The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Marcus could smell fear, rank over sportsclothes and cocoa in the close little room. He said, “Maybe we should just give up. Maybe this is too much for us.”

  “I shouldn’t like to think that. All good things are dangerous. I think we should follow the signs, the leadings we have, even into disaster, if necessary.”

  Marcus waited politely to be told where the leadings led.

  “On Fylingdales Moor, as I told you, there are over 1000 small stone cairns. Over 1000. One of the things I’ve found out in my reading is that the very early gods – and goddesses, Aphrodite for instance – were just pillars or cairns or cones of stone. I think that was a system of calling down power, a field of force, of terminals. They are – ah – touchstones,” he said, smiling with a touch of his ancient brightness over this last revelatory double-entendre. “We should go there. I suppose the dark forces will have it ringed. We could be burned to a cinder. But if not, we could go there.”

  “How?” Marcus breathed.

  “I’ll drive you. In a day or week or two. We need to purge ourselves – eat no blood and nothing after sundown – to make our bodies less accessible to the eaters, to the bloody-minded. I expect it will become quite clear when we must go. I expect you will see that, if I don’t. Won’t you?”

  Marcus nodded, painfully. He looked at the window, but no faces stared in, only sunlight. He looked at Lucas, whose hands were weaving his flannel lap. He remembered his secret garden of forms and felt pure rage that Lucas should have connected gods and electricity to cairns or cones of stone. The connection impressed him, of course; but not enough for him to share what he had no doubt was his own knowledge, sure and certain, that their thoughts had again overlaid each other, that each in his method, or system of signs, had seen what the other had seen. Lucas was a fumbler, there was no doubt of it, mucking up the purity, the cleanness of what he, Marcus, knew, with all this stuff about ancient gods and demons and bodies, human or hydra. And Lucas was dangerous: demons or no demons, it was to Marcus clear that if they got in that car together again and anything happened, they were likely to end up dead. He did not have to specify what kind of “thing” had to “happen” – sexual, religious or mathematical, its end would be the same, cinders, whether caused by demonic intervention, burning petrol, or light from heaven centred by some metaphysical burning glass on them. He also knew that although he would not tell Lucas about the mathematical Forms and their return he would, if asked or commanded, get into that car, whatever forebodings he might feel. He owed him that. He owed his perspicuity that, whatever filtered through sweaty smells and buzzing wires of guardians on destroyers. He thought he must now, at last, speak to someone else, and made a decision.

  In the other tower Alexander sat at his desk on which he had laid out the Times Educational Supplement and a pile of application forms he had acquired. An application form is neither a passport to another place or another way of life, nor is it an examination paper: it has a reassuringly vacant, routine appearance, like the census, or an opinion poll. He could fill in details of his qualifications and views for the BBC, in London or Manchester, for an ancient school or a modern training college, strong on drama, without overstepping the threshold of imagining or desiring any of these places. He knew, indeed, he would be foolish to come to any decisions about his life until the play was opened and closed, as Crowe said. This knowledge simply helped to make the forms appear neutral, and papery. He remembered, as a man with a hangover might, the events of the night and the early morning, winced, and drew the BBC forms towards him. Wedderburn, he wrote. Alexander Miles Michael. A peculiarly resonant and militant array of names for one as passive as he was, he had always thought them, and he considered the anomaly again as he filled the little boxes, date of birth, places of education, parentage, nationality and publications, conducting a retreat with his only weapon, the pen, and hoping that it was a strategic withdrawal and not a rout. Maybe only a feint was necessary. He did not have to send these things off. Perhaps it would be enough, for the time being, to assure himself of the possibility.

  He considered his own erotic oddities and embarrassments. What he liked, he believed, was nearer what most men liked than they would be prepared to admit. He liked the imaginary relish. He liked imagined contact with real women, and real contact with imaginary women. He liked his delicious solitude, certainly, and intended to let no one invade it. But also – and this was odder, if still not very odd, surely – he liked fear. Not excessive fear. He had no fantasies of ripping flesh, piercing heels or whirling knouts and could not, even by the usual process of extending the fantasies he did have, reach any real imaginative apprehension of what it might be like to desire these things. But the ripple of apprehension, the prickle of hairs on the skin, the sense of panic flight through crashing undergrowth and under whipping foliage, the alertness of scent and sight bestowed by a flicker of real fear, this he repeatedly provoked. Embarrassment and humiliation afforded him no joy and so his relationships had been transitory, since he terminated them when embarrassment and humiliation supervened, which they always did. But he liked, his desires were most immediately stirred by, minatory and ferocious women, when they were angry. He had never, even as a very little boy, had any trouble with Keats’s line about “When thy mistress some rich anger shows”. This recondite pleasure seemed to him entirely natural.

  So far, so good. He had fallen in love with Jennifer because she had admonished him, indeed, knocked him down, in the music-hole during The Lady’s Not for Burning. He had taken his customary pleasure in appeasing her wrath and converting its energies to those of desire. He was still afraid of her, it was true, but he had realised, when his flesh had retreated before her need, and she had been so understanding and so gentle, that the fear had changed its nature. He was afraid now of her love, not her wrath, of Thomas and being shut in a house, not of any savage and unsubdued quality in the woman. Whereas in the case of Frederica Potter some roughly antithetical process had taken place. He had found her attachment to him humiliating and embarrassing, had been afraid of its stifling domestic implications, had seen her as some childish nuisance, dragging Bill’s suburban proprieties behind her.

  He had no exact idea when this had changed. Partly, it had changed through the princess in the play, who represented his desire for fear of minatory women, but also, being a self-portrait, shared it, and not only it, but his own secretly acknowledged delicious solitude, which was both escape, energy and power. She knew how to be stony, did that girl, how to display fear and rage and grace. He was afraid of her knowledge. He was afraid of her. When she had clutched and scratched at him, he had been most happily afraid. He looked at the submissive, lovely lines of the white marble back of the Danaïde, on his chimney-breast, and began to fill the forms in, rather fast. He had no intention of becoming any further embroiled with Bill Potter or his family. Or, he realised more sadly, with Geoffrey and Thomas Parry and the rifts in their household. He would, when his play was over, pack all these things, stone, harlequins, books, in his trunk, and drive away, to Weymouth and points south. He would leave, for Jennifer, a very large potted plant – he thought about it – a bay tree in a wooden tub, a white rose out of Nicholas Hilliard, and some book or other, some appropriate book, not The Ocean to Cynthia of which anyway there was no decent edition, but some book he would think of. As for the terrible girl, he would count himself lucky and she would trouble his dreams – but there was advantage in that – she would forget, very quickly, because of her energies, which were restless and incessant, she would scrabble at someone else’s hair. He would not, because of her, keep in touch with Bill, but he would keep in touch with Crowe, he would maybe even visit, after a decent interval, before Long Royston was handed over to the academics.

  He filled in the rest of the BBC script department form and embarked on the BBC educational programmes form. His handwriting calmed him. It was a little like Elizabeth’s own elegant and businesslike Italic. Running footsteps sounded on t
he stairway. His door was unceremoniously pushed open. He imagined an apparition of Frederica-as-huntress and had the ludicrous idea that a man was cornered in the top of a tower, as though egress would have been more possible from a room situated somewhere else. This caused him to smile to himself, in a way which seemed to annoy his visitor, who was, in fact, Jennifer.

  “I had to see you,” said Jennifer. “There is only you.”

  “Should you be here?” said Alexander, weakly. He had always managed to stop women from visiting his room. This was one way in which he, and his reputation at least for discretion, had survived so long.

  “Everyone has gone demented. And I should have thought this, and everything else, was so public by now that it hardly arose whether I should be here or not.”

  “I suppose not,” said Alexander, equally weakly. He began to shuffle scripts over his application forms. Jennifer took off, and threw down, her macintosh and headsquare.

  “It’s all right when I see you,” she said, “it all falls into place again. Honestly, you can’t imagine what it’s like in that house. I wish you wouldn’t grin conspiratorially to yourself. Nothing’s funny. Geoffrey’s smashed a lot of things, the dinner service, the Spode, imagine it, Geoffrey, who never hurt anything or noticed anyone or anything, or I shouldn’t have … or maybe I shouldn’t … anyway. And he won’t speak, except to Thomas, and he addresses Thomas in an awful false mournful voice. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of it, honestly.”

  “Was it wise to come out?”

  “What do you mean? I can’t stay in, not with things like that. I can’t. I had to see you. Though you don’t seem overjoyed to see me.”

  “I can’t be overjoyed when you are so alarmed. I get alarmed myself.”

  She was silent for a few moments, striding up and down and rearranging things, the Wedgwood bowls with their fleeing forms and forest boughs, the stone cairn. She breathed in, dramatically.

  “I’m all right here. See, I’m all right, now. What were you doing?”

  She came over and sat on the arm of his chair. He curved a sad arm round her bottom. She scrutinised his papers, a habit he disliked in anyone, and pulled out the end of the application form.

  “Alexander Miles Michael. How lovely, what lovely names. What are you doing? Alexander, what are you doing? You aren’t getting another job.”

  “Only thinking about it.”

  She pulled, with customary efficiency, at the stack of papers and uncovered the remaining forms.

  “Five other jobs. You must be desperate, even if only in your thoughts.”

  “Well,” he said carefully, “there does seem to be some sort of crisis. At least in my thoughts. Doesn’t there?”

  “You must have sent for these long before last night.”

  “There was a crisis long before last night.”

  “Because of me.”

  “And Thomas,” said Alexander, truthfully. The fact of Thomas alarmed him genuinely.

  “Thomas? Thomas. Were you going to leave us?”

  “I was only thinking.”

  “You could take us. I’d come. I love you. You could really go, and we’d come, and start again, properly.”

  “Jenny, my dear …”

  “You wouldn’t leave me?”

  “No, no. I wasn’t going. I love you, Jenny.”

  “But you could go, and take us, it would change everything, it’d be truthful, and open, and hopeful …”

  “What about Thomas?”

  “He loves you. He’s little. He’d come.”

  “Jenny. If I were Thomas, I’d, I mean, he has his own life.”

  “I could leave Thomas. That is, I don’t want to, I don’t want to leave Thomas, but what is there left for him or me as things are?”

  “A lot, maybe. How can we know, just now, as things are now? Jenny, love, let’s get through this play. It means a lot to me. And you are so good in it, if you will try to be – even if I’ve ruined things, at least partly …”

  “No, don’t say that. You haven’t. Between you and me things are all right, we’re all right, my darling, I came to prove that.”

  “What?”

  “It would have been all right for you without Thomas. What you’ve just said makes me quite sure about that. I knew you’d brood, I knew you’d suffer, I came because I know, if we try now it will be all right, we owe ourselves that.”

  “Jenny – this is a boys’ school – my room – in the middle of the morning.”

  “You can’t be pernickety about everything. I should have overridden you long ago. It isn’t as though that usually happened to you.” Sharply. “Is it?”

  “No,” he said truthfully.

  “Well, then.” Her skirt slid to the ground. She kicked out a leg and unfastened her suspenders. She was naked beside his desk, naked under the Danaïde, naked in his narrow bachelor bed. He undressed, politely, without haste, and climbed in. He could not. If he could have done, he would have, he told himself grimly, not to prolong the embarrassment, to get it over, now. But he could not. He turned his face to the wall. Jenny, crimson to the curve of her breasts, suddenly collapsed into noisy weeping. Alexander was appalled by her pain and humiliation. He picked her up and cradled her in his arms, murmuring, “Don’t take on, ah, don’t,” wondering, even then, where he had got an idiom like that, northern and not his own, and tracking it down wryly a few moments later to Lady Chatterley’s lover. Jenny went on and on crying, accelerating in speed and sound. He sensed that she found it the only possible thing to do, did not know what to say, or how to touch him.

  “Don’t take on, love, it’s only not the moment, we are both so jangled and have had no sleep and I feel nervous here, now … It’s really of no significance, it will be all right, when …”

  “When. When? Oh, I meant so well, and have made it so much worse, blundering in, displaying myself, all cocky …”

  “An unfortunate word.”

  “Alexander, don’t laugh.”

  “Why not? What else can we do? You had better laugh, too. For now. I assure you, it will be all right …”

  “When?”

  “When we have decent time and space.”

  “Then you will take us, me, away.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think.”

  “Honestly. I can’t see how you can honestly mean anything else.”

  “Well, in that case,” said Alexander, placatory, “I must mean that, mustn’t I?”

  She smiled a watery smile and began to cry again, more quietly. He held her. She stroked his persistently limp member, and his flanks, in a nervous manner, as though he might explode, or recoil. He was patient. She said, “You are so white, you are so lovely, you have such an untouched, unused look, I love to see you.”

  “Well, you can do that,” he said, and something in his voice must have alarmed or embarrassed her for she sprang up and began to dress again, hastily. He dressed himself, before she could change her mind, and saw her out, before she could offer to stay. He even made himself appear deliberately more hangdog than he felt. For the time being he was quite happy to have ascribed to him a psychic anguish he didn’t feel. It seemed to put her in a tolerant and uncertain frame of mind that was the best he could decently hope for.

  He went back, feeling hot and a little sticky, to his forms, and filled out another one. This took ten minutes or so, after which he again heard running feet on the stair, and the door was again pushed open. He assumed it was Jenny come back for something forgotten or some further urgent admonition. This time it was Frederica.

  “I had to see you,” said Frederica, “there is only you.”

  His blood raced. “I can’t say the same,” he said, “unfortunately.”

  “No, I know,” she said, “I’ve been lurking. In the tomatoes. Luckily I had a book. And it’s quite sunny out there. So I dozed in the tomatoes and read little bits of this book. Tomatoes have a terrible smell, they smell like powdered hot metal and something else, maybe sulph
ur, is it, it’s a smell that comes at you and attacks your metabolism, or that’s what I think, this morning, having had no sleep and feeling kind of scraped and over-sensitive to everything. But the sun was as nice as the tomatoes were sinister, and I’m a bit better read than I was when I set out, for what that’s worth.”

  “What are you better read in?”

  “Well, I’m having another go at Women in Love. I was suddenly afraid I might be Gudrun. I mean, I saw the house as an awful trap, like the red-brick Brangwen house in that book, and Daddy was really beastly to me, and I thought of how Steph and I used to talk about you, and thought Steph was Ursula, and then I got really put out because that only left Gudrun, and I don’t want to have to be her.”

  “You could always read someone else.”

  “True. True. I love Lawrence and I hate him, I believe him and I reject him totally, all at the same time all the time. It’s wearing. Maybe it was just the tide. I mean, I wanted to read a book called that. What else shall I read then? You give me something, something different.”

  “What do you like best?”

  “Best of all, at the moment, I like Racine.”

  He thought about Racine and about Women in Love, and about Frederica Potter, and could make only one connection.

  “Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.”

  “No, not that, the awful balance of the ineluctable. Let me tell you my clever thought about the Alexandrine, which I couldn’t get in my A level script, or hardly, because the questions were so circumscribed. I’m breaking with knowledge about Racine I shall never tell anyone, and after a time I shan’t know it. That’s terrible.”

  “You will,” he said. “Tell me about the Alexandrine.”