The Virgin in the Garden Read Online Free PDF

Economics, and his work was described as satisfactory and uninspired. “Satisfactory” covers a wide range of performances, between the excellent and the almost inadequate. In Alexander’s classes, for instance, Potter habitually left sentences unfinished and was surprised when this was pointed out to him. In class he seemed silent and strained, and Alexander had entertained the idea that he was one of those who put so much initial effort into the process of attention that they fail in practice to hear anything, frozen into an attitude of concentration.
    As a small boy, however, he had had the uncanny gift of being able to do instant mathematics. He had also been discovered to have perfectpitch. When he was fourteen the mathematical ability had mysteriously left him. The perfect pitch remained, but the boy showed no great interest in music. He sang in the choir and played the viola in an accurate expressionless way. Bill’s colleagues were aware that he himself, almost entirely unmusical, was touchingly proud of his son’s gifts, which he persisted in regarding as evidence of a capacity, in due course, for an even more phenomenal academic success than those already achieved, more conventionally, by his two elder sisters.
    Alexander had had a brief period of intense interest in Marcus. A year ago he had produced a school
Hamlet
in which Marcus had been a chilling and extraordinary Ophelia. The boy’s acting had something of the same quality as his maths and his music: something simply transmitted, like mediumship. His Ophelia was docile, remote, almost automatically graceful: the songs and mad speech were a hesitant, disintegrating parody of these qualities. He had not made a sexually attractive girl, although he had made a vulnerable one, and a bodily credible one. He had given the flirtation and the bawdy the gawkiness of extreme uncertainty about how these forms of talk should be conducted, which was exactly how Alexander thought the part should, or anyway could, be played. He had produced these moods and manners from Alexander’s smallest hints, though he had always waited for direction of some kind, never adding anything of his own volition except an apparently faultless instinct for the rhythm of the language, the fall of the lines. Boys before the age of self-consciousness are lovely to direct and could give, as Alexander well knew, depths they were unconscious of to lines they didn’t understand. But Marcus had achieved something extraordinary that had moved Alexander, and indeed frightened him, though apparently no one else. No other performance of Ophelia had ever made it so clear that the play’s events simply cracked and smashed the innocent consciousness.
    Bill had sat through that production, for all its three nights, grinning with pride and a sense of achievement. Alexander hoped to be allowed to use Marcus in the new play – he had an idea for him – and hoped further that if this came off he would be able to catch Bill’s interest for the play in general.
    As Alexander crossed the grass, Marcus dropped on all fours and laid his face on the paved margin of the Bilge Pond. Alexander veered away and made noises, coughing, shuffling, to indicate his presence. The boy sprang up and stood shaking. There was mud on his face.
    He adjusted his spectacles, moony National Health, which had been driven to one side by his extravagant manoeuvre. He was an undergrownboy, thin, with a long pale face and a lot of fine falling, colourless, dusky blond hair. He wore flannels and a faded blue tweed jacket, too small for him.
    “Are you all right?” said Alexander.
    Marcus stared.
    “I was going to see your father. Are you going home? Are you all right?”
    “No.”
    Alexander could not think of a further question.
    “Everything shook. The earth.”
    “That was the train. It always happens.”
    “Not like that. It doesn’t matter. I’m O.K. now.”
    There was something unattractive about Marcus Potter.