“It’s news. The public has a right—”
“No, it doesn’t. It just has a hunger for blood.”
“It’s an amazing bit of film,” said Wilkie. “But OK, I’ll scrap it. I’ll show it to you, first.”
“I don’t want to see it. I don’t want her in my mind. She’s dangerous.”
Chapter 25
Time moved on. The events of the Battle, as it came to be called, settled into legend, and the University began its repair work. Luk published his paper, in Nature, and it was taken up by a Sunday paper, which presented him as a bristling genetic predestinarian and moral pessimist. Wilkie said to Frederica that they ought to have him on the programme to talk about it, and Frederica said it was no good, they’d tried that, he thought they were trivial, and wouldn’t come. Luk, who was beginning to have some success in public debates and on the radio, was in fact waiting for the television invitation, which did not arrive. Both Luk and Frederica thought from time to time about their night together, in the shadow of the burning. The shape of it changed, in both their minds. Luk felt a sudden compunction, visited by a memory of the damp-headed, naked woman, bent over his snail-shells, and then could not think why, and dropped it into the well of unconscious cerebration. Frederica allowed Agatha and Daniel to think that her unusual diminution of confidence and energy was a result of the débâcle of John Ottokar, as indeed it partly was. She bought herself a Liberty peacock shirt, and then did not wear it. She took, without too much thinking about it, to celibacy. She got better at television interviewing, and branched out into other arts’ programmes. She was better, as she had originally been good, because she was not anxious, she was not intimidated. She did not quite care.
At the beginning of the next academic year, in late September 1969, she invited Alexander Wedderburn and Daniel to dinner in Hamelin Square. She was in charge of Saskia and Leo, as Agatha had been in charge when she travelled to the Conference. Agatha was away at a conference on examination boards, and the complicated business of assuring parity of judgement. Frederica said to Alexander that she thought their way of life was about to come to an end.
“Why? It seems a good way of life, considering everything.”
“Well—it appears that Agatha is going to be very rich. Rupert Parrott told me, Flight North is making a fortune. They reprint and reprint and reprint. Everyone reads it. Children and adults. Culture and counter-culture. People remembering their childhood reading, and kids looking for a story. It’s given Saskia and Leo enormous kudos at school. Only I can’t see how a woman that rich will want to go on living in this South London desert.”
“I’ve noticed the gentrification going on. You’ve got brass knockers and new-old shutters, and window-boxes all round the square.”
Daniel said “Have you asked Agatha?”
“No. It’s up to her.”
“You are a family. An odd one, two women and two children, but you are one. She won’t want to break that up.”
“Well, I’m not going to be able to afford her life-style.”
“She hasn’t changed it,” said Daniel.
Daniel had things preying on his own mind. His son, Will, never a great scholar but always competent, and always pursued by his grandfather’s pedagogic vigilance, had quite suddenly failed all his exams. This had been made worse by the fact that the school thought that Mary was showing signs of unusual brilliance—like her mother, Daniel thought—and had been moved on a year ahead of her age-group. He had gone North on receiving this news, and had tried to talk to Will. It had not been a success. Will had glared, and shuffled, and burst out, on one occasion only, with a series of accusations that, Daniel felt, were clearly seared into his mind. Daniel had left him when he was little. Daniel didn’t really care what happened to him, he only cared about the down-and-outs in his horrible crypt. Daniel had let his mother die. Daniel was a bad—a bad religious, he didn’t really believe in God, he didn’t really understand that God was absolute, and came before exams.
This last accusation stung Daniel horribly. He said that what he believed was a personal matter.
Will said, rightly and cruelly, that no, it was not, actually. He had no right to go about behaving like a—religious—since he wasn’t one.
Where are you getting all this? Daniel asked his son.
“You don’t care where I get anything, or what I get, or what I believe. When have you ever talked to me about God?”
Daniel could not answer.
“Never,” said Will. “That’s when. Never. Never. Never. Only about fucking exams, which don’t matter.”
“Don’t swear. And yes, exams do matter. And, if you want me to, I will talk about God.”
“Well, I don’t. It’s long past—the time when—that would have been—any use. Why don’t you go back to your failures, they make you feel better, I don’t.”
“Will—” said Daniel. But Will’s burst of speech was over, and he could not be got to say any more.
Alexander told Frederica that he was going to go North, in November, and put on a play, in Long Royston, in aid of the University’s appeal for funds for damage-reparation. He said that his costume-designs for Astraea had been damaged in the violence, and the Vice-Chancellor was concentrating the appeal action where—where things had been lost.
He thought he would put on a Shakespeare. His own writing was not going too well, inspiration was burned out. He thought he might put on The Winter’s Tale. Indoors, of course, it was Winter. A play about rebirth after tragedy. Appropriate.
Frederica said her father had always hated that play.
Why, said Alexander.
For being a wilful device for making comedy out of tragedy by ignoring real feelings. By ignoring the feelings of a woman shut in a vault for sixteen years who then conveniently comes back to life as a statue.
“As we are mock’d with art,” she said, thoughtfully.
Alexander asked Daniel what he thought. Daniel said he didn’t know the play, and stared darkly down, through the floorboards it seemed.
“I hope you don’t hate it,” said Alexander. “I was thinking of doing the play the way we did Astraea—with a largely amateur cast, and some professionals. I wondered if you’d like to act.”
Frederica hesitated. She handed around a dish of fruit. Dark grapes and pale golden plums, pomegranates and kiwi fruit, tangerines and Chinese gooseberries. No time to cook pudding, these days, she said.
She said she was too old for Perdita, and too young for Hermione, and not fierce enough for Paulina. And had lost the desire to act a part, somehow. Although she granted she might be said to be doing that all the time.
“I had a sudden vision of you as Hermione, and Mary as Perdita,” said Alexander.
“That’s meddling with genes in an unacceptable way—sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, I’m thinking aloud. It feels wrong. And I don’t seem to want to act, any more.”
Daniel thought, something’s wrong, but he was too tired to ask what. He picked at the seeds in his fruit. He thought, Will too had Frederica’s genes, and belligerent Bill’s, in his fiery half. And his own dark, heavy heredity. Damn.
Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, on one of his autumnal surreptitious snail-excursions, crept in through his sawn paling, heard sounds, and stopped. The ground rose, just inside the Pale, at that point. He dropped down, and crawled forward, peering cautiously over a hummock.
The Hearers were gathered on what had been the burned earth of the hen-houses, next to “his” dry-stone wall. They were chanting. There was a sound of crashing stones.
A figure stood against the wall, a female figure, in a white gown of some kind, pleated. Paul-Zag was sitting on the wall, playing his guitar, and John Ottokar stood beside him, blowing a mournful melody on the clarinet. The Hearers were dancing, shuffling, and filing past, stones in their hands. As they passed, they cast them in the direction of the woman. He did think for a moment that they were stoning her, but then he saw that it was not, not exactly, not t
hat. They were heaping up stones—many of them gathered from the snail-wall—before and beside her, making a kind of cairn, or a loose barrier. She stood and shivered—it was chilly—and they sang.
It was unhappy.
Luk wondered if they were going to hurt her, if he should stay, or get help.
It became clear that they were not. The punishment—if that was what it was—was symbolic only.
Luk retreated, ill-at-ease.
From Brenda Pincher to Avram Snitkin
Well, here I still am, a sacrifice to the cause of true ethnomethodology. I’ve got no more tapes, so I’ve got to write to you, as I’ve got to communicate or I shall get sunk and absorbed in what’s going on here. Even if communicating is not the right word, given the one-way nature of this—well, it isn’t a correspondence. I won’t think about that. I’ll pretend you’re real, and out there, and that I shall be able to get this message-in-a-bottle out to you. Gander still goes out regularly, and Zag occasionally. They do such shopping as is done, and we have to rely on how spaced-out, or not, they are, for what they remember, or don’t remember (Loo-paper. Aspirins. Torch batteries)—to bring back.
We work a lot harder and eat a lot less and grow a lot thinner. We clean a lot, but somehow—maybe some of this is subjective—things get grubbier, paint gets scraped off and not put back, blankets fray. We have rituals now. The Manichees worked a lot with mirrors and light and Gander brought back a whole van-full—balancing mirrors on stands, mirrors to screw on walls, old pub mirrors, gilded mirrors out of what looks like redundant cinemas or something. We’ve got a mirror-room lined with the things now, and we do—movements—in there, and—sing, and dance. Also there’s a lot of talking. Joshua talks a lot, about light, and emptying out, and self-loss. Eva W. talks a lot, about Rosicrucians, and astrological mysteries, and alchemical transfigurations. I think I’m not the only one that thinks that’s all crap, though it’s interesting that none of us would ever say any such thing to any of the others. This might be a relic of the Quakerly charity, which could be a very severe thing. But it also feels like fear. As though everything’s explosive, or potentially so, and no one wants the explosion quite yet. (Some, including me, don’t want it at all.)
We have got semi-savage chickens running in and out of everywhere, shitting on things, like a Yorkshire version of sacred cows. That adds to the general run-down feeling. We are still allowed to look at the television, oddly, but the programmes are restricted. We get to see Nature programmes—lots and lots of shots of snakes pretending to be leaves, and killer fig-trees in the Amazon—and we get to see children’s TV. No News. Can you tell me, Avram (if you ever get this letter) who is Charles Manson, and what has he done?
I’ve been wondering why everyone puts up with Eva W. now she’s moved in permanently. She even got what used to be Lucy’s bedroom. I’ve had the idea that she’s a kind of lightning-conductor. Because we are all repelled by her—I was going to say, because we all hate her, but that’s schoolgirlish talk, we don’t, it’s more primitive, we are repelled and appalled, except those who are fascinated (Zag, Lucas Simmonds, Canon Holly)—because we are all repelled by her, except those, we somehow draw together, and don’t mind things in each other that might have been irritants.
Also, she somehow channels away the conflict between Gideon—sexy, out-of-his-depth, no-longer-charming, grumpy Gideon—and Joshua Ramsden, who grows in beauty, and epigrammatic crispness, and untouchability. He really has got a lovely face. I have to say that. He is both repelled by, and in a way I simply don’t understand, attracted to Eva W. and her mumbo-jumbo.
I’m avoiding telling you, Avram Snitkin, Avram Snitkin, who have got to be real and ordinary (well, you never were that) and out there somewhere in an ordinary world—I’ve been avoiding telling you what has scared me. If we all end up dead, I’d like to have told somebody.
He talks a lot about stones, as well as about light, and fruit, and mirrors. He gets them out of the Book of Joshua in the Bible, which is one of the really bloodthirsty ones. God and Joshua are always beating people into submission with hails of stones.
Anyway, as we all know, one of the things people were traditionally stoned for, was adultery.
One of the girls—well women—I’m scared to write this, Avram—turns out to be pregnant. It is that Ruth, with the plait dangling, and I suppose I assume Gideon is the other party, since no one’s suggesting parthenogenesis, though when she’s asked, she stares—she stares stonily—and says she doesn’t know how it happened.
No, we didn’t stone her. Joshua quoted the New Testament, Let him who is without guilt among you, cast the first stone.
Then he said, we were all guilty, because we were all one, and we would build a commemorative pile of stones.
So we all walked past poor silly Ruth and solemnly added our non-vindictive stone to the heap in front of her.
It was silly and quite horrible.
I want to come out, and must not, for some sort of professional ethnomethodological honour requires me to see it through.
I am not sure, Avram, we shall always stop at symbolic stones. I mean, they were already real, she was already in a sort of pillory.
They haven’t sent for a doctor, or sent her to see one, or anything. I tried mentioning it to Elvet Gander, and he said
“In the fullness of time, dear girl” and snapped his fingers. If we all die, it will be because of his mind-expanders.
It is just possible that Joshua Ramsden is the father. I mean, why does he otherwise not go after Gideon? It is also possible that the whole idea of sex, and everything to do with it, embarrasses him, with a religious intensity of embarrassment.
I can’t be a very good sociologist if I can’t sniff that one out. No, it has to be Gideon. Clemency’s past caring, which makes it harder to tell.
They all—including Eva W.—want to be the Maiden of Light.
I don’t. But I feel I have to say I do.
I want fish and chips, and a Mars bar, and you, Avram Snitkin.
From Elvet Gander to Kieran Quarrell
Worry not, worry not, old friend, dear chap, all is under control, or if not under control, expanding splendiferously, producing marvellous fruits and flowers and bursts of fireworks.
Yes, I declare myself a responsible person, fit to watch over Lady Wijnnobel, and yes, I declare this a Therapeutic Community, where she is safe (and yes, if you like, old friend, where people are safe from her). I am sure that—with my own assurances of personal interest—will calm the Vice-Chancellor, and the Chief Constable, and all other interested parties. And, whilst I am at it, may I assure you also that your ex-patient, Josh Lamb, Joshua Ramsden, is more resplendently sane than the next man (yours truly) and is conducting, in the fullness of time, a Great Work, which will change utterly those of us who are in-volved in it, wound up in it, concentrated upon it.
These persons, who are not patients, and not very patient, are embarked upon a spiritual journey which inevitably takes them—and us—through the Valley of the Shadow—but the Light is visible—and better to travel on than cower in a drugged stupor under hospital blankets.
We are living in a world of perpetually shimmering symbolic Truths which connects with the real world at points of wonder—Rocks, Stones, Trees, Mirrors. I am learning daily the beauties of synchronicity and many-layered coincidences of staggering beauty.
That woman—your ex-patient—Lady Vineyard—is a silly Old Bag, Old Hag, Old Crone—but out of the mouths of Old Crones come the Speakings of true Priestesses. Now and then, and often, I am the first to admit, involuntarily. She is a Conduit, Kieran (oh the horror and the beauty) for celestial and infernal jellyfish and Medusas and blood, sweat and tears.
She discerns upon the white fleece and pale brow of our sacrificial Lamb and vengeful Ram the true bloody Sweat, the rosy dew, of the Proclaimed One. (Or One of Them.) A veil of blood. He is to be the Work, the Mysterium Coniunctionis, the Stone, which is the true Mercurius or Psychopom
p, born as White Light from the bath of colour, the peacock-tail, the Cauda Pavonis. She told us an esoteric creation story in which the God made the Peacock, and showed him Himself in a mirror, and the lovely bird was so amazed at his own beauty that beads of rosy sweat burst out on his brow—and from these, were all other creatures made.
I have been reading and reading in Jung’s Alchemical Studies and as I read, I see that the veils and threads of colours and connections in the fabric of the unconscious are more real than the world of—of—dirty socks, old friend, trouser-flies, nail-clippers, junk like that. I see and know it. But not as Ramsden knows it, who knows it with grace and in both worlds at once. I am either in the coloured veiling, glimpsing the light, or coming round amongst tea-leaves, trash, and toe-clippings. He can see the light in the toe-clippings, and can get it out. Have you noticed (but I think you are as yet unconverted to Jung) how Jung says that One of the primary metaphors for the Alchemical Work is torture? The flesh must groan to release the spirit, the light is wrung with blood out of the Stone, the veils of flesh are ripped and bleeding so that the Child of Light may come forth and shine.
Listen, Kieran, this is ecstasy, not madness. But it might not help with yr Practical problem wch is who is in charge of yr So-called Patients. (Victims.)
I AM.
OK ?
I AM.
A handclasp, dear old Kieran.
Elvet Gander
From Brenda Pincher to Avram Snitkin
Listen, you bastard, I am going to get this letter out to you, and you are going for once in your life to do something.
Things have been happening. They aren’t funny. I daren’t write much.
The baby got born. Nobody fetched a doctor, and nobody had ever consulted one. It was a horrible birth, she screamed for twenty-four hours, I’d guess. Lady W. waved her arms and said all would be well, and burned nasty smelly choking charms. Clemency and Lucy saved the baby, and saved Ruth, I think and trust. There was an awful lot of blood. Gander and Zag were unconscious with something they took. Lady W. said to Ramsden, Come and behold the Work (I quote exactly) and he came. He said he smelled blood. (Well, how could he not, it was everywhere.) Anyway, he strode in, looking priest-like, and took one look at her lying there—they had tidied her up—and had a colossal epileptic fit, and Lucas S. and Canon H. had to hold him down and do things with his tongue and drag him away to bed. Where he’s kind of comatose.