A Whistling Woman

  “It’s dedicated to me. For Leo and Saskia, it says. We were told this story.”

  “How wonderful,” said Deborah Ritter, politely. She said “So you know the writer of this book? She must have a lot of money.”

  “Not really,” said Leo. “We all live in a very mean, that is ordinary place. We are not really a family, but we are like a family. We are two women, and two children, and this story was told for us ...”

  He was happily settled, lecturing the assembled children, with some of his mother’s arrogance, on life in Hamelin Square when Will caught up with him, and pulled him away. Will was embarrassed. And a little annoyed that a sense of responsibility had made him leave the singing. They walked home in a complex silence.

  Gerard Wijnnobel looked at his wife across the breakfast table. She was eating fiercely, forkfuls of scrambled egg, great gleeful snatched bites of butterbright toast. He said

  “Eva, I have tried not to restrict your freedom, or dictate your actions in any way. You must do me the justice of recognising this.”

  Lady Wijnnobel chewed. She smiled through the chewing.

  “Please listen to me. I do ask you not to do this.”

  She swallowed, and smiled.

  “You cannot prevent me.”

  “No,” said Wijnnobel, patiently. “I cannot. But I have never before asked you—myself—for a concession, a consideration. Please consider what is at stake. With the Conference so near. And the volatile situation with regard to the students.”

  “Hmnf. All my life has been subordinated to your whims and your importance. Now, I am asked to speak for myself. And you try to prevent me. It is all of a piece.”

  It is not, he told her in his mind. It is not so. Not quite or altogether so.

  “Free speech,” said his wife, through more toast. “You b’lieve in free speech.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And I am asked to speak—on the air, in person—about what I believe. And you try to prevent me.”

  “It is a bad moment.”

  “You mean, you don’t like what I say. But you can’t stop me saying it, Gerard, unless you restrain me. Bodily, so to speak. Bodily.”

  He looked down at the table, and saw his own wooden face in the polished wood.

  It came to him that since she would not listen, his speech had made things worse. God knew, he thought, what she would now do, if, for instance, he were to appeal over her head to Edmund Wilkie, who must in any case have thought of all these matters—his own problems—before making this—on the face of it—dangerous and absurd proposal.

  As she often did, Eva appeared to read his mind.

  “The young man came to hear one of my weekly lectures,” she said. “To assess me, no doubt, to assess my presence of mind, and so forth. He said he was very impressed. He said there is a great deal of interest in astrology, these days.”

  “So there is,” said Wijnnobel, truthfully.

  “Well then,” said his wife. “It is natural that I should be approached. And natural that I should accept. Please think no more of it.”

  Gerard Wijnnobel, daunted, lowered his crest in defeat.

  John Ottokar stood in the doorway of his university room, and tried to prevent Frederica from leaving. They had not been to bed together. Frederica had not felt able to be naked in front of this man who knew every inch of her skin, outer and inner. She wanted to be separate. She wanted to be gone. She was not thinking. John was both thinking and speaking, as though she might be able to hear him. His voice churned in her mind like water at the bottom of some deep pothole, vaguely audible. He said that he had come to her classes, all those years ago, to learn how to speak, and now he was speaking and she must listen. She must help him, she must save him, for he was being torn apart and destroyed. In the days before she had taught him to speak, he said, he had had maths and mutterings, mutterings with him, which no one understood. Except God, maybe, and Frederica did not like God. He had wanted to be—he said, his language faltering—an individual in an ordinary world—and she was the way, she must not let him go. He had tried to—to keep steady through work—but work was full of terrible things, it was soul-destroying. I work to prove the individual is nothing, said John Ottokar, eloquently. Frederica stood and waited, inside the door. I want you to marry me, said John Ottokar, and we will make a good home for Leo, and you can do whatever you want, whatever you want.

  She had been attracted to his grace and self-assurance, and now these were gone. She had a terrible sense of a weight of responsibility and an even more violent urge to escape, to get out, to go away. Instinct had got her into this, and instinct was hoisting her out by the hairs, and reason and humanity were nowhere. She waited for him to finish speaking, which took a long time, for he had become good with words, and appeared to believe he was pleading for his life.

  Then she said she had to go.

  John Ottokar said she was a bitch.

  Frederica said that was very true, she was, she saw she was.

  She said, let me out.

  He lowered his crest in defeat and she went out. She was leaving for London the next day.

  She wept in bed, for what seemed like hours, a pillow over her head, out of consideration for Leo, in the next room, who must not hear a grief that was not his.

  When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed that she was running between trees, naked among the ribbons of her cut dress. Someone was behind her, was gaining on her, had grabbed her from behind and hoisted her high, driving an anonymous cock in between her arrested legs. Someone was stroking her hair, and she twisted round to see who, for she hated lovemaking in dreams, she fought invasion and involuntary surrender. She was lifted up, and up, ridiculously high, always with the rigid thing between her legs. Her face saw a face between the leaves of the canopy, and her mind had a momentary memory of Alice’s encounter with the angry bird. The face was the face of Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, and he was laughing.

  The Vice-Chancellor watched Through the Looking-Glass alone in his drawing-room. The curtains were open, and the stars were scattered across a clear sky, interspersed with thin cloud, and the purposeful linear winking of man-made lights. The Alice-in-a-box-of-mirrors set was decorated with the vanishing grins of the Cheshire Cat, interspersed with fishbones and nursery stars. Frederica wore black, with a necklace of spherical green glass beads. Gander sat on her right hand, white-robed, perspiring in the white lights. Eva was on her left, arrayed in a velvet gown of dull purple, with a boat-shaped neck and a heavy gilded collar, with inset stones, almost certainly of symbolic significance. Someone had smoothed her thick hair into a sleek form, and had sprayed it into a crisped solidity, like meringue-crust, cinder-black.

  He saw immediately that she was very nervous. Her nostrils were flaring, her breathing was laboured, she was dabbing at her red-red lips with a screwed-up tissue. Little spheres of sweat stood on her frowning forehead, above the huge, uncompromising eyebrows. The one thing he had not thought to worry about was whether she would be afraid, or made ill again by the experience. He was angry with himself: he had been concerned simply with what she might say, and how she might say it.

  He watched Frederica Potter, who must by now be experienced in reading nervous states. She embarked on a series of banal, easy questions. Astrology wasn’t anything so simple as fortune-telling columns in newspapers, was it? Astrology had always been there, hadn’t it, it had been used to explain history and the human psyche and the movements of the heavenly bodies? Eva began to make her usual cumbersome, angry, faintly threatening assertions. Like a bull, he thought, no, a cow, hurling itself at a fluttered pink silk cloak. She felt better for getting her mouth open, as everyone did. She said that the moon pulled the seas, which was hard for common sense to credit, and small human lives were part of large cosmic movements. And over the ages, people, some people, had learned to read these movements and connections finely. Astronomy, put in Gander, was the child of astrology, as chemistry was the child of alchemy, and there w
ere two ways of looking at ancient things, one of which was to understand that they were deeply human, deeply human, not just errors but clues to our own nature, as our genes and chromosomes also were. Also our dreams. All had their limitations. All their power.

  They discussed Dr. John Dee, who was the evening’s personality, his occult knowledge, its human consequences. They discussed the fact that many contemporary cultures and communities still did nothing without consulting an astrologer. Gander said that the counter-cultural movement was aware of old spiritual forms, was deeply into their renewal, their so to speak re-volution into the Light once more ...

  They looked at the object, which was a Renaissance celestial globe, showing the creatures spread across the dark, crab and scorpion, bull and ram, goat and fishes. Frederica said that as a little girl she had always thought of these as the stuff of poetry, made-up things, that weren’t there, and yet were there, because you said they were there. She couldn’t get her mind round the celestial globe, she said, because it wasn’t a real thing, what was out there was infinity, this was just an imaginary spherical skin, unlike a terrestrial globe.

  Lady Wijnnobel said, with a toothy smile that wasn’t really placatory, that Frederica must have been, must be, quite a silly little girl, since these forms were poetic truth, but also truth in a form that all those—she waved her arm dismissively, shaking the frame of the set—molecules and things—couldn’t express, couldn’t begin to express. Her voice took on its liquid, beating note. She spoke of how the Creator had wanted to make a world in which He had created ensouled creatures linked with every conceivable area of nature in the most profound sense. Every ensouled creature had its form, pincer and horn, fin and feeler, that connected it to the whole universe at one particular point. The old myths knew this. Modern man dissected everything with his senses and had made a new ignorance. “Instinct is a deeper and wiser guide to the totality of nature, to the ultimate wisdom, than ordinary human understanding. True, we humans fly, we swim, but unnaturally, but awkwardly, at what a cost to earth, to water, to air. Now, the signs are the forms which head us back ...”

  The camera held her wide, urgent, stressful face. Gerard Wijnnobel stood up, as though embracing the glass box, or breaking it, could stop her flow. Frederica Potter said, conversationally, lightly,

  “You know, it’s hard on those of us who have the human signs. If you buy a pottery mug, or a place-mat, or something, with your own sign on it, you get a beautiful form if it’s a crab or a scorpion or the fishes, and usually you get not bad goats and rams and bulls. Even Sagittarius is OK. But the Virgin and the Twins they always come out simpering and sentimental. They look like Disney’s Snow White, or ghastly mass-made statuettes of the Virgin Mary, with sweet little doll-faces. I know, because I’m the Virgin.”

  The camera had moved away from Eva, whose long sentences trailed like underwater weeds amongst the beginning of Frederica’s froth. Frederica’s face smiled out at the Vice-Chancellor, modern, trivial, and reassuring.

  Lady Wijnnobel could not resist the inevitable question. “Virgo, are you?”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “No, no. I knew you were Virgo.”

  “And what is the Virgo character?”

  “She is closed in herself. She is focused inwards, and shuts off the outside world. She is innocent and without dark wisdom. There is a price to pay for this dreaminess, in general.”

  Gander joined in, and challenged Eva to diagnose his own position on the Zodiac. He was correctly—according to him—told he was Sagittarius, warhorse and archer, animal and semi-divinity, two beings in one. Lady Wijnnobel had lipstick on her teeth. The conversation trickled into the runnels of many, many, previous human conversations, and was duly brought to an end.

  The Vice-Chancellor thought hopefully that it could have been much worse. Given that it had happened at all. Better not to count in his head how many millions was it of people would have seen her. It was of course possible, even probable, that what she said made more sense to them than anything he himself might ever say about the algorithms of the Universal Grammar. He thought with his usual pleasure of Noam Chomsky’s example of a perfectly grammatical, perfectly meaningless sentence. “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.” He always associated it with Sir Charles Sherrington’s more ornate, and not meaningless metaphor for thought. “The brain is an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern.” He thought he would include both in his opening remarks for the Conference. Poetry struck out of everything like sparks from flint. The forms of astrology were not privileged, were indeed worn, overhandled coinage. He smiled at the gallant banality of Frederica Potter and her multiplied simpering virgins on mugs. And their juxtaposition, oh yes, with the cats’ teeth, and the fishbones, and the stars, and, he was afraid, his wife’s teeth, and the jagged edges of her necklace-thing. In a glass box. A new metaphor.

  Meanwhile, since his wife was in London, and not at his side, he could sit and read a book. He took up the one he was currently reading. As was everyone else, he had discovered.

  Artegall said, “Just because it is written in books, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. The books say take notice of every little detail, how every stone lies, how every twig is broken. They have drawings of how sand is disturbed, and how deep fast footprints differ from light springing ones.”

  “They can’t do smells,” said Mark. “You can’t describe a smell, so’s anyone would recognise it, if they didn’t know it.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Artegall. “They’ve got lists of honeys that resemble each other—ones like wine, ones like roses, ones like heathers, ones like primroses ... They’ve got lists of rotting fishes and which you can still eat and which you shouldn’t ...”

  “You’ve got to begin by knowing a rose, or a rotten fish, though.”

  “That’s the point,” said Artegall. “In the schoolroom, there was neither one nor the other. Only the words. I liked the words. But out here, there’s the things, and of course they’re different, but you’ve got to admit, the words have helped. Now and then.”

  Mark had to admit grudgingly that Artegall’s knowledge of tracking and fishing had in fact proved extremely useful.

  The Vice-Chancellor read on. It was a good story. He could feel things looming, in the world outside. He read on.

  Chapter 23

  The Conference opened without problems on 15th June. Gerard Wijnnobel welcomed the guests in the University Theatre in the Central Tower, and made a brief speech on the Idea of a University. There was then a welcoming party in the great Hall of Long Royston, where the television people mingled with the assembled scholars. The students had finished their exams. Some had gone home, and some were attending the Conference. The assembled scholars smiled benignly at the little group of protesters organised by Nick Tewfell, with placards denouncing the unjust tyranny of exams. Inside, there were very acceptable Nordic open sandwiches, red and white wine, and a summery fruit punch. Hodder Pinsky and Theobald Eichenbaum were both there, and were not speaking to each other. Frederica was pleased that Pinsky recognised her. He was standing by a pillar, under the minstrels’ gallery, himself a gleaming pillar, ice-blond head, blue glasses, ice-blue shirt, off-white linen jacket and trousers.

  Wilkie pointed out Eichenbaum. He was short and very broad, standing close to the ground on thick legs. He was not fat, he was big-boned, and very muscular. His skin was tautly wrinkled all over, and tanned, no doubt because he spent most of his working life out of doors. He wore heavy owlish glasses, and had very thick white hair which pushed into a very thick, fanning white beard, surrounding full, complicated lips. He was a walking legend. His work on wolf-packs, domestic dogs, foxes and jackals contained a series of classic descriptions of the behaviour of beasts in the wild and under domestication. He had also worked on the learning patterns, parental and sexual behaviour, mating rituals and displacement activities of generations of domestic fowl and wild quail. He live
d by a lake, in a German forest, and had a famous wood hut to which he retired to think, surrounded by animals who thought he was a kind of stag, or goose, or fox, or rabbit, or crow, or chicken, or wood-god. He could always think up a way of studying a behaviour pattern but did not bother with scientifically controlled experiments. He was unmarried, and kept his assistants, it was said, at a distance.

  He was criticised more and more frequently for believing that human beings, like all other creatures, were full of an energy he called aggression, in English, and “so-called Evil,” sogenannte Böse, as Lorenz did, in German. It was said that he believed that this force was nature, and its suppression was damaging to animals, including the human animal. He had no time for those who believed in universal gentleness, or the possibility of teaching lions to lie down with lambs (unless the lions were denatured). And he preferred nature to nurture. As an explanation, and, it was said, as a state of being. There were photographs of him taken from a distance, wandering naked amongst his thickets and trees, his tanned hide blending with the bark, his brush of hair gleaming. Children were told stories about the man who spoke to the creatures. Social scientists told other tales, of intolerance and lack of understanding of human society or community.

  Frederica saw Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, standing below the plaster frieze of the Death of Actaeon. He was talking to Jacqueline Winwar and Lyon Bowman: all wore cocktail smiles. Jacqueline was even thinner, and even more handsome. She was wearing a very plain nutmeg-brown mini-dress, which could only be worn by someone very confident of having a trim body, which she now had the right to be. She wore a soft scarlet buckled belt, resting on her hips. Frederica tried to guess the current relations between the three scientists, and couldn’t. She walked up, anyway. She knew them all. She was pleased to see them.