The Virgin in the Garden (69 page)

“What is it, my love?”

“Crowe says I’m too ugly to be an actress. And I can only act myself. Get a new face, he told me. The awful thing is, he’s right.”

“I can’t see why you should want to be an actress. Not with a mind like yours. And God knows you’re not ugly.”

“Not?”

“Not. Dry sexiness was what Lodge said, the first time he saw you, when I was so blind and pig-headed. He didn’t say the half of it. Every inch of you is … you are … You are the only woman – ever, I swear – I’ve got myself in this state of extremity about. If that amuses you.”

“It doesn’t
amuse
me,” slowly. It did frighten her. It frightened her even, in her present state, that Alexander should think, or wish, her to be capable of amusement about sexual extremity. She was an ignorant fool. She had wanted an Alexander who was ungraspable, unspeakable, closed.

“I love you, Frederica. You are ludicrously young, and we are surrounded by ghastly examples of error, and the whole thing is impossible from start to finish, and I love you.”

“I have always loved you.”

He drove her out of Long Royston and as they went past the gatehouse and through the ornate iron gates, it struck her that she would not come again. Not at least until the new University had changed the whole landscape unrecognisably. She had somehow imagined she would become a welcome and familiar visitor there, wandering across lawns and kitchen gardens, and stable yards. She heard behind her the faint crash of breaking glass. Fled is that music. It really was like being shut out of Paradise. The gate should have clanged shut, but did not, for there was a lot of other traffic.

Alexander drove her very fast to the Castle Mound, stopped between the
Nissen huts and grabbed her. He tore, most unlike Alexander, at her underwear, causing pain with elastic and pain with fingernails and tugged hairs.

“I must, I must,” he kept saying, even now incapable of a reasonable verb. Frederica fought, as she had once fought for a response, to keep herself intact.

“Not here, not now,” she kept saying. Alexander battled, but not very manfully. They had trouble, and some pain, from gears and handbrake.

“Listen – Alexander – I’ll think of something, I’ll come tomorrow, I promise – if you’ll just take me home now, now this minute. It’s all been too much. I feel dirty. Please.”

“Of course.”

He took her home. They agreed to meet tomorrow, maybe on the Railway Bridge by Far Field, and go for a long quiet walk, away from these places, and think out ways and means. As soon as he was gone and she was alone in her narrow bed in Masters’ Row she was overcome with belated, confused desire, to hold his silk skin, smell his hair, let go … whatever had to be let go. She went to sleep with fists clenched in wrath and desire.

Alexander, staring sleeplessly out of his tower window at the moon on the tomato-houses, witnessed accidentally the weaving, lurching return of Lucas Simmonds, who drove back as he had gone out, except that he was chugging now slowly, over peninsulas of grass and flowers. Dispassionate and cold Alexander watched Simmonds, a tousled figure, roll more or less out of the front of the car, and proceed drunkenly towards his own tower. He did not close the car door. Alexander considered going to his assistance, and could not bring himself to do so – there was no sort of assistance he could render in case of peering demons and milkbottles of blood on doorsteps, and if Simmonds was all right a good night’s sleep would do him more good, most good. The thought of Simmonds was distasteful to him, too. He could leave it till morning. That the man was not dead, but going quietly back to bed disproved some part at least of Marcus Potter’s anxious theory.

Next day was Sunday. Marcus woke at home, heard with relief the familiar squeeze and hiss of his own painful breath, opened heavy eyes,
closed them again, and lapsed into dreamless sleep. He was ill. He was irresponsible.

Alexander, who had not slept, became ashamed of his last night’s behaviour with regard to Lucas Simmonds. He also remembered that Geoffrey and Jennifer would almost certainly appear with their new plans for his future, and decided with a mixture of cravenness and courage to go out. He went across the cloister to the foot of Simmonds’s tower, where a pristine, gold-topped, white bottle of milk stood in the sun, and ran lightly up the stairs. Simmonds’s door was open. Alexander knocked. No one was there. Alexander went in, noticing that the bed had been slept in normally, that pyjamas were flung across the pillow, as though normally stepped out of. He smelled toast and sweat. It was no business of his to open a window. He decided to keep an eye open for Simmonds and take his walk in the direction of Frederica Potter.

Frederica had trouble in getting out because Bill was quarrelling obscurely with Winifred about Stephanie’s pregnancy. Although it was clear that Winifred could in no way be held responsible for the engendering of their future grandchild, this in no way prevented Bill from berating her for it, saying loudly and frequently that all was now explained, the thing had been conceived out of wedlock, that clergymen should have principles, that he would make a public mock of Daniel Orton. Winifred, unusually for her, wept. She wept, not because of Stephanie, whom she bitterly envied, but because of Marcus, whom she loved and had failed. She did not mention Marcus to Bill in case he thought of something to do about Marcus, such as interrogate Lucas Simmonds, if that person could be found. Anything Bill might do would be worse than inertia. This thought made her weep, and Bill shout, louder. When Frederica said she was going for a walk, Bill said no she was not. Winifred said why shouldn’t she, and Frederica retreated into the kitchen and out through the back door. Immediately she was out, alone, in the sun, her body became her own again, and glistened with hope and terror. She began to run, up across the Far Field, knowing that Alexander would, must, be waiting for her, as surely as she knew the grass was hard and the railway train thundering across the horizon.

A large number of people seemed to be leaning out of the window of this particular express, calling and pointing. She felt that they had recognised her famous face, and then, more plausibly, that she had, in the agitation of the moment, left off some crucial garment. She hesitated, stood, and looked about. It was in this way that Alexander, from the bridge, and Frederica from the touch line of the rugger pitch saw the figure in the Bilge Pond, male, naked, and singing aloud. They advanced
slowly. As they came nearer, Frederica to the back, and Alexander to the front of the figure, they recognised Lucas Simmonds, Frederica by the curly head and a certain importunate jut of the ivory buttocks, Alexander by the contorted crimson face. Simmonds was stirring the black, soft, circular water with a long pole, which he manoeuvred with his left hand. The Bilge Pond, long unplumbed, must have been deeper than anyone supposed. At least, it came over Simmonds’s plump knees, swaying and soughing. The singing was partly O come, o come, Adonai, with endlessly elongated and trilling vowels, and partly Milton’s version of the 136th Psalm, which was sung in the Blesford Ride Sunday Service on an average twice a term. The lines of this were often truncated and fell away into swishing of water. There was a certain febrile anger about the way the rod beat the water when the words went, and a curious loud, genuine exultation about those words that were remembered. Simmonds’s hair, on both his head and his body, was very carefully dressed with flowers, furrow weeds, cow parsley, cranesbill and cockoo-pint, birds-foot trefoil and carefully placed large moon daisies, with ears of rye grass and barley grass and trailing woven sticky skeins of goose grass.

When Alexander approached closer he saw that the right hand was holding a very sharp butcher’s knife, and that there were little wounds, and quite possibly larger wounds, crisscrossed along the inside of Simmonds’s thighs, which were sheeted with glistering and dulling blood.

Alexander saw that Simmonds was mad: he had never for a moment supposed he would ever see anyone so classically, so grandly, so archetypally mad. But he could neither begin to imagine his state of mind nor think what to do. He thought he ought probably to walk boldly up. He walked.

“Simmonds. Simmonds, old chap. Can I help?”

Simmonds, with a look of ferocious concentration, stared at the sun, and continued to sing. Alexander stepped to the edge of the pond. Simmonds, wading and splashing a little made a very threatening slash at him with the knife. Alexander retreated. He became conscious of Frederica and made frantic gestures to her to go away. Frederica came closer, and Simmonds turned to face her, so that she saw at last the wilting glory of his floral crown, and breastplate, and the drooping purple flowers looped in the soft bush of his pubic hair. She also saw the blood, and the knife.

“Run home,” said Alexander, “there’s a good girl. Run home, and find help.”

“No help,” intoned Simmonds. “No help.”

“R
un
,” said Alexander to Frederica.

She ran.

Alexander squatted on the margin of the pond, at a distance, and stared, mesmerised, at Simmonds’s private parts, which were large, and though bloody, unbowed. Simmonds bowed and batted the water, and sang sweetly and trailed away into disgruntled silences. Alexander wondered agitatedly what he should do if this maniac took it into his head to run for the railway line, or to make a determined attempt to castrate himself. Simmonds circulated. Alexander decided that on the whole he preferred the back view.

Frederica burst into a family row that had become augmented by the presence of Daniel and Stephanie who had decided, somewhat despondently, to try and improve matters by apologising jointly for the conception of their child. She shouted out,

“Help, help, Lucas Simmonds is stark raving mad in the Bilge Pond and Alexander’s up there and he’s threatening him with a
knife
. And when I say stark, I mean
stark
. Help. Covered with flowers and things, like King Lear or Lady Chatterley’s lover. Do something. They always said there are leeches in there, in that pond, it’s horribly black. He looks
awful
, he keeps
singing
.”

“Ambulance,” said Daniel to Stephanie. “Stop shouting,” said Daniel to Frederica. It was, however, too late for this admonition. Marcus appeared, pale and shaky, on the landing. Stephanie was addressing the emergency services and explaining that she wanted an ambulance in the middle of the rugger pitch – the Far Field – at Blesford Ride school. No, it was not a sporting accident, she thought police might be needed – a dangerous man with a knife … restraint.

“You needn’t
enjoy
it,” said Daniel crossly to Frederica.

“I’m not really, it’s just my way of expressing myself, and I did come for help, that’s the main thing, isn’t it?” said Frederica, tossing her head like a maenad and glowing with drama and self-importance.

“You could have kept your bloody
voice down
,” said Daniel. Frederica looked round blankly uncomprehending. Marcus crept quietly down the stairs and pulled at Daniel’s sleeve.

“Are you going there? Shall I – come?”

Daniel turned his mind to this problem.

“You don’t have to.”

“I knew something terrible would happen. I am responsible for him. I must come.”

“If you must, you must. If it makes it worse, or if I say so, you go home, you understand?”

“He isn’t going,” said Bill.

“It’s his life,” said Daniel. “You’ve let him live it up to just without interfering in it. Now they’re in real trouble, if he feels he’s got to see it through, I say he can.”

“The man’s a maniac.”

“Maybe so am I,” said Marcus, twitching very gently with pale fingers at Daniel’s coat-sleeve. “Maybe – I can calm him down. He used – to do – what I told him.”

“
You
do what I tell
you
,” said Bill.

“Why?” said Daniel, who was as he put it to himself, proper narked with Bill on his own account, and maybe therefore not seeing clearly about Marcus.

“I’ve
got
to come. If anything – happens – I shall – be responsible all my life.”

“Come on then,” said Daniel. At this, Stephanie too pulled at Daniel’s sleeve. “Should you?”

“Truth is better than imagination, and Marcus is right, this is his business. Come on.”

They all trailed away up the garden path and onto the Far Field, at this, Marcus faltering between Daniel and Stephanie, Bill and Winifred wandering after, Frederica striding, subdued by the bad taste of her own noisiness, in their wake. Lucas Simmonds was still in the pond, the singing now a little raucous, and Alexander was still squatting uselessly on guard. Daniel strode up to Lucas.

“We’ve come to get you out.”

Lucas circulated.

“Why?” said Daniel, who could have done without his open-mouthed audience, whom he found inhibiting. He genuinely wanted to know
why
Simmonds had chosen to enter this pond, in this state of floral nakedness.

Simmonds brandished the knife. Marcus ran forward.

“Sir! Sir! This is all wrong. I know I should have come, I didn’t think what you thought I thought, I do believe, the photisms, the grasses, sir, we
saw
, there are scientific records – but this isn’t the way.”

Lucas turned, his head lowered like a bull, and glowered. Marcus stepped forward and held out his hand.

“Please come out.”

Very deliberately Lucas Simmonds splashed the fine black silt of the bilge pond up in great blotches over the boy, clean shirt, grey trousers, white freckled face.

“Go away. You aren’t going to be kind to me. Not you.”

He beat again at the water. An ambulance could be observed humping its way over the grass at the edge of the verge.

“Who?” said Daniel, as various ambulancemen and policemen made
their way up the field, with a stretcher, a straitjacket, a scarlet blanket in the hot sun. “Who?”

Lucas Simmonds looked desperately round the circle, so many Potters, fragile Alexander, stolid Daniel. He stepped out of the pond, which sucked at his feet, walked over to Stephanie, and buried his hot head on her breast. There he stood, grotesquely humped, since she was a small woman, grotesquely striped, black mud, red thighs, white body, crimson neck, and the blotches of flowers, and she put her arms round him, her stomach heaving and said, meaninglessly, “Never mind.”