The Virgin in the Garden (35 page)

The man next to her encroached. It was usually true that the person on her own side took up an unfair proportion of the seat. This man’s large bottom was warm on hers. His forearm overlapped her space. When the bus swung round a corner he put out a hand, clasped her knee, righted himself, and said,

“Sorry. Bit unsteady.”

“Not at all.”

“Going far?”

“Goathland.”

“You live there?”

“No, no.”

“Sightseeing?”

“A day out.”

“Likewise. Got a day to spare, thought I’d view the wilds. On your own?”

“Yes.”

“Likewise.”

Economical, Frederica thought. He relaxed into silence again. His bottom grew larger and closer. His lapel nudged her breast. His breathing was noticeable. She put her face on the window and studied the landscape. Last year’s browns, faded biscuit bracken, old heather, on this year’s raw earth and coming greens. There was art without landscape, before it, maybe after it. Racine for instance, would have had no interest in shades of bracken, and Mondrian, whom she had just discovered, almost certainly had none either. If you lived up here, you supposed landscape was of the essence, you had a Brontesque sense of using it to think and perceive with but at the same time it was in the way. You could neither see it nor through it, it was thickened with too many associations. Momentarily she envisaged an imaginary London flat, possibly Alexander’s, smooth pale woods, much white, closed curtains, soft light, artificial shapes, squared, rounded, streamlined, touches of cream and gold. She grinned again, which again aroused speech in her neighbour.

“Got any tips about what to do in this place?”

“No. They say it’s very pretty.”

“They do. Might take a stroll, stretch the old legs, eh? Funny, me taking a trip on my day off, seeing I travel by way of business. I’ve been all up and down this county this week. Huddersfield, Wakefield, Bradford, York, Calverley. Off to Harrogate Toy Fair. I’m in the toy trade. You’d think I’d want to keep still on my day off, but I find I’m restless.”

Frederica nodded cautiously. The man said, with a surprise flare of irritability, “You get lonely travelling. It’s hard to keep up house and family, if you’ve got to travel. I pour money into that home, I pour it, you’d not believe, but I get no benefit of it, unless you count the pleasure of knowing they’re better off than they’d otherwise be. Nothing personal. You can’t expect to be part of things, like if you came home regular for your tea. I sometimes feel I’m resented, if I turn up, making trouble, like, so I don’t, if I can help it, any more, I don’t put myself out dashing around, straining myself, I send a nice postcard and stay put, take a little trip or two like this, see a thing or two, chat to people. I find it’s more pleasant in the long run, less disillusioning.”

“Yes,” said Frederica, who never came to know who inhabited that
home, parents, wife or children. “My sister’s getting married. So we’ve got chaos.”

“I bet, I bet,” said the brown man, with huge sympathetic force.

When they got to Goathland the coach stopped outside a pub. It was cold: on the irregular village green geese walked, and moorland sheep trailed, munched, glowered, trotted away. Frederica’s companion said, “Buy you a drink.” She thought of saying no, but wanted to see inside a pub, where she had never been. Asked what she would drink, she said “whisky”, which she had had for colds, with honey, and felt was more appropriate to the place where they were than sherry, or gin and lime. The man bought her two whiskies, and talked to her about dolls.

“Now you wouldn’t think it, but the Huns make much sweeter dolls than what we do. Real pretty little faces, soft hair, ever so natural, ever so delicate. Our own average doll’s a real hard-faced little thing, with cheeks like red marbles and rattly eyes like little stones, and they don’t stop them clattering when you tip them. Surprising the kids like most of them at all, with their blood-red sweetie pie mouths and cutie expressions, which make you a bit sick if you really look at them, which I don’t, of course, in the run of things, my job being to sell the product. Mind you, kids’ll love anything, I often think they don’t really see what they’re cuddling at all, any old rag, or clothes-peg, or rubber contraption’d do most kids if they’d decided on it to cuddle. I’ve noticed that. But if you’re in a position to make comparisons you get a sort of sense of the ideal. I’d really like to see a natural doll, you know, a soft one, with real wrinkles like babies have, one that drank and wet and all that, with those useless little legs real babies have. I could design one but the trade wouldn’t touch it, much too ugly, no hair, all that bulgy tummy, they wouldn’t contemplate it. Pity that. Pity about little boy dolls too. Just permissible if black or Dutch, costumes on over nice smooth nothings. I wonder if the kids ever ask where the little cockle or winkle or widdler or whatjumcallit they see on self and brothers is. We wasn’t made to be so bashful, it persists throughout life. More whisky? No harm in accuracy, wouldn’t you say? But if I tried it, I’d be prosecuted.”

“I’m sure. I had a nice rubber doll. Her name was Angelica. But her stomach perished. Her vest melted into it. It was horrible.”

“Too hot, I expect you got her. Talcum powder helps, with rubber. Now take hair. Take hair. The Huns are better at hair, too. They’ve got a much better range of colours – quite realistic – our stuff’s all raven black or platinum blonde or occasionally auburn, if you can call it that. Henna’d I’d say. But the Huns make quite natural looking hair and space the tufts better, not in regimented rows as you might expect of them,
but natural like, all over the head, some of them real pretty, as I said. It destroys your faith in Made in Britain, it does really, and I don’t want to have to praise the Huns, I assure you. Not me. I’ve seen too much. Though mind you, not the Huns, nor the British or anyone else could get hair so lovely and soft and unusual as yours is. Such a marvellous shade, really unique, if you don’t mind the remark.”

“Thank you,” said Frederica, with irrelevant dignity.

“Not at all. Now, I was in the occupying forces in Germany and I can tell you artistic dolls is the last thing you’d want to think Germans could do. Lampshades of human skin, more like, and walking skeletons, same as what we saw when we marched in to liberate those Polish death camps. I tell you what reminded me of them; I went in the Minster and there was those figures of corpses and skeletons those old bishops used to keep on the bottom shelf, of their tombs, to remind themselves. Think of a host of those twittering at you, and smelling something awful when you came in. Turn your stomach and your nerves for good that would. You couldn’t think they were human, tho’ they were what you’d come for. More whisky? No. How about a bit of a walk round?”

Under the table his ankle hooked hers, wrinkled sock on nylon stocking. She felt that the rules of some game she didn’t know were being strictly if eccentrically observed. So much drink, so much talk, a ration of each, and then,

“What’s your name?”

“Freda. Freda Plaskett.”

“Unusual. Mine’s Ed. Edward really, of course, I prefer Edward, but Ed I always get.”

“Ed.”

“Shall we go?”

They walked through the centre of Goathland, down a road that became a track, scrambled over a little beck, and took a few steps into the real country. It became clear that Ed meant to go no further. He enquired whether Frederica felt it would be too cold to have a sit down. She said no. He produced a macintosh and laid it out under a somewhat Wordsworthian thorn bush. Frederica sat stiffly on the edge of it, telling herself that there were certain things that when she knew them would not bother her in the same way any more. She had read
Lady Chatterley
, true, and
The Rainbow
too, and
Women in Love
, but it cannot be said that she expected a revelation from the traveller in dolls. She wished her ignorance, part of it, to be dispelled. She wished to become knowledgeable. She wished to be able to pinpoint the sources of her discontent.

Ed propped himself, rather clumsily, on one elbow beside her, and looked up at her face. She did not meet his eye. Throughout the whole
proceedings, she did not really consider his face. Its general outline was heavy-jowled and clean-shaven. He had short, bristly brown hair.

“Comfy?” he enquired.

“More or less.”

“Better if you relax a bit and lie down.”

She lay down.

“Good girl,” he said, and humped his body over to hers. He threw one leg over hers and applied his face to her face, kissing, pecking, with hot, firm, dry lips, every bit of it, brow, cheeks, closed eyelids, chin, lips. He had a kind of daemonic proficiency, he had entered upon the performance of a routine technique. After a certain time spent on this dry kissing he began to apply himself simply to her mouth, nipping it, with lips, with teeth, rubbing it sideways, finally pushing it open with his tongue, which seemed monstrously huge, round and swollen, breathing nicotine, beer and tea. Their teeth clashed and jarred. Frederica tried to twist away, which increased his activity, he clamped her close with one arm and lifted the weight of his body onto hers. She felt his hard front pressing on her, rubbing, rubbing, and her own tongue, curled back in retreat, relaxed momentarily and brushed his, which caused her to quiver with anxiety, revulsion, and the persistent and appalling anonymous curiosity. Perhaps he was a sex maniac. She should have thought.

At this point he ran his hand up her leg, inside her skirt, as far as her thick school knickers. These he began to rub as efficiently as he was rubbing her face. Frederica wanted to twist away in embarrassment or revulsion. I shall go mad, she thought, I have got to know and I can’t stand it. It doesn’t matter how you get to know, it has got not to matter. She tried to close her legs, to say no, but her mouth was occupied, her pelvis weighted, and the busy hand was slowly moving round to the inside of her knickers which was, to her intense embarrassment, becoming hot and wet. It was strange: the more she disliked the whole business, the more a kind of automatic greed in her body took over, so that it rose of its own accord to meet, to invite the intrusive fingers so that when finally, he thrust two of them into her she twisted in anguish on them, convulsed by something, and tears started to her eyes. She imagined those working fingers, blunt, unknown, nicotine stained, not too clean, and went wild with contrary passions, biting back at the biting mouth, arching her body, flinging up an arm to beat at or caress the wiry hair which turned out to be, in fact, baby-soft and giving. Her dress was thrown up and her legs were both cold and wet. It occurred to her to wonder what if she were to want to pee, and this thought stilled her. Ed then took her hand and guided it gently to his fly front. Frederica
let it stay there, uncertainly, for a moment or two over his suit, and then removed it, after a momentary vague pressure for politeness sake. She did not know what she was expected to do, and did not want to do it. She went suddenly, largely involuntarily, limp. When Ed picked up her hand again she removed it fairly firmly and turned away her face. He sat up abruptly and could be seen carefully wiping his hand on his handkerchief. Frederica pulled her legs together over the hot, scratched, throbbing feeling and considered him. She had no means of telling, no precedent, whether this was an expected outcome, a monstrous frustration, a signal for a new onslaught. In fact, staring out at the impassive moorland, Ed began again to talk.

“Some of the chaps and me, in the Army, before the German bit, we used to visit the brothels in Cairo. They had shows, you know, as well as the usual, and the unusual I expect you might call it. Some of it wasn’t much cop, you can see enough of the same thing and I’ve never been one for boots and such. But there were things you don’t see every day. Like the place where they had this girl, and they used to hang this donkey over her, in a pretty tough net, suspended from the ceiling. She’d work it up, like, the ass, lie under it and work it up, with her hands and her mouth and all she’d got, a real active girl. It had this great tool, fair bursting through the net, and it would get properly worked up, but it couldn’t come at her, because of the net. They had to have it tied up, like, or it could have done her a lot of damage, torn her up, split her apart, and its hooves plunging about and her twisting and turning. That was something, that was.”

He stopped talking, as abruptly as he’d started. Frederica could think of nothing to say. They sat side by side, both with a slightly puzzled frown. He said,

“We’d best be getting back to the village. Could take the next bus to the coast.”

“I think – I’ll stay here, and just walk about.”

They sat a bit longer.

“Well,” said Ed. “I’ll be off. If you would get off my macintosh.”

Frederica stood up in a hurry, whilst he gathered up the macintosh, brushed it meticulously, hung it over his arm, gave her a taciturn nod, and set off back up the track.

She did not, in fact, walk very far: only a little way onto the moor and then, rather aimlessly, back onto the track again. The desire to stride out had quite left her: so had her strip-film. She did not by any means know all that was necessary but it was undoubtedly true that she knew considerably more than when she had set out. She walked along the track, and came across a very clean, silvery car, parked in a gateway.
It seemed familiar, and then was certainly recognised. She walked up to it, put her face against the front window, and peered in.

The front seats were empty. In the back seat, Alexander was spread ungracefully, one knee trailing off the seat, over some vanished and unidentified woman. His jacket and trousers were on, his waistline lumpish and knotted under the flaring corduroy coat-skirts. The beautiful hair hung smooth and soft over his face and onto the woman’s, brushing her, obscuring him. Frederica froze, and stared. She continued, mesmerised, possessed by curiosity, to peer in; Alexander, alerted by something, raised his face, flushed and delicately shining, and met her eyes.

The framed face of Frederica Potter, in the midst of the Goathland moors, was much worse than the Cheshire cat apparition of the girl in the snood on the Castle Mound. She had repaired her make-up after the episode with Ed, and the face Alexander saw had a certain puppet-like garishness, as was then fashionable, arched, gilded eyelids, gleaming wine-dark mouth, pale-powdered mask around them. Large gilded rings depended from the ears, under the red hair. Her expression, as Alexander read it, was eager and cruel. For what felt like a very long moment they held each other’s eye, silently. Then Alexander decided confusedly that if he ducked, that was, if he dropped his face again over Jennifer, who was he hoped protected by his own body from Frederica’s scrutiny, Frederica might not identify Jennifer, and might perhaps, ignored, go away. She was no hallucination, her breath misted his windscreen. He curled himself, with as dignified a motion as was possible, around Jenny, and waited, listening to his breathing. He wished, for all sorts of reasons, aesthetic and muscular, that they had got out of the car. But Jenny complained of the cold.