A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

He handed his heavy glasses to Frederica.

  “I suggest you look at the gin and tonic.”

  She looked first at his eyes. They were very pale blue, the pupils huge, the balls rounded out. He smiled.

  She put on the glasses, warm from his skin.

  The gin and tonic was cobalt caverns, was vertiginous staircases, was drowning in blue Arctic seas, was ink and water. It swayed her stomach and made her breathless.

  “You don’t see what he sees,” said Elvet Gander. “You have normal eyes.”

  Frederica took off the glasses and handed them back to the psychologist.

  “It was like being under the ice-cap.”

  “That’s why I suggested the gin and tonic.”

  Wilkie came over. He said to Pinsky

  “In the 50s, I repeated the experiment of the reversing lenses for a week. The rehabituation was more nauseating than I could have believed. Then I did a series of experiments with coloured lenses. Saturation viewing. Ten days per colour.”

  “I read about it.”

  “Have you ever thought of trying different colours?”

  “I like blue. Blue is prescribed.”

  Elvet Gander took hold of Frederica’s elbow in the lift.

  “I have a word or two to say to you.”

  “I must go home to my son.”

  “I know you don’t want to hear my words. A few words won’t hurt you.”

  “You know better than that.”

  He grinned. They walked towards the way out, round the television centre’s apparently endless circular passages. They stood in its courtyard in the dusk, and Gander gestured up at it.

  “It always appears to me to be a defensive fortification. Walled round, to keep the world at bay. Both Broadcasting House and this new cylinder seem to me to be like the towers in Tolkien—full of internal passages, with red blinking eyes on top. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. This is an inward-looking domain. All the glass walls face inwards.”

  “It talks to the whole world.”

  “It emits thought-rays and disembodied voices, and phantom faces, very true, very true. Many of my patients are made profoundly uneasy by that. Madmen knew about radio waves long before Edison and Marconi. You do not allow me to speak of the Heavenly Twins, Frederica.”

  “My private life is my own business.”

  “Ah, but no twin has a private life. And Zag’s private life is my business.”

  Frederica turned to face him in the growing dark, in the red light of the sodium lamps on the navy blue White City sky.

  “Please. Leave me alone. I don’t like—all the religious things Paul—Zag—the twins—are caught up in. It isn’t my kind of thing. I don’t like it.”

  “Listen to yourself, woman. How can a human being use such flaccid language about spiritual powers? Something extraordinary is brewing—a huge change in human vision, a whole new access of spiritual power—and you think you can turn it away with ‘l don’t like it’ and ‘not my kind of thing.’ ” He mimicked her, not inaccurately, still smiling. His bald crown had red and golden lights on the greyish flesh.

  “Maybe feeble little ordinary words are the best way,” said Frederica. She shivered. Her body felt flimsy. Gander had that kind of electrical field the charismatic do have. He bristled with significance and magnetism at once attractive and repellent. Not a wizard, she thought, a gnome. A Rumpelstiltskin gnome.

  “I know you mean well—”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t even think I mean well. You do think I may be right.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t want to think about it at all. All right? I want to go home to my son.”

  “You will have to think about it. You will need friends and allies.”

  “I shall try to look after myself.”

  “So small, so alone, so unaware,” said Gander.

  A black taxi drew up. Frederica got in.

  “May I come with you?”

  “I am very sure you aren’t headed towards my bit of south London.” Frederica slammed the door. He stood there, smiling, the little mirrors on his shirt glinting in the headlights, which illuminated his moon-head, swept on, and left it darkling.

  Chapter 11

  Jacqueline’s working-space was in a cubicle in the Physiology laboratories in the Evolution Tower. Her very small, cellular window looked out on to the inner curve of the spiral, too high to see grass, too low to see sky. Lyon Bowman liked silence and privacy for his own work, so she was boxed-in with egg-box baffling partitions, which further reduced her ration of daylight. Her work was beginning to show results. She had various preparations of the suboesophageal ganglion of Helix aspersa, exposing the giant neurones, into which, through delicate micro-pipettes, she was injecting, alternately, potassium chloride and salt solution. There were problems with the chloride blocking the pipette. She had constructed a primitive version of a voltage clamp, and was measuring the resistance of the membranes of the cell by passing brief electrical currents through them. There had been many failures in the dissection of the cells, which were covered with layer upon layer of connective tissue, all of which had to be stripped away, since the membrane could not otherwise be penetrated without breaking the pipette or bursting the cell.

  The fragments of living matter responded with rhythmic spikes of electrical activity. Hodgkin and Huxley, in the early 1950s, had suspected the existence of ion channels in the surface of cells. Through these holes in the membrane—which was more a thick glutinous, tensile oil than a film—they suggested, the chemical messengers permeated the cells, conducting the electricity, which was life, which, Jacqueline believed, was thought. Her pinned-down brains were communicating messages to severed feelers and feet. Somewhere here was the place where mind and matter were one thing.

  She had had the idea that it might be possible to locate the electrochemical moment of a memory if she could train her snails to learn, in a Pavlovian way, to avoid certain stimuli and seek out others. There might be changes in cells which had learned pleasure or pain, greed or avoidance. So besides the spread ghost-snails of the “preparations” she had boxes of live snails in various experimental living-quarters. She had wondered, at first, whether the creatures could be trained to respond to a bright light. She had tried shining a very bright light into their boxes, and accompanying this with an electrical shock. This had not worked very well, partly because of the difficulty of controlling the snails’ excursions outside their shells. She was interested anyway in whether the creatures responded differently at times of year when they would normally have been hibernating, and at times of year when they would have been vigorously mating and foraging.

  She decided it would be better to work with aversion-training in foodstuffs. She had various groups of snails who were encouraged to feed on carrot, and then given potato, some with an unpleasant taste added, some without. She had begun with mild doses of snail poison in the experimental group, which had frothed and convulsed and died. She had now started with a kind of cyanogenic glucoside, naturally found in plants they fed on, but in increased concentrations. This seemed to be working better. She had several circular plastic dishes with perforated floors, with a two-centimetre footbridge in the middle. “Trained” snails (slightly poisoned snails) avoided the half-dish containing potato. Untrained snails crawled everywhere. In principle. Sometimes they sat inside their shells, motionless but not dead.

  The idea was to be able to check the chemical messengers carrying the memory of poisoned potato, from neurone to ganglion to rasping lip. And this would be one tiny piece in the jigsaw which might show how what is not there, or its representations, inhabit the neurones and the synapses, the flow of currents and molecules round the brain and the body. Carrots, potatoes, the smell of a lover’s skin, or a child’s hair, the second law of thermodynamics, the howl of King Lear.

  Lyon Bowman came in from time to time, to see how Jacqueline was getting on. He admired her voltage clamp, and expressed an interest in the aversion-training
.

  “There’s that man, Ungar,” he said, “who trains rats to avoid darkness, with electric shocks. He thinks he’s on to a memory molecule he calls scotophobin. Fear of the dark. He thinks he can extract it, inject it into other rats, and get the same reaction. It’s a bit like the planaria, in my view. Dicey observations, dicey science. But in the end, you’ll have to look into mammal synapses.”

  “I know. I still have an intuition that Hebb was right. Learning strengthens connections. Or makes new ones. It feels right.”

  “You’re a bit in the dark here,” said Bowman, considering the gloom of Jacqueline’s box as though it was new to him. He always said that.

  “I know. And I’m scotophobic. I’m one of those people who slow down horribly in the winter months—I’m like my snails, I’m a born hibernator.”

  “Well, you can’t afford to indulge yourself in that sort of sensitivity in the competitive world we live in.”

  He was standing quite deliberately very close to her, crowding her against her bench.

  “You need time off. You need a change. I’m off to a conference on the visual cortex in Turin. Do you want to come along? The Department can support you. Meet a few new scientists. Get a little more sun, even in winter.”

  He put an arm briefly about her shoulder. Jacqueline had heard about Lyon Bowman’s conference invitations to women graduates. Like a cockerel in a farmyard, one woman had said, crossly, having locked her bedroom door and failed to advance her career. Jacqueline said “If I can get my experiments to a state where I can leave them.”

  “Good,” said Lyon Bowman. “You’ll like my new paper, it’s elegant. You can help with the slides. You don’t make mistakes.”

  In the aeroplane, he said very little. He sat beside her, and made calculations with his slide-rule. Galton could remember the whole slide-rule, Jacqueline said. He could call it up in his mind, and operate it. How can that work?

  Bowman laughed, pleasantly.

  She thought, for the first day of the conference, that she had been mistaken about his intentions. He had taken her along as an assistant, as he had said. They were in the same hotel, but not on the same floor. He introduced her to Italians, Americans, Germans. He praised her research to them. She drank a few glasses of Chianti, said good-night, and went to bed.

  An hour later, the door-handle turned. She thought of doing nothing, stood up, and opened it.

  “Here I am,” he said. He was in shirt and trousers. He smiled. “I hope you want me. I hope you’re expecting me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, at least let me in so we can discuss the matter in civilised privacy.”

  Jacqueline stepped aside. She sensed his impatience. The preliminaries bored him. Possibly, she thought, because he had gone through them so often. In which case, it was no big deal. For either of them. Was it?

  “I brought a bottle,” he said, with the same faintly detectable weariness at having to say anything.

  Jacqueline tried to think clearly. She was sleepy, and had eaten and drunk well, and what her mind said to her was, after all, why not? It was probably the quickest way of getting a good night’s sleep, her body said. The line of least resistance, her brain mocked. She sat down, on the edge of her bed.

  Bowman sat down beside her, took a swig from his bottle, and handed it to her.

  “I’ve been looking at you,” he said. “You don’t sell yourself. You don’t—” he sketched the exaggerated shape of a woman in the air of the hotel bedroom, with a hand which he then put on her breast. “You don’t dress to kill.”

  “No,” said Jacqueline.

  “You’ve got a sort of comfortable look. At ease with yourself. It’s very attractive, in a subtle way.”

  “Good,” said Jacqueline. “Good.”

  “You don’t say much.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “No. Do you know what you want to do? If you want me to go away, you’ve only got to speak. Contrary to what you’ve no doubt been told, I never force myself on the unwilling.”

  Jacqueline’s cheeks were hot and the skin of her neck was flaring. Lyon Bowman had a disconcerting skin-smell, partly acrid, partly hot, which she found at once repellent and irresistible. She moved her legs a little closer together, which had the unfortunate effect of making her feel a distinct tug and twitch of desire. She was damp. She put her hand over his on her breast. She thought in her head, OK, I’ll have this, I will have this, but he’s got to stop talking to me or I won’t be able to.

  She turned her face towards his, and moved her hand under his shirt. His skin was electric, also both repellent and attractive.

  “Magnetism,” she murmured.

  “What?” he said into her hair. He was stripping her nightshirt.

  “Magnetism. Sex as well as memory.”

  He laughed, and revealed her nakedness.

  “Very nice,” he said, staring brightly. “You got a lucky set of genes. Lovely firm muscles. What a beauty.”

  He stood up, still staring, and took off his own clothes. Jacqueline looked away. His mouth was red, the tip of his erection was redder. She closed her eyes.

  He was not in a hurry, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He remarked in a practical voice that she was “tight” and added “Surely this isn’t your first time, however old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-nine, and no it isn’t.” She said “Put the light out.”

  “Very few women,” said Lyon Bowman, “like doing it in the light. Even little brown scotophobes like you.”

  It was the nearest he came to an endearment. Jacqueline recognised this for what it was, a sort of honesty.

  He touched Jacqueline’s body into a whiplash of tension and pleasure. He turned her world on the tip of his finger on her clitoris, and she arched, and gasped, and waited for what must come. He said

  “I suppose you are on the Pill. They all are, these days.”

  “No,” she managed to say. “I’m not.”

  “Shit. You should have said. Now, have I. Did I?”

  He whipped himself out of her, and she trembled, and her body ached and opened. She could hear and feel him fumbling in his pockets. “Have I, did I?”

  She heard the sound of the rubber being opened, the twang of its appliance.

  “You should have said,” he said. He added “I suppose you don’t need to be on the Pill.”

  Jacqueline did not rise to this. Her body most desperately needed him to finish what he had interrupted.

  “Never so good with these things,” the professional voice muttered in her ear. “Now, where were we? Back to where we were ...”

  It took time to retrieve the rhythm, and it was to his credit, Jacqueline thought, as her orgasm racked her and his followed, that he could do it at all.

  As he came to his climax he cried out, in a kind of groan, “Ah, good girl, you good girl.”

  Like a rider encouraging a horse, she thought.

  The phrase was to haunt her.

  The “Non-Maths” Group met every fortnight to study maths. It was one of Wijnnobel’s institutions, and he himself was a regular attender. “Non-Maths” was short for “Mathematics for non-mathematicians.” The group met in a classroom in the Maths Tower (a pyramid on a cylinder on a cube) and adjourned often enough to a pub. The idea was to have a forum where the mathematical problems of non-mathematicians could be aired and solved. Marcus Potter was always there, sometimes accompanied by Jacob Scrope the professor in the computing department, and, more recently, by John Ottokar, who wrote the programmes which churned slowly through the great machines.

  Both Jacqueline and Luk Lysgaard-Peacock depended on Marcus and John Ottokar for the number-crunching, the conversion into equations, of the traced electrical spikes of action potential in Jacqueline’s case, and for the complicated and elegant models of variables in population genetics in Luk’s. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock was a competent mathematician, though not a brilliant one. He liked to submit h
is ideas to Marcus in the pub and watch the long pale fingers sketch diagrams, connecting webs, to represent his own intuitions. Jacqueline was not a competent mathematician. Marcus had had to give her a crash course in differential equations. John Ottokar was teaching her to write her own programmes in FORTRAN. In later years, when computer screens glimmered and ticked on every student desk, it was hard to remember these heroic years of the huge humming machines, full of transistors, emitting monstrous empilings of print-out, and fed by punched cards. To get their sums done, both Luk and Jacqueline had to wait—for hours, or days—for their turn on the computer, which could be wasted if a mistake had been made in the programming, in the recording of the data, in the way the problem was put.

  Another regular visitor to the Non-Maths Group was Vincent Hodgkiss, the philosopher, who was writing a study of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dislike of the mathematical logic he had himself excelled in. Hodgkiss was a quiet man, whose appearance people found they misremembered, as though he was not quite embodied, a ghost in a machine. He was certainly short, and certainly balding, his remaining hair wispy, of an indeterminate colour. He sometimes wore spectacles, and sometimes didn’t. His voice, when he spoke, was unexpectedly plummy, full of Oxford vowels. He liked to sit under the window, with his back to it and his face in shadow. An observant man.

  Jacqueline continued to be irritated by Lyon Bowman’s phrasing. “Good girl.” She heard in her mind, over and over, “Good girl.” He had reminded her that at twenty-nine she was hardly any longer a girl, was indeed a woman who was heading beyond the natural age for easy child-bearing. He had created in her a kind of angry hunger for sex, when she had intended him to be a neat, snipped-off episode. He had judged her, her Pill-less life, her solitude in which she worked. He looked at her in the lab as though it was only a matter of time, until he chose to suggest, or expect ...

  She strode into the Non-Maths Group with, as Vincent Hodgkiss put it to himself, “a few cautious flags flying.” More careful make-up. A new jacket, in a chocolate-coloured suede, and a new golden jumper. Hodgkiss had been secretly amused for some time by the dynamics of attraction and repulsion between Marcus, Luk, and Jacqueline. If Jacqueline moved closer to Marcus, he shrank into himself. If she looked away, Marcus addressed his remarks to her as though she was the obvious person to understand them. The ease of childhood friends, and beyond that, unease. He watched Luk, too, watching Jacqueline with a proprietary look which was also discouraged and vulnerable. He was interested to see that the faintly flaming new Jacqueline looked at Marcus, almost shrugged, and went to sit near Luk. To whom she spoke animatedly, about her research, about aversion-training in slugs and snails. And the Dane lit up, as though he was a house with lamps in the windows. So simple, thought Vincent Hodgkiss. So simple, so far. I wonder why? He did not expect to know why and his wondering was, in a sense, mild and academic. Lord what fools these mortals be! he liked to think, aligning himself with the soulless immortal watchers.