The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Fludd had prevailed on Elsie to sit for the classes, although she sat there running over in her mind what should be fetched from the farm and the market for the next meal. No one dared contradict Benedict Fludd, in case he should cease to be amiable and become moody or irascible. He was teaching them to model a head. No one was modelling Elsie below the neck. They were trying to render her flying hair, and sharp mouth, and wide eyes. Mrs. Oakeshott’s effort was much the best. She had got the angle of the jaw and the neck right. The brows over the empty eyes were promising and lively.

  Little Tabitha wandered about with the child, Robin, and came upon Violet Grimwith in the orchard, reading aloud to the assembled smaller Wellwoods, Florian, Robin and Harry. Hedda, rather sulky, was with this group but not of it. She was reading a book, lying on her stomach in the grass, thinking this was not enough for her, not enough, she would go mad with boredom.

  Tabitha crept up to the very edge of the audience. Violet looked up. “Come and sit with us, if you like, why don’t you? What is the little boy called?”

  “Robin. I look after him for his mum.” She was older than Hedda, but smaller. Violet said “Well, bring him into the circle, to listen to the story. We’re reading At the Back of the North Wind. Do you know that?”

  “No, mam.”

  “I do,” said Robin Oakeshott. He sat down, next to Robin Well-wood. “I like it. Go on reading.”

  Violet gave him a measuring glance, and went on reading.

  Mrs. Oakeshott offered her services to help with the play. She gave Imogen Fludd a hand with the costumes, and turned out to be deft with bits of glitter-braid, and abundant pleats for the pregnant Hermione. Olive liked her. Everyone liked her. It would have been hard not to.

  Olive came upon Mrs. Oakeshott, in the place behind the yew hedge, where they waited to go on and off, adjusting the clasp of Humphry’s regal cloak. She saw Humphry’s hand, in the nape of Mrs. Oakeshott’s neck, his clever fingers feeling for tension, and relieving it, as he did for Olive herself. She stepped back.

  “All the same, Marian,” said Humphry. “However sensible you are—we are—the whole idea is simply foolish. I wish you would go home.”

  Marian Oakeshott rested her head—intimately—on Humphry’s shoulder.

  “It is hard,” she said. And then, “I do love you, I do love you so very steadily, so very much, my dear, however hopelessly it must be.”

  And Humphry said “Oh well, I love you too, that can’t be altered. But it can’t be, and you know it, you have always known it.”

  And Marian Oakeshott put up her arms, and drew down Humphry’s head, and kissed him, and he gave a kind of groan, and grasped her, and kissed her back. Olive saw the crown of hair tremble and sway. She thought of marching forwards, and retreated.

  Hedda lay in the long grass, with her skirt rucked up above her knickers, and her lengthening brown legs stretched out. She was fortunate not to have hay fever, as Phyllis did. She was not exactly reading The Golden Age. I am a snake in the grass, she thought, a secret snake. Violet was sitting on the roughly mown grass in the orchard, at some distance, in a low wicker armchair, sewing. Hedda spent a lot of time spying on Violet, as a revenge for the fact that Violet spied on her, going through her private drawers and notebooks. Hedda, like Phyllis, was perpetually agitated by being left out of the group of older children, Tom and Dorothy, Charles and Griselda, and now Geraint. But whereas Phyllis was plaintive, Hedda was enraged. She was the traitor in all tales of chivalry and in myths. She was Vivien, she was Morgan Le Fay, she was Loki. She despised the cow-eyed and the gentle, Elaine the lily maid, faithful Psyche, Baldur’s weeping wife, Nanna. She was a detective, who saw through appearances. No one was as nice as they seemed, was her rule of judging characters. She was the darkest of the children, with long black hair and very solid black brows, drawn in a frown more often than not, and long, black lashes which in themselves were beautiful, especially when she was asleep. She had no one to talk to about her investigations. Phyllis was an idiot. Florian was a baby. She had had hopes of Pomona, but Pomona was an idiot, too, of the same kind as Phyllis. Dorothy was who she hated, because she was older, and in the way, and got things Hedda didn’t get. And because she had Griselda, and they were together, and Hedda had no one. But Dorothy didn’t know what Hedda knew, or partly knew. She had even wondered about Tabitha as a sort of friend—it was odd that she, at ten, was certainly a young child, whereas Tabitha, at twelve, was supposed to be in charge of Robin Oakeshott, and was a sort of nursemaid. She saw that Tabitha’s simple manner was put on. Tabitha had her own thoughts, which she kept to herself. Hedda did not know what those thoughts were, and she saw Tabitha didn’t want her to know. Tabitha was acting, and could not afford a crack in the surface.

  Olive came through the orchard, running, clutching her skirts. She pulled up a chair near Violet, and leaned forward, and hissed to her in a desperate whisper. Hedda could hear perfectly from where she was, and kept very still.

  “I’ve just discovered something frightful, Vi. I don’t know what to do.”

  She was all atremble.

  “Tell me,” said Violet. Violet liked being told things, Hedda knew. “That woman—that Mrs. Oakeshott—who is no Mrs. anyone—she is the same woman—she is Maid Marian.”

  “That was fairly clear from the outset,” said Violet. “What?”

  “That was what I thought, myself. What has upset you?”

  “She kissed him. He kissed her. I saw.”

  “That was stupid of you. Better not see. She’s going away to be the schoolmistress at Puxty. What are you thinking of doing?”

  “I am not made of stone, Violet, though you may think so. I have violent feelings. I feel—very angry, very—I can’t stand the mess. I can’t work if there’s a mess. You know that. I can’t afford to get agitated, I need to work.”

  “Well then, you must not get agitated. You are the goose who lays the golden eggs on which we all depend. Including, I imagine, Mistress Maid Marian. You’ll be better off if you leave her to go earn her living at Puxty. You don’t need any more dependants.”

  “He kissed her.”

  “Well, you know what he is and what he does. He won’t leave us, all the same, you can feel safe on that count. Mistress Marian is the victim, not you, you goose.”

  “But I saw—”

  “Well, take good care to see no more. You’ve had practice. Kiss someone yourself, there are those who would enjoy that, and you know it.”

  There was something going on, Hedda sensed, that she did not understand, over and beyond what she did understand. Olive gave a little laugh.

  “Mr. Methley has been lecturing me on the nature of women.”

  “He’s another who can’t keep his hands to himself.”

  “You’ve noticed that?”

  “There’s not much I don’t notice,” said Violet, with quick satisfaction. That was it, Hedda thought, she has to know everything, or she feels—smaller, lesser—

  “So you think I should just go on—as though nothing—as though I’d noticed nothing—”

  “Isn’t that one of your great accomplishments?”

  “Oh, you are hard on me.”

  “Rather the opposite,” said Violet.

  That first summer school was ad hoc and haphazard, from start to finish. Later schools took up deliberately a pattern that developed casually and at odd moments, in that first year, where one event—a lecture, a drawing class, a poetry reading, the Play above all—became connected to the others, so that Toby Youlgreave gave a lecture on Italian tales of abandoned babies who were returned as beautiful girls, whilst the textile and embroidery group were put to designing floral prints and weaves for the black and white wintry first act, and the spring festival of the second, where Perdita scattered flowers. August Steyning came over to help with stage effects—notably Olive-Hermione, as statue—and stayed to instruct the young Fludds and Wellwoods in theatre and costume design. He took from The Winter’s Tale w
hat fitted his version of the theory that marionettes were more profound in their presentation of human passion than clumsy or self-obsessed human actors. He instructed Florence in how to dance “like a wave of the sea,” bending her body with his own hands, inducing a paralysis of self-consciousness and then, inexplicably, a new freedom of flowing movement. Florence said, flicking her wrists and ankles,

  “What have you done? I feel as though my hands and feet don’t belong to me.”

  “Good,” said August Steyning. “Now, again, skip, skip, glide, make a full moon of your arms, let your fingers hold it—it is cold to the touch—so—”

  Florence felt she was made of quicksilver.

  Prosper Cain came when he could, when the business of the Museum allowed it. He gave a talk on the craft of art, and the art of craft, and of how—even in painting and sculpture—the two were inseparable. You needed design, and you needed basic physics and chemistry, or your paint would not dry under its varnish and your clay would not hold its glaze. And you needed also something—a sharpness of vision—which couldn’t be taught, but could not be acquired, in his view, without incessant practice.

  He went to a class where several students—professionals and amateurs—were designing The Winter’s Tale series of alternating squares, tiles as it were, on stitched or printed fabric. Seraphita Fludd was ostensibly teaching this class, sitting at one end of the barn, and saying “very nice, very acceptable,” to whatever was brought up for her to look at. Cain wandered, with Olive Wellwood, behind the chairs and easels, offering comments. His own children had produced very pleasing, very faintly parodic, floral forms, Florence’s Dutch, Julian’s a version of Sèvres porcelain. “Very nice,” said Prosper Cain to his son. “Very competent, you mean,” said Julian. “I can do this with one hand behind my back. It’s a mockery. I don’t have any of that sharpness of vision you were extolling this morning. It’s not real, as I know you know.”

  “I wonder what it needs to become real?” said Prosper, accepting Julian’s evaluation of his own work.

  “I don’t think art should be personal,” said Julian. “In fact, I think it shouldn’t be. And yet, what is wrong with my very nice roses, is that they’re nothing to do with me. They don’t need me, and I don’t need them.”

  When they were out of earshot, Olive said to Prosper that he was fortunate to be able to talk to his children with such ease, to put them at ease, she meant to say—she wanted to say, how very well he had succeeded at bringing them up—at being—

  “Both parents,” said Prosper. “Male and female, both. It hasn’t been easy. Soldiers are very male, by nature. Except that they need female skills, like sewing and polishing, for they live separately from women. In that sense, they are like the boys to whom Dr. Badley is diligently teaching needlework and cookery at Bedales. A concept that, as a soldier, I find attractive. Camps, and needlework for boys. And theatre. Come and look at Miss Fludd’s work. It interests me.”

  There she sat, Imogen Fludd, in her imperfectly hand-sewn garments, that lacked both art and craft. She had designed one black and white square, and one small group of spring flowers. The black and white was frost-flowers on a window-pane, their petals outlined with meticulous strings of minuscule dots, a laciness that owed something to Beardsley’s work for the Yellow Book and the Savoy, though Prosper Cain could not imagine this dumb girl understanding Beardsley’s sly, sexual forms. The lips and clefts of her frost-flowers were surely innocent? Her spring flowers were in vanishing pastel colours, a hint of rose, a shadow of primrose, a blue stain like the vein in her pale wrist. They were trying to retreat back into the plane of the paper, they were blushing mildly to be present at all. He was about to say something anodyne and pass on when the shapes pulled together in his head, and he saw that she had, in a helpless way, exactly that sharp vision that Julian had rightly renounced. He said

  “These could be good, you know. Why do your flowers lurk in the centre of the paper? As though they were going down a funnel. You should do what Mr. Morris always insisted on, extend the vegetable forms to the edges of the square so that they can grow beyond it—”

  “I can’t.”

  She didn’t look up, her face was heavy.

  “Well, then,” said Prosper, on an impulse. “Define their limits. May I?”

  She handed him her charcoal and her pencils.

  He enclosed the frost-flowers in squared panes. And then he drew a circle round the spring flowers, almost as though they were on a plate, or inside the rim of a basket. It was surprising how the confinement brought them to life. He laughed.

  “They needed to feel safe,” he said.

  “They needed to feel safe,” she repeated.

  He said

  “Have you other work I can see?”

  She handed him a portfolio. He found a series of drawings of little coloured fishes, springing and curling, blue and yellow and red.

  “I was trying to illustrate The Arabian Nights,” she said. “The talking fishes. It’s got no shape, like everything I do.”

  Prosper enclosed the fishes in an extempore frying pan, with two handles, bringing them to life in the same curious way.

  “Not,” he said, “that you can now say they are safer. But they are livelier. They have a purpose, if it is only to get out of the frying pan.”

  “Into the fire?” said Imogen doubtfully.

  “Have you thought of enrolling at the Royal College?” Prosper said. “You have talent. You could learn a craft—”

  “I don’t know,” said Imogen.

  “You should think. I will talk to your father.”

  He saw her think of begging him not to do so, and then deciding to say nothing.

  When they had left the class, Olive asked him why he had encouraged Imogen Fludd, and not his own children. Who were, she said, clearly much more accomplished.

  “Accomplished, oh yes,” said Prosper Cain. “But that girl has what you have, my friend—she knows the shapes of things, as you know the shape of tales. Look at her work. One artist should recognise another.”

  “I am not an artist. I earn my living by storytelling.”

  “That is nonsense, dear lady, and you know it.”

  So they came slowly to the performance of the play, and the end of the summer school. The theatre was the wild garden at the side of Purchase House, which had once been a formal garden, and had unkempt hedges which had once been clipped yew, and were now bearded and tufted and invaded by brambles and Old Man’s Beard. Steyning commandeered some students and helpers, including Dobbin and Frank Mallett, to make papier-mâché statuary on wire frames, which in the winter scenes were stark and in the summer scenes were garlanded with silk flowers and real flowers, mixed. He had brought footlights, with limelight, which altered the shadows on these forms, making them bald and sinister, or bright and clear. There was a goat-horned herm, with shaggy thighs, and a naked girl with falling hair, seen from the back. There were two squatting, cross-legged little fauns who grinned at the stage-corners in the harvest scene, and were absent in the Sicilian sculpted palace. Then there was Hermione’s plinth. He was exigent about this object—he wanted the woman-statue higher than the cast and the audience, with the moon, which was full, silver and shadowy behind her. He wanted both stone mother and fleshly daughter to be chastely clothed in endless swirling pleats of white cloth, and exhausted Olive by rearranging both her standing place and her complicated garment over and over again. He pointed out that by moonlight, with her back to the moon, and a veil cast over her, she would glow in the shadows, the shape of the dark bushes and her mysterious cowled head against the moon would be magical. And she must move, when she stepped down, like an automaton. As though the force of gravity, not her own will, lifted each foot, bent each knee, held her arms in place. “I don’t know what to do with my arms.”

  “Practically, you will need to hold on to the pleats, whilst you’re up there, or they’ll come out. Your right arm across your breast, to hold the vei
l down at your left shoulder. The left arm around the waist to hold the cloth in so it doesn’t swirl away when you move. You need white rings on your fingers, ivory or moonstone, I’ll see what I can find.”

  Olive was not very good at gliding like an automaton, and became irritated by the constant repetition.

  “You are related to the stone man in Don Giovanni, you are a sister of Pygmalion’s ivory Galatea … Think of the stone music—”

  “I am a woman of a certain age, who has borne a number of children,” said Olive drily.

  “You are a fine figure of a woman,” said Steyning, who was still thinking in terms of sculpture.

  So there she stood, on the first night, with the moon behind her, making shadows in her wound garments, which she clutched, pale-knuckled. She was surprised how very difficult it was to keep still, for so long. She thought about her body, under all its unaccustomed white sheeting—like a dressmaker’s dummy, she thought, something vague and muffled. She was ageing. She was pleated across her stomach as well as over her shoulders. She was still in her time. Prosper Cain admired her. Herbert Methley desired her. Humphry wanted her, but she was cross with Humphry. She had cheered herself somewhat, going over Humphry’s conversation with Maid Marian, by remembering that it was quite clear from what he said that he had not known either that Marian was the new schoolmistress at Puxty, or that she was coming to the summer school. It would go by, she thought, as other things had gone by. She made what she hoped was an invisible adjustment to her stance, as her ankles were both numb and strained.