The Virgin in the Garden (41 page)

When they got home, they realised that neither of them had checked the period of blackness on his watch.

Before June 2 that year most of the people collected in Mrs Thone’s drawing room had never seen a television broadcast. Amongst these were all the members of the Potter family, Felicity Wells, the Parrys and Lucas Simmonds, who was very excited, and had told Marcus that both Coronation and television might provide fruitful experiences of the transmission of power. There were six little boys there, some of whose parents owned sets, and the Ellenbys, who were sophisticated, having visited various parishioners who had not turned the thing off whilst offering tea or sherry to the Vicar. There was also Alexander, who had hoped to be invited to Long Royston by Crowe, and had not been. In the middle of the morning Mrs Thone answered the doorbell and found on the step Edmund Wilkie and a strange girl. He had heard, Wilkie said blandly, that she was keeping open house. This was Caroline. He wondered if
they might call. All the streets of Calverley and Blesford were emptied of their folk and desolate: it was like a death or a disaster: they needed
people
. They were up for Crowe’s jollifications that night but found themselves a little previous. He came past Mrs Thone into the hall, pulling his girl by the waist, dropping a lengthy scarf and a globular crash helmet on Mrs Thone’s oak chest. Mrs Thone ushered him in. He had been a thorn in Dr Thone’s flesh. He had broken every rule; he had created emotional, intellectual and moral factions whilst adhering to no one but himself. He had conspicuously claimed that his conspicuous success was in spite of, and not because of, the efforts of Dr Thone and the community. Basil Thone nevertheless felt a not uncommon perverse affection, not for Wilkie’s intellect, which he mistrusted, but for the pure difficulty he presented. Like many teachers he was compelled to love the most complex problem, not the ninety and nine. Like many prodigal sons, Wilkie returned from time to time, to re-establish, to flaunt, to exact and to reject this unreasonable liking. It was not shared by Bill Potter. Bill admired Wilkie’s mind, despised his posturing, argued his morals on their merits and did not much care what happened to him. This was largely because he had little time for psychology as a part of the cultural hierarchy. So when Wilkie came into Mrs Thone’s rose and silver room, Dr Thone, rosy-faced himself, with a silver flow of hair the boys believed, without evidence, to be a toupée, rose to greet him joyfully. Bill grunted, and settled deeper into his chair. Wilkie, still clutching his girl, flashed happy nods of greeting at his acquaintance: Bill, Alexander, Stephanie, Frederica, Geoffrey Parry. He raised his voice above the orotundities of Richard Dimbleby, and told them that this was Caroline. Caroline was dark and thin, with the urchin hair and prominent slender bones then fashionable, a skipping walk and little ballet-like slippers which made her ankles seem tiny and her calves curving.

“Look,” said Frederica, “the Queen’s coming out.”

“What a farce really,” said Wilkie’s girl.

Miss Wells made a distressed little noise.

“Sit down,” said Alexander repressively to Wilkie, “do.”

In those days, neither the public nor the private mores that went with the intrusive camera-eye and the obtrusive screen were established. The official BBC report on the coverage of the Coronation enquired of itself, “Might there not be something unseemly in the chance that a viewer could watch this solemn and significant service with a cup of tea at his elbow? – there were very real doubts …” Most of the Press was democratically statistically ecstatic. “The Coronation brings the tiny screen into its own, turns it into a window on Westminster for
125,000,000 people … All these millions from Hamburg to Hollywood will see her coach jingle through rejoicing London
this very day
 … 800 microphones are ready for 140 broadcasters to tell the world Elizabeth is crowned. But today is television’s day. For it is television, reaching out to the Queen’s subjects, which will give a new truth to the Recognition of the Monarch on her Coronation Day … ‘And the Queen, standing up by King Edward’s Chair, shall turn and shew herself unto the People …’ ”

They called it the tiny screen and they called the Queen, repeatedly, delightedly, a tiny figure, exclaiming also repeatedly, how erect and undaunted she was, however exhausted by the long ceremony and the weight of all those robes and the exceedingly heavy crown. Diminutives and superlatives proliferated as they stared at the flickering grey and white shadows, sparking shoots of light off metal and gems, a matt and twinkling tiny doll, half an inch, an inch, two inches, a face maybe eight inches across, grave or graciously beaming, a black and white smiling image of pleated linen and cloth of gold and shimmering embroideries in mother-of-pearl shades – pink, green, rose, amethyst, yellow, gold, silver, white, embroidered bands of golden crystal, graduated diamonds and pearls. Crisping black waved locks and a mouth black with presumably red lipstick since an unslicked mouth in those days was naked. Squared postage-stamp-sized, envelope-sized, columns of pin-headed marching men, soft tapestry-stitch flowerbeds of dotty undifferentiated faces and hats in crowds after crowd, the same and not the same, gun-carriages, tiny coroneted breeched peers, windows, choirboys, regalia, greyly swirling, with Dimbleby’s thick rolling voice informing, and crashes of psalm and anthem accompanying all this flow, formation, dissipation, reformation.

What did they truly make of it? The Press used blandly lyrical, spasmodically archaic, uneasily hortative words about a New Elizabethan Age.

“The bright promise of tomorrow is of a second Elizabethan age when the expanding resources of science, industry and art may be mobilised to ease every man’s burden and produce new opportunities of life and leisure.

“Yet these are the years when the first atomic clouds have drifted between us and the sun. If anything at all is plain it is that many a generation will be robbed of its future unless there can be established a settled peace …”

Winston Churchill’s rhetoric had its own note of archaising certainty, heavy with worn and inherited rhythms.

“Let it not be thought that the age of chivalry belongs to the past.
Here, at the summit of our world-wide community, is the lady whom we respect, because she is our Queen, and whom we love because she is herself. Gracious and noble are words familiar to us all in courtly phrasing. Tonight they have a new ring in them because we know that they are true about the gleaming figure whom Providence has brought to us in times when the present is hard and the future is veiled.”

Dubiety intruded oddly into affirmations of promise and significance. The
Daily Express
, in an imperial Leader, quoted sonorously and incongruously

glossing this gloomy thought with the explanation that they were shadows, that was, unless commoners and Queen dedicated themselves to “high aims” and pursued these with “tenacious purpose”.

The
News Chronicle
, on Everest, wavered between uneasy blasts of acclaim and contortions of verbal and moral embarrassment. It also produced an irrelevantly uncertain piece of great English verse, this time Browning:

It was lyrical about “the cold, beautiful, cruel, desirable peak of the Earth, beyond man’s grasp – decade after decade”. It was not quite prepared, although it flirted cloudily with the concept, to say that the Coronation and conquest of Everest indicated the coming of the new Imperium, Heaven on Earth, Golden Age, Cleopolis or any such conjunction of temporal imperfection and eternal satisfaction. Instead, it ruminated:

“These islands are fluttering with flags; and now another flag flutters half a world away, on the pinnacle of the earth. It is the same emblem.

“What is it in this news that must stir the deep pride of a nation? It is the sense that ail is possible: it is the elation of the knowledge that the age of Elizabeth II is opening dramatically and magnificently. Let them scoff who will, but there is a quality about this news that lifts it higher than the headlines it makes.

“An earlier age would have called it a Sign. Being unsure what that can mean, we are inclined in this age to be embarrassed by any such extravagance of language.”

In 1973 Frederica saw Alexander, on an adult education programme on the television, give a lecture on changing style in public communications, illustrated with words and pictures culled, like these extracts,
from the events of June 2 1953. Alexander analysed shrewdly, Frederica thought, the flimsy vocabulary, the trumped-up, wilfully glistening sentiments which juxtaposed words now no longer permissible, like gleaming, drifting, visionary, jingling, glittering
et caetera
, Churchill’s courtly phrasing, itself already vapid, with the new awkward technologico-Benthamite pieties about the “resources” of science, industry and art, these three, “mobilised” to ease every man’s burden to produce new “opportunities” of life and “leisure”. If the easing of burdens, Alexander said, ran back in unbroken rhetorical lines through Bunyan to Christ, morally weighty, heavy with dead resonance, “resources”, “mobilising”, “leisure” were hopefully vague new abstractions to conjure, with their own jargon, their own telling redeployment of words with old useful meanings smaller and more precise. The truth was, Alexander said in 1973, invoking some abstractions of his own, and of that time, the huge misguided nostalgic effort of archaism had been a true shadow of blood and state, a real fantasy and trick of fame. The truth was and had been that the party was and had been over. He ended his programme, predictably, with Low’s impressive cartoon, broken Union Jacks, limp dolls, deflated and burst balloons, empty glasses, blank screen. The new language and the old, he said, and their uneasy marriage, were vacant, as events had proved.

Frederica, in 1973, thought he oversimplified. What he said was part of the media’s pervasive receding narcissism, mirror on mirror mirrored and their peripheries endlessly commented on by commentators. In 1953 Alexander tried to write, to discourse, in verse, about history and truth. In 1973 he criticised, in prose, modes of communication. There were other truths. There had been, Frederica considered, some sort of innocence about the rejoicing at that time (when she was a sharp but unobservant seventeen). There was no duplicity, only a truly aimless and thwarted nostalgia, about the pious enthusiasms of the commentators. And the people had simply hoped, because the time was after the effort of war and the rigour of austerity, and the hope, despite the spasmodic construction of pleasure gardens and festival halls, had had, alas, like Hamlet’s despair, no objective correlative. But they had been naturally lyrical. Their lyricism had turned out to be wandering and threadbare, but nothing had replaced or succeeded it. After the threadbare lyric had come threadbare “satire”, a sluggish and ponderous anti-rhetoric, a laboured passion for deflating almost anything. Low had been tough, but much of what followed was only shrill.

She did not think this at the time, in 1953. Then she largely agreed with Wilkie’s girl’s “What a farce!”, sensing immediately that this was the “right” response. It was what contemporary people would say and
feel about these events. “Contemporary” was in those days synonymous with “modern” as it had not been before and is not now (1977). Contemporary was what she wanted, then, to be, and she was quite clever enough to see that the Coronation was not only not the inauguration of a new era, it was not even a contemporary event. A year later, when
Lucky Jim
came out, Frederica wept with hysterical glee over Jim Dixon’s bludgeoning animosity towards Merrie England, although she was, also, quite shrewd enough to see that Amis and Dixon would have shared her ambivalence about Matthew Crowe’s public festivities that evening. Crowe was rich enough to pay real musicians to play real Elizabethan music in real Elizabethan gardens, and real jazz for variety, whilst people in real silk clothes drank rather a lot of real drink, champagne or Newcastle Brown Ale. Money was real to the contemporary mockers, and as the glittering coach rolled the real Queen in her cloth of gold garments into the courtyards of Buckingham Palace, the Age of Affluence, pound in pocket and man-made fibrous fancy dress brightly shining, bubbled up over the edge of Amis’s glass of vintage wine, or whisky, was photographed for the Colour Supplement, clothed itself in silver PVC buskins and plastic union jacks and addressed itself to the production and definition of Beautiful People.

True Paradise, Proust said, is always Paradise Lost. Only when Frederica was old enough to equate the tenuous pastel hopes of 1953 with her own almost-adult knowledge that everything was a new beginning, that reality for her was the future, did she come to feel nostalgia for what at the time she diagnosed boldly as blear illusion. In a Proustian way too, as she acquired age, she came to associate her obsession with the
Four Quartets
with the Coronation, with the Coronation’s gestures towards England, history and continuity. It had tried and failed to be now and England. There had been other worse failures. In the sense in which all attempts are by definition not failures, since now
is
now, and the Queen was, whatever the People made of it, crowned, it
was
now, and England. Then.

As for the others, they had their thoughts. The Ellenbys were delighted and reassured, as though the whole world wore, briefly and significantly, a Sunday aspect. Felicity Wells was in a state of cultural ecstasy, seeing the vaults of the Abbey, imitating the inhuman perspectives of the reaches of Heaven, and the Queen’s little white human face over her emblematically embroidered robes, as a promise of renovation. Eliot had said, and she remembered, that the “English unbeliever conformed to the practices of Christianity on the occasions of birth, death, and the first venture in matrimony …” Now a whole Nation was conforming to an ancient national Christian rite. It was a true Renaissance.