The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Stephanie hopped a few steps, entangled, caught her calf painfully on the edge of a pedal, stopped to rub it. Susan saw a long oily streak on the smooth stocking. She wondered whether she herself was now obliged to go past, turn back, or very obviously hang about.

  Daniel, head down, manipulated handlebars and interlocked brake-blocks with ferocity. He had reckoned he might get ten minutes. With luck. It would have to do. He had planned the encounter with his usual care, calculating that she must be more or less in that place at that time. Better here than fail to pull off some more apparently casual bump in Blesford. But now he could not speak. So he ground metal and rubber.

  She stared at him, out of her struggle with green cloth, oil, chain. Black hair all over, black raincoat, black trousers, black shoes. Huge shoulders and belly. Dog-collar. Cycle clips. So much of him. She did not speak.

  He wrenched his mount away, by main force, and said baldly: “I was waiting for you.”

  “So I see.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  She was rubbing her leg: he ignored that.

  “I was in a bit of a hurry. Perhaps some other time.”

  “It’s important.”

  “There isn’t anything wrong?” Her bland and lovely brow creased in anxiety.

  “No, no. Just that I-I myself – I wanted to talk to you.” He repeated rather crossly, as though she should have known, “It’s important.”

  He could only keep saying exactly what he meant. He had wanted so little in his life. What he had wanted he had got. If he could get her to stay with him just ten minutes, he knew it, she would begin to see the necessity. He knew already, without having to work it out, that she found it very hard to say no.

  “You could spare a few minutes,” he told her.

  “Oh, a few minutes.” As though he had been demanding hours. “A few minutes. I suppose I could. Would you like a cup of coffee in the new coffee bar? That’s near.”

  It was not what he would have chosen, but he could be graceful.

  “Thank you, yes. I’m sorry I scratched your paint.”

  “It’s not fresh enough to matter. The chain-guard’s more of a problem. We should make the coffee bar.”

  The peering literary child watched them bump off uncertainly together, through the dusky bushes, the fat dark back and heavy piston legs obscuring her view of the captured green and gold. She was shaken by disappointment and rage, as though dark had descended. She thought irritably, oh let it go, it’s only Blesford Grammar and a crush on a teacher, it’s only the bomb crater, and I’m only very young. As though she knew that at some future time age might make other grass and other people more real, more durable. As though other unseen colours must necessarily be brighter than the vanishing gold and green.

  Blesford’s new Coffee Bar, an early northern exemplar, was underground, an experimental conversion of the basement of the Spinning Wheel tea-shop. It had a new expresso machine, a few booths with peg-board screens, candles in bottles on the table, and posters depicting Italian beauty spots: Sicily, Pompeii, the Spanish Steps. The lighting was gentian-coloured, which made the froth on the cappuccino look like phosphorescent ink.

  Daniel eased his dark bulk down the wooden ladder, hunching his shoulders, reminding Stephanie briefly of Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise in Beatrix Potter. They sat in a corner booth on rexine tumps: Daniel’s creaked ominously under his weight. They faced each other with blue lips, teeth glinting hyacinthine, the caverns of their mouths grape-purple. Stephanie’s hair and the primroses were without colour, and metallic. The dim light flowed into the folds of Daniel’s shadowy clothing, sank into his hair and heavy brows and shaded chin, making him seem warmer, fluid, less portentously substantial. Unaware himself of this he remarked that the lighting was in his view cheerless, and ordered coffee.

  He wondered if he should just say: I believe you should marry me. Or, which was more exact and more modest: I believe I should marry you. He was distracted, rare in him, by the fact that she had become glittering and blue. Being a man who usually said what he meant was a disadvantage here, where what he meant was extreme and unprepared for, and might even sound silly. He tried:

  “I felt we ought to talk.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, a great many things. But it wasn’t ‘what about’ I was thinking of. Just that we – that you and I – ought to be talking to each other. It seemed important.”

  She maintained a courteous silence, as though waiting for him to say something to which there was an answer. He blundered on.

  “I wanted to get to know you. I don’t usually – I mean, only for work – this is for myself.”

  She said, “Don’t.”

  “Don’t?”

  “I – I don’t like people to say things like that to me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh dear. Because so many people do. That’s something you should understand.”

  He did not: he had never addressed a girl out of personal need before: but he was thinking quickly. He was suddenly, despondently aware of her as a woman of whom much was demanded, by family, work, chance acquaintances, and no doubt other men. What was unique for him was not for her. It was his turn to be silent.

  “I don’t know you,” said Stephanie.

  “That’s what I’m asking you to do.”

  “I know. But you make it seem so – much. And I feel, I feel it’s nothing to do with me. Please try to understand.”

  There was something wrong and nervously patronising about her gentleness, a response already mechanical with use. He was enraged by this: he glowered. She looked nervously at him and saw this. She said, “Oh dear.”

  “Well,” he said, “that’s that. Shall we go?”

  “Oh dear,” she said again.

  “Oh dear,” he agreed, ferociously, and waved at the waitress. He felt suffocated.

  “Don’t go. I shall feel bad. I only meant –”

  She could not say what she only meant, and he could not say that he didn’t care if she did feel bad. So they sat. Finally, with a crude social effort, she asked about his work. Felicity Wells, living in the Vicarage, had developed an apprehensive admiration for Daniel’s bulldozing pastoral methods, and his use of time, although she was worried about his theology. Stephanie had listened to Miss Wells’s talk, and had responded to something wholly reasonable and yet usually impracticable in Daniel’s moral behaviour.

  “The work’d be easier if folk weren’t so scared of each other,” Daniel said gloomily. “People get all meshed and mashed in conventions. Don’t speak if you aren’t spoken to, charity’s a dirty word, don’t put on people, don’t get put on. Scrunching their guts away from inside with loneliness and pointlessness, but they’d not cross a road to say a word to anyone else in the same mess. Mostly my job’s just asking, politely if possible, a bit rudely if not, making it look official, like a committee, requesting this and that. What I do is invent an alternative set of non-operative conventions. Ones that say you’ve got to speak out how it is, find out how it is.”

  “Conventions,” she said, “have their uses. They keep people safe – from hurt, from taking on what they can’t bear. Or they can make a slow, bearable way of getting into – bits of life. You can’t always rush people to extremes. In case people can’t stand them.”

  “Extremes exist,” said furious Daniel. “Take Miss Phelps. Pelvis smashed, no chance she’ll walk again, day after day in a hospital bed, in pain, looking at the likely end, trying not to. Take Miss Whicher. Lives two doors away from Miss P., doesn’t know her, or anyone else, serves me tea in rosebud cups, cup after cup, ever so dainty, oh Mr Orton, I feel my life is slipping away to no purpose, no one really needs me, so I say, go and see Miss Phelps. And the carry-on, the carry-on.”

  He imitated, for Stephanie, Miss Whicher’s layered caveats. One might be thought pushing, or do-gooding, or might turn out to have no interests in common, or find it all too painful and make it worse, or say the wrong thi
ng, and they would be so conscious they weren’t really friends, not naturally, as it were … Stephanie was amazed at his power of mimicry, amorphous and indignant in the blue dark. She had thought of him as always and essentially the same, a man on one note, a line heading one way.

  “The Vicar,” said Daniel, who did not normally utter complaints, “bothers about intruding. He smiles and says, lovely roses someone brought you, Miss Phelps. Better weather we’re getting, Miss Phelps. Not, no more walking, Miss Phelps, how will you manage, nor yet, there is someone still there inside you, Miss Phelps, you can speak, we are both here and not finished yet. He doesn’t say that.”

  “You have to say that so it sounds right, if you say it at all. You can’t generate everyone’s energy, all on your own.”

  “I can’t see what else I can try to do.” He grinned grimly. “Vicar doesn’t like me. I disturb things.”

  “You like disturbing things. You’re right, of course.” This admission led her to ask, involuntarily and unnaturally politely, “Is there anything I could do?”

  “I did have an idea.” He risked a joke. “Apart from talking to me. There’s Mrs Haydock.”

  “Mrs Haydock?”

  “Brontë Buildings, Branwick Estate. Must be about thirty. Husband walked out. As happens. Two kids, a scared girl, autistic boy, six, nine. That boy’s a smasher. Quiet, quiet, not a word, never has spoken one, everything systematically pulled apart – crushed, bashed, ground, ripped. Not people, ever. Only things. Sometimes he hums. They say he can hum quite complicated things. I wouldn’t know, I’m not musical, I can sing the responses and that. He stares a lot. Not stupid, not at you, not away from you. In another dimension, he stares. She won’t have him put away. She loves him. I’d say that might he a difficult decision, if you take a good look at the other kid, the girl, not a mousehole to call her own or hide her head. But there is no decision, she loves him, she gives her life to him.”

  “You haven’t tried to make her give him up?”

  “Thought about it. Yes, I did think. Because of the little one, little Pat. But I think it’s possible Mrs Haydock’d just come to pieces without him. Having made him her life. Funny thing, the variety of lives, you can’t know what accident won’t set yours in some very simple terrible deep channel for the rest of its run. To have such a child, or a daft parent. Love. God. Anyway, I decided –”

  “You decided –”

  “If she had a day, even an afternoon, off a week, to take little Pat out, not to have him, if she had someone reliable to mind him, who’d come, regular, so she could count on it. Things would change for all of them. She’d never ask. She’d take persuading. But if someone offered. Can you imagine being her?”

  “I should be scared,” said Stephanie Potter.

  “And don’t you think Mrs Haydock isn’t? And Pat?”

  “And such responsibility …”

  “We must all take some.”

  “Daniel – Mr Orton – why me?”

  “I just always thought you were the right one. You could hold it for her. You could do it. I think if you went, you’d see I was right.”

  She was suddenly afraid of him. He dealt absolutely, in areas where one neither thought nor lived, normally. Where one hoped to avoid living. He saw the world in extremis and was right. She tried to imagine the life he had made for himself and could not. She did not want to have to. He dealt in what had properly daunted Keats who had abandoned surgery for poetry but knew that poetry had no answer to pain.

  “You’d get blood out of a stone,” she said. “If you and I understand that I’m only offering once or twice – till I see if I can manage – I’ll try. I can only try.”

  She smiled briefly, more animated than he had seen her yet. She added proudly, “But if I do agree, I am reliable. I can say that.”

  “You don’t have to. Some things I do know about people and some I don’t. That kind of thing, I do.”

  9. Meat

  Marcus spent inordinate lengths of time in the bathroom. Each week, Winifred thought, he added half an hour or more. He ran water, in inexplicable rushes, between long silences. Sometimes she saw Bill creeping across the landing in socks, brown toes, arched knees, profile of a scowl, to take account of this, to peer and listen. Once or twice he beat with frantic fists in the panel of the door, requiring answers, exits, explanations, which Marcus did not oblige with. Winifred tried not to react. To either of them. In Bill’s case this was because to endemic wrath any behaviour at all was simply provocation. About Marcus, she felt superstitiously that if she averted her attention from him, her eyes, her anxiety, her love, there was a chance he might get by. Might go unnoticed, either by Fate or his father. So she observed him, in her dressing-table mirror, slip out of the bathroom in one of Bill’s lulls, and gave no sign. Peace and quiet were her priorities. At all costs, peace and quiet. For this boy, above all.

  She remembered clearly not only his birth but what she believed to have been the moment of his conception. He was born at the time of Munich, in the unreal lull before the unimaginable storm. He must have been conceived in that house, in that bed, one night when Bill had come home from a WEA lecture on Shakespeare, beery and contentious, to lecture her on acceptable and unacceptable reconcilings in the Last Plays. He disliked A Winter’s Tale. Partly because it was said to have christian overtones, primarily because it was strictly improbable, he had said, thumping about the bedroom, odour of effort rising from his relaxing stockinged feet. A man does not lose his wife for twenty years and get back an animated statue and profess joy in a deception as though it was a miracle, not so easily. This was Shakespeare’s real failure at the primitive level of plausibility of plot, Bill said. And what about Hermione, Winifred said mildly. All the years of her womanhood gone, and her two children, one dead, one vanished, and no feelings required but gratitude and joy. His class, Bill said, had tried to tell him that the statue represented a resolution of the pains of life in Art and he had said, some things could not be so resolved. Prospero was a more complex, a better solution. Less easily slipped into, the circle of reconciliation, more consistently artificial. He must have got round to loving his daughters by the last plays, Winifred had said, there were so many the same, and Bill, in his underpants by now, had grinned, and said there was no evidence about daughters.

  It hadn’t been because he or she had wanted a son – though the elaborately feminine names of their daughters, both versions of names for a son, had been his choice. It had been because the daughters they had were for once miraculously quiet, and because of the WEA beer, and because he was talking to her, which he was usually too tired, or too busy, or too dogged by bills and babies, to do. Or too angry.

  She had married him because he was the man she most admired. Just, passionate, prodigious with effort, discriminating. She had been most afraid of living like her mother, too many children, too little money, mastered by a house and husband which were peremptory moral imperatives and steady physical wreckers. Winifred had been her mother’s confidante about every detail of blood, polish and indignation: she was the eldest. She knew about childbirth and male “selfishness” after it, about black lead, white stone on doorsteps, laundry blue, starch and scrubbing. Her mother had made efforts, ambivalently, to let her out: had not stood in the way of the Grammar School education, which had led to Winifred learning that one could, indeed should, marry for passion and conversation, not for bleeding or black lead. Bill had lent her Lady Chatterley and preached about freedom: he was in flight from a more harshly defined version of the house, man, woman, she herself meant to step beyond.

  By 1938 she had learned that it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors. The unknown is hard to get at, because it is unknown. Paradoxically, Winifred had decided, two people are closer before they have lived together or even slept together or talked for very long – what they do say is
more their own saying, makes less concessions to habit, or quirks of temperament, or previous failures to get through. She had talked to Bill in those days, making him in her own image, it was true, but she had talked more truthfully, and if she had, it was possible that this was also his case. He was now constantly enraged by cooking, cleaning, crying daughters. But she knew he was not like this at work: he was patient, persistent, forbearing. And she discovered in herself a fatal and steady need for tasks and reprobation. Maybe rage and patience were all that could be left.

  In the beginning she had been violent in bed. Not demanding, no, nor insistent, but wild and tough, ready to bite and lick and smell and touch and taste and battle. Conventions closed on her imperceptibly, one by one. She could not be bothered to take off her nightdress. Or shift from the horizontal to the vertical. Or kiss his mouth. And his feet irritated her. She opened her eyes once in the dark and realised that someone, not exactly herself, had been sneering inside her at Bill’s insensitivity to her pain and fatigue when he was doing what would, after all, have delighted her a year before. She supposed this might be usual, but had no friends whom she could ask. And she would never talk to her daughters, she vowed, as her mother had talked to her, never. She would be quiet. Quiet spread over more and more areas where hope had been.

  So that evening in 1938, when Bill had actually, because of the beer, spoken to her about Shakespeare, and when Frederica had not, for once, woken screaming, she was wearily grateful, no more, for speech, and stayed on her back, murmuring about Hermione. And Bill hoisted himself up and moved purposefully up and down, and she felt as she now habitually felt at best, mild claustrophobia and a mild peripheral possibility of pleasure, not worth straining for. When Bill sighed, and shook himself, and rolled back to his side of the bed, she felt suddenly dark and cavernous inside, chill and a little dizzy, and had listened as though changes were happening, like electric currents, which a perception fine enough might note. She believed steadily afterwards that she had indeed noticed the moment of conception. The tepid, largely accidental beginning of Marcus, her son.