The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Stephanie had learned all these things. She had a blandly, unselectively retentive memory. As a child she had never failed, even against Frederica, to win that game where objects are brought in on a tray under a tea-towel, unveiled and whisked away again. She always remembered the details of the pattern on the tray, as well as the spoons, scissors, clocks, shoelaces, marigolds and glass animals disposed upon it. At night it was difficult to disembarrass herself of the day’s accumulated irrelevant knowledge. Remembered objects clogged her thoughts, floated, vivid spectra, before her closed eyes. She had sometimes to call them up deliberately one by one and mentally wipe them out, make her mind’s eye a temporary, illusory tabula rasa before sleep was possible. Even then, waking next day, she had trouble with an endless conveyor belt of unrelated objects, soliciting precise memory.

  Until she started teaching she had not thought there was anything unusual about this. She had supposed everyone was enriched or tormented by some such swarm of useful irrelevant remembered things and information. Education, then, was memory-training and those pupils she discovered with no memories were at a disadvantage. Later, when habits of mind, time and history were to be constructed without the pains of “learning by rote”, without mapped categories of sequence, grammatical, temporal or aesthetic, when art and politics were concerned with now and the future, such skills as hers were taken more lightly, or even mocked and discouraged. There are fashions in habits of mind as in habits of gear, and memory-banks went out, a little after the time of this story, a little after the coronation of Elizabeth II, as memory theatres had gone out with the Renaissance, and with memory-banks went works of art that were themselves memory-banks, went tradition and the individual talent, the bible, the pantheon, the different organisations of other languages. In stalls in the Antique Hypermarket or the Furniture Cave you might have seen on japanned or lacquered or brass or inlaid trays a pile of shored fragments like those that cluttered Felicity Wells’s surfaces, but you would neither have seen nor remembered their order or disorder in the way Stephanie did in 1953.

  In normal times Miss Wells’s room was hung with pieces of cloth. Lace over the table, dimity over the bed, red and gold silk, weighted with little gold beads, like milk-bottle covers draped, casually, for warmth and mystery, over the table-lights. But now it was layered and lined and stuffed with rolls and heaps and hanging half-constructed garments of bright and glistering cloths.

  Stephanie saw it all double, with wide clarity and narrow sharpness. She saw what things meant to be, and missed no detail of how they, in fact, presented themselves. She could imagine the scale of grandeur envisaged by those who deployed a Maple’s Louis Seize suite in a tiny lounge with walls of whipped-up plaster like the frosting on a cream cake. She could see what cleanness and simplicity had been imagined and desired by those who, ignoring existing geometry, converted Victorian kitchens to contemporaneity by tacking flimsy plywood over solid bourgeois panels, and added tiny hexagonal plastic doorknobs in “clear bright” modern colours where decent white china or solid brass had been. She saw, then, the layered glowing mystery, the gorgeous stuff Felicity Wells saw, and saw further the ambition to embody, here, now, in the present time and place, the vigour, the sense of form, the coherence lost, lost, with the English Golden Age. She saw how the hanging stage-cope on Miss Wells’s wardrobe-rail, and the Illustrated London News photograph of the Dean of Westminster in a cope worn at the coronation of Charles II, brought out for the coronation of Elizabeth II, and Daniel’s dog-collared presence, brought to Felicity Wells a happy sense of coincidence, superimposition even, of past grandeur and present business.

  She saw, and did not share. She saw too the hammered milk-bottle tops on the cope, and Daniel’s complete lack of interest in ceremony, Shakespearean, Yeatsian or High Anglican. She saw the chips in the teacups and the holes in the stockings. It was not her business to fuse any of these into new wholes. She just saw.

  Daniel took the tea-pot down to the Baby Belling on the half-landing and made tea. When he came back, putting the pot down carefully in the hearth, kneeling at Stephanie’s feet, Miss Wells, enthroned now in her art silk robes, was lecturing Stephanie on colour symbolism in Elizabethan dress. Everything she was declaring, had then had its precise significance, colour could be read. Yellow was joy, though lemon yellow was jealousy. White was death. Milk-white was innocence. Black was mourning, orange spite, flesh colour lasciviousness. Red was defiance, gold avarice, straw plenty. Green was hope, but sea-green was inconstancy. Violet was religion, and willow was forsaken. Her own dress she feared betokened inconstancy and was certainly unreliable.

  Daniel was sceptical of these mysteries. How, he enquired, did an Elizabethan tell white from milk-white, or distinguish straw from yellow from lemon from gold. And why, said Stephanie, did Carlyle speak of sea-green incorruptible if the thing meant inconstancy. In those days, Felicity Wells informed them, what was valued was the true colours. Not hues or shades. Yellow, blue, scarlet, green. Mixed colours almost always indicated shiftiness or corruption. It made for a brighter world. Carlyle was a Romantic and saw the sea as a natural force. With the Elizabethans nature was not the first thing, the first thing was the mind’s truth. Colour was harder for them to achieve. Stephanie said such certainty and intricacy were beautiful. Daniel said it seemed a bit daft. Miss Wells laughed at him waggishly and said that prostitutes wore green for a pretty reason. The pretty reason was the grass-stains on the girls’ gowns when they were tumbled. Also it was the bridegroom’s colour. For lusty spring. She sighed, glanced from Daniel to Stephanie. Lovely words, there were, for green. Popingay, gooseturd, willow. Even the shapes of the clothes, in those days, were full of significance. Early Tudor men and women were so very male and female. Huge shoulders and trunks. Full hips for childbearing, and bosoms you could see and judge. Only it got overblown. Vast peascod doublets and codpieces, farthingales and ruffs one could see neither round nor over so that the clothes were in truth a prison for the body. Or, in the case of women, the clothes showed they were someone’s property. Immobilised like hobbled horses by their own finery. Sexual symbols taking over from sexual display. Stuffed and wired. The old queen dyed and painted, with a commode under her farthingale. She blushed with appropriate pedantic earthiness. Daniel encouraged her, asking questions about special Westminster scaffolding for members with stuffed breeches. This irritated Stephanie. Clergymen were always trying to prove they were as animal as the next man. She did not see why.

  The dark closed in. The gas fire roared, spat and grew hotter. Daniel looked at Stephanie, at the place where her shirt collar met above her breast, at her glistening nylon calf, under the flow of silk she stitched. He burned. Miss Wells watched him burn.

  “Clothes,” he said glowering, “are to keep you warm, not gorgeous. King Lear.”

  Miss Wells told Stephanie she should have heard Daniel using Lear in his old age sermon, last Sunday. Stephanie said, not lifting her eyes, she thought he hadn’t read Lear. It had been pointed out to him, he said, that he ought to have. (He had meant to speak to her about Lear. But now could not. It had been a reasonably good sermon: he had talked it out.)

  “Unaccommodated man,” said Miss Wells, filling the silence. “But as a churchman, you should know that adornment has meaning …”

  The Cloth, said Daniel, was often enough like an embarrassing smell or skin rash. People had shifted out of railway carriages, when he got in. He wore it because he reckoned if there were rules, then you kept them. But he took no pleasure in it.

  This remark had the effect of drawing their female attention to his body, in its bulging and shiny suit. He felt sweat run under his arms and his brow as shiny as his trouser seat. He felt mocked. He said: “I’ll be off, now”.

  Miss Wells raised a finger. “No, no. Stephanie, my dear, you can get about. Offer Daniel a Jaffa cake, please.”

  She stood up, fetched the biscuit box, the floral one, came and stood close to him, hip against his shoulder, her breas
t near his face, bending solicitously over him. Her skirts – she was wearing the obligatory layers of stiffened net petticoat – rustled. Her shirt-dress was dark rose-pink. Her falling hair on her gold cheek was curved and full. He was seized with strangled rage.

  “No. I won’t, thank you.”

  “Take one, do,” said Felicity Wells.

  “Go on,” she said, uncharacteristically lingering. “Be a devil.”

  “I’m meant to be getting thinner.”

  “Just one,” she said, with absurd urgency, “can’t make any difference.”

  “To my fat? Oh, yes it can. I can burst out of my only suit. Go away. Take it away.”

  And still she stood, laughing, proffering.

  “Really,” he exploded, “really, I said no. Really no. For God’s sake, Please.”

  She drooped her head and took an irresolute step away. Miss Wells suddenly moved surprisingly fast, despite the bum-roll. Murmuring “excuse” and “bathroom”, she closed herself out of there. Daniel put his head in his hands. He held onto his own hair. He felt her stepping uneasily this way and that. He heard her say, “I don’t know why people are so awful about other people’s slimming. They seem driven to interfere with it. It’s funny.”

  He heard his own voice. “It’s not only slimming. People seem to be driven to interfere with other people’s attempts to resist any kind of temptation.”

  She drew back to the mantelpiece, laying a round arm along it, stealing a look at him. “Oh?”

  The gas fire poured out its creaking, dazing red heat. The talk sickened and muddled him. She was all rounds and folds and flutes of warm clean pink and gold. He understood for the first time that to compare a woman to a flower or a fruit was not just ornamentation.

  “People like to offer – biscuits and things – as an exercise in power. The woman tempted me and I did eat.”

  “No, really.” Her face deepened to the rose of her dress. “Really that won’t do. You can’t preach sermons on Jaffa cakes. Apart from dubious theology.”

  “I’m sorry my style doesn’t suit you.” He allowed his sense of injury to come through. He did not look at her. She would be immediately sorry. She was such a nice girl. He did not know how much she knew about what was going on. He added nothing, stared sullenly at the carpet, let her own anger embarrass her. If he said nothing at all, did not smile, placate, nor smooth …

  She floated back across the carpet, stood squarely next to him.

  “Daniel. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so rude. I don’t know why I’m so rude to you …”

  Don’t you, he muttered in his head, don’t you just. Or don’t you? He continued to stare at the floor. He burned. After a moment, incredibly, she put out a hand and brushed it across his hair.

  At this the ruthless Daniel began to tremble. He leaned blindly forward, grasped, pulled her against him, buried his hot and furious face in the pink laps of her skirts. She stiffened, began to tremble herself, then took one steadying step nearer, and her arms closed, light, protective, round his head. He pushed his face against her thighs, rocking them both. He heard her saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right …” He thought, you don’t know, you don’t know what it is. He murmured into the cloth, I want, I want, and withdrew hotly as Miss Wells, yet another example of stage-management and timing as the exercise of power, re-entered the room. Her eyes glittering as she took them in, she chattered away to them for ten relieving, even pleasant, interminable minutes, and then grandly dismissed them.

  One flight down, Daniel paused on the landing. “I live here.” She nodded, not looking at him. “Come in a moment,” he said. He had not known, until he asked, whether he would. She walked in. He noticed that she shut the door behind her soundlessly, releasing the catch slowly in the socket. She stood just inside the door. Daniel turned on, one after another, all the gloomy lights. Then he sat on the bed.

  “What can I say now?” he asked, almost angrily.

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “Oh yes I do.” He pushed fist into fist. “You can’t go on doing that to me.”

  “I’ve said I’m sorry. I had no intention of provoking.”

  “Oh no, you’re nice. You are so very nice. You meant to be nice.”

  “Don’t dislike me for it.”

  “I don’t dislike you.” He sighed heavily. “I just – no, what’s the use. This talk has got to stop here. You’d better tie up your scarf and go home. You’re not stupid, you can see you’d better go home. As for me, I can take good care it doesn’t happen again.”

  “That seems a bit bleak. As though I’d deliberately upset you. Just to dismiss me.”

  “You know it’s not that. Listen. You didn’t start this, right? I did. You are just being nice. Because you’re sorry for me, because of my job, and other things, fat for instance, so you’re nice. You must be nice. Well, I could take advantage of that, and the result’d be horrible. And I’m not using up time and energy on that sort of mess. So I think you should go home. And stay there a bit, please.”

  “You’re so sure you’re right. You make such heavy weather …”

  “No. I’m being practical.” He gathered himself and announced bluntly, “I love you. I want to marry you. I want … I want. No, it’s not heavy weather, but it’s me as has got to deal with it. It interferes with my work.”

  “You can’t want to marry me. You …”

  “That is what I want,” said Daniel, with finality, as though no answer could be possible or expected. He half expected her, faced with this bald statement, to get up and go away. He truly half hoped she would. What she surprisingly said was, “People always do.”

  “Always do what?”

  “Want to marry me. It’s frightening. Men at Cambridge. People I’ve only met twice, even only once. A waiter once at a hotel where we had a holiday. One of Daddy’s miners. The boy in our Bank. I think I must – it isn’t sex appeal, it’s always marriage – I think I must just look comfortable. It doesn’t feel like anything really to do with me. They don’t any of them know me. I must have a face like they choose for cigarette advertisements, an archetypal wife-face. It’s almost humiliating.”

  He said wrathfully, “I see, I see. A recurring problem you have. A bunch of misguided men. Puts me in my place. All right, I’m sorry, please go home.”

  She began silently to weep, brushing her eyes with the back of her hand, standing stockstill in his doorway. She brought out:

  “They don’t say, let’s go dancing, let’s have a holiday, let’s go to bed, or anything but I want to marry you, with a sort of awful reverence. I can’t deal with it. I don’t understand it.”

  He stood up and led her to the bed, where he sat her down, and sat beside her.

  “I could make you understand. But there’s no point. It’s not an awful reverence. I just want you. Better to marry than burn, and burning’s an appalling waste of time, I can tell you, so I would marry you, only I am able to see it won’t do. But don’t go away supposing I don’t know you. I want you, the way you would be, married to me –”

  “Don’t be arrogant.”

  “You’ve noticed that. Well, I’ve got most of what I really want. But this – no. I’ve prayed about it, to be let off –”

  “How dare you?”

  “What?”

  “That’s a horrible thought. Discussing me with …”

  “I don’t discuss …”

  “I won’t be prayed about. I don’t believe in your God. I’m not anything to do with that.”

  She could not tell why the thought of being prayed about filled her with such rage.

  “That’s another reason why it’s hopeless,” said Daniel, equally furious.

  “Your Church makes too much out of sex.”

  “If you mean they spend far too much time lecturing on it, and talk like Freud, as though everything was it, and nothing was anything else, yes, I agree,” he said. “But I’m in no position to judge. I simply haven’t pe
rsonally bothered about it before now, simply not.”

  She turned a dubious, tear-stained face to him.

  “I don’t think I’m homosexual or anything. Just very busy. If you can believe that. Until this …”

  Some of his furious energy left him: he dropped his large head and began to shake again. She edged timidly closer.

  “I didn’t understand.”

  “I shouldn’t roar at you.”

  “You shouldn’t take things so hard.”

  “That’s easy to say.”

  “I see that.”

  She put a hand on his knee.

  “Oh, Daniel –”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Daniel –”

  He turned then, and cast his arms heavily around her, and bore her over onto his protesting bed, where they lay, she staring over his shoulder at the ceiling, he with his weight, all of it, across her body, his face on her wet face on his pillow. He lay inert. She felt, her body felt, entirely relaxed. He moved a little and the opening of her shirt came into vision. Slowly, painstakingly, he undid the buttons, staring with alarm, amazement and pain at the golden-pale breast and throat. With an invisible fumbling hand he pushed up her skirt and felt her thigh, smooth and warm. He shuddered.