Read Online The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: A.S. Byatt
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brushing down skirts. They took out diaries, arranged to meet again, promised to write. Then, as she did always, she set out almost at a run, not looking back. He always gave her fifteen minutes start.
He sat back in the dead leaves composing a sentence of a yet-unwritten letter that would somehow weave the frailties of numb and cramped bodies into the sense he had of infinite golden time and space. She left such warmth behind her. He felt possessed by her. He smiled.
When he was a little boy, alone on Weymouth sands he had always had, or possibly been, so intense was her foamy presence, an imaginary girlfriend out of the sea, white and gold and clean and shining like Ellie in
The Water Babies
. Some memory of this presence was behind his Elizabeth. Possibly he had wanted to be a woman. This felt like some rather remote observation about someone else. If it was right then it ought to have added some sort of energy, or force, to his play. Which was what mattered. He must check that pseudo-Eliot-pseudo-Ovidian line.
After the proper time he got up and strolled deliberately back to the Castle Mound. The male and female gangs had now amalgamated and were cooking things in cans over a twiggy bonfire. The girl in the scarlet snood was splayed backwards over the knees of the largest and grubbiest boy, her dress rucked up over her thighs. The three smaller girls were sitting crosslegged, staring intently, their observation obviously an essential part of whatever was going on. As Alexander came out of the dark they switched their stares to him. The girl in the snood, wriggling with a movement as deliberate as a three-year-old’s automatic exposure of round belly and drooping pants to any male, arched her little crutch at him, quivering, waved a languid hand and made a loud, vulgar noise. Alexander felt the blood rise to his face and move under his hair. Worsted in some primitive test of audacity, he looked away, and hurried on.
4. Women in Love
The sisters sat by Stephanie’s electric fire in nightclothes. Stephanie was dripping, injecting milk into the increasingly bedraggled but still living kittens. She wore striped Marks and Spencer’s boys’ pyjamas, ratherlarge, inside which her rounded body seemed formless and elusively bulky. Frederica affected a long white nightdress with full sleeves, and a yoke of broderie anglaise threaded with black ribbon. She liked to imagine this garment falling about her in folds of fine white lawn. It was in fact made of nylon, the only available kind of nightdress, except for vulgar shiny rayon, in Blesford or Calverley. It did not fall, it clung to Frederica’s stick-like and knobby limbs, and she disliked its slippery feel. She was always too easily seduced, when buying clothes, by some Platonic ideal garment possibly, though not necessarily, also envisaged by the makers of the cheap imitations she could afford to buy. She would have had a Yorkshire sense of quality in cloth if she’d had the money to go with it. Lacking money, she refused to be shrewd about the second-rate.
They talked about Alexander, and about their lives. There was no rivalry, only a curious complicity, about their love for him, probably because both in different ways were convinced that the love was hopeless. In Frederica’s case, the hopelessness was believed to be strictly temporary: she could not expect him to notice the glories of her mind and body just yet, since both of them were clouded by the repulsively constricting uniform, conventions and intellectual horizons of Blesford Girls’ Grammar. It is harder to know why Stephanie was so sure her love was hopeless. Alexander had watched her grow from girl to woman over five years and had never really
seen
her, so there was no reason to suppose he would suddenly do so. Her idea of him, which she enjoyed, was an idea of a man untouched, remote and pristine. This was part of a symbolic view of Alexander held by both sisters, elaborated in talk, which was in
He sat back in the dead leaves composing a sentence of a yet-unwritten letter that would somehow weave the frailties of numb and cramped bodies into the sense he had of infinite golden time and space. She left such warmth behind her. He felt possessed by her. He smiled.
When he was a little boy, alone on Weymouth sands he had always had, or possibly been, so intense was her foamy presence, an imaginary girlfriend out of the sea, white and gold and clean and shining like Ellie in
The Water Babies
. Some memory of this presence was behind his Elizabeth. Possibly he had wanted to be a woman. This felt like some rather remote observation about someone else. If it was right then it ought to have added some sort of energy, or force, to his play. Which was what mattered. He must check that pseudo-Eliot-pseudo-Ovidian line.
After the proper time he got up and strolled deliberately back to the Castle Mound. The male and female gangs had now amalgamated and were cooking things in cans over a twiggy bonfire. The girl in the scarlet snood was splayed backwards over the knees of the largest and grubbiest boy, her dress rucked up over her thighs. The three smaller girls were sitting crosslegged, staring intently, their observation obviously an essential part of whatever was going on. As Alexander came out of the dark they switched their stares to him. The girl in the snood, wriggling with a movement as deliberate as a three-year-old’s automatic exposure of round belly and drooping pants to any male, arched her little crutch at him, quivering, waved a languid hand and made a loud, vulgar noise. Alexander felt the blood rise to his face and move under his hair. Worsted in some primitive test of audacity, he looked away, and hurried on.
4. Women in Love
The sisters sat by Stephanie’s electric fire in nightclothes. Stephanie was dripping, injecting milk into the increasingly bedraggled but still living kittens. She wore striped Marks and Spencer’s boys’ pyjamas, ratherlarge, inside which her rounded body seemed formless and elusively bulky. Frederica affected a long white nightdress with full sleeves, and a yoke of broderie anglaise threaded with black ribbon. She liked to imagine this garment falling about her in folds of fine white lawn. It was in fact made of nylon, the only available kind of nightdress, except for vulgar shiny rayon, in Blesford or Calverley. It did not fall, it clung to Frederica’s stick-like and knobby limbs, and she disliked its slippery feel. She was always too easily seduced, when buying clothes, by some Platonic ideal garment possibly, though not necessarily, also envisaged by the makers of the cheap imitations she could afford to buy. She would have had a Yorkshire sense of quality in cloth if she’d had the money to go with it. Lacking money, she refused to be shrewd about the second-rate.
They talked about Alexander, and about their lives. There was no rivalry, only a curious complicity, about their love for him, probably because both in different ways were convinced that the love was hopeless. In Frederica’s case, the hopelessness was believed to be strictly temporary: she could not expect him to notice the glories of her mind and body just yet, since both of them were clouded by the repulsively constricting uniform, conventions and intellectual horizons of Blesford Girls’ Grammar. It is harder to know why Stephanie was so sure her love was hopeless. Alexander had watched her grow from girl to woman over five years and had never really
seen
her, so there was no reason to suppose he would suddenly do so. Her idea of him, which she enjoyed, was an idea of a man untouched, remote and pristine. This was part of a symbolic view of Alexander held by both sisters, elaborated in talk, which was in
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