The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Inside was a series of various furnished rooms, all different, all rich and simple together, with shining woodwork, mottled and inlaid with other woods, with fabrics woven from stiff damask and spider-light threads, with tapestries and burnished copper, with glass, and fine ceramics, and touches of gilding that glittered in dark corners. Julian took a secret pleasure in “framing” Tom in these unlikely stage-sets. He looked as if he had wandered into the citrus-wood and damask off an English village green, having just put down his bat. He looked also like a Greek statue of a young athlete, who would not have been out of place here, naked but crowned with filigree vine-leaves.

  They went into what was perhaps the most beautiful room, a dressing-room by Georges de Feure, all in moony colours, with furniture of dappled Hungarian ash, decorated with silvery copper inlay, hung with a shimmering silk tapestry of blue and grey formal flowers, shifting shape in the light, woven on a woof of silver threads. The chairs were covered with blue-grey cloth embroidered with white silk roses. Julian thought he would have liked to see Tom in a silk dressing-gown, standing in that room—he imagined the gown in midnight-blue, he imagined it in dark pewter, he combined the two, whilst Tom strode around with genuine curiosity and repeated that it was a pity his mother could not see it. “It would give her so much for her work,” said Tom. He pushed his hands through his fair thatch, making temporary horn-stubs. They moved on into a bedroom, where a great bed was spread with an embroidered cover in every muted shade. Julian tried to imagine Tom spread naked on it, whilst Tom stood a little stiffly taking an interest in the bed-curtains. A large number of fashionable ladies and gentlemen came into the little room and exclaimed over the fittings, and made aloud several observations about inhabiting the bed. Tom said suddenly that he was tired, he felt oppressed, he should be glad if they could sit down.

  They sat in an adjacent café, waiting for Prosper Cain. They ordered citrons pressés, and Tom deranged his hair with his fingers a little more. Julian couldn’t think what to say to Tom, and Tom said nothing, so Julian said

  “Doesn’t it seem odd that Herr Susskind turns up, just like that?”

  “Does it? Everybody in the world seems to be here. I can’t get my breath for being crushed by people. I admit there are so many, the chances of meeting any particular one can’t be very high.”

  “I think he fixed it with Charles. I think he knew we were there. Maybe he has a thing about Charles.”

  “A thing?”

  “Maybe he’s in love with Charles. He seemed excited.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought of that. It’s odd, though. I bumped into them together, once, in Hyde Park. I was going through with Papa. They pretended not to see us, and we pretended not to see them. Papa said it was gentlemanly to look the other way. I didn’t quite know why, but I could see everyone was embarrassed.”

  Julian said “Have you ever been in love? Really in love?” Tom looked down at the table. Julian immediately thought he had gone too far. Tom was in fact thinking that Julian was sophisticated, and would mock the true answer. Nevertheless, he said

  “Only in the imagination.”

  “A mysterious answer. What do you mean by that?”

  Tom was dumb. Then he said “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Do you mean love in the imagination with real people you don’t love—in the flesh, so to speak? Or in the imagination with ideal people you don’t know at all?”

  Tom looked up, and flushed. Julian was looking at him with a quizzical, but amiable grin.

  “More the second. But they get mixed. You wonder what it would be like, you know—”

  What Tom meant by “what it would be like,” was in fact a reference to knights and damsels riding together through forests, heading from the city into the vacant and the unknown. He had had a habit since childhood of inserting his imagination into Sir Gareth, in Tennyson’s “Gareth and Lynette,” who had been bidden by his mother to be an anonymous kitchen-knave in the ashes of King Arthur’s Hall, and who had ridden on his first quest with the scolding and jeering young woman, who said he smelled of the kitchen, like a foul agaric, but had slowly come to know how strong and gentle he was, who had been sorry, and watched over him like a mother in his sleep. He had no idea why he had picked on Gareth, and not the more complicated and passionate Lancelot.

  Julian said

  “I suppose we try it out in books, or on beautiful boys at school. Until we find something real—”

  Tom flinched, and Julian remembered what he imagined had been done to Tom at Marlowe.

  They sipped their citrons pressés. Julian said “Don’t you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you—all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven’t met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures—unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.”

  “When I think that thought,” said Tom, “I think of caves of ice, I don’t know why, with things frozen into weird shapes, and tunnels all bored into it—”

  “They talk as though youth is carefree, and at the same time, ever so subtly, they try to mould you, into a gentleman, or an empire-builder, or whatever. I don’t want anything to do with the Empire. I don’t ever want to rule anyone, or order anyone to do anything.”

  “What do you want?” It was Tom asking, now.

  Julian said “After seeing all this—all this lovely stuff people have made—I think I do want what my father wants for me—which is very banal and unorthodox, to agree with one’s father, one ought to be in—manly rebellion. I wouldn’t mind being a collector, or a dealer, in beautiful things. And I want to love, of course, someone. To love and be loved.”

  He looked straight at Tom, who had his chin in his hand and was staring, unfocused, at the beckoning ladies on the outside of the Bing Pavilion. Julian wondered if Tom was putting this distant innocence on. He thought not.

  He said to himself that he had never met anyone so virginal.

  Karl Wellwood was finding out about sex in a quite different way. Joachim had hurried him to the Palace of Woman, an elegant modern building, in whose entrance hall stood figures of women of achievement, with the Byzantine Empress Theodora side by side with Harriet Beecher Stowe. There they met the famous Cassandra, the anarchist Emma Goldman, who was just bidding goodbye to a group of earnest American tourists. She was a serious-looking woman, with cropped dark hair, deep-set eyes and a black bow at the neck of a striped shirt. She kissed Joachim Susskind, and shook Karl’s hand, saying that anyone trusted by Joachim was a friend of her own. They had heard her speak passionately against the South African War, earlier that year, in London, dealing wittily with hecklers, arguing lucidly. Her good sense and passion for justice and tolerance, like those of Peter Kropotkin, who spoke with her, were part of what excited Charles about anarchy, although, still the son of a successful businessman, he could not help feeling that these individualist idealists would save no one without better, and more, organisation.

  They strode swiftly away to the boulevard Saint-Michel, where Susskind and Goldman were staying in the same hotel. Goldman told Charles she was earning her keep by being a cicerone at the Exposition and by cooking lunch on an alcohol burner for a group of friends in the hotel—“I am a good cook, you will see, I invite you to lunch, and you may pay what you can.” She was, she said, irritated to desperation by the prudery of the American schoolteachers, who were embarrassed by naked statues in the Louvre—“What, I ask myself, do they make of the women for sale on every pavement—but I dare not ask them, for I must smile and smile and earn my loaves and fishes. I would truly like to guide them round the circles of a hotter place. Have you seen Rodin’s Gates of Hell? You must—more than once, it is a masterpiece. That man knows how much sex matters, in the modern world, in any world.”

  She talked away about sex, with wit, indignation and a kind of social fervour that was new to Karl. She had argued with Kropotkin a
bout it, she said, as they rode the travelator, and had been forced to tell him he underestimated it because he was no longer young. He had the grace to laugh and to concede the point, she said. She told Joachim in an undertone that the Malthusian society was meeting in secrecy—she would tell him where and when if he was interested, but the police were snooping, and she had no wish, at present, to be imprisoned in the cause of birth control, because that was only one part of the larger mission, the whole vision.

  They came to the hotel on the Boul’ Mich’ and ate Russian beet soup, and a beef hotpot, with boiled potatoes, concocted on the burner. The room was full of smoke from Russian cigarettes and French Gauloises—everyone’s outline was blurred in Charles’s eyes, and the gathering spoke many languages, apparently at random, French, Russian, Italian, German, American, Dutch. Joachim in this company looked smiling and wild, his hair ruffled, his shirt-neck open. He sounded meek and thoughtful in English. In German he sounded excitable and harsh. They were talking about someone called Panizza, who had been imprisoned in Munich for blasphemy and was now released and in Paris. Emma Goldman said that Panizza had called on her—she had been moved and excited—and had invited her to dine with Oscar Wilde. “Dear Hippolyte,” she said, turning to her lover, had recalled her to ethics—it was the night of the comrades’ session—but she would so very much have liked to meet Wilde.

  Karl looked curiously at Hippolyte, who was small, agitated, elegantly dressed and had bandaged hands. He was a penniless Czech, who had ruined his skin cleaning boots for a living. As an example of “free love,” he was uninspiring. He fussed. He said something in either Russian or Czech about Wilde, in which the tone was disparaging. Someone else, a grey-haired Dr. somebody, said he was surprised at Emma Goldman, a good woman, defending a man like Wilde, a pervert, and a perverter.

  This led to an animated discussion of the right attitude to inversion, perversion and “sex variation.” Most of it was in German. Karl had learned German, as his German mother wished. He thought Susskind knew that he knew German, but for some reason, he had kept quiet about it. He found he had an instinct to be secretive. He took pleasure in having a secret life, and within his secret life, he took pleasure in keeping secrets. He listened to the fierce discussion of Panizza’s ideas about masturbation, rape and perversion with the blank face old Etonians knew how to put on, courteously imperceptive. He was both excited and alarmed by the world he had entered. If you were a German freethinker, you could be imprisoned for blasphemy, like Panizza, or for lèse-majesté, like Johann Most, or shut in an asylum and declared insane. He stared, watchful, through the swirling smoke at the intent faces, and listened to the voices, earnest, bitterly ironic, gleeful. He was there and not there. He could always walk home, and close his respectable door behind him. But he was not playing, he told himself, he was in earnest. Something had to be done about the horrors of society.

  The conversation had moved to Emma Goldman’s forthcoming lecture on Trafficking in Women. This discussion was in English. What other ways of earning their bread did most women have, other than selling their bodies, Goldman asked. How could you blame a woman who was a servant kept to herself in a cellar, or a labourer at a factory bench, for wanting human warmth and better nourishment, yes, and pretty clothes. Wages were so low that married women sold themselves too. With their husband’s connivance, often enough. The men who used these women went home and infected their wives—whom they had also bought—with syphilis. It was not the men who were punished by the state and its police and doctors, of course, oh no. It was the women. Women must take control of their lives and their bodies.

  A thin woman in a grey dress, with a regular little cough, asked whether the supplies of rubber had arrived. Was it true that the Americans meant to demonstrate these things at the congress?

  Goldman said she hoped so.

  Charles felt himself vaguely excited. Not in quite the right way. Later, as he walked back to the hotel, he looked intently at all the women they passed, the little groups of smiling and beckoning girls in pretty skirts and prominent corsages, the elegantly strolling demi-monde. He had never seen a naked woman, except those sculpted in marble or bronze. He had an idea of apertures and protuberances he needed to know about. It might be a good thing to buy this knowledge—he would be contributing to a solid meal—but precisely because it was incumbent on him to see the strolling, signalling, smiling creatures as people in need, it became hard, perhaps impossible, to bargain with one. It was all a lie. Moreover, as Goldman had insisted, there was the question of disease. Panizza’s condemned play, The Council of Love, Joachim told him, had presented God and Mary and Jesus in heaven as a degenerate enfeebled family who gave the Devil licence to introduce syphilis to the world to punish the Borgia popes for their orgiastic excesses. Joachim would never have talked like this in England. Karl wondered for the first time what Joachim did about sex. He could not think of a way to ask him.

  He dined with the Cains, Tom, Fludd and Philip. Everyone talked of what they had seen at the fair. Charles did not mention Emma Goldman, and did not discuss streetwalkers. Cain said he supposed it was encouraging that people at war with each other—the Germans and the Chinese, for instance—could coexist in this imaginary city. Benedict Fludd, who seemed alternately excitable and grumpy, said perhaps Cain had not seen the papers? An anarchist had stepped out of a crowd with a revolver and shot point-blank at the King of Italy. They missed him three years ago with a knife, said Fludd. This time they got him. He’s dead. What do they hope to achieve?

  “Chaos,” said Prosper Cain. “They are mad.” Karl kept his polite public-school face at this moment also. He was in a moral knot that he was beginning to recognise. Belonging to something, believing in an idea, meant perhaps conceding assent to things that were, outside the belief, ludicrous or horrid. He had tried being Christian, and had tried to force himself to believe in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. He found the anarchists compelling and arousing. But he could not—he could not—accept that a symbolic killing of this or that muddle-headed or insulated old monarch would really advance freedom or justice. And then he tried to see it from the anarchists’ point of view. He formulated an idea: they are more sane, and madder, than other people. They have a better idea of human nature, which is perhaps only an idea. But they are serious and real, and this hotel is not, and this soufflé is all airy nothing, and the women in evening gowns at the next table are bought and sold.

  It was, however, a delicious soufflé, elegantly put together with Seville orange and Grand Marnier. It lingered on the tongue like a blessing.

  Philip had spent much of his time alone. Fludd would refuse to get out of bed, or would sit in the hotel gloomily drinking coffee and cognac. He told Philip to get out and educate himself. Philip walked for miles, looking at the lights, translating things seen into ideas for pots, failing miserably. It was all too much for him. His own art seemed small and provincial and far away, and he felt he was a lout and an ignoramus.

  He found the ceramics stands on the Esplanade des Invalides. He was attracted to the special exhibition of the Gien Faïencerie by its principal exhibit, an awesome ceramic clock, towering more than three metres, and standing on a carved pedestal. He thought it was a silly shape, and was in awe of the extraordinary technical skill that must have gone into its construction. It was shaped like a very tall vase, decorated with gold underglaze he had never seen before, and sprouting, at its shoulders so to speak, spirals and pendants of green and turquoise blue foliage, out of which, like strange fruit, peeped and poked a bunch of spherical electric lights. Above this, three naked cupids knelt sportively, and supported a clock in the form of a pale blue celestial globe, studded with stars, and telling the time with a mechanism contained in its depth, showing the process of the hours in an opening in the equator. Another Cupid, with little wings, squatted on top of the globe and clasped a torch, which also contained a powerful electric light.

  Philip started to make a drawing of it. H
e had learned his dislike of pouting cupids and what he called “pottery frills” from Benedict Fludd. He thought he might be able to tempt him out of bed with this monstrous vision. The visitors jostled him, and occasionally asked to see what he was doing. A young man, about his own age, in a workman’s overall, came from inside the stand, and asked to see what Philip was drawing. He commented on Philip’s draughtsmanship in French, of which Philip understood not a word, but the tone was both friendly and admiring. Philip said, in English, that he didn’t speak French. He put down his pad and pencil, and demonstrated with mime that he was a potter, running his fingers inside the imagined cylinder of imagined clay on an imagined wheel. The Frenchman laughed, and mimed the painting of fine flowers with a fine brush on a close surface. Philip pointed to himself and said “Philip Warren.” “Philippe Duval,” said the Frenchman. “Venez voir ce que nous avons fait.”