The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  The child and the war swelled inevitably together. Bill, predicting Armageddon, cultural annihilation, and evil in jack-boots stalking English lanes, chose to blame some unspecified inadvertence of Winifred’s for the untimely birth. Younger masters left the school to volunteer. Bill, discommoded, fumed and spent more and more time out of the home. Winifred, heavy and frightened, pushed the perambulator around Blesford, Frederica gingery, furious, imperious under its hood, Stephanie dangling plump legs under its handle, staring too solemnly from under a sunbonnet. Fear is infectious. Stephanie was learning fear. Winifred was not enough of an actress, and had also not enough physical strength, to communicate assurance or reassurance. She stared over her daughters’ heads, nerving herself for everything, pushing the pram, facing Bill, the birth of the baby, bombs, gas, occupation. She had fantasies of small bodies spitted on bayonets, of cots, and flesh, crushed in thundering rubble. The baby should not have been conceived, but since it was there must now be protected. If possible. That was all.

  He was born, swiftly and entirely painlessly, one bright afternoon in July, so fast that for days she felt unreal, as though there were some ordeal still to come. “It’s a boy,” they said, and she answered politely “That’s what I wanted”, although she had never seriously considered the possibility that the child was not a girl. She raised herself, with her unexpended strength, and saw him, still attached by the cord, pulsing livid and slate-blue. His dark eyes blinked unseeing against the flooding sunlight. He was tiny, delicate, enraged, an exact replica of Bill in a spasm of fury, wavering impotent crimson fists over a creased bald pate streaked with damp gingery strands. Nothing at all of her. What had lived in her, stirred, turned, what she had held and protected, turned out to be Bill’s rage, simply. A boy. She lay back very calmly on the pillows and waited for them to take him away.

  Bill flared in and out of the hospital, volatile with unpredictable joy. He made the nurses unwrap the boy and display on the white muslin the comparatively vast genitals, crimson-dark. He named him, without hesitation. He had wanted to be called Marcus himself, as a boy, he said. She lay still and watched him poke his finger into the small, cold clutch of his son. She almost felt she had lost someone.

  Three nights later, in the dark, something terrible happened. They brought the baby to be fed, under green-shaded light, a virtually weightless scrap, trailing damp ends of flannelette sheet and stiff hospital nightgown. She shifted the lolling head, the gaunt, disappointed face in the crook of her arm and knew that he was fragile and that she loved him. She knew the need to hold him close, and close to the need, the fear of crushing him. Babies’ flesh is chilly where it is not hot and damp with striving. This baby was uniformly still, and chilly. She sat on her rubber sheet possessed by terrible love, in fear, although he had only just come, of the moment when they would take him away. As she had known when he began, so she knew now that the whole pattern of her future was changed, he was best, first and worst: she was already making dispositions. He fed, neatly, quietly, collapsed into sleep. Already she assumed that the violence of these new feelings was dangerous to him, or at least burdensome: it must be dissimulated. They came and took him away. She waited all night in rigid apprehension and immobile delight for the moment when they would bring him back. And so something began.

  Bill roared in the kitchen “Get out of that bathroom, boy. There are other people with biological needs in this house.” The walls were thin, the piercing voice pierced. Bill had made such classic errors. Every toy bought six months before the boy could deal with it. Every teacher told – with the unfortunate support of the mathematical strangeness – every teacher admonished that the boy was a genius. Most of all Bill had wanted to share Marcus’s early reading. He himself had scratted in the thin dust of evangelical tracts. Marcus should have imaginative worlds which Bill would enter with him. What do you feel, what do you picture in your mind’s eye, what moves you? The slow boy looked into space. And did sums. Which were not his heritage, and, in that innumerate family, not shared, nor marvelled over.

  In the face of the blast of Bill’s love she could only keep quiet. Convert energy to inertia. Undo, unmake. Perhaps she did the wrong thing. It was not a very satisfactory thing to do.

  She heard a cautious click of the bathroom door. She followed him into his boy’s room, with its bench, engines of war, models, neatly aligned. He was looking out of the window. He had not looked much like his father since those first moments in the air. He looked like her, more than the daughters did. Stolid, mild, large, plain. She wanted to touch him and did not.

  “Are you doing anything, Marcus?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m going shopping in Blesford. Would you come and carry?”

  “O.K. I’ll get my jacket.”

  She did not say: when we get back he might be better about the bathroom. Marcus gave no sign of knowing that was involved. They communicated, if they communicated, without speech. Sometimes she wondered if she ought to shout out: Marcus, you are strange, there is something really wrong, Marcus, speak to me. But she did not say such things. He relied upon her not to say such things. Or so she believed.

  Masters’ Row, backing on to the Far Field, was at the front a row of isolated suburban houses on a country road, at least in 1953, turning between fields with hawthorn hedges or drystone walls. In those days too, Masters’ Row had its own bus-stop, a tarmac bay with a galvanized shelter and cast-iron sign. By 1970 the whole road had been developed, widened and straightened with orange glass and concrete lamps along its sleek and mottled black length. Uprooted hedgerows and levelled fields were thickly planted with tiny ranch houses, miniature drives, dwarf white plastic fences. The Masters’ Row houses, then, seemed besieged and impoverished. In 1953, it was still possible for the Potters to see themselves as country-dwellers, of a kind. They took regular walks along cart-tracks, away from the school grounds, through meadows, and fields of oats and barley, to a sewage works. On these walks Winifred told the children names of plants: harebell, stitchwort, toadflax, St. John’s wort, eggs and bacon, vetch, trefoil. The girls chanted these names after her. Marcus, who had hay fever, sneezed and shook, his eyelids glossy and swollen round his lashes, his sinuses drilled boxes of pain, his palate raw and puffy.

  The sewage works was like a closed fort, iron-railed, windowless concrete boxes, artificial grass mounds. There was a human silence. All the sound was the discreetly humming wires, the scratching of rotor arms on deserted round tubs of gravel. The girls tended to veer away from the place as though it was, or must be, unhealthy. Marcus liked it, to a certain extent. It had no feathery grasses and it had the order of a well-kept cemetery, the mown neatness, the humps, the noiselessness. He felt that they should stop and look at it, since it was their declared goal. But they never did. Recycled water, recycled liquid wastes, Lucas Simmonds had once told a class, were purer than spring water, quite sterile. Marcus thought, at that moment, about the quiet business of their own sewage works.

  Trips into Blesford, by bus, like the walks to the sewage works, were for Marcus an order of repeated information and pain. He had gone to school the other way, many more miles, to the prep school attached to the Minster choir school in Calverley. Blesford was shops and the hospital. When they went there, Winifred told him its scanty history, as on the sewage walk she told him botany. It had been a mediaeval market town, of which there were still some relics, beleaguered by identikit square glass and pebble dash concretions. The shell of the old castle still stood on a minimal grassy hump, and was reached by a flight of steps and an iron handrail. There was a marketplace with striped stalls and down by the railway on Wednesdays a cattle market, where for a few hours the stones smelled of straw, dung, urine and panic before it was all hosed away. There were old names: Beastfair, Finkle Street, Slutwell Lane, Grindergate. The bus circled the periphery of these narrow roads, past functional red-brick buildings with asphalted yards: Blesford Main Post Office, Blesford Hospital, Blesford Bus S
tation.

  Marcus had spent many weeks in the hospital, either with his worst attacks of asthma, or undergoing inconclusive searches for the asthma’s cause. “They” believed he might contain a “focus of infection”, of which the asthma might be a secondary effect. He had been x-rayed, skin-tested, weighed and measured. His tonsils and adenoids had been hopefully removed. He had learned things, mostly about the nature of vision.

  He had once heard Alexander and his father talking about the effects of consumption on art: hectic brilliance and speed, Alexander had said. Years later he himself was to speculate about the relationship between oxygen and insight. At the time he was roused enough to remark to himself that asthma was not like that. It was not energising. What it did was stretch time and perception so that everything was slow and sharp and clear.

  When he was not ill, the hospital was a neutral retreat. Cavernous, dark red, smelling of carbolic and flowers, nurses passing and repassing, starch, bits of boiled metal.

  When he was ill, space and time were both biological and abstract. Every rib was defined and located by pain, every cold breath, laboriously and noisily drawn in, laboriously and noisily expelled, impressed its duration on his consciousness. He had developed the characteristic crouch of the asthmatic, bowed spine, hunched shoulders, hanging rib-cage, the weight of the body on rigid arms and tensed knuckles. An anthropoid cage for pain and struggle. From this crouching stillness he perceived more sharply strictly limited things. Colours, outlines, people, trolleys, vases. A coiling inner design of grating, whistling air moving the stops of an intolerably sensitive organ. Everything, inner and outer, precisely defined in black outline against an encroaching haze.

  There was an extreme point where pain refined vision to mathematics. He would see a two-dimensional map, grey-black-white, of linear relations: curtains, furniture-corners, bed, chair, fingers plucking up triangles of blanket. This was related to the inner map of blocked, narrowing, imagined passages for air. Twice, losing consciousness, he had seen the same last thing, just before. Once had been when he struggled with the pad of ether, for the tonsils, and once an attack so severe he had fainted. (He fainted relatively frequently, and hated it.)

  What he saw was turning geometry, spinning graph paper with the squares decreasing in size on some almost definable geometric principle, and simultaneously rotating, so that somewhere in the centre, on the periphery of the field of vision, was the vanishing point, infinity.

  So that geometry was close to, and opposed to, the suffering animal. It intensified with pain, and yet the attention could, with effort, be deflected from pain to geometry. Geometry was immutable, orderly, and connected with extremity. He did not, in his mind, oppose pain and geometry: what was opposed to both was “normal life” where you took things easy as they came, things shiny, glossy, soft, hard, shifty, touchable, not needing mapping or ordering. When the Blesford bus turned round the hospital, he noted the number of upper and lower windows, their geometric proportions, and crossed his fingers. His mother sat beside him, clutching her handbag, with her own memories. They did not speak to each other.

  The Butcher’s Shop was not in Beastfair, which contained the new Marks and Spencer, Timothy White’s, Etam and some little wool shops. It was an old and flourishing High Class Butchery with green and white tiled walls, and sawdust and blood on its floor. Its proprietor, W. Allenbury, was florid and vigorous, an active man, as butchers seem to be, responsibly engaged in local politics and ready, indeed pressing, to discuss the state of the nation and the nature of the universe with the housewives over whom, in the days of rationing, he had exercised a benign despotism that had somehow never worn off. He was helped by three young men in long blood-stained white aprons, all exceedingly, sometimes indecently, lively. Marcus associated their liveliness with the Potters’ Sunday joint. There was a time when they regularly sat down to a roast sirloin, preceded by large squares of Yorkshire pudding, crisp, golden, steamy, sprinkled with salt and hot gravy. Bill and Winifred frequently adjured pale Marcus to take some of the good red juices from under the joint to put a little life and colour into him.

  Allenbury’s shop window was, in its way, a work of art. It is not possible, with meat, to create the symmetry, the delicate variation of colour and form that a fishmonger can make on marble or ice with a wheel, or an abstract rose, of his proffered goods. But Allenbury’s window had a compensating variety. It combined the natural, the man-made, the anthropomorphic and the abstract in a pleasingly eclectic way. It had its own richness.

  From a glittering steel bar on elegantly curved hooks hung the chickens, with plump naked breasts and limbs, and softly feathered stretched necks. The ducks, in line, had their webbed cold feet tucked neatly along their sides, gold beaks, black eyes, neck feathers scarlet on white. Beneath them the display counter was lined and fringed with emerald green artificial grass. On this miniature meadow capered various folklorique figures and mythical creatures. A grinning cardboard pig, poised on one trotter, bore on its forelegs a platter of steaming sausages. It was covered, possibly for decency’s sake, with a blue and white striped apron, and wore a tall, white, three-dimensional chef’s cap, at a rakish angle. A benign and jovial bull’s head, all curly hairy strength and weighty life, cut off at the nape, was juxtaposed in a kind of triptych of glossed cardboard with various bright cubes of Oxo and beakers full of hot brown energising liquid. A very young cut-out nursery-rhyme black-and-white calf skipped sportively on daisy-spangled grass under a bright sun and clear blue sky. On the top of a mound of little pies wrapped in cellophane, a chicken, calf and piglet disported themselves in circular dance, representing the English concord and harmony of veal, ham and egg.

  On the next layer, white marble below the brilliant green, were enamelled dishes of more recondite goods, alternating in colour and texture. A block of waxy suet, a platter of white, involuted, honeycombed and feathery tripe. Vitals: kidneys both stiff and limp, some wrapped still in their caul of fat, the slippery bluish surface of meat shining through slits in the blanket, the cords dangling: iridescent liver; a monumental ox heart, tubes standing out above it, a huge gash in one side, darkening yellow fat drying on the shoulders. Half a pig’s head, boiled, pale and faintly blood-stained, a metal tag clamped to one ear, bleached white bristles round the snout, stiff, salty white eyelashes, a levelled plane at the base.

  In front of these, cuts and joints. A Bath chap, sliced and pushed into a regular cone, coated with golden crumbs, glistening in its cellophane wrapper, a neat, impersonal object. Lamb cutlets in neat lines, a repeating pattern, pink flesh, white fat, opalescent bone, parallel lines, identical uneven blocks, achieving a kind of abstract regularity through the repetition. A crown roast, twisted, knotted, circled with curled coronets of snipped white paper on every protruding rib. Rump and flank and shoulder and hand and belly of beef and pork and lamb and veal tidied into long and short, fat and slender rolls, held in networks of knotted strings, punctuated by miniature wooden stakes and skewers.

  If all flesh is grass, all flesh at some other extreme is indeed geometry. The consuming human, with his ambivalent teeth, a unique mouthful, herbivore and carnivore, is an artist in the destruction and reconstruction of flesh, with instruments for piercing, prying, tidying, analysis and palatable rearrangement. Man the artist can reconcile under golden skies the jocund pig and the plump and tubular sausage, or he can create, from sweated suet, mangled breast of calf, chopped parsley, bread and beaten eggs an incurving sculptural spiral of delicate pink and white and green and gold.

  On each side of the door hung, straining from a hook through the tendon, half a carcase of beef. Marcus walked in with his mother as it were through this creature, which must have been splayed across the doorway that morning, headless neck down, and slowly sliced down the spine with blows of a hatchet. He had seen that done. He saw now the bulging flesh in its stained and clinging muslin coverings, and saw also the cold structure: chain of vertebrae, fan of ribs, taut sheen of inner skin bet
ween veiled bone and bone. Beyond this was a row of pale pig corpses and stiffly extended lambs.

  The geometrical defence was hard and close to the grain, here. The smaller the cut, the greater the geometrical precision, and with the precision, the possibility of contemplating the thing. If a man might see, or imagine, or think in terms of units like molecules, units like chops might in turn be tolerable, parts of varying and interesting other organisations. Units like half-pig’s-heads were not possible. But the earth and the air were full of matter that may once have been part of a half-pig’s-head. He couldn’t care about everything, nor about nothing. Through his own eyes, half-a-pig’s-head was a meaningful and bearable unit.

  From behind the wooden block, scored, indented, scooped by chopper and cleaver and saw, dark Grinner greeted them vigorously. Stephanie and Frederica had named him because his expression varied only between the more and less gleeful. Once he had invited Frederica out for a ride on his motor-bike, leaning across the counter, wiping his hands on a damp and bloody dishcloth. Frederica would have gone, but Bill had forbidden it on the grounds that the motor-bike was certainly and the Grinner probably dangerous. “What can I do for you?” he asked Winifred. His hand was buried inside a distended fowl, from which he drew, in a long stream, with a suck and a crack, all the contents: soft pale guts, hard giblets in glistening fat, red-veined golden-skinned clusters of eggs, his manipulation swelling the creature into a gawky parody of life.

  “A pound of lamb’s liver and a shoulder of veal,” said Winifred. The Grinner nodded, swung out a thing like a child’s seaside bucket, from which he popped out a glossy pie of frozen livers from the Antipodes, brittle and dark. He tapped it with his big knife.