The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “Yes, she did. She does.”

  “The audience has gone mad.”

  “It does seem to have.” He said, “Will you come backstage? To see Frederica? I must get out and go down there.”

  The audience was rhythmically stamping and tossing. The Bottle Chorus had assembled invisibly and was irrepressibly and not quite accurately bubbling out the Music of the Spheres, to which part of the audience was singing, like a football crowd, like a heavenly choir, in a Hollywood Spectacular or Milton’s empyrean. Alexander escorted Stephanie around the bowing and chanting multitude to the pandemonium of the dressing rooms. He was carried along by waves of sound, and wanted to touch Frederica. Visions beset him of glimpsed thighs, delicately bony wrists.

  Frederica was staring into the mirror, greasing her skin. Her face shone, with grease, with tears, with heat, with passion. He looked over her shoulder and into her eyes.

  “I’ve brought Stephanie. I can’t stop. I must see Marina.”

  “I know.”

  She stared unblinking, the moppet of wool motionless in her hand, the black eyes glittering.

  “O God, Frederica. I’ll talk to you later. There are things I’ve got to do. I can’t concentrate.”

  “Of course. I’ll lurk. I’m a good lurker. You know that.”

  Stephanie came up. If the currents of sexual rage singed her she gave no sign of it, merely fumbled peacefully inside the green shawl.

  “You were marvellous, Frederica. I never stopped to remember it was you.”

  “That’s praise.” Frederica turned wickedly to Alexander. “And you. After all the trouble I’ve been, did you stop to think I was me? Did you notice me?”

  “In some ways, not at all. In others, all the time.” He bent down to kiss her in an ostentatiously casual way. His knees knocked.

  “Go and talk to the old Queen, go on, you can always come and talk to me.”

  Frederica was learning fast. There is a tic-tac, in the early stages of passion, griping constrictions and furious energies, which can, with most agreeable pain, be controlled and exacerbated by, for instance, dismissing the beloved before he leaves voluntarily. He walked away through a congratulating throng towards the old actress. Frederica turned hectically to Stephanie.

  “He loves me.”

  “Yes. I see. Of course. He does.”

  She folded her hands round her thick waist in her green fringes and considered. The two sisters watched Jenny put out a hand from her dressing-stool and speak urgently to Alexander, who leaned over to kiss her, too, with a gracefully anxious stoop. He took her clutching hand from his dress-shirt front and laid it gently on the crimsoning skin between her ruff and stomacher. Jenny grasped his hand and held it there, over hers. Frederica stared, assessing, and then began to brush the curls out of her piled-up hair.

  “What will happen?” said Stephanie, standing in the middle of an electric field of charge and countercharge. “You can’t crash down whole lives.”

  “I can. I will. I’m free to do what I choose.”

  “You can’t. You’re an official child.”

  “You know I’m not a child. I want … I want, I want, I want.”

  “I want you to be happy.”

  “There are more ways of being happy than living in a council flat and making pots of tea for old bags. Anyway, happy isn’t the point. The point is, it’s real, it’s alive, it’s happened.”

  “Frederica, people will get hurt.”

  “That’s their look-out.”

  “You will get hurt.”

  “And if I do, I can stand that.”

  Alexander peered over Marina Yeo’s shoulder, into the black mirror between white bulbs. She too was greasy, wiping away death-pallor and blue-black hooded eyes, as well as some, if not all, of the furrows which mapped her brow and jawline.

  “Isn’t it bad luck,” she asked, “to loom in people’s looking-glasses, from behind?”

  “I haven’t heard that one. I only came to say you were a miracle.”

  “Well, don’t pat your own eyebrows, Narcissus, get out of my light. I’ve got eyes in my head, and I can see that the mirror on the wall doesn’t tell you that I’m the fairest of them all. Does it? The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured. Mind now, dear boy, whilst I see if these lines are fixed or scrubbable. So you were satisfied, were you?”

  “I was thrilled and enchanted and so moved – you made the end magic.”

  “You’re no good at the compliments.”

  “Well, if you know that, you know when I mean what I say.”

  She laughed, and stretched her soft kid-leather mouth this way and that.

  “She was right not to want a mirror. Can you say that Kipling poem, Alexander darling?”

  “ ‘Backwards and forwards and sideways did she pass,

  Making up her mind to face the cruel looking glass’

  That one?”

  “Something like. Ah well, it’s only a property, at my age, a face. Not yourself, you know. My face is my fortune, my living, but not me. Now go away, and when I’ve put a new one on, for the press, you can come and take my arm. I think we shall do all right. It was a good enough crowd, didn’t you think?”

  “It loved you.” He kissed her hand, bowed to the haggard face in the glass and got himself out.

  Upstairs in the Great Hall public and actors and everyone else were milling around. Alexander proceeded in brief, much-complimented stages towards Crowe and Lodge. He saw Geoffrey and Thomas and veered away from them, grateful to find himself pushed up against Thomas Poole who was, from grease paint or fatigue or lack of oxygen, rather grey under the spotlights cast up over his head onto the nymphs of Diana and their stiff burden.

  “Thomas. Thank you. So very good.”

  “Congratulations, on a success. I’ve been talking to the local press and the chap from the Manchester Guardian and they’re wildly enthusiastic. Listen – you’re my friend – I’ve got to talk to you. About what you saw the other evening.”

  “Don’t think about it. I saw nothing.”

  “Hell, no, you saw. I don’t mind. Or anyway, I don’t mind much. I just can’t think … I can’t go on. Alexander – I must tell someone. I am most horribly in love with this – this child – and …”

  “Are you sure you want to tell me?”

  Thomas stood, square, blond-headed, mild, and said, “If you don’t mind.”

  “Is it not just a midsummer night’s dream?”

  “I don’t know that I ever even thought it could be that. In any case, it can’t now. The thing is, she is, she is pregnant. She thinks. I don’t know how I can live without her, but I have got sense to see she can and should live without me – I mean, look at her, I’m not anyone, just a second-rate teacher of teachers, whilst she … in a year or two … now, I can make her happy or could … And then this.”

  “Thomas … what do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing. Listen. You’re discreet, and reasonably wise. I had to say it, to see if I could stand up and say it in an ordinary voice. I see I can. Did you see her, down there? I daren’t go near her.”

  “She was lovely in the play.”

  “Virgo-Astraea. She wasn’t, you know. Wasn’t a virgin. I wouldn’t have touched her, but she told me – made it clear – that she knew what she was doing. Used to fuck her cousin madly in copses and barns when they were supposed to be hunting, she says.”

  “And Elinor …” Elinor was Thomas Poole’s wife.

  “She’s here, somewhere. I must shut up, go find her. I suppose I should find a doctor. It’s not the sort of problem I’ve ever … Elinor. For the last three years we’ve had a bedful of kids more often than not, the great bed of Ware, and I’m not complaining about that, I love it, I love them, Elinor and all my little things – you should see them. Only this is. This is. This is so much worse, Alexander, that I can hardly realise they exist, most of the time. I’m sane enough to know it can’t last, not like this – but that’s
absolutely as far as my famous level head will get me. God, that girl – she has me doing things I’d’ve thought were puerile and degrading – lying about getting the car repaired, inventing examiners’ meetings, touching her up on the top of country buses. Things I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud – that are puerile and degrading. And lovely. I know you’ve got problems of your own – do you have trouble with your dignity? I’m not being pompous, I need my dignity. Partly that was what she liked about me. Now I’m an incompetent panting loon.

  “I suppose I ought to go and get a doctor, oughtn’t I? But I can’t stand the thought – I mean, that’s my child, that would be – and she’s only a kid herself, in that school with its clean little portico and portress, like a nunnery.”

  Alexander was prevented from replying to this entirely uncharacteristic outburst, by Marcus Potter, who came up with his look of staring absence more than usually pronounced. He opened and closed his mouth silently at Alexander, who felt that Fate was screwing him down with an excessive number of ludicrous parallels and analogies.

  “Speak up, boy,” he said almost nastily to Marcus, whilst trying to reply to Thomas Poole’s desperate stare with a look of deprecating, useless understanding.

  “Sir, I’m sorry. Sir, please come.”

  “What is it now?”

  “Sir, my father has got into a quarrel with the Bishop. A horrible quarrel, that is, a quarrel about horrible things. And he – Mr Simmonds, sir – is there too, and seems to think – well, seems to be very excited and think they’re particularly going on about him. I’m afraid.”

  “If you think I am going willingly to interpose in any quarrel between your father and the Bishop …” Alexander began, adding peevishly, “tonight of all nights …”

  Huge tears stood brimming in Marcus Potter’s pale eyes. Thomas Poole, a gentle man, said, “Never mind, Marcus, I was harassing Mr Wedderburn with my own less urgent problems. Just as unforgivable, in the middle of his triumph. Come on, Alexander, you can afford to be magnanimous and even you must see the immediate need to separate Bill Potter and the Bishop.”

  He nudged Alexander, who saw, over Marcus’s shoulder, the fretful face of small Thomas Parry in his father’s arms.

  “Ah,” said Geoffrey, with heavy meaning. “There’s Alexander. Come on, Thomas, you like Alexander. I’m told you like Alexander very much indeed. Wave to Alexander.”

  Alexander strolled hastily off with Marcus. Thomas Poole said in a rapid undertone, “Just as well, you see. Not that I don’t feel dreadfully for poor old Parry, make no mistake. Why can’t we all live quietly? You’re a lucky man, you have no ties. Make none. Poor old Parry. Women are so ruthless. What a banal thing to say. I don’t mean Elinor, of course. For Christ’s sake, Alexander, stop me talking.”

  The Bishop, the Ellenbys, the Ortons, the Potters, Miss Wells and several minor clergy were gathered towards one end of the Hall, holding glasses of champagne and shouting. By the time Marcus brought Alexander there they were shouting quite loudly about a concatenation of matters loosely ranging from pain through dismemberment, execution, crucifixion, disembowelling, regeneration and back to pain. Also present were Lucas Simmonds, who was also shouting, and Edmund Wilkie who was not, but was proffering a great deal of psycho-somatic information about pain-thresholds and the body-image to those capable of taking it in. As Alexander came tentatively nearer, Bill Potter seemed to be declaring in a barely controlled scream that the Bishop was a bloody butcher, the Bishop, flushed wine-coloured, but lucid, was apparently lecturing Lucas Simmonds on the necessity of suffering, and Simmonds was wringing his hands round and round and making agitated remarks about excising corruption. Wilkie was still clothed in the black velvet of his Tower vigil although he had resumed his roseate goggles: Felicity Wells was stiff in her grass-green train, bum-roll, ruff and farthingale. Frederica was not there, but Stephanie was, drooping heavily graceful and pensive next to Daniel, like the early Venus of the Primavera.

  The conversation had not begun in this way. Miss Wells had tugged Stephanie along with the Ellenbys to meet the dear Bishop. The Bishop, a tall, saturnine, handsomish man with a flow of white-flecked black hair, a trim figure and an intelligent look, had complimented Stephanie on what he had heard of her excellent work with Youth, Young Wives, the housebound and disabled. Stephanie, who had made a considered decision to help Daniel flat out in those areas of his work where no doctrinal conflict could be said to arise, would, in fact, have accepted this compliment gracefully had her father not been skipping from side to side behind her like a flyweight boxer preparing to land a body-blow on the smooth, very slightly convex purple silk front of the Bishop.

  The Bishop, seeing Bill, had attempted, spreading automatically flowing oil on the choppy waters, to make a few observations about this flowering of their common cultural heritage, the sense of true communion imparted by the rising-up of all the folk, as exemplified by churches, schools and Bill’s excellent adult education classes, in this sustained, jointly achieved work of art. Bill had said that the Bishop could speak for himself. For his own part, he had no faith that much of our culture, including, he might say, the Church, either could or should be revivified. Let them lie down and die decently, he said, he said. And moreover he was afraid he had to make it clear that he had certainly no faith in this sort of play, which he went on to categorise as nostalgia for something that never was, a charming, airy dream of a time which was in fact nasty, brutish, and bloody. A despotic police state, controlled by spies, torturers and executioners, whom he noticed we hadn’t been shown. It was in this way that what Marcus had so accurately categorised as a “horrible argument” had been embarked upon.

  Miss Wells had shrilled nervously that the hanging, drawing and quartering of Dr Lopez had in fact been reported, if briefly: Wilkie had volunteered that the original description, very gruesome, had been cut; the martyrdom of Campion had been touched on; Lucas Simmonds had asked, with a disproportionate intensity, whether pain and suffering were qualitatively different in those harsher days, either for men to watch or men to undergo. One of those curious compulsive conversations about what man is capable of doing to man had at this point erupted: the Bishop had called to witness the slaughtered saints of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Bonhoeffer’s concentration camp: Lucas Simmonds had recounted some tales of what he had been told, when on a Destroyer in the Pacific, the Japanese did to recalcitrant p.o.w.s. Wilkie remarked that useful work had been done on the relation between where a man felt pain and where the stimulus was applied: also on the reaction which, when the whole body is filled with pain, makes a man able to detach his consciousness, stand outside his body and watch the pain take its course. Lucas was very interested in this and pressed Wilkie for more information about the psychological machinery that made such things possible. The Bishop, at this point, remarked that there were things worse than pain and the fear of pain, death and the fear of death. There were ignorance and evil. He himself had been chaplain at Bentham Gaol some years ago and had always refused to allow those of what he referred to as “his” prisoners who were hanged to go to the drop with their minds clouded or stupefied by morphine, lest they should lose the real chance, face to face with extremity, of repentance or conversion. He was, indeed, on these grounds, in favour of the retention of capital punishment.

  It was at this point that Bill Potter had begun to roar. He had called the Bishop bloody, arrogant and perverted. Marcus went to fetch Alexander. The Bishop, bland, wine-dark, and hard, continued to listen and to convey the belief that his opponents were naive and superficial, had not taken into account the true nature or real consequences of his own position.

  When Alexander, Thomas Poole and Marcus arrived, Bill was graphically describing the degrading terrors to be experienced in condemned cells. To this the Bishop replied quietly, and as far as he went, truthfully, that Bill had no first-hand experience of such matters, that he himself had been witness of, sharer of, moments of great beauty and glory in
these unlikely circumstances. Bill cried out that this was the more shame. Stephanie was in tears. Lucas was talking about our blind modern squeamishness, in support of the Bishop, who seemed to find his support distasteful. “If thine eye offend thee, cast it out,” Lucas cried. “Or a leg, or an arm, or anything else.”

  Wilkie said to Alexander, “This began with a discussion of the exaggerated charm of your portrayal of the Tudor State.” Bill turned on Alexander and said they were now on matters infinitely more important than that, and returned to demolishing the Bishop with statistics of innocent Sheriffs who had gone white and insane overnight because of duty. The Bishop said that great faith and strength were indeed requisite, and Lucas, his words falling muddily over each other, into incoherence said that the first man was of the earth, earthy, and needed to be wholly, however painfully, done away with, so that the immortal corn should spring, which caused the Bishop to click his tongue loudly and audibly and caused Bill to begin to roar about the repugnant, savage and bloodthirsty nature of Christianity, which worshipped a smashed body and a crushed self. He then turned on Daniel and said he must be mad to expect him to condone his daughter’s marriage into this thwart, disnatured sect. Lucas said that a crushed body liberated a glorious soul, the Bishop said firmly that he was not sure that some of Mr Simmonds’s – was it – Mr Simmonds’s responses were quite healthy, that he was not advocating an obsession with pain or dissolution by any means, only a healthy acceptance of it, at which point Lucas Simmonds, drooping, wet with perspiration, became poppy-crimson with agitation, and Daniel spoke. He spoke first to Bill, saying that he expected nothing of him, except trouble, and second to the Bishop to say briefly and flatly that he believed that what he, the Bishop, had just been arguing was wicked, cruel and unjustifiable.

  It was immediately clear that Daniel was angrier than anyone else: that he could barely speak for wrath. He added that no one had given him a good reason yet for coldly killing anyone, let alone involving anyone else in the killing, and that he was now taking his wife home. Bill was somehow silenced by this hefty and unexpected, indeed probably unwelcome support. Daniel put his arm round his wife and led her away without looking back: Mr Ellenby told the Bishop that Daniel was a rough diamond: the Bishop said, chill, that Daniel might in courtesy have waited for a reply. Lucas Simmonds suddenly ran out of the Hall: Alexander saw the Parrys, now all three, making their inexorable way to his rowdy corner. He thought he must speak to Marcus: or to Lucas: the chap was definitely odd, no question, he looked all swollen and shrunken out of shape, somehow, and was surrounded by some almost tangible electric fug of anxiety, or terror. He said, “I’m sure what I said was right. You can’t afford to stay involved in whatever …”