Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  Laura spends several chapters agonising over whether or not to go to bed with various young men, and spends various nuits blanches with one or another. Her virginity is finally taken, not by Sebastian, but by Hugh (who is naturally smaller, stronger, more muscular, less dreamy than his willowy friend). We have here the beginning of a faintly interesting triangular relationship, of which Margot Cherry makes nothing, as she is interested in diagnosing who is “in love” with whom. Some narrative satisfaction might be gained if we were told whether Laura married Sebastian or Hugh or no one or someone else altogether, but we are not told: Oxford days come to an end, and everything is vague and shadowy and in the air.

  This is the sort of novel every young woman at university reading English imagines she can write—though most [“most of us” Frederica writes honestly, and then crosses it out in the interest of impartiality and objectivity]—most don’t have the stamina or determination actually to write all these hundreds of pages. There is something peculiarly touching about the details of daily life that Margot Cherry includes, even if her characters are stereotypes and sticks. She describes the bathtubs in Somerville College, water running down her arms when she punts, college gardens, electric kettles, coffee bars, the Bodleian library, as though these things had never been seen or described before. This has a curious effect on the reader, for they have in fact been described so often that they have a kind of banal mythic force, into which Margot Cherry’s pale narrative drives suckers, and soaks up a kind of energy. This applies also, to a certain extent, to the emotions of the books, the empty longing, the clumsy negotiation of sexual decisions. I think on balance Margot Cherry can write, and might write well if she had something to write about.

  And why is not Oxford, and young love, and Shakespeare something, I do ask myself. Because it fills me with a kind of nausea I suspect would not be peculiar to me. It is déjà vu in its youth and newness. It is a reason why sensitive young women should refrain from writing sensitive young novels about Oxbridge. All the same, having done these pages, she might do something else?

  Daily Bread by Phyllis K. Pratt

  This novel opens with a woman making bread. It describes the action of the living yeast, and the dough, which is beaten down and swells up. It describes the patience of waiting for dough to prove, it describes buns and loaves and hot cross buns in the oven.

  The heroine of this book is a clergyman’s wife in a Warwickshire village, who has thirteen children and is obsessed with bread-making. Her name is Peggy Crump. Her husband is the Reverend Evelyn Crump. She met him when they were both volunteers in refugee camps, and was converted to Christianity by the strength of his faith and its obvious useful life in the world. He was not advanced as he hoped—he is very irascible when not labouring in extreme situations—and they are now living in genteel near poverty in a backwater. Various incidents (a death from leukaemia, a pompous bishop, capital punishment, a vision of “delightful emptiness”) cause Peggy to lose her faith in God, but Evelyn forces her to continue “as if” and indeed with all those children she has little choice.

  The drama of this novel—and although it appears at first to be a storm in a teacup, it is a real drama—occurs when Evelyn himself has a dark night of the soul, and has a vision of the devil, who tells him a) that he himself, the devil, is a fiction and b) that Christianity is also a fiction, and that Evelyn must learn to live without fiction, in the world of death.

  This vision reduces Evelyn to extremes of pessimism, sleep-walking, self-starvation, histrionic riddling sermonising and deliberately incompetent suicide bids. Peggy tells him, as he told her, that he should live “as if” and when he tells her that a consecrated priest can do no such thing, although it is quite all right for a housewife to do so, she attacks him, after premeditation, with a bread-knife, and there is a great deal of blood everywhere.

  This novel is not a tragedy, and not a melodrama, but a peculiarly poised black comedy. There is a most wonderful comic jumble sale (an image of cosmic and social disorder and pointlessness), some sanely and rigorously observed teenagers, a sweet curate, a pugnacious donkey, a menacing baby and all sorts of other good things.

  The book turns on the image of bread, in a completely satisfying way. The bulging life and expanding energy of Peggy’s bread is contrasted with the communion wafer which is no longer the Host for the body of the Lord. It is almost (but not quite, not tidily, symbolic) as though the yeast cells were the true God, sustaining everything. The metaphor threads its way through the text, bobbing up in cucumber sandwiches, brioches at the bishop’s palace, mould and penicillin.

  I think you should read this book and consider it carefully. It made me laugh and it made my hair stand on end. Also, it made me feel that the English language can say things, deep, funny, difficult things—something in which I was beginning to lose faith after reading the other three books.

  When Frederica has finished writing these reports she feels a kind of complicated glee. It has many components: she has enjoyed the act of writing, of watching language run black out of the end of her pen; this has in turn made her feel that she is herself again, and has made her body real to her, because her mind is alive. And then there is the idea of money, however little, money earned, which is independence. And then there is pleasure, not only in Phyllis K. Pratt’s handwritten bombshell, but also in the industry of Bly, Gully and Cherry, who have felt writing to be important enough to sit down day after day or night after night and invent imagined worlds as though it mattered. And this pleasure in turn makes her feel more tolerant towards Olive and Rosalind and Pippy Mammott, now they are no longer the bounds of her world—because of them she recognises Peggy Crump’s imprisonment with a strong savouring, whereas Margot Cherry’s Laura seems infinitely far away.

  Thomas Poole knocks at her door and tells her supper is ready. He has cooked it: it is gammon and spinach and béchamel. Frederica tries to describe to him her pleasure in writing the reports. She says, “I love having something to do I can do. And I love it that all these people have done all this work even if it’s hopeless. Is that silly?”

  “Oh no,” says Poole. “Pleasure in use of energy, I know that so well. Like when a rather stolid boy at school would suddenly write twelve pages instead of one, and you saw his mind was going. It was enough.”

  “I must work,” says Frederica. “It kills you, unused energy, it turns against you.”

  She thinks of the yeast.

  “I like to see you smiling,” says Poole. He hesitates. “I am so glad you have come here. It seems odd, when I remember you—such a cross girl, such a wayward girl, such a puzzle to your father. And now a woman, with Leo, and here.”

  Frederica smiles with a little constraint, pleased and bothered by the word “woman.”

  They have a good supper together. They talk about Phyllis K. Pratt, and Elvet Gander, and about why sensitive young women should not write novels. They do not talk about Nigel. But soon they must.

  Bill Potter is rewriting his lecture on Mansfield Park. He has been giving extra-mural classes on Mansfield Park now for thirty years, not every year, but most, and he always rewrites his lecture, partly out of courtesy to the new students, who deserve more than stale repetition, partly because his relations with this secret and sad text change constantly and slowly, like a man’s relations with his own family. He is thinking about Sir Thomas Bertram, who paid insufficient attention to his daughters’ moral upbringing, but is able to make a satisfactory substitute family from his wife’s sister’s son and daughters, the Prices. He thinks with love of his grandchildren who live with him.

  Outside, the village is quiet. A car purrs in the distance, expands its roar, and does not pass, but stops. The door bell sounds. Bill supposes Winifred will answer, but she appears not to be there. It rings again, and he goes to open the door.

  It takes him a moment to recognise his son-in-law, Nigel Reiver. He sees a stocky man in a scarlet polo neck and a tweed jacket over cavalry twill trousers.
Nigel sees a gnome-like old man, with a few strands of flyaway grey-and-ginger hair and sharp, faded blue eyes.

  “I want to speak to Frederica.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the wrong place. She isn’t here.”

  “I think she is. I’ve come instead of using the telephone, because I worked out you’d say she wasn’t there, or she might not want to speak to me. I have to speak to her.”

  “Young man, you have written yourself a story in your head that bears no relation to fact. I didn’t know she wasn’t with you until you just told me. I’m sorry she hasn’t come here, if she’s seen fit to go away, but she hasn’t.”

  “I don’t believe you,” says Nigel. Bill sees he is what he thinks of as “all worked up.” “I’m coming in, to look for her. She’s got to talk to me. And I want Leo.”

  “I can’t help you,” says Bill. “And if I could, I wouldn’t. What sort of a life are you making her lead?”

  “A very comfortable life,” says Nigel. “Would you mind getting out of the way? I’m coming in, to look for my wife and son.”

  “I don’t tell lies,” says Bill. “They aren’t here.”

  He tries to shut the door. Nigel’s face works. He pushes the door open with such force that Bill’s head is crushed against the rough wall behind it. Bill, grazed, bleeding and dizzy, falls to his knees in the hall before Nigel, who immediately puts his arms round him, murmuring frantic and inarticulate apologies, touching the grazed scalp with horrified fingers. They stagger, in a kind of embrace, into the kitchen, where Nigel, curiously efficient, finds a clean tea-towel and begins to bathe his father-in-law’s head.

  Bill says, with quavering sharpness, “Look about you. Do you see any sign of them? Go through the house if you must, now you’ve forced your way in. You won’t find them.”

  Nigel is indeed staring round the kitchen, almost smelling, it appears, for traces of the lost. He does make a dash into the hall, at this invitation, and Bill hears him crashing doors on the upper landings. Blood trickles into Bill’s eyes. Nigel reappears, carrying a green, full-skirted dress.

  “This is hers.”

  “It is. It’s been here since she went off to be married. Cast-off. We’ve got a cupboardful. Think if you’ve seen her in it.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “As you please. Shouldn’t think she wants to see it again.”

  “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

  “It’s easy to be sorry after the event,” says Bill, and stops short. It is a sentence often said to Bill by others. He looks more closely at Nigel, and dabs blood with a dirty handkerchief from his brows.

  “No—use mine—it’s clean,” says Nigel. He sits down on a stool, at the corner of the table, next to Bill.

  “She ran away in the night. With Leo. I hadn’t been too nice to her. I’m going to be better. I get, I get carried away. You know,” says Nigel, recognising that Bill, mutatis mutandis, does in a way, know. Bill does not reply. He dabs busily with Nigel’s handkerchief.

  “I was sure she’d have come up here. That’s what women do. They go back to their mothers. I waited a bit—I was so furious, I felt I needed to calm down and think—I thought it out.”

  “Frederica doesn’t do what ‘most women’ do.”

  “I don’t know how to start finding her friends. I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them all—”

  “She won’t thank you for that.”

  “I love her. She knows I love her. And how can she have taken Leo? He was happy. He had a happy time. He’ll be all bewildered and upset. Children need homes, and routines. He belongs in my house. She can’t just take him from me, in the middle of the night, with no discussion, no warning, no message, no—”

  “You don’t appear to be very good at discussion,” says Bill.

  Nigel glowers at him.

  “I’ll go now.” He looks anxious. “Will you be all right? Should I stay till someone comes? Do you feel faint?”

  “No,” says Bill, who does feel faint. “I shall be very glad if you do go. Now, if you will.”

  “Will you let me know if you hear—if they are all right, if they need money or anything, if—”

  “I will do as Frederica wishes,” says Bill. “As you should know.”

  Marcus, coming home for lunch, sees a man outside his house arranging a green party-dress like a fainted woman in the back seat of a green Aston Martin. He watches it drive off, skilful but far too fast, back through the village.

  The General Election finally comes on October 15th. Frederica and Thomas Poole watch the results together on the television, along with Hugh and Alan, who have no televisions, and Alexander, who has taken to dropping in more frequently since the arrival of Frederica and Leo. Poole himself is a literary man not naturally inclined to want a television in his house—he fears it as self-indulgence, he is puritanically inclined to regard it as a waste of time. But he has been talked into it by his children, who claim to be social pariahs at school because they cannot discuss Batman and Top of the Pops. Tony Watson is in Huyton for Harold Wilson’s count; he is writing an in-depth analysis of the effects of television on elections, and is full of exasperated admiration for Wilson’s ability to adjust his television appearances, his shape, his message, to what the opinion polls tell him. The election is very close, and it is not clear until the next afternoon that the Labour Party has in fact achieved an effective overall majority of five. The friends eat chilli con carne and drink a great deal of red wine. Frederica thinks often, but does not speak, of Olive and Rosalind and Pippy Mammott watching with bated breaths the fluctuations in the fate of “our people” as the balance sways. They are the enemy; the Conservative Government is somehow involved in sleaze and failure and ridicule, in the prancing of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, in a huge gap between public and private fronts, in deceit and humiliation. She is ready to like Wilson, suddenly seen at midnight waving his arms wildly, in the crowded hall at Huyton. He has trebled his majority. He kisses his wife for the cameras. Behind him can be seen the large, gleeful face of Owen Williams.

  “He wanted to marry me,” Frederica announces. “I wonder what would have happened if I—”

  “I should think it would have been horrible,” says Alan, placidly. “He’s wedded to his politics, you’d have had to be a Hostess, you’d have hated it.”

  Hugh says, uncharacteristically sharply, “It was just Cambridge. Everybody felt they had to snap up somebody. A lot of misery was caused, a lot of silly misery. There were too few women, everyone was silly.”

  Frederica is vaguely hurt. Harold Wilson beams manically at the camera. It is at this point still quite possible that he has lost the election.

  Alexander says, “If he wins, I wonder if he will disband my committee. I was beginning to think we were doing something useful. We have become, so to speak, bonded. We are a Group, I am interested. I want to go on. We’re visiting primary schools all next week. Like Brobdingnagians. I’m learning things.”

  Nobody has any thoughts to offer on this. They separate in the small hours, mildly drunk, mildly contented. Thomas and Frederica see them out at the door of the flat, like a married couple. Thomas puts an arm round Frederica’s shoulder. She does not break free, but does not respond to the gesture.

  “Do you think Hugh Pink is in love with you?” Thomas asks Frederica.

  “No,” she says. “He was once, I think, but as he says, everyone was in love with everyone, especially women. We thought we were special and we were only scarce.”

  “Were you in love with him?”

  “Oh no. I was in love with Raphael Faber. Or with the idea of Raphael Faber. The unattainable, you know, the teacher, the tabu, the monastic. I could feel a lot and nothing happened. It’s far away.”

  “You’ve changed,” says Thomas Poole. He thinks a moment, and then pulls her towards him and kisses the top of her hair, softly. He releases her.

  “Good night. Sleep well.”

  “And you. Tomorrow we shall be i
n the new white-hot technological world. Or not.”

  They are.

  On the steps of the Samuel Palmer School of Art and Craft, the word “portal” comes into Frederica’s mind, seeming odd and bristling, as words do when they detach themselves and insist. The School does indeed have an imposing portal, which has a whole paragraph to itself in Pevsner’s architectural guide to London. It is a long stone building which takes up the whole of one side of Lucy Square, which is next to Queen’s Square beyond Russell Square and Southampton Row. The front is adorned with bas-reliefs by Eric Gill and the portal, reached by a flight of wide, shallow steps, is set deep in a round stone arch, at either side of which stand Adam and Eve, life-size, also carved by Gill, both holding apples and both smiling as though the Fall were a matter of little or no consequence. The arch above them is composed of serried ranks of flying figures, though whether these are angels, genii or fairies is not wholly clear. The handles of the two heavy dark doors are brass castings of a sphinx and a mermaid, both with golden breasts rubbed bright by constant touching.

  “Portal,” says Frederica to Alan Melville. “This qualifies as a portal. It’s a queer word, portal.”

  “ ‘Beauty is momentary in the mind—/The fitful tracing of a portal;/But in the flesh it is immortal,’ ” says Alan, grasping the brass breast of the sphinx.

  “I may have been thinking of Lady Chatterley quoting Swinburne,” says Frederica. “She goes on about ‘Pale beyond porch and portal’ and how she has to go through them. Something to do with Proserpina coming up from the earth.”

  They are in the building, which is, and is not, like any teaching institution. There are long corridors and staircases—all solid and stony, made to endure—and a faint whiff of the institutional smell of polish and disinfectant. But the corridors are also lined with paintings, bright abstracts, Pop portraits of singers and filmstars, Blake-like clouds of flying bodies, collages of masks. And the smell of disinfectant is drowned by the smells of the work itself—oil, turpentine, putty, hot metal. Alan is telling her about Liberal Studies.