The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  They made their way to the centre of this space between high rows of peas and beans, growing up poles with supporting netting. These screening plants explained why they came upon the Methleys, quite suddenly, in a sheltered spot at the centre of the radiating paths. They were sitting side by side upon the grass. Herbert Methley was holding up a book and Phoebe Methley was shelling peas and broad beans into a colander on her lap.

  Both of them were naked. Both wore spectacles.

  Everyone stared.

  Neither Arthur Dobbin nor Frank Mallett had seen a naked woman during his adult life, though Frank had visited sweaty sick or dying ladies in dishevelled nightgowns.

  Both Methleys had sun-roughed and reddened noses, necks and wrists. Both were otherwise lean and pale. Herbert Methley was dark, with flopping fine hair, and a luxuriant black growth under his armpits and round his relaxed member. He was quite sinewy, with thin but muscular arms and legs, and a spattering of wiry hair on his chest. Phoebe Methley had sandy hair tied up in a knot with a broad band. Her breasts—they saw her breasts first, to the exclusion of the rest of her—were flattening mounds, hanging over her rib-cage, with nipples the colour of dog-roses, not sticking out, but retracted. They saw that she too had a lower bush of hair, a brighter ginger than her head, and averted their eyes. She had a long neck, and the skin on it was just beginning to crease into folds. She had big eyes—very big behind the glasses—which if she had been clothed might have been the first thing they would have noticed. They startled her into upsetting the colander, which had been resting on her thighs, so that hard bright green spheres of peas, and grey-green kidney-shaped broad beans rolled everywhere on flesh and earth.

  Neither Frank nor Dobbin, curiously, felt urged to back off, or retreat in disorder. Herbert Methley said, easily,

  “You have caught us taking the sun. Sun-worshipping, in fact. It is our habit, when we can, and this is truly flaming June.”

  Frank Mallett murmured that he had been told they would find them in the garden. Innate caution led him not to say by whom he had been told. There had been a glitter in Miss Dace’s eye.

  Phoebe Methley rolled on her hip to gather up the peas and beans. Dobbin felt impelled to help her with this task, and impelled to turn his head away. He did neither, but continued to study her naked flesh. Frank Mallett said

  “Perhaps we should return another time. We came to ask about a lecture series in the autumn. We hoped you might…”

  Herbert Methley stood up, stolid on his naked feet, and reached from a camping stool some folded garments that turned out to be two embroidered gowns in the form of kimonos. He held one out to his wife, who stood up, in a practised movement, and held out her arms for the sleeves. She did up her sash, and went down on her knees to continue the gathering of the peas and beans. Herbert Methley said

  “The original couple in the original garden were in a happier state before they learned shame. Come into the house. Tell me about your lectures.”

  His voice had a northern tang, which Frank, a child of the Home Counties, could not place. Dobbin knew it came from somewhere quite a way north of his Sheffield.

  They padded back in single file, into the house through the back door, Phoebe Methley in the rear with the colander, like some saint’s attribute in a painting. She went into the kitchen, to make tea. Herbert Methley offered the two friends seats in low, slatted Arts and Crafts armchairs. The room was full of a smoky darkness, after the blaze of light in the garden. There was a vase of field flowers on a carved table. Dobbin explained the lecture plan to Herbert Methley, and Frank withdrew into his own mind for a moment, wondering whether to thank Methley for Marsh Lights, or at least to tell him how it had moved him. He decided against this. He found he was annoyed that this robed person, with his electric black hair, was more the owner, so to speak, of the imagined rocks and stones and elder bushes than he, the reader. Readers ought not to meet writers, he thought. They are meant not to.

  He came out of his brief reverie to hear Methley proposing a lecture on “something like ‘Elements of paganism in modern art,’ or even ‘Elements of the pagan in modern art and modern religion.’” Frank said that that was exactly what they had hoped for. He then added, with a fake casualness, that he had enjoyed Mr. Methley’s work very much. Mr. Methley said he was delighted. He asked if Frank had read his latest book, Apple-bobbing. He would be happy to present a copy. He found one, and inscribed it, in a neat hand. The man in the dog-collar smiled cautiously at the man in nothing but a robe splashed with crimson peonies and gold and silver chrysanthemums.

  As they rode back home, Dobbin said

  “The odd thing is, how much more bad-mannered it seems it would have been, to run away. It is really odd that courtesy seemed to mean we had to stand and stare.”

  Frank said the world was changing. And he agreed, it would have been much ruder to withdraw than to stand their ground. Dobbin, remembering his brief visit to Edward Carpenter, and his naked air-baths and river-baths in the Derbyshire countryside, asked whether Frank would ever be tempted to take the sun, in that way. Frank said, no. He said, after further thought, that the human body was not lovely, seen uncovered. His face was flushed with the energy of his pedalling. The marsh sheep moved slowly across the marshes, grazing the salty grass. Dobbin said it had been a successful day. Frank said it had, indeed.

  II

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  10

  The old dairy was a good shape for a pottery studio. The kiln was separated, in a room that had been a scullery; its chimney protruded through the slate roof. The dairy had slate shelves, with drawers under them, and various cupboards in the wall, as well as an inner larder, where once butter and whey had cooled, and now the pots were left to become leather-hard, or to wait for a glaze to dry. The windows were small and deep-set. There were two, and a wheel stood underneath each of them, one a large wheel with a treadle motor, one a simple hand-turned wheel, with a milking stool and bucket beside it. There were little stained-glass roundels set in the windows. One showed a maned and horned sea serpent on cobalt waves, and one a white sailing sloop, skimming or foundering, it was not clear which. Pinned to the door was a life-size coloured drawing of a Renaissance man, in doublet, hose and gown, all a dark crimson, and a flat velvet cap. He stood beside a large urn.

  Philip, very cautiously, set about ordering things. He swept up the debris, and made a neat heap of the reusable parts of the exploded kiln. He was tactful: he knew what things he could rearrange, and what he might need permission to touch. There were drawers containing tangles of metals, used for experimental glazes, which he left as they were. The new clay he put in bins, in a kind of coal-shed, pointed out by Fludd, who at first stood in the doorway, poised and watchful, to see what Philip would do. Philip wiped the wheels, and found cloths to cover the slurry. Fludd said “Well, we might take a look at the kiln. We need to take care with the mortar. The last was too coarse. It exploded here and there, and marked the pots.” Philip nodded. He knew about explosions. He even offered advice as they rebuilt the firing-holes and the spy-holes for the pyrometric cones. He went up on the roof—Fludd held the ladder—and repaired the chimney, where it came through the slates. From up there across the yard, he saw the fat-necked shape of what he did not know was an oast-house. He came down again and asked Fludd what it was. It was too fat to be a kiln, he said, though at first, when he saw them in the countryside, he had thought they were bottle kilns. Fludd explained about the hop-growing, hop-picking and brewing in Kent. He fired his kiln, he said, with spent hop-poles, which were plentiful and easy to get. Philip said he thought you could make a whacking big kiln in one of those. Fludd said “We might. You’d have to make some pots yourself.” Philip grinned with pleasure, and Fludd grinned back.

  Over the next weeks, cautiously, the two of them made pots. At first Philip simply did apprentice-work. He wedged the clay, a process akin to kneading bread, which battered every air bubble and water drop out of the solid mass. O
therwise, as Philip knew very well, a duck-egg bubble could expand, and burst, in the firing, causing large or small explosions, which could lose the whole kiln-full. The clay was mostly local. There was clay dug from Rye Hill, which was a strong red, and clay dug in the marshes, which was sandier. Fludd pointed out one sackful—reddish—and remarked drily that that was the clay to which we all returned, and had been excavated from the graveyard, which had a particularly rich layer of it. He looked at Philip to see what he thought, and Philip grinned again. It was, as Fludd said, good strong clay.

  Fludd did import, by train, a pale, creamy clay from Dorset, which he used to make pouring slip, or engobe, and mixed with the red clay to lighten it. Philip learned to pound and sieve this clay, and mix it in water. He learned to revolve clays in the bladed pug-mill which stood where the butter-churn had been. He learned to mix clay bodies and later to mix glazes. Like most potters, Fludd was secretive about the recipes for both these things. He had leather-backed ledgers, locked in a drawer, written in a code, based on Anglo-Saxon runes and Greek lettering, which Philip could not read. He did not use conventional weights, but had his own spheres of dried clay, numbered from one to eight. Philip mixed tin glazes and lead glazes, and was given mugs of milk to counteract the poison in the lead. He mixed antimony and manganese and cobalt. There was a substance called pin-dust, made of the copper powder left over from the manufacture of pins, which made green glazes.

  There came a day when Fludd invited him to sit at the wheel and throw a pot. Fludd centred the ball of clay for him, and Philip put his wet square hands on it, and depressed the centre. Brown clay ran over his fingers as though they were becoming clay, smooth and homogeneous, or as though they were clay becoming flesh, with living knuckles and pads. The clay under his hands rose and grew into a thin cylindrical wall, higher and higher, as though it had its own will. It whirled evenly round, lined with the movement of the fingers—up, up, and then suddenly it flapped and staggered, and form slumped into formlessness. Philip was breathless and laughing. Fludd laughed too, and showed him how to finish the rim, how to recognise the form to which the clay aspired. He said that many master craftsmen never threw a pot, but confined themselves to the decoration. Philip said, how can they not want to know the feel of the clay. Fludd said, Philip had potter’s hands. He took Philip’s place, and threw a tall crane-necked jar, a wide deep dish, a useful beaker, a squat jug with a ludicrous lip. Philip tried all these, and after a time succeeded more often than not. He kept laughing, soundlessly. Fludd smiled, benign. His bad temper seemed quite gone. He gave Philip a fat sketch-pad, and said in his ear, as he circled and smoothed the wet earth, that he must feel free to come in and model whenever he wished to.

  Philip did not quite trust the genial mood that had come over the artist. He did not presume. He had noticed—without having analysed—the perpetual quality of watchful fear, or at least anxiety, in the curiously inert female members of the family. He had noticed Geraint’s scornful wildness, and whatever lay under it, though he could not have told anyone that he had noticed. Fludd appeared, even in a good mood, to have no small talk. The family, very unlike the Todefright gaggle, seemed to expect to eat in near-silence, and disperse after meals. On one occasion Fludd announced that Philip must have more clothes, so that those he was wearing could be washed. He seemed to assume that his vague request would be carried out. In fact, a parcel of clothes was put together—but it was put together by Dobbin and Frank Mallett, some things from both of them, some from members of the parish, fishermen’s socks and a jacket, workingmen’s shirts, blue and grey. Another working smock, so that Tom Wellwood’s could be washed. Philip found Pomona, sitting on the terrace in front of the house, altering cuffs and replacing buttons for him. He protested. She said “You can believe it’s a change from embroidering crocus and daisies.” Her voice was breathy and too quiet. Philip said he could sew, and Pomona said, be quiet, and let me measure this against you. Imogen came out through the door with glasses of barley water, and said to Philip “If you can help him—so that work is done, and things are made—and sold—we shall all be greatly in your debt.” Philip said he hoped there would—reasonably soon—be enough for a trial firing.

  Fludd and Philip were taciturn, in different ways, and for some weeks they discussed only the weight of clay, or the best place to dry a platter, or the colour of glazes, or why Philip’s pots had gone wrong. Fludd did not think to ask his apprentice about his past life, or his family, and Philip volunteered nothing. Philip himself rarely asked questions, and only after some time asked about the figure in the drawing pinned on the door. He said he thought he might have seen it, in South Kensington, was that possible? Fludd said indeed it was. This was the figure of Palissy, the great French potter, from the Kensington Valhalla in the South Court. Ah yes, said Philip. I saw a dish—with toads and snakes—in Major Cain’s house. He said it was a fake. Fludd said that the Museum had made a horrible error, buying a modern imitation of a Palissy dish, worth at most £10 os od, for thousands of pounds. He added that it was a mistake easily made—the fakes resembled Palissy ware quite astoundingly accurately. Was Philip interested in the potter? Oh yes, said Philip, who was interested in pots.

  Fludd began to tell Philip the heroic life history of Bernard Palissy. He told it in vivid, intense instalments, to the rhythm of the wheel, or the slap and thud of the wedging, or the scratch and slush of the sieving. It felt almost like an initiation rite—this was the exemplary tale of what it was to be a true worker with clay, a complete artist. Fludd’s voice was deep, and he left gaps between his sentences, as he meditated on what he was saying. Philip meditated too. He was learning.

  He learned that Palissy had been, like Benedict Fludd, an inhabitant of salt marshes, a workingman who painted portraits and had also learned to paint on glass. He was poor and ambitious, and one day someone showed him “an earthen cup, made in Italy, turned and enamelled with so much beauty” that he had been driven to learn how to do such work—“regardless of the fact that I had no knowledge of clays, I began to seek for the enamels, as a man gropes in the dark.”

  Fludd stopped, and said “Something like that happened to me. It’s not reasonable, how a choice is made, of this or that craft, this or that life. In my case it was an Italian majolica plate, gold and indigo, covered with arabesques, and a kind of shadow in light—”

  Philip said “I saw your watery pot at Todefright. I was looking already of course, I grew up, with the clay, but I saw that pot.”

  It was the most personal thing he had ever said. Fludd, who was painting a jar with a stripped goose-plume dipped in manganese, looked up and smiled straight at Philip, seeing the serious square face.

  “It’s a form of madness,” he said. “Palissy was a madman, and in my book supremely sane, and you’ll come to see—if you stay here—that I too am a madman. When the wind’s in the wrong quarter, I’m driven the wrong way. So to speak. You’ll see, I’m telling you in advance. A good gale in the right direction—and some solid earth—and I’m driven to be a perfectionist.”

  He told how from seeing the one cup, Palissy had narrowed and intensified his search for perfection to the discovery of a pure white enamel to put on earthenware. He had a wife, and many children, and lived in poverty, for years upon years, experimenting with mixtures of metals and tinctures he’d learned from glass on hundreds and hundreds of shards of pot, which he took to local potters, or glaziers, to be fired. And he failed, and failed. Fludd gave a bark of laughter, and observed that failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements, he said. Any one of the old four—earth, air, fire, water—can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter—months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln. “It’s purifying fire and demonic fire,” he said to Philip, who took in every word and no
dded gravely. “Very dangerous, very simple, very elemental—”

  Palissy had given up his search, for a time, and turned his attention to other things—the nature of salt, or salts, the way plants used salts, the way plants used manure, and the way it was connected to salts—and the construction of artificial salt marshes—“on earths which are tenacious, clammy, or viscid, like those of which are made pots, bricks and tiles.”

  He loved the earth, said Benedict Fludd. He worked with the earth and he loved it. He got his hands dirty, and improved his mind.

  Another day, he told the heroic story of the initial discovery of the white glaze. He enacted Palissy’s four-hour wait at a glass furnace for the three hundred broken pieces of clay, each numbered and covered with a different chemical mixture. The furnace is opened. One of the shards has a melted compound on it, and is taken out, dark and glowing. Palissy watched it cool. His thoughts were black. But as the black shard cooled it whitened—“white and polished”—a white enamel—“singularly beautiful.” Palissy is a new creature, reborn. The glaze contained tin, lead, iron, antimony, manganese and copper.

  Palissy ground a quantity of it—he tells no one the proportions, of course—coats a kiln-full of vessels, relights his own kiln and tries to raise it to the heat of the glassmaker’s kilns. He works for six days and nights, heaping in faggots, and the enamel will not melt or fuse. “He lost the first firing,” said Fludd. “He went out and bought new pots, and reground his glaze, and relit his furnace, and laboured another six days and nights. In the end, he had to feed his furnace with his own floorboards, and smash up his kitchen table. And still the firing failed, and he was thought of as a mad alchemist or forger, and reduced to extreme poverty. He worked for another eight years, built a new kiln, and lost a whole firing of delicately glazed pieces because the mortar had been full of flints which splintered, and spattered his pots.”