The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  When Marcus came into the church, all those already present thought he was looking for them. Frederica assumed he had come about her birthday or her marks, Alexander that he was in search of advice and assistance so far not rendered, Stephanie that he was, as she was, distressed by Bill’s new démarche in one direction, perhaps by the memory of the unfortunate attempts to stimulate and foster his own diagnosed “genius”. Daniel supposed that he was in religious trouble. Lucas Simmonds, it subsequently appeared, was in no doubt that he had been called in by spiritual tones emitted by himself, moth-messages of another nature.

  He stood uncertainly in the doorway, in any case, upon seeing them all there, clearly ready to turn and flee. Frederica waved her postcard at him and belled out percentages, Stephanie stepped out to touch him, Alexander side-stepped behind the lectern, Lucas Simmonds opened his eyes, rose neatly from his knees and stepped out to the altar-rail from where he turned and addressed the boy in a brusque, no-nonsense tone.

  “It’s taken you long enough to get the message. I knew we were safe here. I did tell you prayer and preparation would be required. I was aware there was a lot of interference and static you might say – we won’t give it its name, not even here – but I didn’t think they could join anything put out from here, or anyway, I took the risk, I took the risk. My God, if I may say so, I’m glad to see you. There’ve been batteries, I can tell you, infernal batteries. Now you’ve come, we shall stand.”

  He took cognizance of the others.

  “Good morning, Vicar. Wedderburn. It seems too much to hope you are all come prepared to fight on your knees. However, good morning. Marcus!”

  Marcus stood. He opened his mouth but no sound came. He tried to put out a hand, and could not, but did not imagine any demon or electrical mischievous elemental was holding it down. He snuffed the hot roadside smell of the cow-parsleys on the chilly stone. He stood. Daniel took a few steps towards him, and he staggered a little, and put out a hand, which Daniel clasped.

  “Tell me what you want to do,” said Daniel, carefully.

  “I – don’t – know.”

  Alexander strode up. “Do you want to go home?”

  Marcus shook his straw head.

  “Daniel’s flat?” suggested Alexander.

  Marcus nodded, his flannel knees knocking, trying to see neither Hellmouth nor the betrayed Lucas. His head was humming with messages like winged serpents coiling and uncoiling, his brain-box flashed with light, white, gold, imperial purple, his body was a thing that at any moment, just as Lucas had prophesied, might dissolve and fade, leaving not even its own wreckage behind. Daniel’s flat was full of horribly real and just possibly consoling cushions and teapots and human paraphernalia, that if they were not a crushing trap, not like stone boots in Mother Shipton’s Dropping Well, might just be plump and warm to hold on to. He gripped Daniel’s dry, strong hand. “Take me,” he said.

  Daniel was perturbed about Lucas, the cure of whose soul was at least as certainly his as that of Marcus Potter, another victim, in his practical vision, of the over-valuation of marks. Souls, souls at least so peremptory as this one, were not his natural concern, though he did his best with those he had encountered. But at present the rather evanescent Marcus had a very drowning grip on his own flesh, to which he responded, and so he went with him. Alexander, feeling responsible in some useless way, and just less nervous of Marcus than of Lucas, went with them, and Frederica dashed after Alexander.

  Stephanie picked up her trug, moved over to the alabaster flower-trough by the altar-rails, and said carefully to Lucas Simmonds,

  “I was doing the flowers for the church, for the saint’s day, St Bartholomew.” There was a reek of perspiration, and sweet hair-oil, and carbolic, and sick breath coming from the man, which the over-sensitive nostrils of pregnancy flared and picked up, so that she was for a moment nauseated. English good manners are a horrible thing, Stephanie thought. I should ask him what is terrifying him, I should offer to kneel down with him, I should say Marcus is sick. I cannot. I cannot. She wandered as calmly as she could up and down collecting a green can of fresh water, casting out some dead arum lilies and carnations put in last week by Mrs Ellenby, whose style was more conventional.

  “Sit down, why don’t you,” she said finally, vaguely, a hostess in her church. To her surprise he sat down just where he was, on the chancel steps, resting his head in his hands. She crunched chicken-wire, not looking at him. He said, in the ghost of his old cheery manner,

  “Well, when is the baby?”

  “Nobody knows,” she said, quickly. And then, “About Easter. I mean, nobody knows because we haven’t told them.”

  “I saw.”

  She did not like this idea: as though she was naked. She tried to turn it aside, lightly.

  “You are a biologist. It’s your subject.”

  “Don’t say that. I hate biology.”

  “I never liked it myself,” she said, comfortably, inanely, padding across the trough and disposing marguerites in a kind of fan from its centre. “It was the only science I could do, though. I had to have one, to be allowed to read English. I couldn’t do the abstract things, maths and those. Girls are always made to do biology.”

  “Plants,” he said. “Or stones. I don’t mind. But you have to be better than me to get away from the flesh and specialise. I’m a hack. Why did you get married?”

  “To have a private life,” she said, truthfully, seeing Daniel’s face momentarily, as it was, close. “Not that it is very private. There are so many callers.”

  “To have a private life.” He thought. “I have no private life. I have no life. I touch no one. I ask you to believe that. There are reasons.”

  “And Marcus?” she said, very carefully.

  “Marcus is gifted. Marcus – can see what – no one else sees. Marcus is – not like – other men.”

  “He would be better if he were,” she said, almost sharply.

  “You can say that if you like. It is not true.”

  He stood up, the momentary contact broken, and went back to his meditation or vigil at the pillar. She continued slowly about her work until all the receptacles, at font and pulpit, lectern and altar, were full, pallid, candid, greening. Daniel came back.

  “Are you all right? Will you go to Marcus? Frederica is worse than useless and Alexander just leans about on the furniture looking frightened.”

  She reached up and whispered in his ear what Lucas had said.

  “I’ll hang around,” said Daniel. “He might talk.”

  “I covered up your St Bartholomew with flowers.”

  “Very pretty,” said Daniel. “Very pretty. For a girl who wouldn’t have flowers at Easter.”

  “I didn’t say he rose from the dead. I said I covered him up, him and his knife and his skin.”

  Daniel looked at St Bartholomew, Michelangelo’s version, blued and blurred by a poor intermediary printer, patted his own belly, and said, “Well, if he rose not, he’s bloody descending in wrath.” He thought for a flicker of time about flaying, about how his own fat was held together by a thin tight skin, about how a man would spill out, about how muscular the cross Saint was, and then touched Stephanie’s taut skin and said, “Go on, get out of here, go and see to Marcus.” A body inside a body, his son.

  He knelt down, for some time, waiting for Simmonds to get up, wondering if he should speak to him directly. When Simmonds rose, Daniel rose too, in a hurry, and for a moment they looked at each other across the church. Then Simmonds held up the flat of his hand at Daniel, warning him off, gave a jerky nod, in the direction of the altar, and left. Daniel went after him, as far as the churchyard, only to hear the roar of the little sports car on the quiet road outside. He came out, as Simmonds vanished in white dust.

  39. Party in the Pantheon

  Bill’s party for Frederica, hastily conceived and hastily carried out, might have been expected to provide awkwardnesses. It was held in the Pantheon, not in the enclosed garden,
since the sky was lowering. Yorkshire closeness had reasserted itself sufficiently for the party to have become a rather odd combination of tea-party and alcoholic celebration: tea and ham sandwiches and fairy cakes and strawberries were to be followed by one glass of champagne per guest, more or less, in which Frederica’s health was to be drunk. The guests were mostly Bill’s friends and colleagues, extra-mural lecturers, class secretaries, W.E.A. group organisers, amateur dramatic ladies and those school colleagues who were personae gratae. These included Mr and Mrs Thone, ex officio, Alexander and for some reason Geoffrey Parry who had after all, Bill decided, showed guts, even if wrong-headed guts, about Thomas Mann. Frederica said that was a repulsive mixed metaphor, and Bill, gleefully acknowledging this, said that wrong-headed guts were repulsive, but must, as he had said, be respected. Why the Parrys had eagerly accepted the invitation was a different problem, Frederica thought, and one which recurrently bothered her. Her initial euphoria over the exam results was wearing off, and she was beginning to realise that she was a very slow and clumsy student of human behaviour. It took her a long time to see what Daniel had seen immediately, that her party was not only her party, but Bill’s revenge on Stephanie for forcing him to pay for champagne to celebrate her abandoning of her First Class career and her marriage to a stout curate. And then when Bill called Frederica in and asked her to say which of her “friends” she wished to invite to the party she began to see the awkwardnesses of broadcasting those 90 and 95%s, as well as the unwisdom of bringing together her daily world of school and home with the dream world of Astraea, in which it had seemed easy to be sweetly scornful of the public hum about her behaviour with, and with regard to, Alexander. She wished no such hum to penetrate Masters’ Row. She began, indeed, to ask herself what she did wish. She said she wished Wilkie to be invited. Thomas Poole was coming in any case, as a respected friend of Bill’s, so she suggested Anthea Warburton, whom she disliked, but felt would, for reasons of her own, behave discreetly about Alexander. She suggested Lodge, who was quiet, and Miss Wells, who was ignorant, and would be nice to Stephanie, about whom Frederica was feeling very stupid and very guilty. Her only other ally was Crowe, and she was not sure how much of an ally Crowe still was, after the episode in the Sun Bed, which had never been mentioned. Also, Bill would not stomach Crowe. He himself had a huge admiration for Marina Yeo, to whom a card was accordingly despatched. Miss Yeo replied graciously, excusing herself on grounds of age, headache, the length of the run and the need to restore her energies for the exigencies of the Last Night. Wilkie said to Frederica that she knew what that meant, didn’t she, but he promised, himself, not to be more than a little late for her bun-fight. From old queen to young virgin, back round the circle of the years, he said, I shall come. Have you done anything about that, yet? About what? said Frederica, crossly. About the virginity, silly girl, said Wilkie, about that. Frederica said no, she hadn’t, and was getting into a dreadful state about it, because of the lie she had told, and because she was surprised to find she was scared, and because Alexander was somehow so standoffish, even when he was being most loving, and so nervy, the beautiful thing, that one couldn’t talk to him about it as one could to Wilkie himself, and so she had got herself further and further into a bog of circumstantial lying and God knew where it would come out, or how, except that it must, because she could not endure to go on, and burn, as she was. No indeed, said Wilkie, thoughtfully, no indeed.

  The party was one of those parties, unlike Crowe’s Saturnalia, which did not take off. At the beginning, it looked as though it might. There were enough people talking firmly to each other about teaching, and the success or failure of different ways of teaching poems or people, for a certain intelligent courtesy to play for a little, in the light of which Miss Wells’s ruffled fluttering could be smoothed into smiling by some clever remarks of Wilkie’s about Herbert, in the light of which Alexander could appear gracefully pedagogic faced with Bill’s literary housewives from Arkengarthdale, in the light of which Frederica’s success could be made smoothly to seem a civilised achievement by Thomas Poole, who took her aside and talked to her about the language of the Four Quartets. He was interested, he said, in whether the thought in the poem, the element of doctrine, weakened or dried it out, and Frederica, turning the needle of her attention to the nature of place and time in dry verse in a dry culture, forgot her vision of his rounded nakedness, on dark green, spoke as she had spoken to Alexander about Racine’s rhythms, liked him, and was grateful to him. And Poole, who was in agony, was later to remember this conversation, as was Frederica, as something disproportionately sane and important in an insane day.

  There were, however, dark and troubled spots on the academic light. One of these was Marcus, got up in his one tidy suit, sitting stiffly on the edge of the cloister wall and staring vacantly over the lawn. Daniel and Stephanie had got nothing out of him except an assurance that whatever was up, was all over, and that he preferred not to talk. Alexander had told his version of Marcus’s “problem” to Daniel, which had greatly relieved Alexander’s impotent sense of responsibility. Daniel had thought about it, and about what Lucas had said to Stephanie, and had kept quiet. He wished more and more that he was what he thought of as a “religious”, by which he meant perhaps a visionary, or a mystical, man. His existing strength would only be of use in this situation when it was completely out of hand, as far as he could see. He kept half an eye on the boy, and half on his wife.

  Winifred, to whom nobody had said anything, stood as near as she dared to Marcus, watching him watch space. He had gone away somewhere, worse and further than he had always been gone. If she tried to go after him, or so she thought, he might vanish entirely. If he did not, a lifetime’s or at least a marriagetime’s experience had taught her that if she showed agitation Bill would come and club one or both of them with too much love or hate, would yank or drive them into some girning, daemonic clinch, to avoid which stillness and more stillness was the only resort.

  Mrs Thone stood and watched Winifred chilly. Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame. Winifred, to Mrs Thone, was simply a woman who had a son, and could, or would, do nothing for that son’s trouble. Mrs Thone’s son had died on a summer day, and in the winter Mrs Thone felt kinder to mothers of living sons who were less than wise and perfect. Today she watched bleak patches of sunlight and cloud-shadow on the school-lawn, rested a hand lightly on Pallas Athene’s unnecessarily ample hips, and sipped tea, unbending.

  Alexander drifted long-legged and lovely over to the group of Frederica and Thomas Poole, and attempted to congratulate her, in what he hoped was his old friend-of-the-family voice, on the amazing marks. She grinned, horribly, as she had been used to do, and for a moment he wondered what had gripped him, that he should have come to desire so precisely to slide his hand up those hot brown legs and his mouth down that thin throat, and as his imagination made the desire precise he knew that no matter what had gripped him, he was still gripped.

  “We were talking quietly about Eliot,” said Poole, sadly.

  “Please go on,” said Alexander, trying to lean away from Frederica onto the nearest stone monstrosity, who was the blind, straightforward, incorruptible highest Arthur. Anthea Warburton, in a great many layers of stiff white net petticoat under rosebudded poplin, came and touched Poole’s elbow.

  “Can you do something,” she said, in her featureless well-bred little voice. “I feel so awfully green.”

  “Too much school tea,” said Frederica, heartily, and took notice, too late as always, of the stiff, alarmed complicity of the two men. Green? Green. School slang. An old word. Oh, God. I have put my foot in it. She was annoyed mostly at the childishness of her remark about the tea, and then bothered by why Alexander should be so scared. At this point, as though by accident, Elinor Poole appeared, closely followed by Jennifer Parry, who was balan
cing her small son on her hip, and was followed in turn by her husband. Bill had moved towards the tables, clearly preparing to speak, and champagne corks popped.

  “Well –” said Jenny, loudly, shrilly and terribly to Frederica. “When’s the happy event?” Frederica looked at Anthea, looked away, smoothed her own skirt defensively down over her own flat front.

  “What happy event?” she countered, drawing her brows together.

  “The new arrival. In your family. I take it we’re celebrating that, as well as your successes, aren’t we? Though if I were Stephanie, I don’t know, entre nous, that I’d have embarked on motherhood with such gay expedition. Too late to tell her, my dear, and I shall of course put a smiling face on it, but let me tell you, Frederica, for what it’s worth, don’t. Don’t give it up, don’t stop, don’t turn into a cow and a mopper-upper, don’t suppose that the death of the mind can be avoided by a little rushed reading between two lots of nappies and dishes, because it can’t. Adultery you may find time for, but life, no, and thought, no, and don’t let them –” she frowned round at Poole, Anthea, Elinor, Alexander and sad Winifred who had joined them – “don’t let them tell you any different.” She tugged at the fat little legs of her son, which were wound round her waist. “Get off, you little old man of the sea. Go to Daddy. You’re a little old man of the sea, and the fact that you’re a lovable dumpling makes it worse, not better. Are you listening to me, Frederica Potter? The real glory of this conversation – or monologue it’s been so far, but I’ll shut up, don’t worry – is that you won’t listen to me, because it’s me telling you and you won’t trust my motives, and you’ll be right. But I’m right too, and you’ll find that out, one way or another. End of speech. Oh Geoffrey, do take this damp creature. I shall move off and offer my best wishes to Mrs Orton. I’d like a word with you, Alexander, before the break-up of this happy occasion, if that’s O.K. by you.”