The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “It’s all right,” she said, still staring at the ceiling, as she had reassuringly said so many times that evening. “It doesn’t matter. It will be all right.”

  Daniel shifted his mountain belly and pressed his face right into the breast he had laid open. With fingers hesitant or listless, how could he tell, she touched his hair. He heard her, quickly, one, two, kick off her shoes. He undid another few buttons and her belt. For a wild moment he ran his hand round under the breast, inside the dress, holding her beating ribs, her hinted spine. There, under him, in his grasp. He lifted his head and addressed his mouth to hers, which was warm, and opened softly and sweetly, retreating before him. He arranged his weight clumsily on one of his own knees and looked down, knitting his brow, at her expression. She was still staring at the ceiling. He made out, he thought, that her accepting posture was one of despair. She meant to please him, she meant to give him something, she felt he ought to have something, and it seemed to him that she expected nothing for herself from this, there was no corresponding need or fury in her. He thought that this was maybe how she always was, this posture was habitual.

  He pulled himself away. “No. You don’t know what you want.”

  “No, Daniel, I do, I do. It’s all right.” Almost querulous.

  “All right. All right. You keep saying, all right. I want more than just all right. Anyway it’s not true.”

  “I should have thought about that. You can’t, of course, you’d be doing – wrong.”

  She had in fact thought about that. There is something pleasurable in breaking real taboos, even for moralists like the Potters, maybe especially for moralists like the Potters.

  “If I am, that’s my affair. You must sit up now. You’re going home.”

  “But why?” She did not move.

  “I will not just be given things. Now, sit up. Sit up.”

  “Don’t be rough.”

  “You must know what you want.”

  “One doesn’t make up one’s mind in cold blood, love.”

  “Oh yes, one does. About many things that really matter. And don’t call me love. I am not.”

  “You are too hard on me,” she said, and began to cry again, sitting now hunched on the bed, plucking at disordered garments.

  “Please go home now,” he said, harshly, looking away, unable to move. Pride, need and policy were now inextricably confused. He didn’t know if he was sending her away because she was patronising him, or because to finish it now would be to finish it completely, and unfinished business has its own power, things undone torment the imagination, sometimes pleasurably. Partly, he could simply not take any more.

  She was putting on her shoes. When he made no move to get up, she put on her hat and coat too.

  “Well,” she said, “goodbye.”

  He shook himself. “No, wait. I’ll walk you home. Let’s just walk back there quietly together.”

  She looked as though she would protest, and then said, “All right.”

  12. Nursery Garden

  Marcus supposed that if one was properly mad one was not afraid of being mad. Mad people in films and books seemed to have in common a rock-bottom certainty that they were in the right. His own increasing anxiety about madness could perhaps be taken as a sign that he was sane. And madness in this literary household had overtones of raving, vision and poetry which were nothing to do with what was bothering him.

  What was bothering him was spreading fear. More and more things aroused it: things he could no longer do, could no longer bear to see. These things were recognisable because of the little shocks that went with them, shocks of consciousness momentarily disconnected, like stepping down two steps when the body has only allowed for one. It had to do with geometry: careful measurement and sense of scale could prevent it. It had to do with an animal fear of not responding quickly. Like burning oneself, because one’s skin, or sense of smell, was not functioning as it should. He was out of touch all ways, animal and geometric both.

  Every day something new became problematic and difficult. An early thing was books, always bad and now impossible. Print reared off the pages like snakes striking. His eye got entangled by the anomalous, like the letter g, and the peculiar disparity between its written and printed forms. Reading was unmanageable because he measured frequencies of gs, or sat and stared, mesmerised by one. Any word will look odd, stared at, as though it was incorrect or unreal or not a word. Now all words were like that.

  Going downstairs was another area of the problematic. He had never liked it. Now he stood irresolute for long periods at the top of flights, and then slithered down, step by step, both feet on each, hip and flank scraping and measuring the intervals between bannisters.

  And the bathroom. When the water rushed into the lavatory pan, burst from the front, sheer fall from the sides, plain trickle at the back, all knocked into a turmoil by the others, and sucked away down, he was afraid, yet had to watch the lines pulling. Also he did not like the plughole, a cartwheel covering an empty tunnel with a circular design.

  He delayed going to the lavatory, then delayed leaving it to wash his hands, delayed leaving the basin to dry them, delayed leaving the bathroom because of the stairs.

  But he was not mad, and was not quite compelled to behave as his fears dictated. If at school he was joined in the bog by another boy he moved around quite briskly. It was just pleasanter to comply, in private. And his evasive rituals had, he was vaguely aware, their own seductions. Waters, vertigo, figures, rhythms, the letter g, released him from worse imperatives. They conferred the ease of safety. He managed, too, to stop eating meat without taking up a position on vegetables. This was an evasion of a looming imperative that he should give up eating altogether.

  What finally threw him was when the light shifted.

  He was crossing those playing-fields on a Monday morning, towards the school. He was equidistant from the lines of force exerted by the fading white lines of the pitches. It was a spring day, with cold sun on new grass and evergreens. The polished curves of the railway were lit, and so was the wire grid round the tennis courts, intermittently flashing with shoots of brightness. The sky was empty, blue and pale. The remote sun, a defined, painful, liquid disk, hung somewhere. The laws of perspective were no help with that sun, either what it was, or where. It could be taken in only by looking at where it was not, somewhere to the side of it, stealing a flickering glance at it. It was not gold, it was more white, and very shining. Its multiplied after-images dotted the green fields with indigo circles.

  The fields stretched on, even and green, tramped and mown. The Bilge Pond lay to his left, little, black and ordinary. Suddenly the light changed and he stopped.

  An essential part of what then happened was his own reluctance to believe it was happening. When he remembered it his body remembered huge strain and oppression, caused by two antithetical fears, working together: the fear of being changed completely, beyond help, and the equally powerful fear that all this was only a fantasy, perversely imposed by his errant consciousness on the real world. And even at this moment, which possibly changed all his life, he heard a cheery inner voice telling him that it was possible, as with books, staircases and bathrooms, not to have to know. Later he thought this was a lying, evasive voice. Later still, he remembered it as a true comforter, its cheerful hollow smallness a guarantee that he had kept his identity, had gone on being himself …

  The light then changed. He stopped because it was hard to go forward, there was too much in front and all round him, light almost tangibly dense and confoundingly bright. He stopped in parts, his body first, then his attention, so that there was a sickening moment when the inside of the head, the cavern, was striding on beyond the frightened soft eyes and contracting skin.

  The light was busy. It could be seen gathering, running and increasing along the lines where it had been first manifest. Wild and linear on the railway tracks, flaming, linking, crossing on the tennis-court mesh, rising in bright intermittent streams
of sparks from glossy laurel leaves and shorn blades of grass. It could also be seen moving when no object reflected, refracted or directed it. In loops, eddies, powerful direct streams, turbulence and long lines proceeding without let through stones, trees, earth, himself, what had been a condition of vision turned to an object of vision.

  Things were newly defined by it. Objects it met, rocks, stones, trees, goal posts, were outlined darkly and then described in light. Its passage through these things only increased their opacity.

  Beyond its linear movements it could be experienced as sheets, or towering advancing fronts, like crested waves miles high, infinite or at least immeasurable, like walls and more and more walls of cold, white flame. It had other motions not measured by measurements available to man, or separable in the experience of man, yet there, so that he had to know he could not know more than that they were there. He was confined by their closeness and ubiquity, stretched and distorted by his stressed, distressed sense of their continuous operation beyond any attention he could fix on them.

  So he came to see this as a presence, and a presence with purpose. It was a presence wholly outside his scale, conducting its work with a magnitude and a minuteness at once too grand and too precisely delicate for him to map. Stretched and contracted he sensed it lap round him and through him and for the worst moment he was almost concentrated on its passage through his own consciousness. He was both saved (from bright blinding, from annihilation) and prevented (from losing himself in it) by a geometric figure which held as an image or more in that glare and play of light. He saw intersecting cones, stretching to infinity, containing the pouring and rushing. He saw that he was at the, or a, point of intersection, and that if it could not pass through it would shatter the fragile frame to make a way. He must hold together, but let it go through, like the burning glass with the gathered light of the sun. The rims flared and flared and flared. He said “Oh God.” He tried to be and not to be, and most dangerous, to go on.

  When he walked it came with him, or was seen to be ahead also. He thought he might die before he got to the school and could not go back because what was behind was steadily increasing its activity. He took a step and a step and a step and the fields of light swayed and roared and came and went and sang.

  He arrived in some way at the school and was able to sit down on the low wall of the cloister, opposite horned Moses, a figure who owed something to Michelangelo and more to Rodin’s bulky Balzac. Marcus stared into the convex stone eyes and considered.

  The turbulence was at some distance: it stopped short of the red brick: the edges of its activity troubled the lawn and the glasshouses. He could not go on or back. As he considered, a figure in white garments stepped radiantly through the films of light as though it inhabited them briskly and easily. Its head curled softly bright in the sun. Marcus, cold now, blinked painfully. It was Lucas Simmonds, heading for the Bilge Lab. He did not believe, how should he, in signs and portents. But this was the third time. In the Odeon, in the Butchery, Simmonds had offered a helping hand. Now he came past. Marcus got up and began exhaustedly to trail after him. There was in any case, the small voice pointed out, absolutely no one else.

  The Bilge Lab was part of the old buildings. Physics and Chemistry had a new extension, rectangular, glass-walled, tiled with abstract mosaics. The Bilge Lab was Gothic, with “Biology, Human Physiology and Anatomy” over its door in gold Gothic lettering on a midnight blue ground. The door was arched heavy oak.

  He got in. Rows of high empty benches, high stools, curving serpentine brass taps, tiny porcelain basins, gas fittings, green shaded lights. In the window, in the sun, a figure in a white coat with crumpled grey flannels hanging below.

  “Sir,” he said. Although he felt he was bellowing and winced at the roar, his voice was in fact reedy and faint, slurred like the feet he couldn’t drive forward. “Sir …”

  Simmonds turned round, smiling.

  “Hullo, old chap. What’s up?”

  “Sir …”

  Slowly clutching the doorknob he came down to the floor and sat clutching the door. It swung unstably. Pure hatred of its shiftiness moved over him.

  Lucas Simmonds ran round the benches.

  “Take your time. Don’t worry. Had a shock? Lie down, that might be best.”

  He did not touch Marcus. He stood over him, with a grin of concern and gestured at the lino. “Go on. Lie back. Much the best.”

  Marcus lowered himself gingerly. He arranged his arms, out of some nervous compulsion, neatly alongside his body. Above him, bent over him, Simmonds’s bright face beamed and wavered.

  “Had a shock,” he reiterated. Marcus acquiescently closed his eyes. “A drink might do you good.”

  He brought a lipped glass laboratory beaker of water, which he put down beside Marcus’s head. Awkwardly, rolled over, upon one elbow, tears in his eyes, Marcus sipped. There was a faint chemical taste, and the taint of ether, which always hung over the place.

  “Been seeing things?” Simmonds now knelt beside Marcus, peering closely into his face. This casually pressing question increased Marcus’s hazy sense of portent and working destiny. Anyone else surely would have asked are you ill? He turned his head from side to side on the lino. “Seeing things?” Simmonds echoed himself, watching, smiling.

  “Not things.”

  “Not things. I see. Not things. What?”

  Marcus remembered Simmonds going on about the mathematical landscape. Beyond that, his hunted mind casting this way and that to escape Bill’s relentless questions.

  “What?” Simmonds insisted gently.

  He closed his eyes and mouth. He opened them furtively and said, “Light. It was the light.” And closed again. Everything he could.

  “Light. I see. What kind of light?”

  “I can’t say. Too much light. It was terrible light; alive, if you see what I …”

  “Oh yes,” said Simmonds, rapt. “Oh yes, I do indeed. Tell me.”

  Marcus opened his mouth and was very sick. When he next knew anything he was lying with his head on some sort of cushion and something, Simmonds’s raincoat, was tucked over and round him. He was cocooned by incapacity. Simmonds’s face reappeared close to his own.

  “You are shocked. You must keep still. Just lie there until you feel more like it. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of everything.”

  He had no choice.

  “I’ll finish what I was doing and we’ll go on with our chat when you’re more the thing.”

  Simmonds was striding up and down along the benches, piling up aluminium lunch-boxes and corked jars. He seemed extraordinarily solid, superlatively normal. He whistled a little, gaily, through his teeth. Marcus remembered the dissection of the earthworm. Simmonds had dropped the worms, enough for the whole class, one by one into a beaker of chloroform, where they frothed and paled. Later, Marcus had had to slit and pin back the livid, rolling skin.

  This room went back a long way, to the humanising intentions of the school’s founders. Here, aided by the study of the development of species, fish, flesh, fowl and frond, the boy should learn to obey the primary commandment: Know Thyself.

  A few stuffed birds, an owl, some terns, a dusty group of robins and wrens, were perched on the top shelves of glass-fronted mahogany cupboards. Under these a wired skeleton lay on its side, joints dangling. Boxes of unstrung vertebrae, tarsals and meta-tarsals, chalky, creamy, rattled on desks by generations of boys like so many Jacks, scattered, swept together, returned to the shelf for next time.

  A case contained things in bottles – kilner jars like those in which his mother preserved gluts of Victoria plums or unripe fallen apples and pears. Jam-jars, test-tubes. Dozens of foetuses. Tiny creamy-pink rats, blunt-headed, blind-eyed, with minute stumps of feet and tails, all rolled together and surely slightly crumbling like cheese in the surrounding liquid. Larger round-bellied ratlings, cord and placenta attached, flat-headed unborn cats, pallid flesh, unformed eyes closed against the glass
wall and the light. Snake embryos, preserved in strings, like beads on a chain, coiled and forever undelivered, bird embryos preserved with the wall of their egg-shell cracked open to show the clenched ball of damp feathers, skinny thighs, flaccid beak. There was an Edwardian monkey embryo, in a mahogany-framed case, a grim homunculus, a brown shrivelled Genius in a bottle.

  Parts of creatures were also preserved, to be handed for inspection from boy to boy, a bottle of lungs, of hearts, of eyes. Marcus remembered particularly the skinned cat’s head, its black-jelly-dark and lustreless eyes in the cloudy liquid, sunk and horrid. And the white rabbit in his ovoid box, his little paws, still furry and clawed, held apart to frame his pale innards, stained crimson, viridian, cobalt, guts, lungs, heart, over which his rabbit teeth grinned and his long ears drooped, squashed against him by the jar.

  There were living things as well: a scuttering white mouse in a treadmill, a tank of water-snails and sticklebacks, a formitory through whose glass walls the dark passages of the ants could be seen, and the ants too, dragging pale pupae from level to level, hurrying and purposeful in mixed light and dark. There was the old experiment with the growth of seeds and photosynthesis. Peas and beans deprived of water, shrivelled and self-contained on cotton-wool. Peas and beans deprived of light poking up, blind and weak, straggling and colourless, their questing points. Warmed peas, cold peas, crowded peas, peas in slanted light and half-light, little blunted energetic tips here; there, already, a bowed uncurling leaf.

  Marcus took another tepid sip of water and turned his attention to the comparative neutrality of diagrams. The urino-genital systems of frogs and rabbits, drawn in Indian ink by Lucas Simmonds, were displayed in two-dimensional good taste near the blackboard. Marcus’s knowledge was sketchy and Lucas’s notation minimal, so that he was quite unable to decide whether certain blunted, wriggling, finger-like shapes were protrusions or pockets, and thus mistook the male for the female rabbit and could see no apparent difference between the frogs.

  Directly opposite the master’s dais, on which he was now lying, hung, side by side, in all their clinical and resolutely unlovely emancipation, Man and Woman. Both were in quadruplicate, on ancient, unrolled strips of parchment-coloured oilcloth. First, they appeared skeletal, next, a flayed and liverish pattern of muscular pulls and directions, next again, a view through the frame to the internal organs. Last, solid and cheesy, naked, steatopygous and hairless, the surfaces of flesh, the thing itself.