The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “In my day,” he said, “we were, anyway girls of your age were more innocent. Or had less opportunity.”

  “This is your day,” she retorted, adding, like the old gaffer demonstrating to Henry James that circumlocution did not coincide with circumvention, at least as far as the High Street of Windsor was concerned, “You’re in it.” They listened in silence together to the furious jargoning of the birds.

  “And I can’t do with any more complications. You’re quite intelligent enough to have noticed that I’ve got problems as it is.”

  “I’ve thought about that, too. I’ve decided that that’s nothing to do with me. I’m not a problem, anyway. I only want you to see me, to treat me as someone.”

  “I shall have to do that. But I don’t think it is all you want.”

  “It’s what I’ll settle for, for now.”

  He fell upon her again, and rumpled her considerably. He had no idea what either of them wanted. He thought he would leave it to her. He was obscurely pleased and alarmed when she suddenly shifted her weight and fell heavily asleep, her hair spread innocently over his thighs. He held her, staring at the trees and the Nissen huts, whilst the birds sang on and on. He thought ruefully of previous meditations on the inviolable voice, as they ran up and down their, simple, chattering scales.

  “Damn,” he said, “oh damn,” and pulled at the thin shoulders to stop her slipping away from him. “Oh damn.”

  36. Interludes in Two Towers

  Marcus walked the biology corridors, past corals and bones and fossils. Term was now over: the boys had all gone home except one or two stray foreigners. The place had lost its thick smell of grubby clothing and smelt stale and empty and disinfected. He went up and down there a lot now, under Lucas’s tower. Since the drive back from Whitby, it had been unclear whether the great experiment was continuing or not – or, if it was, who was in charge of it. At the time of the drive itself Marcus had supposed he would die: crouched with his face in the leather seat, on the floor of the car, his skeleton jarring and his flesh juddering, he had dropped into dark and had been physically shocked to find himself, let alone Lucas and the vehicle, stationary and steaming in the school car-park. He had somehow tumbled out onto the gravel and lain there, curled up and still. Lucas had walked off mechanically towards the building, leaving doors gaping and not looking back at his passenger, who had after a while stood up, locked up tidily, and put Lucas’s car-keys into Lucas’s pigeonhole at the bottom of his spiral stair. Sunspots revolved before his face during this time. He had supposed it likely that Lucas would never again acknowledge his existence, recognising without thinking, and without previous experience, a state of sexual extremity in his friend that would make this the only possible course of action. He didn’t ask whether he himself wanted to recognise Lucas, or to continue with the experiment. He considered himself committed: and responsible for Lucas. He had made that plain by putting out his hand, and more so by leaving it there. Again on the edges of thought he was aware that if he consulted his own sexual feelings they would be somewhere in the area between mild distaste and violent disgust. But this was, or should be, a matter of no importance besides the responsibility and commitment he felt, the first, the unique experience of these things in his curiously null life. He had involuntarily, nevertheless, received enough moral training to recognise these at least for what they were.

  In fact Lucas had subsequently steered a lurching and veering course between acknowledging and ignoring the events of Whitby, acknowledging and ignoring the experiment and the relationship. A few days after the return, Marcus had felt compelled, he who habitually initiated nothing, to knock on Lucas’s door. Lucas had called cheerily enough “Come in” but on seeing Marcus had sat in his arm-chair staring at the wall in a fixed and rigid silence until the boy had gently closed the door and stolen away again. He had not been able to find anything to say, and had understood that in any case Lucas was physically preventing himself from hearing anything.

  Two days later, they had met, not entirely accidentally, in the Cloisters. Lucas had said, “Oh, hullo, it’s you, is it, come up and have some crumpets,” and had cooked for Marcus an archetypal schoolroom tea, which he accompanied with a smiling, avuncular discussion of Marcus’s academic progress, as though his A-level candidature was the most striking, most profoundly interesting characteristic of his visitor. Twice after that, clothed in his white garments, he had walked past Marcus as though Marcus was insubstantial: on a third occasion he had said “Oh there you are,” as though the boy had been absent, or dilatory, and had drawn him conspiratorially into the laboratory where he explained that they were certainly being watched, and indeed visited, by outsiders, beings, of whose nature and precise intent he was uncertain, but that when this was revealed the experiment would enter a new phase which he had almost resolved upon. On a fourth occasion he had proposed a drive to the field of the 1000 cairns at Fylingdales in Yorkshire, where there was bound to be a considerable concentration of radiant power. Marcus realised that he would be wholly afraid of entering that car again: and that, if he were invited, he would do so. He began to wonder if there was any action he could take with regard to Lucas, whose moods were no indication of the validity or otherwise of his theories: better men than either of them had, as Lucas had lucidly pointed out at the beginning of the enterprise, cracked under the kind of strains they were imposing on themselves. He could think of none at that time, and so began his patrolling of the corridors, to keep an eye on things, as he put it, with deliberate vagueness, to himself.

  One day as he walked towards the Bilge Lab door he saw about three feet in front of him at eye level in the interior dark a burning and glowing orange-red circle, moving along, also, towards the door. The thing was solid and gave the impression of being distinctly opaque and spherical, without the obvious immaterial quality of simple after-images. Marcus blinked, and glanced away from it to the tiled floor behind him: the thing climbed down leisurely, diminishing in size, not in brightness, and followed him along the ground. He went on: the thing, being related to his eye-movements, must be some optical illusion, and yet, when he looked back for it, there it was, tracking from side to side of the corridor with what appeared to be enough independence of movement to suggest at least purposes of its own. He pushed at the swing door which was not, though it should have been, locked, and went in. The thing followed him, changing in the evening sunlight to a vivid kingfisher blue: it lay glowing on a bench for a long time, diminishing, still very slowly, in size, and then changing to a narrowing, still solid crescent. The last fine curve of it persisted for some time more, and then where it had been, Marcus saw, as it were, its shadow, perceived again circular, smoky, and finally at last clearly a function only of his own vision. Marcus had seen things before: apart from trouble with light, or Lucas’s transmissions: but this thing had a perceptual difference. It was as much there as the jars or books it had rested beside. Hallucinations, he had thought, had always a perceptual insecurity you could locate. This didn’t. It was admittedly, as far as he could tell, pointless. It was, on the other hand, immensely sensually pleasing, more almost than anything else he could think of, although orange had never been a colour he liked, seeming brash and violent: his preferred perceptions had always been in the range of lavender, blue and green. This flaming was beyond orange.

  In the early days of the experiment Marcus would have been anxious to describe this thing to Lucas, in order to neutralize or incorporate it. Now he felt distinctly reluctant. The thing was as it was, and he wished simply to have seen it, not to be forced to discuss or contemplate it. It went with another recent phenomenon about which he had also more or less decided not to tell Lucas. This was a recurrent dream – only since Whitby – in which he simply was, timelessly, in the garden of mathematical forms which he had lost by attempting to describe them to his father. The garden had darkened: the sky and the measurable vegetation were a rippling mussel-blue: there were no lights in that sky and no hori
zon, but placed here and there in satisfactory radiating lines and clusters were the forms, cones, pyramids, spirals and aerial networks of spun paleness which were an order and a source of order. The cones and pyramids were like polished marble, it might have been said by anyone interested in similes, which Marcus was not, but they had a life, or at least an energy, contained in them which precluded any chill to the sheen. In this garden Marcus was not exactly: rather, he was coextensive with it, his mind its true survey. Maybe for that reason, maybe for others, he did not want Lucas, or anyone, to come into it or know of it. It was the blueness and paleness of this place which made him recognise how startling was the flaming concentration of what he automatically alluded to, in his mind, as “that indoor sun”.

  When he came into the laboratory he expected both to find it empty, and to find Lucas there though he could not imagine what he might be doing. He was in fact at the sinks, white-coated, sleeves rolled up, wearing onion-brown rubber gloves that gave his hands a look of mortified flesh. Marcus came on gingerly. Lucas said, without turning round, “Is anyone there?”

  “It’s me.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” said Lucas in an accusing voice as though this meeting was pre-arranged and Marcus was late for it.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m trying to put my house in order. Before anything happens.”

  Marcus took a few steps forward. There was a strong smell of formalin, with an undertone of sickly sweetness. Lucas was transferring handfuls of dead batrachians from a basin to a tall jar: the dull mottled flesh slithered and flapped. In another basin floated various severed parts and undulating pale internal organs. A case of dissecting instruments was open on the bench beside him. Lucas gave Marcus a friendly patronising grin, pointed at the dish and said with determined jocularity, “If you were superstitious enough to want to read the future from these entrails you’d find it pretty thin and grey, I’m afraid. Do you have any idea why people in the old days ever thought entrails were a particularly good guide to events in the outside world? Did they think chickens and goats were microcosms? You might read your own future from your own entrails if you could get at them, and make a lot of sense, but of course you can’t. Or from your genes and chromosomes which can’t be revealed with the crude machinery at our disposal.”

  “No,” said Marcus, cautiously. He snuffed the dead smell. Lucas meditatively tried the edge of his little triangular knife on the ball of his rubbery thumb. He gestured at a whitely coiling jar of worms.

  “As for them, their insides are too simple and similar for augury. The lowly worm. The lowly necessary worm. I’m collecting them up for the Lower IV. Worms have many uses, of which being dissected by the Lower IV is not the most important. Still, there are a great many worms on the surface of the earth, and I do want to leave everything in good order before …”

  “Before what?” said Marcus, daring and troubled.

  “Before what is going to happen. Something will happen shortly. There have been indubitable signs already. I’ll tell you about them. For instance I knew you would come today.”

  This may well have been true, but the gleaming authority with which he had invested his earlier declarations that things were prefigured seemed to be lacking. Lucas looked grey, the bright curls limp, the brows and chin clammy and glistening. Marcus wanted to walk out again, and knew he must not.

  “Will you come upstairs? We must now be prepared for any eventuality, good or evil. I’ve had signs that I’ve let forces in – that there is conflict – in the outer spheres possibly – my fault, my failure – a fault in the coherent surface – from which great gains or great losses could issue. Please come up. You must be in possession of the facts, in case – before

  Marcus said he would come up. Lucas rubbed his squeaking palms together and slopped another handful of small corpses into his jar. Marcus stared round, remembering the day the light had driven him here, the beginning. He looked at heaped bones and bottled embryonic forms, and then across at the hanging images of Man and Woman. Something about these was odd. Marcus realised that small patches had been sliced very precisely from each body where the genitals had been depicted, including, in the case of the interior views, the internal organs of reproduction, the seminal vesicles, fallopian tubes, the whole frilled, winding or bulging apparatus. As far as he could see these the resulting apertures were exact squares, windows on a blank, unsunned, unfaded wall. He looked across at Lucas, not doubting for a moment that this trimming was his work. Lucas was now rolling up the cloth case of dissecting instruments, which he popped into his white pocket. He shelved his damp jars. He beckoned to Marcus.

  In Lucas’s tower room Marcus stood awkwardly in the door whilst Lucas investigated, at random, cushions and curtain rails, remarking darkly that wires were always on the cards now, it had been done before, he had certainly been wired before, and it was only sensible to be on the lookout. There had been incredibly fine work with wires on that destroyer in the Pacific. Had Marcus thought about the paradox implicit even in that simple factual phrase, the destroyer in the Pacific? The ocean was pacific and the man-made vessel, even if it said it was on a peacekeeping mission, was a destroyer. Lately he had had a series of encounters, indeed near-collisions, with a curious van which was labelled Sun Ray Blinds Whitby and was certainly a sign. It had a curious symbol on its side, a sphere divided by a wavy line, which was a crude attempt at the Yin and the Yang, the ocean of light moving above the ocean of darkness. Some of that light they had concentrated at Whitby with the burning-glass and blood and wine, no question, but he was inclined to think that then they had not gone far enough, not offered enough, and that later they had been punished for this by his own failure of tact, or taste. Marcus must be aware that tact or taste were curious ambivalent words too, Marcus must have wondered why these sensual words were applied to matters of judgments which often bore no relation to sensuality. The terrible anthropomorphic universe again. To be avoided at all costs. Possibly one way was to crash out of it with sexual magic or rites he should have said but that was accompanied with such dangers, and deceptions and dubious advantages … where was he? Oh yes, the van, the van. It jumped at him out of side roads or stood across his path in Blesford. It was driven by a creature who was clearly not of this world, a demon in angelic form, with a leathery sort of skin and a mop of clearly unreal golden curls on its head. It grinned and grinned but also sometimes threatened distinctly, and made various beckoning or exorcising gestures, also unfortunately ambivalent, which he, Lucas, found hard to read. And there had been a milk-bottle full of blood he had found outside the lab, which certainly had some meaning, had been put there by some visitant for some reason. And there were the watchers. Faces, for instance, at these windows, yes these, so high up this tower, staring in, taking their time, grinning and grinning, making sure he knew he was under surveillance. If you drew the curtains they were to be seen mopping and mowing at the foot of the stairs. And the breathing. You would hear breathing in the room, as though the tower stood near the lung-tip of the universe, if it were anthropomorphic, which of course it was not.

  All this was delivered in what Marcus could only think of as a threatening manner, accompanied by punctuating blows on Lucas’s desk surface for heavy emphasis. Marcus felt accused of provoking or manipulating these manifestations himself. He said to himself, in his mind: he is mad. This was terrifying, not because he was afraid that Lucas-as-madman would act dangerously, or damage him, but because of what it did to the pattern of preceding events. He, Marcus, had been afraid he was mad: had been offered a reasoned explanation of the phenomena that tormented him by the super-sane Lucas: had shared with Lucas experiences, the transmission of images for instance, which suggested that they were at least on the same wavelength (oh those wires), and working with mental events mostly unacknowledged. If Lucas was mad, he, Marcus, was on his own with the things which had initially been almost too much for him, the geometry of water in plugholes, the terror of
staircases, the spreading, the fields of light. If Lucas was not quite mad, then it was at least a tenable hypothesis that they had aroused angry outside forces of some indeterminate nature. Marcus had always felt an abstract scepticism about the names and histories Lucas chose to ascribe to things seen or sensed; even if this masked, to some extent, a readiness to be credulous because he had no names and histories of his own. Angels or demons these were not, precisely; they were experienced as cones and winds and spirals of light, as magnetism and heart-hammer. It didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  And, if Lucas was mad, he was responsible. Responsible that was, for Lucas, because he had agreed to be his friend. And responsible perhaps also for the events that had led to the madness, what with his photisms and hypnagogic vision.

  “What are you going to do, Sir?” he asked, neutrally, respectfully. Lucas dropped into the arm-chair at one side of the fire.

  “I called you up,” he said, producing another effortless double-entendre, “I called you up, because I have a very important communication to share with you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Lucas sat in brooding silence, apparently attempting to recollect what the communication had been. He slapped his hands vigorously on his thighs, and cried out,

  “We should have been more extreme.”

  Then, in another voice, he said, “Do you know, there are men in the prisons, a great many men in His Majesty’s, or I should now say Her Majesty’s, prisons, some of whom, in my view, can’t strictly be called criminals, although many certainly can, old men who expose themselves, flash out from behind bushes at silly little girls, or abuse, on commons and open land, what they’d do better to hide – a great many such men, who beg, who cry out, for hormones or even more drastic treatment, for surgical interference, and are denied. They would not have been in all times and cultures. Frazer tells a lot about the priests of the old gods, Adonis and Thammaz and Atthis, which makes it sufficiently clear that they cut themselves voluntarily and joyfully … If fasting and celibacy and austerity produce new and different knowledge, why not the knife, I sometimes think, though that is not what I called you up to say.”