The Virgin in the Garden

by A. S. Byatt

  “It isn’t your business.”

  “No, it isn’t. I’ll go, if you like, and leave you to your preparations. Why don’t you have a bowl of roses in the middle of the table?”

  “Oh, Wilkie, don’t go, I’m all in a mess, I’m so scared, and no, it didn’t happen this morning, and it should have, and now I don’t see how it ever will, because if I’m not scared, he is, and vice versa.”

  “If he does manage to make you, here, tonight, I can tell you, that’s the last you’ll see of him. And if he doesn’t, you’ll never have the guts. You are in a mess, love.”

  “I don’t see how you can be so categorical.”

  “O.K., I can’t. It’s a hunch. I have good hunches. I have a hunch you want to cry off the whole thing.”

  “Me? I love him. I want him.”

  “You might still have got him in the wrong time and place. It happens all the time. Love, and want, and two people the wrong age, or going in the wrong direction; look at me and Marina. I might have loved her, if I’d been born twenty years ago, or hadn’t got my girl in Cambridge, or could stand being a gigolo. But as it is, I can fuck her more or less affectionately, pro tern, and that’s it. She knows.”

  “What does she feel?”

  “What she knows she can afford to feel. She’s a wise woman, no fool.”

  “I feel a strong urge to throw these horrible chops at you, Edmund Wilkie.”

  “Better pack your nightie and get on my motorbike and let Alexander sort you out some other, better way.”

  Frederica put the dead chops down on the draining board.

  “I told my mother I might go away with a friend for a few days.”

  “Ah, you did, did you? And what did she say?”

  “She said, who, and I said, that nice girl, Anthea Warburton, and she said, fine.”

  Wilkie began to laugh. He laughed a great deal. Frederica began to laugh, somewhat hysterically. When they had stopped laughing, Wilkie said, go on, get your nightie and toothbrush, and a swimsuit and a towel.

  “You don’t love me, Wilkie.”

  “No. I love my girl. Sort of. You don’t love me, either.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “That’s sensible. I can show you a thing or two, and then you’ll be able to look after yourself. Now I am in the right time and place, here. Go and get your nightie.”

  Frederica went to get her nightie. Edmund Wilkie, a tidy-minded man in a less than wholly practical way, made a neat pyramidal pile of the dinner ingredients in the middle of the kitchen table. Frederica came back, with her things in a rucksack, and Wilkie, smiling slightly, said,

  “Now, telephone your Mum, and Alexander, so you aren’t flapping or brooding or changing your mind once we’ve gone, and we’ll be off.”

  “I can’t telephone Alexander. Not now.”

  “Write him a note. We’ll drop it off at the school.”

  Frederica did as she was told. Winifred sounded unbothered by her movements and the note was delivered, by Wilkie, to the school porter, who said gloomily that it was ’ard to get in touch with Mr Wedderburn, these days. Good, said Wilkie, and went back to Frederica and the motorbike.

  It was now late afternoon. Wilkie said that they would stop and buy a crash helmet for Frederica at the next big garage, and that if she didn’t mind him giving her a few tips about riding motorbikes, they would get on better, safer, and faster. For instance, she was to lean forward, not sway about, hold him tightly about the waist and move with him. That would anyway be good practice. They would go out through Calverley, east across the moors, south through Goathland and down to Scarborough, where he reckoned they could be before dinner. Frederica said something awful had once happened to her at Goathland. Wilkie said in that case it would be good for her oversensitive psyche to speed through it on a bike, and that she could tell him about it, if she felt it would do her good, in Scarborough.

  Frederica at first intensely enjoyed the motorbike. The crash helmet, when she acquired it, felt like a second high head, and an empty one at that, Wilkie put it on for her, laughed at her, and put on his own, pulling down the goggles, so that only his rather curvy mouth remained of a human face. The mouth was grinning. In motion, she realised that the strong wind they made, and the motor, imposed total silence on her in a flow of inhuman noise, and this she liked. She liked the peculiar intimacy and distance of this relationship with a man, too. There was Wilkie’s ample bottom, and her own pushed against it, there were his strong arms, gripping and twisting, and her own clasped tight but not lovingly round his waist. There was the uncommunicative flat of his leathery back and the shiny smooth unmarked globe of the back of his helmet. His legs went up and down, now and then, and hers did not. After a while, as evening drew in, her own legs became very cold, as she had come out in a dirndl skirt, no stockings, and sandals. After more time, she became very stiff, and ached. The heather darkened and began to vanish: Frederica saw little of it, for she had her head tucked most conscientiously into Wilkie’s shoulderblade and saw always and only the strip of verge, the flow of tarmac, the white line and the lighting cat’s-eyes. Once they stopped at a transport café for a hot cup of Camp coffee and sat next to a wailing and juddering juke box, their limbs too stiff and their faces too set by the wind to speak or smile. There Wilkie expressed concern about her cold legs, said he had not been as clever as he should have been, and insisted on lending her a pair of bright yellow oilskin trousers, hugely too big for her, which she pulled on with stiff hands in a very smelly lavatory. There, too, she remembered Alexander, lovely, elegant and neither in her power nor feeling inadequate. She remembered the sunken garden where they had stood like statues, the eyebeams crossed from stage to scaffold at the height of their incipient shared passion. It would be all right. She had written that he was right, she was wrong, the house was impossible, she had behaved badly and was ashamed and had gone away to think things out and would assuredly be back.

  The awful yellow trousers creaked and slithered as she struggled back to Wilkie, clutching them up. He grunted with laughter, and said she looked shapeless and awful, that if she wanted a nice anonymous disguise there wasn’t a better one than motorbike gear that didn’t fit.

  When they finally drove into Scarborough her body was nevertheless frozen and set into a tense curve she wasn’t sure she could come out of. Wilkie roared along the Promenade, changing gears and jerking, and out over the rail the black sea stood, with white curls appearing and disappearing in it, with lines of light from harbour wall, and further out, boats, and further out still, the point of cliff and lighthouse. Her heart lifted, as it always did when she saw the sea, no matter how, or when, and always would, she thought, being only just eighteen, and like Daniel, no prophet. Wilkie drove straight up to the Grand Hotel, and parked the bike.

  “The bigger, the more anonymous, the less inquisitive, the more fun,” he said. “I find. You stay out here and try and get those trousers off, or you’ll never get up the steps, and I’ll enquire about rooms. Or room.”

  He came back and said he had booked a room. He pulled off his little signet ring, and suggested she wear that, with the signet itself turned in. “It’s worked before,” he explained.

  She followed him, hobbling, in. He had written in the register, Mr and Mrs Edmund Wilkie, Cambridge. She trailed her rucksack, feeling that she looked unlike Mrs anyone, but the porters were polite, indeed smiling, they bowed and opened lifts, and doors, and there she was, with Edmund Wilkie, in a high-ceilinged room with crimson and gold brocade curtains, a lace counterpane, a kidney-shaped dressing-table and a soft, silent carpet. There was also a large bed, with lamps on little tables and bell-pushes.

  Wilkie rattled crash helmets like coconuts and made no attempt to touch her. He said she should have a hot bath, which she did, and put on some make-up so that she looked less like a runaway schoolgirl, which she did, and have dinner, with him, which she did, in a dining room red and gilt and cream with chandeliers and stiff white dam
ask napery and heavy silver knives and forks and spoons. Wilkie laughed at her face. “This is something like,” he said. “Posh, Frederica. Not posh, for the likes of us, you understand, but posh for men in Yorkshire industry having weekends off with wives or secretaries. Have what you like to eat, within reason. I’m flush. And I’ve got more money coming in from some broadcasting I’m lined up for.”

  “Broadcasting?”

  “Well, yes. Two sorts. One on my funny experiment with the coloured glasses, which has produced some quite interesting results. And then I’m doing Parolles in a recording of a Marlowe Society All’s Well. Still no clear guidance as to the future, you see. I progress on all fronts. I might quit Cambridge, though, if I can get my girl to come. There’s beginning to seem no point in actually getting a degree.”

  They ate consommé julienne, lobster thermidor, and a pudding which was constructed of meringues and cream and sugar and ice cream and nuts to look like a swan sailing with furled wings. They drank a lot of white burgundy. Wilkie made little jokes, and urged Frederica to tell him about Goathland, but she could not, beyond saying that odd things had been said to her, a story about a donkey in a brothel. Donkeys in brothels, said Wilkie, went back to Apuleius and were staple stuff. Look at the lovely little pudding, said Frederica. Just like Elizabeth might have actually had, she thought, she said. This reminded her again of Alexander, and she fell silent.

  “Don’t worry,” said Wilkie. “You left a note. He didn’t want to go there, not really, you know that with absolute certainty. I’ll deliver you back to him.”

  Alexander had not got the note. He had barely avoided Jennifer, whom he had seen at the foot of his staircase just in time to slip, himself, into the doorway of Lucas Simmonds’s, where there gleamed now several bottles of milk, which no one seemed to have cancelled. He did not consider it his responsibility to do so. When he had seen Jennifer leave, he ran back to his car, which he drove up and down, at one point passing Crowe in the Bentley, which hooted peremptorily and rolled on. He got out in Blesford and bought a large bunch of cornflowers, white asters and moon-daisies. He realised that his pockets were still full of intractable letters, which he did not want to spread around his little bedroom, and that he was hot, and tousled, and should have had a wash. All the same, he did not want to go back to his tower. He put the letters in the glove compartment of his car and locked it. He stopped at a pub, drank two pints of beer, and had a wash of sorts in the men’s room. He remembered he had promised wine, and purchased two bottles of Vin Rosé d’Anjou. When it was dark he drove back to the school car park and walked down, past the Masters’ Garden, across the bridge, past the unruffled black Bilge Pond, towards the garden gate. His heart thumped. His breath came hard. He would do this.

  Outside the gate, the blackness of the house struck him. An empty house is recognisable by senses other than sight, but he told himself he was confused, that it could not be so, that she had said repeatedly, as as though it was important, “in the dark”. He smelled the cut grass of the terrible Far Field and the warm scent of Winifred’s unculled roses: Virgo, Albertine, King’s Ransom, Papa Meilland, Elizabeth of Glamis. He banged on the back door and the French window. He called Frederica. No answer. He stood his bottles on the sill of the French window and laid his harvest bundle of flowers beside them. He wandered, with a pretence of casualness, back to the gate and leaned on it. He peered up at bedroom windows, looking, if there had been an observer, as Stephanie had seen Lucas, like Lady Chatterley’s lover. He sat on the grass, with his arms clasped boyishly round his knees. Lines of “Come into the garden, Maud” floated with ridiculous persistence through his memory. Queen lily and rose in one. The white rose weeps, she is late, she is late. I am coming, my dove, my dear. The conviction came to him that this moment was, that he himself was, ludicrous.

  Time passed. He strode about, but there is not much room for striding in the back gardens of Masters’ Row. He lost his temper, and kicked cornflowers and daisies all over the lawn. He said, “Bitch, bitch, I knew it,” aloud to the moon. His capacity for both anger and desire had its limits. He remembered the prurient laughter of the bottle chorus and experienced a moment of uncomprehending cold like Demetrius unenchanted by Puck and Oberon. He knew that there would be a moment, very soon, when he would not even be able to understand how he had come to be waiting in that garden. If that were so, there was nothing to prevent him getting out, out of the garden, out of Blesford Ride, out of the North of England, now. It was the glare of her will that had held him, and wherever she was now, he was free. He kicked a few more cornflowers, without savagery: his storms were brief and subsided quickly. He thought of kicking the winebottles, but did not. They could sit on that sill, an offering, for anyone to make of them what anyone could. He would not be there to see. He was going. The whole episode was at an end.

  43. Seas of Blood

  In due course Wilkie took Frederica up to the bedroom, where the bedspread was now off, and the corner of the sheet turned neatly back.

  “Well,” he said, “we might as well get in.”

  After some undemonstrative washing and undressing, they got in. Wilkie walked naked towards the bed; Frederica glimpsed him, moony and plump, with sunburned hands and neck and the V of his shirt collar, and his thing, as she thought of it, red, and rigid, and curving up. She turned her face away. There was a smell of toothpaste, an inhuman little smell, and soap, and an undertow of warm bodies. Wilkie made a crinkling sound with paper and rubber, his white back towards her, his neck muscles, which she could see, stiff with concentration.

  “Now,” he said, “listen. I’m a scientist. I’m going to tell you how all this works, what gives women pleasure, and what gives me pleasure, and then you won’t be frightened, and I shall enjoy myself, if we go along gently and carefully. O.K.?”

  Frederica nodded. Wilkie sat up and, using her almost as a demonstration model in a human biology class, touched her here and there with dry, delicate fingers, telling her that here she liked to be rubbed, there she liked to be tickled, here he himself was sensitive and could be irritated or pleasured. He murmured something about the need for lubrication, and produced a small jar of vaseline with which, his back again modestly turned, he carefully anointed himself. He was courteous, dogmatic and authoritative. In later life Frederica was to discover that his knowledge, both about these things in general, and about her own reactions in particular, was not as exhaustive as he might have thought, or claimed, it was. At the time she was grateful to him for seeming so matter-of fact and secure. Later, also, she came to be grateful to him for providing her with the capacity to make further discoveries with aplomb.

  At first, Frederica was startled by a kind of running commentary that went on in her ear. (Wilkie did not kiss her. It was as though that was an inappropriate intimacy.) “Oh,” said Wilkie, entering her with some slithery effort, “that was a big push. God, that is tight. Are you O.K.?”

  “Yes,” said Frederica, briefly tight-lipped.

  Wilkie made a grunting noise, and pushed up and down for a time. “Is that nice?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Frederica, who did not find it either particularly nice or particularly nasty, more like incessant Tampax, but was glad it was happening.

  After a few moments, and with more vaseline, Wilkie began to rub round and round her clitoris. This struck Frederica as a ridiculous gesture, and also as something unnecessarily intrusive, despite the presence of Wilkie, much larger, much further inside.

  “Is that nice?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Frederica, frowning with concentration. Some vague flickers and ripples of turmoil were happening inside her, a slackening, a ventral dizziness like going down a slide very fast, like the onset of drunkenness. She suppressed all these strongly, sensing with her body, beyond the reach of her mind, that at the end of these waves of feeling was a surrender of her autonomy that she wasn’t going to make.

  “Put your knees up.”

  She put them up. Wilkie t
ouched her breasts, which reminded her of Crowe, and murmured something about “erectile tissue”, a biological phenomenon she had already decided was overvalued. He continued to pump efficiently up and down. She continued pliable enough, concentrating on not letting go. People’s buttocks, thought Frederica, were ridiculous, a ridiculous mixture of wobble and muscle. She laughed.

  “Happy?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Good. Good.”

  Frederica thought, with a moment of nausea, of Lawrence’s descriptions of Constance Chatterley’s florid spreading circles of satisfaction. What she had was vertical flickering lines of local tickling, interrupted electric messages which she hastily earthed. Wilkie stopped talking and began to go faster. Frederica stared at his face with interest. His mouth was drooping open, his eyes closed, his breath heavy. His little fat belly was hot and sweaty on hers. After a time, he went very fast indeed, suddenly gave a loud, very private groan, and dropped his head, very heavily for a moment, on her breast, looking tragic and drained. Frederica felt a kind of fluttering and wincing inside, his, or hers, she wasn’t sure; there was also some pain, and a hot throb. Wilkie whipped his penis neatly and smartly out, turned over to attend to himself, and fell back on the pillows, turned away.

  “Was that all right?” he said, in a fading voice, breathing heavily.

  “Oh yes.”

  “You didn’t come.”

  “I’m sorry.” She did not quite know, despite earlier thoughts about Lady Chatterley, what he meant.

  “No, no, probably my fault. We’ll try again. I once took a girl to a hotel who, every time she came, would scream out like a train whistle, earsplitting, awful. People used to knock on the door to see if I was murdering her. I couldn’t moderate it. Pity, really.”

  “It’s all wet.”