Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  It is true that she is changed. She is dressed for hunting. But she no longer looks like a huntress.

  “Frederica,” says Hugh Pink.

  “This is Leo,” says Frederica. “My son.”

  The boy’s look, inside his blue hood, is unsmiling. He has Frederica’s red hair, two or three shades darker. He has large dark brown eyes, under heavy dark brows.

  “This is Hugh Pink. One of my old friends.”

  Leo continues to stare at Hugh, at the wood. He does not speak.

  Or it might begin in the crypt of St. Simeon’s Church, not far from King’s Cross, at the same time on the same day.

  Daniel Orton sits on a slowly rotating black chair, constrained by a twisted telephone wire. Round and back. His ear is hot with electric words that filter through the black shell he holds to his head. He listens, frowning.

  “I say I’m completely shut in you know I say I say I say I don’t get up off my butt and go out of this room any more I can’t seem to get up the force I ought to try it’s silly really but what’s the point I say I say I say I say if I did get out there they’d all stomp on me I’d be underfoot in no time it isn’t safe I say I say I say are you there are you listening do you give a damn is there anyone at all on the end of this line I say I say.”

  “Yes, there’s someone. Tell me where you want to go. Tell me why you’re afraid to go out.”

  “I don’t need to go nowhere no one needs me there’s no need that’s why oh what’s the point? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  The crypt is dark and solid. There are three telephones, set round the base of a pillar, in plywood cubicles soundproofed with a honeycomb of egg-boxes. The other two telephones are unmanned. There is a small blue-and-white jug of anemones in Daniel’s cubicle. Two are open, a white and a dark crimson with a centre full of soft black spikes and black powder. There are unopened blue and red ones, bright inside colours hidden under fur, steel-blue and soft pink-grey, above the ruffs of leaves. Over each telephone is a text, done in good amateur calligraphy. Daniel’s says:

  So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? For ye shall speak into the air.

  There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.

  Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me. I Corinthians 14:9–11.

  The second phone rings. Daniel has to decide to disengage from the first caller. Someone else should be there, but even saints can be tardy.

  “Help me.”

  “If I can.”

  “Help me.”

  “I hope I can.”

  “I’ve done wrong.”

  “Tell me, I’ll listen.”

  Silence.

  “I’m here simply to listen. You can tell me anything. That’s what I’m for.”

  “I can’t. I don’t think I can. I made a mistake, I’m sorry, I’ll go.”

  “Don’t go. It might help you to tell me.”

  He is a man playing a hooked creature in the dark depths on a long dark line. It gasps and twists.

  “I had to get out, you see. I had to get out. I thought I had to get out. Every day that was what I thought.”

  “Many of us do.”

  “But we don’t—but we don’t—do what I did.”

  “Tell me. I’ll simply listen.”

  “I’ve not told anybody. Not for a whole year, a whole year is probably what it is, I’ve lost count. It might kill me to tell anyone, I might just be—nothing, I am nothing.”

  “No. You are not nothing. Tell me how you got out.”

  “I was making the kiddies’ tea. They were lovely kids, they were—”

  Tears, hectic gulps.

  “Your own kids?”

  “Yes.” In a whisper. “I was just making bread and butter. I had this big knife. This sharp big knife.”

  Daniel’s spine stiffens. He has taught himself not to make imaginary faces or places for the voices; that has led to errors; he unmakes a cramped kitchen, a tight-lipped face.

  “And?” he says.

  “I don’t know what come over me. I stood and just looked at everything, the bread, and the butter, and the cooker, and the dirty dishes, and that knife, and I just became someone else.”

  “And?”

  “And I put down the knife, and I didn’t say anything, I just went and got my coat and my handbag, I didn’t even say, ‘I’m just going out for a minute or two,’ I just went out of the front door quietly and shut it behind me. And I went on walking a long time. And. And I never went back. The little one was in his high-chair. He might have fallen over or anything might have happened. I just never went back.”

  “Did you get in touch after? With your husband? Do you have a husband?”

  “I did, yes. I do have a husband, I suppose. I didn’t get in touch. No. I couldn’t. You see I couldn’t.”

  “Do you want me to help you to get in touch?”

  “No.” Quickly. “No, no, no, no, no. I’d die, I’d die. I’ve done wrong. I’ve done terrible wrong.”

  “Yes,” says Daniel. “But I wouldn’t say it couldn’t be helped.”

  “I’ve said it now. Thank you. I think I’ll go now.”

  “I think I can help, I think you need help—”

  “I don’t know. I’ve done wrong. I’ll go.”

  St. Simeon’s is not in use as a parish church. It stands in a grimy courtyard, and has a heavy, square mediaeval tower, now surrounded by a bristling cage of scaffolding. The old church was enlarged in the eighteenth century and again in the nineteenth century, and was partly demolished by bombing in the Second World War. The Victorian nave was always too high and gaunt for its width, and this effect is emphasised by the fact that it has been only partly rebuilt, inside its old shell. It once had gaudy nineteenth-century stained glass, of no particular merit, depicting Noah’s Ark and the story of the Flood on one side, and the stories of the raising of Lazarus, the appearance of the risen Christ at Emmaus and the tongues of fire descending at Whitsuntide, on the other. All these windows were sucked in by bomb blasts, leaving heaps of brilliant blackened fragments strewn in the aisles. A devout glazier in the congregation undertook to rebuild the windows, after the war, using the broken lights, but he was not able, or even willing, to reconstitute the narratives as they had been. What he made was a coloured mosaic of purple and gold constellations, of rivers of grass green and blood red, of hummocks of burned amber and clouded, smoke-stained, once-clear glass. It was too sad, he told the Vicar, to put the pictures together all smashed, with gaping holes. He thought it should all be bright and cheerful, and added modern glass here and there, making something abstract yet suggestive, with faces of giraffes and peacocks and leopards staring at odd angles out of red drapery, with white wings divided by sea blue and sky blue, angels and antediluvian storks and doves mingling with pentecostal flames. The peaks of Mount Ararat balance on a heap of smoky rubble, amongst which are planks of the Ark at all angles. Dead Lazarus’s bound jaw has survived and one of his stiff white hands; both make a kind of wheel with the hand breaking bread at Emmaus and a hammering Ark-builder’s hand. Parts of the primal rainbow flash amongst blue-and-white wave-crests.

  Virginia (Ginnie) Greenhill clatters down on high heels. She explains about late buses and bad-tempered queues. No problem, says Daniel. She offers him tea, shortbread, comfort. She has a sweet face, round, with round glasses resting on round pink cheeks and a mouth arched upwards. She settles in her own armchair—hers does not spin—and spreads out an expanse of complicated Fair Isle, oatmeal and emerald. Her needles click. Daniel is drowsy. His telephone rings.

  “Remember there is no God.”

  “So you have said before.”

  “And because there is no God, do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

 
“So you have also said before.”

  “If you knew what that meant. If you really knew. You would not sound so complacent.”

  “I hope that is not how I sound.”

  “You sound stolid, you sound blinkered, you sound one-dimensional.”

  “You never let me say much, to sound anything.”

  “You are not supposed to mind that. You are supposed to listen to what I have to say to you.”

  “I do listen.”

  “I abuse you. You don’t respond. I can hear you turning your other cheek. You are a Christian parson or person. I waste your time. You waste your own time, since there is no God. Homo homini deus est, homo homini lupus est and you are the dog in the fable with his neck worn bare by the dog-collar, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “You want me to dislike you,” says Daniel, carefully.

  “You do dislike me. I can hear it in your voice. I have heard it before. I tell you that God is dead, and you dislike me.”

  “I listen to you, God or no God.”

  “And you haven’t once told me I must be very unhappy, which is very clever of you, since I am not.”

  “I am reserving judgement,” says Daniel grimly.

  “So just, so restrained, not a fool.”

  “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”

  “So I am a fool?”

  “No. I just said that, because it seemed to fit. I couldn’t resist it. Count it unsaid, if you like.”

  “Do you wear a dog-collar?”

  “Under a thick jumper. Like many these days.”

  “Bonhomie. Anomie. I waste your time. I am a waste of time. I occupy your line with God when other fools stuffed with Seconal or dripping gore may be trying to get through.”

  “Just so.”

  “They are nothing, if there is no God.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “It is my calling to call you and tell you there is no God. One day you will hear me, and understand what I say.”

  “You don’t know what I understand. You are making me up.”

  “I’ve riled you. You will learn—slowly, because you aren’t very bright—I go on until I have riled you, because it is your job, your calling, not to be riled, but in the end I can rile you. Aren’t you going to ask me why I need to rile you?”

  “No. I can ask myself. And I’m too riled. Satisfied?”

  “You think I am childish. I am not.”

  “I’m no expert in childishness.”

  “Ah, you are riled. I’ll go. Until next time.”

  “As you will,” says Daniel, who is indeed riled. “Steelwire,” says Ginny Greenhill. She has given this name to the death-of-god-monger, because of his voice, a clear BBC twang, a produced voice, plangent and metallic.

  “Steelwire,” says Daniel. “He says he wants to rile me and he does. I can’t work out why he goes on calling.”

  “He won’t usually talk to me. It’s you he likes. He just tells me there is no God and rings off. I say, yes dear, or something inane, and he rings off. I’ve no idea if he’s upset, or malicious, or what. Down here, I suppose, we are likely to over-react, to suspect someone who merely wants to rile you, of being desperate, even if he isn’t. We see the underside of the world, I suppose.”

  Her needles tap. Her voice is comfortable, like honey and toast. She is in her fifties, and unmarried. She does not invite questions about her private life. She once managed a corset shop, Daniel knows, and now lives perhaps off a small private income and a pension. She is a devout Christian and finds Steelwire harder to take than masturbators in phone-booths.

  Canon Holly comes down the stairs as Ginnie Greenhill answers another call.

  “No, we’re here to help, whatever the problem, you might shock me of course, but I do doubt it—”

  Canon Holly takes the third chair and watches Daniel write in the log.

  4.15–4.45. Steelwire. There is no God, as usual. Daniel.

  “Any idea what he’s up to?” The Canon inserts a cigarette into a cracked amber holder and puffs smoke towards Daniel. He moves around in a cloud of smoke-scent, like a bloater.

  “No,” says Daniel. “Same message, same style. He set out to irritate, and did. It’s possible he’s really upset because there’s no God, or God is dead.”

  “Theological despair as a motive for suicide.”

  “It’s been known.”

  “Indeed.”

  “But I think he’s too gabby to be suicidal. I wonder what he does all day and night. He rings at all times.”

  “Time will reveal,” says the Canon.

  “It doesn’t always,” says Daniel, who has had one or two nasty experiences, hearing desperate voices subside into meaningless babble and the burring of an empty telephone, or rise more and more shrilly before the sudden severing of the link across the air.

  Or it might begin with the beginning of the book that was to cause so much trouble, but was then only scribbled heaps of notes, and a swarm of scenes, imagined and re-imagined.

  Chapter I Of the Foundation of Babbletower

  When the blissful dawn of the Revolution had darkened to the red light of Terror, when the paving-stones of the city shifted on flesh and oozed blood in their interstices, when the streaming blade rose and fell busily all day and the thick sweet smell of butchery flared in all men’s nostrils, a small band of free spirits left the City separately, at night, in haste and secrecy. They wore various well-studied disguises, and had made their preparations well in advance, sending supplies secretly and ordering horses and carriages to be made ready at lonely farms, by those they could trust—for there was trust in some, even in those dark days. When they were gathered in the farmyard they seemed a ramshackle crew of rusty surgeons and filthy beggars, stolid peasants and milkmaids. In the farmyard those who seemed to be the leaders, or at least in charge of the plan of action, described the coming journey, across plains and through forests, always skirting large towns and villages, as far as the border of the land, where they would cross into a neighbouring mountainous country and make their way to the hidden valley, beyond the white-capped fangs of the mountains, where one of their number, Culvert, had a sequestered property, La Tour Bruyarde, which could be reached only across a narrow wooden bridge between two lines of peaks, across a dark and lifeless chasm.

  They must travel fast, and circumspectly, never trusting anyone they met on the road, save certain helpers at posting stages, and in certain lonely inns and hamlets, who could be recognised by certain secret signs, a blue flower at a certain angle in the hatband, an eagle feather in a tuft of cock feathers. If they all came safely to their destination—as it was most vigorously to be hoped they would—they would be able to set up their own small society in true freedom, far from rhetoric, fanaticism and Terror.

  So they travelled, through a press of dangers and menaces which will not be recounted here, but left to the imagination, for this story concerns itself not with the troubled world they left behind, but with the new world they meant so hopefully to build, if not for all men, since that hope had failed, then for these select few.

  They did not all arrive. Two young men were caught by the military and pressed into the Army, from which they had much ado to escape a year later. One old man was knifed by an older woman as he rested in his sweat in a ditch and closed his eyes for sheer weariness. Three young women were caught and raped by a rabble of peasants, though they were well disguised as pox-ridden crones. When their young, smooth flesh was discovered under their artfully tattered clothing, they were raped again for their deceitfulness, and again for their sweetness and softness, and yet again, upon compulsion, so that they no longer had force to beg for mercy or tears to run down their blubbered cheeks, and then again, and so they died, of suffocation, of fear, of despair, who knows, or who knows if they thought it a merciful release. Their fate was never known by those more fortunate who came to the hidden tower, though rumours of it were rife on the roads. But in those days, so many
were undone, these deaths were not remarkable.

  The group who gathered on the crest of Mount Clytie, before making the crossing on the wooden bridge, might fairly have been thought remarkable. They were mud-stained and dishevelled, thinner after the privations of their journey, but full of vigour, their blood beating fiercely with renewed hope. They could not see La Tour Bruyarde (only one of the names of the place) from where they stood, but they were assured by their leader that once across the bridge and over the last natural bastion, they would behold a possible site for an earthly Paradise, a plain watered by swift streams and meandering brooks, in which was a wooded Mount or Mound on which stood their new home, on a site where his own family, throughout the ages, had always had a fortress-retreat.

  This leader, though of noble birth, went by the name of Culvert, since it was a condition of their society that their names should be newly chosen, to signify relinquishment of the old world, and new beginnings in the new. His chief companion was the Lady Roseace. They were a beautiful pair, in the first strength of confident manhood and womanhood. Culvert was above the common height, broad shouldered but lithe; he wore his hair, which was black and gleaming, longer than was fashionable, and it fell in great negligent tresses on his shoulders. His face was strong and smiling, with a full red mouth, both firm and sensuous, and dark eyes under decisive brows. Roseace was slender but full-breasted, and pressed her saddle with firm but ample buttocks. Her hair was also worn freely over her shoulders, though she had only considered it safe to release it from her hood since they came to the summit of Mount Clytie, and she now tossed her head a little from sheer pleasure at the breezy clarity of the air and the empty spaces of rock, snow and green vegetation spread below her. Her face was thoughtful and imperious, her lips firmly arched and her winged brows drawn in a habitual questioning frown. She had in her young life been destined by her parents for an uncongenial husband, and by the Revolutionary Powers for denunciation, summary trial and rapid execution, but she had escaped both parents and gaolers with equal resourcefulness and ruthlessness. On the day when this narrative begins her golden hair was curling and tangled and her skin lightly veiled with a powdering of dust, amongst which glistened diamond drops of sweat.