Babel Tower

  “You are presenting yourself as a cautious and moderate person, Gijsbert.”

  “Only in some ways, Govinder. Only in some personal ways. I take risks when I must. You cannot do business without taking risks.”

  “That is so. The important thing is, to be clever about which risks.”

  They laugh again. Frederica in her brown tube, is not there, not for those two, not even as a pair of female eyes to observe their male liveliness, for they do not exactly see her as female. Nigel does. He watches her, as well as watching Shah and Pijnakker; he fills their glasses often and hers not at all. She thinks perhaps he is not speaking much because he is partly thinking about the appearance of Alan and Tony and Hugh. But perhaps he never speaks, she wonders. Even his telephone world consists mostly of listening, his head cocked on one side, his lips and brows thoughtful.

  The three friends are eating steak and kidney pie in the Red Dragon. They started with tomato soup, and went on to the pie, which is really very good. The dining-room has low beams, which may or may not be old, and a bar at one end. There is also a real wood fire, in a chimney. A wood fire is a cheering thing.

  Tony says, “She can’t stay there, she’ll go mad.”

  “You can’t just say that,” says Hugh. “She went there. Perhaps she really likes it. Perhaps she had a hankering for country life. I do, from time to time.”

  “Do you think she likes it?”

  “No. No. I don’t.”

  “Why did she go there?” says Tony, as though a good analytic explanation could immediately be produced.

  Alan says, “I have noticed that all sorts of people, who are perfectly sensible when offering opinions about Shakespeare, or Claude Lorrain, or even Harold Wilson, simply go off their rockers when deciding about getting married. Tough people get pressured by weak people and vice versa. People marry their ideas of what they wanted. I know a girl whose ideal was a man with coal-black hair and she found one, and much good it did her. He is the most boring man and keeps a model railway in the attic. And then I’ve noticed people marry to spite their parents, or to repeat the mistakes or the successes of their parents, or quite often both. People marry to get away from their mothers, and hundreds of people marry one lover in order to get away from another, and what they’re really thinking about isn’t the one they are marrying but the one they aren’t. Or they marry to spite someone who didn’t want them.”

  “Or for money,” says Tony.

  “Or for money,” says Alan. “I would have thought it was built into Frederica’s scheme of things not to do that, but of course she might have been in revolt against her scheme of things, temporarily at least.”

  “She said she got married because her sister died,” says Hugh. “That is, that isn’t exactly what she said, but she intimated that that changed her, her sister dying, and she was changed.”

  “I don’t see,” says Tony, “how the death of a sister could turn you into a country lady; it seems an odd reaction, to say the least.”

  “You could imagine a scenario,” says Alan, “where a completely new beginning in a completely new place—a new life … She couldn’t be so silly.”

  “She was always silly,” says Tony. “That was what made her bearable. Silly and clever at once, and so sure she was right, poor dear. There’s a certain Schadenfreude in seeing her in this mess.”

  “No, there isn’t,” says Hugh. “It’s just awful. And that amazing little boy. He wasn’t going to let her say a word to us. He didn’t.”

  “That is the daftest thing of all,” says Tony. “That makes the whole mess irretrievable.”

  There is an element of enjoyment in Tony’s contemplation of Frederica’s predicament. Alan and Hugh are more perturbed, but also less disposed to interfere. Hugh says, “You can’t tell, of course. The most surprising couples are happy in the most surprising ways.”

  Alan says, “You can tell. She’s miserable. She’s lost and miserable and ashamed.”

  Tony says, “Well. What are we going to do?”

  “Can we do anything?”

  The waitress brings lemon meringue pie.

  Alan says, “We can’t just leave her.”

  Hugh says, “I don’t think we’ll find it easy to see her again.”

  The firelight flickers. The pub is comfortable. They order coffee and whisky, and talk about Harold Wilson and Rupert Parrott. Outside a wind gets up, with rain in it.

  Frederica goes to bed early, and Nigel goes into the study, with Pijnakker and Shah. Frederica lies and reads Durrell’s Justine, which she has picked up because she thinks its narrative is strong enough to be gripping even in the state she is in. She thinks, I could just get up and go to Alexandria, and then she thinks that those who will go to Alexandria are in fact Pijnakker and Shah and Nigel Reiver. None of them would probably give more than ten minutes to Durrell’s mannered prose but they would be more at home in his world than she would. She does not want Durrell’s Alexandria in her bedroom and turns out the light. Lying rigid in the dark, willing sleep to come, shakes the brain and causes bone-ache. She puts the light on again and takes up Rilke. She is reading The Sonnets to Orpheus in bed in a side-by-side translation, to keep her mind exercised. This goes better. A little grammatical wrestling is wonderfully soothing, and she finds two lines which shiver her flesh and which she thinks she must show Hugh.

  Geht ihr zu Bette, so lasst auf dem Tische

  Brot nicht und Milch nicht: die Toten ziehts.—

  (If you go to bed, leave on the table

  No bread, no milk: they draw the Dead.)

  And then she thinks she will find it hard to show Hugh anything again.

  When Nigel comes to bed, late, late, she pretends to be asleep. He crashes around, putting on lights: a quantity of malt whisky has been consumed. Frederica lies like an angry needle along one edge of the bed. He gets in, switches off the light, and reaches for her with a heavy arm. She wriggles away. He pulls at her. She has a sudden vision of the buttocks and breasts and mouths in the briefcase. She slips out of bed like an eel, snatching up Rilke, and retreats into the bathroom.

  She hears his voice, “What were you holding his hand for?”

  She tries to remember. The Moated Grange. There is no answer. She thinks of slamming the door, restrains herself, shuts it very quietly, and waits.

  Ist er ein Hiesiger? Nein, aus beiden

  Reichen erwuchs seine weite Natur …

  (Is he from this world? No, from both kingdoms

  Sprang his wide nature …)

  She waits for the explosion. It does not come. Nigel has gone to sleep. Whisky is beautiful, sleep is beautiful, silence is blissful. Frederica’s eye-rims are sore with suppressed tears.

  The next day is Sunday. Frederica breakfasts with Shah and Pijnakker, who then set off in the Triumph. She finds herself walking. Along landings, along staircases, through rooms, back. She thinks of going out for a walk, but thinks also that the friends might come. And indeed, at about ten, she hears the telephone. Pippy is there to answer it in the hall. Frederica is on the landing.

  “Hullo? Oh yes. I don’t know where she is at the moment, or what her plans are. I’ll go and see.”

  Frederica begins to come downstairs.

  Nigel comes out of the drawing-room, and nods to Pippy. Pippy says to the telephone, after a decent moment’s rest, “I’m so sorry, I find she’s busy all morning, I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

  The telephone speaks gallantly. Frederica comes down the stairs. Nigel nods again at Pippy, who says with a cluck of sympathy, “I’m so sorry, she can’t come to the telephone, she’s gone out.”

  And before Frederica can move, she has put the phone down.

  Frederica says, “You could see I wasn’t out, Pippy What is this?”

  Pippy looks at her, drops her gaze, and trots away. Frederica says to Nigel, “So I am not to go anywhere, ever?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not being. You have jus
t told a lie to my friends, to my old friends, you have said I wasn’t there when I was.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Nigel, with the flexibility that is always disarming. “I’m sorry, that was bad. I just can’t stand those people.”

  “You don’t know them.”

  “They don’t like me, and I don’t like them. And you are married to me.”

  They stare at each other. Frederica says, “I am going to call them and say I am here.”

  “I don’t want you to. I want you, just this once, to stay here, to please me. We’ll go out with Leo. We’ll go for a drive. It will be good for Leo to have both his parents.”

  “ ‘Just this once,’ ” says Frederica, picking on the operative phrase. “What do you mean, ‘Just this once’? I never go anywhere, I never see anyone, I have no life, and when my friends come, you have the gall to say ‘Just this once, don’t go.’ ”

  “You have to understand,” says Nigel, “I don’t feel sure of you. You aren’t the sort of girl I was accustomed to. In a sort of a way I was a bit scared of you. I’m frightened you might find me boring, me and Leo, and want to go off, or something. You can understand that?”

  “Oh yes,” says Frederica. “I can understand that. But I can’t live with it, any more. If you keep me shut up here because I might go off, I will go off, you can see that?”

  “Leo—” says Nigel.

  “Don’t blackmail me with Leo. I am myself, as well as Leo’s mother. I want to see my friends.”

  “Just this once—” Nigel begins doggedly, and then laughs, sharp and unhappy. “Look, we’ll start again, we’ll go to London, I’ll take you to Amsterdam with Pijnakker and you can look at your pictures, we’ll go on a holiday—we could go to the West Indies—”

  “I don’t want to go to the West Indies, I want to go where I can talk about books—where I can think—I have to think, the way you have to do whatever you do do, with Pijnakker and Shah—”

  “You can think here. It isn’t thinking you want, it’s men. You need lots of men.”

  “No, Nigel. I need—”

  “He was holding your hand.”

  “Is that so terrible?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. To me, it is.”

  “I’m sorry. It wasn’t anything. Leo was even there. They are just my friends.”

  “Just this once—stay with me. I’m sorry. Stay with me.”

  She stays, because she sees only too well that if she does attempt to telephone the Red Dragon, all that will result will be hideous embarrassment and violence. They go out in the car, Frederica and Leo and Nigel, and they have what might be called a good day. Both of them talk to Leo, who chatters to both of them. Leo does not mention Alan and Tony and Hugh, though Frederica is waiting for him to do so. It is as though they had never come, never existed.

  When they come hack, Nigel says, “There, that was a good day.”

  Pippy carries Leo off to bed. She brings supper for Nigel and Frederica. She does not meet Frederica’s eye. Frederica is tired. She has got through another day, and finds this consoling, until, when relaxation dribbles a livelier blood into her veins, she starts thinking again: Getting through another day, and another day, what sort of a life is that? “Most people’s lives,” some cynical Good Fairy mutters in her head. “Most people’s lives.” Frederica stabs carrots, savagely, with her fork. She thinks, Today is Sunday, they all have jobs, they will have gone home.

  Rifts are closed, but also sprung open, in bedrooms. Frederica sees that Nigel has a scenario for this night, a scenario of long, subtle, complex love-making, of gentleness and closeness, of pleasure and loss of self and exhausted sleep. She tries, because she is tired, and because in some ways she is in despair, to school herself to accept this, because it is what he has to give, and because she needs sleep and unconsciousness, and because of Leo. She watches Nigel undress—he likes to sleep naked—and she thinks to herself that his body is more real to her than those of Tony and Alan and Hugh added together—and Alexander and Wilkie and Raphael Faber, she tells herself rather wildly. She even sits quietly on the edge of her side of the bed, in a white lawn nightdress with long sleeves and a yoke and collar, and wonders whether women in previous centuries would even recognise her despair, given that she does not want to go away and make love to Tony, Alan and Hugh, but merely to talk to them, merely to feel a little mental space for freedom. The bedroom is dark, and Nigel has drawn the curtains, which are dark red, a kind of damask, with red trees and red blooms on a red ground. When Frederica is alone she leaves the curtains open and sees stars or clouds. She imagines Alan and Tony and Hugh in a large room with white walls and pale blue curtains, with open windows blowing the blue curtains, and sunlight coming in. She hunches her shoulders and stares at her knees. The naked man pads, strutting a little, as naked men do, in and out of the bathroom, making tap noises, spitting noises, flushing noises. Frederica sits and waits, and thinks. She thinks, I am a woman, and thinks what a silly pretentious thought that is. She thinks, I thought that, because the kind of woman I am is not quite sure she is a woman, she likes to be reassured about that. I am a thin woman, a sharp woman, a wordy woman, not the sort of animal men think of at all when they think of a woman. Cambridge obscured this, temporarily, there were so few women, we were all treated as though we were real ones, like nurses in prisons, like secretaries in barracks.

  The man carries his penis in front of him, neither erect nor quiescent, but stirring with life, but solidifying. He says, “Darling.” He approaches the motionless woman and pulls at her nightdress, intending to lift it romantically over her head.

  Frederica sees in her head, with total clarity, the succession of images in the locked case, the screwed-up bodies, the blown-up flesh, the carmines and roses, the slippery rubbery masses. She twists away, clutching her garment, and says, “It’s no use. None of it is any use. You know as well as I do that this is over, that I can’t stay, that it hasn’t worked. Tomorrow I will put some things together and get a taxi or something from Spessendborough and just go in a civilised sort of way. And then we can be friends and it will not be so awful.”

  She had not expected to say any of this, and is uncomfortably aware that her tone is that of a nanny talking to a child. Nigel stops a moment, and then continues his advance. The penis has not shrunk, it has become an angry club, wavering in front of him. His face is flushed. He takes hold of Frederica’s hair, pulls her head back on to the bed—she lets herself fall quickly, remembering the commando grips—pushes up the nightdress and takes her. He does not try to hurt her, he does not kiss or caress her. He bangs away, and explodes, and sits back on the floor, swaying slightly. Frederica says, in a thin voice, frightened and furious, “That has nothing to say to it. I am going to go, tomorrow.”

  “No,” says Nigel. His eyes are full of tears. They run on to his cheeks. Frederica wipes her legs with the sheet and the nightdress.

  “It isn’t me you want,” says Frederica. “You just want to hold on to what you’ve got, like all possessive males, you’re like one of the stags when one of the females tries to trot off, you bellow and rush. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “How do you know? You don’t know my thoughts, you don’t know much, I often think. You don’t notice much. How do you know what I feel?”

  “I don’t think I care any more what you feel. I’m going to go and sleep in that other room. Good night.”

  She goes into the spare bedroom and sits on the edge of the bed, in the dark, and shakes. She waits. She is not thinking, she is simply afraid. She waits. When she hears footsteps along the corridor, she gets behind the door. She is still shaking. Perhaps she will faint. The door opens violently and the man comes into the room. He stands, accustoming his eyes to the dark, and Frederica whips round the door, and runs along the corridor and down the stairs. She runs into the kitchen and out into the scullery, and pulls at bolts, and chains, and goes out into the quiet damp night. She goes on running, across the back yard, through a ga
te into the stable-yard. She listens. At first there is no sound of pursuit and then she hears a door open. That is all. He is not crashing. He is coming quietly. Frederica opens the door to the saddle-room, quietly, quietly, slips in and shuts it. She does not like to be shut in. She wants to be out in the air, to run all the way to London, but that is silly, she needs to be very clever. She gets behind a rack of saddles and waits. She thinks, when he opens the door, if he opens the door, this nightdress will shimmer. She finds a horseblanket, drapes it over a chair and crouches under. Every hiding place is also more dangerous, because she cannot run. She can hear her own blood, banging in her head and her heart. Her mouth is dry. She crouches.

  After what seems a long time, the door is thrown open with a crash. She can hear him breathing. She sees his bare feet, and the bottoms of his pyjama trousers, striped blue and white. She breathes shallow, shallow, just enough air to keep alive. He says, “Frederica?” She keeps still. He walks in and looks around. She thinks he must have a hunting animal’s instinct for warm flesh and breath, but he listens, and does not come towards her. He says, “I’ll find you,” and she can tell from his voice that he does not know she is there, not really, he is a bit embarrassed, for all his heaving rage, to be talking to an empty room. He goes out, leaving the door open. She still cannot hear his feet on the paving stones, which makes her feel hysterical. She hears a door, another further door, a sudden movement of a horse in a stall, the scrape of a metal shoe. She hears the second door close. Then for a long time she hears nothing. She crouches in the cold in her damp nightdress and says to herself, “Come on, you are clever, intelligence can be used for anything, what are you going to do?” But she can think of nothing at all, except going back into the house, and hiding, and waiting until morning, and running on to the road, once she has some sensible clothes—and the road is some two and a half miles away, and unfrequented—and hitching a lift. And there is Leo. How can she run away when he is awake?