The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  He was a good teacher, not, like Bill, because he charismatically communicated passion and a sense of importance, but because he could listen, he could ask the next question, he could hear a train of thought. He made a space of time in which Frederica could tell him about the Alexandrine. He sat, with the warmth of Jenny’s crimsoned flesh fading from his arms and belly, and looked at this girl, who had always roared and rumbled at him, vacillating between the Lawrentian hyperbolic and the Just William bathetic, and she told him, cleanly and neatly, quoting at length and with increasing calm and order, about the structure of one Alexandrine, and then two, and then strings of them, from Mithridate to Athalie, from Britannicus’s heavy ironies to the flame in the blood in Phèdre. She sat neatly and on a hard chair, and he thought she had a good ear, a very good ear, and then remembered she was a muscle-bound actress, and smiled to himself, at which she said, as though she had heard his thought,

  “I love it because it’s all so chill and precise on the page, it’s so lucid, and yet I can’t imagine it being acted without extravagant gestures and a kind of roaring noise that would quite ruin its symmetry. I can’t imagine anyone acting it who didn’t just stand still and occasionally sweep an arm up and down, or drop his head in his hands. Do you think so?”

  “That seems right.”

  “I love you.”

  It followed so naturally, the whole explanation had been a love-offering, so made and so received, he reflected.

  “I love you,” he said, as simply as he could, wanting her somehow to know that her cautious and tentative, then fluent and abstract and impassioned words had moved him as another woman, rosy and naked in his hearth, had not. The inviolable voice with a vengeance. No, not that, only how rare it was to offer anyone a thought. He had always been told she was very clever and taken it on trust: she had told him so herself often enough.

  “I love you because you are very clever,” he elaborated, to show her that he now knew it.

  “I love you because you can write.”

  “Are those good reasons?”

  “Well, novels would say not. People in novels don’t love each other because they can both see that Racine is – is what he is. Like maths, really, only I can’t do maths, I was going to say sensual but it isn’t, or at least, the sensual pleasure is geometry, not sex. Actually, I don’t know much about sex, I shouldn’t talk. What was I saying? Oh yes, if we were in a novel it would be most suspect and doomed to sit here drily discussing metre.”

  “If we were in a novel they’d cut this dialogue because of artifice. You can have sex, in a novel, but not Racine’s metre, however impassioned you may be about it. Pound said poetry was a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives one equations not for abstract triangles and spheres but for human emotions. Wordsworth said metre and sex were all functions of the flow of the blood, you know, and the ‘grand elementary principle of pleasure in which we live and move and have our being’. We can hear each other’s blood running, Frederica, in a sort of inspired mathematics, in incantations precise and arcane.”

  “How lovely.”

  “Yes. I shall give you a book that isn’t Women in Love. I shall give you my messy Everyman Silver Poets of the 16th Century because it’s got the Ocean to Cynthia in it, printed all wrong and spelt very oddly, but you must read that ebb and flow.”

  “I shall always keep it,” she said, mocking and serious, parodic and truthful. They sat and stared at each other.

  “People in Lawrence’s novels,” she began again, “love each other because of their unspeakable selves, their loins of darkness and starlike separateness and all that. They hector and gabble but they don’t talk, though he does, Lawrence does. He loved language, he lied in a way when he indicated all those values ‘beyond’ or ‘under’ it. I like language, why can’t one love in language. Racine’s people speak the unspeakable. That’s odd, I was going to say he had a very small language, but so did Lawrence, of that kind, and both of them indicate forms of what isn’t speech, and yet one is as clear and precise and formal about what it isn’t as the other is yelping and muttering and … oh, I don’t know. I do love the bit with the rings, and the venison pasty, and the rabbit, I think. One reason I like Racine so much is that Daddy doesn’t. He doesn’t understand French. I think he thinks it’s chilly and immoral. Perhaps I’ll read French and German. He can’t do his cultural value-judgements so well on what isn’t English.

  “I’m sorry, Alexander, I’m so drunk with you, and not sleeping, and now seeing you, and having this talk, I can’t shut up, I run on, I don’t imagine one can be happy for more than a day or two at a time, so I feel I must make the most of it.”

  “You say Bill was beastly. What exactly happened?”

  “He said I was a messy slut,” said Frederica with considerable verbal satisfaction, “and he bashed me, and he tore a lot of those paper skirts, which I said weren’t my property. I said I didn’t like his language as well, and that my affairs were my own, and he said not if he knew it, and I hit him. With a proper fist, clenched, in his eye. It’s all swollen up. He sent me to bed, so I went, and dozed a bit, and then when I heard him going to the lav I got out and ran here.”

  “That can’t be a true account.”

  “Well, no. It’s tidied up, and presents me in a flattering and resourceful light, and it’s considerably abridged, for which you ought to be very grateful. It was a pretty mucky episode. Nothing was said about you, if that’s bothering you.”

  “It was, a little.”

  “Don’t let it. His mind works slowly, he’s still so busy resenting Daniel that I truly think he only minds him, and my having got dirty and lost some property he’d paid for. I told him I’d get it back.”

  “Did that comfort him?”

  “He didn’t believe me.”

  “I can’t, I can’t get in a mess with him, and your family and you at your age. It’s like seducing pupils, Frederica. It isn’t done.”

  “Isn’t it? That’s not what Wilkie says. I should have thought – I don’t know, the High School’s no paradigm of anything, it’s dead-and-alive, I should have thought it was a primary instinct, subverting that relationship. A possible variant of the Oedipus thing, I mean, not actually forbidden in any primeval way, only school rules, which we all know are there to be broken. I wish I was your pupil. We could have a lovely time. Like Eloise and Abelard.”

  “I don’t call that a lovely time.”

  “Ah, that was their day, as we were saying. This is our day. We’re in it. Even my daddy doesn’t wield a butcher’s knife.”

  “You are horribly reassuring.”

  “Well, I’ve got to say something. And it’s true.” She stood up, and came and sat where Jennifer had sat on his chair arm. Her eye flickered over the application forms. If they meant anything to her she gave no sign of it. She touched his hair and needles ran through his veins.

  “Won’t you make love to me?”

  “I don’t know if I can. It seems dishonest. To various people. Including you. And me, I think.”

  “I can see that. I think it doesn’t matter. Between you and me, here and now.”

  Here and now, at seventeen, was what she was, he said to himself. She had no real life yet, stretching before and after, pulling at her with old causes and effects, duties and sapping failures. She was pristine – well, almost. And for that reason, his intellect told him, vulnerable. What he did to her, or didn’t do, could change all her life. She didn’t look as though that was true, his body observed, his common sense endorsed. She looked tough and self-contained and simply eager to be doing.

  “Hold me, anyway.”

  “It isn’t that I don’t want you.”

  “No. Just scruples. All right. There’s lots of time. Just hold me a little. Without obligation.”

  He lifted her down into his swelling lap, and held her. They sat very still. In the forest of his mind the undergrowth crashed furiously; he was in a car rushing down a steep slope, careering out o
f control. He screamed shrilly and silently, in his head, with vertiginous pleasure like the child he had been on the Big Dipper, and the relentless literary tic-tac told him, not out of his childhood but sighing in German accent out of The Waste Land, to hold on tight, there were no clean or private phrases, but it didn’t matter, there were no doubt no private or star-separate schoolgirls to hold on your knee, if the truth were known. And Lolita still unwritten. He held on, tight. She barked with wild laughter. If she had urged him on, he could and would have taken her. But she did not. She was afraid of possible bloodshed, in fact, and of being discovered in a lie, and was rapidly calculating that some more extended, leisurely, uninterrupted occasion would certainly do better. Also, if she respected his scruples, she thought, they would, like most scruples, come to seem a nuisance to him, in time. If you respect a scruple for a day or two, Frederica informed herself wisely, you get to feel you’ve done your duty to it, and to hope circumstances, or necessity, will remove it. Also, she had her own reluctance. Racine was one thing, but the claws and beak of Matthew Crowe, and further back the plucking fat fingers of Ed were another. She didn’t want to rise in revolt against the impossible, the achieved Alexander. Not when, she thought, caressing his lovely winged shoulder-blades under his shirt, she had come so unexpectedly far.

  Alexander’s final visitor knocked. When he was asked in, his version of the initiating sentence was also more tentative. He said, “I’m afraid I had to come to see you. There was only you I could think of to ask, you see.”

  Alexander very rarely thought of Marcus when he was not, as now, confronted with him. Since the Ophelia he had concluded there was something “wrong with” the boy, which he had ascribed easily and glibly to the obtrusive difficulties of his parentage and social position. His sense of this was complicated by the fact that he still called up this boy’s face and voice when he thought of Ophelia, and worse still, Ophelia immediately came to mind when he saw the boy, blank, straw-pale, bony and fragile. When he did think about Marcus, as he rapidly tried to do now, he decided that their few meetings had all consisted of choked attempts by Marcus to tell him, or show him, something. He wanted to discourage this, out of an English feeling that endemic hysteria was best kept at bay, out of a personal disquiet about meddling in spheres of influence so directly ruled over by Bill Potter. This materialisation of Bill’s son, desperately polite, breathing fear, was in some way a judgment on him for what Bill would certainly have seen as “interference” with Bill’s daughter.

  “Sit down,” he said nervously.

  Marcus sat on the uncomfortable edge of a hard chair, and stared round. He took in the room, pale clear harlequin walls, the harlequin poster for the Buskers, the Picasso acrobats in their pink-grey desert, the Boy with his roses, the glossy Danaïde, the stone cairn below it. He liked the concatenation of the ovoids of alabaster and the irregular dark glossy and chalky rounds and planes of the chalk and flints; he liked the lines of both these against the rounds and rectangles of the Danaïde’s white haunches and black limits. The place had some proper balance between space and bodies in space. It made him, temporarily, feel safer.

  He too remembered Ophelia. He averted his eyes from the dangerous Boy because of his heavy garland. The Hamlet episode had made Alexander a possible if not an ideal confidant or confessor simply because he had then been the Director, and had been accustomed to direct Marcus’s doings and movements. Indeed he had possibly allowed Lucas to behave as he did because he had got used to the idea of a Director of some kind. Nobody else, except his father, had taken the trouble to tell him how to behave.

  Marcus’s silent mapping took time, during which Alexander became more nervous.

  “Won’t you tell me why you’re here?”

  Marcus jumped.

  “I don’t know where to start. It won’t sound sensible. That is, it will sound mad. I think it is mad. Probably, anyway. Almost certainly.”

  “What is mad? Or who is?”

  “Sir, the thing is, the real thing, I am afraid of what may happen to Mr Simmonds. I am afraid of what he may do.”

  Alexander had given almost no thought to Lucas Simmonds, whose normality was unremarkable, even banal, whose staffroom conversation was a carefully achieved flow of corporate trivia. Alexander called to mind that smiling face. That look of cricket and the healthy outdoors. A second-rank character from a detective novel by a lady writer, sound in dress and opinion. Not obtrusive enough for Wodehouse. Not talked about in his absence.

  “Sir, he says there are watchers at his window. He says, sir, he is wired. I mean, him and his room, electronically. I think he is going to drive that car too fast.”

  Marcus had decided to attempt a minimum of the most credible facts, simply to attract attention to his friend’s plight. He looked up hopefully. Alexander’s elegant brow was creased profoundly in puzzlement. He added more facts.

  “He says his mind was destroyed by some destroyers on a destroyer. Also bits of his biomorphic equipment possibly, he says. He saw a milk-bottle full of blood. He has cut holes with scissors in the pictures of Man and Woman in the Bilge Lab. I think he has cut up some frogs.”

  “That’s his job.”

  “It depends how.”

  Alexander tried to think. His mind was, or had been, running on women’s bodies, on recesses of flesh and the singing of blood and mind. Milk-bottles and frogs dubiously cut up were beyond his competence.

  “Well, what do you deduce from all this?”

  “Sir, I don’t know. He thinks I know things I don’t. I don’t understand as much as he thinks I do.”

  “How do you come to be expected to understand at all?”

  “Sir, he’s my friend.”

  This was a truthful, desperate and generous answer. It was also devious, in that it avoided certain things Marcus did not think he could bring himself to talk about, if he could get away without it, those queer competences of his own on account of which friendship had been required, and bestowed. Alexander took it as devious in another sense. “Friend” was not an entirely innocent word in Blesford Ride School. Indeed, it was a word best avoided, in cases of simple friendship. Alexander had never heard of “friends” being attributed to either Marcus Potter or Lucas Simmonds. But there was a lot he did not hear. Alexander stared at the boy, whose white face round his glasses bore a certain resemblance to his sister’s chalky pallor, but whose eyes and hair and expression had a vanishing colourlessness. He glanced involuntarily at the insolent Boy, so very different, on the wall, and shuddered delicately. If Frederica was not a frangible virgin this creature surely was, and the unfortunate Simmonds had been playing with fire, with something unstable and explosive. A wash of irrelevant sympathy for his hypothetical Simmonds flowed over him. Boys were terrible. He asked, in a more threatening way than he meant, “Why do you want to come and tell me about all that?”

  “I said, sir, because I’m afraid of what might happen. I mean, we nearly got killed, both of us, last time.”

  “Last time?”

  “Last time we went out – on a – well, on a sort of trip together, we did, he called them field-trips, sort of days out – with a purpose – I don’t want to talk about that, I – he really nearly killed us, driving back. He says speed’s out of the body.”

  Marcus was no good with words. His dull voice failed entirely to convey the horror of that vertiginous career over moor and hillside. Indeed, his tone could be read, and was disastrously read, as querulous.

  “So you feel the relationship is now too dangerous?”

  “Well, no, or rather, yes, it is, but that wasn’t what I came about. I’m afraid of what he may do.”

  “I’m still very unclear about what he has actually done,” said Alexander, delicate, faintly hostile. “Tell me.”

  Marcus tried. He found it hard. He couldn’t say, when it came to it, the words God, or religious, or light, and though he managed in a circumlocutory manner to speak of the “experiment”, and of minor aspects
of it, like hypnagogic imagery, the curious result of his bowdlerisation to protect the unspeakable was that the account he did offer was very much more one of a “personal relationship” than he meant it to be. Alexander listened for clues. The skills and dangers of being a good confidant are closely allied. Both consist of hearing what is said and listening at the same time for what is not said, of appearing to have understood something with a host of probable meanings, so that the flow of confidence will not diminish and the confider will in the end offer the one lucidly separate meaning. Alexander was usually a good confidant, partly because he was a reluctant and lazy one, which meant that he avoided the danger of treating other people’s confidences as his private property. He should also have been a good confidant because he had a cool, professional dramatic interest in the unfolding of stories, but this was weak in him: he preferred stories old, intricate and finished. But in this case he listened badly. He had had no sleep and was flustered by sex and Jenny and Frederica. He heard Marcus’s fumbling words and patterned them. Marcus talked about “the thing” and “the affair” in order not to name names, and Alexander slotted these words into available patterning places. Marcus talked about “interference” meaning geometry, radio waves, or disturbing Lucas’s concentration, and Alexander read the murmurs biologically and deduced that Marcus had been interfered with. He began to ask Marcus more direct questions about what Lucas had “done to” him. He would in many ways rather not have known, but felt it to be his distasteful duty to let Marcus speak, if Marcus would, which he was doing, but so obliquely that the going was appallingly heavy. Marcus was now murmuring something incomprehensible about Hell Mouth. It was clear to Alexander that both man and boy were riddled with Calvinist guilt. He tried the direct approach.

  “But how much physical contact was there?”

  Marcus began to explain that there was none, a general truth even if not entirely exact, remembered Whitby and became incandescent.

  “You are ashamed,” said Alexander.

  “Well, he was,” said Marcus. “That isn’t the important bit.”