Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  Daniel looks down and sees Mary’s wrist, her little fist closed round her busy spoon. Every movement of every muscle pleases him. Mary says, “Will wants to go to Overbrow with Keith and Micky and that girl with the funny hair.” She thinks a little, and adds inconsequentially, “You won’t go just yet, will you, Daddy? You’ve only just come. I wouldn’t mind if you came to the school, I wouldn’t.”

  “I can stay a bit longer,” he tells her.

  “A bit,” she says. “A bit longer.”

  Two people are coming over the brow of the moor and making their way by sheep tracks down to the back gate. Winifred gets up to make more coffee. “It is Marcus and Jacqueline,” she tells Daniel. “They have been up doing something or other with Jacqueline’s snails. She’s finishing a Ph.D on those snails. They get up at four o’clock to go and count them, and so on.”

  “She comes and talks to our class about snails,” says Mary. “We have a colony of those snails we look after for her, we do real experiments, we see what they eat and what colour the babies are. We have a big snail book, we measure them, we write it all down, it’s useful.”

  “If you think snails are useful,” says Bill, not unamiably.

  The figures are so small, it is at first only just possible to make out which is which. Both are wearing anoraks and rubber boots; it is damp, good snail weather; both are thin, and walk springingly. Daniel does not want to see Marcus. Marcus is Stephanie’s brother, and was in the room when the sparrow fled under the refrigerator and the refrigerator struck. Daniel has never asked whether, if Marcus had shown more presence of mind, he could have saved her. He is afraid of his own rage. Marcus was in his house, in a state of complicated nervous withdrawal, all that year, upsetting Stephanie, invading privacy, brooding. A creature so nervous and futile, Daniel supposed, would be cast again into the stupor from which he was vaguely emerging. Marcus was part of his memory of his own terrible return to that house, a stick-like creature with a face like bad cheese, waxy and sweating, standing close, close to the refrigerator plug in the wall and shaking. Marcus was not, he decided then, a possible concern for himself. He could not help Marcus, because he was who he was. Neither of them could hope or expect he could help Marcus. Let him suffer, he saw he had thought, and now here is this young man, with the young woman, striding down the moorside and, he can hear, laughing as he comes to the gate in the garden wall. How can he laugh, says the demon that squats in Daniel. It is 1964, Daniel replies scrupulously. She died in 1958. We are all alive. Marcus is a young man. He has a degree now, Daniel does not know exactly in what; Winifred has just told him that Marcus has a doctorate, he is now Dr. Potter, he does some teaching at the North Yorkshire University and has just joined an important research team. We are all alive, Daniel tells himself again, knowing that he himself is not. Not exactly, not all, not. Mary tugs at his sweater. “Come and see the snails, come on.”

  Marcus and Jacqueline take off their coats and are given hot coffee and toast and bacon and eggs. These things are delicious after the hunting in the damp and dark, the peaty breath of the moorland air, the cold, the sunrise, the movement, all of which were also delicious. Jacqueline is monitoring two colonies of Helix hortensis and two of Helix nemoralis, studying the genetic changes in the populations, which can be read in the varied bands on the creatures’ shells. She has brought back some snails for the captive colonies and NYU, and Mary exclaims over these—“Look at their lovely horns, look at their little mouths, they have thousands of teeth, Daddy, did you know, Jacqueline told me …”

  Jacqueline has become a handsome young woman, with dark brown hair, worn long to the shoulders, with its own wiry curl. She has an outdoor skin, sunbrowned and supple, and bright brown eyes. In the old days, she used to come to the Young Christians, with Ruth. Daniel wonders if she too is a member of Gideon Farrar’s Children of Joy. He tells her that Ruth has looked after Mary really well, and she replies that she doesn’t know how Ruth can do that job, day after day, it is so hard. Her face is naturally smiling, even as she says this. Marcus says, “Hello, Daniel,” and sits down to his breakfast. He says, “Hello, Mary, how is the head?” Mary says, “I still don’t remember how I got hit, it’s really funny not to know something—so important to me—me not to know.” Marcus, who is now working on the neuroscience of the brain, and on memory particularly, agrees that it is interesting. “It might come back,” he says. “You might remember without knowing you remember. And then one day, it will suddenly come clear, you will know.”

  Marcus does not want to see Daniel. Partly for Daniel’s reasons. As Daniel remembers Marcus by the electric plug, Marcus remembers Daniel’s face, Daniel coming in through the door, Daniel seeing that. Like Daniel, he supposed he himself could not survive the shock. That he did, he thinks, when he thinks of it, he owes to the care given to him by Jacqueline and Ruth. Ruth held his body, and waited until he could cry, and wiped his tears. Jacqueline, robustly, ruthlessly, required him to be interested in things not himself. She dragged him to lectures, which after a time he heard; she bombarded him with her own problems, which his curiously apt mathematical mind solved ingeniously without his emotions needing to uncoil from their shell; she made him go on field studies trips when he could hardly drag one foot after the other; she involved him in her own passion for what was beginning to be generally known as ecological studies. When in spite of his pain he found he was interested, Jacqueline made him know he was interested, made him see he was alive. He sat with her once in a cave in a storm up on Saddle Moor: it was a cave with stony walls and a roof of dark earth, through which poked wiry roots of things clinging to the surface somewhere above. They made their way through air and nosed back into earth. They hung and twisted, out of their elements. As the storm raged, water began to soak through into the cave, streaking the earth with dark rivulets, shining in sudden drops and splinter-shapes on the rock face, dripping down the blind roots. He often dreamed of those dark patches, those few bright drops. That was how it was. It was Jacqueline’s tough exactitude that make him recognise that that was how it was, that the water was making its way in.

  Marcus knows he is guilty of Stephanie’s death. He does not know what to do with this knowledge. He knows that the one person—apart from the dead—whom he has mortally hurt is Daniel, though he knows also that irremediable harm has been done to Will and Mary, and, beyond them, to Bill and Winifred. He does not think of Frederica as someone wounded by what happened. He knows that for him to sink into grief and guilt will do no good, so he does not, but this does not help. He thinks Daniel should not have rushed abruptly off to London, and thinks he should not blame Daniel for things, but think of his own blame. At the same time, he does his work well, very well, and is interested in his colleagues. He lives, and somewhere else he stays, as Daniel does, but differently, in that terrible place with that terrible knowledge.

  Bill opens his letters, which have just arrived. One, in a brown envelope, he leaves till last, and then laughs when he reads it. It is palely typed, on official writing paper. Bill says, “This is from Alexander Wedderburn. They have put him on a government committee to study the teaching of English. It is to be called the Steerforth Committee, after its chairman, who is Philip Steerforth, you know, the anthropologist; they wouldn’t put an English specialist in charge of an English enquiry, not bloody likely. Our grammatical Vice-Chancellor is on the list, old Wijnnobel, I see, but not chairing it. Alexander was never more than a hit-and-miss teacher—well, he says as much here—he wants me to submit evidence to the committee because, he is kind enough to say, I am the best teacher he knows. He says he will be visiting schools and hopes to come by; he says he can pick the parts of the country he visits, and hopes to spend some time up here. I shall write to him about the wonders of Miss Godden’s Top Class writing projects. I may well write some evidence for him. It won’t do any good—I’ve never known one of these things do any good—but some good ideas, some sound principles, lying about in the Education Ministr
y, who knows?”

  Daniel says he has seen Alexander, and Jacqueline asks if Alexander is writing any more plays. Nobody knows. Daniel asks Jacqueline about Christopher Cobb, the naturalist who runs the field station, and Jacqueline says he is away, at a pesticide conference in Leeds. Bill remarks that Cobb has become very vociferous about crop-spraying and seed-dressings, and Jacqueline says he has had to be, nobody understands what is being done to the earth. Only Marcus knows—and Marcus only partly—what happened to Jacqueline in 1961 and 1962, when they both began their research careers at NYU, Jacqueline working with a Dane called Luk Lysgaard-Peacock on the population genetics of snails, and he himself, at that stage, working on the mathematics of a model of consciousness with the mathematician Jacob Scrope, under the direction of the micro-biologist Abraham Calder-Fluss. Nineteen sixty-two, Marcus’s second postgraduate year, was the year of the Cuban missile crisis. Marcus’s generation, including Marcus, are haunted by nuclear fear, a millenarian anxiety that the ultimate weapon will be—hurled, deployed, unleashed?—leaving a world of winter and emptiness and sickness, a world imaginatively constituted by film of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose emblem is the upsurge of the mushroom cloud over Bikini atoll. When Cuba came, Jacob Scrope packed his books and clothes ready to depart for Ireland, out of range of a possible London bomb, or bomb on the Fylingdales Early Warning System, with its white globes resting on the moors. Marcus was rattled by Scrope’s assessment of the risks, but Jacqueline was solidly unmoved—“They cannot be such fools,” she said, “they are just male creatures puffing themselves up like gannets and geese, they will back down and look the other way, you’ll see, they’ve got to, they’re human.” Her confidence came out of her own good sense, which had been Marcus’s life-line, but he could not quite share it. In his experience, good sense was not so strong in human beings as people like Jacqueline supposed, as the society they lived in was built on supposing. In effect, like gannets or geese, Khrushchev and Kennedy deflated their swollen breasts and stepped aside. In the interim, Jacqueline had begun to notice that thrush-anvils where she and Christopher Cobb had counted shells were deserted, that eggs were not hatching in nest-boxes, that dead owls were appearing in barns and farmyards. In the spring of 1961, tens of thousands of birds were found dead in the British countryside. Cobb’s activities began to include the delivery of boxes of tiny corpses to the laboratories of NYU for analysis, where they were found to contain mercury, benzene hexachloride, and other poisons. In 1963 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in England, and Jacqueline gave a copy to Marcus. On the royal estate in Sandringham, Jacqueline told him, the dead birds included: pheasants, red-legged partridges, wood-pigeons and stock-doves, green-finches, chaffinches, blackbirds, song-thrushes, skylarks, moorhens, bramblings, tree sparrows, house-sparrows, jays, yellowhammers, hedge sparrows, carrion crows, hooded crows, goldfinches and sparrow hawks.

  She said to Marcus, “We shall kill the planet. We are a species that has gone wrong somewhere. We shall kill everything.”

  “We’ve all been saying that about the Bomb. I think we probably shall kill everything.”

  “We shall kill everything because we’re too intelligent, and not intelligent enough to control our own intelligence. Nobody meant to kill these birds—they were just trying to improve something else—the wheat, the potatoes, a lot of this is owing to seed-dressings—trying to make things grow. I think—I do think—we might learn not to be so aggressive, when it’s not just another man or another army that’s at stake. But I think we’re just too stupid not to destroy the planet.”

  Marcus said, “Fallout changes genes. Chemical mutagens change genes. Something that has taken millions and millions of years to make forms that work—we can just destroy—or turn into monstrosities—in a twinkling.”

  Jacqueline said, “There’s so little one person can do. Collect dead birds.”

  “Make sure the evidence is watertight. For politicians who are short-sighted and won’t care.”

  They were young and healthy, they were full of the huge, energetic despair of the young and healthy confronted with rational fear. Their waking dreams were haunted by the idea of sumps, and desert wastes, and rotted tree trunks, and lifeless lakes where no birds sing. Every pleasurable walk on the moors, looking for snails, listening to larks climbing and plovers calling, was as surely accompanied by the vision of all this rotting and vanishing as their ancestors’ ramblings might have been by the vision of hell-fire, red-hot pincers, and eternal thirst.

  Daniel asks Bill, watching him tidy away his post, what news he has of Frederica.

  “None,” says her father. “She doesn’t deign to communicate. If I didn’t know her better I’d say she’d cast us off as vulgar relations, but I do know her better—she was properly brought up, as far as that goes, she may be an intellectual snob but she’s no social snob and I absolutely refuse to believe she married that man out of any desire to rise in the world of saddle-thumping bottoms and hunt balls. Now and then she sends a packet of snaps of the little boy. I notice she isn’t on them. We’ve got lots of pictures of him on his pony and boating on lakes—”

  “Nothing wrong with ponies—”

  “You know very well what I mean, Daniel. Very well. She’s bitten off more than she can chew. I can’t say I liked him—that Nigel—when we did meet, and I can’t say I’d choose to spend any more time in his company even if I was asked, which I won’t be. No, no good will come of it. She’s closed off from us, like Beauty and the Beast, like Gwendolen and Grandcourt, and one of these days she’ll turn up with bag and baggage, I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s not a patient creature, our Frederica, she might have been knocked sideways, but she’ll stand up again one of these days, and look around, and—”

  “I don’t see how you can state all that, Bill,” says his wife. “You’ve no evidence for any of it. She may be very happy.”

  “Do you think so? Do you think so?”

  “No. But I don’t know. And there’s the little boy.”

  “She’s my daughter. I know her. Something got into her. Something was always getting into her. She needed someone like you, Daniel, someone like us.”

  Daniel says, “You wouldn’t even come to my wedding, you monster. You made everyone’s life a misery. You can’t just say we’re alike, now.”

  “Well, we are. That was a battle of like with like. This isn’t. I should think the attraction of that Nigel was exactly that he wasn’t like us, that he had nothing to do with us. Well, there are lots of people who have nothing to do with us who would make better husbands for Frederica is all I can say—”

  “You don’t know, Bill. You’re just hurt,” Winifred says.

  “No, I’m not hurt. I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned that if one of your daughters is dead, you just have to feel glad the other’s alive, even if she won’t come to see you, that’s what. You get things in perspective. What’s alive is alive, and kicking, I suppose. Frederica was always kicking. I’ve upset Daniel. I didn’t mean to. I’ll take myself off and write to Alexander. Daniel, you know how things are between us, don’t pucker up.”

  “I know,” says Daniel. “Give my best to Alexander. He’s a good man.”

  Marcus says he must go, and Jacqueline goes with him. Daniel shakes Marcus’s hand, which is no longer, he notices, limp like a dead fish. Marcus is a perfectly ordinary intellectual-looking thin young man, with longish pale brown hair, and glasses. Daniel asks Jacqueline if she still sees Gideon Farrar.

  “No. I gave all that up. It suddenly seemed not to mean anything. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t say that. I never liked it, myself.”

  “It does Ruth good. And it does her no good, too, in some ways, I think.”

  “Indeed.”

  Mary goes to bed, for a regulation prescribed rest, and Daniel is left alone with Winifred, in the quiet kitchen of Bill’s beautiful house. Winifred says, “Honestly, Bill is too much. He worries a lot about Frederica. He misse
s her—and then, with Stephanie gone—he feels it more, that she seems to have abandoned us. I hope you think it’s funny that he’s decided you’re like him. I hope it doesn’t seem a final insult.”

  “No, no. The fire’s gone out in that chimney. We should shake hands. Anyway, it’s half-time. It’s our duty to acknowledge truths. Half-truths included.”

  “And Will will come round,” says Winifred, who wants everything to be calm, to be good, to be well.

  “Why should he? What I did to him—what I did—was wicked, was preposterous. Look at it coldly, look at it straight: a woman dies, a man is left with two kids, so he walks out one day and just leaves them—so they’ve lost two at a stroke—how can that be forgiven?”

  “But you can’t look at it coldly, Daniel—you have to see how it was then—you were half-mad, and were doing them no good—and you can’t say we haven’t looked after them well.”

  “I don’t. You’ve done wonders. They are safe kids. They have a home. A family. I’m not a family. I know all that.”

  “And for Bill. It has been important to him to have Will—he plays with Will—he couldn’t play with Marcus, you know—he was awful—these things can’t be redeemed—but he has done well, and it makes him happy.”

  “I didn’t abandon my kids to make Bill happy.”

  “I know that.”

  “Before I met her—Stephanie—I had this idea of my life. At the edge, just over the edge. Where people weren’t managing. When we were married—I tried ordinary happiness—I were lucky, we were happy—some of the time—and both of us knew what a chance it was, what the odds were against it—and what we’d—abandoned for it—her work, her books, her friends—my—my need to live where it’s dangerous. Yes, that’s it. Where it’s dangerous. And when she died—I were pushed back, into that world—as though I shouldn’t have tried to hoist myself out of it into a sunny shelf, wi’ her—but a life, wi’out her—I couldn’t—I thought.”