The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Daniel, who still appeared unaccountably gloomy.

  When they did come out onto the sand, out of the tunnel, the sea-wind hit them like a wet canvas wall to walk into, a deafening, stinging buffeting on their faces.

  “Oh,” said Stephanie, opening her mouth, swallowing cold salty air. She staggered and laughed. “Oh, Daniel.”

  A steady noisy fluttering set up in the skirts of her coat. She beat ineffectively at them, put up a mittened hand to the starry beret.

  “Come round this side of me,” said Daniel. “I’m a good solid windbreak.” He stood between her and the stream of air off the sea, under the harbour wall. Dry sand blew and snaked and eddied, rose in a crest and fell inanimate under the wall. The tide was running out; beyond them it had flung its limit-line of glittering black grit, ground dust of mussel shells, tossed strands of bladderwrack. The sands were printed with long dimpling ribs, mirror-images of the water; where the beach dipped, a ruffled sheen of it still winked and shone. Daniel laughed with idiotic pleasure.

  “Six miles of sand,” he said, waving his thick arms out, embracing it. He buttoned his collar, pulled the black hood over his bristling hair. The wind swung round his head, and little heads of sand lashed furiously at his turn-ups. Here he could put out scarecrow arms and almost be blown, clumsily weightless, along with the weather. He crooked his arm, and offered it to her.

  “We’ll walk to th’Brigg,” he said, showing where the line of rocks and boulders jutted into the sea. “You don’t mind the wind.”

  It was not a question. Her lips and cheeks stung. Her eyes were filmed with cold air and tears. She put her head behind his shoulders and gave an ambiguous nod. They set off, close together, making an erratic, sinuous, tracking path, in wandering mazes, occasionally bumping each other, out of step, occasionally trotting, almost running, as the wind filled their clothes like sails and almost lifted them into flight. Once, separating her head from his shoulder she looked back at the still wide curve of the bay, onto which the receding sea was thrown in white looping skeins, off which the wind-dried surface sand was snatched and tossed. It was all a pother, and yet a smooth shape, a clear shape. When she took her ear away from him it filled with a frozen roar. She put it back.

  In this way, after a stretch of time, they came to the end of the seawall, where the slipway ran down to the beach, down which the fishing-cobles rolled on rubber wheels, up which pony carts trotted in the summer, bright with 1930s Minnie Mice and Donald Ducks. Beyond the slipway the beach was bounded by the unstable cliffs, whose grassy brows and red muddy walls declined steadily towards sand and water. Perched in this cliff, shored up on girders, was the Marine Café. Daniel indicated it with a sweep of his free arm.

  “If it should be open,” he boomed, “we could get a cup of coffee and a bun, to fortify us for the next bit.”

  There were one or two old men with dogs hugging the shelter of the wall and some lugworm diggers by the waterline. It did not seem likely the place would be open. Stephanie felt a strong desire for coffee, hot, wet, sweet. She swallowed. Daniel bounded ahead up the cliff steps, dipping crazily, wooden sills to vanished mud surfaces, and beckoned from the door. It was open. Life was good. She went composedly up, crimson-cheeked, and sat down in the sudden hot quiet with eardrums throbbing and roaring. It was a little time before they could speak. They ordered coffee and toasted buns. The smell of toasting was almost painfully warm and promising.

  The Marine Café was a faintly boat-shaped construction, with metal-framed windows and little basket-work tables with tops of ice-green glass. The windows of the sun lounge were smeared and blurred by the salt spray; the emerald table-tops were smeared and blurred by indiscriminate wiping. Outside clouds raced across the sun, streamed in the bright sky. Inside the glass brightened and darkened, muted. It was like being in an aquarium, in some thicker element. When the coffee came, it was hot and not nasty. Daniel wanted to produce a compliment on her bright eyes and rosy cheeks, and dared not.

  He said instead, “I used to come here with me dad and mum. They had cups of tea and I had ice-cream in a silver cup. Well, I suppose it wasn’t silver, but I called it that.”

  “Family life,” he said. “Family life. It’s a funny idea. When we were here in this place – us three – we were supposed to be together, we’d come here for that. And not one o’ the three of us had any idea of what to say. Sometimes my dad’d clown about. He couldn’t abide to be still. No, he couldn’t abide to be still. He had to be doing something. Holidays drove him mad, I sometimes think. My mum sat in a deckchair and I wasn’t much use to him. Too fat and slow. I wouldn’t climb and run, I never learned to swim. He’d go out in all weathers, he’d plunge up and down, and we’d watch from th’shore. Silly way of passing time, really. I reckon he heaved a sigh of relief when we could go home and he could get back to work and stop thinking up things to do, like, or to amuse me.”

  “You can’t abide to be still, now.”

  “No,” said Daniel, “I can’t. But that came later, that came after he died.”

  “I didn’t know he was dead.”

  Daniel looked irritated, as though she should have known that. He was struggling to tell her what, in view of the position she held in his thoughts, it was easier and pleasanter to assume she already knew.

  “He died before I was eleven.”

  “I’m sorry. What did he die of?”

  “Iron ore trucks. Broke loose and crushed him.” He brooded, separate from her. He saw his father, huge, white, streaming with water inside the green-lit, sea-smelling, canvas-smelling beach-tent, towelling his shoulders and trunk, and the vigorous hair, like Daniel’s own. He thought of all that, cracked and smashed, and told Stephanie, “I didn’t grieve. I don’t remember grieving. I should’ve grieved more.”

  She put a hand in his direction. He did not take it.

  “I’m sure you did grieve, Daniel. Maybe it was too painful to remember, after.”

  “He was a good man. A big, kind, ordinary good man. He was exacting. Always at you, at me, that is, to excel, to do things properly. I wasn’t grateful. I am now, though. I resented it then, I think. I don’t know. I loved him.”

  How could he make her imagine that dead man? Why, indeed, should she? He wanted her to have his past. But that wasn’t possible.

  As for Stephanie, she knew what he wanted, and yet was angry. It is a frequent irony that those to whom we feel we need to make an offering of our past feel threatened, or isolated, or diminished by that past. It was a further irony, in their case, that a small truculence rose in Stephanie as a result of this. The shadowy engine-driver was not there, after all. But she was. She was. Daniel should see what was there.

  When they came out on the slipway it was colder. The clouds were piling up in vaporous, slaty banks, curdling and swaying behind the crumbling red cliffs. There was another huge half-moon of sand to cross to reach the Brigg. Daniel felt low: he dug his hands in his pockets and stood squarely, staring out. She tugged his sleeve.

  “Come on then. It’s going to rain. It’s blowing enough of a wind to satisfy even you.”

  He looked down at her, shrugged, and took a step. She said something he didn’t hear.

  “What?” he roared into the wind.

  She spoke again, and again he could not hear; the air took her words and mixed them with its own noise. He pulled her closer to him, and they set off across the last segment of sand.

  They crossed a shelving ledge of the squeaking, raw-red mud, and then were on firm sand, which was crossed, from time to time, by rapid channels of blood-coloured water, running down, slicing their own neat shores, to the sea. Once they had to jump, where effluent bubbled and hurried, peaty-cream and frothy, from an iron pipe that rose from the mud, and for a little distance blood-red and creamy froth and silver light off sea water mingled and glittered and turned. Then as they moved out into the bay everything was a plane of dazzling sun off watery sand. There were no oth
er footprints, only dark conical miniature volcanoes of wormcasts breaking the glitter. They advanced crabwise, through the whirling air, both seeing a turning combination of earth, air, water, light, through the stung rainbow of their own tears. Their ears ached and hammered: chorales thundered in Daniel’s head broken by his heavy breathing. Stephanie, lungs beating and distended, waited for her second wind, amazed that cold salt could so scald. It was hard to see how far they had come or had to go, the sand was so extensive and bright, so that they seemed to be struggling on without progressing, running on the spot. And then her second wind came, she breathed a comfortable breath, and the wind came at them in a flurry and they were practically blown on to the Brigg.

  To get on to the Brigg proper it is necessary to scramble over boulders and piled stones, sharp with barnacles and limpets, thick with bubbling brown and soft matted green weeds. They climbed and skidded, arriving in time at the man-made causeway that runs out for some of the way along the spine of the Brigg into the sea, shoring up, solidifying with asphalt and concrete, what is jammed and cracked and grinding and sloping and rocking. They got onto this somehow on all fours, and stood up under the memorial tablet to the Paget family, swept away by a huge wave, their fate carved there as a warning to other men. The salt smell was now organic; briny, iodine, alive, alien. Daniel breathed it in with pleasure. He said, “Do you want to go on? Shall we go out to the end? Or round to the caves?”

  “Out,” she said, pointing.

  “Good.” He could hardly wait. “We can get quite a way before it’ll be dangerous. Tide’s low. Did you know this place was said to have been built by the Enemy of Mankind to lure ships to their doom?”

  “I can believe it.”

  “Or as the first stage in bridging the North Sea. But he got impatient, and it fell about, so he gave up and we have the unfinished ruin.”

  They began, upright at first, and later, as the path vanished, crouching, squatting, sitting, clutching, to edge out to sea, intent only on their progress. Periwinkles rolled and clattered; Stephanie skinned a wrist on barnacles; fitted fingers into clutchholes in porous light boulder clay; went about and about to avoid patches of that leafage so vivid a green that it is tempting to call it unnatural, except that it grows, flourishes, in tufts and thickets, quite naturally, swept and submerged by the sea. A kind of third wind filled her. She began to enjoy her protesting body, placing fingers and toes, balancing spine and hip and shoulder. As they came out of the shelter of the headland the wind beat differently: less monotonous, less flapping, shrill, sharp, singing, whirring. They came to a high flat place and stopped to look about.

  Immediately ahead waves were crashing in over the submerged tip of the rocky projection, flung high and smashed, rolling, circling, converging, splashing. And waves already divided by the end of the headland were crashing in from both sides, waters rising in a precipitous mass, hurled flat on a table of grit, running, trickling, sighing away down holes and channels to where it sucked and swayed invisibly under their feet. There was a weird homogeneity to the world out there. The sky was flung fragments, very blue and bright with flying shreds of cloud involved with tossed and whirling foam, flakes and flecks of white, off-white and cream, and grey and brown, with the birds turning and calling harshly in both elements, white birds, specked brown birds, beaks gold and blooded, hooked, harsh and clean in line.

  They stood on wet stone, stupidly obsessed by seeing, passive while a rapid swell rolled in, green-grey, gold-grey, lifting, cresting, whitening, and suddenly towered beside them, stood formed and tall over them for a moment of time, and fell, and dispersed on the rock at their feet, drenching them both, trickling, chuckling, streaming, broken by every stone and strand of weed, running back every which way into the undifferentiated cold mass. The fair-isle beret was soaked. Daniel shook his black head like a dog, and drops of water flew from it, sparkling and glittering in the patch of bright cold sunlight that seemed suddenly to have steadied over them. He looked at Stephanie who was standing, quietly standing, with the wave’s last waters running busily over and round her shoes on their way out. Slowly she took off the beret: the yellow hair was picked up and blown by the wind. It was streaked darkly with water, and her macintosh was covered with long, dark pointed stains. She stood there as though mesmerised by the water, her mouth open slightly, smiling secretly, while the wind rippled on in her wet hair and clothes. The sun was so bright now he could hardly see her. A smaller wave failed to hurl itself as high as they were. She again said something he could not hear.

  “What,” he cried, “what did you say?”

  She approached her mouth to his ear. He heard “… your language, then. Let there be light, I said.” She seemed drunk and chuckling, lit up. “Come on,” she said. She began to go out along the rocks, very fast, holding her arms wide to balance herself, half-running, half-striding. He went after her. Another tall wave bowed, jarred, cracked and whispered at her feet. She turned to him a face he had never seen, blindly smiling, wild, white and wet. As she set off again, another wave rose, Daniel seized her, the drenching waters descended, and Daniel took hold of her hair and body. He kissed her. There was a mixture of salt and cold and heat and unbalance. She kissed him back. She kissed him so certainly that they both staggered and Daniel could only right them by tugging her hair and shoving with his knees. This caused her to become pliant and docile, who had been straining and flying.

  “You are not going to be drowned,” said Daniel, dragging. Between two boulders he gathered her most uncomfortably and kissed her again. She had a look almost of lewd abandon. Daniel was in a state of extremity. He banged her accidentally on the rock, then propped her on his own solid body. The cold sun shone on.

  “You will have to marry me.”

  “No. This is – a romantic moment – we made. It doesn’t change anything.”

  “Yes it does. We made it. We can make a lot more. We can do anything.”

  “You made it happen,” she said, pleading.

  “I want to live like this.”

  “You can’t. I know. These things – don’t last.”

  “Things I do last.”

  Tears were rolling down her cheeks, hot on cold sea and cold flesh. She knew, she knew that such things slipped away whilst you tried to recognise them, died whilst you tried to find out how to keep them alive, vanished whilst you tried to heave your life into new forms to accommodate them.

  “Have you ever felt like this?” said Daniel, as though the question were conclusive.

  “No. But –.”

  “Nor me.”

  “Daniel – it almost doesn’t mean anything – it’s only for here and now.”

  “No it isn’t. I don’t want much. But I want to go on like this. I want you. I want you. I want to have you.”

  “Oh, Daniel.”

  “And so do you want it. I know what you want.”

  He did not. But she said, “All right.”

  They were both taken aback. She repeated it almost irritably, as though if he hadn’t heard it it could be retracted. “All right. I said, all right.”

  Her face was streaming with tears. Daniel retracted an arm.

  “No, no. I’m forcing you. You don’t have to –”

  “You don’t understand. I thought you did. The thing is, I’ve never wanted anything, not anything for myself, in my whole life. I don’t know how to fit it in with anything else I know. I can’t deal with …”

  If he lost his certainty of purpose now they were both lost. But he said, “Then it’s all right. That’s the only thing. It will be all right.” He stared out over her pale head at the still and hurrying, blown and shining sea and sky.

  Much later they had sandwiches and beer in a pub in Hunmanby. They sat side by side on a wooden settle by an open fire and devoured rare red beef, onions and salt pressed into new brown bread. They could hardly eat fast enough: the taste was sharp and strong and entirely delightful. They were unused to being happy. Both were unconsciousl
y preparing themselves for the moment when happiness would crack up.

  “What next?” said Daniel, draining his pint.

  “Next?”

  “Next today, next in a week, next in a month. What shall we do now?”

  “What can we do?”

  “Get married. Soon. There’s no point in anything else.”

  “How soon?”

  “Well, there’s banns. Somewhere to live. That’s not easy, I earn next to nothing. You don’t want to live with the Vicar. Nor do I.”

  You said, all right, and suddenly everything was unrecognisable. She could not imagine living with Daniel. Or, it was true, without him.

  “I must see the term out, I must talk Daddy round. He won’t like it.”

  “Now or ever?”

  “Possibly not ever. But he might sort of come round a bit.”

  “I wouldn’t rely on it, myself. I wouldn’t wait, myself. But you must do as you think right. Vicar’ll want to talk to you.”

  The Church reared its ugly, sluggish solid head.

  “What will he say? He likes me.”

  “Aye, he likes you. I sh’d think he’ll think you’ll make a good vicar’s wife. Being so clearly on the side of the angels. You don’t need to get embattled wi’ him.”

  “You would.”

  “Yes. But then, I care about such matters. Your point is, you don’t. I sh’d think he’ll think you’ll civilise me. He thinks I’m uncouth.”

  “Daniel –”

  “Hm?”

  “In the nineteenth century, I would, I would have made a good vicar’s wife. In the twentieth, it’s not morally possible.”

  The bread and meat were comfortable inside him: the fire-warmth was on his sea-wet legs: her thigh was on his.

  “You’d make a good wife for me. You need to be doing. So do I. We’re alike. We’ll get on. It’s not as though I was one of the smells and bells kind of churchmen, and all that stuff, is it?”

  He put his hand in her lap, over her hand. Desire lunged at them.

  “I want, I want, I want,” said Daniel in a conversational voice through closed teeth.