A Whistling Woman (18 page)

A service path for gardeners ran to a compost heap behind a copper beech hedge between mound and wall. It was gloomy and overshadowed, but someone had nevertheless put a seat there, under the mound, with no view but the woven beech-twigs and the wall beyond. This dark place had always provided a refuge for the solitary, which was perhaps why it was there. Possibly some gardener even knew about the importance of hiding-places in closed communities. Lucy Nighby sat there whenever they were allowed out. She sat and stared at the dead beech-leaves, which were a drained gold, and rattled, and at the jagged edge of glass that glinted at the top of her horizon. It was almost winter, with a frosty brightness. She had her coat on; it was stained with the moss of the wet wooden seat.

She had decided to die, and had been secreting and saving pills to that end, without really knowing what the pills were, or what effect they would have. She had them in one pocket, in an envelope. She had a plastic bottle of water. Her practical concern was whether she had enough pills. And for that matter, enough water to get them all down. It was the end of the afternoon. A pale-blue sky was becoming thicker, greyer, rosy. She looked at everything very intently, because it was the last time, noting the slow diminishing of the greenness and the sharp brightness of the broken glass as though it was important to do so, noting too the smell of leaf-mould, of resin, of cold and damp. Her hands were cold. She fumbled with the bottle and the envelope. She would put herself out, like a candle, only it was more difficult.

She ate a pill, and sipped, and ate another.

There was a faint movement in the leaves behind her, a step no heavier than a bird disturbing a twig. She turned a little, her chill fingers holding the emerald and scarlet capsule to her lips. He was stepping silently down from the top of the mound, and his crown of white hair appeared to be giving out light in the gloom of the yew-branches. He appeared to be all white, his beard, his shirt, even his pale trousers. He wore no overcoat. He said

“I have been sent to fetch you.”

She didn't speak. She had found life simpler (at least) though not better, since she stopped speaking. The white figure formed and reformed before her eyes; it had rainbow edges, which might have come from her own tears, and it shimmered.

“Something told me,” he said. “Not them, a voice I heard. To look for you here, now. I know how it is. I know where you are because I walk there. We have things to do, before we can—take ourselves out of the world. You must help me. And I will help you. I can help you.”

She sat there, the small woman, hunched in her camel coat. And felt herself coming back to herself, her untidy bunch of hair, her face pink with cold, her tired eyes, her heavy feet, her finger with the capsule arrested at her dry, cracked lips. A small wind rattled in the beech-leaves. The earth exhaled mild vegetable decomposition. The man looking down on her had the wind in his white hair and shirt and seemed to shine cold and white.

“Look,” he said “there is the full moon, in the end of daylight. I shall tell you about the light. You know, and I know, about light and dark and what it is to be outside, where both are strong. We have things to do, but you don't know what they are, because you haven't yet been told. But I shall tell you. And you will listen.”

She held the capsule to her lips. Her eyes were wet. She knew—how?—he was a man who hated touching other people. But when he saw no help for it, he came, and with bright cold fingers took the capsule from her red ones, and folded her two hands in his. The sky darkened slowly. The round disc of the moon brightened. He sat down next to her and told her to look at the moon. In the moonlight, the glass spikes looked like a flowing beck of water over stones.

“We must be wise as serpents,” he said. “We must go in now, and find a way out of here, and I will tell you what I know, and how we must live. Do you have more of those pills?”

She held out the envelope.

“No, I shan't take them. I have my own store, too. Keep them, in case the need is too strong. Because I know that if you and I know we have the means to go, we can find the courage to stay. Put them away.”

She made, now, one little gesture towards him, like a child asking for an embrace.

She felt him overcome his reluctance, give up his distance. Briefly and gracefully, he took hold of her, held her to him, put his cool lips to her brow.

“I am here,” he said. “Remember, I am here, I know, I am watching for both of us.”

“Who are you?” she said.

“I shall take my name, later, when I am told.”

Chapter 9

Leo said “Thano said, I saw your mum on telly.”

“He should have been in bed,” said Frederica defensively. They were walking back from school into Hamelin Square.

“I expect you didn't tell me you were on telly because you didn't want me to stay up to look at you
either
.”

“I think I probably did tell you. You weren't listening, as usual.”

“If you say, you
think
you
probably,
you know you really didn't.”

“Well,” said Frederica ludicrously, “it's private.”

“Ha, ha,” said Leo.
“Private.”

“Lovely to see you in your lovely flower-garden,” cried Marie Agyepong, Clement and Thano's mother, across the square. Victoria Ampleforth appeared on her renovated doorstep and called out congratulations.

“Very
original,
Frederica. I do admire your
nerve
.”

Frederica smiled briefly in her direction.

“
They
all saw you,” said Leo. “Only I didn't.”

“
I
didn't,” Frederica told him.

He stopped on the pavement and looked up at her.

“Why? Why didn't you?”

“I was afraid I might not like the look of myself. I was afraid I might think I looked silly.”

“Thano didn't think you looked silly. He thought you put your hand in your hair too much. He liked your eyelashes.”

“Thano said he liked my
eyelashes
? He's only seven.”

“He thought they were funny. Like furry caterpillars. He said there were furry caterpillars on the programme, but he didn't explain very well.”

“When I was your age,” said Frederica, as they opened the front door, “we used to get terribly upset when our mothers came to things at school in embarrassing hats. The thing is, looking back, all hats are embarrassing. Every child finds its particular mother's hat embarrassing. Too big, too small, too flowerpotty, too dishy, too veiled, too jokey. As many children, as many mothers, so many embarrassments. We didn't want to be children whose mothers didn't turn up, but we didn't want anyone to see our mothers.”

“I don't
mind
you being on telly, I think. I think I'm pleased, rather than not. People are impressed. They make jokes of course, but that's OK. They always make jokes about something. Like they always laugh at hats.”

Through the Looking-Glass
was, from the beginning, a rapid and elaborate joke about the boxness of the Box. As it opened, the box appeared to contain the hot coals, or logs, the flickering flames and smouldering ash, in the hearth which had been the centre of groups in vanished rooms before the Box came. The fire in its shadowy cave was succeeded by a flat silvery mist (or swirl of smoke), in an elaborate gilded frame. The mist would then clear to reveal the interior of the Looking-Glass world. There was a revolving Janus clock, with a mathematical and a grinning face. There were duplicated mushrooms and cobwebs and windows. At the back of the box was what might have been a bay window, or a mirror reflecting a bay window. In the middle was a transparent box within a box, in which Frederica sat, into which the camera peered and intruded. All through the programme, round the edges of the contained space, from time to time, animated creatures and plants sauntered, sped, shot up and coiled. Roses and lilies, giant caterpillars and trundling chess pieces, multiplied by mirrors, made by students from the Samuel Palmer School of Art who had worked on the Blue Meanies and banana-bright funnels of the Yellow Submarine.

These were the early days of Laura Ashley's long dresses, in cottons and corduroys, spattered with rediscovered Victorian posies, with discreet frills at neck and wrist. Frederica wore blood-crimson rosebuds on a moss-green ground, or pale primroses on indigo. She began the pilots with a carved Vidal Sassoon bob, and grew her red hair longer and longer as the hugely successful sequence of programmes went on. She looked like a sharp, and knowing, and very adult Alice.

Wilkie's idea, like Lewis Carroll's chess-board, had a precise and arbitrary schema that could contain and proliferate thoughts, images, and connections. Frederica herself was the constant. Each week, three things were discussed—an object, an idea, and a person, living or dead. The intention was to avoid the normal categories of journalism—current affairs, politics, arts, science, popular titbits, satire—and mix things in new ways. Each programme had a guest for all three items, and a second guest who discussed one or the other.

There were three pilot programmes in the last quarter of 1968. The first, setting the scene, discussed Charles Dodgson, Nonsense, and an antique mirror. The second discussed Doris Lessing's idea of Free Women, in
The Golden Notebook,
George Eliot, and a Tupperware bowl. The third was about “creativity” and discussed Sigmund Freud and a Picasso ceramic. Later programmes sprouted inventively in all directions, both visually and intellectually. They fed on the amiable eclectic parodies of the 60s. Frederica appeared as Snow White in a glass coffin, as a mermaid holding a looking-glass in a glass tank in a raree show, as the Witch in the sugar cottage, and, in a programme whose topic was sex, in a glass box sealed with seven padlocks, like the wife of the Genie, who escaped easily to seduce Scheherazade's husband-to-be and his brother, under a palm tree. They were to discuss DDT and astrology, memory and revolution, the death of the past and schizophrenia, nurture and nature, teaching grammar, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Mrs. Beeton and D. H. Lawrence (who went with sex and the padlocks).
Frederica's guests on the first programme were Jonathan Miller and Richard Gregory, whose Royal Institution Lectures, in the Christmas of 1967–8, on the “intelligent eye” had been full of visual puzzles, mirror games, and conjuring tricks. He had used the television to test its viewers' perceptions and preconceptions about how the brain constructs the visible world. Miller talked about many things: the child'seye view of Victorian behaviour in the Alice books, psychoanalytic interpretations of tiny doors, lost keys, hidden gardens, mathematical games, verbal overexcitement, photographs and mirrors, surfaces and depths, self and other. He spoke of the surrealists' passion for Alice's dream world, and of Carroll's interest in doubles and twins.

Alice, he said, is the Victorian child putting together the wild world of grown-up rules and hidden intentions and violent feelings and incomprehensible conventions. She is an English empiricist, said Frederica. She doesn't get baffled or deceived or disconcerted. She is sure she exists, however she is stretched or shrunk or told she is a Serpent. Carroll saw things from a child's-eye view.

They took off from empiricism and discussed sense, and nonsense. Richard Gregory was presented with the first week's object, a Victorian hand-mirror, backed in silver, which was ornamented with bunches of silver grapes, wreaths of silver vine-leaves and trailing tendrils of coiling silver feelers and claspers. Mirrors, he said, had ancient meanings. The Victorian glass put him in mind of the ancient mirrors used in their religious ceremonies by the Manichees, who believed it was their duty to release the light trapped in matter, and saw grapes as one of the plants which were vessels of trapped light. It was not clear what the Manichees did with the trapped or reflected light, he said. Aristotle, the reasonable scientist, told us that a woman looking at a mirror during a menstrual period would cause its surface to become clouded with blood-red. This was because, according to Aristotle, there was an affinity between the bright eye, full of blood-vessels, and the smooth bright bronze mirror. Influences passed through the bright air. Sensual nonsense, with meaning.

The table was set for a kind of tea-party. A huge silver teapot could be shown to be mirroring the three faces, like a distorting mirror in a gallery, making Frederica into a beaky witch, Miller into a curly Bacchus with great cheeks, and Gregory into a cavernous Pluto. On the tea-table were various dishes, silver and glass, which turned out to contain caterpillars walking on mirrors, segmented, striped and bristling, with sooty eyes and horny probosces, orange, gold and green.

Richard Gregory explained that there were actually
two
Alices, Alice Liddell of Wonderland and her cousin Alice Raikes whom Dodgson had teased with an orange, held in her right hand, perceived in the glass in her left. “Supposing I was on the other side,” that intelligent Alice had said, “wouldn't the orange be in my
right
hand?” And from there, said Gregory, came the idea of going
through,
of seeing from the
other side
. He elaborated on the logical trips and blips of mirrors, which reverse left and right, but not up and down, in alphabets as in faces. Dodgson's friend was John Henry Pepper who used part-reflecting mirrors on stage to make actors appear, disappear, double, become transparent wraiths like the Cheshire Cat. Mirrors had their own illogical logic. Miller spoke of the happenstance of mirrors and photographs, both of which, independently, were first made apparent on a silver mist on glass. The camera showed ghosts of Frederica, of Miller, of Gregory, in mirrors behind the glass box they were in. The caterpillars whirred in their kaleidoscope.

Frederica said that her two guests made her think of how often Alice was between two benign creatures talking over her. The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. Or not so benign. Hare and Hatter, Hengist and Horsa, Walrus and Carpenter, Red Queen and White Queen. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, she said, casting her eyes down, remembering briefly the mathematical Ottokars and their faces in her basement window. But Jonathan Miller had taken her up and was racing onwards, describing the disorderly order of the compulsive doublings of Carroll who was Dodgson, who invented word-games and Doublets and Syzygies where Walrus was introduced to Carpenter in segments of syllables, or Demand to Cormorant, or COOK to DINNER.

The first programme was fortunate. It was fortunate because the two very clever men, at ease with the camera and themselves, benign and gentle with Frederica, brought out the best in her. In the BBC cab which carried her back to the basement where an empty (unmade) bed awaited her, and her small son slept, she looked at her own ghost in the dark window, and gave herself a tight, triumphant grin. She thought about Alice, and herself. She
felt
like a clever child, with those two, who had their own knowledge, vastly greater than hers. Since she had done nothing much, she liked the sense they gave her of things—endless things—to be discovered and discussed. She felt briefly her undefeated childhood energy. I want, I want, I want, she had cried, like a bird in a nest with its gaping mouth. She had thought she had wanted womanhood and sex. Knowledge had been there, and she had swallowed it wholesale, because she was greedy and had a good digestion, but it hadn't seemed to be what mattered. Now, perhaps after all, it did. Those two delighted in the motions of their minds like Keats's sparrows full of themselves, springing on the gravel.

She looked through herself, in the black window of her black carriage, and liked the sparseness of the marks that made her up, a highlight, a smudge, a dark line of mouth, a glint of copper. She thought with a kind of quick horror of Aristotle's bloody mirror as a kind of mystery. Women and blood, blood and sex. Aristotle, Gregory said, believed semen and menstrual blood were the same. That spry confidence of Alice the essential child wavered and crumbled. She had wanted so much to be an actress. She had wanted to act, to go through the elegant motions of what she was not yet. She had been Alice, and had wanted, foolishly, to be Juliet, to be Mary Queen of Scots, to be Cleopatra. She had wanted to be full of Shakespeare's words about life—and love—like a vessel. The great teapot and the mirror-dishes of larvae came into her mind and her ghost laughed at her in the window. Oh no, thought Frederica, who was about to be refracted across a nation into thousands of splintered and glittering Fredericas, I don't want to
act
. I want to think. Clarity. Curiosity. Curiouser and curiouser.
The idea for the second Looking-Glass pilot was Frederica's own. She thought of it when Leo, refusing to eat a navarin she had taken some trouble over, began to quote
Alice in Wonderland,
pointlessly, in a sing-song, teasing voice. “Alice-Mutton: Mutton-Alice,” he chanted. “It isn't etiquette to cut anyone you've been introduced to.
Remove
the joint!” he cried. He added “I don't think it's right to eat creatures. I am going to become a vegetarian.”

“I'd rather you didn't. I'd rather you were properly nourished. Look at your teeth. You evolved into an omnivorous animal. Look at your canine teeth, Leo. Please eat at least the vegetables in the sauce.”

“I don't like boiled vegetables.”

“You are pretending to be a nasty child, winding me up. I spent
hours
cooking that sauce, cutting the meat off the bone—”

“Did you think about how the poor lamb was killed, whilst you cut it?”

“Yes, I did. I always do. I cut it for you. So you'd get protein, and vitamins, and grow strong.”

“One dead sheep, one live boy.”

“Exactly.”

“Did you make rice pudding?”

“I did.”

“I promise not to introduce myself to that. I promise not to sing it's lovely rice pudding for dinner
again
if you let me go straight on to the pudding. If you don't say, just eat a bit of your nice stew, first.”

He knew she knew she was a parody of a mother. She ate her own navarin, which was delicious.

“I think you ought to let me be a vegetarian if I believe it's right.”

“You'd have to live on beans and nuts.”

“I don't like nuts.”

“No, you don't.”

“Beans make you fart.”

“They do.”

“Anyway, you
like
cooking. It relaxes you. I heard you telling Agatha. It's hands-on, you said.”