The Virgin in the Garden (9 page)

He still had the stamp album, empty pages of minute squares, translucent, unopened envelopes of gummed hinges. He had neither thrown it out, nor looked at it again.

He had supposed that he and his mother must be drawn closer to each other: sentimentally, he had seen himself as the little man of the house, as an orphan, offering and requiring comfort In fact his mother soured, rapidly and ungracefully, and spent much of her time complaining over the back gate about the inadequacy of her pension, scratching and scraping, sore bones. Daniel was mentioned as a burden. Mrs Orton was a little woman who had been sharp and fragile; she was now padded with spare fat, on shoulders, ribs, hips, cheeks, in which her nose and chin, her delicate fingers and small eyes were sketched reminiscences of a narrower state. Her only intense pleasure in life had been flirtation, her ripe days the days of teasing and vacillation and power before marriage. Ted had subdued her; she had proliferated placatory objects, little cakes, doilies, antimacassars, polished spoons and brass bells, with which she would fidget, adjusting, polishing, whilst he talked, looking modestly away from him. In her widowhood, many of these objects vanished; although the curtains were still spotless, Daniel came insensibly to think of his home as dingy. Mrs Orton substituted the pleasures of gossip for the pleasures of flirtation: as she had once giggled with other girls over the discomfiture of suitors and rivals, so she now helped to weave an endless web of speculation, criticism, rumour about the doings of the neighbours. She changed shoes for slippers and fed Daniel out of tins.

Daniel was lonely – so lonely that he dared not think of it. At school he became silent and unremarkable. He made efforts with his homework and never had any grasped understanding of what he was doing, of any underlying rational structure of geometry, or grammar. Because he always just passed his tests nobody enquired whether he knew what he
was doing. He did not expect to know. If he had been better, some teacher might have tried to inspire him. If he had been worse he might have attracted some remedial attention. As it was, he went on. He was good enough, just, to go unremarked.

When he was fifteen, imprisoned in coiled, rounding tyres of flesh, he was sent with a motley crew of schoolboy delegates to a Sheffield Civics Week, an inexorable festival of speeches and shows, ranging from rock strata to the steam-sterilising of milk bottles, from the record of Earl Waltheof’s Hall in the Domesday book to the smelting of steel, from the procedural forms of the Corporation to a rhythmic performance by the Isis Players of the Skinners’ Play from the York Mystery Cycle.

Among the speakers, for no ascertainable reason, was a Father from a local Anglican community, St Michael and All Angels. The Community was High, and adhered strictly to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. It had experimented with worker priests, had sent men to work in mills and cohabit in hostels with groups of released prisoners. The Father was billed to speak on Openings for the Ambitious.

He spoke late on a heavy afternoon to a huge, captive, sluggish and aimlessly irritable audience in the cavernous and pillared gloom of the Sheffield City Hall. He rose neatly, as it were from underground, and stood, precisely, gaunt in his pillar of black skirts, flanked by the formally inanimate bronze fascist sphinxes couched on either side of the stage.

What he then said was, and had remained, Daniel’s only experience of communal passion.

The Father was an orator, communicating, without obvious tricks or flourishes, some imperative biological urgency. He stood still for a moment, sounding their shifting listlessness, and then, with dry, slicing speech, set about the destruction of the grey coils of torpor and withdrawal in the Hall. In the beginning, he told them only of what he did, his work in the world; drily he created for them meanness, narrowness, pain, mental confusion, horror. He was decorous, not harrowing, sharp, not pleading. He fixed no one’s eye, imposed no obligation to respond and yet held the attention with a nervously controlled authority. He seemed single, spoke to himself in what was clearly his own voice, making no concessions to the supposed youth or tenderness or stupidity of his audience. And yet he had an extraordinary multiple presence. As he spoke, he inhabited other bodies. From moment to moment his body shifted slightly with what he contemplated while the dry voice informed. A lip drooped in paralysis, set stony with fear and horror, pain held his hands momentarily, vacancy peered uncertainly out of his eye at a shapeless world, though the harsh voice never faltered.

He said that it seemed odd, that when so much was clear, was
admitted, so few answered. That when Christ had said how men should live, so few even considered living so. He said bleakly, his face somehow stripped, that what was required was that people should use their lives. Very few people, he said, knew what they were really capable of. Most were afraid to find out. And afraid that circumstances might nevertheless force them to know. Better – he spread his hand, flickering, straining fingers – better to walk out and face it, purposefully, for a good reason. It was hard for a man to know he had only one life, could do only so much and no more. But such knowledge, like all knowledge, was really power. To know one’s limitations and then to act, and act again, was power, and engendered more power. A man must
use
his life, must think how to use it. The raised, spread hands were somehow taking in, receiving at the fingertips the electric silence of a listening charged with energy. He turned his hands over and down, a Magian gesture, told them that there were two or three in the room, maybe, who would settle for not less than everything, would turn all their power one way, work for God, with God. He did not want half-crowns, he wanted lives. Christ came that they might have life more abundantly. Not happiness, life.

It was not what he said, though he was by now eloquent, enfolding them in a mesmeric incantation of common sense and pure reason. He was alive, certainly, and not only Daniel but all the others stirred and reached out for the knowledge he proffered at the ends of his branching fingers. He looked out over their heads at the pale suspended electric globes on their bronze chains in the dusk, and they, like one creature, followed and were held by his bright eye: if he had walked down, they would have reached and strained for him to lay his hands on them.

Take, he told them, take what is there, what is real, the chance to do one thing well. There is one Way, one Truth, one Life. The rest is a dream.

He quoted:

He said: we can change that. Any one of us, all of us, can change that.

Daniel was no judge of phrases. Many he could not, later, remember, and those he did remember had lost their grace and thrust, seemed, even, banal or flamboyant. But he remembered forever, after the man had drawn in, from a final gesture of threat, incitation or embrace, the voluble arms and circling energy – he remembered the eddying passion
in the hall, the sense that it was possible to speak the unspoken, the loosed power. Boys stood in knots, disputing and urgent. There was a kind of glee abroad that all had been moved, that the strangeness could be shared and perpetuated. Daniel stood too and talked excitedly too, enfranchised from the solitude of his fat and silence. The next day he went to see his local Vicar, and his Headmaster, in order to find out what qualifications he would need to enter the Church. He was even pleased to find that he would need to spend an extra year at school, picking up School Certificate Latin – resistance and difficulty sharpened his sense of power. He had a purpose and his eyes were bright with it.

Theological College taught him a lot about what it was that he had seen on that dim afternoon. He had remained doggedly faithful to the requirement that he had then known was being made of him. But as his training proceeded he defined it more clearly to himself. What was needed, he came to see, was someone practical, someone completely committed to
practical
solutions. He used this word to himself in a sense perhaps uniquely his own. As it became clear to him that he was neither a reflective man nor a scholarly man, that he was interested neither in his own nor anyone else’s motivation, nor in early heresies and liturgical forms, he reiterated to himself that there was need for someone wholly committed to being practical. To be practical was to deal directly with pain, poverty, horror, quite directly. To drag back to a place where they were measured by human standards those forced out of human proportions of body, or understanding, or social relations, by the forces of evil. He needed qualifications, to be employed to do this. The rest was simply impedimenta, to be dealt with.

He had enough practical cunning to conceal from those in authority his lack of interest in prayer-meetings, or communal self-examinations. He believed, but did not bother to say, that the state of his, and his fellow-students’ souls, should properly receive less attention than the work they had to do. He was both innocent and subversive, but he looked fat and respectful, and was put down by those above him as willing, but slow. The Blesford curacy, when it came, was as good a place as any for an apprentice practical man. He was looking, not for a cause, but for a job, and no one therefore noticed that he was a fanatic. If Mr Ellenby was beginning to have an idea of this, Daniel himself still had none – he was working out what his work was, and how best to do it.

He usually spent solitary evenings writing up his work, correlating information about work to be done, people to be seen in the parish, in long columns of square black handwriting in coloured folders. He believed in records, in case he missed, or forgot anything important. He
believed in making a network of help – using the lonely to visit the housebound, the bereaved to visit the very ill. People were moved, amazingly, to be practical by his own solid assumption that it was possible for them, required of them. He just had to be clever about who should be asked to do what. Once or twice he had made errors. Mrs Oakeshott had offered to mind Mrs Haydock’s autistic son and had run from the house in terror and complained to Mr Ellenby about spiritual blackmail. He had been asked to apologise. He had apologised. It occurred to him, now, that Stephanie Potter showed most of the qualities required for dealing with Malcolm Haydock. She had been admirably calm, practical, imperturbable and reasoning over the death of the cat. If she was not Christian, she was conscientious. He could only ask, and he should ask.

He shifted in his hard little bed and addressed himself to
King Lear
. It seemed important to have read it. He was not quite sure why. He had been driven to it by a kind of wrath and a more obscure desire to deal with the Potters, particularly Stephanie. He did not know, as he read, exactly what he was reading for, and so read for the story, to see what happened to Edgar and Cordelia, whom he took to be hero and heroine, admiring, without awe, Shakespeare’s cleverness in creating so hugely real an old man, so maddening, so injured, so inevitably broken and cracked. He did not see, what Bill Potter
anima naturaliter theologica
automatically saw, the black and violent anti-theology of the play, not because he supposed it to be about redemption, but because he knew, at a point where he asked no questions, that the world was like that.
King Lear
was true. He noted down various phrases for sermons. Age is unnecessary. These are unsightly tricks. Return you to my sister. It was plainer to read, much plainer and more forceful than he remembered from School Certificate Shakespeare. He wished he could achieve such plainness. There was a kind of clerical slurring to what he said which he disliked, knowing that it set him wrongly apart, without knowing how to deal with it.

As he came to the end, he realised he had learned something about pain. His body was strained and stiff. He felt stirred and apprehensive – something to do with the reading, more with Stephanie Potter. He remembered how she had cleared away, after the death of the cat, so fastidious and practical with her blood-stained hands, how she had rubbed and wrapped the kittens, had held the weeping child lightly against her own body, to comfort her. A ferociously sentimental old lady had said to him, that week, of her daughter’s new baby, “Oh, I could
squeeze
’im, I could just
squeeze
’im.” He recognized in himself the desire to squeeze Stephanie. Whilst her father preached to him, he had
imagined, with extraordinary clarity, that he might lean forward and take hold of her round, lazy ankle and grip, grip till the bones shifted.

At weekends, Marcus courted vacancy. He had an inviolable place, where no one came, the café of the Blesford Gaumont. Going to the flicks was forbidden at school and discouraged by Bill, except on carefully selected occasions.
Snow White
had been judged to be a creative experience, when he was little, and had loosed him into horror, vast and shapeshifting, like the illusions which beset the newly separated soul, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, swelling and gulfing monsters, deep romantic chasms, white cataracts, roaring slabs of rock, spinning blades of light, clawing crumbling cliffs and creatures, blood red, slimy green, black. Frederica said it was smashing. Marcus was smashed. Even so little, he had tried to unmake the illusion by twisting his head to stare at the clear cone of light wavering and streaming from the high projector. But for the small boy, encompassed and whelmed by racket, reason was no protection. The phantasmagoria rushed into his skull when he closed his eyes at night.

Bill did not let him see
Bambi
or
Dumbo
, which were judged sentimental.

It was not forbidden pleasures that tempted Marcus now. He hurried past the exterior blandishments of chrome-framed stills depicting smooth lovers leaning at impossible angles into each others’ bodies, or a boy hero, delicately dabbed on white skin with scarlet gore, riding a pirate poop through frozen, lacy, ivory peaks of boiling tide, or unnaturally glossy dogs and deer ambling amiably across unnaturally verdant forests into vibrant rose horizons. Marcus never went to see films. What he liked was the centre of this closed citadel, whose outer walls were blank and blind, whose doors were barred on the inside.