The Virgin in the Garden (34 page)

“Oh
no
,” said Frederica, and closed him in.

They were all there. Something was wrong with the lighting: it was unusually cold and dim. Bill asked if Alexander would like sherry, poured a little for the two of them, and then, as an afterthought, a small dose for Winifred. No one but Frederica showed any impulse to speech: Frederica rattled on to Alexander about Mrs Parry, and her performance in
The Lady’s Not for Burning
, from which it was only a short step to Frederica’s own determination to be a professional actress, not sit in a house and let her talents, such as they were, fust in her unused, by God. Since she had had Lodge’s letter offering her the part of Elizabeth before
her coronation she had been, apart from the contretemps in the Chattery, in glory, and had taken to decorating her conversation with oaths and expletives, not exactly archaic, but obviously modern versions of Elizabeth’s. This was very trying. Alexander tried to damp her enthusiasm with statistics about the number of unemployed female members of Equity. Bill said she would go to University and get a good degree, like Stephanie, and then she would be equipped to choose a profession. “Like Stephanie,” said Frederica jeering.

“Like Stephanie,” said Bill. “Though you show surprisingly little sign of Stephanie’s self-discipline, or respect for truth, I must say.”

“I suppose Stephanie’s done what you want, then, Stephanie’s career is O.K. by you?”

“She could do better. She will do better. This place is only a stage.”

“You don’t know anything about Stephanie, or what she means to do. You don’t know what she wants, or what any of us want. You don’t know what you’ve done to us.”

“Oh, Frederica,” said Stephanie. She began to redden. Alexander looked at her with interest. He thought that Frederica had predicted a row with such certainty because she intended to provoke it.

“I know that Stephanie wants too little. I tell her frequently she’s wasting herself in that place. You would agree I’m sure, Alexander.”

Alexander was saved from replying by Winifred, who said, without thinking rapidly enough of the consequences of speech, since she was put out by Frederica, “That isn’t it. Something’s wrong – Stephanie?”

“Nothing is wrong. Nothing at all. The truth is, I am engaged to be married. I didn’t want to talk about it yet.”

For some reason she was addressing Alexander. She looked unhappy. Bill said, “And to whom, if I may ask, since I must ask, since I have no inkling, are you engaged to be married?”

Still addressing Alexander, she said, “To Daniel Orton.”

“And who is Daniel Orton?”

It was impossible, Alexander decided, to work out whether this question arose from genuine ignorance or heavy irony. It was answered by Frederica.

“He’s the curate. The one who comes, you know, who came about kittens.”

“No,” said Bill.

“My felicitations,” said Alexander, weakly.

“You must be out of your mind.”

“I want to marry him. I’ve thought about it. So has he. It’s something you’re supposed to think about for yourself.”

“Piffle.”

“Daddy, please don’t
start
. Please don’t. I do mean what I say. It is my life. Please don’t.”

“Your life. And what the hell do you think that will be, married to the curate? Chat and hassocks and Brownies and Mothers and Fayres. You’re totally unfitted for that sort of non-existence. Like a race-horse in a milk-float. You’ll go crazy in a week if you aren’t, as I said, already. And he must be mad, or totally without imagination, to expect it of you. Not that he looks as though imagination’s his strong point.”

“Daddy –”

“And then there’s his faith, such as it is, in these latter days. I take it you don’t share that, you haven’t gone as far as
that –
”

“No, but –”

“No but?”

“His work, his
work
is good, I respect his work.”

“It isn’t
your
work, you fool, it doesn’t require your gifts, and it does require things you haven’t got. The man can’t have thought at all. His Vicar’ll never permit it. My God, Stephanie, you aren’t going to tell me you can honestly want to go and join an institution with St Paul’s views on women, and views, no doubt, about breeding and the sanctity of recurrent parturition. You’ll become a cow. A cow and a slave and a tweedy tea-pourer. You can’t.”

“I wish you would stop it. You are making a thing of Daniel. You have no right to do that.”

Bill turned histrionically to Alexander.

“I am at fault. I am at fault, I must be. I have failed somewhere. All my children lack guts, they lack real guts and persistence. They creep and sidle away from the real challenges. My son is a moony fool, and my daughter wants to marry a lie and a totem and bury her one talent –”

“You are at fault,” said Frederica. “You are at fault because you do what you’re doing now. You make it impossible for us to do what you want us to do because you make it seem totally repulsive by the way you go on. I should think she’s marrying the curate just to spite you, just to shut up your voice grinding on and on so sure what’s right and good …”

“Frederica be quiet,” said Winifred. “And Bill. Be quiet. You are doing irreparable damage.”

“I’m trying to
stop
irreparable damage, you lunatic. Do you want the girl to marry a fat curate?”

“No. I don’t. But I don’t think it matters, what we want. It’s her decision, and I shall stand by her.”

“You’ll get no thanks. She’s intent on flouting us.”

“No,” said Stephanie chilly. “Whatever you – and Frederica – think – it’s
nothing to do with you. I love Daniel. It wasn’t an easy thing. And you are making it all much worse. But you won’t change anything. So please, don’t go on.”

Bill gathered up a tall pile of books topped by an ashtray and flung them at her. She bent sideways. The books landed, fluttering and thudding, around her: the ashtray hit a small lamp, which exploded, scattering glass and a smell of burning. Stephanie picked up two books. Her hands were shaking. Alexander saw that there was a crusty thin line of foam at Bill’s mouth-corners. He averted his eyes and said, “I think you shouldn’t say any more. And I feel it isn’t right for me to be here. And Stephanie is very distressed.”

“Very distressed,” said Bill. “Very distressed. And so she should be and so am I. Very distressed. All right. I won’t say any more. I shan’t mention this topic again, ever. You may do what you like, of course, but whatever it is, I want no part in it, so you will kindly not bother me with it ever again.”

He glared round the room, nodded curtly at Alexander, and slammed himself out. Winifred, her face expressionless, went after him.

“I told you it would be awful,” said Frederica.

“You didn’t help,” said Stephanie.

“I tried,” said Frederica.

“Hardly,” said Alexander.

Stephanie had wrapped her arms round herself and was shivering. Alexander went over to her.

“Are you all right?”

“Probably. I feel sick.”

“You shouldn’t try so hard to be reasonable.”

“We were brought up to be reasonable.”

“Hardly,” said Alexander.

“Oh yes we were. To believe in reason and humanity and personal relations and tolerance. You can reinforce any precept with any technique. I shall never feel the same for him after this.”

Her voice was thin and small. Alexander had a nasty moment’s doubt as to whether it was Bill or Daniel she would never feel the same for. Frederica declared robustly, “He’ll come round. He does.”

“And if he does I shall have been through all this for nothing. I shall be expected to pretend it doesn’t really matter. That’s what he does to us, what he always does, so we are in the wrong to mind what he says, because he explains he didn’t exactly mean it. So you become guilty of letting ugly words go sour in your head because they’ve been unsaid.”

“You can’t afford to mind what’s absurd.”

“No.” Very coldly.

“Stephanie – go and talk to Daniel. Now. As soon as you can.”

“Daniel? I can’t tell him about this. That would be
terrible
. I can’t …”

“It’s his business,” said Alexander, gently. Stephanie began to cry in great panicky gulps.

“I can’t
remember
him. I can’t remember him properly. It’s not as though I hadn’t had my own – debates with myself – about those things – the Church –”

“But Daniel’s there,” said Alexander, “and real.” He put his arms round her and she smelled the fragrance of Old Spice. She could not say that his own unreality, in that sense, and his presence now, exacerbated her uncertainties. She clung to him and wept and he stroked her hair, over and over.

Frederica sat unremarked on the sofa. She felt shaken and invigorated. Their lives had been punctuated by such gales of rage. This was by no means the first broken lamp. They lived by a myth of normality, an image of closed family safeties and certainties. But there were rips and interstices through which the cold blasts howled, had always howled and would howl. That had its exhilarating aspect. Howls, grimaces, naked unreason were not, as the Potter ethic and aesthetic said, temporary aberrations. They were the stuff of things. If you knew they were there you could act, truly. She uncurled, patted Stephanie, who winced, on the shoulder, and went out.

“The trouble is,” said Stephanie, “I feel unfit to live.”

“Nonsense.”

“No, truly. He makes me feel like that. I don’t think it’s a sensible thing to feel, I just do.”

“You placate him like Jehovah. That’s no good.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No, because it makes it worse. For him, too.”

“I should be dead. I want
not to be
.”

“You want to marry Daniel Orton.”

Having said this, he kissed her, drily and gently, on the mouth. She dropped her head on his shoulder, and so they sat, for some time. She could not remember Daniel, it was true.

Frederica offered her gifts, with a flourish and an apology, to Stephanie. Stephanie thanked her, and said she really need not have bothered. Stephanie was clever enough, Frederica considered, to know how
hurtful such remarks about not bothering can be. She tried to make allowances for stress, but thought Stephanie should have recognised that she was under considerable strain herself.

She was suffering from a generalised wrath, inspired by a kind of illicit sex-film, blurry and full of hiatuses, which ran constantly in her head and elsewhere. Daniel, however fat, had become monstrously interesting: willy-nilly Frederica’s imagination lifted the clerical shirt and rolled down the clerical trousers, measured the weight of the mountain belly or fleetingly saw the gleeful prancing of Stephanie’s soft white and his craggy and hirsute black. She exposed herself to the air, which was not penetrating but encased her in claustrophobic heat. She snarled at everyone, postured and boasted, and elicited a response only from the mirror. Winifred suggested that she go for a good long walk and get some fresh air. This released Frederica like a spring: she took the bus to Calverley, from where she intended to take a further bus onto the North Yorkshire Moors, and tramp.

Behind Calverley Minster, in which she wandered for a rapid fifteen minutes, was the bus yard. Frederica mounted a brown bus that was going to Goathland and Whitby, and settled back against the window, hoping vaguely for the sense of disembodiment a good journey can confer. A man came and sat beside her. She ritually rose, subsided, indicating concession of space, drawing in her skirt. Her neighbour immediately swelled to fill the space. The bus drew away, out of Calverley. She glanced quickly at the man. He wore a hairy, reddish-brown suit, inside which he was very solid. The square hand on the knee next to her wore a gold signet ring. She looked out of the window.

Outside Calverley, the bus began to climb. Frederica, loosed from grumble and heat, began to think. She thought about Racine. They were doing
Phèdre
for A Level. Miss Plaskett, the French teacher, set them to write endless character analyses: they had done Phèdre, Hippolyte, Aricie, Oenone but not yet Thésée. A Level took that form. Somehow what they were doing made Racine seem exactly like Shakespeare and Shakespeare exactly like Shaw – last term she had done Joan, Dunois, Cauchon, de Stogumber in exactly the same way. One was required to discuss the function of the characters in the plot, and on top of that, like cream on a trifle, what extra individuality they had, what intrinsic nature, unique and separate. The other thing they did, which made Shakespeare like Racine, but not like Shaw (who was indeed rather recalcitrant to the good, professional A Level candidate), was trace recurrent images. Blood and babies in
Macbeth
, blood and light and dark in
Phèdre
. This made both Shakespeare and Racine seem very like Alexander Wedderburn. (Shaw was more difficult. If you did not repeat his own polemical
points you had almost nothing left to say. If you were any good, it was most unsatisfactory, repeating someone else’s, even the author’s, remarks about what his play was about. He had made that kind of commentary redundant. There must be some other kind, but she was damned if she knew what it was.)

Whereas what struck one, meeting Shakespeare and Racine, was the difference, in the whole frame of the work. There ought to be a way of describing the difference. Compare and contrast Phèdre and Cleopatra as portrayals of passionate women. No, no. It was not really to do with the unities either, which felt like a red herring.

It was to do with the Alexandrine. You had to think differently, the actual form of your thought was different, if you thought in closed couplets, further divided by a rocking caesura, and if you thought in French, in a limited vocabulary.

Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée
.

C’est Vénus toute eutière à sa proie attachée
.

Four segments of a proposition, balanced,
balanced
, even in this most extreme statement, and think of the effect of emphasising cachée and attachée by the rhyme. Did one
see
Venus toute entière? She had without thinking always seen a formless crouching thing, dropped from a branch, claws extended, involved in the struggling body like Stubbs’s lion and horse. The outer ripping up the inner. But the verse form separated the clutcher from the clutched whilst linking them inexorably. Something like that. Now if one wrote, Frederica thought, on the thought processes of the Alexandrine – one might get somewhere – see how
argued
comparatively the images were, not fluent as in Shakespeare. She grinned a grin of pure pleasure, sitting staring out at what was by now a distinctly moorland landscape, the road bordered by uneven banks and expanses of wiry grass and trembling cotton grass, the earth humping and folding and cracking away to the horizon in granite and heather and bracken plots.