The Virgin in the Garden (16 page)

What he saw was turning geometry, spinning graph paper with the squares decreasing in size on some almost definable geometric principle, and simultaneously rotating, so that somewhere in the centre, on the periphery of the field of vision, was the vanishing point, infinity.

So that geometry was close to, and opposed to, the suffering animal.
It intensified with pain, and yet the attention could, with effort, be deflected from pain to geometry. Geometry was immutable, orderly, and connected with extremity. He did not, in his mind, oppose pain and geometry: what was opposed to both was “normal life” where you took things easy as they came, things shiny, glossy, soft, hard, shifty, touchable, not needing mapping or ordering. When the Blesford bus turned round the hospital, he noted the number of upper and lower windows, their geometric proportions, and crossed his fingers. His mother sat beside him, clutching her handbag, with her own memories. They did not speak to each other.

The Butcher’s Shop was not in Beastfair, which contained the new Marks and Spencer, Timothy White’s, Etam and some little wool shops. It was an old and flourishing High Class Butchery with green and white tiled walls, and sawdust and blood on its floor. Its proprietor, W. Allenbury, was florid and vigorous, an active man, as butchers seem to be, responsibly engaged in local politics and ready, indeed pressing, to discuss the state of the nation and the nature of the universe with the housewives over whom, in the days of rationing, he had exercised a benign despotism that had somehow never worn off. He was helped by three young men in long blood-stained white aprons, all exceedingly, sometimes indecently, lively. Marcus associated their liveliness with the Potters’ Sunday joint. There was a time when they regularly sat down to a roast sirloin, preceded by large squares of Yorkshire pudding, crisp, golden, steamy, sprinkled with salt and hot gravy. Bill and Winifred frequently adjured pale Marcus to take some of the good red juices from under the joint to put a little life and colour into him.

Allenbury’s shop window was, in its way, a work of art. It is not possible, with meat, to create the symmetry, the delicate variation of colour and form that a fishmonger can make on marble or ice with a wheel, or an abstract rose, of his proffered goods. But Allenbury’s window had a compensating variety. It combined the natural, the man-made, the anthropomorphic and the abstract in a pleasingly eclectic way. It had its own richness.

From a glittering steel bar on elegantly curved hooks hung the chickens, with plump naked breasts and limbs, and softly feathered stretched necks. The ducks, in line, had their webbed cold feet tucked neatly along their sides, gold beaks, black eyes, neck feathers scarlet on white. Beneath them the display counter was lined and fringed with emerald green artificial grass. On this miniature meadow capered various folklorique figures and mythical creatures. A grinning cardboard pig, poised on one trotter, bore on its forelegs a platter of steaming
sausages. It was covered, possibly for decency’s sake, with a blue and white striped apron, and wore a tall, white, three-dimensional chef’s cap, at a rakish angle. A benign and jovial bull’s head, all curly hairy strength and weighty life, cut off at the nape, was juxtaposed in a kind of triptych of glossed cardboard with various bright cubes of Oxo and beakers full of hot brown energising liquid. A very young cut-out nursery-rhyme black-and-white calf skipped sportively on daisy-spangled grass under a bright sun and clear blue sky. On the top of a mound of little pies wrapped in cellophane, a chicken, calf and piglet disported themselves in circular dance, representing the English concord and harmony of veal, ham and egg.

On the next layer, white marble below the brilliant green, were enamelled dishes of more recondite goods, alternating in colour and texture. A block of waxy suet, a platter of white, involuted, honeycombed and feathery tripe. Vitals: kidneys both stiff and limp, some wrapped still in their caul of fat, the slippery bluish surface of meat shining through slits in the blanket, the cords dangling: iridescent liver; a monumental ox heart, tubes standing out above it, a huge gash in one side, darkening yellow fat drying on the shoulders. Half a pig’s head, boiled, pale and faintly blood-stained, a metal tag clamped to one ear, bleached white bristles round the snout, stiff, salty white eyelashes, a levelled plane at the base.

In front of these, cuts and joints. A Bath chap, sliced and pushed into a regular cone, coated with golden crumbs, glistening in its cellophane wrapper, a neat, impersonal object. Lamb cutlets in neat lines, a repeating pattern, pink flesh, white fat, opalescent bone, parallel lines, identical uneven blocks, achieving a kind of abstract regularity through the repetition. A crown roast, twisted, knotted, circled with curled coronets of snipped white paper on every protruding rib. Rump and flank and shoulder and hand and belly of beef and pork and lamb and veal tidied into long and short, fat and slender rolls, held in networks of knotted strings, punctuated by miniature wooden stakes and skewers.

If all flesh is grass, all flesh at some other extreme is indeed geometry. The consuming human, with his ambivalent teeth, a unique mouthful, herbivore and carnivore, is an artist in the destruction and reconstruction of flesh, with instruments for piercing, prying, tidying, analysis and palatable rearrangement. Man the artist can reconcile under golden skies the jocund pig and the plump and tubular sausage, or he can create, from sweated suet, mangled breast of calf, chopped parsley, bread and beaten eggs an incurving sculptural spiral of delicate pink and white and green and gold.

On each side of the door hung, straining from a hook through the tendon, half a carcase of beef. Marcus walked in with his mother as it were through this creature, which must have been splayed across the doorway that morning, headless neck down, and slowly sliced down the spine with blows of a hatchet. He had seen that done. He saw now the bulging flesh in its stained and clinging muslin coverings, and saw also the cold structure: chain of vertebrae, fan of ribs, taut sheen of inner skin between veiled bone and bone. Beyond this was a row of pale pig corpses and stiffly extended lambs.

The geometrical defence was hard and close to the grain, here. The smaller the cut, the greater the geometrical precision, and with the precision, the possibility of contemplating the thing. If a man might see, or imagine, or think in terms of units like molecules, units like chops might in turn be tolerable, parts of varying and interesting other organisations. Units like half-pig’s-heads were not possible. But the earth and the air were full of matter that may once have been part of a half-pig’s-head. He couldn’t care about everything, nor about nothing. Through his own eyes, half-a-pig’s-head was a meaningful and bearable unit.

From behind the wooden block, scored, indented, scooped by chopper and cleaver and saw, dark Grinner greeted them vigorously. Stephanie and Frederica had named him because his expression varied only between the more and less gleeful. Once he had invited Frederica out for a ride on his motor-bike, leaning across the counter, wiping his hands on a damp and bloody dishcloth. Frederica would have gone, but Bill had forbidden it on the grounds that the motor-bike was certainly and the Grinner probably dangerous. “What can I do for you?” he asked Winifred. His hand was buried inside a distended fowl, from which he drew, in a long stream, with a suck and a crack, all the contents: soft pale guts, hard giblets in glistening fat, red-veined golden-skinned clusters of eggs, his manipulation swelling the creature into a gawky parody of life.

“A pound of lamb’s liver and a shoulder of veal,” said Winifred. The Grinner nodded, swung out a thing like a child’s seaside bucket, from which he popped out a glossy pie of frozen livers from the Antipodes, brittle and dark. He tapped it with his big knife.

“Too ’ard. There’s some just in from t’slaughterouse, Mrs Potter. I know you appreciate fresh offal. ’Alf a tick, I’ll ’ave a look.”

To Marcus’s sickening eye the fresh liver had a hot and bursting look. The Grinner slapped it compact with his left hand and sliced it, razor-thin, with his right. He then boned the veal, working with speed and precision with the three remaining inches of a long carving-knife
sharpened almost to thin air. He shaved delicately, clearly, and the soft flesh fell away from the glistening knob, pearly white, bluish-mauve, rosy, increasingly unreal. Marcus stared. He arranged. He rearranged. He looked from side to side. The meat surged. He thought: people come in and out of here all day quite all right, people
do
.

“There,” said Winifred. “That’ll make us a good meal. Marcus.” Offering him, thinking of the cooking, the transformation into eating. His pleasure perhaps. Then she saw his face. “Marcus!”

“Mummy,” he said. “Oh, Mummy –”

It was not a word he now used.

It was not a word she had ever liked, to be truthful. It reminded her of bad things, the dead preserved in dusty cerecloths, and moreover it had a disagreeable gobby sound. She had never told her children not to use it, nor had ever asked them to call her by her first name. That was not her way. They had all learned it, from other children, other women, used it tentatively, and then unlearned it, substituting Mother when direct address was unavoidable, and nothing, most of the time.

She took his hand and led him out on to the pavement.

“Marcus, tell me. Marcus, there
is
something …”

In their ears, drowning speech, a horn sounded, peremptory, shrill, unnaturally prolonged. They both started; drawn close in to the pavement, its coming or previous presence unremarked, was the gleaming black sportscar of Lucas Simmonds, a brief Triumph on which he could be seen, in the school quadrangles, lavishing extraordinary cares. He rolled down a window and beamed up at them innocent and rosy.

“Mrs Potter. Marcus. Were you by any chance returning to Blesford Ride? Could I offer you a lift – if Marcus doesn’t mind being a little bit bundled in the back of a vehicle
really
only designed for two?”

Marcus took two steps away, shifting. Winifred thought that he looked worse than ever, ill almost, likely to faint as he was given to doing. So she addressed Lucas Simmonds with gratitude, said how timely his appearance was, to which he replied that he always tried to oblige in that way, with a slight embarrassed snicker to cover any oddness in this remark. Lucas Simmonds’s car was loud, and swooped round corners so that Winifred, inside it, had to brace herself and could not feel any emanations, friendly or hostile, from Marcus coiled behind her. Lucas talked, mostly inaudibly, with complete banality, about Blesford traffic. When they got home Marcus said he was carsick and went to bed.

Frederica received a letter.

Frederica wrote several grateful, enthusiastic, intelligent replies. The one she despatched ran:

She hoped, but doubted, that he would notice the nuances.

Alexander lived in the red western turret of the school, approached under a Gothic arch and up a spiral stone staircase. He had an oak door to his room, and inside it a green baize door, in imitation of Oxbridge. He had vaguely Perpendicular windows, facing two ways, south, over the lawns and flowerbeds towards the walled gardens and Far Field, west, towards the Castle Mound, and its bit of surrounding country (which included the sewage farm). Over his door was a fretwork contraption with a sliding shutter, obliterating either the possibility that Alexander M. M. Wedderburn, M.A., B. Litt., was IN or the possibility that he was OUT. The staircase was red stone and smelt of Jeyes fluid.

On the Wednesday he looked gloomily out of his southern window and saw her advancing on him, spiked heels pitting the prohibited grass. He had expected school uniform but she was done out like a ballet dancer in mufti, in severely buttoned black and grey, with her hair scraped into a knob, and her sharp nose up, snuffing the air. She was early, at least in the sense that she was earlier than Lodge and Crowe. He felt beleaguered. It had been made clear to him by the discussion after her auditions that he felt some element of positive dislike towards Frederica Potter. It was not only that she was embarrassing, nor even that he had wondered if she had some kind of crush on him: such things were natural and best dealt with by kindly
ignorance. But Crowe’s pleasure in her performance, his positive insistence on her powers as an actress, coupled with the belligerence of her last appearance, had given Alexander a disproportionate and unreasonable certainty that she was at best a nuisance and at worst dangerous. It was like trying to ignore a boa-constrictor with a crush on you. Well, if not was, would be.

He heard the rapid clatter of her feet. Her knock crashed. He cursed Crowe and opened his inner door.

“It says you are OUT,” she accused him.

“I am always forgetting.”

He tried to take her coat, but she was prowling about his room, scanning book shelves, pacing distances, getting bearings on the two views. He tried, as far as was consonant with his duties, to keep people out of this room. Certainly she had never been there. He asserted himself.

“Sit down. Give me your coat.”

She did as she was told. She had a lot of grey and black woollen skirt and a black bat-winged sweater, with a snarl of stainless steel jewellery on a leather thong, of a kind he particularly disliked, round her neck. She crossed her knees like a Hollywood secretary, and glared at him like an inquisitor. He got behind his desk.

“The others aren’t here yet. We are a bit early.”

“I am early. You live here.”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell me what this is about, please, Alexander?”