The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Frederica said, “Are we going to be able to act in it? Are we local culture ourselves? I am going to be an actress.”

  “Oh,” said Alexander. “There will of course be auditions. A great many. For everyone. Including the schools. Although I did myself want to suggest that Marcus – if he were willing – should be specially considered for a part. I wanted to know what he – and you – thought.”

  “I thought he showed real talent in Hamlet,” said Bill.

  “So did I,” said Alexander. “So did I. And there is an ideal part for him.”

  “Edward VI, I bet,” said the irrepressible Frederica. “He could do that. Lucky old so and so.”

  “No,” said Marcus. “Thank you.”

  “I really think,” said Bill, “you could manage, even with your work …”

  “No.”

  “At least give us a reason.”

  “I can’t blunder about without specs.”

  “You did in Ophelia.”

  “I can’t act. I won’t, I don’t want to act. I can’t.”

  “We could discuss it later,” said Alexander, meaning, away from Bill.

  “No,” said Marcus firmly, but on a rising note.

  The door bell rang. Frederica bounded to it, and came back to announce portentously:

  “A curate has come to call. He wants to see Stephanie.”

  She made the announcement seem an absurd anachronism, a strayed episode from mocking Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell or Mrs Humphrey Ward. Curates did not call on the Potters. Nobody called, exactly. And curates, who might still call elsewhere, certainly never came there.

  “Don’t leave him standing, it’s rude,” said Winifred. “Let him in.”

  The curate came in, and stood in the doorway. He was a large man, tall, fat, hirsute, with coarse springing black hair, dense brows, and a heavy chin shaded by the stubble of an energetic beard. His black garments hung loosely from powerful shoulders; his neck was heavy and muscular above the dog-collar.

  Stephanie introduced him, nervously. Daniel Orton, Mr Ellenby’s curate, from St Bartholomew’s at Blesford. Daniel Orton took in the assembled company and asked, in a rotund voice which might just possibly have been a routine clerical attempt to set them at their ease, if he might sit down. His voice was strongly Yorkshire – a southern industrial Yorkshire, less inflected and singing than Winifred’s northern one.

  “If this is a pastoral visit,” said Bill, “I should say immediately you’re in the wrong house. No churchgoers here.”

  The curate did not react to this. He stated simply that he had come for a few moments’ speech with Stephanie, with Miss Potter. If he might. He had promised little Julie at the Vicarage that he’d drop in and see how the kittens were doing. He sat down, on the other half of Frederica’s sofa, seeming by instinct already to have located the box. He looked in.

  “They’re not doing badly,” said Stephanie. “It’s early to tell.”

  “It’s clear that child blames herself,” said Daniel Orton. “I hope you rear them.”

  “Please don’t raise her hopes – please don’t rely too much on me. They’re not only motherless, they’re premature. It’s a lunatic task, really.”

  “No, quite right, always tell th’ truth. I wanted to come here – I didn’t have time to say to you, on my own account – you did a marvellous job wi’ that child. I wanted to tell you so.”

  A curious trace of clerical unction flickered amongst the flat Yorkshire sounds. Bill said, rapid and repressive, “We’ve already heard quite a lot about the cat episode. Thank you.”

  Daniel’s big dark head turned slightly in the direction of this interjection, assessing it apparently. He turned back to Stephanie.

  “I wondered if I could interest you in a bit of my work. You were kind enough to express an interest in the way I run my work. I have to be pushy in my job or I get nowhere at all, and there’s something I’ve got a feeling you’re the right person to help with. Just an inkling. I wondered …”

  “Another time, perhaps,” said Stephanie, crimson, looking at her knees, almost inaudible.

  “Maybe I interrupted something,” said Daniel. “If so, I’m sorry.”

  Alexander looked at his watch, at the Potters, at the curate.

  “You have some very fine wall-paintings in your church, Mr Orton. I’ve seen nothing to equal them in England. The Mouth of Hell over the nave – and that very English laily worm – are particularly fine. Even faded, a real burning fiery furnace. Very lovely. Pity you’ve not got a more informative guidebook and a bit less rhapsodic. Wife of a previous vicar was the author, I believe.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve not read the Guide Book. And I’ve no judgment of what’s particularly fine. No doubt you’re right.”

  “You’ve come to the wrong place,” said Bill, “if you want anyone in this house to help with your work. As far as I’m concerned, the institution you represent purveys lies and false values and I wish to have nothing to do with it.”

  “Well, that’s clear,” said Daniel.

  “I live in a culture whose institutions and unconsidered moral responses are constructed in terms of an ideology based on a historical story for whose accuracy there is no respectable evidence, and the preachments of a life-denying bigot, St Paul. But we all put up with it. We are all Polite to the church. We never ask, if we swept it right away, what truths might we discover.” Bill glowered. He was saying what he said often, but did not often have the chance to say to clergymen.

  “I’m not asking you to come to Church. I came to ask Miss Potter to help wi’ a project I’ve got on.”

  “You ought to be asking me to come to Church, that’s the point. If you’ve got any beliefs. The thing’s not only dead, it’s flabby.”

  “I have my beliefs,” said Daniel Orton, gripping his large knees with his heavy hands.

  “Oh I know. One God, maker of heaven and earth and so on. Up to the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting. Do you really? In Heaven and Hell? What we believe matters.”

  “I believe in Heaven and Hell.”

  “Cities of gold, cherubim and seraphim, trumpets sounding, rivers of pearl, fiery pit, claws and leather wings, the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire and all that? Or what? Some clever modern version in which your own character is your own hell in perpetuity? I’m very interested in modern churchmen.”

  “More than I am, it seems,” said Daniel. “Why?”

  “Because our communal life is a lie because it is haunted, tho’ most of those haunted are unconscious of it, by the sick and rotten images you purvey. A corpse on two planks. Some exciting untrue images of fire and apple trees.”

  “Why are you attacking me?”

  “There is more truth in King Lear as far as I know than in all the gospels put together. I want people to have life and have it abundantly, Mr Orton. You’re in the way.”

  “I see,” said Daniel. “I’ve not read King Lear. It wasn’t set for Higher when I did it. I’ll repair the omission. Now I’ll go home, if you don’t mind. I’m not the debating kind of churchman, nor yet the preacher. And you are making me a bit cross.”

  “You can’t say that, Daddy,” said Stephanie suddenly. “He practises what you preach. I’ve seen what he does – in hospitals and places – where for all your talk – about experience – you don’t go. He knows King Lear, even if he hasn’t read it.”

  “I bet I know my Bible better.”

  “I bet you do,” said Stephanie. “But whether that’s a point in your favour or his, I’ll leave him to say. Please forgive us, Mr Orton.”

  “So you’ll talk to me at some more sensible time,” said Daniel to Stephanie. He, like the Potters, was obsessively single-minded.

  “I promise nothing.”

  “But you’ll talk.”

  “I admire your work very much, Mr Orton,” stiffly.

  “Right. Now I’ll go.”

 
Alexander looked at his watch again and announced that he was going too. They came out together onto the bare street and stood for a moment in a more or less companionable silence.

  “The man must be mad,” said Daniel Orton. “I hadn’t done anything.”

  “The irony is that he’s a believer and popular preacher born out of his time. In revolt against his upbringing.”

  “Ay. Well, so am I, the other way. I ought to sympathise. I can’t say I do. It’s not of much importance. I’m not much of a preacher myself. Words, words.”

  “Words are his work.”

  “Let him stick to it, then. He lacks grace.” There was no clue in his tone as to whether he meant this criticism to be theological, aesthetic, or in some quite different area. He offered Alexander a large hand and walked away, by no means gracefully, sturdy and rolling towards the town. Alexander set off in a great hurry in the other direction. Like all people over-anxious to keep an appointment without the terrors of being early, he had made himself late. He began to run.

  3. The Castle Mound

  On the outskirts of Blesford, where pre-fabs and ragged allotments pushed out into real fields, Alexander, still running, came to the Castle Mound. The Castle, which had briefly housed the defeated Richard II, was now a stone shell encircling mown humps and hillocks with the ambivalently bursting appearance of grave-mounds: iron labels indicated the sites of dried well, vanished defences, foundations of bedchambers.

  Outside this trim anonymity was a piece of wasteland, once an Officers’ Training Camp, where there was a semi-circle of battered Nissen huts on splitting tarmac; through long cracks in the surface willow-herb and groundsel poked weak, tenacious stems. There was no flagpole in the concrete slot: no cars in the designated car park: the place appeared, not recently, to have undergone a successful siege. The huts let out, through dangling doors, a strong smell of stale urine. In one, a long row of basins and urinals had been deliberately shattered and fouled. The regulars, Alexander saw, were there. A circle of grubby boys lifted their heads from the cupped glow of matches as he passed. In a doorway a gaggle of girls whispered and shrilled, leaning together, arm in arm. The largest, skinny and provocative, thirteen maybe, stared boldly. She wore a drooping flowered dress in artificial silk, and a startling red latticed snood. A cigarette stub glowed and faded in one corner of her pointed mouth. Alexander made a rushed and incompetent gesture of salutation. He imagined they knew very well why he, why anyone, went there.

  Over a wire fence he saw her, walking briskly away from him across the only field, through thistles and cowpats. She had her hands thrust deeply into the pockets of a raincoat, whose blue skirts stood out in a stiff cone above tiny ankles and feet. Her head, gallant in a red cotton square, was down. He was terribly moved; he went after her; under the trees of the little wood, over the stile, he caught up with her and kissed her.

  “My love,” said Alexander. “My love.”

  “Look,” she said in a rush, “I really can’t stay, I’ve left Thomas sleeping, I shouldn’t take such risks, I must go home …”

  “Darling,” said Alexander. “I was late. I get so afraid of being early and losing my nerve, I make myself late …”

  “Yes, well, it’s as well one of us isn’t. Isn’t afraid, I mean.”

  She took his hand, however. Both were trembling. The euphoria of the early evening returned.

  “A good day?” she enquired, dry and nervous.

  “A wonderful day. Jenny, listen, Jenny …” He told her about the play.

  She listened in silence. He heard his own voice fade. “Jenny?”

  “I’m very glad. Well, of course I’m glad.”

  She was trying to edge her hand away. Alexander was entranced by this small resistance. The trouble was, or the delight was, that he was entirely entranced by her. If she was irritated, which she frequently was, her stopped-off movements of wrath filled him with intense pleasure. If she looked furiously away he stared with intense pleasure at her ear and the muscle of her neck. His feelings were insanely simple and persistent. Once, when he had tried to explain them, she had got very angry indeed.

  Now, he saw he must do something. He tugged at her wrist: her hand was back in her pocket.

  “You aren’t pleased. I’m sorry I was late.”

  “That’s immaterial. I expected you to be late. I expect I’m selfish. If the play’s a success – which it will be – I shall see less and less of you. If it’s enough of a success you’ll go away altogether. I would, if I were you, I …”

  “Don’t be silly. I might make a bit of money. If I had a bit of money, I’d get a car.”

  “You always talk as though a car would transfigure everything.”

  “It would make a difference.”

  “Not much.”

  “We could get away –”

  “Where to? For how long? There’s no point in any of all this.”

  “Jenny – you could have a part in the, in my play.” They had had the car conversation so many times. “Then we should see each other every day. It would be what it was in the beginning.”

  “Would it?” she said, stopping, however, and leaning against him, so that he felt dizzy. “We live in a perpetual beginning anyway. We might just as well stop.”

  “We love each other. We agreed, we must take what little we can …”

  That was where it always came to.

  It was her husband, Geoffrey Parry, the German master, who had asked shyly if Alexander could find her a part in The Lady’s Not for Burning. He had hoped, he said, it might prove therapeutic for post-natal depression. Alexander had taken in Mrs Parry only vaguely, plodding across the school lawns gracelessly bulbous as tiny women, in his experience, tended to be. He had courteously heard her read, in his rooms, over a glass of sherry, a whirlwind Cleopatra, a chanting and lyrical Jennet, almost overpowering in so small a space. He had cast her as Jennet, naturally. Talent was sparse at Blesford Ride. Geoffrey had thanked him.

  In rehearsal he had come to dislike her. She knew her own part, the rehearsal schedule, and everybody else’s part, after the first two days. She suggested cuts, changes in moves, possibly useful curtain music. She prompted without being asked, and offered suggestions to other actors on how to speak their lines. She made Alexander nervous and the rest of the cast uncoordinated and insecure. One day, practising with Alexander in the music-holes, airless poky places under the stage, she corrected his grammar, queried his casting, and corrected his quotations in the same sentence. He told her, mildly, not to treat everything as a matter of life and death.

  She stood back, swayed, sprung at him, and aimed a wild blow at his face. He stepped backwards, fell over the gilt music-stand, hit his head on the piano and crashed to the floor. Blood trickled where the piano had wounded the base of his skull and where Jenny’s nails had ripped his cheek. She, so furiously launched, came down on top of him, babbling that it was a matter of life and death, to her it was, her life and death, the baby smelled and was boring and the boys smelled worse and were more boring and everyone in the boring place was obsessed by the appalling boys. She struggled to her knees between Alexander’s outspread legs in the dust, pushing crossly at falling locks of long black hair.

  “I see life is just a regression. The nearest we ever come in this place to what I once thought was real conversation is when we play at students playing at actors playing at medieval witches and soldiers. Flimsy whimsy. So I get bossy and insufferable and you get patronising, and gently point it out.”

  She aimed another blow at him, which he parried, simply covering his face with his arm, smiling at her.

  “When I was a student I was fool enough to suppose life opened up once you got out of university. But what I’ve got is complete closure. No talk, no thought, no hope. You can’t imagine how it is.”

  Alexander had become, perhaps unavoidably, the major confidant of a string of energetic young married women, bored, lonely and unemployed in a small male community. He thought
he knew very well how it was, but had no intention of saying so to her. Instead, he pulled her down on top of him, folded his arms round her, and kissed her.

  Staff plays only took place every two or three years. This was because the community took time to recover from upheavals invariably caused by the unaccustomed combination of drink, drama and undress. Alexander, usually an amused observer, felt at first tarnished by the conventional development of the flirtation that followed, with visits to the Ladies’ Dressing Room and its atmosphere of timid, burlesque licentiousness. He did not like to disappoint. He hooked his leading lady into her gowns, adjusted décolletés, put a cheek, lips, against little round breasts, when no one was apparently looking. But his embarrassment had to give way before her shining recklessness: he responded as a good actor responds to another’s great and unselfish performance. He said, as they stood, waiting to go on, on the First Night, “You know I love you,” and watched her confusion, heat and hope improve her performance as he had supposed it would. He meant, he intended, to take her to bed when it was over.

  That was almost a year ago. A year of snatched brief meetings, of pre-arranged phone calls, of hiding and running, of letters and lies. The letters had run beside his play; phrases from the letters had run into his play. The letters had discussed, with wit, with gentleness, with salacity, with impatience, with quotations, with four-lettered words and increasingly elaborated details the moment when a bed would be available and they would lie in it. It was almost, he thought, now, as if the letters were the truth. So much joint imagination had been expended on the act that it was as though they did, innocently, carnally know each other.

  The Castle Wood, at the root of the Mound, was beleaguered by new building and cramped. They had quickly discovered where they could sit in it without exposing themselves. Their hiding-places almost always showed signs of other recent occupation. There were times, when the initial recklessness persisted, when they found these amusing, when their love transmuted depressed leaves and lipsticked tissues into new matter of interest. Once Jenny unearthed a used sheath in a half-empty can of baked beans. “Ersatz domestic bliss,” she remarked, primly, as Alexander chucked it over the neighbouring bushes, and Alexander said, “A non-fertility rite, take it all in all, what with boiled beans and intercepted seed,” and they had both laughed a great deal.