The Virgin in the Garden (49 page)

The Long Royston gardens filled with voices and bodies, gilded palanquins and floodlights with serpentining wires. The bedrooms, the upper rabbit-runs where once armies of servants had slept invisible, were now inhabited by actors, technicians, property people and hangers-on. Coaches and charabancs carrying crowds, orchestras, dancers and ultimately audiences rolled in from Calverley, York, Scarborough and points north, south, west and east as far as the sea. These battalions were summoned by Matthew Crowe, who charted their movements in time and space on ordnance survey maps and calendars in the Great Hall. He was a wizard with brilliant multi-coloured tacks. He made rehearsal charts in different coloured inks, emerald, ultramarine, vermilion, on spreads of graph paper. He showed people through the intricacies of these with a school-masterly ferule borrowed by Alexander from Blesford Ride. He pointed paths also through his own domain: pleasure garden, winter garden, herb garden, water garden, Ancient Maze, called Roman, but much older. He had had it surveyed from a helicopter and made new with sand and little box hedges.

Hampers of paper roses and crates of bill-hooks and rapiers arrived in delivery vans to be stored in stables and disused sculleries. Beer came early in large quantities and champagne in lesser ones. Sounds and strange airs arose from hidden plots and copses. From the rose garden a counter-tenor offered repeatedly the assurance that here dwelt no serpents, no devouring bears. In the kitchen garden a Spanish accent struggled with tongue-twisting anathematising sibilants. Nymphs and shepherds danced in perspiring circles on the lawns beyond the ha-ha.

Crowe told Marina Yeo, who was sleeping under the moony coverlids under Cynthia descending, that the affair was taking on the proportions of one of the Virgin Queen’s State Progresses. Miss Yeo, staring regally at him over champagne on his terrace in the golden evening said she assumed that was how he meant it to be. Crowe admitted to liking Occasions. “Fireworks come tomorrow. I shall go out with a bang not a whimper before the students ramp and tramp all over my lawns. I like to see a lot of people in one place doing what I call Art, not what they call Life.” Miss Yeo pointed out that no one who came ever seemed to go away, and indeed that was a characteristic of that hectic yet lucid July and August. The sun shone, and those who were rehearsing rehearsed,
and those who were not somehow stayed there, picnicking on grass and stone steps, shifting scenes, knocking in nails, sleeping, looking on, quarrelling, drinking, making love.

Alexander came one afternoon to a winter garden from which somewhat perfunctory laughter and squealing could be heard. Nothing could be seen from outside the hedges, which were tightly glossy against winter winds. At their narrow entrance was a stone putto on a Doric plinth, and leaning against this, one brown arm encompassing the rough grey buttocks, was Edmund Wilkie, in sky-blue aertex shirt and sky-blue glasses over fluted and clinging white shorts. He smiled at Alexander and said, “Genius at the gate of the garden,” which Alexander momentarily took for a compliment of sorts, until it occurred to him that Wilkie was probably referring to himself.

Wilkie went on, “Ben is having trouble educing any form out of those three, I can tell you. That girl wants her bottom slapping or pinching. Maybe I should do it. Or you should.”

“There isn’t much of it,” said Alexander, taking up, as it were, the position of contrary voyeur on the other side of the garden gate. “And I don’t feel any urge to pinch what there is.”

“No?” said Wilkie. “Not for Art’s sake?”

“No,” said Alexander. It was almost impossible, watching Wilkie’s plump Hilliard parody, not to strike some pose himself. Consciousness of this drove him to a disagreeable Guard-like rigidity, and to the reflection that Wilkie’s own bottom would, in ten years or so, be approaching the steatopygous. He noticed that Wilkie’s soft fingers were caressing the hard little stone penis and balls of the putto. He turned his attention to the goings-on in the garden.

Elizabeth’s first big scene, Alexander’s first big scene, Frederica’s first big scene, was the one where the Princess ran hither and thither in the orchard, pursued by that amorous and politic satyr, Thomas Seymour, and her stepmother, Catherine Parr, who together cut her garments, laughing hugely, into a hundred fragments. Alexander had, he hoped, used this scene delicately to intimate the contrarieties of his heroine’s sexuality as he saw it: the ferocious flirtatiousness, the paralysing fear, the desire for power, the sense of solitude. In this scene the Princess spoke out a panic which was, in the play, frequently recalled but never overtly repeated, since she had intelligently decided not to repeat it. In this rehearsal none of Alexander’s words had so far been audible. Lodge was trying to teach his actors, who were slow learners, to scream and laugh and run. Thomas Seymour was played by a rather brutal local librarian called Sidney Gorman, who bore, like Frederica, a considerable physical resemblance to his prototype. Katherine Parr looked more like
the Wife of Bath than like that Puritanical and sadly passionate queen. She was a barrister’s wife and had played motherly bodies in local dramatics for years.

“Run,”
said Lodge. “
Run
, for Godsake as if you meant it.”

There was a minor fountain in the middle of the winter garden, trickling out of a reversed conch held up by a coiled mermaid with a sly little smile. Frederica set off round this, followed by Gorman, followed by Joanne Plummer. She tried a rather desperate toss of her head, and put one hand gawkily and most unnaturally on her hip. She stopped theatrically to look provocatively back at her pursuers who were very close, and heavily prevented themselves from falling over her. Lodge shouted
“No!”
He said, “You were very sexy in a funny way in audition. What’s happened to it?” Gorman, rubbing a shin he had banged on the rim of the fountain, looked ostentatiously as though he found that hard to believe. Wilkie said to Alexander, “It’s when she’s talking she’s sexy. I’ve noticed.” Frederica said to Lodge, “Can’t I repeat my speech?”

She was desperately distressed by her inability to move. Subject to contrary tugs of arrogance and childish subservience she had simultaneously assumed that she could walk into rehearsals and assert her natural superiority as an actress, a queen, and that she was supposed to be pliable, neutral material for an impresario to blow breath into, to bring to life in what form he desired. She did not know, now, whether to show off, or to take marionette-steps as they were dictated. She hated Lodge for not telling her how to run, and felt humiliated that he could not see she did not, naturally, know. Gorman and Joanne Plummer she did not take into account. Physically she disliked them both and showed it in a way quite apparent to Lodge, who was used to having to deal with such chemical motions. It was also apparent to Wilkie, whom it amused. She did not meet the eyes of Gorman and Plummer, when they spoke, which was partly in character, and partly destructive, since it made everyone’s performance clumsier and more uncertain.

“Repeat a bit if you like. Take it from Tom Seymour’s bit about flames and cream. Try and remember you’re
trying out
the royal flirtation game – you’re scared it won’t work. Remember what Marina does with that teasing note in the big masque scene. Try and get a gawky parody of that. Marina’s got the tone of that dead right. And when he makes a lunge at you,
run
. Run, look back, run. Remember part of you wants to be caught. Let him bring you down, though,
don’t
bring yourself down. O.K.? Mind the pond. No duckweed called for. What I want is a real romp. This scene’s the
real thing
, see, – it’s got formalised into a kind of weaving, dancing chase by the big masque scene. But you three have got to tangle and
romp
. See?”

Frederica was quite intelligent enough to see what was required. She was simply not bodily inventive enough to do anything about it. Lodge’s voice purred and threatened together. Many actresses, including Marina Yeo, were stirred in nipples and vagina by such sheathed threats. Frederica was chilly, intellectually anxious. Gorman took her by the shoulders and began again. “See, little lioness, little prickling rose …” His breath smelled heftily of beer and pickled onions. She wrinkled her aquiline nose. Her thin breast swelled, not with excitement, but with pain and inadequacy.

“Don’t you think we’d improve it if we stopped lurking and went to swell the audience?” said Wilkie.

“We’d make it much worse.”

“Nonsense. You bring out the vestigial peacock in that painfully virginal creature.”

“I didn’t
ask
Ben to cast her.”

“Non sequitur. You know she knows what you want. And you know she wants so much to do what you want.” He gave a final flick to the putto’s little stone bubbles. “Come, Sir, be useful.”

They sat on a stone bench, at some distance from Lodge, who seemed gloomy. Frederica, edgier, spoke a few lines vigorously, tripping over words and recovering her dignity fiercely with a dramatic tension that could have been deliberate good acting, and could have been consciousness of Alexander. Lodge sat up. Gorman made a half-hearted unctuous pounce. Lodge rose from his bench with a roar. Wilkie just audibly sniggered. Frederica, flaming with embarrassment, the red and white rose quartered in her face, fell over the rim of the fountain and began to bleed profusely at the ankle. Lodge required a clean hanky of the company at large and the cleanest was, inevitably, provided by Alexander. Alexander knelt to tie this neatly round the thin, dusty leg.

“I can’t move, I’m no good. I’m letting you down.”

“You’ll learn.”

“You don’t really think so. You never did. You were dead right.” Alexander wiped his blood-stained fingers ruefully on his pristine handkerchief.

“I did think so,” he lied. “I do think so. Would you find it easier if you had a real long skirt on?” He had often found in school productions that this helped with boys.

“It might.”

“It could be fixed. Shall I try?”

She sniffed away a tear, at his kindness, at her humiliation. Alexander spoke to Lodge, who spoke to someone, who produced a kind of papery stiffened under-petticoat, and, after some debate, armed Joanne Plummer
with the wardrobe-mistiess’s cutting-out shears. Alexander helped, with nappy pins, to attach the floating paper to the games shirt Frederica was wearing. Lodge took them through the scene again. During it several actors from the next scene to be rehearsed, which included the Masque, wandered in. These included Jennifer, and Matthew Crowe, who had contrived to be cast as Francis Bacon in a furred velvet gown.

This time the scene went better. Wrath, Alexander’s touch, a half-glimpse of Jenny’s bare brown shoulder and newly-washed hair brought considerable life to Frederica’s riddling invitations and rebuffs. The petticoats gave her something to do with her redundant hands. Joanne Plummer of her own accord laid a restraining hand on the girl’s scrawny shoulder, and Frederica winced royally and convincingly, addressing herself in mock rebuke to the empty air somewhere between Sid Gorman and Alexander Wedderburn. “I am not used to be so used,” she said, and the voice had at last the combination of dry impatience and involuntary lewdness that had kindled Lodge at the auditions. Gorman was provoked to genuine aggression; he brought the girl down, rather heavily, with a kind of rugger tackle, and Joanne Plummer, excited by the shears which she brandished above her head began to laugh and snip and laugh and snip with real hysteria, waving the scissors in the air between slashes, whilst Gorman tore with some deliberation at the paper between Frederica’s legs. Shreds and floating scraps of white paper, like fallen petals, settled on pond and lawn: Frederica wriggled free, clutching her own skirt against her crotch and chanting, rudely, nervously, cleverly as Alexander had intended, the old woman’s cry from the ancient ballad. “Lawks a’ mussy on me, this is none of I.” The audience applauded. Wilkie said to Alexander, “Do you see the final state as a body-stocking or a layer of petticoat?” And Alexander said, taking seriously what was to him a serious question, “I want her hair down and a few shreds of cotton-something between a whore and a nymph – a bit of whalebone – a few flowers stuck on by Seymour –” “Lady Chatterley,” said Wilkie. “Rubbish,” said Alexander. “The flowers is a nice touch anyway,” said Wilkie.

The next scene, not chronologically, but to be rehearsed, was the big Masque scene. This came at the end of Act II of the play. It might at this point be useful briefly to indicate the structure of Alexander’s play, both as he had devised it, and as Lodge now elaborated it.

Each of the three acts was prefaced by a meditative dialogue between Ralegh and Spenser, sitting spotlit on the dark terrace, playing chess as it might be, gossiping, in verse, on practical things of permanent import, such as the fitting out of ships, Guinea cannibals, the brutishness and total unreason of the Irish peasantry: or on speculative matters to do
with moons and vision, optic tubes and whether reddened or obliquely elongated eyes saw reddened or obliquely elongated worlds, a matter on which Ralegh, following Pliny, had written his treatise,
The Sceptic
. They gossiped also a little about the Queen, real queen and eternal empress, the Ocean’s Cynthia, Faerie’s Gloriana, Drayton’s, and Plato’s, Idea.

Act I contained Mary Tudor, the imprisonment of Elizabeth, the Accession. Act II encompassed danger and the Golden Age: the Armada, the death of Mary Stuart, the marriage bargains. Its finale was the court Masque, the descent of Astraea the Just Virgin, last of the immortals to leave the earth at the opening of the brutish Iron Age, first to return and usher in the new Age of Gold.
Redit et virgo
,
redeunt Saturnia regna
. As Virgil hath it. Act III observed the Queen’s decline, the Essex rebellion and marshy triumphs of the rude Irish. It lingered on the interview with the archivist in the tower, to whom she had said “I am Richard II, know ye not that?”
King Lear
got in here, echoed and slyly quoted, often only in the casual incorporation of powerful nouns: samphire, the nightmare and her ninefold, germens and moulds, the tight button, the feather and mirror of the promised end, or image of that horror. Sometimes Alexander thought he should have taken these out. Frequently Lodge did take them out, shaving and planing things Alexander believed to be natural growths, sprung unbidden in his mind, a sacred grove. Lodge said whatever their provenance they would be seen as vulgar and ostentatious curlicues, glued on.