The Virgin in the Garden (11 page)

“When I did try to tell, I fainted. And after that I couldn’t, ever again, I couldn’t …”

“Of course. That is usual, with such gifts. Tell me now. It can do no harm now.”

“You see – it was important to see only obliquely – out of the edge of the eye – in the head – the
kind
of thing it was, the area it was in, but never to look directly, to look away on purpose, and wait for it to rise to form. When you’d waited, and it was
there
in its idea, you could draw the figure or even say words to go with it. But it mustn’t be fixed, or held down, or it … It was important to
wait
and they, the people asking, were pressing on me, how could I be patient, how could I, so I tried to fix, to fix, to fix … and it was no good.”

“I understand. In part. What were the forms like?”

“Forms
,” said Marcus, incomprehensibly, as though this was self-evident. “They changed shape. They weren’t exactly solid or not. Plane geometry, and surfaces floating sort of, and things not exactly like trees or flowers. Or you might walk in a field without thickness amongst series after series of planes – all dimensions – shifting. Not real landscape. In the head. But not like other things in the head, like if I try and remember Ramsgate or Robin Hood’s Bay.
Bits
were landscape—any old field or wood – bits not at all … Oh, I can’t.”

Simmonds frowned, puzzled, put out authoritative hands to clasp Marcus’s wrists and withdrew them abruptly. He murmured, “Fascinating. Fascinating.”

Marcus remembered now those lost and shining fields for which he had not grieved because he had been too afraid to imagine them sufficiently to think of loss. He remembered, not with words, but as a floating shadow, how sensuously delightful the place had been, how clear and clean, how bright, airy and open.

“I
think
,” Lucas Simmonds was saying, “I think my stab in the dark was right. You do have direct access to the thought forms, the patterns, that inform and control us. What you need, and I can provide, indeed, by a providential coincidence have come here to offer to provide, is the spiritual discipline to make all that safe and evolving. In late years we’ve too much concentrated attention on
soma
at the expense of
psyche
. Bodily control, physical control, of ourselves, our world, our universe, we are gaining in large measure. Consider the microscope, telescope, radio-telescope, cyclotron, bevotron. Pitch and frequency, colour and light. Thinking machines a man cannot emulate though he can design. And we, where are we? We have lost what primitive techniques we once had for communicating with the consciousness that Informs us. You are peculiarly gifted. You could – with support, with intelligent experimental planning – develop new techniques. How about it?”

Marcus intensely disliked loud sounds and bright lights. He had not been told, then, that asthmatics can pick up higher frequencies of sound than the average man, but he was to be told, and to believe it. Now for a moment he felt his head suspended on wires, with fine, fine metal rods piercing it painfully through its orifices, crossing and grinding with a cruel music in the skull, extending to infinity. He shook his head to shake away the vision and the long rods moved with it, pressing sharp on the yielding matter and cavities of his mind.

He didn’t want Simmonds. Simmonds would not restore the fair fields.

“Of course you appreciate that it’s hard not to utter gobbledegook, astral bodies, auras and ectoplasms – I don’t mean all that
stuff –
I mean your ways of taking in the universe, Potter.”

“Sir, I can’t. I want leaving alone.”

“But you told me, and you haven’t blacked out, now.”

“No.”

“You feel better.”

“No. No. No.”

“I think you’ll find it will make sense. I think coincidence will bring us together again. In the meantime, I’ve said my say. I’ll pay your bill, don’t move.” Simmonds stood up. He smiled cheerily. “There are no real accidents, in God’s universe, remember.”

“I don’t believe in God. All this stuff doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Simmonds’s pink face creased in pain and then snapped out again, like expanded elastic, into a smiling blandness.

“When something happens that does make sense of what I’ve said – as I’ve no doubt, no doubt, it will – come to me. That’s all I ask. Remember I’m there. The rest will be taken care of.”

In March, black and gusty, Matthew Crowe set about to inform and enliven the local community. The Festival was to be his
magnum opus
. He meant to call into being music and flowers, midnight shout and revelry, dancing tipsy and solemn, a realisation of a Royal Progress, with incidental mock-chivalric tourney and goose fair, besides the staging of Alexander’s
Astraea
. He moved with unbelievable vigour up and down across North Yorkshire, from cathedral close to fishing village, from officers’ messes to workingmen’s clubs in mining villages, prodigal with ideas, promises and cash. Alexander, when he could be spared, went with him, fascinated by what amounted to a genius for organisation. He himself stood on platforms looking handsome and reserved whilst Crowe spun out his eloquence over local bodies large and small, Mothers’ Unions, Townswomen’s Guilds, Sewing Circles and Garden Groups. There was something in his manner as absolute as that of Lord Beaverbrook requiring women at war to hurl aluminium, zinc baths and iron railings onto scrap mountains for national munitions, or Savonarola calling the ladies of Florence to repent, save their souls, and cast their false hair and jewels into his bonfire. Crowe worked up his Yorkshire bodies to perform prodigious labours, requiring those same grim energies which, already figments of nostalgia, they had expended on knitting abb wool into comforters or digging for victory. He too required clothes and jewels – any bits of glittering paste or bright or glossy cloth, to be pooled, remade, refurbished to furnish queens and fine ladies. He required skills – real embroidery on kirtles and farthingales which would, he declared, be works of art and museum pieces in their own time. He wanted the country combed for real old English receipts: frumenty, verjuice, boar’s heads, salmagundy. He wanted everyone, this spring, to make the land remember its old sweetness and loveliness, to make the too-much loved earth more lovely with the real old flowers, the sweet-smelling ones, lavender, wallflowers, ladslove, clove gilliflower and matted pink.

He wooed the men too, pursuing the territorial army, the Young Farmers, builders, bakers, Boy Scouts, asking for horses, candy stalls, wagons, palanquins, pavilions. He encouraged the rejuvenation of church monuments, the regilding of rows of dead Elizabethan infants in the Minster, the purchase of bulletproof glass cases to display ancient hidden chalices. He passed through little coastal towns where men had been driven from cottages and villas by the tempests, raging winds and pouring tides of that terrible January and February. He prodded sympathetically at slimy carpets and rotted wallpaper and gave out cash for their renovation. The colours of the Festival of Britain sprouted incongruously, then, amongst the old slate, grey and white: cottage walls, garage doors, imitation American ranch fences were palely bright in sky blue, acid primrose, occasional harsh heliotrope. Later in the year, Crowe told Alexander, he would see to it that mock Tudor houses in suburbs of Calverley and Blesford would be decked with mock Tudor scented hedges and bunting with mock Tudor roses and odds and sods on.

“Colour and light and movement and sounds and sweet airs, why the hell not,” he said to Alexander. “The land’s sick for it and I mean to go out in a burst of fireworks and a froth of pleasure, leaving behind me one or two enduring monuments, small things and not entirely my own, but touched with my touch, a University, my dear, and your lovely play and a brightened up garden or market square here and there. Then I shall break my rod, if not drown my books, and rest from my labours in my little turret and survey the brand-new students in their little black gowns wandering between my yew hedges in an ornamental manner. I’m afraid there’s been some controversy about the gowns – démodé for a
new
place, a democratic place – but I believe grace, and a little humouring of my last whims, will prevail.”

He said also, “What it wanted was a Master Plan. To involve a lot of time and a lot of space and a lot of people. I appeal equally to high ideals and base passions. Real culture – sewing as well as glue, barley sugar as well as candy floss, old words, new words, going gracefully together. Also vulgar competition, dear boy. The Best Elizabethan Feast, the Best Old Elizabethan Garden, the best New Elizabethan Garden, the best Village Pageant. And we hold deliberately exhaustive and long-drawn-out auditions for all the musical events and dancing displays and most of all for your play. Like the worst film tycoons we will comb the country for undiscovered talent, peer down the gymslip of every schoolgirl, get the little boys saying they’ll put girdles round the earth and the big ones doing Caliban … We’ll draw everyone in …”

He sat there, small, cherubic, red and shining, his silvery hair floating
delicately above his pointed ears, his plump arms circling and circling, miming the drawing-in of everyone. He poured more scotch for Alexander, who had, these days, drunk perpetually a little too much scotch for comfort, and proposed a toast.

“The Golden Age, Alexander. Redeunt Saturnia Regna. It is all boiling and bubbling. I hope and trust and believe.”

Local Festival Committees were set up in towns and villages. Alexander put a great deal of despised charm into persuading Bill Potter to chair the Blesford one, which also included Felicity Wells from the Grammar School and the Vicar, Mr Ellenby. Bill’s contempt for these two persons, combined with his wrathful fear that Crowe was taking over his austere cultural groups with promises of gilded cakes and ale, pulled him both ways. Finally he agreed to join, with a somewhat Trotskyite intention of subverting Crowe’s frivolous values, with Crowe’s money, from within Crowe’s structure. He would see that information was purveyed about the Tudor police state and judicial barbarities, about starving and plague-ridden armies: he would have a torture and execution exhibition in Blesford Ride that would be popular and a highly serious lecture by a political historian that would not, but would be well attended, on the swell of Crowe’s tide of interest and the boys’ morbid curiosity.

The Festival Committees visited schools and colleges, eliciting exact and solid support. It was in this way that Alexander found himself filing on to the platform of Blesford Girls’ Grammar School behind the Vicar, in an incongruous line that included a grinning Crowe, a very gracious Headmistress, and the distressed Miss Wells, only too aware that Bill was next to her and alert for any indication of pusillanimous morals. Felicity Wells was scheduled to speak. She had trouble with her chair leg and a potted hydrangea. She made the error of prefacing her description of the new Renaissance with a long and complex analysis of the old one, as it had affected Calverley in particular. She was led by some demon to digress at peculiar length on the damage wrought by the New Model Army, who, quartered in the nave of Calverley Minster, had burned up a unique roodscreen to keep warm. She was a diminutive woman with thinning pewter-coloured hair, pulled into a wispy bun round one of those doughnuts of meshed horsehair held in by large black pins like miniature croquet hoops. Under this hair her naturally olive skin looked like polished old wood, and her eyes were surprised and black over a large nose and mouth. She had tiny hands, which she frequently raised, in a gesture of amazed enthusiasm, palms out, beside her ears. This gesture made her look a little like an intricate Victorian mechanical doll or monkey.

She was aware that Bill was flexing his muscles beside her, the facial ones into a joyful sneer, the bodily ones, quite possibly, as a preface to rising to make an unscheduled speech. Both his daughters, who were present, were stiff with fear that he would do this. Stephanie, amongst a decorous row of minor members of staff, and by an accident of fate exactly behind Alexander, her knees cramped almost against his buttocks, knew that Miss Wells was going on too long, and felt protective. Miss Wells was, Stephanie believed, without malice, and never displayed anger or impatience. In Stephanie’s view, this entitled her to reciprocal tolerance. Miss Wells was now bravely compounding her tactlessness by explaining what a good thing it was that Cromwell’s project for a new University at Calverley had never come to anything since she herself, like T. S. Eliot, Royalist, Anglican and Conservative, would much rather see it come to be in this new atmosphere of revival of ancient truths and forms, under the auspices of … Bill made a loud snorting noise. Crowe smiled and smiled, out of tact, amusement at Bill, pleasure in power. Stephanie looked at Alexander, and Alexander looked uneasily out into the Hall.

Facing them, cross-legged on the floor, were several rows of little girls, intermediate girls, larger girls. Over the heads of these from under the balustrade of the gallery, the Lower and Upper VI examined the platform party, restlessly crossing and uncrossing rows of varied legs in lisle stockings, folding arms awkwardly or suggestively over tiny pointed breasts and generous ripe breasts whose globes distended the box-pleats of their gym tunics. Alexander found them, massed so, appalling. When he had come into the hall he had heard the shushing and rustle that fell like a curtain on the shrill piping and twittering of all these female creatures. These noises alarmed him, whereas the thump and guffawing undertow of boys was reassuring. He crossed and recrossed his own legs, aware of snaky lines of small female eyes on his exposed ankles and trousered knees. When he caught sight of Frederica, bolt upright in the shadow of a pillar that supported the balcony, he felt himself blushing with weakness, Artegall in the house of Radegund, Hercules stared out by Omphale.

Stephanie, sitting behind him, her hands relaxed in her decorous lap, trying to suppress the useless concern for the foolhardy Felicity, to avoid the eddies of feeling emanating from the whirlpools of violent emotion in the places where her father and sister were sitting, thought of Alexander, and tried to see the Hall through his eyes. Much like other school halls: windows too high to see through, and dusty, with long loops of cord and ratchets, dangerously botched-looking gallery, boards with brief gilded lists of Merit, Oxbridge scholarships, her own
name last and freshest. A plaster copy of the Venus de Milo, halfway along the Hall.