by A. S. Byatt
“One always wants to think that the important bit isn’t really what it is,” said Alexander kindly. He felt an irrational irritation with this pale boy, an irrational conviction that he had led the unfortunate Simmonds on, into agonies of frustration and impotent conscience.
Marcus, for his part, began to feel that this conversation was taking on an uncanny similarity to the conversation when Lucas had become aggressive, Germanic and interrogatory about whether he played with himself. He said, angrily for him,
“It wasn’t sex. I mean. It wasn’t. Not …” He had tears in his pale eyes and blood coursing in flat skeins under his thin-skinned face and neck.
“I know you need badly to say that, you feel damaged and corrupted by this experience, that’s apparent. I can see you are holding certain things back, things you haven’t said, can’t bring yourself to say …”
“Not those things.”
“Of course not. If you say not. I don’t want to pry.”
“You don’t understand.”
“How can I understand what you do not say? I think I have a fair inkling, though, of the general dimensions of the affair. I take it you now find it too much for you – because you are repelled or disgusted, because your friend is behaving in a funny way –”
“That isn’t the point. I’m afraid of what he may do.”
“What could he do?”
Marcus cast about. He had failed entirely to make Alexander imagine Lucas. He said slowly, “He says we have to go to the field of the 1000 cairns at Fylingdales Moor. I know if we go we’ll be killed. I know.”
Five or six long tears ran slowly down the expressionless face.
“I shouldn’t think you will,” said Alexander, heartily for Alexander. “But in any case, there’s a simple answer. You mustn’t go. You must simply tell him that the thing’s at an end-that you feel it is all potentially dangerous and destructive. As you do.” He did not think it possible, or proper, to lecture Marcus Potter on the motor car as a symbol of sexual potency, although his literary mind was constructing a series of powerful images of fear of destructive energies, Simmonds’s and Potter’s.
“He needs me.”
“He can’t really need anyone he’s distressing as much as he’s distressing you. People are surprisingly resilient. It’s no good thinking yourself indispensable – almost none of us are, we only need to think so. If you can’t look after yourself, Marcus Potter, you can’t look after anyone.”
Glib, this last lot, some of it untrue, but it was what people needed and wanted to hear, was it not? One could not say it to oneself, but ah, to others, there was a certain virtue, a certain innocence –
“But what will he do?”
“Someone must speak to him. I’ll try to see about that. Is that what you came for? And you must go home, and tell your father something – as little as possible – get sent on a holiday. Stay with an aunt.”
“I have no aunts. It isn’t a good idea to talk to my father.”
Alexander might have offered. But how can you say to a man, “Someone is messing around with your 16-year-old son,” when your own hand is hardly out of his 17-year-old daughter’s skirts, your own nose still aware of her hot, dry skin?
“I only want an eye on him.”
“I’ll keep an eye.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He would ask him about cricket in hall. He would bump into him accidentally in the cloisters. He would make sure. He added, “Just forget, just put the burden off your mind.” It was easy, he thought, for some.
37. The First Night
Whatever Alexander might, on reflection, have decided to do about his three visitors was pre-empted, to some extent, by the opening of his play, which fell on that same early August evening. When he had earlier and frequently foresuffered this occasion he had concentrated on the success or failure of the work. He had not, as Stephanie had not when imagining an abstract Wedding, considered the distractions of flesh, conscience and simple social inconvenience which would then torment him – although it might be argued that he should have known, who had prophesied with uncanny accuracy to Jenny in their days in the dirty goldengrove on Castle Mound, just how much of a saturnalia any such prolonged work was likely to become. As he took his seat on the elevated half-moon of steel and boards he was preoccupied with how much that was private was about to become public, from his arcane knowledge of the Virgin Queen, to his attempt on florid verse, to his sins of omission and commission over the last few days. Now, of course, as the audience climbed and creaked more or less orderly onto the scaffold, the actors were no longer interested in his views. There was this composite, impersonal creature to please, placate, win over.
All traces of the previous night’s misrule had been swept away by men with brooms, baskets and spiked staves. The terrace gravel was smooth and raked, with no glint of broken glass. The lawns were mown and enamelled. Laurel, yew and high pines had been clipped where clambering boys had left dangling twigs and broken branches: the soft, opaque rounds of Hesperidean light were strung orderly among them, ready to glow when dark thickened. Palanquins, wheeled turrets, thrones and battlements were ranged behind the house. The consort whistled and scraped invisible in the sunken garden. This first audience was massive, and differently composed from others there would be. Local dignitaries in golden chains of office, the Bishop in gaiters and purple vest, flanked by rural deans, the already designated Vice-Chancellor and Faculty Deans of the university to be, the men from the Treasury and the Arts Council, the local Viscount and his showjumping daughters, industrialists and the Press. There were local ladies who had stitched and collected bangles, the friends and relations of the cast, some people who had simply bought tickets. In the penultimate category was Geoffrey Parry, who had brought his son Thomas, alleging that it wasn’t possible to find a baby-sitter for a child in so strung-up a state, and the Potter family. Amongst the genuine members of the audience were Lucas Simmonds, whose presence was unforeseen and undesired by the two people who might have felt any interest in it, and Ed, the traveller in dolls.
Charabancs had set out from various points and were converging on Long Royston. You could buy tickets for Astraea or the Virgin Queen which included the coach fare from Calverley, Scarborough, Durham or York, You could buy holidays at a chain of hotels in northern resorts, or village pubs, which included a performance of the play, with optional transport from Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham and London. Crowe was in some ways as good a businessman as his great-grandfather. The success of this enterprise made him wonder if he wouldn’t have done better out of Cultural Trips and Events than out of giving Long Royston to the University. But if he was enterprising he was only intermittently energetic and had no wish to expend much of that energy on tourism. The coaches rolled into an inner courtyard, where they deposited their passengers, who could purchase tea and buns, or beer, or gin, at the Buttery, before wandering along walks and grassy alleys to the wooden half-O.
It was at this put-down place that Frederica, blanching, observed Ed, making his way plump down the steps, staring proprietorially around. She shivered. She saw Ed as a kind of de Flores or Banquo’s ghost, a walking misdeed who would rise up to humiliate her. She drew back from the kitchen window and bumped into Wilkie, who said, “Seen something nasty?”
“A man I know. Well, sort of.”
Ed pottered towards the Buttery.
“Come to watch you perform?”
“Good God no, he doesn’t know I’m me, I mean, he doesn’t know I’m in it.”
Wilkie stroked her. He stroked everybody. It was not easy to be offended. “How’s the passion for the Virgin Queen?”
Before Wilkie, Frederica had been innocent of that use of the word queen, and innocent of such thoughts about Alexander. But her first instinct, characteristically, had been not to appear naive or slow on the uptake. So she said knowledgeably that she didn’t think that was quite the right way of putting it, that she positi
vely knew that wasn’t so, in fact.
“Aha,” said Wilkie.
“Aha,” said Frederica, torn between the desire to keep her dealings with Alexander quiet, and the desire to make them quite real for herself by discussing them. Like Alexander, she was a verbal creature: like the Bevy, she would have liked, if people had liked her well enough to talk to her, to gossip and tell tales of experience and triumph.
“You took my advice.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And now you’re all glowing.”
“Well, sort of.”
“I’m dying of curiosity, my dear.”
“I can’t talk …”
“Of course.” Wilkie’s attention was deflected. “Look, Frederica. Harold Hobson. Ivor Brown. Carsful of critics. Transfigure your life overnight, if you’re lucky. And mine. And his too, of course. Do you in your heart of hearts think it’s a good play, darling?”
Frederica caught an intonation she didn’t like, equivocated, played for time.
“Do you?” she said.
“I think there’s a pretty fair chance it’ll be a raving success. I don’t think all this verse drama thing will really catch on, in the end, though. It’s like the Coronation gewgaws and the awful garments of the ladies-in-waiting, a kind of no-style harking back, without the sharpness of parody.”
“That was the point, he said. Real modern verse, not parody, not doctrinaire modern realism.”
“Very laudable. Do you think he’s done it?”
“Do you?”
“You’re remarkably evasive, for a hectoring bluestocking. But I don’t suppose I’ll wreck your performance if I say no, I don’t. Avoiding parody means he’s been left with involuntary echoes – softy slurry – of things old and not so old, the filleted orthodoxy, Eliot and Fry, no blood, no bones, no guts.”
“That’s not fair. But it’s a recognisable description.”
“Good girl. Furthermore, he’s not resolved the old Post-romantic problem of how to make the interior monologue dramatic. It’s as static as hell – like Eliot, like Fry. Nothing happens. And when you come to think of it, that’s a monstrous negative achievement, because by any account, plenty did. Because of the nineteenth-century failures I think verse is a lost hope. You could do it in prose like Brecht or a sort of grand guignol eloquent pastiche. But verse and psychological realism – the worst possible combination – both are out.”
“You can’t say anything’s out, just like that. A form is as good as the writer who chooses it.”
“I must not believe you. How old are you? Seventeen. Come and tell me, when you find that some forms are historically possible and some aren’t. When you decide to be a lady novelist, and get set to write a long novel by Proust out of George Eliot, and it won’t get up and walk, its words decay and real people turn out to be hectic puppets.”
“I won’t be a lady novelist.”
“Congratulations.”
“Perhaps you could do it like Racine –”
Wilkie did not answer this. Frederica suspected him of not having read Racine – he was not omniscient – and of being, like herself, someone who would not admit ignorance. She respected that, in a way. She respected Wilkie’s iconoclastic asperity, partly because it was a tone of the times, recognisably modern, but partly also because he did seem to care about precise definitions of real thoughts. All the same, she walked away. If she was to say Alexander’s speeches, it was no help to brood about slurry echoes. Judgment was not the matter in hand. It was curious that she didn’t feel – as she certainly didn’t – that Wilkie was either making, or inducing her to make, any personal attack on Alexander. What he said had a fashionable bitchy note, but he was not a bitch.
Alexander observed the critics. They had on the whole agreed kindly to see potential in The Buskers. They came more massed and apparent to Astraea because they had transported themselves in self-administered cohorts. He then saw the Potters. Bill had for some reason sent tickets to Daniel and Stephanie and instructed them that the family would all attend. Alexander, who had decided that it would be intolerable to sit this through next to Lodge, or even the wardrobe mistress, was alone in a high corner. He realised that the chain of Potters was ascending vertically towards him. Daniel, cumbrous and rapid, reached him first. The planking swayed under his weight. Trailing last, Marcus looked up, cast his eyes down and stumbled, earning a growl from Bill, who was wearing an open-necked flannel shirt. Alexander, like much of this audience, was in a dinner jacket.
“Do you mind us?” said Daniel.
“No. No.”
“You might. You might want to be on your own. Not that I’ve got power to shift this bunch.”
“You could sit down and be a bulwark.”
“Aye. I’ll put my wife between us, though, and keep them off her.” Stephanie sat down next to Alexander. The rosy poplin was tight across her breasts. She was wrapped in a green silk shawl, with a trailing fringe. She had insisted that no one at all should know about the baby, since Bill would roar, Winifred fuss, and everyone, especially Frederica, would conclude it had been conceived out of wedlock. This was hard on Daniel, who was obsessively interested in every small bodily change, and would naturally have been loudly solicitous. Alexander considered her with affection.
“Are you all right?”
“If I don’t get vertigo.”
“You won’t, once it starts.”
“If you do,” said Daniel, “we’ll move. Maybe we should move anyway.”
“No, hush. I’m all right.”
Marcus looked straw-green, as though the mention of vertigo had set him off. Alexander saw below them the little row of Blesford Ride masters, all in dinner jackets, some with wives. The Thones, Geoffrey Parry dandling Thomas, Lucas Simmonds, with a scrubbed face, newly washed fluffy curls, and an expression of benignant ordinariness. Not having heard his views either on the theatre or on Renaissance anthropocentricity Alexander did not share Marcus’s alarm at his presence. Indeed he found his doggedly cheery expression reassuring after Bill’s glare and Daniel’s concealed turbulence.
The music struck up. Like a giant flock of birds settling for the night the audience rattled, clattered, preened, smoothed and was still on its multiple perch. Thomas Poole and Edmund Wilkie sauntered in, one from each end of the terrace, met, handclasped and began to speak. Gently they parodied the aesthetic Shepherds and looked back to the mellow Ovidian age of gold. Wilkie was an actor who was never exactly good until the performance was under way. Now it was apparent that he was going to be very good: wry, affectionate, sad, witty, explosive. Alexander sat back with a sigh.
Stephanie had not come expecting much. She felt perpetually queasy now: her world seemed narrowed to her own biology. She observed her own actions with a lazy, impersonal curiosity. She noticed, for instance, that she had trouble to conclude a sentence, written, spoken, or simply thought. The moment she had even a hazily shaped idea of what she meant to say, or might have said, that seemed enough, and she let the words trail away into blank and silence. Today her thoughts hadn’t got as far as a real play and herself watching it. She had solved practical problems, to do with getting there on time and providing a suitably shapeless overgarment. She had scanned emotional problems: Daniel’s solicitude, Bill’s likely quarrel with Daniel and devastating assessment of Alexander’s work, the need to give Frederica moral support. She had not precisely conceived sitting through the action of a real imagined play.
She was thus startled by its density and energy as she might not have been if she had come with preconceptions, or sharp to criticise. She was not a judging nature: she took in Astraea with the complete scanning attention she gave to childhood trays of guessing-objects, poems, and now Daniel. She had a feeling that she occasionally had with certain “fortunate” works of art that what was before her was getting away with, realising, what should by the laws of art then obtaining, have been impossible. Alexander’s play contained the possibility of being a thing o
f shreds and patches, a robe of verbal tatting, a pageant limp with sensibility where it should have been harsh with political necessity. Later all these things were to be said. But Stephanie saw what Alexander and Lodge had meant people to see.
She saw the young Elizabeth sit white and stump-like outside Traitor’s Gate and refuse to go in: she saw the dying Elizabeth sit white and stump-like in a nightgown on a cushion placed felicitously on the identical patch of terrace and refuse to lie down and die. She saw the intervening white vision of Astraea and the palely fluttering Graces weave circles under dark eternal forest boughs and golden fruits of light. She saw patterns and broken patterns: Ralegh superbly spinning terrestrial and celestial globes in sunlit audience with a youngish queen: Ralegh incarcerated in the Epilogue, spinning the same globes in his dark tower. Catherine Parr offered apples to the young girl in the orchard, Virgo-Astraea in courtly masque offered golden apples to painted Gloriana, Robert Cecil coaxed the old queen to mumble just a small bite. She saw the symmetry of the girl spreadeagled on the grass in the warm sun, and the old woman laid out in the gathered dark as the ladies-in-waiting pulled the folds of her nightgown, after her death-struggle, into marmoreal flutings, and in the sunken garden the rebec mourned reedily. She noticed that the tableau revealed when the actors assembled for the curtain call with the young Princess staring at the statuesque old Queen on her plinth, and Astraea conjuring her into movement with her sword, was a muted parody of the resurrection of Hermione in A Winter’s Tale. She said as much, in her drowsed voice, to Alexander, who was pleased, who pointed out that he had been playing with themes of rebirth and renaissance and the Last Plays all through, though Lodge had intended Botticelli’s Primavera, and Stephanie said yes, she had seen, it worked, there was a weight of language … her voice fell away. He touched her hand in gratitude.
“Frederica was marvellous,” she said.
“I thought so.”
“Well everyone was. But I thought she rose to the occasion more than …”
