The Virgin in the Garden (54 page)

“It wouldn’t matter,” said Marcus, embarking on a protestation, or assurance he couldn’t finish. He had not followed the narrative of Lucas’s speech; he was struggling with his own fears, shadowily bodied forth in Lucas’s half-formed memories of actuality; but more powerfully, he felt moved by gentleness. Lucas had fed and lectured and admired him: something was owed in return. He wanted to offer consolation, and had not the wisdom to know how or why to console. So, like so many of us, he offered himself instead.

“Sir, Lucas, I care. I do care. There is me. Can’t I do anything?”

Lucas turned on him a face red with sun and shame.

“You could touch me. Just touch. Contact.”

Slow Marcus again held out his hand. Lucas took it in his own, which seemed puffed and clumsy, and after a moment laid both their hands on his own lap. They sat, silently, not looking at each other, staring out through the windscreen. Lucas moved their two hands closely into his crotch. Marcus jerked involuntarily and Lucas gripped tighter.

“
Never
say,” he said, pleading, pedantic, breathing with difficulty, “
never
say, it was all only sex. But if only you could … no more than touch, I assure you.”

He fumbled desperately with his strained fastenings and suddenly, hot, straight and silky, the penis sprang into view. Marcus pulled back: Lucas gripped, and gripped.

“I know I shouldn’t,” said Lucas. “But if only you could, if you
could bring yourself – just to touch – I should be connected …”

Marcus looked sideways, his way, and out of pity, embarrassment, honour, complicity, put out his thin, pale hand and laid it limply on the burning thing, neither clutching nor caressing. “Ah,” said Lucas, “ah,” and the hard root flowered extravagantly and wetly and wilted slowly in the same moment, leaving Marcus’s hand full. “Ah,” said Lucas again, shuddering in the driving seat. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. It was a failure of the will.”

They could not look at each other.

“It doesn’t matter,” Marcus said in an undertone. “It doesn’t matter, Lucas.”

But it did matter. For a moment he himself had stirred in sympathy, and then Lucas had been convulsed and he was where he had always been, alone, out of touch, separate. He wiped his fingers on his handkerchief, his own trousers, anything.

“It does matter,” Lucas said. “It’s a disaster. It’s the beginning of the end.” He said this in a quiet, dogmatic way, buttoning himself as he said it, and waited for an answer. Marcus could think of none. Lucas then inserted the key, started the car with a jerk, without looking at his passenger, reversed off the grass and set off down the road.

What followed, the drive over the moors, was a nightmare. Marcus, before he stopped thinking at all, thought it should not have been possible to drive so fast. Air and heather and dry stone walls whipped past: corners screamed and sickened: parallax wavered, spun in like a cocoon, centred between his eyes, which he closed. He tried to speak and his mouth was dry: they leaped hills and floated or plummeted into air pockets: cross-roads went past with the slamming sound of gates or trees unregarded and unrespected. Marcus got down on his knees after a time and buried his face in his seat, stealing only one glance up at the set, stony figure of his friend, his rosy face staring impassively under its sunny curls over the wheel into empty space. Do you want to kill us, Marcus wanted to say, and could not speak, nor repeat, do you want to be nothing, either. Marcus crouched, stared, lost consciousness, gained it to see the sky whirling and closed his eyes again.

The night of the dress rehearsal came. And this is our last chance, said Lodge, haranguing principals and extras from the Royal footstool on the
terrace gravel, whilst in the trees one green bottle enquired, musical and most melancholy, who, who? This is our last chance to put it all together, to get the magic right, and we have so nearly made it. He waved his arms, intoning, uncharacteristically, with the musical slither and bell of the true actor, charming, cajoling, minatory, and they all, in wigs and furred gowns, in hoops and bulging trunk-hose, sighed and laughed and gathered up their skirts and their courage.

Frederica sat on a rug next to Edmund Wilkie, under an arc light hung in a tree. Wilkie, in black velvet rayed with seed pearls, the living image of the cloaked Portrait Gallery Ralegh, was doing tiny fine sums on graph paper with a pencil. He had several sheets of such paper, covered with diagrams of test-tubes, tall and fat bottles, demi-johns; also with odd traced diagrams of cosmic serpents traversing the heavenly spheres, Apollo with a pot of flowers, the Graces. Over the last weeks he had expended considerable ingenuity on making the Bottle Chorus, scientifically, into a fine art. He measured columns of air over columns of water, mapped velocities and frequencies of sounds and airs as they echoed round cavernous glass globes or whistled in slender glass tubes. He had assembled a consort of more or less reliable boys from the fauns of the anti-masque, whom he rehearsed, in spare moments, in the great hall. Now these clutched to their doublets mathematically labelled bottles, diamantine, amber, emerald: wine, beer, pop. They could, when Wilkie gave the sign, render
Giles Farnaby his Toye
,
When the Saints Come Marching In
, Dowland and Campion’s
Paradise
, the
Foggy
,
Foggy Dew
, with embellishments and intensified din devised by Wilkie himself. That man of many parts was now writing, he said, the true music of the spheres, according to a scheme to be found in the
Practica Musica
(1496) of Gafurius, who had drawn a series of correspondences between Doric, Lydian, Phrygian and Mixolydian modes, the planets in the heavens, and the muses. Wilkie told Marina Yeo that he would create a true Apollonian order from a Dionysiac cacophony – and all so that he could stand on the terrace and cry out, “The music of the spheres, list, my Marina!”

“How can that be,” asked Frederica sceptical, “when nobody
knows
you’ve been fixing all these planetary octaves and transcendental notes?”

“You know. Marina knows. The bottle boys know, I’ve told them. They twitter and giggle, but they know. Anyway, people will intuit an order if an order is there, even if they can’t name it or the principles it’s derived from.”

It was difficult to know how seriously he took himself. Certainly he did like order, a plurality of perceptual orders, he was a fixer and orchestrator.

“They won’t,” said Frederica. “They won’t intuit anything, and I
won’t, either, however much you inform me, because I’m tone-deaf.”

This information appeared to give Wilkie great pleasure. “You are? How splendid. You bear out a theory I have about flatness of speaking-tone in the tone-deaf. That explains why you’re so good at sounding stony.” He mimicked a line or two of her rendering of Alexander’s Tower speech. He was very accurate. “Flat,” he said. “Flat in semi-tones, and shifting key inconsequentially. Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh. Like a peacock. We can’t all sing the music of the spheres. Now
you
, my dear Marina, something tells me
you
have nearly perfect pitch.”

“I had once,” said Marina Yeo, above them, propping skirts vast as empire on two gilt ballroom chairs. “It’s not been quite so good lately.”

“It decays with age,” said Wilkie with gusto. “But slowly, if surely, you’ll be glad to hear. Shall I write you a song, Marina, to sing to my spherical bottle music, will you sing with my choir invisible? You can listen, Frederica, darling, but you won’t hear. ‘Such sober certainty of waking bliss.’ As Huxley once said, so accurate a description of good music. What
do
you do without it?”

“I meditate,” said Frederica with asperity, “and frequently wish it would stop.”

Wilkie gave her a plump puckish grin, since Lodge had reached the end of his peroration, pointed his flimsy poniard at the bottle players who puffed out their cheeks like Botticelli’s Zephyr and embarked on
Rule Britannia
.

“What we need is
drums
. You’d hear those, girl, the deaf hear those. Hissings and heartbeats both. Now, what
sort
of drums, for the music of the spheres? Did you know, sweet ladies, that the iambic pentameter embodies, as it were, the number of heartbeats between a breath taken in and the same breath sighed out? Shakespeare’s verse is human time. But for spherical music you need a drum-beat set on some inhuman measure, a non-anthropomorphic tic-tac, a water-clock, an astronomical pulsing …”

“Shut up, Wilkie,” said Lodge. “I want to begin. Clear-off, non-beginners, or sit still and shut up and be audience. Wilkie,
do
shut up, and come and do your Prologue. Quiet please. Lights, please.”

And in every tree, like shining golden fruits, lights sprang warm and round and clear on the green. It was late afternoon, grey and dark blue, not darkness. Total dark was due to fall in the final Act, where Lodge, inspired by the York Mystery Plays of 1951, when the real sun had set, bloody and huge, behind the impersonated, crucified Christ and the ruined Abbey with board additions, had used nightfall to emphasize the
dying rays of Gloriana. Wilkie twitched his mantle, gave a skip on to the terrace, and sauntered over to Thomas Poole/Spenser, to begin his Prologue.

Jenny, late because of settling fretful Thomas, ran up and down the old kitchens, which housed the women’s dressing-rooms, begging someone to hook her at the back. In a stone scullery she found Alexander. Who said he would hook her himself. They were both reminded of their first embrace in the Music Hole under the school stage. Alexander pushed his hands inside the pliant whalebone, round the soft breasts. Oh, the rows of little hooks. “Did Crowe suggest …?” She laughed. “He suggested. He’s an old Pandar, a Lord of Misrule. I said yes, of course, I said yes.”

Crowe had offered food, drink and beds to whoever wanted them that night and to Jenny expressly. Geoffrey had said he did not at all see why she couldn’t get back to Blesford. He would fetch her. He must mind Thomas, she had said. She did not report this altercation to Alexander.

“And if I stay, if I stay tonight, will you, will we …?”

“Of course.”

“And it will be all right?”

“Of course.”

His voice sounded saccharine in his ears. He was by no means as sure as he sounded. He remembered Stephanie Potter’s little gold pins and cloud of veiling. He wondered why anyone should wish to paddle with fingertips in the hollows of another body. He wanted a clean white empty room and silence. He wanted no liquor and no dancing.

“Jenny, I must go, I’m nervous about this thing, I must bugger off. I’ll see you after.”

“Of course,” she said, with her new deliberate assurance. “After. Kiss me.”

He touched her red mouth, brushed her stiff, light ruff. She looked as he had designed, tiny and birdlike in floral skirts and gauzy sleeves. What he felt could not have been nostalgia for the drawing-board, nor yet for the dummy on which the dress had been built in summer afternoons in the sewing rooms of Blesford Girls Grammar.

There was now a semi-circle of seats suspended on scaffolding on Crowe’s great lawn, somewhat reminiscent of the stands that had lined the late Coronation route. Alexander did not join Lodge, Crowe and the rest. He sat on one end, high up in tree shadows, listening to Spenser and Ralegh bandying words, his own, their own, to unseen melodies in the bushes.

He remembered his first ideas. A renaissance of language, florid and
rich and muscular. The untouchable complete man-woman under whalebone. A laboured metaphor, grasped too early in the writing, blood out of stone. Pure invisible colours, red and white, green and gold.

And then all the hard work towards complexity and solid incarnation, all the incorporated stuff of fact. Diplomacy, cloaks and daggers, mead, seeds, pearls, neo-Platonic mythography, muckenders, bum-rolls, verjuice and penny royal,
Polyolbion
, the
Faerie Queene
, butchery in Holland and running wet Irish bogs. Giddiness of words and things. If he wrote: “cup” – the word contained all he knew of sack, and household stuffe, Circe,
Comus
, gifts presented on royal progresses. Roses and slaughter, the red and white rose quartered in her face, funest butchery as in the case of Dr Lopez whose grimly detailed death had been so chastely curtailed and adumbrated by Benjamin Lodge.

He had known, because of his earlier play, of the limiting sense of solidity that came with the incarnation of the idea. This one was worse, as he had seen it so sharp as he wrote, in some stereopticon or inner camera obscura, bright with colour and feature. Often one gained from what actors, directors, brought to the airy spaces left in the text for them, a new vision, something undesigned and unexpected. So far, with this, this had not happened. His creatures had acquired local habitations and names: Max Baron, Marina Yeo, Thomas Poole, Edmund Wilkie, Jenny and most confusing, Frederica Potter. It was hard not to resent as brute embodiments what these actors saw as their original interpretations. Marina Yeo was given to speaking of her “creation” of a role. Maybe he had left them too little to create or render. What he had made was so dense: thick, like all good fifties verse drama, with witty imagery, which meant jostling suns and moons and swans and gossamer and flowers and stones, and again thick with the specificity of the visual imagination of a playwright who designed his own costumes, chestnut and twilight velvets, packed radiant pleats and gilded stitchery of which actuality could only be a shadowy representation.

And Lodge had worked steadily away from this fleshed complexity to the bare bones of primitive obsession: sex, dancing, death; death, dancing, sex. Lodge rewrote lines – many lines – at the behest of players who found them awkward or undignified to say. Marina Yeo was a persistent offender. Alexander knew they could be spoken, had heard them clear and flowing in the theatre of his head.

And deeper than his sense of some dilapidation of his imagined gorgeous palace ran the sense that he had meant to state his passion for the past, to provide pipes, timbrels, wild ecstasy, Tempe, and the Vale of Arcady. What they had made was not immortals stalking under Hesperidean boughs but sex in sundresses, sandwiches in gilded
papier-mâché helmets, the extravagances of Edmund Wilkie’s Bottle Chorus.