Babel Tower (77 page)

A drama is going on which neither of them quite understands, since it is largely kept from them when its actors are present in Freyasgarth, and much of it takes place at Long Royston or in Calverley. It is to do with Marcus and his two friends, Ruth and Jacqueline. Frederica, lying in her deckchair on the lawn, watches these three pass, in twos, in threes, in fours—sometimes including Luk Lysgaard-Peacock—arguing, vehemently or gloomily, staring at the ground or gesturing, frozen into silence by Frederica’s look. Once, Frederica comes upon Marcus and Jacqueline, standing by the gate. Jacqueline, brown, determined, severe, is berating Marcus.

“You’ve
got
to. Only you can do anything to stop this wickedness. You know it’s wickedness, and you know you can do something. Why are you so
wet
?”

“It isn’t any of my business. And I wouldn’t change anything. Only make it worse.”

“But it’s
horrible,
Marcus.”

“Possibly. Possibly.”

They see Frederica, and freeze into silence. She broods for a moment, and returns to the intricacies of Thomas Mann’s vision of liveliness and decay in Venice.

Marcus and Jacqueline come to Sunday lunch at Freyasgarth. It is not clear to Frederica whether or not they come as a couple; she even goes so far as to ask Daniel, who says he has no idea, but rather thinks it alternates, on-off, “to everyone’s dissatisfaction.” Winifred makes a good lunch, a roast, a salad, a raspberry soufflé. Afterwards, they have coffee in the garden. A figure approaches the group from the house; the door bell has not rung. It is Ruth, the nurse, with her pale plait hanging between her shoulders, wearing a cotton gingham dress, blue-checked with a crisp white collar. She looks very young. She says to Winifred, “Please forgive me for intruding, please forgive me
for coming in without knocking. I’ve come to say good-bye to you. I’m leaving Calverley—I’ve resigned my job, I’m going away.”

“I’m so sorry,” says Winifred. “I hope you’ll be happy. Where are you going?”

“You said you hadn’t decided,” says Marcus. “You said you were thinking.”

“Well, I’ve thought. And I’ve prayed. And it has all become quite clear. Quite clear. And once it was clear, there wasn’t a moment to lose. So I’ve given in my notice, and packed things, and here I am to say good-bye.”

She continues to smile brightly at Winifred. She does not look at either Marcus or Jacqueline. Daniel says, “Where are you going, Ruth?”

“I’m going to take vows. Oh, nothing like the old nunneries, nothing enclosed like that. But the Children of Joy are forming a little residential community—the Joyful Companions—and I’m to be one of the first Companions. I’m suitable, I have skills I can bring to the work.”

She smiles her little white, composed smile. Daniel offers her his chair, which she accepts, still not looking at Jacqueline or Marcus.

“It is a wonderful opportunity,” she says, in her clear, composed little voice. She folds her hands in her lap, and looks down at them.

“Is this to do with Gideon Farrar?” asks Daniel.

“Of course. The community will begin in Gideon’s vicarage near Bolton. It is ideally situated, there is plenty of quiet country round, and the parish is a country parish, but we will be able to receive—guests, people in need—from the industrial cities—we will be able to go out and find them …”

Marcus says, “You were doing good where you were, in the children’s ward.”

“Oh yes, but that is a place of death and despair. A terrible place, where I couldn’t go out. With the help of the Children I can be much
more
use—we can help each other, and the sick and the unhappy, we can
show
people. We can heal. Gideon can heal. I’ve seen him. We can work together.”

“Vows?” says Daniel.

“Oh, not like vows used to be. New vows. I can’t tell you them, but they’re simple, fidelity to the community, perpetual watchfulness, complete trust.”

Jacqueline says, explosively, “You can’t do this, Ruthie. It’s dangerous. You
can’t.
”

“It isn’t dangerous. It’s saving. I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“Gideon Farrar may have charisma, but
you know,
Ruthie, he’s dangerous—
you know
and I know you know.”

Ruth rises to her feet again, and smooths the gingham dress carefully.

“I knew you’d be like that. I won’t let you upset me. I know you don’t understand. I know—I’m afraid—you won’t understand. That’s why I came—now—to say good-bye—where everyone could see—so you couldn’t—make it hard. You don’t understand and I know you don’t understand.”

“Nor do I,” says Marcus.

“I know. I thought you might. You so easily could. But you don’t. I think I’ll go now. There’s no point in letting anyone upset me.”

She stands. She shakes hands with Bill, who looks gloomy, and Winifred, who smiles mildly. She tries to kiss Jacqueline, who turns away, kisses Daniel, who says, “Look after yourself, Ruthie,” and attempts to kiss Marcus, who suddenly takes hold of her wrist.

“Don’t go, Ruthie.” It is not clear what he means, don’t leave now, or don’t go to the Children of Joy.

She pulls her hand away. She walks quickly away, into the house. Her head is bowed. It is possible she is crying. Marcus goes after her. She begins to run. They both disappear into the house. Jacqueline stands up, sets off, thinks better of it. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock appears at the back gate, from the moor, dressed for walking. Jacqueline pays no attention. She says to Daniel, “
You
know Gideon Farrar.
You
know what he does. Stop her.”

“I can’t. What do you know about the Children of Joy?”

“Nothing. The whole thing is entirely distasteful. But I do know Gideon, and where Gideon is, love means sex. He
uses
his—his
presence
—his separateness—all those young girls—
he works them up
—I’ve been there, I know—”

“Does he hurt them?”

Jacqueline thinks about this. She says, “I think so, yes. I think he makes a kind of horrible fantasy of sacrifice and communion and really it’s just lust—”

“Those are all just words.”

“Are you trying to excuse him?”

“No. I know him, as you say. I think your words are accurate words.”

“Well, then, stop Ruth.”

“It’s hard. She’s grown up. She’s made a choice.”

Marcus reappears. He walks past his family, past Luk, out on to the moors. He begins to walk away, fast. Jacqueline stands up and runs after him. She catches him up at some distance; they can be seen as they embrace. Marcus bows his head on her shoulder, they walk on, arms entwined.

Luk Lysgaard-Peacock comes into the garden and is offered coffee, which he accepts.

Frederica and Luk Lysgaard-Peacock find themselves alone in the garden. Bill has gone to sleep; Marcus and Jacqueline have vanished; Daniel is taking Will to visit a friend, and Mary has gone along for the ride. Winifred is stacking dishes. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock does not ask about the drama, but Frederica tells him, briefly.

“Ruth came in and announced she is going off to live in a holy community and take vows. They are all upset. Jacqueline went off to cheer up Marcus, or vice-versa.”

“In that case, I will save my own news.”

“Your own news?”

“I have been invited to be head of a research institute in Copenhagen. It’s an honour.”

“So you’re going?”

“I’m thinking. There are reasons for and against.”

He considers the now empty moor beyond. Frederica has seen him look at Jacqueline. She wants to tell him, waiting never works. This would be impertinent. So she says, “Are there
Helix hortensis
—or should I say
Helices hortensis
—over there?”

“I imagine so. Not the particular population I am studying. And not my two slug populations on the moors, which are so strangely different.”

Frederica becomes mildly interested in both Lysgaard-Peacock and his snails. She is interested because she suspects him of being another laminated being, a creature capable both of giving his entire attention to small, pearly, convoluted crawling lives, of thinking thoughts about genes and DNA of which she has no conception, and of furious but not incapacitating sexual devotion. She is trying to turn the jottings of her own
Laminations
into a coherently incoherent work. She has had the idea that she is many women in one—a mother, a wife, a lover, a watcher, and that it might be possible to construct a kind of plait of
voices, with different rhythms and vocabularies. But it will not work. The story of Stone is one thing. The legal cut-ups are quirky new
objects.
But the moment she tries to write anything tinged with her own
feelings,
she is disgusted, as though she had touched slime, a metaphor she undoubtedly finds because of her temporary contact with
Helix hortensis.
If she writes what she feels truly—Leo’s strangling arms, the memory of Nigel’s blows, John Ottokar’s blood-stained belly, disgust overcomes her at its falsity; it is false because it is
banal,
a cliché. She looks again at Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. He is a watcher, a collector, a thinker, a walker—he is “in love” with a brown girl who is “in love” with her brother, Marcus—inexplicably, to Frederica’s mind—and this love makes him, too, more banal, more ordinary. She dare not speak these thoughts to him—he has a great deal of reserved dignity. But she does observe that the sex lives of the snails are no doubt less complicated, less anguished than those of human beings. She says she believes snails are hermaphrodite, and can manage the whole business by themselves. Lysgaard-Peacock replies that there is still some dispute about whether they do, in fact, ever keep themselves to themselves. The general belief is that they require another snail to reproduce—there is, as he puts it, some courteous dispute and jostling about who shall put what where. Snails, he says, are equipped with a curious organ, known as a
gypsobelum,
or love-dart, with which they apparently excite each other. Indeed, the differences between these organs are one of the clear ways of distinguishing
Helix hortensis
from
Helix nemoralis.
He describes the work he has done on two populations of large slugs,
Arion ater,
one on the moorlands and one from the valley lower down. These creatures, he says, are interesting because the moorland population, although identical in appearance to those of the valley, are self-fertilising, and genetically identical, whereas the valley slugs are sexually propagated, and genetically diverse. Odd, he says, that the upland, hermaphrodite, celibate slugs have preserved, over presumably thousands of years of disuse, enormous genitalia. Not in line with Darwin. Frederica asks him whether all this genetic science has changed his attitude to human behaviour. He thinks.

“I was going to say, no. But I think, yes, when I think about it. Love, and all that, is human, like language, which is purely human. I’ve never liked the idea of teaching apes human language—it diminishes them, in some way, like putting them in knickers and bonnets. But when you begin to understand how we are all constructed by the coded sequences of the DNA—hermaphrodite slugs, sexed slugs,
Cepaea hortensis
and ourselves—when you realise all the things that go on busily in your cells all the time with which your language-consciousness appears to have nothing to do—I think it does change you, yes. I think it does diminish your sense of your own importance rather comfortably Love is love, and all that, but sex is a blind drive, like—oh—antibodies breeding round diseased cells, or viruses hurrying along our blood.”

“I thought that might be comforting.”

“Oh well. At times. To the head.”

“Perhaps one has to make do with that?”

“Ah, but the
luck,
if one didn’t, if things went well.”

“In my experience,” says Frederica, “they
don’t
go well. Or not for long.”

“Are you trying to tell me something?”

“No. Well, no, not really.”

“Nothing I don’t know.”

Frederica copies part of an article lent by Luk Lysgaard-Peacock into her
Laminations,
partly because she likes the idea of the snails wearing their genetic code for all to read on the spiral of their shells. She also copies out a description of the love-dart of
Helix hortensis
and its difference from that of
Helix nemoralis.

Frederica cuts Luk Lysgaard-Peacock’s information into her reading of the documents of the counter-culture.