Babel Tower (21 page)

Frederica says, “You won’t really need
me
, if you have things to discuss—”

She knows rationally that there is no reason why she should not say this.

She knows she will pay for saying it.

“We’ll be around a bit,” says Tony. “Staying in the Red Dragon. Perhaps we’ll see you again.”

“Perhaps,” says Nigel. “Who knows?”

It is quite clear to everybody that he hopes never to see them again.

Frederica dines with Pijnakker, Shah and Nigel. She does not often meet Nigel’s friends, and when she does, they do not much talk to her. Nigel’s social life seems to be spent in a very male society, a society of clubs, bars, cigars and complicated intrigue. When he is at home, this world rings his moated grange invisibly, airy voices, guttural voices, suave voices, excitable voices, thick-cream voices, European voices, Asian voices, American voices, call him to the telephone, and he sits all evening, lying back in a leather armchair, talking to the wide world. Frederica supposes that if her friends had not come, she would not have been asked to sit through dinner with Pijnakker and Shah. On the rare occasions when people from out there do come to Bran House, she is somehow relegated to Leo’s nursery supper, or Pippy Mammott puts her up something delicious on a tray by the fire. But tonight she sits through dinner and nobody has much to say to her. Pijnakker addresses her more or less in the third person, through Nigel. “Your lady wife is very comfortable here in the country,” he says, including them both in a pleasant enough smile. “In Holland we have no such variety of landscape. It is all flat. Has your lady wife ever visited Holland, I wonder?” “No,” says Frederica. “I should like to see the Rijksmuseum. I should like to see the Van Gogh paintings.” “You must bring her, once, Reiver,” says Pijnakker. “Rotterdam is not beautiful, but she would like Delft and Leiden, she would be interested in tulips.” These are not words that interest Pijnakker, but his intentions are kindly. Shah says, “So you are interested in paintings, Mrs. Reiver.” He, unlike Pijnakker, does look
at
Frederica. When her eyes meet his, he gives her a little private smile, which may or may not be automatic. He says, “I do admire your brown dress, Mrs. Reiver. It is
just
the brown for your lovely hair. What kind of pictures do you like particularly?”

Frederica is fond of the dress she has on, a jersey tube with a high neck and long thin sleeves in a dark brown, between coffee and chocolate. It makes the most of her long thin body, her long thin
arms. Dresses are becoming shorter. It makes the most also of her long thin legs. Govinder Shah is considering her small breasts inside this tube. His look is kindly, but Frederica knows he does not find her attractive. He believes strongly that she
wants
him to find her attractive, and so his eyes linger where they can, politely.

She says, “I don’t know a lot about pictures, I’m afraid. I know quite a lot about Van Gogh. I have a great friend who wrote a play about him. Literature is my subject.”

“I believe there have been many plays about Van Gogh,” says Pijnakker. “People find him very interesting, he was religious and mad, very Dutch. He sold only one painting in his lifetime. I admire his persistence, to go on against such odds. What normal man would paint hundreds and thousands of pictures no one wanted to buy? I ask myself, did he
know
they would come to be wanted, or was it pure chance?”

“Hundreds of people make things nobody wants,” says Shah. “But I agree with you also, there are those with the courage of their convictions who make things they know people
will
want, those who are ahead of their time. Some of these appear to be madmen, and some of them are. I believe Van Gogh’s brother was a dealer. He may have seen more clearly that people would some day want those pictures. Or he may not. I believe he bought them all, stored them all. Maybe he was merely kind. Maybe he was merely exercising family loyalty.”

“He too died mad,” says Pijnakker. “The Dutch are much given to melancholy-madness. It is the grey rain on our coasts. That is why we voyage, to escape the grey rain and the melancholy-madness.”

“Whereas we in the sub-continent,” says Shah, “we voyage if we must to escape the extreme poverty and mess we have made of our daily lives. We have made a world in which enterprise is impossible, because we are not orderly beings, but lazy and corrupt beings, and if we have any enterprise we brave your grey rain and your melancholy-madness in order to earn our daily bread and if we are lucky some butter and jam and perhaps eventually foie gras and caviare to put on our bread. But we do not like your grey mists and your miserable cold wet winds, we get sunsick, we like to go back and forth and cannot.”

All three men laugh at this speech, as though it says more than it appears to say.

“Happy the man,” says Shah, “with an office in Rotterdam, and an office in London, and a house on a hill in Kashmir, and a villa in Antibes, and a yacht in the Mediterranean and an ocean-going boat too in the North Sea, a free man.”

Pijnakker says, “Vincent Van Gogh was melancholy-mad in the south, too. The sun did him no good, I think. I like the sun myself, I am partial to a week or two in North Africa or Italy or southern France, I protect my eyes and my skin, and do not expose myself excessively.”

“You are presenting yourself as a cautious and moderate person, Gijsbert.”

“Only in some ways, Govinder. Only in some personal ways. I take risks when I must. You cannot do business without taking risks.”

“That is so. The important thing is, to be clever about
which
risks.”

They laugh again. Frederica in her brown tube, is not there, not for those two, not even as a pair of female eyes to observe their male liveliness, for they do not exactly see her as female. Nigel does. He watches her, as well as watching Shah and Pijnakker; he fills their glasses often and hers not at all. She thinks perhaps he is not speaking much because he is partly thinking about the appearance of Alan and Tony and Hugh. But perhaps he never speaks, she wonders. Even his telephone world consists mostly of listening, his head cocked on one side, his lips and brows thoughtful.

The three friends are eating steak and kidney pie in the Red Dragon. They started with tomato soup, and went on to the pie, which is really very good. The dining-room has low beams, which may or may not be old, and a bar at one end. There is also a real wood fire, in a chimney. A wood fire is a cheering thing.

Tony says, “She can’t stay there, she’ll go mad.”

“You can’t just
say
that,” says Hugh. “She went there. Perhaps she really likes it. Perhaps she had a hankering for country life. I do, from time to time.”

“Do you think she likes it?”

“No. No. I don’t.”

“
Why
did she go there?” says Tony, as though a good analytic explanation could immediately be produced.

Alan says, “I have noticed that all sorts of people, who are perfectly sensible when offering opinions about Shakespeare, or Claude Lorrain, or even Harold Wilson, simply go off their rockers when deciding
about getting married. Tough people get pressured by weak people and vice versa. People marry their
ideas
of what they wanted. I know a girl whose ideal was a man with coal-black hair and she found one, and much good it did her. He is the most
boring
man and keeps a model railway in the attic. And then I’ve noticed people marry to spite their parents, or to repeat the mistakes or the successes of their parents, or quite often both. People marry to get away from their mothers, and hundreds of people marry one lover in order to get away from another, and what they’re really thinking about isn’t the one they
are
marrying but the one they aren’t. Or they marry to spite someone who didn’t want them.”

“Or for money,” says Tony.

“Or for money,” says Alan. “I would have thought it was built into Frederica’s scheme of things
not
to do that, but of course she might have been in revolt against her scheme of things, temporarily at least.”

“She said she got married because her sister died,” says Hugh. “That is, that isn’t
exactly
what she said, but she intimated that that changed her, her sister dying, and she was changed.”

“I don’t see,” says Tony, “how the death of a sister could turn you into a country lady; it seems an odd reaction, to say the least.”

“You could imagine a scenario,” says Alan, “where a completely new beginning in a completely new place—a new life … She couldn’t be so
silly.
”

“She was always silly,” says Tony. “That was what made her bearable. Silly and clever at once, and so sure she was right, poor dear. There’s a certain
Schadenfreude
in seeing her in this mess.”

“No, there isn’t,” says Hugh. “It’s just
awful.
And that amazing little boy. He wasn’t going to let her say a word to us. He didn’t.”

“
That
is the daftest thing of all,” says Tony. “
That
makes the whole mess irretrievable.”

There is an element of enjoyment in Tony’s contemplation of Frederica’s predicament. Alan and Hugh are more perturbed, but also less disposed to interfere. Hugh says, “You can’t
tell
, of course. The most surprising couples are happy in the most surprising ways.”

Alan says, “You can tell. She’s miserable. She’s lost and miserable and ashamed.”

Tony says, “Well. What are we going to do?”

“Can we do anything?”

The waitress brings lemon meringue pie.

Alan says, “We can’t just leave her.”

Hugh says, “I don’t think we’ll find it easy to see her again.”

The firelight flickers. The pub is comfortable. They order coffee and whisky, and talk about Harold Wilson and Rupert Parrott. Outside a wind gets up, with rain in it.

Frederica goes to bed early, and Nigel goes into the study, with Pijnakker and Shah. Frederica lies and reads Durrell’s
Justine
, which she has picked up because she thinks its narrative is strong enough to be gripping even in the state she is in. She thinks, I could just get up and go to Alexandria, and then she thinks that those who
will
go to Alexandria are in fact Pijnakker and Shah and Nigel Reiver. None of them would probably give more than ten minutes to Durrell’s mannered prose but they would be more at home in his world than she would. She does not want Durrell’s Alexandria in her bedroom and turns out the light. Lying rigid in the dark, willing sleep to come, shakes the brain and causes bone-ache. She puts the light on again and takes up Rilke. She is reading
The Sonnets to Orpheus
in bed in a side-by-side translation, to keep her mind exercised. This goes better. A little grammatical wrestling is wonderfully soothing, and she finds two lines which shiver her flesh and which she thinks she must show Hugh.

And then she thinks she will find it hard to show Hugh anything again.

When Nigel comes to bed, late, late, she pretends to be asleep. He crashes around, putting on lights: a quantity of malt whisky has been consumed. Frederica lies like an angry needle along one edge of the bed. He gets in, switches off the light, and reaches for her with a heavy arm. She wriggles away. He pulls at her. She has a sudden vision of the buttocks and breasts and mouths in the briefcase. She slips out of bed like an eel, snatching up Rilke, and retreats into the bathroom.

She hears his voice, “What were you holding his hand for?”

She tries to remember. The Moated Grange. There is no answer. She thinks of slamming the door, restrains herself, shuts it very quietly, and waits.

She waits for the explosion. It does not come. Nigel has gone to sleep. Whisky is beautiful, sleep is beautiful, silence is blissful. Frederica’s eye-rims are sore with suppressed tears.

The next day is Sunday. Frederica breakfasts with Shah and Pijnakker, who then set off in the Triumph. She finds herself walking. Along landings, along staircases, through rooms, back. She thinks of going out for a walk, but thinks also that the friends might come. And indeed, at about ten, she hears the telephone. Pippy is there to answer it in the hall. Frederica is on the landing.

“Hullo? Oh yes. I don’t know where she is at the moment, or what her plans are. I’ll go and see.”

Frederica begins to come downstairs.

Nigel comes out of the drawing-room, and nods to Pippy. Pippy says to the telephone, after a decent moment’s rest, “I’m so sorry, I find she’s busy all morning, I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

The telephone speaks gallantly. Frederica comes down the stairs. Nigel nods again at Pippy, who says with a cluck of sympathy, “I’m so sorry, she can’t come to the telephone, she’s gone out.”

And before Frederica can move, she has put the phone down.

Frederica says, “You could see I
wasn’t
out, Pippy What is this?”

Pippy looks at her, drops her gaze, and trots away. Frederica says to Nigel, “So I am not to go anywhere, ever?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not being. You have just told a lie to my friends, to my
old friends
, you have said I wasn’t there when I was.”

“I’m sorry,” says Nigel, with the flexibility that is always disarming. “I’m sorry, that was bad. I just can’t stand those people.”

“You don’t know them.”

“They don’t like me, and I don’t like them. And you are married to
me.
”

They stare at each other. Frederica says, “I am going to call them and say I am here.”

“I don’t want you to. I want you, just this once, to stay here, to please me. We’ll go out with Leo. We’ll go for a drive. It will be good for Leo to have both his parents.”