The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  Frederica knotted herself into a tangle of polite words about Miss Yeo, from which it emerged that she found her very fluent, bodily and verbally. She spoiled what politeness she had managed by saying that Marina Yeo reminded her of the Tenniel illustration of Alice as serpent frightening the dove. Wilkie said, “Brainy girls like you think everything can be done from the head.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with brains.”

  “Don’t be touchy, dear I never said there was. I love brains. They’re my work.”

  “They said you were going to be a head-shrinker.”

  “No, no, no. An academic psychologist. I intend to study the relations between perception and thought. Not libido, dear girl, thought. The ultimate narcissism, the brain measuring its own ticks and fluctuations. The roots of knowledge.”

  “How can it?”

  “How can it?”

  “How can it know itself? How can it study what itself is? It can’t get outside itself.”

  “Machines, Frederica.”

  “Machines it thought up itself.”

  “Well – not it. Several discrete brains. But it’s a valid point. A closed circle. The brain can’t check the brain’s conclusions about the brain’s conclusions about the brain. No harm in trying, though.”

  Frederica struggled vertiginously with the image of a brain attempting to contemplate itself. A light approaching a light in a mirror. A puff of smoke, an explosion. Coils of grey matter locked in mortal combat with identical coils of grey matter. Brains were busy, yet one imagined them formless and torpid.

  “It would explode,” she claimed hopefully.

  “Now you are imagining it on an electrical model.”

  “No. I see snakes of grey matter battling with other snakes of grey matter.”

  “And fusing? It’s interesting, the constancy of imagery about the concept. Always coils – electrical or serpentine – cells – organic or in batteries – and then this fusing or explosion. Followed, in my case, by nothing. A satisfactory empty space of clear light. To which I shall never attain, being too busy, by nature, and not quite bold enough.”

  Crowe rose to introduce them to each other. Three professionals, men from Stratford and the old Vic, men who had had speaking parts in Olivier’s films. Max Baron, tall, slim, worried-looking, playing Leicester, Crispin Reed and Roger Braithwaite, Burleigh and Walsingham. These two were curiously similar, though make-up would no doubt produce metamorphosis, clean-cut, dark-haired, suede-shoed, with gleaming teeth and rounded voices in which they swapped stories of theatrical near-disaster. They were heavy men but spoke with a combination of unction, emphasis and excitability, an alternate rushing and lingering of delivery, which Frederica could not relate to those two cold watchers, the careful men of power. Bob Grundy from York Rep, another professional, destined for Essex, was already growing a beard.

  The amateurs began with Thomas Poole, head of English at the Calverley Teacher Training College, who was Alexander’s friend, square, blond, silent, and was to play the sage and serious poet, Spenser. Spenser, with Ralegh, formed the chorus. Alexander had spent some lunatic, embarrassing and unprofitable weeks trying to tackle Shakespeare himself. One night he dreamed he was ceremoniously forced to his knees and executed by a masked headman of huge size who was muttering unintelligibly a flow of what Alexander knew, in the dream, to be the true dark current of English. It was, this figure made clear, not Shakespeare, but himself, who could not abide the question. He woke up with sweat cooling in rivulets all over him and thought of Spenser.

  This poet, more remote, more apparently inaccessible, had proved easier to deal with. The lines Alexander had written for him, a sliding, shifting mixture of deliberate theft, loving pastiche, and Alexander’s own clarity were, Alexander thought, possibly the best thing he’d done. The Elizabethan verse ran easily with the parody and the new thing with its source in the old. Eterne in mutabilitie, as Spenser might, himself an incorporator of archaisms, have said of the language, and had said of Adonis; Alexander had incorporated the phrase itself in Astraea. From where, in due course, it found its way into O-level and A-level footnotes. Alexander was glad of Thomas Poole who knew the Faerie Queene and spoke with neutral and musical clarity.

  The women, besides Marina Yeo and Frederica, her youthful shadow, as Crowe put it, were a prim and passionate Calverley teacher type-cast as Mary Tudor, a mountainous lady from Scarborough Rep, Miss Annette Turnbull, who was Lady Lennox, and Mrs Marion Bryce, wife of Canon Bryce of Blesford, who had given up a promising career as an actress to be a church wife and produced annual nativity and passion plays, Christopher Fry and Dorothy L. Sayers, in Calverley Minster. She was dark and bosomy, with liquid, troubled eyes and voice, undeniable presence and great emotional flutter and tension. Her part, though dramatic, was brief, for Alexander hated Mary Queen of Scots and had made her presence felt largely as an absent menace. There was also Jenny, who might not have been there had Alexander not particularly desired it.

  She was already distressed by her attempts at conversation over lunch. She and Wilkie had exclaimed suitably over their dramatic married state. Wilkie had enquired if she did a lot of acting.

  “Oh no. I’ve got a small baby. Quite a small baby, anyway. I don’t get about much. Do you?”

  “I might take it up professionally. One has talent scouts in the dressing room. Quite flattering. Quite lucrative, anyway for a year or two. I think I’ll stick to the grey cells.”

  Frederica had burst in. She meant to act, her father was keen on Cambridge, she feared Cambridge was a distraction. Wilkie’s aquamarine glitter veered her way. He lit a cigarette in a long black holder, an apparition like a proboscis between the glowing moth eyes. He said seriously that she couldn’t do better, at present, than Cambridge, for openings. And she could teach when she was “resting”. Better than coffee bars. She would not teach. Frederica roared, anything else but not teach. Those that can’t, teach. She meant to be good. Even the good rested, Wilkie said drily, but added, quite avuncular, that you couldn’t be good, if you didn’t grind at it, it was true.

  Jenny was alarmed by these brash and brilliant children. At twenty-four she was old, although she could hardly have been more than two years, or less, older than Wilkie, who had done National Service. They were ambitious: they saw themselves wheeling up, up, and over, whereas her horizon was strictly bounded by Geoffrey, Thomas, Blesford Ride and what beyond that but, with luck, little bits of despised teaching? She had been good at acting at Bristol, but it had never occurred to her to try and build on it. She had known that she must solve the problem of marriage and child-bearing first, before she could identify any rational future. She had wanted marriage, without even considering not wanting it, all through her degree, and indeed from before she had even been entered for it. She had no idea at all whether, if she had thought differently, she might have identified herself differently, seen herself brilliant and perhaps become so. She felt dislike, not for Wilkie, who clearly believed he was a genius, but for Frederica, who equally clearly believed herself to be a genius, and expressed this belief comparatively grossly and stridently. That these judgments were a function of sex she was resentfully aware. She had tried to catch Alexander’s eye, to be at least sexually comforted, but he was busy wrapping a stole round Miss Yeo’s shoulders. She tried to attract Wilkie’s attention again, asking him what his research was, what brain processes he studied.

  “On – the relations between visual images and languages. The way we form concepts, ultimately. Whether, as some psychologists think, visual images are more primitive, more fundamental than words, or whether you can’t think without some sort of precise symbolic language. I want to work with eidetic phenomena – people who think by simply visualising. Certain kinds of mathematical genius – Flinders Petrie for example – think visually – visualise a slide-rule and read the numbers off it. One could study interesting relations between visual memory and conceptual memory and analytic thought …”

 
; Frederica, wildly animated, butted in again.

  “My brother could do instant mathematics.”

  “Could he now? And can he still, and how did he do it and what kinds of thing did he do, do you know …”

  “Well,” said Frederica, and began to tell a very garbled version of Marcus’s mathematical Fall, which had been interrupted by Crowe’s rising. One could surely not become invisible at twenty-four, thought Jennifer.

  Crowe led his guests into the library, where various sketches and mock-ups were displayed. Along one table ran a scaled-down recreation of terrace and trees, with various movable bright pavilions and aery throne-rooms that could be wheeled on and off. There was a cardboard White Tower and a Coronation litter in matchsticks and string and gauze. It was like one of those box-within-a-box microcosms, model village or Russian doll, where the model village contains in its precinct a model model village, which in its turn, like the smallest faceless green pear-shape, contains undifferentiated white kernels, houses or emperors too small for human hand to carve or eye to divide. Or like the gardens of Adonis, miniature landscapes of corn, lettuce, fennel, put out at his feast to flower and die, thrown out, like the effigies of Death and Carnival, when the dancing was over, to propitiate the river.

  On the table were Alexander’s drawings. He had not begun these with the intention of showing them to anyone. They were a product of his obsession at its height. The writing had led him, half-scholarly, half-besotted, to portraits, miniatures, the garments themselves, in the V and A. And then he had taken to drawing his people late at night. It was Crowe, having elicited the information that the drawings existed, who had carried off a sheaf of them. A possible designer had already produced preliminary sketches, thematically linked in colour along lines to be traced in Alexander’s text, red and white, green and gold, Tudor roses, rosettes of ribbons. Burleigh and Walsingham red and white, Spenser and Ralegh green and gold, the Queen all of these. But Alexander’s love of particularity had revolted. He had intended, partly, a thick and accurate realism, a richness thinned by these blatant schemes. He only showed the drawings to Crowe to explain what was wanted. Though he knew more than drawing: could place hooks and eyes, tucks, facings and darts. He had always done wardrobe for school plays.

  The actors gathered and exclaimed. Alexander had given some of the small figures the faces of their originals, and some those of the actors who were to play them. Ralegh in his black velvet rayed with pearls was Ralegh. Leicester, for all his patchy pale beard, peered under Max Baron’s anxious brow. The Queen’s costumes were inhabited by shifting faces and figures. Over a ceremonious ruff glared the chalky, beaked worn face of the white and gold Queen who bestrode England in the thunderstorm portrait. Above the pleated night-gown appeared a hybrid face with Marina Yeo’s huge mouth and serpentining neck under Elizabeth’s high plucked brows and piled wig. Frederica found her own gowns, which pleased her; a white and gold dress to be imprisoned in, a green and gold dress to run in Catherine Parr’s orchard. She was put out to see that the face above the dresses, in these drawings, was an empty oval.

  Alexander had been secretly self-indulgent with Bess Throckmorton. He had done her in water-coloured imitation of Hilliard, and given her Jenny’s nervous eager little face over Jenny’s known round breasts inside the true Bess’s lacy fan collar. She was holding down billowing coral skirts backed up against a Hilliard white rose-tree on a precisely pricked out carpet of white violets and pied daisies. Only the woman’s garments in this idyllic spring scene were troubled by the anomalous gust of wind. Alarmed by his own to him glaring representation of feelings in this picture, he had tried to make it appear more technical by drawing in details of plackets, laces, points, round its margins and had only, to his eye, so accustomed to reading dark conceits, made his meaning more apparent. He gave himself the pleasure of watching Jenny study herself in his palely bright and orderly little wood, looked over her shoulder as she said, “I recognise the woman up against the tree.”

  “Swisser swatter,” cried Wilkie behind them.

  “That’s in my play,” said Alexander. Crowe, behind them again, finished off the Aubrey quotation.

  “As the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cried out in ecstasy Nay sweet Sir Walter. Which became swisser swatter.”

  “She proved with child, and they were put in the Tower,” said Wilkie. “Lovely petticoats, Mr Wedderburn. I shall enjoy those.”

  Frederica caught Alexander’s arm as he was about to follow Jennifer.

  “Caught you,” she said, arch through embarrassment. Alexander, with a whole summer of Jennifer before him, felt kindly.

  “I’ll show you something, Frederica. Look at this.”

  He took out of a brown paper parcel a long narrow strip of velvet, dark red.

  “Something time went past. Matthew found it; he was having the chairs recovered, and found this rolled in the stuffing. Fresh as when they tucked it in, under James I.”

  He hung it from his hands in the light.

  “If you hang velvet the wrong way you lose the sheen. The life goes. This hangs this way. Look.” His fingers caressed the brown-bright pelt. “Look how the light changes in this – from silver through blood to black. Carnation – a shade darker than russet – a corruption of incarnate. Dark flesh colour, darker than all the sonneteers’ damask roses and cherry lips. The thing itself.”

  “You do like things, Alexander.”

  “You sound critical. Don’t you?”

  “No one’s ever expected me to. I’ve got a good Yorkshire respect for a good weight of wool and a decent sharp blade. That’s about it.”

  “Maybe your age. Life thickens as you get older. I doubt if I’d have been so entranced by the objects in this house at your age.”

  “It’s all too much for me. I don’t see it. I’m the austerity generation. Butter and cream and oranges and lemons are mythological entities for us, you know. Daddy liked it. Utility bread and chairs and dried egg and marge. All these carvings and hangings just make me uneasy.”

  Alexander said to Crowe, “Here’s Frederica saying she has no feeling for your things because of the war.”

  Crowe raised his silvery brows at her.

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “It is. They intimidate me. There’s too much.”

  “Not if you know it. I shall show you my beautiful house and teach you to see detail. We shall start with the plaster-work in the Great Hall. Have you looked at the plaster?”

  She had noticed that there was a plaster frieze running round the Great Hall, under the gallery. She had taken in no more than a vague impression of forest trees, naked running figures and animals, in chalky relief. Now, staring obediently at this, she saw that the figures were both vigorous and slightly wooden, an uneasy marriage of the English and the classical. She located a man becoming a stag, a creature whose tortured energy of metamorphosis was something like that of the foliate men in Southwell Minster: stretched sinews, hardening distorted feet, spreading rib-cage, branching horns, creamy-furred dewlap and opening muzzle-mouth under a human brow.

  “Actaeon,” said well-educated Frederica.

  “Right,” said Crowe. “This wall depicts the tale of Diana and Actaeon. The other is about Venus hunting the errant Cupid. Over the hearth, you see, the two goddesses meet, Cupid is tamed and berated and Actaeon is neatly butchered. The whole thing is in my view a continual allegory. Much livelier than most English plaster. Look at the pretty goddesses.”

  Frederica looked at the pretty goddesses. They appeared and reappeared in scenes which melted into each other, giving the repeated concrete figures a multiplicity or ubiquity. Diana stood high-breasted, thin, tall, in a circular pool amongst bulrushes with human Actaeon peering behind a boulder. The observer’s eye was behind the observing hunter, and could thus see the human muscles on his shoulders and buttocks. In the next scene the irate goddess and a bevy of delicate-muscled maidens overlooked the change from man to
beast and then followed the long hunt, dog-feet, girl-feet, horse-hooves flowing like white vertical waves through white flowers and white tree-stems whilst Cupid appeared and reappeared with his toy bow and the goddess leaped, took aim, and reappeared in the next clearing. Towards the hearth a procession of maidens bore the dead weight of the broken body swinging from long poles to where the goddesses, triumphant, in pallid pleats and floral garlands sat throned, hand in hand, above the fireplace.

  On the other side of the room, in a style much less fluid and more artificial, Venus awoke in a forest bedchamber, its walls made of ambivalently decorative white trees or pillars with foliate heads. She flew off in a dove-drawn chariot, alighted in a tiny walled city on a pastoral hill where peasants and miniature sheep and cows pointed to white wounds to show her son had passed and vanished. Venus was more rounded than Diana and wore her elaborately woven girdle over exiguous garments through the fine lines of which her limbs swelled prettily. Wherever she stood white flowers budded from the earth and fell through the white air in sprigs and posies. Her face had a smiling calm as Diana’s had a cold one: together, at the end, amongst formalised wreckage of weeping, bleeding nymphs, victims of Cupid’s arrows, and the stiff deer-man laid out for the knife, they were somewhat disturbing. Frederica said so. Crowe said she was right, and that it was his belief that they were an oblique commentary on the attitude of Elizabeth to Johanna Seale, daughter of the house, whose fate had been much like that of Bess Throckmorton. Virginity and venery had destroyed that lady, who had died young, brought to bed of a second son, most unwisely conceived during her imprisonment. There was a loyal icon of the Queen herself over the entrance to the Hall, opposite the goddesses, which was apposite to Alexander’s play and might interest Frederica.