Babel Tower (9 page)

Nigel Reiver has never put this generalisation to himself as a proposition. But if he does not think about language, he does think, and has thought, about women, and has discovered the force of these words as troublers of wrath, promoters of indecision, softeners of eyeballs and mucous membranes. If you say “I love you” to a woman, it makes her wet, his body knows. He stands between fierce Frederica and the door and watches her mouth soften slightly, watches the blood in her neck, watches her fists unclench a very little.

He concentrates on her. He wants her. He wishes to keep her. He chose her for the mother of his child. At this moment she is all he can see, all his senses are alert for her next movement, of repulsion, of uncertainty, of reconciliation. He watches as a cat might watch a frozen rabbit that cannot now jump this way or that; will it gain strength, will it look away, will it bow its head with beating heart? He loves her, that is what love is. He moves nearer, he puts his hand and his weight on the door, so that she cannot pull it open, so that her body is between his body and the hard wood. He knows without needing to think that if she smells his skin, if she touches his greed for her, she can move two ways, she can scratch with hatred, with the will to break free, she can want him to touch her, as she has before, she can do both together, scratch and want, want and scratch. When his body is in range he changes the verb.

“I want you, Frederica.”

He names her so that she knows what he wants is
her
, is Frederica, not a woman, not Woman, not mindless relief, but Frederica. This is the language of courtly love, by instinct.

Her face is hot with rage, her blood is fizzing in her nostrils and ears. She moves her head this way and that to avoid his kiss, like the ritual dancing movements of gulls and grebes. He moves his head in rhythm with hers, he kisses her neck, her ear, with closed lips. She thinks, I am desperate, she feels desire, she is angry that she feels desire, she suppresses it, it recurs, it is like being electrocuted in parts and in small bursts, it is painful.

“I want you, I love you. I want you” go the small words. She is ready to sink to the floor, she cannot run away and will not respond. So he takes hold of her and takes her upstairs. Propels, lifts, supports, embraces, the verbs could go on for longer than the journey takes. From the swinging door to the kitchen quarters Pippy Mammott watches them go, and then removes the plates. She has seen this before. Frederica looks drunk, Pippy thinks, perhaps she is, Pippy thinks, she would like to think Frederica is drunk. Frederica has got a grip on Nigel, Pippy thinks, contrary to the evidence of her eyes.

Afterwards, he lies with his eyes shut, one heavy arm gently holding her to him. Frederica’s body is warm and happy. The skin of her belly is glowing red with use and relaxation and happiness. Inside, also, she can hear her blood coursing, she thinks of it as “hearing” though this word is inaccurate, it is not to do with her ears. She wonders lazily why she thinks of it as “hearing” and decides that it is to do with the thrumming of one’s own blood one hears in a shell and calls the sound of the sea. Frederica thinks in words, not exactly during love-making, or fucking, or whatever word custom and nicety choose for that activity, but before and after. She thinks now, looking at Nigel’s damp heavy eyelids, at the droop of his mouth as though it had slackened after pain, that she loves him because he takes her beyond words, effortlessly and with skill. She thinks of Blake, the lineaments of gratified desire, and moves her sharp nose along his shoulder, sniffing his sweat, which belongs to her, which she knows, which she
knows
with her body. She thinks of the elaborate conceit of Donne, the pure and eloquent blood that spoke in the cheeks of the dead woman. Frederica’s busy mind, in her skull under her skin and the tangled red hair on the moist pillow, casts about for the accurate quotation.

“Her body thought,” thinks Frederica. “Eloquent blood.” Nigel wouldn’t understand a word of all that, if she were suddenly to start talking in the night about lineaments of gratified desire and eloquent blood. It is only that his body thinks. She chose him for that, she thinks, and everything else goes with it. It ought to be possible to connect, she thinks, it ought, only connect, she thinks, and has an image of herself like a mermaid combing not only her hair but the fibres of her brain into harmony and alignment with damp, rosy fingers. Nigel utters words of his secret, sleepy speech. “Mn,” he says, “hmn? a-hmn,” and other such syllables. She breathes in his scent, their two breaths mix on the pillow, he answers tentatively “hmn, hmn,” and their feet and hands communicate.

Mary’s bed is curtained off at the end of the long ward. It is evening, and quiet, apart from the steady whimpering of one small child, his face muffled in his pillow. Mary lies on her back, quite still, her white face lit by a green-shaded lamp clipped to the metal bars of her bedhead. Daniel sits beside her, still hot and sweating, too heavy for the spindly visitor’s chair. He has been there an hour, but his heart is still hammering, his collar is tight. Winifred, the grandmother, sits on the other side of the bed, peacefully knitting. She knows how to keep still, as her daughter did too, Daniel remembers, wanting not to remember. Mary’s eyes are closed. Her breaths are regular and shallow. There is a neat narrow bandage round her brow, like a Greek princess’s fillet. Her skin is white and cool, and spattered with freckles like brown seeds. Her hair is silky above the bandage, red-gold, gold-red. Her mouth is slightly open: he can see her teeth, baby-teeth and half-grown woman’s teeth, together.

She does not move. Daniel sweats. Winifred knits. She breathes. Daniel shifts on his small seat, touches her cheek with a finger, draws back. Winifred says, “She has not changed since I got here. So still.”

“They said the doctor would come.”

“I suppose he will. He’s bound to. We just have to wait.”

Her knitting needles move steadily. Daniel resumes his study of his daughter’s face.
After some time Ruth comes in, bends over the still face, and flicks up the eyelids with practised fingers, one, two, and looks into the unseeing eyes. “Good,” she says professionally. She lays a palm on Mary’s brow and says again, “Good.” She is grave and beautiful in a grape-purple uniform, belted with a wide black elastic belt, under a white apron, with a pocket full of scissors and other implements. Her long pale plait is doubled up under her cap, which has a starched crown and a frilled fantail, like a dove displaying. She puts her cool little hand over Daniel’s heavy ones and he is quite sure that outside the hospital she would never have touched him, but this is her place. She asks if he would like tea, and he says no, and asks when the doctor will come. “Soon,” says Ruth, “soon, there have been other emergencies, he is on his way.” She slips away, on black, rubber-soled feet. Daniel says to Winifred, “Marcus was taken with her, at one point.”

“He still sees her, I think,” says Winifred. “He’s not given to discussing his life with us. As you know.”

Daniel thinks about Ruth, and about Marcus. None of his thoughts are fit to tell Winifred, so he lapses into silence.

When the doctor comes, he is already on one foot, ready to go again, as doctors always are. Daniel knows doctors. He has been a hospital chaplain. Indeed, he has been a hospital chaplain in this hospital, in this ward, and knows why doctors do not meet the eyes of those to whom he now belongs, the anxious, the waiting, the helpless. Those
human gestures
were his own job, then. The doctor says to Daniel and to Winifred that the X-rays have shown no obvious damage—no fracture—and the child’s condition seems stable, so that all that can be done is to watch and wait. She must be monitored for possible effects of internal bleeding. Time is most likely to heal. He is very young, and very pink, the doctor. He holds up the X-ray photographs of Mary’s head, directing the light through them, and suddenly Daniel sees his child under the shadowy, cavernous image of her own skull, the nasal pits, the hollow eye-sockets, what appear to be super-imposed layers of teeth and are suddenly seen to be the adult molars, buried in the jawbone, surging up under the rootless infant crowns. All in order, says the doctor, folding these images briskly away again.

Later still, it is the end of visiting hours, and Mary still has not moved. Ruth reappears and says that they ought to leave, now.
Winifred says she doesn’t like to think of Mary being alone—waking alone, is how she puts it. She is folding her knitting as she speaks. Daniel says he will stay with his daughter.

“We’ll look after her,” says Ruth. “She’ll be all right. We can get you in a moment, if—”

“I can sit here,” says Daniel, “and upset nobody. I know, I’ve sat here in the past, from time to time, I know how to keep out of the way.”

Winifred says, “Don’t you want to see Will? He’s with his grandfather—I expect he knows by now you are here—”

“Tomorrow,” says Daniel. “Tomorrow, I’ll see Will. Now, I’m staying here. In case she wakes.”

He knows, and Winifred knows, that if Mary wakes, it will be Winifred she will look for. It is Winifred’s
right
to be there when she wakes, he knows, he knows Winifred knows. But he repeats, “I want to stay. I know it can be managed, I remember. I want to stay with her.”

“Of course,” says Winifred. “When you’ve come so far. You can see Will tomorrow.”

He listens vaguely for sharpness or irony and detects none: he is too taken up with his daughter. It is also true that he has come to love Winifred and knows that Winifred feels something like love for him. His own mother died not long after his wife, angry and rambling in a geriatric ward, and had never, that he could remember, felt out his feelings as Winifred is doing now. If she is being sharp and ironic, she is within her rights. He stands up—the shape of the seat is impressed into his buttocks—and shambles forward and hugs his mother-in-law. She is thinner and smaller than he remembered. He says, “Thank you. I do know, you—I do know
you
—I owe you, Winifred.”

“You watch her,” says Winifred. She cannot bring herself to say meaninglessly, She’ll be all right, in case she is not, and so casts around for words. “I’ll go and see to Bill and Will and come back tomorrow. You know you can ring us up any time, if—”

“Aye,” says Daniel.

Ruth says, “There’s a kind of folding bed you can put down by her. Try and get some sleep. I’ll be round every fifteen minutes to check her pupils. I’ll keep an eye on both of you.”

Night comes early in children’s wards. Night comes early, but not complete darkness—angled lamps here and there illuminate tangled
hair, spread-eagled monkey-forms attached to tubing and pulleys, a passionate toddler snuffling hotly into a pillow. Ruth produces a toothbrush and a towel from a cupboard, and Daniel tidies himself in a carbolic-drenched lavatory. He pads back through the ward to his daughter. The walls are painted with cheerful pictures, mostly of sheep. The artist seems to have found sheep either fascinating, or easy, or both. Little Bo-Peep, in her hooped skirt and with her crook, stands under a large tree and peers one way, whilst behind her quite a large flock of multi-coloured sheep scamper and bound over a green hummock in the opposite direction, into a blue sky. They are composed mostly of squarish masses of circular brush strokes, out of which poke black ears, black faces and thin, stick-like black legs. Some attempt, not very successful, has been made to foreshorten the fleeing ones. The blue sky is full of solid sheepish clouds. Bo-Peep is drawn from the back, her face hidden by a bonnet, which suggests a failure of confidence in the artist. On the wall facing her, Mary with her little lamb is proceeding along a fence towards a small-windowed hut labelled
SCHOOL
. Mary is dressed in a crimson jumper and a green skirt. She wears a school beret on fluffy (sheep-like) blond curls, and carries a square brown satchel which seems to weigh nothing. There is something not quite right about the lamb. Perhaps its legs are too short, perhaps its face is too big for its body, perhaps its fixed smile is too human. Mary’s face, on the other hand, is round and empty, apart from smily lips and round pale blue eyes. Some sheep are looking over the fence and staring down on the trotting lamb. Black faces, white faces, horned, woolly.

Daniel sits beside his daughter. The night flows past. Ruth comes from time to time and turns back the eyelids, with their reddish lashes. “Good,” she says, “good,” and whisks away again.

Mary’s mouth is a little open. Her teeth are wet. Daniel thinks of Stephanie’s dead face, suddenly, with the full violence of the unprepared—the staring eyes, the raised lip, the wet teeth. He feels—it is no exaggeration—his heart willing itself to stop beating, juddering in his body like an engine in trouble. He feels waves of nausea. He waits for the image to fade as he might wait for the touch of hot metal to stop throbbing. He waits till it is gone, the face in the mind’s eye, and then puts out a heavy finger and closes his daughter’s lip over her teeth. Her lip is warm, warm and soft. He remembers the energy of the bursting teeth in her bony jaw. He touches her cheek, her little
shoulder, he takes hold, in the dark, of her cool hand, he says, “Mary—,” he says again, “Mary—”

Mary wanders in dark blue caverns. She does not walk, she weaves, or floats, or flies, between muscular fanning trunks of huge plants, or veined rocks. It is dark blue, and there is purple, and slate-grey, and there is a kind of dark light in and on it, given off by the pillars, the boughs themselves. She weaves her way and pain runs beside her like a shining wire, it traces her intricate path, but it does not exactly touch her—its light hurts her if she shifts her attention in its direction, its edge, its razor-blade edge, its needle-point, its flames about to break—but she dances with it slowly, she moves as it moves, it moves as she moves, they bow together, they curve and recurve, they keep a distance, in which there is nothing at all, no blue light, nothing, no visible dark, nothing.