The Virgin in the Garden (31 page)

To get on to the Brigg proper it is necessary to scramble over boulders and piled stones, sharp with barnacles and limpets, thick with bubbling brown and soft matted green weeds. They climbed and skidded, arriving in time at the man-made causeway that runs out for some of the way along the spine of the Brigg into the sea, shoring up, solidifying with asphalt and concrete, what is jammed and cracked and grinding and sloping and rocking. They got onto this somehow on all fours, and stood up under the memorial tablet to the Paget family, swept away by a huge wave, their fate carved there as a warning to other men. The salt smell was now organic; briny, iodine, alive, alien. Daniel breathed it in with pleasure. He said, “Do you want to go on? Shall we go out to the end? Or round to the caves?”

“Out,” she said, pointing.

“Good.” He could hardly wait. “We can get quite a way before it’ll be dangerous. Tide’s low. Did you know this place was said to have been built by the Enemy of Mankind to lure ships to their doom?”

“I can believe it.”

“Or as the first stage in bridging the North Sea. But he got impatient, and it fell about, so he gave up and we have the unfinished ruin.”

They began, upright at first, and later, as the path vanished, crouching, squatting, sitting, clutching, to edge out to sea, intent only on their progress. Periwinkles rolled and clattered; Stephanie skinned a wrist on barnacles; fitted fingers into clutchholes in porous light boulder clay; went about and about to avoid patches of that leafage so vivid a green that it is tempting to call it unnatural, except that it grows, flourishes, in tufts and thickets, quite naturally, swept and submerged by the sea. A kind of third wind filled her. She began to enjoy her protesting body, placing fingers and toes, balancing spine and hip and shoulder. As they came out of the shelter of the headland the wind beat differently: less monotonous, less flapping, shrill, sharp, singing, whirring. They came to a high flat place and stopped to look about.

Immediately ahead waves were crashing in over the submerged tip of the rocky projection, flung high and smashed, rolling, circling, converging, splashing. And waves already divided by the end of the headland were crashing in from both sides, waters rising in a precipitous mass, hurled flat on a table of grit, running, trickling, sighing away down holes and channels to where it sucked and swayed invisibly under their feet. There was a weird homogeneity to the world out there. The sky was flung fragments, very blue and bright with flying shreds of cloud involved with tossed and whirling foam, flakes and flecks of white, off-white and cream, and grey and brown, with the birds turning and calling harshly in both elements, white birds, specked brown birds, beaks gold and blooded, hooked, harsh and clean in line.

They stood on wet stone, stupidly obsessed by seeing, passive while a rapid swell rolled in, green-grey, gold-grey, lifting, cresting, whitening, and suddenly towered beside them, stood formed and tall over them for a moment of time, and fell, and dispersed on the rock at their feet, drenching them both, trickling, chuckling, streaming, broken by every stone and strand of weed, running back every which way into the undifferentiated cold mass. The fair-isle beret was soaked. Daniel shook his black head like a dog, and drops of water flew from it, sparkling and glittering in the patch of bright cold sunlight that seemed suddenly to have steadied over them. He looked at Stephanie who was standing, quietly standing, with the wave’s last waters running busily over and round her shoes on their way out. Slowly she took off the beret: the yellow hair was picked up and blown by the wind. It was streaked darkly with water, and her macintosh was covered with long, dark pointed
stains. She stood there as though mesmerised by the water, her mouth open slightly, smiling secretly, while the wind rippled on in her wet hair and clothes. The sun was so bright now he could hardly see her. A smaller wave failed to hurl itself as high as they were. She again said something he could not hear.

“What,” he cried, “what did you say?”

She approached her mouth to his ear. He heard “… your language, then. Let there be light, I said.” She seemed drunk and chuckling, lit up. “Come on,” she said. She began to go out along the rocks, very fast, holding her arms wide to balance herself, half-running, half-striding. He went after her. Another tall wave bowed, jarred, cracked and whispered at her feet. She turned to him a face he had never seen, blindly smiling, wild, white and wet. As she set off again, another wave rose, Daniel seized her, the drenching waters descended, and Daniel took hold of her hair and body. He kissed her. There was a mixture of salt and cold and heat and unbalance. She kissed him back. She kissed him so certainly that they both staggered and Daniel could only right them by tugging her hair and shoving with his knees. This caused her to become pliant and docile, who had been straining and flying.

“You are not going to be drowned,” said Daniel, dragging. Between two boulders he gathered her most uncomfortably and kissed her again. She had a look almost of lewd abandon. Daniel was in a state of extremity. He banged her accidentally on the rock, then propped her on his own solid body. The cold sun shone on.

“You will have to marry me.”

“No. This is – a romantic moment – we made. It doesn’t change anything.”

“Yes it does. We made it. We can make a lot more. We can do anything.”

“
You
made it happen,” she said, pleading.

“I want to live like this.”

“You can’t. I know. These things – don’t last.”

“Things I do last.”

Tears were rolling down her cheeks, hot on cold sea and cold flesh. She knew, she knew that such things slipped away whilst you tried to recognise them, died whilst you tried to find out how to keep them alive, vanished whilst you tried to heave your life into new forms to accommodate them.

“Have you ever felt like this?” said Daniel, as though the question were conclusive.

“No. But –.”

“Nor me.”

“Daniel – it almost doesn’t mean anything – it’s only for here and now.”

“No it isn’t. I don’t want much. But I want to go on like this. I want you. I want you. I want to have you.”

“Oh, Daniel.”

“And so do you want it. I know what you want.”

He did not. But she said, “All right.”

They were both taken aback. She repeated it almost irritably, as though if he hadn’t heard it it could be retracted. “All right. I said, all right.”

Her face was streaming with tears. Daniel retracted an arm.

“No, no. I’m forcing you. You don’t have to –”

“You don’t understand. I thought you did. The thing is, I’ve never
wanted anything
, not anything for myself, in my whole life. I don’t know how to fit it in with anything else I know. I can’t deal with …”

If he lost his certainty of purpose now they were both lost. But he said, “Then it’s all right. That’s the only thing. It will be all right.” He stared out over her pale head at the still and hurrying, blown and shining sea and sky.

Much later they had sandwiches and beer in a pub in Hunmanby. They sat side by side on a wooden settle by an open fire and devoured rare red beef, onions and salt pressed into new brown bread. They could hardly eat fast enough: the taste was sharp and strong and entirely delightful. They were unused to being happy. Both were unconsciously preparing themselves for the moment when happiness would crack up.

“What next?” said Daniel, draining his pint.

“Next?”

“Next today, next in a week, next in a month. What shall we do now?”

“What can we do?”

“Get married. Soon. There’s no point in anything else.”

“How soon?”

“Well, there’s banns. Somewhere to live. That’s not easy, I earn next to nothing. You don’t want to live with the Vicar. Nor do I.”

You said, all right, and suddenly everything was unrecognisable. She could not imagine living with Daniel. Or, it was true, without him.

“I must see the term out, I must talk Daddy round. He won’t like it.”

“Now or ever?”

“Possibly not ever. But he might sort of come round a bit.”

“I wouldn’t rely on it, myself. I wouldn’t wait, myself. But you must do as you think right. Vicar’ll want to talk to you.”

The Church reared its ugly, sluggish solid head.

“What will he say? He likes me.”

“Aye, he likes you. I sh’d think he’ll think you’ll make a good vicar’s wife. Being so clearly on the side of the angels. You don’t need to get embattled wi’ him.”

“You would.”

“Yes. But then, I care about such matters. Your point is, you don’t. I sh’d think he’ll think you’ll civilise me. He thinks I’m uncouth.”

“Daniel –”

“Hm?”

“In the nineteenth century, I would, I would have made a good vicar’s wife. In the twentieth, it’s not morally possible.”

The bread and meat were comfortable inside him: the fire-warmth was on his sea-wet legs: her thigh was on his.

“You’d make a good wife for me. You need to be doing. So do I. We’re alike. We’ll get on. It’s not as though I was one of the smells and bells kind of churchmen, and all that stuff, is it?”

He put his hand in her lap, over her hand. Desire lunged at them.

“I want, I want, I want,” said Daniel in a conversational voice through closed teeth.

“So do I,” she said, truthfully.

“There isn’t anywhere we could go.”

“No. We could stay here. We could book a room, and make up a story, and telephone and tell some lies. People do. All the time. It ought to be easy.”

His face took on its heavy, brooding look. “Would you find it easy?”

“No. I’m a rotten liar. I’d worry.”

“Aye.” He grasped her hand, crunching bones. “There must be a way. There must. People find all sorts of ways.”

“Fewer people than you think.”

He laughed abruptly. “In my profession you get to know how many people. How many of my kind of people. It seems an awful lot to me. There seem to be an awful lot of people who perpetually find themselves in situations where it’s downright difficult not to … Perhaps I’m just incompetent. Or not trying hard enough. What shall we do?”

“I don’t know.”

They walked a lot more, in the event, and came inconclusively back to Blesford on buses and trains. At Blesford bus station he said,

“The best I can offer is powdered coffee in my room.”

“Well, I can’t offer anything at all.”

The Vicarage was dark and empty.

“They’re out.”

“Aye, it seems so.”

They mounted in the dark to Daniel’s floor. They closed themselves in. They listened. She said, “Where’s Felicity?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you shut the curtains?”

He did that, and lit the fire, and the coal-scarlet bedside lamp. He turned to her. “Oh God, what now?”

She did not know. They were both afraid of going to bed, not, oddly, because they had any primitive fear of failure in the act, but because they were more mildly, more insidiously, more deeply afraid of embarrassment. They feared the sudden irruption of the inhabitants of the house, or urgent parishioners. Daniel feared the ancient springs of his bed, and the faintly mildewed smell which when he was alone did not bother him. Stephanie feared her own incapacity to deal with Daniel’s morality. Sin, which she supposed it was, was a complex business. There must be some sense in which going to bed with her would be wrong, and the urgency of his intention to ignore this wrong excited her. It made the whole business serious and important in a way none of her Cambridge encounters had been, although it now occurred to her that it had suited her to flatten out all the responses of the young men to the automatic and everyday level at which she chose to behave herself. But this plunge into the unknown consequences of Sin alarmed her. She would not want to damage Daniel in his own eyes. She would not want to deal with a tempest of remorse. She held the fair-isle beret in both hands and twisted it nervously round and round in front of her like a fluffy chastity shield.

“At least take your coat off,” he said. She arranged it with exaggerated slow neatness on one of his many chairs. The pointless deliberation irritated him. He made a creaking, sidling stride towards her and got his arms round her waist.

She sidestepped.

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell if you’re going to be sorry.”

“I’m not. Not over you.”

“But you ought not –”

“It doesn’t seem to matter. If it doesn’t bother me, I don’t see why it should bother you.”

“I don’t see
why
it doesn’t.”

“It doesn’t bother you,” he pointed out. “As an act.”

“No. But I – am not –”

He could see what was troubling her but could think of no answer, because the problem seemed to him irrelevant and he had no intention of engaging it, then or ever. The forces and clarity of the day, sea and sky
and wind, were being unnecessarily dissipated. He cast about to distract her, and said with low cunning, “Of course. I’ve never before … never in fact … 
That
worries me.”

It did not worry him. He assumed quite wrongly that passion and attention would make up for lack of skill. But it did have the effect of deflecting her attention from his bruised morals to his presumed sexual insecurity.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said.

The house was silent. Daniel began to turn the bed. She did not try to stop him. When he had done this, she said, “Have you got a towel?”

“A towel?”

“We shall need a towel.”

He found one, white with red stripes, and put it on the pillow. He wondered if he should start undressing her, or himself. She said, “If we put the light out, and keep quiet, if they come back, they won’t know we’re here.”

“Aye,” he said. “That’s so.”

So in the dark they undressed, fast, and got into the bed, cramped cold flesh, hot flesh, pale and dark into the narrow bed together.

It was not very successful, a disorganised arhythmic flurry, with both bodies constantly in danger of slipping off the bed, inhibited almost to the last by creaking springs and unanchored, slithering bedclothes. Daniel, overexcited and wild, did not know, half the time, whether he was in or out, coming or going. Stephanie, not habituated to piercing sexual pleasure, made no attempt to exact an orgasm and did not achieve one, a fact of which the floundering Daniel appeared to be unconscious, since he made no attempt either to induce one, to enquire whether one had happened, or to apologise for the apparent deficiency. This she found more comforting than not, because of the lack of embarrassment. They got hot, and wet, a little battered and confused. Daniel groaned and it was over.