A Whistling Woman (23 page)

He waved his knife.

“My lady is served.”

He arranged the slices, neatly overlapping, on her plate. He hurried to and fro, along his kitchen table, bearing redcurrant jelly and pepper-mill, green spheres of sprouts mixed with chestnuts, the baked potatoes in an earthenware pot.

“Good
girl,
” said Jacqueline's mind. And “My lady is served.”

“There's far too much there, far too much for me,” said Jacqueline. “I eat like a bird.”

Luk grinned. “You forget. I've spent days and days on the moors with you. With thick sandwiches.”

“It smells
wonderful
. It looks
delicious
.”

“Remains taste—” said Luk. He sat down. He had put on a festive sweater, in dark slate oiled wool, but he forgot to take off his apron. By some instinct of stage-management he had set them at opposite ends of the table, regally staring at each other. They stared. Jacqueline asked a few questions about the buying of Loderby; their banality appeared to puzzle Luk, who answered politely, briefly and distractedly, as though these were not real words, but must be ruffled through, for form's sake.

He then asked her about her research, and she spoke with bright intensity for some minutes about the comparative advantages of making slugs and snails artificially averse to carrots or potatoes, and the best ways to induce a measurable aversion.

He then asked her about Lyon Bowman. Was he treating her well.

“Very well.” The dark head was down. She cut small squares off the meat, and chewed them. “He takes an interest,” she said, meaning in the snails, and hearing the doubleness too late. “In the snails,” she added unfortunately, making clear what had not been. There was a silence. They ate. Luk offered more food, but Jacqueline's plate was still half-full. Or half-empty. Depending. Luk tried to remember what they had talked about when he felt so comfortably close to her, and could not.

He said that he was happy to know that Eichenbaum had accepted Wijnnobel's invitation to the Conference next summer. He will redefine “instinct,” Luk told Jacqueline. He has done some beautiful work on nesting responses. What vaguely egg-shaped object—and what colour—does and doesn't trigger nesting behaviour in seagulls, in sparrows, in the domestic hen. Will they try to brood a scarlet egg? How big does an egg have to be to be not-an-egg? Plovers appear to prefer outsize eggs to normal ones. Herring gulls recognise their own chicks, but not their own eggs. They recognise their mates at large distances—50 yards or more. He's working on what triggers egg-recognition and mate-recognition.

Later, Luk was to wish he had not introduced this apparently safe subject. He went round to offer Jacqueline more meat on the point of his stainless steel fork, and saw himself suddenly as a male gull, clattering his beak against the female, proffering a propitiatory fish. Jacqueline declined the meat. She had enough. She said it was delicious. Luk cleared away—he would not let her move—and replaced meat with cheese, and cheese with lemon tarts he had made himself. During this time they talked, neutrally and amiably, about Wijnnobel's conference and the increasing size of the Anti-University encampment.

Luk began to be tormented by a series of inner visions: male birds, strutting and bowing, with worms, with gobbets of flesh, with wriggling silvery fish and eels. Waving rumps, distended throat-balloons, perky crests. Flushed sticklebacks, and cuttlefish across whose sac-like bodies played lights of successive blushes in successive waves of crimson and rose, amber and cool blue. He saw the blue booby, a bird he had once observed for a time, descending from a wintry sky, rotating its only remarkable feature, huge, flat, bright, swimming-pool blue feet, and offering its desired mate a symbolic twig to make a nest on land where no nest could be made, and where eggs were balanced in inclinations in bare rock.

He offered Jacqueline a dish of apples, and thought of the bower-bird who specialised in feathers from a bird of paradise known as the King of Saxony. The feathers are rare (they don't grow before the bird is four years old) and brilliant blue, with square pennants on fine stems, several times longer than the bird, and sprouting from its brow. Male bower-birds fight for these rarities, which they weave into their paradise gardens of ferns and twigs. He began to see all his movements as ritualised gestures. He should have been able to share the joke with Jacqueline. But because she was now ritually defined as the audience for his mopping and mowing, he couldn't speak.

She refused the apples. She had had, she said, more than enough. It had been delicious.

He poured red wine, accompanied by the ghost of a solicitous albatross. She accepted the wine, with a neat little inclination of her head. She had made a rational decision that it would be a good idea to be a little drunk. She was aware that something was bothering Luk, but could not quite guess what, and again, felt that the pattern of their dance required her not to ask. She did notice that he had arranged things so that he was constantly in motion, along the table, round the kitchen. She wished his plan allowed her to move herself. She wished to be able to follow his lead. That was what this was about. She sipped wine, thinking of the alcohol gently fuddling her over-active head.

When Luk was at his far end of the table, he looked like the old, familiar, too familiar Luk. As he came dancing towards her, with his offerings, his bearded face passed from pool of light to pool of light, from candle-light to island of lamp-light. When these fiery lights were under his face he looked unfamiliar. He looked demonic.

Recent research, she remembered, had shown that children raised together on the Kibbutzim to be good husbands and wives for each other had seemed somehow to share the primitive incest tabu, although they were quite unrelated. They had turned outwards for husbands and wives. She thought about arranged marriages. The quite different fears, and hopes, and excitements there must be when the chosen mate was the Unknown.

She was trying to arrange her own marriage, on rational grounds. These thoughts too, she could not communicate to Luk.

Bed-time came. Luk said

“Shall we go upstairs?”

Jacqueline nodded.

“This is just a weekend,” said Luk. “I don't expect it—necessarily—to lead to anything. I hope, of course. But I want to take it step by step.”

Jacqueline nodded.

Luk held out his hand, and led her from the chair to the staircase. Beside him a ghostly grebe whirled on water, wreathing its neck. Rose and plum and azure baboon genitals flashed across his inner eye.

She stopped on the corner of the stairs and saw the peacock feathers and the honesty, gleaming under the Kelly lamp.

She said, before she could stop herself

“I was always told it was unlucky to have peacock feathers in the house.”

Luk's voice was light. “Something maybe to do with the evil eye? Superstitious nonsense.”

“Of course.”
The little bedroom was cold. There were stars and scudding clouds across the little window. The paisley quilt, the flaming sheets, looked warm. They shivered as they undressed, without ceremony, and dived into them. He had imagined her nakedness in detail as they worked together, but scarcely saw it as she hurried it under the blankets. He could feel it however. He ran his hands all over it, collarbone and spine, breasts and navel, flanks and buttocks, and the unseen bush of dark hair. Timidly, trembling, she touched him in return. This was what he had waited for. He was careful. He was very careful. He could not speak for emotion, but he kissed the vein in her neck, he buried his rough beard in her soft hair. He was visited by an unsolicited and unwelcome memory—in ludicrously complete detail—of Szymanski's careful experiments, in 1913, on the long and complicated system of mutual stimulation in the giant Roman snail,
Helix pomatia,
which cumulated—since the creatures were of course, hermaphrodite—in the mutual release of the horny love-shaft, subsequently absorbed, for the calcium it contained, by the now inseminated pair. He touched the inner lip of Jacqueline's cunt and saw in his mind's eye the rearing, twisting mantle and the wavering horns of the creatures. It was like being a mediaeval monk tormented by diabolically induced visions. He might have told the old companionable Jacqueline the joke, and exorcised the demons with laughter. But this new, uncertainly responsive, reticent woman was another person, another problem.

As for Jacqueline, she heard in her mind's ear “good girl” and her body bucked with retrospective irritation. Luk put his arms round her, held her tight, began to pump with his own rhythm, asking, in a whisper, “Is it all right,” which effectively disturbed her own weak response, before matters were out of his control altogether. Jacqueline squirmed, and twisted her body against his, both desiring and rejecting her own climax, and achieved a small shiver, like a single minor sneeze. Luk gathered her to him, and stroked her along the length of her body, over and over. In his mind, mercifully released from snail-slime and love-darts, he saw his own fingers, repairing the hook and eyes of the bedraggled peacock feathers. And then the blade of the carving-knife on the steel, smoothing the molecules all one way. “My love?” he tried saying, and his love buried her hot, unhappy face in his shoulder, and kissed it, and he felt hot tears.
So much had hung on that inconclusive embrace. Luk knew that rhythms needed to be learned, and he was not sure Jacqueline was going to give either of them any more time to learn them in. They should have been unable to keep their hands off each other, and were sitting politely apart, at breakfast, in the car. He thought of saying “Next weekend?” and thought of not saying it. When he did say it, Jacqueline said “I need time to think,” and this cool sentence sounded like doom.

Jacqueline felt desperate. She was behaving badly. She was trashing generous gifts, she was capriciously stirring mud in the river of Luk's life. She was trying to make sensible decisions about her own life—it was
the whole of her own life
she was disposing of—and appeared to be unable to make them either rationally or impulsively.

Over the next few weeks, her work slowed. Bowman noticed it. He came and stood behind her at her bench, touched her shoulder, and then her breast, briefly, and said

“Everything OK? You look a bit pale.”

“I'm a winter depressive. I don't like dark.”

“You're heavy-eyed. Take a few days off.”

“How can I? The experiments need watching.”
She had missed a period. The time came when she could say she had missed two, except that it was always the same one she had missed. She went more and more frequently in and out of the lavatory, looking for signs, a streak, a drop, of brown, or red, on knicker or paper. Everything remained pristine white. She had been here before, and knew that obsessive expectation delayed the desired flow. She went on long walks, and then rushed again into the lavatory, feeling, she hoped, the hoped-for bar of pain across the base of her belly, the twinge. Nothing. And the next day, nothing. Like a watchman on a high tower, looking for relief across a plain of snow, and seeing no movement, no change, day after day.
During this time, she dined occasionally with Luk, and talked brightly, alternating “I” and “we” in her descriptions of her future. He took away an image of wilful irresolution.

She went, in the end, to the university health service. A woman doctor inserted fingers, and cupped her cervix.

“Oh yes, I think so,” she said. “I think so. I hope you're happy about this. We'll do a test, just to be sure.”

Jacqueline went back to the Evolution Tower and took out a heap of books on embryology. She stared at images of dividing cells, of curved seahorse-like chains of cells with huge bland eyes, of limb-buds and vanishing tails, and transparent frog-fingers and ghost-mouths forming busily out of formlessness, as the messages sped from cell to cell, and the division and building increased and increased. She felt a kind of pain—an imaginary pain—where the knot of new cells was, the invader, clinging to the very inside of her solitary self, using her blood, her food, her DNA. A creature. Not a missed period. A new creature.

She knew that that made everything easier. She had kept her hopes and fears to herself, but the knowledge needed to be shared. She put on her jacket—it was about eight in the evening—and went round to find Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. She did not want to think—let alone to feel—too much. She must now do what had to be done.

It was a long time since she had simply turned up in his Long Royston rooms. She had hurried across dark lawns and courtyards, and his little room was bright and lively. He was sitting at his desk, correcting papers. She came in, and stood with her back against the door she had just closed, somehow still clothed with the wintry evening. She held the collar of her jacket to her chin.

“I appear to be pregnant,” said Jacqueline, baldly, to Luk.

He stood up. She looked both wild and shrunk. He did not touch her.

“I'm very pleased. If you are,” he said.

“It's a shock.”

Luk's imagination danced. He saw a small boy with brown hair, a red-headed girl, their two faces mixed to make a new face. He said

“Pleased is a daft word, a ludicrous word, as long as you—”

She stood there.

“Jacqueline, you
do want
—?”

“I think so. I—I wouldn't do anything else. It's a shock.”

“What I want—what
I
want—is that we should get married, as soon as we can, and I will look after you—and—the child—and your work, because I know how good you are going to be, you are the real thing, a scientist—”

She began to cry, her shoulders sagging slightly, whether from relief or despair he could not tell.

“Will you? If you say you will—”

“Oh yes. I think this decides everything. I will. I do want to marry you. I do want—”