Babel Tower (26 page)

“It is only a suggestion,” says Poole.

Frederica looks round at the books.

“No,” she says, “I’m not turning it down. I feel like Simon and Leo with that chocolate cake. Greed. Pure greed.”

But her face, when she says that, does not, Alexander thinks, have quite the old rapacity.

Thomas asks Alexander how his work on the Steerforth Committee is going. Alexander says that he is absorbed by it and that everyone else appears to feel the same. They are worried that if there is a change of government at the Election, now imminent, they might be disbanded. He finds it interesting, he says, partly because he likes to watch the group at work as a group—the formation of alliances and conflicts, the little eddies of passion and incomprehension. The committee is very thorough: he has visited, or will visit, schools in villages and city centres, prosperous suburbs and agricultural fens, schools for infants and schools for teenagers. Anyone’s idea of teaching and learning, he says, looking for confirmation at Poole’s thoughtful face and Frederica’s drawn one, comes from his own early experience of being taught. “And I suppose we all thought life was somewhere else, not in the classroom, that was the essence of it.” He remembers, he summons up, a pervasive smell of trapped boredom, of brown linoleum and dusty windows, of slow, slow-ticking clocks and scratches and splutters of intransigent ink. And within this sea of brown air and chalky ennui a few moments of vision: a theorem coming out just so, a chorus ending from Euripides, Hamlet saying “Words, words, words.” He can still catch that feeling, he says, on the visits to secondary schools. But in the primary schools there has been nothing less than an explosion of a
new
sense of what children are and can do. He has a sense sometimes, he says, that he and his fellows are
like Alice, travelling in a brighter world Underground or through the Looking Glass. He has seen such things—such brilliant paper forests hung with poems and painted birds, such cardboard towers, such purposive hurrying and constructing and experimenting … He has talked to the experts in language acquisition and learning psychology on the committee and now knows that small children are miracle-workers of sentence-construction
ex nihilo
, and that once we understand this we need not drill, or force …

“It is all very exciting, certainly,” says Thomas. “But there may be sufferers for all this ferment of activity. Simon, for instance, my own son, Simon. I think he’s a natural quiet boy in a corner. But they are always saying he doesn’t
relate
to other children …”

“He seems a bright boy, to me,” says Alexander guardedly.

“I think so. But maybe he is emotionally disturbed, more than I think. I’ve tried to compensate for his mother’s absence—”

Alexander’s crest falls. He is almost sure that Simon, Simon Vincent Poole, is his son, and not Thomas Poole’s son. Simon’s mother, Elinor, was also almost sure, and took some pleasure, at the time of Simon’s birth, in explaining to Alexander the exact degree of her almost-certainty. Since then, Simon’s existence has been a constant preoccupation of Alexander’s. When Simon was very small, and Elinor was still at home with the children, Alexander experienced him as a threatening problem, an extension of Elinor’s emotional raids on his peace, which were alternately seductive and more or less sneering. He feared for his friendship with Thomas, which mattered to him, and which he had managed to sustain. Then, after Elinor’s departure, he had had a bad few months
thinking
, as a moral conundrum, about Simon’s hypothetical position, with a father who was not his father, and a mother departed. He had not experienced any wish to get to know Simon. He did not like small children. Simon was in a family, with his own siblings (or half-siblings) and a settled existence. Any claim of Alexander’s was in a sense ludicrous, since it was a claim based on a moment of pleasure and the accident of genes. If genes were an accident. He avoided meeting Simon.

The major problem was Thomas. Alexander has not the slightest idea whether Thomas Poole knows, or suspects, any of this difficult history. He does not see how Thomas can know, and continue his amiable trust in Alexander. He does not see how he cannot know, given Elinor’s fits of emotional teasing and taunting, which appear to be part of her nature. He thinks that if Thomas
did
suspect that Simon
was Alexander’s son, his present behaviour would be exactly as it is, if he could sustain it. And so every conversation between the two friends is ambiguous, for Thomas either is, or is not, partly trying to needle and wound Alexander with his obsessive accounts of Simon’s problems and his assertions of his, Thomas’s, Simon’s father’s, single-handed and single-minded care for the boy.

Things have taken another turn since the Steerforth Committee began to sit. For Alexander is now able to imagine eight-year-old boys. He has seen what they write, he has discussed what they feel and know. He would like to speak to Simon. And dare not. Sex is a short thing, thinks Alexander, looking at Frederica, whom he once desired, who once desired him, and its consequences are long.

Leo and Simon come back into the room.

“We are going to stay here for a bit,” Frederica tells Leo. “With Waltraut and Simon. Will that be all right?”

“I think so,” says Leo.

Alexander looks at Simon. His nose has no real form yet, but his mouth, his mouth surely … Thomas Poole puts an arm round the boy and draws him close.

“OK, Simon?” says Thomas.

Simon rests his brow on Thomas’s shoulder.

“OK,” says Simon. “I don’t mind.”

Much later that evening, Thomas Poole and Frederica sit together, on either side of the hearth. Poole remembers the Frederica of the play, awkward, incandescent, full of ambition. He has made an appointment for her to see his doctor, and cannot bear to see her so damaged. He says none of this. He says, “I like your Leo.”

Frederica frowns and gulps.

“So do I. He is … I would have left him. But he came, he
would come
—”

“If you had left him, you would have gone back?”

“Would I? I suppose I would. It’s like still being attached by a rope, by a cord, that stretches for ever. I can’t bear to go back. Not only because—because things have gone wrong. Because I shouldn’t have gone there.” She looks round. “There’s a room that’s called the library, but there isn’t a book in the house that anyone
reads
, except children’s books, of course.”

“Why did you go there?” asks Thomas, quietly, neutrally.

Frederica looks round at the books.

“It’s like my parents’ home here, the same things matter. And I wanted to get out of that, then. When Alexander was talking about his education, that was how I remember my childhood—
brown air
, he said, that’s how it felt, stifling. I thought people were
really living
somewhere else, not just doing everything at second hand. Well, that was part of the reason. There was Stephanie. She made all the past, all my world—a way into death. And then there was Nigel. He
was
more alive than—nice, clever, second-hand Cambridge people. I thought he was the opposite of everything—so
faded
, so—so
discussy
and not
doing
—but he wasn’t really. I was a total fool. It would be simply a ghastly lesson, if it wasn’t for Leo.”

“A child needs his mother,” says Thomas Poole. “Conventional wisdom. But true, as I know to my cost.”

Frederica says, “There, he has everything. He has two devoted aunts and a kind of super-nanny, he has a pony, and a house with a moat, and stables, and an orchard and the earth—don’t tell me all these are simply material things, for they aren’t, he loves them, he belongs there—I don’t, I only love them out of the glamour they have because they
aren’t
what I am or want—but he—I ought not to take him away.”

“You didn’t, as I understand it. He came.”

“How can he know
anything
about how we should have to live, how can he make any sort of anything anyone can call a
decision
—he just
came
—he probably supposes if we’re together we shall go back together—”

“He may suppose that. Has he said that?”

Frederica considers. “No. But children don’t say what they really think, almost ever, do they? They can’t say what they hope, in case it’s gone, like a flash, if anyone truly says no.”

“Nevertheless, he is a clever boy, and he came. And children need their mother.”

“Nigel might let
me
go without too much terrible fighting. I don’t know anything about divorce; I’ll think that out next. But he’ll never let
him
go, and he’ll be right not to, a child needs two parents, and Nigel loves Leo—”

“Then, in time, a
modus vivendi
—”

“I don’t think so. He’s like my father. An absolute master of the will. No, he won’t let me go and see Leo at all, I know that, inside myself. I don’t want to
use
Leo, in a battle of wills—”

“Nothing you have said leads me to suppose you have any idea of the sort. You love Leo. Leo came. Take it gently. Your instinct was
right. A boy needs his mother. I don’t know why Elinor left as she did. That is, I can see she was in love, and all that sort of thing, and perhaps she wanted a different sort of life, that’s understandable, too. But to leave like that—to go out one evening—when I was teaching—and leave a note with the baby-sitter—and simply never—never voluntarily—speak to any of us again. She took
nothing
, not a photograph, not any of their writing. Can you understand that?”

“In a way. It may have been the only way. To be able to go at all.”

“But she cannot have imagined—or let herself imagine—them, the next morning—in a month—in a year—”

Thomas Poole is full of passion. He is reliving the next morning, the next month, the next year.

Frederica says, “She can’t have permitted herself to imagine—”

Thomas says, “A child needs—”

Frederica begins to weep, hoarsely, desperately, racked by great sobs. Thomas puts an arm round her. The door opens. It is Leo. He looks at Thomas to see if Thomas is responsible for the tears, works out that he is not, and launches himself, like a bolt, into Frederica’s lap.

“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t, don’t, don’t.”

Frederica obediently dries her tears.

“I don’t know what you’ll make of him,” Hugh Pink says, more than once, on the way to see Rupert Parrott at Bowers and Eden. “He isn’t quite what he appears to be.”

Frederica is getting into her stride. Bookshops. Vegetable litter from the market. Election posters. London. Life. She is wearing a kind of shift dress in a sacking-like cloth, with a black bow at the neck, cut just above the knee. I shall have to get my hair cut, she thinks, looking keenly at the passers-by. Will it work, has it enough weight, my hair?

“You keep saying that,” she says to Hugh. “As though he’s a magician. Or shady.”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that. On the contrary. It’s just that he appears to be so
typical
of something, and isn’t quite. You’ll see.”

It is Hugh’s day off supply teaching. He is giving it up to take Frederica to meet Parrott, who might give her some manuscripts to read. This is kind of him, as he needs that sort of work himself, in order to write his poetry. He has become obsessed with Orpheus, is reading
Rilke, is afraid that this is banal and is overwhelmed by the vision of the dead head still singing. He tries lines in his own head:

“Do
you
like him?” says Frederica.

“Parrott? Oh yes. Very much.” He thinks. “He’s religious. That’s what you don’t see at first.”

“Is that bad?”

“No, why should it be? Just surprising.” The poem is no good, it sounds
soft
, it should be cut and clear but running on.

Number 2, Elderflower Court, does not feel quite safe on its joists. It is a tall, thin house, which is in fact joined back to back to other tall, thin houses, by makeshift doors in walls and bridging corridors across shafts of dim courtyard. The entrance hall is minute, and contains a school-mistressy table in oak and two armchairs with dusty padded seats and oak arms. There is a rather faded display of books, front-on, on a shelf in the wall.
Within God Without God
and
Our Passions Christ’s Passion
by Adelbert Holly.
Within God Without God
has a kind of Op Art black-and-white spiral, swirling into a vanishing black hole which is also the O in Holly.
Our Passions Christ’s Passion
has the same spiral, in blood-red and a flaming orange. They are elegant, and evidence of energy.

Inside a cubby-hole opening out of the entrance hall is a lift, with a creaking iron trellis door, and a jerking, whining, ramshackle method of hoisting itself. Frederica and Hugh go up to the fourth floor and, almost ducking, travel round three sides of an uneven rectangle in dusty corridors painted bottle-green. Parrott’s office is in what must once, in Dickensian times, have been a servant’s attic. It has a sloping mansard ceiling and is painted in a colour resembling
tobacco-stained onion skin. The floor is heaped with dusty books; there are shelves of dusty books; there is a desk piled high with dusty paper, on which are two photographs, a posed bride in veil and train, and a row of smiling babies in suits with frilly collars.

Rupert Parrott is a small man, with a lot of tight dark reddish-blond curls, which are kept from being a mop only by rigorous training with scissors. His face and body show the same effects of discipline. He should be plump-cheeked but is not, quite. He should have a double chin, but it is barely perceptible, and the little paunch which should be beneath his lilac shirt and his pink-and-silver-spotted purple tie is also not really there, though the eye stubbornly tries to sketch it in. His mouth is, as Hugh has told Frederica, round, a little puckered, with soft lips drawn in. His eyes are blue and his nose nondescript. His voice has a public school drawl, which, with the impression of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t fleshiness, should make him seem slow. But the overall impression is of quickness, of energy, of an ease perturbed only by his own need to get going.