A Whistling Woman (48 page)

I can't be a very good sociologist if I can't sniff that one out. No, it has to be Gideon. Clemency's past caring, which makes it harder to tell.

They all—including Eva W.—want to be the Maiden of Light.

I don't. But I feel I have to say I do.

I want fish and chips, and a Mars bar, and
you,
Avram Snitkin.

From Elvet Gander to Kieran Quarrell

Worry not, worry not, old friend, dear chap, all is under control, or if not under control, expanding splendiferously, producing marvellous fruits and flowers and bursts of fireworks.

Yes, I declare myself a responsible person, fit to watch over Lady Wijnnobel, and yes, I declare this a Therapeutic Community, where she is safe (and yes, if you like, old friend, where people are safe from her). I am sure that—with my own assurances of
personal interest
—will calm the Vice-Chancellor, and the Chief Constable, and all other interested parties. And, whilst I am at it, may I assure you also that your ex-patient, Josh Lamb, Joshua Ramsden, is more resplendently sane than the next man (yours truly) and is conducting, in the fullness of time, a Great Work, which will change utterly those of us who are
in
-volved in it, wound up in it, concentrated upon it.

These persons, who are not patients, and not very patient, are embarked upon a spiritual journey which inevitably takes them—and us—through the Valley of the Shadow—but the Light is visible—and better to travel on than cower in a drugged stupor under hospital blankets.

We are living in a world of perpetually shimmering symbolic Truths which connects with the real world at points of wonder—Rocks, Stones, Trees, Mirrors. I am learning daily the beauties of synchronicity and many-layered coincidences of staggering beauty.

That woman—your ex-patient—Lady Vineyard—is a silly Old Bag, Old Hag, Old Crone—but out of the mouths of Old Crones come the Speakings of true Priestesses. Now and then, and often, I am the first to admit, involuntarily. She is a Conduit, Kieran (oh the horror and the beauty) for celestial and infernal jellyfish and Medusas and blood, sweat and tears.

She discerns upon the white fleece and pale brow of our sacrificial Lamb and vengeful Ram the true bloody Sweat, the rosy dew, of the Proclaimed One. (Or One of Them.) A veil of blood. He is to be the Work, the
Mysterium Coniunctionis,
the Stone, which is the true Mercurius or Psychopomp, born as White Light from the bath of colour, the peacock-tail, the
Cauda Pavonis
. She told us an esoteric creation story in which the God made the Peacock, and showed him Himself in a mirror, and the lovely bird was so amazed at his own beauty that beads of rosy sweat burst out on his brow—and from these, were all other creatures made.

I have been reading and reading in Jung's
Alchemical Studies
and as I read, I see that the veils and threads of colours and connections in the fabric of the unconscious are
more real
than the world of—of—dirty socks, old friend, trouser-flies, nail-clippers, junk like that. I see and know it. But not as Ramsden knows it, who knows it with grace and in both worlds at once. I am either in the coloured veiling, glimpsing the light, or coming round amongst tea-leaves, trash, and toe-clippings. He can see the light in the toe-clippings, and
can get it out
. Have you noticed (but I think you are as yet unconverted to Jung) how Jung says that One of the primary metaphors for the Alchemical Work is
torture
? The flesh must groan to release the spirit, the light is wrung with blood out of the Stone, the veils of flesh are ripped and bleeding so that the Child of Light may come forth and shine.

Listen, Kieran, this is ecstasy, not madness. But it might not help with yr Practical problem wch is who is in charge of yr So-called Patients. (Victims.)

I
AM
.

OK
?

I
AM
.

A handclasp, dear old Kieran.

Elvet Gander

From Brenda Pincher to Avram Snitkin

Listen, you bastard, I am going to get this letter out to you, and you are going for once in your life to do
something
.

Things have been happening. They aren't funny. I daren't write much.

The baby got born. Nobody fetched a doctor, and nobody had ever consulted one. It was a horrible birth, she screamed for twenty-four hours, I'd guess. Lady W. waved her arms and said all would be well, and burned nasty smelly choking charms. Clemency and Lucy saved the baby, and saved Ruth, I think and trust. There was an awful lot of blood. Gander and Zag were unconscious with something they took. Lady W. said to Ramsden, Come and behold the Work (I quote exactly) and he came. He said he smelled blood. (Well, how could he
not,
it was everywhere.) Anyway, he strode in, looking priest-like, and took one look at her lying there—they had tidied her up—and had a colossal epileptic fit, and Lucas S. and Canon H. had to hold him down and do things with his tongue and drag him away to bed. Where he's kind of comatose.

That's bad, but there's something worse.

There is—was—a girl called Ellie. She was pretty sick, in a quiet way. She took the not-eating very seriously, and got thinner and thinner. And thinner. The other day, someone went up to look for her—she slept in a tiny attic. Well, it wasn't
someone,
it was me.

And she was dead. Quite cold, with her mouth and eyes open.

I thought, now they'll have to get a doctor, or the police.

But they buried her, in the garden, with singing and clarinet music.

It was quite respectful, and if you're dead, you're dead, but it's illegal.

And they seemed to think oh well, it was quite natural, she was better off, her journey was over, Gander said.

Avram, I think you'd better tell someone.

Who can I trust with this letter?

I can't think.

What can I do?

Oh,
shit
.

The Winter's Tale
was performed in the Great Hall at Long Royston. Alexander had asked Harold Bomberg who had played Gauguin in his London production of
The Yellow Chair
to play Leontes, and had found a Hermione amongst the lecturers in English in the University who had been at Cambridge with Frederica, and was now a mediaevalist. The rest of the cast were university teachers and students, with the exception of Perdita. Perhaps sentimentally, but also because Blesford Grammar School said she was outstanding, he had chosen Mary Orton. For this reason, Daniel, as well as Frederica, Agatha, Saskia and Leo, had come North to see the first night. They sat together in a long row, Bill Potter next to Daniel, Winifred next to Will, who was on the end, Frederica between Daniel and Alexander. The university dignitaries and the county notables were in front of them, including Matthew Crowe, in his own arm-chair, wrapped in blankets.

Vincent Hodgkiss sat, not with the university dignitaries, but with Marcus, further back, behind the row of Potters. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock was with them. He looked to see where Frederica was—deep in family and old friends—and looked away again.

Alexander had had a hand in the costumes. They were vaguely classical, with Elizabethan touches. In the first act, with its crescendo of jealousy and its polarised trial scene, the men wore black, with touches of crimson, and the women wore white, with touches of purple. The boy, Mamillius, wore a miniature version of his father's black robe, standing collar, and tights. He spread the wings of his cloak to tell his ghost story.
“A sad tale's best for winter.”
He told his father “
I am like you,
they say
” and went off, to die of grief and humiliation. Gerard Wijnnobel listened with delight and amazement to the tortured syntax, the straining thread of language, of Leontes' agony of jealousy. It was coherently incoherent, beyond bearing, and entirely beautiful.

Luk Lysgaard-Peacock got faintly bored of all these words, and considered the back of Frederica's red head. He had always supposed she slept with Edmund Wilkie—they seemed to be a couple—and he saw her touch Alexander Wedderburn's arm with a sort of intimacy. She was a free woman. He might go and talk to her. Or not.

Marcus suddenly had a complicated idea about the geometry of the physics of nodes of growth forming on the stems of sunflowers. He looked desperately around for a mnemonic.

“
My life stands in the level of your dreams,
” said Hermione.

“
Your actions are my dreams,
” returned her terrible husband.

Frederica wanted to cry, at the closed perfection of those running feet. She remembered her dream of Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. What relation did it have to the now-dreamy nature of remembered actions? There were drinks at the interval. Luk decided he
would
speak to Frederica, made his way across the Hall, and found her with her son and the headmistress. “You should have been Mamillius,” said Miss Godden, “if Mary is to be Perdita.” Frederica put an arm round Leo. “I don't want him to be Mamillius,” she said. “Hullo, Luk. In any case, he's in his own school play. He's in
The Wizard of Oz
.”

“I wanted to be the cowardly Lion. But I'm the Scarecrow. I sing, I dance.”

“I must come and see that,” said Alexander. He said to Bill

“How are you bearing up?”

“Oh, the first half's splendid. It's always splendid. The verse, the pace, you've got it very well. It's the damned
statue
. I'm waiting to see what on earth you can have done with that impossible piece of stage machinery.”

“You do have to lend it your imagination.”

“I have never been able to do so. Never once. Just because
he
got old and self-indulgent—is no reason why
I
should—”

Most of this meant nothing to Luk. He said to Frederica

“I saw you interviewing that herpetologist. I noticed you mentioned my research. Quite a lot of people have remarked on it. Remarked on the mention on TV, that is.”

“I'm sorry.”

“No, no, I didn't mean that. It's always good to get recognition. I wanted to say, thank you.”

Frederica remembered the previous thank you. Her face stiffened. Luk drew back. The second half began.
Alexander had dressed the sheep-shearers and pastoral dancers in sharp pinks and blues and yellows—new colours of the 60s, colours of the flower children, dyes that hadn't been created when Frederica played the young Elizabeth in 1953 on the terrace of the House. It was winter, outside and in, and Alexander filled the stage—the space under the minstrels' gallery, under the plaster frieze of marble men and maidens under blanched forest boughs—with an artificial summer of silk flowers—poppies and lilies, roses and delphiniums, marigolds and convolvulus—made by a clever Chinese artist he had found working for tiny sums in Soho.

Mary Orton appeared, in a demure white cotton dress and a floral crown, weightless and intricate. She began to speak Perdita's flower speech.

O Proserpina
For the flowers now that frighted thou let'st fall
From Dis's wagon ...

Daniel was quite unprepared for the effect this would have on him. She was acting a woman a year or two older than herself, and was full of the careful dignity of speaking great verse clearly. She was in her own world, not trying to charm, but enchanting. He saw, not his daughter, but his wife. Only for a moment, but entirely, and remembering life he remembered death, automatically, and his eyes filled with tears. He heard a small sound next to him. Bill Potter was rubbing his cuff angrily across his faded eyes. An audience is one, and many, it is moved separately, and together. Daniel pushed at his own eyelashes, and with his other hand touched Bill's knee, to show he knew they knew.

The play swept on, and broke up into the irritating little runnels of scenes in which the greatest of playwrights evaded the recognitions, reparations, climax, everyone had a right to expect, and fobbed off his audience with
oratio obliqua,
reported speech, when the father met the lovely living daughter who replaced both his dead son, and her exposed infant self, for whom he had mourned for sixteen unstaged years. What a
mess,
Frederica thought, as she always thought. “I can see why he did it, and we find ways to excuse it, because it is what
he
did, but
what a mess
—”

And all squeezed and rushed and jangled together for the sake of the set piece of the damned statue.

Alexander had done his best, like many before and after him. He had put the woman on a plinth, and had veiled her, in imitation of those virtuoso seventeenth-century marble carvings of metaphorical stone veiling over metaphorical stone flesh. With hidden gold safety-pins he had pulled the fine muslin back over the dead Queen's face, as though a wind was blowing through the twilight of the windless underworld. He had damped it very slightly, and the contours of the face—the nose, the cheek-bone, the eyeballs, the lips and brow, could be seen. They were highlit with a white spotlight—a white of a purity and coldness also unavailable in 1953, a dead white, that made pure shadows.

Paulina, the psychopomp, led the repentant intemperate king, his rage cool, into the vault, followed by his reconciled friend, his daughter, and her young lover.

It is an impossible piece of creaking stage machinery.

LEONTES
        See my lord,
Would you not deem it breathed, and that those veins
Did verily bear blood?

POLIXENES
         
Masterly done.
The very life seems warm upon her lip.

LEONTES
         
The fixture of her eye has motion in't
As we are mocked with art.

“Mocked” mouthed Bill Potter, silently. Daniel saw. Alexander's lighting changed to rose and gold, which filled the whole space under the minstrels' gallery with a liquid shimmer, in which, to the sound of music, rebeck, hautbois, lute, the veiled figure, its face pressed against its cerecloth, began to flow down off its pedestal and to cross the ground. The stage-vault was heaped with colourless silk flowers, transparent like the discs of honesty, or the operculum which closes a snail-shell in winter. The rose and gold light transfigured these drifts of ghost-petals, making them substantial. Mary-Perdita had one in her hair, which now caught this new light, and shone out like a living flame. The statue—the only moving thing in the dumb-struck gathering—swept on towards the king, and lifted its veil, like a bride, and held out a rose-bathed face for a kiss.