A Whistling Woman

  “You should take them for a long walk, Eva,” said Gerard Wijnnobel. “Those sorts of dogs need exercise.”

  “I know, dear. You are always telling me. I am always trailing up and down with them. All the time. I know about dogs, don’t I, my darlings?”

  Odin grimaced. Frigg abased herself. Gerard Wijnnobel sipped black coffee. He knew she had not been out with the dogs and would not go out. He believed that all this—stars, paint, dogs, the ravenous dove-destroying Abyssinian cat, Bastet—was his fault. He had no idea what to do. He was, in this, entirely dependent on the kindness of others, a housekeeper, a secretary, a doctor. He decided it might be possible to live with a black, starry cloakroom. He would ask the housekeeper to remove the antique chair, tactfully. To clean the carpet. Perhaps even to consult Lady Wijnnobel about a replacement carpet, more in keeping with black walls.

  He had met Eva Selkett during the war, during his time at Bletchley. He was thirty-four and had had one love-affair, with a Dutch Jewish art historian, who had been shot in Amsterdam. Eva was twenty-four, a stenographer. She came from an English family that had been settled in Alexandria, she said. She said she was an Egyptologist, and had written a thesis on hieroglyphs, this was how she had come to be working with the code-breakers. She said that this research had been done in Oxford, and then said that she had given the wrong impression and she was about to take up a place in Oxford when the war broke out, her serious research had been done in Alexandria. In 1942 and 1943 she was beautiful, with a great mass of dark hair rolled over her brow, and another rolled under, along her shoulders. She said very little, and gave the impression of sadness and private withdrawal. Bit by bit, she revealed that all her family had died in the German invasion; that she had also lost a lover; that she had been very ill, but was now better. She listened, when he took her out to dinner, occasionally offering an enigmatic and appropriate quotation. She quoted Yeats and Vaughan, Jung and Hermes Trismegistus. Wijnnobel was naturally a sparse talker, but in those days he talked to her, over dinner, over warm English beer, sitting by their bicycles in a field, listening to the planes go over. He told her briefly about Liliane. He talked to her about Mondrian, Hepworth, Gabo, the spiritual meanings of horizontals and verticals. She spoke—quietly and cogently—about number symbolism and spiritual forms. It was in the air, amongst the code-breakers, the Platonic world of pure maths. He was awkward with women, because of his height. He was afraid of her creamy beauty. One day, as they leaned on a gate, she took his hand, gravely, and put it on her breast, over her cotton shirt. She said, a week or two later, “When we are married we will have a dovecote, and doves.” The future seemed brief, in those days. He wanted children. He wanted to lose himself in the curves of that warm skin. They married quickly—there was no family to invite, or so he thought. Later he discovered that Eva’s orphaned state, like her degree in Egyptology, was not what it seemed. They had a honeymoon in a country farmhouse in Oxfordshire.

  He knew quickly that he was disappointed—he did not then say, deceived. He tried to overcome his disappointment. After the war, he had university posts in Durham and London. He worked. Eva grew fat. He hoped, once or twice, that she might be growing heavier because she was pregnant, but no children came. He retreated into Fibonacci spirals and a study of word order in sentences in several languages. Eva in a white nightgown walked out of an upper window in Durham and crashed through an apple-tree, breaking her wrist and her nose. She was, she said, the scorpion goddess, Selket. She was also drunk. She was also sick. Remedies were tried—a Jungian analysis, group healing sessions at Cedar Mount, periods in nursing homes. She told anyone who cared to hear that she was a sacrificial victim of her husband’s ambition, his self-absorption, his worldly success. She told everyone that he had mistresses in foreign parts. In his Calvinist soul Gerard Wijnnobel believed her, even though his reasonable mind could put the contrary case with his usual clarity.

  Another man, not far away, sat on the edge of his bed in Cedar Mount and tried to make plans. He was supposed to be in the Association Room. It was thought desirable that those who were able should associate in groups. He was due for an interview, an assessment, with the psychiatrist, Dr. Kieran Quarrell. These were rare and had to be made the most of.

  He watched the blood run down the walls and seep up mildly round the edges of the linoleum. It was clear red blood this morning. It burst through the wall-covering—washable vinyl, with a cheerful pattern of two-dimensional sunflowers—in small bright gouts and bubbles. From there it descended in trickles, which joined to form a clear red sheet towards the base of the wall. Round its edges, as sheets of blood do, it coagulated and browned. Round the edges of the linoleum it pulsed a little, as though some system of veins under the floorboards were pumping it out. He watched it soak into someone’s white sock that had been left lying around. He felt calm. The blood, that morning, was an interesting phenomenon. He would have liked to discuss it with someone. Was it there or not there? He was certainly seeing it—with his eyes—noting its viscosity and flow. He was not making it up. It wasn’t a projection of his state of mind, which was calm, not bloody. It was not a metaphor.

  On the other hand, he was almost entirely certain that if he picked up the soaked sock, it would be white wool, and would not drip red. In certain hectic moods, he saw blood falling through the air itself, in sheets, like rain. Then sometimes he lost, lost, lost his head a bit, lost what the male nurses called his cool.

  He thought, if he failed to mention the blood—and he was under no obligation to mention or not to mention things—then he might talk himself out of there, out through the gates of the enclosure. He was almost entirely sure he wanted to get out. His life had a purpose. It was meant to flow on, towards its goal, not to eddy round this anchored bed. An obligation was laid upon him, to live his life, which he was not doing. Those who spoke to him explained that, not entirely patiently, over and over. The voices, like the blood, were there and he himself did not produce or control them. They were different from the hum of chatter in the Association Room. They were not in his head. He listened to them. He knew no one else heard them.

  He had hidden his pill in his shoe. A clear head was required. His head was old and young. His hair was a bright white mass. His beard bristled brindled, black and fiery, with touches of steel. He was a big man. He sat quietly on the edge of the bed, and waited, and watched the blood.

  Chapter 4

  Frederica gave up teaching because she wanted to teach. All that summer in 1968, the students marched and held meetings, made banners and discussed the nature of things. They barricaded the administrative offices. They wrote long documents with endless clauses, demanding both to be released from the oppression of imposed ideas and establishment-structured concepts, and to be better prepared for the “total environment” they were to enter. “Total environment” meant the world of employment. The art students at the Samuel Palmer School were particularly hostile to the newly-introduced courses of Liberal Studies, which included Frederica’s literature, as well as some philosophy, sociology and psychology. A note was pushed under the door of the Liberal Studies Office. “We Demand that courses in Literature and Philosophy be made conceptually relevant to Jewellery Design.”

  The past was to be abolished. Someone put all Alan Melville’s Vermeer slides in a bath of acid, and displayed them with a notice “The Lady Vanishes.” Richmond Bly, the head of Liberal Studies, and a Blake enthusiast, was very much on the side of the students. At a passionate 36-hour meeting, in which he urged the students to become Tigers of Wrath and do away with the Horses of Instruction, he agreed that there should be no more authoritarian lectures, that all meetings of students and teachers should be open-ended explorations, or interchanges, and that difficult and irrelevant things like Frederica’s classes in Metaphysical Poetry should be abolished. Frederica’s classes in contemporary fiction became a series of repetitive attempts to find out the first principles of why art students should bother themselves wit
h literature at all. Frederica had no answer. It was clear to her that it was better to be interested in things than not interested in them, and that included literature, as it might have included botany or nuclear fission. But she found it increasingly difficult to retain her own interest in the transient phenomenon of being a student, especially a student who didn’t study, but talked and talked. She suggested that the contemporary fiction class agree a topic on contemporary fiction and discuss it. Someone proposed Lady Chatterley’s Lover. After lengthy debate this proposal was adopted. The seminar took place. Frederica sat at the back, in a non-authoritarian position. No one spoke. No one spoke. Frederica asked if anyone had read Lady Chatterley’s Lover. No one had, or no one would admit it. Frederica stood up. She said “If I had lectured on this book, I should have learned something. One or two of you might have learned something. As it is, we breathe a bit, and it gets to be lunch time. I have my life to live. I’m going.”

  She glared at them. They stared back, critical and recalcitrant. She walked out. She walked along the corridor, and tapped on the door of Richmond Bly’s office.

  “More trouble?” he said, with a kind of pleasure, sensing the electric field of Frederica’s rage.

  “Not really. I want to resign. As of now.”

  “You don’t want to be too rigid, Frederica. These are exciting times. You don’t want to be hide-bound and old. There’s a lot to learn from the passion of these young people.”

  “Yes,” said Frederica. “But not the things I want to learn, that’s the point. I’m in the wrong place, at the wrong time. OK, I accept what you say, I’m too old to be here. Who the hell wants to be twenty forever? I need to learn something, and it isn’t how to be a Student.”

  “OK,” said Bly, equably. “As of now?”

  “As of now.”

  Why? she wondered later. It was true that she wanted to learn something, to think, and it was true that she was a good teacher because she was more interested in the books she taught than in the students who listened—which is not to say that she wasn’t interested in the students, only that she had her priorities. It was also true that she had no idea what she wanted to do. There was the projected thesis on metaphor, impossible now—she would never get a research grant as a single woman with a small child. She envied Agatha, who had a career and made real decisions that changed people’s lives. But Agatha had said, once, that she felt that she was becoming her job, that a civil servant was what she was, whether she liked it or not, which she wasn’t sure about. Agatha was defined. She herself—though still undoubtedly in her own mind, and in other people’s, “brilliant”—was somehow a scrappy structure lacking outline and architecture. She considered her options. She had to, there was the problem of no money, and perhaps she had meant to drive herself to action by creating a financial crisis where there had been a bare sufficiency. Like most freelance persons she had become addicted to opening envelopes containing cheques. Cheques from newspapers for small reviews. Cheques from Rupert Parrott for reading the slush heap of Bowers & Eden. Cheques for extra-mural teaching. Pink cheques, grey cheques, duck-egg blue cheques for £3.7.6d or £1.12.71⁄2d meaning trousers for Leo, a pair of tights, an Iris Murdoch novel, washing-up liquid, apples, roses, wine.

  So, how to replace the art school cheques? What did people do? She asked her friends Tony Watson, who had his own column now in the New Statesman, and Alan Melville. Tony said he would talk to the editor. Alan said he was entirely with her in her decision but couldn’t help. She talked to Hugh Pink, the poet, who worked part-time for Bowers & Eden. Hugh said there were almost no women in publishing, though there were women authors, he had always supposed she would eventually be a writer. Frederica said that the writer in the house was Agatha Mond, and she wanted Hugh to get Agatha to send the fairy story to Rupert Parrott. “Now it’s come to an end,” said Frederica. “Then she’ll have to write a sequel. Saskia and Leo are languishing. I can’t write a fairy story for them. I appear not to be a writer.”

  “You do write,” said Hugh. “I saw.”

  “That’s not writing, that’s a game,” said Frederica. She was defensive.

  Hugh was the only person to whom Frederica had shown her book of jottings, cut-ups, commonplaces and scraps of writing, which she called Laminations. She had only shown him certain bits, as illustrations of jokes or literary points.

  “It’s a contemporary game,” said Hugh. “Like Burroughs and Jeff Nuttall, only quite different, of course, because it’s you.”

  “It’s got intimate bits in, bits of me. Only a few lines long.” She didn’t show him those bits.

  She had had the word, Laminations, before the object. It referred to her attempts to live her life in separated strata, which did not run into each other. Sex, literature, the kitchen, teaching, the newspaper, objets trouvés. She did not put Leo into Laminations, not because he was not part of her fragmentary life, but because he was not fragmented. Lately, however, she had begun to put in odd passages from the books with which she was trying to teach him, too late, to read. How do you interest a boy with the vocabulary of a sophisticated adolescent in Daddy cleaning the car and Mummy making cakes?

  She took the exercise books out of her desk and showed them to Hugh. Her last entry was a collection of graffiti from the Samuel Palmer School.

  Turn on, tune in, drop out.

  Art is Orgasm which blasts away Civic Walls and Bourgeois Frames and BURSTS OPEN the locks and chains of Capital.

  Student-networks for relevance to the total environment.

  Teaching is oppression.

  We Demand you make Literature more relevant to Jewellery Design.

  Shut up and listen for a change.

  Use pricks and cunts not brains. Use tongues for Human Delight not syllabubbles.

  Prescribe mushrooms not Shakespeare Texts. Learn folly to be wise.

  Paint all the walls every day with everything that comes to hand.

  Hugh flicked back through the pages. Frederica hovered nervously. He laughed. He smiled. He noted the cut-ups of Lawrence and Forster. “And those are the cut-up letters from my ex-husband’s solicitor.”

  “It’s like a private I Ching,” said Hugh. “Well, not private. A particular, an individual I Ching. Can I show it to Rupert?”

  “It isn’t finished.”

  “That’s its nature.”

  Frederica gave in. Hugh was part of her laminated system. He was a friend, in many ways the friend, as far as writing and reading went. It was important that he should never be confused with possible lovers. He had not always quite seen it that way himself. Frederica thought, thinking about not thinking about sex, about John Ottokar. Who had accepted the Yorkshire job, starting in the autumn term.

  The person who produced real work, real cheques, for Frederica, turned out to be Edmund Wilkie.

  Wilkie, who was still professionally interested in the activities of the brain, and the nature of perception, had somehow also managed to become part of the then small, curiously open and anarchic world of BBC Television. People had good ideas (and bad ideas) and put them into practice, without too much bureaucratic consultation. One of the series he had inaugurated was a kind of literary guessing-game called Gobbets. The idea was simple. Four guessers, a chairman and an actor sat round (or along) a table. The actor read out quotations and the guessers guessed where they came from. At the time, many people assumed that this was the way television would go, or one of the ways—civilised, after-dinner mind-flexing, the reader’s version of snooker or tennis. Frederica didn’t have a television. She was beginning to see that this was an impossible state of affairs, for Leo wept with rage that his friends could see Batman and Dr. Who, and he could not. She was not unusual in this. She did not consider television to be important, despite her journalist friend Tony Watson’s excited speeches on how all elections from henceforth would be won and lost on the small screen. She had a vague idea that it was sinful to spend one’s evenings passively staring, whether at news
, satire, discussion or whatever. All these things could be better and quicker experienced by other means. And then, there was the old individualist’s supercilious fear of becoming part of a mass. Which was thought, by the producers of Gobbets, to be interested in the attribution and discussion of literary quotations.

  Wilkie told Frederica that she could come and be part of the team, for a trial run. “We can never find enough women to go on the programme,” he explained. “They won’t play. You do some reviewing, we’ll class you as a journalist.” The programmes were recorded in blocks of four, sometimes in the Television Centre, sometimes in Manchester. There was an atmosphere of party-going and an illusion of a complex cultural life which was going on, on and off the screen. Frederica guessed Marvell’s “Garden,” and Henry Green’s Loving and Auden’s “September 1939” and an obscure passage from Sense and Sensibility. She failed to guess a passage from Byron, whom she had never got on with, and a passage from Dombey and Son, which made her briefly furious. She was surprised to be invited back—despite the difficulty of finding women. Wilkie said to her “You’re not scared of the camera. That’s very unusual. You just say what you think.”

  Frederica thought about being scared of the camera. If she wasn’t, it was because she didn’t take it seriously. She didn’t see herself and didn’t want to. Small cheques arrived. She travelled to Manchester in a carriage full of poets, historians and thinkers and listened whilst they talked about how to write about war.

  Then Wilkie said casually that he wanted her to audition for a new series which was partly about television itself, about what it did, what effects it had. On everything from politics to science to art. “I’ve put you down for an audition,” he said. “To do interviews on it. To ask questions. You’d be good.”