A Whistling Woman (45 page)

In a recent book on
The Life of Insects,
Professor Sir Vincent Wigglesworth wrote that insects do not live for themselves alone but
devote
their lives to their species, of which they are representatives. They do no such thing. There is no question of “devotion” or “representatives.” Please understand that this is quite a different idea from the one that in a nest of ants all the workers are sisters, daughters of the same mother, with the same genes. They have no noble idea of the species. The German philosopher, Feuerbach, tried to prove that the idea of God was simply a personification of “the species,” the big Man, as the Nest is the big queen-ant. These ideas, whether right or wrong, do not help with thinking about survival and fitness at the level of the dividing cell, and the inherited DNA. An idea is not a cell. Although we need cells to form ideas.

So where does it all come from. Our final speaker, Professor Eichenbaum, has argued that domesticated species are degenerate, in that they are less capable of communicating with each other than their congeners in the wild. Except for man, in whom communication has burgeoned to an astonishing degree. We gabble, we babble, we sing, we chant, we paint, we draw, we carve, we use wires, and lights, and amplifiers from taut skins to knobs on radios. Professor Eichenbaum describes displacement activities in captive creatures. J.B.S. Haldane suggested that an ethologist could describe religion as a vacuum activity of communication—a displacement ritual—in which human beings communicate with non-existent Hearers.

In human society, Luk said, as in other niches where competition takes place, there are winners and losers. Females are the losers. They have to bear the nutritional cost of reproduction—the growth of the zygote—for both themselves and their mate. Human societies in general have made ethical and religious traditions out of the patterns of human sexual reproduction. Humans have so arranged matters that women are oppressed by men, and children by both. However, if you look at the working-out of lives, I would suggest the ultimate losers are the redundant males. You need only to begin by considering the sex differences in the statistics of illness in general, and of death at all ages.

Frederica watched Luk, amazed and delighted. He seemed like some sort of small golden fire-demon, with sparks coming out of the ends of his fingers (which he used a lot, as he paced the platform, very effectively). She had been infected by his stage-fright, and was now infected by his joyous contact with his audience, which had become one attentive creature. She thought, he's sweeping around like a great peacock, showing off, and laughed to herself that he was doing this to demonstrate the wastefulness and pointlessness of just such male display. She remembered her dream. It was odd to make love to someone in a dream. It was not his body, it was something she had called up, but it made her feel differently. Once, she would have asked herself, was she “in love” with this person to whose shadow she had in her sleeping brain made love. He was very busy explaining that this was an unaskable question. He was taking everything apart—ethics, romantic love—with great good humour and controlled aggression. She wondered what Jacqueline had done to him.

Everyone gathered round, afterwards, to congratulate him. Eichenbaum himself stumped up, and held out a hand. “
Du bist der Geist der
stets verneint,
” he said. “It's not so simple. But it was
resplendently
argued.”

Luk glowed. As he was leaving the Theatre, someone pushed the bog-roll pamphlet into his hand.
The next two papers were about the biology of memory. The first was Christopher Cobb's paper on birdsong. He accompanied himself with both recorded birdsong and his own very musical renderings. He described the difference between chaffinches and canaries which need to hear singing to learn, but can learn in isolation to produce a well-structured song, whereas the chaffinch needs to hear both its own song, and those of other birds. A chaffinch deafened within the first three months of life will produce little more than a continuous screech. It cannot learn from a song-tutor which has pure notes and not a chaffinch-voice, but it can learn from recordings of chaffinches even if played backwards. A bird can be muted by destroying the left side of its nervous system, but—since birds are more plastic than humans—an aphasic canary will recover its song. Cobb looked like a woolly Pan, his hands cupped to his mouth, with the bubbling, inhuman music pouring out.

Someone in the audience—it was Waltraut Ross—cried out “And it is worth imprisoning and mutilating these free creatures to find out this kind of thing?”

Christopher Cobb said mildly enough, “Well, of course, you do always wonder.”

“Shame!” cried Waltraut Ross.

There was a moment of shouting and counter-shouting in the audience. Cobb mildly turned up his sound-system, and produced a choir of variegated nightingales. He went on to explain how they invented new songs, varying those they heard, learning the new sequences in groups. The audience subsided, and he was warmly applauded.
The final paper of that day was Lyon Bowman, and was about the debate between those who argued that particular neurones had very specific, precise functions, and the holists, or Gestalt thinkers, who believed in the plastic functioning of the complicated networks. He explained that in the cerebral cortex there are perhaps 600 million synapses in each cubic millimetre. In a human cerebral cortex there were somewhere between 10
¹⁴
–10
¹⁵
synapses. Imagining large numbers is something the human mind is generally bad at. If you counted 1,000 per second, he said, it would take you somewhere between 3,000 and 30,000
years
to count them all. Let alone to disentangle the branches and stems of the axons and dendrites. Nevertheless work was being done on individual groups of neurones and in some cases—such as Alving's work on
Aplysia
pacemaker neurones, and work in his own laboratory on the giant neurones of
Helix aspersa
—on individual neurones. He spoke of the location in the anaesthetised brains of cats and macaque monkeys of particular sets of cells which appeared to react very precisely to fine angles and movements of light sources. He described the chemistry of the snail neurones. Deborah Ritter rose in the audience to denounce him. What he called a
preparation,
she said, was an impaled living creature. He had no
right
to indulge his reductive speculations at the expense of the helpless cat or monkey. Jacqueline Winwar sat there and heard her results described, and so to speak, claimed, without acknowledgement. It was her work—her months of trial and error, failure and triumph, smoothly taken over, as part of the Lab's generally excellent performance. Of Bowman's performance. She was a see-through implement, that was all.

Various other contentious voices were raised. Bowman smiled and finished his paper, speaking more loudly.

There was a cocktail party afterwards. Jacqueline stood at the edge of it, possessed by fury, and also by the knowledge that her academic future—the snails, the oscilloscope, the lab space—were in Bowman's plumply delicate fingers. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock appeared behind her.

“Pretty cool,” he said. “Those were
your
figures. Very smooth.”

“As though I don't exist.”

“Good work, though. And the bit about the effects of injected calcium sounded surprising—”

“It doesn't do what you might think. You'd think it would increase membrane resistance—but it appears to increase permeability—I'm not sure yet—”

“You should be speaking yourself.”

“Your paper was very good.”

Luk grinned. “The rage of the rejected. Good for the mind.”

Jacqueline smiled doubtfully. “Then I'd better learn to use the rage of those whose work is appropriated—”

Bowman came up to them, leading Hodder Pinsky.

“This is the young researcher I was telling you about, Hodder. Jacqueline Winwar. Very promising. Professor Pinsky is founding a new—very broad-based—discussion group. I suggested he might ask you along.”

“
Filaments,
” said Pinsky. “Cybernetics suggests hierarchies and central power. Filaments is a good—well, a goodish—pun. Neural networks, spider-threads, all that. But it's got files in it, to suggest memory, and
mens,
or almost. Karl Lashley uses
double-entendres
as an argument for some sort of residual mental representation in the cells of the brain. You have to connect the one to the other, arbitrarily, so to speak, to ‘get' the idea. Tell me about your research, Dr. Winwar.”

Bowman smiled, like the Cheshire cat, and moved away, leaving the smile in the air. Jacqueline saw in her mind's eye her preparations of neurones, the wonderful steady bursts of action potential, the perturbations, the gaps.

“What I've been trying is—” she began. Pinsky listened.

Wijnnobel, Hodgkiss, Calder-Fluss and Wilkie met to discuss the opposition to Theobald Eichenbaum. Calder-Fluss was of the opinion that it might be a good plan to call in the police. With the vandalism, and the pamphlets, and now libellous posters about animal experiments, eugenics, and proto-Fascism. Wijnnobel said that if you called in the police, the matter became a criminal investigation, in their hands, not the University's. Hodgkiss said he was sure that what the core of the opposition wanted, was that the police should be called in. It didn't follow, unfortunately, that anyone could guarantee that Professor Eichenbaum could give his paper without some major disruptive act. Wilkie said why not ask Eichenbaum himself, and Hodgkiss said he would prefer not to perturb him. He had a right to speak freely, and was an invited guest. Wilkie said he must have been the object of a lot of this sort of thing already. Wijnnobel said no, he had not been. The offending 1941 paper had not been translated—or returned to life, so to speak—until Pinsky had sent it to him. He did not know how—or when—the Anti-University had got hold of it. Hodgkiss remembered its arrival. He remembered Pinsky's letter. He remembered, suddenly, the excited comportment of Nick Tewfell.

He saw no point in confronting Tewfell. That would be what Tewfell wanted. He saw no point in mentioning Tewfell to the Vice-Chancellor. He rather hoped the whole problem would go away. He must have known it would not, he thought much later, without being able to think of any very good course of action he might have taken. All they could do was to be vigilant, he said.

Wijnnobel said that he would take it upon himself to discuss the matter with Eichenbaum.

The penultimate day of the Conference was devoted to what are known as the Humanities—as though, Luk said crossly to Jacqueline—genetics or neurology or biochemistry were somehow
inhuman
. Jacqueline, a little rattled by the rash of posters and leaflets depicting Lyon Bowman and Christopher Cobb as torturers, said that it was a general perception that they were, precisely, inhuman.

Hodgkiss, looking nervously at the audience, for he did not think of himself as a brave man, gave his paper on Wittgenstein's ideas of colour—which did not include any discussion of the physics of wavelength, or the physiology of the retina, but did somehow describe the mind describing its own operations.

There were various literary and historical papers, including one on George Eliot's metaphors from anatomy, perception, tissue study and webs in
Middlemarch
. There were papers on Lawrence on blood and semen, and blood and brain in Shakespeare; Raphael Faber spoke on Proust's visual metaphors, and Canon Holly spoke excitedly about the idea of the Incarnation, that God was made flesh, and had blood and brain and bone—was confined in them, he said, quoting Marvell on the prison of the rib-cage and the nerves, on the walking corpse
impaled
on the spirit, which reached upwards. Frederica had expected to find these literary papers the most interesting. She had grown up in the narrow British educational system which divides like a branching tree, and predestines all thirteen-year-olds to be either illiterate or innumerate (if not both). She had grown up with the assumption that to be literary is to be quick, perceptive and subtle. Whereas scientists were dull, and also—in the nuclear age—quite possibly dangerous and destructive. She thought of F. R. Leavis's
Education and the University,
which she had studied, and which had said that the English Department was at the centre of any educational endeavour. This suddenly seemed, as she listened to Lawrence's dangerous nonsense abstracted from Lawrence's lively drama and held up for approval, to be nothing more than a Darwinian jockeying for advantage, a territorial snarl and dash.

What is important, she thought, is to defend reason against unreason.

Chapter 24

Jonty Surtees believed in the logic of history. He believed that the Revolution must come, and therefore could come, that the old order must be overthrown, and therefore would be overthrown, and that he must and would help it along. He believed, and often said, that Socrates and Jesus were political activists, who in their time asked awkward questions, taught the young to ask awkward questions, and were killed by the then Establishment. He had studied the logic of destabilising institutions, and knew that you used whatever forces were to hand—if they wanted to believe they were elves and wizards marching on the Dark Tower, that was fine by him—
at this stage
—as long as they marched. He didn't think the new forms of government desired by Greg Tod and Waltraut Ross, still less by Nick Tewfell, bore much relation to the true anarchy he felt was right for human life, but they weren't there yet, for the moment he needed to work them all up. He told them that now was the moment for the
Act
that followed talk. They sat around in a fug of scented smoke and stared through blurred vision, and felt the logic of his smile, his voice, his urgent body movements. Avram Snitkin kept falling asleep and had to be shaken awake. Nick Tewfell stared with a kind of horrified fascination at the three shrouded figures. Deborah Ritter gave Maggie Cringle some hashish fudge and stirred a nourishing pot of bean soup. We go tomorrow, said Surtees. We let him get into the building, and then we march on it.

“And—those?” said Nick Tewfell.

Surtees pulled the covers off, like a magician unveiling sawn women. They were horribly life-like effigies, squat Eichenbaum, pale Pinsky, and the unmistakeable long lined face and lanky figure of Gerard Wijnnobel. About one and a half times life size, with papier mâché masks.

“We shall burn them in front of the Maths Tower, the Evolution Tower, and the Language Tower,” said Surtees. “Since the students are having their demo against compulsory maths and languages.”

It was text-book revolution, a rallying point.

Tewfell said, he feared there were not enough protestors to make fires in three places.

Surtees said little did he know. There was an army of protestors, coming to join the cause, from Essex and the LSE and further-flung places. They were rolling up the A1 in buses and vans as he spoke. They would need signs to carry. There would be music.

“They will send for the police,” said Nick Tewfell.

“Precisely. And when the pigs come in, we have won. If we make them send for the pigs, and use
force,
they show themselves for what they are.”

He flared with conviction. Whatever in Nick Tewfell was reluctant felt shame and humiliation. All they did was talk. Now they would
act
. In the beginning was the
Act
. He looked at the lolling simulacra of authority, and felt loathing. His mind was full of threatening cold-voiced authorities and blundering lackeys. And pigs. Which were disgusting.

Deborah Ritter, handing out fudge, said “Come on, we need a hand with the bloody paint.”

Gerard Wijnnobel gave Theobald Eichenbaum a glass of wine, in his study, and asked if he had seen the brown pamphlet. Eichenbaum put down the glass, and sat with his hands on his knees, block-like.

“Several people, most of them anonymous, have made it their business to see that I have seen it. So I have seen it.”

Wijnnobel waited.

“The original paper—the language of the original paper—was an error of judgement and a failure of imagination. For which I have been lucky enough not to have to pay.
This
version is a distortion, both of Galton's work and of my own. We both make it very clear that human crowds—herds—become mindless under domineering dictators. Galton gives some statistics of the prison population—of people suspected of speaking against the state—under Napoleon III. He liked statistics. They are not pretty figures. He also talks about fanatical priesthoods. They do not, of course, translate these passages. I could argue that what I wrote was a coded attack on our leaders. But it was not. It was simply unthinking folly. I did not then know—though I should have known—how a word or two can inflame exactly such a crowd as I loathed and loathe. I am a scientist. I had insufficient respect for the power of words.”

Wijnnobel said “Niko Tinbergen was in a concentration camp in Holland.”

“I know. I am sorry. Efforts were made to get him released. He would not consider it.
He
would not.”

“I think there is going to be trouble, if you speak. I think there was always going to be trouble, and they are waiting for you.”

“I am going to speak about how we have weakened our courage, and denatured our children, under domestication. I cannot
not
speak because I once wrote wrongly. That would be compounding a wrong with a wrong.”

“I cannot guarantee that there won't be—trouble, greater or smaller.”

“Are you asking me not to speak?”

“No. How can I? I believe in the right to speak and be heard.” He laughed, briefly. “I do say, I cannot guarantee how well you will be heard.”
The auditorium was packed. The visible breath above the ranked heads simmered. The notice on the door, announcing Theobald Eichenbaum's lecture “Domestication and Dehumanisation, Instinct versus Culture, Ontogeny and Phylogeny,” had been smeared all over with something brown. Nevertheless, the Vice-Chancellor and the ethologist appeared promptly on stage. Eichenbaum had chosen to dress in brown—a slightly dusty, crumpled brown suit, and an illfitting cream-coloured shirt, out of which his walnut-brown thick neck rose into the fan of his beard and the white bush of his hair, which glittered in the stage lighting.

Wijnnobel said very directly that he knew that Professor Eichenbaum's passionately-held views were controversial. They were also not simple. Those who disliked his stance in the nurture-nature argument must surely admire his stance against environmental poisons, about which his early warnings were proving to be accurate prophecies. A university was a place for discussion and debate, and he was glad so many people had gathered to hear someone who was both an independent thinker, a true experimental scientist, and an uninhibited polemicist.

When Wijnnobel sat down, they heard the drums. Eichenbaum stomped heavily to the rostrum and took the microphone in his hand.

“I am going to talk to you about packs, and groups, and shoals, and herds, and individuals—” he said.

This was in fact all, or almost all, that was heard of the final paper of the Conference as the hall erupted into howling and baying, and, outside, Jonty Surtees's marchers swarmed across the campus, singing, shouting, dancing and making music. They had been organised to come in waves, from all sides, from the encampment and up the road from the village. They wore all sorts of costumes—there were maenads and tin soldiers, masked executioners and carnival demons, elves and witches and wizards and huge
commedia dell'arte
cockerels. There were drumbeats and clashing cymbals, pan-pipes and guitars. There were banners—Down with SKOOL, Mao Thought Is True Thought, Free the Grass, Feel the Rain, Free Speech Is a Fetishism, Smash the Establishment, No More Grammar, No More Maths, No More Vivisection.

They sang

We are One We are Many, We are Many We are One.
We are gun we are bullet, we are bullet we are gun.
We can kill and resurrect you, we are god when you are gone

They also sang

The metal men in coats of white
In shuttered rooms with shuttered eyes
Make metal death with metal claws
Black out the sunshine from the skies

The children dance in forests free
They smell the sunshine and the rain ...

They also sang the war song of Tolkien's tree-men, the Ents.

Though Isengard be strong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone
We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door!

Theobald Eichenbaum settled on his feet, gripped the microphone, and raised his voice.

“Our culture,” he said “has infantilised its young people, and set generation against generation as though they were different breeds—”

It was doubtful whether anyone heard him. Things had begun to be thrown. Eggs, good and bad, fruit, books, a few stones, and a strange floating series of bunched flower-charms, wreaths of bryony and nightshade, drooping grasses and bindweed, corncockles and wilted poppies.

The marchers burst into the auditorium. Jonty Surtees, businesslike in blue denim, and Paul-Zag, in silver, carrying his guitar with red and yellow streamers, stood high at the back. Paul strummed and sang “We are one, we are many, we are many, we are one.”

Surtees stepped down between the rows of seats. He advanced on Eichenbaum, who briefly had the advantage of being above him and holding the microphone. The lighting had the auditorium in darkness, and a spotlight on Eichenbaum's mask of pure rage. He leaned over and growled at Surtees.

“I see what you are. Do you know what the nastiest kind of herd is? It is
rats,
it is
rats,
tame
rats
in an enclosure. Do you know who you are, Pied Piper with a crowd of denatured children draggling behind you—”

Jonty Surtees, limber, surefooted, vaulted up on to the platform and struggled with the Professor, who resisted for a moment, having the advantage of weight, and rootedness, but only for a moment. Surtees twisted the microphone out of his hand, and cried into it “No one's going to listen to you, old man, no one wants to hear you.” He whirled round, raising the microphone above his head, in a trail of sparks. “Freedom begins,
here,
and
now,
” he shouted, and felled Eichenbaum with an efficient blow from the microphone, which filled the hall with a shriek, and a groan, and gave up the ghost.

Wijnnobel in the front row said to Hodgkiss “We must get the police.”

“We have to get out of here, first. We cannot get out, at the moment.”

Fighting had broken out, most of it merely the result of those outside trying to pour in, and those inside—at least those who did not suddenly feel combative—trying to get out. There was pushing, and trampling, and worse. Hodgkiss climbed up on to the stage, ignoring Surtees, and bent to check Eichenbaum's breathing. Surtees was smiling.

“
Why?
” said Hodgkiss, mopping Eichenbaum's face with a handkerchief.

“How stupid can you get?” said Surtees. He jumped down, and vanished into the crowd.
It was, the University ruefully recognised, very well organised. The gibbets were set up outside the Evolution Tower, the Language Tower, and the Maths Tower. By the time the authorities had fought or wriggled their way out of the Theatre, the effigies were burning brightly, amongst a stink of petrol and a lot of noise, musical and unmusical. Wijnnobel, hurrying to meet the police, who had been called, but had some distance to come, stood momentarily at the back of a dancing crowd that was watching him burn. His own long face looked down on him through greasy smoke and sullen flames. The University health-centre team hurried past him in the opposite direction, presumably to collect Eichenbaum, and were not opposed.

We come, we come, with horn and drum: ta rûna rûna rûna rom!

Small fires and battles were breaking out all over the campus.

Someone threw a petrol bomb through a window of the Language Tower.

Wijnnobel had managed to lock himself into the Dean's office and speak to the police, and the fire brigade, on the phone. The police asked if they would have trouble getting in, and the Vice-Chancellor said yes, they would, they should come prepared. There were a great many more protestors than the University alone could have provided.

It was Frederica Potter who noticed the flames in the windows of the old house, of Long Royston. Curtains were flaring, flames crawling up them, although there was no crowd encamped outside. It took a little time to find the Vice-Chancellor and a group of staff, who began to run across the lawns. Frederica ran too, followed by Wilkie. The front door was open. There were very small fires in the hall—slowly burning neat heaps of books, which Frederica recognised. Skoob. An art-form.

Someone had set fire to the bed-curtains in the Elizabethan bedrooms. The beds were burned, and the ceiling, with its painting of the Death of Hyacinth, had fallen in on the bed. People brought fire appliances, and succeeded in dousing the flames, though more damage was done to the ancient embroideries and carvings. People gathered, including Matthew Crowe, in a velvet dressing-gown and slippers.

“Has anyone seen my wife?” asked Wijnnobel.

Crowe said “She was here, Gerard, she was here.”

Wilkie said “She was seen—I'm sorry, Vice-Chancellor—she was seen—marching in with them. When they marched in. With one of the singing groups.”

Wijnnobel stood in the burned bedroom.

“She had better be found. I had better find her. Has anyone seen her
recently
?”

No one had. Frederica said, she knew who burned little heaps of books, like that. It was a habit of Paul Ottokar's. There was one at the foot of the bed. Lady Wijnnobel, she did not say, had been marching behind Paul-Zag. But she knew that the Vice-Chancellor knew.

“There are many, many things that need attention,” said Wijnnobel. “Of which the whereabouts of my wife is only one, and not the most important. But I should be very glad to know if anyone can find her—and even more glad if they can persuade her to come—here—to come—back, home.”
On his way across Long Royston, conducting his own grim search for his wife, he heard noises in the antechamber with the museum exhibits. They were noises of breaking glass. He walked heavily towards the sounds, and came upon a group of his own students, breaking up the cases with the handles of placards. Several were drunk, including Maggie Cringle, who, dressed like a heroine of
Dr. Who,
was jabbing not very effectively at the case which contained the relics of
Astraea
with a banner that said “What Do We Want? Cultural Studies. An End to Rote-Learning.”