The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  The minute hand reached the appointed stroke. Marcus gathered and excluded his body, looked into the dark and saw the swimming figure, in its no-space. Quiet deepened down. He waited.

  He saw grasses. At first, briefly, he saw what he identified as the flower of lords and ladies, pointed pale green hood bowed over the purplish-brown spadix. This was replaced by the brilliantly clear grasses, a substantial handful of them, folded in some large green leaf, hanging their seeded ears out and low. They were varied kinds: fescues, rye grass, couch grass, meadow grass, hair grass, silky bent and quaking grass. They were silver-green, green-gold, pale and glassy, clear, new elm-leaf green and darker, bitter marshy-green. Fine lines down their stems glistened like stretched hairs: their finely swollen joints were glossy and shiny. If he had walked across a meadow, over a moor, by a river, he would have trodden down thousands. Here they seemed almost impossible in their intricacy and difference one from another. Also beautiful. Marcus was not one for beauty: he had early given that up as a value, in his imaginary mudscape: he had been frequently told to identify it, and had looked the other way. He did not now use the word to himself – in any case, he was occupied simply with seeing – but the pleasure that accompanied the seeing was an intense recognition of something satisfactory in colour, variety, form. Once or twice what Lucas had sent him had taken this particular form of a variety of related natural objects – eggs, vertebrae, stones and shells. On all occasions it had had this overplus of intense aesthetic pleasure. He did not know, indeed, he did not ask, if the feeling had been transmitted with the grasses, if it was Lucas’s or his own. As he watched, the grasses faded and for a time a strange transparent glassy shade of them hovered and trembled, each tube now defined as a translucent colourless cylinder by the light of its circumference, each seed, each sharp husk or falling spikelet revealed in its implicated, minute combing of particles. If one did not count such things, one frequently, Marcus frequently, remembered a large amount of exact numbers – of grasses, of ears, even of spikelets. Lucas would have preserved the grasses themselves for a check.

  When the inner eye was emptied the primary geometry recurred, known, rather than seen – that is, Marcus sensed its shape rather as if he had heard it, or known it in the way one knows a chair one is about to occupy, or an obstacle one must avoid in the dark. He could have made it materialise, ropes or planes of looped fibre or tracery or light, but chose not, and cast about for something to send back through its funnel. His look lit on hell mouth on the opposite wall. He had started to scan and map and absorb it before the flicker of doubt about the propriety of the subject, and by then it had chosen itself. It yawned energetically, a squared oval, red and deep and cracking between strongly curving portcullis tusks. Above it dragon nostrils flared and smoked and round black eyes bulged and stared. Around the lower jaws a crowd of black matchstick demons capered with curling tails and hooked pitchforks: between the teeth, in diminishing clouds, tiny figures flew like chaff, or lay baled, waiting the push. Marcus’s eidetic vision composed itself to include what it had not previously remarked: clouds of insect-like creatures somewhat realistically swarming over ears and nostrils as though the thing were a cow recumbent in a summer field: hairy ears pricked above the gateway: black bristles on ochre skin like slashes of infantile rain. It was a bit obvious, but even so, it would serve: Lucas was not to know which of the famous paintings he might select, even if he might have them, in general, in mind. Having fixed outlines and details Marcus went on staring and ceased attending, became blank and blanker, a way of work he had found peculiarly effective but had to recover from. So it was this time. When, suddenly, the pull between himself and fading hell mouth was relaxed he felt the church chill and heavy: its goings-on, which he had excluded, became oppressive.

  They were singing “Teach me my God and King”, which Stephanie had chosen because it was by Herbert. Marcus turned his attention to the bride and groom, feeling his hand and cheek clammy on the now warmish stone.

  He tried to make geometrical sense – a strong design – out of the fine, crisped, overlying triangles in the slopes of that veiling. His eye was always peculiarly attracted by transparencies over transparencies. But no sense could be made: the thing produced the random frustration of certain car or bus numbers he hated to travel with, near-weak, vague numbers, neither prime nor particularly variable, but with one or at most two possible threads of relation to tighten. It was a senseless cocoon. In retrospect an analogous dissatisfaction struck him about the crossings of the lines of the visionary grasses. They would not go. He did not in any way have it in him to do a little mental rearrangement, a little design of his own, using this material, to get it right. As it was, so he saw it. He began to be uncomfortable between this vague web and the very much overdesigned web of the church’s geometry, closed to convey openness, heavy to suggest lightness. He stared glumly at Daniel’s wide black back and was suddenly affected by it as he had been at the Coronation. Black absorbed light and did not reflect it. Black gave out radiant heat: it was dark and warm. The lines of energy, the fuzz of forces went into that solid flesh and ceased, coiled and rested, or so it seemed. He looked flatly at Daniel’s unbowed, unmoving shoulder-blades, humped a little below the cloth. He stopped thinking. He felt hungry. He yawned. He struggled inside his best suit and good shoes and got up to follow the family to the vestry.

  In the vestry they all nestled and chattered. Alexander approached his charge and said, “A kiss for the bride.” Daniel said, “Me first,” turned back the veil, and kissed her firmly. The vestry was small and stony with one little high window, heavily leaded. Marcus thought he might go out again, to make breathing-space. Winifred wiped up some tears, when Daniel kissed Stephanie.

  They signed the register, scratching and spidery. Daniel Thomas Orton. Stephanie Jane Potter. Morley Evans Parker. Alexander Miles Michael Wedderburn.

  Stephanie found Daniel’s Mum looking up at her. Mrs Orton hooked a little hand over the white arm and said confidentially, in a chesty whisper, “I do like to hear folk speak up. I suppose our Daniel gets lots of practice. But you spoke up lovely.”

  Stephanie stared down. “I get lots of practice too, in my job.”

  “Aye, I expect you would. I were that shy at my own wedding, I couldn’t get up more than a whisper, me throat were so dry, and I were all shaky. But you were cool as a cucumber.”

  “It doesn’t all seem quite real yet,” said Stephanie, conventionally and truthfully. She didn’t want to be touched: she would have been glad to be able to shake the clutching little fingers off her arm. They were covered with spotted grey transparent nylon, through which the flesh took on strange tinges of brick, and brown, and bluish-purple.

  “Aye, well it’ll dawn on you gradual,” said Daniel’s Mum, with a certain grim satisfaction. “You can’t expect to tek it in all at once, like.” She gave a peremptory little tug on Stephanie’s arm, preluding a confidence, and Stephanie bowed her head over her. She had discovered – indeed, it was the only thing she did know about her – that Daniel’s Mum saw life through a stream of endlessly dredgeable, endlessly self-referring anecdotes.

  “T’other night I dreamed I were young again, I war young Clarrie Rawlings, and there was Barry Tammadge – a young man as I used to be friendly wi’ – and we were walking out, and he were pressing me, like – and I were saying, well, I don’t know, and, it might be, and, we’ll have to see, won’t we, and all the while I knew there was some reason I couldn’t, you know, something I’d gone and forgotten like. And when I woke up I cast about and it were a good five minutes, must have been, before it came to me I were a married woman. And widowed, and Dan’s Dad buried these thirteen years.

  “I were married in 1922 and there it was all gone out of my head. Funny, that. It were so natural to be young and courting, as though all the rest hadn’t gone by, as though I’d never taken me wedding right in, though Brian is gone, and has been all these years. Sometimes I look at me own hands and I thin
k, whose are those then, old woman’s? But there it is. E’d have liked to see our Dan married, Dad would. We did have doubts as to whether he’d make it, him being so religious, which is inclined to put people off, and so fat into th’ bargain, which naturally made him shy, like. But he’s a good lad, in his way, I will say for him, and his Dad’d have been right proud to see him so well set up.”

  Stephanie continued to lean foolishly over this new mother, unable to think of a word in answer to these confidences. She was rescued by Mr Ellenby who was forming his reverse bridal procession. He coiled the trail of incongruous pairs: bride and groom, Morley Parker and Frederica, Alexander and Winifred, Marcus and Daniel’s Mum, round the vestry table, signalled the organ, and got them going out again.

  Daniel smiled around the church. He felt more that it was his, on this one progress as bridegroom, than he did proceeding towards his vicarious handshakes on ordinary days. He felt like a conqueror. He had brought it off. Against odds. His wife paced beside him in her drooping garments. He himself strode out jauntily, almost springing. He turned his head this way and that, surveying the flock, grinning a little with a primitive huge pleasure in the fact that they were there, and as they were, in their Sunday best, all different, portly and willowy, grey and gleaming, greedy and melancholy. They were all right, they were in the right place. He gave them private nods and happy acknowledgments. He saw Mrs Thone, sitting very still, her hands folded in her twilled silk lap, her face set and stony under a brimmed dark hat. He registered this stillness, dropped his smile, gave her a brief, harsh look that showed he had seen her, and went on to smile with unabated delight at the becks and bobs of the school matron behind her.

  They came out onto the doorstep where they stood for some time, in twos, threes, groups, for the photographers. During this time Daniel said to Stephanie,

  “I heard my Mum telling you what was what.”

  “She seemed to think one didn’t believe one was really married until – until one was dead – or something.”

  “Depends who you are. I doubt she exactly wanted to know. I reckon it’ll take us a bit of time to know what’s hit us. But not that long, I hope. At any rate, I’m enjoying this so far.”

  “Are you?”

  “Of course I am. We’re getting on fine. It’s all great fun.”

  She took his hand and looked up at him, and all the cameras appropriately clicked.

  Daniel included his Mum in his pleasure in the present solidity of the people around him. He had not, oddly, felt either alarmed or embarrassed to hear her discussing his fatness and churchiness with Stephanie. More a great, rash, comic glee. He was here, and married as he chose to be, and she was his mother. His little mother, with her thick humped pad of flesh across her upper back, with her small body now shapelessly squared above her narrow, bowed legs and thickened ankles. He was amused by the structure of her face, tremulous, greying, spattered with brown skin-stains, petulant with vanished prettiness like a ghost in the pout of the mouth and the pleat of the eye-corners. She wore on her head a kind of shiny, squashy bowl of unreal violet straw with a bundle of plaster holly-berries, cloth cornflowers, limp marguerites and bristling emerald feathers. Under this her thinning hair was permed into rigorous little coils; he remembered when she had had soft golden curls, much prized, hair that in her generation had led her to be labelled “a beauty” before she had any choice in the matter. She was hung about in a square crêpe dress with large purple and white flowers on, a modesty front of fluted lace, a rusty black winter coat. He did not like her. But with some quite other part of him he was simply delighted that she was there, just as she was, and that he knew it. He was even delighted that he knew that, and how, the grey coils had been gold.

  30. Masters’ Garden

  Alexander found himself alone outside the church, waiting for the white ribboned car to come back for him. He felt happy and English. Bells sounded their clear, limited, recurrent jargon, notes tumbling over each other and caught up. The grass between the graves, thick with daisies, was soft and silent. He was a man who made detours to be alone in such places, green and still and stony, a man who felt reverent in porches, a man moved by stones, mossed over, rain-pitted, sooty, leaning displaced on railings and walls. Churchyards made more of Alexander. He drifted off down a path under dark flowering yews. Tennyson had written that yew trees, the males anyway, standing separate, smoked with pollen if you struck them. Idly, curiously, Alexander gave one of them a random blow and saw that it was indeed so, a living smoke did indeed go up into the still summer air, spin a little, and settle on his sleek morning suit.

  Someone, bystander, gardener, delayed wedding-guest, was loitering at the far end of the graveyard. Alexander picked his way delicately, with long pale grey legs, over two yellowing, newly-turfed hummocks. The air was so thick and slow he could not have called out.

  The man wore a crumpled summer suit in an intense colour which Alexander thought of as electric blue, without knowing what kind of blue electricity might truly be. Over this he wore an elderly, deep-crowned panama. He was squatting against a Victorian tombstone-slab, poking with a sharp stick at the encrustations of moss over the lettering. As Alexander came nearer he did not look up. His shoes were muddy brown veldtschoen.

  “Bill,” said Alexander, wondering if he should really have tiptoed mutely back the way he had come.

  “I trust it is finished,” said Bill, still jabbing at the stone. “It took an unconscionable long time. I take it there was no hitch.”

  “No.”

  “Flattish strains of jubilation crept by me across the graves from time to time, whilst I was prowling around. I thought this was as near as I should decently get.” He rattled his stick in the holes of an imitation marble flower holder, which contained some browned dahlias and stiffening cornflowers. He read out his handiwork.

  “Peace, perfect peace with loved ones far away

  In Jesus’ bosom we are safe and they.

  Ambiguous, don’t you think, and not totally coherent. I suppose I even hoped someone might rise up mightily and proclaim a cause or just impediment. But I gather no such luck?”

  “No,” said Alexander. Bill rocked back squat on his heels and gestured up at him with his implement.

  “I suppose you think I’m overdoing it. I suppose you think blood should call. I suppose you think I should have given up my profound beliefs and gone in there. I don’t suppose you see that I could not, I simply could not.”

  “I haven’t said so.”

  “English mollysoft politeness before anything else. Sheep. At least I take it seriously.”

  “It was very moving,” said Alexander, leaning gracefully against a newish marble stone, to prevent green staining on his nacreous sleeve. “I was moved.”

  “You would be. Anything moves you. I saw you, batting trees. ‘Thy gloom is kindled at the tips And passes into gloom again.’ Remember that, in your clouds of fruitful smoke, or whatever. Gloom, gloom. That’s what I see.”

  “Bill, they were very happy.”

  “Like sheep, sheep, temporary sheep. I wanted something real for her.”

  Alexander could almost hear the hissing and spurt of his wrath. He was reminded of his perpetual image of Bill Potter as a fire smouldering in the inwards of a straw stack. He felt a vague responsibility to douse this one, and did not know how. He said, “I don’t see why you should mind quite so much.”

  Bill turned sharply. “You don’t? You think I exaggerate? You think I’m putting it on.”

  “No, no,” said Alexander soothingly.

  “I wanted something real for her.”

  Nettled, Alexander said, “Daniel is a real man. By any standards, I’d say.”

  “Would you? Now that’s where I doubt, I do genuinely doubt, if it’s possible. In that world. Embalmed zombies. Christ. No one’s interested in that aspect of it, they think I’ve no manners, he’s a nice enough chappie according to his lights, serious and so on. It’s not a question of ma
nners. The English panacea, good form. Good form, dead form. No, no. It’s a question of life. And that’s not in there.” He flung a crumpled hot arm in the direction of the church and nearly over-balanced.

  “You think I should extend a loving hand and dance at the wedding?”

  Alexander was not at all sure what he thought about this. All he could say, however, was, “Yes, of course.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Alexander looked at him gravely.

  “However, you have persuaded me. I will come with you. You were going there, I take it?”

  “Oh yes,” said Alexander.

  They got into the car together, and there was another delay whilst Bill instructed the driver to furl and stow away his white ribbons. “Most unsuitable,” he said to Alexander, leaning back on the grey cushions and pushing the panama almost down to the bridge of his nose. “We are neither virgins, nor cakes, nor festive. Certainly not festive. Lambs to the slaughter, you might say, but we’ll go quietly without bows, I think.”

  The Masters’ Garden had elements of the ultimate garden in Alice, with its locked door in the high wall. Like everyone else Bill and Alexander made their way down the steep alley from the school and peered in. It was a rectangular walled plot: Alexander was perennially irritated by the limited imagination apparent in its layout. On the far wall was a kind of raised embankment with a paved ridge: at one end of this was a mock orange bush and at the other a waterless weeping willow. Here he had staged The Lady’s Not for Burning; from behind these inadequate bushy brakes he had sprung in scarlet tights and black jerkin. Today trestle-tables, hung with much-laundered school damask, were balanced on the paving stones. On those were a cold buffet, two worn urns of coffee and tea, and a two-tiered, doric-pillared, blue-white cake. Alexander would have planted lavenders and lings, thymes and rosemarys, espalier peaches and pears. There should have been clematis and briar roses tumbling over the gate. But the uniform beds round the plot of grass were laid out in tidy rows of scarlet salvia, blue lobelia, white alyssum, in patriotic streaks, with two or three clumps of crudely brilliant petunias. Alexander disliked puce, and the more clamant purples. Along the margins of the hoed earth trotted school waitresses with foaming bottles and flat glasses.