by A. S. Byatt
This story is interesting because of the words bacon-slicer, and for that matter the thing to which they refer, a whirring blade with a precise function which is not self-slaughter. It is a tale of congruities and incongruities, perhaps spoiled by this excrescent commentary which I may learn to omit.
Two days later, she adds another.
A woman is sitting in Vidal Sassoon’s salon, the Bond Street one. She is having her long hair, which she has always had, shorn into one of those smooth, swinging cuts, like blades in their precise edges and points. Two young men are working together on the nape of her neck. Her feet are surrounded by shanks and coils and wisps and tendrils of what until recently was her body. It sifts, it is soft, it pricks between her collar and her skin. One man leans over her and holds the two points of her new hair down, dragged down, to her jaw. He hurts her. If she tries to look up, he gives her a little push down again, which hurts her. The other works above the vertebrae of her naked nape with his pointed shears. She can hear the sound of hair on blade: a silky rasping. He nicks her skin with his points. He hurts her. She is almost sure that the small hurts are deliberately inflicted. Over her neck the two talk. “Look at that one then, look at her strut, she thinks she’s the bee’s knees, the cat’s whiskers and she’s a walking disaster, look at that clump he’s done at the back, like a great bubo all bulging and she can’t see it, she can’t see it jiggle and wiggle as she walks, she thinks she looks delicious, he told her so, he held the mirror at the right angle, so she couldn’t see what a godawful mess he had made, cutting higher and higher trying to make it better and now there’s nothing left to cut, only a gob on the back of her lumpy head.” They laugh. The woman under their hands tries to look up and is jerked down. She thinks, I will always remember this, but doesn’t know why; there are many humiliations, many disasters, why will she always remember this one? They let her head up. She sees her face through tears. The line is like a knife along her jaw. They tell her she looks lovely. All the women in the room have the same cut and all look lovely in the same way, except those who don’t. When she moves her head, the curtain of her hair swings and re-forms into its perfect edge. Her neck is naked. She gives the two a tip, though she would like not to. Her hair looks good. Does she?
This is a distinct improvement on “I went to the bathroom”: it has no “I” although it is a true story, and a story about Frederica. It gives her a quite disproportionate aesthetic pleasure, both because the words do not immediately nauseate her, and because she has somehow got it right, has pinned something down. (As the young men had her pinned down, she thinks, wondering if this is part of the pleasure.) The incident had rankled in her memory but is now pleasing and shapely. It gains something from being next to, but not part of, the cut-ups, the bacon-sheer, Nietzsche, Blake, and The Divided Self.
XV
October 1965
The extra-mural class is in full swing. Frederica is teaching Dostoevski and Thomas Mann, Kafka and Sartre. John Ottokar has not signed up for the current session, nor has he said anything to Frederica about this. Most of the rest of the class are there, at ease with each other now, knowing where to look for a response. Couples have formed, jealousies have deepened. Jude Mason has not returned, though his hippopotamus-grey skin can be seen shining under the red lights of the life-class studio at the Samuel Palmer School, and postcards with Nietzschean quotations appear in Frederica’s pigeonhole there. Leo has made a friend at school who also lives in the square: a tall black boy with a broad gentle face, whose name is Clement Agyepong; he has a brother called Athanasius, a mother who is a nurse on night duty, and an occasional father, who “sells things.” The Agyepongs are second-generation English, whose parents came from Ghana. Frederica likes Clement. Clement belongs to a gang of small boys who race around the square and are suspected of ringing door bells and running away, of twisting off windscreen wipers, nicking milk bottles and vandalising the window-boxes which are beginning to appear on the more gentrified houses, which have new white paint and new brass knockers, which are occasionally unscrewed. Frederica feels an emotion about Clement that she dare not describe to anyone. She is pleased that he and Leo really like each other, two boys playing and talking together. She is pleased that she herself likes Clement so much, laughs at his jokes, listens to his stories. She is pleased that her son has a black friend who is a friend. She is also pleased because before Clement was Leo’s friend, Leo had been knocked over by-accident-on-purpose once or twice, playing in the square. Dinky cars had gone out and had not come back. His tricycle disappeared and mysteriously re-appeared, without its bell, without the rubber treads on its pedals. These things worry Frederica. She fought her own battles at school, was bashed, bitten, tripped and torn. This is normal. But she always felt safe walking to school in the village as a small child, or riding into Blesford on the bus as a larger one. She wants to see Hamelin Square as an urban village, but it is not. It is less safe. She has not begun to imagine how much less safe she is—along with her contemporaries—going to feel it is. Urban fear in 1965 is a sprout, no more. She is more afraid of Nigel’s solicitors finding out about the bicycle and the Dinky toys. Her bruised and tearful son, she thinks, wiping eyes and knees, could be cantering in the paddock on Sooty. Or being tortured by horrid sprogs in shorts in some prep school locker-room, she thinks, more darkly, offering home-made scones and jam to Clement, and reading The Tale of Mr. Tod to both boys.
Clement is collecting wood for the bonfire. It is traditional to have a Guy Fawkes bonfire on the earthy tip in the middle of Hamelin Square. The boys rush around to local shops, cadging vegetable crates and broken chairs. Too much cardboard is bad, Clement tells Agatha and Frederica, it flares up and flakes all over, you need wood that will burn steady. Nothing like car-seats that will stink, either, he says, good wood. The fathers, middle-class and working-class, bring contributions. One night the whole collection is stolen in the small hours, and never recovered, though expeditionary forces are sent out to inspect rival bonfires on local bombed sites and football fields. The collecting starts again and guards are mounted, little boys in the daytime, the odd lounging man in the dark. Leo is excited. He does not know what the bonfire will be but it fills his imagination with light on the night sky. He is desolated to find that the great day occurs in fact in the middle of one of his now regular weekend visits to Bran House. He tells Frederica he won’t go. This is the first time he has made any demur about his movements between his parents. He comes back from Bran House white-faced and solemn, and says nothing of what he has done or said there. Frederica never asks him, and hopes that those in Bran House maintain the same discretion. She does not like to imagine Pippy Mammott or Olive and Rosalind asking probing questions about the William Blake School, or Clement, or John Ottokar, who has not been introduced to Leo, but has been seen by him, once or twice, sitting with Frederica—only sitting—after Leo has been safely tucked up in bed. Frederica does not want to know what Leo is being asked, and this deep desire for ignorance keeps her quiet. But she imagines, and is afraid. Out of what Leo might inadvertently say could be made the evidence on which he will be taken from her.
Leo says: I won’t go there when it’s the bonfire. I won’t. Frederica says: You must. Leo says: I won’t. I will see this bonfire, I will be there. Frederica says she expects there will be a bonfire at Bran House he can see. Leo works himself up into a breathless rage, wheezing and squealing, reminding Frederica of her father and herself. She says, “I can’t ask your father.” Leo says, “You can. You just won’t.” “Daren’t,” says Frederica. “You hate me, you don’t love me, you don’t want me,” shrieks her son in his wrath. Frederica telephones Arnold Begbie, who replies, after an exchange of letters, that he is told there will be an excellent bonfire, a positive beacon, in Herefordshire. Leo has another tantrum and ceases to speak. He does not speak for twenty-four hours. The next evening, Frederica comes in with his supper to hear him speaking on the telephone.
“You told me. You
told me how to make the number. In case I ever wanted you, you said, and I do want you. I want to go the bonfire here in vis square. We’re building it.”
He listens.
“No, Mummy doesn’t want me to stay here, she says I can’t, she says she doesn’t want me.”
He listens.
“I know. It would be nice there, too. But I’ve set my heart on vis bonfire.”
Frederica admires his phrase. I’ve set my heart.
“I told you, she doesn’t want me to stay. Otherwise, I wouldn’t need to telephone, would I? She isn’t reasonable, you know she isn’t. She doesn’t understand how much I really need to see vis bonfire with my friends. She thinks you won’t understand I only want to see vis bonfire, but I know you will understand. You do, don’t you?”
He listens.
“So I can stay? Thank you. I knew you’d understand. I’ll find her. You’ll talk to her, you’ll tell her. Just tell her. Here she is.”
“Frederica?”
“Yes.”
“What is all this? What have you been doing to him? Why can’t he see this bonfire he’s set his heart on?”
“I thought you would want to hold to your weekend.”
“And have him think I’m a tyrant. Weekends can be changed, can’t they? If he wants something so much, he ought to be able to ask for it, without you riding roughshod over him. Can’t you have him, or something? What are you doing?”
“Of course I can have him. I can always have him. I just—”
“I expect you had something else on. As far as I’m concerned, he’s welcome to stay for the bonfire. I’ll have him the weekend before, that suits me quite well, I’ve got things in Holland … Never mind that. Same arrangement, weekend earlier. Put him back on.”
“Thank you,” says Leo. “I knew you’d make it all right.”
The phone makes a gratified quacking.
Frederica goes crossly into the kitchen.
Leo comes back from his next visit to Bran House with his red hair shorn and shaved, so that his pale crown shows through. Frederica is horrified. She catches him up in her arms—he clings, as he always does, tight, choking tight. She says, “Oh, what have they done to you?”
“Pippy said I looked like a little girl. Like a fairy, she said, or one of those hippies. She said she’d make a little man of me.”
“Do you like it?”
“Not much. I feel a bit cold. I fink I look a bit silly. Clement’s hair’s short, though. His is curly. Mine was all floppy. I ought to have gone to the hairdresser, Pippy said.”
“You don’t like the hairdresser.”
“No. I don’t like those clipper things on my neck. Pippy did it with scissors and a razor. She said, ‘Admire my handiwork.’ Everyone did admire it. But it is a bit cold and I look a bit sort of skull-like. But it’ll grow, won’t it?”
“It will.”
Clement and Athanasius, known as Thano, have also made a Guy, which they push around the local streets in a broken pushchair. “Penny for the Guy,” they say at the mouth of the local Tube, at the entry to Hamelin Square. The body of the Guy is made from an old stained, tea-leaf-coloured pillow, clothed in a green-and-orange shirt covered with parrots and palm trees. It has a limp pair of pink rubber gloves pinned to its “shoulders,” and a pair of diminutive infant’s plimsolls, cracked and holed, propped at the base of its lolling trunk. It has a paper mask-face, done on bright orange shiny paper with black felt-tips, round eyes with long, spiky cartoon lashes, a bravado curly moustache. This is tied to a punctured football, on top of which sits an old baseball cap, with the legend SUNRISE RISE AND SHINE! on its brow. Agatha, confronted by this vision at the mouth of the Tube, studies it critically.
“OK, I’ll give you a sixpence, because you have done some work. Someone tried to get money out of me for a Daz box with a smiley-face drawn on it. But I can’t bear your Guy’s horrible armlessness and leglessness. Bring him round this evening and we’ll see what we can do.” Clement and Thano duly appear with their creaking conveyance, and Agatha helps them to stuff and stitch old tights with waste paper—the Guy’s new legs have a certain androgynous curvaceousness, and his arms are plump and solid. Agatha tells Frederica that she was filled with pity and terror at the sight of the dangling gloves, “like parody thalidomide sufferers.” She hates the whole business of Guys, she says, the whole idea of celebrating the burning of a minor conspirator, all those centuries ago. I know, says Frederica, but I remember what fun it all was, after the war, when I was little, when we had fireworks again. I don’t want them not to have what we had. And then you think, how dreadful, a man’s fingers and innards all bursting and sizzling, the pain, how can we? I know, says Agatha.
The characters of Flight North have reached what appears to be an impassable wall of icy rock, sheer, glassy, frozen, louring. They are based in the Last Village, a tiny community which lives in ice huts around a very small geyser in a very small lake in the midst of a frozen waste. In the depths of the lake, in the warm waters, swim shoals of coral-coloured shrimp and steel-blue darting fish, which the people eat sparingly, on certain feast days only. They are globular people, with lovely bracelets of shining fat round their wrists and elbows and knees; they have rose-red faces with round apple cheeks, framed in furry hoods made from the skins of bears and foxes and martens; they look cheerful, but are not. The company of travellers or fugitives has been augmented considerably: they have acquired an ancient, draggled Thrush, who speaks when he chooses, which is not often; a Crow, whose speech is understood only by Artegall, who does not entirely trust it; a strange hound, grey and frequently invisible, which Saskia believes will turn out to be a Wolf; and a strange creature found by Mark in a cave on a moor, which sometimes appears to be a squat toad-like minor dragon, and sometimes is clearly only a lump of flinty stone with glinting silica in the ledges under what appear to be its “brows.” It is about the size of a large tom-cat, and in its stony form heavy. Mark, who mostly has to carry it, is often ready to abandon it, but the Thrush says its moment will come, and it has various useful gifts, like the power to start fires in wet wood. The most recent recruit is called Fraxinius, and moves in and out of resembling a human being as Dracosilex moves from stone to reptile. Fraxinius is one and a half times as tall as the men of the party, and skeletally thin and gangling. Everything about him is pale buffs and browns and straw colours—his eyes, his caramel-coloured teeth, his ivory lips, his bushy hay-coloured brows, his barley-sugar smoking eyes, his shoulder-length, knotted, mud-coloured hair “like a hillside which has lain under snow.” He can appear to resemble a broom, or a besom, or a clothes pole, and moves, when he can be seen to move, slow and creaking, but when he is not watched, or seen out of the corner of an eye, he appears to bundle along weightlessly, like tangled straw on the wind. The Last Village suits neither Fraxinius nor Dracosilex. Fraxinius spends his time slumped like a broken ladder in a corner of a hut, growing paler and drier in the smoke from the perpetual central hearth. Dracosilex squats like a boring stone. The Thrush has its head under its wing. The Crow reports that the inhabitants of the Last Village are building a great fire on the mountain ledge near the black ice-wall of the escarpment.
Clement and Thano have taken to listening to the story. Saskia originally objected to this but has come round—they share not her private night-time narration but a kind of bumper recapitulation and—almost always—dramatic Shock—which is narrated on Sunday afternoons. Agatha says that the requirement of the Sunday Shock is formally very satisfying, no doubt like constructing episodes of novels like The Idiot or Dombey and Son. The story does not usually have anything to do with the daily lives of its narrator or listeners, but in this case the Bale Fire has been growing pari passu with the bonfire in the mud in the centre of Hamelin Square.
Agatha sits on the sofa, in a black velvet top like a mediaeval page’s surcoat, and a pair of silvery knitted trousers. Her dark hair is loose and falls about her face. Saskia is curled up against
her. Clement and Thano sit side by side on the floor by the fire. Frederica and Leo are in an armchair.
“Mark and Artegall offered to help with the collection of wood, but the villagers refused sullenly, saying their fire was their own handiwork. They travelled long distances in search of the wood, which had to be dead and dry; they dragged it back on rough sledges they made from poles tied together with hide. There were not many trees on the Grüner Waste; what there were were stunted thorn bushes, tenacious of life, leaning along the wind which always blew through their fingers, full of ice crystals, which settled there like an encrustation of diamonds.
“Dol Throstle made friends with an old village woman called Throgga, who lay muffled and wheezing in a heap of skins by the fire, toasting fragments of goat-cheese in its embers, or drowsing. None of the villagers talked to Throgga; they brought her beakers of water, and sometimes the leg of a roasted rat or rabbit, but they treated her otherwise as if she was not there. For this reason, perhaps, she was glad to talk to Dol Throstle, and told her tales about the Bale Fire.
