The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Frederica stared up at this altogether more cluttered, less delicate creature, and observed that the queen seemed to be squatting.

  “Indeed she does. That’s partly an effect of foreshortening. But mostly because her garment is the map of England which necessitates some squashing and extending of the body. You see Land’s End fluttering beyond her left knee. And Scotland knotted over her left shoulder. Related to Drayton’s Polyolbion frontispiece, of course.”

  “The cornucopia,” Frederica began unguardedly, “seems to be coming out from between her legs from her …”

  “I take that to be the Thames Estuary. Centre of commerce. This is Elizabeth as Virgo-Astraea. Astraea, last of the immortals, goddess of Justice, ascended to heaven in the iron age and became conflated with the zodiacal Virgo. She acquired Libra’s scales, but also Virgo’s harvest-attributes, since Virgo and Libra are the signs of harvest.”

  “I know. I was born under Virgo. August 24th, St Bartholomew.”

  “An unexpected conjunction of portents.”

  “I don’t believe in all that.”

  “She was born under Virgo, Elizabeth. It’s arguable that Virgo and the Virgin Mary are quite closely related to much nastier savage harvest-deities – Cybele, Diana of Ephesus, Astarte.”

  “Birkin’s Moon.”

  “But his icons are so forced don’t you think, when you see this?” Frederica stared dutifully up at Elizabeth-Polyolbion-Virgo-Astraea. Because of its squat position the figure, partly absurd, had a craggy, chthonic, amorphous presence, more primitive than the nymphs and goddesses with their neat spherical breasts. Under its literally landscaped draperies it was heavy and exuberant, castle-crowned. The left hand held a naked sword; the scales of justice depended from the right; the cornucopia rose powerful and huge, a stiff curving horn, a river of plenty, between the monumental knees, spilling to its earth and along the architrave a cascade of plaster flowers and fruit, ears of corn and gilded apples.

  This was not the end of Frederica’s aesthetic education. All of them were taken, willy-nilly, on a guided tour of the State Bedrooms. These were cosmologically named, Sun, Moon and Planets, opening into each other, each containing a huge curtained bed under an elaborately painted ceiling. These large and draughty rooms had several entrances and exits, leading to closets, corridors and landings. Crowe bustled, somewhere between housekeeper, art historian and slave-driver, his arms heaped with the protective paper that hid the bedspreads, embroidered by the unfortunate Johanna Seale, from the light. In the Moon room these, and the hangings, had silver crescents on blue: Crowe pushed open the shutters and let in a little pale, cold, doubtful sunshine. All the bedchambers had plasterwork by the imaginative English Master of classical metamorphosis. In the Moon room this depicted the doings of Diana: the deaths of Niobe’s children and Hippolytus, the changing of Egeria to a spring of water. The ceiling, as Crowe said, unfortunately dominated things: a baroque innovation, it depicted in strange perspective the descent of Cynthia down the domed heaven to Endymion sleeping in his cave.

  Wilkie said, “I wonder how long since anyone made love in those beds? Rather a grand experience, I should think.”

  “They’d have been very cold at night,” said Thomas Poole. “Even with a fire, and all those hangings.”

  “I should think,” said Frederica, “if you bounced on that you’d raise vast puffs of dust. I should think if you shut yourself in those curtains you’d get claustrophobia. I should think with the room being a kind of thoroughfare you’d be quite put off.”

  “The ceiling was no doubt designed to put you on,” said Crowe.

  “Not me,” said Frederica robustly and personally, who had never exactly been put on to make love to anyone. “All those roundy slabs of pinky-brown flesh, and that awful flat unreal blue, and sickly rosy clouds. That flesh has an awful baked look, or half-baked, you wouldn’t want to touch.”

  Wilkie stared into the trompe-l’œil dome and after a moment took off his glasses. When he turned to Frederica she was startled to see that his eyes, which she had imagined were bright blue like his lenses, were in fact chocolate-brown. He blinked. She blinked. He said:

  “It was an Italian artist. That’s not English flesh, nor English light. The shadows are too sharp, the light’s too thin and intense, those browns and pinks aren’t part of our landscape. English eroticism isn’t rich blue and terracotta. Or carne cotta. It’s sylvan and aqueous. We expect to look through mists into depths. The English Arcadia is brakes and thickets and watery obscurity. Ho for the greenwood and the midnight clearing in Women in Love, or Lady Chatterley’s naked lover rushing around in the pelting rain in the forest.”

  “Mystic palpable real otherness,” said Frederica, producing her most-mocked quotation, quite aptly. “No thank you.”

  In the Sun room Mrs Bryce said her feet hurt, sat down on a carved chest and rubbed her arches. Reed and Braithwaite, enjoying themselves, scooped up papers from the resplendent fiery bed. Crowe pointed out the plaster Daphne, amongst the loves of Apollo, the plasterer’s masterpiece in his view, so very English, sprouting leaves on knobby joints, human veins starting and spreading into leaf veins, the arrested leaping legs thrust down into roots, the funny little face like an ancient English elf, not a Greek nymph. Miss Yeo quoted Marvell. Not as a nymph but for a tree. Reed and Braithwaite chanted about vegetable love and its vast growth. Crowe got hold of Frederica’s elbow and directed her gaze at the ceiling.

  “Better than next door. Jacopo I suspect was not profoundly inspired by women. But this.”

  The ceiling depicted the death of Hyacinth. It was in doubtful taste, if that was the way to describe the curious discomfort that overtook most who looked at it. The pale gold naked sungod, his golden locks elaborately dressed on his narrow shoulders knelt with his arms spread wide in horror or erotic adoration above the limp, idealised, bleeding brown body of the boy, whose redder blood stained the red sand in pleasing swirls and was already blossoming at the edges of its pools, into hyacinths, purply crimson on the scarlet and terra-cotta. The god’s head was poised, contemplating his work, on one side. The lids were dropped over the eyes, so that he peered through narrow slits, the wide mouth was stretched and down-drooping, slightly parted in that ambivalent expression that might be pure pain or pure pleasure, a mask of extreme feeling, frozen.

  Crowe gripped tighter.

  “Look at the line – the inner line of Apollo’s thighs, and the way they echo the boy’s. Look at the mindlessness of both those faces, and the line of the head in the blood, the repeated curves –”

  “He’s dead,” said Frederica. It seemed important to establish that he was dead.

  “Death and sexual ecstasy were interchangeable images.”

  “Still are,” said Wilkie. “People do look like that. Dead or ecstatic.”

  He spoke with authority. Frederica had no wish to ask him how he knew. Crowe went on.

  “Note the different perspective. Next door’s world’s enclosed in a regularly lit dome. Here the desert horizon stretches well away beyond the edges of easy vision – the eye has to travel, it can’t rest and take it in. And in this formless desert the central group is wholly formed, wholly composed. Look how precisely the flower-petals echo those glittering droplets of gore on his flank – with the droplet shape reversed in the flower. The whole thing’s a pyramid made up of little segments going up or down, like these drops – look at Apollo’s hair, the apex, the repeated curls and kinks. My theory is that it’s all a deliberate image of the cycle of generation and regeneration under the sun – the blood drops into the soil, the flowers spring up …”

  “Blue flesh,” said Wilkie, removing the goggles again. “Allowing for the after-image of these things. A lot of paradoxical cold reds, painted over blues, too.”

  “He has a cruel mouth,” said Frederica.

  “He was a cruel god,” said Crowe. “His stories are cruel stories. You shall see my little Marsyas, last of all. This god didn’t kil
l the boy, but look how Boreas, who did, over there, echoes his posture. Last of all, note the subsidiary groups of figures. Art historians label ’em nymphs and shepherds but I think that’s highly unlikely. My view is that the lot in the right – the ones formally dancing – are the Muses – ‘his choir, the Nine’ – you know – and those on the left, rather obscurely leaping around and gesticulating, are the initiates, the young men who celebrated Hyacinth, or Adonis, or Thammuz or whoever with orgies of self-mutilation and so on. You see the whole thing’s an infinity symbol – an elongated 8 on its side if you look – follow the arms and bodies through-crossing through Apollo and Hyacinth in the centre, where their bodies – ah – almost touch. Jacopo was quite a student of arcana and neo-Platonic mysteries. Here we have Apollo as principle of order and disorder, art and destruction. Resurrection and so on. Florid with a hard shape underneath.”

  “How obscene,” said Wilkie to Frederica, who giggled.

  Alexander and Jennifer had managed to get left behind beneath the visiting moon. They stood in tacit agreement at opposite sides of the room until the last straggler, who was Thomas Poole, came in, opened his mouth to address Alexander, thought better of it, and hurried on.

  Alexander stood inside the window, looking out over herb-garden, kitchen-garden, high walls, to the moor beyond, with its blown, tumbled, sharp-legged sheep.

  “Jenny. Come over here.”

  “You come over here and look at this bed.” They stood, side by side, peering solemnly at its convex silk surface. “You are always saying, if only we had a bed. Here is a monstrous bed.”

  Alexander agreed that it was. His hand found hers, in the small of her back. They stood enlaced.

  “I should push you,” he said, “ever so gently over, and take up your feet, so, and take off your shoes, and let down your hair … and then take off everything else – quite quietly … and spread you out …”

  “And stand and stare whilst I shivered in the middle of all this space.”

  “No, no. I would … I would …” He could have written it. He could not speak it.

  “You would do such things. I know, I know. We’ve been through all that. But we don’t, do we?”

  “We shall. There are months ahead –”

  “No, no. We must either give up, or –”

  “Or –” said Alexander.

  “Or get married. Then we could –”

  “Married.” He contemplated the moving curtains. He realised he supposed Jennifer was not good at marriage. He drew her closer. He was very nervous of being seen. He pulled her rather roughly behind the bed-curtain. He kissed her.

  Footsteps clattered. They sprang apart. Alexander pointed up at the ceiling and said the first line which came into his head.

  “And thee returning on thy silver wheels.”

  “Oh yes, Tennyson,” said Frederica with a chuckle of irrelevant complicity. “I always used to suppose that was about a statue on castors, not a chariot, silly fool I was. I’ve been sent to get you both, Mr Crowe wants to lock this wing and take us into his own turret he’s going to have when the students come. To see his Marsyas, he says. Personally, not being in the habit of sightseeing, I don’t know if I can take any more. Anyway, I’m here.”

  Crowe’s little wing, if not as hugely grand as the staterooms, was still palatial. He gave the cast tea in his study, a panelled dark room, in which only the little Marsyas was directly lit, and that Frederica took at first for a murky and obscure crucifixion. Crowe explained, with glee, that it was Jacopo’s subtlest and nastiest work, not, like Raphael’s Marsyas, an image of the animal strung up to await the divine flaying that would produce high art, but like Ovid’s Marsyas an image of pain on the point of disintegration, the body after flaying but still, for a brief moment, holding its terrible shape. The furry pelt was extended on the ground, the flesh and laced muscles were exposed, and gouts of blood were bursting out under the muscles, so that what had appeared at first glance to have the firmness of marble was running and slippery, bulging, about to burst into formlessness. Carved horn pipes lay cast aside: in the middle distance Apollo smiled his terrible empty smile and struck his lyre.

  Crowe put his arm round Frederica’s shoulder.

  “What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “It is very painful. It is lovely. It is the moment of the birth of the new consciousness. Marsyas cried out to Apollo: quid me mihi detrahis. Why do you tear me from myself. And Dante prayed to be so torn. Apollo should deal with him ‘si come quando Marsia traesti: Della vagina delle membre sue.’ As when thou didst tear Marsyas from the sheath of his members. A metamorphosis, yet again. The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Lava, pupa, imago. An image of art.”

  “It’s repulsive,” said Frederica. “I don’t want art if it has to be so nasty. Thank you.”

  “You still feel oppressed by my beautiful house?”

  “Oh, more so. But more interested.”

  “In what way?”

  She considered, casting a now cold eye on the hanging satyr.

  “Well – before I looked at it, it seemed amazing but unreal. And now I have looked, it seems amazing and too real. But I do want a good long walk in the open air.”

  Crowe laughed and released her. He said, “You must come and look again. You must familiarise yourself with all this.”

  14. Cosmogony

  At Blesford Ride, what most schools would have called the Sanatorium was called the Nursery. It was presided over by a stout Sister in not quite clean starched white, who wore a cap like a winged helmet, a row of scissors and pens across the swell of her breast, and a vigorous greying moustache. Her prescription for most upsets was darkness and starvation, which she called giving the brain and stomach a little rest. Most boys, after an hour or two of privation, more or less miraculously recovered and asked for release. Marcus was often in, with asthma and headaches. He did not ask to be let out.

  After the light and the Bilge Lab Marcus tried weakly to erase God and Lucas Simmonds from his consciousness. He did not read Simmonds’s pamphlet. He went the other way if he saw Simmonds in school corridors. He sought company before crossing the playing fields, or walked round. He had headaches with lights flashing just behind his head, neither in nor out. He did not throw the pamphlet away, but he kept it in his desk.

  One day, in a maths lesson, Marcus looked out and saw light moving on the tops of a row of lime trees on the horizon. He looked again, and saw it gathering and dancing. A bird went up in sunlight and flung sparklings and sprinklings of brilliance in the air. Marcus, greening, thrust a blind hand in his desk, seized the papers, put up his hand, and asked to be excused on account of migraine.

  In the Nursery, Sister tissocked her teeth, opened cold sheets on a high iron bed, watched him climb in and pulled down the green blind. The wooden acorn rattled on the sill. The room was in submarine gloom. Marcus drew up his knees to his chin, and did not look at the splinters of white light round the edges of the blind. Sister rustled out, closing him in.

  He was visited by brief visions. Light, the glassy hyaline rising like a sea and drowning him. Himself clasping Simmonds’s grey flannel knees and howling like an animal. Nothing else he called up seemed substantial or possible.

  Sister had put the papers in his bedside locker. He rolled over, let up the blind a cautious half-inch, and began to peruse them.

  Marcus had not, as Eliot said of James, a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. In a sense, however, all ideas appeared to him to be of the same weight as each other: he made no judgments about their possible truth or untruth: his response to them was not so much an intellectual as a near-perceptual planning of their coherence or incoherence, as he mapped the squares and possible moves on a chess board. His sense of coherence with verbal structures was also less acute than his response to visual, or mathematical forms. He assumed, without formulating the assumption, that words were crude indicators anyway and the
ir messages only approximations at best. So he skimmed Simmonds’s pamphlet as he might, in his youthful eidetic days, have skimmed a picture he was offered of fields or streets or shoals in waterways, simply as a kind of neural reconnaissance to aid memory. If his reading, even in this neutrally cognitive form, was also at fault because he had no knowledge of other texts from which Simmonds had patch-worked his theory of the universe, this was counterbalanced by the fact that he was reading Simmonds. He was indeed, in that sense, Simmonds’s only reader, though he had no desire, unlike every other person in this story, to prove his skill at reading people.

  The Plan and the Pattern was concerned to describe the interrelated wholes, indifferently named organisms or organisations, of which infinity was made up. There were three infinities: the Infinitely Great, the Infinitely Small, the Infinitely Complex. Some sort of weighting of value of things seemed to be attached to degrees of the last Infinity. E.g., “The further we proceed up the Scale of Matter, from minerals to vegetables, from vegetables to animals, from animals to Man and creatures more complex than Man, so it becomes truly manifest that the corpuscles that compose matter, atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, tend to group themselves in ever more complex ways to form ever more complex compound Bodies.

  “In respect of Complexity a living Body is superior to an inanimate Body since an arrangement of cells is more complex than an arrangement of molecules. An ant is therefore superior to the physical Being of the sun.

  “On this Planet there is no more complex organism than the human brain.

  “The whole Organisation of the Life of the Earth can be regarded as a sensitive film called the Biosphere stretched over the earth’s solid surfaces. This with the Lithosphere (the solid earth) the Hydrosphere (the liquid globe) and the Atmosphere (the gaseous envelope) make up the four aspects of this physical globe. I say nothing yet of the Mental Globe.