The Virgin in the Garden (15 page)

It hadn’t been because he or she had wanted a son – though the elaborately feminine names of their daughters, both versions of names for a son, had been his choice. It had been because the daughters they had were for once miraculously quiet, and because of the WEA beer, and because he was talking to her, which he was usually too tired, or too busy, or too dogged by bills and babies, to do. Or too angry.

She had married him because he was the man she most admired. Just, passionate, prodigious with effort, discriminating. She had been most afraid of living like her mother, too many children, too little money, mastered by a house and husband which were peremptory moral imperatives and steady physical wreckers. Winifred had been her mother’s confidante about every detail of blood, polish and indignation: she was the eldest. She knew about childbirth and male “selfishness” after it, about black lead, white stone on doorsteps, laundry blue, starch and scrubbing. Her mother had made efforts, ambivalently, to let her out: had not stood in the way of the Grammar School education, which had led to Winifred learning that one could, indeed should, marry for passion and conversation, not for bleeding or black lead. Bill had lent her
Lady Chatterley
and preached about freedom: he was in flight from a more harshly defined version of the house, man, woman, she herself meant to step beyond.

By 1938 she had learned that it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors. The unknown is hard to get at, because it is unknown. Paradoxically,
Winifred had decided, two people are closer before they have lived together or even slept together or talked for very long – what they do say is more their own saying, makes less concessions to habit, or quirks of temperament, or previous failures to get through. She had talked to Bill in those days, making him in her own image, it was true, but she had talked more truthfully, and if she had, it was possible that this was also his case. He was now constantly enraged by cooking, cleaning, crying daughters. But she knew he was not like this at work: he was patient, persistent, forbearing. And she discovered in herself a fatal and steady need for tasks and reprobation. Maybe rage and patience were all that could be left.

In the beginning she had been violent in bed. Not demanding, no, nor insistent, but wild and tough, ready to bite and lick and smell and touch and taste and battle. Conventions closed on her imperceptibly, one by one. She could not be bothered to take off her nightdress. Or shift from the horizontal to the vertical. Or kiss his mouth. And his feet irritated her. She opened her eyes once in the dark and realised that someone, not exactly herself, had been sneering inside her at Bill’s insensitivity to her pain and fatigue when he was doing what would, after all, have delighted her a year before. She supposed this might be usual, but had no friends whom she could ask. And she would never talk to her daughters, she vowed, as her mother had talked to her, never. She would be quiet. Quiet spread over more and more areas where hope had been.

So that evening in 1938, when Bill had actually, because of the beer, spoken to her about Shakespeare, and when Frederica had not, for once, woken screaming, she was wearily grateful, no more, for speech, and stayed on her back, murmuring about Hermione. And Bill hoisted himself up and moved purposefully up and down, and she felt as she now habitually felt at best, mild claustrophobia and a mild peripheral possibility of pleasure, not worth straining for. When Bill sighed, and shook himself, and rolled back to his side of the bed, she felt suddenly dark and cavernous inside, chill and a little dizzy, and had listened as though changes were happening, like electric currents, which a perception fine enough might note. She believed steadily afterwards that she had indeed noticed the moment of conception. The tepid, largely accidental beginning of Marcus, her son.

The child and the war swelled inevitably together. Bill, predicting Armageddon, cultural annihilation, and evil in jack-boots stalking English lanes, chose to blame some unspecified inadvertence of Winifred’s for the untimely birth. Younger masters left the school to volunteer. Bill, discommoded, fumed and spent more and more time
out of the home. Winifred, heavy and frightened, pushed the perambulator around Blesford, Frederica gingery, furious, imperious under its hood, Stephanie dangling plump legs under its handle, staring too solemnly from under a sunbonnet. Fear is infectious. Stephanie was learning fear. Winifred was not enough of an actress, and had also not enough physical strength, to communicate assurance or reassurance. She stared over her daughters’ heads, nerving herself for everything, pushing the pram, facing Bill, the birth of the baby, bombs, gas, occupation. She had fantasies of small bodies spitted on bayonets, of cots, and flesh, crushed in thundering rubble. The baby should not have been conceived, but since it was there must now be protected. If possible. That was all.

He was born, swiftly and entirely painlessly, one bright afternoon in July, so fast that for days she felt unreal, as though there were some ordeal still to come. “It’s a boy,” they said, and she answered politely “That’s what I wanted”, although she had never seriously considered the possibility that the child was not a girl. She raised herself, with her unexpended strength, and saw him, still attached by the cord, pulsing livid and slate-blue. His dark eyes blinked unseeing against the flooding sunlight. He was tiny, delicate, enraged, an exact replica of Bill in a spasm of fury, wavering impotent crimson fists over a creased bald pate streaked with damp gingery strands. Nothing at all of her. What had lived in her, stirred, turned, what she had held and protected, turned out to be Bill’s rage, simply. A boy. She lay back very calmly on the pillows and waited for them to take him away.

Bill flared in and out of the hospital, volatile with unpredictable joy. He made the nurses unwrap the boy and display on the white muslin the comparatively vast genitals, crimson-dark. He named him, without hesitation. He had wanted to be called Marcus himself, as a boy, he said. She lay still and watched him poke his finger into the small, cold clutch of his son. She almost felt she had lost someone.

Three nights later, in the dark, something terrible happened. They brought the baby to be fed, under green-shaded light, a virtually weightless scrap, trailing damp ends of flannelette sheet and stiff hospital nightgown. She shifted the lolling head, the gaunt, disappointed face in the crook of her arm and knew that he was fragile and that she loved him. She knew the need to hold him close, and close to the need, the fear of crushing him. Babies’ flesh is chilly where it is not hot and damp with striving. This baby was uniformly still, and chilly. She sat on her rubber sheet possessed by terrible love, in fear, although he had only just come, of the moment when they would take him away. As she had known when he began, so she knew now that the whole pattern
of her future was changed, he was best, first and worst: she was already making dispositions. He fed, neatly, quietly, collapsed into sleep. Already she assumed that the violence of these new feelings was dangerous to him, or at least burdensome: it must be dissimulated. They came and took him away. She waited all night in rigid apprehension and immobile delight for the moment when they would bring him back. And so something began.

Bill roared in the kitchen “Get out of that bathroom, boy. There are other people with biological needs in this house.” The walls were thin, the piercing voice pierced. Bill had made such classic errors. Every toy bought six months before the boy could deal with it. Every teacher told – with the unfortunate support of the mathematical strangeness – every teacher admonished that the boy was a genius. Most of all Bill had wanted to share Marcus’s early reading. He himself had scratted in the thin dust of evangelical tracts. Marcus should have imaginative worlds which Bill would enter with him. What do you feel, what do you picture in your mind’s eye, what moves you? The slow boy looked into space. And did sums. Which were not his heritage, and, in that innumerate family, not shared, nor marvelled over.

In the face of the blast of Bill’s love she could only keep quiet. Convert energy to inertia. Undo, unmake. Perhaps she did the wrong thing. It was not a very satisfactory thing to do.

She heard a cautious click of the bathroom door. She followed him into his boy’s room, with its bench, engines of war, models, neatly aligned. He was looking out of the window. He had not looked much like his father since those first moments in the air. He looked like her, more than the daughters did. Stolid, mild, large, plain. She wanted to touch him and did not.

“Are you doing anything, Marcus?”

He shook his head.

“I’m going shopping in Blesford. Would you come and carry?”

“O.K. I’ll get my jacket.”

She did not say: when we get back he might be better about the bathroom. Marcus gave no sign of knowing that was involved. They communicated, if they communicated, without speech. Sometimes she wondered if she ought to shout out: Marcus, you are strange, there is something really
wrong
, Marcus, speak to me. But she did not say such things. He relied upon her not to say such things. Or so she believed.

Masters’ Row, backing on to the Far Field, was at the front a row of isolated suburban houses on a country road, at least in 1953, turning between fields with hawthorn hedges or drystone walls. In those days
too, Masters’ Row had its own bus-stop, a tarmac bay with a galvanized shelter and cast-iron sign. By 1970 the whole road had been developed, widened and straightened with orange glass and concrete lamps along its sleek and mottled black length. Uprooted hedgerows and levelled fields were thickly planted with tiny ranch houses, miniature drives, dwarf white plastic fences. The Masters’ Row houses, then, seemed besieged and impoverished. In 1953, it was still possible for the Potters to see themselves as country-dwellers, of a kind. They took regular walks along cart-tracks, away from the school grounds, through meadows, and fields of oats and barley, to a sewage works. On these walks Winifred told the children names of plants: harebell, stitchwort, toadflax, St. John’s wort, eggs and bacon, vetch, trefoil. The girls chanted these names after her. Marcus, who had hay fever, sneezed and shook, his eyelids glossy and swollen round his lashes, his sinuses drilled boxes of pain, his palate raw and puffy.

The sewage works was like a closed fort, iron-railed, windowless concrete boxes, artificial grass mounds. There was a human silence. All the sound was the discreetly humming wires, the scratching of rotor arms on deserted round tubs of gravel. The girls tended to veer away from the place as though it was, or must be, unhealthy. Marcus liked it, to a certain extent. It had no feathery grasses and it had the order of a well-kept cemetery, the mown neatness, the humps, the noiselessness. He felt that they should stop and look at it, since it was their declared goal. But they never did. Recycled water, recycled liquid wastes, Lucas Simmonds had once told a class, were purer than spring water, quite sterile. Marcus thought, at that moment, about the quiet business of their own sewage works.

Trips into Blesford, by bus, like the walks to the sewage works, were for Marcus an order of repeated information and pain. He had gone to school the other way, many more miles, to the prep school attached to the Minster choir school in Calverley. Blesford was shops and the hospital. When they went there, Winifred told him its scanty history, as on the sewage walk she told him botany. It had been a mediaeval market town, of which there were still some relics, beleaguered by identikit square glass and pebble dash concretions. The shell of the old castle still stood on a minimal grassy hump, and was reached by a flight of steps and an iron handrail. There was a marketplace with striped stalls and down by the railway on Wednesdays a cattle market, where for a few hours the stones smelled of straw, dung, urine and panic before it was all hosed away. There were old names: Beastfair, Finkle Street, Slutwell Lane, Grindergate. The bus circled the periphery of these narrow roads, past functional red-brick buildings
with asphalted yards: Blesford Main Post Office, Blesford Hospital, Blesford Bus Station.

Marcus had spent many weeks in the hospital, either with his worst attacks of asthma, or undergoing inconclusive searches for the asthma’s cause. “They” believed he might contain a “focus of infection”, of which the asthma might be a secondary effect. He had been x-rayed, skin-tested, weighed and measured. His tonsils and adenoids had been hopefully removed. He had learned things, mostly about the nature of vision.

He had once heard Alexander and his father talking about the effects of consumption on art: hectic brilliance and speed, Alexander had said. Years later he himself was to speculate about the relationship between oxygen and insight. At the time he was roused enough to remark to himself that asthma was not like that. It was not energising. What it did was stretch time and perception so that everything was slow and sharp and clear.

When he was not ill, the hospital was a neutral retreat. Cavernous, dark red, smelling of carbolic and flowers, nurses passing and repassing, starch, bits of boiled metal.

When he was ill, space and time were both biological and abstract. Every rib was defined and located by pain, every cold breath, laboriously and noisily drawn in, laboriously and noisily expelled, impressed its duration on his consciousness. He had developed the characteristic crouch of the asthmatic, bowed spine, hunched shoulders, hanging rib-cage, the weight of the body on rigid arms and tensed knuckles. An anthropoid cage for pain and struggle. From this crouching stillness he perceived more sharply strictly limited things. Colours, outlines, people, trolleys, vases. A coiling inner design of grating, whistling air moving the stops of an intolerably sensitive organ. Everything, inner and outer, precisely defined in black outline against an encroaching haze.

There was an extreme point where pain refined vision to mathematics. He would see a two-dimensional map, grey-black-white, of linear relations: curtains, furniture-corners, bed, chair, fingers plucking up triangles of blanket. This was related to the inner map of blocked, narrowing, imagined passages for air. Twice, losing consciousness, he had seen the same last thing, just before. Once had been when he struggled with the pad of ether, for the tonsils, and once an attack so severe he had fainted. (He fainted relatively frequently, and hated it.)