The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “Do I embarrass or excite you, young man? Father?”

  “No,” said Frank, though he was both embarrassed and minimally aroused in his own flesh. “No, I am here to listen.”

  “I know, naturally, that I was not her only lover,” said Fludd. “She had her trade, it was part of her Self. Or so I thought. Maybe she was only a lost, impecunious young creature, driven by pure hunger and cold to offer heat and hearing which I took for understanding. I think differently of it from day to day, from phase to phase of my own moon-cycle. I did form the intention of making her my wife. I needed her so abjectly. It was when I found her that I found my vocation—fingers in clay running with water, fingers puddling in divine female flesh—I made vessels that were metaphors for her and our dealings with each other, coiled mermaidens and fern fronds uncurling—oh, it was all innocent enough, despite her trade and my madness.”

  He stopped. Frank had a crazy moment when he wondered if this Magdalen had become Seraphita Fludd, and if that explained her inhibited stiffness.

  Fludd was doing something which Frank saw was wringing his hands; he thought he had never seen it done before. Fludd said

  “The next bit is nasty. You are the first person to whom I have told this—this thing. I went to see her at my fixed time—I had a key, but we had agreed when I should and shouldn’t visit—and I went up the stairs, two at a time.”

  He stopped again. Frank waited, his own hands folded.

  “There was a stench. I noticed it, I think, before I opened the door. She was on her bed. She was quite dead. She was a mass of raw, open wounds and blood, and blood. The edges of the pools of it were congealing, like glaze, on the surface of her thighs, and on the linoleum.”

  “Yes,” said Frank, to interrupt the flow.

  “She had run about, all over the room, pouring blood, grasping at things with bloody fingers, the marks were everywhere. I couldn’t look at her face—it was simply a mass of bloody knobs—”

  “Yes,” said Frank, more firmly. He said “What did you do?”

  “I stepped back, and closed the door, and went home to my lodgings. What else could I do?”

  “Called the police?”

  “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. It was too late for help. And I became—ill, sick, debilitated.” He came to a stop. “This is all?” said Frank. “All? It is a horror.”

  “But not a horror of which you are—by your own account—guilty.”

  How to find the voice of a confessor, or a judge. It slipped across Frank’s mind to wonder whether Fludd had really killed the woman, in a brainstorm, and was either lying or had forgotten. And it slipped into his mind to wonder whether the story was made up, either to hurt him, Frank, with, or to feed Fludd’s appetite for horror. Fludd said

  “I am not lying, you know.” Then he said

  “I am faithful to her, involuntarily. I do not love my wife, as I promised to do. There are thick walls between us. She is a beautiful woman, who expects to be desired, and I do not—often—desire her. I should not have married her.”

  “It is very late to say that,” said the priest.

  “She is a stupid woman. A plucked chicken in a serge carapace. Sometimes I think she has no soul.”

  “You promised to love and cherish her.”

  “I have tried. I may sneer to you, now, but I have tried. There is no love in our house. I am not the only one guilty of that.”

  “I cannot judge, there.”

  “I am not asking you to judge. Or to interfere. If I thought you had the nous or nerve to interfere I wouldn’t talk to you. Look at you shaking. You will pretend this—confession—has never happened.”

  “I expect it was partly your intention to make me shake. What do you expect me to do?”

  “Nothing, nothing, nobody can do anything. I shall go home and slide for a time into my private compartment of Hell. I am horribly afraid—always—of never finding the way out or of—”

  “Or—?” Frank prompted. But Fludd had come to the end of his confession, just as abruptly as he had begun it. He stood up, and stumbled out of the church without a backward glance.

  Frank Mallett had thought to himself that what had been “confessed” was not what Fludd had come to confess. He lived for a few weeks in fear of Fludd doing something to harm himself, or his family, or some outsider—he had been afraid of something in the future, and had confessed something far in the past. Fludd did indeed enter a black period, alternately swearing and breaking pots, or taking long solitary marches along the shingle beach at Dungeness, waving his arms, and shouting at the sky. Frank Mallett made timid attempts to visit Sera-phita and “bring her out” and Seraphita, remorselessly, made minimal tea-party comments on the weather, or the jam, or the servants, and waited for him to go away. Geraint’s schoolwork suffered when Fludd was in a black mood. His arithmetic deteriorated. So did his Latin translation. And then one day—or so Frank imagined it, for he was not, naturally, present at the time—Benedict Fludd shook himself, and went back into his studio and began beating out wedges of clay.

  The two friends cycled into Winchelsea on a very hot summer day, to discuss the preparation of a series of lectures, in Lydd, for the darker months in the autumn. They took paths across the Walland Marsh and along the Camber Sands, which covered the drowned town of Old Winchelsea, as though it had never been. They skirted Rye Harbour, and wheeled past Camber Castle along the flats, with the hill on which Winchelsea had been rebuilt in the thirteenth century, a mediaeval planned town, in front of them. They were visiting Miss Patty Dace, who lived in a small house facing the part-ruined church of St. Thomas the Martyr, across peaceful turf, marked by ancient leaning gravestones. Like many Winchelsea houses this one resembled the white clapboard houses of New England. It had a small, well-tended front garden.

  Miss Dace was waiting, and opened the door before they could knock. She was in her forties, and made of bone and muscle, with a fierce face, hooked nose, high cheek-bones and deep-set dark eyes under brows like bristling caterpillars. Her hair looked as though it had undergone intense applications of the curling-tongs, but in fact coiled itself naturally, as though she had African ancestors. She liked to be busy. She was the acting secretary of many groups: the local Theosophists, the local Fabians, the Winchelsea and District Dramatic Society, the Circle of Watercolourists, and a group which worked for women’s suffrage. She had taught at a London girls’ school in her time, and had worked briefly as an assistant almoner in a hospital. She had been very active in the agitation to extend the franchise for local authorities and Poor Law boards to married women, and women who were not home-owners. Last year the Liberal Government had abolished the property qualification for Poor Law boards and had made it possible for married women to stand for election. Miss Dace had rejoiced. She had stood for election herself, and had been defeated by a married woman, Mrs. Phoebe Methley, the wife of a writer, Herbert Methley, who had bought a smallholding near East Guldeford. Miss Dace had had a good Christian upbringing. She tried to feel neither disappointment nor resentment, and turned her attention to the cultural life of the community. She was the custodian of the Fabian book-boxes, which were despatched from London full of challenging and improving reading. She arranged lectures, both for the Fabians and for the Theosophists, and for combined groups of both. Until recently, she had also, through something called the Christo-theosophical Society, tried to arrange discussions of esoteric spiritual life, and especially the female aspect of Christian spirituality. Patty Dace wanted more life and thought it might reside in Theosophy. She had been put out to read, in the pages of Lucifer, a passionate denunciation of Christianity’s attitude to women, written by Blavatsky herself, studded with quotations from the Bible and the Church Fathers about woman as the organ of the devil, the hissing of the serpent, the most dangerous of wild beasts, a scorpion, an asp, a dragon, a daughter of falsehood, a sentinel of hell, the enemy of peace. Mme Blavatsky noted that in the New Testament “The words sister, mother, d
aughter and wife are only names for degradation and dishonour.”

  Patty Dace the feminist, Theosophist and socialist sat down and argued with Patty Dace the vestigial Christian, condemned her nostalgia for the Church, and renounced it. This had led to a certain amount of embarrassment over what she felt to be duplicity in her dealings with Frank Mallett, with whom it was such a pleasure to collaborate in choosing lecturers and publicising lectures. She would, oddly, not have been comforted to know that Frank himself often felt that his faith was erected on shifting and slipping sands. She liked the Church to be there, like the overlarge, ancient solid mediaeval buildings in the marshes, a reality, even if she had to relinquish her connection to it.

  She welcomed the young men, and gave them cups of tea, and homemade shortbread biscuits after their ride. They had, as a committee, secured a series of Thursday evenings in a community hall in Lydd, where audiences of local writers and teachers and shopkeepers were augmented by officers and men from the military camp near the town. She put on her spectacles, and said to Frank that they should perhaps find a title for a series. Dobbin said he thought they should find exciting speakers first, and then make up a title. Although Dobbin had been shy and ill at ease at Todefright he felt in retrospect that he had been privileged and delighted to meet the glittering folk in their fancy dress. He wanted to hear them again—Humphry and Olive, Toby Youlgreave and August Steyning, the anarchists and the London professor who worked with Professor Galton on human statistics and heredity. He said that he had heard some very interesting ideas about folklore and ancient customs whilst in Andreden. Maybe she could think of those.

  Miss Dace said she was interested more in change. She wanted lectures on new things, the New Life, the New Woman, new forms of art and democracy. And religion, she said, looking bravely at Frank.

  Frank sipped his tea and said thoughtfully that in fact there was only an apparent contradiction. For many of the new things looked back to very old things for their strength. The Theosophists looked back to the wisdom of Tibetan masters, for instance. William Morris’s socialism looked back to mediaeval guilds and communities. Edward Carpenter’s ideas about shedding the stultifying respectability of Victorian family life looked back also, to human beings living in harmony with nature, as natural creatures. And the same was true of the vegetarians and the anti-vivisectionists, they required a wholesome respect for natural animal life, as it was before technical civilisation. In the arts too, Benedict Fludd, for instance, wanted to return to the ancient craft of the single potter, and to find the lost red glazes, the Turkish Iznik, the Chinese sang de boeuf. The Society for Psychical Research had rediscovered an old spirit world, and lost primitive powers of human communication. Old superstitions might furnish new spiritual understanding. Even the New Woman, he said, venturing a half-joke, sought freedom from whalebone and laces in Rational Dress but also in free-flowing mediaeval gowns. Women’s work in the world appeared to be new, but in the old times abbesses had wielded power and governed communities, as principals of colleges now did. Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past. He would almost dare to propose himself as a lecturer on this theme.

  There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board. The committee considered what it would like to hear, and how the contributions should be balanced. Dobbin proposed that August Steyning be asked to expound his ideas about the new theatre, which would go beyond realism into the ancient skills of marionettes and puppets. It was agreed that Toby Youlgreave should be asked to speak on the relations between modern folklore and the ancient fairy faiths of our ancestors. They decided to invite Edward Carpenter to speak on his hopes for men, women, and his “in-between sex,” newly described. Names were brought up: Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas, Beatrice Webb. Annie Besant, who had spoken persuasively, intensely and successively for secularism, birth control and Fabian socialism, had taken on the disputed leadership of the Theosophists since Madame Blavatsky had, in 1891, “abandoned a physical instrument that could no longer be used,” the “worn-out garment that she had worn for one incarnation.” For two or three visionary moments the three made models of what Mrs. Besant might have to say. But Patty Dace said, reluctantly, that she felt that Mrs. Besant would be too implicated in the current problems of the society to want to come and talk in Romney Marsh.

  Miss Dace proposed a lecture on prostitution and the injustice in the differing ways in which women and men were treated. It was not, on reflection, a good idea to give such a lecture to an audience including so many military men. Maybe Mrs. Wellwood could talk about modern children, and modern children’s literature; that was safer. It was agreed, rapidly, that Mr. Fludd was not temperamentally suited to lecturing. Maybe someone from the South Kensington Museum could speak about crafts and their future.

  All of them knew, even Dobbin, that no lecture series conforms to its ideal elegance and depth, as first mooted. Lecturers refuse, lecturers fail. The same people, who can be relied on, turn up, and say the same things. There would have to be a lecture on vegetable-growing, and Mrs. Wolsey would have to give it. Bernard Shaw would be replaced by some thin and nervous student, who would have no idea how to speak to soldiers. They went on to the second stage of planning, which is the secondary list of reliable performers.

  Patty Dace said she thought they should ask Herbert Methley. He had decided opinions and was an inspirational speaker. She had heard him, once, in Rye, which was an indication that he might be willing. She could not remember exactly what he had said, but she remembered it as being mesmeric. It had been to do with freeing the instinctual self, something like that. Everybody present had been stimulated and excited.

  Frank said that he had never met Mr. Methley but he had been very impressed—very impressed indeed—by the copy of Marsh Lights which Miss Dace had kindly given him. He had gone on to read The Giant on the Hill, and Bel and the Dragon, which he had also admired. He would be delighted both to meet Mr. Methley, and to hear him speak.

  Patty Dace looked searchingly at him. He smiled mildly back. He was unaware that the gift of the novel had been a test of his faith on her part. It had tested his faith. But he felt obliged not to reveal to Miss Dace how much it had done so. In fact, he thought about it, quite hard, every day. It had given him solid images of his doubt.

  It was a novel about someone in his own position, the solitary priest in a made-up Marsh church, with a dwindling congregation. The priest in the book, who was called Gabriel Medcalf, had been bewitched by, or had fallen in love with, or had deceived and disappointed, a woman called Bertha, whom he met mostly when he was walking along the brook in the countryside. There was a kind of greenness about this character, which was rather cunningly done by flickering references to the lights in her pale hair, or her eyes, or the shadows on her fine skin. Frank was not very responsive to female charm, and Bertha corresponded to no fantasy of his own. He rather thought she might be an embodiment—symbolic or actual—of a kind of elder-tree witch, a guardian of flowers and berries. She had no blemishes, and was evasive. What Frank responded to was a something in Methley’s description of the relations between the church building and the landscape. In this world, the church was gaunt and skeletal, a solid shell around a lifeless space. The spiritual energy had leached into, or returned to, the earth and the marsh and the water around the church. Trees appeared to walk, and moved angry arms, or spoke in inhuman voices, creaking and groaning. The marsh lights flittered and gathered in dancing circles, and split again into snakes of light, running errands across the evening darkness. Frank had been impressed as a boy by Wordsworth’s sense of the ancient force—not measured by human time—in crags and boulders. Methley had learned from him—huge stones lurched like primeval scaled beasts, from the lips of brackish lakes to dry land and back. Hillo
cks heaved with slow, slow energy. Cracks opened into traps. The whole earth was possessed, and either indifferent or inimical, unless the inadequate Bertha was meant to be a way to enter it, or find harmony in it. Gabriel Medcalf failed the test, and ventured less and less frequently outside his church, and its walled graveyard. Gabriel in the novel lost his sense of the divinity of Christ, and saw him as “a kindly Jew, slaughtered long ago in Palestine.” This phrase had got under Frank Mallett’s skin. He recognised it, and resented his recognition. At times he felt his own church, like the one in Methley’s novel, to be surrounded by inimical elementals, crowding in, peering through keyholes, muttering and waiting. He wasn’t sure he wanted to meet the author. But he didn’t like failing tests. He suggested that he and Arthur should call on Mr. Methley and discuss their project with him.

  Patty Dace said that that was an excellent idea. She thought for a moment or two, and then said that the Methleys were very keen on their smallholding and were enthusiastic gardeners. If they didn’t answer the doorbell, they could usually be found by walking round into the garden at the back.

  They pedalled the East Guldeford road in a companionable silence, and found their way to Wantsum Farm, which was hardly large enough to be called a farm, but supported a few sheep, some ducks, a pair of goats and a small orchard. The farmhouse was squat, with small windows and an ill-fitting door. They rang the bell, and when no one answered, did as Miss Dace had suggested, and went along the path round to the back of the house, across a rough lawn with a diminutive duckpond, and through a gate in a wall into the kitchen garden.