The Virgin in the Garden (59 page)

“Before what?” said Marcus, daring and troubled.

“Before what is going to happen. Something will happen shortly. There have been indubitable signs already. I’ll tell you about them. For instance I knew you would come today.”

This may well have been true, but the gleaming authority with which he had invested his earlier declarations that things were prefigured seemed to be lacking. Lucas looked grey, the bright curls limp, the brows and chin clammy and glistening. Marcus wanted to walk out again, and knew he must not.

“Will you come upstairs? We must now be prepared for any eventuality, good or evil. I’ve had signs that I’ve let forces in – that there is conflict – in the outer spheres possibly – my fault, my failure – a
fault
in the coherent surface – from which great gains or great losses could issue.
Please come up. You must be in possession of the facts, in case – before

Marcus said he would come up. Lucas rubbed his squeaking palms together and slopped another handful of small corpses into his jar. Marcus stared round, remembering the day the light had driven him here, the beginning. He looked at heaped bones and bottled embryonic forms, and then across at the hanging images of Man and Woman. Something about these was odd. Marcus realised that small patches had been sliced very precisely from each body where the genitals had been depicted, including, in the case of the interior views, the internal organs of reproduction, the seminal vesicles, fallopian tubes, the whole frilled, winding or bulging apparatus. As far as he could see these the resulting apertures were exact squares, windows on a blank, unsunned, unfaded wall. He looked across at Lucas, not doubting for a moment that this trimming was his work. Lucas was now rolling up the cloth case of dissecting instruments, which he popped into his white pocket. He shelved his damp jars. He beckoned to Marcus.

In Lucas’s tower room Marcus stood awkwardly in the door whilst Lucas investigated, at random, cushions and curtain rails, remarking darkly that wires were always on the cards now, it had been done before, he had certainly been wired before, and it was only sensible to be on the lookout. There had been incredibly fine work with wires on that destroyer in the Pacific. Had Marcus thought about the paradox implicit even in that simple factual phrase, the destroyer in the Pacific? The ocean was pacific and the man-made vessel, even if it said it was on a peacekeeping mission, was a destroyer. Lately he had had a series of encounters, indeed near-collisions, with a curious van which was labelled Sun Ray Blinds Whitby and was certainly a sign. It had a curious symbol on its side, a sphere divided by a wavy line, which was a crude attempt at the Yin and the Yang, the ocean of light moving above the ocean of darkness. Some of that light they had concentrated at Whitby with the burning-glass and blood and wine, no question, but he was inclined to think that then they had not gone far enough, not offered enough, and that later they had been punished for this by his own failure of tact, or taste. Marcus must be aware that tact or taste were curious ambivalent words too, Marcus must have wondered why these sensual words were applied to matters of judgments which often bore no relation to sensuality. The terrible anthropomorphic universe again. To be avoided at all costs. Possibly one way was to crash out of it with sexual magic or rites he should have said but that was accompanied with such dangers, and deceptions and dubious advantages … where was he? Oh yes, the van, the van. It jumped at him out of side roads or stood across his path in
Blesford. It was driven by a creature who was clearly not of this world, a demon in angelic form, with a leathery sort of skin and a mop of clearly unreal golden curls on its head. It grinned and grinned but also sometimes threatened distinctly, and made various beckoning or exorcising gestures, also unfortunately ambivalent, which he, Lucas, found hard to read. And there had been a milk-bottle full of blood he had found outside the lab, which certainly had some meaning, had been put there by some visitant for some reason. And there were the watchers. Faces, for instance, at these windows, yes these, so high up this tower, staring in, taking their time, grinning and grinning, making sure he knew he was under surveillance. If you drew the curtains they were to be seen mopping and mowing at the foot of the stairs. And the breathing. You would hear breathing in the room, as though the tower stood near the lung-tip of the universe, if it were anthropomorphic, which of course it was not.

All this was delivered in what Marcus could only think of as a threatening manner, accompanied by punctuating blows on Lucas’s desk surface for heavy emphasis. Marcus felt accused of provoking or manipulating these manifestations himself. He said to himself, in his mind: he is mad. This was terrifying, not because he was afraid that Lucas-as-madman would act dangerously, or damage him, but because of what it did to the pattern of preceding events. He, Marcus, had been afraid he was mad: had been offered a reasoned explanation of the phenomena that tormented him by the super-sane Lucas: had shared with Lucas experiences, the transmission of images for instance, which suggested that they were at least on the same wavelength (oh those wires), and working with mental events mostly unacknowledged. If Lucas was mad, he, Marcus, was on his own with the things which had initially been almost too much for him, the geometry of water in plugholes, the terror of staircases, the spreading, the fields of light. If Lucas was not quite mad, then it was at least a tenable hypothesis that they had aroused angry outside forces of some indeterminate nature. Marcus had always felt an abstract scepticism about the names and histories Lucas chose to ascribe to things seen or sensed; even if this masked, to some extent, a readiness to be credulous because he had no names and histories of his own. Angels or demons these were not, precisely; they were experienced as cones and winds and spirals of light, as magnetism and heart-hammer. It didn’t mean they weren’t there.

And, if Lucas was mad, he was responsible. Responsible that was, for Lucas, because he had agreed to be his friend. And responsible perhaps also for the events that had led to the madness, what with his photisms and hypnagogic vision.

“What are you going to do, Sir?” he asked, neutrally, respectfully. Lucas dropped into the arm-chair at one side of the fire.

“I called you up,” he said, producing another effortless
double-entendre
, “I called you up, because I have a very important communication to share with you.”

“Thank you.”

Lucas sat in brooding silence, apparently attempting to recollect what the communication had been. He slapped his hands vigorously on his thighs, and cried out,

“We should have been more extreme.”

Then, in another voice, he said, “Do you know, there are men in the prisons, a great many men in His Majesty’s, or I should now say Her Majesty’s, prisons, some of whom, in my view, can’t strictly be called criminals, although many certainly can, old men who expose themselves, flash out from behind bushes at silly little girls, or abuse, on commons and open land, what they’d do better to hide – a great many such men, who beg, who cry out, for hormones or even more drastic treatment, for surgical interference, and are denied. They would not have been in all times and cultures. Frazer tells a lot about the priests of the old gods, Adonis and Thammaz and Atthis, which makes it sufficiently clear that they cut themselves voluntarily and joyfully … If fasting and celibacy and austerity produce new and different knowledge, why not the knife, I sometimes think, though that is not what I called you up to say.”

Marcus could smell fear, rank over sportsclothes and cocoa in the close little room. He said, “Maybe we should just give up. Maybe this is too much for us.”

“I shouldn’t like to think that. All good things are dangerous. I think we should follow the signs, the leadings we have, even into disaster, if necessary.”

Marcus waited politely to be told where the leadings led.

“On Fylingdales Moor, as I told you, there are over 1000 small stone cairns. Over 1000. One of the things I’ve found out in my reading is that the very early gods – and goddesses, Aphrodite for instance – were just pillars or cairns or cones of stone. I think that was a system of calling down power, a field of force, of terminals. They are – ah –
touchstones
,” he said, smiling with a touch of his ancient brightness over this last revelatory
double-entendre
. “We should go there. I suppose the dark forces will have it ringed. We could be burned to a cinder. But if not, we could go there.”

“How?” Marcus breathed.

“I’ll drive you. In a day or week or two. We need to purge ourselves – eat no blood and nothing after sundown – to make our bodies less
accessible to the eaters, to the bloody-minded. I expect it will become quite clear when we must go. I expect you will see that, if I don’t. Won’t you?”

Marcus nodded, painfully. He looked at the window, but no faces stared in, only sunlight. He looked at Lucas, whose hands were weaving his flannel lap. He remembered his secret garden of forms and felt pure rage that Lucas should have connected gods and electricity to cairns or cones of stone. The connection impressed him, of course; but not enough for him to share what he had no doubt was his own knowledge, sure and certain, that their thoughts had again overlaid each other, that each in his method, or system of signs, had seen what the other had seen. Lucas was a fumbler, there was no doubt of it, mucking up the purity, the cleanness of what he, Marcus, knew, with all this
stuff
about ancient gods and demons and bodies, human or hydra. And Lucas was dangerous: demons or no demons, it was to Marcus clear that if they got in that car together again and anything happened, they were likely to end up dead. He did not have to specify what kind of “thing” had to “happen” – sexual, religious or mathematical, its end would be the same, cinders, whether caused by demonic intervention, burning petrol, or light from heaven centred by some metaphysical burning glass on them. He also knew that although he would not tell Lucas about the mathematical Forms and their return he would, if asked or commanded, get into that car, whatever forebodings he might feel. He owed him that. He owed his perspicuity that, whatever filtered through sweaty smells and buzzing wires of guardians on destroyers. He thought he must now, at last, speak to someone else, and made a decision.

In the other tower Alexander sat at his desk on which he had laid out the
Times Educational Supplement
and a pile of application forms he had acquired. An application form is neither a passport to another place or another way of life, nor is it an examination paper: it has a reassuringly vacant, routine appearance, like the census, or an opinion poll. He could fill in details of his qualifications and views for the BBC, in London or Manchester, for an ancient school or a modern training college, strong on drama, without overstepping the threshold of imagining or desiring any of these places. He knew, indeed, he would be foolish to come to any decisions about his life until the play was opened and closed, as Crowe said. This knowledge simply helped to make the forms appear neutral, and papery. He remembered, as a man with a hangover might, the events of the night and the early morning, winced, and drew the BBC forms towards him. Wedderburn, he wrote. Alexander Miles Michael. A peculiarly resonant and militant array of names for one as passive as he
was, he had always thought them, and he considered the anomaly again as he filled the little boxes, date of birth, places of education, parentage, nationality and publications, conducting a retreat with his only weapon, the pen, and hoping that it was a strategic withdrawal and not a rout. Maybe only a feint was necessary. He did not have to send these things off. Perhaps it would be enough, for the time being, to assure himself of the possibility.

He considered his own erotic oddities and embarrassments. What he liked, he believed, was nearer what most men liked than they would be prepared to admit. He liked the imaginary relish. He liked imagined contact with real women, and real contact with imaginary women. He liked his delicious solitude, certainly, and intended to let no one invade it. But also – and this was odder, if still not
very
odd, surely – he liked fear. Not excessive fear. He had no fantasies of ripping flesh, piercing heels or whirling knouts and could not, even by the usual process of extending the fantasies he did have, reach any real imaginative apprehension of what it might be like to desire these things. But the ripple of apprehension, the prickle of hairs on the skin, the sense of panic flight through crashing undergrowth and under whipping foliage, the alertness of scent and sight bestowed by a flicker of real fear, this he repeatedly provoked. Embarrassment and humiliation afforded him no joy and so his relationships had been transitory, since he terminated them when embarrassment and humiliation supervened, which they always did. But he liked, his desires were most immediately stirred by, minatory and ferocious women, when they were angry. He had never, even as a very little boy, had any trouble with Keats’s line about “When thy mistress some rich anger shows”. This recondite pleasure seemed to him entirely natural.

So far, so good. He had fallen in love with Jennifer because she had admonished him, indeed, knocked him down, in the music-hole during
The Lady’s Not for Burning
. He had taken his customary pleasure in appeasing her wrath and converting its energies to those of desire. He was still afraid of her, it was true, but he had realised, when his flesh had retreated before her need, and she had been so understanding and so gentle, that the fear had changed its nature. He was afraid now of her love, not her wrath, of Thomas and being shut in a house, not of any savage and unsubdued quality in the woman. Whereas in the case of Frederica Potter some roughly antithetical process had taken place. He had found her attachment to him humiliating and embarrassing, had been afraid of its stifling domestic implications, had seen her as some childish nuisance, dragging Bill’s suburban proprieties behind her.

He had no exact idea when this had changed. Partly, it had changed through the princess in the play, who represented his desire for fear of
minatory women, but also, being a self-portrait, shared it, and not only it, but his own secretly acknowledged delicious solitude, which was both escape, energy and power. She knew how to be stony, did that girl, how to display fear and rage and grace. He was afraid of her knowledge. He was afraid of her. When she had clutched and scratched at him, he had been most happily afraid. He looked at the submissive, lovely lines of the white marble back of the Danaïde, on his chimney-breast, and began to fill the forms in, rather fast. He had no intention of becoming any further embroiled with Bill Potter or his family. Or, he realised more sadly, with Geoffrey and Thomas Parry and the rifts in their household. He would, when his play was over, pack all these things, stone, harlequins, books, in his trunk, and drive away, to Weymouth and points south. He would leave, for Jennifer, a very large potted plant – he thought about it – a bay tree in a wooden tub, a white rose out of Nicholas Hilliard, and some book or other, some appropriate book, not
The Ocean to Cynthia
of which anyway there was no decent edition, but some book he would think of. As for the terrible girl, he would count himself lucky and she would trouble his dreams – but there was advantage in that – she would forget, very quickly, because of her energies, which were restless and incessant, she would scrabble at someone else’s hair. He would not, because of her, keep in touch with Bill, but he would keep in touch with Crowe, he would maybe even visit, after a decent interval, before Long Royston was handed over to the academics.