The Virgin in the Garden (43 page)

In his drawer he kept a dozen Spenserian stanzas about nature, genius, and the square world of glass which perhaps only Frederica would entirely have understood. And he had no intention of ever showing them to her.

Three or four times before in her life Stephanie had had dreams which were heavy and bright, different in kind from other dreams, visions and conundrums admonishing and enchanting. This latest dream was both fascinating and insulting, as though it had been done to her.

She went along a long white beach. The sea was far out, sluggish waves rolling over silently on distant sand. She was not hot, or cold, but chilly. She was aware that she did not want to be where she was.

She went slowly. She was held up by some inertia in the nature of things, as though the world was exhausted. Things appeared bleached, though some had hints of possible colour palely vanishing as in an over-exposed negative. The sand was transparent ash-silver, filmed with a yellow stain. The pearly cliffs were smeared in places with a ghostly flesh colour. The sky was white with creamy streaks like folds in cartridge paper. The water was milky and the distant rocks were white like stranded dry sea-skeletons.

The silent horse and rider came from the cliffs, contained in their own wind, which troubled the many layers of clothing in which they were wound. The horse, pounding along under fluttering scalloped trappings, stretched a soft white muzzle through a white hood. Its ears were back: its mouth foamed: under its muffling its eyes couldn’t be seen. The rider was cocooned in goldish and whitish veilings, flapping and whipping behind her, bunched in her fists on her breast, together with the loop of scalloped reins and some indistinct wrapped object. The face, still in the moving cloths, was bone-white.

She watched them scud away towards the water and went on, with difficulty. The beach was almost airless now they had taken their disturbance with them. She had to look for something in or under the rocks. She was confident she would remember what it was when she got there. And then the confidence drained away and she knew she had overestimated herself. Her head was empty.

Behind her the pony slopped wearily back along the edge of the sea, which had crept up, rapid and shining, crested now and swaying vigorously, close to her.

She put out a hand and caught the rein. The touch of warm flesh, the soft, barely furred horse-lips, the wrinkling nose, was a shock. She let go. The creature drew up, head hanging. It was not so wild and bright after all – rather heavy, barrel-like, hairy-fetlocked. The rider sagged in the saddle. She felt a weight of responsibility; she must get them moving again at all costs. And she was gripped by that ancient, primal feeling of being in a story one has no desire either to share or to see out.

She looked up at the knot of cloths and fingers on the rider’s breast, and enquired whether it would not be best to go on? The rider, hunched, did not speak, but exuded panic. The primal storyteller communicated to her that the urn must be buried, that the world was drowning. At this she slapped the pony’s solid haunch and it started forward and trotted away in the water.

She looked behind and saw the high glittering wash of water, collected so rapidly in the bay, sweeping towards her.

She began to run, getting nowhere, and smoothly the fleet waters moved after her.

In dreams, if what pursues comes up with what is pursued, the story merely begins somewhere else some other way, failing awakening.

She scrabbled with wet hands under the cliffs near the rocks, weeping a little, far too hot now, making a hole with slithering spangled wet at the bottom, into which its walls perpetually caved and slipped. Elbow deep she tunnelled down, until she reached a rusty iron pipe mouth and a ring of white froth appeared on the dark smooth surface in her hole. She sat on her heels and surveyed her work. This was not the urn, this was sewage, and should be covered up. The urn should not be hidden but multiplied. She was digging in the wrong place. Everything was wrong. She would be punished.

She ran on the rocks. The wish not to be part of this story was stronger, but she was dutiful. Here were shelves of rock on which, as in a druggist’s shop, were ranged rows of alabaster urns, jars and vases, certainly multiplied, corked and lidded, rising through fronds of cushioned bladderwrack and those sleek swollen squares with spiked
corners laid by dogfish and called mermaid’s purses. She could not touch these containers, all similar, none identical. She sat down on a heap of that seaweed which is like tough old unbleached linen, its living texture seeming woven, its scalloped edges reminiscent in little of the horse’s trappings. The air had a milky, misty whiteness and was closing in. She had lost the urn that had contained all there was to be saved, although the rocks bristled with other lidded jars containing who knew what ashes or unguents. She should have kept still. She had left undone something essential. She could never walk back over the hissing acres of bladderwrack. The white water was rising, sucking and soughing up the bony cold rocks.

She woke in terror and found her face wet and slippery with tears and her bladder bursting.

When she came back from the lavatory it was impossible to slip back into sleep, which was one reason why she was able to fix and remember the dream with such clarity. Such dreams in any case, in her experience, continued into waking and reason. It was just after dawn, pale violet-grey. She drew her quilt round her shoulders and sat up to apply her mind to the matter.

Ends of verses curled and coiled in vacancy, like clues of thread, like shining ends of flying gossamer. Which is death to hide. Tender curving lines of creamy spray. Cold pastoral. The fleet waters of a drowning world. Thou silent form dost tease us out of thought … Behind these stalked the high forms of high language, ghostly grammatical skeletons of forgotten periods, inchoate remembered cadences and unheard melodies with continuing lines of singing rhythms. She could have wept because they were bleached and vanished, all the same blank whiteness.

There were other emotions involved. One was plain wrath at what had been made willy-nilly of a real, complex and vigorous memory. The roaring wind and blown sea, the local precision and true drama of the day at Filey had been in this dream, without her will, unified, internalised, drained and stilled. High art, modernist shored fragments of allusive high art, pickings, flotsam and jetsam of a foundering culture, had been made of it, but she had not made it. She had called up this impotent ghost of English poetry, but could offer it no blood to make it utter.

It was also a ghastly Freudian joke, working with the reductive simplicity, the obtrusive meanings, of its animated picture-language. Delicately, fastidiously, she sorted out the fronds as it were of this psychoanalytic growth.

Item: bladderwrack was, to an habitual sufferer from post-coital cystitis, a peculiarly painful pun.

Item: the womb-tomb-urn complex was intellectually insulting in its simplicity, and heavily reinforced by seaweeds and holes. One would have to hint, allude, obscure what, in a real dream, apprehended as a real event, sensuous object or motive for action, reduced one to wet tears, frenzy and terror.

Item: digging frantically in order to locate or maybe bury the one precious urn, she had created a deep, bloody wet hole and discovered in it a rusty, frothy parody of the male organ. The associations called up by this were peculiarly nauseating because of the presence, on the real beach, of real rusty, frothy sewage pipes and real blood-coloured clay.

She was also appalled by, indeed she almost succeeded in not noticing, an association she only too neatly made, between rings of froth on the sand and the traces of white round her father’s pinched, enraged hole of a mouth.

Then there was the didactic message. As though dictated by some bookish pythoness from an English
sortes Virgilianae
. “Which is death to hide” was Milton, talking about literature and the loss of it, talking about blindness, cross-referring his own inertia to the terrible story of the unfaithful servant who cravenly buried the one talent instead of multiplying it. There was the Grecian Urn. Thou still unravished bride of chastity. The non-sensuous sensuality in the mind. Urne buriall. Monumental alabaster. Smooth as monumental alabaster. That was surely far-fetched, dragged from too remote a text. Association looped irrelevances together. White, pale, cold, urn, horse, sky, sea.

The horse had antecedents, of which death on a pale horse was a remote and uncertain avatar. There was an archaic palfrey she couldn’t place, instinct with fear, and some other very precise literary image of a rider hurrying to bury a treasure. This she waited blankly for, conjuring it, with the phrase “fleet waters of a drowning world”, with a kind of contrary after-image of her dream, a humped and trundling dark steed on a reach of black sand, not white, William Wordsworth’s dreamed dromedary.

She called up various other verbal quirks – from
Moby-Dick
and
The Idea of Order at Key West
, from
Dover Beach
and the Tennysonian last battles in the mist. But the didactic centre, she knew, was with Milton and Wordsworth and the urn burial. She got down her old Cambridge
Prelude
. Wordsworth’s dream occurred in the middle of that unsatisfactory Book V, entitled
Books
. In this dream, the rider, neither Arab nor Don Quixote, was fleeing the ultimate flood to bury a stone and a shell, which were, in the dream, an impassioned Ode and Euclid’s elements, language and geometry.

Stephanie read. Some passions are the regular subjects of fiction and
some, though certainly passions, are more recondite and impossible to describe. A passion for reading is somewhere in the middle: it can be hinted but not told out, since to describe an impassioned reading of
Books
would take many more pages than
Books
itself and be an anticlimax. Nor is it possible like Borges’ poet, to incorporate
Books
into this text, though its fear of the drowning of books and its determination to give a fictive substance to a figure seen in a dream might lend a kind of Wordsworthian force to the narrative. In Wordsworth’s dream and Stephanie’s the undifferentiated narrator made clear the nature of the events. It is not so easy to describe a careful, conscious reading as an event. What Stephanie found in
Books
was a superfluous fear, a fear of drowning, of loss, of dark powers, ambivalent about whether it was life or the imagination that was the destroyer, or where these two became one, where, if at all, the undifferentiated narrator tells a solid tale. What she thought she thought, weeping a little, consciously and decorously, was that she should not marry, she had lost, or buried, a world in agreeing to marry, she should go back to Cambridge and write a thesis on Wordsworth’s fear of drowning books. Then she thought this was ludicrous and laughed hysterically. Then she thought she herself was afraid of being in the same place as her attention, body and imagination at once, and that Daniel would require this of her, and there would be no place for urn or landscape in their own terms. But if it was death to hide them, it was, it surely was, death to immure oneself with them. She had no answer, so would do what came easiest, what was already well-fixed, and marry. She turned back to the beginning of the book and began wildly to read it all, as though her self depended on it.

The Coronation commentaries lavished superlatives on the English genius for ceremonial. The events which constituted the Potter wedding were characterised by muddle, ill-temper, and aspersions on the church service. Bill waited until the arrangements were near completion and then announced that of course they must understand he would not countenance the thing by going into any church. Just in case they had supposed he was going to give his daughter away. Winifred said no, of course, dear, and went away and co-opted Alexander. Like many acquiescent people she was over-decisive when wrought up to it: she neglected to ask Stephanie about this: Stephanie was embarrassed: by
then Alexander, who liked ceremonies, had accepted most gracefully.

There was a general feeling that the bride was somewhat unresponsive to events. She had her own sourish thoughts about ceremony. Like most little girls she had played ritually, pruriently, narcissistically, at “my wedding”. Like most citizens she craned to peer into white-ribboned cars to see The Bride pass briefly, some unrecognisable typist, duchess, riding-instructor, schoolmistress whom she would neither see nor recognise again. Primitive societies had ceremonies for circumcision, puberty, hunting, shooting, fishing, birth, marriage and death. Bodies were decorated with knobs, scars, blisters, paint, leaves, flowers and feathers. People marched in the Queen’s wake with slashed cheeks under English hats and helmets. It was habitual. Her distaste for the Church enactment was to do, as was her family’s, with Daniel’s presumed belief in the real efficacy of the ceremony. No God for Stephanie stared down from the rood-beam, nor would touch the ring with true magic, nor knit up handclasp or eyebeams. Nevertheless there she would be, murmuring Cranmer’s prose in a cloud of white veiling. Her thoughts flirted persistently with blasphemies and indelicacies. There was the brute reality of the friend whose new husband, after an ill-judged wedding journey from Keswick to Dover, had put on his pyjamas in the hotel bedroom and had, whilst his bride struggled in the lavatory with a slippery and intransigent Dutch cap, ritually removed the trousers again and sunk, bare buttocks and striped torso, into a snoring torpor on the counterpane, from which he could by no means be waked. Everyone insisted in telling Stephanie such tales. She was glad that both actually and metaphorically it was at least certain that no one could hang her own marital sheets out of the ill-fitting council house window.

Leaving home she had always imagined against a background of thick domestic life and closing family ranks. When the wedding day began the house in Masters’ Row had a stripped, windswept look and there was one large gap in the ranks. Breakfast was very early, and all the women came down bundled in dressing-gowns, unkempt. Bill was not there, nor, it was subsequently discovered, anywhere in the house. On Stephanie’s plate was a brown envelope. In it was a cheque, made out to Stephanie Potter, for £250. This made everybody feel very uncomfortable.