The Virgin in the Garden (24 page)

Alexander said to Crowe, “Here’s Frederica saying she has no feeling for your things because of the war.”

Crowe raised his silvery brows at her.

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“It is. They intimidate me. There’s too much.”

“Not if you know it. I shall show you my beautiful house and teach you to see detail. We shall start with the plaster-work in the Great Hall. Have you looked at the plaster?”

She had noticed that there was a plaster frieze running round the Great Hall, under the gallery. She had taken in no more than a vague impression of forest trees, naked running figures and animals, in chalky relief. Now, staring obediently at this, she saw that the figures were both vigorous and slightly wooden, an uneasy marriage of the English and the classical. She located a man becoming a stag, a creature whose tortured energy of metamorphosis was something like that of the foliate men in Southwell Minster: stretched sinews, hardening distorted feet, spreading rib-cage, branching horns, creamy-furred dewlap and opening muzzle-mouth under a human brow.

“Actaeon,” said well-educated Frederica.

“Right,” said Crowe. “This wall depicts the tale of Diana and
Actaeon. The other is about Venus hunting the errant Cupid. Over the hearth, you see, the two goddesses meet, Cupid is tamed and berated and Actaeon is neatly butchered. The whole thing is in my view a continual allegory. Much livelier than most English plaster. Look at the pretty goddesses.”

Frederica looked at the pretty goddesses. They appeared and reappeared in scenes which melted into each other, giving the repeated concrete figures a multiplicity or ubiquity. Diana stood high-breasted, thin, tall, in a circular pool amongst bulrushes with human Actaeon peering behind a boulder. The observer’s eye was behind the observing hunter, and could thus see the human muscles on his shoulders and buttocks. In the next scene the irate goddess and a bevy of delicate-muscled maidens overlooked the change from man to beast and then followed the long hunt, dog-feet, girl-feet, horse-hooves flowing like white vertical waves through white flowers and white tree-stems whilst Cupid appeared and reappeared with his toy bow and the goddess leaped, took aim, and reappeared in the next clearing. Towards the hearth a procession of maidens bore the dead weight of the broken body swinging from long poles to where the goddesses, triumphant, in pallid pleats and floral garlands sat throned, hand in hand, above the fireplace.

On the other side of the room, in a style much less fluid and more artificial, Venus awoke in a forest bedchamber, its walls made of ambivalently decorative white trees or pillars with foliate heads. She flew off in a dove-drawn chariot, alighted in a tiny walled city on a pastoral hill where peasants and miniature sheep and cows pointed to white wounds to show her son had passed and vanished. Venus was more rounded than Diana and wore her elaborately woven girdle over exiguous garments through the fine lines of which her limbs swelled prettily. Wherever she stood white flowers budded from the earth and fell through the white air in sprigs and posies. Her face had a smiling calm as Diana’s had a cold one: together, at the end, amongst formalised wreckage of weeping, bleeding nymphs, victims of Cupid’s arrows, and the stiff deer-man laid out for the knife, they were somewhat disturbing. Frederica said so. Crowe said she was right, and that it was his belief that they were an oblique commentary on the attitude of Elizabeth to Johanna Seale, daughter of the house, whose fate had been much like that of Bess Throckmorton. Virginity and venery had destroyed that lady, who had died young, brought to bed of a second son, most unwisely conceived during her imprisonment. There was a loyal icon of the Queen herself over the entrance to the Hall, opposite the goddesses, which was apposite to Alexander’s play and might interest Frederica.

Frederica stared up at this altogether more cluttered, less delicate creature, and observed that the queen seemed to be squatting.

“Indeed she does. That’s partly an effect of foreshortening. But mostly because her garment is the map of England which necessitates some squashing and extending of the body. You see Land’s End fluttering beyond her left knee. And Scotland knotted over her left shoulder. Related to Drayton’s Polyolbion frontispiece, of course.”

“The cornucopia,” Frederica began unguardedly, “seems to be coming out from between her legs from her …”

“I take that to be the Thames Estuary. Centre of commerce. This is Elizabeth as Virgo-Astraea. Astraea, last of the immortals, goddess of Justice, ascended to heaven in the iron age and became conflated with the zodiacal Virgo. She acquired Libra’s scales, but also Virgo’s harvest-attributes, since Virgo and Libra are the signs of harvest.”

“I know. I was born under Virgo. August 24th, St Bartholomew.”

“An unexpected conjunction of portents.”

“I don’t believe in all that.”

“She was born under Virgo, Elizabeth. It’s arguable that Virgo and the Virgin Mary are quite closely related to much nastier savage harvest-deities – Cybele, Diana of Ephesus, Astarte.”

“Birkin’s Moon.”

“But his icons are so
forced
don’t you think, when you see this?” Frederica stared dutifully up at Elizabeth-Polyolbion-Virgo-Astraea. Because of its squat position the figure, partly absurd, had a craggy, chthonic, amorphous presence, more primitive than the nymphs and goddesses with their neat spherical breasts. Under its literally landscaped draperies it was heavy and exuberant, castle-crowned. The left hand held a naked sword; the scales of justice depended from the right; the cornucopia rose powerful and huge, a stiff curving horn, a river of plenty, between the monumental knees, spilling to its earth and along the architrave a cascade of plaster flowers and fruit, ears of corn and gilded apples.

This was not the end of Frederica’s aesthetic education. All of them were taken, willy-nilly, on a guided tour of the State Bedrooms. These were cosmologically named, Sun, Moon and Planets, opening into each other, each containing a huge curtained bed under an elaborately painted ceiling. These large and draughty rooms had several entrances and exits, leading to closets, corridors and landings. Crowe bustled, somewhere between housekeeper, art historian and slave-driver, his arms heaped with the protective paper that hid the bedspreads, embroidered by the unfortunate Johanna Seale, from the light. In the Moon room these, and the hangings, had silver crescents on blue: Crowe pushed open the
shutters and let in a little pale, cold, doubtful sunshine. All the bedchambers had plasterwork by the imaginative English Master of classical metamorphosis. In the Moon room this depicted the doings of Diana: the deaths of Niobe’s children and Hippolytus, the changing of Egeria to a spring of water. The ceiling, as Crowe said, unfortunately dominated things: a baroque innovation, it depicted in strange perspective the descent of Cynthia down the domed heaven to Endymion sleeping in his cave.

Wilkie said, “I wonder how long since anyone made love in those beds? Rather a grand experience, I should think.”

“They’d have been very cold at night,” said Thomas Poole. “Even with a fire, and all those hangings.”

“I should think,” said Frederica, “if you bounced on that you’d raise vast puffs of dust. I should think if you shut yourself in those curtains you’d get claustrophobia. I should think with the room being a kind of thoroughfare you’d be quite put off.”

“The ceiling was no doubt designed to put you on,” said Crowe.

“Not me,” said Frederica robustly and personally, who had never exactly been put on to make love to anyone. “All those roundy slabs of pinky-brown flesh, and that awful flat unreal blue, and sickly rosy clouds. That flesh has an awful baked look, or half-baked, you wouldn’t want to touch.”

Wilkie stared into the trompe-l’œil dome and after a moment took off his glasses. When he turned to Frederica she was startled to see that his eyes, which she had imagined were bright blue like his lenses, were in fact chocolate-brown. He blinked. She blinked. He said:

“It was an Italian artist. That’s not English flesh, nor English light. The shadows are too sharp, the light’s too thin and intense, those browns and pinks aren’t part of our landscape. English eroticism isn’t rich blue and terracotta. Or carne cotta. It’s sylvan and aqueous. We expect to look through mists into depths. The English Arcadia is brakes and thickets and watery obscurity. Ho for the greenwood and the midnight clearing in
Women in Love
, or Lady Chatterley’s naked lover rushing around in the pelting rain in the forest.”

“Mystic palpable real otherness,” said Frederica, producing her most-mocked quotation, quite aptly. “No thank you.”

In the Sun room Mrs Bryce said her feet hurt, sat down on a carved chest and rubbed her arches. Reed and Braithwaite, enjoying themselves, scooped up papers from the resplendent fiery bed. Crowe pointed out the plaster Daphne, amongst the loves of Apollo, the plasterer’s masterpiece in his view, so very English, sprouting leaves on knobby joints, human veins starting and spreading into leaf veins, the arrested leaping
legs thrust down into roots, the funny little face like an ancient English elf, not a Greek nymph. Miss Yeo quoted Marvell. Not as a nymph but for a tree. Reed and Braithwaite chanted about vegetable love and its vast growth. Crowe got hold of Frederica’s elbow and directed her gaze at the ceiling.

“Better than next door. Jacopo I suspect was not profoundly inspired by women. But this.”

The ceiling depicted the death of Hyacinth. It was in doubtful taste, if that was the way to describe the curious discomfort that overtook most who looked at it. The pale gold naked sungod, his golden locks elaborately dressed on his narrow shoulders knelt with his arms spread wide in horror or erotic adoration above the limp, idealised, bleeding brown body of the boy, whose redder blood stained the red sand in pleasing swirls and was already blossoming at the edges of its pools, into hyacinths, purply crimson on the scarlet and terra-cotta. The god’s head was poised, contemplating his work, on one side. The lids were dropped over the eyes, so that he peered through narrow slits, the wide mouth was stretched and down-drooping, slightly parted in that ambivalent expression that might be pure pain or pure pleasure, a mask of extreme feeling, frozen.

Crowe gripped tighter.

“Look at the line – the inner line of Apollo’s thighs, and the way they echo the boy’s. Look at the mindlessness of both those faces, and the line of the head in the blood, the repeated curves –”

“He’s dead,” said Frederica. It seemed important to establish that he was dead.

“Death and sexual ecstasy were interchangeable images.”

“Still are,” said Wilkie. “People do look like that. Dead or ecstatic.”

He spoke with authority. Frederica had no wish to ask him how he knew. Crowe went on.

“Note the different perspective. Next door’s world’s enclosed in a regularly lit dome. Here the desert horizon stretches well away beyond the edges of easy vision – the eye has to travel, it can’t rest and take it in. And in this formless desert the central group is wholly formed, wholly composed. Look how precisely the flower-petals echo those glittering droplets of gore on his flank – with the droplet shape reversed in the flower. The whole thing’s a pyramid made up of little segments going up or down, like these drops – look at Apollo’s hair, the apex, the repeated curls and kinks. My theory is that it’s all a deliberate image of the cycle of generation and regeneration under the sun – the blood drops into the soil, the flowers spring up …”

“Blue flesh,” said Wilkie, removing the goggles again. “Allowing for
the after-image of these things. A lot of paradoxical cold reds, painted over blues, too.”

“He has a cruel mouth,” said Frederica.

“He was a cruel god,” said Crowe. “His stories are cruel stories. You shall see my little Marsyas, last of all. This god didn’t kill the boy, but look how Boreas, who did, over there, echoes his posture. Last of all, note the subsidiary groups of figures. Art historians label ’em nymphs and shepherds but I think that’s highly unlikely. My view is that the lot in the right – the ones formally dancing – are the Muses – ‘his choir, the Nine’ – you know – and those on the left, rather
obscurely
leaping around and gesticulating, are the initiates, the young men who celebrated Hyacinth, or Adonis, or Thammuz or whoever with orgies of self-mutilation and so on. You see the whole thing’s an infinity symbol – an elongated 8 on its side if you look – follow the arms and bodies through-crossing through Apollo and Hyacinth in the centre, where their bodies – ah – almost touch. Jacopo was quite a student of arcana and neo-Platonic mysteries. Here we have Apollo as principle of order and disorder, art and destruction. Resurrection and so on. Florid with a hard shape underneath.”

“How obscene,” said Wilkie to Frederica, who giggled.

Alexander and Jennifer had managed to get left behind beneath the visiting moon. They stood in tacit agreement at opposite sides of the room until the last straggler, who was Thomas Poole, came in, opened his mouth to address Alexander, thought better of it, and hurried on.

Alexander stood inside the window, looking out over herb-garden, kitchen-garden, high walls, to the moor beyond, with its blown, tumbled, sharp-legged sheep.

“Jenny. Come over here.”

“You come over here and look at this bed.” They stood, side by side, peering solemnly at its convex silk surface. “You are always saying, if only we had a bed. Here is a
monstrous
bed.”

Alexander agreed that it was. His hand found hers, in the small of her back. They stood enlaced.

“I should push you,” he said, “ever so gently over, and take up your feet, so, and take off your shoes, and let down your hair … and then take off everything else – quite quietly … and spread you out …”

“And stand and stare whilst I shivered in the middle of all this space.”

“No, no. I would … I would …” He could have written it. He could not speak it.

“You would do such things. I know, I know. We’ve been through all that. But we don’t, do we?”

“We shall. There are months ahead –”