The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “Someone has got to help him,” said Marcus.

  Alexander considered the Bishop, who now looked distinctly irate, and Bill, who was now sulking. He thought of drawing Marcus after Lucas, which would have avoided Bishop, Bill, Parrys and Thomas Poole’s insoluble and terrifying mirror-problem, but was pre-empted. Floating like Gods from machines from the end of the Hall came Crowe and his three Elizabeths, Marina, Frederica, Anthea, smiling and beckoning. Crowe, still got up as Baron Verulam, brandished his long staff like Comus stilling his rabble, or his mother, Circe, dismissing the swine to their swill.

  “Alexander – this is your night, my dear – the Press is wild with delight – you must come and meet – you are positively howled for, dear boy – they die to meet you – good evening, Bishop, a triumph, I’m sure you agree, such a marvellous corporate effort – come away, Alexander, excuse me I must drag him off – help me ladies – good evening Jenny darling, you were lovely, the Yorkshire Post has promised a special mention, Bess Throckmorton by sweet Sir Walter so rudely forced – so convincing – and you of course you bad clever lordling, your name is made too – now come away, please excuse us, good night, Bill, I’m glad you managed to get here. Alexander, come away, come away.”

  Marcus went out on the terrace in search of Lucas. He found him standing close to the royal palanquin, breathing fast and smiling unnaturally. He could not think why Lucas should have come to this scene at all unless out of some need, fanatical or pathetic, to keep an eye on Marcus himself.

  “Sir. Are you all right? You looked …”

  Lucas answered testily that he was quite all right, quite all right, more than all right. They were simply caught up in the flow of very big movements of force. They had a part to play. They had to be sure what it was. They were required to set off for Fylingdales on Friday.

  “Sir, I can’t. I can’t come any more. I’m afraid.”

  Naturally he was afraid, retorted the flushed cherub, even more irritably, clattering a fist on the flimsy gilded panels of the palanquin. He couldn’t expect to displace real powers and not be afraid, that wasn’t reasonable. There was every likelihood that they would freeze on Friday, or fry, or vanish in pure energy with nothing left of them but shadows like the men of Hiroshima after the lightburst. This prospect seemed to afford him some furious pleasure. We always knew what we risked, he pointed out, sweetly reasonable. Didn’t we?

  Marcus said no, he had not known. And that now … now … he wasn’t sure they hadn’t made the whole thing up.

  “And the transmissions? The levitation at Owger’s Howe? Your photisms? Did we make those up?”

  “No. Well, no. But maybe those – were not – what you – what we – thought.”

  “We don’t know what they were. There is only one way to find out.”

  “No. I’m afraid.”

  “But you are the seer.”

  “I’m not sure. I daren’t. You’ve got to let me off.”

  “You aren’t – disgusted by me?”

  Marcus began to cry. Lucas glared stonily at his tears. He repeated his question.

  “No. I’ve told you that. I’m scared. I told you.”

  “Then I must go alone. Alone, I shall almost certainly fail. But there is no alternative.”

  Marcus begged him weakly to give up. Lucas sneered. He said, “All right. Go away. It’s too late to retreat but you can delude yourself if you choose. What you fear is everywhere, and will do what it will do where it chooses.”

  Marcus, weeping, and not entirely truthfully, cried out that it was of Lucas that he was afraid most of all, “of you, of you, of you.” At this Lucas suddenly struck hard at his face, cutting the corner of his mouth, told him to leave him alone, then, and hurtled away down the terrace. Marcus sat down by the palanquin, holding his stinging head in his hands and sobbing. People wandering past him thought he was drunk, considerately stepped round him, and left him alone.

  Two of the people who ran past Marcus late that night were Alexander and Frederica. Both were in flight; Alexander from the Parrys, who had taken their eyes off him to quarrel over who should change Thomas’s stinking nappy, Frederica from the traveller in dolls, who had raised his arm, snapped his fingers and started to shove his way towards her through the crowd. He was not invited, but almost anybody could have, and had, effected an entry. One might discuss Ed with Wilkie, but not with Alexander, to whom she had simply said she absolutely must get out. He had agreed it seemed a good idea, and so they had run, hearing behind them faint ironic cheering and public laughter. In the dark, hearing her breathing and leaping, he felt close to her. In the garden with the fountain it was different. They stood awkwardly in the circle of each other’s arms, and both distinctly felt the other to be bony and ungiving. Both were visited by a revisionary white coiling of Anthea Warburton’s fine solid buttocks and calves. He could not tumble Frederica Potter under a bush. As for Frederica, she could not initiate such tumbling. So they stood entwined, hardening already into familiar attitudes like children playing statues. She chattered at him, recalling gross compliments, stage mishaps, faux pas. He willed her into a more desirable silence, into which she presently fell. He put a finger on her cold lips.

  “Well, what shall we do?”

  No answer.

  “Perhaps we should agree to forget all this?”

  No answer.

  “No good can come of it.”

  “I want it.”

  “It can be so little.”

  “I don’t care. I want you.”

  “But what can we do?”

  She did not know. Bed, marriage, communion of souls, a perpetual continuing of this delightful crisis.

  “Just let it go on. I love you.”

  She said that with a threatening imperative that melted him. Somewhere at the back of his consciousness was the knowledge that she would deal for herself with any consequences. Her face was frowning, colourless and cold. She was the bitch-goddess in the grove, his own creation, or evocation, she was the untouchable girl, safe to want because she could not be had. He got hold of her; she twisted and tugged, rousing him to a grabbing that was not part of his usual repertory. She laughed and laughed aloud in the garden, lewd and innocent, in charge, and he knew that however he protested he was caught, pure curiosity would lead him on.

  For the three following weeks they were both so entrammelled by each other and by success that his identification of her as the bitch-goddess took on a new irony. The newspapers were floridly ecstatic, in the manner of the day. The enterprise was a cultural triumph. Alexander was the most hopeful new star in the dramaturgical firmament since Shaw. Homage was done to Lodge and Marina Yeo. Wilkie and Frederica attracted a disproportionate quantity of attention, it was felt by the rest of the cast. Frederica found her own face, specked with newsprint, glowering proudly under a floral coronet in the Yorkshire Post and Manchester Guardian. Portly ladies and anxious young men from women’s magazines and local newspapers made appointments to discuss the phenomenal success of an amateur local schoolgirl. She told them she wanted to be a great actress like Marina Yeo. She told them she was waiting for her A level results “with considerable trepidation”. She said her family was literary. She gave her views on Elizabeth’s virginity. She acted herself acting herself.

  Alexander went to Manchester and talked on the radio about the renaissance of verse drama. He was asked, for large sums of money, to write on history, verse, and Women in periodicals academic, in the know, and vulgar, and tried to do so. He was approached about a London production of Astraea – with some changes, and an all-professional cast. None of all this, for which they had waited, seemed quite real to either of them, because their powers of concentration and enjoyment were so sapped by plain desire. Bill – “disgustingly”, Frederica said with considerable satisfaction – came round. He carried in his breast pocket a sheaf of newspaper cuttings, with pictures of his thin daughter sitting on a stone, beating a fist on a stone wall, lying spreadeagled on the
ground.

  The rest of the cast were more hostile to Frederica than they had been, and used words like “insufferable” and “vain” about her, not with entire justice. She was, it was true, drunk with the whole business. She walked through hot cow parsley and laughed to herself at the memory of her face in the Blesford photographer’s window, but the pleasure was so intertwined with a narcissistic preening of the body at long last desired by Alexander that her worst social fault was a dazed absent-mindedness that those who chose took as insult. Alexander praised her to the Press and his praise was printed. “A highly intelligent performance,” Wilkie read out to her, in the gardens at Long Royston. “So sensitive to the verse, he says. You did it.”

  “I am intelligent.”

  “We all know that ad nauseam. How are you proceeding on other fronts? Are you bedded? Is there poison in your coffee?”

  The affair, or whatever it was, had become horribly public before it had defined itself. The cast, with one of those corporate twists of judgment and curiosity of which close groups are capable, had chosen to admire, in principle, Frederica’s pertinacity in “getting” her reluctant man, whilst continuing to dislike her for the inconsiderate and single-minded nature of her pursuit, as well as for hogging the publicity. (Wilkie, better organised, already known as an oddity, a polymath, a “genius” with his own file already in the BBC News Information stacks, was already juggling several agents and conducting his own skilful self-advertisement, without attracting dislike or hatred.) The cast had, however, capriciously decided to despise Alexander for capitulating to so blatant a sexual campaign. They did not show this too much: his play was great, and so was the reflected glory. But they were full of unobtrusive little attentions to Jennifer Parry: little boys wormed their way through bushes trailing Alexander and Frederica across any lawn over which they chose to walk together: Elizabethan courtiers leaned out of mullioned windows to stare and even snigger when the two attempted to sit down together on a bench.

  Alexander was too bewildered to be more than peripherally aware of all this. Frederica, somewhat stoically used to being disliked for being top in exams, managed to put up with being disliked for the newspapers in a solid enough way, although she was temperamentally unable to make any deprecating or conciliating noises. The sexual attention was harder to cope with, and she suffered from it, without being able to deploy any pleas for sympathy, or interesting confidences. She became more self-sufficient with success. She would show the lot of them. Except Alexander. Even he was exposed to reprimands for cravenness which he partly gloomily enjoyed. It was clear that this could not go on, in its nature, very long. Something must shift, happen, change things. It was not at all clear what this might be.

  38. St Bartholomew

  August 24th, which was St Bartholomew’s Day, and Frederica Potter’s birthday, was, by a nice coincidence, the day on which Frederica’s A level results came in the post. It was the Monday of the last week of the Play. Stephanie went into the church, which was St Bartholomew’s church, early that morning to do the flowers for him: flowers were another thing she had found she could gracefully, as a curate’s wife, do. She had tried to find out about St Bartholomew, but it turned out that he was a saint about whom very little was known, and that little, bloody. He was an Apostle who had travelled through Asia Minor, North West India and Greater Armenia, where he had been flayed alive and subsequently beheaded. His identity was uncertain: he was quite possibly in fact the same person as Nathanael, a native of Cana in Galilee of whom Christ had remarked, “Behold, an Israelite indeed in whom there is no guile.” His movements were also uncertain: “India”, Stephanie discovered, meant to Greeks and Latins indifferently Arabia, Ethiopia, Libya, Parthia, Persia, and the lands of the Medes. In his wanderings he resembled the Dionysos of the Bacchae, and also, she supposed, in being flayed and shredded and reconstituted. She had hoped briefly that Daniel’s church was dedicated to a more local Bartholomew, St Bartholomew of Durham, a Benedictine native of Whitby who had spent forty-two uneventful eremite years in St Cuthbert’s cell on Farne Island and had quietly died there, about 1193. But the little statue of the saint in his niche near the pulpit was identifiable only by his grasped knife, the instrument of his martyrdom. There was also, in the side-chapel, a bad blown-up reproduction of Michelangelo’s depiction of the martyr descending ferociously in the Sistine clouds of judgment, brandishing his knife above his head and trailing his dead leathery integument, on which the artist’s distorted face was depicted. Stephanie decided to embower, and partially to obscure, both these images in a cloud of wild cut flowers.

  She was now, to a close observer, visibly pregnant, and had disguised herself in very churchwomanly clothes, a pleated green linen overall or smock, suggesting cook, gardener, or secular surplice, flat sensible shoes, secateurs in the smock pocket, and a trug of branches and blossoms over one arm. She could still balance a bicycle and drove slowly and erect along country lanes, gathering white umbellifers and marguerites, green hellebore and sprays of dogroses, drooping heads of wild oats and barley grasses, foxgloves, spotted and pale. She would have liked a splash of red, scarlet or crimson, in respect to the anonymous martyr, but poppies fall before they are picked and garden peonies – just possible – were almost certainly too much for the delicate haze of green and white and gold and pale purple she was constructing.

  She had ceased some time ago to hate the church building. Alone in it, crushing wire, pouring water, twisting stems, she was happy. On this morning however, as for several previous mornings, she was not alone. Lucas Simmonds was there, in an attitude of rebarbative prayer, waiting close under a pillar and the painting of Hell Mouth. She cast a quick glance in his direction, padded suede-soft to the font, thought that he looked at death’s door, that sweet peas were the answer and could be begged from Mrs Ellenby, that something must or might at least have happened to Marcus too, that Simmonds needed help but had sought silence, which it was indecorous to break.

  So she worked silently, and Lucas prayed or agonised silently, until the door in the porch swung with a great disturbance of air and Frederica burst in, crashing along the aisle.

  “Look,” she cried, “look,” looking at nothing herself, and Stephanie rose slowly from her knees and took the postcard Frederica was waving, grubby now and fuzzed, and read a list of marks so extraordinarily excellent that it was momentarily hard to credit them.

  “Well,” said Stephanie. “Well. Are you pleased? Happy Birthday.”

  Frederica leaped about the lectern, ruffled the Queen Anne’s lace which gave off clouds of pollen.

  “Don’t, it’s delicate, I’ve spent ages on it.”

  “It’s pretty. What’s it for? Harvest Festival?”

  “No, silly. Not yet. St Bartholomew’s day.”

  “Of course, my birthday. The day of the massacre. I massacred them, I did, I did, no one can beat me.”

  “Don’t shout in church. People are trying to be quiet.”

  Frederica stared round. “Oh. Him. Steph, what does he do here? He gives me the creeps.”

  “Please have the grace to shut up. Your voice carries.”

  “Steph, I can do anything, I can do anything, better than anyone, I can do …”

  “You can not mess up my flowers,” said Stephanie, as gently as she could. You could not offer admiration or encouragement to anyone who was so wildly admiring and encouraging herself.

  “Steph, an unheard-of thing, Daddy’s giving a birthday party for me, a celebration, with champagne and strawberries, at school, in the Masters’ Garden, or cloisters if wet. A lunch-time party, Saturday, the day of the last night. He’s actually sent me out to invite you and Daniel – he won’t go to your place of course, but he sent me there. I saw Daniel, he said to come here, you were here.

  “Oh, and Dad telephoned Alexander, which is hilariously funny from some angles. But all the same, rich. My cup runs over.”

  “Mind you don’t slip,” said Stephanie, referring perhaps
to her own trug, perhaps to life. Frederica was waving her arms and giving little disconcerting jumps all over the nave. It became clear, as first Alexander, then Daniel, appeared through the porch, that Frederica had converted the church into a place of assignation and celebration. Alexander looked like a male moth, called by some chemistry of honey and musk. Daniel looked like Daniel. Frederica flashed her glorified postcard at both these newcomers. Lucas Simmonds remained on his knees by the pillar, his eyes closed. Frederica skipped, tripped over the trug, made sure Alexander caught her.

  Stephanie turned her thick back to them, and went on placing Canterbury bells amongst the sprinkling grasses. Apart from the dogroses those flowers of summer that foamed up, veiling the grim Sistine saint, smelled live but rank, greenish and corrupt, hellebore, digitalis, and the cousins of hemlock. Sweet peas were undoubtedly necessary. Daniel came and stroked her spine, his heavy hand warm where already her muscles hurt.

  Potters, he thought, were cruelly unobservant. How could they miss her pallor, her thickness, her new slow purpose? Potters chattered on about 90%, 95%, marks, marks on scraps of card, marks on scripts, marks made on or in the world. Bill Potter might evade his eldest daughter’s wedding, and make ludicrous what part of its ceremony he touched, but he would break a close northern habit of meanness to provide champagne for marks. Daniel despised them. His imagination was powerful enough when it came to a woman afraid of pain, a man, Daniel himself, who had watched other men love their sons, well or badly, and could therefore measure how he knew and did not know that he would love his own. But his imagination could not correlate blank black marks with an informed knowledge of the precise passion of Racine, with writing clearly, at least, about the terrors of Hamlet and Lear. Daniel did not desire to be a Bishop, and thus did not connect his own furiously directed energies with ambition, as he did connect the Potters’ obsession with marks.