The Virgin in the Garden (53 page)

“No, neither do I. Words sound silly. I think we should hold hands.”

So they sat, holding hands, and Lucas raised the glass circle, catching the prism of light for a moment and reflecting it on the napkin, and then held it steady.

It was hard to see whether there was a white flame, or only molten air: it was very steady: no tongues licked: only what was laid out was eaten away, shrivelled and charred black. The transmitted grasses flew into fine ash, a shadow that held shape and then trembled into dust, and with them the gentian. The cellophane containing the dog’s mercury flared gold and platinum for a moment, went treacly and then black, and then nothing. The hair, over the blood, crisped, squirmed, settled and was blackly gone, and the blood under it with it. The viper’s bugloss hissed, boiled, curled up: most startling, the glass tube containing the mercury gave a creaking cry, shattered, and released a multitude of separated silvery droplets that ran through threads of charred cloth into burned earth. On the napkin, a charred circle, a black hole, spread silently, eating away the glare, briefly gold where the black advanced. There was a smell, animal and vegetable, of protesting, consumed matter. Over the hump of the ammonite the cloth flaked into darkness and fell in shreds, leaving a black and juicy tracery on the stone coils. Marcus stared: he remembered the earlier experience: this was concrete evidence of the power a lens could concentrate: flame or hot air it danced white, white, thick transparent white: a nothing into which if you put your finger you would most painfully be included.

Hold the glass, Lucas said, hold the glass steady and watch. I’m
going to
finish it off with a libation of milk and wine. He fiddled in Marcus’s basket, poured a little milk from a bottle into a tin lid, struggled briefly with a corkscrew and a bottle of Nuits St Georges. He splashed wine into the charred circle, where it steamed, flamed, smelled and went out. The milk in the tin lid contracted to wax-dark, then brownish traces and bubbles, producing a particularly nasty tortured smell which Marcus remembered from schooldays when he was five or six and the boys had clustered round the school stove, spitting bubbles of their ⅓-pint milk rations through straws onto the cast-iron surface. Lucas added a further drenching of wine, a reasonable puddle, on which charred fragments floated and which the earth supped up slowly.

Marcus put down the burning glass, which was truly burning to touch. He looked around him at air not molten, and down at the blackened sun-shaped patch which was the end result of their acts. It had been an extraordinary demonstration of the power of forces one normally had to take no account of. Lucas’s face and hair were sodden with sweat.

“Now what?” said Marcus.

“Now we sit and wait. We have made our cry, we have indicated what we want. Now we wait.”

Marcus watched the light move softly over the buttercups and wondered: what had they indicated that they wanted? To be consumed hotly and vanish? To become invisible? Black scraps and brimstone butterflies eddied and settled. They waited. The still afternoon went on.

“Have some wine,” said Lucas. He poured. After a time he said, “Have some more wine.” Marcus, unused to alcohol, drank thirstily. Lucas, erect, as though waiting for a touch of flame on the brow, or a voice from the blue vault, sipped angrily from a bakelite mug. He offered Marcus a beef sandwich and an apple, which Marcus accepted. He ate nothing himself. After two good beakers of wine Marcus lay down with his head on the rug and folded his arms over his face, making darkness. The light that had purposefully invaded him on the Far Field was conspicuous by its absence. Here was the sun, a burning glass, too much intention, a headache. After a moment, Lucas’s body was lowered next to his. The old questing voice said, “What next?”

“Oh, wait.” Thickly, into the crease of his elbow.

“Wait for what?”

“How should I know? You started this.”

After some more time, his friend said, meekly, “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologise to
me
. I didn’t think the heavens would open. We did really burn up some things, though, it was extraordinary.”

“Not extraordinary. Simple.”

Marcus realised that he had been reinvested with his dubious authority. He became angry.

“You
saw
what happened to all those things. You did. Now you ought to know what I’m so scared of, you ought to go carefully. I’m scared of my brains boiling in my head like the viper’s bugloss. You don’t seem to see that there is a simple real thing there that one could be really scared of. You ought to be scared, not put out, you haven’t
thought
. Do you want to be melted into a column of hot air and scattered on the sea by convection, do you, or made into ashes like the lovely grasses? Do you want to be nothing, do you? How near do you want to get? I don’t think you know what it might be like. I know. What you made was at least an illustration of what I’m scared of, but you’d never let me say it was terrible, you kept saying it was glorious. What do you want it to do? How do you know, if it took any notice of you, if it’s intelligent, that you could stand its attention? No, keep out of the way, keep still, that’s all we can do.”

There was a long silence. Then Lucas said simply, “I am so unhappy.”

Marcus turned his face away, and then, with darkened eyes, held out
his cut hand to Lucas, who took it, and hotly held it. Their bodies moved closer together. There was a strange clicking: Marcus became aware that Lucas’s teeth were chattering. He rolled over and put a tight arm over his friend’s shoulder, clutching the hot flannel. He smelled sweat, and panic. He scrabbled at Lucas’s body, like one keeping someone from dying of cold with his own warmth. The dull little voice said:

“I am so unhappy. I have nothing, no friends, nothing I do is real. And every now and then I almost see something, almost – and then there’s a disaster.”

“You have me,” said Marcus, trembling himself with unaccustomed gentleness.

“I am no good to you. You live in the real world. I go in and out of a phantasmagoria. I ought to know, I ought to keep watch, when I get thinner, it’s a Sign. I ought to protect you, you are in my care, not …”

“No. You’ve changed my life. And, Sir – what we saw was real, the grasses and the picture, that hasn’t gone, and maybe this is only taking its time to work, and there was Owger’s Howe – you did a lot – a lot – a lot was real –
is
real –”

He did not want this closed world to go. Lucas Simmonds was his protection from the importunity of the infinite.

“I am not pure. That’s what it is. Partly. Of the earth, earthy, though it smells and I hate the smell, I hate the whole messy business. I hate my body, I hate bodies, I hate hot and heavy … You are pure. One recognises it when one sees it. You are a clean being, you see cleanly. You are …”

Marcus did not want to know what he was. He edged closer, pulling at the blazer, and the weight of flesh under it. He said, as one might to a child, “Hush, keep still, it doesn’t matter. Something did happen, you’ve got to keep still. You’ve got me, I’m here.” And when had his own presence been a help or a consolation to anyone, ever, he thought, not remembering the days of his youth, or the moments shared with Winifred, speechless and closed, in the maternity hospital. He said, as she might then have said to him, a woman with a restless, struggling child, “Keep still, keep still, it doesn’t matter.” And quite suddenly Lucas Simmonds dropped into a flushed sleep, his wet mouth slightly open, his face turned towards Marcus, who lifted his head slightly and glimpsed the glitter of sweat along the cleft of the nose, the little balls of it gleaming amongst the hairs of the eyebrows. He held onto Lucas’s hand, and closed his own eyes, and slept, heavily and blackly, as though unconsciousness was what was most deeply to be desired.

When they woke, they disentangled arms and legs in silence and, backs turned one to another, gathered up their things, the blanket from the crushed grass, the apple core, the knife, packed and set out walking.
Marcus felt terrible. Indigo circles, like after-images of the sun, danced before him in triads and circling spires across the cliff grass, hovered over the fall to the water, hung in the sky. Lucas said nothing and went very fast so that Marcus had to stretch his legs and trot to keep up with him.

The glossy black-beetle car, parked on a grass verge, was very hot, outside and in, a little furnace, throwing off a haze of visible heat like a jellyfish skirt swaying in cool water might be, undulating. Lucas flung the baskets into the rudimentary back seat and got rapidly into the front, slamming the door and winding down the glass. Marcus followed him, running his hand round his neck inside the shirt. They added their blazers to the pile in the back. Marcus looked at Lucas who leaned back in his seat, staring not at the boy, but through the windscreen. Heat coiled about them.

Lucas said, “There are a lot of things I should say, things you should know, things I haven’t mentioned.”

“No, no …” deprecating. “It doesn’t matter.”

“How can you know that? There are things about me you should know, perhaps – though I’ve hoped this wasn’t all primarily a
personal
matter, I’ve hoped so. But I have cheated you in a way, there are things that happen – to me – you might feel you had a right to know about, if they happened again. I’ll tell you, I will tell you, in good time. No one can be blamed for being afraid of being transformed, translated or incarcerated, as has happened, in the past, I have to admit. It began with the destroyer. In the Pacific, when I was serving on that destroyer. There was some trouble, with aerials and messages, there too, and a Tribunal, I was called before a Tribunal, and then in a white cell for a long time – They told me then, you must never have children, you must never contemplate having children, you can transmit … I had the idea they had me electronically tracked to see if I was going in for – activity – on that front, to make sure there were no children. Maybe all that was an illusion. They were all white and the rooms were white, might have been anywhere, on the destroyer, outside time and space, I believed various things at various times as to the precise location of the events, and only really came to when I was somewhere in Greenwich which was certainly not where I began. Maybe I flew. Maybe they flew me. Maybe time stopped. Nobody told me. They didn’t think, I expect, that I was fit, in a fit state, that is, to take information in, but I didn’t stop thinking on that account, by no means, I formed hypotheses as to my whereabouts. I think, I’m not sure, I know I
thought
they had electrodes in my lobes, and in my … To make sure … Maybe they did. They can do such things. You’d be surprised if I told you some of the things I saw them do, before … before I left.

“I told you, they wanted me to teach sex instruction at that school, as an extension of human biology, but I said no, no, no, you must get a good lady from some Welfare in a hat to do that, or some wholesome smiley girl; I leave the Undying Worm alone, in my condition, nice hermaphroditic anonymous earthworms are as far as I go, convenient creatures with few problems, at least as they are made apparent to the human eye. I do amphibians and rabbits, but man that great amphibium I leave alone and hope very much we may so evolve that the whole issue becomes redundant, I tell them, or not, depending on who I think is listening, and
how
they are listening, naturally. There are ways to eternal life that aren’t available to the higher organisms, you know, even Freud said so. He said death was bound up with our sexual method of perpetuating ourselves. Once the cells of the body have become divided into
soma
and germ-plasm, he said, an unlimited duration of individual life would become a quite pointless luxury. A quite pointless luxury. When this differentiation had been made in multicellular organisms death became possible and expedient. The
soma
dies, the protista remain immortal. The undying seed. But they told me, you must never contemplate … I said that. Another thing, Freud said, was that reproduction didn’t begin only when death did. Oh no. It’s a primal characteristic of living matter, like growth. Life has been continuous from its first beginning upon earth. There’s a mystery. It’s only the individual higher organism that’s sexually divided and dies. Not the biosphere on the one hand. Nor the hermaphrodite hydra on the other, that divides and divides and becomes more examples of the same form, somewhere between vegetable and animal.

“There was a book I was led to read recently, an odd old book of Heard’s, not one of the ones about the evidences of God, a book called
Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes
. I liked that because it saw the clothes we wear as our way of modifying our anatomy – corsets and razors – and later, chemistry and pharmacy, control of the pituitary gland, the removal of unwanted hair – Heard sees it all as an evolutionary move to reduce the
mass
of our bodies. That’s very interesting, I thought. He said that houses and wardrobes and tool chests were ways of laying aside fur and nails and teeth. He said scientific diet would in due course rid us of our clumsy distillery of intestinal coils. He said that we should grow to be like Wells’s Martians, tentacled brains in machines, only we would not find that repellent but beautiful, a man without his machine would revolt us then, as a man without his clothes disgusts respectable ladies now, or the sight of the lovely brain without its covering of hair and skin still revolts us irrationally. He said we should become swarms of bright little clockwork organisms like watch cases, with tiny opalescent
bodies at the heart of the springs. It fitted into the Jung in my mind – about Mercurius and the
prima materia –
because he said we could get back to where we began – an idea imprisoned in matter – “You said out there, did I want to be nothing. Like the grasses, you said. Well, yes, I do and I don’t. Do you read much poetry?”

Marcus said no, he did not. He added that he had been allergic to poetry, which had lain about his house all his life, like so much dust or pollen, all over, and he now considered himself desensitised. To this remarkable and illuminating confession Lucas did not listen, or barely, since he was going on to explain that he had also recently been led to read a considerable amount of poetry and particularly the works of Andrew Marvell who had seemed to understand about the desire to be without the limitations of sex and the troubles of flesh. He had written a very lovely poem called
The Garden
in which he spoke of Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. My vegetable love, Lucas said, broodingly and apparently irrelevantly. After a further gap, he said, “I wish I could simply teach botany, I wish it were possible to stick at a green thought.” After another silence he added, “I’m not a homosexual you know, I’m not anything.”