The Virgin in the Garden (73 page)

Time passed. He strode about, but there is not much room for striding in the back gardens of Masters’ Row. He lost his temper, and kicked cornflowers and daisies all over the lawn. He said, “Bitch, bitch, I
knew it,” aloud to the moon. His capacity for both anger and desire had its limits. He remembered the prurient laughter of the bottle chorus and experienced a moment of uncomprehending cold like Demetrius unenchanted by Puck and Oberon. He knew that there would be a moment, very soon, when he would not even be able to understand how he had come to be waiting in that garden. If that were so, there was nothing to prevent him getting out, out of the garden, out of Blesford Ride, out of the North of England, now. It was the glare of her will that had held him, and wherever she was now, he was free. He kicked a few more cornflowers, without savagery: his storms were brief and subsided quickly. He thought of kicking the winebottles, but did not. They could sit on that sill, an offering, for anyone to make of them what anyone could. He would not be there to see. He was going. The whole episode was at an end.

In due course Wilkie took Frederica up to the bedroom, where the bedspread was now off, and the corner of the sheet turned neatly back.

“Well,” he said, “we might as well get in.”

After some undemonstrative washing and undressing, they got in. Wilkie walked naked towards the bed; Frederica glimpsed him, moony and plump, with sunburned hands and neck and the V of his shirt collar, and his thing, as she thought of it, red, and rigid, and curving up. She turned her face away. There was a smell of toothpaste, an inhuman little smell, and soap, and an undertow of warm bodies. Wilkie made a crinkling sound with paper and rubber, his white back towards her, his neck muscles, which she could see, stiff with concentration.

“Now,” he said, “listen. I’m a scientist. I’m going to tell you how all this works, what gives women pleasure, and what gives me pleasure, and then you won’t be frightened, and I shall enjoy myself, if we go along gently and carefully. O.K.?”

Frederica nodded. Wilkie sat up and, using her almost as a demonstration model in a human biology class, touched her here and there with dry, delicate fingers, telling her that here she liked to be rubbed, there she liked to be tickled, here he himself was sensitive and could be irritated or pleasured. He murmured something about the need for lubrication, and produced a small jar of vaseline with which, his back again modestly turned, he carefully anointed himself. He was courteous,
dogmatic and authoritative. In later life Frederica was to discover that his knowledge, both about these things in general, and about her own reactions in particular, was not as exhaustive as he might have thought, or claimed, it was. At the time she was grateful to him for seeming so matter-of fact and secure. Later, also, she came to be grateful to him for providing her with the capacity to make further discoveries with aplomb.

At first, Frederica was startled by a kind of running commentary that went on in her ear. (Wilkie did not kiss her. It was as though that was an inappropriate intimacy.) “Oh,” said Wilkie, entering her with some slithery effort, “that was a big push. God, that is tight. Are you O.K.?”

“Yes,” said Frederica, briefly tight-lipped.

Wilkie made a grunting noise, and pushed up and down for a time. “Is that nice?”

“Oh, yes,” said Frederica, who did not find it either particularly nice or particularly nasty, more like incessant Tampax, but was glad it was happening.

After a few moments, and with more vaseline, Wilkie began to rub round and round her clitoris. This struck Frederica as a ridiculous gesture, and also as something unnecessarily intrusive, despite the presence of Wilkie, much larger, much further inside.

“Is that nice?”

“Oh, yes,” said Frederica, frowning with concentration. Some vague flickers and ripples of turmoil were happening inside her, a slackening, a ventral dizziness like going down a slide very fast, like the onset of drunkenness. She suppressed all these strongly, sensing with her body, beyond the reach of her mind, that at the end of these waves of feeling was a surrender of her autonomy that she wasn’t going to make.

“Put your knees up.”

She put them up. Wilkie touched her breasts, which reminded her of Crowe, and murmured something about “erectile tissue”, a biological phenomenon she had already decided was overvalued. He continued to pump efficiently up and down. She continued pliable enough, concentrating on not letting go. People’s buttocks, thought Frederica, were ridiculous, a ridiculous mixture of wobble and muscle. She laughed.

“Happy?”

“Oh yes.”

“Good. Good.”

Frederica thought, with a moment of nausea, of Lawrence’s descriptions of Constance Chatterley’s florid spreading circles of satisfaction. What she had was vertical flickering lines of local tickling, interrupted electric messages which she hastily earthed. Wilkie stopped talking and
began to go faster. Frederica stared at his face with interest. His mouth was drooping open, his eyes closed, his breath heavy. His little fat belly was hot and sweaty on hers. After a time, he went very fast indeed, suddenly gave a loud, very private groan, and dropped his head, very heavily for a moment, on her breast, looking tragic and drained. Frederica felt a kind of fluttering and wincing inside, his, or hers, she wasn’t sure; there was also some pain, and a hot throb. Wilkie whipped his penis neatly and smartly out, turned over to attend to himself, and fell back on the pillows, turned away.

“Was that all right?” he said, in a fading voice, breathing heavily.

“Oh yes.”

“You didn’t come.”

“I’m sorry.” She did not quite know, despite earlier thoughts about Lady Chatterley, what he meant.

“No, no, probably my fault. We’ll try again. I once took a girl to a hotel who, every time she came, would scream out like a train whistle, earsplitting, awful. People used to knock on the door to see if I was murdering her. I couldn’t moderate it. Pity, really.”

“It’s all wet.”

“Well, it will be.” He sighed. “Was it painful?”

“Not much.”

He seemed to be drifting into sleep. Frederica stared at the back of his hair, and reflected that she had never known him less well, or felt less close to him, than now, since they first began to talk. She had learned something. She had learned that you could do – that – in a reasonably companionable and courteous way with no invasion of your privacy, no shift in your solitude. You could sleep all night, with a strange man, and see the back only of his head, and be more self-contained than anywhere else. This was a useful thing to know. It removed the awful either/or from the condition of women as she had seen it. Either love, passion, sex and those things, or the life of the mind, ambition, solitude, the others. There was a third way: you could be alone and not alone in a bed, if you made no fuss. She too would turn away and go to sleep.

She went to sleep and was woken, after all, in a panic, by the blood. She pulled at Wilkie.

“Wilkie – please – it’s
very
wet, it is.”

“Hmm?”

“Please. I seem to be lying in a sea of wet.”

“That’s wrong,” said the obliging Wilkie. “Let’s have a look.” He leaped out of the bed and turned back the blankets, observing that there’d certainly been blood on the durex thing, but not such a lot he’d thought it worth mentioning.

Blood was rising and puddling round Frederica, her thighs were scarlet, it was creeping in a puddle up her back. Even the collected Wilkie blanched a little at this sight, and asked if she felt faint.

“I don’t think so. Just
wet
.”

“Sit up.”

She sat, and said she did feel faint, a little.

“Let’s have a look, how fast it’s coming out.”

He put his head down, and said it seemed not to be gushing, or even running, very noticeably. He said he would make a pad of a bathtowel and she would sit on that, and he would deal with the bed.

“Wilkie – it’s awful, it’s embarrassing.”

“Rubbish. Hotels are for dealing with this kind of thing. As long as you feel O.K. But I’m not sleeping in a pool of blood, there’s limits to my sang-froid. I’m clearing this up. Now sit on this towel and keep still.”

She watched, fascinated, whilst he removed the bloody sheet, rinsed it as far as possible in the basin, and hung it over a radiator. Then he remade the bed, with the over-sheet under and the blankets on top. Then he sponged Frederica with a flannel, and reinspected her and the towel.

“It doesn’t seem to qualify as a haemorrhage,” he said, with his usual cocky certainty. “Just heavy hymeneal bleeding, I’d say.”

“Has this happened to you before?”

“I can’t say it has, no. I wouldn’t like it often, either, it’s a bit alarming. And very messy. I think I’ll keep off virgins. You can be my only good turn to virgins, Frederica. Now if you get cautiously back in that bed I’ll wrap you up in all these towels and fix them on you and then we’ll get some sleep. If it were to get worse we’d have to get a doctor, but it won’t. You’re just a very bleeding sort of girl.”

“You are
useful
.”

“Right man at right time in right place. I told you so. Poor old Frederica. No point in bringing your swimming costume if that won’t stop, either. Now, concentrate on stopping the flow, mind over matter, and wake me up if you’re worried.”

In ten minutes he was asleep again.

Bill and Winifred returned to Blesford the next day. They brought with them Marcus, in an ambulance. Marcus was observedly thinner, and stared with extravagant terror at everything. When he saw the Masters’
Row house he flung himself about, and screamed, and tossed his arms, with an energy that it had not seemed likely he could summon up. He then fainted on the gravel. They carried him into the house and put him on the sofa. When he came round, he began again to scream and flail. A doctor was telephoned. The ambulance returned and Marcus left again. The hospital psychiatrist sent for Winifred, alone.

Frederica and Wilkie had a day on the beach: the wind came howling and icy off the North Sea: Wilkie threw a few stones, and Frederica hobbled beside him, swathed in cotton wool and bleeding, if not profusely, considerably more than she was used to. Finally she said she was sorry to be a drag, she must sit down somewhere, she felt wobbly. Wilkie took her back to the Grand Hotel, where she lay on the bed in a huddle, imagining looks of pity and curiosity on the faces of chambermaids and porters. Wilkie went away to make a phone call and came back to say that his girl wanted him in Cambridge rather urgently, she was a bit put out not to have been able to get in touch with him, and there was a possibility of a part in a production of
The Changeling
at a student drama festival in Munich. So if she didn’t mind, they ought to be getting back.

Alexander did a lot of telephoning. He was feeling buoyant. Now he was out of that garden, his success, his prospects, seemed his own. He arranged to see the BBC in Manchester, and to travel down to London, for interviews there, and then on to Oxford about the schoolmaster fellowship. He refused the interview at the school in Dorset, he had had enough of education, for the time being. He had his trunks brought out of the school basement and some tea chests from the school stores. He went to see Dr Thone, and proffered his formal resignation. He locked his door, sported his oak, put his fretwork notice to OUT and began to pack.

Daniel had a letter from Sheffield, in an unknown hand. When he opened it, he read that his mother had had a bad fall, had cracked her hip in several places and would be in hospital for some weeks, maybe months. At the end of that time it would be quite possible that she would be unable to continue to manage for herself as she had. He appeared, the hospital authorities wrote, to be her closest and indeed only relative, although she had not asked for him. He went to the station and took a train to Sheffield.

Thomas Parry developed a complex infection of the middle ear, with a
raging temperature, and screamed day and night for five nights. Geoffrey and Jenny sponged him with cool flannels, tried to make him drink, sat over him.

The psychiatrist said to Winifred that the root cause of Marcus’s troubles appeared to be fear of his father, and that it was most desirable that he should recuperate elsewhere, with someone understanding and less alarming, if that could be arranged. He did not want to keep him in the hospital since the place itself was doing him no good, and had unfortunate and undesirable associations with Lucas Simmonds, who was a very sick man, and best left to professional care.

Anthea Warburton set off for a fortnight’s visit to the kind Marina Yeo, and a sunny holiday with friends and cousins in Juan-les-Pins.

Frederica and Wilkie drove, as stately as a motorbike can drive, back into Blesford, and roared along Masters’ Row. Going in the other direction, behind the Blesford bus, was Alexander’s silver Triumph. It had, as it had not had before, a roof-rack, which was tidily loaded, and roped in with a tarpaulin. Frederica saw Alexander, quite clearly, beautifully brushed, smiling, preserved and distant behind the greenish glass of the windscreen. Alexander saw Wilkie clearly enough, allowing for the insect-bulge of helmet and goggles, and saw a flicker and puff of ginger hair behind Wilkie’s clinging passenger which allowed him to identify her. He looked out at the road in front of him and continued to smile, thus missing the nervous waving and leaping of Jenny Parry at her garden gate. It was not in Alexander’s nature to let other people have the dénouement, or crisis, or climax, to which they might in life feel entitled, however well he knew that in art such things are necessary. His endings, like his beginnings, were solitary things. He let out the clutch and fled faster.

Wilkie put Frederica down, gathered up her helmet, strapped it to his pillion – “do for my girl,” he said – and pushed up his own visor to kiss her.

She said, “I will see you again, won’t I?”

“Probably. It’s a small world. Look after yourself.”

He closed up his face, too, in plastic shields and screens, and clambered onto the bike. She stood on the pavement, and watched him roar away after Alexander. She saw Jennifer Parry on her garden path, and began to take in the implications of Alexander’s roof-rack and comportment. She walked into the house and was met by a roar of rage from her father
who wanted to know where she thought she had been, why she had left such a mess in the house, with uncooked food scattered across the kitchen, and why, when he had opened the French window, wine-bottles had shattered all over the paving. And as much mess in the garden as in the kitchen, and her mother quite distracted, and all she could think of was swanning off with smart friends. Frederica was saved from answering these reproaches, which shed a little more murky light on Alexander’s possible feelings and movements, by the telephone, which Bill answered. It was, he said, coming back hunched and suppressed, her mother. He told Frederica what Winifred said the psychiatrist had said about Marcus. He said he had always believed they all knew he didn’t mean it – the things he sometimes did and said. Frederica said testily, her mind still on Alexander, that Marcus had clearly not known, had he, and that if he wanted to know, she thought Stephanie had not known, either, but that she, Frederica, if it comforted him, was made of tougher stuff, and did know that he wasn’t going, in this crisis, to fuss about uncooked chops on the kitchen table and wine-bottles on the flowerbeds. She then took in his expression and felt a twinge of pity and more than a twinge of fear. She cast about for a practical solution. There was Daniel, she said. Marcus seemed to trust Daniel. She’d noticed. Maybe Daniel and Stephanie would have Marcus until he’d pulled himself together a bit, or whatever he had to do.