John Ottokar said “Shit. How can she sit there between those two and go on like that?”
Luk assumed for a moment that “those two” were Roy Strong and Lucinda Savage, and could not think why they were suddenly so objectionable. Ottokar could surely not be obsessed enough to be jealous? Then he realised that “those two” were the cardboard cut-out figures of Lewis Carroll’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who flanked Frederica. He had seen Paul-Zag wandering across the campus from time to time. His hair seemed to grow pari passu with his brother’s. He had once, even, on a darkening evening, mistaken Paul for John, and watched blankness succeeded by a sly grin as the other observed his discomfiture. Lucinda Savage began to advance a theory that in the future we would all have moving narrative portraits of our loved ones on our walls, like television screens. Luk stood up and turned her off. He wanted to ask John a question, and couldn’t think what it should be. He settled for
“When is Frederica coming north again?”
“I don’t know. Easter hols, probably. Bringing Leo. Also, they are going to film your Conference. She says. I dunno when. So she’ll be here.”
The words were ground out. Luk said
“You’re not happy about it.”
“No.”
There was a long silence. John Ottokar drank whisky, and jerked his long limbs into various postures. He said
“Talking isn’t what I do. Didn’t really speak English until I was eleven. Spoke Jabberwocky and maths with my brother. Not easy. He makes things difficult.”
“He must,” said Luk, at a loss.
“I’ve been thinking. We’re some kind of clone. Or some sort of virgin birth, one from the other, dunno which, dunno if scientists could find it out. All your stuff’s been making me think. I never really did much biology, only maths and computers. I worked on where oil tankers ought to go. What you’ve worked out is an explanation of everything. From the point of view of cells and organisms. Makes all sorts of ideas meaningless. Kindness, love. God.”
“I don’t think we need God.”
“I know you don’t. You don’t know what I think, however. God’s always been there. As a reason for.”
He seemed unable to say as a reason for what.
Luk murmured something awkward about it being difficult perhaps, to be here, when Frederica was there ... John Ottokar looked at him almost aggressively.
“I came up here so she’d make her mind up, one way or the other. And to get away from him, to be myself.”
“But he’s here, not there.”
“I know that. The point is, he wasn’t. Not when I came. I came on my own, to do my own thing. And then he comes. With God all round him. It’s like a ghastly Fate. Those people could have gone anywhere else and they came here. There isn’t really any Fate, of course, or any sort of—sort of—watching over us. There’s just genes, as you keep saying. I’m really glad,” he said, with a useless attempt at irony, “that you get so much pleasure from all these ideas. I don’t. I see they’re right but they just take away—the meaning. And they don’t change the fact that he’s my fate, because he’s my genes. We’re interchangeable and dispensable.”
“Have some more whisky,” said Luk, male and at a loss. He said “I thought it might be—good—having another person like oneself.”
“Oh, it was. As long as that was the only person. Before we were in the world. Then it got complicated. He’s got his group he plays with, of course. I’ve got the lab. But the group’s better, the music’s better, with me in, not out.”
“At least you’ve thought it out.”
“You can say that. You can say that. And where has it got me?”
He drained his whisky rather quickly and subsided into silence.
Frederica did come north for Easter, bringing Leo to spend his holidays with his grandparents and cousins. She was accompanied by Edmund Wilkie: they were making arrangements for filming parts of the Body-Mind Conference for the television. They went to a meeting with Gerard Wijnnobel, Vincent Hodgkiss, Abraham Calder-Fluss and Lyon Bowman to discuss what should be filmed, and how, whether the two “stars,” Pinsky and Eichenbaum, would consent to be interviewed on camera, how the University’s unique architecture should be presented. Vincent Hodgkiss had had what he believed to be a politically astute idea, and had invited Elvet Gander to join them. This was because it had come to his attention that Gander was also speaking—on myth and psyche—at the Anti-University, and he believed he might give them some intelligence about the attitude, benign or otherwise, of the encamped counter-culture. Gander’s own proposed paper, in the Human Sciences session of the Conference, on schizophrenic perception of body-parts, was scheduled next to a paper on autism, and a paper on concept formation in early life by a Reader in Education.
Hodgkiss had not invited Nick Tewfell that morning: this was not a meeting of an official university body. It took place in Gerard Wijnnobel’s study, round a rosewood table in the window looking over his secluded lawn. It was a cold, bright spring day. The academics were in various kinds of corded trousers and shabby jackets. Wilkie looked natty, in a very tight dark blue silk roll-neck sweater under an iron-grey velvet suit. Gander and Frederica were both, by some odd accident, wearing long, loosely knitted black woollen cardigans. There the resemblance ended. Gander had a whitish flowing woollen shirt with a grandfather collar, unbuttoned, over baggy trousers. Frederica had a transparent black shirt, belted above a long black skirt, patterned with poppies and cornflowers. Hodgkiss considered her very visible black lace bra, and her almost visible pointed little breasts, with a socio-historical eye. Semi-nude women at Vice-Chancellorial meetings, purely matter-of-fact, were not something he would ever have thought he would see. He put Frederica into the plural in his mind, though there was only one of her. He thought about Marcus’s analogous thinness. Despite this, he thought Frederica’s breasts were too small.
Wilkie exclaimed over the Mondrian and the Rembrandt prints. How perfectly proportioned, he said, how final. Would the Vice-Chancellor be interviewed on camera in front of them? Wijnnobel said he had no particular wish to be interviewed. He wished to remain behind the scenes. He had heard from both Eichenbaum and Pinsky, who were both happy to be interviewed, although Pinsky had stipulated that he would not be interviewed with—or about—Eichenbaum. He waited patiently for the inevitable question. Wilkie asked it. Professor Pinsky, Wijnnobel said, had reservations about some of Professor Eichenbaum’s opinions—old political opinions, nothing to do with the conference. Hodgkiss looked at Wilkie, whom he knew well, and waited for the terrier to fasten on to the rat. Wilkie, not catching Hodgkiss’s eye, said smoothly that that was quite all right, he would fit in with any such wishes, he was glad of the chance of the interview. Hodgkiss felt uneasy. Gerard Wijnnobel moved on to his next point. He said the University was prepared to contribute to the making of as full a filmed record of the proceedings as possible. We know you must select and discard, he said. But televised film is the medium of the future, and when we are discussing the juncture of body and mind, it will be in every way enhancing to have a visual record of the bodies, expressing the minds, so to speak, of the speakers. For our archive. We shall be pioneers in this.
Wilkie, who had every television director’s desire to work with luxuriating coils and heaps of overmatter, agreed happily. He said he hoped his programme—his eventual programme—would be true to the purpose of the gathering, which he respected enormously, enormously. Hodgkiss again felt uneasy.
The discussion moved on to the content of the various papers—the pure sciences, the applied sciences, the human sciences, the arts, the humanities, languages, maths, philosophy, even sport. Frederica looked distractedly out into the garden. The Barbara Hepworth wound its paradoxically weightless volute of weight around its captured air and silent strings. Frederica thought the easy, banal and invigorating thought, There’s a woman who has done things. With heavy hammers and mallets and chisels, she imagined vaguely. Her attention was reca
ptured, as attention has statistically been observed to be, by a reference both to a person and to a subject she understood. Raphael Faber was coming to speak on Proust’s metaphors for the activity of the mind. Wijnnobel announced this with enthusiasm, and Hodgkiss permitted himself a prim little ironic smile. He said he was sure the paper would be a high point among high points.
Frederica saw a ring of snow-capped mountains on a horizon where none were. She was reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to Leo, and found her mind taken over by Tolkien’s absolute landscapes and battles. “There shall be counsel taken,” her mind had been muttering irrelevantly all morning, “stronger than Morgul spells.” What a shivered, splintered mess her own mind now was. She remembered a much younger Frederica, who had had some idea of metaphor as the flicker of fiction and connection in a world of religious belief, in what she had thought were the last days of the power and certainty of religious belief, in the days of Paradise Lost. She remembered demanding—or abjectly begging?—to write a thesis on religious metaphor with Raphael Faber, who had turned her away with a glass screen, a division, he was a modernist, he worked in French. And why should a Mallarmé expert not understand Paradise Lost, Frederica thought angrily in the mist of her own past, and then grinned at herself. (The grin was observed and misinterpreted by Hodgkiss, who was thinking about naked Raphael with his own grin.)
Frederica looked at the assembled academics and wondered why her own mind began to move so swiftly, so surely, in places where people were discussing ideas which had nothing (little) to do with what she was thinking about. An idea of herself in a library with time to pursue the nature of metaphor until she had understood it—well, until her understanding was quite other than it was now—overwhelmed her with sadness. She had made a wrong choice. She sat about dressed as a clever metaphor, in an easy-to-grasp metaphorical glass box, like a mermaid in a raree show, and posed trivial superficial questions with trivial superficial brightness. She saw herself as a mayfly on water, and changed the metaphor to one of those copper-coloured dragonflies that dart and glitter. She looked at the assembled academics, and saw, not as Hodgkiss did, the windings and manœuvres of small territorial jealousies and large ambitions, but an angelic group of humans dedicated to thought, to thinking things through, thought Frederica, staring mistily through the Hepworth stone tunnel.
Gerard Wijnnobel was in fact talking about the artificial invisible barriers between disciplines. He said it was natural for the mind to erect them and to work within them—they were forms, philosophy, bio-chemistry, grammar—to which the Towers of the University gave a metaphorical solidity. But such forms were scaffolds, he said, such towers were lookouts, from which other forms could be seen, to which other forms could be linked. The world was infinitely multifarious and its elements were simple and could be seen from infinite viewpoints, in infinite rearrangements.
Frederica, not quite listening, though later she remembered every word, for half her attention was enough for memory, thought of John Ottokar, and his idea that she should work here, with these people, on these things—
Vincent Hodgkiss looked at Gerard Wijnnobel with love, and saw him as the Architect of Babel. An architect who, contrary to a quick imagining of such a person, was intent not upon chaos, but upon the discovery and communication of extraordinary order.
His love for the Vice-Chancellor had always included the rhythm of Browning’s poem, “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” in which a group of mediaeval disciples bear their dry-as-dust, detail-obsessed, time-defeated teacher to his last resting-place on the peak of a high mountain. “Leave him, still loftier than the world suspects / Living, and dying.” Most people read that poem as a comic condemnation of a life drained of humanity by minute obsessions. And so it was, and yet it was not, because a fine excess was to be finely human, and grammar was essentially human, Hodgkiss thought. He thought Gerard Wijnnobel would not thank him for thinking of him in terms of funeral elegies, when he was concentrating on his work.
At this point in the discussion, silence fell, as Lady Wijnnobel, accompanied by Odin and Frigg, crossed in front of the window, resolute and angry-looking. For a moment she stood, her big face under a vaguely academic tricorned hat peering in at them. Then she swung away, and stomped off across the lawn, leaving a trail in the damp grass.
Elvet Gander said, when she had gone through the hedge, “She is very diligent and very much appreciated in your, so-to-speak, shadow-entity.”
Wijnnobel said nothing. Wilkie asked Gander, what does she teach? Astrology, said Gander. He added that he himself had recently become very interested in astrology. He added that it was an ancient form of thought—of experience—in which, so to speak, generations had lived.
Hodgkiss saw his moment, and asked lightly if Gander had any idea how the Anti-University might propose to react to the Conference. Gander said he guessed many of them might attend, if permitted. He said, abstractedly, that he didn’t suppose there’d be trouble from them, if that was the question. He thought they were humming along with their own affairs. Humming along. Hodgkiss thought Gander looked unwell. He was thinner, and had aged. He seemed, somehow, perpetually distracted.
They stood and chatted over coffee. Wilkie and Gander considered the uncompromising reductive mystery of the Mondrians. Wilkie said it wasn’t clear to him why human beings were driven to reduce their world to minimal elements. Horizontals and verticals, particles and pixels, it might be wired into the way the brain worked. Maybe a Mondrian was a map of a brain, Mondrian’s brain, anyone’s brain. Gander looked restlessly about him and fixed his gaze on the Rembrandt astrologer. He said he himself was becoming more and more involved in more elementary, that was, more elemental, forms of experience. The word “primitive” was probably nonsense.
Freud began as a neurologist, said Gander. He made his map of the mind like a three-storeyed house, with the Id rampaging in the basement and the Superego frowning away under the eaves. It was all in the end personal, said Gander. Carl Gustav was an old charlatan, but old charlatans know things—about things—about the general consciousness—that tight-arsed ironists like the supremely rational Sigmund don’t pay enough attention to. What things? said Wilkie. Gander’s hooded eyes stared over his head. Gods and demons, said Gander. Forces of nature. Things you meet in the great dreams, not the nagging little personal ones. The things behind the forms people thought up for mystery, like alchemy and astrology. Those kids, he said, waving vaguely in the direction of the encampment beyond the garden, beyond the University, those kids in the counter-culture are playing with the things of the spirit as though they were clouds of coloured smoke, or—corn-dollies—or—or mugs with pretty crabs and scorpions and bulls and lambs painted on them for birthdays.
No harm in that, necessarily, said Wilkie.
I think there’s harm, said Gander. Ideas are stronger than individuals, so are forms of the spiritual life, they twist, they pull. They mould.
Lyon Bowman came up and said he hoped Wilkie was going to televise his paper on chemical and electrical communication in neurones.
Wilkie said, oh yes. He was still considering the psychoanalyst. He had just had an interesting idea.
Frederica was surprised to be tapped on the shoulder by the Vice-Chancellor. He wanted to show her something, he said. His long, nut-cracker face smiled down on her. “It’s a new project,” he said, leading her out of his study, and away into the antechamber of the Hall of Long Royston, with its minstrels’ gallery. This space now contained several free-standing glass cases. “We are building a collection to show the history of this house, and the history of the University,” he said. “As you see, most of our space is still empty. But I have something here which is of interest to you, perhaps.”
The box contained Alexander Wedderburn’s drawings for the costumes for Astraea in 1953. It contained also some of the costumes, and photographs of the actors and actresses. There were ribbons and embroideries, bum-rolls and ruffs, a fox-coloured cone of artificial curls,
a necklace of fake pearls and false enamel. There was Marina Yeo, photographed in black and white, dying regally on a monstrous cushion. There was the glass-and-wire crown, the musical instruments, rebeck and lute, pipes and tambours. There was Wilkie, playing Sir Walter Raleigh, much thinner and wearing his own look of intelligent mischief. There was Alexander, holding hands with Frederica and Marina Yeo, in a photo-call of the entire pinheaded motley New Elizabethan cast. There was her old school-teacher, Felicity Wells, who had died on a school trip, quite suddenly, in front of the Bayeux tapestry, her finger raised to explain that here was the death of Harold, the last English King. Marina Yeo was not dead, but was crippled with arthritis, her hands twisted into claws, her legs bowed. She had been—to an extent—saved by the television, on which she played spiteful and super-sharp detecting ladies in serial thrillers, swathed in chiffon, holding herself up in arm-chairs.