The Virgin in the Garden (20 page)

One flight down, Daniel paused on the landing. “I live here.” She nodded, not looking at him. “Come in a moment,” he said. He had not known, until he asked, whether he would. She walked in. He noticed that she shut the door behind her soundlessly, releasing the catch slowly in the socket. She stood just inside the door. Daniel turned on, one after another, all the gloomy lights. Then he sat on the bed.

“What can I say now?” he asked, almost angrily.

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“Oh yes I do.” He pushed fist into fist. “You can’t go on doing that to me.”

“I’ve said I’m sorry. I had no intention of provoking.”

“Oh no, you’re nice. You are so very nice. You meant to be nice.”

“Don’t dislike me for it.”

“I don’t dislike you.” He sighed heavily. “I just – no, what’s the use. This talk has got to stop here. You’d better tie up your scarf and go home. You’re not stupid, you can see you’d better go home. As for me, I can take good care it doesn’t happen again.”

“That seems a bit bleak. As though I’d deliberately upset you. Just to dismiss me.”

“You know it’s not that. Listen. You didn’t start this, right? I did. You are just being nice. Because you’re sorry for me, because of my job, and other things, fat for instance, so you’re nice. You must be
nice. Well, I could take advantage of that, and the result’d be horrible. And I’m not using up time and energy on that sort of mess. So I think you should go home. And stay there a bit, please.”

“You’re so sure you’re right. You make such heavy weather …”

“No. I’m being practical.” He gathered himself and announced bluntly, “I love you. I want to marry you. I want … I want. No, it’s not heavy weather, but it’s me as has got to deal with it. It interferes with my work.”

“You can’t want to marry me. You …”

“That is what I want,” said Daniel, with finality, as though no answer could be possible or expected. He half expected her, faced with this bald statement, to get up and go away. He truly half hoped she would. What she surprisingly said was, “People always do.”

“Always do what?”

“Want to marry me. It’s frightening. Men at Cambridge. People I’ve only met twice, even only once. A waiter once at a hotel where we had a holiday. One of Daddy’s miners. The boy in our Bank. I think I must – it isn’t sex appeal, it’s always marriage – I think I must just look
comfortable
. It doesn’t feel like anything really to do with
me
. They don’t any of them know me. I must have a face like they choose for cigarette advertisements, an archetypal wife-face. It’s almost humiliating.”

He said wrathfully, “I see, I see. A recurring problem you have. A bunch of misguided men. Puts me in my place. All right, I’m sorry, please go home.”

She began silently to weep, brushing her eyes with the back of her hand, standing stockstill in his doorway. She brought out:

“They don’t say, let’s go dancing, let’s have a holiday, let’s go to bed, or anything but I want to marry you, with a sort of awful reverence. I can’t deal with it. I don’t understand it.”

He stood up and led her to the bed, where he sat her down, and sat beside her.

“I could make you understand. But there’s no point. It’s not an awful reverence. I just want you. Better to marry than burn, and burning’s an appalling waste of time, I can tell you, so I would marry you, only I am able to see it won’t do. But don’t go away supposing I don’t know you. I want you, the way you would be, married to me –”

“Don’t be arrogant.”

“You’ve noticed that. Well, I’ve got most of what I really want. But this – no. I’ve prayed about it, to be let off –”

“How dare you?”

“What?”

“That’s a horrible thought. Discussing me with …”

“I don’t
discuss
 …”

“I won’t be prayed about. I don’t believe in your God. I’m not anything to do with that.”

She could not tell why the thought of being prayed about filled her with such rage.

“That’s another reason why it’s hopeless,” said Daniel, equally furious.

“Your Church makes too much out of sex.”

“If you mean they spend far too much time lecturing on it, and talk like Freud, as though everything was it, and nothing was anything else, yes, I agree,” he said. “But I’m in no position to judge. I simply haven’t personally bothered about it before now, simply not.”

She turned a dubious, tear-stained face to him.

“I don’t think I’m homosexual or anything. Just very busy. If you can believe that. Until this …”

Some of his furious energy left him: he dropped his large head and began to shake again. She edged timidly closer.

“I didn’t understand.”

“I shouldn’t roar at you.”

“You shouldn’t take things so hard.”

“That’s easy to say.”

“I see that.”

She put a hand on his knee.

“Oh, Daniel –”

“Leave me alone.”

“Daniel –”

He turned then, and cast his arms heavily around her, and bore her over onto his protesting bed, where they lay, she staring over his shoulder at the ceiling, he with his weight, all of it, across her body, his face on her wet face on his pillow. He lay inert. She felt, her body felt, entirely relaxed. He moved a little and the opening of her shirt came into vision. Slowly, painstakingly, he undid the buttons, staring with alarm, amazement and pain at the golden-pale breast and throat. With an invisible fumbling hand he pushed up her skirt and felt her thigh, smooth and warm. He shuddered.

“It’s all right,” she said, still staring at the ceiling, as she had reassuringly said so many times that evening. “It doesn’t matter. It will be all right.”

Daniel shifted his mountain belly and pressed his face right into the breast he had laid open. With fingers hesitant or listless, how could he
tell, she touched his hair. He heard her, quickly, one, two, kick off her shoes. He undid another few buttons and her belt. For a wild moment he ran his hand round under the breast, inside the dress, holding her beating ribs, her hinted spine. There, under him, in his grasp. He lifted his head and addressed his mouth to hers, which was warm, and opened softly and sweetly, retreating before him. He arranged his weight clumsily on one of his own knees and looked down, knitting his brow, at her expression. She was still staring at the ceiling. He made out, he thought, that her accepting posture was one of despair. She meant to please him, she meant to give him something, she felt he ought to have something, and it seemed to him that she expected nothing for herself from this, there was no corresponding need or fury in her. He thought that this was maybe how she always was, this posture was habitual.

He pulled himself away. “No. You don’t know what you want.”

“No, Daniel, I do, I do. It’s all right.” Almost querulous.

“All right. All right. You keep saying, all right. I want more than just all right. Anyway it’s not true.”

“I should have thought about that.
You
can’t, of course, you’d be doing – wrong.”

She had in fact thought about that. There is something pleasurable in breaking real taboos, even for moralists like the Potters, maybe especially for moralists like the Potters.

“If I am, that’s my affair. You must sit up now. You’re going home.”

“But why?” She did not move.

“I will not just be given things. Now, sit up. Sit up.”

“Don’t be rough.”

“You must know what you want.”

“One doesn’t make up one’s mind in cold blood, love.”

“Oh yes, one does. About many things that really matter. And don’t call me love. I am not.”

“You are too hard on me,” she said, and began to cry again, sitting now hunched on the bed, plucking at disordered garments.

“Please go home now,” he said, harshly, looking away, unable to move. Pride, need and policy were now inextricably confused. He didn’t know if he was sending her away because she was patronising him, or because to finish it now would be to finish it completely, and unfinished business has its own power, things undone torment the imagination, sometimes pleasurably. Partly, he could simply not take any more.

She was putting on her shoes. When he made no move to get up, she put on her hat and coat too.

“Well,” she said, “goodbye.”

He shook himself. “No, wait. I’ll walk you home. Let’s just walk back there quietly together.”

She looked as though she would protest, and then said, “All right.”

Marcus supposed that if one was properly mad one was not afraid of being mad. Mad people in films and books seemed to have in common a rock-bottom certainty that they were in the right. His own increasing anxiety about madness could perhaps be taken as a sign that he was sane. And madness in this literary household had overtones of raving, vision and poetry which were nothing to do with what was bothering him.

What was bothering him was spreading fear. More and more things aroused it: things he could no longer do, could no longer bear to see. These things were recognisable because of the little shocks that went with them, shocks of consciousness momentarily disconnected, like stepping down two steps when the body has only allowed for one. It had to do with geometry: careful measurement and sense of scale could prevent it. It had to do with an animal fear of not responding quickly. Like burning oneself, because one’s skin, or sense of smell, was not functioning as it should. He was out of touch all ways, animal and geometric both.

Every day something new became problematic and difficult. An early thing was books, always bad and now impossible. Print reared off the pages like snakes striking. His eye got entangled by the anomalous, like the letter
g
, and the peculiar disparity between its written and printed forms. Reading was unmanageable because he measured frequencies of
gs
, or sat and stared, mesmerised by one. Any word will look odd, stared at, as though it was incorrect or unreal or not a word. Now all words were like that.

Going downstairs was another area of the problematic. He had never liked it. Now he stood irresolute for long periods at the top of flights, and then slithered down, step by step, both feet on each, hip and flank scraping and measuring the intervals between bannisters.

And the bathroom. When the water rushed into the lavatory pan, burst from the front, sheer fall from the sides, plain trickle at the back, all knocked into a turmoil by the others, and sucked away down, he was afraid, yet had to watch the lines pulling. Also he did not like the
plughole, a cartwheel covering an empty tunnel with a circular design.

He delayed going to the lavatory, then delayed leaving it to wash his hands, delayed leaving the basin to dry them, delayed leaving the bathroom because of the stairs.

But he was not mad, and was not quite compelled to behave as his fears dictated. If at school he was joined in the bog by another boy he moved around quite briskly. It was just pleasanter to comply, in private. And his evasive rituals had, he was vaguely aware, their own seductions. Waters, vertigo, figures, rhythms, the letter g, released him from worse imperatives. They conferred the ease of safety. He managed, too, to stop eating meat without taking up a position on vegetables. This was an evasion of a looming imperative that he should give up eating altogether.

What finally threw him was when the light shifted.

He was crossing those playing-fields on a Monday morning, towards the school. He was equidistant from the lines of force exerted by the fading white lines of the pitches. It was a spring day, with cold sun on new grass and evergreens. The polished curves of the railway were lit, and so was the wire grid round the tennis courts, intermittently flashing with shoots of brightness. The sky was empty, blue and pale. The remote sun, a defined, painful, liquid disk, hung somewhere. The laws of perspective were no help with that sun, either what it was, or where. It could be taken in only by looking at where it was not, somewhere to the side of it, stealing a flickering glance at it. It was not gold, it was more white, and very shining. Its multiplied after-images dotted the green fields with indigo circles.

The fields stretched on, even and green, tramped and mown. The Bilge Pond lay to his left, little, black and ordinary. Suddenly the light changed and he stopped.

An essential part of what then happened was his own reluctance to believe it was happening. When he remembered it his body remembered huge strain and oppression, caused by two antithetical fears, working together: the fear of being changed completely, beyond help, and the equally powerful fear that all this was only a fantasy, perversely imposed by his errant consciousness on the real world. And even at this moment, which possibly changed all his life, he heard a cheery inner voice telling him that it was possible, as with books, staircases and bathrooms, not to have to know. Later he thought this was a lying, evasive voice. Later still, he remembered it as a true comforter, its cheerful hollow smallness a guarantee that he had kept his identity, had gone on being himself …

The light then changed. He stopped because it was hard to go forward, there was too much in front and all round him, light almost tangibly
dense and confoundingly bright. He stopped in parts, his body first, then his attention, so that there was a sickening moment when the inside of the head, the cavern, was striding on beyond the frightened soft eyes and contracting skin.

The light was busy. It could be seen gathering, running and increasing along the lines where it had been first manifest. Wild and linear on the railway tracks, flaming, linking, crossing on the tennis-court mesh, rising in bright intermittent streams of sparks from glossy laurel leaves and shorn blades of grass. It could also be seen moving when no object reflected, refracted or directed it. In loops, eddies, powerful direct streams, turbulence and long lines proceeding without let through stones, trees, earth, himself, what had been a condition of vision turned to an object of vision.

Things were newly defined by it. Objects it met, rocks, stones, trees, goal posts, were outlined darkly and then described in light. Its passage through these things only increased their opacity.