The Virgin in the Garden (63 page)

Stephanie had not come expecting much. She felt perpetually queasy now: her world seemed narrowed to her own biology. She observed her own actions with a lazy, impersonal curiosity. She noticed, for instance, that she had trouble to conclude a sentence, written, spoken, or simply thought. The moment she had even a hazily shaped idea of what she meant to say, or might have said, that seemed enough, and she let the words trail away into blank and silence. Today her thoughts hadn’t got as far as a real play and herself watching it. She had solved practical problems, to do with getting there on time and providing a suitably shapeless overgarment. She had scanned emotional problems: Daniel’s solicitude, Bill’s likely quarrel with Daniel and devastating assessment of
Alexander’s work, the need to give Frederica moral support. She had not precisely conceived sitting through the action of a real imagined play.

She was thus startled by its density and energy as she might not have been if she had come with preconceptions, or sharp to criticise. She was not a judging nature: she took in
Astraea
with the complete scanning attention she gave to childhood trays of guessing-objects, poems, and now Daniel. She had a feeling that she occasionally had with certain “fortunate” works of art that what was before her was getting away with, realising, what should by the laws of art then obtaining, have been impossible. Alexander’s play contained the possibility of being a thing of shreds and patches, a robe of verbal tatting, a pageant limp with sensibility where it should have been harsh with political necessity. Later all these things were to be said. But Stephanie saw what Alexander and Lodge had meant people to see.

She saw the young Elizabeth sit white and stump-like outside Traitor’s Gate and refuse to go in: she saw the dying Elizabeth sit white and stump-like in a nightgown on a cushion placed felicitously on the identical patch of terrace and refuse to lie down and die. She saw the intervening white vision of Astraea and the palely fluttering Graces weave circles under dark eternal forest boughs and golden fruits of light. She saw patterns and broken patterns: Ralegh superbly spinning terrestrial and celestial globes in sunlit audience with a youngish queen: Ralegh incarcerated in the Epilogue, spinning the same globes in his dark tower. Catherine Parr offered apples to the young girl in the orchard, Virgo-Astraea in courtly masque offered golden apples to painted Gloriana, Robert Cecil coaxed the old queen to mumble just a small bite. She saw the symmetry of the girl spreadeagled on the grass in the warm sun, and the old woman laid out in the gathered dark as the ladies-in-waiting pulled the folds of her nightgown, after her death-struggle, into marmoreal flutings, and in the sunken garden the rebec mourned reedily. She noticed that the tableau revealed when the actors assembled for the curtain call with the young Princess staring at the statuesque old Queen on her plinth, and Astraea conjuring her into movement with her sword, was a muted parody of the resurrection of Hermione in
A Winter’s Tale
. She said as much, in her drowsed voice, to Alexander, who was pleased, who pointed out that he had been playing with themes of rebirth and renaissance and the Last Plays all through, though Lodge had intended Botticelli’s Primavera, and Stephanie said yes, she had seen, it worked, there was a weight of language … her voice fell away. He touched her hand in gratitude.

“Frederica was marvellous,” she said.

“I thought so.”

“Well everyone was. But I thought she rose to the occasion more than …”

“Yes, she did. She does.”

“The audience has gone mad.”

“It does seem to have.” He said, “Will you come backstage? To see Frederica? I must get out and go down there.”

The audience was rhythmically stamping and tossing. The Bottle Chorus had assembled invisibly and was irrepressibly and not quite accurately bubbling out the Music of the Spheres, to which part of the audience was singing, like a football crowd, like a heavenly choir, in a Hollywood Spectacular or Milton’s empyrean. Alexander escorted Stephanie around the bowing and chanting multitude to the pandemonium of the dressing rooms. He was carried along by waves of sound, and wanted to touch Frederica. Visions beset him of glimpsed thighs, delicately bony wrists.

Frederica was staring into the mirror, greasing her skin. Her face shone, with grease, with tears, with heat, with passion. He looked over her shoulder and into her eyes.

“I’ve brought Stephanie. I can’t stop. I must see Marina.”

“I know.”

She stared unblinking, the moppet of wool motionless in her hand, the black eyes glittering.

“O God, Frederica. I’ll talk to you later. There are things I’ve got to do. I can’t concentrate.”

“Of course. I’ll lurk. I’m a good lurker. You know that.”

Stephanie came up. If the currents of sexual rage singed her she gave no sign of it, merely fumbled peacefully inside the green shawl.

“You were marvellous, Frederica. I never stopped to remember it was you.”

“That’s praise.” Frederica turned wickedly to Alexander. “And you. After all the trouble I’ve been, did you stop to think I was me? Did you notice
me
?”

“In some ways, not at all. In others, all the time.” He bent down to kiss her in an ostentatiously casual way. His knees knocked.

“Go and talk to the old Queen, go on, you can always come and talk to me.”

Frederica was learning fast. There is a tic-tac, in the early stages of passion, griping constrictions and furious energies, which can, with most agreeable pain, be controlled and exacerbated by, for instance, dismissing the beloved before he leaves voluntarily. He walked away through a congratulating throng towards the old actress. Frederica turned hectically to Stephanie.

“He loves me.”

“Yes. I see. Of course. He does.”

She folded her hands round her thick waist in her green fringes and considered. The two sisters watched Jenny put out a hand from her dressing-stool and speak urgently to Alexander, who leaned over to kiss her, too, with a gracefully anxious stoop. He took her clutching hand from his dress-shirt front and laid it gently on the crimsoning skin between her ruff and stomacher. Jenny grasped his hand and held it there, over hers. Frederica stared, assessing, and then began to brush the curls out of her piled-up hair.

“What will happen?” said Stephanie, standing in the middle of an electric field of charge and countercharge. “You can’t crash down whole lives.”

“I can. I will. I’m free to do what I choose.”

“You can’t. You’re an official child.”

“You know I’m not a child. I want … I want, I want, I want.”

“I want you to be happy.”

“There are more ways of being happy than living in a council flat and making pots of tea for old bags. Anyway, happy isn’t the point. The point is, it’s
real
, it’s alive, it’s happened.”

“Frederica, people will get hurt.”

“That’s their look-out.”

“You will get hurt.”

“And if I do, I can stand that.”

Alexander peered over Marina Yeo’s shoulder, into the black mirror between white bulbs. She too was greasy, wiping away death-pallor and blue-black hooded eyes, as well as some, if not all, of the furrows which mapped her brow and jawline.

“Isn’t it bad luck,” she asked, “to
loom
in people’s looking-glasses, from behind?”

“I haven’t heard that one. I only came to say you were a miracle.”

“Well, don’t pat your own eyebrows, Narcissus, get out of my light. I’ve got eyes in my head, and I can see that the mirror on the wall doesn’t tell you that I’m the fairest of them all. Does it? The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured. Mind now, dear boy, whilst I see if these lines are fixed or scrubbable. So you were satisfied, were you?”

“I was thrilled and enchanted and so moved – you made the end magic.”

“You’re no good at the compliments.”

“Well, if you know that, you know when I mean what I say.”

She laughed, and stretched her soft kid-leather mouth this way and that.

“She was right not to want a mirror. Can you say that Kipling poem, Alexander darling?”

That one?”

“Something like. Ah well, it’s only a property, at my age, a face. Not yourself, you know. My face is my fortune, my living, but not me. Now go away, and when I’ve put a new one on, for the press, you can come and take my arm. I think we shall do all right. It was a good enough crowd, didn’t you think?”

“It loved you.” He kissed her hand, bowed to the haggard face in the glass and got himself out.

Upstairs in the Great Hall public and actors and everyone else were milling around. Alexander proceeded in brief, much-complimented stages towards Crowe and Lodge. He saw Geoffrey and Thomas and veered away from them, grateful to find himself pushed up against Thomas Poole who was, from grease paint or fatigue or lack of oxygen, rather grey under the spotlights cast up over his head onto the nymphs of Diana and their stiff burden.

“Thomas. Thank you. So
very
good.”

“Congratulations, on a success. I’ve been talking to the local press and the chap from the
Manchester Guardian
and they’re wildly enthusiastic. Listen – you’re my friend –
I’ve got
to talk to you. About what you saw the other evening.”

“Don’t think about it. I saw nothing.”

“Hell, no, you saw. I don’t mind. Or anyway, I don’t mind much. I just can’t think … I can’t go on. Alexander – I must tell someone. I am most horribly in love with this – this
child –
and …”

“Are you sure you want to tell me?”

Thomas stood, square, blond-headed, mild, and said, “If you don’t mind.”

“Is it not just a midsummer night’s dream?”

“I don’t know that I ever even thought it could be that. In any case, it can’t now. The thing is, she is, she is pregnant. She thinks. I don’t know how I can live without her, but I have got sense to see she can and should live without me – I mean, look at her, I’m not anyone, just a second-rate teacher of teachers, whilst she … in a year or two … now, I can make her happy or could … And then this.”

“Thomas … what do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. Listen. You’re discreet, and reasonably wise.
I had to say it, to see if I could stand up and say it in an ordinary voice. I see I can. Did you see her, down there? I daren’t go near her.”

“She was lovely in the play.”

“Virgo-Astraea. She wasn’t, you know. Wasn’t a virgin. I wouldn’t have touched her, but she told me – made it clear – that she knew what she was doing. Used to fuck her cousin madly in copses and barns when they were supposed to be hunting, she says.”

“And Elinor …” Elinor was Thomas Poole’s wife.

“She’s here, somewhere. I must shut up, go find her. I suppose I should find a doctor. It’s not the sort of problem I’ve ever … Elinor. For the last three years we’ve had a bedful of kids more often than not, the great bed of Ware, and I’m not complaining about that, I love it, I love them, Elinor and all my little things – you should see them. Only this is. This is. This is so much
worse
, Alexander, that I can hardly realise they exist, most of the time. I’m sane enough to know it can’t last, not like this – but that’s absolutely as far as my famous level head will get me. God, that girl – she has me doing things I’d’ve thought were puerile and degrading – lying about getting the car repaired, inventing examiners’ meetings, touching her up on the top of country buses. Things I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud – that
are
puerile and degrading. And lovely. I know you’ve got problems of your own – do you have trouble with your dignity? I’m not being pompous, I need my dignity. Partly that was what she liked about me. Now I’m an incompetent panting loon.

“I suppose I ought to go and get a doctor, oughtn’t I? But I can’t stand the thought – I mean, that’s my child, that would be – and she’s only a kid herself, in that school with its clean little portico and portress, like a nunnery.”

Alexander was prevented from replying to this entirely uncharacteristic outburst, by Marcus Potter, who came up with his look of staring absence more than usually pronounced. He opened and closed his mouth silently at Alexander, who felt that Fate was screwing him down with an excessive number of ludicrous parallels and analogies.

“Speak up, boy,” he said almost nastily to Marcus, whilst trying to reply to Thomas Poole’s desperate stare with a look of deprecating, useless understanding.

“Sir, I’m sorry. Sir, please come.”

“What is it now?”

“Sir, my father has got into a quarrel with the Bishop. A horrible quarrel, that is, a quarrel about horrible things. And he – Mr Simmonds, sir – is there too, and seems to think – well, seems to be very excited and think they’re particularly going on about him. I’m afraid.”

“If you think I am going willingly to interpose in any quarrel between your father and the Bishop …” Alexander began, adding peevishly, “tonight of all nights …”

Huge tears stood brimming in Marcus Potter’s pale eyes. Thomas Poole, a gentle man, said, “Never mind, Marcus, I was harassing Mr Wedderburn with my own less urgent problems. Just as unforgivable, in the middle of his triumph. Come on, Alexander, you can afford to be magnanimous and even you must see the immediate need to separate Bill Potter and the Bishop.”

He nudged Alexander, who saw, over Marcus’s shoulder, the fretful face of small Thomas Parry in his father’s arms.

“Ah,” said Geoffrey, with heavy meaning. “There’s Alexander. Come on, Thomas, you
like
Alexander. I’m told you like Alexander very much indeed. Wave to Alexander.”

Alexander strolled hastily off with Marcus. Thomas Poole said in a rapid undertone, “Just as well, you see. Not that I don’t feel dreadfully for poor old Parry, make no mistake. Why can’t we all live quietly? You’re a lucky man, you have no ties. Make none. Poor old Parry. Women are so ruthless. What a banal thing to say. I don’t mean Elinor, of course. For Christ’s sake, Alexander, stop me talking.”