The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “Run,” said Lodge. “Run, for Godsake as if you meant it.”

  There was a minor fountain in the middle of the winter garden, trickling out of a reversed conch held up by a coiled mermaid with a sly little smile. Frederica set off round this, followed by Gorman, followed by Joanne Plummer. She tried a rather desperate toss of her head, and put one hand gawkily and most unnaturally on her hip. She stopped theatrically to look provocatively back at her pursuers who were very close, and heavily prevented themselves from falling over her. Lodge shouted “No!” He said, “You were very sexy in a funny way in audition. What’s happened to it?” Gorman, rubbing a shin he had banged on the rim of the fountain, looked ostentatiously as though he found that hard to believe. Wilkie said to Alexander, “It’s when she’s talking she’s sexy. I’ve noticed.” Frederica said to Lodge, “Can’t I repeat my speech?”

  She was desperately distressed by her inability to move. Subject to contrary tugs of arrogance and childish subservience she had simultaneously assumed that she could walk into rehearsals and assert her natural superiority as an actress, a queen, and that she was supposed to be pliable, neutral material for an impresario to blow breath into, to bring to life in what form he desired. She did not know, now, whether to show off, or to take marionette-steps as they were dictated. She hated Lodge for not telling her how to run, and felt humiliated that he could not see she did not, naturally, know. Gorman and Joanne Plummer she did not take into account. Physically she disliked them both and showed it in a way quite apparent to Lodge, who was used to having to deal with such chemical motions. It was also apparent to Wilkie, whom it amused. She did not meet the eyes of Gorman and Plummer, when they spoke, which was partly in character, and partly destructive, since it made everyone’s performance clumsier and more uncertain.

  “Repeat a bit if you like. Take it from Tom Seymour’s bit about flames and cream. Try and remember you’re trying out the royal flirtation game – you’re scared it won’t work. Remember what Marina does with that teasing note in the big masque scene. Try and get a gawky parody of that. Marina’s got the tone of that dead right. And when he makes a lunge at you, run. Run, look back, run. Remember part of you wants to be caught. Let him bring you down, though, don’t bring yourself down. O.K.? Mind the pond. No duckweed called for. What I want is a real romp. This scene’s the real thing, see, – it’s got formalised into a kind of weaving, dancing chase by the big masque scene. But you three have got to tangle and romp. See?”

  Frederica was quite intelligent enough to see what was required. She was simply not bodily inventive enough to do anything about it. Lodge’s voice purred and threatened together. Many actresses, including Marina Yeo, were stirred in nipples and vagina by such sheathed threats. Frederica was chilly, intellectually anxious. Gorman took her by the shoulders and began again. “See, little lioness, little prickling rose …” His breath smelled heftily of beer and pickled onions. She wrinkled her aquiline nose. Her thin breast swelled, not with excitement, but with pain and inadequacy.

  “Don’t you think we’d improve it if we stopped lurking and went to swell the audience?” said Wilkie.

  “We’d make it much worse.”

  “Nonsense. You bring out the vestigial peacock in that painfully virginal creature.”

  “I didn’t ask Ben to cast her.”

  “Non sequitur. You know she knows what you want. And you know she wants so much to do what you want.” He gave a final flick to the putto’s little stone bubbles. “Come, Sir, be useful.”

  They sat on a stone bench, at some distance from Lodge, who seemed gloomy. Frederica, edgier, spoke a few lines vigorously, tripping over words and recovering her dignity fiercely with a dramatic tension that could have been deliberate good acting, and could have been consciousness of Alexander. Lodge sat up. Gorman made a half-hearted unctuous pounce. Lodge rose from his bench with a roar. Wilkie just audibly sniggered. Frederica, flaming with embarrassment, the red and white rose quartered in her face, fell over the rim of the fountain and began to bleed profusely at the ankle. Lodge required a clean hanky of the company at large and the cleanest was, inevitably, provided by Alexander. Alexander knelt to tie this neatly round the thin, dusty leg.

  “I can’t move, I’m no good. I’m letting you down.”

  “You’ll learn.”

  “You don’t really think so. You never did. You were dead right.” Alexander wiped his blood-stained fingers ruefully on his pristine handkerchief.

  “I did think so,” he lied. “I do think so. Would you find it easier if you had a real long skirt on?” He had often found in school productions that this helped with boys.

  “It might.”

  “It could be fixed. Shall I try?”

  She sniffed away a tear, at his kindness, at her humiliation. Alexander spoke to Lodge, who spoke to someone, who produced a kind of papery stiffened under-petticoat, and, after some debate, armed Joanne Plummer with the wardrobe-mistiess’s cutting-out shears. Alexander helped, with nappy pins, to attach the floating paper to the games shirt Frederica was wearing. Lodge took them through the scene again. During it several actors from the next scene to be rehearsed, which included the Masque, wandered in. These included Jennifer, and Matthew Crowe, who had contrived to be cast as Francis Bacon in a furred velvet gown.

  This time the scene went better. Wrath, Alexander’s touch, a half-glimpse of Jenny’s bare brown shoulder and newly-washed hair brought considerable life to Frederica’s riddling invitations and rebuffs. The petticoats gave her something to do with her redundant hands. Joanne Plummer of her own accord laid a restraining hand on the girl’s scrawny shoulder, and Frederica winced royally and convincingly, addressing herself in mock rebuke to the empty air somewhere between Sid Gorman and Alexander Wedderburn. “I am not used to be so used,” she said, and the voice had at last the combination of dry impatience and involuntary lewdness that had kindled Lodge at the auditions. Gorman was provoked to genuine aggression; he brought the girl down, rather heavily, with a kind of rugger tackle, and Joanne Plummer, excited by the shears which she brandished above her head began to laugh and snip and laugh and snip with real hysteria, waving the scissors in the air between slashes, whilst Gorman tore with some deliberation at the paper between Frederica’s legs. Shreds and floating scraps of white paper, like fallen petals, settled on pond and lawn: Frederica wriggled free, clutching her own skirt against her crotch and chanting, rudely, nervously, cleverly as Alexander had intended, the old woman’s cry from the ancient ballad. “Lawks a’ mussy on me, this is none of I.” The audience applauded. Wilkie said to Alexander, “Do you see the final state as a body-stocking or a layer of petticoat?” And Alexander said, taking seriously what was to him a serious question, “I want her hair down and a few shreds of cotton-something between a whore and a nymph – a bit of whalebone – a few flowers stuck on by Seymour –” “Lady Chatterley,” said Wilkie. “Rubbish,” said Alexander. “The flowers is a nice touch anyway,” said Wilkie.

  The next scene, not chronologically, but to be rehearsed, was the big Masque scene. This came at the end of Act II of the play. It might at this point be useful briefly to indicate the structure of Alexander’s play, both as he had devised it, and as Lodge now elaborated it.

  Each of the three acts was prefaced by a meditative dialogue between Ralegh and Spenser, sitting spotlit on the dark terrace, playing chess as it might be, gossiping, in verse, on practical things of permanent import, such as the fitting out of ships, Guinea cannibals, the brutishness and total unreason of the Irish peasantry: or on speculative matters to do with moons and vision, optic tubes and whether reddened or obliquely elongated eyes saw reddened or obliquely elongated worlds, a matter on which Ralegh, following Pliny, had written his treatise, The Sceptic. They gossiped also a little about the Queen, real queen and eternal empress, the Ocean’s Cynthia, Faerie’s Gloriana, Drayton’s, and Plato’s, Idea.

  Act I contained Mary Tudor, the imprisonment of Elizabeth, the Accession
. Act II encompassed danger and the Golden Age: the Armada, the death of Mary Stuart, the marriage bargains. Its finale was the court Masque, the descent of Astraea the Just Virgin, last of the immortals to leave the earth at the opening of the brutish Iron Age, first to return and usher in the new Age of Gold. Redit et virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna. As Virgil hath it. Act III observed the Queen’s decline, the Essex rebellion and marshy triumphs of the rude Irish. It lingered on the interview with the archivist in the tower, to whom she had said “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” King Lear got in here, echoed and slyly quoted, often only in the casual incorporation of powerful nouns: samphire, the nightmare and her ninefold, germens and moulds, the tight button, the feather and mirror of the promised end, or image of that horror. Sometimes Alexander thought he should have taken these out. Frequently Lodge did take them out, shaving and planing things Alexander believed to be natural growths, sprung unbidden in his mind, a sacred grove. Lodge said whatever their provenance they would be seen as vulgar and ostentatious curlicues, glued on.

  Each act had a solitary prisoner: Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, the degenerate and undignified Essex. The epilogue was Ralegh’s, also imprisoned in the Tower, with fifteen years of confinement, the terrible voyage to the Orinoco and the History of the World before him. The sage and serious Spenser was then dead, his castle of Kilcolman burned by the savages along with various lost volumes, it was presumed, of the endless Faerie Queene, and himself buried, destitute, next to Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, by Essex. At the putting-out of that light, in Alexander’s play, the shadows began to lengthen and grow cold.

  The imprisoned speakers alternated with populous romps and ceremonies, richly elaborated by Lodge. Against this dance were set various black messengers from the outside world, telling of the hanging, drawing and quartering of Lopez on his gibbet, of the dignified and ridiculous death of the bewigged Queen of Scots, of Essex’s horrible lonely progress through the City. Alexander’s messengers were he hoped like the crucial Messengers of Greek tragedy and spoke what he hoped was particularly well-fleshed and full-blooded verse. Lodge kept cutting them down. He said they detracted from the action. Alexander said on the contrary they were the action, they were to work in poetry on the audience’s imagination whilst the silver and golden maskers wove their labyrinth of pleasure and virtue, and the poets sat on the steps of the terrace. Lodge said audiences would get shifty and restive on cold evenings no matter how well provided with blankets and thermoses and really things must be kept moving. Alexander, said Lodge, was imagining endless balmy clear evenings with the moon high in the sky and stars floating but he himself had seen too much outdoor drama to fall for that. Secretly he thought Alexander’s play was a little like Frederica Potter’s body – clever and static. They needed a bit of pushing around and limbering up.

  The Astraea masque, Alexander’s box in box play in play, coincided then with the report of the death of the other Queen, giving its vision of golden world, completed circles, eternal harvest, a grim counter-point. Lodge had wanted to let down Astraea and her maidens on gold wires, but this proved impracticable. Their formal dance, as court masques did, nevertheless involved the whole court finally, including Ralegh, Spenser, Bess Throckmorton, an anti-masque of schoolboy satyrs with horns and fur, culminating in an orderly-disorderly Saturnalia and the famous swisser-swatter dialogue, straight from Aubrey in its pristine glory. Wilkie-Ralegh was an elegant Dionysos. Marina Yeo, high-enthroned and jewel-encrusted, sat like a still point until at last she too was induced to dance, high and disposedly.

  Astraea and her maidens were played by Anthea Warburton and the lovely girls who had caused Frederica’s earlier despair: they had almost non-speaking visionary parts. Anthea had a face like a Botticelli Venus, a Beauty Queen’s body, and a dignified manner. She could carry a sheaf of corn at various classical angles, all of them lovely. She could wave her white arms, or incline her heavy harvest-coloured head, and cause audiences, and Lodge, to smile involuntarily because it was so rightly done. The attendant bevy of graces and young maids-in-waiting had an atmosphere of female wholesomeness, innocence, readiness and wonder at the glamour of the actors which became an increasingly crucial part of the Bacchanalian atmosphere which developed. They giggled over sandwiches preserved in helmets, developed crushes on the great, Max Baron, Crispin Reed, Roger Braithwaite, Bob Grundy, neither knowing nor not knowing what effect their sweet and silly intensities were having.

  From this bevy Frederica, by virtue of her part, and more of her nature, found herself excluded. She could not giggle. No one in a flood of sudden tears turned to her for help. Nobody confided to her that she had become possessed of one of Braithwaite’s handkerchiefs with initials on. She was quickly known to be soppy about Alexander Wedderburn but this was felt somehow to be a folly, an aberration, even, she surmised darkly, pathetic. The kind of rage the Bevy’s soft twitterings induced in her plays its part in what follows of this story.

  The Bevy also had an effect on Jennifer. She had applied her intelligence to the problem of her love and decided that this summer Alexander should hear nothing of the washing-machine and see nothing of small Thomas. This required considerable planning, since both Thomas and the washing-machine were certainly still there. She dealt with them at night, she borrowed friends of the Bevy to baby-mind. She went to Calverley, had her hair dressed, and bought sundresses and whirling skirts. Today she was in peach-coloured poplin with ribbon-straps; she sat more or less with the Bevy, looking younger, less wan and less brisk. This touched Alexander, who went and sat at her feet. He was followed by Wilkie, who assured Jenny that he was greatly looking forward to their contribution to the dance.

  Lodge disposed the Bevy in fair attitudes at one end of the terrace, the boy-satyrs in convenient shrubs, and the nuclear court rising in the centre, from step to step to throne. The girls danced forward, strowing imaginary garlands. The boys leaped, acrobatically pumping little legs. Lodge walked lords and ladies into the pattern, pacing deliberately over ground where they would scamper and skip. There was no music; the Consort had not yet come to rehearsals. Frederica sat with Alexander; there was now no reason why she shouldn’t go home, except that she feared to miss something. “Ah, bonny sweet Robin …” said Marina Yeo to Max Baron. “Now, Wilkie,” said Lodge. Wilkie pushed Jenny against a rocky stone pillar – “It should be a tree,” said Alexander, leaning forward – and thrust a plump knee into the blown peach folds of her dress. “Nay, Sir Walter, nay sweet Sir Walter,” cried Jenny with conviction. Wilkie applied his face to Jenny’s breast above the frilled edges of the sundress. She flushed, and stumbled convincingly in her lines. “Smashing,” said Lodge. “Our best days are shadows,” said Marina Yeo, “my Robin, and our gestures, the same and the same, stiffen a little, though always new.”

  “Alexander,” said Frederica, “why do actresses always trill words so? Why can’t they just speak clearly?”

  “Hush,” said Alexander.

  “Bonny sweet Robin,” said Frederica, in a thrilling parody. “Hush.”

  Wilkie’s knee was deeper, his arm gripped. “Swisser swatter,” said Jenny. “Stop,” said Lodge. “Not embarrassment, a kind of manic screech, if you can see your way to it, love.”

  “A kind of orgasm,” said Wilkie.

  “It is certainly very funny if the timing’s right,” said Frederica to Alexander, who did not answer. Wilkie took hold of Jenny’s naked parts and seemed to whisper fiercely in her ear. This time the sweet Sir Walter had a sawing-quavering edge, and the swisser swatter could certainly be called a manic screech. Lodge clapped, Wilkie kissed Jenny, Alexander crossly hushed Frederica and the Queen rose in virgin wrath before the whole party dissolved in laughter.

  Later that afternoon the first note of the bottle-chorus, which was to reach such glorious and hideous proportions, was heard. Edmund Wilkie, who had emptied a bottle of beer, blew a meditative note across its neck, a soughing, hooting, owlish music which sounded surprisingly loud off stone an
d treetrunks. He tried again, and picked up one of the beats of the dance-steps. Alexander laughed, and blew across a fuller bottle from the other side of the terrace. Crowe magisterially waved his ferule and the two fluted and huffed their way through a kind of melody. Lodge bowed to them, called “Encore”, and returned to the dance. In later days Wilkie made an octave of bottles, and then an orchestra, combining champagne, cider, large and small beer and whisky, enrolling tappers as well as blowers, chipping, singing, sighing. Later still there was a time when musical discord fell away into wild cacophony and mindless drumming. But now Alexander stood on the terrace nodding at Wilkie and tapping his foot; Anthea tossed mane and wrists; Thomas Poole, having found a full bottle of Guinness and drunk most of it in a long swallow, was hooting too, and the duet was a trio. The Bevy was giggling. At the end of the figure Alexander danced Jenny along the terrace and into the Great Hall: the Bevy followed: Frederica, unmusical and ungainly, was left to Crowe, who tucked his rod under one arm in a military way, offered her the other, and led her in.