A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  She remembered John Ottokar’s legs. His double face on the window, his and Paul’s.

  She did, also, remember the first weeks of colour television. Not because of Wilkie’s words about it, but because of the colour. She sat before it on the end of her mattress, or curled on her side and stared into it. What she remembered of it at sixty was:

  Tennis on green grass with white figures and the geometry of the court contained and constantly in movement in the geometry of the box.

  A programme which watched a hand drawing, which watched the movements of eye to object, of hand on paper, as black and white unreal edges and contours and shadows grew out of nothing, and the photographed face became the analysed, placed, disposed pattern of marks.

  An educational programme on the uses of a microscope, with prepared slides in gels of aquamarine and violet.

  The first colour transmissions of snooker. The gleam of the pink ball, the perfect sky-blue of the blue ball, the trajectories of vermilion, the ivory-white of the cue-ball, the eye-expanding green field of the table.

  An early film by a herpetologist in the Amazon who was able, with colour, to show a lethal bushmaster camouflaged in decaying forest debris, a golden poisonous toad amongst glittering water-drops on glossy quivering leaves, the flap of the blue wings of the brilliant Morphos in the canopy, the swarming of army ants, the perfect disguise of the bee orchid ...

  Also the plumes of smoke and towers of flame in the rainforest in Vietnam.

  These she remembered, when her own clothes and furniture had gone from her, reviews she had written, lunches she had eaten, hopes she had entertained.

  Most of all, from that time, she remembered a woman, to whom reading had come as easy as flying to a sparrow, trying to teach an articulate eight-year-old who stared at simple words as though they were mazes or traps. She remembered, as they sat together, she and Leo, how in her own childhood the words had seemed to dance into meaning as the elements in a kaleidoscope danced into geometrical forms. She remembered, like the taste of honey, or vanilla, the pleasure of mastering ch, qu, wh, and quickly after, its and it’s, who’s and whose, the delightful logical order of it, the sense that her own mind already knew these things which were there like a carpet to be unrolled and danced on. She could not quite imagine what went on in the head of the clever boy who could not read. What did he see, or not see, what connections did he not make? She tried to think analogically—her own sums at school had always gone wrong, she could not get the decimal point right by thinking, though she had got reasonably good at placing it by simple common sense, in adult life. But she couldn’t get her imagination inside what he couldn’t see. She couldn’t help. The school said it would sort itself out, and she did not believe them. Her own head became full of stopped-off electric currents. She could do it. She couldn’t pass the capacity to do it to him. She could teach almost anyone to see in a poem something that they hadn’t known was there. But she couldn’t see what Leo didn’t see.

  What do you remember of 1968? Snakes and snooker and a set white face, with a frown, and tears brimming in proud eyes.

  Chapter 5

  Jacqueline Winwar went to see Lyon Bowman at the end of the summer term about doing post-doctoral work in his lab. He was working on the visual cortex of kittens and pigeons. He was in his early forties, a brightly-coloured man, with a lot of shiny dark hair, long lashes over large brown eyes, round cheeks with a red-apple redness, and a full mouth, which could also fairly be described as red.

  Jacqueline said she wanted to work on the physiology of memory. She wanted to find out how the neurones changed after learning had taken place, how memories were preserved in the cells. She had an idea for an experiment—a series of experiments—with snails, which had giant neurones that were relatively easy to dissect and observe. She thought it would be possible to do a kind of Pavlovian training on snails. She thought, she said, that they could be both habituated to shocks (as Kandel’s work with Aplysia was designed to show) and also sensitised to good and bad flavours in their food. She wanted to be able to measure pre- and post-synapsal changes after learning. She wanted to study the neurotransmitters, and the electrical signals.

  Lyon Bowman said he didn’t really believe you could train a snail. It was true, the neurones were promising. If she was going to measure action potentials she would need sophisticated maths. How good was her maths? He had the look of a man who assumed that a woman naturalist had probably underestimated the problems of changing to hard laboratory science.

  Jacqueline said she knew a lot about snails, and had kept them, and practised already on training them to eat and refuse certain foods. She thought she had evidence. She handed him her records. She said that the maths was a difficulty, but could be learned.

  “Why study memory this way?” said Bowman. “Why not follow Jacobson and suppose that the way to study memory is to study the molecules of the RNA, or Ungar’s idea that it’s communicated in protein chains?”

  Jacqueline said that she had always been interested in Hebb’s idea that the remembering brain actually constructed new links, new reinforced joins between stimulated neurones. He’d seen the brain as a system of flashing lights, building electric links which caused the flashes to be more definite and more prolonged. He’d had that idea in 1949 when it wasn’t possible to study how neurones and synapses behaved. But it was now—in simple ways—beginning to be possible. She wanted to see if he was right. If the brain grew and shaped itself. “And how.”

  Jacqueline continued to explain, citing various elegant experiments of the Japanese neuro-ethologist Hagiwara, and J. Z. Young’s work on the eyes and mind of the octopus. She was describing a world in which she wanted to be, in what she thought was the appropriate formal and academic manner. Lyon Bowman was shuffling the papers on his desk. He said that no one in his lab was working on snails, particularly, and mentioned San Diego and Plymouth.

  Jacqueline heard herself say

  “It would be an interesting physiological experiment to find out what it is in people’s eyes that shows you they aren’t really interested in you. It’s like photographs. There’s a moment when the face dies, and if you click the shutter just after it, the photo’s dead. I don’t know what it is. Eyes are eyes, and if they’re alive, they’re alive. How do we read that they’re looking or not looking?”

  “I see. I’m not looking at you. Or rather, I’m looking at you, but not attending to you.”

  “Yes. And it’s my life we’re discussing.”

  “Why should I have to worry about your life more than the life of any other well-qualified—better qualified—post-doctoral candidate?”

  “No reason. For you. I—I can feel you thinking, I’m a dull good competent student. I’m not. I’m obsessed. I work. I want to do real science. I want to do your sort of science.”

  “Obsessive women make bad members of teams, in my narrow experience.”

  “They don’t get much chance. I wasn’t really asking you to take me because I’m obsessed. Just to see me.”

  “I see you.”

  He laughed.

  “Another thing, Miss Winwar. Women often vanish with half their work done, to attend to their own physiology. How do I know you won’t?”

  “You don’t. But I won’t.”

  “Have you a boy-friend?”

  “No.”

  She could see him not asking, why not. She waited. They had been playing some game with eyes and other minute, involuntary movements and probably with smells, she suspected, that she couldn’t have played if she’d been a man, and also wouldn’t have had to play, of course. She tried to see her sex—with some success—as a problem and an obstacle, to be solved and surmounted. She thought, she probably had her place, her space in the lab, unless some better candidate turned up and erased the impression she’d made, the memories that had somehow or other arranged themselves in the soft grey matter behind Lyon Bowman’s now smiling eyes.

  She thought, we shan’t ever
be able to sort out all of what happens when two people talk to each other.

  She thought, each of us can put a building-block into the wall of understanding it.

  In the event, Lyon Bowman offered her the place, for the autumn of 1968.

  Cedar Mount

  Hospital for the care of the Insane and the Mentally Ill

  Calverley

  From Kieran Quarrell,

  Senior Psychiatrist, to Elvet Gander, M.D., Psychoanalyst

  Dear Elvet

  I got yr letters and yr paper on the Spirit’s Tigers, for wch many thanks. I was agreeably surprised at yr level tone in reporting all these spiritual stirrings. You don’t go overboard, as some of yr profession lately have done, but you don’t automatically reject. I remain sceptical about spiritual journeys to hell (or heaven) in general, but I don’t think filling people up with pills and inducing vacancy is the answer either. Part of the problem you and I are both dealing with is that genuine spiritual seekers (whatever the “spirit” is) do bear some resemblance to the truly batty whose wiring has short-circuited. We can say that, even if we aren’t at all clear—who is, really?—what the desirable definitions of “sane” and “normal” are.

  I’ve been thinking about all this—and yr paper was opportune—because I’ve got a patient who troubles me and might interest you. And indeed he might interest yr Tigers, since he presents what are certainly some sort of “spiritual” problems.

  He’s called Lamb. Josh Lamb, he calls himself. He’s about forty, with a North Yorkshire accent of an educated kind. He’s impressive to look at. Tall, with a mass of very straight bright white hair, long lined face, big, wide-set dark eyes under dark brows and lashes. An hairy man. He wears a beard, straight and bristling, like a bush. His beard isn’t white, it’s multi-coloured, blacks and browns and reds.

  He’s cagey about his life, and sometimes claims to have no memories, or to be unable to distinguish memories from lying visions sent by the devil. (He tells you these things pleasantly and reasonably.) He’s been a teacher, so much is clear, also a verger, and a hospital porter. He’s also spent long periods as a tramp, doing odd jobs in farms, and begging—like a sadhu with a begging-bowl (his own analogy). This isn’t his first stay in Cedar Mount. He’s been in and out; his first stay dates back to before I came here.

  He presents auditory and visual hallucinations; he goes through phases when he can do nothing but lie flat on his back and weep silently. He seems to forget to eat and he doesn’t make a fuss, he just doesn’t eat. When the hallucinations are strong, he stands in a corner, with his back to the wall, arguing and gesticulating. Or bowing, repeatedly and rapidly. Sometimes he insists on wearing a wide-brimmed oilskin hat, and becomes threatening when it is taken away. (I don’t know why it ever is. It calms him. I make them give it back.)

  It isn’t easy to establish any personal history for him. He says his parents are dead. He says he simply doesn’t remember them. Sometimes he cunningly ascribes this loss of memory to electric shock therapy, which is half-plausible. Why am I so sure he does remember his parents?

  I ask how old he was when they died. Mostly he says he doesn’t remember, but once, when he was perturbed and haunted, and his guard was down, he said “Eleven.” I asked on that occasion if both parents had died together. He replied—I took it down as he said it, exactly—“Oh no. Absolutely not together. But at related times, not very far apart.” I couldn’t get any more out of him. He has a way of looking at you as though he’s offered you a vital clue, on a plate, but you are much too much of a fool to follow it up. It isn’t offensive. He isn’t offensive. He’s rather dignified.

  He was in one of my groups, for a time. What I called the sticky group. The group full of bellyachers and obstinate mutes and moaners. They could all simply glare and sulk for a whole session if I abdicated the “leading” rôle. He didn’t—doesn’t—have that disconnectedness that goes with classic schizophrenia. I noticed early on that he was a noticing man. He knew, often before I did myself, where the next outburst was coming from, who was simmering, who was upset. So when I abdicated, he took charge. No, I’ll correct that. The others gave him charge, they turned to him. I thought, in the early days, maybe it was just that he looked enigmatic. And clean, spick and span, unlike many of the others. There was a woman whose husband had bashed her to jelly and who cried a lot. Another woman, superficially no-nonsense, a great avoider of depth or difficulty, kept having a go at the jelly-woman, implying she’d asked for it. I was going to write “Lamb suddenly said—” but actually, that would be a mis-statement. She said to Lamb “What do you think, what would you do?”

  And he said “You must give up the arrogance of supposing evil is your fault, or begins with you. It’s out there in the world. It’s active. It got you. I say simply, get out of its way. Forget blame, that’s of the least consequence.” And she thanked him, as though he’d given her something precious. You could argue, of course, that an idea of active evil, for which no one is responsible, is actually quite dangerous. He gave it, so to speak, a consoling gloss. I always refuse to suggest particular courses of action, of course. That is emphatically not part of my role within the group. So they turn to him, and he obliges. He does it pretty well. But not as though he’s involved himself. Maybe he does it well for that reason. That’s his role. It may be part of my role to put his pronouncements in question, but it makes me uneasy.

  He had an appointment today, for his regular assessment. He says he wants to leave the hospital, but when I ask where he’d go, what he’d do, he simply smiles and says

  “I would say, the Lord will direct me, but you might take that for a sign of madness, and I do wish very much to leave this place.” I asked why he should think that this would be taken as a sign of madness. He replied that St. Joan had been burned, but also sanctified, for seeing and hearing things. Whereas now, as he pointed out agreeably enough, we shut them up.

  He is reading St. Augustine and Kierkegaard. I asked him why these two, and he said they knew evil. I asked him what evil was. He replied “Roast lamb.” He likes puns. He says Cedar Mount is transfiguring him into a walrus. This I think is to do with blubber. Largactil tends to make the patients fat, and also perhaps there’s a reference to blubbing. (He weeps frequently.) On the other hand his education might not include that prep-school locution.

  Dr. Shriver wrote in his case-notes that Lamb’s conversation was inconsequential, not to say meaningless. He was trying hard to be chatty, at the assessment, because he wants to get out. I asked him if he felt he had a religious vocation. He said “Many are called but few are chosen. I was despised and rejected.”

  Why? said I. “Because I told them I could see Christ’s blood stream in the firmament,” said he, composedly. “It does, you know,” he added, pleasantly. Again that sense of being handed a clue on a plate, and proving inadequate. (Me. I suppose it’s good for me, to feel inadequate so often. As long as it’s balanced by occasional self-approval for possible adequacy.)

  I tried to pursue the topic of St. Augustine. I don’t know much about the Saint—a ferocious old African predestinarian, I vaguely believe, courtesy of the excellent novels of Anthony Burgess. Lamb said he (St. A.) had betrayed his Master. Jesus? I asked. No, said Lamb, the prophet Mani who had understood the true nature of the world. The true nature of evil, he glossed that statement. Augustine betrayed him, he said again. The Manichees were in the Truth and he abandoned them for milky Christianity. (Milky? What does a good Freudian like yr good self make of that?) He then said something I couldn’t follow or record about how there would be understanding of those things, also of “the testament of my father who burns like the cherubim in heaven or the fiends in hell, he will show the way ...”

  I asked if he meant his real father. He said “What do you mean by real?” and wouldn’t say any more.

  He has no record of violence—though he does create, so to speak, an atmosphere of the possibility of violence. You get religious language abo
ut blood and fire every Sunday in church. No one thinks vicars are odd or should be shut up.

  He deserves respect, I feel instinctively.

  If he was amongst your Tigers he might (I am being fanciful, of course, but) discover who or what is speaking to him. He says no one is. (He wants out of here, he knows he has to look normal.) But I watched him listening-in (without letting-on that I was watching) and something was talking to him—from the region of the air-vent—all through our conversation. He wasn’t letting-on, and I wasn’t letting-on.

  I think he deserves better than a bed in a ward and the company of the amiable and disgusting mad.