There is a silence. Then there is a shuffling. Nigel is moving about in the bedroom. She waits. There is a sudden explosion of terrible
sound: he is battering the bathroom door with something heavy and howling imprecations. The door is solid. The house is solid. It is a house which once did not have many bathrooms, but those that have been added have solid doors. Frederica sits inside, holding Shakespeare, and says nothing. She cannot think what to do. She is a creature to whom impotence and indecision are painful. After this has gone on some time Frederica thinks of the other inhabitants of the house and wonders what they will think, what, if anything, they will do. She thinks Olive and Rosalind and Pippy Mammott will put their heads under the bedclothes and shut their ears. She thinks of Leo, which she has been trying not to do. Will he hear, will he be afraid, who will he blame? Now she feels both guilt, for the first time, and real hatred of Nigel, for the first time.

The barrage stops as suddenly as it started. She waits for a questing “Frederica?” but there is nothing. The door is so thick she cannot hear exactly what is happening out there. Shufflings, draggings, a crash. Silence. Silence. She looks at Shakespeare, and finds she has got him open at
Much Ado about Nothing.

Frederica, skinny and freckled at twelve, Frederica angular and noisy at seventeen, Frederica surrounded by young men in Cambridge at twenty, has always had in her mind, as the image of love, this contented prosaic recognition of inevitability. What is love, what is love, is it just a dangerous
idea
? There is a kind of twang, and the room goes dark. There is also no line of light under the bathroom door. It is black, black. She cannot see Shakespeare or her own feet. It is the country, there are no street lamps, the window is black, too. She hears her own hot breath, and a drip of water, somewhere. Outside the bathroom door a thick voice asks, with desperate satisfaction, “And
now
what will you do?”

She doesn’t answer.

“You can’t stay in there for hours and read
now
, can you? Come out.”

She cannot answer. She draws her knees up to her chin, enfolding Shakespeare in her body.

“I can wait. I can sit here and wait,” says the voice.

She tiptoes to the door, and says through the keyhole, “You’ll frighten Leo.”

“And whose fault is that, you bitch,
who
wishes he’d never been born?”

There is a renewed battery on the door. Frederica retreats again. Her eyes have got used to the dark. The window is a small, smoky square, midnight-blue-black. She can see the shadows of the jasmine fronds and the creeper leaves. She can see a star or two, bright pinholes behind the glass, stars without identity, isolated from the spread of the sky.