by A. S. Byatt
Tom was assessing Julian in his usual terms. Was he, would he ever be, someone who could be invited into the Tree House? It was too early to tell, but he rather thought not. He said, blandly and meaninglessly,
“Grown-ups always think we don’t know things they must have known themselves. They need to remember wrong, I think.”
The audience were gathered for the marionettes like a flock of hens. They sat in a half-moon, in the blue daylight, on chairs, stools, grass. Griselda and Dorothy sat together on embroidered footstools, to safeguard Griselda’s skirt. They both thought they were too old for puppet shows.
August Steyning stepped out from behind the booth that he and Herr Stern had erected. It had star-spangled midnight-blue curtains. He bowed, profoundly, and announced
“We welcome you to Aschenputtel, or Cinderella.”
He went back, behind the dark box.
A trumpet sounded, and a tapping drum. The curtains swept open. A funeral procession crossed the stage, to a slow beat: black-coated mourners, carrying a coffin, the sombre widower, the decorous daughter, cloaked in black, her face shadowed. The coffin was lowered, to sad drumbeats. A green mound, and a gravestone rose in its place. Father and daughter embraced.
The next scene was in the house. The stepmother and stepsisters arrived to strutting violin music. The marionettes were delicate creatures, with fine porcelain faces, real human hair twisted or plaited into elaborate coiffures, and a frou-frou of finely stitched skirts, crimson, lilac, amber. The sisters were not ugly. They were fashionable beauties, with pearl necklaces and haughty little faces with sneering mouths and plucked and painted eyebrows. They and their mother were like peas in a pod, from the same mould. Aschenputtel had long golden plaits, and a simple sky-blue dress. The step-family indicated imperiously chairs she should dust and arrange, silver tureens she should carry, the hearth she should sweep, the fire she should tend. She moved as they commanded. A puff of real smoke came from the fireplace.
Aschenputtel shuddered, sat on a stool, put her sweet china face in her fine china hands. The shudder was human and disturbing, as the little limbs swayed and folded.
The father returned, booted and caped for a journey. He kissed their hands and asked what they would like as a gift on his return.
There were few words in this production, but this ritual question was spoken in August Steyning’s high, light, reedy voice, which seemed proportionate to the tiny actor. He lifted it to counter-tenor. Silk and velvet, said the crimson sister. Rubies and pearls, said the violet. A branch of whatever tree touches your hat, said Aschenputtel.
She was next seen kneeling by the green mound and the grey stone, smoothing the grass, planting the twig. Slowly, wonderfully, a tree unfolded from beneath the stage, a wiry trunk uncurling branches, hung with a haze of leaves. Two white doves, fluttering and swooping, stitched from feathers and silk, with jet beads for eyes, pink toes and iridescent ruffs, settled in the tree. The violin twittered. The doves flew to Aschenputtel’s fingers. She lay down and embraced the mound, and they strutted and preened in her hair.
Dorothy blinked. The little creatures had taken on a sinister life, which perturbed her. She set herself against giving in to the illusion. Griselda beside her was staring, engrossed.
The stepmother set Aschenputtel to sorting lentils from cinders. The doves sifted the ashes, and deftly threw the lentils into a pan—a rain of tiny clatterings could be heard.
The sisters were fitted with ball-gowns, by a new marionette, a subservient dressmaker, her painted mouth full of pins. One sister had puce bows. One had purple pom-poms. Aschenputtel sat by the hearth, head in hands.
The weeping daughter stood by the mound, her hair now loose, a mass of gold threads, under the dancing tree, which waved its arms and produced, like a descending angel, a fine gold dress, a coronet, a pair of gold slippers.
The Ball was done behind gauze, with whirling figures, and dance music in a music box, twanging waltzes, prancing polkas. The prince had shining white hair, tied back, a long dark coat and knee-breeches. He danced with the golden girl. The clock struck. She fled. The tree and the birds made a second dress out of thin air, silver as the moon. And a third, caught like the starry sky in the pointy branches. The countertenor sang.
Shiver and shake, little tree
Throw gold and silver over me.
The prince appeared, with a pot of pitch, and cunningly painted the steps of his palace. They danced, the chimes sounded, Aschenputtel fled, the little gold shoe was left shining on the tar.
The final scenes were gruesome. One disdainful sister, her proud expression unchanging, aided and abetted by her mother took a kitchen cleaver to her big toe, splat. “When you are queen, you will not need to go on foot,” said the mother, falsetto. The bride and groom set off on horseback, on a finely caparisoned horse made of real hide. The gold shoe brimmed with blood. Several of those children remembered, well into their future, that they had seen the red liquid dripping from the shoe.
Dorothy blinked and refused to imagine.
The pirouetting doves called to the prince
Turn around, look behind
Blood in the shoe.
Turn around, change your mind
She’s not the bride for you.
So they turned back. And the stepmother, learning nothing, following her fate, took the cleaver, slap, to the second sister’s heel, and crammed her porcelain toes into the golden shell.
“How horrible,” said Hedda, audibly. “When it’s already all bloody.”
The doves sang, the prince turned back.
Aschenputtel’s father called her from the cinders where she sat in drab rags. She came and put her dainty toe in the slipper and was embraced by the prince. She ran off, and reappeared, radiant in her starry dress. Puppet father and puppet daughter clung to each other, centre-stage, her china cheek on his shoulder, as he stroked her golden hair.
The backdrop became a candlelit choir. The wedding procession came back from the altar. The doves flew down, at the church door, cooing and shrilling, and mobbed the haughty sisters, beating their white wings about their heads, topping their headdresses, obscuring with commotion faces that were then revealed to be eyeless, with bloody sockets.
Griselda closed her lips. Dorothy shuddered crossly. Phyllis said that it was all wrong, there had been no pumpkin, no godmother, no glass coach. No rats and mice and lizards, cried Hedda, overexcited, unnerved by cruel doves. Florian said, More, having understood nothing, mesmerised by the moving miniature world.
Griselda said to Dorothy that it was interesting, how different the story was. Dorothy said she herself wasn’t very interested but that if Griselda wanted to know, she should ask Toby Youlgreave, he was always going on about fairytales.
Griselda, looking like a lost china shepherdess in a swarm of raggedy fairies, pulled timidly at Toby’s arm. She said she really wanted to know why the story was different. “Dorothy said you would tell me.” Toby sat down beside her on a garden seat. He said that the version she was used to was the French one by Charles Perrault—whose stories were written for young ladies, and usually had fairy godmothers. Whereas Anselm Stern’s version was German, out of the Brothers Grimm. Griselda said that she herself was half-German, but that she did not have German fairytales at home. She wished she did. Toby said those were only two of the endless versions from many, many countries from Finland to Scotland to Russia—with varying combinations of some or all of the events—wicked stepmother, selfish sisters, friendly animals, magic dresses, shoes, with or without blood in them. The Grimms believed that what they were collecting were part of the very old beliefs and magic tales of the German Volk. There are English fairytales, too, said Toby. Mrs. Olive Wellwood uses them, very cleverly.
Griselda said that her aunt’s fairy stories frightened her. So did Hans Andersen, he made her cry. But not this sort of tale. She didn’t know why. It should be scary, there was a lot of blood. Toby said these were memories of some other tim
e, long ago, and he agreed, they weren’t scary.
“They are just like that,” said Griselda, feeling for what intrigued her, not finding it.
Toby looked at the serious thin face. He said he would send her a book of the Grimms, if she was allowed to receive it. Griselda said she didn’t think her family had anything against the Grimms. They just didn’t know about them. Toby wanted to stroke her hair, and say, don’t worry, but he didn’t think that was a good idea.
Everyone, old and young, now gathered for a kind of sumptuous picnic. As happens in such gatherings, where those whose lives are shaped, fortunately or unfortunately, are surrounded by those whose lives are almost entirely to come, the elders began asking the young what they meant to do with their lives, and to project futures for them.
They started, naturally, with the older boys. Prosper Cain said Julian had a fine eye for antiques, and could tell the real thing from a fake. He had a collection of valuables he had found in flea-markets, a mediaeval spoon, a very old Staffordshire slipware beaker. Julian said easily that after Cambridge he might indeed like to work in museums, or galleries. Seraphita Fludd said she hoped Geraint would be like his father, an artist, and make lovely things. Geraint said she knew really he was no good at that kind of thing. He was good at maths. An astronomer! cried Violet. Geraint said he should like to make a comfortable living. He smiled amiably. Basil said he should go into business, in that case. Like William Morris, said Arthur Dobbin, who hoped to introduce business practices in the artists’ workshops in Lydd. Geraint went on smiling, and eating jellied ham mould. Basil Wellwood said Geraint was welcome to join Charles in his family firm. Charles made a strangled noise, blushed, and was heard to mutter that that was yet to be decided. Etta Skinner said it was odd that nobody in this forward-looking community had asked any of the girls what they wanted to be. She hoped some of them had ambitions. Prosper Cain, simultaneously, asked Tom what he hoped to become. Tom had no idea. He told the truth.
“I don’t ever want to leave here. I want to go on being in the woods—out on the Downs—just being here—”
“And to be boy eternal,” said August Steyning, inevitably, with a theatrical hum. Olive said Tom had all the time in the world.
Leslie Skinner took up Etta’s point. He addressed Dorothy, almost pugnaciously.
“And you, young woman. What do you hope to be?”
“I am going to be a doctor,” said Dorothy.
Violet said that was the first that had been heard of that idea. It was indeed, the first time it had formed in Dorothy’s mind, and she had spoken spontaneously. Doctors and nurses was not a game they played. But she heard herself answer, and suddenly in her head there existed a grown-up Dorothy, a doctor. Not sweetly benign, but wielding a scalpel. Skinner said that was a fine ambition, though the way was hard still, and he hoped she would come to University College.
“But you must want to be married, Hejjog,” said Phyllis, using a nickname Dorothy disliked. “I do. I want a lovely wedding, and a house just like this, with a rose garden, and I want to bake bread, and wear lovely dresses, and have seven children …”
Phyllis knew she was pretty. She was always being told she was. The young Fludds, Imogen and Pomona, could have been described as beautiful, but they were beautiful in a subdued and uncertain way, certainly unlikely to be Stunners. They were both graceful and awkward in their home-woven linens and hand-enamelled bracelets. Imogen had full breasts, and wore no supporting underwear. She looked plump. She said she had from time to time thought of studying embroidery at the Royal College. Pomona said she might like that, too, or she might like to stay and make tiles in Dungeness. Hedda said she wanted to be a witch. Violet slapped her wrist.
They turned to Florence Cain. Florence had had a governess who had borne in upon her that she had caused her mother’s death, and must devote her life to caring for her father. Florence had not mentioned these admonitions to her father, who was quite unaware of them, and was also well looked after by housekeepers and sappers. He liked to play games with both Julian and Florence, filling brass trays with miscellaneous buttons, beads, bottles, snuffboxes and so on, and asking his children to remember them, describe them and identify them. He took quite as much delight in Florence’s acuity as in Julian’s. Florence did, indeed, look like his lost Giulia, but he thought of the likeness in terms of a Van Eyck angel, serene amongst its crimped hair.
“Well,” he said, “Florence. What will you do?”
“I shall keep house for you,” said Florence, who thought this was understood.
“I hope you won’t. I hope you’ll have a home of your own, and before that, an education. I hope Julian will go to Cambridge, and I hope you will too. Newnham College offers a great deal. I hope you will want to go there.”
Florence was confused. They had never discussed this, and now firm statements were being made, in the middle of a large party. She did not know anything about Newnham College. It was just a name.
“She doesn’t want to be a maiden lady,” said Julian. “A bluestocking.”
This annoyed Florence, who said she didn’t see why she shouldn’t learn something. Julian was going to. She would do so. She fell over her words, and fell silent. She couldn’t imagine what she might try to learn.
That left Griselda. Basil and Katharina were clear about her future. She would be Presented at court, become a debutante, and make an advantageous match. Katharina said she hoped Griselda would be as happily married as her parents.
Griselda twisted a puce bow rhythmically round and round. Her mother tapped her fingers. Griselda had been shocked—deeply shocked—when Dorothy said she wanted to be a doctor. She had not thought of wanting anything beyond release from puce bows. She had an intense secret life, which consisted of reading novels about women reduced to silent attentiveness, full of inner rebellion, or of the effort of resignation. Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Maggie Tulliver. But all these had really wanted love and marriage. None had wanted anything so—so destructive—as to be a doctor. Why had Dorothy never said anything of this intention? Griselda loved Dorothy as Dorothy loved Griselda. She loved Todefright with a passion she dared not admit to, even in Todefright. She came to stay there, and was immediately released from her good clothes and set loose to run wild in the woods. There were books everywhere. She had it in her pale head that she and Dorothy might live in the country together, and never bother with stays and hatpins and button-hooks. That was all she had thought of. And now suddenly Dorothy’s world was black bags, and blood, and sickbeds, and grief and drama, and Griselda was nowhere. Dorothy had a secret. Griselda, her face white, said
“I mean to study. Like Florence. I learn German and French. I mean to study languages.”
Katharina said that Griselda had the best possible teachers, and her progress was exemplary.
Basil remarked to the surrounding bushes that women’s education simply made them dissatisfied. He did not say with what.
Griselda twisted another bow, and her mother tapped her hand. Humphry Wellwood picked up Florian.
“And what do you want to be, Florian?”
“A fox,” said Florian, with total certainty. “A fox, in a foxhole, in a wood.”
5
Olive believed she was a wonderful party-giver, and the belief was infectious, though not entirely well founded. It rested on the charm of her presence, and where she was, her parties were lively. She liked to be at the centre. She liked to charm, and to charm those she was excited to entertain—in this case leaders of culture, Prosper Cain and August Steyning, both of whom stood, champagne glasses in their hands, laughing at her self-deprecating jokes. She relied on others to do what was needful—introduce people, feed people, change the structure of groups. To a certain extent Violet could do this—she saw to bodily comforts, but was uneasy with bright talk. And Humphry could normally be relied on to amuse both men and women, but he had become ominously locked in argument with his brother. Children flickered and flit
ted along the flowerbeds and in and out of the shrubbery as the light thickened.
Vasily Tartarinov was performing his party piece to the Skinners and the young, Tom, Julian, Philip, Geraint, Florence and Charles. His party piece, which also formed part of his London lectures, was the story of a horse. The English cared about horses. It was the way to hook their attention. This horse, a noble black beast, Varvar the barbarian, had played an essential part in a series of daring escapes from Russian prisons and police surveillance, including Tartarinov’s own. Varvar had been waiting when Prince Kropotkin flung off his immensely heavy green dressing-gown, in a movement practised for weeks, and simply ran out of the prison hospital courtyard and into a waiting carriage, where one conspirator was waiting, whilst another distracted the guards by showing them how to see parasites under a microscope. Varvar had galloped out of sight with Sergey Mikhailovich Kravchinsky, known universally as Stepniak, and now a much-loved member of English socialist and anarchist groups, advising on the translation of the Russian classics, looking like a great, amiable bear in his thick beard. Tartarinov, in his turn, had been on his way down from his apartment, with a small bundle of essentials, to rush away behind Varvar, when he met the secret police coming up.
“I dissembled,” he told them, in his high-pitched voice. “I said to them, we are too late, I am on the same errand, the bird is m-m-m-flown. The trail is cold, that is how I put it. We all descended together, and I got into the carriage, and we walked sedately to the corner, and then away flew the great Varvar, like the wind. He took me back to Cherkasov’s estate, where he lived, and I disguised myself as a seaman, and worked my way, via Sweden and Holland, to my refuge here. Others were less fortunate.” He touched a handkerchief to his eye.