Babel Tower

  I have been a cabin attendant on Zag’s spiritual voyage long enough to know that he believes it is your wish to put a distance between you. This is a sane wish, worthy of respect. There are three things I would nevertheless say to you—after great deliberation, as I say.

  1. Your retreat is directly endangering Zag’s progress—he feels bereft, he feels angry, he feels many many negative things, which he turns against himself, like a child who cuts his own skin. When he does not see you you become in his mind a fantasy spectre or emanation, powerful, to be fought. When he does see you, he sees that you are a complex, separate human being, with real needs and a real life with which he can come to terms.

  From Zag’s point of view, steady contact with you—above all, perhaps, in the sane and controlled emotional “field” of the Spirits’ Tigers—is necessary for the preservation of some sense of “reality.” And however much I may believe that “reality” is not the same thing as common-sense convention or normality, I do believe it exists. There is a real world—even if infinite—and there is an unreal world, and Zag is in great danger of being trapped in the latter.

  2. Your retreat is, I suspect, endangering you, John. For you are part of Zag, and the separation must be a subtle unravelling, not a brutal and bloody teasing. You know that in your heart of hearts. Your “dailiness” you cling to is an unreality as dangerous as Zag’s bad trips to the Aurora Borealis. If I overstep the mark, burn this letter. If I speak to any flicker of recognition in any anxiety anywhere in your head or your heart, consider further, come and talk to me, come back to the Spirits’ Tigers and bring the problem into the white light of our joint watchfulness and dreamy unknowing.

  3. The world is changing before our eyes. Consciousness is changing. We can move into a state where we do not hurt each other. You were drawn to the Spirits’ Tigers for reasons beyond even your mysterious positive and negative charge to and from your brother. We can say these things, these days, without sounding mad, or cranky, but soberly and truthfully.

  Again, if this says nothing to you, burn this letter, forget you received it.

  With best wishes.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Elvet Gander

  John Ottokar shows this letter dumbly to Frederica. He holds it out, over the table in a coffee bar where they are meeting in his lunch-break. He is wearing his suit, and a blue-and-white-striped shirt, and a dark blue tie with small emerald spots on it. Frederica is irritated by his portentous and apprehensive expression. She is more irritated by the content of the letter.

  “His problem,” she pronounces, “is logorrhea. Some of those sentences mean almost nothing.”

  “It’s partly a question of religious language,” says John Ottokar. “It tends to be kind of portmanteau and empty at the same time. I do rather hate it. The Quakers avoid it if they can.”

  “He’s meant to be a psychoanalyst.”

  “It’s not exclusive. You can be both.”

  They are bickering about language, in order to avoid discussing the letter.

  “What do you think?” says John Ottokar.

  “It’s nothing to do with me,” says Frederica. “It’s your letter, and your brother, and your Quakers and your Tigers. And your psychoanalyst.”

  “I see.”

  He stares gloomily at the tablecloth. He puts together his papers, as though he is about to leave.

  “I’m sorry. I sound spiteful. I don’t mean to be. It scares me. All these things you seem to be involved in, to belong to.”

  “I don’t say that. The point is, I haven’t gone to the Spirits’ Tigers, not since … not since we … I know you don’t like it. I want—I want to give—what we have—a chance.”

  “If you think I think I’ve got any right—am in any position—to stop you being a spiritual Tiger—please reconsider. I don’t have any such right—I’m not asking for it.”

  “I know.”

  And don’t look gloomy and submissive, Frederica wants to cry out; what I liked was your independent prowling. John Ottokar says mildly, “Elvet Gander has got a point. He won’t say Paul is sick, because he doesn’t like the word, but Paul is whatever Paul was when everyone said he was sick. He can’t cope with normal life, I do know. And I do know that I could help. He’s right there. I know.”

  “Well then, you must help him.”

  “But if I help him at the expense of my own life—if I get all snarled—”

  Frederica feels she ought to say, “We’ll deal with this together, we’ll see it through, don’t worry.” Those are the lines that are written into the script, but she doesn’t want to say them. She doesn’t know where she and John Ottokar would or would not be going without Paul/Zag and Elvet Gander and the Spiritual Tigers.

  “I don’t want to bore you,” says John Ottokar, responding accurately to this unspoken communication.

  Frederica laughs.

  “I don’t see how anyone could find all this boring,” she says. “Frightening, yes. What will you do?”

  “I shan’t go to the Tigers. I do want peace and quiet—the normal. I find them heady and—and intensely satisfying. But I ought perhaps to write to Gander and try and say what I feel, why I don’t think it’s a good idea. And I don’t want to write, I hate writing, I hate putting things down, it’s all lies, it’s all approximate …”

  “I’m going to meet Gander myself,” says Frederica. “Rupert Parrott’s having a meeting ‘In Defence of Babbletower.’ He’s asked all his trendy authors—Gander, and Canon Holly and Phyllis Pratt. He’s asked me, because he says I can make Jude behave better. He says a recent graduate gave evidence in the Lady Chatterley case, just a young girl, to show she was unsullied. I can’t see me making a good impression in the witness box as an unsullied young girl who had read Babbletower and was still unsullied. He’s terribly worked up. In a crusading sort of way. Whereas Jude is terribly worked up in a personal sort of way, and doesn’t look well.”

  The June end-of-the-year exhibition at the Samuel Palmer School is still known as the Dip Show, though the students are now taking a degree, not a diploma. This is why they must pass a literature exam, and why Frederica has been working hard, invigilating and marking papers. Frederica and Agatha go to the Dip Show together, on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Leo and Saskia go with them, and Clement and Thano attach themselves to the party. So does John Ottokar, who turns up “for the fairy story,” and stays to lunch, as he sometimes does.

  Frederica enjoys the atmosphere. The great studios are divided into spaces, and there are abrupt changes of identity from space to space. A series of stormily menacing rural landscapes is juxtaposed with a box containing brilliant demi-lunes and diamonds of purple and yellow spots and stripes. This is next to a series of collages—balloon-breasted bearded men in fishnet tights and stilettos wrestling or embracing giant carrots and stuffed rabbits, which is in turn next to a painterly series of portraits of men and women in the act of peeling soft plastic masks off their faces. Frederica now knows enough about painting to see that what makes these interesting is the virtuosity and variety of the troughs and channels and folds and texture of the different surfaces, the perspectives of the doubled eyes and twisted sockets. She can also see that the student (Susie Blair) has been taught by Desmond Bull. Susie Blair writes decorous little essays for Frederica on “Show the different methods by which Jane Austen invites and discourages the reader’s sympathy for Emma Woodhouse and/or Fanny Price”—these essays show no sign of the savage intelligence that imitates flesh and plastic in oil paint. Frederica enjoys the gaps between the painters’ writings and their inventions, which she could never have thought up, or begun to imagine, even the weakest. In the next cubicle are a series of dream-worlds somewhere between Claude and Arthur Rackham, entitled Faery Lands Forlorn. They ought to be kitsch, and are not, not quite. Saskia says, “Look at the little greeny lights.”

  The painters are dispensing red and white wine in crinkling plastic beakers; everything is spread with a
faint dust of trodden potato-crisps. The party hurry past a room with nothing in it but a red canvas, a white canvas and a blue canvas, with the predictable rubric “United?” They come to the graphics department, where everything is display-conscious. Here they discover that the design teacher has been as good as his word, and has set Babbletower as an exercise in jacket design and poster production. Here too they find Jude himself, patrolling the display like an Ancient Mariner ready to pounce and expound. He hurries up to Frederica, John and Agatha.

  “Here you have the Artwork for a work of art temporarily, we hope, suppressed. What is your opinion of all this? Who carries away the palm for suggestiveness?”

  “Vis man,” says Leo to Saskia, sotto voce, “is ve other smelly man. My mum knows lots of really stinking men.”

  “This one pongs,” agrees Clement, equably.

  “Be quiet,” says Jude. “Little children should speak when spoken to, you must know that. How fortunate that you are all too short to see my collection of turrets. Go over there, where a well-meaning young woman has done a pretty Perrault and give me your opinion of her Puss-in-Boots and her Little Red Riding Hood. Marks out of ten, please.”

  Some of the Babbletower covers are banal. Others are clever and suggestive. One has Hockneyish drawings of a man in a wig and a woman in hoops, leering at each other half-heartedly. Two or three have Disneyish Germanic castles. One has a long procession of maggot-like infants, carrying rose branches, passing under a portcullis into blackness. One has three Blake-like Elders or Wise Men standing on a battlement amongst flocks of big black birds. One has Brueghel’s beautiful painting of the unfinished, crumbling, weed-ridden Tower of Babel, with brilliant little droplets, or tongues of scarlet shiny blood dripping out of its orifices and down its ledges. Jude points this one out with approval. “The lettering is a bit fancy,” he says. “If you look closely you can see it’s made of needles and pins, I don’t like that. But it’s better than these dreadful people who aren’t my people, who stop you seeing the people in the book, who interfere.”

  “This one’s clever,” says Agatha.

  It is semi-abstract and very bright—a tomato-coloured double-apple-cheeked fruit, with a serpentine pointed conical tube in very bright green, coiled round it and penetrating it.

  “I hate it,” says Jude.

  “It’s a good joke,” says Agatha, in her mild, dark voice. “Cul-vert. Rose-Arse. It’s all there, in purely visual language.”

  “I can see that. I hate it.”

  Agatha considers.

  “I might hate it, if I were you. But since I’m not, I find it very witty. I hope it got a good mark.”

  “It did,” says Jude.

  He takes them “to see my glory and my shame.” He hurries them down flights of stairs and into the refectory, where there is a display of the Foundation Course Life Studies, which include Jude naked, in chalk, in charcoal, in pastel, in gouache, in pencil, in acrylic, in oil. He is a faceless skinny length of bone in a tent of hair, he is meticulously delineated nipples and prick in bronze and green on grey paper, he is soft, soft lead, uncannily recalling the exact tone of his hippo-grey skin, sitting regally in a gilt chair, lying foetally coiled on plumped and depressed cushions. He is tendons and knobby knees and chilblains and scraggy neck; he is aquiline disdain; he is gloom with downcast eyes. The three little boys go from image to image; they do not say so, but everyone can see they are comparing the depictions of his genitals. Leo points and whispers: Clement nods.

  “I am instructive,” says Jude.

  “Do you enjoy seeing these?” says Agatha.

  “It convinces me I exist, I suppose. And that we do not see ourselves as others see us, which I know. And that my shins are not proportionate—at some moment, from some angles—with each other or with other parts of my anatomy.”

  Far away, in the bowels of the building, they hear music. It is a jazz clarinet, wooden and liquid, a clear long, long wail, a run of chords, a desolate repeated complaint. They wander in its direction. One or two canted notices, hung on door-knobs, say in red letters on white card: PERFORMANCE THIS WAY. Performance art is not—not yet—really on the agenda of the Samuel Palmer School. Not many people are following the signs, but the children pull the adults along. In a sculpture storeroom, abutting the garages and car park, a small dais has been set up. It is shrouded in black velvet, hazed with chalk dust. Behind it is a long and welded sculpture, painted in pillar-box red, with a series of blade-like forms suspended from a series of ladder-like forms. To its right is a huddled crowd of chipped and cheesy-surfaced classical plaster casts: a bland Apollo tipped off-balance against a smiling, hoofed Pan, a headless Athena with her Gorgon breastplate, a horsehead, a very small centaur. On the left of the dais is Paul Ottokar, in tailcoat and white tie (he looks classically beautiful), playing the clarinet, with his music propped before him on a very pretty gilt stand. On the right is a kind of cage-like edifice made from multi-coloured playstraws, inside which is a human being dressed like a large bird, with a bright yellow bulging rump, a feathered tail, wrinkled yellow tights, large clawed feet constructed from wire, insulating tape and putty, a tarred and feathered torso, and a head crested with green feathers, masked like an American Indian bird-man, over which is strapped an aluminium contraption with a very long, proboscis-like stabbing beak with a strip of Day-Glo-pink fluorescent paint running its whole length.

  With this he monotonously taps a large metal plate, painted with a black-and-white spiral pattern, at his feet. The tapping is not in synch with the clarinet music. At irregular intervals the bird-man raises and lets fall his wings/arms in an impotent way. When he does this, a rattle whirs briefly. Saskia says, “It is the Dong with the luminous nose.” Leo says, “It is ve other smelly man, ve other John.” He looks at John, to make sure there are two. Frederica looks at John, to see what they should do. John stands in the shadow of the plaster casts and smiles slightly, listening. The only other person in the room is Desmond Bull, who kisses Frederica and smiles at Jude.

  Paul Ottokar pauses in his playing, without acknowledging his audience. His companion does not pause in his manic tapping. Paul Ottokar bows, sits down, and begins to play the Adagio from Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. The man-bird taps, mechanically. The beautiful sounds bubble and flow. The beak stabs and taps. Frederica tries to shut out the tapping and cannot. The bird-man raises his wings and whirs. The music gathers power. The bird-man ceases to tap and for a moment a small trill is alone in the silence. Then the bird-man begins a virtuoso imitation of a hen laying an egg. The children laugh. It is a very good imitation. The music sings away. The bird-man taps again. He stops. He makes a series of sounds which can be interpreted as a hen trying frantically to escape pursuit, failing, and having its neck wrung. He strangles, he gags, he croaks. The lovely music runs on. Frederica thinks: There is not enough point to all this, or else I am missing something. It is a thought she is often to have, in those years.

  When the music has come to an end, Paul Ottokar closes his music book, folds his music stand, takes out a box of matches and sets fire to the straw cage.

  “Watch it!” says Bull.

  The base flares, blackens and dies. The structure collapses. Clarinet player and bird take a bow. They step off the dais. “Is vat all?” says Leo.

  “That is all,” says Paul Ottokar, unsmiling.

  “It was quite funny,” says Clement judiciously.

  “It gives a headache,” says Saskia, more musical than Frederica and Leo.

  The brothers are side by side.

  “You burned the cage,” says Leo. “How can you start again?”

  “We aren’t going to,” says the bird-man, with a Liverpudlian voice under his mask. “We’ve done that, now. We’re going for a spaghetti. It’s the end of the day. Anyone coming?”

  “Yes,” says John Ottokar. “That would be a good idea. Anyone else?”

  Everyone goes to the Spaghetti House around the corner. It seems quite natural, quit
e ordinary, two brothers have met by accident, a group of friends have decided to have spaghetti after a Dip Show.

  The bird-man is introduced as Silo. Under his aluminium dong-beak and his formal mask he is pale, scrawny-necked and bespectacled. Frederica asks John Ottokar, who appears to know him, if Silo is anything to do with Silence. John says no, his name is Sidney Lowe, it’s the first syllable of his names. Paul Ottokar says, “You could take it as a sign, though, that the syllables come out like that. It might have a meaning.”

  “Most syllables can be made to mean something,” says John.

  “Empiricist, nationalist,” says Paul, as though these words were delicate insults.

  The meal goes well. The Spaghetti House is made with barn-like booths and red-checked tablecloths; all the booths are full of celebrating art students drinking Chianti. The children become restive, waiting for their dishes of carbonara and bolognese, and John Ottokar organises a kind of round-table serial game of scissors-paper-stone. Leo says, “Is it true, what you said, you two always put out ve same thing, always?”

  Paul smiles at John. “Did you tell him that?”

  “It was true, then.”

  “And now? Try now?”

  It is like arm-wrestling, a trial of strength in a pub; it is amiable, but tense. John and Paul are sitting opposite each other. They put out a hand each. Flat, both. Paper, paper. Again. Clenched fists. Stone, stone. Stone, stone. Stone, stone. Scissors, scissors. Paper, paper. Scissors, scissors. Stone, stone. Stone, stone. Frederica watches with alarm. Bull says, “This is nothing to do with the law of averages.” Silo says, “Do you read each other’s minds?”

  “No, no,” says Paul. “We just know. Quick as a flash, we know.”

  Scissors, scissors. Paper, paper. Stone, stone.

  They look pleased with themselves. Paul says, “Do you remember, we used to sing?” He hums. “Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything, better than you.” John joins in.