The Virgin in the Garden Read Online Free PDF Page B

Alexander knew he should probe further, and did not wish to.
    “I’m O.K.,” the boy repeated, in one of his more dutiful, robotic tones. Alexander was quite clever enough to know that the boy wanted this statement setting aside. But he said only, “May I walk home with you?”
    Marcus nodded. They set off in silence for the little row of lights in the houses at the edge of the field.
    Marcus Potter had grown up on these playing fields. During holidays he was often their only inhabitant. They lay about him in his infancy and he lay in their mud and tussocks, making them Passchendaele and Ypres and the Somme, trenches, dugouts, No-Man’s land.
    He had played a game called spreading himself. This began with a deliberate extension of his field of vision, until by some sleight of perception he was looking out at once from the four field-corners, the high ends of the goal-posts, the running wire top of the fence. It was not any sense of containing the things he saw. Rather, he surveyed them, from no vantage point, or all at once. He located with impossible simultaneity a berberis stenophylla low on the left, the muddy centre of the field, the Bilge Pond away on the right.
    He was quite little when he became good at this game, and quite little when it went beyond his control. Sometimes, for immeasurable instants he lost any sense of where he really was, of where the spread mind had its origin. He had to teach himself to find his body by fixing the mind to precise things, by shrinking the attention until it was momentarily located in one solid object, a half-moon of white paint gripping blanched grass, the softly bright chained cricket rectangle, the soft black pond-water. From such points he could in some spyglass way search out the crouching cold body, and with luck leap the mind across to it.
    He learned early to be grateful for geometry, which afforded grip andpassage where knots of turves and cakes of mud did not. Broken chalk lines, the demarcation of winter games crossing summer ones, circles, parallel tramlines, fixed points, mapping out the surging, swimming mud, held it under, were lines to creep along, a network of salvation.
    There had been some years when he had neither played the game nor thought about it. Lately he had started again with a new compulsiveness, although he did not like it. It was like masturbation, something that came on him suddenly, all the more urgently because he had just decided not to do it, and had therefore relaxed. And then he would think he would do it, just do it, quickly, and start life again immediately after.
    This time he had thought he would get across the field without it. He would walk on the lines and get across that way, on them. The sudden train had shaken him out of himself with none of the preliminary visual and bodily manoeuvres that were necessary to comfort and maybe survival.
    He was now bitterly cold. He could not remember with any exactitude what had happened. It always left him bitterly cold.
    He dragged his feet along the grass, still trying to pursue the safe white lines.
    They went under the tall white rugger posts which as a tiny boy he had believed to be a high jump for superior beings. They opened the wicket gate and went up the garden path.

2. In the Lion’s Den
    Alexander had been frequently told he had a standing invitation to walk into the Potters’ house. They would, they said, turn him out unscrupulously if he wasn’t wanted. They never had turned him out, and he had never felt quite wanted, but always as though he was interrupting some closed and peremptory family process. He was afraid of homes and families, and treated them with exaggerated respect. His own parents kept a small hotel in Weymouth in and out of which he, an only child, had wandered at his own times, never at least accused of treating his home as a hotel, since that was what it was.
    The back door opened into the kitchen, where Winifred stood at the sink. She held out her arms to Marcus,