Babel Tower (54 page)
Authors: A.S. Byatt
She writes:
It is not so simple as supposing that sexual love replaced for the Moderns the mystical experience of the Christian religion. It is more that the narrative of the Novel, in its high days, was built on, out of, and in opposition to the narrative of the one Book, the source of all Books, the Bible. Both Forster and Lawrence use for the joining of lovers the old biblical symbol of God’s covenant between Heaven and Earth, the rainbow, even though Forster’s rainbow is also a simulacrum of the rainbow bridge built by Wagner’s all-too-human deities between earth and Walhalla.
Why bring in the stars? Ursula asks. D. H. Lawrence said the novel is the one bright book of Life. In the one bright book you have to have it all, the Word made flesh, the rainbow, the stars, the One.
Why, thinks Frederica, does it seem so impossible, so far away, so
finished,
this Oneness, Love, the Novel?
Those archaisms were a way of containing and continuing—
just
—the past of the monks, the mystics, the preachers. Now, it can’t be done.
Or perhaps, it’s only me who can’t do it.
• • •
Frederica looks at her markings on her dreadful catalogue of Nigel’s sins, or offences, her partial, her lying, summing up of her own story, and asks herself what she thinks about love.
Does the word mean anything?
Did I love Nigel?
He taught me desire.
That destroyed something in me: a separateness that was a strength.
But I did want to
know.
To know, yes, but not to be
fused
with someone else. The idea is, and was, a little sickening. I am a separate being.
Before Nigel, the men I loved were Alexander and Raphael. They were like unfinished rainbows, they were like Birkin’s stars in the sky, they were beautiful and untouchable, and I
liked them that way,
I could put energy into trying to change them, to make them desiring and desirable, but they weren’t
for that.
They were what I loved, as paintings are shining. They were the same as each other.
Stephanie and Daniel were part of each other, I think. She knew. He knew. I have had my moments, lately, of desiring Daniel, of imagining his touch, because he knows what it is about.
I don’t. I betrayed Nigel because I can’t do it.
I recognise John Ottokar. He is
charged,
the way Nigel was, and unknown, in an interesting way.
We could hurt each other. I know that. I am older now.
She thinks: If I don’t want Oneness, what is it I want?
She remembers a day, long ago, on the Goathland moors, when a word hit her as a description of a possible way of survival. Laminations. She had been young, and greedy, and acting Princess Elizabeth, the Virgin in Alexander’s play, who had had the wit to stay separate, to declare, “I will not bleed,” to hang on to her autonomy. And she, Frederica, had had a vision of being able to be all the things she was: language, sex, friendship, thought, just as long as these were kept scrupulously separate,
laminated,
like geological strata, not seeping and flowing into each other like organic cells boiling to join and divide
and join in a seething Oneness. Things were best cool, and clear, and fragmented, if fragmented was what they were.
“Only connect,” the “new paradisal unit” of “Oneness,” these were myths of desire, the desire and pursuit of the Whole.
And if one accepts fragments, layers, tesserae of mosaic, particles.
There is an art form in that, too. Things juxtaposed but divided, not yearning for fusion.
What is really fused is the sperm and the ovum in the zygote, Frederica thought with a certain intellectual rigour. Not man and woman, but cells. Language fails man and woman trying to transcend it and themselves. But the genes go coiling, spiralling, joining, building sentences and phrases of life with their primeval alphabet. Two halves become One.
She remembers her son, who has been suspiciously silent during all this thinking and writing and failing to write. And all the thinking is undone. For it is clear what love is. This flesh which is and is not her own, which was and is not part of her, which completes the circle of the arms.
“Leo.
Where the hell are you?
Leo! Leo!
Where are you?
”
Frederica never invades Agatha Mond’s space, but Leo does. Less often, Saskia Mond comes down to play with Leo, to eat supper when her mother is out. So now Frederica goes upstairs, in search of her son. There is no sound of movement, no shrill voices. She turns a corner, and hears Agatha’s voice, quiet and dramatic.
“ ‘It’s a house on fire.’
“ ‘There aren’t any houses in this wilderness.’
“ ‘It’s a camp-fire. Soldiers perhaps. Looking for us, perhaps.’
“ ‘We should hide.’
“ ‘No, it’s a bush, on fire. It’s a great thorn bush, burning all by itself on the moor.’
“ ‘Let’s look,’ said Mark, who was always impetuous. ‘Who could have set a bush on fire?’
“ ‘Lightning, maybe,’ said Dol Throstle.
“ ‘We should go and see,’ said Artegall.
“So the four of them walked over to the burning bush, which could be heard crackling and smelled singeing from a great distance. When they came
near it the air was visibly shivering in the heat, and full of flying black specks of burned matter. There was no sign of any human presence, no footprints, no broken stems.
“ ‘Just a bush, burning,’ said Claus.
“ ‘All the nests,’ said Dol Throstle. ‘All the young birds will be burned.’
“ ‘They may well be flown,’ said Artegall. ‘It is late in the year for them to be still in the nest.’
“He remembered his huge leather books, with page after page of drawings of eggs, speckled and mottled, of nestlings and fledglings, of plumage and claws.
“ ‘There’s something moving in there,’ said Dol Throstle.
“The four travellers peered into the smoke. Deep in the heart of the burning bush something stirred and writhed in the heat.
“ ‘It’s a bird burned naked,’ said Claus. ‘A very big bird.’
“ ‘It’s not a bird,’ said Dol Throstle. ‘I can see its beaky mouth. It’s got teeth.’
“ ‘It’s a snake, a nasty snake,’ said Mark.
“ ‘We must rescue it,’ said Artegall.
“ ‘It’s just a nasty snake,’ said Mark. ‘And badly burned I should think. Better leave it. Rescued snakes always bite you. I read stories too.’
“The two boys, prince and page, glared at each other with brief anger. Then Artegall drew his sword and moved towards the bush. The heat flared in his face: he could smell his own hair burning. He cut away a few branches, in order to get nearer. He was afraid of trying to hook the snake: a sword was not the best implement for that purpose, and if he pushed wrongly the snake might fall from the branch it was on, into the roaring bonfire beneath it. Wrapping his cloak about his face, Artegall pushed nearer to the bush, and pushed his sword under the whole body of the snake, which, to his surprise, seemed to have strength and intelligence enough to coil and cling to the blade.
“ ‘You’ve skewered it,’ said Mark.
“ ‘Hold on!’ said Artegall to the snake.
“He withdrew the sword and its burden, steel and sinuous flesh, carefully through the flames and smoke. His own hand was scorched, and his sleeve black.
“ ‘It’s
roasted,
’ said Mark.
“The snake was very large, and mostly blackish in colour, with a weaving pattern of gold spirals and coins visible under the smoke. Its belly was pale golden, and it had horned eyebrows above a diamond-shaped head. It lay limp for a little time, like a piece of rope, and then a ripple of life ran along its body and it coiled itself, painfully it appeared, raised its head, and opened two great eyes like carbuncles, fiery and burning with inner light.”
• • •
“What’s a carbuncle?” says Leo.
“A big red jewel,” says Agatha. “A big fiery-red jewel. Sometimes also a painful bump on your skin, which can also be red and shiny.”
“I don’t like snakes,” says Saskia.
“You don’t know any,” says Agatha. “But most people don’t.” She is sitting on the sofa, with Leo on one side and Saskia on the other. Frederica sits down on the floor.
“Go on,” she says.
“And then the snake spoke. It spoke with a kind of hissing, sibilant voice, a voice like leaves rustling, and silk being pulled swiftly through a ring or a buckle, a voice dry and yet sharp and swift. It said, ‘I am the Horned Viper, the King of the snakes in this country, and I was thrown into that bush by an angry soldier who set it on fire. I have it in my power to make you able to hear the speech of the creatures that have speech: the birds, and the running and creeping things with legs, and the flying things, and the things that tunnel and burrow. But only you can hear, because only you held out your hand through the flames.’
“ ‘I didn’t believe the creatures talked,’ said Artegall. ‘I have read it, of course—’
“ ‘It wasn’t exactly talk, in the beginning. Once, we were all one thing, and could hear each other’s nature well enough if we
listened,
with no need for speech. And then men made words, and used words for mastery, and we also spoke out what once we had heard and known in our heads, and understood. There have always been a few Men who can hear, or remember in their blood, the old speech—’
“ ‘And will everything speak to me?’ said Artegall.
“ ‘Why are you talking to it?’ said Mark. ‘It can’t answer.’
“ ‘No, of course not,’ said the snake. ‘Most things won’t want to go anywhere near you, and most will pretend to be dumb, even if you challenge them. We do not love you. But you may
overhear
things that are useful, even in the gossip of woodlice or the chatter of starlings.’
“ ‘I should go mad,’ whispered Artegall to the King Snake, ‘if I could hear everything’s voice all the time.’
“ ‘Well you won’t hear it, unless you
listen,
’ said the snake. ‘And then only if you are patient and persistent. Now I shall go.’ And suddenly, like the crack of a whip, he was away, across the heather, and pouring himself into a crack between two great granite boulders.
“ ‘Did it speak to you?’ said Dol Throstle.
“ ‘I thought so,’ said Artegall.
“ ‘I’ve heard of that,’ said Dol Throstle. ‘I couldn’t hear it.’
“ ‘I don’t believe it said
anything,
’ said Mark.”
“Mark is very silly,” says Leo.
“No, he’s not,” says Agatha. “You’ll see. He’s just a bit cross, at the moment, because he was only a page and a whipping-boy before they escaped, and after the escape he thought that Artegall would be helpless and useless because he’d never come out of his tower.… But he’ll change. People change.”
“Good,” says Saskia. “I don’t like people who are always cross.”
“What are you telling them?” says Frederica to Agatha.
“It’s my story,” says Saskia.
“I can hear it too,” says Leo. “It’s all right, Agatha says I can hear.”
“You’re very welcome,” says Agatha.
During the next weeks, Frederica joins the others at the story-telling sessions. She gets a
frisson
of ancient pleasure from watching Leo and Saskia lost in another world; from time to time she is lost herself, for the story is intricate, and Agatha tells it with conviction, inhabits it herself. It is the tale of a prince, Artegall, who wakes one morning in the sunlit tower overlooking a harbour, and finds that everyone has gone. He has spent his whole life in this tower, because his country is at war with neighbouring powers; the town is empty because an enemy fleet has landed. Artegall is rescued by a cook’s maid, Dol Throstle, a palace guard, Claus, and his page and whipping-boy, Mark, with whom he has practised soldierly arts, fencing, wrestling, archery. The four escape in a wagon, in disguise, and undertake a journey north, in search of Artegall’s dangerous uncle, Ragna, who is neither friend nor enemy. They are pursued by various forces. Artegall is believed by everyone to be useless and simply a parcel, but turns out, despite his incarceration, to be a skilled tracker of game and finder of paths, simply because a princely education has included endless large leather books on venery, woodcraft, geography, navigation and so on. Mark, the page, assumes that he will now assert the superiority denied him by Artegall’s position, but Artegall proves “I am
someone,
not just a prince.” As they go north, Agatha tells Frederica, the landscape becomes alive: creatures are met that are magical, or from other worlds, and speak other languages.
She says, “I wrote it for bookish children. Like myself, like you. For children despised because they read. To say, you can
learn to live
from books. Not didactically. But the obvious thing would have been to make Mark, the ordinary boy, triumphant. Whereas I think princes and princesses are what we all are in our minds—to be a prince
is
to be ordinary in a fairytale—”
“Isn’t it too old for Leo and Saskia?”
“Would it have been too old for you?”
“No. I’d have loved it. I’d have devoured it.”
“Well, then. They listen. They ask about the words. I don’t know what some of the teachers on our committee would say.”
Frederica tells Agatha about her difficulties with the dreadful catalogue. She has been writing a quite different kind of fantasy tale, she tells Agatha, grimacing. Agatha looks darkly composed, and says it must be most disagreeable. She listens, she is sympathetic, but she offers no confidences in return. Frederica wonders from time to time who is Saskia’s father. Agatha has visitors: married couples, single friends from Oxford days, male and female, members of the committee, Civil Servants. She cooks elegant little dinners, to which Frederica is sometimes invited. These are the great days of the marathon home-cooked meal, the five-course delicious gourmandising,
pâtés
and prawns in cream, delicate soups and imaginative
hors d’oeuvres,
followed by
estouffades
and
boeuf en croûte,
by
gigot
and ducklings in cider, by stuffed carp and
paupiettes
of sole, followed by delicious salads of endive and oranges, watercress and cucumber, followed by home-made tarts and soufflés, followed by a rich cheese board and possibly devils on horseback. Agatha serves, always, an avocado salad, a roast chicken with garlic, a tart from a French patisserie. Three courses, one cooked. The conversation is civilised and quiet. Agatha appears to have no attachments. Frederica notices at one of these dinners that Alexander is interested in Agatha. She notices the warmth with which he looks forward to a Bristol school visit on which he will go with Agatha, whilst Frederica takes care of Saskia and Leo. She thinks: They could do well together. She wonders what she means by this, and decides that she supposes they both have no need of violence. She thinks of Alexander sharing a house with Agatha, quiet and civilised, never quarrelling, never, she supposes, trembling with passion of any kind. She thinks, she does not know Agatha well
enough to make any such supposition about her, however well she knows Alexander, by now. Agatha does not want to be known, and some people, Frederica can see, find this quality rebarbative, call her, in their own minds, cold. She is composed, Frederica thinks. She does everything carefully, just so.
