The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Both Tom and Dorothy had been reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age, published a year ago. Grahame had given the book to Humphry: they had once been colleagues in the Bank of England, where Grahame still worked—he was grander than Humphry had been, and was already promoted to Acting Secretary of the Bank. Like Humphry he wrote for the Yellow Book and like Humphry busied himself bringing culture to the East End. He had published a work called Pagan Papers in 1893, a tribute to the goat-god Pan, with a frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley, which contained the stories of childhood which were continued in The Golden Age. Dorothy asked Tom if he thought going away to school would change him, like Edward in the book. Tom said, vaguely, of course things wouldn’t be the same, and suddenly, for the first time, focused his dreaming mind on what this new beginning was bringing to an end, on what he had done to himself by passing an exam. He was filled with fear and grief, which were impossible to impart to sharp Dorothy.

  Olive, despite her preference for legend and fairytale, had herself published two books, that year, about imaginary children, written fast, and easily, and compulsively. Money had been needed because Humphry had had to “help out” with the confinement of Maid Marian in Manchester. He looked sidelong at Olive, before he asked for help, but he made no wild speeches of contrition, did not beat his breast, said, almost man to man, “She’s a good creature, you know. She’s got a good brain. She’s brave.” Olive said he should have thought of all that earlier, and Humphry said, with a kind of satyr-grin, that he had thought he had thought of it, but clearly not well enough. He was inviting Olive to grin with him. Much of his success as an errant husband lay in this whiskered grin of collusion—there were women out there whom, briefly, he couldn’t resist—but she, Olive, his wife, was the one he shared things with, the one to whom he spoke truthfully, from himself. She took a curious pleasure in the power of independence when she gave him a cheque to meet the Manchester bills. You did not so much mind being—conventionally—betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

  Olive’s two stories were The Runaway and The Girl Who Walked a Long Way, and were based, in part, on the way Olive imagined the tale of Philip Warren and the tale of his sister Elsie. She had been able to use her own memories of escaping from the coalfield, and from the industrial smoke, to find oneself in the Garden of England amongst orchards full of apples, and gardens full of wholesome, clean vegetables. Her two characters were preadolescent children, escaping a cruel aunt and a drunken uncle. They settled, not in anywhere like Purchase, but in a farming community of orphan children and runaways like themselves. She had invented a kind of guru for this community, a Pied Piper who vaguely resembled Edward Carpenter in idealism and sandal-making. But she could not prevent this figure from being either domineering or sinister, and realised that this was because what children liked to read about was a world without adults, in which they themselves produced their food, and decided how to run things. So she replaced the Carpenter figure with a fourteen-year-old boy called Robin, who was camping in a derelict barn, and took in other fugitives. They called themselves the Outlaws, and learned how to pick mushrooms and berries, and entice runaway hens to lay eggs in their outhouse. She was rather pleased with this concept, and did not know whether to be annoyed or amused to find that Marian in Manchester had called her son Robin. She told Humphry that it was negligent—or invidious—of him to have two sons called Robin, and Humphry smiled his satyr-smile and said that only proved that he had little or nothing to do with Marian and her child, apart from making sure they had enough to live on. Olive didn’t point out that it was she who had made sure. They both knew that.

  That summer, before Tom left home, they all went together, big children and tinies, and in-between Phyllis and Hedda, on a seaside holiday in a village called Selstrood, which had a wild beach that looked across the Channel to France, which was sometimes visible as a shadowy strip in the sky, and sometimes hidden in mist or cloud, and now and then a lit, creamy line of solid rock, just distinguishable from bright cloud and wavecrest. They took an old vicarage, furnished only with minimal wooden chairs and tables, and iron bedsteads, and they camped in the way the English like to camp. Tom and Dorothy, and Charles and Griselda who came with them, had workmanlike tents in the orchard. Violet hired a donkey cart, and drove the little ones along the quiet lanes. Olive wrote furiously. They had beach picnics, carrying hampers of delicious things through the sea-holly onto the washed sand. They swam. They visited Purchase House, of course, which was still shabby, but had a look of polish and darning and clean crockery, no doubt contrived by Elsie. Olive studied Philip and Elsie. Elsie noticed this, and Philip didn’t. He was learning his craft, and Benedict Fludd was still in a reasonable temper, and still producing work.

  Other people came. Toby Youlgreave came, and lodged with Miss Dace in Winchelsea. He talked to Griselda about literature, and Charles confirmed his idea that Youlgreave’s secret other self was Olive Well-wood’s knight errant, or maybe something else. The Cain family came, and stayed in a comfortable inn, near Winchelsea. Prosper Cain was in need of rest and distraction. It was proving to be a horrible year at the Museum. The Director, Professor Middleton, had been found dead in June, with a laudanum bottle and a glass at his side. He was known to have taken laudanum regularly since he had had “brain fever” as an undergraduate, and a verdict of death by misadventure was returned. But most people, including Prosper, suspected that he had taken his life, in an excess of despair over battling scholars, soldiers and librarians. The campaign against the military presence in the Museum in the art newspapers had intensified: in July, at the time of Tom’s exams, the parliamentary debate on the Budget had produced scathing criticism of the management of the Museum, led by the socialist John Burns. Cain wanted to be able to forget all these things. He thought he might try to interest Benedict Fludd’s aimless daughters in finding places at the new Royal College of Art, formed from the old National Art Training School. Pomona was still just about a child, but Imogen was seventeen, and nobody seemed to care what happened to her. She didn’t talk to Julian, who was a year younger than she was, and in a mood for sauntering sardonically away on his own. Some of her embroidery was quite promising. Vapid, Prosper thought truthfully, but technically promising. He wondered, not for the first time, what was wrong with Seraphita, and remembered the empty laudanum bottle.

  • • •

  There were many picnics on the beach, under umbrellas with bleached stripes, where Olive sat in a graceful swirl of muslin and a cotton sunhat, holding court, Prosper thought, as he became a courtier. He liked the free movement of the many Wellwoods, up and down the sand, in and out of the salt water, collecting things in nets and buckets, riding away on bicycles. He confided in Olive Wellwood as a figure of motherhood, but he knew that she knew that his eyes were on her waist, and the eager movements of her hands, and the curl of her haunch and thighs under her. He said he was afraid his Florence had too much gravitas to run freely with Dorothy and Griselda. She had been forced into grown-up seriousness before her time. Look at her now, sitting on a rock, staring out to sea like a mermaid. He did not know how to make it up to her. Olive asked, looking down at his solid fingers playing with the sand, if he had ever thought of remarrying—even perhaps for Florence’s sake? And Julian’s. Prosper said he had wondered if he should, but had never yet met any woman he could—take to in that way. Or if he had, he said, they were already spoken for. He knew there were things he could not discuss with Florence, that she might need to discuss with someone. Olive said she thought he did very well on his own; he was a percipient person. She said Julian was a young man, now, he had almost nothing of the little boy left in him. She did not like, she confessed, the thought of Tom going away to Marlowe. She did not believe Tom was as strong as Julian. “He is ludicrously innocent, I sometimes think,” she said confidingly. “Life will deal him blows. He has run wild, delightfully, bu
t he will find it hard to adjust to discipline.”

  So they talked on quietly, sharing things, in a rather pleasant electrical prickle of unactivated sex. It was like dancing. Olive enjoyed it. She had a right, she thought, considering Maid Marian. There needed to be balance, if balance was the word, latitude for latitude, excursion for excursion. Humphry’s vagaries meant she had a right to take pleasure in being admired, looked at, confided in.

  Toby loved her too much. He waited, perpetually dumb, he didn’t know for what, and everyone could see it, she thought, and she herself had to be circumspect and watchful, for the truth was, she couldn’t do without Toby, she needed Toby to talk to about fairy mythology, about plots and tales. Every now and then she paid for conversation—she didn’t feel commercial, it was loving, as she loved Toby—with a silent, passionate embrace, mouth to mouth, skin to skin, her laughing face close to his bemused one. He had understood from the beginning that these encounters could only happen if no one spoke, and they were never referred to. He had been awkward at first, blushing, clumsy, but he had grown adept at clutching and letting go, at fierceness followed by lassitude and a kind of consequent indifference. She guided his fingers into hidden places, her body at first immobile and then quivering a little. She did not know what he thought of all this. It didn’t matter, as long as they were not discovered, and he did not become overexcited, indignant, or morose.

  Toby had been lecturing in Winchelsea and Lydd, in the winter and spring, speaking about the Saxon fairy-faith, and the Paracelsian elementals. He had become a great friend of Patty Dace, Frank Mallett and Arthur Dobbin. The inner group of the Theosophists had held discussions of Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age in Miss Dace’s parlour. This group included Herbert and Phoebe Methley, who were resolutely outspoken about the fact that sex-love and its expression were natural and necessary to both sexes. If Patty or Frank or Dobbin directed a curious look at their bodies as they said these things—and these looks were almost inevitable—they stared back, amiable and unabashed.

  Olive wanted to meet Methley, and commanded Toby to bring the Methleys to Sunday lunch in the vicarage. She wanted to meet Methley because, like Frank Mallett, she had been greatly perturbed by one of his stories. He had a book of inconsequential tales of the sighting of fairies, or people of the hills, or the kind folk (who were not kind). These tales were written in a pragmatic first person by a naturalist who saw and observed these creatures as other men observed rare bugs or birds. The introduction to this book pointed out, persuasively enough, that there were indeed more things in heaven and earth than humans could usually apprehend with their limited senses. We cannot see radio, or molecules. We can receive an electrical shock from an apparently inert wire. We see clouds form and unform—where is what made up that bulging grey muscle a minute ago, where now is the grey-blue veil of mist that hung over the marsh poplars? How can it be that our species so steadily and persistently and consistently reported sightings of the fair folk, and occasional dealings with them, if they do not exist? In the beginning of the Bible men talked and walked with God: then with Angels: then with invisible voices. Some humans—of whom I myself am one, wrote the narrator, whose name, he wrote, was Nathanael Carter—have the trick of vision that lets us see these people, which is perhaps no odder than knowing where a trout lies under the shelf of a stream, or where honey is hidden in a tree-trunk.

  “Nathanael Carter” claimed to have seen the fair folk from early childhood, and to have thought nothing of it, as a boy, until a teacher reproved him for lying when he told what he had seen. So he did not tell, any more. He understood that he saw because he did not tell.

  Olive had never supposed for one moment that fairies or spirits existed. She lived most intensely in an imagined world peopled by things and creatures that drew their energy and power from other human imaginings, centuries and centuries of them. But she didn’t suppose that these creatures were tangible—or alive and going about their purposes when she was not “making them up,” or watching them in her mind—did she? Did she? She read Methley’s tales and was half-convinced that the storyteller must indeed have seen what he said he had seen—it felt like sober fact, to read, and did not run into the usual groove of the fantasy-tale. Did he really know something she didn’t? Or was he simply an extraordinarily competent writer? Either way, she needed to meet him.

  His creatures were not exactly pleasant. One story began

  I came upon one of these folk when I was out with my butterfly-net on the moors. I saw a wriggle of grey flesh in the heather, and believed I had startled a young rabbit, and then my eyes came into the right frame to see the other, and he came clearly into my vision as though I were adjusting a binocular glass. He was sitting with crossed legs in a clump of gorse, and his flesh was silver-grey like an eft, but duller, like pewter. He must have been about two feet high, if standing. He was all the same colour—he had long, rather coarse, pewter-coloured hair, and pewter eyes in his cobweb-grey face. They weren’t human eyes—nor cats’ eyes neither, and didn’t resemble the eyes of any beast or fish I have ever seen. I don’t think he saw me. His bony mouth was pursed with effort, and his long sharp fingers were busy. He was skinning a fat slow-worm—which was still alive and writhing—with a triangular stony knife, chipped to the thinness of a leaf. He was quite naked. All the fair people I have seen have been quite naked, except for a female walking unobserved in Smithfield Market, who wore a skirt made from a single cloth, like a Malay, and a necklace of pearls.

  Olive mentioned this tale to its author, who sat next to her at lunch. She asked him quite directly if he saw the things he described.

  “They ring true, do they? I don’t think I could make them up. Sometimes I embroider a bit, or add a bit—but I must see them, to begin with. Don’t you? Your splendid stories are so full of authentic powers, I imagined…”

  After the visit, Herbert and Phoebe Methley took to walking in the direction of the old vicarage, or joining the games of cricket and rounders on the beach. Methley wore cotton shirts and a floppy sunhat. His legs were long and brown and wiry. He was a good bowler—too good, he demolished the younger batsmen too quickly—and an indefatigable fielder. Olive sat with Phoebe, or with Prosper Cain, and watched them all run. Herbert and Phoebe went bathing with Toby and the children. Phoebe wore a bathing cap which made her face look gaunt, Olive thought, and a bathing dress with a bunched little skirt round her thin hips.

  When Methley was alone with Olive he spoke to her with a different intentness. He consulted her about writing, about editors, about literature. What did she make of Bernard Shaw? Had the man a heart, when all was said and done? And Kenneth Grahame, did she succumb to his charm? Was it not all a little bloodless? He was a man who looked a woman in the eye and did not look away. What did she make of John Lane’s new magazine, The Savoy? He said he envied Olive the fullness and complexity of her life. The boys and girls and their different characters. He did not know how she could stretch her love so far—though he saw very clearly that she did so. He had no experience of it. They were sitting on the beach, picking at a dish of strawberries. Olive said that children connected you to the earth, and therefore weighed you down, a little. She felt, she said, like a farmyard hen, clucking. (Though it was Violet, at a little distance, who was wiping Florian’s sandy face after a fall, and sponging Robin where he had dirtied his pants.) Methley said the family must be of inestimable value when it came to writing tales for children. She wrote with such insight into the hopes and fears of childish minds. Olive said that she did not believe having children was necessarily helpful. It was enough to have been a child…

  “I do not know,” said Methley. “I am childless, and sometimes, these days, I lose touch with the child I once was. Do you think there is an age when we become completely adult, Mrs. Wellwood, with no child left in us? When is that, do you think? I am not referring to second childhood that comes to all of us who don’t die early enough.”

  His voice was droppe
d and very serious. He spoke to a thought Olive had had. She wrote for the child she had been, the child she was. In a kind of flurry she asked Methley whether he regretted having no children. The moment she had spoken she regretted the question. There were many reasons why marriages were childless. They were best left unmentioned.

  He bent towards her.

  “I have observed that there are childless marriages in which the unique pair are everything to each other, everything. They enact the absent children, they love the child in each other, they have a capacity for play and innocence which often—I have noticed—disappears from more fecund relations. Though they can also be—to use Blake’s term—experienced with each other, uninhibited by any watching presence …”

  Olive could not think of a quick answer. Herbert Methley went on