The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “So do I,” she said, truthfully.

  “There isn’t anywhere we could go.”

  “No. We could stay here. We could book a room, and make up a story, and telephone and tell some lies. People do. All the time. It ought to be easy.”

  His face took on its heavy, brooding look. “Would you find it easy?”

  “No. I’m a rotten liar. I’d worry.”

  “Aye.” He grasped her hand, crunching bones. “There must be a way. There must. People find all sorts of ways.”

  “Fewer people than you think.”

  He laughed abruptly. “In my profession you get to know how many people. How many of my kind of people. It seems an awful lot to me. There seem to be an awful lot of people who perpetually find themselves in situations where it’s downright difficult not to … Perhaps I’m just incompetent. Or not trying hard enough. What shall we do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They walked a lot more, in the event, and came inconclusively back to Blesford on buses and trains. At Blesford bus station he said,

  “The best I can offer is powdered coffee in my room.”

  “Well, I can’t offer anything at all.”

  The Vicarage was dark and empty.

  “They’re out.”

  “Aye, it seems so.”

  They mounted in the dark to Daniel’s floor. They closed themselves in. They listened. She said, “Where’s Felicity?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you shut the curtains?”

  He did that, and lit the fire, and the coal-scarlet bedside lamp. He turned to her. “Oh God, what now?”

  She did not know. They were both afraid of going to bed, not, oddly, because they had any primitive fear of failure in the act, but because they were more mildly, more insidiously, more deeply afraid of embarrassment. They feared the sudden irruption of the inhabitants of the house, or urgent parishioners. Daniel feared the ancient springs of his bed, and the faintly mildewed smell which when he was alone did not bother him. Stephanie feared her own incapacity to deal with Daniel’s morality. Sin, which she supposed it was, was a complex business. There must be some sense in which going to bed with her would be wrong, and the urgency of his intention to ignore this wrong excited her. It made the whole business serious and important in a way none of her Cambridge encounters had been, although it now occurred to her that it had suited her to flatten out all the responses of the young men to the automatic and everyday level at which she chose to behave herself. But this plunge into the unknown consequences of Sin alarmed her. She would not want to damage Daniel in his own eyes. She would not want to deal with a tempest of remorse. She held the fair-isle beret in both hands and twisted it nervously round and round in front of her like a fluffy chastity shield.

  “At least take your coat off,” he said. She arranged it with exaggerated slow neatness on one of his many chairs. The pointless deliberation irritated him. He made a creaking, sidling stride towards her and got his arms round her waist.

  She sidestepped.

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell if you’re going to be sorry.”

  “I’m not. Not over you.”

  “But you ought not –”

  “It doesn’t seem to matter. If it doesn’t bother me, I don’t see why it should bother you.”

  “I don’t see why it doesn’t.”

  “It doesn’t bother you,” he pointed out. “As an act.”

  “No. But I – am not –”

  He could see what was troubling her but could think of no answer, because the problem seemed to him irrelevant and he had no intention of engaging it, then or ever. The forces and clarity of the day, sea and sky and wind, were being unnecessarily dissipated. He cast about to distract her, and said with low cunning, “Of course. I’ve never before … never in fact … That worries me.”

  It did not worry him. He assumed quite wrongly that passion and attention would make up for lack of skill. But it did have the effect of deflecting her attention from his bruised morals to his presumed sexual insecurity.

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said.

  The house was silent. Daniel began to turn the bed. She did not try to stop him. When he had done this, she said, “Have you got a towel?”

  “A towel?”

  “We shall need a towel.”

  He found one, white with red stripes, and put it on the pillow. He wondered if he should start undressing her, or himself. She said, “If we put the light out, and keep quiet, if they come back, they won’t know we’re here.”

  “Aye,” he said. “That’s so.”

  So in the dark they undressed, fast, and got into the bed, cramped cold flesh, hot flesh, pale and dark into the narrow bed together.

  It was not very successful, a disorganised arhythmic flurry, with both bodies constantly in danger of slipping off the bed, inhibited almost to the last by creaking springs and unanchored, slithering bedclothes. Daniel, overexcited and wild, did not know, half the time, whether he was in or out, coming or going. Stephanie, not habituated to piercing sexual pleasure, made no attempt to exact an orgasm and did not achieve one, a fact of which the floundering Daniel appeared to be unconscious, since he made no attempt either to induce one, to enquire whether one had happened, or to apologise for the apparent deficiency. This she found more comforting than not, because of the lack of embarrassment. They got hot, and wet, a little battered and confused. Daniel groaned and it was over.

  He turned away and she sat up, nervously examining his face, heavy and shut. She could not imagine what he felt. She could not tell who he was. Almost she expected him to rouse himself and roar out transports of self-reproach or self-referring ecstasy, either of which would have embarrassed her profoundly.

  He opened shrewd eyes and grinned, lazy, amused, still.

  “Well” – he said, “That was a beginning, anyway. I reckon that’s the main thing. That was a beginning.”

  She stared down.

  “I like to see you there,” he said. “That seems right.” He put up a heavy arm and pulled the blonde head down on his chest. She lay along him, growing accustomed to his hard ledges, the heavy rolls of flesh. He had a huge hand on the small of her back, and one in her hair. She felt that the limits of their bodies were not quite clear. She heard his strong racing heart.

  “Are you comfortable?”

  “Extraordinarily.”

  “Can you imagine –” She missed the end of the sentence.

  “What? Can I imagine what?”

  “Can you imagine anyone getting married without really wanting to? So many must, from looking at them. There seems no sense in it, without really wanting …”

  “People might not want to be alone.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  His certainties alarmed and delighted her in equal proportions. Now, she sighed, and was asleep.

  When they woke, occasional thumps and bangings indicated that there were now people in the house. They debated in whispers whether to put the light on, and did not: they did not want Ellenby chatter, or the hopeful, participant gaze of Felicity Wells. So they lay still and dozy for another hour or so. When the Ellenbys had made bed-making noises, and burglar-precautionary noises, bathroom noises and switching off of last lights, they got up and dressed. They were both very hungry and needed the lavatory. It was this ultimate embarrassment that finally decided Stephanie to creep downstairs and home: Daniel pointed out that she could use the gardener’s outdoor closet in comparative security. It was agreed that he would not come out. So he watched from his window as she tiptoed across the moonlit lawn, head bent under the beret, looking up once at his dark bulk in his darkened window. He lifted his arm in generous salute, a victorious general. His body was pleasantly warm. His imagination was pleasantly at ease. He did not, he hoped, underestimate the difficulties of the next advance. But he had come so far, so far, with daring and love, it was impossible to imagine he would not go further.


  19. Mammon

  Some weeks later, when term had begun, when Alexander had returned in his car and carried off the Four Quartets, Stephanie and Frederica had coffee in the Chattery in Calverley’s big department store, Wallish and Jones. They were sheltering from a downpour and the plate glass window was steamy inside and out. The tables had starched damask cloths. There was a dense silent carpet, rampant with compressed horizontal leafage, jungle lianas and water-lily leaves improbably cross-fertilised with palmate horse-chestnuts, in tropical greens and English autumnal browns and golds, with bright little bunches of berries like drops of blood at geometrically measured intervals. This absorbed, besides all noises from stiletto heels, sensible brogues, clattering claws of lapdogs, the drips from umbrella tips and plastic macs and oiled silk caps and carrier bags. It was hot. The ladies sweltered, discarding layers of clothing. Your voice, if you spoke, did not carry, being absorbed into damp coats and Axminster tufts. It was customary to lower your voice, all the same, whether you were discussing the dreadful price of net curtains or the dreadful after-effects of your hysterectomy. The Potter girls liked it. They had been coming there all their lives.

  It was Saturday. Frederica wore, dashing at that date in that place, tight black slacks and her batwing sweater with a little scarf knotted round her neck. She was heavily made up, with grass-green eyelids, black lashes and a plummy mouth. Stephanie was dishevelled and overheated in a coat and skirt. Frederica drank iced coffee de luxe, with two blobs of ice cream, a long spoon and straws. Stephanie had coffee with a pot of cream. She said, “I want to tell you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well.” There seemed to be some difficulty. Frederica looked up from her purple-stained straws. Stephanie was crimson, the rosy colour flooding even the tips of her ears and the roots of her hair.

  “Out with it.”

  “I’m going to be. That is, I’m getting married.”

  “Married?”

  “I’m going to marry Daniel Orton. Quite soon.”

  Frederica for a terrible moment glared with outrage. She said the words that came into her head.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “We haven’t told anyone yet.”

  “I didn’t know,” Frederica repeated, on an aggrieved note.

  “I can see there are going to be difficulties.”

  “I should think so,” Frederica agreed sharply.

  “I shall have to tell Daddy.”

  “He’ll hate it. That’s for sure.”

  Frederica stole a glance at her sister, now duskily incarnadine, an absurd colour under the pale hair. A large round tear stood in one eye-corner. Frederica found this repellent.

  “Being a Vicar’s wife is a full-time career. Fêtes and Mothers’ Unions and bosoms to weep on and things. Will you do all that?”

  “Some of it, I expect. I don’t mind.”

  “Well, I do see what you mean about difficulties. Oh dear.”

  Stephanie cried out, “I wish you would say something else. I am very happy.” She pushed aside, with a swimming gesture, white china, silver-plated cake-forks and paper napkins, buried her face in her arms and sobbed, abandoned.

  Frederica was horrified. She summoned a waitress, tapped Stephanie’s shoulder, said,

  “Of course I’m delighted, two more coffees please, with cream and quickly, Stephanie, it’s just a shock, I had no idea, nobody had. Are you in love with Daniel Orton?”

  “Yes. That’s certain.”

  “How do you know?” That came out inquisitorial, though she had meant to invite a confidence. Daniel Orton was fat and religious. Frederica both did and didn’t want to imagine what it could be like to love Daniel Orton.

  “How does one ever?” She sat up, flushed and shiny and looked vaguely about. “I went to bed with him.”

  “And was that exciting?” enquired Frederica, in a voice that startlingly combined the lubricious and the acid.

  “It was a revelation,” said Stephanie with dignity. She heard her ordinary Cambridge voice fall squat on the cushioned silences of Calverley’s gossipry, looked up, and met, not a friendly curious nod from a college friend, but the greedy, strained, overpainted foxy face of Frederica, which expressed a horrified glee mixed with an overpowering fury.

  “And will you,” she cried hoarsely, “have orange blossom and veils, will you make me a bridesmaid in a pretty hat and scatter rose-petals in your path from a dear little basket and will you promise to obey, or are you marrying a modern clergyman …?”

  “I can’t see why you are like this.”

  Frederica could not see herself. Boundless unreasoning malice possessed her.

  “I wish I hadn’t told you.”

  “I’m jolly pleased for you. Honestly I am.”

  “Yes. Well,” said Stephanie. She stood up and pushed two half-crowns across the table. She had walked away before Frederica had time to frame her next sentence.

  Frederica sat fiddling with the coins. She had behaved frightfully and felt frightful.

  When they were little girls, in the war, they had played at being grown-ups, a different game from playing house, more limited in what it imitated, with rules they had never quite understood. They had dressed up in Winifred’s cast-offs, an old black velvet evening gown, a flounced crêpe with scarlet poppies and brilliant cornflowers spattered on it, satin pumps, petticoats, torn fringed shawls, hats, silk flowers, pheasant feathers. They had carried a sequinned purse on a tarnished chain and a patent poche, and had made imitation powder compacts from Elastoplast tins, cigarettes from rolled paper, lipsticks from waxed crayons jammed into cardboard tubes. It had been a game designed to discover what its own subject-matter really was, and in this had signally failed. They had pranced and paraded, had endlessly prepared themselves for events they failed to bring about. The game came to be played, necessarily, in imaginary waiting rooms – vestibules, foyers, ladies’ cloakrooms at dance halls or hotels, places where, according to their meagre knowledge of the worlds of film and the novel, significant adult events, events not confined to kitchen or bedroom, took place. Neither of them considered acting a man, so their encounters were always with thin air, with which Frederica held terse, abortive dance-hall dialogues and from which Stephanie ordered unavailable luxuries, cream, grapes, oranges and lemons, fresh butter and little iced cakes. This game always began by offering a sense of the tantalising, the forbidden, the arcane, and ended in frustration and boredom.

  Now Frederica snapped her handbag once or twice, as she had done then, peered at its contents, fat Burgundy lipstick, Max Factor solid powder, as though conjuring them, wondered why she had been, why she still felt, so venomous. Stephanie had stolen a march on her and simultaneously corrupted the vision of getting out of semi-detached Blesford and Calverley to a more real and necessary world. If Stephanie, having tasted freedom, could settle for domestic bliss with a fat curate, defeat was horribly possible. Anybody at any moment could become enslaved by a cooker, a set of Pyrex dishes with snowflake crystals stamped black on negligée pink, a personal teapot. It had its secret attractions, that, as one recognised from a reading of Good Wives or The Rainbow, to be enclosed with a transfigured man and transfigured possessions in a private place. But mostly, and in Blesford, it was horrible.

  She thought of Alexander. Stephanie’s apparent defection from the love of Alexander made him seem more insubstantial and further away. How would he live now? When he was rich and famous as he would be, and deeply concerned with art, as he already was? Her imagination boggled and failed as it had in those early games. He would listen to the Four Quartets. And set out to observe rehearsals of his plays, which she could imagine, and attend literary cocktail parties which she could not. The essence was talk not tea-pots and she could not imagine the talk. It would not be like Potter talk, it would be like writing, not ponderously about writing.

  There would also be sex. Stephanie had found out about that. They had never discussed Stephanie’s sex life or ev
en whether she had one, and Frederica was now troubled to imagine that it was, and had been, matter of fact. This enraged her, at least as much as the surrender to bourgeois solidities. At both ends of the scale, style and fact, she was wandering in an imaginary vestibule. That Stephanie had abandoned the chaste, fantastic hope of Alexander for solid flesh made the hope of Alexander either impossible or more concrete. “I went to bed with him.” “It was a revelation.” Somebody, some time presumably would, or did, go to bed with Alexander. So logically one should either want that, or call a daydream a daydream. “This is flesh and blood, sir.” It was extremely likely that he had never noticed, and never would notice, that. But he too, like Daniel Orton and unlike Mr Rochester, was flesh and blood. And so …

  She decided that her frightful behaviour to Stephanie must be expiated. She would spend some of her T. S. Eliot fund on an appropriate wooden spoon or rolling pin. She pocketed Stephanie’s change, from the coffee, and set off for the Household Basement.

  Wallish and Jones, that total emporium, was as old a part of her way of life as the black velvet game, or older. When she was a tiny child she had been brought there year after year at Christmas, to see Father Christmas in his Fairy Palace, or, alternatively, Father Christmas in his Underground Grotto. One of her earliest memories was of her first hydrogen-filled balloon, pearly and ebullient on a silver wire, which had been handed to her by the bearded old man himself, from his throne winking with tinsel and fairy lights, in the glass-green depths of the Grotto. She had held it ten minutes before it exploded in the jaws of the dark-varnished, piston-armed, heavy doors of the ladies’ lavatory. She had heard her own voice wailing in the grimy tiled area behind the lavatory windows, an imprisoned soul in torment, echoing and re-echoing. She had been consoled, they told her, though this she could not remember, by pink ice-cream in the Chattery, then, before it was done up, tiled in green and gold with lace doileys and bentwood chairs, almost austere.

  The war had been bad for the verisimilitude, the glamour, of both Palace and Grotto, the one inhabited by clusters of starry fairies, the other by diamond-studded, shovelling, barrow-trundling gnomes. The lights winking and twinkling on battlements, stalagmites and stalactites, the shimmering cascades of silvery-dry water had become a little shivery and creaky. Papier-mâché encrusted rocks, or pinnacles on which tiny Gothic windows entrancingly shone, had, like the gnomes’ hose and the fairies’ tulle, the cobwebs in the caverns and the banners in the Castle, become a little threadbare and grubby. Balloons, being rubber, vanished. The true brilliance of the Land of Faery was succeeded by the specious glamour of the discovered theatrical illusion, the back of the grotto was exposed as something akin to the flats one walked knowledgeably behind on the stage-set. The venerable silver-bearded mage who had handed her that first shimmering, fragile translucent ball, had been succeeded by an ambivalent old-young cotton-woolly, grease-painted smiler who had held her on his knee in the Fairy Palace, uttered a lubricious chuckle, rubbed his prickly crimson cheek on her face, patted her hot and lingering on her small bottom, and had given her a curious object like a jet turd, or rubber lump of coal, which had turned out to be a liquorice-sherbert fountain, from which you sucked a lot of bright yellow sparkling powder, which dyed your tongue and teeth mustard-colour.