The Virgin in the Garden (42 page)

Daniel and Stephanie noticed very little. Stephanie watched Bill and Daniel watched Stephanie, and Bill watched the television, apparently taking a childlike and unexpected pleasure in its mechanics. Jennifer Parry watched Alexander, and Geoffrey watched Thomas, who was strapped into a little chair on the floor. Mrs Thone was little moved. Her interest in the future, and her real interest in the outside world, had ceased with her son. Once she had understood exactly that between a good breakfast and an end of break bell a boy could run, fall, smash, twitch, stop moving forever and begin to decay, she understood also that nothing could be undone, no air raid, no death camp, no monstrous genesis, and that the important thing about herself was that she had not much time and it did not matter greatly what she did with it. In lieu of caring, since she had unfortunately a good deal of vitality which this understanding had not diminished, she had developed a sharp and pointless pride in the keeping up of appearances. The Coronation was an appearance that was at least being pretty well kept up. (Winifred’s efforts on Stephanie’s behalf were another: therefore the invitation.) The dead king was buried and his daughter was his future. For her his going was simply another landmark, a further indication that her own real life, including any future she might have cared for, was in the past. She served sausage rolls and squash to the little boys. She liked to have them in the house. She found it quite proper that they could not or would not look her in the eye. If they knew her thoughts, they should be unable to.

Alexander’s preoccupation with the past made him highly critical of the present. He was excessively irritated by Richard Dimbleby who chose to emphasise his encomium of Elizabeth II with sharp disparagement of Elizabeth I.

“Once again the fortunes of England are low, but in the character of the Queen how much greater is the advantage with which the second Elizabethan era begins. Her character is well known to all; it is the product of a happy childhood, based on the highest ethical and Christian principles, and serene in the knowledge of family love and unity.

“By contrast, the first Elizabeth, with the lusty imperious Henry VIII as her father and the scheming Anne Boleyn for mother, was not perhaps without some qualifications for the title ‘the daughter of the devil’ which the Spanish ambassador bestowed upon her. In mitigation she could offer evidence of a childhood that would make most of the twentieth-century’s broken homes to which young criminals’ delinquencies are so often attributed seem highly respectable. This grim childhood fostered the development of her wiles and cunning …” Alexander’s feelings about the “young wife and mother” cried up by Dimbleby were lukewarm at best. The young wife and mother, moreover, was on record as
disliking her predecessor for having been cruel to her ancestor, Mary Queen of Scots. Alexander brooded about the neo-Freudian social pieties implicit in Dimbleby’s panegyric, and then became gloomy as he thought that his own play, too, presented neo-Freudian pieties about what drove the original Gloriana. He had not really dealt with government: only with family life. Of Elizabeth I’s Coronation a contemporary had said, “In pompous ceremonies a secret of government doth much consist.” Elizabeth had “spontaneously” addressed the people in the City on the way to her Coronation: Alexander had stitched these words into the patchwork of his play.

“And whereas your request is that I should continue your good Lady and Queen, be ye assured that I will be as good to you as ever queen was to her people. No will in me can lack, neither do I trust that there lack any power. And persuade yourselves that for the safety and quietness of you all I will not spare, if need be, to spend my blood. God thank you all.” “If it moved a marvellous shout and rejoicing it is nothing to be marvelled at, since both the heartiness thereof was so wonderful, and the words so jointly knit.”

No, Alexander thought, that day, it is very apparent that we lack both heartiness and words jointly knit. Years later, before his successful lecture on the commentaries, he had written a parodic screenplay around the Coronation, trying to capture his sense of it as an attempt on style in a time of no style, a watery bright nostalgia created in weak, meandering, failing rhythms that were still moving, had surely some kind of unintentional dying fall. No producer could be got to be interested in it. It lacked, they said with bland tactlessness, topicality and bite.

Lucas had told Marcus that millions of mental energies would be concentrated on this one place, on this one event. Marcus must attempt to hook on or tune in to these forces. Real electrical connections were making invisible powers produce visible signs and symbols, the anointing with oil and the operations of the cathode rays. He spoke of flowing and combing and bands. Marcus had a confused impression that their efforts of attention were directed towards weaving a smooth flow of new forms with the aid of the ministrations of Princes and Bishops, Lords spiritual and temporal. Lucas sat at the other side of the room from Marcus, who was with the other boys on dove grey velvet stools in the front row. Lucas had said better keep the work unnoticed. Now and then Marcus felt the swivelling of his friend’s intermittent lighthouse glare of concentration on himself.

Most of the time his dutiful staring produced nothing but a geometrical vision of the glass surface, swanning with dots, pothooks, worms, pillules, blotches, rhythmic ticking and twitching. However, at
the moment of the Queen’s anointing, to which Lucas had adjured him to pay particular attention, he suddenly managed to focus the image as an image, the shiny grey cloth of gold put off, to see the tiny woman with fifteen yards of pleated white linen folded over her substantial breast, sitting in the clumsy ancient chair, hand on hand, as his own sweating hands were. The picture now flicked, flicked and flicked, as he saw it, so that the frames rose and rose again from underneath themselves, feet over head over feet over head, therefore two-dimensional.

Maybe Lucas had hoped he would see the dove descending, or, as one clairvoyant had, the pillared feet and knees of the Angel of the Abbey rising glassy and huge through the fabric of the roof.

What happened was closer to the spreading. For a moment Marcus’s fingers plucked at white linen chill on his shoulders and breast. Mrs Thone’s placid cool room humped and shuddered. Marcus stood up, muttering incoherently, and blundered towards the television, which immediately abandoned the representation of the human body for a representation of waves of wires vibrating in a blizzard. People told him to sit down. He wandered away a step or two and as he stepped away so the screen, still crackling, returned to the transmission of its images. Lucas Simmonds rose to his feet. So did Daniel. Lucas, seeing Daniel, sat down again, looking frightened and angry. Marcus rotated slowly. Daniel gripped his arm; it was observable that once Daniel’s body was between the boy and the instrument the crackling ceased and Her Majesty stabilised and beamed again. Marcus, in pain, considered biting Daniel, whom he could not see for haze, but who was, he felt, enveloping him like a boa constrictor. Daniel, after a look at his face, gave his elbow a violent pinch, the least conspicuous shock he could administer, and said to Stephanie on the sofa, “Shove up, make room for him over here.” Between their two warm bodies Marcus sagged and shivered. Daniel gave him another pinch, almost vicious, which caused him to snap closed his hanging mouth. Then he shut his eyes, too, and rested against the dry black heat which seemed to move from Daniel to Stephanie, making a circuit that kept him from whatever other forces moved in the room.

Stephanie, roused momentarily from the too-placid lethargy that was her defence against Bill’s crackling, remembered that worry about Marcus had sent her to Daniel in the first place, and that she, they, had forgotten Marcus in their own troubles. She had been sleeping like the dead, so as not to think, a gift she shared with her brother. She did not know whether or not he was still weeping at night. She glanced briefly at Lucas Simmonds. He wore a pleased and conciliatory grin, boyish, pillar-box red under the curls, and tears stood in his eye-corners. When he saw her looking at him he gave a series of rigid, presumably affable
little nods, put his hands under his buttocks and sat on them, giving the impression that he was exercising some form of difficult self-control.

The processions wound on. Dimbleby remarked on the superb English gift for ceremonial, several times. So many men moving as one, so many hearts beating as one. Frederica observed that she hated being moved in the mass, that the thing she really feared was great groups of people moving around like one animal. This seemed to inspire Edmund Wilkie to make a speech. At one point during the proceedings when the London streets were jetty with rain, he had put on a pair of pink goggles, through which he now smiled out at them, saying that he had met a most interesting psychoanalyst called Winnicott who had some really riveting ideas about the unconscious drives behind democracy. All human beings, Wilkie said, according to Winnicott, were possessed by an unconscious fear of Woman, which made it very difficult for individual women, naturally, to get or handle social or political power. Rulers were surrogate parents, and both men and women wouldn’t accept women in this position because in their subconscious jungles lurked monstrous and overpowering Fantasy Women. According to Winnicott this explained the terrible cruelty to women found in most cultures. People were afraid of Woman because they had all, once, in the beginning, been totally dependent on Her, and had had to establish their individuality by denying this dependence. Dictators, according to this Winnicott, dealt with the terror of Woman by claiming to encompass her and act for her. This was why they demanded not only obedience, but Love. This may be why Frederica was so afraid of group emotion, love or hate.

Everyone furtively searched his or her unconscious, in so far as it could be said to be accessible, for a fear of Woman, and, it must be related, duly found it. Bill Potter told Wilkie that the whole thing sounded like codswallop to him, ludicrously pat, and Frederica said well, then, what about the Queen and all this affection we’re demonstrating?

Ah, said Wilkie, the Crown was O.K. because it was hereditary and at the top of a chain of symbolic parentage, as the first Elizabeth had cleverly known. The Commons were the parents of the people, and the Lords of the Commons, and the Monarch of the Lords. If the Monarch could manage to believe in God then the chain extended conveniently to infinity and was quite safe and stable. Thus, said Wilkie, Winnicott demonstrates, that the myths of the Dying God and the Eternal Monarch are still at work in our own culture at this juncture. The Queen protects us from the fear of Woman because she is a good, distant, unthreatening parent, and so we have our democratic monarchy.

Bill said that he was sick and tired of having everything brought back
to sex and the family. Wilkie said he did agree, but in our time we had to be Freudian, we had no option, and universal psychological tropisms always looked wrong dragged into the light of day where they were not meant to be, since one resisted and repressed them, or they would not be what they were. That, said Bill, was the trouble with psychoanalysis: it was a closed circle: any disagreement was simply ascribed to resistance, which reinforced the original point. In the eyes of the believers. That was the nature of belief. He preferred not to tangle with it. And if Wilkie wanted to know what he thought, he thought the real danger to individuals came not from Women but from this bland little, simple little, universal little screen. Which would clearly do away with reading, talk, communal play, craft and life.

Wilkie said it might not do that, but that if they had seen the experiments he had seen with subliminal suggestions – giving a man a raging thirst with a series of invisibly rapid frames of a glass of iced water in the middle of a film about something quite different – they would be afraid of what a Hitler could do with pictures of leering Jews strangling starving kids. But the thing was here to stay, and he personally intended to involve himself in it, because it was where the centre of energy was, in our culture, and you either used it, or sat on your bottom and watched it. This dictum at least Frederica and Alexander took to heart and remembered, though Wilkie appeared on this occasion possibly foppish and of no account, with his round pink eyes and a captiously sprouting bit of beard he was trying to grow for Ralegh.

Years later, after his play and his play’s aftermath, after his abortive screenplay and his severe lecture, Alexander was visited by total recall of the Coronation day on an evening when he was employed to write 500 words about a very different television occasion, the grilling of the female Jan Morris by Robin Day, and a team of women, psychological, feminist, fierce, friendly. During this exercise film was shown of the beautiful young James Morris leaning out over the shining white reaches of that conquered virginal peak that was not a Sign, and gleefully proclaiming its submission. Here in person was a sign, Alexander thought, if a hard sign to interpret, female by sex, male by gender, undergoing a positively Attic self-mutilation to become an analogue of the first Elizabeth’s emblem, the renewed Phoenix, the alchemical
mysterium coniunctionis
, Hermes and Aphrodite, mother and father, like Spenser’s Ovidian Nature. He thought of the occult myth that the first Elizabeth was a man, or a woman with male characteristics. The reign of the second had, it turned out, been ushered in by Hermes on a mountain who became Aphrodite and enjoyed having her bottom anachronistically slapped by taxi-drivers in Bath. Robin Day trapped and
teased this ambivalent but dignified figure with unexpected images of her, or his, earlier incarnation. It was a long way from Richard Dimbleby’s orotund homage to the Young Woman.

Alexander spent an unduly long time trying to write a riddling metaphysical witty meditation on Ms Morris and Mr Day, and gave up, out of considerations of courtesy, taste, and legality. What he published was, ironically, an almost Dimblebyesque tribute to Ms Morris’s leggy poise and husky civility.