Babel Tower (30 page)

“You never talk too much,” says Frederica, turning her attention to her friend. All the way through Cambridge, she would ask herself, and occasionally him, who he loved, what he loved, and never came up with an answer. He is neat, and fair, and kindly, and she is sure of his friendship, and sure she does not know him. She likes this state of affairs.

“What is it like,” she asks him, beglamourised by her surroundings, by the other-side-of-the-mirror world beyond the portals. “What is it like, teaching art history to artists?”

“Horrible,” says Alan. “They think the dead are dead, and irrelevant to their own problems, or worse, threatening to their
originality.
Well, not all of them. Most. You’ll see. It’s quite testing. It tests your own reasons for caring about Raphael. Or Giotto, or Piero della Francesca. But they tend to vote with their feet, so you don’t always have the pleasure of arguing the toss with them. That’s one thing. Another is that places like this are run on the energies of part-timers, paid low rates for piece-work. If they don’t come, you’ve got no class, no course and
no money.
”

“All the same,” says Frederica. “It’s alive, here.”

V
 

Alexander’s fears that the new Labour Government might disband the Steerforth Committee prove to be unnecessary. What happens is that two new members are added, to give it a more popular aspect. Like all committees, this one is a mixture of the relevant Great and Good from some perennial Civil Service list, and judiciously balanced professionals in its field. The original list was as follows:

To these the new government had added:

There are also Civil Servants in attendance: Aubrey Wace, the Secretary of the Committee, and his assistant, Agatha Mond.

The brief of the committee is to make recommendations for the teaching of English language in both primary and secondary schools. This brief included attention to areas where small wars are raging: the teaching of reading—sound or sight?; the usefulness or harm of teaching grammar; freedom of expression against correctness and conformity to rules. In his preliminary speech to the committee, sitting uneasy and inhibited round a board table in the Ministry of Education, Philip Steerforth said:

“Language and children are two things we might say previous generations in our culture took for granted. We have made both problematic, and made them objects of intense study. Between us we bring to bear a formidable array of expertise and talent in both fields, that is, child development and education, and the study of the nature and behaviour of language itself. We must be philosophically rigorous, and we must also be intensely
practical;
otherwise we shall be sitting here in another twenty years, for both subjects are young, are in transition and flux, and our work may be
helpful
but cannot hope to be definitive. Let
us also remember that we are, many of us, parents, and consult our hopes and fears and understandings from that source.”

The work of the committee is divided into two kinds: the gathering of evidence and consultation with teachers, and the debates in the Ministry. There is also the evidence, which pours in by the sackful, passionately written pleas for grammar, for the abolition of grammar, for learning poetry, for learning nothing ever again “by rote,” for “look and say,” for sonics, for mixed-ability teaching, for remedial teaching, for the gifted child, for the non-native speaker. There is a brief moment when Alexander surveys this mass of passionate paper like a cool human observer, knowing that he is about to become part of it, that he is about to join the battle and the battlefield.

He does not wholly know why he agreed to join the committee. Partly, he was flattered to be asked. Partly, he is interested in language; it is the medium of what he still thinks of as his art. Partly, his art is not going well. He wants to write differently, and does not know how. There is a new life in the theatre, and it is not one that bears any relation to the lyrical richness of his one great success, the 1953 versedrama,
Astraea.
The new theatre is based on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. It believes, not in measured verse, but in “shattering language in order to shatter life.” It is a theatre of blood, of screams, of bodily extremity. It is iconoclastic in a mannered way. Glenda Jackson has appeared as Christine Keeler, stripped, bathed, and ritually clothed as a convict to the recitation of the words of the Keeler court case. She has then appeared, to the same chanted words, as Jacqueline Kennedy, preparing herself for the funeral of the President. This has been followed by
The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.

Alexander, the man, was moved and appalled by the production, by the writhings and moanings and ritual head-bangings of the impersonators of the insane: by the concatenation of the artist-Marquis and the tormented revolutionary, by Jackson again, a wildly erotic Charlotte Corday beating de Sade with her long hair. He also feels that
it is not good
to release such violence as spectacle. And beyond that, secretly, he thinks “childish.” But what is “childish”? The child is wiser than the man, in the thought of this time. He is old, he is out of date, he once believed in contemplation, in singing rhythms, in thinking things out, and all this is swept away by this new bleeding, and howling. It may sound bathetic to say that he joined the committee
also to observe the drama of the politics of groups, but it is so; there may be an idea there.

The consultation process is wide-ranging. The committee is too large to crowd into any classroom or staffroom, so it divides itself into platoons, which make local forays, north, south, east and west, visiting schools in Wales and the Fens, in Cumberland and Dumfriesshire, in Devon and in Belfast. Alexander manages to attach himself to a group which is to be based for two nights in York, and will visit primary schools in Leeds and Freyasgarth, grammar schools and comprehensive schools in Calverley and Northallerton. He has chosen this group partly because it will enable him to see Bill Potter, whose grandchildren’s primary school, at Alexander’s suggestion, is one of the chosen ones. He has also chosen it because it will be organised and accompanied by Agatha Mond, the young Principal from the Ministry of Education.

The rest of the group are Professor Wijnnobel, Hans Richter, Louis Roussel, Auriol Worth and the two new members, Mickey Impey and Roger Magog.

Alexander manages to travel from London to York with Agatha Mond. She is a darkly beautiful woman, around thirty, he thinks. She says little, and keeps her head down, studying the papers in front of her. Her hair is long and straight and worn in a loose bun. Her eyelashes are long and black. Her hands are fine. She is perhaps a little thin, and looks perhaps a little sad and withdrawn. She is Alexander’s type; he recognises her; a woman reluctantly self-sufficient with a secret anxiety, or fear, under her cool look. All the women he has loved have been like this, quick dark women with potential passion. Except Frederica. He does not like to think about the very brief period when Frederica enforced love from him. He sits opposite Agatha Mond and watches her arrange her papers, as the London suburbs go past, and the edge of the Midlands. He fetches her a cup of coffee and observes that early rising is tiring. He asks if she has far to come.

“I live in Kennington. It isn’t too bad. I get claustrophobic in the Tube.”

“I can walk to King’s Cross. I am fortunate. I live alone.”

“I live with my daughter,” says Agatha, answering his question precisely. “She is four. I have to make arrangements for her when I go on
these visits, and of course I worry about her. She has just started at a local nursery school.”

“Her father?” says Alexander, who has already observed that there is no wedding ring.

“She has no father,” says Agatha Mond. She does not elaborate. After a moment she says, “Careers for women are not easy in this country. One of the odder and more humane provisions of the British Civil Service is that women may have up to three illegitimate children, with maternity leave, and no questions asked. It is unexpected. And useful.”

“Indeed. But your life must be very strenuous.”

“It is not easy. But it is quite manageable. I am very fortunate to have this job.”

They ride on in companionable silence. Alexander says, “What are our new recruits like?”

“You must form your own judgement. Mickey Impey did begin a degree course at Liverpool, but dropped out. He performs at the Cavern and the teachers and children get very excited to hear he is coming. They ask for him to recite his poetry. I suppose no harm can come of that.”

“And Magog?”

“Don’t ask. He writes to the department every week, with new ideas for educational initiatives. When this committee was first mooted, he wrote suggesting himself as an obvious member. Civil servants react badly to that kind of thing. He may be quite all right. He just seemed—overwhelming. But it was not felt that we could—at the present juncture—resist any suggestion of the new Minister. It was thought better to absorb him.”

“Now you look very official.”

“I love the impersonal verbs. ‘It was not felt.’ So useful.”

“Elegant and stuffy.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think you are stuffy.”

“Oh, I have to be. I have to be. Actually, I like it.”

When they get to Doncaster, he says, “It must be very interesting for you, to do this work, with a four-year-old child.”

“I talk to her like a watermill. I hear so much about the need to talk, and
how
to talk. I exhaust her with talking.” She laughs, and then
frowns. “I love her too much, because I’m on my own. I try not to talk about her but I think about her all the time.”

Alexander thinks of saying: I have a son who thinks he is another man’s son. But he does not say it. He thinks: Here is someone to whom I might say it, one day. But maybe she thinks I am an old buffer, a has-been. Maybe she is being kind to me. He has never had to worry about this before.

Just before York, she says, “I’ve been wanting to tell you. I once acted in a production of
Astraea.
It was OUDS, at Oxford. I was doing research at the time. I was Bess Throckmorton. I married Walter Raleigh. I loved it.”

“When it was first put on,” says Alexander, “I was in love with the woman who played Bess Throckmorton.”

She too was his type, dark, secret, smouldering.

“I fell in love with Edmund Spenser, but it came to nothing,” says Agatha Mond. “Short and sweet, a midsummer’s night.”

They are at York. They step out into the station. Alexander takes Agatha’s bag. As they get into the taxi, he says, “What is your daughter’s name?”

“Saskia. She doesn’t look like her, like Rembrandt’s Saskia. She looks like me. But I always think of Saskia as
complete
, somehow. It’s a name of good omen.”

They are becoming friends, Alexander feels. He is alive. Yes, he is alive.

Their first visit is to the Star Primary School in a Leeds suburb. They are driven there from the Dean Court Hotel in York. Alexander is not able to sit next to Agatha Mond, who is having a serious discussion in the front seat with Professor Wijnnobel about the grammar evidence. Wijnnobel is too tall to fit comfortably into a minibus seat: he stoops, and inclines his large face gravely. Hans Richter sits behind Alexander, who is one of the few people he talks voluntarily to. He wears a business suit, and has well-cut grizzled grey hair and a neat, unremarkable face, with glasses. Louis Roussel sits at the back of the bus, away from Wijnnobel, to whom he is ideologically opposed. He is a little man, dark and birdlike, energetic and short-tempered. The two new members sit apart from each other and everyone else, as new members usually do. Roger Magog looks suspiciously around at the others, sussing them out, summing them up, at once self-conscious about their probable attitudes to him, and vaguely believing that his
scrutinising self is invisible. Alexander wonders how he himself knows all this. Magog wears a shabby off-white polo neck under a shapeless tweed jacket, the garments of a slightly passé authenticity. His thinning hair is pale red, and his fat curly beard is dark russet.