Free A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt Page A

knew
that
either, did you? They made me learn it. You don’t need grammar.”
    â€œI have noticed you use it very elegantly in your poems.”
    â€œDid you say
elegant
? You fink my pomes are
elegant
. You are full of shit.”
    â€œNo, you are. But it doesn’t stop you writing interesting poems.”
    The rocking increased in tempo.
    â€œCUT,” said Alexander.
    The poet fell over backwards and remained lying on his back with his legs in the air, wound in the struts of his chair. His expression was beatific.

Later, Wilkie invited Frederica to the Television Centre to watch a playback of this interview. They sat in a windowless room, and watched the box in the corner. Wilkie said “As I said, the quality you have is a complete lack of fear of the camera. If you watch any of the others—including your garrulous partner—you can see fear in the neck-muscles, in the roll of the eye. The onset of Medusa. Not you. Look.”
    Frederica said that she probably didn’t look anxious because she took the precaution of not looking at herself. Wilkie said that if she was going to be professional she would
have
to look, and then to retain her insouciance.
    She hardly recognised herself. The cameras were kind to her sharp bones, her large mouth. They made her sandy quality richer, gave her hair a dark red depth, her eyebrows, so carefully dusted and patted by the make-up artists, a winged arch. Mickey Impey’s eyes had a fishy glare over his chirpy grin. But Frederica’s eyes, on screen, glittered with interest and amusement. Her mouth had an intriguing wry slant.
    â€œDo you remember, in the play, when I was Elizabeth, I recited that ballad? The woman whose skirts were cut off. Lawks a’ mussy on me, this is none of I.”
    â€œIt isn’t anybody else. You have all the ingredients of being a
personality
. Including what I would once have thought unlikely, a capacity to listen to other people.”
    â€œWe all grow older. I’m a teacher. I’m a mother.”
    â€œThe job’s yours. Everyone agreed.”
    â€œBut I don’t
want
to be a personality—”
    â€œOh, Frederica. I want, I want, like a bird in a nest. This is the future, wouldn’t it be interesting, for a time anyway? I live two lives, I do my research, I do this. What
do
you want, anyway?”
    â€œI don’t know. Rupert Parrott thinks he’ll publish my book of bits and pieces. He says it’s of the moment, it’s a book for
now
. I don’t know that he knows. Anyway, it isn’t a book, not a real book, I’m not a writer. I seem to have had an education designed to incapacitate writers. Mickey Impey wasn’t so far wrong.”
    â€œWell, then. If you know. We could pay you a retainer, the programme doesn’t start for months and months, but there’ll be lots of consultation, I’d like your input, as they say here. You’d be at the cutting edge of what ought to be the new form of thought, maybe a new kind of art.”
    He ran back the tape and started again. Frederica gazed at her own face. What she liked in it, she saw, as Impey recited his youthful credo again, was that it was a woman’s face, not a girl’s. Alert, watchful, grown up. Attractive, even to its owner. She was not used to this.

Wilkie explained his idea of
Through the Looking-Glass
. Frederica thought later that this was the first time she had given him her complete attention, and also the first time he had addressed her completely seriously, as though she was neither audience for wit, nor satirical sparring-partner. She had lost her virginity to him, back in 1953, but that had been (and had been designed by her to be), a casual and unimportant happening. He had always been known as a brilliant man, a student of perception and cognition who managed to have a public career also, designing programmes. At the auditions, Frederica remembered, he had worn a pink shirt