The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “Well, there’s not really anything for you to be in charge of. A white lie about staying with a friend would do it. Do you good, a bit of sea air.”

  “Don’t be silly. I can’t. Come in and have a cup of coffee.”

  “No, thank you. I’ve got things to do.” He began to resume gauntlets and helmet. “I was only helping in case of distress. I’ll be in touch. Before long, before I go. Look after yourself.”

  He flung a leg over the saddle, revved several times very loudly, and roared off up the road, an unlikely black knight. Frederica went back into the house and walked about from room to room. She had never been alone there; the small silence and emptiness frightened her a little – but things had also begun to take on a rather pleasing combination of unreality and disposability. She put a vase she’d never liked in a kitchen cupboard, and was encouraged by this to wander back into the sitting room and dispose of the family photographs on the top of the bureau. Her own childish self and Stephanie’s she stuck in a desk drawer, with a certain glee, but she lingered over baby Marcus, feeling confused by knowledge she hadn’t known she had: how much Winifred loved that baby; how much she herself had hated it; how she had protected herself and Marcus from this hatred by what now struck her as an extraordinary deliberate ignorance of his nature and ways. She had simply treated him as a social element of injustice, to be indignant about. She pushed him away in a drawer too, and then added all Bill’s spare pipes, pipe cleaners and ashtrays to this collection. She wished Wilkie would have come in to coffee. Never in her life had she had a place into which she could ask anybody or anything, and he had not noticed this momentous occasion, he had just said, no, and driven off.

  She was about to wander rashly out into the back garden and cut roses, which Winifred did not do, when Alexander’s silver car drew up smoothly outside the front door. He leaped up the front path, a hart in flight, his face averted from the direction of the Parrys’ front gate, wanting not even to know if there was a twitch of a curtain or a chink of light round a door. Frederica opened the front door rather grandly.

  “I’ve got a whole house to myself.”

  “Well, let me get inside it, don’t stand on the step, if you don’t mind. How is he? How is Marcus?”

  “Oh, he’s O.K. They’ve found him. Well, no, he isn’t very good, but they have found him. He had gone off to that mental place. Daniel was right, it was just nobody knew who he was. Now he’s in bed there himself, quite ill, Mummy says, she doesn’t say how ill, or what sort of ill. Anyway, they’ve gone there to be with him, and I’ve got a house to myself.”

  She led Alexander into the sitting room of this house, and said,

  “Have a cup of coffee.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Alexander, politely.

  She clattered about, very busily and not very competently, with pans. Alexander followed her, and leaned on the dresser, watching her. Both of them were inhibited by the contradictory facts of the house: it was a closed, secretish place, and they were alone together in it. It was Bill Potter’s house, in which Frederica was a berated child and Alexander a junior colleague, in which rage, and domesticity, the tedious repetitive patterns of cleanliness, eating and sleeping, hung heavy in the air. They took their coffee back into the sitting room, sat down in separate chairs, and began a rather polite conversation about Marcus.

  “I feel very bad,” said Alexander. “He came and told me, Marcus, that that man was going mad, and I didn’t take him seriously.”

  For some reason – which was nothing to do with what Marcus might have felt – this information made Frederica very angry.

  “Why should he do that? Why should he bother you? They are lunatics. What did you do?”

  “Well – I thought – it was all sex. I advised the boy to keep clear.”

  “Well, that was all right, that was sensible.”

  “It obviously wasn’t sensible. I was confused. Because of you.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Well, I felt I had no room to talk. Seduction of minors. Your father. All that.”

  “That isn’t a very nice thing to say to me.”

  “You can’t take that line. You aren’t very nice.”

  “Not very nice?”

  “Well, are you? If you were, we wouldn’t be sitting here. We’d be worrying about Marcus.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good if we did. It probably never would have, it certainly won’t now.”

  “Tell me how he is.”

  “I told you. I don’t know.”

  They drank coffee, silently, on that, thinking of the unthinkable Marcus and the even more unthinkable Lucas, whom they had, nevertheless, conjointly, seen.

  The telephone rang. It was Winifred, who said that Marcus was worse, that he wouldn’t or couldn’t eat, was mostly unconscious, couldn’t be moved. She was staying with him.

  “And Daddy?”

  “He says he must stay, too.”

  There was no rapport between Winifred and Frederica. No sympathy was offered to, or sought by, Winifred. Frederica said, “It feels a bit funny, being here on my own with nothing to do.”

  There was a dazed silence at the other end of the phone.

  “I feel awful, there was the play, and now there’s just all this disgusting mess about Marcus, and nothing, Are you still there?”

  “Yes, Frederica.”

  “I might go away for a bit, with a schoolfriend.”

  “Which one?”

  “Oh, Anthea. Anthea Warburton. You know, the nice girl who was in the pageant bit of the play.”

  “Yes. Well. I’m sorry, I can’t think, I’m so worried about Marcus. Do go away.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “No, no. I can’t see what you’re making such a fuss about.”

  “I thought you might need me, in some way.”

  “No,” said Winifred, who felt that she might just, possibly, conserve enough calm and strength to deal with Bill and Marcus if someone would simply remove Frederica for several days.

  “Well, I’m sorry I’m not needed. I’ll take myself off. Or perhaps I won’t. I’ve told Alexander and Wilkie to stop looking for him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Has he said anything?”

  He had begged to see Lucas, he had told his parents to go away, he had screamed and screamed that he would not go home.

  “Nothing really,” said Winifred. “He’s ill.”

  “Oh well. How awful. So you aren’t coming home?”

  “No.”

  “You do sound rotten. Don’t worry about me. If I can’t cope, I’ll just take myself off. I’ll be sure to keep in touch.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It might come out all right,” said Frederica with a touch of doubt. She was speaking to the black air. Her mother had, out of pure fatigue, put down the receiver.

  “How is he?” said Alexander.

  “Worse,” said Frederica. “They aren’t coming home.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “She won’t say. She won’t say anything. She doesn’t trust me. She only cares about him.”

  “You can’t blame her.”

  “Can’t I? I do. I do. I do.”

  “I think I’ll go, now.”

  “No, don’t. Don’t. I’m sorry. I only grate on people’s nerves because I don’t know what to do, I don’t fit in anywhere, I’m not seen, for all I flaunt myself so. I agree, that doesn’t matter, beside what Marcus is going through, whatever that is, but it does to me, I’ve got to be, I can’t annihilate myself.”

  “Stop whirling about. I’ll go now. I can’t sit in your mother’s house, like this, and feel as I do, with all this going on.”

  “No, don’t. Don’t go. Stay with me. I’m scared in this house, by myself.”

  “What can I do here? I feel I’ve betrayed their trust once, and now I’m starting again. I feel terrible.”

  Frederica did not want to know that. There was something final
ly disastrous in confessions of doubt, or inadequacy, or guilt, from Alexander at that time in that place. It increased her dangerous sense of power, over him, over things, intolerably. She became glittering and irresponsible, in answer to this.

  “It’s only a place. It’s only bricks and mortar and chairs and things – not your chairs, or mine, just chairs that are here, as far as we’re concerned. You can touch me up in the garden at the House, or on the Mound, or here, it doesn’t matter, the place doesn’t matter, that’s just – a matter of taste. Aesthetics. Love isn’t a matter of aesthetics. This is just a place.”

  Alexander, whose nature was profoundly aesthetic, chose to respond to this by saying that he was sorry, he saw she was really upset, he shouldn’t have fussed her further. Frederica said that he mustn’t go, that odd though it might seem, she was afraid of being alone in the house, she had bad thoughts. Perhaps Alexander would stay to lunch.

  He stayed to lunch. They had spam, and tinned carrots, and old bread, and some vinegary beetroot out of a jar, and tea. Frederica observed that this was a very nasty meal, and Alexander agreed. Both, after the debauchery of Crowe’s hospitality, were beginning to feel badly in need of a drink, which wasn’t to be had, without going out which, under Jennifer’s eye, they didn’t want to do. After lunch they went back to the sitting room, and Alexander took hold of Frederica on the sofa. This was not a success. All their limbs were at awkward angles, and Frederica was rigid with terror. This drove her, glittering again, to say that since they had a whole house, it would be better if Alexander came upstairs.

  “No,” said Alexander. “Not here.”

  “It’s only a house, it’s my house, it’s my room, I want you to.”

  They went upstairs. Alexander remembered his brief trip to Stephanie’s room, on the wedding day, in search of small gold pins. He then remembered his trip round Jennifer Parry’s considerably brighter and more “contemporary” version of this form of house. Why were women, even Frederica, apparently compelled to act like estate agents and proudly display the cramped comforts of brick boxes? Frederica had a glorious apprehension of which he was quite unaware, that this house would never seem to her again so dumpy and solid and indisputable. She had imagined Alexander on these stairs, entering this bedroom. She was converting the blocks of house into her own imagination. She flung open the door of her little bedroom and said, as she had never expected to, “Come in.”

  He was moved by its poverty: the few things, the lino, the faded prints, the piles of books, for which there was not enough shelf space. There was no dressing-table, only a square mirror over an old oak chest of drawers. In one corner of the mirror was stuck a rather blurred newspaper photograph of himself: in another was a large glossy proof of a press photograph of Frederica in the Elizabeth costume. This moved him too, though differently. Frederica, catching him looking at it, said, “I see Crowe was quite right, it was type-casting. School makes me play men, and Crowe picks me up for a chance facial resemblance. How humiliating.”

  “It wasn’t only that. You can’t carry off a part like that only on type-casting.”

  “I will not bleed,” she said, ruminatively, and became nervous, there in broad daylight, of what might happen. Alexander, for reasons of his own, also became nervous. He sat down gingerly on the end of her bed, motioned to her to sit beside him, and said, “I keep thinking your father will come hurling in. I feel very unsafe. And in bad taste, which I do mind, actually.”

  “I don’t see how you can afford to. The whole affair is in terrible taste, but there it is, and here we are, and we aren’t unsafe. I think.”

  Alexander put his arms round her and pushed her down on the bed: He kissed her. His feeling of being overlooked became more pronounced, and so did her fear of his discovery of her ignorance. She bobbed up again, like a Kelly doll.

  “This is all wrong,” she said.

  “Yes. I told you so.”

  “It seems such a waste of a lot of private space.”

  “Maybe tonight,” said Alexander, laying a heavy hand on the now, again, pleasurably inaccessible line of her crotch. She sighed.

  “I could come back much later, with a bottle of wine. When you were sure they weren’t coming back.”

  “I could make you some dinner.”

  “So you could.”

  “With candles. In the dark.”

  “Splendid.”

  “Would you like that, Alexander?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I shall walk down, quietly in the dark, across the playing fields, and in at the back and we’ll sit and have a quiet drink, and a night, a whole night –”

  “And you won’t mind that it is this house?”

  “I want you,” he said, as fiercely as he could. He thought he might not mind the house so much, in the dark. Anyone might enter any house in the dark, clandestinely, for love: things would look different.

  After this was decided they lay together and struggled with fruitless passion, for a little time, fully clothed, and then Alexander got up and went away.

  He drove back ruminatively to the school. This time he looked at Jennifer’s house, but it was still and eyeless on the roadside. And it did not, he reflected, overlook the playing field, since it was too near the end of Masters’ Row. His pockets were crammed with unanswered letters. He must, he thought, remember to empty them before tonight’s engagement. Besides Jenny’s thick, still unopened envelopes he had answers to most of the wild batch of application forms he had sent off. Everyone seemed to want him. He was summoned for interview in Oxford, in the Manchester BBC, in the London BBC, at the famous old public school in Dorset. He had also unsolicited letters from drama publishers, literary agents, a London producer, an American producer of doubtful standing and various school and college and town and country literary groups. He was somebody. He was mobile. He was advancing. And all that was in his head was an image of a thickset naked man in a pond and a ferocious schoolgirl in a cheap brick house, waiting for the dark. It might be more sensible not to turn up: simply to pack his bags and go. The moment he had that thought, he realised, with a wave of weakness and heat that that was out of the question: there were things to be settled with Frederica, here and now, before he could be his own man again. He would settle them, in the dark. As for Geoffrey and Jenny, he would simply write and tell them the truth, as he saw it, the whole truth, to both of them, and the truth would release him. But not quite yet.

  Frederica realised she would have to go shopping. The spam had not done, really, once, and would certainly not do again. She realised she had never cooked dinner for anyone, and didn’t really know how. She realised she had almost no money. It was before the days of Elizabeth David and her ideas of what constituted a nice dinner for two were derived from Woman’s Own and her mother’s exceedingly infrequent practical example. Grapefruit with cherries in, and a roast duck, and fresh fruit salad with cream? Hors d’oeuvre and steak with jacket potatoes and salad, followed by baked bananas with rum and cream? Ice cream? Soup with hot rolls followed by trout followed by trifle with lots of sherry in it? She did not trust herself to roast a duck, or to choose and cook a steak without producing something leathery and unchewable: there wasn’t any sherry or rum and she hadn’t got any money to get any with. She couldn’t think what went in an hors d’oeuvre, never having had one she liked. She knew soup should be home-made, not tinned, and had no idea how to make or improvise a soup. The only bits of any of these menus she could do were the grapefruits and jacket potatoes, so she decided to get those and try to get inspiration for the main course by staring at the Blesford butcher’s window. It was whilst she was doing this, gloomily, with a bag full of potatoes, grapefruit, Danish blue cheese and cream crackers, that Wilkie roared past again. Frederica went hastily into the butcher. The butcher, when asked, suggested a nice pork chop, and Frederica, who didn’t know the difference between a lamb and a pork chop, or if there was a beef chop, somewhat weakly bought two, because she vaguely remembered that mal
e characters in Dickens frequently found chops very succulent, and because indifferent chops she had had were never as nasty as the gone-wrong steaks.

  When she came out again, she had almost no money for the unsolved pudding, and Wilkie was waiting for her on the pavement.

  “Housekeeping?” he said, pleasantly.

  Frederica glowered at him. “Trying to cook dinner for someone. But I haven’t got any money.”

  “I could stand you a bottle of wine.”

  “I don’t have to get that. I’ve got pudding problems.”

  Wilkie swung his helmet, and expressed great interest in the pudding problems. Frederica deployed the fruit salad, the bananas and rum, the sherry trifle. Wilkie said he didn’t really think any of those were very nice, and he suggested a sizeable bunch of grapes and some really good chocolates, which he would lend her the cash for, if that helped. He came with her, most obligingly, selected her bunch of grapes for her, bought her the chocolates, commented adversely on her choice of cheese, insisted that she go back for a piece of real Lancashire or Wensleydale, and offered her a lift back home on the back of the bike. The shopping was strapped to the luggage rack, Frederica, her red hair blowing out, swayed breathlessly on the pillion, and they rode back to Masters’ Row. This time, uninvited, Wilkie came in. He watched with interest whilst Frederica wandered round the kitchen looking for presentable plates, and candles.

  “Who’s coming, then?”

  “Alexander. They’ve all gone off, to look after Marcus. Alexander’s coming.”

  “I see. The classic supper and wine and candles and conversation and bed for two. God, you are a loon, Frederica Potter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told you he was in flight from suburbs and teacups. And here are you, all domestic and not, if I may say so, any good at it, preparing him a bourgeois seduction. He’ll run a mile. Before or after.”

  “I want him.”

  “Do you? In a house? In this house?”

  “It’s a rather nice destructive act. Like sacrilege. He was here all morning.”

  “I see. And if it’s a destructive act, why are you flapping about chops and Danish blue? And if he was here all morning, did you get deflowered, and if you did, why did he go away at all, and why the candles and grapefruit, girl?”