The Biographer's Tale

by A. S. Byatt

  In the day I was trembling, calm and collected. At night I inhabited a phantasmagoria. (Whether I was in Vera’s bed or my own. Our encounters were decorously separated. A kind of cool distance was essential to both our pleasures.) (I think.) Erik and Christophe stalked through my dreams, in many guises, all appalling. Erik was a golden berserker in a horned helmet and very little else, howling a battle-cry, his beautiful skin running with blood (not his own). Christophe was a surgeon, naked under his white coat, dissecting a small boy who was and was not Phineas G. Nanson. They pranced across veldt in leopard-skins and feathers, they crawled out of the jungle in enormous penis-gourds carrying pathetic shrinking, decomposing heads. I dreamed of impalings and freezers with meat-hooks, of bull-headed men, and bleeding seals harpooned in water-holes with human faces. One of my most bizarre creations was a room full of lively pink worms (rather beautiful, transparent, slender pink worms) on which Christophe was stamping nonchalantly and remorselessly in specially-designed tennis-shoes with blades. Phrases rose to my mind. Trollaukin—humans with something of the troll in them. Once I saw the crucified man Galton had seen—that is, I saw his vision, of a completely identifiable hanging figure in agony (somewhat burly and greying, thick lips pulled back over yellow teeth, flies clustering on his eyes). And the phrase came into my mind “butchered to make a Roman holiday.” As it did into his.

  It was of course, my mind, the mind of Phineas G. Nanson, that was doing all this work of redesign and recombination.

  It wasn’t nice.

  They came back on a day when I wasn’t in Puck’s Girdle. I thought I’d got the files back in order, but wasn’t sure. By the time I went in again, I had managed to transfer some of my excessive anxiety to the question of what I had possibly lost along with Maurice Bossey’s favoured sites. When I came in that morning, Erik and Christophe were in what I should describe as a frisky and expansive mood. They had stopped off in San Francisco, and had a gay time. They had made friends, through Christophe, with an ex–tennis star who was offering sports holidays with a difference in exclusive resorts. They were full of laughter and, for them, unusually full of camp movements and jokes. They chattered with a mixture of affection and malice about new acquaintances and new “scenes” in a way they didn’t, usually. It is true that during my time at Puck’s Girdle I had envied them their world of endlessly interconnected friends and acquaintances. It is also true that I had even more admired their grave and settled affection—love—for each other. On that day, this love was unusually showing the form of playing at being queers. It made me edgy, right away.

  They had brought me presents. A Japanese netsuke with a tiny gnome-like person with an enormous phallus. A beautiful silver paperknife with a handle in the form of a naked Janus-figure, young and nubile, male one side, female the other. A prize they had won in an Easter raffle in San Francisco. “We didn’t know what to do with it, so we thought, why not take it home for our dear dogsbody.” It was an Easter basket full of tiny chocolate eggs, each wrapped in a different colour of silver paper. There were two white fluffy Easter Bunnies sitting amongst the eggs, and chained by tiny silver handcuffs and chains to the handle of the basket. They wore S and M leather masks and panties. They had little cat-’o-nine tails and truncheons, and various other miniature instruments in amongst the eggs. I sat and stared at it.

  “He doesn’t like it,” said Erik. “He doesn’t find it funny. Never mind, dear. Throw it away.”

  I sat and stared.

  Christophe was fiddling with the computer.

  “I can’t find—” he said. “This is all a bit odd. Where’s all my tennis-stuff? And all the stuff on the starvation-and-get-fit-and-beat-your-friends-at-something even if it’s only mini-golf? Rolf agrees with me about beating people, or watching them lose. An essential pleasure. Schadenfreude’s a human universal …”

  He said, “Phineas, you have been being naughty. I didn’t know you were into all this hard-core stuff. I’m surprised at you. It’s all got stuffed into my innocent tennis. What have you been up to?”

  The next few minutes were horrible. I do not remember them clearly. I do remember throwing the Easter eggs with some violence at both of them. I remember hearing my own voice screaming incoherently about dogsbodies, schadenfreude, Pym or Pim, semiotics, disgust, limits after all, everything doesn’t go; I remember screaming and growling and howling—yes, and weeping—in complete sentences. I remember mentioning—rather late—Maurice Bossey and snuff and Belgium. At some point—that point—Erik and Christophe began to shout too, and so to speak advanced upon me. I was tearing things up, letters I’d written, bookings I’d made. I was shrieking words I’d never used and didn’t exactly know the import of.

  I remember crouching on the counter like an angry monkey—gibbering—and stabbing the silver paperknife into the flesh of both Erik and Christophe. Their faces were no longer smiling but distorted with fury. They went for me with four hands, one of which (Erik’s right) was bleeding from a slash I had given it. Blood dripped on the counter. At which point, the door opened (did I say it was announced by a delicate silvery bell?) and I saw a blazing halo, a crown of golden fire, advancing to my salvation.

  “What is going on here?” said Fulla Biefeld.

  I had cut Christophe’s cheek too. His shirt was soaking up blood. My own hands were smeared with it, and my own face, where I’d pushed back my hair. Fulla said to me, “Phineas, are you hurt?”

  Erik and Christophe sat down on the beautiful chairs, took beautiful duck-egg blue handkerchiefs out of their pockets, and began very gently to wipe away the blood from each other’s wounds. Erik kissed Christophe’s cheek. Christophe bent his face over Erik’s hand. Fulla Biefeld held out a steady hand and helped me off the counter.

  “Of course the little shit isn’t hurt,” said Erik. “You ought to take his weapon away. He went for us. With a nice knife we’d just given him. He’s fired.”

  I said I didn’t want to stay. I said there were limits. I said I hadn’t known about Maurice Bossey. They had no right to expect me to deal with Maurice Bossey.

  Fulla was picking up chocolate eggs from the floor.

  Erik said I was sacked because I had been able to think even for a moment that they had dealings with Maurice Bossey.

  Christophe said, “We sacked Pym Purchase the moment we found out what he was up to.”

  Erik said, “How could you think, even for one moment, we would go in for that sort of thing?”

  Fulla, rummaging around the counter for a receptacle for the eggs, found the basket with the chained fluffy rabbits, the little whips, the cuffs. She put it on the counter and heaped in the eggs.

  “He quoted Christophe on schadenfreude,” I said. “He said the dogsbody fixed his kind of holiday. He said he’d paid through his—”

  “What kind of holiday?” said Fulla Biefeld.

  Erik told her to shut up and keep out of it. He said,

  “Anyway, that’s that, you’re fired, piss off.”

  Fulla said, “That’s no way to behave.” Her voice had a Swedish sing-song.

  Erik said, “I told you, shut up.”

  Christophe was bandaging Erik’s hand, very gently. He said, “I can see how some of the things we say—our style—might lead him to construe—”

  Fulla Biefeld brandished the chained bunnies.

  “I came here with what I thought was an interesting idea,” she said. “For combining my research—which might yet be needed to save your food crops—or your children’s—”

  “We shan’t have any children, dear,” said Christophe. “Or maybe a few anonymous test-tube ones.”

  “Well,” said Fulla, imperturbably, “Phineas’s children, then. Somebody has to care. You’d think the fate of the earth would impinge even on fairy hedonists.”

  “Fairy’s not a nice word,” said Erik.

  “Well, whatever a Puck is then, hedonists,” said Fulla. “You send people out there into fantasy worlds, and they choke in real f
orest fires in Indonesia, in palls of smoke from burning forests that aren’t in your pretty cutouts. The Danube is full of asphyxiated and radioactive fish corpses after the bombing in Kosovo; there has been a huge tidal wave of human sewage on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro; you send out physically unfit teachers and clerks to disturb the gorillas in Rwanda and they in turn get slaughtered by Hutu guerrillas, or to look at ever-so-romantic mediaeval fortresses in the Yemen and they get in the crossfire in a religious war. You can’t fly round and round on your pretty invisible girdle without impinging and being impinged on. The Mediterranean’s a dead sea, owing to the Aswan dam and international deluges of tourist shit and preservatives and herbicides and pesticides … but just the shit would do for it. We are an animal that needs to use its intelligence to mitigate the effects of its intelligence on the other creatures. And the air, and the earth, and the water. But we don’t, do we? We use chlorine bleach to make nice fluffy white bunnies and we tie them up in little bits of real leather off some other poor beast’s back, and that’s what we think the creatures are, fluff and glass eyes and pretty chains.”

  “Bravo,” said Christophe, whether ironically or otherwise was not clear.

  “Fuck off,” said Erik, who was much crosser, and whose wound was nastier. He was crosser because he was bigger and stronger than Christophe, and actually kinder. Something in Christophe acknowledged the existence of Maurice Bossey—and therefore of my own distress—whereas Erik, a Scandinavian moralist at heart like Fulla, his opponent, was simply enraged. “If you’ve finished talking,” he told her, pompous and absurd, “just go away. Even if you haven’t.”

  “I will,” she said. “Come on, Phineas.”

  I don’t know how it would have ended if Fulla hadn’t swept in like a Valkyrie. I might have injured one, or both of my employers seriously. Or we might—so to speak—have kissed and made up. Seen the absurdity of it. As it was, I followed Fulla out of the shop, with Erik behind me reiterating that I was fired, fired, fired. And that Fulla had no sense of humour. This annoyed her. “I do,” she said to me, as we went into the street. “But it doesn’t have to be uppermost all the time. There’s a proper time for everything. Even humour. Though the British don’t think so.” I said Erik and Christophe were not British. She said she knew that, she wasn’t a complete idiot. She stopped in her tracks.

  “You don’t mind me shouting at them, Phineas?” she said, doubtfully. “They were being horribly aggressive and irrational.”

  I said of course I didn’t mind. I was in fact touched by her championship. It was the first time, I think, anyone had ever tried to defend me. From bullying or from anything else. I hadn’t thought we knew each other well enough—she called me “Phineas” as though we were old and close friends. I found myself—despite her exaggerated personality, despite her extreme beliefs—hoping that we were indeed friends. She might have lost me my job. (I might have lost it myself.) I said, “Thank you, Fulla.”

  She took out a large, clean, gold-and-white checked handkerchief. “Come here,” she said. She pulled me towards her. She wiped the blood, which was not my own, from my face. She put out a sharp little tongue and damped a corner of the handkerchief, rubbing at the corner of my eyebrow. The transferred touch of her damp made me weak at the knees. I was overcome with a memory of my return to consciousness under her skirts. As she lifted her arm, I smelled her sweat, salt and pungent. I put out a hand to steady myself on her shoulder. I swayed towards her, and converted the fall to a brief, darting, respectful kiss of gratitude on her cheekbone.

  “Now what?” I said, with uncharacteristic insouciance. “I’ve just lost a job, and have nothing to do with the rest of the day. What shall we do now?”

  What would she say? I needed to stop feeling drunk.

  “We shall go to Richmond Park,” she said. “I have something I wish to show you.”

  “We shall buy a picnic,” she said, and led me into Fortnum & Mason’s, where she bought wholemeal baps, and sheeps’ cheese, and endives, and tomatoes, and large crisp apples, and yogurt, and honey, and bitter chocolate, and bottles of water. All this she stowed in a kind of knapsack she always carried. We made our way to Richmond by tube, bus and then foot. It was a very bright late-spring early-summer day. In central London the tube was crowded, and I stood with my nose in Fulla Biefeld’s huge spangling wing of hair. I breathed its scales, the pulse of the scalp under it. I offered to carry her knapsack-thing, but she refused me, saying that she had carried it through forests and deserts, and would feel amputated without it. So there I was, empty-handed, with my nose in her hair.

  It was midweek, and Richmond Park, once we got off the roads and the beaten track, was unpeopled. Deer grazed among the bracken, butterflies hovered over dandelions and thistles, twisted hawthorns were in full bloom, and the air was full of many kinds of pollen. Fulla strode along steadily—she knew where she was going. There were flocks of jackdaws, and a woodpecker tapped, invisible. There were rabbits, squatting and scattering unconcernedly. Fulla was looking at smaller things than these. She strode along—she was wearing a kind of full-length shirt, and trainers. I kept up. We passed huge ponds with sailing swans and coots and geese and variegated ducks. I felt like a little boy on a magical walk, except that I felt very aware of being male, beside this almost violently female creature. I had never been to Richmond Park before. Our school “nature walks” took us to a local children’s zoo, with guinea pigs in cages and a few tattered, cross goats.

  Fulla was heading for a kind of oaky glade, where centenarian trees stood amongst the rotting stumps of their fellows. “They understand—the verderers—that you need to leave rotten wood lying around,” said Fulla, with satisfaction. “This is what I brought you to see.” She examined the stumps with satisfaction, finding signs of burrowing and drilling which she didn’t explain. “Wait,” she said. “They’ll come. Have some bread and cheese.” We sat side by side on the edge of the clearing, our backs against a stump, and munched. Fulla—not a graceful woman—stuck her legs straight out in front of her. They were shining with golden hairs, which caught the light. After a time, creatures began to impinge. A tiny spider let itself down on a long thread and scurried away into her hair. A twiggy olive-coloured caterpillar of the kind that hoops itself, stretches, and peers, found its way on to her knees and negotiated them. Other caterpillars arrived on sailing threads and fell on to the hair, or the breast-pockets of her shift. She made no move to brush anything off. A hoverfly darted about her moving lips, as she ate. Bees hummed past, or tunnelled into the light earth round the roots. She identified them obligingly. Solitary bumble-bees, carder bees, male and female, a cuckoo bee, Nomada flava, on a dandelion. Another cuckoo bee, Psithyrus bohemicus, which Fulla said laid its eggs in the bumble-bees’ nest (Bombus lucorum). It hides amongst the moss in the nest until it smells of the nest, Fulla said, and then creeps out and eats the eggs of the bumble-bee queen, leaving its own in their place. Cuckoo bees have thick cuticles, to resist stinging, and tend to be bright and to produce many more eggs than their hosts. The male Nomada imitates the smell of its host, Andrena, and patrols its nest to attract females of its own species. Their larvae often start with huge sickle-shaped jaws—like the egg-heaving hump on the cuckoo-bird fledgling—to enable them to destroy their host’s eggs and larvae. “Not much was known until recently about male bees,” said Fulla Biefeld. “Studies concentrated on the social life and the pollen-gathering, which is female. But the males are very interesting. Bumblebees for instance—the males congregate in a kind of run—on an open hedge—and invite the females to run the gauntlet with a kind of dancing display. Or there’s this carder bee, which specialises in making nests from the down on salvias and lambs’ ears. The male is (unusually) bigger than the female, and very territorially aggressive. It fights and kills all intruders—including much larger bees.” I asked how. I said I thought male bees didn’t sting. They don’t, she said. They have an armoury of spikes on their bellies which they curl
round enemies, to pierce them. The females of that species—unlike most—mate more than once. “Most females—we think—put out a hormonal signal after they’ve mated. They don’t want to be pestered and lose breeding energy to pestering males. They only live six days.”

  I asked, had we come to look at aggressive male bees? No, she said. Here they come. I’ll show you what we’ve come to see.

  They came in, flying like tiny demons from some fresco of the Last Judgement, horned and ponderous. Their flight was ungainly, the sound of it burring and clicketing. They are heavily armoured, and yet seem hugely vulnerable, huge in the insect world, eminently crushable in the human. Fulla said, “Southwest London, you know, is the only place they are known to breed in the British Isles. They lay their eggs precisely in rotting oak-stumps. A male will hold a territory—a stump—and fight off the others. Watch, Phineas, the jousting is beginning.”

  They do, precisely, joust. A large, shining male sat on a stump, and Fulla pointed out the female waiting in the shade of some dead leaves. She produced from her knapsack a magnifying glass, which we passed from one to the other. The male beetle was a very dark chestnut brown with a (Norman) shield-shaped wing-case and huge jaws, resembling both the indented claws of lobsters and crabs, and the antlers of stags. Behind these was a pair of long feelers with agitated combs on the end, at a right angle. His head too had a carved look, with a wide brow and curving case with bright little gold eyes on the side of it. He had six arms or legs with feathery ends. The female was smaller, and blacker, with discreet pincers in place of the extravagant antlers. He stood on his log, his rival flew in, and battle began. It did indeed, resemble the head-to-head bellowing engagements of true stags, which must also take place in these ancient clearings. They ran at each other, almost prancing, and locked their jaws, twisting and wrestling, the aim being to dislodge the opponent or, it seemed, to overturn him. In the event the challenger overturned the king of the castle, and both tumbled to earth, where they righted themselves after wild leg-waving, and advanced on each other again, this time walking along a long, narrow root, trying to clash and sway each other off. Again, both fell, again, battle recommenced. Fulla pointed out other battles for other stumps. She handed me her glass. Her fingers are dry and stubby, with tight-trimmed nails. When they touched mine—in a matter-of-fact manner—it was electric, I tingled. I looked through the glass and suddenly, briefly, lost my sense of scale, seeing armoured monsters lurching on a rugged battlefield, glossy carapace, and wonderfully articulated, tremulously wiry limbs. I was about to say, they were glaring at each other, but that is pure anthropomorphism. I asked Fulla if they met each other’s eye, and she said that was an interesting question, she didn’t know, and took the glass back. They must emit smells, she said. I said—it had been waiting to be said, and my anthropomorphic observation drove me to saying it—that I had always thought the idea of learning about sex from the birds and the bees was simply foolishness. Dogs, and cows, I said. Fulla put her fingers over my lips to keep me quiet. The challenger was rolled over. A third male was watching from the edge of the ring (the rim of the rotten trunk). Fulla’s fingers on my lips were sharp as a bee-sting. I thought of biting them, and did nothing. Surely she knew, I thought, what was going on—in some ways ludicrously, I could see that, but it wasn’t how it felt. The king of the castle climbed back up, and made a dash at the new intruder, who backed off.