The Virgin in the Garden (10 page)

To get there, you climbed stairs, dark at midday, winding upwards and inwards, your feet soundless, printless, on shallow treads carpeted in thick crimson, curved round by a balustrade of twisting gilded ivy crowned with a swelling dark-rose plush handrail. The stairs were softly lit by peachy light from frosted flesh-pink florets on gilded cups, which cast a warm life on the glossy faces on the wall, dark enchantresses in black lace with scarlet nails and long jewelled cigarette-holders, soft
pale stars with swelling breasts cradled in white swansdown, pouting lips and silvery hair waved into evenly rippling ridges, little girls with sunny fleeces of tight gold curls, crowned with floral coronets.

In the middle of the crimson plain of the landing was a softly plashing fountain, dropping from a flat cup held in the hand of a very 1930s translucent greenish glass nymph, featureless face, regularly fluted gown, posed toes and fingers, high little knobbed paps, the water running shallow over a pool of mirror glass, splashing on bronze water lily leaves, lit from below, rose and viridian. You went on up, into deeper quiet, and the gate of the café was across the second landing.

The gates were bronze and plate-glass, thick-curtained inside. You pushed, and were in a palely lit underworld, with some small natural light diffused through heavy, creamy ruched curtains, reinforced by clusters of dusky pink light bulbs, organised long buds on brassy curving stalks, thrusting out from pillars tiled with bronze mirror-glass. The carpet was dense with roses, pink and cream, the size of cabbages. The little chairs were gilt. Between pillars you saw the Soda Fountain, bronze-mirror-backed, with faintly hissing urns and rows of goblets. Two girls in little white caps and aprons sat on high stools, leaned on their elbows, chatted quietly. Their clientele was intermittent. Marcus was frequently alone there for hours.

He bought himself milk shakes, dark pink, salmon pink, brown, bright yellow, crowned with slowly bursting foam. A milk shake took a long time to sip, if you were economical, and while you were sucking, or seemed to be, no one disturbed you, you could sit quiet and safe. From the unseen depths below sounds rose intermittently; faint strains of music, bursts of gunfire and distant tumult. At symphonic climaxes the whole place vibrated gently and then swayed back into thick silence. Marcus kept still and avoided thought.

He had various techniques for avoiding thought. One was a soundless humming, a set of variations on a deliberately restricted number of notes in the middle range. Another was the analogous construction of rhythmic sequences with tapping and clutching of knuckles and thumbnails. Another was a kind of mathematical mapping of the Café and Soda Fountain. He would plot heights of pillars and distances between them, numbers of pink bulbs and creamy carpet roses, radii of light, spun from table to table, off the refracted glitter on the mirror work and gilt, which slowly homogenised the whole place into an ordered cube of ribbons and threads of soft, crossing light, bronze, cream, dark pink, pale pink, with something of the flexuous complexity of Arab tilework. This technique was more vulnerable, if more satisfactory than others, since the slowly constructed cocoon could be suddenly ripped by an
unexpected movement of the waitresses, who tended to be represented in the patterning by ovoid black spaces.

He was therefore not pleased to hear, as he sipped his sweet roseate drink, a voice above him asking if he would mind terribly if he was joined.

He started and gulped. The other swept out a chair.

“I see we had the same idea. Peace and quiet. Coincidence. I like coincidences, don’t you?”

Marcus made an indeterminate gesture with his head. He had managed to recognise the intruder, who was Lucas Simmonds, the Junior Science man at the school. Simmonds must have been rising thirty, though he looked some years younger, clean, fresh, pink, with brown curls and rather large brown eyes. His shoulders, under heathery tweed, were square and his bottom was slightly heavy for his neat torso. His shirt was very clean indeed, his flannels only slightly less so. He smiled a frank smile at Marcus, who looked away.

Marcus attended a general science class given by Simmonds to extend the cultural range of A Level candidates. This course was desultory at best, easily deflected by the brighter boys who liked to confuse Simmonds with awkward questions, which was easy, since he seemed to be a slow thinker, all too ready to give up if his planned proceedings were interrupted. He was, however, curiously immune to teasing, and would simply abandon trying to teach and attempt cheerfully and inadequately to respond to what was said, no matter how absurd. Quite bright boys thought they were scoring off him. Very bright boys believed he was simply not clever enough to see what they were aiming at. Marcus thought the real explanation was at once too simple and too insulting for boys to grasp. Simmonds simply did not care whether they learned anything or not. People should be able to recognise indifference, Marcus considered. He himself respected it. Throughout the general science class he sat quietly amid the uproar, drawing. He drew, on pieces of graph paper, a pattern of spirals moving through concentric diamonds. The point of this exercise was to avoid, yet indicate and deal with, the point at the centre where all the lines converged on infinity. One way of doing this was to draw the lines almost invisibly pale, so that the preformed network of the graph paper supported and restrained their vanishing. Once Simmonds had come up behind him and looked down on the current pattern for some time, nodding and smiling silently. Marcus remembered this. He did not like to be overlooked.

“You’re sure I’m not intruding? What do you recommend? I see you’re having a milk shake. I’m partial to those myself. Waitress – another
milk shake – whatever my friend here has got, the pink. And a doughnut. Two doughnuts? No? One doughnut then, but perhaps
two
milk shakes more, yes. Thanks.”

Marcus had one and a half frothy pink glasses in front of him. They were not things you could bolt.

“Funny we should meet. I came in here quite on the spur of the moment, never been in before in my life, but you were a bit on my mind, so to speak, so I take it as meant, one of those coincidences that are meant. Do you believe in those? Never mind. You were on my mind because you keep cropping up at staff meetings. Not happy in your work, they wonder. Not happy in yourself. Baffled, they seem to be. Wedderburn says you won’t act in his play. Don’t look so worried. Nobody really sees why you should.”

Marcus made a strangled sound.

“No need to look so betwattled. I expect I’m butting in where I’m not wanted. Just thought I might help.”

“Thanks.”

“Not at all.”

“I’m all right, thanks. I just can’t act. If that’s what they’re on about.”

“Oh, but you can. I saw
Hamlet
, you know.”

“I don’t want to. I don’t like it.”

“I could see you didn’t. Very moving, very unhappy. Oh yes.”

Simmonds took a long pull on his milk shake, puffing one or two minuscule raspberry bubbles into the air as he did so. Marcus, fastidious, wiped one off the back of his left hand. He remembered Ophelia.

All those nights, stripping the wrecked garlands and crumpled white dress from his body, the wrong body, he had been in such trouble, his hands not his hands, the only words in his head her chilly plaints, his hair not his hair, prickling ghoststruck under the mat of long blonde hair he lifted off, nightly. Her breaking song he heard from some lost part of himself crying to get out, to come back in, which? It was like being “spread” only without the sense of thin air and extended space – out of himself, but only to be cabined and confined in strange clothes and clogging skin of greasepaint, rubber breasts and her shroud wound and knotted round his limbs. He had heard singing and screaming and had never known if he had sung or screamed afterwards.

“Alarming thing, acting,” said Simmonds. “Culture excuses all, in modern eyes, but earlier folk knew better. Those old Puritans knew very well you could get taken over, the
soma
, that is, the physico-chemical body, they knew it could be devil’s work. Dangerous to tinker with consciousness unless you’re very sure what you’re doing. Some people have closed consciousness, of course, come to no harm. Some revel in
power over others, exhibitionists and mesmerists and so on. Not you.”

Marcus did not very much understand most of this, although Simmonds’s phrase “taken over” did uncannily express the sense of his Ophelia-experience, which he was determined never to repeat.

“Very struck by your performance, I was,” said Simmonds. “More like a medium than an actor. A vehicle for another consciousness. I’m by way of being a student of consciousness myself – in a scientific way. I think we’re not adventurous enough. I don’t mean all that arty-crafty spiritualism, you must understand, crystal balls and so on, and séances and mumbo-jumbo left over from the garbage of old rites. Equally I don’t mean the pure laboratory stuff where you never get beyond counting coloured pips blindfold on playing cards, or bending the law of averages through a few degrees. No, we ought to start with people who can be
seen
to have special gifts of consciousness – that might extend the limits of human power. Which is why I’m interested in you, young Potter, very interested indeed.”

“I don’t,” said Marcus. “Lots of people could act Ophelia.”

“I know that. But you have other gifts, have you not? A perfect pitch? A capacity for solving mathematical problems without the usual contortions of ratiocination?”

Marcus stared silently. He never spoke of these things.

“Have I spoken out of turn? You do well to be cautious with such gifts. In the wrong hands they can prove terrible. Like the capacity to let other forces inhabit your body. Powers for good or evil. Maybe I should explain my position.”

One of the uncomfortable properties of this dialogue, heavily weighted as it was to one side, was that it appeared to be arousing contradictory emotions in Simmonds. On the one hand he was extraordinarily cheerful, wreathed in smiles and winks of boyish goodwill. On the other, he was clearly unduly agitated: he was sweating, and kept mopping his brow, pink as the raspberry milk shake, with a crumpled paper napkin. Marcus neither invited nor forbade him to “explain his position”. Indeed, he was incapable of either. So Simmonds went on.

“I’m a religious man, I suppose you might say, in a scientific way. I’m interested in the laws of organisation of the universe. Big organisations, big organisms, planets and galaxies, little organisations, little organisms, Lucas Simmonds, Marcus Potter, mice and microbes. Yes. We don’t begin and end with our bodies. All through history men have had techniques for getting beyond the physico-chemical
soma
. Good and bad. Prayer and dance, science and sex. Well and ill used. Some people find it easier than others. Now, in the beginning God formed, or informed, do you see – FORM, IN FORM – the inert mass of
things. If you are not informed by God, you can be informed by lesser, or worse things, or both.”

“I don’t see.”

“I know. I am telling you.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“I know. That’s of no importance, old chap, if G. believes in you. I’ve been watching you for some considerable time and it’s my considered opinion that He does. As an inlet for force or form.”

“No.”

“Tell me how you did the mathematics?”

“I can’t do it any more.”

“Since when?”

“Since I – told – someone – how it was done.”

“Aha. You betrayed your vision. The old prophets were punished for that.”

“Listen. It
wasn’t
a vision. It wasn’t a religious thing. It was a kind of trick.”

“You have no concept of what a religious thing might be. However, be that as it may. Why can’t you do it now?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“You don’t want anything. I’ve been watching you, I
know
. Have you ever thought, it might be to do with that? A power, a gift, you turned your back on.”

Marcus had not thought that. He had, as has been said, sedulously avoided thought. It was possibly true that his general sense of having no place in the world, no hope, no solidity, as well as the recurrence of odd and disturbing tricks of his constitution, like the “spreading”, might well date from his loss of the maths. Simmonds took on the double appearance of mind-reading mage and interfering maniac.

“Please – as a scientific experiment – try to remember.”

“Look – it was very scary. I’m trying to forget.”

“I won’t hurt you. I only want to know. Not to do anything to you.”

His father had brought a professor of mathematics. Marcus had been put through his tricks. They – father and professor – had been very excited. He began to speak.

“I thought for ages anyone could do it. I thought it was the normal way of seeing. The normal way of seeing a problem, that is. I don’t know how anyone can see what is in anyone else’s head. I don’t know how or why they should try –”

“Don’t get excited. Just tell me. It’s of no importance if I don’t fully understand.”

“It might help.”

Marcus was coming to share Simmonds’s view of himself as someone urgently in need of help.

“Well – I used to see – to imagine – a place. A kind of garden. And the forms, the mathematical
forms
, were about in the landscape and you would let the problem loose in the landscape and it would wander amongst the forms – leaving luminous trails. And then I saw the answer.”

“Can you tell me what the landscape garden looked like?”

“No, no.”

This was where he had broken down, last time. Under their eyes, greedy and proud. This was the vanishing point where it had all gone, a cone or triangle of black descending, a cone or triangle of black rising, his mind the pressure point at the meeting of these ambivalent solids or planes. He had crashed face down on the table in a dead faint. He had embarrassed his father. He had been put to bed and told to take it easy. After that he had never done it again; had known categorically that he could not do it again.