The Virgin in the Garden (50 page)

Each act had a solitary prisoner: Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, the degenerate and undignified Essex. The epilogue was Ralegh’s, also imprisoned in the Tower, with fifteen years of confinement, the terrible voyage to the Orinoco and the
History of the World
before him. The sage and serious Spenser was then dead, his castle of Kilcolman burned by the savages along with various lost volumes, it was presumed, of the endless
Faerie Queene
, and himself buried, destitute, next to Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, by Essex. At the putting-out of that light, in Alexander’s play, the shadows began to lengthen and grow cold.

The imprisoned speakers alternated with populous romps and ceremonies, richly elaborated by Lodge. Against this dance were set various black messengers from the outside world, telling of the hanging, drawing and quartering of Lopez on his gibbet, of the dignified and ridiculous death of the bewigged Queen of Scots, of Essex’s horrible lonely progress through the City. Alexander’s messengers were he hoped like the crucial Messengers of Greek tragedy and spoke what he hoped was particularly well-fleshed and full-blooded verse. Lodge kept cutting them down. He said they detracted from the action. Alexander said on the contrary they
were
the action, they were to work in poetry on the
audience’s imagination whilst the silver and golden maskers wove their labyrinth of pleasure and virtue, and the poets sat on the steps of the terrace. Lodge said audiences would get shifty and restive on cold evenings no matter how well provided with blankets and thermoses and really things must be kept moving. Alexander, said Lodge, was imagining endless balmy clear evenings with the moon high in the sky and stars floating but he himself had seen too much outdoor drama to fall for that. Secretly he thought Alexander’s play was a little like Frederica Potter’s body – clever and static. They needed a bit of pushing around and limbering up.

The
Astraea
masque, Alexander’s box in box play in play, coincided then with the report of the death of the other Queen, giving its vision of golden world, completed circles, eternal harvest, a grim counter-point. Lodge had wanted to let down Astraea and her maidens on gold wires, but this proved impracticable. Their formal dance, as court masques did, nevertheless involved the whole court finally, including Ralegh, Spenser, Bess Throckmorton, an anti-masque of schoolboy satyrs with horns and fur, culminating in an orderly-disorderly Saturnalia and the famous swisser-swatter dialogue, straight from Aubrey in its pristine glory. Wilkie-Ralegh was an elegant Dionysos. Marina Yeo, high-enthroned and jewel-encrusted, sat like a still point until at last she too was induced to dance, high and disposedly.

Astraea and her maidens were played by Anthea Warburton and the lovely girls who had caused Frederica’s earlier despair: they had almost non-speaking visionary parts. Anthea had a face like a Botticelli Venus, a Beauty Queen’s body, and a dignified manner. She could carry a sheaf of corn at various classical angles, all of them lovely. She could wave her white arms, or incline her heavy harvest-coloured head, and cause audiences, and Lodge, to smile involuntarily because it was so rightly done. The attendant bevy of graces and young maids-in-waiting had an atmosphere of female wholesomeness, innocence, readiness and wonder at the glamour of the actors which became an increasingly crucial part of the Bacchanalian atmosphere which developed. They giggled over sandwiches preserved in helmets, developed crushes on the great, Max Baron, Crispin Reed, Roger Braithwaite, Bob Grundy, neither knowing nor not knowing what effect their sweet and silly intensities were having.

From this bevy Frederica, by virtue of her part, and more of her nature, found herself excluded. She could not giggle. No one in a flood of sudden tears turned to her for help. Nobody confided to her that she had become possessed of one of Braithwaite’s handkerchiefs with initials on. She was quickly known to be soppy about Alexander Wedderburn but this was felt somehow to be a folly, an aberration, even, she surmised
darkly, pathetic. The kind of rage the Bevy’s soft twitterings induced in her plays its part in what follows of this story.

The Bevy also had an effect on Jennifer. She had applied her intelligence to the problem of her love and decided that this summer Alexander should hear nothing of the washing-machine and see nothing of small Thomas. This required considerable planning, since both Thomas and the washing-machine were certainly still there. She dealt with them at night, she borrowed friends of the Bevy to baby-mind. She went to Calverley, had her hair dressed, and bought sundresses and whirling skirts. Today she was in peach-coloured poplin with ribbon-straps; she sat more or less with the Bevy, looking younger, less wan and less brisk. This touched Alexander, who went and sat at her feet. He was followed by Wilkie, who assured Jenny that he was greatly looking forward to their contribution to the dance.

Lodge disposed the Bevy in fair attitudes at one end of the terrace, the boy-satyrs in convenient shrubs, and the nuclear court rising in the centre, from step to step to throne. The girls danced forward, strowing imaginary garlands. The boys leaped, acrobatically pumping little legs. Lodge walked lords and ladies into the pattern, pacing deliberately over ground where they would scamper and skip. There was no music; the Consort had not yet come to rehearsals. Frederica sat with Alexander; there was now no reason why she shouldn’t go home, except that she feared to miss something. “Ah, bonny sweet Robin …” said Marina Yeo to Max Baron. “
Now
, Wilkie,” said Lodge. Wilkie pushed Jenny against a rocky stone pillar – “It should be a tree,” said Alexander, leaning forward – and thrust a plump knee into the blown peach folds of her dress. “Nay, Sir Walter, nay sweet Sir Walter,” cried Jenny with conviction. Wilkie applied his face to Jenny’s breast above the frilled edges of the sundress. She flushed, and stumbled convincingly in her lines. “Smashing,” said Lodge. “Our best days are shadows,” said Marina Yeo, “my Robin, and our gestures, the same and the same, stiffen a little, though always new.”

“Alexander,” said Frederica, “why do actresses always trill words so? Why can’t they just speak clearly?”

“Hush,” said Alexander.

“Bonny sweet Robin,” said Frederica, in a thrilling parody. “Hush.”

Wilkie’s knee was deeper, his arm gripped. “Swisser swatter,” said Jenny. “Stop,” said Lodge. “Not embarrassment, a kind of manic screech, if you can see your way to it, love.”

“A kind of orgasm,” said Wilkie.

“It is certainly very funny if the timing’s right,” said Frederica to
Alexander, who did not answer. Wilkie took hold of Jenny’s naked parts and seemed to whisper fiercely in her ear. This time the sweet Sir Walter had a sawing-quavering edge, and the swisser swatter could certainly be called a manic screech. Lodge clapped, Wilkie kissed Jenny, Alexander crossly hushed Frederica and the Queen rose in virgin wrath before the whole party dissolved in laughter.

Later that afternoon the first note of the bottle-chorus, which was to reach such glorious and hideous proportions, was heard. Edmund Wilkie, who had emptied a bottle of beer, blew a meditative note across its neck, a soughing, hooting, owlish music which sounded surprisingly loud off stone and treetrunks. He tried again, and picked up one of the beats of the dance-steps. Alexander laughed, and blew across a fuller bottle from the other side of the terrace. Crowe magisterially waved his ferule and the two fluted and huffed their way through a kind of melody. Lodge bowed to them, called “Encore”, and returned to the dance. In later days Wilkie made an octave of bottles, and then an orchestra, combining champagne, cider, large and small beer and whisky, enrolling tappers as well as blowers, chipping, singing, sighing. Later still there was a time when musical discord fell away into wild cacophony and mindless drumming. But now Alexander stood on the terrace nodding at Wilkie and tapping his foot; Anthea tossed mane and wrists; Thomas Poole, having found a full bottle of Guinness and drunk most of it in a long swallow, was hooting too, and the duet was a trio. The Bevy was giggling. At the end of the figure Alexander danced Jenny along the terrace and into the Great Hall: the Bevy followed: Frederica, unmusical and ungainly, was left to Crowe, who tucked his rod under one arm in a military way, offered her the other, and led her in.

Crowe gave them drinks. Max Baron sat on a table and lectured the Bevy on the secret of
Hamlet
, in which he had played a much-remarked Claudius. Alexander and Jenny sat in a window together. “What on earth was that creature
saying
to you?” said Alexander. Wilkie was presenting, with both hands and considerable drama, a large cup of wine to Marina Yeo. “He only
said
, wait till I get my hand in. Only a joke.” “He was a repellent little boy.” “He’s not a little boy now. And not repellent. But you don’t have to take him quite seriously.” She was flushed and happy: it was playtime again: Alexander squeezed her hand.

“So I
knew
,” said Max Baron to the Bevy, “I simply
knew
that Claudius had seduced Ophelia before the action began. It makes sense of it all. The fact that he’s the centre of corruption, it’s to
him
she’s singing all that stuff about virginity …”

Anthea Warburton, surprising Frederica badly, suddenly sang in a clear, cold soprano,

There was a moment’s pure silence, then the Bevy giggled in unison. “Exactly,” said Max Baron. “And she sings it to him, to the
King
, in the
flower scene –
it’s the last casual betrayal of poor Hamlet …”

“Who isn’t there,” said gruff Frederica.

“That’s not the point. The
point is
that something is rotten, and
Claudius
 …”

“I don’t think that can be right,” said Frederica.

“I
knew
, when she came up with those flowers, that
he
knew, that
Claudius
knew, that
I
knew … she should be played as a young-old minx who knows it’s his fault, she’s his
creature
 …”

“I think that’s brilliant,” said Anthea Warburton.

“Nonsense,” said Frederica, having meant to mutter it, hearing it clear as a bell in her father’s voice.

“It’s a fascinating theory,” said silky Crowe at her elbow.

“No, it’s nonsense. He was a better playwright than that. If he’d meant it to be that it’d have been clear enough. Laertes thinks
Hamlet
may have stolen his way into her favours. But all this just can’t be so.”

“I don’t see why not. I tell you, I
knew
.”

“What you
knew
,” said Frederica, painstakingly, accurately and unforgivably, “was your own feelings.” Ignoring Crowe she turned to Alexander. “Alexander. Alexander – he
was
a better playwright …”

Alexander, his arm easily round Jenny, let Frederica largely down. “It’s the most riddling of all texts,” he said, his voice dying away to a murmur. He was annoyed with himself, and then thought, I am not a school-master now, and tightened his arm round his love.

Crowe said to Frederica, “You haven’t a drink.”

“No.”

“You want one.”

“Have you ever known me refuse one?” She said that badly. Her face was hot, hot. Crowe gave her a cold glass and said, “Come, I have something to show you.”

So she was back in his inner room again, and he was showing her drawings for masquers, horned men and frondy women, and his pudgy little hands were round her waist.

“Cross-patch, stick-like girl. Bend, bend.”

The room was mostly dark. A strip-light over the Marsyas, a confined bright circle of desk-light.

“All the same, he was wrong, he was simply wrong, he was reading it
wrong
.”

“Yes of course, but what does it matter?” He had brought the cold bottle as well as the glasses. “Sit down, look at my Inigo Jones …”

She walked away and sat down. He came padding after, cherub-red face, silvery tonsure, tiny paunch. “I could make you into a real woman, Frederica.”

“More to the point to make me a real virgin princess. I’ve got to be good, since it’s no good being clever, and I’ve got no skills like singing and dancing, and to be truthful I’m too uninformed to see what’s special about your pictures, except they’re old, people are always
showing me things
, and I’m simply too ignorant to know why the things inspire whatever they do inspire. And when I do say what I do know I get hooted at.”

“Dear girl,
dear
girl, I only want you to remember in ten years you saw such things – my line drawings, my bleeding Marsyas, my ripe Hyacinth, I want you to remember, you stand for who must remember. Have more wine. You may be unappreciative now, but you will remember clearly. When I am dead or senile.”

“Nonsense.”

“Having said nonsense so recently in such clarion tones in such a good cause, don’t lie now. How old do you think I am?”

“I have no idea.”

“Old?”

“Compared to me.”

“Ah, well, yes.” He sat on the edge of her chair. He put his hand in her dress and began to pinch her breasts. “Not old enough to be necessarily repulsive?”

“No.” Though he was, or that particular activity was, repulsive, then.

“But not compelling like Alexander Wedderburn.”

“I’ve loved him all my life. Or almost. You know.”

“I don’t know. In spite of his other – preoccupations.”

“That’s not serious.”

“You speak with such appalling certainty. Do you –” twisting her breast almost sharply now – “know what
is
serious, with him?”

She began to say that she imagined she knew, meaning that she herself would be, when the time came, when she got there, which had not yet, it was true, come about, and then, sensing danger, she closed her mouth. She began again to say that his play was, and again closed her mouth, as though she was exposing something vulnerable in Alexander, which was ridiculous, since Crowe must know, better than she did, what Alexander’s play meant to Alexander. She turned up a silent fierce face to
Crowe, who gave her a nip, and then something of a bite, on the lips. He was now definitely hurting, as well as fondling, her breasts. She wondered if she should perhaps bite him back. She went on talking.