A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  On their way into the Mauritshuis, they stopped on its dignified steps, to look at the dark water of the moat, which perfectly reflected the white swans sailing placidly on it. The camera crew had gone ahead to set up. A man, a woman and a child, a girl, were leaning on the stone balustrade, considering the swans. The man had his arm about the girl’s shoulder. The woman stood with her body pressed slightly against his. A family. And then they turned, and the tall man straightened, and Frederica and Alexander recognised them. Agatha and Saskia Mond, smiling, and Gerard Wijnnobel, the Dutchman. A family.

  There was a moment when Agatha clearly thought of pretending not to have seen them. Then she looked up at Gerard Wijnnobel, who smiled.

  “So you see,” she said.

  “I see,” said Frederica.

  “It was too early to say anything. We needed time—”

  Stories raced through the minds of both Alexander and Frederica, stories they could never substantiate or deny, stories of committee-journeys, meetings, what had been said to Saskia, when, of the death of Eva Wijnnobel, of the lovers meeting, talking ...

  No one spoke.

  Wilkie said “We’ve a film to make.”

  Wijnnobel said “What are you filming?”

  “The View of Delft.”

  “A mystery of survival and renewal. They say it has been so much restored that the brush-strokes Bergotte so lovingly traced on the little patch of yellow wall are no longer the ones we see. But it is still there.”

  He gathered his family, bowed to Frederica and Alexander, and they walked off.

  Filming is long and tiring, the lights are hot (even if the great View is protected from them) the repetitions which must look more and more spontaneous are exhausting. Frederica asked Alexander sprightly questions about the still panorama, and he spoke of what it had meant to writers—to Proust—something that endured—great art which lasted longer than life. Frederica struggled with a haze of female somnolence, and thought the “petit pan de mur jaune” was sandy, was almost orange. It was partly because she was tired—and making the effort not to think about Agatha until later—that they had to record so many versions of what would be reduced to an amiable ten-minute chat. The paintings brooded and shone around. Shadowed seventeenth-century gilded faces under fantastic hats and helmets. Huge impossible vases of flowers, striped and spotted, red, blue, white, pink, tiger-gold, against heavy stone windows opening on glimpsed paradisal depths of plain and forest. Wilkie and Alexander went off to look quickly at other rooms, whilst the crew packed and removed the cameras. Frederica sat on a long leather seat in front of the View of Delft and went to sleep. She went into a very deep, very brief sleep, a drowse of defeat.

  And woke, and for a moment did not know where she was. She was in a calm place where golden buildings stood above dark water, where the sky was blue and still, the stone was pink, time was very quietly arrested. She stared at the View, which has the quality of being so wide that the eye must travel along it to see it. She saw it as though she was in it, and saw, simultaneously, the perfect art with which each element had been considered, and understood, analysed geometrically, chemically, so that the colours could be reconstructed, and harmonised. This artist is not present in the traces of his hand—no flamboyant brush-marks make his signature, though Proust and Bergotte were wise in envying the spontaneity of the yellow strokes where the sun strikes. Delft is not, and was not, Paradise. It is, and was, a temporal city, with its own burghers, in the middle of a tempestuous history, for all its calm. What Frederica remembered was the momentary illusion of reality—the light in the dark room had appeared to be coming from the painting, had indeed come liquid through the window and been reflected off its surface. And beyond that, the adequate intelligence of the Master. Who had set himself problems only he could solve, and had solved them, and made a mystery.

  Leo said “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “Well?” said Frederica.

  “You’re not telling me something, and I’m not stupid, I notice things, and I know.”

  Frederica looked up, a little haggard, from her desk.

  “I want to know what you’re going to do. I mean, it does concern me too. But that’s not why. It’s because you’re so horribly miserable. I can’t bear it. Tell me what you’re going to do.”

  “I don’t know, Leo.”

  “Babies have fathers,” said Leo. “I’ve got one other family already. And Saskia. I wanted to tell you about Saskia. She minded most dreadfully, all those years, not knowing who—who her father was. We talked. She used to imagine all sorts of things. She never said any of them to Agatha. They didn’t talk about it. It doesn’t mean she didn’t think. That’s what I’ve got to tell you.”

  Frederica considered her son. There were two of them, and he was ten, and having to be the man, since a man was needed. But he was a boy.

  “I just wondered—because of Saskia—if he knows?”

  “No,” said Frederica. She began to cry. “I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. I shouldn’t put all this on you.”

  “I exist,” said Leo. “So does—this—baby. So does Luk.”

  She saw that he was afraid, whether of her wrath, or of his having got things wrong. She held out her arms.

  “I’ve been silly, I love you. You’re right. We must tell him. Then we can think what to do.”

  “Telephone—” suggested Leo.

  “I can’t.”

  “Well then, we’ll go there. Come on. We can go.”

  They arrived on a May morning at the North Yorkshire University to find that Luk was neither in his laboratory, nor in his apartment. An interested neighbour in the Evolution Tower said she rather thought he had gone on a field trip to Norway. She added that he had been talking of going to Japan.

  Frederica said they should try Loderby. She drove out across the High Moor, filled with a desperate sense of urgency, as though she had left everything too late. Leo sat stolid and alert, staring around him.

  Loderby too appeared to be deserted. The shutters were closed, there were plastic bags of rubbish stacked by the terrace wall, and a broken bunch of honesty thrown on the compost heap. Frederica sat down heavily on the terrace wall. Leo went round the house, and came back to report an open window, in which there was a stone jar, full of freshly cut yellow gorse.

  “Come on,” he said. “He’s still here. We must look for him.” So they drove over the moor—there are very few roads—looking for the blue Renault, or the fiery-headed man.

  The gorse was out, and spread like a sea of fire, along the sides of the road, across the heather. It was bright, bright, sun-yellow, with flecks of scarlet and crimson. It was full of movements in the turmoil of the air, it bowed, and flickered, and lapped with vegetable flames at the sooty roots of the heather and ling. Frederica drove unthinkingly towards where she had once, with John Ottokar, found the snail-seekers, round the thrush’s anvil. The sky was full of huge white heaped cumulus, which piled forwards like castles on the move, like flocks of fleecy monsters, like sails.

  Leo saw the blue Renault, parked at the edge of a track, almost obscured by the swaying golden bushes.

  They stopped, and set out on foot, down the track, and then across the open moor, like hunters or beaters. Leo leaped over the bushes, his hair blazing in the blaze of flowers. Birds started, insects scuttled, brown moths rose like dust. Frederica ran slowly but purposefully. She thought about her life. She found herself thinking about Paradise Lost, which seemed to float beside her mind like a great closed balloon of its own colour of light, a closed world, made of language, and religion, and science, the science of a universe of concentric spheres which had never existed, and had constructed the minds of generations. It was part of her. She thought of the Faerie Queene, and Britomart the female knight, who saw her lover in the magic glass sphere made by Merlin, which was also a tower. She looked at the earth under her feet, and the cobwebs and the honey-scented gorse, and the peat, and the pebbles,
and thought of Luk’s world of curiosity. She thought that somewhere—in the science which had made Vermeer’s painted spherical waterdrops, in the humming looms of neurones which connected to make metaphors, all this was one. And in front of her, another creature, another person, contained in a balloon of fluid, turned on the end of its cord, and adjusted to the movement.

  Leo crashed over the brow of a hill into a small decline, and found Luk, walking, in fact, towards him.

  “There you are—” he said. “We were looking for you.”

  Luk looked up, and saw Frederica standing on the skyline. She was wearing an odd garment, in fact one of her Laura Ashley dresses from Through the Looking-Glass, which she had put on simply because it was made of a heavy cotton and had no waist, fanning out from below the breast. It was cream-coloured, sprigged with pink flowers, and olive-green leaves. It had long sleeves, and a kind of ruffle round her long neck. It ended below the knees and Frederica’s long thin legs, striding purposefully, were naked. The wind from the sea tangled her hair, and blew the folds of the dress back around her belly, making her state perfectly visible at first glance. One or two startled sheep trotted in front of her. She looked like an absurd shepherdess.

  Luk walked up through the gorse, and Frederica stepped carefully down. Leo kept his distance. He watched them meet, and heard raised voices. Luk shouted. Frederica shouted. The wind rushed in their clothes and hair and shouted. Then Luk put his arms round Frederica, and Leo knew it was all right, and continued up the hill, to join them.

  They stood together and looked over the moving moor, under the moving clouds, at the distant dark line of the sea beyond the edge of the earth. In the distance, the man-made Early Warning System, three perfect, pale, immense spheres, like visitors from another world, angelic or daemonic, stood against the golds and greens and blues. Frederica said to Leo “We haven’t the slightest idea what to do.” Everyone laughed. The world was all before them, it seemed. They could go anywhere. “We shall think of something,” said Luk Lysgaard-Peacock.

  FINIS

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to many people in many ways for help with this book. Steve Jones and Frances Ashcroft have been patient with my queries about snails and genetics, physiology and cognition, and have been creative with their suggestions. Jonathan Miller and Richard Gregory aroused my interest in vision, memory and cognition in the early 60s and have been frequently helpful since.

  I am also grateful to Steven Rose, Helena Cronin, Robert Hinde, Pat Bateson, Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, Antonio Damasio, Semir Zeki, Marion Dawkins and Arnold Feinstein for help with science; to the Reverend Mark Oakley, and Dr. J. S. Fountain for help with religion; to David Caute, Martin Asher, Jeff Nuttall, John Forrester and Lisa Appignanesi, and Carmen Callil for help with the culture of the 60s. Mike Dibb and Leanne Klein were helpful with television, and Leanne’s film of gorse was a useful delight. My interest in the possibilities of television was aroused in the late 1960s by Julian Jebb. Clara Sodrê Gama was helpful about dyslexia. Daniel Fabre’s ethnological work on birds has been invaluable. I read Charles Lindholm’s splendid book on charisma at a crucial moment, and am grateful for his e-mail discussions. Judy Treserder long ago started me thinking about groups and group therapies. John Wren Lewis and James Mitchell, both now dead, started me thinking about religious culture in the 60s.

  I owe much to my translators, and have discussed this work with Jean-Louis Chevalier, Anna Nadotti and Melanie Walz. Claus Bech has provided both endless interesting facts and words, and extraordinary understanding.

  I could not have written the book at all without Gill Marsden, who kept my life in order, typed the pages, understood my problems, and understood the novel.

  My publishers, Alison Samuel and Caroline Michel, have been both warm, wise and patient, as has my agent, Michael Sissons. My editor Jenny Uglow is the editor all writers hope for—clear-minded and enthusiastic, a true reader.

  A. S. BYATT

  A Whistling Woman

  A. S. Byatt is the author of numerous novels, including The Biographer’s Tale and Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990). She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of shorter works, including The Matisse Stories. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.

  INTERNATIONAL

  ALSO BY A. S. BYATT

  FICTION

  The Shadow of the Sun

  The Game

  The Virgin in the Garden

  Still Life

  Sugar and Other Stories

  Possession: A Romance

  Angels and Insects

  The Matisse Stories

  The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye

  Babel Tower

  Elementals

  The Biographer’s Tale

  CRITICISM

  Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch

  Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge

  Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings

  Imagining Characters (with Ignês Sodré)

  On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays

  Portraits in Fiction

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 2004

  Copyright © 2002 by A. S. Byatt

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan), [date]

  A whistling woman / A.S. Byatt.—1st ed.

  p. cm

  1. Potter, Frederica (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

  2. Women in television broadcasting—Fiction.

  3. Yorkshire (England)—Fiction. 4. London (England)—

  Fiction. 5. Women—England—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR6052.Y2 W48 2003

  823’.914—dc21

  2002072957

  www.vintagebooks.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42457-0

  v3.0