The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Crowe gave them drinks. Max Baron sat on a table and lectured the Bevy on the secret of Hamlet, in which he had played a much-remarked Claudius. Alexander and Jenny sat in a window together. “What on earth was that creature saying to you?” said Alexander. Wilkie was presenting, with both hands and considerable drama, a large cup of wine to Marina Yeo. “He only said, wait till I get my hand in. Only a joke.” “He was a repellent little boy.” “He’s not a little boy now. And not repellent. But you don’t have to take him quite seriously.” She was flushed and happy: it was playtime again: Alexander squeezed her hand.

  “So I knew,” said Max Baron to the Bevy, “I simply knew that Claudius had seduced Ophelia before the action began. It makes sense of it all. The fact that he’s the centre of corruption, it’s to him she’s singing all that stuff about virginity …”

  Anthea Warburton, surprising Frederica badly, suddenly sang in a clear, cold soprano,

  Then up he rose and doff’d his clothes

  And dupped the chamber door

  Let in the maid that out a maid

  Never departed more.”

  There was a moment’s pure silence, then the Bevy giggled in unison. “Exactly,” said Max Baron. “And she sings it to him, to the King, in the flower scene – it’s the last casual betrayal of poor Hamlet …”

  “Who isn’t there,” said gruff Frederica.

  “That’s not the point. The point is that something is rotten, and Claudius …”

  “I don’t think that can be right,” said Frederica.

  “I knew, when she came up with those flowers, that he knew, that Claudius knew, that I knew … she should be played as a young-old minx who knows it’s his fault, she’s his creature …”

  “I think that’s brilliant,” said Anthea Warburton.

  “Nonsense,” said Frederica, having meant to mutter it, hearing it clear as a bell in her father’s voice.

  “It’s a fascinating theory,” said silky Crowe at her elbow.

  “No, it’s nonsense. He was a better playwright than that. If he’d meant it to be that it’d have been clear enough. Laertes thinks Hamlet may have stolen his way into her favours. But all this just can’t be so.”

  “I don’t see why not. I tell you, I knew.”

  “What you knew,” said Frederica, painstakingly, accurately and unforgivably, “was your own feelings.” Ignoring Crowe she turned to Alexander. “Alexander. Alexander – he was a better playwright …”

  Alexander, his arm easily round Jenny, let Frederica largely down. “It’s the most riddling of all texts,” he said, his voice dying away to a murmur. He was annoyed with himself, and then thought, I am not a school-master now, and tightened his arm round his love.

  Crowe said to Frederica, “You haven’t a drink.”

  “No.”

  “You want one.”

  “Have you ever known me refuse one?” She said that badly. Her face was hot, hot. Crowe gave her a cold glass and said, “Come, I have something to show you.”

  So she was back in his inner room again, and he was showing her drawings for masquers, horned men and frondy women, and his pudgy little hands were round her waist.

  “Cross-patch, stick-like girl. Bend, bend.”

  The room was mostly dark. A strip-light over the Marsyas, a confined bright circle of desk-light.

  “All the same, he was wrong, he was simply wrong, he was reading it wrong.”

  “Yes of course, but what does it matter?” He had brought the cold bottle as well as the glasses. “Sit down, look at my Inigo Jones …”

  She walked away and sat down. He came padding after, cherub-red face, silvery tonsure, tiny paunch. “I could make you into a real woman, Frederica.”

  “More to the point to make me a real virgin princess. I’ve got to be good, since it’s no good being clever, and I’ve got no skills like singing and dancing, and to be truthful I’m too uninformed to see what’s special about your pictures, except they’re old, people are always showing me things, and I’m simply too ignorant to know why the things inspire whatever they do inspire. And when I do say what I do know I get hooted at.”

  “Dear girl, dear girl, I only want you to remember in ten years you saw such things – my line drawings, my bleeding Marsyas, my ripe Hyacinth, I want you to remember, you stand for who must remember. Have more wine. You may be unappreciative now, but you will remember clearly. When I am dead or senile.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Having said nonsense so recently in such clarion tones in such a good cause, don’t lie now. How old do you think I am?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Old?”

  “Compared to me.”

  “Ah, well, yes.” He sat on the edge of her chair. He put his hand in her dress and began to pinch her breasts. “Not old enough to be necessarily repulsive?”

  “No.” Though he was, or that particular activity was, repulsive, then.

  “But not compelling like Alexander Wedderburn.”

  “I’ve loved him all my life. Or almost. You know.”

  “I don’t know. In spite of his other – preoccupations.”

  “That’s not serious.”

  “You speak with such appalling certainty. Do you –” twisting her breast almost sharply now – “know what is serious, with him?”

  She began to say that she imagined she knew, meaning that she herself would be, when the time came, when she got there, which had not yet, it was true, come about, and then, sensing danger, she closed her mouth. She began again to say that his play was, and again closed her mouth, as though she was exposing something vulnerable in Alexander, which was ridiculous, since Crowe must know, better than she did, what Alexander’s play meant to Alexander. She turned up a silent fierce face to Crowe, who gave her a nip, and then something of a bite, on the lips. He was now definitely hurting, as well as fondling, her breasts. She wondered if she should perhaps bite him back. She went on talking.

  “It’s no use, I’m not cultured, I just know a bit more literature than most girls my age.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well I know Phèdre and Le Misanthrope and Vol de Nuit and Hamlet and The Tempest and Paradise Lost IX and X and Keats (1820) and Wuthering Heights and Kubla Khan and Goethe’s lyrics, a selection, and Tonio Kroger and Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, and I will know Persuasion and something by Kleist because those are my A Level set texts. Oh, and some Ovid and Tacitus and Aeneid VI. And I’ve read,” she added, as Crowe inserted a hand under her skirt and nipped far in with sharp nails and she thought grimly of Ed and Goathland, “I’ve read Lady Chatterley and all the other Lawrence Daddy insists on. But I can tell you,” she said, glowering up at the gouts of blood in the woven muscles of the Marsyas, “all that’s no help with your culture, with what you keep showing me.”

  “Like hard little apples,” said Crowe, “and soft little fish-roes. You’re a nice creature, a hard and soft creature, and you will know, if you don’t now, that Aeneid VI and The Tempest and Phèdre and Tonio Kröger are directly to do with what I show you, and if you are using words at all accurately when you say you ‘know’ these things, you are doomed to have no hope except to take in everything else as well. Shall I drive you home, or make Alexander take you as an awkward third with Mrs Parry? Which will induce you to come and sit on my knee again, and show me a little more while I show you a little more?”

  “Alexander, please.”

  “You won’t be popular.”

  “I’ve got used to that.”

  “Do you think you’ll get what you want?”

  “I don’t know. That doesn’t seem to be the point.”

  “I admire your single-mindedness.”

  “It’s all I’ve got.”

  “Not quite. Apples, fish-roes, a minimal basis of culture. But I don’t think you’ll find what you want is what you want when you get it. There’s a hairbrush in my bog, and a mirror. I’ll trot off and do your bidding.”

  Je
nny was happy. Lodge was congratulatory and Alexander was attentive and Wilkie was just sufficiently flirtatious. She thought, not about Thomas, but about symbols of the fact of Thomas; her front door, an unwashed Peter Rabbit dish, daylight on closed cotton curtains. She hated closed curtains, but you had to do it to babies. Crowe came up, and told Alexander that Frederica had had too much to drink and he had promised her Alexander would take her home. Alexander said he had other plans. Crowe said they could wait. Jenny said it was of no importance. Her tone was so different from her late sharpnesses that he gave her a quick hug and was bathed in warmth and ease, a feeling that persisted when Crowe returned with a slightly hectic Frederica. An intimacy is often intensified by the presence of an excluded third. It was so on this occasion. Jenny sat beside him; thigh and shoulder and lingering fingers touched. Frederica was jounced in the back, in solitary dumps. As they rolled over Crowe’s cattle grids she remembered her vision of humped figures on this back seat at Goathland, and Alexander simultaneously remembered her bedizened face peering in at the glass he was now looking out of. He swerved dangerously under a cedar. Jenny laughed. Frederica said, “Gosh, look where you’re going.” Alexander said, “For God’s sake, shut up, Frederica.”

  33. Annunciation

  Stephanie stood in the telephone box in the middle of the circling caterpillar tracks on the sea of mud at Askham Buildings, trying to make a call. It was hot. The box smelled of stale tobacco, evaporated urine, warmed metal. The children bounced and slouched round the black tyres on their scaffolds. The directories were coverless and puffy, with a patina of grey-brown grease. She stood in her column of foul air, fastidiously reading a number from a folded scrap of white paper. Daniel watched from their window. A figure rosy and white between scarlet bars, bending an ear, turning a finger, pushing button A.

  The connection clicked. Her knees trembled. “This is Mrs Orton. You said if I rang about now you might know something.”

  “I’ll get him to speak to you. A moment, please.”

  Clicks. Humming wire. Humming waiting mind.

  “Ah yes, Mrs Orton.” A booming, authoritative voice. “I am happy to tell you the results are positive.” Happy was not a good word: he sounded more like a judge than a bringer of good tidings. “You’d better come and see me as soon as possible. You’ll need to make some arrangements, fix up a bed and so-on … Mrs Orton, are you there?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  The voice hunted a phrase, asked quite smoothly, “Was this news unexpected?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you must not be silly, Mrs Orton, you must come and see me and make plans. You’ve not got only yourself to consider.”

  “I know.”

  “Then I’ll make you an appointment. Which day would suit you?”

  Paper crackled over wire, the appointment was made, the receiver cradled. She continued to stand in the box, staring at its one opaque wall. She folded her arms round her belly.

  She tried to think. She was wholly dazed by Daniel, his weight, his warmth, his being, whether he was there or not. This had not prevented her from doing other things. She had taught successfully to the end of term, and was now reading The Prelude minutely and with delight in the evenings, despite gang battles on the stairs, shrilling bells, chronic radios, breaking glass. It was all lit by Daniel, as though the clarity of reading was his gift, or a gift of sex, to whom, or to which, the moment he returned from church or home or hospital she gave her entire attention. He was so strong, so ingenious, so much there. She must have known that he was like that, or she could never have done something so contrary to what she believed she cared about. Like many intellectuals she was possessed by amazed delight at having done something instinctive and right. She had thought with her body, must have, and was being rewarded with pure pleasure, of a kind she vaguely believed most people were never privileged to know.

  She thought she remembered the moment of conception. Sunlit and glassy, like waterglass, and she compelled drowsily to listen to her internal dispositions, cells shifting, like yeast in dough, so that she caught her breath. They had not meant this to happen. Probably she thought, still motionless and cradling her belly, with the secret smile that belonged to past plains of pleasure, there had simply been too much of Daniel for flesh or blood or any rubber device to withstand. She thought she was sorry. This must be the beginning of the end of extravagance, and she had never before been, or wanted to be, extravagant. Clustered implanted cells would perhaps, like rubber, not withstand extravagant energy. It was strange how rapidly one developed an instinct to protect this unwanted thing. But there it was. Her senses quickened by Daniel she took note of it. Ten minutes, in her case, was apparently long enough.

  Money would be a problem. Daniel was so sure what he wanted, and had not said he wanted children. Some men, she knew, listened to heart-beats through belly-walls and some resented intruders. What should she say to Daniel?

  He came across the mud, dog-collared and hulking, and tapped on the glass. She stared out at him. He opened the door.

  “Well,” he said. “The Annunciation.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Well, you look like all those pictures of the Virgin at her desk, and just as stunned as if you’d seen an angel. No, no, it’s the arms. All women do that, hug themselves like that, you can always tell. Then their hair goes awful.” He touched the bright gold and grinned blackly at her. “You can’t be quite shattered, we did stretch a point and cut a corner here and there. It can’t have been a bolt from the blue. Steph?”

  “I was worrying what you would feel.”

  “I feel clever. Most people can do it if they try, most people feel clever, I feel clever. Won’t you come out of there?”

  “Daniel, it’s not clever, it’s a mistake, it’s an awful problem –”

  “I know. But I reckon we’ll cope, won’t we? It’s very interesting. You look quite different.”

  “I feel quite different.”

  “Well, there you are. Ten minutes, and we’re quite changed. Do come in.”

  They went in. Daniel kept looking at her as though she must be transfigured. Possibly because she felt indeed transfigured this struck her as wildly funny. She began to laugh. Daniel roared with laughter. All the same, she thought, it’s an end, things have changed, we have changed, we haven’t understood that. But they couldn’t stop laughing.

  34. The Dragon at Whitby

  The extraordinary success of the experiments in transmission carried out during the Orton-Potter wedding seemed to galvanise Lucas Simmonds into a new and different phase of activity. The experiments had been successful beyond doubt: the laboratory beaker of grasses seen by Marcus in St Bartholomew’s Church was observably standing on Lucas’s workbench. Lucas had made a drawing of a lipped and fanged mouth, surrounded by a cloud of flying particles, which was recognisably a crude adumbration of the St Bartholomew Gate of Hell. He had even put in a kind of jagged halo of red pencil, so certain was he that the colour was of some importance. What they had achieved, Lucas declared, pink and beaming, was irrefutable proof that they could both receive and transmit complex images and messages. Now they must, they absolutely must, establish contact with the outside intelligences who were waiting. There was, in his own mind, no doubt that this would be done, and very shortly. A little contemplation, a little research, would produce an appropriate technique. He had every confidence, every confidence. He laughed, loudly, out of an apparent superflux of physical energy.

  Marcus, unjudging but curious, remarked Lucas’s behaviour during the following few days. He seemed to have become possessed of an almost daemonic health and vigour; he strode up and down to explain a point, instead of sitting, he made endless little journeys to fetch this and that; he walked on the edge of running speed habitually through the cloisters. His ruddy cheeks shone like apples but he was observably growing trimmer, even thinner, about the wa
ist and down the thighs. His flannels hung baggier, and he bunched clumps of them from time to time in clenched fists. Some of his hesitance before his disciple had vanished – he no longer looked at Marcus for pointers of direction with the dog-like, questing look he used to deploy. He seemed to be getting messages of his own, about which he was cheerily, busily secretive. He looked for signs, straws in the wind, coincidences, and found them. He became excited by the interrelatedness of volumes grabbed at random from the library shelves and seemed to be consuming vast tracts of written works: Freud, Frazer, Jung, the records of the Society for Psychic Research, Gerard’s Herbal, J. W. Dunne, Gerald Heard. He used all these, the Red Guide to the North Yorkshire Moors, the Bible, his field guides of British flora and fauna, Mother Shipton, indifferently as a kind of eclectic universal sortes Virgilianae. Puns, or multiple uses of words, greatly excited him. He lectured Marcus incomprehensibly for a long time on the meanings of the word Mercury, mythical, chemical, alchemical and botanical: they had found creeping dog’s mercury at Knaresborough, there was meaning in that. He made a sally into hermetic doctrines and hermetic seals on vacuum jars and the alchemical hermaphrodite who was the human symbol of the perfected Work, spiritualised matter, the lumen novum, the Stone.

  Marcus sat and listened to all this, letting most of it pass over his mind without trying to grasp it. It confirmed his mistrust of words, when he thought about it, which he did with the use of a rather peaceable mental image of a globe, scored, pierced, and netted with lines meeting and diverging at poles and centre: all such languages could be made to head at breakneck speed towards coincidence and coherence, if that was what you set out to do with them. Marcus thought: to say “the light was too much for me” is to speak a different language, in which he doesn’t seem to be interested. He stared out of the laboratory window at the small white sun, painfully glittering, and thought that the relation between the light, which bothered him, and his own perceptual equipment, and that mass of flaring gas and matter, and any other intelligence, might not at all be so seamlessly interrelated as all this pretty but reductive word-work made it. But he was not uncontent: Lucas had, at least temporarily, stopped attempting to use Marcus’s hypnagogic visions for divination, and thus he was getting more sleep. And the word-work, even more the bodily cheerfulness, of his friend, consoled and protected him if he did not think.