The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “Ambulance,” said Daniel to Stephanie. “Stop shouting,” said Daniel to Frederica. It was, however, too late for this admonition. Marcus appeared, pale and shaky, on the landing. Stephanie was addressing the emergency services and explaining that she wanted an ambulance in the middle of the rugger pitch – the Far Field – at Blesford Ride school. No, it was not a sporting accident, she thought police might be needed – a dangerous man with a knife … restraint.

  “You needn’t enjoy it,” said Daniel crossly to Frederica.

  “I’m not really, it’s just my way of expressing myself, and I did come for help, that’s the main thing, isn’t it?” said Frederica, tossing her head like a maenad and glowing with drama and self-importance.

  “You could have kept your bloody voice down,” said Daniel. Frederica looked round blankly uncomprehending. Marcus crept quietly down the stairs and pulled at Daniel’s sleeve.

  “Are you going there? Shall I – come?”

  Daniel turned his mind to this problem.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I knew something terrible would happen. I am responsible for him. I must come.”

  “If you must, you must. If it makes it worse, or if I say so, you go home, you understand?”

  “He isn’t going,” said Bill.

  “It’s his life,” said Daniel. “You’ve let him live it up to just without interfering in it. Now they’re in real trouble, if he feels he’s got to see it through, I say he can.”

  “The man’s a maniac.”

  “Maybe so am I,” said Marcus, twitching very gently with pale fingers at Daniel’s coat-sleeve. “Maybe – I can calm him down. He used – to do – what I told him.”

  “You do what I tell you,” said Bill.

  “Why?” said Daniel, who was as he put it to himself, proper narked with Bill on his own account, and maybe therefore not seeing clearly about Marcus.

  “I’ve got to come. If anything – happens – I shall – be responsible all my life.”

  “Come on then,” said Daniel. At this, Stephanie too pulled at Daniel’s sleeve. “Should you?”

  “Truth is better than imagination, and Marcus is right, this is his business. Come on.”

  They all trailed away up the garden path and onto the Far Field, at this, Marcus faltering between Daniel and Stephanie, Bill and Winifred wandering after, Frederica striding, subdued by the bad taste of her own noisiness, in their wake. Lucas Simmonds was still in the pond, the singing now a little raucous, and Alexander was still squatting uselessly on guard. Daniel strode up to Lucas.

  “We’ve come to get you out.”

  Lucas circulated.

  “Why?” said Daniel, who could have done without his open-mouthed audience, whom he found inhibiting. He genuinely wanted to know why Simmonds had chosen to enter this pond, in this state of floral nakedness.

  Simmonds brandished the knife. Marcus ran forward.

  “Sir! Sir! This is all wrong. I know I should have come, I didn’t think what you thought I thought, I do believe, the photisms, the grasses, sir, we saw, there are scientific records – but this isn’t the way.”

  Lucas turned, his head lowered like a bull, and glowered. Marcus stepped forward and held out his hand.

  “Please come out.”

  Very deliberately Lucas Simmonds splashed the fine black silt of the bilge pond up in great blotches over the boy, clean shirt, grey trousers, white freckled face.

  “Go away. You aren’t going to be kind to me. Not you.”

  He beat again at the water. An ambulance could be observed humping its way over the grass at the edge of the verge.

  “Who?” said Daniel, as various ambulancemen and policemen made their way up the field, with a stretcher, a straitjacket, a scarlet blanket in the hot sun. “Who?”

  Lucas Simmonds looked desperately round the circle, so many Potters, fragile Alexander, stolid Daniel. He stepped out of the pond, which sucked at his feet, walked over to Stephanie, and buried his hot head on her breast. There he stood, grotesquely humped, since she was a small woman, grotesquely striped, black mud, red thighs, white body, crimson neck, and the blotches of flowers, and she put her arms round him, her stomach heaving and said, meaninglessly, “Never mind.”

  “I did tell you, I did tell you, I have no private life, I touch no one.”

  “Never mind.”

  “The destroyers are coming.”

  “No, no. A little peace.”

  “Don’t you believe it, lady. I’ve been there before. There is no peace in those places, only white lights and the annihilation of reasonable time and space. I think I won’t go.”

  He stood up weakly and waved his knife, so that the little posse of men came running at him from behind, tackled and felled him, took the knife, and bundled him into the ambulance. The door closed.

  “Where will they take him?” said Marcus.

  “Calverley General Hospital, I should think,” said Daniel. “It’s got a psychiatric ward.”

  “Is it all right there?”

  “Not bad. There are better, and worse. He’ll be quiet, there.”

  “He doesn’t want …”

  Back in Masters’ Row, Winifred insisted that Marcus, who was wheezing horribly, should be put back to bed. Alexander stood next to Frederica, listening to Bill inveighing about the fundamental immorality of interfering with pupils. Stephanie sat down with her eyes closed. The man’s skin had burned under her fingers, he had put his wet mouth on her breast, she would never be free of the pity, she wanted a bath. Bill said he would go up and have a good talk to Marcus, find out exactly what those two had been up to, make sure the boy knew that the whole foul thing was absolutely at an end. Winifred said, over her dead body – Marcus must be left alone, he must not be hectored or inquired of, he must have peace and privacy. Winifred was right, but it was because she unexpectedly won her point that it was not discovered until late afternoon that Marcus had climbed out of his bedroom window, asthma and all, and had vanished.

  It took Bill and Winifred two days and a half to find their son, although it should have been simple. Bill began by asserting wildly that the boy was “all right” and “had only gone for a walk”. Winifred was convinced that Marcus was, probably intentionally, dead. When Bill belatedly agreed to call in the police time was lost looking on waste ground and in rivers: Alexander drove uselessly up and down side-roads, and Wilkie was roped in by Frederica and roared up and down on his motorcycle peering into ditches and thickets. Daniel telephoned the Calverley General Hospital, who said that Marcus Potter was not there, and that neither was Lucas Simmonds, who had been examined, transferred under sedation, and admitted to Cedar Mount, a large asylum some twenty-five miles out of Calverley in the middle of the countryside, set in its own walled grounds. Daniel then telephoned Cedar Mount, which informed him that Lucas Simmonds was still under sedation and that nothing had been seen or heard of Marcus Potter.

  Frederica went with Alexander. She felt odd: her attention flew off in all directions: sometimes she saw in her mind’s eye the man’s red nakedness and sometimes her brother’s nonentity of a face, but could not connect the two. Sometimes a kind of warm fatigue slid over her, and with it desire, and she would touch Alexander’s legs beside her. Sometimes, when she did this, he trembled with desire, and sometimes with irritation; he too could not focus his attention either on the extraneous disaster or on the girl, now. He had several pieces of paper in various pockets from the school secretary saying that Mrs Parry, or sometimes that Dr Parry, had phoned, but he had managed to avoid actually having to answer any of these calls. He also had two thick letters from Jenny, which he had not opened. Like Frederica, mutatis mutandis, his mind’s eye was unpleasantly drawn back to Lucas Simmonds’s exposed and scarlet parts.

  As for Marcus, he walked. Daniel had been right in his instincts: only his calls had been mistimed and the hospital switchboard people ill-informed and inefficient. First Marcus had walked to Calverley, along sec
ondary roads, lightheaded with movement and breathing more easily as he went on. He was convinced that he had himself, partly inadvertently, severed some thread that held Lucas to reality, and that with that thread, his own tenuous connection, through Lucas, to daily life, had gone. He should have gone with him to the stones and been killed, he kept thinking, though why that would have been better he was not quite sure. Anyway, he had done wrong – to do right was to stick to Lucas. He plodded along grass verges and pollen flew up and swelled his eyelids and the mucous membranes in his throat. No messages came through, but he had a horrible sense that the light was waiting to flow at him, and was inimical, if he let down some curious defences of inanity and ordinariness he had built up. As he was afraid of the light, so he had also become afraid of the house in Masters’ Row, which he envisaged as a square black system of boxes inside which you wandered forever, in intolerable heat, ending at blank walls and turning.

  When he got to Calverley, he was cunning. He found the hospital by finding a street plan outside the Minster, and he walked there, circuitously, round a ring road which was easy to follow but horribly long, noisy and dusty. By the time he got there he felt that he looked odd, which was dangerous, and indeed that he was odd, from emotion, hunger, hay fever, asthma and fatigue. He had no wish or capacity to eat, but hadn’t eaten already for two days.

  He sat on a park bench and let himself weep a little, soundlessly: this was part of the cunning, as the weeping relaxed him, and thus made it possible for him to do what he must, and produce a nice normal voice in which to request to visit Lucas Simmonds. He flapped his hands at his dusty flannels and polished his shoes with his handkerchief, with which he then tried, with indifferent success, to remove the film of dust from his glasses. He then got up and staggered about a bit until he considered he could walk briskly into the hospital, adjusted his smeared glasses on his smeared face, leant in the right direction, and set off.

  He hated and feared hospitals. The smell, the echo, the bustles and languors. He plunged between swing doors into this one and addressed a porter in a squeak that settled, miraculously, into the right, polite, neutral noise.

  He had to keep this up for half an hour as he was transferred from glass cage to glass cage, from porter to nurse to nurse to male nurse who knew, who told him, that Lucas Simmonds had been sent away to a place in the country. Which place? The male nurse was kind, wrote down directions on a piece of paper, drew a little road map, the scale of which was, perhaps fortunately, at that point meaningless to Marcus. Marcus nodded stiffly with gratitude, afraid that if he spoke any more some squeak or tremor might betray him.

  Next, taking two days over it, expending some more cunning on sleeping in a hayfield to conserve what he ludicrously thought of as his “strength”, he walked cross-country to Cedar Mount Asylum for the Insane. He did not remember much of this walk except that dust and sweat and tears caked on him like a death-mask, and that he had drunk a rather nasty puddle, which made him feel sick, just before reaching a quite passable cow-trough. He almost certainly – no one ever measured or knew – covered more miles, many more miles, than were necessary, circling the place several times before hitting its high wall, round which he staggered and trotted until he came to a gate, and a path, through which he squeezed and down which he went. Cedar Mount was, like Blesford Ride, only much bigger, Victorian Gothic, and like Blesford Ride, in fact, endowed by Crowe’s munificent liberal ancestor to be run humanely, like the Retreat in York.

  Now too tired for cunning Marcus mounted steps, clutched at a white-overalled woman and said he had come to visit his friend, Mr Lucas Simmonds, and was afraid he was a little late. He put the last bit in to make his pink and panting appearance more plausible. He squeaked and groaned, and let the asthma sound like an organ to cover his lack of control of his voice. He had in fact grabbed the best person possible, a kindly, possessive and officious tea-lady, who said, doubtfully, that she thought Mr Simmonds wasn’t having visitors. “Nonsense!” said Marcus, in an amazing imitation of his father’s bark. “Well,” said the tea-lady, she would see, and she plodded away down a hall, closely followed by Marcus, and along a ward, in which old men in nightgowns, or in cheery shirts and flannels, sat by lockers or near a long window. At the end of this ward, the tea-lady veered away in search of a sister and Marcus found Simmonds lying in an iron bed, staring at the ceiling, his cherubic face vacant and flushed.

  “Sir,” said Marcus. “Sir. I came to see you.”

  Simmonds rolled his head over, and stared.

  “I’m sorry I look so awful I expect. I walked.”

  “Where we are is uncertain.”

  “No it isn’t, it’s called Cedar Mount, it’s in a quiet place, I know where it is, I walked it.”

  Simmonds stared. Marcus thought: he will spit at me, he will just shut his eyes, he will be sick or something. Simmonds stared. Then he said, forming the words very carefully,

  “Sit down.”

  Marcus sat down. He pulled out Simmonds’s limp hand from under the sheet and held it. It shook. He said,

  “You see, I came. It was all real. It just went wrong. You were afraid it might. You must tell me, but not now, not yet, when you can. What happened.”

  “Oh. Nothing happened. Only – something – shameful.”

  “It doesn’t matter, sir. You’ve got to get better.”

  “They’ll – take bits of me away. Not the right bits. Bits of brain. They’ll … they damage my memory. Then – you – lose your job. Probably that – anyway. Don’t let them. Don’t – go away – Marcus. Thank you – very much – for coming.”

  Marcus felt that only his dusty death-mask was preventing his face from creasing into tears. He said,

  “I won’t go. I promise I won’t go.”

  Simmonds said,

  “Let me – whisper.”

  Marcus dropped his clay-face nearer the struggling mouth.

  “I’m scared – but it doesn’t – really matter – about me. You’re – the real thing. The miracle. Don’t – let them wire you. Don’t. Don’t let anyone – get your brain. God – wants – you.”

  “Or something.”

  “God or something.” Simmonds gave a leaden smile. “Or me. You won’t go.”

  “No. I won’t go.”

  He didn’t go, for some time, though he and Lucas fought a complex battle against ultimately insuperable odds. Both wept, both at one point screamed, Marcus tried clutching the bed when touched. Simmonds was dealt with by a needle, so that Marcus passed the last part of the vigil, after the threshing of Simmonds’s body had been succeeded by torpor, watching a snoring lump. As long as no one knew who he was, incredibly, they let him sit there, occasionally coming to interrogate him as to his identity, or how he had come. He answered with polite, dusty, ghostly smiles. Daniel’s third, more desperate telephone enquiry at length gave the hospital authorities some idea of what they had to deal with, and Marcus finally lifted a tired head from a glass of water – he had still refused all food – to see his parents proceeding down the ward towards him. Winifred averted her eyes from the figure in the bed. Bill said,

  “Now, it’s all right, now you can come home, and all this nonsense will be over, as though it hadn’t happened.”

  Marcus began to scream. He was amazed he could make so much noise, and then amazed that he couldn’t stop, and then amazed at the case the sound built round him. His father’s face spoke earnestly and no voice was heard. An old man told Marcus – Marcus thought he was telling Bill, and giggled in his screaming – to shurrup. A doctor was fetched. A strong nurse was fetched. Marcus screamed and wept and was needled. Bill and Winifred talked to the doctors, and it was agreed that they and Marcus should stay there, overnight, they to watch with him, so he would feel safe when he regained consciousness. Then they could all talk over what to do. Winifred telephoned Frederica, and told her that Marcus was found, but ill, was in hospital and they with him, that they would not come home that night. Frederica
would not mind being alone, would she? She would be sure and lock the doors, she would let Daniel know, who had found Marcus, she would be all right on her own.

  Frederica said she would be quite all right.

  42. The Virgin in the Garden

  Frederica called off the search. It was easy to find Alexander, which she had still time to be amazed by, since years had passed when she had loved him and seen him only with a leap of the heart and inadvertently, every two or three weeks, or at even longer intervals. Now, like a lover, he never left her without instructions as to where he could be found, or where a message could be left. This was terrible power, his anxiety that she should be certain of him conferred on her a terrible power.

  Wilkie was harder to find, now the play was over: during its run he had had digs in Calverley but had as often as not slept at Long Royston, and the Calverley digs, where Frederica had never been, had only a phone-box in the hall, which mostly rang echoing and interminable, but was occasionally answered by complete strangers, who did not know who Wilkie was, or had seen him, but maybe two or three weeks ago, not since. So she left messages for Alexander to call at likely places, and waited for Wilkie to turn up, which he did, roaring goggled and leather-coated up Masters’ Row, like Cocteau’s messengers of death from Orphée. Frederica had not really expected that she and Alexander would find Marcus at all: she realised, as Wilkie’s head emerged from its cavernous shell, that she had feared that Wilkie would find him, horribly limp and mangled.

  “It’s O.K. He’s found. He’d gone to the looney bin where that man has been put. Two looney bins. He walked. They say he’s ill himself, they don’t know how ill, they don’t say if he’s mad, too, or what.”

  “I see. Oh well, I’ll get back to my plans for departure. You aren’t coming?”

  “How can I? The parents have stayed with him, with Marcus, he’s under observation, I’ve got the house to myself. I’m in charge.”