The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Stephanie mutely indicated her chest of drawers and watched Frederica briskly apply her pristine wedding makeup to her own face. She was ashamed of the feeling that the things were hers, should have been used by her; like a small child on its birthday, not a grown woman, she told herself, watching Frederica spit expertly on her mascara and twist her mascara brush on the sandy lashes. The green eyeshadow looked rather nice on Frederica.

  “There – all done in a jiffy. Now I can let Alexander in whilst you beautify yourself. Mummy’s been pressing your folds out. I’ll go and get The Dress, shall I?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Frederica gave her a long, greedy, proprietary look and flared out again, rustling net petticoats and crisp cotton skirt. After a moment, she came back with the white, sagging plastic bag containing the dress and hung it in the door.

  “If you need a tirewoman, shout. He’s coming up the garden path, I’ll open the door, I hope he doesn’t think this yellow is juvenile …”

  Left alone, she moved the naked bulb of her bedside lamp nearer to her mirror – the shade had also been taken down to Askham Buildings. In the theatrical glare this produced she made up her own face, rapidly, minimally, stepped out of her dressing-gown, stared at her naked breasts for a cool angry moment, and began on a whirlwind hooking and zipping. She brushed too fiercely at her hair, so that protesting damp bits of it whipped into unintentional tight spirals, and then, as ruthlessly as she could, she poked and pinned and squashed the little white wired cap and the clouds of tulle onto her head. It was all a nonsense. One, two, she tapped her heels into white kid slippers and stalked out, skirts rustling, onto the landing. In the hall Frederica was making little rushes in search of a lost glove and Winifred, military in glossy navy blue, was struggling with a pleated linen hem. A car-driver stood by the door. Stephanie stood on the stairs.

  “Oh, you’re there. Oh, good. You look lovely. Alexander’s in the sitting room with the flowers. If he – if your father – comes back – tell him – oh, I don’t know – tell him – but don’t on any account wait, whatever you do. Don’t wait. Is my back hair all right? Do I look silly?”

  “Lovely, you look.”

  “Not that it matters, anyway. Perhaps it will be just as well if he doesn’t put in an appearance. My dear – I will see you in the church.”

  “I hope so,” said Stephanie, still on the stairs. Frederica spun past, gesturing with a handful of cornflowers and white rosebuds.

  “I tell you one thing, Alexander’s much the most handsome …”

  “I feel a fool,” said Stephanie.

  “You will,” said Frederica, in a thoughtlessly soothing voice, and rushed out to her carriage. Stiffly, Stephanie went into the sitting room.

  Alexander rose most gracefully, smoke-grey, pearl-grey, oyster-grey, from the sofa, gave her a half-bow and said, “Ah, let me look at you, let me see.” She stood stony in the doorway. He gestured with a hand. “Please, walk towards me. I am so honoured to have been asked. Could you put your head up a little. Take longer steps. Forgive me. That’s lovely.”

  Flustered, she nearly tripped over the trailing flex of the iron. She caught up a pointed trail of veiling, bent awkwardly down, rustling and white, to disconnect the plug.

  “Let me,” said Alexander.

  “Fires can start that way.”

  “We have avoided a fire.” He put the iron onto the bookshelf. He put the ironing board behind the sofa. The room was a graceless chaos: Frederica’s discarded dressing-gown on the carpet, dirty coffee cups on mantelpiece and table, trails of packing shavings. In the middle of this, Alexander took her hands.

  “Lovely dress.”

  “I feel silly.”

  “Why?” He was excited: he felt a pronounced distaste for the domestic mess. He would never have advocated the wearing of bright red jackets and white tight trousers on the buttocks: but a woman in a white veil, a long, wide skirt and a sash caught his attention in a way a woman in an apron – off-stage – never would. He repeated, “Why? Use your sense of occasion. Step out.” He studied her with a practised eye. Some of the seams were puckered: a hook and eye at the waist were sewn askew: her rigorous dressing had depressed the waistline of the dress below the line of the sash; there was something wrong with her head. He gripped her hands, briefly, and said,

  “If I may – I could just fix your sash. Give the veiling a tweak? May I?”

  She nodded, speechless.

  “You look so lovely.” His hands were busy round her waist, pulling, pleating, tucking. “Have you any of those tiny gold pins? There’s a stitch here.” She shifted brusquely, with the immediately suppressed impatience of those who are required to keep still and be touched by helpers. The hands stopped for a moment, hard, on her waist. She began to inhabit the dress. She lifted her shoulders. “Little gold pins,” said Alexander’s beautiful voice, amused, deprecating, insistent.

  “Oh, little gold pins. By my bedroom mirror. I’ll go.”

  “No, no, keep still, I’ll go.”

  She stood like a white pillar, hearing him, Alexander, prowling in her bare box of a room, swinging downstairs. He took her in his hands again, turning, bending, delicately inserting a pin here, tugging a fold there. He retied the sash, running his hands down her ribs, one over her buttocks, suggesting, somehow, the stance that would hang the dress. He turned her to face him. Abstractedly, he pulled at her collar, peering into the chaste V neck. He put a hand under her chin, turned up her face.

  “Have we time? I could do something with that hairline. Your pretty little cap is all asymmetrical. Stephanie, you are deliberately torturing yourself with those ferocious grips and pins. You are a beautiful girl, all soft curves and rounded lines. You can’t drag your hairline, love, it won’t do. May I?”

  “Do I have any choice?”

  “You know I know better.”

  “I know you know better.”

  He had the pins out in a few seconds, produced a shining new comb from a breast-pocket, soothed, curved, resited the little cap, pinned it down. One or two sore and burning places she had made on her own scalp glowed and vanished. She breathed deeply. He stepped back to look at her, stepped close again and studied her face. She wondered if he was going to offer to apply fresh make-up, too, but he simply nodded appreciatively, touched her cheek with a gentle finger, tucked a curl behind her ear.

  “I am enjoying this,” said Alexander. “I am so glad to have been invited. I shall get your flowers.”

  He strode away and returned with the wired cascade of white and gold, roses and stephanotis, freesias and orange blossom, the heads bitten in their metal stems, the surface dense, crisp, scented.

  “I shan’t know how to hold it.”

  “I shall show you.”

  He handed the thing to her. She held it awkwardly, protruding, dangling, heavy.

  “No, you must clasp it – not down there – at waist level, and tuck your elbows in. Above your sash.”

  It looked so light and airy, and was so rigidly wired.

  “Like a chastity belt,” she said vaguely.

  “The way you were holding it, it would have been easier to give it a grosser name,” said Alexander, and they both laughed. “Now, you mustn’t stand, frozen, you must step out lightly. Take long strides, from the hip, move that skirt. Try it.”

  She stepped out. His hands, his eyes, defined her body. She was briefly pleased with it. The doorbell rang. The driver of the car had returned from the church for this last cargo. Together they went out into the little hall. Cream paint, flowered walls, telephone table, coat hooks, hardboard bannister case. She remembered the sites of unbuilt homes, marked out with corner bricks, strips of wood, concrete. A house takes up so little earth — a few of these floating white strides and you had covered it, end to end. A child playing out of doors could skip a minute and move over living room and kitchen, step quickly beyond the equivalent of the inhabited space. In some way this perception was linked with the disturbing
idea of Alexander, in her stripped bedroom, rifling her dressing table for little gold pins, where she had so often daydreamed him into a finished box of a home, curtained and carpeted against the night and cold. It was all struts, and padding and muffling, a house. She tightened a little white-gloved hand on Alexander’s arm. He bent and kissed her mouth, and then lifted the veiling and covered her face with it. Neatly, pacing together, they went down the garden-path and into the ribboned car.

  The next stage was briefly endless. They sat silently in the car and small knots of people stared, even waved, from street-corners, as to a princess passing. She picked her white way across uneven churchyard stones, Alexander’s hand under an elbow. In the porch a man with a camera crouched and grinned, gestured and begged her to smile and smile again. Muffled in white, she turned her head this way and that. A black verger beckoned her into the dark, and there was Frederica, yellow and peering, with glittering eyes. Between porch and church was a black velvet curtain, up against which the verger led her, so that she stared into it whilst Frederica and Alexander twitched at the veiling and shook out the flow of skirts. The verger said that when the organ sounded he would whip back the curtain and give a vicious shove to that sticky door. She should mind that old step down, a bride had measured her length only the other week and been spliced with smashed glasses and a beautiful black eye. Frederica curvetted like a restrained procession of one. Alexander arranged her arm over his: there was a wheezing and winding of bellows and then suddenly music. The verger pulled the curtain, Alexander negotiated the step, Frederica paced after. The Vicar, in rehearsal, had urged her to give Daniel a big smile. He loomed under the bright brass lectern eagle. She met his eye, briefly, vaguely. He had his concentrated frown.

  The congregation swayed like a windy garden, tilting helmeted and floral heads to see the bride. They judged the dress, they were caught in the throat, they remembered their own moment, or looked forward to it, they divested the woman of her clothes in their mind’s eyes, they speculated about what she knew and did not know. She was their dubious innocence, their experience, come, coming or to come. Under a Peter Pan cap of overlapping mauve grey petals Felicity Wells’s withered cheeks were wet. Alexander wondered why people should be so watery at weddings. He himself felt a certain satisfaction at his handiwork. He stepped forward to give this woman to be married to this man, and admired the effectiveness of his underpinning.

  They stood before Mr Ellenby, their backs towards him, one white, one black, one airy and foaming, one dark, thick, slightly shining. They were both very solid. Stephanie’s dress was plain, no lace, no floss, nun-like under the falling triangle of veiling. But she had big round breasts under the bodice, and grand hips emphasised by the reasonably small circle of the waist. A child-bearing body, Alexander thought, sharing the general impression. He was moved by the exchange of vows, the old clear words, the uncompromising rhythms. Daniel spoke gruffly and Stephanie spoke clear and low. Mr Ellenby was solicitous, rather than clerically hooting. He had given great thought to the few words he felt bound to speak, on this occasion. He had read over and abandoned his usual remarks on the duties and delights of true Christian marriage, in favour of something new, vaguely literary in honour of the bride, and yet firmly reminding the bridegroom, he trusted, of those other vows he had embraced. With what he hoped was a graceful kind of tact Mr Ellenby proceeded from Spenser’s epithalamium and Milton’s celebration of the nuptial bliss of Adam and Eve to the biblical unions mentioned in the marriage service, including that primitive, first one. Eve was flesh of Adam’s flesh and bone of Adam’s bone. Man and wife was one flesh. The marriage service explicitly likened this union to the coming together of God and Man in the union of Christ and his Spouse, the Church. “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies,” St Paul said, and his saying was incorporated in the prayer book, “He that loveth his wife loveth himself: for no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the Church: for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.” Daniel when he was ordained had been enlisted to serve and protect the Church and Congregation who were the Spouse and Body of Christ. “They two shall be one flesh,” St Paul went on. “This is a great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and the Church.” In a truly English way no one looked at anyone’s face during this exhortation. Descending his winding stair to the earth again Mr Ellenby reflected on Daniel’s impenetrable reception of his private remarks on St Peter, “himself a married man” according to Cranmer, whose pithy advice on the conversion of a pagan spouse was also included in the marriage service. “Even if any obey not the Word they may without the Word be gained by the conversion of the wives.” Or husbands, he had said to Daniel, who had said yes, bluntly, and no more. Mr Ellenby sometimes suspected that Daniel himself was more than half pagan. The girl, whom he liked, was paradoxically more capable of understanding the drift of his, or St Paul’s, parabolic analogies than his grim curate. She had sat in his study and talked wisely of Herbert’s Temple. She had the essence of the matter in her, must have. In some further divine paradoxical way, her chaste conversation might indeed Christianise her uncouth partner. So much must be prayed for. He looked benignly upon that veiled white head, which harboured briefly savage thoughts about the essential shiftiness of argument by analogy. He blessed the couple, gracefully.

  Marcus, at the back of the church, rested his face on the cold pillar from behind which Stephanie had overlooked Easter. At moments during the ceremony he consulted his watch: synchronicity was of the essence. He could see the rare old paintings above the arches. He could see the backs of Stephanie and Daniel. He could smell the strong smells of stephanotis, stone and wax in that place. He partly heard the vicar. He looked idly at the faded stains of charcoal, ochre, yellow and red, white and streaked cobalt. Ramping serpent, protesting Eve, recumbent Infant, dolorous Mother, Christ on the Tree, Christ in Wrath and Glory, the gaping, toothed Mouth of Hell. He yawned himself: nervous tension always made him sleepy. He checked his little dial again. Lately, since they had submitted to the apparent aimlessness of the proceedings, he and Lucas had had some startling successes with the transmission of very detailed mental pictures. In ten minutes or so he must make himself into a receiver, an antenna, an aerial. And after that, a transmitter. This was now done briefly and simply. Feet together, hands together, eyes closed, mind cleared, eyes opened, unfocused. Then the figure was called up and held, and held, geometric and pure. After a time the image rose, through and athwart it, an after-image on the screen of the mind’s eye, a projection. If possible, it was noted with pencil and paper. If not, committed to memory.

  They had had no success with the transmission of words, nor with the transference of thoughts. Lucas felt that this was a failing. They should be able to communicate thoughts. Marcus himself had trouble about the definition of thoughts, in so far as these differed from words. A thought to Lucas might be said to be a truth about the biosphere, or the nature of consciousness, or the mental Plan for the evolution of the Species. Marcus asked how such a thought could be formulated for transmission, or, even more, apprehended. Lucas protested that what they did achieve was so pointless, so almost wilfully redundant. What use was a detail of a flowered counterpane in the Calverley Local Arts Centre? Or the Piranesi-like grilles and winches, transmitted by Marcus and clearly received and sketched by Lucas, of the interior of Winifred Potter’s toasting-machine, stripped and partly dismantled for repair? Marcus had discovered, since the events of the Dropping Well and Owger’s Howe that he had a certain authority over Lucas that he took a cool, limited pleasure in exercising. The truth was that, message or no message, the things received were to him, in their limitations, manageable and pleasant. They were without the endless extension which so terrified him in the geometry which in its inhuman clarity also so consoled him: they were without the stammering, stumping thick wordy mess of human theory with which Lucas sometimes seemed to be positively belabouring his mind.
They were shared yet separate, a detailed achievement yet pointless. He liked them the way they were. He therefore said to Lucas that he thought they were meant, that the meaning would be revealed as long as neither of them did anything to disturb the process. They had after all discovered that what they transmitted must come to them at random, for success must not be deliberately selected for didactic or “testing” reasons, must, as it were, almost be noted slyly and sideways, rather than stared out of countenance. This was so true that Lucas was forced to concede that they must go on as they were. He came up, a little later, with the hypothesis that they were being trained to remember, when their time came, some mental blueprint so precise, novel and intricate that an unprepared mind would be able neither to plot nor to recognise it. Marcus was partly pleased by this idea. Some such extreme, required precision, taking him over totally, would relieve him of many of his present anxieties. He still carried a dumb doubt as to the possibility of naming any of these things at all.

  He didn’t altogether like the idea of transmitting things in the Church. Lucas’s identification of places of power had been sure enough, whatever qualifications one might want to make about what he did with this knowledge. The pillars and arms of stone had their own geometrical singing, which he could seize and see as a strong three-dimensional structure of interlocking lines and proportions, enclosing a space and a knot of intersections and yet also flowing away, doors, roofs, aisles, lines of arch-openings, into infinity. An infinite box is alarming. Then the field of flowery heads was a field of force that could powerfully intensify, he would guess, or distort, any message. Who knew, he thought, hearing and not hearing Mr Ellenby promulgating St Paul, what could get through. “O God, who by thy mighty power hast made all things of nothing,” said the Vicar, “who also (after other things set in order) didst appoint, that out of man (created after thine own image and similitude) Woman should take her beginning …”