Babel Tower (4 page)

“It doesn’t always,” says Daniel, who has had one or two nasty experiences, hearing desperate voices subside into meaningless babble
and the burring of an empty telephone, or rise more and more shrilly before the sudden severing of the link across the air.

Or it might begin with the beginning of the book that was to cause so much trouble, but was then only scribbled heaps of notes, and a swarm of scenes, imagined and re-imagined.

Chapter I    
Of the Foundation of Babbletower

When the blissful dawn of the Revolution had darkened to the red light of Terror, when the paving-stones of the city shifted on flesh and oozed blood in their interstices, when the streaming blade rose and fell busily all day and the thick sweet smell of butchery flared in all men’s nostrils, a small band of free spirits left the City separately, at night, in haste and secrecy. They wore various well-studied disguises, and had made their preparations well in advance, sending supplies secretly and ordering horses and carriages to be made ready at lonely farms, by those they could trust—for there was trust in some, even in those dark days. When they were gathered in the farmyard they seemed a ramshackle crew of rusty surgeons and filthy beggars, stolid peasants and milkmaids. In the farmyard those who seemed to be the leaders, or at least in charge of the plan of action, described the coming journey, across plains and through forests, always skirting large towns and villages, as far as the border of the land, where they would cross into a neighbouring mountainous country and make their way to the hidden valley, beyond the white-capped fangs of the mountains, where one of their number, Culvert, had a sequestered property, La Tour Bruyarde, which could be reached only across a narrow wooden bridge between two lines of peaks, across a dark and lifeless chasm.

They must travel fast, and circumspectly, never trusting anyone they met on the road, save certain helpers at posting stages, and in certain lonely inns and hamlets, who could be recognised by certain secret signs, a blue flower at a certain angle in the hatband, an eagle feather in a tuft of cock feathers. If they all came safely to their destination—as it was most vigorously to be hoped they would—they would be able to set up their own small society in true freedom, far from rhetoric, fanaticism and Terror.

So they travelled, through a press of dangers and menaces which will not be recounted here, but left to the imagination, for this story concerns itself not with the troubled world they left behind, but with the new world they meant so hopefully to build, if not for all men, since that hope had failed, then for these select few.

They did not all arrive. Two young men were caught by the military and pressed into the Army, from which they had much ado to escape a year later. One old man was knifed by an older woman as he rested in his sweat in a ditch and closed his eyes for sheer weariness. Three young women were caught and raped by a rabble of peasants, though they were well disguised as pox-ridden crones. When their young, smooth flesh was discovered under their artfully tattered clothing, they were raped again for their deceitfulness, and again for their sweetness and softness, and yet again, upon compulsion, so that they no longer had force to beg for mercy or tears to run down their blubbered cheeks, and then again, and so they died, of suffocation, of fear, of despair, who knows, or who knows if they thought it a merciful release. Their fate was never known by those more fortunate who came to the hidden tower, though rumours of it were rife on the roads. But in those days, so many were undone, these deaths were not remarkable.

The group who gathered on the crest of Mount Clytie, before making the crossing on the wooden bridge, might fairly have been thought remarkable. They were mud-stained and dishevelled, thinner after the privations of their journey, but full of vigour, their blood beating fiercely with renewed hope. They could not see La Tour Bruyarde (only one of the names of the place) from where they stood, but they were assured by their leader that once across the bridge and over the last natural bastion, they would behold a possible site for an earthly Paradise, a plain watered by swift streams and meandering brooks, in which was a wooded Mount or Mound on which stood their new home, on a site where his own family, throughout the ages, had always had a fortress-retreat.

This leader, though of noble birth, went by the name of Culvert, since it was a condition of their society that their names should be newly chosen, to signify relinquishment of the old world, and new beginnings in the new. His chief companion was the Lady Roseace. They were a beautiful pair, in the first strength of confident manhood and womanhood. Culvert was above the common height, broad
shouldered but lithe; he wore his hair, which was black and gleaming, longer than was fashionable, and it fell in great negligent tresses on his shoulders. His face was strong and smiling, with a full red mouth, both firm and sensuous, and dark eyes under decisive brows. Roseace was slender but full-breasted, and pressed her saddle with firm but ample buttocks. Her hair was also worn freely over her shoulders, though she had only considered it safe to release it from her hood since they came to the summit of Mount Clytie, and she now tossed her head a little from sheer pleasure at the breezy clarity of the air and the empty spaces of rock, snow and green vegetation spread below her. Her face was thoughtful and imperious, her lips firmly arched and her winged brows drawn in a habitual questioning frown. She had in her young life been destined by her parents for an uncongenial husband, and by the Revolutionary Powers for denunciation, summary trial and rapid execution, but she had escaped both parents and gaolers with equal resourcefulness and ruthlessness. On the day when this narrative begins her golden hair was curling and tangled and her skin lightly veiled with a powdering of dust, amongst which glistened diamond drops of sweat.

Other members of the assembled company were the young Narcisse, pale, gentle and hardly more than a boy, full of tremulous self-doubt and sudden starts of eagerness; the careful Fabian, who had shared Culvert’s student freedoms and had been a voice of caution in his wilder enterprises; and an older man, who called himself Turdus Cantor, and was wrapped in a heavy cloak, appearing to find the mountain air, even in the fresh sunlight, chill. Fabian’s brave wife, Mavis, was there, and with them were their three children, newly named Florian, Florizel and Felicitas. More children had set out, two families with their own young and orphaned cousins, but these were not expected to reach the bridge for a few days, since their journey was necessarily slower. Three younger women, clustered together and speaking in low voices, were the raven-haired Mariamne and the palely glimmering twin girls, Coelia and Cynthia. There were also the servants in charge of carts and pack animals—of these, who were appointed to become companions with the rest, once their destination was reached, more will be told at a later date.

Culvert looked around him, and laughed, and said:

“So far we have come, through risk and dread, and now we shall enter into the possession of our own lives and our own ways of living. La Tour Bruyarde, where you will be received, had lapsed into disuse
in my grandfather’s time. Its stones were plundered for the walls of barns and chapels, its halls were empty and the vines were creeping through the broken windows. But much work has been done, many suites and chambers have been restored, the necessary offices are in order, although as you will soon see, the building work will continue above our heads, to make all more secure and harmonious.

“All of you, I think, know something of my plans in making our retreat here. I wish our new lives to be an experiment in freedom—freedom in large things, in education, in government of our society, in shared labour, in the life of the mind and the life of the passions. Attention will be paid to things that may appear to be lesser things—art, dress, food, the decoration of our living quarters, the cultivation of our plants and trees. These will all be debated amongst us and made new in ways now only partly to be imagined, as we live our passionate and reasonable lives with goodwill. Petty restrictions will be done away with. New combinations will be instituted. Those who desire one thing greatly shall be satisfied, and so shall those who wish to flutter like butterflies from flower to flower.

“When we and our fellow labourers have crossed this bridge, and when Damian and Samuel have waited here another seven days in hope of the wagon with the children, and other straggling companions, we shall take axes and cut the supports away from the bridge, which will render us unassailable from this direction, from where our danger comes.”

“Will it,” asked Fabian, “render us also unable to escape from this valley?”

“We hope no one will ever wish to escape. But also of course no one should be prevented—we are designing a community of entire freedom—and to the south there are narrow passes through the mountains and ways in which, with difficulties no greater than we have just faced, anyone might come out. But I hope we shall all be living in such pleasure, and delight, and mutual usefulness, that such wishes would be far indeed from your thoughts.”

“Far indeed,” said Roseace, smiling, and spurring on her horse to be the first to set foot on the bridge. So they passed over in safety, some averting their eyes from the giddy chasm below, in which a sullen torrent roared over sharp black basalt, dimmed by stream and spray, forever out of reach of the direct warmth of the sun. Fabian clasped his young son to his breast so that the boy should not look down, but the boy’s sister gazed about her in all directions fearless and
laughing. And so, talking animatedly of the haven they were so soon to see and enter, the company entered the rocky defile which would open on the Valley of Faisans.

Frederica seems set on coming into the wood, where Hugh is, rather than inviting him over to her side. She hands the boy into Hugh’s hands and comes down quickly herself, rejecting assistance. She is as thin as ever, her sharp face still bony.

They wander along the paths between the trees. They do not know how to talk to each other. Once they met daily and discussed everything, Plato, the tanks in Budapest, Mallarmé, Suez, metre. This makes it harder, not easier, to ask for narratives of the six years that have passed. They mention old friends. Alan is teaching art history at the Samuel Palmer School of Art, Hugh says. He thinks he is also writing a few articles. He travels to Italy. Tony is doing rather well as a freelance journalist. He even does some television. Hugh himself is still writing, yes, he is still writing, it is the poetry that matters, he tells Frederica, who makes an affirmative noise, nodding her scarfed head, staring down at beech mast. He makes his living teaching, he says, but he would like not to. A publisher has offered him some reading, but it would only be for a pittance. Poets can only expect pittances, says Hugh Pink to Frederica, who makes the same, slightly suffocated, affirmative noise. She does not ask about Raphael Faber, whose poetry-reading group they once both attended. Hugh tells her that Raphael’s poem “Lübeck Bells” has been published. He says it is much admired by those who can see what it is.

“I know,” says Frederica.

“Do you still see Raphael?” asks Hugh innocently. Hugh was in love with Frederica and Frederica was in love with Raphael, but that was in what seems to him in this wood another country, another time, his youth, which is already gone.

“Oh no,” says Frederica. “I’ve lost touch with everyone from that time.”

“You were writing for
Vogue
,” says Hugh, who had found that almost as odd as this manifestation in jodhpurs and jacket. Frederica was intellectually stylish but hardly part of the world of consumer delights and chic gossip.

“I did for a bit. Before I married.”

Hugh waits. He waits for an account of Frederica’s marriage.

She says, “My sister was killed. I don’t know if you knew. And I married Nigel not long after, and Leo was born, and I was quite ill, for a bit. You don’t realise at first, Hugh, what a death is going to do to you.”

Hugh asks about the death. He did not know Frederica’s sister, who was older than Frederica, had also been at Cambridge, he believed, but had lived in Yorkshire, where Frederica came from. He could not remember Frederica talking much about a sister. She had always seemed to be a kind of solitary, one-off creature, fierce and striving.