A Whistling Woman (50 page)

Chapter 26

Daniel often wondered if he had triggered subsequent events. Two nights later—on a clear night this time—the farmer who had seen Will and his bicycle saw a red light over the moor. The Hearers had been known to light “bonfires and such” on other occasions, but this was duller, and smokier, and contained exploding lumps of sparks. He reported it, in a stolid way, when he reached home and had had a cup of tea. By the time the fire engine had come out from Blesford, the whole of Dun Vale Hall was going up in smoke and leaping flames. Since there was no telephone, no one had called for help. Various concerned people in various places—including Daniel, Jacqueline, Luk Lysgaard-Peacock and Frederica—piled into cars and drove across the moorland to be of help.

It turned out that Need-fires had been lit, to purify the place. Need-fires, ideally, begin with sparks ignited from wood on wood—impregnated cloth is attached to a wooden frame, through which infected cattle—or in this case, sinful people—are herded. The whirling fire-lighter should ideally be pulled alternately by twin brothers. In this case, it was. This information came from Brenda Pincher, who was the only Hearer, when the fire spread to clothing, bushes and buildings, who ran out of the grounds into the road, to flag down passing cars and ask for help. She came back, however, with the helpers, and rushed energetically, indeed desperately, in and out of burning outhouses, driving the beasts and fowl to safety. It was Brenda Pincher, too, who showed the firemen where the Nighby children slept, so that a ladder could be got up, in time to get them out.

Everyone rushed, sooty, unrecognisable. There was somehow, Frederica thought, as she beat out the dull conflagration on the hindquarters of Tobias the sheep, a gap between those who had been Inside—who were part of a spectacle, ringed with flame—and those who were Outside, and had come partly at least because they were drawn by the perennial need to observe someone else's disaster at close quarters. Even if you got hurt, she thought, it wouldn't be the same. Her lungs were bursting simply with running and carrying. She bumped into Luk, in the courtyard, who was struggling with something wrapped in a singed blanket. The faceless thing hopped and spun, struggled out, and turned out to be John Ottokar, his lovely hair burned almost off, his face scorched.

“You've had
enough,
” said Luk. “Go and get attention, get yourself out of this, you've had enough.”

John Ottokar stood submissively, and appeared to listen. Luk let go of him, and turned to Frederica. “There are apparently people still in the attic,” he said, looking up at what was empty windows full of scarlet light and billowing blue-black fumes.

John Ottokar suddenly darted away, back into the house.

“
Shit
—” said Luk, and rushed after him.

Frederica pulled at Luk.

“He's mad. You can't.”

She panted. They touched sooty hands and went to fetch help. A fireman was found, armed and ponderous.

John Ottokar came out of the house, howling, and pulling. He had his brother by the foot—a silver-meshed leg shone in the flame-light—the same face, curiously peaceful, was dragged along the ground, with the same burned-off blond hair. The fireman rushed forward with blankets.

Frederica turned to Luk, who held her.

Something inside exploded, and everyone ran for cover.

There were three dead, it turned out. Everyone thought it would have been many more. Joshua Ramsden was found amongst a heap of shattered and melted glass—mirrors, a television—no more than burned bones, recognisable from his bridge-work. Eva Wijnnobel appeared to have died sitting in an arm-chair, staring into what must have been an advancing wall of smoke and flame.

Ruth was a curled heap under a windowsill, her arms over her head, her gold plait scorched but still in one piece.
The Ottokar twins survived, and lay side by side in Calverley General Hospital's Burns Unit, their faces turned to each other, their bandages and skin-grafts uncannily symmetrical.

Frederica visited them. They did not speak. Their lips were covered with dressings.
Elvet Gander came to consciousness in Cedar Mount, looking into the eyes, very cross, very relieved, of Kieran Quarrell. He was not badly burned, but his lungs were smoke-damaged.

“I blame myself,” said Quarrell. “I blame myself.”

Gander croaked “We are all to blame.”

“Some more than others,” said Kieran Quarrell.
Little congealed, burnt-together heaps of books were found, on the turnings of what was left of the stairs, on the landing outside the room where Eva Wijnnobel had met her end.

The newspapers wrote of An Accident Waiting to Happen, of A Terrible Fate, of A Religious Cult in Self-Destruct Mode. One journalist opined that there were no such things as accidents, and quoted D. H. Lawrence, on how everyone made their own fate. Most cults imploded, self-destructed, in the same manner, you could observe it like the workings of beehives and antheaps and battery hens, said this sage observer.
Daniel Orton, who knew very well that there were such things as accidents, went heavily into Freyasgarth Church, to pray for a man whose father had predestined him to die, to save him from a predicted holocaust. Daniel sat inside the man-made heap of stones, and turned it all over, in the light of his own mind. He judged, harshly and clearly. He put aside his judgment, because the important thing was kindness, was Will, was the lost souls who had blundered out of the fire, Lucy and Gideon, Clemency and Canon Holly, the Ottokars and that anxious little person who had seemed, and still seemed, out of place, Brenda Pincher.
Brenda Pincher found Avram Snitkin. He was lying in his caravan in a singlet and some not very nice underpants, snoring. His hair and beard fanned out over a dirty pillow with no case. He was almost the only remaining person in the Anti-University. The tents were gone, the cottages were empty and disinfected. The University had asked him to go, and he had said “Sure, sure” but had not yet gone.

She shook him awake.

She said “Where are my letters?”

He snuffled and mumbled. He reached under his bed-settee and pulled out plastic bag after plastic bag, full of unopened letters.

“Bills,” he said. “Persecutions. Unrealities.”

Brenda Pincher looked around for a weapon. She took Talcott Parsons, and smote Avram Snitkin across the shoulders. She hit him and hit him, weeping and laughing, and he parried the blows, wincing and smiling.

Later, after her important
Hen Parties: A Study of Female Interfemale
Chat,
she published
Group into Cult: An Ethnomethodological Analysis of
the Development of a Belief-Structure
.
After the burning, Luk took Frederica back to Loderby. They phoned Freyasgarth and ascertained that Leo was still soundly asleep. Luk opened a tin of tomato soup, vegetable red and creamy-sweet, and they sat on the terrace in the cold night, clutching hot black mugs. They looked at the stars, and the black ridge of the moor on the blue-black sky, and talked. Luk wore his hooded anorak. Frederica was shivering. He fetched his quilted eiderdown, and coiled it round her in a rough cone, with a trailing foot. The cloak of feathers was light and warm. Frederica rested her sharp chin on top of it. The outside was scattered with paisleys, a design she had never liked, because it was too common. These were crimson, and scarlet, and orange. Some had frills like sea-slugs, and some had tails like tiny whales, and some had fine branching patterns, like veins or ferns, inside them. Frederica was in that state of exhaustion where everything seems very sharp, and clear, and transparent. She thanked Luk for the warmth, and remarked on the pattern.

“Paisleys have some sort of Eastern symbolic meaning which escapes me,” she said. “I've always not liked them. But when you look properly, they are an extraordinary example of pointless and delightful human ingenuity.”

Luk said he didn't like symbolic meanings. He said some of the paisleys reminded him of the patterns you saw on the retina if you closed your eyes and pressed lightly on the lids. They both tried this. Frederica got blue pools, and Luk got trains of bright sparkles. Luk said, the thing the paisleys now irresistibly reminded him of was a magnified photo of a female mite which he had once been shown by Bill Hamilton. I used it as an example in my lecture, you may remember. I do, said Frederica. The mite lived on fungus threads in rotting oak. She contained two different kinds of unhatched female and a smaller number of males, who copulated with the females, before the mother burst. Some of the hatched impregnated daughters were a special “dispersal morph,” with claws like lobsters, which they used to cling to the hairy forelegs of insects flying away from the oak tree. The males, said Luk, were never dispersers.

Frederica huddled inside the paisley quilt and said he made her see the whole world quite differently, which was true. They looked up at the stars. Frederica, who accepted the poetry of astrology, could identify nothing but the three stars of Orion's belt. You could just see Gemini, said Luk, and that was Aries over there, and the Triangle, and Taurus, and the Whale. Looking at them, he couldn't even begin to see why they had been given these names. Did Frederica realise that we can only see the night—the dark—because the universe is expanding? If it was not expanding, wherever we looked, our line of sight would end at a star. It would be like looking into a forest of trees. The whole sky would be the surface of a star, and shine with perpetual starlight. But because the universe is expanding, we have darkness. The expansion degrades the light from distant stars and galaxies, and turns them into points. I like the dark, said Luk, sitting darkly on his terrace wall, his hooded head thrown back, his sharp beard silhouetted dark on dark.

They did not speak much of what had happened at Dun Vale Hall. The place was becoming already, in their minds, a closed form, a wall of flame enclosing disintegrating walls of stone, inside which were unimaginable aspirations, and destruction and pain. It was a separate thing. Frederica said cautiously that she could not begin to understand it. Religion had been left out of her, indeed knocked out of her, by her father, who was
fervently
anti-religious. Luk said, looking away over the moor, that he could understand it, because he had once been religious. He had had experiences, which he had believed fitted into the pattern of—Christian explanations. Then he had had—other experiences—it had come to him with a saner version of the same—certainty—that it was all untrue. All made up. All wrong. He said “Much more light, so to speak, flooded in the second time. The world became real.”

He stopped and thought, still staring out over the earth.

“There are all sorts of words I mistrust, because of those two experiences,” he said. “Reality's one. Authenticity. Creation. Love. Words that have become meaningless.”

Frederica in her feathers kept still and silent, watching his shadow on the night.

“ ‘Creativity,' for instance,” he said. “My Danish religious forebears knew that only God creates, and I think I avoid the word out of a vestigial religious respect. But also—I haven't really thought it out—because I think current uses of it have got hidden religious roots, and they cause us not to think clearly. Is there any real difference between a really intelligent piece of work and a
creative
piece of work? I don't think so. I saw your programme on the notion, with Elvet Gander and Pinsky. I hated it.”

Frederica shrank into her covering.

“For personal reasons,” said Luk. “Oh, with hindsight, we can see that poor old Elvet Gander was wandering off towards Jungian mysticism and whatever led to what's just happened to those poor creatures. Pinsky was OK. I suppose this story is against myself, because it could be said to be about synchronicity and coincidence, in which I don't believe.”

He told Frederica, then, about Jacqueline and the child that never was, Pinsky's retailing of Freud's tale of the associations of “
aliquis,
” his own disappointment and rage. He said, rage. He said it hadn't actually been
helped
by Frederica's discussion of female matters on the Free Women programme.

“I wasn't talking to you.”

“You don't know who you're talking to. And I was watching.” He said “Anyway, Jacqueline is now potentially a very successful Free Woman.”

Frederica shivered.

“I'm sorry. I sound cross with
you
. Which would be ludicrous. What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking about bower-birds. I was thinking about peacocks' tails, and your lecture, and the peacock feathers and honesty in your jar. The horror Darwin felt at the excess of the peacock's tail—he was right of course, to try to get rid of the idea that God made it for Man's delight in Paradise. But theories of sexual selection don't explain why human beings find peacock feathers beautiful. Or for that matter why
we are interested
in the bower of a bower-bird. We like bower-birds because they are an image of us. They use the feathers of the Bird of Paradise—you said in your lecture—with other blue flowers and shells and things—you said they were a kind of prosthesis for attracting female bower-birds. But you didn't say why bower-birds attract naturalists and aesthetic theorists, or why peacocks attract men and women, who see metaphorical eyes where none are.”

Luk laughed. “My curiosity, and your aesthetic pleasure, according to strict Darwinian theory, would both be fantastic elaborations of something originally adaptive. Like the tailfeathers, if you like. I have a hunter-gatherer's need to notice how things function. Snails and birds. You are trained to discriminate between more and less perfect eyes and feathers.”

“You make metaphors yourself. I saw you wore a peacock scarf to give your peacock lecture on the irrelevance of peacocks. Freud thought everyone was implicated in their own name, which they hadn't chosen. What's your star-sign, unbeliever?”