The Virgin in the Garden

ALSO BY
A. S. Byatt

FICTION
Shadow of a Sun
The Game
Still Life
Sugar and Other Stories
Possession

CRITICISM
Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch
Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time
Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings

She had invited Alexander, whether on the spur of the moment or with malice aforethought he did not know, to come and hear Flora Robson do Queen Elizabeth at the National Portrait Gallery. He had meant to say no, but had said yes, and now stood outside that building contemplating its sooty designation. She had also, for good measure, invited everyone else present at a very ill-assorted dinner party: only Daniel, beside himself, had accepted. There had been a young painter there who had declared that the words National and Portrait were in themselves enough to put him off, thanks. It was not, this decided person declared, his scene. It was Alexander’s scene, Frederica had firmly said, and Alexander had demurred, although he had always had a fondness for the place. Anyway, he had come.

He considered those words, once powerful, at present defunct, national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation. Both mattered, or had mattered, to Alexander. He found himself, nevertheless, aesthetically amused by his surroundings. There was the black circling curve of railings to which was tied a repeating series of pale reproductions of the Darnley portrait of Elizabeth Tudor, faded coral, gold, white, arrogance, watchfulness, announcing “People, Past and Present”.

On the way he had passed several recruiting posters for the First World War, pointing accusatory fingers at him, and a shop called “I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet”, full of reproduced bric-à-brac of the British Empire, backed not by bugles calling but by the universal clang and moan of amplified electric guitar. On a Shaftesbury Avenue hoarding he had seen a monstrous image of a rear view of a brawny worker, naked to the waist and from there enclosed in tight-buttoned red, white and blue breeches. “I’m Backing Britain” was scrawled across this person’s bulging backside.

Above him, on the steps of the National Gallery were the peripatetic folk with the new ancient faces. Jesus boots, kaftans, sporadic bursts of song or tinkling breaking a tranquillised hush.

Alexander went in. She was not there, as he might have known. The Gallery had changed since his last, not recent, visit. It had lost some of its buff and mahogany Victorian solidity and had acquired a stagey
richness, darkly bright alcoves for Tudor icons on the stairway, not, he thought, unpleasing. He went up to look for the Darnley portrait, which had been removed for the performance, so he was left to sit on a bench contemplating an alternative Gloriana, raddled, white-leaded, bestriding the counties of England in thunderstorm and sun, painted an inch thick, horse-hair topped and hennaed, heavy with quilted silk, propped and constricted by whalebone.

The crowd flowed between him and the paintings. It seemed to have overflowed from the steps of the National Gallery, variously uniformed, uniformly various. Grimy thonged feet under, silky, fluffy, matted beards over, sari and saffron robe. Military jackets from Vietnam and the Crimea, barely sprouted moustaches and poultry-thin necks popping out of gilded collars above tarnished epaulettes. Rubber-hard girls in silver tights and silver boots, with silver skirts bouncing on compact rumps. Limp girls in black velvet dangling meshed-metal purses, with paper flowers in the coils and curtains of their artificial hair. Several George Sands, Mesdemoiselles Sacripant, in trousers, frilled shirts, and velvet berets. Shuffling, sexless people in drooping garments made from the ill-printed Indian bedspreads that had gathered dust in the seaside attics of Alexander’s childhood. Some carried brand-new Benares begging bowls. Like cows they clattered new shiny bells round their necks. Alexander had seen these for sale in dozens of street-stalls. The vendors had little placards saying that the bells symbolised inwardness.

Under English macintoshes, English tweed, English cashmere, American tourists edged doggedly forward, wired from plastic knobs in the ears to the inward murmur of the boxed soundguides. It was no doubt whispering about the iconic and yet realistic qualities of these English Renaissance images, barbaric and crude two centuries after the solid and airy glories of the High Renaissance, yet a style that was beginning to know what it was. A secular style, a new beginning after the iconoclastic excesses under young Edward VI, when angels, Mothers and Children had flared and crackled in the streets, immolated to a logical absolute God who disliked images.

Alexander thought, surveying Thomas Cromwell and the mock-soldiers, about the nature of modern parody. It seemed to him who did not understand or like it, undirected and aimless: they imitated anything and everything out of an unmanageable combination of aesthetic curiosity, mocking destructiveness and affectionate nostalgia, the desire to be anything and anywhere other than here and now. Did these soldiers loathe or secretly desire warfare? Or did they not know? Was it all a considered “statement”, as the painter would have said, about accommodated and unaccommodated man? Or was it just a hysterical
continuation of childhood dressing-up? Alexander himself had considerable knowledge about the history of clothing, could place a shift of seam or change of cut in relation to tradition and the individual talent almost as well as he could a verse-form or a vocabulary. He watched his own clothes and his own poetry in the light of these delicate shifts of subdued innovation. But he was apprehensive that at this time there was no real life in either.

He was nevertheless, at fifty, in well-cut olive gabardine, cream silk shirt and gold chrysanthemum tie, a handsome man.

He went out again, against his better judgment, to look for Frederica. He leaned over the balcony above the stairwell. Directly below him, in front of a portrait of the late King, his Queen, and two princesses in vermilion lipstick, drooping skirts and sling-back shoes, all dwarfed entirely by the huge canvasful of pale green good taste and glitter of chandeliers and silver teapots in a drawing-room in Windsor, Frederica was engaged in a feinting, weaving dance, round a quilted triangular stool, with an unknown man. This man was large, and, foreshortened from above, consisted of a wide expanse of glossy black PVC raincoat, crisping out round a bulky body, and a heavy mass of straight blond hair, with a sheen like cool butter.

This man reached across the stool and caught her wrist: she reached up, spoke in his ear, kissed him under it, and twisted away. He reached after her as she moved off, and ran the flat of one large hand down her spine, over her tail, cupping it, resting there. It was a gesture of complete, and public, intimacy. He then shouldered his way out through the crowd, not looking back. Frederica laughed, and came on up. Alexander retreated.

“Ah,
there
you are. Have you seen Daniel? I’m amazed he thought fit to come.”

Alexander did not answer, since he could see Daniel coming along the landing, a fat man in black cords and black turtleneck sweater. He came heavily up to them and nodded.