The Virgin in the Garden (39 page)

She received Winifred coolly, and Winifred found it hard to open a conversation. They sat in Mrs Thone’s chill drawing-room, two stiff, grim, tall Englishwomen, unable to drop their English shields of cautious silence. Winifred thought: I could weep, I could fling myself about. How she would hate that. She said neutrally, “I need your help.”

“How can I help you?”

“It is my husband. I shall have to explain … my husband …”

“Are you quite sure …” murmured Mrs Thone.

Winifred, more decisively, said she was indeed sure. She offered an excellent and unemotional précis of the events so far and explained that the wedding must take place and soon, and that Bill must not be troubled, or involved.

“And what can I do?”

“I don’t like to talk about Bill. He would hate it so.”

“According to my husband, he is a difficult genius.”

“If you are married to him,” said Winifred, “you notice the difficulty more than the genius.”

“My husband says he is invaluable. And often intolerable.”

“Exactly.”

They smiled, very briefly, together.

“I wondered if you – if your husband – if the school – might help with a wedding reception. To be truthful I can’t even be sure Bill will
come
. I want her to have things done properly. All the proper things. Here, he couldn’t … object … or derange …”

“I do see. Forgive me,” said Mrs Thone delicately, “but will you be all right, in the circumstances, for money?”

“We have a joint account. I shall use it.”

Mrs Thone began to laugh.

“I must admit, I should take some pleasure in fixing that without telling him, though I shouldn’t say so. I don’t see why we shouldn’t use the Masters’ Garden, weather permitting. I don’t see why – for the daughter of a long-established colleague – we shouldn’t use the kitchen staff and crockery and glasses. I don’t think I shall bother Basil with it much. He’s scared stiff – between you and me – of your husband’s tantrums. I shall simply inform him it’s being done – that
I
am doing it – and that there’s no need at all for him to mention it to Bill. It’ll leak through of course.”

“I’m relying on Bill to pretend not to take any notice.”

“He might not.”

“He might do … such things and so on. But with luck he can’t stop a whole wedding.”

“Your daughter seems a good, calm sort of girl. Is the young man a solid young man?”

Solid, yes, said Winifred. And like a steamroller. Didn’t admit obstacles. Winifred, Mrs Thone said, showed more similarity to a steamroller than might have been expected. Would she – and any available Potters – and the ferocious curate – care to come and watch her television on Coronation Day? All the boys had a holiday, of course, but there were always one or two with no home to go to, whom she would ask, and a few staff. Winifred felt both obliged, and pleased, to accept this invitation.

Daniel and Stephanie had now a wedding date, June 21st, and an invitation to the Coronation (on television). Winifred got out her treadle machine and began a yellow poplin dress for Frederica. Mrs Ellenby’s dressmaker measured Stephanie. Invitations were despatched, even to unknown Potters. Stephanie wrote briefly and delicately to Mrs Orton, suggesting a visit. She received a floral postcard, depicting a huge silver jar of dahlias on a burnished table, on the back of which Mrs Orton had written, no, don’t come, it would be too much upset for all concerned, my health is NOT UP to MUCH, but I’ll be there on the day don’t worry, thanks for writing and all the best. Daniel said she was a lazy old so and so and always had been. He added gloomily that she’d irritate Mrs Ellenby proper, but what must be must be. Stephanie found nothing to say about that, either.

Lucas Simmonds said they would plot a Mental Map of the part of the earth on which they were. The biosphere was to be drawn up into the noussphere, where it was to be fulfilled and completed, so that change and decay should no longer corrupt or impede its full shining. This was to be aided by their instrumentation. Led by their, particularly of course by Marcus’s, intuitions, they would perform experiments, or rites, which were strictly different names for the same thing, in those Places of Power they could certainly locate in the area surrounding Calverley. Their proceedings must be both biological and mental, because they, partaking of both worlds like amphibia, linked both worlds. The night’s meditation would reveal the
locus
of the next day’s experiment.

To assist the work he hung like mandalas in his room Ordnance Survey maps of the North York moors, photographs of Whitby Abbey, a marine pothole known as Jacob’s Ladder, Calverley Minster’s rose window, standing stones and geometrical earthworks on Fylingdales moor. He extended his eclectic reading to books on Fairy Mythology and druids. He told Marcus there were places which traditionally and for good reasons had been felt to be meeting places between the earthly and the unearthly, umbilici of the earth, hilltops and caverns, and there they would go. They would go in a scientific spirit and write up, neatly, their observations and conclusions. They would collect physically as well as mentally specimens, talismans, significant creatures. It was a scientific field trip combined with a spiritual pilgrimage, healthy fresh air, combined with mental gymnastics whose modes Marcus had not yet grasped. Any coincidence, analogy, concatenation, of dream and object, act and vision were pounced and worked on. Everything bristled with possible significance.

Marcus, over-alert and tremulous, nevertheless enjoyed these exercises more than the rest of the discipline. Lucas had begun to record and exploit his waking visions, that endless train of detailed shape-shifting images he saw when idle, or betwixt asleep and awake. The spider-web in various forms, grey ropes and glassy fibres, hyacinth, iris, gentian blue, recurred frequently. Or cloth, unfurled and undulating, decorated with spangles and paisley coils, faces and hands, on and amongst the layers of tissue. Once he saw a long procession of creatures, reptilian, rhinoceroid, elephantine, marching on bleeding feet over ice and snow against a line of stunted bushes whose leaves and twigs he could draw but not recognise. Once a face in a helmet rose and would not go, though he opened and closed his eyes, though smoke flew across it, though its outer peripheries temporarily transmuted themselves into conger eels or layered black wing-feathers. Perhaps because Lucas talked of them he began to see flowers, anemones rising and uncurling like serpents into cups of crimson, sapphire and purple, branches of blossom snapping into light and taking flight into a black sky. (The vision of the bleeding creatures in the snow was almost the only one with a pale sky.) He saw sap rising in transparent reeded stems, clear green flowing light up to gold cups, and white throats, crimson-spotted, and trailing swirling speedwell-blue florets. Lucas said he was seeing the inner Forms of the Biosphere, flowers as they had been, or would be, or innerly meant to be. Lucas told him that Goethe had
seen
the Urpflanze, the Typical Plant, revealed in existing plants, though it did not grow in Nature. So maybe Marcus saw the species-pattern, the Plan of creatures as he had seen the mathematical Forms. He himself had recently been led to wonder
whether the numerous fairytales about ointments which, rubbed on your eyes, caused you to see tiny species, moving invisible creatures under hills, in streams, even in market-squares, were to do with vision peculiarly attuned to the creation of species-patterns of microscopic or yet-uncreated life. Blake had drawn the ghost of a flea and had declared that if the gates of perception were cleansed man would see everything as it was, infinite. Imagine, Lucas cried lyrically, waving a crocus under Marcus’s nose, imagine being able to
perceive
the infinity of this creature, the matter and force that have flowed in and out of it through all time, the power that as we see it at this moment holds it in this pure and complex form …

Marcus could not follow Lucas’s excited analogical leaps. He did see the crocus, the fine lines and channels on its sheen, the deepening gold, the almost transparent flower-flesh. He was in a perpetual daze of focused visions and things, real things, studied and learned with a hallucinatory closeness that was so like the visions that the memory-images of both ran into each other. This was bearable because it had the firm purpose of Lucas’s sense of direction.

They covered their chosen ground in Lucas’s car, which was black and low and shining. Inside it Marcus was initially tormented by geometry. The way in which the sides of the road, the white lines, converged, were swallowed and vanished, filled him with the plughole and graph paper alarm. Trees and horizon were converted by speed to converging geometry: tall trees bowed and danced towards the windscreen in car-constructed lines. Lucas drove very fast, hissing between his teeth as he leaned extravagantly round corners. Marcus said he was afraid of speed and parallax. Lucas said this was good for vision. In the old days, did Marcus know, they suspended witches in sacks from the boughs of trees and gave them a good shove. In there, detached from time, space and the body, they were aware of other dimensions and saw visions. There was no earthly reason why sports cars shouldn’t have the same effect on moderns, at least passengers. He should empty his mind and stop fussing. Marcus said he was afraid of that. Lucas said he, Lucas, was there, wasn’t he, he could bring Marcus back from any temporary displacement of consciousness to hedgerow or white line. Thus encouraged Marcus began to enjoy speed. Disembodied he saw the overarching heaven and mapped the moorland as a series of turning concentric globes. He was carsick once and once only. Lucas said carsickness was a failure of the will, a failure of control in the solar plexus. He said he, Lucas,
didn’t wish
Marcus to be sick in his car. It was distracting and the smell lingered. He gave Marcus a barleysugar. Marcus was not sick again.

One Spring Sunday they visited the Dropping Well at Knaresborough
and a second powerful place, a long barrow on a tumulus known as Owger’s Howe.

Lucas had read up on Mother Shipton who had once lived in a cave-house by the Dropping Well. This person he told Marcus must have had considerable Mental Power since she had foretold tidal waves in the Thames, the Plague of London, Wolsey’s death, the dissolution of the monasteries, the defeat of the Armada, the length of Elizabeth’s reign, and the execution of Charles I. She had power over nature: she threw her staff in a fire and retrieved it unharmed. She had predicted many of the advances of our own time.

Lucas thought it might well be that such persons were in touch with the motions of earth’s magnetic fields. Marcus had no views, but listened.

It was grey when they came to Knaresborough. They proceeded, a usual pair of tourists, man and boy, along the river walk beside the Nidd, under the overhanging cliff, to which the spring-water, full, Lucas explained, of fine particles of nitrous earth, dropped through a pipe over what was now a stone fall of solidified streamlets, droplets, ferns, roots of trees and plants, bulging and sagging, to the shallow stone basin of the Well. In the early nineteenth century the conduct of the guardians of the Well had aroused serious aesthetic objections in lovers of the picturesque. Lucas had borrowed an old guide book from Calverley library. “The top of the cliff,” he read to Marcus, “with all its vegetation, has been naturally encrusted with carbonate of lime, which drops over in a continuous stony mantle. Beneath this the guardians of the spring have suspended dead birds and animals, branches of trees, old hats, stockings and shoes and various matters equally absurd which become ‘petrified’ under the dropping and are carried off as ‘objects de vertu’ by the curious, chiefly visitors from Harrogate.”

When Marcus and Lucas came there, there were indeed, suspended on strings, partially encrusted gloves and socks, a bowler hat, green around the still unswallowed band, over which the stony crust was slowly advancing. Lucas stood and watched Marcus eagerly as Marcus gravely considered the heterogeneous petrifying objects under the heavy, slow
drops. There was a whole birdsnest, layered straw, smoothed feathers, clutch of tiny eggs, slowly becoming stony and durable. Marcus stared at this for a long time. There was also a book, its pages sealed by congealing lime, its title obscured already forever. There was something sinister about this uniform, permanent transmutation. If one broke off a stone bough, a stone fern frond, would there now be, inside, even a dark thread of what had once been alive?

“I don’t like it. I wonder why people put things in.”

“Curiosity about change of substance. Curiosity about curios. It’s like
real
sculpture, if you see what I mean.”

Marcus stared at the pathetic dangling stone socks, every weighted crease fixed.

“It’s all dead. I can’t see why it’s so fascinating.” But he was fascinated.

“You have to put your hand in. And wish. And let the water dry naturally on your hand.”

“Why?”

“It’s the customary rite. An invocation perhaps. A contact. We should put our hands in.”

Marcus had no wish to do so.

“Touch, smell, taste, hear, see,” said Lucas. “Rocks and stones and trees. This is where the lithosphere touches the biosphere. A point of entry and exit as I see it. We need to know.”

He took off his jacket and rather solemnly and portentously rolled up his sleeve. Marcus discarded his blazer, opened his cuff, and rolled up his own sleeve. Side by side they extended their arms and hands into the frigid fall and pool. It bit. It burned cold.

“Concentrate,” said Lucas, without specifying on what. Marcus fixed his eye on the limed nest. Addled liquid sealed in a stony shell. He looked away and was struck by a cluster of contorted stone bootlaces. For what might people require household objects stiffened into stone? He pulled out his dripping arm and hand which tingled and crimsoned. Beside it Lucas’s forearm, rosy and freckled, trembled slightly.