The Virgin in the Garden (17 page)

He ignored the desperate shake in the voice. He said, “Perhaps it’s best if I do. The problem is, a difficulty has arisen about the casting of – of the main part. Lodge wants – and Matthew wants – to cast Marina Yeo as the Queen. In fact,” he said, disguising he hoped a little bitterness, “they have approached her – she’s an old old friend of Matthew’s – and she is very keen, I’m told.”

She stared and said nothing.

“She’s too old,” said Alexander. “For the, for my play, as it stands, that’s the trouble.”

“I saw her in
Hedda Gabler
in Newcastle. And as Cleopatra once. You can play Cleopatra old. I saw that awful film,
The Mortal Moon
, too, where she was Elizabeth. She was O.K. in that.”

“That was made some time ago. She is a great actress. Crowe had a bright idea – he wanted to split the part, to – to cast a young girl as Elizabeth in the first act – before her Accession – and let Marina take over and age gracefully from there. I don’t want that, myself. It’s only fair to say that. I wrote it as one part.”

“If I’d done that,” she said, “I’d be furious if they tried to split it. It’s the wrong
style of thing
 …”

“It’s not a pageant,” said Alexander incautiously.

“No.”

“Anyway, Crowe was hit by your likeness to – the original – and thought it was just possible to cast you for the first scenes.”

“I wouldn’t want that,” she said, “even if they wanted me, I wouldn’t, if you didn’t … I mean, I care what
you
think, and it’s your play. You wrote it.”

“That doesn’t make it mine, now,” he said scrupulously. “It’s in Lodge’s hands now. He liked you.”

What Lodge had attributed to Frederica was “a peculiar dry sexiness”, a phrase which had stuck in Alexander’s mind because he had never considered her as sexy at all. Blundering, and in his presence she blundered perpetually, excluded sexiness in his eyes.

“Crowe said I might hope for an understudy,” she said. “I
was
hoping. But I still don’t think you should let them impose
any
splitting on your play if you don’t like it. It’s
yours
.”

“I don’t want to stop you hoping …”

“I wanted to be in on it. There won’t ever be anything like it.” She thought of the visions she had alternately cherished and abandoned: fanfare, farthingale, gloss and glimmer of English language, men and maidens and talk and who knew what else, and Alexander. Alexander … naturally Alexander. “It’s premature to say,” she said, “that I won’t do it, to split it, they probably won’t like me. But I
wouldn’t
, I mean it.”

She wondered what she was saying. She meant what she said. She saw what he thought. In his place, she would think that. It was his work. But the most important thing was that she, Frederica Potter, should have a part, should have
the
part. So why was she saying all this? Not exactly so that he should say, as he now did, “No, no, you must do your best, the decision is Lodge’s …” Just that she knew what his interests were, and cared about them, and knew what hers were, and cared more about those, and he did not, but must come to.

She stared round his room. She had always meant, some time, to penetrate this place. It was only partly as she had imagined. It was cool and plain and as modern as possible inside its Victorian-Gothic shell. The walls, in a way that was fashionable in those post-festival years, were all painted in different pastel colours: duck-egg blue, watered grass-green, muted salmon rose, pale sandy gold. The armchairs were pale beach, upholstered in olive cord. On the window
sill, in black basalt Wedgwood bowls, were white hyacinths and dark crocuses.

On the blue wall, behind Alexander, was a large print of Picasso’s
Saltimbanques
, framed in thin strips of light oak. Opposite, on the pink wall, was Picasso’s
Boy with a Pipe
, which Frederica did not recognise. On the green wall, over the hearth, was a very large and gleaming photograph, white on black, of a nude woman, sculpted in marble, lying on one side, seen from the back. This, too, she did not recognise. Under this, on the shelf, was a mound or cairn of irregular stones. One or two were polished eggs, agate and alabaster, others were just stones. Those which would not heap were laid out in a tapering row beside those that would.

On the gold wall, fading a little, was a mounted poster announcing
The Buskers
by Alexander Wedderburn. The letters of the title were formed from sprouting twigs or branches, held up by capering and posturing
commedia dell’arte
figures. Brown and green letters, black and white chequered figures.

Frederica read, twice, the information on this poster, vanished days and hours at the Arts Theatre in 1950. Then she read the titles of the books on the shelves nearest her. She was magnetised by print, by lettering, she took sensual pleasure in reading anything at all, instructions about Harpic and fire alarms, lists, or, as now, the titles of books.
Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Théâtre Complet de Racine
.

On the door was an empty gown and a tweed jacket.

What was the room not, that she had expected it to be? Something more dramatic, richer, darker. Its decorous airiness was unexpected if pleasing.

“I like your stones.”

He stood up nervously and turned them in his hands, cold, susurrant, clashing.

“I bring them up from the Chesil Bank. Where I come from, my place of origin, Dorset.”

Another scrap of information; she stored it away, greedily, but could think of nothing to say, about stones, or about Dorset. She was a girl unusually ill-equipped with small talk. The lengthening silence was broken, almost to her relief, by Crowe and Lodge, who strode hurriedly into the room.

They were prepared to be mysterious about their intentions, which embarrassed both Alexander and Frederica, neither of whom chose to describe the discussion that had already taken place. Crowe talked, with meaningful little winks, about a possible understudy, and Lodge
said that they had been impressed enough with her previous appearance to be considering her for a speaking part. Could she perhaps recite the Perdita speech for them, as a preliminary.

Frederica said she would rather do something else. She had discovered, she told them grimly, that she was no good at girls. Could she not do Goneril? Lodge laughed aloud at this, and said that girls, not Goneril, were unfortunately what was wanted, and it would be nice to discover, if she didn’t mind, how far she could go in the direction of girlhood. Something in the elaborate mock-courtesy of this made Frederica sense that she was being treated specially, was liked, was wanted. They were prepared to bandy words. So she grinned, and said well, they knew by now she was no nymph, and made her way obediently through O Proserpina! For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall From Dis’s wagon. It was not inspired, Alexander thought, but it was a little more than workmanlike: the breaths and pauses were in viable places, the verse was at least unimpeded in its flow: it sang, almost, even if Frederica did not.

“And now,” said Lodge, “if you could study a small speech from Alexander’s play … Alexander, do you have any particularly suitable bit in mind?”

Alexander said perhaps the Tower speech. Frederica tried to assess his expression as he handed her a script. Patient melancholy. The speech was a soliloquy by the young Princess, thrust into the Tower by Mary Tudor, a moment of history, and fiction, that Frederica had lived often enough, since she had grown up on the heady romantic emotion of Margaret Irwin’s
Young Bess
. She supposed Alexander had not, though there was romantic emotion here, all right.

Alexander watched her. There is always something unnerving about watching someone else purposefully, rapidly, going over something one has written. He began to hover, and, almost involuntarily, to offer scraps of useful, or mitigating, or distracting information. She set her face cross and private to read: he did not acknowledge it, but he feared her judgment.

“I take it she did mean it. I shall never marry. The play assumes that those historians are right who believe she really meant to stay single,” …

“Yes, I see …”

“The ‘she’ she keeps referring to is Anne Boleyn. There is of course no record of her ever having spoken of Anne Boleyn.”

“I know that.”

“Ah, yes. I might point out that the speech is meant to begin in a hysterical rush, like the descriptions of Anne Boleyn in the tower, laughing and weeping, and then it modulates its tone …”

“Yes, yes.” Almost impatient. “The sentences are very long. To say.”

“It isn’t easy,” said Alexander. Matthew Crowe said, “Let the poor child concentrate, do.” Alexander went and looked out of the window.

The verse was nervous and glittering, adjectival and highly metaphorical. The Princess described the cold wet stone of the tower, the black Thames, the narrow garden plot with a few uncut flowers. Then she wove a long serpentining period out of red and white roses, the Tudor rose, blood, flesh, marble, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed,
ego flos campi
, not to be cut off by the butcher. A thematic sideways curve, ornate and delicately whimsical, about the Princess who lost a golden ball in a fountain and repelled a clammy frog. Marble and the gilded monuments of princes. The periods gave way to flat, uncompromising claims. Elizabeth would not bleed. She would neither be butchered nor marry. She would be a stone that did not bleed, a Princess,
semper eadem
and single. Her virtue her stronghold.

Frederica stood in one window embrasure, looked down at the garden, settled her imagination, and read. The particular difficulties were, as she had intimated, grammatical, and she was good at grammar. Alexander, although he had not told her so, had already heard several potential Elizabeths, all of whom had had trouble with his language. Frederica, contrary to his expectations, had powerful negative virtues. She did not murder his sentences. She had, fortunately, come to the intellectual conclusion that the language was so ornate, florid even, that the best way to speak it was plainly and quietly, let it elaborate itself as it must. Alexander was disproportionately impressed by this approach. He was afraid of vibrant actresses “expressing themselves” athwart his words. He had assumed she would be worse than most. She was not. Possibly not vibrant enough, indeed, to impress Lodge. He found himself hoping Lodge would not think her too dry and monotonous.

What Lodge thought was not clear. He did indeed take her over the peroration again, asking her to give it all she had got, and exacted from her a kind of gruff ferocity he seemed pleased with. He said, do you think you could learn to move more naturally, and Frederica said, of course. Crowe said that he was of the opinion that their little plan was distinctly promising, and Frederica prevented herself from asking what was their little plan. Crowe then offered her a lift to her home: it was clear to her that, with his liking for hints, indiscretions, manipulations, he would tell her about the “little plan” and no doubt about Alexander’s opposition to it. Of the three men, Crowe was the one who most certainly liked her, who was on her side. He was also the least
appealing: he had only money and power, whereas Lodge, and even more Alexander, were artists, which was obviously more impressive. She was in fact naive enough to suppose that what she felt to be her aesthetic morals in this case coincided with what she more vaguely labelled, inaccurately, her political interests: the man it was necessary to impress was Alexander. The play was his play: she needed his approval of her reading, of their plan. She supposed, wrongly, that the other two were already in favour of the conflation of herself and Marina Yeo into one Queen, and that they had staged this reading to convert Alexander. So she told Crowe that she did not need a lift, she was at home already, had only to walk down the lane and across Far Field. And then, by blatantly not leaving through a door held open for her, she contrived to be left alone with Alexander.

Alexander said, magnanimously, that he admired her reading. She said that it had been a pleasure, despite the strain, because the verse was so exciting, because of the imagery. Alexander said that that speech was the metaphorical centre of the whole play. She liked, she said, the colours. The red and white. He said he had always seen that scene red and white and grey, and Frederica said would he not get green out of doors and he said no, not if it was late enough, you could make stones with artificial light, he hoped. Would she like a glass of sherry after her ordeal? He had, he told her, pouring sherry, taken the red and white from the little poem about Elizabeth the Virgin he had incorporated in his text.

Under a tree I saw a Virgin sit
.

The red and white rose quatered in her face
.

Quartered had made him think of hanging and drawing there, as well as heraldry, and so the red and white, blood and stone, had grown. Would she sit down on the sofa? Was she interested in the iconography of the idolization of Elizabeth? It had its interests. Elizabeth had acquired many of the traditional attributes of the Queen of Heaven. Rosa mundi, tower of ivory.
Ego flos campi
, said Frederica, and all that bit about the fountain sealed. That, she said, was on their school blazer, “Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed.” Where was that from, then?

Alexander was startled into ribald laughter.
That
, he informed her, was from Tennyson’s “Princess” about the feminist academy. The poet was more or less mocking the virginal aspirations of his Princess Ida, the bluestockings and all. Before that, long before that, of course, the fountain sealed came from the Song of Songs, and was highly erotic. A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse. A spring shut up: a fountain sealed. In
that case
, said quick-witted Frederica, on her second
glass of sherry, Tennyson was being emancipated or obscene since he was suggesting that common knowledge, far from being original Sin, was a good thing. Alexander said he feared it was a joke on the part of the Laureate at the expense of the virginal idealists who claimed access to the springs of knowledge: backed up by the fact that their lovely lyrics ran counter to their proclaimed message, being highly erotic or in praise of babies. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white, for instance. One of the most suggestive poems in the language. Frederica said that she was glad the Blesford Girls’ Grammar blazers were not only hideous but secretly obscene, it made it all seem more tolerable, and she was grateful to him for telling her. It became clear to both of them that they were sitting side by side on a sofa, talking about sex.