The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “Too ’ard. There’s some just in from t’slaughterouse, Mrs Potter. I know you appreciate fresh offal. ’Alf a tick, I’ll ’ave a look.”

  To Marcus’s sickening eye the fresh liver had a hot and bursting look. The Grinner slapped it compact with his left hand and sliced it, razor-thin, with his right. He then boned the veal, working with speed and precision with the three remaining inches of a long carving-knife sharpened almost to thin air. He shaved delicately, clearly, and the soft flesh fell away from the glistening knob, pearly white, bluish-mauve, rosy, increasingly unreal. Marcus stared. He arranged. He rearranged. He looked from side to side. The meat surged. He thought: people come in and out of here all day quite all right, people do.

  “There,” said Winifred. “That’ll make us a good meal. Marcus.” Offering him, thinking of the cooking, the transformation into eating. His pleasure perhaps. Then she saw his face. “Marcus!”

  “Mummy,” he said. “Oh, Mummy –”

  It was not a word he now used.

  It was not a word she had ever liked, to be truthful. It reminded her of bad things, the dead preserved in dusty cerecloths, and moreover it had a disagreeable gobby sound. She had never told her children not to use it, nor had ever asked them to call her by her first name. That was not her way. They had all learned it, from other children, other women, used it tentatively, and then unlearned it, substituting Mother when direct address was unavoidable, and nothing, most of the time.

  She took his hand and led him out on to the pavement.

  “Marcus, tell me. Marcus, there is something …”

  In their ears, drowning speech, a horn sounded, peremptory, shrill, unnaturally prolonged. They both started; drawn close in to the pavement, its coming or previous presence unremarked, was the gleaming black sportscar of Lucas Simmonds, a brief Triumph on which he could be seen, in the school quadrangles, lavishing extraordinary cares. He rolled down a window and beamed up at them innocent and rosy.

  “Mrs Potter. Marcus. Were you by any chance returning to Blesford Ride? Could I offer you a lift – if Marcus doesn’t mind being a little bit bundled in the back of a vehicle really only designed for two?”

  Marcus took two steps away, shifting. Winifred thought that he looked worse than ever, ill almost, likely to faint as he was given to doing. So she addressed Lucas Simmonds with gratitude, said how timely his appearance was, to which he replied that he always tried to oblige in that way, with a slight embarrassed snicker to cover any oddness in this remark. Lucas Simmonds’s car was loud, and swooped round corners so that Winifred, inside it, had to brace herself and could not feel any emanations, friendly or hostile, from Marcus coiled behind her. Lucas talked, mostly inaudibly, with complete banality, about Blesford traffic. When they got home Marcus said he was carsick and went to bed.

  10. In the Tower

  Frederica received a letter.

  Dear Frederica,

  We are still undecided about all the casting of Astraea. The committee would like to hear you read again. I wonder, therefore, if you would come up to my room in School on Wednesday, as soon as you can after you get home.

  Yours

  Alexander Wedderburn.

  Frederica wrote several grateful, enthusiastic, intelligent replies. The one she despatched ran:

  Dear Alexander,

  I shall be very happy,

  Frederica.

  She hoped, but doubted, that he would notice the nuances.

  Alexander lived in the red western turret of the school, approached under a Gothic arch and up a spiral stone staircase. He had an oak door to his room, and inside it a green baize door, in imitation of Oxbridge. He had vaguely Perpendicular windows, facing two ways, south, over the lawns and flowerbeds towards the walled gardens and Far Field, west, towards the Castle Mound, and its bit of surrounding country (which included the sewage farm). Over his door was a fretwork contraption with a sliding shutter, obliterating either the possibility that Alexander M. M. Wedderburn, M.A., B. Litt., was IN or the possibility that he was OUT. The staircase was red stone and smelt of Jeyes fluid.

  On the Wednesday he looked gloomily out of his southern window and saw her advancing on him, spiked heels pitting the prohibited grass. He had expected school uniform but she was done out like a ballet dancer in mufti, in severely buttoned black and grey, with her hair scraped into a knob, and her sharp nose up, snuffing the air. She was early, at least in the sense that she was earlier than Lodge and Crowe. He felt beleaguered. It had been made clear to him by the discussion after her auditions that he felt some element of positive dislike towards Frederica Potter. It was not only that she was embarrassing, nor even that he had wondered if she had some kind of crush on him: such things were natural and best dealt with by kindly ignorance. But Crowe’s pleasure in her performance, his positive insistence on her powers as an actress, coupled with the belligerence of her last appearance, had given Alexander a disproportionate and unreasonable certainty that she was at best a nuisance and at worst dangerous. It was like trying to ignore a boa-constrictor with a crush on you. Well, if not was, would be.

  He heard the rapid clatter of her feet. Her knock crashed. He cursed Crowe and opened his inner door.

  “It says you are OUT,” she accused him.

  “I am always forgetting.”

  He tried to take her coat, but she was prowling about his room, scanning book shelves, pacing distances, getting bearings on the two views. He tried, as far as was consonant with his duties, to keep people out of this room. Certainly she had never been there. He asserted himself.

  “Sit down. Give me your coat.”

  She did as she was told. She had a lot of grey and black woollen skirt and a black bat-winged sweater, with a snarl of stainless steel jewellery on a leather thong, of a kind he particularly disliked, round her neck. She crossed her knees like a Hollywood secretary, and glared at him like an inquisitor. He got behind his desk.

  “The others aren’t here yet. We are a bit early.”

  “I am early. You live here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you tell me what this is about, please, Alexander?”

  He ignored the desperate shake in the voice. He said, “Perhaps it’s best if I do. The problem is, a difficulty has arisen about the casting of – of the main part. Lodge wants – and Matthew wants – to cast Marina Yeo as the Queen. In fact,” he said, disguising he hoped a little bitterness, “they have approached her – she’s an old old friend of Matthew’s – and she is very keen, I’m told.”

  She stared and said nothing.

  “She’s too old,” said Alexander. “For the, for my play, as it stands, that’s the trouble.”

  “I saw her in Hedda Gabler in Newcastle. And as Cleopatra once. You can play Cleopatra old. I saw that awful film, The Mortal Moon, too, where she was Elizabeth. She was O.K. in that.”

  “That was made some time ago. She is a great actress. Crowe had a bright idea – he wanted to split the part, to – to cast a young girl as Elizabeth in the first act – before her Accession – and let Marina take over and age gracefully from there. I don’t want that, myself. It’s only fair to say that. I wrote it as one part.”

  “If I’d done that,” she said, “I’d be furious if they tried to split it. It’s the wrong style of thing …”

  “It’s not a pageant,” said Alexander incautiously.

  “No.”

  “Anyway, Crowe was hit by your likeness to – the original – and thought it was just possible to cast you for the first scenes.”

  “I wouldn’t want that,” she said, “even if they wanted me, I wouldn’t, if you didn’t … I mean, I care what you think, and it’s your play. You wrote it.”

  “That doesn’t make it mine, now,” he said scrupulously. “It’s in Lodge’s hands now. He liked you.”

  What Lodge had attributed to Frederica was “a peculiar dry sexiness”, a phrase which had stuck in Alexander’s mind because he had never considered her as sexy at
all. Blundering, and in his presence she blundered perpetually, excluded sexiness in his eyes.

  “Crowe said I might hope for an understudy,” she said. “I was hoping. But I still don’t think you should let them impose any splitting on your play if you don’t like it. It’s yours.”

  “I don’t want to stop you hoping …”

  “I wanted to be in on it. There won’t ever be anything like it.” She thought of the visions she had alternately cherished and abandoned: fanfare, farthingale, gloss and glimmer of English language, men and maidens and talk and who knew what else, and Alexander. Alexander … naturally Alexander. “It’s premature to say,” she said, “that I won’t do it, to split it, they probably won’t like me. But I wouldn’t, I mean it.”

  She wondered what she was saying. She meant what she said. She saw what he thought. In his place, she would think that. It was his work. But the most important thing was that she, Frederica Potter, should have a part, should have the part. So why was she saying all this? Not exactly so that he should say, as he now did, “No, no, you must do your best, the decision is Lodge’s …” Just that she knew what his interests were, and cared about them, and knew what hers were, and cared more about those, and he did not, but must come to.

  She stared round his room. She had always meant, some time, to penetrate this place. It was only partly as she had imagined. It was cool and plain and as modern as possible inside its Victorian-Gothic shell. The walls, in a way that was fashionable in those post-festival years, were all painted in different pastel colours: duck-egg blue, watered grass-green, muted salmon rose, pale sandy gold. The armchairs were pale beach, upholstered in olive cord. On the window sill, in black basalt Wedgwood bowls, were white hyacinths and dark crocuses.

  On the blue wall, behind Alexander, was a large print of Picasso’s Saltimbanques, framed in thin strips of light oak. Opposite, on the pink wall, was Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe, which Frederica did not recognise. On the green wall, over the hearth, was a very large and gleaming photograph, white on black, of a nude woman, sculpted in marble, lying on one side, seen from the back. This, too, she did not recognise. Under this, on the shelf, was a mound or cairn of irregular stones. One or two were polished eggs, agate and alabaster, others were just stones. Those which would not heap were laid out in a tapering row beside those that would.

  On the gold wall, fading a little, was a mounted poster announcing The Buskers by Alexander Wedderburn. The letters of the title were formed from sprouting twigs or branches, held up by capering and posturing commedia dell’arte figures. Brown and green letters, black and white chequered figures.

  Frederica read, twice, the information on this poster, vanished days and hours at the Arts Theatre in 1950. Then she read the titles of the books on the shelves nearest her. She was magnetised by print, by lettering, she took sensual pleasure in reading anything at all, instructions about Harpic and fire alarms, lists, or, as now, the titles of books. Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Théâtre Complet de Racine.

  On the door was an empty gown and a tweed jacket.

  What was the room not, that she had expected it to be? Something more dramatic, richer, darker. Its decorous airiness was unexpected if pleasing.

  “I like your stones.”

  He stood up nervously and turned them in his hands, cold, susurrant, clashing.

  “I bring them up from the Chesil Bank. Where I come from, my place of origin, Dorset.”

  Another scrap of information; she stored it away, greedily, but could think of nothing to say, about stones, or about Dorset. She was a girl unusually ill-equipped with small talk. The lengthening silence was broken, almost to her relief, by Crowe and Lodge, who strode hurriedly into the room.

  They were prepared to be mysterious about their intentions, which embarrassed both Alexander and Frederica, neither of whom chose to describe the discussion that had already taken place. Crowe talked, with meaningful little winks, about a possible understudy, and Lodge said that they had been impressed enough with her previous appearance to be considering her for a speaking part. Could she perhaps recite the Perdita speech for them, as a preliminary.

  Frederica said she would rather do something else. She had discovered, she told them grimly, that she was no good at girls. Could she not do Goneril? Lodge laughed aloud at this, and said that girls, not Goneril, were unfortunately what was wanted, and it would be nice to discover, if she didn’t mind, how far she could go in the direction of girlhood. Something in the elaborate mock-courtesy of this made Frederica sense that she was being treated specially, was liked, was wanted. They were prepared to bandy words. So she grinned, and said well, they knew by now she was no nymph, and made her way obediently through O Proserpina! For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall From Dis’s wagon. It was not inspired, Alexander thought, but it was a little more than workmanlike: the breaths and pauses were in viable places, the verse was at least unimpeded in its flow: it sang, almost, even if Frederica did not.

  “And now,” said Lodge, “if you could study a small speech from Alexander’s play … Alexander, do you have any particularly suitable bit in mind?”

  Alexander said perhaps the Tower speech. Frederica tried to assess his expression as he handed her a script. Patient melancholy. The speech was a soliloquy by the young Princess, thrust into the Tower by Mary Tudor, a moment of history, and fiction, that Frederica had lived often enough, since she had grown up on the heady romantic emotion of Margaret Irwin’s Young Bess. She supposed Alexander had not, though there was romantic emotion here, all right.

  Alexander watched her. There is always something unnerving about watching someone else purposefully, rapidly, going over something one has written. He began to hover, and, almost involuntarily, to offer scraps of useful, or mitigating, or distracting information. She set her face cross and private to read: he did not acknowledge it, but he feared her judgment.

  “I take it she did mean it. I shall never marry. The play assumes that those historians are right who believe she really meant to stay single,” …

  “Yes, I see …”

  “The ‘she’ she keeps referring to is Anne Boleyn. There is of course no record of her ever having spoken of Anne Boleyn.”

  “I know that.”

  “Ah, yes. I might point out that the speech is meant to begin in a hysterical rush, like the descriptions of Anne Boleyn in the tower, laughing and weeping, and then it modulates its tone …”

  “Yes, yes.” Almost impatient. “The sentences are very long. To say.”

  “It isn’t easy,” said Alexander. Matthew Crowe said, “Let the poor child concentrate, do.” Alexander went and looked out of the window.

  The verse was nervous and glittering, adjectival and highly metaphorical. The Princess described the cold wet stone of the tower, the black Thames, the narrow garden plot with a few uncut flowers. Then she wove a long serpentining period out of red and white roses, the Tudor rose, blood, flesh, marble, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed, ego flos campi, not to be cut off by the butcher. A thematic sideways curve, ornate and delicately whimsical, about the Princess who lost a golden ball in a fountain and repelled a clammy frog. Marble and the gilded monuments of princes. The periods gave way to flat, uncompromising claims. Elizabeth would not bleed. She would neither be butchered nor marry. She would be a stone that did not bleed, a Princess, semper eadem and single. Her virtue her stronghold.

  Frederica stood in one window embrasure, looked down at the garden, settled her imagination, and read. The particular difficulties were, as she had intimated, grammatical, and she was good at grammar. Alexander, although he had not told her so, had already heard several potential Elizabeths, all of whom had had trouble with his language. Frederica, contrary to his expectations, had powerful negative virtues. She did not murder his sentences. She had, fortunately, come to the intellectual conclusion that the language was so ornate, florid even, that the best way to speak it was plainly and qu
ietly, let it elaborate itself as it must. Alexander was disproportionately impressed by this approach. He was afraid of vibrant actresses “expressing themselves” athwart his words. He had assumed she would be worse than most. She was not. Possibly not vibrant enough, indeed, to impress Lodge. He found himself hoping Lodge would not think her too dry and monotonous.

  What Lodge thought was not clear. He did indeed take her over the peroration again, asking her to give it all she had got, and exacted from her a kind of gruff ferocity he seemed pleased with. He said, do you think you could learn to move more naturally, and Frederica said, of course. Crowe said that he was of the opinion that their little plan was distinctly promising, and Frederica prevented herself from asking what was their little plan. Crowe then offered her a lift to her home: it was clear to her that, with his liking for hints, indiscretions, manipulations, he would tell her about the “little plan” and no doubt about Alexander’s opposition to it. Of the three men, Crowe was the one who most certainly liked her, who was on her side. He was also the least appealing: he had only money and power, whereas Lodge, and even more Alexander, were artists, which was obviously more impressive. She was in fact naive enough to suppose that what she felt to be her aesthetic morals in this case coincided with what she more vaguely labelled, inaccurately, her political interests: the man it was necessary to impress was Alexander. The play was his play: she needed his approval of her reading, of their plan. She supposed, wrongly, that the other two were already in favour of the conflation of herself and Marina Yeo into one Queen, and that they had staged this reading to convert Alexander. So she told Crowe that she did not need a lift, she was at home already, had only to walk down the lane and across Far Field. And then, by blatantly not leaving through a door held open for her, she contrived to be left alone with Alexander.

  Alexander said, magnanimously, that he admired her reading. She said that it had been a pleasure, despite the strain, because the verse was so exciting, because of the imagery. Alexander said that that speech was the metaphorical centre of the whole play. She liked, she said, the colours. The red and white. He said he had always seen that scene red and white and grey, and Frederica said would he not get green out of doors and he said no, not if it was late enough, you could make stones with artificial light, he hoped. Would she like a glass of sherry after her ordeal? He had, he told her, pouring sherry, taken the red and white from the little poem about Elizabeth the Virgin he had incorporated in his text.