The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  He pondered the tone of the word “just”. He picked it up.

  “Why don’t you? We need a rest. Just a rest. I feel done in,” he said untruthfully. She bent down, at this, and eased off her shoes. Without the stiletto heels she looked dumpy and middle-aged in the squarish linen suit and circular hat she had Gone Away in.

  “You could take your hat off, as well,” said Daniel, staring at her with interest. She still did not look at him. She did take off the hat, revealing the shining, tidy yellow rolls of her hair. Daniel thought it was, or had been, longer. If you pulled it, would it float out, or spring back, like a metal coil, or was there simply less? In a week, or a month, he would know her hair. The thought gave him a great and simple pleasure. She walked through to the bedroom, carrying hat and shoes, and Daniel followed her. She left dark, elegant, damp footprints on the linoleum. These stirred him. In the bedroom she put the hat on the chest of drawers, and the shoes beside the bed and came out again, quickly, Daniel still padding after her. She sat down on the sofa and held her feet up to the air, wriggling toes and ankles.

  Everything seemed terrible to her, terrible, dark and final. All these new implements, the unaccustomed net and lace, the solidity of Daniel’s things, all over, big worn black shoes in the wardrobe, huge dressing-gown bellying from the bedroom door, prayer-book on the chest, next to the male hairbrush, with coarse black hairs in it. She looked up and about, for airholes in the box. Around and above different wirelesses jangled and crooned different tunes. Outside feet thudded and voices suddenly shrilled:

  Our Gloria is a fool

  Like a donkey on a stool

  When the stool began to crack

  All the fleas ran down her back.

  Stephanie’s face twitched in and out of a brief smile. The song was repeated. It was repeated again. And again. She wished Daniel would stop looking at her. It left her nowhere to rest her eyes.

  “Why don’t you lie down?” he suggested. “Close your eyes. Have a nap.” He wanted to say, I won’t touch you, but that offended some sense he had of the proprieties of a wedding day. “Go on,” he said, making his voice deliberately inert. He could see her thinking. She said, “All right,” in a toneless voice. She stood up and went into the bedroom. In there, there was just room for the bed, a chair, the chest, a little rug. He watched her slide off her skirt, her shirt, her jacket. He went round her and closed the curtains. She got quickly into the bed, extended herself, in slip and stockings, stole one glance at Daniel and closed her eyes. After a moment he took off some of his own clothes and lay down carefully beside her. She was screwed up, eyelids, mouth, little fists on the pillow by her cheek, even the stockinged feet. He gave a large, deliberate sigh, kissed her briefly on the brow, clasped his hands under his head, and stared darkly at the shadowed ceiling. To his subsequent surprise, he slept.

  They woke, after an indeterminate time, when it was dark, a dusty summer dark. They had moved together on the new bed, in a dip created by Daniel’s weight. He felt her struggle vaguely to raise herself, and he put out a heavy arm and pinned her down. “Here,” he said. “Here I am.” She turned her head sideways, between his pillow and hers, and he could see her shining eyes staring quietly in the dark. “Come on,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” Lovers’ talk stands on a fine edge between babbling folly and wholly explicit plainness, depending simply on whether it is heard as it is said, or not. He could not tell, at all, if she was listening. “I love you,” he said hopefully. She made a small sound. Her lips, he thought, moved. “Hmm?” said Daniel. “I love you,” she said in a little voice. He had no idea what she meant by it. He pulled at some of her straps. She did not resist. Awkwardly, in silence, accompanied by jingling piano above his head, and Glenn Miller a few feet beyond the bed-foot, conscious of his weight on her small if buxom frame, and on the new bedsprings, which twanged, Daniel consummated his marriage. There was a moment during this time, when his face was on hers, cheek on cheek, brow on brow, heavy skull on skull, through soft skin and softer flesh. He thought: skulls separate people. In this one sense, I could say, they would say, I lose myself in her. But in that bone box, she thinks and thinks, as I think in mine, things the other won’t hear, can’t hear, though we go on like this for sixty years. What does she think I am? He had no idea. He had no idea what she was. Alone in the vicarage, he had had an idea, he had addressed a clear enough figure of her, who laughed, and answered, sitting on his bed, in his chair, swinging imaginary legs. He opened his eyes in a hurry to see the outside of her face and not the red and black inside of his own head, dark and flaming. He saw closed lashes, damp frowning brow, precisely tight lips, a series of signs, indicating closure. All the same, he thought, I am here. I am here whatever she thinks. This was as near as he got to triumph.

  After this, she became astonishingly lively, as though she now again understood the social forms that obtained. She sat up briskly.

  “Maybe we should eat Mrs Ellenby’s supper.”

  “We don’t have to.”

  “Well, it was nice of her, it’ll be on my mind, just lying around …”

  “I thought you weren’t hungry.”

  “I am, I am now, horribly hungry.”

  “Well, if that’s so, obviously we’ll eat it.”

  So they washed, and dressed, and sat across the table from each other and ate the chicken, and the two salads, green and fruit, and drank some of the wine. During this meal she chattered. He had never known her to chatter, but now she ran on fluently with a public social intimacy quite different from her usual lazy or thoughtful silences. She made sprightly remarks about the wedding, hats, mannerisms, awkward moments, the capacious urns and the frosted tier of cake they had in a tin in the kitchen, the disposition of their books and pictures, the view from the kitchen window, the cupboard that always stuck, the need to replace the awful overhead light-fitting with something milder and more welcoming. She arranged stones from the maraschino cherries in the fruit salad round her plate, even counting these with nursery jingles and ancient magical rhymes. One for silver, two for gold … He said yes, and no, even made a blundering attempt to join in, since he had a parish capacity to plump out the surfaces of a battered cushion of gossip, but he felt obscurely he was being treated as a woman, fed kitchen chit-chat as pabulum, denied and neutralised.

  He had not been a member of a family. He had no experience of, no gift for, that kind of communication that consists of the conversion into matter-of-language of all the bare and self-sufficient matter-of-fact of a day endured. He had heard it going on, but he hadn’t time for it, he preferred, and encountered, extremity. He had never really heard the anonymous recuperating voice that speaks on and on over lunch and of an evening, telling what is known or will be forgotten. Saying, half-a-dozen eggs, when I distinctly said a dozen, too bad really, a very lovely shade of rose-pink, rather like that blouse of yours, not the one you had on last Saturday but that one I haven’t seen for six months, with the embroidery, gas is better than electricity, I always swear by it, you can turn it up and down so economically though the surfaces are much more difficult to clean, I tried very hard to get silverside but all they had was brisket, what you’re eating, actually, a bit fatty, I think you’ll agree, but there was really no choice, so I put in a few extra peppercorns, nice bits tend to be tastier on brisket even if it is fattier, or may be because it is …

  She ran on. Why should she tell him, damn it, the gladioli were red, and red wasn’t a colour she cared for, when he could see they were red and had known for months that she didn’t like it? A clutter of talk derealised and still emphasised a clutter of things. He didn’t exactly think that out: he was hazed: he chewed his chicken. She still spoke brightly. What she touched with words was for her defused and neutralised; acceptable. She moved verbally round inside the confines of the flat, appropriating, in this primitive way, a mirror she didn’t want by declaring it to be the right size to make the little lobby look larger, coming to terms with the bathroom tiles
, in that windowless tiny room, with words like cucumber and avocado, with the voiced hope that their shrieking could be muted if one had matching bath-mat and curtains in a much deeper version of the same shade. He had no recollection of the bathroom tiles. He said he was sure she was right. She pushed cherry pits and grape pips nervously round the rim of her fruit-dish with a spoon. The fruit salad had been heady with some dark and potent wine in the syrup. She asked him was it sherry or port, and he said he was sure he didn’t know, the Mothers’ Union madeira at a guess, not the altar wine at any rate, that was very thin and acid. Quite a kick, it had, she said. That too, he didn’t need telling.

  She washed up, with a kind of formality, and he helped her. She wrung out a number of cloths, and polished the draining board, whilst he watched her. She made some coffee and he drank a little. She went in and out of bathroom and bedroom, doing things he couldn’t identify and took no interest in. As she touched the circumference of the flat it became tolerable to her: as she touched it, it closed in on him. He thought of the streets, out there. He got up, after a time, and went into the kitchen, where he stood in the dark, staring out. Two lights, a midsummer moon and a sodium cube on a concrete pole lit the sleek cut surfaces of the clods of clay, making it glitter like motionless waves on a thick, still sea. The hawthorn trunk and the coil of black tyre were sooty-dark, but the surface of the hawthorn leaves was dappled and patched with moony white and stained with acid orange. He pushed his hands down into his pockets, pushed his shoulders up, settled into silence.

  In the end she came up quietly behind him.

  “Daniel –”

  “Hmn.”

  “What are you doing, in the dark?”

  “I don’t know.” Loudly. “I don’t know.” It was a declaration. “I thought you were sure you did.”

  She put a hand on his arm, which he shrugged away. She stepped back, and stood very still. After a time, she said, “You were the one, you were the only one, who knew what he was doing.”

  He didn’t answer: she saw him indistinctly, a big black mass against a black window-pane. She remembered his sudden burst of wrath in the Vicarage. That day in Miss Wells’s room. He had done it all, it was all his doing. She took hold of his arm again, and pulled herself up on her toes and kissed his hard cheek. He jerked his face away: she felt his anger, crackling on his skin. She tried to kiss him again, making a little cajoling noise, which she did not mean, which was neither here nor there, since by now he had her attention, except that it roused him to fury. He turned round and grabbed for her, cracking her in his arms, twisting at her hair and grinding her face under his. They stumbled back through the flat into the bedroom. He remembered now, the first time he saw her, he had wanted to break her. He caught her a kind of blow across the shoulders. She subsided. He thought again, I am here.

  Later he said, I am hurting you, and she cried angrily, no, no, no, you are not. Later still he was lost, and opened his eyes to see her sitting, naked, staring at him, both faces running with tears and sweat, both heads of hair soaked. His face was too stretched and tired to smile. Hers had a rigid, mask-like look that, he imagined, mirrored his own. He touched her hot breast, and nodded at her. She put a hand over his.

  Later again he woke, and woke her, and made love to her for a long time, quietly. If he did not know who she was, this was desirable, they were both in the same place, that was all. They were anonymous, it was dark, he did not know what either of them felt, but he felt it. Now there was no extraneous music.

  As for her, she had the thought, in words, that this was truly the only time in her life when her attention had all been gathered in one place – body, mind, and whatever dreams or makes images. Then the images took over. She had always a very vague imagining of the inner spaces of her body, dark interior flesh, black-red, red-black, flexible and shifting, larger than she imagined herself from outside, with no kind of graspable perspective, no apparent limits. If Daniel defined these spaces by moving amongst their shape-shifting chambers and blind vistas, they neither contained nor were contained by this definition. This inner world had its own clear landscape. It grew with precise assurance, light out of dark, sapphire rising in the black-red, wandering in rooted caverns, glassy blue running water between carved channels of basalt, and coming out into fields of flowers, light green stalks, airy leaves, bright flowers moving and dancing in wavering tossing lines to the blown grass of a cliff over a pale bright strand beyond which shone the pale bright sea. They have their own lights, Virgil said of his underworld, and this too, however bright, with the clarity of more than a summer’s day, was seen in its own light, knowing it was seen against dark, had risen out of dark, was in the warm dark. It was seen, not with the memory’s eye for recollection or recognition, but with the blind boy’s vision, and the light came off it, was in it, shone through flower stalk and running water, in the rippling heads of the flowers and corn, a sunless sea brimming with its own shining, white blowing sand with a night sky just beyond vision. She was this world and walked in it, strayed lingering and rapid between the line of leaves and the line of sand and the line of the fine water, the line perpetually glittering and falling, perpetually renewed.

  PART III: REDIT ET VIRGO

  32. Saturnalia

  The Long Royston gardens filled with voices and bodies, gilded palanquins and floodlights with serpentining wires. The bedrooms, the upper rabbit-runs where once armies of servants had slept invisible, were now inhabited by actors, technicians, property people and hangers-on. Coaches and charabancs carrying crowds, orchestras, dancers and ultimately audiences rolled in from Calverley, York, Scarborough and points north, south, west and east as far as the sea. These battalions were summoned by Matthew Crowe, who charted their movements in time and space on ordnance survey maps and calendars in the Great Hall. He was a wizard with brilliant multi-coloured tacks. He made rehearsal charts in different coloured inks, emerald, ultramarine, vermilion, on spreads of graph paper. He showed people through the intricacies of these with a school-masterly ferule borrowed by Alexander from Blesford Ride. He pointed paths also through his own domain: pleasure garden, winter garden, herb garden, water garden, Ancient Maze, called Roman, but much older. He had had it surveyed from a helicopter and made new with sand and little box hedges.

  Hampers of paper roses and crates of bill-hooks and rapiers arrived in delivery vans to be stored in stables and disused sculleries. Beer came early in large quantities and champagne in lesser ones. Sounds and strange airs arose from hidden plots and copses. From the rose garden a counter-tenor offered repeatedly the assurance that here dwelt no serpents, no devouring bears. In the kitchen garden a Spanish accent struggled with tongue-twisting anathematising sibilants. Nymphs and shepherds danced in perspiring circles on the lawns beyond the ha-ha.

  Crowe told Marina Yeo, who was sleeping under the moony coverlids under Cynthia descending, that the affair was taking on the proportions of one of the Virgin Queen’s State Progresses. Miss Yeo, staring regally at him over champagne on his terrace in the golden evening said she assumed that was how he meant it to be. Crowe admitted to liking Occasions. “Fireworks come tomorrow. I shall go out with a bang not a whimper before the students ramp and tramp all over my lawns. I like to see a lot of people in one place doing what I call Art, not what they call Life.” Miss Yeo pointed out that no one who came ever seemed to go away, and indeed that was a characteristic of that hectic yet lucid July and August. The sun shone, and those who were rehearsing rehearsed, and those who were not somehow stayed there, picnicking on grass and stone steps, shifting scenes, knocking in nails, sleeping, looking on, quarrelling, drinking, making love.

  Alexander came one afternoon to a winter garden from which somewhat perfunctory laughter and squealing could be heard. Nothing could be seen from outside the hedges, which were tightly glossy against winter winds. At their narrow entrance was a stone putto on a Doric plinth, and leaning against this, one brown arm encompassing the rough grey buttocks, was Edmun
d Wilkie, in sky-blue aertex shirt and sky-blue glasses over fluted and clinging white shorts. He smiled at Alexander and said, “Genius at the gate of the garden,” which Alexander momentarily took for a compliment of sorts, until it occurred to him that Wilkie was probably referring to himself.

  Wilkie went on, “Ben is having trouble educing any form out of those three, I can tell you. That girl wants her bottom slapping or pinching. Maybe I should do it. Or you should.”

  “There isn’t much of it,” said Alexander, taking up, as it were, the position of contrary voyeur on the other side of the garden gate. “And I don’t feel any urge to pinch what there is.”

  “No?” said Wilkie. “Not for Art’s sake?”

  “No,” said Alexander. It was almost impossible, watching Wilkie’s plump Hilliard parody, not to strike some pose himself. Consciousness of this drove him to a disagreeable Guard-like rigidity, and to the reflection that Wilkie’s own bottom would, in ten years or so, be approaching the steatopygous. He noticed that Wilkie’s soft fingers were caressing the hard little stone penis and balls of the putto. He turned his attention to the goings-on in the garden.

  Elizabeth’s first big scene, Alexander’s first big scene, Frederica’s first big scene, was the one where the Princess ran hither and thither in the orchard, pursued by that amorous and politic satyr, Thomas Seymour, and her stepmother, Catherine Parr, who together cut her garments, laughing hugely, into a hundred fragments. Alexander had, he hoped, used this scene delicately to intimate the contrarieties of his heroine’s sexuality as he saw it: the ferocious flirtatiousness, the paralysing fear, the desire for power, the sense of solitude. In this scene the Princess spoke out a panic which was, in the play, frequently recalled but never overtly repeated, since she had intelligently decided not to repeat it. In this rehearsal none of Alexander’s words had so far been audible. Lodge was trying to teach his actors, who were slow learners, to scream and laugh and run. Thomas Seymour was played by a rather brutal local librarian called Sidney Gorman, who bore, like Frederica, a considerable physical resemblance to his prototype. Katherine Parr looked more like the Wife of Bath than like that Puritanical and sadly passionate queen. She was a barrister’s wife and had played motherly bodies in local dramatics for years.