The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  “But in the end,” said Philip. “In the end, he found the enamel, and made the pots.”

  “He worked for kings and queens, he designed a Paradise Garden, and an impregnable fortress. He hated alchemists—he knew they were looking for something simply mythical. He liked to watch plants grow, and speculate about how hot springs, and fresh-water springs, rise in the bowels of the earth. He had a theory of earthquakes, which wasn’t unreasonable—he was thinking cleverly about earth, air, fire and water moving mountains—”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was a Protestant. He didn’t accept the doctrines of the Church, and he wouldn’t compromise his beliefs. They put him in prison, and condemned him to death for heresy. He should have been burned to death for refusing—in his own words—to bow down to images of clay. He died in the Bastille, tough as ever. He was seventy-nine. I will lend you Professor Morley’s book, you can read it in there.”

  Philip said he was afraid that would be no use. His reading was not up to it. He added, reddening, “It’s not up to much, to tell the truth. I can make out simple words, that’s all.”

  “That won’t do,” said Fludd. “That’s no good. Imogen shall teach you to read.”

  “Oh no—”

  “Oh yes. She hasn’t enough to do. You won’t get far if you can’t read. And you’d like to read about Palissy.”

  • • •

  Docile Imogen agreed to give Philip daily lessons in reading. She said she had never taught, and did not know how to teach, but would do her best. She sat with him at a garden table in the orchard, or in the kitchen if the wind was blowing in from the Channel. She wore the same two or three lumpy linen dresses, with uneven necklines and embroidered lilies and irises, on whose petals Philip could feel the tiny spheres of blood from pricked fingers. He noticed—he was young and male—that she had a strong and well-proportioned body under the sacklike folds. He thought with the tips of his potter’s fingers about the contours of her breasts, which were round and full. He did not notice any female atmosphere around her—no scent in the hair, no hint of the smell of her skin, no hidden damp, breathing—and he was too young to know how odd this absence was. He did think, as she sat with her head of heavy hair bent over the pages, that she resembled some of the ceramic madonnas in the Museum. Sweetly calm. That was not quite an accurate way of putting it.

  For the first two lessons she wrote words on a paper pad in flowing calligraphy. Words like “apple” and “bread,” words like “house,” “studio” and “garden.” She then decided Philip would do better with joined-up stories, and brought out a handsome book of fairytales, illustrated with line drawings by various artists, including Burne-Jones and Benedict Fludd. The stories were an eclectic collection from the Grimms and Andersen, from Perrault and the poets, including Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott.” The illustrations calmed Philip’s sense that he was being asked to read something babyish. This was the world of the Dream scenes enacted at Todefright. He was experimenting with modelling clay snakes and dragons to make handles for pots and he was impressed by Fludd’s wicked imps. He read “Cinderella” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” “The Princess in the Glass Mountain” and “The Princess on the Pea,” “The Little Tailor” and “The Constant Tin Soldier,” and finally “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Snow Queen.” He practised writing—which he was good at, since he was already precise with pen and pencil. He practised drawing imaginary persons, following the flowing lines of Burne-Jones’s garments and hair.

  This was not quite what he had wanted. This wasn’t his style. Fludd had illustrated “The Snow Queen.” His Queen had a long, sharp face and a sad smile in a whirlwind of snowflakes over a lake of ribbed ice. She was attended by deformed imps, and tiny Kai was curled at her feet, like a sleeping snail. The pattern of lines was mesmerising and frightening. Philip wanted to learn from it, and do something different.

  The stories—for better or worse, for insight or danger—gave him ways of describing the people around him. Imogen was the Sleeping Beauty, she had pricked her finger and was sleepwalking. He alternated this image with a half-dream image of her as a figure half-baked, fried in biscuit, not yet glazed or coloured, a pale first attempt at a living creature. Geraint—who was at home as little as possible—was some version of the Ashlad, careering about the outside world looking for his fortune. Pomona was all the Cinderella daughters in the hearths, woebegone and unregarded. She had come to his bed twice more, and frightened him terribly. What could he do, if she woke and found herself there?

  Imogen never touched him, even accidentally. Pomona pulled at him constantly, fingering his smock, his clay-covered hands, standing behind him at table and ruffling his hair. No one commented on this behaviour, and Philip put a lot of energy into pretending it was not happening.

  He made two more dangerous analogies, more or less simultaneously. In his daily work he was slowly making order in Fludd’s storerooms, arranging crocks and sacks, sweeping and mopping. When he could write fluently he would label everything, he told himself. The pottery had colonised much of the servants’ quarter of the manor house—which didn’t matter, because there were no servants, only an old woman who came in from the Marsh and cleaned, slow and creaking, and her daughter, who helped out with the laundry. Philip found a pantry that was locked. He asked Fludd if there was a key, and Fludd replied curtly, no, there was not. Philip remembered this when he read “Bluebeard.” He noticed for himself that people in stories always did what they were told not to do, and went where they were told not to go. He couldn’t see why, and had no intention of trespassing. But, perhaps because of Bluebeard, he thought the pantry was odd.

  One day, putting his book together in the kitchen where he had been reading, he saw Seraphita coming in from one of her rare excursions outside.

  She came with little skimming steps across the grass and across the gravel path, very slow, very rhythmic. Unlike her daughters, she paid a lot of attention to her dress. She wore white muslin decorated with violets, and a violet shawl. The muslin flowed from a high yoke: she was uncorseted, with a simple violet sash. Her gleaming hair was coiled on her head, and pinned with silk violets. She looked straight ahead, dreamy and distracted, her mouth composed in a pretty, unchanging half-smile. Philip thought it was as though she was skating on unseasonal ice—or rolling along on invisible balls or wheels. She came in through the door and progressed past him, still smiling fixedly, acknowledging his presence with an inclination of her long neck so transient that he wondered if he had imagined it. She reminded him of something. He remembered what it was. It was the puppet Olimpia, from the brilliant performance of Anselm Stern, Olimpia who was an automaton—a puppet playing a puppet, where the other characters had been lifelike.

  He did not know what ladies did—he supposed they called on each other, went to parties, went shopping, went riding, played tennis. Not Seraphita. She walked, sat in her chair and stared pleasantly forwards till lunch, stitched a little, operated a loom a little, waited a little more, and arrived at supper-time. He thought she passed whole days without speaking. When he read about the Lady of Shalott, who was under a curse, and saw the world only in a mirror, he thought of Seraphita Fludd, and her large, glaucous, luminous eyes. But the Lady was awash with desire and discontent. The Lady rushed across a room and opened a window. Mrs. Fludd rushed nowhere.

  Another peculiarity of the family was that they all went for walks in the countryside, but no two went together.

  Geraint associated with gangs of young men on the marshes. These local youths, when Philip encountered them, tended to avoid him, or, if they were in groups, to gather and mock at a distance. Geraint made no attempt at all to introduce Philip to the boys he knew, and indeed barely spoke to him. Fludd went out for whole days, wrapped in a caped oilskin, carrying a gnarled walking-stick and wearing a brimmed hat pulled down over his brow. He never invited Philip to join him. Imogen went into Lydd, and occasionally, by bicycle, into Rye or Winchelsea,
to buy food and sewing things. Sometimes Pomona went with her. They did not invite Philip—not, he thought, because they did not want him, but because it did not occur to them. He waited a few weeks until his writing had improved, and then wrote a careful letter home. He waited a little longer, and asked Dobbin, who had called in, about posting it. Dobbin explained about the post office in Lydd, and gave Philip a postage stamp. He asked Philip if he would like to walk with him to Lydd—or borrow a bicycle from the Fludds. Imogen said of course he could borrow hers. Dobbin asked if Philip had seen much of the countryside and Philip said he had not left Purchase House. “Not seen the sea?” said Dobbin.

  “No,” said Philip. He said “I don’t exactly have working hours, or wages … So I keep doing what I can.”

  Dobbin said Philip must walk with him and the vicar to see the sea. He could not be wanted all the time in the studio, encouraging though his work was. Dobbin asked Seraphita, who said she was sure Philip should go out now and then, they should ask Mr. Fludd. Fludd, when asked, said of course Philip should see the sea. He was a canny boy. He would know when he could go. And when he could not, of course, he would know that too.

  So he walked, with Frank Mallett and Dobbin, to the seaside village of Dymchurch. Dymchurch has a seawall to keep back the ever-encroaching stormy salt water, and the seawall has to be climbed in order to see, or get to, the beach. The three went up the narrow steps, and Frank and Dobbin watched benignly to see their artistic protégé from the Midlands take his first look at the sea. It was a still, sunny day, and waves wrinkled in peacefully, one after the other, and soaked into the sand. Philip felt the mass of the water in his bones, and was changed, but found nothing to say, and stood there looking stolid. Frank and Dobbin waited. Philip said, after a time, that it was big. They agreed. He remarked on the salt smell, and the sound of the gulls screaming. It was a very long time, he felt, since he had been expected to say what he did or felt, as opposed to simply doing or feeling. He knew he needed to make acquaintance with the sea on his own, by himself. Children were paddling in the edge of the water. He wondered what it felt like, but his body shrank from it. Frank and Dobbin walked with him along the beach, and he got better at making the required exclamations of interest and amazement. He picked up a piece of seaweed, interested in its texture and little bursting cushions of water. He picked up some fragile pink shells and a razor shell. Frank and Dobbin were delighted. They walked him back into the village, bought him a good lunch in the Ship Inn, and told him tales of smugglers, in whom he was less interested than in the texture of the sea-surface and the seaweed. It was Frank Mallett who asked if he had a sketch-pad and pencils. Philip said no, he had used up the one he had had in South Kensington. Mr. Fludd had given him one and he had used that too. Frank bought him a new one in the general store in Lydd—the paper was not very good, it was greyish and too porous, but it was paper. They took him home.

  On the way back to the vicarage at Puxty Frank Mallett asked Dobbin if he felt worried about Philip’s position at Purchase House. He seemed to be doing a lot of work, for no reward, said Frank. No one thought of providing things for him, personal necessities. Dobbin said that Fludd liked Philip. He thought for a moment, and then said he thought maybe Philip was the only person Fludd liked. He said he hoped Philip could make things workmanlike enough for the pottery to earn some money. And then he could have wages. They must just keep an eye on his welfare.

  In the studio Philip told Fludd he had been to see the sea. He said he hoped to go again. Fludd said, why not, and that Philip should go to Dungeness, Dungeness would interest him.

  Philip made his way to Dungeness, on foot, one hot day when the broom was shining gold and the seakale was covered with spherical seeds, turning from pale green to bone. Dungeness is bleak and rich, the longest shingle stretch in the world, swept by winds from the sea, westerlies and easterlies. It is inhabited—boats are drawn up on the pinkish bleached pebble banks, and there are strange, soot-black wooden huts, in which fishermen live, and round which lobster pots, anchors, broken oars, nets, accumulate. You walk out, over the stony surface, which is in fact full of strange life, plants and creatures, which prosper and suffer in extremes of weather. At the end of the promontory pebbles are banked high above a shingle beach which is constantly sucked back into the dark wake, churned and thrown up elsewhere. Between the pebbles, ochre-pink, seakales sprout with fantastic fringes of frills or leaves that are purple or rich green or blue-green. Philip saw viper’s bugloss, spiky blue and sinister (maybe only because of its name) which he knew from meadows in Staffordshire, but which here seemed bluer and livelier. He saw cotton lavender, and scarlet poppies and clumps of pink valerian. All this was both bright and provisional: in winter it all disappeared as though it had never been.

  Philip walked almost ceremoniously along the shingle towards the bank of pebbles at the edge of the land. The first time he came—he came many times—he was eager to reach the water edge, and only took in the human clutter and the tenacious vegetables with sidelong glances. He met no one. It was his adventure, and felt like his place. When he came to the end, he scrambled up the bank with the pebbles rattling and rushing below him, pulling him down with them, so that he went up slowly and with effort. There was the sea, to be seen from the unstable summit. He stood under a sunny sky and saw that it was dark and deep, with patches of wind, and contrary currents, pulling this way and that, and the waves coming in, and in, and shifting and grinding the stones. He thought it would be good to see it in a storm, if he could stand up. He was at the edge of England. He thought about edges, and limits, and he thought about Palissy, studying salt water, and fresh water, springs and runnels on the earth. He hadn’t ever considered the fact that the earth was round, that he stood on the curved surface of a ball. Here seeing the horizon, feeling the precariousness of his standpoint, he suddenly had a vision of the thing—a huge ball, flying, and covered mostly with this water endlessly in motion, but held to the surface as it hurtled through the atmosphere, and in its dark depths, blue, green, brown, black, it covered other colder earth, and sand and stone, to which the light never reached, where perhaps things lived in the dark and plunged and ate each other, he didn’t know, maybe no one knew. The round earth, with hills and valleys of earth, under the liquid surface. It was pleasant, and frightening, to be alive in the sun.

  He sat down on the pebbles, which were warm, and ate the bread and cheese and apple he had brought. He thought he must take a stone back with him. It is an ancient instinct to take a stone from a stony place, to look at it, to give it a form and a life that connect the human being to the mass of inhuman stones. He kept picking them up, and discarding them, charmed by a dark stain, or a vein that glittered, or a hole bored through. He held them, and looked at them, put them down and lost them, gathered up others. The one he finally chose—almost irritably by now, feeling anxious about the huge accumulated bank of rejects—was egg-shaped, with white lines on it, and narrow little bore-holes that didn’t come all the way through. Hiding places for tiny creatures, sand-spiders or hair-thin worms.

  He spent time drawing things—the leaves of the seakale, a ghostly crab-shell, a piece of bleached driftwood, just for the pleasure of looking and learning. Now and then he looked furtively at the water, to see if it had changed—it always had. He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

  He returned often, and extended his exploration also across the Marsh, discovering the Norman churches perched in sheets of marshy water, kept from foundering by dykes and ditches. Once he saw, from the height of the pebble bank, on a windy day, the bent figure of Benedict Fludd, struggling along at the water’s edge, shuffling his feet amongst the stones, gripping his hat. He appeared to be shouting at the sea. Philip did not hail him, and did not mention later that he had seen him.

  He drew, and drew, and drew.

  He went to Benedict Fludd, when his sketch-book was full, and showed him designs he had made from his drawings, which he thought might perh
aps be worked into tiles. He had an idea for a series. An allover pattern of seakale leaves, and one of tangled seaweed, with keylike forms and plump bladders. A very delicate, lacy pattern, formalised one day when he had seen, outside the lonely church of St. Thomas Becket in Fairfield, that the dykes and the marsh grass were completely infested with crane-flies, long-winged, angular-legged, fragile.

  He made a geometric web of their touching bodies. He made another with the pale little balls of the seakale seeds on their separate stalks, and one with fronds of fennel. He got interested in a principle of design that used the underlying geometrical structure of the natural forms to make a new formalised geometry. He marked them out as best he could with soft pencil on greyish furry paper. He said to Fludd that he knew something about pricking out paper designs which could be used to repeat patterns in biscuit, before glazing. But he didn’t know how to make glazes. He knew about pin-dust, which made pea-green, and various things that could be done with manganese. But he didn’t know how to get that grey-blue-green of the thicker kales. Or the ghost-colour of the crane-flies, which, he said daringly, it would be good to trace over cobalt colours, or maybe a sort of marshy green?

  Fludd said he had an eye. He said his paper was rubbish, and was ruining his designs. Philip said it was all he had. Fludd opened a cupboard and thrust several sketch-pads into Philip’s hands, and a box of variegated pens and pencils. He said he thought they might make the tiles. They could try out glazes.

  When they had a batch ready for firing, they reloaded the kiln, and sat up all night, feeding it with driftwood and sawn hop-poles. Geraint offered to help, which was unusual. He liked the drama of the cavern of flame and was interested in the product. The firing and the cooling were surprisingly successful. The kiln produced a row of tiles, blue, gold, green and scarlet, with the Dungeness patterns in webs of grey and charcoal and burnt umber over the colours, and another row, in a creamy glaze, with the patterns in crimson and blue and coppery-green. Philip was entranced. Pomona said they were very pretty. Geraint asked if they could make more—a lot more? “It’s not too hard,” said Fludd.