The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Other beings were met, and neither trusted nor distrusted. Cutty Soams, very jolly, half-mansize, chipping away with a pickaxe in a green and mustard glow, bared to the waist but wearing a ragged green cap and a spiky beard, warning against going further on or deeper down—he would never dare, oh no. He misdirected the Company, sending them left along a level which ended with an impenetrable rock-face. He may or may not have been helping the Enemy. They were aware of spies. Little fluttering bats with eyes like minuscule rubies and diamonds, touching hair with bony fingers, flickering away into shadow. Worms of all shapes and sizes, quick and slow. Dancing lights that they had the sense not to follow. A carved figure on a stone chair, swelling out of the rock.

  • • •

  There was also the Wild Boy. It was possible—Tom in the story entertained the possibility—that the Wild Boy was Tom’s Shadow. He was always glimpsed at a distance, at the other end of a tunnel, running fast. He was ragged and dusty, barefoot and fleeting. Sometimes he turned to wave, mocking or inviting, they did not know, before vanishing into the shadows.

  They found him, of course. Hunter and his sidekicks, Blewett and Fitch, stalked through the boiler-room in dressing-gowns and slippers, shining a light into crannies and under ledges and pipes. They probably went on these boyhunts regularly, though this did not occur to Tom, who felt he was Tomallalone, unique, the single object of their mocking venom. Hunter’s dressing-gown was scarlet, wide-skirted, the colour of judges’ robes, with gilded braiding and a gold cord round his manly waist above his purposeful haunches. He had glossy beetle-black slippers, embossed with his crest, which had plumes and portcullises on it. The butts would clean the coal dust off the slippers the next day. Tom remembered, holding his breath, that he had himself performed that task, and was furious with himself for not seeing what it implied. They sauntered past his hiding-place, and he breathed again, and then, of course, they turned, and Hunter said “Let’s just cast an eye behind here—now what have we here, a naughty little newbutt, out of bed, with a little lamp and a filthy heap of paper, and a blanket too, all mod cons. You will see me tomorrow, Wellwood, and I’ll flay your buttocks for you. Now, show me what you’re reading to yourself. Some smutty tale, I’m sure.” He motioned to Blewett to seize the pages. Tom bared his teeth, like a rat, and cowered back, and panted.

  “Bum-wad,” said Hunter. “Read it out, Blue, let’s hear what the little swine is masturbating with.”

  Blewett read. He read badly, halting and humpy, putting on a false, exaggerated squeak.

  Then Gathorn said “We need to go still further in, however dark it is.”

  And Tom said “I would give anything, almost, to see the light of day. I am shadowless by torchlight and candlelight, I might as well be shadowless in the sun.”

  And the Loblolly hummed a little tune, and said that rats were nearby, he could smell them, thousands of rats, swarming through the tunnel. And Tom said “I am afraid I may never come out of here alive.”

  • • •

  “What sort of crap is this?” said Hunter. “Stories for babies, whining babies who need bedtime pap like this. You won’t forget this in a hurry, Wellwood.”

  Tom croaked “Give it back.”

  “Did you write it yourself? It’s pretty comprehensive rubbish, isn’t it? And you know what we do with rubbish. We could cut it up for bum-wad. Or we could just chuck it in here,” he said, opening the door of the furnace.

  A flame shot up from the surface of the incandescent coke-bed inside the boiler. Blue flames rippled, gold flames flickered, dull red patches sprouted on the exposed lumps. The stench was asphyxiating. Fitch began to cough, and Hunter began to throw Tom Underground, page by page, clump of pages by clump, into the open porthole. The story writhed and shrivelled on its bed of fire. Tom seized his Kelly lamp, which he had turned off, and hurled it at Hunter’s head. It struck his cheek, leaving a bruise and a blister, and poured lamp-oil down the scarlet gown, in dark stains.

  “You could be sent away for this,” said Hunter, mopping his cheek with a handkerchief. “You nasty little turd, you could be hurled up in front of the Head, you could be beaten in front of the whole school, you could be finished. You’ve hurt me, you bummer. Really hurt. I’ll see you never forget it. I think you might like to get sent away, and I don’t think you should get anything you like. So I’ll stay mum, and make sure you pay—this hurts, I’ll hurt you, make no mistake.” He cuffed Tom about the ears; rhythmically, several times, so that Tom’s head was a box of pain.

  “Come and see me after school tomorrow. Think about it. Bring me the black cane, after school tomorrow. Don’t forget, now, will you? And you can get the oil off my dressing-gown first thing tomorrow.”

  The next morning, Hunter waited in vain for his butt. He sent scouts out to look for him—he was probably shaking somewhere, in some hidey-hole, paralysed with terror, he had no guts. He wasn’t found by class-time, and was marked absent in the register. He did not appear to receive his beating after school. He was not in the dorm at night. Hunter sent Fitch down to search the cellars, but he was not there.

  • • •

  The next day, the headmaster asked the whole school if anyone had seen Wellwood. Hunter had shown his bruise and cut to the Head, saying curtly that Wellwood had caused it, by throwing a hot lamp, when he was caught reading after lights out. The Head said the boy was probably hiding. In his mind was a sick memory of an earlier beautiful boy, swollen-faced and no longer beautiful, hanging from a hook in the coal-cellar. He told Hunter to set about finding Wellwood. He instituted a search of the grounds. After another two days, he called in the police, and telegraphed Humphry Wellwood.

  Humphry and Olive got on a train, and went North. Humphry was partly annoyed to be missing a deadline for the Evening Standard. Olive was trying to hold on to several story-threads, from The Outlaws to Tom Underground. At the same time, exactly, as they experienced normal continuing irritation, they found themselves, somewhere else, alien, frozen by fear, staring at raw shapes through the window of smoke, steam, looming vegetables.

  When they arrived at Marlowe Tom was still lost. Humphry counted the days during which Tom had been missing and he himself had not been informed. He expressed indignation. Olive said Tom’s letters had been perfectly placid. With hindsight, too placid, not like Tom at all. They met Hunter, who assessed them insolently, curtly displayed his bruise and cut. Olive asked him how he had come by it. Hunter explained that Tom had been using a lamp to read a heap of nonsense in the dark, and had thrown the lamp at him, when discovered. A hot lamp is dangerous, said Hunter. He stared coolly, and apparently unperturbed.

  Olive suggested, when Hunter had gone away, that it might be worth talking to Julian Cain, who knew Tom outside school, and might be in his confidence.

  Julian was fetched, and said he knew nothing. He said, under questioning, that he thought Tom was finding it hard to settle in. He said cautiously, to Humphry, that Jonson’s was famous for discipline, and newbutts—new boys, that was—sometimes found it hard, at first. Humphry understood the unspoken message, but it did not help. There was no sign of Tom, and after a few days in an inn, Humphry and Olive went home again, to their other children, and to wait in case Tom got in touch, which he did not.

  Todefright became terrible. Phyllis cried a lot, and got smacked frequently. Humphry drank whisky, and talked to the police. Olive walked. She walked from end to end of the house, as a woman in labour walks, to use the contracting muscles to distract body and mind from the pain. After three weeks, walking, walking, occasionally sinking into the nearest chair and pulling at her fingernails and hair, she took some of Humphry’s whisky, and then some more. At first late at night, and then, in small slugs, in the evening, and then in the day, still walking, walking. After six weeks, her bright black hair was dull and bushy, and her eyes—though she did not weep—were puffed by whisky.

  Violet managed everything. Meals, letters to editors, the little children, who had not b
een told, though Violet knew Hedda knew perfectly well what was going on, although she did not know what Hedda thought or felt about it.

  Dorothy went out. She didn’t go to stay with Griselda, or to any of her lessons. She went out into the country and disappeared. It was odd that neither Humphry nor Olive noticed her absence, though they might have been supposed to be anxious about their other children.

  Dorothy went to the Tree House, which was still well camouflaged by autumn foliage and bracken turning gold. She sat quietly on the edge of one of the bracken beds, and waited. After six weeks, she found a chipped pottery mug, and some mouldy crumbs, just inside the door. She began to stalk the Tree House, creeping up on it from behind, not approaching down paths, and by this method she was able, one day, to go in and find the ragged boy curled like an unborn child in the heather nest, with worn shoe soles, a filthy jacket several sizes too large, a satchel she recognised, a shock of long, dusty hair, full of all sorts of things, living and very dead.

  Dorothy said “I knew you’d come here. I think I’d have known if you were dead. I thought you weren’t.”

  Tom made a scratching, snuffling noise.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Helping a gamekeeper,” said Tom. It was all the answer she, or anyone, ever got. It was like and unlike one of Olive’s tales of fugitives. It took Dorothy two more days to persuade him to walk back with her to Todefright. She never, ever told Olive that she had known for two days where he was, without saying anything, for she would never have been forgiven.

  When Olive saw ragged Tom she had to rush into the cloakroom to be violently and unromantically sick. She came back, her face white as plaster, and put her arms around her boy, who smelled of unspeakable things, and whose skin had no bloom. He stiffened, and instinctively pushed her away. She said “Where have you been?” She said “We were sick with worry.” Tom did not reply. Olive put her arms again round his hunched, unresponsive shoulders and said “You will never go back there again.” Olive wanted to tell him, in pain and grief and rage, what the days of waiting and not knowing had been like, and knew that his own state was too bad for her to burden him with hers. She had been there before, when the pit flooded, when the fire damp puffed its venom. She had waited and grimly known she was waiting in vain, had almost longed for certainty to replace the agony of uncertainty. Something in her—because of those earlier waits—had known Tom would never be seen again. And now he was here, alien and grubby. She said “My poor boy.” She said to Violet “He must have a bath, and his own clothes.” She said to Tom “You can tell me all about it, in your own good time.”

  But he never told her about it. Olive suspected that he was telling Dorothy, and interrogated Dorothy. Dorothy said, quite truthfully, that she knew nothing except that Tom had been helping a gamekeeper. Olive did not really believe that this was all that Dorothy knew. Tom said one thing, after a week or so. “I haven’t got the story.” Olive said “Never mind. I have a copy. Don’t worry. I know all about it. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” said Tom, and went and shut himself in his bedroom.

  Olive felt shut out. Tom was part of her, and she was part of Tom, and the evil boy, Hunter, had severed the connection. She was angry with Tom, because of the waiting she had done, and his unawareness of the waiting. She was not given to introspection. She had “been through” something bad, and she dealt with it in her usual way, writing a children’s story of an innocent boy set upon by bullies at school, and bravely defying them. She made a Gothic horror out of the neo-Gothic turrets of Marlowe and included a heartfelt appeal for schools to become kinder and more civilised places. Innocence should not be regimented and brutalised, like recruits to an army. We should care for our young, and teach them tolerance, kindness and self-reliance. This book, with the title Dark Doings at Blacktowers, was a huge success. Julian Cain read it in the Easter holidays of 1897 and said to himself that if he were Tom he would find the book unforgivable. By then Tom was apparently back to “normal,” running wild in the woods, and still doing Latin with Vasily Tartarinov and English with Toby Youlgreave. Olive had given him a copy of Blacktowers, inscribed “To my dear son, Tom,” but it was not clear to her, or to anyone, whether he had read it. He had developed a habit of simply not speaking about a great number of things. Olive did not write any more of Tom Underground until after the publication of Blacktowers. She rewrote the last section she had sent to Marlowe, with the company trapped in a shaft which was a dead end, and made them hear a silvery tapping on the other side of what had seemed impenetrable rock. Gathorn wielded his pick from one side, and the other pick echoed his blows, until the rock suddenly crumbled, and they were in a large chamber, lit by silver lamps, where a creature neither woman nor spider, but with features of both, was spinning long silvery threads …

  18

  Eighteen ninety-six was a gloomy year. William Morris died in October, as Tom was hiding in thickets and Olive was pacing her corridors. Prosper Cain, still grieving over the suicide of his Director in June, was harassed, both personally and professionally, by the sustained Press campaign against the military presence in the Museum. The military, accused of muddle and incompetence, hit back with statistics and oratory. A Parliamentary Select Committee was formed to go into it, which met twenty-seven times in 1897 and twenty-six times in 1898. It included Sir Mancherjee Bhownaggree, Conservative Member for Bethnal Green, where objects from the Museum were on display. It also included John Burns, the socialist MP for Battersea. The committee recommended that the whole Department of Science and Art be reorganised, and the duties of all the officials redefined.

  All sorts of institutions were coming to life. The Tate Gallery opened on Millbank in 1896, the National Portrait Gallery moved from Bethnal Green to a site next to the National Gallery, in the same year. The Whitechapel Gallery, a solid and elegant Art Nouveau building by C. Harrison Townsend, and an offshoot of all the teaching, studying and social enthusiasm in Toynbee Hall, was built between 1897 and 1901. A Fabian Society member, incurably ill, committed suicide and left his fortune to the Fabians, to forward their ends. Sidney and Beatrice Webb decided that this could best be done by the founding of the London School of Economics, and in 1896 the rich Irishwoman Charlotte Payne-Townshend took the top floor of no. 10 Adelphi Terrace for the first students and lecturers—though this move was not wholly approved of by all the Fabians. The dissenting Fabians included John Burns, and Sir Sydney Olivier, who worked in the Colonial Office and had taught at Toynbee Hall.

  There were other suicides: in 1897 Barney Barnato, the bankrupt Randlord, jumped overboard and drowned on his way back from the Cape to a monstrous party, in his newly built monstrous house in Park Lane, to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In 1898 Eleanor Marx, socialist, new woman, trade unionist, Ibsen translator, poisoned herself on finding that her lover, Edward Aveling, had secretly married an actress, and needed her to sell her father’s papers to keep her. The Yellow Book produced its last issue in 1897, destroyed at least partly by Oscar Wilde. (Aubrey Beardsley had made a cover, which was not used, for the first edition of the Savoy, in 1896, which depicted a naked putto pissing on the discarded Yellow Book. The cover, when it appeared, was without Yellow Book, and showed a putto innocent of cock and balls.)

  In 1899, in May, the little old Empress of India, having been celebrated in flaming summer weather by a swelter of loyal emotion in 1897, was driven up in a semi-state open landau to perform what turned out to be her last public duty, the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone of Aston Webb’s new buildings at what was now to be called the Victoria and Albert Museum. The stone was red Argyll granite, and the ornate trowel, with which, assisted by Aston Webb, she laid the stone, was kept by the Museum. She was too tremulous either to climb any steps or to speak, and handed her speech to the Lord President of the Council, the Duke of Devonshire, who had persuaded her to add her own name to her dead husband’s. “In compliance with your prayer, I gladly direct th
at in future this Institution shall be styled The Victoria and Albert Museum and I trust that it will remain for ages a Monument of discerning Liberality and a Source of Refinement and Progress.”

  In 1899, in October, the High Commissioner in Cape Colony prepared to go to war with the Boers for the gold mines of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Boers immediately invaded Natal and Cape Province, taking Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley. Prosper Cain did not think it would all be over by Christmas. He went to Purchase House, to talk to Benedict Fludd, having visited those sappers who were to embark for the battlefield, where they were training as bombardiers and explosives experts in the barracks at Lydd. They had invented an explosive, Lyddite, which was to be used in South Africa to blow bridges and destroy farmhouses.

  Cain did not like the war. He was not sure it was a just war, and he was not sure it could be prosecuted successfully. He quoted Rudyard Kipling, with a sardonic smile, to Benedict Fludd.

  Walk wide o’ the Widow at Windsor

  For ’alf o’ Creation she owns: