Babel Tower (29 page)

“He wanted to marry me,” Frederica announces. “I wonder what would have happened if I—”

“I should think it would have been horrible,” says Alan, placidly. “He’s wedded to his politics, you’d have had to be a Hostess, you’d have hated it.”

Hugh says, uncharacteristically sharply, “It was just Cambridge. Everybody felt they had to snap up somebody. A lot of misery was caused, a lot of silly misery. There were too few women, everyone was silly.”

Frederica is vaguely hurt. Harold Wilson beams manically at the camera. It is at this point still quite possible that he has lost the election.

Alexander says, “If he wins, I wonder if he will disband my committee. I was beginning to think we were doing something useful. We have become, so to speak, bonded. We are a Group, I am interested. I want to go on. We’re visiting primary schools all next week. Like Brobdingnagians. I’m learning things.”

Nobody has any thoughts to offer on this. They separate in the small hours, mildly drunk, mildly contented. Thomas and Frederica see them out at the door of the flat, like a married couple. Thomas puts an arm round Frederica’s shoulder. She does not break free, but does not respond to the gesture.

“Do you think Hugh Pink is in love with you?” Thomas asks Frederica.

“No,” she says. “He was once, I think, but as he says, everyone was in love with everyone, especially women. We thought we were special and we were only scarce.”

“Were you in love with him?”

“Oh no. I was in love with Raphael Faber. Or with the idea of Raphael Faber. The unattainable, you know, the teacher, the tabu, the monastic. I could
feel
a lot and nothing happened. It’s far away.”

“You’ve changed,” says Thomas Poole. He thinks a moment, and then pulls her towards him and kisses the top of her hair, softly. He releases her.

“Good night. Sleep well.”

“And you. Tomorrow we shall be in the new white-hot technological world. Or not.”

They are.

On the steps of the Samuel Palmer School of Art and Craft, the word “portal” comes into Frederica’s mind, seeming odd and bristling, as words do when they detach themselves and insist. The School does indeed have an imposing portal, which has a whole paragraph to itself in Pevsner’s architectural guide to London. It is a long stone building which takes up the whole of one side of Lucy Square, which is next to Queen’s Square beyond Russell Square and Southampton Row. The front is adorned with bas-reliefs by Eric Gill and the portal, reached by a flight of wide, shallow steps, is set deep in a round stone arch, at either side of which stand Adam and Eve, life-size, also carved by Gill, both holding apples and both smiling as though the Fall were a matter of little or no consequence. The arch above them is composed of serried ranks of flying figures, though whether these are angels, genii or fairies is not wholly clear. The handles of the two heavy dark doors are brass castings of a sphinx and a mermaid, both with golden breasts rubbed bright by constant touching.

“Portal,” says Frederica to Alan Melville. “This qualifies as a portal. It’s a queer word, portal.”

“ ‘Beauty is momentary in the mind—/The fitful tracing of a portal;/But in the flesh it is immortal,’ ” says Alan, grasping the brass breast of the sphinx.

“I may have been thinking of Lady Chatterley quoting Swinburne,” says Frederica. “She goes on about ‘Pale beyond porch and portal’ and how she has to go through them. Something to do with Proserpina coming up from the earth.”

They are in the building, which is, and is not, like any teaching institution. There are long corridors and staircases—all solid and stony, made to endure—and a faint whiff of the institutional smell of polish and disinfectant. But the corridors are also lined with paintings, bright abstracts, Pop portraits of singers and filmstars, Blake-like clouds of flying bodies, collages of masks. And the smell of disinfectant is drowned by the smells of the work itself—oil, turpentine, putty, hot metal. Alan is telling her about Liberal Studies.

“I always said I would never teach,” says Frederica. “But it will be nice to be working with you.”

The Head of Liberal Studies has a panelled office, with bright colour-spattered linen curtains (made by the textiles students). He offers Frederica coffee in a tomato-red cup (made by the ceramics students) and looks through her CV, which she and Thomas Poole have expertly put together. He is a large and handsome man, with what Frederica’s mother would have called a sweet face, bright blue eyes, great wings of groomed black-and-white-streaked hair, and a soft, smiling mouth. He is wearing a blue corduroy suit and a red knitted silk tie. Round the room, three deep, are paintings and prints with beautifully lettered verses and quotations underneath them, all of which Frederica sees are from Blake. An abstract of splashes: “Exuberance is Beauty.” A rather childlike face on a blue starry ground: “He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.” Trees, a huge collage: “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” An eye: “One thought fills immensity.” “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” There is also a large, Piranesi-derived etching, with the verse

“Golgonooza” is a word that has always annoyed Frederica. It is infant-babble, not true language-forging. It is unintentionally comic. The Head of Liberal Studies murmurs “Impressive” as he reads the CV, and looks up to see her studying the varied images.

“I make Blake the centre of my teaching here. He is the greatest English poet and the greatest English painter. He draws the mind out of itself. The students find him inspirational. Over the years I have made this collection of their tributes to his genius—as you can see, the styles are diverse, but the source is One. I like to employ creative people. Do you write yourself, Miss Potter?”

(Frederica has decided to return to her maiden name.)

“No, I’m afraid not. Studying English literature knocks the desire out of you. But it might be different here—where everyone is making things.”

“There is a special atmosphere. I try to write myself. I think if one is entrusted with the minds of creative people one should at least try to create oneself, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I have been inspired by the Prophetic Books.”

Frederica, unguarded, begins, “I could never stomach the Prophetic Books because the language is ugly—whereas the Songs of Innocence—”

He smiles forgivingly. “I think you will find upon closer attention that the language does have a beauty all of its own, a peculiar beauty. A
free
beauty—free, as he said, of the monotonous Cadence—the
bondage
—the fetters of rhyme and blank verse. ‘Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race.’ You need an ear made new. It is visionary—the vision of Albion and the Druids as the foundation and source for the Hebrew religion—”

“It’s an interesting myth,” says Frederica, trying to read the dedication of a rather wistful water-colour of the invisible worm in the heart of the Rose.

“Or truth, or true myth,” he says smilingly, as she deciphers the dedication.

“To Richmond Bly, who taught me to understand the infinite nature of Desire, with admiration and love from Marigold Topping.”

Frederica whitens momentarily as her gleeful dissection of
The Voyage of the Silver Ship
rises in total recall to her mind. She swallows nervously. Richmond Bly does not notice. He is offering Frederica a year’s part-time employment, on probation, and an office in which to see students and write lectures. Alan will take her to see it.

Up, up, up. The solid, shallow-stepped staircase hugs the wall of the Samuel Palmer School. It is wide—large objects are regularly carried
up and down it. It has an elegant wrought-iron balustrade and its steps are worn in the centres, reminding Frederica of external processional staircases for monks. The staircase is dark, but at the top are the studios, roofed with glass, full of light. Alan takes Frederica through these, to the end of the building, past flashes of colour, past pools of dark and light, in the smell of oil and acrylic and turpentine and spirits. In the last airy space, in the centre, stands a strange object, surrounded by a swarm of students in black, tight clothes, and two men in jeans with what seem to be projectors of some kind. The object is a huge flask, or retort, or diving bell, with rounded sides rising to a kind of funnel into which one of the projectors appears to be pouring coloured light. As Frederica watches, this light changes from red-gold to cyan blue, and then to indigo, and then to acid yellow, and then to rose-pink. The walls of the retort or cask are painted matt black with variegated shapes and sizes of portholes out of which shimmer ribbons and flashes of changing coloured light. The light has a thick, liquid quality. The students are armed with black cardboard tubes, or periscopes, and drawing pads, and are peering in where they can, some crouched at low portholes, some perched on high stools. The operations are being directed by a burly man with not much hair, in a paint-streaked and unravelling mariner’s sweater in oiled wool. Alan introduces this person, who seems to know and like Alan, as Desmond Bull, who is a painter, in charge of the Foundation Year. “This is Frederica Reiver—Potter—” says Alan. “She’s going to teach literature.”

“Good luck to her,” says Desmond Bull.

“Can I look at what you are doing?”

“Please. Go up to the top, the view’s best from there. Matthew here invented these coloured lights—he’s got all sorts of oils inside jars and frames—it’s a kind of instructive colour-happening. Come up this ladder.”

Frederica climbs up, and peers in. The diving bell appears to be full of liquid light, but it is only air, somehow dense with colour. The background colour changes and is traversed by shoals of green spots, or golden streaks or waving lines of crimson and emerald. So delightful, so mesmerising, is the play of energy, light and colour that it takes Frederica some time to see that something is coiled below the imaginary depths, a wavering trousse of hair, or seaweed, a smooth succession of stones, or limbs, hard to fix, hard to discern, as it shifts from gold to green to sky blue.

“Is it a sculpture?” she asks, delighted, and is answered by a voice from the depths, plangent and twanging. “No. It is a living creature. The Human Form Divine, precisely. Any movement is illusory. I am a professional.”

“You can come out now,” says Desmond Bull. “Coffee-break time.”

Frederica retreats from the brim of the flask. Whoever is inside gives a little jump, and clasps the edge of the tank with long greyish fingers, distinctly grey, once out of the coloured light, though whether intrinsically grey or by contrast is hard to say. A head then appears above the rim, a head long, long, with a long, fine nose, hooded eyes and a thin mouth, a head clothed and veiled in long, iron-grey hair, dead-straight, smooth, long, iron-grey hair that cloaks the shoulders and bust as they rise, so that it is impossible to see whether this is a man or a woman. A long, grey leg, sinewy and thin, is then hoist over the edge of its prison, also cloaked in the long, grey threads, and then the strange figure, all blue-grey in the daylight, is perched briefly on the edge, jumps down, and advances towards Frederica on tall, thin legs moving amongst its tent of hair. Frederica’s eyes focus on the genitals, which a swing of the hair-curtain, accidental or deliberate, reveals to be male, rather small, clouded by iron-grey pubic hair. The creature holds out a bony hand.

“Jude,” he says.

“Frederica,” says Frederica, registering a not very nice smell, a smell of fish, of old frying pans, of rancid oils.

“A very ancient, fish-like smell,” says Jude, in his high-pitched, cultivated voice. Frederica feels a frisson of distaste, and catches him looking at her, waiting for just such a frisson. When he has noted it, he turns away, and moves towards the folding chair by the studio heater, three roses of red elements on a metal stalk. He extends his grey hands into the red light, turns a thin grey shank in the rose. The skin on his ribs, the skin on his buttocks, hangs in sculpted folds, not flapping, but folded, like the plated armour of a rhinoceros. Students bring him coffee in plastic cups and offer him biscuits, which he refuses. A whole group gather at his feet.

Alan takes Frederica into her little office, which is a partitioned-off corner of the high studio, still under the studio lights, and with a white table and a good anglepoise, not a desk. The chair is pink moulded plastic, with hands, feet, and a microcephalic head for her own head to rest against, its long-lashed eyelids closed, its red mouth pursed to kiss.

“Who was
that
?” says Frederica to Alan.

“Jude. Jude Mason. Not his real name, I suspect. He’s a bit of a mystery man, a bit of a poseur. No one knows where he lives or where he comes from. He doesn’t say much, but occasionally he lectures the students on Nietzsche. They like him. They listen to him. He turns up for some sessions and asks for modelling work, and then he vanishes, and then he returns. Art school models are hard to come by, and he’s reliable.”

“He looks like Gollum. Or Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar only thinner.”

“He’s not very pro-Blake. He gets into arguments with Richmond Bly’s Blake-clique or -claque. He prefers Nietzsche.”

“Which reminds me of something awful.” Frederica recounts the story of
The Voyage of the Silver Ship.
She cannot resist making it funny. It is funny, funny and sad. She says, “When I saw the mills of Golgonooza I knew. I should have listened to you telling me his
name
, but I obviously couldn’t bear to hear it. What can I
do
?”

“Keep very quiet,” says Alan. “Tell nobody else, no matter how tempting—you always talked too much, my dear, and I’m glad to see it coming back to you, but resist, resist. Forget the Silver Ship and all who sail in her.”