A Whistling Woman (40 page)

From Brenda Pincher to Avram Snitkin

Writing to you, Avram, is a real act of faith by now, quite as irrational as the increasing
fervour
in this place. It's all building up to something, and I've been racking my brains to remember what. I've got no access to any library. As I seem to remember, lots of more recent cults have been sort of cemented together by things like group sex, or the leader having the right to sleep with everyone and beget lots of children. Our situation is odd, because the leadership is sort of split. We've got the Ram who is genuinely ecstatic, and also genuinely ascetic, and then we've got good old Gideon, who likes to be cock in his own midden and I think doesn't always understand how he got to be involved in the Ram's thing.

It is
all to do with women,
of course, either way. Gideon is here because Clemency deserted, and Clemency's here because she's in love with the Ram, in the way all the women sort of are, including those Gideon fucks. I expect they lie there imagining Gideon is Himself, but the old fool is far too self-satisfied to imagine that, though he may have to, in the end. Some of the men are in love with the Ram, too. The Ram went away on a spiritual journey a week or two ago (time isn't real here)—i.e. he had a quite severe epileptic fit—and came back with all sorts of new instructions and prohibitions and practices. Most of these are to do with making things physically harder for ourselves. We now do an awful lot of digging and carting—we are building a bloody great fence to close us in from the contaminating dirty people out there. Also we get to eat less and less because there's a sort of competitive fasting instituted by the Ram, who says the body thrives on self-denial. Elvet Gander chipped in with the info that experiments on rats and anecdotal evidence from long-lived tribes in the steppes had proved that eating markedly less led to longevity. The not-eating bit has hurt Clemency F. since her great contribution to the community was buns and biscuits. But she's regathered herself and now makes exquisite little soups and vegetable platters containing almost no calories, which are ceremoniously and
very slowly
chewed. What with the digging and the not-eating, I've become very trim myself. You wouldn't recognise me, you old slob, and I'm enough of a Ram-groupie to feel a positive distaste for the idea of all those fatty folds of your overindulged belly—though sometimes I cry for you in the night, Avram, sometimes I'm scared,
why don't you write, you
bugger
?

Because I've got trim, I do understand that you can get on a sexual high as well as a spiritual high with a lot of hard work and not-eating much. I lie awake thinking how blissful a good long fuck would be. I lie. I lie awake like all the others imagining the Ram has chosen
me
to so to speak break his fast on, that he's come into my bed-cupboard and is standing there smiling gently with his cock swinging up and I
hurt inside
with wanting him to touch me, my poor bloody vagina grips and grips on nothing (sometimes I help it, but it doesn't help). Listen, Avram Snitkin, you shit, I'm writing you porn to show I'm not part of all this even if I'm ethnomethodologically committed to observing it from
inside,
and also to punish you, because you never answer. If I didn't know you, I'd have given up long ago, because anyone
sane
would suppose they ought to take a hint and realise the letters weren't wanted. But I do know you, and I think you're just sitting there stoned and smiley, thinking how funny it is that I'm getting in such a state here. Well, it isn't, damn you, damn you, Avram Snitkin. It isn't funny, it's scary.

What happens to cults, and this isn't a therapeutic Group now, it's a full-blooded
cult
—is that they implode. They've got nowhere to go but up in smoke, the theory goes. They get more and more intolerant of deviants and more and more in synch.—including things like menstruation, wch I've tried to do a bit of research on, but so far failed. Everyone does wear more and more the same clothes. White sort of lineny shirts and dresses. There's a girl here called Ellie who was a “patient” of Gander's—we're not allowed to speak of patients now, only spiritual explorers—and she's kind of invented a very new complicated technique of embroidering white on white. Suns and moons and grapes and daisies (day's-eyes, apparently) and other Manicheeish things. With all sorts of knottings and satin stitch (I bet you don't know what
that
is, I didn't) infinitely time-consuming. All the chairs and tables and beds are slowly getting covered with bits of white stuff with all this white stitching on. White with secret little bloodstains of course, the poor things
prick themselves,
it's classic. Overdetermined. Then there are special ways of drinking water. And good old Canon Holly's poetry readings of seventeenth-century poems about seeds of light and things. He reads like a creaky hinge, but this place is at the moment awash with charity and everyone listens lovingly.

I've got my theory about how it will begin to implode. Gideon can't
rampage
as he does without it bearing fruit—to move from an animal to a
vegetable
metaphor. And then what? Since it isn't his wife he fucks. Then what? One of the real brain-teasers of this situation is that
the Ram doesn't appear to
know what Gideon gets up to
. Maybe he sort of lets him do it for him by proxy so to speak, but that's an ethnomethodologically untenable theory, and I oughtn't to advance it without evidence, wch I don't have.

Another thing that I think
will happen
is that we shall get shut in. Right in. We're building this fence. I can foresee when the Ram ceremonially locks the gates, and the sheep stay in, and the goats are despatched into the outer moorland. At the moment there's still a lot of coming and going. That funny Blake man Richmond Bly comes and goes, he looks sweet and puzzled. The Vice-Chancellor's horrible wife pays sinister visits and reads people's palms (well, not really, she casts horoscopes). I think much depends on Elvet Gander. He's like me, so to speak, professionally
interested in it
. He goes away and gives talks and things, but less than he used to. I think he'd resist enclosure. But he's on a kind of high with it all—it's his way of stepping over some boundary, of going on his own spiritual journey, he might feel he had to want to see it through. He likes that Ziggy Zag, who is quite often stoned himself and in need of a helping hand. I think we could do without
him,
but his singalong evenings like Canon Holly's recitations, are part of our ceremonious normality. Some of the Quakers are quite good at all that—as though it came naturally to see everything with a religious contemplative eye. They still have little gatherings for outside youngsters, who come to hear stories and make things out of cardboard and such.

The thing is, if and when, we get shut in—with a fair possibility of starvation, for we are not feeding ourselves a subsistence diet—what do I do? The project is fucked if I miss the (I presume) final act. But it really is scary. It's like one of those boxes you see on pylons, saying Danger High-Tension Wires. Keep Out. But I'm in. And I get my letters out to you, and you don't answer them, you bastard. Unless they're all secretly going nowhere, and being read and judged by a committee consisting of the Ram, Gideon and Gander. No, they aren't, that's sheer paranoia induced by group mentality. I've put almost all in post-boxes
myself,
haven't I? So why don't you write, you bastard, you bastard. What am I going to do?

Chapter 21

There is nothing like hard work for restoring gloss to the plumage, glitter to the eye, a strut to the stride. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock began somewhat grimly to prepare his half-thought-out paper on the cost of meiosis, and found himself trying to stare through a shining swarm of relevant and irrelevant facts and figures. This was a time when some scientists were beginning to ask distinctly awkward questions about the adaptive benefit (if any) of sexual reproduction (as opposed to parthenogenesis, or budding) in the Darwinian scheme of things. The answers they were offering were profoundly unsatisfactory—and therefore intriguing, and maddening, and exciting.

Luk read studies of the dissemination of clouds of elm seeds and scattering of cod-eggs. He read about the life-cycle of the aphid, which produces parthenogenetic clones until its last days, when it produces males, and mates with them. He read about the slow distribution of strawberries and corals, about the habits of sessile beings like oysters, as well as elms, about competition for territory, crowding, and the frequency of death in its relation to the number of offspring of cod or starlings, minute marine beings or snails. He studied hermaphrodites and clones. He went into precise details of arcane research on generations of ants and cockchafers, and tried to come to grips with theoretical models of distribution, competition, statistical advantages, handing on of genes and chromosomes.

New intriguing paths opened up before him, new flocks and herds of relevant bodies flew and ranged and lumbered across his field of vision. He was only averagely good at mathematics. He needed help in formulating his questions, let alone in answering or amending them. He began to waylay and buttonhole John Ottokar, asking for more time on the great computer than was allotted, taking John out to drinks and persuading him to help turn questions of the reasons for life, death, reproduction and immortality into elegant equations and satisfactorily crunched numbers. He bombarded the patient—and largely silent—John with a great many more urgent sums than could ever conceivably be adumbrated in one paper in the Body-Mind Conference.

On his way to and from the computer, he met Jacqueline, from time to time, also carrying bundles of punched cards and sheaves of print-out. The air between them was still full of ice splinters. He asked if her work was going well. For a moment her face was transfigured by satisfaction. Yes, she said, yes, she was really getting results. There was a spring in her step. A month ago, he would have found this selfsufficient hurry personally wounding. Now, he transferred his attention back to rotifers and rotating winged seeds.
One evening, rather late, John Ottokar came to his flat to deliver a delayed heap of results. Luk, who had been talking agitatedly
at
John for weeks about Darwinian altruism and selfishness, ruthless self-propagation and the harmlessness of cloned slugs, noticed for the first time that Ottokar looked unwell. He had grown his shining blond hair to shoulder length. It was very clean, and he tended to hide his face behind its curtain. Luk said he was afraid he must have been overworking him, asked him in, and gave him a glass of whisky. He had been watching the television news, student protesters at the LSE, government wrangles over unofficial strikes. As John Ottokar took his glass,
Through the Looking-Glass
swam on to the screen, fireplace, glass box, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Frederica Potter in coral and white silk. Luk remembered that Ottokar was, or appeared to be, in some way involved with Frederica. He had once referred to her as “my girl-friend” which had struck Luk as a singularly inept way of describing this angular person. Because of this, he did not spring to his feet to turn her off. John Ottokar stretched out his legs, settled into the arm-chair, and stared impassively at the screen. His look was, Luk considered, morose.

Frederica's guests for the evening were Roy Strong and Lucinda Savage, a photo-journalist, who wore a business-like jumper and dark-rimmed glasses. The object for discussion was an Elizabethan miniature of an unknown lady, whose fine face, soft gold curls, beautifully gleaming pearl necklace and ear-rings, over blue velvet, against a background of evergreen leaves, briefly filled the whole screen. The person of course was Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, and the idea to be discussed was, Frederica announced, “Resemblance and Reproduction.” This idea was Wilkie's, one of his more arcane ones.

The three talked well enough about Elizabeth's portraits as icons, the fact that most were copies of copies, not attempts to copy the Queen's face directly, the
mana
that attached to her portraits, which, Roy Strong pointed out gleefully, were objects both of veneration and witchcraft, as if she could be stuck to death with pins and needles. The photo-journalist, predictably, went on to discuss the reluctance of certain cultures to be “taken” in snapshots or photos, the belief that each reproduction, each copy, took from, or thinned, the life of the original. Frederica said that this was so, there was something unexpectedly alarming about one's image being loose in the world. They talked about the iconic nature of the endlessly replicated face of Che Guevara, hanging in student rooms, in squats, in guerrilla tents.

Frederica tried, as Wilkie had wanted her to, to start a discussion about the different words. Likeness. Resemblance. Reproduction. Replication. We all have our own faces, she said, and yet we are all constructed by the endless replication of the family genes, so that we also have the family face. Luk's attention was caught by this, possibly not very meaningful, ploy, simply because it slotted into the jigsaw of his own thoughts about clones and diploid zygotes. Roy Strong spoke of the family resemblance between Elizabeth and her Tudor brother. The photographer mentioned Andy Warhol, who was making icons of repetition, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, who were already mechanically reproduced icons. Marilyn flashed across the screen in silvery greens and oranges, grape-purples and shocking pinks. Roy Strong said he had chosen the miniature because it was so clearly a portrait of a singular person, with her own history and attitude to the world, none of which was so far discoverable, and yet, there she was, and, even though the painter's style conferred a kind of likeness on all his models, there she was, unique. Frederica said brightly that every day on the underground she looked at all the faces, and they were
all
unique, unrepeatable. She sounded, for her, almost saccharine. Luk however felt friendly towards her, because she had touched on his own problem. If human reproduction was not sexual, the persons on the underground would resemble each other like the black slugs
Arion ater
.

John Ottokar said “Shit. How can she sit there between those two and go on like that?”

Luk assumed for a moment that “those two” were Roy Strong and Lucinda Savage, and could not think why they were suddenly so objectionable. Ottokar could surely not be obsessed enough to be jealous? Then he realised that “those two” were the cardboard cut-out figures of Lewis Carroll's Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who flanked Frederica. He had seen Paul-Zag wandering across the campus from time to time. His hair seemed to grow
pari passu
with his brother's. He had once, even, on a darkening evening, mistaken Paul for John, and watched blankness succeeded by a sly grin as the other observed his discomfiture. Lucinda Savage began to advance a theory that in the future we would all have moving narrative portraits of our loved ones on our walls, like television screens. Luk stood up and turned her off. He wanted to ask John a question, and couldn't think what it should be. He settled for

“When is Frederica coming north again?”

“I don't know. Easter hols, probably. Bringing Leo. Also, they are going to film your Conference. She says. I dunno when. So she'll be here.”

The words were ground out. Luk said

“You're not happy about it.”

“No.”

There was a long silence. John Ottokar drank whisky, and jerked his long limbs into various postures. He said

“Talking isn't what I do. Didn't really speak English until I was eleven. Spoke Jabberwocky and maths with my brother. Not easy. He makes things difficult.”

“He must,” said Luk, at a loss.

“I've been thinking. We're some kind of clone. Or some sort of virgin birth, one from the other, dunno which, dunno if scientists could find it out. All your stuff's been making me think. I never really did much biology, only maths and computers. I worked on where oil tankers ought to go. What you've worked out is an explanation of everything. From the point of view of cells and organisms. Makes all sorts of ideas meaningless. Kindness, love. God.”

“I don't think we need God.”

“I know you don't. You don't know what
I
think, however. God's always been there. As a reason for.”

He seemed unable to say as a reason for what.

Luk murmured something awkward about it being difficult perhaps, to be here, when Frederica was there ... John Ottokar looked at him almost aggressively.

“I came up here so she'd make her mind up, one way or the other. And to get away from him, to be myself.”

“But he's here, not there.”

“I know that. The point is, he
wasn't
. Not when I came. I came on my own, to do my own thing. And then he comes. With God all round him. It's like a ghastly Fate. Those people could have gone anywhere else and they came here. There isn't really any Fate, of course, or any sort of—sort of—watching over us. There's just genes, as you keep saying. I'm really glad,” he said, with a useless attempt at irony, “that you get so much pleasure from all these ideas. I don't. I see they're
right
but they just take away—the meaning. And they don't change the fact that he's my fate, because he's my genes. We're interchangeable and dispensable.”

“Have some more whisky,” said Luk, male and at a loss. He said “I thought it might be—good—having another person like oneself.”

“Oh, it was. As long as that was the only person. Before we were in the world. Then it got complicated. He's got his group he plays with, of course. I've got the lab. But the group's better, the music's better, with me in, not out.”

“At least you've thought it out.”

“You can say that. You can say that. And where has it got me?”

He drained his whisky rather quickly and subsided into silence.

Frederica did come north for Easter, bringing Leo to spend his holidays with his grandparents and cousins. She was accompanied by Edmund Wilkie: they were making arrangements for filming parts of the Body-Mind Conference for the television. They went to a meeting with Gerard Wijnnobel, Vincent Hodgkiss, Abraham Calder-Fluss and Lyon Bowman to discuss what should be filmed, and how, whether the two “stars,” Pinsky and Eichenbaum, would consent to be interviewed on camera, how the University's unique architecture should be presented. Vincent Hodgkiss had had what he believed to be a politically astute idea, and had invited Elvet Gander to join them. This was because it had come to his attention that Gander was also speaking—on myth and psyche—at the Anti-University, and he believed he might give them some intelligence about the attitude, benign or otherwise, of the encamped counter-culture. Gander's own proposed paper, in the Human Sciences session of the Conference, on schizophrenic perception of body-parts, was scheduled next to a paper on autism, and a paper on concept formation in early life by a Reader in Education.

Hodgkiss had not invited Nick Tewfell that morning: this was not a meeting of an official university body. It took place in Gerard Wijnnobel's study, round a rosewood table in the window looking over his secluded lawn. It was a cold, bright spring day. The academics were in various kinds of corded trousers and shabby jackets. Wilkie looked natty, in a very tight dark blue silk roll-neck sweater under an iron-grey velvet suit. Gander and Frederica were both, by some odd accident, wearing long, loosely knitted black woollen cardigans. There the resemblance ended. Gander had a whitish flowing woollen shirt with a grandfather collar, unbuttoned, over baggy trousers. Frederica had a transparent black shirt, belted above a long black skirt, patterned with poppies and cornflowers. Hodgkiss considered her very visible black lace bra, and her almost visible pointed little breasts, with a socio-historical eye. Semi-nude women at Vice-Chancellorial meetings, purely matter-of-fact, were not something he would ever have thought he would see. He put Frederica into the plural in his mind, though there was only one of her. He thought about Marcus's analogous thinness. Despite this, he thought Frederica's breasts were too small.

Wilkie exclaimed over the Mondrian and the Rembrandt prints. How perfectly proportioned, he said, how
final
. Would the Vice-Chancellor be interviewed on camera in front of them? Wijnnobel said he had no particular wish to be interviewed. He wished to remain behind the scenes. He had heard from both Eichenbaum and Pinsky, who were both happy to be interviewed, although Pinsky had stipulated that he would not be interviewed with—or about—Eichenbaum. He waited patiently for the inevitable question. Wilkie asked it. Professor Pinsky, Wijnnobel said, had reservations about some of Professor Eichenbaum's opinions—old political opinions, nothing to do with the conference. Hodgkiss looked at Wilkie, whom he knew well, and waited for the terrier to fasten on to the rat. Wilkie, not catching Hodgkiss's eye, said smoothly that that was quite all right, he would fit in with any such wishes, he was glad of the chance of the interview. Hodgkiss felt uneasy. Gerard Wijnnobel moved on to his next point. He said the University was prepared to contribute to the making of as full a filmed record of the proceedings as possible. We know you must select and discard, he said. But televised film is the medium of the future, and when we are discussing the juncture of body and mind, it will be in every way enhancing to have a visual record of the bodies, expressing the minds, so to speak, of the speakers. For our archive. We shall be pioneers in this.