Babel Tower (74 page)

The painters are dispensing red and white wine in crinkling plastic beakers; everything is spread with a faint dust of trodden potato-crisps. The party hurry past a room with nothing in it but a red canvas, a white canvas and a blue canvas, with the predictable rubric “United?” They come to the graphics department, where everything
is display-conscious. Here they discover that the design teacher has been as good as his word, and has set
Babbletower
as an exercise in jacket design and poster production. Here too they find Jude himself, patrolling the display like an Ancient Mariner ready to pounce and expound. He hurries up to Frederica, John and Agatha.

“Here you have the Artwork for a work of art
temporarily,
we hope, suppressed. What is your opinion of all this? Who carries away the palm for
suggestiveness
?”

“Vis man,” says Leo to Saskia,
sotto voce,
“is ve
other
smelly man. My mum knows lots of really
stinking
men.”

“This one
pongs,
” agrees Clement, equably.

“Be quiet,” says Jude. “Little children should speak when spoken to, you must know that. How fortunate that you are all too short to see my collection of turrets. Go over there, where a well-meaning young woman has done a pretty Perrault and give me your opinion of her Puss-in-Boots and her Little Red Riding Hood. Marks out of ten, please.”

Some of the
Babbletower
covers are banal. Others are clever and suggestive. One has Hockneyish drawings of a man in a wig and a woman in hoops, leering at each other half-heartedly. Two or three have Disneyish Germanic castles. One has a long procession of maggot-like infants, carrying rose branches, passing under a portcullis into blackness. One has three Blake-like Elders or Wise Men standing on a battlement amongst flocks of big black birds. One has Brueghel’s beautiful painting of the unfinished, crumbling, weed-ridden Tower of Babel, with brilliant little droplets, or tongues of scarlet shiny blood dripping out of its orifices and down its ledges. Jude points this one out with approval. “The lettering is a bit fancy,” he says. “If you look closely you can see it’s made of needles and pins, I don’t like that. But it’s better than these dreadful
people
who aren’t my people, who stop you
seeing
the people in the book, who
interfere.
”

“This one’s clever,” says Agatha.

It is semi-abstract and very bright—a tomato-coloured double-apple-cheeked fruit, with a serpentine pointed conical tube in very bright green, coiled round it and penetrating it.

“I hate it,” says Jude.

“It’s a good joke,” says Agatha, in her mild, dark voice. “Cul-vert. Rose-Arse. It’s all there, in
purely visual language.
”

“I can see that. I hate it.”

Agatha considers.

“I might hate it, if I were you. But since I’m not, I find it very witty. I hope it got a good mark.”

“It did,” says Jude.

He takes them “to see my glory and my shame.” He hurries them down flights of stairs and into the refectory, where there is a display of the Foundation Course Life Studies, which include Jude naked, in chalk, in charcoal, in pastel, in gouache, in pencil, in acrylic, in oil. He is a faceless skinny length of bone in a tent of hair, he is meticulously delineated nipples and prick in bronze and green on grey paper, he is soft, soft lead, uncannily recalling the exact tone of his hippo-grey skin, sitting regally in a gilt chair, lying foetally coiled on plumped and depressed cushions. He is tendons and knobby knees and chilblains and scraggy neck; he is aquiline disdain; he is gloom with downcast eyes. The three little boys go from image to image; they do not say so, but everyone can see they are comparing the depictions of his genitals. Leo points and whispers: Clement nods.

“I am instructive,” says Jude.

“Do you
enjoy
seeing these?” says Agatha.

“It convinces me I exist, I suppose. And that we do not see ourselves as others see us, which I know. And that my shins are not proportionate—at some moment, from some angles—with each other or with other parts of my anatomy.”

Far away, in the bowels of the building, they hear music. It is a jazz clarinet, wooden and liquid, a clear long, long wail, a run of chords, a desolate repeated complaint. They wander in its direction. One or two canted notices, hung on door-knobs, say in red letters on white card:
PERFORMANCE THIS WAY
. Performance art is not—not yet—really on the agenda of the Samuel Palmer School. Not many people are following the signs, but the children pull the adults along. In a sculpture storeroom, abutting the garages and car park, a small dais has been set up. It is shrouded in black velvet, hazed with chalk dust. Behind it is a long and welded sculpture, painted in pillar-box red, with a series of blade-like forms suspended from a series of ladder-like forms. To its right is a huddled crowd of chipped and cheesy-surfaced classical plaster casts: a bland Apollo tipped off-balance against a smiling, hoofed Pan, a headless Athena with her Gorgon breastplate, a horsehead, a very small centaur. On the left of the dais is Paul Ottokar, in tailcoat and white tie (he looks classically beautiful),
playing the clarinet, with his music propped before him on a very pretty gilt stand. On the right is a kind of cage-like edifice made from multi-coloured playstraws, inside which is a human being dressed like a large bird, with a bright yellow bulging rump, a feathered tail, wrinkled yellow tights, large clawed feet constructed from wire, insulating tape and putty, a tarred and feathered torso, and a head crested with green feathers, masked like an American Indian bird-man, over which is strapped an aluminium contraption with a very long, proboscis-like stabbing beak with a strip of Day-Glo-pink fluorescent paint running its whole length.

With this he monotonously taps a large metal plate, painted with a black-and-white spiral pattern, at his feet. The tapping is not in synch with the clarinet music. At irregular intervals the bird-man raises and lets fall his wings/arms in an impotent way. When he does this, a rattle whirs briefly. Saskia says, “It is the Dong with the luminous nose.” Leo says, “It is
ve other
smelly man,
ve other
John.” He looks at John, to make sure there are two. Frederica looks at John, to see what they should do. John stands in the shadow of the plaster casts and smiles slightly, listening. The only other person in the room is Desmond Bull, who kisses Frederica and smiles at Jude.

Paul Ottokar pauses in his playing, without acknowledging his audience. His companion does not pause in his manic tapping. Paul Ottokar bows, sits down, and begins to play the Adagio from Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. The man-bird taps, mechanically. The beautiful sounds bubble and flow. The beak stabs and taps. Frederica tries to shut out the tapping and cannot. The bird-man raises his wings and whirs. The music gathers power. The bird-man ceases to tap and for a moment a small trill is alone in the silence. Then the bird-man begins a virtuoso imitation of a hen laying an egg. The children laugh. It is a very good imitation. The music sings away. The bird-man taps again. He stops. He makes a series of sounds which can be interpreted as a hen trying frantically to escape pursuit, failing, and having its neck wrung. He strangles, he gags, he croaks. The lovely music runs on. Frederica thinks: There is
not enough point
to all this, or else I am missing something. It is a thought she is often to have, in those years.

When the music has come to an end, Paul Ottokar closes his music book, folds his music stand, takes out a box of matches and sets fire to the straw cage.

“Watch it!” says Bull.

The base flares, blackens and dies. The structure collapses. Clarinet player and bird take a bow. They step off the dais. “Is vat all?” says Leo.

“That is all,” says Paul Ottokar, unsmiling.

“It was
quite
funny,” says Clement judiciously.

“It gives a headache,” says Saskia, more musical than Frederica and Leo.

The brothers are side by side.

“You burned the cage,” says Leo. “How can you start again?”

“We aren’t going to,” says the bird-man, with a Liverpudlian voice under his mask. “We’ve done that, now. We’re going for a spaghetti. It’s the end of the day. Anyone coming?”

“Yes,” says John Ottokar. “That would be a good idea. Anyone else?”

Everyone goes to the Spaghetti House around the corner. It seems quite natural, quite ordinary, two brothers have met by accident, a group of friends have decided to have spaghetti after a Dip Show.

The bird-man is introduced as Silo. Under his aluminium dong-beak and his formal mask he is pale, scrawny-necked and bespectacled. Frederica asks John Ottokar, who appears to know him, if Silo is anything to do with Silence. John says no, his name is Sidney Lowe, it’s the first syllable of his names. Paul Ottokar says, “You could take it as a sign, though, that the syllables come out like that. It might have a meaning.”

“Most syllables can be made to mean
something,
” says John.

“Empiricist, nationalist,” says Paul, as though these words were delicate insults.

The meal goes well. The Spaghetti House is made with barn-like booths and red-checked tablecloths; all the booths are full of celebrating art students drinking Chianti. The children become restive, waiting for their dishes of carbonara and bolognese, and John Ottokar organises a kind of round-table serial game of scissors-paper-stone. Leo says, “Is it
true,
what you said, you two always put out ve
same thing,
always?”

Paul smiles at John. “Did you tell him that?”

“It was true, then.”

“And now? Try now?”

It is like arm-wrestling, a trial of strength in a pub; it is amiable, but tense. John and Paul are sitting opposite each other. They put out a
hand each. Flat, both. Paper, paper. Again. Clenched fists. Stone, stone. Stone, stone. Stone, stone. Scissors, scissors. Paper, paper. Scissors, scissors. Stone, stone. Stone, stone. Frederica watches with alarm. Bull says, “This is nothing to do with the law of averages.” Silo says, “Do you read each other’s minds?”

“No, no,” says Paul. “We just
know.
Quick as a flash, we
know.
”

Scissors, scissors. Paper, paper. Stone, stone.

They look pleased with themselves. Paul says, “Do you remember, we used to sing?” He hums. “Anything
you
can do, I can do
better.
I can do
anything,
bet
ter than you.” John joins in.

“No you can’t.” “Yes, I can.” “No you can’t.” “Yes, I can.”

“It was true and not true,” says Paul.

Frederica has not seen them together since the bonfire night. Leo and Clement and Thano start singing. “Anything
you
can do,
I
can do
bet
ter.” Frederica thinks: I thought the problem was, the two of them, fighting over
me.
She has the sexual self-confidence, over-confidence perhaps, of her curious historical position, brief and anomalous, a Cambridge woman when there were eleven men for every woman. They were princesses, those women, though ordinary enough, in fact. Now she sees that it is not that, not so much that, that is the problem. She is in competition with each brother for the attention of the other, and must lose. They sit at ease, smiling at each other, thrusting out their identical fists, paper, scissors, stone, with no winner, no loser, no difference.

She thinks: They are like the two blades of a pair of scissors. She thinks: If we are two, we are two so, as stiff twin compasses are two. She thinks, with an internal mad laughter, “Those whom God hath joined together let no woman put asunder.” She has a brief memory of their joined bloody bodies, John’s and hers. She feels Desmond Bull’s hand, making a firm secret curl behind her buttocks, strong, steady. She does not push it away.

They sing another song. Everyone joins in.

Saskia and Agatha raise clear voices. Thano sings strongly. It is a good, friendly party. “I’ll sing you two-oh. Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-oh. One is one and all alone, and ever more shall be so. I’ll sing you three-oh. Green grow the rushes-oh. What are your three-oh? Three, three, the Rivals.”

“You’re out of tune, Frederica.”

“I expect I am, Paul. I always am. I told you, I’m not musical. I’m tone-deaf.”

“We could teach you. You probably aren’t
really
tone-deaf. Almost no one really is incurably tone-deaf. You could learn.”

“No, I couldn’t. I can’t. I’ll shut up, since my singing offends you. I’ll be the audience.”

Desmond Bull’s fingers wrinkling the cloth on her buttocks. The two faces opposite, both with eyebrows quizzically and ruefully raised, the charming expression identical,
the same.

“Go
on,
” says Leo, crossly.

“Three, three, the Rivals. Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-oh. One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.”