by A. S. Byatt
Under a tree I saw a Virgin sit.
The red and white rose quatered in her face.
Quartered had made him think of hanging and drawing there, as well as heraldry, and so the red and white, blood and stone, had grown. Would she sit down on the sofa? Was she interested in the iconography of the idolization of Elizabeth? It had its interests. Elizabeth had acquired many of the traditional attributes of the Queen of Heaven. Rosa mundi, tower of ivory. Ego flos campi, said Frederica, and all that bit about the fountain sealed. That, she said, was on their school blazer, “Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed.” Where was that from, then?
Alexander was startled into ribald laughter. That, he informed her, was from Tennyson’s “Princess” about the feminist academy. The poet was more or less mocking the virginal aspirations of his Princess Ida, the bluestockings and all. Before that, long before that, of course, the fountain sealed came from the Song of Songs, and was highly erotic. A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse. A spring shut up: a fountain sealed. In that case, said quick-witted Frederica, on her second glass of sherry, Tennyson was being emancipated or obscene since he was suggesting that common knowledge, far from being original Sin, was a good thing. Alexander said he feared it was a joke on the part of the Laureate at the expense of the virginal idealists who claimed access to the springs of knowledge: backed up by the fact that their lovely lyrics ran counter to their proclaimed message, being highly erotic or in praise of babies. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white, for instance. One of the most suggestive poems in the language. Frederica said that she was glad the Blesford Girls’ Grammar blazers were not only hideous but secretly obscene, it made it all seem more tolerable, and she was grateful to him for telling her. It became clear to both of them that they were sitting side by side on a sofa, talking about sex.
They shifted apart, but not far apart. Alexander unwisely poured more sherry. He had forgotten – it was strange how one could forget – how he had worked on Elizabeth’s metaphors, winding into her verse the iconography of her cult, the phoenix, the rose, the ermine, the Golden Age, the harvest-queen, Virgo-Astraea, virgin patroness of justice and foison. Alone in this room he had worked and worked, and since he had finished the work, no one had remarked on these things. Crowe and Lodge talked about dramatic pointing, contemporary relevance, cutting to speed it up, overall pace, character. No one mentioned those images he had so lovingly, with such an indescribable mixture of voluntary elaboration and involuntary vision, constructed. This girl picked up bits of these, like a superlatively good A-level candidate, which of course she was. But then, he was a teacher. He explained how Elizabeth’s motto, semper eadem, had in his mind come to be associated with the homogeneity of stone, on the one hand, and the sempiternities of the Golden Age, on the other. Whereas Mary Queen of Scots’s motto, eadem mutata resurgam, I shall arise, the same transmuted, he felt was Christian and much less rock-like than Elizabeth’s pagan reliance on her own eternal identity. It seemed a pity, said Frederica honestly, that a play so much about rock-like identity should be in danger of having a dual protagonist thrust upon it. Alexander said incautiously that he minded this prospect less than he had imagined. There was at least half a chance of his language not being messed about. Frederica was lit up by hope. She said it was marvellous language, invigorating language, people would come to understand …
Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane, honey of roses, whither wilt thou flie?
In the fifties they wrote critical articles on “Blood and Stone Imagery in Wedderburn’s Astraea.”
In the early sixties helpful lists of these images were published in Educational Aids to help weak A-level candidates.
In the seventies the whole thing was dismissed as a petrified final paroxysm of a decadent individualist modernism, full of irrelevant and damaging cultural nostalgia, cluttered, blown. A cul de sac, the verse drama revival, as should have been seen in the beginning.
On that day, having deserved, and extorted, partial approval from Alexander, Frederica decided to change the subject. She pointed at the photograph of the woman, an easy transition, and asked him what it was.
It was, he said, Rodin’s Danaide. He went and stood under it, studying minutely what her distracted gaze had skated over the gloss of.
“Look what a line. Look.”
He ran his index finger along the indicated line of recumbent marble spine, under the marble-silky skin, a half-moon from abased nape to rounded buttocks vanishing and shining into the black. An ambiguous gesture, purely instructive, purely sensual. Frederica watched the moving finger and saw the statue.
She was acute enough to realise, despite her excitement over Alexander himself, that she had never been made to look at a visual work of art before. This kind of silent sensual contemplation was usual for him, she saw, and profoundly new to her. She had never, she realised, looked at a picture or a carving or even landscape without some immediate verbal accompaniment or translation. Language was ingrained in her. Bill had done that. He had described her own early words to her, sung them back at her, repeated them admiringly to others in her presence, improved on them unconsciously. He had read and read and read.
But he was completely uninterested in forms not made with language. He was like any other moralising Philistine from his own chapel background when it came to colour or light or sound not made with words. He would not have said so, but he conveyed with every gesture, every judgment, a feeling that these were dispensable luxuries, not moral, at best adjuncts to an essential civilisation based elsewhere.
So, early inured to the knowledge that Lear was truer and wiser than anything else, she had never been surprised enough to ask herself why, why a man should want to write out a play and not simply deal at no removes with the grim truths of age, ague, recalcitrant daughters, folly, spite and death. Or why a man should want to write O Western Wind rather than lie in bed with his love or the pleasure and pain of absence. Knowing nothing, she imagined that poem and play were somehow more what they were than those things they were images of. But watching Alexander’s familiar description of the Danaide’s spine, she was enough struck by strangeness to marvel that a man might choose to make a marble woman, and another man, or another woman, might prefer to stand and look at that stone, rather than to … do anything else. When she got home she would indeed imagine other scenes on that sofa, that finger on her own spine, but she was even canny enough to know that for that time the imaginary relish was enough and more than enough. And so got herself away before he had time to regret any of his gestures, a rare moment of grace, for her.
Alexander was immediately distressed by his own behaviour. He knew very well what it meant to show things, particularly his own things, to people. It was next to giving gifts. He had shown Jennifer the Danaide, had talked to Jennifer about the mystery of stones whilst they turned over his cairn together. Jennifer, unlike Frederica, had been volubly admiring, had achieved an almost immediate familiarity with his things, discriminating stone from stone, finding adjectives for the woman’s white despair: she knew it was despair. She had brought additions to his things: the bulbs in the Wedgwood basalt were her gifts, and she had wept, unwrapping them from their white florist’s shrouds, because they had had to be bought with Geoffrey’s money; nothing was truly hers to give. Alexander ran a finger over these marble men and maidens, and came to rest under The Boy with a Pipe who was his private, his secret joke.
The Boy is crowned with blurred and decadent orange-red roses. He sits against a burnt-earth wall on which are depicted pale, white-ribboned bouquets of full-blown flowers. His face is harsh, austere, corrupt, clean, judging. He wears a tight blue jacket and trousers, and sits with his knees apart. Between his thighs his creased clothes indicate complete sexual ambiguity, deep-pleated and firmly bulging: he could be anything, or more probably everything. One hand is between his legs and one holds a neat stubby pipe, awkwardly, pointing in at his body. No visitor had ever commented on these, fairly obv
ious, characteristics of the Boy to Alexander, nor had they proposed, as had been suggested to other masters of a Gauguin nude or a Lautrec whore, that he be put away. It might have been that he was assimilated by conjunction into the ambience of the Saltimbanques, coloured patches between earth and sky, partaking of both, insubstantial.
Alexander knew, he thought, what this Boy was. He knew also from time to time what he himself was: a man who displayed the Rodin Danaide to fierce girls but kept on his wall, as a mode of knowledge, this Boy. It was not that the Boy was a desirable boy: he was not. What Alexander felt for him approximated most closely to vicious envy.
11. Play Room
Softly, in shreds and patches, brightly, in beads and feathers and tinsel, the play invaded the Vicarage.
Last year the Blesford ladies had made petit point hassocks for the pews of St Bartholomew’s, embroidering cream and ochre lilies and fishes on a discreet khaki background. So as not to show the dirt.
Ten years ago they had gathered in hand-downs for evacuees, paperbacks for soldiers, knitted wool squares for blankets for bomb victims.
This year they were building farthingales.
In London thousands of small seed pearls and crystals were being sewn into a shimmering work on the Queen’s coronation dress of white slipper satin. Emblems of Commonwealth and Empire were being embroidered in coloured silks, roses and thistles, maples and acorns, on the hem of this garment.
Felicity Wells, co-ordinating the artistic efforts in Blesford, saw herself at the spinning centre of endless threads of culture, reknit, reknotted. Baskets stood in vicarage hall and church porch for any bit of stuff, rich or rare, that could be spared. Embroidery classes stitched rays of small plastic pearls into Sir Walter Ralegh’s black velvet cloak, silver moons and golden birds and crimson and white roses on kirtles and loosegowns and trains, knots of straw and carnation ribbons on embroidered garters.
We have been starved of colour, said Miss Wells, emptying a carrier bag of new reels of Sylko out on to her carpet, rolling, clattering, glittering, gleaming, all shades and gradations of colours. Gorgeous household-stuffe, she exclaimed to Stephanie, and confessed that she had always desired a whole drawerful, and had had no excuse.
Stephanie had meant to have nothing to do with the play. She had had enough of it with Frederica: in so far as it was Alexander’s, it evoked in her a lazy, or reticent, disinclination to put herself forward. If she sat, as she did, and knotted gold cord in the vicarage in the evening, or bicycled over the moors with messages about whalebone and material for ruffs, it was because she could not refuse Felicity.
It had come to be accepted that Daniel, when not at work, sat there too. The ladies stitched and deedy Daniel made tea and washed teacups. Daniel was in a bad way. True, he had been right about Stephanie Potter and Malcolm Haydock. She had offered her services once, twice, and then regularly, promising alternate Saturdays and Sundays. Mrs Haydock had wept in Daniel’s room out of relief, and fear that it would not last, and guilt, to Malcolm, to Stephanie, both of whom seemed, though neither Daniel nor Mrs Haydock saw them at it, to have found a way of surviving their time together. It was a miracle, Mrs Haydock said, considering the damage Malcolm did, the way Miss Potter always had the house neat as a pin when she herself got in, she was quite ashamed really, knowing that when she had care of Malcolm there was always trails of flour and mud and smashed crockery and worse up and down the house any time anyone cared to call. True, Miss Potter might have had to put a pile of broken cups or milk-bottles in the bin, but it was always quiet and neat, Mr Orton, so you could come in without feeling awful, at the work to do, or even at just coming into that racket again. It shamed her really, that Miss Potter should have such a grip on things, such a way with her, it made her wonder if she was doing worse than she needed herself. Daniel said no, she was Malcolm’s mother, he knew her, he behaved different with her because of that, and Miss Potter had only to manage one day. All the same, she was a treasure, he was glad of it.
Once or twice he had called at Brontë Buildings, as was surely more or less obligatory, to see how she was getting on. He usually found her and the boy in a state of distant stillness and silence, she with folded hands in a chair, the boy, as was his custom when he wasn’t hyperactive, sitting in the corner of the floor knocking his head rhythmically and alternately against the meeting walls. He was daunted to his own surprise, by the quality of the silence and felt some inhibition about disturbing it. He asked her once in a cheery clerical voice how she did it, how she kept the boy so quiet, and she said she did it by keeping quite still and taking her attention away from him. When you did that, she said, he tended to imitate you, so they both got abstracted, for the allotted time. She thought perhaps she ought to try to make contact, or play with him, but she had no skills and no knowledge how to begin. At least he was doing no harm.
No, Daniel agreed, no harm. He came to feel, both there and in Felicity Wells’s little room, that consciously or unconsciously she was treating himself in the same way as Malcolm Haydock: imposing silence on him by absenting herself and her attention. She was there, but she gave him no opening to speak to her, presented a smooth soundproof barrier like a plate-glass wall. He did not know, he told himself, why he went on sitting there.
He did, of course, know. She obsessed him, and for this unreasonable state of mind he was ill-prepared. For years he had hardly considered himself except as an instrument of his own purposes. Now, he thought constantly of her, and if, by some vehement act of will, he succeeded in expelling her image from his church or his bedroom he became horribly aware of himself, instead. He tried to see himself as she might see him, and could not. Various certainties disintegrated. He considered his own history and wondered if he was not profoundly unnatural, in some way, not to have been troubled like this before. “Impure thoughts” had not been his problem. Masturbation was a relief to which, wise in his generation, he had always considered he had a right, since it was a quick and practical solution to certain biological urgencies. Before Stephanie, it had not been accompanied, not really, by visual images. Now and then he heard a plaintive echo of his own tough voice expressing the wish that she would be kind. This disgusted him.
There was also trouble with God. He had not had, and had not required, a personal relationship with God. He never addressed God, when he prayed, in words of his own. The Church’s words were like the church’s stones, there. Prayer was to know that there was much more there, much stronger, than himself, to sense the tug and rush of forces behind his perception or comprehension.
The Christ he loved was the Christ who had been aware of the forces upholding sparrows and considering lilies. Also the Christ of devastating common sense who neither equivocated nor stood any nonsense, and exposed the machinery of the soul and of divine justice in witty parables. He did not address this Christ because, although he did not know exactly that it was so, he believed in fact that this Christ was dead.
His beliefs had not mattered compared to the certainties of strength and solidity he had felt, alone with God. Now she got between him and God, so that God became problematic and he himself was aware, as in boyhood, that he was confined in his own fat.
He could have thumped her. Or broken her.
He came to tea because if he was in a room with her she was at least reduced to size, confined to the chair she sat in. That was not, of course, his only reason: If he must desire her in the flesh he preferred the flesh present: he was not one for evading reality. So he sat with her in hot black trousers, and suffered.
Felicity Wells took her own pleasure in their company. She cosseted them and lectured them, watched them with dark, vague, sad eyes. The fact that it was her room, her stage management as it were, suited all three of them.
One day Stephanie came in to find her friend poised on one foot, framed against the last light from her dormer window, at the peak of an uneven stairway composed of a dictionary, a footstool, a coffee table, the bed, and a higher table. She
was wearing a vast skirt and overskirt of bluish-green shiny curtaining, which she clasped, in two large knobs, in her two little fists heaved high before her. On her head was a satin cap wired with pearls, and a skewed organdie head-rail.
She was to make one of the loyal crowd at the Coronation of Elizabeth I, of the mourning crowd at her death. “Practical trial of stepping gracefully,” she said, smiling down on Stephanie. Behind Stephanie, Daniel loomed. Miss Wells waved, swayed, and crashed to the bed, giggling amongst the billowing cloth, searching with a blind hand for the dislodged hair-piece. Daniel thundered with laughter.
“You are a naughty boy. You startled me. I hope no pins are driven into me. I knew it required practice to mount stairs in a bum-roll. Give me a hand, girl.”
Stephanie tugged. Miss Wells’s trunk rose upright amongst her skirts: she put up her hands to twist together hair and wire and netting and false hair.
“A treacherous garment,” she observed, clicking her teeth in gleeful disapproval, crouching in the wired bum-roll. Stephanie saw her painfully, a little breastless breathless woman whose skin about her low-cut bodice had that crinkling decadent delicacy that precedes wrinkles. Daniel put out huge arms and lifted her easily to her feet. They both laughed. Stephanie took up her hemming.
Miss Wells’s room was tiny, decorated, perched in and temporary. Black Victorian bookcases, with machine-cut Gothic beading of the kind that ruined the young Alfred Tennyson, supported a bitty collection of objects. Cut glass candlesticks, tin teacaddy with Gloire de Dijon roses, Japanese silk pincushion, conical Benares brass vase with two peacock feathers, three biscuit barrels (rotund glass, floral china and wicker, wooden keg with brass knobs), Florentine leather sewing bag, scissors with enamelled handles representing a crane stalking, a miniature Spode cup, six sugar-pink grey-tinged Woolworth’s tea-cups, a pile of apostle spoons, half a loaf of bread, half a pot of lemon curd, a pile of bills weighed down with a plaster of Paris hand, an ebony and silver crucifix, a crocheted beret, a bundle of lisle stockings, a bottle of ink, a jam-jar of red pencils, pussywillow and a Palm Sunday cross from the Holy Land …