Babel Tower

  “He’s doing just fine, Mrs. Reiver. Such a bright little boy.”

  “He is, isn’t he?”

  “His relationships with the others are good, no problems there, he has lots of friends.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  “He hasn’t started reading independently yet, of course, he’s a bit late with that. I expect he’s a slow developer.”

  “What?”

  “I expect he’s a slow developer. As far as reading goes.”

  “There must be some mistake. He has an enormous vocabulary. He said ‘incandescent’ the other day. He talks about ‘prototype’ jets and ‘machinations.’ ”

  “I expect he does. He probably doesn’t have the motor skills. Don’t worry.”

  “Listen—he can read all Beatrix Potter. He reads them to me.”

  “Reads, or recites, Mrs. Reiver? He’s probably too clever for his own good, for his reading, that is.”

  “He reads them to Saskia.”

  “Saskia is a fast reader. Don’t worry, Mrs. Reiver, all children develop at different speeds. He’ll learn.”

  “But my family is a reading family—”

  “I expect you put him off. A bit, you know. Too much emphasis, too many expectations. Go easy on him.”

  “But if he can’t read—he can’t learn anything—”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Reiver.”

  She looks at her watch.

  Frederica talks to Agatha. She says, “He can’t read, I didn’t notice, he talks all the time, I’m dreadful—”

  “I did wonder,” says Agatha. “I tried him out once or twice. Saskia’s quick. He’s impatient. He can’t be bothered with the little words, and he can’t run at the big ones. They teach them with all sorts of methods, look-and-say, ITA, all sorts of experiments, some of which work with some children, some of which don’t. Don’t worry. There are people I know who can help. It’s early days.”

  Frederica is desolate. She says nothing to Leo. She listens to him “read” The Tale of Mr. Tod and feels, when he goes to Bran House for his summer holiday, that she deserves to lose him. It has not occurred to her that Leo could be her son and not read.

  August comes. The Beatles go to meditate with the Maharishi and Brian Epstein kills himself. The Beades return. They say the Maharishi has told them not to mourn. Jude Mason is still lost, and Frederica, restless and lonely, goes to the Middle Earth with Avram Snitkin. Avram Snitkin is observing, not dancing. He has brought with him a notebook with an art nouveau cover in purple and gold and silver, and a paper bag full of fudge. He takes out the pieces of fudge and arranges them in a row on the edge of the table in front of him. “Have some,” he says. “It’s hashish fudge, it’s a good recipe, it’ll do you good.” His eyes are moist with happiness, his hair floats gingery towards his shoulders, his beard bunches, his bare crown gleams purple and green, orange and rose, yellow and crimson, in the strobe lighting. He squats like a stolid dwarf in a corner and smokes his own rolled cigarettes, reaching out meditatively from time to time and ingesting the hashish fudge. Frederica wants to take a piece, and does not. She is a northern Puritan, getting back control of her own life. She has a little flowered shift, with cut-away armpits, a little girl’s shift, covered with great innocent white daisies and brilliant blue convolvulus, on a black ground. The points of her red helmet of hair lick her white cheeks.

  “Do dance,” says Avram Snitkin, “if you feel like it.” He takes another chunk of fudge. Frederica looks around. The place is like a warehouse, or a hangar. It is concrete, coloured only by the moving lights, which weave and dance and swirl, giddy and violent. It is full of scented smoke; the smoke changes the light, thickening it, filtering it, catching it and twisting it. The noise threads through the light. Somewhere, a long way away, a band is playing, a group is singing. Avram Snitkin likes to be marginal; they are in an alcove, round a corner, they cannot see the players.

  Frederica is not musical. She is a not a child of her time in this. She is torn apart by the noise. By the amplification of the throb, by the howl, by the blast. By the thrum, by the beat, by the rhythm, by the reprise, by the clash. It gives her no pleasure. It explodes the blood in her ears, it appears to be jabbing through her kidneys, it is pain, it is pain, it is pain.

  They are dancing. They are gyrating, dreamily, in their conical witch-shifts, in their elven robes, in their falling black layers of cheesecloth, in their silver-and-white net, in their fleurs du mal, purple and black, in their white roses and moonflowers. They sway like snakes piped to, they twist and turn slowly, they move all together to the rhythm, smiling slightly, intent in their incantations and evocations. They are all dancing together, but there are no couples. Frederica is good at jiving—she can twist and turn at the end of a man’s arm, spiral away and stamp and laugh and come back. Jive is sex, jive is a swing, jive leaves you laughing and breathless. These creatures—most of them are girls—are like mushrooms, like twining flowers, they go round and back, all together, all separate, a group, no individuals, no pairs.

  “I do empathise with these people,” says Avram Snitkin. He pops in another cube of fudge. His smile is beatific. “I do empathise with these people.” Frederica looks at his notebook. He has written, “I do empathise with these people,” drawn a smiley-face, added a copperplate alphabet and a series of loops followed by another, round which he has drawn a snake.

  He repeats, “I do empathise with these people.”

  Frederica gets up and walks carefully round the dancers, looking for the loo. The noise increases. It is a not-unsubtle noise, turned up to a howl, to a screech, to a scream. She catches a glimpse of the group that is playing. The lead singer has a loose coat of multicoloured satin patches with huge silver cuffs and lapels. His trousers are white satin and he wears a kind of Augustus John hat in white satin. He is waving a white stick wound round with flowers and ribbons. His head is thrown back, his throat throbs with his ululations, his face is John Ottokar’s face.

  Frederica turns round and starts walking back again. She thinks she must go home. Her teeth are blue, her hands are green, her hair is murky purple. She sifts smoke, she slides between dreaming figures. She makes her way back to Avram Snitkin, who says or shouts, “I do empathise with these people.”

  Frederica cannot speak. Two lines of Herbert come into her head.

  Thus thinne and leane, without a fence or friend

  I was blown through, with ev’ry storm and winde.

  She begins to say them to herself like a mantra. Later, whenever anyone says “the sixties,” this is what she will think of, Zag and the Szyzgy (Ziggy) Zy-Goats singing in the Middle-Earth, the hum become a howl, the maze of light, the crowd of single dancers. Thus thinne and leane, without a fence or friend, I do empathise with these people, I was blown through, by every wand’ring wind. Blown through, blown through, blown through.

  “We need Jude to sign the appeal form,” says Rupert Parrott. “Frederica, you were always our lead to him. Can’t you find him?”

  “There’s not been a squeak out of him. All the Press fuss, no one has had any idea.”

  “You don’t think he’s jumped in the river?”

  “I would have thought,” says Samuel Oliphant, “that he’d have made sure we saw him jump, or at least found his floating body.”

  “I thought that at first. I’m not so sure now. Don’t we know anyone who might know where he is?”

  “Daniel,” says Frederica. “He used to phone Daniel, in that crypt. Daniel and Canon Holly.”

  Frederica and Rupert Parrott go round to St. Simeon’s. Daniel is sitting in his egg-box cubicle, talking to a schoolboy who has failed his A-levels and taken six codeine pills. He is persuading him to go to a hospital. After a bit the boy puts the phone down, whether because he is bored or because he is sleepy or because he has despaired is not quite clear. Daniel writes up the conversation, ending, “I think he knew six codeines won’t kill him but I may be wrong.” He says, “What brings you here
?”

  “Jude. We can’t find Jude. We need him to sign the appeal form. And we’re worried about him, of course. We’d like to be sure he’s all right. Obviously we would.”

  “He hasn’t been here.”

  “Has he called?” says Frederica.

  “That would be confidential, if he had. But he hasn’t, no.”

  “Do you have any idea of where he lived?”

  “Not really. South London, I had the impression, I don’t know why.”

  “He came ‘home’ on the Tube with me once.”

  “South London’s very big,” says Rupert. “And he might have gone elsewhere. Anywhere else, except he had no money.”

  “No bank account?”

  “No. He took postal orders. Or cash.”

  Daniel turns over the log of the early days, when Jude Mason was the anonymous and irritating Steelwire. Whilst they are doing this research, Ginnie Greenhill comes in, offers tea, and asks what they are doing.

  “I remember something,” she says. “I do remember something.” She thinks.

  “I almost had a conversation with him once, when Daniel was away, in Yorkshire. He talked about living at the top of a tower.”

  “That was his book.”

  “No, no. He said, ‘No one wants to live where I live because a child fell from here, from the top of the tower.’ ”

  “That was his book,” says Rupert Parrott. “A child fell from the top of Babbletower.”

  “Well, perhaps he put the fall in his book,” says Ginnie Greenhill, who has not read the book.

  “He says all sorts of things,” says Daniel.

  “We could try,” says Ginnie Greenhill. “We could ask the local newspapers and the social services about children who fell from the tops of towers. In South London.”

  This search takes time. More children have fallen than they expected, from towers in Rotherhithe, in Brixton, in Peckham, in Stockwell. They ask the councils who lives in the flats from which the children fell, and find no one resembling Jude Mason. The most hopeful is the Wastwater Tower in Stockwell, on an estate called the Wordsworth Estate, where all the towers are mysteriously and perversely named after lakes—Grasmere, Derwent, Ullswater. A small girl did fall from the top of this tower in 1962; she was two years old, the daughter of a seventeen-year-old mother who was accused and acquitted of pushing her. Her name was Diamond Bates. This is all anyone knows. The flat is now occupied by an unemployed man—“a bit simple,” called Ben Leppard. Frederica frowns in thought. She says “Monckton-Pardew. Benedictine Pards. It could be him.” “He’s lived there since 1962,” says the council official they are talking to. “Let’s try it,” says Daniel.

  The Wordsworth Estate has, though it is already unfashionable to say so, a certain presence, a certain style. Its concrete towers are uncompromising and erect; wide open spaces spread between them. There are little balconies and the windows vary in form—some are circular, some are small rectangles, some are large. Their frames were once painted pale blue, but are now smeared and peeling. The idea of the architect was to expose the natural materials, the concrete, the metal, so they would weather as granite weathers. But concrete does not weather as granite weathers, and the smears and stains on the tower-surfaces look like great expanses of splashed and drained dirty dishwater. The space between the towers, which on the maquette was green, with bushes and trees, is cracked asphalt, with the odd spike of a ripped-off sapling, dying in its round hole; there is green between the cracks, where the earth bulges, the green of moss, green of algae. It is a grey day in early autumn when Daniel and Frederica arrive. The wind blows fish-and-chip papers across the asphalt. The entry to Wastwater Tower stinks of urine and is stained with smeared faeces. These are clichés, and like clichés, are depressing most of all because they are commonplace and inescapable. It would be nice if the lift worked, but it does not. Frederica skips up several floors, and then, the hare to the tortoise, waits for the steadily toiling Daniel. They are both completely out of breath when they reach the thirteenth floor. Frederica’s lungs are bursting, her heart is hammering. Daniel wipes his face with a handkerchief.

  They are in a bare concrete landing outside a blue door with peeling paint. On the landing is a plate with a chicken bone (the rib cage) and a smear of tomato ketchup. They knock. No one answers. They knock.

  A voice from the floor below says, “Ben doesn’t come out.”

  A girl is standing there, neatly dressed in a pleated skirt, a jumper, and white school socks. She is perhaps ten years old, round-faced, and has a mixed inheritance, wiry African hair, dark red in colour, dusky cheeks, a large mouth.

  “Do you know him?”

  “We feed him. Mum does. We put his food, and he fetches it in when we aren’t looking. He doesn’t like to come out. Mum says he’s a bit simple.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “We haven’t seen him for yonks. He used to be a weirdo. A long-hair. He used to get beat up. Now he don’t go out.”

  “Can we get to see him?”

  “Not if he don’t answer.”

  “Has nobody got a key?”

  “It isn’t locked. No one wants to go in there. It stinks something dreadful.”

  Daniel tries the door. The hall is empty, the floorboards bare. There is a smell. A decaying version of Jude’s lively odour. They go through a dark passageway into a largish room, which has a whole wall of glass, and is therefore full of grey light, which shows old wallpaper covered with autumn leaves, stained and sprouting salt and fungi. There is almost no furniture. A mattress, with a heap of blankets, in one corner. A table, with a row of coloured ink bottles and a pot of calligraphic pens. A Baby Belling, on the floor, encrusted with layer upon layer of burned food like the crust of an extinct volcano, black, mouldy, verdigris, soot-brown.

  In another corner is a very neat heap of books, arranged in several flat towers, by size.

  There is someone curled in the blankets, but he does not move.

  “Jude,” says Frederica.

  “Out,” says the ghost of the sawing voice.

  “It’s us. Frederica and Daniel. Your friends, we hope. We want to talk to you.”

  “Out.”

  Daniel advances and turns back the blankets. Jude is lying there in the respectable shirt he wore to the trial, which looks as though it has never subsequently been taken off. His hair is growing—it is tousled and filthy, but it is a good nest of grey wires, not a grey skull cap. Daniel sees that Jude is dangerously thin. He says, “We’ll have to get you out of here. You’ll have to come with us. I could get you into a hospital.”

  “You—need not strive. Officiously. To keep alive.”

  Frederica says, “They need your signature. For the appeal.”

  “There is no need. They will lose.”

  “Jude—come on—you used to fight, in your way—”

  “And now I am dying in my way. Go away.”

  In the end, they carry Jude, more or less, down the twisting stairs of the tower, and into a taxi, whose driver sniffs Jude’s smell, thinks of rejecting him, looks at Daniel, and accepts. Jude begins to cry when Daniel suggests a hospital. In the end they take him to Daniel’s own bedsitter, which is in Clerkenwell, and is spartan in a more cluttered way than Jude’s echoing eyrie, is small, and overfurnished. Jude is bathed, by both Daniel and Frederica, moaning a little. His hair is washed, and becomes oddly floating and electric, giving him the air of a Blakean sage. He closes his eyes throughout the operations, and is dressed in Daniel’s pyjamas, and put into Daniel’s bed. Daniel will sleep on the sofa. “Not for the first or the last time,” says Daniel. Frederica says she would have Jude, but there is Leo, there is Agatha, there is Saskia. “No,” says Daniel, “he’s my job. For the present.”

  “He’s got to sign the appeal form.”

  Jude opens his eyes. “If you keep them from me, I will sign it.” He closes them. He opens them again. “I wonder, did you find my original garments?”


  “No,” says Daniel.

  “They were in a paper box somewhere there. They are all I have.”

  “You want me to go and look for them?”

  “I have no others. Yours will not do for me, and you would not care to lend them. Thank you.”

  He closes his eyes again, and settles back into Daniel’s pillow. He murmurs, “You are a man of God.” There is a note of satisfaction in his voice.

  Daniel lets Frederica out. He says, “I wonder how long I’ve got him for.”

  Frederica says, “You’re both as tough as old boots. You’ll get him out, when the time’s right.”

  “Aye,” says Daniel. “I will.”

  The Space is mysteriously hung with silken draperies, painted with symbols, cups and swords, suns and moons, sunflowers and compasses, crowns and chains. It is lit by glancing rays of coloured lights, and scented with strange smoky perfumes. Two parties of travellers advance across it and meet. One party are fair tall folk, cloaked in shimmering grey cloaks over flowing green robes belted with silver belts wrought of leaf-shapes and clasped with emeralds. All wear crystal wings that flash in the changing light and silver bands in their flowing hair, from which simple jewels hang to rest on their brows. They are led by a white-robed figure, hooded, with a tall stave in his hand, and they are singing quietly.

  A Elbereth Gilthoniel

  Silivren penna miriel

  O menel aglar elennath!

  Their feet are sandalled or shod with fine boots in pale leather.

  The second party are white-robed and masked with sun and moon masks in silver and gold. They are crowned with mistletoe, and in their midst are figures partly naked, but with bright metallic sunbursts and crescents covering their sex. They are led by a Bard who introduces them: