Babel Tower (42 page)

He has somehow acquired a little more territory. He turns to Frederica.

“Won’t you open yours?”

“I’ll put it under the tree with the others and open it later, on Christmas Day.”

“Now,” says Nigel. “I may have to take it back, I need to know now if it is what you want.”

Nothing, she wants to cry, I want nothing. Leo says, “Open it. I want to see. Open.”

Will carries the parcel across. Frederica pulls listlessly at the blue rosette, at the wrapping paper. Leo climbs down from Nigel’s knee
and comes to help. The shiny paper rustles. There is a large, solid, cardboard box. There is silver-and-pink tissue. There is a dress. It is dark charcoal grey with a high neck and long tight cuffs, woven with red silk braid and embroidery, very rich, very plain. It is a long tunic that goes over a short, slightly flaring skirt. It looks like, it is, Courrèges. Frederica, like most women with red hair, does not wear red, but there is one red, a clear dark vermilion, that brings out the fire in her hair and the gold in her dusting of freckles. This is that red. No one knows what to say. Winifred is wearing a heavy green polo neck and a tweed skirt; Jacqueline is wearing a dark brown double-knit jumper over fawn cord trousers: Frederica herself is in jeans and a checked flannel shirt. Leo says, “Put it on.”

“I can change it, or get it altered,” says Nigel.

“Put it on! Put it on!” says Leo. “Now. I say, now!”

And Frederica, who has been holding the lid of the box, ready to replace it, suddenly puts it down, picks up the dress, and walks out of the room to put it on.

“I thought,” says Nigel to Winifred, “there must be a pub near here, where I could stay—”

“Our bedrooms are full,” says Winifred foolishly.

“Completely full,” says Bill. “No room at the inn, I’m afraid. None.”

Frederica comes back wearing the dress. In its honour she has put on black tights and carefully dressed her hair in a chignon. She is beautiful. Frederica is never beautiful, though often alive with attractive energy, but just for the moment, in the Courrèges dress, she is wholly beautiful, it is the word. The dress fits almost too perfectly: her small high breasts sit neat and elegant inside its beautiful seams; her thin wrists, her narrow waist, her long thin hips, are beautiful where the silk-lined cloth skims past them, making them look like necessary forms in relation to each other. It is a strange style, formal, tailored, severe, ending so far above the knee that the brevity of the skirt should be childish, a gym-slip, a dolly-dress, but is not. Frederica’s long thin legs are set off by it; another inch on her thighs would spoil its up-and-down simple complexity. She stands there. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock says, “Beautiful,” and Nigel looks sharply at him.

“I can’t take it,” says Frederica. Every precise inch of it is a betrayal of carnal knowledge, of Nigel’s certainty of the nature of her body, of how it works, how it moves, how it is.

“And everyone always says men can’t shop for women,” says Nigel, as though she had not spoken. “They can if they put their mind to it, of course they can. When I saw that red, I thought, That’s the one, it’s a risk, but it’ll work. And it does. You have to admit it
does something for you,
Frederica. You’ve got to keep it—no strings—whatever you—whatever we—decide. I want you to have it. It’s
yours.
No one else could wear it like that. Leo likes it, don’t you?”

“I like it,” says Leo.

Winifred makes a new pot of tea for her son-in-law whom she does not know. Leo sits on his knee. Frederica stands there, incongruous and beautiful. The dress isolates her from the company, as though she were in cellophane wrapping. She looks at Nigel with reluctant admiration: there are things he knows how to do. He discusses with Winifred the possibility of local pubs. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock thinks of recommending the Giant Man at Barrowby and then looks at Frederica and does not speak. Leo says, “You might possibly sleep here with us, possibly you might.”

“I don’t think so,” says Nigel, with the same reasonable ease. “Not just now, I don’t think that could be managed.”

A clock strikes in the village. Mary says, “We shall miss the carol service, we
must go.
”

“Count me out,” says Bill.

“We already did,” says Mary. “But Daddy will come, and Grandma, and Will, and Jacqueline and Dr. Lysgaard-Peacock, will you come?”

“Why not?” looking at Jacqueline.

“And Marcus will come with
them,
and what about you?” says Mary, looking doubtfully first at Frederica and then at Leo and Nigel.

“Last year we went to carols,” says Leo.

“So we did,” says Nigel. “In Spessendborough. It was lovely, wasn’t it? I love carols. They connect you to your ancestors. Mine are all buried in Spessendborough.”

“We don’t run to
ancestors,
” says Bill.

“Everyone has ancestors,” says Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, looking at the faces with a geneticist’s eye.

“Come to the carols,” says Leo to Nigel. He turns to his mother in her dress. “You come.”

“I’ll change this dress.”

“
No.
Come in the dress.”

Frederica changes her dress.

•   •   •

They put on their coats, all except Bill, and walk through Freyasgarth to St. Cuthbert’s Church, where in the candlelight they sing the old songs: “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “Unto Us a Boy Is Born,” “Lullay My Liking,” “We Three Kings,” “It Came upon the Midnight Clear,” “The Holly and the Ivy.” Leo stands between his parents, holding both hands from time to time, separating them and connecting them. Daniel stands between Will and Mary. The singing is not much, but there are one or two sweet high voices in the stone, and Luk Lysgaard-Peacock has a clear, unafraid, pleasant tenor. Mary, alone of the Potter stock, can sing, and does, clear and small. Frederica thinks of years of being
trapped
in school singing. And now she is a grown woman, autonomous, and
trapped
by her own nature—her own acts and choices.

Winifred weeps for her daughter Stephanie.

Will cannot weep for his mother.

Nigel’s bass is occasionally off-key, but a useful augmentary din.

Daniel thinks of the child in the straw. He thinks of his son, who has a brief life in front of him, and of Mary’s son, who was most cruelly killed, long ago. He thinks of the face he does not think of and manages to avert his attention from it in time, by concentrating on song. “The holly bears a berry, As red as any blood, And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ, To do poor sinners good.”

Back in the house, there is a move to leave Nigel and Frederica alone to talk. Frederica does not want this, but everyone nevertheless disappears: Luk and Jacqueline to their own families, Bill to his study, Marcus and Winifred to wrap presents, Daniel and his family to wash up. Nigel and Frederica and Leo sit together in the sitting-room in the evening dark. There is a wood fire.

“We never lived in a beautiful house,” says Frederica, wondering.

“Listen,” says Nigel. “Come back to our house—not for Christmas, I can see you’re here—but come back
for a visit,
say Boxing Day, say the day after—there’s the Meet—we could talk a bit and think things out. Sooty is dying to see Leo, and so are Pippy and Auntie Olive and Auntie Rosalind—they are
very sad
at spending Christmas without him, when families ought to be together—”

“This is mine—”

“And I found you, because I knew you’d be here, because
families are important.
So I know you know they are, so I know you know Leo ought to see his.”

“I want to see Sooty,” says Leo. He says, “I want to see him every day.” He says, “Let’s go back and just see him, Mummy?”

“I can’t,” says Frederica.

“Only for a few days. You can bear us for a few days.”

“I can’t. I mustn’t. I can’t come.”

She cannot, in front of Leo, cry out that she is sorry, she made a hideous mistake, she should never have married, and now they must all suffer for it.

Nigel says, “Well, let Leo come. Let me take him back to see Pippy and Sooty and the aunts. We love him, he’s ours, it will be his house, I have a right to see my son.”

Frederica bows her head. She thinks she knows that if Leo goes back to Bran House she will never see him again, unless, of course, she too goes back. And she is afraid of going back, physically as well as emotionally. She cannot go there again. It is quite reasonable for Nigel to want to see, to entertain, his son—she believes a child needs two parents, she believes, in principle, in civilised sharing. She also fears, with a sick, exhausted part of her, that Leo may be happier in the end at Bran House, where his life will have a form to which he has been brought up, a form that is his inheritance, on one side. And then she thinks of him being sent away, a little boy, to boarding school, as Nigel was. And then she remembers the clinging body of the boy on the run through the woods.

“I don’t know if that would work,” she says weakly. She may be being hysterical. Leo could go for a fortnight and come back. He
might
come back.

She is sure in her bones that he would not.

“What do you think, Leo?” says Nigel. “Do you want to come with me?”

“It isn’t fair,” says Frederica. “How can you make him choose?”

“
You
made him choose,” says Nigel with sudden violence. “
You
took him off against his will, against my will, without a word, with your shoddy
friends
in a vulgar way—”

“He
came
—”

“Ah. So
he
came. So in that case you were prepared to leave him then. So you can let him come back now. Bran House is
where he belongs.
So are you coming, Leo?”

“Not without Mummy.”

“Just for a week or two, with or without Mummy. If you can persuade her to come, so much the better—if not—”

“You
can’t do this to Leo.
Let him go to his grandmother now, let’s talk this out without him.”

“Leo. Are you coming? Come with me. Come home.”

“Listen, Nigel. I
can’t ever come back,
I should never have come in the first place, and so far it’s
all my fault
because of that.
All.
I think we should get a quiet divorce and think things out
quietly.
As for Leo, he
chose to come with me
and he is with me. Later, when we have a—an official arrangement—”

“There won’t be one. If you think I’m going to give you the pleasure of divorcing, you can think again. You are my wife and my son’s mother as far as I’m concerned. I don’t go back on my word.”

“I’m not ever coming back. You know that, really.”

“Leo! You come. Now. Get your train, and come.”

“Leo—go and find Grandma. I’ll try and explain to—to your father—”

“Bitch!” says Nigel. He walks up to Frederica and grabs her shoulders. Frederica flinches and struggles. “Bitch!” says Nigel. “Manipulative bitch.” He flicks her about the face with his palm. “Don’t you
dare
—” he says, thick with sudden rage. Leo begins to scream. He screams and screams. Everyone appears. Daniel goes up to Frederica, and Nigel lets go. Leo runs to Winifred.

Bill says, “It looks as though you’d better get going.”

“It’s nothing,” says Nigel.

“It isn’t nothing,” says Frederica.

“Come on,” says Daniel, and takes Frederica and Leo away, holding both their hands. Bill continues to glare at his second son-in-law.

“I don’t say who’s right and who’s wrong,” says Bill, “for I don’t know, and no one’s perfect. I do say, you’d better get going, until Frederica says she wants to see you. We are her flesh and blood.”

“Leo is
my
flesh and blood.”

“We know that. But now isn’t the moment. Please go. Christmas statistically breaks up thousands more marriages than it sustains, they say. Try again later.
Please go.
”

Nigel is about to say something belligerent, notices Bill’s scars from his last visit, desists, and goes, slamming the door.

Perhaps because Nigel has united them, the family take pleasure in one another’s company on Christmas Day. Winifred and Mary have
made the house pretty, as the house in Masters’ Row was never made pretty. Christmas dinner is traditional and tastes good; the turkey is well cooked, the bread sauce bland and spicy together, the stuffing full of herbs and interest. Frederica and Bill talk animatedly about her next term’s novel course. She talks to her father about talking to adults, and about teaching
Women in Love.
They discuss the problem of Birkin, who is a teacher, not a writer.

Bill says, “You can go away from Lawrence and get in a frightful rage with him—a
silly
man, even at times a
bad
man—and pompous—and then you come back and open the book and there’s the language, and the vision,
shining
at you, with authority, whatever that is.”

“I didn’t understand about teaching. I thought it was
dry.
But it isn’t. It makes things more real—another world, that is also this world—more real in
this
world—you can’t say things like that.”

“
That
is what is missing from old Birkin, Frederica. He doesn’t have a way of doing that.”

“And next term,” says Frederica. “
Madame Bovary, The Idiot, Middlemarch, The Castle, Anna Karenina,
I think
Mansfield Park,
perhaps
La Nausée
—”

Life,
she wants to say, though it is books she is talking about, and her life, her angry husband, who has a Bluebeard’s cupboard full of rubbery pink flesh and has been taught silent slaughter, her life is simmering away elsewhere. She smiles at her father, and imagines his life differently, a class in Scarborough reading
Bleak House,
a class in Calverley coming to grips with
Paradise Lost.
She imagines him imagining dinosaurs striding through the foggy London streets and angels shining in the distance through the trees of the Garden.

In the afternoon she helps Will and Leo to put the train together. The three of them make a good team: Frederica helps Leo unobtrusively, so that he knows the train is his, and can fit the pieces without Will becoming impatient or snatching. At the same time she asks Will’s advice, which he gives. Daniel watches them. He offers help, once, but Will snatches the piece of rail from his hands and fits it somewhere quite different. Daniel thinks that there is nothing motherly, even so, about Frederica. She is thin, she is quick, she is nervous: the two boys treat her neither as an adult nor as an equal but as something in between. Leo treats her almost as a prisoner, putting out a small imperious hand to pull her back if she strays too far away. He remembers Stephanie saying that no one
played
in their childhood, and
sees that it is a process to which Frederica is applying her intelligence, that does not come naturally to her.