Babel Tower (63 page)

Agatha and Frederica say good-bye. They walk out into the street, bumping against hurtling children. Agatha says it is a good school: the buildings may be grotty, but the children’s work is displayed along every corridor; there is a frieze of
The Hobbit,
made by a whole class, with the travelling dwarves with their coloured hoods, Bilbo the Hobbit with his pipe and his furry feet, Gandalf the wizard with his flowing white beard and flaming staff, a mountainous background with peering orcs in cave-mouths and wolves on the skyline, a wood full of fat black spiders and carefully constructed webs, and at the very end, Smaug the dragon in his cave, made out of shining milk-bottle tops for scales, and lying on a treasure made of coloured sweet wrappings and tiny plastic beads. The collage is excellent: Agatha tells Frederica to observe that the children have had to consider how trees grow and spider-webs are woven, to think about perspective and be inventive with materials. On the corridor above this, illustrations to William Blake’s poems “The Lamb,” “The Tiger,” “The Little Boy Lost,” “The Clod and the Pebble” celebrate the school’s name. There was nothing like this in the schools of Frederica’s youth. She finds it exciting and invigorating. But she does not know how Leo will survive group life. In the tiled corridors the shrill voices echo and bay. Frederica was a child pushed aside by, hunted by, other children. A solitary, angry child. Does this hand on? She says to Agatha, “I was no good at group life. I hated school.”

“Me too. It seemed eternal. It dragged so. I say to myself, Where are they now, the ones who were so successful, so popular as children?”

At home Frederica has another long, legal envelope. This contains a letter from Arnold Begbie, and encloses, he says, the Respondent’s Answer to Frederica’s petition. As you will see, says Begbie, the respondent denies all the material facts alleged in our petition. His solicitor has written a letter, of which I enclose a copy, urging you to
meet him with a view to reconciliation and restitution of conjugal rights. He also claims custody of your child.

Frederica reads the Answer, on its heavy foolscap paper.

Frederica goes to see her solicitor. She sits in the barred light, and hears her own voice, a pleading voice, a panicky voice.

“He can’t take him, can he?”

“It would be very unusual for the court to award custody of so small a child away from the mother. Very unusual. Very bad luck. We must ensure it doesn’t happen. We must fight. Since your husband clearly intends to fight, we must fight back. I had imagined he might at least have admitted the adultery—if we would drop the cruelty—that would have been civilised, though we would always have to be careful about appearing to collude, or connive at such adultery. For our legal system is oppositional, Mrs. Reiver—the law requires that there be a guilty party and an innocent party, and is hostile to any appearance of
agreement
to divorce, seeks zealously for evidence of manufactured evidence, or lax moral attitudes suddenly conveniently tightened. Not that that appears to be the case here. Your husband is loving and forbearing—”

“Furious and pig-headed.”

“As you please. He will say he is loving and forbearing. He condones desertion. He wants you back. You must
prove
that he treated
you badly enough for divorce to be a reasonable requirement. I shall instruct Griffith Goatley He fights like a bull terrier. We need witnesses to the cruelty, and witnesses to his behaviour when away from you. You would not consider instructing an enquiry agent?”

“No. That’s a horrible idea. And besides, I can’t afford it, I can’t afford
anything.
”

“I will ask about those clubs. The Honeypot. Tips and Tassels. There may be a doorman. A barman. An ex-doorman, an ex-barman. They are reluctant to be witnesses. It is not good for their employment. They may know a young woman who may be prepared to say something. It is worth a try. We must have a case.”

“He threw an axe at me.”

Begbie looks mournful. “We need to
prove
it.”

“I have a huge scar. Pink. It throbs in rainy weather.”

“We need to be able to
show
what caused it.”

“I don’t want Leo in a dormitory in a prep school. It’s horrible, it’s unnatural, I can’t bear to think of it—he’s
little
—”

“Lots of little boys survive quite adequately.” A pause. “I did.” Another pause. “The judge probably did.”

His face is lugubrious, frowning with what might be anxiety and might be a kind of professional
Schadenfreude.

“He’d
hate
it.”

“We must hope it doesn’t come to that. It shouldn’t. I’ll get Goatley. Meanwhile, think of
anyone
who can describe your husband’s unreasonable, cruel, or aggressive behaviour. Maids? We must get on to the doctors. Your friends?”

“They didn’t
see
him hurt me. They saw me shortly after.”

“Hearsay evidence is not admissible.”

“He
can’t have
Leo.”

Daniel keeps watch in the dark in St. Simeon’s Church. Orange street light glares through the jumbled stained glass of the windows, producing a muted glare of acid colours on stone, which occasionally flare differently as headlights pass in the street. He sits in the shadow, behind a Victorian pillar, looking at the faded reproductions of Rubens’s
Deposition
and Holbein’s
Dead Christ
which Canon Holly has hung over the altar. It is October 28th and Daniel wishes to give thanks for, to contemplate, the ending of an evil. On this day the House of Commons, in a free vote, has passed the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Bill. Daniel sits in the presence of whatever
haunts the dark stone and meditates on the panoply, the grisly ceremony, the ghoulish cruelty, of what has just been done away with. What he has felt, all his life since he first became aware of the pain of death, is not, mostly, a sympathetic identification with the sufferer, though that is part of it. He has seen and he has imagined the man or woman in the dock seeing the judge’s black cap, hearing the sentence pronounced, having to do things that belong to the still living, walk back to the cell, eat, speak, defecate, breathe, as a human being certainly dead, a human being whose existence is the knowledge that in ten days, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one day, ten hours, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ten minutes, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, they will come with the hood and ropes, and the dead legs must walk to the gallows and the trap. A death is a death, and this death is a peculiarly horrible death, because of its certainty, because of its public enactment, because it is unnatural, as many other murders are not unnatural. But a death is a death, Daniel knows. Many wait in pain. All human beings come there. What horrifies him about the infliction of capital punishment is the horror it spreads into the whole society which enacts it, connives at it, decrees it. The breath of evil in the court officials, the policemen and -women, the counsel at the bar, the judge, who together must enact the sick drama that leads to the killing. The evil that can be smelled in the cells and in the warders and in the other prisoners who witness the agony, with furtive glee or sick horror. The pleasure in pain that thrills in the press and in the sickened, the profoundly infected, imagination of the people as they imagine what can’t be imagined, whether with a murderous delight, or a bloody righteous wrath, or with the unwilling, terrified,
damaged
identification with the sufferer’s terror, which was his own response as a child. In Calverley he had met a blabbering man, a shaking man, who was a priest who had attended executions in Calverley Gaol, and had lost his mind in a mixture of guilt, terror and revulsion. A society that can make these mechanisms, Daniel believes, is a sick society, and if it cannot be called an inhuman society, it is only because cruelty is human, cruelty is part of our nature, as it is part of the nature of no other creature. (The warmongering chimpanzee is a discovery of the future.)

Daniel sits in the church and destroys in his mind, one by one, the elements of the narrative and the drama. He thinks of them all soberly, gagging as he always gags as he pronounces in his head “to be hanged
by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul.” He imagines the black cap and the posy on the judge’s desk, the condemned cell and the last walk as Saint Ignatius Loyola taught his followers to picture and meditate on the Stations of the Cross, bringing the agony of the God-Man vividly to life, step by step in the darkroom of the brain, blood, sweat, broken bones, the stink, the roar, the failing muscles, the spitting crowd, the piercing thorns, the failing thighs and knees, the crunching shock of the nails. These things are obscene, and the obscenity is not in the murderous impulse, but in the ingenuity that devised and devises the long-drawn-out agony, the spectacle, the complicity of participants and passers-by. He cannot really see, in the dark, either the heavy, pearly, meat-stiff fall of Rubens’s painted flesh, or the grim, stretched, leathery cadaver of the Holbein. Those two knew what flesh was, its beauty and intricacy, its mixtures of rose and wax, blue and grey, shadow and fatty sheen. They painted it at the moment of its dissolution, with aesthetic pleasure in their own power, love of the flesh as it was and would not be, alive in their steady contemplation of death. This is Christ, the divine man, a man tortured and executed, and perhaps, Daniel thinks, it is right after all to find God here, where human ingenuity in evil is most crassly lively and most disingenuously self-righteous. And it is good to thank whatever is for the end of evil, at least in this time and in this place. In later years, when the freedom of the 1960s is spoken of, Daniel will always think of this quiet dark night, when he cleared his imagination’s charnel-house and torture-chamber of their gibbering ghosts, and ended sitting in a dark blue silent dome of night darkness, soft and cool and still.

A week before, exactly a week before the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Bill, in Hyde, in Cheshire, Ian Brady, twenty-six, a stock clerk, and Myra Hindley, twenty-three, a shorthand-typist, were charged with murdering Lesley Ann Downey, aged ten, whose body had been found buried in peat in the Pennine moors six days earlier. Brady was also charged with the murder of Edward Evans, aged seventeen. If the chronology had been a little different, Daniel will think, often, would he have had his quiet night?

Agatha Mond comes down to Frederica’s basement to collect Leo for school. It is her day. She has Frederica’s post in her hand. There are two fat foolscap envelopes, a small brown one, and one covered with small “Victorian scraps”—angels’ heads and bullfinches, a lily and a
rose. Leo is struggling with the zip of his anorak, with which he refuses to accept any help. He frowns. Frederica mimes distress and fury over his head to her friend, opens the foolscap letters rapidly, not because she is eager to know their contents, but because she dreads them, and formless dread is always worse than the known and delimited. A letter from Nigel’s solicitor, Guy Tiger, is enclosed in a letter from her own solicitor, Arnold Begbie. The letter is about Leo. It is not the first. Nigel has taken to dispatching a steady stream of these legal documents. He does not write letters himself: language is not his medium. He has never written letters to Frederica. She has no box of dead love-letters to consider with incredulity or regret. Begbie’s covering note says that the present letter requires careful thought. Frederica, unable to speak because of Leo, snatches up the dressmaking shears with which she has been making chains of paper men for her son, holds up the letter to Agatha, and mimes its destruction.

“Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,” says Agatha. They grin. The quotation makes them both feel better. They do not question why this should be so: they are women who share a certain culture.

“Blind Fury is about right,” says Frederica savagely.

“
Courage,
” says Agatha.

Leo zizzes his zip to a triumphant snap. He and Saskia and Agatha depart.

Frederica reads the letter again.