The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  But perhaps we only dream such things because somewhere, some time, they are and were as we imagine them? Rosy told no one about the little people in her doll’s house, who were solid enough, and cross enough, to be independently real. But they were not to be shared, in case, despite being solid, they vanished.

  One day Rosy was lying on her stomach, gazing in at the window of the doll’s house. Her mother had crossed the river to shop in the village. She heard a heavy sound, like a hammer on a road, or in a forge. Thud, thump, thud, a regular crashing. The floor of her house trembled, and Rosy trembled on it. The windows of her house darkened. She heard a great wind, sighing and soughing in the chimney. She lifted her head, and tried to look out of the window, and could not at first make out what she saw. It was black velvet dark, ringed with concentric splinters of palest blue, mixed with silvery threads and emerald-green lights. The circle of splinters was surrounded by something whitish, between blancmange and the white of a soft-boiled egg. It was an eye. It was an eye that was as big as the window. There was an enormous gruff grunt, like an oak tree falling. Then her house began to sway from side to side. And then to rise, as though some vast creature was pulling it up by the roots, which was indeed what was happening. Rosy felt very sick and held on to a stool, which didn’t help, as the stool shot across the sloping floor and back. The house was lifted, shaken, and dropped, falling with a muffled sound into soft dark. Then it rose again, and began to move, jerk by jerk—huge jerks—stride by stride. Something, someone, had dropped the whole house into a monstrous sack, and was making off with it. Rosy began to cry. Finally—because the striding went on so long, she fell into something between a faint and a sleep.

  Later she peeped cautiously out of the kitchen window of her house. She saw huge carved posts rising out of sight, and realised that they were the legs of a vast table, whose surface was out of sight. She made out a bucket as big as the house she was in, and a lot of overlapping coloured blankets, which she understood to be the edge of a rag rug, the size of a lawn. Then she heard thudding again, and saw a shiny shoe with a thick high white sock in it, a little girl’s shoe, on a huge foot. There was a rustling and thumping, and the eye was to the window again. The front door opened. Rosy cowered against the kitchen wall. The giant child began to murmur and growl what Rosy could see were meant to be soothing sounds. A plump hand, the size of a sofa, squeezed in through the door, twisted, and reached with bolster-like fingers in Rosy’s direction. Thumb and finger closed round Rosy, who was dragged, resisting, out of her own door and swung up in the air. The giant child was sitting on the rug, in a heap of scarlet skirts like the folds in a hilly landscape. She pinched Rosy’s middle, and held her up to her eyes, frowning as she stared. She had a lot of thick shiny yellow hair, standing out round her head like the sun. Her breathing sounded like bellows. An eye that size is a terrible thing—wet colour round a black space that opens into an unknown intelligence. There were more booming, soothing sounds.

  Rosy twisted and squirmed and spat, like an angry kitten. She bit the finger that restrained her as hard as she could, which caused the giant child to yowl so loudly that Rosy thought her ears were bursting. She went on struggling and scratching and biting. A huge tear brimmed on the lower lid of the giant eye, flowed over, and fell, a heavy liquid sphere, and splashed on the hand that held Rosy. Another followed. Rosy found herself thrust back inside her door; the fingers extracted her key, fumbled, and turned it in the lock, from the outside. Then the shutters were pushed, from the outside, against the windows, and Rosy’s world went dusty dark.

  She did not even think about the little people in her doll’s house. She was reminded of them when the giant child opened the front door and pushed in a platter the size of a tea-tray full of chopped-up fragments of some fruit or vegetable—turnip or pear—with a sickly smell she couldn’t bear. She had food, for the time being—the kitchen and the larder were stocked with biscuits and cheese. But her revulsion at the giant food made her suddenly full of misery about what she had done to her own captives. She knelt down by the doll’s house, with tears running down her cheeks, and opened the hasp that kept the front wall closed, and said in a whisper, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I would let you out, I should never have shut you in, but now we are all prisoners. I don’t suppose you understand a word I say. I want to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  The little people had been crouching in the nest of toy bedclothes. One of the little old ladies stood up. To Rosy’s amazement, she spoke. Her voice was high and scratchy, like a cricket sawing away with its legs. Rosy had to stop breathing to hear her.

  “We do understand. That is, we understand your language. We don’t understand why you took us prisoner and we don’t want to. We want to go home.”

  “Oh, if only you could. But something—someone—has carried away me and my house and we are locked up in a giant kitchen. Come and look.”

  She took the old lady up, very carefully, and placed her on the table, so that she could see out through a crack in the shutters. The old lady commanded Rosy to fetch the others. She asked them, very politely, to step into her sewing-basket, and in this she lifted them all up to the window.

  It was clear that they could make no sense of what they saw. Rosy said “That’s a table-leg, and that’s the edge of a rug. This is a dish of food it put in for me to eat, but it’s loathsome and smells quite horrible. You have to believe me. It took the key and locked the door on the outside. It is a monster.”

  “You are a monster,” whistled one of the little men, severely. “We know a monster when we see one.”

  “Oh I am so sorry,” Rosy said again, beginning to cry. Her tears splashed into her sewing-bag amongst her captives, and one of the little children was hit full in the face by a balloon of salty liquid.

  “You see,” said Rosy, “we can’t get out.”

  “You can’t get out,” said the little man. “We can. We can squeeze and scramble under your door, which doesn’t fit perfectly. We can escape easily, but to what and to where we don’t know.”

  At this point they all fell silent, as they heard the crashing footsteps of the giant child. The cracks in the shutters were full of the red light of her skirts. The monster looked to see if its offering of food had been accepted, and sighed heavily when it saw it had not. It spoke, incomprehensibly, booming like an organ in a church. Rosy stayed mum. The door closed again, and the key turned.

  Rosy said

  “When it’s dark, you could all get out and run away to somewhere. I should think you’re so little the monster can’t even see you. You can run away like spiders.”

  The little old woman then said something surprising.

  “If you—Miss Rosy Monster—can push the key to the floor from inside the house, we can slide under the door, where the step dips, and take with us a string, a rope, which we can tie to the key, so that you can pull it back to the inside, and open the door, and go out.”

  Rosy was dumbfounded.

  “Why should you want to help me to get out?”

  “Well,” said another woman, “we could say practically that your legs are a great deal longer than ours when it comes to making our way home. Or you could say we don’t approve of locking people up and making them into toys. Or you could say both.” She added “Don’t cry. It makes us damp.”

  Rosy said “Even if I get out, I don’t know where we are, or how to get out of this kitchen.”

  “That’s as may be,” said the little man. “One thing at a time. First we get out, second we hide and hide—we are good at hiding, we can give you advice—then we work out the way home.”

  “We must have come over the mountain.”

  “Then we find the mountain, and cross it. Some advice, young monster. You will be dreadfully visible in a bright pink dress. Find yourself some clothes the colour of shadows and dead leaves before nightfall. And make yourself a satchel of food you can eat, and put in some oats for us. We can travel in this basket and hide amongs
t the bobbins of thread. Think what you will need on a journey. Something to cut and stab with. Something to drink from, for you and for us. Now go and find string, to make a rope to pull in the doorkey.”

  Rosy did as he said, and they waited till nightfall and all went as they had planned.

  How they made their dangerous way home over fells and fens, how the large child helped the small people, and how they helped her, must wait for another tale …

  27

  No child, it is said, has the same parents as any other. Tom’s parents had been younger and wilder than Robin’s parents would ever be. Harry had never known a family where there were not older children who seemed free and powerful, came and went mysteriously, were not confined to the nursery. The little ones experienced the family as a flock of creatures who moved in clutches and gaggles, shared nurseries and also feelings and opinions. Tom and Dorothy were old, and separate enough to have started thinking of their own futures, away from Todefright, full of tenuous hopes and fears, and in Dorothy’s case a rigorous and sometimes dispiriting ambition. Tom, at the end of 1900, was eighteen. His parents had a plan for his future—he was to sit matriculation exams in the autumn, and present himself as a candidate for a scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, at the end of the year. They had engaged tutors—Toby Youlgreave and Joachim Susskind. Beyond that they did not think very often about what was, or was not, going on in Tom’s head. Olive continued—at intervals—to elaborate the adventures underground, and Tom read them, feeling, as the year moved on, an increasing unease, almost a guilt, for being still so caught up in a tale. He had a fit of vehement anger when the journalist came, and was shown the secret books, even though everyone knew about them, they were not real secrets. He said you didn’t display that sort of private family thing to the public, as a kind of boasting. It wasn’t nice. Olive said she hadn’t intended to do it, it had just happened. They patched up the quarrel, but Tom glowered for two or three weeks.

  Neither Humphry nor Olive really knew what subjects he was studying for matriculation. Humphry was away, much of the time, writing and lecturing. Olive sat in her study and scribbled. Violet made steak and kidney pie, and darned socks, and gave Tom biscuits and milk at bedtime when he looked tired. It occurred to both Toby and Joachim that Tom was possibly going to fail to matriculate. This was partly because he sometimes failed to turn up for lessons—he had gone for a long walk, had slept out in a tent, had forgotten, he was sorry. Joachim and Toby did not tell Humphry and Olive about these absences. They joined Tom on country walks and discussed Shakespeare and botany as they went.

  Tom’s exam results in the autumn were, in a way, both odd and shocking. He gained a distinction in elementary botany, but failed general elementary science. He failed Latin, and scraped through in English. He passed elementary sound, heat and light, and failed maths, which Joachim could not understand. It was all somewhat embarrassing for the tutors. The tutors also felt that Humphry and Olive should have been more perturbed than they were by the patchiness of the results, by the evidence of Tom’s lack of interest or application. But they said, never mind, he can sit the exams again at the same time as the Cambridge exam. He will find a way to do it, said the parents, without any real evidence to justify this view.

  In the months leading to the Cambridge exam Tom went out more and more, striding away in all weathers. He took his books to the Tree House. Dorothy, who was worried about him, didn’t know how often he opened them. What she did know was that he had made friends with the gamekeeper with whom he walked the woods, tracking down predators and poachers, looking for illicit snares and traps. The gamekeeper had been hostile at first—gamekeepers don’t like wandering children, or picnickers—but this one seemed to accept Tom as a serious apprentice. Tom showed Dorothy, one day, the gibbet on the black tarred wall of a forest hut. There they hung on nails, rows of dead beaked things, and things with sharp teeth opened in agony. Some were fresh—a staring owl, pinned by the wings, a broken-necked jay, a couple of stoats. Some had been rotted in wind and weather to no more than scraps of mouldered skin and the odd adhering bone, or tooth, or battered quill. Dorothy said it was horrible, and Tom said no, it was the way things really were, it was how the real world worked. Dorothy said lightly “Maybe really you’d rather be a gamekeeper?”

  Tom said “Oh no, I’ve got to go to Cambridge, it’s expected, this is just—I like finding things out from Jake, I like knowing new things—like woodwork—”

  The week before the Cambridge exams, Tom went out at night, not with Jake, but alone. He didn’t come back. Search parties set out—rather belatedly, as he’d been expected to return as he always did. He was found, unconscious, with a broken wrist and blood in his hair, in a shallow quarry. His ankle was still entangled in the wire snare he had caught it in, tracking poachers along the rim of the quarry, by moonlight. He didn’t regain consciousness for two days, and when he did, appeared a little crazed, and couldn’t remember what had happened to him. Violet brought him nourishing broth and fed him with a spoon. He lay bandaged among his pillows, staring mildly at the window and the sky.

  It was, of course, quite impossible in the circumstances, that he should sit the Cambridge entrance examinations, or even, with a broken wrist, resit his failed matriculation exams.

  Dorothy thought that at some level, he was smug about this.

  Tom and Dorothy noted hidden and shadowy things in the family, and then, on the whole, did not think about them. They heard Olive operatic behind closed doors, or saw Humphry pack his bags and leave in a sudden hurry, and they took stock of these events, and stayed silent. They were both afraid of uncovering things they were better not knowing. Hedda had no such inhibitions. Hedda was a finder-out, a sleuth, a discoverer and uncoverer. In 1901 she was eleven, and belonged neither with the elder nor with the younger children. She had spent hours of her childhood lurking outside the Tree House, trying to overhear conversations to which she had not been invited. It was Hedda who pricked up her ears when Marian Oakeshott was meaningfully and casually mentioned at table, and Hedda who knew Mrs. Oakeshott’s handwriting on letters, though she had never gone so far as to try to read one. She was a light sleeper, and padded about the house, at night, lurking on the back stairs, standing in shadows of tallboys on the landing. She knew that the grown-ups crept about the house at night. She knew—and had so far not shared her knowledge—that Humphry Wellwood visited Violet Grimwith in the small hours. He always closed the door with velvet softness. She had never had the nerve to listen at the keyhole, though she wanted to.

  Then, one night, there was more than a susurration or a chuckle from behind that door. There was a storm of weeping, passionate and audible, and broken murmurs and shushings from a male voice. Violet wailed, and Hedda crept up, because she could hear the words in the wailing, and she could sense that the two inside were too locked in some sort of argument to be listening out for creeping children.

  “It is possible that you are mistaken,” said Humphry’s voice, trying for calm.

  “I wasn’t mistaken before. I am only just past forty, it is perfectly possible. I can’t go through it again, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. The pain and the fear and the hiding. I shall die. And she will kill me this time, she will…”

  “Hush, little flower,” Humphry improbably said. “I’ll look after you, I always have, we’ll sort it resourcefully, we always do. We are clever creatures, you and I. We mean no harm.”

  “She will kill me this time. And I cannot abide any more hiding and lying. The children of my body don’t know they are mine—though in some sense they are all mine, all, who is their mother if not I? Oh, Booby, we can’t start again, on concealing and pretending and contriving, I’m too tired, I’d rather die, I might do away with myself—”

  “And where would all your lovely family be then? Keep still, keep calm, breathe deeply. I’ll go down and fetch you a flask of brandy.”

  “Better gin,” said Violet’s voice, in choking sobs. �
�Better a great glass of neat gin.”

  Hedda stepped hurriedly into the shadow of the tallboy and flattened herself against a wall. The trim figure of her father whisked past her and flew down the back stairs. She was side-tracked in her thoughts by the silliness of the nickname. “Booby” diminished her clever and elegant father—just as the revelation of his relations with Violet diminished him. This was altogether less pleasant than his mistake with Marian Oakeshott. And Hedda didn’t like the idea of Olive—whose greatest failing so far in her eyes was abstraction—a want of attention—being ready to “kill.”

  It was only then that she realised she had been told that some of the children—an unspecified number—were, as Violet had put it, Violet’s children “of my body.”

  Who? Who was not who they thought they were?

  What did it mean?

  Hedda heard her father coming back, creeping in his slippered feet. She waited until he had gone back into the room, carrying a bottle and two glasses, and then she retreated. She had been changed, and she did not know how.

  Hedda called a meeting of the elders in the Tree House. She had never done this. Meetings were called almost always by Tom, sometimes—when there were practical problems to discuss, like birthday presents—by Dorothy. The elders were Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis and now Hedda. She told them they had got to come, it was something very important, and it was secret, secret, secret.