The Virgin in the Garden (60 page)

He filled in the rest of the BBC script department form and embarked on the BBC educational programmes form. His handwriting calmed him. It was a little like Elizabeth’s own elegant and businesslike Italic. Running footsteps sounded on the stairway. His door was unceremoniously pushed open. He imagined an apparition of Frederica-as-huntress and had the ludicrous idea that a man was cornered in the top of a tower, as though egress would have been more possible from a room situated somewhere else. This caused him to smile to himself, in a way which seemed to annoy his visitor, who was, in fact, Jennifer.

“I had to see you,” said Jennifer. “There is only you.”

“Should you be here?” said Alexander, weakly. He had always managed to stop women from visiting his room. This was one way in which he, and his reputation at least for discretion, had survived so long.

“Everyone has gone demented. And I should have thought this, and everything else, was so public by now that it hardly arose whether I
should be here
or not.”

“I suppose not,” said Alexander, equally weakly. He began to shuffle scripts over his application forms. Jennifer took off, and threw down, her macintosh and headsquare.

“It’s all right when I see you,” she said, “it all falls into place again. Honestly, you can’t imagine what it’s like in that house. I wish you wouldn’t grin conspiratorially to yourself. Nothing’s funny. Geoffrey’s smashed a lot of things, the dinner service, the Spode, imagine it,
Geoffrey
, who never hurt anything or noticed anyone or anything, or I shouldn’t have … or maybe I shouldn’t … anyway. And he won’t speak, except to Thomas, and he addresses Thomas in an awful false mournful voice. I wouldn’t have thought him
capable
of it, honestly.”

“Was it wise to come out?”

“What
do
you mean? I can’t stay in, not with things like that. I can’t. I had to see you. Though you don’t seem overjoyed to see me.”

“I can’t be overjoyed when you are so alarmed. I get alarmed myself.”

She was silent for a few moments, striding up and down and rearranging things, the Wedgwood bowls with their fleeing forms and forest boughs, the stone cairn. She breathed in, dramatically.

“I’m all right here. See, I’m all right, now. What were you doing?”

She came over and sat on the arm of his chair. He curved a sad arm round her bottom. She scrutinised his papers, a habit he disliked in anyone, and pulled out the end of the application form.

“Alexander Miles Michael. How lovely, what lovely names. What are you doing? Alexander,
what are you doing?
You aren’t getting another job.”

“Only thinking about it.”

She pulled, with customary efficiency, at the stack of papers and uncovered the remaining forms.

“Five other jobs. You must be desperate, even if only in your thoughts.”

“Well,” he said carefully, “there does seem to be some sort of crisis. At least in my thoughts. Doesn’t there?”

“You must have sent for these long before last night.”

“There was a crisis long before last night.”

“Because of me.”

“And Thomas,” said Alexander, truthfully. The fact of Thomas alarmed him genuinely.

“Thomas? Thomas. Were you going to leave us?”

“I was only thinking.”

“You could take us. I’d come. I love you. You could really go, and we’d come, and start again, properly.”

“Jenny, my dear …”

“You wouldn’t leave me?”

“No, no. I wasn’t going. I love you, Jenny.”

“But you
could
go, and take us, it would change everything, it’d be truthful, and open, and hopeful …”

“What about Thomas?”

“He
loves
you. He’s little. He’d come.”

“Jenny. If I were Thomas, I’d, I mean, he has his own life.”

“I could leave Thomas. That is, I don’t want to, I don’t want to leave Thomas, but what is there left for him or me as things are?”

“A lot, maybe. How can we know, just now, as things are now? Jenny, love, let’s get through this play. It means a lot to me. And you are so good in it, if you will try to be – even if I’ve ruined things, at least partly …”

“No, don’t say that.
You
haven’t. Between you and me things are all right, we’re
all right
, my darling, I came to prove that.”

“What?”

“It would have been all right for you without Thomas. What you’ve just said makes me quite sure about that. I knew you’d brood, I knew you’d suffer, I came because I
know
, if we try now it will be all right, we owe ourselves that.”

“Jenny – this is a boys’ school – my room – in the middle of the morning.”

“You can’t be pernickety about
everything
. I should have overridden you long ago. It isn’t as though that usually happened to you.” Sharply. “Is it?”

“No,” he said truthfully.

“Well, then.” Her skirt slid to the ground. She kicked out a leg and unfastened her suspenders. She was naked beside his desk, naked under the Danaïde, naked in his narrow bachelor bed. He undressed, politely, without haste, and climbed in. He could not. If he could have done, he would have, he told himself grimly, not to prolong the embarrassment, to get it over, now. But he could not. He turned his face to the wall. Jenny, crimson to the curve of her breasts, suddenly collapsed into noisy weeping. Alexander was appalled by her pain and humiliation. He picked her up and cradled her in his arms, murmuring, “Don’t take on, ah, don’t,” wondering, even then, where he had got an idiom like that, northern and not his own, and tracking it down wryly a few moments later to Lady Chatterley’s lover. Jenny went on and on crying, accelerating in speed and sound. He sensed that she found it the only possible thing to do, did not know what to say, or how to touch him.

“Don’t take on, love, it’s only not the moment, we are both so jangled and have had no sleep and I feel nervous here, now … It’s really of no significance, it will be all right, when …”

“When.
When?
Oh, I meant so well, and have made it so much worse, blundering in, displaying myself, all cocky …”

“An unfortunate word.”

“Alexander, don’t laugh.”

“Why not? What else can we do? You had better laugh, too. For now. I assure you, it will be all right …”

“When?”

“When we have decent time and space.”

“Then you will take us, me, away.”

“I don’t know. I can’t think.”

“Honestly. I can’t see how you can honestly mean anything else.”

“Well, in that case,” said Alexander, placatory, “I must mean that, mustn’t I?”

She smiled a watery smile and began to cry again, more quietly. He held her. She stroked his persistently limp member, and his flanks, in a nervous manner, as though he might explode, or recoil. He was patient. She said, “You are so white, you are so lovely, you have such an untouched, unused look, I love to see you.”

“Well, you can do that,” he said, and something in his voice must have alarmed or embarrassed her for she sprang up and began to dress again, hastily. He dressed himself, before she could change her mind, and saw her out, before she could offer to stay. He even made himself appear deliberately more hangdog than he felt. For the time being he was quite happy to have ascribed to him a psychic anguish he didn’t feel. It seemed to put her in a tolerant and uncertain frame of mind that was the best he could decently hope for.

He went back, feeling hot and a little sticky, to his forms, and filled out another one. This took ten minutes or so, after which he again heard running feet on the stair, and the door was again pushed open. He assumed it was Jenny come back for something forgotten or some further urgent admonition. This time it was Frederica.

“I had to see you,” said Frederica, “there is only you.”

His blood raced. “I can’t say the same,” he said, “unfortunately.”

“No, I know,” she said, “I’ve been lurking. In the tomatoes. Luckily I had a book. And it’s quite sunny out there. So I dozed in the tomatoes and read little bits of this book. Tomatoes have a terrible smell, they smell like powdered hot metal and something else, maybe sulphur, is it, it’s a smell that
comes at
you and attacks your metabolism, or that’s what I think, this morning, having had no sleep and feeling kind of scraped and over-sensitive to everything. But the sun was as nice as the tomatoes were sinister, and I’m a bit better read than I was when I set out, for what that’s worth.”

“What are you better read in?”

“Well, I’m having another go at
Women in Love
. I was suddenly afraid I might be Gudrun. I mean, I saw the house as an awful trap, like the red-brick Brangwen house in that book, and Daddy was really beastly to me, and I thought of how Steph and I used to talk about you, and thought Steph was Ursula, and then I got really put out because that only left Gudrun, and I don’t want to have to be her.”

“You could always read someone else.”

“True. True. I love Lawrence and I hate him, I believe him and I reject him totally, all at the same time all the time. It’s wearing. Maybe it was just the tide. I mean, I wanted to read a book called that. What else shall I read then? You give me something, something different.”

“What do you like best?”

“Best of all, at the moment, I like Racine.”

He thought about Racine and about
Women in Love
, and about Frederica Potter, and could make only one connection.

“Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.”

“No, not
that
, the awful balance of the ineluctable. Let me tell you my clever thought about the Alexandrine, which I couldn’t get in my A level script, or hardly, because the questions were so circumscribed. I’m
breaking
with knowledge about Racine I shall never tell anyone, and after a time I shan’t know it. That’s terrible.”

“You will,” he said. “Tell me about the Alexandrine.”

He was a good teacher, not, like Bill, because he charismatically communicated passion and a sense of importance, but because he could listen, he could ask the next question, he could hear a train of thought. He made a space of time in which Frederica could tell him about the Alexandrine. He sat, with the warmth of Jenny’s crimsoned flesh fading from his arms and belly, and looked at this girl, who had always roared and rumbled at him, vacillating between the Lawrentian hyperbolic and the Just William bathetic, and she told him, cleanly and neatly, quoting at length and with increasing calm and order, about the structure of one Alexandrine, and then two, and then strings of them, from
Mithridate
to
Athalie
, from
Britannicus’s
heavy ironies to the flame in the blood in
Phèdre
. She sat neatly and on a hard chair, and he thought she had a good ear, a very good ear, and then remembered she was a muscle-bound actress, and smiled to himself, at which she said, as though she had heard his thought,

“I love it because it’s all so chill and precise on the page, it’s so
lucid
, and yet I can’t imagine it being acted without extravagant gestures and a kind of roaring noise that would quite ruin its symmetry. I can’t imagine anyone acting it who didn’t just stand still and occasionally sweep an
arm up and down, or drop his head in his hands. Do you think so?”

“That seems right.”

“I love you.”

It followed so naturally, the whole explanation had been a love-offering, so made and so received, he reflected.

“I love you,” he said, as simply as he could, wanting her somehow to know that her cautious and tentative, then fluent and abstract and impassioned words had moved him as another woman, rosy and naked in his hearth, had not. The inviolable voice with a vengeance. No, not that, only how rare it was to offer anyone a thought. He had always been told she was very clever and taken it on trust: she had told him so herself often enough.

“I love you because you are very clever,” he elaborated, to show her that he now knew it.

“I love you because you can write.”

“Are those good reasons?”

“Well, novels would say not. People in novels don’t love each other because they can both see that Racine is – is what he is. Like maths, really, only I can’t do maths, I was going to say sensual but it
isn’t
, or at least, the sensual pleasure is geometry, not sex. Actually, I don’t know much about sex, I shouldn’t talk. What was I saying? Oh yes, if we were in a novel it would be most suspect and doomed to sit here drily discussing metre.”

“If we were in a novel they’d cut this dialogue because of artifice. You can have sex, in a novel, but not Racine’s metre, however impassioned you may be about it. Pound said poetry was a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives one equations not for abstract triangles and spheres but for human emotions. Wordsworth said metre and sex were all functions of the flow of the blood, you know, and the ‘grand elementary principle of pleasure in which we live and move and have our being’. We can hear each other’s blood running, Frederica, in a sort of inspired mathematics, in incantations precise and arcane.”

“How lovely.”

“Yes. I shall give you a book that isn’t
Women in Love
. I shall give you my messy Everyman
Silver Poets of the 16th Century
because it’s got the
Ocean to Cynthia
in it, printed all wrong and spelt very oddly, but you must read that ebb and flow.”

“I shall always keep it,” she said, mocking and serious, parodic and truthful. They sat and stared at each other.

“People in Lawrence’s novels,” she began again, “love each other because of their unspeakable selves, their loins of darkness and starlike separateness and all that. They hector and gabble but they don’t
talk
,
though he does, Lawrence does. He loved language, he lied in a way when he indicated all those values ‘beyond’ or ‘under’ it. I like language, why can’t one love in language. Racine’s people speak the unspeakable. That’s odd, I was going to say he had a very
small
language, but so did Lawrence, of that kind, and both of them indicate forms of what isn’t speech, and yet one is as clear and precise and formal about what it isn’t as the other is yelping and muttering and … oh, I don’t know. I do love the bit with the rings, and the venison pasty, and the rabbit, I think. One reason I like Racine so much is that Daddy doesn’t. He doesn’t understand French. I think he thinks it’s chilly and immoral. Perhaps I’ll read French and German. He can’t do his cultural value-judgements so well on what isn’t English.