Babel Tower (68 page)

“I don’t know when he will come or go.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t
want to
want to. I don’t want him to matter that much, too much. I can’t afford …” She doesn’t finish that sentence. She starts another. “But it isn’t very
convenient,
not knowing from one day to the next, whether someone will come or not.”

“Can’t you ask?”

“I don’t think so.” She thinks. “I don’t know that any answer I’d get would mean anything.”

“Things you don’t know,” says Agatha, “take up energy, they rankle in the mind. Best not to let them. A counsel of perfection, I do know.”

“He’s nice, though.”

“He’s certainly beautiful. And seems nice enough, yes.”

Frederica thinks that Agatha never has any men visiting, young or old. You would think, she thinks, that Saskia had been produced by parthenogenesis. But that can’t be. There is, or was, someone, somewhere. Will she ever be told? Frederica is beginning to doubt it.

In Agatha’s sitting-room, John Ottokar is teaching Leo and Saskia a game. Scissors, paper, stone. “You put out your hands together,” he says. “
Simultaneously,
” Leo says. “Simultaneously,” John Ottokar agrees. His smooth gold hair falls forwards over his brow. He shows them. A flat hand, paper. Forked ringers, scissors. A clenched fist, stone. Scissors cut paper, stone blunts scissors, paper wraps stone. The children are entranced. They play quite differently. Leo changes his shape at each game: he is stone scissors stone paper scissors paper stone paper. Saskia holds on to one form patiently: paper paper paper paper, then suddenly scissors, then stone stone stone stone stone, scissors. John Ottokar laughs and keeps the score. “I played this when I was your age,” he tells them. “With my brother.”

“Who won?” says Leo.

“No one,” says John Ottokar. “We always put out the same thing. Identical. Two scissors, two stones, two papers.”

“Boring,” says Leo.

“Not exactly. Frustrating, though. Not exactly
playing.
”

“Like when Leo and me make the same noise on the recorder ’cause we only know C and B,” says Saskia.

“A bit like that,” says John Ottokar. “We used to play the recorder, too.”

He stays and plays, quietly, all afternoon. He cuts out newspaper trees with scissors, he glues cut-out dinosaurs in a book, he talks easily to Agatha and Frederica. He stays to supper and helps put Leo to bed, sitting in the corner of Leo’s bedroom, out of the light, and listening whilst Frederica reads about Moldy Warp and Fuzzypeg and the old Roman coin. When Leo is tucked in bed, he follows Frederica into her own room, draws the blind, and touches her on the shoulder. Frederica, preoccupied, turns to face him. He puts a hand on her neck, sure, and a hand on her buttocks, sure, and his mouth on hers, gathering her body into his. His skin warms hers and sets it alight. Shafts of lightning run up her spine. She leans back releasing her mouth, to say thickly, “It isn’t
fair.
”

“What is? What isn’t, what’s worrying you, nothing must, nothing must.”

He is doing what he can to make their clothed bodies one.

“We
can’t.
Leo. Leo. I can’t. You can’t just.”

“OK. Just sit down and keep still with me then. Keep still.”

They subside on to the couch. Unsatisfied desire has its own
frisson,
its own bliss. They enjoy it. They do not undress, they do not make love. So that when Leo wanders vaguely in, saying he cannot sleep, there is nothing untoward, no whiff of salt, no exposed organs he should not see, but a large man smiling in a jester’s sweater, and a thin red-headed woman in a chocolate-brown shirt over lilac velvet pants.

They do not talk, much. They sit, next to each other. At midnight, John Ottokar leaves. At the foot of the area steps Frederica says, “Leo will be away next weekend. You could come here …”

“I can’t.” At first it seems that he is going to leave it at that. Then he says, “I’ve got to go on a kind of religious retreat. There’s a group. Some of them Quakers, some of them from Ceylon, and some doctors. Some doctors. It’s a new thing. I—I go sometimes. I’m expected. Next weekend, I’m expected.”

“Where?” says Frederica, who dares not say “Why?”

“Does it matter? There’s a kind of Retreat House called Tangle-wood, in a Quaker village in Bucks, called Four Pence. I know it
sounds dreadfully twee. Names don’t matter, words don’t matter, if they do, you can change them. I’d tell you about it, but I rather suspect you won’t like it, you won’t want to know. Religion isn’t your thing.”

“I’m not
hostile
to religion.”

“Aren’t you? Think about it, and tell me next time, what you think about religion. I’m hostile to it myself, half the time. But it’s there, you can’t deny it’s there.”

“I don’t try to.”

He looks at her as though she is the world’s greatest nay-sayer. He says, “I know I ought not to tell you. I’m under instructions not to—”

“John!”

“You see. You don’t like it.”

“How do I know what I—? When you don’t?”

“We shouldn’t have started this conversation. My fault. Come here. Hold on to me. Don’t talk. That’s better. Now,
this
is real, whatever
that
is.
This
is real.”

Her alarmed body does not tingle as it did. He strokes her spine and the flame lies low, flickers sullenly. He puts his warm, mute hand suddenly, swiftly, between her legs, holds her gently, waits for the shift in her pulse, the very slight relaxation of her tense muscles, and says, “This is real. Remember. Now I’m going.”

He goes.

Frederica is on the whole pleased that John Ottokar has met Leo in this public, uncompromised way. This is more because she does not enjoy the fact that her relations with John Ottokar have a clandestine and furtive aspect than because she wants to establish, any
particular
rapport between son and lover. She does not want to include John Ottokar in any tentative trio, man, woman, child. Nobody wants that. She wants things to be easy and friendly. So she is pleased when John returns once or twice more when Leo and Saskia and Agatha are there. They go once, even, to the Natural History Museum, two women, John Ottokar, the boy, the dark little girl. She feels something discreet and stable and mature is being set up. One evening, over supper, she says to Leo, “Shall we ask John Ottokar to the bonfire?”

Leo says, “No. I don’t like John Ottokar.”

“Oh, Leo. Why? He taught you scissors, paper, stone—”

“He makes horrible scary faces at me when no one’s looking.”

“He doesn’t—”

“Through the window. Bits of him go white. Sneery faces.”

“Why should he do that?”

“And I don’t like his smell. He has a bad smell.”

“Leo!”

“You asked me. You did ask me. If you want him at ve bonfire, you ask him. I expect the smell won’t be too bad out there, not with all the smoke and stuff.”

“I won’t ask him, if you feel like that.”

“I don’t feel like anything. I just told you. I just told you,
he stinks.
”

Frederica wonders about discussing with Agatha the possibility that Leo is reacting to herself, John Ottokar, and the smell of sex, even though they have been so careful. Or maybe he simply said the worst thing he could think of—which has certainly been effective, if he did, for Frederica now never thinks of John Ottokar without wondering about the smell, real or fantasised, and of
what
?

Bonfire Night arrives. Agatha and Frederica have been visited by Giles and Victoria Ampleforth, the owners of the pretty white-painted corner-house in Hamelin Square with its vandalised window-boxes, its renovated Georgian shutters, its polished brass knocker. Giles and Victoria want to join in the fun, want to contribute, do not want to be rejected by the other inhabitants of the square, for they know they represent gentrification, which the local Labour Party vociferously opposes, though its councillors, or some of them, and even some Labour MPs are “doing up” the pretty terraced houses in the sallow and sullen squares of south-east London. Giles is an architect, lean and apologetic; his dusty thatched head and horn-rimmed stare do in fact cover a resolute intention to restore, beautify,
save
all the houses in Hamelin Square. Victoria is the proprietor of a children’s boutique. Rags, Tags and Velvet Gowns, which sits oddly in the local row of shops between a ferocious Cockney greengrocer and a Pakistani chemist’s shop. She sells fancy dresses and sweaters, and a stock of fat and grinning stuffed lions and tigers and polar bears, home-made and full of bounce. Giles wants to be friends with the Agyepongs and the Utters, a huge matriarchal society of the unemployed, who live behind grimy brocade curtains in Number 17, apparently with no furniture and no carpets, though occasional chairs are hurled
through windows, some of which now form part of the base of the bonfire. Victoria has made bowls full of hot cider with bobbing frothy apples in it, and trays of dark, burned, sticky toffee. She is afraid it will be rejected, does not want to bring it out. Agatha says, Nothing venture, nothing win, and, Everybody
always
likes toffee. But the middle-class households lurk behind their shutters until the festivities have started, which they do when Kieran Utter sets light to the petrol-soaked brown paper at the centre of the pyre, and a roar of flame leaps upwards. Rockets go up from various areas, and patches of red sizzling light, green fountains of sparks, silver geysers, hiss and flare and vanish into black velvet. Frederica and Leo bring out Leo’s box of Roman candles and Vesuvius fountains and peacocks. Leo and Saskia hold sparklers, and wave them solemnly. Someone screams; something hisses. The fire catches and begins to crack and gleam. People come out and stand and stare into it; children run squealing, hide behind cars; Victoria Ampleforth picks up courage and goes round the square with a tray of toffee which everyone accepts happily. She picks up more courage and brings out a stout folding table, behind which she sets up her stall with her hot cider and a collection of Polish enamelled mugs, scarlet and green and blue. The sky is full of puce rain, it is full of silver arrows falling, it is full of humming blue flies. The Guy—Clement and Thano’s Guy—has been built into the pyre in a rotting wicker chair, to which he is tied with string and old knitting wool. “Like a Druid sacrifice,” Agatha says; he lolls and smiles, the flames not yet near him. “It’s a good thing there’s no wind,” says Giles Ampleforth. “This thing is far too big for this square. We ought to have water buckets around.”

“Mrs. Kennet has got her hose attached in her kitchen,” says Carole Utter. “As per usual.” She takes a swig from a beer bottle. “Two kids got their hair burned last year, and a car got its paint blasted.”

“I don’t know whose that little Austin is,” says Victoria. “It’s always parked here, but it doesn’t belong to any of the residents.”

Frederica brings out a basket of oven-roasted chestnuts, which are also acceptable to everyone. Leo says he wants a banger, and Frederica tells him he doesn’t.

The sky is a gold meadow full of crimson serpents; it is a huge fan of silver fronds; it is indigo lit with orange and sepia and hot yellow and scarlet.

They drink hot cider, plastic cups of red wine from a box with a spigot, bottles of ale, Tizer by mistake, Coke and rum, sweet sherry,
advocaat. Clement and Thano have got strings of Chinese firecrackers; Brian Utter attaches one to the branch of a tree near the little Austin, where it bangs and splutters and crackles and twists, causing Leo to burst into tears, and a small bald-headed man with a moustache to cry out, “Mind my car!”

The fire is now producing clouds of smoke. It is difficult to see across the square. People are linking arms and singing—“Oh my darling Clementine,” the only song the English can ever get very far with. Across the square, through the smoke, Frederica sees John Ottokar, in his many-coloured patchwork jumper; he is bending to set light to something; he straightens up, and waves at her through the grey billows. She makes her way round to him, with smarting eyes. Whatever he has lit does not rush into the air or explode into shimmers of light. It burns sullenly, a tallish thing, producing a blue flame like a cowl around it.

“Skoob,” says John Ottokar. It is a new art-form. Book-burning. “Books” backwards. Frederica does not like it. The books are lurid paperbacks. The top one has a pair of breasts bursting out of black lace and a vanishing face above them. The next one down, however, is Tillich’s
The Ground of Our Being
and below that, Bishop Robinson’s
Honest to God.

“I don’t like book-burning,” says Frederica.

“That’s why Skoob,” says John Ottokar. “No point burning things nobody cares about.”

He raises a glass of ink-dark wine to the Guy.

“Here’s to him. He had the right idea. Explode it all. From underneath. Then there’s a chance of living a real life. Up in flames. Theophany.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Oh no. You may be. Let’s dance.”

He links arms with a swaying line of residents, and pushes his other arm through Frederica’s. She smells his armpits, acrid, sour, and another smell, thick incense, musky, sweet, sweet. She tries to pull away, and he pulls her tightly to him, his head back, his lovely face ruddy in the reflected flames.

“Let’s dance.”

Through the smoke, on the other side of the bonfire, she sees John Ottokar in his multi-coloured sweater.

She has failed a test she was waiting for.

•   •   •

Little black boys, little white boys with sooty faces, rush like imps, widdershins, as John Ottokar comes round and links arms with Frederica on his left, and the population of Hamelin Square sway, amiably drunken, and sing. “We’ll take a cup of kindness yet/For the sake of Auld Lang Syne.”

XVI