The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  This information appeared to give Wilkie great pleasure. “You are? How splendid. You bear out a theory I have about flatness of speaking-tone in the tone-deaf. That explains why you’re so good at sounding stony.” He mimicked a line or two of her rendering of Alexander’s Tower speech. He was very accurate. “Flat,” he said. “Flat in semi-tones, and shifting key inconsequentially. Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh. Like a peacock. We can’t all sing the music of the spheres. Now you, my dear Marina, something tells me you have nearly perfect pitch.”

  “I had once,” said Marina Yeo, above them, propping skirts vast as empire on two gilt ballroom chairs. “It’s not been quite so good lately.”

  “It decays with age,” said Wilkie with gusto. “But slowly, if surely, you’ll be glad to hear. Shall I write you a song, Marina, to sing to my spherical bottle music, will you sing with my choir invisible? You can listen, Frederica, darling, but you won’t hear. ‘Such sober certainty of waking bliss.’ As Huxley once said, so accurate a description of good music. What do you do without it?”

  “I meditate,” said Frederica with asperity, “and frequently wish it would stop.”

  Wilkie gave her a plump puckish grin, since Lodge had reached the end of his peroration, pointed his flimsy poniard at the bottle players who puffed out their cheeks like Botticelli’s Zephyr and embarked on Rule Britannia.

  “What we need is drums. You’d hear those, girl, the deaf hear those. Hissings and heartbeats both. Now, what sort of drums, for the music of the spheres? Did you know, sweet ladies, that the iambic pentameter embodies, as it were, the number of heartbeats between a breath taken in and the same breath sighed out? Shakespeare’s verse is human time. But for spherical music you need a drum-beat set on some inhuman measure, a non-anthropomorphic tic-tac, a water-clock, an astronomical pulsing …”

  “Shut up, Wilkie,” said Lodge. “I want to begin. Clear-off, non-beginners, or sit still and shut up and be audience. Wilkie, do shut up, and come and do your Prologue. Quiet please. Lights, please.”

  And in every tree, like shining golden fruits, lights sprang warm and round and clear on the green. It was late afternoon, grey and dark blue, not darkness. Total dark was due to fall in the final Act, where Lodge, inspired by the York Mystery Plays of 1951, when the real sun had set, bloody and huge, behind the impersonated, crucified Christ and the ruined Abbey with board additions, had used nightfall to emphasize the dying rays of Gloriana. Wilkie twitched his mantle, gave a skip on to the terrace, and sauntered over to Thomas Poole/Spenser, to begin his Prologue.

  Jenny, late because of settling fretful Thomas, ran up and down the old kitchens, which housed the women’s dressing-rooms, begging someone to hook her at the back. In a stone scullery she found Alexander. Who said he would hook her himself. They were both reminded of their first embrace in the Music Hole under the school stage. Alexander pushed his hands inside the pliant whalebone, round the soft breasts. Oh, the rows of little hooks. “Did Crowe suggest …?” She laughed. “He suggested. He’s an old Pandar, a Lord of Misrule. I said yes, of course, I said yes.”

  Crowe had offered food, drink and beds to whoever wanted them that night and to Jenny expressly. Geoffrey had said he did not at all see why she couldn’t get back to Blesford. He would fetch her. He must mind Thomas, she had said. She did not report this altercation to Alexander.

  “And if I stay, if I stay tonight, will you, will we …?”

  “Of course.”

  “And it will be all right?”

  “Of course.”

  His voice sounded saccharine in his ears. He was by no means as sure as he sounded. He remembered Stephanie Potter’s little gold pins and cloud of veiling. He wondered why anyone should wish to paddle with fingertips in the hollows of another body. He wanted a clean white empty room and silence. He wanted no liquor and no dancing.

  “Jenny, I must go, I’m nervous about this thing, I must bugger off. I’ll see you after.”

  “Of course,” she said, with her new deliberate assurance. “After. Kiss me.”

  He touched her red mouth, brushed her stiff, light ruff. She looked as he had designed, tiny and birdlike in floral skirts and gauzy sleeves. What he felt could not have been nostalgia for the drawing-board, nor yet for the dummy on which the dress had been built in summer afternoons in the sewing rooms of Blesford Girls Grammar.

  There was now a semi-circle of seats suspended on scaffolding on Crowe’s great lawn, somewhat reminiscent of the stands that had lined the late Coronation route. Alexander did not join Lodge, Crowe and the rest. He sat on one end, high up in tree shadows, listening to Spenser and Ralegh bandying words, his own, their own, to unseen melodies in the bushes.

  He remembered his first ideas. A renaissance of language, florid and rich and muscular. The untouchable complete man-woman under whalebone. A laboured metaphor, grasped too early in the writing, blood out of stone. Pure invisible colours, red and white, green and gold.

  And then all the hard work towards complexity and solid incarnation, all the incorporated stuff of fact. Diplomacy, cloaks and daggers, mead, seeds, pearls, neo-Platonic mythography, muckenders, bum-rolls, verjuice and penny royal, Polyolbion, the Faerie Queene, butchery in Holland and running wet Irish bogs. Giddiness of words and things. If he wrote: “cup” – the word contained all he knew of sack, and household stuffe, Circe, Comus, gifts presented on royal progresses. Roses and slaughter, the red and white rose quartered in her face, funest butchery as in the case of Dr Lopez whose grimly detailed death had been so chastely curtailed and adumbrated by Benjamin Lodge.

  He had known, because of his earlier play, of the limiting sense of solidity that came with the incarnation of the idea. This one was worse, as he had seen it so sharp as he wrote, in some stereopticon or inner camera obscura, bright with colour and feature. Often one gained from what actors, directors, brought to the airy spaces left in the text for them, a new vision, something undesigned and unexpected. So far, with this, this had not happened. His creatures had acquired local habitations and names: Max Baron, Marina Yeo, Thomas Poole, Edmund Wilkie, Jenny and most confusing, Frederica Potter. It was hard not to resent as brute embodiments what these actors saw as their original interpretations. Marina Yeo was given to speaking of her “creation” of a role. Maybe he had left them too little to create or render. What he had made was so dense: thick, like all good fifties verse drama, with witty imagery, which meant jostling suns and moons and swans and gossamer and flowers and stones, and again thick with the specificity of the visual imagination of a playwright who designed his own costumes, chestnut and twilight velvets, packed radiant pleats and gilded stitchery of which actuality could only be a shadowy representation.

  And Lodge had worked steadily away from this fleshed complexity to the bare bones of primitive obsession: sex, dancing, death; death, dancing, sex. Lodge rewrote lines – many lines – at the behest of players who found them awkward or undignified to say. Marina Yeo was a persistent offender. Alexander knew they could be spoken, had heard them clear and flowing in the theatre of his head.

  And deeper than his sense of some dilapidation of his imagined gorgeous palace ran the sense that he had meant to state his passion for the past, to provide pipes, timbrels, wild ecstasy, Tempe, and the Vale of Arcady. What they had made was not immortals stalking under Hesperidean boughs but sex in sundresses, sandwiches in gilded papier-mâché helmets, the extravagances of Edmund Wilkie’s Bottle Chorus.

  The Prologue passed. Lodge cut another line, one of Ralegh’s, not Alexander’s, about the fickleness of the chill planet. The late afternoon sun displayed the cavorting and scissor-waving in Catherine Parr’s orchard. Alexander watched the satisfactory slow fluttering descent of the shredded particles of the girl’s skirt onto her spread naked legs. Her body was rigid with exactly the right combination of wrath, ungiving solitude, excitement. She knew, he thought, what she was doing, all right. Her red hair was furiously unfurled on daisies and turf. Alexander f
elt a stab of plain, urgent desire. He told himself it was for his play, for his character. Frederica stood, laughed shrilly, barked out, “Lawks-a-mussy on me, this is none of I,” roared an oath, fled. There was a spatter of applause, from which she derived considerable satisfaction.

  It was only when, in the last week of rehearsal, Lodge told Frederica that he believed her performance had “come together” that she wholly took in how dubious he had been about its doing so. She had, despite bodily panic, persisted in the easy and comfortable assumption that what she did was likely, without very much effort, to be better than what anyone else could do anyway. That was true with school work. It was true with reading aloud in class, in her view, because her grammar was stronger and her vocabulary larger than anyone else’s. She told herself she understood this play. And that understanding must show.

  What saved her performance, however, was not understanding but unpopularity. She wasn’t liked at school, but believed she didn’t mind that. She didn’t like her coevals. But here, amongst artists and wits and what she innocently thought of as Bohemians she had expected to come into her own. Maybe her definition of her “own” had been inadequate. The real actors laughed at and with the Bevy, rumpled them in bushes and made them little gifts. They made adoring noises and obeisances at Marina Yeo. When Frederica spoke, they looked, usually, irritated. They giggled at her devotion to Alexander, but not with her, not as they giggled communally about Anthea’s crush on Thomas Poole, that sober and secretive man, pearly-crowned gleaming heads swaying together. She had no manner of addressing them, although her imaginative life had been full of sophisticated laughter, and companionable allusive jokes such as they, certainly, shared. She was saved from despair, as she was frequently to be saved in later life, by pure competitive rage, an ugly but effective emotion. They might not like her: all right, but they must admire her.

  She would do it with will. She asked advice of Crowe and Wilkie. She waved her arms and legs in front of the mirror until they no longer looked statuesque, stick-like, or purely foolish. She performed grimly for some monstrous, infallible, inexorable inner Frederica. Because the part was what it was this largely worked.

  It is an irony possibly worth recording, in this context, that whilst Alexander, perhaps because he had imagined an unreal and vanished world too intensely, perhaps more simply because he was already too old, his memory too long and full, his visions or hopes of glory formed some ten or twenty years before 1953 – whilst Alexander was never able in retrospect to see this high moment of his career as any kind of archetypal golden age, Frederica was easily able to do so. Again this may have been purely a function of age. At seventeen the world was all before her, unspotted, whatever it might become, whatever it was already doomed to be. Disembarrassed, in the sixties, of the awkwardness of being seventeen, a virgin, and snubbed, she was able to fill her memory theatre with a brightly solid scene which she polished and gilded as it receded, burnishing the image of Marina Yeo’s genius, after Marina Yeo’s slow and painful death from throat cancer, seeing the Bevy, as they developed into housewives, gym mistresses, social workers, boutique assistants, an alcoholic and another dead actress, as having been indeed golden girls, with a golden bloom still on them, seeing the lawns, the avenues, the lanterns in the branches and the light winking on half-obscured singing bottles, in the still eternal light through which we see the infinite unchanging vistas we make, from the height of one year old, out of suburban gardens or municipal parks in summer, endless grassy horizons and alleys which we always hope to revisit, rediscover, inhabit in real life, whatever that is.

  The first Act ended on the tower speech. Wilkie’s mimicry of her tone-deaf intonation had strengthened a suspicion she’d formed after a suggestion he’d dropped, earlier, that this play was in fact a backsliding from Alexander’s true line in metaphysical puppetry, like The Buskers. She wondered if her speech were not dangerously pretty. She wondered how to excise the rhapsodic note from this very wordy renunciation of biology. She cut out the wheeling steps Lodge had instructed her in, stood blunt and heavy, was sardonic about the sealed fountain, gave a convulsive giggle and cut it all short. “I will not bleed.” Lodge shouted crossly “Never mind”, as she walked off. Alexander, who had begun by resenting her tampering with his stresses, ended by suspecting that his speech tripped too easily off the tongue, and that she was dealing with it for him. He decided to come down and reassure her.

  Lodge harangued them like a football-team in the dressing-room, told them they were dragging atrociously and would be there till dawn, and asked Frederica pointedly if she’d got muscle-bound. That word always made her think abstractedly of Blake’s marmoreal eidola whose long thongs, slivers and lumps of flesh were indeed precisely bindings. She said no, it had just seemed all right to her that way, did it matter? I thought I’d got you on the move, said Lodge, and you backslid. Kindly run up and down in future.

  Alexander slid into the seat beside her, Alexander’s Old Spice smell brushed her nostrils, Alexander’s soft-modulated voice murmured no, surely not muscle-bound, but with her nerves chained up in alabaster and she a statue, or as Daphne was, root-bound, that fled Apollo. Was that how it looked, Frederica enquired, and added, there was something wrong, somewhere, there was something. He said he was afraid it was his verse. She nodded, and continued to puzzle her mind about sweetness and grammar.

  Even before the embarrassment or disaster there was something frenetic and uncontrolled about Act II. People were underacting and overacting, roaring out sage counsels as though they were news of an imminent day of doom, reacting to the production of the death warrant of Mary Queen of Scots as though they had been offered a tepid cup of tea. The maskers could not co-ordinate their movements: Wilkie corpsed the Bevy by striking a posture as the Fairy Queen armed with Astraea’s gilded sword, and the little boys of the anti-masque swarmed over the stage and each other like the inhabitants of a disturbed ant-hill. Alexander and Frederica sat on the scaffolding, both of them now supernumerary, and watched Lodge cuffing tiny demons or dragging the sauntering men and maidens into artistic groups, out of which they then again automatically strayed. Someone shattered a beer bottle on a stone baluster as the strains of heavenly harmony sang out raggedly for the third time. Jenny’s big moment came, the swisser-swatter episode, and as Wilkie, imperturbably lively, moved in on her and began his expert fumbling, a new noise added to the sawed strings, bubbling lute, hooting bottles, muffled shrieks and giggles of Bess Throckmorton under siege. It made itself heard in the distance round the corner of the building, a rattle and squeak as of a child driving an iron hoop irregularly over gravel, a regular, rapid, marching crunch of feet. Between posed Astraea and furred Baron Verulam, driving furiously onto the terrace and excruciatingly in need of oiling, came a swaying perambulator, and behind the perambulator, Geoffrey Parry. He halted in the gold light directed on to the tiered Bevy, peered owlishly through horn-rimmed glasses for his wife in the shadows, and advanced on her, wearing, above his heathery tweed and folded flannels, an unnatural rational smile.

  “I have had enough,” he said pleasantly, taking Wilkie’s hand and plucking it abstractedly out of Jenny’s bosom. “I have done more than my share, and now enough. You can come home or take your baby. I have work to do. I am supposed to be a scholar. I will not sing Hush-a-bye baby or Ten green bottles one more time. You must come home or make other arrangements. Do I make myself clear?”

  “You are making a fool of yourself,” said Jenny. “I can’t come, it’s the dress rehearsal, it’s obvious. You can’t …”

  “Oh yes I can.” Rage is always partly comic. Frederica gave a snort of laughter. Several little boys giggled in the undergrowth. Geoffrey Parry stripped the blankets from the perambulator and pulled out his son Thomas, who roared. Geoffrey’s face was scarlet. Thomas’s face was scarlet. “He does this all the time,” said Geoffrey. Thomas wriggled and howled. “Are you coming, or not?”

  “Obviously not,” said Jenny, staring
from Crowe to Wilkie to the uninterested beautiful gaze of Anthea Warburton. She did not look at Alexander. Crowe and Wilkie were smiling broadly, with what she interpreted as male malice.

  “Right,” said Geoffrey, pleasantly. “O.K.” He gave Thomas a little toss and then threw him, hard and neatly, across the stage at Jenny’s breast, to which she clasped him, hugger-mugger, winded and staggering. Thomas fought for breath and roared more crimson. Geoffrey considered the perambulator. He considered the terrace and the cast. He gave the perambulator a fierce precise kick towards the top of the terrace steps where it teetered, rocking on its springs, before descending jerkily and falling on its side on the lawn. A bottle, several Heinz cans, a bundle of nappies and a teddy bear rolled out.

  “Well, that’s that,” said Geoffrey. “Now I can get on with some work. You’ll be better with Mummy, won’t you, Tom?” he finished sweetly, viciously, in a voice no one had imagined he could muster. He walked away, into the dark of the corner of the house, and after a time they heard his car starting up.

  Shrilling and twittering and booming of actors began. Jenny’s breast heaved with the onset of tears. Lodge beckoned wardrobe ladies and asked them to try and take the child. Frederica said abstractedly to Alexander, “It would seem more sensible never to marry.” “Yes,” said Alexander, thinking that these events had brought him himself considerably nearer marriage than he had thought to be. He looked briefly at Frederica, who was watching him with intent amusement, and then, because he was a gentleman, after all, and Jenny was in pain, he uncurled his long legs and went over to comfort her. Jenny turned fiercely on him and sobbed out that it was all all right now, it would really be no trouble, everybody could get back to work, Thomas knew Alexander, he would be all right with Alexander, Alexander could hold the baby.

  Alexander dandled Thomas through Act III, having offered him to Frederica, who simply said she did not like babies, thank you. He had a dismal sense that honour required this of him, though on the one or two occasions when he met Thomas’s furious stare he felt a compulsion to push him under the scaffolding and take off alone in his car for Calverley and points north. Frederica sat next to him, studying him. She was uncharacteristically silent, which made him wonder, for the first time in their relationship, what she was thinking. Thomas disrupted Marina Yeo’s silent dying with odd squawks and obscure liquid noises. The dark descended: the poet Spenser had vanished to his obscure death: black, flamboyant, and preparing for his long fall and incarceration, Wilkie delivered his epilogue. Jenny came, then, and took the child in her arms, where he renewed his screams of rage: Lodge began his judicial summing-up: serious drinking began. There was dancing, to bottle chorus, gramophone and Tudor consort, on lawns and terraces. There was kedgeree in quantities and hide and seek in the bushes. Jenny said she had got to talk to Alexander. Frederica, realising that no one would be giving Jenny or herself a lift back to Blesford, went to ask Crowe if she could, after all, stay the night. Crowe said she could not only stay, but sleep in one of the great bedchambers, if she wanted to. Wilkie turned up at Frederica’s elbow and said do stay, do stay and dance, do have fun.