by A. S. Byatt
And everything else is still.
“Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down
“And the dews of night arise
“Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
“Till the morning appears in the skies.”
“No no let us play, for it is yet day
“And we cannot go to sleep;
“Besides, in the sky, the little birds fly
“And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.”
“Well, well, go & play till the light fades away
“And then go home to bed.”
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh’d
And all the hills ecchoed.
On the right, Experience shows three figures in a doorway, a purple woman bending solicitously over a green-clad youth with long blond hair and a hand laid across his waist to emphasise, rather than conceal, his sex, which is faintly outlined in gold on his green breeches. Behind him a female figure of indeterminate age sits in the angle of the doorstep, head bowed. Vines heavy with grapes climb richly upwards, purple, gold and green, reaching out spiralling tendrils towards both woman and youth.
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And whisp’rings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring & your day, are wasted, in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.
“I wish I had these pictures,” says Frederica with abstract politeness.
“I wish I had them all. I love their doubleness. One thinks differently about the innocence of children once one has them. And about oneself, one’s own childhood.”
Frederica looks out of the window, at the mud and rubbish in the centre of Hamelin Square. Some children are chasing and dodging each other between the car-seats, three black, three white children, screaming. It is not possible to tell if they are playing or trying to hurt each other. She says, “At the Art School where I teach, my Head of Department is mad about Blake. He gives lectures on recovering the energies of childish innocence, polymorphous perversity and unrestrained desire.”
“That crops up in our committee, too. We have members who talk about learning from the children, letting the children set the agenda, freeing the curriculum. Personally, I find it hard to sympathise with.
“When I was a child I was terrified of other children. They seemed to me like ravening tigers or stupid trolls who wanted to tie you down and poke you. I wanted to be a real person, which meant grown-up.”
“So did I,” says Frederica. “You understand slowly that you understand things that you can’t say or use until you’re—‘a human being,’ I used to say to myself—I felt I was a person inside a kind of silly mask and disguise, to whom people spoke in voices suitable for my silly face and silly clothes—even other children—”
“And then you wonder—is everyone else in a silly mask, or is it only me—”
“And you don’t even know the answer, but you suspect it’s only you—”
“And you wait to be a grown-up, or a real person, or a human being—you wait savagely in solitude, guarding your secrets and nursing your—hopes—possibilities—”
“And you find that everyone else, now you’re a real person, is saying how much more authentic it is—how much more free—to be a polymorphously perverse child—”
“And you wonder if your own child thinks as you thought—”
“Because your child is innocent, there is a sense in which you know they don’t know all the things you are so confident you knew all the time but didn’t say—they can so easily be hurt.”
“So easily. It’s no good saying that childhood is like paradise. It’s at least as much like hell. Whatever you do.”
“Yet when we get the idea of Paradise”—says Frederica, looking away from Blake to the black Martin engraving of the angel Raphael, made of white light, advancing under black Romantic paradisal trees across a glade towards the softly luminous naked figures of our first Parents—“when we get that idea, it is a memory of a first state—we did once—when was it?—experience everything more brightly than now—”
They stop, almost out of breath. They smile at each other. Agatha Mond’s face is brightened and lifted by her smile; it is less beautiful than it is in repose, more pointed.
“I’ve never had this conversation,” says Frederica.
“Nor have I. More cake?”
A turmoil in the playhouse ends their talk.
Frederica has made a friend.
Three weeks later, Frederica and Leo move into the lower flat in 42 Hamelin Square.
Frederica goes to St. Simeon’s to see Daniel. She is restless and lonely, and since Christmas the two have become more friendly than in the past. She stops in the vestry of the half-church, and considers the notices. There is a poster for Gideon Farrar’s Children of Joy, “The Christian Embrace. It’s Child’s Play—the Mums and Dads Are Learning Fast,” with a large photograph of a barefooted circle of people of all ages hugging each other and smiling ecstatically. There is a very small card in a corner, with a decorated border in green, red, and blue inks vaguely Gothic, richly elegant, which on inspection contains bleeding red-breasted pelicans and robins, and pointed-toothed bats and monkeys amongst its foliage. It contains a text in beautifully penned Gothic script.
There is a great ladder of religious cruelty with many rungs; but three of them are most important.
At one time one sacrificed human beings to one’s god, perhaps precisely those humans one loved best, as in the sacrifice of the first-born.
Then in mankind’s moral epoch, one sacrificed to one’s god one’s strongest instincts, one’s “nature.” The joy of this festival glitters in the cruel glance of the ascetic.
Finally, what was left? Did one not have to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in a concealed harmony, in future bliss and justice? Did one not have to sacrifice God himself, and out of cruelty self-cruelty to oneself worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness?
To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the final act of cruelty was reserved for the generation which even now arises: we all know something of this already
Frederica stands and considers this text, which she cannot place, although it is vaguely familiar. Then she goes down the spiral staircase into the crypt.
Ginnie Greenhill is in her cubicle, listening to the squawk and splutter of the telephone. Her round shoulders, in an apple-green sweater, are tense: from time to time she nods attentively, staring at her egg-box walls.
Daniel is sitting in his own cubicle, reading. His large face is brooding.
From Canon Holly’s little sanctum come animated voices. Coming into the crypt, Frederica is surprised to see Rupert Parrott, smoking a briar pipe, woolly-pated and rosy-faced, wearing a greenish tweed jacket and a mustard-coloured waistcoat. He is sitting on the Canon’s swivelling chair, turning this way and that, gesticulating. The Canon, also smoking a pipe, and wearing a cassock, is buried in a decrepit leather armchair.
Daniel is pleased to see Frederica. He offers her tea, and goes to fill the kettle. Rupert Parrott swivels energetically and catches sight of her as he comes into view.
“Frederica! I am thinking of publishing a collection of your Reader’s Reports. I laugh aloud. I didn’t know you came here.”
“I come to see Daniel.” She sees Parrott coming to the conclusion that she is in Daniel’s pastoral care. “He’s my brother-in-law.”
“You surprise me. I thought you were in training as a Listener.”
“I’ve thought of it. I don’t think I’d be any good. I’m not patient, and I’m not self-effacing.”
“I’d like to be—” says Parrott, his pink cheeks pinker. “Of course I’m partly here as Adelbert’s publisher. But
I am interested in the work. The work is important. I’m thinking of publishing a book called The Helpers, which I’d like Adelbert to write. About individuals in the caring professions—a psychoanalyst, a psychiatrist, a probation officer, a Listener—and some of the newer leaders of encounter groups and things that are springing up—”
“Tea,” says Daniel.
“Please,” say Holly and Parrott. It has become a tea party. They chat. Ginnie Greenhill continues her passionate listening to the telephone’s babble, in another world.
“Frederica does wonderful work for me, for a pittance,” says Rupert Parrott. “I almost never publish anything she reports on, but I do appreciate her reporting.”
“You did accept Phyllis Pratt’s Daily Bread,” says Frederica. “I was glad about that, she could write. That would interest Daniel and Canon Holly, it’s about a clergyman who loses his faith.”
“She came to see me last week,” says Parrott.
“What is she like?” says Frederica. “Tell.”
“She is very large,” says Parrott. “In a black broadcloth suit, with a priestlike hat, flat and black with a dull red ribbon. She came into my office and said, ‘I have come to withdraw my book.’ I said it was already in production, I said the cover was chosen—it has a wonderful cottage loaf on it and a great knife, a shiny knife—a bread-knife—I said we all loved the book. She said in a toneless sort of voice that it was an un-publishable book, not worthy, and she wanted it back. So I said it was worthy, and that I should be hurt—one always makes the mistake of supposing large people are kindly and concerned—and she repeated that she’d come to withdraw it, it wasn’t worthy. She was being the immovable object and for some reason I felt I had to be the irresistible force. So I said she owed me an explanation, she’d wasted a lot of my time and money and emotion, and all that didn’t matter, but I thought she was really good—I’d at last discovered a really good novelist—and as I said it, I saw I really thought it, and I became quite distressed, quite distressed on my own behalf. So she sat there, and repeated her two sentences, about withdrawing the book, and not being worthy. And something made me say, ‘If you can honestly assure me that this is your own wish—that I should disrupt publication—that you are under no pressure—’ And suddenly she was all water, her face dissolved, she said her husband had read the blurb we sent and felt it was all about him.”
“Is it?” asks Frederica.
“Probably. How do I know? But I felt somehow furiously determined. So I lectured her on what she owed me—and how good it was—and she got hotter and hotter—steaming hot—and went off to think, she said. I don’t know what she’ll do. She didn’t go into detail. I haven’t stopped production. That book matters to her, I can sense. I couldn’t work out what she was like.”
“She can write.”
“Oh yes.”
“And the other book?” says Frederica. “All that typescript I gave you. Babbletower. Have you read it?”
“Oh yes,” says Rupert Parrott. “Two or three times.” He lowers his voice conspiratorially. “It’s a dreadful risk. It could get any publisher into trouble. Even in these marginally more enlightened days. It’s not a nice book.”
“It sticks in the mind,” says Frederica, testing.
“It does. It does stick in the mind.”
“Has anyone else seen it?”
“No. I’ve been thinking about it.”
There is a sound above them, and then a sound of feet coming down the stairs.
Black, shiny, cracked patent shoes. Very dirty speedwell-blue socks. Filthy skin between socks and trousers. Tight pin-striped trousers, silver stripe on matt black, calf-clinging, rising to a high waist and old dress-braces. A cloak of iron-grey hair. A velvet jacket, stained midnight blue, partly threadbare, an old white silk evening muffler, a long grey face under the grey hair, an aura, an odour of active staleness and decay.
“I had believed,” says the plangent voice, “that you lived here immured and listened to the voices of which the air is so full, the wailing to which I have made my small contributions. I felt a certain inhibition about imposing my corporeal presence on this ghostly converse and so I came secretly and saw that others felt no such compunction, that there is a steady stream of distinctly solid fleshly visitors, of which I thought I might make one. I left a calling card, which was found acceptable, or not immediately torn up or cast into the flames. I wondered if I might be permitted to continue my theological debate with the judicious Daniel in judgement. And I see Frederica, taking tea. This resembles the under-earth hideout of the Lost Boys. Do I interrupt, should I leave, may I stay?”
Canon Holly says, “We welcome all comers. I recognise your voice. We are happy to see you. May I know your name? I am Adelbert Holly, over there is Virginia Greenhill—you have spoken to both of us—and this young man is a visitor, Rupert Parrott.”
“I know that name,” says Jude. “The arm of coincidence is long.”
Frederica’s mind has been racing. She does not know whether Rupert Parrott has made up his mind for or against Babbletower, but she is fairly sure that the sight and smell of Jude is not likely to influence him favourably. Jude’s last remark, however, is decisive. She says, “This is Jude Mason. The author of Babbletower, which we were discussing.”
“Ah,” says Rupert Parrott. He looks at his feet, and twirls in his chair. Jude advances to the centre of the crypt. Rupert Parrott says, “Some of the tortures the little boys undergo in the Dormitories, in your book—”
“Far-fetched, you think? Improbably ingenious?”
“Not at all. Wholly convincing. Traditional, even. I wonder if you were at Swineburn School, perhaps?”
Jude stares; his face closes.
“I even seem to recognise some of the more unpleasant cupboards and places of water-torture. And a few very local slang terms. ‘Fessy,’ for instance. ‘Bullapot.’ ‘Gullanging.’ Were you there in the days of Claude Hautboys?”
Jude stands in his grimy finery and drops his head, so that his face is covered by a curtain of greasy hair. Then he lifts his head, parts the curtain, pushes it back over his shoulders, and says, “No mean French scholar, an excellent guide along the more recondite pathways of French decadence. Heavy-handed, though, and heavy in other ways, very heavy.”
This adjective causes a rictus of mirthless laughter in Rupert Parrott’s brownie-like face.
“Heavy,” he concurs, nodding.
“I matriculated,” says Jude, staring intently at Parrott, “and then put an end to it. I scarpered, I quit, I fled, I discharged myself, I disembogued, I ran away betwixt the dark and dawn and was no more seen in that place. Over the hills of Cumberland and far away I wandered, piping wild, feeding on swine-nuts, and so to Paris, a wandering scholar, where I found protection and a library.”
“A good library,” says Parrott.
“The best,” says Jude. There is a silence. “May I hope that you found my offering acceptable?”
“A book for our times,” says Rupert Parrott. “Strong meat.”
“I am a vegetarian,” says Jude. “A butcher only in the imagination.” It is as though they are speaking in code.
“You realise that this book runs the risk of prosecution? Even after Lady Chatterley.”
“I had not considered the matter. I wrote what I had to write. Lady Chatterley is a vulgar and improbable book.”
“And Babbletower—”
“Is all around us,” says Jude, casting an arrogant stare around the egg-boxes, telephones and battered chairs amongst the fanning pillars of the crypt.
“It is a challenge,” says Parrott. “A challenge I must say I feel I have to accept.”
He is worked up. He is sweating slightly around his crinkled hairline.
Daniel recognises the tension in his voice. Daniel spent a long night talking Rupert Parrott out of cutting his wrists, some time ago. He remembers, though he tries not to, a Parrott obsessed by self-disgust and moral despair, a Parrott who
finally arrived, tear-smeared and shaking, in St. Simeon’s in the small hours, to be consoled by Daniel and subsequently invigorated by Canon Holly’s calm acceptance of his secret self, his hidden desires, his ambiguities and equivocations. Daniel told him human beings were infinitely diverse, but Holly commanded him to love his own difference, to admit his dark side into the circle of his fuller Self. And so Our Passions Christ’s Passion found a publisher and Rupert Parrott became a visiting helper of the Listeners. He is wary of Daniel, whom he does not love but does trust. Daniel can see both why Parrott feels he must publish Jude’s book, and why this will not be easy for him, if the book does get into trouble. Daniel knows nothing about book-trouble. But he knows, he thinks, a real suicide risk from a counterfeit or mimic.
“We should drink to this venture,” says Canon Holly, producing a bottle of Hungarian Bull’s Blood, fashionable at that time. Slugs of Bull’s Blood are poured into various unbreakable tumblers, and they drink, including Ginny Greenhill, whose caller has abruptly rung off in mid-sentence, interrupted by despair, a visitor, embarrassment, collapse, she cannot say. Frederica proposes the toast:
“To Babbletower!”
They drink.
Frederica sits in the basement in Hamelin Square. She tries to write, and cannot. The paper is blank in front of her. It is early evening. The flat still smells faintly of new paint. She is looking at the area wall through the slats of a buttercup-yellow Venetian blind, which casts a ghostly gold and violet-grey shadowed lattice, or grid, on the white expanse of the paper. She has a new writing table in pale pine-wood and a deep blue plastic chair on chrome legs.
She is surrounded by writing and cannot write. Tony Watson has shown some of her reports for Bowers and Eden to the new literary editor of Spyglass, a cultural weekly founded by a minor member of Bloomsbury, surviving with a precarious circulation and a disproportionate reputation for wit and influence. Frederica is now part of a rotating team of four novel columnists, and is therefore surrounded with cardboard boxes of hardback novels. She can review four or even five of these at once, giving the most important perhaps two hundred fifty words and the least a thirty-word sentence. She has learned, the hard way, what you can and can’t say in two hundred fifty words. You cannot summarise a plot in that space: you can only hint, at an atmosphere, at an analogy (Amis-territory, Murdochian moral intricacy, Sparkian wit and bizarrerie, Storey-north, Snow-corridors). However often they may tell you you should not use adjectives, here you have no choice; adjectives must substitute for discrimination and for narrative: shocking, flat, murky, torpid, energetic, ferocious, intricate, gripping. Clichés have become clichés because they are concise, useful and evocative (more adjectives) but Frederica has her standards. She eschews both vivid and vibrant, both brilliant, hilarious, maxi and mini. From feeling like an ugly sister clamping a bleeding foot into a glass slipper, she has come to enjoy picking her way precisely through the possibilities. She plays fair. Any really waspish sentence must be balanced by one purely descriptive. Every week two or three novelists write in with at least a thousand indignant words pointing out what she has not said. The column makes a substantial addition to her income, more through the sale of suitcases of rejected books than for the words themselves. For every book she reviews, she reads and sells perhaps twenty. She knows a great deal about how not to write a novel.
