Babel Tower (20 page)

“What is sulphur, Mummy? What is persian powder?”

“Sulphur is yellow and has a disagreeable smell,” says Frederica, whose style is infected by Beatrix Potter’s own idiom. “Matches have sulphur in them, and fireworks, and so does the smell of bad eggs, which you probably don’t know—eggs don’t seem to go bad these days. It’s a nasty smell.”

“Tommy Brock must have smelt
very
nasty if you need a bad-egg smell to get rid of his smell,” says Leo. “What do you think he smelt of?”

“Like people’s dirty feet when they haven’t washed for
months
,” says Frederica. “You probably don’t know what that smells like, either.”

“I’ve smelt Mr. Wigg’s shirt when he’s been gardening,” says Leo. “What a
pong
, Daddy says, Mr. Wigg makes. Do you think Tommy Brock smelled like Mr. Wigg, Mummy?”

“
Much worse
, Leo. And you ought not to say people pong, it’s an ugly word, and you might hurt their feelings.”

“I like it. Pong. Pong. Ping-pong-ping-pong. Ping is like needles and pong is like Sooty’s piles and pools.”

“That’s enough of pongs. Let’s get on with the story.”

“You haven’t told me what persian powder is.”

“I haven’t, have I? That’s because I don’t know. I told you yesterday I didn’t know.”

“You could have
found out.
”

“I could. How was I to know you would want Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod for a fourth time running?”

“You could have known. I
love
Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod. We will have them tomorrow too. I love it when they do horrible things to each other. They are horrible people and they do horrible things and everything is
horrible
and the little rabbits are all safe after all. Only a bit frightened, they were, the little rabbits. Their mummy
wringed
her ears, she was worried. How do you wring your ears?”

“You can’t, if you aren’t a rabbit. Something like this.”

Frederica puts her hands to her head and more or less wrings her red hair. Leo laughs shrilly—the story overexcites him.

“Go on reading, now. Go on.” He prompts. “Mr. Tod opened the door …”

“Tommy Brock was sitting at Mr. Tod’s kitchen table, pouring out tea from Mr. Tod’s tea-pot into Mr. Tod’s teacup. He was quite dry himself and grinning; and he threw the cup of scalding tea all over Mr. Tod.”

Leo shrieks with laughter and rolls about on his pillows, damp-skinned and catching his breath. Frederica touches his hair, and then buries her face in his chest. He clutches at her hair and kicks, convulsed with laughter.

One day, a week or so later, they are all having tea, Olive, Rosalind, Pippy Mammott, Frederica and Leo, when the sound of wheels is heard on the gravel outside. Rosalind says, “That must be Alice,” and
Pippy Mammott, her mouth full of fruit cake says, “Not Alice’s car. Land Rover.” “Not our Land Rover,” says Olive. “No shuddering noise.” “Don’t recognise it,” says Rosalind. Pippy goes to the window. “Three men,” she says. “No one we know. Getting out. Coming to the door.” “Conservative canvassers?” says Olive. Pippy has gone to the door. There is a male murmur, which ends distinctly with “Frederica.” Frederica stands up and goes herself to the door. There is Pippy Mammott, and there on the flight of steps leading up to the front door, where they have no right to be, where in some sense they do not exist, are Tony and Alan and Hugh Pink. The Land Rover is new and shiny. Hugh says, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Mammott. We happened to be passing—”

“And thought we would look up our old friend Frederica,” says Tony.

Alan says, “Frederica. We aren’t intruding, I hope?”

Frederica is afraid she will cry. She runs down the steps and puts her arms round Alan’s neck. He hugs her. Tony hugs her. Hugh Pink gives her a peck of a kiss on a cheek. Pippy Mammott stands in the doorway and observes these indiscriminate embraces.

“Tea?” says Frederica with a slightly hysterical laugh. “Would you like to come in for some tea?”

“That’s what we
hoped
you would say,” says Tony, advancing on Pippy Mammott. “So kind,” he says, though Pippy Mammott’s expression is not exactly kind. “We’ve come such a long way, tea is just what we want, isn’t it, Alan, isn’t it, Hugh?”

They come in, a body of energy, they look around themselves curiously, they advance on Olive and Rosalind and shake their hands.

“You found your way back, I see,” says Olive to Hugh Pink.

“It wasn’t difficult. We happened to be passing. We thought we’d look up Frederica. On the off chance.”

“The tea’s cold,” says Pippy Mammott. “I’ll make fresh.”

She goes off with the trolley. Frederica performs introductions: Tony, Alan, Hugh, Olive, Rosalind, Leo.

Everyone sits down and considers everyone else, watchfully. Alan says one or two polite things to Olive and Rosalind about the architecture of Bran House, to which they reply briefly, at a loss.

Tony says, “And you, dearest Frederica, how are you keeping? What are you doing with yourself, tell us how things are?”

“I have Leo,” says Frederica, and stops. “Tell me—
you tell me
—about everyone—about what you are doing—”

Tony says, “Everyone’s got election fever.”

Alan says, “I’ve got some lectures to do at the Tate, on Turner, I’ve suddenly got interested in Turner, romanticism was never my thing, but I’ve got interested—”

Hugh says, “I actually sold my pomegranate poem, the one I sent you, to the
New Statesman.
I’ve written quite a lot, there might be a book, almost. Can’t call it ‘Bells and Pomegranates,’ that’s spoken for, but I’m having a go at bells. No competition with ‘Lübeck Bells,’ of course. More of a relation of ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.’ ”

“With silver bells and cockle shells,” says Leo.

“
Exactly
,” says Hugh to Leo. “A garden full of shiny things—”

“But a silver nutmeg.
And
a golden pear.”

“Your son is a poet, Frederica.”

“He likes words,” says Frederica.

“He could hardly not,” says Tony, looking at the dark aunts on their sofa. They do not speak. Pippy Mammott returns with the trolley, and fresh tea. Tony eats three slices of fruit cake and Alan eats a sandwich with cucumber and Gentleman’s Relish.

“And Wilkie?” says Frederica. “You must have seen Wilkie?”

“He’s full of his television game. He’s made a pilot, he says it’s hilarious, literary knights and theatrical ladies getting everything
deliciously
wrong, mistaking Auden for Byron, he says, and Dickens for Oscar Wilde, and Shakespeare for C. S. Forester, he told us to tell you you’ve got to come and play, everyone is playing, even
Alexander
is playing, you have to come and play …”

“You’d leave them all standing at the starting post, Frederica,” says Alan.

“No one wants to see
me
,” says Frederica.

“No, but you will make them want to. You always did.”

They take the tea, and smile vaguely at the denizens of the house who offer it, they talk in a trio, lightly and brightly, they reminisce, they cross-refer, they are not impenetrably rude and private, but they speak Frederica’s shop, Frederica’s staple chatter and gossip and thoughts, for which she is dry and thirsty. She begins to speak. She tells Hugh why she loved his poem. She discusses Persephone in the dark with the fruit and seeds, and furious dry Demeter in the air. They quote lines at each other, Hugh and Frederica, companionably.

Leo says suddenly, “Picks with pink fingers, listless.”

Hugh smiles at him. “I didn’t know your mother had read it to you too.”

“She didn’t,” says Leo. “Daddy did.”

The two dark women narrow their mouths and look at each other. Frederica puts out a hand towards Leo. Hugh, thinking of his poem, notices none of this. He says, “Did he like it?”

“I don’t think so,” says Leo.

“Poetry isn’t his—” begins Frederica.

“He likes hobbits,” says Leo. “
I
liked it,” he says kindly.

Alan Melville says, “I should very much like to take a walk in your woods, Frederica, if we may? Do you think we could go on a walk? Being from the grey north I don’t know this country. It’s very beautiful.”

Frederica stands up. “Let’s walk,” she says. “Yes, that would be wonderful, just what I need, a walk, let’s
walk.
”

Alan says to Olive and Rosalind, “Would you like to come with us?”

“Well, that would be—” says Rosalind.

“No thank you,” says Olive.

“No thank you,” says Rosalind.

It is the first time Frederica has seen them disagree, Frederica thinks; then she thinks she
must
be exaggerating, she just feels she is herself again, dangerously happy and observant.

“We won’t be long,” she says, going into the hall, getting a jacket. “I don’t suppose we’ll be all that long and anyway it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“I’m coming,” says Leo. “Wait for me.”

“Better not, dear,” says Pippy Mammott. “You might miss your supper. Lovely Welsh rarebit, you like that, and treacle tart, you like that, too.”

“I’ll get my coat too,” says Leo, making for the door.

“Your mummy doesn’t want you,” says Pippy Mammott. “She’d like to see her friends she hasn’t seen. We will all just stay here quietly until she comes back. We’ll play Happy Families. You like that.”

“She
does
want me,” says Leo. He stands stiffly, near tears, full of force, Bill Potter’s grandson, Nigel Reiver’s son, a small figure by the chimney-piece. “She
doesn’t want to see them
without me. She doesn’t.”

Frederica stands and looks at him. She doesn’t speak, but she does meet his eye. It is Tony Watson who says, “Where’s this coat then?” and Alan who says to Pippy, “We’ll take
very
good care of him, we’ll bring him back in plenty of time for his supper.”

Frederica holds his coat for him, and he shrugs himself into it. They set off through the orchard and across the meadows, with Leo at first swinging between Hugh and Alan, and then riding on Tony’s strong shoulders, clutching his curly head, and pointing things out, things rapidly becoming invisible in the thickening autumn evening, a crow, a jump, a trough, a gate with dead stoats and magpies nailed to it.

Because he is there, nobody asks Frederica about her life. It occurs to Alan that the child, however small, has come out with precisely that intention, conscious or unconscious, of preventing Frederica from talking to her friends about her life. If there is a reflective pause in the conversation the boy rushes in, with lots of bright, showy, slightly shrill chatter,
in case
, Alan thinks,
in case.
The three friends accommodate themselves to the situation. They are real friends, they came to help as best they can. It is quite dark in the woods, the smoky light lingers after sunset.

They come back companionably, discussing words for twilight: dusk, gloaming,
crépuscule, Dämmerung.
Hugh quotes Heine—“Im Dämmergrau, in das Liebeland / Tief in den Busch hinein.” Alan says to Frederica, as they prolong the walk by coming back to the front door round the outskirt of the moat, “You really do live in a moated grange.”

“When Hugh came, he kept quoting ‘Only connect.’ I got quite cross, but he was right, of course.”

“Did you connect?”

“Look, Alan, how can one say one thing is more
real
than another, here and London, people with their heads full of books and people with their heads full of figures? But I got a bit sick of all the Cambridge literary intensity. I am half sick of shadows, I said to myself, I will Connect, and found myself in a moated grange.”

“Complete with Mrs. Danvers.”

“Don’t. You can do
awful damage
with inappropriate comparisons.”

Leo says, “Im Dämmergrau in das Liebeland.”

Hugh says, “You can twist your tongue round anything.”

Alan takes Frederica’s hand.

They come round the corner, across the bridge over the opaque green water, and crunch across the gravel. There is another car beside the Land Rover, a shimmering silver Triumph, not Nigel’s green Aston Martin. On the top step, looking down from a height, are three men, one of whom, much the smallest, is Nigel. The other two are
both dressed in blazers and flannel trousers, formally informal. One has dark skin and a large curling white beard, elegantly trimmed. The other is bald, with horn-rimmed glasses. Alan drops Frederica’s hand, and Tony lifts down Leo, who looks around him, and then makes a little rush across the gravel, and toils up the staircase to his father.

Frederica apologises for her friends, although she knows she should not. She introduces them, says they are old friends, explains that she had no idea they were in the neighbourhood. Whilst she says all this, falling over her words, Nigel and his companions remain stolidly in possession of the centre of the top step, in front of the door. He nods quickly and silently in the direction of Alan, Tony and Hugh, as they are introduced, neat, unsmiling, economical nods. He introduces his own companions, Govinder Shah and Gijsbert Pijnakker. Both these persons hold out their hands formally to Alan, Tony and Hugh, who have to take them on a slant, like courtiers.

“And my wife,” says Nigel. “Delighted,” says Shah. “So glad to meet you,” says Pijnakker. Frederica has a sensation of being summed up and judged, by both at once, in different ways. Shah has soft full lips inside his beard, and deepset dark eyes, under curly white brows, with smile-lines set round them. He is wearing an Indian silk scarf inside an ivory silk shirt inside his dark blue blazer: it is flame and gold, with little flowers in crimson and black. Pijnakker is egg-shaped, a shining egg-head on a solid egg-body, neat and hairless. His shirt is striped butcher-blue and white, and he wears a navy scarf tied extremely neatly. Nigel is wearing a dark sweater and dark trousers. Alan, Tony and Hugh are all in corduroy jackets and trousers, over polo-necked sweaters. Nigel’s friends make Frederica’s friends look flimsy and insubstantial. Frederica’s friends, on their own ground, might make Nigel’s friends look pompous, but they are not on their own ground. The two groups might join and talk animatedly and fuse, but that is not going to happen. Nigel explains to Frederica’s friends that he has important things to discuss with Pijnakker and Shah. He then offers the friends a drink, which they refuse, retreating towards their Land Rover. Tony says, “Why don’t you lend us Frederica to have dinner with us in Spessendborough, whilst you talk?” There is an effort of pure will behind this casual invitation which everyone can feel. Nigel says, “Oh, I don’t think so, I don’t think she’d want to do that. We’ve only just arrived.”