The Virgin in the Garden (21 page)

Beyond its linear movements it could be experienced as sheets, or towering advancing fronts, like crested waves miles high, infinite or at least immeasurable, like walls and more and more walls of cold, white flame. It had other motions not measured by measurements available to man, or separable in the experience of man, yet there, so that he had to know he could not know more than that they were there. He was confined by their closeness and ubiquity, stretched and distorted by his stressed, distressed sense of their continuous operation beyond any attention he could fix on them.

So he came to see this as a presence, and a presence with purpose. It was a presence wholly outside his scale, conducting its work with a magnitude and a minuteness at once too grand and too precisely delicate for him to map. Stretched and contracted he sensed it lap round him and through him and for the worst moment he was almost concentrated on its passage through his own consciousness. He was both saved (from bright blinding, from annihilation) and prevented (from losing himself in it) by a geometric figure which held as an image or more in that glare and play of light. He saw intersecting cones, stretching to infinity, containing the pouring and rushing. He saw that he was at the, or a, point of intersection, and that if it could not pass through it would shatter the fragile frame to make a way. He must hold together, but let it go through, like the burning glass with the gathered light of the sun. The rims flared and flared and flared. He said “Oh God.” He tried to be and not to be, and most dangerous, to go on.

When he walked it came with him, or was seen to be ahead also. He thought he might die before he got to the school and could not go back
because what was behind was steadily increasing its activity. He took a step and a step and a step and the fields of light swayed and roared and came and went and sang.

He arrived in some way at the school and was able to sit down on the low wall of the cloister, opposite horned Moses, a figure who owed something to Michelangelo and more to Rodin’s bulky Balzac. Marcus stared into the convex stone eyes and considered.

The turbulence was at some distance: it stopped short of the red brick: the edges of its activity troubled the lawn and the glasshouses. He could not go on or back. As he considered, a figure in white garments stepped radiantly through the films of light as though it inhabited them briskly and easily. Its head curled softly bright in the sun. Marcus, cold now, blinked painfully. It was Lucas Simmonds, heading for the Bilge Lab. He did not believe, how should he, in signs and portents. But this was the third time. In the Odeon, in the Butchery, Simmonds had offered a helping hand. Now he came past. Marcus got up and began exhaustedly to trail after him. There was in any case, the small voice pointed out, absolutely no one else.

The Bilge Lab was part of the old buildings. Physics and Chemistry had a new extension, rectangular, glass-walled, tiled with abstract mosaics. The Bilge Lab was Gothic, with “Biology, Human Physiology and Anatomy” over its door in gold Gothic lettering on a midnight blue ground. The door was arched heavy oak.

He got in. Rows of high empty benches, high stools, curving serpentine brass taps, tiny porcelain basins, gas fittings, green shaded lights. In the window, in the sun, a figure in a white coat with crumpled grey flannels hanging below.

“Sir,” he said. Although he felt he was bellowing and winced at the roar, his voice was in fact reedy and faint, slurred like the feet he couldn’t drive forward. “Sir …”

Simmonds turned round, smiling.

“Hullo, old chap. What’s up?”

“Sir …”

Slowly clutching the doorknob he came down to the floor and sat clutching the door. It swung unstably. Pure hatred of its shiftiness moved over him.

Lucas Simmonds ran round the benches.

“Take your time. Don’t worry. Had a shock? Lie down, that might be best.”

He did not touch Marcus. He stood over him, with a grin of concern and gestured at the lino. “Go on. Lie back. Much the best.”

Marcus lowered himself gingerly. He arranged his arms, out of some
nervous compulsion, neatly alongside his body. Above him, bent over him, Simmonds’s bright face beamed and wavered.

“Had a shock,” he reiterated. Marcus acquiescently closed his eyes. “A drink might do you good.”

He brought a lipped glass laboratory beaker of water, which he put down beside Marcus’s head. Awkwardly, rolled over, upon one elbow, tears in his eyes, Marcus sipped. There was a faint chemical taste, and the taint of ether, which always hung over the place.

“Been seeing things?” Simmonds now knelt beside Marcus, peering closely into his face. This casually pressing question increased Marcus’s hazy sense of portent and working destiny. Anyone else surely would have asked are you ill? He turned his head from side to side on the lino. “Seeing things?” Simmonds echoed himself, watching, smiling.

“Not
things
.”

“Not things. I see. Not things. What?”

Marcus remembered Simmonds going on about the mathematical landscape. Beyond that, his hunted mind casting this way and that to escape Bill’s relentless questions.

“What?” Simmonds insisted gently.

He closed his eyes and mouth. He opened them furtively and said, “Light. It was the light.” And closed again. Everything he could.

“Light. I see. What kind of light?”

“I can’t say.
Too much light
. It was terrible light;
alive
, if you see what I …”

“Oh yes,” said Simmonds, rapt. “Oh yes, I do indeed. Tell me.”

Marcus opened his mouth and was very sick. When he next knew anything he was lying with his head on some sort of cushion and something, Simmonds’s raincoat, was tucked over and round him. He was cocooned by incapacity. Simmonds’s face reappeared close to his own.

“You are shocked. You must keep still. Just lie there until you feel more like it. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of everything.”

He had no choice.

“I’ll finish what I was doing and we’ll go on with our chat when you’re more the thing.”

Simmonds was striding up and down along the benches, piling up aluminium lunch-boxes and corked jars. He seemed extraordinarily solid, superlatively normal. He whistled a little, gaily, through his teeth. Marcus remembered the dissection of the earthworm. Simmonds had dropped the worms, enough for the whole class, one by one into a beaker of chloroform, where they frothed and paled. Later, Marcus had had to slit and pin back the livid, rolling skin.

This room went back a long way, to the humanising intentions of the school’s founders. Here, aided by the study of the development of species, fish, flesh, fowl and frond, the boy should learn to obey the primary commandment: Know Thyself.

A few stuffed birds, an owl, some terns, a dusty group of robins and wrens, were perched on the top shelves of glass-fronted mahogany cupboards. Under these a wired skeleton lay on its side, joints dangling. Boxes of unstrung vertebrae, tarsals and meta-tarsals, chalky, creamy, rattled on desks by generations of boys like so many Jacks, scattered, swept together, returned to the shelf for next time.

A case contained things in bottles – kilner jars like those in which his mother preserved gluts of Victoria plums or unripe fallen apples and pears. Jam-jars, test-tubes. Dozens of foetuses. Tiny creamy-pink rats, blunt-headed, blind-eyed, with minute stumps of feet and tails, all rolled together and surely slightly crumbling like cheese in the surrounding liquid. Larger round-bellied ratlings, cord and placenta attached, flat-headed unborn cats, pallid flesh, unformed eyes closed against the glass wall and the light. Snake embryos, preserved in strings, like beads on a chain, coiled and forever undelivered, bird embryos preserved with the wall of their egg-shell cracked open to show the clenched ball of damp feathers, skinny thighs, flaccid beak. There was an Edwardian monkey embryo, in a mahogany-framed case, a grim homunculus, a brown shrivelled Genius in a bottle.

Parts of creatures were also preserved, to be handed for inspection from boy to boy, a bottle of lungs, of hearts, of eyes. Marcus remembered particularly the skinned cat’s head, its black-jelly-dark and lustreless eyes in the cloudy liquid, sunk and horrid. And the white rabbit in his ovoid box, his little paws, still furry and clawed, held apart to frame his pale innards, stained crimson, viridian, cobalt, guts, lungs, heart, over which his rabbit teeth grinned and his long ears drooped, squashed against him by the jar.

There were living things as well: a scuttering white mouse in a treadmill, a tank of water-snails and sticklebacks, a formitory through whose glass walls the dark passages of the ants could be seen, and the ants too, dragging pale pupae from level to level, hurrying and purposeful in mixed light and dark. There was the old experiment with the growth of seeds and photosynthesis. Peas and beans deprived of water, shrivelled and self-contained on cotton-wool. Peas and beans deprived of light poking up, blind and weak, straggling and colourless, their questing points. Warmed peas, cold peas, crowded peas, peas in slanted light and half-light, little blunted energetic tips here; there, already, a bowed uncurling leaf.

Marcus took another tepid sip of water and turned his attention to the comparative neutrality of diagrams. The urino-genital systems of frogs and rabbits, drawn in Indian ink by Lucas Simmonds, were displayed in two-dimensional good taste near the blackboard. Marcus’s knowledge was sketchy and Lucas’s notation minimal, so that he was quite unable to decide whether certain blunted, wriggling, finger-like shapes were protrusions or pockets, and thus mistook the male for the female rabbit and could see no apparent difference between the frogs.

Directly opposite the master’s dais, on which he was now lying, hung, side by side, in all their clinical and resolutely unlovely emancipation, Man and Woman. Both were in quadruplicate, on ancient, unrolled strips of parchment-coloured oilcloth. First, they appeared skeletal, next, a flayed and liverish pattern of muscular pulls and directions, next again, a view through the frame to the internal organs. Last, solid and cheesy, naked, steatopygous and hairless, the surfaces of flesh, the thing itself.

They stood repeated with dangling arms and parted legs, ciphered mouths, possibly smiling, skulls demarcated like battlefields in zones and hillocks. They were pierced like Victorian Sebastians by long black darts on the end of which appeared, in subdued Italic lettering, the names of parts. They had a look of ancient disuse, as though some maybe Edwardian usher had repeatedly indicated and partially obliterated their salient points with a long rule, and they had since fallen into neglect.

Lucas Simmonds returned and knelt beside him.

“How are you doing now?”

Marcus shook his head miserably.

“Tell me about this light.”

“Sir – I could be getting ill. It could be the aura of an illness? Or fits, or brain trouble. Sir.”

Lucas’s mouth-corners turned up quizzically in the middle of his round pink face.

“Do you really think that? Do you really feel that’s so?”

“How do I know? I’ve not been feeling right, exactly, for weeks. I’ve been …”

There was a tabu about describing tabus. He huddled under the raincoat.

“Please go on. I can probably help. Go on.”

“Well. I can’t concentrate. Not on the right things. Not on work. Too much on the wrong things. I get frightened of things. Not things it makes any sense to … treat that way. Silly things. A tap, a window,
stairs. I worry for ages. About
things
. I must be sort of ill, I must. And now this.”

“We label too many things as illnesses,” Simmonds said, paradoxically clinical in his white coat. “Anything unusual. Anything that changes our conventional habits, often very detrimental to our true well-being. Maybe you are being distracted for good reasons. Please go on to tell me about the light.”

Marcus closed his eyes. Simmonds gripped Marcus’s shoulder with one hand and jumped sharply away again.

“You see, it’s something about the playing fields. Always there, I’ve felt funny. I can get that I don’t know where I am, there, I can get that I can’t find my – I get spread.” Secretively offering the important word as code, or hostage.

“Spread. You mean, out of the body?”

“I don’t know what you mean. You could call it that. It’s a technical trick. I used to be able to make it happen or not, when I was little. Now it’s got out of hand.”

“A technical trick. A technique. I like that, that’s good. You can do it at will?”

“I don’t like doing it. Any more.”

Simmonds’s smile was enamel-bright.

“And did this technique produce the shock? This light you speak of?”

“Oh, no, no, no. I didn’t do anything at all.
It
did it. I mean, that’s the one thing I’m sure of. It just happened.”

“That’s better. Now. Tell me
what
it did?”

“How can I? It was frightful. It crowded me out. I was afraid of being – done away with.”

Simmonds wound his hands agitatedly together.

“And you think there’s something
wrong
with you, boy?”

“I told you. I was afraid. I couldn’t hold together.”

“Maybe you weren’t intended to. Maybe you were in the presence of a Power.”

Marcus found Simmonds’s attitude partly reassuring and partly alarming. It was reassuring that someone seemed confident of recognising and docketing phenomena he had feared only he was aware of at all. It was alarming because Simmonds seemed to have intentions, plans, a vision, in which he was by no means sure he wished to share.

“Photisms,” said Simmonds. “There’s a technical term for it, Potter. Photisms. Experiences of floods of light and glory which frequently accompany moments of revelation. The phenomenon is known.”

“Photisms,” Marcus repeated dubiously. He decided to sit up.

“The explanation of the phenomenon is of course open to scientific doubt. But it is a known experience, recorded and discussed.”

“Oh.”

“For God’s sake,” shouted Simmonds, greatly excited, “does it not occur to you that what you saw may have been more or less what Saul saw on the way to Damascus. What the shepherds saw in the fields at night. They were sore afraid,
sore
afraid, and so should you be, it’s no joke. You have to be trained, you see, to withstand, to respond to, things like that. Which you are not.”