The Virgin in the Garden (12 page)

A large part of her history was here. When you were little you sat in front of the Venus, with her blind and horrible empty eyes staring out behind you. When you reached puberty, more or less, you sat, more or less, beside and below her, and had an upward view of her bulky waist and huge swathed hips above your head, and the stumps of her sliced arms. When you got to the top of the school you saw her staring out, away from you, from behind, ponderous and hefty-buttocked. Her texture was polished old cheese, the colour of Cheddar with a coat of thick varnish, which for many years had borne little relation to the marble it imitated and now seemed, seen critically, to be corpse-colour, opaque and turgid. From eleven to eighteen her vague feelings had focused, every morning, on that sightless block. Here, now, she looked down on it, but it still bulked large.

She looked at Alexander’s combed hair, so very much alive, and thought weakly that she must have come back here from Cambridge because she loved him, she wanted to be with him. What she loved him for was a kind of secretive grace he had, a shyness, which made her imagine that if he ever did notice her it would be possible for them to share a life that was private, understood, economical with language. She did not know what he wanted, and had wondered if he was queer. One usually knew about those who were, or anyway one’s body surmised. She wondered if he ever thought of her at all. Other men did. If he did not, why did he not? Why was she invisible for him? Maybe she loved him because she did not know.

Alexander too wondered why he did not think of her. Whenever he saw her, he wondered that, and never thought further. Whenever he spoke to her, as he had, briefly, about his play, he had meant to do so again, and never made the opportunity. She was golden and reassuring and quick and understanding; and maybe he was afraid of those things, as they led to things he was certainly afraid of; though she was not, he thought, menacing, as Frederica, who suddenly rose into his vision, was. She was directing all her attention at him, crude and unsmiling. That girl, he thought, should have been heavily spanked in childhood. As Bill rose to speak, whether spontaneously or in the order of things was uncertain, he reflected that she quite probably had been. He dropped his eyes before her single-minded glare.

Bill was scoring debating points. He was speaking of the opportunity to exhibit the
real
history of Calverley and its environs: press-gangs and rick-burning, spinning jenny and hunger marches. He felt he should just point out, in passing, that the real damage to Calverley Minster had
not been done by the New Model Army, which had conducted itself with reasonable decorum, but by the iconoclastic excesses of the supporters of the secular Virgin and her puritanical young brother. Stephanie tried not to listen. It did no good, no good at all, listening to Bill. Though as his voice rasped eloquently on she thought her fantasy of a silent entente with Alexander was to do not with Alexander but with Bill, and that her decision to come back and teach in this mediocre and stifling place was to do with Bill, that she had clanged the gates of the Cambridge gardens behind her so the noise would resonate in Bill’s ears.

She was here as an extreme act of passive defiance. The one thing Bill did not want was that she should “throw herself away” on Blesford Girls’ Grammar. So here she was. In his house, asserting her independence by refusing to leave it, refusing to inhabit his ambition for her, which would be a worse prison than his house. He had been a careful tutor, and she had, by nature and through art, the gifts he desired for her, and because the ambition was his, not hers, she would not use them. She was doing as he preached and practised, an honest job in a place where the rewards of an honest job were sparse and hard to come by. She was maddening him. He wanted her to be a Fellow of Somerville, the literary editor of a worthy weekly, a provincial professor. If he had not wanted it, she might have. Now, she would not. She was, she thought, sorry for Frederica, who was blown differently by these contrary hot and cold winds of morality and ambition. She became sorrier as Miss Wells came to the list of those girls who had been pre-selected to attend auditions for
Astraea
at Blesford Ride. Frederica’s glare became a scowl of desperate anxiety. She had never wanted anything so much as she wanted to be on that list.

Lists are a form of power. Frederica spent much of her school-time studying the forms of the exercise of power. Control of pace of feet, of numbers of girls abreast, of socks, knickers, stockings, size and colour of gingham checks. Inclusion, exclusion, prominence, failure, were regulated and embodied in public lists. Lists of Posture Prizes, Conduct Marks, Tennis Teams, Debating Team, School Cert credits, Form Orders, in subjects and overall. Frederica hated the lists, and created wild energies with the hatred. But she had to be first, in every case where she had not decided not to be reckoned with at all. She knew the teachers did not like her, but justice required that she come first on any academic list, and it was the duty of those who made the lists to represent, whilst they made them, abstract justice, incarnate and undefiled.

She believed she should also come first on all dramatic lists, but was aware that it was harder to construct these on clear principles of abstract
rectitude. She had nevertheless no idea how horrible she was to have in any drama class, or play-reading. It was impossible for a teacher to distribute parts without becoming aware of Frederica’s desperate concentration, fingers, toes, eyes, mouth, strained with eagerness. If she was cast, she read aloud with throbbing
brio
, embarrassing other girls, who felt that classroom conditions required muted tones, as a matter of good manners. If she was not cast, she glowered and concentrated and muttered over her desk, only too transparently producing a corrected counter-reading of everything in her head.

An odd aspect of this obsession was that the parts she ostentatiously desired were dictated more by sex than by number of lines: rather Goneril than Lear, rather Miranda than Prospero. Her readings of women were tremulous or ringing with feeling. Her men, though there are more, and more passionate men in Shakespeare, were paradoxically less alarming to her involuntary audiences.

The worst was
St Joan
. Miss Wells did not know, she told Stephanie, how she had survived
St Joan
. There were times, she said, when she had seriously feared that Frederica would rise and strike her for casting some other girl as Joan in the Trial Scene or the epilogue. There were times when, having cast Frederica, she wished to leave the room rather than endure the stress and embarrassment of the passion put into the performance.

Miss Wells rose now to read out the crucial List, twenty or so names long, and Frederica screwed herself round in agony on her chair and cast a desperate glance at Alexander, who pretended, obviously, not to have seen. Stephanie was mildly irritated both with Miss Wells and with Frederica. There had been a determined attempt to exclude Frederica from the list, on the ground, advanced by Miss Wells, that she was an academic high-flyer who could not afford to take so much time from her studies, and on the ground, advanced by the headmistress, that Frederica put herself too much forward, and that other girls should be allowed to shine. Stephanie knew that Frederica’s name was on the list because she herself had argued with unusual firmness that it was unjust that it should not be, and had known, whilst arguing, that she asked for so little, and was so useful, that the others would do as she asked. When Frederica’s name was read out Frederica drew in a long breath, un-gripped her hands from her chair seat, cast a triumphant and possessive look over Alexander, and visibly lost interest in the proceedings, as though that name was the only name. Stephanie felt a moment of pure rage. And then a guilty fear: for after this small success, what could be hoped? And Frederica’s face was ablaze with arrogant and silly hope.

The Blesford girls were driven to the boys’ school in a hired bus. They wore berets with stitched golden roses and portcullises. They wore striped ties. They looked remarkably like each other. They stood in a tight flock in the drive as other buses drove in and deposited other little gaggles. Many wore ankle socks, but above these their uniform made them look portly and matronly. Girls in those days, even not in uniform, tended towards this state, partly at least because the types of beauty presented for their imitation in glossy papers and films were on the whole women, not girls, hatted, gloved, mysteriously veiled or painted with the ripeness of experience. Experience, paint, and veiling they could not proffer; the matronly was all that was left. They all stared suspiciously at each other. Boys ran past, between classes: some whistled. Miss Wells made useless little rushes at some of these boys, and was detained by Frederica, who said that she would take them to the Hall, where the stage was, and the auditions must be. Once she began striding through the cloisters the other girls, the other schools, fell into a crocodile behind her, so that she strode into the Hall, banging its swing doors, like a commander of troops. They were shuffling troops, who hung back, and bunched in the way out.

Inside, the atmosphere was different: liberty could almost be smelled. Lodge was sprawled in an armchair, one leg hooked over the arm, in a huge and filthy sweater. He was smoking. Alexander was leaning classically against the proscenium arch, one leg across the other at an elegant angle she was later to note in Hilliard’s decorous lover behind the delicate pale roses. Crowe was on the move, shepherding the girls into chairs, shouting orders to some invisible being about floods, so that the stage, and Alexander, were gradually and warmly illuminated with rosy-gold light.

They had prepared auditions. Perdita, Helena, Imogen, the Duchess of Malfi. Frederica had practised for hours before the mirror, uncertain between Helena and the Duchess. Stephanie, overhearing these outpourings, had with courage offered to play audience, and with greater courage begged Frederica to be a little less expressive, to let the verse speak for itself. Frederica had cursed Stephanie – shouted at her that
she
couldn’t speak,
she
didn’t know, she underplayed herself and everything else.

Lodge divided the girls into small groups and, unexpectedly, told them they must now run, and dance. They must shed hats and coats, sweep across the hall and on to the stage, form circles, skip, jump. Alexander moved across to the piano and began to play Thomas Bull. The girls began to run, and Lodge shouted “Faster”. Long plaits bounced on Prefects’ badges, soft bunches brushed flushing cheeks.
“Now, leap,” cried Lodge, laughing. He and Crowe were writing copious notes. “Leap
high
, spring up, stretch yourselves right out.”

Frederica was without bodily grace. During all her rehearsals before the mirror, no matter how her voice swooped and sobbed, her arms had been rigid along her rigid trunk. She had no idea what to do with them. She had held out a hand in the Duchess’s plea to her timid suitor and had reminded herself of a clockwork tin drummer she and Stephanie had had when they were little. Woodenly, now, crashing down heavily on wood, she thrust furiously up in a straight line, heavy-footed amongst the thicket of tossing arms and feat toes. Alexander, at the piano, moved like a wave of the sea, with rippling shoulder muscles and flowing hair and fingers. Frederica’s face grew dusky with unavailing effort and humiliation. She stumped, as soon as she was decently able, off the platform, and sat scowling in the shadows.

Now they were limbered up, Lodge declared, he would hear their speeches. He read out their names, the Gillians, Susans, Judiths and Patricias who now, because of the dancing, were paradoxically loosed from their drilled similarity and came up, one after the other, blinking from the rosy light into the dark, and recited Perdita’s flower speech, Helena’s love for the bright particular star, Imogen’s trouble over Milford Haven, the Duchess’s proposal to her steward. Perditas predominated. O Proserpina! For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall From Dis’s wagon. In Yorkshire, in tinkling china tones from the expensive convent, faltering, gushing, an incantation endlessly delightful, however frequently renewed. When Frederica came it was Crowe who asked her what she would do, and Crowe who told Alexander to read in for her, as he had for others, the necessary few lines of Antonio’s part. Frederica’s voice shook as she announced herself. Alexander, standing opposite her, was moved with unaccustomed gentleness towards her.

“Steady, Frederica. Take your time. It’s not the end of the earth.”

“No?” she said, with a dimmed flash of the old contradictory passion.

“No,” said Alexander. He smiled. It was the first smile of real warmth, for herself, she had ever had from him, teacherly and considerate. She was irritated, as well as excited, by this thought.

Alexander said his piece.

Blindly, Frederica began on the answering declaration: she had meant
it to be prettily, though nobly, tentative, but Alexander’s presence and her wrath over the fiasco of the dancing had added to it qualities she could not quite control; a touch of impatient aggression, a touch of the pure will to have what she desired, which had taken her so far, and sustained her. She did not move: but because Alexander was Alexander she trembled in her rigidity.