Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt Read Free Book Online

straight there, tell them all I’ll come straight there. Thank you, Ruth.”
    “She’s in the best place,” says the far-away voice. “She’ll be cared for as well as possible, you know.”
    “I know. I’ll see you soon.”
    He puts down the phone and sits staring into the cubicle, a heavy man, shaking.
    “Can we help?” says Canon Holly.
    “My child’s been hurt. In Yorkshire. I’ve got to go.”
    “You need hot sweet tea,” says Ginnie. “Which you shall have. And the Canon will get King’s Cross about trains, won’t you? Do you know what happened, Daniel?”
    “No. They don’t seem to know. She was found in the playground. I must go.”
    The Canon has dialled and is listening to the burring tone.
    “How old is she?”
    “Eight,” says Daniel.
    He never talks about his children, and Holly and Ginnie never ask. They know his wife was killed accidentally and that he has children in Yorkshire, living with grandparents. He visits them, they know that, but he does not talk about these visits. Ginnie brings more tea and sweet biscuits—sugar for shock is one of their stocks-in-trade. The Canon suddenly begins to write down train times. At least, Ginnie says, Daniel has only a few minutes’ walk to King’s Cross, he can buy a toothbrush somewhere on the way. She asks practically about the child’s state.
    “She’s not conscious. They say she’ll almost certainly be all right, I expect they mean that, they’d be careful what they say, wouldn’t they?”
    “They would have to, yes.”
    “She’s only a little thing,” says Daniel.
    But he cannot see Mary’s face, conscious or unconscious. He sees Stephanie, his wife, lying on the kitchen floor, with her lip pulled back over damp teeth. This is who he is, the man who looked at thatface. This is what she is, a terrible face; this sight persists in his brain. This is her after-life. He is hunted through his waking life by that face, he has developed the cunning of a hunted creature who twists and darts to avoid anything in the passages of the brain that might trigger, might switch on, that remembered face. There are words, there are innocent, pleasant memories, there are smells, there are whole people, whom he avoids with ferocity in case they call up that dead face. He even paints his dreams with black ink, he clamps his dreaming head with a vice of will, he never slips into dreaming that face and waking with the memory.
    He has told himself that survivors, like himself, quite commonly feel they are dangerous to others, to other survivors. He does indeed feel that he is dangerous to Will and Mary, his children, though that is not the whole story, is not the whole reason why they are in Yorkshire and he is here in St. Simeon’s, under the tower.
    And now it is as though he has hurled a rock at his small daughter, or pushed her from a high place.
    “There’s a train in fourteen minutes,” says Canon Holly, “and another in an hour and fourteen minutes. You can’t make it in fourteen minutes.”
    “I can try,” says Daniel. “I can run.”
    He sets off up the steps.
    La Tour Bruyarde must have been almost invulnerable in its great days, long ago. As the company approached it across the plain and the mountain meadows that surrounded it, they saw how thick and frowning was its outer wall, crumbled and breached in many places, here rising proudly, there lying in a dense arrested fall of mossy blocks crusted on the hillside. Men could be seen on the ramparts and in the clefts, repairing the structure. They wore brightly coloured singlets, cerise, royal blue, scarlet, which gave their labours an appearance of cheerfulness. The Lady Roseace imagined she heard them singing, that a faint hum of musical noise was borne to them on the air.
    Within the confine of the wall could be seen not one but many towers, and of all shapes and sizes, as though this citadel had been put up at random over the ages, all made of the same stone hewn from the same