The Virgin in the Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

cast-iron bridge. Under it, behind high embankments, the railway wound its way along the edge of the Field, providing in a long loop, also, the curve of the horizon. Along the edge of the embankment ran a heavy steel mesh fence behind which trains rushed north and south, showering billowing steam onto the field and the few rhododendrons on the embankment, and clouds of fine, hot, pricking grit onto the boys in the jumping-pits at the edge of the path, leaving black smears on leaves and skin.
    Alexander stopped and put his hands on the rail of the bridge. He felt flatly happy. He felt complete. He had the strange thought that he was as intelligent as he needed to be: he could take in whatever came. This was something to do with the fact that the play was now one thing and he himself another, deprived, but at liberty. He had habitually seen these fenced fields and the school itself as imprisoning. When he first came he wrote to old Oxford friends mocking its ugliness, northernness, narrowness. Then he stopped mocking, afraid that to talk at all was to admit that the place constrained him, too. Occasionally he had said to people at Blesford Ride itself: I am writing a play: and they had said: oh yes: or, what about?: but it had felt at such moments thin and hectic, a fever of the mind. Now it was being carried around, reproduced, read. And now he was separate from his work, he was separate also from Blesford Ride. And separate, could take a benign, curious interest in it. He stared down at the grimy field with arrogant pleasure in the fact that it was as it was and he saw it.
    The failing evening light thickened shadows and outlines, blackened the mesh of the fence, extinguished the remnants of colour in the muddy grass. He felt under him the tremble and hum of the bridge which heralded a passing train. He stared with gleeful curiosity. It came black and sinuous, then thundering and plunging towards and under him, working pistons, hammering wheels, enveloping him in spat sparks andacrid steam, banging away into the real distance. He came down: the earth was still shuddering, as though the thing had a wake in soil like vessels in water. Long strips of vapour spread raggedly, vanishing, at the edges, into the grey coming of dark. Someone was standing beside the Bilge Pond.
    The Biology Pond had always been known as the Bilge Pond. It had been dug out when the school was founded, and was now untended and decayed. It was a circular pond, stone-rimmed, set into the grass under the embankment. There were one or two water lilies and some duckweed, a rickety flagstone for newly transmuted frogs to sit on. The surface was silky black and the depth was difficult to determine, since the bottom was covered with a sediment of fine black mud. Boys had earlier cultivated water-life there, but now used the school’s well-endowed Field Research Station higher in the moors. There was an unsubstantiated rumour that the Bilge Pond was full of leeches which had propagated there since its beginning. No one put his feet in, in case these possibly mythical creatures should fasten to his ankles.
    The figure beside the pond was bent awkwardly over it, stirring with a long stick. As Alexander came nearer, he saw that this figure was Marcus Potter.
    Marcus was Bill’s youngest child and his only son. He had a free place at the school, and was officially due to take A levels in two years’ time. Nobody knew much about him. There was a general desire to treat him “normally”, which meant in practice never singling him out, and leaving him as far as possible to his own devices. Alexander occasionally heard himself addressing the boy in an unnaturally colourless tone, and knew he was not the only one to do so. But this was possibly because Marcus, unlike Bill, was an unnaturally colourless person.
    Bill could be seen to believe that Marcus was uncommonly gifted. There was little conventional evidence for this: he was working at Geography, History and