The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “Have some wine,” said Lucas. He poured. After a time he said, “Have some more wine.” Marcus, unused to alcohol, drank thirstily. Lucas, erect, as though waiting for a touch of flame on the brow, or a voice from the blue vault, sipped angrily from a bakelite mug. He offered Marcus a beef sandwich and an apple, which Marcus accepted. He ate nothing himself. After two good beakers of wine Marcus lay down with his head on the rug and folded his arms over his face, making darkness. The light that had purposefully invaded him on the Far Field was conspicuous by its absence. Here was the sun, a burning glass, too much intention, a headache. After a moment, Lucas’s body was lowered next to his. The old questing voice said, “What next?”

  “Oh, wait.” Thickly, into the crease of his elbow.

  “Wait for what?”

  “How should I know? You started this.”

  After some more time, his friend said, meekly, “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologise to me. I didn’t think the heavens would open. We did really burn up some things, though, it was extraordinary.”

  “Not extraordinary. Simple.”

  Marcus realised that he had been reinvested with his dubious authority. He became angry.

  “You saw what happened to all those things. You did. Now you ought to know what I’m so scared of, you ought to go carefully. I’m scared of my brains boiling in my head like the viper’s bugloss. You don’t seem to see that there is a simple real thing there that one could be really scared of. You ought to be scared, not put out, you haven’t thought. Do you want to be melted into a column of hot air and scattered on the sea by convection, do you, or made into ashes like the lovely grasses? Do you want to be nothing, do you? How near do you want to get? I don’t think you know what it might be like. I know. What you made was at least an illustration of what I’m scared of, but you’d never let me say it was terrible, you kept saying it was glorious. What do you want it to do? How do you know, if it took any notice of you, if it’s intelligent, that you could stand its attention? No, keep out of the way, keep still, that’s all we can do.”

  There was a long silence. Then Lucas said simply, “I am so unhappy.”

  Marcus turned his face away, and then, with darkened eyes, held out his cut hand to Lucas, who took it, and hotly held it. Their bodies moved closer together. There was a strange clicking: Marcus became aware that Lucas’s teeth were chattering. He rolled over and put a tight arm over his friend’s shoulder, clutching the hot flannel. He smelled sweat, and panic. He scrabbled at Lucas’s body, like one keeping someone from dying of cold with his own warmth. The dull little voice said:

  “I am so unhappy. I have nothing, no friends, nothing I do is real. And every now and then I almost see something, almost – and then there’s a disaster.”

  “You have me,” said Marcus, trembling himself with unaccustomed gentleness.

  “I am no good to you. You live in the real world. I go in and out of a phantasmagoria. I ought to know, I ought to keep watch, when I get thinner, it’s a Sign. I ought to protect you, you are in my care, not …”

  “No. You’ve changed my life. And, Sir – what we saw was real, the grasses and the picture, that hasn’t gone, and maybe this is only taking its time to work, and there was Owger’s Howe – you did a lot – a lot – a lot was real – is real –”

  He did not want this closed world to go. Lucas Simmonds was his protection from the importunity of the infinite.

  “I am not pure. That’s what it is. Partly. Of the earth, earthy, though it smells and I hate the smell, I hate the whole messy business. I hate my body, I hate bodies, I hate hot and heavy … You are pure. One recognises it when one sees it. You are a clean being, you see cleanly. You are …”

  Marcus did not want to know what he was. He edged closer, pulling at the blazer, and the weight of flesh under it. He said, as one might to a child, “Hush, keep still, it doesn’t matter. Something did happen, you’ve got to keep still. You’ve got me, I’m here.” And when had his own presence been a help or a consolation to anyone, ever, he thought, not remembering the days of his youth, or the moments shared with Winifred, speechless and closed, in the maternity hospital. He said, as she might then have said to him, a woman with a restless, struggling child, “Keep still, keep still, it doesn’t matter.” And quite suddenly Lucas Simmonds dropped into a flushed sleep, his wet mouth slightly open, his face turned towards Marcus, who lifted his head slightly and glimpsed the glitter of sweat along the cleft of the nose, the little balls of it gleaming amongst the hairs of the eyebrows. He held onto Lucas’s hand, and closed his own eyes, and slept, heavily and blackly, as though unconsciousness was what was most deeply to be desired.

  When they woke, they disentangled arms and legs in silence and, backs turned one to another, gathered up their things, the blanket from the crushed grass, the apple core, the knife, packed and set out walking. Marcus felt terrible. Indigo circles, like after-images of the sun, danced before him in triads and circling spires across the cliff grass, hovered over the fall to the water, hung in the sky. Lucas said nothing and went very fast so that Marcus had to stretch his legs and trot to keep up with him.

  The glossy black-beetle car, parked on a grass verge, was very hot, outside and in, a little furnace, throwing off a haze of visible heat like a jellyfish skirt swaying in cool water might be, undulating. Lucas flung the baskets into the rudimentary back seat and got rapidly into the front, slamming the door and winding down the glass. Marcus followed him, running his hand round his neck inside the shirt. They added their blazers to the pile in the back. Marcus looked at Lucas who leaned back in his seat, staring not at the boy, but through the windscreen. Heat coiled about them.

  Lucas said, “There are a lot of things I should say, things you should know, things I haven’t mentioned.”

  “No, no …” deprecating. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “How can you know that? There are things about me you should know, perhaps – though I’ve hoped this wasn’t all primarily a personal matter, I’ve hoped so. But I have cheated you in a way, there are things that happen – to me – you might feel you had a right to know about, if they happened again. I’ll tell you, I will tell you, in good time. No one can be blamed for being afraid of being transformed, translated or incarcerated, as has happened, in the past, I have to admit. It began with the destroyer. In the Pacific, when I was serving on that destroyer. There was some trouble, with aerials and messages, there too, and a Tribunal, I was called before a Tribunal, and then in a white cell for a long time – They told me then, you must never have children, you must never contemplate having children, you can transmit … I had the idea they had me electronically tracked to see if I was going in for – activity – on that front, to make sure there were no children. Maybe all that was an illusion. They were all white and the rooms were white, might have been anywhere, on the destroyer, outside time and space, I believed various things at various times as to the precise location of the events, and only really came to when I was somewhere in Greenwich which was certainly not where I began. Maybe I flew. Maybe they flew me. Maybe time stopped. Nobody told me. They didn’t think, I expect, that I was fit, in a fit state, that is, to take information in, but I didn’t stop thinking on that account, by no means, I formed hypotheses as to my whereabouts. I think, I’m not sure, I know I thought they had electrodes in my lobes, and in my … To make sure … Maybe they did. They can do such things. You’d be surprised if I told you some of the things I saw them do, before … before I left.

  “I told you, they wanted me to teach sex instruction at that school, as an extension of human biology, but I said no, no, no, you must get a good lady from some Welfare in a hat to do that, or some wholesome smiley girl; I leave the Undying Worm alone, in my condition, nice hermaphroditic anonymous earthworms are as far as I go, convenient creatures with few problems, at least as they are made apparent to the human eye. I do amphibians and rabbits, but man that great amphibium I leave alone and hop
e very much we may so evolve that the whole issue becomes redundant, I tell them, or not, depending on who I think is listening, and how they are listening, naturally. There are ways to eternal life that aren’t available to the higher organisms, you know, even Freud said so. He said death was bound up with our sexual method of perpetuating ourselves. Once the cells of the body have become divided into soma and germ-plasm, he said, an unlimited duration of individual life would become a quite pointless luxury. A quite pointless luxury. When this differentiation had been made in multicellular organisms death became possible and expedient. The soma dies, the protista remain immortal. The undying seed. But they told me, you must never contemplate … I said that. Another thing, Freud said, was that reproduction didn’t begin only when death did. Oh no. It’s a primal characteristic of living matter, like growth. Life has been continuous from its first beginning upon earth. There’s a mystery. It’s only the individual higher organism that’s sexually divided and dies. Not the biosphere on the one hand. Nor the hermaphrodite hydra on the other, that divides and divides and becomes more examples of the same form, somewhere between vegetable and animal.

  “There was a book I was led to read recently, an odd old book of Heard’s, not one of the ones about the evidences of God, a book called Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes. I liked that because it saw the clothes we wear as our way of modifying our anatomy – corsets and razors – and later, chemistry and pharmacy, control of the pituitary gland, the removal of unwanted hair – Heard sees it all as an evolutionary move to reduce the mass of our bodies. That’s very interesting, I thought. He said that houses and wardrobes and tool chests were ways of laying aside fur and nails and teeth. He said scientific diet would in due course rid us of our clumsy distillery of intestinal coils. He said that we should grow to be like Wells’s Martians, tentacled brains in machines, only we would not find that repellent but beautiful, a man without his machine would revolt us then, as a man without his clothes disgusts respectable ladies now, or the sight of the lovely brain without its covering of hair and skin still revolts us irrationally. He said we should become swarms of bright little clockwork organisms like watch cases, with tiny opalescent bodies at the heart of the springs. It fitted into the Jung in my mind – about Mercurius and the prima materia – because he said we could get back to where we began – an idea imprisoned in matter – “You said out there, did I want to be nothing. Like the grasses, you said. Well, yes, I do and I don’t. Do you read much poetry?”

  Marcus said no, he did not. He added that he had been allergic to poetry, which had lain about his house all his life, like so much dust or pollen, all over, and he now considered himself desensitised. To this remarkable and illuminating confession Lucas did not listen, or barely, since he was going on to explain that he had also recently been led to read a considerable amount of poetry and particularly the works of Andrew Marvell who had seemed to understand about the desire to be without the limitations of sex and the troubles of flesh. He had written a very lovely poem called The Garden in which he spoke of Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. My vegetable love, Lucas said, broodingly and apparently irrelevantly. After a further gap, he said, “I wish I could simply teach botany, I wish it were possible to stick at a green thought.” After another silence he added, “I’m not a homosexual you know, I’m not anything.”

  “It wouldn’t matter,” said Marcus, embarking on a protestation, or assurance he couldn’t finish. He had not followed the narrative of Lucas’s speech; he was struggling with his own fears, shadowily bodied forth in Lucas’s half-formed memories of actuality; but more powerfully, he felt moved by gentleness. Lucas had fed and lectured and admired him: something was owed in return. He wanted to offer consolation, and had not the wisdom to know how or why to console. So, like so many of us, he offered himself instead.

  “Sir, Lucas, I care. I do care. There is me. Can’t I do anything?”

  Lucas turned on him a face red with sun and shame.

  “You could touch me. Just touch. Contact.”

  Slow Marcus again held out his hand. Lucas took it in his own, which seemed puffed and clumsy, and after a moment laid both their hands on his own lap. They sat, silently, not looking at each other, staring out through the windscreen. Lucas moved their two hands closely into his crotch. Marcus jerked involuntarily and Lucas gripped tighter.

  “Never say,” he said, pleading, pedantic, breathing with difficulty, “never say, it was all only sex. But if only you could … no more than touch, I assure you.”

  He fumbled desperately with his strained fastenings and suddenly, hot, straight and silky, the penis sprang into view. Marcus pulled back: Lucas gripped, and gripped.

  “I know I shouldn’t,” said Lucas. “But if only you could, if you could bring yourself – just to touch – I should be connected …”

  Marcus looked sideways, his way, and out of pity, embarrassment, honour, complicity, put out his thin, pale hand and laid it limply on the burning thing, neither clutching nor caressing. “Ah,” said Lucas, “ah,” and the hard root flowered extravagantly and wetly and wilted slowly in the same moment, leaving Marcus’s hand full. “Ah,” said Lucas again, shuddering in the driving seat. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. It was a failure of the will.”

  They could not look at each other.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Marcus said in an undertone. “It doesn’t matter, Lucas.”

  But it did matter. For a moment he himself had stirred in sympathy, and then Lucas had been convulsed and he was where he had always been, alone, out of touch, separate. He wiped his fingers on his handkerchief, his own trousers, anything.

  “It does matter,” Lucas said. “It’s a disaster. It’s the beginning of the end.” He said this in a quiet, dogmatic way, buttoning himself as he said it, and waited for an answer. Marcus could think of none. Lucas then inserted the key, started the car with a jerk, without looking at his passenger, reversed off the grass and set off down the road.

  What followed, the drive over the moors, was a nightmare. Marcus, before he stopped thinking at all, thought it should not have been possible to drive so fast. Air and heather and dry stone walls whipped past: corners screamed and sickened: parallax wavered, spun in like a cocoon, centred between his eyes, which he closed. He tried to speak and his mouth was dry: they leaped hills and floated or plummeted into air pockets: cross-roads went past with the slamming sound of gates or trees unregarded and unrespected. Marcus got down on his knees after a time and buried his face in his seat, stealing only one glance up at the set, stony figure of his friend, his rosy face staring impassively under its sunny curls over the wheel into empty space. Do you want to kill us, Marcus wanted to say, and could not speak, nor repeat, do you want to be nothing, either. Marcus crouched, stared, lost consciousness, gained it to see the sky whirling and closed his eyes again.

  35. Queen and Huntress

  The night of the dress rehearsal came. And this is our last chance, said Lodge, haranguing principals and extras from the Royal footstool on the terrace gravel, whilst in the trees one green bottle enquired, musical and most melancholy, who, who? This is our last chance to put it all together, to get the magic right, and we have so nearly made it. He waved his arms, intoning, uncharacteristically, with the musical slither and bell of the true actor, charming, cajoling, minatory, and they all, in wigs and furred gowns, in hoops and bulging trunk-hose, sighed and laughed and gathered up their skirts and their courage.

  Frederica sat on a rug next to Edmund Wilkie, under an arc light hung in a tree. Wilkie, in black velvet rayed with seed pearls, the living image of the cloaked Portrait Gallery Ralegh, was doing tiny fine sums on graph paper with a pencil. He had several sheets of such paper, covered with diagrams of test-tubes, tall and fat bottles, demi-johns; also with odd traced diagrams of cosmic serpents traversing the heavenly spheres, Apollo with a pot of flowers, the Graces. Over the last weeks he had expended considerable ingenuity on making the Bottl
e Chorus, scientifically, into a fine art. He measured columns of air over columns of water, mapped velocities and frequencies of sounds and airs as they echoed round cavernous glass globes or whistled in slender glass tubes. He had assembled a consort of more or less reliable boys from the fauns of the anti-masque, whom he rehearsed, in spare moments, in the great hall. Now these clutched to their doublets mathematically labelled bottles, diamantine, amber, emerald: wine, beer, pop. They could, when Wilkie gave the sign, render Giles Farnaby his Toye, When the Saints Come Marching In, Dowland and Campion’s Paradise, the Foggy, Foggy Dew, with embellishments and intensified din devised by Wilkie himself. That man of many parts was now writing, he said, the true music of the spheres, according to a scheme to be found in the Practica Musica (1496) of Gafurius, who had drawn a series of correspondences between Doric, Lydian, Phrygian and Mixolydian modes, the planets in the heavens, and the muses. Wilkie told Marina Yeo that he would create a true Apollonian order from a Dionysiac cacophony – and all so that he could stand on the terrace and cry out, “The music of the spheres, list, my Marina!”

  “How can that be,” asked Frederica sceptical, “when nobody knows you’ve been fixing all these planetary octaves and transcendental notes?”

  “You know. Marina knows. The bottle boys know, I’ve told them. They twitter and giggle, but they know. Anyway, people will intuit an order if an order is there, even if they can’t name it or the principles it’s derived from.”

  It was difficult to know how seriously he took himself. Certainly he did like order, a plurality of perceptual orders, he was a fixer and orchestrator.

  “They won’t,” said Frederica. “They won’t intuit anything, and I won’t, either, however much you inform me, because I’m tone-deaf.”