Babel Tower (38 page)

“Because it is knitting, I should be glad if you wouldn’t break the thread of my argument.”

“
Argument,
is it? Happy those who earn their daily bread by arguing, as opposed to displaying their flesh and blood for study. I will hear your argument.”

This too is a nice provocation: it requires Frederica either to invite him into her class, or to speak up to be heard and interrupted, or to speak low, conspiratorial, so that he cannot hear. The best would be to invite him. But she does not want him. She does not like him. She does not like his look, his smell, or his sawing voice. He is disruption in person. She decides to continue. She opposes herself to him. She wills the attention of her group, the fringes of which turn their heads to see what Jude will do.

“At the centre of
Women in Love,
” says Frederica, “is a mystery, an emptiness. The two women are wonderful both as real women making decisions about love, about sex, about the future, and as myths, as mythic beings willing life or death. But what are we to make of Birkin, who in many ways is Lawrence, in many ways is the central consciousness of the whole tale? We are told, and mostly forget, that he is
an Inspector of Schools.
Indeed, at one moment, we actually see him inspecting a school, when he discusses with Ursula the sexuality of the hazel catkins. But mostly we do not believe in him as an Inspector of Schools. He has the entrée both to the upper-class society of Nottinghamshire and to the Bohemian artistic world in London. There is no reason why this should be so. It feels wrong.”

“Matthew Arnold,” says the sawing voice, “was an Inspector of Schools.”

“Also the author of innumerable books and poems,” says Frederica, this time managing to contain and include Jude’s contribution. “And part of a cultural dynasty. I was going to go on to say, we experience Birkin, if not as Lawrence’s
alter ego
(though he is best when most absurdly insisting on his maleness, for which Lawrence intelligently and complicitly
mocks
him)—if Birkin is not Lawrence’s
alter ego,
he is the presence of the
author of the book.
And
Women in Love
is not, is trying very hard not to be,
A Portrait of the Artist.
Lawrence may have said, “The novel is the highest form of human expression yet attained”—which you are in a better position to question than most people are—but I think he felt a kind of sickliness in writing novels about writing novels about writing novels.”

“
Tout existe pour aboutir à un livre,
” speaks the Chorus. Frederica gives him a theatrical nod of complicity, covering rage, and goes on again.

“He was in the tradition of realism in which George Eliot wrote of the travails of Lydgate and the moral defeat of Dorothea. He wasn’t an aesthete, he didn’t want to be. But he was pushed towards it. Because
Women in Love
is a novel about experiencing the world as art—
good art or bad art. It came at the time of the First World War and the trenches, but it does not look directly at those, it is about the forms of vision and the forms of thought.”

“And sex.”

“And sex. Seen as part of art. But Birkin is not an artist, because Lawrence felt a distaste for writing with his nose in his navel. He wanted to write about death and Europe. And there is an emptiness, a lack of solidity,
because Birkin is not writing a book
when in fact we experience him as though he is. As there would have been an emptiness—a disappointment—if
all he was doing was writing a book
—when Lawrence wants to talk about everything, all life,
not books.
”

She stares at the students fiercely. They stare back. They are all listening. She does not know if she has put it properly this time. It is a question that obsesses her: the unreality of Birkin, Inspector of Schools, who sees the world as a book he isn’t writing.

Jude says, “You know what Nietzsche said. He said, ‘Only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity.’ He says
we are all art works
of ‘the veritable creator,’ ‘although our consciousness of our own significance does scarcely exceed the consciousness a painted soldier might have of the battle in which he takes part.’ ”

“That’s a red herring. I don’t believe in your ‘veritable creator.’ ”

“No. But maybe your David Herbert does or did, maybe his Birkin does or did or will. I’m afraid you’re snarled up in your own narrow little utilitarian roots.”

Frederica is about to reply angrily when there is a disturbance at the other end of the studio, and two people come in. The first is Desmond Bull, who says, “Here she is. The class must be finished or almost finished. All these kids must move on.”

Behind Desmond Bull is Daniel Orton. His face is an interesting mess, his eyes lost in black bruised pits, his lips split, his nose crimson and florid.

“I’ve come to tell you,” says Daniel, “that your husband is looking for you.”

Frederica scrambles off the platform, and embraces him. The students begin to pack up.

“He found me,” says Daniel, mildly enjoying the drama of his own appearance. “I hope he can’t find you.”

Desmond Bull fetches a chair. Daniel and Frederica sit down. Things rush through their minds. Stephanie, William, Mary, Leo.

“He went to see your father, too.”

Frederica laughs. “I hope he didn’t turn
him
black and blue.”

Daniel says, “Don’t laugh. He did. He slammed a door on his head. Your father took it calmer than I would. He let him go off with your dress.”

“My
dress
?”

“Your dancing dress, your dad said.”

Frederica does not like the idea of Bill hurt. Of Bill vulnerable.

“Help me, Daniel,” she says, putting out a hand to touch his sleeve. Behind her she senses a whiff of rancid grease, of sour sweat, of fish.

“A Daniel come to judgement,” says Jude. “I do believe I have found you at last, my own, my sweet, my only friend, and in the flesh, in the splendidly substantial and generously
abundant
flesh which I hadn’t envisaged in all its perfection. Will you acknowledge this thing of darkness, my invisible Master?”

“Oh sod,” says Daniel, alarmed out of his manners. “Steelwire.” He repeats, “Oh sod.”

“Steelwire?” says Jude. “An expletive I do not know.”

“What we write in the book at work when we hear your nasty voice,” says Daniel. “Descriptive, sort of.”

“Is it flattering? Am I flattered? On the whole, yes. It is not bad. A little fame, a pseudonym. Steelwire. It isn’t good, either. My name is Jude Mason. It was not, and now is. I am my own progenitor. In my own way. Will everything else be an anti-climax?”

“Probably,” says Daniel. “You should start ringing someone else. I’ve got to talk to Frederica, now. Seriously.”

“We shall meet again. I am glad to have seen you. You have an unexpected beauty, parson-person, you do not glitter or gleam but you have a sort of
light
in you. I hope my own appearance was not too disappointing.”

Daniel stares gloomily from his chair. His eyes meet Jude’s encrusted navel and travel down, across his limp grey member, towards his thin knees.

“You smell like an alley-cat,” he says.

“I know several. Resourceful beasts, my friends. Do you know, I was present in the aether when meat was made of our friend’s cheeks and ears?” he says to Frederica.

“Go away,” says Frederica. “Please. I’ve got to think. You can talk to Daniel after.”

“No he can’t. I’m going. You and I can go somewhere and talk and then I’m going.”

•   •   •

Frederica and Daniel talk in a coffee bar. It is a good coffee bar for talking in; it has booths, around Formica tables. Muzak plays. Frederica, who has been avoiding Daniel, who has not attempted to see him or answer his letter, is almost overwhelmed by her happiness in seeing him, by his reality and solidity. Tears rise in her eyes and run over: she puts out a hand amongst the coffee stains and Daniel grips it.

“It’s not that your letter wasn’t right. It was that I couldn’t cope. I have been
such a fool
and now I’m scared. I wouldn’t be
so
scared if it wasn’t for Leo. I can’t do right, for him.”

“Tell me.”

She tells him. The whole sorry story, the attraction of strangeness, the trap of the country house, the horror of being “a married woman” (“I thought I would still be
myself,
Daniel, and wasn’t”), the mistake and the wonder of Leo, the guilt, the guilt, the Conservative canvassers, the friends, the anger, the blood, the axe. She does not tell him about the Bluebeard cupboard or about her visits to the Middlesex Clinic for sexually transmitted diseases.

Daniel listens well. It is his job, and he knows Frederica. She tells him hysterically that
he is real,
tears dripping down her sharp nose.

He says, “He told me he comforted you when she was killed.”

“He did. That is true.”

They stare at each other.

“It’s not really
unusual,
” says Daniel, referring to the pain of grief and memory. “It’s all over the place, everybody’s got something. It doesn’t make it any easier.”

Frederica is grateful he is prepared to share any part of his pain with her. She grips his hand on the table.

“What will you do?” he asks her. “Get a divorce?”

“I must. There’s Leo. It won’t be easy.”

“You need a good lawyer. I know one or two—it goes with the job. I’ll give you a name and a number. You’d best get on wi’ it, get some peace at the end. Where are you living?”

“With Thomas Poole. It works beautifully. He has an
au pair
and we all share the baby-sitting. Leo is not a baby. You must come and see him.”

“I should like that. I work long hours, but I should like that. And I wonder—should we all go back to Yorkshire for Christmas? They’d be glad to see you—you know the reasons, beyond that you’re their
child and in trouble. And I’d like Leo to meet Will and Mary. It’s not quite right that they don’t know each other. Blood’s thicker.”

“Not so much these days. I’ll think. I’m scared. I want to lick my wounds, I don’t want to
discuss
things, the idiotic things I’ve done.”

“You won’t need to. Come with me.”

They discuss Jude, briefly. Daniel describes his gadfly phone calls. Frederica expresses distaste. So does Daniel.

“He wants us to dislike him,” says Daniel.

“Then we will,” says Frederica. “We will dislike him
intensely,
if that’s what he wants.”

Frederica’s extra-mural class is not in the Crabb Robinson Institute, but in an old elementary school, in Islington, a Catholic school, red, ugly, with a basement canteen serving ham and cheese buns, doughnuts and potato crisps, watery coffee and tannin-tanned tea, a school which has the beautiful and mysterious name Our Lady of the Sorrows. Frederica’s course at Our Lady of the Sorrows has the work-manlike title “Post-War British Fiction.” There is one full-length book on that subject, by an American, which states that post-war British fiction is about rebellious working-class lads from the provinces asserting themselves and finding a voice where once they were mute. It says that this subject is entirely new. Frederica questions this view: has the author of this work never read Lawrence, never read Arnold Bennett? She reads this book and takes a certain aesthetic pleasure in the critical attempt to make interesting what is (compared with Lawrence and Bennett) intrinsically
not very interesting,
except that everything is interesting
if you take a run at it,
she tells herself, I will get myself interested in Amis and Wain and Braine and all those others. I will also teach
Lord of the Flies
and Iris Murdoch. I am myself a provincial person become self-conscious but I cannot like the world of these novels. Lawrence was greedy for knowledge, for learning, he was interested in natural history and cultural history, he felt people should get out of mining villages. These people mostly sneer at such things. They have chips on their shoulders. I will say why this depresses me.

Her first extra-mural class resembles an Ionesco play. “If there are fewer than seven students,” said Thomas Poole, “the class may have to close. It is pure luck whether people come or not, especially in your area. It is pure luck whether they stay, to some extent. If they don’t, the class will be closed.”

The class is on the top of the school, up four flights of steep red stone stairs, with an uncompromising metal railing. When Frederica goes into the room, clutching an introductory talk—“Some Trends in Modern British Writing”—she is greeted by the sight of about fifteen people squatting in an uncomfortable circle on small chairs, made for gnomes, for people Leo’s size. There are two youngish men in dark suits, a middle-aged couple, a very pretty girl and a stretched-skinned woman who was once beautiful, a small man in a very clean forget-me-not-blue jumper over a tightly knotted green tie, a severe-looking woman, a large comfortable woman, an elderly man in a tweed jacket, and a nun. Frederica stares at this uncomfortable ring of unrelated faces.

“They can’t expect you to sit like that,” she says.

The nun says, “It has been known. Sometimes the only available chairs are infant chairs. I knew a woman who got down and her bones set into that position, and she had to be carried home bent up like a ladder, most unfortunate.”

“My astronomy class,” says the elderly man, “has more or less acceptable chairs.”

“I think,” says the blue jersey, “we should do a raid on other classrooms, Miss Potter, and quickly, and decisively.”

The faces, variegated adult faces, with none of the homogeneity of the art student groups, look up at Frederica in a circle, assessing her, assessing the situation. One of the women has amazing blue-and-silver eyelids. One of the men has pince-nez:

“Do you know
where
to raid?” Frederica asks the blue jumper.

“Two floors down, double classroom, nothing in it
pro tem.
”

“We shall get into trouble,” says the large lady.

“We are all grown-ups,” says Frederica.