The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Perhaps there was something particularly unpleasant about English Easter. It had not been possible to graft Eastern blood rites and dismembered God on to English Spring as it had been possible to bring together Northern celebrations of the winter solstice, moving star, evergreen tree, ox, ass, shining messenger and stone-frozen land. There was a hot, barbaric quality about the lessons for Easter Day which had nothing at all to do with pussy-willow and lemony floss chickens, although it might possibly have related to forgotten druidic atrocities. The lesson from Exodus was about the Paschal lamb and the god who flew over in the night and slaughtered the first-born men and beasts. It gave instructions for smearing blood on doorposts and for slaughtering and broiling the immaculate offering. The second lesson, from Apocalypse, presented Alpha and Omega, first and last, the Son of Man white like wool, white like snow, with flaming eyes like fire and feet like fine brass burned in a furnace. The scarlet and white woolliness of the souls washed in blood had mystified and appalled generations of men, and Englishmen. But it was alien. Birth was a real miracle, Stephanie’s cold mind ran on, and resurrection would be a greater one, if believed, but the blood we drink, the shadowy, temporary Form outside the spiced tomb, are neither believed nor needed as the song of the heavens at the Birth is believed and needed. Our Green Knights sprouted new heads on riven shoulders, their startled veins ran new blood, Langland’s Christ harrowed Hell like any hero visiting the underworld and returning scatheless. But those were Christmas again. English Easter tried to graft to the imagery of cleansing ritual slaughter the renewal of sap, the bounding of Wordsworthian lambs, the emergence from smooth sealed eggs of fluffy chicks, living gold from stone. But the English mind was secretly horrified by glassy sea, crystal walls, white wool, brass feet and throne of the New Jerusalem where Spring would never come again because there was neither grass nor winter.

  Mr Ellenby preached on St Paul. He assured his congregation that if Christ had not risen there would be no Church and they themselves would be condemned to eternal death. If after the manner of men, said Mr Ellenby, adjusting his glasses, licking his dry lips, I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die. A terrible saying, said Mr Ellenby, beating his fist on the stone edge of his pulpit, smiting it, if we were not assured that Christ is alive now, that the natural processes, so terrible, were thwarted and changed, a dead heart beat and dead feet walked, decomposition was stayed and reversed, and therefore we rejoice, in fear, because we too live forever. The people nodded and smiled as they nodded and smiled annually, and Stephanie felt every stage of rejection, from embarrassed discourtesy to frozen hate.

  After the service Mr Ellenby and Daniel stood at the door and shook each parting parishioner by the hand. She knew by now that she should not have come; that Daniel knew she had come to look at him praying; she tried to linger. She strayed over to Miss Wells’s Easter garden, around which a knot of people had gathered, exclaiming at its prettiness.

  It was heaped up and landscaped on carefully chosen pieces of local limestone and granite, the interstices padded with wet earth and turfed with strips of moss. The tomb was a squared wigwam of leaning slates: inside it linen handkerchiefs were carefully rolled and disposed as cerecloths. Outside, a pottery angel with a silver wire halo leaned a little uncertainly against a sprig of hawthorn, its hands clasped in prayer or rapture. At the top of the hummock Christ, also porcelain, stood in pale blue and blessed the air with pallid hands. Lower down, Mary Magdalene, darker blue, followed his upwards progress along a spangled trail of snapped heads of primroses and aubretia. Round a little pond, made of mirror glass, stood clumps of spring flowers, snowdrops, wood anemones, aconites, their stems encased in cotton wool in meat paste pots beneath the stones. Scyllas as tall as Christ himself nodded open-mouthed over the stones above him. Stephanie was reminded of the dolls in Two Bad Mice who leaned against the dresser and smiled and smiled. The children had placed offerings round the periphery: shells of eggs, thrush, blackbird, plover, a few floss chickens with sharp wire feet. Miss Wells begged Stephanie, as once before, to smell the honey and wine of the primroses: she did so, and there was the smell again, pure honey, pure wine, cold earth.

  A new voice reminded her of other problems. Lucas Simmonds inserted his shoulder beside hers and made a way for himself: he thanked Miss Wells, as though she had made it for his benefit, for the little pretty garden, greeted Stephanie and remarked that it had been a very happy service, he thought.

  Stephanie had nothing to say. Even more than the china Christ and angel, Lucas Simmonds smiled and smiled. Involuntarily she caught Marcus’s eye. As Daniel had blushed, so Marcus paled. His hands were pleating his trouser-leg along his thigh. It was the first time she had seen him, at least apparently voluntarily, with anyone else, she realised, for as far back as she dared remember. It was the first thing, outside daily routines, she had known him do, since … Ophelia.

  “Easter is a time of triumph,” said Simmonds. “The Church has never fully understood the universal significance of Easter. Easter, not Christmas as is vulgarly presumed by our practices at least, Easter is the central feast of the true calendar. In it we celebrate – as we so beautifully see here emblematised in this little garden – our unity with the vegetable creation, the grass that is mown and springs up, the harvest that is sown from the gathered seed. In it too we celebrate the eternity of the Spirit, the eternity of the Species, the assurance that we shall not fail. There is something in this Feast for everyman, even those who are not of this Faith, who do not worship according to this rite. A man must worship in the time and place he finds himself in. I have not seen you here before, Miss Potter.”

  “No. I don’t – come here.”

  “I am glad to see you on this occasion,” said Simmonds, as though the church was his. The pontifical tone bore no relation to the painful attempts at small talk she remembered from the Blesford Ride “do”.

  Stephanie thought she should say something to her brother: as though to meet was natural: which, God knew, there, it was not. Simmonds said, “We must slope off, Marcus. There’s work to be done!”

  “On Easter Day!” protested Miss Wells.

  “God’s work,” said Simmonds, inclining his head and pushing Marcus out of the church before him. “God’s work.”

  Stephanie looked around the church and saw that she was now almost alone in it, with Felicity. She decided to hurry out.

  In the porch, Vicar and Curate waited. Mr Ellenby took her hand in both his, said he was pleased to see her, that he hoped … voice trailing. Daniel held out a stiff hand, touched hers.

  “Good morning,” he said. He looked into the church hopefully for another customer.

  “Good-bye,” he said, on seeing that there was none.

  It had stopped raining. She strayed across the churchyard, between grassy hummocks and leaning stones, stopped to look at a bunch of daffodils thrust into a polished urn amongst marble chips. Grass, daffodils, yews, the dead, Marcus.

  She wondered if she should possibly be glad Marcus had a friend. He never had had any friends; never brought anyone home. The peculiar grimness of their family life made it possible for this to have gone unremarked, as her own and Frederica’s reluctance to invite friends in went unremarked. She herself had had friends. She was popular in her mild way, had gone camping with the Girl Guides. Frederica had passionate relations with girls much older or much younger than herself, which led to disaster, rebuff, or sudden distaste. But their father’s unpredictable behaviour precluded bringing friends home. He might, excellent teacher, socratically quiz a young visitor, paying flattering and manipulative attention to that visitor’s views and beliefs. He might just as likely be heard screaming through lath partitions that it was intolerable that no thought should be given to his need for silence to work in, or, worse, that mince had been served once too often that week already and the cook could expect to have it thrown at her.

  W
inifred appeared to believe that what they had was a “family life” more intense and significant than such casual entertaining, if it had even taken place, could aspire to be.

  Stephanie thought: I have no idea what Marcus is like with other boys because I have never seen him with one. She thought, even if that man is making a pass at him it’s almost arguable it’s better than nothing at all. But she hadn’t liked Simmonds’s phrase “God’s work”, no, it had been gnomic, public, complacent. She could have consulted Daniel, and would have done so, if sex had not confused everything. She felt uncharacteristic self-pity. She had not asked Daniel Orton to become crimson and floundering and intense and censorious. She could have co-existed with his Christianity if he’d kept his distance. She liked him and now it was spoiled. This thought and the thought of Marcus’s friendless state made her sorry for herself that she was here. Cambridge had wanted to keep her: she could have paced the polished corridors of Newnham or Girton discussing Keats’s prosody and the protection of clever debutantes from their sillier selves. She could have married any of five or six or probably more young men, future dons and civil servants, teachers and town clerks, even a minor landowner with a vintage Rolls Royce and an ancient monument in need of a mistress, he said. She had come back to grim bedrock because reality was enduring things. But was what Marcus endured, reality? Was she simply burying her one talent in the grimy soil of Blesford?

  She had come back, she admitted, partly because of the young men, because she was always so very glad to get out of their beds. She couldn’t have kept that up. Nor could she have kept up refusing what they seemed to want or need, on the other hand. She felt used, and that if she was, it was her own fault. If Marcus was having a weird fling she hoped at least it was bringing him some pleasure, however superficially unlikely that seemed.

  She found she had walked halfway round the periphery of the church and was now standing against the vestry wall next to a water butt and compost heap, built of dead wreaths and faded bunches of flowers. Walking towards her between the tombs was Daniel, divested of the surplice. He stopped some feet away and asked peremptorily.

  “Looking for someone?”

  “No. Just walking up and down.”

  “Why did you come?”

  “I don’t know. To see what it was like.”

  “And are you satisfied?”

  “Satisfied?”

  “Did you see what it was like, then?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t like it.”

  “I don’t suppose you expected to.”

  “I mean, I was so convinced it was all untrue. I was miserable. Christmas means something to me – even if I don’t – but all this – Christmas has its own truth.”

  “Things are either true or not,” he said harshly. “Ultimately. Christmas or Easter. Either they happened or they didn’t. Either you believe them, or you don’t. They aren’t pretty stories or nice metaphors, nor yet folklore, and you know that. You don’t believe a word. You shouldn’t have come here.”

  “You can’t tell everyone not to come just because there are things they don’t believe. You’d have no one left.”

  “I’ll be judge of that. But I’m not telling everyone. I’m telling you. You oughtn’t to have come.”

  He looked at the earth at his feet, ridged and grassy. His hands were clasped behind his back.

  “If you mean – I came because of you – if I did – I only came – to see what you believed. To try and understand. Was that bad?”

  He hunched his shoulders, as though his neck ached.

  “I reckon it wasn’t much good. Did you understand?”

  “No.” The ice hung heavy in her. She was a woman who, out of a usual combination of sensitivity to others’ feelings and moral cowardice would put herself endlessly out in order not to offend sensibilities or trample down firmly held beliefs. With him, she was not to be like that. She said waspishly, “No. Truthfully, if I try to take it seriously, I find the whole thing repellent. A tarted-up blood-sacrifice, a fairy-tale with no evidence an historian would accept, and a kind of revolting sappiness covering it over, like sugar. I really feel that.”

  “Well,” he said slowly. His face closed blackly. “You knew you’d feel that. I could’ve told you what you’ve just said. You ought to’ve stayed away.”

  She became angry in turn.

  “Is that all you have to say? You don’t take me seriously, do you, it doesn’t matter to you what I think, we won’t discuss it, oh no. You just behave as though I’m some sort of tempter, as though all this – confusion and embarrassment – is my doing. As though I was a sin of yours. Well, I’m not. I am –”

  “All right. That’s fair. I retract. It was all my doing. Because I was slow. I should’ve stopped it all before it properly got going but I was too slow. Such things hadn’t happened to me before, as I told you. I didn’t rightly see how things were. Now I do, I’ll manage. I’ll manage.”

  “And what can I do?”

  “Forget all about it. Go home.”

  He appeared to be deliberating with himself. He said with weighty kindness, reassuring himself, her, neither of them, “I should be able to take notice in time, next time. There must be a point where you can choose things not to happen. If you watch out. There must.”

  She too was slow. She had used violent words and released violent feelings: any expression of anger, since she always carefully avoided it, terrified and elated her. She had committed double sacrilege, offending his feelings, breaking her own rule of mild behaviour. And he simply condescended to her. Anger filled her, and took the strange form of a desire to touch and disturb him. Morally he was right and she was indefensible. Nevertheless she took a stumbling step across the mown grave-hump, and pulled crossly, urgently at his locked hands. She was visited by a precise memory of his face on her legs. He twisted his hands sharply free.

  “If this goes on,” he told her, “I s’ll have to leave this place altogether. Can’t you see that? I don’t want to.”

  “You treat me as though I wasn’t there.”

  “I wish you weren’t, now.”

  “You’re as bad as you say I am. You needn’t have come out here now. You could have left it as it was.”

  “I wanted it cleared up,” he said, with dubious authority. “I’ve prayed, and I’ve thought, and I’ve come to see I’m paying for having thought I’d not got much in me – much private needs, much sex, and so on. I’m slow. I’m slow. But it oughtn’t to do any more damage.”

  “You are appallingly self-centred and arrogant.”

  “As you’ve already told me. Maybe we both are. I’ve still got a right to ask again – what do you want out of this now? Why are you still here?”

  “I told you.”

  “And I said, you shouldn’t have come.”

  At this, she turned, and began to walk rapidly away across the grass.

  Daniel, who had in fact premeditated none of what he had said, who had neither prayed, nor thought, as he said he had, who was still slightly winded by the shock of seeing her there at all, nearly growled out a command to her to stop, thought better of it, let her go. He would have liked to shake her till her teeth rattled and then bang her against the yew. Instead he kicked leaves, rusted wires of wreaths on the compost heap, tossing up coffee-coloured dead daffodils, rotting and blotched roses, shrivelled irises, in the rubbish. His serviceable shoes were wet and muddy and spattered with clinging dead petals. Looking back at the gate she saw him there, glum and substantial, grinding dead stalks into the earth.

  16. Hypnagogy

  Stephanie woke from a liquefying dream to a liquid sound. In the dream she was standing in a bare room, boards and plaster, by a carpenter’s table on trestles, explaining to someone just out of vision that the house was well-made, very solidly made. Its window-frames were primed but not painted: the room was daylit, but when she looked out of the window she was looking into a night sky, tossing and agitated, which she slowly unde
rstood to be not sky but sea, towering heavily, blackly crested, swaying higher than her house. She went to the window and looked out, and saw, or knew, what perhaps from where she was she could not actually have seen, that the house stood on a sandbank that was already eaten away in a huge curving cantle by the advancing water. Under the window the water was lit, so that she could see the sand breaking in wet wedges, dissipating, running out in swirling currents of grains, like yellowed mist. There was a steady sound of slopping wet sand and slapping water, and an ominous creaking of wood. She woke herself just before the house shifted. The dream, she thought, was somehow the same as the one in which all one’s teeth crumble and gape. She resented, also, being made to dream in biblical parables of such crude relevance. The sound, however, persisted, a wet sound, a creaking of wood.

  Her room was next to Marcus’s room, her bed-head, through the wall, next to his. When the sound did not stop she went out to look; there was a strip of light, under his door. She knocked. He didn’t answer. She tried the handle and went in.

  He was lying in bed, the reading-lamp still on. The sound was the sound of long, bubbling sobs, mixed with an intermittent creaking of the bed. She whispered his name: he did not answer: she crept nearer.

  He was turning his head from side to side. His eyes were closed, screwed up as though against the sun; his brow was wrinkled; his mouth was pulled open. The whole of his face was running wet, and so was part of the pillow. As she watched, more tears burst out under his eyelids and ran down into his open mouth. His hair was wet. On the floor by the bed were papers, spread in a fan, covered with geometrical drawings and crude little pictures of stick-men, trees, buildings, connected by arrows in different colours, or chain-like links. There was also an exercise book with a label: Hypnagogic Vision. She did not touch the papers, but put a hand on his shoulder, and when he neither woke nor stopped weeping she sat and stroked his hair, tucking the sheet round his chin. He closed his mouth and the sobbing stopped. He sighed heavily, jerked up his knees and buried his face in the pillow, seeming to compose himself into immobile sleep. After some time she went back to her room.