Babel Tower (82 page)
Authors: A.S. Byatt
Griffith Goatley objects. Pre-marital incontinence is inadmissible as evidence in a divorce suit. The judge over-rules him, when Ounce explains that he is seeking to establish how likely or unlikely Mrs. Reiver was to have been surprised by “sexual peccadilloes and so on, on a husband’s part.”
“You may answer,” says the judge.
“You knew quite a lot about men, when you married,” says Ounce, wrinkling his eyes at Frederica, waiting to re-establish the fleeting sexual connection between them.
“Yes,” says Frederica.
“How many men had you slept with?”
Goatley objects; his objection is sustained; the judge and the Court have seen Frederica hesitate, not knowing the answer.
“Moving on,” says Ounce, “moving on to the question of these feelthy pictures. Do you not think—as a sophisticated woman, as you are, that you may have been exaggerating your reaction to them? You have a degree in English literature, a good degree. You must have discussed Shakespeare’s bawdy, Chaucer’s naughty tales, Rochester’s lyrics, with aplomb, in your day, I imagine. Are you really shocked by a few filthy pictures, however deplorable—are they not an unfortunate phenomenon like smoking-room songs, like the lavatory jokes indulged in by all little boys, including your own son, I have no doubt.”
“I can only say I was terribly shocked. It does interest me that it was such a blow. I agree, if you’d
told
me I’d react like that, I’d have said I probably wouldn’t. But they made me sick.”
“A real foray into Bluebeard’s cupboard. Perhaps best to leave cupboards shut, you might think. All marriages need private places, private cupboards, you may think. The pictures were not forced on you, were not left about to upset you?”
“Oh no.”
“Going back to your evidence. My learned friend asked you why your sexual happiness changed. I believe he expected you to reply, ‘Because my husband neglected me and was cruel to me’ or some such answer. But I wrote down what you did say. It was ‘I think it went wrong because I withdrew. I began to see I ought not to have got married.’ Would you care to comment on that observation, Mrs. Reiver?”
Frederica looks down at her hands. She cannot quite speak. He has heard her thoughts. She knows the answer, and knows she should not give it, and cannot speak.
“Come, Mrs. Reiver, you are usually so articulate, so clear. It is a simple question. ‘I began to see I ought not to have got married.’ ”
“I began to see I had promised something I couldn’t give,” says Frederica, temporarily relieved by having at last said what is in her mind. She pauses again.
“You had married in bad faith?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly. But it might look like that. You might be thinking, I have made a mistake, maybe even, a dreadful mistake, and a sensitive man, even if not the most articulate man, might become irascible, sensing this reserve, might have fits of blind irritability, in response to this withdrawal.”
“I didn’t withdraw.”
“Forgive me, Mrs. Reiver. It is the word you used.”
“
Withdrawing
doesn’t excuse axe-throwing.”
“It does not. But we do not admit that an axe was ever thrown. Tell me again, Mrs. Reiver, why you married Nigel Reiver.”
“I have told you. Sex. Sexual happiness, that is. And persistence. His persistence.”
“The fact that he was very rich had nothing to do with it?”
“Almost nothing. I like—I liked—good restaurants. But it was more the glamour of the opposite, of the unknown, how the other half live. Bad faith, again. I am not asking for maintenance, not for myself. I hope I am allowed to make that clear at this point. I didn’t marry for money. A bit for the glamour of the difference.”
“You
are
very articulate,” says Laurence Ounce, somehow diminishing Frederica.
Q. If we may turn to your precipitate flight from Bran House, for a moment. It was very convenient, was it not, that your friends, a group of male friends, were visiting at the time, were able to hang around with a Land Rover and wait for you?
A. They were not welcome. They might never have come again. I was very frightened. It seemed like then or never. At the time.
Q. And how did you prepare your son for this midnight exodus? Did you tell him you were leaving Bran House, his father, who loved him, his aunts, the housekeeper who had been responsible for his upbringing, his pony, to whom he was so attached? Did he come willingly?
A. (The witness is visibly shocked by this question.) He decided himself.
Q. What do you mean? You put it to him, to a little boy in his bedroom, a
very small
boy—you asked him to decide between his parents?
A. No. I would never do that. No. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t wake him. I didn’t think I could. I didn’t think it was fair. I didn’t mean to go for long, for ever, then, at that moment. I felt he was better where he was.
Q. You felt he was better where he was.
A. Well, then, in a sense, obviously, yes, he was.
Q. How did he come to go with you, then?
A. He ran after me. He said he was coming. He seemed to know I was going.
Q. He wanted you to stay?
A. No. He said he was coming. I would have gone back in with him, and stayed. But he said he was coming.
Q. He was a desperate, confused little boy, in the middle of the night?
A. Yes. But he was determined. You don’t know him. He has a strong will.
Q. You are not going to tell me that a little boy of—four years old—has a will strong enough, in the middle of the night, to impose a decision on a loving mother who has—with some self-renunciation it would appear—decided that
he was better where he was
? Was it not rather, Mrs. Reiver, the case that a little boy, whom you had been content to leave in his bed, sensed inconveniently that you were leaving him, and came out to remonstrate, to plead? And you, fearing that your rendezvous with your young men would be missed, snatched up this little boy,
as an afterthought,
and carried him away as an unplanned piece of luggage
(The witness is silent.)
Q. Would you not say it was more or less like that?
A. (In a whisper) No. It was not like that. I love my son.
Her voice is small and dry. She cannot utter, she cannot speak. She licks her lips, a nervous gesture which the Court notes.
Griffith Goatley asks his client a few calm questions after this. He then produces signed affidavits from Bill Potter and Daniel Orton, describing violent assaults made upon them by Nigel Reiver on two occasions after his wife’s departure.
Laurence Ounce’s first witness is Miss Olive Reiver. He establishes that she is the unmarried sister of Nigel Reiver and lives in the family home, Bran House. He takes her through her brother’s marriage.
Q. Were you surprised when he married Frederica Potter?
A. Not by then, no. She had often been staying with us. They were obviously very much in love. I was happy to see Nigel so happy.
Q. And Frederica. Was she happy?
A. It was hard to tell. She didn’t find it easy to fit in to our way of life. She wasn’t from our sort of background.
Q. Do you think she found you intimidating—the close family—the lifestyle of the country, to which she was not used?
A. Oh no. I think perhaps she rather despised us. She thought we were a bit slow and boring, I think. She lived for the moment
when Nigel was there. She didn’t try too hard with the rest of us.
Q. She perhaps missed her old friends?
A. I wouldn’t say that. She had lots of visitors. All the visitors she wanted. Mostly young men from London. We made them welcome, of course; that was good manners.
Q. Was any attempt made to prevent her friends from coming, or to discourage communication with them?
A. Oh no. We keep open house. I think they found us a bit stick in the mud. Tweedy types. (Laughs.)
Q. And when your nephew was born—young Leo—did she seem more settled?
A. Oh no. Perhaps the reverse. She began to seem quite sulky and unhappy. We couldn’t cheer her up. She took to sitting in her room.
Q. She was depressed?
A. You could call it that. It was a good thing there were so many of us to give a hand with the baby.
Q. But she loved the baby?
A. Oh, I think so. But I don’t think she’s the sort to whom looking after a baby comes naturally. She didn’t hold him naturally, you know, she was kind of awkward.
Reserved
with him.
The evidence moves on to the alleged acts of cruelty.
Q. Did you ever see your brother express anger towards his wife?
A. They had the odd row. They both gave as good as they got. Shouting matches on the stairs. Kiss and make up, I’ve seen it several times. Normal, I’d say. She did sulk rather a lot, and that provoked him. But they were happy after their rows, all smiles and hugs.
Q. Did you ever see your brother strike his wife?
A. No. Never.
Q. But he might have done?
A. I don’t know what went on in their private quarters. But I wouldn’t think it was like him. We’d have seen, if she’d been bruised, and she wasn’t.
Q. On a certain occasion, in 1964, the doctor was called to dress an extensive gash in your sister-in-law’s thigh?
A. She told us she’d tripped over the barbed wire in the paddock field, going about to look at the moon.
Q. Did that strike you as an odd story?
A. Not really. She was always running around at night and wandering off. She was bored, poor thing.
Q. And the injuries were consistent with the barbed-wire story?
A. The rips in her trousers were. I didn’t get a close look at her leg. That wasn’t my concern.
Q. The wound didn’t happen when she was wearing a nightdress?
A. I know nothing about a nightdress. I never saw a nightdress. I did see trousers with bloodstains and barbed-wire rips.
Q. Did you ever think your brother might have caused the injury?
A. No. I’m surprised to hear it suggested. He loves her—well, anyway, he loved her. He was very tolerant of her ways, in my opinion, and has made great efforts to get her to come back and live in the family home, with the little boy. It’s not surprising he got a bit irritable—she made him look a bit of a fool, you might think, just going off like that in the middle of the night, with a pack of arty types from London. But he wouldn’t
hurt
her. What good would that do?
Q. And what do you think should happen now, after she has stayed away for three years?
A. I don’t approve of divorce. I’m a regular churchgoer, I know the Church’s teaching is that marriage is once and permanent. I think a child should live in the family home with both his parents. But if she won’t come hack and try again, try a bit harder, I think she should let Leo come back to us,
to the home he grew up in and will inherit, where he’s loved and safe.
Laurence Ounce calls Rosalind Reiver. The witnesses have not been in the courtroom before they give evidence. Rosalind Reiver too reports that Frederica had frequent visitors, made no attempt to settle in Bran House, “sulked” and enjoyed quarrelling with her husband. She also states that the wound in Frederica’s thigh was said at the time to be caused by barbed wire, and that she has seen ripped trousers with bloodstains consistent with this story. She too knows nothing of a nightdress.
The two sisters are impressive because of their solid, unimaginative ordinariness. They are reasonable, circumscribed, English country gentry. They frown as they appear to try to be fair to their errant sister-in-law. They make it clear that they are devoted to Leo; their heavy mouths smile, their dark eyes open with love when he is mentioned. Rosalind adds to Olive’s evidence a moving image of the two of them teaching the enthusiastic little boy to ride Sooty, of the mother refusing to come out and watch his exploits, “reading a book” all the time, when he has learned to post at the trot. She too thinks Nigel has been very patient.
Laurence Ounce calls Pippy Mammott. Pippy’s face is pink and shining with generous indignation. She is a more volatile witness than the stolid sisters, in that she has an air of having worked herself up to make an appearance, state a position, fight for a cause. Pins are working their way out of her head: now and then, during her evidence, she puts up her hands to put them back, looking as though she is trying to hold her head together. Ounce puts to her much the same series of preliminary questions as he put to the sisters, about the early days of the marriage, about Frederica’s friends, or lack of friends, about their way of life, about Leo.
Q. She seemed happy to be pregnant?
A. I wouldn’t say that, no. Oh no. I would say it came as a blow to her.
Q. It wasn’t a planned pregnancy?
A. I overheard her talking to one of her friends on the telephone. She was always talking away on the telephone, all the time. She said, “Guess what, I’m preggers, it’s an absolute disaster, it ruins absolutely everything, my life is in ruins.”
Q. Are you sure these were her words? Or is that just the drift of what she was saying?
A. I was dreadfully shocked to hear her. It was a terrible thing to say. So naturally I remember it.
Q. But perhaps when the baby was born she felt different? Many women are shocked to find themselves pregnant, but love their child when he comes.
A. I don’t think she felt any different. She wasn’t natural with him. I tried to show her little things—how to soothe him, how to do his little nappies, how to get him to take his milk, but she was very irritable, very sulky, very sluggish, she didn’t want to know. I caught her looking at him as though she wished he weren’t there.
Q. That was your interpretation.
A. I know who did everything for that child. I know who put plasters on his knees and who he turned to when his guinea-pig died. I know who knew how he liked his eggs and his toasted soldiers …
Q. Perhaps she felt
de trop
?
A. What did you say?
Q. Perhaps she felt you looked after him so well, she was superfluous?
A. I don’t think that was so, not at all. She plain
wasn’t interested.
She was always
reading a book
when she wasn’t walking
by herself
or phoning her friends. I’ve seen her feeding the little boy with one hand and holding up some book with the other, and her eyes were on the book, I can tell you, not on the baby. I’ve heard him howl his little heart out, and I’ve run and run to see what the matter was, and he’s been hurt with a penknife, and there she was upstairs,
reading a book,
and didn’t seem to hear a squeak. Not a squeak.
Q. But the boy loved his mother?
A. Naturally he did. He was always trying to get her attention. Mostly he failed. But I was there—his Pippy—and his aunts were there, and so he was well looked after.