The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

“Not now, not yet, however you look at it. Old friend, you are behaving like a tyrannical father in a story. I know you better than that. I know you love your daughter—”

  “Do you? Do you know that?”

  “Too much to part with her easily. But she will love you more freely if you can bring yourself to let her go. And I’ll bear the cost of her move if you’ll let me have that oxblood jar with the smoky snakes on it, which I’ve had my eyes on for a couple of years. It ought to be displayed in the collection, and you know it.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know I don’t know. But I have watched Imogen, and you haven’t given one good reason why she shouldn’t come to London.”

  “Oh, take my daughter, and take my jar, and go to the Devil, Prosper Cain. Have a brandy. Look at Philip’s dandelion heads on these plates, with the seeds blowing. He’s a bright lad.”

  “He’s a young man, too, as Imogen is a young woman. May I take some of the dandelion work to show to the Keepers, as well?”

  Imogen came to London, and Prosper said to his daughter that something must be done to get her a decent hat and dress, but he didn’t know how. Florence said “I’ll find a hat—you know how good I am at hats—and I’ll tell her it’s mine and I can’t wear it. She’s too tall for my dresses. I’ll think of a way.”

  “I do love you, my Florence. Will you always be so sensible?”

  “No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to.”

  • • •

  In the Cains’ house inside the Museum, apart from the crashing and trundling and dust of the building programme, Imogen did indeed seem to settle into a more cheerful normality. She turned out to have an unexpected flair for architectural drawing, she made a few silk rosebuds and forget-me-nots for the simple hat Florence found for her, and she set out of her own accord to restructure her clothing into a usual shape for a lady art student. In the Fludds’ house, things were less cheerful. After Imogen’s departure, Pomona began sleepwalking again. She ended up, several times, in Philip’s bedroom, on one occasion wearing no clothes, and wrapped only in her excessively long, not very clean, golden hair. Philip and Elsie talked about this. Elsie thought Pomona was play-acting. She told Philip that Pomona was throwing herself at him—literally—because he was the only young male person anywhere in reach. She said Pomona was hysterical and was putting it on. Philip said no, she wasn’t, she was deeply asleep, he could tell when she touched him. He wanted to tell Elsie that Pomona’s cold, naked flesh, pressed against him, did stir and disturb him—he was only human—but at the same time as being most desirably creamy-white, with firm little breasts and soft pale pink nipples, she was somehow inert, meaty, kind of dead, he said to himself, so deeply asleep she was. Elsie did not tell Philip of an odd conversation she had had with Imogen, the day of Imogen’s departure. It was so improbable, that when she tried to remember it, she wondered if she had made it up. Imogen had embraced her warmly, which was uncharacteristic, was indeed the first time she had embraced Elsie, whom she always held at arm’s-length, in every way. She said to Elsie that there was something she must say to her. She drew her into the kitchen, in the pretext of checking supplies.

  “If he asks you to—to pose for life-drawings, don’t. That is, don’t take your clothes off, even if you feel it’s all right, don’t. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” said Elsie, feeling perversely that she would take her clothes off if she liked, whereas if she had been asked ten minutes earlier whether she would ever pose nude for an artist, she would have laughed sharply, and said “Not on your life.”

  Things in the Wellwood families were less happy, and more contentious than in the Cains’. Basil Wellwood’s children were both opposed to the futures their parents desired for them. Charles, or Karl, had done moderately well at Eton, spending parts of his vacations secretly attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation with Joachim Susskind, and (also with Joachim Susskind) attending meetings of the Fabian Society where his uncle was speaking. The Fabians were going through a contentious period themselves, which divided the Imperialists, who supported the British army in the Boer War, and believed in spreading the virtues of British democracy throughout the world, from the gas-and-water socialists, who believed in concentrating, at home, on the public ownership and management of utilities and the land. The society had voted on a motion which expressed “deep indignation at the success of the monstrous conspiracy … which has resulted in the present wanton and unjustifiable war.” The motion was narrowly defeated. Sydney Olivier, although a senior Colonial Office official, was incensed at the war: his wild daughters burned Joseph Chamberlain in effigy on Guy Fawkes Night in 1899. The Webbs thought the war was regrettable and “underbred.” G. B. Shaw argued that the Society should sit on the fence, and wait till the war was won and demand nationalisation of the Rand mines and good working conditions for miners. A further vote was held in November, and won by the Imperialists. A flock of Fabians then resigned, including Ramsay MacDonald, Walter Crane, the head of the Royal College, and Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the campaign for the rights of women.

  Charles/Karl and Joachim were excited. Charles wanted to go to the new London School of Economics, then in its sixth year of teaching. Basil Wellwood, who had not been to university himself, wanted his son to be at Oxford or Cambridge, and insisted that he sit the entrance exam. Charles asked for time to make up his mind, at least. He thought he might like to travel, to see the world. He thought, though he did not say this, that he might visit the German socialists, with Joachim. It was usual for English gentlemen to travel. All he asked, said Basil, was that Charles should ensure his place at Cambridge before his travel. Charles agreed to sit the scholarship exam in December 1900. He went back to Eton, and did the minimum of academic work.

  Griselda was already threatened with a Season as a debutante. She and Dorothy were sixteen in 1900 and were studying—more slowly, more haphazardly than if they had been boys—for their school certificates and Highers. Katharina gave little dances for Griselda already, with selected young men, a harp and piano, fruit punch and lobster salad. Griselda begged Dorothy to come to these. “I am paralysed with shyness; if you are there we can look at it from outside, we can smile at each other, I won’t be alone.” Dorothy said dancing was no part of her plan of her life. She came, however, on occasion. She did care for Griselda. Griselda was altogether too pale to be beautiful, but she was striking in a fragile way. Dorothy was the opposite, dark-haired, golden-skinned, lithe from running in the woods. She told Griselda she hadn’t a party dress. Griselda gave her two of her own—an ivory silk, a deep rose chiffon. Violet adjusted them. Dorothy glared at her, and insisted that she strip away much of the ornamentation. This had the effect of streamlining Dorothy, so that she looked well-shaped and attractive. The boys pressed damp hands on her waist, and talked to her about hunting, and about other parties. Dorothy tried to talk to them about the war, and was rebuffed. She developed a fantasy which bothered her of anatomising the most clumsy and spotty ones in an operating theatre. If she said she meant to be a doctor, they said things like “My sister took a course in nursing until her children were born.” They seemed to think she was confused about the medical profession. Whereas they were confused about her.

  Griselda asked her if she had ever been in love. No, said Dorothy, oddly she hadn’t, though perhaps she ought to have been, everyone appeared to be. Griselda said that sometimes she thought she herself was in love. This surprised Dorothy, and slightly annoyed her. She was the clever one. If Griselda was in love, she should have noticed for herself.

  “Anyone I know?” she asked, too casually.

  “Oh yes, you know him. Can’t you guess?”

  Dorothy ran her mind over the boys at the dances. Griselda treated them all the same, making gentle small talk, dancing elegantly, not joking, not flirting.

  “No, I can’t. I’m shocked. Tell me.”

  “You must
have noticed. I love Toby Youlgreave. It’s hopeless, I know. But things happen to me when I see him. I go to his lectures just to hear his voice—well no, not just—what he says is amazing—but when I hear it, I feel a jump, inside me.”

  “He’s old,” said Dorothy flatly. She said it too vehemently, because she had prevented herself from saying “But he’s in love with my mother.”

  “I know,” said Griselda. “It’s totally inappropriate,” she said lugubriously. She added sententiously “It doesn’t matter how old he is, because at our age it would be a disaster to meet the one, because it would be the wrong time. Since it has to be hopeless, he can be as old as he likes. Well, is. As old as he is.”

  “I think you’re making fun of me, Grisel.”

  “No, I’m not, I’m not. There’s a sensible watching bit of me that knows I’m making use of beloved Toby, to practise being in love, in safety so to speak. And there’s an irrational bit that goes swoony and dissolving when I see him. Doesn’t that happen to you at all?”

  “No,” said Dorothy, staunchly and truthfully. They began to laugh, for no good reason, and were soon weak with laughter.

  Prosper Cain was pleased with his children. The Wellwoods were anxious about Tom. He had become solitary in a way that was unexpected and did not seem quite natural. Charles had passed his Highers comfortably. Tom had not. He had done well in geometry and zoology and had failed everything else, including English, which was hard to do. Basil and Olive were surprised, as were Toby Youlgreave and Vasily Tartarinov, who had both expected him to pass with better results than his cousin. Tom remarked briefly that he felt he hadn’t been concentrating. He had found the whole situation—writing all that stuff—time-restrictive and unreal. What did he intend to do? Humphry asked him. Tom didn’t know, apparently. He was always occupied. He spent his days on foot, in the woods, on the hills, never really considering going outside the bowl of English countryside between the North and South Downs. He didn’t seem to mind being alone—Dorothy, to whom he had been close, lived as much at Griselda’s houses as her own, and was concentrating furiously on physics, chemistry and zoology. He made friends, in a remote way, with gamekeepers and farmers’ boys—he was good at leaning on fences, for long periods, asking questions about rabbits, pheasants, trout and pike. He sat on river banks with a rod and line, observing the weeds and shadows where the fish hung in the current, or lurked under a stone. He practised approaching rabbits and hares as Richard Jefferies recommended, putting his feet down softly and steadily, without a two-legged rhythm, keeping his arms close to his sides—human arms, Jefferies believed, alarmed wild creatures as teeth and claws and scent did in other predators. Tom got to be reasonably skilful at approaching recumbent hares, or keeping quiet in a wood at twilight and waiting for the badgers to emerge, snuffling. He could pick up their scent as though he was himself a wild thing. He spent hours rigorously training his imagination to understand the needs and limitations of the body of a bee, or a redstart, a slow-worm or a moorhen, a laying cuckoo or the enslaved foster-mother of its monstrous changeling. He made inventories of the varieties of grasses in the edges of the ploughed fields, or the numbers of nesting birds in one hedgerow, or the pond life in the clay-lined pond where the cattle slobbered with their lips, smelling of hay and dung and milkiness. He didn’t consider all this a preparation for any particular way of life. He didn’t want to “be” a naturalist, and had no professional interest in being either a sportsman or a gamekeeper. He read perpetually—there was always a book in the satchel he carried—but he only read two kinds of writings. He read books by naturalists—particularly Jefferies, whose very rooted mild English mysticism about the English soil seemed to Tom to be part of his own body. And he read and reread William Morris’s romances about tragic lovers, monstrous dangers, and infinite journeys; this included News from Nowhere, with its ideally happy craftsmen in their stone cottages, with their rich crops of vegetables, flowers, vines and honey. There was much that he did not read. He shied away from sexual intrigues, feeling what he characterised as boredom and disgust, and secretly half-knew was a kind of fear. He did not read, as did many Fabian children, and upper-class renegades like Charles/Karl, the angry descriptions of the condition of the working class, in Manchester and London, Liverpool and Birmingham. Nor, which is perhaps more surprising in a boy with his inclinations, did he read travels and explorations outside England. India did not inhabit his imagination, nor did the North American plains and the South American jungles. He knew there was savage fighting in the Veld in South Africa, he knew there were stubborn and sturdy Boers resisting Imperial Britain, but his imagination did not partake in gallant battles, or suffer wounds and setbacks. Still less did it reach out to the original black or brown inhabitants of those remote places. It burrowed into the chalk with solitary wasps, and sky-blue butterflies who laid their eggs in ants’ nests. He read Darwin’s work on earthworms, and accepted—without thinking too hard—Darwin’s views of the natural world, including human animals, as a perpetual violent striving and struggling for existence and advantage. Sex interested him in English creatures—he knew about the domestic lives of stoats, and the breeding of champion hounds and horses. Love interested him as something far away and hopeless in the world of romance. He walked over the earth, noting things like a scout or a hunter—a newly broken twig, a disturbed heap of pebbles, an unusually dense clump of brambles, the slotted footprint of a fallow deer, the holes stabbed in turf by predatory beaks. He seemed to be there just—simply—to take all this in, and know it. Underneath the earth, in an imaginary realm of rock tunnels and winding stairs, the shadowless seeker, with the trusted Company, never growing older, never changing their intent, travelled on towards the dark queen weaving her webs, and snares, and shrouds.

  Olive Wellwood, visiting Prosper Cain in his London house, thick with the dust of building works, shaken by the sound of sledge-hammer and cranes, told the Keeper of Precious Metals, in confidence, that she was troubled about her son. She knew that Cain found this motherly concern attractive; she created, deliberately, a feeling of warmth and helplessness; it was also true, as she recognised with a slight shock of fear, that she was worried about Tom. He had been such a sunny child, she said, so sweet-tempered, so bright. And now he seemed to moon around, aimlessly, and had no friends. “I feel I don’t know him any more,” she said. Major Cain said that that was perhaps usual with parents and children. Children grew up, they moved away. Yes, said Olive, but Tom didn’t exactly move away, that was partly what she was saying. He had moved, she said finely, into himself.

  She took Prosper Cain’s hand between her own.

  “I wondered if Julian—he and Julian seemed to like each other—I wondered if Julian might come and—say—take a walk with him, talk to him?”

  Cain thought it was always tricky, enlisting one member of a generation against another. He said cautiously that he knew that Julian had felt badly when Tom ran away from Marlowe.

  “That was when it all began,” said Olive. “I don’t want you to ask Julian to interrogate Tom, that would be most unwise. Just to come and walk with him, talk with him.”

  So Julian wrote to Tom and asked him to accompany him on a walk through the New Forest. He wrote, which was true, that he needed to get away from London and academic work. He thought they might mix sleeping out of doors with staying in pubs. Tom took time to reply, and then sent a colourless postcard saying he would be very pleased to come.

  When Julian saw Tom again he knew he had always been in love with him. Or knew, for Julian was always double-minded, that he needed to indulge in the fantasy that he had always been in love with him. Tom at eighteen was lovely in the way he had been lovely at twelve, with the same rapid, shy, awkward grace, the same perfectly proportioned face, the same—for Julian was now experienced—lovely buttocks in his flannels. He was still like a carving, with his mass of honey-hair and his long gold lashes almost on his cheek when he blinked. And his mouth was quiet and calm, a
nd the odd fact that he had become very hairy, on both face and body, only complicated the carved effect by veiling it. Men who loved boys, Julian thought, simply loved beauty, in a way men who loved girls did not. There were beautiful girls who had the same pure effect as beautiful boys, but girls were to be assessed as mothers-to-be, they were not simply and only lovely. He had no illusion that kissing Tom, or simply touching him, would have anything to do with communing with Tom’s soul. Tom’s body was opaque. If there was a soul animating it, Julian felt that it would be both presumptuous and possibly unrewarding to try to commune with it. He watched the light in the hairs on Tom’s forearm as he swung his pack to his shoulders. He felt—apart from a stirring in his trousers—as he felt when his father showed him a gleaming mediaeval spoon, when the wrapping fell away. He thought to himself that Tom had done well to leave Marlowe so precipitously. If he had stayed, he would have become prey to the hunters and possibly learned to be a nasty flirt, as happened to so many. This Julian thought along with many other things, as they strode along the field-paths and round the woodlands, for Tom was not given to conversation, only to companionable pace-keeping, so Julian talked to himself, in his head. Julian decided wryly that he had to be on his best behaviour, because Tom had been foolishly entrusted to him by their elders.

  Tom did not look at Julian, almost at all. He poked with his stick in hedgerows, or stopped, raising his hand, to listen quietly to birdsong and rustlings. Julian knew that he himself was not only not beautiful, he was not even handsome. He was slight and wiry; his mouth was long, narrow and mobile; he was slightly knock-kneed, and he walked circumspect and hunched, unlike Tom’s habitation of all the air around him. Because he had the sense to say nothing for a very long time, Tom did begin to initiate conversations. They were about hedges and ditches. He pointed out good places to set snares. He found an orchid—“quite rare.” He discussed good and bad coppicing.