The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Frederica was without bodily grace. During all her rehearsals before the mirror, no matter how her voice swooped and sobbed, her arms had been rigid along her rigid trunk. She had no idea what to do with them. She had held out a hand in the Duchess’s plea to her timid suitor and had reminded herself of a clockwork tin drummer she and Stephanie had had when they were little. Woodenly, now, crashing down heavily on wood, she thrust furiously up in a straight line, heavy-footed amongst the thicket of tossing arms and feat toes. Alexander, at the piano, moved like a wave of the sea, with rippling shoulder muscles and flowing hair and fingers. Frederica’s face grew dusky with unavailing effort and humiliation. She stumped, as soon as she was decently able, off the platform, and sat scowling in the shadows.

  Now they were limbered up, Lodge declared, he would hear their speeches. He read out their names, the Gillians, Susans, Judiths and Patricias who now, because of the dancing, were paradoxically loosed from their drilled similarity and came up, one after the other, blinking from the rosy light into the dark, and recited Perdita’s flower speech, Helena’s love for the bright particular star, Imogen’s trouble over Milford Haven, the Duchess’s proposal to her steward. Perditas predominated. O Proserpina! For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall From Dis’s wagon. In Yorkshire, in tinkling china tones from the expensive convent, faltering, gushing, an incantation endlessly delightful, however frequently renewed. When Frederica came it was Crowe who asked her what she would do, and Crowe who told Alexander to read in for her, as he had for others, the necessary few lines of Antonio’s part. Frederica’s voice shook as she announced herself. Alexander, standing opposite her, was moved with unaccustomed gentleness towards her.

  “Steady, Frederica. Take your time. It’s not the end of the earth.”

  “No?” she said, with a dimmed flash of the old contradictory passion.

  “No,” said Alexander. He smiled. It was the first smile of real warmth, for herself, she had ever had from him, teacherly and considerate. She was irritated, as well as excited, by this thought.

  Alexander said his piece.

  Conceive not I am so stupid but I aim

  Whereto your favours tend: but he’s a fool

  That, being a-cold, would thrust his hands i’th’fire

  To warm them.

  Blindly, Frederica began on the answering declaration: she had meant it to be prettily, though nobly, tentative, but Alexander’s presence and her wrath over the fiasco of the dancing had added to it qualities she could not quite control; a touch of impatient aggression, a touch of the pure will to have what she desired, which had taken her so far, and sustained her. She did not move: but because Alexander was Alexander she trembled in her rigidity.

  The misery of us that are born great!

  We are forced to woo, because none dare woo us;

  And as a tyrant doubles with his words

  And fearfully equivocates, so we

  Are forc’d to express our violent passions

  In riddles and in dreams, and leave the path

  Of simple virtue, which was never made

  To seem the thing it is not. Go, go brag

  You have left me heartless; mine is in your bosom:

  I hope ’twill multiply love there. You do tremble:

  Make not your heart so dead a piece of flesh

  To fear, more than to love me. Sir, be confident:

  What is’t distracts you? This is flesh and blood, sir;

  ’Tis not the figure cut in alabaster

  Kneels at my husband’s tomb …

  Towards the end of the speech she took one involuntary step towards him, aware that she was doing it wrong, roaring too much, asking for support, coming to an embarrassed halt. “Thank you,” Crowe said, unexpressive, when she had finished, and she got down, somehow. Alexander pushed back his hair and mopped his brow with a very white handkerchief.

  There was a pause, and coming and going and comparing of notes, between the three men, and then Crowe announced that they would like to hear ten of the girls read again, a poem. He read out these names, the no doubt penultimate List. Frederica’s name was not amongst them. She experienced a moment of simple incredulity. They must have forgotten. The ten, nervous and shining, made their way back to the stage and Lodge uncoiled himself from the chair and went up to one of them, a tall, cleanly-carved pig-tailed girl from the Convent, named Anthea Warburton. Would she mind, he enquired, if he undid her hair. And the others, would they …? The Convent’s chaperoning nun rustled but did not protest. Lodge wound expert fingers up one glossy snake of pale hair: Miss Warburton, brisker altogether, her eyes cast modestly down, undid the other. Lodge shook her hair about her face. She stared at him, coolly questioning, through its cloud, and Frederica realised with pain that the chosen had one thing in common. They were all pretty. Very pretty. Frederica had never before been made to know so clearly her own limitations, or the large variety of qualifications in the world. There would, she saw, be singing and dancing under the trees in the gardens at Blesford Ride, and laughter and verse. But she would not be part of it. Well, she had no intention of making an audience for anyone else’s performance. She would get up and go. She got up, and went.

  Matthew Crowe caught her arm in the Pantheon.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “Why?”

  “There was no point in staying.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was clearly,” said Frederica venomously, “a beauty contest.” She had a sudden soothing vision of scanty bathing suits, high spiked heels, satin sashes supported on jutting bosoms.

  “A play is a spectacle,” said Matthew Crowe.

  “I see that.”

  “What we are mostly looking for is attendant nymphs and graces. For a masque performed before the Queen. I don’t see you in that category.”

  “No.” Then, “I don’t see why you couldn’t have said it was – that – you wanted.”

  “It wasn’t all. Serving wenches, crowd.”

  “I see. Well, now I shall go home.”

  She tried to step past him. They were standing between the statues of Baldur the Beautiful, his limbs relaxing in granite death, in conscious or unconscious imitation of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, a meticulously Gothic piece of mistletoe protruding from his left nipple, and Pallas Athene, stonily swathed in a granite chiton, clutching the horripilant Gorgon head.

  “I shouldn’t go. Your audition gave me a rather amusing idea. It was rather good in itself, actually. What gave you the idea of making her so aggressive?”

  “Well, she had to be. She was her wicked brothers’ sister. She was a great prince. She was greedy. She clutched at apricots. She was used to having her own way. Actually, to tell you the truth, I meant it to come out more – well, less – more pleading. I got cross about the dancing. I can’t dance. I felt awful. I was flustered. I can do it better than that. Tho’ when I was doing it, I saw, you could play it on the edge of being – overpowering. It would make sense.”

  “Indeed. Very clever.”

  “Thank you.” She drank in praise like a reviving plant. Crowe leaned on the gorgon’s writhing stone serpents and said, “Let me look at your face.” He ran a finger down her sharp nose. “I really think it might be worth your while coming back.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, speaking of type-casting … as we were … we might be able to wangle at least an understudy of the first act …”

  This was a much worse exhibition of the power-game than lists. This was the fairy-tale shift of fortune, the Noel Streatfeild children’s tale in which rude girls like herself had their pretensions depressed and were then allowed, after all, to pass GO. She touched her sandy hair and stared at the tiny impresario. It was like a fairy-tale because he enjoyed engineering fairy-tales. He lived in a world where such engineering was the pattern of art; and life, and power, imitated art.

  “Ah,” she said, “ah thank you – I’ve never want
ed anything so much, never. If you only could – I’d be –”

  “Mind, I promise nothing,” he said. And then, “You didn’t talk to your dad about the Duchess?”

  “Entirely my own work. I promise.”

  He laughed. “Come back. Come back.”

  She swept eagerly after him.

  8. Ode on a Grecian Urn

  Stephanie sat in a chill brown classroom, whitened over with chalk dust, and taught the Ode on a Grecian Urn to those girls who had not gone to Blesford Ride. Good teaching is a mystery and takes many forms. Stephanie’s idea of good teaching was simple and limited: it was the induced, shared, contemplation of a work, an object, an artefact. It was not the encouragement of self-expression, self-analysis, or what were to be called interpersonal relations. Indeed, she saw a good reading of the Ode on a Grecian Urn as a welcome chance to avoid these activities.

  She had never had trouble with discipline, although she never raised her voice. She exacted quietness, biologically and morally. Girls came in from outside, buzzing, crashing, laughing. Barbara, Gillian, Zelda, Valerie, Susan, Juliet, Grace. Valerie had a disfiguring boil and Barbara an acute curse pain. Zelda’s father was dying, this month or next, and Juliet had been shocked by a strange boy who had thrust his fist up her skirt and crooked an elbow around her throat in a Blesford ginnel. Gillian was very clever and required a key, mnemonics and an analytic blueprint of the Grecian Urn for exam purposes. Susan was in love with Stephanie whom she tried to please by straining her attention. Grace wanted only to have a florist’s shop, was held at school in a vice of parental ambition, biding her time.

  Stephanie’s mind was clear of all this information, and she required that their minds should become so. She made them keep still, by keeping unnaturally still herself, as tamers of wild birds and animals keep still, she had read in childhood, so that the creatures became either mesmerised or fearless or both, she was not sure which.

  She required also that her mind at least should be clear of the curious clutter of mnemonics that represented the poem at ordinary times, when the attention was not concentrated upon it. In her case: a partial visual memory of its shape on the page, composed, in fact, of several superimposed patterns from different editions, the gestalt clear, but shifting in size: a sense of the movement of the rhythm of the language which was biological, not verbal or visual, and not to be retrieved without calling whole strings of words to the mind’s eye and ear again: some words, the very abstract ones, form, thought, eternity, beauty, truth, the very concrete ones, unheard, sweeter, green, marble, warm, cold, desolate. A run of grammatical and punctuational pointers: the lift of frozen unanswered questions in the first stanza, the apparently undisciplined rush of repeated epithets in the third. Visual images, neither seen, in the mind’s eye, nor unseen. White forms of arrested movement under dark formal boughs. Trouble with how to “see” the trodden weed. John Keats on his death-bed, requesting the removal of books, even of Shakespeare. Herself at Cambridge, looking out through glass library walls into green boughs, committing to memory, what? Asking what, why?

  She read the poem out quietly, as expressionless as possible, a ditty with no tone. And then again. The ideal was to come to it with a mind momentarily open and empty, as though for the first time. They must all hear the words equally, not pounce, or tear, or manipulate. She asked them chilly, “Well?” prolonging the difficult moment when they must just stare, finding speech difficult and judgment unavoidable.

  She sat there, looking into inner emptiness, waiting for the thing to rise into form and saw nothing, nothing and then involuntarily flying specks and airy clumps of froth or foam on a strongly running grey sea. Foam not pure white, brown and gold-stained here and there, blowing together, centripetal, a form cocooned in crusts and swathes of adhesive matter. Not relevant, her judgment said, the other poem, damn it, the foam of perilous seas. The thing had a remembered look, not pleasant, and she grimaced, as she saw it. Venus de Milo. Venus Anadyomene. The foam-born, foam from the castrated genitals of Kronos. Not a bad image, if you wanted one, of the coming to form from shapelessness, but not what she had meant to call up.

  “Well,” she said to the girls, “well, what do you see?”

  They began to talk about when Keats required his reader to see an urn and when a landscape, what colours he called up and what he left to choice, and moved from there to the nature of the difficulty of seeing what is formed to be “seen” by language alone, marble men and maidens, the heifer and altar, a burning forehead and a parching tongue, cold pastoral.

  Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard

  Are sweeter,

  said Stephanie. Clever Gillian commented that the word desolate was the centre of the poem, almost allowing one to be taken out of it, like the word forlorn in the Nightingale. They talked about beauty is truth, truth beauty. They talked, as Stephanie had meant them to, about a verbal thing, made of words so sensual and words not sensual at all, like beauty and truth. She talked about what it could mean, that the urn should “tease us out of thought As doth eternity.” It is a funeral urn, said Zelda. That is not enough to say, said Susan, staring at Stephanie.

  Things moved in the classroom, amongst eight closed minds, one urn, eight urns, nine urns, half realised, unreal, white figures whose faces and limbs could be sensed but not precisely described, bright white, the dark, the words, moving, in ones, in groups, in clusters, in and out of whatever cells held their separate and communal visual, aural or intellectual memories. Stephanie talked them out of the vocabulary she was supposed to be teaching them and left them with none, darkling. Gillian, who was enjoying the process, reflected that words could be quickly enough snatched back, when the occasion required it. Stephanie reflected that this poem was the poem she most cared for, saying ambivalently that you could not do, and need not attempt, what it required you to do, see the unseen, realise the unreal, speak what was not, and that yet it did it so that unheard melodies seemed infinitely preferable to any one might ever hope to hear. Human beings, she had thought, even as a very small child faced with The Lady of Shalott, might so easily never have hit on the accidental idea of making unreal verbal forms, they might have just lived, and dreamed, and tried to tell the truth. She had kept asking Bill, why did he write it, and the answers had been so many and so voluble and so irrelevant to the central problem, that she closed her mind to them, even whilst effortlessly committing them to memory for future use, as Gillian now must and would.

  The bell rang. They came out blinking, like owls into the bright daylight. Stephanie, gathering her books, allowed herself to wonder whether the irrelevant flying foam she had seen had come from the Nightingale, or from her own intellect, making Freudian associations all too tidily between marble maidens, the Venus and the subconscious knowledge she had of the nature of that foam. It was not very nice foam.

  Afterwards she tried to get out of the school quickly. She wanted to think. She passed through the staffroom, and thought about teaching. One could say: I teach: and smell ink, and dampish serge, and floor-polish. In the staffroom too many dirty gaudy utility chairs, peacock, lemon, tomato and a thick smell of tea. Window frames, too high, opening on no vista. One could say: I teach: and listen to unheard melodies and see white figures running under dark boughs. Miss Wells, returned from Blesford, rose from a chair and offered a posy of primroses. An identical posy dangled from her own purple knitted cardigan. Stephanie bent her nose to their pale honey and wine, pinned them to her coat, and put that on, a gesture of grateful adornment, a prelude to departure.

  “Lovely,” she said. “I must fly. How did the auditions go?” She had not wanted to be trapped to be told.

  “He made them all dance, and undid their hair.”

  “Not Frederica!”

  “She didn’t dance very well. They liked my sweet Mary. There were one or two lovely Perditas. Frederica did a very aggressive audition, dear. And I fear they only wanted nymphs and maidens. But they kept her. When I left, the
y had her on stage, saying some lyric of Elizabeth’s own. They were laughing. And arguing. ‘A muscle-bound lion’s cub’ I heard Mr Crowe say. She looked so cross.”

  “Oh dear.” Stephanie could bear no more. “I really must fly. I’ve got the bike. I am grateful for the flowers, you do such lovely flowers.”

  Susan, desperate, lurked amongst the lockers, waiting for Miss Potter’s passage to the bike shed. She had prepared a very intelligent question about the Urn that required in her view a long and conscientious answer. When Miss Potter got on her bike, Susan would rush out, and, perfectly naturally, get on her own, and at about the crater, would catch up, and for about ten or fifteen minutes they would, they must, ride along side by side, and speak, just the two of them, as had never happened.

  The crater was a waste dip encroaching on tennis lawns and the school drive. Blesford’s only bomb, partially exploding, had thrown the earth up fairly harmlessly there, breaking a few windows, leaving a ridged whirlpool and decadence of mud which had generated grass and willow herbs and had not been reclaimed. It had become a kind of War Memorial, and little girls used it as a theatre for imaginary dramas.

  Stephanie Potter, knowing Felicity Wells had counted on tea, guilty but determined, strode past. The smooth pale hair was tied under a grass-green scarf; the primroses were now pinned to a rather dashing voluminous coat, also green, shaped a little like an artist’s smock, with full sleeves caught in tight cuffs.

  Susan darted to the cycle shed and eased her machine out of its concrete rut.

  Miss Potter rode past briskly, pedalling firmly, flowing gold and green.

  Susan mounted, shoved, swayed, set off.

  Stephanie descended into the declivity of the path that crossed the crater, in bumps and starts, braking.

  Into the crater from the other side, ponderously manoeuvring, came a large black figure on a massive black bicycle. As though, Susan thought, also braking, he had simply risen up from the sooty laurels the other side of the crater. Which he had, indeed. He came heavily on, bore down on Miss Potter in a rut, clashed their handlebars, like horned beasts engaging each other. Clumsy, thought Susan, which it had not been, exactly.