Babel Tower (59 page)

“Come in,” says Frederica. “You can’t stand here—we can’t stand here—in the entrance.”

They go down the stairs into the basement. His feet are heavy. His face is heavy. In the class, in the pub, it has always been alert, mildly curious and pleased, responsive. Now it is set into an effort of mindless will. Frederica wants to laugh, and cannot. The tension in his body crosses the air between them. They sit down, on the edges of armchairs, staring across the room.

“You didn’t come, for weeks. I thought you’d given us up.”

“My brother was ill. I had to see to some things. I saw to them. It was a bad time. I could only think about you.” He hesitates. “When things went wrong, it became clear to me that I had to—come to you—I’m not making sense.” He hesitates again. “I told you, I’m no good at language. I—I have a picture in my mind of you
understanding
it all—”

“All?”

He bows his head.

“My—history. Two people in a room. Bodies and histories.”

Frederica has been thinking about his body, though not about his history, which she cannot imagine. She thinks of all the bodies that
have just stumbled and strolled and hurried out of this room: Hugh Pink, white and gingery; Alexander, long and bending; Owen Griffiths, bustling; Tony, brisk, and Alan, elegant; Daniel, solid as a rock and jutting with energy; Rupert Parrott, pinkly gleaming; Edmund Wilkie, fin-de-siècle pale, with heavy dark-rimmed glasses; Desmond Bull, muscular and chemical-tinged; the repugnant Jude, grey and scaley. She likes John Ottokar’s shoulders. She likes his wide mouth. He is a shape she likes. His skin and hair have for her a kind of delineating glitter of interest and electricity, a field, almost, of force, an almost visible aura of movement in the air.

She says, “I don’t know your history.”

“No.”

He stares at the ground. He does not tell her his history. He lifts his head and stares silently at her. Frederica stares back. The looks are like touching each other; they shock. She says, “I must clear up all this mess.” She does not move.

“Later,” he says. “Not now.”

He stands up. He crosses the carpet, which seems suddenly to be an immense desert space. He puts a hand on the nape of her neck. She thinks, Do I want this? and raises her face to his. He stares down at her and brings down his mouth like a gold bird striking. But gentle. At the moment of touch, gentle.

Frederica thinks: Do I want this, do I want this? John Ottokar touches her face, her hair, her long haunches, her small breasts. He touches lightly, lightly, so that her skin begins to desire, half-irritated, half-compelled, to be touched more violently. She puts her own hands on his shoulders. He kisses her face, again, and his fingers question her clothes, a button, a zip, a strap, so that inside these the naked woman is defined and comes to life. And her mind does not cease: Do I want this, do I want this? She stares out of the basement window at the cone of light falling from the street lamp, frowning slightly, lips nevertheless parted with mindless pleasure, and thinks: Do I want this? She remembers her own young greed, and her need to know—about her body, about sex, about male bodies—her indiscriminate clutchings and searchings and muddles and laughter and disgust. She is afraid now, as she was not, then. Her body is used, not furiously ready. She remembers her childish attempts to attract Alexander’s attention and make him want her. She thinks of them as childish now, she thinks of herself as old, on the edge of being undesirable. She thinks
that she wanted Alexander because he was remote, the teacher, her father’s friend, tabu. And now, she thinks, there is the same thrill: I am the teacher, I am wanted because I am separate and looked at, there is a boundary of the forbidden to cross. She thinks all this whilst she stands there on her carpet in the lamplight, and her clothes fall slowly around her as John Ottokar’s fingers find their fastenings and make her into a woman, a woman he wants, and has imagined, and has not seen, and now sees. I am thin, thinks Frederica. I have no breasts to speak of, despite Leo. John Ottokar reaches the warm triangle of her pants, slips a large hand inside them, and takes them gently down to her knees, and then, kneeling, below. Frederica puts a hand over the red-gold triangle of hair, and John Ottokar kisses the hand, and the hair, softly.

He is still wearing all his clothes, including the PVC raincoat. When he moves to kiss her, kneeling before her, his outer casing crackles and whispers loudly, whilst his hair against her hand is sleek and thick and soft and yellow. Frederica is still
thinking
: she makes an effort not to think of Leo and Nigel, who become immediately present in the room. Her nostrils remember the smell of Leo’s hair: the closest, the most powerful, the most loved smell of all. She kneels down next to John Ottokar and buries her face in his gold; its smell is good, and alien, and wholesome like bread. She begins to tremble. John Ottokar is shrugging off the PVC skin: inside is a flowered shirt, a shirt like a garden of green chrysanthemums and blue roses, a busy Paradise but well cut, a shirt to go inside a suit, a respectable-shaped shirt but burgeoning with brilliance. Frederica puts timid fingers to its mother-of-pearl buttons. Do I want this? Do I want this? Neither of them speaks. They are separate, and yet intent on connection. The struggle with his shoes is ungainly: Frederica looks modestly away. His trousers are quick, a snakeskin sloughed. His prick is grand and blond and sure of itself. Frederica laughs when it is revealed. They fall together, warm flesh on warm flesh. Do I want this? I want this. I think I want this. I.

They roll laughing on the carpet, near Jude Mason’s still damp winestain: they clutch, they touch; it takes its way: it is good. No one speaks, but Frederica hears his voice in a drowse, a series of soft meaningless syllables, full of
z
s and
s
s, a rush of stuttering
t
s, a dreamy hum, and then a final strange whistling, like the sharp thin cry of a bird. She swallows her own cry; she will not let go so far; she keeps her pleasure, which is intense, partly secret.

•   •   •

In the morning, the two wake naked in Frederica’s narrow bed. When, finally, they get up, still almost without speaking, John begins to clear away Frederica’s party, still naked, padding in and out of the kitchen with dirty glasses and empty bottles. Frederica sees the bottles and ashtrays and Leo’s toys, a tank, a mechanical dinosaur, an articulated wooden snake.

“I can’t stay here,” she says. “By myself. I can’t stay here.”

“We could go somewhere else.”

“I was thinking of going up to Yorkshire. To see my family.”

“We could go to Yorkshire. I don’t know Yorkshire. I’m on holiday.”

“We can’t both go to see my family.”

“You could see them—after—when I have to be back. We could have a few days, by ourselves. We could.”

“We could just get dressed and lock the house, and go north.”

“I’ve got a car. I could drive you.”

“Why not?”

“It is all right, isn’t it?”

“It is all right.”

Her body hums with happiness. Her mind surveys the place where she lives: books, toys, typewriter, Rupert Parrott’s typescripts.

“Let’s go
quickly,
” she says.

XIII
 

There is a moment on the road north when red-brick houses give way to grey stone, and grey stone walls make their appearance. The colour of the sky and the grass changes in relation to these stones: the sky is a bluer blue, the grass a bluer green, and the whole world, to the eyes of a northerner returning, both more solid and more potentially liquid, more serious, less friendly, more real. Frederica sits beside John Ottokar as his dark blue car eats the miles of road, and is surprised by the violence of her sense of homecoming. Most of the houses they see are not particularly beautiful; they are dour enough, though sometimes softened by creepers or climbing roses; the nineteenth-century ones have an air, she thinks, of civic and non-conformist confidence. She remarks on this to John Ottokar, who replies that he grew up in Milton Alfrivers, a twentieth-century Garden City planned by Quaker philanthropists in Essex. “Toy houses in toy closes,” he says, “we said they were, in the 1950s. Solid though, with pretty gardens. We wanted to get out.”

Frederica, who wanted to leave the north for London, and who likes London, who likes her various displaced London lives, cannot quite describe her sense of belonging to this grey and blue and green, so lapses into silence. They drive into the Dales, and the grey-green hillsides slope up and away from the road to the sky, crazily divided into uneven patchworks by the industrious and energetic dry-stone walls, long snakes of skilfully layered dark flat stones, occasionally staked with bare wooden poles. These craftsmen are my people, thinks Frederica, and then reprimands herself for sentimentality. But the walls are beautiful. “Such skill, such precision,” says John Ottokar, looking at the orderly human rearrangement of rocks and
stones. “That’s what my father always used to say,” says Frederica. “I used to wait for him to say it, as he always did. Now I look at the walls, and that’s what I think. Such skill.”

They are not going to Freyasgarth. They have booked in at the inn at Goathland, where they arrive in the thick blue evening, where the light on the moors is like water or suspended powder. They sign themselves in: Mr. and Mrs. John Ottokar. It is a fantasy, a fiction: Frederica feels freed by it. She is
not
Mrs. Ottokar; nobody here knows who she is. They go up a creaking black wooden stair to a low-ceilinged bedroom with a sprigged wallpaper and a sprigged bedspread. They embrace: John Ottokar’s large body is interestingly strange still, and yet warm, and yet connected to hers. They go out of the door and watch the last light flicker and fade over the bowl of hills: they watch the early stars in patches, and the fast rags of cloud blown in darker patches between the starclusters. They hold hands. His fingers are warm; she has the idea that his fingertips make little shocks against her own.

Inside, there is a warren of dark bars, a smell of rich beer, a smell of wine, a smell of paraffin. They eat in a restaurant with peach-painted rough-plastered walls, and have a candle between them in a cobalt-blue pot. They eat roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and are formal with each other, suddenly. They share their histories, or parts of their histories. Frederica describes Bill and Winifred (non-conformism, teaching, common sense), Stephanie (good, clever, dead), Marcus (mathematical, brilliant, difficult), Blesford Ride and Blesford Girls’ Grammar (a) liberal and b) stifling and boring). John Ottokar tells of a childhood amongst pacifist Quakers; his father, now retired, was production manager in a chocolate factory, imprisoned during the war for conscientious objection. He describes his mother, but Frederica fails to imagine her, although it is clear that she too is a Quaker and a pacifist. “We went to the local Grammar School in Milton Alfrivers,” says John Ottokar. “It was OK. We went to Bristol and did maths. They thought we ought to be separated, so one of us started in Bristol and one in Liverpool, but it didn’t work out, so we both went to Bristol.”

“Which were you?”

“I was the Bristol one.”

“Did
you
think you ought to be separated?”

Frederica is making conversation.

“Yes and no,” says John Ottokar, evenly. “I could see why they thought what they did, but it didn’t work out.”

Frederica thinks of asking, “Why didn’t it work out?” and finds she cannot: she is somehow forbidden. There is a silence. He is working out what to say.

“At first we weren’t doing the same course at Bristol, but by the end we were, we were doing the same pure maths course.” He stops again, and starts again. “Living in the same digs. Solving the same problems the same way.”

“Happy?” asks Frederica, who now realises that all this is somehow dangerous ground. There is a long silence. John Ottokar eats and frowns. She remembers him saying that he came to the extra-mural class to learn language.

“Very happy in one way,” he says, finally. “I mean, that is, we
knew
each other, you know. That was all we did know. And because—because we were together—we—didn’t get to know anything else. We didn’t have—friends of our own—that is to say, we did have some friends, we had friends of both of us, and we liked those friends because we were like each other, but we needed—I needed—I needed, I thought, a life of my own, so to speak.” He gives a snort of painful laughter. “A girl of my own, for instance. Opinions of my own, I sometimes thought, though an opinion is an opinion, if you happen to share one
genuinely
you can’t pretend you don’t, that’s silly. We were very involved in the CND marches—the whole Aldermaston thing. We marched with our parents and all the Quaker Meeting from Milton Alfrivers. We played in a band. We were part of something much larger than ourselves. That was good.” He thinks again. “If you can say terror is good.”

“Terror?”

“You march and march, you sing, you link arms, human
solidarity,
but you’re doing it out of terror at what some fool can do to the world—of what can’t be imagined, but
must.
Every now and then you
do
imagine it. You know? Marching is what you can do, but every now and then you know—that marching might achieve nothing.”