A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  Anyway, today he overstepped someone’s boundary. His sermon went well, one or two people were sniffling and one or two more were smiling beatifically. So he decided—I think—to try for a miracle. He talked in a roundabout way about “one of our dear fellows” who perhaps had very grievous matters heavy in her heart, whose strings she could not loosen. No matter what you have done, no matter what has been done to you, he said, sharing it will start up the healing process, confession will set you free. Jesus cast out devils, he said, and I say, you can be free of your torment, with the help of our fellowship. And he went up to Lucy Nighby, and laid both his great hands heavily on her shoulders.

  It was not a success. To put it mildly. She jerked about as though a devil had got into her, rather than coming out of her. If anyone there didn’t believe she was mute, I think they’d have had to concede defeat, for I don’t think she could have put on that horrible face and choking noise of silent screaming. He went on holding her for some minutes, and her writhing got worse. I think he thought she really was wrestling with whatever possessed her. My own view was that he was torturing her. When he let go, I think he thought she would collapse. He began to say “The process is working, the painful birthing of ...” (This again is an exact quote. Check tape. I daren’t play it back, in case anyone overhears.) But she didn’t collapse. She stood up, and shook herself, like a dog shaking off mud or water, and simply turned her back and walked out. He said something (the twister) about “hiding tears,” but there weren’t any. She was just very cross.

  Elvet Gander went after her, and came back in a minute, and sat down without saying anything.

  We watched a TV programme in the evening. It was “hosted” (is that the word?) by that girl Frederica Potter who was a witness in the Babbletower trial you so brilliantly taped. We saw the first—they’re called Through the Looking-Glass—the night Josh Lamb had his epileptic fit. This one was called “Free Women.” It was a clever idea; she was trying to get a group of women to talk about being women the way they do when no one is likely to overhear them. This very public chatter will make an interesting contrast with my Hen Party tapes, when I publish them. (She’s on one of those too, in the VC’s ladies’ loo.) Staged hen parties and covertly recorded hen parties. They talked about female blood, wch I’d have thought was tabu on the TV. They used a Tupperware bowl as a kind of ceremonial kitchen object. Anything looks different if you set it up as an object to be discussed. It gives it back a bit of that sacred mystique that Gideon Farrar’s trying to eliminate. I can’t do much about my Hen Parties here. There aren’t enough hens, and they don’t talk much amongst themselves. Quite apart from mute Lucy, that is. They could tell a tale or two about glamorous Gideon, I suspect, but I don’t think they do. Or if they do, they don’t do it when I’m in range. I may not be assimilated enough. But I won’t let him fuck me for the cause of ethnomethodology, Avram, there are limits. His paws are hot. He reeks of overconfidence and anxiety in equal proportions. I’ll stop, before I get even less objective and even more indiscreet. Please acknowledge my tapes.

  From Elvet Gander to Kieran Quarrell

  Well, my TV appearance in Full Technicolour went off well, I think. Certainly the Four Pence residents were impressed. Even your Josh Lamb, who is over his epileptic fit, and back amongst us. There have been changes—violent changes even—in the dynamics of this Group, which I need to report to you, both professionally and personally. As you might imagine, they involve your two proteges.

  Yesterday, in the full Meeting for Worship, he made his move—there is no other way of putting it. Gideon Farrar the Good Shepherd spoke at length last week about sweetness and light, openness and contact. Our man rose up today to answer—and to confute—him, without mentioning him. It is hard to record the substance of his speech. The manner was gentle, quietly certain, as though he was speaking intimately and directly to each member of the group. What he was saying was something you’d already touched on in your letters about his interventions in your groups. He was saying that we underestimate the forces of evil and darkness. He praised the Quakers for their intuition that we all carry an Inner Light within us, but called them to task for their sweet reasonableness in not acknowledging the horrors, the terror, of the outer darkness. We tell ourselves stories, he said, about a good and omnipotent creator, who shares our suffering and will heal all our wounds. That is a human story told as a bulwark against the real fear we should feel of the terror of the dark. He said the Quaker Inner Light was like putting on a table-lamp and closing the curtains in a nuclear winter. He said the Creator didn’t make the earth as a pretty walled garden for humans to inhabit. It was forged out of chaotic matter, and the light it imprisoned was dimmed and in pain. He repeated once or twice, we tell ourselves the wrong story. He said, a better story was the Book of Job, where the biblical God joined with Satan to torment Job. There was an intuition, he said, of the battle, the even battle, the poised battle, between dark matter and the threatened light. We are not little lambs who skip and play among the daisies. We are bloody scapegoats and poleaxed cattle, fed to the holocaust desired by the Lord of this World. (I paraphrase badly. The man is a theologian. I am not.)

  Anyway, he said all this, in this still small voice, almost sweetly, and suddenly sat down.

  And Gideon Farrar stood up and said this was a Manichaean vision, and we were Christians, and knew better than that. He sounded petulant, not the utterer of a clarion call. I saw immediately that Lamb had tempted him into saying just that. He rose again, and said that the Prophet Mani had intuited the truth—had indeed, had the truth revealed to him by his syzygos, his heavenly twin in the world of Light. And had been flayed alive for his pains, and mocked by being exposed, stuffed with straw, on the city wall of Bēt-Lāphāt. He had known that the truth could go down, that suffering might not automatically redeem, that evil might win. His Way had survived, his secret Way, it had been carried along the Silk Road and had flourished amongst the Buddhists in China. It was a way of difficulty, a way of ascesis. The good is unnatural. The natural world—according to Mani’s story—was made by evil dark beings who absorbed and ingested and distorted the Light. He had devised ways to free it. Lamb was ready to concede that Mani’s story was a myth. Jesus Christ’s life was a myth which had become a truth, both in history, and in the lives of his followers. Mani’s myth was also a truth, but a truth which had suffered defeat and humiliation. In these days when even the atoms of matter were split to provide hideous destructive energy, and clouds of invisible sickness which ate into flesh and bone, mountain and tree, Mani’s message and Mani’s method might be worth contemplating again. For extreme remedies are needed.

  I wonder very much if this—without the music of his voice, without the charm of his grave face, without the lurking threat in his idea of things, his real fear—sounds to you like a rigmarole, or a—a—vision of the Truth? A Truth? The Quakers—et al.—were all stirred up, like water with a wind on it, like a cornfield in a tempest. I forgot to say, he mentioned his own story, in riddles. I know, he said, I have survived the smothering, I have survived the knife, I have been evacuated into darkness and seen the light shining in it. I shall tell you, he said, at the right time, what these things mean. Stories are useful at times, including our own stories, and pernicious at others, when we should see clear light, uncluttered by the personal. You can free yourselves of your personal lives, he said. And live in the light. But it is hard.

  I kept thinking of what Kent says to old, mad Lear, that he has that in his countenance he would fain call master. And Lear asks “what” and Kent answers “authority.” That’s what Lamb has—and Gideon doesn’t. I ought to be able to give a good psychoanalytic explanation of this authority—which I feel the attraction of. I ought to be able to say, he represents the Good Father, the figure from our childhood, the Good Mother, even. But he doesn’t, you know. He has about him a real noli me tangere quality. He is, God help us, a man come back from the dead, and untouchable because h
e’s other. When he touches you—touches me—during Gideon’s little bodily-encountering charades, his long palm is cold on your cheek, like ice. It burns a bit, like ice. It feels transparent, like ice. It isn’t clammy. It’s dry and cold. Weightless. You want to feel it again, because there is absolute calm in it, in the midst of the tempest.

  I’ve let myself run on, because you have to know what kind of boiling he’s churned up in the cauldron. (Dry ice.) Last week Gideon botched an attempt to open up Lucy. When Lamb had finished, he didn’t sit down, but stood looking round, like a triumphant athlete at the end of a hard race. He looked straight at her. And she stood up, very composedly and walked across to him. She knelt down in front of him, and held up her two hands to him—open hands—and spoke. She said only three words, “All my life,” and then repeated them. “All my life. All my life.” It wasn’t clear whether she was telling him she’d been waiting for him all her life, or was offering him all her life. Her voice began faint and frightened, and then strengthened.

  The next thing was the clincher. Clemency Farrar, Gideon’s endlessly patient helpmate, stood up with a jerk, and went to join Lucy. She’s a handsome woman, the worse for wear, and wears a lot of black—long black drapy skirt, a long black jumper with dangly things round the neck—turquoise and silver—a kind of knotted scarf (black) round and round her head. She walked like a sleepwalker, with her hands out, and trembling. I really don’t think it was a performance, but I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, she arrived next to Lucy, and knelt beside her, and copied her gesture and her words. “All my life. All my life,” she said, and a strangled utterance became a ritual declaration. Upon which my little Ellie—trailing a few white bandages from her wrists, her little stick-legs in white cotton socks—jumped up too, and went to make a third. “All my life,” she said. “All my life.”

  And there he was the untouchable, with his three women. And then there were others. Not me, I should say. But enough. All saying, “All my life” as though they knew what it meant.

  He said, “Today I take my true name, which is not Lamb, but Ramsden. I am Joshua Ramsden.” One or two of them repeated this name.

  Very gracefully, not touching them, he made an ambiguous circling movement of his hands over their bent heads, blessing and dismissing them. A wonderfully tactful combination of modesty and power.

  The practical end of all this is that Lucy has asked Lamb to ask me to tell you she’s ready to come back and speak up in court, to answer Gunner’s accusations, and to bear witness. Lamb says she needs to do this, because she knows now that she must make a completely new beginning, and clear the past, in order to enter the future. She follows him everywhere with her eyes, if not her body. Another Noli me tangere. But in this case, I think of Sir Thos Wyatt on Anne Boleyn. Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am—And wyld for to hold, though I seem tame. They are a wild pair.

  I’ve been thinking again, after—partially at least—going through this communal experience of—of what? Charisma? Otherworldly vision? Spiritual power and energy, let’s say. I’ve been thinking about Jung and Freud. What is borne in upon you, when you see this kind of spiritual turmoil, is that Jung ventured into those worlds, without fear of the ridicule that often goes with the aesthetically repulsive vocabularies that usually go with spiritual journeys—auras and visions, journeys to the underworld and so on. Jung fought it out, with the demons and the creatures of the night, and said we should all go down to the Underworld, to the Mothers, the Dead, in order to hear them speak, before we could constitute ourselves, whole, healthy and sane. He claimed he might be destroyed by the collective dark and its images (stories) archetypes—a word I’ve always loathed, but it fits the things Lamb is trying to make us see, it fits the secret dark places he’s been in. There are odd coincidences. He says he saw mirrors of blood on Through the Looking-Glass, and claims that the mention of twins and syzygies in the discussion of L. Carroll was a Sign. It was certainly odd. The world is odd. Our dear tough old Sigmund kept his head, and his biology, intact in the fusty drawing-rooms of bourgeois Vienna. But he did try to diminish—to rationalise in a painfully inadequate way—the sheer difference and strangeness of spiritual experience.

  Zag and I have been experimenting with the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid. I have seen some beautiful Creatures, some visionary spaces—and some horrors, and monsters—which are not thought of in Sigmund’s philosophy. Angels and ministers of grace, dead flesh and humping foul things. I can’t agree with Timothy Leary that this is a short-cut to seeing infinity in every grain of sand, for everyone. I agree, I think, with Josh Lamb that an ascesis is needed, a discipline, inside which to conduct our journey into these worlds.

  OK, Kieran, I wept too, when he spoke of the smothering, the knife, the evacuation. But I knew. They didn’t. Yet. He is revealing himself to them, piece by piece.

  From Brenda Pincher to Avram Snitkin

  Have you received any of my tapes? I have a dreadful feeling this latest one—much the most important yet—is a defective recording. There seems to be a lot of interference, a lot of crackling. It’s a recording of an electrical speech by J. Lamb but I refuse to believe that he cd have the same effect on my machine as he definitely had on the gathered assembly. Strong stuff about flayed men and demons. Listen, Avram, you must get this copied on to a decent tape. You must get in touch—tell me how much is there. I can’t write it all down, it just looks weird. Please get in touch. My sanity is beginning to depend on it.

  From Kieran Quarrell to Elvet Gander

  Well, the Lucy question is in some sense resolved. She appeared in Court this morning. They wanted to get the matter sorted out before the Christmas recess—surprisingly kindly of them, considering the Law’s delays in this part of the world. Ramsden (shall we call him Ramsden?) was allowed to go along with her for moral support, and because it’s by no means clear she won’t just clam up again if he’s not there. The magistrate had talked to two of the three children, who persist in their varying evidence. They are called Carla and Ellis, aged nine and six. Carla says Lucy took the rake and went for Gunner “because he was going on about dirt in the house.” Ellis says Gunner hit Lucy, and Lucy bit Gunner, and Gunner took up the rake and Lucy “got it away from him and poked him and he ran away.” Nobody mentioned what effect, if any, the children’s communications with each other might have had on their evidence in all these months. They weren’t in court. It was feared that the little one, Annie, could lose an eye. I told you that. Someone laid about themselves with insane fury. On the evidence they had, especially from Gunner, they had to charge Lucy.

  Gunner was the first witness and spoke up for himself. He’s a burly slow cross-looking creature, walking now slightly hooked to one side to show he’s wounded (his muscles probably have knit awkwardly or painfully, but he looks incompetently histrionic). He said he knew he hadn’t been a perfect husband but he hadn’t done all this stuff. He didn’t bash children. Lucy had just gone berserk, that was what it was, she’d just begun to scream, and started laying about her with the rake. She’d hit his face with it. (He does bear those scars, too.) When asked why, if the children were in danger, he’d run away to the hen-house, he said he kept his motor bike out there and meant to go and get the police. He said the kids were fine when he left. He said he didn’t think she’d hurt the kids, she never had before. When asked how all this had started, he said it was because he’d pointed out that the kitchen was filthy, which was no more than the truth, Lucy was a slut, and he’d told her so. But he’d just told her, not hit her. “You didn’t find no marks on her,” he said. Which was unfortunately true.

  The people who found them gave evidence. Two scientists—snail students, a man and a woman, and a mathematician, who had found Lucy, and raised the alarm. They said Gunner did know that the children were hurt. He had been “grumbling about how they were hurt,” the woman, Jacqueline Winwar, said. When pressed, she said he had not been wholly coherent, as he had lost a lot of blood. But he had certa
inly said the children were hurt. She was asked about the tone of voice in which he’d given this information. Had he suggested who had hurt them? I am fascinated by the unnatural ability of lawyers to ask questions about violent emotions and indeed violent events in an artificially “objective” and “neutral” manner. Miss Winwar, a model witness, precise and unemotional, said he certainly hadn’t made any suggestion that he had hurt them himself. His predominant tone was one of indignation, she said. About everything. No, she said, he hadn’t actually said Lucy had hurt the children. He was more interested in himself. That was perhaps natural, given the circumstances. He was very clear that Lucy had “murdered” him. He was indignant about that, too, she said. Being murdered by a small woman was an indignity. He was indignant because it was his own trowel. She created, very economically, a sense that Gunner was completely unreasonable. But she didn’t say he had said he had hurt the children.