The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  He drank several glasses of sherry, very fast. He refused to recognise difficulty. He filled the frequent silences, too rapidly, with comical parish anecdotes and nervously forceful clerical laughter. The anecdotes were mostly bluffly and humbly slanted against himself. He admired the soufflé, which he greatly enjoyed, so vigorously that Winifred felt like some intractable slattern being congratulated by a caseworker on having, at long last, produced an acceptable Spotted Dick. Stephanie said almost nothing.

  After lunch they drank coffee out of tiny lustre cups. No one had mentioned marriage. Daniel described to Winifred Stephanie’s success with Malcolm Haydock and Winifred was moved as he had meant her to be. She said she knew little of his work, and Daniel, remarking that the left hand was often better not knowing what the right hand did, went into it, perhaps offering credentials, in a professional way. Winifred asked if his profession made it harder and Daniel burst into an account of the funny ideas people had about clergymen, ending up, unfortunately for him, on the subject of clerical sex. Stephanie was already constrained: she had been moved when he told her about the railway-carriage ostracism in Felicity’s room but disliked the comic oratorical flourishes he gave to it for her mother. She loved his harsh and practical work, but hated to hear him root out, for her mother, the sloppy abstract words, “spontaneous,” “personal,” “caring,” “tenderness,” which made it sound muffled and facile. He began to assure them with booming jollity that clergymen were really just like other men, more or less, as regarded sex, that very few held high views about renouncing birth control, or low views about self-denial, or even sacramental views about Beautiful Unions which entailed a lot of bedroom prayerwork. He became aware of a constraint between the women, and saw Stephanie’s face over her coffee, a cool rejecting mask.

  “My God,” he said to her. “I’m sorry. I was just going on about things I’ve gone on about before, in other places, in silly contexts. Not to you. I oughtn’t to talk like that to you.”

  Although this was what she thought, she was worse embarrassed to hear him say it.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  Winifred took up her courage. “I don’t think you should criticise Daniel. There are difficulties – about this marriage – and this is one of them. I am glad you spoke out.”

  Daniel continued to stare frowning at Stephanie, who did not meet his eye.

  There was a further succession of crashes in the hall. The coffee cups rattled. Bill’s head came round the door.

  “Ah. Am I interrupting? Please tell me if I am, and I’ll go.” No one spoke.

  “Clearly I am interrupting. I’ll take myself off.”

  He made no move. Daniel stood up and extended a hand.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “Thank you,” said Bill. He did not take Daniel’s hand. The women were still as stones. “Courting my daughter?”

  “I hope I’ve finished with the courting.”

  “I take it you’ve been told I think it’s potty.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “I refuse my consent.”

  Daniel opened his mouth. Bill rushed on.

  “I know I’ve no legal force. But morally, morally I stick. I can’t countenance something so patently doomed.”

  “That’s not morality. That’s arrogance.”

  “As for the vulgarity of surreptitious get-togethers …”

  “I’ll go now,” said Daniel. “That’s best. I’ve no wish to stay where I’m not welcome. I hope Stephanie will marry me soon. It strikes me she’ll be better off wi’ me.”

  Bill skipped dramatically across his path and held out his arms, barring the door.

  “You’ve nothing to offer her. You’re nothing to do with what she is.”

  “That’s for her to say.” Daniel was very angry, and the anger was fuelled by his awareness of his own previous ineptitudes, and Stephanie’s prolonged silence. “I don’t like to see you torment her. You presume too much on her love for you. What you do is downright cruel, that’s the word, and it’s lucky for you she’s so very strong. But I’m not sure it’s lucky for her. You put it all on her. It’s got very little to do with her really. And now will you let me get past.”

  “Pastoral!” Bill remarked, weak and jeering. He dropped his arms, however, and collapsed into conciliation, with the characteristic suddenness that so disoriented and cheated his family.

  “Please don’t go. They all know I don’t mean most of what I say. Good heavens, I’d – I’d kill myself if I thought for a moment anyone believed what I say. I huff and puff, I can’t deny, but there’s smoke and no flames, you ask them, no one’s singed. You can’t go, we’ve discussed nothing. Now, Stephanie, you must know we’ll stand by you, you are our first-born.”

  “It isn’t a question of standing by,” said Stephanie. “I’m not in disgrace, nor am I pregnant.”

  Daniel sat down. The women were still stony. Bill surveyed them all and said, “Perhaps we should have a glass of – what have I got? – I see you have had sherry and wine is heady. What have I got? Will you have whisky?”

  “Yes please.”

  “Stephanie, please fetch a little jug of water for Mr Orton’s whisky. Now Mr Orton I cannot have you supposing I don’t love my daughter. All families have their own ways, you know, and if I am volatile and inflammatory in expressing my love, I am at fault, but I am understood. We are a very close family and very alike, and it is that, Mr Orton, that leads me still to question whether you have fully thought out how Stephanie will deal with your – faith.”

  “We have talked about that.”

  “I suppose you well may have. And your Vicar? I can’t imagine he feels great enthusiasm –”

  “He’s fond of Stephanie,” said Daniel, concealing from Bill as he had from Stephanie Mr Ellenby’s tortuous anxieties and his own grim stand. “He wants to see her. But he thinks – if she agrees – that it’s our business in the end.”

  A look of passionate distaste played around Bill’s pointed face.

  “I suppose you can hardly plan to carry out this project for some considerable time.”

  Better to marry than burn, said Daniel to himself, and said carefully to Bill, as Stephanie returned with the water, that he hoped on the contrary to marry as soon as the banns could be called. That he had been promised a council house on the Arkwright Estate where he felt he should, professionally, be, and which was possible to afford. Bill’s slender white hands went to his chest in mock palpitations, he gasped ostentatiously and said, “I see you are a fast worker. I underestimated you. You’ll find yourself alienated in that modern desert. I’ve tried to teach there. It’s an asphalt desert, with no sense of community, no cultural roots no … In Yorkshire we say Our Nellie, Our Ernie, Our cat, Our Dog, Our Street. But in that place it’s The Estate, and the everything else down. They hate it. Prowling kids and regularly sawn-off cherry-trees. I’ve been there.”

  “So’ve I. It’s not that different from where I come from.”

  “I see. Well, you may be right to want to go there. But I think you should wait some considerable time before taking my daughter.”

  “I want her now.”

  Bill poured whisky and chatted on, mostly affably, about the deficiencies of the Estate. The women did not join in. Daniel was aware of their reserve, but nevertheless felt he was managing, he was getting on, the thin end of the wedge was quivering in the aperture. He decided to leave before he outstayed his welcome.

  At the door Bill said, “It’s all been most instructive, our discussion, I’ve learned a lot.” He contracted his face with chill venom. “But nevertheless, Christianity died in the nineteenth century, my friend. It began to die long before, and achieved it in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. What you think you feel now is an amputated limb that incorporeally wiggles.”

  “You’ve said that before. I shan’t try and change your mind.”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “I have a mind
of my own, however.”

  “Not much of one,” said Bill, and shut the door in his face.

  23. Comus

  A few days later Matthew Crowe appeared to Frederica out of the gloom of early evening from behind Pallas Athene in the Blesford Ride Cloisters. He seemed to be delighted to see her, trotted portly up and clasped her hands.

  “Dear girl, an unexpected pleasure in these dismal surroundings. I have just been to see Alexander, who was surly and unwelcoming. Were you on the same errand?”

  “I went to see my father. Also surly and unwelcoming.”

  “What a rejecting institution. My worthy forebear. All this catholic atheist religiosity. Hideous, truly. Look at them. No one smiling except ever-so-sweet Jesus. Athene with the muscles of a coal-heaver and a mouth like Lizzie Siddall. Pop-eye Shakespeare with no calves and drooping garters. Let us go away from them.”

  “Yes please,” said Frederica, who cherished in fact a childhood affection for the hefty Pantheon. They fell into step.

  “Working hard?”

  “I suppose so. The idea of the play unsettles me. But I can usually work no matter what.”

  “A great gift.”

  “Only I get so restless.”

  “You will always be restless. It’s in your blood. Shall I drive you back to my house for a nice relaxing drink? How about that?”

  Frederica resisted only ultimate temptations. Crowe conducted her into the Bentley, which gleamed in the school drive. Relaxing into an almost indecently comfortable seat Frederica had a momentary, very distinct perception of what it would be like to want to be a vandal, to bring a heavy knife and rip and shred all this smooth, soft-smelling leather. This startled and then interested her; she folded her hands in her lap as Crowe accelerated and then accelerated, sweeping smooth and monstrous past fields and patches of moor and dry stone walls as though they were floating ribbons of grey, brown, olive and buff.

  At Long Royston Crowe walked her through the dark, silent, partially sheeted halls. Light caught the apple breasts and buxom knees of Venus and Diana on the plasterwork, highlit Actaeon’s white corse. Elizabeth-Virgo-Astraea was picked out by a tiny spotlight that sallied a little way into upper darkness and was blunted. It was all stone-cold and gusty: Crowe trotted and Frederica dashed: they followed corridors and came to the hot, bright little study. In the stone hearth here a wood-fire flickered. Crowe offered her a deep, high-winged leather chair and what seemed an inordinately large glass of brown sherry, glinting reddish gold in the firelight. He held a plate of salted nuts, of which she greedily took a fistful, her usual practice in case her host should forget to offer them again. At this, he laughed. She need not have worried: he was an attentive host and filled her glass frequently and assiduously.

  He talked to her about herself. His talk was fluttering and caressing, a titillation with feathery praise, a curiosity as warm and rich as the sherry, about her ambitions and intentions. He told her she had “presence” and that presence was a gift, not to be learned, and went with “drive”, which she also had, and would make her always fascinating to some men, if not to all. A characteristic of 1953 in Frederica’s life was to be an extraordinary preponderance of encounters with people ready, indeed eager, to offer her summarising definitions of herself which fell, almost all, between the triple stools of aphoristic wisdom, clique banality, and the straight pass. Crowe’s remarks fell on her irritable consciousness like the rhythmic strokes of a hairbrush on hair: she sat up, preened her mind and body, smiled graciously and downed another glass of sherry.

  Crowe said, “Of course I have no particular gifts. I only care for gifts in others. This tends to make one a bit bitchy, I will freely admit, people have so much to live up to, in the eyes of anyone who’s invested, as it were, in them. That’s a veiled warning I’m sure you’ll ignore, as it’s all you really can do with it. Power fascinates me.”

  “Power’s what you have.”

  “Not in the way you have, my dear. A heritage I hold in trust for the culture. Yours is in the blood.”

  He invited her over to the desk, where he showed her a miniature of Johanna Seale, a frowning, bejewelled beauty, cut off below the forced-up breasts under brown velvet. He put two small plump hands about her waist and remarked that power even created electricity in certain people. She was undeniably prickly, it was most interesting. He drew her proficiently into his lap in the desk chair.

  Frederica was startled, simply because she had assumed Crowe was an old man. She had the vague idea that at his age (and she was entirely uncertain about what his age precisely was) men were frequently reduced to talk instead of action. She thus felt she was performing some kindly, even condescending act, out of her total youth and vigour, to cast back demurely suggestive glances at his most piercing sallies. Demureness was in fact incompatible with her foxy hauteur, but she had not yet worked this out, and thus invested her glances with a lewd, hinting quality which was not intentional. Grasped, she realised immediately that Crowe was neither senile nor awkward. He patted, poked and fingered with automatic sureness. She sat rather uncomfortably on his lap. Proficient he may have been but he was also little: her legs, her torso, stuck out in ways she felt must be gawky and unaesthetic. She tried to smile, but it was not easy, as she was developing a crick in her neck from trying to keep her head on a convenient level for Crowe, whose love-making was as chatty and verbal as Ed’s had been taciturn.

  The chat took the form of a running commentary on her parts as though she was a work of art, or a beauty queen. After each item of the inventory, Crowe applied his fingers and lips to the part just enumerated, tickling, twisting, nipping, brushing, as seemed appropriate. Her eyes, he declared, should be bigger and darker, but there was nothing to be done about that, though he was against heavy pencillings around them, the remnants of which he wiped away with a licked handkerchief. Her hair, which he fanned his hands in, needed a good conditioner and a good thinning, never lacquer, maybe a Titian rinse to modify the ginger – but it was springy, energetic hair, he said, twisting it playfully round several fingers and snuffing it with his snub nose. He loved her cheekbones. He pecked at them like a dry, soft, warm bird. Her mouth had great character: she must vary its downdroop and never, never, as he could well see she had, apply lipstick beyond the true periphery. He did a bit more scrubbing to the offending remnants, which left her feeling rubbed and glowing, then he bent, warm and dry, and enclosed her lips in his. He smelled of sherry and wood smoke. She saw the glistening moon-round of his tonsure, ruddy in the firelight. She wished she looked less like Worzel Gummidge with stiffly protruding unbendable arms and legs. Crowe put one little hand into her shirt and began to rotate the nipple between finger and thumb. This was a distinctly unpleasant sensation but she felt powerless to stop him. She hoped her underwear was clean, which it frequently wasn’t, very. Crowe said, “Oh, like new hard little apples, what a delight, as firm as the rest of you, my dear girl.” She stared out of the window, which was uncurtained because Crowe loved to see his cypresses, yews and junipers fade slowly into the thickening night, because he liked to smell gillyflowers and night-scented stocks and to watch the white moon sail over his box hedges, over the white Apollo and Diana poised over the walk which led to the sunken garden. In and against this window, as Alexander had seen her own face at Goathland framed in his windscreen, Frederica now saw a disembodied face, white, staring, with flowing hair and horrified aspect. It was Alexander, whose lovely hands materialised for a moment on the glass beside his face, as though mutely pleading, before the vision wavered and receded, the gravel scrunched and there was a knock at the door.

  Crowe called, “Come in,” without letting go of Frederica. Indeed, he tightened his grip on her groin with one arm and removed his other hand only from inside her shirt to the same position outside. Frederica stared like a monstrous defiant puppet at Alexander, who said, “You did ask me to a drink. You did say, walk round the terrace and walk in.”

  “I did. But you were
so reluctant to leave your grubby exercise books that I assumed you would not materialise. And Frederica was as eager for a drink as I was. So here we were, dallying until you came.”

  He tipped Frederica neatly off his knee, patted her bottom, and poured sherry for Alexander. Frederica hiccoughed and held out her own glass, which he refilled. Alexander creased his brow. Crowe smiled over them both, benign and rubicund, his silvery fringe of hair floating slightly in the draught to his chimney. He threw wood chips in his fire and sparks raced and streamed upwards, green, silver, blue.

  Thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air

  Thrice sit thou mute in this enchanted chair;

  And thrice three times tie up this true love’s knot

  And murmur soft, she will, or she will not.

  “Comus,” said Frederica.

  “No, no,” said Alexander, teacherly. “Campion.”

  “You were confused by the enchanted chair,” said Crowe mischievously, brandishing the decanter.

  “The chair in Comus is most repellent,” said Frederica.

  “Most,” said Crowe. “This marble venom’d seat/Smeared with gums of glutinous heat/I touch with moist palms, chaste and cold.”

  “Obscene,” said Frederica, flushed and meaningful. Alexander looked at her coldly and sat down. He waited for someone to speak. No one did. After a time Frederica announced that she must be going. Crowe said surely not, and Alexander said he would give her a lift. She looked, he thought, positively drunk. Crowe said, ring your mother and say you’ll be home late, and relax, and Alexander said he was really quite happy to give her a lift. He ought to be getting back anyway. At this, Crowe laughed inordinately and asked Frederica if she was sure she could get up out of her chair.