The Virgin in the Garden (22 page)

“I told you, I don’t believe in God.”

“And I told you that was of no importance if He believed in you. Did you say anything aloud, when you saw the photisms?”

“I said, oh God.”

“Precisely.”

“Look here, everyone, people, say that, all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Nothing ‘doesn’t mean anything’. All words are said for reasons. I knew what you said.”

“Anybody might –”

“You are subject to too many coincidences. The most important of which is me. I happen to have the techniques to channel the forces that properly scare you. I’ve been working on ways of training consciousness. Meditation if you like, but scientific. You came to me. You could run away now but God would engineer another nasty shock, and you’d be back.”

“No.”

“I say yes. Tell me about the manifestation.”

“It did something to my sense of scale.”

“Did you see anything?”

“A diagram.”

Lucas Simmonds became enthusiastic. He confused Marcus, he produced pencil and paper, he extracted a drawing.

On paper it looked like nothing. But the memory was still faintly dangerous.

“An infinity symbol,” said Lucas. Marcus diffidently mentioned that it had seemed to indicate a burning glass. Also, Lucas said, an infinity symbol, a symbol of infinite energy passing through a point. They should, would use the symbol as a mantra, an object of joint contemplation and meditation.

Marcus looked at it silently. It looked diminished, as Lucas interrogated it. The whole thing was becoming diminished, safe to handle,
wrapped in Lucas Simmonds’s fluent words. Although Simmonds was paradoxically trying to unwrap it. With speech, it all receded, seeming, as it vanished, bright and desirable for the first time.

Simmonds, brightly reasonable, leaned on the teacher’s bench and lectured him.

“The Renaissance was when they got Man’s relationship with Spirit wrong. They revived the old pagan idea that Man is the Measure of all things, which of course is absurd, and that idea did untold damage. Instead of infinity you had to be content with a circle a man could touch at every point.” He drew a crude version of Leonardo’s encircled microcosmic man beside Marcus’s infinity symbol, and smiled peacefully.

“Conjuring with wrong images. Since then we’ve been living in an anthropocentric universe with our eyes and ears and minds shut. What’s called Religion isn’t about inhuman Spirit but about Man and Morals and Progress, which are much less important. And then Science came, which should have given them an inkling, an inkling of the inhuman Powers that Be, but what they did was develop their anthropocentricity into the terrible idea that Man is the Master of all Things. Now that, Potter, is black conjuring, that produced Hiroshima and Satanic mills. Science
could
have been used, of course, to re-establish the ancient knowledge that Man had his place on a Scale of Being as an intermediary between Pure Matter and Pure Spirit. But they talked about the indomitable human spirit and the empty heavens and lost their chances. Including any chance to deal with, or describe, or even recognise experiences of the kind you’ve just had.”

He was sweating again. His facial muscles twitched. Marcus observed these signs with frigid alarm. What attracted him about Lucas was not yet his theories, but his air of assurance, when he had it, his tweedy normality, that quality so ambivalently dear to all the younger Potters. When he was agitated, Marcus was put out. But today his assurance seemed mostly inspired, if the word could be thought appropriate, and included a sense of the shifts of Marcus’s moods.

“You suspect the language. Science is O.K., it has technical terms. This doesn’t, because Man has neglected spiritual forms for somatic ones. You don’t want me to talk about alchemy or auras or even angels I can tell. All those things are misshapen descriptions of things we’ve got askew. In fact, I believe, I do believe the world is trying to evolve out of matter into spirit … Here. I’ve written it out, actually. In a fumbling way. I’d like you to read it.”

He brought out, from his briefcase, a wad of cyclostyled paper.

“You might find some profit …”

It was blurred, much-handled, soft. Marcus read.

“I think we should work together, profitably. It must be your decision, in so far of course,” he laughed, “as no higher Powers take a hand again. The first stage is your reading my book – just to see if you have any comment, to clear the ground. Then I think we might devise a few experiments.

“What shall I do?”

“Do?”

“Now. I feel awful.”

“Now. Now I should go to the Nursery and tell Sister you’ve been sick in the Bilge Lab, and get her to tuck you up in bed. I might come with you, but it’s better not to excite comment, we must keep our secrets close … Just say you were sick.”

“I was sick.”

“Exactly so. I look forward to our next meeting.”

He did not say when that would be, but by now Marcus doubted no more than Simmonds that it would be taken care of.

Frederica, entering Long Royston for the first time, did not take to it. She had meant to. It was a step, several steps, up and out of Blesford. Like Everest, climbed that year, it had always been there, but inaccessible. Now, invited by its owner, she walked across its gardens, planted, according to Crowe’s instructions, more or less in accordance with Francis Bacon’s prescriptions in his essay “Of Gardens”. It was a hideous grey spring, that year, but Bacon’s April flowers, in walled gardens, were struggling out. Bacon liked the breath of flowers on the air. Frederica breathed in: the double white violet; the wallflower; the stock-gillyflower; the cowslip; flower-delices and lilies of all natures; rosemary flowers; the tulippa; the double piony; the pale daffadil; the French honeysuckle; the cherry-tree in blossom; the dammasin and plum-tree in blossom; the white-thorn in leaf; the lilac-tree. It was all
in the guide-book, issued with pretty drawings when the gardens were thrown open at Easter and in June. You may, said Bacon, have
ver perpetuum
, as the place affords. Even in North Yorkshire, though the moorland winds do sorely ruffle. Frederica crunched along the terrace gravel, on which later the play was to be enacted. The breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air than in the hand. Wallflowers are very delightful to be set under a parlour or low chamber window. They were. But those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three: that is, burnet, wild thyme, and watermints. Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure, when you walk or tread. Crowe had provided that pleasure. Frederica saw other people walking and treading in pleached alleys planted with these things, known faces, unknown faces, familiar from photographs and posters. The revels are now beginning, she told herself.

When she got in she was less happy. There was a white-coated butler, who took her macintosh and her name: there was Crowe, who said “how lovely” and passed on, there was a young man in a peacock corduroy jacket, studying a carving, half his face hidden behind huge tinted aquamarine lenses. She thought what she felt was social unease – alarm at being unable to impress herself on this knot of highly articulate, loudly fluting, brilliantly mobile creatures. Social unease always made her aggressive. Later, she wondered whether what daunted her was not Long Royston itself.

They were gathered for a preliminary briefing, to consider costumes, and because Crowe thought it would be fun. They sat down to lunch in the Great Hall, under the minstrels’ gallery, fifteen at table, the prospective principal actors, the triumvirate and the wardrobe mistresses, the wife of the Dean of Calverley and someone Lodge had inveigled from Covent Garden. Marina Yeo was enthroned between Crowe and Alexander, pronouncing on the power of garments. Frederica, at the other end of the table between the aquamarine young man, who had not taken off his goggles, and Jennifer Parry, who was to play Bess Throckmorton, and just qualified, in this huge cast, as a principal, observed her critically.

“Clothes have terrible power, on the stage,” said Miss Yeo. “What one appears to be, there, one
is
, one is at their mercy, always, to some extent. Some actors impart power to their clothes. Ellen Terry’s daughter would never have her costumes cleaned. They were stiff with her
mana
. Sybil told me once that when she put on those shimmering beetle-wings that Ellen Terry wore as Lady Macbeth she became
simply absolutely fearless
. They bore her through the part. Do you know,
Alexander, the Oscar Wilde story about those beetle-wings? How he said – the Queen of Scotland – purchased the banquet – a very frugal one – in the local shops – and patronised the local weavers – for her husband’s – drab – kilt. But for her own garments – she shopped – in Byzantium. So it was.”

“I shall never forget your Lady Macbeth,” said Crowe. “I can still see your hands, as though you would wring them away …”

“I preferred the nightdress in that,” said Miss Yeo, “to all those rather
square
robes I had to cart about …”

“You shall have a lovely nightie to die in, in this,” Crowe told her. “Wait till you see. Clothes to the author’s own design, a novelty.”

“Really,” said Miss Yeo, turning total attention on Alexander, who felt required to woo her. Frederica and Jennifer Parry both watched him to see how he would deal with this requirement, Jennifer covertly, and Frederica with an unabashed stare. As she had expected, he dealt badly, stammering woodenly, obviously insincere, which in fact he was not. Marina Yeo’s face was long and dark-skinned, her hair thick, smooth and greying, her eyes very dark under deeply sculpted lids. Her large mouth was invariably described as mobile. Her neck was very long and had aged like finely knotted wood, without puffiness. She twisted her face about too much all the time, Frederica decided, composing her own stiffly. Frederica had been much impressed by the rigid and mask-like quality of portraits of Elizabeth.

“I didn’t catch your name,” said the creature with the goggles, turning these on her, lifting his face under the high windows so that sparks danced in the iridescent lenses. “I believe I know you.”

“I doubt it. I’m Frederica Potter.”

“Ah. You see I do. Bill Potter’s daughter. The second one, the fierce one.”

Frederica drew back, said “How,” and recognised his manner.

“You are Edmund Wilkie. How odd. Why are you here?”

“I am Sir Walter Ralegh, love. The local prodigy returning to the fold to astonish and confound prophecy. Why are you here?”

“I am Elizabeth. Until Marina Yeo is old enough – or young enough – to do it, to be her. If you see.”

“I see precisely. What fun. You will have to learn her mannerisms. Not difficult, they’re very clear-cut.” He bent his body towards her in a very passable imitation of the actress’s curvilinear attentive stoop.

“I can’t see your face,” Frederica protested. “Those glasses are most off-putting. I don’t remember that you had to wear glasses.”

“I don’t. They’re experimental, my own design, an explanation of the effect of intense colours on mood. I did try those reversing glasses
they put on chickens but I only dare wear them in my own place. Guaranteed, when you take them off, to produce oceanic feelings of totality. The top of the world and the bottom identical. Or at least the top and bottom of the stairs since your senses confound your intellect and declare that each is the other. Colours are easier in public life. I have several pairs. Brown, gold, blue, grey smoke, purple smoke, Bristol crimson and conventional rose-tinted. I’m keeping a long and detailed record of my moods and reactions. I get my girl to keep a control record. So far the only thing we’re both dead certain about is that the less you can see me the ruder I am.”

“Everybody,” said Frederica, “seems very proud of being very rude, these days.”

“True. How right you are. A facile way of appearing witty. By all means let’s be revolutionary and polite. Tell me what you think of your
alter ego
, the other Gloriana?”

Edmund Wilkie was Blesford Ride’s maverick success. At the school he had, with extraordinary facility, passed A-levels both in arts subjects and, subsequently, in sciences. He then left, and went to King’s College Cambridge to become a psychologist, where he was said to be showing unsurpassed brilliance. He had also risen meteor-like to national fame as an actor, had written, directed and acted in a review called Midnight Mushrumps which had had a brief London run and had played a Marlowe Society Hamlet about which Harold Hobson had written, “The most intelligent, least bombastic Prince to grace the stage in my memory”. Frederica was very temporarily in love with him, after a vision of him as Bunthorne, in grass and primrose velvet, in a Blesford Ride
Patience
. He was the sort of boy schoolmasters secretly hope will come a cropper, so blithe, so arrogant, so effortless, so ingrate had been his academic proceedings. They wrote heavily qualified references which Cambridge ignored.

Gossip columnists were already speculating about whether he would be a great psychologist, an innovatory don or doctor, a brilliant entertainer, a valuable Shakespearean actor. Alexander had thought he might properly be called back to do Ralegh, that man of many parts, climber, poet, mountebank, scientist, atheist, soldier, sailor, historian, prisoner. Ralegh carried a lot of the play’s weight: he was part-chorus as well as character. Wilkie was to Frederica living proof that escape was possible from Blesford to metropolitan speed and glamour. Bill’s vision of her future did not include such things: he was cautious about Wilkie, gloomily testifying that he was sharp-witted and possibly something more.