The Virgin in the Garden (72 page)

When she came out again, she had almost no money for the unsolved pudding, and Wilkie was waiting for her on the pavement.

“Housekeeping?” he said, pleasantly.

Frederica glowered at him. “Trying to cook dinner for someone. But I haven’t got any money.”

“I could stand you a bottle of wine.”

“I don’t have to get that. I’ve got pudding problems.”

Wilkie swung his helmet, and expressed great interest in the pudding problems. Frederica deployed the fruit salad, the bananas and rum, the sherry trifle. Wilkie said he didn’t really think any of those were very
nice
, and he suggested a sizeable bunch of grapes and some really good chocolates, which he would lend her the cash for, if that helped. He came with her, most obligingly, selected her bunch of grapes for her, bought her the chocolates, commented adversely on her choice of cheese, insisted that she go back for a piece of real Lancashire or Wensleydale, and offered her a lift back home on the back of the bike. The shopping was strapped to the luggage rack, Frederica, her red hair blowing out, swayed breathlessly on the pillion, and they rode back to Masters’ Row. This time, uninvited, Wilkie came in. He watched with interest whilst Frederica wandered round the kitchen looking for presentable plates, and candles.

“Who’s coming, then?”

“Alexander. They’ve all gone off, to look after Marcus. Alexander’s coming.”

“I see. The classic supper and wine and candles and conversation and bed for two. God, you are a loon, Frederica Potter.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told you he was in flight from suburbs and teacups. And here are
you, all domestic and
not
, if I may say so, any good at it, preparing him a bourgeois seduction. He’ll run a mile. Before or after.”

“I
want
him.”

“Do you? In a house? In this house?”

“It’s a rather nice destructive act. Like sacrilege. He was here all morning.”

“I see. And if it’s a destructive act, why are you flapping about chops and Danish blue? And if he was here all morning, did you get deflowered, and if you did, why did he go away at all, and why the candles and grapefruit, girl?”

“It isn’t your business.”

“No, it isn’t. I’ll go, if you like, and leave you to your preparations. Why don’t you have a bowl of roses in the middle of the table?”

“Oh, Wilkie, don’t go, I’m all in a mess, I’m so
scared
, and no, it didn’t happen this morning, and it should have, and now I don’t see how it ever will, because if I’m not scared, he is, and vice versa.”

“If he does manage to make you, here, tonight, I can tell you, that’s the last you’ll see of him. And if he doesn’t,
you’ll
never have the guts. You are in a mess, love.”

“I don’t see how you can be so categorical.”

“O.K., I can’t. It’s a hunch. I have good hunches. I have a hunch you want to cry off the whole thing.”

“Me? I love him. I
want
him.”

“You might still have got him in the wrong time and place. It happens all the time. Love, and want, and two people the wrong age, or going in the wrong direction; look at me and Marina. I might have loved her, if I’d been born twenty years ago, or hadn’t got my girl in Cambridge, or could stand being a gigolo. But as it is, I can fuck her more or less affectionately, pro tern, and that’s it. She knows.”

“What does she
feel
?”

“What she knows she can afford to feel. She’s a wise woman, no fool.”

“I feel a strong urge to throw these horrible chops at you, Edmund Wilkie.”

“Better pack your nightie and get on my motorbike and let Alexander sort you out some other, better way.”

Frederica put the dead chops down on the draining board.

“I told my mother I might go away with a friend for a few days.”

“Ah, you did, did you? And what did she say?”

“She said, who, and I said, that nice girl, Anthea Warburton, and she said, fine.”

Wilkie began to laugh. He laughed a great deal. Frederica began to laugh, somewhat hysterically. When they had stopped laughing, Wilkie
said, go on, get your nightie and toothbrush, and a swimsuit and a towel.

“You don’t love me, Wilkie.”

“No. I love my girl. Sort of. You don’t love me, either.”

“That’s awful.”

“That’s sensible. I can show you a thing or two, and then you’ll be able to look after yourself. Now
I
am in the right time and place, here. Go and get your nightie.”

Frederica went to get her nightie. Edmund Wilkie, a tidy-minded man in a less than wholly practical way, made a neat pyramidal pile of the dinner ingredients in the middle of the kitchen table. Frederica came back, with her things in a rucksack, and Wilkie, smiling slightly, said,

“Now, telephone your Mum, and Alexander, so you aren’t flapping or brooding or changing your mind once we’ve gone, and we’ll be off.”

“I can’t telephone Alexander. Not now.”

“Write him a note. We’ll drop it off at the school.”

Frederica did as she was told. Winifred sounded unbothered by her movements and the note was delivered, by Wilkie, to the school porter, who said gloomily that it was ’ard to get in touch with Mr Wedderburn, these days. Good, said Wilkie, and went back to Frederica and the motorbike.

It was now late afternoon. Wilkie said that they would stop and buy a crash helmet for Frederica at the next big garage, and that if she didn’t mind him giving her a few tips about riding motorbikes, they would get on better, safer, and faster. For instance, she was to lean forward, not sway about, hold him tightly about the waist and move with him. That would anyway be good practice. They would go out through Calverley, east across the moors, south through Goathland and down to Scarborough, where he reckoned they could be before dinner. Frederica said something awful had once happened to her at Goathland. Wilkie said in that case it would be good for her oversensitive psyche to speed through it on a bike, and that she could tell him about it, if she felt it would do her good, in Scarborough.

Frederica at first intensely enjoyed the motorbike. The crash helmet, when she acquired it, felt like a second high head, and an empty one at that, Wilkie put it on for her, laughed at her, and put on his own, pulling down the goggles, so that only his rather curvy mouth remained of a human face. The mouth was grinning. In motion, she realised that the strong wind they made, and the motor, imposed total silence on her in a flow of inhuman noise, and this she liked. She liked the peculiar intimacy and distance of this relationship with a man, too. There was Wilkie’s
ample bottom, and her own pushed against it, there were his strong arms, gripping and twisting, and her own clasped tight but not lovingly round his waist. There was the uncommunicative flat of his leathery back and the shiny smooth unmarked globe of the back of his helmet. His legs went up and down, now and then, and hers did not. After a while, as evening drew in, her own legs became very cold, as she had come out in a dirndl skirt, no stockings, and sandals. After more time, she became very stiff, and ached. The heather darkened and began to vanish: Frederica saw little of it, for she had her head tucked most conscientiously into Wilkie’s shoulderblade and saw always and only the strip of verge, the flow of tarmac, the white line and the lighting cat’s-eyes. Once they stopped at a transport café for a hot cup of Camp coffee and sat next to a wailing and juddering juke box, their limbs too stiff and their faces too set by the wind to speak or smile. There Wilkie expressed concern about her cold legs, said he had not been as clever as he should have been, and insisted on lending her a pair of bright yellow oilskin trousers, hugely too big for her, which she pulled on with stiff hands in a very smelly lavatory. There, too, she remembered Alexander, lovely, elegant and neither in her power nor feeling inadequate. She remembered the sunken garden where they had stood like statues, the eyebeams crossed from stage to scaffold at the height of their incipient shared passion. It would be all right. She had written that he was right, she was wrong, the house was impossible, she had behaved badly and was ashamed and had gone away to think things out and would assuredly be back.

The awful yellow trousers creaked and slithered as she struggled back to Wilkie, clutching them up. He grunted with laughter, and said she looked shapeless and awful, that if she wanted a nice anonymous disguise there wasn’t a better one than motorbike gear that didn’t fit.

When they finally drove into Scarborough her body was nevertheless frozen and set into a tense curve she wasn’t sure she could come out of. Wilkie roared along the Promenade, changing gears and jerking, and out over the rail the black sea stood, with white curls appearing and disappearing in it, with lines of light from harbour wall, and further out, boats, and further out still, the point of cliff and lighthouse. Her heart lifted, as it always did when she saw the sea, no matter how, or when, and always would, she thought, being only just eighteen, and like Daniel, no prophet. Wilkie drove straight up to the Grand Hotel, and parked the bike.

“The bigger, the more anonymous, the less inquisitive, the more fun,” he said. “I find. You stay out here and try and get those trousers
off, or you’ll never get up the steps, and I’ll enquire about rooms. Or room.”

He came back and said he had booked a room. He pulled off his little signet ring, and suggested she wear that, with the signet itself turned in. “It’s worked before,” he explained.

She followed him, hobbling, in. He had written in the register, Mr and Mrs Edmund Wilkie, Cambridge. She trailed her rucksack, feeling that she looked unlike Mrs anyone, but the porters were polite, indeed smiling, they bowed and opened lifts, and doors, and there she was, with Edmund Wilkie, in a high-ceilinged room with crimson and gold brocade curtains, a lace counterpane, a kidney-shaped dressing-table and a soft, silent carpet. There was also a large bed, with lamps on little tables and bell-pushes.

Wilkie rattled crash helmets like coconuts and made no attempt to touch her. He said she should have a hot bath, which she did, and put on some make-up so that she looked less like a runaway schoolgirl, which she did, and have dinner, with him, which she did, in a dining room red and gilt and cream with chandeliers and stiff white damask napery and heavy silver knives and forks and spoons. Wilkie laughed at her face. “This is something like,” he said. “Posh, Frederica. Not posh, for the likes of us, you understand, but posh for men in Yorkshire industry having weekends off with wives or secretaries. Have what you like to eat, within reason. I’m flush. And I’ve got more money coming in from some broadcasting I’m lined up for.”

“Broadcasting?”

“Well, yes. Two sorts. One on my funny experiment with the coloured glasses, which has produced some quite interesting results. And then I’m doing Parolles in a recording of a Marlowe Society
All’s Well
. Still no clear guidance as to the future, you see. I progress on all fronts. I might quit Cambridge, though, if I can get my girl to come. There’s beginning to seem no point in actually getting a degree.”

They ate consommé julienne, lobster thermidor, and a pudding which was constructed of meringues and cream and sugar and ice cream and nuts to look like a swan sailing with furled wings. They drank a lot of white burgundy. Wilkie made little jokes, and urged Frederica to tell him about Goathland, but she could not, beyond saying that odd things had been said to her, a story about a donkey in a brothel. Donkeys in brothels, said Wilkie, went back to Apuleius and were staple stuff. Look at the lovely little pudding, said Frederica. Just like Elizabeth might have actually had, she thought, she said. This reminded her again of Alexander, and she fell silent.

“Don’t
worry
,” said Wilkie. “You left a note. He didn’t want to go
there, not really, you know that with absolute certainty. I’ll deliver you back to him.”

Alexander had not got the note. He had barely avoided Jennifer, whom he had seen at the foot of his staircase just in time to slip, himself, into the doorway of Lucas Simmonds’s, where there gleamed now several bottles of milk, which no one seemed to have cancelled. He did not consider it his responsibility to do so. When he had seen Jennifer leave, he ran back to his car, which he drove up and down, at one point passing Crowe in the Bentley, which hooted peremptorily and rolled on. He got out in Blesford and bought a large bunch of cornflowers, white asters and moon-daisies. He realised that his pockets were still full of intractable letters, which he did not want to spread around his little bedroom, and that he was hot, and tousled, and should have had a wash. All the same, he did not want to go back to his tower. He put the letters in the glove compartment of his car and locked it. He stopped at a pub, drank two pints of beer, and had a wash of sorts in the men’s room. He remembered he had promised wine, and purchased two bottles of Vin Rosé d’Anjou. When it was dark he drove back to the school car park and walked down, past the Masters’ Garden, across the bridge, past the unruffled black Bilge Pond, towards the garden gate. His heart thumped. His breath came hard. He would do this.

Outside the gate, the blackness of the house struck him. An empty house is recognisable by senses other than sight, but he told himself he was confused, that it could not be so, that she had said repeatedly, as as though it was important, “in the dark”. He smelled the cut grass of the terrible Far Field and the warm scent of Winifred’s unculled roses: Virgo, Albertine, King’s Ransom, Papa Meilland, Elizabeth of Glamis. He banged on the back door and the French window. He called Frederica. No answer. He stood his bottles on the sill of the French window and laid his harvest bundle of flowers beside them. He wandered, with a pretence of casualness, back to the gate and leaned on it. He peered up at bedroom windows, looking, if there had been an observer, as Stephanie had seen Lucas, like Lady Chatterley’s lover. He sat on the grass, with his arms clasped boyishly round his knees. Lines of “Come into the garden, Maud” floated with ridiculous persistence through his memory. Queen lily and rose in one. The white rose weeps, she is late, she is late. I am coming, my dove, my dear. The conviction came to him that this moment was, that he himself was, ludicrous.