Babel Tower (3 page)

They do not move as Hugh Pink approaches. He decides to strike off himself, into a shady path on his left. Then she calls his name.

“Hugh Pink? Hugh Pink. Hugh—”

He does not recognise her. She is in the wrong clothes, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. She is helping the child on to the stile. Her movements are brisk and awkward, and this reminds him. The child stands on the top step, balancing with one hand on her shoulder.

“Frederica—” says Hugh Pink.

He is about to add her old surname, and stops. He knows she is married. He remembers the buzz of furious gossip and chatter at the time of this marriage. Someone nobody
knew
, they had said, they had complained, none of her old friends, a stranger, a dark horse. No one was invited to the wedding, none of her university lovers or gossips, they had found out purely by chance, she had suddenly vanished, or so they told each other, with variants, with embellishments. It was put about that this man kept her more or less locked up, more or less incommunicado, in a moated grange, would you believe, in the country, in outer darkness. There had been something else, some disaster, a death, a death in the family, more or less at the same time, which was said to have changed Frederica, utterly changed her, they said. She is very changed, everyone was saying, you would hardly
know her. Hugh was on his way to Madrid at this time, trying to see if poetry and making a living could be done in that city. He had once been in love with Frederica, and in Madrid had fallen in love with a silent Swedish girl. Also he had liked Frederica, but had lost her, had lost touch, because love always came before and confounded liking, which is regrettable. His memories of Frederica are confused by memories of his own embarrassment and memories of Sigrid, and of that embarrassment.

It is true that she is changed. She is dressed for hunting. But she no longer looks like a huntress.

“Frederica,” says Hugh Pink.

“This is Leo,” says Frederica. “My son.”

The boy’s look, inside his blue hood, is unsmiling. He has Frederica’s red hair, two or three shades darker. He has large dark brown eyes, under heavy dark brows.

“This is Hugh Pink. One of my old friends.”

Leo continues to stare at Hugh, at the wood. He does not speak.

Or it might begin in the crypt of St. Simeon’s Church, not far from King’s Cross, at the same time on the same day.

Daniel Orton sits on a slowly rotating black chair, constrained by a twisted telephone wire. Round and back. His ear is hot with electric words that filter through the black shell he holds to his head. He listens, frowning.

“I say I’m completely shut in you know I say I say I say I don’t get up off my butt and go out of this room any more I can’t seem to get up the force I ought to try it’s silly really but what’s the point I say I say I say I say if I did get out there they’d all stomp on me I’d be underfoot in no time it isn’t
safe
I say I say I say are you there are you listening do you give a damn is there anyone at all on the end of this line I say I say.”

“Yes, there’s someone. Tell me where you want to go. Tell me why you’re afraid to go out.”

“I don’t need to go nowhere no one needs me there’s no need that’s why oh what’s the point? Are you still
there
?”

“I’m here.”

The crypt is dark and solid. There are three telephones, set round the base of a pillar, in plywood cubicles soundproofed with a honeycomb of egg-boxes. The other two telephones are unmanned. There is a
small blue-and-white jug of anemones in Daniel’s cubicle. Two are open, a white and a dark crimson with a centre full of soft black spikes and black powder. There are unopened blue and red ones, bright inside colours hidden under fur, steel-blue and soft pink-grey, above the ruffs of leaves. Over each telephone is a text, done in good amateur calligraphy. Daniel’s says:

The second phone rings. Daniel has to decide to disengage from the first caller. Someone else should be there, but even saints can be tardy.

“Help me.”

“If I can.”

“Help me.”

“I hope I can.”

“I’ve done wrong.”

“Tell me, I’ll listen.”

Silence.

“I’m here simply to listen. You can tell me anything. That’s what I’m for.”

“I can’t. I don’t think I can. I made a mistake, I’m sorry, I’ll go.”

“Don’t go. It might help you to tell me.”

He is a man playing a hooked creature in the dark depths on a long dark line. It gasps and twists.

“I had to get out, you see. I had to get out. I thought
I had to get out
. Every day that was what I thought.”

“Many of us do.”

“But we don’t—but we don’t—do what I did.”

“Tell me. I’ll simply listen.”

“I’ve not told anybody. Not for a whole year, a whole year is probably what it is, I’ve lost count. It might kill me to tell anyone, I might just be—nothing, I am nothing.”

“No. You are not nothing. Tell me how you got out.”

“I was making the kiddies’ tea. They were lovely kids, they were—”

Tears, hectic gulps.

“Your own kids?”

“Yes.” In a whisper. “I was just making bread and butter. I had this big knife. This sharp big knife.”

Daniel’s spine stiffens. He has taught himself not to make imaginary faces or places for the voices; that has led to errors; he unmakes a cramped kitchen, a tight-lipped face.

“And?” he says.

“I don’t know what come over me. I stood and just looked at everything, the bread, and the butter, and the cooker, and the dirty dishes, and that knife, and I just became
someone else
.”

“And?”

“And I put down the knife, and I didn’t say anything, I just went and got my coat and my handbag, I didn’t even say, ‘I’m just going out for a minute or two,’ I just went out of the front door quietly and shut it behind me. And I went on walking a long time. And. And I never went back. The little one was in his high-chair. He might have fallen over or anything might have happened. I just never went back.”

“Did you get in touch after? With your husband? Do you have a husband?”

“I did, yes. I do have a husband, I suppose. I didn’t get in touch. No. I couldn’t. You see I couldn’t.”

“Do you want me to help you to get in touch?”

“No.” Quickly. “No, no, no, no, no. I’d die, I’d die. I’ve done wrong. I’ve done terrible wrong.”

“Yes,” says Daniel. “But I wouldn’t say it couldn’t be helped.”

“I’ve said it now. Thank you. I think I’ll go now.”

“I think I can help, I think you need help—”

“I don’t know. I’ve done wrong. I’ll go.”

St. Simeon’s is not in use as a parish church. It stands in a grimy courtyard, and has a heavy, square mediaeval tower, now surrounded by a bristling cage of scaffolding. The old church was enlarged in the eighteenth century and again in the nineteenth century, and was partly demolished by bombing in the Second World War. The Victorian nave was always too high and gaunt for its width, and this effect is emphasised by the fact that it has been only partly rebuilt, inside its old shell. It once had gaudy nineteenth-century stained glass, of no particular merit, depicting Noah’s Ark and the story of the Flood on one side, and the stories of the raising of Lazarus, the appearance of
the risen Christ at Emmaus and the tongues of fire descending at Whitsuntide, on the other. All these windows were sucked in by bomb blasts, leaving heaps of brilliant blackened fragments strewn in the aisles. A devout glazier in the congregation undertook to rebuild the windows, after the war, using the broken lights, but he was not able, or even willing, to reconstitute the narratives as they had been. What he made was a coloured mosaic of purple and gold constellations, of rivers of grass green and blood red, of hummocks of burned amber and clouded, smoke-stained, once-clear glass. It was too sad, he told the Vicar, to put the pictures together all smashed, with gaping holes. He thought it should all be bright and cheerful, and added modern glass here and there, making something abstract yet suggestive, with faces of giraffes and peacocks and leopards staring at odd angles out of red drapery, with white wings divided by sea blue and sky blue, angels and antediluvian storks and doves mingling with pentecostal flames. The peaks of Mount Ararat balance on a heap of smoky rubble, amongst which are planks of the Ark at all angles. Dead Lazarus’s bound jaw has survived and one of his stiff white hands; both make a kind of wheel with the hand breaking bread at Emmaus and a hammering Ark-builder’s hand. Parts of the primal rainbow flash amongst blue-and-white wave-crests.

Virginia (Ginnie) Greenhill clatters down on high heels. She explains about late buses and bad-tempered queues. No problem, says Daniel. She offers him tea, shortbread, comfort. She has a sweet face, round, with round glasses resting on round pink cheeks and a mouth arched upwards. She settles in her own armchair—hers does not spin—and spreads out an expanse of complicated Fair Isle, oatmeal and emerald. Her needles click. Daniel is drowsy. His telephone rings.

“Remember there is no God.”

“So you have said before.”

“And because there is no God, do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

“So you have also said before.”

“If you knew what that meant. If you really knew. You would not sound so complacent.”

“I hope that is not how I sound.”

“You sound stolid, you sound blinkered, you sound one-dimensional.”

“You never let me say much, to sound anything.”

“You are not supposed to mind that. You are supposed to listen to what I have to say to you.”

“I do listen.”

“I abuse you. You don’t respond. I can hear you turning your other cheek. You are a Christian parson or person. I waste your time. You waste your own time, since there is no God.
Homo homini deus est, homo homini lupus est
and you are the dog in the fable with his neck worn bare by the dog-collar, wouldn’t you agree?”

“You want me to dislike you,” says Daniel, carefully.

“You do dislike me. I can hear it in your voice. I have heard it before. I tell you that God is dead, and you dislike me.”

“I listen to you, God or no God.”

“And you haven’t once told me I must be very unhappy, which is very clever of you, since I am not.”

“I am reserving judgement,” says Daniel grimly.

“So just, so restrained, not a fool.”

“The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”

“So I am a fool?”

“No. I just said that, because it seemed to fit. I couldn’t resist it. Count it unsaid, if you like.”

“
Do
you wear a dog-collar?”

“Under a thick jumper. Like many these days.”

“Bonhomie. Anomie. I waste your time. I
am
a waste of time. I occupy your line with God when other fools stuffed with Seconal or dripping gore may be trying to get through.”

“Just so.”

“They are nothing, if there is no God.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“It is my calling to call you and tell you there is no God. One day you will hear me, and understand what I say.”

“You don’t know what I understand. You are making me up.”

“I’ve riled you. You will learn—slowly, because you aren’t very bright—I go on until I have riled you, because it is your
job
, your calling, not to be riled, but in the end I can rile you. Aren’t you going to ask me why I need to rile you?”

“No. I can ask myself. And I’m too riled. Satisfied?”

“You think I am childish. I am not.”

“I’m no expert in childishness.”

“Ah, you
are
riled. I’ll go. Until next time.”

“As you will,” says Daniel, who is indeed riled.
“Steelwire,” says Ginny Greenhill. She has given this name to the death-of-god-monger, because of his voice, a clear BBC twang, a produced voice, plangent and metallic.

“Steelwire,” says Daniel. “He says he wants to
rile
me and he does. I can’t work out why he goes on calling.”

“He won’t usually talk to me. It’s you he likes. He just tells me there is no God and rings off. I say, yes dear, or something inane, and he rings off. I’ve no idea if he’s upset, or malicious, or what. Down here, I suppose, we are likely to over-react, to suspect someone who merely wants to
rile
you, of being desperate, even if he isn’t. We see the underside of the world, I suppose.”

Her needles tap. Her voice is comfortable, like honey and toast. She is in her fifties, and unmarried. She does not invite questions about her private life. She once managed a corset shop, Daniel knows, and now lives perhaps off a small private income and a pension. She is a devout Christian and finds Steelwire harder to take than masturbators in phone-booths.

Canon Holly comes down the stairs as Ginnie Greenhill answers another call.

“No, we’re here to help,
whatever
the problem, you
might
shock me of course, but I do doubt it—”

Canon Holly takes the third chair and watches Daniel write in the log.

4.15–4.45. Steelwire. There is no God, as usual. Daniel.

“Any idea what he’s up to?” The Canon inserts a cigarette into a cracked amber holder and puffs smoke towards Daniel. He moves around in a cloud of smoke-scent, like a bloater.

“No,” says Daniel. “Same message, same style. He set out to irritate, and did. It’s possible he’s really upset because there’s no God, or God is dead.”

“Theological despair as a motive for suicide.”

“It’s been known.”

“Indeed.”

“But I think he’s too gabby to be suicidal. I wonder what he does all day and night. He rings at all times.”

“Time will reveal,” says the Canon.