The Virgin in the Garden (74 page)

Bill said gloomily that there was hardly room in that ludicrous little flat for another person, let alone two more with a baby, and that Daniel had enough on his plate. Frederica said that was one thing about Daniel, you could never say with certainty that he had enough on his plate. Bill became tense and thoughtful, and then put on his coat and rushed out to Askham Buildings.

It had turned out, as it happened, that it was to be impossible for the Ortons to stay in Askham Buildings. Daniel returned from Sheffield and said that he feared they would definitely have to house his mother. Mr Ellenby found for them a workman’s cottage in a part of Blesford where the younger middle classes were doing up such dwellings into tiny first homes, and suggested Daniel get his Youth Club layabouts onto the decorating. Stephanie, after the surprise of Bill’s inrush, his tears of self-accusation, his dramatic enactment of Marcus’s plight and his own guilt, said to Daniel that it was as much their duty to have Marcus, if he would come, as to have Daniel’s mother. Of course, said Daniel. Of course they must have Marcus. If Marcus wanted. Marcus, when Daniel went to the hospital and asked him, said he did want. It was the only thing he said at all for several days.

Autumn came and grew cold. Marcus was brought to Askham Buildings, where he slept on the sitting-room sofa until the cottage was fit for habitation. Frederica went back to Blesford Girls’ Grammar and began to work for university entrance. It had rapidly become clear to her that Alexander had gone for good. She felt humiliated, but also, without the stress of his presence, of desire, of a crisis to work for or avoid, she felt self-contained. The most useful lesson of the summer, she discovered, had been that things, and people, could by her be kept separate from each other. She could lie on her bed and weep for Alexander, also for Wilkie, and even for
Astraea
, but she could then rise up neatly and discover large available reserves of energy and concentration to spend gleefully on her work. She was pleased that the simple landmark of the bleeding was, however messily, past. She was shaken and discomposed by the change in her parents. Bill had cancelled a lot of classes, and spent his time wandering up and down, restlessly, in carpet slippers. He spoke to no one, often even opening and closing his mouth silently as though physically choking back speech. Winifred spent days together in bed. Frederica worked through this, for the sake of the way out, for the sake of the books themselves. But one night, feeling the danger of emotions seeping between the laminations of her attention, she decided to go and call on Daniel and Stephanie, to see at first hand how Marcus was, what was to be hoped, or feared.

Daniel opened the door to her, did not smile, but let her in. She said brightly, “I just dropped by, to see you. It’s unbearable at home. Oppressive.”

Daniel could have said the same, but would not. He said, “Well, do sit down, now you’re here. I’ll make a cup of tea.”

Stephanie and Marcus were sitting in silence on the sofa, side by side, his thin body in some strange way propped and supported by her swollen one. Stephanie nodded at Frederica, as though Marcus was a child or invalid not to be disturbed: Marcus gave no sign of having noticed her.

Since Marcus had come, the Ortons’ whole life had changed. For the first two days Marcus had turned to Daniel, whimpering like a small child if he went out of sight. Stephanie had noticed that this irritated Daniel, and was dismayed. She tried to take over: sat for long hours next to Marcus in a neutral unmoving silence, as she had sat with Malcolm Haydock: it was not, indeed, so very different. One day she had offered him the information that Lucas Simmonds had been moved again and was said to be feeling calmer: Marcus had asked if Lucas had been hurt or attacked, and when assured that he had not, had offered Stephanie a
version of his fears for Lucas and himself, of Lucas’s smashed hopes, of the photisms, the transmissions, the light. She had not understood much of this but had thought, possibly wrongly, that what was required was not understanding but “total acceptance”, and she had set with her usual conscientiousness about accepting Marcus. Animal taming came into it, as it had into her imagery about Malcolm Haydock: she had made it possible for him to lay his head in her lap for long hours and do nothing, be still. So Daniel increasingly found them when he came in from his work: he accepted her recuperative stillness, he tried not to interfere.

He went into the kitchen now, to make Frederica’s cup of tea, clattered with kettles and plates, lumbered from cupboard to cupboard. After a moment, Frederica followed him out there. She hissed, “Is it like that all the time? Will he get better?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you
manage
?”

“I’m not sure.” Daniel gave a brief, grim smile. He did not like Frederica Potter: he would not tell her how he felt, who in any case habitually told no one. But the answer was that he barely did manage. A moral man, he was appalled by his own reactions to Marcus’s presence, and to Stephanie herself. He dreamed nightly of murder. Pale innocent Marcus, slaughtering his unborn child. The child ripping Stephanie bloodily apart under his own eyes. Himself, Daniel Orton, pursuing Bill Potter across Far Field with Simmonds’s carving knife. And, most terrible of all, a blanket terror of smothering: his own bulk accidentally weltering on a, on the child, some unknown damp and heavy monstrosity pressing and choking away his own life. He could not speak to, or frighten, his wife, who was pregnant, and was doing what she believed to be right. He was truly sorry for Marcus. He missed the days of laughter and heat in that little flat, which would never come again. Even on a purely practical level he could say nothing: the walls were thin, the flat was tiny, the boy was always inert but alert and nervous.

“How do you
manage
, Daniel?” Frederica repeated.

“It’s got an end. There’ll be more space in the cottage. He’ll get over th’shock. It’s to be hoped. And there’ll be the baby.”

He stood for a moment staring out, as he often stared, as he had stared on his honeymoon night, at the black tyre turning and returning on its gallows, at the twisted thorn and the tracked muddy sea. She stared with him.

“In our house everyone’s gone passive and flabby as though energy was indecent. I work but I feel I’m attached to nothing, all in the air, loose.”

“Aye.”

“Whereas you seem – a bit clotted with problems.”

“Oh, aye,” said Daniel, staring. “In the midst of life, I am. It’s the normal course of things.” He had told himself that, often and often. But his powers were blunted by care: for the first time since his conversion he acknowledged the possibility of being wholly impeded from using his energies. He sensed some shadow of this care in the thin silly girl beside him.

“You’ll be all right once you’ve got into t’university. It’s just the waiting time.”

“I suppose so. And you – when the baby’s born.”

“Aye.”

“And Marcus?”

“I don’t know, Frederica. He’s not my kind of practical problem.”

He piled up teacups and a packet of biscuits and they went back into the little box of a room. Marcus had his head against Stephanie’s shoulder; he sagged like a straw man; his limp hands and legs were still. She sat, like some unnatural and ungainly Pietà, looking out over his pale hair at Daniel, with what seemed to be unseeing patience. He had unfrozen her once, and could surely do so again. He said again to Frederica, “It’s a question of the waiting time – of being patient now – for all of us.”

Waiting and patience, of this inactive kind, did not come easily to him. Or to Frederica, he decided, without much sympathy for her. He gave her a cup of tea and the two of them sat together in uncommunicative silence, considering the still and passive pair on the sofa. That was not an end, but since it went on for a considerable time, is as good a place to stop as any.

A. S. B
YATT
has written six works of fiction—
Possession
, which won the Booker Prize and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, as well as
Shadow of a Sun, The Game, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life
, and
Sugar and Other Stories
. She has taught English and American literature at University College, London, and is a distinguished critic and reviewer. Her critical work includes
Degrees of Freedom
(a study of Iris Murdoch) and
Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time
. Her latest book is entitled
Passions of the Mind: Selected Essays
.

In “Morpho Eugenia,” a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a family whose clandestine passions come to seem as inscrutible as the behavior of insects. And in “The Conjugal Angel,” a circle of fictional mediums finds itself haunted by a real historical personage.

Fiction/Literature

Frederica’s husband’s violent streak has turned on her. She flees to London with their young son and gets a teaching job in an art school, where poets and painters are denying the value of the past and fostering dreams of rebellion, which hinge upon a strange, charismatic figure, the unkempt and near-naked Jude Mason.

Fiction/Literature

Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student, decides to escape postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. A tantalizing yarn of detection and desire,
The Biographer’s Tale
is a provocative look at “truth” and our perennial quest for certainty.

Fiction/Literature

When children’s book author Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of a museum, she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined.

Fiction/Literature

In this collection of fairy tales for adults, the title story describes the relationship between a world renowned scholar of the art of storytelling and the marvelous being that lives in a bottle found in an Istanbul bazaar. Byatt renders this interaction of the natural and supernatural not only convincing, but inevitable.

Fiction/Literature

A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince. Striving to master color and line, a painter solves his artistic problems when a magical water snake appears in his pool. Elegantly crafted and suffused with wisdom, these tales are a testament to a writer at the height of her powers.

Fiction/Literature

The Game
portrays the sibling rivalry between Cassandra and Julia who, as little girls, played a game in which they entered an alternate world modeled after Arthurian romance. Now they are hostile strangers, until a man they loved and suffered over reenters their lives.

Fiction/Literature

In this innovative book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré bring their sensibilities to bear on six novels they have loved: Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park
, Charlotte Brontë’s
Villette
, George Eliot’s
Daniel Deronda
, Willa Cather’s
The Professor’s House
, Iris Murdoch’s
An Unofficial Rose
, and Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
.

Literary Criticism

Each of these narratives is inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, and each is about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling. Beautifully written, intensely observed,
The Matisse Stories
is fiction of spellbinding authority.

Fiction/Literature

Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath, Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison, or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging, entertaining, and unflinchingly committed to the alliance of literature and life.

Literary Criticism

These short stories explore the fragile ties between generations and the dizzying abyss of loss and the memories we construct against it, resulting in a book that compels us to inhabit other lives and return to our own with knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder.

Fiction/Literature

A tale of a brilliant and eccentric family fatefully divided,
The Virgin in the Garden
is a wonderfully erudite entertainment in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably.

Fiction/Literature

Frederica lucks into a job hosting a groundbreaking television talk show based in London. Meanwhile, the University is planning a conference on body and mind, and students are establishing an Anti-University.
A Whistling Woman
is a thought-provoking meditation on psychology, science, religion, ethics, and radicalism and their effects on ordinary lives.

Fiction/Literature

VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com