Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “We must not lose hope,” said Culvert, without conviction.

  “In the old days,” said Colonel Grim, “I would have known how to find out what had happened. But my old methods are not part of our new world.”

  “And must never be again,” said the Lady Paeony, with scorn. “How many innocents have not confessed to unreal evils on your rack?”

  “Just so,” said Colonel Grim. “We shall never, I believe, see the bottom of this matter.”

  “That is the conclusion I too have come to,” said the Lady Mavis. “And now, I have a few other things to say.”

  And she went to the table, and took up the triangular sooty segment of the sugar heart of the Human-Sweetmeat, which had been left untouched on the table. She bit into this, and climbed back to her station beside the battlements, tasting its black taste on her tongue, ingesting its shadowy substance.

  “We are told by antiquaries,” said she, “that in ancient Babylon, in the chamber at the top of the ziggurat which was reserved for the activities of the God Baal, he came sometimes to sleep with the priestess, and sometimes to share a feast at a giant stone table, and sometimes, in difficult times, to demand a sacrifice. And there are many tales of what this sacrifice was—a red human heart, tastefully roasted, a whole human infant, the first-born, trussed and tossed into the flames of his altar fire. It is told that on his feast days a great cake was baked, and cut into small portions, one of which was blacked with the soot of the eternal Fire of his altar. The people took their cakes blindfold, and he who chose the black square was the Chosen One, devoted to the God. And for a time this Devoted One was fed and fattened, granted his desires of the flesh, sweet cakes and wine, sweet bedfellows and smoky opiates. And when his time came, he was led smiling to the fire, and the God was pleased, and did not wilfully torture or persecute the people for the following year, but let their corn and vines grow rich and their children spring up plump and healthy. We are told that the Krebs still build a Bale Fire and make their offerings, somewhere in the forest, a prisoner, a fool, a goat, a beloved son—the tales vary. And in the religion we have renounced, too, the god-man made himself bread and wine, drank the bitter cup and offered his body to dismemberment, to save the people from pain. He sacrificed himself to himself, as we were all taught.

  “We are not gods, we are rational beings in pursuit of happiness. We have no gods, to judge or to comfort, to afflict us or to take away pain. All we are is ourselves, and we have discovered in ourselves in these latter days deep-rooted desires to hurt and to be hurt, ancient instincts of immolation and oblation. I have thought much, over these last weeks, about the desire to hurt. In the farmyard, the sight of blood on a wounded bird, a broken wing, a lame foot, arouses the fat fit hens, the young cockerels and the growing chicks to a frenzy of plucking and pecking. They will peck to death a beast which is injured; they will strip its breast bare of plumage, and expose pimpled purple skin, and then blood, and then bone. This is usual, this is not unnatural in these witless feathered things.

  “I do not think there is any god to whom I may sacrifice in order to demand the restoration of my son. I do not believe in vengeance—it is part of the old ways, which we have abjured. Whatever may have happened to my sweet son’s eyes and his growing teeth, I ask for no other mother’s son’s eye or tooth in recompense. All we can punish is ourselves, and the stripped, ridiculous hen, if she could, would hasten her end, if she were rational. If I harbour the idea that my death might propitiate the spirit of cruelty that is abroad amongst you, I know that idea for the sentimentality it is. I should like to think that I can take with me,” said she, climbing higher on the battlements, with the wind stronger in her hair and garments—“I should like to think that I can take with me the yeast of blood-lust and malice that is at work, that I could concentrate its energy in my body and extinguish it with my life. Because I go voluntarily, no one else is guilty of my death, I kill myself, and restore a kind of preliminary innocence. I mean the pain to stop with me, and the old innocence of flowers and sweetmeats to be restored for a time.”

  And she ascended another step to the battlements, and stood looking at them. And a strange, strangled sound was heard amongst the skirts of the ladies, and the little Felicitas struggled out and ran across the courtyard, and clambered up the steps, holding to her mother’s skirts, and making the raw sounds of the voiceless. The Lady Mavis bent down and picked up her daughter, with tears streaming down her cheeks, and cradled her in her arms, kissing her.

  “The child has saved the mother,” said the Lady Roseace.

  But the Lady Mavis turned again, and climbed, and stood for a moment high and free on the wall itself, crooning to the child in her arms, and then stepped out into the air, crooning and murmuring.

  They all ran to the battlements. Culvert alone did not: he ran down. He had an idea of catching his old friend in his strong arms.

  Jojo said to Adolphus, “She has decided finally to be a vol-au-vent. She is light.”

  She was light, and the Tower was high, and her skirts were voluminous. The air pressed under her skirts, and lifted her and played with her, like a sycamore seed, like a kite, eddying and spiralling. They could not hear if she was still singing to the child, but they could now hear the child screaming, a rough, shrill sound, as she took account of her slow descent to death.

  Culvert was again defeated by his own Tower, whose corridors deceived and delayed. He hurtled and fell: he stood again and found he had run in a circle and was rising where he had been descending. He put his shoulder to a door and found it rusted in its hinges and locks; he ran on, opened another, almost stepped out himself into air.

  So the Lady Mavis came down like a great bird, swaying in her skirts amongst the child’s raucous cries and her own singing. But when she saw the tree-tops, where she might alight like a bird, or break her fall, she made various ungainly movements with her body, twisting and turning, and managed to project herself downwards head-first, her skirts tumbling around her face, her stately legs scissoring the air in their lace-edged drawers. And her head hit a sharp rock, like a snail dropped by a thrush, and burst apart as Culvert managed to rush across the moat from a side gate with a railed bridge. He was in time to pull the child Felicitas, unharmed, from her mother’s twitching grip, and to wipe the blood and brains from her little face.

  “She is wrong,” said Turdus Cantor, “if she thinks she will terrify those who hurt her son out of their course.”

  “She will give them a taste for blood,” said Colonel Grim. “And for spectacle. As we saw in the old world.”

  “Hers was an old illusion,” said Samson Origen, “that self-punishment will shame the wicked. So many women hurt themselves, thinking their pain will hurt their persecutors, who take pleasure in it.”

  “And what do you make of her talk of sacrifice?” asked Turdus Cantor. “Her thinking on that matter was deeply confused and deluded, it seemed to me.”

  “All thinking on that matter is confused and deluded,” said Colonel Grim. “But a little blood shed has always been wonderfully fortifying to the energies of judges and soldiers, kings and priests. All such like to seal their pacts with blood.”

  “Necessity is ineluctable,” said Samson Origen. “A self-perpetuating mechanism. Our blood oils its cogs, whether we offer it up or not. Our intention matters not a jot. On the other hand, the absence of this lady is the removal both of an irritant and of a goad to persecution in our little world. It could calm our flushed blood. Or it could arouse further animosity against less vulnerable targets. Blood finds its own level, like water.”

  Frederica thinks of antechambers, and wonders why, since she is not in an antechamber, but in Arnold Begbie’s office, sitting opposite Arnold Begbie, both in tan hide chairs with chrome frames. Begbie is a partner in Begbie, Merle and Schloss. They are on the ground floor of a Georgian house in Sunderland Square, which is, just, Bloomsbury. The room is mostly full of Begbie’s large oak desk. Sunlight floods through the w
indow, which is covered with an intricate steel mesh. Beyond are the spearheads of the iron fence of the residents’ locked garden. Faint from the garden come voices of children, running and calling.

  Frederica looks like a pantomime Maid Marian, in a short green suede dress, mesh tights, high crumpled suede boots. Arnold Begbie’s suit is dark, his tie spattered regularly with blood-red dots. He has springing black hair in just-controlled surges. His eyes are black and his skin sultry, his bones—nose, chin, cheeks—jutting and pronounced. His voice is subdued and Scottish. He murmurs, writing, looking down.

  “You are quite decided upon divorce.”

  The meshes make patterns on his blotter.

  “I wouldn’t have come if I wasn’t.”

  “You know your own mind.”

  “I didn’t mean to sound rude.”

  “You didn’t. So many people come to me, to discuss divorce, when divorce is the last thing they want. Tell me about yourself, Mrs. Reiver, and about your husband.”

  Frederica gives what she thinks is a precise, dispassionate résumé of her marriage. She has thought out what to say and what not to say. She explains that she was left alone for very long periods, and that her husband opposed her return to any kind of work. She says that she saw no one, but that when her friends visited, her husband was unreasonably angry. She says unemphatically that he became violent. He attacked her, she says. He hurt her. She tried to run away, she says, and he threw an axe after her, wounding her. She is proud of the level, quiet, informative voice in which she says all this. Arnold Begbie writes. He says, “Is that all?”

  “We are incompatible.” A silly word. An undescriptive word. “It is all my fault. I should never have married him. I know I should not.” This she thinks every day. Mr. Begbie taps his pen on his strong teeth. Incompatibility and mistake, he tells her with practised gentleness, are not grounds for divorce. Grounds for divorce are desertion, cruelty, adultery, insanity and certain arcane and unacceptable practices he is sure they need not go into. It is possible that Frederica is in a position to petition for divorce on grounds of cruelty. Neglect, refusal to listen, can amount, in some cases, to cruelty. Physical violence is certainly cruelty, though the courts take into account the character and circumstances of the partners in deciding what the effects of one particular act of violence might be deemed to be. He imagines she is not used to being struck, or to having things thrown at her. No? Good. And she saw a doctor, perhaps, after the axe wound?

  “Of course,” says Frederica. “We told him I tripped and fell on some barbed wire.”

  “A pity. Would he have believed you?”

  “I don’t know. He stitched it. My London doctor dressed it. I told him how it happened.”

  “That, unfortunately, would be too late after the event to be very helpful. He might however be able to say that such a wound could not have been caused by barbed wire. The courts do not always look favourably on unsupported assertions of cruelty by the complainant. Did anyone else see the wound?”

  “Several people. None of them were people it was any good telling—”

  Arnold Begbie allows this matter to drop, and asks whether Frederica supposes her husband will contest a divorce, if she asks for one. Frederica says she believes he will: when last seen, she says, he was pressing her to return, and to return her son. He does not like to be thwarted or contradicted, she says. She adds that she knows that if she allowed her son to visit she would never see him again. The solicitor says that the courts may have views on the father’s rights of access. Frederica says that she herself believes her child should see his father; that she would encourage this; that she knows in her bones that she would not see him again, if he went there, now. She may need to find evidence, says Arnold Begbie, to support the feeling in her bones in a court of law. Frederica’s bones become briefly knobby and obtrusive in the seamless dry run of the language of the discussion: she has a sudden vision of them, quivering and bloody, inside her composed flesh and her green suede. Her bones are not evidence.

  Arnold Begbie brings up the subject of adultery. Mrs. Reiver has not herself mentioned any suspicion of adultery. She has said that her husband was often absent for long periods. Has she ever imagined that he might be seeing other women, during those periods?

  Frederica says she doesn’t know, and hasn’t thought about it. She says she believes her husband loves her and adds, flushing slightly, that as far as sex goes, they are happy, they are compatible. That silly word, again. She says her husband is a man who likes women. She hesitates. Arnold Begbie watches her hesitate. He prompts her. “You have remembered something.”

  “Not exactly,” says Frederica. “But I have—I have a venereal infection.” She is proud of the precise, unpleasant word. Because she is Frederica, having brought herself to say it, she thinks of irrelevant connotations, Shakespeare’s hot Venus, panting for Adonis, Spenser’s veiled Venus, medieval Venus, a regal being charioted by doves and accompanied by her winged son and his burning arrows. She shifts in her seat. She says, “There is no other way I could have caught it.”

  “No other person.”

  “That is what I said.”

  “A communicable venereal disease is evidence of adultery. You can produce evidence of that?”

  “Yes.”

  The conversation continues. Frederica dredges her memory. It is agreed that Arnold Begbie will write to Nigel Reiver, saying that his wife intends to petition for divorce on grounds of cruelty, and see what response he gets. In the interim, Frederica must go home and write out an account of her marriage, as fully as possible, listing every example of anything that might be construed as cruelty, and anything she may recall which might be evidence of adultery. Arnold Begbie would like to know what Mrs. Reiver would say to an amicable meeting—in the presence of her solicitor—to discuss the questions of divorce, maintenance, custody, care and control of her child.

  “I don’t want him to know where I am living.”

  “That may be difficult. Where are you living?”

  Frederica tells him. He says, “And Mr. Poole, in whose flat you are living. Do you hope to marry him, if you obtain a divorce?”

  “No—” says Frederica. She says, “It is purely an arrangement—it isn’t what you think—it is to share the looking after children—it isn’t—”

  She cannot tell if he believes her. He says, “If you petition for divorce, you are required to enter a statement asking the court’s discretion with regard to your own adultery, if there has been any adultery. Your solicitor is required to bring this matter to your attention.”

  “There hasn’t,” says Frederica, with a strong sense of injury. “For one thing, as I told you, I’ve got this infection …” She stops in some confusion.

  “And if you had not, you would be tempted.”

  “I’m not saying that. I don’t think—”

  “You don’t think it is my business. But it is, Mrs. Reiver, it is. I cannot advise you to go on living with an unattached man—even in the presence of an au pair girl and several children—if your husband is likely to contest the divorce.”

  “I can’t earn my living if I can’t share the child care.”

  “You could ask your husband for maintenance for yourself, and your son.”

  “I won’t do that. I want to earn my own living.”

  “I would not be emphatic about that if you hope to persuade the courts to allow you custody of your son.”

  “But my present arrangement—”

  “Does not look good, frankly. I advise you to move. Unless you really wish to marry Mr. Poole. Do you think he wishes to marry you?”

  Frederica, who has her complex anxieties on that point, is silent.

  “Reflect on it, Mrs. Reiver,” says Arnold Begbie. He smiles. “We shall find a way. Don’t look so downhearted.”

  “I feel suddenly trapped.”

  “We shall find a way to free you, don’t worry.”

  This is Frederica’s first legal na
rrative. It is an official tale, told to a partial, official listener. Frederica selected its narrative elements; Arnold Begbie sorted, assessed, rearranged and added to them. It is only the beginning. There will be more. And more, and more.

  Coming out of the offices, into the winter sun in the square, Frederica stops to peer through the railings at two blond children, a bigger girl, a smaller boy, riding tricycles on the gravel path round the grass. Two women are sitting with their backs to her on a bench. She can hear their conversation.

  “They’re all the same. I say, ‘You say, “Don’t nag.” I wouldn’t nag if you’d only ever listen to what I’m saying and remember it.’ But he thinks it’s beneath him, he thinks anything I say is bound to be trivial and somehow demeaning, he goes on thinking his important thoughts. I tell him, ‘I don’t want my brain cluttered with questions you can’t be bothered to listen to or answer, I could think important thoughts if I didn’t have to remember every trivial thing for you.’ He doesn’t care about cluttering my brain, his own’s a plane of white frost, an infinite tabula rasa, on the personal plane, so to speak.”

  “I think they feel threatened,” says the second woman. “He treats me as though I was a fussing hen, or his mother, who’s stopping him doing what he wants, telling him grown-up things are naughty, slapping his fingers. I don’t want to be his mother, I don’t want to be anybody’s mother as far as slapping people and stopping people goes. But you don’t have much choice, if people are to eat and be kept clean. He laughs at me in an indulgent sort of way, but like a little boy, if I try to talk about any household thing, and off he goes to the pub. But he gets pretty mad if I do anything he doesn’t like while he isn’t looking.”

  “He says, ‘Is there any?’ or ‘Where is the?’ all the time. He comes in at any hour, and says ‘Is there any food?’ He stands there: ‘Is there any bread?’ He doesn’t look for it. ‘Where is the butter? Where are the matches?’ Often he can see them. But I have to run up and down, fetching things. He needs that.”