The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  We ’ave bought ’er the same with the sword an’ the flame

  An’ we’ve salted it down with our bones.

  (Poor beggars!—it’s blue with our bones!)

  Fludd said “A Black Widow indeed.” He was paying little attention to the war, which he denounced as another evil in a Fallen World. Cain, with and without his children, visited Purchase House frequently between 1896 and 1899. There had been a time when, as a very young man, Cain had drunk with the pre-Raphaelite Bohemia to which Fludd briefly belonged, and had watched him disappear into the night—“in search of dissolution,” he always said, holding up a pale hand to prevent anyone accompanying him. There had been rumours that he took pleasure in danger. Often he disappeared, in black moods, for weeks together, and his friends and companions canvassed the possibility that he was dead in an alley, or flotsam in the black Thames. He came back from one of these absences accompanied by his own Stunner, Sarah-Jane, whom he named Seraphita, and married. Prosper, by then a young lieutenant, was at the wedding, and could still, with increasing difficulty, remember the radiant, blithely innocent face of the young bride, her hair full of flowers, her garments spattered with them, like Botticelli’s Flora. She had looked at Fludd with a slightly silly, but touching adoration, the lieutenant thought, not himself finding her desirable, for she lacked spice. He himself was twenty-three, then, in 1878, and he thought Seraphita was younger. He was in love, and married his elegant and secretive Italian Giulia later the same year, taking her briefly to Lucknow, which she hated, and back to London for Julian’s birth in 1880. When he next saw the Fludds, which was not until after Florence’s birth, and Giulia’s death, in 1883, Imogen was four, Geraint two and Pomona one year old. By then, Seraphita had taken on the blank, listless look she still had. The children were prettily dressed and slightly grubby. Fludd, he discovered, was absent for days and weeks together. He had been making pots in Whitechapel, and had set a house on fire with a kiln disaster, after which he simply walked into the night, and disappeared. It was not Seraphita who told this to Prosper Cain. She offered him tea made without boiling water, and with insufficient tealeaves, and stared slightly to the side of his head. Prosper Cain found some connoisseurs to buy some pots and commission some more, and when Fludd returned, employed him as a ceramics consultant at South Kensington.

  He had been doubtful about the recent renewal of Fludd’s artistic energy, on the arrival of Philip. He had noted that the daughters—Imogen certainly, Pomona in an odder, jerkier, more effusive way—had taken on Seraphita’s vacant look. He went back from time to time to encourage the firings and was surprised how long both the work and the marginal profit-making had gone on. He thought this was to be attributed to Philip Warren, whose own throwing and, later, glazes increasingly impressed him. He thought Philip was stolid—he saw to the flues and the packing of the kiln—and was surprised by the intricacy and delicacy of his designs for tiles and bowls. Fludd was bold and breath-taking. Philip was fine. Prosper Cain was both amused and encouraged by the unconventional commercial support the pottery had. Geraint, still in a rage to escape poverty, suborned traders and charmed great ladies. Miss Dace, Frank Mallett and Dobbin kept track of orders and dispatches—these were not numerous, but were increasing. Fludd disappeared from time to time, silently and without warning, in the old way, but Philip went on with the work, silently. The house was more like a house, and less like a wrecked barn, Prosper said to Olive Wellwood, with whom he went walking in the Marsh, occasionally, when they were visiting.

  “Oh,” said Olive. “That’s Elsie. None of them could do anything without Elsie.”

  Prosper said he had hardly noticed her, which pleased Olive at some subliminal level, since Elsie had recently become very pretty indeed, almost beautiful.

  “She doesn’t try to be noticed,” said Olive, fairly. “She gets on with fixing things, so that they work. You know, Prosper”—they were on first-name terms now—“you know, I don’t think either of those two—Philip and Elsie—get paid a penny. I suspect she gets all her clothes from cast-offs or Patty Dace’s jumble sale stuff. I think Dobbin looks after him. I think Seraphita notices nothing and no one dare speak a word to Fludd in case he goes into a gloom, or stops working, which they expect him to do, every day, although he’s been working on and off for five years now.”

  Prosper Cain was shocked. Olive went on.

  “I notice—a woman will notice. Curtains are mended and things are polished—sideboards and spoons. There are bowls of wild flowers on the dresser. The sink is clean.”

  “How old is that girl?”

  “No one knows. She must be about twenty.”

  “Do you think—with some arranged assistance—she could look after a group of students from the Royal College of Art? The poor souls are much harassed by the building works at the Museum—I had the possibly over-ambitious idea of a summer school in the outhouses and meadows of Purchase House—with tents to camp in, and camping for the ladies in the haylofts—and with great luck a few master classes from Benedict Fludd.”

  “It is ambitious,” said Olive. “It would delight Geraint. We could add other things—literary talks, and plays put on, and so forth.”

  “Fludd is the attraction, and Fludd the major hazard,” said Cain.

  Fludd was in rather a gleeful mood, having made some odd-shaped vessels with Black Widow spiders lurking in their depths, their spinnakers busy, their multitude of eyes glittering opal. He said “Why not, why not, let them all come, let them learn to see clearly and use their hands.”

  They were having a business tea, and Frank and Dobbin were present. Dobbin asked, respectfully, if Fludd was sure he wouldn’t find a summer school—intrusive maybe, oppressive perhaps?

  Fludd said “Don’t be daft. A bevy of lovely young ladies is just what we need around us—and some of them may even have an inkling of what it’s all about. I’ve been thinking of modelling women again. Let them come.”

  “We must talk to Elsie,” said Frank, who was quite as aware as Olive was of the importance of Elsie.

  “Elsie’ll do as she’s told. Elsie’s a good girl,” said Fludd.

  No one asked Elsie what she thought or felt. Or, at least, with a youthful egoism which she had been forced entirely to conceal, Elsie believed no one asked or cared what she thought or felt. She had worked out her master plan from the moment of setting foot in Purchase House—or perhaps even earlier, in the dusty track across the Marsh, when she noticed that Philip was taken aback by her presence. She didn’t go quite as far as thinking he didn’t want her there, but she kept the possibility in mind. She saw something was missing in the house—a real woman, she told herself, looking at the three pale Fludd females. Elbow-grease, cunning, foresight, tirelessness. She had brought her mother’s fine camelhair brushes for Philip. And for herself she had kept her mother’s sewing-truss, with its needles and cottons and wools, and a pair of sharp scissors that had never been pawned. She would rather have had the brushes. She had been learning to decorate fine porcelain, when her mother collapsed, muttering Philip’s name. She thought she would use the needles and scissors as a weapon to make a space for herself. She made excellent soups, out of almost nothing, a hambone and a sheaf of peapods, slowly simmered. Scrag-end of Romney salt-marsh mutton, with onions and pearl barley. She was not, it should be said, naturally tidy or orderly or domestic. She wanted to go barefoot, and didn’t really care if her underwear was in holes. But in this situation she needed to be needed, she needed to become indispensable, and she made herself so. She learned—for herself, no one thought to teach her—the embroidery stitches, cross-stitch, petit point, and unpicked and reworked where Pomona had gone wrong. She worked out how to deal with Philip. She loved Philip, and believed he did not love her. He had room for only one passion, she thought, and it wasn’t his family. By all sorts of mute signs, and tactful withdrawals, she made it clear to him that she expected nothing, nothing from him, beyond not being sent away. He would have been s
hocked if she had said he did not love her, and she did not. And his mode of being was largely silent anyway. At first she asked Seraphita and Imogen if she might mend the bedspreads, or collect scraps to make a peg-rug, and they gave their sweet empty smiles, and said, by all means. So she turned to, and put sides to middle in old bed-sheets, and contrived storage systems, and found muslin to hang over jugs in hot weather. She moved around the house fast and invisibly—it was as though all the energy that drained from the three pale females had collected in her, like galvanism.

  At night, very late, once she had installed an initial order that she could keep her hand and eye on, she crept into the pottery studio. She made, as she had told Dorothy, little pots. Fludd didn’t have porcelain clay, but she mixed kaolin with earthenware, and made it lighter, lit a lamp and painted intricate little designs on tiny cups and saucers and platters the size of pen trays. She had been starving when she came, with a bony body and lank, dusty hair. Adequately fed, intensely busy, she became, as Olive had noticed, pretty, or more. Her hair suddenly took to curling and became a luxuriant mass, which she kept down with a kind of gipsy-scarf. Her waist narrowed, and above it and below it she rounded out and found herself tempted to strut, or twirl, and resisted, for who was there to see her? The obvious person for her to desire—the only visible person—was Geraint. He had energy, like her, but mostly used it to get out and about on a bicycle, far from Purchase. And if she let her hair out, or made a new shirt from a roll of blotched blue cotton, he showed no sign of noticing.

  There were people, besides Olive, who did notice. One night, as she was working on the little pots, she was surprised by Benedict Fludd, who strode in, wearing a rough cowled garment like a monk’s habit, in black. He was carrying a candle and his eyes glittered in the shadow above its flame.

  Elsie gathered her little pots together like a hen with chickens. Fludd made a gesture like some kind of benison.

  “Please continue. Don’t be alarmed. Will it trouble you if I draw you at work?”

  “No,” said Elsie, stoutly, though her veins had stiffened. “Just keep working. There’s an interesting light from the lamp. I’ll use charcoal. You have a very interesting face, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Elsie, confused. Fludd laughed and began to draw.

  He showed her what he had done, before they went back to their rooms. It was done with bold lines, and sweeps of shadow. It was a modeller’s drawing, of the young flesh and bones of a girl who was, indeed, beautiful. He had done her hands, too, the competent fingers holding the clay and the brush. He had sketched in her sharp breasts, under her nightdress, and the barest possible indication of the folds of the cotton as it fell over them. Elsie said she was amazed. She said, too boldly,

  “May I have it?”

  “Certainly not,” said Fludd. “I’m making myself a collection.” And he leafed through his sketch-book, showing her drawings she had known nothing about, Elsie bending a brooding face over the dishes, Elsie poised over a pie with a knife, Elsie feeding the chickens, with the wind in her skirts. The chickens were a miracle of economic indications of movement, a strutting one, one with its head back to crow, one with flaring wings attacking another. He had caught her own motions as he had caught the nature of the birds. She felt exposed, and that something had been taken from her.

  “I didn’t know,” she said.

  “Now you do. I should like you to sit for a more serious study.”

  Elsie clutched her nightdress about her body. She said, somewhere between pert and indignant,

  “And who will do the cooking and cleaning and shopping, I’d like to know.”

  “Certainly not my family of pallid silk moths. They float about and don’t know how lucky they are. I do. Major Cain is bringing us a gaggle of lady students from the Royal College for this summer school they are planning. Would you consent to sit for all of us—myself and the lady artists? You are very unusual to look at. In a good way. Very.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “I’m sure Dobbin, or Major Cain, or the Vicar, can find you an auxiliary when the school people come. Then you could model for us. Delectable.”

  When he had gone, Elsie, somewhat ruffled, thought he might have looked at her little pots, as well as her face, and other parts of her. He might have given her some encouragement.

  She wondered if there was a career in being a model. It might not be respectable. Did she care?

  They were rather lovely little pots. He should have noticed them.

  19

  The summer school took place. Humphry put on The Winter’s Tale, with himself as Leontes, Toby as Polixenes, and Geraint and Florence as Florizel and Perdita.

  Herbert Methley talked to Olive about sex. He sat next to her during rehearsals, when neither of them was needed. He took her for walks, along the rivulet, past the church, into the Marsh. His talk was at once theoretical and fleshly. Much of it was about what women desired. He said that until recently it had suited men to suppose that women felt little or no desire, were pure creatures or milch cows, that men treated as property. The ten commandments listed wives along with ox, ass, field, maidservant or manservant as things neither to be taken nor to be desired. Adulterous women were beheaded, in Semitic cultures, but not adulterous men. And yet, as a good student of Darwin, he believed that sexual desire was instilled in human beings—like other animals—by the needs of the species to propagate itself. Elsie Warren, trim and fine-waisted, in a linen hat, came rapidly towards them with a basket over her arm. Did Olive suppose, Herbert Methley asked her, that such a young woman—he studied her figure very intently as she went past, smiling politely at them—felt none of the stirrings young men felt at her age? It was very improbable. Olive herself, he said, drawing her hand through his arm, was both a wise woman, and like himself, a student of human nature. What did she think?

  “I am mostly a student of inhuman nature—imaginary nature,” said Olive, evading. “I tell fairytales to children. The prince always marries the princess. Or the daft young man gets the princess because of his good nature and because he is the third son. Or the prince becomes a roe deer, or a swine, and has to be disenchanted by the clever princess. I don’t know what it has to do with what you call the needs of the species. All the tales stop off with marriage, or perhaps foretell a large number of progeny, undefined.”

  They were going past a fenced field with a herd of cream-coloured cows, heavy, muddy, staring cows. In a corner, under an elm tree, one female cow was busily mounting another, making the movements a bull would make, although unequipped, and provoking—they both noticed—a quiver of response (or irritation) in the strained area under the lower cow’s tail.

  “Does not that prove my point?” said Herbert Methley. “The poor things are deprived of the presence of a bull—who would in nature be there, guarding his harem and snorting defiance at other bulls. Yet they feel a need…”

  Olive felt a blush mounting from her bosom to her face.

  “I hope I have not shocked you. I did not mean to shock you.”

  “I think you did. But I am not shocked. And I take your point. Scientifically, your example—look, she has got down, and sauntered away—is evidence for what you say it is.”

  “When we can prevent the unfortunate consequences of following our instincts to what John Donne called the one true end of love—our society will be different, and we shall be transfigured.”

  “By sexual freedom? Instincts are one thing. Donne uses the word, love.”

  “Is not desire always love, whilst it exists? Whatever it may become. I sometimes think, there are as many ways of loving women, as there are women. And I sometimes think, if women were honest, there are as many ways of loving men as there are men.”

  “Ah, but a good student of human nature needs also to study indifference, and even revulsion and distaste. For these also are instincts.”

  Methley thought for a moment or two about his remark, and then attacked directly.

/>   “I hope I inspire none of those in you?”

  He laughed, not quite easily.

  “Don’t be foolish,” said Olive. “We are not talking about ourselves. And we are good friends, which is yet another relation between men and women, hard to manage and rare to find.”

  When she got back to the inn where they were staying, she found herself shrugging her whole body with a mix of emotions. Of course such talk aroused some kind of—yes, sexual—pricklings in her. It had to. She knew what desire was, and what its satisfaction was. But she had no idea whether she desired Herbert Methley. The presence of his body aroused her own in some way, but it was not clear to her that what it aroused wasn’t indifference, revulsion and distaste. He was not lovely to look at, as Humphry was. Though he had a kind of dreadful energy which is always—how did she know these things?—stirring, like a huge octopus quivering through water, or flailing on a slab and slipping back into the sea.

  What was very certain was that she had had none of these thoughts at Elsie Warren’s age. They were a grown woman’s thoughts.

  Benedict Fludd held classes in clay modelling in what had been the grand coach-house. Elsie had cleaned its little row of spider-webbed windows and Philip had brought tubs and buckets of clay and slip. There was a serious group of five young women from the Royal College, whose previous experience of ceramics had been painting tiles, and one or two young men also. Then there were locals who wanted to try their hands—Patty Dace, Arthur Dobbin, a schoolmaster from Lydd, and the new schoolmistress-to-be from Puxty, a young widow called Mrs. Oakeshott. Mrs. Oakeshott had come from the North, to make a new beginning, she said, after the tragic death of her young husband in a railway accident. She was accompanied by her small son, Robin, who would start school at Puxty in September, with the few Marsh children who attended—the whole school, from five to eleven, was only fourteen children. Frank Mallett, who was on the local education committee, had been delighted to find Mrs. Oakeshott, and was already afraid she would find the harsh weather and the loneliness unbearable. She had excellent qualifications and a mild wit. Her son had come with her to Purchase, accompanied by a kind of nursemaid, twig-limbed, diminutive, frizzy-haired, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, called Tabitha. Mrs. Oakeshott had a thick, coiled plait of strawberry-blonde hair, golden, creamy, rose-tinged. She had a fine face, square in shape, placid but watchful, and a delightful smile, when she smiled. She wore glasses, which she tended to mislay, and which were returned to her by the young men, and by Dobbin, when they found them in clumps of grass in the orchard, or lying amongst the drying pots in the studios. She was good at modelling.