Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “You could see them—after—when I have to be back. We could have a few days, by ourselves. We could.”

  “We could just get dressed and lock the house, and go north.”

  “I’ve got a car. I could drive you.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is all right, isn’t it?”

  “It is all right.”

  Her body hums with happiness. Her mind surveys the place where she lives: books, toys, typewriter, Rupert Parrott’s typescripts.

  “Let’s go quickly,” she says.

  XIII

  There is a moment on the road north when red-brick houses give way to grey stone, and grey stone walls make their appearance. The colour of the sky and the grass changes in relation to these stones: the sky is a bluer blue, the grass a bluer green, and the whole world, to the eyes of a northerner returning, both more solid and more potentially liquid, more serious, less friendly, more real. Frederica sits beside John Ottokar as his dark blue car eats the miles of road, and is surprised by the violence of her sense of homecoming. Most of the houses they see are not particularly beautiful; they are dour enough, though sometimes softened by creepers or climbing roses; the nineteenth-century ones have an air, she thinks, of civic and non-conformist confidence. She remarks on this to John Ottokar, who replies that he grew up in Milton Alfrivers, a twentieth-century Garden City planned by Quaker philanthropists in Essex. “Toy houses in toy closes,” he says, “we said they were, in the 1950s. Solid though, with pretty gardens. We wanted to get out.”

  Frederica, who wanted to leave the north for London, and who likes London, who likes her various displaced London lives, cannot quite describe her sense of belonging to this grey and blue and green, so lapses into silence. They drive into the Dales, and the grey-green hillsides slope up and away from the road to the sky, crazily divided into uneven patchworks by the industrious and energetic dry-stone walls, long snakes of skilfully layered dark flat stones, occasionally staked with bare wooden poles. These craftsmen are my people, thinks Frederica, and then reprimands herself for sentimentality. But the walls are beautiful. “Such skill, such precision,” says John Ottokar, looking at the orderly human rearrangement of rocks and stones. “That’s what my father always used to say,” says Frederica. “I used to wait for him to say it, as he always did. Now I look at the walls, and that’s what I think. Such skill.”

  They are not going to Freyasgarth. They have booked in at the inn at Goathland, where they arrive in the thick blue evening, where the light on the moors is like water or suspended powder. They sign themselves in: Mr. and Mrs. John Ottokar. It is a fantasy, a fiction: Frederica feels freed by it. She is not Mrs. Ottokar; nobody here knows who she is. They go up a creaking black wooden stair to a low-ceilinged bedroom with a sprigged wallpaper and a sprigged bedspread. They embrace: John Ottokar’s large body is interestingly strange still, and yet warm, and yet connected to hers. They go out of the door and watch the last light flicker and fade over the bowl of hills: they watch the early stars in patches, and the fast rags of cloud blown in darker patches between the starclusters. They hold hands. His fingers are warm; she has the idea that his fingertips make little shocks against her own.

  Inside, there is a warren of dark bars, a smell of rich beer, a smell of wine, a smell of paraffin. They eat in a restaurant with peach-painted rough-plastered walls, and have a candle between them in a cobalt-blue pot. They eat roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and are formal with each other, suddenly. They share their histories, or parts of their histories. Frederica describes Bill and Winifred (non-conformism, teaching, common sense), Stephanie (good, clever, dead), Marcus (mathematical, brilliant, difficult), Blesford Ride and Blesford Girls’ Grammar (a) liberal and b) stifling and boring). John Ottokar tells of a childhood amongst pacifist Quakers; his father, now retired, was production manager in a chocolate factory, imprisoned during the war for conscientious objection. He describes his mother, but Frederica fails to imagine her, although it is clear that she too is a Quaker and a pacifist. “We went to the local Grammar School in Milton Alfrivers,” says John Ottokar. “It was OK. We went to Bristol and did maths. They thought we ought to be separated, so one of us started in Bristol and one in Liverpool, but it didn’t work out, so we both went to Bristol.”

  “Which were you?”

  “I was the Bristol one.”

  “Did you think you ought to be separated?”

  Frederica is making conversation.

  “Yes and no,” says John Ottokar, evenly. “I could see why they thought what they did, but it didn’t work out.”

  Frederica thinks of asking, “Why didn’t it work out?” and finds she cannot: she is somehow forbidden. There is a silence. He is working out what to say.

  “At first we weren’t doing the same course at Bristol, but by the end we were, we were doing the same pure maths course.” He stops again, and starts again. “Living in the same digs. Solving the same problems the same way.”

  “Happy?” asks Frederica, who now realises that all this is somehow dangerous ground. There is a long silence. John Ottokar eats and frowns. She remembers him saying that he came to the extra-mural class to learn language.

  “Very happy in one way,” he says, finally. “I mean, that is, we knew each other, you know. That was all we did know. And because—because we were together—we—didn’t get to know anything else. We didn’t have—friends of our own—that is to say, we did have some friends, we had friends of both of us, and we liked those friends because we were like each other, but we needed—I needed—I needed, I thought, a life of my own, so to speak.” He gives a snort of painful laughter. “A girl of my own, for instance. Opinions of my own, I sometimes thought, though an opinion is an opinion, if you happen to share one genuinely you can’t pretend you don’t, that’s silly. We were very involved in the CND marches—the whole Aldermaston thing. We marched with our parents and all the Quaker Meeting from Milton Alfrivers. We played in a band. We were part of something much larger than ourselves. That was good.” He thinks again. “If you can say terror is good.”

  “Terror?”

  “You march and march, you sing, you link arms, human solidarity, but you’re doing it out of terror at what some fool can do to the world—of what can’t be imagined, but must. Every now and then you do imagine it. You know? Marching is what you can do, but every now and then you know—that marching might achieve nothing.”

  Frederica has thought about the Bomb. But, either from self-preservative insensitivity, or from a possibly ill-founded faith in human reasonableness in the last resort, or from individualistic foolish courage, she has always turned away from being obsessed by it. She has a distaste for mass emotion, which she does not admire in herself, but does acknowledge and respect. She has absolutely no desire to spend time demonstrating, and thus is sceptical about the value of demonstrations. She is not sure she wants to involve herself with “all that,” though well enough disposed towards it. She takes an internal step back from John Ottokar, and looks sharply at his outer self, across the table. His head is bent over his apple crumble: he is frowning. When he feels her look, he lifts his head, and smiles at her. The smile is full of light and of bright warmth. Frederica is dazzled and touched. She smiles back, a wide smile.

  She wants to ask him if, and how, and when, he found a girl of his own, and dare not.

  The love-making is more inventive, more collusive, less startled, than the night before. He learns quickly what Frederica does and doesn’t like; he stirs her body, he keeps it singing, he is pleased with himself, she is humming with pleasure, with pleasure, with pleasure. They sleep, and wake, and turn to each other and touch hands and faces. Frederica is drowsily alive; she breathes in the air he breathes out and the intimacy is acceptable, is delightful. He speaks in her ear, tesh, teran, azma, unknown syllables. And again, softly past her ears, that strange, low whistling note of triumph and ending. He falls asleep quickly and heavily and she raises herself to look at his sleeping
face in the moonlight, intimate and strange, a still, sculpted, empty face, fair and beautiful, closed to her. Do I want this? says the insistent serpentine voice. She extends her thin body the length of his, skin to skin, in the fading warmth of their pleasure and each other.

  In the morning they eat breakfast in the pink restaurant, now looking out at the moor. There are other guests: a family, a married couple, a solitary spectacled man reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They ask the inn for sandwiches, and set out to walk on the moors. They stride out: their steps go together. The rhythm of the striding, the warmth of her lively skin, bring poems into Frederica’s mind, poems she learned when her body ached to be touched, and was not.

  “Love, do I love? I walk

  Within the brilliance of another’s thought

  As in a glory. I was dark before

  As Venus’ chapel in the black of night:

  But there was something holy in the darkness

  Softer and not so thick as otherwhere

  And as rich moonlight may be to the blind

  Unconsciously consoling. Then love came

  Like the out-bursting of a trodden star …”

  She thinks of saying this to John Ottokar, and dare not. As a girl she said it to her mirror, conjuring a non-existent face: and now his face, more or less, shines in that space, but the poem is still her secret, is private. I was looking for you, she wants to say to him, and says instead, “Did you find her, the girl of your own?”

  “The girl?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Oh, the girl of my own. Oh yes. I found her. She was a French girl. It was—difficult.” He pauses. “It was dreadful.”

  A long silence. Frederica says she is sorry. They walk on. John Ottokar says, “I don’t want to—spoil this—by bringing in all that. It’s past. It’s a—a bad story. Funny and bad.

  “When I saw her, Marie-Madeleine, I thought she was beautiful. She was staying in the house we were lodging in: she was a lectrice at a school. She wasn’t happy. She was out of place. I didn’t tell anyone—not anyone—what I felt. I thought about her. I wondered how I could—speak to her. Finally, I went up to her as she was coming back from work—near the school, not near our house—and I said, I wanted to get to know her, to talk a bit. She said, ‘Which one are you?’ That was the first thing she said. She couldn’t tell us apart, then. So I said I was John, and asked her to the cinema. I thought it was dark and secret. We went to see Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête, I think. We sat down in the dark. After a bit I had a funny feeling—I knew before I saw—I saw my brother had come in, and was sitting on the other side of her. So when the lights went up, she saw both of us. She had very good manners, she discussed the film with both of us. We went out to coffee, and talked. About CND, about jazz, about the film. She smiled at both of us.

  “So then we went out several times, the three of us. I knew what he was thinking, he didn’t have to say. He knew what I felt, I wanted Marie-Madeleine, I wanted her.

  “I don’t think he wanted her, exactly. He wanted what I wanted.

  “I told him, I must be alone with her. I told him, we had to separate a little, we had to have individual lives, we had to be two.

  “I told her I wanted her. She let me kiss her. And then other things. I could speak to her that way, she knew what I felt.

  “But he wouldn’t let it be.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He haunted us, at first. He always knew where we were going and turned up, by accident on purpose. One day, Marie-Madeleine told him we wanted to be alone together. She said, nicely, that he should find a girl of his own. He punished her.”

  “How?”

  “He pretended to be me. She couldn’t tell us apart. He took my clothes, and took her out, and made love to her, and then mocked her, because she couldn’t tell us apart. She went home, she said the situation was too much for her. She was humiliated. And frightened. I shouldn’t tell you all this.”

  “I want to know.”

  Frederica is greedy to know. She is intrigued. The story is dramatic. They stride companionably along sheep tracks. She says, “You said, when you came, that you brought your history.”

  “So much of it is our history.”

  “What did you do, when she left, when Marie-Madeleine left?”

  She has a very clear mind-picture of Marie-Madeleine, a thin dark French girl with tendrils of ragged curls, downcast eyes and a secretive pointed mouth. Nothing, probably, to do with the real Marie-Madeleine.

  “I was furious. I told him we had to separate. I said I was going to get an ordinary job and live an ordinary life, on my own, like any other single person, any individual, I was going to make my own life. He couldn’t bear it. He—he pleaded. He apologised. I packed up in the night, and he crept into my room when I was packing. I said no doubt he knew which train I was leaving on, but I didn’t want him on it, he wasn’t to come. He said he would make her come back. I said that wasn’t the point. I left the house to get in the cab to the station, the next morning, and he came out, he was going to get in, he took hold of me. I stood in the street and shouted. I—I hit him, once, he sat down on the pavement. I went.”

  The words come awkwardly and painfully. The clouds race in the blue sky: there is a lot of wind, blowing the words into the heather. Frederica imagines the scene. She sees John Ottokar, stiff with grief and rage, closing the cab door. She sees the figure sitting on the pavement, with the breath knocked out of him. She sees this figure from the back, a figure in a space, “he.”

  “And then?”

  “The next I heard, was a phone call from Marie-Madeleine, in Caen. She was desperate. He’d gone there, he was sitting on her doorstep, begging her to come back to me, acting the fool, serenading her with a guitar and a trumpet—he’s the musical one—in the small hours.

  “I went and brought him back. He had—a sort of breakdown. She said she couldn’t take it, she never wanted to see either of us ever again. He’s in therapy, now. I—tried that, but I didn’t like it, I quit. He—depends on his therapist. He lives in a sort of commune, I think. He was in hospital for a bit. I got my job and my flat.

  “If—you and I—go on—you need to know these things.”

  “It’s all interesting.”

  “That isn’t the word I’d use,” says John Ottokar.

  Frederica is a clever woman, but she is not a woman with an unusually quick imagination. It is not until the two are in bed that night that her imagination really begins to work on the other, the absent brother. She wonders, as she smells the particular smell of his hair, of his chest shining with sweat, of his sex, what it could really be like to make love to another man, indistinguishable from this one, “identical.” She measures the length of his arm-bones with the span of her hand, she studies the whorl and spiral of his ears, she touches and tastes their interior with her tongue. Could there be another, the same, who punished Marie-Madeleine through trompe-l’oeil and humiliation? The essence of love is that the beloved appears to be unique—more unique, thinks Frederica, in whom was instilled (by her father) the knowledge that “unique” is an adjective that cannot be qualified. She tries to imagine another Frederica and her mind shies away in panic.

  They set out to walk across the moors to the Falling Foss; they leave the car at Sleights, and walk through Ugglebarnby, Iburndale, Little Beck. The names on the map are ancient and full of life: Hemp Syke, Soulsgrave, Foul Syke, Old Mary Beck, High Bride Stones. At the edge of some woodland they see splashes of scarlet and blue and gold: two people are moving slowly along the hedgerow, pausing and bending; the colour is their thermos flasks, plastic boxes and canvas knapsacks. As Frederica and John Ottokar pass they straighten up and recognise her. They are Jacqueline Winwar and Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. Frederica, held in a kind of glass globe of touch and tension with John, does not want to stop and speak. She wants to greet these two marginal persons and pass on. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock appears to expect this: he inclines his head and ret
urns to his contemplation of the damp grass and the roots of bushes. But Jacqueline greets her warmly and asks if she is on her way to Freyasgarth. She offers coffee from the scarlet flask and John Ottokar accepts. They sit down on large scattered stones, each holding a different brightly coloured plastic beaker. From where they are they can see the new Early Warning System on Fylingdales Moor, three pure white spheres, huge and perfectly round against the sky with its bright blue and slow-moving shifting fluffy clouds, like sheep slowly metamorphosing into cotton-wool, or octopods, or feather beds, or chariots.

  Jacqueline asks Frederica if she is on her way to Freyasgarth. Frederica says she does not know: she is taking a few days off on impulse. Jacqueline’s bright brown eyes consider John Ottokar. She tells Frederica that Marcus would be pleased to see her. There is something intimate and very slightly proprietorial in her tone: Frederica wonders, as she has wondered on other occasions, exactly what is the relation between those two. Daniel will be pleased to see Frederica, too, says Jacqueline, if she comes. Frederica says she did not know Daniel was there. No reason why she should, she adds. And Agatha will be very surprised, says Jacqueline. She is bringing Saskia to meet Will and Mary. We are all looking forward to her visit. Oh, says Frederica, put out. Jacqueline smiles. We are looking forward to meeting Agatha, she says.

  John Ottokar is staring at the three great spheres. It is almost as though they were in another dimension, he says, another reality. Their size is incommensurate with the moorland, their scale is in another world. They are beautiful and sinister. They are so beautiful and simple it is not easy to see them as man-made, and thus they do not seem to spoil the wild landscape as they might be expected to. They are huge yet unobtrusive.

  They are monuments to human power, though, says Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. They are listening for the sound of Armageddon. We have built engines that can destroy the world, and we have built these huge, inhuman domes, that watch and listen for the approaching doom. He laughs drily. “I do not suppose they are a very adequate defence,” he says, “despite their scale, despite their grace.”