The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Some time much later that night, when Jenny had temporarily vanished to settle Thomas in his pram, Alexander found himself walking with Frederica and Wilkie along moonlit grassy paths in the old herb garden. Wilkie had Frederica by the arm; their steps were silent; the twanging and jangling sounded far away. They could smell rosemary, and thyme, and camomile. Alexander thought he must soon turn round, and go back to Jenny, who had a little wooden maid’s-room in a high attic. He was a little hazy with drink, but seemed to see clearly that the so much imagined moment was upon him. He found himself wondering about Frederica. What would she do? He remembered her hot, pink and firelit on Crowe’s lap, he took a look at Wilkie’s plump body walking in step with hers. Perhaps he ought to have returned her to Bill Potter. She wasn’t his business. Pale grey foxgloves stood up by the gate of the herb garden: Wilkie said, if you go out here and turn sharp right down this little alley there’s a fantastic bit of scented shrubbery which might be nice at this time of night. They followed him amongst a maze of high clipped hedges, deeper into dark and silence. Alexander thought, it would be pleasant, more than pleasant, just to sit still here all night amongst the pungent leaves and soundless grasses. He saw a naked white foot, protruding from behind some bays and was uncertain for a moment whether it was flesh or stone. Turning the corner the three of them found themselves staring down on two interlaced and skimpily clad bodies, a pile of rumpled cloth, a glinting champagne bottle.

  What Frederica took in, before she took in the rhythmic movement of white female thighs and darker white male buttocks, was the upturned face of the woman, or girl, who was Anthea Warburton. It was a face as blank with violent, mindless abandon as on stage it was blank with regular, untouchable loveliness: the blonde hair streaked black with wet under the bleaching moon, the huge eyes glittering and empty, the mouth a black, soundless cry of extreme pleasure or pain. The man’s body, half-seen through a shirt, hung poised and straining, wet falling down blond hair over hidden eyes. It was Alexander who realised that this intent creature was his bland, civilised, secret friend, Thomas Poole, who lectured so quietly on the moral world of Mansfield Park, making meditative gestures with a stumpy tobacco-pipe, and then went home to a round happy wife and three bouncing children. He felt that it was obscene not that he, but that Frederica, should see this. He put out a hand to draw her back: when he touched that bony shoulder she winced furiously, looked at him for a moment with an expression that he could only translate as contempt or hatred, pulled away and began to run back down the alley. The sound of her departure disturbed Poole and Anthea, who drew defensively together, and looked up at the remaining spectators. Poole picked up his glasses from the grass, wiped them on his shirt-tail and stared, sternly, at Alexander. Anthea’s lovely face settled slowly back into its schoolgirl softnesses. They were all silent. Alexander bowed, and withdrew. Wilkie gave a little skip and came after him. Poole and Anthea remained, sitting on the grass, naked white legs extended, shoulder against shoulder, heavy heads drooping against each other.

  “I didn’t know,” said Wilkie, “that it had got that far, did you? I thought they were both just dreamers, quite happy to stand and stare.”

  Alexander had not thought at all. He was profoundly disturbed.

  “Some strong enchantment,” said Wilkie, dreamily. “If I’d’ve thought you could have got that out of that girl I’d’ve had a go myself. But she seemed so static. Not muscle-bound, like our vanished friend. Static and slumberous. Ah well, we all make mistakes. Don’t you think you should go after Frederica? She seemed quite upset.”

  “She should have gone home,” said Alexander with some violence. “And anyway, I’m not responsible for her. I’ve got other things to do.”

  “I suppose old Poole has lots of chances to practise on all those dreary students,” said Wilkie chattily.

  “Oh, Wilkie, shut up, do.”

  “Perhaps I’ll have a go at Frederica.”

  “Do whatever you like, it’s none of my business, just leave me alone.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “No. She’s a baby.” Anthea Warburton’s face rose before his imagination. “Or else I’m getting old. She seems a baby to me. So ought you, but you don’t.”

  “Perhaps you’d better get back to your real baby,” said Wilkie, silkily. Alexander strode away. Wilkie laughed, plucked himself a sprig of rosemary and went back towards the music

  Alexander made his way up to what had been the servants’ floor. Here large dormitories had been divided into a warren of little cubicles with wooden partitions and whitewashed ceilings into which, in later years, privileged students of the new University would be packed. Jenny had been allotted a little room, under the eaves on the corner of the building, near a tiny pantry with a gas-ring in which she had warmed milk, tinned Liver-and-rice Dinner, and prune and apple custard for a distracted and smeary Thomas. Thomas’s detachable pram had been lugged from its wheels and rested on the floor of the room: Jenny was sitting by this, patting her son’s back, in an attempt to allay his suspicions, and get him to sleep.

  Alexander knocked: Jenny jerked nervously up, let him in, and hastened back to the pram, which was already convulsively heaving and jerking. A woman with a wrathful and sleepless baby is the compulsive puppet of strings of tiny sounds, rattles, scrapes, pace of breathing, the no-sound of intent listening on the part of the invisible non-sleeper. Alexander sensed none of these: he came into the little room and said, gallantly and reverberatingly, “Well, I made it.”

  “Sh,” said Jenny.

  “Something very strange happened in the garden, just now –”

  “Oh do shut up,” hissed Jenny, desperate, every muscle rigid. Alexander obligingly hushed, and wandered over to the window. Thomas could be heard, by Jenny, listening to every step. There was a wooden window seat under the dormer slope: Alexander sat on this and peered down through silver and black boughs into the garden. He saw people passing. Lodge and Crowe, with glowing red cigar-tips. Thomas Poole and Anthea Warburton, brushed and blonde and pristine.

  “Darling –” he said.

  “Sh. If I don’t get him off, now, I can’t, we can’t … he won’t ever settle.”

  “Shall I go away and come back later?” said Alexander, mildly ruffled. He had been bracing himself for passion of some kind: nervous tears or reckless abandon, he couldn’t gauge which – but not for this pure, absorbed irritability. His suggestion made Jenny more irritable. She said no, if he would just be quiet a minute in a sensible way, Thomas would drop off, for certain, whereas if he kept coming in and out and banging the door like that, they might well be at it all night. She then reapplied her attention to Thomas. She had discovered that a very sleepy baby will sometimes capitulate if forcibly restrained from moving. But this is a nice problem, as one less sleepy can be rendered furious by the same treatment. She put pressure on Thomas’s bottom and the small of his back: he stiffened and relaxed, and after a moment the tone of his breathing changed. His hot wet face went into the cot sheet: his mouth opened. She rose stiffly, and looked uncertainly at Alexander. Alexander had been keeping himself in temper by remembering the painful pleasures of his early longing for her. He remembered the moment in the wind on the car-seat at Goathland, and suddenly saw again Frederica’s staring face on the glass. No, not that. He half expected her to rise on the air and put her sharp nose to this high window.

  “Well,” he said to Jenny, “here we are. After all.”

  She tried to laugh, and almost wept. She came and sat beside him on the window seat. He had meant to go out and procure a bottle of wine. He now felt he would be berated if he left the room again. So he began, in a rather matter-of-fact way, to undo Jenny’s buttons. When she, reciprocally, started on his shirt, he was put out to have to stifle an impulse to push her hand away.

  They reached a point when Jenny was clothed in bra and suspenders and nylon pants and Alexander still in trousers and stocking feet. Jenny pulled away from him and went to put out
the bedside lamp; Alexander said, softly courteous, “I wanted to see you.” She was crying gently. She said, “No you don’t, I’ve gone all soft and pulled, I’ve got lines on me.” “I want to see those, then,” said Alexander, who did not. “I want to see you.”

  “Really?” said Jenny, and cast off the last clothes, pulled out her hairpins and padded back to him, swaying on naked feet. “Really, don’t you mind?” “I love you,” said Alexander, doggedly. She sat down again beside him, head drooping, round soft breasts falling very slightly against her body from skin less than tense, less than wholly elastic. She had little silver lines criss-crossing round the nipples and when he looked, there they were, like rippling fish, pale eels, round her belly and thighs. “I’m not very new, I’m used,” said Jenny, and Alexander bent his head and brushed his lips along the silver lines with a kind of protective despair. She must be loved, he thought, she must, and he stroked her spine gently, and her still solid sun-brown knees.

  “Let’s go to bed,” said Jenny, so Alexander stood up at last and let down his trousers and went white and long to lock the door, whilst her head spun with his casual beauty and terror lest he wake Thomas.

  “How marvellous that it should be in this house, after all,” said Alexander, in a preoccupied voice, coming back. Jenny, also preoccupied, said as he slid into the sheets, beside her,

  “I can’t stay with Geoffrey after this you know, I can’t live a lie.”

  Alexander’s penis, whose rudimentary snail-stirrings had been troubling him with their inadequacy, wilted at this into a totally quiescent rose. He lay beside her, running his fingers abstractedly along the stretch-lines in the dark of her groin. After some time she put her hand on his genitals which retreated, soft, soft, soft. She gave an inexpert little tug, and he gave some snort of protest. He said, “It somehow seems awkward with him in the room.”

  “And after so long,” she said. “Never mind. Just keep still. I can’t believe I’m here, and it’s you.”

  He had a vision of the still herb-garden, moonlit and silent inside its clipped hedges. He had a vision of Thomas Poole’s falling hair, and the wet glitter of his working body. He put a hopeful hand between Jenny’s legs and she jerked with a tense pleasure that alarmed him.

  “I’m sorry, Jenny.”

  “Don’t be. It’ll be all right.”

  “I’ve waited too long.”

  “I don’t know enough,” she said, acknowledging embarrassment. “Kiss me, just hold me and kiss me.”

  He kissed her. He moved his body hopefully against hers. He meant very well. Thomas, hearing in his sleep these desultory shifts and dispositions, twisted his tiny body with total competence and could be seen peering with large dark eyes at their nakedness, a domed head raised over the pram-side, wobbling with intent interest. He opened his mouth to wail. He shrieked. Jenny was up in a flash, and had caught him to her naked breast which he clutched with tiny plump fingers, twisting crossly where Alexander had sketched his distant concern. They sat on the bed together, and after a time, for sheer fatigue, lay down together, the hot cross tiny body clamped to Jenny’s, the fat little feet somewhere on Alexander’s collar-bone. “If I hold him a bit,” said Jenny, “he’ll go to sleep, he always does.” Alexander nodded, always polite, and turned his face to the wall. It was, out of a profound desire for unconsciousness, Alexander who went to sleep first.

  Frederica was in a passion. Everything in the emotional life must have a first time, and for her that year had already provided almost too many and was to provide more: family shifts, sex, art, culture, success, failure, madness, despair, the fear of death. Some of these vicarious. As well as more recondite, perdurable first things: the old voice murmuring about beginnings and ends out of the walnut cabinet, the Sunne Rising, Troilus and Cressida, The Duchess of Malfi, Racine and Rilke. How can one, in middle age, truly imagine meeting such forms for the first time? How can the young truly imagine the forms this new acquaintance will impose, limiting and extending, on the lifelong set of the mind?

  Such imaginative incapacity also occurs with sex and identity. The dull, furious days of the past weeks had become Frederica’s first experience of willed solitude. Mirrored Frederica had desired and admired only Frederica. Before that had been the prurient turmoil over Daniel and Stephanie. Before that again, she had wanted to know Alexander. As some women might desire unknown actors at first, and through them Benedick or Berowne or Hamlet, and through them a dead playwright. After Goathland there were indications that that kind of want was inadequate. Ed, Jenny, Crowe, Wilkie, had not let her love any Benedick or Mr Rochester. They had fleshed Alexander. Lodge, Elizabeth, and anxiety about pretty verses had unfleshed him again, perfectionism and intellectual snobbery combining against him. Now the flashing white vision of Thomas Poole and Anthea-Astraea had stirred to life that unassuaged greed. If Anthea, a schoolgirl, could … then Frederica, a more powerful schoolgirl, must … If the gentle Poole could be induced …

  She did not know then, that as an ageing woman walking along a London street she could almost with certainty tell herself: I have come to the end of desire. I should like to live alone. Or that, shaken by desire at forty, she could know with a very comfortable despair that desire will always fail, and still shake. At seventeen it was virginity that was, like the grasshopper, a burden. It caused Frederica Potter to drink a good deal of red wine and two brandies and go in search of someone to relieve her of it.

  Temporarily, as he took care to inform her, with what she only later recognised as courtesy, she found Wilkie.

  “I can give you a little time, my dear, later I have an appointment.”

  “I wasn’t looking for you.”

  “No, no, I know, but I will have to do, he has other things to do, just now.”

  Frederica gulped wine. “Why?” she got out.

  “Isn’t it obvious? A lovely woman, sympathy, a long – and hopeless – love.”

  “I don’t see it. She doesn’t love him.”

  “Not as you would? Now what you should be bothering about is whether he loves her. If you ask me does she love him as much as you would, I should say, considerably more. If you asked me, does he love her, I’d say, he’s scared. Which he enjoys. He likes to be scared stiff, if you’ll excuse the joke. And there you have, if you’d the wit to see it, distinctly the advantage. Because you could be naked terror. And poor dear Jenny scares him not with severity but with suburbia, the dread of our generation, the teacup, the nappy, the pelmet, the flowery stair carpet, the click of the latch of the diminutive garden-gate.”

  “I come from suburbia.”

  “You come from haunts of doiley and teacosy, I know, so do I, I’ve eaten crumpets with your Dad. But you’re no more staying there than I am, and our Virgin Queen ought to be able to see that, poor timid thing, if he looked. Stop caring. Any woman can get any man, if she’s dogged enough and doesn’t love him too much. But women are daft. They won’t use their heads.”

  “Stop it, Wilkie. I don’t feel like you going cleverly on. I feel sick. Because of all this wine, and him creeping off with her, and me talking to you about love and love and love, and nothing happens.”

  Wilkie went Shakespearean. He asked what was love, and answered himself there was no such thing, nor honour either. He was very unsatisfactory to listen to. He must, he said, love her and leave her, he did, as he’d said, have an appointment. He told her just to make certain of her lift back to Blesford, swept her a bow, and sauntered off. It seemed inevitable, in the pattern of this garden state, that he should be replaced by Crowe, who gave her a third glass of brandy, expressed concern about the dark lines under her eyes, and asked if she would like to sleep in the Sun room, since Marina had already installed herself under the Moon.

  Her head was going round with alcohol, aesthetic effort and love. She said she would go to bed, and followed Crowe, who chose to provide her with a candle in a glass and pewter holder, along dark corridors. The lighting in the Sun room, he said, wa
s for display, not for reading in bed by. She might find a candle a comfort. Behind a carved panel in the Sun room he had a concealed dimmer switch which threw theatrical beams of light onto the terra cotta Hyacinth and Apollo on the ceiling, hazy patches of cold red in a tall gloom. The curtains were slatted blinds that kept light off the hangings. Odd knobs of plaster and gilded threads of tapestry in the candlelight showed writhings and excesses picked out from the half-dark. Crowe put the candle on a marble-topped table, turned down the coverlid with a finicking gesture and implored her not to smoke. He opened a panelled door behind which was a mahogany lavatory and a huge wash basin with brass taps.

  “Inserted by my granddad. For the Assize judges, who slept here. I shall leave you to your toilette. Do you require a nightshirt?”