The Virgin in the Garden (2 page)

“Well met,” she said. “We three. Were you given gifts on the way in?”

“No,” said Daniel.

She extended her hands. In one was a greenish square of mirror glass, possibly a tiny bathroom tile. In the other was a crushed strawberry cloakroom ticket with 69 on one side and LOVE stamped on the other in mauve ink.

“Pressed on me by a platinum blonde Pocahontas and a cowboy in a green eyeshade. Is it a joke, or an earnest message?”

“Both,” said Alexander. “All our earnest messages are couched as
jokes and we take our jokes deadly seriously. We frame them and cover our gallery walls with them. The great British Sense of Humour, cross-fertilised by American self-consciousness, the Latin absurd and the Oriental finger-snap or educative blow on the ear. Your messages say what they say – and they indicate that what they say is absurd – and they add, moreover, that the absurdity is due to a further profundity. And so
ad infinitum
.”

“My dear,” said Frederica, “that reminds me. Did you know you are now an established O level set text? Do they have to ask your permission?”

“Don’t,” said Alexander, wincing.

She held out the glass. “What shall I do with it?”

“Carry it. Like a type of vanity. Or a just possible alternative – a type of self-knowledge.”

She held it to one eye. “You can’t
see
much in it.”

“Put it in your pocket,” said Daniel, “since you took it from them.”

“That was good manners, English good manners.”

“Good manners means you pocket it gracefully.”

“Yes,” said Frederica.

The long gallery, in which they took their seats for the recital was full of a different kind of people. Alexander amused himself by counting powerful women: there was Dame Sybil Thorndike, graciously accepting a throne-like chair from Dr Roy Strong, at that time Director of the Gallery, and an iconographer, possibly even an idolater, of the Virgin Queen. There was Dame Helen Gardner, head up, face benignly severe, Merton Professor of Renaissance Literature in the University of Oxford. There was Lady Longford, biographer of Queen Victoria, and in the background he thought, he hoped, he discerned the large, contemplatively vague figure of Dr Frances Yates, whose writings on the images of Elizabeth Tudor as Virgo-Astraea had, as it turned out, signally changed the whole shape of his own life. There also was Lady Antonia Fraser, accompanied by a dumpy woman in a raincoat, and wearing a St Laurent skirt, a pair of high soft suede boots and a jerkin and hat which were derived remotely and through endless shifts of urban elegance from the buckskins of cowboys, Indians or trappers. She was considering the Darnley portrait, which hung above the dais, with a firmly courteous if critical gaze. Her sympathies were presumably elsewhere, although she had a look, he thought fancifully, of a modern Belphoebe in those garments, sunny hair and the accoutrements of a huntress. If she was Belphoebe, Frederica, in a kind of brief knitted corselet of dark grey wool with a glitter in it, and boots with a metallic
sheen, was Britomart, her hair itself cut into a kind of bronze helmet, more space-age, maybe, than Renaissance. He turned his attention to the Darnley portrait, his favourite.

There she stood, a clear powerful image, in her airy dress of creamy stiff silk, embroidered with golden fronds, laced with coral tassels, lightly looped with pearls. She stood and stared with the stillness and energy of a young girl. The frozen lassitude of the long white hands exhibited their fineness: they dangled, or gripped, it was hard to tell which, a circular feathery fan whose harsh whirl of darker colours suggested a passion, a fury of movement suppressed in the figure. There were other ambiguities in the portrait, the longer one stared, doublenesses that went beyond the obvious one of woman and ruler. The bright-blanched face was young and arrogant. Or it was chalky, bleak, bony, any age at all, the black eyes under heavy lids knowing and distant.

Her portraits had been treated as icons and as witches’ dolls: men had died for meddling with them in various ways, such as stabbing, burning, piercing with hog’s bristles, embedding in poison.

She herself had been afraid, but had not lost her head.

It was so clear, thought Alexander, that there had been someone real there to be portrayed. But she was like Shakespeare, a figure whose over-abundant energy attracts dubiously mixed emotions, idolatry and iconoclasm, love and fear, and the accompanying need to diminish and reduce their strangeness and ordinariness by reductive myths and pointless “explanations”. Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare: Shakespeare was not Shakespeare: he was Marlowe or Bacon or de Vere or Queen Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth was not Elizabeth the Virgin Queen: she was a whore, of Babylon or London, a clandestine mother, a man, Shakespeare. He had once, with delight, read a book with a laudatory preface by Erle Stanley Gardner that “proved” that Shakespeare’s plays were the secret fruit of the Queen’s marriage to England, the result of a double vow, to celibacy (at 15) and to literature (at 45). Arguments advanced in favour of her authorship of Shakespeare were the likelihood that she might be well enough educated to possess the necessary very large vocabulary (variously estimated at 15,000 or 21,000 words) and the necessary Negative Capability. This Negative Capability was exemplified in her capacity to hold military, marital and economic decisions in endless unresolved suspense. She had, of course, concealed her authorship to ensure fair criticism of her work, and because she feared she might be charged with neglecting her duty as a sovereign.

Alexander smiled secretly. If Shakespeare, like Homer, must be proved to be a woman, people, including many of his own contemporaries, had always found it necessary to prove that Queen Elizabeth was really a
man. As a boy he had been excited by that idea. More, much more, than by the secret hustling away of Leicester’s putative bastard. Thews and sinews buckled under whalebone, male muscles, and other things, buried and hidden in rustling silk. Later still he had come to associate this arcane pleasure with Spenser’s Dame Nature, who “hath both kinds in one”, “nor needeth other none”. A satisfactory state of affairs. To imagine.

The actors entered, recited, were applauded. Dame Flora, plain in plain black, recited the Queen’s own lyric

There were rich descriptions of her coronation and generosity to the commonalty. There was the Tilbury speech. Alexander was quietly moved.

Frederica was not. She found Dame Flora’s rendering too softly feminine: she was perhaps predisposed to be critical. The stiff Petrarchan antitheses were delivered with a liquid Victorian painfulness and the rich, plaintive, sincere voice stumbled over the most ferocious and famous assertion: I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king. This was all woman, Frederica thought crossly, ordinary woman, like peering into the Royal kitchenette at Buckingham Palace to be reassured that robes and furred gowns hide a wife and housewife. Turn this queen out of her kingdom in her petticoats and handy-dandy, which is the actress, which is the queen? And the grand, fierce cadences of the great prose given human pauses and “natural” flow. “I take no such pleasure in it that I should much wish it, nor conceive such horror in death that I should greatly fear it; and yet I say not, but if the stroke were coming perchance flesh and blood would be moved with it and seek to shun it …” Frederica wondered what they had sounded like, the speeches, whether they had been as sonorously perfect as she imagined them, or more broken, halting, nervous, written up maybe and polished for posterity, of which she herself was part.

Actor and actress recited a poem she, Frederica, had not known,
A Song betweene the Queen’s Majestie and Englande
.

Memory tugged. Come over the born, Bessy. Frederica got excited. When the performance was over she tugged in turn at Alexander’s sleeve.

“That poem, that’s
Lear
. Look, where he stands and glares. Wantest thou eyes at trial, madam? Come o’er the bourn, Bessy. That’s Edgar. And the fool: her boat hath a leak. And she dare not speak, why she cannot come over to thee. My footnotes always said that meant syphilis. Surely that was risky, surely that was sacrilege or something?”

“It was about the end of her reign, when they were afraid the kingdom would be divided,
Lear
. Decay of powers. And of merry Englonde.”

“She said, when she talked to the archivist in the Tower, she said, I am Richard II, know ye not that?”

“I know,” said Alexander. “I know.”

“So you do, it was in your play, I probably learned it from there.”

“Probably,” said Alexander, possessed by terrible sadness. He wished, he thought, that he had never written that play. To be here, now, with the Darnley Portrait, was like being in a room with a woman you had once been led to assault, unsuccessfully, with whom no other relation was now possible.

“If I had the chance to do that again now, I’d do it quite differently, quite.”

“You always could do it again.”

“Oh no.” Alexander had a strongly linear sense of time. Chances did not come round again, they went, and stayed, past. He had sometimes thought of more modern, more artificial ways of rendering that matter, the virgin and the garden, now and England, without undue sentiment or heavy irony. But he would not try.

“It was good the first time, though,” Frederica was saying. “In the first place. All the singing and dancing. Funny, the fifties. Everybody thinks of it as a kind of no-time, an unreal time, just now. But we were there, it was rather beautiful, the Play, and the Coronation and all that.”

“A false beginning,” said Alexander.

“All the beginning there was,” she said. “My beginning, anyway. That was what did happen.”

“I must go,” said Daniel. “I must go.”

They turned to him in distress. He hadn’t said anything, had he enjoyed it? What did he think?

Nothing, really, said Daniel. To tell the truth, he was so tired, he’d
sunk into a kind of peaceful coma, he’d heard almost nothing, he was sorry. He must go now. He had to see someone.

Someone was a woman whose son had been damaged in a smash. He had been a beautiful boy, and still was, a walking unreal figure of a beautiful boy, a wax doll inhabited alternately by a screaming daemon and a primitive organism that ate and bulged and slept, amoeba-like. His father had been unable to bear it and had left. The woman had been a good teacher, and now was not, had had friends, and now did not, had had a pleasant body, and now did not. She was afraid, and angry, and exhausted and would not for a moment leave what was and was not her boy. She wanted Daniel to come with her to Court about the damages: the grounds she gave were that someone might laugh at her boy, and she would go berserk. Daniel had said he would come: it was tiring, waiting in court corridors for the case to be heard. He had come today to hear other voices than her repetitive desperate shrilling and the boy’s occasional snort. But he had not managed to listen. He shook his head, and repeated that he must go.

They walked companionably out together, the three of them. Daniel said with an effort, “I preferred your play”, and Alexander said, “No, no”, still brooding on the irreversibility of art and time. They cut through to Piccadilly Circus, and Eros poised over the hunched and lolling and weaving junkies. Daniel suddenly announced that he was going into the Underground, he had to get somewhere. Frederica said, “Stay and have tea” and Daniel began slowly to descend with heavy steps, into the warm and smelly dark. “Let’s have tea, in Fortnum’s, that would be amusing,” said Frederica to Alexander. He meant to say no, but said yes.

In 1952 history took a grip on the world of Alexander Wedderburn’s imagination. When the King died Alexander’s play was in fact largely finished, although later he had perpetual difficulty in establishing, in other people’s minds, the true chronological order of his own choice of themes and the accident of death. His play was frequently misrepresented as a pageant, commissioned for the Festival which celebrated the handing-over of Long Royston Hall to the still insubstantial new North Yorkshire University. The Festival itself was certainly timed to coincide with the spontaneous outbursts of national cultural fervour in parks and gardens all over the country in celebration of the Coronation. If Alexander’s play had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent it. Fortunately, it was to hand.

In the beginning he had been innocently obsessed with the renovation of the language, and of verse drama in particular. This was in the air. There were Eliot, and Fry. As an undergraduate at Oxford Alexander had decided that the problem was Shakespeare, who had been in one sense so much too much that he had made it almost impossible to write good dramatic verse after him. Either the playwright was distractedly obsessed with innovation for its own sake, or he wrote watery imitation Shakespeare, involuntarily. It had come to Alexander that a thing to do might be to take a run, as it were, at Shakespeare, head on. To write a historical drama, like Shakespeare’s own, but in modern verse, and confront the time, the place, and the man. Later, for some private reasons and some aesthetic reasons, he had come to leave Shakespeare out and to concentrate on the Queen. He was aiming at a vigorous realism, and had great trouble with a natural warp in the work itself towards pastiche and parody. The writing took him several years, on and off, years of loving research, formal experiment, despair, visions. He was at the time Second English Master at Blesford Ride School, in the North Riding, and realised, almost involuntarily, tinkering with his verse whilst invigilating a biology examination, that the thing was finished, it had come to an end. He could do no more. He did not know what to do without the hope, the obsession, the glassy cage of singing rhythms and moving forms inside which he had walked about. He put the text of the play in a drawer, left it a month, during which the King died, and then took it to Matthew Crowe.