Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  And then for a day and a half I work for Rupert Parrott. The Papagallo Press is an offshoot of Bowers and Eden, a kind of loss-making highbrow branch where Rupert does things he considers worthwhile—poetry, a few literary novels, even essays. He wants very much to start a monthly journal under the Papagallo imprint, and if he ever does there is a slim chance I may get to be the first editor. But old Gimson Bowers is not too keen, and he controls the lucrative bit of it, the textbooks and the religious books, these days. Bowers is making a lot of money out of a curious theological tome called Within God Without God which everyone seems to need. The Papagallo Press is in Elderflower Court, a Covent Garden cul-de-sac, and consists of two dingy offices up a rickety staircase and a basement full of packaging. I love it. I even love all the very bad poems that come in, and I have to send back, because it makes you see how much poetry matters, even to people with no ear, no vocabulary and no thoughts to put together. When the schoolkids say, “Wot’s it for, then,” I tell them about how people pick up the pen when their baby’s born or their gran dies or they see a wind in a wood.

  Perhaps I will try to describe Parrott, He’s curly, and plump, and not very tall, and public school. Late 30s early 40s. He wears waistcoats, sometimes red or mustard-yellow wool, sometimes sort of brocaded. He has a sweet, pursed-up little mouth, and a slightly high-pitched voice, which makes everyone think he’s more limited than he is, because he fits easily to a stereotype. But he’s actually very bright, and can tell a hawk from a handsaw, and is doing good things. He likes my poetry, but he has reservations, which I accept and respect. I don’t think you’ll imagine him right from this description, but it’ll do to start with—you must come and meet him.

  I had better stop writing this long letter and go back to marking essays on Goblin Market. I have seen both Alan and Tony recently and told them I had seen you and they were delighted—they miss you, they say, and send their love, and hope, as I do, to see you soon. We were callow creatures then and you had so many of us half or altogether in love with you—but that was then—and now we are older and wiser, I suppose.

  I think I will include my pomegranate poem, if I work up the courage. Perhaps I will dedicate it to you, if it finds a home. I wonder sometimes if it is still possible to write poems about Greek myths—are they not dead, should we not be thinking about quite other things now? But poems about the classrooms and bits of the quotidian seem just as conventional and just as dead-alive to my eye, to my mind, as Demeter and Persephone. Who have been Powers, Frederica, for much longer than the 1944 Education Act, or Canon Holly and his Inside-Out God. I don’t know what I’m saying. They don’t feel dead though of course the poem—I see as I write—is about Death in that sense too. You will see it doesn’t really have an end and that’s because I still don’t know why it got written—I’ll let you know if I find out. Do write back now I’ve found you again.

  Lots of love,

  Hugh

  Pomegranate

  Puzzle-fruit, skinny globe, parchment-tough,

  Packed with jelly-cubes stained with

  Blood and brown water, containing

  Soot-black spheres like fine shot

  Containing orchards.

  Sherbet in the dark and black-skinned boys

  Bring moonsilver plates with melons

  Like crimson moons in snakeskins.

  Bring burst pomegranates and curled segments

  Of orange light with teardrops of tissue

  Fat with sweet juice. Bring silver pins

  For the seeds, and silver spoons

  For the sirops and goblets

  For blood-black wine. They sing

  Sweet and low in the dark, they sing

  Of deserts in moonlight.

  She sits in a silver chair

  His velvet-dark pupils

  Stare, take her in and in

  Do not reflect her. Such dark eyes

  Are not seen elsewhere. This dim light only

  Shines mildly, shines soft black

  Blue-white teeth smiling

  Between soft black lips.

  He is large, he is comely.

  His gaze is fixed on her.

  She sits in a silver chair.

  Picks with pink fingers, listless.

  For politesse eats a few seeds.

  Pomegranate-taste is almost

  No taste, and so surprising. She savours

  The absence, she swallows

  The dark little spheres in their jelly.

  Her throat ripples. Her palate

  Considers, remembers

  The taste of earth and water, faintly sweet.

  He smiles in his darkness.

  In the air the old woman ramps.

  She is angry, she is dry, there is no moisture in her.

  Her breasts are leather, they are dry as her shoesoles.

  She has whirlwind and salt in her skirts.

  She tramps on, she peers in fissures where hair roots

  Shrivel and fail to grip. Bony birds

  Peep and cheep. Their eggs are husks

  With no flesh in them, no coiled lizard

  With damp down, no nubs

  To spring into pinions. She stumps

  Through dry fields, leaving cracked clay

  And dust. She will make earth’s surface dust

  All dust. The old woman’s anger

  Is single and fearful. Dust blows

  And drags in her skirts. She stirs it

  With horrible pleasure, extracting

  Damp from soil and bones and soft seeds

  Pippy Mammott brings this letter to Frederica at breakfast in Bran House. They are all round the breakfast table, looking out over the lawn to the moat and the fields and the woods. Leo is eating a boiled egg with toast soldiers, Olive and Rosalind are eating bacon and egg and fresh mushrooms, which they are praising as they eat. Nigel is helping himself to more mushrooms from the hotplate on the sideboard when Pippy Mammott comes in with the post. She puts his letters by his plate, and gives two each to Rosalind and Olive and one to Frederica. Then she goes back to her porridge.

  The letter is fat and Frederica does not at first recognise the handwriting; she only knows she knows it well. Then she sees what the letter is, and puts the folded poem beside her plate, and considers putting the whole letter away until later, to read in private. She looks up, and sees eyes on her, Pippy’s eyes, Olive’s eyes, so she unfolds the letter and starts to read, smiling to herself a little. Nigel, returning from the sideboard, sees this smile.

  “You’ve got a long letter. Who’s it from?”

  “An old friend.” She does not look up, she reads. Nigel opens his letters with an unused butter-knife, rip, slash, rip.

  “A Cambridge friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “A good friend, a particular friend?”

  “Yes, yes. Let me read my letter, Nigel.”

  “It seems a particularly juicy letter. Tell us what you’re grinning at.”

  “I’m not grinning. It’s a description of teaching in London schools. Read your own letters, Nigel.”

  He gets up, and goes back to the sideboard. Olive says the mushrooms are moreish. Nigel ignores this diversionary move. He says, “Share it with us, the joke, Frederica.”

  “There isn’t one. Let me finish my letter.”

  “It must be a love letter,” says Nigel, silkily, standing behind her. “What’s this you’ve put aside?”

  “None of your business.”

  Nigel leans over and picks up the folded paper.

  “A poem. Nothing to do with you.”

  “The young man who came to tea wrote poems,” says Rosalind, mildly enough.

  “The young man who came all the way from London to get lost in the Old Forest,” says Nigel. “I wish I’d been here to meet him. I do really. What does he say now he’s found you, Frederica?”

  He leans forward, and snatches the letter. His movements are quick and clean; Frederica’s grip is loosed and he
r letter lost before she can think. He gives a little jump like a fencer and is out of reach, with the table between them. He holds up the letter. He reads:

  “Dear Frederica, You said you would like a letter so I am writing one. It was so strange, seeing you in that wood, like a creature from another time, or another world, and with your beautiful son.”

  He reads in a clipped, childish voice. He says, “Etcetera etcetera etcetera here it is. ‘I doubt if you even knew how much you meant to me, and it is only since I saw you that I have come to realise just how much I miss your uncompromising intelligence blah blah blah.’ ”

  Pippy Mammott says, “Don’t be naughty, Nigel.” There is no expectation in her voice of being heard, or heeded.

  Frederica says, “Give me that letter.”

  Nigel goes on reading out sentences in a faintly silly voice. No one reacts, so after a time he gives up and finishes reading the letter to himself, frowning darkly. Then he opens the poem, and starts on that, with a new mocking edge:

  “She sits in a silver chair

  Picks with pink fingers, listless.

  For politesse eats a few seeds.”

  Frederica, rage rising in her, nevertheless notices that, even in the mock-sobbing voice he has now resorted to, he has put the stresses where they should be.

  “What kind of nonsense is this?” he asks, bold and confident. “Why can’t it say what it’s about?”

  “It does.”

  He reads a few more lines, again getting the stresses automatically right, and then gives up.

  “Give me back my letter and my poem.”

  He cannot quite think what to say next or do next, and looks darkly about, threatening and ruffled. He is quite possibly about to give the papers back to Frederica when she says unwisely, “Where I come from, it is quite unforgivable to take away people’s private papers.”

  “You aren’t where you come from. You’re here. Here I don’t like you getting letters from soppy poets, here it isn’t done to keep up with old boyfriends once you’re married with a child.”

  “Your beautiful son,” says Leo, in a musing voice, reminding them of his presence.

  “Little boys aren’t beautiful, dear,” says Pippy Mammott. “A better word is ‘handsome’ or ‘good-looking.’ ”

  Leo repeats mulishly, “Like a creature from another time or another world and with your beautiful son, that’s what it said. Like elves perhaps I thought or hobbits I think he means, you see, we surprised him, he was nice, I liked him.”

  Frederica, who has been working up to a roar of rage as full throated as ever her father uttered, stares dumbly.

  Leo says, “I don’t like you reading in that silly voice I don’t like it. I myself asked him to tea, I liked him, I told you.”

  “It’s easy to see he twisted you around his little finger,” says Nigel, less dangerous already.

  “I don’t know what that means,” says Leo. He looks from one of his parents to the other, trying to think what next to say or to perform to avert disaster.

  Nigel says, “Here. Take your letter, then. I hope you mean to write a poem back.”

  “I can’t write poems.”

  Frederica folds the violated letter, and watches Nigel eat his mushrooms. He stares down at his plate, black, black eyes under long black lashes. Such dark eyes / Are not seen elsewhere. I hate you, Frederica’s head says, I hate you, I hate you, I should never have come here, I cannot live here, I have been a fool, a fool, a fool. She holds tight to her letter under the table and chews a little bread, thoughtfully, and thinks of Hugh and Frederica-then, another person. Frederica-then could tell immediately whether a man was or was not attractive to her, whether or not she could bear him to touch her. It had nothing to do with loving the same poems, or finding it easy to tell someone a grief, a success, an idea. There were men she felt potentially connected to, and men she did not. She thought about this for a moment, without understanding it. She liked, indeed she loved, Hugh Pink, much more than Nigel, she told herself crossly and in panic. But Nigel’s body stirred hers as he angrily dissected mushrooms, and Hugh, whom she had been so pleased to see, gave her the pleasure of an old well-loved book, lost and found again. Not this appalling sense of connection, of being-to-do-with-her, which endures. Nigel munches mushrooms.

  Hugh Pink’s letter has changed Frederica’s marriage. She is accustomed to telling herself her marriage is unhappy, but she is also accustomed to blaming herself for this. She made a wrong decision, she did not take account of the circumstances, wise little remarks of this kind she makes constantly to herself, mixed with more shapeless moanings of boredom or frustration. She does not blame Nigel yet for her unhappiness, although she is constantly angry at his long absences, and at his failure to see what she needs, by which she means work, not too well defined, but work. She is ready to explain that she loved him because he was different, but that this has not transformed her. She is still Frederica. She is ready to explain this, but the conversation never happens, for Nigel is not a talking man. She tells herself that she should have known this. Poor Frederica is so desirous of being responsible for her own fate. Human beings invented Original Sin because the alternative hypothesis was worse. Better to be at the centre of a universe whose terrors are all a direct result of our own failings, than to be helpless victims of random and largely malevolent forces. This is bad because I didn’t think hard enough, says Frederica to herself. She is distressed by Nigel’s letter-snatching, both because it is his first real act of aggression against her—not listening is not always aggression—and because it makes him look ridiculous. She is upset by how silly he looked, reciting Hugh Pink’s words in that childish, finicking voice. She needs to love and want him, even if she does not like his friends, his family, his life. She likes him to look secret and dangerous. Not silly.

  Hugh Pink’s letter brings about other changes. Just when Nigel is for once at home and watchful, Frederica receives a spate of letters from old friends. These are unsolicited—she has written to no one—but she fears that Nigel may imagine they are all responses to desperate, or affectionate, messages from her. He watches her read them. He snatches no more, but he asks who they are from. She tells him. All your friends are men, he observes again, truthfully. Once he says, “You wouldn’t like it if all my friends were women.” “I wouldn’t mind,” says Frederica staunchly, but her imagination works for a moment on his absences, and she sees that she would mind. “It’s just a peculiarity of my education,” she says, placating. Nigel does not answer.

  One letter is from Alan Melville.

  Dearest Frederica,

  Hugh Pink says you would like to hear from us, and told us all where you were. We all drank your health in the Lamb and Flag, Tony and Hugh and I, and one or two others. Hugh says you are living in a Country House, with woods and fields. I cannot see you doing this, but should like to, as I’m sure you do it very spectacularly, as you did everything. Do you have a collection of paintings in your house? I am thinking of writing a book on early Venetian art, and there are some surprising faces and places from those perpetual golden worlds hidden away in the corridors and the grey northern light of the English House. I don’t earn a living by this kind of thing, yet, so I teach—not in a school, like Hugh, but in the Samuel Palmer School of Art, in Covent Garden. I teach Art History to painters and potters and industrial designers and weavers who think they don’t want to know about Giotto or Titian in case I make little dents in their Originality—they are all Sons of God, of course, even the most slavishly derivative. You would like to see this place, it would interest you.

  Hugh isn’t very good at describing buildings and people. He noticed some yew trees, a staircase, a ha-ha and some teacups but gave me no real idea of your surroundings or of you. He did mention your very beautiful son. Why didn’t you send a card with a stork, or a silver basket of dragées? I am good at Country House sort of people nowadays—shall I come and see you?

  Another is from Alan’s clos
e friend Tony Watson. In the old days, when they were room-mates, Frederica used to call them the chameleon and the fake, for Alan, a child of the Glasgow slums, had a blond, agile, classless social charm, and Tony, the progressively educated son of a distinguished Marxist man of letters, had a whole repertoire of working-class tastes and mannerisms, and an assiduously cultivated accent, part-Birmingham, part-Cockney. Tony’s letter is longer than Alan’s, and more affectionate, although it is Alan to whom Frederica feels more attached. It is with Alan that she has best negotiated real friendship, she considers, without any danger of falling into sexual abjection, instability or bullying. She has wondered from time to time if he is queer.

  Dear Frederica [says Tony],

  I gather you are in need of amusement. There is plenty here, what with the Election hotting up, and lots of dancing—twist, shout, shake, everyone’s got dislocated spines or ankles, it’s an epidemic. I wrote a piece on the Mod Clubs for the Statesman—you wd. appreciate my Leavisite analysis of the Lyrics of the Who—as you would appreciate my Italian trousers—tho’ come to think of it, you never had any musical sense, and then again maybe you are twisting away somewhere in some swish night club and don’t need me to report on the latest sounds. I wish we hadn’t lost touch.

  Seriously, though, the Election’s the thing. I’m working hard in Belsize Park, leaflets, doorsteps, the lot. The atmosphere is electric—in places, honesty leads me to add—there are whole reaches of the Labour Party quite as staid and stuffy as the Shire Tories you seem madly to have decided to settle amongst. I shall have to rely on you to be the agente provocateuse of a one-woman Revolution amongst the bulls and the milk churns and the saddle-soap and all the braying. Tread carefully, Watson, you idiot. I go up and down promising a New Morality and a New Technology and no more nasty scandals with call-girls, trousersdown ministers, no Masked Men in frilly aprons with horsewhips, but good honest Liverpudlian economists and clean men in white overalls making useful classless things to bring about equality quicker and quicker (the washing-up machine as an agent of revolution goes down a treat on the North London doorstep, esp. to the larger part of the workers, i.e. women, trapped in unpaid sloggery and dirty dishwater).