The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “No.” She was half-surprised when Crowe, rapidly enough, went away.

  She got into the bed in cotton pants and poplin blouse, having discarded the boned bra she wore for the play, which had dug various raw red pits in her. It was the only time she had slept, or tried to sleep, under a canopy: the spangled cressets and broidered suns hung round her head and glittered in the candlelight. Apollo, Zephyr, Hyacinth, the puddle of blood and the crimson flower were too high to be seen with any exactness and were further obscured by hangings. She discovered that the room was rising and falling at her, like waves of the sea, like Keats’s long carpets on the gusty floor. She fixed her eyes on the candle, which had its own rhythm of rising and falling, the flame bellying mitred and double in the draught. The mattress rose smoothly to a central whale-backed bulge on which she could not settle. Moreover, she had no wish to be sick in this ancient bed. She sighed, wrapped her thin arms round her breast, sat up, and stared at the candle.

  There was an iron creaking sound, and red light increased and wavered on the white Apollonian frieze and the peopled red desert on the ceiling. She craned out past her curtain to peer at this, but turning her head upwards made her feel ill, so she swayed back to the vertical. Crowe came through a door, lapped now in a crimson and gold brocaded dressing-gown, with scarlet embroidered velvet slippers, a fat bottle, and a platter of fruit in his hands.

  “I thought you might be hungry. A dormitory feast.”

  He poured a glass of champagne, which she knew she must not drink, and sat down uninvited on the side of the bed. It was, after all, his bed.

  “You weren’t asleep?”

  “No.”

  “And all alone. Have some grapes. You don’t mind a visit? I’m sure you don’t.”

  “I’m rather drunk,” said Frederica hopefully.

  “I imagined you were. It might even improve your appreciation of my lighting effects. I can do sunrise and sunset, the blaze of noon and a rather inadequate twilight, which I thought might amuse you. An indoor sun at dead of night. Shine here to us and thou art everywhere.”

  He skipped off the bed and operated switch-handles. The desert was flooded with gold and amber. He returned. Frederica noticed that under the robe he wore nothing. She ate a grape, then two grapes, and spat the pips into the candlestick.

  “May I look at you?” He was not really asking. He took off her shirt and she sat still, stiffly upright. He turned back the covers and plucked at her pants. “Off,” he said, not so nicely. She wriggled them off. Her face was stony. Crowe stared at her, throat, breasts, little hard belly, gingery thicket, long thin legs.

  “Have another grape. Are you a virgin?”

  “Yes.” She was caught in some madness of minimal courtesy. It was his bed, his house, his initiative, his game.

  “That’s a nuisance.”

  “I can’t always be,” said Frederica crossly, remembering Anthea. In the abstract, virginity was a very simple nuisance.

  “I could teach you a lot.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “Oh, I think so. I think so.”

  She did want to know. She wanted not to be ignorant. But his face, rubicund if sunny, surrounded with its mock-tonsure of wisps of white hair was, as it set intent, faintly ridiculous, and Frederica found it hard to tolerate the ridiculous.

  “Lie down,” said Crowe. She did as she was told. He stroked her from top to bottom, gently: she shut her eyes, which increased the whirling of the room, but cut out his silly shining face. He poked amongst her hairs and damp places: she remembered Ed: her body arched up of its own accord: she remembered the coherent rhythm of white bodies under dark bushes. Crowe dabbled. He bent his head and brushed her prickling skin with mouth and eyes and teeth and camel-brush lashes. Her senses flickered from unfocused desire to highly focused irritation, fast and frequently. He pulled sharply between her legs, hurting her. He kissed where he had hurt, causing such mixed local delight, total embarrassment and drunken sickness that she jerked away involuntarily like a whiplash. “Keep still,” he said. He was taking his gown off. She sat up and took in his lower half, raw-specked crimson with a blue undertone, like the flesh-tints on the ceiling, and the angry red tip of his engine. He lay beside her and bit bruise-marks into her neck. All his movements were neat and fierce. He tried to pull apart her thighs, which she twisted automatically together, like roots.

  “It won’t hurt. It won’t hurt, or not much, only a nice sort of pain, the sort you really like, that puts an edge on …”

  She might have dreamily or politely or nervously allowed him to go on if he had kept silent. But the tone of “a nice sort of pain” made her whiplash again: one thin knee cracked up against his double chin.

  “Don’t jerk,” he said crossly, rubbing this, but she had stopped taking orders. She wriggled away and stared with cold judgement at his white Silenus-paunch and rosy appendages on the sheets.

  “I am going to the lav,” she said, rolling off the whale-back and springing up like a cat.

  “Of course,” he said, suave again, but the honeyed voice came incongruous from that cherry-face and circling tired white flesh. Frederica stalked away, under the hectic glare of the murderous sunny desert, and locked herself with a flourish into the mahogany room. Here, sitting on the lavatory, she acknowledged herself flummoxed. She would not go out again: and could not stay there. She gathered up a large white bathtowel and tied it toga-like round her body. At that moment she heard a voice: not Crowe’s: saying incongruously “Here’s rosemary for remembrance” and answered by a low melodious laugh. It occurred to her that what she had taken for a cupboard door in the bathroom might well enter some adjoining apartment. Even though this seemed to be inhabited, it might provide an escape route preferable to the way back to where the fierce jolly little satyr lay sprawled, ready to bite and hurt. She tried the door, which opened. Soundless, barefoot, she stepped through.

  Naked, on the high bed under Cynthia descending, arranged in a straining parody of Rodin’s Baiser, were Marina Yeo and a man who, when he spoke, Frederica knew to be Wilkie.

  “I brought you chamomile, my dear, as well as rosemary, and eye-bright, and lemon thyme, and bergamot, to strew on your pillow.”

  “No rue?”

  “No rue. It causes terrible allergies. We don’t want to lie together covered in prickly heat and unsightly blotches.”

  Marina laughed again. Wilkie murmured something inaudible. The theatrical voice said, “Ah, but I am an old woman, a tired old woman, age can wither me, and has …”

  “Age has made you more fragile and wiser, and you know it. I love old women. Truly I do. As long as they want loving.”

  “You are an indiscriminate young man.”

  “No, no. I’m very discriminating. Just insatiable. Like you. I recognised it immediately in you. Admit it.”

  The actress laughed in her throat. “When I am a little older, only a very little older, it won’t be safe to admit that, even to myself, dear.”

  “But tonight – to me –”

  “Ah, Wilkie,” she said, with a marvellously modulated break in her voice, “love me tonight, love me –”

  “You’re crying real tears.”

  “I can produce them to order.”

  “You needn’t cry to me. I’ll be so nice to you, so very nice, all night, my most beautiful old woman, and you’ll show me things I never thought of – because you’re the best …”

  “You are a cuddly, insinuating little …” said Marina, and chuckled, and then, to Frederica’s dazed relief, the statuesque arrangement entwined itself more closely and fell back against the pillow, and speech was reduced to little questing moans and murmurs. Frederica judged that now, if ever, was the moment for her démarche. Clutching her towel she strode from door to door, past the foot of the bed, across the light through the uncurtained window. As she passed the loaded bed she turned involuntarily to have a good look at it, and found Wilkie’s expressionless brown eyes staring, over th
e buried and twisting actress, straight at her. She nodded severely at him, in some kind of mad ritual of greeting. A grin flashed across his face – slowly, elaborately, he winked, and bent his head again to his business, as though keeping Marina’s eyes closed with kisses until Frederica had got round the door.

  She went quickly along the long galleries, in moonlight and dark, stopping for a moment under the iconographical representation of Elizabeth with the cornucopia. She shifted the knot in the towel over her own shoulder, which pulled like Scotland over Polyolbion’s, and made a sketchy obeisance to the squat figure. She herself had no river, no cornucopia, no golden fruit. She had also better get rid of the toga. She progressed downwards, into the great kitchens, and clothed herself in some layers of the paper petticoats she used for the orchard scene, and a torn muslin blouse worn by one of the crowd. She covered this with a green stuff cloak. She considered walking barefoot back to Blesford in this gear, and decided against it. She went out into the gardens.

  Rounding the terrace, she stared up at the windows of the servants’ lofts. Somewhere up there Alexander was … She should have stayed with Crowe; if she had let him go on, she would have taken some definite step, made a purposeful move in whatever game she was playing. She was afraid of Crowe. She began to run.

  She ended up in the little winter-garden with the fountain, where the nymph still smiled slyly though no water slid over her fingers or thighs. Frederica sat crosslegged on the grass, much in the attitude of the Polyolbion icon, and considered the iron-grey hedges, the moon, the water. At first she looked about aimlessly, for a long ten minutes, and then the thing formed itself as a kind of trumped-up vigil, none the less real for its deliberation, which lasted a considerable time. Dawn came up, and through gaps in the hedge edges of moorland could be seen, where night had earlier not differentiated the surrounding bowl. On the terrace someone sounded a clashing breakfast gong. On the moors, a sheep made a thin, dry bleat. Frederica stood up, still, and went back.

  A huge communal breakfast had been provided for those who were able to eat: kedgeree, sausages, toast and marmalade, urns of coffee and tea. Crowe sat at the head of the table in the Great Hall, presiding, genial and dapper, with Marina Yeo at his side. Frederica, whom he ignored, did not sit down. She observed Alexander and Jenny making their way through on to the terrace, each supporting one side of Thomas’s baby-carriage. Remembering what Wilkie had said, she plunged at them eagerly, driving the skeleton wheels along the gravel.

  “Are you looking for these? Are you going back to Blesford? May I have a lift?”

  Sleeplessness and solitude had made her clear and sharp. They were blurred and puffy with anxiety. Alexander looked sheepishly at Jenny and said he didn’t exactly know: Jenny said briskly that of course that was the sensible thing, and could he concentrate on holding his end steady whilst she clipped the struts together. Frederica studied Alexander for signs of bliss. His mouth had a droop, a different slackness, but she was not prepared to ascribe it to bliss.

  Wilkie, plump, sleek, smelling freshly of soap, appeared with trays of sausages and dishes of kedgeree. He winked at Frederica, and looked her up and down.

  “No shoes?”

  “I mislaid them.”

  “Maybe I could retrieve them for you.”

  “No,” she said, with unnecessary violence, and saw their drowsed stare flicker with curiosity.

  Alexander drove away with Frederica firmly in the back.

  “I’ll drop you,” he said, on the outskirts of Blesford, “and then Mrs Parry and Thomas.”

  “Easier the other way round. I can help decant Thomas.”

  “We don’t need help.”

  “I’ve lost my handbag as well. With my keys in it. I can’t get in at this hour if I don’t ring the bell. I’ll be slaughtered. You’ll be doing me a favour if you let me hang around.”

  “You seem to have lost everything, overnight.”

  “Yes,” said Frederica, simply.

  Jenny said tartly that she thought it would be very much better if she and Thomas were disposed of before Frederica. Alexander puzzled himself sleepily with permutations of motives for this suggestion: these ranged from hoodwinking Geoffrey into supposing Frederica an integral member of the party, to rage with himself for his erotic inadequacies (though Jenny had expressed gentle understanding of these), to jealousy and pique that he hadn’t strong-mindedly got rid of Frederica at the outset. He made another weak protest and was further talked down by Jenny, who seemed to be in some irrational female mood of vengeful self-sacrifice. In the event, it was the strangely draped Frederica who helped Jenny and Thomas up the garden path, juggling ebulliently with wheels and superfluous Heinz jars. Alexander knew he should have managed to assert continuing concern over Geoffrey’s probable mood, to offer refuge and consultation when they were, as they would be, needed. He was ashamed at his relief that this wasn’t possible.

  When Frederica came back he exerted himself to open the back door of the car for her. She got in meekly enough, and then said, “Would you mind just driving me up to the school and back, or just anywhere, while I think things out? I seem to have got rather into difficulties.”

  “You do,” he said, more knowingly than he felt. He thought it would be injudicious to question or lecture her, though he felt some compulsion to do both. He was, in addition, not very eager to go back into his own room and start thinking out his own position. He started the car and drove off, obediently. After a few moments, in a crackling and rustling of paper skirts she began to climb over into the front seat.

  “Get down.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not safe. And I don’t want you.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  She landed beside him in a tangle of arms and legs, wriggled and got upright. He drove slowly on. After a moment she put an unequivocal hand on his knee.

  “Frederica, this has got to stop. You’re making both of us ridiculous.”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “Well, I do.”

  He pulled up. They were now, by some accident of his habits, in the mouth of the old concrete drive leading to the OTC Nissen huts and the Castle Mound. From high elms came an absurdly uproarious dawn-chorus of birdsong. The terrible girl flung herself furiously on him, and clutched thin fingers tightly in the hair behind his neck. For what seemed a very long time he struggled uselessly to free himself: she was very strong. Finally he managed to break her grip, and pushed her back into her seat, holding her hands down into her lap. He was panting. She had scratched his ear, and drawn blood.

  “This is not my idea. I don’t want this, Frederica.”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “I ought to know.”

  “Well, I expect I’ve thought about it more than you have,” she said, as though this explained her indubitably superior insight. He looked at her: dangling, uncombed red hair, blue-shadowed chalky face, creased bow, cross stare. She was a parody of the virgin in the garden.

  “What on earth were you doing all night?”

  “Various things, some nice, some nasty. Mostly nasty, I must say. I seem to have become an involuntary voyeur, among other things. I suppose I can be said to have learned something. What were you?”

  “Nothing I should choose to tell you.”

  “No, well, none of all that’s really important now. I wish I hadn’t lost my clothes, though. I thought all this paper was the least like pinching things, which I couldn’t bring myself to do. I mean, it’s expendable. I had a very moral upbringing. About stealing and things like that. And bourgeois, of course, about losing clothes.”

  Alexander laughed briefly, half-excited, despite himself, at her cavalier dismissal of his unsuccessful night of passion, half-amused at her accurate deployment of the Potter morality, which might well take no cognisance of possible losses more considerable than clothes. He then said gloomily, “I feel vaguely that I ought to stop you or something. I mean, I feel responsible for your an
tics. God knows why.”

  “No, that’s exactly it. You aren’t responsible, not in that sense, of course not. I wouldn’t have it, anyway. I’m responsible, and that’s how it’ll be. The only thing is, I do love you.”

  “O God,” said Alexander. Some demon of politeness, or sense of occasion, or temporary truth, or female will drove him to add, “I suppose I love you too.”

  He was a man of words. Once those were said, they took hold of him. He saw with a kind of haggard horror that those were, now, true, that he had made them true. That perhaps, though unfortunately not certainly, it was only leaving them unsaid that had kept him so coolly secure from them.

  “Not,” he added miserably, compounding the offence, “that that’s any good, or can make any difference, to either of us, you do see. It’s impossible.”

  But she was already sitting astraddle his knees, pressing her face against his. She gripped and clutched and wriggled. He gave her a little slap on the papery folds and saw for a moment the torn scraps floating and falling on the forked creature in the summer air. His flesh was indubitably not unresponsive. She was even more impossible than Jenny had ever been.

  “Stop that, you intolerable creature, keep still. I don’t seduce children.”

  “I’m not a child. And I don’t need seducing.”

  “You are a child to me. And you are a virgin.”

  Alexander’s long, dismayed, gentle face spoke closer to her than she had ever imagined it would truly come.

  “No, no, I’m not, I’m not,” crowed Frederica, in a paroxysm of daring. After all, she thought, remembering Ed’s fingers and Crowe’s teeth, it was pure accident that she was still technically intact.

  Alexander felt the world shift round him. “You’re not?” he said, and “Oh, God,” again. He kissed her, then, with some fury, tearing unintentionally at the paper skirts. It was she who pulled away, staring at him with more of a peremptory challenge than the soggy devotion he had feared. She was growing up, had grown up, fast. He felt some curiosity about the time and place of her defloration.