The Virgin in the Garden (36 page)

Installed again in the bus, Frederica was surprised to see Ed mounting its step. She was more surprised when he came and sat down beside her and pulled out a fat black notebook. Before the bus got moving, he told her, business-like, he would just like to take down her name and address. In case he ever came her way, which was likely enough, with the travelling. Frederica reiterated Miss Plaskett’s surname and recited a fictitious address, composed of the number of Jennifer’s house with the name of Daniel’s street, and a telephone number composed of half the school’s number added to half the doctor’s. This fictive tissue of true facts had a plausibility pure invention could not have had: she was rather proud of it: though unable to understand why Ed should have shown any interest in having it. He wrote it down, slowly and patiently, breathing heavily, and spoke to her no more between Goathland and Calverley, though occasionally on corners his bottom squashed hers in the old way.

She thought, hard. Her day had been bitty, but full of things: Stephanie, Calverley Minster, Racine, the moorland, Ed, Alexander. Taken together, as they undoubtedly could be, these things had alarming aspects. If, for instance, you took the bad pictures of Daniel, and related them to
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, and that to Ed, and Ed’s hot swollen tongue to the donkey’s hot swollen tool, and those to Alexander, and if, for aesthetic elaboration you pressed, in a military sense, the Cathy-Heathcliff aspects of moorland, the crude Freudian view of the upthrust of the spire of Calverley Minster, you had what could be called an organic image that was, there was no question, extremely depressing, if undoubtedly powerful.

But, if you kept them separate. If you kept them separate, in many ways you saw them more truly.

Racine, for instance, was important because of the Alexandrine.
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was simply an example, not a particularly good one in fact, which she happened to have chosen because everyone knew it by heart, you could remember it easily on a bus bumping over a moor.

The moor, to continue, was nothing to do with Cathy-Heathcliff unless she chose. What she had seen was that last year’s bracken was pale biscuit colour, and that at a distance the haze of biscuit over the uncurling green seemed striped.

Ed was nobody. She had let him do that because he was nobody. She had not seen his face and if that had been accident it was now design, she would not look at his face. He had his function. Beyond it, she had stopped him off.

The donkey was nothing to do with anything but she now knew about it. It was, in itself, interesting.

As for Alexander. She knew perfectly well who Jenny was, having recognised the colouring of those parts of her that stuck out. She ought to have been put out, but was not. The feeling she had, on seeing Alexander, was one of power. Knowledge was power, as long as one did not muck it up by confusing one piece of knowledge with another and trying to ingest it and turn it all into blood and feelings. She knew now what was what, who did what to whom, and what Ed did to her, and Alexander to Jennifer were useful knowledge but different things from what she would do to Alexander, or he to her, when the time came. It now seemed possible that there was a time, which would or could come.

One could let all these facts and things lie alongside each other like laminations, not like growing cells. This laminated knowledge produced a powerful sense of freedom, truthfulness and even selflessness, since the earlier organic and sexual linking by analogy was undoubtedly
selfish. It was she, not Daniel, Alexander, Racine, Ed, the Cairo donkey, Emily Brontë and the architects of Calverley Minster who had linked these creatures to each other out of her own necessity. The whole problem of selfishness and selflessness was odd, since seeing things either separate or linked felt like an exercise of power, which she had been most ambiguously, by her father, taught to eschew theoretically and pursue in practice.

She sensed that the idea of lamination could provide both a model of conduct and an aesthetic that might suit herself and prove fruitful. It would, she decided, as in the event it did, take years to work out the implications.

She returned to the Alexandrine, as the part easiest to concentrate on, least likely to stir up all the others. It seemed that there was some very simple way in which it was clear to her that Racine’s play was
good –
hard, strong, finished, durable – in a region in which she was very much less sure about
Astraea
. Now, how did one come to recognise that sort of goodness, and how did one check one’s judgment? Could that be measured in the structure of the lines of verse?

It was probably a good thing for her at seventeen that she had no knowledge of Coleridge’s ideas of the origin of metre. By the time she acquired this piece of information, she was equipped to laminate it, too.

Winifred came to Stephanie’s room one night, an unusual step for her, who assumed that Stephanie, like herself, preferred things unstated and undiscussed. She said that she had come to the conclusion that she herself must invite Daniel to the house, if Stephanie wished it, and welcome him. As for Bill, she went on, when Stephanie did not answer, he would come round, Stephanie knew that, he always did. Stephanie replied that she doubted this. A man like Daniel, Winifred hoped, would respect another man’s passionately held beliefs. Stephanie said dully that she doubted this too. Daniel was not a tolerant man, was capable of considerable anger. Winifred showed agitation, and asked if she could sit down. She did not want Stephanie, she said, to marry an angry man. She had tried to make them all a happy home, to give and take, to make allowances; it had cost her. She sat on the end of the bed, in her dressing gown, and said,

“He left me on my honeymoon.”

Stephanie stared.

“I’ve never talked about it to anyone. We went to Stratford-on-Avon and he walked out of the theatre bar in the interval. We were watching
Much Ado
, and I felt so happy, those love scenes are so real – I do love nothing in the world so well as you, is not that strange – so in the interval I told him what I’d done. I felt such accord with him, but it was the play.”

“What had you done?”

“Oh yes. I wrote to his parents to tell them we were married and happy. I hoped they might get in touch then, or even come to the wedding.”

“But they didn’t?”

“No. He was right and I was wrong. Potters are rigid and stubborn.”

“Yes,” said Stephanie, and thought, she is not a Potter. But I am. I am.

“Anyway, when I said this he began to scream and shout in the bar, as he does. That was the first time. I didn’t know he … I said, please be quiet, and he said, if it’s like that, I’ll go where you can’t hear me. He rushed out. He took the little car we had. He was gone for two days.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, I tried to sit in my seat, but I couldn’t. So I went back to the hotel, and waited. You know, about waiting, you set yourself a limit, before you’ll start worrying, an hour, six hours, a day, two days. Two days and two nights in a hotel, with no money and no one. I daren’t go far away. Little walks, in case he came back and rushed off again, not finding me waiting. Sometimes I sat in the garden at New Place. I hate those smells now, that garden, ladslove, artemisia, so sour. The weather was lovely, and dog roses too, very pretty. I thought of going home but I was humiliated.”

“Was he ill?”

“I wondered. I’d got it in my head to call the police, but it was such a worry, and on one’s honeymoon, a difficult time. Then he came back. He said he’d been to Malvern, and walked. So he took me there, too, and we stayed up at the British Camp, and were happy, the happiest time in my life, possibly. Why did I tell you that? Oh yes – I was saying – he does come round, you see.”

“You said you didn’t want me to marry an angry man.”

“No, I don’t.”

“What did he say when he came back?”

“Oh, he burst into the dining room – I was eating an omelette – I daren’t eat anything else, with no money, and I was afraid I’d have a huge bill. And he began to shout how his behaviour was insufferable,
and the more he stayed away the more he daren’t come back. So we went upstairs – and he said – he was crying – he didn’t think he could ever calm down, not really. He shouldn’t have married, he said. So I – calmed him down – and said we would work out a way of getting on. And we have.”

“I’m glad it ended happily.”

“Oh, Stephanie. Don’t sound like that. It produced you. I didn’t come to tell you that. I came to ask Daniel to lunch. Would he come?”

Daniel did come. Winifred took trouble over the lunch. She made a cheese soufflé, roasted a chicken, put together a fresh fruit salad and splashed in a miniature bottle of Cointreau. She enjoyed the soufflé-making, with a limited nostalgia for pre-war plenty. It was her daughters, children of austerity, who would later go in for authentic, gluttonous cookery with butter and wine and roasted spices. Winifred believed in convenience foods as she believed in labour-saving devices. She remembered baking days in the past, raised pies and kneading dough, as she remembered galvanised wash-tubs, copper ponches and monstrously strutting hand-wringers, chores you were glad to be shot of. She bought wine, for Daniel, and got out damask napkins and cut-glass goblets. She was determined that he should feel both feasted and at his ease.

He crashed into the hall and slammed the front door so violently that the sherry-glasses in the sitting-room tinkled on their tray. He cried out “Hullo, hullo”, and admired things too loud, too soon and too much. He was over-confident; he had assumed that he could deal with the social flow of a lunch-party since he spent his life not unsuccessfully battering his way through awkward gatherings. He had exercised his usual sense of priorities and told himself that what Bill and Winifred thought or felt should not, must not, and therefore would not, alter what was between him and Stephanie. This made, as he was to discover, insufficient allowance for what Stephanie thought and felt about them.

He drank several glasses of sherry, very fast. He refused to recognise difficulty. He filled the frequent silences, too rapidly, with comical parish anecdotes and nervously forceful clerical laughter. The anecdotes were mostly bluffly and humbly slanted against himself. He admired the soufflé, which he greatly enjoyed, so vigorously that Winifred felt like some intractable slattern being congratulated by a caseworker on having, at long last, produced an acceptable Spotted Dick. Stephanie said almost nothing.

After lunch they drank coffee out of tiny lustre cups. No one had mentioned marriage. Daniel described to Winifred Stephanie’s success with Malcolm Haydock and Winifred was moved as he had meant her to be. She said she knew little of his work, and Daniel, remarking that
the left hand was often better not knowing what the right hand did, went into it, perhaps offering credentials, in a professional way. Winifred asked if his profession made it harder and Daniel burst into an account of the funny ideas people had about clergymen, ending up, unfortunately for him, on the subject of clerical sex. Stephanie was already constrained: she had been moved when he told her about the railway-carriage ostracism in Felicity’s room but disliked the comic oratorical flourishes he gave to it for her mother. She loved his harsh and practical work, but hated to hear him root out, for her mother, the sloppy abstract words, “spontaneous,” “personal,” “caring,” “tenderness,” which made it sound muffled and facile. He began to assure them with booming jollity that clergymen were really just like other men, more or less, as regarded sex, that very few held high views about renouncing birth control, or low views about self-denial, or even sacramental views about Beautiful Unions which entailed a lot of bedroom prayerwork. He became aware of a constraint between the women, and saw Stephanie’s face over her coffee, a cool rejecting mask.

“My God,” he said to her. “I’m sorry. I was just going on about things I’ve gone on about before, in other places, in silly contexts. Not to you. I oughtn’t to talk like that to you.”

Although this was what she thought, she was worse embarrassed to hear him say it.

“Don’t be silly,” she said.

Winifred took up her courage. “I don’t think you should criticise Daniel. There are difficulties – about this marriage – and this is one of them. I am glad you spoke out.”

Daniel continued to stare frowning at Stephanie, who did not meet his eye.

There was a further succession of crashes in the hall. The coffee cups rattled. Bill’s head came round the door.

“Ah. Am I interrupting? Please tell me if I am, and I’ll go.” No one spoke.

“Clearly I am interrupting. I’ll take myself off.”

He made no move. Daniel stood up and extended a hand.

“Good afternoon.”

“Thank you,” said Bill. He did not take Daniel’s hand. The women were still as stones. “Courting my daughter?”

“I hope I’ve finished with the courting.”

“I take it you’ve been told I think it’s potty.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“I refuse my consent.”

Daniel opened his mouth. Bill rushed on.

“I know I’ve no
legal
force. But morally, morally I stick. I can’t countenance something so patently doomed.”

“That’s not morality. That’s arrogance.”

“As for the vulgarity of surreptitious get-togethers …”

“I’ll go now,” said Daniel. “That’s best. I’ve no wish to stay where I’m not welcome. I hope Stephanie will marry me soon. It strikes me she’ll be better off wi’ me.”

Bill skipped dramatically across his path and held out his arms, barring the door.

“You’ve nothing to offer her. You’re nothing to do with what she is.”

“That’s for her to say.” Daniel was very angry, and the anger was fuelled by his awareness of his own previous ineptitudes, and Stephanie’s prolonged silence. “I don’t like to see you torment her. You presume too much on her love for you. What you do is downright cruel, that’s the word, and it’s lucky for you she’s so very strong. But I’m not sure it’s lucky for her. You put it all on her. It’s got very little to do with her really. And now will you let me get past.”