The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “Can women be doctors?”

  “There are some. It’s hard, I think, to get the training.” She paused. “People don’t think women should work.”

  Philip wanted to say “My mum works, she has to.” It wasn’t the right thing to say. He said “My mum works, she has to.”

  Dorothy gave him her attention.

  “And you? What do you want? Why did you run away?”

  He said, sounding cross because he was desperate, “I want to make something. A real pot.” He always saw it in the singular. “It might seem odd, like, to run away from the Potteries, to make a pot. But I had to.”

  “I think you will find a way,” said Dorothy, serious in the dark. “I hope we can help.”

  “Everyone has been very kind.”

  “That isn’t the point.”

  There was a silence. They were aware of each other’s unspoken thoughts, the form of Dorothy’s apprehensiveness about her newly discovered ambition, and what it might do to her life, the inarticulate shape of Philip’s need. It grew darker. They stood up at the same time, and went out of the shrubbery, back to the dancers.

  August Steyning and Anselm Stern had relieved the musicians so that they could dance. Steyning took the flute, and Stern the fiddle. They improvised waltzes and Bavarian folk dances. Geraint, daring, asked Florence Cain to dance, and they took a few tentative steps, treading on each other’s toes, before Humphry swept her off, and signalled to the players to go faster. He held Florence very close, his hot dry hand hard in the small of her back. She felt him controlling and teaching her body rhythms she hadn’t known she knew, swaying and intricate, her face held on his embroidered chest. Her feet were suddenly skilful, as though she was one of Herr Stern’s puppets. She caught her breath. Violet applauded. Olive came circling past, dancing with Tom, as they had danced in the nursery, holding both hands at arm’s-length, swooping round, and round, and round, Tom’s feet scampering on the periphery, Olive smiling and rotating in the centre, so that when they stopped the whole sky went on hissing in a circle, the planets and constellations, the great wheeling moon, the whipping branches of the trees, the blurry flame of all the lanterns.

  After the dancing, when they were all breathless, came the now almost traditional tableaux from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. August Steyning produced the ass’s head said to have been worn by Beerbohm Tree, and Toby Youlgreave reenacted Bottom’s enchanted sleep, lying on the rising mound that led to the shrubbery, whilst Dorothy, Phyllis and Florian hovered as Peaseblossom, Moth and Mustardseed. Toby was not in fancy dress apart from the papier-mâché and horse-hair mask he was inside. He lay in Olive’s lap, his modern legs in flannels looking both thick and vulnerable. Olive stroked the mask. Toby could feel her heartbeat, somewhere lower in her body. He snuggled up to her, as a child might, empowered by the drama, remembering with regret the earlier performances, in which he had been in a torment of erotic pricking and pulsing. Just there, under the skirt, was the desired place. His hot cheeks were on it. Or not on it, on a smoothly lined boot with ears, which encased his head. He sang damply into it. “The finch, the sparrow and the lark, the plain-song cuckoo grey—” She was trembling a little. She stroked his mask. She stroked his living shoulder-flesh. Humphry advanced in his cloak, and squeezed juice on her eyelids, and she started dramatically away. The enchantment was over. Oberon had won, and claimed the changeling boy.

  The other passage they always acted was the end of the play, the blessing of the house. Tom stood at the entrance to the shrubbery, and began

  Now the hungry lion roars

  And the wolf behowls the moon—

  He spoke lightly, clearly, in time. Everyone was still.

  And we fairies that do run

  By the triple Hecate’s team

  From the presence of the sun

  Following darkness like a dream

  Now are frolic; not a mouse

  Shall disturb this hallowed house:

  I am sent with broom before

  To sweep the dust behind the door.

  Philip was caught in the common stillness. The lion roared and the wolf howled in his unaccustomed head. Glamour was sprinkled over humans and bushes, and for the first time he saw house and garden as their makers saw them, with love. It was both wild and tame. Magic flickered inside the hedged and walled circumference. Humphry and Olive, fairy king and fairy queen, spoke the golden speeches of blessing on married men and women, on children born and unborn. (Olive had begun to suspect she was pregnant again.) The watchers had contented faces.

  Hedda came running in her witch dress. She cried “Fire! Fire!” portentous and gleeful. The audience streamed back towards the lawn.

  Philip’s lantern, with its painted flames and smoke, and elegant, sinister forms, had been given a place of honour in a herbaceous border, standing on an uneven terra-cotta pillar. As its candle burned down, it had wavered and flared. Then it had fallen into the surrounding vegetation, which was a mixture of ferns, brackens, fennels and poppies, both the great silky Shirley poppies and self-sown wild ones. It was a very English piece of semi-wildness, at the centre of which was a huge alien clump of pampas-grass, including last year’s growth, which was dry and burned fiercely, with a crackle. Poppies shrivelled in the heat. There was a smell of roasting fennel. Sparks rose against the curtain of the dark, and tiny floating tissues of blackened leaves and seeds. Violet said she would go for a bucket, but Olive said, no, it wouldn’t spread, and it was a magical midsummer bonfire, like the ones made by Stone Age people and mediaeval witches on the Downs.

  When it died down, they should leap over the ashes. It was a real Midsummer bale fire, a propitious sign. Lovers should leap together over the ashes. Burned branches—or stems—should be saved. Toby Youlgreave could tell them all about bale fires.

  They stood round her, watching the flames catch, hearing the sap hiss in the stems. She smiled recklessly at Prosper Cain, August Steyning, Leslie Skinner, Tartarinov. She said to Toby “There is even fernseed, look.”

  Fernseed, Toby said, was almost too tiny to be seen. It had the power of making you invisible, if gathered at midsummer. You need to gather it with a forked hazel bough, over a pewter plate. It is said to be fiery in colour, and folklorists think it is the seeds of the burning light of the sun. There is a German story of the hunter who shot at the sun on midsummer day, and collected three hot drops of blood on a white cloth, and this became fernseed. It is said to reveal buried treasure if you throw it in the air. One of the most potent charms there are.

  The fire diminished, and became a glow amidst floating grey leaf-ash.

  “We must jump,” said Olive, charming and beckoning. She took Tom’s hand, pulled him forward, ran and leaped with him, laughing, beating the dying sparks from her skirts. Humphry took Griselda’s hand, and they jumped together. Soon everyone was running and jumping, anarchists and Etonians, the tall playwright swinging the diminutive Hedda by the waist.

  Someone was singing. It was Anselm Stern, leaning against an elder, clear and reedy, Loge’s song of the fruit of eternal youth,

  Die goldenen Äpfel,

  In ihrem Garten …

  It was magical. Everyone agreed, it was magical.

  The Wellwoods disrobed in a lamplit bedroom, the curtains open to the moon and the starry sky. They bickered, in a customary way. Humphry stood in his velvet breeches and embroidered jerkin, leaning against the bedpost, looking at his wife, divested of her wings and robes, standing in bodice and bloomers, still with the honeysuckle and roses in her hair.

  “I saw you enchanting those men. You can’t help it. The German and the don, the playwright and the soldier from the Museum, you gave them all a look—”

  “There’s no harm in that. Whereas it really isn’t proper to tell little girls like Griselda, that green dresses were for prostitutes, because they were tumbled in the grass.”

  “Did I do that? I have seriously drunk too much. I shouldn’t think Griselda knows what a prostitu
te is. She doesn’t live in reforming circles.”

  “Well, Dorothy knows, she can hardly help it. So I imagine Griselda does.”

  “Etta Skinner will be enrolling them to promote pro-prostitute leaflets.”

  “You have drunk too much.”

  She was plucking the wilting wired flowers, one by one, from her hair. He stepped out of his clothes and stood naked, slightly aroused, reaching for his nightshirt. This was white cambric, embroidered by Violet with bulrushes and arum lilies. She had made him a nightcap, with gold chrysanthemums. He never wore this, but it hung on the bedpost, and perhaps Violet supposed that he wore it.

  “I drank too much because of Basil. He knows, now. He always knew, I suspect, but it wasn’t in the open. According to his lights what I wrote was not honest.”

  Olive said, easily, “You did what you thought right.”

  “I don’t know. I did what I felt I must do. Now, you know, I think I shall have to resign from the Bank. For noble and ignoble reasons, both. I think I must. I don’t know how we shall pay Tom’s school fees.”

  “And what will you do?” said Olive, pausing in the act of unbuttoning.

  “I shall write. I shall use my pen. I shall write for journals. I shall write books. I can get things done, in the world.”

  Olive resumed her unbuttoning. She stepped out of her underwear.

  “I shall write harder. I am doing better than adequately. I shall work harder.”

  “You like that idea. The woman as breadwinner.”

  “I do like it, yes. We both do, I think.”

  “We make a good partnership. Fortunately.”

  Olive had put on her nightdress, white and not embroidered by Violet.

  “Maybe too good. This is the wrong moment, but I have to tell you. There will be another little open mouth. I am almost sure.”

  Humphry tilted his beard up, laughed, and embraced his wife. She could feel him erect, under the bulrushes.

  “Clever girl. Clever Humphry. How good we are at what we do, isn’t it so, creamy Olive?”

  “You needn’t be smug. You know it has dangers. You know it will be an expense. It won’t be so easy for me to win bread.”

  “We’ve love enough for another. We’ll find a way, we always do.”

  He stroked her flanks, smiling.

  “I expect you’re so pleased, because you’re still drunk. How shall we manage?”

  “Violet will take over. You will rest and write. And I shall change the world, one of these days.”

  From his moonlit room, leaning on the windowsill, Philip could see their forms, moving across their window-pane, graceful, obscurely occupied. He did not know them. He was outside, peering in. That suited him. He watched their lamp go out, and stood still for some time, looking at the moon. Then he took his towel, and lay down, and pleased himself again, shivering with brief delight in his solitude. Then he was limp, and drifted into sleep.

  6

  Nutcracker Cottage, like many English things, appeared at first sight to be an instance of pure whimsy, but was in fact more complicated. It was a restored labourer’s cottage, with new thatch, and small recessed windows in thick white walls. The front garden had long beds along a flagged path, thick with flowers—hollyhocks, delphiniums, foxgloves and pinks, sweet williams and bachelors’ buttons, with a haze of self-sown forget-me-nots. The front door opened directly into the parlour, with walls covered by what William Morris had called “honest whitewash, on which sun and shadow play so pleasantly.” The parlour had been made by knocking two rooms into one. At one end was an alcove-study papered with Morris’s pink and gold honeysuckle, and containing a plain table. There was little furniture—a heavy dining-table, some heavy, mediaeval-looking chairs, a modern box piano. The plainness was contradicted, to an extent, by a scattering of incongruous pots, on the mantelshelf, in the hearth, on the windowsill. There were lunatic mugs with smiling faces, a piece of fine Italian gold and indigo majolica, decorated with arabesques and maenads, an imposing piece of Sèvres-style Minton, in that violent dark sugar-pink, with Pierrot and Columbine on an oval plaque amongst roses and clematis. Standing in a corner, four feet high, was an object that amazed Philip and was immediately identified by Prosper Cain as a version of the Prometheus Vase shown by Minton at the Paris Exhibition in 1867. Prometheus in fleshy earthenware sprawled on the gleaming turquoise dome of the lid. A green-gold eagle perched on his thigh and belly, and tore at his crimson liver. The tall handles were blond-bearded chained Titans in mail shirts. The body of the vase was painted with fury, a whirling scene of mounted, turbaned oriental hunters and hounds, spearing a hippopotamus at bay, its painted mouth wide open, displaying tusks, molars, and a coral tongue and throat. At the foot of the vase snakes were coiled and intertwined with acanthus leaves. Philip stared. He could not begin to comprehend the glazes, let alone the subject-matter.

  The puppet theatre was already set up on the dining-table, which had been displaced to make room for the audience. It was a large, black lacquered box, veiled by black velvet curtains, with imitation onyx pillars and a gilded architrave. The table itself was covered by a velvet pall, underneath which the puppet caskets were stacked.

  August Steyning offered everyone tea in the garden. His housekeeper, Mrs. Betts, was arranging sandwiches and an urn on the round stone table on the lawn. The garden was surrounded by trees—a walnut, an ash, hawthorns, sloes—and fenced, with a wicket-gate that led to the wild, a little wood on a rising hillside, in which, Steyning said, he had hidden surprises for children bored by adult talk.

  Anselm Stern was wearing a soot-coloured, not-entirely-British Norfolk jacket over his dark drainpipe trousers. He stood with his teacup (Minton, Dresden shape, painted with pansies) and spoke in German to Vasily Tartarinov. He was hesitant in English, but became rapid and passionate in German. Tartarinov, much taller, wearing his working smock, bent over him, speaking softly and insistently. The English formed an impression of conspiratorial secrets, partly because the only words they understood were the names of the recently assassinated French President, Carnot, and the guillotined anarchist, Vaillant, who had thrown a nail-bomb into the Chamber of Deputies. Yet a few moments later, Tartarinov joined authoritatively in a discussion about royal treasuries between Olive Wellwood and Prosper Cain with some knowledgeable observations about the gold and silver objects in the possession of the Tsar. Etta Skinner, wearing a shapeless flowing apple-green tent, took her teacup gingerly and stared critically at the sandwich plate, which had the Three Graces dancing on a floral meadow, surrounded by sugar-pink. August Steyning smiled at her. He said she probably thought he should have earthenware plates, bearing the marks of the fingers that made them, was that not William Morris’s diktat? Etta said that was indeed her preference, but everyone had a right to his own taste. August said he liked things absurd and fragile, and that the skill of the painter and gilder was as much skill as that of the moulder. Philip stood, looking sullen, taking in the argument, thinking of his mother. Prosper Cain said he had a weakness for Minton who had designed some bold pieces—including the ceramic pillars—for the museum. Olive Wellwood described how, as a small child, she had made up stories about people on teacups.

  “We had some precious ones that only came out on Sunday, and feast days, with girls in pink floating petticoats clinging to craggy ledges with bushes with roots in the air. I gave them all names, and worked out how they got stranded on those stony places, and how they were rescued by eagles, just as the North Wind set about to blow them over…”

  When Olive spoke, she made an electric silence around her. She was looking lovely, in a tea-gown of cream Liberty lawn, covered with field flowers, cornflowers, poppies and marguerites. She had a straw hat with a scarlet ribbon. When she saw they were all listening, she laughed, and said

  “I still do that. People on plates, sipping from glasses they will never empty, plucking roses they never put in their hair. I imagine them escaping, out of their flat circle. I had an idea
about two-dimensional beings trying to locate themselves in a three-dimensional world. And then the three-dimensional beings would enter another dimension in just the same way. Catch glimpses, of other life-forms—”

  Anselm Stern said something to Tartarinov about Porzellan-sozialismus.

  “Ah, yes, m-m-m,” said Tartarinov. “Fyodor Dostoevsky’s definition of utopian socialism, m-m-m, the pleasant and frangible vista on a teacup. Porcelain socialism.”

  “Maybe that is all we are,” said Humphry, ruefully. “Porcelain socialists, or in the case of Etta, earthenware socialists. When the just society comes, we will have quite other ideas of beauty. I agree with Morris, Sèvres is an abomination. I am shocked at you, August.”

  “To be frivolous is to be human,” said August. “To be pointlessly skilful is to be human, as far as I can see. I hope you would not consider legislating to prevent me from having a Sèvres vessel.”

  Humphry frowned. “We must hope to make a society where nobody wants anything so absurd.”

  Etta nodded vehemently. Leslie Skinner said that a new society must produce new patterns, as yet not thought of. Made by craftsmen, not by wage-slaves. Humphry looked round for Philip, but he had sidled away to go back and look at the Prometheus Vase.

  The children, most of them, had wandered, as instructed, into the wood. In it they found creatures squatting in hollows, perching on roots, warty toads, scaly lizards, an owl with matted clay feathers and amber glass eyes, a pair of malevolent crows. Tied to their necks and claws were shiny scarlet boxes of sugar flowers, and burnt toffees. They wandered, nibbling, along a rapid little stream, over a wooden bridge. Hedda had brought the shoeful of manikins, from which she would not be separated.

  Philip stayed behind. He wanted to stay inside and study the vase, but came out to be given tea and cake, and found something just as interesting. This was a fountain, which was, like the two-faced jars and mugs indoors, and the grotesque creatures in the wood, the work of the Martin Brothers, which appealed to August Steyning’s theatrical imagination. It was shaped in a series of thick dishes, glazed in muddy greens and browns and occasionally vivid ceramic emerald slime. The stem of it was intertwined roots, serpents, worms and creeping ivies. The dishes were inhabited and clung to by toads and newts and fish with legs.