The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Under the table his ankle hooked hers, wrinkled sock on nylon stocking. She felt that the rules of some game she didn’t know were being strictly if eccentrically observed. So much drink, so much talk, a ration of each, and then,

  “What’s your name?”

  “Freda. Freda Plaskett.”

  “Unusual. Mine’s Ed. Edward really, of course, I prefer Edward, but Ed I always get.”

  “Ed.”

  “Shall we go?”

  They walked through the centre of Goathland, down a road that became a track, scrambled over a little beck, and took a few steps into the real country. It became clear that Ed meant to go no further. He enquired whether Frederica felt it would be too cold to have a sit down. She said no. He produced a macintosh and laid it out under a somewhat Wordsworthian thorn bush. Frederica sat stiffly on the edge of it, telling herself that there were certain things that when she knew them would not bother her in the same way any more. She had read Lady Chatterley, true, and The Rainbow too, and Women in Love, but it cannot be said that she expected a revelation from the traveller in dolls. She wished her ignorance, part of it, to be dispelled. She wished to become knowledgeable. She wished to be able to pinpoint the sources of her discontent.

  Ed propped himself, rather clumsily, on one elbow beside her, and looked up at her face. She did not meet his eye. Throughout the whole proceedings, she did not really consider his face. Its general outline was heavy-jowled and clean-shaven. He had short, bristly brown hair.

  “Comfy?” he enquired.

  “More or less.”

  “Better if you relax a bit and lie down.”

  She lay down.

  “Good girl,” he said, and humped his body over to hers. He threw one leg over hers and applied his face to her face, kissing, pecking, with hot, firm, dry lips, every bit of it, brow, cheeks, closed eyelids, chin, lips. He had a kind of daemonic proficiency, he had entered upon the performance of a routine technique. After a certain time spent on this dry kissing he began to apply himself simply to her mouth, nipping it, with lips, with teeth, rubbing it sideways, finally pushing it open with his tongue, which seemed monstrously huge, round and swollen, breathing nicotine, beer and tea. Their teeth clashed and jarred. Frederica tried to twist away, which increased his activity, he clamped her close with one arm and lifted the weight of his body onto hers. She felt his hard front pressing on her, rubbing, rubbing, and her own tongue, curled back in retreat, relaxed momentarily and brushed his, which caused her to quiver with anxiety, revulsion, and the persistent and appalling anonymous curiosity. Perhaps he was a sex maniac. She should have thought.

  At this point he ran his hand up her leg, inside her skirt, as far as her thick school knickers. These he began to rub as efficiently as he was rubbing her face. Frederica wanted to twist away in embarrassment or revulsion. I shall go mad, she thought, I have got to know and I can’t stand it. It doesn’t matter how you get to know, it has got not to matter. She tried to close her legs, to say no, but her mouth was occupied, her pelvis weighted, and the busy hand was slowly moving round to the inside of her knickers which was, to her intense embarrassment, becoming hot and wet. It was strange: the more she disliked the whole business, the more a kind of automatic greed in her body took over, so that it rose of its own accord to meet, to invite the intrusive fingers so that when finally, he thrust two of them into her she twisted in anguish on them, convulsed by something, and tears started to her eyes. She imagined those working fingers, blunt, unknown, nicotine stained, not too clean, and went wild with contrary passions, biting back at the biting mouth, arching her body, flinging up an arm to beat at or caress the wiry hair which turned out to be, in fact, baby-soft and giving. Her dress was thrown up and her legs were both cold and wet. It occurred to her to wonder what if she were to want to pee, and this thought stilled her. Ed then took her hand and guided it gently to his fly front. Frederica let it stay there, uncertainly, for a moment or two over his suit, and then removed it, after a momentary vague pressure for politeness sake. She did not know what she was expected to do, and did not want to do it. She went suddenly, largely involuntarily, limp. When Ed picked up her hand again she removed it fairly firmly and turned away her face. He sat up abruptly and could be seen carefully wiping his hand on his handkerchief. Frederica pulled her legs together over the hot, scratched, throbbing feeling and considered him. She had no means of telling, no precedent, whether this was an expected outcome, a monstrous frustration, a signal for a new onslaught. In fact, staring out at the impassive moorland, Ed began again to talk.

  “Some of the chaps and me, in the Army, before the German bit, we used to visit the brothels in Cairo. They had shows, you know, as well as the usual, and the unusual I expect you might call it. Some of it wasn’t much cop, you can see enough of the same thing and I’ve never been one for boots and such. But there were things you don’t see every day. Like the place where they had this girl, and they used to hang this donkey over her, in a pretty tough net, suspended from the ceiling. She’d work it up, like, the ass, lie under it and work it up, with her hands and her mouth and all she’d got, a real active girl. It had this great tool, fair bursting through the net, and it would get properly worked up, but it couldn’t come at her, because of the net. They had to have it tied up, like, or it could have done her a lot of damage, torn her up, split her apart, and its hooves plunging about and her twisting and turning. That was something, that was.”

  He stopped talking, as abruptly as he’d started. Frederica could think of nothing to say. They sat side by side, both with a slightly puzzled frown. He said,

  “We’d best be getting back to the village. Could take the next bus to the coast.”

  “I think – I’ll stay here, and just walk about.”

  They sat a bit longer.

  “Well,” said Ed. “I’ll be off. If you would get off my macintosh.”

  Frederica stood up in a hurry, whilst he gathered up the macintosh, brushed it meticulously, hung it over his arm, gave her a taciturn nod, and set off back up the track.

  She did not, in fact, walk very far: only a little way onto the moor and then, rather aimlessly, back onto the track again. The desire to stride out had quite left her: so had her strip-film. She did not by any means know all that was necessary but it was undoubtedly true that she knew considerably more than when she had set out. She walked along the track, and came across a very clean, silvery car, parked in a gateway. It seemed familiar, and then was certainly recognised. She walked up to it, put her face against the front window, and peered in.

  The front seats were empty. In the back seat, Alexander was spread ungracefully, one knee trailing off the seat, over some vanished and unidentified woman. His jacket and trousers were on, his waistline lumpish and knotted under the flaring corduroy coat-skirts. The beautiful hair hung smooth and soft over his face and onto the woman’s, brushing her, obscuring him. Frederica froze, and stared. She continued, mesmerised, possessed by curiosity, to peer in; Alexander, alerted by something, raised his face, flushed and delicately shining, and met her eyes.

  The framed face of Frederica Potter, in the midst of the Goathland moors, was much worse than the Cheshire cat apparition of the girl in the snood on the Castle Mound. She had repaired her make-up after the episode with Ed, and the face Alexander saw had a certain puppet-like garishness, as was then fashionable, arched, gilded eyelids, gleaming wine-dark mouth, pale-powdered mask around them. Large gilded rings depended from the ears, under the red hair. Her expression, as Alexander read it, was eager and cruel. For what felt like a very long moment they held each other’s eye, silently. Then Alexander decided confusedly that if he ducked, that was, if he dropped his face again over Jennifer, who was he hoped protected by his own body from Frederica’s scrutiny, Frederica might not identify Jennifer, and might perhaps, ignored, go away. She was no hallucination, her breath misted his windscreen. He curled himself, with as dignified a motion as was possible, around Jenny, and waited, listenin
g to his breathing. He wished, for all sorts of reasons, aesthetic and muscular, that they had got out of the car. But Jenny complained of the cold.

  Installed again in the bus, Frederica was surprised to see Ed mounting its step. She was more surprised when he came and sat down beside her and pulled out a fat black notebook. Before the bus got moving, he told her, business-like, he would just like to take down her name and address. In case he ever came her way, which was likely enough, with the travelling. Frederica reiterated Miss Plaskett’s surname and recited a fictitious address, composed of the number of Jennifer’s house with the name of Daniel’s street, and a telephone number composed of half the school’s number added to half the doctor’s. This fictive tissue of true facts had a plausibility pure invention could not have had: she was rather proud of it: though unable to understand why Ed should have shown any interest in having it. He wrote it down, slowly and patiently, breathing heavily, and spoke to her no more between Goathland and Calverley, though occasionally on corners his bottom squashed hers in the old way.

  She thought, hard. Her day had been bitty, but full of things: Stephanie, Calverley Minster, Racine, the moorland, Ed, Alexander. Taken together, as they undoubtedly could be, these things had alarming aspects. If, for instance, you took the bad pictures of Daniel, and related them to Vénus toute entière, and that to Ed, and Ed’s hot swollen tongue to the donkey’s hot swollen tool, and those to Alexander, and if, for aesthetic elaboration you pressed, in a military sense, the Cathy-Heathcliff aspects of moorland, the crude Freudian view of the upthrust of the spire of Calverley Minster, you had what could be called an organic image that was, there was no question, extremely depressing, if undoubtedly powerful.

  But, if you kept them separate. If you kept them separate, in many ways you saw them more truly.

  Racine, for instance, was important because of the Alexandrine. Vénus toute entière was simply an example, not a particularly good one in fact, which she happened to have chosen because everyone knew it by heart, you could remember it easily on a bus bumping over a moor.

  The moor, to continue, was nothing to do with Cathy-Heathcliff unless she chose. What she had seen was that last year’s bracken was pale biscuit colour, and that at a distance the haze of biscuit over the uncurling green seemed striped.

  Ed was nobody. She had let him do that because he was nobody. She had not seen his face and if that had been accident it was now design, she would not look at his face. He had his function. Beyond it, she had stopped him off.

  The donkey was nothing to do with anything but she now knew about it. It was, in itself, interesting.

  As for Alexander. She knew perfectly well who Jenny was, having recognised the colouring of those parts of her that stuck out. She ought to have been put out, but was not. The feeling she had, on seeing Alexander, was one of power. Knowledge was power, as long as one did not muck it up by confusing one piece of knowledge with another and trying to ingest it and turn it all into blood and feelings. She knew now what was what, who did what to whom, and what Ed did to her, and Alexander to Jennifer were useful knowledge but different things from what she would do to Alexander, or he to her, when the time came. It now seemed possible that there was a time, which would or could come.

  One could let all these facts and things lie alongside each other like laminations, not like growing cells. This laminated knowledge produced a powerful sense of freedom, truthfulness and even selflessness, since the earlier organic and sexual linking by analogy was undoubtedly selfish. It was she, not Daniel, Alexander, Racine, Ed, the Cairo donkey, Emily Brontë and the architects of Calverley Minster who had linked these creatures to each other out of her own necessity. The whole problem of selfishness and selflessness was odd, since seeing things either separate or linked felt like an exercise of power, which she had been most ambiguously, by her father, taught to eschew theoretically and pursue in practice.

  She sensed that the idea of lamination could provide both a model of conduct and an aesthetic that might suit herself and prove fruitful. It would, she decided, as in the event it did, take years to work out the implications.

  She returned to the Alexandrine, as the part easiest to concentrate on, least likely to stir up all the others. It seemed that there was some very simple way in which it was clear to her that Racine’s play was good – hard, strong, finished, durable – in a region in which she was very much less sure about Astraea. Now, how did one come to recognise that sort of goodness, and how did one check one’s judgment? Could that be measured in the structure of the lines of verse?

  It was probably a good thing for her at seventeen that she had no knowledge of Coleridge’s ideas of the origin of metre. By the time she acquired this piece of information, she was equipped to laminate it, too.

  22. Much Ado

  Winifred came to Stephanie’s room one night, an unusual step for her, who assumed that Stephanie, like herself, preferred things unstated and undiscussed. She said that she had come to the conclusion that she herself must invite Daniel to the house, if Stephanie wished it, and welcome him. As for Bill, she went on, when Stephanie did not answer, he would come round, Stephanie knew that, he always did. Stephanie replied that she doubted this. A man like Daniel, Winifred hoped, would respect another man’s passionately held beliefs. Stephanie said dully that she doubted this too. Daniel was not a tolerant man, was capable of considerable anger. Winifred showed agitation, and asked if she could sit down. She did not want Stephanie, she said, to marry an angry man. She had tried to make them all a happy home, to give and take, to make allowances; it had cost her. She sat on the end of the bed, in her dressing gown, and said,

  “He left me on my honeymoon.”

  Stephanie stared.

  “I’ve never talked about it to anyone. We went to Stratford-on-Avon and he walked out of the theatre bar in the interval. We were watching Much Ado, and I felt so happy, those love scenes are so real – I do love nothing in the world so well as you, is not that strange – so in the interval I told him what I’d done. I felt such accord with him, but it was the play.”

  “What had you done?”

  “Oh yes. I wrote to his parents to tell them we were married and happy. I hoped they might get in touch then, or even come to the wedding.”

  “But they didn’t?”

  “No. He was right and I was wrong. Potters are rigid and stubborn.”

  “Yes,” said Stephanie, and thought, she is not a Potter. But I am. I am.

  “Anyway, when I said this he began to scream and shout in the bar, as he does. That was the first time. I didn’t know he … I said, please be quiet, and he said, if it’s like that, I’ll go where you can’t hear me. He rushed out. He took the little car we had. He was gone for two days.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Oh, I tried to sit in my seat, but I couldn’t. So I went back to the hotel, and waited. You know, about waiting, you set yourself a limit, before you’ll start worrying, an hour, six hours, a day, two days. Two days and two nights in a hotel, with no money and no one. I daren’t go far away. Little walks, in case he came back and rushed off again, not finding me waiting. Sometimes I sat in the garden at New Place. I hate those smells now, that garden, ladslove, artemisia, so sour. The weather was lovely, and dog roses too, very pretty. I thought of going home but I was humiliated.”

  “Was he ill?”

  “I wondered. I’d got it in my head to call the police, but it was such a worry, and on one’s honeymoon, a difficult time. Then he came back. He said he’d been to Malvern, and walked. So he took me there, too, and we stayed up at the British Camp, and were happy, the happiest time in my life, possibly. Why did I tell you that? Oh yes – I was saying – he does come round, you see.”

  “You said you didn’t want me to marry an angry man.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “What did he say when he came back?”

  “Oh, he burst into the dining room – I was eating an omelette – I daren’t ea
t anything else, with no money, and I was afraid I’d have a huge bill. And he began to shout how his behaviour was insufferable, and the more he stayed away the more he daren’t come back. So we went upstairs – and he said – he was crying – he didn’t think he could ever calm down, not really. He shouldn’t have married, he said. So I – calmed him down – and said we would work out a way of getting on. And we have.”

  “I’m glad it ended happily.”

  “Oh, Stephanie. Don’t sound like that. It produced you. I didn’t come to tell you that. I came to ask Daniel to lunch. Would he come?”

  Daniel did come. Winifred took trouble over the lunch. She made a cheese soufflé, roasted a chicken, put together a fresh fruit salad and splashed in a miniature bottle of Cointreau. She enjoyed the soufflé-making, with a limited nostalgia for pre-war plenty. It was her daughters, children of austerity, who would later go in for authentic, gluttonous cookery with butter and wine and roasted spices. Winifred believed in convenience foods as she believed in labour-saving devices. She remembered baking days in the past, raised pies and kneading dough, as she remembered galvanised wash-tubs, copper ponches and monstrously strutting hand-wringers, chores you were glad to be shot of. She bought wine, for Daniel, and got out damask napkins and cut-glass goblets. She was determined that he should feel both feasted and at his ease.

  He crashed into the hall and slammed the front door so violently that the sherry-glasses in the sitting-room tinkled on their tray. He cried out “Hullo, hullo”, and admired things too loud, too soon and too much. He was over-confident; he had assumed that he could deal with the social flow of a lunch-party since he spent his life not unsuccessfully battering his way through awkward gatherings. He had exercised his usual sense of priorities and told himself that what Bill and Winifred thought or felt should not, must not, and therefore would not, alter what was between him and Stephanie. This made, as he was to discover, insufficient allowance for what Stephanie thought and felt about them.